ISSN 0309-0892 the Schematic Development of Old Testament

[JSOT 29.1 (2004) 3-36] ISSN 0309-0892

The Schematic Development of Old Testament Chronography: Towards an Integrated Model

Jeremy Northcote 11 Silverton Avenue, Butler, WA 6032, Australia

Abstract The chronological ﬁgures in the Old Testament have been of considerable interest to early and modern scholars, but there has been little success in developing an overarching model to account for their historical development. Through a synthesis of past approaches and new insights, an attempt is made in this article to develop a model that explains the emergence of Old Testament chronology and accounts for the divergences that exist in the ﬁgures found in different Old Testament textual traditions. The position taken is that Old Testament chronology was, from its very beginnings, largely schematic in form. Further, it is argued that subsequent adjustments to the chronology were motivated mainly by changing schematic interests rather than ‘rational’ concerns such as the resolution of internal anachronisms or ‘secret’ systems of calendar reckoning (as some scholars have proposed). These schematic considerations are viewed in terms of the changing political, theological and sectarian interests of Palestine and the diaspora between the sixth century BCE and the second century BCE.

Despite the prominence of chronological material in the Old Testament and the ontological importance placed on time and history in early Jewish thought, an understanding of Old Testament chronography remains one of the least developed areas in Judaic studies. For example, despite numerous attempts, there is still no coherent explanation for why the three principle surviving Old Testament versions—the Masoretic text (MT), the Greek Septuagint (LXX) and the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP)—should present such radically divergent chronologies in the books of the Pentateuch. The explanation often given by scholars—namely, that these divergences are

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004, The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX and 15 East 26th Street, Suite 1703, New York, NY 10010. 4 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) the result of rational solutions to internal anachronisms and contradictions in the Old Testament chronological material1—fails to take into account the schematic patterns that are evident in all three chronological traditions —patterns that point to a symbolic mode of representing various political, theological and sectarian concepts through the use of numbers. In this article, a general framework is put forward for conceptualizing the development of Old Testament chronological material in the Penta- teuch, with particular attention to the ‘age of begetting’ figures found in Genesis 5 and 11. It is the begetting figures that have long formed the basis for calculating a timeline of Israelite history, enabling ancient Jews and Samaritans to date significant events from the time of Creation (expressed as Anno Mundi [AM], or ‘year of the world’).2 It will be proposed that the variations that emerged in the begetting figures were the outcome of a series of chronological revisions of an ‘original’ progenitor chronology devised in the late monarchical period. These revisions, it will be argued, were made primarily to accord with numerical schemas that held special symbolic importance in terms of the changing theological, political and historical considerations of the times, with ‘rational’ considerations being, for the most part, of only secondary importance. While the argument that the surviving Old Testament chronologies emerged from a progenitor chronology and are fundamentally schematic in character is not new (see, e.g., Jepsen 1929; Hughes 1990), the model put forward in this paper to explain precisely how these versions emerged is the first attempt to place Old Testament chronology within a comprehensive developmental framework. This framework not only integrates many of the past findings made by scholars regarding the form taken by earlier Old Testament chronological versions, but includes a number of important new insights. For example, it will be argued that a progenitor Old Testament chronology was modified in the fourth century BCE by Jewish editors to accord with a jubilees schema similar to (although not identical with) the one that survived in the later book of Jubilees. This revised chronology then underwent a series of further modifications in the third and second centuries BCE, and ultimately resulted in the four main chronological systems that have survived to our present era—the MT, LXX, SP and book of Jubilees chronologies (see Fig. 1).

1. See, for example, De Vries 1962; Klein 1974; Hughes 1990; Larsson 1983, 2000. 2. The lifespan figures in Gen. 5 and Gen. 11 are not dealt with at length here. These figures possibly had a separate path of development from the begetting figures.

Figure 1. Postulated Development of the Old Testament Chronological Tradition Because the model put forward in this paper represents something of a synthesis of several past theories (often seen by their supporters to be con- ﬂicting), it will be helpful to begin with a brief survey of these approaches to show how they shed light on the development of Old Testament chronology. Of particular importance will be the work of Alfred Jepsen, whose largely neglected reconstruction of the original ‘Priestly’ chronology holds the key to the developmental model that is put forward.

1. Jepsen’s Progenitor Chronology Alfred Jepsen’s reconstruction of the progenitor chronology centred on a fairly straightforward assumption—namely, that the earlier Old Testament chronology consisted of the lowest set of figures that can be gleaned from the various surviving Old Testament manuscripts. More specifically, Jepsen combined the SP figures for the ante-diluvian generations in Gene- sis 5 and the MT figures for the post-diluvian generations in Genesis 11 (see Appendix, Table 14). He also calculated the birth of Arpachshad as

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 6 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) occurring three years after the Flood,3 and incorporated the MT’s 430-year calculation for the Egyptian period (Exod. 12.40) and its 480-year calculation for the period between the Exodus and the foundation of the First Temple (1 Kgs 6.1). Jepsen’s reconstruction produced the series of schematic dates for several key Old Testament events shown in Table 1. Table 1. The Progenitor Chronology Flood 1307 Abraham’s birth 1600 Exodus 23204 Temple foundation 2800 An interesting aspect of Jepsen’s chronology is the way in which the Exodus occurs three-fifths of the way between the time of Abraham’s birth and the laying of foundations for the First Temple. Also of interest is the pronounced 40-year schema within this chronology, with the figures given for Abraham’s year of birth, AM 1600, and the foundation of the First Temple, AM 2800, each being the product of 40 (1600 being 40 × 40, and 2800 being 70 × 40). This 40-year schema accords with the importance that the Deuteronomist writer placed on 40-year periods in general (such as the 40 years surrounding the life of Moses, the periods served by several of the early Judges, and the reigns of David and Solomon). Jepsen (1929: 255) was of the opinion that the progenitor chronology was probably devised some time late in the seventh century BCE prior to the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian captivity. This would account for the chronology’s lack of emphasis on events surrounding the destruction of the First Temple, the Jewish return from exile in Babylon and the construction of the Second Temple. It would also suggest that Palestine—more specifically Jerusalem—is the probable location of its composition. There is good reason for believing that Jepsen’s reconstructed progenitor chronology does indeed represent a very early stage in Old Testament chronological development and is the progenitor of the four main surviving chronological traditions. As shall be demonstrated, later findings by Old Testament scholars have provided further support for this view, even

3. Jepsen based this calculation on the statement in Gen. 11.10 that Arpachshad was born two years after the Flood, and he then allowed an extra year for the duration of the Flood itself. 4. This calculation is based on adding 430 years to AM 1890, which was the year Jacob entered Egypt (at the age of 130). See Gen. 47.9.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. NORTHCOTE Development of Old Testament Chronography 7 though these scholars themselves appear to have been unaware of the signiﬁcance of their ﬁndings in terms of supporting Jepsen’s progenitor chronology.

2. Murtonen’s Maccabean Chronology

In the 1950s, Aimo Murtonen (1954: 137) argued that the MT chronology could not have attained its final form earlier than 164/5 BCE—the date of the Maccabeans’ rededication of the Second Temple. He based his argument on his finding that, if the MT chronology was extended beyond the Babylonian exile period—using the ancient Near Eastern king lists (see Appendix, Table 15) that were likely known to Jews in the Maccabean era—it yields the highly significant date of AM 4000 for the Maccabean rededication of the temple. The logical assumption one can make from this correspondence is that, unless prophetic powers are attributed to the ancient Jewish chronographers, the composition of the MT chronology must be dated after the event it describes (i.e. some time after 164/5 BCE). As Joseph Blenkinsopp remarks (1992: 48): Unless this is just a remarkable coincidence, it indicates a very late date for the insertion of the chronological data, or at least for the final revision of an existing schema. Appending the Near Eastern king lists to the Old Testament chronology was a rather straightforward process for Murtonen (as it was no doubt for the ancient Jewish chronographers themselves), given that various dates for certain sixth-century BCE Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian kings already existed in the Old Testament. In particular, the fall of Jerusalem, which is calculated as AM 3575 in the MT chronology, is dated by the Old Testament as occurring in Nebuchadnezzar’s eighteenth (Jer. 52.29) or nineteenth year (2 Kgs 25.8; Jer. 52.12), a date which can be synchronized with the Near Eastern king list’s own date for Nebuchadnezzar’s reign. The MT chronology could then be extended forward through the Persian and Greek eras to include the date provided in 1 Macc. 4.52 for the rededication of the Second Temple (i.e. 148 Seleucid Era, according to the Seleucid dating system, or 164/5 BCE in modern historical reckoning).5 It should be noted, however, that the synchronization of the MT’s date of AM 4000 with the date of the Second Temple rededication in 164/5 BCE is

5. For the method of converting Seleucid dates to modern dates, see Bickerman 1984: 61.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 8 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) not an exact match, because the year AM 4000 actually falls on 161 BCE (if AM 3575 is calculated as Nebuchadnezzar’s eighteenth year) or 162 BCE (if AM 3575 is calculated as Nebuchadnezzar’s nineteenth year). However, the Old Testament chronology is flexible enough to allow the addition of two or three years. For example, two or three years can be added for Shem’s age at the birth of his firstborn—a calculation that, as noted earlier, Jepsen believed was made in the progenitor chronology. Blenkinsopp’s reference above to a ‘final revision’ of the MT chronology is important, as it allows for the possibility that this 4000 years was added to a previous Old Testament chronology. Murtonen himself points out that the 4000-year schema could have been achieved through a few key alterations to an earlier chronological system (1954: 137). Evidence of the form that this earlier ‘proto’-MT chronology may have taken can be found in the work of von D.W. Bousset (1900), who noticed that if 215 years (rather than 430 years) are attributed to the Egyptian captivity period in the MT chronology, the result yields a date of AM 2451 for the Exodus (rounded off to AM 2450). Significantly, this is a period equal to a ‘jubilee of jubilees’ (i.e. 50 × 49 years), which is the culminating date in the book of Jubilees. The association of the jubilee dating with the Exodus is well established in Jewish chronography: the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus calculated this same date for the Exodus in several instances (Ant. 1.6.5; 2.15.2; 10.8.4-5). Jeremy Hughes (1990: 250) also notes this alternative method of calculating the MT figures and its correspondence with Josephus’ calculation. However, with little justification, Hughes rejects Josephus’ calculation here as a scribal error and makes no further mention of the possibility of an earlier proto-MT ‘Jubilees’ chronology. The reason why Hughes was sceptical about the existence of such a chronology may have been because it seemingly contradicts Jepsen’s reconstruction of the progenitor chronology (a reconstruction that Hughes heavily favours), which posits a period of 430 years for the Egyptian captivity. Instead, the proto-MT ‘Jubilees’ chronology seems to suggest that the LXX and SP’s 215 years was the original calculation. There is, however, an alternative solution—namely, that the original calculation of 430 years in the MT was subsequently replaced by a 215- year period, only to be reinstated in the Maccabean era when this particular calculation proved useful for devising the Maccabean timeline. In fact, because the 430-year calculation had already been established in previous versions (and, as will be shown, was still circulating in various non-MT

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. NORTHCOTE Development of Old Testament Chronography 9 chronologies during the Maccabean era), the Maccabeans may have felt justiﬁed in re-introducing it into the MT tradition in order to legitimize events in their own time. The existence of an earlier proto-MT ‘Jubilees’ chronology, as postulated by Bousset, is the ‘missing link’ between the progenitor chronology uncovered by Jepsen and the proto-MT Maccabean chronology uncovered by Murtonen. Further, such a chronology could represent one of two identiﬁable ‘Jubilee’ offshoots from Jepsen’s progenitor chronology, with the other offshoot—which will be referred to as the ‘Nehemiah’ chronology—forming the basis of the LXX and SP chronological traditions, and also the chronology that survives in the book of Jubilees. To understand how a proto-MT ‘Jubilees’ chronology could have developed from the progenitor chronology, it is necessary to take a closer look at the Nehemiah chronology and the jubilee schema that it followed.

3. The Nehemiah Chronology

Scholars have been baffled by the extra generation added in the LXX to the post-diluvian period—namely, the generation of Cainan (who is said to have begat Shelah at the age of 130).6 This extra generation does, however, appear in the second-century BCE work of the book of Jubilees, a book that in other chronological respects owes little to the LXX. The existence of this second, independent source should suggest some caution in treating the extra generation of Cainan as merely a later interpolation made by LXX chronographers. Indeed, according to F. Bork (1929), the extra generation of Cainan was present in an earlier Old Testament chronological tradition, but was later removed from the SP (although not the LXX), a viewpoint that is confirmed by the reconstructive model offered here. The significance of the Cainan addition becomes clear when Cainan’s 130 years are added to the progenitor chronology uncovered by Jepsen. The result yields a rather schematic timeline (see Table 2 [next page]). It can be seen from Table 2 that with the addition of Cainan, the Exodus is dated to AM 2450 or 50 jubilees (a jubilee being equal to 49 years), and the return from Babylon and/or completion of the Second Temple is dated to AM 3430 or 70 jubilees. These dates accord with the proto-MT ‘Jubilees’ dates for these respective events noted by Bousset (1900), while not requir- ing that any alterations be made to the figures contained in Jepsen’s progenitor chronology. In fact, it seems likely that the Nehemiah chronology

6. See Hasel 1980; Cassuto 1961: 251.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 10 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) actually precedes the proto-MT ‘Jubilees’ chronology noted by Bousset, serving as its inspiration (rather than its emulation). Table 2. The Nehemiah Chronology Flood 1307 Abraham’s birth 1730 Jacob in Egypt 2020 Exodus 2450 First Temple foundation 2930 Jerusalem fall 33607 Second Temple completion 34308 Nehemiah’s mission 35009

To understand why a reviser might want to modify the progenitor chronology to produce the Nehemiah chronology, it is necessary to understand the theology underlying the Nehemiah chronology’s timeline, and to do this, it is instructive to examine the events and schemas it emphasizes. Of key interest is the motive for replacing the 40-year schema of the progenitor chronology with a 49-year jubilee schema. The answer would seem to be that the reviser held in high regard the laws and observances surrounding the year of jubilee (which are outlined in detail in Lev. 25— part of a section that scholars generally identify as the ‘Holiness Code’). It is particularly appropriate in this respect that the jubilee schema in the Nehemiah chronology should be associated with the Exodus, given that the command to observe the jubilee was, according to Leviticus 25, actually given to Moses at the time of the Exodus. It is also appropriate because the requirement to free Israelite slaves and to return ‘borrowed’ land to its original owners accords well with the key events of the Exodus itself—

7. This calculation is based on adding together the reigns for the Judaean kings provided in the MT books of Kings and Chronicles. The result is 430 years from the foundations of the ﬁrst temple in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign (1 Kgs 6.1) until the fall of the Judaean kingdom. 8. The date for completion of the second temple can be calculated either by simply adding the 70 years of Babylonian captivity (Jer. 25.11; 2 Chron. 36.21) to the date of the fall of Jerusalem, or, with the aid of the Near Eastern king-list, counting 70 years from the destruction of the ﬁrst temple in Nebuchadnezzar’s nineteenth year (Jer. 52.12; 2 Kgs 25.8) to the completion of the second temple in Darius’ sixth year (Ezra 6.15). 9. This calculation is based on synchronizing the date provided in Neh. 2.1 (i.e. ‘the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes’) with the Near Eastern king-list that has survived in Ptolemy’s Canon (see Appendix, Table 15).

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. NORTHCOTE Development of Old Testament Chronography 11 namely, the freeing of the Israelites from their Egyptian captivity and the restoration of the land of Canaan. The association of the jubilees schema with the return from Babylon makes sense for the same reason, given that this return involved the release of Jews from their captivity in Babylon and the return of Jerusalem to their possession. Another point of interest is the date given by the reviser to Nehemiah’s mission—namely, AM 3500. This figure is significant in that 3500 years represents half of a 7000-year period. Later c. first-century CE Jewish works attributed great significance to a 7000-year period, considering it as constituting the total duration of world history, a notion that may have been derived from the same tradition underlying this earlier chronology.10 The emphasis that the reviser placed on Nehemiah’s mission is also consistent with the emphasis placed on the jubilee in the chronology, for it was Nehemiah after all who ‘reminded’ the Jews to observe the year of the jubilee (Neh. 5.1-13). The Nehemiah chronology was probably composed by Levites in Jerusalem not long after Nehemiah’s mission, perhaps some time late in the fifth century BCE (i.e. nearing 400 BCE). The reason for identifying a Levitical authorship is the chronology’s emphasis on Nehemiah and the regulations of the jubilee, which are consistent with a Levitical theology. The Levites are thought to have been immensely loyal to Nehemiah, and it was he who promoted the Levites to senior posts within the temple. The Levites also had a special regard for the jubilee regulations, which preserved their ‘perpetual right to redeem houses’ in their towns (Lev. 25.32). It would seem that the jubilees schema continued to govern chronological reckonings throughout the post-exilic period, and was the tradition that spawned both the proto-MT ‘Jubilees’ chronological tradition noted by Bousset (1900) and the book of Jubilees chronology (the latter inheriting the Nehemiah chronology’s ante-diluvian chronology and its extra generation of Cainan). But while the Nehemiah chronology indicates a 49-year cycle for the jubilee, it seems that a modification that supported a 50-year interpretation was made by subsequent chronographers—a modification that would be preserved in the later LXX and SP chronologies and, according to Bousset (1900), would also briefly feature in the proto-MT chronology. This modification shall now be examined in more detail.

10. See 2 En. 33.1-2, the Testament of Abraham (recension B) and Liber Antiqui- tatum Biblicarum 28.8.

4. The Nahor Chronology

B.W. Bousset (1900) suggests that, at some point, the proto-MT ‘Jubilees’ chronology included an extension to Nahor’s age at the birth of his firstborn.11 Working with the MT chronology, Bousset’s reconstruction involves substituting the 29 years given for Nahor’s age when his son Terah was born, with the figure of 79 years found in the LXX and SP. Bousset also ignores the 430 years given in the MT for the Egyptian captivity period (Exod. 12.40, 41), and instead employs the LXX and SP’s calculation of 215 years for this period. These modifications produce the following variant ‘jubilee’ timeline. Table 3. The Nahor Chronology Exodus 2500 First Temple completion 300012 Second Temple completion 3480

While the proto-MT tradition most likely did include this modification (for reasons that will be discussed later), this tradition was certainly not the first Old Testament chronology to utilize it. In fact, it is my contention that this modification was made at an early stage in the pre-LXX/SP tradition, where an extension to Nahor’s age of begetting from 29 years to 79 years resulted in the same timeline as noted by Bousset (i.e. Table 3), but without any adjustment needing to be made to the 430-year period spent in Egypt and using the same chrono-genealogical figures found in the Nehe- miah chronology. The Nahor chronology shifts the date of the Exodus to AM 2500, and results in a dating of AM 3000 for the completion of the First Temple. These dates mirror the 50 jubilees and 70 jubilees of the Nehemiah chronology, but count a jubilee period as 50 years in duration rather than 49 years. Incidentally, this conflict of interpretation over the correct length of the jubilee period is one that continues to divide scholars and theolo- gians to this day (Gooder 2000: 97), just as it divided rabbis in earlier times.13 The lack of significance accorded to the Second Temple and Nehemiah’s mission might suggest that an anti-temple cult rationale

11. See also Johnson 1988: 35. 12. This is dated twenty years after the temple’s foundation, as stated in 1 Kgs 9.10; 2 Chron. 8.1. 13. See, for example, Talmud tractates Rosh Hashanah 9a; Arakin 12b; and Abodah Zarah 9b.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. NORTHCOTE Development of Old Testament Chronography 13 underlaid the chronology. However, there is not enough evidence to conclude that the Nahor chronology was devised outside Levite circles, or even outside the Jerusalem temple cult itself. In fact, the lack of emphasis on the foundation of the Second Temple and Nehemiah’s reforms may have simply been a means of stressing the continuity between the Second Temple and the First Temple—a continuity that seems to have come under question by rival groups (most notably the Samaritans14) during the fourth century BCE, and hence was in need of scriptural reinforcement.15 It is also interesting to note that the AM 3000 date for completion of the First Temple seems to be confirmed in the text of the second book of Esdras (generally dated c. first century CE), in which it is written: The woman you saw in Zion, which you now see as a city complete with its buildings. She told you she was childless for thirty years; that was because three thousand years passed before any sacrifices were offered in Zion. But then, after the three thousand years, Solomon built the city and offered the sacrifices; that was when the childless woman bore a son. (10.44-46) If this passage is taken at face value—that is, as a precise time-reckoning rather than an approximation—it would suggest that the AM 3000 dating for the temple completion in the Nahor chronology (or a later version that preserved this date) was known to later writers. The Nahor chronology’s terminus ad quem is the third century BCE, by which time its descendant, the LXX chronology, had developed (see below). But the Nahor chronology was probably devised some years before that time, perhaps some time in the fourth century BCE, as there was yet one more stage of development that took place to the pre-LXX/SP chronological tradition before the LXX and SP chronologies emerged. This stage was marked by an expansion to the post-diluvian generations, which produced a timeline that will be referred to as the ‘Saros’ chronology.

5. The Saros Chronology The Nahor chronology was revised at some point to include an additional 600 years, which involved adding an extra 100 years to each generation

14. The Samaritans, who may have been building their own temple at Mt Gerazim at the time (Bright 1981: 410), are described in Ezra 4 as having tried to sabotage the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple. 15. This is a motive that some scholars (such as Williamson 1985: xxxv) believe prompted extensive revisions to the books of Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah around the same time.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 14 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) from Arpachshad to Serug (with the exception of Cainan, whose age at the birth of his ﬁrstborn was not altered). This addition is preserved in both the LXX and SP chronologies, which some scholars (e.g. De Vries 1962: 581; Harrison 1969: 149; Klein 1974: 257-58) believe to have been a rational alteration intended to avoid the problem of Abraham’s forefathers still being alive when he left for Canaan (as is the case in the MT and presumably in the earlier chronologies). However, the addition of 600 years to the chronology produced a discernable schema (as shown in Table 4) that also needs to be considered as a motivating factor for the modi- ﬁcations made. Table 4. The Saros Chronology Flood 1307 Abraham’s birth 2380 Exodus 3100 First Temple completion 3600 Second Temple completion 4080

Of particular note is the AM 3600 dating for the completion of the First Temple. The figure 3600 held special significance to later Palestinian religious thinkers, and certainly had significance in terms of Babylonian mathematics and astronomy, which were known to Jewish scholars (many of whom resided in Babylon). The Babylonians referred to this number as a ‘saros’ (hence the name ‘Saros’ chronology that is given to this particular timeline in this paper). Given that 360 degrees represented a complete geometric circle in Babylonian mathematics, the Saros reviser may have viewed the number 3600 as representative of the concept of cyclic completion in regard to the temple’s construction. 3600 also marks 72 cycles of 50-year ‘jubilee’ periods, significant because the number 72 was known to have a prominent place in Jewish symbolism. It is also possible that there is a symbolic connection between the AM 3600 date for completion of the First Temple and the 3600 chief officers that Solomon chose to supervise construction of the temple (stated in 2 Chron. 2.2 and LXX’s 3 Kgdms 2.25, although MT 1 Kgs 5.16 gives 3300). As noted in regard to the Nahor chronology, the lack of schematic significance accorded to the Babylonian return/Second Temple is also evident in the Saros chronology, which again raises the question of whether the reviser was critical of the Jerusalem temple cult. However, it must be kept in mind that, as the basis for the later LXX chronology and pre-SP chronologies, the Saros chronology probably wielded a great deal of ‘official’ authority (assuming, of course, that the SP and LXX are directly descended

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. NORTHCOTE Development of Old Testament Chronography 15 from an ‘official’ priestly text).16 For this reason it is likely that this chronology formed part of the official temple Old Testament edition, and that its author, like the Nahor reviser before him, was simply downplaying the exile and the foundations of the Second Temple in order to highlight the continuity between the First and Second Temples. It is also possible that twenty years were added to Methuselah’s age of begetting in a later version of the Saros chronology (a modification that was thereafter preserved indirectly in the LXX and MT chronologies). This would have resulted in a date of AM 2400 for Abraham’s birth and AM 3600 for the foundation of the First Temple, hence conforming overall to a neat 1200-year schema. The terminus ad quem of the Saros chronology is the third century BCE. By this time, the chronology had been modified to accord with the timeline that survives in the existing manuscripts of the LXX.

6. The Septuagint (LXX) Chronology

The Saros chronology was revised at some point in the third century BCE to include yet a further extension to the timeline. This revision has been preserved, with perhaps some semblance of its original form, in the surviving LXX manuscripts. The LXX chronologer(s) made a number of significant changes. First, and most noticeably, an extension was made to the ante-diluvian period (i.e. the period before Noah), with the LXX chronology adding 100 years to each ante-diluvian generation from Adam to Enoch, an extra 100 or 120 years for Methuselah, and an extra 135 years for Lamech.17 A second modification made by the LXX chronologer was a reduction of the Egyptian captivity period to 215 years. This change may have reflected the views of the third-century BCE Egyptian historian, Manetho, who talked of the invasion, reign and eventual expulsion from Egypt of the ‘Hyksos’ kings, who are said to have subsequently established the city of Jerusalem.18 Egyptologists tend to date the start of the Hyksos era to the

16. Eugene Ulrich, for example, views the LXX as largely ‘a faithful, not innovative in content, translation of the sacred text’ (1999: 42). 17. Norbert Lohﬁnk (1994) attributes rational motives for the extension to the ages of begetting in the LXX, arguing that this enables all the ante-diluvian ancestors (with the exception of Adam and Noah) to be alive to witness Enoch’s assumption into heaven (p. 158). However, a simple extension to their life spans would have achieved the same result. 18. Preserved as a fragment in Josephus’ Contra Apionem 1.14.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 16 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) second intermediate period, in the mid-seventeenth century BCE, and it is the Hyksos (or ‘Shepherd’) kings of this period whom Josephus, a first- century CE Jewish historian, associated with the Israelite migration to Egypt in the time of Jacob (Contra Apionem 1.14). Earlier Jewish chronographers may have arrived at a similar conclusion and, noting that the 430-year captivity of the previous timeline placed the migration at least two centuries too early, reduced the Egyptian period by 215 years. By also reducing the period from the Exodus to the foundations of the First Temple by 40 years (giving a total of 440 years altogether), the reviser thus managed to coincide the migration with the start of the Hyksos period. Employing these figures, it is possible to work back from the fall of Jerusalem (which in modern Julian reckoning occurred in 586/7 BCE) and see that the LXX’s calculation of 1085 years prior to this event (i.e. 430 years for the Judaean reigns + 440 years + 215 years) places the Egyptian migration in 1671/2 BCE. It has yet to be established, however, whether third-century BCE Jews were actually familiar with a timeline of Egyptian kings similar to the one reconstructed by modern Egyptologists.19 At any rate, in contrast (or in addition) to the Hyksos hypothesis—which can be considered a ‘rational alteration’ on the part of the reviser—attention should be paid to the schematic patterns that are also produced by the modifications made. Unfortu- nately, an examination of the schematic form of the LXX chronology is complicated by the fact that this chronology survives today in several different versions that contain minor, yet numerous, variations, none of which have yet been definitively established as representing the ‘original’ LXX version. Even the fifth-century CE text of the Codex Alexandrinus (LXXA), which is the earliest surviving manuscript containing the chrono- genealogy20 (and the chronology most supported in the other LXX manuscripts), contains variable figures for Enosh and Methuselah’s age of begetting. However, if the variations in the LXXA are examined, traces of schematic development are revealed that (if accepted as being of early antiquity) can give us some indication of the schematic thinking of the LXX chronologer in the third century BCE. The first variation can be seen in the original surviving text of the LXXA, which gives 90 years for Enosh’s age of begetting and 167 years for

19. Unfortunately, Manetho’s Egyptian king-list, which is the only ancient source that posits a date for the Hyksos period, seems to have suffered considerable corruption, given that the fragments preserved by Africanus, Eusebius and Josephus signiﬁ- cantly disagree with one another (see Waddell 1940). 20. The Vatican version (LXXB) is lacking Gen. 1.1–46.28.

Methuselah’s age of begetting. This produces a chronology (see Table 5) that, if two years are deducted somewhere along the timeline for the ante- diluvian era, results in an AM 3500 date for Jacob’s migration to Egypt (an event which undoubtedly held a great deal of signiﬁcance for Jews who had migrated to Egypt).

Table 5. Original LXXA Chronology Flood 2140 Abraham’s birth 3210 Abraham in Canaan 3285 Jacob in Egypt 3500 A second variation of this chronology is the one known to some of the early Christian writers such as Theophilus (late second century CE)21 and Eusebius (early fourth century CE),22 and is preferred as the original figures by some modern scholars (e.g. Hughes 1990: 267 n. 14; Klein 1974: 259-60). This variation consists of a 190-year (corrected) reading for Enosh’s age of begetting. Interestingly, this alternative reading, which dates the Flood in AM 2242, also reveals a schematic pattern in the chronology—namely, that if two years are deducted from the timeline (as in the ‘original’ version noted above), Jacob’s entry into Egypt would have occurred in AM 3600, which neatly fits in with the saros schema discussed earlier. The third version of the chronology is found in the corrections that appear in the surviving LXXA manuscript for Enosh and Methuselah’s ages of begetting (given as 190 years and 187 years respectively), and it is possible that the early editor who inserted these corrections was familiar with a ‘superior’ reading of the text in which these figures were found. Indeed, the ‘corrected’ LXXA version of the ante-diluvian generations agrees with the figures put forward by a number of early Christian-era writers, such as Josephus (first century CE),23 Julius Africanus (third century CE),24 Epiphanius of Salamis (late fourth century CE)25 and St Augustine (early

21. Theophilus to Autolycus 3.24 and 3.28. 22. See the ﬁrst book of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Chronicle (Schoene 1967 [1875]: 125). 23. Speciﬁcally, the version of Antiquities 1.3.3, preserved in the fourteenth- century CE Codex Regius Parisinus manuscript. 24. Fragments 3 and 5 in Julius Africanus’ Chronography (repr. and trans. in Roberts and Donaldson 1957: 131). 25. Epiphanius’ Panarion (Haer. I).

fifth century CE).26 The corrected figures also agree with the total that can be calculated from the figures provided by the ancient chronographer Demetrius (late third century BCE).27 The (corrected) LXXA chronology for the pre-settlement period schematic pattern can be seen in Table 6.

Table 6. Amended LXXA Chronology Flood 2262 Abraham’s birth 3334 Abraham in Canaan 3409 Jacob’s birth 3494 Jacob in Egypt 3624 Exodus 3839 Israelite settlement 3879 Although there is no evident schema in the pre-settlement timeline above, the schematic nature of the chronology becomes apparent when the post- settlement period is calculated using the MT’s Judaean regnal ﬁgures (see Appendix, Table 16), as can be seen in the following table (Table 7).

Table 7. Amended LXXA Post-Settlement Chronology First Temple foundation 4277 Jerusalem fall 4707 Second Temple completion 4777 It is the 777 aspect of this final dating that seems to have been the main consideration in the LXX chronographer’s reckoning—a figure that probably had importance in Jewish-Greek numeric symbolism generally (with 777 years being the length of Lamech’s lifespan in the MT, and a seven- fold division later being central to the structure and symbology of the book of Revelation). The figure may also have had some correspondence with the MT’s date of AM 2666 for the Exodus (which will be discussed later). The AM 4777 dating and the other variations outlined above rely on the figures for the Judaean kings found in the pre-LXX chronologies (i.e. those that have survived in the MT) and those that can be calculated from the LXX book of Chronicles.28 In contrast, the regnal figures provided in surviving LXX manuscripts of the book of Kings vary considerably (both

26. St Augustine’s City of God 15.20. 27. Fragment 2, preserved in Eusebius’ early fourth-century CE work, Preparation for the Gospel (9.21). 28. This supports Edwin R. Thiele’s (1951: 202) contention that the MT regnal ﬁgures are original, with the LXX’s variant readings being late modiﬁcations.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. NORTHCOTE Development of Old Testament Chronography 19 from the MT and from each other).29 For example, the regnal chronology found in the LXXA book of Kings adds 45 years to that found in the MT book of Kings. Interestingly, this extra 45 years accords with the alternative LXX chronologies mentioned earlier, producing dates of AM 4700 for the return from Babylon if the ‘original’ LXXA figures for Enosh and Methuselah are accepted, and AM 4800 for the same event if the original figure for Methuselah alone is accepted. This latter dating, in fact, marks 1200 years from Jacob’s entry into Egypt until the Israelites’ return from Babylon, and places the former event precisely three-quarters of the way through the total 4800-year period. It is possible, therefore, that even the modified figures produced by the Kaige recension of the LXXA book of Kings were intended to serve a schematic purpose. Demetrius himself is of little help in clarifying which figures the LXX originally employed for the Judaean regnal period, for the surviving fragments of his work do not preserve his overall calculations for this period, and certainly not for the period where the LXX manuscripts differ. There may, however, be confirmation of the AM 4777 dating (and, hence, of the MT regnal figures that it was probably originally based upon) in the chronological work of Eupolemus, a Palestinian Jewish historian who wrote in Greek in the mid-second century BCE (Schafer 1977: 546-47). Eupolemus calculated the fifth year of King Demetrius (not to be confused with Demetrius the chronographer) as AM 5149.30 While scholars debate whether he was referring to Demetrius I or Demetrius II (Hughes 1990: 243-44), it just so happens that the fifth year of Demetrius II (141 BCE) would, according to Eupolemus’ chronology, place the completion of the Second Temple (515 BCE) in AM 4775 (4775 = 5149–374)—just two years short of AM 4777. Regardless of which reading of the LXX is accepted (and we might keep in mind here the possibility that a number of LXX versions circulated from a very early date), there seems sufficient evidence to conclude that schematic considerations motivated the calculation of the LXX chronology. In fact, in addition to the schematic patterns already discussed, it would seem that, overall, the LXX chronology was attempting to fit into a 5000-year schema of world history—a schema that was, perhaps, influential at the time of its composition. An AM 5000 date would, in the (corrected) LXXA chronology, fall in c. 292 BCE—a few years after Palestine came under the

29. See Galil 1996: 159. 30. Fragment 5, preserved in Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata (1.21).

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 20 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) control of Ptolemaic Egypt in 301 BCE, and just a few years prior to the accession of Ptolemy II Philadelphus in 285 BCE (the king who, according to legend, requested the LXX translation be made).31 It was probably around this time, then, that the LXX chronology was devised. It was certainly devised no later than 222–205 BCE, when, as noted above, Demetrius made his calculations in accord with the amended LXXA chronology (Wacholder 1968: 456).

7. The Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) Chronological Tradition Yet another chronological tradition developed from the Saros chronology around the same time as the LXX and served as the prototype for the SP chronology. Whereas the LXX lengthened the Saros chronology’s ante- diluvian generations and halved the period of Egyptian captivity, this proto-SP chronological tradition took the Saros chronology in another direction altogether. First, the extra generation of Cainan was dropped in accord with the progenitor and MT chronologies. Second, two to three years were deducted from the dating of the Flood (as per the LXX and the MT chronologies). Finally, seven years were subtracted from the chronology somewhere along the timeline (although they were later restored). The result was the proto-SP chronology that John Skinner (1910) has identi- ﬁed, shown here in Table 8. Table 8. The Proto-SP Chronology Shem’s birth 1200 Flood 1300 Abraham’s birth 2240 Jacob’s birth 2400 Joseph’s death 2600 Israel’s settlement 3000

Skinner remarks (1910: 136):

if we assume MT of Exod. 12 to be the original reading… we ﬁnd that [the SP]…counts from the Creation to the entrance into Canaan 3007 years. The odd 7 is embarrassing; but if we neglect it (see Bousset, 146) we obtain a series of round numbers whose relations can hardly be accidental. Skinner goes on to explain the schematic system that he contends lies within this chronology. He writes (1910: 36):

31. See the Letter of Aristeas (Thackeray 1902).

The entire period was to be divided into three decreasing parts (1300 + 940 + 760 = 3000) by the Flood and the birth of Abraham and of these the second exceeds the third by 180 years, and the ﬁrst exceeds the second by (2 × 180 =) 360. Shem was born in 1200, and Jacob in 2400. While the surviving SP text does not proceed beyond the settlement period, there is no reason to believe that its forerunner did not. In fact, when the proto-SP chronology is extended, a deﬁnite schematic pattern emerges. Assuming that the proto-SP chronology, like the LXX, calculated 440 years between the Exodus and the foundations of the First Temple and employed the progenitor chronology’s (as per the MT’s) regnal list, the following key dates are produced for post-settlement events (Table 9): Table 9. Proto-SP Post-Settlement Chronology First Temple foundation 3400 Samarian famine ends 3500 Second Temple completion 3900

The AM 3500 dating is interesting, in that it would fall on the third year of Ahab’s reign. According to 1 Kgs 18.1, this is the year that Elijah brought an end to the famine in Samaria after his dramatic showdown with the prophets of Baal. Also, the fall of Jerusalem would, according to this reckoning, correspond to AM 3830, and the return from Babylon and/or the completion of the Second Temple would have taken place in AM 3900. The only significant figure missing from this chronology is AM 3600, which, if present, would have completed the 1200-year schema evident within the chronology. It is clear, however, that it is a 1300-year rather than a 1200-year schema that is dominant in this chronology. In this respect, the significance of the Flood dating (AM 1300) can be noted as comprising one-third of the period from Creation to completion of the Second Temple. Also, the year AM 2601, which lies two-thirds of the way through this period,32 marks the death of Joseph, the patriarch who was sometimes used in the Old Testa- ment to symbolize the northern tribes of Samaria (e.g. Ezek. 37.16, 19). Finally, the culminating date of AM 3900 for the completion of the Second Temple probably relates to the 390-day/year period allotted for the

32. The year of Joseph’s death is calculated as follows. According to Gen. 47.9, he was 39 years old when Jacob was 130 years old (i.e. 30 years old when appointed gov- ernor as per Gen. 41.46, plus seven years of plenty as per Gen. 41.47, plus two years of drought as per Gen. 45.6), and died at the age of 110 (Gen. 50.26). Hence, Joseph’s death occurs 71 years after Jacob’s migration.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 22 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) punishment of Samaria, as prophesised in Ezek. 4.5.33 Indeed, it seems that an association with punishment is the common feature of the 1300-year intervals of the proto-SP chronology: first, the Flood, and later the Israel- ites’ fall from favour in Egypt (marked by Joseph’s death). As for the significance within the schema of the Jewish return from Babylon and/or completion of the Second Temple, this might have served to mark the end of Samaria’s period of punishment, for Samaritan tradition (as revealed in the Samaritan Chronicle) held that their own Mt Gerazim temple was founded in the same year as the second Jerusalem temple.34 The proto-SP chronology is an early version (or forerunner) of the chronology that appears in the surviving texts of the SP. The final version of the SP included the following modifications: a rejection of 430 years in favour of 215 years (in accord with the LXX and proto-MT); the restoration of the 7 years that were removed from the proto-SP chronology; and the addition of three years, perhaps to account for Arpachshad’s birth after the Flood. The resulting chronology that survives in the SP is shown in Table 10: Table 10. SP Chronology Flood 1310 Abraham’s birth 2250 Abraham in Canaan 2325 Jacob’s birth 2410 Jacob in Egypt 2540 Exodus 2755 Israelite settlement 279535 Division of the land 2800

The date of AM 2800 is based on the ﬁve-year period implied in the book of Joshua for the conquest of Israel,36 and was considered by Jepsen (1929: 253) to be the date when the SP chronology culminates. In light of

33. This period is given in the LXX as 190 days/years. 34. See Oliver Turnbull Crane’s (1890) translation of T.W.J. Juynboll’s (1848) edition of the Samaritan Chronicle, ch. 45. For a discussion of the possible ancient origins of this c. fourteenth-century CE manuscript, see Macdonald 1969. 35. The Samaritan Chronicle (ch. 15) dates the crossing of the Jordan in AM 2794, obviously adding only two years (rather than three) for Arpachshad’s birth after the Flood. 36. This ﬁve-year calculation is based on Caleb’s statement in Josh. 14.10 that 45 years had passed since Moses sent him to spy on the land—a mission that, according to Num. 13, took place in the ﬁrst year of the Exodus.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. NORTHCOTE Development of Old Testament Chronography 23 the progenitor chronology’s dating of the First Temple in AM 2800, Jepsen wonders if the Samaritan chronologer sought to establish that a sanctuary at Mt Gerazim was also built at this time. Indeed, the Samaritan Chronicle (1.24) states that, upon conquering the land, a synagogue was built by Joshua on Mt Gerazim to house the tabernacle. If the Samaritan chronologer did, in fact, emulate the progenitor chronology’s AM 2800 dating, then it would suggest that Palestinian writers were still familiar with the progenitor chronology at a relatively late date. The precise date of the SP chronology’s composition is, however, uncertain, but the chronology’s ﬁnal form was probably devised in the second or ﬁrst century BCE, when the Samaritan Pentateuch as it is known today seems to have come into being (Cross 1964). Meanwhile, the Jerusalem temple-cult seems to have found favour with the proto-MT chronological tradition, which shall now be discussed in some detail.

8. The Masoretic Text (MT) Chronological Tradition

Unlike the LXX and SP, the proto-MT chronology does not seem to have been an offshoot of the Saros chronology but, rather, a direct descendant of the earlier Nahor chronology. Instead of simply preserving the Nahor chronology, however, the proto-MT chronological tradition followed certain trends found in contemporaneous chronological traditions (most notably the LXX). For example, the ante-diluvian ﬁgures were expanded in accordance with the trend to push back the age of Creation (as occurred in the LXX and proto-SP chronologies). These expansions correspond to the LXX ﬁgures, with Jared and Methuselah’s ages of begetting being identical, and Lamech’s age of begetting being very similar (182 in the MT and 188 in the LXX). The proto-MT chronographer also made the following changes: two to three years were deducted from Shem’s age of begetting Arpachshad (in accordance with the LXX and proto-SP chronologies); the generation of Cainan was omitted (in accordance with the proto-SP chronology); and the period of captivity in Egypt was halved from 430 years to 215 years (in accord with the LXX and SP chronologies). Although these alterations yielded the same AM 2500 date for the Exodus that is found in the Nahor chronology, the time of Creation differed in that it was pushed back to an earlier dating and a new date of AM 1656 was established for the Flood. The revised chronology produced the following key dates (Table 11):

Table 11. Proto-MT Nahor Chronology Flood 1656 Abraham in Canaan 2070 Jacob in Egypt 2285 Exodus 2500 First Temple completion 3000

According to Jules Oppert (1903), the proto-MT’s date for the Flood was intended to correspond to the Flood date in the king list devised by the third-century BCE Babylonian historian, Berossus. Berossus himself drew on older Sumerian and Babylonian chronological traditions, which, much like the Old Testament chronographers, he appears to have flexibly re- worked according to his own schematic leanings.37 Oppert contends that the Old Testament’s 1656 years (approximately 86,400 weeks) is a translation of Berossus’ figure of 432,000 years for the Flood (= 86,400 sosses).38 If Oppert’s reasoning for the dating of the Flood is accepted, and if it can be safely assumed that the proto-MT chronologer derived the Flood date from Berossus and not vice versa, then it suggests that the proto-MT Nahor chronology was composed after Berossus’ era (c. 285–61 BCE), which certainly fits the developmental time frame that has been presented in this paper. The chronology’s terminus ad quem is the mid-second century BCE when the Maccabean revision was carried out. Prior to the Maccabean revision, however, the proto-MT chronology was modified slightly to accord with the 49-year jubilee schema found in the earlier Nehemiah chronology (which may have continued to serve as the official version for some Jewish groups, such as those in Babylon, even while it underwent extensive modification by the temple priests in Jeru- salem). Specifically, the modification involved restoring Nahor’s original age of begetting (as found in the progenitor chronology and the Nehemiah chronology), which effectively reduced the overall chronology by 49 years (an adjustment that survives in the present MT). This modification, which accords with the chronology identified by Bousset (1900), places the Exodus in AM 2451, the return from Babylon and/or completion of the Second Temple in AM 3431, and Nehemiah’s mission in AM 3501. The restoration of the Nehemiah chronology might possibly be explained by renewed support for the 49-year jubilee period and/or the schematic importance of the Second Temple and Nehemiah’s mission. Alternatively,

37. For an examination of surviving fragments from these earlier Sumerian and Babylonian traditions, see Lambert 1973; Finkel 1980; Jacobsen 1981. 38. 1656 years is exactly 86,407.7 weeks.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. NORTHCOTE Development of Old Testament Chronography 25 the restoration may have marked the ‘official’ acceptance of the updated chronology by the diasporic Jewish community in Babylon, who may have considered themselves to be custodians of the original Nehemiah chronological tradition. The association of the proto-MT Nehemiah chronology with the diaspora in Babylon is largely based on Frank Moore Cross’s (1964) view that the proto-MT textual tradition itself developed in Babylon. It also makes sense in this respect that such a long-standing Old Testament chronological tradition (one that seems to have been known to Josephus in the first century CE) would have developed in a strong, stable and influential Jewish community such as that which flourished in Babylon, which perhaps avoided much of the political and sectarian turmoil (and the immense redactional activity that was perhaps symptomatic of such turmoil) that occurred in Jerusalem throughout the Second Temple period. Irrespective of where the proto-MT chronological tradition developed, however, it is almost certain that the final revision of the MT chronology occurred in Jerusalem in the mid-second century BCE. It was at this time that the Maccabean family gained power in Palestine and a pro-Macca- bean editor revised the proto-MT chronology (which was perhaps introduced to Palestine in the Maccabean era) to celebrate the rededication of the Second Temple. To achieve this end, the 430-year calculation for the Egyptian period was reinstated from the earlier chronologies, producing the chronology that survives in the MT today (Table 12):

Table 12. MT ‘Maccabean’ Chronology Flood 1656 Abraham’s birth 1946/1948 Jacob in Egypt 2214/2216 Exodus 2666/2668 Temple completion 3166/3168 Fall of Jerusalem 3575/3577 Second Temple rededication 3998/4000

The AM 2666 date for the Exodus falls two-thirds of the way through the period between Creation and the Second Temple rededication in c. AM 4000 (Blenkinsopp 1992: 48), thus contributing to the ‘prophetic’ nature of the Maccabean rededication of the temple. Also, according to Alfred von Gutschmid (cited in Skinner 1910: 135), the ﬁgure 2666 corresponds to the 26Ҁ generations that elapsed between Adam and Moses at the time of the Exodus (Moses being 80 years old at the time, with 40 years of his lifetime remaining).

The significance of the AM 2666 date is probably the reason why the Maccabean chronographer did not wish to reinstate definitively the progenitor chronology’s additional two or three years for Shem’s age at the birth of his firstborn (an adjustment that would have dated the rededication of the Second Temple at precisely AM 4000, as discussed earlier). By leaving Shem’s age at the birth of his firstborn ambiguous, both the AM 2666 date for the Exodus and the AM 4000 date for the Second Temple rededication could be precisely reckoned from the chronology using alternative systems of calculating Shem’s age of begetting (as shown in Table 12). After the final revision of the MT chronology, other chronographers added extra dates (although they did not change the basic timeline itself). For example, the dating of Jehoiachin’s release from prison in the thirty- seventh year of his exile (2 Kgs 25.27; Jer. 52.31), which coincides with the great saros year AM 3600, may have been inserted at this time.39 An alteration was also made to the length of Saul’s reign, which was assigned an unlikely ‘two years’ (1 Sam. 13.1).40 This calculation placed Saul’s accession in AM 3100, thus producing a neat 500-year period from his accession to Jehoiachin’s release. Yet another chronographer may have inserted Jer. 52.30, which states that Nebuzar-adan carried the people away to Babylon in Nebuchadnezzar’s twenty-third year—a dating that corresponds to AM 3650 and quite possibly relates to the 365-day solar calendar.41 Indeed, calendrical schemas seem to have been immensely popular with second- to first-century BCE Jewish chronographers, as indicated by schemas of this type found in yet another great chronological tradition that emerged during this period—the book of Jubilees chronology. It is this chronological tradition—the final one to be addressed in terms of the developmental model being presented here—that will be examined next.

9. The Book of Jubilees Chronology The book of Jubilees is a historical account of the period from Creation to the settlement in Israel following the Exodus, providing a chronology of events that is explicitly dated in terms of jubilee periods (of 49-year intervals) and ‘weeks of years’ (i.e. of seven-year intervals). It generally

39. Mention of Jehoiachin’s release is notably absent in 2 Chronicles. 40. This ﬁgure is sometimes amended in modern translations to ‘twenty-two years’. 41. Jer. 52.28-30 is absent in the LXX, and is generally considered to be a late addition to the MT version of Jeremiah (Jones 1992: 548-49).

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. NORTHCOTE Development of Old Testament Chronography 27 follows the SP chronological tradition for the ante-diluvian generation figures (see Appendix), and also includes the extra generation of Cainan which is characteristic of the LXX chronology. Consequently, many scholars consider the book of Jubilees chronology to have borrowed these features from two of its contemporaries—the SP and LXX chronological traditions (Hasel 1980). However, as the development model presented here indicates, these particular features are also characteristic of earlier Old Testament chronologies from which the SP and LXX later developed, such as the Nehemiah chronology. In fact, with respect to the Nehemiah chronology, the book of Jubilees shares with it a feature not found in the SP or LXX versions at all—namely, its culminating date of AM 2450. For this reason, rather than being a hybrid of the SP and LXX chronologies, it seems more likely that the book of Jubilees chronology developed relatively independently of them, being instead a direct descendent of the Nehemiah chronology. The book of Jubilees chronology departs in some significant ways, however, from the Nehemiah chronology—a departure that indicates a considerable evolution from the earlier chronology. Most significantly, the book of Jubilees provides a different set of ages of begetting for several post-diluvian generations, ranging from a surprising twelve years for Peleg to 108 years for Reu. There are certain schematic structures evident in the resulting chronology that provide clues to the rationale behind at least some of the changes. These structures become evident upon a close inspection of the book of Jubilees chronology (as preserved in Ethiopic manuscripts) shown in Table 13: Table 13. Book of Jubilees Chronology Noah (birth) 701–707/708 Flood (start) 1062/1309 Tower of Babel 1590–1633 Abraham (birth) 1876 Jacob (birth) 2046 Jacob in Egypt 2172 Exodus 2410 Israelite settlement 2450

The first point to note in the above table is the AM 1062 dating for Noah’s Flood which, according to the surviving Ethiopic manuscripts of the book of Jubilees (5.22-23), corresponds to the sixth year of the fifth week (of years) in the second jubilee, or, perhaps more significantly, to 3 × 354 ‘lunar’ years (354 being the number of days in a Jewish lunar year). The resulting chronology yields a two-third schema: Noah being born two-thirds

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 28 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) of the way through the period between Creation and the start of the Flood (approximately 2 × 354 ‘lunar’-year periods); the start of the Flood occurring two-thirds of the way through the period between Creation and the construction of the Tower of Babel; and the construction of the tower itself occurring two-thirds of the way through the period between Creation and the final Israelite settlement. This schema is reminiscent of the two-third schema found in the proto-SP chronology (which was marked by the death of Joseph in Egypt) and also found in the MT Maccabean chronology (which was marked by the Exodus). The correspondence between the two- third schema and events involving punishment would seem to reflect a late Jewish theology which might have been drawn from Zech. 13.8 and its message that two-thirds of the people shall be ‘cut off’ from the land of Israel as punishment for their sins. Despite their prominence as overarching schemas in the book of Jubilees chronology, it should be noted that both the two-third schema and the lunar-year schema are likely to have been late modifications, with the AM 1307 date for the start of the Flood suggested elsewhere in the text (Jub. 6.18) likely to be the more original (Hughes 1990: 23)42—a supposi- tion supported by three principle factors. First, an AM 1307 date is consistent with the dates for events preceding the Flood, such as Noah’s marriage in AM 1207 and his begetting of Shem two years later (Jub. 4.33). Second, the emphasis on a lunar-year schema contradicts the strong condemnation of the lunar calendar made in several places in the book of Jubilees (e.g. Jub. 6.32-38). Indeed, Jacob’s birth 364 years before the Exodus would indicate that the solar year schema was intrinsic to the chronology (as it is to the book of Jubilees Flood chronology). The third factor is that the Tower of Babel date—in fact, the whole story surrounding the construction and fate of the tower—has all the hallmarks of being a late interpolation. For example, the date given for the Tower of Babel (1590–1633) can be seen to contradict the earlier date given for the division of the land (AM 1569), which was probably traditionally associated with the dispersal of the people following the destruction of the Tower.43 The later reviser appears to have tried to downplay this contradiction by shifting the occupancy of the divided land (Jub. 10.28-36) to after the fall of the tower (Jub. 10.18-27), a shift that results, however, in a rather fragmented and confused narrative that essentially gives two different

42. R.H. Charles (1917: 59) simply amends the date in question to the ‘27th jubilee’. 43. See Gen. 10.25, 32; 11.1-9.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. NORTHCOTE Development of Old Testament Chronography 29 explanations for why the dispersal of the people occurred. It also results in an anachronism with respect to Noah’s death, which is announced prior to the construction of the tower, but which is not supposed to occur (if the timeframe of the chronology is followed) until several years after the destruction of the tower. Even Jacques van Ruiten (2000), who generally treats the book of Jubilees as an integrated, harmonious account, describes this anachronism as being ‘somewhat peculiar’ (p. 342). If these interpolated dates are ignored, then an original chronology can be postulated that—with the exception of the AM 2450 date and possibly the 364-year period from Jacob’s birth until the Exodus—is rather un- schematic in nature. In the absence of any obvious schema that would explain the original chronology, then, it could be argued that its extension of the Shemite chrono-genealogy merely reflects the unique challenge faced by a chronologer wishing to employ a reduced Egyptian captivity period (in accord with the kind of historical thinking of the time that seems to have been reflected in, for example, the LXX chronological changes) yet still arrive at an AM 2450 date for the return to the Promised Land.44 The interest shown by the book of Jubilees chronographer in a culminating year of AM 2450 continues a jubilees tradition that began with the Nehemiah chronology and was upheld by the third or early second-century BCE proto-MT chronology (and a few other second- to first-century BCE sectarian texts).45 The composition dates for the original book of Jubilees chronology and its ‘lunar’ revision, however, are uncertain, although most scholars date the book of Jubilees to the mid-second century BCE, some time between 160 and 140 BCE in the early years of the Maccabean revolution (Wintermute 1985). There is also uncertainty surrounding the sectarian leanings of the document. Some scholars (e.g. Nickelsburg 1984: 103; Boccaccini 1998: 87) attribute the book of Jubilees to an Enochian sect (so dubbed because of their supposed authorship of parts of 1 Enoch). How- ever, the fact that the book of Jubilees chronology is likely a derivation of the Levite-authored Nehemiah chronology (from which the proto-MT chronology also took its inspiration) supports those who view the book of Jubilees as being a more conservative text (e.g. Wintermute 1985: 48). Given the manner in which some of the dates preserved in fragments of the book of Jubilees found at Qumran disagree with the Ethiopic

44. The book of Jubilees calculates the Egyptian period as 238 years. 45. A period of ‘ten jubilees’ is allotted for the period from exile to the coming of the Messiah in the Melchizedek Document. The same 490-year period is also suggested by the ‘seventy weeks’ (i.e. 70 × 7) in Dan. 9.24.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 30 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) manuscripts,46 however, caution should be exercised in inferring too much from the surviving chronology. More investigation of this matter is clearly required.

10. Conclusion

The MT chronology, together with the chronological material found in the LXX, SP and the book of Jubilees, are our only surviving witnesses to the Old Testament chronological tradition that, as has been postulated in this study, was developed over a period spanning several centuries. In this article an attempt has been made to reconstruct this path of development from an originating, ‘progenitor’ version. Towards this end, support has been given to the validity of A. Jepsen’s (1929) reconstruction of the progenitor chronology by offering a model of how this chronology might have developed sequentially into later versions. In particular, it has been demonstrated that the progenitor chronology was modified in accordance with a jubilees schema that was dominant in the Old Testament chronologies of the fifth to third century BCE. It is these Old Testament-based jubilee chronologies that have been shown in this paper to comprise the ‘missing link’ between the progenitor chronology and the final Old Testament chronologies that have survived. In general, the proposed model has emphasized a progressive development of Old Testament chronology in Scripture, with each chronology being a revision of a prior one. The failure to produce such a developmental model in the past is perhaps the main reason why Jepsen’s reconstruction has not received the recognition among Old Testament scholars that it rightly deserves,47 and why the misguided debate over which of the surviving chronologies represents the ‘original’ chronology has failed to be satisfactorily resolved. In particular, this paper has challenged the view current among Old Testament scholars that the major shifts in Old Testa- ment chronology were primarily based on ‘rational alterations’ or ‘secret calendar systems’. Instead, a schematic explanation has been proposed as the most likely rationale for the changes that were made to successive chronologies. In regard to the rational alterations noted by various scholars, it could be argued that rational issues—to the extent that they had any

46. 4Q219, for example, dates the death of Abraham in the forty-third rather than forty-fourth jubilee (Attridge et al. [eds.] 1994). 47. See, e.g., Cassuto 1961: 254; Hasel 1980. Two exceptions are Jeremy Hughes (1990) and Norbert Lohﬁnk (1994: 159), who have offered strong support for Jepsen’s reconstruction.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. NORTHCOTE Development of Old Testament Chronography 31 influence at all—were merely a secondary consideration, serving perhaps as a convenient justification for the more schematic-based changes desired by the chronographers for sectarian reasons. With respect to the idea that the Old Testament contains secret calendar systems, as promoted most recently by Gerhard Larsson (2000), this article has argued that schematic considerations alone (which occasionally included calendrical-based schemas) are sufficient to explain the system of calculating dates employed by the chronographers. To the degree that these schematic systems appear to be ‘secret’, this has been more the result of disturbances to the surviving texts through rescensional activity than to any active concealment undertaken by the ancient chronographers themselves. A final point that should be made is that although the strength of the model presented in this paper currently lies more in its developmental rationale than in any direct textual or historical support, this is an unavoid- able consequence of the fact that little literature has survived from the period between Nehemiah’s mission and the Maccabean era (literature, at least, that can be reliably dated as such) that might either confirm or invalidate the reconstructive model presented here. As for the Qumran manuscripts, they are of little help since they either merely confirm the chronological figures that survive in their final second-century BCE form in the book of Jubilees, MT, LXX and SP, or they append their own calculations to the existing Old Testament timelines.48 The Qumran texts’ lack of usefulness in regard to chronography is not surprising, given that the manuscripts themselves are generally dated no later than the second century BCE, by which time the main surviving Old Testament chronologies had more or less been finalized. Further, the chronological material in the Qumran manuscripts is very fragmented and mostly refers to the post- Abrahamic Old Testament timeline, which, since the progenitor chronology, had undergone few modifications anyway. We are fortunate, however, to at least have the final form of the chronologies preserved in several different Old Testament traditions, even though the variable figures found in some surviving manuscripts (particularly in the case of the LXX) leave us somewhat apprehensive of accepting them as representative of the original versions of the pre-Christian era. Nevertheless, the variations within and between Old Testament versions serve as important clues

48. For example, the Damascus Document provides a brief timeline for sectarian events after the fall of Jerusalem (CD 1.5-9), while the Testament of Levi and 4Q559 offer extra chronological details concerning the activities of the generations from Jacob to Aaron.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 32 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) regarding the past developments that led to the composition of these different chronologies. The comparative analysis that has been undertaken in this paper has made it possible to present a hypothetical model to account for the various chronological developments that have shaped the Old Testament. Future historical and textual research may yet lend further support to this reconstruction. In turn, a developmental model of Old Testament chronology of the type proposed here may provide important clues that will help us better understand the development of Old Testament textual traditions in particular (Klein 1974: 255) and early Jewish history and theology in general.

Appendix. Reference Tables Table 14. Old Testament Chrono-Genealogical Table (Genesis 5.3–25.26)

Patriarch MT SP LXXA Jubilees Progenitor

1. Adam 130 130 230 130 130 2. Seth 105 105 205 105 105 3. Enosh 90 90 90/190 9049 90 4. Kenan 70 70 170 70 70 5. Mahalalel 65 65 165 66 65 6. Jared 162 62 162 61 62 7. Enoch 65 65 165 65 65 8. Methuselah 187 67 187/167 65 67 9. Lamech 182 53 188 55 53 10. Noah 500 500 500 500 500 11. Shem 100 100 100 ? 103 12. Arpachshad 35 135 135 ? 35 Cainan 130 57 13. Shelah 30 130 130 71 30 14. Eber 34 134 134 64 34 15. Peleg 30 130 130 12 30 16. Reu 32 132 132 108 32 17. Serug 30 130 130 37 30 18. Nahor 29 79 79 62 29 19. Terah 70 70 70 70 70 20. Abraham 100 100 100 100 21. Isaac 60 60 60 60 22. Jacob

49. In Jub. 4.13 it is Seth that is said to beget Kenan, although this is probably a scribal error or a later modiﬁcation.

Table 15. Ancient Near Eastern King-List as Derived from ‘Ptolemy’s Canon’

BABYLONIAN PERSIAN Ruler Reign BCE Ruler Reign BCE

Nebuchadrezzar II 43 605–562 Cyrus II 9 539–530 Evilmerodach 2 562–560 Cambyses II 8 530–522 Neriglissar 4 560–556 Bardiya 0.5 522 Labashimarduk 0.25 556 Darius I 36 522–486 Nabodinus 17 556–539 Artaxerxes 21 486–465

Table 16. MT Judaean King List (1 Kings 2.11–2 Kings 24.18; 1 Chronicles 29.27—2 Chronicles 36.11) King Reign King Reign

1. David 40 12. Uzziah (Azariah) 52 2. Solomon 40 13. Jotham 16 3. Rehoboam 17 14. Ahaz 16 4. Abijah 3 15. Hezekiah 29 5. Asa 41 16. Manasseh 55 6. Jehoshaphat 25 17. Amon 2 7. Jehoram 8 18. Josiah 31 8. Ahaziah 1 19. Jehoahaz/Joahaz 0.25 9. Q. Athaliah 6 20. Jehoiakim 11 10. Jehoash/Joash 40 21. Johiachin 0.25 11. Amaziah 29 22. Zedekiah 11

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Attridge, H., et al. (eds.) 1994 Qumran Cave 4, VIII: Parabiblical Texts, Pt. 1 (DJD, 13; Oxford: Clarendon Press). Bickerman, Elias J. 1984 ‘Calendars and Chronology’, in W.D. Davies and L. Finkelstein (eds.), The Cambridge History of Judaism (3 vols.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), I: 60-66. Blenkinsopp, Joseph 1992 The Pentateuch (New York: Doubleday). Boccaccini, Gabriele 1998 Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Parting of the Ways between Qumran and Enochic Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). Bork, F. 1929 ‘Zur Chronologie der biblischen Urgeschichte’, ZAW 47: 206-22. Bousset, D.W. 1900 ‘Das Chronologische System der biblischen Geschichtsbücher’, ZAW 20: 136-47.

Bright, John 1981 A History of Israel (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 3rd edn). Cassuto, Umberto 1961 A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, I (Jerusalem: Magnes Press). Charles, R.H. 1917 The Book of Jubilees or the Little Genesis translated from the Ethiopic Text (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge). Crane, Oliver Turnbull (trans.) 1890 The Samaritan Chronicle (based on T.W.J. Juynboll’s 1848 edition) (New York: John B. Alden). Cross, Frank Moore 1964 ‘The History of the Biblical Text in the Light of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert’, HTR 57: 281-99. De Vries, S.J. 1962 ‘Chronology of the Old Testament’, in IDB, I: 580-89. Finkel, Irving 1980 ‘Bilingual Chronicle Fragments’, JCS 32: 65-72. Galil, Gershon 1996 The Chronology of the Kings of Israel and Judah (Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East, 9; New York: E.J. Brill). Gooder, Paula 2000 The Pentateuch: A Story of Beginnings (London: Continuum). Harrison, Roland Kenneth 1969 Introduction to the Old Testament (London: Tyndale Press). Hasel, Gerhard F. 1980 ‘Genesis 5 and 11: Chronogenealogies in the Biblical History of Begin- nings’, Origins 7, 1: 23-37. Hughes, Jeremy 1990 Secrets of the Times: Myth and History in Biblical Chronology (JSOTSup, 66; Shefﬁeld: JSOT Press). Jacobsen, Thorkild 1981 ‘The Eridu Genesis’, JBL 100: 513-29. Jepsen, Alfred 1929 ‘Zur Chronologie des Priesterkodex’, ZAW 47: 252-55. Johnson, Marshall D. 1988 The Purpose of the Biblical Genealogies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn [1969]). Jones, Douglas 1992 Jeremiah: Based on the Revised Standard Version (NCB; London: Marshall Pickering). Klein, Ralph 1974 ‘Archaic Chronologies and the Textual History of the Old Testament’, HTR 67: 255-63. Lambert, W.G. 1973 ‘A New Fragment from a List of Antediluvian Kings and Marduk’s Chariot’, in M.A. Beek, A.A. Kampman, C. Nijland and J. Ryckmans (eds.), Symbolae Biblicae et Mesopotamicae: Francisco Mario Theodoro De Liagre Böhl Dedicatae (Leiden: E.J. Brill): 271-80.

Larsson, Gerhard 1983 ‘The Chronology of the Pentateuch: A Comparison of the MT and LXX’, JBL 102: 401-409. 2000 ‘Chronology as a Structural Element in the Old Testament’, SJOT 14: 207-19. Lohﬁnk, Norbert 1994 Theology of the Pentateuch (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). Macdonald, J. 1969 The Samaritan Chronicle No. II from Joshua to Nebuchadnezzar (BZAW, 107; Berlin: W. de Gruyter). Murtonen, A. 1954 ‘On the Chronology of the Old Testament’, ST 8: 133-37. Nickelsburg, George W.E. 1984 ‘The Bible Rewritten and Expanded’, in M. Stone (ed.), Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period: Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Qumran Sectarian Writings, Philo, Josephus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press): 89-156. Oppert, Jules 1903 ‘Chronology’, in C. Adler et al. (eds.), Jewish Encyclopaedia (12 vols.; London: Funk & Wagnells), IV: 64-68. Roberts, Alexander, and James Donaldson 1957 ‘The Extant Fragments of the Five Books of the Chronography of Julius Africanus’, in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (eds.), The Ante- Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325 (10 vols.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans), VI: 130-38. Ruiten, J.T.A.G.M. van 2000 Primaeval History Reinterpreted: The Rewriting of Genesis 1–11 in the Book of Jubilees (Boston: E.J. Brill). Schafer, Peter 1977 ‘The Hellenistic and Maccabean Periods’, in J.H. Hayes and J.M. Miller (eds.), Israelite and Judaean History (London: SCM Press): 539-603. Schoene, Alfred (ed.) 1967 [1875] Eusebi Chronicorum Libri Duo. I. Eusebi Chronicorum Liber Prior (2 vols.; Dublin: Weidmann). Skinner, John 1910 A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). Thackeray, Henry St. John 1902 ‘Appendix: The Letter of Aristeas’, in H.B. Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn): 501-74. Thiele, Edwin R. 1951 The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings: A Reconstruction of the Chronology of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Ulrich, Eugene 1999 The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible (Boston: E.J. Brill). Wacholder, Ben Zion 1968 ‘Biblical Chronology in the Hellenistic World Chronicles’, HTR 61: 451-81.

Waddell, W.G. 1940 Manetho (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Williamson, H.G.M. 1985 Ezra, Nehemiah (WBC, 16; Waco, TX: Word Books). Wintermute, O.S. 1985 ‘Jubilees’, in OTP, II: 35-142.

The Role of Exchange in Ancient Mediterranean Religion and Its Implications for Reading Genesis 18–19*

Thomas M. Bolin Religious Studies, St Norbert College, 100 Grant St, De Pere, WI 54115, USA

Abstract This article reads Genesis 18–19 in the light of the principal of exchange at work in ancient religious belief concerning divine justice. Genesis 18.1-15 and 19.1-29, as examples of the well-worn tale of the divine visitor, are narrative expressions of conﬁdence in a divine justice that rewards the kind and punishes the inhospitable. In the dialogue of 18.6-33, Abraham explicitly raises the question of divine justice, but complicates it by also exploring the possibility of divine mercy. The second divine visitor tale in Gen. 19.1-29, in which Sodom is justly destroyed while Lot is spared out of mercy, shows that Yahweh operates according to more stringent ideas of justice than humanity would wish.

The complex narrative of Gen. 18.1–19.29 deftly utilizes two variants of a divine visitor tale framing an extraordinary dialogue between Abraham and Yahweh about divine justice and mercy. This article puts forth two theses. First, the two folktales of Abraham at Mamreh and Lot at Sodom also provide reﬂections on divine justice and mercy that serve to highlight the dialogue that they frame. Consequently there is no need to separate them from the dialogue on form- or source-critical grounds. Second, the interplay between divine justice and mercy in Gen. 18.1–19.29 can be understood when set against the role of exchange in the religions of

* This article is a revision of a paper read at the University of Shefﬁeld in October 2001. Diana V. Edelman, Philip R. Davies, John Barton, and Ed Risden were kind enough to read earlier drafts and make helpful suggestions. Deﬁciencies in the article are due solely to my own efforts.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004, The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX and 15 East 26th Street, Suite 1703, New York, NY 10010. 38 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) antiquity. Doing so shows the text to delineate two distinct understandings of the relationship between divine justice and mercy. One is the hope of humankind, expressed in Abraham’s desire that Yahweh be selective in his reciprocal relationship with humanity, giving only to the righteous the goodness they deserve, while sparing the wicked from their well-earned punishment. The second is the will of Yahweh, shown in his respective treatment of the citizens of Sodom and the family of Lot. Here too Yah- weh is inconsistent in his treatment of humanity, but not in accordance with Abraham’s request. Instead, it is the wicked citizens of Sodom who receive what they deserve while Lot is spared out of divine mercy. This implies that, seen from the divine perspective, there are fewer righteous people deserving of reward than humanity supposes.

Religion in Antiquity as a System of Exchange Recent scholarship has noted similarities in religious belief and practice throughout the Mediterranean and the Near East, spanning in time from the third millennium BCE to the legalization of Christianity. While there are great differences in language, culture, and political systems in such a vast expanse of geography and chronology, there are also several constants in religious practice.1 Important among these is the essential role of offering, which is most visible in the connection between the gods and temple complexes. While the speciﬁc permutations of offerings changed across time and cultures, there were also countervailing tendencies that helped to preserve certain features of the system. First, there is the derivative nature of ancient religion, with ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean traditions and practices mutually inﬂuencing each other.2 There is also the conservative nature of religion itself, in which even new practices or deities are placed into old, well-worn contexts to give them added weight and pedi- gree. Thus, while care must be taken in speaking of transcultural and

1. Among the many examples of recent scholarship discussing these constants, the Gifford Lectures of Walter Burkert (Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religion [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996]) are the premiere example. Burkert goes even further than discussing ancient religions, and argues that the ubiquitous similarities between religions throughout history are due to the shaping of the human psyche by biological necessities. 2. See Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Inﬂuence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 41-87, and Martin West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 33-60.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. BOLIN The Role of Exchange 39 transtemporal religious phenomena, this kind of broad view is nevertheless a viable scholarly enterprise, comprising one of the foundations of modern biblical studies, which has sought for over two centuries to place the Bible in a comparative context with other ancient cultures.3 The elaborate system of offering and sacrifice founded upon the hierarchical supremacy of the gods and governed by the language of praise and submission served both to maintain and appease the divine world. At work in this religious system was the notion of reciprocity, typified by the phrase, do ut des (‘I give so that you will give’).4 In exchange for favor and protection from the gods, humanity would offer service and devotion. This is aptly expressed in the Akkadian proverb that observes, ‘Prayer, supplication, and genuflection; for every grain you render, your profit will be a talent’.5 The persistence of this view is shown centuries later, when Cicero writes, ‘I cannot understand why the gods should be worshipped if one has not received, nor has any hope of receiving, any good from them’ (De natura deorum 1.41.116).6 This arrangement was identical to the

3. ‘As to the chronological spread, this is a feature especially of the Meso- potamian material, which reaches back into the third millennium BCE. What has to be borne in mind here is the extraordinary durability of the cuneiform tradition’ (West, East Face of Helicon, p. ix). Cf. the discussion of comparison, and the dangers it poses, in Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion from Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 19-35. By this I do not mean to imply that such a thing known as ‘Ancient Religion’ ever existed. Religion as a concept is a scholarly construct that furnishes an abstract category in which to place certain kinds of phenomena that appear in different cultures and epochs (Smith, Imagining Religion, p. xi). What I wish to do here is isolate one particular and ubiquitous feature of the religions practiced in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds, namely, sacriﬁce, and to look at the underlying motives and values that helped to sustain it for so long. By doing so I do not mean to imply that sacriﬁce is the essence of ancient religious beliefs, or that there were exclusively utilitarian reasons for its practice. 4. See the discussion in Burkert, Creation of the Sacred, pp. 85-92, 134-38, drawing on the anthropological work of Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: Norton, 1967). 5. The Akkadian reads su-up-pu-u su-ul-lu-u u la-ban ap-pi ud-da-at ta-nam-din- šum-ma i-rib-ka kaš-šat (text in W.G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963], p. 104); following the translation by Benjamin Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature (2 vols.; Baltimore, MD: CDL Press, 2nd edn, 1996), II, p. 329. 6. Qui quam ob rem colendi sint non intellego nullo nec accepto ab iis nec sperato bono (text and translation in H. Rackham, De natura deorum; Academica [LCL, 268; London: Heinemann, 1933); for ancient Israel, see James. L. Crenshaw, ‘Popular Ques- tioning of the Justice of God in Ancient Israel’, in his Urgent Advice and Probing

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 40 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) system of patronage that governed political and social relationships throughout the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Patronage presupposes the regular behavior of both parties and operates with an enlightened self- interest that from the standpoint of humanity views the relationship in terms of cost-benefit analysis.7 At any time this relationship could be, and often was, disrupted. Such breakdowns were often attributed to the fact that the gods were much more powerful than their human counterparts, and in their role as patrons could renege on the obligations to their clients.8 This freedom, combined with their power and necessary role in sustaining human life, made the gods an object of fear. The acknowledgment of divine power and the corresponding human limitations were essential characteris- tics of ancient religion.9 In the Old Testament, this is expressed in the wisdom tradition’s repeated assertion that the fear of Yahweh is the beginning of wisdom. And of course, in biblical Hebrew the root CJ denotes either ‘fear’ or ‘worship’. Despite the gods’ freedom in their obligations to humanity, people still asked why the gods were not good to those who served and obeyed them. The explanations given to this question are categorized under the heading of theodicy.10 At the heart of this question is the issue of divine justice or, more specifically, its absence. Justice can be understood as the ideal that governs the relationship between two parties based upon previously agreed criteria defined through negotiation, custom, or law. Thus, the notions of reciprocity and proportionality are crucial to justice.11 Put bluntly, justice

Questions: Collected Writings on Old Testament Wisdom (Macon, GA: Mercer Uni- versity Press, 1995), pp. 175-90 (p. 179). This is the view critiqued by Socrates in Euthryphro 14e, namely, that ‘holiness is a skill in trading between gods and human beings’ (FNQPSJLI= BSB UJK BOFJI X &VRVRSXO UFYOI I PTJPUIK RFPJK LBJ= BORSXQPJK QBS BMMIMXO). 7. See Ronald Simkins, ‘Patronage and the Political Economy of Monarchic Israel’, Semeia 87 (1999), pp. 123-44. 8. Crenshaw, ‘Popular Questioning’, p. 178. 9. Put succinctly by Burkert (Creation of the Sacred, p. 30), ‘to transmit religion is to transmit fear’, building on E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), p. 29. 10. See the discussion in James L. Crenshaw, ‘Introduction: The Shift from Theodicy to Anthropodicy’, in his Urgent Advice and Probing Questions, pp. 141-54, and Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997), pp. 385-99. 11. Aristotle stresses that the idea of reciprocity (B OUJQFQPORPK) is necessary for justice to be present between two parties (Nichomachean Ethics 1132b-33a); cf. also

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. BOLIN The Role of Exchange 41 is present when we get what we deserve, the latter being determined according to previously defined standards. Injustice is correspondingly not getting what we deserve. This may be understood either negatively or positively. Negatively speaking, when someone does not receive an anticipated benefit, he is quick to speak of injustice. In a Babylonian dialogue between a sufferer and his friend, the sufferer points out repeatedly that he has not neglected the rites that comprise service to the gods. Yet, not only has he lived a life of sorrow rather than the expected, and to his thinking deserved, prosperity, but he has also witnessed the impious prosper. The sufferer’s frustration culminates in an exclamation that shows the prag- matic motivation behind ancient religion, ‘How have I profited that I have bowed down to my god?’12 The iconoclastic author of Ecclesiastes recasts this observation didactically. If the good are punished and the evil rewarded in this absurd existence, then obviously it is in one’s own interest not to strive for goodness (Qoh. 7.15-16). Positively speaking, whenever someone avoids a deserved but unwanted consequence this too is, strictly speaking, injustice. However, such a lack of commensurate response is hardly ever understood as such; undeserved kindness is known as mercy.13 Humans do have some recourse in their dealings with the gods. As in the numerous stories that tell of the relationship between parties of unequal power, the weaker partner must often resort to trickery or some other use of wits to exact his due. Often this involves shaming the gods, which plays off a key value at work in a patronage system.14 Honor comes to patrons

John Rawls, ‘Justice as Reciprocity’, in S. Freeman (ed.), John Rawls: Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 190-224. 12. The Akkadian reads i-na ma-haar qád-mi šá ad-da mu-sau min-na-a ú-at-tar (Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (text and translation in Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature, pp. 86-87); compare the unapologetic language of self-interest here with that of the Akkadian proverb quoted above (n. 5). Cicero (De natura deorum 1.41.116) makes this explicit when he states that ‘piety is justice toward the gods’ (est enim pietas iustitia adversum deos) and asks whether one owes piety to a party who has done him no good; see also the discussion of Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testa- ment, pp. 735-42. 13. Philip R. Davies (‘In Our Own Image, Reading the Bible as an Intellectual’ [unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the SBL, Nashville, TN, November, 2000], p. 7) has made this same point in regard to Gen. 18–19 when he asks, ‘Can one be just and merciful? Clearly no. If one is merciful that is not justice, for it delivers the guilty from their just deserts.’ 14. Johannes Pedersen (Israel: Its Life and Culture [South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism, 28-29; 2 vols.; repr., Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991 (1926)], II, pp. 213-44) emphasizes the connection between honor and reciprocity.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 42 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) and clients when they fulﬁll their obligations. To do otherwise exposes the offending party to shame.15 The stratagem of shaming the gods for being bad patrons is employed in several ancient texts. In Atrahasis, the god Ea counsels his client Atrahasis that the way to stop divine punishment is to increase offerings to whichever particular god is responsible for the suffering. This god, in turn, will be shamed by the gift and end the suffering. Atrahasis follows this advice repeatedly to great success. In Exodus 32, the Israelites have shamed their patron, Yahweh, by making the Golden Calf and honoring it for having saved the Israelites from Pharaoh. In exchange for this favor and protection, the Israelites offer the calf their devotion and service. Moses persuades Yahweh in Exod. 32.12 not to kill all the Israelites by appealing to the god’s sense of honor: ‘Why should the Egyptians say, “With evil intent he brought them [the Israelites] out, in order to slaughter them in the mountains and wipe them from the face of the earth”?’ Yahweh’s proposed punishment is not commensurate with the crime and, rather than accomplishing its intended task of restoring his affronted dignity, will only bring more shame upon him. The Egyptians will scorn him as a poor patron who abused and ultimately destroyed the clients he should have protected.

Genesis 18.1–19.29 and Divine–Human Exchange Honor, shame, and reciprocity are essential in understanding how the relationship between humanity and divinity was understood in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. They are therefore useful in examining Gen. 18.1–19.29, a text that raises a series of questions centered on what people deserve from each other and from God, be they traveling strangers, or their hosts, the wicked inhabitants of an evil city, or the few good individuals who dwell among them. The dialogue between Abraham and Yahweh in 18.16-33 has often been separated from the two tales and understood by many to be a later insertion from the exilic or post-exilic eras that serves to link the two heavenly

15. Cf. Saul Olyan, ‘Honor, Shame, and Covenant Relations in Ancient Israel and Its Environment’, JBL 115 (1996), pp. 201-18 (206): ‘There is evidence that reciprocal honor in Israel and West Asia had hierarchical dimensions in a setting of unequal covenant relations’. However, because the gods need human service, they are vulnerable to manipulation. An Akkadian proverb baldly states, ‘You can teach your god to run after you like a dog’ (ila tu-lam-mad-su-ma ki-I kalbi arki-ka it-ta-na-lak, Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature, pp. 148-49).

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. BOLIN The Role of Exchange 43 visitor tales.16 This position assumes that the theology of individual responsibility exempliﬁed in 18.16-33 was a late development in the intellectual history of ancient Israel and appeals for support to post-exilic texts such as Jer. 31.29 and Ezek. 18.2 that negate the idea of collective responsibility.17 Yet the assumption that collectivism is a more primitive notion than individual retribution is open to criticism. Ideas such as individual and collective responsibility do not develop in a culture on a unilateral trajectory from one to another. They co-exist and are repeatedly put forward in response either to new situations or to the claims of other ideas.18 To say

16. Usually the dialogue is understood as an oblique reference to the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE; so, for instance, Ludwig Schmidt, ‘De Deo’, Studien zur Literarkritik und Theologie des Buches Jona, des Gesprächs zwischen Abraham und Jahve in Gen. 18.22ff. und von Hi. 1 (BZAW, 143; Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1976), pp. 146-64; Joseph Blenkinsopp, ‘Abraham and the Righteous of Sodom’, JJS 33 (1982), pp. 120-31; Ephraim A. Speiser, Genesis (AB, 1; Garden City, NY: Double- day, 3rd edn, 1983), p. 135; and J. Alberto Soggin, ‘Abraham hädert mit Gott, Beo- bachtungen zu Genesis 18,16-32’, in I. Kottsieper, J. Van Oorschot, D. Harald and M. Wahl (eds.), ‘Wer ist wie du, HERR, unter den Göttern?’ Studien zur Theologie und Religionsgeschichte Israels für Otto Kaiser zum 70. Geburtstag (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), pp. 214-18 (217). See Ehud Ben Zvi, ‘The Dialogue Between Abraham and YHWH in Gen. 18.23-32: A Historical-Critical Analysis’, JSOT 53 (1992), pp. 27-33, for a review of scholarship. 17. John Skinner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis [ICC, 1; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2nd edn, 1930], pp. 298, 304-305; conversely, Martin Noth (A History of Pentateuchal Traditions [trans. Bernhard Anderson; Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice–Hall, 1972] [= Überlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuch (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1948)]) attributes vv. 22-33 exclusively to J (p. 238). For Gerhard von Rad (Genesis [trans. John Marks; OTL; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, rev. edn, 1972] [= Das erste Buch Mose: Genesis (Das Alte Testament Deutsch, 2-4; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 9th edn, 1972)]) the dialogue represents a shift from one kind of collective responsibility to another in that Abraham’s concern is for the entire city of Sodom (pp. 210-15). 18. William John Lyons, Canon and Exegesis: Canonical Praxis and the Sodom Narrative (JSOTSup, 352; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), p. 147. R. Freund (‘Individual Vs. Collective Responsibility: From the Ancient Near East and the Bible to the Greco-Roman World’, SJOT 11 [1997], pp. 279-305) acknowledges that notions of collective and individual responsibility existed simultaneously in ancient Israel, yet he also argues for an evolutionary model in which the idea of individual responsibility is a later development; cf. Joel Kaminsky, Corporate Respon- sibility in the Old Testament (JSOTSup, 196; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), pp. 116-38, and Joze Krašovec, Reward, Punishment, and Forgiveness: The Thinking and Beliefs of Ancient Israel in the Light of Greek and Modern Views (VTSup, 78; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999), pp. 110-59.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 44 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) that simply because a story exhibits the idea of collective guilt it is tem- porally prior to a dialogue that argues for individual responsibility is to ignore substantial contradictory evidence. Ancient texts express an endur- ing belief in communal responsibility, especially in relation to the gods.19 In Jonah 1, a post-exilic biblical text, one reads that Yahweh endangers an entire boatload of sailors due to the guilt of one passenger.20 To assert that individual responsibility is an exclusive feature of exilic or post-exilic Israel on the basis of certain prophetic texts, and then to date other examples of such thinking to that period overlooks the complexity that typiﬁes the intellectual life of ancient cultures. The dialogue treats issues of divine justice that are at the heart of the two divine visitor tales that frame it, and are best understood in light of the reciprocal nature of ancient religious belief.

The Divine Visitor Tale (Genesis 18.1-15; 19.1-29) The tales in Gen. 18.1-15 and 19.1-29 are two examples of a tale-type from the ancient world that tell of the gods travelling incognito in order to test human goodness.21 The idea of hospitality which forms the inter- pretive background of these tales, as with the divine–human relationship discussed above, revolves around the ideas of honor, shame, and recip-

19. For example, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus presupposes the worldview of communal responsibility. The narrative device that drives the plot is the plague that has settled on the entire city of Thebes on account of the murderer of King Laius. Other examples can be found in Burkert, Creation of the Sacred, pp. 102-28; and Freund, ‘Individual Vs. Collective Responsibility’, pp. 300-301. 20. See the discussion in Thomas M. Bolin, Freedom Beyond Forgiveness: The Book of Jonah Re-Examined (JSOTSup, 236; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1997), pp. 68-96. 21. An often-quoted line from Homer reads, ‘And the gods do take on the look of strangers dropping in from abroadDisguised in every way as they roam and haunt our cities, watching over us—All our foul play, all our fair play too’ (LBJ UF RFPJ= DFJOPVTJO FJPLPUFK B MMBEBQPJTJO UBOUPJPJ UFMFRPOUFK FQJTUSXGX_TJ QPMITBK BORSXQXO VCSJOUFLBJ=FVOPNJIOFGPSX_OUFK, Od. 17.485-87 [translation by Robert Fagles, The Odyssey [New York: Viking, 1996], p. 370). Equally cited is Heb. 13.2: ‘Do not neglect to extend hospitality to strangers. Some by doing so have played host to angels without knowing it’ (UIK GJMPDFOJBK NI= FQJMBORBOFTRF EJB= UBVUIK HB=S FMBRPO UJOFK DFOJTBOUFK BHHFMPVK). See also Robert Letellier, Day in Mamre, Night in Sodom: Abraham and Lot in Genesis 18 and 19 (Biblical Interpretation, 10; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), p. 210: ‘The secret advent of a deity tests the responses of the recipients and explores the extent of their goodness’.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. BOLIN The Role of Exchange 45 rocity. Hospitality was the creation of a temporary patronage relationship with the host as patron and the guest as client. The motivation behind offering hospitality to a stranger lay in the increased honor one had in assimilating a potential threat into the community by asserting one’s superiority over the newcomer. Guests played their role in this arrangement by acceptance of the offered hospitality. The practical beneﬁt of this arrangement was that it defused a confrontational moment with the potential for violence.22 Reciprocity was essential to the arrangement’s success. Hosts honored guests by extending favor and protection in order to increase their own honor. Guests accepted the honor of the host and, in doing so, added to the host’s honor as patron.23 For either party to be denied its due in the relationship created the situation of injustice. Guests deserve to be treated hospitably, and conversely gracious hosts deserve some sort of recompense from their guests.24 Divine visitor tales have the cultural roles and responsibilities of hosts and guests as their backdrop, but with an important modiﬁcation: the divine status of the guests com- promises the normally dominant role of the host as patron. It is the guests who, because they are gods, really dictate the interaction between themselves and their hosts. Dramatic irony is created in that the hearers are aware that the hospitality of the unwitting but good-hearted hosts is really an ideal example of divine service.25 Turning now to the encounters of Abraham and Lot with the divine visitors, the parallel nature of the two stories is clear. The hosts are sitting at the thresholds of their respective domiciles when their guests arrive.26

22. See Victor H. Matthews, ‘Hospitality and Hostility in Genesis 19 and Judges 19’, BTB 22 (1992), pp. 3-11, and T.R. Hobbs, ‘Hospitality in the First Testament and the “Teleological Fallacy”’, JSOT 95 (2001), pp. 3-30. 23. Hobbs (‘Hospitality in the First Testament’, pp. 11-12, 25) maintains that guests in Mediterranean societies rarely reciprocate hospitality. However, hospitality, because it uses the logic of honor and shame, requires reciprocity in the interplay between host and guest (James Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens [New York: St Martin’s, 1998], pp. 109-12). 24. Weston Fields, Sodom and Gomorrah: History and Motif in Biblical Narrative (JSOTSup, 231; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1997), p. 56. In ancient Greece, Zeus was worshipped under the title of DFOJPK, the protector of the rights of guests. 25. Letellier (Day in Mamre, Night in Sodom, p. 217) notes that a point of contact between showing hospitality to strangers and giving honor to the gods in antiquity is that both involve the offering of food. 26. Liminality is important because the hospitality of the host represents safety in the face of potential dangers outside, contra Letellier (Day in Mamre, Night in Sodom, p. 61), who contrasts the safety of Abraham’s bucolic dwelling with the urban dangers

Upon seeing the wayfarers, they bow down to them and offer to feed, wash, and house the strangers.27 In order for the visit to be an actual test, they do not know the true identity of their guests.28 This requires the moment of discovery, when the hosts realize that their guests are from the divine realm. In the two texts under discussion it comes, respectively, when Yahweh reads Sarah’s thoughts and the angels strike the citizens of Sodom blind.29 With the theophany comes the reward to the hosts. Abra- ham and Sarah are promised a son. Lot and his family are saved from the destruction of Sodom. Examination of variants of this tale-type reveals the standardized elements in the tale and their role in the overall purpose of these stories.30 of Sodom. Brian Doyle (‘“Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Sodom’s Door”: The Function of E=5/IEA in Genesis 18–19’, JSOT 28 [2004], pp. 441-43) sees in the opening of Abraham’s tent (IEA) a theological contrast with the door of Lot’s house (E=5). The former implies access to Yahweh, while the latter symbolizes denial of that access: ‘The apparent fact that a tent, as in the case of Abraham and Sarah, cannot have a E=5 in the sense outlined above (protection, hospitality) underlines our understanding of IEA in both segments of the narrative as signifying something more than a simple opening or entrance, something associated (certainly in the minds of the reader/ audience) with the temple as a place of encounter with God’ (p. 442). Ultimately, Doyle’s reading requires a level of intertextual subtlety on the reader’s part that cannot be assumed, and moreover, overlooks the clear parallels between the divine visitation in both Gen. 18 and 19. 27. Letellier (Day in Mamre, Night in Sodom, pp. 39-41, 64-66) charts the parallels. 28. Although the Masoretes pointed the text of Abraham’s greeting in 18.3 as J?%5@ ;, thus making it read as if Abraham knows one of his visitors is Yahweh, commentators (e.g. Skinner, Genesis, pp. 299-300; and von Rad, Genesis, p. 206) assume that the original text was intended to be read J?"5@ ;. The Masoretes did the opposite for Lot, pointing his greeting of the two angels in 19.2 as J?"5@ ;, and changing it to J?%5@ ; in 19.18 in order to show that Lot initially did not know the true identity of his guests. Lyons (Canon and Exegesis, pp. 157-61) maintains that Abraham immediately recognizes the divine nature of the visitors. So too does Doyle (‘“Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Sodom’s Door”’, pp. 441-43), who provides no rationale for supporting the Masoretic reading—a curious oversight, given that a key aspect of Doyle’s reading of Gen. 18–19 is in the contrast between Abraham’s recognition of the divine visitors and Lot’s igno- rance of them. 29. Hermann Gunkel, Genesis (trans. Mark E. Biddle; Mercer Library of Biblical Studies; Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997) (the English translation of Genesis [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 3rd edn, 1910]), pp. 196-97. 30. Fields (Sodom and Gomorrah, passim) engages in a detailed comparison of Gen. 19 with other biblical texts that deal not with the visit of heavenly beings in dis- guise, but rather with the presence of travelling strangers, divine or otherwise. As such, the emphases and results of his analysis are signiﬁcantly different from those here. For

Two illustrative examples are preserved in Ovid. The first, in Fasti 5.493- 544, recounts an etiology for the hero Orion in which Jupiter, Neptune, and Mercury travel disguised as wayfarers and come to the house of an old, poor widower, Hyreius.31 In response to the man’s offer of hospitality, the gods reveal their true identity, whereupon Jupiter bids the man to make any request. The old man asks for a son, who is then miraculously conceived. The second tale, Metamorphoses 8.618-724, tells the story of Baucis and Philemon, a poor, old, childless, and pious couple that unwittingly play host to Jupiter and Mercury. The two deities have just made an unsuccessful tour of a town, testing the hospitality of its inhabitants. Upon arrival at the humble dwelling of Baucis and Philemon, the strangers are received graciously by the old couple, and are offered rest, warmth, and food. The moment of recognition comes when the wine bowls continue to fill miraculously after every draught. Struck with fear, the old couple is prepared to kill their only goose as a sacrifice to their divine guests when Jupiter and Mercury dissuade them, ‘We are gods; this evil area will get its deserved punishment, but you will be made immune to this penalty’ (Metam. 8.689-90).32 The gods lead the old couple away from the doomed town and up into the nearby mountains where Baucis and Philemon are allowed to minister for the rest of their days to Jupiter and Mercury in a miraculously formed temple created just for the occasion out of their decrepit house. The similarities between these tales and those in Genesis 18–19 reveal that, while the constituent elements in divine visitor tales can occur in a comparative study of divine visitor tales both within and outside the Bible, see Thomas Millington, The Testimony of the Heathen to the Truths of Holy Writ, A Commentary on the Old and New Testaments, Compiled Almost Exclusively from Greek and Latin Authors of the Classical Ages of Antiquity (London: Seeley, Jackson & Halliday, 1863), pp. 38-44; Gunkel, Genesis, pp. 192-93; Theodore Gaster, Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 156-61; Dorothy Irvin, Mytharion: The Comparison of Tales from the Old Testament and the Ancient Near East (AOAT, 32; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1978), pp. 17-24; and Letellier, Day in Mamre, Night in Sodom, pp. 196-254. 31. Noted by Skinner, Genesis, pp. 302-303. Claus Westermann argues that the Greco-Roman tale exhibits ‘late’ features that make comparison with Gen. 18.1-15 fruitless; see p. 276 of his Genesis 12–36 (trans. John J. Scullion, SJ; Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1985) (= Genesis 12–36 [BKAT, 1/2; 2 vols.; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1981]). 32. Dique sumus, meritasque luet vicinia poenas inpia…vobis immunibus huius esse mali dabitur (text and translation in Frank Justus, Metamorphoses [LCL, 42-43; 2 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966–68).

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 48 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) variety of combinations, the elements themselves remain fairly stable over time. Ovid’s stories have three and two divine visitors respectively, as do Gen. 18.1-15 and 19.1-29.33 While Baucis and Philemon are an old couple living outside of any settlement, as are Abraham and Sarah in Gen. 18.1- 29, Ovid’s story contrasts hospitality rewarded with the punishment of an evil city whose sin is the lack of hospitality, as does the story of Lot in Gen. 19.1-29. The divine reward for hospitality may be the gift of a son, as in Fast. 5.493-44 and Gen. 18.10, or escape from a general calamity, as in Metam. 8.690-724 and Gen. 19.29. Because divine visitor tales utilize the social grammar of hospitality in order to tell of tests of character that are rewarded or punished accordingly, they deal speciﬁcally with reciprocity, honor, and justice, that is, the very concepts that structure humanity’s understanding of its relationship with the divine in ancient religion. The principle of do ut des is the opera- tive motivation. Those who show hospitality, that is, give their guests what they deserve, are rewarded; those who do not show justice to their guests are rightfully punished. Abraham and Lot’s respective displays of hospitality to the strangers are acts of justice, giving them their due as it is understood by the rules governing accepted social roles. Conversely, the Sodomites’ sin is that of inhospitality, that is, injustice, because the visiting men deserved good treatment at their hands, but received abuse instead.34 Abraham and Lot deserve recompense for their hospitality and

33. Given the presence of these similar tales in extra-biblical literature, commentators operating from the approach of die religionsgeschichtliche Schule saw behind the two divine visitor tales in Gen. 18–19 non-Israelite polytheistic myths that had been taken over and given an Israelite, that is, monotheistic, overlay. The presence in Gen. 18.1-15 of both singular and plural verbs in reference to the divine visitors was adduced as proof of this (e.g. Gunkel, Genesis, pp. 193-94, 199-200). The singular verbs occur in vv. 3, 10, 13-15, 16, the plural in vv. 2, 4-5, 8-9, 16. John Van Seters (Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis [Louisville, KY: West- minster/John Knox Press, 1992], p. 258) argues that originally 18.1-15 was a birth announcement story and only Yahweh appeared to Abraham and Sarah. The plural verbs were added when the birth announcement story was integrated into a divine visitors tale. However, the presence of the divine visitor tale in Ovid used to explain the birth of a hero speaks against Van Seters’s view; cf. Letellier, Day in Mamre, Night in Sodom, p. 213. 34. The many references to the destruction of Sodom in the remainder of the Old Testament do not speciﬁcally speak of inhospitality or sexual aggression as the precipi- tating causes of the divine wrath; see Westermann, Genesis 12–36, p. 301. Lyons (Canon and Exegesis, pp. 225-34) makes a well-argued case for understanding the Sodomites’ sin as inhospitality.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. BOLIN The Role of Exchange 49 receive it in the form of an heir for Abraham and deliverance for Lot. The Sodomites deserve punishment for their abrogation of responsibility as hosts, and receive it in the divine destruction. Into this tidy picture intrudes an apparent anomaly in Genesis 19 that merits further examination, namely, the ambiguous characterization of Lot, the putative representative of virtue in the story. As in the story of Baucis and Philemon, Lot the good host is contrasted with the wicked men of Sodom. However, unlike Abraham, Lot is slow to comply with the commands of the angels after their identities have been revealed (19.16, 18-20), so much so that the angels must forcibly remove him and his family from the city, in an act understood as a display of divine mercy (v. 16).35 More signiﬁcant among Lot’s failings is the offer of his daughters to the men of Sodom in order to spare his guests (v. 8). Some interpreters have attempted to see in Lot’s offer a profound example of hospitality,36 but this viewpoint has been unable to withstand scrutiny. First, there is other clear evidence, mentioned above, that supports the ambiguous characterization of Lot. Next, there is obvious parallel between Lot’s offering of his daughters and the rape and murder of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19, a clearly deplorable act from the standpoint of the biblical author. Then there are the actions of Lot’s daughters toward their father in Gen. 19.30- 38. There, the women who were offered up as sexual objects by their father to the men of Sodom use their father as a sexual object in order to guarantee themselves offspring.37 Recently, in the pages of this journal, Scott Morschauser has argued that the request of the men of Sodom to ‘know’ the visitors and Lot’s

35. Fields (Sodom and Gomorrah, p. 57) calls Abraham, ‘the ideal host’, and notes the repeated use of C9> in Gen. 18. 36. T. Desmond Alexander, ‘Lot’s Hospitality: A Clue to his Righteousness’, JBL 104 (1985), pp. 289-91 (291). For Matthews (‘Hospitality and Hostility’, p. 6), Lot’s offer of his daughters is an extravagance reciprocated by the angels’ ‘extravagant’ protection of Lot through miraculous means. 37. One can interpret the daughters’ actions as a direct response to their father’s placing them in harm’s way. Male offspring in a patriarchal society served to protect their mothers when the women were without other male guardians, such as husbands or fathers. Lot’s offering of his daughters to the men of Sodom is an abrogation of his responsibility as their protector, thus creating the daughters’ need for other male guardians. For other criticisms of Lot, see Lyons, Canon and Exegesis, pp. 222-25. For Lyn Bechtel (‘A Feminist Reading of Genesis 19.1-11’, in Athalya Brenner [ed.], A Feminist Companion to Genesis [The Feminist Companion to the Bible, Second Series, 1; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1998], pp. 108-28 [123-24]), the impropriety of Lot’s offer is because of its irrelevance to the Sodomites’ demand for the visitors.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 50 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) counteroffer of his daughters have no sexual meaning whatsoever. Rather, they illustrate the practice of interrogation of outsiders and hostage exchange in the ancient Levant.38 Drawing numerous thematic and ver- bal parallels from extra-biblical texts, especially the Amarna corpus, Morschauser maintains that the men of Sodom are eager to interrogate the visitors and determine whether they are spies. Lot, having taken them under his patronage as host, offers his daughters as hostages—tokens of his good faith to send the men away in the morning.39 Morschauser’s reading of Genesis 19 offers an alternative to the more common reading of the text that requires a reader to face squarely in the biblical text the horrors of predatory sexual violence and the abusive nature of patriarchy. And, while Morschauser raises the interesting possibility that the standard reading of Genesis 19 has been inﬂuenced too much by Judges 19, his own interpretation of the Sodom account is problematic. It requires idiosyncratic reading of Hebrew terms in the narrative.40 Moreover, the martial background necessary to explain the Sodomites’ need to interrogate the strangers is alien to the story in Genesis 19, forcing Morschauser awkwardly to supply this background by appeal to Sodom’s participation in the war against the northern kings in Genesis 14. The negative portrayal of Lot in Genesis 19 culminates in v. 29, which states that Lot was spared from the doomed city’s destruction on account of the goodness of Abraham.41 This observation, along with the other blameworthy aspects of Lot in the story, combine to call into question a

38. ‘“Hospitality”, Hostiles and Hostages: On the Legal Background to Genesis 19.1-19’, JSOT 27 (2003), pp. 461-85. Morschauser’s reading of Lot’s offer is similar to Bechtel’s (‘A Feminist Reading’) in that Morschauser also sees an incongruity between what the men of Sodom have requested, that is, to interrogate the strangers, and what Lot offers in place, that is, his daughters as hostages. 39. ‘The women—technically, legal detainees/captives—are to be held safely overnight, and are to be released, unharmed, when the two visitors vacate the premises in accordance with Lot’s assurance’ (‘“Hospitality”’, p. 477 [italics in the original]). 40. For example, that 5J in 19.5 means to investigate, and in 19.8 it refers to sexual intercourse (‘“Hospitality”’, pp. 471-72), severs the crucial link between the Sodomites’ demand and the relevance of Lot’s counter-offer of his daughters. Also problematic for Morschauser is the claim that the phrase ‘to do good according to one’s eyes’ in 19.8 refers to the juridical assignment of responsibility; while that is certainly a meaning of the phrase in the Old Testament, the claim overlooks the use of the phrase at the end of the book of Judges (Judg. 21.25) to describe the anarchy of ancient Israel, ‘in those days when there was no king’. 41. Some commentators (e.g. Westermann, Genesis 12–36, p. 299) read v. 29 as a gloss by P.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. BOLIN The Role of Exchange 51 reading of Genesis 19 as a straightforward tale about Yahweh rewarding the good of Sodom and punishing the evil.42 Lot’s portrayal, and the narrator’s remark in 19.29, shift this divine visitor tale away from divine justice and broach the topic of mercy, which Abraham has already introduced in his dialogue with Yahweh in Gen. 18.1-15, to which I now turn.

The Dialogue between Abraham and Yahweh (Genesis 18.16-33) Although a dialogue, Gen. 18.16-33 actually begins with a divine solilo- quy. Speaking sotto voce in vv. 17-19, Yahweh decides to reveal his intentions about Sodom to Abraham because he has chosen Abraham from all peoples to be the bearer of blessing. Consequently, Abraham ‘will command his sons and daughters after him to keep the way of Yahweh, doing justice and righteousness (A>H 9B54) so that Yahweh may bring to Abraham all that he has promised him’ (18.19).43 This prescient statement is immediately fulﬁlled as Abraham begins to teach Yahweh concerning the qualities of justice and righteousness, echoing Yahweh’s language of v. 19 in v. 25, when he demands that Yahweh act justly (A> 9 J) by not treating the righteous ((J54) the same as the evil.44

42. Paul Tonson (‘Mercy without Covenant, A Literary Analysis of Genesis 19’, JSOT 95 [2001], pp. 95-116 [110-14]) argues that the author ultimately sought to paint Lot in a favorable light; cf. L. Turner, ‘Lot as Jekyll and Hyde’, in David J.A. Clines, Stephen E. Fowl and Stanley E. Porter (eds.), The Bible in Three Dimensions: Essays in Celebration of Forty Years of Biblical Studies in the University of Sheffield (JSOTSup, 87; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), pp. 85-101. Wis. 10.6 and 2 Pet. 2.7-9 hold up Lot as an example of righteousness; cf. the discussion in Letellier, Day in Mamre, Night in Sodom, p. 184. These positive portrayals of Lot are due to the standardized goodness of the host in divine visitor tales. 43. Krašovec (Reward, Punishment, and Forgiveness, pp. 57, 59-60) and Lyons (Canon and Exegesis, pp. 175-79) stress the contingent nature of Yahweh’s promises to Abraham, provided that Abraham teaches his descendants to walk in the way of Yahweh. 44. Brueggemann, Genesis (Interpretation; Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), pp. 168-69. The dialogue is similar to the exchange between Yahweh and Amos in Amos 7.1-9; see Van Seters, Prologue to History, p. 259. Ben Zvi (‘Dialogue’, p. 40) sees in the portrayal of Abraham as the premiere teacher of A> the reflection of the post- exilic sages who composed the dialogue. Although Westermann (Genesis, pp. 290-91) acknowledges the exalted status of Abraham, he denies an intercessory role for him. For Thomas L. Thompson (The Origin Tradition of Ancient Israel: The Literary Formation of Genesis and Exodus 1–23 [JSOTSup, 55; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic

The dialogue next explores the relationship of divine justice and mercy, expressed in a cluster of questions put to Yahweh by Abraham. The issue is whether Yahweh will treat the good the same as the evil. More specifically, Abraham asks whether Yahweh will destroy the good in Sodom along with the evil. For Yahweh to do so would be unjust because the good would not get what they deserve. Abraham’s rhetoric here is forceful. He twice challenges the justice of Yahweh’s proposal to destroy the city: 18.23: ‘Will you really sweep away the righteous with the wicked?’ (, 9 C ) BJ54 9ADE) 18.25b: ‘Will the judge of all the earth not do what is just?’ (#C 9 =< A9 A> 9 J =) In between these two questions, Abraham stresses the absurdity of treating the good like the evil in v. 25a through the use of two clauses that juxta- pose the words ‘just’ (BJ54) and ‘evil’ ( C).45 As the icing on the cake, the two clauses in v. 25a are also framed by a double occurrence of the phrase, ‘Far be it from you [Yahweh]’ ((= 9==I): 18.25a: ‘Far be it from you ((= 9==I) to do such a thing—to kill the righteous (BJ54) along with the wicked ( C), so that the righteous (BJ54) are like the wicked ( C)—far be it from you ((= 9==I)!’46 Abraham is clear and forceful in this part of the dialogue. For Yahweh to kill the innocent in Sodom along with the guilty opens him to the charge of injustice. Sandwiched between his two questions concerning Yahweh’s justice in vv. 23 and 25, another issue is raised in v. 24, where Abraham asks whether Yahweh will not spare the entire city on account of fifty righteous people. Once Yahweh responds to this question affirmatively, establishing the

Press, 1987], p. 93), Abraham reminds Yahweh that the rules of justice apply to him as well. For Krašovec (Reward, Punishment, and Forgiveness, pp. 57, 59-60), Abraham is taught by Yahweh because of his limited understanding of the divine nature. This is the position too of Nathan Macdonald, ‘Listening to Abraham—Listening to Yhwh: Divine Justice and Mercy in Genesis 18.16-33’, CBQ 66 (2004), pp. 25-43. 45. This occurrence of a form of B54 is overlooked by Macdonald, who makes much of the fact that Abraham does not use the term 9B54 in his challenge to Yahweh in 18.25. Yet when one sees the repeated juxtaposition of BJ54 and C in v. 25b, one cannot say with Macdonald that ‘the omission’ of 9B54 in Abraham’s question of v. 25b is ‘signiﬁcant’ (‘Listening to Abraham’, p. 37). 46. Cf. Letellier, Day in Mamre, Night in Sodom, pp. 123-26.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. BOLIN The Role of Exchange 53 principle that the evil majority of Sodom may be spared on account of the virtuous minority, Abraham presses him in order to determine exactly how few good people are required to save the many who are evil. Abraham is now no longer appealing to Yahweh’s justice, but rather to his mercy because he wants Yahweh not to give the evil inhabitants of Sodom the punishment they deserve so that the few good citizens of Sodom may avoid a punishment they do not deserve.47 The three questions of Abraham in vv. 23-25 can be reduced to a single one: ‘Should God treat the good and the evil alike?’48 Abraham demands two separate answers to this question. He wants it answered negatively in reference to the possibility that Yahweh might treat the good as if they were evil by destroying everyone indiscriminately; to do so would be unjust. Abraham also wants the question answered afﬁrmatively when it refers to the possibility that Yahweh might treat the evil as if they were good and spare everyone. While this is also, strictly speaking, unjust, because it deals with the aversion of a deserved yet undesired consequence, it is understood as mercy.49

Folktales and Dialogue: A Common Theology Because the dialogue was believed to be a later insertion in Genesis 18–19, exegetes have seen contrasting theological visions between it and the two divine visitor tales. Ehud Ben Zvi maintains that the premise of the dialogue, which arises from the human experience of the undeserved suffering of the good, is that Yahweh is incapable of destroying the wicked while sparing the righteous from among them. As such, the dialogue cri- tiques the more popular theology of Gen. 19.1-29 in which the good are spared and only those deserving of punishment are destroyed.50 Walter

47. Cf. the discussion in Blenkinsopp, ‘Abraham and the Righteous of Sodom’, pp. 122-23. 48. Westermann, Genesis 12–36, p. 291; for von Rad (Genesis, p. 213) and Crenshaw (‘Popular Questioning’, p. 180), the question at the heart of the dialogue is: ‘What determines God’s judgment on Sodom, the wickedness of the many or the inno- cence of the few?’ 49. Albeit this mercy is at the service of justice so that the righteous will not be destroyed; see, too, Nahum Sarna, Genesis (JPS Torah Commentary, 1; Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1989), p. 133; cf. Lyons, Canon and Exegesis, pp. 188, 190. 50. Ben Zvi, ‘Dialogue’, pp. 41-43; cf. James L. Crenshaw, ‘The Sojourner Has Come to Play the Judge, Theodicy on Trial’, in Tod Linafelt and Timothy Beal (eds.),

Brueggemann reads the dialogue as an exposition of divine mercy written to critique the rigid divine justice portrayed in ch. 19.51 Such attempts to drive a wedge between the theology of the divine visitor tales and the dialogue are fraught with problems. If the dialogue is meant to critique the rigid/individualistic theology of the Lot story, then why not alter the tale to ﬁt more closely with the dialogue’s criteria? Why not place ten righteous people in the city to spare it? Why not have the entire city spared on account of Lot or simply out of gratuitous divine favor? Why not have the exchange between Abraham and Yahweh focus on the power of divine mercy by continuing from ten good individuals down to one? Does not the ambiguous characterization of Lot in Genesis 19, coupled with the statement about his survival in 19.29, show that mercy is at work in the Sodom story? Alternatively, if Genesis 19 is written to undercut the challenge to divine omnipotence in the dialogue, as Ben Zvi maintains, there remains the fact that attacks on divine omnipotence are perennial in any theistic worldview. A fantastic story may not adequately respond to such challenges if the story in question ignores so much contradictory experiential evidence from the world of the readers. The dialogue derives its meaning from the fact that Abraham and Yahweh are discussing the fate of a particular city. The dialogue’s conclusion does not really resolve the issue. The reader must continue into the following chapter to learn Sodom’s fate because it is tied to how many righteous people may be found there, a requirement established in the dialogue. The important role that exchange plays in the dialogue and the folktales creates a thematic connection between them that requires the attempt to read Genesis 18–19 as a coherent unit, rather than a combination of differing theological viewpoints. The ﬁrst divine visitor tale of Gen. 18.1-15 tells of a just God’s reward of a righteous man’s goodness. Genesis 18.16-33 builds on this as the righteous Abraham demands that God extend his goodness to all those deserving in Sodom. But the dialogue also pleads for divine mercy, insofar as Abraham wants Yahweh to refrain from giving the evil of Sodom their deserved punishment.52 While the second divine

God in the Fray: A Tribute to Walter Brueggemann (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998), pp. 83-92 (86). 51. Brueggemann, Genesis, p. 167. 52. Abraham’s request rests on the fact that there are different kinds of people and that Yahweh ought to deal with these two groups according to different criteria, contra Lyons (Canon and Exegesis, p. 206), who claims that Abraham’s dual request is incoherent.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. BOLIN The Role of Exchange 55 visitor tale in Gen. 19.1-29 appears to operate on the notion of strict divine justice identical to the first tale, Lot’s less than virtuous behavior and the narrator’s observation in 19.29 shows the second tale to be concerned with mercy.53 Consequently, one of the principles of the dialogue is upheld, namely, that the merits of the good can move Yahweh to pity the unrighte- ous. He is a merciful god. But the absence of ten righteous people in Sodom underscores the depth of the city’s corruption and justifies its destruction. Thus the dialogue’s other principle is also affirmed. Yahweh is just. However, Yahweh’s justice and mercy are not configured as Abra- ham would wish them to be, but are inverted. Abraham implores Yahweh to be merciful to the many who are wicked in the city and just to the righteous few. In response, Yahweh brings his justice to bear on the many evil citizens of Sodom and spares Lot and his family out of mercy.54 The text seems to say that Yahweh is both just and merciful—as do many biblical texts55—but stresses that divine justice and mercy are applied according to different standards. Specifically, Yahweh’s actions in Genesis 19 offer a more pessimistic view of humankind than that put forward by Abraham. There are not ten righteous people in the city of Sodom—a number Abraham was so confident would be found in the city that he ended his pleading at that point.56 Moreover, in a significant departure from the divine visitors tale-type, the author makes Lot, who is the putative hero of the tale, someone instead whose sinfulness does not merit the sparing of his life. The only righteous person in the narrative deserving of Yahweh’s blessing is Abraham, the only one to have been declared righteous by Yahweh (18.19). Abraham, the righteous intercessor, pleads for Sodom

53. Brueggemann (Genesis, p. 173) maintains that the purpose of 19.29 is to continue the dialogue’s portrayal of Abraham as intercessor. E. Theodore Mullen (Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations: A New Approach to the Formation of the Pentateuch [SBLSS; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997], p. 141) claims that the salvation of the evil based upon the merit of one righteous person is the implied message of the dialogue, even though Abraham stops at ten. 19.29 illustrates the principle. 54. Contra Macdonald (‘Listening to Abraham’, pp. 40-42), for whom Abraham’s request for divine justice really shortchanges humanity, insofar as Yahweh is willing to be merciful and ‘Abraham has not plumbed the depths of Yhwh’s grace’ (p. 40). 55. Most notably, the poem of Exod. 34.6-7 acknowledges Yahweh’s justice and mercy, while in the scene prefacing the poem, Yahweh makes clear that he will show mercy to whomever he chooses (33.19). See the discussion of Exod. 34.6-7 in Bolin, Freedom Beyond Forgiveness, pp. 164-72, and Krašovec, Reward, Punishment, and Forgiveness, pp. 114-18. 56. That it is Abraham who ends the dialogue is made clear by Macdonald, ‘Listen- ing to Abraham’, p. 40.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 56 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) and challenges Yahweh to show mercy to the evil and justice to the good. Yahweh rises to Abraham’s challenge, but in a way not foreseen by Abra- ham. Yahweh does indeed show mercy to sinners, that is, Lot and his family. And he does show justice, but not to the good people Abraham assumed would be in the city. There are not ten good people in Sodom; indeed, there is not a single good person in Sodom. Receiving what one has demanded from God, the text seems to say, can be both unexpected and dangerous.57

57. Unfortuantely, I was unable to consult Ed Noort and Eibert Tigchelaar (eds.), Sodom’s Sin: Genesis 18–19 and its Interpretation (Themes in Biblical Narrative, 7; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004).

Making Sense of Sex: A Study of Leviticus 18

Doug C. Mohrmann Cornerstone University, Center for the Study of Antiquity, 1001 E. Beltline NE, Grand Rapids, MI 49525, USA

Abstract This study exposes the implicit logic of the sexual laws in Leviticus 18 and thereby throws light on the problematic relationship between these laws and the chapter’s introductory and concluding material. The sexual laws were arranged in a tripartite scheme that addressed relations according to family, clan or tribe, and nation, moving outward from the nearest relations to the most distant. Thus the sexual laws circumscribed both internal and external boundaries in Israelite life. As part of the Holiness Code the sexual laws are presented in Leviticus 18 to deﬁne Israel’s life in the face of outside, cultural competitors. The discovery of this scheme in the sexual laws builds upon Mary Douglas’s analysis of other priestly traditions.

Leviticus 18.6-23 strikes a reader as a hodge-podge of laws loosely related to matters of sex. When they are described as incest laws, vv. 6-17 appear sensible, but vv. 18-23 then remain without a comprehensible rationale. The explicit rationale for the laws which is given in the immediately preceding context (vv. 3-5) frustrates rather than aids the situation, since its generalization seems ﬁtting to neither the narrowness of the sexual laws nor their peculiar mixture. A few commentators have recently engaged this problem without much progress. Even Jacob Milgrom in his meticulous commentary ultimately retreats in one place to state the obvious (they all involve procreation) and in another place to conclude, with only slight improvement, that vv. 6-18 are linked by consanguinity and afﬁnity and

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004, The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX and 15 East 26th Street, Suite 1703, New York, NY 10010. 58 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) vv. 19-23 are ‘miscellaneous sexual practices’.1 James Miller’s attempt to see the latter as organized around CK awkwardly forces vv. 19 and 22 into his model, and is therefore unsatisfactory, even if v. 23 is emended to include CK=H following the LXX.2 The more imaginative and thorough reading by Calum Carmichael explains the motivation for these laws as an apologetic gloss over Israel’s patriarchal narratives’ embarrassing accounts of incest. His creativity, however, stretches beyond credibility at several points (e.g. regarding vv. 7, 10, 13-14).3 This study contends for a new understanding of Leviticus 18 by pursu- ing a line of analysis between the legal material in vv. 6-23 and the chapter’s framing material, vv. 1-5, 24-30. To argue successfully that the laws and the surrounding texts belong together one must overcome two major problems. First, there is a redaction-critical issue which arises from their stylistic differences. Secondly, the redactional issue highlights the trouble in reconciling the content of vv. 1-5 with vv. 6-23. The problem of style is obvious since vv. 1-5 exhibit narrative qualities while vv. 6-23 preserve apodictic law. For the second issue, many readers have noted that the ﬁrst ﬁve verses admonish Israel to separate itself from Egypt and Canaan by observing YHWH’s laws, while vv. 6-23 present a series of regulations which were not peculiarly Israelite. Although not every scholar has acknowledged the second problem, Baruch Levine and Erhard Gersten- berger, for example, rightly question the polemical value of the incest laws. It is uncertain, therefore, that the incest laws would distinguish Israel even from Egypt where it is known that the royal family occasionally allowed some incestuous unions.4 These observations appear to exacer- bate the redactional problem and cast serious doubt on the chapter’s coherence. N.H. Snaith states what most commentators have concluded: ‘The compilations of laws and customs are from different sources, all brought

1. Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22 (AB, 3A; New York: Doubleday, 2000), pp. 1530, 1593. 2. James E. Miller, ‘Notes on Leviticus 18’, ZAW 112 (2000), pp. 401-403. 3. Calum M. Carmichael, Law, Legend, and Incest in the Bible: Leviticus 18–20 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). Also, and most simply, he assumes the incest laws are the most important elements of this collection. This analysis by contrast prefers a more inclusive label, such as sexual laws. A fuller critique is provided by Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22, pp. 1591-93. 4. Baruch Levine, Leviticus (The JPS Torah Commentary Series; New York: Jew- ish Publication Society of America, 1989), p. 118; Erhard S. Gerstenberger, Leviticus (OTL; Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1996), pp. 256-57.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MOHRMANN Making Sense of Sex 59 together without any real attempt at editing or correlation’.5 In order to address these problems, this article will ﬁrst address the question of literary context and then look at the second crux with the help of Mary Douglas’s anthropological approach, which she has rigorously applied to the food laws of ch. 11.6 After demonstrating the implicit logic of vv. 6-23, several reﬂections on the chapter will be possible.

1. Analysis of the Framing Material Two features of the framing material of Leviticus 18 conﬁrm that it was composed expressly for the sexual laws and not for a separate literary tradition. First, a closer look at the framing material ﬁnds the language of vv. 1-5 resurfacing in vv. 24-30 which thereby creates the effect of two bookends holding up the material in vv. 6-23. Similarly, parallels between the framing material in chs. 18 and 20 should be recognized, as Table 1 reveals.7 All four sections of the frames mention the behavior of God’s

5. N.H. Snaith, Leviticus and Numbers (NCB; London: Thomas Nelson, 1967), p. 137. See also particularly Noth, Leviticus (London: SCM Press, 1977), p. 146, and Carmichael, Law, pp. 6-9, 40. 6. Her ideas have progressed over time since her first major application of pollution theory to Leviticus in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Purity and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), until her most recent book, Leviticus as Litera- ture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). In the latter she gives a historical overview of both her work and anthropology as it relates to pollution theory (pp. v-viii, 6-10). Her earlier work was marked by occasional and unsystematic attention to the sexual laws. However, her book and her article ‘Justice as the Cornerstone: An Inter- pretation of Leviticus 18–20’, Int 53 (1999), pp. 341-50, somewhat closes that lacuna. This essay diverges from her work, not because of a fault in her anthropological approach, but precisely because of a denial of her assumptions about the relationship between vv. 1-5 and vv. 6-23. 7. A connection between chs. 18 and 20 has also been noted by Mary Douglas, who analyzed the structure of Lev. 18–20 as a ring composition. Accordingly, ch. 19 is the pivot point and chs. 18 and 20 are seen in parallel. She contends that the second half of a ring structure gives further refinement or definition to the first. When one observes that the otherwise pedantic restatement of the sexual laws in ch. 20 are now accompanied by punishments for the infractions, her point carries some merit. Douglas, Leviticus, p. 223, most recently depicts the structure of Leviticus after the form of the tabernacle. Her literary model is a sophisticated and imaginative advance from a simple ring construction as explained in her article, ‘The Forbidden Animals in Leviticus’, JSOT 59 (1993), pp. 3-23. Cf. also Rolf Rendtorff, ‘Is it Possible to Read Leviticus as a Separate Book?’, in John F.A. Sawyer (ed.), Reading Leviticus: A Conversation with Mary Douglas (JSOTSup, 227; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), pp. 29-31.

18.1-5 18.24-30 20.1-2 20.22-27 The LORD spoke to Moses… The LORD spoke to Moses… ‘speak to the people of Israel’ ‘speak to the people of Israel’ (vv. 1-2) (vv. 1-2) I am the LORD your God (vv. 2, I am the LORD your God I am the LORD your God 4, 5) (v. 30) (v. 24); I the LORD am holy (v. 26) Canaan (v. 3) nations (vv. 24, 28); inhabi- nation (v.23) tants of the land before you (vv. 25, 27); implied in v. 30 Egypt (v. 3) separated you from the peoples (vv. 24, 26) land (of Canaan) to which I am cf. v. 28 the land to which I bring you bringing you (v. 3) to settle (v. 22) You shall not do as they do… You shall not walk in the stat- You shall not follow their statutes of the nations (v. 23) utes (v. 3) My judgments you shall observe But you shall keep my statutes You shall keep all my statutes and my statutes you shall keep and my judgments (v. 26) and all my judgments, and (v. 4); You shall keep my stat- observe them (v. 22) utes and my judgments (v. 5) defilement (vv. 24, 25, 27, 28, defilement (v. 25); cf. v. 27 30); abominations (vv. 26, 27, in view of 19.31; abomination 29, 30) (#B, v. 25) defilement (vv. 24, 25, 27, 28, defilement (v. 25); cf. v. 27 in 30); abominations (vv. 26, 27, view of 19.31; abomination 29, 30) (*B, v. 25) I am driving out before you I am driving out before you (v. 24) (v. 23) land vomits people out (vv. 25, the land…may not vomit you 28) out (v. 22) citizen or alien who resides people of Israel or alien who among you (v. 26) resides in Israel (v. 2) 62 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) people in the land with other peoples or in distinction to them. Parallels of defilement, abomination, and vomiting are also present in the summations as they continue themes which were first introduced within the sexual laws (18.19-23; 20.2, 13). In no case was Israel to conform, but in every case others were to conform to God’s statutes. Put succinctly, these framing texts deal with external boundaries around Israel’s culture. These laws were to contribute to Israel’s identity vis-à-vis her neighbors. If an alien was admitted into the culture, they would only be allowed on the condition that they must not violate these external boundaries (18.26; 20.2). Penal- ties for violations were personal—death (20.2, 9-16)—and national— forfeiture of the land (18.25), which leads to cultural death. Within the context of the exodus narrative, Israel is here portrayed as entering a physical boundary that, by God’s design, had a cultural boundary invisibly superimposed upon it. Exit from the cultural boundary led necessarily to exit from the physical. The text even claims that the Canaanites failed to understand this, so God was driving them out (18.25; 20.23). By recapitulating material of the introduction in the summation, the redactor intended to combine the two sections in such a way that violence would be done to the framing material if it is considered separately from the sexual laws. The whole chapter, in this case, would have arisen as part of the larger tradition called P (Priestly tradition) or H (Holiness code). Therefore, such a pattern of redaction gives credence to the suggestion that the framing material should be read in light of the remainder of the chapter. Secondly, the narrative thread which weaves together the sections of Leviticus reflects an ambition to fit the following material into the constituting laws of the nation.8 Leviticus 18.1-5 belongs to a speech that has its implied setting at Mt Sinai in the running narrative from Exodus 19 to Numbers 10. Whatever the biblical record states about the conquest, it shows that Israel’s settlement was only partially successful, so throughout the centuries Israel witnessed the practices of the Canaanites. Certainly, an interest in laws governing sexual behavior falls within the purview of ancient legal systems. The general admonitions in Leviticus 18 portray H’s attempt to erect constituting laws that (1) would protect Israel from what

8. Cf. Thomas L. Thompson, Early History of the Israelite People: From the Writ- ten and Archaeological Sources (SHANE, 4; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992), p. 381; Michael Fishbane, ‘Inner Biblical Exegesis: Types and Strategies of Interpretation in Ancient Israel’, in Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick (eds.), Midrash and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 257-58.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MOHRMANN Making Sense of Sex 63 the authors of H considered debased elements of Canaanite religion9 and (2) would allow them to transform common theological conceptions for their own perception of God and his special purposes for them. Even as Israel found imagery and words from its neighbors helpful in articulating its vision of God, it also strove for its own conceptual and ritualistic identity, and Lev. 18.1-5 and 23-30 in a small way share this same impulse. Again, sexual laws could contribute to this process, but how they do so must be explored more thoroughly.

2. Implicit Logic in the Sexual Laws This analysis uncovers the redactor’s intent, but it also sharpens the differences between the content of the framing sections and the legal material. A brief review of 18.1-5 will add more clarity to the problem of the differences in content. a. A Review of Verses 1-5 The formulaic beginning of ch. 18 (‘YHWH spoke to Moses, saying…’) would imply that another proclamation of God’s laws was to follow.10 In this case, however, the text bluntly interjects ‘I am YHWH your God’ (v. 2). There is no clear connection, either conceptually or syntactically, between this clause and the remainder of the speech, but its echo in v. 4 hints at its importance. Indeed, in view of its concentration within chs. 18–26 (21 of 22 times in Leviticus), we may see the declaration here adumbrating the holiness motif explicitly started in ch. 19. It reinforces, through repetition, the relationship between God and Israel in distinction from other gods and other nations. These compounded associations thus imply that God had separated Israel to his purposes. The phrase simultaneously identiﬁes the source of the commandments (cf. the ﬁrst person singular of v. 4)11 and

9. It would be because of both similarities and differences that such actions would be necessary. F.M. Cross focuses on matters of continuity (Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epics: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel [Cambridge, MA: Har- vard University Press, 1973]), while John Gray emphasizes discontinuity (The Legacy of Canaan [Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1957]). 10. It begins chs. 1, 4, 6, 8, 12, 14, 16, 17–25, 27, and is used outside the book in Exodus (19 times), Numbers (48 times), Deuteronomy (once), and Joshua (twice). Other variations include YHWH speaking to Moses and Aaron: Lev. 11.1; 13.1; 14.33; 15.1; also cf. 21.1. 11. Levine, Leviticus, p. 118; Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22, p. 1517.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 64 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) provides the basis for an expectation of obedience; that is, they must obey his commands, because he was their God.12 Israel Knoll helpfully characterizes its function in H, when he connects this assertion (and variations thereof) and ‘holiness’: ‘In HS [Holiness School], holiness is depicted not only as a basic fact and motivating force, but also as the final aim of all the commandments’.13 The meaning of v. 2 becomes plain in v. 3: Israel must sever its ties with Egypt and must preserve itself amid the cultural or religious climate of Canaan. Clearly, this is a call for cultural isolationism. The parallel clauses of this verse begin with J<, giving them a concessive meaning to set up the prohibitions thus: ‘even though the Egyptians conduct their lives in such a manner, you will not!’ The commands lead in a progression to the final clause, also a prohibition, which demanded that Israel not ‘walk’ (live) by their statutes.14 Therefore, insofar as these nations’ statutes conflicted with YHWH’s, Israel was required to show him loyalty by rejecting their customs (v. 4).15 What was the intended scope of EBI and )JA> in 18.3-5? Being addressed to the nation and coming from priestly traditions, they were national and most probably both cultic and social; in other words, they are ‘law’ in its broadest, most inclusive sense in order to show the laws of Israel in a programmatically distinct light.16

12. Snaith, Leviticus, p. 122. Milgrom argues that the ‘bulk of H reﬂects the Priestly response to the indictment by the prophets of the eighth century (especially by Isaiah of Jerusalem) of Israel’s cultic and socio-economic sins’ (‘The Changing Con- cept of Holiness’, in Sawyer [ed.], Reading Leviticus, pp. 65-75 [74]). Holiness was thus intended to motivate an ethical life. 13. Israel Knoll, The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School (Minneapolis: Augsburg-Fortress, 1995), pp. 182-83. 14. Cf. F.J. Helfmeyer, ‘(=9 hƗlakh’, in TDOT, III, pp. 388-403 (391-92). Walking after a king or leader implies loyalty (e.g. ANET, p. 478; cf. ‘alƗku’, CAD, A1, 300, 308, 320). Walking in/by statutes or laws seems to be a particularly Hebrew appropria- tion of the metaphor. ‘Living in accordance with’ is doubtless the meaning here. 15. Noth, Leviticus, p. 134, believes that this prohibition in the context of vv. 6-23 shows that Israel considered the Canaanites as sexually licentious and promiscuous to an extreme. Traditions of a similar bias are found in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah; nevertheless, vv. 6-23, as will be explained below, do not necessarily signal this. 16. Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22, pp. 1520-21, presumes to read them etymol- ogically alone and thus fails to recognize that at least a general application of these words must stand unless the context constrains them to more speciﬁc statutes or judgments.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MOHRMANN Making Sense of Sex 65 b. The Problem between the Framing Material and the Laws Here is the problem of reading vv. 1-5 and vv. 6-23 together alluded to above. For, how can this goal of differentiation from foreign nations and the broad associations of EBI and )JA>, be reconciled with the goal, if there is one, in the particular sexual laws in vv. 6-23? This quandary has induced great confusion among the commentators, despite attempts by Gordon Wenham, among others including Mary Douglas, to allege distinctions in the sexual practices between Israel and Egypt or Canaan.17 It is insufﬁcient to grant that comparative literature illuminates a common rationale for vv. 3-5 and the laws of vv. 21-23 (regarding Molek, homosexuality, and bestiality). This leaves the incest laws (vv. 6-17), which were virtually universal, as pointless, even contrived cultural markers.18 Likewise, vv. 18-20 fail on the same grounds but add the wrinkle that they are not incestuous and they appear to be interjected awkwardly among these laws.19 Should a source–critical piecemeal approach to this question be the only option? Put another way, since the framing material seems to be composed solely for the purpose of offering a context to the sexual

17. Wenham, Leviticus (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), pp. 251-52, finds evidence of homosexuality from Mesopotamian and Canaanite sources; bestiality from Egyptian, Canaanite, and Hittite; and child sacrifice in Ammonite; see also his ‘The Old Testament Attitude to Homosexuality’, ExpTim 102 (1991), pp. 359-63. Cf. also Harry A. Hoffner, Jr, ‘Incest, Sodomy and Bestiality in the Ancient Near East’, in idem (ed.), Orient and Occident: Essays Presented to Cyrus H. Gordon on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (AOAT, 22; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1973), pp. 81-90. Jerome T. Walsh, ‘Leviticus 18.22 and 20.13: Who is Doing What to Whom?’, JBL 120 (2001), pp. 201-209, argues that Lev. 18.22 differs from 20.13 by intending only for the free male Israelite citizen to refuse anal penetration. Lev. 20, by contrast, which is written later in his estimation, threatens the penetrator and the one being penetrated. Walsh, however, ignores the implication for the C8 in 18.26 in this context, so social class is not a factor in this law as he alleges. His conclusion that Lev. 18.22 falls in line with other, foreign laws governing male–male relations thereby falters. 18. Occasional practice of incest between members of the Egyptian royal family in pharaonic times is not a sufficient basis for a polemic; cf. Lise Manniche, Sexual Life in Ancient Egypt (London: Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 29. Roger S. Bagnall and Bruce W. Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 127-34, show that this taboo relaxed in Egypt during the Roman period second–fourth centuries CE, particularly in the urban areas of the northern Arsinoite nome. They have concluded that this trend began in the Hellenistic age, but was uncommon before this. 19. For the condemnation of adultery in Egypt, see Manniche, Sexual Life, pp. 20-22.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 66 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) laws, can sense be made of the whole passage to expose a coherent logic that does not result in a needling, unimaginative polemic with Israel’s neighbors? c. Mary Douglas’s Anthropological Approach to Leviticus This latter question will be given an affirmative answer here with the help of certain insights from Mary Douglas’s anthropological studies on social pollution and taboos. She has shown that the logic for a society’s rules are often imagined through a symbolic use of the human body. From her field work and literary studies she has specifically discovered the implied symbolism carried in a culture’s convictions regarding food and sex. She writes: The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. The body is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures.20 Her findings in the study of primitive cultures, when applied to the exegesis of Leviticus 11, have shown how that legislation, which was heretofore observed as a desultory grouping of rules, also carried an important sociological logic.21 For our purposes, it is noted that sex, like eating, deals with the entries and exits of bodily boundaries and as such becomes another, apt analogy for social, cultural, and theological intercourse.22 Although Douglas acknowledges that sexual taboos are equally important for comprehending many implicit social structures, her work in Leviticus has not substantially considered ch. 18.23 In fact, 20.25 reiterates language

20. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 115. Later she adds ‘we should expect the ori- fices of the body to symbolize its [society’s] specially vulnerable points… The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins’ (p. 121). Thus, menstrual flow, seminal discharges, and births are assigned cultic significance through purity concerns (Lev. 12 and 15). Also, in ‘The Forbidden Animals’, p. 21, she says: ‘In Leviticus the body is the cosmos’. 21. Her analysis has evolved from Purity and Danger through her article ‘The Forbidden Animals’. In the article she integrated her explanation of the food laws more fully into Leviticus and especially in relation to the blood laws and blemish laws. In Leviticus as Literature, she offers another advance in integrating these laws with the entire literary and theological setting of P. The principle source of this advance is through her reading of the laws in light of Gen. 1 as well as the covenants with Noah and Abraham (see pp. 134-75). 22. Mary Douglas, Implied Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 271. 23. Despite the fact that Douglas repeatedly places sexual taboo in parallel with

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MOHRMANN Making Sense of Sex 67 from the legislation on the food laws (‘You shall therefore make a distinction between the clean animal and the unclean, and between the unclean bird and the clean…’, NRSV), making the proposed correlation between food laws and sexual laws necessary. If it can be shown that a similar implicit logic guided both, then we have at 20.25 a fortuitous revelation of the connectedness between sexual and gastronomical taboos in P(H). As Douglas’s analysis of Leviticus has matured from her Purity and Danger (1966) to Leviticus as Literature (1999), she has fruitfully connected her understandings of the food laws to the wider concerns of Leviticus and P(H). In her earlier work, she portrayed the taxonomy of animal life in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 being arranged thus in the categories (listed in narrowing order) of (1) all animals, clean and unclean, (2) clean and edible, and (3) perfect for sacriﬁce—each described within the three kingdoms of animal life: air, sea, and land (cf. Gen. 1).24 She has more recently discovered other parallel techniques in Leviticus.25 She variously describes these as rings, inclusive sets or tripartite divisions. This technique signals a logic of redaction which she labels microcosmic or correlative or analogical thinking.26 Most fascinating is the use of the tabernacle and Mt Sinai as the lead analogies, because these images form a basic grid to organize legal material in Leviticus. The three parts of the tabernacle and Mt Sinai are thus understood: from the foot of the mountain (Exod. 19.23) or the outer court of the tabernacle, one moves upward or inward to the middle of the mountain (Exod. 24.1-9) or the sanctuary, and ﬁnally towards the summit or Holy of Holies. Her work explains how this tripartite structure is the unstated organizing principle of the blemish laws (Lev. 13–14), which form a picture of concentric circles from person

dietary taboo, she does not treat the sexual laws of Lev. 18 and 20 with a comparable perspicacity; cf., for a similar critique, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 129. She unfortunately makes three fundamental errors in Leviticus as Literature, pp. 234-40. First, ﬁnding a ring structure between chs. 18–20, which correspondingly induced a conviction that ch. 19 is the pinnacle and main point of the section, riveted her attention to ch. 19 to the neglect of chs. 18 and 20. Secondly, she devoted overmuch time to deal with the ethics of homosexuality, despite it being one issue among many. Finally, she assumes that the incest laws preserved a polemic against the occasional incestuous behavior of Egyptian royalty. 24. Douglas, Implied Meanings, p. 263. 25. The book of Numbers exhibits similar traits; see Douglas, Leviticus, p. 52. 26. Douglas, Leviticus, pp. 13-65.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 68 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) to garment to house.27 Douglas discovers more evidence of tripartite structures of Leviticus in the altar’s cleansing on the Day of Atonement (ch. 6).28 Once the implied correlative logic in these examples (and others) is exposed, a sensible picture of Israelite life emerges. Holiness in P(H), as expressed in taboos, rituals, and legal codes, reinforced both interpersonal and cultic standards by connecting these prominent physical structures and other, seeming unrelated, legal statutes. One might reasonably assume that systematic ranking in these measures of purity would have been a useful mnemonic device, but it would provide clarity as well. To live according to this priestly vision was to function in society and in worship with a proper knowledge of order and disorder, clean and unclean, holy and defiled. Life is highly integrated or systematized, so that humanistic concerns were implicitly meshed with cultic.29 Douglas often remarks how causal relations are rarely explicit in Leviticus (unlike Deuteronomy), which makes probing the basis of a particular law challenging. Greater cultural configurations, such as the tripartite Tabernacle/Temple, on the other hand, which provided patented designs, supply a more implicit logic through a network of mutual purpose and enforcement. These insights will now be applied to the sexual laws of Leviticus 18. d. The Tripartite Structure of Verses 6-23 The general prohibition of v. 6—do not have sex with close relatives (HC3)30—guides the specific prohibitions in vv. 7-17 which were given to define how close were close relations. The subjects of these commands were men, at least in vv. 8-22, because all the familial members with whom the subject must not have sex were women.31 Within the prohibitions, the text often preserves a justification for including a particular female relative, expressing it variously in a circumlocution such as ‘she is

27. Douglas, Leviticus, pp. 177, 191. 28. Douglas, Leviticus, p. 178. 29. Douglas, Leviticus, p. 27. Douglas writes: ‘The analogic system of thought has a more comprehensive idea of truth; what is true is so by virtue of its compliance with a microcosm of the world and of society; to be convincing, what is true must chime with justice; it looks to match microcosm with microcosm in ever-expanding series’. Knoll, Sanctuary, has trenchantly argued that this would be characteristic of H in contradistinction to P, but Douglas’s analysis crosses this literary boundary. 30. For the sexual connotations to 3CB, see, for example, Levine, Leviticus, p. 119. 31. J.R. Porter, Leviticus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 145, and Carmichael, Law, p. 7, narrow (too far) the target audience to the head of the household.

vv. 7-8: ‘nakedness of your father’/‘and the nakedness of your of a mother or stepmother (with a son) of a father (with mother’ a daughter?) (J3 E //(> …H (J3 vv. 9, 11: ‘nakedness of your sister’/‘daughter of your father’s of a sister or half-sister or step-sister wife’ (EHI /(> E3 H (J3 E3 v. 10: ‘nakedness of your son’s/daughter’s daughter’/‘for of a granddaughter behold your own nakedness’ (E3E3 H (?3E3 v. 12: ‘nakedness of your father’s sister’/‘she is your father’s of a paternal aunt flesh’ (J3 EI v. 13: ‘nakedness of your mother’s sister’/‘she is your of a maternal aunt mother’s flesh’ (> EI v. 14: ‘nakedness of your father’s brother’/‘she is your aunt’ of a wife of a paternal uncle HE …(J3 JI v. 15: ‘nakedness of your daughter-in-law’/‘she is your son’s of a daughter-in-law wife’ (?3 E v. 16: ‘nakedness of your brother’s wife’/‘she is your of a sister-in-law brother’s nakedness’ (JI E v. 17: ‘nakedness of a woman and her daughter’/‘they are of a step-daughter or step-grandchild your flesh’/‘this is wickedness’ (9>K) 9E3E3H 9?3E3…9E3H 9 70 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) the nakedness (9HC ) of your father’ (speaking of a mother or stepmother —see Table 2). These explanations suggest that if one were to ignore these taboos, the family’s structure would be jeopardized by directly and indirectly violating members within one’s extended family. An offense of this sort would rupture its cohesiveness. These were the most intimate internal boundaries of Israelite culture—boundaries, in that they must not be crossed, but internal and not external, because they were within the social structure. Therefore, vv. 6-17 focus on the life of the extended family.32 Verse 17 has caused some difficulties for commentators. Erhard Gersten- berger, for example, broadens his description of vv. 7-17 by claiming it concerns the clan.33 Yet, extended family members dominate the section and HC3 (v. 6) designates a blood relative. Levine and Milgrom, who acknowledge vv. 6-16 pertain to the family, are right to see that v. 17 falls outside the family as a regulation regarding a step-daughter or step- grandchild. Nevertheless, the added justification for the prohibition, ‘they are your flesh’ (9?9 9C ; see vv. 6, 12, 13) indicates the editor was treating this situation as incest.34 Perhaps it is best to see v. 17 as a transitional element of the text: it is most closely connected to the incest laws, yet it also hints at an intention to move beyond the family in the next verses. Intriguingly, certain gaps in the laws of vv. 6-17 remain. Certain female members of the extended family are not mentioned: daughters, nieces, and female first cousins. Omission of a law for the daughter is especially problematic. Milgrom has presented the many attempts to account for the omission of daughters, but a most obvious option is neglected: v. 7 may have implied that both mother–son ((J3 EHC ) and father–daughter ((J> EHC H) relations are taboo.35 In support of this speculation, one notes

32. Porter, Leviticus, pp. 143-44; Rolf P. Knierim, ‘Customs, Judges, and Legis- lators in Ancient Israel’, in Craig A. Evans and William F. Stinespring (eds.), Early Jewish and Christian Exegesis: Essays in Memory of William Hugh Brownlee (Home- page Series, 10; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), pp. 3-15 (12). 33. Gerstenberger, Leviticus, pp. 248 and 258. See Eilberg-Schwartz, Savage, pp. 170-71, for C3 as a cipher for penis and kinship. 34. Levine, Leviticus, p. 122, and Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22, pp. 1545-46. S. Bendor, The Structure of Ancient Israel: The Institution of the Family (Beit ’ab) from the Settlement to the End of the Monarchy (Jerusalem: Simor, 1996), pp. 57-66, agrees with Levine on this division, but does not address the mixed character of v. 17. He does, however, conclude that vv. 6-16 deal with the extended family, 3 EJ3. 35. Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22, pp. 1527-30, 1537-38, relies chieﬂy on the work of Susan Rattray, expressed in ‘Marriage Rules, Kinship Terms and Family Structure in the Bible’, SBLSP 26 (1987), pp. 537-44 (542), who sees a parallel use of C in Lev.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MOHRMANN Making Sense of Sex 71 that the ﬁnal law, v. 23, is also inclusive. The discussion will return to the other gaps. There is a clear shift in the redaction of the sexual laws at v. 18. The prohibition against marrying a woman and her sister hints of no problem for the man’s male and female relatives, but rather it relates to the family from which his wife originated, that is, another family in the clan (or perhaps the tribe or nation).36 This law supposes a larger jurisdiction than the previous verses.37 Hence, the sexual laws have moved beyond the orbit of family into the larger society. The prohibitions against sex during menstruation and against adultery in vv. 19 and 20, which have seemed to be out of place, are no longer so surprising. Relations with one’s wife were ﬁne until they interrupted ritual purity (v. 19), or relations with a woman, not already excluded, became forbidden if adulterous. Both laws come from an understanding that societal cohesion was at risk (v. 20).38 It is

21.2 as a key to unlock the mystery of the missing daughter. Her insight is indeed helpful, but it still leaves (> EHC as a cumbersome pleonasm. Cf. 1 Sam. 20.30, where (> EHC is used to refer to the father, albeit through the son’s relationship to him in a polygamous setting. Here the relationship is more likely father–daughter (heterosexual) than father–son (homosexual), because homosexuality will be mentioned specifically in v. 22. The waw is, therefore, not explicative but conjunctive. The structure of v. 14 makes for an interesting comparison with v. 7. It is the same as v. 7 for the uncle, but it clarifies the apposition between ‘nakedness of your father’s brother’ and ‘his wife’. See also Jonathan R. Ziskind, ‘The Missing Daughter in Leviticus XVIII’, VT 96 (1996), pp. 125-30, and Tirzah Meacham, ‘The Missing Daughter: Leviticus 18 and 20’, ZAW 109 (1997), pp. 254-59. 36. Paula McNutt, Reconstructing the Society of Ancient Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1999), contends that the endogamy was typically practiced in the clan throughout the pre-exilic periods. More about endogamy will be said below. 37. A lack of clear stratification in ancient Israelite society complicates the process of assigning a precise level of jurisdiction to these laws. Yet, (EJ> E (v. 20) denotes members of society not necessarily from one’s extended family (see 5.21; 19.11, 15, 17; 24.19; 25.14, 15, 17). McNutt (Reconstructing, p. 165) and Bendor (Ancient Israel, pp. 92-93), persuasively argue that clan and tribe distinctions may well have survived trends towards greater urbanization throughout the era of the monarchy, particularly in rural areas. See McNutt (Reconstructing, pp. 159-62, 164-70, 172-76, 197-200, 246 n. 57) for responses to Weber, Gottwald, and de Vaux, who believe that the larger structures were completely fractured during the transition in Iron Age II (900–586 BCE). Therefore, the laws of vv. 18-20 cover the next circle of associations within the Israelite nation, which we will conveniently label clan or tribe. 38. See Douglas’s discussion of ‘pollution’ in Purity and Danger, pp. 129-39. Eilberg-Schwartz, Savage, pp. 177-94, improves on Douglas’s work, demonstrating

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 72 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) vital to note that this logical, outward progression is also marked by a change in justification for the prohibitions. These verses stress defilement or uncleanness (9 >). Whereas vv. 6-17 dealt with the family, vv. 18-20 extend the scope of sexual laws to the clan or tribe and accordingly attract different significance and different issues regarding their enforcement. Implications for sexual activity reach beyond small family units to greater social structures. Verses 18-20 still articulate internal boundaries of the society, but by connecting sexuality with the cult’s or religion’s coherence, the laws symbolize the next circle of associations with the Israelite nation.39 Finally, that a polemic against child sacrifice (v. 21), homosexuality, and bestiality also finds its place in these statutes reinforces the notion that the family was to be understood as part of the culture at large and most importantly that sexual boundaries may represent even the limits of cultural boundaries; that is, external boundaries, as was mentioned above.40 Starting with v. 21, we note the law against sacrificing children to Molek became germane to this body of legislation since it dealt with the fruit of legitimate sexual activity.41 By sacrificing a son or daughter, violators exhibited a profound disregard for the blessing from their sexual activity; they weakened the nation’s future and, of course, they compromised the cultic, theological, and covenantal relationship with YHWH.42 Milgrom how ancient Israel placed social values on menstruation, as a symbol of gender, mortal- ity, and control. 39. Contra Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22, p. 1530, who surprisingly claims: ‘The acts described in the final prohibitions in this list—sex with a menstruant, Molek, sodomy, and bestiality (vv. 19, 21-23)—are patently private matters’ (emphasis added). 40. I do not hereby suggest that child sacrifice, homosexuality, and bestiality in fact were only practiced outside of Israel and that Israel had no indigenous interest in these practices. 41. Eilberg-Schwartz, Savage, p. 183. The legitimacy of speaking about a Molek cult and child sacrifice (questioned most thoroughly by Eissfeldt) has now been confirmed conclusively by the work of George C. Heider (The Cult of Molek: A Reassess- ment [JSOTSup, 43: Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1985], and ‘Molek’, in ABD, IV, pp. 895- 98). Note, however, his despair at finding a purpose for 18.21 in context after review- ing various explanations: ‘Noth’s explanation is practically an admission that there is no explanation (or, at least, no substantive connection with the context). In short, the context of 18.21 provides little help to us.’ This law’s importance goes beyond a key- word attachment (so Noth, Leviticus, p. 136), but K. Elliger’s suggestion that it represents the fruit of fertility cults (i.e. presumably with prostitutes) is too conjectural (Leviticus [HAT; Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1966], p. 241). 42. Fishbane, Ancient Israel, pp. 186-87.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MOHRMANN Making Sense of Sex 73 separates the social and theological reasons here but the verse alludes to both: ( CK> (sexual/social) and (J9H= ) (theological).43 The laws against homosexuality and bestiality in vv. 22-23 likewise carried implications for procreation. The jurisdiction of these laws accordingly transcend family, clan, and perhaps tribe to the very boundaries of the nation. This becomes clear at 20.5, where the punishment for making sacriﬁces to Molek is put on the entire clan (9IA>). Thus, a greater entity, such as the tribe or nation, would be required to carry out the sanctions. So, these three prohibitions are symbols of external boundaries that are manifest through sexual activity or the fruit thereof (cf. Exod. 22.19). Therefore, in Leviticus 18 the prohibitions on sexual relations move through ever widening concentric circles from the closest internal cultural structures to its fringes (see Fig. 1 below).

(A) Family (vv. 6-17), (B) Clan/Tribe (vv. 18-20), (C) Nation (vv. 21-23), (D) Egyptians, Canaanites, etc. (vv. 3, 24-30)

Figure 1. Sexual Relations in Leviticus 18 e. Four Conclusions on the Sexual Laws in Leviticus 18 The scheme just described leads us to four important conclusions from the sexual laws of Leviticus 18. First, these laws are part of the analogies which stem from the imagery of the tripartite divisions in the tabernacle

43. Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22, pp. 1558-59.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 74 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) and Mt Sinai; this explains the logic of moving from inward towards outward boundaries. Secondly, both civil and cultic aspects of life are integrated in Leviticus 18 as the sexual laws transcended the jurisdiction of the family (vv. 18-23), when issues of enforcement would be more complicated. Precisely at the point when there was a need for greater support, cultic impurity ( >, ==I, =3E, EH3 HE) appeared.44 Taboo has a preserving effect for the culture and this is the chief emphasis of Douglas’s work.45 Third, regulations on sex issue from the same conceptual grid not only by virtue of their negative statements, but also by the positive endorsement of endogamy. The gaps in the list of female members in Lev. 18.6-17 (particularly cousins and nieces) indicate that endogamy was allowed for, perhaps even encouraged in Israel. The choice to practice either endogamy or exogamy carries an important social symbolic load. Endogamy attempts to isolate a culture by refusing the exchange of women for external alli- ances.46 Such a cultural impulse accords with the desire for high boundaries between those of the inside and those of the outside. Since endogamy is explicitly required for the high priest (21.14), we may witness here again the connection with priestly convictions and a desire to codify such convictions for society generally, just as Howard Eilberg-Schwartz found for the rite of circumcision.47 Endogamy denies the value of culture exchange, and even raises such a prospect to an analogy of social contagion which must not be allowed admittance.48 Furthermore, endogamous

44. Douglas, Purity and Danger, pp. 129-39; she writes: ‘deﬁlement is never an isolated event. It cannot occur except in view of a systematic ordering of ideas’ (p. 41). 45. Douglas, Leviticus, p. 131. 46. Douglas, Implied Meanings, pp. 271, 302-15. Cf. Philo’s mixed feelings in Spec. 3.25 and 29. 47. Eilberg-Schwartz, Savage, p. 164. What is perhaps surprising is that marriage or sexual relations could be associated with external boundaries without the strict prohibition of marriage with Gentiles. The clear and strict prohibitions of Ezra 9–10 and Neh. 13.1-3 are exactly what is missing here, even though their language of separation parrots the concerns of Leviticus. This transition from implicit to explicit points to the development of this doctrine in Israelite religion, just as the practices in the earlier, patriarchal traditions show more leniency than Lev. 18 (see R.W.L. Moberly, The Old Testament of the Old Testament: Patriarchal Narratives and Mosaic Yahwism [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992], pp. 89-96); Milgrom concludes similarly (Leviti- cus 17–22, p. 1584). 48. For more discussion of social contagion encoded in ritual deﬁlement laws as a means to enhancing boundaries in society, see Mary Douglas’s ‘Sacred Contagion’, in Sawyer (ed.), Reading Leviticus, pp. 86-106 (93-95). She also matches these strategies

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MOHRMANN Making Sense of Sex 75 marriage preserves a culture through its implications for inheritance for land rights, herds, and so on, as in the case of Zelophehad’s daughters (Num. 36).49 Israel’s patriarchal narratives buttress this observation, since endogamy there served to define who would be the inheriting descendant: cf. Isaac and Jacob as against Ishmael, the sons of Keturah, and Esau (cf. also Num. 27 and Deut. 21).50 The fourth conclusion relates to the redaction of the chapter. One must doubt whether the redactor ever meant to offer vv. 6-20 as part of a polemic against Egyptian and Canaanite practices (as the framing material stresses); yet, as these laws defined levels of internal boundaries, they functioned in coordination with the external boundaries (vv. 21-23) to set a comprehensive structure for Israelite life. The organizing scheme for vv. 6-23 overall is its progression of sexual laws, which it implicitly achieves through the body’s symbolic representation of cultural boundaries. The implied meaning of the sexual laws was a strategy to circumscribe life through multiple layers of boundaries. To organize these laws in this manner expresses a goal which was and is most important in relationships with cultural competitors. Therefore, the framework of 18.1-5 and 24-30 make plain what the sexual laws imply: Israel must eschew Egyptian and Canaanite customs. Accordingly, the notion of boundaries, as Douglas has demonstrated elsewhere, brings forward the implicit meanings in Israel’s of marriage with an aversion to certain animal anomalies (Implied Meanings, p. 305). The pig may be the quintessential example for its half-qualifying cloven hoof, but half- disqualifying eating habits. Some Canaanites would be tolerable like the clean and edible wild animal since they could be absorbed into Israel under the right conditions, while others (Ammonites, Samaritans, etc.) would intrinsically suffer the defiling stigma of the pig or other animal anomalies. One wonders, therefore, if homosexuality and bestiality would have elicited for the Israelites the same ‘strange’ or anomalous association insofar as they were thought to be unnatural pairings. 49. Cf. the analysis of brother–sister marriages of Roman Egypt by Bagnall and Frier, Demography, pp. 131-33. 50. Naomi Steinberg, Kinship and Marriage in Genesis: A Household Economics Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), pp. 24-26. Lot’s story is an interesting tradition where the internal boundaries of society as specified by Lev. 18 are violated, and, while no explicit statement is made to condemn his behaviour, the structure of the narrative seems purposely placed in juxtaposition with Sarah’s miraculous conception of Isaac, the true heir of God’s promises, in order to implicate Lot and disparage the Moabites. Other violations of these laws in Lev. 18 can be found: Gen. 11—Abraham with Sarah his half-sister (cf. 18.6, 9, 11); Gen. 29—Jacob with both Rachel and Leah (cf. v. 15); Exod. 6.20—Amram and Jochebed (nephew and aunt; cf. vv. 12-14); 2 Sam. 13.13—Tamar and Amnon (cf. vv. 9, 11).

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 76 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) cosmology, taxonomy of animals, and tabernacle/temple construction. Now the sexual laws may be added to these coordinated priestly visions. Each contributes to their epistemological grid, in order to sort clarity out of confusion.51

3. Leviticus 18.5: The One who Observes these Sexual Laws Will Live It has been argued here that the intent of ch. 18 was to define living for Israel. Considering the importance of sexuality and reproduction, it should not be a surprise that sexual laws along with food laws would be integral to that definition. To conclude this reflection on keeping YHWH’s statutes and the sexual laws, it is essential to consider the important promise of life in v. 5.52 I have contended for interpreting ‘statutes’ (EBI) and ‘judgments’ ()JA>) in vv. 3-5 as national, constitutive laws of Israel as expressed through the tripartite structure of the sexual laws in vv. 6-23. In v. 5b ()E 9 J C )93 JIH )5 9), the subject is singular and may at first appear to pertain to an individualistic perspective on ‘living’. However, its relation to the independent clause in v. 5a, which features a plural command, as well as the wider context, begun at v. 1, necessitates that the entire nation is in view even in v. 5b (cf. Lev. 19.37; 20.22). Hence, )5 9 is everyone, a collective to represent Israel (Lev. 5.21-22; cf. also Exod. 30.38; Deut. 17.12; 27.15; Mal. 2.12; Qoh. 7.20). The point of applying the promise of life to a singular entity makes the transition to vv. 6-23 less abrupt. Thus the laws and statutes in 18.5 are the sexual laws specifically. What, therefore, should be inferred from the phrase ‘shall live’ (JIH)? When considering that the punishments (ch. 20) for breaking the sexual laws would allow the nation to expunge the contagion and still preserve its life, it should be noted that the promise of ‘living’ realized not everyone would comply with the laws and live (18.29). In other words, some would die while others would live because of their deaths. Consequently, the context minimizes the relevance of reading ‘living’ when it is defined by physical life, a view espoused by Noth, Snaith, and Levine.53 No explicit

51. Douglas, Purity, pp. 169-75. 52. This verse is taken up by many later traditions, including Deut. 4.1; 30.16; Ezek. 18; 20; 33; Neh. 9.29; CD 3.15-16; 7.3-6; 4QDa, e col. 2 l.12; Pss. Sol. 14.2-3; Philo, Congr. 86; Gal. 3.12; Rom. 10.5; Lk. 10.25-28; 18.18-20 (and parallels). 53. Noth, Leviticus, p. 134; Snaith, Leviticus, p. 122; Levine, Leviticus, p. 119.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MOHRMANN Making Sense of Sex 77 reference in the chapter points to economic life, relegating the interpretations of Porter and Hartley to the periphery also.54 Wenham comes closer when he defines it: For the Old Testament writers life means primarily physical life. But it is clear that in this and similar passages more than mere existence is being promised. What is envisaged is happy life in which a man enjoys God’s bounty of health, children, friends, and prosperity. Keeping the law is the path to divine blessing, to a happy and fulfilled life in the present (Lev. 26.3-13; Deut. 28.1-14).55 Wenham thus embraces an individualistic definition which extends the scope of living from the physical into the psychological and, to a small degree, sociological. This, however, begins from the wrong perspective or does not go far enough to account adequately for the national. Mary Douglas believes that these laws are strictly consigned to a cultic frame of reference, in contrast with ch. 19, which keeps to general comments on justice.56 In her estimation, the sexual laws have little to do with daily life but reflect concerns for idolatry and an interest in ritual purity.57 Accord- ingly, the living of v. 5 would be ritual obedience. Two problems arise from this reading. First, the incest laws in ch. 18 mention nothing about defilement and must be strictly civil laws. Secondly, to admit that there exists in chs. 18 and 20 a blended emphasis on civil, cultic, and national law makes a much smoother and more sensible association with ch. 19 where this is most obvious. It would be preferable, pace Douglas, to read the cultic implications as a secondary interest of the sexual laws rather than their chief rubric. This is not to say that the cultic interests of P(H) are here suspended, but instead I would argue that the concentric, analogical

54. Porter, Leviticus, p. 143. This may be an understatement of Hartley’s position, which emphasizes the economic quite strongly but hesitates to describe this as the only dimension; see John Hartley, Leviticus (WBC, 4; Dallas: Word Books, 1992), p. 293. 55. Wenham, Leviticus, p. 253. Interestingly, Gerstenberger does not even address the question of its meaning, as if it is obvious (cf. Leviticus, p. 256). He begins to make a connection with Mic. 6.6-8, but fails to develop it into any sort of explanation. 56. Perhaps she is too much under the inﬂuence of Moshe Weinfeld, who earlier had claimed this in Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1972), pp. 187-88: ‘even when we do encounter laws dealing with such matters [conjugal life] they are always present in ritual aspect. Thus incest, for example, is exposed as sin deﬁling the land and desecrating the holy name of God who dwells in the land…’ Here he tries to drive a wedge between civil and ritual ordinances even as he drives a wedge between D and P. 57. Douglas, ‘Justice’, p. 343.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 78 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) reasoning which pervades Leviticus and is again found here is an organizing schema, not the content. ‘Living’ is inextricably related to the cult, but is more than that too. Von Rad’s comments on the Decalogue, by contrast, offer an exemplary guide for understanding these and similar types of legislation, saying: It confines itself to a few basic negations; that is content with, as it were, signposts on the margins of a wide sphere of life to which he who belongs to Jahweh has to give heed.58 In the Decalogue and in the sexual laws of Leviticus 18, ‘living’ is defined more by what it is not than what it is. If my reading of vv. 6-23, which emphasized the signposts of internal and external margins of life, is accurate, then we see this same potential meaning in 18.4-5. YHWH’s speech used the most common phrases of doing, observing, walking, statutes, and judgments. The ensuing laws then contributed to the narrative context by promoting a structured view of life for the nation in distinction to its national neighbors. Together, the framing material and apodictic laws placed walls around life while keeping its corridors quite wide as well. This definition of corporate life was even capable of incorporating non- Israelites (18.26). The punishments of ch. 20 record that an exit from these boundaries may indeed lead to the end of physical life, but the sentences were exercised by the community in its life (cf. Exod. 31.14). Therefore, living in Lev. 18.5 was first and foremost national life within the confines of its distinctive (holy) calling by God in relationship to its national neighbors. No doubt physical and economic prosperity were behind this, because sexuality and reproduction were intimately linked to these concepts in the ancient Near East, but they must remain subsidiary. Surely Eilberg-Schwartz is right when he observes that living, as protecting the integrity of Israelite lineage, is symbolized by the (implied) proper use of bodily fluids: semen and blood.59 His observation adds a historical dimension to the national life in 18.5 (cf. Ezek. 20.11, 13, 21; Neh. 9.29).

4. Summary In sum, this reading has argued that the framework material in Leviticus 18 was composed speciﬁcally for the sexual laws and that they in turn help

58. Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology (2 vols.; New York: Harper & Row, 1965), I, p. 194. Cf. Milgrom’s comment in Leviticus 17–22, p. 1518. 59. Eilberg-Schwartz, Savage, p. 191.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MOHRMANN Making Sense of Sex 79 deﬁne ‘living’ in and by YHWH’s statutes and judgments. The one who abode by these sexual laws would contribute to holiness, righteousness, and security in the most vital relationships of the life of his family, clan or tribe, and nation. Sexuality was thus not only a constituent part of life, it also functioned as a metaphor for life: its fruit was a blessing, so it was part of living; its violation produced a curse, so it was part of dying. Living happened inside the boundaries of familial, religious, and national structures, dying happened outside. Through the allowance of endogamous relationships, the sexual laws also propped up these boundaries in order to retain Israel’s economic and cultural base. With the aid of Mary Douglas’s analysis on animal taxonomy, we may now observe in Leviticus 18 a tripartite structure which guides larger sociological and theological concerns. By opening the aperture to view these larger forces, coherence emerges in Leviticus 18 as a synthesis between theology and sociology.60 The prominence of the land’s physical boundary as a theme in these texts, therefore, represented an attempt to establish a cultural boundary in the laws of Israel.

60. This comports with Knoll’s (Sanctuary, p. 219) description of H generally: ‘the obligation to distance oneself from the laws of other nations and their practices… plays a highly central role in the Holiness Code’.

The Violent Storm in Lamentations

Jill Middlemas

Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford, 41 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW

Abstract Using reader-response criticism as a beginning point, this article considers the ﬁnal form of the book of Lamentations as a violent storm in the shape of a whirlwind. Without stressing that the book was consciously composed to elicit the effect of a whirlwind, it nevertheless shows how this type of storm remains consistent with the overall shape of the book and with images found therein. The storm shape suggests implications for reading in modern theological discussions as well as providing a means of understanding one view of the community’s plight.

The book of Lamentations has elicited a great deal of interest, not the least of which is concerned with its similarities to a genre of Mesopotamian literature in which the fall of a city is mourned, the so-called Sumerian city-laments. Provocatively enough, the Mesopotamian laments not only share a common background with the biblical book of Lamentations, the woeful collapse of a city, but also correspond with many of the images and themes in the biblical book. In past discussions of the relationship between the Hebrew Lamentations and the city-laments of Sumer, one nettlesome point remains unresolved in spite of Dobbs-Allsopp’s authoritative attempt to provide a solution to the issue with his ascription of a genre of lamentation over a fallen city indigenous to the Hebrew Bible, but nonetheless deeply steeped in the literary world of the ancient Near East.1 That is,

1. F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Weep, O Daughter of Zion: A Study of the City-Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible (BO, 44; Rome: Editrice Pontiﬁcio Istituto Biblico, 1993). In a re-evaluation of his previous perspective on this issue, this is a point raised already

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004, The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX and 15 East 26th Street, Suite 1703, New York, NY 10010. 82 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) the lack of the depiction of Yahweh as a violent storm. The storm-wind described by one commentator as the ‘destructive agent, par excellence’ in the Mesopotamian laments remains largely unknown as an image for the destructive force of Yahweh in the biblical Lamentations even though the deity is associated with storm imagery elsewhere in the book and in other places in the Hebrew Bible. The lack of the association is particularly troublesome because Lamentations, like the Sumerian laments, is no less concerned with attributing the cause of the fall of the city and the suffering of its inhabitants to the deity. Its absence is so striking for McDaniel that it provides an additional argument in favour of his view that the biblical book is related to the Mesopotamian laments only in a superficial way.2 Although the discussion of the relationship between the Sumerian laments and the book of Lamentations belongs by and large to an earlier phase of scholarship,3 with more recent studies focusing instead on the appropria- tion of its themes to situations of disaster and distress throughout history,4 by D.R. Hillers, Lamentations (AB, 7A; New York; Doubleday, 2nd edn, 1992), pp. 32-39. 2. T.F. McDaniel, ‘The Alleged Sumerian Influence upon Lamentations’, VT 18 (1968), pp. 198-209 (207), and P.W. Ferris, Jr, The Genre of Communal Lament in the Bible and Ancient Near East (SBLDS, 127; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1984), pp. 167-74 (173). 3. See C.J. Gadd, ‘The Second Lamentation of Ur’, in D.W. Thomas and W.D. McHardy (eds.), Hebrew and Semitic Studies Presented to Godfrey Rolles Driver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 59-71; S.N. Kramer, ‘Lamentations over the Destruction of Ur’, in ANET, pp. 455-63; idem, ‘Lamentation over the Destruction of Nippur: A Preliminary Report’, Eretz-Israel 9 (1969), pp. 89-93; H.-J. Kraus, Klagelieder (Threni) (BKAT, 20; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 3rd edn, 1968), p. 9; W.C. Gwaltney, ‘The Biblical Book of Lamentations in the Context of Near Eastern Lament Literature’, in W.W. Hallo, J.C. Moyer, and L.G. Perdue (eds.), Scripture in Context. II. More Essays on the Comparative Method (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1983), pp. 191-211; J. Klein, ‘Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur’, in W.W. Hallo (ed.), The Context of Scripture. I. Canonical Compositions, Monumental Inscriptions, and Archival Documents from the Biblical World (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997), pp. 535-39. 4. P. Joyce, ‘Sitting Loose to History: Reading the Book of Lamentations without Primary Reference to its Original Historical Setting’, in E. Ball (ed.), In Search of True Wisdom: Essays in Old Testament Interpretation in Honour of R.E. Clements (JSOTSup, 300; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 246-62; T. Linafelt, ‘The Impossibility of Mourning: Lamentations after the Holocaust’, in T. Linafelt and T.K. Beal (eds.), God in the Fray: A Tribute to W. Brueggemann (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998), pp. 279-89; idem, Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MIDDLEMAS The Violent Storm in Lamentations 83 the debate surrounding the absent image of the violent storm, nevertheless, deserves further consideration. Using as a starting point one of the more current methods of biblical criticism, the present study discloses that the image of the violent storm, though lacking in the biblical Lamentations, serves to inform the final shaping of the book. A helpful interpretative method of analysis for our quest, reader-response, stems from the more general, new literary criticism.5 As new methods of literary theory continue to make an impact on biblical interpretation,6 a marked shift from the focus on the author of a given text to the text itself and finally to the reader can be discerned.7 In reader-response criticism, meaning is generated by the interaction between a text and a reader who brings to any given text a particular social background. On this process, Gale Yee comments: The shift of paradigm to the reader underscores the importance of context and a reader’s specific social location or place of interpretation. The posi- tionality of the reader with respect to factors such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, and religion become determinative in answering the question, what does the text mean?8 Reader-response criticism thus disavows any objective interpretation of a biblical text because the reader is always influenced by his or her experiences. As Sherwood appropriately asserts, this interpretation

2000); K.M. O’Connor, Lamentations and the Tears of the World (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002). 5. J. Cheryl Exum and D.J.A. Clines, ‘The New Literary Criticism’, in J. Cheryl Exum and D.J.A. Clines (eds.), The New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible (JSOTSup, 143; Shefﬁeld: JSOT Press, 1993), pp. 11-25. 6. A. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics (London: Marshall Pickering, 1992), and E.V. McKnight, The Bible and the Reader: An Introduction to Literary Criticism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985). 7. A sampling of accessible introductions includes E.V. McKnight, Post-Modern Use of the Bible: The Emergence of Reader-Oriented Criticism (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1988); P.R. House (ed.), Beyond Form Criticism: Essays in Old Testament Literary Criticism (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992); F.F. Segovia, ‘“And They Began to Speak in Other Tongues”: Competing Modes of Discourse in Contemporary Biblical Criticism’, in F.F. Segovia and M.A. Tolbert (eds.), Reading from this Place. I. Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), pp. 1-32; J. Barton, Reading the Old Testament: Method in Bib- lical Study (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, rev. edn, 1996). 8. G.A. Yee, ‘The Author/Text/Reader and Power: Suggestions for a Critical Framework for Biblical Studies’, in Segovia and Tolbert (eds.), Reading from this Place, pp. 109-18 (113-14, emphasis added).

explains the existence of competing, even contradictory, interpretations of the same text, all claiming to be ‘objective’, and foregrounds what many commentators are already aware of: the possibility for numerous interpretations, and the way in which their own preferences condition their reading of the text.9 In other words, there is no disinterested reading. However, as Yee rightly points out, the very nature of the enterprise whereby a reader approaches a text, itself the product of a social location informed by the norms of the author, necessitates that the text and even its author provide guidelines and constraints for reading.10 It is this interplay between the author of Lamentations, the text, and the present reader, a native Floridian, which highlights what one might think of in terms of the intentional shaping of the book as a violent storm figured as a whirlwind. As such, the book as a whole represents the image of a swirling storm which highlights the present reader’s appreciation of the shape of the book as a cyclone with a restful eye in the centre surrounded by chaotic images of unabated violence, destruction, disease, and despair, truly human suffering on a grand scale. Should this be the case, the violent storm is not absent in the biblical Lamentations. Rather, by informing the shaping of the book, it serves more appropriately as a metaphor for the contemporary experience of the community and thus the community itself instead of as a description of the destructive force of the deity. Indeed, consistent with one depiction of Yahweh’s engagement in history in the Hebrew Bible, the deity is portrayed in the book of Lamentations as a divine warrior,11 not a storm-wind. The present study explores the possibility of a correspondence between the final form of Lamentations and the figure of a storm-wind by first explaining the image of the whirlwind drawn from a reader’s response followed by a shift to the textual clues that guided this reader to make the connection between the form of the material and the storm and the authorial role in guiding the process. The analysis will conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of this reading in terms of interpretation.

9. Y. Sherwood, The Prostitute and the Prophet: Hosea’s Marriage in Literary- Theoretical Perspective (JSOTSup, 212; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1996), p. 31. 10. Yee, ‘Author/Text/Reader and Power’, p. 117. 11. P.D. Miller, The Divine Warrior in Early Israel (HSM, 5; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973).

A Reader’s Response The weather phenomenon known as a cyclone, associated more specifically with a hurricane or tornado in the Western hemisphere and a typhoon in the Eastern, occurs when high winds swirl in a circular pattern around an eye of low atmospheric pressure in which there is complete calm. The image of a violent storm with which this paper proposes to associate the final form of the book of Lamentations is akin to that of a hurricane. Was a weather system like this known in the ancient Near East and do we have traces of it in the biblical text? There are two common words for a whirlwind or tempest in the Hebrew Bible, 9AHD12 and (9)C D,13or the semanti- cally related, but much less common (9)C .14 At various places, all are associated with strong winds, clouds and swirling movement. Although the use of a hurricane might appear to be inappropriate, it is, in fact, an accept- able term, as Hebrew lexicons show. B. Davidson’s Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon defines 9AHD as ‘whirlwind, hurricane’, while BDB lists 9C as a noun derivative of the verb C meaning ‘to sweep, whirl away’, both of which clearly associate the storm-wind with a circular pattern. Furthermore, the words for this type of storm are used with verbs of circling motion such as ==8 (Isa. 5.28; 17.13) and =HI (Jer. 23.19; 30.23), along with the idea of being surrounded or encircled, 3J3D (Ps. 50.3). The image for these types of storms in the Hebrew Bible equates well with the Mesopotamian laments because the whirlwind is associated with raging winds of destructive force described once in the form of a circular or whirling motion.15 Although there are other images in the Hebrew Bible associated with these types of weather systems, scattering (#HA, Isa. 41.16; Hab. 3.14; )JCK>, Job 37.9), sweeping (,=I, Isa. 21.1), carrying off (3?8, Job 21.18; 27.20), breaking out ( B3, Ezek. 13.11, 13), and stirring (CH ,

12. 9AHD occurs 15 times: Isa. 5.28; 17.13; 21.1 (plural); 29.6 (+ 9C D); 66.15; Jer. 4.13; Hos. 8.7; Amos 1.14 (with C D); Nah. 1.3 (// 9C ); Ps. 83.16 (// C D); Job 21.18; 27.20; 37.9; Prov. 1.27; 10.25. 13. (9)C D, from the verb C D (‘to storm, rage’), occurs as a masculine noun seven times: Jer. 23.19 (+ 9C D); 25.32; 30.23 (+ 9C D); Ps. 55.9; and as a feminine noun sixteen times: 2 Kgs 2.1, 11; Isa. 29.6; 40.24; 41.16; Jer. 23.19; 30.23; Ezek. 1.4; 13.11, 13; Zech. 9.14 (plural); Pss. 107.25, 29; 148.6; Job 38.1; 40.6. 14. (9)C , from the verb C (‘to sweep, whirl away’, = C D), occurs four times: Isa. 28.2; Nah. 1.3; Job 9.17 (twice). 15. In ‘Lamentations over the Destruction of Ur’ Song 5, l. 187, the evil storm causes (lacunae) to ‘whirl’.

Jer. 25.32), the image most consistent with the language and shape of the book of Lamentations is that of a whirling storm. The final form of the book of Lamentations likened to a cyclone with a peaceful eye in the centre of howling and churning winds is consistent, therefore, with the depictions of certain types of storms in the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible. Speaking in response to Lady Jerusalem’s claims of on-going suffering and abandonment in Lamentations (Lam. 1.12-24; 2.22-24), the prophet to the exiles, Deutero-Isaiah, addresses the personified city and terms her: ‘O afflicted one, storm-tossed (9C D), and not comforted…’ (Isa. 54.11). Whether assigning the metaphor or responding to the use of 9C D as a self-designation of the Judahite populace, it is the case that a contemporary witness associates the plight of Jerusalem with the image of a whirling storm. A growing number of scholars have begun to recognize that passages in Isaiah 40–55 respond directly to concerns raised within the book of Lamentations.16 Is this image an internal one or has it been superimposed by the ancient reader, Deutero-Isaiah, and the modern one, myself ? In other words, would a consideration of the author and the text shed any additional light on the type of storm encom- passing the Judahite population?

Telling Textual Features In spite of the fact that each of the ﬁve chapters of Lamentations can be viewed as an independent, self-contained unit,17 there is a great deal of cohesion between the poems in terms of literary features, form, imagery and outlook. The poet composed chs. 1, 2, 3 and 4 as alphabetic acrostics while the number of verses in the ﬁfth chapter corresponds to the number of consonants in the Hebrew alphabet. The common woe opening of 9

16. C. Westermann, Lamentations: Issues and Interpretation (trans. C. Muen- chow; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994), pp. 104-105; C.A. Newsom, ‘Response to Norman K. Gottwald, “Social Class and Ideology in Isaiah 40–55”’, Semeia 59 (1992), pp. 73-78; T. Linafelt, ‘Surviving Lamentations’, HBT 17 (1995), pp. 45-61; idem, ‘The Impossibility of Mourning’, pp. 282-83; P.T. Willey, Remember the Former Things: The Recollection of Previous Texts in Second Isaiah (SBLDS, 161; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997). 17. There is a history of positing chs. 3 or 5 to a time period later than the rest of the material. Westermann (Lamentations, pp. 54-55, 66-72, 105, 160-93), argues that ch. 3 is later than the rest of the material while E. Janssen (Juda in der Exilszeit: Ein Beitrag zur Frage der Entstehung des Judentums [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1956], p. 22), believes ch. 5 to stem from the early post-exilic period.

(‘how’, 1.1; 2.1; 4.1), repetitive themes, similarly patterned acrostic poems, and the mixed form of lament and dirge set chs. 1, 2 and 4 off as a sub- group within the whole. Chapters 1 and 2 are further aligned because they begin with a third-person eyewitness narrator (1.1-11; 2.1-21) followed by the first-person address of the city personified as a heartbroken woman (1.12-24; 2.22-24).18 The more complex ch. 3 is marked off by an elaborate acrostic pattern and shifts in speaking voice between an individual lamenter19 and an anonymous communal voice. The various voices of the previous chapters are picked up in the fifth which exhibits the form of a communal lament throughout.20 Childs, one of the main proponents of concentrating on the final form of biblical books in interpretation, notes the general agreement among interpreters: The clarity of the structure of the book of Lamentations has led to an initial unanimity of scholarly opinion which is rare for Old Testament studies… The form-critical discussions regarding the literary genre have produced areas of disagreement as one would expect, but even here the differences between the alternative theories are less than with most biblical books.21 The coherence of the text raises other issues of interpretation, however: There is no literary evidence to indicate that the book of Lamentations was edited in a way which differed extensively from its original form. Indica- tions of how the book was understood must, therefore, lie in the form and function of its various parts in relation to the whole.22 For Childs, the collection is designed in such a way that the concluding poem pushes beyond an articulation of misery to position suffering in the context of communal worship. In his estimation, the form of the book, therefore, relates to its function as a liturgical text.

18. On the city personiﬁed in the various roles of womanhood, see B.B. Kaiser, ‘Poet as “Female Impersonator”: The Image of Daughter Zion as Speaker in Biblical Poems of Suffering’, JR 67 (1987), pp. 164-82 (174-82). 19. Lam. 3.1 clariﬁes the identity of the individual by the opening expression J? C389 (‘I am the man’). Though the exact identity of the speakers in this chapter remains disputed (see the commentaries), there is no conclusive argument against asso- ciating the man of 3.1 with the individual who proceeds from despair into hope only to shift back to despair again after the interruption of a communal voice in vv. 41-55. 20. W.F. Lanahan, ‘The Speaking Voice in the Book of Lamentations’, JBL 93 (1974), pp. 41-49. 21. B. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (London: SCM Press, 1979), pp. 590-97 (591). 22. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament, pp. 593-94.

I propose that the form of the book is designed to elicit the effect of a whirlwind, as certain textual features suggest that this image informs the layout of the collection as a whole. The peaceful eye of a storm corresponds well with what is considered by some to be the climax of the book, its ‘theological nub’23 or ‘the ideological focus of the work’,24 that is, the grand articulation of hope in the central verses of ch. 3, the middle chapter. Although opinions vary over the exact parameters for the central verses, a positive outlook serves as the primary indicator for delineation.25 It seems best, therefore, to follow Hillers and Grossberg in viewing vv. 17-21 as a transition to hope marking out vv. 22-39, whose length equals exactly one third of the whole poem and which begins with the ﬁrst appearance of the letter I rather than with its second or third occurrence (vv. 23, 24). The introduction of the heretofore unknown ﬁrst person plural speaking voice in v. 40 demarcates the transition to a new section. The articulation of hope appears in a chapter distinguished from the other poems in Lamentations by certain distinctive features: (1) an inten- sive alphabetic acrostic whereby the Hebrew consonants introduce three lines apiece equalling an impressive 66 lines in total; (2) it contains the most regular use of the qinah meter; and (3) it contains the only lengthy message of hope in the entire collection. The expectation of vv. 22-39, fal- ling as they do within an acrostic masterpiece, suggests to many that this section provides the high-point or climax of the collection as a whole.26

23. A. Mintz, ‘The Rhetoric of Lamentations and the Representation of Catas- trophe’, Prooftexts 2 (1982), pp. 1-17. 24. D. Grossberg, Centripetal and Centrifugal Structures in Biblical Poetry (SBLMS, 39; Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989), p. 85. 25. N.K. Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations (SBT, 14; London: SCM Press, rev. edn, 1962), includes vv. 19-39; Hillers, Lamentations, pp. 128-29, and Grossberg, Centripetal and Centrifugal Structures, pp. 92-93, understand vv. 17-21 as a transition to the central verses of vv. 22-39; Mintz, ‘Rhetoric’, pp. 10-11, includes v. 21, while B. Johnson, ‘Form and Message in Lamentations’, ZAW 97 (1985), pp. 58-73 (65-68), extends the passage from v. 21 to v. 41. 26. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, pp. 594-95; R. Brand- scheidt, Gotteszorn und Menschenleid: Die Gerichtsklage des leidenden Gerechten in Klgl 3 (Trier: Paulinus-Verlag, 1983), pp. 20-235, 344-52; Gottwald, Studies, pp. 96-99, 105-11; Hillers, Lamentations, pp. 5-6, 119-23; Mintz, ‘Rhetoric’; R.B. Salters, Jonah and Lamentations (OTG; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1994), p. 117; Johnson, ‘Form and Message’, pp. 65-68; J. Krašovec, ‘The Source of Hope in the Book of Lamentations’, VT 42 (1992), pp. 223-33.

The importance of 3.22-39 to modern interpreters cannot be overem- phasized. A general consensus on the message of these verses highlights a hope in future possibilities resting in Yahweh, who is characterized by covenant loyalty (5DI, vv. 22, 31-33) and whose governance is defined by justice and righteousness (vv. 34-38). Future possibilities thus exist because of a belief in the sovereignty of the deity. These verses found in the exact centre of the book of Lamentations further insist that the correct stance of someone in the dire predicament described in the immediately preceding verses is one of silent, contrite submission along with the acknowledgment that the punishment of Yahweh was meted out in response to sinful behaviour (vv. 27-28, 39). In the view of many commentators, the communal prayer of repentance in vv. 40-47 continues the change in attitude arrived at in the hopeful vision of vv. 22-39, thereby stressing the corollary between the acknowledgment of sin and the shift in outlook. The suffering individual of vv. 1-21 arrives at a change in attitude by rationalizing the disaster, almost explaining it away, with the declaration that one should wait quietly and patiently for the salvific intervention of Yahweh (v. 26) and endure the punishment conceived of as correction for sin. As such, it serves not only to portray the internal change of attitude of the petitioner, but as an ‘ethical vision’27 that functions paradigmatically by presenting a model of behaviour which others should emulate in a time of crisis. Particularly with its emphasis on being still, awaiting the intervention of Yahweh, it corresponds well with the peaceful eye of a storm. Surrounded by a dizzying array of images of suffering and misery such as those of an engulfing storm-wind, the verses of hope found articulated in a sustained way only in 3.22-39 become eclipsed. Because the positive assessment of the petitioner turns quickly to the dire circumstances of the present distress (vv. 48-66) followed by an eyewitness report of graphic suffering in ch. 4 and the communal lament of ch. 5, a growing number of scholars shy away from the importance ascribed to these verses. Provan rightly points out that the overall impression of the chapter and, indeed, the book as a whole is one of despair.28 The material outwith the articulation of hope in ch. 3 isolates those verses from the great amount of continued suffering in the outlying verses of ch. 3 and the other chapters. Around

27. F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp, ‘Tragedy, Tradition, and Theology in the Book of Lamen- tations’, JSOT 74 (1997), pp. 29-60. 28. I. Provan, Lamentations (NCBC; London: Marshall Pickering, 1991), pp. 22-23, 83-84.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 90 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) what we have discussed in terms of the peaceful eye of the storm, then, swirls a riotous mixture of depictions like the storm-winds of a cyclone. Moreover, the final shape of the book in the form of a whirlwind fits the types of images presented through the lips of the various speaking voices who seek to portray graphically the situation of distress in which the various members of the community find themselves. The poet depicts the city of Jerusalem encircled in the swirling clouds of Yahweh’s anger; ‘How Adonai has overclouded (3J J) Daughter Zion in his anger’ (2.1).29 That the wrath of the deity can be imagined as clouds can be seen by 3.43- 44, in which v. 43 conveys the sentiments of the inhabitants who feel: ‘You have enveloped ((9) wherein Jerusalem finds itself pursued by enemies (1.3), being trapped in ‘the pit’ (CH3, 3.53, 55), and being ‘swallowed up’ ( =3) by Yahweh and the

29. 3J J is a hapax legomenon usually associated with the noun 3 (‘cloud’)—so LXX and P. As the presence of Yahweh in a cloud normally carries a positive connotation (Exod. 19.9; 34.5-6; 1 Kgs 8.10-13), a few connect it with an Arabic root ‘yb (‘to blame, revile’—L. Kopf, ‘Arabische Etymologien und Parallelen zum Bibel- wörterbuch’, VT 8 [1958], pp. 188-89; W. Rudolph, Das Buch Ruth–Das Hohe Lied– Die Klagelieder [KAT, 17; Güttersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1962], p. 218), and translate ‘How Yahweh has disgraced…’ However, the presence of the deity in a cloud is elsewhere associated with theophanies (ThWAT, V, pp. 980-81) and theophanies associated with the judgment of Yahweh can have a negative connotation. Otherwise, T.F. McDaniel, ‘Philological Studies in Lamentations’, Bib 49 (1968), pp. 34-35, and Brandscheidt, Gotteszorn, p. 126, associate it with the verb 3 E (‘to be abhorred’), appealing to the Targums and Ps. 106.40, ‘How Yhwh treated Zion with contempt’. The last point is the least likely, as 3 E never elsewhere is used to describe the deity making something or someone contemptible. See J. Renkema, Lamentations (trans. B. Doyle; HCOT; Leuven: Peeters, 1998 [first published as Klaagliederen (Kampen: Kok, 1993)]), pp. 216-17, for a fuller discussion and references. The cloud motif fits in with one of the motifs Renkema finds reiterated in the first four chapters—that of darkness as a consequence of divine judgment (1.2a; 2.1a; 3.2b; 4.1a). In a section of text dealing with the theme of the reversal of past glory, it would not be surprising to find the poet using 3H in a new way as a means of expressing the current situation of the city and its inhabitants. 30. Taking the suffix from the following verb to be serving double duty rather than reading (= as in the following verse.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MIDDLEMAS The Violent Storm in Lamentations 91 nameless and faceless enemies (2.2, 5, 8, 16). The image of enclosure is on par in terms of use with other images like abandonment, rejection, and pursuit, so poignantly expressed in the poems. The poet even ascribed imagery evocative of being surrounded to the actions of Yahweh as ‘In Jacob he burned like a ﬂaming ﬁre consuming all around (3J3D)’ (2.3), ‘As on an appointed feast day you summoned those who terrorize me on all sides (3J3D>)’ (2.22), ‘He builds a siege wall against me and encompasses (,BJH) with poison and hardship’ (3.5), and ‘He has walled me in (C58) and I cannot get out’ (3.7). Speaking of the third chapter, Lanahan concludes that ‘the dominant image throughout the chapter has been that of encirclement: the speaker has been imprisoned, trapped in the drown- ing-pit, surrounded by his enemies’.31 The descriptive account of the third- person eyewitness which depicts an over-clouded city of Jerusalem (2.1) is supported by the language used for the experience of the community by the members of the same who describe their circumstances in terms of constraint and of being enclosed. Images of constraint express the tragic experiences of the survivors of the destruction of 587 BCE. They swirl and enclose the hopeful vision of 3.22-39 as dark, oppressive storm clouds encircle the eye of a storm.32

Authorial Intention The author plays an active role in shaping any reading of the book of Lamentations through his use of alphabetic acrostics in the composition of the poems. The exact reason for the utilization of the acrostic remains a matter of dispute, with suggestions ranging from its use as a mnemonic tool to a means of expressing the totality of the disaster with which it is most commonly associated, that is, the destruction of Jerusalem by a Babylonian invading army in 587 BCE. Whatever the exact purpose, the

31. Lanahan, ‘The Speaking Voice’, p. 46. 32. The third chapter is distinguished from the rest of the poems in its use of *HJ= for the deity, in its form and content, particularly in its scant concern for Jerusalem and the effects of war on the populace, and in the consistent image of enclosure or imprisonment. It is often judged to be later than the other chapters. I suspect it is from a different place. The prevalent motif of enclosure or encirclement suggests that the layout of the poems was designed by the author of ch. 3 who might well be responding from Babylon to the concerns raised in Lamentations. A helpful assessment of imprisonment as an image arising in the Babylonian exile can be found in D.L. Smith, The Religion of the Landless: The Social Context of the Babylonian Exile (Bloomington, IN: Meyer Stone, 1989).

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 92 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) fact remains that the lines of four poems (chs. 1–4) begin with and correspond with the sequence of the Hebrew alphabet from aleph to taw while the number of consonants of the Hebrew alphabet informs the number of lines of the fifth poem. Moreover, the various speaking voices throughout the first four poems seem to be included in the communal lament of the fifth. The careful construction of the book attests to a great degree of intentionality in the production of the poems and the book as a whole. The alphabetic acrostic, far from constraining the concepts explored in the individual poems into an artificial form and thus jumbling ideas together in an uncoordinated way, indicates instead a purposefulness in its composition. The artistry of the laments serves as a catalyst for inquiry into the techniques used in the composition of the poems. With the visual effect of the acrostic used as a springboard for further analysis, many discussions focus on internal indicators of detailed construction in the poems,33 between the poems34 or in the final form of the book.35 Some examples of the attempt to posit authorial intention and design include the work of Shea, who argues that the poems themselves fit into a pattern that corresponds to the qinah or the most common lament meter.36 Using a different line of inquiry, Renkema finds themes and concepts to be common between verses associated by the letters of the alphabet. Though his analysis in many places stretches plausibility, it provides another example of the close unity of the book as a whole.37 In a similar vein, Hunter draws on Renkema’s insights and traces the concepts of the first eleven verses of ch. 1 throughout the other poems.38 Without pressing the issue beyond the realm of belief, it is fair to say that four themes recur throughout: the purposefulness of Yahweh, the acceptance of a measure of responsibility for the fate

33. Johnson, ‘Form and Message’. 34. J. Renkema, ‘The Literary Structure of Lamentations (I–IV)’, in W. van der Meer and J.C. de Moor (eds.), The Structural Analysis of Biblical and Canaanite Poetry (JSOTSup, 74; Shefﬁeld: JSOT Press, 1988), pp. 392-96; idem, ‘The Meaning of the Parallel Acrostics in Lamentations’, VT 45 (1995), pp. 379-83; idem, Lamen- tations (= Klaagliederen); J. Hunter, Faces of a Lamenting City: The Development and Coherence of the Book of Lamentations (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996). 35. W.H. Shea, ‘The qinah Structure of the Book of Lamentations’, Bib 60 (1979), pp. 103-107, and Grossberg, Centripetal and Centrifugal Structures, pp. 83-104. 36. Shea, ‘The qinah Structure’. 37. Renkema, ‘The Literary Structure of Lamentations (I–IV)’, and Lamentations. 38. Hunter, Faces of a Lamenting City.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MIDDLEMAS The Violent Storm in Lamentations 93 of the nation, the exaltation of the enemy, and the humiliation of the city and its people. Various structuring devices including the use of the elaborate alphabetic acrostic, along with conceptual links that tie the poems together on thematic lines, suggest a degree of intentionality in the construction of the book. Though reader-response enabled this reader to associate the ﬁnal form of Lamentations with a cyclonic storm, the artistry of the composition suggests that the author has provided clues to generate this reading.

Implications Through the shape of a cyclonic violent storm, the final form of the book of Lamentations serves a constructive purpose by suggesting an interpretative lens with which to engage the text. In the first instance, it allows us to consider anew the hermeneutical challenge. In terms of the theology of the material, it provides a means of negotiating among discussions that focus either on the centre (i.e. the hopeful passage of 3.22-39) or on the periphery (i.e. portraits of suffering and woe). Secondly, it creates possibilities of interpretation particularly with regard to discerning the actions of the deity in the midst of the on-going hardship faced by the community. In the first place, the image of a storm with a peaceful eye set among violent, raging winds aids in the assessment of the theology of the book. It is well known in the current discussion that attempts to isolate a theological unity along the lines of those proposed by Gottwald or Albrektson remain problematic.39 Through a close analysis of the poems, Moore, for instance, shows how the different themes and snapshots of suffering create a complex portrait in which a single focus cannot be sustained for any length of time.40 His objection highlights the difficulty encountered by those who isolate the hopeful passage of 3.22-39 (and they are many) from the stark images of the rest of the poems. Around what is considered by some to be the theological showcase of the work swirl masses of complaint and descriptions of suffering, along with vivid images of a deity who hunts his own people.41 A helpful alternative focuses on the trope of

39. Gottwald, Studies; B. Albrektson, Studies in the Text and Theology of the Book of Lamentations (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1963). 40. M.S. Moore, ‘Human Suffering in Lamentations’, RB 83 (1990), pp. 539-43 (535-36). 41. Noted already by Gwaltney, ‘Lamentations’, p. 208, who ﬁnds that one of the major differences between the Hebrew Lamentations and the city-lament literature of

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 94 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) suffering or pain in the book as a distinctive expression in its own right and one that does not fit easily into any theological interpretation.42 This emphasis on tragedy corrects the almost myopic concentration on the hope expressed by the suffering and solitary male figure of the third poem. The figure of Lady Zion who speaks as a widow (1.12-22) and a mother (2.20-22) in protest against the extent of the suffering experienced by the city and its people provides Linafelt, for example, with an alternative, and in his view a corrective one, to the figure of the solitary petitioner who advocates silent submission in the face of abject despair.43 As he astutely observes, a Christocentric concentration on sin, guilt and repentance guides the reading of many who search for the theological message of the book. Although confessions of sin are expressed, they appear relatively infre- quently and contain ambiguous language. According suffering its due in terms of its thematic importance within the overall scheme of Lamenta- tions yields a different conclusion, and, one could even say, an oppos- ing message to that generated from an exclusive focus on the optimistic 3.22-39. The on-going, relentless tragedy experienced by the community in Jerusalem suggests that Yahweh has acted capriciously, with the punishment meted out far outweighing the crime. The sensitive studies of Moore and Linafelt point to the trouble with sys- tematizing Lamentations, a work that resists any attempt at organization.44 The two means of approaching the material, via discussions of the central theological message of the book and the protests against such an enterprise, are not necessarily as incongruous as one might expect. The grand statement of hope in 3.22-39 stands at the centre of the work as a whole, but not as the focal point because it exists in tension with the portraits of human suffering so thoughtfully pointed out by those who stress the more negative images of the material. That said, there is no other place in the book in which a sustained comment on the nature of the deity in a hopeful way occurs. There are two very brief statements elsewhere about the completion of the period of judgment (4.22) and the eternal reign of God

the ancient Near East is that the description of suffering in the former is more grue- some. 42. Moore, ‘Human Suffering’, and Dobbs-Allsopp, ‘Tragedy’. 43. T. Linafelt, ‘Zion’s Cause: The Presentation of Pain in the Book of Lamenta- tions’, in idem (ed.), Strange Fire: Reading the Bible after the Holocaust (The Biblical Seminar, 71; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 2000). 44. See also that of Dobbs-Allsopp, ‘Tragedy’.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MIDDLEMAS The Violent Storm in Lamentations 95 as king (5.19), but neither compares to the expression of hope in 3.22-39. Directly in the centre of the book these verses provide a kernel of belief in the nature of the deity that is not found so eloquently or profoundly expressed in the outer material. Several factors suggest that the two ought to be held in tension, not the least of which is the final form of the book. Like the funnel effect of a cyclone that cannot exist without the peaceful eye and raging winds, the two approaches to the book of Lamentations, through the centre and the periphery, co-exist because the very nature of the material insists that they do so. In the second place, the final form of Lamentations likened to the violent storm evokes thoughts of the way storm imagery is used elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. The terms for storms, 9AHD and 9C D/, are associated with the judgment of Yahweh (Isa. 17.13; 29.6; 40.24; 41.16; 66.15; Jer. 4.13; 23.19 [= 30.23]; 25.32; 66.15; Ezek. 13.11, 13; Hos. 13.3; Amos 1.14; Nah. 1.3; Zech. 7.14; 9.14; Ps. 83.16 [Eng. v. 15]; Job 9.17; 21.18; 27.20; 37.9; Prov. 1.27; 10.25). The shaping of the final form of Lamenta- tions into a whirlwind or storm suggests that the one who compiled the material continued to view the Judahite community under judgment, not necessarily in a condemnatory way as might be the perception of the Baby- lonian exiles who foresaw the future promise of salvation and redemption only for their community, but in a realistic way considering the situation at hand. Although 4.22 declares that punishment for Zion’s sin is accom- plished,45 the end of the communal lament with its question regarding the possibility or even probability of Yahweh’s intervention in a salvific way on behalf of the people looms large (5.22). Combined with the images of intense and apparently on-going suffering, the only natural assumption would be that the nation continued to be under the judgment of its deity. Storms appear another way in the Hebrew Bible in association with the creative intervention of Yahweh in human affairs. In the story of Elijah, the great prophet is swept heavenward by a whirlwind (2 Kgs. 2.1, 11). In another story about Elijah, while the prophet flees from enemies, Yahweh appears to him in the aftermath of a great and strong wind capable of splitting mountains and shattering rocks (1 Kgs. 19.11-14). Although not

45. Renkema (Lamentations, pp. 564-66) argues that it is not that the punishment is at an end, but that ‘the destructive effects of the sin of daughter Zion have reached completion’, that is, the curses meant to accompany the punishment for violations of the covenant, starvation, exile, and so on, have been carried out. The suggestion is pro- vocative in the light of the fact that the MT has only (?H )E (‘your sin has ﬁnished’).

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 96 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) an exact match, since the words for storm are never used, the imagery of the strong winds is suggestive of them. It is even within the whirlwind itself that the deity finally addresses the righteous man in the book of Job (38.1; 40.6). Storms in the Hebrew Bible, in addition to evoking thoughts of judgment, provide one avenue through which the deity engages salvi- fically in the world. One prominent image associated with theophanies is indeed the storm (Ezek. 1.4; Nah. 1.3).46 These examples show that in addition to their destructive force, storm-winds have a positive role suggestive of the coming of the deity. If the final form of the book of Lamentations is figured like a storm, although the specific words describing it as such are absent from the book, the purpose of the design is ambiguous. It is difficult to choose between judgment and hope. Does the book of Lamentations urge the conception of the community of Jerusalem, in particular, and Judah, in general, under the continued judgment of Yahweh? Or does it yield the impression that out of chaotic painful situations there are as yet unimagined possibilities for future hope? The final shape of the book suggests that we are not obliged to choose between these two. Just as scholars have corrected a hope- centric focus with an emphasis on the equally valuable images of pain and suffering, implying that the two can lie alongside each other as uncomfort- able bedfellows, the final shape of the book suggests that the whirlwind as an image applied to the situation in Judah represents doom and the possibility of newness. In the case of the book of Lamentations, then, the answer is not either/or, but both/and. In the final assessment, what appear to be two positions completely at odds with each other, a hope-filled outlook and one of despair, can co- exist because the very nature of the book of Lamentations invites and supports both interpretations. Likened to a violent storm hovering over Jerusalem, the still centre finds itself encircled by raging winds just as the optimistic solitary figure of ch. 3 stands wind-blown among repetitive cries of complaint. It is only by holding the two in relationship with each other that a fuller understanding of the artistry behind the conception of the final form of the book becomes more clear. The agony of Lamentations is that hope expressed in a belief in the efficacy of the deity is eclipsed by the tragedy that surrounds it and encompasses it. It leads ultimately to the

46. J. Jeremias, Theophanie: Die Geschichte einer alttestamentlichen Gattung (WMANT, 10; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1977), and E.C. Kingsbury, ‘The Theophany TOPOS and the Mountain of God’, JBL 86 (1967), pp. 205-10.

ﬁnal embattled gasp of query which touches on the ultimate nature and character of Yahweh: ‘Unless you have utterly rejected us, are wroth with us forever’ (5.22).47

47. The translation of ) J< is disputed. It occurs over 150 times, but is never followed by an inﬁnitive absolute + perfect as here. A summary of views is available in Hillers, Lamentations, pp. 160-61, and R. Gordis, ‘The Conclusion of the Book of Lamentations’, JBL 93 (1974), pp. 289-93. A close analogy is ) J< + absolute + imperfect, which is frequently rendered ‘if…’ of the protasis (Exod. 22.22; Deut. 11.22; Josh. 23.12; 1 Sam. 20.9, etc), but once as the apodosis (Exod. 23.22). Linafelt (Surviving Lamentations, pp. 58-61, and ‘The Refusal of a Conclusion in the Book of Lamentations’, JBL 120 [2001], pp. 340-43) translates the line as a protasis without an apodosis and leaves an ellipsis. However, a conditional rendering is not found with a perfect construction. Most frequently, with a perfect it means ‘unless’ (Gen. 32.27; Lev. 22.6; 2 Kgs 4.24; Isa. 55.10, 11; Amos 3.7; Ruth 3.18; Est. 2.14). Quite often it represents ‘but’ (Gen. 40.14; 2 Kgs 23.9; Isa. 65.6; Jer. 37.10; Ezek. 12.33; Lam. 3.32) and less frequently, ‘even, surely’ (2 Sam. 5.6; 2 Kgs 5.20; Jer. 51.14), ‘then’ (1 Sam. 25.34), and ‘that’ (Gen. 47.18). With Rudolph (Klagelieder, p. 258), I prefer ‘unless’. Though Albrektson (Studies, pp. 205-207) notes the translation ‘unless’ follows a negative, once it does not (Isa. 55.10). Fittingly, the verse closes the collection on a note of hesitant expectation.

Who are the Princes of Persia and Greece (Daniel 10)? Pointers Towards the Danielic Vision of Earth and Heaven

Tim Meadowcroft

Bible College of New Zealand, Private Bag 93104, Henderson, Waitakere City, New Zealand

Abstract An examination of the nature of the ‘princes’ of Persia and Greece in Daniel 10 suggests that these figures could just as easily be the temporal leaders of those kingdoms as angelic or heavenly figures of some sort. This is indicative of an apocalyptic cosmology of permeability between earth and heaven that has not always been well appreciated. This conclusion is supported by a number of features of the narratives in chs. 7–9 and also chs. 10–12. It is also in tune with the nature of the book of Daniel as a whole, with its juxtaposition of court tales and heavenly visions. The significance of this for contemporary missiology and theology, as well as pastoral practice, is explored in an Appendix to the article

Introduction ‘Is the redemption of the universe (Rom. 8.21) ultimately a question of allowing spirit to come to dominance in the universe of matter—not against matter or separate from matter, but in and through matter as its true home?’ (Byrne 2000: 203). The vision narratives of the book of Daniel pose the same question, although more in terms of the links between earth and heaven, and matters temporal and eschatological (the terminology that I use in this essay), than in terms of spirit and matter. Daniel’s visions ask us to consider whether earth and heaven and the temporal and eschatological are so interwoven with each other, so at home with the other, that neither can be understood in isolation from the other. Indeed, their differentiation into separate categories or modes of being tends both to devalue

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004, The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX and 15 East 26th Street, Suite 1703, New York, NY 10010. 100 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) the mystery and to militate against an adequate appreciation of the subtlety of their relationship. The purpose of this article is to explore that relationship. My starting point is seen in the title of the paper, the princes of Persia and Greece (Daniel 10), perhaps because that is one point at which the question of the relationship between earth and heaven comes sharply into focus. And perhaps also because in their attempt to interpret the ‘princes’, interpreters tend to reveal their cosmological assumptions. After a consideration of the nature of the ‘princes’, I will further consider the wider context of the narrative of the visions in chs. 7–12, followed by the narrative form of the book of Daniel as we have received it in the Hebrew Bible. From that will emerge a portrait of the subtle interaction of earth and heaven in the apocalyptic vision of Daniel. In a final section I propose several contemporary implications for that portrait. Before we can proceed with the argument, though, I need to clarify my use of terminology since the discussion we are embarking on is a terminological minefield. The Hebrew Bible does not make a watertight distinction between earthly and heavenly agents, or )< => as they are usually termed. More often than not the term evokes heavenly messengers, but it can also indicate human figures such as priests or prophets (see Hag. 1.13 and Mal. 2.7).1 The LXX use of BHHFMPK to translate the term ‘sons of God’ (see Gen. 6.2; Deut. 32.8, and most famously Job 1.6 and 2.1) illustrates an attempt to clarify the ambiguity and to develop a clearer distinction between the earthly and the heavenly. The LXX of Aramaic Daniel also makes a further distinction in this realm, in that it uses BHHFMPJ as a translation for ‘gods’ at Dan. 2.11 and 3.25(92), thus eliminating the ambiguity between ‘gods’ and ‘angels’ that is a feature of the Hebrew Bible. Interpretation of apocalyptic material in the Western tradition has inherited both Septuagintal tendencies; the differentiation of ‘gods’ and ‘angels’ into different categories of heavenly being, and the distinction between heavenly and earthly messengers. Moreover contemporary interpretation, particularly popular interpretation, tends to maintain another terminological distinction, that between angels and demons, which is not at all evident in the Hebrew Bible. In this study I am attempting to be consistent with the Hebrew Bible’s approach, first, in that I make no distinction between types of non-earthly

1. The description of the ﬁgure in the vision as ‘a man clothed in linen’ (10.5) is similarly ambiguous. For further on these distinctions, see Meier 1999.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MEADOWCROFT Who are the Princes? 101 beings, gods, angels or demons, and second, in that I am working with the very ambivalence between earthly and heavenly beings that the text appears to promote.2 For ease of expression, I use the term ‘angel’ or ‘angelic being’ to refer to any non-earthly agent in the narrative, without distinguishing between whose side the being may or may not be on.3

Princes of Persia and Greece Overwhelmingly the princes of Persia and Greece with whom the speaker in Daniel 10 contends are presumed to be combatants in a heavenly battle. This probably arises from the general context of the vision itself, and the accompanying assumption that all the beings in it apart from Daniel are angelic figures of some sort. Daniel is caught up into a vision and encounters the one ‘clothed in linen’ (v. 5) on the banks of the Tigris River. In his trance Daniel experiences a hand touching him and raising him to his hands and knees (v. 10). The narrative does not require us to identify the one touching Daniel with the fabulous being glimpsed earlier in the vision, but nor does it exclude it. Although Gabriel, who featured in vision interpretation in chs. 8 and 9, is not mentioned by name, it appears that the figure ministering to Daniel in ch. 10 is undertaking a similar function. If he is not Gabriel himself, he is a being of similar ilk. At the same time, this figure presents himself as a colleague of Michael, about whose identity and nature as ‘one of the chief princes’ (v. 13) there is general agreement. The further assumption is then made that the ‘princes’ of Persia and Greece with whom Michael and his unnamed colleague contend are also angelic beings. But is this a defensible assumption? I suggest that the term translated as ‘prince’, C, renders the entire narrative more ambivalent than we have assumed it to be. Granted, there is biblical precedent for an angelic understanding of this term—see Josh. 5.14, for example. In the Qumran material it is also commonly used in that sense. The Community Rule (1QS) 3.20 contrasts the ‘prince (C) of lights’ with the ‘angel (( =>) of darkness’.4 This possibility is reinforced by the reference to Michael as one of ‘the chief princes’ ()J? C9 )JC9, v. 13). This is his first appearance in the

2. Contra Stevens (2000: 415), who speaks of ‘malevolent angelic powers’ (emphasis original). 3. For further on these matters, see Meadowcroft 2003. 4. As translated by García Martínez and Tigchelaar (1997: 75). See also the discussion by Collins (1993: 375).

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 102 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) biblical record. It is clear from material kept by the community at Qumran that he is a key figure in the angelic line-up, where he is listed in the War Scroll as one of the four archangels (1QM 9.15-17).5 In 1QM 17.6-7 he is given chief authority among the gods. For a further Second Temple understanding, note also 1 Enoch 20 on the list of angels and their duties.6 If Michael is a C, albeit the chief prince, might not the other )JC of this chapter be in the same category of being as Michael? It seems reasonable that the chapter then reflects the concept of different guardian spirits of the nations, such as that reflected in Psalm 82.7 But the more expected sense of the term C in the immediate context, aside from its usage for Michael, is as a human official or ruler. This is the case in ch. 1, where the term describes the official put in charge of the young men at court. It is also used of the king’s commanders in 11.5. In other later material it refers to the heads of courses of priests in Ezra 8.24 and to tribal heads in 1 Chron. 27.22, as two of myriad examples. There is further evidence for this line of thinking in the Old Greek, which after all may date from not very long after the final formation of the book of Daniel itself, where TUSBUIHP K is used to translate ‘prince’ for the princes of Persia and Greece, whereas Michael is an BSYXO.8 This terminology almost certainly indicates an assumption in the mind of the translator that the princes of Persia and Greece are human figures, whereas Michael is not.9 Given the Septuagintal tendencies noted above, this translation is surprising and evinces a perspective that we should take seriously. If we read C in the manner suggested by the LXX, and supported by the term itself, we have a scenario of the angel Michael and his colleague involving themselves in the affairs of the temporal kingdoms and leaders of Persia and Greece.

5. The other archangels listed are Raphael, Gabriel and Sariel. 6. In the New Testament, Michael is similarly conveyed (Rev. 12.7; Jude 9). 7. This is the assumption of Theodoret of Cyrus, Commentary on Daniel (Theodotion text), Patrilogia Graeca 81. He refers to the leader of the kingdom of the Persians as ‘the one entrusted with the actual king of the Persians’. I am grateful to Charles Hill for sharing his translation of Theodoret of Cyrus, forthcoming in the new SBL series, Writings from the Greco-Roman World. 8. Compare Stevens (2000: 417), who counters this detail with the Theodotionic translation BSYXO, a usage which he supports with the problematic comment that it ‘best reﬂects the original reading of the Septuagint’. 9. See Meadowcroft (1995: 253-54) for further detail. Note also the view held by Calvin (1966, II: 252) that the prince of Persia was Cambyses, son of Cyrus.

What Cosmology is Reflected? So what is the issue at stake for our examination of earth and heaven in the Danielic vision? Let me note first the outcome of the more usual interpretation of these figures. If the princes of Persia and Greece are indeed heavenly beings, this lends credence to the view of G.B. Caird that ‘the struggles of the Jewish people for the survival of their religion during the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes are reflected in the contest of angel princes in the court of heaven’ (Caird 1997: 238). John Collins expresses the interaction in a more nuanced way: The angelic patrons are conceived as distinct from their nations but insepa- rable from them. They represent a metaphysical dimension of the nations which is not fully actualized in any human king. They give imaginative expression to the author’s belief that each nation has a significance which goes beyond its manifest earthly reality. In this case, transcendent reality is represented by reference to celestial archetypes rather than to primordial paradigms. (Collins 1977: 115-16) Although brilliantly put, Collins’s expression is not able quite to break free from a perception of two planes of existence or expression, somehow reflecting each other. There is still a ‘metaphysical dimension’ as against a ‘manifest earthly reality’, an ‘imaginative expression’ of ‘belief’, and ‘celestial archetypes’.10 Pablo David takes us closer with his notion of the ‘interplay between the celestial and the terrestrial’, although he also draws too heavily on what he calls ‘a two-layered reality’ (David 1993: 512). In contrast, I suggest that the text enables us, and the context leads us, to interpret the )JC, the ‘princes’, as human figures subject to the attention of Michael and his angelic colleague. Therefore the struggle that takes place is not simply an earthly carbon copy of events in heaven nor, in the terms employed by Collins, even a ‘manifest earthly reality’ made comprehensible by reference to ‘celestial archetypes’. Rather, events on earth and in heaven interact with each other in a more subtle, and probably ultimately indefinable way. The very ambivalence of the term ‘prince’ creates the possibility of that intermingling of earth and heaven. I suggest

10. As an example of this cosmology reﬂected in writing on the book of Revela- tion, Lee (1998: 192-93) asserts that John’s visions serve as ‘an explanation of a transcendent reality in which the true battle happens not on earth, but in heaven between God and Christ against Satan and the beast’. Paradoxically, she is still able to argue that believers ‘take part in the cosmic drama’.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 104 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) further that this is of the essence of the apocalyptic vision, that earth and heaven have to do with each other, and that that dealing reﬂects, in the words of Joyce Baldwin, that ‘there is a measure of contingency in human history’ (Baldwin 1978: 181), even when it comes to encountering angelic beings.

Narrative Features of Chapters 7–9 All of this may appear to hang a great deal on the possible meaning of one word. However the interactive nature of the relationship between earth and heaven is in consonance with other features of the vision narratives, and it is to those features that I now turn. I begin by considering the narrative structure of each of the visions. Each of them is as much a story of a man having a vision as of the vision itself (Casey 1979: 8). This is most obvious in ch. 9, where the long prayer of Daniel leads into a visionary encounter with ‘the man Gabriel’ (9.22). Gabriel then conveys the pro- grammatic material on the 70 weeks (9.24-27). An important clue to the interpretation of these 70 weeks is the context of the prayer of Daniel in the early part of the chapter (Meadowcroft 2001: 434-35). Chapters 7 and 8 are also both structured as narratives within which a vision is conveyed and in which the visionary participates. First, in ch. 7 we are told that ‘Daniel had a dream’ (v. 1). The facts of the vision never entirely obscure the visionary. Narrative markers such as ‘After that, I looked’ (v. 6), ‘while I was thinking about…’ (v. 8), and ‘I was troubled…’ (v. 15) occur at regular intervals to remind us of Daniel having the dream. Finally he is left with a deep sense of unease as he emerges from the vision (v. 28). Similarly in ch. 8, the physical outcome of the vision on Daniel is emphasized (v. 27). Similarly also, regular narrative markers remind the reader of Daniel’s participation in the vision. See, for example, the opening words of vv. 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 13. In both chapters also we ﬁnd that the interpretation of the vision is itself part of the vision (see 7.15-16 and 8.16). All of this helps to confound any attempt to draw a neat line between the vision and the seer, the earthly and the heavenly. There are a couple of further narrative hints that cosmological caution is indicated. The question of the integrity of ch. 7 has been thoroughly worked over by commentators, and I do not wish to rehearse the argu- ments here.11 I am working from the conviction that 7.21-22 is not simply

11. See my summary (Meadowcroft 1995: 206-208).

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MEADOWCROFT Who are the Princes? 105 a redactional seam, but can be appreciated in literary terms.12 Proceeding on that basis, we ﬁnd that during the course of the interpretation some further details of the vision are apparently added by Daniel—namely the war waged on the holy ones by the little horn and their eventual vindica- tion by the Ancient of Days (vv. 21-22). That additional material is introduced in the context of the conversation between Daniel and the angel, a conversation in which the interpretation is conveyed.13 The angel then proceeds to complete the interpretation in light of the additional vision material. Because of this, the vision, the interpretation and the interaction between the two are almost impossible to separate. A further hint that all is not as straightforward as might be supposed lies in the regular narrative use of what we might call the ‘apocalyptic passive’. This is most startlingly evident in 7.4-13. A feature of the syntax of these verses is the number of verbs in the peil conjugation as well as in the causative haphel. The use of the peil as a passive in these verses is highly unusual in Biblical Aramaic and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (Meadow- croft 1995: 209-10). This coupling of peil with the haphel forms is a delib- erate literary effect, designed to convey divine activity in the background of both the vision and the earthly reality behind the vision. This effect continues into the Hebrew chapters containing the vision material, instances of which are so prevalent that the ‘apocalyptic passive’ can almost be described as the deﬁning cast of the language of those visions. The literary effect of this narrative habit is to make yet more indistinct the boundary between vision and interpretation, earth and heaven, which characterizes the vision narratives.

Narrative Features of Chapters 10–12 On a larger scale, the vision of chs. 10–12 echoes the narrative effects of each of the visions in chs. 7–9. This is masked by the long angelic discourse of ch. 11, in which the story being told indicates little contact with the wider vision narrative of which it is a part. Yet, if we step back from ch. 11 to the overview of chs. 10–12, we see that similar narrative effects

12. For a similar perspective, see Casey (1979: 27) and Hooker (1967: 24-30), contra Noth (1966) and others. 13. Note the comment by Eissfeldt (1951: 112) that this interaction between interpretation and message and vision is a feature of style in Daniel. His particular example is the variation in detail in ch. 5 between the inscription as ﬁrst described and the inscription as eventually interpreted.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 106 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) are in fact in play. First, let us note the role of chs. 10 and 12 with respect to the narrative of the kings of the North and South in ch. 11. There is a tendency among commentators to denote ch. 10 as a ‘prologue’ or ‘introduction’ to the vision of 11.1–12.4, while 12.5-13 is consigned to the status of ‘epilogue’.14 Unfortunately, this categorization has the effect of further masking the narrative impact of chs. 10–12. It is misleading in that there are elements of the vision in all three chapters. Indeed, rather than arguing for a prologue or introduction and epilogue, it is more accurate to see ch. 10 and 12.5-13 as forming the framework within which ch. 11 may be understood. When we do so we notice the same narrative patterns as in the earlier visions. As in ch. 9, ch. 10 indicates the prelude to Daniel’s vision experience, the three-week fast (10.2-3). Then we see his experience of being caught up into a vision. His physical context is described, the bank of the river Tigris, and the detail of those who were with the seer (10.7) is a further reminder of the connectedness of the visionary experience with the temporal setting. The physical response of fear and the trance-like experience are also features with which the reader is now familiar (see 7.28; 8.27, 18). The words of ch. 11 are then read as directed to Daniel who, by now, through the offices of his extended conversation with the angelic figures, has been incorporated into the vision itself. If we have been inclined to forget this dynamic as we work through the machiavellian complexities of events described in ch. 11, the first verse of ch. 12 alerts us with the reference to ‘your people’. Suddenly we are reminded that Daniel has been part of all of this. He has been both observer and participant in the vision. The ‘apocalyptic passive’ is not entirely absent from ch. 11 either. We note that the kingdom of Greece will be ‘broken and divided’ (11.4), a further hint at forces at work behind the historical events. This effect is enhanced by the comment that the kingdom is ‘divided toward the four winds of heaven’. Although there is little dissent from the premise that the historical referent of the four winds of heaven is the diadochoi who inherited the empire of Alexander the Great, the mode of expression is pregnant with meaning, echoing as it does the theme of the four kingdoms and the ‘four winds of heaven stirring up the great sea’ in 7.2. It is a reminder that

14. Charles (1929: 252) speaks of a ‘prologue’, while among more recent commentators Longman (1999: 245) terms ch. 10 an ‘introduction’. Collins (1993: 371) treats 12.5-13 as an ‘epilogue’, while Redditt (1999: 165) ﬁnds the epilogue to be of a ‘secondary nature’.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MEADOWCROFT Who are the Princes? 107 these events have a cosmic signiﬁcance as well as a temporal one. This comes to a head in the explicit statement in 11.36 that ‘what is determined shall be done’.

History and Eschatology in the Final Vision At the same time, there is a significant difference between ch. 11 and the earlier visions. Despite the continuation in ch. 11 of what Charles has called the ‘reticence’ of the narrative vision (Charles 1929: 282), this vision is more firmly and obviously rooted in human history than any of the others.15 This is reinforced by the date in 11.1, further evidence of the interplay between the terrestrial and the celestial in this particular vision narrative.16 Ironically, this rootedness in history is highlighted by the oblique interpretation given to Daniel in ch. 12. Earlier visions have been less historically explicit but their interpretation has been more explicit; this vision is explicitly historical, yet the answer to Daniel’s question, ‘what shall be the outcome of these things?’ (12.8), is strangely truncated. Daniel is left simply with the instruction to seal them up and await the reward coming to him and his people. This forces us both to take the temporal aspect of ch. 11 seriously and to await an outcome that apparently tran- scends temporal experience. The reader must take the temporal aspect seriously because the interpretation gives us no other basis on which to understand the events described in ch. 11, in contrast to the earlier visions. But the linking of events with the ‘time of the end’ and the instruction to seal them up requires us to recognize that they have an eschatological significance. This effect is reinforced by the abruptness of the ending of the book of Daniel itself.17 In some inescapable sense, history and eschatology have to do with one another. This effect can be further illustrated from 11.36-45. There is a range of views about this material, and I acknowledge Tremper Longman’s call for humility in its interpretation, along with his comment that ‘not to acknowledge the difficulty and not to allow for tolerance for the other view is

15. Gowan (2001: 141-42) draws this feature out further. Many of the recent commentators give an account of the historical details behind ch. 11. I have found particularly helpful in this respect Hartman and DiLella (1978), Goldingay (1989) and Longman (1999). 16. I acknowledge the debate over the problematical placement of the date in 11.1, which is more usually designated a late gloss. However I am persuaded by the argument for its authenticity by David (1993). 17. This contrast deserves further reﬂection, but is beyond the scope of this study.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 108 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) simply bad faith’ (Longman 1999: 280). The key critical debate concerns whether or not vv. 36-39 continue the explicit account of the reign of Antiochus IV or move into a broader eschatological statement. My position is that there is a surface reference to events in the 160s BCE ongoing, but that there are also elements that point beyond them. The presence of the unnamed king who will ‘speak horrendous things’, his dominance ‘until the period of wrath is completed’, and that he shall ‘consider himself greater than any god’ are all cases in point. Once we get to v. 40 the historical correspondence breaks down entirely. The classic response to this has been the assumption that these verses refer to events after the writer’s work was done in 167 BCE.18 The lack of a shift in time perspective, it is argued, simply reflects the writer’s casting of past events as if they remained in the future. But another approach to these verses is possible. Essentially they anticipate that present trends will continue to get worse pending a final resolution. The northern king will expand his influence yet further (v. 42), the ancient enemies of Israel will continue to oppose the people of the covenant (v. 41), the plundering will become more successful (v. 43), and the general unpleasantness that has characterized Antiochus IV will be writ ever larger (v. 44). Furthermore, the impact of all this on the faithful ones and their land will come ever more sharply into focus (v. 45). As a result, these verses stand between the historical present and the culmination of history. They reflect the trends that are seen in the ongoing tussle between the Hellenist kingdoms while pointing towards a larger significance and culmination in a future that may be glimpsed in only the broadest outlines. This is reflected in the term ‘end’ (#B) which opens v. 40 and is woven through these verses. The final occurrence of the word in v. 45 refers to the ignominious end of the king of the North. His anticipated end is a temporal end, but the term #B indicates that it anticipates a greater end, the culmination of all earthly kingdoms and the establishment of the eternal kingdom.19 It points to a future that looks like the past but is something quite different from the past. It is a vision built on the earthly and temporal events of Dan. 11.1-39 but looking towards a time described as ‘the end of the days’ (*J>J9 #B, 12.13). In that respect 11.40-45 also

18. See Gowan 2001: 149-51. Hartman and DiLella (1978: 303) rather unhelpfully term vv. 40-45 ‘imaginative prediction’ following on from ‘ﬁctional prophecy’. 19. Baldwin (1978: 192) comments that ‘Antiochus is the prototype of many who will come after him’.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MEADOWCROFT Who are the Princes? 109 reﬂects the steady interaction between history and the eschatological vision that is such a central feature of the entire book of Daniel.

Juxtaposition of Narrative and Vision Mention of the entire book of Daniel brings me to my final point, which is that the Hebrew Bible form of the book itself reflects the type of interaction that I have been arguing for. Another well-known puzzle in the study of the book of Daniel is its genre.20 What have the stories to do with the visions, and what do the apparently world-affirming impulses of the court tales have to do with the apparently pessimistic attitude towards the present kingdoms of the vision narratives? I have argued elsewhere that the juxtaposition of the two sets up a dialectic between the accomodationist impulses of the court tales and the adversarial cast of the vision narratives (Meadowcroft 2000: 261-62). The two are forced into conversation with each other, and neither can prevail. In this way the very structure of the apocalyptic vision of Daniel is one that sees the eschatological or transcendent vision as earthed in temporality.

Conclusion I have argued that in their immediate context the ‘princes’ of Persia and Greece in Daniel 10 are as likely to be human ﬁgures as to be participants in some celestial battle. The very ambivalence of the term C indicates that a rigid distinction between one possibility and the other ought not to be drawn. Indeed, the narrative structure of the visions in which they appear and the wider structure of the book of Daniel as a whole indicate a direction in thought that sees a subtle conversation between the vision and the interpretation, the temporal and the eschatological, and the earthly and the heavenly. The membrane between the two categories in each instance is highly permeable. Each must constantly be understood in terms of the other. In this context, it is entirely reasonable to envisage that Michael and his colleague encounter in some material way the current temporal rulers of Greece and Persia, without excluding the possibility that there is a heavenly signiﬁcance to the encounter. The presence of the princes of Persia and Greece in the story therefore constitutes an important indicator

20. This is all further exacerbated by the mystery of bilingualism in the book of Daniel, but that too is beyond the scope of this article.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 110 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) of the apocalyptic vision of earth and heaven (and spirit and matter) and the interaction between the two contained in the book of Daniel.

A Theological Appendix From my perspective, the outcome of this study is more than academic. I suggest that these ideas have significance for contemporary Christian thought and practice. I have identified five areas of significance, all of which would repay further exploration. But before delineating those areas, there is one further academic footnote to make. That is that the apocalyptic perspective proposed by this study challenges us histo- riographically. How can we discern the hand of God and God’s agents in the affairs of human society? We have not been helped in doing so by two key related distinctions that the discipline of biblical studies, at least in the Western tradition, insists on main- taining: that between history and myth, and that between proper historical investigation of events and faith or confessional affirmations about events. In fact these distinctions almost forbid us from even attempting to do so in any meaningful way. It is time for these canons of interpretation to be revisited. However, to turn to more immediate concerns, pastorally, and perhaps most fundamentally, the ambiguity of Daniel’s vision, at least in human terms, draws us to an appreciation of the mystery of these matters in our pastoral interactions with people. We have hardly glimpsed the depths of God’s involvement with the world of his creation, yet our scientific critical training constantly tempts us to paper over the mystery of it all with glib pastoral answers. That temptation must be resisted. Missiologically, there are two important outcomes. The first has been given clear expression by Paul Hiebert in his work on the concept of the ‘excluded middle’ in the Western cosmological framework, and the problems that arise when a Western post- Enlightenment expression of Christianity encounters quite different worldviews. His plea is for a theology that draws on a less rigid distinction between earth and heaven and is more open to the everyday operation of non-earthly forces within the social and created order of things.21 Hiebert’s plea would appear to be supported by the Danielic vision. A second missiological outcome relates to the popular conceptualization of territorial spirits. This is the view that events in the world are presided over by malevolent

21. Hiebert (1982: 45-46) concludes his analysis with a plea for ‘holistic theolo- gies that deal with all areas of life, that avoids the Platonic dualism of the West, and takes seriously body and soul. On the highest level this includes a theology of God in cosmic history: in the creation, redemption, purpose and destiny of all things. Only as human history is placed within a cosmic framework does it take on meaning, and only when history has meaning does human biography become meaningful. On the middle level, a holistic theology includes a theology of God in human history: in the affairs of nations, of peoples and of individuals. This must include a theology of divine guidance, provision and healing; of ancestors, spirits and invisible powers of this world; and of suffering, misfortune and death.’

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MEADOWCROFT Who are the Princes? 111 spirits, each of which has its own territory.22 The task of the Christian community in any given place is to defeat such spirits by means of the weapons of spiritual warfare, thus opening the way for the exercise of God’s benevolent sovereignty in that local- ity.23 The celestial interpretation of the princes of Persia and Greece in Daniel 10 is often a key plank in the justification of this concept.24 On the surface, the doctrine of territorial spirits may appear to be a concession on the part of Western Christianity to just such a vision as I have attributed to the book of Daniel. In fact, it owes more to the dualistic perception of differing planes of reality, and is immediately suspect once the possibility is conceded that Michael’s battle is as likely to be with the temporal rulers of Greece and Persia as with their supposed non-earthly counterparts.25 Christologically, the permeability of the membrane between earth and heaven is in tune with the Johannine perception of the Son of Man as the ladder leading to the open heaven on which the ‘angels of God’ ascend and descend (Jn 1.51). This perception of the Son of Man as the locus in which earth and heaven meet is arguable also from other moments at which the title occurs in the Fourth Gospel (Burkett 1991: 112-19). Anthropologically, we are led towards an essential optimism concerning humanity and the possibilities of a new heaven and a new earth. This is the case because the transcendent vision of spirit, of heaven and of eschatology ‘finds its home’, to use Byrne’s phrase, in matter, earth and temporality. If God is working his purposes out in the theatre of creation and human society, then the Church is called to work within the same theatre. Finally, and appropriately, eschatologically the vision in which the princes of Persia and Greece participate reminds us that the God who draws all history to a conclusion continues to oversee the conclusions of all those who would defy him. Just as the ignominious end of Aniochus IV prefigured the glorious culmination of human history in the reign of God, so the collapse of all evil regimes continues to give assurance of that coming day. We are compelled towards an eschatology that sees the hand of God in the catalogue of smaller triumphs of justice and defeats of evil, draws on them as hope for a yet greater conclusion to the question of evil and suffering, and motivates our involvement in the ongoing struggle for ‘peace on earth’ and the coming of God’s kingdom ‘in heaven and upon earth’ (Mt. 6.10).

22. While I take issue with the view of Stevens (2000: 427-30) that the princes should be understood as ‘demonic princes’, I acknowledge his nuanced refutation of the way his interpretation is used in much popular literature on the subject. 23. The impoverished notion of divine sovereignty indicated by such views needs addressing, but is tangential to the present discussion. 24. For a full discussion of the issues, see Pratt 1991. 25. The point is unwittingly illustrated by Warner (1991: 34-36), who writes concerning the story in 1 Kgs 2.23-34, that ‘the real issue was between God and the gods, not just between the people in the nation of Israel and the people in the other nations. This is why battles were always won or lost on the basis of spiritual power, not military power.’

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baldwin, J.G. 1978 Daniel (TOTC; Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press). Burkett, D. 1991 The Son of Man in the Gospel of John (JSNTSup, 56; Sheffield: JSOT Press). Byrne, B.R. 2000 ‘Creation Groaning: An Earth Bible Reading of Romans 18.18-22’, in N.C. Habel (ed.), Readings from the Perspective of Earth (The Earth Bible, 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press): 193-203. Caird, G.B. 1997 The Language and Imagery of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). Calvin, J. 1966 A Commentary on Daniel (trans. and ed. T. Myers; 2 vols.; London: Banner of Truth). Casey, M. 1976 Son of Man (London: SPCK). Charles, R.H. 1929 A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Collins, J.J. 1977 The Apocalyptic Vision of the Book of Daniel (Ann Arbor: Scholars Press). 1993 Daniel (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press). David, P. 1993 ‘Daniel 11,1: A Late Gloss’, in A.S. van der Woude (ed.), The Book of Daniel in the Light of New Findings (Leuven: Leuven University Press). Eissfeldt, O. 1951 ‘Die Menetekel-Inschrift und ihre Deutung’, ZAW 63: 105-14. García Martínez, F., and E.J.C. Tigchelaar (eds.) 1997 The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, I (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). Goldingay, J.E. 1989 Daniel (WBC, 30; Dallas: Word Books). Gowan, D.E. 2001 Daniel (AOTC; Nashville: Abingdon Press). Hartman, L.F., and A.A. DiLella 1978 The Book of Daniel (AB, 23; New York: Doubleday). Hiebert, P. 1982 ‘The Flaw of the Excluded Middle’, Missiology 10: 35-47. Hooker, M.D. 1967 The Son of Man in Mark (London: SPCK). Lee, M.V. 1998 ‘A Call to Martyrdom: Function as Method and Message in Revelation’, NovT 40: 164-94. Longman, T., III 1999 Daniel (NIV Application Commentary; Grand Rapids: Zondervan). Meadowcroft, T.J. 1995 Aramaic Daniel and Greek Daniel (JSOTSup, 198; Sheffield: Sheffield Aca- demic Press).

2000 ‘Metaphor, Narrative, Interpretation and Reader in Daniel 2–5’, Narrative 8: 257-78. 2001 ‘Exploring the Dismal Swamp: The Identity of the Anointed One in Daniel 9.24-27’, JBL 120: 429-49. 2003 ‘Sovereign God or Paranoid Universe? The Lord of Hosts is his Name’, ERT 27: 113-27. Meier, S.A. 1999 ‘Angel, I’, in K. van der Toorn, B. Becking and P.W. van der Horst (eds), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (Leiden: E.J. Brill): 45-50. Noth, M. 1966 ‘Die heiligen des Höchsten’, in Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag): 274-90. Pratt, T.D. 1991 ‘The Need for Dialogue: A Review of the Debate on the Controversy of Signs, Wonders, Miracles and Spiritual Warfare Raised in the Literature of the Third Wave Movement’, Pneuma 13: 7-32. Redditt, P.L. 1999 Daniel (NCBC; Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press). Stevens, D.E. 2000 ‘Daniel 10 and the Notion of Territorial Spirits’, BSac 157: 410-31. Warner, T.M. 1991 Spiritual Warfare (Wheaton: Crossway).

Hosea 1–2 and the Search for Unity

Matthew W. Mitchell

Department of Religion, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122-6090, USA

Abstract Hosea’s early chapters have borne the weight of much of the critical commentary and scholarly discussion of the book throughout the history of its interpretation. Although much of this attention has been the result of what Yvonne Sherwood has termed the ‘critical obsession with Hosea’s marriage’, and its related assumptions about the biographical basis of this material, much of this scrutiny has also focused on the issues of genre and literary structure. Hosea is affirmed as a unified work of exceptional qual- ity, in spite of the initial impression the text often gives of being comprised of distinct and loosely connected units whose meaning is obscured by an admittedly corrupt textual tradition. Chapters 1–2 are often described as a microcosm of this exceptionally subtle book, although this study’s close examination of these chapters calls scholarly affirmations of Hosea’s unity into question.

A metaphor’s not supposed to tie things up and it’s not supposed to be limiting.1 The structure of the book of Hosea has long been a source of difﬁculty for biblical scholars.2 Often commentators will provide lengthy disclaimers

1. Gillian Cooper and John Goldingay, ‘Hosea and Gomer Visit the Marriage Counsellor’, in Philip R. Davies (ed.), First Person: Essays in Biblical Autobiography (The Biblical Seminar, 81; London: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 2002), pp. 119-36 (131). 2. Jerome (Hieronymus), Commentarii in Prophetas Minores (CChr Series Latina, 76; Turnolt: Brepols, 1969), Prologue (1): Si in explanationibus omnium prophetarum sancti Spiritus indigemus aduentu, ut cuius instinctu scripsi sunt…Quanto magis in explanatione Osee prophetae orandus est Dominus…? (‘If we stand in need of the

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004, The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX and 15 East 26th Street, Suite 1703, New York, NY 10010. 116 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) about the corrupt state of the text and the seemingly fragmented character of the work,3 citing Robert Lowth’s 1787 assessment that the book bears more than a passing resemblance to the cryptic utterances of the Sibyl.4 This disclaimer aside, many of these commentators then proceed to announce that, in spite of these difficulties, Hosea is a work of remarkable subtlety that displays a discernible, if sometimes obscure pattern, noting that the book begins with a negative indictment of Israel in ch. 1, and ends with blessing in ch. 14.5 The seemingly disjointed structure of the book, and its ‘disorientating or disturbing’6 effects upon its readers, have generally been attributed to the difference in genre between the book’s early and later chapters,7 the former containing biographical information and the presence of the Holy Spirit when interpreting all the prophets [as they were written at his instigation]…by how much more in the interpretation of the prophet Hosea should the Lord be called upon?’). Cf. the summary of reactions provided by Yvonne Sherwood, The Prostitute and the Prophet: Hosea’s Marriage in Literary-Theoretical Perspective (JSOTSup, 212; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), pp. 11-12. 3. Francis I. Andersen and David Noel Freedman, Hosea: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB, 24; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), p. 66: ‘The text of Hosea competes with Job for the distinction of containing more unintel- ligible passages than any other book of the Hebrew Bible’. 4. Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (trans. G. Greg- ory; 2 vols.; London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995), II, p. 96: ‘There is therefore no cause to wonder, if in perusing the prophecies of Hosea, we sometimes find our- selves in a similar predicament with those who consulted the scattered leaves of the Sibyl’. 5. Gale A. Yee, Composition and Tradition in the Book of Hosea: A Redaction Critical Investigation (SBLDS, 102; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), pp. 51-52; Ander- sen and Freedman (Hosea) state that ‘because of the many subtleties and intricacies in the text which are noted below, and which make it clear that the Book of Hosea is not a mere hodgepodge, extreme caution is advisable in dealing with materials where patterns are not discernible’ (p. 66); Hans W. Wolff (Hosea [trans. Gary Stansell, Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974]) notes that, in spite of the ‘peculiar way the sayings have been strung together’ (p. xxx), ‘three large complexes of transmission [chs. 1–3; 4–11; 12–14] are parallel to each other in that they each move from accu- sation to threat, and then to the proclamation of salvation’ (p. xxxi). 6. Sherwood, The Prostitute and the Prophet, p. 15. 7. William Rainey Harper, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Amos and Hosea (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1905), p. clxiii; Wolff, Hosea, pp. xxix-xxxii (esp. xxx and xxxi); Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, pp. 57-59. James Luther Mays (Hosea: A Commentary [OTL; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969]) shares the view that the book ‘falls into two easily recognized sections’ and also sees disunity in chs. 4–14, as the section ‘lacks the clear plan of the first’ (p. 15). A.A. Macintosh (A

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MITCHELL Hosea 1–2 and the Search for Unity 117 latter oracular utterances. The text’s shifting between positive and negative tones (termed Yhwh’s ‘schizoid utterances’ by one scholar8) has also presented difﬁculties to commentators, although this ﬂuctuation between positive and negative oracles does not seem to be an obstacle to proclama- tions of the book’s unity and subtlety any more than the corrupt state of the text or the disputes over the varying genres within the book.9 Indeed, as noted above, this vacillation has been deemed to be less an objection to the unity of Hosea than an important component of the book’s subtlety and an integral part of its structure. Martin Buss, in his 1969 study of Hosea, thus claims that the book’s use of negative imagery and negation is a synthesizing, as well as uplifting, element: Hosea’s prophetic word points to a reconciliation which incorporates, but goes beyond, a consciousness of personal reality with a sense of responsibility and alienation. In dialectical terminology, it is a negation of the negation. It does not ignore a condition of tension, but having pictured reality in the blackest terms possible, it goes on to announce a victory beyond.10 Literary studies of Hosea, such as those of Harold Fisch and Gerald Morris, have not treated the issues of unity or coherence very differently from the standard commentaries.11 Gerald Morris’s study of Hosea, in particular,

Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Hosea [ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1997]) entitles chs. 1–3 ‘Hosea’s Marriage’ (pp. 113-26), and treats chs. 4–14 as a frag- mentary collection of oracles from various times addressing a wide variety of circumstances. 8. Sherwood, The Prostitute and the Prophet, p. 236. 9. Harper (Amos and Hosea) consistently seems to see the bulk of the book as disjointed, as well as displaying a rather more somber tone than later commentators, describing the redaction of Hosean utterances as a putting together ‘without chronological or logical relationship’ (p. clxiii). 10. Martin J. Buss, The Prophetic Word of Hosea: A Morphological Study (BZAW, 111; Berlin: Alfred Töpelmann, 1969), p. 140. 11. Harold Fisch, ‘Hosea: A Poetics of Violence’, in idem, Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation (Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature; Bloom- ington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 136-57; Gerald Morris, Prophecy, Poetry and Hosea (JSOTSup, 219; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). Feminist readings of Hosea have, despite (or because of) their reaction against biographical readings of Hos. 1–3, tended to be almost exclusively concerned with chs. 1–3 and the figure of Gomer. See Phyllis Bird, ‘“The Harlot as Heroine”; Narrative Art and Social Presupposition in Three Old Testament Texts’, Semeia 46 (1989), pp. 119-39; idem, “To Play the Harlot”: An Inquiry into an Old Testament Metaphor’, in Peggy L. Day (ed.), Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), pp. 75-94; Gale A. Yee, ‘Gomer: Victim of Violence or Victim of Metaphor?’, Semeia

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 118 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) claims that the problem of structure within the book is not a problem at all, but simply a perceived problem because of erroneous genre classiﬁcation. From a ‘poetical’ perspective, according to Morris, there is a marked unity to the book. Not a single chapter is void of the poetic devices of varying types of wordplay; in particular puns, ‘root-play’, and repetition.12 Morris states that ‘it is hard to imagine another book in which wordplay is such a pivotal device’.13 The prevalence of wordplay and repetitions which run throughout the entire book, such as the use of the root 3H being juxta- posed with the root 3J,14 has simply been overlooked by scholars reading non-poetically. An inability correctly to identify the genre of the book of Hosea is thus the source of all errors. Morris states that those critics who have found Hosea to be structurally incoherent are invaria- bly applying to this poetic text the structural standards of rhetoric. Rhetoric, in order to persuade with clarity, requires coherence and logical transitions, standards which these same interpreters would not dream of imposing on a long lyric poem such as Whitman’s “Song of Myself” or the Bible’s Song of Songs.15 For Morris, the unity of Hosea is to be found in ‘other features, previously ignored as rhetorically irrelevant’.16 Chapters 1–3 are an integral part of

47 (1989), pp. 87-104; Naomi Graetz, ‘God is to Israel as Husband is to Wife: The Metaphoric Battering of Hosea’s Wife’, in Athalya Brenner (ed.), The Feminist Companion to the Latter Prophets (The Feminist Companion to the Bible, 8; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), pp. 126-45; Rut Törnkvist, The Use and Abuse of Female Sexual Imagery in the Book of Hosea: A Feminist Critical Approach to Hosea 1–3 (Uppsala Women’s Studies; Uppsala: Uppsala Library, 1998); Teresa J. Hornsby, ‘“Israel Has Become a Worthless Thing”: Re-Reading Gomer in Hosea 1–3’, JSOT 82 (1999), pp. 115-28. Fokkelien Van Dijk-Hemmes (‘The Imagination of Power and the Power of Imagination: An Intertextual Analysis of Two Biblical Love Songs: The Song of Songs and Hosea 2’, JSOT 44 [1989], pp. 75-88) explicitly states: ‘I do not conceive of Hos. 2, nor of its immediate context, chs. 1 and 3, as a direct reflection of the “real” life of Hosea’ (p. 79). 12. Morris, Prophecy, Poetry and Hosea, pp. 45-100; cf. Fisch, ‘Hosea: A Poetics of Violence’, pp. 144-49. 13. Morris, Prophecy, Poetry and Hosea, p. 78. 14. Morris, Prophecy, Poetry and Hosea, p. 120. Morris lists other root-plays such as CDJ/CCD/CHD and their connection with = CJ, most notably in 4.16’s 9CA< J< = CJ CCD 9CCD with repeated sibilants and the strong resh sounds pre-dominating. Morris adds 4.19’s CC4 (p. 122 n. 63) and one could also mention 9CA’s strong connection with the various wordplays connected with the name )JCA (p. 125). 15. Morris, Prophecy, Poetry and Hosea, pp. 108-109. 16. Morris, Prophecy, Poetry and Hosea, p. 109.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MITCHELL Hosea 1–2 and the Search for Unity 119 the book as they serve to introduce many of the words and catch-phrases which will come to characterize later chapters, often by means of providing a lengthy list of the keywords.17 These links are only visible, he asserts, if one accepts the premise that Hosea is first and foremost a poetic text. This classification of a prophetic book as poetic is not a new suggestion, but Morris claims that biblical scholars have misunderstood the implications of designating Hosea as a book of poetry by continuing also to view it as rhetoric, a mixed genre designation he finds unlikely. He writes: Those who identify biblical prophecy as rhetoric and then add blithely that it is poetry, have not perhaps considered how very odd such a connection really is. In terms of purpose especially, the two types of communication stand utterly opposed to each other. Rhetoric is equipmental language: it exists for an external purpose. Rhetoric seeks to persuade an audience of a proposition or a course of action.18 There is much to speak against the rather sharp and absolute separation which Morris makes between poetry and rhetoric, not least of all the confusion over terminology in biblical and non-biblical literary theory.19

17. Morris, Prophecy, Poetry and Hosea, p. 111: ‘These early chapters abound in lists. For instance, as described in some detail earlier, 1.7 includes a list of human means of salvation [root J, used twice in this verse]: bow, sword, war, horses and riders. The first three items on this list reappear in 2.20 and then separately several times in the main body of the book. The last two items, a formulaic word pair, dis- appear until 14.4, where “horse” reappears, again in conjunction with the verb root J.’ 18. Morris, Prophecy, Poetry and Hosea, p. 42. 19. See George Aichele et al., The Postmodern Bible (New Haven: Yale Univer- sity Press, 1995), especially the chapters ‘Structuralist and Narratological Criticism’ (pp. 70-118) and ‘Rhetorical Criticism’ (pp. 149-86). They write, ‘poetics…most often appears as the preferred term in Hebrew Bible studies for what New Testament critics call narratology’ (p. 70). Even Aristotle writes of the commonality shared by poetry and rhetoric in matters such as concern for style (Rhet. 3.1.3-4): ‘It is clear, therefore, that there is something of the sort in rhetoric as well as in poetry’ (EI_MPO PVÔ PUJ LBJ= QFSJ= UI@OS IUPSJLI O FTUJ UP@ UPJPV_UPO XTQFS LBJ= QFSJ= UI@O QPJIUJLI O) (John Henry Freese [ed. and trans.], The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric [LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947], pp. 346-47). J.J. Glück (‘Paronomasia in Biblical Literature’, Semitics 1 [1970], pp. 50-78), comments ‘we shall use the word “rhetoric” to denote literature intended mainly for oral delivery’ (p. 50 n. 2). This definition should serve as an indicator of the breadth of the term’s use in biblical studies, although it should be mentioned (contra Morris) that the distinction of rhetoric from poetry is not absolute now, nor was it so in ancient times. See Brian Vickers (In Defence of Rhetoric [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988], pp. 59-62), and also Donald C. Bryant (‘Uses of

Yet more curious is the claim that the disunity most scholars find in a first glance at the book is a result of misreading the book as rhetoric, particularly since rhetorical criticism in biblical studies has often emphasized a focus on the text’s final form as a unity.20 More likely, this view is an admission that the book’s present appearance is in some way not logical, and thus needs to be made so. This view parallels Andersen and Freed- man’s claim that, despite all appearances to the contrary, Hosea is not a mere ‘hodgepodge’.21

Negation: = These studies of Hosea, regardless of their understanding of the book’s structure, claim that a microcosm of this structure can be seen in the use of negation in its opening chapters. Despite the debates concerning the genre designation of Hosea’s early chapters, Hosean scholarship has almost uni- versally agreed that if there is a solution to the problem of Hosea’s structure, it will be found through careful analysis of the book’s opening chapters.22 The movement from judgment to blessing, condemnation to

Rhetoric in Criticism’, pp. 1-14) and O.G. Brockett (‘Poetry as Instrument’, pp. 15-25) in Donald C. Bryant (ed.), Papers in Rhetoric and Poetic (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1964), to see the depth of the debate which Morris chooses not to acknowledge with his ‘utterly opposed’ definitions. For the most extensive discussion of the rise of rhetorical criticism in biblical studies, see Roland Meynet, Rhetorical Analysis: An Introduction to Biblical Rhetoric (JSOTSup, 256; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 9-42. 20. Andersen and Freedman (Hosea), most notably, are at some pains to emphasize that their work is rhetorical criticism, and that their ‘premise and point of departure are conservative, that the book is essentially the work of a single person, and that the text is basically sound’ (p. 59). 21. Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, p. 66. 22. Francis Landy (Hosea [Readings: A New Biblical Commentary; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995]) writes that ‘the narrative of ch. 1 is a prototype of that of the entire book… [W]e will also consider ch. 2 as a mise-en-abyme, or microcosm, of the whole’ (p. 12); James Luther Mays (Hosea: A Commentary [OTL; Phila- delphia: Westminster Press, 1969], p. 24) terms it a ‘family’ metaphor; Wolff (Hosea, p. 10) refers to it as ‘by no means an allegory’, but rather belonging to ‘the literary genre of the memorabile’; A.A. Macintosh (A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Hosea [ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1997], p. 9) terms it ‘a parable or sign (cf. the Hebrew word mšl)’; Andersen and Freedman (Hosea, pp. 124-25) describe it as ‘not allegory in the strict sense’ but ‘prophecy’ and thus can have a ‘variegated’ presentation; cf. Buss, The Prophetic Word of Hosea, pp. 34, 58. Morris (Prophecy, Poetry and

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MITCHELL Hosea 1–2 and the Search for Unity 121 reconciliation, negative to positive, or negative to negated negative are all alleged to be implied in the transformation of the children’s names from names of woe and exclusion to names of acceptance and inclusion. Yet, if one carefully analyzes the use of that basic term of Hebrew negation, =, in Hosea’s opening chapters, what sort of patterns or structure does one find? The first two appearances of = in the book of Hosea are in the name Lo-Ruhamah and in the explication of the name’s significance: ‘Call her name Not-Pitied, for Not-Again shall I pity the house of Israel’ (Hos. 1.6). The naming of J> = in 1.8 continues the pattern established with Lo- Ruhamah: ‘Call his name Not-My-People, for you are not my people’. Verse 9 makes use of two negated names, one of which is intended for the son (Lo-Ammi), while the other is a play upon the divine name: J> = )E J< J> = H> CB C> JH )<= 9J9 = J

Hosea), as noted above, asserts that chs. 1–3 provide the lists of important key-words necessary for interpreting the remainder of the book (p. 111). 23. ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites: “Ehyeh has sent me to you”’ (Exod. 3.14). Cf. Wolff, Hosea, pp. 21-22; Mays, Hosea, pp. 29-30; Andersen and Freedman, Hosea, pp. 197-99; G.I. Davies, Hosea (NCB; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), pp. 59-60; Macintosh, Hosea, pp. 26-29; Fisch, ‘Hosea: A Poetics of Violence’, pp. 144-46; Sherwood, The Prostitute and the Prophet, pp. 248-51. Thus Willibald Kuhnigk (Nordwestsemitische Studien zum Hoseabuch [Biblica et Orientalia, 27; Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1974]) argues on this basis against the critical apparatus of the BHS, writing ‘Die Annahme dieses Wortspiels ist auch ein Argument gegen die BHS (u.a.), die für ’ehyeh lakem als probabiliter legendum ’elohêkem notiert’ (p. 5). See further Morris, Prophecy, Poetry and Hosea, pp. 128-29, on the form J9 in ch. 13 as an allu- sion to 1.9, although compare BDB (p. 13) and GKC (pp. 475-76). 24. Wolff (Hosea, p. 21) observes: ‘The last four words are comprehensible only when thus interpreted: “I am not” (9J9 =; note the maqqeph) functions as a predicate noun’.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 122 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) chapter of Hosea, three appear as portions of names while two of the remaining occurrences appear in the explanations of the names’ significance and meaning. As the reader who is familiar with the naming of Hosea’s children well knows, the anticipated positive forms of the children’s names do eventually appear in 2.25, foreshadowed by a preliminary re-naming in 2.3. This structure establishes a pattern which is invoked in virtually every occurrence of the negative adverb = in the first two chapters. For example, in 2.6 the phrase )IC = is exactly the phrase used to explain Lo-Ruha- mah’s name in 1.6: ‘Name her Lo-Ruhamah, for I will no longer pity them’. Yet, in 2.6, the verse intertwines the explanation of Lo-Ruhamah’s name with other symbolic ‘names’ for the Israelites. The Israelites, represented symbolically by Hosea’s children, Lo-Ammi and Lo-Ruhamah, alternate between being )J?H?K J5=J (1.2), = CJ J?3 (first appearing in 2.1), JI= J?3 (2.1) and )J?H?K J?3 (2.6) within a short amount of space. This pattern creates the perception of a continual shifting between positive and negative, with one anticipating the other since it is impossible to invoke the negated term without mention of the positive term at one and the same time.25 This pattern of removal of the negation from the names of the children (Hos. 2.3) is immediately followed by two more uses of the negative: ‘Contend with your mother, contend: for she is Not-My-Wife (JE =), and I am Not-Her-Man (9J =)’ (2.4). The wording is similar to that found in the first chapter, with Lo-Ammi’s name being formed in the same manner, with a negative attached to a suffixed noun: Hos. 1.9: J> = )E J< )<= 9J9 = J

25. Fisch (‘Hosea: A Poetics of Violence’, p. 145) also observes that names containing a negated term contain and thereby anticipate that term in its positive form, although he views the situation strictly dialectically: ‘But all these names contain their own antitheses. In fact they are themselves antitheses, names that exist only by virtue of that which is denied. We are haunted by their contraries.’ See also Grace I. Emmer- son, Hosea: An Israelite Prophet in Judean Perspective (JSOTSup, 28; Shefﬁeld: JSOT Press, 1984), p. 15: ‘hope is latent in the word of judgement…9>IC = and = J> are constant reminders of a relationship now broken’.

The similarities between these two verses in terms of both content and syntax support the sense of a stylistic rather than accidental connection between the two. In 2.10, another similar sounding phrase occurs: = J9H 9= JEE? J =. The difference is that in 2.3 it is not Yhwh who is saying ‘my people’, but merely commanding it to the siblings. The appearance of the positive forms of Lo-Ammi and Lo-Ruhamah in 2.25 is not an unanticipated occurrence following the similar pattern of phrases like 2.4’s 9J = J

26. GKC §152e (p. 479).

This pattern certainly challenges the attempts to read chs. 1–2 in an order other than the present one on the assumption that it is merely an accident of the book’s redactional history. Yet, to further conﬁrm the importance of this pattern of alternation between positive and negative and the importance of giving special attention to the use of the negative adverb, examples can also be drawn from elsewhere in the book. Hosea 11.9 contains four occurrences of the negative =. In this verse it is difﬁcult not to see the negative as providing a link between the various elements of the verse, as well as with certain elements found elsewhere in earlier portions of the book:27 )JCA EI= 3H = JA *HCI 9 = J =H J

27. Andersen and Freedman (Hosea, p. 589) feel that this verse provides an instance of the asseverative use of = (GKC §149 [pp. 471-73]), thus meaning ‘I will surely destroy’.

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MITCHELL Hosea 1–2 and the Search for Unity 125 positive sense because it is an exclusion of the word/name = 3 from both the woman’s mouth and memory. One reason that interpreters have found it difficult to understand Hosea is the regularity of this alternation. Yet, while most of the critical energies directed towards the image of the )J?H?K E have been concerned with either biographical interpretations of Hosea’s marriage or with newer attempts to invert what Yvonne Sherwood has termed ‘the critical obsession with Hosea’s Marriage’,28 there has been far less energy expended on viewing the use of 9?K terminology as part of a wider use of terminology and imagery which defies expectations and creates ambiguity and contradiction. The root 9?K in 1.2 is directed towards a description of Hosea’s wife, or more precisely, to the woman whom he is commanded to marry. The point which has caused so much contention and critical excitement is the jarring nature of this union. Yhwh says, ‘Go and marry a promiscuous woman’ and Hosea does just that, a point which the vast majority of critics have found difficult to accept.29 The reason for the difficulty is simply that the verse defies the reader’s expectations: the proper sequence is for him to marry a woman and for her then to become promiscuous. Many of the commentaries are dedicated to showing that this sequence is what is ‘really’ there in the text because the present sequence is difficult to explain. Hosea 2.16 states: ‘Therefore30 I am “alluring” her, and I shall take her to the midbar and I shall speak to her heart’. Yet, in the sequence in Hosea 2, the verb C , used to indicate the act of betrothal, is not used until 2.21-22—three verses after ‘my husband’ makes its appearance in 2.18. From a logical perspective, the sequence of events is inverted. First the woman is denied the status of wife (2.4), although she is then paraded before her ‘lovers’ (2.12) and threatened with the punishment of death. These are not the actions one inflicts upon one who is not one’s wife; but to be followed by the allurement, then the reinstatement of the title ‘husband’ before the act of ‘betrothal’ has the normal sequence of events all wrong. Particularly since it all begins with a call to the children to aid

28. Sherwood, The Prostitute and the Prophet, p. 55. 29. See Stephan Bitter, Die Ehe des Propheten Hosea: Eine auslegungsgeschicht- liche Untersuchung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975), pp. 181-82, for a summary of pre-critical (pre-nineteenth-century) views. 30. The 9?9 *<= in the MT is troublesome in terms of the logical sequence that would produce a *<=. The 9?9 here, as is most often the case, is better left untranslated, rather than to use ‘behold’ or some similar phrasing (the French voici or voilà are better approximations).

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 126 Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29.1 (2004) in the denial of the woman’s status as wife, so that she is acknowledged as mother long before betrothal! Small wonder that attempts to relate ch. 2 to some sort of description of Hosea’s domestic reality have been less than successful. While purely metaphorical language does not need neatly to arrange its components, the complete jumbling of the logical order of events, however metaphorical the language, is a striking device when viewed against the background of the text’s careful balancing of negative symbols and descriptions with their positive counterparts outlined above.31 One could thus say that the paradoxes of Hosea lie at many levels, down to the very oddity of Yhwh’s proving himself to be a provider by not providing, since Ephraim/Israel’s fruitfulness only increases his distance,32 and that the ﬁrst two chapters prepare the reader very well for engaging with a book that appears as anything but uniﬁed.

Conclusion Yet, what of the questions of structure, the thesis–antithesis, reversal of fortune that Wolff, Buss, Andersen and Freedman, and various other commentators have noted? Or what of the genre question that so troubles Morris? Surely a close reading of chs. 1–2 resolves the issue of structural unity once and for all, showing that Hosea is unified even if one does not know how to describe that unity? Despite the importance of chs. 1–2 to the book as a whole, as is evidenced by the use of negation in Hosea 1–2, one finds oneself a trifle suspicious of all these views that easily summarize and categorize Hosea, resolving all the widely acknowledged problems with a new genre designation or assertions of even more intricate patterns

31. Once again, the ‘over-reading’ of the language in this chapter can lead one astray. Daniels (Hosea and Salvation History, p. 102) speculates on the use of C as to the question of how the bride’s father in this instance receives the C9>: ‘Once the gift had been received, the girl or woman became the legal wife of the groom (Deut. 22.23-24) even though the marriage was not yet physically consummated (Deut. 20.7; 28.30). But who could be conceived of as Israel’s father?’ Cf. David J.A. Clines, ‘Hosea 2: Structure and Interpretation’, in his On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays, 1967–1998, I (JSOTSup, 292; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 293-313 (308), who writes: ‘The allegory is necessarily defective at this point’. Daniels provides an example of reading too much into the metaphor of betrothal; to try to find out who the proud parents would be in a marriage of Yhwh and Israel is certainly to misunderstand the entire chapter on a very basic level. 32. Buss, The Prophetic Word of Hosea. Buss observes, ‘in Hosea, culture and success as such—even as a gift of God—is paradoxically a problem’ (p. 132).

© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. MITCHELL Hosea 1–2 and the Search for Unity 127 to counteract the impression of confusion and disorder. To quote Yvonne Sherwood once again, the ‘image of reversal is rhetorically reassuring, showing how the opposite emotions are completely under the writer’s and Yhwh’s control, and it is also theologically reassuring, because, reading chronologically, blessing is Yhwh’s “last word”’.33 One could add that it is interpretatively reassuring as well, since scholars of Hosea have resisted their initial reactions to the text and insisted upon its subtlety, intricacy, and unity in the face of all sorts of evidence of not just intricacy, but of a concerted and consistent ‘messiness’. Chapters 1–2 are certainly a preface to the book as a whole, but a disordered and jumbled preface to a work of disorder and ambiguity.34 Yvonne Sherwood termed the scholarly scrutiny of Hosea’s marriage to be a ‘critical obsession’, but perhaps underlying that marital obsession is another obsession that is not in need of ‘inversion’, but negation: the search for unity. Whether Hosea is mapped as a ‘reversal of condemnation into blessing’, or recast as poetry so that its illogicality is downplayed (even as it is admitted), what has remained consistent in Hosean studies is that, despite differing notions of what constitutes ‘unity’ or what the char- acteristics of a ‘uniﬁed’ work are, Hosea, despite all appearances to the contrary, ﬁts those criteria. Yet, surely Hosea 1–2, if one views it as a microcosm of the book’s structure as a whole, negates such comfortable conclusions in much the same manner that scholarly admissions of confusion and corruption continue to negate their assertions of unity and coherence.

33. Sherwood, The Prostitute and the Prophet, p. 236. 34. This observation is not motivated by an attempt to ‘deconstruct’ the text of Hosea into a set of unresolved binaries (à la Sherwood), although important literary insights could be gained from such approaches. There should be virtually no need since this book deconstructs itself in terms of everything from its imagery to its logic, and most especially with regards to its overarching message or meaning. Deconstructionist approaches also tend to impose as equally rigorous and strict a structural understanding as any synthesizing approach.