Blue Cord

Calvin Park at Random Bloggings has a review of my book, The Campaign of Pharaoh Shoshenq I into Palestine. I met Calvin and his wife last December when I found out they lived close to me in Massachusetts. Calvin provides a very positive review of my book, which I am sure has nothing to do with the fact that I gave him a copy when we met for lunch.

As an aside, when I first met my new roommate Jin Yang, he said he thought my name sounded familiar. We chatted for a bit, and he happened to ask what my dissertation topic was. When I said it was Shoshenq, he said he knew why my name was familiar. Apparently Ralph Klein assigned my book for a seminar in Israelite history at Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. Jin had read my book for that class. It’s a small world, or at least a small academic field.

I am almost finished with chapter two of From Priestly Torah to Pentateuch. In this chapter, Nihan moves from source criticism to a discussion of the structure of Leviticus. He critiques prior ideas about its outline. Among these are several theories that see Leviticus structured in a ring centering on Leviticus 16, such as that proposed by Mary Douglas in Leviticus as Literature. Personally, I have never found such ring theories to be particularly convincing for Leviticus, as I have trouble imagining the authors and redactors working this way, especially given the amount of complexity some scholars have seen in the ring structure.

Nihan does not like the ring structure either. Instead, he proposes a threefold division into chapters 1-10, 11-16, and 17-27. This is nothing particularly new. What is new, however, is his discussion of the narrative logic that lies behind this division.

Nihan points out that Exodus ends with an unresolved issue: the gap between God and the people of Israel. As Nihan puts it,

After the completion of Israel’s sanctuary . . . Moses is not allowed inside the tent specifically because the latter is filled with the divine presence . . . . In other words, although he is present among his people as promised in 25:8 and 29:45, Yahweh cannot be approached, even by Moses, and the gap between God and man remains insuperable. [emphasis original]¹

Leviticus begins with this gap in place, but God begins to speak to Moses from within the tabernacle for the first time. Leviticus 1-7 give the rules for approaching God with sacrifices, and this culminates in Moses and Aaron being admitted to the tabernacle in Leviticus 8-9.

A similar problem is raised by Leviticus 10, namely the unauthorized sacrifice of Nadab and Abihu. Their offerings pollute the tabernacle, both because they offer unholy fire and because their corpses are found within the confines of the sacred space. Leviticus 11-16 provides the solution for this. It contains laws that are intended to prevent the contamination of the tabernacle (and later the temple), and it ends with the ritual that cleanses the temple from any defilement that may occur.

Finally, Nihan points to an interesting theological move that Leviticus makes. In Exodus, God appears on Mt. Sinai at times of God’s choosing, and then only Moses may approach (at least in P). With Leviticus 16, however, this changes:

[F]inally, Aaron is permitted inside the inner–sanctum (16:13ff.), where Yahweh appears to him inside the cloud (cf.16:2b?, ?), thus recalling the previous encounter between God and Moses on the mountain in Ex 24:15-18. — except that Aaron has now replaced Moses in the role of the communities mediator, and that this encounter is no longer unique but part of a yearly ritual (cf.16:29, 34a). [emphasis original]²

This is a remarkable reading of Leviticus, and it casts a wonderful light on P’s theology concerning the role of priests within the community of Israel.

1. Nihan, Priestly Torah, 90. [back]
2. Nihan, Priestly Torah, 105. [back]

I am currently reading Christophe Nihan’s From Priestly Torah to Pentateuch. This book was my big purchase at the SBL, and the more I read of the book the more I am glad I bought it. The book is very well written, clearly organized, and beautifully argued. The topic of the book is the composition of Leviticus (I can hear the collective yawn from the majority of my readers), but in dealing with this subject Nihan has to deal with broader issues in source criticism.

I am currently in the second chapter, where Nihan is dealing with the question of the extent of the Priestly Document.¹ Working backwards through Deuteronomy and Numbers, he finds no suitable ending to P in those texts. He then skips Leviticus and moves to Exodus. A large section of this chapter is devoted to arguing that Exodus 25-31 as a whole are a part of the original P document instead of being from several redactional hands (with a few exceptions). Within this section, however, he finds no suitable ending for P. This means the ending must be in Leviticus, as he will no doubt argue in subsequent chapters.

One of the issues he addresses is whether Exodus 35-40 were a part of the P document or are later additions. Israel Knohl has argued that PT sees the tabernacle as being built by Moses while HS views it as the work of all the people.² Nihan disagrees, and points to Pola’s argument that P frequently contains “execution formulas” in which commands from God are paired with passages in which the command is carried out.³ He argues that it would be odd to find the command to build the tabernacle without also having a report of its completion.

I am not completely convinced either way, although I still lean towards Exodus 35-40 coming from HS. I can easily see some short expression of completion in PT that has been expanded into a larger section by HS. I think the theological differences between 25-31 and 35-40 are stronger arguments than an expected execution formula.

This whole topic feeds into a post I made prior to the SBL about the covenant at Sinai in the Priestly Document. If the ending of P is found in the building of the tabernacle or in the consecration of the priests in Leviticus 8-9 (as Nihan argues), then the setting up of the cultus would be the one of the main goals of P. It would fit nicely with Mark George’s idea that the completion of the tabernacle is the completion of creation.⁴ This ending would also explain why P is focused more on the Abrahamic covenant than one at Sinai as Steve Cook has argued.⁵

1. Nihan views P as a document, and not as a redaction the way Frank Moore Cross and others have seen it. [back]
2. Israel Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 64–66. [back]
3. T. Pola, Die ursprünglich Priesterschrift, WMANT 70 (Neukirchen–Vluyn, 1995), 116ff. [back]
4. Mark K. George, “Israel’s Tabernacle as Modification of Priestly Creation,” paper delivered at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, 2007 (San Diego). [back]
5. Stephen L. Cook, “Holiness Versus Reverence: Two Priestly Theologies; Two Priestly Schools” (forthcoming). [back]

I have just come across a review of my book, The Campaign of Pharaoh Shoshenq I into Palestine, in JSOT 30.5 (2006): 51-52. The review is written by Diane Edelman. It is just a one paragraph review, and she mostly just summarizes what I have to say. At the end of the review, however, she says:

His analysis leaves unexplained three points: (1) why a pharaoh would establish a political alliance with a foreign commoner, marrying one of his daughters to him, (2) why the geographical scope of the list is limited to Cisjordan, unlike the wider range found in other such lists; and (3) why there are so many unique sites here that are not attested earlier or later.

I wanted to point out that I did, in fact, discuss all three of these points. In the conclusion on pp.98-99, I discuss the campaign from a foreign policy standpoint, suggesting that Shoshenq established a political alliance with Jeroboam in order to weaken Solomon’s kingdom. This policy changed the situation in Palestine. Egypt went from being faced with a relatively strong nation under Solomon, a nation that controlled the others in the region, to being faced with numerous weak nations, one of whom was in alliance with Egypt. This would have been a much more favorable situation as far as Egypt was concerned.

I addressed her third point on pp.44-46, where I discussed possible sources for the topographical list in Shoshenq’s relief. I think onomastic lists are a strong candidate for the source of the topographical list. Onomastic lists were kept up to date by the scribes so that they had an accurate catalog of cities. Since the other examples of topographic lists are from the Late Bronze Age, we should not be surprised that the Shoshenq list is different. It comes from several centuries after the lists of Thutmose III, Seti I, Ramses II, and Ramses III. The cities in Canaan had changed greatly during that those centuries, and the onomastic lists would have reflected those changes.

As for the list being limited to the Cisjordan, there are some sites, such as #22 (Mahanaim), which are located in the Transjordan. Given how incomplete the list is and the fact that we are unable to identify a large number of the sites, I don’t think we can say that the list is limited to the Cisjordan. I doubt the we have sites outside of Palestine (with the exception of ##1-9, which include Egypt, Nubia, and Libya), but the presence of Mahanaim means that we cannot rule out sites in the Transjordan.

If anyone is interested in reading a short summary of my dissertation, Bible and Interpretation has an on-line version of a paper I gave on the topic at the SBL meeting in 2000.

I have been sitting in the San Diego airport for four hours so far and I still have four hours before the plane takes off. I have used the time to read the first essay in Persia and Torah: The Theory of Imperial Authorization of the Pentateuch. This is a translation of Peter Frei’s article, “Die persische Reichsautorisation: Ein Uberblick.”¹ Frei was the first to propose the idea that the Torah was the officially authorized law of Yehud in the Persian period, and James Watts has done American scholars a great service by translating it for this volume.

The article consists of a catalogue of instances in the Persian period where the Persian authorities authorized local laws. Frei cites examples from Egypt, Greece, and Asia Minor, including examples from Nehemiah, Daniel, Esther, and the letters from Elephantine.

The evidence falls in two different groups. First is the command under Darius to codify all the laws in Egypt. This is the example that seems to me to be parallel with Ezra’s work with the Torah. Yet even here it is not clear that Darius is authorizing the laws. He is the one who has them collected, but they are already the law of the land. He may be responsible for the laws as a collection, but I don’t know if I would say he authorized these laws to be the law of the land, unless we mean that in the sense of him reaffirming them.

The second group - that is, the rest of the examples - consists of the king authorizing individual laws or giving his approval to judicial decisions. These seem to me to bear little resemblance to what Ezra was doing.

That means we are looking at Darius’s codification of the laws in Egypt as the main parallel to Ezra’s work. It seems to me, however, that these two “law codes” are very different in nature. For one thing, the Torah is hardly a law code. Large sections contain laws, but there are also huge swaths, such as the entirety of Genesis, that are narrative. And taken as a whole, the laws in the Pentateuch would hardly constitute a complete law code. There are many areas of life that are simply not covered. It doesn’t really compare to the law collection of Darius or to other law codes such as that of Hammurabi.

In addition, I don’t think Ezra 7:12-26 presents a picture of the Persian king calling for the codification of Jewish law. What we see is Ezra deciding to return to Yehud and Artaxerxes giving him permission. Undoubtedly, Ezra could not have returned to Yehud and carried out his program without the permission of the Persian king, but passive permission seems different than the active authorization that Frei envisions.

Obviously, this post is not doing justice to the full range of evidence that Frei presents. But after an initial reading of his article, I have to say I am not even slightly convinced.

1. Originally published in Zeitschrift fur altorientalische und biblische Rechtgeschichte 1 (1995): 1-35. [back]