I spent all of the morning and half of the afternoon sessions listening to papers on the Torah, which is my area of interest. The topic of the sessions was The Torah and Canon - Five Books and a Concept? Each of the five papers focused on one of the books of the Torah in turn. The Leviticus paper was particularly interesting, as it focused on parallels with Leviticus 10 and the growth of the book of Leviticus. It was along the lines of my own research, although focusing on different passages. It is interesting to note that all Torah must be placed in the mouth of Moses. So, even in an instance like Ezekiel 44, where Ezekiel gives Torah, later layers of the Pentateuch saw fit to incorporate these into the Pentateuch. If they had remained with Ezekiel, they would not have had the same authority.
The Numbers paper asked whether Numbers was a book or not, which of course raises the question of what we mean when we talk about books in ancient times. Obviously, our concept of book is quite different from what they produced, not only in technical matters (scrolls vs. bound pages) but also in definition. Book implies something that is complete in itself, and this certainly does not apply to Numbers. It is hard to imagine Numbers circulating by itself without the other parts of the Pentateuch,
One of the problems with these papers is that they were all in German. After listening to all of them, one thing because clear: my German is not as good as it needs to be. And since most of the scholars in these sessions were German, the difference between European and American scholarship on the Torah was greatly in evidence. For instance, in talking to the scholar who delivered the paper on Leviticus, I asked him what he thought about Knohl’s division of P into PT and HS. He replied that he thought it was merely a return to the method of Wellhausen and he didn’t like it. Instead, he followed the current German approach of Rendtorff, which sees the formation of the Pentateuch through a more tradition critical process instead of a source critical one.
The rest of the afternoon session I spent in the section on Production and Reception of Authoritative Books in the Persian Period. I heard Diane Edelman give a paper on how she thinks the prophetic books from the pre-exilic period came together. In a nutshell, she thinks that temples kept records of all prophetic oracles, a practice that we know from Mesopotamia. In the post-exilic period, those prophets who had predicted the fall of Jerusalem were pulled together and edited. She also surveyed temple functionaries in Mesopotamia and Egypt, noting that in each case there were prophets associated with the temple.
I am not convinced that she is correct, although I am not completely opposed to her idea either. One question I raised was whether temples would have collected oracles from peripheral prophets such as Amos and Hosea, who were obviously not temple prophets and opposed the temples in northern Israel. Edelman pointed to an example from Assyria where an oracle against the king was recorded. Apparently, all oracles concerning the king were considered important enough to be written down.
I have several other problems with her idea as well. For one, we need to examine Assyrian and Babylonian policies about libraries associated with temples. Did they usually destroy them, or did they protect them. I find it hard to believe that documents concerning Amos and Hosea would have survived the fall of Samaria (even if they were kept in Bethel), and then also have survived the destruction in Jerusalem. If we had evidence that the Assyrians and Babylonians made a point of protecting those libraries, her theory might be more plausible.
Also, we have evidence for writing and temple libraries in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but not in Israel. We do not know of anything in Israel paralleling the temple and royal scribal system that is found in those other areas. And we don’t get evidence for them until the Second Temple period. Also, we have no mention of temple scriptorums in Israel and Judah, nor do terms for prophetic temple functionaries survive (unless ro’eh and hazon are such terms). While the parallels from other areas are suggestive, in the complete absence of evidence in Judah I think we need to be very careful in assuming that the same systems were in place there.