The Edited Bible: The Curious History of the “Editor” in Biblical Criticism 9781575065670

Citation preview

The Edited Bible

The Edited Bible The Curious History of the “Editor” in Biblical Criticism

John Van Seters

Winona Lake, Indiana Eisenbrauns 2006

ç Copyright 2006 by Eisenbrauns. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

www.eisenbrauns.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Van Seters, John. The edited Bible : the curious history of the “editor” in biblical criticism / John Van Seters. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN-13: 978-1-57506-112-2 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Bible—Criticism, redaction—History. 2. Classical literature— History and criticism. 3. Editing. I. Title. BS500.V36 2006 220.6u609—dc22 2006004840

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. †‘

To William McKane In Memoriam

Contents Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

The Problem of Definition in Old Testament Handbooks 2 Etymologies and Meanings 13 Understanding Ancient Book Production, Dissemination, and Distribution 15 The Revival of Scholarship in the Renaissance and Editing the Classics 18 Editing the Scriptures in Judaism and Christianity 20 Additions and Editions 21 The Task before Us 22

2. The Early History of Editing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 The Rise of Homeric Scholarship in the Pre-Hellenistic Period 27 Alexandrian Scholars and the Editing of Homer 35 Homeric Scholarship in Pergamum and Rome 45 Editing and Its Influence on the Vulgate and the Book Trade 46 Editing Classical Texts in the Roman Period 52 Conclusion 57

3. Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization of Biblical Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 The Sopherim as “Editors” of the Hebrew Bible 60 Scribal Signs and Corrections 79 Editing and Translating the Sacred Texts among the Church Fathers 83 Conclusion 109

4. Classical and Biblical Text Editions: Editing in the Age of the Printing Press . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 The Revival of Classical Learning and the Publication of Editiones Principes 113 The Textus Receptus of the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible 117 Editing Classical Texts and the Education of the Gentleman 121

- vii -

viii

Contents Richard Bentley and the Critical Editing of Texts 124 Editors and the Collection of Manuscripts

130

5. Editing Homer: The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 F. A. Wolf and the Homeric Problem 133 The Editor in Homer after Wolf 151 The Demise of the Redactor in Homeric Studies 163

6. The History of the “Editor” in Biblical Criticism from Simon to Wellhausen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 Richard Simon: Editing Historical Documents 185 Editor as Compiler of Fragments and Documents: From Eichhorn to Vater 191 W. M. L. de Wette: Pioneer of Historical Criticism 205 Heinrich Ewald: Conservative Reaction 215 Hermann Hupfeld: Editor as Conflator of Documents 221 Wellhausen and Kuenen: The Redactor in the Documentary Hypothesis 223 Summary and Conclusion 238

7. The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century: Crisis in Higher Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 The Wellhausen Legacy in the Twentieth Century: Driver, Eissfeldt, and Pfeiffer 244 Form Criticism and the Editor: Hermann Gunkel 247 Form Criticism of the Hexateuch: Authors and Editors in G. von Rad 256 Editors and Historians in the History of Traditions: Martin Noth 260 The Revisionist Successors of von Rad and Noth and the Triumph of the Editor 269 The Composition of the Pentateuch: Neither Authors nor Editors—Erhard Blum 277 Wellhausen and the Rise of Redaction Criticism in New Testament Studies 283 Summary and Conclusion 296

8. Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298 Editors in the History of Textual Criticism 299 Editors, Urtext, Recensions, and the Problem of Textual Diversity: Emanuel Tov 314 Editors in the Book of Jeremiah 327 Editing the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls 332

Contents

ix

The Editions of the Septuagint and Other Early Greek Recensions 340 Conclusion 346

9. Editors and the Creation of the Canon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 The Problem of Definition: “Canon” and “Canonical” 351 The History of the Canon as a Restricted Corpus of Sacred Books 353 Canonical Criticism, Canonical Process, and the Editing of the Bible 362 The Role of the Editor in Innerbiblical Exegesis Conclusion 389

376

10. Summary and Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391 Appendix: Original Text of Translated Excerpts . . . . . . . . . 402 Indexes Index of Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index of Scripture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index of Other Ancient Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index of Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

407 411 412 413

x

Contents

Abbreviations General D DH Dtr E HC J JE LXX MT P R reb SamP

Deuteronomy Deuteronomistic History Deuteronomistic Historian Elohistic writer Holiness Code Yahwist Jehovist (Yahwist + Elohist) Septuagint Masoretic Text Priestly Writer Redactor (in combination with D, JE, or P) Revised English Bible Samaritan Pentateuch

Reference Works ABD BASOR Bib BIOSCS BWANT BZABR BZAW CBQ ExpTim FRLANT HAT HTR HvTSt HUCA ICC IDB

Anchor Bible Dictionary. Edited by D. N. Freedman. 6 vols. New York, 1992 Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Biblica Bulletin of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten und Neuen Testament Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für altorientalische und biblische Rechtsgeschichte Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Catholic Biblical Quarterly Expository Times Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments Handbuch zum Alten Testament Harvard Theological Review Hervormde teologiese studies Hebrew Union College Annual International Critical Commentary The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. Edited by G. A. Buttrick. 4 vols. Nashville, 1962

- xi -

xii IDBSup IEJ JAOS JBL JNSL JQR JSOT JSOTSup JSS OBO OCD OED OLD OtSt SAT SJOT TDNT

TRu VT VTSup WMANT ZAW ZNW

Abbreviations The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible: Supplementary Volume. Edited by K. Crim. Nashville, 1976 Israel Exploration Journal Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages Jewish Quarterly Review Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal for the Study of the Old Testament: Supplement Series Journal of Semitic Studies Orbis biblicus et orientalis Oxford Classical Dictionary. Edited by S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth. 3rd ed. Oxford, 1996 Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford, 1989 Oxford Latin Dictionary. Edited by P. G. W. Glare. Oxford, 1982 Oudtestamentische Studiën Die Schriften des Alten Testaments Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Edited by G. Kittel and G. Friedrich. Translated by G. W. Bromily. 10 vols. Grand Rapids, 1964–76 Theologische Rundschau Vetus Testamentum Supplements to Vetus Testamentum Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche

Preface The title of this book, The Edited Bible, may suggest a wide range of subjects, including the modern production of critical editions of biblical texts and their translations by highly trained scholars and the history of these efforts back to the rise of critical scholarship in the Renaissance. However, that will not be the primary concern of this book, although some attention will be given to this period in the sections on the history of editing the Bible and classical literature. Instead, the title is intended to suggest a much longer and more ancient process of editing or “redaction” from the earliest stages of composition, a continuous modification and revision by anonymous editors. It is these “editors” who are thought to have produced the “final authoritative form” of the Bible that has been handed down to the later religious communities of Jews and Christians as their “canonical” text. The “edited Bible” in this latter sense has been the object of critical study for over 300 years, and the “editors” who created this “edited Bible” were invented by scholars on the analogy of the more modern phenomenon. The deep conviction in the existence of this “edited Bible” lies at the foundation of most critical literary and textual analysis of the biblical text, especially in German scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with its flowering in the contemporary sophisticated and highly complex method of “redaction criticism” (Redaktionsgeschichte). It is the curious history of this critical dogma of an “edited Bible” and ancient “editors” that will be the primary object of our investigation here. It should be obvious from the use of the scare quotation marks that I do not believe in such an “edited Bible” and its “editors.” For over three decades I have expressed grave doubts about the use of hypothetical “redactors” as a way of solving literary problems and supporting increasingly complex literary theories. Already in my book Abraham in History and Tradition (1975), I stated: “In the actual practice of literary criticism the redactor functions mainly as a deus ex machina to solve literary difficulties. In fact the whole elaborate system of redactors . . . is unnecessary if it can be shown that the various writers who succeeded one another (and who were admittedly also compilers and editors) were directly dependent upon the works of their predecessors and incorporated these works into their own” (p. 129). Since I made this statement, my conviction has only grown stronger with subsequent work on the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History. In my view a literary analysis of this corpus makes the notion of the redactor quite superfluous. Nevertheless, so strong and so pervasive is the dogma of the ancient “editor” in critical scholarship that arguments based on a presentation of an

- xiii -

xiv

Preface

alternative analysis alone, one in which there is no need to posit a redactor, are not enough to dislodge this conviction or even to be taken seriously. Any approach to the biblical text that does not engage in redaction criticism may be dismissed as too naïve and unsophisticated, as I was told recently by one German authority in pentateuchal studies. Ancient “editors” are the indispensable foundation of critical study. Consequently, there remained only one course open to me if I was to make any progress in this current literary debate, and this was to investigate the history of this notion of an edited Bible in order to understand how the dogma arose and became so pervasive in the discipline. The fact that the modern practice of editing seems to contradict so completely the general characterization of the activity of the biblical redactor was all the more reason to explore this intellectual history of such an important notion. No reflection or introspection of this sort in the discipline of historical criticism has ever taken place. In spite of several centuries of education in the classics, biblical scholars may quite glibly question the existence of the author or the historian in antiquity, but one may never question, apparently, the existence of the redactor. My historical study led me into a rather wide range of fields and disciplines over which I do not claim to have mastery or professional competence. Although I do not claim to be a classicist, I soon realized that the parallel development of “redactional analysis” in classical studies since the time of F. A. Wolf in the late eighteenth century and even back to Richard Bentley in the early eighteenth century demanded serious comparison with the same development in biblical studies during the same period. For this purpose I have had to depend on a selection of respected authorities and their learned works, which I have frequently quoted at length. What became particularly striking to me was to discover that, after about 150 years in which redactional analysis, especially of Homer, dominated classical studies, in the course of the last 50 years this form of literary analysis has virtually died out, even in Germany! Why did this happen in classical studies when it did not happen in biblical studies? It also became clear to me in my research of the history of scholarship that, from the very beginning, with Richard Simon in biblical studies and Wolf in classics, literary analysis (or “higher criticism”) and textual (or “lower”) criticism were inseparable in their use of the notion of the “editor.” Indeed, the very term editor originated within the discipline of textual criticism as the one responsible for the preparation of the text of an ancient author for publication in printed form as authoritative. This meant that one could not treat the notion of redactor without, on the one hand, exploring the history of editing from the rise of the printing press and, on the other, the development of the history of textual criticism as it relates to the editor and editing. Again, it was necessary for me to make extensive use of several authorities to treat these areas. More recently, certain modes of interpretation, motivated largely by confessional or religious concerns, such as canonical criticism and innerbiblical exegesis have made great use of the notion of the redactor/editor as the “canonizer” or the “interpreter” of the text and

Preface

xv

the tradition transmitted to the faithful. These very popular modes of biblical exegesis claim to operate within the discipline of historical criticism, or at least to be compatible with it, largely through their use of the “editor.” Any serious doubt about the existence of these editors would place these modes of interpretation in great jeopardy. Yet while scholars of these modes of biblical interpretation are ready to question many other aspects of historical criticism, the dogma of the redactor remains unexamined and foundational to their methods. This topic of investigation, as I discovered, covers such an extended period of time, reaching back into the very origins of scholarship in the Hellenistic period, and encompasses such a wide variety of methods and disciplines that limits had to be made on what could be reasonably included within the scope of this book. For each chapter the amount of relevant literature that could be cited is enormous, and I have made a selection (I hope a judicious one) that will allow some in-depth treatment of the authors discussed. Some will chide me on my omissions, especially of their own works, and they may be justified. Nevertheless, what I have intended by this study is to challenge all those who seriously engage in biblical criticism, “higher” and “lower,” to justify their use of the notion of an edited Bible and their assumption of ancient “editors” or “redactors” as agents in the formation of the biblical text prior to the authorized editions and versions of modern times. As I have pointed out in this study, the fact that in classical studies (which was for so long closely related to biblical studies as the twin foundations of elementary and higher education) the method of “redactional analysis” has virtually died out after an extended period of vigorous debate demands a similar serious introspection in biblical studies as well. My case in this book does not rest on my own particular theory of the literary history of the Pentateuch but on the evidence presented against the notion of an “edited Bible.” It is for this reason, therefore, that I decided not to include any examples of recent literary analysis using the redaction-critical method and my refutation of them or my own literary theories in which an editor plays no role. Apart from the need for a few examples in the historical survey, this debate about the contemporary state of affairs in Pentateuchal studies or the composition of the historical books would only detract from the central issue of this book. This book has been in the making for some time, and I have many to thank for their support and assistance. Various parts of the manuscript in the course of its preparation have been read by Johann Cook, Natalio Fernández Marcos, Albert Pietersma, John Rogerson, John Barton, Thomas Römer, and Steven McKenzie. These have often given me words of encouragement, offered points of correction or disagreement, and contributed useful information that has been incorporated into the text. For this I am grateful to them for their time and effort, but they are not responsible for any errors that remain or the views expressed. To my colleagues of the Biblical Colloquium here in Waterloo, Ontario, who provided a forum for

xvi

Preface

discussing this topic (and who may be getting tired of hearing about these “editors”), and to Paul Dion, who helped me with translating a Latin text, I offer my thanks. Harold Remus also was very helpful and generous with his time in reviewing all my German translations, in particular the translations of nineteenth-century texts in chap. 6, offering numerous corrections and revisions, for which I am most grateful. Again I take full responsibility for any errors than remain. I have learned much from Peter Erb of Wilfrid Laurier University, a specialist in the religious and intellectual history of the nineteenth century. Our frequent discussions over coffee and his suggestions of important literature have taught me much about the period under scrutiny in this book. Jim Eisenbraun and the copy-editor Beverly McCoy are both responsible for the “final edited form” and accurate copy of this text, and I am grateful for their many corrections and improvements. Nevertheless, as author, I take full credit for the content and blame for any errors that remain. Jim has also been very helpful and accessible during the production of this work, and for this he has my heartfelt thanks. One part of the discussion in chap. 7 about the use of redactors in New Testament studies has appeared previously under the title: “An Ironic Circle: Wellhausen and the Rise of Redaction Criticism,” ZAW 115 (2003) 487–500. Another part of the same chapter, dealing with the relationship of G. von Rad and M. Noth to the rise of redaction criticism, was given as a paper in the centennial celebration of von Rad’s scholarship in Heidelberg in 2001 under the title “The Pentateuch as Torah and History: In Defense of G. von Rad” and has now been published in Das Alte Testament—Ein Geschichtsbuch? (ed. E. Blum et al.; Altes Testament und Moderne 10; Münster: LIT, 2005), 47–63. Both pieces have been significantly revised for their place in this discussion. This book is dedicated to the memory of William McKane of Saint Andrews, Scotland, whose scholarship I have greatly admired and some of whose works were used with great profit in this study. We became good friends when he spent a year at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and he and his wife, Agnes, lived in Chapel Hill, where I was teaching at that time. Finally, as in the case of all my previous publication endeavors, my wife, Elizabeth, and my family have given me their support and encouragement and have endured my seemingly endless obsession with these mythical editors and redactors. They all have my heartfelt gratitude and affection.

1

Introduction

There is a generally accepted notion in biblical scholarship that the Bible as we know it today is the product of editing, from its earliest stages of composition through to its final, definitive and “canonical” textual form. So persistent has been this idea since the rise of critical study in the seventeenth century and so pervasive has it become in all aspects of biblical study that nowadays there is virtually no reflection on the validity of this idea, and those who make reference to ancient editorial activity and to the editors who engaged in it do not feel any need to offer evidence for such editing and editors beyond the results of their own analysis. Editors—or to use the common scholarly jargon, “redactors”—are invented as a mode of literary analysis, and they are made to perform all the tasks necessary to make a particular literary theory work as an explanation for various features in the biblical text. This assumption about the role of ancient editors in the creation of the Bible is the framework within which literary and textual critics have worked for a very long time, and only rarely has there been any reflection upon the validity of such an assumption from outside this framework. One way to gain a broader perspective from outside this mode of critical analysis is to recognize the fact that this particular form of scholarly criticism is not unique to biblical studies but developed hand in hand with classical studies during the course of the same period of time. However, in the case of the latter, classicists have for much of the twentieth century undergone a vigorous debate about this mode of analysis, with the result that it has largely faded from the scene, even though for more than a century and a half previously Homer also was viewed as the product of editors, from the time that the poems emerged out of oral tradition to their final vulgate form in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. What is truly remarkable is that this critique of scholarly method in classical studies has completely escaped the notice of biblical scholars. Why have the myriad of editors evident in the literary analysis of the classicists of the nineteenth century entirely disappeared while they have continued to proliferate in biblical studies? This radical divergence of development in two fields of humanistic studies that for centuries grew side-by-side suggests that we should give particular attention to what happened in classical studies, particularly as it relates to the basic assumption about the role of editors in the creation of the Bible. From this stance, outside the framework of biblical studies, we can follow developments within classical studies to reflect upon and assess the validity

-1-

2

Chapter 1

of the claims about the editorial process within the Bible’s formation and whether or not such a process ever existed. To develop sufficient competence to make such judgments, it will be necessary to devote a large amount of space to the discussion of classical scholars and the history of their debates in this study. I see no other way of breaking the virtual stranglehold created by the reigning assumption that an editorial process, Redaktionsgeschichte, supposedly gave rise to the biblical text. Consequently, the notion that the Bible is the product of editing and the work of editors is problematic if for no other reason than the fact that the discipline of biblical studies has retained this notion without reflection or justification, while classical studies, after prolonged and intense deliberation, has found good reason to give it up. The task in this introduction, therefore, is to lay out the broad parameters of the problem in biblical studies, because it affects so many disciplines, methodologies, and perspectives in exegesis and interpretation. The problem of the “edited Bible” includes in its scope everything in the formation of the text from its earliest stages of composition to its “final form,” often understood as its “canonical form,” whether that “canonical form” is to be located in antiquity or in the early modern period with the first authorized printed editions. The use of quotation marks enclosing these rubrics is intentional and will appear frequently throughout this book because all of these concepts are problematic. In order to appreciate the full extent of the problem and why this study must lay out such a broad range of data and issues, many of which may seem rather distant from biblical studies and the usual pursuits of biblical scholars, it will be necessary to take some time to investigate the depth of the problem and the course of action needed to come to terms with it. I will need to ask for the reader’s patience with the seemingly obscure details of ancient scholarship and text transmission as well as the modern history of literary criticism of ancient texts and textual criticism in both classical and biblical studies. Yet, these details are necessary for the development of a compelling case that our understanding of the whole composition and transmission-history of the biblical text must change radically—and all that this implies for historical-critical interpretation of the Bible. We may begin our examination of the problem of biblical “editing” and the “editor” or “redactor,” as he is often called, by looking at the discussion of “redactors” and “redaction criticism” in the standard handbooks of biblical exegesis.

The Problem of Definition in Old Testament Handbooks The notion of the “editor” or “redactor” as a constitutive part of the compositional process by which the Hebrew Bible in general and the Pentateuch in particular came into existence has its most obvious point of departure for most scholars today in the Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch, as articulated by Julius Wellhausen in his Prolegomena to the History of Israel

Introduction

3

(1883). 1 In this literary theory of biblical composition, the redactor or editor is primarily responsible for the combination of independent sources, and because the supposed independent documents that make up the sources of the Pentateuch have been combined in a series of successive stages, a different redactor is needed for each of these stages. Thus the oldest stage, the combining of J and E, reflects the work of the redactor Rje; this work’s subsequent combination with Deuteronomy was achieved by Rd; the final combination of this corpus with the Priestly writer was the work of Rp, the “final redactor.” Throughout the articulation of this basic hypothesis, in which the number of sources may increase and consequently result in a proliferation of redactors, the authors of the sources or documents are clearly distinguished from the redactors or editors. Only very minor changes or “editorial” additions are attributed to the redactors themselves. In the last few decades, there has been a tendency to change radically the understanding of the role of the redactor so that, in addition to the older notion derived from the Documentary Hypothesis, a quite contradictory notion has developed that makes little distinction between author and redactor and is even willing to label the Pentateuchal authors J and P as redactors; at times, authors are dispensed with altogether. Borrowing terminology and method from New Testament studies, we are now confronted with a new methodology called “redaction criticism,” which has become a major analytical tool of literary criticism. Because there is no clear definition of “redactor,” we are left with a confusing morass of compositional analysis with little hope of any clarity about the actual process of composition. It would be useful at this point, in trying to understand the contradictory and chaotic nature of what goes under the rubric of “redaction criticism,” to look at the descriptions found in the current handbooks. A quite typical example is the treatment of John Barton. 2 Barton makes a list of the various “elements of redaction-critical analysis,” which are worth considering. 3 These elements are to be found in clues to “redactional” activity within the text. The first of these is seen in “link passages” associated with the function of the redactor in the Documentary Hypothesis, in which the independence of sources is assumed. Thus, any reference from one source to another, such as in Gen 26:1, which makes explicit reference back to the story in Gen 12:10–20, which often is thought to belong to a different source, needs to be attributed to a redactor. This is the original notion of the redactor as 1. As we will see later in this study, the Documentary Hypothesis of Wellhausen was not the birthplace of the notion of the redactor; the notion arose from a long process of development stretching back to the seventeenth century. 2. John Barton, Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984), 45–60; and idem, “Redaction Criticism (Old Testament),” ABD 5:644–47. Also J. A. Wharton, “Redaction criticism, O.T.,” IDB Sup, 729–32; K. Koch, The Growth of the Biblical Tradition: The Form-Critical Method (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), 57–67; Odil H. Steck, Old Testament Exegesis: A Guide to the Methodology (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 79– 98, 127–49. 3. A similar list treated much more abstractly is given in ibid., 84–94.

4

Chapter 1

compiler and conflater of sources, and making belief in independent documents workable is an invention of the Documentary Hypothesis. Consequently, any doubt about the independence of the Isaac story in Gen 26 from the prior Abraham episodes in Gen 12:10–20 and Gen 20 makes the redactional links quite unnecessary. Furthermore, all other uses of hypothetical redactors in Pentateuch criticism are completely dependent upon the rationale for their existence in the Documentary Hypothesis. The second element in Barton’s discussion of redaction-critical analysis is the presence in the text of “interpretive additions.” His examples do not focus on the Pentateuch, but “interpolations,” whether interpretive or otherwise, have long been associated with redactors in literary criticism, and this question will need to be taken up in greater detail below. This kind of editorial function is entirely different from compiling or conflating sources, so it may be ascribed to an entirely different kind of redactor unlike any of those familiar to us from the Documentary Hypothesis. Thus, we frequently hear of a Deuteronomistic redactor of Genesis to Numbers whose activity accounts for traces of Deuteronomistic language in the text even though there is no effort to associate such a redactor with Rd, the redactor responsible for combining JE with D. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that, while there is abundant evidence in antiquity that “interpretive additions” were made to the Greek “classics,” there is no justification for attributing them to ancient “editors”—an observation on which we will elaborate later. On the contrary, we will see that what most clearly defines ancient “editors,” such as those of Alexandria in the Hellenistic Period, was their attempt to identify interpolations as corruptions and to remove them. It is this function of editing that is also closely allied to the rise of textual criticism. After the revival of classical learning in the Renaissance, textual criticism, as the restoration of an author’s original work, became part of the history of editing down to the modern period. Interpretive additions or interpolations of any kind are inimical to the whole notion of editing. How this contradiction came to find a place in discussions of redaction will be an important concern of this study. At this point in his discussion of the elements of redaction criticism, Barton shifts from the older way of characterizing the “redactor” to the new methodology of redaction criticism under the influence of New Testament studies. Thus, Barton’s third element of redaction criticism is the identification of “explicit insertions.” Here his examples are most instructive. He refers to the texts in the Deuteronomistic History (DH), such as Judg 2:6–23 and 2 Kgs 17:7–41, that were identified by Noth as the hallmark of a historian and the way in which Dtr composed and integrated his work into a unified literary work. Barton himself states, in agreement with Noth: “Here the compiler of the history offers comments of his own on the story he is telling.” 4 As we shall see below, against Noth’s own strong statements to the

4. Barton, “Redaction Criticism (Old Testament),” 646.

Introduction

5

contrary, his Deuteronomist, whom he regarded as a historian and author, has become a redactor. This redefined redactor strongly resembles the redactor of New Testament criticism, in which the evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are all treated as editors. Thus, even the historian and author Luke, like Noth’s Dtr, has become nothing more than an editor. In his handbook on method in biblical studies, Reading the Old Testament, and within his discussion on redaction criticism, Barton actually attributes this particular development of redaction criticism to G. von Rad. He states that it is through his work above all that the redaction-critical approach has really established itself in Old Testament studies. Von Rad is always anxious to move beyond the mere reconstruction of earlier stages in the growth of the biblical text and to begin to listen to the redactor, to ask how he meant us to read his finished text, and what he was trying to tell us. Besides his work on Genesis, von Rad wrote extensively on the theology of the Yahwist (the redactor of the ‘J’ strand in the Pentateuch as a whole).5

This view of the Yahwist Barton sets alongside “the compiler of the ‘Deuteronomistic History’” so that he regards both works as the products of editors. The statement is quite remarkable, because von Rad makes it very clear that he views the work of the Yahwist as an author and historian, not as a redactor or editor. He retains Wellhausen’s distinction between the sources or authors and the redactors throughout his work, and it is a serious misrepresentation of von Rad’s position to reinterpret his treatment of the Yahwist as a precursor of the present method of redaction criticism. 6 The same can be said of Noth’s view of Dtr as an author and historian. As we will see below, it is the abuse of the term “redactor” in New Testament studies that has hopelessly confused Old Testament studies and created within it this major 5. Idem, Reading the Old Testament, 47. 6. As we shall see below (chap. 7), Barton is following the lead of Klaus Koch and Rolf Rendtorff, who, in my view, have seriously misrepresented the work of von Rad and Noth. Barton also seems to contradict himself when he states, “Both of these scholars [von Rad and Noth] referred to their own work as ‘traditio-historical.’ Nowadays, however, this term is more commonly reserved for their contribution to the history of Israel’s religions and historical traditions, and the more literary side of their interests would be called redaction criticism” (“Redaction Criticism,” 645). Barton seriously confuses what these two scholars were about. He goes on to state: “Some of the biblical editors have reshaped the material at their disposal so freely that we might call them ‘authors’ rather than mere redactors. For example, the ‘J’ material in Genesis is said by von Rad to represent such a thoroughgoing reworking of its underlying source materials that ‘the Yahwist’ should no longer be called a redactor at all, but an author, an original writer.” How then can von Rad be viewed as a pioneer of redaction criticism? Yet before von Rad, no one viewed the Yahwist as a redactor; the issue for von Rad was quite different. It was the Deuteronomist of Judges-Samuel-Kings who was viewed by many scholars prior to Noth as a redactor, an idea against which Noth strongly objected; Noth viewed him as an author and historian. So how can Noth be considered a pioneer of redaction criticism? Both scholars are badly misrepresented in this way. To this issue we will return in chap. 7.

6

Chapter 1

contradiction. Recent efforts to eliminate this contradiction by eliminating authors and replacing them with editors reaches the ultimate absurdity. The very existence of editors depends on authors whose works they edit, so if there are no authors there can be no editors. Barton’s fourth element of redaction criticism—“changes to the original source material”—seems to contradict the preceding third element because he reverts to the author-editor distinction that he has just destroyed. That is, Barton returns to the original notion behind the Documentary Hypothesis, first asserting that the editors had great respect for their sources and left these literary works ( J, E, and P) largely unaltered. This is presumably how we are able to identify the works as independent, with the editor now largely invisible. Nevertheless, Barton asserts that some editors did in fact make some changes in their sources. His example of this activity, however, comes from the prophetic literature, so it is not clear what he has in mind with respect to the Pentateuch. Still, it is true to say that appeal to the changing of original material by editors is most often made when the language of a text appears to be late or “deuteronomistic,” but the scholar’s literary analysis demands that its “nucleus” or original form be much earlier. Barton admits that modifications of original wording are often hard to prove. That editors, ancient and modern, did “emend” the text they were editing is certainly the case, but the kinds of emendations and the motivations for making them have little in common with the modifications attributed to ancient editors. The fifth element in redaction criticism has to do with “the arrangement of the text.” Barton states: “The redactors of biblical books also arranged existing material into the order in which we now find it.” 7 This activity Barton regards as one of the most important. He provides illustration of this in the case of the Psalter and the prophetic books (a very complex problem about which I will make no comment). He then states: A still more deliberate interpretive intention can be seen in the redaction of the Pentateuch, where material from a wide range of sources, often originally inconsistent with each other, has been arranged so as to tell a single, coherent story running from the creation of the world down to the death of Moses. One may, indeed, speak of many stages in the redaction of the Pentateuch, at each of which such interpretive arrangement must have occurred. Before the four (or more) major sources were combined, each source was itself composed from a variety of older units of tradition. If, as many traditio-historical studies maintain, the stories of the patriarchs (for example) were originally separate stories about unrelated heroes, each used as a cult legend of a particular sanctuary, then the editor we call “J” was already a creative writer who integrated them into a single narrative framework and made each relate to the others.8

7. Barton, “Redaction Criticism,” 647. 8. Ibid.

Introduction

7

This, of course, once again contradicts Barton’s discussion under his element four, where the distinction between editor and source is maintained, and returns to point three, which deals with the editor as author in the Pentateuch and historical books. Here we are left with a complete muddle: the Pentateuchal sources, J E D and P, all of whom are editors, have been combined by yet other editors, who are distinct from sources. Barton is not himself to be blamed for this muddle; he is only reporting on the method used by others. Yet one might have hoped for some reflection on what the term editor actually means, because none of this supposed editorial activity reflects in the slightest way what editors outside of biblical studies actually do. Even so, the idea of redactors as arrangers of biblical books has been taken much further by recent biblical scholarship than perhaps even Barton wants to take it. We frequently hear of the “final redactor” of the Pentateuch as the one who gave this corpus its shape and made it distinct from the books that followed. Some also see signs of a “Hexateuchal redactor” and attribute certain texts to this editor, in addition to the “Pentateuchal editor,” as evidence supporting competing arrangements of books. Here redaction criticism joins forces with canonical criticism and interest in the “final form of the text.” In this case, redaction criticism is used as an explanation for the canonization of Scripture and a legitimation of “holistic exegesis” of biblical books and whole divisions of the Bible, such as the Pentateuch. The “redactional process” becomes equated with the “canonical process” or “innerbiblical exegesis” and is given special sanctity and legitimation, while at the same time redaction criticism bestows scholarly legitimation upon these forms of theological exegesis. In this endeavor, literary analysis often becomes completely subverted by confessional bias and theological concerns. Let us now return to Barton’s definition of redaction criticism. He states: “Redaction criticism is a method of biblical study which examines the intentions of the editors or redactors who compiled the biblical texts out of earlier materials. It thus presupposes the results of source and form criticism, and builds upon them.” 9 As we have seen above, this statement encompasses two quite different and contradictory understandings of redactional activity. On the one hand, redaction criticism, seen as a result of source criticism, attributes a minimal amount of text to editors, who primarily combined the sources, and says almost nothing about their intentions. The Documentary Hypothesis had no need for an independent “redaction criticism.” On the other hand, the redaction criticism that arises out of form criticism is identified with the tradition history of von Rad and Noth, which addresses the literary formation of traditional materials. Here the editors of tradition have now supplanted authors, in the one case von Rad’s J and in the other Noth’s Dtr. Examination of their literary activity and their intentionality is paramount. Yet in place of just two authors, J and Dtr, the denial of authorship

9. Ibid., 644.

8

Chapter 1

in the Pentateuch and the historical books has led to a proliferation of editors such that the whole enterprise of the literary criticism of the Pentateuch and historical books has descended into a morass of “redactional” chaos. The apparent contradiction in Barton’s treatment of redaction criticism and the role of the redactor or editor in the formation of biblical literature is not unique to Barton but inherited from older treatments of this subject. This can be seen in the earlier description of redaction criticism or, more properly, “redaction history” by Klaus Koch. 10 Koch situates redaction history in relation to transmission history and form criticism. Transmission history within the methodology of form criticism deals with the development of tradition from its origins in oral tradition to its latest preliterary stages. Redaction criticism, on the other hand, deals with the stage of the transmission of a tradition in which the oral form is written down. “This, the last, form-critical process is called redaction history. A written text is interpreted against the background of its literary type, setting in life, and its transmission history.” 11 The redaction history of a text is thus its editorial history—that is, the history of its successive editions. This, of course, follows the lead of New Testament studies, which also has tied redaction criticism (Redaktionsgeschichte) to form criticism. This leads Koch into the same contradictory position that we find in Barton. Koch goes on to define what is meant by redactor: “A redactor is one who revises a particular piece of writing. His work is different from an author or writer, who creates something new.” 12 What does Koch mean by “creating something new”? Does a historian create something new by the collection and presentation of his sources, traditional and otherwise, and does he not frequently attempt to revise the understanding of that tradition, as does the Chronicler with the earlier history of Judah? And should we speak of editors’ “revising” the works of others? Do modern editors of the classics or the Scriptures “revise” the texts they edit? Koch points out that redactors previously were viewed in a derogatory way, as persons who made additions that distorted the original. Yet, as we shall see, this derogatory perspective arose precisely because, although some editors were viewed as faithfully preserving the text, others were accused of making “revisions” and thus altering it. Editors of older literary works who deliberately revise the words of the author can only be spoken of in a derogatory way! This distinction is already present in the older Pentateuchal criticism and created some serious problems for it. Koch makes some effort to repair the breach between the two senses of redactor. He states: Form criticism has brought with it a thorough revaluation of the relationship between writers and redactors. The transmission history of most biblical texts reveals that the oral tradition went through a long process of

10. Koch, The Growth of the Biblical Tradition, 57–67. 11. Ibid., 57. 12. Ibid.

Introduction

9

development before it actually came to be written down. Therefore the first writer, whether historical writer or evangelist, did not create anything of literary originality, but he collected and assembled into some sort of order traditions which had already existed and which were found in general circulation. The material which he put into writing had taken shape long ago. He merely took it out of linguistic flow of oral tradition, and by writing it down he froze it into a fixed form. 13

Here Koch has taken a page from New Testament studies, which, in its own curious way, developed a methodology of redaction criticism by viewing the Gospel writers as editors rather than authors; Koch then applied this to the first writers of the Pentateuch and the historical books. Just how it happened that the New Testament Evangelists were transformed into editors will be taken up below (chap. 7). Koch goes on to describe the work of these first writers: Of course the first writers did not record the oral unit as a tape recorder does today. They did in fact compose. From the material they appropriated they took what in their opinion was no longer topical or what was misleading, and worded the piece in the language of their own times. They added explanatory details, perhaps chronological, or geographical. They provided the text with a central theme, thus giving it unity. . . . But, other than a few New Testament letters, no book in the Bible still retains the form it was given when it was first written down. Subsequent generations of redactors took over the work of the first writer and brought it up to date, just as the first writer had done with the oral traditions. Of course the work done by the man who collects and writes down traditions which had hitherto been circulating only orally is greater and more difficult than the work done by those who later revise it. However the basic approach is similar. 14

Quite apart from the fact that this approach to form criticism and tradition history in Pentateuchal studies is problematic, there is every reason to distinguish between an author-historian who shapes his source material into a literary work and someone who attempts to revise some statement within a work that he does not like or who adds an interpolation. To blur this distinction in the interest of making these “redactors” and authors similar or identical is not helpful. Koch admits in a footnote that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the first writer and redactors, and that neither in the case of J in the Pentateuch nor Matthew and Luke in the New Testament can he say whether they are writers or redactors. 15 This admission makes the whole discussion quite untenable. He goes on to state: Redaction history therefore follows the work of both first writer and the subsequent redactors. It traces the path the unit has taken from the time it was 13. Ibid., 57–58. 14. Ibid., 58, Koch’s italics. 15. Ibid., 58 n. 1.

10

Chapter 1 first written down until the time it achieved its final literary form. Therefore whenever the written transmission of a unit is reckoned to have been long, the study of its redaction history is essential. In fact, any text which calls for a study of its transmission inevitably requires a study of its redaction also. 16

What should be obvious from all this is that redaction criticism as it is carried out in the New Testament cannot possibly work in the same way in the Pentateuch. In the Gospels, the first writer is virtually the final redactor, and interpolations, such as the long ending of Mark or the episode in John 8:1– 11, are treated by textual criticism as corruptions, whereas in the Pentateuch the process of writing and redaction goes on in stages, with several successive writers and redactors before the supposed “final redactor.” It seems ironic that Koch describes the study of textual transmission as something different from that which is the object of textual criticism. But, as we shall see, the origin of the notion of editors’ being behind the final form of the text is derived from the parallel notion that editors were responsible for the vulgate recensions of the biblical and classical texts. However, there is no agreement with regard to what the “final form” of the text is or even whether there ever was such a final edited and authoritative form. This will be a major concern of our study. In Koch’s treatment of the “history of research” in the field of redaction criticism, we may discover how it is that Barton and others have regarded von Rad’s work on the Yahwist and Noth’s study of the Deuteronomistic Historian as exercises in redaction criticism. In discussing the rise of “redaction history” in the Old Testament field, Koch states: The turning point came with Gerhard von Rad in his book, Das Formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuch. Perceiving the potential of the tradition history of most of the Hexateuch material, von Rad wheels sharply round and asks how it was that a uniform final composition such as the work of the Jahwist could actually have come about. Here form criticism has at last reached its highest point. The structure of the Jahwistic work, which links such a variety of disparate material, so von Rad discovers, is not merely a literary composition: it is the result of very ancient cultic custom of reciting the salvation history . . . ceremonially at festivals, and to express joyous acknowledgment of it. The traditional confession of faith became the framework for the first Tetrateuchal source, the Jahwist. 17

It is true that von Rad placed a great deal of weight on the so-called little credo of Deut 26:5–9 as an explanation for the framework used by the Yahwist ( J), but he was quite adamant in rejecting Gunkel’s treatment of the Yahwist as if he were merely part of a process of accumulating tradition history and what Koch calls, at the written stage, redaction history. For von

16. Ibid., 58, Koch’s italics. 17. Ibid., 65–66.

Introduction

11

Rad the Yahwist is an author and historian, and to represent him as the beginning of redaction criticism is to do him a grave injustice. The same applies to his remarks about Martin Noth. Koch states: “Von Rad’s work on the first books of the Bible is paralleled by Martin Noth’s work on the Deuteronomistic and Chroniclers’ histories in Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien 1943, and later in Überlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuch 1948. What Noth treats under the title of transmission history is basically only that part of the form-critical method which is concerned with the development of the written material, i.e., redaction history.” 18 Like von Rad, Noth is quite insistent that Dtr is an author and not a mere redactor, so Koch’s statement as it stands is quite misleading. 19 The reason for this questionable reinterpretation of the work of von Rad and Noth is the application of New Testament redaction criticism to the Old Testament. Koch explains: “The term [redaction history] has of course only arisen since the Second World War, and was first adopted by W. Marxsen in his research into the Synoptics. Marxsen, and also Conzelmann in his parallel work on the formation of St Luke, have taken over for the field of New Testament studies the methods evolved by von Rad and Noth for the Old Testament.” 20 This is a most curious attempt to integrate von Rad and Noth into the current method of redaction criticism. The development of the notion that the Evangelists of the Synoptics were redactors owes everything to Wellhausen and nothing to von Rad and Noth, and its application to Old Testament studies is largely 18. Ibid., 66. 19. A more detailed discussion regarding authors and redactors in von Rad and Noth will be taken up below, in chap. 7. 20. Ibid., 66. This statement about von Rad’s and Noth’s influence on New Testament studies is quite misleading. It refers to two brief comments, one in each author. Marxsen, in his preface, says merely that in the matter of “redaction history . . . Old Testament research led the way. In any event, I am grateful for stimulation received for this investigation from Gerhard von Rad’s work on the Pentateuch” (Marxsen, Mark the Evangelist [Nashville: Abingdon, 1969], 7). The statement is not explained further and is virtually meaningless as it stands because von Rad says nothing about “redaction history.” Marxsen’s references to Noth have to do primarily with matters of Jewish history in the first century c.e. and make no reference to the two works of Noth under discussion here. H. Conzelmann, on the other hand, is more illuminating. In the book to which Koch refers, Conzelmann (The Theology of St Luke [London: Faber & Faber, 1960], 11 n. 3) makes the comment: “A significant analogy to our approach can be found in the present-day study of the Pentateuch. This has frequently provided a model for the study of the Synoptics as regards approach and method. The phases of the investigation correspond: literary criticism, Form Criticism, study of the composition and the ‘framework’. Reference should be made to the work of Gerhard v. Rad and Martin Noth.” Because Conzelmann says nothing about Luke as a redactor and everything about the Evangelist as an author and historian as reflected in the mode of composition and “framework” of both the Gospel and the Acts, it is the focus of von Rad and Noth on the respective authors and historians, the Yahwist and the Deuteronomist, that Conzelmann has in mind. Conzelmann seems to stand much closer to Ernst Haenchen (Der Weg Jesu: Eine Erklärung des Markus-Evangeliums und der kanonischen Parallelen [Berlin: Alfred Töpelmann, 1966]), who completely rejects Marxsen’s use of the term “redactor.” To this we will return below in chap. 7.

12

Chapter 1

responsible for the hopeless contradictions that we have seen in this preliminary survey. We will need to examine this development in greater detail below (chap. 7). This brief survey of the handbook descriptions of “redaction criticism” or, more correctly, “redaction history” (i.e., the history of editing in the Hebrew Bible) mandates the examination of a number of problems and topics that will be explored in the following pages. It is clear that the notion of editor came to play a most important role in literary analysis of the Hebrew Bible in the early nineteenth century, especially within the Documentary Hypothesis. As we shall see, however, biblical scholarship was not alone in its use of the notion of editor or redactor. Classical scholarship, especially in its examination of the “Homeric Question,” also developed its own “redactor hypothesis,” which was prominent throughout the nineteenth century and had an important impact on biblical studies. Indeed, so closely were the two disciplines related to each other that we will need to deal with the histories of scholarship in both fields in order to understand properly the role of the “editor” in “higher criticism.” In the seventeenth century, the analogy of the “editor” as one whose task was to restore the often fragmentary works of ancient authors and to reproduce them as a standard text for broad distribution was used to explain the nature of the Pentateuch and historical books of the Bible and, later, the poems of Homer. Much of our investigation will need to focus on how it was that this simple analogy took on a life of its own, with the most bizarre and contradictory results. The current use of “editor” or “redactor” has little in common with this original analogy, and we will need to look at the history of biblical studies to see how it was that this understanding of the role of editor came about within the development of biblical criticism. Furthermore, more than a century after the notion of editor or redactor had come into use in literary analysis, we have the rise of what is called “redaction criticism,” imported from New Testament studies. This development and its particular application within Old Testament studies will need to be examined more thoroughly. As we have seen from the handbooks, redaction criticism (i.e., the history of editing of biblical texts) is said to have arisen not only out of the nineteenth-century legacy of source criticism but also the twentieth-century development of form criticism and tradition history: the editorial history is viewed as the final written phase of the tradition’s transmission history. Since both von Rad and Noth are viewed as scholars who moved from the older concerns of form criticism and tradition history to the composition of literature in its later stage of tradition formation and transmission, they are crucial for the discussion of the newer understanding of the editor’s role in the most recent formulation of redaction criticism. We will therefore need to look carefully at these twentieth-century scholars and whether they can be construed, seemly against their own protestations, as pioneers of the new redaction criticism. We have seen in the above survey that there is no shortage of definitions of the terms redactor and redaction criticism, but these are merely based upon

Introduction

13

what scholars would like the terminology to mean within their methodology. Our review of the history of scholarship in the nineteenth century will reveal that the meaning of the term editor or redactor has undergone a transformation that directly corresponds to changes in literary analysis. The term merely serves at the convenience of literary theory. It therefore seems advisable to look at the broader history of the term editor as it arose in early modern times and what we know about the actual role of editorial activity. This is especially important because scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries began to apply these terms entirely on the basis of analogy drawn from editorial practices familiar to them from their own scholarly activity.

Etymologies and Meanings The terms editor and redactor do not have direct ancient equivalents. These terms were invented in the Renaissance to represent certain kinds of activity related to the production of books. Thus, when the terms were first used in biblical studies to describe what scholars supposed was the ancient equivalent of the activity of editing and the roles of the people involved in an activity of this sort, they used the analogy of editor, a term that was familiar to all scholars in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Because the terms editor and redactor have a broad range of additional meanings and connotations, it would be useful to discuss briefly the primary meanings of the words and the way in which they are derived from the Latin linguistic base. The verb to edit means, in its older primary sense, “to publish, give to the world (a literary work of an earlier author, previously existing in manuscript).” 21 Closely related to this is “to prepare an edition of (a literary work or works by an earlier author),” “to prepare, set in order for publication (literary material which is wholly or in part the work of others).” Later meanings have to do with the role of editors in the production of newspapers and periodicals, films, and other modern extensions that are not relevant for our purposes. Related to this verb is the noun edition, representing the corresponding action “of putting forth, or making public; production”; “the action of producing, or bringing into existence; hence, birth, creation, . . . extraction, origin.” This very general meaning is closely related to its Latin base, as we shall see. More closely related to the verb “to edit,” an “edition” is “one of the differing forms in which a literary work (or collection of works) is published, either by an author himself, or by subsequent editors”; “an impression or issue in print, of a book, pamphlet, etc.; the whole number of copies printed from the same set of types and issued at the same time.” An editor is one who edits. This can mean “the publisher of a book”; “one who prepares the literary work of another person, or number of persons for publication, by selecting, revising, and arranging the materials; also, one who prepares an edition of any literary work.” Again, it

21. OED, 2nd ed., 1989. The following definitions are all taken from this source.

14

Chapter 1

is not necessary to include the activity of newspaper editors and other modern extensions of the term. These terms, of course, are derived from the very common Latin verb edere, which means “to emit,” “bring forth,” “produce,” and has to do with every kind of production, whether of offspring, livestock, agricultural products, as well as performances, declarations, nominations, and so forth. 22 One of its many meanings can relate to producing a book. The noun editio refers to the action reflected in the verb and can therefore represent the product of this bringing forth, a “performance,” “statement,” “nomination,” or “publication (of a book), an edition.” It is significant that the term editor as the actor of the verb edere is not used in antiquity for the writing or production of a book but only as “one who puts on (a public performance).” Consequently, the specialization of the verb “to edit,” its product, “edition,” and the one producing an edition, the “editor”—all terms related to the production of the works of earlier authors, which came about in modern times—should not be anachronistically read back into antiquity. This is even more the case with the term redactor and its related terms, to redact and redaction. These are all modern terms used as synonyms for “editor,” “edit,” and “edition.” They were created as neologisms from the Latin verb redigere and its past participle redactum, “to restore,” which among its many meanings could have the sense “to restore something to its former condition” or “to reduce in size to fit certain limits.” Both of these meanings could be applied to the task of editing, and one who was engaged in such an activity could then be called a “redactor.” But this is a later application of the Latin language to editorial activity in the modern period for which there is no precedent in the ancient period. There is, therefore, even a greater danger of anachronism in the use of this term for “book production” in antiquity. Similar to “redaction” is the term recension, another Latinism developed for the activity of editing. In Classical Latin, the verb recensere, “to make a review or census,” “to pass in review, enumerate,” and the related noun recensio, “the revision of a roll by a censor,” took on an entirely different character in the noun “recension” in the Renaissance and early modern period. It has become a term that is directly related to the preparation of a text from multiple manuscripts for publication in printed form. However, this term too has been used anachronistically in textual criticism to refer to ancient “editing” and will come in for further scrutiny later in this study. It is not enough, however, to lay out the dictionary meanings of these terms; these meanings have a history, and as a consequence it is necessary to review briefly the history of editing. It is this history of practice—what editors actually did when the terms editor and redactor first arose in the Renaissance and early modern period—that must be set over against the application of these terms to the production of ancient biblical literature. It is also a fact that the biblical scholars who first began to apply this terminol-

22. The Latin definitions are taken from the Oxford Latin Dictionary (1982).

Introduction

15

ogy of editing to their analysis of the biblical text were themselves editors of the texts. The very foundation of biblical scholarship rests on the practice of editing known as textual criticism, with which the other disciplines of philology, grammatical study, paleography, historical criticism, and literary criticism then became associated. Thus, when biblical scholars began to imagine how the biblical texts first came into being, they used themselves as the models for the persons who brought these texts together. So when we review the use of this terminology within biblical studies, we will do so against the background of a brief history of editing from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. 23

Understanding Ancient Book Production, Dissemination, and Distribution The reproduction of “editions” of classical texts, such as Homer, in the Roman imperial period goes back to the earlier practices of ancient Greece and particularly those of the Hellenistic centers of Greek culture, such as Alexandria and Pergamum. Consequently, any discussion of ancient editing must pay close attention to the Greek terminology corresponding to the Latin terms discussed above and to what they tell us about the rise of scholarly editing in Hellenistic Alexandria and its relationship to the book trade. The Greek equivalent to Latin editio is ekdosis, cognate with the verb ekdidonai and with the same range of meaning as its Latin counterpart. Because ekdosis has been commonly rendered “edition” and used in connection with various “editions” (ekdoseis) of Homer and other classics, its proper interpretation becomes very important to the proper understanding of ancient editing. The current scholarly understanding of the term ekdosis is based on the often-cited article of B. A. van Groningen, and therefore it would be useful to summarize his discussion and conclusions. 24 In his article, van Groningen attempts to arrive at a precise understanding of the term ekdosis (eßkdosiÍ), often rendered “edition.” To do this, he first deals briefly with two related terms, diadosis (diavdosiÍ) and paradosis (paravdosiÍ). These three terms should be understood as reflecting the history of the text of a literary work in a particular chronological order: ekdosis, diadosis, paradosis. The term paradosis (“tradition”) refers to the process of text transmission through the recopying of the text from manuscript to manuscript, in the course of which the text undergoes certain changes, either deliberate or accidental. It is clear that textual criticism deals with the attempt to reconstruct this process throughout a text’s history, working back to the 23. For a brief overview of the history of editing from the Renaissance to the present, see G. Thomas Tanselle, “Classical, Biblical, and Medieval Textual Criticism and Modern Editing (1983),” in Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 274–321. See also Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 24. B. A. van Groningen, “EKDOSIS,” Mnemosyne 16 (1963): 1–17.

16

Chapter 1

“vulgate” version or archetype, if possible. Such a paradosis produces a stemma or family tree of the oldest traceable archetype text and its subsequent (inevitable) variants. The term diadosis has to do with the wider distribution of a single copy or exemplar of a text through multiple copies, viewed synchronically. This process of distribution could be related to the book trade, but it could also be a case of individual copies made from time to time from an exemplar made available in a library or from some other source, either the original or a secondary version. As van Groningen points out, this process of diffusion of a text need not involve an ekdosis, if we understand the term to mean “edition,” because we generally associate the process of distribution with a particular edition of a text. The diadosis of a text could simply be a case of someone making a personal copy of a readily available exemplar for his own interest or that of another reader. Concerning this process, van Groningen states: “It uniquely depends on the personal interest of the readers; it is arbitrary; it is not at all systematic.” 25 There is no controlled, centralized distribution point, such as a publisher or bookseller, and most diadosis in antiquity was of this kind. This leads van Groningen to discuss the term ekdosis (editio in Latin), from which is derived the modern term “edition,” and the related verb ekdidovai. The verb ekdidovai is used in a range of situations in which an object or person, such as a piece of property, or a daughter in marriage, or a son for adoption, is given over to someone else’s control. One no longer has a claim on the object thus given up. When this is applied to a book (to biblion), it means that the author no longer has control over the text, and it is left to the whims of those who wish to use and abuse it. There was no ancient copyright, no fixed text, and this fact led to great suspicion of the written word. The word spoken directly from teacher to student and transmitted from one generation of scholars to the next was viewed as more trustworthy than the process of scribal transmission, over which an author and his disciples had no control. Consequently, in certain cases, such as the works of Plato, they were kept unpublished (anekdotoi) for a long time by his disciples within the Academy until some time after Plato’s death, when permission to copy them was finally granted and they were thus “published.” Only at this point could one then speak of a text as an ekdosis. To clarify the term ekdosis, van Groningen points to the fact that there could be written compositions such as suggrammata (“treatises”) that may be discussed, annotated, and interpreted as texts but that do not become ekdoseis until they are made available to the public. This leads him to discuss the “editions” of Homer that are associated in the scholia with the names of cities or the names of persons. These so-called “city editions” of Homer’s poems have become prominent in the discussion of the text history of Homer because they are named as sources used by the Alexandrian scholars in their

25. “Elle dépend uniquement de l’intérêt personnel des lecteurs; elle est arbitraire; elle n’a rien de systématique”; ibid., 3.

Introduction

17

“editions” and thus have acquired some importance in the history of ancient editing. Such local “editions,” however, should not be viewed as special recensions or edited versions of the text of Homer. They are merely single exemplars of a text that happen to originate from a particular place. Van Groningen points to evidence from the third century c.e. that archives and libraries of various cities still had their own “municipal exemplars” of Homeric texts, and this is the best way to translate ekdoseis politikai. 26 To this issue we will return in our discussion on the editing of Homer (chap. 5). The association of an ekdosis with a particular person has to do with texts associated with the critical scholars, especially the grammarians of Alexandria. Can we speak of these as “editions”? Citing examples from the literary domains of other Greek authors, van Groningen argues against the notion that the names attached to the ekdoseis of Homer represent the editors of his work. He describes the situation somewhat differently. First, an Alexandrian grammarian attempted, on the basis of the various exemplars that he had in the library, to reconstruct the text and to mark the text with critical signs such as the obelos when he had doubts. He then compared his results with his predecessors and noted these differences with a diple. Alongside this marked text, he produced a commentary (hupomnemata) in an accompanying scroll. When he had completed his work, he submitted it to the library, where it could be consulted by other scholars and by the public. “It is at that moment that he ekdidosi [publishes] his text of Homer with the attached commentary. At that moment there exists only one exemplar, his own.” 27 Van Groningen expresses grave doubt that the libraries of Alexandria would be quick to reproduce and to distribute widely such a large work of at least a hundred papyrus scrolls. It is more likely that colleagues or even subordinates and students would make notations in their own copies of Homer to include the critical signs of their master and copy whatever interested them from the commentary. The Museum would likely be careful to maintain an exemplar and recopy it when necessary. But van Groningen disputes that anything in this permits one to speak of an edition in the modern sense. The effect of the Alexandrian ekdoseis of Homer on the papyrus copies from Egypt seems to be late and limited. 28 He thus feels that everyone should abstain from referring to ekdosis as an “edition.” This matter will be taken up in greater detail below (chap. 5). This treatment by van Groningen raises another issue, with which he does not deal, and this is the obvious etymological connection between ekdosis through Latin editio to “edition” and the related verbs (ekdidonai and edo “edit”) as well. Here again I will anticipate my later discussion. It seems 26. Ibid., 12. He therefore rejects the position of Friedrich Wolf on these texts, which will be discussed below. 27. Ibid., 16. 28. Van Groningen concludes that “the exact sense of the expression such as ekdosis Aristarcheios seems therefore to be this: a recension that Aristarchus has considered as final and of such a nature as to be accessible to the one who has the right” (ibid., 17).

18

Chapter 1

that during the revival of classical learning in the Renaissance the effort of scholars to reproduce new “editions” of the text of Homer and other classics using critical methods, collation of texts, and grammatical study to emend and restore the texts gave a new and expanded sense to the terminology of “edition” and “editing.” It is at this point that ekdosis comes to be combined with diadosis in the sense that the critical text is consciously prepared for wide, more controlled distribution and also becomes combined with paradosis in that any critical reconstruction of the text must reflect the text’s history in its critical notations. The notion of a modern “edition” of Homer comes to mean all of these things together, and editors are those who are engaged in this kind of activity. The early modern practice of publishing ancient texts and the development of the book trade and of printing changed the way in which “editing” was understood. It is in the critical reproduction of the classics and sacred texts that the one responsible for producing a text for public reading, an edition, became an editor distinct from the author himself. The act of editing acquired an association of skills that had to do with critical emendation of the manuscript and the preparation of the text in an appropriate form for its reproduction and distribution. While the scholars of Alexandria were the models, in a limited way, for the critical editing of texts, it is clear that they were not in any way directly connected with the book trade or with the dissemination of a particular form of the Homeric text. It therefore becomes highly anachronistic to consider them or anyone else in antiquity as editors. Editors in the modern sense simply did not exist.

The Revival of Scholarship in the Renaissance and Editing the Classics In the Renaissance and following centuries, as scholars began to understand more fully, through publication and study of the medieval scholia, the place of the Alexandrian scholars in the development of textual criticism and their role in the restoration, preservation, and “canonization” of classical works, later scholarship emulated and improved upon the activity of these early scholars. They not only saw themselves as the continuation of this tradition of learning but also tended to project back onto the ancient scholars their own expanded understanding of their task. They believed the Alexandrian scholars to be responsible for the production of the vulgate text of the classics, such as Homer, Plato, and the Greek tragedies. The best of these ancient “editors” was Aristarchus, while other earlier “editors” such as Zenodotus were considered more suspect and unreliable in their emendations of the text. Emendation (diorthosis) could be the result of collation of texts, but also included grammatical corrections and consideration of an ancient author’s usage (ethos); the latter came to be known as “historical criticism.” However, other reasons for emending a text (e.g., artistic, philosophical, or theological), both in the ancient period and later, in the Renaissance and early modern times, could be seen as corrupting the “editorial” process. Recognition of the fact that editors who were engaged in emending

Introduction

19

texts also changed the text rather than just restoring it and the fact that bad editing could therefore result in textual corruption led, by erroneous reasoning, to the conclusion that ancient revisions and interpolations in a text likewise resulted from the activity of editors. Of course, we know that many errors result from the work of copyists, whose existence is not in doubt. Nevertheless, it is generally assumed that editors producing “authorized” editions, as they did in the Renaissance, also existed in antiquity, and it is enough confirmation of this “fact” merely to find their “fingerprints” in the textual alterations and additions uncovered by critical study. Yet there may be many different causes for changes in a text, whether accidental or deliberate, and unless editors are known to have intervened in the production of a literary work, there is no need to consider any textual change as “editorial.” Consequently, if one is to affirm the notion that editorial activity is reflected in ancient biblical texts and resulted in the production of their “final, authorized form,” it becomes rather important that one also be able to identify the Alexandrian scholars as “editors” who were responsible for the vulgate versions of the works of Homer and other classics. No other persons in antiquity who engaged in producing “edited” texts have a better claim to be considered “editors” of standard editions, and we have much direct evidence about the Alexandrians’ activity. Once it was accepted in the late eighteenth century, through the influencial work of F. A. Wolf, that the Alexandrian scholars were “editors” who produced, through their critical textual activity, the vulgate version of older classical texts, then it was assumed that one could also trace this same editorial process back into earlier editions or redactions to the beginning of a literary work. In the case of Homer, especially, this meant the transition from oral poems to the first written authoritative text. The speculative process of investigating the literary history from the first written formation to the “fixed” vulgate text was its editorial history (Redaktionsgeschichte) 29 and was labeled “higher criticism.” Note that we have come full circle to the discussion of redaction criticism, for we now discover a “redaction history” in Homeric studies in the late eighteenth century, and in this case it arises out of textual criticism. While the object of textual criticism was the reconstruction of the vulgate version produced by the Alexandrian “editors” and as such was labeled “lower criticism,” nevertheless, in the case of both higher and lower criticism, the methodology used by modern scholars involved the supposition of ancient editorial practice. Editors were thought to be involved in the composition of the basic “first edition” of the text, in the transmission of the text in various revised forms, and then in its definitive vulgate version. Once again, the scheme is largely based on the analogy of editorial practice from the rise of the Renaissance onward.

29. However, throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, this process was known as Überlieferungsgeschichte (i.e., the transmission-history of the written text).

20

Chapter 1

It should be clear from this simple sketch that notions about ancient editors and their place in the development of classical literature run parallel to notions about redactors in biblical studies, particularly in the nineteenth century, and they often influenced each other in both directions. This suggests that the subject of editors and “redaction criticism” should not be treated in biblical studies in isolation from similar scholarly study in the classics, especially Homeric studies. Consequently, we will need to undertake a review of the “Homeric question” as it relates to the thorny problem of the editing of Homer. This will serve as an important background for a greater understanding of the editor in both “higher” and “lower” criticism in biblical studies.

Editing the Scriptures in Judaism and Christianity With respect to “lower” textual criticism, this discussion of the editing of classical texts in antiquity has a direct bearing on the scholarly understanding of the “editing” of biblical texts in a number of important respects. First of all, the scribes known as the sopherim, who were thought to have been active in the centuries just before and after the common era, are considered to be largely responsible for the fixing of the final “vulgate” text of the Hebrew Bible and the precursor of the Masoretic Text. Their activity is often compared with that of the Alexandrian scholars, and some even see direct influence from Hellenistic scholarship on the activity of the sopherim. The latter are also considered to constitute the beginnings of a long scholarly continuity of editorial practice that extended from before the common era to the rise of the Masoretic tradition of textual annotation, marginal Masorah to the so-called Textus Receptus of the Ben Asher text (tenth century) and the “authoritative” printed edition of the Masoretic Text, the Second Rabbinic Bible of the sixteenth century. Parallels have been drawn between the Masorah of the Hebrew Bible and the scholia of Homer (notations of variant readings and “corrections” in the margins of some medieval MSS), which encouraged comparison between the textual and literary criticism of Homer and the Bible. In a similar fashion, the early Christian tradition of scholarly editing of the Bible, reflected supremely in the work of Origen and Jerome but also attributed to other early “recensions” of the Greek text of the Bible, likewise raises the question of comparison with the editorial practice of the Hellenistic scholars and their successors. This is because Origen in particular stands in direct continuity, as a grammarian trained in Alexandria, with the Greek tradition of scholarship, and in his great work, the Hexapla, he made use of the same kinds of text-critical signs as were used by the Alexandrian scholars to mark the differences between various Hebrew and Greek texts. However, I have suggested above that there is good reason to doubt that the scholarly tradition of Alexandria was actually comparable to what we would today regard as editing, and this would mean that there is some question

Introduction

21

about whether or not Origen’s purpose was actually to edit the Bible. If Origen, the text-critic, was not an editor but engaged in this scholarly activity for other reasons, as we shall see, then can we speak so glibly about various “editions” and “recensions” of the biblical text for this early period? The implications of this question for textual criticism are obvious. During the Renaissance, the revival of interest in the Greek and Latin classics meant a revival in classical philology, including grammatical study and textual criticism. In the fifteenth century, the correction of classical texts became the fashion. The development of the printing press greatly expanded and improved the scholarship related to textual criticism and the editing of manuscripts. In addition to reproduction of classical works, however, the editor now became indispensable for the production and publication of new works. It was the editor who stood between the ancient writer and the modern printer. The editor became a part of the production of new literary works in a way that simply did not exist in antiquity, when the ancient writer was a scribe who “published” the original single copy of his own work. The creation of publishing houses, literary societies, and institutions of learning, each with its editors, became the indispensable means by which writers could utilize the wonders of the printing press in the publication and distribution of their works. 30 This phenomenon is so common today and taken for granted that it is hard to think about the production of books without editors. 31 This arrangement between writer and editor in the production of literary works was, of course, the rule in the nineteenth century in a manner far more so than it is today. And when scholars thought about the production and publication of the books of the Bible, it was difficult to conceive of them as coming into being without editors. It was editors or redactors who put together the various editions of the Pentateuch, and in the older literary criticism they play only a limited role in the creation of the text itself. However, so far as I can tell, there is no equivalent in antiquity to the indispensable modern editor or redactor. The use of the term redactor in the discussion of the creation or production of new literary works in antiquity is an anachronism.

Additions and Editions There is one other matter that must be addressed in this introduction because it has lead to a great deal of error and misunderstanding in the discussion of editors and editions in antiquity. There seems to be some confusion between additions that were made to older texts from time to time and the

30. See Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 31. Of course, computer technology has once again made it possible for writers to produce their works without this arrangement between writers and editors, and editors and printers. While publication on the internet can bypass much of this arrangement, distribution in hard copy still depends on the old system.

22

Chapter 1

characterization of these additions as new editions, and then attributing to each “edition” an editor who was responsible for the new production. There is, of course, an obvious fallacy in this reasoning. It is true that an addition to a literary work can create a new edition, but it is not the role of the editor to make additions. It may be the writer himself who adds, or a later writer, whose own contribution is kept distinct from the earlier author. If the addition appears without authorization, or posthumously, in a classical work as someone pretending to be the original writer, then an editor may remove the addition as spurious. This was certainly the case with the Hellenistic editing of Homer and other classics. Interpolations are corruptions of the text. The fact that literary works in antiquity were subject to modification by means of additions, often substantial, is not evidence of editorial or redactional activity, and it is an abuse of language to label them as such. Additions made to manuscripts cover a wide range of types and intentions, from mere glosses to large additions and revision, whether by the author or someone else. These may be characterized in different ways by text critics who compare earlier and later exemplars of a text, or by literary critics dealing with a single extant version. Anonymous literary works, such as the biblical text of the Pentateuch, pose special problems for the literary critic, who may want to distinguish between different layers in the composition. Nevertheless, there is no warrant for identifying any literary layer or addition as editorial. Only in a very limited sense do editors revise—for clarity, to correct mistakes, or to overcome difficulties in the text. This was as true in antiquity as it is in modern times, and the degree to which a text is revered as a classic or sacred is the same degree to which the modern editor producing a new edition of the text is conservative in reproducing and not modifying it, if at all possible. It is quite remarkable, therefore, that ancient “editors” are blamed for all kinds of additions and modifications in order to deal with literary problems in the extant corpus of texts, when editors are the least likely persons to be responsible for making additions to the texts of others.

The Task before Us In the above review, I have tried to establish the thesis that notions about “editors” or “redactors” as those responsible for the final compositional form or the standardization of the text of the Hebrew Bible or its parts, books, and divisions are, at the very least, problematic and in my view entirely erroneous. In order to support fully this thesis, we must engage in a step-by-step consideration of all the relevant aspects of this discussion. Much of this is a review of the history of the way in which the role of “editor” has been conceptualized in classical and biblical scholarship. Since the very beginning of historical criticism, it was assumed that editors played a vital role in the production of ancient literary works; our first task therefore will be to examine the early history of editing, beginning with the rise of the scholarly editors in the Hellenistic and Roman periods and their impact, or lack of it, on the creation and dissemination of the final form or “vulgate” versions of the

Introduction

23

text. We will consider first the classical world, where the evidence is the most abundant, and then look at the possible impact of the scholarly tradition of critical “editing” on Jewish scribes responsible for the transmission of the biblical text and later Christian scholars, such as Origen. We will see that the “editors” of antiquity contributed nothing to the composition of the classical and biblical texts and that their influence upon the establishment of vulgate texts was limited, indirect, and accidental. They do not correspond in any way to the “editors” and “redactors” of modern biblical criticism. The period of rather limited editorial activity in antiquity may be compared with the rise of the editor in the Renaissance and his role in the production of standard editions of classical and biblical books in the age of the printing press. The scholarly editor comes into his own as indispensable in this process, and the earliest notions of the editor that appear in historical criticism have precisely this role of editor in mind. This becomes obvious when we begin to survey the histories of classical and biblical scholarship. These editors are extremely conservative with respect to the MSS that they collate and preserve and the corrections that they introduce in order to restore the precise words and text of the ancient authors or sacred books. It is this type of editor that forms the oldest model for the notion of the redactor in biblical criticism, although it should be obvious to us that this analogy is entirely anachronistic. As the scholarship of textual criticism advanced, editors went beyond recension and emendation to identify spurious works wrongly attributed to the ancients, as well as interpolations and expansions in the genuine classics, and these were often attributed to “bad editors.” The invention of anonymous editors of this sort as an explanation for dubious passages paved the way for the two quite contradictory notions about editors and redactors that we encountered above in our brief survey of handbooks on biblical method. In my review of the history of editing in the modern period, I will try to bear out this observation. At this stage in the historical development of editing ancient texts, scholars moved beyond the task of textual criticism to engage in what they called “higher criticism” or “historical criticism.” Here we will narrow our focus to specific areas within classical and biblical studies that have particular significance for the discussion of the editorial history of texts. We will address the “Homeric Question” as it was first set out by Friedrich Wolf at the end of the eighteenth century, in which the notion of editors and an editorial history of the texts of Homers poems played such a major part. Then we will trace the development of Wolf’s legacy in Homeric scholarship throughout the nineteenth century and the eventual challenge to Wolf’s views, primarily in the twentieth century, that led to the demise of his thesis. This review is most important, because the “analytic” approach of Wolf and his followers had so many connections with, and influences upon, biblical studies that what happened in the field of Homeric studies had serious ramifications for the field of biblical studies, especially Pentateuchal scholarship. The stage is finally set for the central focus of this book, the rise of what is now known in biblical scholarship as “redaction history” or “redaction

24

Chapter 1

criticism,” from the seventeenth century until the present. Beginning with Richard Simon, the redactor evolves in the course of the nineteenth century into its most recognizable form in the Documentary Hypothesis of Wellhausen and Kuenen. Throughout this historical survey, it will become clear how much the image of the biblical redactor is formed in the likeness of his pagan counterpart in Homeric studies. It should also be clear how much the concept of the redactor is transformed from a simple analogy in Simon to an increasingly complex and self-contradictory notion by the end of the nineteenth century. Although the twentieth century began with an underlying consensus regarding the Documentary Hypothesis and equally widespread agreement on the Deuteronomistic nature of the historical books from Joshua to Kings, new developments arose that continued to change the way that the “editorial process” or “redaction history” was to be understood. The rise of form criticism, which had its primary focus on the formation of the Pentateuchal and early historical traditions at the oral level (a revival of early-nineteenth-century concerns), tended to shift attention away from editors and authors to a new type of tradition-history of oral tradition. This, in turn, led to a reaction by Gerhard von Rad, who revived the notion of the Yahwist of the Pentateuch as not only an author in his own right but also as a historian. In a similar fashion, Noth reacted to the older notions of the Deuteronomist as merely an editor and elevated him also to the status of historian. Very similar reactions against the older criticism were taking place in Homeric studies, with a new interest in the nature of oral tradition behind the Homeric poems and a new emphasis on Homer as author. In classical studies, this led to the demise of the role of the editor in the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but in biblical studies this did not happen. In the period after World War II, a reaction to form criticism, similar to von Rad’s reaction, developed in New Testament Synoptic studies: the Evangelists were viewed much more as authors in their own right and with their own theologies, in much the same way that von Rad had treated the Yahwist. But instead of simply characterizing them as authors, Willi Marxsen labeled them “redactors” and the study of their mode of composition “redaction criticism” (Redaktionsgeschichte). This very misleading terminology was not only accepted in New Testament studies with the most contradictory consequences but was imported into Old Testament studies as well. As we have seen above, contrary to their own explicit intentions, von Rad’s Yahwist and Noth’s Deuteronomist were now construed as redactors, and the understanding of the “editor” or “redactor” was transformed again to accommodate this new amalgam. This was accompanied by a breakdown in the consensus regarding the Documentary Hypothesis, with the result that some simply wanted to do away with the older sources in the form of authors, particularly the Yahwist, and merely retain the “editors.” This development of “redaction criticism” no longer retains the slightest resemblance between the original analogy of the editor—who carefully collects and preserves his ancient documents, his historical sources, or his authors and

Introduction

25

faithfully presents them for publication—and the “redactor” in current biblical scholarship—who adds to and changes his sources at will. To lay bare this curious history of the editor is sufficient to condemn current usage as quite untenable. The use of the analogy of the scholarly editor who meticulously prepares the final standard edition (editio princeps) of an ancient work through recensio and emendatio could be used in a quite different way from that of the “redactor” in higher criticism—namely, to suggest that the “vulgate” text of the Hebrew Bible and its major rival “editions,” the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Greek Septuagint, could likewise be viewed as the result of editorial (i.e., recensional) activity. Because these two conceptions of ancient editor, however contradictory and mutually exclusive they may seem, were originally closely associated throughout the nineteenth century, it is necessary to review, however briefly, some of the scholarly discussion on the history of the biblical text. We have already seen that, in the view of van Groningen, it is quite anachronistic to regard the “editions” of antiquity as the result of editorial activity in the modern sense and that the greatest of the ancient critical editors, Aristarchus, was not responsible for the text and publication of any standard editions of classical authors; this view will be affirmed below (chap. 2). In the same way, it may be asserted that no such “editions” or “recensions” of biblical texts existed. Because the Alexandrian scholars are often used as ancient models for early biblical scribes, any critical appraisal of the former ought to have important consequences for our understanding of the latter. Thus, we will need to evaluate the current discussion of textual criticism of the Old Testament as it relates to a critical issue: the role of the “editor” in the standardization of the biblical text. Because the standard or “final form” of the text is often tied to the issue of its canonization, the “editors” responsible for the “final form” are also viewed as the “canonizers” of Scripture. It is in this way that “canonical criticism” and redaction criticism converge in a kind of mutual affirmation. To raise serious questions about the very existence of such editors or redactors, on the one hand, and doubts about the deliberate standardization of the biblical text, on the other, has serious consequences for “canonical criticism,” especially as it is reflected in the work of Brevard Childs and James Sanders. In a similar vein but with different terminology, the hermeneutical method known as “innerbiblical exegesis” rests on the notion that the redactors all stand in a tradition of exegetical interpretation, from the earliest written formation of the text down to rabbinic times. The redactional process is meant to encompass the entire literary development of biblical texts, down to their standardization and canonization by these same scribes, who then shifted to a midrashic exegesis, external to the text, that was ultimately codified in the Mishnah and Talmud. This method also deserves closer scrutiny, because it runs counter to all of the evidence presented in this study that disputes the existence of such redactors. Finally, the question must be asked: What difference does it make in our understanding of the biblical texts? If one eliminates the editor as an option

26

Chapter 1

in both higher and lower criticism of the Bible, then other ways must be advanced to explain features in the text that have been thought to reflect multiple authorship, interpolations, and additions, and the like. This, of course, cannot possibly be done in any detail in the short space of a final chapter. And yet, both von Rad and Noth already suggested a way out of this dilemma in their understanding of Israelite historiography and both the Yahwist and the Deuteronomist as historians. We do have abundant examples of ancient historians whose work may be used for comparative purposes, and we may test this model of historian in preference to the model of editor as a way of accounting for the peculiar character of the Pentateuch and historical books of the Old Testament, the context in which this redactional hypothesis arose in the first place.

2

The Early History of Editing The Rise of Homeric Scholarship in the Pre-Hellenistic Period There is a very good reason for beginning our discussion of the early history of editing with the editing of Homer because, as we shall see, the history of Homeric scholarship has much in common with biblical, and particularly Pentateuchal, scholarship. Indeed, Homer’s poems were viewed as inspired and “canonical” and the fundamental basis of a common Greek culture and religion long before the same could be said for the books of Moses. They were recited at special festivals and were the foundation of Greek education and were emulated by other works of literature. And from the rise of Hellenism onward, there is every reason to believe that Homer provided both a rival and a model for the way in which Jews viewed Moses and the rest of their own inspired classics. This impact also applies to the first steps in the critical “editing” of Homer and the other Greek classics, on the one hand, and the “editing” of the Bible on the other. These are the issues that we will try to address in this chapter. Later in our discussion we will address the impact of Homeric scholarship on biblical scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A major study of the early history of editing is the work of Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginning to the End of the Hellenistic Age (1968), which forms the basis of many other summary descriptions of the subject. 1 Pfeiffer sets out his task in his Preface with some important remarks that are also relevant for my study. He states: Nobody will deny to scholarship, whether in its highest or in its humblest form, its own right, and as long as one carries on the daily work of interpretation, of textual criticism, of historical reconstruction one may expect approval; but to turn from that activity to reflection upon the past of scholarship and upon the scholars of bygone days may be deemed inopportune and unnecessary. Yet, if such skepticism is by any means to be converted, it will surely be by confrontation with the very facts of history; and to make the important facts visible in their historical perspective is precisely our purpose. For it was in the course of time and the succession of peoples and generations that the full nature and the many forms of

1. Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginning to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968).

- 27 -

28

Chapter 2 scholarship were revealed. The history of classical scholarship, therefore, is classical scholarship in the making. 2

Much of this history of scholarship has to do with the history of editing, so to properly understand and criticize the current practice of scholarship we must confront the facts of this history and how it gave rise to a form of scholarship that made the ancient editor so important in the analysis of the biblical text. The main focus of Pfeiffer’s work is on the scholars that we associated with the Museum and its Library in Alexandria under the Ptolemies and those who could reasonably be regarded as the first textual critics and editors of classical works. Pfeiffer refers to the Alexandrian scholar-poets as the “noble ancestry” of modern classical scholars, 3 but there is a certain sense in which they are also ancestors of biblical scholarship, not only of obvious ancient scholars such as Origen and Jerome, but also the proto-Masoretic scribal tradition and the later Masoretes, who borrowed much from their Hellenistic forbears. Furthermore, in a curious way they have become the ancestors of the “higher critics” of modern biblical scholarship. It is this connection that I want to trace because it has very important implications for understanding the development of the discipline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Pfeiffer begins with the following definition of scholarship: Scholarship is the art of understanding, explaining, and restoring the literary tradition. It originated as an intellectual discipline in the third century before Christ through the efforts of poets to preserve and to use their literary heritage, the ‘classics’. So scholarship actually arose as ‘classical’ scholarship. 4

It is important to note that Pfeiffer is using the term scholarship in the older sense of “philology” and all those aspects of study that were associated with a set of disciplines under this rubric. The history of biblical scholarship in this sense is the history of philology as it relates to the study of the Bible, and it is therefore inevitable that it has its roots in classical philology. Pfeiffer continues: At least three centuries had prepared the way, and their contribution should not be minimized. On the contrary, there had been very important attempts at studying the language, collecting learned material, and applying some form of literary criticism. But all these efforts belong to the history of poetry, historiography, philosophy, or pedagogy. It was only when the new Hellenistic civilization changed the whole perspective in this field as in others that these various activities, formerly disconnected, were united into one selfconscious discipline. In this sense the history of classical scholarship does not start before the third century. 5 2. Ibid., vii. 3. Ibid., x. 4. Ibid., 3. 5. Ibid.

The Early History of Editing

29

Pfeiffer proceeds in the first part of his book to review the antecedents of the scholarship in the three centuries that preceded the Hellenistic period. 6 There are certain issues that must be addressed in this period because of their importance in modern Homeric scholarship, so we will look, in particular, at the early development of Homeric scholarship. Pfeiffer begins with the epic poets themselves: The epic poets were inspired by the Muses, and the poet who created the main part of our Iliad is the greatest poet of all time. It has often been said that Homer must be his own interpreter; this is true also in a quite specific sense. He not only created but again and again ‘interpreted’ his own powerful language in the course of his poem. Thus the earliest Greek poetry that we know included a sort of ‘philological element’; poetry itself paved the way to its understanding. This is of signal importance for the origin and development of scholarship. . . . On the other hand, one should not speak of ‘Homer as a philologist’. When epic poets themselves add elucidating words, half-lines, lines to ambiguous expressions, or to proper names, this may be due to a desire to make themselves clear, but no less to pleasure in playing on words, to delight in similarity of sound. It is certainly a genuine part of their traditional poetical technique, not a combination of learning and poetry. 7

As will become apparent below, an important aspect of philology is the editing of ancient texts, in which the task of explaining obscure words plays an important part. Consequently, it is equally important to note that these explanatory words and phrases do not necessarily constitute evidence of editorial (“redactional”) activity. In Pfeiffer’s judgment this is a quite inadmissible anachronism. Pfeiffer proceeds to give a large number of examples of epexegetical, etymological, and even “allegorical” elements in the Homeric poems. All of these Pfeiffer attributes to the original “great poet” who had created them. 8 Regarding the activity of the rhapsodes, the poets who preserved the Homeric tradition for future ages by their recitations, Pfeiffer states: They had, as before, some difficulty with old and rare single words or strange combinations of them; they, therefore, sometimes altered their original form and even gave them new meaning. This reshaping may appear to the modern mind quite arbitrary or even mistaken; yet it can be regarded as an early attempt at interpreting the traditional text. But there must have been a limit beyond which the rhapsodes were no longer free to make their own additions or to reshape the epic texts.9

This stage of rhapsodic interpretation in the course of poetic transmission cannot be considered editorial anymore than the previous stage. 10 It is part 6. Ibid., chaps. 1–3. 7. Ibid., 3–4. 8. Ibid., 4–5. 9. Ibid., 5–6. 10. This has relevance to our later discussion of innerbiblical exegesis.

30

Chapter 2

of the very character of oral performance and is altogether different from the scholarly editorial process that will be viewed below. Yet many scholars feel that it accounts for at least some of the subsequent textual variation in the poems of Homer. Pfeiffer then turns to deal with the question of the collection of epic poems into the written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and here he addresses the theory of the so-called Peisistratus recension. He states: Here we have only to state the well-known fact that the story that Peisistratus ‘assembled’ the formerly ‘scattered’ songs of Homer cannot be traced back beyond the first century B.C. Not only in the later embroideries, but in the whole conception of a powerful statesman as a collector of literary texts, as the earliest founder of a Greek ‘library’, as head of a committee of scholars, we seem to have a projection of events of the Ptolemaic age into the sixth century. Yet in modern times, from d’Aubignac and Bentley to Lachmann, that late ancient tradition was regarded as trustworthy. 11

Pfeiffer goes on to point out that “defective” ancient texts were emended to include the notion of Peisistratus as a “collector” of the Homeric poems, though no such reference exists in the text. He mentions a number of scholars who supported this reconstruction of Peisistratus’s compilation, although he does not include Wolf, whose views will be taken up below. However, he does refer to the “first penetrating criticism of the traditional belief in the Peisistratus legend” 12 by George Grote, which we will consider below, but Grote’s view did not receive a great deal of attention in his own time. This legend of Peisistratus forms one of the major foundation stones for the notion of a kind of editorial board, the “redactor,” at the crucial transition of Homer from the oral tradition stage to that of a composite written text. 13 Pfeiffer disputes in the strongest way this legend of a Peisistratus recension as an anachronism and admits only that the tradition points to “the lively activity of so-called rJayådoi as reciters of epic poems in the sixth century, often at competitive performances.” 14 The contradictory testimony to this early age seems to agree on the facts that the contests were held at the festival of the Panathenaea and that they followed a rule that each recitation must continue at the point where the preceding reciter left off. From this Pfeiffer concludes: In the sixth century, therefore, a traditional text must have been available to which the rhapsodes were compelled to keep; they now became the professional reciters of established literary works ascribed to ‘Homer’. In the new, the lyric, age these epic poems were acknowledged as ‘classical’; and the persons known to have not only recited but also explained and criti11. Ibid., 6. This theory of the Peisistratus recension will be taken up in much greater detail below. 12. Ibid., 7. 13. The parallel with Pentateuchal studies is obvious. See below, chap. 6. 14. Ibid., 8.

The Early History of Editing

31

cized them from their own point of view were again rhapsodes. This fact, though often overlooked, is particularly significant. For it shows that it was poetically gifted or at least poetically minded people, who made the first attempt at interpreting the heritage of the epic age; one may even regard it as a continuation of the earlier self-interpretation of the poets.15

Here a process of the transmission of the Homeric tradition is described that involves a controlling written version as well as oral performance with some continuous interpretation and therefore presumably continual modification of the text within limits. Yet there is no need to label any of this process as editorial or “redactional,” and indeed it would be misleading to do so. Pfeiffer deals with the subsequent development of criticism of Homer, especially in the philosophical tradition, as well as the efforts by the rhapsode to defend himself against this Socratic detraction. It also appears that, alongside an increasingly conservative trend in the transmission process, the rhapsodes made collections of “rare and obsolete epic words,” glossai, as well as “the explanations of Homeric proper names and obscure words by ‘etymology,’” 16 and these became a common feature of both philosophical and antiquarian learning by the fifth century. Very important for the prehistory of philology or scholarship, in Pfeiffer’s view, are the Sophists, and yet he insists that they should not themselves be viewed as scholars or “humanists.” He states: “Sophists concerned themselves not with the values that imbue man’s conduct with ‘humanitas’, but with the usefulness of their doctrine or technique for the individual man, especially in political life.” 17 Yet a number of their activities bear upon the future development of scholarship, in particular their relationship to the book. He states: The very existence of scholarship depends on the book, and books seem to have come into common use in the course of the fifth century, particularly as the medium for Sophistic writings. Early Greek literature had to rely on oral tradition, it had to be recited and to be heard; even in the fifth and fourth centuries there was a strong reaction against the inevitable transition from the spoken to the written word; only the civilization of the third century can be called—and not without exaggeration—a “bookish” one.18

At this point, Pfeiffer goes into an extended discussion of the rise of writing in the ancient world, including Mesopotamia and the Levant, and the rise of an alphabetic script and the use of leather rolls. The discovery of Linear B as an early Greek script does not really bear on the development of writing

15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 12. 17. Ibid., 17. 18. Ibid., 17. This continuation of the value and respect for oral tradition long after the production of literary works is dealt with in detail by R. Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); idem, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

32

Chapter 2

for literary purposes. It is the Phoenician origin of the alphabet and its modification that is the most important for Greek literature. Out of this extensive review, Pfeiffer raises two important questions: “how far first poetry and then philosophy were written down and at what time some form of commercial publication finally came into being.” 19 He then continues: If we try to answer the two questions in the last paragraph, we are led to distinguish four periods. There probably was first a time of merely oral composition and oral tradition of poetry. The second stage, we assume without further proof, began with the introduction of alphabetic writing. Epic poets, heirs of an ancient tradition, began to put down their great compositions in the new script: we still possess as the product of that creative epic age the two ‘Homeric’ poems. The transmission remained oral: the poets themselves and the rhapsodes that followed them recited their works to an audience; and this oral tradition was secured by the script which must have been to a certain degree under proper control. There is, so far, no evidence for book production on a large scale, for circulation of copies, or for a reading public in the lyric age. The power of memory was unchallenged, and the tradition of poetry and early philosophy remained oral. From the history of script and book we get no support for the belief that Peisistratus and Polycrates were book collectors and founders of public libraries. 20

It is only in the third period that literacy becomes significant. He states: “No further change is noticeable until the fifth century, when the third period began, one in which not only oral composition, but also oral tradition, began to lose its importance. The first sign of this is the sudden appearance of frequent references to writing and reading in poetry and art from the fifth century onwards.” 21 This third period, which is the one in which he places the Sophists, is succeeded, through a slow process of change, by the fourth period in the Hellenistic age. It was only in this last period that “a conscious method of paravdosiÍ, of literary tradition by books, became established.” 22 As a context for his discussion of paradosis, Pfeiffer presents the evidence for the rise of the book trade and a reading public in the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e. He states: “In the course of the fifth century the tragic poets, the historians, and the Sophists became the predominant figures in the literary life of Athens.” In each case there was, to begin with, a strong connection with oral performance. “The Tragedies were composed for performance in the theatre of Dionysus, but were also available as ‘books’ afterwards.” 23 This meant that not only were the plays available to readers but they could be performed again at a later date. In a similar fashion, it is likely that He19. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginning, 24. 20. Ibid., 25. The matter of the transmission from oral to written will be taken up again below, in chap. 5. 21. Ibid., 25. Pfeiffer gives the evidence for this in an extended discussion, pp. 25–32. It would be useful to compare his summary with the view of Wolf. See below, chap. 5. 22. Ibid., 27. 23. Ibid., 28.

spread is 9 points long

The Early History of Editing

33

rodotus’s history was first presented as a series of public lectures for entertainment and only later put together in a single work. Thucydides, on the other hand, seems to emphasize that he is writing a permanent record for posterity that has future readers in mind. 24 Pfeiffer suggests that the Sophists in particular, in connection with their manner of pedagogy, greatly encouraged the production of books as “practical textbooks.” 25 This procedure was still controversial at this point, as is evident from the Platonic criticism of such methods of book learning. In this respect, Pfeiffer makes an important observation about this criticism. He states: Two points in these much discussed passages [of Plato] are relevant to our purpose. In the first place the immediate target for the attacks was the Sophists, their exaggerated respect for the written word, and their own preference for the use of books. Such an attitude, it was argued, propagated by influential teachers, was bound to weaken or even destroy physical memory (mnhvmh), on which the oral tradition of the past was based, and in the end would be a threat to true philosophy, which needs the personal intercourse of the dialectician to plant the living word in the soul of the listener. The second point may have been still more important for the future. The Socratic and Platonic arguments are the expression of a general, deeply rooted Greek aversion against the written word; they strengthened this instinctive mistrust in later ‘literary’ ages also and helped to promote sober ‘criticism’. The Greek spirit never became inclined to accept a tradition simply because it was written down in books. The question was asked whether it was genuine or false, and the desire remained alive to restore the original ‘spoken’ word of the ancient author when it was obscured or corrupted by a long literary transmission. 26

It is this second point of “criticism” that is most important for our discussion. Pfeiffer proceeds to illustrate various types of criticism of literary works, especially Homer, but these are not an investigation of Homer’s work for their own sake but for its practical application, the development of style, the proper use of language and rhetoric, and so forth. From his survey of Sophist criticism, Pfeiffer raises the question whether the Sophists ever advanced to the point of engaging in literary criticism and answers it in the negative. He states: At first it may be unexpected and somehow disappointing that in the age of the Sophists no distinct traces can be found of that krÇsiÍ poihmavtwn, which was to be regarded as ‘the finest flower of scholarship’ in the best Hellenistic times. On second thoughts, however, we may find this result in harmony with the general line we took that the Sophists should not be regarded as ‘pioneers of scholarship’. The study of epic poetry only subserved their rhetorical and educational aspirations.27

24. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 27. Ibid.,

29. 31. 31–32. 45.

34

Chapter 2

Another contribution to the future development of scholarship is reflected in the activity of Hippias of Elis, in particular, his development of the field of archaiologia, “antiquities.” This involved the collection of traditions of ancient times in ethnography, genealogy, customs, and the like, gleaned from many different sources. These materials seem to have followed the format of lists or catalogs, including victors of Olympic games, philosophers, poets, and the like. “The Sophist was in need of this knowledge as orator and teacher; as in other fields, it was not a scholarly interest in the customs of life in former ages or even in the ‘history of culture’, but the practical requirements of his calling, that inspired his efforts.” 28 In fact Pfeiffer sees a continuity between the rhapsodes of the earlier period and the Sophists of the fifth century. In both cases Plato regards them as having “neither ‘art’ nor ‘knowledge’.” 29 Pfeiffer sums up their contribution in this way: Their various activities in the literary field were based only on observation and practical experience. There can be no doubt about their own efficiency and their kindling of sparks in other minds. They made a decisive contribution to the development of the book on which the rise and further existence of scholarship depended. They awakened and maintained a new interest in early poetry, even if interpretations meant no more to them than mental training. Rhetorical virtuosity was the immediate result of their analysis of language and their ‘critical’ study of literature. Nevertheless, their genuine love of language was not without stimulating influence on generations who started more serious researches. Finally, if they had to accumulate wide erudition for their performances and the instruction of pupils, such collections turned out sometimes to be suggestive for later studies. But all their endeavours, considerable as they were, had a more or less casual and arbitrary character; even the mathematics they taught apparently remained on an empirical level. 30

For our particular concern in this study, the point that Pfeiffer makes about the role of the Sophists in the transmission of the Homeric tradition is clear. They did not engage in critical studies of the poetic tradition for the sake of its pure preservation but for quite different, rhetorical and educational purposes, and it was only later in the fourth period, the Hellenistic age, that use was made of their “critical” study for editorial purposes. In no way can the Sophists themselves be viewed as editors or redactors of the Homeric tradition. 31 Pfeiffer discusses Aristotle’s relationship to the history of classical scholarship. Fundamental to his place in scholarship was his role as collector: “Aristotle and his followers could not have achieved their immensely learned compilations if they had not accumulated as many writings of the 28. Ibid., 52. 29. Ibid., 55. 30. Ibid., 55–56. 31. Contra Friedrich Wolf, Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), chap. 37, to be discussed below in chap. 5.

The Early History of Editing

35

past as they could get a hold of; after the occasional allusions to modest earlier collections it is well attested that the first large private library was founded by Aristotle and passed on to his successors, who probably transferred it to the Lyceum.” 32 In this connection, Aristotle wrote a book on Homeric Problems in which there was a collection of the questions that had exercised earlier critics and to which he proposed solutions. However, contrary to some late witnesses, Pfeiffer states: “Aristotle, we conclude, made no recension of the Homeric or any other text; neither was he an ‘interpreter’ of the Homeric poems. What he actually did was to answer a long series of attacks by censorious critics; according to his theory, these poems were above such censure, and he had to prove their absolute superiority.” 33 By Aristotle’s time and under his influence, Homer was the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the rest of the epic poems were excluded from that status. Aristotle, following the earlier lead of such sophists as Hippias, was a great collector of texts and of information contained in texts, and this ultimately created the basis for the Lyceum collection of works and the precursor of the Alexandrian Library collection. It is important to observe at this point that, although Aristotle was a prodigious collector and dealt with problems in the text of the poems and their overall interpretation, activities in which later Hellenistic editors also engaged, he himself was not an editor of the text of Homer. 34

Alexandrian Scholars and the Editing of Homer Pfeiffer sees the beginning of the third century as marking the rise of scholarship, primarily in Alexandria. The Greek term for scholar is kritikos, “critic,” having to do with the literary heritage of the past. Zenodotus, the first true scholar, was the one who “initiated Homeric studies on a grand scale and in a methodical way both as editor and lexicographer.” 35 It is 32. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginning, 67. 33. Ibid., 72. 34. This is against the view of Wolf, Prolegomena, chap. 40, that Aristotle edited his own edition of Homer. 35. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, 92. Pfeiffer has some important comments on Antimachus (pp. 93–95), who dates to about 400 B.C.E. and was known as a poet and scholar (“critic”) but not as an “editor” (diorqwthvÍ). This figure is important because he is the only one before the Alexandrian who is credited with his own “edition” among those handed down under the scholar’s own name, kat’ andra. T. W. Allen (Homer: Origins and Transmission [Oxford: Clarendon, 1924], 297–99) lists all of the readings of this edition that are found in the scholia. There is nothing particularly distinctive about this “edition,” which appears to be similar to the editions classified as kata tas poleis, those coming from various cities and dating to about the same time, a century before Zenodotus. Pfeiffer states: “We have no reason to assume that Antimachus made a ‘recension’ of the Homeric poems, collating manuscripts and emending the text; his work is never called a ‘diovrqwsiÍ’” (p. 94). And according to Pfeiffer: “This is the decisive difference between Antimachus and Zenodotus” (p. 94). See Wolf (Prolegomena, chaps. 39–40), where Antimachus is treated as an editor of Homer.

36

Chapter 2

Zenodotus who is called the first editor (diorqwthvÍ) of Homer by the scholia. The context for the work of Zenodotus and his successors was the new institution, the “Museum,” instituted by Ptolemy I, the one “who brought together the Museum.” The “assembly” or “community” had a “religious character,” which was “shown by the fact that its head was a priest nominated by the king, the priest of the Museum,” and whose members were all “devoted to the service of the Muses.” 36 This was appropriate because the muses were those who had inspired the writings that were to be collected and studied in this place. From its early days, scholarship was ridiculed as carried on by “rare birds” in a cage, somewhat like modern academics in an “ivory tower,” and their critical work on texts denigrated. Thus, the “old copies” of Homer were often preferred to those “corrected” by scholars. 37 Indeed, their work was largely confined to a small group of literati within the confines of the library, and there was no mechanism for a broad distribution of the works or dissemination of their views apart from a group of students. The development of editing goes hand in hand with the increase in the use of the book in the rise of literacy and learning, and this reaches a new stage in the Hellenistic era, 38 which Pfeiffer describes as “a ‘bookish’ one.”He goes on to state that The book is one of the characteristic signs of the new, the Hellenistic, world. The whole literary past, the heritage of centuries, was in danger of slipping away in spite of the learned labours of Aristotle’s pupils; the imaginative enthusiasm of the generation living towards the end of the fourth and the beginning of the third century did everything to keep it alive. The first task was to collect and to store the literary treasures in order to save them forever. It is precisely to this period, the later decades of the fourth century b.c., that we can assign the earliest of the papyri which have come to light in Egypt and provide us with actual specimens of Greek books. . . . These books were the necessary means for the regeneration of poetry as well as for the birth and growth of scholarship.39

While Pfeiffer allows for some stimulus from Near Eastern and Egyptian civilizations and their institutions of learning, collections of texts, and scribal techniques, he places primary emphasis on the Greek alphabetic script, which made literature accessible to everyone. Coupled with this was the accessibility of the Alexandrian libraries that “were open to everyone who was able and willing to read and to learn. . . . The unprecedented interest in books was kindled by the new scholar poets, who were in desperate need of texts; by a notable coincidence the royal patrons and their advisers immedi-

36. Ibid., 96. 37. Ibid., 98. 38. See also William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Thomas, Oral Tradition; idem, Literacy and Orality. 39. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, 102.

spread is 3 points long

The Early History of Editing

37

ately fulfilled these imperative demands in a princely way.” 40 Pfeiffer briefly draws a comparison with the revival of learning at the end of the medieval period, and we will come back to this in greater detail below. As we shall see, it is in the renewed effort of the fifteenth century and later that the great urge to recover and restore the ancient classics led to the rise of the scholarly editor in the modern era. And the great acceleration of book production with the invention of the printing press had a decisive role in bringing this about. Yet for all the similarity of the later age, there were still important differences between that later age of editors and the scholars that came to the fore in the Hellenistic era, and it is this difference that we need to explore. Pfeiffer attempts to offer some idea on the nature of the Homeric text in the time of Zenodotus, its first editor (diorqwthvÍ), 41 in order to gauge what he then did with it. He states: “The frequent quotations by writers of the fourth century, especially Plato and Aristotle, show considerable variants.” 42 Cautioning that these quotations are always difficult to use, Pfeiffer turns to the earliest papyri fragments, of which for this period there are about 20 out of 680 total Homeric papyri, a small but quite significant number. They surprisingly differ not only from our medieval manuscript tradition, but also from the papyri later than 150 b.c.; quite a number of new lines (‘plus verses’) and of new readings occur besides a few omissions. It would be too much to say that these early Ptolemaic texts give the impression of a ‘chaos’; but we can appreciate Zenodotus’ problem when we realize that he was confronted with such a great number of more or less differing copies. 43

Pfeiffer goes on to suggest that there is no evidence that Zenodotus had access to some superior copy from Athens as a base text. Many copies from cities [ekdoseis kata poleis] all over the Greek world were assembled in the royal library. . . . It is not improbable that Zenodotus, examining manuscripts in the library, selected one text of Homer, which seemed to him to be superior to any other one, as his main guide; its deficiencies he may have corrected from better readings in other manuscripts as well as by his own conjectures. DiovrqwsiÍ can be the term for either kind of correction. 44

When it comes to assessing just how Zenodotus actually treated the text of Homer, there is, on the one hand, the testimony of ancient critics, who accused him of “making arbitrary changes for wrong internal reasons,” 45 and, 40. Ibid., 103. 41. Pfeiffer (ibid., 105–7) discusses this term and the related verb diorqouÅn as referring to an editor who makes critical editions. 42. Ibid., 109. See Allen (Homer, 249–70) for early quotations. 43. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, 109–10. 44. Ibid. Pfeiffer draws a parallel to the Italian humanists of the Renaissance who were confronted with multiple divergent medieval manuscripts and had to make the same kind of choices. More on this below, chap. 4. 45. Ibid., 114.

38

Chapter 2

on the other hand, the witness of the papyri that he probably did have grounds, based on variant readings, for the changes that he did make. Because Zenodotus was a poet as well as a scholar, some modern critics have accused him of inserting his own verses into the text of Homer. To this Pfeiffer replies: “It would be farcical for the first diovrqwthvÍ [‘critical editor’] of the genuine Homeric text to play the part of the disreputable diaskeuastaÇ [‘revisers’], as they were called.” 46 There is no evidence that Zenodotus wrote a commentary on the text of Homer, as the later scholars did, but he did create a glossary in alphabetic order. And he invented the use of critical signs, specifically the obelus. Pfeiffer states: This was the first time that an editor had provided the serious reader and scholar with an opportunity of appraising his critical judgment. Zenodotus did not suppress the lines of which he doubted the genuineness, but left them in the context, marking them, however, on the margin with the obelus; he disclosed his own opinion and enabled the reader to check it. The early Ptolemaic papyri with their bewildering quanitity of ‘plus verses’, the poluv sticoi, revealed more clearly than any previous considerations how urgently necessary it was to distinguish the insertions from the original text. 47

Pfeiffer cites an interesting instance in which the poet Apollonius of Rhodes, author of the epic Argonautica, in making frequent use of Homer, preferred to use the old traditional koine editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In a monograph, Against Zenodotus, Apollonius objected to Zenodotus’s critical edition and followed a more conservative approach to the text. 48 One of the tasks of the librarians of the Museum was to compile a catalog of the papyrus scrolls, reaching a half million in number, 49 and this Callimachus did in a thorough and systematic way in his “lists” or “tables” (Pinakes). 50 P. M. Fraser describes Callimachus’s achievement in this way: His main work was the Tables (PÇnakeÍ), or, to give it its full title, Tables of persons eminent in every branch of learning together with a list of their writings. . . . Of this very influential work little remains of the original one hundred and twenty books of which it was composed. It was a sort of universal bi46. Ibid. This distinction between the diorthotes, “editor,” and diaskeuastai, “revisers,” is important for the later use by Kuenen, who employs both terms to describe the “redactors” of the Pentateuch. The lexicon suggests very similar meanings for both, but with the former there is the added element of a “critical” edition. 47. Ibid., 115. 48. Ibid., 146–47. It would not be surprising to find this same approach to the biblical texts in Judaism and, as we shall see, this was very much the case. 49. P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, vol. 1: Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 329. 50. Ibid., 452–54. See the extensive treatment by Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginning, 126–34; also M. Hadas, A History of Greek Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), 199.

The Early History of Editing

39

ography and bibliography, in which the authors and others were arranged according to subjects—‘Table of Lyric poets’, ‘Table of Orators’, ‘Table of Philosophers’, and so on—alphabetically under each heading. The amount of detail recorded is uncertain, but it appears that each entry normally contained a brief biography of the subject, followed by the titles of his works (or, where necessary, the opening lines), also listed alphabetically, and the total number of lines in the edition consulted by Callimachus.51

Fraser emphasizes that this work “was not the catalogue of the Library, as has often been supposed. . . . It was an independent work of scholarship conceived in the tradition of Aristotle himself, . . . but elaborated and transformed to suit a new purpose.” 52 The work became a valuable literary tool in its own right. The later librarian-scholars, Aristophanes and Aristarchus, took up again the task of editing texts apparently neglected by Callimachus, but they manifested a more conservative attitude toward the “‘old text’ hallowed by tradition” 53 than the text reflected in Zenodotus and endeavored to preserve it at all costs. Pfeiffer states: “Aristophanes apparently shared this attitude. Reluctant to delete lines or to put conjectures into the text, he and his pupils preferred to express their opinions by signs in the margin; Aristarchus resorted to separate commentaries and monographs.” 54 What is also clear is that later scholars felt entirely free to disagree with the judgment of their predecessors in the field of Homeric scholarship and engaged in the production of their own critical editions, and these differences are recorded in the medieval scholia. 55 There never was a single “authorized” version of Homer even within the Library, and those outside of this academic circle often openly disparaged these critical attempts at revision, preferring their own familiar text. In spite of the conservative approach of Aristophanes and Aristarchus, there is reason to believe that both scholars regarded y296 as the end of the Odyssey, thereby marking the following 600 lines as an addition. Exactly why the longer ending, which continued to be preserved in the vulgate version of the text, was rejected by Aristophanes and agreed to by Aristarchus, is no longer possible to say. It could have been the witness of a better text or his own judgment about what was the more appropriate ending, and this opinion has been accepted “unanimously” by the modern critics of Homer. 56 Aristophanes also concerned himself with the Pinakes of Callimachus in a special way. This has to do with the attempt to select certain authors and their works in each category of literature as the best of their class. This is the beginning of a strong tradition in which scholars, from Aristophanes on51. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 1:452. 52. Ibid., 453. 53. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginning, 173. 54. Ibid., 173–74. 55. Much more will be said about these scholia below, chap. 5. 56. Ibid., 177.

40

Chapter 2

ward, were very much involved in deciding which works were classics and to be admitted into the first rank and also which were to be excluded. As Pfeiffer explains: “The Greek expression for selecting authors and registering their names in the selective list was ejgkrÇnein [‘sanction’, ‘approve’]; they were then called ejgkriqevnteÍ. . . . [I]t became the Roman way to call the ejgkriqevnteÍ ‘classici’, which means writers of the first class.” 57 It was this term that was adopted by the scholars of the Renaissance. 58 These classical works, ejgkriqevnteÍ, were those that were regarded as worthy of the grammarians’ attention in the production of editions and commentary, as most evident in the work of Aristarchus, who succeeded Aristophanes. Aristophanes’ own work on the lyric poets firmly established the “canon” of the nine lyric poets. This classification of the various categories of literature also meant that they were copied over and over and were part of the school curriculum. 59 What is noteworthy about this development of the classics or “canon” of Greek literature is the way in which it anticipates the similar development of the “canon” of the Hebrew Bible. It begins with Homer as the undisputed authoritative “canonical” work for all Greeks in the same way that the Pentateuch became the most important work for the Jews. To Homer and Hesiod, the great epics, the Alexandrians added other categories and works, but none drawn from their own time. They were all the great works of a past era. For the most part, the works were accepted as those of the first rank, without dispute, not only within the Hellenistic world, but especially by the Roman literati as well. This undoubtedly had a great impact on the proliferation of copies of these works and of a certain movement toward vulgate versions of these texts by the scriptoria, but even though the learned editors of Alexandria had an influence on the selection of the writings in the list of “classical” works, they did not establish a definitive “canonical” text for each of these works. This is important when we come to consider the rise of the Hebrew “canon” that took place much later, likely under the influence of Greco-Roman culture. One important aspect of the so-called Alexandrian canon is the fact that it comprises lists of persons, epic and lyric poets, orators, historians, philosophers, and so on, along with their genuine written works and excluding the works that were spuriously attributed to them. Canonicity therefore en57. Ibid., 206–7. 58. Pfeiffer (ibid.) points out that it is common for scholars to use the term “canon” in connection with Aristophanes’ lists and to speak of the Alexandrian canon of lyric poets and orators. But this is actually a perversion of the Greek meaning of the term kan∫n by an eighteenth-century scholar, David Ruhnken, based on the analogy of the biblical canon. It was never used in antiquity for the Greek writers. Nevertheless, this does not exclude the possibility that what is going on in Greek literature anticipates the later development of “canonization” in Judaism and Christianity. We will return to this in chap. 9. 59. See G. A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 117. Kennedy emphasizes the role of the canon as “models” for literary imitation, from the Greek kan∫n, “rule” or “measure.”

The Early History of Editing

41

tailed known authorship. Now a problem with most biblical literature is that it is anonymous. Yet it is precisely this impulse to follow the Hellenistic practice of creating an exclusive “canon,” a list of the classics of biblical literature that also came from the age of inspiration, that leads to the impulse to ascribe all of the works within this inspired corpus to individual authors: Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Solomon, and so on. Indeed, it is this notion of authorship that accounts, more than anything else, for the inclusion of some works, such as Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes, into this fixed corpus. Furthermore, there can be no canon, whether classical or biblical, without known authors, because anonymous works were undatable in antiquity; and if they could not be attributed to “inspired” persons from the age of inspiration, they had to be excluded. It may also be noted that most pseudepigraphic works were specifically attributed to “canonical” authors or the notables who belonged to that ancient period. Of course, for the scholareditors of Alexandria it was equally important that one be able to establish the original text of these authors, and a large part of their scholarly activity was dedicated to this purpose. Even though their lists of “canonical” authors and works were widely accepted, this did not mean that their critical editions were also accepted, anymore than that the critical editions of biblical books and their commentaries by scholars redefine what is or is not canonical today. The scholars of Alexandria did not create “canonical texts” for each of the works in their lists and had only marginal impact on the vulgate texts of the “classics,” especially on the text of Homer. The correlation of a fixed “canon” with a “canonical text” that is so often suggested in biblical studies is problematic, as we shall see. However, too little attention has been paid to the Hellenistic canonization of the Greek classics in the treatment of the Hebrew canon. There are many reasons to believe that the Hebrew canon, an ordo that sanctioned some works and excluded others, was directly modeled on the “canonization” of the classics. We will return to this issue below. The greatest Alexandrian editor of the classics, and of Homer in particular, is Aristarchus, and it would be useful to have a look at this scholar. A student of Aristophanes, Aristarchus built on the work of his predecessor, and it is sometimes hard to distinguish who of the two is responsible for a particular achievement. Fraser describes him in the following manner: Aristarchus was pre-eminent among the Librarians in the realm of pure learning. His interests were those of a scholar, and he strayed little from the narrow path of scholarship, as he conceived it. . . . His work may be divided into three main categories: work on Homer, work on other writers, and grammatical studies, the last originating in his Homeric studies but embracing the whole of Greek grammar. 60

Fraser lists his non-Homeric studies, among which are editions and commentaries of Hesiod, Archilochus, Alcaeus, Pindar, the tragedians, Aristophanes, 60. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 1:462.

42

Chapter 2

and Herodotus. The range of works is quite remarkable and by no means restricted to one author or genre. He is said to have produced 800 commentaries! Nevertheless, as Fraser says, “It is as a Homeric scholar that Aristarchus is best known, and in this field his achievement was outstanding. Our knowledge of it is rarely at first hand. . . . Most of the material comes from the scholia, especially those of the great codex of the Iliad, Venetus A, which record predominantly Aristarchean views.” 61 As we will see below, the publication of this scolia by J.-B. de Villoison in 1788 was a decisive factor in Wolf’s reconstruction of the history of the text of Homer. 62 Of decisive importance for this text-history was the debate over whether or not Aristarchus produced one or two editions of Homer or only a commentary. Pfeiffer discusses at length the rather difficult problem of terminology used by later ancient scholars who referred to Aristarchus’s work. 63 He comes to the conclusion that Aristarchus produced “a commentary based on Aristophanes’ text, and therefore written earlier than Aristarchus’ own recension,” but he regards it also as “a reasonable assumption that the earlier commentary was regarded as less accurate, and that it was followed by a revised one after Aristarchus had finished his recension of the text. The sequence seems to have been: Aristarchus’ first uj pomnhvmata based on Aristophanes’ text, Aristarchus’ diovrqwsiÍ, his second uJpomnhvmata using his own text, the revised recension made by others.” 64 Regarding the editorial task itself, Fraser describes it as follows: In general Aristarchus pursued the same course as his predecessors, the collation of copies and the application of critical signs, but in carrying out this task he showed far greater sense of method and greater knowledge of Homeric usage. He further evinced a wise conservatism in the admission of conjectures and the alteration of inconsistencies in the traditional text. . . . In his Homeric criticism Aristarchus also proceeded in some instances, in the same way as in his other work—by the force of analogy: the ‘ethos’ of Homer, the ‘usage’, as we would say, was to determine the true reading whenever possible. Application of this and other principles of criticism might lead either to emendation (metavqesiÍ), or to preference for one reading over another, or, when longer passages were involved, to censure or even suppression of the entire passage. In the last case Aristarchus had recourse to the use of critical signs, which he had amplified from the system already existing. 65

61. Ibid., 463. 62. See also Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginning, 214. The primary studies on Aristarchus were done by K. Lehrs, De Aristarchi studiis Homericis (1833). See later editions, 1865 and 1882. Also A. Ludwich, Aristarchs Homerische Textkritik nach den Fragmenten des Didymos (2 parts; Leipzig: Tübner, 1884–85). 63. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginning, 214–18. See also T. W. Allen, ed., Ilias (1931; repr. New York: Arno, 1979), 57ff., 194ff. 64. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginning, 217. 65. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 1:464–65.

The Early History of Editing

43

This description represents the editorial activity of Alexandria at its best, and it is a far cry from anything that is ever attributed to ancient “redactors” in biblical criticism. The successors to this scholarly editing within the early transmission of biblical texts are Origen and Jerome. Because the matter of the use of critical signs in the course of editing texts is of some importance in the later discussion of editing biblical texts, Pfeiffer’s discussion of Aristarchus’s use of signs is helpful: The marginal sigla in Aristarchus’ ejkdovseiÍ were the link to his uJpomnhvvmata. He used the shme∂a introduced by Zenodotus and Aristophanes with the few alterations and supplements: disagreements with Zenodotus he marked by the diplhÅ periestigmevnh, his own notable observations against other editions and explanations by the simple diplhÅ; in the frequent cases of repetitions of lines in Homer, he added the ojbelovÍ to the ajsterÇskoÍ when the repeated lines seemed to be out of place; when the order of lines was disturbed, he put instead of Aristophanes’ sÇgma and ajntÇsigma the ajntÇsigma and stigmhv; a simple dot indicated that he suspected the spuriousness of a line which he was reluctant to obelize. The exposition of these critical signs was no longer left to oral tradition or to guesswork; Aristarchus himself provided it now in a specific part of his uJ pomnhvmata. . . . As long as papyrus volumes were used so that text and commentary had to be written on separate rolls, the symbols marked the lines of the critical text and were repeated with lemmata in the roll of the commentary, though short notes were occasionally jotted down in the margins and between the columns of the text. The situation changed only when the codex was introduced and its margins provided space for notes. 66

The description given here is so similar to the markings that were used by the sopherim and their successors in the Masoretic tradition, as well as those used by Origen in the Hexapla, that both “editorial” processes must be considered in comparison with each other. The fact that the classical material has been so completely ignored in recent scholarship is unfortunate. After surveying Aristarchus’s work as editor and writer of commentaries on the “selected authors” (Pfeiffer’s term for the classical canon), Pfeiffer turns to Aristarchus’s method of interpretation: “Explaining a literary work was to him at least as worth while an endeavour as the editing of the text, if not more worth while.” 67 This is also an important comparative issue because biblical “redactors” are often viewed as interpreters of the texts they edit, but all of the Hellenistic editors produced their interpretations separate from the text of their editions. Pfeiffer gives us a view of Aristarchus as a philologian; Aristarchus worked on the principle that “each author is his own best interpreter” (although this is not a maxim that Aristarchus ever uttered). Pfeiffer explains:

66. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginning, 218. 67. Ibid., 225.

44

Chapter 2 Aristarchus’ main object was to discover the Homeric usage; for the explication of words and facts he collected all the parallels in the Iliad and Odyssey, treating any without parallels as a§pax legovmena of the poet. But when he encountered something which seemed not to fit at all into the pattern of the Homeric language or the Homeric life, he termed it kuklik∫teron [“commonplace”] 68 in contrast to ÔOmhrik∫teron, the genuinely Homeric. He went far beyond the earlier glossographic, lexicographic, and antiquarian studies and criticized their deficiencies, having a wider view over the whole epic period. 69

This reflects a commitment to the literal and historical mode of interpretation. This philological method is also seen in his commitment to “general grammatical and metrical rules,” one of which was the “concept of grammatical analogy” taken over from Aristophanes. As Pfeiffer says: It seems to have become a sort of guiding principle of Aristarchus’ interpretation and to have involved him in heated disputes with an opposition that defended anomaly. But he was no pedant in his search for parallels. Unlike any of his predecessors, Aristarchus, by surveying the epic usage in its entirety, was able to pick out those words which occurred only once in Homer. . . . Dealing with the problems of these many singularities was an integral part of his interpretation.” 70

All the Alexandrian scholars followed the view of Aristotle regarding the excellence of Homer. However, as Pfeiffer points out, [I]f the Iliad and the Odyssey were to be esteemed as creations of perfect workmanship by one poet, not a few difficulties and discrepancies presented themselves to the scrutinizing scholarly mind. It was relatively easy to recognize and to remove lines missing in some of the manuscripts as post-Homeric insertions. But there were many lines or even passages in all the manuscripts which seemed hardly reconcilable with the idea of perfection and unity, and had therefore to be carefully considered and, if necessary, marked as un-Homeric or, in special cases, as ‘cyclic’. The only solution was not to delete them, but to mark them as spurious, as ‘interpolations’ (to; ajqete∂n); athetesis, invented by his predecessors, was practised by Aristarchus with the utmost skill and continued to be practised by his followers in the field of Homeric criticism through two millennia. 71

What is somewhat ironic is that the scholars and editors of the nineteenth century attributed to ancient editors or redactors these spurious passages that the editors of Alexandria athetized. These conflicting roles of the editor, 68. This has reference to the usage of the early epic Cycle considered to be much inferior to Homer. See ibid., 230. 69. Ibid., 227. 70. Ibid., 229. The hapax legomena of the Hebrew Bible also became a major concern of the Masoretes. See Frederick E. Greenspahn, Hapax Legomena in Biblical Hebrew (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1984). 71. Ibid., 230–31.

The Early History of Editing

45

invented by classical scholars and adopted by biblical scholars, as we shall see, introduced a hopeless contradiction in the understanding of the ancient editor. If we simply follow the Alexandrian model of editor, then it is clear that the editorial task is to remove, or at the very least note as questionable, the interpolations that one has good reason to regard as not genuine. Adopting this position, which to me seems the only reasonable one, would call into question the whole project of redaction criticism.

Homeric Scholarship in Pergamum and Rome A center of scholarship developed at Pergamum at the end of the third century and continued through the second century b.c.e., as a rival to Alexandria and also in a royal library attached to a temple. 72 It invented the use of parchment, in preference to papyrus. Its scholarship was dominated by Stoic philosophers who employed an allegorical method of interpreting poetry, which became widespread in the Hellenistic and Roman world. The primary figure of this center was Crates, who organized and administered the library and was the chief exponent of the allegorical method. Concerning Crates’s use of allegory in interpreting the deeper meaning of the Homeric poems, Pfeiffer states: “He may have been unconscious of doing violence to poetry; certainly a great many future scholars down to the present day have been induced by his example to apply philosophical doctrines in various forms to the explanation of poetic and prosaic literature.” 73 The same could be said for the application of theological doctrines to the biblical texts from Philo and the rabbis through Clement and Origen to the present. Crates was a contemporary of Aristarchus and in conscious opposition to the grammatikoi of Alexandria. He viewed himself as “critic” (kritikos) in the philosophical sense. There is no evidence that he ever produced an “edition” or a “commentary” similar to the Alexandrians. Thus, passages in Homer that the Alexandrians regarded as suspect Crates interpreted as having great allegorical significance. This lack of concern for the critical text in the interest of philosophical or ideological interpretation is quite in keeping with the allegorical method of Philo and the later Christians as well as the midrashic methods of the rabbis. The level of scholarship in Alexandria goes into decline in the later years of the Ptolemies, and eventually in the age of Augustus, scholarship moves to the new center of Rome. It is in this new environment that Greek scholarship and Greek civilization are revived and preserved. Pfeiffer describes this transition of scholarship from the Hellenistic to the Roman world in these terms: The scholar poets and their successors in the third and second centuries b.c. had been moved by their love of letters and their own work as writers

72. Ibid., 234–51. 73. Ibid., 238.

46

Chapter 2 to preserve the literary heritage of the epic, Ionic, and Attic ages; they firmly believed in its eternal greatness. Didymus in his turn was moved by the love of learning to preserve the scholarly heritage of the Hellenistic age; he had a sincere admiration for the greatness of scholars and a firm belief in their authority, although he was not totally devoid of critical judgement. He also knew that editions, commentaries, and monographs ought not to be treated as sacrosanct monuments of literature. Their substance had to be preserved, not their form: the careful compilation of intelligently chosen excerpts gave them the best chance of survival in a declining civilization that wished for short cuts to knowledge.74

Thus, 129 years after Aristarchus, his views, scattered in his various writings, were all brought together and summarized by Didymus in a careful collation of Aristarchus’s work. This school of criticism was transmitted through the Roman period until about 200–250 C.E., when a summary of the works of four scholars of the Aristarchan tradition (Didymus, Aristonicus, Herodian, and Nicanor) combined them into a single commentary, and this became in time the basis of the later scholia of the Iliad, found in the margins of ancient manuscripts.

Editing and Its Influence on the Vulgate and the Book Trade Up to this point, we have postponed addressing an important question— namely, the impact of scholarly editing by Alexandrian scholars on the vulgate text of Homer as it has come down to us in the medieval manuscripts and in the contemporary papyri that have been recovered in modern times. The consensus view is well reflected in Fraser’s remarks on two distinct but related aspects of this issue: the first is the question of “the survival of learned work even within antiquity,” 75 and the second is the problem of the papyri: “What text do they represent, and how does it compare with the ‘learned’ texts of Alexandria?” 76 Regarding the first question, the fate of the scholar’s critical edition, he states: “As we have seen, an ‘edition’ consisted essentially of the individual copy of a particular scholar with his critical and exegetical signs attached. Further copies might be made of such work for the use of other scholars, but there is no reason to suppose that copies were multiplied by the book trade.” 77 The consequence of this, as based on the evidence of the scholia, is that these learned texts tended to get transmitted rather precariously from scholar to scholar, rarely in the form in which they were received, and their survival as critical editions and commentaries was slight. They were already greatly abridged in the first century b.c.e. by Didymus of Alexandria, whose work was further greatly abbreviated in the scho74. Ibid., 279. 75. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 475. 76. Ibid., 476. 77. Ibid.

The Early History of Editing

47

lia. None of the original commentaries has survived. “Thus the chance of their influencing popular texts was obviously slight.” 78 Regarding the testimony of the papyri to the Alexandrian editions, Fraser states: Papyri of the Iliad exist in very large quantities. They number approximately four hundred and fifty, of all periods. There is a fundamental division in their contents which is observable about 150 b.c. The few papyri before this contain a large number of ‘plus’ verses, . . . verses, that is, which are not found in subsequent texts, whether papyri or manuscript, and which, though they add considerably to the bulk of the poem, add little or nothing to its movement or action. Later texts—the vast majority of witnesses, numbering hundreds of papyrus fragments and all the manuscript material—represent the Vulgate, the Iliad of approximately 15,600 lines, as we read it today. Evidently the earlier texts were very different, although the sources for them remain very uncertain. It is a plausible assumption that the earlier papyri reproduce in essential the more fluid text as it was available in the fourth century b.c. Certainly, they show no sign of the influence of the work done on the text of Homer—athetesis, conjecture, and so on—by the scholars of the period before 150 B.C., as recorded in Venetus A scholia. . . . The papyri of the period after 150 B.C., like the medieval manuscripts, not only lack almost all the ‘plus’ verses, but also show numerous omissions of lines generally present in the earlier versions. This feature, combined with general agreement in readings . . . and a regular division into books, characterizes the Vulgate. We must undoubtedly give Alexandria some credit for the purification of the text, though whether it was due more to its scholars than to the increased demands for uniformity by booksellers, is perhaps an open question. Certainly one aspect of Homeric scholarship in which Alexandrian scholars established a lasting tradition is in the use of critical signs. On the other hand in the field of textual criticism—in the establishment of readings and the admission of conjectures— Alexandrian scholars seem to have exercised very little influence on the Vulgate. . . . Thus, not only did the work of Alexandrian scholars mostly survive only for a short time, but even when it did its influence outside the learned world seems to have been restricted.79

The upshot of all this is that the tradition of critical editing had only a limited influence on the “final form” of the text, the vulgate, the form that was widely distributed. The scholarly tradition was likely responsible for the division of the two poems, the Iliad and the Odessey, into 24 books each, numbered by the letters of the Greek alphabet, and the choice of the medium text. This viewpoint now represents a fairly broad consensus, although this was not always the case. From this survey of scholarly opinion, one would surmise that the view in classical scholarship is now quite clear on the relationship of scholarly 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid., 476–77.

48

Chapter 2

editing to the book trade. However, this is not entirely the case. In a wellknown authoritative survey of the history of scholarship by L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (1967), the authors state, regarding the scholars of Alexandria: It is no coincidence that five of the first six librarians . . . were among the most famous literary men of their day, and it is in no small measure due to the success of their methods that classical Greek texts have come down to us in a state that is reasonably free from corruption. In one case we can see clearly the influence which the scholars of the Museum exercised on the state of texts in common circulation. Of the many fragments of ancient copies of Homer a modest proportion are as early as the third century b.c. The text in these papyri is rather different from that now generally printed, and there are numerous lines added or omitted. But within a short time this type of text disappeared from circulation. This suggests that the scholars had not merely determined what the text of Homer should be, but succeeded in imposing this text as standard, either allowing it to be transcribed from a master copy placed at the disposal of the public, or alternatively employing a number of professional scribes to prepare copies for the book market. . . . [I]t is a reasonable assumption that the Alexandrians did what was necessary to prepare a standard text of all authors commonly read by the educated public. 80

This seems to be a case of a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, 81 which we will encounter again as an explanation for the standardization of the Hebrew Bible with the Alexandrian scholars as a model. But the arguments reviewed above seem to me quite decisive against it. Indeed, Reynolds and Wilson, in their summary of the arguments discussed above seem to contradict their own position and offer quite strong testimony against it. They first of all describe the nature of the emendations introduced by the Alexandrian scholars and then evaluate the impact of these emendations upon the vulgate text. The point is very important, so I quote it at length: It is clear that many copies of the Homeric text reached the Museum from widely different sources: the scholia refer to texts coming from such places as Massilia, Sinope, and Argos. These were sifted and evaluated by the scholars, but it is not clear which text, if any, was taken to be the most authoritative. The procedure which made the Alexandrians notorious was their readiness to condemn lines as spurious (ajqete∂n, ajqevthsiÍ). Their reasons for doing so, though possessing a certain specious logic, generally fail to convince the modern reader. One ground frequently alleged was undignified language or conduct (ajprevpeia).

80. L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (2d ed.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 7–8. Wilson seems still to hold the same opinion in his article on “Scholarship, Ancient: Greek,” in OCD, 1363. 81. See Allen, Homer, 303.

The Early History of Editing

49

Reynolds and Wilson give examples of athetesis on the grounds of aprepeia and then continue: Scholars capable of treating a text so drastically, especially in their willingness to condemn lines as spurious for inadequate reasons, might have done great damage to the text. But fortunately for subsequent generations of readers the Alexandrians avoided the temptation to incorporate all their proposed alterations into the text itself and were content to note proposals in their commentaries; but for this restraint our text of Homer would have been seriously disfigured. It is interesting to note that most of their proposals did not commend themselves sufficiently to the ancient reader to become part of the ordinary text in circulation. 82

They then appeal to the statistics compiled by Allen to show how little the proposals for athetesis in Zenodotus, Aristophanes, and Aristarchus are reflected in the extant vulgate text. 83 Thus, contrary to their earlier statement, the Alexandrian scholars did not create or significantly influence the vulgate text. Furthermore, it is a little misleading even to suggest that the average “ancient reader” ever read the “editions” and commentaries by these Alexandrian scholars, which survived only in abbreviated scholarly notations for the very few. The “ancient reader” was entirely dependent upon the textual preference of the copyists, especially those employed by the larger scriptoria, who likely never saw such learned critical editions. The limited agreement of extant MSS with the “corrections” of the Alexandrians may reflect some collation of different copies in the ancient libraries as well as sporadic “corrections” introduced from scholia into private copies over a long period of time. There is simply no evidence that any learned editor produced a critically edited text that became the basis of multiple copies for wide distribution or to be established as the authorized text. As will be seen below, Reynolds and Wilson contradict this view when it comes to the influence of the Latin editors of their classical texts. 84 Yet there are a number of more specific issues that need additional discussion because of their importance for later comparison with biblical editing. The first question is: what is meant by the “vulgate” text? The second is: what is the origin of this vulgate text? Each of these questions involves many thorny issues that cannot be settled definitively here. Nevertheless, a brief summary here will help in our subsequent discussion of the biblical “vulgate” at a later stage of this study. The vulgate text of Homer is the one that became the predominant form of the text that was largely “stabilized” in the second or first century b.c.e.

82. Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 11–12. The first edition of 1967 came shortly before the works of Pfeiffer and Fraser, which are duly noted in the endnotes of the 2nd edition, p. 215. 83. The work of Allen is cited on p. 215 in Scribes and Scholars. 84. See ibid., 27. Reynolds and Wilson here indicate that there is little evidence that Latin editors of Virgil and other classics had any effect on the “authentic text.”

50

Chapter 2

and is identical with that of the medieval MSS. In comparison with older long or short forms of the text, it represents the medium-length text. In contrast to the vulgate text, the long texts, which rarely show much agreement with each other, are often called eccentric. The vulgate is referred to in contemporary Greek sources as the koine, but in the Byzantine scholia the vulgate MSS, the koinhv “common,” are also characterized as dhm∫deiÍ “popular,” e√ka∂oÍ “random,” fauÅ loÍ “careless” or “vulgar,” and their comparative forms in -ovtera. These terms all belong to one broad category of common (koine) texts that cannot be distinguished more precisely. They are compared with others that are carievsteroÍ “more graceful” or “pleasing,” or ajsteiovteroÍ “more elegant.” 85 Richard Janko takes the latter class to refer to all the editions produced from Zenodotus on as well as the “city” texts and the texts that were identified by names, such as Antimachus. He also takes the terms “all” or “the majority” to likewise refer to these named texts and not to the vulgate. 86 But the matter is somewhat confused, and it is not certain whether any of the general categories refer to any specific form of the text and not just to the quality of the MSS. 87 Whether this terminology goes back to Aristarchus or is to be attributed to Didymus’s summary of earlier views, or even later, is not at all clear. This terminology cannot be used to refer to different text families. The vulgate or koine text of Homer was the common or usual version of the text. It could be represented by rather careless copies and therefore contain more simple scribal errors than the elegant texts, but the koine was often superior in its readings to the copies that were more carefully and elegantly produced. This was because a specially produced “elegant” text could be “corrected” to suit the personal taste of the patron. 88 However, there is certainly no reason to believe that the “elegant” texts were those that were “edited” by scholars or marked with critical signs. Allen compares the use of the term koine for the vulgate text of Homer with its similar use in Origen and Jerome, where it also means the common version of the Greek Bible, the Septuagint, as used in the churches; it also formed the base text for the fifth column of Origen’s Hexapla. To this subject we will return. In any event,

85. Allen, Homer, 277–82. 86. R. Janko, The Iliad: A Commentary, vol. 4: Books 13–16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 26. 87. The matter can be illustrated from an example of a particular text in the scholia of the Iliad A, B, and T (see Allen, Homer, 271). On Iliad B 53, one finds: “The majority and the most elegant are without the n boulhv and the [edition] of Aristophanes. In the common ones (koina∂Í) it is written and in the [edition] of Zenodotus boulhvn. The more refined are without n and that of Aristarchus (sch. A). The majority and the more elegant are without the n as also the [edition] of Aristarchus. But the [edition] of Zenodotus is with the n (sch. T). boulh;n, but the majority and the more elegant they write without the n. But Aristarchus and Zenodotus [write] using the n (sch. B).” The vulgate of the medieval MSS follow the koinai in using the form with n. 88. Thus the koine text preserves the digamma more often than the “elegant” texts because it was no longer recognized in the language and therefore deemed inelegant, and the Alexandrians followed these “superior” texts (Allen, Homer, 281–82).

The Early History of Editing

51

there is no reason to believe in the vulgate as an “authorized” text; this is simply not the case in antiquity. It is certain that the vulgate or koine cannot be equated with the text of Aristarchus or the other Alexandrians. As indicated above, the vulgate is a medium text, and this suggests comparison with the long texts of the older period as attested in a few of the quotations in classical sources and in the early papyri of the third and second centuries B.C.E. In the early papyri, which are quite few compared with the great number from the later period, the longer texts outnumber the medium texts. In the publication of these papyri, Grenfell and Hunt make the point that the pluses in the text of Homer usually stem from quotations taken from other parts of the Homeric poems and that “the other differences are often due to the unconscious influence of parallel passages.” 89 Allen also lists the kinds of additions that may come from other epic texts, including Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, as well as other literary sources. It appears, therefore, that the largest portion of interpolations in “eccentric” or expansionist texts come from other texts and are not literary creations of the copyists. 90 On the other hand, the short texts are often represented by the special “editions” known in the scholia as “city editions,” kata; povleiÍ or politikaÇ. These were older, generally more conservative and restricted, and this was also the case with the “edition” of Antimachus mentioned above. They were used by the editors of Alexandria, who collected them, perhaps to justify their deletions, but they had little effect directly on the vulgate version. 91 This brings us to the next question: where did the vulgate come from? We have already indicated that there is now broad agreement that it did not arise as a result of the editorial activity of the Alexandrian scholars, whose judgments about the text were largely ignored. The major reason in the past for associating these scholars with the vulgate is the argument post hoc ergo propter hoc, that there were long texts alongside medium texts down to the second century, and after the Alexandrian scholars the long texts disappear. 92 This is coupled with the modern analogy that standard editions of the older classics are the work of scholarly editors. But it now appears quite certain that the texts proposed by the Alexandrians are not reflected in the vulgate. This suggests to Allen that the medium text was a major text tradition that goes back before the Hellenistic period into the fourth and fifth centuries b.c.e. This is still an expansionist text, and the Alexandrians tried in a conservative way to indicate this, but it survived any attempt at revision by the editors and became the accepted text of the Roman period. Allen argues that the people primarily responsible for the standardization 89. B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, The Hibeh Papyri (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1906), part 1, p. 75. On pp. 67–75, Grenfell and Hunt discuss the fragments of Homer (nos. 19–23), all of which date to the early third century b.c.e. 90. Allen, Homer, 202–24. 91. Ibid., 283–99. 92. Ibid., 303.

52

Chapter 2

and proliferation of the vulgate were the booksellers in the majors centers of Alexandria, Athens, Pergamum, and above all, Rome. From what is known about the book trade, there is no indication that they ever used editors or grammarians. At most, the liberti corrected copy by collation against the original. It was this book trade that decided on the medium text, perhaps because the scholars also used this as their base text and indicated the length of the various classics in their catalogs. Otherwise, they paid little attention to critical details. The vulgate adopted modernization of language, which the scholars resisted. 93 Among the many Homeric papyri fragments of the later period, there are a few that contain critical signs in the margin that certainly point to the Alexandrian influence. 94 But markings of this sort did not actually change the text. In one case, there is a longer text (P51) that has a passage in which five lines out of thirteen are new, featuring a four-line quotation from Hesiod. These lines were marked with the critical signs as interpolations, but they were not removed. This suggests that the owner of the text perhaps inherited a long text and compared it with a scholarly edition and marked it but was very reluctant to change it. This is the case with all the marked texts. There was the greatest reluctance to remove anything from a text that was being used as an exemplar for copying a new one. We will see that this is exactly the attitude of Origen toward his own vulgate text.

Editing Classical Texts in the Roman Period In J. E. G. Zetzel’s Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity, which deals with the question of the ancient editing of Latin classics, including the period from the Republic to the end of the Empire, Zetzel addresses the nature of editing in the Roman world and its relationship to the book trade. 95 In part one, Zetzel discusses the rise of textual criticism within Latin scholarship in the time of the Roman Republic, which was strongly influenced by the Alexandrian tradition. He states: The fact that Suetonius [the best source on editing for this period] knew of the use of critical signs in adnotationibus does not by any means imply that there were critical editions in any sense of the word in this period, or in any other period of antiquity. Critical signs . . . are essentially a conservative device: their use implies that the text is left entirely unaltered, but that attention is drawn to difficulties by the signs; the problems are then usually explained in an accompanying commentary. Adnotatio . . . not only means the placing of the notae, critical signs, in the margins; it also means the writing of annotation in the modern sense to explain the signs. But not only is adnotatio a conservative textual device, it is also only a textual device at all in a very limited sense. Only a few of the signs that are given in 93. See ibid., 321–27. 94. See ibid., 306–7. 95. J. E. G. Zetzel, Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity (Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1981).

The Early History of Editing

53

the surviving Greek and Latin treatises on the subject mean that a verse is questionable; most of them were used to indicate the strophic divisions of choruses, the changes of speaker and changes of scene, or for rhetorical purposes: to point out that lines are repeated elsewhere, to identify lines that refer to another passage, or to signal lines that are simply worth noticing for one reason or another. Aristarchus, indeed, used a special sign, the diple periestigmene, to object to deletions made by his predecessor Zenototus, but in no case, it is important to note, does a critical sign imply any reference at all to the presence or absence of a verse in any other manuscript; nor does it refer to variations of the text in any smaller segment than a line. In sum, the critical signs were in no way the ancient equivalent of an apparatus criticus; rather, they are to be considered as an abbreviated form of a commentary. 96

This long quotation is important in several respects. First, the fact that Origen, in his “editing” of the Septuagint, made use of Aristarchus’s critical signs, as we shall see below, means that we must also understand these in the light of the practice of critical editing of his day. Second, the sopherim also used signs in the Hebrew Bible for a variety of reasons, some of which parallel those mentioned here. Third, the remark about Aristarchus, that “in no case . . . does a critical sign imply any reference at all to the presence or absence of a verse in any other manuscript,” is particularly startling because so many scholars, including Pfeiffer, assume that some of the signs relate directly to the collation of multiple texts by Aristarchus and his predecessors. 97 In reviewing all of the evidence, Zetzel comes to the conclusion that it was only in the second century c.e. that the Alexandrian methods of textual criticism begin to have any real impact on Roman scholarship. 98 This criticism, whatever its nature, was restricted to commentaries and was not reflected in any changes made in the text. In part 3, Zetzel addresses the issue of how textual criticism that was set down in commentaries and grammars found its way into the manuscripts themselves. 99 The first issue has to do with textual corrections. Zetzel asserts that in the early period any emendation based on variants is “extremely scarce and that corrections . . . are limited to correction against the manuscript from which a text was copied. The most extensive corrections involved the deletion of dittographies or the insertion of lines omitted; the latter activity was certainly the result of collation, the former probably 96. Ibid., 15–16. 97. The remarks in Zetzel’s introduction (ibid., 6) are revealing. He states: “[O]ne reads with depressing regularity about the ‘editions’ or ‘recensions’ made by ancient scribes that lie behind the extant manuscripts. Even though few, if pressed, would accept all the implications of such terms, it is still the case that even acknowledged masterpieces . . . like Pasquali’s Storia della tradizione e critica del testo or Pfeiffer’s History of Classical Scholarship tend to model the ancient critics on their modern successors.” 98. See his summary, ibid., 72–74. 99. Ibid., 206–54. Part 2 deals with the scholia of the Byzantine period and does not concern us here.

54

Chapter 2

so.” 100 The scholars of this period, when they made conjectures, kept them in their commentaries and did not produce “editions.” When the critics were said to have emended (emendare) the text of a manuscript, this refers to only the slightest change in the text itself. With respect to evidence for emendatio within the manuscripts themselves, this is very ambiguous for the early period and only comes to the fore in late antiquity, where “there does exist some evidence of how manuscripts were corrected, and by whom.” Zetzel continues: “In a considerable number of texts there were notes, subscriptions, giving the name and rank of a corrector, sometimes including the date, rarely some information about the sources and methods of correction. These notes are found in some ancient manuscripts, and they were often copied along with the text to which they were attached, being now found only in much later witnesses.” 101 While these “subscriptions” have been known and collected since the mid-nineteenth century they were largely ignored in the later discussions of the history of the text. Zetzel reproduces a sampling of these. From this material he concludes: The subscriptions, in fact, provide little evidence to support theories of large-scale collation or recension. . . . The general rule, it seems, was quite the contrary: one copy was corrected, and it was corrected against only one other copy, which may well have been the exemplar from which it was itself transcribed. In other words, such emendation may have been no more extensive than that performed by correctors in the middle ages who merely tried to make sure that a new manuscript was an accurate copy of its exemplar, and no more. 102

Even when, in a few cases, there is some evidence of more extensive emendation using readings from another manuscript, it is completely haphazard and unsystematic, not the work of a professional grammarian but of an amateur for personal interest. 103 With these issues in mind, Zetzel turns to the subject of the relationship between editors and publishers. He states: In part I of this study, it was suggested that direct intervention in the text of an author by an ancient grammarian was extremely limited; professional scholars did not, for the most part, insert conjectures into the text nor did they actually excise lines of which they disapproved. In the last chapter, moreover, it was shown that the signatures to be found in extant manuscripts suggest that they are descended from copies made not by professional scholars, but by amateur readers. Those two facts are complementary, but they leave a significant problem: the fact that some scholiasts appear in some instances to have known manuscripts which had been

100. Ibid., 206–7. 101. Ibid., 209. 102. Ibid., 228. 103. See also the discussion on subscriptions in Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 33–37.

The Early History of Editing

55

affected by scholarly criticism, make it clear that professional critics did have some influence on ancient books, that the texts were tampered with. And if the critics themselves did not do that, then who did?104

The subscribers who left their names on manuscripts did not produce “editions” but at most they were responsible only for the “peripheral organization” of a text, such as “the order of plays or poems, arguments, lemmata and the like” that “may without particular harm be ascribed to an ‘editor’, but constitution of a critical text was surely not one of his tasks.” 105 Regarding the role of editing in ancient publishing, Zetzel remarks: In general, it seems illogical even to refer to publishing or to editing in antiquity. Edere does not mean ‘edit’, but merely ‘make public’.106 Atticus, of course, is the standard example of the great publisher in antiquity; but his service to Cicero . . . suggests that he was much closer to a publicity agent than a publisher. Moreover, the number of copies made will have been small, and the act of making a work public informal. Cicero could expect to correct errors after a work had been completed and, presumably, published; in one case he actually succeeded. But a book once given out was not controllable. 107

Zetzel goes on to draw a distinction between distribution of books in antiquity and in modern times, after the invention of the printing press: The very absence of any formality about book distribution makes it hard to find any evidence about it. There clearly were booksellers, there were people like Atticus who had many scribes capable of making books available quickly. . . . Still, circulation will have been very limited, and copies probably made on commission rather than in advance. One should not forget that the number of potential readers was small, that scribes were not as effective as the printing press, and that the supply of material was often limited. 108

In contrast to the commercial distribution of books, Zetzel places greater emphasis on the individual book owner and reader. He states: “Private enterprise and private interest are far more significant than commerce in this respect. Many examples of this can be found.” And he goes on to cite cases of this sort. He continues: “Books were made by private scribes, who would borrow and duplicate a friend’s book; copies were even sent to the authors for their correction.” 109 The question that arises, of course, is where the “editors” fit into this scheme. Zetzel addresses this issue: 104. Zetzel, Latin Textual Criticism, 232. 105. Ibid. 106. This statement is made on the authority of van Groningen whose article on the subject we have discussed earlier. See above, pp. 15–17. 107. Ibid., 234. 108. Ibid., 234–35. 109. Ibid., 235.

56

Chapter 2 The grammarians as textual critics were cautious by training and instinct, and probably had very little direct effect on the text; the readers of the books will not have been so well trained, or necessarily have had the same scruples. Some, of course, were probably exemplary: Atticus and his scribes were no doubt as careful as the best grammarians, and an author called upon to correct a text of his own work is likely to have been extremely assiduous. But, on the other hand, such people were reading and correcting books not for posterity or for sale, but for their own use, and they may well have felt free to impose their own views on the original texts. . . . The fault here is not, as is often said, that of the librarii, the scribes; it is the error of the amateurs who try to improve the texts. . . . The desire of modern scholars to find the work of ancient textual critics in extant transmissions has obscured the true origin of most of our late antique manuscripts, and their descendants. 110

The implications of these observations for the text and versions of the Hebrew Bible are obvious and will be addressed below, in chap. 8. As we saw earlier, there was a distinction in the scholia, and imputed to Aristarchus, between the common, often badly copied texts, the koine, and the elegant copies. Zetzel has some revealing remarks about copies of Latin classics that bear upon this issue. He states: Extant ancient manuscripts of the classics tend to be large and beautifully written volumes, in rustic (or even, rarely, square) capitals; they are clearly deluxe books, more the equivalent of modern coffee-table books than of serious scholarly editions. By contrast, less literary works, or minor ecclesiastical texts, might be written in a cramped hand in a lowly half-uncial script. Such books were used more for study than for display. The titles of the subscribers, as seen above, show the high level of such lavish books: consuls, even emperors were interested. . . . These books are surely not the sign of a scholar’s interest, or of a bookseller’s. They are the property of the wealthy few. 111

We have taken the time to dwell on this issue because the distinction has been made in biblical studies between elegant copies as superior to the common text. We will need to look at that issue when we deal with the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Yet the question remains; if the grammarians and critical scholars were not responsible for preparing “editions” for distribution, then how is it that such readings show up in some texts? Zetzel’s solution to this problem is to suggest that it is entirely sporadic and happenstance. He states: Given the nature of book circulation at Rome, . . . it is also possible to see how such readings entered the transmitted text. Our manuscripts are those of amateur and wealthy book-lovers; and like modern readers, they wrote comments in the margins, made corrections of errors where they noticed 110. Ibid., 236. 111. Ibid., 237.

The Early History of Editing

57

them, and generally created a book that was of service to themselves. . . . Since a commentary or another copy might not abide by the rules of a professional critic, it was up to the reader or corrector to do as he chose. He might substitute one reading for another, or he might leave it in a margin. But even if he cautiously left it in the margin with an indication of its source, that did not mean that someone making a copy of his text, or using it to correct his own, would be so scrupulous. Some of these men, as far as we can tell, showed exemplary tact and caution, but not all need have done so, and it is pure wishful thinking to believe that our manuscripts descend only from those in which a scrupulous or cautious reader had made corrections. In general, there is no escaping the disturbing fact that, in antiquity, the preservation and the quality of a text were the result of the interests of its successive owners or readers, not of a scholarly editor. Whether or not we have a careful or sloppy text, an interpolated version or an accurate representation of the author’s original work, depends entirely on the individuals whose copies have survived. 112

This description of the process of textual transmission, based on the careful investigation of the actual activity of text copiers and their own statements about what they did and the booksellers, as well as the work of known scholars and “editors,” is far more helpful and trustworthy than all of the invented descriptions of the activity of “redactors” in the composition and transmission of the biblical text. 113

Conclusion From the survey of the history of scholarship by Pfeiffer we have seen that there is no basis for the opinion that there is any editing of classical texts in general and the texts of Homer in particular before the Hellenistic period. The so-called “editions,” whether associated with particular cities or individuals, were not the result of editorial activity. The limited scholarly activity having to do with the study of Homer was restricted to philological study of rare words and etymologies, to literary criticism as an aid to rhetoric, to antiquarian research, to the study of Homeric “problems,” and to the collection of texts by Aristotle’s Lyceum. None of this can be judged as editing texts although it anticipated some of the later activity of the Alexandrian scholars. But only in the Hellenistic era in conjunction with the Library in Alexandria did the critical editing of classical texts, especially Homer, arise. This included the collection and collation of texts against a basic exemplar and the marking of the text with critical signs in the margin, accompanied by a commentary in a separate literary work giving the explanation for the

112. Ibid., 238–39. 113. Our knowledge of editorial practice in the Greek east during the Roman Empire is much more limited, apart from what we know of Origen and the Christian scholarly tradition that followed him, and we will deal with this in the next chapter. See the brief remarks by Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 38–42.

58

Chapter 2

editors’ critical judgments. There is little evidence that editors removed any of the text that they were editing, only correcting what they viewed as scribal mistakes and athetizing the “interpolations” in the text with signs. Their efforts were scholarly and conservative and did not result in the creation of a new eclectic text. Their work was available for consultation in the Library, but there is no evidence that “editions” of this sort were ever used by booksellers for the production of new texts. The vulgate text of Homer in the Roman period was a medium text that became the standard and led to the death of the long, eccentric texts. This vulgate was not an “authorized” text, and it was not the work of any editor or library but merely the preference of bookdealers. Even in the Roman period, there were sporadic long texts, but they did not survive, and the text tradition of the medieval MSS all go back to this vulgate form of the text. The “editions” of the Alexandrian scholars had no paradoseis and therefore cannot be reconstructed from any extant MSS. Their unique readings of a few hundred passages can only be reconstructed on the basis of the scholia. There was very limited distribution of their work through copying (diadosis), and by the first century b.c.e. it was already reduced to abbreviated form. Although it can be said that these scholars did anticipate the learning of the Renaissance, yet in two respects the modern meaning of the term “editor” is altogether different from this ancient counterpart: in the production of a recognized standard edition and in the proliferation of this edition by a bookdealer. To the extent that the term editor implies that one prepares the work of an ancient author for publication and wide distribution in a standard and “authoritative” form of the text, the Alexandrian scholars do not fit this designation. Because biblical editing has been compared with the activity of the Alexandrians as a way of understanding the standardization of the Hebrew Bible and its versions, it seems appropriate to look at the primary examples of this sort of biblical editing in the early centuries after the Hellenistic scholars. In the Roman period, Zetzel points out the continuation of the use of “critical signs” in the text, in continuity with their use in Hellenistic scholarship, not so much as a means of altering or “editing” the text as to call attention to various terms or forms that were then discussed in an accompanying commentary. Many of these signs had a rhetorical usage, and Zetzel actually disputes that they point to variant readings or were the equivalent of our “apparatus criticus.” This suggests great caution in reading too much into the use of similar signs and markings in the Hebrew text, as is often done. Furthermore, the practice of emending texts on the basis of a special exemplar, apart from the immediate Vorlage of the copyist, was quite late in developing and usually quite modest in scope. As we will see below, Origen was an exception for rather special reasons. Even so, the tendency of scribes and scholars was always a very conservative one. Zetzel makes the further observation that indications of corrections in texts most likely had nothing to do with editorial activity but were the result of alterations or “corrections” made by the owners, as private individuals, in their personal copies.

The Early History of Editing

59

These often originated as marginal entries that were then inserted into the text by careless subsequent copiers. The usual discussion of “redactional” activity has no basis in the reality of the ancient culture of written texts. The MSS of the Latin classics transmitted also illustrate very well the distinction between “elegant” and “common” texts and reinforce the understanding of the way in which terms of this sort are used in the scholia of Homer. Because the evidence for biblical “editing” of the Hebrew Bible and its versions belongs to the time of the Roman Empire, the evidence for editorial practice as applied to the classics in this period should be considered alongside the rabbinic and Christian sources. Although there is abundant evidence of the closest interaction between these two worlds, the so-called pagan world of the classics and the Jewish and Christian world of biblical texts, the discussion of the latter is usually conducted in complete isolation from the former. Having briefly surveyed the editing of classical texts in antiquity, therefore, we will now turn to the editing of biblical texts in Judaism and Christianity.

3

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization of Biblical Texts The Sopherim as “Editors” of the Hebrew Bible There is a widespread assumption in biblical studies, especially within the field of textual criticism, that the text of the Hebrew Bible, as it is now reflected in the Masoretic Text (MT), was standardized by the end of the first century c.e. and that the men responsible for this were a group known in the later rabbinic tradition as the sopherim, the “scribes.” This same rabbinic tradition dates the activity of this particular group to the Persian period as successors of the great scribe, Ezra. It is customary for scholars to view them as part of an ongoing process of “editing” the text of the Bible, first that of the Torah, and then of the subsequent divisions and books, up to the point of its final canonization in the first or early second century c.e. There is, of course, a wide range of opinion on the dating of the activity of the sopherim, depending on how critical one is of the late tradition about them and in light of the fact that the Qumran texts suggest a wide diversity in Hebrew texts down to the Roman period. Nevertheless, the view persists that, at least within the circles of the Pharisees and their rabbis, a group such as the sopherim were at work on the biblical texts and ultimately responsible for its final “edited” form that became preserved in the MT. The classical view of the sopherim as the precursors of the Masoretes, those who shaped and preserved the text that was then transmitted with great care to a later age, is well illustrated by the remarks of Robert Gordis in the “prolegomenon” to the new edition of his book, The Biblical Text in the Making: A Study of the Kethib-Qere (1937). 1 Gordis makes it clear from the outset that he agrees with the position of Paul de Lagarde, a century earlier, “that a single manuscript was the source of the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible.” 2 This position is supported by the view that the medieval manuscripts reflect a common source: “An investigation of the Biblical manuscripts collated by Kennicott and de Rossi made it clear that they all had a common origin. The slight variations in defectiva and plene orthography and other similar details were to be explained as scribal errors due to 1. Robert Gordis, The Biblical Text in the Making: A Study of the Kethib-Qere (augmented edition with a prolegomenon; New York: Ktav, 1971), xi–liii. 2. Ibid., xi.

- 60 -

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

61

anonymous copyists.” Lagarde’s conclusion was that “all the Biblical manuscripts that reached us were copies of a single authoritative archetype or Mustercodex.” 3 Lagarde dated this development “in the period of Rabbi Akiba, approximately 130 c.e.” and gave as the reason “the very precise method of Biblical hermeneutics that derived legal and religio-ethical interpretations from such apparently unimportant words as ˚a, µg, and qr,” and it was this method, therefore, that “recognized the necessity for an official text. Hence, he and members of his school chose one manuscript as an archetype and established it for all Jewry.” 4 Gordis rejects the challenge to this view raised by Paul Kahle and others “that there never had been an archetype [for the Masoretic Text], and that the variations in the Biblical text were widespread in Jewish circles until the Middle Ages.” 5 Yet already in the work of C. D. Ginsburg, Introduction to the MassoreticoCritical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (1897), 6 there were some serious questions raised about the continuity between the sopherim and the Masoretes, which Lagarde’s view assumes, and the applicability of the “editorial” work of the sopherim to the whole corpus of what became the archetype of the MT. After reviewing the features in the MT that are usually ascribed to the sopherim, Ginsburg writes: We have seen that the registration of anomalous forms began during the period of the second Temple. The words of the text, especially of the Pentateuch, were now finally settled, and passed over from the Sopherim or the redactors to the safe keeping of the Massorites. Henceforth the Massorites became the authoritative custodians of the traditionally transmitted text. Their functions were entirely different from those of their predecessors the Sopherim. The Sopherim, as we have seen, were the authorised revisers and redactors of the text according to certain principles, the Massorites were precluded from developing the principles and altering the text in harmony with these canons. 7

It is clear that Ginsburg holds the view that the sopherim are to be equated with the “authorised revisers and redactors” that were identified by “higher criticism” from the time of the final compositional stage of the Pentateuch to its standardization by the Masoretes. The model here is clearly the common nineteenth-century understanding of the editing of Homer as set forth by Wolf, which as we will see below, is no longer tenable in classical scholarship. We are not, at this point, concerned with the role of the Masoretes in the transmission of the text. However, Ginsburg introduced a distinction within the work of the sopherim between their editing of the Torah and the rest of the Bible, which he finds reflected in the extent of diversity in the 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., xii. 5. Ibid. 6. C. D. Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (with a prolegomenon by H. M. Orlinsky; New York: Ktav, 1966). 7. Ibid., 421 (my italics).

62

Chapter 3

codices of the various schools of the Masorah. Regarding the second and third division of the Bible, he states: These were not so popularly known and the ancient Sopherim were, therefore, not so careful in the redaction of the Prophets and the Hagiographa. This is abundantly demonstrated in the books of Samuel and Kings, in the books of Kings and Chronicles &c. which contain duplicate records of identically the same events. Hence great differences obtain among the sundry Schools [of Masoretes] as to the precise reading of certain passages, and hence too Standard Codices proceeded from these Schools which more or less reflect other recensions. And although the recension which is now exhibited in the textus receptus has finally superseded the other recensions, the Massorah itself frequently records the readings of other Standard Codices. 8

The remarks by this expert of the Masorah suggest that the evidence from this body of material alone limits the editorial activity of the sopherim primarily to the Pentateuch. When this testimony to diversity of the Prophets and Hagiographa is taken together with the witness from the versions, especially the Septuagint, as well as the Qumran scrolls that were not available to Ginsburg, then the focus of what constitutes editorial activity on the biblical text must be placed primarily upon the Pentateuch. Harry Orlinsky, in a “prolegomenon” to the latest reissue of Ginsburg’s Introduction, gives a critical survey of the scholarship on the work of the Masoretes leading up to Ginsburg’s publications and a review of “the history of the printed editions of the Hebrew Bible,” whose purpose generally was to reproduce the Masoretic Text and by implication the truest edition of the Hebrew Bible. He concludes these remarks with the thesis: “We are now ready to deal with the crux of the whole matter, something that the numerous editors of ‘masoretic’ editions of the Bible have overlooked, namely: There never was, and there never can be, a single fixed masoretic text of the Bible! It is utter futility and pursuit of a mirage to go seeking to recover what never was.” 9 In this perspective, it is clear that Orlinsky sets himself in opposition to Lagarde’s archetype for the MT and also the view of Gordis as quoted above. Orlinsky lays the blame for this on the confusion between canon and text. He states: “What scholars have done is to confuse the fixing of the Canon of the Bible with the fixing of the Hebrew text of the Bible.” 10 Orlinsky points out that at the very least it can be shown that the order of the individual biblical books in the second and third divisions of the Bible was never really fixed even in the late codexes. 11 Likewise, Orlinsky also suggests that even the fourfold division of the Christian Bible (Torah, Historical Writings, Wisdom Books, and Prophets) and the Christian names of the Pen8. Ibid., 422. 9. H. M. Orlinsky, “Prolegomenon: The Masoretic Text: A Critical Evaluation,” in C. D. Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (New York: Ktav, 1966), xviii. 10. Ibid. 11. The evidence for these variations is given by Ginsburg (Introduction, 1–8).

spread is 12 points long

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

63

tateuchal books “are actually of Jewish origin.” 12 They seem to reflect the Jewish tradition of Alexandria and thus came into the Church with the Septuagint. 13 Orlinsky continues: So far as the Hebrew text of the Bible is concerned—the consonantal (unvocalized) text—that too was never fixed for all Jewry for all time. During the Second Jewish Commonwealth, numerous scrolls of the individual Books of the Bible circulated in the learned Jewish circles of Judea, Egypt, Syria–Babylonia, and other regions. And in the rabbinic literature of the first several centuries there are numerous references to the existence of biblical texts with faulty readings. Not only that, the rabbinic literature itself, in quotations from the Bible, exhibits more frequently than is generally realized readings that differ from those preserved in our so-called “masoretic” texts, readings that are not due to faulty memory and that crop up in Hebrew manuscripts and/or biblical quotations in Mechilta, Sifra, Sifre, the Gemara, the grammatical work of ibn Janah, etc.14

After citing numerous examples in support of this statement, Orlinsky concludes: “There never was and there can never be ‘the masoretic text’ or ‘the text of the Masoretes.’” 15 There is, therefore, within biblical scholarship a clear division between the view that a standard archetype of the MT was created in the first or second centuries c.e. and was carefully transmitted through the medieval period until its publication in the Second Rabbinic Bible of Jacob ben Chayim in 1524–25, and the view that no such uniformity existed throughout this period and that consequently one cannot speak of the standardization of the Hebrew Bible. It is not my purpose in this chapter to engage in an examination of the Masoretic tradition of the text nor to write a detailed and complex textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Some of these issues will be taken up in chapter 8. My concern here is with the very limited question why it is that the sopherim are considered by Gordis and others to be “editors” of the Bible, those who were ultimately responsible for the “standardization” of the text by the first century. The primary argument for this in the current discussion is the comparison made between the sopherim and the Alexandrian scholars who “edited” the text of Homer, and this case has been made most forcefully by Saul Lieberman, whose work is frequently cited in the subsequent discussion. 16 Consequently, it would be useful to review Lieberman’s position on this matter in some detail. 12. Orlinsky, “Prolegomenon,” xix. 13. See further the discussion by P. Katz, “The Old Testament Canon in Palestine and Alexandria,” ZNW 47 (1956): 191–217; A. C. Sundberg, “The ‘Old Testament’: A Christian Canon,” CBQ 30 (1968): 143–55; J. Barton, Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 13–95. 14. Orlinsky, “Prolegomenon,” xx. 15. Ibid., xxiii. See also the opinion of E. J. Revell, “Masoretic Text,” ABD 4:597–99; Revell likewise supports this view. 16. S. Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine: Studies in the Literary Transmission, Beliefs and Manners of Palestine in the I Century b.c.e.–IV Century c.e. (2d ed.; New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1962).

64

Chapter 3

In his comparison of the sopherim with the “Alexandrian grammarians” of Homer, Lieberman takes up the rabbinic evidence, which he interprets as reflecting “textual activity of the Soferim [in] three categories: 1. They strove to establish the genuine text, as given by God to Moses. 2. They introduced dots and possibly other signs . . . into the text. 3. In the view of some Rabbis of Southern Palestine, they deliberately emended the text on occasion for certain reasons.” 17 This hardly looks like the “revisers and redactors” that was suggested above by Ginsburg and is indeed much more conservative in scope. Nevertheless, at the outset of Lieberman’s discussion he makes two very debatable assumptions. The first is that the sopherim are group of scholars whose function is rather narrowly defined when compared with the role of the scholars of the Alexandrian Library. This, of course, is how the later tradition presents them, but it is most likely that this is an anachronism projected back into an earlier age. Exactly the same kind of anachronism existed in the early centuries of the Roman era: the conception of scholars working on the text of Homer in a royal library was retrojected into the time of Peisistratus to produce the first recension of the Homeric poems. The second assumption is that the Alexandrian scholars were those responsible for the “edited” form of the text of Homer, and thus the similarities of the sopherim to this group proves the same process with regard to the Hebrew Bible. In fact, as we have seen, the “standard” vulgate version of Homer was not based on the scholarly activity of men in the Alexandrian Library, and therefore any similarity between these two groups says nothing about the standardization of the Hebrew Bible. The factors that gave rise to it may be entirely otherwise, and the scholarly “editing” of the text may be quite secondary to the rise of the vulgate version of the text. The problematic character of these two assumptions alone moot Lieberman’s whole argument. Nevertheless, we shall look at the individual examples of his evidence because they are cited so often in the discussion of the sopherim. Lieberman begins with the Qere and Kethib system of the MT as evidence of textual variants. He states: The system of the so called Keri and Kethib undoubtedly belongs to the history of text criticism. In the preface to his commentary of Joshua, Rabbi David Kimhi remarks: “It seems that these words (i.e., of the category of Keri and Kethib) came into existence because the books were lost or dispersed during the first exile, and the sages who were skilled in Scripture were dead. Thereupon the men of the Great Synagogue, who restored the Torah to its former state, finding divergent readings in the books, adopted those which were supported by the majority of copies and seemed genuine to them. In those cases where they were not able to reach a decision, they wrote down one alternative but did not vocalize it (!), or noted it in the margin but omitted it from the text. Likewise they sometimes inserted one reading in the margin and another in the text.”18 17. Ibid., 20–21. 18. Ibid., 21.

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

65

This appeal to such a blatant anachronism from the late medieval period, which even Lieberman seems to acknowledge by his use of “(!),” certainly does not strengthen his case. The whole of the fully developed Masoretic system, with vocalization and marginal notations, is read back into the Persian period. Others have attempted to salvage a part of this tradition by maintaining the interpretation of the Kethib/Qere system as reflecting variants, but it is increasingly difficult to do so. 19 What speaks against it is the fact that only one other possible variant is cited in the Qere, and it is usually of a very limited kind and hardly reflects the real variation in the textual tradition, especially in its early stages. By comparison, variants in the Homeric editing of texts were treated in an entirely different way, if in fact they were treated at all (see above, chap. 2). The primary argument from the rabbinic literature for the treatment of variants in early Torah MSS is the famous passage having to do with the three scrolls that were “found in the Temple court.” Lieberman greatly simplifies the discussion of this account of the three scrolls by regarding it as an early case of collation of MSS in order to create an official standard eclectic text. 20 However, the episode of the three variant Temple texts has been a matter of controversy for a long time, with little agreement about its meaning. 21 It is preserved in four different versions of late date, although it is said to go back to Rabbi Simeon b. Lakish of the third century. 22 There are two parts to the account: the opening statement followed by commentary. There seems to be a strong sentiment toward taking these two parts as originally

19. Two different attempts to treat the Kethib-Qere as a reflection of variants are H. M. Orlinsky, “The Origin of the kethib-qere System: A New Approach,” in Congress Volume: Oxford, 1959 (VTSup 7; Leiden: Brill, 1960), 184–92; and Gordis, The Biblical Text in the Making. See Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 58–63, for a review of the various positions on it. Tov seems to favor the view of Gordis, who must postulate that the variant reading was put in the margin as a correction of the text and there became the Qere when the vocalization of the text was introduced. This system, of course, could not work if there were more than one variant listed, as often happened in the scholia of the classics, and if the variant consisted of more than a single word or no word at all. See most recently J. Barton, Holy Writings, Sacred Text: The Canon in Early Christianity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 123–30. 20. Lieberman, Hellenism, 21–22. 21. See A. Geiger, Urschrift und Übersetzungen der Bibel in ihrer Abhängigkeit von der inner Entwickelung des Judentums (Breslau, 1857; 2nd ed., Frankfurt a. Main: Madda,1928), 97–100; L. Blau, Studien zum althebräischen Buchwesen und zur biblischen Litteraturgeschichte (Strassburg: Trübner, 1902), 101ff.; J. Z. Lauterbach, “The Three Books Found in the Temple at Jerusalem,” JQR 8 (1917–18): 385–423; S. Talmon, “The Three Scrolls of the Law That Were Found in the Temple Court,” Textus 2 (1962): 14–27; S. Zeitlin, “Were There Three TorahScrolls in the Azarah?” JQR 56 (1966): 269–72; B. Albrektson, “Reflections on the Emergence of a Standard Text of the Hebrew Bible,” Congress Volume: Göttingen, 1977 (VTSup 29; Leiden: Brill, 1978), 55–56. 22. Y. Taºanit 4.2, 68a; ªAbot R. Nat. B, 46; Sipre Deut. 356; Sop. 6:4. The texts of these are conveniently set out in Lauterbach, “The Three Books,” 419–20 n. 2; and Talmon, “The Three Scrolls,” 16–17.

66

Chapter 3

separate and belonging to quite different periods, the first being an old tradition and the second being a rather late, forced interpretation of a misunderstood text. The opening statement consists of the remark: “Three scrolls were found in the court [of the Temple], the méºoni (méºonim/méºonâ) scroll, the zaºa†u†e scroll, and the hîª scroll.” The reference to the Temple court dates this account as very early, prior to the Temple’s destruction, and the later commentary on this statement identifies these scrolls as copies of the Torah, but the form of the statement makes this problematic. As Lauterbach points out, it would be very unusual to identify such scrolls as Torah or tôrôt, because there were lots of scrolls in the Temple archives that were not Torah scrolls or even Scripture scrolls. 23 It is also curious that Torah scrolls would be given such unusual names. Lauterbach argues that they are not biblical scrolls at all but have to do with public records of various groups of people that are distinguished by these three categories. Whatever the exact meanings of the names given to these scrolls may be, the commentary that follows has construed them as references to biblical texts. The commentary on the opening statement reads: In the one they found written µdq yhla ˆw[m and in the other two was written µdq yhla hw[m. They adopted the [reading of the] two and discarded the one. In one they found written larçy ynb yfwf[z ta jlçyw and in the two was written larçy ynb yr[n ta jlçyw. They adopted the two and discarded the one. In one they found awh written nine times, and in two eleven times. They adopted the two and discarded the one.

If the scrolls were named after defective readings in the text, then why is the first scroll called méºonî, méºonîm or méºonâ when the defective reading is méºon and the correct reading is actually méºonâ. The explanations for the name hîª in the third case are so varied and contradictory as to amount to wild conjecture on the part of the commentators. That there were just three Torah scrolls in the Temple is very doubtful, and that they had just one defect each is virtually impossible. Furthermore, the fact that one of these presumably better-quality texts would have an obscure Aramaic word zaºa†û†ê in place of the Hebrew in Exod 24:5 is also most unlikely. Notwithstanding Talmon’s ingenious efforts to salvage the problematic readings of this account of the three texts, they can hardly be taken as a historical account of the creation of a critically collated text in the Second Temple period. 24 Talmon conveniently transforms the three scrolls into three codices, which is an anachronism. Talmon further believes that this account is about the establishment of an authoritative text of the Torah and the elimination of those texts that were in disagreement with it. He states:

23. Lauterbach, “The Three Books,” 398–401. 24. Talmon, “The Three Scrolls,” 20–25.

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

67

We may assume that the variants cited in our sources were not the only readings which set the minority MSS apart from the majority MSS whose text was sanctioned. But it was these variants that were used conveniently to designate those codices, until ultimately they were named after them. From this we may deduce that these variants were not mere random textual deviations, but rather were considered distinguishing signs for types of texts that the rabbis sought to remove from circulation. This we can deduce from other discussion which deals with books that deviated from the authoritative text of the Pentateuch. 25

Of course, to make this deduction from our texts on the three scrolls demands a great deal of ingenious interpretation. This interpretation, however, is quite contradictory and without merit. We are asked to believe that three erroneous texts were specially preserved in the Temple (as sacred?) in order to serve as models for identifying bad texts that were then to be destroyed. After all texts of this type had been discovered, then these three texts were also destroyed, because no text with these deviations has ever been found. But what about the majority readings among these three defective scrolls? Were they used to construct an eclectic fourth text? There is no direct statement about the fourth edited “codex” created out of these readings to produce an official standard text. 26 The rabbinic sources simply cannot be used to portray the editing of biblical texts. If we believe that there is a complete disconnect between the reference to the three scrolls of the Temple with unusual names and the commentary that suggests some form of textual collation or comparison of MSS, however implausible the actual presentation, then how are we to account for this particular description of textual comparison? The answer lies in a footnote by Lieberman in which he is commenting on the frequent phrase bwtk waxm, “they found written,” in the commentary of these texts in reference to the various readings of the three scrolls. He states: “It is the terminus technicus of both the scholiasts on Homer (euß romen gegramevnon—bwtk waxm . . .) and the Rabbis.” 27 Of course, what Lieberman had in mind was to turn the rabbis into the functional equivalent of Homeric scholars, and thereby he missed the whole point of the similarity. This similarity is striking because it does not pertain to the activity of the Alexandrian scholars themselves but does pertain to the terminology of the scholia that were contemporary with the rabbinic texts of the late Roman and early Byzantine period. Given the very close similarity between these two bodies of commentaries on textual matters, it appears that the rabbis are imitating the Homeric scholia; it can hardly be the reverse. However, the comments in the scholia do not pertain to the creation of an eclectic critical edition. At most, they simply indicate variant readings found in certain MSS, which the scholars then commented upon in their commentaries. The Homeric scholars may have athetized 25. Ibid., 25. 26. See also Albrektson, “Reflections,” 55–56. 27. Lieberman, Hellenism, 21 n. 11.

68

Chapter 3

them with an obelus in their own copies of Homer, but they never removed the “rejected passage” from a text. Nor did they ever construct an eclectic text and then destroy or “remove from circulation” texts with variant readings. Furthermore, many of the MSS of Homer in the scholia were known by the names of persons or places. It is therefore significant that one rabbi, Rab Yose, thought that the first scroll was actually found in Beth Maºon and in this way gave its name to the scroll. It seems to me quite likely that the rabbis, trying to make sense out of the obscure text that referred to scrolls with names, associated them with the Torah in the same way that the scholia cited Homeric “editions” according to the names of persons and places. Because “editions” of this sort were cited in the scholia for their variant readings, the rabbis thought that these named scrolls also must relate to variant readings. They interpreted the names of the texts to refer to the variants themselves and then proceeded to “find” them in the Torah. This process of text-critical comparison they read back into the period of the Second Temple, though doing this was a complete anachronism. Of course, three scrolls with these variant readings never actually existed. This is merely midrash that is based on a rather vague understanding of scholarly scribal activity. When the rabbis speak about approving the reading of the majority of texts and rejecting the minority reading, this does not mean that the whole text itself would have been rejected, as Talmon suggests. 28 There is nothing comparable to this process in Greco-Roman editorial practice or nothing like it is suggested by the scholia. The comment simply has to do with a specific reading and illustrates how scholars expressed a preference for one reading over another. But the whole discussion is completely artificial because there is no evidence that an eclectic text was ever created in antiquity in this way. The scholia simply list in their marginal notations the various readings “found” in different “editions” but never change the text to which the notations were attached. Only in a separate commentary did an “editor” express his preference—not in the copy of the text itself—and the later Masoretes also reflect the same reluctance to change the text. Although the account of the three scrolls suggests that at this time in the late Roman period there was a general familiarity with the principles of textual comparison and the preference for a majority reading over the minority, yet more than this cannot be said. In any case, never does the evidence actually portray the creation of a “standard critical text” of the Hebrew Bible, either during the time of the Second Temple or in the later Byzantine period. Nevertheless, Lieberman expresses a strong opinion on the existence of this specially edited text of the Torah (or the whole Bible?). He states: Although it appears from the earlier rabbinic sources that only one authoritative book was deposited in the [archives of] the Temple it does not follow that other copies were not to be found there. It means only that 28. Talmon, “The Three Scrolls,” 18.

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

69

this book was the standard copy par excellence, the book, as the Rabbis tell us, from which the Scroll of the king was corrected under supervision of the High Court. A special college of book readers (µyrps yhygm), who drew their fees from the Temple funds, checked the text of the book of the Temple. This was probably the only genuine text which was legally authorized for the public service. 29

This statement is quite confusing and contradictory. It throws together a number of quite distinct texts and issues. Lieberman assumes that this special text was the result of the “editing” of the three scrolls mentioned above and that it was then deposited along with them in the archives (?) of the Temple. Yet, it was a text that was both in regular use as an exemplar for collation and correction and was strangely itself subject to correction (hhgh). And what is this “scroll of the king” that was collated against this special text? The matter is discussed in much greater detail by Gordis, who construes the situation somewhat differently, although no less problematically. He suggests that, during the Second Temple period, “The guardians of the Biblical text found one ancient, meticulously written manuscript and made it the foundation for their work. They established it as the archetype from which all official copies were to be made and by which all manuscripts in private hands could henceforth be corrected.” 30 Such an event would be completely unprecedented in the history of textual criticism; it certainly never happened with the text of Homer. So how does he know that this was the case with the Bible? Well, he must confess: “Because the selection of this standard codex had taken place in the dim past, the process is not recorded in our sources, but the product of the process is, we believe, referred to explicitly in Rabbinic literature.” 31 In other words, he has just used vivid imagination in place of a complete lack of evidence. Unlike Lieberman, this “standard very ancient text” is not the result of the editing of the three but is the result of a remarkable discovery. That this is an anachronistic myth is shown by the fact that this ancient text is described as a “codex” because only as such could it contain the whole of the Torah, let alone the whole Bible; the codex, of course, did not exist in the Second Temple period and only came into use several centuries later. 32 29. Lieberman, Hellenism, 22. 30. Gordis, The Biblical Text in the Making, xxvi. 31. Ibid. 32. See Barton, Oracles of God, 83: “The use of codices for the Hebrew Scriptures is only very sparsely attested before the eighth century AD.” On the origin of the codex in early Christian book production, see T. C. Skeat, “Early Christian Book-Production: Papyri and Manuscripts,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2: The West from the Fathers to the Reformation (ed. G. W. H. Lampe; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 65–79; Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 30–32. Compare the discussion of Lieberman, in an appendix, “Jewish and Christian Codies,” in Hellenism, 203–8; he cites the use of the Greek term pinax, “writing tablet,” in rabbinic sources, and he conjectures from this an early use of the codex that derived from the binding together of several pinakes to produce a primitive

70

Chapter 3

What then is the evidence in the rabbinic literature for this wondrous “codex”? Gordis states: “The Mishnah, the Tosefta, and the Palestinian Talmud, as well as other Rabbinic sources, speak of hrz[h rps, ‘the Scroll of the Temple precincts,’ or arz[ rps ‘the Scroll of Ezra’ and inform us that it was utilized as a standard by which other codices were corrected.” 33 The fact that this scroll of the Temple court can also be characterized as “the scroll of Ezra” should warn us that we are in fact dealing with a mythical object. 34 A single book, a codex, which is not even designated Torah, places this “scroll of the court” in the same category as the other three scrolls of the court discussed earlier. Having identified this hrz[h rps with his imagined ancient standard text used for correcting other manuscripts, he then cites the Mishnah: “All Biblical scrolls defile the hands, except the scroll of the ºAzarah.” 35 However, Gordis does not explain why such a remarkable biblical text does not “defile the hands.” It must have to do with the fact that the book was thought of as a nonliturgical text that was to be used for purposes other than public worship. 36 Gordis also cites the rabbinic text mentioned by Lieberman above, “And they corrected it (the Torah scroll of the king) in accordance with the scroll in the ºAzarah in accordance with the instruction of the Court of Seventy-One.” 37 Gordis must admit, in contrast to Lieberman, that “the reference to the ‘scroll of the king’ makes it clear that, like many other rabbinic traditions regarding the Court of the Seventy-One, it is the ideal Sanhedrin rather than the historical reality that is being described. Nevertheless, the matter-of-fact, almost incidental reference to the Sepher ha ºAzarah is impressive evidence for the existence and function of this codex in the Temple.” 38 On the contrary, the only reasonable view of the matter is to conclude that the whole notion of such a special codex is a fiction. Indeed, given the considerable charges leveled at the Hebrew Bible by the Christians—that the rabbis changed the text—it would not be surprising if the rabbis suggested that there was such a primitive and special codex that was used to ensure the continuity of a correct text in spite of all evidence to the contrary. The “scroll of the king” is simply the term for a high-quality

codex. The oldest evidence he can find is to speculate that the “first Jewish Christians, such as Matthew and Mark, would follow the accepted Jewish practice” and put their sayings of Jesus in pinakes or “codices” (p. 205). In this kind of circular argument for the early use of the writing tablet, pinakis (only in Luke 1:63) is transformed into scriptural codices. 33. Gordis, The Biblical Text in the Making, xxvi. 34. R. Beckwith (The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1985], 84–86) chooses to take the reference in the rabbinic tradition quite literally and make it an important aspect of his early dating of the canon. This, to me, hardly seems likely. 35. M. Kelim 15:6. See Gordis, The Biblical Text in the Making, xlviii nn. 38–39. 36. Barton discusses the meaning of the phrase “defile the hands” (Oracles of God, 68– 71; Holy Writings, Sacred Text, 108–21) and its particular reference to the “scroll of the Temple court,” ibid., 114–15. 37. Y. Sanhedrin ii 6.20c. 38. Gordis, The Biblical Text in the Making, xxvii.

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

71

manuscript that demanded special care in its production, a text that was copied from and collated against a high-quality exemplar. 39 To this we will return below. Gordis, likewise, combines two separate texts to prove that the ºAzarah scroll was used as the basis for the collation and correction of biblical MSS. He first cites a passage from the Babylonian Talmud: “The revisers of Bible manuscripts [µyrps yhygm] in Jerusalem received their recompense from the income of the Temple treasury.” 40 Along with this he cites a text of the Palestinian Talmud, which reads: “The revisers of the ºAzarah Scroll used to receive their recompense from the Temple treasury.” 41 But Gordis argues that this cannot be what is meant. Thus, he states: “The passage almost surely means, ‘The revisers [of Bible manuscripts] by means of the ºAzarah Scroll etc.’” 42 Only with this understanding can he declare: “It, therefore, seems reasonable to identify the hrz[h rps . . . with the ancient, highly regarded manuscript which became the archetype for all accurate codices. The general accuracy of this manuscript and the authority of these early Masoretes endowed it with a high level of sanctity.” 43 The anachronism of this whole scheme is obvious, 44 and we cannot accept the implicit emendation in his interpretation of rabbinic texts. The process described in these texts has nothing to do with editorial “revision.” It simply refers to the belief that, whenever the need arose for new copies of biblical texts, the biblical scrolls were carefully copied and collated against the exemplar from which they were made, and the same process applied to the so-called ºAzarah scroll. And all this was done at the expense of the Temple authorities. The ºAzarah scroll was simply thought of as an exemplary text that could be used in copying or correcting biblical scrolls, very much like the library copies of classical writers in Rome and other principal centers. There may have been a practice of this sort in Jewish centers around the Roman Empire, and the whole 39. We are reminded of the copies of biblical texts made on demand by Eusebius for Constantine. See Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 124. 40. B. Ketubbot 106a; cited by Gordis, The Biblical Text in the Making, xxvii. 41. Y. Sheqalim 4.48a. 42. Gordis, The Biblical Text in the Making, xxvii. 43. Ibid. 44. As Barton points out (Oracles, 83), Wolfenson already in 1924 identified the source of the strong prejudice for this constant reference to a primitive codex. Wolfenson states: “The idea that the Jewish Bible or Canon, i.e., a collection of books in a single volume, was formed at an early date is due to Elias Levita, who states . . . that ‘in Ezra’s time the 24 books of the Old Test. were not yet united in a single volume: Ezra and his associates united them together, and divided them into three parts, the Law, the Prophets, and the Hagiographa’. There is, however, absolutely no evidence for this assertion. It is a fabrication pure and simple, and this idea of a single volume containing all the Scriptures at the time of Ezra is not met with before Elias Levita” (L. B. Wolfenson, “Implications of the Place of the Book of Ruth in Editions, Manuscripts, and Canon of the Old Testament,” HUCA 1 [1924], 151–78, quote on p. 171 n. 49). Levita was a major authority on the Masorah in the sixteenth century.

72

Chapter 3

scheme was read back into the time of the Second Temple. It may have been a factor in the gradual development of increasing uniformity of the Hebrew vulgate. However, there is certainly nothing in any of these texts that suggests the creation of a standard text by means of deliberate editorial activity in the Second Temple period. Albrektson is of the same opinion regarding these Talmudic texts: It is however important to notice precisely what these talmudic passages tell us and what they do not tell us. Here, as so often in traditional material of this kind, it is sometimes difficult to decide which period the statements refer to. But above all it is hard to see how they could really prove an official standard text common to all Jewry. It is evident from these passages that new manuscripts of the sacred scriptures, especially more or less official copies, were carefully checked to ensure their complete agreement with the Vorlage. But as far as I can see, they do not imply that this Vorlage had to represent an authorized standard text. Accuracy in transcription and collating the copy is one thing; the claim that the copy must not only be flawless but also reproduce a certain type of text is another. 45

I completely concur with Albrektson’s remarks. His statement agrees with the practice that was widespread throughout the classical world from the Hellenistic period onward, and all the comments about copying and collating texts in the rabbinic texts can best be understood within this broad horizon of textual transmission. Furthermore, Lieberman has introduced a distinction between various kinds of biblical texts—official, semiofficial, and popular—which were in use, he believes, in various Jewish communities and among the general populace, and he bases this distinction on the analogy of classical terminology. A number of scholars have picked up on this to defend the notion that alongside an official critical standard text there were still divergent texts in the early Roman period. Thus, after affirming his belief in a “legally authorized” text of the Bible in the Second Temple period, Lieberman continues: “But it is highly doubtful that the public at large accepted at once the alterations and corrections of the learned men. In all likelihood they adhered to their old texts for a long time. The vulgata, authoritative popular texts, circulated among the masses, in many synagogues and in the schools. The copies of the temple were the hjkribwmevna, the most exact books, but the vulgata continued to exist as the standard texts of the public.” 46 What Lieberman suggests by this distinction is that the books that were hjkribwmevna, “the most accurate,” have to do with carefully edited texts executed by the sopherim, but in fact all the term means is that these are the texts that were most carefully copied and collated so as to avoid the usual copyist errors. It has nothing to do with text-type. Lieberman cites as an example of the latter type, the vulgata, the so-called Severus Scroll that originated in Jerusalem and was a prize of war after 45. Albrektson, “Reflections,” 57. 46. Lieberman, Hellenism, 22–23.

spread is 6 points long

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

73

70 c.e., eventually finding its way into a synagogue in Rome. It belonged to a group of Jerusalem texts including those of Rabbi Meir. These texts had readings that differed from the readings in the MT. On this basis, Lieberman states: “These books of Jerusalem are thus quoted as possessing some authority; they probably represented the general vulgata of the Jews of the first centuries c.e.” 47 Lieberman cannot escape the fact that Rabbi Meir, perhaps the most distinguished disciple of Rabbi Akiba, not only owned a copy of the Torah that was not “corrected” according to some “official” version, he owned a version that was held in high esteem by other rabbis and from which as a professional scribe he made many excellent copies. Indeed, they would fit the description of hjkribwmevna, which means “accurate copies.” 48 Yet Lieberman calls Meir’s version “the vulgata, the text to which the public was accustomed.” 49 Lieberman goes on to make a comparison with the Homeric text tradition. He states: “This practice parallels the one that was characteristic of the circulation of the Homeric texts. The publishing houses took little notice of the literary activity of the Alexandrian grammarians, and continued to copy the common text. The copies designated as carievstata and ajsteiovtera (urbana) were the appanage of the few; the koinovtera were the possession of the public at large.” 50 As we have seen above, it is quite true that the Alexandrian scholars had no direct effect on the Homeric koine, which became the standard text throughout the Middle Ages. It was precisely this unedited text that became the standard text. This is where Lieberman’s comparison breaks down. Furthermore, one would guess from his remarks that the texts in the scholia labeled carievstata and ajsteiovtera are the texts of the Alexandrian scholars, but this is not the case. They are cited wihtout reference to the scholars Zenodotus, Aristophanes, and Aristarchus and simply indicate better-quality copies. 51 We certainly cannot apply these laudatory terms to a special group of Temple texts. They would probably apply just as well to the scroll of the synagogue of Serverus and the scroll of Rabbi Meir. If we follow the analogy of the Homeric text tradition, it is much more likely that the vulgate text tradition is the one that finally won out over the few elegant texts such as those produced by Rabbi Meir. Lieberman seems further to suggest that below the level of the koine or vulgate text was “the worst type, faulovtera”: texts that were used in small Jewish localities in Palestine” and that were “inferior to the vulgata of Jerusalem.” 52 However, Allen, who has examined this terminology of the scholia closely, finds that a number of terms are used interchangeably with

47. Ibid., 24. 48. As Lieberman admits in another connection (ibid., 97). Lieberman’s citations indicate that he is taking this terminology from the scholia of Homer. 49. Ibid., 25. 50. Ibid. 51. See Allen, Homer, 271–82. 52. Lieberman, Hellenism, 26.

74

Chapter 3

faulovtera, including the term koinhv. He concludes that the term is “ambiguous, like ‘vulgar’ and ‘vulgate’.” He goes on to suggest that it can mean the “usual” and “universal” but that it can often take on this secondary, disparaging sense, because the common text was the one that was so easily abused. 53 The employment of this Greek terminology as a way of distinguishing different types and families of texts, as Lieberman has done, is not helpful. It is certainly the case, both in the Hellenistic world and in the Roman world, as we have seen above, that there were both expensive higherquality texts and poorer common texts, 54 but it is hardly possible to build on this any notion of the text-history of the classics, on the one hand, and the Hebrew Bible, on the other. I have spent time and space on this question because one frequently encounters the scheme of three categories of texts related to the corresponding Greek terminology, and the discussion does not improve in the course of transmission from one scholar to another. A couple of examples are sufficient to make the point. Thus Gordis, after he has created in his imagination the archetype of the MT complete with a selection of variants copied into the margins, asserts: Undoubtedly, this text [the archetype] was first accepted in the official circles of normative Judaism, the scholars who were the successors to the Sopherim and the Pharisees. It was natural that members of the groups that followed Pharisaic tradition tried to procure for their own use copies of the Torah, the Prophets, and the Hagiographa that would agree with the text of the archetype or that would be exact copies of it. Failing that, they would try to have manuscripts already in their hands corrected by comparing them with the official codex in Jerusalem. . . . Yet at times even scholars had to be content with “popular” manuscripts that differed from the official standard. Such was “the scroll of Rabb Meir,” some divergences of which are recorded in the Talmud. Moreover, the expense and scarcity of Bible texts often impelled scholars to quote Scriptures from memory, with the result that they sometimes cited passages inexactly. There would come into play the tendency to leveling, i.e., recalling the verse in a more usual and familiar form. 55

After the assertion of an official and authoritative text within Pharisaic Rabbinic Judaism and its broad dissemination through copies, Gordis curiously dismisses all the contrary evidence by this appeal to the use of “popular” texts, although Rabbi Meir was still using a prized text that differed from the “official” one in the third century c.e. and making copies from it! How could such a prominent rabbi with a great reputation as a professional scribe be understood as promulgating a corrupt text? And all the rabbinic evidence that goes against his position Gordis dismisses as lapses of memory. All the 53. See especially Allen, Homer, 277–78. 54. It is a little like the difference between leather-bound folio volumes and cheap paperbacks. 55. Gordis, The Biblical Text in the Making, xxxi–xxxii.

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

75

Jewish groups in the rival sects and in the Diaspora can be discarded as beyond the pale of “normative” Judaism, or at least not knowing enough Hebrew, like Philo, so that “inexact manuscripts sufficed for their limited needs.” 56 Gordis further calls upon the testimony of Josephus. He states: “This view is confirmed by Josephus who boasts to his Greek readers that ‘during all the past generations no man dared to add to them (i.e., the Scriptures) or take from them or make any change whatever in them.’ This statement makes sense only if in Josephus’ time (first century c.e.) the Biblical text had been fixed and universally recognized for at least several generations.” 57 This “prooftext” does not really suggest what Gordis takes it to mean, however. The purpose of statements of this sort was simply to affirm the great antiquity of Jewish Scriptures against the charge of forgery or falsification. A statement like this was typical of many Hellenistic authors and says nothing about the mechanics of textual transmission. Josephus’s own quotations and references to the content of the Jewish Scriptures are not restricted to a hypothetical MT archetype. His readings often seem to reflect the LXX in preference to the MT. Gordis dates the MT archetype to the reign of Salome Alexander (76–67 b.c.e.), 58 a full two centuries before the date proposed by Lagarde. In his concluding summary, Gordis again returns to the issue of textual diversity, but now it is not to the different texts within rabbinic Judaism but to the different texts of “normative” Judaism and Jewish sects that he turns. He states: The creation of the Masoretic text did not eliminate the existence of “vulgar,” inexact manuscripts, which continued to circulate among the people, particularly in those circles which were distant either in space or in outlook from normative Judaism. These groups included divergent ideological sects, like the Samaritans and the Qumranites, and Diaspora communities, as in Alexandria. These popular scrolls also continued to be used among broad segments of the people of Palestine, including those scholars who were unable to afford the expensive, accurately revised manuscripts. These popular scrolls contained many variants, most of which were due to scribal error, yet some of which presented original and preferred readings. But the early Masoretes were concerned only with preserving the text unchanged. For them the distinction between these two types of divergencies did not exist—both represented aberrations from the standard, sacred model and hence were not incorporated into the Masoretic codices.59

The so-called “vulgar” texts of which Gordis speaks were, in fact, vulgate texts, and this means they were regarded as “standard” in their communities. With the exception of some very late additions to the Samaritan text, the texts within the “sects” named by Gordis were no more ideological than 56. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 59. Ibid.,

xxxii. xxxiii (passage from Josephus cited from Ag. Ap. 2.42). xl–xli. xlii.

76

Chapter 3

those used by “normative Judaism.” And because Rabbi Meir used one of these so-called “vulgar” texts as a model from which to make copies, it seems quite gratuitous to suggest that this scholar was either too poor or not orthodox enough to make a good copy from the archetype text. There is nothing to suggest that Meir’s scroll was in any way inferior to the supposed “model text.” 60 The idea that a normative text was created for a “normative Judaism” is just a figment of the imagination. Another scholar who follows Lieberman’s classification of texts is S. Talmon, who presents this summary: (1) authoritative books kept in the Temple (hjkribomevna) [sic] 61; (2) authoritative popular books used by the general public (koinav); (3) inferior texts, which survived in small communities in Palestine (faulovtera). Only books of the first category were considered suitable for public reading in the synagogue. The second group, representatives of which are the Torah Scroll of Rabbi Meir, the Torah Scroll of the Synagogue of Severus in Rome and the other books that emanated from Jerusalem . . . , were used for study. The rabbis strove, however, to keep the books of the third category from being used even for study purposes. 62

As indicated above, this whole scheme is completely artificial and does not correspond with the reality of textual transmission in the ancient world. The most glaring contradiction is to suggest that the Torah scroll of the synagogue of Severus was not used for public reading in the synagogue. And if Rabbi Meir, the most noted scribe and copyist of his day, did not copy texts for use in the synagogues, who did? In fact Lieberman himself is inconsistent regarding what texts were used in the synagogue. 63 The whole point of the scheme is to try to explain away the fact that there are many biblical quotations in rabbinic sources that do not correspond to the text of the MT, which these scholars seek to establish as an official standard text by the end of the Second Temple period. Emanuel Tov, who is critical of Lieberman’s tripartite division, nevertheless attempts to distinguish between two broad scribal conventions: “vulgar” texts, which were in general use by the people, and “nonvulgar” texts, which were more conservative and “official.” 64 Thus, Tov makes the distinction that, in contrast to the nonvulgar texts, “the vulgar texts were not used for official purposes, such as the liturgy, but one cannot be sure of this with regard to the Qumran sect.” 65 Included in this group are the pre-Samaritan and SamP texts, as well as the Roman period Severus Scroll and the first- or 60. For a list of the variants in the Severus scroll, some of which parallel those in the R. Meir scroll, see Ginsburg, Introduction, 410–20. See also the discussion in Tov, Textual Criticism, 119–21, who gives a more select list of the variants. 61. This should read hjkribwmevna. 62. Talmon, “The Three Scrolls,” 14–15. 63. See remarks by Lieberman, Hellenism, 22 and 26. 64. Tov, Textual Criticism, 192–95. 65. Ibid., 192.

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

77

second-century b.c.e. Nash papyrus. Thus, the statement about nonliturgical use is contradicted by the fact that Tov maintains that the Nash Papyrus containing the Decalogue was “probably used for liturgical purposes.” 66 The socalled Severus Scroll, understood as a vulgar text, was also almost certainly used as a liturgical text within a rabbinic community, and the Samaritan Pentateuch was also likely a liturgical text within the Samaritan community. Concerning the vulgar texts, he states: “Their copyists allowed themselves the freedom of inserting many changes and corrections into the text and even of introducing an idiosyncratic orthographic and morphological practice, such as found in many Qumran texts.” 67 There are, as we have seen, copyist tendencies both in “correcting” texts in the direction of modernizing in terms of language and scribal convention, as well as tendencies towards retaining archaic form and style and even “correcting” in an attempt to recover a more ancient text. The “vulgate” text is only known by the fact that it is the text that survives, and it is misleading to distinguish texts as “vulgar” or “nonvulgar” while this process was very much in a state of flux. According to Tov, the “nonvulgar” texts include both the MT tradition and the LXX, as well as some unaligned Qumran texts; this distinction is made on the basis of certain characteristics of orthography and morphology. This means that while one can set aside SamP as a vulgar text, the nonvulgar group still does not allow one further to distinguish between the MT and the LXX. 68 This distinction only came about as a result of the later adoption of the LXX by the Christian church; thus, the MT becomes the textual tradition of “mainstream” Judaism from the late first century c.e. onward. 69 This was not the result of a stabilization or standardization of the proto-Masoretic family of texts but of the texts that belonged to “the only organized group which survived the destruction of the Second Temple. Thus, after the first century c.e. a description of the transmission of the text of the Hebrew Bible actually amounts to an account of the history of MT.” 70 Here Tov seems to be in agreement with Albrektson, although he waters down Albrektson’s position. A problem, as Tov acknowledges, is the Severus Torah scroll, the origin of which is linked to the Temple, and it belonged to a group of Jerusalem texts that also included R. Meir’s Torah scroll. All of this hardly fits the description of “vulgar.” Because we lack a manuscript tradition of the vulgate MT for the whole period from the second century to the ninth century c.e., the argument becomes a typical case of post hoc ergo propter hoc. It ends up being no different from the origin of the vulgate of the text of Homer. 66. Ibid., 203. 67. Ibid., 193. 68. Ibid., 193–94. 69. Tov constantly uses the term “central stream in Judaism” to mean rabbinic Judaism as well as the equivalent of what Gordis calls “normative Judaism.” This notion is very problematic. 70. Ibid., 195.

78

Chapter 3

There can be no doubt, based on the broader evidence of antiquity, that there existed a range of scribal practice in the copying and transmission of literary texts, particularly texts that were perceived as classics or “canonical” in the broad sense of that term. To understand this process and the degree to which editing may or may not have affected it is important to the history of the text. Yet it is not helpful simply to transfer some of this jargon to the discussion of biblical texts for the purpose of supporting preconceived notions about archetypal or “canonical” texts. It would be best simply to eliminate categories such as “vulgar” and “nonvulgar” from the discussion of how the MT became the vulgate text of the Hebrew Bible. Before we can address the question of the specific activity of the sopherim, we need to understand who they were, especially in relationship to the rabbis from whom we get bits and pieces of information about them. Lieberman makes it clear in his discussion of the sopherim that there is a direct continuity between the sopherim and the rabbis, and this is a common assumption in many studies of the so-called proto-MT. However, there is good reason to dispute this point of view. Thus, E. Bickerman draws a firm distinction between the scribe, who is a professional penman, and the sages, who are the interpreters of the law and other religious texts. He states: Modern scholars misrepresent the soferim by confusing these notaries, accountants, and legists with the rabbis. It would be a rather amusing metonymy if the rabbis, who discouraged their students from writing down their opinions, had styled themselves ‘writers.’ . . . In fact the rabbis of the Talmud never called themselves soferim, reserving that name for penmen, drafters of documents, and teachers of elementary reading and writing. . . . Accordingly, neither Philo, nor Josephus, nor the Church Fathers called the rabbis grammateis. The rabbis, rather, took over the traditional title of ‘Wise Men’ in Israel, for while the Torah belonged to the priest, and oracles came from the seer, ‘wisdom was from the sages.’ But for the talmudic rabbis the idea of wisdom acquired a new meaning, one that was unknown in ancient Israel, and the first man who was accorded the new title was Ben Sira.” 71

Nevertheless, Bickerman does draw some comparison between the sopherim and the Alexandrian scholars. He states: “About 150 b.c.e. the first use of the word grammatikos (‘a scholar who studies books’) appears in Jewish sources. This means that at that date there were already sopherim busy correcting the biblical text.” 72 This observation is important because it means that we can expect to see the beginnings of the kind of “editorial” activity that is reflected in the Alexandrian scholars, who were also called grammatikoi, in their studies of Homer, imitated by the sopherim’s study of the scrip-

71. Elias J. Bickerman, The Jews in the Greek Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 163–64. He puts the error down to a mistranslation of grammateis, “scribes,” in the Gospels by Luther. 72. Ibid., 171.

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

79

tures. This is a kind of study of the Law quite different from what one would expect from the priests and rabbis; it represents the beginnings of biblical scholarship as it relates to the text of the Hebrew Bible. Of course, whether or not the sopherim were “busy correcting the biblical text,” as Bickerman suggests, may be based on a misunderstanding of the activity of the Alexandrian scholars and exactly what is meant by “correcting” texts. To this issue we will now turn.

Scribal Signs and Corrections Lieberman’s association of the scribal activity of the sopherim with that of the grammarians of Alexandria is heavily dependent on the similarity of the “critical marks” in the Hebrew Bible with the marks used in Greek literature of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. 73 His point is that the marks extant in the Hebrew Bible may be attributed to the sopherim, who were grammarians and editors of the Bible in the Second Temple period. This discussion should be qualified in two ways that are not immediately apparent in Lieberman’s discussion: (1) we must distinguish between scribal markings that have to do with corrections in the course of copying or collation of a copy against its exemplar and the critical signs that were used by the grammarians and scholars in their “editing” of the MSS of ancient works; and (2) the scribal marks were used by a wide spectrum of scribes and copyists in the Greco-Roman world and by the various groups of Jewish scribes and copyists and were therefore not limited to the two entities suggested by Lieberman’s comparison. Lieberman also spends much of his discussion on the matter of rabbinic interpretation of these signs, and to this issue we will return at the end of our treatment of these signs and their place in the “editing” of the Bible. First of all, the many scribal marks or “para-textual elements” in the MT came into the text over an extended period of time, and it is very difficult to date any particular instance exactly. 74 Some indication of this chronology of development can be gained now by the fact that similar markings are evident in the texts from Qumran. 75 Of the various markings, Lieberman highlights two for discussion: the so-called “inverted nuns” and the “extraordinary points” or dots placed above the letters of certain words. The “inverted nuns” are very likely derived from the Greek signs sigma and antisigma, the origin of the modern parenthesis. They usually signified the displacement of a text that does not fit easily within its present context. The classic example is the unit in Num 10:35–36, which is marked in the MT by inverted nuns. 76 The “extraordinary points” were used as an indication of erasure in Greek and Latin scribal practice, and this is the use they usually 73. Lieberman, Hellenism, 38–46. 74. On the use of “para-textual elements,” see Tov, Textual Criticism, 49–58. 75. See Tov, Textual Criticism, 213–17. 76. See also Ginsburg, Introduction, 341–45.

80

Chapter 3

have in the biblical texts as well, a form of athetesis based upon collation with another text. 77 It should be noted that both of these scribal marks, and many more besides, were used by the scribes of Qumran, and they were not limited to biblical texts but could be used in many nonbiblical texts as well. Tov has compiled all of the material from Qumran to suggest the existence of a “scribal school” at Qumran. 78 These markings are primarily, if not exclusively, concerned with the task of the faithful transmission of the text and the correction of texts that were collated against an exemplar. Only in a very limited sense can any of this be characterized as “editing.” It is akin to “proofreading.” It is true that some of these marks were used by the grammarians, but the more distinctive marks of the Hellenistic editors, such as the use of the obelus, has no counterpart in the biblical texts. As indicated above, the rabbis as a group were not scribes, although some, such as Rabbi Meir, were scribes by profession. Some of them were well aware of scribal conventions and the meaning of such marks in the text, but others considered them somewhat mysterious and gave them a special meaning that had little to do with their original intention. 79 This is simply in keeping with the general tendency in rabbinic midrash to give a special hidden meaning to every anomaly in the text, such as unusual spelling of words or grammatical forms, and this could also include the use of critical signs. There is nothing in the use of scribal markings used to correct texts that indicates editorial activity as such. Rabbinic literature also refers to “correctors” of texts (magihîm), who were concerned with the matter of text-copying quality. These textual corrections should not be confused with the so-called “corrections of the sopherim” (tiqqunê sopérîm), which are of quite a different kind. 80 They have to do with slight alterations in the text, such as a change in suffix, that were made by pious scribes or copyists to preserve the honor of the deity. Thus, in the case of Zech 2:12b the original text read, “Whoever touches you, touches the pupil of my eye,” but “my eye” referring to God’s eye has been changed to “his 77. Ibid., 315–34, on the extraordinary points. Ginsburg also notes that the same practice can be found in Greek and Latin MSS (p. 321) and that it continued long into the medieval period. He further notes: “The important part of the record is the admission by the Sopherim themselves that the dots on the letters and the words marked them as spurious, and that this admission is corroborated by the ancient Versions where some of the stigmatized expressions in question are actually not represented” (p. 334). 78. E. Tov, “Further Evidence for the Existence of a Qumran Scribal School,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Fifty Years after Their Discovery (ed. L. H. Schiffman, E. Tov, and J. C. VanderKam; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2000), 199–216. 79. See examples cited by Lieberman, Hellenism, 45–46. Ginsburg (Introduction, 342–45) suggests that the rabbis deliberately tried to suppress the true critical significance of the inverted nuns. He states: “The treatment which these Inverted Nuns has received on the part of some of the later Massorites affords another striking illustration of the anxiety to obliterate all early traces of critical signs as to the condition of the text. Instead of placing these brackets at the beginning and at the end of the verses which are designed to indicate as dislocated, in accordance with nearly all the best Codices, some MSS exhibit the inverted Nun in the word in the text itself which contains this letter in each of the nine passages.” 80. See also Ginsburg’s detailed treatment (ibid., 347–63).

spread is 12 points long

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

81

eye” to remove any suggestion of anthropomorphism. The “corrections” are, from the point of view of critical editing, corruptions of the text, and, although they were recognized as changes, they were allowed to stand to protect the honor of the deity. The earlier rabbinic sources simply attributed them to the biblical text itself, but in the later rabbinic sources they are made the work of the sopherim. The notion of the “correction of the sopherim” is simply the product of rabbinic midrash and can give us no firm information regarding ancient editorial practice. Lieberman points to the fact that Zenodotus expresses a similar kind of concern for what is “appropriate” with reference to remarks about the heroes in Homer. However, there was a long history of “correcting” Homer in order to eliminate or modify certain features of the epic that caused some people difficulty. It was, in fact, the editor’s task to resist such changes, not to engage in them, and later editors criticized Zenodotus for some of his changes. What Lieberman neglects in his comparison with the Alexandrian critical scholars and the Latin grammarians is the fact that their most important critical signs in the text, the signs that marked possible additions and interpolations, were accompanied by commentary, either in separate works or at the very least in marginal notes. There is nothing comparable to this in the early biblical text-tradition, and we must wait for the later Masoretic tradition for any kind of marginal comment, which is more akin to the scholia. As we will see below, critical editing in the Alexandrian tradition has its earliest reflection in Christian scholarship in the work of Origen. The rabbinic midrash is a commentary on the text of an entirely different character and has little in common with the tradition of critical scribal editing. Who, then, were the sopherim? It is likely that here we have to do with scribal guilds that arose at least by the Hellenistic period and who developed their own scribal conventions of bookmaking, their own orthographic styles, the production of copies and textual correction. There may have been some regional differences, such as the style of Jerusalem or Qumran, and in time a group may have developed a group that specialized in biblical and closely related texts. No doubt some remarks about the sopherim and their activity in the rabbinic literature are anachronistic and idealized for the Second Temple period. Within or alongside such scribal guilds there may have been “grammarians” who arose under the influence of the Hellenistic and Roman world of scholarship and who developed an increasingly sophisticated approach to the biblical text. They may have engaged in antiquarian and grammatical studies similar to their scholarly counterparts in the GrecoRoman world. Evidence for this seems to be reflected in the works of Origen, Eusebius, and Jerome, who all had close contact with this scholarship. However, it seems extremely doubtful to me that such scribal scholars had any great impact on the text of the Bible until a rather late stage in the whole process of textual transmission. The simple fact of a strong movement toward textual uniformity does not, of itself, prove that there was a deliberate standardization of one particular text-type and that this was the product of “editorial activity.” The parallel of textual uniformity in the text of Homer by the time of the Roman Republic without any direct influence from the

82

Chapter 3

scholarly editors of Alexandria makes it all the more likely that this uniformity came about in the Hebrew Bible without any deliberate intervention by either scribes or rabbis. There is another parallel with Alexandria that may also be significant, and it has to do with the relationship between text and canon. We noted above that the scholars of Alexandria, particularly Aristophanes, were largely concerned with establishing a definitive list of the classics—the works that were to be included and those that were excluded—and it was this list that was largely accepted by the literary world as the “canon” of literature for Greek education and culture. Yet, the critical texts that these scholars sought to produce for just these “canonical” works do not seem to have commanded the same authority for men who continued to produce copies of the vulgate text. The influence of the Alexandrian scholars in the establishment of the “canon” did not carry over to the acceptance of their particular textual forms of these works. The establishing of the “canonical” list of classics may have helped to encourage a general uniformity of its vulgate texts for practical purposes but not a specific edited text. In similar fashion several centuries later, the rabbis made up their list of “inspired” works, no doubt in imitation of the Greek world of the classics with a similar range of writings. It is also interesting that they were concerned to identify each of the biblical works with particular writers because, as with the Greek classics, a work could not belong to the age of inspiration without this sort of identification (see b. B. Bat. 14b–15a). However, the listing of such inspired works from the past was not directly connected with the concern for an edited standard text for each of the books on the list. As we have seen above, Orlinsky is one of the few scholars in the past who has strongly argued against any direct connection between canonization and a fixed standard text. He has argued that there never was, in fact, a standard Masoretic Text, either in the early centuries or even later in the medieval period. He states: In many scores of instances, the fragmentary remains of Aquila’s translation—‘slave to the Hebrew letter’ is how Origen put it—manifest readings different from those of the preserved Hebrew text, and this in the late first to early second centuries c.e. But apart from translations and versions of the Bible, for example, the Samaritan, the Targums, the Peshitta, and the Vulgate, such tannaitic works as the Mechilta, Sifra, and Sifre, the Gemara, the Kethib-Qere system, and even liturgical compositions and grammatical works of the late first millennium, not to mention manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible of the second millennium—all these offer the discriminating textual critic quotations from the Hebrew text that differ from our preserved Hebrew text in circulation and not from faulty memory or carelessness. 81 81. H. M. Orlinsky, “The Septuagint and Its Hebrew Text” [completed in 1977], in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 2: The Hellenistic Age (ed. W. D. Davies et al.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 534–62. Quotation on pp. 559–60; also idem, “Prolegomena,” xx (quoted above, p. 63). See similar judgment earlier by G. M. Powis-Smith, “Studies in the Masoretes,” JAOS 45 (1927–28): 208ff.

spread is 12 points long

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

83

It is entirely misleading to argue that the establishment of the canon and the development of the midrashic method of exegesis reflected in Rabbi Akiba’s work demanded a fixed standard text and then find some excuse for all those instances in rabbinic writings where the quotations of biblical texts point to textual diversity. To the larger issues of editing and canonicity we will return in chap. 9.

Editing and Translating the Sacred Texts among the Church Fathers There were two great Christian scholars, Origen and Jerome, whose work bears directly upon the question of biblical editing in antiquity. Between the two was a third scholar, Eusebius, who provided a valuable link in the transmission of so much of Origen’s work to a later age. Both Origen and Jerome were trained in the scholarly, text-critical methods of the day—Origen as a grammarian in the Alexandrian tradition and Jerome as a student of Donatus, the most influencial grammarian and critic of the fourth century c.e. 82 In the case of both Christian scholars, they were confronted with the same kinds of problems as the Hellenistic and Roman editors of Homer and the classical tradition, that of how to deal with multiple “editions” and versions; in addition, they were faced with the problems of relating the text in the original language (Hebrew) with the texts in translation (Origen) and of revising or creating a new translation from the exiting editions and versions ( Jerome). In both cases they must be viewed as the primary examples of the Christian editing of scripture before the Renaissance and the modern period. Furthermore, in both cases, these scholars were also deeply involved in the task of biblical interpretation and in questions of canon as this related to the canon of the Christian Old Testament. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the editorial tradition of criticism in which both scholars were trained was extremely conservative in the treatment of classical, and especially sacred, texts and, in particular, the koine or vulgate form of these texts. As Zetzel has pointed out, one must be very cautious about recreating these ancient scholars in the image of the modern textual critic. 83 Origen My primary focus in looking at this remarkable scholar and leader of third-century Christianity is to examine his role as an editor of the Bible and in particular the Old Testament as it related to the Hebrew Bible of his day and the Septuagint, the common Bible of the Church. This means that we will consider the intellectual and religious background that Origen brings to this task, the major work that embodies his efforts at “editing” the Bible, the Hexapla: its purpose and its place within the Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman scholarship of his day. Because “editors” of classical works 82. On Donatus, see OCD, 494–95. Donatus wrote commentaries on Virgil, whose works were regarded as sacred in the same way that the Greeks considered Homer sacred. 83. See above, chap. 2.

84

Chapter 3

also produced commentaries that were closely related to their “editions,” we will also need to look at the relationship of Origen’s commentaries and homilies to the “fifth column” of the Hexapla. This, in turn, will also address the question of Origen’s understanding of canon and the “canonical text” of the Bible and the extent to which he considered himself to be “editing” or producing the “final form” of such a text. Origen was born in Alexandria (ca. 185 C.E.) and educated in the Catechetical School of Alexandria under Clement, and later became head of the same school, which R. P. C. Hanson describes as “a sort of Christian University, where the teaching included references to pagan philosophy.” 84 Origen was himself trained in pagan philosophy and classical scholarship and continued to draw on this learning for the rest of his life. By 212 Origen had begun his scholarly work and travels, perhaps already beginning the Hexapla and collecting texts. He left Alexandria for good and settled in Caesarea in 232 where he took up his project of the Hexapla in earnest. 85 With his move to Caesarea, he became competent in Hebrew for his text-critical editing of the Septuagint, so most of his work on the Hexapla must have been done after this time. It was not completed until ca. 243. During his whole career as a biblical scholar, he was engaged in writing commentaries, many of them produced before his “edition” of the biblical text in the Hexapla was completed. They were not, therefore, commentaries on his particular text. Late in his career he also produced a number of homilies on various biblical books, based primarily on the “uncorrected” Septuagint koine. To these works we will return later. Let us now turn to the Hexapla, which is the focus of Origen’s “editing” of the Old Testament. The Hexapla, as Eusebius tells us (Hist. eccl. 6.16), was a work setting out the various versions of the text of the Old Testament in order to compare the Greek Bible with the Hebrew Bible, thought to be “the original writings in the actual Hebrew characters, which were extant among the Jews,” by placing its Hebrew text and its transliterated form alongside the Septuagint and the various “editions” of the other translations into Greek, notably, Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion. In the case of some biblical books, Origen also added copies of less-known local “editions” that he had collected in the course of his travels, for comparison with his primary Greek text. Origen assumed that the Hebrew text that he used was virtually identical with the text that was used to translate the Septuagint, so that in his view he could use it to correct the Greek text, which had become defective over the course of time. He also used the other, more-recent Greek versions, which manifest close similarity to the Hebrew text, for much the 84. R. P. C. Hanson, Origen’s Doctrine of Tradition (London: SPCK, 1954), 2. 85. Ibid., 2–4. For a slightly different summary of the basic facts of his life and career, see H. Chadwick and M. J. Edwards, “Origen,” OCD, 1076–77. Chadwick and Edwards (p. 1076) describe Origen as a “conservative redactor” because he “defended the Greek portions of Daniel” that were lacking in the Hebrew Bible. See also William McKane, Selected Christian Hebraists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 22–31.

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

85

same purpose. In his reproduction of the “edited” version of the Greek text, however, he was careful not to obliterate the actual koine text with which he worked but to mark all additions from the Hebrew and other versions with asterisks, and the passages in the Septuagint that were not in the other versions he marked off with the obelus. It should be noted that the common (koine) text used as the base text for Origen’s fifth column was the common one in use in the Church, and for this purpose he was careful to preserve it in spite of all corrections. It was the common and familiar text that was regarded the sacred text, not the specially edited one, and no one understood this better than Origen, as reflected in his commentaries and homilies. Furthermore, Origen’s editorial methods follow essentially the same practice as the Alexandrian scholars’ on Homer. In making a comparison between the Alexandrians and Origen, Allen states: Origen took a freer hand with the LXX than Aristarchus did with his koinhv, in so far as he added passages which he considered had been omitted in translating the Hebrew original. This original was a factor wanting in Aristarchus’ scheme, and to obtain a correct equivalent of it in Greek was Origen’s aim as he says himself. . . . Hence he did not object to amplify the common Greek text and to correct one Greek version from another. 86

Unlike Aristarchus’s edited version of Homer, however, Origen’s edited version of the Septuagint, which was kept in Caesarea, was copied by others and in time became the standard used by the Palestinian peoples, alongside the Greek texts of Hesychius (in Alexandria and Egypt) and Lucian (from Constantinople to Antioch). Allen draws some interesting conclusions, based on his comparison between the editing of Homer and the Hexapla. He states: We conclude from the account of Origen and the Hexapla that there was in the O.T., as in Homer, an edition known as the koinhv. In the case of the O.T. it applied to more than one edition in different parts of the world. It meant, however, where it was used, the general or usual text. . . . Further, we see that in both cases [the O.T. and Homer] the contents of the koinhv were sacred. Critics expressed their opinion of the genuineness of parts of it by signs appicted on its margin . . . without removing a jot or tittle from it. . . . In the O.T. additions were made to the koinhv from one particular version; no one thought of doing this to the Homeric koinhv, but Homer had no sanctified Hebrew original establishing an undisputed canon of bulk. In Homer the tendency was to restrict the text.87

The important point made here is that the koine, the text in general use, is the sacred “canonical” text, and as such it is treated by scholars with great conservatism. Whether or not this text in common use, the vulgate, was influenced over the course of time by an “editorial” process, such editing is not part of the canonization of the text; it is a recognition of the status

86. Allen, Homer, 317–18. 87. Ibid., 320.

86

Chapter 3

given to a text as classic or sacred. Thus the form that the “canonical” text may take within any particular “community” in which it is regarded as classical or sacred may change over the course of time and has constantly changed up to the present. The tendency of the scholarly elite is to effect a change by “correction” of the text from accumulated corruptions to its more original form; the tendency of the “community” is to resist such change and to retain the familiar that has been through time the vehicle of their belief system and the basis of their culture, values, and identity. For the general public, the vulgate version was appropriated by means of a constant tendency toward “modernization” of the text; for the scholarly critic, this modernization was viewed as corruption to be constantly resisted and corrected. Some, like Origen, seem to have been caught in the middle with both concerns in tension: to “heal” the text through scholarly endeavor as well as to make it relevant by means of homilies to the religious concerns of his community for whom it was sacred text. However, it cannot be stressed strongly enough that Origen’s system of editing was fundamentally different from that of the Alexandrian scholars in that he had two quite different text-traditions that he was trying to reconcile, one in the original language and the other in a translation, and it was the translation that was his own koine. Furthermore, it was the Hebrew text-tradition that was favored in the “correction” of the LXX, with the result that he made interpolations from the Hebrew-based “editions” and marked them with an ambiguous sign, the asterisk, something, as Allen says, that the Hellenistic editors never did. And where the LXX koine had pluses, compared with the Hebrew, they were marked with obeli as if they were “interpolations” to be athetized. This is a remarkable adaptation of the critical method of the Alexandrian school of criticism. The basic point of the criticism was to bring these two text-traditions into quantitative agreement with each other. Unlike the Alexandrian scholars, no attempt was made to “emend” the text or mark interpolations, using other criteria in the way that the Alexandrian scholars did. Comments in the commentaries on the critically marked texts consisted primarily in justifying the pluses in the Hebrew as part of the sacred text and explaining or explaining away the pluses in the LXX that were lacking in the “original” text. In any event, the sole object of the editing was to preserve at all costs the entire text of Scripture as it was transmitted in both streams of text-tradition. To try to understand why Origen undertook such a monumental task as that reflected by the Hexapla is to raise the question as to its purpose. As we have seen, the Alexandrian scholars selected an “edition” as the basis for their commentary or else created their own critical edition, with the appropriate critical signs, and then explained the reasons for their athetesis in their commentary. In the case of Origen, it is hotly debated whether or not he produced a critical edition distinct from the Hexapla as a basis for his commentaries, because the fifth column of his Hexapla can hardly be construed as doing so. While Origen used the Aristarchan signs as critical indications of pluses and omissions, he did so for quite different reasons. Their

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

87

only point is to signal a comparison with the Hebrew text by means of the “editions” (ekdoseis) that were in agreement with the Hebrew text that he was using. 88 Furthermore, in order to facilitate the comparison between texts, Origen had to render the Greek in his fifth column in a way that was not the same as the Greek of the Septuagint or in accord with Greek style. Consequently, it cannot possibly have been Origen’s intention to have this Greek text of the fifth column represent an “edition” of the Septuagint, and anyone copying it, even if he restored the Greek order of the Septuagint, would still have produced a “long” text with interpolations, quite different from the usual intention of critical editors. 89 The copies of Pamphilus and Eusebius clearly misunderstood and misused Origen’s project, as we shall see, and the result is a mixed text. The only interpretation of Origen’s task that seems to make sense is that he undertook an intensive study of the relationship of the Hebrew Bible of his own day, which he regarded as corresponding closely to the original form of the Hebrew text from which the Septuagint derived, and the koine version of his own day, which he viewed as having suffered some corruption. This issue had become especially important in view of the debates between Christians and Jews over the text of the Bible. M. F. Wiles makes some important observations about the purpose of Origen’s Hexapla as it relates to the question of text and canon. 90 The Hexapla must first of all be understood within the context of the contemporary controversies between the Jews and the Church over sacred Scripture. As Wiles points out: It would be apparent in any such discussion that the text used by the Jews and the Septuagint version used by the Church were not identical either in the books which they contained or in the more detailed questions of precise text. The tendency of the Church controversialist was to claim that the Church’s version was the true one and that any differences in the Jewish version must be due to deliberate falsification of the text on the part of the Jews. . . . Origen approached the problem in a very different spirit. The question of the books to be admitted was not for him a matter of great difficulty. He knew which books were recognised by the Jews and was content to work within that frame for his discussions with them. But there were other books, treated by the Jews as apocrypha, which were in regular use in the Church. Origen saw no reason why the Church should be dispossessed of them just because the Jews did not acknowledge them and there 88. Jerome refers to the three recent versions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion as recentiores—that is, more recent or modern translations in comparison with LXX. See A. Kamesar, Jerome, Greek Scholarship, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 4–5. 89. See P. E. Kahle, The Cairo Geneza (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959), 239–45; S. Jellicoe, The Septuagint and Modern Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968; repr. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1989), 100–133. See also the summary statement by D. C. Parker, “Hexapla of Origen, The,” ABD 3:188–89. 90. M. F. Wiles, “Origen as Biblical Scholar,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 1: From the Beginnings to Jerome (ed. P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 454–89.

88

Chapter 3 was no Hebrew version in existence. Books like Judith, Tobit and the Wisdom of Solomon he was ready to use within the Church as freely and as authoritatively as any other part of the Old Testament. His readiness to do so was based quite simply on the fact that the Church accepted them and used them. They were the Church’s scriptures. 91

While this compromise was perhaps possible on the level of the content of Scripture, to use the Jewish Scriptures in conversation with the Jews and to use his own in his homilies and other dealings with Christian congregations, even with respect to the text of the Old Testament, Origen recognized the priority of the Hebrew text as the source for the Greek text and was willing to use the Jews’ particular copies in his discussion with them. Thus he states: I make it my endeavour not to be ignorant of their various readings, so that in my controversies with the Jews I may avoid quoting to them what is not found in their copies, and also may be able to make positive use of what is found there, even when it is not to be found in our scriptures. If we are prepared for our discussions with them in this way, they will no longer be able, as so often happens, to laugh scornfully at Gentile believers for their ignorance of the true reading which they have.92

It is clear from this statement that Origen always maintained the distinction between the Scriptures of the Jews and the Scriptures of the Church. Yet the belief that the Hebrew text that he acquired from the Jews in Palestine was virtually identical with that used for the translation of the Septuagint meant that he was willing to use it for the purpose of restoring the Greek text that had become corrupt over the course of time. However, he did not just adopt a Greek version that was closer to the Hebrew but, as with the “editors” of Homer, maintained the continuity with the koine text and carefully marked the deviations from the Greek koine with the appropriate signs. At the same time, he firmly rejected any suggestion that the Hebrew text could be used to reconstruct a replacement for the Septuagint. He asks rhetorically: “Are we when we notice such things [i.e., differences between the Hebrew and Greek texts] immediately to reject as spurious the copies in use in the Church, and to tell the fellowship that they should put away the sacred books current among them and should cajole the Jews into giving us copies which will be untampered with and free from forgery?” 93 The answer for him, as it was not for Jerome, was obvious, that the Septuagint text-tradition must be maintained at all cost and the use of the Hebrew was only to assist at those points where the copies did not agree and where the corruptions of copying yielded problems that could be solved by comparison with the Hebrew text and other Greek translations.

91. Ibid., 455–56. 92. Ibid., 456, quoted from Ep. Afri. 5. 93. Ibid.

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

89

Because the question of Origen’s purpose in creating his Hexapla is controversial, his own statement is crucial to the discussion. He states: With the help of God’s grace I have tried to repair the disagreements in the copies of the Old Testament on the basis of the other versions. When I was uncertain of the Septuagint reading because the various copies did not tally, I settled the issue by consulting the other versions and retaining what was in agreement with them. Some passages did not appear in the Hebrew; these I marked with an obelus as I did not dare to leave them out altogether. Other passages I marked with an asterisk to show that they were not in the Septuagint but that I had added them from the other versions in agreement with the Hebrew text. Whoever wishes may accept or reject them as he chooses. 94

In his discussion of this text, A. Kamesar makes it quite clear how he interprets this statement: “It would appear from this description that Origen was attempting to re-establish the correct text of the LXX by bringing it into accord with the Hebrew text.” 95 Kamesar himself believes that this has reference to a separate Hexaplaric “recension” based on the Hexapla but distinct from it. Even if we accept the view of Kamesar that this statement does refer to a corrected “edition” of the LXX, the critical use of the asterisk and the obelus are rather curious and idiosyncratic from the perspective of the Hellenistic tradition of criticism. If Origen is using the LXX as the base text, then the obelized passages would be considered interpolations into the LXX and suspect on the basis of the Hebrew from a quite different text-tradition. Yet the additions that he makes to the text, based on the Hebrew and clearly not from the hands of the original translators but the more recent ones (Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion), he marked with a very ambiguous sign, the asterisk. It is these that end up being interpolations into the LXX and creating a hopelessly mixed text, as any text-critic of the LXX knows. If he believed that the Hebrew text of his day actually reflected the original LXX, then he should have abandoned the “corrupt” copies of the LXX and used one of the other translations as the base text, as he did for the book of Daniel, where the pluses were too great for him to accept. The fact is that, as we saw above from his statement in his Letter to Africanus, he could not ask the Christians to give up their own familiar Bible and replace it with the Bible of the Jews, and his devotion to the text of the Septuagint from his youth to the end of his life becomes very clear in his homilies. His exegetical and interpretive skills were such that in his commentaries and in his homilies he could deal with all the texts that were included from the Hebrew under the asterisks as well as the texts of the LXX marked with obili as if they were all part of Scripture. Nevertheless, the statement by Kamesar concerning the use of critical signs in an edition may 94. Ibid., 457, quoted from Comm. in Matt. 15:14. See also the detailed discussion of the Greek text in Kamesar, Jerome, 4–6. 95. Kamesar, ibid., 5.

90

Chapter 3

be a little misleading. He states regarding the quotation from the Commentary to Matthew: Origen can only mean that he has “healed” the manuscript tradition of the LXX already, since it is generally acknowledged that in the immediately following sentence he is describing what he actually did in his Hexaplaric LXX. If the text has been healed, it must constitute a finished product, not a means to an end. An objection to the idea that the Hexaplaric LXX was a private document may be derived from the critical signs. Origen’s masters, the Alexandrian grammarians, employed the signs for the purpose of communicating textual information to readers in published texts.96

The problem with this argument, that the Alexandrian scholars’ use of critical signs in their published editions proves that Origen also produced a similar published edition with critical signs, is the fact that it leaves quite a wrong impression about the Alexandrians’ “editions” of Homer. These critical editions were not for public consumption but were single library copies for private study in conjunction with their commentaries. They did not significantly affect the vulgate of Homer, as we have seen. Thus the analogy of the Alexandrian example points in the opposite direction from what Kamesar suggests. As the future of these signs prove, they do not help to establish a corrected “edition” because they are only understood by scholars and even then can be easily misunderstood. Consequently, it remains very uncertain that a separate Hexaplaric LXX was ever produced by Origen and if it was, it was certainly not “published” (except as a single copy placed in the library) in the same way that the Hexapla as a whole was made public there, not merely as a “preparatory dossier” as Kamesar states. 97 This common misconception, that Origen published a new corrected “edition” of the Septuagint, is reflected in the remarks of the textual critic Eugene Ulrich. In commenting on what the Septuagint looked like in Origen’s day, he says: That question necessarily requires a diachronic perspective, for the biblical text which Origen used was the product of a historical process. But this is a complex understanding, if for no other reason, because Origen himself significantly changed the shape of that text. Origen primarily used “the Septuagint,” and what later theologians, such as Eusebius, Jerome, or Pamphilus would think of as “the Septuagint text” looked noticeably different from “the Septuagint text” which Origen first took in hand. We should presume, for example, that “the Septuagint text” of Jeremiah, or Psalms, or Daniel cited by Origen early in his career would read differently from “the Septuagint text” cited by Origen late in his career, because he devoted a substantial amount of time re-editing that “Septuagint text.”98 96. Ibid., 9. 97. Ibid., 10. 98. E. Ulrich, “Origen’s Old Testament Text: The Transmission History of the Septuagint to the Third Century c.e.,” in Origen of Alexandria: His World and His Legacy (ed. C. Kannengiesser and W. Petersen; Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 3–33, quotation from pp. 3–4.

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

91

This statement is quite misleading. We do not need to “presume” how Origen cited the Septuagint late in his career because there is abundant evidence from commentaries and homilies that suggests that he continued to maintain quite the same koine text as that in the beginning, and Ulrich cites no evidence to contradict this. He did not “re-edit” the “Seventy,” which continued to be the koine version and the Bible of the Church. 99 It seems quite clear, therefore, that Origen’s massive undertaking was a reference work kept for that purpose in Caesarea, which could guide others in the copying and “correction” of particular texts, but above all was a resource for his philosophical interpretation of Scripture (to which we will return below). While the Hexapla’s fifth column was not actually intended as a new standard text, containing as it did the longest possible text, with critical signs and marginal glosses, it gradually became the standard in Palestine by the time of Jerome, in competition with those of Lucian and Hesychius. In my view, the credit for this goes to his followers, Pamphilus and Eusebius. Pamphilus, with his considerable financial resources, built up the library as a major research and study center and engaged in revising and correcting biblical texts by collation against the Hexapla. Pamphilus continued to copy and propagate Origen’s work after his death and some years later adopted the young Eusebius, who perpetuated this same tradition. It was they who were responsible for creating the separate Hexaplaric LXX and making it the standard version for their region. As Timothy Barnes states: “Pamphilus and Eusebius disseminated the results of Origen’s biblical scholarship. It was through their efforts in copying and revising manuscripts that a hexaplaric text of the Septuagint gained popularity in Palestine and Syria. Yet this diffusion of Origen’s text by no means reflects his original intentions; he designed for his own use a scholarly tool from which Pamphilus and Eusebius extracted and reproduced one element in isolation.” 100 This consequence of Origen’s Hexaplaric “edition” demonstrates a familiar pattern. Origen, the editor, prepared his work for one particular purpose, as a resource for biblical study, but his zealous amateur followers used it for quite a different purpose, and the resulting regional “vulgate” caused more harm than good in terms of restoring the Septuagint to its original form. This brings us to the matter of textual interpretation and commentary, which also bears on the question of comparison with the classical tradition of scholarship. On Origen’s handling of the text of the Bible in his commentaries and homilies, R. P. C. Hanson comments: “The form of the Old Testament which Origen uses in the vast majority of his scriptural references is

99. Compare Ulrich’s statement with that of J. Wright, “Origen in the Scholar’s Den: A Rationale for the Hexapla,” in Origen of Alexandria: His World and His Legacy (ed. C. Kannengiesser and W. Petersen; Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 48– 62, which is much closer to the position stated here. However, even Wright does not take seriously enough the Hellenistic and Roman practice of scholarly editing. 100. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 95.

92

Chapter 3

the LXX version. He follows this translation faithfully, even in its mistakes.” 101 Even when he acknowledges that words are mistranslated or that passages such as the headings in the Psalms are different from those in the Hebrew, he accepts them as the Church’s text. According to Hanson, Origen “acknowledges that the LXX is inspired, inasmuch as he often regards its divergence from the Hebrew text as divinely prompted.” 102 Yet this seemingly credulous attitude toward the LXX Hanson indicates was “more sober and scholarly than any of his predecessors and than most of his successors.” 103 His training as a grammarian and critic modified his outlook but did not change it to that of the critical standards even of the Alexandrians and hardly comparable to that of the text-critic today. His major problem was that he did not know enough Hebrew to be able to critically reconstruct the Hebrew text by collation and reversion of the LXX in the proper text-critical fashion. He could only use the other Greek versions to fill in the gaps and to help solve textual problems. Origen’s attitude to variant readings is also instructive. Hanson points out that “his attitude to variants in the text was sometimes disarmingly casual. That is to say, he will recognize a variant and interpret it unconcernedly as if both this reading and the other could be equally valuable and original.” 104 After citing some examples, Hanson continues: “In his exposition of the Old Testament this ambiguous attitude to variant readings may be accounted for by his conviction that where the LXX differed from the Hebrew text and other versions it might have been a deliberate and inspired alteration on the part of the Seventy translators.” 105 Nevertheless, Hanson sums up Origen’s scholarly treatment of the biblical text in this way: But when we have made all proper allowance for the fact that Origen was not wholly out of sympathy with the conventional view of the sanctity of the LXX prevailing in the Church of his day, we cannot but be impressed by the manner in which he handles realities of the textual situation. He did not allow sentimentality nor polemical spirit to blur his vision. He makes large use of all the instrumenta studiorum available to him—alternative translations, the transliteration of the Hebrew text, Onomastica and the name-lists and miscellaneous midrash from Rabbinic sources. He towers above all his predecessors, all his contemporaries and all his successors, with the possible exception of Jerome. 106

101. R. P. C. Hanson, Allegory and Event: A Study of the Sources and Significance of Origen’s Interpretation of Scripture (Richmond, Va.: John Knox, 1959), 162. Hanson illustrates this with a number of examples. 102. Ibid., 163. 103. Ibid., 165. 104. Ibid., 175. See also McKane’s detailed study of some texts in a homily on Jeremiah by Origen (Selected Christian Hebraists, 197–98), which largely confirms Hanson’s position. 105. Hanson, Allegory and Event, 175–76. See also Kahle, The Cairo Geniza, 159–60. 106. Hanson, Allegory and Event, 178.

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

93

In the realm of biblical interpretation, Origen combined two different and opposing traditions of hermeneutical method. The first was the literal sense that is primarily reflected in his scholia, which are in the same tradition as that of the Hellenistic scholarship on Homer and the contemporary Roman tradition of critical editing and that also deal with clarification of obscure language and terms and the literal meaning of the text. Even if much of the information included in this was derived from Jewish sources, the impulse for using this kind of material in scholia and commentary is directly parallel to the classical tradition of scholarship and complementary to the critical edition of texts. The second interpretive tradition was that of the spiritual or allegorical meaning of the text, which was highly philosophical in character, as reflected in Philo and inherited by the Church in Alexandria. This approach was coupled with a doctrine of inspiration such that the smallest detail in the text reflected the intention of the Holy Spirit and was fraught with great meaning. One may compare this with the Pergamum school of Homeric criticism under Crates (a rival to the school of Aristarchus), who preferred the longer text of Homer if it allowed for a wider range of allegorical and philosophical interpretation and whose methods had considerable influence in the Roman world. So it is perhaps not surprising to find that Origen’s similar mode of interpretation favored a longer text, which gave more scope to the interpretive possibilities. This method is likewise similar to that of rabbinic midrash, except that the philosophical and theological content read into the text was quite different. As we shall see, the rabbis, too, liked to cite alternate readings of texts, not in any critical sense but only to allow themselves additional possibilities for fanciful midrash. Wiles endeavors to explain how Origen could reconcile his scholarship regarding the text and its literal meaning with his allegorical method. He states: We have already seen how this concern for detail helped to make him a textual critic far in advance of his contemporaries. It drove him on to compare the text of the Septuagint at every point with that of the Hebrew original. It forced him to notice and record even the smallest variations of wording between the different synoptic accounts of the same incident [in the Gospels]. So firm a belief in inspiration and so great a concern with the detail of the text might be expected to have given rise to a straightforward ‘fundamentalist’ insistence on the possibility of providing a completely reliable text which would be infallibly true at every level of understanding. But Origen was too honest in his scholarship and too Platonic in his spirituality ever to have adopted such an attitude. How could the declared despiser of the ‘letter’ of scripture also hold that inspiration applied to every jot and tittle of the scriptural record? The answer lies in the fact that when Origen insisted that every jot and tittle is inspired, he means every jot and tittle of the intended meaning. The minutest detail is important, but it is the detail spiritually understood that counts.107 107. Wiles, “Origen as Biblical Scholar,” 475.

94

Chapter 3

However, this explanation is not entirely satisfying because the same thing about deriving meaning from every jot and tittle could be said of Rabbi Akiba or of Philo without their having any interest in textual criticism. Wiles must admit that Origen could never resolve the tension between the textual detail and the detail of spiritual interpretation. Even at the points where the Septuagint copy that he uses is in disagreement with the Hebrew, “its mistranslations can still be used to provide divinely intended spiritual meanings.” 108 Wiles further states: “Origen’s detailed textual work is not irrelevant to his fundamental goal of providing a spiritual interpretation of the text, because it can be used in pursuit of that goal; but nor is it essential to that purpose, for in practice whatever text he has in hand could serve the same purpose.” 109 Wiles cites many examples to illustrate this principle, some of which have to do with the explanation of biblical names. 110 “The Bible,” he says, frequently explains the meaning of the names of people or of places in a way which coheres with the spiritual significance of that person’s life or of the events recorded as happening at that particular place. Origen vastly extends the range of such interpretations. In doing so he could draw upon an established tradition of rabbinic exegesis. Most of his explanations seem to be drawn from written Jewish sources. 111

What is clear from this is that Origen’s understanding of “canonical intentionality” did not arise out of his activity as editor of the text but was in considerable tension with it, just as the midrashic interpretation of the rabbis did not arise out of the editorial activity of the sopherim. The activity of religious interpretation was largely irrelevant to that of editing the text. As we will see, things were quite otherwise with Jerome. Origen’s insistence that the Hebrew Bible of his day represented the true original text that lay behind the LXX and must be used in its correction was not the usual attitude toward the Hebrew text by the Church leaders that preceded him. Indeed, they often accused the Jews of having deliberately tampered with the text for doctrinal reasons, so one is struck by this significant difference in attitude. Origen spent the greater part of his life in two cities that had major Jewish communities and traditions of learning, Alexandria and Caesarea, and in both he had a close association with them. In Alexandria the great Jewish scholar of the first century was Philo, and in his voluminous commentaries on the Bible he demonstrated the allegorical method of interpretation and how to mediate Greek philosophy, especially Platonism, in the Jewish tradition by means of his hermeneutical method.

108. Ibid., 476. 109. Ibid. 110. There is also a great interest in the meaning of names in the work of classical scholars and in Philo. 111. Ibid., 477.

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

95

The influence of Philo on the later Christian theologians, especially Clement of Alexandria and Origen, was considerable. As Henry Chadwick points out: Except for some substantial borrowings in the pages of Josephus, the history of Philo’s influence lies in Christianity, not in Judaism. . . . The Judaism which established itself as normative was that of the rabbis. Philo stands closer to the second- and third-century Christians than to the Judaism of the Talmud, and is much less ‘rabbinic’ than St Paul. . . . Nothing of his work was known to the medieval Jewish philosophers. By contrast his work was of great importance for the early Christians. . . . The philosophical side of Philo was taken up, after a surprising relative neglect in the second-century apologists, by Clement and Origen. 112

Clement is not our concern here except to note that Origen was a younger contemporary of Clement in Alexandria and was very likely a student of the latter, as Chadwick suggests. 113 Regarding Origen’s similarities with Philo, Chadwick writes: “Origen’s work resembles Philo more closely than Clement’s, mainly because, except for the two great works De principiis and Contra Celsum, its form is almost entirely a series of massive commentaries and expository sermons on the Bible. He bases himself on the principles of allegorical interpretation by which Philo had been able to discover in the Pentateuch the doctrines of Greek ethics or natural science.” 114 Chadwick goes on to stress the fact that, in addition to this exegetical method, Origen combined it with the apologetic method of typological exegesis, “seeking in the Old Testament for specific foreshadowings of Christian doctrine in a way that is a natural and easy extension of the argument from prophecy common in the canonical gospels and going back to the earliest Christian generation.” 115 While Origen seems to allow for a literal and historical meaning of the text more than Philo, he is in agreement that it cannot have only a literal meaning, because many statements, if taken literally, are simply unworthy of God and must be integrated spiritually. Chadwick’s main concern is a review of Origen’s Platonism, in comparison with Philo and Clement, and these need not be taken up here. Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that Origen’s “principles of allegorical exegesis” continued on through Jerome and others “to become an accepted tradition in medieval commentaries on Scripture.” 116 One difference that Chadwick does not call attention to is the fact that Origen must have included in his education in Alexandria the study of editing classical texts as a grammatikos because he follows the same style of editing as used by 112. Henry Chadwick, “Philo and the Beginnings of Christian Thought,” in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (ed. A. H. Armstrong; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 156–57. 113. For the relationship of Origen to Clement and both of these scholars to Philo, see esp. Hanson, Origen’s Doctrine. 114. Chadwick, “Philo,” 183. 115. Ibid. 116. Ibid., 192.

96

Chapter 3

the Alexandrian “editors” of Homer and other classics, whose works were in the great Library of that city. These included not only the collation of manuscripts to produce a critical edition with obeli and asterisks but also learned notes (scholia) in this same scholarly tradition. In Caesarea in Palestine, Origen came into close contact with the rabbinic tradition of Judaism through his interest in gaining a direct understanding of the Bible in Hebrew and the body of rabbinic tradition that went with it. R. P. C. Hanson, in his study of Origen’s understanding of tradition, indicates that there is a vital connection between Origen and the rabbis. He states: “In all the works and fragments of Origen that survive in Greek the word paravdosiÍ occurs forty-six times; thirty installations of it signify Rabbinic or Jewish tradition.” 117 This compares with the fact that “Origen never uses the phrase ‘apostolic’ or ‘ecclesiastical’ paravdosiÍ.” 118 Hanson further states: There is one copious and unusual source of this extra-Scriptural occasional tradition . . . ; that is, contemporary Jewish scholarship. It is very clear that Origen was in quite close touch with Rabbinic scholarship for most of his life, and from this source he derived a varied collection of elaborations upon the narrative of the Old Testament, exegetical and philological suggestions, and midrash generally. The habit of elaborating upon the Old Testament stories he must have learnt primarily from Philo.119

Hanson proceeds to give examples from Philo’s writings. Origen was apparently well aware of the traditions of oral law that he regarded as their secret tradition 120 and uses it in his commentaries. 121 This familiarity with Jewish tradition is only to be expected in the context of his study and work in Caesarea on the Hexapla, which was the means by which he could enter into controversy with them. “But,” says Hanson, “Origen’s acquaintance with rabbinic schools is by no means confined to controversy. He reproduces several times glosses on the Old Testament which are obviously akin to midrash and sometimes tells us something of the source of the information.” 122 These “glosses” are not part of his editorial activity on the Septuagint but are scattered throughout his Homilies. Again, Hanson states that “Origen displays also some knowledge of Jewish custom and practice, and of Rabbinic glosses on the Law and etymologies and translations” 123 and then proceeds to give numerous examples. Sometimes within the Hexapla a number of readings are attributed to “the Hebrew” and re117. Hanson, Origen’s Doctrine, 73. 118. Ibid. 119. Ibid., 146. 120. Ibid., 80, 149. 121. It is interesting to note that the term apocrypha also has the basic meaning of “that which is secret or hidden.” Origen sometimes used the Apocrypha as another resource for making critical decisions on texts. See Kamesar, Jerome, 100–101. 122. Hanson, Origen’s Doctrine, 150. 123. Ibid., 152.

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

97

corded in the margins of the Septuagint, and it is likely that this designation refers to a rabbi in Caesarea. Hanson concludes: “It is clear from the evidence set out above that Origen at least had quite a full acquaintance with schools of Jewish scholarship . . . not merely for the purpose of controversy, but even for the sake of common study of difficulties in the Old Testament, study conducted in a friendly spirit.” 124 The concept of “tradition,” paravdosiÍ, as it related to the text of the Bible had a twofold meaning for Origen. On the one hand, to the grammarian and text-critic, it meant the history of the text, its transmission and the various vicissitudes that it suffered in the process of copying. In the case of the Greek Bible, it was this text that was in need of “healing.” The other meaning was the secret “oral tradition,” the oral law that of necessity was fundamentally part of the transmission of the Hebrew text, which quite literally could not be read and understood without it. It was this oral paradosis that guaranteed the fidelity of the written paradosis and that strengthened Origen’s conviction that the Hebrew Bible was the true text behind the Septuagint. 125 Because Origen’s whole doctrinal structure of belief and his mode of allegorical interpretation was so deeply bound up with the form of the text in the Greek Bible, he could never resolve the dilemma between these two streams of textual paradosis. It was left to Jerome to make the move decisively in favor of the Hebrew over the Greek tradition of the text. Eusebius Between the time of Origen and Jerome, the most important development that prepared for Jerome’s own great work was the preservation and dissemination of the earlier work of Origen. Prominent in this activity was the work of Pamphilus and Eusebius. The former was a direct pupil and disciple of Origen and was responsible for the preservation and expansion of Origen’s library as a center of biblical research and text dissemination. As Timothy Barnes points out, “Pamphilus carefully sought out and often copied in his own hand Origen’s voluminous writings. He attempted a complete collection, and the surviving list of Origen’s works documents the extraordinary extent of his success.” 126 It was this collection that Jerome was able to consult at a later date. In addition, another important task undertaken by Pamphilus and his pupils, among whom was Eusebius, was copying and correcting biblical manuscripts, using the version of the Greek text in the Hexapla, and in this way disseminating a “recension” that was distinctive of the region of Palestine. As indicated above, it was not Origen, the “editor,” but his amateur followers and successors who were ultimately responsible 124. Ibid., 155. 125. As Kamesar points out (Jerome, 30–32), it is not surprising that the Church Fathers after Origen who supported the LXX against the Hebrew text developed a parallel notion of a secret oral tradition transmitted by the translators of the Greek text within the interpretation of the Greek translation. 126. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 94.

98

Chapter 3

for the so-called Hexaplaric recension, separate from the Hexapla itself, which, as we have seen, was not the original intention of the work. Eusebius, as pupil of Pamphilus in the generation after Origen, trained as a biblical scholar in Caesarea using the Hexapla and Origen’s numerous commentaries as well as his Hebrew glossary, remained deeply committed to the promulgation of his works. Eusebius himself produced two commentaries on biblical books, on Psalms and Isaiah, using many of the same techniques as Origen. Barnes observes: Eusebius’ debt to Origen stands revealed on every page of his two biblical commentaries. Most obvious and pervasive is Eusebius’ use of the Hexapla: though he takes his lemma from the Septuagint, time and again he quotes, compares, and comments on the variant versions of Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion, and in the Psalms, the anonymous fifth and sixth versions. Sometimes too, he quotes the Hebrew or compares the Hebrew reading in the passage under discussion with that in another. He occasionally notes that a phrase of the Septuagint is obelized, because it occurs neither in the Hebrew nor in the other translators. 127

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to assume from this that Eusebius understood and used the basic principles of textual criticism. As Barnes explains: Eusebius’ interests led him to differ from Origen in matters of both the text and the interpretation of Scripture. Origen designed the Hexapla as a means of discovering the original text of the Old Testament. Eusebius consistently assumes that if there are variants, then the reading most susceptible of messianic interpretation must be correct. Thus, in a passage about the suffering servant (Isaiah 53:2), he prefers Aquila’s “from untrodden ground” for the “in thirsty ground” of all the other versions, and the Hebrew, because he can take untrodden to signify virgin and thus allude to the Incarnation. 128

This style of interpretation certainly reveals the indebtedness to Origen’s allegorical method, and even if Eusebius shows greater inclination toward the historical origins of the text of Isaiah the prophet, or David the psalmist, than Origen did, his method of treating the text and its variants is dominated by theological concerns and hardly qualifies as critical editing. This judgment applies to one who was deeply committed to Origen’s scholarship and a leading Church intellectual, so it is fair to say that the principles of editing ancient texts were largely unknown in Christendom in his day, and he himself could hardly be described as a scholarly editor of biblical texts. Nevertheless, Eusebius provided an important link and means of continuity between Origen and Jerome, who was able to take up the contributions of Origen in a new way.

127. Ibid., 98. 128. Ibid, 102. Barnes (pp. 102–4) cites a number of such examples from Eusebius’s Isaiah and Psalms commentaries.

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

99

Eusebius is, of course, best known for his works on historical geography and history, which are still indispensable tools for the study of antiquity because of the sources that he used. His most notable of these works, among others, are the Onomasticon (On the Place-Names in Holy Scripture), the Chronicle, and the Ecclesiastical History. While these works used older models of similar genre and sources, they were developed by Eusebius in his own way and for his own particular scholarly purposes. They had considerable impact on early Christian scholarship, being translated into Latin in whole or in part by Jerome, as well as into Syriac and the other languages of Christendom. Jerome did not feel obliged merely to render a direct “diplomatic” translation of the original but made certain additions and supplements to bring them up to date. Thus, with respect to the Chronological Canons, which were detailed chronological tables of historical events drawn up in parallel columns in the second half of Eusebius’s Chronicle, Jerome went beyond a mere translation of the original, as he himself explained, and as Barnes summarizes: His Latin version (he states) falls into three distinct parts: as far as the fall of Troy it is a straight translation; from there until the vicennalia of Constantine the translator has felt free to expand existing entries and to add new ones to compensate for Eusebius’ neglect of Roman political and literary history; and from 325/6 to 378 it is all Jerome’s own composition. 129

The attitude of Jerome to such a work as the Canons was that it was a tool for scholarship and as such needed to be revised and updated to make it useful. It was not the kind of text to be “edited” and translated in the same way as the biblical books and other such literary works of antiquity. William Adler’s comments on Jerome’s own view of the matter is instructive. He states: Some of Jerome’s innovations were cosmetic, strictly in the interests of legibility. In order to relieve later readers of difficulties, Jerome devised a system of color coding, intended to identify clearly which dates belonged to which kings. But for recent history, he admits that he had to act as both “translator and author,” especially in order to supplement Eusebius’ spotty treatment of recent Roman history. There will be some purists, he writes, who would charge that by adding to the original, he had failed to discharge the responsibility of the “faithful interpreter.” These critics, he says, “need not read unless they choose,” but he hopes that “they may attribute to the Greek author the credit which is due, and may recognize that any insertions for which we are responsible have been taken from other men of the highest repute.” What this meant was that since Eusebius appeared

129. Ibid., 113. On the Chronicle, see also R. M. Grant, Eusebius as Church Historian (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 3–9; William Adler, “Eusebius’ Chronicle and Its Legacy,” in Eusebius, Christianity, and Judaism (ed. H. W. Attridge and G. Hata; Leiden: Brill, 1992), 467–91. On the problems of its text-history, see pp. 481–86.

100

Chapter 3

to slight Roman history, Jerome allowed himself the privilege of augmenting the Canons with more recent events from Roman history, so as to make the work more contemporary. 130

What is clear from these remarks is that Jerome clearly understands the role of translator and editor as that of maintaining strict fidelity to the text, but in the interests of making Eusebius’s Chronicle more useful, especially to those in the West, the Latin readers, he has augmented the text as an “author,” again using sources of the highest caliber, as had Eusebius himself. What Jerome does with this text of Eusebius is entirely different from that of the “editors” of ancient texts. He considers his own work as akin to the work of Eusebius, the historian, and an extension of that same activity. As Adler points out, there were many revisions and expansions of the Chronicle in the other Eastern centers of Alexandria and Antioch, often with extensive narrative materials added from other works. 131 These are regularly referred to as “redactions” or “recensions,” suggesting editorial activity, but this is an inappropriate description of this literary process. The Chronicle with its Canons was always regarded more as a historiographical tool than a work of literature and therefore always was open to revision and correction; it was an area of “scientific” study and treated as such. It is useful to spend a little time looking at Eusebius’s method in his historical works, particularly because there seems to be considerable confusion between understanding what it means to edit historical documents and what it means to be a historian making use of historical sources in the construction of histories, especially those that deal with the more distant past. As we will see below, the biblical histories from Genesis to 2 Kings are variously interpreted as the work of either historians or editors (redactors), with little effort to distinguish between the two literary activities. Eusebius is an ancient historian who makes quite explicit his use of sources as well as the purpose and design of his works. Barnes gives us a useful summary of the Chronicle’s character and content. He states: The first part, or first book, of the Chronicle, which is expressly entitled Chronography, opens with a claim to impartial, or at least to reliable, scholarship. Eusebius has perused (he states) the historians of the ancient Near East and ancient Greece with the aim of dating Moses and the prophets in relation to the Incarnation and of correlating sacred history with events in the history of Greeks and barbarians. Such research is necessary, because a universal chronology cannot be discovered from part of the evidence alone, not even if part be Holy Scripture. Moreover, the evidence needs careful sifting: each chronological system must be established by careful documenta-

130. Adler, ibid., 482–83. 131. Ibid., 483. Unfortunately Adler follows the habit of referring to these revised and expanded texts as “redactions” in keeping with the terminology of nineteenth-century scholarship.

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

101

tion and scrutinized for accuracy and credibility before the results of the individual inquiries can be integrated into a single chronology. 132

To do this, Eusebius treats each of the various peoples separately, quoting earlier historians as his authorities and extracting from them the chronological lists that form the basis of his parallel Canons. In the case of his history and chronology of the Jews, he of course uses the Bible but also the works of Josephus and Africanus. Eusebius has much in common in method and literary technique with the long historiographical tradition that goes back seven centuries to the antiquarians Hippias of Elis and Hellanicus of Lesbos. Eusebius’s debt to the prior tradition of classical and biblical historiography is most evident in his Ecclesiastical History, especially in the case of traditions that deal with archaic history, such as Dionysius’s Antiquities of Rome and Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews. These follow an older model of setting the national or ethnic histories within a universal history of mankind, and Eusebius likewise places his history of the Church within universal parameters, “its role in the divine scheme and the history of mankind.” 133 Most histories in antiquity have a strong ideological bias, including, of course, the biblical histories, and Eusebius’s history of the Church is certainly no exception. 134 Our concern with this work, however, is not with its scope and content but with certain aspects of his method. It must also be remembered that, apart from the earliest written works that deal with more ancient times and that may therefore have been dependent on oral tradition, subsequent historians used earlier literary works, especially earlier historians, as their primary sources and quoted liberally from them, either acknowledged or unacknowledged. Barnes describes this method of Eusebius in the following terms: A close inspection of the text and a comparison of the History with the documents and writers employed as sources immediately discloses several grave deficiencies. When Eusebius paraphrases, he feels free to rewrite, to omit or to expand passages, to alter the emphasis of the original, and he often misreports, just as if he had composed his paraphrase from memory. When he quotes extant writers directly, Eusebius often truncates his sources, beginning or ending a quotation in the middle of a sentence. As a result, he sometimes misrepresents his authority or renders the mutilated sentence unintelligible. Sometimes too, Eusebius leaves out a section in the middle of an extract, with consequent alteration of its overall meaning. It must be inferred that the quotations of lost documents and lost writers have undergone similar alterations. The quotations, moreover, are often preceded by introductions or paraphrases which partially contradict 132. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 113–14. 133. Ibid., 126. 134. For a recent treatment of this issue in biblical and classical historiography, see my “Is There Any Historiography in the Hebrew Bible? A Hebrew-Greek Comparison,” JNSL 28/2 (2002): 1–25.

102

Chapter 3

or are contradicted by the contents. It seems probable, therefore, that Eusebius trusted a scribe or assistant to insert the quotation and neglected to remove the inconsistencies which he introduced.135

To anticipate our later discussion of the “redactor” in biblical literature, I must point out the evident similarity of these characteristics of the ancient historian with the characteristics attributed by modern scholars to the invented “redactor.” Eusebius’s method of writing history was very much the norm among ancient historians when it came to writing national and antiquarian histories, and the biblical histories are no exception. On the other hand, the ancient editors that we have reviewed were extremely conservative with respect to the transmission of their texts and viewed their task as altogether different from that of the historian. Furthermore, Eusebius was responsible for a second revised and undated edition of his History, created without benefit of an editor. 136 The confusion of the roles of editor and historian in biblical studies has had a detrimental effect on the understanding of the nature of biblical literature. Theodore of Mopsuestia Eusebius, the biblical scholar in the tradition of Origen and the historian in the tradition of Greco-Roman historiography, represents something of a compromise between two conflicting systems of scholarship. This conflict can be seen most clearly in the Antiochene school of biblical exegesis and interpretation, which fought and lost the battle for the historical-literal interpretation of Scripture, although it was not without its influence on such major figures as Jerome. While there was undoubtedly a long tradition of this method of interpretation among the biblical scholars of Antioch, many of them were damned as heretics by later Church councils and their works lost or destroyed. The best known of this group was Theodore of Mopsuestia, who was a contemporary of Jerome and some of whose writings have survived. 137 The historical and literal approach to the interpretation of the biblical text that characterized this school was in strong opposition to the allegorical method as practiced by Origen and the Alexandrians. This is not to suggest that they did not also engage in theological interpretation, but their approach stressed typology: historical personages and events were basic and crucial to the explication of the type, of which the corresponding event as reflected in the New Testament was the reality and fulfillment.

135. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 140–41; see also B. Gustafsson, “Eusebius’ Principles in Handling His Sources, as Found in His ‘Church History,’ Books I–VII,” in Studia Patristica IV (Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literature 79; Berlin: Akademie, 1961), 429–41. 136. See Grant, Eusebius as Church Historian, 10–21. 137. See M. F. Wiles, “Theodore of Mopsuestia as Representative of the Antiochene School,” in Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 1: From the Beginnings to Jerome (ed. P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 489–510.

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

103

This treatment of a kind of Heilsgeschichte in the Old and New Testament meant a canon of sacred books, at least in a practical sense, even if Theodore never actually drew up a list. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that Theodore placed greater weight on the historical texts of Scripture and those that could at least be given a historical context, and he demoted to a lower level works such as the wisdom books of Solomon as of lesser spiritual value. The distinction between a strict historical and literal sense of the text and the theological exegesis that was subsequently built on this foundation seems to correspond closely with the similar distinction in the rabbinic tradition between peshat (literal meaning) and derash (homiletical interpretation). Erwin Rosenthal characterizes this method of biblical interpretation in the following way: The rabbis of the first centuries of the Common Era coined a terminology of interpretation which reflects the dynamic character of their diligent search for the truth of the Bible. This was not a theoretical ideal, or an intellectual exercise of the contemplative life; it was a wrestling with a text which was alive with meaning, a practical guide to individual and social conduct, a ‘tree of life’ for the Jewish people. . . . Thus, we have two different approaches and methods side by side, the literal and the homiletical, figurative interpretation of the Bible. To guard against creative imagination running wild and undermining the obligatory character and significance of the preceptive side, the rabbis asserted a basic hermeneutical principle: ‘No verse in Scripture can lose its literal (plain, simple) meaning.’ This peshat or literal meaning must not be explained away by an allegorical or mystical interpretation; it always remains basic. But alongside it, derash or homiletical, figurative, meaning can be deduced from the text as a legitimate additional meaning. 138

It is not difficult to see how this distinction in interpretive method corresponds closely to the same division between the literal-historic and the homiletic in the Antiochene school, and indeed there is every reason to believe that Theodore was in close association with the rabbis of Antioch and gained much of his understanding of the Old Testament text in the literal sense from this source, even though, unlike Origen, he never did undertake to learn Hebrew. Already Origen had no doubt imbibed a serious concern for the literal sense of the text as a result of his instruction in Hebrew at the hands of the rabbis in Caesarea, and his scholia on the text reflects this peshat tradition of learning, in spite of his heavy commitment to the allegorical method. Eusebius was also inclined more in this direction of emphasis on the historical

138. Erwin I. J. Rosenthal, “The Study of the Bible in Medieval Judaism,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2: The West from the Fathers to the Reformation (ed. G. W. H. Lampe; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 252–79, quotation on p. 253. See also B. L. Visotsky, “Jots and Tittles: On Scriptural Interpretation in Rabbinic and Patristic Literatures,” Prooftexts 8 (1988): 1–13.

104

Chapter 3

interpretation, But it is in Jerome that this distinction became the most clearly manifest, as we shall see. Some comment is also appropriate concerning Theodore’s views on textual matters, and Wiles provides a convenient summary: Theodore shows the scholar’s instinct in his insistence that the Hebrew text, ‘the language the prophet actually spoke’, must be regarded as fundamental. But he falls short of modern scholarly standards in not being led on by that conviction to the acquisition of a working knowledge of the Hebrew language for himself. In general, therefore, he is dependent on the Septuagint. . . . Its great merit is its deliberate closeness to the original even at the risk of obscurity, in contrast to its closest rival, the translation of Symmachus, whose gains in clarity are sometimes at the cost of accuracy. Theodore recognises that no translation can convey without loss the exact force of the original, and that varying translations, some keeping nearer to the original idiom, some giving more clearly the general intended sense, can usefully supplement one another. To appreciate the proper sense of a comparatively literal translation like the Septuagint he regards some knowledge at least of Hebrew idiom and poetic form to be necessary. A notable example, to which Theodore frequently recurs [in his Commentary on the Psalms], is the precise significance of the verb-tenses in the structure of the Psalms. The Septuagint frequently gives the literal equivalent of the Hebrew tense, when the context (and sometimes one of the other translations as well) shows that that cannot be the intended force of the original. 139

This statement should be taken together with that of Kamesar, who emphasizes the place of the Antiochene method of interpretation within the larger context of humanistic study. He states: In their use of the LXX, Greek scholars from the time of Origen onwards placed heavy emphasis on close analysis of the linguistic features of that version. On the one hand, they applied to the Greek Bible the standard techniques of grammatical and rhetorical analysis employed in the exegesis of secular works of literature. On the other hand, they were also aware that the Bible was a translation from the Hebrew and had to be seen as a literary work sui generis. Accordingly, they often point out linguistic and stylistic peculiarities which appear to be unique to the Bible. These peculiarities came to be ascribed to the sunhvqeia thÅÍ grafhvÍ [usage of Scripture] and were identified as √di∫mata th thÅÍ grafhvÍ [the distinctiveness of Scripture]. In the fourth and early fifth centuries, the Antiochene Fathers, Eusebius of Emesa, Diodore of Tarsus, and above all Theodore of Mopsuestia, were the major exponents of this philologically oriented exegesis.140

These summaries of the perspective of a major scholarly interpreter of the Bible give a good picture of the use of variant translations of the Hebrew text in comparison with the Septuagint on the eve of Jerome’s major under139. Wiles, “Theodore of Mopsuestia,” 496. 140. Kamesar, Jerome, 158.

spread is 6 points long

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

105

taking of biblical translation. The observation of Kamesar, that this linguistic method goes back to the classical tradition, is important, because we have already seen that in the case of Origen there is continuity with the editorial tradition of Alexandria and the study of Homer. These earlier Homeric scholars also emphasized the importance of Homeric idiom and usage in the correction and interpretation of Homer. However, the primary concern of the Antiochene scholars was not to establish a critical edition of the biblical text but to better understand the Church’s vulgate text, the Septuagint. While Origen’s allegorical method of interpretation was rejected, his work of making available the various versions based on the Hebrew text for the purpose of interpreting the Septuagint was highly esteemed. That was its value. There was, however, no real understanding of how variant text traditions could be used in the attempt to establish the original text of the Bible. Jerome Jerome’s life spans the period from 346 to 420. The details of his colorful and impressive career do not concern us here, but a few salient facts are, nonetheless, important to note. 141 In his youth, he received a good classical education, studying under the noted grammarian of Rome, Donatus. 142 Early in his career as a biblical scholar, Jerome moved to Antioch, learned Greek as a second language, and came under the influence of Antiochene scholarship, with over a decade of close association. 143 Jerome was even more committed to the value of Hebrew in understanding the Greek Bible than others of that school and took up the study of Hebrew. As Kamesar points out, Jerome . . . had major objections to the manner in which the Antiochenes approached the Hebrew text. For it seems that a consequence of the assignment to the Hebrew text of a role subordinate or equal to the Syriac and the Greek texts was the fact that Eusebius [of Emesa] and Diodore did not make a serious attempt to come to terms with the Hebrew language nor to develop a systematic procedure in dealing with the text. Rather, we find in their writings incidental references to the original, and a somewhat unstudied method in approaching it. This method was based on indirect knowledge and what Jerome might have called conjecture.144

141. For a useful overview of Jerome as a biblical scholar, see: E. F. Sutcliffe, “Jerome,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol 2: The West from the Fathers to the Reformation (ed. G. W. H. Lampe; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 80–101; H. F. D. Sparks, “Jerome as Biblical Scholar,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 1: From the Beginnings to Jerome (ed. P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 510–41; J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies (London: Harper & Row 1975); McKane, Selected Christian Hebraists, 31–41; Kamesar, Jerome. 142. On Aelius Donatus, see OCD, 494–95. 143. For the relationship between Jerome and the Antiochene Fathers, see Kamesar, Jerome, 126–75. 144. Ibid., 133.

106

Chapter 3

It was during this time in Antioch that Jerome became aware of Origen and translated some of his works, as well as those of Eusebius of Caesarea. Later, when he took up permanent residence in Bethlehem, he obtained a copy of Origen’s Hexapla and became committed to the use of Hebrew directly for his Latin translation of the Bible. There is some difference of opinion over both the extent and chronology of Jerome’s revisions and translations of the Latin Bible. During a period in the mid-380s, while in Rome, after his Antioch stint, and before he moved to Bethlehem, Jerome was commissioned to do a revision of the Old Latin Bible, the vulgate of the day, and he completed a version of the Gospels and the Psalter. Yet already during this period, as Kamesar points out, 145 Jerome was strongly committed to the importance of Hebrew in the interpretation of the biblical text. It was sometime during the early period of his move to Bethlehem that Jerome undertook the more extensive revision of the Old Testament based on the Hexaplaric LXX, in which he included the pluses based on the Hebrew Bible and the critical signs employed by Origen. While he was engaged in this revision, Jerome also decided to make a translation based directly on the Hebrew Bible, which he regarded as the Hebraica veritas, and the Latin version thus produced was known as the iuxta Hebraeos. It is Kamesar’s opinion that from about 391 onward Jerome worked on both versions, the revision of the Old Latin based on the Hexaplaric LXX for the more conservative believers who were committed to the complete inspiration of the LXX, and the new translation from the Hebraica veritas into Latin, to which he himself was so strongly committed. 146 Jerome began his great scholarly career, both as translator and also as editor, in dependence on and in imitation of Origen. He initially set about to “heal” the Old Latin “vulgate” or common text that was a translation from the Septuagint, Origen’s “vulgate” version in the fifth column. Jerome used this fifth column and comparison with the other Jewish Greek versions, employing the same editorial critical signs to mark additions from the Hebrew. As McKane remarks: 145. Ibid., 41–49. 146. For the full discussion of this issue, see ibid., 49–72. Kamesar explains that, “in conformity with the complexity of the situation, Jerome gradually developed a three-tier approach. His minimum or ‘bottom-line’ position was support for the Origenian ‘Hebraized’ recension of the LXX. He believed, however, that Christians could get a better idea of the original through a version which was closer to it than the traditional Greek version, so he made his own. But there were two ways in which Jerome went about promoting this text. On the one hand, he presented it as an auxiliary version, to be employed in the same manner as the recentiores [Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion] were employed by the Greeks. Such a use of the version did not imply a negative view of the LXX nor faith in the ‘Hebraica veritas’. That is, one could use the version quite profitably without sharing the views of the translator. On the other hand, Jerome himself believed that the version of the LXX was flawed on the basis of the fact that it diverged too much from the original. He thought that his own version could (a) better serve anyone who would desire to understand and study the original, and (b) was indeed worthy of replacing the Latin versions of the LXX in the West. This was his ‘top-line’ position” (ibid., 70–71).

spread is 6 points long

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

107

It is because the Old Latin is a translation from the text of the Septuagint similar to the one which Origen repaired that the two are so closely connected in Jerome’s mind. Hence he associates his affirmation that he has not lost his regard for the Latin version received in the Church with his insistence that neither in his Latin imitation of the fifth column of Origen’s Hexapla nor in his translation from Hebrew into Latin is it his intention to lay blame at the door of the Seventy. 147

McKane further explains: Jerome’s primary assumption in all of this is that the text of the Hebrew Bible which was available to him was identical with the one used by the Alexandrian translators, and that the representation of a Latin text corresponding qualitatively with the extant text of the Hebrew Bible amounted to a recovery of an original purity which had been lost through corruptions suffered by the Greek text in the course of transmission. This is a text-critical assumption which Jerome does not transcend when he moves on from a patching of the Old Latin to a new translation from the Hebrew into Latin, because the possibility that the translators of the ‘ancient Septuagint’ may have had a Hebrew text different from that of Hebraica veritas is one which does not enter his mind. 148

As McKane points out, this understanding of the uncorrupted nature of the Hebrew text from the time of the translators to that of his own time is extended to the Greek translation of Theodotion, used by Origen to supplement the text of the fifth column. Jerome’s own translation aims not at good Latin style, of which he was a master, but at a close correspondence with the original, whether it be the reconstructed Septuagint or the Hebrew text. When Jerome switched to translating directly from Hebrew into Latin, he did not dismiss his former effort as unfruitful. On the contrary, as McKane points out: “Imitating Origen or translating de novo from Hebrew into Latin are presented by Jerome as alternatives and he invites Christian critics to select the result which they prefer: either his use of old resources or his pioneer work as a translator of the Hebrew Bible into Latin.” 149 It should be emphasized that all of Jerome’s work as editor and translator was with the intention of repairing the corruption that had infected the Latin common text. This is the fundamental ideal of all ancient “editing.” His resort to Hebraica veritas was to work with what he thought was the purest and most original text. This does not mean that Jerome entirely escaped his own Christian prejudice in his rendering of some texts. It is also a fact that Jerome’s editing and translations had a very hard time winning acceptance within the Church and did not become the Vulgate until the Council of Trent. Only his initial revision of the Old Latin Gospels and Psalms was an “authorized” version at the time that it was produced.

147. McKane, Selected Christian Hebraists, 34. 148. Ibid., 34–35. 149. Ibid., 35. This is also the view of Kamesar in n. 146 above.

108

Chapter 3

It is also a remarkable fact that in his latest work, the commentary on Jeremiah, Jerome seems to have reverted to a pre-Hexaplaric notion of the common text of the Septuagint. McKane states: Jerome’s commentary on Jeremiah, which was incomplete at the time of his death, will serve to establish that what is indicated by ‘Septuagint’ in his commentaries founded on Hebraica veritas is not the Hexaplaric text of Origen or Jerome’s Latin expression of it. It is a pre-Hexaplaric Greek text which is not quantitatively equivalent with his Hebrew text and which, in all important respects, is the same as the Greek text in Vaticanus or in Ziegler’s Göttingen Septuagint. From this it can be deduced that the Septuagint to which he refers is the type of Greek text from which the Old Latin was translated and that, in so far as he translates it into Latin when he is calling attention to it, we are brought close to the Old Latin translation.150

For Jerome, there is still a strong religious attachment to the Old Latin as the Bible of his youth and to the specific Greek text that lies behind this Bible. Even with Jerome’s strong commitment to Hebaica veritas, it is doubtful that one can speak of a “canonical text” as a preference between the Latin translation based upon the Hebrew text and the Old Latin “vulgate” of the Church at large. 151 One important issue is the fact that, although Jerome started his career as a translator of biblical texts by producing a revision of the Old Latin of the Gospels that was authorized by Pope Damasus, his most notable work on the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Latin was not authorized but done on his own initiative. Furthermore, though Augustine used Jerome’s “edition” of the Gospels, he did not approve of his rendering of the Latin text from the Hebrew. G. Bonner points out that in North Africa there were a number of different translations of the Bible in circulation, with Augustine recommending the one known as the Itala. He continues: In any case, from about 400 onwards, Augustine used Jerome’s Vulgate revision of the text of the gospels in his church at Hippo and the long passages from the Vulgate appear in his works after that date. At the same time, . . . Augustine continued to the end of his life to regard as authoritative an Old Testament text based on the Greek Septuagint translation, and to depreciate Jerome’s new translation based on the Hebrew. ‘Their authority is of the weightiest’, he wrote in 394 or 395, apropos of the Septuagint translators; he still held the same view at the end of his life, when he was concluding the De Civitate Dei in 426–27. 152

While Augustine acknowledged that there were various new translations of Scripture based on the Hebrew—including the Three, and most recently that 150. Ibid., 40. 151. This issue will be taken up again in the discussion on canon, chap. 9. 152. G. Bonner, “Augustine as Biblical Scholar,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 1, From the Beginnings to Jerome (ed. P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 545.

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

109

of the gifted Jerome—nevertheless, it was the Septuagint that was received by the Church as its inspired translation, and this in turn was the basis for the Latin translation that was used in the Latin churches. The argument used against Jerome for the establishment of the larger canon, namely, the witness of the use by the Church, was also the one used to establish the text. Augustine treated the LXX as the true text of Scripture upon which the diverse Latin translations were based in the same way that Jerome treated the Hebraica veritas as the true text to overcome the problem of the diversity and corruption that he and Origen perceived in the vulgate version of the LXX. In any case, there was no agreement on a single “authorized” version of the text, whether in Greek or in Latin, no final “edited” form, and certainly no “canonical” form of the text. Thus, from Origen to Jerome there were various attempts to revise or correct the vulgate Greek and Latin versions of the Old Testament, or even to replace them with better texts. However, at no point can it be said that there was a fixed and stable text of the Bible. The closest that was achieved was perhaps the Gospels of the revised Old Latin by Jerome.

Conclusion In our review of the sopherim, we have found no evidence for the view that they represented a group of scholars and grammarians who were responsible for the standardization of the Hebrew Bible by the end of the first century c.e. The effort to support this position by Lieberman on the analogy of the Alexandrian “editors” of Homer fails on a number of counts: (1) The Alexandrian scholars did not actually produce revised eclectic texts that they then used as the basis for reproduction and distribution as a vulgate, and there is no reason to believe that this happened in the case of the biblical text. (2) The essential features of a critical text, the use of critical signs such as the asterisk and obelus accompanied by commentary, are completely lacking in the biblical tradition, and it is not until the Masoretes that something comparable is found in the Masorah. (3) There is no evidence that the sopherim were anything more than a professional guild of scribes, unlike the select group of scholars associated with the royal Library in Alexandria. (4) The rather vague and confused statements about the three variant scrolls found in the Temple that are used to suggest critical textual collation of texts read more like an anachronistic imitation of classical scholia with little real apprehension of the practices and principles of scholarly editing. (5) Nor is it possible to make out of a single “scroll of the Temple court” a standard exemplar in the Second Temple period against which all other biblical texts were to be corrected or rejected and discarded. Furthermore, there is an effort by several modern scholars to make a distinction between superior and inferior texts by referring to terminology found in the scholia; these scholars claim that the superior texts were those that were carefully edited and “corrected” while the inferior texts were texts that were common among the people and reflected aberrant, uncorrected

110

Chapter 3

texts. This, as we suggested above, is a complete misunderstanding of the terminology, the description of such texts having to do with the quality of their penmanship and accuracy of copying and checking for mistakes rather than their value in the critical restoration of the text of an ancient author. Thus, a “vulgate” text that belonged to the majority text-type could be either “vulgar” or “superior” in quality. The use of this analogy from the language of the scholia is nothing more than a red herring, because it corresponds to nothing in the rabbinic evidence. The fact that Rabbi Meir of the second century obviously produced texts of the highest quality, but texts that did not correspond entirely with the MT, is proof enough that the distinction is quite unworkable. If the evidence for a distinctive standard text by the end of the first century is lacking, then the evidence for identifying the sopherim as editors, based on the “corrections” and special markings in the extant Hebrew Bible, is also very weak. The scribal marks and corrections are difficult to date, but those that correspond to similar markings found in the Qumran scrolls and can be dated to the Second Temple period belong to a very broad type of scribal markings and corrections that occur not only in texts within Judaism but also in Greek and Latin texts. They have to do primarily with the broad culture of copying and textual transmission. The scribal marks have to do with “proofreading” in the process of text production and little more. As we have suggested, there is every reason to suppose that a scholarly tradition of grammatical and antiquarian study grew up within the guild of the sopherim comparable to the scholars and grammatikoi of the Greco-Roman world who were increasingly concerned about the conservation and preservation of the text against its modernization. This group has its direct continuation in the Masoretes and their annotated codices. However, like other scholars and editors of their day, they were extremely conservative toward the vulgate text, and there is no evidence that they practiced athetesis. They did not create the “standard” text; they merely created the mechanisms to preserve it. It was the rabbis who tended to retroject the sopherim’s activity in the late Roman period anachronistically back into the Second Temple period and even to the time of Ezra. We have also seen, in a comparison with the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, that there is no necessary or direct connection between the “canonization” of the biblical books and their scholarly editing. The idea that the drawing up of a list of books that were to be regarded as “select” and superior, whether for religious or cultural reasons, demanded the need for a fixed text that was then created by a particular authority simply goes against all of the evidence, whether it has to do with Homer or with the Torah. Both were considered sacred and inspired, the basis of Greek and Jewish education and culture, respectively, and yet both experienced textual diversity, corruption, and interpolation over a long period before the text finally reached a certain equilibrium. Neither “canonization” in the form of a list nor the activity of any special group of scribes had anything to do with it.

spread is short

Jewish and Christian Scholarship and Standardization

111

In the case of the rest of the “canonical” books, there is even less reason to believe that an editorial process had anything to do with the form of the text in the MT. The mere fact that broad textual diversity was tolerated in the library of Qumran up to the end of its existence at the end of the Second Temple period, with no evidence of any attempt critically to establish a standard text, makes it extremely doubtful that any editorial activity was going on hand in hand with the drawing up of a “canon.” The term “canonical text” applied to antiquity is an anachronism and cannot be used to support the notion of an authoritative edited “final form” of the text of the Hebrew Bible or any part of it. Furthermore, what we have seen in our review of the great editors among the Church Fathers, most notably Origen and Jerome, is that the activity of editing the text of Scripture was a scholarly enterprise, based on an understanding of the problem of textual diversity, both within the koine or vulgate versions of the Greek text of the Old Testament, and between the Septuagint and Hebrew Bible. Any appreciation of this problem was the result of having received a training in classical scholarship, which was limited to very few, who had a great deal of trouble convincing even the leaders of the Church of the real importance of their scholarly work. The fact that in their commentaries both Origen and Jerome constantly appealed to the older, “precritical” and uncorrected vulgate as the authoritative version for theological teaching and used the Hebraica veritas in a rather limited way demonstrates that there was a gap between the Bible of the Church and the Bible of the scholar, which they were not able or willing to bridge. Their “edited” texts of the Old Testament did not result in “authorized versions” within their own lifetime and influenced the standard text of the Church only accidentally, in much the same way that the Alexandrian scholars affected the vulgate of Homer. The passion of these great Christian scholarly editors was the Urtext, the original Hebrew text behind the Septuagint, and both thought, however erroneously, that they could recover this by using the Hebrew Bible of their own day as the standard against which to compare the corrupted Greek text. Their efforts were most conservative, but in different ways. Origen, the more cautious about not losing anything of the original Septuagint (“the Seventy”), included most of both texts, with critical markings to note the differences between the Hebrew and the Greek. Jerome, somewhat more daring, produced a Latin version based almost entirely upon the Hebraica veritas as the original, uncorrupted Hebrew Vorlage of the Septuagint. Yet he also had a version based on Origen’s fifth column of the Hexapla that left open a more conservative option for those who would choose it. There is nothing in all of this activity that suggests that Origen and Jerome were “redactors” of the final form of the text in the way in which this is commonly used in biblical literary criticism, even though, as we shall see below, the notion of the editor or redactor in higher criticism is based directly on the analogy of the role of the editor of ancient texts.

112

Chapter 3

In contrast to the editorial activity of Origen and Jerome on the Bible is the role of Eusebius, the historian. In his historical works he takes great liberty with his sources, abbreviating them, expanding them, adding interpretive and ideological content, arranging them to suit his own framework and perspective. Even though he was a close disciple of Origen and a great preserver of his works, he nevertheless created his own major books in an entirely different mode. He was, of course, merely following the conventions of historiography practiced in his day. Yet it is precisely these kinds of literary conventions that are often attributed to the ancient biblical editors or redactors. This is an unfortunate confusion of entirely different scholarly and literary activities. Even Jerome, when he set out to complete the work of Eusebius in his translation of the Chronicle, shifted from the conventions of editing that he used in his biblical work to those of the historian in order to augment Eusebius’s history. The misunderstanding of ancient historiography and the displacement of the author/historian by the notion of editor or redactor is one of the fundamental errors of redaction criticism.

4

Classical and Biblical Text Editions: Editing in the Age of the Printing Press The Revival of Classical Learning and the Publication of Editiones Principes With the revival of classical learning in the Renaissance, there was a great urge to reproduce classical texts, as well as Hebrew and Greek biblical texts, that had survived the Middle Ages. Once again, as if in imitation of ancient Alexandria, scholars and new academic institutions began to collect manuscripts from wherever they could find them and then to recopy them. 1 The development of new state libraries and academic institutions made such collections of ancient texts and their newly produced copies open to the scholarly community and the public, and this encouraged the development of the related humanistic disciplines of grammar, paleography, and history. This revived a book trade in new “editions,” and with the development of the printing press, these editions could be mass-produced. Nevertheless, one problem that soon became apparent was the fact that many of these “new” editions were merely the reproduction of one particular manuscript of an ancient work and not always the best exemplar of that work. However, the collection of multiple manuscripts of the same work soon made it apparent to the new scholarship that there was considerable variation among these texts. The task then became to produce a critical text by collating and evaluating the qualities of texts, in order to produce a better eclectic text. In addition, the new grammatical expertise in classical and Oriental languages led to the possibility of emending the texts, thus producing new critical editions in what they hoped was the “final form” of these newly edited texts. Those who produced these new editions became known as “editors.” The new editions were no longer merely copies of single manuscripts. Thus, printers joined forces with scholarly text-critical editors to produce editions for wide distribution. These were dubbed editiones principes and each editio princeps tended to become viewed as the standard text of a particular classic. For the first time, the work of the editor is associated with the standard and, 1. Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); E. J. Kenney, The Classical Text: Aspects of Editing in the Age of the Printed Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976).

- 113 -

114

Chapter 4

at that point, “final form,” of the text in question. It is this notion of an editor as one who stands between an ancient author and the final published and disseminated version of the text that constitutes the basic and original meaning of the term “editor.” The history of editing is therefore coterminous with the history of textual criticism and the production of the standard form of a text. This development should be compared with the practices of the Middle Ages from about 800 to 1500 c.e. As E. J. Kenney states: The general attitude to the copying and correction of classical texts was broadly speaking what it had been in the ancient world. That is to say, in the monastic scriptorium the ancient grammatical tradition, in however garbled or imperfectly realised a form, was respected. . . . Copyists saw it as their task to reproduce the transmitted text, that of their exemplar; correction was limited to diorthosis and collation, criticism to choice between existing variants. 2

There was no place in this process for conjectural emendation or the idea of trying to recover a standard edition of the original—only the concern to produce an acceptable copy for private use or the use of the monastic community in which the text was kept. Needless to say, this fairly mechanical form of text-transmission, whether a corrupted text was grammatical or not, led to considerable diversity of texts during a long period when safeguards against textual errors were not very stringent. 3 However, the recognition of the possibility of textual corruption led to an even greater danger: how to correct the damage. Kennedy states that because of “the irresponsible operation of conjecture . . . the Italian humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may well have inflicted more damage on classical texts by their efforts at correction than they removed.” 4 Conjectural correction was so unsystematic and antiphilological that the texts that they produced were worse than the original manuscripts. Kenney continues: This was the process that reached its apogee just at the time when printing was invented; and it was nearly always the mongrel texts produced by the activities of the humanist copyists, scholars and critics (to distinguish functions in a quite anachronistic way) of the Revival of Learning that served as printer’s copy for the editiones principes. This was the textual situation . . . which was arrested, frozen and perpetuated by the advent of Gutenberg’s invention. . . . Until the opening decades of the nineteenth century brought awareness of the historical processes by which classical texts had been transmitted and editorial criteria could be devised which would take proper account of the realities thus revealed, editors of texts were largely engaged in a piecemeal and haphazard attempt to undo the

2. Kenney, “The Character of Humanist Philology,” 120. 3. The case is somewhat different with the texts of the Hebrew Bible, as we shall see. 4. Kenney, The Classical Text, 3.

Editing in the Age of the Printing Press

115

damage that had been inflicted in the period between the ninth century and the Renaissance. 5

What this means is that for a long time there was a strong tendency to view each editio princeps as the lectio recepta, and the later nineteenth-century editor-scholars regarded it as their task to undo the damage of earlier editors and to get back to the archetypal text of late antiquity or the early Middle Ages. And so the editors of a later period were engaged in the criticism of the editors and editions of a previous age. As a result, all deviations from the hypothetical archetype that were not merely scribal could be viewed as the result of editorial caprice—that is, “redactional.” In this way, there arises the quite contradictory notion of “good” editors, who tried to restore and preserve the text in its most original form and therefore eliminate the work of earlier editorial corruption; and “bad” editors or redactors, who had revised the classical texts on nonphilological grounds and were thus responsible for the corruption of the text. Kenney summarizes the situation for this early period thus: “The editiones principes were usually . . . printed from current copies, the text of which represented a chance mixture of traditional readings with conjectural emendations. Such in most cases was the foundation of the learned activity of the next three centuries or so.” 6 Kenney goes on to illustrate with numerous examples how the lectio recepta used as the basis for these editions was often not the best extant text known at the time but an inferior text that was more readily available to the editor. Furthermore, the rush to get so many editiones principes into print meant the reliance on many inferior scholareditors, and the corruptions that they passed on and even added to by way of unfounded conjectural emendations were then “perpetuated and on occasion even enhanced” 7 by the new printed editions. Thus Kenney notes: With remarkably few exceptions the descent of any given text through the printed editions is in a single line, and each editor is found to base his work on that of his (usually though not invariably) immediate predecessor. For each author the base text, the lectio recepta—the text tout court—is the printed text; this is now the uniquely stable point of reference. In one sense this can be seen as a gain. Printing had come to stay; the multiplication of textually uniform copies of a book was now the norm; the early printed editions, however much they left to be desired philologically, at all events represented from the textual point of view a fixed point, an ubi consistam. 8

What is important to note for our study is that a fundamental shift takes place in the concept of an editor between the Alexandrian scholar, a diorthotes, and the Renaissance scholar-editor. The latter is not just a scholar, like Aristarchus, attempting to recover an ancient text for his own purposes and 5. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 8. Ibid.,

3–4. 4. 17. 18–19.

116

Chapter 4

to offer it, with critical notations and commentary, to others for their consideration. His work is now closely tied to the dissemination of a standard text of a sacred or classical work, a critical edition. In terms of a comparison with the ancient usage discussed earlier, ekdosis, “an edition,” or more particularly, diorthosis, “a corrected edition,” has now been made for the purpose of diadosis, the broad distribution of the edition, and as the end product of the paradosis, the transmission of the text tradition. It is this conception of editor or “redactor,” especially “final redactor,” that lies at the base of all conceptions of the redactor’s function in later literary criticism. There is, however, another very important consideration in the development of the editor’s role that accounts for the great ambiguity expressed toward the editors of a previous age. Kenney discusses this as a “false problem.” He states: “the problem immediately confronting the successors of the earliest editors, the men of the post-editio princeps age . . . was . . . in one sense, and that most fundamental, a false problem.” 9 Kenney explains that the task of the modern editor is first of all to establish the text from all the available manuscript evidence through an appropriate method of recension, quite apart from and independent of any prior printed edition. But this kind of editorial methodology was just not available to the scholarly editors of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. What, in fact, they did was to begin with a printed text as the lectio recepta and to work at correcting and annotating this text. It was not just the copyists of manuscripts that were the problem, but also the editors that had intervened in the production of the “received text.” What is important to note is the common notion held by these early text scholars that between the text of antiquity as it left the hand of the author and the final form of the “received text” was an editorial process, quite apart from that of the usual process of manuscript transmission. To better understand this interconnection, we must try to understand the perspective of these early textual critics and editors. Kenney describes the production of classical texts in the sixteenth century: “In the stylized prefaces of the early editions . . . one commonplace recurs again and again: the idea, expressed in images of polishing and of scouring, of clearing away the rust and dirt engendered by centuries of slothful neglect, that the editor’s task is to restore the author to his pristine splendour.” 10 The notion of textual restoration is therefore fundamental to the earliest conceptions of the editor’s task. 11 Kenney points out that the editors of classical texts, who were also scholars, did not have any real comprehension of a historical understanding of the process by which classical texts had come to be in the state in which the editors found them. . . . In their minds 9. Ibid., 19. 10. Ibid., 21. 11. An important meaning of the Latin verb redigere is that of restoring something to its former condition, and it is this verb that was commonly used in early modern times to refer to editing, as is evident in French and German usage and from which we have the noun redacteur/redactor.

Editing in the Age of the Printing Press

117

reigned a polarity in which two things were starkly contrasted: the state of the text as the editor saw it actually before him, and the perfect state in which it had (putatively) left the author’s hands and to which he aspired to restore it. . . . A historical reconstruction of the processes intervening between these two extremes was neither attempted nor indeed envisaged.12

Furthermore, as Kenney points out, the expectations of the reading public, for which the editors prepared their editions, were not very high when it comes to a desire for the true text. The public prefers the text with which it has become familiar. This is particularly the case with the lectio recepta, which usually came to be identified with the first printed editio princeps. Kenney states: Dependence on the printed base text was, for the earlier editors, a necessity, but the habit of dependence died hard and long after it should have done. Long after the materials for a more radical appraisal of textual problems had become available, for some if not for all classical authors, the defense of the lectio recepta as such persisted as a vexatious legacy from the age of the editiones principes. 13

The Textus Receptus of the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible The first printed edition as the “received text” leads us to another important subject: the relationship between editorial practice and printer. Commenting on this, Kenney states: In all this [editing of classical texts] the role of the printer-publisher was crucial. Some printers, like Aldus and Stephanus, were men of learning, who published their own works as well as those of others. Some, like Froben and Herwagen, were business-men who relied on the assistance of scholars to select and edit the learned works which they published. Most were actuated by motives that were not purely commercial, but all were under commercial pressures and had to compete for sales in a world of rapidly expanding but quite unpredictable demand for the printed word, especially for theology. 14

Kenney illustrates the case with Erasmus and his printer, Froben, “as representing an extreme case of the pressures that militated against careful and scientific editing.” 15 On the one hand, “Erasmus’ struggles with the theologians had made him intensely conscious of the need for a critical treatment of the sources of Christian doctrine and faith,” with the result that he and his publisher were constantly on the lookout for better manuscripts. On the other hand, 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 15. Ibid.,

22–23. 25. 49. 50.

118

Chapter 4

[Erasmus] worked under constant pressure from friends and from himself and without time for sufficient reflection on what he was doing. In these circumstances it would be unreasonable to expect his editorial work to satisfy modern criteria. . . . What makes Erasmus important for the history of editing . . . is the impetus which his great authority and example gave to the whole enterprise of establishing the foundations of all (as it then seemed) religious and secular learning—the texts themselves. At the centre of this activity stood the New Testament: defective as was Erasmus’ edition in execution, the spirit and the driving-force behind it was a potent source of inspiration for literate Europe. 16

Erasmus’s printed edition of the New Testament, which became the Textus Receptus, illustrates very well the way in which an early edition of a sacred or classical text became the standard and authoritative form of the text regardless of its obvious deficiencies. Its history is briefly described by Bruce Metzger. 17 The first printed edition of the New Testament by Erasmus was produced in 1516 in great haste to beat the competition of a rival publication project, the Complutensian Polyglot, and ran through five editions, the fourth edition being the most “definitive” (1527). In spite of the superiority of the Complutensian Polyglot edition, the Erasmus edition gained widespread acceptance. The reprint of Eramus’s edition by the Elzevir brothers in a new edition in 1633 was advertised as “the text which is now received by all,” and the designation Textus Receptus as the standard and only true text became the norm. As Metzger states: It lies at the basis of the King James version and of all the principal Protestant translations in the languages of Europe prior to 1881. So superstitious has been the reverence accorded the Textus Receptus that in some cases attempts to criticize or emend it have been regarded as akin to sacrilege. Yet its textual basis is essentially a handful of late and haphazardly collected minuscule manuscripts, and in a dozen passages its reading is supported by no known Greek witness. 18

What Metzger describes is the makings of an authoritative recension, a “canonical text,” if one can speak of such a thing, by an editor or redactor. And it is this process that is anachronistically used as an analogy for the formation of the “final form” of the text in the ancient period. Much the same can be said for the Hebrew Bible in the form of the second edition of the Bomberg Rabbinic Bible that was edited by the rabbinic scholar Jacob ben Chayim (Venice, 1524–26). There were several printed editions of the Hebrew Bible, in part or the whole, from the inception of the printing press to the time of this volume, but none gained the reputation of the Bomberg Rabbinic Bible. It was created as a collaboration between the 16. Ibid., 50–51. 17. Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament (2nd ed.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 95–118. 18. Ibid., 106.

Editing in the Age of the Printing Press

119

Christian publisher Daniel Bomberg and the Masoretic authority Jacob ben Chayim, with the publisher collecting a number of late manuscripts of the Masorah—all that could be found—at considerable expense, which ben Chayim then edited. This edition became the standard and the Hebrew Bible equivalent of the New Testament Textus Receptus. As C. D. Ginsburg states: “All subsequent editions are in so far Massoretic as they follow the standard edition of Jacob b. Chayim. Every departure from it on the part of editors who call their texts Massoretic has to be explained and justified on the authority of the Massorah and MSS which exhibit the Massoretic recension of the text.” 19 This statement must be understood as Ginsburg’s justification for its republication in 1894, along with collation of some additional manuscripts and printed editions. At some point, the Masoretic Text in this particular form became known as the Textus Receptus by analogy with the New Testament Textus Receptus, and this designation continues down to the present day, even though superior Masoretic manuscripts have moved the publication of the Hebrew Bible beyond scholarly commitment to the particular form that it took in the Bomberg Bible. Paul Kahle makes a number of observations about this edition of the Hebrew text. 20 The text’s prestige and authority rests upon the inclusion of ben Chayim’s Masoretic notes, but Kahle regards them as of little value. He states: “Jacob boasts of being the first for a long time who made a special study of the masoretic material. He is proud of having been able to supplement the incomplete statements of his texts and to correct the faulty ones.” In other words, what he did was to use Masorah that originally belonged to other texts and altered them to make them fit the text that he had; on occasion, he even invented new Masorah to fill in the gaps in his material: “the Masora became correct only when it was adapted to the Masoretic Textus Receptus, in other words when it was brought into agreement with the text which it should have supported.” 21 In some cases, when the old commentaries of Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Kim˙i were added to the margins of the Hebrew text, their biblical quotations were corrected to agree with the biblical text and not the text actually used by the commentators. Kahle himself uses the term Textus Receptus in a somewhat specialized fashion, not just for this particular edition but for the form of the Hebrew Bible that lies behind it and in fact behind all printed editions from the late fifteenth century onward. He regards it as a mixed text comprising elements of the two Masoretic schools, that of Ben Asher and Ben Naftali. He states: “The result of this development is a kind of textus receptus, which although based on the Ben Asher text, must be regarded as a compromise between the two texts. This text begins to appear about 1300 and is mostly to be found 19. C. D. Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (1897), with a prolegomena by H. M. Orlinsky (reprinted; New York: KTAV, 1966), 956–76, quotation on p. 976. This judgment is supported by Orlinsky, pp. x–xi. 20. Paul E. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza (2nd ed.; Oxford: Blackwell, 1959), 119–31. 21. Ibid., 120. See also p. 130.

120

Chapter 4

in MSS of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.” 22 In other words, the standard text of the second Rabbinic Bible is not in the least based upon ancient texts but is simply the result of a continuous text tradition that happened to become fixed in a particular printed form. Kahle’s final judgment on this printed edition is given thus: Nobody would be inclined to regard a classical text, printed at the beginning of the sixteenth century, as the best text available. The New Testament published about this time by Erasmus [the Textus Receptus] has to-day historical interest only. It is inconceivable that such a complicated text as that of the Hebrew Bible should have been satisfactorily edited by a man who, more than 400 years ago, relied on late and inaccurate MSS, was overwhelmed with other work, and spent hardly two years on the job. The text is printed together with all sorts of Targums and commentaries on 952 folios, about 1900 folio pages, and is supposed to have been completed in the astonishingly short time of about 15 months. Yet this text has been accepted almost up to the present day as the only authoritative text!23

More recently, Emanuel Tov speaks of the second Rabbinic Bible as the “received text” and states: “The second Rabbinic Bible became the determinative text for all branches of Jewish life and subsequently also for the scholarly world. All subsequent editions, with the exception of a few recent ones, reflect this edition, and deviate from it only by the change or addition of details according to manuscripts, or by the removal or addition of printing errors.” 24 To the extent that one can speak of a canonical form of the text of the Bible, it is certainly the case with this edition. Its creation is also linked to an editorial process that fits the larger environment of the sixteenth century, although the editorial practices of ben Chayim left much to be desired, even by the standards of his own day. The notion of a particular edition of the Masoretic Hebrew Bible as the Textus Receptus underwent a still further development in biblical scholarship by a backward extension of the term to apply, not just to the form of the Masorah in the text-tradition as identified by Kahle, but to the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible as such and to the entire proto-Masoretic Text tradition thought to begin with a hypothetical standardized Urtext in the first century C.E. There seems to be not the slightest hesitancy or self-consciousness about using this completely anachronistic concept, with all that it entails about a specially edited text, to apply authoritatively to all of Judaism. These text-critical matters will be taken up in chap. 8 below. It is only necessary here to point out the historical origins of notions related to the term Textus Receptus and the fact that it is a complete misnomer for any textual form in antiquity.

22. Ibid., 119. 23. Ibid., 131. 24. E. Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 78.

Editing in the Age of the Printing Press

121

This sketch of the early editing of classical and sacred texts and of the relationship of editorial activity to the process of distribution in the book trade is very important for understanding how scholars, who were trying to work out the history of the text in the period of its origin and early transmission, conceptualized the role of ancient “editors.” The early practice of textual criticism, carried out in the course of editing particular texts as editiones principes, involved both emending the text on the basis of variants in manuscripts and employing conjectural readings for which there was no extant evidence, of which Erasmus’s New Testament and the second Rabbinic Bible are primary examples. Rarely, however, was there any evidence that a distinction was made between these emendations and the transmitted text. From the perspective of a later, more sophisticated age of textual criticism, this sort of editing (or “redaction”) can be viewed not as a restoration of the author’s work but as its corruption. Consequently, the critical editing of classical and biblical texts became increasingly contested, especially when it involved conjectural emendation in the restoration of ancient texts. Kenney sums up the classical editions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in this way: There is evident . . . in the editions of these centuries a fundamental practical uncertainty in the treatment and documentation of sources; and in particular a persistent inability to come to a firm decision about conjecture—whether to relegate it to a position outside the text or to promote it to a level with ms readings as a source of textual improvement. It is against this background of hesitancy that the contribution of Richard Bentley (1662–1742) to the art and science of editing must be viewed.25

Before we review this new science of editing of ancient texts and the career of Richard Bentley, it would be worthwhile to consider for whom and to what purpose these classical texts were being edited and rushed to print, because this had a profound influence on the nature and quality of the editorial activity. It is for this reason that we need to look at the education of the elite and the privileged in Western European society from the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century and the tension that arose over the older mode of classical education and the new science of textual criticism.

Editing Classical Texts and the Education of the Gentleman We have outlined above the fact that in the period from the time of the Renaissance and for the next 300 years a steady stream of classical texts in multiple editions was being produced. In answer to the questions: “What was the appeal of the Greek and Latin classics throughout the early modern period?” and “How did they live on from place to place and from generation to generation?” Joseph Levine gives the following answer: 25. Kenney, The Classical Text, 71.

122

Chapter 4

From the Italian humanists to the English humanists and beyond, there was complete agreement that the classics were meant to instruct the young in all that was required to govern. From Thomas Elyot in the sixteenth century to William Pitt in the eighteenth, the justification does not seem to alter. The best, the only political education, is a training in the classical authors. Latin and Greek are the keys to a treasure chest of wisdom and examples, unmatched by anything afterward. The student must model himself on his predecessors for style and substance, in his speech and his behavior, and he is not likely to surpass them. Perfection can only be imitated. The goal is eloquence joined to moral and political wisdom.26

As Levine points out, this is a remarkable restoration of antiquity’s own pattern of education, the “Ciceronian ideal of humanitas,” which consisted of the “classical humanities: grammar and rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy.” 27 This was the curriculum for the privileged class from grammar school to the university and remained so for centuries. The “canon” of texts to be studied was restricted to the Greek and Latin classics, and everything else was secondary. 28 The ancient basis of education was that the “canonical” texts, as models and measures of excellence, were to be imitated and emulated. This becomes quite apparent in the late seventeenth century when the Augustan Age of Rome, viewed by the later Romans as the golden age of their literature and culture and also the age in which the republic gives way to empire and the great pax Romana, becomes the model for the French and English ruling classes. The classics of this period are used to create a completely idealized world of eloquence and order to which the education of the elite was directed. But it was also well known that the Augustan Age of Rome looked back to ancient Greece of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. for its classics and the source of its inspiration; thus, the texts of this period occupied a special place in the classical canon, and none was more highly esteemed than Homer. Alongside the classical canon was the Hebrew canon, the source from which the Scriptures derived, so Hebrew was added to Latin and Greek as the third language of learning. The pagan classical canon and the sacred scriptural canon were the two great wellsprings of knowledge— not that all schoolboys mastered competence in each one—although of the three, Latin was indispensable. Learned clergy were expected to have competence in all, and those in training for positions in the Church made up a large percentage of the university population. 29

26. J. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 5. 27. Ibid. 28. This also applied to education in America. See C. Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 29. Admission to Harvard required competence in all three languages (ibid., 11).

spread is 6 points short

Editing in the Age of the Printing Press

123

This world of learning and its program of education began to be challenged seriously in the late seventeenth century by the new world of the sciences. The sciences were not restricted to what we think of as the world of the natural sciences but embraced all forms of research and inquiry, based on the belief that knowledge could be expanded beyond what was known in the past, that the wisdom of the ancients could be improved upon, and that progress in understanding the world could be achieved. This approach could apply to philology and the understanding of ancient texts as well as the physical universe. This viewpoint of the “moderns,” as they were called, was in direct conflict with the perspective of the “ancients,” those who held that all wisdom was contained within the classical and biblical canons and could never be excelled, only emulated. The “ancients” could tolerate the new sciences as long as they dealt only with what they regarded as the trivialities of Copernicus, Harvey, Boyle, Newton, and others, but the controversy with the “moderns” moved to a whole new level when the “ancients” were faced with subversion within the ranks of the best classical scholars themselves in the form of the new philology. This “scientific” philology advocated the view that texts must be understood historically, that language changes in form and meaning over time, that texts are written within certain contexts that have to be understood and recovered in order to interpret the meaning of those texts. Texts historically understood were not immutable objects that could simply be used as ideal models for any age; they were bound to a past that could only be recovered with the greatest difficulty. The controversy can be illustrated very well on the English scene by the debate that developed between William Temple, with his publication of a tract in 1690 (frequently reissued) in defense of the “ancients,” and William Wotton’s response on behalf of the “moderns” in his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694). It is not necessary here to review the details of the debate except to say that Temple’s view was that the greatest writers and scholars of antiquity were superior to any of the modern period, while Wotton argued that there had been significant advances in knowledge on many fronts, and there was no reason not to believe that still greater ones could be achieved in the future, equaling or surpassing those of the past. What is remarkable about this debate is that the Royal Society, which included Newton, Boyle, and Hooke, scientists in the narrower sense, chose Wotton, a relatively young classical scholar and fellow of the Society, to represent them in the response to Temple. In this comparison of authors, ancient and modern, in the “battle of the books” as it was called, Levine points out how similar the perspectives of both scholars were, in many respects, regarding the literature of antiquity. He states: Both thought that its function was to educate the statesman and citizen; both agreed that the most perfect examples of life and art lay in the ancient past and ought to be imitated, differing only about the possibilities of success. And both believed that the moderns would have to be evaluated according to classical standards as to subject, style, and composition.

124

Chapter 4

If they disagreed somewhat in the emphasis they placed upon each of the special qualities of the ideal history and thus in their evaluation of specific works, there was still enough general agreement to identify them equally as part of a single common culture, the neoclassical culture that had been reborn in the Italian Renaissance and slowly but steadily taken root in England. 30

However, as Levine states: “Philology was another matter. Here at last was a basic disagreement.” 31 Philology was the form of scholarship that was directly related to the critical editing of texts. It was all very well to acknowledge that philology had once been helpful in the restoration of classical texts and the production of useful printed editions. It was quite another to see how much the discipline had grown in complexity so that only an expert could use it. The critical editions produced by philology became increasingly cumbersome tomes of erudite learning. For this reason, Temple “condemned it, . . . exactly as he had condemned natural science, for its uselessness and its futility.” 32 What the man of affairs wanted was simply a text that he could regard as trustworthy so that he could use it in a practical way. Philology, however, had become a science and an end in itself. “Philology,” as Levine explains, “furnished the key to the understanding of the whole of classical life and literature; it was the historical discipline par excellence, the technique that allowed the moderns to know more about antiquity than even the people who had lived in it. And it did so progressively, cumulatively, adding little by little to the sum and precision of modern learning.” Thus, with Wotton’s response to Temple, the lines were drawn in this battle of the books. Levine states: “By 1700 it was becoming necessary to choose either one side or the other: either imitation or scholarship, either standards of ancient rhetoric or new techniques of modern criticism, either polished narrative or antiquarian compilation.” 33 Yet it was with the second edition of the Reflections of 1697, for which Wotton asked his close friend and colleague Richard Bentley to contribute a piece on the so-called Epistles of Phalaris, that matters came to a head. It was this essay, above all, that brought Bentley into the limelight, and so to this scholar we must give some attention.

Richard Bentley and the Critical Editing of Texts Richard Bentley (1662–1742) was a brilliant and controversial scholar, a person who gained great notoriety both in England and on the continent as

30. Levine, The Battle of the Books, 44–45. 31. Ibid., 45. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 46.

Editing in the Age of the Printing Press

125

a critical editor of Latin and Greek texts. 34 He is generally hailed by later classicists as one of the greatest classical scholars of all time. 35 As indicated above, it was the Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris that first brought his brilliance to public notice within the context of the controversy between the “ancients” and the “moderns.” 36 Temple had used, in his famous essay in defense of the “ancients,” some examples of what he regarded as great literature from very early periods of Greek history to argue against the notion of the progressive development of literary excellence. A prime example used by Temple was the Epistles of Phalaris, which was in fact an anachronistic forgery and known as such from the days of Erasmus, though some scholars continued to believe it to be genuine. Bentley’s dissertation was an exhaustive demonstration of historical analysis and criticism of the text, showing that it was in fact spurious and not the work of antiquity that it claimed to be. The charge that the Epistles was a fake was not new, but what was new was the form of Bentley’s demonstration that it was a forgery, which set a new standard for critical scholarship. What this case proved against the claims of the “ancients” was that the new philology was absolutely necessary for the proper understanding of texts and for the critical editing of all works of antiquity. The victory for the new philology did not come easily and was a battleground in the whole field of education for much of the eighteenth century, with Bentley at the heart of it for the first half of that period. Historical criticism as a fundamental necessity for the editing and presentation of an ancient classic (as well as the text of the Bible) was not just a case of furnishing a printed text that could be used as something relevant for educational and didactic use in the present but was much more—a painstaking exercise in recovering something from the distant past that would become increasingly foreign to the present. Nor was it just a case of some texts’ becoming discredited as fakes or late fictitious creations, which was upsetting enough; in addition, within the great classics, whose vulgate form had been established by the editio princeps, the new philology would find significant later additions and interpolations that did not come from the ancient author. This discovery threatened to undermine the whole foundation of the established model of education built upon the classics, shifting instead in the direction of the “moderns” and their scientific model of the progressive accumulation

34. See C. O. Brink, English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson, and Housman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); R. C. Jebb, Bentley (London: Macmillan, 1889); Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850, 143–58; Levine, The Battle of the Books, 47–84. 35. See the remarks by U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, History of Classical Scholarship (trans. A. Harris; ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 79–82. 36. It is true that an earlier work, Epistola ad Joannem Millium (1691), established his credentials as a scholar among his peers, so he was not entirely new on the scene. See Grafton, Defenders of the Text, 12–21.

126

Chapter 4

of knowledge, of which the new philology with its emphasis on historical analysis was a part. The work that perhaps best exemplifies Bentley’s skill as a text-critic is his edition of Horace (1711). In his attempt to restore the purity of the original, he went far beyond the evidence of the manuscripts alone and made liberal use of conjecture, which he characterized as a sort of “divination.” The result was a text drastically different from the familiar vulgate version. Pfeiffer characterizes Bentley’s attitude toward this style of editing: [Bentley] had hardly any doubt of the correctness of the text restored by his criticism; on the contrary he had complete confidence in his own ‘divination’. . . . Confidence in his own divination led Bentley to the belief that he knew what the poet ought to have written. In Bentley’s view Horace as a classical poet could not have written anything inconsistent with the harmonious measures of classical poetry. . . . The true critic must recognize the errors of transmission and restore the original harmony. 37

Using this intuitive method led Bentley to make more than 700 changes in the text of Horace. Likewise, Kenney uses Bentley’s editing of the text of Horace as the primary example of Bentley’s innovation as an editor of ancient texts. He remarks: “The most striking feature of the edition is in fact the part which Bentley allows conjecture ex ingenio to play in the establishment of the text.” For Bentley, the correction of the text based on conjecture had equal status with the evidence derived from manuscripts and must be judged on its “intrinsic merits.” 38 Bentley edited several classical works of Latin and Greek authors, using conjectural emendation quite freely, often based on the principles of meter in poetry. In his latest editions, he also frequently rejected verses that he identified as interpolations. In addition to completed editions of classical authors, there were two projects that Bentley undertook late in life that he never completed. One was a critical edition of the New Testament. As Pfeiffer indicates, his plan was to restore the oldest knowable text. This was in his opinion the text of the fourth century A.D. at the time of the Council of Nicaea. He proposed to restrict himself to the oldest Greek manuscripts, supplemented by the oldest manuscripts of the Vulgate, of the ancient Oriental versions, and of the earliest quotations in the writings of the Church Fathers. . . . Although personal difficulties, as well as the complexity of the problems, prevented Bentley from completing and publishing his edition, his project anticipated by a whole century the work of Lachmann and others. 39

What is noteworthy for our purposes is the close association between classical and biblical studies, especially when it is observed that K. Lachmann, a

37. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850, 154. 38. Kenney, The Classical Text, 72. 39. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850, 156.

Editing in the Age of the Printing Press

127

major classical scholar of the nineteenth century, made some of the most important contributions to New Testament studies of the period. The second editorial project in which Bentley was involved at the same time was an edition of Homer. One of his greatest discoveries was the digamma, a consonant that sounded like Latin v and was known to have existed in the early language of epic but was nowhere preserved in the extant manuscripts of Homer. As Pfeiffer states: “For linguistical and metrical reasons he reintroduced it, and the importance of this discovery is enormous; for the first time a step had been made beyond the text as it had been fixed by the Alexandrian grammarians and their followers in later ancient and medieval times.” 40 Yet perhaps even more important was a remark that Bentley made about Homer in response to a statement that Homer “designed his poems for eternity to please and instruct mankind,” a sentiment quite typical of the “ancients,” as noted above. Bentley’s response was: Take my word for it, poor Homer had never such aspiring thoughts. He wrote a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at festivals and other days of merriment. The Iliad he made for men and the Odyssey for the other sex. These loose songs were not collected in the form of an epic till Pisistratus’ time, above 500 years after. 41

This statement epitomizes the difference in approach to the classics between the idealistic view of the “ancients” and the new historical perspective of the “moderns,” such as Bentley. As Myres asserts: “Here we have evidently a very concise summary of a whole philosophy of Homeric study; every clause in it is significant; and it comes from a man who by this time had the world’s learning about Homer at his fingers’ ends.” 42 Furthermore, as Pfeiffer points out: “The last sentence repeats the common tradition of later antiquity about the collection of the Homeric poems by Pisistratus.” 43 Nevertheless, this somewhat offhanded comment, which Bentley never followed up, later became the point of departure for much future speculation about the compositional history of Homer’s epics. 44 The use of the new philology, however, especially what Bentley called “divination,” even in the hands of so brilliant a scholar, could have rather dire consequences. The problem can best be illustrated from another example of Bentley’s work, his edition of Milton. 45 He was asked by Queen Charlotte of England to produce a scholarly edition of the great English classic, Milton’s Paradise Lost. So Bentley applied to this work his methods of conjectural emendation, his “divination,” just as he had with the editing of

40. Ibid., 157. 41. Quoted from Pfeiffer, ibid., 158. 42. J. L. Myres, Homer and His Critics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), 49. 43. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850, 158. 44. This will be taken up below under the discussion of the work of F. A. Wolf. 45. See especially Levine, The Battle of the Books, 245–63.

128

Chapter 4

Horace and other classical works. As he worked, there were many passages in Paradise Lost that he viewed as unworthy of Milton, inappropriate to the work as he understood it. Consequently, he invented the explanation that an editor had willfully changed many words and phrases in the text and had even interpolated large passages, hundreds of verses, in the same style and language as Milton. These he deleted from his edition! Of course, doing this created a scandal. It has not been difficult for scholars of the twentieth century to prove that Bentley was wrong and that no such editor existed. Even though Milton was blind, he took the greatest care to get the text just right. 46 But if one could invent an editor for Milton as a convenience to textual and historical criticism, why not for Homer and the Pentateuch? Indeed, Bentley’s treatment of Milton reads like a parody of contemporary redaction criticism of the Pentateuch. The methods that Bentley used to identify editorial interpolations and to attribute to an editor an ideology that he considered foreign to Milton could have been taken directly out of Steck’s handbook on exegetical method. 47 Lest we judge Bentley too harshly, we must remember what was said above about the emendations of earlier editors. In addition, the period from the Renaissance onward was also the time during which many famous forgeries were identified, such as the Donation of Constantine; some were produced in ancient times but others more recently, due to the great demand for new manuscripts of ancient authors. 48 And some scholars and “editors” were not above creating works of this sort by skillful imitation of ancient works. Among these was Erasmus, who faked a patristic treatise in order to create ancient support for his scholarly work. 49 As we have seen, Bentley’s early scholarly reputation rested on the complete discrediting of a similar forgery, the Epistles of Phalaris, using a wide range of grammatical and historical arguments. Consequently, the scholarly editor was expected to apply to any ancient work the full critical repertoire of philology, and his tendency was to attribute to an ancient “editor” any corruption and “forged addition” in the text. It was in the application of Bentley’s methodology that W. M. L. de Wette, in his famous dissertation of 1805, identified Deuteronomy as a forgery from the time of Josiah, not as a genuine work stemming from Mosaic authorship. Levine has some instructive observations about Bentley’s edition of Milton. He states:

46. Helen Darbishire, ed., The Manuscript of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book I (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931), x–xv; John William Mackail, Bentley’s Milton (Warton Lecture on English Poetry 15; London: Oxford University Press, 1924). 47. O. H. Steck, Old Testament Exegesis: A Guide to the Methodology (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 79–98; 127–49. 48. Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 49. Ibid., 44–45.

Editing in the Age of the Printing Press

129

Still, in method and attitude Bentley’s Milton was not much different from his Horace or from any of his other works; in the parlance of the day, they were decidedly modern. The text of the Roman poet, he saw, had been corrupted by ignorant medieval scribes who had foisted their own misreadings, sometimes deliberately, on a hapless text. His scorn for the “librarians” was exactly like his contempt for Milton’s amanuensis. Bentley’s avowed intention in either case was to retrieve the original as he imagined it must have been when it left the author’s own hand, and he used every device of modern philology to accomplish this task. 50

What is noteworthy for our purposes is to observe that, while the great age of the classics allowed many scribes to inflict haphazard and sporadic alterations on the texts that they were copying, the relatively recent date of Milton’s work required that all of these corruptions be attributed to a single scribe and editor. It may be, as Levine believes, that Bentley was not that serious about the actual existence of such an editor but, ironically, those following later in the footsteps of the master critic were more inclined to conjecture the role of an editor, by analogy with Milton’s editor, as an explanation for alterations and additions made to ancient texts. It is a curious fact that when scholarly editors looked at ancient texts, whether biblical or classical, they saw within them their alter ego, the “editor” who was responsible for the preservation of the text in its final ancient form but who also had the power to alter and corrupt the text or to create a complete forgery. Of course, the critics regarded their own work of editing as controlled only by the highest standards of fidelity to the ancient author and his work. Nothing could be more contradictory than Bentley’s view of himself as a true editor and his view of the invented “editor” of Milton’s Paradise Lost as responsible for its “corruption.” When applied to ancient texts, the function of an ancient “editor” was construed in two conflicting roles: (1) as preserver and stabilizer of the final form of the text, and (2) as the reviser, interpolator, and corruptor of the text. The application of the analogy of the “editor” to formation of the ancient text can already be seen in Richard Simon’s Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament, in the late seventeenth century, and in classical studies in the text-history of Homer constructed by F. A. Wolf at the end of the eighteenth century; the latter has been very influencial in all subsequent studies of Homer. These developments will require extended treatment below. What is important to understand is that the creation of the analogy of the “editor” or “redactor” arose out of this era of editorial activity and was very strongly shaped by it. One cannot properly understand the history of textual criticism or historical criticism, and the role of the “editor” in both, without taking into account this background in the history of editing. Neglect of the history has led to the perpetuation of the most glaring anachronisms in

50. Levine, The Battle of the Books, 254.

130

Chapter 4

both textual and historical criticism and in the entire interpretive enterprise in the study of biblical literature.

Editors and the Collection of Manuscripts Kenney, in his history of editing, deals at length with the important relationship of editors to manuscript collections. 51 The editor was only as good as the materials that he could collect for collation and for editing. 52 The activity of gathering manuscript material was inherent in the task of the editor, but it also engaged the energies of institutions, printers and booksellers, and well-heeled patrons. 53 For our purposes, however, the important point is that there is a close association between the activity of collecting manuscripts, which often are in fragmentary condition, and editing the works of ancient authors represented by these manuscript sources and fragments. Kenney gives an account of the vicissitudes and dispersion of many manuscripts as they passed among scholars, academic institutions, and collectors. Associated with these collections was the parallel effort of cataloging known manuscripts reported to be in the holdings of various libraries; Kenney gives an extensive account of catalogs and bibliographies of this sort. Cataloging was indispensable to the whole scholarly enterprise. As we will see below, the analogy of collections (Sammlungen) of documents and fragmentary sources by compilers (Sammler) plays a major role in the rise of historical criticism of the Hebrew Bible. It begins already with Richard Simon’s notions about collections of historical documents compiled by editors and maintained in state and temple archives in Judah in the time of the Judean monarchy, and the notion of such collections persists throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century in historical criticism. In classical studies, during the Renaissance, it was all too easy to see a resemblance between this learned activity and some accounts of the work carried out at the Alexandrian Library: librarians there acquired copies of classical works, subsequently “edited” these works, and cataloged the collections of manuscripts of classics, the pinakes, which had been developed by the same scholars who “edited” the classical texts. These and other parallels will be discussed in more detail below. It was, of course, one thing to be able to collate the extant manuscripts but quite another to begin to make critical judgments between manuscripts. The most important first step was to date the manuscripts and to identify their provenance, utilizing the principle that the oldest is more likely to be the best. This led to the development of paleography as the means of recog-

51. Kenney, The Classical Text, 75–104. 52. That was the case for both Erasmus’s Greek New Testament and Jacob ben Chayim’s Masoretic Bible. In both cases the weakness of the editions was the result of the poor quality of the manuscripts. 53. For example, Daniel Bomberg was heavily involved, personally and financially, in the acquisition of manuscripts for the Bibles he produced.

Editing in the Age of the Printing Press

131

nizing the age of the hands in the copies of such texts. Nevertheless, Kenney points out: The criterion of age was not alone sufficient. . . . This general truth [older is better] is, however, by no means an iron-clad rule: antiquity is at best only a rough and ready indication of merit in a ms, and might . . . totally mislead the critic. What was needed, once the witnesses to a text had been identified, described and classified according to their age and origin, was a way of judging the authenticity of their testimony. 54

It is at this point that Kenney emphasizes the close relationship between textual criticism and historical criticism, a connection that is of fundamental importance for our study, so I will quote him at length. Kenney continues: Here too by 1800 substantial progress had been made. Techniques were devised of treating textual evidence according to the laws of historical enquiry. The MSS were witnesses of varying degrees of credibility: the problem was to determine which were merely repeating hearsay and which possessed independent authority. When that distinction had been made, the independent witnesses could be compared with each other and their relationships determined. It was a problem, in modern terminology, of sourcecriticism. There is no genuine English word for this operation, merely a translation of the original German term Quellenkritik. 55

Kenney attempts to find the “cradle of this fundamental historical technique” and looks to F. A. Wolf, “who in his Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) enunciated the principles on which recension of a classical text should be based.” These principles in turn were passed on to Immanuel Bekker and August Boeckh, “who proceeded, with varying degrees of completeness and success, to put these principles into practice.” 56 Yet Kenney does not find the inspiration for this development in the historical criticism of texts in “the current advances in the techniques of historical scholarship” and looks for the source in biblical studies, particularly New Testament criticism and the work of Richard Bentley. The inspirtation is found particularly in Bentley’s grand design for a new critical edition of the Greek New Testament, which he thought he could reconstruct “exactly as it was in the best exemplars at the time of the Council of Nice.” 57 Kenney states: “This was the vision which a century and more later was to find new expression in Lachmann’s formulation ‘the establishment of a text according to its tradition is a strictly historical undertaking’. Nowhere is Bentley’s claim to be considered the chief founder . . . of the science of historical criticism more clearly evident than in his abortive design to edit the New Testament.” 58

54. Kenney, The Classical Text, 96–97. 55. Ibid., 97. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 100. 58. Ibid., 100–101.

132

Chapter 4

This view of Bentley’s role in the rise of historical criticism perhaps needs some qualification. It may be argued that Richard Simon already anticipated the interconnection between historical criticism and textual criticism in his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678), although the primary impact of this work in biblical studies did not occur until about a century later. Bentley also had a significant impact on Old Testament studies and in particular on the work of de Wette and his understanding of historical criticism. And as we will show below, there is an important link between Bentley and Wolf that Kenney has not noticed, specifically with Homer and with Wolf’s reconstruction of the historical paradosis of the Iliad and the Odyssey. However, even more important is Wolf’s strong dependence on current Quellenkritik in Old Testament studies and the work of Eichhorn, as Grafton has shown. 59 It seems to me that Simon and Bentley represent two different and contrasting modes of historical criticism in their respective approaches to “source criticism,” the former positive and the latter negative. Historical criticism in Simon’s work was intended to affirm the historical value of the biblical tradition, to discern historical sources behind the biblical texts of the Pentateuch and historical books and to assert, against some of the rationalist criticism of the day, their historical worth and credibility. Bentley’s historical criticism was directed more at the elimination of errors and spurious additions from texts, the exposure of fraudulent documents and forgeries, the recovery of true historical sources and their context, and the exposure of anachronism. As we will see below, Simon’s mode of historical criticism has its primary impact on early “higher criticism” in Old Testament studies (in the work of Eichhorn, for example), whereas Bentley made a deep impression on classical studies (especially in the work of Friedrich Wolf). But early in the nineteenth century, these two modes of historical criticism came into contention with each other, a situation that has largely remained the case up to the present time. 59. This will be taken up in greater detail below, chap. 6.

5

Editing Homer: The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies F. A. Wolf and the Homeric Problem Before treating the long history of the “editor” in biblical scholarship from Simon to contemporary redaction criticism, we will find it helpful to look at the parallel development of the role of the editor in Homeric studies. The role of the editor(s) lies at the heart of the “Homeric Question” 1 in the same way that the redactor is central to the history of Pentateuchal criticism. As we shall see, the two fields of classical and Oriental studies (the study of the Old Testament was often located in the latter) were very closely associated. We begin with Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824), 2 who matriculated as a student of philology at Göttingen in 1777 under the tutelage of the classicist Christian G. Heyne and the biblical scholar J. D. Michaelis. These two were also the teachers of the Old Testament scholar J. G. Eichhorn. It is a notable fact that Eichhorn was always close to Heyne, who helped him get a permanent post at Göttingen in 1788 and whose influence on Eichhorn’s approach to mythology is reflected in the latter’s interpretation of myth in Genesis. Wolf, on the other hand, had a difficult relationship with Heyne from his student days onward and was something of a rival in the matter of Homeric scholarship. Nevertheless, Wolf was quite familiar with Eichhorn’s major work, Einleitung ins Alte Testament, and referred to it for comparative purposes in his own studies. Wolf later held an academic position at Halle (1783–1807), where he took up intensive study of Homer 1. For useful surveys of the “Homeric Question,” see R. C. Jebb, Homer: An Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey (3rd ed.; Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1888), 103–55; J. L. Myres, Homer and His Critics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958); J. A. Davidson, “The Homeric Question,” in A Companion to Homer (ed. A. J. B. Wace and F. H. Stubbings; London: Macmillan, 1962), 234–65. For more general treatments on the history of classical scholarship, see Rudolf Pfeiffer, The History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976); U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, History of Classical Scholarship (trans. A. Harris; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). 2. In addition to the works cited in n. 1, see also the “Introduction” in F. A. Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 1795 (trans. with introduction and notes by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E. G. Zetzel; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 3–35; A. Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 214–43.

- 133 -

134

Chapter 5

that lasted more than 20 years. His study eventually resulted in a fourvolume edition of the Iliad in 1804, but it was his earlier short preliminary study, Prolegomena ad Homerum, of 1795 that was viewed as revolutionary and made his reputation. It should be noted that Wolf’s tenure at Halle overlapped with that of the Old Testament scholar Johann Severin Vater (1799– 1809), who would hardly have been unaffected by the former’s work. Wolf finished his career in Berlin (1807–1824), at an institute established by von Humboldt for humanistic studies and the new science of historical criticism, in which Wolf was viewed as a leading figure and an inspiration to B. G. Niebuhr, the Roman historian who joined the faculty in 1810. Another, younger contemporary who joined the faculty that same year was W. M. L. de Wette, who is likewise considered the pioneer of historical criticism in biblical studies. 3 It is highly likely that de Wette, too, was deeply influenced by both Bentley and Wolf in his formative years as a scholar. The point cannot be made strongly enough, because the very closely relationship between the fields of classical and biblical studies throughout the whole of the nineteenth century is so often ignored. And nowhere was this connection between the two worlds more strongly felt than between the study of Homer and of the Pentateuch. 4 Our primary interest in Wolf is in his most famous work, Prolegomena to Homer, 5 which set much of the agenda for “higher criticism” in humanistic studies in general and classical studies in particular. A number of scholars who had an important influence on Wolf and his conception of this work may be noted at the outset. Perhaps none was more important than Richard Bentley, who served in many respects as his model. Even though Bentley did not produce a published work on Homer, he made a famous remark about the Iliad and the Odyssey that was taken up by many scholars, including Wolf (see p. 127 above for the quotation and its context). 6 This was quoted in a modified form by Wolf 7 and a number of other scholars both before and after him. The point is that a work as great as Homer was to be understood first of all, not on the basis of how it is judged by later ages, but within the context of its own times and setting, and then the subsequent history of the songs in their formation as epic poems. This was the program of historical criticism. The remark also gave rise to the theory of a “Peisistratus recension,” in which the decisive forms of the Homeric tradition did not

3. See below, chap. 6. 4. For some remarks on the close relationship of these two disciplines in American education in the nineteenth century, see C. Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in Amerian Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 85–92. 5. References to this work will be taken from the translation: Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 1795. 6. The citation is taken from Pfeiffer, The History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850, 158. See also the editors’ “Introduction” in Wolf’s Prolegomena to Homer, 10–11. 7. Wolf, Prolegomena, 118 n. 84.

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

135

arise until several centuries after the death of the famous poet. This, as we shall see, becomes the point of departure for Wolf’s own work. Another important influence on Wolf was the work of Robert Wood, who had traveled as a politician in the Ottoman Empire, the Near East, the region of ancient Troy, and elsewhere in Greece, with Homer in his pocket, to produce his famous book, An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, with a Comparative View of the Ancient and Present State of the Troade (1769). It came to the attention of Heyne in Göttingen, who had it translated and thus made it accessible to German readers. Wood’s firsthand observation of the Greek world furthered the Bentley’s program of recovering the ancient context of Homer. He states: “A review of Homer’s scene of action leads naturally to the consideration of the times, when he lived; and the nearer we approach his country and age, the more we find him accurate in his pictures of nature, and that every species of his extensive imitation furnishes the greatest treasure of original truth to be found in any Poet, ancient and modern.” 8 His point is that the landscape that the poet presents is a thoroughly realistic one that gives a true portrait of his own age, whenever that might be, and it is this that can be recovered. Of particular interest for us is his discussion of the way the poems were composed and the issue of the first written texts. Myres summarizes Wood’s discussion thus: He was a good enough observer, though no specialist, to be aware how late and rare were the examples of archaic stages in the Greek alphabet; he knew habitual intercourse between the Greeks and Egypt did not go back beyond the days of the XXVIth Dynasty, that is to say the seventh century b.c.; consequently, before that date, the materials as well as the skill for book production were, at best, very rare. Provisionally he offers his “opinions, as a matter of conjecture, . . . that the art of Writing, though probably known to Greece when the Poet lived . . . was very little practised there; that all knowledge at that time was preserved in memory, and with that view committed to verse, till an alphabet introduced the use of prose in composition.” He quotes ancient authority in support of this opinion and suggests . . . that the first written versions of the poems may have been due to later men, Lycurgus, Solon, Peisistratus or his son Hipparchus; “just as some curious fragments of ancient poetry have been lately collected in the northern parts of this island [i.e., the epic poem Fingal by Ossian], their reduction to order in Greece was a work of taste and judgment: and those great names which we have mentioned might claim the same merit in regard to Homer, that the ingenious Editor of Fingal is entitled to from Ossian.” We remember at this point that Macpherson’s Fingal was published in 1761 and Wood’s Essay in 1769. 9

Here Wood introduces two important themes that were to be taken up and developed by Wolf. The first was the observation that in Homer’s time (for

8. The citation is taken from Myres, Homer and His Critics, 60. 9. Ibid., 65.

136

Chapter 5

Wood this was the eleventh century b.c.) there was insufficient use of the alphabet; Homer’s poetry was composed and recited in an oral tradition for a long time before it was committed to writing. The second suggestion of Wood was that an “ingenious Editor” was responsible for putting the various songs of the great poet together to produce the later epics, based upon the supposed analogy of Ossian’s epic Fingal. Both of these suggestions are taken up and developed at considerable length by Wolf, who refers to “the brilliant audacity of Wood” and notes in particular the observations of this chapter in Wood’s work. 10 Not long after the publication by James Macpherson of Fingal, an ancient Epic in Six Books, together with several other poems composed by Ossian, son of Fingal, translated from the Gaelic language (1761), serious doubt was cast on the authenticity of the work. Macpherson never produced the Gaelic manuscripts from which the supposed translation was made, and the whole matter descended into great controversy. 11 Wolf himself expressed some doubt about the Ossian work and was reluctant to use it for comparative purposes. 12 Nevertheless, the notion that an “ingenious editor” put together the fragments of ancient poetry seems to have been too tempting to resist. 13 The third scholarly work that must be mentioned as an important influence on Wolf is Jean-Baptiste d’Ansse de Villoison’s publication, in 1788, of the scholia or marginal notes of a newly discovered early manuscript of the Iliad from Venice. These scholia contained many references to variant readings of the Alexandrian scholars Zenodotus, Aristophanes, and especially Aristarchus, as well as other pre-Alexandrian “editions” and other classes of texts. Grafton sums up Villoison’s views on the significance of the scholia: The evidence of the scholia seemed to Villoison and others to confirm and enrich the literary critic’s view of Homer. The scholia showed that professional scholars in later periods of antiquity itself had found Homer’s poetry alien and offensive to their canons of taste. And they proved that the ancients had known a far greater number of editions and variant readings of the text than any modern critic had suspected. Both sets of facts seemed to lead naturally to the same conclusion: that Homer had been a primitive oral bard, whose poems would inevitably shock more cultivated readers and undergo hundreds of changes and corruptions as they were preserved and transmitted by memorization. . . . The need to show that Homer’s text had taken form by gradual accretions over centuries, the wish to trace the outlines of his original lays, the hope to find a Homer as pure and bardic as Lowth’s David—these were the factors that made the evaluation and application of Villoison’s new material seem an urgent task. 14

10. See Wolf, Prolegomena, 71. 11. See Myres, Homer, 78–80. 12. Wolf, Prolegomena, 204. 13. See also the remarks of Grafton, Defenders of the Text, 224. 14. From the introduction to Wolf’s Prolegomena, 11–12.; see the additional remarks on Villoison on pp. 7–8, 11–15.

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

137

At the time of the appearance of Villoison’s publication, Wolf was already engaged in his work on an edition of the Iliad, and he saw in these scholia the possibility of constructing a text-history of the Iliad. This led to the interruption of his work on the new text edition of the Iliad and the writng of the Prolegomena, based on his close study of these scholia. Others also had an influence on Wolf, including his former teacher and a leading authority on Homer, C. G. Heyne. The latter probably introduced Wolf to the work of Bentley and Wood and claims to have anticipated, by means of his earlier lectures, much of what Wolf presented in the Prolegomena. 15 Grafton also places particular emphasis on the influence of Eichhorn’s Einleitung on the form and character of Wolf’s presentation. To this subject we will return in the next chapter. At this point, it would be useful for the purpose of this study to review the contents of Wolf’s Prolegomena and highlight some remarks that bear particularly upon our subject. Wolf begins by laying down the principles of textual criticism that he will use to edit the text of Homer, especially the task of recension, which is a careful examination, collation, and evaluation of all the textual witnesses. 16 The textual witnesses, however, raise the problem of how to bridge the gap between the late manuscripts, few of which date before the eleventh or twelfth centuries, and the older texts. 17 This he does by means of the scholia and the quotations in the classical authors. 18 After criticizing previous attempts at restoring Homer, 19 Wolf turns to the recent publication of Villoison’s Venetian scholia. While he recognizes some weaknesses in the amount of information that the scholia actually provide about the editorial process, Wolf states: But even if you find these and worse faults, there remains a great supply of learned, acute, clever annotations, either the result of sensible study or relics of a very ancient time. Hence anyone can see that once this treasury is opened, it brings a greater aid for the accurate interpretation of Homer, both critical and historical, than we have for any of the other poets on whom the same Alexandrians worked. 20

Wolf compares this scholia material to the biblical Masorah: “we too have a sort of Greek Masorah, one far superior to the other in both age and variety of learning, and far better preserved.” 21 He goes on to suggest: “And by comparing both of these farragoes, the Greek and the Hebrew, we will finally be able to gain a more profound knowledge of the beginnings from which the 15. See ibid., 14–15 for a lengthy quotation by Heyne and a reproduction of Heyne’s review of the Prolegomena in the Subsidia of this edition, pp. 235–39. 16. Wolf, Prolegomena, 43–45. 17. The problem is, of course, familiar to Old Testament scholars who deal with the text tradition of the Masoretic Text. On this more below, chap. 8. 18. Wolf, Prolegomena, chap. 2. 19. Ibid., chap. 3. 20. Ibid., 51. 21. Ibid.

138

Chapter 5

emendation of manuscripts and the art of criticism developed.” 22 This comparison between scholia and Masorah is a constant theme throughout his work. After these preliminary remarks, Wolf lays out the plan for a history of the text of the Iliad from the time of the poem’s origins (which he dates about 950 b.c.e.) down to his own time. This is never carried through to completion but basically ends with Aristarchus, with a few final remarks about Crates and the rival school of critics in Pergamum. 23 Wolf illustrates the principles of emendation by comparison of manuscriptS. Even verses that seem perfectly “Homeric” in style are revealed by manuscript evidence to be interpolations. There are other interpolations that are supported by the best witnesses and yet cannot be defended. After illustrating the principles of emendation, Wolf suggests that already in the ancient period the Greeks attempted to deal with the corruptions in the text of Homer. 24 He states: “the very fact that their emendation was begun and practiced by the Greeks at a very early period shows that the ancient Greeks themselves lacked exemplars of adequate purity, from which those who wished could copy new ones. The very first recensions, the products of an art of criticism that was not yet sophisticated, disagreed on many points to an extraordinary extent, and the vulgate form of the text was finally introduced in a more learned phase of Greek history by various grammarians after Aristotle.” 25 By “recensions,” Wolf has in mind all of the texts of Homer that were labeled “editions” (ekdoseis), but, as we have seen earlier, to regard these as edited recensions is highly problematic. Up to this point, Wolf has laid out the direction of his work. He now takes up an extended discussion on the origins of writing, paying tribute to the work of Wood discussed above, the whole point of which is to try to understand the social context and environment in which the songs arose as oral poetry before the time of writing. He is critical of scholars who do not read ancient texts from the perspective of their own historical contexts and states: “For the method of those who read Homer and Callimichus and Virgil and Nonnus and Milton in one and the same spirit, and do not strive to weigh in reading and work out what each author’s age allows, has not yet entirely been done away with.” 26 In the course of this discussion about Homer’s social context, Wolf has a brilliant discussion about the argument from silence, the silence in Homer about anything that has to do with writ-

22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., chap. 7. 24. Ibid., chaps. 8–11. 25. Ibid., 68. 26. Ibid., 72. The editors in note a see this comment as directed against Heyne. It is easy to understand, in this statement, the selection of four major classical poets who are spaced in time from Hellenistic and Roman times to late antiquity. But why throw in Milton? This seems to me to be a clear reference to Bentley’s application of classical historical criticism to an early modern classic, Milton’s Paradise Lost. See the discussion above, pp. 127–129.

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

139

ing. 27 From this complete absence, Wolf argues for the dominant orality of the age in which the poet lived. 28 This leads into his discussion of the nature of oral poetry: “It seems to follow necessarily from what we said above that works which are so large and are drawn out in an unbroken sequence could neither have been conceived mentally nor worked out by any poet without an artificial aid for the memory.” 29 Furthermore, there is no probable social context in which such long performances, which would have necessitated several days’ duration, could have been made. Neither the occasion for performances of this sort nor the willingness of spectators to endure them would lead to the creation of such works. He concludes: “Similarly, if Homer lacked readers, then I certainly do not understand what in the world could have impelled him to plan and think out poems which were so long and were strung together with an unbroken connection of parts.” 30 These two arguments against the oral form of the extant poems— namely, the length and complexity of the poems and the amount of time needed by the poet to recite them—continue to be debated in discussions of the Homeric Question down to the present time and will be taken up again below. For Wolf this meant that Homer’s poems must have originated in a number of shorter independent oral songs. When Wolf analyzes the two poems, he finds that there is no unified theme but a rather complex structure that weaves together a number of different blocks of material that could easily be viewed quite separately. Development of an interconnection between episodes is accomplished with great skill and is the reason for Aristotle’s high praise for the works’ literary qualities, 31 but the collection of this group of poems into a single continuous narrative poem is the result of a literary process quite different from that of the oral songs. Wolf points to other ancient examples, such as the Homeric Cycle, where the poems and episodes are much more mechanically arranged into a series using what is obviously a later but much less skillful construction. He compares these with the structural complexity of the Odyssey to show that the compilers of the Cycle did not have this model when they were put together. “For this Cycle was a collection of many epics, extending from the very creation of the universe through the death of Ulysses, containing practically the whole of legendary history in a continuous and natural sequence. This alone makes clear that the Cycle poets narrated their stories in the same order in which they had happened one after another, not following the design of our Odyssey.” 32 Wolf does not consider it reasonable, if the

27. Wolf, Prolegomena, chaps. 19–20. 28. This is the same kind of argument used later on by biblical critics, especially Wellhausen, for the lateness of the Priestly Code—namely, its complete absence from Judges to Kings. See below, chap. 6. 29. Wolf, Prolegomena, 114. 30. Ibid., 116. 31. Ibid., 122–23. 32. Ibid., 125–26.

140

Chapter 5

poems were composed later than Homer in its present form, that the Cycle poets would not have emulated it. He does not dispute that the structure and composition of the present Homeric poems reflect considerable artistry, but the investigation of this structure or framework must be investigated “on historical and critical grounds.” 33 This leads him to examine reasons for suspecting that the persons who made the framework are different from those who made the poems. The data he points to “are a number of obvious and imperfect joints,” 34 and he proceeds to give examples of these. One of these is the passage Il. 18.356– 68, on which there is a comment in the scholia that Zenodotus considered it an interpolation (Dieskeuaomevnon touÅton to;n tovpon, “this passage revised”). From this Wolf argues: “The chief point that I derive from this is that these verses were added not by an ordinary interpolation, nor by some grammarian or other, but by the first diaskeuaotaÇ [“revisers”] in order to bind together two sections. And I think I can see a number of additions of the same sort in the Odyssey.” 35 I think it is obvious that Wolf gets this designation of diaskeuastai from the scholium on the Iliad just noted, which merely suggested that the Alexandrian scholar Zenodotus had marked the text as an interpolation. Wolf sees it as part of extensive editorial activity, and the result is that the specific Greek term, diaskeuastai (“revisers”) has been associated by scholars from this point onward as a label for the first composers and editors (redactors) of the Homeric epics in the time of Peisistratus. It was by means of these clearly discernible “joints” that the individual poems were put together to form a larger whole. However, there is no evidence that either Zenodotus and the other Alexandrian scholars or the later scholia ever identified interpolations as editorial activity intended to meld independent poems into a single unit. The use of the term diaskeuastes was simply intended to designate a scribe or copyist who made an un-Homeric addition to or otherwise corrupted in the text. Wolf goes on to describe how “this artistic structure was introduced by later ages.” He states: For we find that this was not done suddenly by chance, but that instead the energies of several ages and men were joined together in this activity. . . . Someone might say that nothing could be added to or subtracted from the form as it now is without violating the laws of elegance. I hear this, and in part I see it clearly, and I am grateful to those revisers. But it will surely be clear to everyone that they have applied their own skill in putting together these works, once it has been demonstrated that both poems contain not only certain small portions, as I showed before, but also whole sections which are not by Homer, that is, by the man responsible for the larger part and the order of the earlier books.36 33. Ibid., 127. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 128. 36. Ibid., 131–32.

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

141

Again, it is the “revisers” who skillfully and artistically create both the joints between songs and substantial additions to what appears to be an original Homeric collection of lesser scope. In the category of major supplements are the ending of the Odyssey (beginning at 23.297 to the end), which the Alexandrian scholars regarded as suspect, as well as Iliad 24. Wolf, in fact, suspects the whole of the last six books of the Iliad. While Wolf did not spell out any specific literary theory, it is easy to see that his suggestions could lead to the fragmentary, supplementary, and documentary hypotheses that were to come in the future, with the editor playing a key role in the compositional process. Wolf deals, in chaps. 32–35, with various theories and ancient traditions about the origins of the “fixed order” of the songs, and some of these he quickly discounts as unreliable. However, regarding the traditions about the creation of a Peisistratus recension, he boldly claims: “History speaks. For the voice of all antiquity and . . . the consensus of tradition attest that Pisistratus was the first to set down the poems of Homer in writing and to have put them into the order in which they are now read.” 37 As the editors point out in a footnote, this tradition is no older than Cicero, so it must be viewed with considerable skepticism. Furthermore, Wolf has conflated elements from a number of different sources to construct the version that most suits his purpose. 38 As we will see, the point is very important, because much of Wolf’s text-history depends on it. He discusses the ancient tradition and his own interpretation of it, and he thinks that the evidence of the scholia points to “revisers” as being responsible at this time for combining the various parts of the poems and adding material to fill in the gaps. 39 The term “reviser” is also regularly used of the persons who made additions before the period of the Alexandrian scholars. This leads Wolf to make the distinction between diaskeue, “revision,” for the period prior to the Alexandrians, and diorthosis, “critical edition” or “recension,” as produced by the Alexandrian scholars themselves. The first activity is responsible for creating the interpolations, the second for trying to identify and remove them. Wolf sums up his position: “Therefore it was under the rule of the Pisistratids that Greece first saw the ancient poems of its bards consigned to durable records. A number of nations have experienced such an age, one when letters and a greater civic culture were in their infancy.” 40 One also finds it used as an argument for the rise of written records in the Davidic– Solomonic era and the earliest written formation of the Pentateuchal traditions. Wolf himself even draws a parallel with the Old Testament:

37. Ibid., 137, Wolf’s italics. 38. Ibid., 137 nn. a, b. 39. Ibid., 142–43. 40. Ibid., 145. The editors point out in a footnote (p. 145 note a) that analogies of this sort were common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

142

Chapter 5

Besides these and other peoples we should compare the Hebrews. Widespread literacy and writing of books were, in my view at least, a good bit more recent among them than is generally thought, and hence the corpus of writings, especially the more ancient ones, is less genuine. But experts on Oriental literature will decide about these questions.41

Wolf almost certainly has in mind the Pentateuch and Eichhorn’s defense of Mosaic authorship. Eichhorn dated the rise of Hebrew script to the time of Moses, who was often compared with Homer. Wolf suggests that this date for Hebrew literacy is too early, with the obvious implication that Moses himself is no more the author of the Pentateuch we have than is Homer of the extant Iliad. 42 Up to this point in his Prolegomena, Wolf has set out the first major problem of the Homeric Question, that of the relationship of the oral tradition behind the Homeric poems and the way in which they became part of two large written masterpieces under the name of Homer. He sees this as a long process of transmission and editorial collection and conflation that reached its apex with the “Peisistratus recension.” His concern with the nature of the literary origins of Homer runs directly parallel to the development of the literary criticism of the Pentateuch, both constructing similar fragmentary, supplementary, and documentary hypotheses under the rubric of “higher criticism.” The final “recension” or “redaction” was produced, in both cases, by editors out of prior oral and written materials after a long and complex tradition-history, and this decisive compositional stage is identified with a specific point in history and a specific person, Peisistratus or Ezra, based on a tradition about the authoritative establishment of the Homeric poems or the Law of Moses. From the time of Wolf onward, the two fields of Homeric and Pentateuchal studies become deeply intertwined with each other, and it will be our special concern in a review of Pentateuchal studies to try to assess their connections and influence on the notion of the editor in biblical criticism. Wolf now takes up what he calls “the second period” of his text history, “from the Pisistratids to Zenodotus.” 43 During this period, he sees Homer subjected to philosophical, moral, and hence allegorical interpretation, because the texts were viewed on the one hand as inspired and on the other as the source of instruction of the young. Against such tendencies in interpretation, Wolf sees the development of a more critical method of dealing with the problems in Homer in the fifth and fourth centuries. After citing some discussion of Homer in Plato’s dialogues, he states: “This makes it perfectly clear that the ‘Problems’ or ‘Uncertainties’ and ‘Solutions’ on which the erudite pupils of Alexandria later toiled so greatly had already begun to become standard exercises in the schools of the philosophers and soph41. Ibid., 146. 42. See also the editorial note, ibid. note b. 43. Ibid., chaps. 36–37.

spread is 6 points short

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

143

ists.” 44 To this statement the editors of the Prolegomena attach a note: “Despite his many admonitions against doing so, Wolf here retrojects the terms and conditions of Alexandrian literary life into the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.” 45 This conclusion regarding Wolf’s error has the strong support of Pfeiffer as well. 46 Wolf, however, argues for “the birth of critical study” in the second period, in which he includes the work of “grammarians” who lived before the Alexandrians. 47 He imagines a flourishing book trade in which many copies were available, each not entirely the same, so that, “if some intelligent person, one who was also a poet or at least no stranger to the poetic faculty . . . had compared the best manuscripts which he had heard were preserved anywhere in order to prepare for himself and for his friends a new copy, he would quite often have found it extremely difficult to judge what might really be the genuine reading, and would have had no readier and better aid than his own talent.” 48 What Wolf is proposing is that in the second phase the beginnings of critical editing surfaced, based, however, on the model of new editions that were produced in his own day. The anachronism is obvious. There is no evidence that the collation of texts for the purpose of creating a corrected copy existed before the Alexandrians. Of course, Wolf is quick to defend himself against the charge of anachronism. Thus he continues: At this point we must thoroughly abolish the opinion by which we model the critics of that period to match the modern rules of the art.49 I shall show shortly that not even Aristarchus himself must be judged by this standard. We certainly find that the early progress of the art was aimless and random, whether we consider its subject matter in the ancient variants of the rhapsodes and the manuscripts, or in the innate character of the Greek genius, or in the conditions of the time, or finally the remains of the art themselves. Perhaps many toiled to the limit of their ability to represent Homer with complete accuracy and in his own dress; but they had to toil even harder to make him appear nowhere inconsistent or unworthy of himself, often removing many verses, and elsewhere adding polish where there was none. Just as nowadays an elegant and ingenious man, but an amateur critic, would work on an ancient poetic monument of our language which he might have found in a mutilated form and equipped by many readers with marginal variants—that, I claim, is more or less how those first emenders toiled in correcting and harmonizing their bards. . . . In short, this whole art arose rather from what our fellow countrymen call

44. Ibid., 153. 45. Ibid., 153 note a. 46. See above, chap. 2, where Pfeiffer’s views are reviewed in detail. 47. Wolf, Prolegomena, chap. 38. 48. Ibid., 157. 49. As the editors point out (ibid., 132 note b), Wolf has previously made these same “critics” into critical text-historians.

144

Chapter 5

aesthetic judgment than from critical judgment, or, if I may put it this way, from poetic rather than from diplomatic standards of accuracy. 50

In spite of this qualification, Wolf is comparing the ancient process of producing new versions or editions of texts with a form of unscholarly editing of classical texts in his own day, exactly the kind of early editing that we surveyed in the last chapter. It is from this historical point onward that editors and redactors, who also go by the name of revisers, emenders, critics, or interpolators, play a major part in literary criticism and source analysis, both in classical studies and in biblical criticism. The retrojection of the editing of Wolf’s day into the distant past is based on an argument from analogy, in this case, an analogy that is the equivalent of scholars looking in the mirror, or at less skilled members of their own guild. Not only is there a reading back into an earlier age the accomplishments of the Alexandrian scholars, but comparisons are often drawn between ancient redactors and the editors of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, and others. Once speculation on the origins of the editorial process went back behind the period of the Alexandrian scholars, there was no longer any control over what constituted the expected behavior of such editors; any kind of literary activity that was required by a particular hypothesis of compositional history could be attributed to them. The fact of the matter is that there is no evidence for editorial activity before the Alexandrians, as we have seen above, in our extensive review of Pfeiffer’s definitive study, in chap. 2. The kind of criticism of Homer that is reflected in the sophists and the philosophers has nothing to do with editing or copying texts. Little is known about the book trade in the early period before Hellenistic times, but even in the much better-documented Roman period, copies of texts were not based on “critically edited” recensions. Wolf, in dealing with the “recensions” before Zenodotus, states that “the names of eight divergent texts earlier than Zenodotus, which the Greeks called diorq∫seiÍ, have been transmitted to us.” 51 The diorthosis was a critically emended copy of a text, and a late tradition credited Aristotle with having such a copy; 52 however, this tradition is quite unreliable, and Zenodotus is in fact credited with being the first to make a critical edition, a “recension.” 53 So Wolf’s attribution of multiple recensions to this period is a serious anachronism. These “editions” (ekdoseis), which Wolf regards as edited recensions, are the so-called city “editions,” as well as two associated with the names of Aristotle and Antimachus. As we have seen above, according to Pfeiffer’s meticulous study, none of these can claim to be critical editions (diorthoseis), as Wolf does. 54 The idea that during the period between Peisistratus and Zenodotus there were redactions that were revised by 50. Ibid., 157–58. What Wolf reflects here is the difference between an Alexander Pope and a Bentley in the “battle of the books.” 51. Ibid., 158. 52. See Pfeiffer, The History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginning, 71. 53. Ibid., 94. 54. Wolf, Prolegomena, 161.

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

145

means of interpolations alongside other editions that were the result of critical study has had a great influence on text-critical studies. In Prolegomena, chaps. 41–49, Wolf covers his third period of text-history with a discussion of the textual criticism of the Alexandrians, Zenodotus, Aristophanes, and Aristarchus. We need not deal in detail with his remarks on the first two of these. His primary focus is on Aristarchus, about whom the Venetian scholia provide the most information. Wolf begins with a most important comparison between ancient and modern editing: In this connection one must examine carefully the whole method of ancient criticism, and form a true mental image of it. We have not yet adequately refuted the common error into which everyone easily falls, of thinking that the ancient critics are similar to those of the present day, and in particular that Aristarchus is very like Bentley or Valckenaer or anyone else who improves the ancient texts with equal brilliance.55

Once again, in spite of his protest against anachronism, Wolf is guilty of precisely that, because the notion of editing texts for the purpose of publishing new editions is itself anachronistic for the ancient period. It is precisely the reading back into antiquity of the scholars’ own activity of creating emended editions that is the real problem, not merely the quality of the Alexandrian’s scholarship. Wolf pays particular attention to the best of these scholarly editors, Aristarchus, and his recension. He attempts to give a description of his recension, although he admits that its reconstruction from the limited number of readings in the scholia is not possible. But this does not prevent him from imagining how Aristarchus created his edition. He states: We watch him for the most part choose, from a group of discordant readings, that one which best suits the genius and custom of Homer and is most appropriate to the passage; we see many wise and learned observations on his part; but the one thing that must be asked first, what novelty he brought to the totality of the poems, how conscientiously he dealt with ancient manuscripts, how he used the recensions of Zenodotus, Aristophanes, and the others whom I mentioned above;—these and other things cannot today be inferred by certain or even probable arguments. Indeed, from the time when the Aristarchean reading became the transmitted text (the common, and satisfactory, terms are vulgate reading and vulgate text), which seems to have happened fairly early, new emendations and annotations were composed and attached to it in particular, with the omission, in general, of those responsible for the readings, except perhaps when they disagree among themselves. This custom was preserved by the grammarians above all, from the time when, as a result of the criticism and observations of Crates and other opponents of Aristarchus, many readings, either new or resurrected from older texts, were imported into the then vulgate text; until, in the third or fourth century, that recension emerged from the 55. Ibid., 190. See his remarks quoted above, pp. 143–144.

146

Chapter 5

same sources, by a renewed examination, which, as it is alike in all surviving manuscripts in the most important matters, and derived from a single copy, we consider as the vulgate today. 56

This is a very fanciful and misleading description of the ancient editorial process. It suggests that Aristarchus created an eclectic text, choosing from all of the variant readings of the available recensions and that this Aristarchan text became the “vulgate text.” However, for some centuries after this, some readings that had been deleted by Aristarchus were restored, and others quite new were added, and thus the editorial process of creating a new recension was required, which became the present “vulgate.” Wolf admits that he cannot identify these later editors whose names were omitted from the record. The whole scheme fits the pattern of a modern scholar, such as Wolf himself, constructing an eclectic text, but the pattern is extremely unlikely for the ancient period. It is more likely that Aristarchus worked on the basis of selecting one specific, medium-length text (the precise reasons for the selection can no longer be recovered) and marking with obeli the parts that he regarded as interpolations. Apart from minor correction of scribal and grammatical errors, there is no reason to believe that his text without the marginal sigla was substantially different from the text that he inherited. Wolf admits that the scholia do not allow us to see how he treated the previous “editions” of Zenodotus and Aristophanes and the other variant texts. Furthermore, there is no justification for considering his work as having established the “vulgate text,” even for a short period of time. Wolf gets around the fact that the vulgate of today, which corresponds with the vulgate of the Roman period, does not match Aristarchus’s text by suggesting that no sooner did it become the vulgate than it was corrupted by lesser grammarians, and a new recension was created in the third or fourth century that became the current vulgate. This kind of special pleading brings the whole scheme into question. 57 Furthermore, the scheme of introducing still additional changes into the “vulgate text” after Aristarchus allows him to account for the fact that not all of Aristarchus’s readings match our expectations of one who is supposed to be the best of the ancient critical scholars. Regarding these later additions and corruptions, Wolf states: If this is the case, we will have to be wary of rashly ascribing many mediocre readings which are reported as from the text of Aristarchus, to the warped cleverness of the emender. And perhaps we should have the same opinion about all the inept readings of his, most of which were rejected long ago, and which I at least would rather assign to Zenodotus or one of the earlier editors than to Aristarchus. 58

56. Ibid., 196–97 (Wolf’s italics). 57. See Wilamowitz-Moellendorff below, pp. 163–166. 58. Wolf, Prolegomena, 197.

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

147

Having thus created the role of Aristarchus as a critical editor making the standard edition of a text, Wolf goes to considerable lengths to preserve this image and to dispute a large number of readings in the scholia that are attributed to Aristarchus, because they are “mediocre” or problematic. Aristarchus the editor serves entirely at the convenience of Wolf’s text-historical reconstruction. As we shall see below, the discovery of papyri in Egypt a century later clearly showed that the vulgate of today was established already in the period shortly after the Alexandrians in the second or first century b.c.e., not in the third or fourth century c.e.—a chronology that also creates grave problems for Wolf’s scheme. Regarding the achievement of Aristarchus’s recension, Wolf states: Thus we can see how dubious was the state of affairs at the time when Aristarchus placed the finishing touches on his Homer. Indeed, we can easily believe the commentators and Homeric grammarians that this critic at length completed this polished and elegant redaction of Homer, in which the middle does not differ from the beginning, nor the end from the middle, and that it was perhaps he too who divided the two works into their present books. And therefore, if we are considering the general appearance and manner of the poems, there is no doubt that Giphanius [in his 1572 edition of Homer] rightly conjectured that our vulgate recension is the very one of Aristarchus. 59

The viewpoint expressed in this quotation is that it is Aristarchus who stood at the end of the redactional process that produced the finest unified version of Homer that has been so admired by scholars of all subsequent ages and that is therefore the true object of textual criticism. Thus, Aristarchus corresponds, in biblical studies, to the “final editor” of the “canonical text” of the Pentateuch, the Masoretic Text. To be sure, there were still additions made to Aristarchus’s text, some restorations of lines that had been athetized by Aristarchus, but it is still the Homer at the end of the process that reached its highest point with Aristarchus that should be the object of the critic. The whole course of historical criticism has reached this conclusion: “the voices of all periods joined together bear witness, and history speaks.” 60 After making this strong statement against the unity of Homer, in the very next chapter, Wolf seems to contradict himself in a great rhetorical flourish: But the bard himself seems to contradict history, and the sense of the reader bears witness against it. Nor indeed are the poems so deformed and reshaped that they seem excessively unlike their own original form in individual details. Indeed, almost everything in them seems to affirm the same mind, the same customs, the same manner of thinking and speaking. Everyone who reads carefully and sensitively feels this sharply. . . . Does it matter if we owe the restoration of that miraculous harmony above all to the exquisite talent and learning of Aristarchus? 61 59. Ibid., 205; Wolf’s italics. 60. Ibid., 209. 61. Ibid., 210.

148

Chapter 5

Grafton points out the contradiction and suggests that it remained a conundrum, a way of satisfying everyone. 62 But I think that the ploy was quite deliberate, to state in the strongest way the argument for unity and then to undercut it by suggesting that Aristophanes and Aristarchus, “by gathering all the remains of antiquity, became connoisseurs of the language appropriate to each age and of the legitimate forms of primitive language, that those same men expelled from the Homeric family as illegitimate the Hymns and the other books that were once hawked in great numbers under the name of Homer.” 63 The resemblance between the scholarship of these editors and Wolf himself is obvious. They recovered the ancient text by not adding anything of their own and by admitting only “what was of Homeric, or at least archaic, coinage.” 64 However, this explanation does not account for all the additions and interpolations that created the framework for the poems, additions that were non-Homeric and that they did not remove. And it still leaves open the question of how the texts of the Alexandrians were related to the vulgate, which becomes a major issue in subsequent discussion. It is indeed quite remarkable that Wolf wants to engage, on the one hand, in the most rigorous historical criticism of the text-history and, on the other hand, reserve a place for a holistic approach to the “canonical text” of Aristarchus, however difficult that may be to reconstruct; in this, he anticipates the debate of scholarly interpretation two centuries later. Wolf’s attempt to reconcile these two opposing perspectives—an appreciation of the greatness and beauty of Homer and a rigorous historical-critical evaluation of the text—reflects very clearly the eighteenth-century struggle between the two opposing camps in the “battle of the books,” as discussed above. The immediate impact of Wolf’s work may be seen in Heyne’s review of Wolf’s book, in which he expresses his own view of the compositional process. 65 Heyne states: To the author [Wolf], the expression of this consideration seems new and daring; he demonstrates the improbability that Homer might already have composed a unified epic . . . in a long-winded, but learned and acute manner. To the reviewer [Heyne] the matter seemed quite simple, and he always so presented it in lectures. Historical evidence for Yes or No is lacking; hence historical probability must decide. . . . What is more, all the ancient legends tend in the same direction: that in the beginning only individual rhapsodies were sung; this corresponds precisely with what we know about the ancient songs of the bards, even from Homer; everywhere it is only individual heroes, actions, and events which are the subject of a song. The natural course of events and of the human spirit gives just about the same result as well; and the Cyclic poets, and in more recent times the poems of 62. Ibid., “Introduction,” 34. 63. Ibid., 210. 64. Ibid., 211. 65. This is given in translation in this recent edition of Wolf, Prolegomena, 235–39.

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

149

Ossian, illustrate how such individual songs can be combined later into a whole, more or less artistically and with genius.66

Here it is important to note that Heyne had already adopted a position that was akin to that of Bentley and Wood but modified in some important respects—that is, individual poems created by bards were sung orally level before any were collected and committed to writing. The latter step seems to be more complicated for Heyne than it does for Wolf. This fact is important, because Heyne was a teacher of Eichhorn and influenced his views on the Pentateuch. At the very least, we can suggest that Heyne held a kind of fragmentary hypothesis of the composition of Homer and that an oral stage made up of small units of tradition preceded the literary stage of larger written compositions. There is very clear continuity between this position and that of K. Lachmann, with his notion of 18 individual songs behind the Iliad and his comparative use of the Nibelungenlied. 67 Heyne also seems to agree that the present Homeric text is based on Aristarchus and therefore identical with the text that Wolf attempts to reconstruct, but Heyne believes that one can discern mistakes in Aristarchus, so that one must go even further back than this. 68 Throughout his review, Heyne seems to express a basic agreement with Wolf and even suggests that in his lectures he had earlier expressed these views; they were not entirely original. In a long letter from Wolf to Heyne ( Jan. 9, 1796), 69 Wolf rather severely criticizes Heyne for his inconsistency in the treatment of Homer’s poems as a unity, when he also admits in his review that they were a collection of individual songs. Wolf states: Instead, you provide us with introductory observations concerning the whole of Homer’s epic poems, dealing with great action, great designs, great passions, great dangers, great obstacles, great sentiments, about astonishments and admiration, knots and illusion and beginning and middle and end of the epic poem. . . . In short: we have never read a syllable of yours in writing or heard one of your lectures about how the rhapsodies and so-called poems might have looked before Pisistratus. 70

Wolf further criticizes Heyne’s notion of the “high epic poet Homer” 71 and indicates that he clearly had Heyne in mind in his remarks in chap. 27, but the same could be said for Wolf’s own opening remarks in chap. 50. It is

66. Ibid., 238. 67. Heyne did fault Wolf for not making adequate use of Bentley’s digamma discovery and its implication for the history of the text. Because the Alexandrian scholars also did not recognize the digamma, they made numerous (erroneous) “corrections” in the koine text to compensate for this loss. 68. Ibid., 239. 69. Ibid., 241–47. 70. Ibid., 243; Wolf’s italics represent quotations from Heyne. 71. Ibid., 244.

150

Chapter 5

one thing to concede, as Heyne does, that the poems originally consisted of many individual songs; it is quite another simply to treat them as a unity with no recognition of how they came to have this sense of coherence. This is the “Homeric Question” that has bedeviled Homeric studies ever since Wolf. In summing up, it seems to me that Wolf has trapped himself in a dilemma in which he must assume that a collection of oral poets and their individual songs was made by Peisistratus, who then had them committed to writing and at the same time had an editorial board of scholars put them together, using joints and other devices. Because they interpolated poetic lines into the text in imitation of the older poems, they were diaskeuastai, “revisers,” and the complete recension was a diaskeue, “revision.” A process of further revision and refinement, to give greater cohesion and coherence (among other things), went on until the time of the Alexandrians, whose chief task was to remove as much of the subsequent revised and interpolated material as possible, without adding anything of their own. In this, they were the first true “editors,” diorthoteis. But the logic of this whole reconstruction would be to suggest that, in the degree to which the “editors” were successful, they would be undoing the work of the earlier “revisers” (redactors) and thereby reducing the poems to their original fragments. The texts that Wolf himself identifies as “joints,” some athetized by Aristarchus, would render the poems into their earlier pieces. Perhaps Wolf thought Aristarchus to have stopped short by reaching back only to the first great recension of Peisistratus in the archaic period. Yet, it is far from clear that this is his intention. And his understanding of both a “Peisitratus recension” and the “editions” of the Alexandrians have come in for severe criticism, which will be taken up below. Before treating the subsequent history of Homeric studies as it relates to the editorial history of the poems, let me make a brief observation that should be altogether obvious by this time: the broad scheme of Wolf’s textual tradition-history of Homer, which is at the same time its editorial history (Redaktionsgeschichte), corresponds remarkably closely to the subsequent development of “higher and lower criticism” of the Pentateuch. The history begins with the preliterary period of oral tradition, in which the stories or songs are first composed as small individual units, which are then combined into larger blocks and then collected and joined into complex compositions in written form. Subsequent to this is a period of further revisions, whether conflation of parallel versions or supplementation of additional episodes or traditions and a final edition that becomes the vulgate or “canonical” edition. In this process, the one who is responsible for the growth of the literary tradition through revision, supplementation, or conflation is the editor, who is given much greater latitude in his activity than is ordinarily accorded such figures in the modern world of scholarly publication. In both classical and biblical studies, there are any number of variations within the broad parameters of this scheme, but it is this common approach to the evolution of the texts attributed to Homer, on the one hand, and to the books of Moses, on

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

151

the other, that becomes the basis of “historical criticism.” And within this scheme, the editor plays a most important, perhaps even the most important, role in the formation of the final product. In subsequent chapters, I will deal with the history of the editor or redactor in biblical criticism. In the rest of this chapter, however, I want to trace briefly the fate of Wolf’s editors within classical studies.

The Editor in Homer after Wolf My purpose in this section is not to review the whole development of Homeric studies but to give a representative sample of opinion regarding the role of the editor in the formation of the poems, the transmission and revision of the tradition, and the final standardization of the text of Homer. A younger contemporary of Wolf, Gottfried Hermann (1772–1848), received his Gymnasium training at Schulpforta under the headmaster K. D. Ilgen 72 and later was a student of Heyne at Göttingen. Through Heyne, he also was greatly beholden to Bentley, whose scholarship he emulated in his attempt to master completely the language, grammar, and style of Homer as the basis for his criticism. 73 In comparison with Wolf, Hermann was more conservative and, while he still recognized many interpolations in the text, he nevertheless regarded both the Iliad and the Odyssey as the work of the same author. 74 Furthermore, Hermann was perhaps the first to stress the 72. Ilgen, who was earlier a professor of both classics and Old Testament at Jena before going to Schulpforta as its headmaster, is best known in biblical studies for his documentary hypothesis of the Pentateuch. More on Ilgen below, chap. 6. 73. See Myres, Homer, 89–90; Pfeiffer, The History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850, 178–79; J. Latacz, “Tradition und Neuerung in der Homerforschung,” in Homer: Tradition und Neuerung (ed. J. Latacz; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979), 33–36. 74. The impact of Wolf’s new historical criticism on Hermann may, nevertheless, be seen in his lectures on Pindar early in his career. In notes on Hermann’s lectures taken by Leopold von Ranke when he was a student, we find the statement: “Pindar’s writings were edited in antiquity by Aristarchus and the other grammarians of the Alexandrian school. They set out both to explain them and to correct them so that they fitted the grammatical and ethical standards which these gentlemen had made up for themselves. How they did this, we simply do not know, since a great portion of their commentaries has been lost. Hence we must not think that the text of these poems that we now have before us is what Pindar produced, but rather one into which the grammarians’ corrections have been interpolated. We must, therefore, reconstruct the genuine texts and remove these inventions of the grammarians” (quoted and translated in A. Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997], 89–90). Here the Alexandrian grammarians, who are also viewed as editors, do not merely restore the text but actively intervene to revise and modify it. For the current assessment of the Alexandrians’ treatment of Pindar, which hardly supports Hermann, see Rudolf Pfeiffer, The History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginning to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 183–89, 221–22. One may also compare this view of editorial corruption of the text with a more recent perspective in William H. Race, Pindar (Boston: Twayne, 1986). In Race’s discussion on the “history of the text” (pp. 8–11), he gives no hint of any such difficulty with the history of the text. He states:

152

Chapter 5

fact that the Homeric poems represent oral composition and that many of their artistic qualities must be attributed to improvisation. He specifically attributes many, although not all, of the repetitions found in the poems to the technique of oral composition, repetitions that would have been eliminated in a written work. 75 In this he anticipated the work of Milman Parry much later. 76 Nevertheless, he did allow for the possibility that some repetitions were the result of conflation of separate poems as supplements to the main work, the Wrath of Achilles, and in this respect he suggested that the work of a final redactor was involved. According to A. Heubeck, a contemporary of Hermann named K. L. Kayser, in some articles on the Odyssey “expressed his conviction that in the poem as we have it a series of ‘layers’ can be isolated, and that these layers must be attributed to several successive poets. In his work we also find for the first time the notion of a ‘redactor’ who eventually combined these hypothetical thematically related poems into a single unit, the Odyssey as we know it.” 77 It is, I believe, quite significant that a little later both Ewald and Hupfeld developed very similar models for their literary analyses of the Pentateuch, in which successive layers belonging to different authors are combined by a final redactor. And it is precisely at this time that the notion of “redactor” begins to proliferate in biblical studies. Furthermore, in the case of the Iliad, various literary theories were proposed to explain the nature of its composition, whereas with the Odyssey a model that relied on source division and final redaction continued to dominate literary analysis into the future. Heubeck expresses it thus: In the chequered history of research on the Iliad the most diverse analytical solutions have been proposed, amongst which the so-called ‘redactor hypothesis’ is only one of many. In contrast, where the Odyssey is concerned, the concept of a final editor has predominated. Most scholars who were convinced by Kayser’s pioneering work that the Odyssey must be explained analytically have argued in favour of this concept, whatever their differences in reconstructing the older poems and their sequence, and have thus understood the Odyssey as a consciously assembled unit. Where “the text of the epinicians [Victory Songs] is remarkably sound. . . . Thanks to the labors of ancient, Renaissance, and modern editors, there is a general agreement on most of the readings, and there are only a couple dozen or so small places where a word or at most a sentence is in real doubt. . . . There are no gaps or lacunae in the text, and with only one questionable case, the integrity of each poem is guaranteed.” 75. G. Hermann, “Über die Wiederholungen bei Homer” [1840], in Homer: Tradition und Neuerung (trans. and ed. J. Latacz; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979), 47–59. 76. This point is strongly emphasized by J. Latacz, “Einführung,” in Homer: Tradition und Neuerung (ed. J. Latacz; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979), 1–5. 77. A. Heubeck, “General Introduction,” in A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, vol. 1: Introduction and Books I–VIII (ed. A. Heubeck, S. West, and J. B. Hainsworth; Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 5.

spread is 12 points short

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

153

there are differences of opinion they occur mainly in the evaluation of this editor’s poetic talent and extend over the whole range of possibilities: at the one end of the scale he is seen as an incapable, uncritical bungler, at the other as a sensitive master of his art with great poetic gift.78

From this description of the ongoing history of research on the Odyssey, it appears that this Homeric poem had the most influence in shaping the model for the Documentary Hypothesis in Pentateuchal studies, and as we shall see below, two scholars who did special studies on the Odyssey, U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and E. Schwartz, had a particularly close association with Wellhausen. A notable student of Hermann was Karl Lachmann (1793–1851), who made famous the method of textual criticism of recensio and emendatio that still bears his name. Through application of his method to the New Testament, he was able to discredit the Textus Receptus of Erasmus. 79 His editing of Latin texts and his textual methodology also identified him as an heir of Bentley. But our interest in him is his work on Homer, 80 in which he rejected the unity of the Iliad as the work of one poet and took up the position of Wolf regarding the original plurality of separate poems. 81 As a young scholar and in keeping with the interests of the times in folk traditions, he proposed the notion that the German epic, the Nibelungenlied, was originally made up of many individual songs. Several years later he applied the same method to the Iliad, showing that it too consisted of 18 separate poems. This resulted in a fragmentary hypothesis, much like the hypothesis of 17 documents in Genesis proposed by Ilgen and the subsequent fragmentary hypothesis of the Pentateuch of Vater. 82 It should be pointed out that Lachmann’s cultural analogy with the Nibelungenlied and much of Wolf’s and Heyne’s use of the Ossian epic were all based on quite erroneous assumptions about the compositional processes that gave rise to these works. 83 Various forms of this kind of social analogy affected both the Homeric Question and Pentateuchal studies for many years. Of course, Lachmann’s theory of poetic fragments also required the notion of a recension by Peisistratus, the first collector and editor to bring them all together. Lachmann’s fragmentary hypothesis, that there were small pre-Homeric units, did not survive long, and its failure had the effect of deflecting much attention away from the early oral stages of the Homeric tradition. 78. Ibid. 79. Pfeiffer, The History of Classical Scholarship from 1300–1850, 190; Metzger, Text of the New Testament, 124–26. 80. Karl Lachmann, Betrachungen über Homers Ilias (1837–41; 2nd ed., Berlin: Reimer, 1865). 81. Myres, Homer, 90–91. 82. On Ilgen and Vater, see below, chap. 6. 83. For a critique of Lachmann’s view on the Nibelungenlied, see Jebb, Homer, 133–34.

154

Chapter 5

The reaction of historians to Wolf’s historical criticism of Homer may be seen in the work of two historians of the early nineteenth century, B. G. Niebuhr and George Grote. Niebuhr (1776–1831), a Roman historian, saw in Wolf’s Prolegomena “those wonderworthy investigations in which the higher branch of criticism reacht its perfection,” 84 and the need to apply the same methods to Livy and the early traditions of Roman origins. 85 Our primary concern, however, is with Grote (1784–1871), whose massive, 12volume work, A History of Greece (1846–56), dealt in the opening volumes more directly with Wolf’s historical criticism of Homer. 86 Grote’s work is heavily indebted to Hermann’s theories. Grote criticizes Wolf’s Prolegomena on a number of points. He disputes, first of all, that the unity of the poems is connected with their transmission in written form. Writing arose long after the Homeric age, and so, like Hermann, he believes that the first stage of transmission must have been oral poems recited by bards or rhapsodes. 87 There is, likewise, a long discussion of Wolf’s thesis that the poems were put together for the first time in the age of Peisistratus. Grote presents a series of arguments against this proposal and shows that the Iliad must have been already a unity in its present form by the age of Peisistratus. 88 Finally, Grote considers the primary question: Are the poems by one author or several and are they are of one date and scheme? 89 He argues that Wolf and Lachmann have begun their investigation of unity with the wrong poem. It is the Odyssey that shows a clearer structure and unity, and it to try to break it up does not work. Thus, the techniques used to unify the Odyssey make the nature of the Iliad clear, and it is possible to isolate a primary Achilleis epic organized around the theme of the wrath of Achilles, to which a broader set of episodes focused on the larger context of the Trojan War, the Iliad, has been added. The primitive Achilleis includes books 1, 8, and 11–22. The 9th book is viewed as an unsuitable later addition. Grote considers books 23–24 as probably not part of the original epic. He likewise discusses books 2–7 and 10 as a major addition. The author of the Odyssey is different from the Iliad but from the same time period. All of this points to a supplementary hypothesis, in contrast with Lachmann’s fragmentary hypothesis, and there is no need for Peisistratid redactors in the whole process. It was much more

84. Quoted from the “Introduction” to Wolf, Prolegomena, 28. 85. Pfeiffer, The History of Classical Scholarship from 1300–1850, 183–84; N. Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 61–70. 86. George Grote, A History of Greece (12 vols.; London: Dent, 1846–56), 2:231–312; see also Myres, Homer, 91–92; E. R. Dodds, “Homer,” in Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship (ed. M. Platnauer; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1954), 2; F. M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 142–44. As Turner makes clear throughout his book, Grote was perhaps the most influential and controversial classical scholar in Britain in the nineteenth century. See especially Turner, The Greek Heritage, 83– 101, 213–34. 87. Grote, History of Greece, 2:253–55. 88. Ibid., 2:261–69. 89. Ibid., 2:270–312.

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

155

a case of “the gradual accretion of episodes” 90 by successive poets and rhapsodes instead of bookish editors. 91 While Grote’s views on Homer, in modified form, became in time the orthodox opinion in Britain, they also stirred up considerable controversy and were often lumped together with Wolf as undermining the unity and authorship of Homer. 92 One of the major concerns about Grote’s views was that accepting a critical approach of this sort to Homer would encourage the application of the same critical methods to the Bible. The reason for the strong feelings on this issue was that Homer was viewed as a kind of “secular Bible,” so the comparison between Homer and the Bible was a very natural impulse within the academic world. 93 Therefore, historical criticism of classical texts was understood as a threat to conservative understanding of the Bible as well. Furthermore, it was in the nineteenth century that the Greek classics and culture came into their own as the secular “canon,” not only for academic scholarship but as the model and standard for literature, the arts, ethics and education, and politics: views about Homer and the classics cut right across the social fabric of British and European society. One of the most bitter opponents of Grote’s understanding of Homer was the politician William Gladstone, who wrote his own reply to Grote in Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (1858), which was at the same time a defense of his conservative British politics. 94 While this Greek canon, of which Homer was the supreme example, did not entirely supplant the Latin canon so dominant in the “Augustan age” of the eighteenth century, for Gladstone and others of the political and academic elite, “Virgil was at best a poet of talent rather than original genius, limited, literary and derivative, a pale shadow of Homer.” 95 In Germany, a student of Lachmann, A. Kirchhoff (1826–1908), took up the task of analyzing the Odyssey, 96 as Grote had the Iliad. Kirchhoff developed the supplementary theory into a more complex source analysis and “redactor hypothesis” along the lines suggested by Kayser. 97 According to Myres’s summary: “He distinguished three stages in the [Odyssey’s] creation, independent poems on the Wanderings and on the Revenge, brought together by a later poet who added the Telemachy. He dated the final stage to about 600 b.c.” 98 Kirchhoff also introduces into the final stage the notion of a reviser (Bearbeiter), who is viewed as the equivalent of Kayser’s redactor. So the 90. Myres, Homer, 92. 91. Dodds (“Homer,” 2) lists the names of several scholars in the next “two generations” who followed Grote’s lead. See also Turner (Greek Heritage, 144), who lists R. C. Jebb and Walter Leaf as followers of Grote. 92. Turner, Greek Heritage, 144–50. 93. Ibid., 154–70. 94. Ibid., 234–44. 95. Vance, The Victorians, 134. 96. A. Kirchhoff, Die Homerische Odyssee (1859; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1973); idem, Die Composition der Odyssee (1869). 97. See Heubeck, in Homer’s Odyssey, 5. 98. Myres, Homer, 93.

156

Chapter 5

term redactor could apply to both a reviser and an interpolator. Furthermore, the new focus of attention was on the Odyssey, which received much greater treatment in the period that followed. This source approach was further developed by his brilliant student Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff in his Homerische Untersuchungen (1884), 99 in which he deals with the composition of the Odyssey and with the history and transmission of the epic. In Wilamowitz’s view, a poet ca. 650 b.c., whom he characterizes simply as a “reviser” (Bearbeiter), put together three poems: an “elder Odyssey” consisting of the hero’s wanderings and homecoming, the Telemachy, and the victory over the suitors, all combined with some additions to produce the later Odyssey. At an earlier stage, the “elder Odyssey” had itself been the work of a redactor, who had combined three earlier poems. The resemblance of this theory to the Pentateuchal Documentary Hypothesis is obvious. Wilamowitz uses terms like Redaktor and Bearbeiter throughout his analysis, and his work largely set the stage for later work in Germany. 100 A new direction within the scholarly tradition of Kirchhoff and Wilamowitz was suggested in a series of studies by Dietrich Mülder from 1903 to 1910, in which he questioned the method of trying first to identify the smaller units of the poems of Homer, and thus he gave primacy to the analysis of the final form of the poem. Concerning his study on the Odyssey, Myres writes that, while he still recognized expansion and reworking of the earlier composition, he was already insisting, as a matter of critical method, that we must begin with the poems as we have them, not from a more or less problematical archetype; that we must ascertain in the first instance the method, the intention, and the literary and creative qualities of the poet who made the Odyssey what it is; and that only when we have defined and isolated this poet’s work, is it permissible to apply the same strictly literary criticism to the sources which we can discover him to have used.101

Thus, in an analysis of the Cyclops episode in the Odyssey, one may certainly discern elements of folktale, but they have been combined with the poet’s own ingenious treatment of them and “so intricately interwoven into the narrative that ‘patchwork’, ‘expansion’, or any kind of editorial manipulation of archetypal versions is out of the question. The whole story has been retold by a great narrative poet in his own way and in his own words.” 102 Mülder’s examination of the Iliad along the same lines led to 99. As Myres points out (Homer, 154), Wilamowitz’s book “was dedicated, appropriately and significantly, to Wellhausen, a leading figure in the ‘higher criticism’ of the Hebrew Scriptures which had owed so much in its inception to the Homeric Prolegomena of Wolf.” See also Turner, Greek Heritage, 150. Turner gives the following translation of some remarks from Wilamowitz’s dedication: “Moreover, the Bible and Homer must be understood and analyzed first of all in terms of themselves, and even the nature of their transmissions, the history of the texts, demands the use of parallel analysis.” 100. See also the remarks by Davidson, “Homeric Question,” 252; Heubeck, Homer’s Odyssey, 5–6. 101. Myres, Homer, 210; Davidson, “Homeric Question,” 254–58. 102. Myres, Homer, 211.

spread is 6 points long

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

157

even greater emphasis on the composer as poet rather than editor. This led him to the view that “every poet, it is contended [by Mülder], is an ‘overworker’ and ‘expander’ in the sense that he will not and cannot leave his materials as he finds them; but what he composes is his own work, behind which it is only possible to detect themes and episodes, and vain to search for ‘lays’ and a ‘kernel’ with recognizable literary features.” 103 Mülder’s new approach gave quite a new impetus to the view that the great genius of “Homer” was not to be seen in the earlier songs, as Wolf had suggested, but in the poet who put all the inherited materials together in such a skillful way. 104 The impact of this approach can be seen in the work of Wilamowitz in his book Die Ilias und Homer (1916), written 32 years after the first work. The new emphasis on design and structural plot development made Wilamowitz even more critical than earlier of the value of the quest for individual units of epic tradition as reflected in the work of Wolf and Lachmann, which “crumbles” the poems into pieces by neglecting the integrating patterns. 105 Myres states: This design, for him as for Mülder, can be recovered only by a new kind of analysis, which must begin with the latest additions and not attempt to dissect out an original core or kernel; and he submitted the results of his own analysis, of which it is sufficient to say that there is lacking any demonstration that the whole process was not rapid enough to have been comprised within the working life of a single composer. Within the Iliad as we have it, the ultimate units now recognizable by analysis are not originally separate lays, such as Lachmann supposed, but cantos of a ‘sequel of Songs and Rhapsodies’, to revive Bentley’s phrase, presupposing, both in the poets and in their audiences, acquaintance with a great repertoire of such narratives; and the Iliad was not the first nor the only attempt to present coherently larger masses of such material.106

The particular poet or poets of these two poems came at the high point of the development of “epic technique” and “at the climax of this school of literary art.” One aspect of this epic technique was the development of hexameter as the medium of recitation, and the creator, or at least perfecter, of this “new hexametric vehicle” was the “personal Homer.” This theory requires a fundamental shift in the analytic method, as E. R. Dodds points out: The nucleus-theory, in its traditional form, places its ‘Homer’ at the beginning of the long poetic development which produced our Iliad. To this it has been objected (a) that the language and style of the Iliad, even in its 103. Ibid., 212. 104. Mülder’s new methodological approach anticipates to a remarkable extent von Rad’s treatment of the Yahwist in the Pentateuch in reaction to the form-critical analysis of Gunkel. See below, chap. 7. 105. For a similar contemporary critique of the use of medieval epics and more modern collections of folk literature, such as the Kalewala of Finland, see Jebb, Homer, 131–35. 106. Myres, Homer, 214.

158

Chapter 5

‘oldest’ parts, is far from being ‘primitive’, but has a technical perfection which presupposes a long tradition of epic poetry; (b) that the matter of many parts of the Iliad seems to be saga-stuff, which presumably was current long before the tale of the Wrath was invented. To meet these and other difficulties, Wilamowitz devised a novel view. . . . Wilamowitz’s Homer comes in the middle of the development: living at Chios in the eighth century, he took over, combined, and in some cases remodelled, the work of various pre-Homeric poets; his own work was in turn enlarged, and in places remodelled, by a succession of post-Homeric poets.107

The result was an original Iliad that consisted of about three-quarters of the current text, and while there was still no agreement on Wilamowitz’s particular limits, there was widespread acceptance of the fact that “Homer” used many pre-Homeric oral traditions, on the one hand, and that to Homer’s poems later additions and interpolations were made, on the other hand. Nevertheless, even in his latest work, Wilamowitz is still inclined to speak of the final composition as the work of a letzten Bearbeiter, or final redactor. 108 At this point the historical criticism that began with Wolf and had placed so much weight upon the “editor” as the one responsible for the final form of the text has now come round to the poet and, hence, the author, as the one ultimately to be credited for its beauty and excellence. This is not just a capitulation to the “unitarians,” who had insisted all along that Homer was the sole author of both poems and virtually all that they contained and condemned “higher criticism” as sacrilege. 109 Nevertheless, the rejection of the Peisistratus recension as unhistorical and a new appreciation for the artistic design and structure of the poems meant the eventual demise of the Wolf hypothesis and its replacement with other ways of accounting for the Homeric problem. Yet, it would be wrong to suggest that the older Wolf hypothesis had no further influence or did not give rise to further efforts to make it work. One notable example was the effort of a student and junior colleague of Wilamowitz, namely, E. Schwartz, in his book Die Odyssee (1928). 110 Schwartz’s primary innovation in this work is to apply a source analysis in which the sources are not separate poems, as is the case in the work of earlier scholars, but parallel sources that have been interwoven in a final redaction. This formulation certainly seems to reflect the influence of 107. Dodds, “Homer,” 4–5. 108. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Die Heimkehr des Odysseus. 109. On the “unitarians” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Dodds, “Homer,” 8–13. Concerning the early unitarians, Dodds writes: ‘The ‘naive unitarians’ . . . held a fundamentalist faith in the integrity of the Homeric Scriptures; their religion forbade them to make any concession whatever to the infidel, although it compelled them at times to fall back on arguments as unconvincing as the worst efforts of the analysts” (p. 11). 110. See the review by Rudolf Pfeiffer, “Rezension von E. Schwartz, Die Odyssee, und U. v. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Die Heimkehr des Odysseus” (1928), in Ausgewählte Schriften: Aufsätze und Vorträge zur griechischen Dichtung und zum Humanismus (Munich: Beck, 1960), 8–25.

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

159

Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis. Wellhausen was a scholar who was very close to Schwartz and whom the later greatly admired. 111 Another attempt to deal with the Homeric Problem by means of historical criticism was Gilbert Murray’s Rise of the Greek Epic (1907). 112 Murray was primarily concerned with the place of epic in the evolution of Greek religion and morality and was closely associated with the English “myth-ritual school” of J. G. Frazer and Jane Harrison. 113 Our particular interest here is in the way in which he attempted to link the literary character of the Homeric poems, by way of comparison, to the parallel development of the Old Testament as he understood it. In chap. 4, which deals with Homer under the rubric “an ancient traditional book,” Murray compares the heroic tradition of Greece with traditions of other cultures, as was typical of the nineteenth century, but he pays particular attention to the Hebrew Scriptures. He states: The most instructive example of the growth and change of a traditional book under ancient conditions is to be found, I think, in the Hebrew scriptures. I often wonder that the comparison has not been more widely used by Greek scholars. The scientific study of the Old Testament has been carried out with remarkable candour and ability by many Semitic scholars of the last two generations. The results of their researches are easily accessible; the main results may be said, in a sense, to be practically certain.114

What he is referring to is, of course, the Documentary Hypothesis. In fact, there was a lot more interchange between Homeric studies and Pentateuchal studies than what Murray implies. Murray proceeds to lay out the basic features of the Documentary Hypothesis, but he does so in a way that makes the parallel with his view of the Homer problem as close as possible. Thus, he says about the Deuteronomic reform: “Now among the other tasks which the reformers had before them was the re-editing of the ancient traditional books of the people.” 115 He has in mind the Pentateuchal sources J and E, which he says “must have been originally pagan and polytheistic.” 116 He further states: A copy of J and E before the Deuteronomists altered it would be, for Semitic historians, the most valuable book in the world. The strange thing is that the reformers were able to carry their project through. It was necessary 111. See A. Momigliano, Studies on Modern Scholarship (ed. G. W. Bowersock and T. J. Cornell; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 268. Momigliano suggests that Schwartz absorbed more of Wellhausen’s method of literary analysis than Wilamowitz, especially with regard to the analysis of the Odyssey. 112. Gilbert Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic (4th ed.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1934). See also Myres, Homer, 205–9; Turner, Greek Heritage, 150–54. 113. See G. S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and Other Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press / Berkley: University of California Press, 1970), 2–5; also Turner, Greek Heritage, 119–34. 114. Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, 107. 115. Ibid., 108. 116. Ibid.

160

Chapter 5

for them not only to alter their own versions at Jerusalem, but to suppress all old copies that differed from their own. . . . There seems to have been a regular military expedition against the remnants of Paganism, a formal destruction of the old High Places, and the massacre of the priests of Bethel. At last Jerusalem stood alone as the only sanctuary, and the reformers had undisturbed control of the Book. 117

Strange indeed! The Old Testament says nothing about book burning, and I know of no biblical scholar who has suggested any such thing; nor does Murray cite any authority. 118 The notion that the JE redaction represented a widely distributed edition, which was then replaced by a Deuteronomistic edition, with the earlier one suppressed, is simply a case of carrying the anachronistic analogy of modern editions to its ultimate absurdity. Furthermore, Murray is concerned to draw his parallel to Homer, and so he continues: “One is reminded of Greek stories about the interpolation of Homer, how Solon or Peisistratus or another bolstered his city’s claim to the island of Salamis by citing a passage in the Iliad, which the opponents of Athens thought spurious but were not, apparently, able to convict by producing an authoritative text with different wording.” 119 This, of course, refers to the notion of the so-called “Peisistratus recension” in support of which this supposed interpolation is one of the primary arguments, but few classicists would support this notion today, and there were many in Murray’s day that strongly disputed it, including Wilamowitz, about whom Murray says nothing. Returning to the Pentateuch, Murray adds further: “The whole book was revised again, increased by large stretches of narrative, and, roughly speaking, brought into its present shape after the return from exile, between the years 440–400 b.c. This reviser, known to critics as P, was a member of the priestly caste.” 120 In Murray’s simplification of the Documentary Hypothesis, P and Rp have become one, which corresponds rather closely with Wilamowitz’s notion of the final Bearbiter in the composition of the Odyssey. Furthermore, contrary to his notion about how D revised JE, the P editor apparently does not suppress the Deuteronomic edition but merely expands it, because the earlier 117. Ibid., 108–9. 118. Turner (Greek Heritage, 151 n. 22) cites W. Robertson Smith, The Old Testament in the Jewish Church (2nd ed.; London: Black, 1892); and S. R. Driver, The Book of Genesis with Introduction and Notes (7th ed.; London: Methuen, 1909) as Murray’s authorities on biblical criticism. However, Robertson Smith says very little about the actual Josiah reform beyond a brief summary of the biblical account. His treatment of Deuteronomy is altogether different from the view suggested by Murray. Driver’s book on Genesis obviously has nothing to do with Deuteronomy and, in his Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (1891; repr. New York: Meridian, 1957), he likewise has a very brief description of the Josiah reform, following the biblical account in his chapter on Deuteronomy, and nothing that would suggest the description given by Murray. This reconstruction is entirely the product of Murray’s own vivid imagination. 119. Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, 109. 120. Ibid.

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

161

one is clearly still there. Murray’s whole approach seems to be a supplementary hypothesis rather than a documentary hypothesis, which was hardly the viewpoint of scholarship of his day and does not correspond to the views of S. R. Driver, his colleague, who seems to be the only authority to whom he refers. Driver says almost nothing about the redactional process. 121 It appears that Murray merely construes Driver’s understanding of higher criticism of the Pentateuch in such a way as to make it match his own theory about the growth of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In a similar fashion, Murray uses an argument from textual criticism. He observes that because in the book of Samuel there are “considerable slices of narrative which are found in the ordinary Hebrew text, but not in the Septuagint translation . . . it is clear that the authorized text was not definitively established. A traditional book of which large parts can be left out or put in at discretion is still in the stage of growth.” 122 This parallels the discussion among classical scholars about the long and short texts of Homer before the supposed standardization by the Alexandrian “editors.” The redactional argument is thus seen to be in continuity with text-critical arguments. Murray returns to the Pentateuch: When J or E was first composed, it was not composed out of nothing. Each of them was really put together in the same way as the whole composite Pentateuch of the Priest, by taking an older existing book, copying it out, omitting, and sometimes altering. Many of these earlier sources are quoted by name, as the Iliad quotes the older Argonautica. 123

The evidence from the Pentateuch that Murray cites are the pieces of poetry thought to be from older literary works, but the description of the compositional process is surely a strange caricature of biblical criticism. His method, however, is clear. He states: “I hope that by now I have succeeded in illustrating two points about these ancient authorless books; first, the immense periods of time during which they remained fluid and growing; and second, the difficulties which they have in combining their multiplex sources. The object which I have in view is, of course, Homer.” 124 The Pentateuch and the poems of Homer have now become “authorless books,” not merely because historical criticism has rejected the authorship of Moses and Homer but because the author has been replaced by the editorial process. The compositional activity of an author has been completely confused with the work of the editor or redactor, and Murray is not alone in the creation of this confusion. This example anticipates the rise of redaction criticism in biblical studies of a later period. In addition, Murray cites two other features from the Pentateuch that he wishes to compare with Homer: 121. On this, see below, chap. 7. 122. Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, 111. 123. Ibid., 111–12. 124. Ibid., 114.

162

Chapter 5

The expurgations and the interpolations; all that a man rejects from his traditional teaching and all that he puts in its place; a knowledge of those two together will surely contain the main secrets of all that is most alive in the man’s own character. And the same is true of an age. The interpolations and expurgations, if we followed the subject up, would teach us much about the age of the Deuteronomists and the later age of the Priests. And I wish now to apply this method, at least in one of its aspects, to Homer. 125

Thus, in the next chapter Murray takes up the expurgations in Homer. But nothing can be said about the expurgations of the Deuteronomists and P in the biblical account because there is no unexpurgated version with which to compare the present text. So the comparison rests entirely on conjecture, not evidence. The argument seems to be that one form of editing is the expurgating or censuring of problematic material from classical or traditional texts, and this can be seen even in cases such as the works of Shakespeare. It is hard to see how this sort of editing can be made to apply to the Pentateuchal texts. In the end, Murray must admit the existence of some fundamental differences between the Old Testament and Homer. 126 His final remarks about these differences are instructive: The Hebrew reviser, except where religious motives came into play, tampered so little with his wording. He took his raw material just as it was, and copied it out, merely inserting his introductory and connecting formulae, smoothing out the contradictions, and correcting the orthodoxy of his authorities where they needed it. A Homeric scholar cannot but be surprised at the extreme ease with which interpolations in the Hebrew writings often betray themselves. . . . No Greek editor ever dreamed of doing his business like that. For every Son of Homer was himself a poet, and kept modifying and working up into poetry everything that he touched. 127

This “Son of Homer” turns out to be the rhapsode and poet, Kynaithos, whom Murray regards as responsible for the final written form of the poems that were used in the great Panathenaea under Peisistratus, the so-called Peisistratus recension of tradition. 128 This is already a long distance from Wolf’s editors. I have taken the liberty of dealing with Murray in some detail because he illustrates so clearly and explicitly the comparisons drawn between Homeric and Pentateuchal studies, even if his attempt may be severely criticized from several perspectives. As an example, it merely confirms the fact that in both biblical and classical studies there was a common conceptualization of the editing of ancient “traditional books” that produced their standardized forms. We will need to look at the biblical side of this comparison below. Nevertheless, it should be abundantly clear that all the varied notions about 125. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 128. Ibid.,

118. 169–94. 193. 310–16.

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

163

the ancient editors and their effects on texts, whether Homer or the Bible, employ an anachronistic model based on book production from an entirely different age. The anachronism is so glaring in Murray as to make this fact obvious.

The Demise of the Redactor in Homeric Studies At the same time that ever-more-complex forms of literary analysis were developing into multiple sources and redactors or revisers in Homeric criticism, there was also a strong reaction by scholars advocating the single authorship of both the Iliad and the Odyssey by the traditional Homer. These scholars became known as the “unitarians,” and they mounted a vigorous attack on what they regarded as a serious devaluation of the great artistic skill and genius of the poet and author of the poems. 129 This reaction was combined with a defense of the historicity of the Iliad and the Odyssey as true reflections of the Mycenean age, supported by archaeological discovery, and the combination formed a kind of Homeric orthodoxy, accompanied by a bitter attack on historical criticism. This movement was perhaps strongest in the Anglo-Saxon scholarly world, 130 while the “analytic” approach was more characteristic of scholarship in Germany. It is not my intention to deal with these developments in detail, although it should be obvious that unitarians had little place for “redactors” in their own literary criticism of Homer. There are two areas of scholarly discussion, both closely associated with the “unitarian” cause, that had a decisive effect in changing the whole scholarly discourse on the “Homeric Question.” These were (1) discussions regarding the textual history of the Homeric poems, and (2) a new approach to the problem of oral tradition behind the written form of epic poetry. We will briefly take up these two issues. Homer and the Unitarians: Text-Critics versus the Literary Analysts Let us turn back again to Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and his discussion of textual criticism as it related to the history of the editing of classical texts. Wilamowitz concludes his discussion of classical scholarship in Geschichte der Philologie (1921) with a ten-page review of textual criticism in the early twentieth century. 131 He states: We now possess evidence about epic language from the sixth century [b.c.e.] onwards which shows that it remained the same throughout the 129. See n. 103 above. 130. This is exemplified by none other than William Ewart Gladstone, who published his Studies in Homer in 1858, as well as many other books and articles between 1847 and 1898. See Myres’s extended treatment in Homer, 94–122; also Turner, Greek Heritage, 159–70. 131. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, History of Classical Scholarship, 169–78. The quotations are taken from this translation.

164

Chapter 5

ages. We also have remains of ancient books dating from every period since the end of the fourth century, so that we know in what form the tragedians reached the library of Alexandria. We marvel at the technique of bookproduction which attained perfection there. We follow its subsequent course from generation to generation, and we observe the increasingly chaotic state of orthography . . . , the decline of the papyrus industry, and the replacement of the roll by the codex. In the manuscripts intended for scholars we note the addition of variant readings and the slow growth of accentuation and other aids to correct reading, while scholia consisting of extracts from separate commentaries begin to fill the margins. 132

Two points are worthy of note. First, Wilamowitz associates the editorial activity of the Alexandrian scholars with “book production” and argues that their standardization of the texts of the classics was for this purpose. In an earlier chapter, we have called into question this understanding of their editorial activity. Second, Wilamowitz makes the same distinction among classical texts, between the usual Greek manuscripts and scholarly texts in codex form with marginal notations, as the distinction among Hebrew texts, between the Masoretic texts and the common unpointed medieval Hebrew manuscripts. It is this parallel that suggests comparison between the origins of the MT and the editorial activity of the Alexandrian scholars. Wilamowitz continues: Fragments of surviving writings are more important to the critic than the new discoveries, because they enable him to judge the Byzantine tradition. We see the difference it made to a book whether it enjoyed the protection of the ‘grammarians’ or was reproduced without that safeguard. . . . It seems scarcely credible that incompetence should still dare to claim that the safest course is to keep to the [textual] tradition, as though it were not the critic’s business first to test the reliability of the tradition and then to act accordingly. Anyone who is incapable of working his way back from the surviving manuscripts to the author’s autograph, which was innocent of both word-division and punctuation, had better leave textual criticism alone. . . . A great deal of what passed for emendation is concerned with alterations which do not touch the real transmitted text at all, and the mere removal of an error due to misreading of the ancient hand-writing leaves the actual tradition untouched. But textual history, which has taken its place alongside of recensio and emendatio, means more than that. When we have got back to the archetype via its surviving descendants, we are usually left with a single copy dating from late antiquity. Recension is then at an end; but emendation does not follow immediately, except where the time that elapsed between the author’s lifetime and the archetype is a complete blank. 133

132. Ibid., 169–70. 133. Ibid., 170–71.

spread is 12 points short

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

165

Wilamowitz is arguing here, in the tradition of Wolf, that textual history involves conjecture on the level of higher criticism, beyond the task of what is usually included within textual criticism. In this sense, “textual history” is the direct equivalent of what is referred to today as “redaction history” (Redaktionsgeschichte). Wilamowitz goes on to indicate that in some cases the reconstructed archetype gives rise to variant readings that provide a choice to the modern editor of the text. He then raises the question: What if several ancient copies of the work had survived and their texts differ? It then becomes necessary to distinguish between different redactions, which are by no means confined to the classics; but we ought only to speak of “redactions” when the divergencies are on a more serious scale than the minor variations found in the same book. If the evidence indicates that there really were separate redactions, the one before us may equally well be either a complete revision, in which case we can properly speak of interpolation, or the result of the vicissitudes experienced by the text before some [ancient] scholar fixed it. In this context we shall do well to recall how the works of Goethe and Kleist have fared even in the era of the printed book. Textual criticism of this kind is impossible without recourse to the ancient grammarians, particularly with the classics. There the standard Alexandrian edition is a second archetype which we have to reconstruct, and if there was more than one edition, we are faced once more with the problem of where variants end and interpolation begins. Here again there will have been an interval between the author’s lifetime and the standard edition, during which the text was unprotected.134

Wilamowitz is here once again invoking the textual history of Wolf, in which there was a diversity of “editions” before the texts were standardized by the Alexandrians. When Wilamowitz speaks of distinguishing between “different redactions, which are by no means confined to the classics,” he almost certainly has in mind the model of biblical “recensions” of the MT, LXX, and SamP, and these he is using as an analogy to the pre-Alexandrian “editions” of the classics. As we have seen above, this is the same model that has been used in the case of the proto-MT. The analogy is drawn between the ancient “editors” and the modern editions created by the printers; this is an inadmissible anachronism. Wilamowitz continues with this same argument: Our possession of manuscripts of Homer, Plato and Euripides dating from that interval [before the Alexandrians] can teach us almost all we need about critical method. . . . The New Testament, especially the Gospels, after remaining entirely unprotected for centuries, had its text more or less fixed, though in a somewhat violent fashion, but fortunately the traces of other redactions were not completely obliterated. The additional evidence provided by translations and earlier quotations puts the history of its text 134. Ibid., 171.

166

Chapter 5

on a par with Homer’s, to which it is the nearest parallel in spite of all the differences between them. 135

What is clear is that “redaction” is being used in the sense of “edition” or “recension” in the text-critical sense and is being applied to the state of the text prior to its standardization, not to its compositional stage. 136 This usage is also clear from Wilamowitz’s remarks about the manuscripts of Homer, Plato, and Euripides; he believes that the Alexandrian scholars had largely fixed the text and contrasts the case of other authors, where this had not happened. He states: “Where there are several markedly divergent redactions, as with Herodotus and Thucydides, . . . it means that no ‘grammarian’ had produced a standard edition.” 137 The “redactions” can hardly refer to the compositional phase of these works but only to differing versions of the text that came about in their transmission. This is the primary meaning of the term “redaction,” and literary usage has grown out of this. Wilamowitz’s view of Homeric text-history may be compared with the perspective of a contemporary scholar of the late nineteenth century, Arthur Ludwich. His Aristarchs Homerische Textkritik (1884–85) was adopted and conveniently summarized by R. C. Jebb in Homer: An Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey (1886). 138 The view expressed by Ludwich and Jebb, in contrast to Wilamowitz, is that, in spite of the apparent diversity of “editions” prior to the Alexandrian critics, “the copies known to the Alexandrians must have rested on an older vulgate text, of which the sources are unknown. This is indicated by the narrow limits of textual divergence. The Alexandrian critics notice only differences in regard to the reading of particular verses, or to omissions and additions of a very small kind.” 139 With respect to the work of Aristarchus, Jebb emphasizes his very conservative and cautious approach to the text and the fact that his opinions on the text of Homer were scattered throughout his works and were only much later brought together by Didymus in the Roman period. He further observes: The recension of Aristarchus was never canonized in its entirety as a standard text. But his criticism seems to have had a much larger influence than that of any other single authority. It is probable that between about 200 and 400 a.d. a vulgate (the ancient common text modified in detail) was gradually formed by a comparison of his views, so far as they were known, with those of other critics. 140 135. Ibid., 171–72. The reference to the text of the New Testament is particularly puzzling. There was certainly no single Greek vulgate text of the New Testament in antiquity. If the reference is to the Textus Receptus of Erasmus, this is remarkably anachronistic, hardly suitable as an analogy for the Alexandrian editions of Homer. 136. This contrasts with the use of redaction criticism in New Testament studies today (as we will see below, chap. 7), where redaction is related to the activity of the Evangelists. 137. Ibid., 173. 138. Jebb, Homer, 91–97. 139. Ibid., 92. 140. Ibid., 97.

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

167

And he later summarizes this view: We saw that the editions used by Aristarchus represented an older common text, or vulgate, and that one of these editions was that of Antimachus (circ. 410 b.c.), in which the variations appear to have been only of the same small kind as the rest. Hence there is the strongest reason for believing that the common text of 200 b.c. went back at least to the fifth century b.c. But Aristarchus caused no breach in the transmission of that common text. He made no wild conjectures or violent dislocations. He handed on what he had received, with such help towards exhibiting it in a purer form as careful collation and study could give; and so, with comparatively slight modification, it descended to the age from which our MSS date. Our common text, then, we may reasonably believe, is fundamentally the same as that which was known to Aristarchus; and therefore, in all probability, it rests on the same basis as the text which was read by Plato and Thucydides. 141

This view of the relationship of Aristarchus to the standard vulgate is a radical departure from both Wolf and Wilamowitz. Under the scenario presented by Jebb, following Ludwich, the Alexandrians can hardly be understood as editors preparing editions for “publication” and wide distribution. Their influence on the vulgate is minor and occurs long after their time. Once one gives up the notion of a Peisistratus recension and a standard edition created by Aristarchus, the analogy of the “editor” as the one responsible for the final form of the text has completely dissipated. Gilbert Murray is one who takes direct issue with the viewpoint of Ludwich and believes that Aristarchus was responsible for the establishment of the vulgate text. 142 He looks at two bodies of evidence, the papyri and the quotations in classical sources, especially those in Plato. Regarding the papyri, he follows the lead of B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt (Hibeh Papyri I, 1906) 143 and asserts the view that the texts before Aristarchus were highly eccentric or “wild” in comparison with the later vulgate text, whereas the wild texts quickly diminished after 150 b.c.e. He concludes that this is the result of the work of Aristarchus. But one should be careful to note that what Grenfell and Hunt actually assert is something much more modest. In response to criticism by Ludwich, they replied: “What we meant and what we in fact said . . . was not that the rise of the vulgate took place after b.c. 150, but that its rise in general acceptance occurred after that date, i.e., that it did not supercede the ‘eccentric’ traditions until then. . . . The question how and when the vulgate, whether identical or not with the text called by Didymus and Aristonicus the koinhv, took its origin is another point.” They simply assert that the evidence supports the idea that “the normal text in

141. Ibid., 102. 142. Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, 285–95. 143. B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, Hibeh Papyri (Egypt Exploration Fund; London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1906), part 1, pp. 67–75.

168

Chapter 5

circulation through Egypt apart from Alexandria” during the early Ptolemaic period was not the vulgate. 144 Murray clearly makes more out of this than Grenfell and Hunt suggest. Murray goes on to consider the matter of quotations from classical sources, the most important of which are quotations found in Plato, which he lists. Here he must admit that there is a strong resemblance between Plato’s references and the vulgate text: “The simplest conclusion would be to assume that Plato used a text very like ours.” 145 Instead of accepting this obvious conclusion, Murray suggests that Aristarchus and his school made the vulgate conform to the readings found in Plato. This seems like rather special pleading. It is much more likely that Aristarchus used an Athenian text very similar to the text that Plato had and the text that became the preferred medium text of the later book trade. The matter of the text-history of Homer was taken up by T. W. Allen in the second part of his study on the Homeric Question, Homer: The Origins and the Transmission (1923). Allen begins with a review of the “additions” to the poem, listed and dated by Allen from the eighth century b.c.e. onward, based on parallel quotations or unusual words in other sources, or forms and language that belong to specific periods. He sums up these results: We have now collected the recorded instances of alterations of the Homeric text. They entered from the eighth century to Hellenistic, Roman and all but Byzantine times. The character of the alterations changes with time. Their importance diminishes with the century; lines were added in the period of Hesiod and the Cycle, a passage was given another version in the time of the Hymns; shorter but material changes of sense are found in the same period. Later than the seventh century we find little but new forms, new uses of words and new words. . . . In other words, deliberate augmentation of the text, or material alteration of its meaning, ceased after the eighth and seventh centuries; succeeding changes were limited, with few exceptions, to vocabulary and forms of words. 146

There is a rather obvious fallacy in Allen’s reasoning at this point. The fact that an interpolation was made from a quotation of Hesiod does not mean that the addition was made in the time of Hesiod. It hardly seems likely that papyrus text P51, which contains a four-line quotation from Hesiod, 147 actually reflects a text descended from that period. Indeed, Allen himself suggests a much more likely reason: Moreover, as in most of the recorded cases of additions we can trace the additions to literature, it follows that there is considerable probability that additions were due to the effect of literature, mostly epic literature. . . . The interpolator did not make them up, he took them from a work which went 144. Ibid., 71. 145. Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic, 295. 146. T. W. Allen, Homer: The Origins and Transmission (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), 217. 147. Ibid., 204.

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

169

under Homer’s name, or which might have been Homer’s or might represent Homer’s knowledge on another occasion, when better informed.148

This kind of addition could be made in almost any period by some copyist or other improving his text; nothing is implied about when these additions were made. A much larger addition to the Odyssey, the ending in y297 to the end of w, was athetized by the Alexandrian scholars, although they did not have textual support for doing so, and it is not a quotation from another known literary work. Allen, a unitarian, nevertheless regards the whole of y267– w as the work of a “diasceuast” or “continuator,” who took materials from other sources to make up this new ending to the Odyssey. 149 His arguments for this view do not concern us here, although many critics of Homer agree with the Alexandrians on this deletion. What is of interest to us is the use of the technical term diasceuast, 150 which was used by Wolf for the interpolator and is also used in this sense by biblical scholars of the nineteenth century, often as a synonym for redactor. Elsewhere, however, Allen attributes additions such as these to the rhapsodes. 151 It is the “editors” of Alexandria who identified this ending as an addition and marked it as “un-Homeric.” The tradition of the Peisistratus recension, in which the poems of Homer were collected and edited into the two great poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and which formed the basic point of departure for Wolf’s text-history of the poems, is rejected by Allen in toto. He spends a chapter citing all the ancient authorities for this tradition, most of which, as we have seen, are very late, and offers evidence that strongly suggests that the poems were in existence long before the time of Peisistratus. 152 The tradition had already been largely discredited by scholars. Jebb acknowledges that the “story is both doubtful and vague” and that “[i]t would satisfy the vague shape in which the story has reached us, if we regarded Peisistratus, not as creating a new unity, but as seeking to preserve an old unity which had been obscured.” 153 Allen’s renewed attack on the notion of a Peisistratus “recension” left it with little credibility as a witness to early editorial activity in the creation of the Homeric poems. 154 Allen next turns his attention to the nature and degree of textual diversity that existed before the time of the Alexandrians. The evidence is of two kinds and is basically the same as the data used by Murray above, but with quite different results. One kind of evidence is derived from quotations of Homer in other classical sources; the other is from references to specific text148. Ibid., 217. 149. Ibid., 221. 150. The term appears in the OED with the meaning “reviser.” 151. Allen, Homer, 325. 152. Ibid., 225–48. 153. Jebb, Homer, 114–15. 154. For further critique of the notion of a Peisistratus recension, see Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Homeric Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 65–86.

170

Chapter 5

editions as cited by the Homeric scholia, together with the early papyri. After citing and reviewing all the evidence from the quotations, Allen concludes “that there were medium and long or short texts in the fifth and fourth centuries [b.c.e.], and that the medium texts were more common,” 155 but the nature of the evidence does not permit him to say what the precise proportion between the two may have been. Concerning the citations from the scholia, Allen reviews the various categories of texts. Beginning with the largest group of “common” texts, he concludes that the koinhv or vulgate adduced by Didymus in his commentary—if not by the Alexandrians themselves—consisted of the ordinary or uncorrected copies produced by the book trade, whose general characteristic was an increasing modernity in syntax, vocabulary, and phonetics. In most of these points the vulgate was ‘careless’ or even ‘bad’. The principal aim of the professional critic, Alexandrian and others, was to stay the course of the modernizing process by restoring older forms and words.156

Comparison between this pre-Alexandrian vulgate and the vulgate of the medieval manuscripts is important in order to gauge the degree of impact of the Alexandrian grammarians on the text—“in other words how far modernization triumphed over the efforts of the grammarians.” 157 And after listing the statistics, he concludes: “The third-century ‘vulgate’ forms the staple of the medieval text.” 158 By contrast, the so-called “city editions,” which Allen characterizes as older editions that “show an older stage of language and a restricted text containing fewer lines,” had much less effect on the medieval text. 159 The last texts of Homer showing textual diversity are the papyri from Egypt, beginning in the third century b.c.e. These texts clearly show that in the third and second centuries the number of texts with additional lines is rather high, whereas in the later period long texts seem to disappear almost entirely. The sample of early texts is too small to draw conclusions about proportions, but the change is significant nonetheless. All of the supplements in these texts tend to be “formulaic repetitions of phrases already in the poems.” 160 When Allen comes to the question of whether or not the Alexandrians were responsible for establishing the vulgate text and eliminating the long texts, based on the evidence set forth, his answer is clearly negative. He states: The usual view is that the extinction of the longer texts, or the establishment of a ‘vulgate’ in the ordinary sense of the word, was the work of the Alexandrine critics. . . . I am at one with Ludwich in believing that as the 155. Allen, Homer, 270. 156. Ibid., 282. 157. Ibid. 158. Ibid. 159. Ibid., 296. 160. Ibid., 301.

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

171

Alexandrians had practically no eventual effect (no immediate effect at all) upon the detailed readings of the medium text, so they did not extinguish the longer versions. The belief that they did so is an excellent example of the argument post hoc ergo propter hoc. Had we nothing but the bare tradition that there were Homeric critics in the third and second century, the conclusion that they created the vulgate would seem guaranteed by all the methods of logic. Down to the second century there were long texts as well as medium. In the first century they ceased. By the end of the second century the great Alexandrian grammarians had long since finished their labours. . . . The culmination of the school and the standardization of the texts correspond in time. They were therefore causally connected.161

The argument based upon this coincidence is important because the same kind of argument is frequently used regarding the establishment of the MT as a standard vulgate in the early Roman period. Against this argument, Allen presents the evidence of the scholia regarding what the Alexandrians did and “what effect they had upon the Homeric text” as reflected in the manuscript tradition. He states: The labour of the Alexandrians . . . took two directions. (i) They made verbal and formal alterations in the text, with a view to resisting modernization; (ii) they condemned many lines as unhomeric. They did not eject these lines, they branded them, as it were, with marginal signs—obeli and asterisks—by which their particular fault was conveyed to the reader. Their reasons for these judgements they expounded in their hypomnemata [commentaries]. 162

These are the things the Alexandrians did to their texts of Homer. What was the effect of this editorial activity on the text as reflected in the medieval manuscripts? Aristarchus’s distinctive readings are rather unevenly scattered throughout the manuscripts, many occuring not at all or very rarely, whereas only a small percentage occur in most or all of the manuscripts. This can only mean that the influence on the vulgate was meager and indirect. When one looks at the papyri down to 600 c.e., there is no evidence of Aristarchus’s edition at all. Regarding the passages that Aristarchus stigmatized with athetesis, very few of these are missing in the manuscripts, so his influence on the vulgate text of Homer was negligible. 163 The evidence of the Homeric papyri is of another kind. Of several hundred papyri, there are a few (Allen lists eight) that contain critical signs in the margins. These papyri date from the second century b.c.e. to the fourth 161. Ibid., 303. This is the position argued by G. M. Bolling, The External Evidence for Interpolation in Homer (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925). Although it was published at almost the same time as Allen, it does not really address Allen’s arguments. 162. Allen, Homer, 304. 163. Allen’s argument is used against Bolling by Whitman, Homer, 328 n. 37; he states: “Since Aristarchus does not always agree with the vulgate, it is hard to see how he could have created it. He seems to have adopted a medium-sized text, doubtless Athenian, longer than that of Zenodotus, but shorter than the padded texts of the earlier papyri.”

172

Chapter 5

century c.e., and as Allen asserts: “It would be absurd to attribute the presence of these signs to any influence but that of Alexandria.” 164 Thus, it appears that, out of the great number of texts produced by the book trade, a small number were of the scholarly variety in the tradition of Aristarchus. Yet, as Allen points out, “the texts of these papyri are ordinary: they have neither more nor less lines than the average, and their verbal variants are not particularly Aristarchian.” 165 However, one papyrus fragment (P51) is an exception, because it is an example of a long text with an apparent four-line quotation from Hesiod’s “Shield of Heracles” in the description of the shield of Achilles. The addition is marked with the Alexandrian critical signs but is not removed. As Allen says: “They found lines, and they left them, in the long texts, exactly as they did in the medium texts. Therefore we see what the Alexandrians did (they marked verses with signs), and what they did not do (they were not able to remove lines).” 166 Furthermore, Allen asserts “that the two classes of editions [the more elegant and the more commonplace] continued after their time, differing not at all as far as the text went, but expressing different opinions on the margin. The Alexandrians could not and did not impose uniformity even on the more learned type of edition.” 167 There is little need to carry this historical survey of the text-history of Homer beyond this time period, because we have now arrived at the point at which we reviewed the current perspective on these matters in chap. 2. Let me merely summarize the recent survey of the text-history of the Iliad as set forth by Janko in his commentary. 168 After reviewing the comparison of the Alexandrian variants with the vulgate of the Roman and Byzantine manuscript fragments and the medieval codices from ca. 900 to 1550 c.e., as well as the evidence of the scholia, Janko comes to the conclusion: Whereas the Alexandrians’ choice of readings had little effect on ancient MSS, Aristarchus’ determination of the length of each book affected copyists’ practices from c. 150 b.c., when the longer ‘wild’ texts begin to disappear (they persist at second hand in quotations as late as Plutarch). There is an obvious reason for this: few purchasers of book-rolls would know enough to worry about the quality of the text, whereas they could find out how many verses it should contain, especially since scribes were paid by the verse. 169

This is in substantial agreement with Allen and the other scholars cited in chap. 2 above.

164. Allen, Homer, 306. 165. Ibid. 166. Ibid., 307. 167. Ibid. 168. R. Janko, Iliad: A Commentary, vol. 4: Books 13–16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 20–32. 169. Ibid., 22.

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

173

Regarding the other contentious issue, the existence of the “Peisistratus recension,” Janko again reviews the ancient testimonia and concludes: “In any case, a full-scale ‘Pisistratean recension’ is certainly a scholarly theory, not a genuine tradition; it was unknown in the heyday of Alexandrian scholarship. Had anyone had an official Pisistratid text, we would certainly have heard about it.” 170 Nevertheless, he does put some weight on a connection between Peisistratus’s establishment of the Panathenaic festival and the presentation of Homer there. Based on his evaluation of the earliest script of Homer as East Ionic, with Attic modifications coming later, he concludes: Yet the superficial Attic traits in the epic diction do prove that Athens played a major role in the transmission, and this must be related to the Pisistratids’ patronage of Homeric poetry. They probably procured the first complete set of rolls to cross the Aegean. That they tried to add a few verses is possible; that all later MSS derive exclusively from a copy they made is at best unlikely; and that they put the poems together from scattered lays, or altered them in any substantial way, is out of the question. 171

This judgment again agrees with Allen’s, and it completely excludes the notion of an editorially constructed text as Wolf conceived of it. Thus, the two major pillars that undergird the whole “redactional history” theory of Wolf and the later analysts are without foundation in fact or plausibility. The New Debate: Oral Poetry and Written Composition in Homer While the approach to Homeric studies reflected in the work of Wilamowitz-Moellendorff continued to dominate classical scholarship for the first half-century or more in Germany, 172 a new interest in the nature of oral poetry and its relationship to the written texts of Homer arose in the AngloSaxon world, and this development was to take the “Homeric Question” in a quite different direction. 173 This new development is associated above all with the name of Milman Parry, who, in the late 1920s and early 30s, revolutionized the understanding of oral composition. Parry, in his two Paris

170. Ibid., 32. 171. Ibid., 37. 172. See Dodds, “Homer,” 7–8. 173. See ibid., 13–17. Dodds begins with the remark: “We have still to consider what is perhaps the most important single discovery about Homer made during the past halfcentury [1900–1950], the decisive proof that the poems are oral compositions. This is mainly, if not entirely due to the gifted American scholar, Milman Parry” (p. 13). See also the concluding cautionary remarks directed at “‘naive’ analysis [redaction criticism] which claims to recover older poems from the Iliad and the Odyssey by a process of simple subtraction” of additions made by redactors (p. 16). A collection of Milman Parry’s writings is contained in A. Parry, ed., The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). For a valuable collection of studies relating to this whole topic, especially for German readers, see J. Latacz, ed., Homer: Tradition und Neuerung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979).

174

Chapter 5

theses of 1928, L’Épithète traditionnelle dans Homère and Les Formules et la Métrique d’Homère, “showed that our Iliad and Odyssey are composed in a traditional style designed to enable illiterate singers to improvise heroic song.” 174 Following this, in the years 1933–35, Parry made three field trips to Yugoslavia in which he recorded the living tradition of oral poetic performance, which he saw as “external confirmation of his analytic conclusions.” 175 Unfortunately, Parry died of a gunshot accident in 1935, but his work and insights were carried on by his assistant, A. B. Lord, best known for his book The Singer of Tales (1960), as well as by numerous other members of the “school.” Without going into detail, it is enough to say that the Parry and Lord thesis is intended to demonstrate that oral poetry is a form of oral composition quite different from written poetry. In oral poetry, the poet improvises in song on a number of traditional themes, using certain techniques, most notably fixed formulae and epithets associated with heroes, gods, and other nouns, such as the dawn, the sea, and so on. Thus, each performance is different, and each poet creates his own repertoire of songs, although for a single poet there may be considerable continuity over a number of years in the case of a particular song. If given the ideal opportunity to perform his work, the poet may create over an extended time a very long poem corresponding in size to that of the Iliad, although such cases are rare. Consequently, this new understanding of oral composition of epic poetry was bound to result in the rejection the older formulation of the Homeric Question by Wolf and others, who thought that the poems of Homer was the result of a combination by an editor of numerous songs, each of which had been transmitted in a relatively fixed form. The adherents of this new school of oral composition were all “unitarians,” and Homer was himself the singer of these great songs. To the extent, therefore, that the new understanding of oral tradition came into the discussion of Homeric studies, it tended seriously to undermine the older Wolf–Wilamowitz approach involving sources and editors. As Adam Parry writes concerning his father: Parry’s true reputation rests on his influence among scholars and readers of Homer, and of other heroic poetry. Much of the most valuable work on such poetry since Parry’s death and even before has been influenced by his theories, its direction and even determined by them. They appeared at a time when the old Homeric Question, deriving from the doctrine of Wolf, had worn itself out and become a repetitive and futile debate. Parry’s work gave the whole study of Homer a new life.176 174. Adam Parry, “Have We Homer’s Iliad?” in Homer: Tradition und Neuerung (ed. J. Latacz; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979), 429. 175. Ibid. 176. A. Parry, “Introduction,” in The Making of Homeric Verse, xliii (reprinted in Latacz, ed., Homer, 501).

spread is 12 points short

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

175

One leading German scholar who was aware, in the mid-1950s, of this remarkable change of an era in Homeric studies and who greatly praised Parry’s work was Albin Lesky in his article, “Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Homerischen Epos” (1954). 177 He describes rather sarcastically the older method of literary criticism that it replaced: It is quite irresistible to imagine all these redactors with written texts in their hands, deleting here, inserting there, and fitting together various passages they have snipped out. To speak of writing desk, scissors, and paste is, naturally, a blatant anachronism—but appropriate, it seems to me, to indicate the direction in which all suppositions of this kind tend. Philology authors have thought up these theories, and for them work on books and with books has remained the basic assumption.178

In a similar vein, a British scholar, C. M. Bowra, who strongly supported the work of Parry and whose own comparative study worked in a broad range of heroic poetry, contrasted this new approach to Homeric studies with that of the multiple sources and redactors of “analytic” studies. He states: If some of the contradictions and inconsistencies in the Homeric poems can be explained by the circumstances of oral recitation, we may well ask whether they form after all a solid basis for theories of multiple authorship. If we accept this explanation of them, we follow a sound rule of criticism in judging a work of art by the rules and technique proper to its time and conditions. . . . The absence of final and conclusive arguments for the multiple authorship of either poem must be considered with the two powerful arguments for their unity, the main, dominating design of each poem and the remarkably consistent use of formulae in them. The first indicates a poet in each case who has his material in full control and is unlikely to be an editor or a compiler; the second surely indicates an individual touch, since, however many formulae were provided by tradition, there were certainly alternatives among them, and their rigorous discipline in the poems suggests a poet who had made his own choice and kept it.179

Both Lesky and Bowra firmly reject the application of anachronistic notions of modern editing to this ancient literature and in its place insert the need 177. Albin Lesky, “Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Homerischen Epos” (1954), repr. in Homer: Tradition und Neuerung (ed. J. Latacz; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979), 297–307. Quotations are from this reprint. 178. Ibid., 299; see appendix, p. 402, for original German. Latacz’s own comment on Lesky’s critique of the Wolf position in favor of Parry’s position was that Lesky remained for two decades a voice crying in the wilderness (Rufer in der Wüste); see Latacz, “Einführung,” 12. Latacz, in his own opening article on the history of the “oral-poetry theory,” quotes a number of scholars with sentiments similar to Lesky’s (Latacz, “Tradition und Neuerung,” 26–27). 179. C. M. Bowra, “Composition,” in A Companion to Homer (ed. Alan J. B. Wace and Frank H. Stubbings; London: Macmillan, 1962), 60 (italics mine).

176

Chapter 5

to understand the nature of ancient oral composition. All of the data, such as inconsistencies and contradictions, that were used to account for sources and editors, are here given an alternative explanation. And this in turn supported the notion of a single author for each poem, if not the same author for both. Once the Parry method was accepted as the best explanation for the nature of the oral tradition that lay behind the Homeric poems, it virtually spelled the death knell for the analytic method and multiple editors, even if some still acknowledged, as Bowra did, that a few later interpolations did get into the text. As both Adam Parry and Lesky noted, the new scholarship on oral tradition was developed outside Germany in the Anglo-Saxon world, which, in addition to the Parrys and Lord, included Bowra, Denys Page, G. S. Kirk, and many more. 180 It is not my purpose to review this whole debate but merely to make a few remarks on one aspect of the discussion that relates to our larger subject—namely, the point at which the oral tradition behind Homer’s poems became fixed in written form. Under the older scheme of Wolf– Wilamowitz, the transition from oral to written and subsequent transmission required the work of editors who collected, combined, reworked, and put the older songs into written form. Following the new understanding of Parry and his school, how is one to account for this transition from oral performance to written text, and where in this process is Homer’s poetry? It is this question that is taken up for critical appraisal by Adam Parry, and it would be useful to consider some of his observations. 181 According to the younger Parry, Milman Parry avoided the “old Homeric Question”: whether the Iliad was a unity and the work of one author or a “composite to which many hands contributed.” His primary interest was in the Homeric tradition, and thus, even if one singer did put together our Iliad, his debt to the tradition was so great that the song could still be said to be a direct manifestation of the tradition and the work of the generations of bards who made and preserved that tradition. . . . At any rate, the revelation of how thoroughly the language of the Iliad is controlled by a formulary system which it took generations of bards to form, was, as Parry clearly saw, one more hopeless impediment to any analytic solution of the old Homeric Question: the style of both Iliad and Odyssey was so uniform in respect of formula and meter that chronological layers or different hands could not conceivably be detected. 182

180. Latacz (Homer, 573–618) provides a bibliography of 45 pages on oral poerty theory through the late 1970s. 181. Parry, “Have We Homer’s Iliad?” 428–66. 182. Ibid., 430. This concern for the oral tradition-history has a strong similarity to the work of H. Gunkel and M. Noth in Pentateuchal studies, although the latter both saw it as preliminary to the documentary analysis rather than replacing it, as Parry did for Homer.

spread is 6 points short

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

177

This left open the question of the transition from the world of heroic narrative kept alive by a succession of bards until its commitment to a written form. By contrast, Parry’s successor, A. B. Lord, “assumed that the Iliad and the Odyssey have each one author or have the same author.” 183 According to Lord, this author must have been an oral poet and one who stood at the point directly preceding its commitment to writing, although this must have been done by means of dictation to a scribe, a performance recorded, though not by the poet himself. 184 This view of the formation of the written text is based on two principles. First, because oral composition consists of extemporaneous performance, the traditional oral song cannot be handed on from one performer to another without fundamental change. This means that the poet Homer can only represent the poet who is performing his great song at the point at which it is turned into a written composition. He states: “It is to the period of writing that we owe the texts of traditional epic which we possess. What the collector does in effect is to petrify a particular performance of a given song by a given singer.” 185 This means that the “collector” must be understood as a scribe taking dictation, not of the usual oral performance, which would be much too fast, but of a quite unusual and perhaps somewhat idealized “sitting.” The second principle is that the one who records the work in writing cannot be the oral poet himself. As Lord states: The real riddle is who wrote down the poems and why. Did Homer write them down himself? The possibility of a literate oral poet writing his own song is very attractive to Homerists, more attractive than the idea that someone else wrote down the Iliad and the Odyssey from Homer’s dictation. It appears to be a welcome compromise; Homer could thus be both an oral poet, as his style indicates, and also a literary poet, as some scholars feel he must be in order to have composed such long and artistically well unified poems. 186

Lord goes on to argue that, even if the oral poet did have some limited writing skills, the moment he began to use this skill to compose his poems, he would at the same time destroy the very techniques of oral improvisation that are basic to his form of poetry. Such written forms of poetry take on a quite different style that is distinguishable from oral style. This scheme, in which the poet Homer stands at the high point and end of the heroic narrative tradition when his work was committed to writing, 183. Ibid., 431. 184. See A. B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960) based on his 1949 dissertation. For a convenient summary of his views, see idem, “Homer and Other Epic Poetry,” in A Companion to Homer (ed. Alan J. B. Wace and Frank H. Stubbings; London: Macmillan, 1962), 179–214, esp. 193–97. 185. Lord, “Homer,” 193. 186. Ibid., 196.

178

Chapter 5

goes against Wolf’s argument that Homer’s poetry reflects an illiterate society and that Homer is removed by several generations from the transition to writing. It is this possible objection that Kirk seeks to address. 187 Kirk accepts the general characterization of the Homeric poetry as given by Parry and Lord, but he rejects the placing of Homer at the very end of the transition from oral to written. He dates the monumental poems of Homer to the eighth century b.c.e., which is when Wilamowitz dated “Homer” but which is still too early for the existence of a very rudimentary alphabetic literacy necessary to produce such works; thus, he dates their transition to writing a century later. This means that between the time of the oral composition of the two poems and their written form there must have been a process of oral transmission. Yet, as Adam Parry points out, this would suggest a quite different kind of oral tradition, one in which songs were memorized and passed on in an unchanged form, instead of extemporaneous oral composition. Even if this kind of tradition transmission existed alongside of, or in place of, oral composition, it could scarcely guarantee that there would not be a rather high rate of change in the poems. A. Parry concludes his critique of Kirk thus: “It is surely evident that an ‘Iliad’ transmitted in a series of oral performances over six generations would end up as something vastly different; so different that it is surely the singer at the end of this process whom we should think of as the author of our text, rather than the hypothetical singer at the beginning who first put together the story of the Iliad.” 188 A. Parry further argues that the poems as we now have them reflect the genius of a poet whose work shows a very subtle differentiation in characterization of the different heroes and gods and quite delicate crafting of the various scenes in relationship to the larger structure and plot; thus, even rather minor alterations in the course of transmission, such as one would need to expect according to Kirk’s theory, would destroy the effect of the whole work. He therefore affirms: “It follows that the name ‘Homer,’ if by this we mean the author of our poem, must be reserved for the poet who composed the Iliad at the time when it was put into writing. The poets who preceded him, even if we imagine them as singing poems the length of the Iliad and dealing with the same theme or group of themes, cannot have been responsible for the essential quality of what we possess.” 189 Finally, A. Parry deals with the question of whether Homer dictated his poems to a scribe or whether he himself used the new medium of the alphabet to put his poetry into written form. Here Parry disputes the evidence that Lord presents from the model of the Yugoslavian poets, whose style of heroic poetry was corrupted and destroyed when they learned to write be187. G. S. Kirk, The Songs of Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962); idem, “Homer and Modern Oral Poetry: Some Confusions,” in Homer: Tradition und Neuerung (ed. J. Latacz; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979), 320–37; idem, The Iliad: A Commentary, vol. 1: Books 1–4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 188. Parry, “Have We Homer’s Iliad?” 438. 189. Ibid., 447.

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

179

cause it was infected by modern literary genres, as an inappropriate, anachronistic analogy. When the Phoenician alphabet was introduced into the Greek world, it was not accompanied by a wide range of literary genres that could have greatly affected the dominant oral form of composition; only after some time did new literary forms arise that replaced the forms of the older heroic poetry. It is for him “a reasonable guess that the Ionian singer of 725 b.c., trained in the use of a formulary technique far more subtle and elaborate than any other we know,” 190 used the new alphabet in order to set down his works in a fixed form. He concludes with the statement that we have the striking coincidence that in the Iliad and the Odyssey we have poems far longer than improvised heroic poems are likely to be, longer than the usual conditions of improvised singing . . . would suggest or allow; and that in this very same period, the use of writing becomes available. It seems difficult not to see in the use of writing both the means and the occasion for the composition, in the improvising style, of poems which must have transcended their own tradition in profundity as well as length, just as that tradition itself surpassed all subsequent traditions of heroic song. 191

It should be evident that, in place of the editors of Peisistratus and subsequent periods, Adam Parry presents Homer as an author and poet who composed his poems in the style of the older oral poets and with the content of a long tradition but who now used writing. A German Homeric scholar who strongly supports the work of both the senior Parry and the particular emphasis by Adam Parry on written composition is Alfred Heubeck. 192 He states: The conclusion that the poets of the Iliad and the Odyssey took substantial elements of their work from the oral tradition of the bards seems to me no longer open to doubt, and I believe that the acceptance of this helps us to grasp an important, though not the decisive, aspect of their intentions and achievements. The fact that they dealt with material already exploited in oral poetry, and that they continued to shape this material by methods very like those of their predecessors and colleagues, seems to me of less relevance than other observations which force themselves on the interpreter. 193

Heubeck then proceeds to explain how Homer has gone beyond the improvisational methods of the oral poets: “But even a superficial glance at the Homeric epics shows that in their creation free improvisation has played 190. Ibid., 458. 191. Ibid., 459. 192. A. Heubeck, “Homeric Studies Today: Results and Prospects,” in Homer: Tradition and Invention (ed. B. C. Fenick; Cincinnati Classical Studies 2; Leiden: Brill, 1978), 1–17; idem, “Blick auf die Neuere Forschung,” in Homer: Tradition und Neuerung (ed. J. Latacz; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979), 556–71; idem, “General Introduction.” 193. Ibid., “General Introduction,” 11.

180

Chapter 5

only the smallest part. . . . Their most important characteristic is the structure of form and content, the ordering of the material, which is planned precisely and in detail from the very beginning.” 194 Heubeck points to the ways in which the individual parts are integrated “into a harmonious and balanced structure,” and this leads to the decisive contrast between the oral poets and Homer: The strength of the Homeric poets lies in the skilful composition, that of the oral poets in improvisation. The creations of oral singers are always new, as chance and the immediate situation dictate; their songs are for the moment and ephemeral. But there is nothing ephemeral about the Homeric epics: they are meant to be permanent and permanently valid, they are not creations of the moment, but reveal planning and careful arrangement. We can recognize how much mental effort and detailed polishing lie behind them, and how many preliminary attempts and drafts must have preceded the finished works. 195

Furthermore, this mode of composition could not be done without the aid of writing, and thus he asserts with Adam Parry: “In short, the poet of the Iliad, I believe, took the decisive step from oral poetry to written composition, a step of epoch-making importance whose effects cannot be overestimated.” 196 To Homer he attributes the Iliad, but the Odyssey, which was composed somewhat later, he ascribes to a younger poet who imitates Homer by a kind of “conscious rivalry” and “creative mimesis.” 197 It appears that the position of Adam Parry on the written composition of the Homeric poems, as affirmed by Heubeck, has gained quite widespread support, as is attested in the remarks of Bernard Knox: It is not surprising that many recent scholars in the field have come to the conclusion that writing did indeed play a role in the creation of these extraordinary poems, that the phenomena characteristic of oral epic demonstrated by Parry and Lord are balanced by qualities peculiar to literary composition. They envisage a highly creative oral poet, master of the repertoire of inherited material and technique, who used the new instrument of writing to build, probably over the course of a lifetime, an epic poem on a scale beyond the imagination of his predecessors.198

By extending the process of transition from oral to written by the poet himself over the period of a lifetime, Knox even allows for some additions and interpolations by the author himself without the least bit of concern that in doing so he is not entirely self-consistent.

194. Ibid. 195. Ibid., 12. 196. Ibid. 197. Ibid., 13. The terms and the idea are borrowed from F. Jacoby. 198. B. Knox, “Introduction,” in Homer: The Iliad (trans. Robert Fagles; New York: Viking, 1990), 20–21.

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

181

However, the debate about whether the poems of Homer were written by the poet himself or are the result of dictation remains unresolved in current scholarship, and perhaps it will always be unresolvable. Janko, in his commentary on the Iliad (1992), has expressed his support for A. B. Lord’s comment “that we are dealing with two oral poems dictated by a single, no doubt illiterate, poet. Whether he knew how to write is essentially irrelevant; what matters is whether the existence of writing made any difference to the quality and scale of the poem. There are too many uncorrected blunders, like the dead man who is carried off groaning at 13.423, to allow us to suppose that the poet or his amanuensis used writing to revise his poem.” 199 Against those who “deem writing indispensable,” Janko points to the modern evidence on oral poetry, which proves that “vast epics can be created, given suitable conditions, without the use of writing,” and that literacy is a threat to the demise of the oral poet’s work. However, the evidence on oral poetry to which he refers has not been unequivocally in support of Lord’s notion of dictation as Janko suggests, and to this we will now turn. In fact, support of Adam Parry’s position against Lord has come from specialists in the field of “oral literature” as it relates to literacy, notably anthropologists who have done fieldwork in places other than Yugoslavia. Ruth Finnigan, in a conference paper, “What Is Oral Literature Anyway?” addresses the issues raised by the Parry-Lord theory of “oral poetry” and strongly disputes that the method of oral composition evident among the oral poets of Yugoslavia can be generalized to apply to all oral poetry or oral epic narration. 200 She makes two basic points. First, she questions whether there is such a thing as “oral literature” that one can clearly distinguish from written literature on the basis of a distinct “oral style,” such as the use of formulaic language. This issue is also tied to the notion that literacy is destructive of this style. She argues from her comparative African material that “oral and written literature often in practice comprise relative and overlapping rather than mutually exclusive categories.” 201 She further argues that literate persons who have learned the art of oral performance can often do so quite well, and literacy does not necessarily affect their poetry adversely. The second point she makes has to do with “oral composition.” She states: It cannot be assumed without a detailed investigation of comparative evidence beyond just the Yugoslav case that ‘oral poetry’ and, correspondingly, ‘oral composition’ is of one predictable kind. There may be a number of different ways of composing orally, corresponding to the different social circumstances of the literary piece involved or the varying ways in which 199. Janko, Iliad, 37. 200. R. Finnigan, “What Is Oral Literature? Comments in the Light of Some African and Other Comparative Material,” in Oral Literature and the Formula (ed. B. A. Stolz and R. S. Shannon; Ann Arbor, Mich.: Center for the Coördination of Ancient and Modern Studies, 1976), 127–66. See also idem, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance and Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 58–87. 201. Finnigan, “What Is Oral Literature?” 137.

182

Chapter 5

literary production and distribution is organized in different cultures and periods. The impression, therefore, that one receives from oral-formulaic work that there is something clear-cut and definite called ‘oral composition’ is misleading. 202

Furthermore, Finnigan disputes that “oral poetry is always composed-inperformance” as Lord asserts. “This,” she says, “is just not true empirically.” She continues: “there are a number of known cases where the emphasis is on composition before performance and of instances where . . . memorisation rather than improvisation is in fact involved. In these cases, the aspects of composition and performance, conjoined so inseparably in the ParryLord analysis, can be split apart.” 203 Finnigan sums up her study thus: Since, then, there is a great variety of oral literary forms and a number of differing ways in which “oral composition” can take place, there is no short cut to discovering the exact process of composition and performance involved: in each case one has to ask further detailed questions about the circumstances and conventions of the particular piece itself and of its social and poetic background, as well as the personality . . . of the individual poet. It is entirely appropriate too, I suggest, to ask about its relation to the written word. To rule out a possible relationship with writing on the grounds of some supposed absolute quality called “orality” seems totally unjustified, and I would certainly go along with considering the kinds of questions raised by, say, . . . Adam Parry (1966) about the possible relation of Homeric epics to writing, even at the same time as saying they are in some senses “oral.” 204

Likewise, Jack Goody, in The Interface between the Written and the Oral (1987), 205 supports Adam Parry, against Kirk, arguing that the oral poetry of a particular poet could not be transmitted without change over several generations and, against Lord, that an oral poet could use writing to compose or preserve his own work. Goody sums up his view thus: Reviewing the general literature on the comparison of the Homeric composition with the other ‘epic’ forms, I concluded the genre was less typical of oral cultures than of early literate ones, a suggestion that is supported by other features of the style and content of the poems; the structure is not inconsistent with literary influence. In making this point I do not mean to suggest that the author of the Iliad was necessarily literate. But the poem as we know it appears to have been considerably affected in form and content by the existence of writing, if only by being inevitably transformed when it became transcribed, by the author or another, as a written text. 206 202. Ibid., 145. 203. Ibid., 146. 204. Ibid., 161–62. 205. Jack Goody, The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 78–109. 206. Ibid., 108.

spread is 3 points long

The Rise of Historical Criticism in Classical Studies

183

This statement does not come down firmly on the side of dictation or on the side of the poet himself as being responsible for the written form. Instead, he argues that in a “partially-literate” society there is no sharp demarcation between the two realms of oral and written. Rosalind Thomas, in Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (1992), makes much the same point. 207 Regarding the issue of how the poems were transmitted from oral to written form, whether “the monumental poet himself dictates to a scribe” (Lord) or “the poet writes it down himself” (Adam Parry) or “the poems, transmitted orally, are only written down much later” (Kirk), she states: “I would argue that the debate has been inconclusive partly because it draws too strict a division between oral and written poetry, and between oral and written communication, and partly because it is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of writing and literacy.” 208 On the first point, Thomas expands on Adam Parry’s argument that in early Greek society, where there was little literacy for a long period of time, the line between “orality” and literacy was very vague, so the presence of a written text would not have suppressed oral composition. The conception that a text could be fixed in writing for several centuries did not exist, and, even if the poet dictated the text, it was not necessarily his last and definitive performance; and if he wrote the text down himself over a period of time, he could have modified it as he wished. The comparison to improvisation in musical composition, especially in jazz, can be drawn; this is true also in older classical music, which does not preclude written composition. Thomas points out that, in the case of the Yugoslav bards, “The first thing they used their writing skills for was to write down their own poetry in its fully formulated style.” 209 And the same was true of oral poets in Africa who learned to write. Thomas thus concludes: In short the severe division so often drawn between the oral poet and the literate one does not hold universally, even if it holds true in some areas. The use of writing in early Greece, when seen in the wider context, more probably duplicated the activity of the oral bards rather than suppressing it. It is even conceivable that the poet of the Iliad could have used writing to record his poetry, or more likely, part of it. . . . Whether or not Homer knew the art of writing, he would have remained an ‘oral’ poet in any meaningful sense of the word. 210

What should appear obvious in this discussion of oral composition is that there is certainly no place for a “bookish” editor. Consequently, these critiques and modifications of the Parry-Lord understanding of the nature of oral composition in Homer do not diminish in any way the revolutionary effect that the whole discussion has had on the 207. R. Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 29–51. 208. Ibid., 45. 209. Ibid., 49. 210. Ibid., 49–50.

184

Chapter 5

older “analytic” approach to the editing of Homer. On the contrary, what this new and broader understanding of the nature of “oral poetry” and “oral composition” does is make completely obsolete the older scheme of the Wolf–Wilamowitz era, in which a number of independent songs were collected and arranged into a fixed written form for publication by an editor. As Lesky asserts, this whole scheme is a blatant anachronism, and nothing in the subsequent critique and refinement of the Parry-Lord “oral-poetry theory” makes the analyst’s editor any more acceptable than it was before. The transition from oral tradition to written form does not require the agency of an editor, as suggested originally by Wolf and propagated by the “analysts” in their various literary hypotheses for over a century and a half. Nor is there any place for editors to combine individual songs and story themes; heroic poetry by its very nature contains multiple combinations of this sort, and the notion of editors conflating themes and traditions is anachronistic and completely inappropriate. Concerning the redactional analysis of critics “in the 150 years after Wolf,” Martin West states that “the difficulties on which these ‘analysts’ based their discussions have been resolved through a greater understanding of oral poetry, and now most scholars see each [poem] as the work of one author. Whether he was the same for both remains uncertain.” 211

211. OCD, 718.

6

The History of the “Editor” in Biblical Criticism from Simon to Wellhausen It is not my purpose to give a detailed history of biblical scholarship in the modern era. Instead, I will focus on a few important figures that seem to me to illustrate and clarify how the concept of editor or redactor came into use as a means of explaining the compositional development of the Old Testament, especially in theories about the nature of the Pentateuch and historical books, where the redactor plays such a dominant role. I believe that it will become clear that the “editor” in biblical antiquity is invented and reinvented on the analogy of the modern editor, whether favorably or unfavorably, until it eventually takes on a life of its own beyond anything recognizable as an “editor” today. We begin with Richard Simon.

Richard Simon: Editing Historical Documents The story of the “editor” begins with the rise of historical criticism in biblical scholarship in the person and work of the French priest Richard Simon, a member of the Congregation of the Oratory, and his publication of Histoire critique du Vieux Testament in 1678, and, although it was placed on the index by the Catholic Church and most copies of the first publication destroyed, it was reissued in another form in Protestant Netherlands in 1685. 1 It was translated into English in 1689 and almost certainly had an influence on Richard Bentley. 2 A century later (1776), it was translated into German by Johann Salomo Semler, and in Germany it had a great impact, so that Simon was viewed as the father of historical criticism in biblical studies. 1. See A. Bernus, Richard Simon et son histoire critique du Vieux Testament: La critique biblique au siècle de Louis XIV (Lausanne, 1869; repr., Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969), 77–96; J. Steinmann, Richard Simon et les origines de l’exégèse biblique (Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1960), 100–103. Steinmann’s very slim review of Simon’s principal work is not very useful for this discussion. 2. See L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (2nd ed.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 169–70: “This [Histoire critique] seems to be the first attempt to write a monograph on the transmission of an ancient text, and despite its unattractive appearance and concern with polemic it contained important exemplifications of critical principles in the chapters on the manuscripts, and it is impossible to believe that Bentley did not know and approve them.”

- 185 -

186

Chapter 6

Within his very perceptive treatment of Simon, William McKane has some interesting remarks about Simon’s literary understanding of the Old Testament that are relevant to our study. 3 He reports that Simon regarded the Pentateuch as made up of materials derived from archives and that it was therefore the work of archivists. McKane states: [Simon] is working with a crude idea of historicity, according to which all material in the Old Testament is historiographical. All that needs to be demonstrated is that it has been safely conserved in archives, and transmitted and edited by reliable archivists. It is true that he describes these archivists as “divine writers” and “inspired prophets,” but also preachers and unveilers of the future whose harangues are deposited in archives. On the whole, however, he is reducing inspiration to professional competence in the selection, abridgement and expansion of archives, and so he gives the palm to Ezra, the scribe par excellence, whose editorial superintendence was the most crucial and far-reaching in the entire process of transmission. He observes that these editors, who are preserved from error by a special divine endowment, sometimes indicate the archives from which they are selecting. 4

The works that Simon has in mind for these archival sources are: “The Book of the History of Solomon,” “The Book of the History of the Kings of Israel,” and “The Book of the History of the Kings of Judah.” 5 As we shall see, the notion that archival sources lay behind the whole corpus from Genesis to 2 Kings has a considerable impact on later, nineteenth-century historical criticism. The fact that the biblical historians who were responsible for collecting and arranging this material are characterized as “editors” is very significant. Whether or not Simon was anticipated by an earlier scholar depends on how one views the evidence. H.-J. Kraus argues that before Simon the notion of biblical editors appears in the work of Andreas Masius, a Catholic scholar of the sixteenth century. 6 In his critical commentary on Joshua, Masius makes the following statement, as quoted by Kraus: Quare futilis commenticiaque est veterum Judaeorum sententia; quam in suo Talmude scriptam reliquerunt. . . . Mihi certe est opinio, ut putem, Esdram sive solum sive una cum aequalibus, insigni pietate et eruditione viris, caelesti spiritu afflatum non solum hunc Josuae, verum etiam Judicum, Regum, alios quos in sacris ut vocant bibliis legimus libros ex diversis annalibus apud ecclesiam Dei conservatis compilasse in eumque ordinem, qui jam olim habetur, redigisse atque disposuisse. 7 3. W. McKane, Selected Christian Hebraists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 111–50. 4. Ibid., 115. 5. Ibid., 232 n. 22. 6. H.-J. Kraus, Geschichte der historisch-kritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments von der Reformation bis zur Gegenwart (Neukirchen: Erziehungsvereins, 1956), 35–36. 7. My translation: “Therefore, the position of the ancient Jews, which they left in writing in their Talmud, is futile and fictitious. . . . To be sure, I for one am of this opinion, that

spread is 9 points long

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

187

What Masius has done is to take the notion that Ezra and the men of the Great Synagogue were responsible for the preservation and transmission of the Hebrew Scriptures 8 and has attributed to them the kind of scholarly and editorial activity that characterized the scholars of the Renaissance, who attempted to recover from religious archives the texts of the Bible and other classical works. Masius has rationalized the early Jewish legend to make it fit the reality that was familiar to him. The ecclesia dei, in which the biblical texts were preserved, must refer, in this case, to the religious community of Jerusalem during the Second Temple period, but it could be construed by later readers of these remarks as referring to the storing of texts in the archives of the temple itself. Simon very likely took over the suggestion of scribes editing biblical books from Masius, and if this is the case, he then pushed the editorial process back from the time of textual transmission in the post-Ezra period into the period of the monarchy: the inspired scribes are now those who put the books together during the period of the First Temple. He further developed the role of editors in the compositional process of the biblical books well beyond the role suggested by Masius. 9 Thus, it is to Simon that we must attribute the notion that scribal editors played a major role in the composition of the historical books of the Hebrew Bible. McKane makes some additional interesting comments about the relationship between the idea that literary editors constructed the ancient text and the subsequent process of text transmission. He states: It is a matter of some difficulty to establish how these higher-critical observations are to be related to Simon’s text-critical opinions on the Hebrew Bible. Simon makes much of the imperfections of the Hebrew text and of the circumstance that the originals (autographs) are not preserved and that only defective exemplars (copies) are available. The most reasonable interpretation is that the process of transmission which he describes, involving archives and archivists or scribes, is not intended to convey any suggestion of defect or imperfection and that it goes beyond the limits of textual criticism proper. It is described as an organic process of selection and modification of existing archives. This implies that in such a process of weeding out and supplementation the representation of the raw archives in the biblical text is constantly changing, and that this transformation goes on until the text is fixed. Then, and only then, will it be possible Ezra, whether alone or together with contemporaries of his, men of outstanding piety and erudition, inspired by the heavenly spirit, compiled not only the book of Joshua, but also those of the Judges, the Kings, other books that we read in what is called the Holy Bible, out of annals preserved in the church of God, and edited and arranged them in this order which exists from early on.” I must thank Paul Dion for helping me to understand and translate this text, although I take full responsibility for the interpretation offered here. 8. M. ªAbot 1:1. For one account of how Ezra, under the influence of the holy spirit, dictated the 24 books of the Scriptures, as well as 70 other books, to 5 scribes over a 40-day period, see 4 Ezra 14. 9. There is a direct connection from Masius, through his student Bento Pereira, to Simon, who was the student of Pereira, and Simon also refers directly to Masius’s commentary on Joshua. See Kraus, Geschichte, 37; also McKane, Selected Christian Hebraists, 140.

188

Chapter 6

to speak of autographs and copies and to describe the transmission of the text in text-critical terms. This, in the post-Ezra period, will bring us into the area of mechanical defects in the copying of the text, in a word into the sphere of scribal errors. 10

It appears from this assessment of Simon that he distinguished between the “editors” behind the original fixed text and the subsequent copiers, in whom he was most interested. But it is a short step to see editorial activity as covering the whole process from composition down to the establishment of a fixed standard text, as suggested in the approach of Wolf toward the text of Homer. This is especially the case if the Alexandrian scholars are viewed as editors, and the same would apply to the Masoretes. As we will see throughout our study, it is the disputed area between the supposed end of composition and the “standardization of the text” that becomes fraught with so many problems for the understanding of the “editor.” McKane goes on to discuss Simon’s understanding of the period of textual transmission after the text has been fixed at the end of the compositional period—that is, after the creation of the autograph, which is the beginning of the period when textual errors appear. He states: This point has been reached when Simon observes that the Hebrew text available to the Seventy was different from the Hebrew text ‘of today’, and that the Jews corrected the Hebrew text in the period after the Septuagint translation. Connected with this is the view that manuscripts copied for use in synagogues achieved a higher degree of accuracy than those copied for private use and that the Septuagint was translated from the latter class of Hebrew manuscripts. This is an effort to explain the deviations of the Hebrew Vorlage of the Septuagint from the Hebrew text ‘of today’. Simon supposes that faulty mechanical transmission is partly due to the disappearance of Hebrew in the post-exilic period, its replacement by Aramaic, and the consequent tendency of copyists to introduce Aramaisms. It was one of the tasks of Massoretic scholarship to correct these, but some have survived. He holds that the interchangeability of a and h is also related to Aramaic influence, originating with copyists who confused the two phonemes after the return from Babylon. 11

The notion that there are differences in type or quality of manuscripts and that differences between text-families or text-types can be accounted for in this way is a principle that becomes important in later textual criticism. What is quite remarkable here is that the Vorlage of the Septuagint is being denigrated as a text of the vulgar variety and therefore of inferior quality to that of the Masoretic text-tradition. Simon also paints a picture of “Massoretic scholarship” in which the Masoretes critically correct the defects of the text that they inherited.

10. McKane, ibid., 115. 11. Ibid., 115–16.

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

189

McKane deals at some length with Simon’s evaluation of Jewish biblical scholarship and his review of the Fathers and past opinion regarding the deliberate corruption of the Hebrew text for anti-Christian and apologetic reasons. McKane states: “Simon’s own conclusion is that there is no compelling evidence that the Jews have corrupted their own scriptures.” 12 Instead, it is primarily a case of his challenging rabbinic and Masoretic scholarship, especially in the Masoretic use of Qere-Kethib. Although Simon “recognizes that this device has to be associated with the scrupulous preservation of the consonantal text by the Massoretes,” he is more concerned with the fact “that the Qere is sometimes to be regarded as the correction of a copyist’s error, and a correction has a different status from a textual variant founded on manuscript evidence.” 13 Simon’s approach is to follow the text-critical procedures of his own time and decide on the best reading between the Kethib and Qere. “His programme is to eliminate by critical decisions ‘variants’ which are a consequence of copyists’ errors and to preserve only those instances of Qere-Kethib which represent ‘real variants’, locating the better variant in the text and the inferior one in the margin.” 14 McKane suggests some weakness in Simon’s evaluation of what the Masoretes are about and worries that his method might eliminate genuinely ancient readings and suppress textual evidence. What is of importance for us, however, is the fact that Simon seems to understand the “editing” of the Masoretes as analogous to a form of conservative text-critical editing practiced in his own day. Simon’s comparison of the Samaritan Pentateuch with the MT notes a number of differences with respect to the use of a consistent script plenums of vowel letters in the SamP versus the mixed use of vowel letters in conjunction with the system of vowel points in the MT, as well as the absence of the double readings of the Qere-Kethib system in the SamP and a “tendency to fill out the sense of certain passages by insertions from parallel passages.” 15 From this comparison of Hebrew exemplars, McKane observes: Simon’s conclusion is that where variants in the Massoretic text and the Samaritan Pentateuch both make good sense, they should be noted as significant variants of the same original. The scrupulousness of the Massoretes has been overdone and the number of examples of Qere-Ketib can be considerably reduced, but the elimination of all these alternatives in the Samaritan Pentateuch is a foreclosing of the openness of the sense of the consonantal text. The very excessiveness of the textual conservatives of the Massoretes inspires confidence in their conscientiousness and integrity. Hence, while Simon would use the Samaritan Pentateuch to correct 12. Ibid., 118. 13. Ibid., 120. We will see in other contexts that this is the tension between recensio and emendatio in the textual criticism of the day. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 122. The tendency of the Samaritan Pentateuch to augment the text with quotations from elsewhere is paralleled by the same tendency in the long texts of Homer, a fact that we noted in the previous chapter.

190

Chapter 6

the Massoretic text, if he expresses any preference it is for the consonantal text preserved by the Massoretes. 16

This summary suggests that Simon regarded the Samaritan Pentateuch as a carefully edited recension existing alongside the MT but having a much less conservative character. When Simon takes up the issue of the Septuagint and its relationship to, or comparison with, the MT, a number of issues are raised. The one that is of concern to us here, however, has to do with Simon’s understanding of the nature of the Hebrew Vorlage of the LXX. Thus, McKane observes: The main thrust of Simon’s argument is that by the time the Septuagint came into existence there was already a ‘diversity of exemplars’ attributable to careless copying in an earlier period, ‘when the study of criticism was entirely neglected’. He does not therefore propose to correct the Hebrew text ‘of today’ on the basis of the Hebrew Vorlage of the Septuagint ‘because the Seventy did not have the true original (le véritable original) any more than we have and their copy of the Hebrew text had as many errors as ours’. 17

From this analysis of Simon, it appears that he did not regard the LXX as a recension (i.e., the work of textual critics), as he did the MT and SamP; he regarded the LXX merely as a translation of an exemplar or copy, and not a particularly good one at that. Simon’s primary purpose is to use the Septuagint to demonstrate that the extant Hebrew text upon which the Protestants based their sola scriptura was faulty. “It was already in disarray at the time when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, and the Jews made subsequent efforts to refine and correct it, but, even so, the text ‘of today’ has many imperfections.” 18 Thus, the editing of the Hebrew text according to this view took place long after the translation of the Septuagint, in the time of the Masoretes; it is not possible to develop a notion of three recensions directly from Simon’s views. However, a different judgment about the quality of the Vorlage of the Septuagint perhaps could restore it to the level of the other two “recensions.” To recapitulate: already with Simon in the seventeenth century there are two kinds of editors who played a role in the history of the biblical text. First, we have the editors who as archivists assembled and arranged the materials into their final compositional form; of these, Ezra the scribe is the supreme example. The model is that of the historical editor who reproduces diplomatic copies of historical sources with minimal interpretive joins and connections in order to produce the biblical “histories” of the Pentateuch and historical books. The second type of editor is the one who is confronted with multiple defective copies of the earlier works and who must now critically collate and emend these texts to produce a standard text, a recension, 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 123. 18. Ibid., 124.

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

191

of which the MT and the Samaritan Pentateuch are examples. Both of these models of editors are drawn from the arena of humanistic learning in Simon’s own time and are entirely anachronistic for the early history of the Bible, but both of them continued to influence in modified form the scholarship of historical and textual criticism down to the present time.

Editor as Compiler of Fragments and Documents: From Eichhorn to Vater Johann Gottfried Eichhorn The important facts of Eichhorn’s career that need to be emphasized are, first, his training at Göttingen under J. D. Michaelis in biblical studies and under C. G. Heyne in classics, with whom he had a close association for the rest of Heyne’s life; and, second, his deep commitment to “Oriental” (Near Eastern) studies, which he made a fundamental aspect of Old Testament study. 19 Eichhorn’s first major appointment was in Jena in 1775 in Oriental languages, and it was here that he wrote his Einleitung ins Alte Testament (1780–83). This ultimately earned him a position on the faculty of philosophy at Göttingen, alongside his former teachers, in 1788. Eichhorn was primarily a philologist and, although he lectured on the whole of the Bible, as well as Semitic languages, he was a rather unsophisticated and conservative theologian. His Einleitung went through a number of editions and modifications throughout his career. He was a very influential teacher, and his scholarship had far-reaching effects. Eichhorn’s method was to apply the principles of “higher criticism” to the study of the Old Testament. By “higher criticism” he meant the philological method, practiced in classical studies, that he had learned from Heyne. 20 19. For details on Eichhorn’s career, see T. K. Cheyne, Founders of Old Testament Criticism (New York: Scribner’s, 1893), 13–26; J. E. Carpenter and G. Harford, The Composition of the Hexateuch (London: Longmans, Green, 1902), 69–71; Kraus, Geschichte, 120–43; John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (London: SPCK, 1984), 15–22; C. Houtman, Der Pentateuch: Die Geschichte seiner Erforschung neben einer Auswertung (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1994), 72–76. 20. Carpenter quotes from the preface of J. G. Eichhorn’s Einleitung ins Alte Testament (2nd ed.; Leipzig, 1787) to suggest that Eichhorn was the first to use the designation “the higher criticism” (The Composition of the Hexateuch, 69). He gives the following translation: “I have been obliged to bestow the greatest amount of labour on a hitherto entirely unworked field, the investigation of the inner constitution (Beschaffenheit) of the separate books of the Old Testament by the aid of Higher Criticism (a new name to no Humanist).” Carpenter, however, appears to me to have misunderstood this passage. Cheyne (Founders, 23) renders the same passage (in my view more clearly) as follows: “My greatest trouble I had to bestow on a hitherto unworked field—on the investigation of the inner nature of the several writings of the Old Testament with the help of the Higher Criticism (not a new name to any humanist).” The humanist that Eichhorn almost certainly had in mind was Heyne. Carpenter (p. 70) then goes on to quote a much longer portion from the Einleitung, vol. 2, p. 295 #424, part of which states: “The interpreter, when the Higher Criticism has separated his documents for him, need no longer wrestle with difficulties which before were

192

Chapter 6

This led him to the two-document ( Jehovistic and Elohistic, based on the divine names) hypothesis of Genesis, a discovery that he claims he made independent of Astruc. It is significant that Heyne, and not Michaelis, was supportive of Eichhorn’s work. Nevertheless, Eichhorn still regarded Moses as the one responsible for the combination of these documents and did not yet adopt the notion of a redactor in his study of the Pentateuch. Even when Eichhorn, in his fourth edition of 1823, gave up the notion that Moses was the author of all of the Pentateuch, he speaks primarily of a “collection” (Sammlung) of historical documents in the Pentateuch that were arranged and combined by a “compiler” (Sammler). 21 Perhaps this idea arose under the influence of the work of Ilgen (see below), whose work he followed closely. Eichhorn likewise acknowledges that in addition to the two documents there were numerous additions and glosses, a situation that he regarded as characteristic of all works of antiquity. The rest of the Pentateuch beyond Genesis consisted of a number of separate documents from the Mosaic age. At this point, it is hard to characterize Eichhorn’s approach as merely “documentary”; it possessed many features that were similar to a “fragmentary” approach. Nevertheless, it was important for Eichhorn to defend these documents and writings as early and authentic historical sources. Eichhorn’s view of sources and documents closely follows Simon’s; the similarity is evident in his view on the deposit of documents in the “national library,” which he considers to have been the temple library. 22 As a consequence of

insoluble. He will no longer explain the second chapter of Genesis by the first, or the first by the second and the world will cease to lay on Moses the burden of the sins of his younger expositors. Finally, when the Higher Criticism has distinguished between the writers, and characterized each of them by the general method, his diction, his favorite expressions and other peculiarities, her lower sister [text criticism] who occupies herself only with words and spies out false readings, lays down her own rules and principles for determining the text, discovering glosses, and detecting interpolations and transpositions.” The term “higher criticism” entered into common usage in classical studies as a phrase that stood for the analysis of sources in Homer; it became a term of derision to “unitarians.” In F. A. Wolf’s correspondence with Heyne (9 January 1796), as translated in the subsidia of the Prolegomena to Homer, 1795 ([Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985], 245), Wolf refers to higher and lower criticism in a metaphorical way as if the terminology is shared by both him and Heyne. After dealing with some unpleasantness concerning details of dates and references, he states: “It would be more pleasant to take a stroll into the so-called higher criticism, if only my business with this lower one had not so exhausted me.” It seems clear that Wolf here is referring to Heyne’s use of this term and to Heyne’s basic approach to Homer. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Wolf was being regarded as a pioneer of higher criticism. The historian B. G. Niebuhr described Wolf’s Prolegomena as “those wonderworthy investigations in which the higher branch of criticism reacht its perfection” (quoted by Grafton, “Introduction,” in Wolf’s Prolegomena, 28). Grafton quotes a number of additional scholars of that period on Wolf’s “higher criticism.” 21. See B. Seidel, Karl David Ilgen und die Pentateuchforschung im Umkreis der sogenannten älteren Urkundenhypothese (BZAW 213; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1993), 194–95. 22. J. G. Eichhorn, Introduction to the Study of the Old Testament (trans. G. T. Gollop; London: Spottiswoode, 1888), section 3, pp. 15–16.

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

193

the temple’s destruction, the archives and historical works along with many of the prophecies were also destroyed; what survived was fragmentary and in copies that were not always of the best quality. The Bible consists primarily of a collection of these fragmentary remains, at least for the works that report on the period before the exile. Furthermore, the present text results from “private copies” of manuscripts derived from the period before the Babylonian exile, the time when most of the corruptions came into the text. 23 We have the distinct impression that Eichhorn pictures the postexilic period as a time much like the Renaissance and early modern period, when there was a preoccupation with the search for manuscripts that had survived the medieval period, which were to be collected and corrected by scholarly editors and collectors. During the period of the monarchy, Eichhorn considers the writings of Moses to have been very faithfully transmitted, given their great importance, and to have been reproduced in numerous copies. Likewise concerning the historical books, he states: “The books of Samuel, of Kings, and of the Chronicles, are summaries taken from the complete state annals which are occasionally quoted, and from their contents, must have been intended as manuals of the history of the Jewish monarchy, and according to this destination have been undoubtedly current in numerous copies.” 24As abridgments of the official records, he views them as the work of editors. Referring to the two different versions of the reigns of David and Solomon in Samuel– Kings and Chronicles, he states: “This doubly edited work of the lives of the two kings was placed at the head of two chronicles, one of the kingdom of Israel, one of that of Judah, which again were so epitomised as to appear meant to be a popular text-book.” 25 To Eichhorn, this meant editions of historical texts produced by editors for wide distribution. The anachronism of this understanding of the development of biblical texts is obvious today. A significant modification and clarification of Eichhorn’s understanding of Genesis is found in his book Urgeschichte, which was published with an introduction by Johann Philipp Gabler. It focuses on a new understanding of myth that becomes important for the subsequent treatment of biblical narrative. 26 After reviewing various previous understandings of myth, Eichhorn proposes a new definition: In general, myths are legends of the ancient world told in the way people of the time thought and spoke about what they perceived. In these myths one must not expect an event to be portrayed as it actually happened but, rather, as it necessarily presented itself to that time period with its way of thinking and reasoning, based on the way it perceived the world, and in

23. Ibid., sect. 4, p. 21. 24. Ibid., sect. 4, p. 19. 25. Ibid., sect. 4, p. 20. 26. See Kraus, Geschichte, 136–40. See also J. W. Rogerson, Myth in Old Testament Interpretation (BZAW 134; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), 3–8.

194

Chapter 6

the only way its language and mode of representation could present an event: pictorially, as the eye perceived it, dramatically.27

Kraus points to an indebtedness to his teacher and colleague, the classicist C. G. Heyne, who “shaped the new understanding of myth, and Eichhorn and Gabler took it over into Old Testament biblical scholarship.” 28 This new understanding of myth associates it with a certain level of social development and a primitive way of thinking about the world, in “der Kindheit der Welt.” The task, then, is to enter empathetically into the thought world of the ancients, and in this respect, myth belongs to the same sociological process of development. Eichhorn and Gabler were primarily concerned with how divine revelation was mediated through this process, especially as it was expressed in the primeval history of Genesis, but they left open the application of sociological understanding of myth (Sage) to the later development of biblical literature. It is a major thesis of Anthony Grafton that Eichhorn served as a model for Wolf’s work. He draws a number of parallels between Wolf and Eichhorn: Like Wolf, Eichhorn studied at Göttingen under Heyne and Michaelis. He returned there as professor in 1788. . . . Like Wolf, Eichhorn treated his text as a historical and an anthropological document, the much-altered remnant of an early stage in the development of human culture. Like Wolf, he held that the original work had undergone radical changes, so that the serious Biblical scholar must reconstruct “the history of the text.” Like Wolf too, he saw the true history of the text as its ancient history, before the standardized manuscripts now extant had been prepared. With the work of the Masoretes, he wrote, “properly ends the history of the written text; for the chief work was accomplished, and the Hebrew text continued now, some insignificant changes excepted, true in all its oncefor-all established pattern. . . .” Like Wolf, Eichhorn paid much attention to the development of the literary language in which the texts were couched, the history of the alphabet and writing implements by which they were recorded, and the growth of a canon of books accepted as genuine. Like Wolf, though from the opposite standpoint, he compared the Bible’s growth and fate with Homer’s. 29

At first blush, this list of similarities is impressive, but I think the connection and influence of Eichhorn on Wolf has been overstated. The fact that Wolf also studied under Heyne and Michaelis already accounts for many of the similarities, particularly the negative attitude of Michaelis toward the Masoretes, his concern to establish the history of the text, and the application 27. J. G. Eichhorn, Urgeschichte (1792–93), 484; cited in Kraus, Geschichte, 138. See appendix, p. 402 below, for German original. 28. Kraus, ibid., 139. The German reads: “hat das neue Verständnis des Mythos geprägt, und Eichhorn und Gabler haben es in die alttestamentliche Biblewissenschaft übernommen.” 29. Quotation taken from introduction to Wolf, Prolegomena, 20–21; see also Grafton, Defenders of the Text, 235–39.

spread is 9 points long

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

195

of “Orientalist” philology to the study of the Hebrew text. Comparisons between the Hebrew Bible and Homer were a commonplace in biblical studies. Grafton treats the bridging of the disciplines of classics and theology as exceptional, but in fact throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was a strong connection between classics and “Oriental” studies, in which Hebrew Bible was more at home than in theology. It is true, as Grafton asserts, that Wolf was familiar with Eichhorn’s Einleitung and may have modeled some of his discussion on it, and Eichhorn spends a considerable amount of time arguing for a major library in Jerusalem in the Second Temple period, which he may have seens as a parallel with Alexandria. Nevertheless, Grafton plays down the differences between them, even though they are significant. Wolf is quite dismissive of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, disputes literacy in the age of Moses, and is quite mocking in his remarks about Moses’s large supply of papyrus with which to compose the Pentateuch. 30 In my view, the differences between Wolf and Eichhorn are more important than matters of detail, as Grafton suggests, and have important implications for the way in which future literary (“higher”) criticism develops. First of all, Eichhorn’s history of the text, following in the tradition of criticism since Simon, has to do primarily with the pre-Masoretic texts and versions, such as the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint, the Targumim, and the many translations. The concern is to establish the relative value of these different text-traditions, particularly the Masoretic Text versus the Septuagint, which was so often a matter of theological controversy. There is nothing quite comparable to this in Homeric criticism, and what Wolf meant by the text-history of Homer prior to the Alexandrians was quite different from the text-critical discussion in Eichhorn. Second, Eichhorn’s use of linguistic and other criteria, the distinction in the different names for God, and so on, especially in Genesis, was intended to serve source criticism—that is, to identify the historical sources used by Moses for the period before his own time. These sources were collections of documents, and Moses was a “compiler” and an author. He is never regarded as just an editor. The older “Documentary Hypothesis” that develops from Eichhorn regularly speaks of written sources that are brought together by compilers. Wolf, on the other hand, suggests that the sources of Homer are oral and were first collected and “edited” by Peisistratus to create the earliest written recension, the beginning of the text-history, and this is fundamentally different from Eichhorn. 31 As we will see, it is this model of Wolf that soon finds its way into Pentateuchal studies and becomes basic to the new Documentary Hypothesis. Nevertheless, what is very important for our study is the similarity between Wolf and Eichhorn in their treatment of the Alexandrian and Masoretic textual traditions of Homer and the Bible, respectively. There is the 30. Wolf, Prolegomena, 85 n. 25, 146. 31. Grafton admits in a note (Wolf, Prolegomena, 22 n. 54) that Eichhorn’s analysis of the individual books of the Bible, such as Genesis, took place after his general text-history, not as part of it. This is no small difference.

196

Chapter 6

obvious similarity between the Alexandrian scholars of Homer and the Masoretes, in that both exercised great respect for the text as they had received it and took great pains to transmit it in a way that they regarded as most faithful to the original. In neither case did this correspond to the way in which modern editors deal with ancient texts. Yet, the Alexandrians, by the use of their critical symbols, marginal comments, and commentaries, and the Masoretes by their own markings and Masorah, seemed to reflect the same concerns for an established text. This was especially true if one supposed, as Wolf did on the analogy of the Masoretes, that the Alexandrian scholars were directly responsible for the stabilization of the vulgate text of Homer. Both were understood, on the analogy of modern textual critics, to be “editors” responsible for fixed and final “editions” of their ancient texts. 32 The implications of this editorial model for textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible will be taken up below. Karl David Ilgen Ilgen succeeded Eichhorn as Professor of Oriental Literature at Jena, serving from 1794 to 1802. 33 From 1794 to 1799 he was on the Faculty of Philosophy as a classicist, biblical scholar, and Semitist. From 1799 to 1802 he was on the faculties of both Philosophy and Theology, doing much less in classics but also now working in New Testament as well as Old Testament. As a member of the Faculty of Philosophy, he frequently offered a lecture course and readings in Homer, both the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as the Homeric Hymns, and published a monograph, Hymni homerici (Halle, 1796) and a work on the Greek scholia (1798). 34 This combination of classical and biblical research is important when we consider the significance of Ilgen’s work on the Pentateuch. Ilgen applied the methods of higher criticism used in the classics to his Old Testament studies and published his results in 1798 as Die Urkunden des Jerusalem’schen Tempelarchivs in ihrer Urgestalt (The Documents of the Jerusalem Temple Archives in their Original Form). It is this work for which Ilgen is best known. In it he develops Eichhorn’s notion of dis-

32. See Grafton, in Wolf, Prolegomena, 23–25; and Wolf’s remarks in Prolegomena, part 2, chap. 2, 224–26, about the parallels between the text-history of the Hebrew Bible and Homer. Grafton argues that Michaelis’s view that the Masoretes were text-critics and editors was mediated to Wolf through Eichhorn, but I do not see why Wolf, as a student of Michaelis, did not get this view directly from him. 33. See Cheyne, Founders, 26–30. Cheyne points out that Ilgen was largely a self-taught classicist and biblical scholar: “Ilgen’s classical scholarship was extensive, . . . and when duty or inclination called him to Biblical research, it was only to be expected that there should be some fair fruits of his studies” (pp. 26–27). A most important study is that of Seidel, Karl David Ilgen. See also Kraus, Geschichte, 143–44; Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, 20–22; Houtman, Der Pentateuch, 79–80. 34. Seidel, Ilgen, 68–80. The archives of Schulpforte contain several volumes of his lectures, the first three of which contain his classical materials. Unfortunately, Seidel does not give a summary of the contents of these volumes, only the volumes containing his Old Testament studies (pp. 267–68), so we can say nothing further about them.

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

197

tinct separate sources and anticipates Hupfeld’s reformulation of the New Documentary Hypothesis. B. Seidel, in his very informative book on Ilgen, discusses Die Urkunden des Jerusalem’schen Tempelarchivs in ihrer Urgestalt at considerable length. He notes that this formulation of a title for his study of Genesis is significant because Ilgen construes his work as historical criticism in the strict sense of that term. In the older literature of Eichhorn and Michaelis, Moses was thought to have had access to older historical documents, which he used to compose Genesis. Ilgen finds 17 “documents” of this sort in Genesis, only a few of which are determined to belong to a period before or during Moses’ lifetime. The rest belong rather vaguely to a later period. He associates these “historical” documents with an archive in the Jerusalem Temple, which he considered a fitting repository for such materials. To this approach, Ilgen adds the contribution of Eichhorn and his source analysis; the documents form the basis of not two but three independent literary works by historians, variously called authors (Verfasser) or compilers (Sammler) and are the equivalent of a first and second Elohist and a Yahwist. The three literary sources are not restricted to Genesis, as with Eichhorn, but extend throughout the Pentateuch and are then combined by a final compiler (Sammler). Ilgen places great emphasis on the notion of final “compiler” (Sammler) and wants to qualify the notion of “author” as it applied to the Pentateuch as a whole. In this respect, he says that the Pentateuch, in its final form, cannot be compared with other works of antiquity, the contents of which were created out of older materials and which were created by “authors.” The Pentateuch does not have such “authors” because the work does not show evidence of such authors. Seidel then quotes Ilgen as saying: It is, rather, in the original form of the more ancient monuments themselves—in their fragments pieced together and lined up alongside one another—and not in individual passages or only in certain extended sections that transitions were made by someone who could be called an author; from the beginning to the end of the book, without someone somehow making himself known as a writer/author, one can say that the work does not really have an author but has a compiler, an organizer, a collector.35

Thus, it is the Sammler who is responsible for the fragmentation of his sources, for their arrangement and sequence, and for the creation of their interconnections, while adding little material of his own. Ilgen introduces the distinction between the “authors” of the three documents, who may also be referred to as “narrators” (Erzähler), and the final Sammler. It is this understanding of Sammler that later becomes embodied as the final “redactor.” However, it is anachronistic to use the term “redactor” for either Eichhorn’s or Ilgen’s perspective about the formation of the Pentateuch. Furthermore, Seidel explains that in this respect Ilgen sees a basic distinction between the application of “higher criticism” to the Pentateuch and its 35. Ibid., 179; see p. 402 in the appendix for the original German.

198

Chapter 6

application to classical literature. In Genesis (or the Pentateuch), we are not dealing with a writing that has been transmitted in approximately its original shape as a textual unity, which in its completed extant written form was changed or reworked with additions, scribal errors, and so forth, that can be merely corrected. One simply cannot reduce the text of Genesis by cutting away the foreign elements and thus arrive at the original form. The uniqueness of Genesis and the Pentateuch is that it is necessary first to dissect the text into its pieces, its sources, which are its original divisions, and recreate its individual textual units. This is Ilgen’s “documentary hypothesis.” 36 Ilgen does not date his documents or set them in any particular historical setting or establish any priority of one over another; they are simply parallel documents used by the “compiler.” There are two further issues to be considered here. The first has to do with Ilgen’s indebtedness to earlier scholars. It is clear that the notion of archival sources put together by compilers is reminiscent of Richard Simon. This point is strongly made by Seidel, 37 who points out that Ilgen, in his introduction to the Urkunden, acknowledged Simon as the inspiration of his own work: “He was the first one who ventured out into higher criticism.” 38 It is especially in the notion that the writers of the Pentateuch and historical books used archival documents, genuine historical sources that were kept in temple archives, that the indebtedness of Ilgen to Simon becomes apparent. The primary support for this notion comes from a Jewish Hellenistic text, 2 Macc 2:13, which speaks of Nehemiah’s founding a library in Jerusalem by collecting a wide range of texts and historical documents. The parallel with the Alexandrian Library is obvious and, consequently, leads us to believe that the Maccabees text is an anachronistic fiction. Simon and later scholars assumed that the location of this library during the Judean monarchy was the temple. Seidel likewise emphasizes the point that these scholars regarded the archival documents that formed the sources of the biblical texts as historical. Thus, the appeal to the archival sources was a conservative response to the “rationalist” critique that the Pentateuch and historical books were fantasy and unhistorical. At the same time, it is clear that Ilgen is following the lead of his predecessor at Jena, Eichhorn, in his approach to the distinguishing of “documents” and the idea that they were combined by “compilers.” Ilgen went beyond Eichhorn in separating the documents from Moses, in increasing their number from two to three, and in distinguishing the “authors” of the documents from the final “compiler.” The second matter has to do with Ilgen’s relationship to classical scholarship, since he was himself a classicist and a Homer scholar. It seems entirely likely that Ilgen was aware of the work of his contemporary, F. A. Wolf, who published his work on Homer at this time, but Seidel says nothing about this possibility. Nevertheless, it seems likely that Ilgen had the “higher criti36. Ibid., 180. 37. Ibid., 106–13. 38. Ibid., 108: “Dieser war der erste, der sich an höhre Critik gewagt.”

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

199

cism” of classical scholars in mind when he made a distinction between the Pentateuch and the classics. The characterization of the work of classical higher criticism as requiring identification of revisions and rewriting and removing foreign elements reads like a description of Wolf’s work on Homer. However, he does not use terms such as “revisers” and “editors” in his own discussion. At any rate, it is clear that Ilgen did not feel compelled to provide a text-history of the Pentateuch, so his own work is even less like Wolf’s than that of Eichhorn. Exactly what Ilgen’s lectures on the classics, especially Homer, dealt with is not known; in any case, the information is not provided by Seidel. Nevertheless, his views have some interesting similarities with the views of scholars involved in Homer studies: the two major Homeric epics consisted of many originally individual lays that were combined into two collections, thus forming the later poems. After Ilgen left Jena in 1802, he became the rector of the scholastic foundation of Schulpforte from 1802 to 1831, where he taught the future classical scholar Gottfried Hermann. Hermann’s view of the Odyssey was that it was a combination of originally independent poems (a documentary approach), while his contemporary K. Lachmann preferred a fragmentary approach to the Iliad, which he thought consisted of 18 individual lays. The similarity of Hermann’s and Lachmann’s views with Ilgen’s ideas cannot be fortuitous and suggests that there was considerable interchange between classics and biblical studies at this time. As we have seen in the case of both Eichhorn and Ilgen, they were completely familiar with the classics and classical research, but this combination of the classics and biblical studies was not exceptional. For three centuries, as I noted above, the classics were the foundation of the educational system, the basis from which all humanistic learning arose and the sine qua non for any advanced study, especially theology. So imbued were all scholars from grammar school onward with Greek and Latin and with the great works of literature, the greatest of which was Homer, that it was most natural to draw comparisons or emphasize contrasts and differences (for theological purposes) between the Hebraic world of the Bible and the Hellenic world of the classics. That the works of Homer and Moses should be compared was commonplace, whether by clergy or scholar, and all “cultured” persons could appreciate these comparisons. It was also the case that advances in the field of classics would have had an almost immediate response in the field of biblical studies, and vice versa, especially when some scholars such as Ilgen worked almost equally in both fields. This parallel development continued throughout the nineteenth century, and thus the intellectual history of biblical studies should never be isolated from its broader humanistic base. 39 39. J.-L. Ska (“The Yahwist, a Hero with a Thousand Faces: A Chapter in the History of Modern Exegesis,” in Abschied vom Jahwisten: Die Komposition des Hexateuch in der jüngsten Diskussion [ed. J. C. Gertz, K. Schmid, and M. Witte; BZAW 315; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002], 5, 11–12) comments on the interaction between nineteenth-century classical and biblical scholars. However, he views the influence quite differently from the view I present here.

200

Chapter 6

Alexander Geddes Alexander Geddes was a contemporary of Eichhorn whose career as a biblical scholar flourished in the last decades of the eighteenth century. His career had two important aspects. 40 The first was as a text-critic and translator, and the second was as a historian and literary critic of the Pentateuch. In the first role, he was very critical of the wholesale acceptance of the Masoretic Text as the primary basis for the translation of the Old Testament. He put great stock in variant readings, particularly those of the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint. McKane comments on his attitude to the Masoretic Text, especially in relationship to the Hebrew manuscript collations of Kennicott and the new Hebrew text with Latin translation by the French scholar C. F. Houbigant. What was at stake was the idea of producing a pure Hebrew text free of the Masoretic pointing and, therefore, unhindered by rabbinic interpretation; Geddes sees himself as a champion of this cause. McKane states: The publication of a consonantal Hebrew text, without points and Masora, by Houbigant, Kennicott and De Rossi is intended as a manifesto that the time of bondage to the Massoretic interpretation of the consonantal text has come to an end and that a new era in the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible has been inaugurated. Advances in the fundamental criticism of the Hebrew Bible are to be made by collating large numbers of mediaeval Hebrew manuscripts (Kennicott and De Rossi) and thereby purifying the consonantal text. The collating of Hebrew manuscripts will provide a scientific foundation for a critical text of the Hebrew Bible and this will replace the former reliance on Massoretic scholarship.41

According to McKane, Geddes criticized earlier translations as flawed because they were based on the “bad Hebrew text” of the Masoretes, which was treated uncritically, without “the pains which have been taken with classical texts.” 42 Thus, according to Geddes the previous three hundred years of Bible translation had been corrupted by “the most ridiculous notions of the Rabbins” 43 who, by means of the MT, had misled the Christian translators. Kennicott’s massive project of collecting and collating so many biblical medieval manuscripts was motivated by orthodox theology: he thought that he could actually recover the original Word of God of the Old Testament. Geddes’s own theological perspective was, of course, quite different, but he strongly supported the work and its results. McKane states: “Although Geddes does not share Kennicott’s theological presuppositions, he does, like Kennicott, assume, as a text-critical procedure, a ‘more original’ 40. Two important studies of the career of Alexander Geddes form the basis of my study here: Reginald C. Fuller, Alexander Geddes, 1737–1802: A Pioneer of Biblical Criticism (Sheffield: Almond, 1984); and McKane, “Alexander Geddes,” in Selected Christian Hebraists, 151– 90. See also Cheyne, Founders, 3–12. 41. McKane, Selected Christian Hebraists, 164. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid.

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

201

text in parallel passages of the Hebrew Bible which differ from each other, and also when he compares the text of the Hebrew Bible with the Hebrew Vorlage of the Septuagint.” 44 The thesis of deliberate Masoretic corruption of the Hebrew text, which proper text criticism could restore through manuscript collation and careful comparison of the versions, was an important principle of biblical criticism at the end of the eighteenth century. Scholars such as Michaelis and Eichhorn of Göttingen were committed to this kind of text criticism. Michaelis was also Wolf’s teacher and a close reader of Eichhorn’s work. Wolf’s attitude toward the Masoretes was that their manuscript was another example of a text that had been corrupted by ancient “editors.” It was this understanding of the “editors” of ancient texts such as Homer that became prominent in textual criticism. Geddes’s literary and historical criticism was always understood as secondary and related to his work as a translator and text-critic. His literarycritical reflections on the Pentateuch were set out first in the prefaces to his translation, The Holy Bible, vol. 1 (1792) and vol. 2 (1797), and his later views were planned as remarks for the General Preface to his translation. The latter was never completed, and thus his literary views appeared in a separate publication as Critical Remarks on the Hebrew Scriptures corresponding with a new translation of the Bible, vol. 1 (1800). As with the earlier biblical scholars that we have considered, Geddes regarded the narratives of the Pentateuch and historical books to be the work of ancient historians, although not quite at the same level as their Greek and Latin counterparts. He states: The Hebrew historians have a greater resemblance to Homer than to Herodotus, and to Herodotus than to Thucydides. To the first of these writers they in many respects bear a striking similitude. Like him, they are continually blending real facts with fanciful mythology, ascribing natural events to supernatural causes and introducing a divine agency on every extraordinary occurrence.

As such, the biblical writings are described as “poetical history.” 45 Like all such ancient histories, they deserve critical evaluation for their credibility. Important for Geddes in this respect was the nature of the composition of the Pentateuch and its authorship. He rejected the traditional authorship of Moses and regarded the composition as dated to several centuries later. He even rejected the traditional compositional boundaries of the Pentateuch and saw it extending into Joshua, thus anticipating the Hexateuch of the later New Documentary Hypothesis. He took up the notion common to Eichhorn and other scholars of the time, that there were numerous individual sources of various kinds, not only in Genesis but throughout the Pentateuch. Against the views of Eichhorn, however, he did not subscribe to a division of these smaller units into two collections or authors but instead 44. Ibid., 166. 45. Quoted in Fuller, Alexander Geddes, 40.

202

Chapter 6

advocated the view that they were all gathered sometime during the monarchy, before the time of Hezekiah. The materials thus brought together were of varying dates and types. Whether any of these materials could be viewed as belonging together in prior collections was of less concern to him than identifying the primary units of tradition, and in this he seems to have anticipated the later concerns of form criticism. For him, a single final compiler was all that was needed to account for the whole. In a recent study, John Rogerson has correctly rejected the notion that Geddes developed the literary theory of a “fragmentary hypothesis” as an alternative to the “Older Documentary Hypothesis” of Eichhorn. 46 Rogerson provides the following quotation from Geddes as a more accurate reflection of his literary viewpoint: It is my opinion, that the Hebrews had no written documents before the days of Moses; and that all their history, prior to that period, is derived from monumental indexes, or traditional tales. Some remarkable trees, under which a patriarch resided; some pillar, which he had erected; some heap, which he had raised; some ford which he had crossed; some spot, where he had encamped; some field, which he had purchased; the tomb in which he had been laid—all these served as so many links to hand his story down to posterity; and corroborated the oral testimony transmitted, from generation to generation, in simple narratives or rustic songs.47

The view that small units of oral tradition lay behind Genesis and that they were collected and preserved in written form only much later was similar to the views of Wolf on Homer during this same period and seems to anticipate the work of de Wette and Gunkel. But this thesis hardly constitutes a developed literary theory. Rogerson summarizes Geddes’s views as follows: Of Geddes’s own views on the composition of the Pentateuch we have only vague indications, given that he did not live to write his General Preface. He inclined to ascribe it to a collector and compiler who lived in the time of Solomon and who used ancient documents, some of which were older than Moses, and some of which may have been written by Moses, along with the other sources of information mentioned in the long quotation immediately above. A detailed examination of his work shows, however, that he did not translate these views into details of literary criticism when dealing with the text. 48

It is best, therefore, not to view Geddes as a pioneer of the “fragmentary hypothesis,” as is so often claimed, but to leave that honor to Vater, who made extensive use of Geddes’s views on the text of the Pentateuch but who never once refers to any notion of “fragments” in the writings of Geddes. 46. J. W. Rogerson, “Was Geddes a ‘Fragmentist’? In Search of the ‘Geddes-Vater Hypothesis’,” in The Bible and the Enlightment, A Case Study: Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) (ed. William Johnstone; JSOTSup 377; London: T. & T. Clark, 2004), 157–67. 47. Ibid., 166, quoted from Geddes, The Holy Bible, 1.xix. 48. Ibid., 167

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

203

Our present interest in Geddes is instead with his understanding of the notion of “final collector” and the relationship of this idea to what later scholars understand by the “final redactor” of the Pentateuch. These two concepts are often identified in scholarly discussions of the historical significance of Geddes’s work, and as a result, some confusion has arisen. Fuller states: “Geddes does not seem to be clear in his own mind what he is trying to reconstruct: the Pentateuch as it left the hand of the final redactor or as it stood at some earlier stage of its evolution.” 49 This comment has to do with Geddes’s identifying and eliminating interpolations as the work of a “later redactor” and the fact that “Geddes has very little to say on the editorial work present in these final chapters of Deuteronomy.” 50 This confusion among scholars, however, results from the fact that Geddes clearly distinguished the work of the collector, whom he regarded as an author, from the editors who were responsible for the transmission of the text and who in the process corrupted the text with interpolations—which Geddes eliminated in his translation. He does not believe in a “final edition,” least of all one that is reflected in the MT. In this respect, his distinction between collector and editor is no different from the distinction reflected in the views of Eichhorn and Ilgen between final compiler (Sammler) and the Masoretic editors of the text. Johann Severin Vater In the years shortly after Geddes’s death, Vater published a three-volume work on the Pentateuch, Commentar über den Pentateuch, mit Einleitungen zu den einzelnen Abschnitten, der eingeschalteten Uebersetzung von Dr Alexander Geddes’s merkwürdigeren, critischen und exegetischen Anmerkungen, und einer Abhundlung über Moses und die Verfasser des Pentateuchs. 51 What is clear from the subtitle is the indebtedness of Vater to Geddes and the means by which Geddes’s ideas were transmitted to the world of German scholarship. Indeed, even though Eichhorn knew Geddes’s work firsthand, he seems to prefer to use the version transmitted by Vater. Vater refers to the latest version of Geddes’s views as reflected in Critical Remarks (1800), making extensive use of Geddes’s text-critical observations, duly acknowledged, but, as stated above, he makes no reference whatever to any fragmentary theory in Geddes’s work. 52 What Eichhorn and Ilgen had done by way of identifying “fragments” or independent units of narrative in Genesis, Vater extended to the rest of the Pentateuch. He disputed that such fragments could be distributed among two or three documents, as Astruc, Eichhorn, and Ilgen had done.

49. Fuller, Alexander Geddes, 59. 50. Ibid. 51. Three parts (Halle, 1802–5). On Vater’s Pentateuchal studies, see Fuller, Alexander Geddes, 105–8; Carpenter and Harford, Composition, 73–74; Kraus, Geschichte, 145–46; Houtman, Der Pentateuch, 82–84. 52. For a detailed discussion of this issue, see Rogerson, “Was Geddes a ‘Fragmentist’?”

204

Chapter 6

In Fuller’s discussion of Vater’s views about authorship, he shows how Vater disputed the various criteria for constructing parallel sources, such as different names for deity or for the sacred mountain (Sinai and Horeb), duplicate narratives, and so on, and suggested that there were other ways of explaining these differences among the fragments. Fuller then goes on to give as Vater’s view: “Indeed the usage was much more reasonably explained on the basis of different circumstances than different authors. There might well be a case for similar editorial background rather than for identity of authorship. Of course one might suppose that an editor or collector would have made a better job of the editing, but we should always recall that not every editor is in full command of his materials.” 53 He also has Vater stating that, even though Deuteronomy may have contained material from Moses, “the final editing of the book was much later.” 54 What is not at all clear for the purposes of our study is whether Vater is actually using the term Redaktor, “editor,” in his discussion or whether this is just Fuller’s interpretation of Vater’s use of Sammler, “collector.” De Wette, who refers extensively to the work of Vater, does not use the term “editor” for the compiler in his early works, and I am strongly inclined to believe that Redaktor does not appear in the original text of Vater. 55 Yet, without examining the actual text, which was not available to me, I cannot clarify this matter. In order to resolve this issue, I asked John Rogerson, who has studied Vater’s work in great detail, his opinion on Vater’s use or nonuse of the term Redaktor, and he replied in the following manner: I have consulted the extensive notes that I made when I read Vater for the purposes of writing my de Wette biography. Nowhere have I come across the word Redaktor. Vater’s favourite term is Sammler, but he uses this in at least two senses: to denote someone who collects traditions, and someone who puts smaller Sammlungen together into larger ones. Thus, writing about the chronological framework in Genesis he says (part III p. 508) ‘Man sieht, der Sammler hat Stücke, welche in jener chronologischen Reihe nicht von selbst einen Platz fanden, irgendwo eingeschaltet, wo Personen, die sie betreffen, erwähnt waren’. He gives as an example Ishmael at Genesis 25, where the mention of Ishmael at verse 9 is the occasion for the insertion of 12–18. My impression is that Vater’s Sammler is not a ‘Redactor’ in the sense that that word has often come to be used in redaction criticism, but someone whose work was less purposeful. Commenting on the fact that the Sammler combined passages that repeated or contradicted other passages, Vater wrote (Part III p. 507) ‘Alles hat der Sammler ent53. Fuller, Alexander Geddes, 107–8; italics mine. 54. Ibid., 108; italics mine. 55. Houtman (Pentateuch, 83) also has Vater using the term Redaktor, although not in a direct quotation. He states: “Über die Herkunft der Fragmente und über ihre Redaktion könne man, so Vater, nichts Sicheres sagen. Die Frage, ob bestimmte Abschnitte von Mose stammen könnten, will er weder positiv noch negativ beantworten. In jedem Fall sei Mose nicht der Redaktor des Pentateuch (III, S. 673ff.).” See also Kraus, Geschichte, 145, which contains a very similar statement. Houtman also warns that not too big a difference should be made between Vater’s thesis and the Documentary Hypothesis (Pentateuch, 84).

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

205

weder nicht bemerkt, oder wenigstens nicht so hoch angeschlagen, um nicht Alles so zu geben, wie es schon da war’.56

This description fits entirely within the development of the notion of the Sammler from Eichhorn to de Wette, although it is easy to see how this conception could be identified with the later use of the term Redaktor.

W. M. L. de Wette: Pioneer of Historical Criticism It is generally recognized that, with the publication of de Wette’s Beiträge zur Einleitung in das Alte Testament (2 vols., 1806–7), 57 a new era in biblical studies was inaugurated. 58 It was Wellhausen who acknowledged de Wette as “the epoch-making pioneer of historical criticism in this field [of Pentateuchal studies].” 59 As Wellhausen points out, de Wette “was the first clearly to perceive and point out how disconnected are the alleged startingpoint of Israel’s history [Moses] and that history itself,” 60 and he goes on at length to show how this principle changed the whole perspective with regard to understanding the history of Israel. What makes de Wette’s work significant, therefore, is not the way in which he formulated his literary theory of the Pentateuch but rather the fundamental shift that de Wette introduces in the character of the historical-critical method as applied to biblical studies and certain very important conclusions that derived from this shift. 61 As 56. Personal communication, October 10, 2004. The German reads: “The compiler either did not notice everything, or else he did not consider everything important enough to reproduce it as it stood.” 57. W. M. L de Wette, Beiträge zur Einleitung in das Alte Testament (Contributions to the Introduction of the Old Testament), vol. 1: Kritischer Versuch über die Glaubwürdigkeit der Bücher der Chronik mit Hinsicht auf die Geschichte der Mosaischen Bücher und Gesetzgebung: Ein Nachtrag zu den Vaterschen Untersuchungen über den Pentateuch; and vol. 2: Kritik der Mosaischen Geschichte (Halle: Schimmelpfennig, 1806–7). 58. Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, 28–49, esp. 28–36. The most extensive study of de Wette is by R. Smend, Wilhelm Martin Lebrecht de Wettes Arbeit am Alten und am Neuen Testament (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1958), with his discussion of the Beiträge, on pp. 36– 58. Important also is the work of J. W. Rogerson, W. M. L. de Wette, Founder of Modern Biblical Criticism: An Intellectual Biography ( JSOTSup 126; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992). While this is an excellent biography that fills in much of the background in understanding de Wette within the intellectual climate of his day, it spends only a relatively small part on the Pentateuchal issues and on the Beiträge (pp. 41–62); even in this section, Rogerson is more interested in de Wette’s philosophical presuppositions. See also Cheyne, Founders, 31– 54; Kraus, Geschichte, 160–65. Houtman, Der Pentateuch, 84–87. 59. J. Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (New York: Meridian, 1957), 4; repr. of Prolegomena to the History of Israel (trans. J. Sutherland Black and Allen Enzies, with preface by W. Robertson Smith; Edinburgh: Black, 1885). It should be noted that these words of praise are given in contrast to his negative remarks about Ewald and his treatment of the Pentateuch in his History of Israel, on which see below. 60. Ibid., 4–5. 61. This is set out most clearly in his statement of principles of historical criticism in Beiträge, 2:1–18.

206

Chapter 6

indicated above, the approach to historical criticism from Eichhorn to Vater had been to view this task, in accordance with the scholarly tradition of Simon, as an attempt to recover the historical documents that were thought to lie behind the Pentateuch and the historical books of the Old Testament. This arose out of a conservative impulse to preserve the authenticity of the biblical tradition, even when the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch was given up. By contrast, de Wette stands in the tradition of Bentley, with quite a different understanding of the task of historical criticism. 62 His method was to criticize every text or document to determine the type of text it was and the relationship of the Referent to the events that he recounts or the tradition that he transmits: the period and age out of which the tradition arose, the social and religious or ideological perspective reflected in it, and whether or not the historical information that it contained was genuine or spurious—a good source of information for the period it reported on or a fake and a fraud. In its clarity and simplicity, the Beiträge is a brilliant statement of principles for the way in which both classical and biblical texts that purport to deal with their national histories must be treated. In this respect, de Wette is a kindred spirit with Wolf much more than Eichhorn ever was and a fitting member of the Berlin school of historical criticism, where he became a member of the faculty in 1810. De Wette published many varied works over the course of his long and fruitful career, but in Pentateuchal studies he never went much beyond his work in the Beiträge. It is primarily with this work that we will be concerned here. It must first be observed that de Wette came to study at Jena in 1799, which means that he was there during Ilgen’s tenure, and his familiarity with the latter’s work is attested. Indeed, he is quite magnanimous in paying tribute to both Ilgen and Vater, and he uses their work extensively. 63 He also paid considerable attention to the work of Eichhorn, with whom much of his discussion, particularly on Chronicles, is in dialogue. He was in agreement with Vater on many issues, against Eichhorn; but on the historical setting and significance of Deuteronomy, de Wette went in quite a different direction that transformed the whole understanding of the Mosaic Law. The problem that scholarship on the Pentateuch posed up to this point was the recognition that most if not all of the Law of Moses could not be attributed to Moses himself but was the result of a much longer process of growth and accumulation; it only attained its present form at a rather late date. Yet, any discusion of just how this process came about, what was earlier and what later, could not be determined based on evidence from the Pentateuch itself. There had to be some vantage point outside the corpus from which to view 62. The same comparison between Bentley’s work and de Wette’s Beiträge is suggested by Carpenter and Harford, Composition, 4 note a. 63. See his remarks in the Vorrede of Beiträge 2:iv, and on the title page of vol. 1 he refers modestly to his work as “ein Nachtrag zu den Vaterschen Untersuchungen über den Pentateuch.”

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

207

the problem. The only clue regarding how the Law and its development could be related to ancient Israelite society was from the rest of the Old Testament, primarily the historical books. Consequently, de Wette began with the book of Chronicles, and here he took issue with the prevailing view of the time, expressed by Eichhorn, that this work represented a version of the historial sources at variance with the version presented in the collection of Samuel–Kings and that it therefore could be used as a source for the religion of Israel and Judah during the monarchy. De Wette set out to show that Chronicles was, in fact, a much less reliable history than Samuel–Kings, that it was not independent from but dependent on Samuel–Kings, and that the history was reshaped for ideological and theological reasons. A major part of this reshaping has to do with the introduction into the history of the prominent role of the Law and its defenders and guardians, the priests and Levites. Once de Wette could set aside Chronicles as not being an independent witness to the history of Israelite religion and the development of the Law before it reached its final form, he turned to the other historical books. By contrast, in most of the rest of the history outside Chronicles, from Judges to 2 Kings until the time of Josiah, the religion of the Law is entirely missing. This also holds true for most of the Psalms. Only in the history of Ezra–Nehemiah does the Law come to play a central role in the life of the people, and so this historical context appears to be the appropriate locus for the completed corpus of the Law. Special attention is given to the episode in 2 Kgs 22, in which the book of the Law, of which nothing apparently was previously known, is found in the temple. The reform movement that this discovery inaugurated corresponds with the concerns of Deuteronomy; thus, at least a part of Deuteronomy should be dated to this time and the whole of the Law only much later, in the time of Nehemiah. 64 De Wette likewise addresses one of the important arguments for the early dating of the whole Pentateuch put forward by Eichhorn, who had dated the Samaritan Pentateuch to the time of the division of the Northern Kingdom from Judah, at which time, Eichhorn argued, it became a distinct text, transmitted separately from the version in the South. De Wette shows that this is altogether unlikely and proposes a date for the Samaritan Pentateuch in the late Persian Period, when the Samaritans were excluded from worshiping with the Jews in Judah and built their own temple on Mt. Gerizim. In a later work, de Wette deals more extensively with the history of the Hebrew text. 65 With regard to the period before the closing of the canon, he speaks of “revisers” and “compilers” willfully changing the works of earlier writers and incorporating foreign material into the text. 66 The first important moment 64. See also Smend, De Wette, 40–45. 65. W. M. L. de Wette, Lehrbuch der historisch-kritischen Einleitung in die kanonischen und apokryphischen Bücher des Alten Testament (rev. E. Schrader; Berlin: Reimer, 1869), 202–22 (§§115–29). 66. Ibid., 202.

208

Chapter 6

in the history of the Old Testament text is the origin of the text-form that lies behind the Samaritan manuscripts of the Pentateuch. He dates this text to the time of the construction of the Samaritan temple 67 and is also very critical of the value of the SamP due to its many uncritical revisions. De Wette likewise regards the LXX as subject to more corruption than the MT. He considers the MT to have been largely established by the beginning of the common era, based on the witnesses of Aquila, Onqelos and Jonathan, Origen, and Jerome. Although de Wette largely supports the MT as a faithful text, against the trend of earlier scholars from Michaelis and Eichhorn onward, he makes no comment about recensional activity. Throughout his discussion of the historical books in his earlier Beiträge, de Wette makes only slight comment on the literary and compositional character of the various units of biblical texts; as a result, historians often complain that it is hard to pin him down to a particular literary hypothesis. He seems to borrow the terminology of his predecessors freely. Thus, he regards Samuel as the work of an “author or compiler” (Verfasser oder Sammler) who put the narrative together at the time of the exile. 68 In similar fashion, he regards Kings as “composed or collected” by a Deuteronomist. 69 He cites a number of texts, such as 1 Kgs 2:3–4, as Deuteronomistic. On the other hand, he acknowledges that Kings treats Israel and Judah with equal tolerance, compared with Chronicles, and suggests that this may be reflected in the sources “that he [Dtr] evidently excerpted from earlier books and that their very inclusion and retention demonstrates that he was not given to antagonism or maliciousness.” 70 However, nowhere does he identify Dtr as an editor, 71 and in this he seems to anticipate the work of Martin Noth. In applying the results of his investigation of the biblical histories to the Pentateuch, de Wette looks first at the account of the tabernacle in Exod 25– 31 and 35–50 and suggests that the story is obviously mythical, created after the construction of the Solomonic Temple at the earliest. The parallel account is in Exod 33:7–11, and he is willing to consider this “Tent of Meeting” along with the ark as more “historical” and perhaps even Mosaic in origin. In similar fashion, following Vater, he views the sacrifices, priestly ceremonial laws, and the festivals as not all of a piece but belonging to different periods. He concludes from this:

67. Ibid., 204. Cf. Morton Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics (2nd ed.; London: SCM, 1987), 140–46. 68. De Wette, Beiträge, 1:152–59. 69. Ibid., 159–79, 202–3.

70. Ibid., 202–3. The German reads: “dass er [Dtr] sein Werk wahrscheinlich aus frühern Büchern excerpirt hat, und dass schon die Aufnahme und Erhaltung desselben das Unanstössige und Ungehässige seiner Denkart bezeugt.” 71. The only reference to an editor that I could find in the work is his reference to “der Redacteur der Psalmensammlung” (ibid., 157), which hardly suggests much in the way of literary theory.

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

209

Interestingly, with reference to worship, we can find traces of successive expansions of the legislation in the Pentateuch. On the one hand, this is confirmation that, just as much of the formation of the Pentateuch cannot be ascribed to Moses, so too a great part of the legislation contained in the Pentateuch cannot be ascribed to Moses. On the other hand, because the legislators included history, we can conjecture the most likely times of the origin of many laws and of the introduction of the Pentateuch.72

While this statement suggests a supplemental approach, at least for the legal corpus, it does not really articulate a specific literary hypothesis much different from Vater’s. Rudolf Smend sees de Wette as following the fragmentary hypothesis of Vater, with many small units combined by a Sammler, but Smend suggests that de Wette went beyond Vater in seeing much more unity in a kind of epic poem (episches Gedicht), in which the source collection of Genesis and the early part of Exodus served as the basic stratum (Grundlage), an “Elohim-Epos,” the E source of Eichhorn and the two E sources of Ilgen, to which the rest was added as explanation and supplement. 73 De Wette likewise affirms Vater’s fragmentary approach with respect to Deuteronomy as a collection that is distinct from the rest of the Pentateuch. De Wette offers several arguments to prove that Deuteronomy is distinct from the earlier collection of the first four books, resulting from a succession of “compilers,” of which the one who added Deuteronomy is the last. 74 A further aspect of de Wette’s historical criticism is his attempt to understand the inner spiritual development of Israelite religion, as reflected in the various strata of the Pentateuch. To accomplish this, de Wette compares the style of Deuteronomy vis-à-vis the earlier laws and narratives (the “mythology”) with the later exegetical methods of the rabbis. He states: The whole character of the book bears the stamp of a later time. It is written in a spirit that fairly approximates already that of rabbinical, allegorizing and mystical philosophy. In the earlier books we find mythology and law in their simple, natural form, the former in their true nature as religious folk belief, as the ancestors had handed these down, the latter in its juridical aridity and severity, as imperative letters, as command and prescript. In our book, however, mythology, already delivered from unconscious, simple belief, has become the object of reflection, with concepts and dogmas derived from it, a more esoteric meaning introduced into much of it, a looking back with delight on the miracles of the ancient history and the privileges of God’s people boastfully emphasized. Enough: in place of mythology we find theology, a very tasteless, cold and toying theology. And in the giving of the law a certain moralistic tendency has come to the fore; we no longer hear the jurists interpreting the law in their simple, commanding and decisive language; rather we believe we are

72. Ibid., 265; see appendix, p. 402, for the German original. 73. Smend, De Wette, 51. 74. De Wette, Beiträge, 1:268.

210

Chapter 6

hearing a moralist, a preacher, who lays on our hearts the observance of the laws and through religious motivations seeks to stir us thereto.75

In this remarkable text is the anticipation of the basic program of Wellhausen’s Prolegomena, which went one step further by identifying the Priestly Code as a theological interpretation that was later than the theology reflected in Deuteronomy and closer to the direction taken by Judaism. At the same time, as we shall see, de Wette’s view of Deuteronomy as midrash also foreshadows some recent study on innerbiblical interpretation. 76 In his later publication, Lehrbuch der historisch-kritischen Einleitung in die kanonischen und apokryphischen Bücher des Alten Testament (1817), 77 de Wette again deals with the origin of the Hexateuch. 78 He first reviews the Documentary Hypothesis of Eichhorn and Ilgen, mentioning the final Sammler (or Radaktor) of Eichhorn. 79 It seems to me that in this case de Wette has interpreted the Sammler as a “redactor” in accordance with contemporary usage. It is not clear when the change in usage came about, but it is certain that de Wette himself did not adopt it when discussing his own view of the matter. 80 Furthermore, de Wette’s discussion of the fragmentary hypothesis of Vater does not make any reference to a redactor, only an author, 81 and the supplementary hypothesis also has no need of a redactor. 82 In his own critique of the various positions, de Wette states: “Nor is a single trace discernible of a diction that is distinct from that of the other narrators, namely, that of the redactor.” 83 This suggests that there is, in his view, no criterion for distinguishing a redactor from the narrators. De Wette finds the analogy of the relationship between Deuteronomy–Kings (the Deuteronomistic History) and Chronicles as yielding a more accurate perspective on the origin of the Pentateuch. This analogy suggests a combination of perspectives from

75. Ibid., 275–76; see the appendix, p. 403, for the original German. This statement is followed by a series of examples: Deut 4:7–8, 32–36; 5:21, 23; 7:6–8 (Exod 19:4–6); 11:12; 4:12, 15ff.; 18:16; 8:3, etc. 76. In fact, de Wette comes close to anticipating Noth’s later approach to the Tetrateuch as distinct from the Deuteronomic corpus, expressing much the same notion about the tradition’s Ausbildung. The final compiler anticipates the role of the “final redactor” in later literary criticism, particularly as found in the Documentary Hypothesis. 77. This went through many editions and was later revised by E. Schrader, in 1869, and it is this edition that I will use here. I am aware that use of a late revision (the edition available to me) is somewhat problematic, because it appears that some of Schrader’s revisions represent his views rather than de Wette’s. 78. De Wette, Lehrbuch, §§198–206. 79. Ibid., §199. 80. Thus far, I have found the term “redactor” used only by Hupfeld (see below), and it is only with respect to Hupfeld that Schrader’s revision of de Wette’s Lehrbuch specifically discusses the activity of the “redactor” (cited in quotation marks). 81. De Wette, Lehrbuch, §200. 82. Ibid., §201. 83. Ibid., 312. The German reads: “von einer, von derjenigen der drei anderen Erzähler verschiedenen, Diktion, derjenigen nämlich des Redactors, sich auch rein gar keine Spur aufzeigen lässt.”

spread is 6 points long

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

211

all three hypotheses: fragmentary, supplementary, and documentary. Thus, for the Pentateuch, he proposes that there were two primary documents, one by an annalistic narrator ( J) and another by a theocratic narrator (P), that were reworked by a third prophetic narrator (E), who preserved much from the previous works but also added new traditional materials of his own. A fourth work, Deuteronomy, originally quite independent, was incorporated into a larger historical work that was revised and extended to include the whole of the monarchy, resulting in a comprehensive history from Genesis to 2 Kings. 84 There is no place or need in this scheme for a redactor. The second volume of the Beiträge (1807) takes up a quite different issue regarding the Pentateuch, the issue of the literary relationships of documents or “collections” to each other. De Wette here addresses the historicalcritical question: is any of the material in the Pentateuch, of whatever age, historical, and can it be used to reconstruct the history of Israel’s religion, especially in the way in which this history is presented in the Bible, with Moses as its founder. Here he is at odds with Eichhorn and the whole tradition of biblical studies up to this point, which understood higher criticism as the attempt to recover historical sources in the Pentateuch. He recognizes that his own criticism is negative (or in modern jargon, “minimalist”), but he insists that he is only following the basic principles of historical criticism that he has laid out in his introduction, which must apply equally to all ancient literature, whether biblical or classical. The primary focus of de Wette in this volume is not on documents produced by individual authors or historians—the sources of Eichhorn and Ilgen—but on the small units of tradition, as suggested by Geddes and Vater: myths that reflect a wide range of folk tradition, myths that were brought together in collections. It is the anlysis of the small units that must be the first task of the critic: The relationships [of the collections] of the Pentateuch are, in their origins, separate compositions independent from one another, which the compiler has placed into a false, alien interconnection. In order to understand and appreciate them properly we must therefore free them from this interconnection and restore to them their independence. Then they will perhaps appear entirely other than they do in this distorting arrangement and this mixing of one into another. 85

De Wette works through the Pentateuch, selecting a wide range of examples of myths, legends, Märchen, Sagen, which are not historical and the intent of which is not history in any critical sense of that term. He rejects the possibility that one can merely demythologize them and then derive history from them; thus, no history of the patriarchal age or of the time of Moses can be constructed by using these sources. He concludes: 84. Ibid., §202. See also Smend, De Wette, 113–16. Smend disputes that there was ever any place in de Wette’s view for a second E source, so this development must be a revision by Schrader under the influence of Ewald’s prophetic narrator. 85. De Wette, Beiträge, 2:26; see the appendix, p. 403, for the original German.

212

Chapter 6

Our investigations have shown that the Pentateuch from beginning to end contains, in some parts, myths, i.e., fashioned by poets and tradition into the miraculous and the supernatural, often into entirely fictitious stories, and, in other parts, uncertain, fluctuating, often contradictory old legends. Constituting a class of its own are the juridical myths, i.e., laws and institutions (of a later age) which, according to a particular fiction developed through custom, became ascribed to the name of Moses and tied to the Moses story. Sometimes found between these myths and the uncertain, contradictory legends are accounts that appear to have the stamp of a genuine tradition; even so, these cannot at all salvage the character of the Mosaic connection since they are only exceptions. In other parts, through the use that both the author of the individual fragments and the compiler has made of them, they have likewise been elevated into myths; they are imbued with myths in so many ways that they can no longer count individually as historical truths. If they are also true, then it is in the same way as myths have been viewed, understood, and treated, and we must likewise view and treat them as myths. The Pentateuch exists now as a whole, and not simply because a compiler put it together thus, but because it is the communal product of a poetry and treatment of early history regnant in a particular time period. As a whole, however, it has merely a mythic meaning: its roots themselves are, as it were, implanted in mythic soil. Nowhere do we gain a fixed historical point; Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, the exodus from Egypt, the giving of the law, all the important moments, are appropriated by myth and subjected to its laws.86

This long quotation sums up the results of his historical-critical evaluation of the entire Pentateuch. Both the nature of the individual pieces of tradition and the way in which tradition has been used by the compiler and its nature as a social product of a particular period dominated by poetry make it unsuitable for gaining any “fixed historical point” within any of the major moments or themes of the tradition. In this evaluation of the Pentateuchal material and its historical consequences, we find a clear anticipation of Gunkel’s program of form-critical research on Genesis, both in the latter’s insistence on the unhistorical character of the Sagen and of the attempt to understand their various types and Sitz im Leben. Gunkel was also inclined to refer to the sources in which these Sagen occurred as Sammlungen and he clearly shared his viewpoint on the work of the Sammler with de Wette. In similar fashion, Albrecht Alt took up the “judicial myths”—the laws and their preliterary development. It was also left for later researchers to take up the question of the way in which these myths, legends, and laws were transmitted from the time when they were individual pieces until they were incorporated in larger blocks and collections as part of the program of tradition-history. In this regard, de Wette’s work is a most remarkable anticipation of both Noth’s Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien (1943) and his Überliefer-

86. Ibid., 2:396–97; see the appendix, pp. 403–404, for the original German.

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

213

ungsgeschichte des Pentateuch (1948), which parallel the two volumes of the Beiträge. When de Wette comes to the end of his criticial appraisal of the Pentateuch as unhistorical, he shifts to a more positive perspective. That the Pentateuch is no longer useful as a historical source does not negate its real worth. For de Wette, the basic elements of the Pentateuch, especially in Genesis and the first part of Exodus, had the character of an “authentic Hebrew national epic.” 87 Considered as epic poetry and myth, it can be a most important object of study and in a certain sense a significant historical document. “It is a product of the native religious poetry of the Israelite people, in which is mirrored its spirit, its thinking, it patriotism, its philosophy and religion, and is therefore one of the earliest sources of the history of culture and religion.” 88 At this point, de Wette abandons the model of the Pentateuch as the repository of historical sources and takes up a quite different model: the Pentateuch is an example of collection of oral folklore of many peoples and nations in the form of myths and legends (Sagen), their transposition into written form, and their publication as national treasures in the belief that they embodied the real spirit of the people. It was not too difficult to see that the narratives of the Pentateuch provided just this kind of material for a cultural history, not of Israel’s actual origins, but of its cultural and religious history during the period of the transmission and transformation of these narratives. De Wette’s most obvious and important parallel to this understanding of myth and poetry presented as a historical narrative was in the classical world: What I am demanding for the treatment of the Hebrew myths is only that which happens ever and again to the myths of the Greeks and Romans. One reads Homer and feels and admires the beauty; but thanks to the omnipotence of his genius, it occurs to no one to construe naturalistically, historically-critically, so to speak, the history that he narrates, and which is just as wondrous; and yet true history also lies at the base of Homer.89

De Wette goes on to speculate that behind the stories of gods and heroes there may, in euhemeristic fashion, be some basis in an ancient history of kings that have been deified. But to engage in historical dissection of the narrative in this way destroys the point of the whole and is not helpful. Here de Wette shows that he is a typical product of the education of his day: Homer is held as the embodiment of the Greek spirit as well as the foundation of humanistic study and the model of artistic genius and practical wisdom for every educated person. He is also thoroughly conversant with the 87. Ibid., 31: “ächt hebraisches Nationalepos.”

88. Ibid., 398. The German reads: “Er ist Produkt der vaterländischen religiosen Poesie des Israelitischen Volkes, in welchen sich sein Geist, sein Denken, sein Patriotismus, seine Philosophie und Religion spiegelt, und ist also eine der ersten Quellen der Cultur- und Religionsgeschichte.” 89. Ibid., 401; see the appendix, p. 404, for the original German.

214

Chapter 6

historical-critical debates of his day, especially as they have to do with the classics, and is able to fit the biblical material into this discussion. 90 Smend further observes that, for de Wette, in the Pentateuch only individual elements were epic in character, not the whole. He states, “The epics were performed as short pieces by Rhapsodes. As with Homer, the written fixation and collection is a work of later times.” 91 This summary of de Wette’s view, which was published in 1810, bears a very strong resemblance to the view of Wolf. Smend, however, does not develop the possible relationship between biblical and classical studies on this point. In commenting on de Wette’s biblical hermeneutic, Kraus says that de Wette took up the concept of myth as set forth by Gabler and Eichhorn in the latter’s study of Urgeschichte and developed it further. 92 What de Wette did was to extend the category of myth or Sage far beyond the limits of Gen 1–11 as treated by Gabler and Eichhorn; he included the entirety of the Pentateuchal corpus and demonstrated in a detailed way that it is all the same kind of literature. In this he was anticipated by Geddes and his notion of the Pentateuch as historical myth. 93 De Wette speaks of the entire prehistory as Sagen and says that in folk legend it mixes with the real historical element an ideal poetic element through which the tradition is reshaped, bit by bit, into the miraculous and ideal; contributing to this especially are folk songs which, in their daring lyrical sweep of fantasy, portray that which in nature is astonishing and wondrous in a supernatural light—a portrayal that is easily misunderstood by a people given to belief in miracles.94

This redefinition of the earliest material in Israel’s folk-tradition as Sage, which is to be treated quite differently from written historical sources, belongs to a widespread movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that endeavored to understand the folk-traditions of many peoples. Our concern here is not with the conceptualizing of myth and legend but with the methodological approach to this material. There was an effort to create 90. For the educational background to this period, see J. H. Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 73–106. Rogerson (Old Testament Criticism, 36–44) argues that the philosophy of J. F. Fries, his close friend, was a major influence on views in the Beiträge. It may indeed have had some influence on the way he formulated the positive values of myth, but his classical education, his application of the historical-critical method to the Pentateuch, and his use of comparative folklore and the parallels of classical sources were, I believe, the most important factors in the formation of his views. 91. Smend, De Wette, 51 n. 289. The German reads: “Die Epen wurden als kurze Stücke . . . von Rhapsoden vortragen. Wie bei Homer sind schriftliche Fixierung und Sammlung ein Werk späterer Zeiten.” This is based on de Wette’s views in Heidelbergische Jahrbücher der Literatur 3/1/1 (1810) 176–77. 92. Kraus, Geschichte, 172. See also Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, 16–24. 93. Fuller, Alexander Geddes, 115. 94. De Wette, Lehrbuch, 295, quoted in Kraus, Geschichte, 172; see the appendix, p. 404, for the original German.

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

215

collections and editions of these folk-traditions and to use them as a way of getting back into the earliest prehistory of peoples. It was a small step to read back anachronistically this same process of collection and “redaction” of just such traditions in ancient Israel. As we have seen above, Wolf treated the Homeric material in precisely this fashion, so it is not surprising that his contemporary at Berlin would be influenced in the same direction. What we have in de Wette is a rather uneasy tension between two models of the compositional history of the Pentateuch/Hexateuch that plays itself out in the following two centuries. One model has to do with the identification of the larger literary units—the sources or documents—and their relationship to each other. The other model is focused on the smaller units of “myths” and “legends,” derived from oral tradition and brought together into written collections. Both of these models have their modern analogues, the first in the historian and editor of historical sources, the other in the folklorist and editor who transcribes songs and poems into a written medium. De Wette never makes clear how these two models that he takes up for the different levels of his material fit together, and this will be a concern for later Pentateuchal scholarship, especially as it comes to the fore in the work of Hermann Gunkel and Martin Noth.

Heinrich Ewald: Conservative Reaction Heinrich Ewald was born in Göttingen (1803), received his education there under Eichhorn, among others, and spent most of his academic career there. 95 Cheyne asserts that Eichhorn had considerable influence on Ewald: “He carried on the work of his teacher, Eichhorn, supplementing Eichhorn’s deficiencies and correcting his faults.” 96 This similarity, I believe, is reflected in Ewald’s conservatism regarding the materials in the Pentateuch and historical books and the way he approached historical criticism, in comparison with de Wette, whom he opposed. Yet, there is an important affinity between the “supplementary” method of de Wette and its more detailed presentation in Ewald that makes it fitting to treat these scholars in sequence. 97 Ewald attempted to combine the old documentary approach of Eichhorn (rather than the newer versions of Vatke and George) with the supplementary hypothesis of de Wette. Ewald was also influenced by B. G. Niebuhr, the classical historian, whose great work on the History of Rome (1811–12) he admired and emulated in the writing of his own Geschichte des Volkes Israel

95. See Cheyne, Founders, 66–118, for a review of his life and career. For two chapters Cheyne eulogizes Ewald but has almost nothing to say about the work that Ewald regarded as his most important, the History of Israel. For more useful comments, see Rogerson, Criticism, 91–103; Kraus, Geschichte, 182–88, Houtman, Pentateuch, 91–95. 96. Cheyne, Founders, 71. 97. See also Kraus, Geschichte, 147–48.

216

Chapter 6

(1843). 98 It is in the Geschichte that he lays down his critical evaluation of the biblical sources for his history in the Hexateuch and historical books, and it is to the latter that we will now turn. Briefly stated, Ewald’s scheme for the Hexateuch is as follows: 99 he identifies six narrative stages in the development of the Hexateuch before the final editing of the whole. The first stage is represented by “fragments of early historical works,” including some derived from Moses himself and from shortly after the time of Joshua as well as works composed in the time of the Judges. His methodology for this stage is similar to that of Ilgen, though with different results. The fragments do not constitute a single source, and they are taken up and embedded in later literary works. The fragments he identifies are “The Book of the Wars of Jahveh,” “The Biography of Moses” (Exod 4:18; chap. 18 only), and “The Book of the Covenants” (consisting of a collection of references to covenants in Genesis to Judges). The second stage he calls “The Book of Origins” (“origins” is the way he translates toledot), and this corresponds to what is later called the work of the Priestly Writer. He regards this as the first extensive narrative, extending from creation to the time of the Temple of Solomon, although the period from the judges to David was very briefly dealt with and is no longer preserved. He dates this narrative to the Solomonic era. The writer’s primary motivation is to explain “whatever arose in Israel on the field of law, but preeminently in relation to religion and the priesthood.” 100 The work incorporated little of the previous material other than the Mosaic Decalogue. The subsequent layers were all heavily influenced by the prophetic movement. The third stage is very fragmentary, is associated with Northern materials, and corresponds to the E source of later scholars. Its largest surviving block is the Joseph story. The fourth stage is “another entirely independent work” 101 and consists of the J material. It belongs in his view to the great age of the prophets. The fifth stage Ewald describes as the “first great collection and working-up of all previous sources of the primitive history, to whom therefore is to be referred the whole existing Pentateuch together with the Book of Joshua.” 102 On the whole, this narrator seems to have repeated much of his material “word for word from the older books.” 103 This narrator, in addition to his work as collector, also added certain pieces of his own that can be identified by his lofty prophetic ideas. This figure has much in common with the JE redactor, or Wellhausen’s Jehovist, but Ewald never refers to him as a “redactor.” The sixth stage Ewald attributes to the Deuteronomist, and it corresponds largely

98. Citations are from the English translation, Heinrich Ewald, History of Israel, vol. 1: Introduction and Preliminary History (4th ed.; trans. R. Martineau; London: Longmans, Green, 1883). 99. Ibid., 63–132. See also Rogerson, Criticism, 94–96. 100. Ewald, History, 85. 101. Ibid., 100. 102. Ibid., 106. 103. Ibid.

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

217

with Deuteronomy, as well as much of Joshua, and dates, following de Wette, to the time of Josiah. He regarded this as a separate work, although one that was familiar with the other literary works that existed in the Deuteronomist’s day. He states: That the Deuteronomist had read and made use of the historical work to which the Fifth Narrator gave its final form is certain. . . . But . . . he also drew largely upon many documents, both of a narrative and a legislative character, which are now entirely lost: for the age had long been devoted to learning, and the collection of ancient works on history had doubtless become an established custom. 104

This seems to be an unconscious anachronism reflecting the influence of the Renaissance and early modern period. It is at this point, after the Deuteronomist, that Ewald introduces the figure responsible for the incorporation of the Deuteronomist into the previous, fifth narrator. He states: We can also clearly recognise the manner in which this last compiler and editor of the great History of the Early Times as it has reached us proceeded. He left the work of the Fifth Narrator exactly as he found it, up to the section, shortly before the death of Moses, to which the chief portion of the Deuteronomist’s work could suitably be attached. But since the latter . . . had written the life of Joshua very briefly, the editor proceeded, after the death of Moses, on a freer plan, uniting the more detailed narrative given by the older work with the essential contents of the Deuteronomist’s, and so blending the two works completely into one. It was certainly this last editor who inserted the Blessing of Moses (Deut. xxxiii.); a passage which even yet stands quite disconnected. 105

What is significant about this literary treatment is that for all the previous stages of the literary development Ewald speaks of narrators and authors, but in this last stage he shifts to speaking about a “final editor.” In this he is very much like Hupfeld, whom he otherwise criticizes. The fundamental function of this editor is to conflate documents: in this case, the corpus of the first four books of the Pentateuch collected by the “Fifth Narrator” combined with that of the “Deuteronomist” in Deuteronomy and Joshua. The function of this final editor is not much different from the “Fifth Narrator” except that he adds only the Blessing of Moses—an additional independent piece—but virtually nothing of his own. This is nothing other than the “final redactor” or editor that is the hallmark of both classical and biblical “higher criticism” of the nineteenth century. In the next part of his history (“The Great Book of the Kings”), which deals with the historical books from Judges to 2 Kings, Ewald discusses the language criteria for distinguishing the greater antiquity of the “Book of

104. Ibid., 125–26. 105. Ibid., 130; italics mine.

218

Chapter 6

Origins” (P) from the works that follow in the history. He, of course, considers the distinctive language of P to be earlier and what we now call the Deuteronomistic language of Kings to be much later. Yet, he acknowledges that “the later revisers of the primitive history occasionally introduce a word hitherto foreign to that sphere,” by which he is referring to Deuteronomistic phraseology. Conversely, he suggests that “even the latest redactors of the primitive history retain certain characteristics of the ancient language with great consistency.” 106 It is never made clear how these “revisers” and “redactors” are related to the earlier narrators and compilers, because Ewald speaks only of a single “last editor” who conflated previous sources but did not add anything of his own. So, these “revisers” and “redactors” must refer to changes that occurred in the text of the Hexateuch after the “final editor,” during the course of its textual transmission. This is the pattern that was well established in Homeric criticism by Wolf, and it also became prominent in Pentateuchal (Hexateuchal) criticism in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as we shall see. When Ewald comes to deal with the literary criticism of the biblical histories, “The Great Book of the Kings” ( Judges to 2 Kings) 107 and the “Latest Book of General History” (Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah), 108 he treats them quite differently from de Wette. He finds embodied in them many “archival” sources and “State-annals” and invents a succession of “Court Historians” from the time of David onward, the fragments of which are distributed throughout both histories. From sources of this sort, a succession of historians compiled various histories, and Ewald attempts to reconstruct these within the “Great Book of Kings,” just as he did for the Hexateuch. For Ewald, the most impressive of these was a “Prophetic Book of Kings.” In contrast to de Wette, there is nothing critical about this exercise. From these histories, a Deuteronomistic work was put together under the influence of the Deuteronomic Reformation of Josiah. Ewald describes this process in the following way: But in the meantime [by the time of Josiah] books of narrative [individual histories] were growing more and more numerous, whilst the times which they had to describe were lengthening and becoming more difficult to survey. Hence here as in the primeval history, the desire naturally arose to fuse into one narrative, by proper selection and abridgment, the rich but not always self consistent materials which this literature had produced.109

This task was left to two Deuteronomistic editors, one dating to the years of Josiah (“the last Editor but one”) and the other in the exile (“the last Editor”). What is very curious about his description of these figures is that in his discussion of their activity he rarely ever refers to them as “editors” or 106. Ibid., 135, italics mine. 107. Ibid., 133–68. 108. Ibid., 169–203. See also Rogerson, Criticism, 96–97. 109. Ewald, History, 156.

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

219

explains why they should be given this title. Instead, he speaks of them throughout as authors and compilers, which is akin to the older terminology used by Eichhorn and his heirs. And his characterization of their activity as combining works and adding to them (in a few short passages) a Deuteronomistic perspective is much like his prior description of the “Prophetical Narrator,” whose work he says the final compiler took as his base and “blended into one narrative with all the materials he wished to take from other works, as well as his own additions.” 110 Indeed, he regards this last-but-one author as a “prophetic narrator” 111 as well, so it is hard to see on what basis a distinction is introduced by giving him the title of “editor.” In a similar fashion, Ewald treats the “final editor,” stating: “That one final author and collector edited the present Books of Judges, Ruth, Samuel, and Kings as a whole, is to be concluded from many signs. . . .” 112 He then proceeds to spell out what all these signs are. The language used to describe the activity of this Deuteronomist—whether author, compiler, or editor—is interchangeable, although he prefers to speak of author and only in one short passage reverts to speaking of “this last editor.” 113 One problem he has is how to distinguish this last Deuteronomist from the final Deuteronomistic editor of the Hexateuch, because he must admit that there is a transition between the book of Joshua and the Deuteronomist in Judges in Judg 2:6– 10. However, he merely regards the Judges passage as an imitation of the text in Josh 24:28–33, and thus the Deuteronomist of the Hexateuch had completed his work long before the last Deuteronomist of Judges–Kings. Yet, it remains remarkable and I think significant that there is a final editor for the Hexateuch and two final editors for the “Great Book of the Kings,” in spite of the fact that there were many previous compilers and authors who seem to have engaged in the same kind of literary activity. The history of Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah is considered a late work based on several earlier histories, put together by a Levitical author and historian in the early Hellenistic period. However, he is not called an editor and does not come into the discussion here. As we can see from his description of the historical sources and the various narrators and historians, Ewald is guilty of rather gross anachronism. He has not the slightest hesitation in importing into Israelite and Judean society the kind of literary and intellectual life with which he is familiar. And this is the only explanation for his use of the idea of “final editor.” It is the work of the editor to publish ancient literary works in their definitive form. A historian may put together sources, especially those that relate to the recent past, and an archivist may collect and store state and institutional materials for future reference, but it is the editor who attempts to reproduce in diplomatic form, with little commentary, the fragments of an ancient past. 110. Ibid., 111. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 113. Ibid.,

158. 159. 160. 165.

220

Chapter 6

In fact, Ewald borrowed the notion of a final Deuteronomist from de Wette, without acknowledgment, but in de Wette there was no reference to this author’s being an editor; it was simply not necessary. As we noted above in the case of Homeric studies, K. L. Kayser a little earlier had developed an analysis of the Odyssey in which he saw successive literary layers brought together and molded into a final form by a “redactor,” and this style of analysis, at least for the Odyssey, became standard for a long time. Given the close association between classics and biblical studies, it is little wonder that this view was taken up into the literary analysis of biblical books as well. From this point on, the “final redactor” is the most decisive figure in determining the basic shape of the “vulgate” or “canonical” form of the text. At this point, I must take exception to Rogerson’s assessment of Ewald’s impact on future scholarship. He asserts: “It is fair to say that Martin Noth’s view of the Deuteronomist as compiler is, with certain modifications, still the prevailing modern view, it is not very far removed from Ewald’s treatment of the two Deuteronomists as compilers.” 114 On the contrary, the Deuteronomistic compiler derives from de Wette, for whom he is also truly an author and historian, not an editor, and this is also the case in Noth’s writings. It is Ewald who completely and hopelessly confuses the issue by using de Wette’s terminology and then labeling the Deuteronomistic compiler as an “editor.” Furthermore, it is de Wette’s treatment of Samuel–Kings and Chronicles, mediated through Wellhausen, that is the basis for Noth’s critical study of these works—not the treatment of Ewald, which is almost entirely reactionary against de Wette and the new historical-critical approach. Noth also links the Deuteronomist of Joshua with the author of Judges through Kings, so that they all become one author and historian who worked in the exilic period. It is more recently, since Noth’s death, following the lead of Rudolf Smend and Frank Cross, that scholars have reverted to making the Deuteronomist into a plurality of redactors. This is a matter that will be taken up below. If we wish to look for a more appropriate successor to Ewald, it is to be found in the reaction by William F. Albright and his school against critical scholarship and its negative assessment of the historical value of the primitive history of Israel. Arguments very similar to those used by Ewald about the “antiquity” and historicity of the patriarchs and the Moses tradition were used by Albright and his students against “nihilists” such as Gunkel and Noth, the more appropriate successors of de Wette. One of Albright’s students, Frank Cross, also advocated the double redaction of the Deuteronomistic History, with the same dating for the editors as was posited by Ewald.

114. Rogerson, Criticism, 97–98 (italics mine).

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

221

Hermann Hupfeld: Editor as Conflator of Documents Hupfeld was a contemporary of Ewald who took a quite different approach to the problem of Pentateuchal analysis. He revived the Documentary Hypothesis, now known as the New Documentary Hypothesis, even though he has more in common with Ilgen than he does with his successors, Kuenen and Wellhausen. Here we are concerned only with his primary work on the Pentateuch, Die Quellen der Genesis und die Art ihrer Zusammensetzung (1853). 115 His source division in the work is very similar to Ilgen’s divisions, although he claims that he came to it quite independently. Ewald’s major difference with Ilgen, however, and the one that primarily concerns us here, is his notion of a redactor as the one who put together the three separate sources of Genesis. Hupfeld devotes a chapter of his book to “the method of the editor,” 116 in which the primary function of the editor is described as conflating the sources. To bolster his thesis, he invokes the analogy of the Gospel harmonies at the very beginning of his discussion: In general, the redaction of Genesis out of the previously demonstrated three documents is comparable to the effort to assemble a Gospel harmony out of the Evangelists, especially the first three, which was attempted very early on; and given that the sources out of which these harmonies were assembled were lost and forgotten, the case would be entirely the same. 117

Hupfeld goes on to assert that the success of the harmonizing enterprise is confirmed by the fact that the resulting unity of the work is accepted down to the present day, and only the new criticism opens a way to distinguish the various sources. This analogy is regularly invoked by scholars up to the present day, but it is entirely spurious. Gospel harmonies from the time of Tatian to the present have liturgical and pedagogical functions and are never intended as replacements for the biblical texts. Tatian was certainly not an “editor,” and the analogy of the harmonies is completely anachronistic. 118 Hupfeld’s model of redaction is to start with an Urschrift, the main E document (= P), as a basis and to postulate a redactor who uses this source and incorporates materials from Yahwistic and younger Elohistic sources into it as completely as possible. The sources were all originally independent, so a “redactor” was necessary to bring them together. This “Newer Documentary Hypothesis” was little different from the supplementary hypothesis of Ewald, which simply reckoned with one Elohistic Grundschrift to which a Yahwistic source was added. It should also be noted that, like

115. H. Hupfeld, Die Quellen der Genesis und die Art ihrer Zusammensetzung (Berlin: Wiegandt & Grieben, 1853). See also Cheyne, Founders, 149–55; Rogerson, Criticism, 131–34. 116. “Das Verfahren des Redaktors” in Die Quellen der Genesis, 195–203. 117. Ibid., 195; see appendix, p. 404, for the original German. 118. See also Houtman, Pentateuch, 96.

222

Chapter 6

Ewald, Hupfeld uses the terms Verfasser, Sammler, and Redaktor interchangeably for the final redactor, with the understanding that this writer was a historian. He spells out the basic elements of the editor’s method: on the one hand, as in the oldest historiography generally, in strict fidelity with which the redactor or author of the book inserted his sources verbatim and in full and brought them together, retaining all of their peculiarities; on the other hand, that, combined with this, so much intelligent attention was paid to context and unity or overall structure of the narrative in order to avoid obvious repetitions or contradictions, as well as to arranging the individual pieces of his sources and to connecting them with one another so that they constitute a coherent whole that progresses chronologically, and also to reproducing on an expanded scale in the complete work the (epic) plan of the history inhering in the sources.119

It is clear from this description that Hupfeld has in mind a historian who is editing his sources in diplomatic style, carefully avoiding too much obvious repetition or contradiction and arranging them in orderly, chronological fashion. This is, of course, very similar to Ewald’s editor and depends on the older view of the Pentateuch as embodying historical sources. What is curious is the inclusion of the notion that the scheme for the entire enterprise is also “epic” in plan and proportion. This suggests that the model of the “edited” Homeric epic is also a part of this picture. That the author of the “oldest piece of history writing” should have carried out his scholarly activity in much the same way as a modern historian is, of course, quite anachronistic, as is the notion of editor that depends directly upon it. Yet, it is this earliest description of the function of the Pentateuchal redactor that has persisted throughout its subsequent use. The rest of Hupfeld’s treatment of the redactor’s activity is to point out the places where the redactor has not quite succeeded in welding the work into a unity, where the tensions between the sources remain. However, he notes that at times the redactor must go beyond his role as merely a passive “mechanical compiler” of sources and actively intervene in the text to give it continuity and make it an orderly narrative. A case in point is the way in which the names Abram/Abraham and Sarai/Sarah in all the sources have been made consistent with the name change in one of them (Gen 17). Thus, such contradictions in the text have been eliminated. On the other hand, uniformity in the use of the divine name was not consistently leveled but was allowed to stand. Hupfeld also emphasizes the role of the editor in rearranging his material to fit his larger scheme and gives a number of examples of this. He also assumes that various blocks of material have been omitted from some of the sources and in a few cases glosses or interconnections have likewise been added. With Hupfeld, therefore, the role of the editor/redactor has been defined, and it is subsequently assumed that, when

119. Hupfeld, Die Quellen der Genesis, 196; see appendix, pp. 404–405, for the original German.

spread is 3 points long

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

223

any text in the Pentateuch/Hexateuch shows any signs of this sort of literary activity, it is evidence of the ancient editor. It does not matter that the very existence of ancient editors in Hupfeld and Ewald is based on a totally inappropriate and anachronistic model derived from the modern editor of historical texts. As with Bentley, the invention of the editor was a useful literary device to explain otherwise puzzling features in the text, and the existence of redactors was never again questioned in critical biblical studies from the mid-nineteenth century until the present.

Wellhausen and Kuenen: The Redactor in the Documentary Hypothesis Julius Wellhausen When one thinks of the role of the redactor within the Documantary Hypothesis, one naturally thinks of Wellhausen and his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (1883), 120 so it is a little surprising to find that he says very little about the role of the redactor; furthermore, his references are scattered throughout his discussion of other issues. He also uses a wide range of vague terminology when he describes this editorial activity, but this should not be surprising, given the diversity of use that we have already seen in our survey. While the Prolegomena may have been dedicated to the memory of his “not-forgotten” teacher Ewald, it is de Wette who is regarded as the “pioneer of historical criticism” in the field of biblical criticism and the one whose work provides the point of departure for his own study. 121 This, of course, was qualified by Wellhausen’s commitment to Hupfeld’s New Documentary Hypothesis as revised in the work of Karl Heinrich Graf, Leopold George, and Wilhelm Vatke, as well as his contemporary, Abraham Kuenen. Within the limits of our research here, it will be enough to look at Wellhausen and Kuenen. The first part of the Prolegomena on the “Ordinances of Worship” are primarily concerned with the history of Israelite religion as it bears on the chronological order of the major corpora of the Hexateuch, the Jehovist ( JE), Deuteronomy, and the Priestly Code (Q); any remarks about the redactor are only incidental throughout. It is in part 2, “History of Tradition,” that references to redactors become more explicit. This may be a little surprising to those who are accustomed to associating the “history of tradition” with the development of oral tradition, following the rise of form criticism. However, Wellhausen uses “history of tradition” in the older sense of Wolf to refer to the whole of the tradition (paradosis) of the written text, from the earliest stages of composition to the “final form.” Following the lead of de Wette, Wellhausen begins his discussion with Chronicles. There can scarcely be any dispute that Chronicles represents a major revision of the 120. References will be to the English translation, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1885). 121. Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 4–5.

224

Chapter 6

older history, especially Samuel–Kings, and Wellhausen’s primary concern is to show how this revision reflects the development of the Pentateuch and the Priestly Code within it, when compared with Samuel–Kings. Much of his discussion deals with parallel material found in both histories and the radical modifications made by the Chronicler to the older material that he inherited. Yet, nowhere does Wellhausen describe the Chronicler as an editor with respect to his treatment of Samuel–Kings. He is a writer, an author, a historian, someone who is rewritng the history of the people for his own day and according to his own ideology. It is true that Wellhausen regards the term “midrash” as a more suitable description of the result 122—and this is certainly debatable, but does not affect the understanding of the writer as author. As we have seen above, neither de Wette nor Ewald uses the term “editor” in relation to Chronicles. Wellhausen next turns his attention to “Judges, Samuel, and Kings” (chap. 7), and here his approach is altogether different. He identifies, in the first place, the way in which the older tradition has become overgrown with later additions and accretions, and these he attributes to a Deuteronomistic redactor. Throughout, he tends to use terms such as “redactor” and “redaction” and regards the latter as synonymous with “revision.” Thus he speaks of a major Deuteronomistic redaction, extending from Judg 2:6 to 16:31, with 1:1–2:5 and 17:1–21:24 as later supplements. In fact, there is a succession of revisions, additions, and redactions, both before and after the last major “redaction” or “revision,” but it is the Deuteronomistic redactor who is responsible for giving shape to the work and for including the many programmatic passages that give a “theocratic element in the history of Israel” as a whole. In describing earlier efforts at revision, Wellhausen states: Going a step further back from the last revision we meet with an earlier effort in the same direction, which, however, is less systematically worked out, in certain supplements and emendations, which have here and there been patched on to the original narratives. These may be due in part to the mere love of amplification. . . . But they originate partly in the difficulty felt by a later age in sympathizing with the religious usages and ideas of older times. 123

These revisions are illustrated from the story of Gideon in particular, and they are described as different ways of telling the story, some more pious and others more profane. But in my view, amplification of this sort has little to do with “editing.” The last revision of Judges, however, is the most important and extends to more than one book: “The comprehensive revision which we noticed in the Book of Judges has left its mark on the Book of Samuel too.” 124 Here, also, Wellhausen identifies extended passages that belong to Judges and carries on his search through Samuel and Kings, where he finds the same editor 122. Ibid., 227. 123. Ibid., 237. 124. Ibid., 245.

spread is 9 points long

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

225

of the “last revision” at work: “Here also [in Kings] chronological and religious elements combine to the building up of the framework.” 125 From this he concludes: “That this redaction of our book [Kings] is essentially uniform with that of the two historical books which precede it, requires no proof.” 126 Wellhausen identifies this revision as Deuteronomistic: “this means no more than that it came into existence under the influence of Deuteronomy,” 127 during the exile. This reviser is accused by Wellhausen of doing “violence” to the materials that he uses: “They have been altered in particular by a onesided selection, which is determined by certain religious views.” 128 In this respect, of course, this “revision” is no different from Chronicles, which is even more guilty of the charge because of the way in which the Chronicler treated his sources. In his summing up, Wellhausen draws a direct comparison between the Deuteronomist and the Chronicler. Rejecting the older view of Ewald that it was the prophets who were responsible for Israelite historiography, he states: But the systematic recoining of the tradition was only effected when a firmer stamp had become available than the free ideas of the prophets, the will of God having been formulated in writing. When this point was reached, no one could fail to see the discrepancy between the ideal commencement, which was now sought to be restored as it stood in the book, and the succeeding development. The old books of the people, which spoke in the most innocent way of the most objectionable practices and institutions, had to be thoroughly remodeled according to the Mosaic form, in order to make them valuable, digestible, and edifying, for a new generation. A continuous revision of them was made, not only in the Chronicles, at the beginning of the Greek domination, but . . . even in the Babylonian exile. 129

For Wellhausen, then, we have two parallel revisionist histories, the one using the Mosaic Law in the form of Deuteronomy as its base and the other using the Priestly Code. However, they are not fundamentally different in their revisionary method or technique. The question therefore arises: If the Chronicler is an author and historian, then why not the Deuteronomist? This is precisely the conclusion to which Martin Noth came in his treatment of the Chronicler and the Deuteronomist. He completely rejects Wellhausen’s characterization of the Deuteronomist as an editor and uses the same Deuteronomistic texts to argue that an author and historian, Dtr, was responsible for them. 130 Although Wellhausen has not taken over the 125. Ibid., 272. 126. Ibid., 277. 127. Ibid., 280. 128. Ibid., 280–81; cf. 282. 129. Ibid., 294. It is this passage that Gilbert Murray must have had in mind in his understanding of the Deuteronomic reform. But Murray carries this notion far beyond anything intended by Wellhausen. 130. See M. Noth, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien (2nd ed.; Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1957), 89. We will return to this issue below.

226

Chapter 6

conservative appraisal of the Chronicler and the Deuteronomist from Ewald and prefers the more critical view of de Wette, he has adopted the notion of the Deuteronomist as redactor from Ewald—although he speaks of only one Deuteronomist, whom he places in the exilic period. 131 Like Ewald, he also refers to the Chronicler is a “reviser,” but he does not call him an editor. Wellhausen, in his Prolegomena, says little about additions made to the text of Judges-Samuel-Kings subsequent to the final “redaction,” but in his earlier study, Die Composition, he acknowledges that there are blocks of material, such as Judg 1:1–2:5, 2 Sam 21–24, 1 Kgs 13, and many smaller texts that were not included in the Deuteronomistic redaction. He indicates that it is difficult to assign them to any one hand or editor and that it is hard to draw a line between “vorkanonischer und nachkanonischer Diaskeue [revision],” 132 by which he presumably means interpolations that belong to the “standard” text and materials that are merely late corruptions. The use of the Greek term to designate a certain type of “redactional” addition will be taken up again below in conjunction with the Hexateuch. When Wellhausen turns to “the narrative of the Hexateuch” (Prolegomena, chap. 8), his approach to the role of the redactor is altogether different. He begins by making a distinction between the historical books and the Hexateuch: In the historical books the tradition is developed by means of supplement and revision; double narratives occur here and there, but not great parallel pieces of connected matter side by side. In the Hexateuch additions and supplements have certainly taken place on the most extensive scale, but the significant feature is here that continuous narratives which can and must be understood each by itself are woven together in a double or threefold cord. Critics have shown a disposition, if not in principle yet in fact, to take the independence of these so-called sources of the Hexateuch as if it implied that in point of matter also each is a distinct and independent source. But this is, even a priori, very improbable. . . . Criticism has not done its work when it has completed the mechanical distribution; it must aim further at bringing the different writings when thus arranged into re-

131. It is true that Wellhausen, in his earlier study of Judges-Samuel-Kings reflected in Die Composition des Hexateuchs und der historischen Bücher des Alten Testaments ([4th ed., based on the unchanged 3rd ed., 1899; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1963], 208–301, esp. 297–301) expresses agreement with Ewald in making a distinction between a primary (preexilic) and a secondary (exilic) stage in the final form of these books. Both are nachdeuteronomisch, and Wellhausen can assign important passages to both. Yet, there appears to be only one Deuteronomist, who is preexilic; in the Prolegomena, he is redated to the exilic period and is the author of the final Deuteronomistic redaction that receives the major consideration. The later revision consists primarily of numerous additions from various hands that are not particularly Deuteronomistic. Cf. T. Römer and A. de Pury, “L’historiographie deutéronomiste (HD): Histoire de la recherche et enjeux du débat,” in Israël construit son histoite (ed. A. de Pury, T. Römer, and J.-D. Macchi; Geneva: Labor & Fides, 1996), 27–28. Römer and de Pury consider only the earlier studies, not the Prolegomena. 132. Wellhausen, Composition, 262.

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

227

lation with each other, must seek to render them intelligible as phases in a living process, and thus to make it possible to trace a gradual development of the tradition. 133

This kind of “history of tradition” is understood as dealing with the whole process of the composition of the Hexateuch—but particularly in its written form—and thus as corresponding with what Wolf did for Homer and what is later understood as “redaction criticism.” It is also remarkable that Wellhausen places such strong emphasis on the interdependence of the sources, because it was independence of the sources that was the basis for the documentary approach. However, Wellhausen wants to use the dependence of Q (P) on JE and D to argue that P is the latest source. Nevertheless, the whole question of how the sources are to be related to one another has a direct bearing on the question of the redactor(s), as Wellhausen observes: Thus the agreement of the sources in the plan of the narrative is not a matter of course, but a matter requiring explanation, and is only to be explained on the ground of the literary dependence of one source on the other. The question how this relation of dependence is to be defined is thus a much more pressing one than is commonly assumed.134

But then Wellhausen immediately declines to take up this task: “This, however, is not the place to attempt a history of the development of the Israelite legend.” To do so would encompass the whole of what later scholarship included in tradition-history and redaction criticism, as reflected, for example, in Noth’s Überlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuch. Wellhausen, however, does not address these issues. He is totally taken up with “comparing the narrative of the Priestly Code with the Jehovistic one,” 135 because his primary concern is to defend the priority of JE over P, and the “more pressing” question of defining the relation of dependence is left aside. Only occasionally does he refer to the work of the “reviser” or “editor,” 136 by which he means the priestly redactor, but unlike his remarks on the historical books, where the Deuteronomistic redactor is his major focus, these remarks about der letzten Redaktor tell us little about this “editor.” There is little about the Jehovist ( JE) as redactor in the Prolegomena; for this, we have to search through the relevant parts of his Composition des Hexateuchs (3rd ed.). 137 For JE, Wellhausen seems to prefer the older terminology of compiler, author, and Zusammenarbeiter, reserving the term “redactor” almost exclusively for the “last redactor” (Rp). When he does use the term Redaktor for JE, as in his discussion of Exod 19–24, 32–34, he seems uncertain whether or not he is dealing with a Deuteronomist. 138 In the case of 133. Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 295. 134. Ibid., 296. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid., 299, 311, 342, 370. 137. Wellhausen, Composition, 15–29. 138. Ibid., 94.

228

Chapter 6

Gen 14, Wellhausen regards this chapter as a very late addition in the JE style quite outside the editorial process. 139 When Wellhausen comes to deal with the relationship of JE to Deuteronomy, he runs into some difficulties. He states: As the Jehovistic work was originally a pure history-book, so Deuteronomy, when it was first discovered, was a pure law-book [chaps. 12–27]. These two works, the historical and legal, were at first quite independent of each other; only afterwards were they conjoined, perhaps that the new law might share in the popularity of the old people’s book, and at the same time infuse into it its own spirit. It made it the easier to do this, that, as we have just seen, a piece of law [the Book of the Covenant and E’s Decalogue] had already been taken up into the Jehovistic history-book. . . . This combination of Deuteronomy with the Jehovist was the beginning of the combination of narrative with law; and the fact that this precedent was before the author of the Priestly Code explains how, though his concern was with the Torah alone, he yet went to work from the very outset and comprised in his work the history of the creation, as if it also belonged to the Torah. 140

The problem with this view is that, if JE is a popular history book like the ones that Wellhausen presupposes to be behind the Deuteronomistic revision of the books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings, then we would expect the same kind of “editorial” process to be evident throughout JE. Of this, Wellhausen says nothing. He simply assumes an older view about the combination of JE and D and uses it as an analogy for understanding the form of the Priestly Code. It is only in his “conclusion of the criticism of the law” (Prolegomena, chap. 9) that Wellhausen takes up the question of editors in the Hexateuch in greater detail. It is here that one discovers Wellhausen’s reluctance to make much of the “Deuteronomistic revision” of the Hexateuch because opponents of the New Documentary Hypothesis had viewed the final redactor as the Deuteronomist. Wellhausen notes that the major stumbling block for the view that the Dtr redactor covers the whole Hexateuch is the fact that Dtr is so completely absent from the P corpus. 141 Only in a few places is there a priestly intervention within a Deuteronomistic piece, not the reverse. Thus he speaks of a “final priestly revision.” 142 In this, he follows Kuenen, 143 who argues for a priestly reviser after the Deuteronomist. According to Wellhausen, this is well illustrated by examining the late priestly revision of the Holiness Code (Lev 17–26), a work of the exilic age, dependent, in his view, on both the Book of the Covenant ( JE) and Deuteronomy. 139. Ibid., 311–13. In his earlier treatment, he had considered it an independent piece added by the Endredaktor of Genesis—that is, Rp (p. 25). 140. Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 345. 141. Ibid., 374–75. 142. Ibid., 376. 143. Ibid., 376 n. 1.

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

229

Wellhausen concludes from his examination of the HC: “This revision has not been equally inclusive in all parts. Some of its corrections and supplements are very considerable, e.g., xxiii. 1–8, 23–38; xxiv. 1–14, 23. Some of them are quite unimportant. . . . But the fact that the last edition of the Law of Holiness proceeds from the Priestly Code, is universally acknowledged. Its importance for the literary history of Israel cannot be over-estimated.” 144 Its importance for Wellhausen is the late dating of the Priestly Code, but it also bears on the nature of the PC “revision.” It is hard to see how the priestly reviser can be distinguished from the Priestly Code itself. There are “further important traces of the final priestly revision of the Hexateuch” 145 that Wellhausen mentions in addition to indications in the HC: for example, Gen 7:6–9, to adjust JE with Q; and the dating in Deut 1:3, in order to incorporate Deuteronomy into the larger work. He also notes “that the Priestly Code in the Book of Joshua is simply a filling-up of the Jehovistic-Deuteronomistic narrative.” 146 This leads Wellhausen to attempt to understand P both as a separate work and as a supplement to JE and D. He states: That the Priestly Code consists of elements of two kinds, first of an independent stem, the Book of the Four Covenants (Q), and second, of innumerable additions and supplements which attach themselves principally to the Book of the Four Covenants, but not to it alone, and indeed to the whole of the Hexateuch—this assertion has not, strange to say, met with the opposition which might have been expected.147

The reason that this distinction was tolerated and even encouraged is the fact that many scholars wanted to date the independent P corpus very early and then allow the supplemental material to be late and postexilic. Wellhausen rejects any attempt to construct a long temporal separation between these two forms of P, one preexilic and one postexilic. He states: The secondary part of the Priestly Code of necessity draws the primary part with it. The similarity in matter and in form, the perfect agreement in tendencies and ideas, in expression and ways of putting things, all compel us to think that the whole, if not a literary, is yet a historical, unity. 148

But once the whole of P is dated late, then the question to ask is: Why not consider it a literary unity and regard the whole as a supplement, if a large part of it must be understood in this way and if even Q is shown clearly by Wellhausen to be dependent on JE and D? Indeed, Wellhausen ends the chapter with another example in which Gen 6:9 (P) shows “striking” dependence on Gen 7:1 ( JE). 149 It is remarkable that Wellhausen, with 144. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 147. Ibid. 148. Ibid. 149. Ibid.,

379–80. 384. 385.

390.

230

Chapter 6

his strong emphasis on P’s dependence on JE and D, did not adopt a supplemental approach to the sources of the Pentateuch and eliminate his final redactor altogether. In Wellhausen’s concluding chapter, “The Oral and the Written Torah,” he argues for a parallel between Deuteronomy, which was promulgated in the time of Josiah, and the Priestly Code, in the time of Ezra. He states: Just as it is in evidence that Deuteronomy became known in the year 621, and that it was unknown up to that date, so it is in evidence that the remaining Torah of the Pentateuch—for there is no doubt that the law of Ezra was the whole Pentateuch—became known in the year 444 and was unknown till then. This shows in the first place, and puts it beyond question, that Deuteronomy is the first, and the priestly Torah the second, stage of the legislation. But in the second place, as we are accustomed to infer the date of the composition of Deuteronomy from its publication and introduction by Josiah, so we must infer the date of the composition of the Priestly Code from its publication and introduction by Ezra and Nehemiah. 150

There are some problems with this analogy, because Wellhausen has already admitted that the lawbook of Josiah’s reform was quite limited (to Deut 12– 27), leaving unexplained how the rest was promulgated. Thus, the parallel suggests that only a part of the Priestly Code was inaugurated by Ezra. But this dispute is not our concern here. In a footnote on Ezra’s role in the promulgation of the Priestly Code, Wellhausen states: It is not, however, necessary, and it can scarcely be correct, to make Ezra more than the editor, the real and principal editor, of the Hexateuch; and in particular he is not likely to have been the author of Q. Nor on the other hand is it meant to deny that many new features may have been added and alterations made after Ezra. 151

Stated positively, Wellhausen attributes to Ezra the role of the final redactor, “the real and principal editor,” of the Hexateuch, which means that he is the one who was responsible for combining the Jehovist, in its Deuteronomistic revision, with Q and Deuteronomy to form the Hexateuch. Ezra would also be the one responsible for the supplemental material in the Priestly Code, which would be a considerable amount of text. To this corpus Wellhausen admits that some later additions and alterations were made by the notorious “revisers.” There is, of course, some tension between the idea that Ezra promulgated the Torah as a lawbook and the nature of the entire Hexateuch, which contains as much historical narrative as law. The question of exactly what Ezra introduced and when he did so became a matter of considerable debate after Wellhausen, in spite of Wellhausen’s lack of “doubt” on the matter.

150. Ibid., 408. 151. Ibid., 409 n. 1.

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

231

Wellhausen also associates the promulgation of the law with the promulgation of the canon and, therefore, Ezra and Nehemiah, along with Josiah, are “the founders of the canon.” He states: The introduction of the law, first Deuteronomy, and then the whole Pentateuch, was in fact the decisive step, by which the written took the place of the spoken word, and the people of the word became a ‘people of the book.’ To the book were added in course of time the books; the former was formally and solemnly introduced in two successive acts, the latter acquired imperceptibly a similar public authority for the Jewish church. The notion of the canon proceeds entirely from that of the written Torah; the prophets and the hagiographa are also called Torah by the Jews, though not Torah of Moses. 152

In this last statement, the “redactional” process leads directly into the canonical process, and Ezra the “editor” is the one responsible for the canonization of the Hexateuch. This interconnection between the editing of the Bible and its canonicity has played, and continues to play, a major role in the discussion of both topics: the final redaction of the biblical books, the divisions of the Bible, and the standardization of the text, on the one hand; and the canonization of the biblical books on the other. From the time of Wellhausen onward, the editor has become both the authoritative interpreter and also the canonizer of the biblical tradition. Abraham Kuenen We turn, now, to Abraham Kuenen, who in An Historico-Critical Inquiry into the Origin and Composition of the Hexateuch (1886) follows Wellhausen and makes reference to the Prolegomena; however, his earlier work on the Pentateuch precedes Wellhausen’s by several years and Wellhausen pays him generous tribute. 153 Nevertheless, in Kuenen’s later work we have a much fuller articulation of the role of the “redactor” of the Hexateuch than one finds in Wellhausen—an articulation that betrays more clearly the dependence of the Documentary Hypothesis on the classical scholarship of Wolf and his successors. The last chapter of Kuenen’s book is directed toward a discussion of the “redaction of the Hexateuch” 154 and thus will serve as the focus of our attention here. In Kuenen’s view, up until the time of the “reformation of Ezra and Nehemiah (about 444 b.c.) the deuteronomico-prophetic sacred history [D + JE] and the historico-priestly work [P] both existed independently. The union of these two gave rise to the present Hexateuch.” 155 Kuenen then offers reasons 152. Ibid., 409. 153. See especially R. Smend, “Kuenen und Wellhausen,” in Abraham Kuenen (1828– 1891): His Major Contributions to the Study of the Old Testament (ed. P. B. Dirksen and A. van der Kooij; OtSt 29; Leiden: Brill, 1993), 113–27. 154. A. Kuenen, An Historico-Critical Inquiry into the Origin and Composition of the Hexateuch (London: Macmillan, 1886), 313–42. 155. Ibid., 313.

232

Chapter 6

why there was a need to resolve the tension and contradiction between these two works. “There was but one means of averting this danger; viz. to weld together these independent but related works into a single whole which might then claim, without fear of challenge, the place which Judaism assigned to the documents of Yahwè’s revelation to the fathers. It is therefore highly probable that the Sopherîm lost no time, and that before the end of the fifth century they had produced the Hexateuch.” 156 This scenario differs significantly from Wellhausen’s reconstruction, in that Ezra, a single scribe and editor, is replaced by a kind of editorial board, the sopherim, who now take half a century to produce the Hexateuch. 157 This, of course, destroys Wellhausen’s scheme: he claimed that “the law of Ezra was the whole Pentateuch” and that his promulgation of the law was the origin of the canon. Kuenen begins his discussion of the evidence for redaction of the Hexateuch by establishing its continuity with the three major “recensions” of the Pentateuch as revealed by textual criticism: Almost everything that we can establish with regard to this work of redaction must be deducted from the Hexateuch itself; but this makes it all the more incumbent on us not to neglect the few hints that are presented us from outside. The combined evidence of the books of Chronicles, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Alexandrine translation of the Hexateuch, prove that in the third century b.c. the Hexateuch as we know it was in existence. They fix a terminus ad quem which we must in no case overstep. But at the same time the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Alexandrine translation, when compared with each other and with our textus receptus [MT], show that the Hebrew texts of the third century did not agree with each other. They displayed, of course, the usual type of variants, due to the carelessness or caprice of the copyists; but beyond these they manifested divergencies of far greater extent and significance which can only be understood as the results of deliberate recension of the text conducted with a relatively high degree of freedom and in accordance with certain fixed principles. Now in former times it was usual if not universal, to hold the Samaritans or the Greek translators, or the copyists of the manuscripts they followed, responsible for these divergencies, while our own textus receptus—allowance being made for subsequent corruptions—was regarded as substantially identical with the recognised text of the Scribes in the third century b.c. and still earlier. But we have no a priori right whatever to assume any such contrast, and a posteriori it is contradicted by the prevalence of so-called Samaritan or Alexandrine readings in Judea itself. The true conclusion is rather that the text of the Hexateuch, not only here and there but throughout, was handled with a certain freedom in the third century, and yet more so previously, being still subject to what its guard-

156. Ibid., 314. 157. As we have seen above, the sopherim are viewed as similar to the scholars of Alexandria. This would hardly make them appropriate editors for the task that Kuenen has in mind.

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

233

ians considered amendments. Now this is perfectly natural if, but only if, we think of the redaction of the Hexateuch not as an affair that was accomplished once and for all, but as a labour that was only provisionally closed at first and was long subsequently continued and rounded off. Even apart from the evidence borne by the divergent recensions of the text, this view, as we shall presently see, is supported by phenomena which appear in all three recensions alike. The redaction of the Hexateuch, then, assumes the form of a continuous diaskeue or diorthosis, and the redactor becomes a collective body headed by the scribe who united the two works spoken of above into a single whole, but also including a whole series of his more or less independent followers. It is only in exceptional cases, however, that the original redactor can be distinguished with certainty from those who continued his work. For the most part we shall have to club them together and may indicate them by the single letter R.158

I have quoted Kuenen at length because this statement of continuity between the “redaction” of the Hexateuch and the later “recensions” of the Pentateuch has become a major subject of discussion in recent textual criticism, to which the evidence of the Qumran scrolls has now been added. Many believe that the scrolls confirm Kuenen’s notion of “deliberate recension of the text” for a long period of time up to the establishment of the Textus Receptus, the Masoretic Text. We will take up the questions related to the recent text-critical discussion below. What is of concern to us here is to understand where Kuenen got his ideas about the whole redactional/recensional process that extended from the end of the fifth century b.c.e. to the first or second century c.e. Let us look at the various parts of this argument. The principal argument from textual criticism for an ongoing redactional process is the three “recensions” of the text of the Pentateuch in the form of the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint, and the MT. All of these are regarded as “the results of deliberate recension of the text conducted with a relatively high degree of freedom,” which means that they were edited, not just by the “scribes” of SamP and LXX but by those responsible for the MT as well. If these three local texts could be “amended” through this kind of editorial activity, then it is “perfectly natural” for Kuenen to suppose that the original redaction was only “provisionally closed” and was “rounded off” by this later recensional activity. The three recensions are therefore secondary redactions. This brings Kuenen to a remarkable statement: “The redaction of the Hexateuch, then, assumes the form of a continuous diaskeue or diorthosis, and the redactor becomes a collective body headed by the scribe who united the two works spoken of above [DJE and P] into a single whole, but also including the whole series of his more or less independent followers.” What we 158. Ibid., 314–15. Smend, in “Kuenen und Wellhausen,” 123, quotes an earlier work of Kuenen (1880): “De grenslijn tusschen het schrijven en het redigeeren van den Hexateuch bestaat alleen in onze voorstelling. De jongste scrijvers waren tevens redactoren, en omgekeerd. [The borderline between the writing and the editing of the Hexateuch exists only in our presentation. The most recent writers were at the same time redactors, and vice versa.]”

234

Chapter 6

have here is an implied comparison between the “revisers” and “editors” of Homeric criticism, as set forth by Wolf and as generally perceived during the nineteenth century, and the sopherim, understood as editors from the time of the earliest Hexateuch down to the first century c.e. and beyond. Furthermore, the impression that one gets is that the “original redactor” who stands at the head of this process is the “scribe” of the late Persian period, but then, in a subsequent note, Kuenen explains that there were indeed earlier redactors. He states: We have to assume a redactor or harmonist for the union of J and E, and again of JE and D. But the redactor of whom we are now speaking differs from both of them, for he had DJE and P before him, and he effected their union in the spirit and the interest of P. We may therefore call him Rp in distinction from Rd (the deuteronomic redactor of D + JE) and Rj (the redactor of J + E, whom we have also indicated by JE).159

What is interesting about this note is that the redactor is now identified as a “harmonist,” which means that Hupfeld’s model of the Gospel harmonies has been applied to all of the redactors; in place of a single harmony in the case of Hupfeld, the function of all three redactors now is to “harmonize” their documents with each other. This function, of course, has nothing in common with the editorial model that we find in the Alexandrian scholars or in Origen, and the notion therefore becomes quite absurd. The latter scholars can hardly be accused of conflating texts, and this kind of editorial activity does not predate the Hellenistic Period. It is interesting that G. F. Moore, in his discussion of the Diatessaron, uses it as a way of explaining the conflation of documents in the Pentateuch. However, he gives no hint of the fact that the parallel drawn between Gospel harmonies and the work of redactors had already been in circulation in Pentateuchal studies for 50 years and, although Moore specifically rejects calling such a conflator a redactor, this is precisely how the “conflator” was treated by previous critics and by others since. 160 Furthermore, like Hupfeld, Moore seems to think that there was only one such harmonist for the Pentateuch and does not address the idea proposed by Kuenen that there were several successive harmonists. In any event, the function of harmonist is only one of several attributed to the redactor, and none of these functions are at all evident in the Diatesseron. Kuenen likewise explains that Rp is the equivalent of the first R, who stands at the beginning of the process of textual transmission and is therefore regularly described as the “first” redactor, in spite of the apparent contradiction with his remarks about the other earlier redactors that results from this explanation. Kuenen continues: 159. Kuenen, Historico-Critical Inquiry, 317 n. 5. 160. See George Foot Moore, “Tatian’s Diatessaron and the Analysis of the Pentateuch,” JBL 9 (1890): 201–15, repr. in Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism (ed. J. H. Tigay; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 243–56.

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

235

R’s task has already been described, in general terms, as the welding together of the two works that lay before him [i.e., DJE and P]. His purpose, then, was at once to preserve his material virtually intact and to combine it in such a way as to produce a veritable whole.161

This description in the older critics of the redactors as conservative, which stems from the Alexandrian model, is quite at variance with the notion that the redactors are responsible for so many innovations and the insertion of new documents into old “classical” works. As Kuenen states in a footnote: “We are speaking here, of course, of the first redactor. It lies in the nature of the case that the later diaskeuastae did not cover the whole ground and in some cases only dealt with a single passage.” 162 All the so-called “revisers” (diaskeuastai) in R that come after the “first” redactor have as their function to complete or expand the priestly ordinances; thus, the term is being used in two quite contradictory ways. The scheme of an initial redaction that creates the first major composition followed by a redaction history of revisions is in agreement with the model derived ultimately from Wolf’s treatment of Homer. However, the men responsible for the conservation of both DJE and P are said to belong “to the school of Ezra, to the Priest-scribes of Jerusalem.” 163 Having asserted that R is responsible for the first (and final) redaction of the Hexateuch, Kuenen states: “The redaction of the Hexateuch further includes the division of the Tora into five books and its separation from the book of Joshua.” 164 This leads Kuenen into some real problems, because he explicitly attributes this division to the “first redactor,” who must also be the one who combined P with the prior sources of the book of Joshua to create the Hexateuch in the first place. Then he follows with the rather weak remark: “Whether the redactor of Joshua is the same as the redactor of the Pentateuch may be left undecided.” 165 But he has already asserted that it was R that created the Hexateuch by combining DJE and P. He cannot have it both ways. Kuenen’s remarks about the division of the Torah into five books are likewise quite suspect. Furthermore, he attributes the colophons at the end of Leviticus and Numbers to the earliest scribes, which seems to me very doubtful. And his evidence for a separation of the Pentateuch from 161. Kuenen, Historico-Critical Inquiry, 318. 162. Ibid., 341 n. 14. A. Rofé (“Abraham Kuenen’s Contribution to the Study of the Pentateuch: A View from Israel,” in Abraham Kuenen: His Major Contributions to the Study of the Old Testament [ed. P. B. Dirksen and A. van der Kooij; OtSt 29; Leiden: Brill, 1993], 105–12) comments in particular (p. 111) on Kuenen’s use of “the diaskeuast, a late scribe who interpolates interpretations into his sources.” Rofé approves of this notion and states: “In the wake of Kuenen, critics ought more often to reckon with supplementation as one of the means employed in the formation of biblical books.” While I agree with Rofé’s sentiment, he ignores the fact that Kuenen combined the notion of diaskeuast with his redactor (R) to accommodate his Documentary Hypothesis. 163. Kuenen, Historico-Critical Inquiry, 319. 164. Ibid., 340. 165. Ibid.

236

Chapter 6

what follows is equally debatable. Nevertheless, the notions of Pentateuchal and Hexateuchal redactors propounded by Kuenen are still with us. Wellhausen and Kuenen were in constant contact with each other for a number of years. 166 In the Nachträge of the second and third editions of Die Composition des Hexateuchs und der historischen Bücher des Alten Testaments, Wellhausen responded to a number of articles published by Kuenen in the Leiden journal Theologisch Tijdschrift between 1877 and 1884, and these publications present a scholarly dialogue between the two scholars. 167 In the Nachträge, Wellhausen frequently refers to Kuenen’s terms Diaskeuase, Diaskeue, and Diaskeuast(en). He concedes to Kuenen that beyond the sources JE, D, and Q there were later expansions, and he acknowledges the difficulty of classifying these additions. He states: I was led from text criticism to literary criticism because it developed that sometimes the boundary where the work of the glossator ends and that of the author begins was not discernible. As a result, I became mistrustful early on of the fashion of regarding the Hebrew historical books as a pure mosaic and had already given expression to this mistrust in the preface to the text of the Books of Samuel. 168

At this point, Wellhausen, in a note, quotes a long passage from his earlier, 1871 work on the text of Samuel. 169 As we saw above, for Wellhausen, the historical books were much more than a “pure mosaic” of fragments that were merely in need of a collector and editor (redactor): the distinction between what was text-critically a “gloss” and what was a literary revision was more difficult to make. Likewise, in the case of the Hexateuch he saw a similar process. Thus, he states: In investigating the composition of the Hexateuch it became apparent to me that here, to be sure, three independent narrative threads were proceeding, but these large sequences were not simply snipped and loosely sown together; rather, before, alongside and after being brought together (which did not occur at the same time) they had been considerably augmented and reworked; in other words, the literary process through which the Hexateuch came into being had been very complex and the so-called supplementary hypothesis in fact finds its application in a sense different from that in which it was originally put forward. Nevertheless, the latest stratum, which reposes superficially over the entire moraine, I did not, at least in the narrative parts, properly evaluate, especially not there where it came to the fore very conspicuously. Here Kuenen, to whom I already in another place have expressed my gratitude, liberated me from residual remnants of the old leaven of mechanical source analysis. This acknowl-

166. See especially Smend, “Kuenen und Wellhausen,” 113–27. 167. Wellhausen, Die Composition, 314–53. 168. Ibid., 314–15; see the appendix, p. 405, for the original German. 169. J. Wellhausen, Der Text der Bücher Samuelis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1871), x–xi.

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

237

edgement does not prejudice the fact that I am not always in agreement with him in defining the extent of the interventions of the latest Diaskeue [revision]. 170

This concession to a kind of supplementary hypothesis as an addition to the source analysis, in agreement with Kuenen, is used to account for the last “sediment” of expansions, which in Kuenen’s terminology is the latest diaskeue. Wellhausen does not always agree with Kuenen’s analysis of the expansions and follows this statement with a series of examples taken from Kuenen’s articles. Throughout his discussion of these examples, he constantly uses Kuenen’s Greek terms for reviser and revision to refer to the last type of addition. Thus, in Exod 16, while disagreeing with Kuenen’s general treatment, Wellhausen nevertheless recognizes, with Kuenen, some late additions, and at the end of his analysis he states: “The diaskeuast [reviser], whom Kuenen rightly accepts, already had before him the composition of JE + Q and had subjected it to a new revision. Before its union with Q, JE appears to have gone through the hand of a Deuteronomistic redactor.” 171 In Kuenen’s view, Exod 16 was primarily P with some later revision and no earlier JE material. 172 What seems clear is that both Wellhausen and Kuenen recognize two levels of “editorial” activity, redactors (or editors) and revisers, the same as was prevalent in the studies of Homer and for which the Greek terminology also seemed useful. This terminology was already in circulation in biblical studies before these two scholars began their work, and they simply borrowed it when they deemed it convenient to do so. 173 It seems to me indisputable that one cannot understand the role of editors or redactors in Wellhausen’s and Kuenen’s composition history of the Hexateuch—they were the creators of the “final form” by conflating sources, by adding secondary supplements, and by creating the vulgate versions of the various religious communities—until one recognizes the decisive influence of the classical study of Homer, in which the “redactional hypothesis” pervasively reigned in nineteenth-century scholarship. Inherent in this scheme borrowed from classical studies is the contradiction between the editor, who 170. Idem, Die Composition, 315; see the appendix, p. 405, for the original German.

171. Ibid., 329. The German reads: “Der Diaskeuast [reviser], den Kuenen mit recht annimt, hat schon die Komposition von JE + Q vor sich gehabt und sie einer erneuten Bearbeitung unterworfen. JE scheint vor der Vereinigung mit Q durch die Hand eines deuteronomistischen Redactors gegangen zu sein.” 172. See Smend, “Kuenen und Wellhausen,” 123. Smend quotes Kuenen’s view that the chapter “is afkomstig van P, maar dankt zijn tegenwoordige vorm aan de latere diaskeue [is obviously from P but owes its present form to the later revision].” 173. Smend notes (ibid., 125) that Kuenen borrowed the notion of diaskeue from Julius Popper’s 1862 work on P as a term for the later redaction of the Pentateuch, but Smend nowhere discusses the origin of this and other related Greek terms. Wellhausen was likewise familiar with the term before he encountered it in Kuenen. See Wellhausen, Der Text der Bücher Samuelis, 3, which contains a quotation from Otto Thenius (Die Bücher Samuels erklärt, 2nd ed., 1864), who refers to masoretischen Diaskeuase (“Masoretic revision”).

238

Chapter 6

carefully combines and preserves the traditional sources that he inherits, without significant addition; and the editor, who expands, supplements, and corrupts the “final form” of the text as he has received it. The original terminological distinction between the diorthotes, the editor who conserves and transmits his sources, and the diaskeuastes, the one who expands and thereby corrupts his text (however mistaken scholars may have been about the significance of these terms), was lost when both categories of scribes were subsumed under the general notion of editor or redactor.

Summary and Conclusion As we saw above, Richard Simon, in his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (late seventeenth century), understood the history of the biblical text in terms of two kinds of editors. First are the editors who as archivists assembled and arranged the materials into their final compositional form. This was especially the case for the Pentateuch and historical books, which were thought to be made up of historical sources carefully preserved by scribal archivists. The model in this case is the historical editor who reproduces diplomatic copies of historical sources, a scholarly activity familiar enough to Simon in his day. Simon’s view was that these biblical “editors” reproduced their historical sources with minimal interpretive joins and seams, thus producing the “histories” of the Pentateuch and historical books. This view became the standard in German biblical scholarship by the late eighteenth century, as reflected in the writings of Eichhorn, Ilgen, and Vater. The “editors” in the works of these scholars were consistently understood as compilers (Sammler). The older Documentary Hypothesis that grew out of this understanding thought in terms of two, three, or four collections (Sammlungen) of older sources, which were then combined by a “final compiler.” Only at some point in the mid-nineteenth century did the “final compilers” of the Pentateuch/Hexateuch and the historical books ( Judges to 2 Kings), respectively, begin to be considered “editors” again. The second type of editor found in Simon’s writings is the scribal scholar, who was confronted with multiple defective copies of the earlier works and who then critically collated and emended these texts to produce a standard text, a recension, of which the MT and the Samaritan Pentateuch are examples. Although Simon disparaged the Vorlage of the Septuagint as a bad copy from which the Greek translation was made, later scholars elevated it to the status of recension. The model for this were the scholarly critics of the Renaissance and subsequent periods, who were attempting to produce faithful, authoritative editions of ancient classical and biblical writings. Both of these models of editors were drawn from the arena of humanistic learning in Simon’s own time and are entirely anachronistic for the early history of the Bible, but both models have continued to exercise, in modified form, a profound influence on the scholarship of historical and textual criticism down to the present time.

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

239

From the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century, there was continuous active interchange between the study of the Hebrew Bible, usually as a part of “Oriental” studies, and classical studies—both of them within the philosophical faculties of German universities in which, in both disciplines, the “editor” or “redactor” played a prominent role in historical “higher” criticism. This is especially the case when the comparison is between the study of Homer and the Pentateuch. In addition, the larger context of the rise of folklore studies in the eighteenth century, which generated a great passion for uncovering the origins and character of peoples, especially the Europeans but also the origins of the ancient Orient and classical worlds, led to the collection and editing of oral tradition that was known in the form of lays, songs, and epics. The application of this perspective to the epic poems of Homer is obvious in the work of Wolf, and it was but a short step, given the close association between classical studies and Old Testament studies, for the same to happen for the Pentateuch. This approach was already suggested by Geddes, but it was left to de Wette to articulate it in an extensive treatment in volume 2 of his Beiträge, thus providing an alternative way of understanding the small story units in the Pentateuch in place of the notion of written historical sources. As for the “mythological” material in the Tetrateuch, containing very different kinds of folk traditions, de Wette was content to speak of a major collection put together by a compiler, perhaps from some earlier collections, in a kind of vague supplemental process. But Deuteronomy posed a different problem, because it seemed to be the result of a deliberate attempt to use this material for quite specific ideological and theological purposes, attributing these quite falsely to Moses. The attachment of this document to the rest was also the work of a “compiler”—not the same “compiler” as the rest of the Pentateuch, and not even a compiler of the same kind, but a Deuteronomistic compiler. Furthermore, de Wette has also identified the one responsible for the collection of the material in Judges to 2 Kings as a Deuteronomistic compiler, though he does not address the question of how they are related. It was a short step to identify the “compiler” (Sammler) with the “editor,” especially because this terminology was already being used on a regular basis in classical studies, in Wolf’s treatment of Homer and in particular as evident in the notion of the “final redactor” in Kayser’s study of the Odyssey. Thus, Hupfeld, working with documents and sources rather than small units, attributed the final form of the Hexateuch to a redactor or editor whose principal function was the conflation of documents into one unified corpus. Ewald, who rejected de Wette’s negative evaluation of the Pentateuch’s history with his “mythological” understanding of the smaller units of tradition, nevertheless took over the more supplemental understanding of the successive growth of the documents culminating in the final Deuteronomistic editor of the whole Pentateuch. He also had not one but two Deuteronomistic editors of Judges to Kings, both of whom were distinct from the last editor of the Pentateuch. As we noted in our earlier treatment, Ewald uses a range of language for the editor, more often called an author or compiler. Yet, it

240

Chapter 6

was also natural to move from speaking of collections to “editions” and “redactions” and to imply, especially on the analogy of the highly ideological “Deuteronomistic editor,” a readiness by editors to intervene more actively in the formation and shaping of the text. Up to this historical point, very little has been said about the nature of the editor; the term “compiler” was merely replaced with “editor,” which was then used synonymously with “compiler.” The compilers are primarily the sources for the Documentary Hypothesis, whereas the function of the editor is to conflate these sources into a final authoritative edition. The major change in usage comes with Wellhausen and Kuenen; in their usage, the new term takes over almost completely and is given quite a new and expanded understanding of the original editor’s role. In the Prolegomena, part 2, under “History of Tradition,” Wellhausen sets forth his literary views of the biblical histories and of the Pentateuch, and in the course of this he addresses the role of the editor. Here he clearly follows the lead of the pioneer, de Wette, by dealing with Chronicles in relationship to Samuel–Kings. For Wellhausen, Chronicles is a major revision of the earlier history, with a strong bias toward the priestly perspective as reflected in the Priestly Code of the Pentateuch, with interpolations, modifications, rearrangements, deletions, and many inventions. He would prefer to call the work a “midrash” rather than a history, but he still refers consistently to the writer as an author—never as an editor. Wellhausen considers the corpus of Judges, Samuel, and Kings to be a major revision under the influence of Deuteronomy, parallel, in this respect, to Chronicles and the Priestly Code. Yet, “revision” is synonymous with “redaction,” and the Deuteronomist, an author according to de Wette, becomes an editor, as he is in Ewald. It is true that Wellhausen only has one last editor, but he concedes that there are many minor “revisions” and “redactions” before the final editor in the exilic period. The primary function of “editing” in Judges, Samuel, and Kings has become ideological revision, not the conflation of documents. However, if both Chronicles and Judges-Samuel-Kings exhibit obvious ideological revision, then why were the persons responsible for them not both treated either as authors or as editors? Noth solved this inconsistency by rejecting the label “redactor” for the person behind his Deuteronomistic History. Both the Deuteronomistic History and Chronicles were the product of historians. When Wellhausen comes to the Pentateuch, he recognizes that he must change his perspective drastically: the process he imagined for the creation of the Deuteronomistic History ( Judges-Samuel-Kings) will not work. In the case of the Deuteronomistic History, redaction means a process of supplementation and revision, whereas in the case of the Pentateuch there are extensive parallel narratives woven together with only a modest amount of secondary supplementation. The primary function of redaction in the case of the Pentateuch, therefore, is conflation of parallel texts. Yet, Wellhausen warns against regarding the sources ( JE, D, and P) as entirely independent of each other. He considers the nature of the relationship between the sources, and therefore by implication the nature of the editing process, to be a pri-

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

241

mary desideratum for literary criticism; however, he defers determination of the relationship between the sources in the interest of an extensive debate over the lateness of P. The fact is that Wellhausen reserves almost all of his remarks about the editing of the Pentateuch for the final priestly editor, whom he identifies as Ezra the scribe. He says almost nothing about the conflation of J and E, which he prefers to discuss as a unit, and speaks only of the union of Deuteronomy and JE and the combining of law and narrative, playing down any notion of an extensive Deuteronomistic editor of the Pentateuch, such as one finds in Ewald. All the parallels between Deuteronomy and JE are left unconflated and the accounts contradictory. The role of the “final editor” is reserved, therefore, for the priestly redactor, Rp. It is in the discussion of this “final priestly editor” that Wellhausen expresses most fully his notions about editorial activity in the Pentateuch, and here he seems to present a very equivocal position. The uniformity of all the P material, whether it belongs to his Q source or the “redactional” additions and connective joins with the older sources, leads him to suggest that P is both source and supplement and, as a result, to give some qualified support to the supplemental hypothesis. Even so, he still maintains the distinction between Q as a separate source prior to the final redaction of the Hexateuch by Ezra. He also attempts to link the canonization of the text and its authoritative promulgation, its publication, with the editorial process: thus, the first major edition was “published” under Josiah in its Deuteronomistic form, and the “final edition” appeared under Ezra. Wellhausen acknowledges that even after the priestly redaction some later revisions and additions were made to the Pentateuch, yet he prefers to consider these as belonging to the province of textual rather than literary criticism, although the line between the two is very difficult to draw. We have the feeling that Wellhausen’s Prolegomena, with its collection of folk tradition in JE combined with law and promulgated in a final priestly edition in Jerusalem, shares much in common with Wolf’s Prolegomena to Homer and his notion of the Peisistratus recension of the Iliad and the Odyssey. This feeling is strengthened by the fact that Wilamowitz-Moellendorff dedicated his Homerische Untersuchungen (1884) to Wellhausen one year after Wellhausen’s own work appeared. Yet, Wellhausen gives few direct clues within his own work that he shares his approach to biblical literary criticism with classical studies. In the case of Kuenen, however, the evidence for dependence on Homeric studies is much more obvious. And because Wellhausen expresses his indebtedness to Kuenen regarding his own understanding of the P redactor, both share a common scholarship regarding the ancient editing of classical and biblical texts. Kuenen, in the last chapter of his Historico-Critical Inquiry into the Origin and Composition of the Hexateuch (1886), deals at length with the “redactor” in the Hexateuch, in greater detail than any of his predecessors. This is more a case of summing up 25 years of research and publication on the question. Kuenen accepts the function of source conflation as the mark of a redactor, as proposed by Hupfeld, and therefore recognizes a succession of redactors,

242

Chapter 6

Rje, Rd, and finally Rp. Kuenen seems to take up the notion of the Deuteronomistic redaction (the combination of Deuteronomy with JE) of the older critics but without the Priestly corpus that was independent from it, and it is the final redactor, Rp, who puts these two together in the postexilic period, after the reforms of Ezra–Nehemiah. Unlike Wellhausen, for Kuenen, Ezra is not the final redactor; instead, the final redaction of the Hexateuch is the work of the sopherim a half-century later, and this redaction is also curiously called the “first edition,” a kind of editio princeps. This scheme, of course, strikingly resembles Wolf’s Peisistratus recension, with its editorial board and the “first edition” of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Furthermore, in Kuenen’s subsequent history of the text, he acknowledges various revisions and recensions and for these uses the technical Greek terms diaskeue and diorthosis, which are derived from the scholia of the Iliad and were taken over by Wolf in his description of the text history of the Iliad from Peisistratus to the Alexandrians scholars. And just as Wolf regarded the Alexandrians as those responsible for the stabilizing of the text of Homer in a vulgate and “canonical” form, so Kuenen considered the Masoretic Text, the Textus Receptus, to have become the standard and canonical form by a similar process in the second century c.e. Kuenen subsumes the entire process under the rubric R, the redaction history of the text. For Kuenen, as for Wolf, there appears to be no dividing line between literary criticism and textual criticism when it comes to the editorial process: redaction and recension are basically synonyms, both the work of editors. Nevertheless, there still seems to be some tension between the notion of wanton and indiscriminate interpolation and revision, for which the term diaskeue is used in the scholia; and the correction and critical restoration of the text to its true form, for which the term diorthosis is preferred. Just as Wolf suggested that there were various local “city-editions” prior to the scholarly stabilization of the text of Homer, so Kuenen argues for three major recensions of the text of the Pentateuch—that is, the Samaritan, the Alexandrian (LXX), and the precursor of the MT—during the period of flexibility before the fixing of the text. During the presentation of this entire scheme, Kuenen assumes a familiarity with the notions of ancient editing and its technical language and does not evidence a need to explain or justify any of it. In Wellhausen’s response to Kuenen in his Die Composition, he does not hesitate to use the same technical Greek term for both “revision” and “redaction”: the same terminology very likely lies behind his own discussion of “revision,” “interpolation,” and “redaction.” Nevertheless, Wellhausen does not seem entirely satisfied with the whole scheme and expresses some reservations about how to draw the line between a text-critically recognized gloss and a literary-critical revision or redaction. Similarly, he seems uncertain about how to distinguish between an author who supplements a text and a redactor who does the same thing. As we can see from the above discussion, the application of the notion of editor to explain literary and text-critical aspects of the biblical text’s compo-

The History of the “Editor” from Simon to Wellhausen

243

sition and transmission was the result of scholars’ employing a modern concept anachronistically to the editorial activity of ancient texts, beginning with the Renaissance and on to the present day. It may already have entered into biblical studies in the work of Richard Simon and played a limited role in historical criticism until the nineteenth century. But it was certainly under the influence of the classical scholars Bentley and Wolf that the “editor” became ubiquitous in both higher and lower criticism, in classical and biblical studies, with both fields feeding off the inspiration and practice of the other. By the late nineteenth century, the notion of the redactor bears little resemblance any longer to the original analogy and takes on a life of its own. Even if criticism rejected Simon’s understanding of collections of historical sources for the Pentateuch and Wolf’s notions of the Peisistraus recension—a rejection that should have completely forfeited any further use of the anachronism—the “redactor” had taken on a reality and become a “disease of language” with which scholars were reluctant to part—a dogma as passionately maintained as any article of faith. And although we have observed the eventual demise of the “redactional hypothesis” in classical studies in the twentieth century, it has continued to flourish in biblical studies, quite oblivious to what has happened in the other field. Let us, therefore, turn to the role of the editor in biblical studies in the twentieth century.

7

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century: Crisis in Higher Criticism The Wellhausen Legacy in the Twentieth Century: Driver, Eissfeldt, and Pfeiffer It would be useful to consider the reception of Wellhausen and Kuenen in the English-speaking world. There is perhaps no better perspective on this than through the work of the great Semitic philologist, Samuel R. Driver (1846–1914), and his very influential textbook, An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (1891), which went through many editions. 1 Although Driver gives a detailed discussion of the Hexateuch in chap. 1, 2 following the main lines laid down by Wellhausen and Kuenen, he has very little to say about the idea of the redactor. At the outset of his treatment of the Hexateuch, he speaks of two historical series, one consisting of Genesis to 2 Kings and the other including Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah. Driver points out that both of these series, though different in content and “manner of treatment,” are nevertheless “constructed upon a similar plan”; no entire book in either series consists of a single, original work; but older writings, or sources, have been combined by a compiler in such a manner that the points of juncture are often plainly discernable, and the sources are in consequence capable of being separated from one another. The authors of the Hebrew historical books . . . do not, as a modern historian would do, rewrite the matter in their own language; they excerpt from the sources at their disposal such passages as are suitable to their purpose, and incorporate them in their work, sometimes adding matter of their own, but often (as it seems) introducing only such modifications of form as are necessary for the purpose of fitting them together, or accommodating them to their plan. The Hebrew historiographer, as we know him, is essentially a compiler or arranger of pre-existing documents, he is not himself an original author. Hebrew writers, however, exhibit, as a rule, such strongly marked individualities of style that the documents, or sources, thus combined can generally be distinguished from each other, and from the comments of the compiler, without difficulty. 3 1. S. R. Driver, An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (1891; repr. of 9th ed., 1913; New York: Meridian Books, 1957). 2. Ibid., 1–159. 3. Ibid., 4–5.

- 244 -

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

245

Here the model for the author of the historical books is the historian, who is essentially a compiler of documents, much as in the older style of the early nineteenth century, following Simon. In this description, Driver does not even use the term editor or redactor. Driver makes the same distinction as Wellhausen between the work of the compiler in Judges-Samuel-Kings and in the Hexateuch, with the former being a case of a “series of older narratives” put together by the compiler with his own framework and viewpoint, and the Pentateuch and Joshua consisting of a more complex interweaving of continuous “homogeneous” narratives. But these narratives are themselves a compilation of materials by writers with their own distinct styles, yet also distinct from “the compiler,” who is, however, not referred to as a redactor. However, during his detailed discussion of the sources of the Pentateuch, Driver does use the term “redactor” in a variety of ways, following the terminology of the scholars he is discussing, but he has no general treatment of the stages of redactional development. In his treatment of the historical books, Judges to Kings, Driver refers to the Deuteronomic compiler, who is also called “the Deuteronomic redactor.” From the above description of the Hebrew historians and compilers, we are left with the impression that a limited number of them are involved in the creation of these two historical complexes, but Driver nowhere makes clear how many there are or what their relationship to each other is. For instance, he speaks of JE as a “prophetical narrative” (following Ewald) and as a “compilation” of J and E. 4 But his entire focus is on the two separate sources, J and E, both of which are themselves collections of sources. P also is treated as a “history” in its narrative portion and as a great compilation of laws, all with its own very distinctive style and language. Yet, in the above quotation Driver distinguishes between all these “documents,” which have their own particular style and language and in this sense have authors; and the compilers, who merely collect and arrange their sources but do not alter the language of the sources. At the same time, Driver does not deal with the final “compiler” or “redactor” of the Hexateuch as a whole. It should be noted that, in the case of Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, Driver deals with this compilation as the work of a single author. This thoroughgoing inconsistency in the conception of the roles of the Chronicler and the Deuteronomistic historian or author of the Hexateuch is expressed in precisely the same way that Ewald and Wellhausen treated the two subjects. Otto Eissfeldt is widely viewed as one of the primary exponents of the Documentary Hypothesis in the first half of the twentieth century, beginning with his Hexateuch-Synopse (1922) and followed by his Einleitung in das Alte Testament (1934), which went through three editions. 5 He has only a short discussion of the redactional process in his paragraph on the 4. Ibid., 117. 5. O. Eissfeldt, The Old Testament: An Introduction (3rd ed.; New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

246

Chapter 7

“formation of the Pentateuch.” 6 For him the primary function of the redactor is to combine sources, and because he identifies seven such sources, L, J, E, B, D, H, P, in this chronological order, he simply has one redactor for each new source, Rj, Re, Rb, Rd, Rh, and Rp. 7 By common usage, he prefers to restrict the terms compiler and author to the documents or sources, although he admits some overlap between compiler and redactor. He also conceives the activity of the redactor as “working mechanically” in linking the sources. This is simply an extension of Kuenen’s system but is not otherwise helpful. 8 Robert H. Pfeiffer represents the reception of the Documentary Hypothesis in North America with his erudite textbook Introduction to the Old Testament (1941). Like Eissfeldt, he too has an additional source S (South or Seir) in addition to the usual four, and in contrast to both Driver and Eissfeldt, Pfeiffer has a quite detailed discussion of the “redactors of the Hexateuch.” 9 He regards the “editorial process” as very complicated, involving “countless individual changes.” For him, redaction includes both the amalgamation of narrative sources and interpolations and revisions within them, as well as the complex redactional development of laws apart from their late combination with the narratives. According to Pfeiffer, the redactor used four different methods when he combined documents: “He could omit one story entirely in favor of the other, amalgamate both into a single narrative (or write a new story based on the two accounts), supplement one story given in full with a few details taken from the other, or even reproduce both stories, making them appear to be reports of successive and not identical events.” 10 This description gives the “editor” a great deal of latitude and allows for solving many literary problems by the use of this single invention. However, this hardly resembles the analogy of the Gospel harmonies invoked by Hupfeld any longer, and it surely does violence to the notion of an editor. Furthermore, the fact that “redactors” in general could engage in this rather sophisticated editorial technique throughout the Hexateuch suggests that there was something like a scholarly guild in antiquity. He focuses, however, only on the skills of the more prominent redactors, Rje and Rp. The relationship of P to Rp is problematic for Pfeiffer, as it was for Wellhausen. He states: Despite frequent assumption, it is by no means certain that P was a separate historical and legal work joined to JED by Rp. On the one hand, the history and law in P are closely intertwined . . . and present consistently, both in thought and in diction, the ideal of the theocratic community; the unity of authorship can therefore hardly be doubted. But, on the other 6. Ibid., 239–41. 7. Note that Eissfeldt adds three sources to the usual JEDP, namely, L (lay source), B (Book of the Covenant), and H (Holiness Code). 8. See also G. Fohrer, Introduction to the Old Testament (Nashville: Abingdon, 1968), 190–92. His approach is not very different from Eissfeldt’s. 9. Robert H. Pfeiffer, Introduction to the Old Testament (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), 282–89. 10. Ibid., 283.

spread is 15 points long

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

247

hand, certain of the narrative sections, particularly in Gen. 12–50, although an integral part of P, are incomprehensible aside from JED, and seem to be a supplement rather than an independent work. . . . However, some parts of P, particularly the codes of law and portions of the narrative, circulated as separate works before being amalgamated with JED. It is therefore extremely difficult to differentiate sharply between the author’s work in certain parts of P . . . and in Rp. We shall nevertheless use the symbol Rp for whoever accomplished the fusion of JED to P. 11

At this point, biblical scholarship seems to have lost sight completely of the basic role of the “final editor” as the one who was responsible for the publication and promulgation of the Hexateuch, as this analogy was developed in the earlier scholarship from Ewald and Hupfeld onward. Pfeiffer still tries to retain the notion that such “editors” are somehow involved in producing the authoritative version of the text. He states: “The authors of P, and Rp, would obviously have preferred to substitute P for JED as the charter of Judaism, but such was the popularity and authority of JED in the fifth century . . . that P could become part of the Scriptures at that time only by being fused with JED. The method of Rp was dictated by this circumstance.” 12 Here Pfeiffer creates a hopeless contradiction. If P is a supplement and not a separate work attached by an editor (Rp), then it obviously intends to preserve and expand the older tradition, not substitute for it. If, however, Rp is the (almost) final editor of the Hexateuch who adds P, then it completely contradicts the role of an editor to say that he would prefer to do away with the work he is editing by substituting another for it. Furthermore, even after Rp there are additions by subsequent redactors, including Pfeiffer’s source S, the Covenant Code, and some of Ps. It is only in this form that the editorial work was completed “about 400 b.c., when the Pentateuch was issued to the Jews in their widely scattered settlements as a definitive edition of the Law of Moses.” 13 As such, it “attained canonical status and, except for minor textual changes, its final form—the Law of Moses.” 14 At this point, we must say that the editorial model has degenerated into complete chaos. How could a definitive edition be published and widely distributed without a final editor? As we now know from the Qumran texts, there was certainly no definitive edition by 400 b.c.e.

Form Criticism and the Editor: Hermann Gunkel Hermann Gunkel’s Genesis commentary, written at the turn of the twentieth century, 15 opens a new era in the conceptualization of the editing of 11. Ibid., 285–86. 12. Ibid., 286. 13. Ibid., 282. 14. Ibid., 289. 15. H. Gunkel, Genesis: Übersetzet und erklärt (3rd ed.; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1910). References will be taken from the English translation, Genesis: Translated and Interpreted (trans. M. E. Biddle; Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1997).

248

Chapter 7

the Bible and its relationship to the new methodology of form criticism. Superficially, it seems that one could easily pass over any treatment of Gunkel because he gives rather brief consideration to the question of the redactors of Genesis, says little that is new, and focuses his attention elsewhere on the preliterary stage of the tradition’s development, a stage that has little to do with the literary task of editing. But neglect of Gunkel would be a serious mistake. One cannot grasp the present state of the discussion about the relationship between redaction criticism (Redaktionsgeschichte) and tradition history (Überlieferungsgeschichte), which begins in a new way with Gunkel, until Gunkel is fitted into his past and his anticipation of the studies of Martin Noth is understood. Gunkel took up a major aspect of the work of de Wette that had laid dormant for almost a century: namely, to assert a fundamental distinction between the Deuteronomistic History (Judges-Samuel-Kings), which was an early attempt at a literary collection of historical documents and sources, and the Hexateuch, which was not a history book but a work of an entirely different kind—a collection of folk traditions, mythical and completely unhistorical. As we saw above, de Wette began the exploration of the character of the Pentateuch’s myths and legends within the broader framework of early work on comparative folklore, but he met with great hostility and never carried it very far. It was left to Gunkel, in the spirit of Herder that inspired de Wette as well, to take up the theme of Genesis as a collection of legends (Sagen) in the introduction to his Genesis commentary and explore it further. Gunkel is adamant that one cannot deal with Genesis as a form of historiography, and therefore one cannot treat the so-called documents or sources, especially J and E, as literary works in the same way that one would treat the belles lettres of a developed state. As in the case of other peoples and states, the myths and legends of Genesis belong to the prestate, preliterary period of the people’s past, the “childhood” of the people. They must be treated differently with regard to their forms, their artistic and poetic character, and, above all, their spirituality. Gunkel regularly appeals to comparative studies of folklore such as Olrik’s “Epische Gesetze der Volkdichtung” 16 as a way to understand the Genesis material. Furthermore, Gunkel adopted certain theories of sociological evolution, enabling him to use older forms of “poetic” folk literature (Volksdichtung) to trace the Israelites’ social and religious development from the primitive period of origins to their maturity in the state, which corresponds with the literary development from myth and legend to historiography. This means that for Gunkel the literary works J and E did not correspond to the historical documents and collections of Samuel–Kings but were much more in the nature of collections gathered by storytellers that had a long 16. A. Olrik, “Epische Gesetze der Volkdichtung,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 51 (1909): 1–12. A translation is available: “Epic Laws of Folk Narrative,” in The Study of Folklore (ed. Alan Dundes; Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 129–41. This essay is cited by Gunkel in Genesis, xxxi–xlviii.

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

249

oral prehistory. One could even discern within these collections different strata of social and conceptual development and construct a traditionhistory of their formation and amalgamation, comparable to the way in which one constructs the history of the textual tradition. Indeed, the primary and original meaning of “tradition-history” (Überlieferungsgeschichte) was the history of a text’s transmission, its paradosis, and it was Friedrich Wolf and those engaged in “higher criticism” who extended the meaning to include the whole “editorial” process of written development down to the time of the text’s vulgate or standard form. It is Gunkel who changes the central focus of tradition-transmission to the oral stage of the tradition, as he understands it. Here now for the first time is the scheme, adumbrated by Wolf for Homer, being applied to Genesis. The process requires beginning with the individual legends (Sagen) and then proceeds to tracing their development into written collections—their tradition-history. Subsequently, they are combined by editors into the larger complexes that eventually result in the Pentateuch/Hexateuch—their redaction-history. Finally, a period of diversity of edited recensions eventually leads to the critical standardization of the text in a vulgate form—the text-history. Gunkel largely accepted the division and redaction of sources as they had been worked out by Wellhausen and Kuenen. It was the reevaluation of the first stage of this process, as suggested by de Wette, and the nature of the earliest sources that this implied that was Gunkel’s primary concern. Gunkel’s form-critical approach to Genesis had important implications for how the literary development of the sources and the final “editorial process” were understood. The two collections of legends represented by the sources J and E come at a late stage in the formation of the process of collection, because the amalgamation of traditions “had already begun during the oral transmission.” 17 Earlier in his commentary, Gunkel had described “how individual stories first were attracted to one another and finally how larger groups of legends were formed. Collectors also created the connecting pieces. . . . When the legends were committed to writing, this process of collection continued and the whole tradition of the old accounts was collected.” 18 Gunkel suggests that the process of amalgamation of blocks of tradition continued during this later literary process as well. For this process of a written collection of oral tradition, he suggests a specific social context: “This documentation of popular traditions will have occurred in a period generally inclined to write and when one may have feared that the oral tradition could die out if not documented. One may imagine that the guild of legend narrators may have ceased then for reasons we do not know.” 19 Here Gunkel is thinking of the extensive effort in the nineteenth century to collect folk traditions from oral storytellers and to publish collections of them in written form, and this kind of activity he retrojected into the ancient 17. Gunkel, Genesis, lxix. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid.

250

Chapter 7

period. Of course, Gunkel’s general scheme of an oral stage of tradition accumulation and collection followed by a written stage is clearly built on the development of Homeric scholarship, as we have seen above. And to this we will return presently. Because Gunkel was able to assume the work of Wellhausen on the critical division of the sources and their chronological placement, as he himself says, he turns instead to discussion of the nature of the sources, and asks the question: How is the literary character of the “sources” J and E and their subsources to be assessed? First it must be generally admitted that these sources rest on oral tradition, that they are collections. But several different varieties of such “collections” [Sammlungen] are conceivable. Some collections were produced by literary personalities who have consciously striven to rework the diverse received material into a unity and to imprint upon it the stamp of their intellects. Some collections came together as though of themselves, with no evidence of such intentional personalities, in which the received pieces stand alongside one another loosely without displaying a strict unity. It stands to reason that the two types of collections must be treated very differently in interpretation. In the first instance the author must primarily be interpreted, in the second, the material adapted. How are the sources J and E and their subsources to be evaluated? 20

The background to this question about J and E as collections stretches back, as we have seen, to the beginnings of “higher criticism” and to the varied use of the terms collections and collectors, both for the sources as authors and historians and for the final form of the Hexateuch as a collection and as the work of editors. But now Gunkel offers his reasons for understanding the collections known under the rubrics of J and E not as the work of authors but in the much more restricted second sense. We are not concerned here with his reasons, but his conclusions—that J and E stand, almost by accident, at the end of a long process of growth, to which they contributed little themselves. For Gunkel, “‘J’ and ‘E’ are, thus, not individual authors, but narrative schools. It is relatively insignificant what the individual hands contributed to the whole because they are very indistinct and can never be identified with certainty.” 21 This distinction regarding the nature of J and E becomes a major point of departure for Gerhard von Rad, who takes issue with Gunkel on precisely this point: for von Rad, J is an author. This point also defines the fundamental difference between von Rad and Martin Noth on the nature of the Pentateuch and the role of redaction criticism that develops from this debate. This will be taken up below. In place of authors, Gunkel suggests that there was a process of gradual modification of the traditions on the written level. Although he emphasizes their great fidelity to the traditions that they transmitted, these transmitters 20. Ibid., lxxi. 21. Ibid., lxxiii.

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

251

already did initiate the process of transformation and modification in the traditional materials. For the most part, these additions and changes are to be attributed to “redactors,” understood in the sense of revisers (the “bad editors”), and not to the two major redactors to be considered below. Gunkel suggests a process that is virtually continuous from the oral to the written forms of the tradition. This radical modification of the tradition reaches its extreme in the case of the P source, which no longer reflects the same poetic style or primitive character of the older collections. After reviewing this transformation throughout Genesis, Gunkel states: All of this suggests that P treated the tradition he received rather capriciously. . . . This narrator knew nothing, therefore of the fidelity of the ancients. He will have had the impression that one must mightily intervene here in order to erect a structure worthy of God. The old J and E were not actually “authors,” but only collectors; P, however, is a proper “author.” They only loosely heaped up the received building stones; P, however, erected a unified structure in accord with his tastes. 22

This comparison between P and JE does not really address the problem of the relationship between the two. He states that “the vital legend which was the raw material of the old collectors J and E must have died out by P’s time if he was able to do violence to them in this manner for his historical construction.” 23 Of course, this is completely contradicted by the subsequent union of JE with P. This brings us to the role of the redactors in the creation of the Pentateuch. Gunkel deals with only two redactors in Genesis, Rje and Rp. With regard to Rje, he states: A redactor (Rje), whom we will call the “Yehowist” following Wellhausen’s precedent, later combined the two collections [J and E]. This combination of the two sources occurred before the addition of the later legend book P. We may place this collector in the final period of the state of Judah. Rje proceeded in Genesis with extraordinary care. He expended considerable discernment to preserve as much of the two sources as possible and to produce a good unit from them, although he also found it necessary, of course, to omit much incompatible with the adopted report. In general, he based the final product on the more extensive source, in the Abraham narrative J. He contributed very little in his own words to Genesis. We recognize his few contributions with certainty in a few brief additions intended to unify the variants of J and E. . . . Most are trivialities. 24

Here the redactor, who is also a collector (Sammler), functions in the manner of a true “editor”: he treats his sources diplomatically, insofar as possible. His additions are few, necessary for the unity of the whole and trivial in their impact on the content. Gunkel also recognizes a few additional interpolations 22. Ibid., lxxxiii. 23. Ibid., lxxxiv. 24. Ibid., lxxix.

252

Chapter 7

from different hands at various times; some are “Deuteronomistic,” although not attributed to a specific Dtr redactor. Once again, the final editor (Rjep) created the combination of JE with P, accomplishing it “with extraordinary fidelity, especially to P.” 25 The question, of course, arises as to why a priestly redactor, whom many scholars, including Wellhausen, can scarcely distinguish from P, took such a diametrically opposite attitude toward JE and included it virtually intact in a larger authoritative corpus. Gunkel offers what seems to me a rather weak explanation: “The necessity for such a combination of the old and the young collections shows us that the old legends had worked their way too deeply into the heart to be rooted out by the new spirit.” 26 But previously Gunkel has used the opposite argument, that “the vital legend which was the raw material of the old collections J and E must have died out by P’s time if he was able to do violence to them in this manner for his historical construction.” 27 It seems that he wants to have it both ways, to maintain the separation between P and Rp with completely opposite attitudes toward the JE traditions, which were dead for P but alive for Rp. Indeed, Gunkel does not address Wellhausen’s problem with P, whether it is a separate source or was actually a supplement to JE like all the other “redactional” additions that he suggests updated the tradition. Just as in the case of Rje, Rp makes no substantial additions to the text: “We are able to attribute only very little in Genesis to his hand with varying degree of certainty: that is, a few harmonizing glosses or supplementations.” 28 Gunkel says nothing about how Deuteronomy fits into this scheme or about Rp’s relationship to this corpus, perhaps because he is only dealing with the redactional problems of Genesis. But the “final editor” has this larger corpus in front of him, and the whole must be taken into consideration. Furthermore, there are individual texts, such as Gen 18:17–19 and 26:2–5, that contain “Deuteronomistic” language, but Gunkel merely regards these as pious supplements. 29 Nevertheless, ideological reworking and more substantial additions have also been attributed to redactors in the sense of “revisers,” and this is true of the text after the “final redaction” as well. Gunkel states at the end of his treatment of Rp: “With this, the activity of the redactors in Genesis is largely concluded. But, work (diaskeuhv) on the text continues in the details for a long time.” 30 This is followed by some examples. What is noteworthy here is that Gunkel takes up the same Greek terminology that we saw employed by Kuenen and Wellhausen, derived from classical criticism, in speaking of revisers of the text. That Gunkel is no stranger to the comparative study of Homer and the Pentateuch may be seen from his concluding remark: 25. Ibid., 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 30. Ibid.,

lxxxv. lxxxiv. lxxxv. 201–2, 294. lxxxv. The Greek term diaskeuhv means “revision.”

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

253

Thus, Genesis is the confluence of many sources. It remained in this final form. In this form, the old legends have exercised an immeasurable influence on all later generations. One may regret that the last great poetic genius who could have formed a true “Israelite epic” from the individual stories did not appear. Israel produced great religious reformers who created a comprehensive unity in religious spirit from the dispersed traditions of their people. But it did not produce a Homer. This is fortunate for our scholarship at any rate. Precisely because there was no great poetic whole and the passages were left in an essentially unfused state, we are able to discern the history of the whole process. 31

This comparison between Genesis research and the study of Homer is most ironic. As we saw above, just as Moses was replaced in biblical higher criticism by individual sources that were combined by editors, so Homer was also replaced by the Sagen of individual songs and lays brought together in collections and edited into poems. Precisely the same techniques were used to try to separate the individual lays and later additions and interpolations that Gunkel himself sees in Genesis, and he is well aware of this sort of criticism in Homeric studies, as his remarks and his use of the technical Greek terminology indicates. 32 Indeed, as we saw above, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Schwartz, colleagues of Wellhausen at Göttingen and closely associated with him, were using the same kind of source-criticism and were positing the same kind of final redactor for the Odyssey as Gunkel assumed in his Genesis. Perhaps, like Wolf, Gunkel is using the figure of Homer rhetorically. The nineteenth century in general still admired Homer as the greatest of all poets. Alternatively, one could argue that Israel did, in fact, have such a genius, though not a poet, in the person of the Yahwist, who was not just an itinerant storyteller, as Gunkel suggests. However, the point that I wish to make is that Gunkel places his own study of Genesis into the wider field of comparative folklore where the study of Homer is very much a vital part. It goes without saying that Gunkel’s form-critical study and use of comparative folklore is subject to the same criticism that was leveled against nineteenth-century use of comparative study in Homeric criticism and also, therefore, subject to the same corrective that we reviewed above. Another of Gunkel’s major scholarly concerns, related to his investigation of Sagen in Genesis, was his interest in the rise of historiography in ancient Israel. 33 The scheme that Gunkel and his student Hugo Gressmann developed to account for the evolution of Israelite historiography became widely 31. Ibid., lxxxvi. 32. Throughout his commentary, Gunkel makes frequent reference to Greek myths and legends as parallels to the myths and legends in Genesis. 33. For a detailed survey of scholarship on biblical historiography, see my In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983; repr., Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1997), 209–48. For remarks on Gunkel and Gressmann, see pp. 209–14.

254

Chapter 7

accepted and very influential, especially in Germany, and has important implications for the transformation in the understanding of the editor or redactor in biblical texts. Gunkel accepted the older view that the finest product of Israelite history writing in the Old Testament was the so-called Court History of David (2 Sam 9–20; 1 Kgs 1–2), which was regarded as a contemporary account of David’s reign by a member of the Davidic-Solomonic court. To this, Gunkel added his own form-critical investigation of the evolution of narrative genre in the Penteteuch and historical books, alongside those of like-minded form-critics, such as Gressmann. Gunkel believed that the writing of history arises only under certain social and political conditions at the height of a particular culture. Historiography is thus a gelehrte Gattung; it exists only in writing for a limited circle of literate persons, and it combines the critical spirit with a philosophy of history. Gunkel, of course, has in mind ancient Greece, in which critical historiography evolved out of the Ionic enlightenment. By contrast, the advanced cultures of Babylonia, Assyria, and Egypt, although they produced a great quantity of “historical documents,” did not produce national histories out of these texts. Even though Israel adopted some of these “historical” forms and incorporated them into its histories, Gunkel and Gressmann deny that historiography owed anything to these forms, and Israel’s historiography makes its appearance before the use of these documents became available. 34 For them, the impetus toward historical narrative came from another direction, from the development of the art of narration in Sagen, “legends.” This new orientation in the understanding of the nature and development of the whole corpus from Genesis to Kings represents a decisive shift away from the older understanding of biblical historiography found in Simon, Eichhorn, and Ewald and still reflected in the Documentary Hypothesis—namely, that these works consisted of older “historical” documents collected and combined by editors. Gunkel, in his Genesis commentary, and Gressmann, in his study of the Moses tradition, Mose und seine Zeit, 35 put forward a theory about the evolution of narrative forms from the most primitive, the myth or fairy tale (Märchen), to the most advanced, historiography, with each stage corresponding to stages in the social evolution of the people. Myth and fairy tale, which give free reign to the imagination of the childish “primitive,” moves on to legend, in which the timeless stories are associated with the most ancient times, the earliest ancestors, and the origins of peoples and places. In the biblical tradition, this is reflected in the patriarchal legends of Genesis. These short individual stories replete with etiological motifs underwent an evolution by being combined into collections and by gradually being expressed in a more expansive style as the cultural level of the society also 34. H. Gressmann, Die älteste Geschichtsschreibung und Prophetie Israels (SAT 2/1; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1910), xiii. 35. H. Gressmann, Mose und seine Zeit: Ein Kommentar zu den Mose-Sagen (FRLANT 18; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1913).

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

255

evolved. Alongside the ancestor legends, and gradually succeeding them, were the legends about heroes (Heldensagen), which dealt with the most distant “historical” figures of the past, such as Moses, Joshua, and the Judges, to the more recent kings, Saul and David, in idealized form. It is at this point that historical narrative arises out of legend: in historical narrative, the focus is on the public figure, but one now in the recent past, and on the political events themselves, rather than fantastic deeds. A development of this sort, in Gunkel’s view, cannot take place before the rise of the state, and this means the rise of the monarchy under Saul and David. The finest example of this transformation, for Gunkel and Gressmann, comes in the account of David’s reign known to later scholars as the “Succession Narrative” or the “Court History of David” (2 Sam 9–20; 1 Kgs 1–2). Both scholars stress the continuity of this early history writing with legend, as seen in the similarity of the technique used in both narrative forms. But the difference is that the historian tells “how it actually was” and therefore excludes wonders and direct appearances of gods and their “physical” intervention in human affairs. History is thus profane, although not godless, because the hand of the deity may be discerned indirectly in the events. It is interesting that Gunkel cites a comparison with Herodotus at this point. 36 Thus, the historian may refer to the word of a prophet or an oracle or a wondrous “coincidence of circumstances.” But he retains an objectivity about his subject and is reserved in his judgments. Gressmann stresses that history writing deals with recent events, as in the case of Thucydides, whereas the subject of legend is persons and events of the more distant past. The favorite biblical example of historiography for both Gunkel and Gressmann is the revolt of Absalom in the Court History of David. When it comes to a consideration of the later “historical works” of the Deuteronomist, the Chronicler, and the Priestly Writer, Gunkel considers them “catastrophes” because they came under the influence of either the prophets, in the case of the Deuteronomist, or the priestly hierarchy in the case of the Chronicler and P. The form-critical task is to rescue the old historiographic gems out of the collections of these historical books. Gressmann was less critical of prophecy’s influence and, consequently, more positive in his evaluation of the Deuteronomist. 37 For him, it is prophecy, with its uses of the past, recalling the old traditions in order to deliver a moral critique and encourage reform, that stimulated history writing anew. It gave birth to the Deuteronomic reform, which in turn provided the ideological basis for the “Deuteronomistic redaction” or “revision” (Überarbeitung) of the traditions. The real achievement of “Deuteronomistic historiography” was the skillful way in which the material was organized within a fixed chronological framework. “All the various elements—legends, historical 36. For a comparison between Hebrew and Greek historiography on this point, see my “Is There any Historiography in the Hebrew Bible? A Hebrew-Greek Comparison,” JNSL 28/2 (2002): 1–25. 37. Gressmann, Die älteste Geschichtsschreibung, xvii–xviii.

256

Chapter 7

narratives, anecdotes, annals, and religious legends—make up its flesh and blood so that the past comes alive.” 38 And all is brought under the control of a particular idea. By modern standards, it may be somewhat primitive, but for Gressmann it was a step in the right direction—to organize the material in such a way as to uncover the deeper meaning in the bare events. In this case, the meaning is the religious idea that the deity speaks to his people through events; by means of the good or evil destiny that befalls them he guides them in the right way. As we shall see, this positive assessment of the Deuteronomist anticipates the work of Martin Noth.

Form Criticism of the Hexateuch: Authors and Editors in G. von Rad In his discussion of “the beginnings of historical writings in ancient Israel,” 39 G. von Rad stands in the form-critical tradition of Hermann Gunkel in seeing a gradual social and literary evolution from the Sagen of the patriarchs to the Heldensagen of the judges and King Saul, and finally to the Court History of David, which is a masterpiece of historiography. This literary evolution parallels the social development from the primitive beginnings of the Israelite people to the rise of the nation-state under David and Solomon. 40 This scheme is familiar from many of Gunkel’s writings and was quite pervasive in the works of the whole form-critical movement in Germany, including Albrecht Alt and his students, von Rad and Martin Noth. Von Rad, however, makes a significant break with Gunkel with regard to the historiography of the Pentateuch in general and the Yahwist in particular, and this break sets him on a quite different course in his understanding of this corpus and also helps to explain a fundamental difference between von Rad and Noth. The issue is also important because von Rad’s understanding of the Yahwist is frequently misrepresented in current discussion of redaction criticism. When von Rad turns to the form-critical problem of the Hexateuch, he parts company with the approach of his predecessors, such as Gunkel, by focusing on the “final form” of the Hexateuch—not on the small individual units of tradition. 41 In the overall shape of the Hexateuch he discerns, from 38. Ibid., xvii. 39. G. von Rad, “Der Anfang der Geschichtsschreibung im alten Israel,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 32 (1944): 1–42; repr. in idem, Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament (TB 8; Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1958), 148–88; and translated into English as “The Beginnings of Historical Writings in Ancient Israel,” The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1966), 166–204. 40. See my In Search of History, 213–17. 41. G. von Rad, Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuch (BWANT 4; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1938); repr. in idem, Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament (TB 8; Munich: Kaiser, 1958), 9–86; and in English translation, “The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch,” The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1966), 1–78. Citations will be made from this English version. See also G. von Rad, Old Testament Theology

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

257

the creation of human society to the conquest under Joshua, a “history of redemption” whose summary recapitulation could be called a “creed” of Israel’s faith. Confirmation that the structure of Heilsgeschichte lies behind the Hexateuch is found in a number of creed-like statements, such as Deut 26:5–9 and Josh 24:2–13, which trace the same series of primary events in recounting the origins of the people and their redemption by Yahweh until their settlement in the land. This creed-like summary von Rad locates in the setting of early Israelite liturgy. Because any reference to the giving of the Law at Sinai is conspicuously absent from these summaries, von Rad argues that there was a parallel tradition of revelation and Law-giving that was celebrated in a different festival of covenant renewal and that only became united with the redemptive history at a rather late stage. These two bodies of tradition, the confession of redemptive history and the affirmation of covenantal commitment to obedience to divine Law, become the basis of the two fundamental forms of the Pentateuch/Hexateuch: history and Law. It is in the form and shape of the Yahwist’s work that von Rad sees the working out of this basic confessional Heilsgeschichte into a historiography of Israel’s origins. In addition to the baroque elaboration of the central “settlement tradition”—by which he means everything from the descent into Egypt, the exodus, the wilderness trek, to entrance into the land—J inserted the Sinai tradition of Law-giving into the wilderness journey (Einbau), incorporated the massive, diverse patriarchal traditions into the scheme by way of the land promise before the descent into Egypt to connect them to the ultimate fulfillment in the settlement (Ausbau), and set the whole in a universal context of primeval history (Vorbau). Von Rad states the obvious, that this final form of the Yahwist is a history, and it is here that he bluntly identifies “one of Gunkel’s most significant shortcomings,” namely, his identification of the Yahwist as merely a collector of traditions, a storyteller. 42 Von Rad disputes in the strongest possible way the idea that what we have in the Yahwist’s work is simply the result of “a long process of anonymous growth . . . through the accretion of layer upon layer of old traditional materials added by efforts of many generations.” Over against this possibility, von Rad points out that, by using a simple traditional pattern, the basic Heilsgeschichte, J has brought together a massive amount of material and made it part of the whole. He states: “One plan alone governs the whole, and a gigantic structure such as this, the whole conforming to one single plan, does not grow up naturally of its own accord. How could such heterogeneous materials as

(2 vols.; New York: Harper & Row, 1962–65), 1:48–51, and idem, Genesis (rev. ed.; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1972), 3–43. It should be obvious in the discussion that follows that what von Rad means by Letztgestalt is quite different from the common use of “final form” in biblical studies today. 42. See the discussion above. Gunkel’s primary concern in his Genesis commentary is to dispute that the Genesis stories should be understood as history in the modern sense; he is at pains to emphasize their character as folklore. It is this that leads him to characterize J as a school of storytellers. See Gunkel, Genesis, vii–xi.

258

Chapter 7

those embraced by the Yahwist have cast themselves in this form of their own accord?” 43 As we saw above, this is basically the same argument that was being used in Homeric studies for the view that the Iliad and the Odyssey were single, unified works created by a great poet (or two poets), regardless of whether some later additions had been made to their poems. Von Rad was quite willing to concede to earlier form-critical studies that there were earlier, originally independent blocks of tradition, such as the exodus story, the settlement tradition, the Sinai tradition, and the patriarchal tradition, that had their own history of development and formed the basis of the Yahwist’s work. In addition, a series of quite independent primeval legends had been woven together by the Yahwist himself to form the prologue for the whole. Yet, the point is that the end product is much more than merely a collection of traditions; it is the work of an author and historian who infuses the whole with an ideological and theological understanding both of universal history and of Israel’s past, its “etiology.” This means that the Yahwist cannot be described merely as a compiler of stories or an editor, and von Rad clearly resists every effort to do so. In his Old Testament Theology, von Rad speaks in glowing terms about the rise of historiography in the Solomonic period and about the Yahwist’s work in particular. He states: What was new was that Israel now found herself able to shape history into great complexes [i.e., the Yahwist]; that is, not merely to call to remembrance isolated events basic to history, or to string such data more or less connectedly together for the purpose of cultic recital, but really to present the history in its broad historical connexions, including all the many events which cannot be made to fit with complete consistency into any teaching, and taking in also its reverses, and, above all, its terrible and splendid humanity. 44

Von Rad is primarily concerned, in his various discussions of the Yahwist, with the theological and ideological perspective used by J to integrate the diverse traditional materials at his disposal and expresses rather limited concern with the literary questions of the Hexateuch that he inherited from the previous generation of scholars. With regard to the editing of the Hexateuch, he states: Not that the conflation of E and P with J would now appear to be a simple process, nor one which could be altogether explained to one’s satisfaction! The problem of the origin and purpose of these two works, their derivation, and the readers for whom they were destined, is as much an open question now as it was before, and will probably remains so. But these problems are generically different from the ones we have been dealing with in our present study. The process by which E and P are superimposed on J, as well as their relationship to one another, is a purely literary ques43. Von Rad, “Problem of the Hexateuch,” 51–52. 44. Idem, Old Testament Theology, 1:49.

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

259

tion, which adds nothing essentially new to the discussion so far as formcriticism is concerned. The form of the Hexateuch had already been fully determined by the Yahwist. 45

Von Rad enters into a brief discussion about the literary problems of the nature and extent of E but does not say anything in particular about the redactor, R JE, who was responsible for combining them. He also takes issue with M. Noth, who denies that the legends in Joshua have any connection with the Pentateuchal sources and who asserts that the book of Joshua should be treated quite separately from Pentateuchal criticism. Von Rad states: “What we must protest against is the isolation of the literary problems of the Book of Joshua from the overall problem of the Hexateuch, whose sources represent one single whole from the point of view of form.” 46 It is the literary form of a history from creation to the settlement that demands that the conquest narrative of Joshua as well as that of Numbers be included in the basic form of the Hexateuch. This difference regarding Joshua becomes a fundamental division between Noth and von Rad, one that has important consequences, as we shall see. Concerning P, von Rad’s primary concern in this essay is to contrast the “wholly non-cultic, almost secular manner” 47 of J’s presentation of his history with the “mode of sacerdotal cultic thought” 48 found in P, which P uses to present revision of the earlier history. While Gunkel was willing to regard only P as an author, it is clear that von Rad considers both J and P to be authors, equally. Concerning the redactors, von Rad makes only the one summary statement in this essay: “The Hexateuch achieved its present form at the hands of redactors, who received the testimony to the faith contained in each of the source documents at its own valuation, and held it to be binding.” 49 As late as his revised edition of Genesis (1972), von Rad still maintained a view of the Hexateuch that contrasts with Noth’s perspective: “The books Genesis to Joshua consist of several continuous documents that have been woven together more or less skillfully by a redactor.” 50 In other words, he defines the editor as one who takes a very conservative view of his task, which is to transmit the written tradition in an accurate and faithful way, without altering it. However, von Rad does admit that “Deuteronomistic additions and revisions occur also in Joshua.” 51 This suggests a different notion of editing, in this case, to accommodate his notion of the Hexateuch. Further remarks about von Rad’s views of the Deuteronomist of the historical books must await our review of Noth.

45. Idem, “Problem of the Hexateuch,” 74. 46. Ibid., 76. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 77. 49. Ibid. 50. Idem, Genesis, 24. 51. Ibid., 25.

260

Chapter 7

Editors and Historians in the History of Traditions: Martin Noth In the 1940s, Martin Noth undertook, in two major studies, 52 a comprehensive investigation of “the whole of the historical tradition in the Old Testament,” which, he said, “is contained in a few large compilations. These works have collated and systematized the extremely diverse material of traditional tales and historical reports and enclosed them in a framework, determined in each case by their own particular concerns.” 53 The great compilations (Sammelwerken) of historical tradition that he has in mind are “the Pentateuch and the historical works of the Deuteronomist and of the Chronicler.” 54 The overarching method that he uses to examine all of the diverse material found in these three compilations, whether it is written or oral, is tradition-history (Überlieferungsgeschichte), just as was the case with Wellhausen, and like Wellhausen he begins with the Chronicler and the Deuteronomist. This is the concern of his first book, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien (1943). 55 Noth sets aside any consideration of the Pentateuch because, as he states in a footnote, von Rad (in Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuch, 1938) “has reached most decisive results concerning the essence and development of the Pentateuch.” 56 In the first of the two studies in Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien, Noth examines the character of the “deuteronomistische Werk.” He describes it as the work of a Deuteronomistic author, and for this he uses the abbreviation Dtr. He acknowledges that the Deuteronomistic character of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings is undisputed, but the question of viewing this entire corpus as a unity is another matter. He states: “It is generally considered that Dtr is by a single ‘Deuteronomistic editor’ [Redaktor], or rather by different ‘Deuteronomistic editors’ closely resembling one another in style, and that the nature of their work was to adapt, to some extent, something which had 52. Martin Noth, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien (Schriften der Königsberger Gelehrten Gesellschaft: Geisteswissenschaftliche Klasse 18; 1943), 43–266; (2nd ed.; Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1957); and Überlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuch (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1948); translated as A History of Pentateuchal Traditions (trans. B. W. Anderson; Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1972). 53. Idem, The Deuteronomistic History (JSOTSup 15; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1981), 1. This volume is a partial translation of the 2nd edition of Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien, and quotations here are taken from this English edition. 54. Ibid. 55. The literature on the Deuteronomistic History has become quite voluminous, and it is pointless to cite it all here. For two earlier bibliographical surveys, see A. N. Radjawane, “Das deuteronomistische Geschichtswerk: Ein Forschungsbericht,” TRu 38 (1973): 177–216; H. Weippert, “Das deuteronomistische Geschichtswerk: Sein Ziel und Ende in der neueren Forschung,” TRu 50 (1985): 213–49; and more recently T. Römer and A. de Pury, “L’historiographie deutéronomiste (HD): Histoire de la recherche et enjeux du débat,” in Israël construit son histoire (ed. A. de Pury, T. Römer, and J.-D. Macchi; Geneva: Labor & Fides, 1996), 9–120. For a useful summary, see S. L. McKenzie, “Deuteronomic History,” ABD 2:160–68. 56. Noth, The Deuteronomistic History, 100 n. 1.

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

261

already come into being as a comprehensive narrative complex or as various lengthy narrative complexes.” 57 Noth at the very outset takes issue with this understanding of Dtr as merely “redactional” and sets out to examine the structure of all of the Dtr books taken together as a self-contained unity. He specifically disputes the views of O. Eissfeldt and W. Rudolph, who argue for “two stages of ‘Deuteronomistic’ composition in the books Joshua to Kings, and hence Dtr is not regarded as a unity.” 58 After detailed discussion of the relevant Dtr texts involved in the debate, Noth states: “We conclude, then, for the present, that Dtr, using material from the tradition, planned the history of his people in Joshua–Kings in accordance with a unified plan and divided it according to subject matter.” 59 The way in which Dtr carried out this unified plan through interpretive and structural passages leads Noth to assert: “Dtr is wholly responsible for the coherence of this complex of material and hence the unity of the whole history in Joshua–Kings which is clearly intentional as is shown by the form of these books as we have it.” 60 On the other hand, he points out, there is no comparable “Deuteronomistic editing” in Genesis–Numbers. He notes the problem that this poses for the book of Joshua and its place in the Hexateuch. Nevertheless, he sets forth the primary conclusion that governs the rest of his study: Dtr was not merely an “editor” but the author of a history which brought together material from highly varied traditions and arranged it according to a carefully conceived plan. In general Dtr simply reproduced the literary sources available to him and merely provided a connecting narrative for isolated passages. We can prove, however, that in places he made a deliberate selection from the material at his disposal. As far as facts were concerned, the elements were arranged as given in tradition—e.g., the whole of the history of the kings, or the insertion of the period of the “judges” between the occupation of the land and the period of the monarchy. . . . Thus Dtr’s method of composition is very lucid. The closest parallels are those Hellenistic and Roman historians who use older accounts, mostly unacknowledged, to write a history not of their own time but of the more or less distant past. 61

For Noth, it is not a case of Dtr being both editor and author, as he is now sometimes understood, but a choice between these two models. And this is made very clear by the parallels he cites—the Hellenistic and Roman 57. Ibid., 4. Noth places emphasis on Redaktor (editor) and Redaktoren (editors) in the original German edition and always places the term “Redaktor” or “Redaktion” in quotation marks precisely because they are not terms he accepts as valid; he then takes issue with the understanding of Dtr as a Redaktor. 58. Ibid., 6. 59. Ibid., 9. 60. Ibid., 10 (emphasis is in the original). 61. Ibid., 10–11. Unfortunately, the quotation marks around “editor” in the original German have been omitted in the English translation.

262

Chapter 7

historiography. He assumes that his readers are familiar with these works and therefore does not spell out the comparative details; consequently, the comparitive material has been largely ignored (except for my own studies) 62 in the subsequent treatment of Dtr. What Noth clearly intends to suggest is that all of the compositional activity of Dtr can be adequately explained by the compositional methods of an ancient classical historiographer. What is significant for our study is the fact that Noth demonstrated that Dtr is a historian and an author—not just an editor—in a way that is strikingly similar to von Rad’s treatment of the Yahwist as historian—not just a compiler of traditions. Even the “closest parallels” that Noth cites for Dtr (i.e., the Greek and Roman historians) could also be invoked for the Yahwist. 63 Just as von Rad’s Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch is basically centered on the role of the Yahwist as decisive for the formation of the Hexateuch, with its wide historical structure from creation to the conquest of the land, in like fashion Noth’s Dtr combines a massive accumulation of traditions into a history from the conquest of the land to the death of the monarchy (Joshua to 2 Kings), with the incorporation of Deuteronomy— the Torah of Moses—as its prologue and guiding principles. However, von Rad’s effort to correct Gunkel’s one big mistake about the nature of J, while nonetheless accepting so much of Gunkel’s form-critical analysis of the tradition, is similar to Noth’s claim that he is merely introducing an important correction “in one point only” in earlier literary analyses of Deuteronomy–Kings. Noth states: The whole purpose of examining Dtr in detail above was to show that it is not a matter of a “Deuteronomistic redaction” of a historical narrative that was already more or less complete; rather, we must say that Dtr was the author of a comprehensive historical work, scrupulously taking over and quoting the existing tradition but at the same time arranging and articulating all the material independently, and making it clear and systematic by composing summaries which anticipate and recapitulate. This gives the parts written by Dtr himself a significance quite different from what would be the case if Dtr were assumed to be nothing more than an “editor” [“deuteronomistischen Redaktion”]. 64

I have belabored this point because there has been a tendency by a number of scholars to represent Noth’s work on Dtr as a pioneering work on redaction criticism, with Dtr as redactor, contrary to what Noth himself states was his intention in writing the work in the first place. It should also be pointed out that Noth’s basic concern to establish Dtr as author and historian runs parallel to a similar reaction in classical scholarship of this period against the “redactional hypothesis.” 62. Van Seters, In Search of History. 63. See my Prologue to History (Louisville: Westminister John Knox / Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1992), 78–103. 64. Noth, The Deuteronomistic History, 76. The emphasis is in the original German text, as are the quotation marks on “deuteronomistischen Redaktion.”

spread is 6 points long

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

263

A work written in 1939, before Noth and quite independently of him, but only published in 1953, was A. Jepsen’s Die Quellen des Königsbuches. 65 In this work, Jepsen suggests that the book of Kings began as a synchronistic chronicle of the kings of the two realms and royal annals, the so-called “daybooks,” which together gave an account of the two kingdoms. These two documents were combined by a priestly redactor (RI) after the catastrophe of 587 b.c.e., who also extended his account from the rise of David to the end of the monarchy. A second “prophetic” redaction (RII) followed, and it included Deuteronomy, the addition of the conquest in the book of Joshua, the stories of the judges and Samuel, the Succession Narrative, and the stories of the prophets in Kings. This “redaction” more than doubled the size of the earlier history. A third Levitical redaction (RIII) of rather modest extent followed. When Noth’s work on Dtr became available to Jepsen, he immediately recognized the similarity in extent, especially the inclusion of Deuteronomy and much of Joshua, between his RII and Noth’s Dtr, and he commented on this in his second edition. 66 Following Noth’s lead, Jepsen now acknowledged that the use of “redactor” with respect to the first two authors was inappropriate; rather, they were historians. Consequently, he adopted Noth’s siglum Dtr for his RII and now referred to RI as K. 67 The last stratum, RIII, presumably remained a late Levitical redaction. Nevertheless, Jepsen’s idea of a threefold development of the Deuteronomistic History, with a history earlier than Dtr and a later supplement to Dtr, became a common modification of Noth’s thesis, even if it has taken a number of forms quite different from Jepsen’s proposal. It is of interest here to observe von Rad’s reaction to Noth’s work on Dtr. In a piece published in 1947 on “The Deuteronomic Theology of History in I and II Kings,” 68 he commends Noth’s work and expresses his strong agreement with the general thesis: An exhaustive monograph recently appeared in Noth’s collection of studies of the history of traditions, concerning the work of the deuteronomistic historian. . . . Noth has subjected the literary problem to a wholly new examination, and has above all shown conclusively that this great work is not the result of literary redaction, but fully deserves without any qualification the rarely-merited designation of “historical writing.” On the one hand all kinds of ancient historical texts are brought together and welded into a single whole, within the framework of an overriding plan. On the other hand a rigorous selectivity has evidently governed the entire work, and the reader is referred continually to the sources for everything which 65. A. Jepsen, Die Quellen des Königsbuches (2nd ed.; Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1956). 66. See ibid., 100–101. 67. Ibid., 105. 68. Von Rad, “Die deuteronomistische Geschichtstheologie in den Königsbüchern,” Deuteronomium-Studien (FRLANT 40; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1947), part B, 52–64; translated into English as “The Deuteronomic Theology of History in I and II Kings (1947),” The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1966), 205–21. Quotations are taken from the English translation.

264

Chapter 7

lies outside the scheme of its theology of history. In both respects the office of the historian has been faithfully discharged.69

Von Rad must surely have seen in this historian, Dtr, something very similar to his own understanding of the Yahwist and in Noth’s methodology an approach like his own in order to assert claims of this sort regarding early historiography. It is likewise significant that, while both von Rad and Noth followed Gunkel closely in the latter’s understanding of the rise of historical writing in ancient Israel, they each departed from Gunkel in their evaluation of the Yahwist and Dtr, considering both to be true historians. Later, in his Old Testament Theology (1957), von Rad discusses the theological perspective of the “Deuteronomistic Historian” throughout Judges–Samuel– Kings, which is revealed in Dtr’s use of the rubric “Israel’s anointed,” and von Rad seems to accept this corpus as a single history created by a single author. 70 Yet, in a short appendix to his discussion, he raises several questions and problems regarding the unity and continuity of the work, most notably in the case of the large section in the account of David’s rise and in the Succession Narrative in the books of Samuel; in these sections, there is no comment made by Dtr where it would certainly be expected. He also sees clear differences in the treatments of Judges and Kings. He concludes with the statement: “It is difficult to think that the editing of the Book of Judges and that of the Book of Kings could have taken place as a single piece of work.” 71 It is clear that von Rad has maintained his commitment to the Hexateuch, and this resulted in a problem for the place of Joshua in the scheme of things. In the same work, von Rad rejects the inclusion of Joshua within DtrH and makes his position quite clear: In the account of the saving history as it now lies before us in the old Credo and related texts, the granting of the land of Canaan was the last of the saving acts of Jahweh. Form-critical research has made it absolutely certain that the old picture of the history ended here, and that it was not extended through the conquest into the period of the judges and the kings. Consequently, the major sources in the Hexateuch also ended with the account of Israel’s settlement in Canaan. 72

This was the whole point of von Rad’s “Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch,” in which the Yahwist’s history reached from the patriarchal promises of land to the granting of that land by the deity in the conquest and settlement: “But because the Jahwist’s history of the patriarchs made systematic use of this promise to them at various points, it is this promise [of land] which became the distinctive leitmotiv for the whole Hexateuch.” 73 As

69. Ibid., 205. 70. Von Rad, Old Testament Theology, 1:306–47. 71. Ibid., 347 (italics mine). 72. Ibid., 296. 73. Ibid., 297.

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

265

a consequence, when von Rad speaks of the Deuteronomist in Joshua, he identifies him as an “editor” who made certain additions to the text, such as Josh 1:1–18; 21:43–22:6; and 23:1–16, and by means of these, “the Hexateuch was given its final and most comprehensive interpretation.” 74 This leaves entirely unclear how the “editor” of Joshua relates to the historians or editors of Judges–Samuel–Kings. Notwithstanding what he had said about von Rad’s “most decisive results” in his form-critical study of the Hexateuch, Noth must have quickly realized that his Dtr hypothesis and the Hexateuch could not coexist in critical scholarship. So it is little wonder that he sets out in his second study, Überlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuch, to undercut von Rad’s entire hypothesis of a J historian of the Hexateuch. Noth does this in the following ways. First, he declares at the very beginning of his study—quite arbitrarily, in my view—that “the decisive steps on the way to the formation of the Pentateuch were taken during the pre-literary stage, and the literary fixations only gave final form to material which in its essentials was already given.” 75 This leads Noth to declare further that the Pentateuch must be treated entirely differently from the way that literary histories, such as his Dtr, are treated. Even though it may appear that the same process of collecting and arranging traditional materials and putting them in literary form is going on, as von Rad supposes, the literary histories are the work of “authors,” and the Pentateuch is not. Noth makes a clear distinction between the “author” of the Deuteronomistic History and the literary sources of the Pentateuch. He states: “The Pentateuch, on the other hand, does not have an ‘author’ in this sense at all. Even the original writers of the so-called sources of the Pentateuch, from which the whole was finally compiled, cannot be regarded as ‘authors’ in this sense, however effective and significant their work may have been. To be sure, they gave their works a definitive final formulation, but they did not give them their basic form.” 76 One cannot read this without seeing it as a complete rebuke to von Rad’s position on the Yahwist as author and historian and as the one responsible for the Hexateuch’s basic form (Letztgestalt). It also contradicts Noth’s earlier view that von Rad’s Yahwist was the model for his own Dtr. Second, Noth claims to accept von Rad’s “little credo” as a starting point for his investigation, but in fact he replaces von Rad’s historical credo with a number of individual confessional themes that are also located in the liturgy of the amphictyony. Noth goes on to say, This basic form [of the Pentateuch] did not finally emerge as the later consequence of a substantive combination and arrangement of individual traditions and individual complexes of traditions. Rather, this form was already given in the beginning of the history of the traditions in a small

74. Ibid., 303–4. 75. Noth, Pentateuchal Traditions, 1–2. 76. Ibid., 2.

266

Chapter 7

series of themes essential for the faith of the Israelite tribes. These themes in turn constituted the content of more or less definitively formulated “confessions” which were customarily recited at particular cultic celebrations. The thematic outline so given in the early cult was then richly and variously filled out by the gradual addition of innumerable individual traditions. This has been clearly shown by Gerhard von Rad in his important study of the “Hexateuch.” 77

This is a remarkable and highly misleading statement because this is most definitely what von Rad’s form-critical study of the Hexateuch was not about. Von Rad’s whole point was to argue against the gradual and accidental accumulation of tradition by some nebulous and unguided process. So von Rad’s author and historian, J, is set aside at the outset, and Noth opts for a more limited tradition-history of the oral tradition, as reflected in the works of Gunkel and Gressmann. 78 Consequently, the historical credos cited by von Rad play no further role in Noth’s discussion. Instead, for each theme he cites scattered biblical references drawn from all over the Old Testament, most of which can say absolutely nothing about the independent origin and development of a particular theme. For Noth, there was no heilsgeschichtliches credo to form the basis and inspiration for J’s history. It is generally accepted today that there was no such thing as a premonarchic amphictyony and that we can know nothing about the cultic or religious life of the Israelites before the rise of the state. So there is no Sitz im Leben for Noth’s confessional themes. Furthermore, there is also little reason to believe that the exodus and settlement traditions were independent from each other, or that the wilderness traditions could have existed without presupposing both exodus and settlement, and few today would defend Noth’s division of this corpus. But if Noth could not pry the settlement tradition loose from the others, then he had no serious argument against the supporters of the Hexateuch and von Rad’s use of the credo in particular. Third, these themes each became anonymous blocks of tradition, growing by a long process of gradual accretion of layer upon layer and fused together by compilers—the very method that von Rad had rejected as Gunkel’s “big mistake.” Noth ignores von Rad’s objections without discussion or argument. The only circumstance in which traditions could grow independently in this way is by locating them in distinct regions and communities at a time before both traditions and groups became amalgamated into an “all-Israel” twelve-tribe league. For Noth, the whole process is complete in this preliterary, prestate period. There is simply nothing left for J to do by the Solomonic age. Noth, therefore, relegates the Yahwist to the sidelines by the invention of his Grundlage, which he declares to be the endpoint of the process of Pentateuchal growth. 79 This is what J inherited, so J did nothing

77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., 3. 79. Ibid., 38–41.

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

267

to put the traditional materials together. But where does this Grundlage come from? The Grundlage is Noth’s invention to account for the similarity between the independent J and E sources of the Pentateuch. Any doubt about the independence of the E source, however, renders the Grundlage quite superfluous. Fourth, a serious problem for Noth is J’s primeval history, because it could hardly have been a confessional theme or tradition block of the primitive amphictyony in the same way as the others. Consequently, only here is the Yahwist a historian who is left with putting together different materials to construct a primeval history as a prologue to the “Pentateuchal tradition.” Of course, if J could so skillfully combine quite different traditions to construct a primeval period, he could do the same for the patriarchal era and for the exodus, wilderness, and conquest traditions. Noth’s denigration of the historiography of the Yahwist makes rather meaningless his use of the Yahwist as a model for his Dtr. 80 This is not the place to enter into an elaborate critique of Noth’s thesis on the development of the Pentateuch. 81 However, both von Rad and Noth shared some initial presuppositions that are no longer acceptable today. They both accepted the program of form-critics and tradition-historians, which was to locate the basic tradition units within the primitive premonarchic period. Noth’s theory of a twelve-tribe amphictyony, which von Rad accepted, provided the setting for both von Rad’s credo and Noth’s confessional themes. If this time frame and Sitz im Leben for the tradition formation and its literary transformation is rejected, as it has been by most OT scholars, then what is the impact on both positions? For von Rad, it would entail a radical displacement of his Yahwist to another age. That, however, would not affect the basic thesis that the form of the Pentateuch is a history and that the one who gave it this shape was the Yahwist, an author and a historian of the first magnitude. In the case of Noth, however, I do not see how it is possible to salvage any part of his position. His confessional themes within the liturgy of an amphictyony no longer exist; nor is there any basis for seeing separate blocks of tradition in the exodus story, the wilderness trek, and the occupation of the land. None of these is possible without assuming the others. Nor is there any reason to believe that the whole “Pentateuchal tradition” was the product of the prestate period, and few would argue for this today. 82 But then, there is no reason to believe that the process by which this remarkable history from creation to the conquest came into being is different in any way from the other narrative histories. To continue to do so seems entirely arbitrary. Of course, the original independence of the patriarchal traditions from the exodus-settlement traditions as alternate origin traditions was fully 80. See The Deuteronomistic History, 100 n. 3. 81. On the problem of the form or genre of J, see Van Seters, Prologue to History, 8–23. 82. See R. N. Whybray, The Making of the Pentateuch: A Methodological Study (JSOTSup 53; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1987).

268

Chapter 7

articulated by Kurt Galling 83 and accepted by von Rad and owes nothing to Noth’s thesis. For von Rad it is, quite simply, the Yahwist who integrated the patriarchal traditions with the exodus-conquest traditions, and he did so by means of the land-promise theme that was common to both. 84 Most difficult for Noth is the fact that, once having repudiated the Hexateuch, he has no place in his Tetrateuch for the settlement traditions. His reasons for their exclusion from the Pentateuchal tradition are very forced. Ironically, it is his Dtr historian who incorporates them into his historical work, just as the Yahwist incorporated the rest of them into his history. Furthermore, it is difficult to see how Noth’s Dtr functions any differently in the way he treats his materials in Joshua 1–11 from the way in which the Yahwist arranges and develops his materials in the Pentateuch. 85 By the end of Noth’s study on the Pentateuch, what had been of major concern to “higher criticism” in the history of the editing of a text has become of little importance “traditio-historically.” Regarding the combination of the documents J, E, and P, he states: “For what is involved here is a purely literary work, one that has contributed neither new tradition-material nor new substantive viewpoints to the reworking or interpretation of the materials.” 86 It is merely a process of conflation of the sources, and Noth discusses this process first with regard to the combination of J and E, which was somewhat complex, given the duplication of content involved, and then the “simpler” addition of “the old sources into the literary framework of the P narrative.” 87 In spite of the incongruities and differences in style among the traditional materials within the sources and between the sources, the final product—the completed Pentateuch—was an “admirably compact corpus.” “This came about through editorial work which was by no means uninspired or unperceptive and which was accomplished on the basis of the presuppositions of a period interested primarily in the material of the traditions.” 88 Noth’s “redaction criticism” is very limited in scope and says nothing about the “conscious intentions of the redactors” beyond the collection and conflation of traditional materials in written form. He does not address the other “revisers,” as the older scholars did, although he makes frequent reference throughout his study to interpolations and supplements. But they do not come within the scope of his redactors in this final summary. 83. K. Galling, Die Erwählungstraditionen Israels (BZAW 48; Giessen: de Gruyter, 1928). 84. Van Seters, Prologue to History, 227–45; idem, “The So-called Deuteronomistic Redaction of the Pentateuch,” in Congress Volume: Leuven, 1989 (VTSup 43; Leiden: Brill, 1992), 58–77. 85. However, I do not believe, as Noth does, that a number of originally distinct ancient traditions lie behind the account of the conquest in Joshua. The whole is a literary and fictional construct of Dtr based on the experience of similar invasions by the Assyrians in the late monarchy. See my In Search of History, 330–31; idem, “Joshua’s Campaign of Canaan and Near Eastern Historiography,” SJOT 2 (1990): 1–12. 86. Noth, Pentateuchal Traditions, 248. 87. Ibid., 249. 88. Ibid., 250.

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

269

This very brief dismissal of the entire editorial process by Noth is all the more remarkable because he is often viewed, along with von Rad, as giving rise to the subsequent development of a very elaborate “redaction criticism.” Let us recall that in the introduction to this book I noted that John Barton and Klaus Koch have identified both von Rad and Noth as the fathers of “redaction criticism” in Old Testament studies, although von Rad and Noth do not use the term and admit that they have nothing new to say about the Pentateuchal redactors beyond what their predecessors have said. In the case of the Yahwist for von Rad and Dtr for Noth, their whole emphasis is on authors and the fact that J and Dtr are historians—not merely compilers of tradition and editors. How does this complete transformation in the understanding, indeed the misunderstanding, of von Rad and Noth come about? Quite remarkably, one finds it in the work of their epigonoi.

The Revisionist Successors of von Rad and Noth and the Triumph of the Editor It appears that it was Klaus Koch (a student of von Rad), in his Was ist Formgeschichte? (1964), who introduced a distinction into the older understanding of “tradition-history” (Überlieferungsgeschichte), which, since the days of Friedrich Wolf, had referred to the whole process of the formation of a text such as Homer or the Pentateuch from its first written form to its “final form” in the vulgate or standard version of the text—that is, its entire texthistory. Following what appeared to be Noth’s restriction of the traditionhistory of the Pentateuch to its oral stage (although Noth certainly did not make this distinction in his study of Dtr and the Chronicler), Koch decided to introduce the new term Redaktionsgeschichte, rendered in English “redaction criticism,” 89 to represent the period of the Pentateuch’s textual history from its first appearance in written form to its “final edited form.” Koch’s understanding of “redactors” also placed primary weight on their role as “revisers” and interpreters of texts. He states: “A redactor is one who revises a particular piece of writing. His work is different from that of an author or writer, who creates something new.” 90 This, of course, is an aspect of redactors that is not even discussed by von Rad and Noth and goes back to the older discussion of the “bad” editors—the diaskeuastai, the corrupters of texts. What Koch suggests is that the study of oral tradition has revealed that the first writers did not really create anything new (which, as we saw, was Noth’s view of the Yahwist), and therefore these first writers must be included within the redactional process. Thus, the whole of von Rad’s “Form-Critical 89. See K. Koch, The Growth of the Biblical Tradition: The Form-Critical Method (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), 57–67. The confusion in the English rendering of this and other terms in German is due to the fact that the term Redaktionsgeschichte represents in shortened form “the critical history of editorial activity,” and hence it may be rendered either “redaction history” or “redaction criticism.” 90. Ibid., 57.

270

Chapter 7

Problem of the Hexateuch” and Noth’s studies of the histories of both Dtr and the Chronicler, as well as the Pentateuch, are immediately turned into “redaction history.” 91 Koch acknowledges that this terminology is a new creation: “This term has of course arisen since the Second World War, and was first adopted by W. Marxsen,” and he goes on to assert that Marxsen has “taken over for the field of New Testament studies the methods evolved by von Rad and Noth for the Old Testament.” 92 This statement is highly misleading. The rise of redaction criticism has a quite different origin, stemming primarily from Wellhausen’s study of the Synoptics, which we must investigate more fully below. However, before doing so, we must consider two more epigonoi of these two colossi of German biblical scholarship: Rudolph Smend, student of Noth, and Rolf Rendtorff, student of von Rad. As indicated above, Martin Noth’s thesis that a Dtr historian was responsible for the composition of the book of Joshua rests heavily on the view that it contains a clearly identifiable Deuteronomistic framework in 1:1–18, 21:43–22:6; and 23:1–16, into which the stories of the conquest of the land have been set. 93 R. Smend has attempted to modify this thesis by suggesting that, within this framework, in Josh 1 and 23, there is evidence of a later redactor with a distinctive set of theological concerns, and this redactor is also present in the rest of the Dtr history. 94 According to Smend, the distinctive characteristic of this editor is his constant reference to the Law of Moses in a number of different forms and expressions, and he is therefore identified as a “nomistic” Deuteronomist, DtrN. Noth’s original Deuteronomistic History (Dtr) is now identified by the siglum DtrG (for Geschichtswerk). This is not the place to undertake a detailed critique of Smend’s thesis, which I do not believe can stand up under close scrutiny. 95 His work merely marks the beginning of the so-called Göttingen school, in which redactors proliferated. 96 These new redactors do not conflate documents, as they did in the older notions of the Documentary Hypothesis. They are all “revisers,” who impose upon the text their own ideology and theological concerns. Conse91. Ibid., 65–66. 92. Ibid., 66. 93. M. Noth, Das Buch Josua (3rd ed.; HAT 7; Tübingen: Mohr, 1971), 9; idem, The Deuteronomistic History, 36–41. 94. R. Smend, “Das Gesetz und die Völker: Ein Beitrag zur deuteronomistischen Redaktionsgeschichte,” in Probleme biblischer Theologie: Gerhard von Rad zum 70. Geburtstag (ed. H. W. Wolff; Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1971), 494–509. 95. J. Van Seters, “The Deuteronomistic Redaction of the Pentateuch: The Case against It,” in Deuteronomy and Deuteronomic Literature: Festschrift for C. Brekelmans (ed. M. Vervenne and J. Lust; Leuven: Peeters, 1997), 301–19, esp. 304–10. 96. See in particular the works of two of Smend’s students: W. Dietrich, Prophetie und Geschichte: Ein redaktionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zum deuteronomistischen Geschichtswerk (FRLANT 108; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972; and T. Veijola, Die ewige Dynastie: David und die Entstehung seiner Dynastie nach der deuteronomistischen Darstellung (Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Series B 193; Helsinki, 1975); idem, Das Königtum in der Beurteilung der deuteronomistischen Historiographie: Eine redaktionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Series B 198; Helsinki, 1977).

spread is 6 points long

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

271

quently, there is even some concern to redefine the term “redactor” exclusively according to the notion of “reviser,” to maximize the distinction between redactors and editors and to minimize the distinction between redactors and authors. This of course is semantic nonsense. As a consequence of this development in the “higher criticism” of the historical books, the original thesis of Noth, which sought to recover the author and historian of Joshua to Kings, has been completely inundated and obliterated by the new redaction criticism of this corpus. G. von Rad was to suffer an even worse blow at the hands of his student, Rolf Rendtorff. Taking the block model of individual oral confessions as set forth by Noth in his Überlieferungsgeschichte des Penateuch to its logical extreme, Rendtorff dismisses the Yahwist and, with him, the Documentary Hypothesis as unnecessary. 97 Von Rad’s beloved author and historian, the Yahwist, is relegated to the scrap heap. Rendtorff began his challenge of von Rad’s position in an IOSOT congress address entitled “Der ‘Jahwist’ als Theologe?” 98 He notes at the outset that his contemporaries have considerable interest in the theology of the Pentateuchal sources, 99 and he puts this down to the influence of von Rad and, particularly, to his book Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuch, in which, he asserts, von Rad argued that the development of the Hexateuch was the result of imposing on the traditional material “distinct theological principles,” and, therefore, it is the product of a theologian, the Yahwist. This is quite a remarkable statement, because Rendtorff has altered the entire viewpoint of von Rad’s book from the form of the Hexateuch as history to a discussion of the Hexateuch’s theology—that is, a shift from genre to ideology. 100 The implication is clear. Von Rad is a Christian theologian who is only interested in the theology of the Pentateuch, and the Yahwist has become a kind of cipher for his own ideology. This, however, is a serious misunderstanding of what von Rad actually says and does in this book, most of which is taken up with his discussion of 97. See R. Rendtorff, Das überlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Penateuch (BZAW 147; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977). This has been translated as The Problem of the Process of Transmission in the Pentateuch (JSOTSup 89; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990). 98. “Der ‘Jahwist’ als Theologe? Zum Dilemma der Pentateuchkritik,” in Congress Volume: Edinburgh, 1974 (VTSup 28; Leiden: Brill, 1975), 158–66; translated into English as “The ‘Yahwist’ as Theologian? The Dilemma of Pentateuchal Criticism,” JSOT 3 (1977): 2–9. 99. He does not name these scholars, but he certainly has in mind works such as those by H. W. Wolff and W. Brueggemann. For them, the Pentateuchal sources were still authors. See the collection reproduced in W. Brueggemann and W. H. Wolff, eds., The Vitality of the Old Testament Traditions (Atlanta: John Knox, 1975). 100. J.-L. Ska (“The Yahwist, a Hero with a Thousand Faces: A Chapter in the History of Modern Exegesis,” in Abschied vom Jahwisten: Die Komposition des Hexateuch in der jüngsten Diskussion [ed. J. C. Gertz, K. Schmid, and M. Witte; BZAW 315; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002], 15–17) also follows Rendtorff in reading von Rad’s treatment of J as a “theologian,” and therefore he also misrepresents what von Rad was trying to do in his form-critical study. He further says on p. 21, “for Van Seters, J is no longer a ‘theologian’, as for von Rad, but a ‘historian.’” In fact, there is no difference between von Rad and me on this question, as the above discussion shows.

272

Chapter 7

J’s historiography. The Yahwist is a historian! Only at the end of his formcritical discussion does von Rad address the “theological problem” of the Yahwist, because he finds some evidence of secularization and rationalization of sacred traditions. 101 Yet von Rad argues that J, even as a historian handling quite different kinds of traditional material, is able to articulate a sophisticated theology, a theology that may be compared with that of another historian, DH. 102 It was, after all, Gressmann, the form-critic, who made the case for viewing the Deuteronomistic historiography as motivated by the ideology of Deuteronomic theology (see above). Still, the primary focus of von Rad’s study is on J as historian and author. Yet, in all of Rendtorff’s discussion in this article and in his later monograph, there is not a single line that addresses the question of J as history. It is, in fact, not von Rad but Noth who denies that any of the Pentateuchal sources are historians and who then suggests that their only role is theological reflection on the material that they take up. 103 It is this view that Rendtorff has transferred from Noth to von Rad. The next step Rendtorff takes is to represent von Rad as, in essence, a tradition-historian primarily concerned about the “complexes of tradition” and their development toward the final form of the Pentateuch, who only used the source designation “Yahwist” as a convenience that had little to do with the Documentary Hypothesis. Thus he states: Most significant of all, von Rad’s ‘Yahwist’ is not one of several authors of the sources. Quite the contrary. Von Rad has said himself, quite clearly, that the traditional division into sources has no place in his view. “Not that the conflation of E and J would now appear to be a simple process, nor one that could be altogether explained to one’s satisfaction. The problem of the origin and purpose of these two works, the nature of their genesis, the readers for whom they were destined, is as much an open question now as it was before, and will probably remain so. But these problems are generically different from the ones we have been dealing with in our present study.” In a word, the existence of different sources side by side disturbed von Rad’s perspective and was really incompatible with it.104

This quotation that Rendtorff lifts out of von Rad as evidence is a puzzle because it seems to contradict von Rad’s treratment of the character of the Yahwist as author and historian, his social setting, his individuality—in fact, everything that precedes this statement by von Rad, until one realizes that

101. This “secularization” was a common process in the works of early Greek historians under the influence of the Ionic enlightenment. 102. Von Rad also wrote a piece on “Die deuteronomistische Geschichtstheologie in den Königsbüchern” (1947). One should observe that Noth, at the end of his study of Dtr, also examines Dtr’s “central theological ideas,” The Deuteronomistic History, 89–99. 103. See Noth, Pentateuchal Traditions, 2 and 228. 104. Rendtorff, “The ‘Yahwist’ as Theologian?” 4. See my criticism of this statement in “The Yahwist as Theologian? A Response,” JSOT 3 (1977): 15.

spread is 6 points short

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

273

this is a misquotation. 105 What von Rad actually said was that he would end his discussion of the problem of the Hexateuch’s form with his treatment of J because J was definitive for the final form of the Hexateuch. He then went on to say: “Not that the conflation of E and P with J appears to be a simple process . . .” and further adds, after the portion quoted by Rendtorff: “The process by which E and P are superimposed on J, as well as their relationship to one another, is a purely literary question, which adds nothing essentially new to the discussion so far as form-criticism is concerned. The form of the Hexateuch had already been finally determined by the Yahwist.” 106 He then goes on to discuss some of the problems within source criticism having to do with E and P. There is nothing in these pages that suggests that von Rad was anything other than someone fully committed to the Documentary Hypothesis; he never wavered from his use of source analysis. As indicated above, Noth’s notion of a Grundlage denied to J any responsibility for bringing the complexes of traditions together into their final form. Rendtorff seizes upon this argument to undercut von Rad’s conception of J. With reference to Noth’s argument, he asserts: “Von Rad’s basic view of the Yahwist can scarcely be contested more concretely and clearly.” 107 But this statement is completely disingenuous, because Rendtorff does not himself believe in Noth’s G, because it is dependent entirely upon the Documentary Hypothesis and the J and E sources, which he rejects. The problem of E and its relationship to J has long been an issue in literary criticism and has nothing to do with form-criticism or tradition-history. Even Wellhausen preferred to discuss the two sources together as the Jehovist. And Wellhausen had considerable difficulty in defining the relationship between P and JE, so he was no different from von Rad on these matters. That one can make a distinction between non-Priestly and Priestly material in Genesis to Numbers and between these and Deuteronomy seems beyond dispute, and traditionhistory (in the later sense of the development of oral tradition) has little to do with it. Rendtorff takes over the “larger units” of tradition complexes from Noth’s tradition-history. Of course, he has to give up the liturgical and cultic Sitz im Leben of the amphictyony, the primitive setting of tradition formation, and all the social and historical explanations used by Noth to account for the place of the various tradition blocks within the Pentateuchal tradition (the Grundlage), but he retains what to him seems the self-evident conviction that the separate blocks of tradition existed independently somewhere. Perhaps some did, but unlike Noth, Rendtorff makes no effort to locate each 105. See my earlier quotation of this passage, pp. 258–259 above. 106. Von Rad, “The Form-Critical Problem,” 74 (italics mine). Rendtorff gives the corrected quotation in Das überlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Penateuch, 15; trans. The Problem of the Process of Transmission, 27. In doing so, he has to modify his comment about it. Even so, he leaves quite the wrong impression that von Rad has little concern for source criticism. 107. Rendtorff, The Problem, 29.

274

Chapter 7

complex of traditions in different social and historical settings. 108 The unity of each confessional complex of traditions and its distinctiveness from the other blocks is entirely theological. Thus, each confessional theme becomes a separate theology of a distinct religious group. 109 For Rendtorff, the unity of a literary work, such as J or P, is therefore judged solely on the criterion of theological unity, a single theological theme. Such a criterion is, of course, entirely arbitrary and has nothing to do with von Rad’s discussion of J’s historiography, which is the integration into a single history of many different themes and traditions. 110 According to Rendtorff, these theological themes grew by their own internal inertia, layer by layer, oblivious to other tradition blocks, and only came together with each other by some late redactional, Deuteronomistic process. 111 He illustrates his method in the case of the patriarchal traditions, which is a fairly safe context, because it is widely recognized that they were originally distinct from the exodus-conquest traditions. By noting variations in the patriarchal promise formulas, Rendtorff seeks to prove, against von Rad, that this tradition block did grow through a slow process of accretion over many generations to its final bulk, before being redactionally connected with the exodus story. The final history was not the result of a grand design; it was an accident. Nothing could contrast more sharply with von Rad’s view of the Pentateuch in general and the Yahwist in particular. Of course, the fact that both in Exodus–Numbers and in Deuteronomy we have exactly the same kind of variation in the formulas used to express the promises to the fathers obviously has nothing to do with strata in the tradition is quite overlooked by Rendtorff. 112 Von Rad simply asserted that the whole promise scheme in the patriarchal stories is the work of the Yahwist as a way of integrating the varied mass of traditional material at his disposal. Indeed,

108. See, ibid., 205. Rendtorff simply asserts that “individual traditions were handed down in certain circles and over a long period of time, but remained unknown in other circles.” Nothing more specific than this is stated. 109. Ibid., 189. 110. A similar misrepresentation of von Rad is found in R. Rendtorff, The Old Testament: An Introduction (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 180. Theology, at least in antiquity, is not a genre category and can never be used to define the limits of a literary work. It is always an abstraction based on the content of some statements that refer to the deity. A person who engages in such activity as a primary scholarly occupation, a “theologue,” is an anachronism when applied to the Old Testament, and this is certainly not what the Yahwist is about. He is a theologian only in the limited sense that statements may be abstracted from his work that evidence an understanding of the deity that is fairly clear and consistent and may be compared with other theologies abstracted from other bodies of literature, such as the Dtr corpus, the priestly texts, and so on. Contrary to Rendtorff, source analysis and specific authors have everything to do with identifying these “theologies.” 111. Rendtorff, The Problem, 196–99. The description of this imaginary process I find very confusing. 112. See my “Recent Studies on the Pentateuch: A Crisis in Method,” JAOS 99 (1979): 663–73; idem, Prologue to History, 218–20.

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

275

the land-promise formulas in Deuteronomy were originally connected with the exodus-conquest tradition and are only secondarily used by the Yahwist in the patriarchal traditions. 113 Like the Documentary Hypothesis, which had to account for the integration of separate independent sources into the larger whole, Rendtorff must also explain how independent tradition complexes became combined with each other. This he does by using the same technique as the Documentary Hypothesis—the activity of “redactors.” Initially, he wants to reject the term “redactor” because of its close association with the Documentary Hypothesis, and therefore he tries to find another term, such as “collector” (Sammler) or “reviser” (Bearbeiter) to represent the same functions—conflation and revision—associated with redactors. 114 In the past, these terms had often been used as synonyms for editor. Thus, the cross-references that now occur between the tradition blocks that might otherwise be ascribed to an author and historian Rendtorff attributes to a very vague Deuteronomistic “layer of revision” (Bearbeitungsschicht), which simply becomes synonymous with Deuteronomistic redaction. In his book The Old Testament: An Introduction, Rendtorff states: “It is clear that the integration of the larger units in Genesis into a comprehensive whole took place at a level that can be described as theological redaction. This connection is particularly obvious between the patriarchal narratives and the exodus story.” 115 He then goes on to cite a few texts that make cross-references between Genesis and Exodus that he regards to be editorial. The texts mentioned have all been formulated in language with a Deuteronomistic stamp. . . . The theological collectors and editors who were at work here therefore stand more or less close to Deuteronomy. The work of these groups can also be recognized elsewhere within the individual books of the Pentateuch. It may therefore be taken as certain that a collection of Pentateuchal traditions (probably the first) came from this theological school. 116

What has happened here is that several theological editors belonging to a “school” have replaced a single author whom von Rad called the Yahwist. 117

113. T. Römer, Israels Väter: Untersuchungen zur Väterthematik im Deuteronomium und in der deuteronomistischen Tradition (OBO 99; Freiburg: Universitätsverlag / Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990). 114. Rendtorff, The Problem, 189–92. The tradition-critics love these myriads of invisible redactors, inherited from the Documentary Hypothesis, because they can use them to solve any argument raised against their position. 115. Idem, The Old Testament, 161. 116. Ibid., 162. 117. For a complete rejection of the notion that the Yahwist reflects Deuteronomistic theology, see my “Theology of the Yahwist, A Preliminary Sketch,” in “Wer ist wie du, Herr, unter den Göttern?”: Studien zur Theologie und Religionsgeschichte Israels. Festschrift für Otto Kaiser zum 70. Geburtstag (ed. I. Kottsieper et al.; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 219–28. The same criticism would also apply to Blum, whose work will be considered below.

276

Chapter 7

Alongside this school of editors, Rendtorff finds a second school: “Another group of texts which similarly provide an overall connection has been formulated in the language of the Priestly tradition.” After citing a number of P texts, he continues: “The relationship between this Priestly stratum of revision and the cultic traditions in the books Exodus to Numbers call for even closer investigation. . . . Similarly, its relationship with the Deuteronomistic revision is still largely unexplained.” 118 Here the Priestly writer has been rejected in favor of a priestly “revision,” and the problem of the relationship between J and P is replaced by the relationship between two very vague “revisions” made by two schools of editors. While Rendtorff seems to leave unresolved the matter of the sequence of these two “revisions,” he answers this question by immediately suggesting that the “final revision” is indeed the work of the Deuteronomistic editors. He states: “Finally, the Deuteronomistic character of the comprehensive revision of the Pentateuch again raises the question of its relationship to the books that follow.” 119 This again raises the debate between von Rad’s Hexateuch and Noth’s Deuteronomistic History, but in another form, namely, without the authors J and P of von Rad and the historian Dtr of Noth: “The Deuteronomic-Deuteronomistic circles who had played a crucial part in shaping the subsequent books were also key figures in giving the outline of the Pentateuch its shape. In both places they have worked over earlier traditions of different kinds and given them a theological interpretation.” 120 Not only has the nebulous process of continuous theological interpretation by editors swallowed up von Rad’s Yahwist, it has also devoured Noth’s Dtr Historian. The problem of how to account for the division between the Pentateuch and the following historical books is briefly dismissed as merely reflecting “different stages of the history of the Old Testament canon.” 121 But one must ask the question: Why are these hypothetical schools or circles of editors, whose activity is viewed as extending over a very long period of time, a better explanation for the collection and integration of diverse materials under overarching ideological perspectives than authors and historians as set forth by Noth and von Rad? This is precisely what ancient classical historians did, but it is certainly not what the “editors” of Alexandria or the later Roman world did. 122

118. Rendtorff, The Old Testament, 162, italics mine. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid., 162–63. This takes us back to the worst abuses of the “redactor hypothesis” of the nineteenth century. 121. Ibid., 163. 122. For the similarity between the Yahwist and ancient historiography, see my Prologue to History, 86–99; idem, “Is There Any Historiography in the Hebrew Bible?”

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

277

The Composition of the Pentateuch: Neither Authors nor Editors—Erhard Blum Rendtorff left it to his student Erhard Blum to flesh out this traditiohistorical position on the Pentateuch and the nature of the two tradition complexes, the Deuteronomistic and the Priestly. In a massive tour de force comprising two very erudite tomes that I cannot begin to review or criticize here, Blum takes up the program of accounting for the multiple strata of the blocks of tradition. 123 Again, like Rendtorff, he begins with the Vätergeschichte and attempts to map out the tradition’s relief. Few would doubt that there were distinct traditions about Abraham and Jacob and a Joseph story prior to J, but whether Blum accounts for their connections better than von Rad’s Yahwist may be strongly disputed. However, it is when he comes to the traditions of Exodus–Numbers that any effort to support such a program of Überlieferungsgeschichte of the tradition blocks is given up, and in its place we have two literary works, a D composition (KD) and a P composition (KP) that in content resemble the literary sources J and P. The problem that I have with the D composition is that it still owes so much to its antecedents in the tradition-historical methods of Noth and Rendtorff. Thus, Blum refers to KD Tradenten (plural: transmitters of tradition) to avoid the suspicion that he has merely given J another name or that KD might be thought of as a single historian or theologian. But how does he know it was a group? Is this just Rendtorff’s “school of editors”? And what value does group composition have over the composition of works by individuals? Blum also follows Rendtorff in giving up on the primeval history as part of this corpus, a choice that is based entirely upon the fact that, originally, Noth could not accommodate the primeval history within the confessional themes of the prestate period and had to acknowledge that they were the work of the writer J. Neither Rendtorff nor Blum can invoke this reason for excluding them from consideration along with the rest of the material in Genesis. 124 KD likewise plays only a slight redactional role in the patriarchal narratives, and Blum repudiates any connection between KD and the Joshua conquest tradition. Noth, when he excluded both Dtr and any extensive

123. E. Blum, Die Komposition der Vätergeschichte (WMANT 57; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1984); idem, Studien zur Komposition des Pentateuch (BZAW 189; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990). For a recent critical appraisal of both Rendtorff and Blum on the patriarchal stories, see Ernest W. Nicholson, The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 101–31. 124. Recently Blum has modified his views on KD in Gespräch mit neueren Endredaktionshypothesen and now regards Genesis prior to P as a separate work. All of the previous KD texts in Genesis merely become redactional additions, as well as many connecting texts in Exodus–Numbers that were formerly attributed to KD. See E. Blum, “Die literarische Verbindung von Erzvätern und Exodus,” in Abschied vom Jahwisten: Die Komposition des Hexateuch in der jüngsten Diskussion (ed. J. C. Gertz, K. Schmid, and M. Witte; BZAW 315; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), 119–56. A detailed critique of this essay and other redaction critics referred to in this volume will be taken up in another place.

278

Chapter 7

Deuteronomistic redaction from Genesis to Numbers, was at least consistent. How is it that Blum, who characterizes the major non-Priestly composition of the Pentateuch as Deuteronomistic and admits that KD even contains a conquest narrative regarding the eastern tribal region, still excludes any connection between KD and the book of Joshua? Even Rendtorff had suggested some nebulous continuity with the Deuteronomistic History. This brings us to the question of the connection between KD and the conquest narrative of DH, which had been the major issue between von Rad’s Yahwist and Noth’s Dtr. Blum acknowledges that KD is later than DH and rejects the notions of pre- or proto-D as a way of accounting for similarity between them. Nevertheless, after a brief survey of the most notable narrative parallels, he cannot decide whether they are earlier or later and opts for a solution familiar to us from Noth’s treatment of J and E. The two works, KD and DH, are quite independent of each other, and both are dependent on a Grundlage, which accounts for their similarity. 125 As with Noth, this use of Grundlage 126 is a convenient way of dismissing any serious comparison between the parallel texts. Some similarities are verbatim, possessing characteristic Dtr terminology; others are quite different in language and perspective. And what is the scope of this Grundlage? Does it include the Vätergeschichte, which DH ignored, or the conquest of Joshua, which KD ignored? Does it include the legal materials, because here is where some of the most important parallels are to be found? We must then suspend all comparison among the codes (including also the Holiness Code) because they may relate to this unknown and unknowable third source and not to each other. What is the form of this Grundlage, oral or written? And who are its tradents? As in the case of Noth’s Grundlage, there is no good reason to believe in a hidden source of this kind apart from its convenience in not facing the most obvious fact: in such a small and tightly knit religious and ethnic community, a major work like the DH was surely known to those who came after it. KD must have known Deuteronomy and DH and had to come to terms with it. KD must have known the conquest narrative of Joshua. KD has his own version of the eastern conquest under Moses, parallel to the one in DH, and his own version of Joshua’s installation at the tent of meeting as the new leader (Deut 31:14–15, 23), in anticipation of the conquest. The idea, proposed by Blum, that a three-verse eulogy of Moses in Deut 34:10– 12 was intended to end the whole story of Israel’s early history must be flatly rejected. There is far too much in KD (alias J) that speaks against it. Von Rad was absolutely correct on that point. There is therefore no evidence that KD intended to create a Pentateuch, as Blum suggests. When all is said and done, after Blum has endeavored to spell out Rendtorff’s new program with meticulous precision, we basically have three Pentateuchal sources: KD, KP, and Deuteronomy, which are roughly the 125. Idem, Studien, 176–88. 126. A variety of terms are used by Blum, such as grundlagenden Traditionen, vor-dtn Überlieferung, but they all mean the same thing.

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

279

equivalent of J, P, and D, whatever the prehistory of these sources might have been. One (D) originates in a law code with hortatory and legalistic expansions; the other two (KD or J and KP or P), however, are narrative historical compositions that should not be denied to individual authors. But this still leaves open the question of the relationship of these works to each other. Under the Documentary Hypothesis, the final “redactor” (Rp), who was responsible for combining P with the earlier sources J, E, and D, was usually dated to the Persian period and associated with the mission of Ezra, “the priest, the scribe, learned in matters of the commandments of Yahweh and his statutes for Israel” (Ezra 7). Wellhausen identified Ezra with this final redactor, the creator and canonizer of the Pentateuch, while Kuenen, as we have seen, thought that there had been a more extended process carried out by the sopherim. More recently, a number of scholars have suggested that this redactional process is the result of influence or pressure by the fifth-century Persian authorities to create a unified codification of the various Hebrew law codes in existence (as reflected in the Pentateuchal sources), and this led to the final “redaction” of the Pentateuch. Unification of the various law codes is associated with the mission of Ezra, who is viewed as an official of the Persian government who was sent to Judah to carry out this work. 127 Blum, likewise, takes up this suggestion as a way of accounting for the union of KD and KP, a kind of enforced compromise between these two documents with quite different perspectives. But this still leaves many questions open. How are we to envisage this process? Was it simply the work of one scribe, Ezra? Or are we to think of a kind of editorial board with equal representatives from both “schools”? And if the process was merely intended to codify a common legal tradition, as the parallels cited might suggest, then why is so much narrative material also involved? The result hardly reflects any unified code of laws. Indeed, it would have been very easy to extract the Book of the Covenant from its context in KD as the only legal material in that corpus and to deal with it as a separate entity, together with the other laws. Furthermore, what does one do with Deuteronomy, which is viewed in Blum’s scheme as part of the Dtr corpus from Deuteronomy to Kings, even though it would need to be included within the common legal collection? Although Blum considers the resulting combined priestly composition as the decisive formative step leading to the canonical Torah, it is not the “final form” because there are still two circles or schools of priestly and Deuteronomistic tradents who are responsible for yet further additions. Blum proposes a number of examples of these additions or glosses, many of which may be disputed and which in any case are not particularly Priestly or Deuteronomic. At any rate, the question of how both sets of additions entered the text would need to be addressed. Are we to suppose that both sides submitted

127. See the discussion in F. Crüsemann, The Torah: Theology and Social History of Old Testament Law (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 329–39.

280

Chapter 7

their suggestions for additions to some impartial board of scribes or editors? There is little dispute over the fact that there are later interpolations into the text of the Pentateuch—the diaskeuastai of Kuenen—but their characterization as the work of members of schools is particularly problematic. In addition to these two schools of “revision,” Blum also proposes a quite distinct “Joshua 24 revision” (Jos-24–Bearbeitung), which he sees as responsible for establishing a connection between the Tetrateuch (Genesis–Numbers) and DtrH. 128 He points to two specific clues to this stratum, the theme of Joseph’s burial in the land of Israel, in Josh 24:32, being anticipated in Gen 50:25–26 and Exod 13:19, and the suggestion of von Rad that the recounting of history in Josh 24:2–12 has the appearance of a miniature Hexateuch. He also believes that this connection was made after the combined KD and KP Pentateuch was created. Although Blum has been hesitant in using the terms redactor and redaction to describe this conflationary activity, those who have followed him have not been the least bit reticent in referring to a “Hexateuchal redactor” alongside a “Pentateuchal redactor” and in positing any number of other redactors to replace the authors of the older Documentary Hypothesis. 129 After suggesting that there was a prolonged period during which various revisions and alterations were made, whether by later Deuteronomistic or Priestly circles or others, Blum makes the following concluding statement about a possible “final form” of the Pentateuch: We could further extend and detail the search for the final redaction of the Pentateuch, but it would still not produce a positive result. Pointedly formulated: There is no “final redaction.” Methodologically, it has functioned up to now simply as a kind of a priori postulate of exegetical method to help simplify the posing of many a question, thereby certainly heuristically rendering meaningful service; this justification, however, “a posteriori” would not actually rescue it. Now one could leave the matter at that, were it simply here a matter of detail about one of many redaction-critical problems. In fact, however, this question is methodologically mixed in many respects with a . . . basic issue of exegesis: the exposition of the canonical final form. The discussion of the methodological problems and challenges connected with it nevertheless proceeds only slowly. 130

There are two important issues here. First, for Blum there is no final redaction, because he cannot decide at what stage of “revision” to draw the line and merely consider everything afterward as textual corruption, a problem also confronting Wellhausen and Kuenen, as we saw above. He hints in a footnote that the same question relates to the Urtext of textual criticism. My 128. Blum, Studien, 363–65. 129. See T. Römer and M. Z. Brettler, “Deuteronomy 34 and the Case for a Persian Hexateuch,” JBL 119 (2000): 401–19; E. Otto, “Forschungen zum nachpriesterlichen Pentateuch,” TRu 67 (2000): 125–55. For my critique of these and Blum, see my “Deuteronomy between Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History,” HvTSt 59 (2003): 947–56. 130. Blum, Studien, 380; see the appendix, p. 405, for the original German.

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

281

position here is fundamentally different. There is no final form because there were no comprehensive “redactions” in the first place, and no redactors or editors. Just as there was no editorially-constructed text of Homer or any other Greek and Latin classic, one can say the same for the Pentateuch and DH. And this applies to the whole process from initial composition to the “standardization” of some form of the text in the Roman period. Although Blum came to the right conclusion, that the quest for the “final form” is fruitless, he never examined the problem of the existence of ancient editors itself. Second, Blum’s observation that the postulate of the “final edited form” is a kind of shortcut to avoid the problems of historical criticism in the exegesis of the “canonical form” and his rejection of this as ultimately solving nothing are certainly warranted. The important point, however, is that not only notions about the “final redactional form” but also notions about the whole redactional process are imbued with theological legitimation. It is no longer the author but the “editor” who is the theologian, with each “editorial” interpolation making its contribution toward the final edited form, the “canonical text.” It was Rendtorff who certainly encouraged this notion of “theological redaction” in the Pentateuch, 131 and the development of “canonical criticism” as well as “innerbiblical exegesis” rest upon the notion of redaction as a theological process. There can, of course, be no doubt about the fact that interpolations and “revisions” are often motivated by ideological and theological concerns. One need only think here of the so-called “corrections of the scribes” in the MT or the frequent references to Mount Gerizim and other ideological changes in the Samaritan Pentateuch 132 to see that it persists over a very long period of time. Similar changes occurred within the text of Homer and in the New Testament. 133 It is a matter of theological viewpoint whether or not one treats any of these changes positively. This question of the role of editors in “canonical criticism” and “innerbiblical exegesis” will be taken up in a later chapter. A recent study that reflects considerable influence from the works of Rendtorff and Blum is the literary-critical analysis of Genesis by David Carr, Reading the Fractures of Genesis (1996). 134 In his introduction, he discusses some of the important literary issues of the book of Genesis, including the question of the distinction between author and redactor/editor. After comparing Genesis with a wide range of Near Eastern texts to illustrate the complex development of literary works, such as Gilgamesh, and the nature of ancient authorship, Carr makes the following statement: 131. Rendtorff, Introduction, 161. 132. E. Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 64–67, 94–95. 133. See Bart Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 134. David M. Carr, Reading the Fractures of Genesis: Historical and Literary Approaches (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996).

282

Chapter 7

Seen within this perspective, Genesis is part of a broader spectrum of originally anonymous, historylike ancient Near Eastern narratives, many of which were formed gradually out of earlier traditions and only achieved textual solidity as they became authoritative in the communities that transmitted them. Within this context, sharp modern contrasts between “author” and “redactor” often miss the point. Ancient Near Eastern authors built on earlier materials yet often intervened in these materials to make them into a more or less new whole. That is why throughout this discussion and the rest of the book, I often use the term author or author/ redactor to refer to the composer of a biblical text, even when a substantial portion of the composition consists of earlier materials.135

There is no disputing the similarities between biblical and ancient Near Eastern modes of literary composition, although comparison with the “historylike” character of Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch and historical books shows that the composition techniques are much closer to the historians of Greece and Rome, as Noth suggested. However, there is no need to associate any of these compositional techniques with redactors or editors. The inclusion of the “redactor” is entirely superfluous. Furthermore, it is also curious that Carr seems to make a distinction between the “very old and highly dubious contrast between artless redactors and artful authors” 136 on the one hand and the more recent treatment of the Pentateuch that attributes grand designs of large units to redactors on the other. The “dubious contrast” between redactors and authors to which Carr refers is the basis of the Documentary Hypothesis, and the model used for this kind of artless redaction was the Diatessaron, which, as we have seen, was already invoked by Hupfeld and applied by Kuenen and others. 137 The reason that this limited use of the redactor has become “dubious” is that the redactor has developed in the scholars’ imagination into something other than the original analogy of an editor of old manuscripts. It is not my intention to evaluate critically all of the authors treated above or to review the vast body of additional scholarly work in Pentateuchal studies or those dealing with the Deuteronomistic History that relate to theories of literary criticism. My point is simply to make clear that the notion of an editor has become pervasive within a wide range of methodologies, both among those who have remained committed to the Documentary Hypothesis and those who have replaced the Documentary Hypothesis 135. Ibid., 20–21. 136. Ibid., 23. 137. Carr (ibid., 20) also makes use of the Diatesseron when it suits his purpose. So also H. Donner, “Der Redaktor: Überlegungen zum vorkritischen Umgang mit der Heiligen Schrift,” in Aufsätze zum Alten Testament aus vier Jahrzehnten (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994), 259– 85. Another example of conflation sited by Carr (Fractures, 19) is the Temple Scroll from Qumran. See the study of Stephen A. Kaufman, “The Temple Scroll and Higher Critics,” HUCA 53 (1982): 29–43. Kaufman makes the comparison with Rp of the Documentary Hypothesis as an example of conflation of documents, but throughout his discussion he refers to the composer of the work as an author. This is not the place to debate such dubious examples.

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

283

with a traditiohistorical or redaction-critical methodology, as well as those trying to define the nature of the “Deuteronomist” within the historical books from Joshua to Kings. Throughout the past two centuries, the editor has remained ubiquitous. There is, however, one further issue that needs to be addressed, and this is to explain how it is that “editors” could so easily take the place of “authors” such as J and P in the Pentateuch and Dtr in the historical books, a phenomenon that arose in the 1960s. As we saw earlier in the remarks of Klaus Koch, this came about through the adoption of redaction criticism from New Testament studies. To this issue we will now turn.

Wellhausen and the Rise of Redaction Criticism in New Testament Studies As I indicated in the introduction, redaction criticism (or, more correctly, redaction history), as a distinct methodology in its own right, did not arise out of either source criticism or form criticism in Old Testament studies. Our historical survey has shown that redactors came into the discussion of source analysis within the Documentary Hypothesis only as a necessity, as a way of explaining the combination of independent sources, and usually received minimal attention in their own right. Likewise, form criticism was viewed as a method that was closely related to source criticism, the investigation of the smaller primitive units of tradition that made up the works of individual authors. It was not editors but authors, the sources, who collected and constructed their works out of these units of tradition. This was especially the case in Pentateuchal criticism, in which, under the older form-critics, the editing of sources is well removed from the form-critical, largely oral, stage of composition. It is not redaction history but traditionhistory, in the newer sense, that was closely coupled with form criticism. In New Testament studies, however, form criticism, which was taken over as a method from Old Testament studies, has become linked with the activity of redactors or editors, particularly in the study of the Synoptic Gospels. Only in this sense has “redaction criticism” as a term for a distinct methodology arisen out of form criticism in New Testament studies and subsequently been imported back into Pentateuchal studies, with contradictory consequences. However, in contrast to the Pentateuch, where parallel versions of stories and laws occur intermingled, the Synoptics are distinct literary works that were not combined by redactors, so redactors such as one finds in the source criticism of the Pentateuch have no counterpart in Synoptic studies. Thus, redactors in New Testament studies had to be something quite different from what they were in the Documentary Hypothesis. What, then, is redaction criticism, and what is the role of redactors in the New Testament? Redaction criticism in New Testament studies is defined by Robert Stein as follows: “Redaction criticism is the study of NT texts that concentrates on the unique theological emphasis that the writers place upon the materials they used, their specific purposes in writing their works, and the Sitz im

284

Chapter 7

Leben out of which they wrote.” 138 Or as R. Fortna states, it is “a method of studying the NT that concentrates on the way the principal author of a work has adapted (‘redacted’) earlier materials to his own theological ends,” and “Redaction is the conscious reworking of older materials in such a way as to meet new needs. It is editing that does not simply compile or retouch but creatively transforms.” 139 It is in New Testament studies that the authors have become editors. In Pentateuchal studies, before the rise of redaction criticism, authors and editors were quite distinct from one another. This fundamental shift in the understanding of editors or redactors as authors is abundantly clear from Norman Perrin’s definition of redaction criticism: “It is concerned with studying the theological motivation of an author as this is revealed in the collection, arrangement, editing, and modification of traditional material, and in the composition of new material or the creation of new forms within the traditions of early Christianity. Although the discipline is called redaction criticism, it could equally be called ‘composition criticism.’” 140 What is clear from this definition is that redaction is being equated with composition, and everything that an author does to compose his work—as I am doing now in this book—is viewed as identical with editing. However, on any reasonable understanding of the work of editors and editing, this seems to me to be contradictory nonsense. On this basis, all historians, whose work would fit the above description, would be classified as merely editors. On the basis of all the definitions cited, it seems most reasonable simply to speak of the Gospel writers as authors and to label study of the literary process that lies behind their work as “composition criticism,” as Perrin proposes. “Redaction criticism” is a literal rendering of the German term Redaktionsgeschichte, but a more appropriate translation would be “editorial history”—in other words, how a literary work has been edited over the course of time—but this hardly fits the description given above. 141

138. Robert H. Stein, “Redaction Criticism (New Testament),” ABD 5:647. 139. R. Fortna, “Redaction Criticism, NT,” IDBSup, 733. 140. Norman Perrin, What Is Redaction Criticism? (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969), 1. In a footnote, Perrin cites Haenchen’s use of the term Kompositionsgeschichte (Der Weg Jesu, 24), but he does not mention that Haenchen specifically rejects the use of Redaktionsgeschichte as inappropriate. On Haenchen, see below. 141. The term Redaktion is used in two different senses. On the one hand, it can have the passive sense of “edition,” as in the edition of a book or periodical. This use implies nothing about the activity of an editor in its production. But Redaktion is also used in an active sense, in which it means editorial activity. This is the sense in which it is most commonly used in the context of Redaktionsgeschichte. Yet, there remains a certain ambiguity in the term Redaktionsgeschichte. In its basic and what I believe to be its oldest sense, it could simply mean the history of the various recensions of a text, its “edition-history.” This relates to the field of textual criticism and has to do with the history of the text after its composition and its circulation as a finished work. Only in the eighteenth century, when the notion arose in classical studies that redactors or editors intervened in an active way to change texts in the course of their transmission, did Redaktion take on the active sense of editorial activity within the study of a text’s Redaktionsgeschichte, its “editorial history.”

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

285

How is it, therefore, that we even have such an enigmatic term as “redaction criticism” and redactors in place of authors? This method, we are now told, arose out of the form-critical study of the Synoptics as a way of distinguishing between the traditional materials taken up by the individual authors and the intention and perspective of the authors themselves and their own social setting. The primary authors under review are Mark, Matthew, and Luke and their relationship to the prior Jesus narratives and early church traditions. In this, Markan priority is assumed and Mark’s gospel is the primary source for a comparison of the distinctive intentions and perspectives of the three authors. The whole point of the research is to show that the three evangelists were not just collectors of traditional materials uncovered by form criticism but were authors who actively arranged, shaped, and modified the material they inherited for their particular theological purposes. The method is particularly suited to the Synoptic material and has only limited application to other New Testament literature. 142 This characterization of the evangelists as both authors and editors, it may be noted, is at odds with the role of redactors in the Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch. What would correspond most directly in the Old Testament to the works of Matthew, Mark, and Luke in the Synoptics are the authors J and P in the Pentateuch and the Dtr in Noth’s DH. A fundamental difference between the Pentateuch, as understood by the Documentary Hypothesis, and the Synoptics is the fact that the Pentateuch is thought to be the product of a conflation of independent sources or authors, brought about by editors, whereas the Gospels remained unconflated and independent and therefore seemingly in no need of editors. 143 The question therefore arises as to how this understanding of the redactor came about in New Testament studies and then found its way into Old Testament studies in the form of redaction criticism. The term redaction criticism, as it is currently used, goes back to Willi Marxsen. 144 It is Marxsen who sees redaction criticism as derived from form criticism (Formgeschichte), with heavy dependence for this view on Martin Dibelius. Marxsen states: “On the whole, the so-called redactor always fares poorly in form history. He is readily characterized as ‘collector’, and there is little inclination to concede to him any real share in the composition of his work, save in the matter of minor details.” 145 At this point, he quotes

142. The Gospel of John is a special case because it shares some traditional material with the other Gospels, though in quite a different form, and reflects greater liberty by the author in the production of his work. The method has little application for the genre of the epistles and the rest of the New Testament. 143. Actually, there is a long tradition going back to the mid-19th century (Hupfeld) that compares the redactors of the Pentateuch with Gospel harmonies (see above, p. 221). 144. W. Marxsen, Mark the Evangelist: Studies on the Redaction History of the Gospel (Nashville: Abingdon, 1969), 15–29. 145. Ibid., 15.

286

Chapter 7

Dibelius as typical: “The literary understanding of the synoptics begins with the recognition that they are collections of material. The composers are only to the smallest extent authors. They are principally collectors, vehicles of tradition, editors.” 146 It is obvious that Dibelius’s older understanding of the evangelist as a mere collector of received materials is similar to the role of the sources in the Pentateuch as understood by form critics such as Hermann Gunkel. It is Gunkel, from whom Dibelius derives his understanding of form criticism, who characterizes J as a mere collector of traditions. 147 Gunkel also greatly disparages the notion of the sources J and E as authors and emphasizes the process of tradition-history. Nevertheless, Gunkel clearly distinguishes between J and E as collectors and the redactor Rje, who combined the two collections into its present form. 148 It is Dibelius, therefore, who combines the role of collector with that of editor, while at the same time belittling the role of author in the Synoptics. In this respect, Dibelius follows Gunkel’s method in understanding the whole process of Gospel formation as following certain form-critical and traditiohistorical laws, and thus “to trace out those laws, to make comprehensible the rise of little categories, is to write the history of the Form of the Gospel.” 149 These laws are to be found at work in the Sitz im Leben of the primitive Christian community. In this understanding of the tradition’s formation and transmission there is very little place for an author. When Dibelius comes to deal with the final stage in the transmission of the traditions, “how the evangelists make a book out of the traditions,” 150 he finds this in incidental remarks and references that were added to the prior units of tradition, which in the case of Mark reflect the so-called Messianic secret. Thus, he states: The most significant of all the means used by the evangelist for creating a lively connection among the fragments of tradition . . . has to do with the interpretation of tradition. The evangelist, in making his collection, strives to do this by setting a number of traditional events in a particular setting. He shows how and why they must have taken place in accordance with the Divine Plan of Salvation. 151

Dibelius also comments on the “editing of parables by Mark” 152 as another indication of Mark’s editorial activity. 146. Quoted from M. Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel (trans. B. L. Woolf; Cambridge: James Clarke, 1982), 3. 147. Gunkel, Genesis, lxix–lxxix. 148. Ibid., lxxix. As we have seen above, there is nothing very new in Gunkel’s use of Sammler. The literary critics of the early nineteenth century (J. G. Eichhorn, K. D. Ilgen, A. Geddes, J. S. Vater, W. M. L. de Wette) all prefer to use the term Sammler or “collector” as the term for those making the collections of small “fragments” of tradition or as a term for the parallel sources. 149. Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel, 4. 150. Ibid., 223. 151. Ibid., 225. 152. Ibid., 227.

spread is 6 points long

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

287

When Dibelius comes to discuss Matthew and Luke, he is faced with the situation of their use of two major sources, Mark and Q. Regarding Luke’s use of Q, Dibelius states: Luke is writing history, as elsewhere, in this connection. He places the sayings of Jesus in narrative contexts and puts them into corresponding places, i.e., into those which seem to him historically probable. That he thereby approximated to the surrounding literature of the surrounding world . . . has already been shown in Chapter VI. But in this way he transformed the original style of the tradition of sayings in so far as by his framework he gave a narrative character to this tradition. . . . Luke himself is perfectly conscious of his historical mode of writing in his work.153

Quite apart from the fact that this seems to contradict his opening remarks about the nature of the Gospels as not being literature, 154 it is difficult to reconcile it with the characterization of the work as merely editorial. Were all ancient historians who worked in this way merely editors? Comparing Matthew’s use of Q, Dibelius states: Matthew did his work in quite another way. He brought together the tradition of actual words into long speeches, where he offers the words of Jesus arranged on distinct themes. And he ordered even the Markan tradition, at least in the first half of his book, in cycles according to the viewpoint of the material. With him the main thing is not the narratives, but the systematic arrangement. 155

Is it appropriate to characterize this activity as editorial? This is a serious abuse of language, but it follows a long scholarly tradition, and bad habits are hard to break! Let us return to Marxsen. His primary protest against form criticism of the Gospels is its understanding of this final stage in the development of the Gospels. While he grants that there are older materials that have been identified within the Gospels and that even some collections of these smaller units existed, yet Mark has contributed substantially to the shaping of the whole gospel tradition. Marxsen is therefore concerned with the Gospels as the work of authors. However, rather than reject the term redactor/editor for the evangelists, he adopts the term “redaction history” for this final stage in the growth of the Gospels. In a footnote he gives the following justification: Among other things, we choose this term so as to use the most common expression possible. . . . We hold, of course, that all the evangelists were considerably more than mere “redactors,” but by naming the method [we] do not wish to anticipate the result. . . . The term “redaction history” is especially appropriate because we can begin with the general agreement that

153. Ibid., 262. 154. Dibelius says in his introduction that in the Acts of the Apostles Luke “acts as an author, but in the Gospel rather as a collector and editor” (ibid., 3). 155. Ibid., 263.

288

Chapter 7

the evangelists were redactors. The investigation itself must determine to what extent they were redactors. 156

This is a remarkable piece of double-talk that both denies the appropriateness of the term redactor and then on the basis of some vague agreement about usage seeks to redefine the term to mean “author.” There is, in fact, no good reason to use the term redactor in this new way, because it can only lead to hopeless confusion. It is even worse to create a new method, the method of redaction criticism (Redactionsgeschichte), parallel to form criticism (Formgeschichte), as if it were some esoteric academic exercise. What is at issue in the Gospels is to ascertain the sources or materials used by the particular author and then investigate the way in which he used them. There was some opposition to Marxsen’s use of redactor for the gospel writer, but this disagreement, unfortunately, has not carried the day. 157 However, the question that we must ask is: from whence came this “agreement” about the usage of redactor for the Gospel writer that so compelled Marxsen to retain it? The answer lies not in Dibelius, who makes limited use of the term, but in Rudolph Bultmann. 158 And very mportant for Bultmann’s understanding of the development of form criticism is the work of Julius Wellhausen. It was Wellhausen who, in his commentaries on the Gospels (from 1905 onward), demonstrated the view that “in each of the gospels one must distinguish between the old tradition and the redactional contribution of the evangelist; the former consists essentially in single brief units; the latter not only altered many of the details but first gave its continuity to the whole, thus creating the artificial effect of a historical development.” 159 In outlining the task of form criticism as distinguishing traditional material from its redaction, Bultmann states: “one must endeavor to judge in accordance with a systematic investigation of the strata or strands of tradition the gospels contain.” 160 This is the language of Wellhausen’s source analysis, not the language of Gunkel’s Formgeschichte. In the introduction to his basic work on the Gospels, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (1963), Bultmann states: The most important and far-reaching work in the field of synoptic research since Wrede has been done by Wellhausen. His work is more comprehensive than Wrede’s for he has shown how the theology of the early Church has influenced the traditional material, not only in Mark, but also in 156. Marxsen, Mark the Evangelist, 21 n. 17. 157. See Haenchen, Der Weg Jesu. In his introduction, Haenchen discusses the work of Marxsen on Mark and is particularly critical of his use of the term Redaktionsgeschichte for the second stage of Formgeschichte (p. 24). He regards the idea of Redaktor as quite inappropriate and Marxsen’s justification for continual use of this term as contradictory. His own term for the evangelist is Schriftsteller. 158. Rudolf Bultmann, “The Study of the Synoptic Gospels,” Form Criticism: Two Essays on New Testament Research (trans. and ed. F. C. Grant; New York: Harper, 1962), 1–76. 159. Ibid., 22. 160. Ibid., 25.

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

289

Matthew and Luke, and therefore in Q, which, like Mark, lies behind them. Wellhausen stated very clearly the fundamental assumption that the tradition consists of individual stories or groups of stories joined together in the Gospels by the work of the editors [Redaktionsarbeit]; and he also showed how pieces of primitive tradition alternated with secondary material, but he did not reach a final, comprehensive and detailed conclusion.161

After a long quotation from Wellhausen, he continues: In these circumstances it was inevitable that the analysis of the synoptics into literary sources should give way to an attempt to apply to them the methods of form-criticism which H. Gunkel and his disciples had already applied to the Old Testament. This involved discovering what the original units of the synoptics were, both sayings and stories, to try to establish what their historical setting was, whether they belonged to primary or secondary tradition or whether they were the product of editorial activity [Redaktionsarbeit]. Naturally such a method cannot be confined to Mark, but must be applied to the whole range of synoptic material. But just as naturally such a task cannot put aside literary nor yet historical criticism. Not only is the result of synoptic study such as the Two-source theory presupposed, but even the distinction between tradition and redaction could not be made without literary analysis. Form-criticism cannot possibly perform its task in opposition to literary criticism. . . . 162

According to this statement of Bultmann, it is absolutely clear that redaction criticism does not arise out of form criticism itself, but, just as in the case of Gunkel’s own work on Genesis, it arises out of the prior work of Wellhausen’s literary criticism, by which is meant source criticism. As in Pentateuchal studies, form criticism focused on the smaller units of tradition, not on the final literary stages of the sources and their “redaction”; the latter is the work of literary criticism. So Marxsen did not get it right when he made the connection between “redaction criticism,” as he calls it, and form criticism. Bultmann goes on to say that form criticism is not just a matter of description and classification of the individual units of tradition but is part of the larger task of historical criticism, and this is exactly how Wellhausen conceived it. Bultmann has much to say about distinguishing between the traditional material that lies behind the “oldest attainable sources, the Gospel of Mark and the Sayings-source” and “the traditional material which the evangelists used and their editorial additions.” 163 He further states: “In my book [The History of the Synoptic Tradition], I have dealt comprehensively with the editorial procedure of the evangelists. The historical process becomes the clearer in that one may trace the development of editorial technique from Mark to

161. Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (trans. John Marsh; New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 2. 162. Ibid., 2–3. 163. Ibid., 25 (italics mine).

290

Chapter 7

Matthew and Luke. While with Mark the art of the evangelist appears to be quite underdeveloped, Luke displays a fine editorial artistry.” 164 The socalled “editorial activity” of the evangelists consists of collecting, arranging, interpolating new material into older accounts, framing and building the material into an organic whole. It is, of course, a complete distortion of language to describe all of this kind of activity as “editorial.” Much confusion has arisen within New Testament studies from models based upon the Pentateuch, whether it is the source-critical method as used by Wellhausen or the form-critical method of Gunkel. For Gunkel, the sources J and E represented collectors of tradition, not authors. Yet, only at a later stage were these collections, J and E, put together by a redactor. Thus, Dibelius prefers to talk about the evangelists as “collectors” and says little about them as editors, although he did, in fact, combine the two functions into one. The notion of the evangelists as editors, however, comes directly from Wellhausen and his attempt to apply his method of source analysis to the New Testament. As Nils Dahl points out, Wellhausen’s treatment of the Gospels conforms with the sort of source analysis that was typical of his Pentateuchal studies and the general practice of Quellenscheidung of ancient literary texts that prevailed in the nineteenth century. Wellhausen accepted the Two-Source theory, that Matthew and Luke had used Mark and a common source, Q, as the basic solution to the Synoptic problem. His treatment of the Gospels is particularly important, especially in comparison with his work on the Pentateuch. 165 As Nils Dahl states: Both Wellhausen himself and his critics observed the analogy between his Gospel criticism and his chronology for the sources in the Pentateuch. The ancient sources (JE) were predominantly narrative; the discourses and laws in Deuteronomy and the Priestly Codex were later and had been incorporated into the narrative framework by a redactor. In a similar way, Matthew and Luke had incorporated the logia into the narrative of Mark.166

It is not too difficult to see how Matthew and Luke could, on the analogy of the Documentary Hypothesis, be construed as redactors of Mark plus Q. 167 But Wellhausen also viewed Mark as a redaction at an earlier level, much as the JE redactor (Rje) belongs to an earlier level of composition than RP in the Pentateuchal scheme of analysis. Wellhausen’s application of source 164. Ibid., 26 (italics mine). 165. Nils A. Dahl, “Wellhausen on the New Testament,” Semeia 25 (1982; Julius Wellhausen and His Prolegomena to the History of Israel): 89–110. 166. Ibid., 97. 167. It is tempting to attribute to Wellhausen the coining of the term Q (Quelle) for the Sayings-source, just as he had used the designation Q (abbreviation for quatuor—the fourcovenant source) as his term for the Priestly Writer in the Pentateuch. However, the term was already in use by Johannes Weis, and Wellhausen borrowed it from him. For a discussion of the origin of the symbol “Q,” see H. K. McArthur, “The Origin of the ‘Q’ Symbol,” ExpTim 88/4 (1977): 119–20; J. J. Schmitt, “In Search of the Origin of the Siglum Q,” JBL 100 (1981): 609–11. I wish to thank Herold Remus for calling my attention to these references.

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

291

analysis to the Gospels, with its notion of ancient editors, was prior to the use of form criticism in Gospels study, and consequently Redactionsgeschichte owes nothing to form criticism, either in Pentateuchal studies or in New Testament studies. Nevertheless, it is clear that the form critic Bultmann mediated the language found in Wellhausen’s New Testament studies to a later generation of scholars using form criticism. There is, however, a tendency to confuse these two models—that of Gunkel, the form critic, and Wellhausen, the source critic—and merely to identify collectors with editors. This is clearly the case in Marxsen’s discussion of redaction criticism. We can now see that the “agreement” to label the evangelists as redactors goes back to Wellhausen and his attempt to apply the principles of the Documentary Hypothesis to the New Testament. One further consequence of the development of redaction criticism in Synoptic studies is the disappearance of the author, who gives way to the redactor. In Bultmann’s discussion of the editing of traditional material in the Gospels, he states: “There is no definable boundary between the oral and written tradition, and similarly the process of the editing [Redaktion] of the material of the tradition was beginning already before it had been fixed in a written form. In so far as we have dealt with the history of the traditional material in the preceding sections, we have also been dealing with its editing [Redaktion].” 168 Here Bultmann seems to be equating Traditionsgeschichte with Redaktionsgeschichte without using these exact words. And it is hard to see how Redaktionsgeschichte as Marxsen understands it can be restricted to the stage of the evangelists. Bultmann sets rather broad parameters on what he will consider in his own study under the category of the “editorial process” [Vorgang der Redaktion]. He states: Thus we shall not consider every change which the material of the tradition has undergone in the course of its history [die der Stoff in der Geschichte der Redaktion erfahren hat], but only such editorial changes [redaktionellen Veränderungen] as are due to the assembling of the material; that is, the history of that editorial work [die Geschichte der Redaktion] which, as far as we are concerned has come to a palpably substantial conclusion in the composition of the Synoptic Gospels. 169

In the above discussion, Bultmann makes it quite clear that for him Redaktionsgeschichte is the whole of the transmission process through which the traditions passed, from the oral to the written stage, of which the collection of materials in the Gospels is merely the final phase. Thus, he has a rather lengthy section on the “editing of the spoken word” (die Redaktion des Redenstoffes), which deals with the process of assembling the oral tradition into collections of sayings, their arrangement into speeches, and their integration into narrative before the composition of the Gospels. 170 Consequently, this 168. Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, 321. 169. Ibid. 170. Ibid., 322–37.

292

Chapter 7

notion of “editorial process” (Vorgang der Redaktion) that encompasses virtually the whole of tradition-history has gone beyond anything that was originally suggested in the Documentary Hypothesis and is simply made to function at the convenience of a literary theory. This effectively does away with authors and sources as they are understood in the Documentary Hypothesis, in spite of what Bultmann has said earlier about presupposing the work of literary criticism. It also seems quite arbitrary for Marxsen to limit the use of Redaktionsgeschichte, as it was taken up by the form criticism of Bultmann, to the level of Gospel composition by the three evangelists. There is, of course, a profound irony in all of this, because there is a concerted effort, especially in German Pentateuchal scholarship, to abolish the Documentary Hypothesis along with all of its authors and sources and to replace these with a complex system of redactors. The new method used to achieve this goal is Redaktionsgeschichte. Just as all the authors of the Gospels have become redactors and the method of dealing with them is redaction criticism, the same is proposed for the Pentateuch. Based on the analogy of Synoptic studies, redaction criticism is seen as the direct continuation of form criticism and tradition-history, or even inclusive of tradition-history, with no need any longer for source criticism. As with Bultmann, everything that could possibly be attributed to the work of a collector of tradition or an author is simply regarded as “editorial activity” and “editorial artistry.” However, because the existence—indeed the very invention—of the redactor is dependent on Wellhausen’s form of source analysis of both the Pentateuch and the Gospels, Wellhausen is being used to contradict and replace Wellhausen. We might well have been spared all of this hopeless contradiction of redaction criticism, this complete abuse of language with regard to what is and is not an editor, and whether editors even existed in antiquity, if Marxsen had not insisted on retaining the older terminology inherited from Wellhausen. Why did he not simply accept the fact that the evangelists were authors—not editors—precisely as Noth argued for Dtr? The same applies to von Rad’s Yahwist. It seems to me a grave mistake to make these scholars into redaction critics in their treatment of Dtr and J, respectively. Appeals to redactors and to a sophisticated method of redaction criticism are completely unnecessary. These appeals ignore the fact that, without the authors of source analysis, redactors would never have had a place in literary criticism in the first place. If scholars wish to give up the Documentary Hypothesis, they will have to jettison the redactors as well. It would be appropriate at this point to return to a detailed statement on the method of “redaction history” as it is presented in a standard handbook of German biblical scholarship, Odil Steck’s Old Testament Exegesis: A Guide to the Methodology. In the presentation of his exegetical method, Steck suggests that the historical analysis of the text, which leads back to its “origin,” encompasses the methods of literary criticism (or source criticism), transmission history (of small oral units), and redaction history. He goes on to state:

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

293

In most cases, this origin does not occur in a single act which conceives and composes a writing in the final form which comes to us. Rather, this origin occurs in a multi-stage process over an extended period during which an older portion is occasionally expanded and newly accented. As a rule, the origin of an Old Testament literary work therefore means the history of origin! This history of origin of an Old Testament writing can even stand out sharply in a specific text. This contrast is particularly true if transmission historical and literary critical analysis establish that the text contains transmission elements, and especially formulations, from different times. The more recent material is thereby attached to older, preexisting material and enriches the older material with new accentuations which change the older material. 171

The transmission-history has two basic stages in this scheme: the first is the oral stage of composition and transmission, which is usually dealt with under the rubric of tradition-history; the second is the written stage and is the concern of redaction history. This stage is therefore directly linked with literary criticism, which elucidates the “fixed formulations and literary contexts for the individual text.” Thus: Redaction history concerns itself with the area of written transmission, above all with the analytical materials from literary criticism. It envisions these analytical materials synthetically as elements of a historical, transformational process within the framework of a text’s developmental history— hence the component “history” in redaction history. The component “redaction” in redaction history implies that a linguistically pre-existing text would be revised in this process, in the sense of a changed construction. . . . Pre-existing text material (also now newly integrated) or several literary entities are joined into a new whole, by means of reordering (composition) and/or the redactor’s own, new, textual inscriptions. . . . The new is therefore constructed by constitutive joining to the old, or relatedly, in keeping with the old. Correspondingly, redactional and pre-existing material form a newly understood whole in the resulting writing. In this respect, redaction is a text-bound shaping which is characteristically differentiated in method and perspective from a writing’s more original formulation. 172

The editorial process described above by Steck includes reshaping a text, making additions to a text, placing a piece of written work in a wholly new context, combining different texts, conflating similar texts—in short, almost anything imaginable. All this is attributed to an editor or redactor! And because Steck sees the redactional process as including everything that belongs to the written transmission of the text, there is no way of distinguishing it from the composition and, therefore, from the author. 173

171. O. H. Steck, Old Testament Exegesis: A Guide to the Methodology (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 79. 172. Ibid., 80. 173. Ibid., 85 n. 80.

294

Chapter 7

Much of Steck’s discussion has to do with his understanding of the growth of prophetic literature, the combinations of individual units of sayings, which is very different from the literature of the Pentateuch and historical books, although it was in the study of the Pentateuch and historical books that the notion of the redactor originated. He continues: The creation of this juxtaposition/compilation by its structure and occasionally by its formulations, is a formative act on the written level which is fixed for posterity. Therefore, it is a subject for the redactional historical approach. If the first version productively shapes older transmission, then the first written version could also be seen as the last step of the transmission history. If so, it naturally leads to the new status as written material. That new status now leads into the field of redaction history. 174

The remarkable thing about this statement is that nothing has really changed since Wolf. The idea that the first written version was equivalent to a recension, a lectio recepta, a publication of a collection of sayings or stories, is the totally anachronistic application of the editorial analogy of the editio princeps. At the point of the first written version, there is complete confusion between the author and the editor. Thus Steck states: “The first written version of pre-existing oral transmission can also signify its extensive (or more limited) reformulation and rewording by the author of the written material,” 175 and: The composition of a pre-existing oral transmission into a larger work by a revising author presents its redactional profile variously. On the one hand, the redactional profile presents itself when it selects, orders, and coordinates the old transmissions as well as when it reformulates and rewords the old transmission. . . . On the other hand, working out the intentions of the redactor should especially rely upon the purely redactional components of the work. 176

In these quotations, the “revising author” is the redactor, and the author’s “intentions” are the same as the redactor’s “intentions,” as can be seen in the “redactional components.” Steck lists these as the following: “Framing Formulations (introduction and conclusion), connecting pieces, speeches and prayers (concentrations of central theological points).” 177 All of these are precisely the components that von Rad uses to identify the intentions and theology of the Yahwist and that Noth uses to characterize his Dtr as author and historian of the DH. The Pentateuchal authors and historians of Joshua to 2 Kings have all become redactors! But they are certainly no longer the redactors of the Documentary Hypothesis. Steck has some difficulty dealing with texts that have no prehistory in oral tradition. The assumption is that the vast majority of OT texts have a 174. Ibid., 85–86. 175. Ibid., 86. 176. Ibid., 87. 177. Ibid.

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

295

prior transmission history (Überlieferungsgeschichte) in oral tradition. He concedes the possibility, however, of a case in which “a literarily homogenous text has no background in orally transmitted material before the writing originated, nor has the text been incorporated as written material during the stage of writing. Rather, the text has been composed in its entirety, from the beginning, for some phase of the continuation of that writing. The text is thus a redactional formulation.” 178 By this logic, the author of a “literarily homogenous text” is a redactor insofar as he intended to publish his work in this form. This, of course, is the reductio ad absurdum of the present discussion of biblical redactors. The method, as inherited from Synoptic studies discussed above, has virtually obliterated all discussion of authors and replaced them all with mythical redactors. In place of the concern for authorial intentionality, Steck lists typical examples of “redactional proceedings” that may reveal redactional intentionality: 179 (1) Revisions by means of additions, ranging “from small, commentary-like insertions into small sections of a text, to more comprehensive new formulations . . . which have the entire writing in view and which serve to structure that writing”; (2) The continuation (Fortschreibung) of an existing text by way of (a) commentary-like additions, glosses, and the like attached to interpret the immediate context, or (b) additions that are “part of the total redaction of the writing.” These are part of a larger body of similar additions that are said to “shed new light on the received writing as a whole” as part of the “total redactional profile.” 180 (c) Sometimes, larger literary additions to the text seek to revise it by taking up formulations from the entire writing and its various layers, giving direction to the redactional meaning of the whole; (d) restructuring the entire received text; (e) combining or conflating texts. What Steck makes clear in his discussion of redaction history is that the role of the editor of biblical texts represents stages in the production of the “received writing,” the lectio recepta or textus receptus, pushed back into its ancient context. The editor who sought to produce the “received text” at the beginning of the age of printing was, of course, fundamentally distinct from the author whose text he was attempting to recover and edit. He engaged in none of the “redactional proceedings” that are outlined here. In many cases, his task precisely was to undo those marks of revision. He collated texts of the same work but did not conflate texts of different authors. Nor did he try to impose his own meaning or perspective on the text. Yet, in some cases, such as that of Bentley’s Milton, attempts at restoration did lead to revision. This, however, was an abuse of the editorial method that 178. Ibid., 91. 179. See ibid., 80–82. 180. This is one of the most revealing statements, because the expression “received writing” is the equivalent of lectio recepta, the standard printed edition that is the primary object of the editing of classical and sacred works. Yet, the characterization of the role of editor could not be more contradictory.

296

Chapter 7

cannot be read back into antiquity. The editor was first and foremost a textcritic. It is this issue of editor as text-critic that we will pursue in the next chapter.

Summary and Conclusion The twentieth century began with a strong commitment to the Documentary Hypothesis, including its use of redactors, although to a large extent these shadowy figures were largely taken for granted. This did not immediately change when form criticism was introduced by Hermann Gunkel and his followers, who focused more particularly on the early, preliterary stages of oral tradition behind the Pentateuchal writers, with little concern for the final literary formation that they took over from Wellhausen. In a similar fashion, Gunkel was interested in the origins and early development of Israelite historiography as an evolutionary process from Sagen to the narration of what he thought was contemporary historical reporting of political events in the time of David and Solomon. He regarded the Deuteronomistic historiography of Kings and the Chronicler’s revision as a serious decline and dismissed them from consideration. Gressmann, however, while following Gunkel’s earlier evolutionary scheme, did give closer and more positive attention to the historiography of the Deuteronomist and paved the way for Noth’s later treatment of Dtr. Von Rad likewise followed Gunkel’s understanding of the origins and development of Israelite historiography, but he departed radically from Gunkel’s understanding of the nature of J as merely a collector of oral stories. Instead, von Rad advocated the view that the Yahwist was also an author and historian and that his work gave the Pentateuch its basic shape, which was comparable with the best historiography of the Solomonic age. In a similar fashion, Noth advanced the view that Dtr, who was responsible for an extensive literary work stretching from Deuteronomy to 2 Kings, was a historian, not merely a redactor. This meant that two historical works, the Yahwist and Dtr, covered the whole scope of history from creation to the end of the Israelite monarchy (Genesis to 2 Kings) without any need for a single redactor. This might have ushered in quite a new understanding of ancient Israelite historiography, except for the fact that these two scholars came to a fundamental disagreement over the question of the Hexateuch, that is, whether the Pentateuchal source J (and P) ended in Joshua or in Numbers, with Joshua belonging solely to Dtr, and how to understand the relationship of J and Dtr to each other. This disagreement frustrated any further clarification of the nature of Israelite historiography. The next generation of German scholars may be viewed as reactionary with regard to the understanding of J and Dtr as historians and instead retreated to the older position of early-nineteenth-century scholarship, that multiple editors were responsible for the ultimate form of the Pentateuch or Hexateuch and the DH. They went so far as to replace all authors with editors or schools of editors or some other nebulous editorial process. In

The History of Redaction in the Twentieth Century

297

this, scholars sought support from New Testament studies, where a new redaction criticism was invented for the analysis of the Synoptics. However, as we have seen, this was simply a case of using terminology introduced into New Testament studies by Wellhausen on the analogy of the Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch. Scholarship was no further ahead than it had been a century earlier. The notion of the ancient editor originated in the seventeenth century in the work of Simon as an anachronistic analogy to explain the composition of the history from Genesis to 2 Kings and the Chronicler. Given the lack of sophistication in historical criticism of that era, this anachronism is understandable, and this quite transparent error is still obvious in the early stages of Pentateuchal criticism from Eichhorn to Ewald. However, the redactor took on a life of its own and has gained a form and reality that scarcely resembles its humble origins. Redaction criticism has become the ultimate solution to all critical problems, the new science of Germanic biblical scholarship. The current status of redaction criticism or redaction history, in which the redactor or editor has virtually replaced the author of all literary works within the Hebrew Bible, is well reflected in Steck’s handbook on exegetical method reviewed above. Redaction criticism is the method that has come to predominate German literary criticism. The remarks by Lesky, quoted above, 181 are equally appropriate here. Nor is redactional analysis limited to literary criticism, but it also embraces textual criticism as well, just as it did with Wolf in Homeric studies. Consequently, we will need to turn our attention to the role of the editor in the discipline of textual criticism. 181. See above, p. 175.

8

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism There is a sense in which editing the Bible is specifically about textual criticism, because the objective of textual criticism is to restore the ancient text of the Bible to its true, original form. As we have seen above in the history of editing (chap. 4), the modern notion of editing and editors originates in the scholarly activity of restoring ancient texts and publishing them in standard editions. Nevertheless, the discussion of the history of editorial activity (Redaktionsgeschichte) has become much more complex and now involves the compositional stage of the text, so that editors are seen not only as critically restoring texts but also as creating them. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, beginning at least with Friedrich Wolf, these two functions have been viewed as related, subsumed under the rubrics “higher” and “lower” criticism. As a result of the increasing specialization in biblical studies during the twentieth century, however, awareness of the connection has tended to diminish. As a result, recent attention to the relationship between literary criticism, in which the redactor plays a major role, and textual criticism, with its talk of ancient “recensions,” is now being presented as something new. 1 Even when it is recognized that the broader discussion about “editions” goes back to an earlier period of biblical studies, the connection between the two areas of research is regarded as something quite desirable. Thus, Frank Cross states: The recovery of editions and literary levels in biblical works begins a process of no small importance in biblical studies: the uniting of text-criticism and literary criticism in scholarly approaches to biblical literature. During the past century there has been a divorce between higher and lower criticism, properly a scandal of excessive specialization, with dreary results. The marriage, or rather remarriage of the two disciplines . . . is therefore an event of unusual promise. 2

The irony of this remark, in the light of our larger study, should be obvious. It was the way in which editors were introduced into textual criticism as 1. A major discussion of these issues is presented by E. Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 155–97, 313–49. His treatment of this subject will be the central focus of this chapter. 2. F. M. Cross, “Some Notes on a Generation of Qumran Studies,” in The Madrid Qumran Congress: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Madrid 18–21, March 1991 (ed. J. Trebolle Barrera and L. Vegas Montaner; 2 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 1992), 1:10–11.

- 298 -

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

299

those responsible for the major “recensions” of the Hebrew Bible and then extended back into the literary criticism of the Bible, especially the Pentateuch, that created the myth of the “redactor” and redactional criticism in the first place. I will not attempt to present a broad review of the discipline of textual criticism but will focus specifically on the issue of the role of editors in the history of the text. It will become apparent that there is a direct parallel between recent treatment of text-history and the method proposed by Wolf for the history of the poems of Homer. Because the language of editing and editions has been used for so long in biblical studies, both in literary criticism and in textual criticism, often with completely contradictory results, the parallel becomes even more apparent when the two areas of research are brought into conjunction with each other once again. Although there has sometimes been concern expressed about the abuse of language and terminology in textual criticism, the discussion rarely touches on the use of “recension” or “edition” and related terms. 3 Thus, it is useful to review briefly the scholarly debate about “recensions” in the history of the biblical text, from Simon to the present. 4

Editors in the History of Textual Criticism The publication of the medieval manuscripts of the Samaritan Pentateuch in the early seventeenth century meant that from that point on there were three primary witnesses to the text of the Pentateuch, and discussion of their relationship to one another provided a most important starting point for the history of the text. As we saw above, it was Richard Simon who first attempted to deal with this new datum in a thoroughly scholarly manner and to relate his textual criticism to his literary criticism by means of his understanding of the editor. Just as he saw editors as the men responsible for the composition of the Pentateuch and historical books from archival sources, in a similar fashion he regarded the Masoretic Text and the Samaritan Pentateuch as products of late editing. The Septuagint, by contrast, was just a translation of a copy, a vulgar text, with many imperfections, and therefore unedited. However, if one makes a different judgment about the value of the Septuagint and elevates it to the status of a recension and reads the activity of the Masoretes or their predecessors and the Samaritan scribes 3. See D. G. Gooding, “An Appeal for a Stricter Terminology in the Textual Criticism of the Old Testament,” JSS 21 (1976): 15–25; E. Ulrich, “Pluriformity in the Biblical Text, Text Groups, and Questions of Canon,” in The Madrid Qumran Congress: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Madrid, 18–21 March 1991 (ed. J. Trebolle Barrera and L. Vegas Montaner; 2 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 1992), 1:37–38. 4. For useful overviews, see Tov, Textual Criticism, 155–63, 180–87; S. Talmon, “The Old Testament Text,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 1: From the Beginnings to Jerome (ed. P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 159–99; and M. H. Goshen-Gottstein, “The Textual Criticism of the Old Testament: Rise, Decline, Rebirth,” JBL 102 (1983): 365–99.

300

Chapter 8

back into an early period, then one arrives at the common three-“recension” theory. As Tov points out: “In the literature, the terms recension and text-type are generally applied to a textual tradition which contains some sort of editing of earlier texts, while the term recension is also used with the general meaning of textual tradition or simply text.” 5 There is little reflection on the distinction between the two meanings implied by the term recension. The next step in the discussion comes with the publication of the medieval Hebrew manuscripts in the late eighteenth century: Eichhorn observed in his Einleitung ins Alte Testament that all the manuscripts belonged to the same family or recension of texts and were quite distinct from those of the Septuagint, and this was taken up by E. F. C. Rosenmüller, 6 who spoke of a single recension for the MT. 7 What Rosenmüller had in mind is merely the fact that all the extant Hebrew manuscripts belong to a common family of texts derived from a single source and therefore a single recension, from the viewpoint of a modern editor. This datum says nothing about ancient editing. De Lagarde took the matter one step further and simply declared that all the MT manuscripts derived from a single archetype, which was a single text. The same could be said for the manuscripts of the LXX. It should be noted that de Lagarde regarded this archetype as a single “Scroll of the Law” that he thought he could identify as dating to the mid-second century. This view does not seem to be compatible with the notion of a text carefully edited by scribal editors in the first or second century. By contrast, P. Kahle advocated the view that the MT, LXX, and SamP— the three main witnesses to the Pentateuch—were archetypes (Haupttypen) with different recensional histories. This notion was merely an extension of de Lagarde, but against de Lagarde Kahle asserted that none of these textual witnesses was created from a single text but passed through a process of editing and revising. 8 They were all the product of vulgar texts, a notion already suggested by Simon. It became common to appeal to the difference between vulgar and nonvulgar texts. The views of Kahle have been advocated in various forms by a number of scholars. The main thrust of his position, however, was to suggest that the three main textual families, at least for the Pentateuch, consisted of edited recensions of a number of different texts. Yet, as Tov points out, the result was considerable terminological confusion among the terms recension, family, and text-type. 9 5. Tov, Textual Criticism, 155. 6. E. F. C. Rosenmüller, Handbuch für die Literature der biblischen Kritik und Exegese (Göttingen, 1797). 7. See Tov, Textual Criticism, 182–83; and M. H. Goshen-Gottstein, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts: Their History and Their Place in the HUBP Edition,” Bib 48 (1967): 243–90. It is Goshen-Gottstein who insists on the importance of the distinction between Rosenmüller’s recension and de Lagarde’s archetype. In the case of the latter, it is a text that survived the wars of Hadrian and therefore can hardly be regarded as an “edited” text. There are few, if any, followers of de Lagarde who today accept such a specific dating and provenance for the MT archetype. 8. Tov, Textual Criticism, 157, 184. 9. Ibid., 157. See also Gooding, “An Appeal for a Stricter Terminology.”

spread is 9 points long

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

301

The discovery of the Qumran scrolls in 1947 should have had a profound effect on the history of the biblical text, but, as Tov points out, scholars tended merely to adjust the new data to their older theories, primarily based on the tripartite or bipartite division of the textual witnesses into recensions: the MT, the LXX, and the SamP (in the case of the Pentateuch). 10 This can be seen in the case of E. Würthwein, a strong supporter of Kahle, as reflected in his handbook The Text of the Old Testament. 11 Although he acknowledged the new discoveries in the caves of the Dead Sea, he did not regard them as very significant in comparison with the medieval Hebrew manuscripts. To make the point, he compares the papyri of Greek classics found in Egypt. He states: Nevertheless if we are rightly to assess the surviving [medieval] manuscripts, the majority of which are thus relatively late, we must recognise that the value of a manuscript does not depend solely or even chiefly upon its age. When papyrus fragments of Greek classical authors were discovered which were of considerably greater age than the mediaeval manuscripts known up till that time, they disappointed the extravagant hopes which they raised especially among the laymen. They proved in general to be inferior to the later manuscripts. The fact is that the medieval manuscripts went back to the careful studies of the great Alexandrine philologists, whereas the papyri came generally from private manuscripts which circulated in the provincial towns of Egypt and reveal that confused state of the transmission of the text which made the work of the Alexandrian scholars so urgently necessary. 12

Würthwein further supports this view, invoking again the parallel with the Greek papyri, when he argues in favor of Kahle’s distinction between popular texts and authorized texts. In his view, the Hebrew Vorlage of the Greek Septuagint was a popular text, whereas the MT was a specially edited text, and he then draws the parallel between the classical edited texts of the Alexandrians and the popular texts of the Egyptian papyri. As we saw above, this position does not reflect the viewpoint of contemporary classical scholarship. There is no evidence to suggest that the Alexandrian scholars directly influenced the vulgate of the classics. The same applies to the notion of a critically established Hebrew text created by the sopherim. Furthermore, the papyri did have a significant effect on the reassessment of textual criticism in the case of Homeric studies, and the parallel is more important than biblical scholars have realized. 13

10. Tov, Textual Criticism, 158. 11. E. Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament (trans. P. R. Ackroyd; New York: Macmillan, 1957). 12. Ibid., 11. 13. See B. Chiesa, “Textual History and Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Old Testament,” in The Madrid Qumran Congress: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Madrid 18–21, March 1991 (ed. J. Trebolle Barrera and L. Vegas Montaner; 2 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 1992), 1:270. We will return to this below.

302

Chapter 8

Würthwein explains the production of this specially edited text in the following way: Our present consonantal text goes back to about 100 a.d. when an authoritative text of the Old Testament was produced in connection with a great Jewish revival. A fully reliable text became a necessity with the completion of the process of canonization, and as there became dominant in Judaism, particularly through the work of Rabbi Akiba (c. 55–137 a.d.), a method of exegesis in which even the smallest details and peculiarities of the text are of significance. 14

At this point, Würthwein quotes Kahle: Thus there came into existence first the authoritative text of the Torah, which is in all essentials the consonantal text which we have in our Masoretic text. This text was established with the aid of the available ancient manuscript material, and in contrast to the well-established popular texts, of which the Samaritan Pentateuch survives as a good example, it gives the impression of greater antiquity and reliability. The remaining books of the Bible followed. We cannot trace all the stages of the work in detail; only the final result is clearly observable. 15

Würthwein asserts that this text was “declared to be normative,” and all the other texts were corrected or replaced. As we observed above in chap. 3, this general scheme was widely accepted in various modified versions, and we have offered a number of arguments against it. Würthwein seems himself to be well aware of the various exceptions to this supposed standardizing of the text. After citing a number of examples, he states: “We must therefore assume that the consonantal text established in about 100 a.d. did not immediately supersede all other textforms, but rather that manuscripts with a variant text-form, and especially those in private hands, continued to circulate for a long period.” This, of course, is special pleading, as Albrektson and Orlinsky have pointed out. 16 A different response to the new textual information furnished by the Qumran scrolls was the attempt to explain the three major text witnesses of the Hebrew Bible in terms of a theory of local texts or recensions. This was first taken up by W. F. Albright and developed in a revised form by Frank Cross. Albright’s short piece, published in 1955 after the first few years of Dead Sea Scrolls’ research, calls for special comment. 17 He begins by making

14. Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament, 12. 15. Ibid. 16. Bertil Albrektson, “Reflections on the Emergence of a Standard Text of the Hebrew Bible,” in Congress Volume: Göttingen, 1977 (VTSup 29; Leiden; Brill, 1978), 49–65; H. M. Orlinsky, “The Septuagint and Its Hebrew Text,” The Cambridge History of Judaism (ed. W. D. Davies and L. Finkelstein; 3 vols.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–89), 2:555–62. 17. W. F. Albright, “New Light on Early Recensions of the Hebrew Bible,” BASOR 140 (1955): 27–33.

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

303

the remarkable statement: “Recognition of the existence of early Hebrew recensions is not new. Though there has never hitherto been any clear evidence for different recensions in the extant Hebrew and Samaritan manuscripts, the text of some of the Greek books differs so widely from the Massoretic Hebrew tradition that divergent Hebrew recensions must be assumed.” 18 Having thus set the SamP aside as not an early recension, Albright turns his attention to the Hebrew Texts of the proto-MT and the Vorlage of the Old Greek text. The new texts of the Qumran scrolls, particularly the text of the complete Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa), gives him the confidence that he can project the MT text-type back into very early times. He suggests that “we can now revert to the position shared by tradition and by scholars of the Wellhausen and related schools of criticism, that many of the older books of our Hebrew Bible were edited in approximately their present form in Babylonia and were brought back to Palestine by the returning exiles during the late sixth and fifth centuries b.c.” 19 Albright does not give any documentation for these views of the older critics, so one can only guess at what he has in mind. He is apparently identifying the final “redaction” of the Pentateuch and other biblical books with the creation of the proto-MT “recension.” This is comparable in classical studies to identifying the vulgate of Homer in the Roman period with the Peisistratus “recension,” which we discussed earlier. Albright’s view certainly cannot be said to reflect the views of Wellhausen, Kuenen, and other such critics. Nevertheless, as confirmation of his remarkable statement, Albright points to the “most striking confirmatory evidence from the first Qumran Isaiah Scroll,” which is “a number of correct vocalizations of Assyro-Babylonian words and names,” 20 which he then goes on to list. He further states: “I have maintained for several years that the prototype of the first Isaiah Scroll came from Babylonia, probably in the second half of the second century B.C. . . . 1QIsa is thus an offshoot of the proto-Massoretic text-tradition in Babylonia, where it may have developed further for several centuries after the ancestral Hebrew text was taken by the returning exiles to Palestine.” 21 Turning his attention to “the Egyptian recension of the LXX,” Albright asserts, “we note that there is much evidence of pre-Septuagintal Egyptian influence on the text of several books.” 22 He further rejects the suggestion that this Egyptian influence is to be attributed to the translators and maintains that it must be present in the Hebrew text that they used and concludes from this: “We are, therefore, compelled to reckon with the probability that the translators dealt piously with a text which had been handed down for generations in Egypt itself. We can probably fix the time at which the Egyptian 18. Ibid., 141. 19. Ibid., 142. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 143. 22. Ibid.

304

Chapter 8

recensions of the Pentateuch and Samuel–Kings were edited about the fifth century b.c.” 23 It is not clear what Albright means by “recension” in this case, but it appears from his examples that he has in mind an “editing” that resulted in a more-Egyptian flavor—places-names and the like—being added to the text. This is hardly the same as what earlier scholars meant by the “redaction” of the Pentateuch. On the relationship of the “Egyptian editions” to the Babylonian recension, Albright states: “I should be inclined to consider the Egyptian Pentateuch as essentially of Babylonian origin, i.e., it generally reflects the text which had probably been established in Babylonia during the sixth century b.c. This text was brought back to Judah and may have become canonical under Ezra’s influence in the late fifth century.” 24 This statement simply identifies the Babylonian recension as the archetype from which the other two texts, the Samaritan and the LXX are derived, which is merely another way of asserting that the proto-MT is in direct continuity with the original Pentateuchal recension, and the other two texts are aberrations of this text. It would be easy to dismiss these views of Albright, and few take his arguments seriously today. 25 Yet they must be understood as the point of departure for the “local-texts” approach to textual criticism advocated by Frank Cross and his students in a greatly modified and highly complex form. We cannot review here the many publications of Cross, extending over several years, that deal with his theory of local texts, but I will cite a few representative pieces on the history of the biblical text and his local-text theory. In one of his earlier pieces, “The History of the Biblical Text in the Light of the Discoveries in the Judean Desert” (1964), 26 Cross makes this statement: “With the publication of the biblical documents from Murabbaºât in 1961, Genesis, Numbers, and Isaiah, and above all, the great Hebrew Minor Prophets scroll, there can no longer be any reason to doubt that by the beginning of the second century a.d. an authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible had been promulgated, the archetype of the Massoretic manuscripts of the Middle Ages.” 27 In contrast to Albright, Cross now places the “archetype” for the MT in the first or second century. He then proceeds to describe “the process by which the official text came into existence.” He continues: The establishment of the official text followed a pattern unusual in the textual history of ancient documents. Unlike the recensional activity in

23. Ibid., 144. Albright, in fine print, sets out all the evidence for the Egyptian character of this text, but few have found his arguments convincing for any early dating of the text form or “recension.” 24. Ibid., 145. 25. Tov, Textual Criticism, 186 n. 45. 26. F. M. Cross, “The History of the Biblical Text in the Light of the Discoveries in the Judean Desert,” HTR 57 (1964): 281–99. 27. Ibid., 287–88. In fact, as we have seen above in chap. 2, there is considerable reason to doubt the existence of an “authoritative” text of this sort. See E. J. Revell, “Masoretic Text,” ABD 4:597–99.

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

305

Alexandria which produced an elegant if artificial and eclectic text of Homer, and quite unlike the recensional activity which produced the Hexaplaric recension of the Septuagint or the conflate textus receptus of the New Testament, the Rabbinic scholars and scribes proceeded neither by wholesale revision and emendation nor by eclectic or conflating recensional procedures. They selected a single local textual tradition, which may be called the Proto-Massoretic text, a text which had been in existence in rough homogeneity for some time. Evidence for this text-type appears in our sources for the Pentateuch first at Qumran.”

The comparisons that Cross makes with Homer, the Hexapla, and the Textus Receptus of the New Testament are instructive because all have been dealt with in our earlier discussion on the history of editing in chaps. 2 and 3. We may quickly dismiss the example of Erasmus’s Textus Receptus as anachronistic and totally irrelevant to any discussion of ancient editing. The case of Origen’s Hexapla is also quite exceptional: the Hexapla was never intended as creating an authoritative text. Finally, Cross’s description of the “recensional activity” of the Alexandrian scholars working on the text of Homer as creating an eclectic text is totally at variance with most of the current scholarship on the nature of their activity. 28 As we have seen in our earlier discussion, Cross presents a view of the origin of the “rabbinic” text that is completely hypothetical and highly suspect. There is every reason to follow the sounder method of comparing the development of the Hebrew text with the origin of the vulgate text of Homer, which was not the result of recensional activity of any kind. The rabbis may well have preferred the proto-Masoretic Text as the majority text and encouraged its use over time, just as the Roman book trade preferred the medium text of Homer, but there is no clear evidence that they ever attempted to “authorize” a text; the notion of “authorization” is an anachronism. And there is much evidence that the rabbis tolerated some textual diversity, as in the case of Rabbi Meir’s elegant non-MT scroll of the Law. Cross proceeds to give a description of this MT archetype: [T]he Rabbinic text is normally short, not conflate or expansionist in the Pentateuch and Samuel. To be sure, there are secondary expansions in the Pentateuch, but by and large it is a superb, disciplined text. On the contrary, the text of Samuel is remarkably defective, and its shortness is the result of a long history of losses by haplography, the commonest error by far in a text which has not undergone systematic recensional activity, or which has not become mixed by infection from a different textual tradition. . . . In the case of Samuel, it is difficult to understand the selection of the Proto-Massoretic tradition in view of the excellence of the Old Palestinian text-type, available at least at Qumran.

28. He cites no classical authority for his statement, but he certainly had T. W. Allen’s work available for a more-accurate picture of the textual history of Homer.

306

Chapter 8

The difficulty that Cross expresses regarding the MT books of Samuel arises from the belief that they were part of an official selection process and that the selection was carried out by scholarly editors, but everything that we have suggested in our study thus far speaks against this process. If the “rabbinic scholars” used the principle of the short, nonexpansive texts for the Torah and the Former Prophets, they did not keep to this principle in the case of the other books. It is hard to discern any editorial principles in the selection process, as a wide range of texts such as those evident in the Qumran library would suggest. Cross takes up the matter of the “local origin of the textus receptus” and, “at least for the Pentateuch and the Former Prophets,” he argues that it “is the local text of Babylon which emerged in the fourth to second centuries.” 29 Because Cross is inclined to date this development to the time of Rabbi Hillel, “Hillel’s Babylonian origins could provide a reason for the unexpected Rabbinic rejection of the Palestinian in favor of the Babylonian text as the basis of the recension.” 30 In contrast to Albright, Cross suggests that the Babylonian text of the Pentateuch and Former Prophets did not arrive in the Judean region until the first century b.c.e., in the time of Herod. Even if this were the case—and this is highly speculative—it would mean no more than the fact that Hillel preferred a text with which he was the most familiar, and his prestige and that of his school would lend weight to its proliferation. It would tell us nothing about any recensional activity at that time. Concerning the other local texts, Cross makes the following comments: In the Pentateuch in the Proto-Samaritan text of Qumrân and in the later Samaritan recension sensu stricto, we find, I believe, a text which developed in Palestine in the fifth–second centuries b.c. Its text is marked by ‘scholarly’ reworking; parallel texts were inserted, grammar and orthography brought up to date, explanatory expansions and glosses intruded. As Kahle observed long ago, it is a text which was the work of centuries of growth, not systematic recension. 31

This is a most interesting statement because it is precisely the features that Cross names that are so often identified as “redactional.” Yet, these texts are certainly comparable to the long texts of Homer as found in the papyri and are certainly not the work of editors but the notorious “revisers.” Thus, I too would agree with Kahle on that score. In contrast to Albright, therefore, Cross has created a new category of local text—the Palestinian text—that is quite distinct from the Babylonian text and to which some of the books in the MT, such as Chronicles, belong. The Egyptian local text behind the Septuagint is taken over without debate, although it is seen as having some connection with the Palestinian—that is, the SamP and Samaritan-type texts. 29. Ibid., 290. 30. Ibid., 291. 31. Ibid., 297.

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

307

Furthermore, Cross takes issue with Kahle’s distinction between “official” and “vulgar” texts as they are applied to the various “recensions.” He asserts that the term “vulgar” only makes sense “after the promulgation of an official text” and thus “the term vulgar must be applied to a text denigrated in favor of an official text, whether this be the Rabbinic Bible or Homeric texts, or else it comes to mean merely ‘non-traditional,’ or even ‘unfamiliar.’” 32 This view is simply untenable, as we have seen in the case of Homeric texts and the use of koine, the equivalent of “vulgar” in the scholia, as well as its use in Origen and Jerome. The koine is both the “vulgar” text, in that it is not always copied carefully, and it is the “vulgate,” the traditional and familiar text, and its use has nothing to do with the creation of authorized texts. The koine text clearly precedes any editorial activity, whether the work of the Alexandrians or of Origen. We will now add a few remarks from Cross’s article “The Evolution of a Theory of Local Texts” (1975). 33 First, Cross rejects the notion of a Babylonian origin for the first Isaiah Scroll, which was so important for Albright’s thesis of a Babylonian recension, and locates its origin, along with all the other Isaiah texts from Qumran, in Palestine. Nevertheless, he agrees with Albright that they are all proto-Masoretic. The reason he gives for regarding them as Palestinian lies in the nature of these texts: “All the Qumrân manuscripts of Isaiah share the expansionistic character of the traditional texts of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, that is, they are marked by conflate readings, explicating pluses, double readings, and like harmonization.” But these features do not necessarily mark it off from the only other textual tradition, the Septuagint. Thus Cross states: “While the Old Greek text of Isaiah, or rather its Vorlage, belongs to a different textual tradition, it is one which is closely allied and shares the expansionistic or full attributes of the proto-Massoretic tradition.” 34 Consequently, it is hard to see how this is a very distinctive “local” attribute or why the LXX text of Isaiah could not have originated in the same place, presumably Palestine. In fact, “Palestine” also becomes the locus for the Samaritan Pentateuch because it too is “expansionistic,” as well as the text of Chronicles within the MT. Cross acknowledges that most of the texts found at Qumran are protoMasoretic and therefore Palestinian, but there are some important exceptions. He notes that, of the texts of Jeremiah found in Cave 4 at Qumran, two are of the long text-form found in the MT tradition, whereas one, 4QJerb, is of the short textual tradition corresponding to the Old Greek. 35 The manuscript evidence from Qumran seems to suggest that these two 32. Ibid., 298–99. 33. F. M. Cross, “The Evolution of a Theory of Local Texts,” in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text (ed. F. M. Cross and S. Talmon; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 306–20. 34. Ibid., 307. 35. To this text add now 4QJer d. See Tov, Textual Criticism, 319–27 for texts and comparison.

308

Chapter 8

text-forms of Jeremiah were transmitted together in the same locale. Nevertheless, Cross asserts: I cannot believe that these radically variant textual types were transmitted side by side in Palestine over many centuries. As I have argued elsewhere, distinct textual families take centuries to develop but are exceedingly fragile creations. When manuscripts stemming from different textual traditions come into contact, the result is their dissolution into a mixed text, or the precipitation of a textual crisis which results in recensional activity, and often in the fixing of a uniform or standard text. 36

Thus, in his view, the short text must have come from Egypt and been developed there before it somehow showed up in the collection at Qumran. The position taken by Cross, as cited above, is certainly necessary for his local text theory, but it seems to me highly questionable. Long, medium, and short texts of Homer existed side by side in the towns of Egypt, as witnessed by the papyri, and the long texts did not disappear as a result of “the fixing of a uniform or standard text” by editors. Long after the medium text of Homer became the vulgate, Plutarch still consciously preferred the longer text of Homer for his own use. The evidence of Qumran should simply be accepted for what it is—namely, different forms of the same text could exist side by side without any apparent need to reconcile them all into a single standard edition. The latter is the concern of scholarly editors, whose work rarely has much influence on the common or preferred text. Furthermore, if this text of 4QJerb “is a short, pristine form of the text of Jeremiah, comparable only to the short, conservative Massoretic text of the Pentateuch,” 37 then why is its origin not in Babylon? Apparently, the Vorlage of the LXX has some texts that are similar in nature to Palestinian texts and others that are similar to Babylonian texts: locus seems to have little to do with the nature of the texts. 38 To these matters we will return below. Shemaryahu Talmon, in “The Textual Study of the Bible: A New Outlook” (1975), 39 expressed the view that the impetus initiated by Albright’s 1955 article, discussed above, and the subsequent formulation of the “threerecension” theory played a dominant role in the development of biblical criticism in the period after the discovery of the scrolls at Qumran and in the neighboring region. 40 Nevertheless, Talmon expresses some reservations about the theory of three local texts and presents his own “new outlook”:

36. Cross, “The Evolution of a Theory of Local Texts,” 309. 37. Ibid. 38. See also the critique of the local text theory by S. Talmon, “The Old Testament Text,” 1:193–99. 39. S. Talmon, “The Textual Study of the Bible: A New Outlook” in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text (ed. Frank M. Cross and S. Talmon; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 321–400. 40. Ibid., 321.

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

309

The theory implies that the three local texts derived directly from one Hebrew proto-type, and that this archetype is to be dated at the latest in the fifth century b.c.e., that is to say more than half a millennium earlier than de Lagarde’s Urtext or Rosenmueller’s Ur-rezension. I would yet maintain . . . that notwithstanding the additional information and further analyses along these lines which have been forthcoming lately, the “three local texts” hypothesis cannot satisfactorily explain the restricted plurality of text-types at the end of the pre-Christian era. It appears that the extant text-types must be viewed as the remains of a yet more variegated transmission of the Bible text in the preceding centuries, rather than as witnesses to solely three archetypes. The more ancient manuscripts are being discovered and published, the more textual divergencies appear. The relatively limited number of distinct textual families which are extant at the end of the pre-Christian era may be explained to have resulted from two factors, among others: historical vicissitudes which caused other textual families to disappear; and the lack of a major prerequisite for the preservation of a text tradition, namely its acceptance by a sociologically definable integrated body. 41

The issue for Talmon is (1) that the diversity of text-types now available to research cannot be restricted to just three text-families in the early period, and (2) that the survival of three major text traditions out of this diversity has to do less with geographical factors and more with sociological factors. He continues: This last [sociological] factor raises an issue which is not sufficiently considered by students of the Bible text: the social and societal aspects of the preservation of literature, first and foremost of sacred literature. A hallowed text-form adopted by a specific group has a decidedly integrating effect. . . . This certainly applies to the Massoretic Text which became the standard version of the Synagogue; the Samaritan Hebrew Pentateuch which gained authoritative status in the Samaritan community; the Greek Version, and later the Latin, that were hallowed in the Church. 42

This proposal looks attractive, but a close examination soon reveals its weaknesses. As argued above, the authorization of specific text forms for religious use is a phenomenon of the sixteenth century and is anachronistic for earlier periods. What makes a particular text-form “hallowed” is long familiarity and use. By and large, however, the specific form of a “religious” text, whether Homer or the Bible, was not of particular concern, so long as it was in a language and form that was accessible to people. The real difference between the Church and the Jews was the use of the Greek text by one and the Hebrew by the other, and this left Greek-speaking Jews in a difficult position for a long time. At issue between the two groups in their controversies was a handful of passages that differed, accompanied by accusations of

41. Ibid., 324–25. 42. Ibid., 325.

310

Chapter 8

deliberate corruption by the other side. The men who understood the textual issues much better, Origen and Jerome, made little immediate progress with their contemporaries. Furthermore, there was considerable diversity of text within these communities, at least for synagogues and churches. The assumption that by the first century all texts used in the synagogues were rabbinic and “normative” is completely without warrant. One only needs to look at the remains of the Beth Alpha synagogue in Palestine (sixth century) or Dura Europos on the Euphrates (third century) to note that many were hardly “orthodox.” But even within rabbinic Judaism, different texts were in use. And the diversity of texts within the Church lasted for a long time and was never finally resolved. Furthermore, just as Qumran and the diversity of its texts creates a problem for the theory of local texts, it also presents a difficulty for the sociological approach. Talmon is aware of this and tries bravely to deal with it. He states: One does not encounter the same degree of textual solidification at Qumran. The diversity of textual traditions preserved in the Covenanters’ library may in part have resulted from the variegated sources of provenance of at least some of the manuscripts. These probably were brought to Qumran by members of the Community who hailed from diverse localities in Palestine, and from various social strata. From the very outset, one therefore should expect to find in that library, as indeed one does, a conflux of text-traditions which had developed over a considerable span of time in different areas of Palestine, and also outside of Palestine, as in Babylonia, and in different social circles. These diverse Vorlagen were continuously copied by the Covenanters’ scribes at Qumran, even in the restricted compass of their scriptorium. The relatively short period of uninterrupted existence of the Covenanters’ community possibly was not conducive to the emergence of one stabilized text form, if they were at all concerned about establishing a textus receptus. It stands to reason that also other constituted deviant Jewish communities may have embraced one specific text-type in their time. But with the disappearance of these groups also their respective literary heritages disappeared or were suppressed, and with them their particular biblical textual traditions. 43

A number of questions and observations present themselves, given this explanation. First, it is curious that Talmon must use the basic principle of the “local text theory”—that different text-types come from different regions— to make up for the deficiencies of the sociological explanation of a particular text-form associated with a particular religious community. Second, the one group that is in need of defining itself over against the group in Jerusalem, the Covenanters in Qumran, do not do so either in terms of a canon of sacred books or of a particular text-tradition. Why? Their isolation and group dynamics seem to make them an ideal candidate for Talmon’s socio-

43. Ibid., 325–26.

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

311

logical theory, but he must admit that they permitted the collection and continual reproduction of a diversity of text-types. The period of time during which Qumran was occupied could have very little to do with it. Third, what about the corresponding library and scriptorium in the Jerusalem Temple? Would it not have at least as much textual diversity? And would not the texts in Jerusalem also continue to be copied? Cross argues that the MT of the Pentateuch and Former Prophets was based on an import from Babylon, perhaps as late as the time of Hillel, and that it remained uncontaminated. With many immigrants coming into Jerusalem from many different regions, there must have been many different texts. And if the libraries of the Hellenistic and Roman world were any model, they probably imported texts, especially elegant ones, for their collection. Nor is it likely that any development of a library collection predated the Maccabean period, and, given the destruction of texts at that time, the period in which Jerusalem’s collection developed probably coincided directly with the development of the collection at Qumran. Fourth, it is not at all certain that the Qumran collection had no further impact on the textual history of the Bible. It appears to be the case that Origen used scrolls found in a jar near Jericho for his extra columns of the Hexapla, and Kahle associated these with the Qumran cache. Kahle also mentions a similar discovery about 800 c.e. in the same region of Qumran, which came into the hands of the Karaites. There is clear evidence that far more texts were stored in jars in the caves than were eventually recovered after 1947. 44 Talmon further proposes greater continuity between the methodologies of “higher” and “lower” criticism and presents this program as something new that arises out of the Albright-Cross three local text-families theory. He states: The Albright-Cross hypothesis has considerably extended the historical reach of the enquiry into the history of the Bible text. . . . The ‘three textual families’ theory penetrates deeper into history, since it assumes that these textual families ‘developed slowly between the fifth and first centuries b.c., in Palestine, in Egypt, and in a third locality, presumably Babylon.’ 45 Thus, the investigation of textual phenomena, and of the developmental history of the Bible text is carried down into a period in which some biblical literature was yet being authored, and other parts were being redacted or edited. 46

As we have seen above, throughout the nineteenth century, higher and lower criticism were integrally associated with each other, and the former actually grew out of the latter. Albright actually went so far as to identify Ezra as the editor who created the Pentateuch redaction that became the

44. Kahle, The Cairo Geneza, 14–20, 98–105, 45. The quotation is taken from F. M. Cross, “The Contribution of the Qumran Discoveries to the Study of the Biblical Text,” IEJ 16 (1966): 86. 46. Talmon, “The Textual Study of the Bible,” 327–28.

312

Chapter 8

Babylonian recension and precursor of the MT, but this connection is played down by Cross. Talmon makes much of the fact that parts of the Bible were being composed at the same time that other parts were being “redacted or edited,” but there is nothing remarkable about this if one views the compositions of the literary units individually and not anachronistically as the Bible. Homer, the Greek dramatists, Herodotus, and Plato were all “authored” at different times and transmitted in different ways until they were “edited” as classics by the Alexandrians. But apparently Talmon means much more than this. He states: To put it differently, in that period diverse literary processes which affected biblical writings in their totality, then were carried out concurrently. The recognition of this circumstance should have alerted scholars to some new issues and endeavours in the wider field of biblical studies: the investigation of the possible comparability and likely interdependence of literary phenomena which, on the surface, obtain on different levels of the literary process. If the history of the Bible text is no longer considered to become the object of systematic study only after the creative impulse, i.e., after the authoring of biblical literature had come to an end, but rather as partly overlapping with it, then it obviously becomes legitimate to probe into the possibility that the textual enquiry, designated “lower criticism,” may illuminate issues that are usually debated in the orbit of “higher criticism.”47

What Talmon has in mind is the fact that, in his view, certain biblical stylistic techniques and literary devices can be viewed as either the work of an author or that of an editor or copyist. As an instance of such continuity, Talmon points to the use of the Hebrew phrase ºd hnh used in both Jer 48:47b and 51:64b. In the former instance, it is a case of an author indicating the “end” of the oracle against Moab; in the latter, it marks the ending of the prophecy of Jeremiah, marking it off from the historical supplement and is therefore “editorial.” 48 Yet, this latter instance of a scribal gloss or notation, which may have imitated the language of the earlier passage, is trivial and hardly addresses the supposed “redactional activity” of the Pentateuch, on the one hand, or the “editing” of the final form of the text, on the other. Talmon sums up his observations of the use of literary devices in this way: The assumed continuity of literary maxims and techniques, employed by the literati who were active in the creation, preservation and transmission of the literary product, viz. the books of the Bible, becomes practically a certainty when, as is done by the “three recensions” school, the process of text recension and preservation is taken to have begun as early as the fifth century b.c.e. It stands to reason that at that stage of development of bib-

47. Ibid., 328. Talmon briefly mentions the special case of the short and long texts of Jeremiah as an example of the overlap of higher and lower criticism, and to this we will return below. 48. Ibid., 335. See also William McKane, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Jeremiah, vol. 2: Commentary on Jeremiah XXVI–LII (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1996), 1201.

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

313

lical literature, and also before it, authors and copyists were not clearly separable classes of literary practitioners. One rather may presume that a unio personalis was the rule: an author often served, when the need or the occasion arose, also as the editor, transmitter, scribe or copyist of his own works or of the works of others. 49

It is hard to know what to make of this statement, given the fact that Talmon earlier quotes Cross as qualifying the whole notion of the “three recensions” as “three local text families” that were “the product of natural growth or development in the process of scribal transmission, not of conscious or controlled scribal recension.” 50 Talmon’s own theory of textual diversity based on socioreligious factors also seems to have little to do with the ruling assumption that the process goes back to the fifth century b.c.e. Furthermore, it is not clear what he has in mind when he suggests that in the fifth century the author of a particular literary work within the biblical corpus functioned as both author and “editor” of his own work, as well as “transmitter, scribe or copyist.” The fact that the notion of “editor” arose to represent someone who attempted to reproduce the work of an ancient author as faithfully as possible makes the statement ludicrous. And as his own “transmitter, scribe and copyist,” the author has only himself to blame for all the mistakes in the text. Talmon goes on to illustrate his point with two examples. The first is Ezra the scribe. Quite apart from the fact that we do not know for certain anything that Ezra wrote or what his scribal duties entailed, he is only useful to the argument because of his title as “scribe” and his early date. Some may believe that he “edited” the Pentateuch, but this is simply conjecture. The other example is the second-century c.e. figure, Rabbi Meir, “Akiba’s most prominent disciple,” who, Talmon says, “was active both as a creative teacher and as a prodigious scribe.” 51 Quite apart from the fact that the date for R. Meir makes him irrelevant to the discussion, his function as teacher in the rabbinic tradition of oral halakah was quite distinct from his activity of making copies of the Scriptures. He could have had some other secular form of employment, as many other rabbis did. Talmon would certainly not be prepared to suggest that in the process of his copying biblical texts he exercised literary creativity as an author or that he even “edited” any of the copies by recensio or emendatio. Yet, Talmon makes the surprising statement about R. Meir as both author and copyist: “it surely must be agreed that his literary techniques would not automatically change whenever he turned from one task to another.” 52 In the case of these two examples, chosen from both ends of the time spectrum representing the period of textual transmission from literary production to its fixed form in the MT, I find the position

49. Talmon, “The Textual Study of the Bible,” 336. 50. Ibid., 323. 51. Ibid., 335. 52. Ibid.

314

Chapter 8

of Talmon very weak and confused. The Alexandrian scholars, our best examples of ancient editors, were also poets and writers who no doubt could imitate Homeric style, and yet as editors they were very conservative in their approach to the text and did not add a single line of their own. The two functions were certainly kept entirely separate. The fact is that, in the case of each book and each different genre of literature, there are different dynamics involved that have a bearing on the “original” form of the text and its transmission until it reaches some degree of textual stability. To lump the whole process together under the single rubric of “Bible” or “biblical” is hopelessly to confuse the process of how these works came into their present form.

Editors, Urtext, Recensions, and the Problem of Textual Diversity: Emanuel Tov The position of Emanuel Tov, in Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (1992), is similar to that of Talmon, in that he takes his basic point of departure from the diversity of text-types in Qumran rather than the “three local texts” theory. He describes his own position thus: As an alternative to the generally accepted theory of a tripartite division of the textual witnesses, it was suggested by Tov that the three abovementioned textual witnesses constitute only three of a larger number of texts. This suggestion thus follows an assumption of a multiplicity of texts, rather than of a tripartite division. The texts are not necessarily unrelated to each other, since one can recognize among them several groups. . . . Nevertheless, they are primarily a collection of individual texts whose nature is that of all early texts and which relate to each other in an intricate web of agreements and differences. In each text one also notices unique readings, that is, readings found only in one source. . . . [A]ll early texts, and not only those that have been preserved, were once connected to one another in a similar web of relations. 53

Tov asserts that these early textual witnesses “should not be characterized as either recensional or text-types” because “they do not usually show the distinctive features of recensional activity,” and this leads him to define what he means by the terms recension and text-type, which he treats as equivalent: The use of these terms requires that the witnesses actually differ from each other typologically, that is, that each of them be characterized by distinctive textual features. A witness reflecting a text-type or recension by definition should show a conscious effort to change an earlier text systematically in a certain direction. Textual recensions bear recognizable textual characteristics, such as expansionistic, abbreviating, harmonizing, Judaizing, or Christianizing tendency, or a combination of some of these characteristics. However, this cannot be claimed of two of the witnesses under discussion 53. Tov, Textual Criticism, 160.

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

315

even though each of them does reflect typological features in small units. ˜ reflects a text like all other texts, and has no specific characteristics—the single typological feature that could be attributed to it is the slightly corrupt nature of the book of Samuel. © reflects a text as well, and not a textual recension. . . . On the other hand, ∑ indeed reflects certain typological features throughout the Torah, but since these features are also found in the pre-Samaritan texts which do not share the Samaritan ideological features, . . . no claim can be made for a Samaritan recension; rather, one should speak of a group of texts having similar typological features.54

From this, Tov concludes that “the theory of the division of the biblical witnesses into three recensions cannot be maintained.” He sees the reason for this division as largely based on religious prejudice, that is, the preservation of the representatives of the biblical texts by important religious groups— the Jews, the Samaritans, and the Christians—which is his interpretation of Talmon’s “sociological factor” discussed above. Tov continues: If the tripartite division is merely a matter of prejudice, attention should now be directed to the actual relation between the textual witnesses. The textual reality of the Qumran texts does not attest to three groups of textual witnesses, but rather to a textual multiplicity, relating to all of Palestine to such an extent that one can almost speak in terms of an unlimited number of texts. 55

Tov seems to prefer to express the relationship of texts to each other as text “families,” a term earlier adopted by Cross, which would apply to the major witnesses, such as MT, LXX, and SamP, but other groups among the Qumran texts as well. 56 I am inclined to agree with Tov’s suggestion that one speak of a multiplicity of texts or text-families in place of just three recensions, but I have grave reservations about his understanding of the term recension. There is a curious circularity in his argument. He defines recensions and recensional activity by the way in which scholars in the past have treated the characteristics of the three textual witnesses, MT, LXX, and SamP, especially with regard to the allegations of “Judaizing,” “Christianizing,” and “harmonizing,” and then says that, because in his view they do not have these characteristics, they are not recensions. If, however, a recension is defined by the very characteristics that in the past have been imputed to these three textual “families,” characteristics that are now seen to be inapplicable, then either recensions are something quite different or they do not exist. Yet, this understanding of recensional activity, as Tov has described it, has long been equated with “redactional” or “editorial” activity, and I doubt that he is willing, as I am, to deny that it exists. Furthermore, it is entirely misleading to speak of the characteristics of the MT and LXX as a whole and not apply 54. Ibid., 160–61. 55. Ibid., 161. 56. Ibid., 163.

316

Chapter 8

the same analysis to individual books or units of literature within the larger collections. If we look at the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.) definition, recension has two basic senses that are relevant for our purposes, one active and one passive. Thus, recension can mean: “the revision of a text, especially in a careful or critical manner,” and also “a particular form or revision of a text resulting from such a revision.” The two basic meanings arise out of a long history in the field of text-critical editing of manuscripts in which recension (recensio) means revising and emending a text and the revision that results from this editorial activity. As we have seen above in chap. 2, it also has a Greek equivalent, diorthosis, which is the term used for the critically edited copies of Homer produced by the Alexandrian scholars. This term may also apply to a possible imitation of Alexandrian editorial methods by the sopherim and by Origen. The term recension is much like the term edition, except that recension expresses a relationship to a specific earlier text edition of which it is a revision in a particular way. Not all scribal corruption, intentional or unintentional, can be considered “recensional activity,” because every copy of a text would then be a recension, and the term would be meaningless. So the matter always comes down to what constitutes editorial activity and what editorial model is implied by the designation that a certain work is a recension. Thus, it can be said that none of the editorial activity of the Alexandrian scholars, of the sopherim, or of the Christian scholars have any of the characteristics that Tov identifies as “recensional activity.” It is also the case that none of the “recensions” that were produced by the scholars of the Alexandrian library were used as the basis of a vulgate or standard edition of Homer, and it is not at all clear that the critical editions created by the sopherim and Masoretes or by Origen were intended to be standard or vulgate editions of the Scriptures. Textual editing that involved recensio and emendatio for the purpose of producing a standard edition is a function of the Renaissance, early modern, and modern periods, and it has been read back anachronistically into the ancient period. A major problem of text-criticism, it seems to me, continues to be the extent to which the critical activity reflected in MT and in Origen’s Hexapla influenced the establishment or modification of a standard text-tradition. There is much talk about some recensions as specific revisions of texts or text families, such as the kaige recension of the LXX, or those associated with Theodotion (or proto-Theodotion), Aquila, Symmachus, and Lucian, but much of this discussion overlooks the limits of ancient editing and the nature of ancient textual transmission and simply reads back into the ancient period the editorial methods of a later time. We will need to take up this matter in greater detail below. Furthermore, there seems to be a fundamental difference between the way in which biblical studies in general, and Tov’s definition in particular, use the term recension and the way in which it is treated in classical studies. The creation of recensions is the work of modern editors, who endeavor to produce critically revised editions that more correctly reflect the closest ap-

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

317

proximation possible of the ancient literary work, based on the manuscript evidence. Thus, recensions, according to M. L. West, are stemmata that can be traced back to archetypes. Recensions are of two kinds. If the manuscripts can be diagrammed in such a way that the lines all diverge from a single source (whether actual or hypothetical), this is called a closed recension, that is, it will be possible to construct a self-contained diagram (known as a stemma) which represents the historical relationship of the manuscripts accurately enough for useful conclusions to be drawn about the antiquity of the individual readings. . . . If the extant manuscripts do not come from such a straightforward area of the tradition, they may still appear to, if not enough of them are extant to reveal the complexity of their true relationships; or it may be apparent that no stemma can do justice to the situation, and we shall realize that we are faced with an open recension. 57

Thus, it appears that most of the biblical texts that are described as recensions are of the open recension variety, particularly those that are contaminated by revision from more than one text-tradition. In such cases, recension carried out by the modern scholar becomes very difficult and highly conjectural. The problem with the notion of recension lies in the fact that a recension is the result of recensional or editorial activity, but textual archetypes may simply be a single text and the work of the author or a particular copyist. At the same time, a critical edition produced as the end result of recensio and emendatio can also be considered a recension = edition of the classical text in question. The confusion between recension as archetype and recension as edited version (or redaction) of a text comes from the fact that in the nineteenth century all classical texts, particularly the oldest, such as Homer’s poems, were viewed as having been produced by a process of editing. The archetype was always a redaction and, therefore, a recension. Thus, the end result of the critical editing of an ancient literary work—a recension—was supposed to approximate as closely as possible the original text, which was always a redaction of the author and therefore (also) a recension. Yet, classical studies has for some time rejected the idea that any of the archetypes, whether understood as the oldest form of literary works or their vulgate versions, are the result of editing; they are therefore not recensions, in spite of the continuing use of this terminology. In biblical studies, however, the belief in the redaction of all “final form” texts has persisted, with the confusion in terminology compounded. This leaves Tov in a state of complete contradiction on the original form of the text. Tov takes up, in considerable detail, the problem of the original shape of the biblical text, commonly designated the Urtext, and whether or not it is possible to reconstruct this text, or at least use it as a presupposition for text criticism. Concerning a belief in an Urtext of the Bible, he states:

57. M. L. West, Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique (Stuttgart: Tübner, 1973), 14.

318

Chapter 8

This assumption is very important in the light of the many differences between the early textual witnesses which would seem to contradict it. An elucidation of the question concerning the original form of the biblical text does not only have theoretical aspects pertaining to the understanding of its history, but also very practical ones, since it determines (or should determine) the approach of scholars to all existing differences.58

Tov outlines the two opposing positions regarding the history of the textual witnesses: the belief that all variant texts stem from one original, and the belief that “there existed at an early stage various pristine texts of the Bible which, rather than deriving one from another, apparently had equal status.” 59 He continues: The question of the original text of the Bible may have entered research “through the back door” as part of the textual discussion, but beyond textual criticism, it also forms a central issue in our understanding of the general development of the biblical books, including their literary history. . . . [W]hoever presupposes one original text of a biblical book assumes that the extant textual witnesses derived from one literary composition which, at a certain stage, existed as a single textual entity from which all texts of that book have derived. 60

This original text is called the Urtext or Urschrift, although sometimes it is given the designation archetype. But Tov warns against confusing the two, because the archetype can actually refer to a stage of textual development far removed from the Urtext, which is understood as the original composition. This approach to a quest for the original text of an ancient work “through the back door” of textual criticism corresponds to the work of Wolf on Homer and the subsequent literary analysts of the nineteenth century, as we saw above. Tov deals with some of the problems inherent in the view supporting the notion of an original text. One of the problems is the great distance between the time of composition of many of the biblical texts and the stage of textual transmission of the earliest witnesses. This period is marked by considerable fluidity that is evident in the earliest extant manuscripts. A second problem is the fact that the biblical books are not the work of one author but reflect compositional layers in which earlier stages underwent “revisions.” His example is the “deuteronomistic revisions . . . in the historical books from Joshua to Kings and in Jeremiah.” 61 This way of understanding the Deuteronomist of the DtrH as editor already prejudices the discussion. He further states: “Since the process of literary development was long, one needs to decide which, if any, of the final stages in the presumed literary development of the book should be considered the determinative text for tex58. Tov, Textual Criticism, 166. 59. Ibid., 167. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 169.

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

319

tual criticism.” 62 As a consequence of this, Tov feels the need to make a distinction “between the level of the textual transmission and that of the various stages of the literary composition of the biblical books.” 63 He points out that scholars have often, in the past, confused “the original text of the Bible with that of the original text of ˜,” which “is but one witness of the biblical text” and therefore not “identical with the original text of the Bible as a whole.” 64 Furthermore, one must also take into consideration the distinction between genetic and alternative readings: A reading described as genetic developed, or may have developed—by change, omission, addition, or inversion—from another reading which may, or may not be known today. . . . On the other hand, readings that are not genetic may be represented as alternative. Such readings did not necessarily develop from a change of a detail in an earlier text. . . . From the point of view of the literary composition, alternative readings are thus parallel and can be described as equally acceptable or original in the context and may have been derived from texts of equal status, if such texts ever existed. The presumed existence of alternate readings has given impetus to the view that there never existed any single original text. . . . Not only individual readings are either genetic or alternative, but also whole sections in one textual source may relate to another textual witness in the same way. 65

Of course, if one believes that in the larger context of such alternative readings one text is the original and the other secondary, then there are no genuine “alternative readings.” All explanations are by nature hypothetical and, therefore, argument is often by analogy, which is always difficult. Furthermore, “individual biblical books may have developed in different ways.” 66 Consequently, assumptions about one original text may not easily cover all of them taken together. Taking into consideration the factors outlined above, Tov attempts to formulate his hypothesis concerning the existence of a single original text, understood as “the copy (or textual tradition) that contained the finished literary product and which stood at the beginning of the process of textual transmission.” 67 The arguments in support of this view are: (1) It is most plausible to assume that “the biblical books were composed at a certain time, or developed in a linear way over a period of time.” Regardless of the previous stages of literary growth of a particular textual unit, from “a single copy or tradition, all other copies of the book are derived.” For Tov textual criticism not only takes into consideration “the one composition which is 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 170. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 171. 67. Ibid.

320

Chapter 8

reflected in all the known textual sources” but also the one “which has been accepted as authoritative by Judaism.” (2) The evidence points overwhelmingly in the direction of linear development and against parallel texts. (3) “The view that textual criticism should take into consideration only one textual entity from which all texts were derived is partly based upon arguments that are socio-religious and historical rather than textual. The canonical concept that has been accepted in Judaism leads solely to the literary compositions that are reflected in ˜, and therefore it is these alone and not earlier or later stages that have to be considered.” 68 Adopting the view of a single original text leads to a definition of this text on two levels, that of textual transmission and that of literary development: (1) At the level of the textual transmission: At the end of the process of the composition of a biblical book stood one textual entity (a single copy or tradition) which was considered finished at the literary level, even if only by a limited group of people, which at the same time stood at the beginning of a process of copying and text transmission. During the textual transmission many complicated changes occurred, making it now almost impossible for us to reconstruct the original form of the text. . . . When dealing with the originality of details in the text, it is to this entity, rather than to an earlier or later literary stage, that we refer. Its presumed date differs from book to book and usually cannot be determined. This entity thus forms the “original” text for textual criticism, though in a restricted formulation, since it was preceded by oral and written stages. (2) At the level of the literary development of the biblical books: Largescale differences between the textual witnesses show that a few books and parts of books were once circulated in different formulations representing different literary stages, as a rule one after another, but possibly also parallel to each other. Since only one finished literary composition is in our mind when we deal with textual issues, textual criticism aims at that literary composition which has been accepted as binding (authoritative) by Jewish traditions, since textual criticism is concerned with the literary compositions contained in the traditional Hebrew Bible. This implies that the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible aims at the literary compositions as contained in ˜, to the exclusion of later (midrashic) literary compilations such as the Hebrew text behind several sections in ©, . . . and the earlier and possibly parallel compositions, such as © of Jeremiah, Joshua, Ezekiel, and sections of Samuel. . . . An analysis of these books and pericopes belongs to the realms of exegesis and literary criticism, while an investigation of details which are not connected with the overall literary structure is part of textual criticism. 69

Let us consider in sequence the two parts of his definition. Tov asserts that the transmission-history begins with a text “considered finished at the literary level,” but what does he mean by this? Is this verdict of what is 68. These arguments are set out, ibid., 172. 69. Ibid., 177–78.

spread is 6 points long

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

321

“finished” the judgment of an editor or publisher? This kind of language suggests modern publication and dissemination and is, therefore, anachronistic. This impression is further strengthened when Tov speaks about earlier and later “editions” of biblical books: as an example of what he means by the original text, he states that, “even if the original formulations by the authors of the biblical books themselves, such as the words of the prophets, had been preserved, these, paradoxically, would be less important for the textual reconstruction than the last editions of the books.” He also speaks of the final edition of the book [of Jeremiah] containing the “rewriting by the deuteronomistic editor.” 70 It is clear that the “original text” for Tov is the same thing as the “final edition”—that is, the work of the final editor or redactor. Tov goes on to say: “earlier editions of the biblical books such as the parent text of © were circulated, because at the time they were considered final. Most of the differences between these early editions concern editorial layers which presumably preceded ˜.” 71 Here, in contradiction to what he has said earlier about recensions, the various witnesses are described as editions and therefore recensions, the work of editors. And ˜ is synonymous with the original texts and the final edition. This is confirmed by his further remark: “the other [in addition to those he has previously mentioned] largescale differences between ˜ and © preceding the time of the edition of ˜ are beyond the scope of the textual criticism of the Bible, and this pertains also to the literary developments subsequent to ˜.” 72 One would have no quibble with Tov if he merely wished to make the archetype of ˜ the focus of his textual criticism, but it is the literary form of the text of ˜ that is identified as both Urtext and the final form by invoking religious arguments—that it is the canonical text of Judaism. He states: “The Bible contains the Holy Writings of the Jewish people, and the decisions that were made within this religious community to a great extent also determine the approach of the scholarly world towards the text.” 73 This is highly problematic. I fail to see how Tov can identify the rabbinic canon of the second century with an original text that is prior to those forms of the text that are now extant in the Qumran scrolls, texts that go back to the third century b.c.e. The religious criterion is to my mind totally irrelevant to the whole issue of textual and literary criticism. 74 However, my primary concern is with Tov’s understanding of the original text as the “final edition” and the product of a “final editor.” After offering his definition of the original shape of the biblical text that is the focus of textual criticism, Tov presents his own “new” description of the history of the biblical text, in comparison with the analysis of earlier critics. 75 He first 70. Ibid., 178. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., 178–79. 73. Ibid., 179. 74. This “canonical” perspective seems to be influenced by the work of Brevard Childs, which we will take up below. 75. We have discussed Tov’s predecessors in more detail above.

322

Chapter 8

notes the internal witness of the Bible to prior written texts as part of the larger units, such as the Ten Commandments written by the deity on stone tablets, the Book of the Covenant written by Moses, or the scroll of Baruch containing the words of Jeremiah. The idea that all three may be fictitious documents is not considered. He continues: Similarly, it appears that the editorial process, assumed for most biblical books, presupposes previously written texts. It is reasonable to assume that editors who inserted their words into an earlier formulation of a composition had to base themselves on written texts. We refer in particular to the revision by the deuteronomistic editor(s) of Joshua–Kings and Jeremiah. . . . It thus follows that the editors of the final stage in the composition of the biblical books acted as both authors and copyists, since in the course of their editing, they copied from earlier compositions. The same applies to the author of Chronicles who, in the process of rewriting, copied considerable portions of Genesis and Samuel–Kings, either as known from ˜ or a similar form of these books, as well as limited sections of other compositions. 76

It is remarkable how reminiscent this statement is of the views of Simon, Eichhorn, and Ewald, with their collections of historical written sources compiled and arranged by editors or compilers from the days of Moses onward, including notions about Deuteronomistic editors. Even the Chronicler has become merely an editor who is compiling sources. Tov’s description of this first stage as redaction-critical strongly resembles Simon’s approach and is thus a rather blatant anachronism. He continues: At some stage, the literary growth was necessarily completed. It is possible that at an early stage there existed different early compositions that were parallel or overlapping, but none of these have been preserved. . . . At a certain point in time the last formulations were accepted as final from the point of view of their content and were transmitted and circulated as such. But sometimes this process recurred. Occasionally a book reached what appeared at the time to be its final form, and as such was circulated. However, at a later stage another, revised, edition was prepared, which was intended to take the place of the preceding one. This new edition was also accepted as authoritative, but the evidence shows that it did not always succeed in completely eradicating the texts of the earlier edition which survived in places which were geographically or socially remote. So it came about that these earlier editions reached the hands of the Greek translators in Egypt and remained among the scrolls at Qumran. . . . The aforementioned acceptance of the final form of the books can, in retrospect, also be considered as the determining of the authoritative (canonical) status of the biblical books. This process took place by degrees, and it naturally had great influence on the practice and procedures of the copying and transmission of the biblical books.77 76. Tov, Textual Criticism, 188. 77. Ibid.

spread is 3 points long

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

323

Again, this understanding of the production and dissemination of books, taken from the age of printing, is completely anachronistic when read back into the ancient past, with first editions, revised editions, and some authority responsible for their approval, production, and circulation. The “final form” created by the latest editorial revision becomes synonymous with the canonical acceptance of the work “in retrospect” and the point at which the compositional phase comes to an end and the copying and transmission phase begins. Consequently, it is this highly problematic notion of the final form as Urtext that is linked with the task of text criticism. Tov states: “the biblical books in their final and canonical edition [as he has defined them] are the objective of textual criticism.” 78 It is in this curious way that, for Tov, the final edited form, the canonical edition, and the MT are all the same and the Urtext of text criticism. The fact that the notion of “final edited form” may be called into question by this study makes Tov’s entire scheme problematic. Furthermore, there is no necessary link between a text’s compositional history and its canonical status, even “in retrospect,” and still less connection between a text’s authoritative “canonical” status and its MT text-form. Otherwise, how can one account for the “canonical” status of the Greek Torah for the Jews of Alexandria or the Samaritan Pentateuch for the Samaritans? The “canonicity” of the Torah had nothing to do with a particular form of the text any more than the “canonicity” of Homer among the Greeks is to be connected with the eventual vulgate form of the texts of his poems, which, in any event, was not determined by editors. The contradiction in Tov’s position becomes clear when he is faced with the fact that the “final form” and its implicit canonical status did not immediately lead to a standard text but gave way to considerable diversity. He states: The period of relative textual unity reflected in the assumed pristine text(s) of the biblical books was brief at best, but in actual fact it probably never even existed, for during the same period there were also current among the people a few copies representing stages which preceded the completion of the literary composition, as described above. . . . If this situation could be described as one of relative textual unity, it certainly did not last long, for in the following generations it was soon disrupted as copyists, to a greater or lesser extent, continuously altered and corrupted the text.

In other words, the theoretical notion of a “final, authoritative form,” for which there is no evidence, is contradicted by all the evidence that does exist. This leads to all kinds of gerrymandering of the theory, as reflected in the following statement: Many scribes took the liberty of changing the text from which they copied, and in this respect continued the approach of the last authors of the books. Several scholars even posit a kind of intermediary stage between 78. Ibid., 189.

324

Chapter 8

the composition and the copying of the books, a stage which one could call compositional-transmissional or editorial-scribal. This free approach taken by the scribes finds expression in their insertion of changes in minor details and of interpolations, such as those described [previously]. Although many of these changes also pertain to content, one should draw a quantitative and qualitative distinction between the intervention of the authors-editors before the text received its authoritative (canonical) status and the activity of the copyists which took place after this occurred.79

What Tov is admitting is that there is, of course, the contradictory evidence of the period between the hypothetical “final form” and the time of standardization and canonization centuries later, during which there were substantial content changes made to the text that were not merely errors of copying. So, to preserve the theoretical position, one can create a transitional period that is still partly compositional and partly editorial. Tov suggests that it can be distinguished from the true final editing of the compositional stage because “fewer and smaller changes” were made, but this judgment depends entirely upon what one regards as “editorial” within the original compositional process. Setting these two quotations side by side, it is apparent that in the first the changes made after the literary “final form” were the work of copyists who “continuously altered and corrupted the text,” and yet from the perspective of the later “canonical” form (the MT) this same process is interpreted as “editorial-scribal.” Among the scribal traditions of this transitional period, Tov also wishes to distinguish a particular tradition of “those who did not adopt this free approach and refrained from changing the text.” 80 Not surprisingly, he identifies this group with the proto-Masoretic text and thus establishes continuity between MT and the final form of biblical books. He admits that “even these texts occasionally reflect the intervention of scribes, . . . although to a limited extent.” 81 Of course, this position becomes very problematic for some texts, such as Jeremiah, in which the more “conservative” and primitive version is that of the LXX and the expansive one that of the MT—which would not support Tov’s position. Tov further attempts to distinguish between two broad scribal conventions: “vulgar” texts, which were in general use by the people, and nonvulgar texts, which were more conservative and “official.” 82 Thus, Tov makes the distinction that, in contrast to the nonvulgar texts, “the vulgar texts were not used for official purposes, such as the liturgy, but one cannot be sure of this with regard to the Qumran sect.” 83 This statement, however, is 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., 190. 81. Ibid., 191. 82. Ibid., 192–95. This, of course, follows the suggestion of Kahle, although Tov uses these terms in a somewhat different fashion than does Kahle. 83. Ibid., 192.

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

325

contradicted by the fact that Tov regards the Nash papyrus containing the Decalogue as a vulgar text and yet states that it was “probably used for liturgical purposes.” 84 The so-called Severus text, understood as a vulgar text, was also almost certainly used as a liturgical text within a rabbinic community. Concerning the vulgar texts, he states: “Their copyists allowed themselves the freedom of inserting many changes and corrections into the text and even of introducing an idiosyncratic orthographic and morphological practice, such as found in many Qumran texts.” 85 Tov also includes in this group the pre-Samaritan and SamP texts. The nonvulgar texts include both the MT tradition and the LXX, as well as some nonaligned Qumran texts. This means that, while one can set aside SamP as a vulgar text, the nonvulgar group still does not allow one to distinguish between the MT and LXX. This distinction only comes about as a result of the later adoption of the LXX by the Christian Church, with the result that the MT becomes the textual tradition of “mainstream” Judaism from the late first century c.e. onward. 86 This did not come about because of a stabilization or standardization of the proto-Masoretic family of texts but merely the texts of “the only organized group which survived the destruction of the Second Temple. Thus, after the first century c.e. a description of the transmission of the text of the Hebrew Bible actually amounts to an account of the history of MT.” 87 Here Tov seems to be in agreement with Albrektson, although he waters down 84. Ibid., 203. Tov’s discussion of the distinction between liturgical and nonliturgical use of texts gets him into some trouble when he comes to discussing codices. After dealing with the rise of the codex form and its use in the post-Talmudic period, post-700 c.e., Tov continues: “The codex was restricted to the non-liturgical use of the Bible, while liturgical scrolls continued to be used for the religious purposes in the Middle Ages. At that time, these liturgical texts continued to be written without vowels and accents in the form of scrolls, in accordance with the rules of writing laid down in antiquity by the rabbis. Most of those rules are reflected in texts that are not used in liturgy, certainly in the carefully written codices, but the latter texts were vocalized and accented and contained the complete Masoretic apparatus. From the point of view of their content no qualitative differences between these scrolls and codices are recognizable” (p. 207). What is noteworthy in this discussion is that Tov fails to notice that it is the “edited” form of the text, which is in direct continuity with the proto-Masoretic tradition, that is not used for liturgical purposes; and it is the nonedited scrolls, which seem to be much more in continuity with the practice of the “vulgar” scrolls, that are used for the liturgy. There may no longer be any “qualitative differences” between the texts of the scrolls and the codices by the late Middle Ages, although this is not entirely uncontested, but it seems very likely to me that the practice of using unedited and unpointed scrolls for liturgy in the later period points to the use of vulgate texts, such as the Severus scroll, for liturgical purposes in the earlier period. Note that Gordis completely muddles this issue when he suggests that the edited archetypal MT codex, which he dates to the Second Temple, became the prototype that was copied by Temple scribes for use in the liturgy of the synagogues. 85. Ibid., 193. 86. Tov constantly uses the term “central stream in Judaism” to mean rabbinic Judaism and at the same time to mean the equivalent of what Gordis calls “normative Judaism.” This notion is very problematic. 87. Ibid., 195.

326

Chapter 8

Albrektson’s position. 88 As Tov acknowledges, the Severus Torah scroll, which had its origin in the Temple, and R. Meir’s Torah scroll are a problem. None of these texts fits the description of “vulgar.” As we have seen above in chap. 3, the distinction between the “vulgar” or koine class of text and the elegant or more accurate text comes from the scholia of Homer and is not useful for classifying text-types. It was a misunderstanding of this distinction that led to all the confusion in so many scholars. In a recent article, Eugene Ulrich sharply criticizes the distinction between vulgar and authorized texts and, therefore, implicitly argues against the position of Tov, by drawing attention to the two Isaiah scrolls from Cave 1 of Qumran. One scroll, 1QIsab, corresponds very closely to the MT, whereas the other, 1QIsaa, contains many variants. He goes on to state: Since we “knew” what the biblical text was supposed to look like, what we saw was that 1QIsab confirmed that the MT “faithfully preserved the original text” (and we were quite relieved); 1QIsaa, on the other hand, was accused of being a “vulgar” or even a “worthless” manuscript because it diverged so widely from the textus receptus. Two factors, however, prove that accusation false. First, 1QIsaa had been carefully wrapped in linen and sealed inside a protective pottery jar, ensuring its excellent preservation. 1QIsab had not been so protected and is thus fragmentary. Why carefully preserve a “vulgar” or “worthless” scroll in contrast to a “perfect” or “authentic” scroll if those really were the views of the community that possessed them? Second, as numerous other scrolls were discovered and deciphered, the same pattern continued to unfold in large quantity. 89

As we saw above, the distinction between vulgar and elegant texts, which comes from classical studies, does not relate to text-families but to the care and quality of its scribal production, and 1QIsaa would certainly qualify as an “elegant” text. 90 Tov further states, in his history of the biblical text: “One should remember that each of the biblical books has a separate history—each one developed in a different way and received canonical status at a different time. The number of variant readings that one might expect to find in a particular book is a direct result of the complexity of its literary development and textual transmission.” 91 It is not clear what notion of canonicity Tov has in mind here. “Canonical status” apparently has nothing to do with the decision of later religious leaders but is only a way of speaking about the “final edited form” of the text. Yet this definition gets him into some difficulty 88. Albrektson, “Reflections,” 49–65. 89. E. Ulrich, “Our Sharper Focus on the Bible and Theology Thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls,” CBQ 66 (2004): 3–4. 90. Note Kahle’s observation that quality scrolls of this sort were found in the caves of the Dead Sea in the time of Origen and used by him in his Hexapla; there apparently was a similar discovery at the time of the Karaites about 800 c.e. (Kahle, The Cairo Geniza, 16– 17, 243). 91. Tov, Textual Criticism, 196.

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

327

when dealing with the Torah, which it is supposed, had special canonical status long before the other books. But in spite of this apparent early authoritative status, “the quantity of variant readings that it contains was not less than the other books.” 92 The parallel with Homer is obvious. Homer was surely “canonical” in the sixth century b.c.e. but continued to receive textual modification for several centuries. Tov’s hypothetical reconstruction of the development of the biblical text depends on the assumption that one can begin with a “final edited form” of the text of each biblical book that was approved as authoritative—therefore canonical—at that point and produced and circulated as such. This Urtext also seems to correspond to the content and limits of the MT, preserved primarily but not exclusively in the MT family of texts. For Tov, the objective of textual criticism is to construct an elaborate and complex structure of arguments that will support this hypothetical Urtext that was the work of the phantom “final redactor.” If we cannot accept the assumption of or belief in such an editor or editorial process, then an entirely new approach to textual criticism must be developed to conform with the evidence.

Editors in the Book of Jeremiah In chap. 7 of his handbook on textual criticism, Tov takes up the issue again of the relationship of textual criticism to literary criticism and seeks to offer evidence in support of his notion that the LXX or the Qumran scrolls, when compared with the MT, point to the existence of earlier editions of particular books or parts of books of the Bible. He states: This chapter contains examples of data from the textual witnesses of the Bible which are relevant to literary criticism and which, it would seem, often contain earlier formulations of the books included in ˜ Ê Í ◊. Some pertain to an entire book which was at one time circulated in an earlier edition, while others relate to a single chapter, and again others to a single section. These data point to the existence of early editions which differed slightly from the later one. . . . However, these limited differences have farreaching implications on our understanding of the growth of the biblical books as a whole. 93

One of the important examples that Tov offers is the text of Jeremiah, which in the Old Greek is a shorter text that is also attested now in the Qumran fragments 4QJerb, d and which is longer in the MT and the principal versions. Tov expresses the view that the Old Greek “reflects a first, short, edition of Jeremiah, ‘edition I,’ which differs from the expanded edition reflected in ˜ Ê Í ◊, ‘edition II.’” 94 It is basic to his whole approach as outlined earlier that the expansions in the MT be interpreted as evidence of

92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., 317. 94. Ibid., 321.

328

Chapter 8

a second, revised edition. And because this later edition becomes the final, “canonical” edition for his “normative” Judaism, the earlier edition is just a stage in the compositional process and not a concern of textual criticism. At this point, we should recall the fact, presented earlier in our study, that the text of Homer was also extant for an extended period of time in long, medium, and short texts, and in the case of Homer, it was the medium text that became the vulgate. But even this text contained many interpolations according to the editors of Alexandria, which they obelized but did not remove. The “editions” of the critics did not dictate the “final form” of the vulgate, and the whole discussion of earlier and later editions along the lines that Tov suggests for biblical studies is meaningless in the history of the Homeric text. There is an alternative approach to the long and short texts of Jeremiah that in my view shows much more promise, and for this reason I will set it out in some detail. William McKane, in the first volume of his very learned commentary, 95 likewise addresses the question of the text-critical differences between the MT and the Greek and other versions, which are all set out in meticulous detail for Jeremiah chaps. 1–25. In addition, he discusses the problem of the prose passages that are usually characterized as Deuteronomistic and editorial and how the addition of these passages within the corpus (his term) relates to the plusses in the MT. This concern parallels Tov’s, but McKane’s approach is altogether different. McKane reviews two contrary approaches to the prose passages, one (Thiel) that asserts their Deuteronomistic character and ascribes them to a Deuteronomistic redactor, and one (Weippert), using similar linguistic arguments, that attributes the prose passages to Jeremiah himself. 96 McKane summarizes Thiel’s explanation of the Jeremianic prose as that of a Deuteronomistic editor as follows: If the prose of the book of Jeremiah has external affiliations, he uses these to demonstrate that it is Deuteronomic or Deuteronomistic and is the work of D. If it does not have these external connections, he still maintains that it derives from this editor, but the argument is internal to the prose of the book of Jeremiah and might be regarded as an argument in a circle. It depends on identifying affinities between different passages of prose, their constitution as a group, and the conclusion that they all have the marks of D. This is a case which is built up gradually by proceeding from one passage to another, and it has cumulative force only if one agrees with every step in the argument. 97

McKane argues that, while Thiel cannot make the case for a “comprehensive and systematic character” for the D material (and therefore by implication its editorial nature), he nevertheless does not deny its Deuteronomistic affinities (contra Weippert). In his view, what gives to the prose of Jeremiah 95. William McKane, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Jeremiah, vol. 1: Introduction and Commentary on Jeremiah I–XXV (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986). 96. Ibid., section B, xli–xlvii. 97. Ibid., xlvi.

spread is 3 points long

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

329

its distinctiveness is the way in which it is influenced by the corpus of the book, of which it is a part. It is precisely this interaction between the Deuteronomistic element of the work and the poetic corpus that McKane seeks to explore. He explains his use of the term corpus: I shall urge that there is a nucleus of the book of Jeremiah which is distinctive, so that the prose which is generated by it, in connection with the processes of growth and aggregation which result in our extant book, is, to a greater or lesser degree, influenced by this distinctiveness. Hence we might expect vocabulary identical with it in the Deuteronomic-Deuteronomistic literature to have different nuances in Jeremiah, because it serves the interests of a corpus which has its own particular character and orientation.98

In carrying forward this examination of the prose passages, McKane warns: A correct appreciation of how the prose functions in the Jeremianic corpus and how it serves the ends of that corpus is more important than the attachment of particular labels to it. As matters stand, with continuous crossreferences to Deuteronomic-Deuteronomistic prose the fashion of scholarship, one is always in danger of succumbing to a condition of distraction and disorientation. 99

McKane’s own general assessment of the nature of the prose passages is: We are dealing with a complicated, untidy accumulation of material, extending over a very long period and to which many people have contributed. The supposition that a major part of it, including much of the prose, was already in existence in the lifetime of the prophet Jeremiah is a literary judgement which does not seem to take serious account of the vexatious difficulties and baffling inconcinnities which emerge with a detailed study of the book. 100

McKane sets this view of his corpus over against Thiel’s notion of a wellconstructed editorial product. He states: He attributes to D comprehensive editorial intentions and policies, and systematic theological principles, which I cannot gather from the text. I am convinced that there is a danger of calling into existence a Deuteronomistic editor, investing him with an editorial policy, determining the contours of his mind, and requiring the prose of 1–25 to be amenable to his hypothesis” 101 [italics mine].

Much the same could be said for the notion of the redactor in the Old Testament in general.

98. Ibid., xlvii. 99. Ibid. One can say the same thing about the current scholarly obsession with redactors. 100. Ibid., xlviii–xlix. 101. Ibid., xlix.

330

Chapter 8

In contrast to the architectonic approach to the Prosareden, McKane sets forth his own understanding of the dynamic of their development. He states: The kinds of impetus which produced growth and enlarged a pre-existing nucleus of Jeremianic material are not necessarily related to a grand, theological scheme and perhaps do not extend beyond narrow contextual limits. The ‘trigger’ may consist of no more than a single verse or a few verses; the expansion may have no more than a narrow, localized exegetical intention. It may be entirely innocent of the comprehensive, systematic theological objectives which it is customary to seek in the prose of 1–25. We must take more account of expansions of such limited scope in our efforts to understand the processes by which the Jeremianic corpus was developed. 102

From this, McKane develops the idea of a “rolling corpus” and applies this to the differences between the LXX and MT, where the notion can be tested by comparison with actual texts. “The main purpose of the enterprise,” he says, is not to recover an ‘original’ Hebrew text, but to explore the possibilities of uncovering the history of the Hebrew text. Hence the principal questions which I have asked are these: What do the differences between Sept. and MT tell us about the history of the Hebrew text of Jer 1–25? Is it possible to ascertain which of them represents a more original condition of the Hebrew text? Is Sept. a witness to a different and shorter text than MT, or is there only one Hebrew text to be recovered (MT) from which Sept. is derived by processes of abridgement and modification? I have concluded that Sept. gives us access to a Hebrew text which is shorter than MT, and so enables us to identify expansions of the Hebrew text in the period which lies between the Hebrew Vorlage of Sept. and MT. 103

It is from this text-critical evaluation that McKane tests his concept of a “rolling corpus.” He comes to quite the opposite conclusion from Tov, when he states: The expansions considered in detail in A.1(c) [the longer pluses in MT] are often scribal rather than editorial. They have exegetical, interpretive, harmonizing functions, and they do not look beyond the small pieces of text to which they are attached, in some cases individual verses. Other expansions (e.g. 25:1–7; 8–14) can be associated with a broader editorial intention, but not with an overarching editorial plan or a systematic theological tendency. It would be unnatural to interpret the examples of additions to the shorter text of Sept. . . . as evidence of a systematic process of redaction. 104

This description hardly fits Tov’s notion of the MT’s Jeremiah being a revised edition of the earlier first edition of Jeremiah represented by the LXX. 102. Ibid., l. 103. Ibid., l–li. 104. Ibid., li.

spread is 6 points long

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

331

There is no point at which some authority produced a decisive edition for distribution. On the basis of this conclusion, McKane goes on to postulate similar types of expansions for the MT that do not have any foundation in textual criticism. Guided by his examination of the cases controlled by the textual evidence, he puts forth the suggestion that “a similar pattern of secondary expansion was already present in the Hebrew Vorlage of Sept., so that no process of textual comparison as between MT and Sept. will disclose it.” 105 McKane sets forth a number of such possible texts of this type and then considers various ways of accounting for this rolling corpus, of which the most promising one is that of “generation” or “triggering,” by which “poetry generates prose,” “poetry generates poetry,” and “prose generates prose.” 106 From his extended discussion, McKane draws the following conclusions: If the assumption is made that the shorter text of Sept. gives us access to a Hebrew text shorter than MT, the most stringent demonstration of the rolling corpus idea is the examination of the history of the Hebrew text in the area between the Hebrew Vorlage on which Sept. rests and the extant Massoretic text [in the case of the longer pluses in MT]. A comparison of MT and Sept. reveals how the Hebrew text has developed and shows that we are not encountering a systematic, comprehensive scheme of editing, but exegetical additions of small scope, operating within limited areas of text. This exegetical expansion or commentary is triggered by a verse or a few verses of pre-existing text, and it is this procedure which is indicated by the term ‘rolling corpus’. Such triggering or generation necessarily has a piecemeal character: the pre-existing Hebrew text, as represented by Sept., has generated a kind of expansion which does not serve the ends of a thoughtful, all-embracing redaction or a superintending, theological tendency. 107

Nothing could speak more eloquently for the thesis of this book and against Tov’s scheme of a clearly defined compositional stage of two editions, the later “authoritative” edition (MT) becoming the sole concern of textual criticism. McKane’s thesis also disputes Tov’s earlier statement that in no case is the MT a product of expansionistic, abbreviating, or harmonizing tendencies. 108 Even though these tendencies were not “informed with allembracing editorial principles or a theological plan,” 109 they were nonetheless expansionistic and exegetical in character. 110 This is a most important 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid., lxii–lxxxi. 107. Ibid., lxxxi–lxxxii. 108. Tov, Textual Criticism, 161. 109. McKane, Jeremiah, 1:lxxxiii. 110. In Jeremiah, 2:clxxii–clxxiii, McKane simply confirms his earlier view about the textual history of Jeremiah. He states: “The evidence gathered from chaps. 26–52 leads me to conclusions similar to those worked out in detail in Jeremiah I with regard to the corpus of the book of Jeremiah. It is the product of a long growth extending into the post-exilic period and generally, if not universally, the shorter text of Sept. is a witness to a more original Hebrew text than that of MT. Thus Sept. has substantial text-critical significance and rests

332

Chapter 8

conclusion that has broad implications with regard to other parts of the Old Testament. 111

Editing the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls When the MT is understood as the Textus Receptus, the primary form of the biblical text for “normative” Judaism and the basic text of textual criticism, as articulated by Talmon and Tov, then the scrolls of Qumran become important primarily as confirmation of the great antiquity of this textual form, and texts that do not conform to it are viewed as “vulgar” and “sectarian.” This view has been challenged by Harmut Stegeman. 112 In a long article, he reviews the whole debate about the identity of the Qumran community and comes to the conclusion that, up until the destruction of the Temple, the Essenes were a major religious group within Judaism, representing a far larger constituency than is reflected by the size of the settlement at Qumran. The size of the library alone and the multiple copies of so many major texts suggests that it was a focal point for a much larger religious faction that was likely a rival to the Pharisees. The great diversity of texts witnesses to this group as “the main Jewish union in the late Second Temple times” and gives added significance to the textual evidence of the scrolls. Stegeman summarizes his view as follows: “If there was a ‘mainstream Judaism’ in late Second Temple times, this mainstream was in my opinion represented by the Essenes, not by the Pharisees who were the real ‘sectarians’ at that time. The Essenes hated those ‘seekers after smooth things,’ since they always tried to find the easiest way to observe the Torah instead of observing it ‘with all the heart’ according to the Shemaº Yisrael (Deut 6:4).” 113 Indeed, there is also good reason to believe that the texts that were found at Qumran were only a small portion of the original library and that many fine texts had been removed from the region over the years. on a Hebrew Vorlage shorter than MT.” McKane even suggests that some of the pluses could be attributed to the period later than the second century b.c., that is, four to six hundred years after the time of Jeremiah himself and the earliest written collection of his prophecies. This would extend Tov’s “compositional stage” beyond all reasonable limits and create a very long overlap with the “transmission stage,” which completely undermines the distinction between the two. 111. See also Ulrich, “Our Sharper Focus,” 6–7, who asserts: “As the full LXX and MT textual forms of the Book of Jeremiah are analyzed in comparison, it becomes clear that the LXX is an earlier edition of the book and that the MT is a secondary, expanded version based on the earlier edition attested by 4QJerb and the LXX” (p. 7). 112. Harmut Stegeman, “The Qumran Essenes: Local Members of the Main Jewish Union in Late Second Temple Times,” in The Madrid Qumran Congress: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Madrid, 18–21 March 1991 (ed. J. Trebolle Barrera and L.Vegas Montaner; 2 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 1992), 1:83–166. His view is summarized in H. Stegemann, “Qumran Challenges for the Next Century,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls: Fifty Years after Their Discovery (ed. L. H. Schiffman, E. Tov, and J. C. VanderKam; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2000), 944–50. 113. Ibid., “Qumran Challenges,” 950.

spread is 9 points long

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

333

Kahle noted that both in the time of Origen in the third century and again at the end of the eighth century, texts were discovered in the region of Jericho and the Dead Sea that were then used by learned “editors” in their study of the biblical text. 114 Eugene Ulrich has also argued that the biblical scrolls found at Qumran may not be dismissed as “sectarian” and “vulgar” and only demonstrate that there was a range of text-types in existence in the Second Temple period. The notion of a “standard” text is anachronistic for antiquity. He states: “There was no ‘Masoretic Text’ in antiquity, nor was there a category of ‘Proto-Masoretic Text.’ Indeed, there does not appear to be any evidence prior to the end of the first century of our era that any Jewish group showed awareness or concern about the various text forms or that their texts differed from those preserved in the temple at Jerusalem.” 115 As we have seen above in chap. 3, this restates the view of Harry Orlinsky, though from a different perspective. Ulrich quotes the recent view of Tov: “The MT was not selected in antiquity because of its textual superiority. In fact, it was probably not selected at all. From a certain point onwards it simply was used.” 116 Ulrich continues: Thus, if the MT cannot be shown to have been the authoritative standard text in that period, then the MT cannot be used to stigmatize the variant texts from Qumran as vulgar and unreliable. It was, after all, the Qumran manuscripts that proved that the Masoretic text forms were genuine, ancient, and accurate. In fact, once the MT is seen as simply one varied collection from among the variant forms circulating among the Jews, it can then be seen that the biblical scrolls of Qumran fit neatly and coherently into the general picture of the text in that period.117

If this view is now emerging as the consensus, then it gives to the textual history of the Hebrew Bible a whole new perspective, because it eliminates the notion of the MT as the end result of a conscious editorial process of examination of variant texts, collation, and emendation. In this, it is very similar to the development of the Homeric vulgate. In a congress on the Dead Sea Scrolls held in 1991, Bruno Chiesa made the following comment on the history of the biblical text: “The Qumran discoveries are important for the textual history of the biblical books inasmuch as they have thrown some light upon an otherwise almost unknown period of the long way to MT. Their importance is comparable to that of the papyri in the textual history of some classical texts.” 118 Chiesa does not say 114. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza, 16–17, 243. 115. Ulrich, “Our Sharper Focus,” 11–12. 116. E. Tov, “The Status of the Masoretic Text in Modern Text Editions of the Hebrew Bible: Relevance of Canon,” in The Canon Debate (ed. L. M. McDonald and J. A. Sanders; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002), 242. This seems to represent a significant shift from Tov’s view expressed in his textbook, which was discussed above. 117. Ulrich, “Our Sharper Focus,” 12. 118. B. Chiesa, “Textual History and Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Old Testament,” in The Madrid Qumran Congress: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Dead Sea Scrolls,

334

Chapter 8

anything more about this comparison with the Greek papyri of classical texts, and this relationship still seems to be largely ignored, but as I have indicated frequently throughout this book, this comparison is essential, especially as it relates to the texts of Homer and the Pentateuch. In both cases, there are long periods between the time in which the poems of Homer and the Pentateuch were regarded as authoritative and “canonical” and yet were transmitted in both long or expansionistic and short or more conservative texts until they reached a vulgate or standard form. However, it cannot be assumed that the vulgate was the result of a decision by “editors” who were responsible either for the expansions, on the one hand, or the shorter “revised” text, on the other. This conclusion now is quite apparent in the case of Homeric studies, and this also is most likely in the case of the Pentateuch as well. Some interesting examples of long texts of the Pentateuch exist among the scrolls from Qumran, and to these we will give brief attention. There are a small number of texts found at Qumran, most notably 4QpaleoExodm and 4QNumb, that have many of the same expansionist characteristics that are present in the Samaritan Pentateuch and go by the designation pre- or proto-Samaritan. 119 These characteristics include various forms of harmonization, such as changes or interpolations made on the basis of parallel texts involving single words or more extensive quotations, or supplying missing material that was implied by a reference back to an earlier episode, or expanding texts so that the divine commands are made to correspond more fully with their fulfillment. In addition, there are also linguistic and grammatical differences and peculiarities. These sorts of differences from the predominant proto-MT texts are frequently characterized as “editorial,” and the larger interpolations are also considered literary, not merely textual. However, it is noteworthy that the particular ideological features of the Samaritan Pentateuch having to do with the choice of Mount Gerizim as the central place of worship are not present in the pre-Samaritan texts of Qumran. However, it remains a debatable question whether or not these sorts of features mark the pre-Samaritan texts as a distinct recension. 120 Frank Cross, in a discussion of what constitutes recensions or editions in textual criticism, states: While on the subject of editions of biblical books, I cannot resist a remark or two. Jastram’s edition of 4QNumb reinforces the view that it may be better to speak of the proto-Samaritan text of the Pentateuch as a recension rather than merely as a textual family. That is, there is the evidence of conscious and extensive expansion and revision of the text, not merely the usual accumulation of inadvertent errors, minor explicating pluses, modernization, and intrusion of isolated parallel readings, the usual stuff of Madrid, 18–21 March 1991 (ed. J. Trebolle Barrera and L. Vegas Montaner; 2 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 1992), 1:270. 119. Tov, Textual Criticism, 80–100. 120. The remarks by Tov regarding what constitutes a distinct recension (ibid., 160–61; see also above) are quite confusing.

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

335

scribal transmission. Something much more systematic appears to have been undertaken. 121

In Cross’s view, what defines an “edition” or “recension” is the “conscious and extensive expansion and revision” of a text, presumably by an editor. Cross sums up his remarks about “editions”: The recovery of editions and literary levels in biblical works begins a process of no small importance in biblical studies: the uniting of text-criticism and literary criticism in scholarly approaches to biblical literature. During the past century there has been a divorce between higher and lower criticism, properly a scandal of excessive specialization, with dreary results. The marriage, or rather the remarriage of the two disciplines . . . is therefore an event of unusual promise. 122

The irony of this remark, in the light of our larger study, should be obvious. It was the way in which editors were introduced into textual criticism as those responsible for the major “recensions” of the Hebrew Bible and then extended back into the literary criticism of the Bible, especially the Pentateuch, that created the myth of the “redactor” and redaction criticism. Let us examine, in a little more detail, the text of 4QNumb as edited by N. Jastram under Cross’s tutelage. Jastram describes it as follows: The fragments come from the latter two-thirds of the book, and from the last half of the book no column is completely lost. About 9% of all the words in Numbers are preserved fully or in part in this manuscript. The manuscript was written during a critical time in the history of the transmission of the biblical text, at the beginning of the Herodian era (ca. 30 b.c.). 123

This dating is important because, as Cross suggests above, this text is regarded as a proto-Samaritan text and not part of the “proto-rabbinic” tradition and, while it may have been composed about 30 b.c.e., it was copied and preserved down to about 70 c.e. within this community. Jastram’s comment on 30 b.c.e. as the date of its composition is significant for his understanding of the text. He states: “This was after the Samaritan temple had been destroyed by John Hyrcanus (128 b.c.), but before the recensional activities of the rabbis at the turn of the era, which suppressed the “non-Masoretic” textual traditions.” 124 It is, of course, far from proved that the rabbis engaged in any “recensional activities” or that they deliberately “suppressed” other text-traditions.

121. Cross, “Some Notes,” 10. 122. Ibid., 10–11. 123. N. Jastram, “The Text of 4QNumb,” in The Madrid Qumran Congress: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Madrid, 18–21 March 1991 (ed. J. Trebolle Barrera and L. Vegas Montaner; 2 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 1992), 1:177. 124. Ibid.

336

Chapter 8

In order to illustrate the “non-Masoretic” and expansionistic character of this text and the history of the Bible’s text-transmission, Jastram focuses on “the secondary readings, that is, the readings which have become corrupt in the process of transmission.” 125 Among the secondary readings, Jastram looks at “those readings of 4QNumb shared by some other witness” and “those readings found only in 4QNumb.” 126 The readings within the first category are a number of “major interpolations from the book of Deuteronomy that have been inserted into the text of Numbers,” which have long been known to be characteristic of the Samaritan Pentateuch and were therefore thought to have been the product of this community. The texts of Qumran, such as 4QNumb, however, have changed this whole perspective. “It is now known from texts that have been discovered at Qumran that the major interpolations both in Numbers and in Exodus were already part of the tradition from which the Samaritans drew their text, and that the only major interpolation attributable to the Samaritans is the final commandment of the Samaritan Decalogue, commanding worship on Mt. Gerizim.” 127 This leads to the conclusion that interpolations of this kind “were native to an expansionistic textual tradition at home in Palestine during the last two centuries b.c.” and “that they were part of a common tradition, a text-type, rather than that they were independently produced by scribes . . . making interpolations into the text.” 128 The interpolations consist primarily of speeches drawn from Deuteronomy and attached to the appropriate narrative of events in Numbers. From a review of the various examples, Jastram concludes: “Taken together, they also suggest that the interpolations in the Palestinian tradition were probably made for scholarly, rather than for theological, reasons. The same sort of activity often occurred in non-theological contexts when complementary texts of the same narrative were copied and reworked. The scholars who worked with those texts felt the desire to harmonize and interpolate, to weave the complementary texts into one.” 129 Such interpolations are also characteristic of “long” texts of Homer’s poems, but they are hardly “scholarly.” The scholars of Alexandria who edited the classical texts endeavored to eliminate the interpolations or at least stigmatize them. Secondary interpolations that are not found in other witnesses, such as the Samaritan Pentateuch, are more problematic because they are based on extensive textual reconstructions by Jastram. In these cases, speeches that have already occurred in Numbers are repeated in a later place. This is precisely the common characteristic of interpolations in Homer—namely, that they are drawn from elsewhere in the same work or closely related texts. Jas-

125. Ibid. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid., 182. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid., 184. In a footnote (n. 11), he refers for comparison to “the textual history of classical literature,” without further references.

spread is 3 points long

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

337

tram concludes from these unique interpolations that 4QNumb “provides an example of a text that is more developed than that of the Samaritan Pentateuch” but also that “they must have shared a common development.” 130 It appears that this “Palestinian” text-tradition continued to “expand” after the break with the Samaritan community in the late second century b.c.e. This also suggests that this “text-type,” which belongs to two quite different religious communities, is not “local” and is therefore not sectarian. This is problematic for the theories of both Cross and Talmon. Furthermore, it is clear that the production of additions and interpolations is not the result of a particular editorial revision of the text, as Cross suggests, but is much more in the nature of a pervasive scribal habit: copyists routinely wanted to “improve” individual texts. The other pre-Samaritan text, 4QpaleoExodm, has much the same characteristics, except that it is earlier and parallels closely the expansions of SamP. 131 Judith Sanderson characterizes it in the following way: “The scroll shares all major, typological features with [SamP], including all the major expansions of that tradition where it is extant (twelve), with the single exception of the new tenth commandment inserted in Exodus 20 from Deuteronomy 11 and 27 regarding the altar on Mount Gerizim.” 132 Yet, this difference is quite significant. The particular ideological change made by the Samaritan community to legitimate their place of worship took place after the adoption of this textual tradition, which continued in use within Judaism for some time. However, once the specific change regarding the choice of Mount Gerizim was made, it was clearly unacceptable to Jews committed to worship in the Temple in Jerusalem and likely led to the disparagement of this particular text-tradition of the Pentateuch among them. The matter, however, does not end here. As Ulrich points out concerning a Qumran text of Joshua: The oldest manuscript of the Book of Joshua also offered a tantalizing puzzle. One large fragment contained the end of Joshua chap. 8 followed by the beginning of chap. 5. That is, the building of the first altar and the subsequent reading of the Torah preceded the circumcision ceremony and the conquest. Again, this turned out not to be a “confused” text but to present the earliest version of an important episode. Where did Joshua build the first altar in the newly entered promised land? He built it near Gilgal immediately after crossing the Jordan, says 4QJosha. 133

Ulrich cites a number of additional witnesses that support this version of the story as original. The SamP in Deut 27:4 places the first altar on Mount Gerizim, as one would expect, whereas the MT displaces the text in Joshua to chap. 8 and places the altar on Mount Ebal ( Josh 8:30). Ulrich continues: 130. Ibid., 196. 131. See J. E. Sanderson, An Exodus Scroll from Qumran: 4QpaleoExod m and the Samaritan Tradition (HSS 30; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986); Ulrich, “Our Sharper Focus,” 4. 132. Sanderson, An Exodus Scroll, 307. 133. Ulrich, “Our Sharper Focus,” 5

338

Chapter 8

Commentators had long realized that Mount Ebal makes little sense, for Joshua marches twenty miles north to build an altar on an otherwise unimportant spot, only to turn around, head back south, and abandon the altar in enemy territory. Thus, the oldest version of the story logically had the altar built immediately upon the entry to the promised land, just where one would expect it. Some northerner—possibly a Samaritan, possibly an earlier Samarian—secondarily made the claim that God wanted the altar built on the hallowed Mount Gerizim. In counterreaction, some later Southerner—perhaps a Jerusalem priest or a Judean scribe—tried to remove legitimacy from Samaritan claims by replacing Mount Gerizim with the implausible Mount Ebal (the mountain of the curse), thus producing the third in a series of versions, the one that we now read in all our Bibles.134

While the second version of the Joshua altar story has long been recognized as being motivated by Samaritan sectarian interest, the third version as reflected in the MT is an even later “sectarian” revision directed against the Samaritan claims. Because the Samaritan revision of Deut 27:4 can hardly be dated very early, the MT revision with Mount Ebal in both Deut 27:4 and Josh 8:30 must be quite late and is more likely to be a rabbinic revision. What is even more remarkable is that the MT revision followed the SamP displacement of the text of Josh 8:30–35 from its original location before chap. 5 to its present location. This is not the sort of “revision” that could be attributed to the sopherim, if one is to assume that there is any similarity between them and the Alexandrian scholars of Homer. Sanderson sums up her study of “editorial and scribal practice” within the Exodus Scroll (4QpaleoExodm) by pointing to various kinds of scribal change. Sometimes scribes “took the liberty of altering the structure of the work of Exodus (and of Deuteronomy) but not of altering the words,” or they changed the text “by deliberately adding words into sentences or altering words and phrases,” or “they inadvertently caused slight accretions and variants in the text.” 135 In a general comparison of the deliberate expansions in the book of Exodus among the four witnesses, 4QpaleoExodm, SamP, LXX, and MT, Sanderson makes the following observations: The major expansions show that some scribes in this period felt the freedom to add liberally to the biblical text for literary purposes, such as filling out the narrative or creating greater harmony with a parallel in another part of Exodus or in Deuteronomy, or for theological and perhaps political purposes. . . . However—and this is a crucial qualification—the major expansions found in the four witnesses were severely restricted to passages that were already in the Torah (and possibly Job and Ezekiel). None of the major expansions which have been discovered involved freedom to compose text. No new text was added. Instead, whatever new effect was achieved resulted from repetition of passages already in Exodus,

134. Ibid.. See also the remarks of Sanderson, An Exodus Scroll, 317–20. 135. Sanderson, ibid., 312–13 (emphasis is in the original).

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

339

or from importation of passages already in Deuteronomy, or from new combinations of passages already in Exodus and/or Deuteronomy. 136

The exception to this general characterization is, of course, the Samaritan addition of the eleventh commandment in Exodus 20 to build an altar on Mount Gerizim and the counter-response by the rabbis in the MT. But as Sanderson points out, “even this ‘sectarian’ expansion followed a pattern identical to that of other expansions. The method was exactly the same as that involved in some of the other expansions, only the motivation was different.” 137 Regarding “moderate and minor expansions and alterations,” Sanderson makes the following characterizations: We have also found many expansions or alterations of moderate length, for purposes such as making a legal pericope more generally applicable, filling out the story, harmonizing minor features of the text, emphasizing aspects of a narrative, usually the miraculous, and for clarification. Varying degrees of deliberation seem to have been involved on the part of the various scribes. There are many expansions or alterations of a minor character, such as varying order of words and phrases, substitution of more familiar or less familiar words, addition or omission of minor words and morphemes, unconscious harmonization to the immediate context or stock expressions in one’s mind. 138

Sanderson expresses the opinion that scribes made their expansions and alterations with the intent of improving the text and did this not by adding something completely new but only by using something that was already present elsewhere in the text. This is the same technique that we saw in the case of the 4QNumb text and that was common in the text-history of Homer. Yet, from the point of view of the scholarly editors, these alterations were corruptions and contrary to the best editorial principles, even those of antiquity. This brings us to the question, suggested by Cross’s remarks above, of the extent to which the expansions, particularly the longer ones, are literary and therefore “redactional,” to use current scholarly parlance. The case is similar to the short and the long texts of Jeremiah, as reflected in the LXX and MT, respectively. At this point, I would remind the reader of McKane’s discussion of this issue, as set forth above. McKane rejects the notion of a Deuteronomistic editor and an overarching editorial design and replaces this with his own notion of a “rolling corpus.” I repeat his characterization of the expansions in MT of Jeremiah: The expansions . . . are often scribal rather than editorial. They have exegetical, interpretive, harmonizing functions, and they do not look beyond

136. Ibid., 299. 137. Ibid., 301 (emphasis in the original). 138. Ibid., 301–2.

340

Chapter 8

the small pieces of text to which they are attached, in some cases individual verses. Other expansions . . . can be associated with a broader editorial intention, but not with an overarching editorial plan or a systematic theological tendency. It would be unnatural to interpret the examples of additions to the shorter text of Sept. . . . as evidence of a systematic process of redaction. 139

The similarity to the two pre-Samaritan texts of Qumran is obvious. Nevertheless, McKane goes further, because he extends his notion of the rolling corpus back beyond what may be controlled by textual criticism to the earlier literary level and seeks continuity in the whole literary process from the earliest expansions of the text to expansions that are obviously quite late. The same appears to be the case with the Pentateuch, based on the more limited evidence of the two expansive pre-Samaritan texts and their comparison with the other witnesses: SamP, MT, and LXX. Finally, it should be emphasized that this kind of literary activity engaged in by copyists should not be connected with scribal markings related to the correction of copy errors and the like, as discussed in chap. 3. It is the association of signs marking copying errors in the MT with the sopherim by Lieberman and others, who also regard the sopherim as the critical editors and revisers of the MT who produced its “final edition,” that has created some confusion. Tov has made a good case for a Qumran scribal school that employed a varied system of copy correction based, very likely, on the collation of the text against its exemplar by the scribe himself or another scribe. 140 Although some of these customs are similar to scribal practice elsewhere, including the methods of the Alexandrians, we do not find any hint of the kinds of critical sigla, the obelus and the asterisk, that would suggest that there was a level of editing like that found in the scholarly Hellenistic and Roman tradition. Scribal corrections are intended to conserve the text and work in quite the opposite direction from the textual expansions discussed above.

The Editions of the Septuagint and Other Early Greek Recensions Discussion of editorial or recensional activity has become exceedingly complex, confusing, and controversial, especially for the nonspecialist, and I will not pretend that I can sort it all out in a few pages here. For comparative purposes, the Septuagint (LXX) is generally cited according to the critical editions of the Göttingen Septuagint series and, where these texts are still lacking for some biblical books, the older edition of A. Rahlfs, Septuaginta. Both of these editions have been reconstructed critically under the assumption of the de Lagarde view that there once was an original LXX for the various

139. McKane, Jeremiah, 1:li. 140. Tov, Textual Criticism, 213–17.

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

341

books of the Bible. Within the body of textual witnesses to the Septuagint, as well as alongside them, there were revisions (recensions) of the LXX. Tov sets forth the two basic conditions for identifying these revisions: A given textual tradition is considered a revision (recension) of © if two conditions are met: (1) © and the revision share a common textual basis. If such a common basis cannot be recognized, the two sources comprise separate translations rather than a source and its revision. The existence of a common basis is based upon the assumption of distinctive agreements in vocabulary between the two texts which set them apart from the remainder of the books of ©. (2) The revision corrects © in a certain direction, generally towards a more precise reflection of its Hebrew source. 141

Within the LXX, there is evidence of revisions of this sort in the so-called kaige-Theodotion recension and the Lucianic recension, both of which are thought to have precursors long before their incorporation into the LXX text-tradition. On the other hand, those that stand alongside the LXX and were used by Origen in his Hexapla to “correct” the LXX were the recensions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion. In addition to these, Origen also used three other unnamed texts for parts of his larger work. Earlier examples of these revisions can be see in a Greek scroll of the Minor Prophets that was found in Na˙al Óever in 1952 and published by D. Barthélemy, which he named the kaige recension. 142 This text was regarded as a precursor of Theodotion’s recension (called proto-Theodotion), with affinities to the unnamed “Quinta” column of the Hexapla and some parts of the LXX in Judges and Lamentations. Evidence of this early recension, dated to the early first century, was also seen in biblical quotations in Philo, Josephus, the Gospel of Matthew, and Justin Martyr. What all these revisions are thought to represent is a correction of the Greek text to bring it more in line with the Hebrew text of the day. There are, however, some very real problems with the various descriptions of the relationship of these texts both to the Greek and Hebrew texts they used and the relationship of them to each other. If one assumes the Lagardian model or the “local texts” model, then the texts described as a revision of the Old Greek text on the basis of the MT or proto-MT text as well as an early proto-Theodotion text appear to be the basis of the widely scattered quotations in the first century and the Greek text used for further revision in the second century. If, on the other hand, one assumes a view closer to Kahle’s perspective, which emphasizes the great diversity of texts both among the Greek texts alongside the standard LXX and also a similar diversity of Hebrew texts as exemplified at Qumran, then it is much more difficult to say how these translations were created. The Vorlage of proto-Theodotion 141. Tov, Textual Criticism, 143. 142. D. Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila (VTSup 10; Leiden: Brill, 1963).

342

Chapter 8

or the so-called kaige recension could be a Hebrew text that contained some features of both the MT and the Vorlage of the LXX and was primarily a new translation from the Hebrew, with only a little help from the LXX in a few places. Thus, some scholars emphasize the translational nature of these Greek recensions as accounting for most of their features, and others emphasize the revision of a standard Greek in the direction of a standard Hebrew text. If it is the case that many of the early quotations of the Greek Bible do not reflect the LXX but seem to conform more closely to proto-Theodotion, then this fact leads to some puzzling results. Thus, it is quite remarkable that Philo, a leading figure in the Alexandrian synagogue, quotes from this “revision,” which he thinks is the miraculous unalterable text of the Seventy, even if he himself could not tell the difference. 143 One way to get around this problem is to suggest that the text of Philo was changed to conform to the later recension of Theodotion; but Kahle rejects this: The development was certainly in the opposite direction. The Greek Bible which Philo had before him was one which was current among the Jews at that time. What a Jewish text of the Bible at the time of Philo looked like we see in the newly-found leather scroll with the text of the Minor Prophets. This text, written by Jews, is perhaps so old that it could have been used by Philo. It shows very many adaptations to the Hebrew original and to parallel translations in circulation among the Jews. The Greek text of the Torah which Philo used may have been similar. 144

In a similar fashion, we have texts in the New Testament, primarily but not exclusively, from Matthew, in which a Greek text of the Old Testament is being quoted that is clearly not from the Septuagint. Kahle compares the Matthew quotations of Isaiah with Theodotion and sees both agreement and disagreement. Regarding the three forms of the text—the Septuagint, Matthew, and Theodotion—Kahle states that they “are an excellent example of the character of a Greek Targum in the time before the standard text was created. We can assume that still other forms of text existed in the MSS of the Greek Bible which were in the hands of the early Christians.” 145 This view of the Septuagint as being in flux for a long time and of the revisions as multiple, targum-like translations suggests an entirely different textual history of the Greek versions and recensions than the textual history proposed by the Lagardian model. If one admits to multiple translations from the Greek in widely scattered places, not emanating from a single standard source, then it becomes very difficult to calculate the degree to which any particular example is a revision of the “Old Greek” text. Nevertheless, the contrary Lagardian viewpoint seems to be the one to which most Septuagint scholars today give their assent. As Albert Pietersma 143. P. E. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959), 247–49. 144. Ibid., 248. 145. Ibid., 251.

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

343

states: “the Lagarde-Kahle controversy of so-called Ur-Septuaginta versus Targum hypothesis has been decided in favor of Lagarde, and, to the best of my knowledge, no current LXX scholar seriously doubts that an Ur-Septuaginta did exist.” 146 Pietersma qualifies this statement in a footnote by explaining that of course he does not mean that the Greek Old Testament was produced as a single work but as “a collection of (sometimes) widely differing translation units” and that “the evident uniformity within these units is original and not secondary.” 147 Pietersma goes on to assert that, in spite of this agreement, “the primary task of LXX research” is “the recovery of the original text,” and that in the practice of textual criticism there is still a “wide discrepancy” in the text-history of the LXX among textual critics. Much of current discussion is focused on the Lucianic recension and the so-called kaige recension. At issue is the degree to which the Greek text of the LXX was being revised to bring it into greater conformity with the Hebrew text. There is generally no dispute about the fact that there was a Hebraizing tendency, as is especially evident in some Greek texts from Qumran, but there is considerable difference about the degree to which this is the case and whether or not this activity should be characterized as “recensional.” Much of this has to do with judgments about the translation techniques of the ancient translators and the reconstruction of the Old Greek. As Pietersma states: The problem of whether a given reading in LXX manuscripts that is demonstrably based on a Hebrew text constitutes the original text or should be regarded as a (secondary) Hebraizing correction is one which confronts the text-critic at many turns. . . . That LXX manuscripts were at times corrected to agree with the Hebraica veritas is indisputable. Whether many of the sporadic corrections were consciously or unconsciously introduced is immaterial to our present purpose. Since sporadic corrections can be found in all our early witnesses, a measure of harmonization with the Hebrew may be as old as the LXX itself, but our evidence for this is thin.148

However, as soon as one admits that corrections may be primarily “sporadic” and could have been unintentional as well as intentional and that they took place over an extended period of time, then it is problematic to lump them together and label them as a particular “recension.” Even if we accept the view that revisions of Greek versions were made to bring them into closer conformity with the Hebrew text that was in use in a particular synagogue or community, this has more to do with the problem of translation than it does with editing. The assumed revisions were carried out in a manner that is altogether different from the practice of Origen or Jerome, as reviewed above. In the case of these so-called recensions, it is simply that

146. A. Pietersma, “Septuagint Research: A Plea for a Return to Basic Issues,” VT 35 (1985): 298. 147. Ibid., 298 n. 3. 148. Ibid., 301.

344

Chapter 8

the Hebrew Bible in use by a particular group within Judaism at a certain time was viewed as the Hebraica veritas, and the Greek text was only an aid to Greek-speaking Jews, much as the Aramaic targums were to Aramaicspeaking Jews whose knowledge of Hebrew was deficient. Only when the Greek Bible was used in place of the Hebrew did it need the legitimation of complete equality with the Hebrew original, as in the Letter of Aristeas and the even more exaggerated versions in Philo and the Church Fathers. For Origen, this meant an effort to salvage the claims of both the Hebraica veritas and the koine form of the Greek Bible, with somewhat disastrous results for the Hexaplaric recension. Jerome ultimately opted for a direct translation of the Hebraica veritas into Latin, with some assistance from the three Greek translations found in the Hexapla. This translation process seems to be the closest approximation to the earlier Greek recensions. Yet, it would certainly be misleading to describe the final product of Jerome’s translation as a revision (recension) of the Old Latin or even a revision of the LXX. The various Greek, Latin, and other versions of the Old Testament belong to the realm of translations, using a wide range of translation technique for a variety of purposes, and should be dealt with in these terms first of all. 149 It is perhaps misleading to label them as “recensions,” which implies a certain degree of uniformity and interrelatedness based on conscious editorial activity that is not immediately discernible. 150 The matter can be illustrated by the following example. John Wevers has carefully examined a group of early papyrus fragments of the Greek Deuteronomy known as P. Rylands Gk. 458 (= Göttingen 957), “written ca. the middle of the second century b.c.” and “the oldest manuscript of the LXX text extant.” 151 He concludes from his examination: Its text stands extremely close to the original text. . . . The text also illustrates the phenomenon of ‘unconscious’ revision on the part of a bilingual scribe, a phenomenon also present in [papyrus] 848, and in the Qumran Greek fragments of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers. As long as copyists of LXX were Jews who knew their Hebrew text well, this could be expected. Only after the LXX fell into disfavor with the Jews by reason of its use by the Christian church are the copyists no longer bilingual, and the era of unconscious revision is at an end. 152

This observation suggests that much of what falls under the early Greek recensions consists of sporadic and unconscious revision, not revision characteristic of a recension proper. Perhaps an exception to these remarks can be noted with respect to the Lucianic recension of the LXX. In this case, some features of the text appear

149. S. P. Brock, “The Phenomenon of the Septuagint,” OtSt 17 (1972): 11–36. 150. See Pietersma, “Septuagint Research,” 304–9; he raises serious objections to the socalled kaige recension. 151. J. W. Wevers, “The Earliest Witness to the LXX Deuteronomy,” CBQ 39 (1977): 240. 152. Ibid., 243–44.

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

345

to suggest something more than merely a matter of translation style. 153 Natalio Fernández Marcos, in a review of the history of the discussion of the Lucianic recension, including notions about a proto-Lucianic recension, 154 calls special attention to the doctoral dissertation of S. P. Brock on the Lucianic text of Samuel. 155 Fernández Marcos credits Brock with identifying certain traits that cannot be explained as a simple result of historical evolution, but which reveal authentic recensional activity. . . . Brock discovers two recensional elements isolated with remarkable clarity in L: a) the desire to improve the LXX-text stylistically by eliminating some Hellenistic forms and terms (e.g., grammatical and syntactical corrections as well as numerous lexicographical variants), and b) the adaptation of the text to needs of the public reading (e.g. insertion of proper nouns instead of pronouns, translation of transliterated words etc.). 156

These are rather minimal kinds of “editorial” activity, the first being part of a much larger cultural phenomenon of Atticization of Greek literary works in the Roman period, the other being as much a matter of translation technique as editorial activity. However, if we stick to a strict understanding of the term “recensional,” then it is hard to see that either one meets the criteria. Atticizing a Hellenistic text to make it appear more archaic and culturally acceptable is hardly appropriate editorial activity, and modifying a text for liturgical purposes also does not fall into the realm of “recensional activity.” Furthermore, Fernández Marcos reports that “Brock in turn insists on the impossibility of ascertaining whether all these recensional changes are the work of one person” 157 but that they probably belong to the time of Lucian, in the late third to early fourth century c.e. Fernández Marcos reviews the complex and highly controversial discussion of the proto-Lucianic recension and its relationship to the other Greek “recensions”—the Old Greek and the Qumran text of Samuel, 4QSama—and he affirms his belief in a proto-Lucianic text. He sums up his views on the “recensional” character of Lucian: In conclusion, I think that the Lucianic text in 1–4 Kgdms is not a text which has been distorted and corrupted by accidents of transmission, but is the result of systematic—even if not absolutely consistent—editorial revision. This revision, consisting of stylistic and several other types of corrections, remains uniform throughout all the sections of Kgdms. This can 153. See Kahle, The Cairo Geniza, 228–35; Jellicoe, The Septuagint and Modern Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968; repr. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1989), 157–71. 154. N. Fernández Marcos, “The Lucianic Text in the Books of Kingdoms,” in De Septuaginta: Studies in Honour of John William Wevers on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (ed. A. Pietersma and Claude Cox; Mississauga, Ontario: Benben, 1984), 161–74. 155. S. P. Brock, The Recensions of the Septuagint Version of Samuel (Ph.D. dissertation, Oxford University, 1966). 156. Fernández Marcos, “The Lucianic Text,” 167. 157. Ibid.

346

Chapter 8

also be recognized through a series of editorial arrangements such as the beginning of 3 Kgdms in 3 Kgdms 2:12, the omission of 3 Kgdms 22:41– 51—because this story has already been told in 16:28a–h—, the addition of 4 Kgdms 10:36 already known by the VL, and several remarkable changes called by Ralfs “Gelehrtenkorrekturen.” Some of them go beyond the limits of textual criticism and enter the field of literary criticism. 158

The “editorial arrangements” that Fernández Marcos mentions here appear to be similar to those that are found in the work of the scholarly editors of the Hellenistic and Roman world, except that, instead of merely marking such things as redundant passages with critical sigla such as obeloi and the like, the text actually makes the corresponding changes. That “learned corrections,” in imitation of some editorial scholarship, appear in some forms of the text alongside more conservative approaches to the text of the Bible should not be too surprising. I interpret his remarks about these “learned corrections” as entering “the field of literary criticism” to suggest that the Lucianic text may have become sufficiently distinct from other witnesses to the LXX that it was treated as a different recension. However, the extent of such a recension within the LXX is still a matter of considerable disagreement. 159

Conclusion What we have seen in our discussion of the textual criticism of the Bible is an interesting rapprochement between the field of textual criticism and the field of literary criticism regarding the formulation of an understanding of the editorial activity involved in the production of the biblical text and its “final form.” The process, however, is viewed in the opposite direction, as it were. As we saw in the last two chapters, the literary hypotheses of the Pentateuch and historical books were formulated by drawing on the role of the editor in textual criticism, reading this role anachronistically back into the period of the formation of the three distinct “recensions”—the MT, LXX, and SamP—and then pushing this model of “book production” still further back into the compositional stage of the text, thus arriving at the earliest “final form” of the Pentateuch or Deuteronomistic History. More recently, textual criticism now reverses the direction of the argument, assuming the validity of speaking about redactors in the Pentateuch and the DH, and uses this understanding of the production of ancient editions and revisions to explain the text-history of the major recensions. Just as in our earlier discussion we observed a general muddle regarding the use of the term redactor to cover both the conservative editor or sources and documents, and the reviser, who takes great liberty with the text for ideological and other reasons, so here in chap. 8 we have seen that editors are confused with creators of recensions and persons who introduced interpolations into the 158. Ibid., 172. 159. Pietersma, “Septuagint Research,” 300–303. Wevers does not find a Lucianic or proto-Lucianic text in the LXX Pentateuch, and Pietersma does not find it in the Psalms.

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

347

text. Indeed, there seems to be great difficulty in drawing a line between the literary process of redaction and textual revision. One way of dealing with this distinction among editors is to use the terms “vulgar” and “refined” or “authorized” when describing texts, based on the analogy of usage in the scholia of classical texts. However, we have already seen earlier that application of this terminology is an abuse of the meaning of these terms, and attempts to classify text-types using this terminology can no longer be justified. As Ulrich pointed out from the evidence of the Qumran scrolls, the major Isaiah Scroll was clearly an “elegant” text and was treated accordingly, but it was not the best text from the point of view of the MT and would otherwise have been treated as a “vulgar” text by modern scholars. Indeed, the diversity of texts exemplified by the Qumran scrolls has created a problem for any theory of limited editions or recensions of the biblical books. This is because a highly disciplined Jewish sect, the Essenes, who were outside the three groups associated with the three major recensions, tolerated a diversity of text-types without manifesting any particular preference for the MT, LXX, or SamP or any of a number of other text-types in their possession. The “local texts” hypothesis of Cross and the sociological approach of Talmon cannot be easily accommodated to the evidence of the scrolls and have most recently led to the view that not even the MT should be considered the product of intentional editing or recension, much less the LXX or SamP. Nevertheless, the “editor” still enters into the discussion of textual criticism by the back door, as it were, through an investigation of the problem of the Urtext or ultimate object of textual criticism. This object is the “final form” of the text, and during the whole history of literary criticism, the final form has become synonymous with the “final edited form.” As with Wolf and his understanding of the text-history of Homer, there are two final forms that are in competition with each other and create difficult problems for the text-critic. The first is the “final” form of the composition, examples being the Peisistratus recension of Homer or the final RP redaction of the Pentateuch; the second is the vulgate or standard form of the text, whether this was Wolf’s Aristarchan edition of Homer or the MT edition of the Hebrew Bible. As we saw above, Tov struggles to create continuity between the redacted “final form” of literary criticism and the “final form” of the MT, both of which are given religious legitimation as “canonical.” It is belief in the editorial process, which is also understood as the canonical process, that allows him to view the MT as the ultimate object of textual criticism. 160 Tov finds further support for the role of editors in his text-history of the Hebrew Bible in the Deuteronomistic editors of the historical books of Joshua to Kings and in the prophecy of Jeremiah. With respect to the former, we traced the history of the Deuteronomist in chaps. 6 and 7 above from Simon to the present. Martin Noth’s thesis of a Deuteronomistic Historian

160. In this he borrows a page from Brevard Childs, whom we will consider below.

348

Chapter 8

offered an all-important critique of the notion of Dtr redactors, even though this notion still persists in biblical scholarship. As for Tov’s two editions of Jeremiah, corresponding to the short text of the LXX and the long text of the MT, McKane has presented a convincing alternative in his notion of a “rolling corpus” that explains textual expansions as sporadic, limited to the small pieces of text to which they are attached, and “triggered” by their immediate context. While they frequently imitate other prose passages in Deuteronomic style, they are not part of an editorial plan or design, so in no sense can they be identified as a first or second edition. There is no final authorized form of the text of Jeremiah, produced and promulgated by an editor. It cannot be assumed that the centuries-old habit of speaking about redactors or editors in the literary criticism of the Bible is sufficient basis for using the notion of editors to explain the text-critical history of the text. The discovery of the Qumran scrolls, with its great diversity of texts belonging to the Essenes, a major division of Judaism and a rival of the Pharisees, raises a number of serious questions about the nature of the two Hebrew “recensions,” the MT and the SamP. Although the majority of biblical texts belong to the MT text-tradition, there is nothing to suggest that these texts were the result of conscious editing, the activity of the sopherim, or any sort of preference over other texts; nor was any distinction made between texts that were merely “vulgar” and texts that were “select” or “authorized.” From the point of view of modern textual criticism, the text of some books found at Qumran seems to be clearly superior to the text now found in the MT. This majority text-tradition is often labeled proto-MT in that it anticipates the form of the text in the MT, but nothing suggests that its place in the MT corpus was the result of a deliberate selection process that also involved the conscious suppression of other rival texts. The matter of the “pre-Samaritan” texts is even more instructive. These are long or expansionistic texts that belong to the same textual tradition as the texts of the SamP, except that they do not include the command to worship on Mount Gerizim in Exodus 20. Thus, it is clear that, apart from this single “ideological” addition of an extra commandment and a few “adjustments” in other texts to accommodate it, the SamP is not particularly “Samaritan.” It was just another text-tradition circulating widely among the Jews in Palestine that was adopted by the Samaritan community at some point after the destruction of their temple by John Hyrcanus in the late second century b.c.e. The fact that the MT text seems to have deliberately modified the text at certain points to alter references to “Mount Gerizim” to read “Mount Ebal” and to change the original arrangement of the text of Joshua makes the “editing” of the MT as ideological as that of the SamP. With respect to the pre-Samaritan texts at Qumran, the nature of their expansions, which continued at least until the late first century b.c.e., are very similar to those of the long texts of Homer and reflect a common and widespread scribal phenomenon. This phenomenon involves sporadic, unsystematic “improvements” by the interpolation of passages imitated or copied from elsewhere in the closely related literary tradition—in the case of the

Editing the Bible and Textual Criticism

349

pre-SamP, from elsewhere in the same book or other parts of the Pentateuch. This is very similar to McKane’s explanation of the additions to the long text of Jeremiah. Because ancient editors, such as Aristrachus, did everything possible to hold the line against expansionist activities, although they strove in vain to reverse most of them, we should not attribute this sort of scribal abuse to editors or characterize the latest stage of this process as a second edition or the “final authorized form” of the text, just because it happens to be part of the MT text. The problem of deciding what constitutes a “recension” in the Greek tradition of the Old Testament is made much more difficult by virtue of the fact that we are dealing with a translation and therefore left with the additional task of reconstructing the Hebrew Vorlage and of understanding the various translation techniques used by many different translators throughout the whole LXX corpus. Although it is widely accepted that there was a long-standing scribal practice of making revisions to the Greek translation to make it conform more closely to the Hebrew text, we cannot assume that the Hebraica veritas was always a completely uniform MT text. Revision of the Greek translation seems to have been a constant tendency, in spite of the sentiment expressed in the Letter of Aristeas that the Greek text could not and should not be improved. It also began long before the LXX became the Christian Bible, so it was not merely motivated by religious rivalry. The fact that there are so many texts that exhibit different degrees of revision over an extended period of time, that the earliest papyri and the Qumran Greek texts betray the sporadic unconscious revision of bilingual scribes, as Wevers has argued, and the fact that so many ancient writers, such as Philo, Matthew, Justin, and Josephus quoted a Greek text closer to the Hebrew and yet seemed to be quite unconscious that they were differing from the LXX— all of these facts make it difficult to support the idea that there could have been a single, consciously revised “recension.” The Lucianic recension is very much in dispute for much of the LXX. However, it seems reasonable to accept the existence of a Lucianic 1–4 Kingdoms and to recognize a number of scribal tendencies in it that are not dissimilar from what one finds in classical texts from the same period. We may perhaps consider much of this as “cosmetic” editing in the interest of producing a more elegant text for Greek readers. However, this is not in the same class as the editing practiced by the scholarly Alexandrian tradition, and it adds little to the broader discussion of editing the Bible. Throughout the scholarly discussion of textual criticism, what remains implicit in the textual histories and what is occasionally expressed explicitly as the goal is the recovery of the “canonical text” or its “final form.” The confusion about what exactly is meant by this designation has greatly muddled the task of the text-critic. Attempts to define this elusive Urtext invariably claim some connection with the notion of an edited text, whether this is a “redaction” at the literary level or a “recension” at the text-critical level. The “canonical text,” because it is an edited text, is also the primary object of biblical interpretation, just as the critical edition of a classic is the point of

350

Chapter 8

departure for its exposition and appreciation. Thus, it is inevitable that the discussion of the redactor in chaps. 6 and 7 and our investigation of the role of editor in the field of textual criticism in this chapter should lead to a treatment of the “canonical text” in biblical interpretation.

9

Editors and the Creation of the Canon The subject of the canon of Scripture that only a few decades ago was quite marginal to the critical study of the Hebrew Bible has now become pervasive in many aspects of biblical studies—in textual criticism, in literary criticism, and in hermeneutics. As we saw above, the Urtext, as the object of textual research, is often stated to be the reconstruction of the “canonical text.” In literary criticism the object of study is, for many, the “final form” of the text of a biblical book or larger text-unit. The “final form” is also the text’s “canonical form,” so that literary criticism becomes “canonical criticism,” which is set in opposition to the literary analysis of historical criticism. And the “canonical method” of interpretation, which is the current trend of biblical theology, is a mode of exegesis based on the “canonical text” and “final form” as defined by a particular theological conception of canon. Any understanding of the early history of the text—its traditionhistory in the older sense of this term that includes redaction criticism—is made quite subservient to this final objective, the “canonical text,” so that the prior history of the “canonical text” is the “canonical process.” In this process, the editor or redactor plays a very important role, and it is the role of the editor as “canonizer” of the text that will now be explored.

The Problem of Definition: “Canon” and “Canonical” We should note at the outset, however, that the development of “canonical criticism” has not gone without opposition from James Barr 1 and John Barton, 2 and much of their criticism has to do with the problem of definition. Barr makes a useful distinction among three different uses of the term “canon” and “canonical.” The first usage is the “usual sense of the word ‘canon’, the list of books which together comprise the holy scripture.” 3 This has to do with the strictly historical discussion regarding when this definitive list of books was made, whether in two or three stages, by whom, and under what circumstances. The second meaning of canon “is the final form, 1. J. Barr, Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, and Criticism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983). 2. J. Barton, Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 13–95. 3. Barr, Holy Scripture, 75.

- 351 -

352

Chapter 9

the so-called ‘canonical form’, of a book, an individual book, as it stands in the Bible.” 4 It is this meaning, which is so closely wedded to notions about the editorial process that leads to the final form of the text and by which it becomes the canonical form, that will be the primary focus of this chapter. The third meaning of canon “is more a perspective, a way of looking at texts, a perception for which the term ‘holistic’ is often used. It is through such a holistic stance that the community relates itself to holy scripture and submits itself to its authority.” 5 What Barr describes is a theologizing of the concept of canon, a theological value that is attributed to the final form of the text as supreme religious authority, that colors the way in which the whole historical and literary discussion of the other two meanings are understood. Our concern in this chapter is with the historical aspects of the meaning of canon and its implications for the history of the biblical text, on the one hand, and with the theologically motivated understanding of a “canonical process” that has given rise to quite a different approach to the canonical form of the biblical text, on the other hand. Consequently, before addressing the topic of editing the canon, we will briefly review the problem of the canon as a list of books. Here we follow the discussion of John Barton, who builds upon the earlier treatment of Barr. Barton takes up the distinction, introduced by Albert Sundberg, 6 between works that are venerated as Scripture, on the one hand, and an exclusive list of the holy books that make up a canon to which no further works may be added and from which religious books previously held in high regard have been excluded, on the other hand. Sundberg accepted the view that the corpus of texts making up the divisions known as the Law and the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible was closed by ca. 200 b.c.e. but that the third group, the Writings, although it had been long regarded as Scripture, was not actually closed as part of the canon until ca. 90 c.e. Barton, however, goes much beyond this fairly traditional view of the development of the canon in three distinct stages to suggest that the distinction between the Prophets and the other books cannot be maintained because there is much evidence that all the books of Scripture were viewed as inspired, the work of prophets who were successors to Moses, so that the designation “the Law and the Prophets” that one frequently encounters in the New Testament and elsewhere is not limited to the first two divisions of Old Testament Scripture but applies to the Psalms and other books as well. Furthermore, there is general agreement that throughout the history of Judaism, from an early period on, the Law of Moses, however it was defined in terms of its specific literary content, had great authority and was deeply 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 76. 6. A. C. Sundberg, The Old Testament of the Early Church (HTS 20; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964). See also recently idem, “The Septuagint: The Bible of Hellenistic Judaism,” in The Canon Debate (ed. L. M. McDonald and J. A. Sanders; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002), 68–90.

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

353

venerated. But beyond this there was a large body of sacred literature that was not clearly delimited except by the antiquity often attributed to it, which, however, was frequently fictitious. Although it is difficult to decide what was or was not regarded as Scripture in early Judaism, it is even more problematic to use the terms canon and canonical, which are quite anachronistic prior to the fourth century c.e. In the fourth century, canon came to be used by Christian scholars to mean a fixed list of books that make up the body of Scripture. For the Old Testament, these lists are said to correspond to the books of the Hebrew Bible, but the books are not listed in any particular order or grouping that corresponds to the standard tripartite division of the later, medieval Masoretic Text. 7 The Pentateuch and the historical books seem to be arranged in an obvious chronological order, and a similar principle is applied to the order of the prophets. The order of the books after the Pentateuch and historical books corresponds more closely to the order of the Septuagint. There also seems to be an obsession with limiting the number to 22 books, corresponding with the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, or in other cases, to 24 books, which equals the count of the letters of the Greek alphabet. This artificial organizational principle requires the combination of more than one book into a single scroll in order to reach the desired number. This tradition is clearly as old as Josephus, who makes much of the specific number of 22 books, though he provides no explanation or any specific list. Fourth Ezra, from the early first century, speaks about the special revelation of 24 books. It is clear that these two totals are viewed as equivalent and do not necessarily represent different-size canons.

The History of the Canon as a Restricted Corpus of Sacred Books It is not my intention to rehearse all of the issues in the debate over the canonization of Scripture. 8 Instead, I will focus on three issues that have been largely overlooked or treated with too little curiosity. (1) Why is there such an obsession with the number of books in the Hebrew canon as 22 or 24? (2) Why is this rather limited corpus of works defined by a narrow band of time in the past, even if some of the works do not strictly fit within this limit? and (3) How was it that the practice of making an exclusive list of sacred books, which is at least as old as the first century (Fourth Ezra and Josephus), was given the designation canon by Christian scholars several centuries later? The answers to these questions have much to say about the whole issue of canon and will lead us into the larger topic of this chapter. 7. See Sundberg, The Old Testament of the Early Church, 129–69, which contains a useful collection and discussion of these texts. See also J. N. Lightstone, “The Rabbis’ Bible: The Canon of the Hebrew Bible and the Early Rabbinic Guild,” in The Canon Debate (ed. L. M. McDonald and J. A. Sanders; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002), 163–84. 8. In addition to Barr, Holy Scripture, and Barton, Oracles of God, see the recent collection of studies in L. M. McDonald and J. A. Sanders, eds., The Canon Debate (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002).

354

Chapter 9

The count of 22 books in the Hebrew canon is regularly explained as corresponding to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, but this correlation is obviously not a simple matter, because achieving the appropriate number required constantly juggling the combination of books in a single scroll. The fact that the number could also be 24, which corresponds to the letters of the Greek alphabet, appears even more puzzling. The answer to this puzzle lies in the fact that the division of the Hebrew Bible into 22 books according to the Hebrew alphabet imitates the division of the two great poems of Homer into 24 books according to the letters of the Greek alphabet. In the case of Homer’s poems, this system of numbering was necessary in order to ensure the proper order of the scrolls, but it was unnecessary in the case of the books in the Hebrew Bible because all of the books were clearly distinguished by names; thus, much more was involved than just imitating a useful scribal technique. What is clearly implied by this 22- (or 24-) book division is that the Jews had a sacred and inspired corpus of books that corresponded to the inspired works of Homer, the Greek “Bible.” 9 Homer had for several centuries, from the sixth century b.c.e. onward, been the basis of Greek education and religion, and from the Hellenistic period onward it was undoubtedly well known to many of the Jews of Palestine as well. 10 Bickerman describes the pervasive influence of Homer in Jerusalem by the end of the third century b.c.e.: The Greek idea of paideia was based on a book, that of Homer, whose poems were memorized; Homer “educated Greece,” Plato says. In school, Greek boys, and the Jewish boys who studied with them, began their education with Homer. Indeed, Greek philology developed out of the task of preparing Homer’s text for the schools; the interpretation of Homer was the foundation of the liberal arts. What could a Jew oppose to this bible of the Hellenes? Ben Sira had an answer: Moses. Not the masses, of whom Ben Sira does not think on this occasion, but the intelligentsia of Jerusalem would be obliged to learn the Torah. 11

Bickerman goes on to show how the study of the Torah in imitation of, and in competition with, the study of Homer became the basis of a lay education and scholarship centered on the Hebrew Scriptures. Of course, the Torah was only five books, but the principle was gradually expanded in order to include, by the rabbinic period, a larger corpus of 22 sacred books to match Homer’s 24 books for each poem. Furthermore, just as the use of Homer as a model to be emulated was expanded in the Hellenistic period to incorporate works from other literary genres into the exclusive rank of first-class literary works for similar educa9. Lieberman (Hellenism, 27 n. 52) notes this similarity of the 22 or 24 books of the Hebrew Bible to the 24 books of Homer but dismisses it as of no significance. But he has no explanation for the division into just 22 scrolls. 10. Ibid., 112–14. 11. Bickerman, The Jews in the Greek Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 171.

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

355

tional and rhetorical purposes, so the rabbinic catalog of Scriptures with special status served as the Hebrew “canon” of classics. And, to answer the second question posed above, this narrow band of time is when the definition of the “age of prophecy,” which parallels closely the similar age of excellence in Greek literature recognized by the Alexandrian scholars, served as a useful way of limiting the works to be included in the corpus. It is true that the selection process carried on by the Alexandrian scholars was based on a number of separate collections of works in different genres and therefore served a function somewhat different from the Hebrew sacred texts. Nevertheless, when Josephus describes the 22 books of the Hebrew Bible, he divides them up into 5 books of laws and traditional history by Moses, 13 books of history by prophets, and 4 books containing hymns and precepts. This generic description, which seems somewhat forced and cannot easily be made to fit the known books of the Hebrew canon, is directed as a response to the non-Jew Apion and compared with the much larger corpus of Greek literature. 12 Like the Greek classics, Josephus defines the Hebrew corpus according to a past age of inspired works—the succession of prophets— usually understood to have ended with Ezra. It was this time and the books that were judged to have come down from this age that led to their inclusion—not the fact that they belonged to a particular religious genre and were “authoritative.” For Josephus, this limit is a little awkward, but he uses it for apologetic purposes to defend his historical sources as the work of inspired prophets. 13 The application of this principle may also result in the inclusion of some problematic texts, such as Qoheleth and Song of Songs, and the elimination of some that were otherwise quite desirable, such as Sirach. However, for the rabbis the chronological limitation also excluded many nonrabbinic sectarian texts of the first rank, while their own sectarian tradition retained its true “canonical” status as the oral Torah alongside the written Torah. Similarly, later Latin scholarship derived its golden age of literature from texts of the late Republic and the Augustan age, and the Christian Church did the same when it applied the principle of an Apostolic age. The idea of a list of selected works that could be used in a variety of ways as standards or models for literature, historical research, philosophy, and religious thought became ubiquitous throughout the Greco-Roman world. It was not a special development of the Jewish or Christian way of thinking. This brings us to the third question: why it is that the term canon came to be used for the exclusive list of Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. Canon was not used by Greek and Latin scholars for their classics as a whole but only for individual authors as exemplars of literary style, historical method, grammar or philosophy. Nevertheless, the Christian authors of the fourth century from the time of Athanasius on use the term canon and its verb to 12. See Steve Mason, “Josephus and His Twenty-Two Book Canon,” in The Canon Debate (ed. L. M. McDonald and J. A. Sanders; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002), 114. 13. Mason points out (ibid., 117) that, for Josephus, John Hyrcanus (135–104 b.c.e.) was regarded as the last prophet, and he clearly falls outside of this time frame.

356

Chapter 9

canonize to mean the selection of an exclusive list of books recognized as holy and authoritative, and it is this meaning that is read back into earlier periods in which there was any discussion about lists of books or limits to a select group of books that were inherited from Judaism. However, this particular meaning of canon is a development of Christian theology that only in the fourth century comes to identify the “canon of the Church” as the Church’s Scriptures. How did this peculiar development come about? The basic meaning of the Greek term kanon has to do with a “rule” or “standard” or “model of excellence,” and as such it could be applied to a particular literary work, such as Homer, or the plays of Euripides, or the history of Thucydides, as a model (kanon) of excellence worthy of emulation. As we showed above, the Alexandrian scholars, following the lead of Aristophanes, established the list of works that were sanctioned and approved as being of the first class, therefore “classics”; this approval constituted them as models of excellence to be used in schools. Other scholars followed with their own choices, so the lists never entirely coincided with one another, and there were debates about whether or not a particular work should be included. The rise of Latin literary works of excellence, such as Virgil and Cicero, led to a corresponding development of Latin classics as canons of Latin literature and rhetoric, in imitation of the lists of Greek classics. Indeed, the entire classical education system was built on the study of the canons of style, grammar, and modes of thought that were to be derived from the selected works. Even though in antiquity the term canon was not specifically used for the lists of epic poets, lyric poets, dramatists, orators, historians, and philosophers, the term kanon is used in the sense of standard or model with reference to individual works within a group. Thus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus regards Thucydides as the model historian: “None of his successors surpassed him or indeed adequately imitated him.” 14 It is easy to see how some Christian scholars would think of the list of texts considered sacred by Jews and Christians as parallel to the classics in “paganism,” but it is not clear why they should have construed the whole list as a single canon. It is not surprising that the common Greek word kanon, taken over as canon in Latin, with the meaning of rule or standard, should have a wide variety of uses, and it is not necessary to review them all. 15 In addition to the use by grammarians and literary critics cited above, there are a few other meanings that may be mentioned here as relevant. The term “canons” (kanovneÍ) in the plural may be used for mathematical, astronomical or chronological tables as a series of measurements. An instance of this is Eusebius’s use of the title cronikoµ kanovneÍ for his Chronicle. But, as we shall see, Eusebius does not use the term in either singular or plural for his list of biblical books. The Church also later used the term canon in a legal sense, in which a list of 14. Quoted from D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom, eds., Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 307. 15. See the reviews of H. W. Beyer, “kan∫n,” TDNT 3:596–602; and B. M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 289–93.

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

357

“canons” refers to a collection of laws. None of these cases leads in any obvious way to the use of canon for the sanctioned list of biblical books. More important for the Christian development of the idea of canon is the use of the term in the field of philosophy and ethics. In the latter sense, canon (both in singular and plural) could stand for the law or principles of proper conduct and behavior. In philosophy, canon could represent the criterion by which to distinguish truth and falsehood, the principle upon which true knowledge is based. It is this philosophical and ethical usage that was taken over into Christianity. Only Paul in the New Testament uses the term kanon and in only one text that is relevant. In his Letter to the Galatians, Paul sums up his own view of Christianity in opposition to the party advocating the continuation of Jewish practice, such as circumcision, and he states: “All who take this principle (kanovni) for their guide, peace and mercy be upon them, the Israel of God” (Gal 6:16 REB). The canon here is what the apostle regards as the basic rule of faith. 16 Clement of Rome later refers to this notion of canon as the “rule of tradition” (7:2), the apostolic faith within the Church, and Irenaeus speaks of the baptismal confession as the “canon of truth.” The idea of canon as the “rule of faith” (regula fidei) is expressed in Clement of Alexandria and Origen by a number of terms but primarily as “the ecclesiastical canon” (kan∫n ejkklhsiastikovÍ). 17 In this early form, canon cannot be equated with the Scriptures as a whole. These two Church Fathers were heavily indebted to Philo, particularly for their allegorical method of scripture interpretation. As Hanson points out, 18 “in Philo the word kan∫n means either a rule or a standard,” and in the sense of a set of rules it can be used as “the rules of allegorizing Scripture” as well as the more general sense of “rules of conduct” and “the guiding lines of right education.” In the second sense, Philo “uses the word [canon] to describe standards of truth” or figures such as Moses and Abraham, who were models or “canons” to be imitated. His indebtedness to the Greek philosophical tradition is obvious. Hanson goes on to describe Clement’s uses of the term canon as it has to do with his notions of a secret tradition of the Church that was handed down orally alongside the written tradition and was the Gnostic’s standard or canon “both of faith and of behaviour.” 19 The content of this gnostic canon has to do both with the meaning of the Church’s canon and also with “the right interpretation of Scripture” according to the true canon. Clement regards the Law and the Prophets as difficult parables, not easy to interpret, “But understanding minds can interpret them who carefully expound the Scriptures kata; to;n thÅÍ ajlhqeÇaÍ kanovna.” 20 It is this gnostic canon 16. See Beyer, “kan∫n,” 598; Metzger, Canon, 290. Paul’s usage of canon in 2 Cor 10:13– 16 in the sense of a geographic area is less relevant. 17. See especially R. P. C. Hanson, Origen’s Doctrine of Tradition (London: SPCK, 1954). 18. Ibid., 59. 19. Ibid., 60. 20. Ibid., 61.

358

Chapter 9

of interpretation that is the true canon, which can reveal the harmony of the Scriptures of the Old Testament (the Law and the Prophets) and the Gospels. The Church’s canon and the secret tradition of gnosis are identical. Hanson sums up his review of Clement’s use of the word kanon thus: The word kan∫n, then, for Clement retains its two fundamental meanings which it has in Philo, that of ‘rule’ and that of ‘standard’. In so far as he uses it of the life of the Gnostic it tends to have the meaning of ‘rule’, or even ‘discipline’, but when he uses it to mean a kan∫n of faith or a doctrinal kan∫n, it has rather the meaning of a ‘standard’. He believed in the existence of a standard of faith maintained by the Church, or rather, it would be more accurate to say, a standard way of interpreting her tradition (the Bible) employed by the Church. And there is no evidence whatever that Clement made any distinction between the ecclesiastical kan∫n and the secret tradition of the Gnostic called ‘gnosis’, but sometimes called kan∫n, which he quite certainly believed to have survived to his own day independently of the Bible through a succession of teachers deriving originally from our Lord and his apostles. 21

Not only is there a close kinship in thought between Clement and Philo, as Hanson points out, but there is also a striking similarity with the thought of rabbinic Judaism, which also believed in a secret tradition—the oral Law— which was handed down from Moses on Sinai in faithful succession to the teachers and their followers. This secret tradition is also authoritative Torah, understood primarily as rules for the interpretation of the written Torah and for the other sacred texts. 22 Although Clement had little direct contact with this tradition in Judaism, the matter was quite otherwise with Origen. Hanson discusses the notions of the secret tradition and the rule of faith in Origen in comparison with the views of Origen’s teacher, Clement. Origen made no appeal to the secret oral tradition of Clement but placed all of his emphasis on the written tradition of the Bible. 23 This is in spite of the fact that Origen retained the allegorical method of interpretation of Scripture. Concerning the rule of faith, Hanson states: “[W]hen Origen spoke of the rule of faith of the Church, he meant the Christian faith as it was preached and taught by the Church of his day, and as it had been preached and taught ever since the time of the apostles.” 24 This rule of faith could be called by many different terms, including “the ecclesiastical canon.” The content of this rule of faith was identical with that of the Bible, and indeed was proved and demonstrated from the Bible, but the rule is not identical with the Bible. The Church by preaching this rule of faith autho21. Ibid., 61–62. 22. Barton (Oracles of God, 81) also suggests that the “‘oral Law’ . . . represented a secret tradition from Moses as regards the divine commandments about daily conduct”; thus, both the written and the oral Law represented the canon in Judaism in the first and second centuries. 23. Hanson, Origen’s Doctrine of Tradition, 62–90. 24. Ibid., 113.

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

359

rized and guaranteed the Bible as the source of tradition belonging to her, and not to either heretics or Jews, but she thereby was bound to the Bible, and had no authority either to add to or subtract from it.25

In spite of this close association of the Bible with the rule of faith, Origen “never speaks of ‘canonical’ Scriptures or of a ‘canon’ of Scripture.” 26 Eusebius, a second-generation disciple of Origen, follows the latter’s lead and treats the matter of the Hebrew “canon” primarily in the context of his lengthy review of Origen’s career. He states that “while expounding the first Psalm [Origen] set forth the catalogue of the sacred Scriptures of the Old Testament,” 27 using the noncommital term catalogue for the list of books, not the term canon. He then proceeds to give the list of the 22 books of the Hebrew tradition, according to the number of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Eusebius then treats Origen’s views on the New Testament “canon” and claims that Origen, “defending the canon of the Church (to;n ejkklhsiastiko;n kanovna), . . . gives his testimony that he knows only four Gospels.” 28 The “ecclesiastical canon” mentioned by Eusebius is obviously taken over from Origen with basically the same meaning as that of his predecessor and cannot refer to a fixed list. It is these four Gospels that embody the “rule of faith,” and they do so by means of their credentials in the apostolic tradition. This is the basis on which the inclusion of the other books of the New Testament are judged as well. The canon of faith is applied to the Old Testament in an entirely different way. It does not function to decide which book is or is not suitable for inclusion, because the Hebrew Scriptures were long since inherited from Judaism as sacred. Instead, canon here functions as the mode or norm of interpretation, and because this is predominantly allegorical and prophetic in terms of the Old Testament’s pointing to and anticipating the gospel, any book in the Hebrew Bible, even Song of Songs, can be made to conform to this canon. Even the choice of textual variants is subject to the same principle, namely, what best suits the Church’s canon or rule of faith. Nevertheless, it is not hard to see how the idea of compiling an exclusive catalog of Christian books, on the analogy of the list of the Hebrew Scriptures, that are closely associated with the Church’s “canon of faith” could easily lead to the idea that the list of canonical books became the canon. It is clear that by the fourth century this has become the common use of the term canon with respect to the determination of the exclusive catalog of biblical books, 29 even though in other respects the Church still retains the basic meaning of canon in the sense of “rule,” as it does in the “canons of the Church,” which are the edicts of its councils. Thus, it should be clear that 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 112. 27. Eusebius Hist. eccl. 6.24.1. 28. Ibid., 6.25.3. 29. For the fourth-century witnesses from Athanasius to Augustine, see Sundberg, The Old Testament of the Early Church, 138–59.

360

Chapter 9

the understanding of canon as a fixed list of sacred texts embodying the faith of the religious community is a particular development of Christian theology that cannot be applied before the fourth century. It is undoubtedly the case that this development was influenced by the fact that a large body of Jewish leaders had also earlier established a fixed corpus of 22 or 24 books as Scripture for their community—a corpus that is frequently referred to as the “Hebrew canon.” Nevertheless, it may be misleading to use the term canon with reference to both the Hebrew and the Christian Bibles, at least at the time of the formation of their respective catalogs. This matter is of some importance when it comes to a discussion of the popular notions of “canonical criticism” and the “canonical process.” Anticipating our examination of these notions below, I will simply point out here that there is a real sense in which in Clement and Origen the “canonical process” is not related to the formation of the whole corpus of sacred Scriptures at all but refers to both the mode of biblical interpretation and the body of doctrine to which all understanding of biblical texts must conform. Thus, “the ecclesiastical canon” is entirely theological in character and predominantly allegorical in method. To engage in “canonical criticism” in the style of Clement and Origen was to write theological commentaries and homilies in the service of the Church. For the Old Testament in particular, this meant a mode of Christian interpretation that was in direct opposition to that of their Jewish contemporaries. Although Christians shared much of the same catalog of books as the Hebrew Bible, they had a fundamentally different canon of interpretation in the original sense of this term. Even though they did not have the equivalent term for canon, the rabbis did have a corresponding method of midrash, halakic or haggadic interpretation, that they applied to their fixed catalog of Scriptures and that embodied their understanding of Torah. This “rabbinic canon” was not limited to the fixed corpus of Scriptures but was governed by the oral Torah as the appropriate theological mode of interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. This was a canon of Torah descended in both written and oral form from Moses and therefore primarily focused on the Pentateuch. Alongside this legal canon, there was also a prophetic canon of interpretation, which can be seen clearly in the Qumran scrolls, such as the Habakkuk Commentary. This allowed for a prophetic (i.e., predictive) understanding not only of prophetic books, such as Isaiah, but also Psalms and other works deemed inspired. These canons could work in tandem with “the Law and the Prophets,” which is less a description of the content and extent of the sacred corpus than it is an understanding of the way it is to be interpreted. Likewise, by the early second century b.c.e., the Law was being equated with wisdom (Sir 24), and the wisdom tradition, strongly influenced by Hellenistic philosophy, became a mode of “canonical” interpretation. As such, Philo’s allegorical method of philosophical interpretation was his “canon” within the sacred Greek Pentateuch. In Philo’s case, his “canon” had little to do with a larger fixed corpus of sacred texts, and as we saw above it was his allegorical method that was inherited by the Alexandrian Christian scholars. Canonical criticism,

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

361

therefore, involved the production of commentaries and homilies, whether Jewish or Christian, using the interpretive principles in all three modes that were appropriate to each religious community. On the basis of these remarks about the development of the notion of canon, it is obvious that it is no longer helpful to speak of a three-stage development of the Hebrew canon. One can, of course, speak of a growing corpus of “authoritative” literature beginning with the promulgation of the Deuteronomic reform as the Law of Moses and its gradual expansion to a substantial body of divinely-revealed Torah. Alongside this were the collections of inspired oracles of the prophets and “prophetic” writings, which were secondarily interpreted as revelations in continuity with the great revelation to the prophet Moses. Various other interpretive strategies—such as the expansion of prophecy to include both history and apocalyptic visions of the future or the composition of liturgical works, the Psalms, and the close association of wisdom with the Law—led to an ever-expanding body of inspired texts that could be used for religious purposes. 30 At the same time, new texts that made the claim to great antiquity and to prophetic revelation could be viewed as threatening to swamp the older corpus of texts. At some point in the late first century, an attempt was made within rabbinic Judaism to draw a distinction between a select group of texts and all others. Yet one cannot simply base this distinction on whether or not these texts were authoritative for religious purposes. This would hardly explain why Song of Songs and Qoheleth were included and Sirach and the Mishna were not. If in rabbinic Judaism it were merely a matter of applying a “rule of faith,” then, as Barton suggests, perhaps the Law alone, followed in time by the Mishnah, could be viewed as a “standard”; 31 however, the Law was hardly in need of canonization—that is, inclusion in a list. Its authority was never in doubt. Thus, the Old Testament Scriptures were a select list of inspired works, developed under the influence of the Hellenistic classics, that were subject to a variety of interpretive strategies (“canons”)—legal, prophetic, theological, and philosophical. What made these individual books canonical was not their actual content but the way in which they could be subjected to one of these interpretive methods. A feature of the Greek classics is that they were subject to commentary and study, none more so than Homer. Various strategies were used, including the allegorical methods of the Stoics, which were imitated by Philo for the study of the Law. But interpretive strategies could also be used with other books that could not be taken literally, such as the rabbinic application of midrash to the Song of Songs. Of course, as we have seen in the case of the Alexandrian scholars, commentaries on the classics could also include grammatical and other philological study, as 30. See J. Blenkinsopp, “The Formation of the Hebrew Canon: Isaiah as a Test Case,” in The Canon Debate (ed. L. M. McDonald and J. A. Sanders; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002), 53–67. 31. Barton, Oracles of God, 81.

362

Chapter 9

well as a serious concern for the text, and it is entirely plausible that the sopherim became involved in similar pursuits. But these scholarly activities rarely combined with the other modes of “canonical” interpretation. Origen is an exception, and he constantly let his theological method override his philological method, as we have seen.

Canonical Criticism, Canonical Process, and the Editing of the Bible It may seem a remarkable leap from Origen’s canonical interpretation of Scripture, in obvious tension with his philological and text-critical methodology, to modern canon-criticism and the canonical method, but in fact the two have a great deal in common. While philosophical modes of thought have certainly changed, both arise out of a strong theological motivation to use the “canonical” text as a basis of religious authority to which philological and text-critical study must be quite subservient. The foremost spokesmen for this approach are Brevard Childs and James Sanders, and to these scholars we will now turn. The purpose of Childs’s Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture 32 is to combine the historical-critical method with a theological form of exegesis that he describes as the “canonical approach.” He does not particularly like the term canonical criticism because he does not see it as just one method alongside others but, rather, as the dominant approach that is able, in his view, to accommodate historical criticism and somehow authenticate the historicity of the “canonical process” within the historical formation of the canon. 33 His criticism of historical criticism, in his brief review of the past history of the field, 34 is that it does not take the theological dimension of the canon seriously but treats it as a particular historical development within the historical-critical discussion. In similar fashion, Childs is critical of the practice of textual criticism because it is not sufficiently focused on the “canonical text” as the object of its text-critical efforts. 35 In contrast to both disciplines, historical criticism and textual criticism, Childs sets forth his own principles of employing the “canonical method” of interpretation, which he feels are compatible with the principles of historical criticism and textual criticism, if not with the way they are practiced. 32. B. S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979). 33. “Canon” for Childs means “the list of books which together comprise the holy scripture,” along with additional meanings that will become clear below. Cf. Barr, Holy Scripture; also idem, “Childs’ Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture,” JSOT 16 (1980): 12–23. When I use the terms canon and canonical in this section, I am conforming to his usage though I am not in agreement with it. 34. Childs, Introduction, 30–45. 35. Ibid., 88–106. See the rather remarkable “about-face” of E. Tov, “The Status of the Masoretic Text in Modern Text Editions of the Hebrew Bible: The Relevance of Canon,” in The Canon Debate (ed. L. M. McDonald and J. A. Sanders; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002), 234–51. In his earlier Textual Criticism of the Bible, he seemed to offer support for Childs’s view.

spread is 9 points long

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

363

It is not my purpose to examine Childs’s position in detail, because this would take us too far afield from the main focus of this research. Let me only briefly point out that it is all too easy for Childs to shift from the use of theological to the use of historical categories and to use this confusion to the advantage of his argument. Thus, in his review of historical criticism, he states: The usual historical critical Introduction has failed to relate the nature of the literature correctly to the community which treasured it as scripture. It is constitutive of Israel’s history that the literature formed the identity of the religious community which in turn shaped the literature. This fundamental dialectic which lies at the heart of the canonical process is lost when the critical Introduction assumes that a historically referential reading of the Old Testament is the key to its interpretation. 36

Now, this charge seems a little confusing, because historical criticism does certainly endeavor to see how some of the Old Testament literature has an important religious dimension that shapes the corporate identity of the community to which it is addressed. There are other texts for which such a religious purpose would be hard to maintain. But this is not what Childs means. He does not mean a historical description but a (Neoorthodox) theological statement about the relationship of the Word of God to the community of faith, the Church. In “dialectic” theology it is the Word that shapes the community and the community that shapes the Word. For Childs, therefore, understanding the “canonical process” is “how one understands the nature of the Old Testament in relation to its authority for the community of faith and practice which shaped and preserved it.” 37 This means that the whole historical-critical enterprise should have the task of seeing how the diverse literature of the Hebrew Bible became a single canon having a single conception of revelation, thereby creating a single community of faith. This approach appears to subvert the whole discipline of historical criticism to theological dogma. Again, in arguing against the suggestion that canon only applies to the final decision to create a limit on the Scriptures that would be considered part of the authoritative corpus of sacred books, Childs advocates a long period of “open canon” as part of an ongoing process. Thus, he states: Essential to understanding the growth of the canon is to see this interaction between a developing corpus of authoritative literature and the community which treasured it. The authoritative Word gave the community its form and content in obedience to the divine imperative, yet conversely the reception of the authoritative tradition by its hearers gave shape to the same writings through a historical and theological process of selecting, collecting, and ordering. The formation of the canon was not a late extrinsic validation of a corpus of writings, but a series of decisions deeply affecting the shape of the books. 38 36. Childs, Introduction, 41. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 58–59.

364

Chapter 9

This statement of principles imposes a theological interpretation about the “authoritative Word” on a supposedly historical process of tradition formation. The two kinds of statements are, however, fundamentally incompatible because one can scarcely examine the categories of “authoritative Word” and “divine imperative” historically as they relate to the entire corpus of the canon or the way that they served in the formation of the “community.” Furthermore, the communities’ participation in the shaping of the Word is characterized as a “process of selecting, collecting and ordering,” which is otherwise attributed to the redactor, so the redactor now becomes a standin for the community as a whole. In contrast to J. A. Sanders’s attempt to define the “canonical process” in purely historical terms as Israel’s search for identity, Childs states: In my judgment, this approach turns the canonical process on its head by couching a basically theological move in anthropological terms. It thus replaces a theocentric understanding of divine revelation with an existential history. Indeed, canon involved a response on Israel’s part in receiving the authoritative tradition, but the response to a continuing experience with God was testified to by a new understanding of scripture. Israel did not testify to its own self-understanding, but by means of a canon bore witness to the divine source of its life. 39

Such a blatantly confessional statement is not, in my view, compatible with historical criticism and would need no further comment, except that Childs tries to justify his “canonical process” in a way that bears striking resemblance to our problem of the redactor, and it is in this connection that I want to look at Childs’s view further. When Childs uses the term “canonical process,” he speaks of this as a “process of selecting, collecting, and ordering,” and this he attributes to “canonical editors.” Indeed, as confirmation of the above quotation about how Israel “by means of a canon bore witness to the divine source of its life,” Childs states: “The clearest evidence for this position is found in the consistent manner in which the identity of the canonical editors has been consciously obscured, and the only signs of an ongoing history are found in the multi-layered text of scripture itself. The shape of the canon directs the reader’s attention to the sacred writings rather than to their editors.” 40 What Childs is clearly alluding to is the notion of multiple redactors, which, because they are invented, are always “obscured,” as they were in Homeric studies and even in Bentley’s edition of Paradise Lost. Childs implies that, when the “canonical editors” ended their selecting, collecting, and shaping,

39. Ibid., 59. Childs uses terminology such as “the Jewish scriptures,” “the canon,” “Israel,” and other generalizations in both theological and historical senses in a completely confused way. The attempt to link the rabbinic “canon” with the Scriptures of the early Church of the first century as a common understanding of canon for both Jews and Christians is nothing other than special pleading, as we saw above. Cf. Barr, Holy Scripture, 130–71. 40. Childs, Introduction, 59.

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

365

the point was reached at which “canon marked off a fixed body of writings as normative for the community rather than attributing authority to the process itself.” 41 To illustrate this development of the canon, Childs appeals to the way in which the Law of Moses is understood within the Deuteronomic tradition as authoritative and constitutive for the community. Of course, this is a particular case that seeks to legitimate a reform program in the late Judean monarchy, and it is a little misleading to apply the legitimating procedures of the fictional reading of the Law of Moses to the people and their assent to its demands to the Old Testament as a whole. Childs consciously attributes one of these scenes in Exod 24:1–11 to “the earliest strands of the Pentateuch,” even though he is well aware of the fact that an early date is strongly contested. The scenes in both Exod 24 and Deut 31 that he cites are late ideological constructs by specific groups and authors and hardly provide “historical evidence for the canonical process.” 42 He finds “further evidence in the canonical development of the Law of Moses . . . in the redactional framework which surrounds the Former Prophets” as well as in the account of Ezra’s proclamation of the law before the inhabitants of Jerusalem (Neh 8) and in the Priestly Code of the Pentateuch. 43 It is easy, superficially, to argue for a correlation between the increasing development and importance of the written Law within Judean society and the notion of an authoritative Word as shaping the community, but Childs finds it difficult to detail “the process by which the narrative material in the Pentateuch was accorded a similar canonical status to that of the laws.” 44 This applies equally to the rest of his discussion about the history of the canon. Childs’s discussion about the canonical method, however, does not rest on his rather cursory remarks about the history of the canon from the reception of the Law of Moses as authoritative, at whatever date, down to the final closing of the canon by rabbinic Judaism but on an internal examination of the canonical process as he understands it—a process that he says has “left its mark on the literature in a continuing process of reshaping and growth.” It is in his description of this process that his indebtedness to the model of the redactor becomes most evident. He lays down as his first principle: “Canonical analysis focuses its attention on the final form of the text itself.” 45 When it comes to understanding exactly what is meant by “final form,” there is considerable confusion. Childs states: “The canon serves to 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 63. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 64. Furthermore, how could the laws of the Pentateuch, such as circumcision, be viewed as normative for the Christian community? Paul did not regard it as part of his “canon.” See Gal 6:16. Only a special mode of allegorical and supersessionist interpretation could save these Scriptures for Christianity, as Paul clearly demonstrates in the rest of Galatians. This was Paul’s “canonical method,” but it cannot possibly be the method of the modern scholar! 45. Ibid., 73.

366

Chapter 9

describe this peculiar relationship [the history of revelation between God and Israel] and to define the scope of this history by establishing a beginning and an end to the process. It assigns a special quality to this particular segment of human history which became normative for all successive generations of this community of faith.” 46 This statement is ambiguous and could be interpreted in a number of different ways. It could suggest that the age of revelation is the period portrayed by the Hebrew Bible itself—which is vague and nowhere suggests closure to the divine encounter between God and people. More likely, it presupposes the common understanding of the period from rabbinic Judaism, which defined the canon for its own particular sectarian group by proposing that the time of Ezra was the end of the age of inspiration and rejecting anything that it thought came after this time. This sort of definition did not actually reflect the use of “Scriptures” within the “community of faith” and was rejected by Christianity. But, more importantly, it did not actually reflect the reality of the texts themselves because many of them belong to a period after the time of Ezra. This makes it problematic to define a normative “segment of human history” for the final form of the canon. Childs attempts to avoid this problem by making the definitive period the actual time during which the texts were produced up to the point at which he believes the text of the Hebrew Bible as defined by the rabbis was standardized and canonized. By this understanding, the final form of the canon represents both the final shape given to it by “redactors” and the subsequent shaping through the process of textual transmission up to some point around 100 c.e. Childs’s understanding of the canon’s final form leads into his discussion about the “canonical process” by which this final form was achieved on two levels: (1) the composition of the texts within the canon, and (2) their transmission history until the point of stabilization. Of course, as we have seen in our study so far, it is the editor who is held responsible for the “final form” of the text in both of these respects. The question to be addressed, therefore, is the extent to which the “canonical process” and “canonical shaping” correspond to notions about the “redactional shaping” of the text from the “final form” of its compositional phase to its “final form” at the point of Masoretic stabilization. Childs describes the canonical process in this way: Beginning in the pre-exilic period, but increasing in significance in the post-exilic era, a force was unleashed by Israel’s religious use of her traditions which exerted an influence on the shaping of the literature as it was selected, collected and ordered. It is clear from the sketch of the process that particular editors, religious groups, and even political parties were involved. . . . But basic to the canonical process is that those responsible for the actual editing of the text did their best to obscure their own identity. Thus the actual process by which the text was reworked lies in almost total obscurity. Its presence is detected by the effect on the text.47 46. Ibid., 75. 47. Ibid., 78.

spread is 6 points long

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

367

Not only does Childs closely identify the editorial process of the so-called redactors, whose reality he fully accepts, with the first stage of his canonical process, but he sees the redactors’ “almost total obscurity” as intentional and as given theological legitimacy as part of the canonical process. To be sure, Childs does not want to limit the canonical process to editors and to their intentionality alone. There may have been unintentional factors, particularly at the level of textual transmission, which he attributes to a “canonical intentionality.” 48 It is quite clear from this that any doubts cast upon the existence of redactors in the formation of biblical literature would create havoc with the canonical approach to the Old Testament. With respect to the second phase of the canonical process, the transmission of the text to the point of its stability and final canonization, Childs’s program puts him at odds with much of the concern of modern text critics. For Childs the canonical text means the Masoretic Text tradition as it was stabilized at the time of the final canonization of the Scriptures by the rabbis ca. 100 c.e. The problem with this approach is that there is no evidence that the rabbis or any other group in Judaism or even in Christianity during the same period had a particular form of the text in mind. Canonization was never about a specific text in the text-critical sense. The establishment of a particular form of the text in preference to another text is the preserve of scholars, as it was in the case of the text of Homer—not the concern of those who treated their copy of the text as canonical. Communities of faith all treat their own vulgate text as canonical, so the transmission process has very little to do with the question of canon. There is not a single discussion of canonization in antiquity regarding a particular text that is to be the “standard” version for the sake of the canon. There may be discussion about what books are or are not to be included as Scripture but never any preference for a particular form of the text of a book. When Philo argued that, quite miraculously, the Greek translation of the Law resulted in the exact equivalent of the Hebrew original, so that it could be treated equally as the divine Word and thus canonical, he had no idea of the complexities of the textual differences between the two versions of his own day. And when the Greek Bible became too closely associated with the Christian Church, it was rejected by the Jews for polemical, not text-critical, reasons, and new translations were made that were thought to reflect more closely the Hebrew texts currently in use. Furthermore, the move toward the standardization of texts was part of a general cultural phenomenon in the treatment of texttransmission of classical or “canonical” texts in the Roman period, which was as true for Homer as it was for the Bible.

48. Ibid., 79. This “canonical intentionality” can only mean something like the activity of the Holy Spirit of Christian theology. The editorial process has been removed from the merely human realm of editorial activity and elevated to the level of the hidden divine redactor. The obscurity of the Old Testament redactors is used to support the notion of “canonical intentionality,” but in New Testament redaction criticism the redactors now have the names Matthew, Mark, and Luke!

368

Chapter 9

Because Childs identifies the text-history of the Scriptures as part of the canonical process that partly parallels and overlaps with the final compositional form of some biblical books, such as Daniel, he is able to draw a parallel between the redactional process of shaping the text and the transmission process. He states: In the light of this overlap, it is not surprising to find important elements of similarity between the canonical shaping in its literary development and the canonical shaping in its textual development. In both phases the formation of the literature as sacred scripture involved its ongoing use within a religious community in contrast to a purely scholarly endeavour. Again, both phases involved a process which exerted critical judgments respecting the preservation and transmission of the literature. Nevertheless, there are some equally important elements of difference between the literary and textual phases. The literary process involved major moves affecting the understanding of the literature, such as combining sources, restructuring the material into new patterns, and providing new redactional contexts for interpreting the tradition. By contrast, the textual phase of Old Testament formation was minor in comparison. . . . Again, the literary phase often involved considerable freedom on the part of the tradents in exerting an active, intentional effect. By contrast, the textual phase reflects a far more conservative, passive role with the activity focused on preserving and maintaining traditions rather than creating them.49

The remarkable thing about this description of the “canonical shaping” of the text is that it so completely coincides with much recent discussion about the redactional shaping of the text. 50 As we have seen in our previous discussion of Wolf, there is nothing new about this proposal: Wolf’s treatment of the “canonical” text of Homer also combines the same two phases of literary composition and textual transmission in his editorial history (Redaktionsgeschichte) of Homer’s epic poems. Apart from Childs’s use of some theological jargon, his description would fit Wolf’s understanding of the formation and transmission of Homer from the time of the final compositional form under Peisistratus to the stabilization of the text (as he understood it) by the Alexandrians, especially Aristarchus. If editorial histories of this sort are erroneous, then there is little support left for Childs’s “canonical process.” The one point where Childs may wish to insist on a fundamental difference with Wolf’s approach is the point at which he invokes his extrinsic theological principle: it is the literature’s “ongoing use within a religious community” as sacred Scripture that is important for understanding its formation “in contrast to a purely scholarly endeavour” of composition and transmission. This statement cannot stand up to any close historical or so-

49. Ibid., 94–95. 50. See also the remarks about the coalescence of literary criticism and textual criticism as it has to do with the redactor in the previous chapter, pp. 298–299, 318–323 above.

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

369

ciological scrutiny. Of course, all literary texts have an audience, their “community,” religious or otherwise, and to a certain extent the audience being addressed shapes the way in which the text is formed. Yet it is always a small elite, particularly in antiquity, who create the texts that are received by its “community” and who can certainly be regarded as its scholars and poets. If the texts were deemed worthy of preservation by the community, and particularly by its leaders, then the transmission of these texts was in the hands of scribes and scholars, not the community as a whole, the vast majority of whom were illiterate. This can be illustrated just as easily with Homer as it can with biblical literature. In attempting to make a case for the close connection between the closing of the canon by the rabbis and the Hebrew text of the Bible, Childs argues for the particular form of the text reflected in the Masoretic Text. He states: “The thesis being proposed is that the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible is the vehicle both for recovering and for understanding the canonical text of the Old Testament.” 51 We will not review all of his arguments for justifying this position but for our purposes will focus on the first one. He gives as a reason for choosing the MT: Not only did the literary shape of the tradition receive a fixed form with the establishing of the canon, but the text of the Hebrew Bible also moved out of its earlier stage of fluidity into a stabilized form by the end of the first century ad. This stabilized Hebrew text was clearly a derivative of a fixed canon. 52

and The term canonical text denotes that official Hebrew text of the Jewish community which had reached a point of stabilization in the first century ad, thus all but ending its long history of fluidity. From that period on, the one form of the Hebrew text of the Bible became the normative and authoritative expression of Israel’s sacred scripture. 53

These statements are quite debatable. There is no direct connection between the limiting of the canon to certain books and their stabilization. The decision to establish a fixed canon did not mean at the same time the choice of a fixed text, so it is entirely incorrect to speak of an “official” Hebrew text, and there is much evidence against the existence of any such document. There was no uniform stabilization of the various books of the Old Testament, only the fact that their veneration as Scripture led to their gradual stabilization, especially as scribal activity in Jerusalem became increasingly sophisticated. Yet it was about this same time that we also have the stabilization of the text of Homer, which surely was a “canonical” text for several centuries prior to this time. Stabilization is more a product of scribal activity

51. Ibid., 97. 52. Ibid. (italics mine). 53. Ibid., 100.

370

Chapter 9

than of “canonical process.” However, a single authorized “edition,” an editio princeps, never existed before the Renaissance. This means that the application of the concept of canon to set the historical limits for textual criticism and a second phase of the “canonical process” is quite unhistorical and at variance with the discipline of textual criticism. The phantom “editor” who created the final form of the Old Testament’s composition in the first phase is duplicated by the phantom “final editor” of the fixed text at the end of the second phase. When it comes to applying the canonical approach to the various parts and units of the Hebrew Bible, it is the application of the first phase that gets the lion’s share of attention, because it is assumed that the MT is the best avenue to the “canonical text.” 54 The “canonical approach” can be illustrated briefly by an example from Childs’s introduction to the Pentateuch. Although he gives a brief survey of the historical criticism of the Pentateuch and its division into sources and small form-critical units, his primary interest is in the “canonical form” of the five books of Moses. He states: “First of all, it is clear that the five books were seen as separate entities by the final biblical editor in spite of the obvious continuity of the one story which extended from the creation of the world (Gen. 1.1) to the death of Moses (Deut. 34).” 55 He then lists the rather weak and debatable clues that he believes justify making these divisions. We will not take the time here to discuss his arguments but only to maintain that the division of the books at convenient points has more to do with the possible length of scrolls than with any hypothetical editorial transitions. What I merely want to point out is the reference, in the quotation, to the “final biblical editor,” who is simply invented for the convenience of the canonical form. When it comes to the final form of the Pentateuch as a whole, Childs applies Rolf Rendtorff’s study of the tradition-history of the Pentateuch. 56 Childs points to the fact that Rendtorff identifies a number of texts that in his opinion do not belong to the sources J or P but rather have the whole Pentateuch in mind 57 and concludes from this: In my judgment, Rendtorff’s analysis allows one to draw some important canonical observations. The final form of the Pentateuch, which cannot be simply derived from the combination of literary sources, gives evidence of a canonical reading of the whole in its final stage of editing. The various parts were more closely united by means of cross-references, either to the promises of the past or to an anticipation of the future. In sum, a theolog-

54. Arguments against a “canonical text” have been presented above in chaps. 3 and 8 and need not be repeated here. 55. Childs, Introduction, 129. 56. R. Rendtorff, Das überlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Pentateuch (BZAW 147; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977). For my earlier critique of this work, see above, pp. 271–276. 57. Gen 22:16; 26:3 (note that Childs misquotes this as 23:6); 24:7; 50:24; as well as texts in Exodus–Numbers: Exod 13:5, 11, 19; 32:11–13; 33:1–3; Num 11:11–15; 13–14; see Rendtorff, Das überlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Pentateuch, 75–79.

spread is 3 points long

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

371

ical force which reflects a knowledge of the whole Pentateuch has given it a final order. 58

In fact, Rendtorff’s study, in my view, shows nothing of the sort. Though he does not relate these texts to a specific source of the Documentary Hypothesis, he regards them as belonging to a Bearbeitungsschicht, which he suggests is either Deuteronomistic or early Deuteronomic or proto-Deuteronomic and therefore not yet inclusive of the priestly stratum. Erhard Blum speaks of these same texts as part of his comprehensive “D composition,” distinct from his “P composition.” It is true that in recent discussion this Bearbeitungsschicht is construed as part of a Pentateuchal redaction, which is certainly what Childs has in mind. Nevertheless, both Rendtorff and Childs ignore the fact that two of their texts, Gen 50:24–26 and Exod 13:19, have a rather obvious connection with Josh 24:32, and some scholars regard these and some other texts as belonging to a Hexateuchal redactor—and this would create havoc for Childs’s understanding of the “canonical process.” However, in my view, all the texts cited and discussed by Rendtorff belong to one source, one author—the Yahwist—not to an invented editor. It is Rendtorff’s denegration of the authors and sources of the Documentary Hypothesis and his substitution of a traditiohistorical and redactional process that has led to his views, and Childs conveniently adopts them for his own canonical criticism. 59 Canonical criticism takes a very curious position with respect to the question of authorship, because, as we have seen, the “canonical process” has been wedded to the activity of redactors, which completely denigrates the work of authors, especially with respect to the Pentateuch. Now, it appears that within the rabbinic tradition, as Childs acknowledges, specific authors are associated with all the books of the Bible, even those that are anonymous; thus, their authority resides in their association with such figures as Moses, David, Solomon, and others, and this association must be viewed as a reason for their inclusion in the canon. This is no different from the works attributed to Homer and the other authors of the classical age and thus regarded as “canonical” by Hellenistic scholars. Childs is aware of the fact that this brings the Hebrew Bible into conflict with historical criticism, which disputes the authorship of, for instance, Moses for the Pentateuch, so he attempts to find a way out of this dilemma. In speaking about the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, he states: The evidence for a long period of historical growth [of the Pentateuch] appeared to rule out the possibility of his authorship when the term ‘authorship’ was construed in its usual modern sense. . . . In my judgment, the question of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch has not been correctly formulated because the issue has been treated apart from its canonical function. On the one hand, critical historical scholarship defined the issue 58. Childs, Introduction, 132. 59. On Rendtorff’s treatment of the “final form of the Pentateuch,” see Problem, 158–73 and my discussion above, pp. 275–276.

372

Chapter 9

of scholarship in a modern sense and investigated it as a strictly historical problem. It did not take much effort to demonstrate the obvious historical difficulties. On the other hand, conservative scholarship—whether in a Jewish, Protestant or Catholic form is almost immaterial—was equally willing to argue on strictly historical grounds . . . , coupled with an appeal to religious tradition, in order to build a first line of defence for the authority of Scripture. . . . In the end, neither side in the debate did justice to the canonical understanding of Moses’ relationship to the Pentateuch.60

The point at issue for Childs is that both critical and conservative scholars have anachronistically applied the modern notion of author to the ancient period, when a quite different understanding of authorship is implied in the biblical material. He argues that Moses is given a mediatorial role by God to communicate the divine Law at Sinai, and then in a few texts he is represented as writing the laws (Exod 24:3; 34:27; Deut 31); henceforth, the divine Law is closely associated with Moses’ book of the Law. Childs then admits: “Although there is no explicit reference in the Old Testament which connects the book of Genesis to Moses, the move was made in Jewish tradition when the unity of the entire Pentateuch was assumed.” 61 Childs of course should have added that according to his own scheme this understanding of Moses’ authorship fits only within his parameters of the canonical process before the fixing of the canon. Childs then attempts to answer a question: How is one able to overcome the obvious discrepancy between the historical evidence that Moses did not write the laws and the canonical attribution of the laws to him. Childs answers this question as follows: [I]n spite of the lack of historical evidence by which to trace the actual process [of attributing laws to Moses], it would seem clear that the authorship of Moses did perform a normative role within the canonical context from a very early period. Thus laws attributed to Moses were deemed authoritative, and conversely authoritative laws were attributed to Moses. . . . The claim of Mosaic authorship functioned as a norm by which to test the tradition’s authority. . . . The appeal to Mosaic authorship derived its meaning only within the context of a community of faith for whom a body of written tradition had already been recognized as authoritative.62

This statement, it seems to me, is a case of special pleading based on an acknowledged “lack of historical evidence.” There is no basis for the view that the authorship of Moses had “a normative role . . . from a very early period.” Not a single eighth-century prophet makes any such claim. The earliest possible date for the use of Mosaic authorship to legitimate the Law is the time of Josiah’s reform, and then it has to do with radical reformation of religious practice. Law and custom that derived from a long tradition did not need legitimation. Only after the Deuteronomic development of Moses’ 60. Childs, Introduction, 133. 61. Ibid., 134. 62. Ibid., 134–35.

spread is 6 points long

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

373

role as lawgiver by making him the author of a wide range of legal reforms did the general conception of Moses as the fountainhead of all law come about. Furthermore, it was not a vague canonical process by which the community tested the traditional laws and assigned them to Moses (through the medium of editors?) but an elite group who were responsible for the various codes found in the Pentateuch and who attributed the authorship of their own segments to Moses in order to gain their acceptance as authoritative. And not only the laws, but an equally large portion of narrative came to be attributed to Moses as well. Rolf Knierim seeks to address the significance of the Pentateuch as the Torah of Moses by stating that “it qualifies the torah as most authoritative because it represents the legacy of Moses. The Pentateuch is not distinct because it is torah but because the personal authority of Moses, and ultimately the claimed authorship of Moses, constitutes the Pentateuch as a unit and its torah as distinctly authoritative regardless of its generic form.” 63 However, Childs objects to this historical-critical notion of authorship as modern and anachronistic, but our notions of author (auctor) and authority (auctoritas) are certainly ancient. 64 This is especially the case with the canon. All the works within a “canon” must be attributed to an author who bears the appropriate authority, and for Scripture this could only be satisfied by divine inspiration from the age of revelation that ended with Ezra. The closest parallel to this is, of course, the establishment of the Greek classics, especially Homer, the rival of Moses. Notions of authorship in the case of the Hebrew Scriptures seem to have been directly influenced by the conceptions of the Hellenistic world. At the very time that the limits of the Scriptures were being debated, the ancient world knew a great deal about pseudepigraphy and the attribution of false authors to texts in order to gain authority for the views expressed in those writings. The book of Daniel is a rather blatant example of an instance in which a pseudepigraphy succeeded in deceiving the rabbinic “canonizers.” Nevertheless, Knierim identifies the generic form or genre of the Pentateuch as biography—specifically, the biography of Moses. 65 This claim is certainly true for the section from Exodus to Deuteronomy, but it is a little forced to make Genesis a prologue to this biography. In fact, it is clearly a prologue to the larger history that includes the conquest under Joshua. This distinctive form of Moses’ biography is not the result of any redactional process but the invention of the Yahwist. 66 It is precisely because the prophetic books contain both the words of the prophets and biographical details of their lives that Moses is understood as the author of the whole. Much of the Moses biography corresponds to elements of prophetic biography, notably 63. Rolf Knierim, The Task of Old Testament Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1995), 369. 64. See OLD, 204–7. 65. Knierim, Task, 372–79. 66. See my The Life of Moses: The Yahwist as Historian in Exodus–Numbers (Louisville: Westminister John Knox / Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1994).

374

Chapter 9

the call narrative, which has close correspondences to Jeremiah’s call; and the plagues narrative, which constitutes a series of judgment oracles against Pharaoh, leading to the exodus. It is also suggested in Num 33 that Moses kept a precise account of the people’s itinerary from the departure from Egypt to their arrival east of the Jordan. All of this lends itself to the identification of Moses as the author of the entire account from Exodus to Deuteronomy. It was but a small step to extend his authorship back to include Genesis as well, because of its close connection with what follows in Exodus. In my view, Childs has taken up the concepts of “canon” and “canonical” in a purely theological way to distinguish the Jewish and Christian Scriptures from all other ancient literatures. Consequently, all comparative and historical-critical considerations must give way to the “canonical approach” and the “canonical process.” We have seen how the latter is heavily dependent on redaction criticism, in which the editors are made to serve as “canonizers,” and their sublimated presence is viewed as a mark of canonicity. The various audiences of the texts have become the “believing community” created in response to the “Word” within this canonical process. If we set aside this confessional and theological perspective, however, the development of the canons of Scriptures have quite reasonable and, to my mind, quite convincing historical and comparative explanations, especially when taken together with their classical counterparts. The other scholar particularly known for his advocacy of canonical criticism is James Sanders. In contrast to Childs, Sanders prefers the term “canonical criticism,” because he sees it as one of a number of disciplines necessary for the critical study of the Bible. Although Sanders shares with Childs the same confessional and theological perspective in regard to the canon and the “believing community,” Sanders does not give the same emphasis to the “final form” and its redactors. He sees the canonical process as involving “the function of authoritative traditions in the believing communities, early and late.” 67 In this respect, the canonical process seems to include the whole of both tradition-history and redaction-history, even beyond the final form of the text to its subsequent history of interpretation. For Sanders, canon is largely synonymous with “authoritative tradition,” as well as the constant reinterpretation and adaptation of this tradition to the changing needs of the community. Sanders sees a continuum from the highly flexible (oral) tradition into stable (written) Scripture and “from Torah materials down through the Writings and beyond.” 68 This is the point 67. J. A. Sanders, Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 24. 68. Ibid., 28. See also Sanders’s remarks in “The Issue of Closure in the Canonical Process,” in The Canon Debate (ed. L. M. McDonald and J. A. Sanders; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002), 252–63, esp. p. 261: “The editor-inventors took accounts already accepted and respected in their communities and, instead of editing them into a harmonious whole, added their own perspective in order to make the older stories and accounts pertinent to and relevant for the problems and issues of their own time.” The “editor-inventor” is an oxymoron that merely creates confusion rather than clarity.

spread is 3 points long

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

375

(which Sanders places in the first century) at which there is a “change in ontology of canon” through the process of stabilization, which led to the development of hermeneutics to make this highly stable form of the tradition flexible and adaptable. “The function of tradition-scripture-canon has always largely been to answer for the believing community the two essential and existential questions of identity and lifestyle.” 69 Of course, it is entirely possible to deal with the role of tradition within Judean society and later Judaism in purely sociological terms, and one wonders what is gained by the added jargon having to do with canon and canonical process. Nevertheless, Sanders insists that there is “a canonical dimension which cannot be attributed to any discreet genius, such as an author or editor or redactor, in the past. . . . Redaction criticism cannot be the final stage of growth of biblical criticism.” And here he refers to Childs’s use of Rendtorff regarding the formation of the Pentateuch (quoted above) to the effect that beyond the literary sources “a theological force which reflects a knowledge of the whole Pentateuch has given it a final order.” 70 In the context of Childs’s discussion, Childs actually does mean the final redactor, but Sanders understands this “theological force” otherwise and identifies it with “the work of the Holy Spirit in that process.” 71 One often has the feeling in reading Childs that this is what he means by canonical process, of which the editors are merely agents, but Sanders makes the point explicit. It appears that, when explaining the ultimate shape of the canon, if all else fails one can appeal to the ultimate editor, the deity himself. Let us sum up our discussion to this point. There are two ways to discuss the meaning of canon and canonical as applied to the biblical books, one historical and the other theological. The historical meaning has to do with explaining how canon, which means “rule,” “standard,” or “model,” came to be applied to a fixed body of sacred texts. This development occurred within Christianity between the first and fourth centuries. Rabbinic Judaism had had already established, by the end of the first century, a selected list of 22 or 24 books as Scriptures, very likely as a kind of Hebrew classics and sacred text in imitation of the Greek Homer and “pagan” antiquity’s corpus of classics. Christianity, which inherited a body of Jewish writings in Greek translation as Scriptures, also took over the idea of a selected body of sacred texts and subsequently identified this list as a “canon.” It is therefore anachronistic and inappropriate to use the term for the Hebrew Scriptures within early Judaism and even within Christianity prior to the fourth century. If one does use the term canon in a discussion of the historical development of the Hebrew Scriptures, it should be used only in the modern sense of a selected corpus of writings considered to have special quality or status for a specific group, whether it be the Hebrew canon, the classical canon, or the canon of English literature. 69. Sanders, Canon and Community, 28 (Sanders’s italics). 70. Ibid., 29 (see my discussion of Childs, pp. 370–371 above.) 71. Ibid.

376

Chapter 9

When canon is used in the theological sense of the inspired Word of God within a community of faith, this usage is something altogether different and is quite beyond any historical discussion of its origin and development. Its theological meaning for Origen is the apostolic tradition as a standard of faith embodied in the Christian writings that became the New Testament; for him, the Old Testament is the writings inherited from Judaism represented by the rabbinic collection of 22 books as well as the additional books found in the Septuagint. In this corpus, the canon may be identified by the extent to which it is seen as bearing prophetic witness to the gospel and the apostolic doctrine, and thus “canonical criticism” is the theological interpretation that discloses this prophetic meaning. This “canonical” understanding of the Hebrew Bible has been present throughout the history of Christianity down to the present and has always been concerned with the problem of the unity between the Old and New Testaments. This sort of traditional “canonical” reading of the Hebrew Bible has long been contested by historical criticism, and Christian biblical theology has attempted to come up with new ways of dealing with the problem of the canon. This conflict has led, as we have seen, to “canonical criticism” or the “canonical method” of Childs and Sanders, which posits an amalgamation of historical criticism with biblical theology under the rubric of the canon. In Childs, final redactors become the “canonizers” of the biblical books; 72 in Sanders, the canonical process encompasses, and is largely identical with, the whole tradition-history from the smallest oral unit to the final stabilized text and beyond. For both scholars, the locus of this canonical process is the theological and completely idealized “believing community,” which is in direct continuity with the Church and synagogue. That this thesis, from a historical point of view, is a gross anachronism seems to matter little. The Hebrew Bible itself presents the Israelite and Judean audience of the prophets as hostile and unbelieving and the long history of the people as unfaithful and disobedient to the Law. On the few occasions when the “congregation” is viewed as attentive, it is entirely passive and nothing more than an ideological construct. There is, of course, a way of understanding the dynamic of tradition within communities, whether primitive or advanced, through the discipline of sociology and social history that has no need to resort to the expedient of “canon criticism.” 73

The Role of the Editor in Innerbiblical Exegesis Another method that stands close to canonical criticism is “innerbiblical exegesis,” which seeks to establish a continuity between the Hebrew Bible 72. See also Barr (Holy Scripture, 146), who asserts that for “canonical critics” the two are exactly the same. 73. I have in mind works such as E. Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); as well as the classical works of Max Weber.

spread is 6 points long

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

377

and postbiblical rabbinic Judaism by discovering a “canonical” interpretive method of midrash within the biblical text that is comparable to the method used by the rabbis, as represented in the Mishnah and Talmud. There were various attempts along these lines in the 1960s and 1970s, 74 and Sanders pays tribute to this method in the development of his own view of canonical criticism. 75 However, the standard work reflecting this approach is Michael Fishbane’s Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel ( 1985). 76 In this study, the editor or redactor plays an important role as exegete and interpreter of tradition, comparable to the “canonizer” in Childs, and this development will be the focus of our examination here. In his introduction, Fishbane presents a set of questions that his book seeks to answer: When did the Jewish exegetical tradition come to be formed? What literary and historical factors contributed to its birth? Is the development of an exegetical tradition in post-biblical Judaism solely the product of internal tensions—fostered by competing sects with different claims on the biblical heritage, or do its roots also go back to the biblical past itself? Are the independent and religiously dignified compilations of oral traditions in early Judaism solely the late product of theoretical study and practical need— fostered by different exegetical techniques and social factors—or does the Hebrew Bible also reflect the prehistory of those post-biblical phenomena whose contents are so new and often ‘unbiblical’?77

Fishbane answers these questions by seeing the roots of the exegetical tradition of “historical Judaism” (by which he means primarily rabbinic Judaism) in what he identifies in the rest of his book as “innerbiblical exegesis.” He asserts in the strongest possible terms a continuity between the transformation of tradition within the Hebrew Bible and postbiblical commentary (halakah and midrash) that was external to the Bible. The strategy employed to support this thesis is to understand the relationship between similar texts, or texts that manifest a literary relationship to each other, as an interpretation of one text by another and therefore as part of the larger exegetical tradition. Of course, a characterization that is so broad and vague establishes nothing. A very high percentage of literature of many peoples imitates older literary works and traditions and can in this sense be said to interpret its predecessors. However, it is quite a different matter to account for specific forms and genres of exegesis and commentary. The danger in Fishbane’s method is the attempt to construe his innerbiblical exegesis anachronistically to conform as much as possible to midrash and commentary. 74. N. Sarna, “Psalm 89: A Study in Inner Biblical Exegesis” in Biblical and Other Studies (ed. A. Altmann; Brandeis University Studies and Texts 1; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 29–46; J. Weingreen, From Bible to Mishna: The Continuity of Tradition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976). 75. Sanders, Canon and Community, 26. 76. M. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). 77. Ibid., 2.

378

Chapter 9

A second strategy is to read back into the biblical period the rabbinic tradition of “oral Torah,” which claims that revelation from Moses was handed down orally alongside the written Torah. Fishbane denies that this notion was an innovation of later Judaism and attempts to trace it back into the biblical text itself and particularly the way in which the Bible came into being. By a sleight of hand, Fishbane is able to identify the process of rabbinic “oral Torah” with the scholarly development of tradition-history. Taking up the language of this method, though for his own purposes, he asserts that the content of (biblical) tradition, the traditum, was not at all monolithic, but rather the complex result of a long and varied process of transmission, or traditio. This supposition is, of course, the staple of the historicalphilological method, whose primary concern in biblical studies has been to unravel the textual strands and documents of the canonical text. . . . In modern scholarship it is the method of tradition-history which focused most intensively on the lively relationship between the traditions and their transmission in ancient Israel. Fully appreciative of the long prehistory of many of the themes, legends, and teachings now found in Scripture, and the fact that over time these deposits of tradition were adapted to new situations and combined in new ways, the practitioners of this approach ideally seek to discern the components of a tradition-complex, to track their origins or attribution to certain locales, and to show the profoundly new meanings which result as these materials were integrated into more comprehensive units. At each stage in the traditio, the traditum was adapted, transformed, or reinterpreted—be this by the use of old cult legends for retelling the life of the patriarch, or the integration of traditions into major literary complexes, like the Book of Genesis as a whole. 78

Fishbane gives no hint in this discussion that there might be anything problematic with this method, either in general or in its application to particular texts and blocks of material. It is the method itself that justifies his establishing of continuity with rabbinic exegesis. He continues: The integration and reworking of many types of tradition at many different times and places thus had the result of incorporating non-Israelite and local materials into a national corpus whose telling and retelling was a new basis for cultural memory. Accordingly, the movement from the small oral traditions (native and foreign) to the final written stage of Scripture is not only a process of tradition-building but of Gemeindebildung as well. Thus, the combination of northern and southern pastoral, warrior or cultic legenda, creates an authoritative and valued anthology of traditions and a sense of national identity. . . . All this is the proper background, I believe, for appreciating the development of inner-biblical exegesis and its postbiblical continuities in early Judaism and Christianity. 79

78. Ibid., 6. 79. Ibid., 6–7.

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

379

At this point, Fishbane acknowledges indebtedness to James Sanders’s attempt to link tradition-history with midrash, a term that increasingly is used to refer to both innerbiblical exegesis and postbiblical Jewish midrash. He states: The dynamic we have just reviewed between traditum and traditio, characteristic as it is of traditions in ancient Israel, is also present in inner-biblical exegesis, but with one significant shift: whereas the study of traditionhistory moves back from the written sources to the oral traditions which make them up, inner-biblical exegesis starts with the received Scripture and moves forward to the interpretations based on it. In tradition-history, written formulations are the final of many oral stages of traditio during which the traditions themselves become authoritative; by contrast, innerbiblical exegesis begins with an authoritative traditum. . . . Inner-biblical exegesis . . . takes the stabilized literary formulation as its base and point of departure. Responses to it are thus interpretations of a basically fixed traditum, despite the somewhat fluid record of the most ancient biblical manuscripts and versions. 80

There are a number of fundamental issues reflected in this quotation, which has as its primary referent the Pentateuch. It first of all assumes as correct the traditiohistorical method, which argues for a long process of development and transmission of tradition on the oral level. The point at which this tradition becomes fixed in writing is the start of the tradition as “received Scripture,” which means that the Textus Receptus understood as the canonical text is now pushed back in time from the period of “canonization” in the first or second century c.e. to the time in which the tradition is first composed in written form. This makes the “interpretive process” within the biblical tradition, as Fishbane understands it, directly comparable to the later rabbinic process of midrash based on the canonical Textus Receptus. All of the notions attributed to the so-called Textus Receptus upon which rabbinic exegesis is based—the “authoritative” text, the “stabilized literary formulation”—are ascribed to the earliest written formation of the text, despite all evidence to the contrary, as Fishbane admits. Clearly, if one does not subscribe to the view of Martin Noth with regard to the traditiohistorical formation of the Pentateuchal tradition at the preliterary stage of the Israelite amphictyonic community, or to any set of “authoritative” texts that make up the Pentateuch during the time of the monarchies, or to a Textus Receptus as the basis of early rabbinic exegesis, then there is no basis upon which to posit a continuity of interpretive method from the time of textual formation to its later exemplars in the Roman period. Fishbane continues his effort to establish continuity between traditionhistory and rabbinic exegesis by setting them out as two poles in a common interpretive process. He states: 80. Ibid., 7–8.

380

Chapter 9

To begin with, the dynamics we have begun to explore between traditum and traditio in ancient Israel can be reformulated, without distortion, as those between (increasingly) authoritative teachings or traditions whose religious-cultural significance is vital (and increasingly fundamental), and the concern to preserve, render contemporary, or otherwise reinterpret these teachings or traditions in explicit ways for new times and circumstances. This formulation is reminiscent of two factors which were considered earlier as ‘necessary components in the development of post-biblical Jewish exegesis’, and is indicative as well of the structural similarities which link tradition-history and inner- and post-biblical exegesis. 81

Of course, the statement of the thesis that there existed continuity of this kind from the earliest oral tradition to rabbinic exegesis is one thing, and establishing this as a fact is quite another matter. At one extreme of traditionhistory, Fishbane must admit that it is very difficult actually to demonstrate that this process of reinterpretation of tradition takes place. Following Martin Noth, Fishbane is more concerned with how “to reorient oneself to Scripture as a complex of living traditions rather than as a pastiche of fixed written sources in the first instance,” 82 by which he means the work of individual authors. Yet, Fishbane must admit: “in the final analysis, however, the great methodological flaw of tradition-history remains. A traditio is inferred from a received traditum, and this ‘recovered’ traditio serves, in turn, as a principal means for isolating the components of the same traditum.” 83 In other words, the reorientation to tradition that is advocated by Noth leads to hopeless circularity. But this circularity does not stop with traditionhistory; it is just as true of the whole continuity of interpretation proposed by Fishbane. It is the very notion of the tradition-history of the Pentateuch that has suggested this process to him in the first place. It is somewhat ironic that when Noth turns to the Deuteronomistic History he applies the quite different model of historian and author, and here the scheme of tradition-history does not work. Fishbane certainly does not limit his own approach to the Torah but regards it as equally applicable to the Prophets. Fishbane’s focus is on innerbiblical exegesis within the written text, and here he asserts a certain uniqueness for the biblical text as compared with “other foundational documents of the Western religious tradition.” 84 Claims for uniqueness are always suspect, because they may just as easily point to an erroneous understanding of features that are actually typical of comparative literature. What exactly are these unique features of biblical literature? Fishbane enumerates them as “textual comments and clarifications, scribal remarks and interpolations, and theological reactions and revisions,” which he interprets as “the principal traits of the exegesis within the Hebrew Bible itself.” 85 However, the features that he lists as evident in the text are not 81. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 85. Ibid.

8. 8–9. 9. 10.

spread is 12 points long

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

381

very unusual at all and can be found in many ancient texts, including Homer, as we have seen. It is only the way in which they have been understood by Fishbane, as a special tradition of exegesis that makes them special and the subject of his investigation of innerbiblical exegesis. It is noteworthy that the features that he lists—comments, interpolations, clarifications, and revisions—are all features that are also associated with redactors, or the Greek diaskeuastai of the Homeric text, and in this respect redaction criticism and innerbiblical exegesis have coalesced. Thus, while Fishbane may be very cautious about attempting to uncover the process in its earliest phase on the level of tradition-history, he is fully committed to its application on the level of redaction criticism. The editor has become the innerbiblical exegete and the protorabbinic scholar! At the other extreme from the pole of tradition-history that is so difficult to control is the pole of rabbinic commentary, which consists of a citation of scripture and a comment outside of the text itself. There is, of course, nothing unique about this, and commentary of this sort has a long tradition in Greco-Roman, as well as biblical, texts. Fishbane’s claim is that there is a “middle area” in which citation and interpretation occur within the Hebrew Bible, and he is concerned with the admittedly difficult task of isolating the interpretive traditio (i.e., editorial element) from the original traditum. Fishbane recognizes the difficulties and uncontrolled dangers in a procedure of this sort and insists that the matters under investigation by him “rest solely on the validity of the instances demonstrated.” 86 For Fishbane, the method is not restricted to any particular genre but covers the whole range of biblical materials throughout the entire Hebrew Bible, and the various chapters of his book deal with broad categories of such material. The method also encompasses a wide range of exegetical techniques, which he sees as clues to the understanding of “the ways ancient Israelite legists, or prophets, preachers, and scribes, resignified and explained their traditum.” 87 The implication is that rabbinic exegesis is in this way directly related to all these aspects of ancient Israelite society. Fishbane sees this process of the reuse of the “authoritative texts or traditions” (traditum) for new social and religious circumstances (traditio) as the fundamental process of continuity and survival across the whole spectrum of the moral and spiritual teachings of the community, with the inevitable tensions and problems that this process embodies. We are not here primarily concerned with issues of political and social rivalries reflected in this interpretive process or the specific Sitz im Leben of the various groups that Fishbane conjectures as participating in this process—with the possible exception of one particular group that Fishbane identifies as particularly important for his thesis: the scribes. He asserts that “scattered information is preserved throughout the Hebrew Bible regarding scribes and their social positions and editorial tasks.” 88 He further states: “Thus, we know that 86. Ibid., 13, his italics. 87. Ibid., 14. 88. Ibid., 16.

382

Chapter 9

scribes existed and that texts were transmitted and copied—for we have these texts and references to copying activities. Scribal exegesis and its lifesettings may therefore be inferred from such indicia.” 89 Here is an instance of Fishbane’s rather typical sleight of hand. No one would dispute the existence of scribes and their important role in Israelite society, especially in the late Judean monarchy and beyond. But it may be disputed that the Bible tells us anything about their “editorial tasks,” and it is even less clear how the “indicia” mentioned say anything about “scribal exegesis.” The process that Fishbane constructs is very similar to, if not modeled on, Childs’s notion of the canonical process. This comes out in the following statement: Biblical Israel was set on its great course by transformative revelations. These served—at least in principle—to set Israel apart from the mythological civilizations round about her. They could have also turned into a closed and lifeless inheritance without the courage of the tradents of biblical teachings to seize the traditum and turn it over and over again, making traditio the arbiter and midwife of a revitalized traditum. The final process of canon-formation, which meant the solidification of the biblical traditum and the onset of the post-biblical traditio, was thus a culmination of several related processes. Each transmission of received traditions utilized materials which were or became authoritative in this very process; and each interpretation and explication was made in the context of an authoritative traditum. Further, each solidification of the traditum was the canon in process of its formation; and each stage of canon-formation was a new achievement in Gemeindebildung, in the formation of an integrated bookcentered culture. The inner-biblical dynamic of traditum-traditio is thus culturally constitutive and regenerative in the most profound sense.90

This statement makes clear that the basic scheme that Fishbane has outlined in his introduction is confessional, a statement of faith that the whole of the biblical tradition, from the initial “revelations” that created the traditum, through the course of its transmission in the traditio, to the authoritative interpretation of normative rabbinic Judaism, is a theological unity. What are these initial “transformative revelations”? Those made to the three patriarchs and Moses? And are we to assume that these late literary formations reflect historical realities that defined the nature of Israel’s religious and cultural community many centuries before the extant form of the traditum? And how are we to know that the way in which the text was transmitted was part of a process of canon-formation unless we attribute some special religious status to the canon of a particular religious community and view the textual history of that particular canon as its destiny and not some alternative canon, such as the Christian canon? To ask these questions is to make it obvious that the answers are all confessional—matters of faith—and not matters of historical criticism, however much the language of scholar89. Ibid., 17. 90. Ibid., 18.

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

383

ship has been employed for that purpose. At any rate, the canon has nothing to do with a particular form of the text, and one cannot assume that text-formation is also canon-formation. The discussion has been formulated in such a way as to support a view that makes the mode of rabbinic exegesis, presumably based on a final canonical text, the MT, basic to the whole development of the Israelite-Jewish religious tradition down to its articulation in the Mishnah and Talmud. Furthermore, because the “transformative revelations” of ancient Israel set it apart from the “mythological civilizations,” any comparison with the Greek world of texts and textual transmission is precluded. Fishbane himself leaves no doubt regarding the inspiration of his scheme when he asks about the origins of the exegetical method of the rabbis. Jewish tradition has one answer, modern scholarship suggests another. In the first case, the exegetical tradition of the Torah of Moses was traced to Sinai according to Jewish (Pharisaic) tradition. In the second, the Alexandrian oikoumene, with its editing and exegesis of Homeric texts, and with its highly developed rhetorical and legal traditions, has been perceived by some modern scholars as the catalyst and shaper of the Jewish ‘oral tradition’.

Of these two options, Fishbane concedes only a minor role to the second “scholarly” opinion and bases his scheme primarily on that of the rabbinic (“Pharisaic”) tradition of Pirqe ªAbot 1.1, which has as its primary reference the oral Torah but which Fishbane extends and reinterprets to mean the whole transmission process, including innerbiblical exegesis. And so he concludes his discussion with the rhetorical question: Is it possible that the origins of the Jewish exegetical tradition are native and ancient, that they developed diversely in ancient Israel, in many centres and at many times, and that these many tributaries met in the exile and its aftermath to set a new stage for biblical culture which was redirected, rationalized, and systematized in the lively environment of the Graeco-Roman world? To ask the question is almost to answer it. 91

Of course, what is possible to imagine is not necessarily probable and depends entirely on the evidence that is brought to bear on the question. What this statement represents is an attempt to give some scholarly support to the previously cited confessional statement, to recognize some complexity in the process of tradition transmission, but to affirm the validity of the theological unity nonetheless. It is a stance that is basically no different from that of Childs and Sanders. At this point, it is necessary to clarify one important issue in the discussion, namely, the social role of tradition. There can be no denying that tradition—that which is handed on from one generation to the next within a society or community, however simple or complex, whether customs, rituals,

91. Ibid., 19.

384

Chapter 9

technical skills, beliefs, or knowledge, and whether oral or written—is very diverse, as are the mechanisms for the transmission of a body of tradition. 92 Similarly, the conditions and circumstances that lead to change in traditions and the ways in which those changes come about are also very diverse and cannot be encompassed by a simple and unitary scheme such as Fishbane’s. Even if we restricted the discussion to narrative traditions, such as the traditions reflected in the Pentateuch, there are more obvious ways of explaining the transmission and transformation of these traditions about the people’s past. Traditions can take the form of national epics, such as the epics reflected in the poems of Homer, with the same problems of tradition formation and transmission that are faced in the biblical tradition and that have been so influential in the past. However, there is also the development of prose historiography to consider, both in the classical world and in Israel: it suggests a model of tradition transmission quite different from the model proposed by Fishbane. Historians may diligently collect traditions from the past and reconstruct them in such a way as to create a vulgate tradition with the intention of offering an “authoritative” account of a people’s past. 93 This version may then be disputed and an alternative offered in its place. We have rival accounts of precisely this kind in the Deuteronomistic History and in the Chronicler. It is rather special pleading for Fishbane to style the Chronicler as a scribe and editor because of his “expansive revision” of Kings rather than treating him as a historian, just to make the Chronicler’s work fit his scheme. 94 The difficult and highly controversial question of the development of legal traditions is a similar case: their origin in “codes,” their transmission and transformation, the incorporation of foreign elements and innovations resulting from social change, and the whole role of these “codes” within the society or religious community. That the development of Law is explicable on the basis of a single principle or model of internal exegesis is extremely doubtful, even if it could be proved in a few individual cases. Fishbane is not concerned about the larger question—the development of legal traditions—or about the study of law in antiquity and the history of the study of biblical Law in particular. For him, biblical Law as Torah is part of the traditum that extends from Sinai to the rabbis. Given this scheme as a basis, the only task that remains is to arrange the laws in relationship to each other to show how any example may be understood as an exegesis or midrash of the other, or to deconstruct a particular law in order for its “editing” to reveal exegetical expansion and interpretation. However, let us suppose that the scholarship of historical criticism for the last two centuries, since de Wette, is correct and that the whole legal corpus has no connection whatever with Moses and Sinai—that such a connection

92. See Shils, Tradition, for a useful overview. 93. See P. Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 94. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, 74.

spread is 6 points long

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

385

is a late invention for particular political and religious purposes. Let us also suppose that, again as scholars believe, the Deuteronomic Code represents a radical break with the past, a document whose connection with the tradition of Moses and Horeb is an invention created to legitimate religious reform. And let us further suppose that a corpus of Law in Exod 21–22, the mishpatim, is directly taken over from a foreign source, the Babylonians, and attributed now to Moses, with whom it had no prior connection whatsoever. 95 None of these very real possibilities, supported by much evidence, can be reconciled with the beliefs that the legal tradition of the Pentateuch was part of the revealed traditum at the inauguration of Israel under Moses and was transmitted by exegetical traditio to the form received by the rabbis for the purposes of their midrashic halakah. One may be permitted to doubt that the development of legal tradition as reflected in the biblical codes and the development of rabbinic halakah have much in common. The fact that halakah is commentary quite separate from the biblical corpus, that it was oral, and that it was based heavily on the oral Torah with its own transmission—all of this points to fundamental differences that cannot be dismissed as easily as Fishbane implies. It is not possible or even necessary to review all of the material that is presented by Fishbane in support of his position. Instead, I will list some of the basic problems with Fishbane’s position: 1. It is clear from Fishbane’s treatment of texts according to innerbiblical exegesis that he has equated the scribal exegetes who were responsible for the transmission and ongoing interpretation of the tradition in its written or literary form with a host of editors. However, he presents no clear compositional theory about the growth and development of this literary corpus, particularly the Pentateuch and historical books, except for a remark late in his book. Here he expresses disagreement with a basic tenet of Wellhausen that the prophets came before the Law, not the Law before the prophets, and he expresses agreement with Y. Kaufmann, against Wellhausen. This enables him to claim much greater antiquity for the legal corpus, especially the laws of the P Code, and throughout he treats P as earlier than Deuteronomy. Nevertheless, it is not possible to gain a clear idea from his work about the literary development of the Pentateuch: documentary? fragmentary? supplementary? Because the whole notion of the “redactor” derives from the Documentary Hypothesis, the issue can hardly be ignored. Yet, Fishbane feels quite at liberty to overlook this theory completely, as well as the relationship of his “editors” to the production of the “authoritative editions”; he invents them at will merely for his own convenience. 95. On the relationship of Mesopotamian law to Israelite law, Fishbane (ibid., 231) prefers to speak of a “shared legal Tradentenkreis,” which in the current discussion of biblical Law seems increasingly unlikely. I have recently argued for direct dependence of the Covenant Code on Babylonian law, which makes his discussion of these laws quite problematic. See my Law Book for the Diaspora (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 29–34, 96–99; also David P. Wright, “The Laws of Hammurabi as a Source for the Covenant Collection (Exodus 20:23–23:19),” Maarav 10 (2003): 11–87.

386

Chapter 9

2. Lack of clarity about a compositional history leads to a corresponding lack of clarity about the dating of specific texts and their relationship to the “authoritative editions” that become the object of his exegetical editors. Often, for Fishbane, the age of a text seems to be governed entirely by the time reflected in the narrative. Texts that deal with the time of the Judges, Samuel, David, and Solomon are often assumed to be from those historical periods; and, because some of what are said to be the oldest texts are associated with Moses in the wilderness, they should by the same token be viewed as Mosaic in origin. Yet, all of these texts are part of a literary corpus that undergoes editing at some later, undetermined period. It does not help that Fishbane occasionally uses terminology familiar to historical criticism as it suits him, because he just as easily ignores it when it does not suit his purpose. 3. The problem with the Fishbane’s method is that he simply applies to many individual texts the phenomenon so common to rabbinic midrash— applying seemingly random comments from many different parts of the biblical corpus. Oral commentary, which is entirely outside the text itself and has nothing to do with editing, is artificially imported into the text by Fishbane and combined with the scholarly notion of redaction, with which it originally has nothing in common. The redactors are no longer the editors who produced the “final form” of the text but innumerable exegetes of a religious community, operating in a completely unsystematic way that mimics of the rabbis who much later produced the midrash. 96 4. Fishbane’s approach to the biblical texts, especially those of the Pentateuch, is form-critical, coupled with the application of Weberian sociology, because this permits him to escape having to deal with the problem of documents dated to particular periods, especially in connection with biblical Laws. 97 Albrecht Alt’s research pointed to the possibility of recovering very old levels of legal tradition regardless of the source in which they are found, and Fishbane uses precisely this method for recovering the oldest (Mosaic?) tradition within the P corpus. Closely related to the oldest laws is the notion of covenant, which Fishbane also believes belongs to the oldest traditum. However, more recently, though also prior to the publication of Fishbane’s book, serious arguments have been raised against the supposed antiquity of the laws that were regarded by Alt as primitive and against the antiquity of the covenant. If one believes, as many now do, that covenant is largely a Deuteronomic invention, based on the contemporary analogy of the Assyrian loyalty oaths, 98 then the whole developmental scheme is seriously jeopardized. Many of Fishbane’s form-critical arguments that are intended to recover ancient levels of legal material in the Priestly Code are forced and circular and contradicted by other evidence and arguments. 5. It is most important for Fishbane that innerbiblical exegesis should be associated with the activity of editing, that it be understood as redactional, 96. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, 84–85. 97. For a critical review of the study of Law, see my Law Book, 47–81. 98. See E. Otto, Das Deuteronomium (BZAW 284; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999).

spread is 6 points long

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

387

because “editors” give to their interventions in the text a positive and scholarly spin and because they are perceived to be the ones responsible for final “authoritative editions,” which Fishbane constantly refers to as “authoritative traditum.” These scribal “editors” are responsible both for the conscientious transmission of the written tradition and for its transformation by means of their revisions, which he styles as exegesis. The contradictions of the role of the redactor, which he freely admits, were already noted by Wellhausen as a real problem, but this contradiction does not seem to trouble Fishbane much. 99 He can, on the one hand, point to evidence in the Hebrew Bible that suggests certain kinds of scribal activity that are common to the Near Eastern world of scribes and the Hellenistic world of Homeric scholars, who transmitted their texts with the greatest care, while at the same time he attributes to these same scribes exegetical interpretation and expansion that is uniquely Israelite in character. Fishbane does this because he has fully amalgamated the scribal activity of the sopherim to rabbinic midrash and exegesis. But as Bickerman points out, this is a big mistake. 100 The rabbis did not regard themselves as scribes; the tradition that they passed on was the oral Law, and only belatedly was it reproduced by their students in written form. In exceptional cases, a rabbi, such as Rabbi Meir, may be known as a scribe who makes his living at this activity and who even makes copies of his own private manuscript of the Torah. In Meir’s case, however, his manuscript did not even agree with the MT, and many rabbis based their midrashim on problematic readings of the biblical text. The activity of professional scribes and the work of the rabbis have little in common and should not be confused. 6. Fishbane identifies a very large number of scribal interpolations and additions within the biblical texts, all of which are attributed to editors (“redactors”). Because he puts a positive spin on these additions, they constitute no problem text-critically and are all retained as holy writ. A small percentage of these can be identified as interpolations when they are compared with the versional evidence, but most cannot. If one did regard them as interpolations into an “authorized edition,” then they should certainly be viewed as corruptions and eliminated, but doing so would produce a very minimal text indeed. The fact is that most supposed additions are the result of speculation for which there is no firm positive evidence and much to the contrary. Many of the examples of scribal activity are in the nature of explanatory glosses, which a Hellenistic “editor” would place in the margin, not the text, but which a copyist could accidentally include within the text itself. If any of the cases cited by Fishbane are true glosses—and I doubt that most of them are—then they can hardly be considered “exegetical.” 7. Fishbane admits that he does not have any examples in the Hebrew Bible of the sort of interpretation in which a text is quoted and its meaning is given, such as one finds in rabbinic literature, in the New Testament, in 99. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, 78–88. 100. Bickerman, The Jews in the Greek Age, 163.

388

Chapter 9

Philo, and at Qumran. 101 Instead, he identifies two or more identical or very similar texts in which the latter can be understood as interpreting or exegeting the earlier. To make this claim, however, requires a very large assumption, because there may be any number of reasons why one author copies the words of another, as, for example, the work of the Chronicler demonstrates. It is hardly likely that every case should be considered interpretation. This claim is only based on Fishbane’s overall design, which requires that all of these texts can be construed in this way. However, in many instances of borrowing so-called lemmata from earlier texts, no intention of interpreting the earlier texts existed. And even when there was a conscious intention, through imitation, to recall the source of a quotation, it was to satirize or parody the earlier text. There are also many cases in which we may dispute the direction of dependence of one text on another, and the supposed interpretation proves nothing about how innerbiblical exegesis works, except to demonstrate the ingenuity of the person applying the method. This is not to suggest that one author may not quote another for the purpose of giving a quite different “interpretation” to a narrative situation or legal injunction. Virgil interprets Homer in this way, but Virgil is not an editor or a Latin “rabbi” of the sacred Homeric tradition. The classical rhetoricians have much to say about imitatio of older “canonical” sources, but this has little in common with Fishbane’s scheme. 8. Fishbane speaks throughout his study of an “authorized” or “authoritative” tradition that leads to a corresponding “authorized” text—terms that in Childs and Sanders are synonymous with “canonical.” As we have seen, the notion of an authorized tradition or text is completely anachronistic before the modern period. In antiquity, there are solemn edicts and decrees issued by kings, to whom subjects may need to swear their loyalty and obedience. These edicts and decrees are “authorized” because the king is the author and has the authority to enforce them. This model is applied in the literary presentation of various promulgations of laws by Moses in the Pentateuch (Exod 24; Deut 27 and 31) and by his successor Joshua ( Josh 8 and 24). All of these are either exilic or postexilic fictions and rest on no “authoritative” traditions. The only “historical” occasion of promulgation of the divine commandments and decrees is Josiah’s presentation of the Deuteronomic reform in 2 Kgs 23:1–3. It is true that Ezra is given authority by Artaxerxes to carry out the provisions of the Law of Moses (Ezra 7), and he also is said to have instructed the population of Judah in the content of the Law—whatever the limits of this corpus might have been. However, there is nothing to suggest that it was anything other than laws and commandments that were apparently quite new to the people, an import from the priestly community of Babylon. There may have been an attempt in the Persian period to impose a set of religious laws on the people of the region, laws that were embedded in a corpus of writings ascribed to the time of Moses. There is nothing to 101. Ibid., 266–71.

spread is 3 pints long

Editors and the Creation of the Canon

389

suggest that the Pentateuch itself, or any other part of the Hebrew Scriptures, was ever “authorized.” In a similar fashion, Homer was a venerated text by the sixth century b.c.e.; its recitation was the focal point of festivals and its use in schools the basis of education. Yet, its text was never “authorized,” and its copies were subject to the same expansionist and revisionist tendencies that one finds in the biblical texts. There is no need to label these revisions “inner-Homeric exegesis.” They are corruptions, even though they often stem from the same desire, as with biblical copyists, to improve the text in order to solve notorious problems or felt deficiencies. The notion that there was an “authoritative” tradition, both oral and written, from the time of Israel’s origins and throughout its history, and that this “authoritative” tradition was transmitted by means of a special guild of scribes and interpreters down to its final “canonical” formation in the time of the rabbis, who were the heirs of this scribal guild, is a myth. It is no more legitimate for Fishbane than it is for Sanders.

Conclusion We have now come full circle. When we take the term canon in its modern sense of a list of books that are regarded as classics—literary works of the highest quality and the standards or models of their genre—the conception derives from the Hellenistic and Roman world. The idea was imitated in the late first century by rabbinic Judaism as a way of defining its own literary and religious heritage. Christianity inherited a body of literary works from Judaism before the idea of a closed corpus arose and then, in imitation of the Hebrew canon, struggled for some time to define its own canon of Scriptures, both the Old Testament that it took over from Judaism and its own Christian, “apostolic” collection, the New Testament. The term canon was only applied to these exclusive collections by Christian scholars in the fourth century a.d. The theological meaning of the term canon does not derive from its late association with the fixed list of Scriptures but from its earlier use, in which the “canon of the Church” meant the “rule of faith,” the apostolic tradition handed down in the Church that was the basis of Christian belief and practice. This canon could only be understood in relation to the older Hebrew Scriptures by means of a tradition of allegorical and prophetic interpretation. Thus, the canon of the Church was the standard of faith and a method of understanding a certain corpus of texts in terms of that standard. Defining the corpus of texts as “canonical” meant setting the limits on which Christian works reflected the apostolic tradition and which of the older inherited Scriptures could be interpreted as witnessing to the standard of faith. Thus, the idea of the canon as a list of books is entirely secondary to the prior understanding of canon as a mode of interpretation and a tradition of belief that had no initial reference to a fixed corpus, either Jewish or Christian. In this respect, the Christian canon was in origin fundamentally at odds with the Jewish rabbinic canon and has been, down to modern times.

390

Chapter 9

The rise of historical criticism created a crisis for the unity of the Christian canon because it called into question the “canonical” method of prophetic interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures. While historical criticism dealt with the problems of understanding the individual books and their literary development within their own historical contexts, biblical theology had to determine new ways of bridging the continuity between the Old and New Testaments. 102 Various attempts were made to combine notions of historical development and literary criticism with theological interpretation, all of which tended to marginalize the notion of the canon of Scripture as a long historical process based on historically dubious principles. The rise of canonical criticism was, therefore, first and foremost a development within biblical theology to recover the theological significance of the canon, not on the basis of the older prophetic interpretation but an amalgamation of selected elements of historical and literary criticism, most notably traditionhistory and redaction criticism. The situation was no different for the Jewish canon. Historical criticism called into question the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and with it the rabbinic “canon” of midrashic and halakic interpretation. Efforts to restore continuity between the biblical canon and the interpretive methods of the rabbis have been proposed by means of the method of innerbiblical exegesis, though also employing elements of tradition-history and redaction criticism. Tradition-history is exploited to suggest continuity back to earliest times, even to Moses himself, and redaction criticism supplies the method, complete with numerous editors, who are then understood as scribes and interpreters of the tradition on the rabbinic model of midrashic exegesis. Recent efforts to modify innerbiblical exegesis, such as Bernard Levinson’s “revisionary hermeneutics,” 103 continue to rely heavily on the editor and redactional criticism. Consequently, the methods of canonical criticism and innerbiblical exegesis depend for their plausibility on the assumption that ancient editors are responsible for the development of the Bible as we have it today, both the small units of individual laws, narratives, prophetic oracles, and hymns; and also the larger units of books and collections, such as the Pentateuch. The editor needs no more proof for his existence than convenience; he makes the method work. If the assumption of editors or redactors in literary criticism or textual criticism is problematic, as I have argued above, then the methods of canonical criticism and innerbiblical exegesis are seriously compromised, if not completely undermined. The editor has become the “canonizer” of the final form or the transmitter of the “authorized” tradition or text, the deus ex machina of both literary criticism and biblical theology. 102. See, e.g., G. von Rad, Old Testament Theology, 2:319–429. Von Rad’s typological exegesis to bridge the gap between the two testaments is still in the old tradition of “canonical” hermeneutics. 103. B. M. Levinson, Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). A work that anticipates Levinson’s (although it is not mentioned by him in his book) is Weingreen, From Bible to Mishna. Weingreen likewise views Deuteronomy as a form of proto-rabbinic halakah on earlier legislation.

long long long

10

Summary and Conclusion In the introduction, I raised questions about the concept and role of the editor or redactor in literary criticism of the Bible. In our review of the definitions of redactors and descriptions of redaction criticism in the handbooks on biblical exegesis and interpretation, we saw nothing but confusion and contradiction. On the one hand, the editor or redactor is said to be completely faithful to his source or author, preserving and transmitting the ancient text and adding nothing of his own. On the other hand, the redactor is portrayed as so completely in control of his material, reshaping it and adding so much of his own content and perspective, that he has become indistinguishable from the author and has largely supplanted him. For instance, in a recent publication we are told that virtually the whole of the book of Numbers is “editorial.” 1 These diverse and contradictory understandings of ancient biblical literary activity do not derive from etymology or the original meaning of the terms editor or redactor, which have only arisen as neologisms in modern times, but are based entirely on their convenience as supports for literary theories that have changed significantly over the course of time. In order to understand the use of these terms in biblical studies and the methodology that goes under the rubric of redaction criticism, we needed to delve into the history of scholarship as it related to the problematic role of the editor. The history of editing is twofold. One history deals with the rise of the editor as a textual critic, whose primary function is the restoration and preservation of the works of ancient authors and their publication in an authoritative form. This role did not come into its own until the rise of the printing press, but it has its precursors in the activity of the Hellenistic scholars of Alexandria. Consequently, we attempted briefly to trace the history of ancient scholarship, with special attention to the critical treatment of the poems of Homer from the earliest period down to Roman times. Our concern was to judge what impact ancient critical editing had on the form and transmission of the text that became the vulgate form reflected in the large majority of medieval manuscripts. The scholarly consensus seems to be that it had little direct influence on the vulgate text of Homer, and any effect that it did have was accidental and marginal. In other words, in antiquity, editors from the Hellenistic period onward produced single copies of individual scholarly editions of Homer that were used by other scholars for 1. R. Achenbach, Die Vollendung der Tora: Studien zur Redaktionsgeschichte des Numeribuches im Kontext von Hexateuch und Pentateuch (BZABR 3; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003).

- 391 -

392

Chapter 10

consultation but not by booksellers for sale and distribution as “authorized” editions. This was likewise true of other classical works throughout the Roman period. The situation within Judaism and Christianity was not significantly different. The sopherim, under the influence of classical scholarship, may have engaged in some forms of editing with the intent of faithfully preserving the text-tradition in favor within their particular group or scribal community. But there is no clear evidence that they ever made a critical edition of any books or parts of the Hebrew Bible for the purpose of creating a standard edition for “normative Judaism.” That a “vulgate” version of the biblical books became established by the late first or early second century c.e. seems clear, paralleling what happened with Homer’s works in the mid-second century b.c.e., but there is no evidence that the sopherim, the rabbis, or anyone else was responsible for this textual form, and it did not become the authorized form of the text until the Renaissance. In early Christianity, the greatest “editor” was Origen. Trained in the Alexandrian scholarly tradition of textual collation and comparison, he produced his great opus, the Hexapla. The Hexapla was never intended as the basis for a standard edition, and it was only after Origen that some scholars and disciples used his fifth column to create a sort of common text for the Church in Palestine. Even Jerome, who made great use of the Hexapla as a scholarly resource, did not attempt to reconstruct a critical edition of the Old Testament on his own, nor did he use Origen’s fifth column as the base for his own translation. Instead, he used the Hebrew Bible that he had available in Palestine as the basis of his Latin translation, because he thought that it was the true Vorlage of the Septuagint. Neither in Judaism nor in Christianity was there anything like an “edited” and standardized form of the text of the Bible that was comparable to the edited editions of the Renaissance. As we have seen, with the revival of classical learning, the urge to recover the ancient texts of the classical world from obscurity and to present them in pristine form and the invention of the printing press that made possible the production of multiple identical copies, the role of the scholarly editor came into its own. The recovery of multiple divergent manuscripts of the same literary work gave rise to the development of textual criticism, which became the primary activity of the scholarly editor in his concern to produce the definitive edition of the text. Editorial work was also directed toward the production of standard editions of the Bible, both Erasmus’s Textus Receptus of the New Testament and the standard Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible—the second edition of the Bomberg Rabbinic Bible, edited by Jacob ben Chayim. This was the age of “authorized” editions of Bibles and their translations. It is, therefore, anachronistic to read standardization back into the ancient period, where this sort of editorial collaboration with book production did not exist, and it is likewise anachronistic to use terms such as Textus Receptus for the proto-Masoretic vulgate of the Hebrew Bible. Scholars of the Renaissance, in the course of editing texts in order to recover the original words of the author, were confronted with the problem

Summary and Conclusion

393

that all of their textual witnesses were corrupt, and no amount of recensio and collation could solve all of the textual problems. This led to conjectural emendations that were not based on any known manuscript. The bolder these conjectures became, the greater was the potential for radical change in the text from the prior text-tradition. With bad editing, this had the potential of corrupting the text instead of repairing it and was more damaging to the text than the variations found in older defective manuscripts. The realization of the problem of bad editing by a later generation of scholarly editors led to the notion that many serious problems in the text, however ancient the manuscript, were the result of this editorial practice. Thus, even the best text-critics, such as Bentley, used conjecture to emend the text of corruptions that they regarded as the work of hypothetical editors working in the past. Bentley’s invention of the editor in his edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost is a prime example of what can happen when this form of “redaction criticism” is applied to a great piece of literature. It is at this point that the actual history of editing in our survey gives way to a review of the completely imaginary and invented history of the editing of ancient texts by classical and biblical scholars, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In classical studies, F. A. Wolf’s Prolegomena to Homer attempted to reconstruct a history of the textual tradition from the point of the transition from oral poems to written text and its transmission to the point of the text edited by Aristarchus, which Wolf understood to be the vulgate. He conceived of the whole process as editorial, from the first redacted editions in the time of Peisistratus to the “final form” in the time of the Alexandrians. The history of transmission (Überlieferungsgeschichte) was also the history of redaction (Redaktionsgeschichte). This was “higher criticism,” a form of textual analysis that went beyond the level of textual criticism (“lower criticism”). This development set the pattern of critical scholarship for classical studies for more than a century and a half, and it had a major impact on the parallel field of biblical studies as well. However, this model of analysis came under attack by the beginning of the twentieth century because it could be shown that neither Aristarchus nor any other scholarly editor was directly responsible for the vulgate text of Homer or any of the other classics, and the prior diversity of “editions” (ekdoseis) could not be construed as a series of editions in the modern sense, leading back to the formation of the original poems. While discussion of the nature of the oral tradition reflected in the Homeric poems and the manner of its transition to a literary form continues to be a complex and unresolved debate, the role of editors in this process is no longer entertained as an option, and the poet as author of the poems has once again come to the fore. Additions and interpolations are recognized in the poems, as they were by the Alexandrian scholars, but they are no longer labeled editorial. Editors and redactors have virtually disappeared from classical literary criticism, and the artistry of the authors has become paramount. Matters in biblical studies have turned out quite differently. As we saw in our historical survey of biblical scholarship, even before the rise of historical

394

Chapter 10

criticism in classical studies represented in the work of Bentley and Wolf, Richard Simon attempted to develop a critical history of the text of the Old Testament. In doing so, he introduced the analogy of the editor and collector of historical materials that was familiar to him from the scholarship of his own age in the seventeenth century in order to account for the nature and content of the biblical books from Genesis to Kings and the books of Chronicles. His was a conservative attempt to confront the rationalistic discrediting of the biblical record as history. Of course, the analogy of scholarly editors in the ancient period was a transparent anachronism. Nevertheless, it was taken over by Eichhorn in his “documentary” model of “higher criticism” and became a fixed notion within biblical criticism thereafter. It became the basis of both the fragmentary and the documentary hypotheses. The primary role of the editor in the Documentary Hypothesis from Hupfeld onward was to conflate independent sources; the editor himself made no significant additions to the text. However, the acknowledgment by Wellhausen, Kuenen, and others of multiple interpolations in the text that apparently did not belong to any of the major documents opened up the possibility of additions and corruptions introduced by bad editors, the diaskeuastai or “revisers.” It is the invention of the editor to explain these two quite different functions within the text that ultimately led to the hopelessly contradictory nature of redaction criticism. And the more extensive the additions are that are assigned to the editors, the more editors begin to replace authors within the text. The rise of form-criticism under Gunkel, Gressmann, and Alt was a return to smaller units of tradition as the basic components of the Pentateuch, much as in the older fragmentary hypothesis, but unlike the latter approach, which thought in terms of literary fragments preserved in archives to be compiled by scholars into collections, the units of tradition in form-criticism were oral. For Gunkel, the compilers of the rather random accumulation of oral traditions were the sources of the Documentary Hypothesis, J and E. These compilers (Sammler) were distinct from the final redactors, who merely conflated the written sources. As we saw in the case of the discussion of oral tradition in twentieth-century Homeric studies, the individual responsible for the formation of the epic tradition from oral to two written poems was an author (or authors), not a compiler or editor. However much recent biblical scholarship has used Homeric research on oral tradition, it has failed to take into account this aspect of the debate about the authorship of the poems. In protest against Gunkel’s notion of a gradual, layer-upon-layer accumulation of tradition, von Rad advocated the authorship of J as a form of ancient historiography. J was indeed a compiler of tradition but, like any ancient historian, he did much more by building his material into a history from the creation to the conquest of the promised land. In similar fashion, Noth made the case for a Deuteronomistic Historian as the author of a history from Joshua to Kings governed by the ideology of Deuteronomy. In this he clearly rejected the notion of Deuteronomistic editors that had been ad-

Summary and Conclusion

395

vocated since Ewald. In spite of this very clear advocacy of authors as historians within Genesis to Kings by von Rad and Noth, their students reverted to speaking only about editors and even to misrepresenting von Rad and Noth as doing the same. This shift was due to an influence from New Testament studies and the rise of what was now being called redaction criticism, in which the Gospel writers—Mark, Matthew, and Luke—were viewed as redactors. The irony is that it was Wellhausen who introduced the idea of the redactor to Synoptic studies on the analogy of Pentateuchal source criticism, and the Evangelists became primarily conflators of written sources. Formcritics, following Gunkel in Old Testament studies, regarded the Gospel writers as compilers of oral and written units of tradition; the multistaged process was all included under the rubric of redaction history (Redaktionsgeschichte). Even when the Evangelists were given much more credit for their contribution to the shape and character of their Gospels and for their artistry and theological perspective, scholars such as Marxsen continued to speak of them as editors. This same obvious abuse of language was read back into von Rad’s treatment of J and Noth’s understanding of Dtr. It was only a matter of time until scholars traveling down this road eliminated the authors J and Dtr altogether, and we are left with the ludicrous scenario of editors editing the work of editors, with no original authors at all. Simon’s original analogy of the conscientious editor has been reduced to absurdity. Because the notion of the ancient editor arose out of the practice of textual criticism by Simon and Wolf, I deemed it necessary to review the role of the editor of ancient textual recensions as discussed in contemporary textual criticism. Serious confusion remains about the degree to which the various “recensions” of the Old Testament, whether in Hebrew or in Greek, are the work of editors, to say nothing of crediting editors with deliberate additions and interpolations. Ironically, textual critics, such as Tov, are seeking to understand the nature of the editor in the text-history of the Bible on the basis of how the redactor is being understood in literary criticism, the complete reverse of how the notion of the editor arose in the first place. Too much of this discussion in biblical studies is being conducted in isolation from the rest of the world of textual criticism, particularly as it is practiced within classical studies. Thus, it is now apparent that the Aristarchian model is not appropriate, because the Alexandrians did not create a vulgate text. The concept of an “authorized” final form of the text is an anachronism from the days of the printing press. Some text-critics would claim, as Tov does, that there are specific examples of different editions of biblical books that may be presented as evidence of deliberate editorial activity. A particularly telling case for Tov is the difference between the two forms of the book of Jeremiah—the LXX version and the MT version—which he characterizes by the labels “edition I” and “edition II.” A quite different approach is taken by McKane: he understands the additions in the MT to reflect no large editorial design but to be the result of what he calls a rolling corpus of interpolations and expansions, and he sees much of the so-called Deuteronomistic additions to the prophecy as

396

Chapter 10

examples of the same kind, even prior to the Vorlage of the LXX. This explanation reflects the phenomenon of long and short texts common to ancient manuscript traditions, and in the case of Homer, the Alexandrian “editors” preferred shorter texts as less corrupt, a preference that is precisely opposite to what is attributed to the biblical redactors. The Qumran scrolls also exhibit a tendency toward preferring long texts, especially in the group that is labeled proto-Samaritan, but the additions scarcely reflect anything that looks like systematic editing. Nor is there anything that is particularly Samaritan in these expansions. This also makes it clear that the only significant ideological revision in the SamP is the addition of the eleventh commandment to build an altar on Mount Gerizim, and this was countered by a still later revision by the rabbis, who tried to change the location of this altar from Gerizim to Ebal in Deut 27 and Josh 8. These deliberate revisions on the part of both religious parties should simply be characterized as corruptions and not classified as distinct editions or recensions. With respect to the recensions of the Septuagint, the texts most under discussion are the so-called kaige recension and the Lucianic recension. The texts often associated with the kaige recension extend over a broad range of witnesses both in time and space. These texts are especially noted for their revision of the Greek versions toward greater agreement with the form of the Hebrew text that is represented by the MT. Yet, as Wevers suggested, this may reflect nothing more than a long-standing tendency by scribes who were also very familiar with the Hebrew text of the day to make revisions in their copies of the Greek to produce greater agreement between the two texts. Because this tendency is already evident in the earliest Greek papyri and the Greek scrolls of Qumran, there is no reason to believe that the revisions were made with one standard Hebrew text in mind or that they were made at one time by one scribe. Like the practice of modernization of language in the “vulgar” texts of Homer, this should be regarded as a peculiar tendency of Jewish scribes copying Greek biblical texts—not a particular recension of the LXX. The Lucianic recension is similar in that it primarily makes “cosmetic” changes in the text to make the language more elegant from the perspective of educated Greek readers. True scholarly editors of the classics in the ancient period usually resisted this sort of activity as going against the ethos of the ancient texts. Implicit in most of the work of textual criticism is the goal of recovering the final, “canonical” form of the text, which for the Hebrew Bible is located sometime in the late first century. The “canonical” form is seen as in competition with the final form arrived at through literary criticism, the work of the final redactor, especially as this has to do with the Pentateuch. But this too is the “canonical” form of the text for the literary critic, removed by several centuries from the “canonical” text for the text-critic. This matter is of no small consequence for what has become known as “canonical criticism.” Canonical criticism as a method alongside other methods, or even as the primary objective of biblical exegesis, has come to the fore under the influence and concern of biblical theology. The mixing of historical and theolog-

Summary and Conclusion

397

ical understandings of canon has led to much confusion in the use of the terms canon and canonical. The term canon arose in Christianity out of Hellenism and Hellenistic Judaism, and in its primary meaning of “rule” or “standard” originally referred to a “rule of faith” as well as a mode of interpretation of Scripture that was in conformity with that rule. Only by the fourth century did “canon” come to stand for a specific, limited corpus of sacred texts, a list of books that were recognized as an “ecclesiastical canon.” Yet at no point in early Christianity did it ever mean a particular form of the text of these “canonical” books, nor was any textual form authorized as “canonical.” This is an anachronism introduced during the sixteenth century. It is only the theological controversies revolving around the theme of sola scriptura and the idea of inspiration of the ipsissima verba of Scripture that led to the notion of the canonical text. Historical and textual criticism called this approach into question. From the perspective of historical criticism, this method of interpretation was regarded as passé. Nevertheless, under the influence of Neoorthodoxy, an accommodation was attempted between a canonical approach to the interpretation of the text and historical and literary criticism. In somewhat differing ways, Childs and Sanders tried to identify a particular form of the Hebrew text as the “canonical text” and then regarded the process of transformation and transmission of the tradition, or the written text from its earliest form, as a “canonical process.” In the case of Childs, in particular, this canonical process is largely synonymous with the text’s editorial history, and the redactor or editor is viewed as a “canonizer,” whether or not the editor is conscious or not of creating an authoritative and specially sanctioned form of the text. Quite apart from the dubious use of “editors” or “redactors” borrowed from literary criticism, these “editors” have also taken on great religious authority. They have become responsible for the “final form” of the text and “authoritative” tradition, whenever that might have occurred. This is a purely theological judgment about the editor’s activity, made in retrospect, after the final result has been achieved. This method of “canonical criticism” has given rise to a mode of interpretation that gives positive affirmation to every “redactional” transformation in the text as a part of the canonical process, whether or not it could be viewed text-critically as a corruption. The notorious “revisers,” who stand in for the bad redactors of the nineteenth century, have been redeemed by canonical criticism. Furthermore, this method has led to a mode of biblical interpretation that is primarily concerned with the final “edited” version of the text and a “holistic” mode of exegesis that takes the place of any attempt to uncover the work of the author within a historical-critical perspective. The author who was the concern of historical criticism, working within the conventions and parameters of a particular genre with idea that his readers expected coherence and consistency and maintaining a particular narrative plot and theological or ideological perspective, now has given way to the “editor,” to whom anything in general may be attributed that belongs to the domain of an author, but of whom nothing in particular can be expected. In

398

Chapter 10

any event, the author has been largely supplanted. The “canonical text” has taken the author’s place, even though, as we have seen, the “canonical text” is a fiction. However, if there never was a final “canonical” form of the text that was sanctioned by a particular authority for all of Judaism or all of Christianity, and if there were no editors and no editorial process responsible for the shaping of the text, then canonical criticism loses all of its historical basis and credibility. All modes of interpretation and exegesis within the academy based on the method of canonical criticism become problematic. This applies also to the method of innerbiblical exegesis as practiced by Fishbane and others. While the emphasis in this case is on the transmission of the tradition and its constant transformation at the hand of redactors, rather than on the final form of the text, nevertheless, it is editors understood as proto-rabbis who are decisive for the legitimacy of this method. Bickermann, however, has argued that the rabbis were not scribes, and it is anachronistic to regard the scribes (sopherim) as editors during the period of the formation of the biblical books. Consequently, the method of innerbiblical exegesis also has no historical validity. I have concluded from this study that there never was in antiquity anything like “editions” of literary works that were the result of an “editorial” process, the work of editors or redactors. It is a figment of scholarly imagination that had its origins in an anachronistic analogy based on the supposition that the scribes and scholars of antiquity were engaged in the same kind of activity that occupied European scholars of the Renaissance. Simon’s original analogy of ancient scribes putting together the Pentateuchal and historical books from archival documents is quite transparent in its similarity to the scholarly model of his own day and thus quite anachronistic. However, once the analogy of editor was adopted in both biblical and classical studies, the notion took on a life of its own and was transformed into a totally hypothetical construct that bore little resemblance to actual editors of any age. Consequently, all talk of “redactors” and “redactions” should be scrupulously avoided in biblical studies. The hopeless contradiction in the usage of these terms, as pointed out above, is proof enough that it serves no useful critical purpose. There is, of course, no intention in this study to deny that, as in the cases of both Homer and the Bible, there have been many additions and interpolations made to various parts of the “original” text. In the case of Homer, these additions were already recognized by the Alexandrian scholars, who marked them with critical signs, although they were reluctant to remove them completely. They certainly did not add any interpolations of their own. Likewise, the Pentateuch has long been recognized as containing literary strata and interpolations, but there is no need to attribute any of these to “editors,” nor is it necessary to claim that “editors” combined the various strata together. There is abundant evidence that ancient literary works often received additions and interpolations in the course of scribal transmission, and there is no need to ascribe these to “editors.”

Summary and Conclusion

399

An alternative to the model of “editors,” introduced by Simon, is that of ancient historiography. Simon had tried to account for Israelite historiography from Genesis to Kings by positing the analogy of learned scribes making diplomatic copies of archival sources, which they combined and edited, on the analogy of the scholarly activity of his own day. De Wette, however, radically altered this understanding of Israelite historiography when he identified the Deuteronomist as the author of a work embracing the corpus Joshua to Kings and composed from an ideological perspective that was in direct contrast to the viewpoint of the Chronicler, who presented his history from a quite different ideological vantage point. The Pentateuch, however, he viewed much more as a mythological collection similar to the epics of Homer, although he did not address directly the nature of the Pentateuch’s composition. This separation of the Pentateuch or Hexateuch from the following historical books has been maintained in subsequent research, but Ewald reintroduced the notion of editor for both bodies of literature, and this was perpetuated by Wellhausen and Kuenen and those that followed them. It was not until Gunkel raised new form-critical interest in the origins of historiography that biblical narrative was viewed in quite a different way. Gunkel saw the origins of historiography in the primitive narrative Sagen in the Pentateuch, which later evolved into the more advanced forms preserved in the historical books. The sources of the Pentateuch, J and E, however, were little more than “collectors” (Sammler) of oral tradition, and the redactors who were thought to be responsible for the texts identified by the Documentary Hypothesis were completely marginalized from this historiographic process. This led von Rad to modify Gunkel’s scheme by disputing the latter’s description of the Yahwist as merely a collector; von Rad characterized J as an author and historian who was responsible for the basic formation of the Hexateuch as a history of Israel’s origins. Von Rad’s thesis represented a fundamental shift away from the comparison of the Pentateuch, especially Genesis, with epic—Homeric epic in particular. The Yahwist was not just a collector or editor of oral tradition. Likewise, Martin Noth, following the earlier suggestions of de Wette and Gressmann, presented the Deuteronomist as author and historian—not merely as a redactor. These significant suggestions regarding the Pentateuch and the historical books of Joshua to 2 Kings as early forms of historiography were rather rudely dropped by the successors of von Rad and Noth, and no effort at comparative historiography was forthcoming in support of their proposals. The parallels of Hellenistic and Roman historiography that Noth cited as a way of understanding the compositional method of Dtr were never taken up by Noth’s successors nor by biblical scholarship in general. The one major exception to this has been my own work on ancient historiography. 2 I have continued to press the case that both the Pentateuch

2. Van Seters, In Search of History; idem, Prologue to History; idem, “Is There Any Historiography in the Hebrew Bible? 1–25.

400

Chapter 10

and the Deuteronomistic History are to be understood on the model of ancient historiography, of which there are numerous appropriate comparative parallels, in preference to the model of the “editor,” which has no comparable parallel in antiquity. Even the most casual familiarity with the work of Herodotus leads one to recognize that he was both a compiler of a great quantity of traditional, folkloristic material and “historical” sources, as well as a consummate storyteller. He also exhibited a strong moral and theological bias, together with a comprehensive world view, and he presented the place of the Greek peoples within it. Among the numerous examples of “archaic history” that deal with the origins of peoples and states, the work of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, The Antiquities of Rome, with its concern for the ethnogenesis of the Roman people, their cultural identity, and the preservation and unification of their ancient traditions in one extended “history,” provides a particularly instructive comparison with the Yahwist. It should be altogether obvious that Hebrew historiography deserves to be compared with its counterpart in the Greco-Roman world. It is true that classical historiography developed a critical appraisal of its sources far beyond that of the Hebrew histories, although this is often exaggerated. There were many such histories in the Greco-Roman world, and few approached the critical level of Thucydides. One may, in fact, differentiate the editing of a literary work such as Homer—attempting to reproduce as closely as possible the words and intentions of the author—and “historical” editing—the reproduction of historical sources in collections with explanatory comment. 3 Although products of this sort are tools of the historian, they are not historiography itself. This distinction may be useful for considering two different kinds of editing, the editing of a text and the collecting of texts into one work for preservation and other purposes. But editing in either case is the faithful reproduction of the originals. While Simon’s original analogy of the editor referred to the historical editing of documents, this is hardly a sufficient basis for describing the nature of the Pentateuchal or historical books of the Hebrew Bible. The notion of the ancient editor was created out of an obvious anachronism and then developed in the interest of literary and text-critical theories, with the result that it has become devoid of all contact with reality. Modern scholars are either themselves editors—this was primary function of scholars in the rise of humanistic learning—or they have frequent dealings with editors in connection with their own work as authors. They know the rules and etiquette of editing and are most indignant when the limits are violated. Yet they have populated their imaginary biblical world with myriads of text-corrupting editors, who virtually replace the actual authors of the text. These editors are given great religious authority to shape the text as they wish until the form of the text is declared canonical. It is time to rid

3. G. Thomas Tanselle, “The Editing of Historical Documents (1978),” in Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 218–73.

Summary and Conclusion

401

biblical scholarship of this great fantasy and to attempt to reconstruct historically the development of the biblical text as the basis of its interpretation and exegesis. For the biblical books from Genesis to Kings and for the Chronicler, the exploration of the genre of ancient historiography is the fundamental key to form and interpretation.

Appendix: Original Text of Translated Excerpts

Page 175: Es ist ganz unvermeidlich, sich alle diese Redaktoren mit geschriebenen Texten in der Hand vorzustellen, da streichend, dort einsetzend und verschiedene Schnittstellen an einanderpassend. Von Schreibtisch, Schere and Kleister zu sprechen, ist natürlich ein boshafter Anachronismus, aber die Richtung, in der alle Annahmen dieser Art liegen, scheint mir treffend zu bezeichnen. Buchphilologen haben diese Theorien erdacht, und Arbeit an und mit Büchern ist für sie die Voraussetzung geblieben. Pages 193–194: Mythen sind überhaupt Sagen der alten Welt in der damaligen sinnlichen Denkart und Sprache. In diesem Mythen darf man also nicht eine Begebenheit gerade so dargestellt erwarten, wie sie wirklich vorgefallen ist; sondern nur so, wie sie dem damaligen Zeitalter nach seiner sinnlichen Art zu denken und zu schließen vorkommen mußte, und in der bildlichen, optischen und dramatischen Sprache und Darstellung, in welcher eine Begebenheit damals nur vorgetragen werden konnte. Page 197: es sind vielmehr die ältern Denkmahle selbst in ihrer Urform in Stücken zusammengestellt, und an einander gereihet, und zwar nicht an einzelnen Stellen, oder nur durch gewisse Theile hindurch, dass doch Uebergänge von jemand, den man würde Verfasser nennen können, gemacht wären, sondern von Anfange bis zu Ende des Buchs, ohne dass irgendwo sich jemand als Referent ankündiget, so, dass man gar nicht sagen kann, dass das Werk einen Verfasser, sondern nur, dass es einen Zusammensetzer, einen Zusammenordner, einen Sammler habe. Page 209: Interessant ist es, daß wir in unserem Pentateuch in Hinsicht auf den Gottesdienst Spuren von successiver Ausbildung der Gesetzgebung entdecken können, die uns auf der einen Seite bestätigen, daß, so wenig als die Aufzeichnung des Pentateuchs, die in demselben enthaltene Gesetzgebung (wenigstens einem grossen Theil nach) Mose zugeschrieben werden kann, und auf der andern Seite, mit Zuziehung der Geschichte, höchst wahrscheinlichte Vermuthungen über die Zeit der Entstehung mancher Gesetze und der Einführung des Pentateuchs an die Hand geben.

- 402 -

Appendix: Original Text of Translated Excerpts

403

Pages 209–210: Der ganze Character des Buchs trägt das Gepräge einer spätern Zeit. Es ist in einem Geiste geschrieben, der sich schon ziemlich jener rabbinischen, allegorisirenden und mystischen Philosophie nähert. In den frühern Büchern finden wir Mythologie und Gesetz in ihrer einfachen natürlichen Gestalt, jene in ihrer wahren Natur, als religiösen Volksglauben, wie sie die Väter überliefert hatten, dieses in seiner juridischen Trockenheit und Strenge, als zwingenden Buchstaben, als Gebot und Vorschrift. In unserm Buche aber ist die Mythologie, schon dem bewusstlosen einfachen Glauben entrückt, Gegenstand der Reflexion geworden, es werden Begriffe und Dogmen daraus abgezogen, es wird in vieles ein geheimer Sinn hineingelegt, es wird mit Wohlgefallen auf die Wunder der alten Geschichte zurückgesehen, und die Vorzüge des Volkes Gottes werden prahlerisch herausgehoben: genug, statt Mythologie finden wir Theologie, und eine sehr geschmacklose, kalte und spielende. Und in der Gesetzgebung ist eine gewisse moralische Tendenz hervorgetreten, wir hören nicht mehr die Juristen in ihrer einfachen, gebietenden und bestimmenden Sprache die Gesetze auslegen, sondern wir glauben einen Moralisten, einen Prediger zu hören, der uns die Beobachtung der Gesetze ans Herz legt, und uns durch religiöse Beweggründe dazu zu bewegen sucht. Page 211: Die Relationen des Pentateuchs sind ursprünglich einzelne, von einander unabhängige Aufsätze, die der Sammler in eine falsche fremdartige Verbindung gesetzt hat. Um sie recht zu verstehen und zu würtigen, müssen wir sie also von dieser Verbindung befreien, und ihnen ihre Unabhängigkeit wiedergeben. Dann werden sie vielleicht ganz anders erscheinen, als in dieser entstellenden Aneinanderreihung und Ineinenderschiebung. Page 212: Unsere Untersuchungen haben gezeigt, daß der Pentateuch von Anfang bis zu Ende eines Theils Mythen enthält, d. h. durch Dichter und Tradition ins Wunderbare und Übernatürliche gebildete, oft ganz erdichtete Geschichten, und andern Theils unsichere, schwankende, sich oft widersprechende alte Sagen. Eine eigene Klasse machen die juridischen Mythen aus, d. h. Gesetze und Einrichtungen (einer spätern Zeit), die nach einer eigenen zur Sitte gewordenen Fiktion dem Namen Mose zugeschrieben und an die Mosaische Geschichte angeknüpft worden. Fanden sich zwischen diesen Mythen und diesen unsichern, widersprechenden Sagen bisweilen Nachrichten, die das Gepräge einer ächten Tradition zu haben schienen: so können diese den Character der Mosaischen Relation überhaupt nicht retten, da sie nur einzeln sind; und andern Theils werden sie durch den Gebrauch, den sowohl die Verf. der einzelnen Stücke, als auch der Sammler von ihnen gemacht haben, ebenfalls zu Mythen erhoben: sie sind so vielfach mit Mythen verschlungen, daß sie nicht mehr einzeln als historische Wahrheiten gelten können: wenn sie auch wahr sind, so sind sie eben so wie Mythen angesehen, aufgefaßt und

404

Appendix: Original Text of Translated Excerpts

behandelt worden, und wir müssen sie ebenfalls als ansehen und behandeln. Der Pentateuch steht jetzt als ein Ganzes da, und zwar nicht bloß dadurch, daß ein Sammler ihn so zusammengestellt, sondern weil er das gemeinschaftliche Produkt einer in einer gewissen Periode herrschenden Dichtung und Behandlung der alten Geschichte ist; als Ganzes aber hat er lediglich eine mythische Bedeutung: gleichsam die Wurzeln desselben stehen im mythischen Boden; nirgends gewinnen wir einen festen geschichtlichen Punkt; Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, der Auszug aus Aegypten, die Gesetzgebung, alle die wichtigen Momente sind, von der Mythe in Besitz genommen und ihren Gesetzen unterworfen. Page 213: Was ich für die Behandlung der Hebräischen Mythen fordere, ist nur das, was den Mythen der Griechen und Römer noch immer widerfährt. Man liest den Homer und fühlt und bewundert seine Schönheit; aber es fällt—Dank der Allmacht seines Genius—Niemandem ein, die Geschichte, die er erzählt, und die ebenfalls wunderbar ist, natürlich, historisch-kritisch, wie man sagt, zu deuten: und doch liegt auch dem Homer wahre Geschichte zum Grunde. Page 214: mischt sich in der Volkssage mit dem real-geschichtlichen Elemente ein ideal-dichterisches, wodurch die Überlieferung nach und nach ins Wunderbare und Ideale umgebildet wird; und dazu wirken vorzüglich die Volkslieder mit, welche im kühnen lyrischen Schwunge der Phantasie das natürlich Erstaunens- und Bewundernswürdige im übernatürlichen Lichte darstellen und deren Darstellung vom wundergläubigen Volke leicht mißverstanden werden. Page 221: Im allgemeinen gleicht die Redaktion der Genesis aus den nachgewiesenen drei Urkunden dem Unternehmen aus den Evangelien, besonders den drei ersten, eine Evangelienharmonie zusammenzusetzen, wie man sie schon früh versucht hat; und gesetzt die Quellen aus denen diese zusammengesetzt sind wären verloren gegangen und verschollen, so würde der Fall ganz derselbe sein. Page 222: einerseits auf der strengen Treus womit der Redaktor oder Verfasser des Buchs wie die älteste Geschichtschreibung überhaupt, seine Quellen wörtlich und vollständig einrückte, und mit Beibehaltung aller ihrer Eigenthümlichkeiten zusammenstellte; andererseits dass sich damit so viel verständige Rücksicht auf Zusammenhang und Einheit oder Planmässigkeit der Erzählung verband, um zu offenbare Wiederholungen oder Widersprüche zu vermeiden, und die einzelnen Stücke seiner Quellen so anzuordernen und miteinander zu verbinden dass sie ein zusammenhängendes nach der Zeitfolge fortschreitendes Ganzes bilden, und den (epichen) Plan wonach die

Appendix: Original Text of Translated Excerpts

405

Geschichte in den Quellen angelegt war in erweitertem Maßstab auch in dem Ganzen wiederzugeben. Page 236: Ich bin von der Textkritik auf die literarische Kritik gefürt worden, weil sich ergab, dass manchmal die Grenze nicht zu finden war, wo die Arbeit des Glossators aufhörte and die des Literators anfing. Ich bin dadurch früh mistrauisch geworden gegen die Manier, die hebräischen Geschichtsbücher als reines Mosaik zu betrachten, und habe diesem Mistrauen schon in der Vorrede zu dem Text der Bücher Samuelis Ausdruck gegeben. Pages 236–237: Bei der Untersuchung der Komposition des Hexateuchs hat sich mir dann herausgestellt, das hier allerdings drei selbständige Erzählungsfäden fortlaufen, dass aber diese grossen Zusammenhänge nicht bloss zugeschnitten und leicht vernäht, sondern, vor, bei, und nach ihrer (nicht zugleich erfolgten) Vereinigung erheblich vermehrt und überarbeitet worden sind, dass mit anderen Worten der literarische Prozess, wodurch der Hexateuch entstanded ist, sehr komplizirt gewesen ist, und dass die sogenannte Ergänzungshypothese, in einem anderen Sinnne, als wie sie ursprünglich aufgestellt ist, in der Tat ihre Anwendung findet. Jedoch das letzte Sediment, welches sich über das ganze Geschiebe oberflächlich lagert, habe ich, wenigstens in den erzählenden Partieen, nicht gehörig gewürdigt, namentlich da nicht, wo es auffallend stark hervortritt. Hier hat mich Kuenen, wie ich bereits an anderer Stelle dankbar gesagt habe, befreit von hängen geblieben Resten der alten Sauerteiges der mechanischen Quellenscheidung. Dieser Anerkennung tut es keinen Abbruch, dass ich in der Bestimmung des Umfanges des Eingreifens der spätesten Diaskeue [revision] nicht immer mit ihm einverstanden bin. Page 280: Wir könnten die Suche nach “der Endredaktion des Pentateuch” noch ausdehnen und detaillieren, sie führte auch dann nicht zu einem greifbareren Resultat. Pointiert formuliert: “Die Endredaktion” gibt es nicht. Methodologisch fungierte sie bisher vielfach als eine Art apriorisches Postulat der exegetischen Methodik, das manche Fragestellung vereinfachen haft, dabei gewiß auch heuristisch sinnvolle Dienste leistete, dessen Berechtigung jedoch “a posteriori” nicht eigentlich eingelöst wurde. Nun könnte man es dabei bewenden lassen, ginge es hier lediglich um eines der vielen redaktionsgeschichtlichen Detailprobleme. Tatsächlich ist aber diese Frage methodisch in mancher Hinsicht verschränkt mit einer . . . Grundfrage der Exegese: der Auslegung der kanonischen Endgestalt. Die Diskussion der damit verbundenen methodischen Probleme und Herausforderungen kommt allerdings nur langsam in Gang.

406

Appendix: Original Text of Translated Excerpts

Indexes Index of Authors Achenbach, R. 391 Adler, W. 99–100 Albrektson, B. 65, 67, 72, 77, 302, 325– 326 Albright, W. F. 220, 302–304, 306–308, 311 Allen, T. W. 35, 37, 48–51, 73–74, 85– 86, 168–173, 305 Alt, A. 212, 256, 386, 394 Astruc, J. 192, 203 Barnes, T. D. 71, 91, 97–102 Barr, J. 351–353, 362, 364, 376 Barthélemy, D. 341 Barton, J. xv, 3–8, 10, 63, 65, 69–71, 269, 351–353, 358, 361 Beckwith, R. 70 Bentley, R. 30, 121, 124–129, 131–132, 134–135, 137–138, 144, 149, 151, 153, 157, 185, 206, 223, 243, 295, 364, 393–394 Bernus, A. 185 Beyer, H. W. 356–357 Bickerman, E. J. 78–79, 354, 387, 398 Blau, L. 65 Blenkinsopp, J. 361 Blum, E. 275, 277–281, 371 Bolling, G. M. 171 Bonner, G. 108 Bowra, C. M. 175–176 Brink, C. O. 125 Brock, S. P. 344–345 Brueggemann, W. 271 Bultmann, R. 288–289, 291–292 Carpenter, J. E. 191, 203, 206 Carr, D. M. 281–282 Chadwick, H. 84, 95 Cheyne, T. K. 191, 196, 200, 205, 215, 221

Chiesa, B. 301, 333 Childs, B. S. 25, 321, 347, 362–377, 382–383, 388, 397 Conzelmann, H. 11 Cook, J. xv Cross, F. M. 220, 298, 302, 304–308, 311–313, 315, 334–335, 337, 339, 347 Crüsemann, F. 279 Dahl, N. A. 290 Davidson, J. A. 133, 156 Dibelius, M. 285–288, 290 Dietrich, W. 270 Dodds, E. R. 154–155, 157–158, 173 Driver, S. R. 160–161, 244–246 Edwards, M. J. 84 Ehrman, B. 281 Eichhorn, J. G. 132–133, 137, 142, 149, 191–203, 205–211, 214–215, 219, 238, 254, 286, 297, 300, 322, 394 Eissfeldt, O. 245–246, 261 Erasmus 117–118, 120–121, 125, 128, 130, 153, 166, 305, 392 Ewald, H. 152, 205, 211, 215–226, 239– 241, 245, 247, 254, 297, 322, 395, 399 Fernández Marcos, N. xv, 345–346 Finnigan, R. 181–182 Fishbane, M. 377–389, 398 Fohrer, G. 246 Fortna, R. 284 Fraser, P. M. 38–39, 41–42, 46–47, 49 Fries, J. F. 214 Fuller, R. C. 200–201, 203–204, 214 Gabler, J. P. 193–194, 214 Galling, K. 268 Geddes, A. 200–203, 211, 214, 239, 286 Geiger, A. 65

- 407 -

408

Index of Authors

Ginsburg, C. D. 61–62, 64, 76, 79–80, 119 Gooding, D. G. 299–300 Goody, J. 182 Gordis, R. 60–63, 65, 69–71, 74–75, 77, 325 Goshen-Gottstein, M. H. 299–300 Grafton, A. 113, 125, 128, 132–133, 136–137, 148, 151, 192, 194–196 Grant, R. M. 99, 102 Greenspahn, F. E. 44 Grenfell, B. P. 51, 167–168 Gressmann, H. 253–256, 266, 272, 296, 394, 399 Groningen, B. A. van 15–17, 25, 55 Grote, G. 30, 154–155 Gunkel, H. 10, 157, 176, 202, 212, 215, 220, 247–257, 259, 262, 264, 266, 286, 288–291, 296, 394–395, 399 Hadas, M. 38 Haenchen, E. 11, 284, 288 Hanson, R. P. C. 84, 91–92, 95–97, 357– 359 Harford, G. 191, 203, 206 Harris, W. V. 36 Hermann, G. 151–154, 199 Heubeck, A. 152, 155–156, 179–180 Heyne, C. G. 133, 135, 137–138, 148– 151, 153, 191–192, 194 Hobsbawm, E. 376 Houbigant, C. F. 200 Houtman, C. 191, 196, 203–205, 215, 221 Hunt, A. S. 51, 167–168 Hupfeld, H. 152, 197, 210, 217, 221– 223, 234, 239, 241, 246–247, 282, 285, 394 Ilgen, K. D. 151, 153, 192, 196–199, 203, 206, 209–211, 216, 221, 238, 286 Janko, R. 50, 172–173, 181 Jastram, N. 334–336 Jebb, R. C. 125, 133, 153, 155, 157, 166–167, 169 Jellicoe, S. 87, 345 Jepsen, A. 263 Johns, A. 21

Kahle, P. E. 61, 87, 92, 119–120, 300– 302, 306–307, 311, 324, 326, 333, 341–343, 345 Kamesar, A. 87, 89–90, 96–97, 104–107 Katz, P. 63 Kaufman, S. A. 282 Kayser, K. L. 152, 155, 220, 239 Kelly, J. N. D. 105 Kennedy, G. A. 40, 114 Kenney, E. J. 113–117, 121, 126, 130– 132 Kennicott, B. 60, 200 Kirchhoff, A. 155–156 Kirk, G. S. 159, 176, 178, 182–183 Knierim, R. 373 Knox, B. 180 Koch, K. 3, 5, 8–11, 269–270, 283 Kraus, H.-J. 186–187, 191, 193–194, 196, 203–205, 214–215 Kuenen, A. 24, 38, 221, 223, 228, 231– 237, 240–242, 244, 246, 249, 252, 279–280, 282, 303, 394, 399 Lachmann, K. 30, 126, 131, 149, 153– 155, 157, 199 Lagarde, P. de 60–62, 75, 300, 309, 340, 343 Latacz, J. 151–152, 175–176 Lauterbach, J. Z. 65–66 Lehrs, K. 42 Lesky, A. 175–176, 184, 297 Levine, J. H. 121–125, 127–129, 214 Levinson, B. M. 390 Lieberman, S. 63–65, 67–70, 72–74, 76, 78–81, 109, 340, 354 Lightstone, J. N. 353 Lord, A. B. 174, 177–178, 180–184 Ludwich, A. 42, 166–167, 170 Mackail, J. W. 128 Marxsen, W. 11, 24, 270, 285, 287–289, 291–292, 395 Masius, A. 186–187 Mason, S. 355 McArthur, H. K. 290 McGann, J. J. 15 McKane, W. 84, 92, 105–108, 186–190, 200, 312, 328–332, 339–340, 348– 349, 395 McKenzie, S. L. xv, 260

Index of Authors Metzger, B. M. 118, 153, 356–357 Michaelis, J. D. 133, 191–192, 194, 196–197, 201, 208 Momigliano, A. 159 Moore, G. F. 234 Most, G. W. 133 Mülder, D. 156–157 Murray, G. 159–163, 167–169, 225 Myres, J. L. 127, 133, 135–136, 151, 153–157, 159, 163 Nicholson, E. W. 277 Niebuhr, B. G. 134, 154, 192, 215 Noth, M. xvi, 4–5, 7, 10–12, 24, 26, 176, 208, 210, 212, 215, 220, 225, 227, 240, 248, 250, 256, 259–273, 276–278, 282, 285, 292, 294, 296, 347, 379–380, 394–395, 399 Olrik, A. 248 Orlinsky, H. M. 61–63, 65, 82, 119, 302, 333 Otto, E. 280, 386 Page, D. 176 Parker, D. C. 87 Parry, A. 174–184 Parry, M. 152, 173, 176, 179 Pasquali, G. 53 Pereira, B. 187 Perrin, N. 284 Pfeiffer, R. 27–40, 42–45, 49, 53, 57, 113, 125–127, 133–134, 143–144, 151, 153–154, 158 Pfeiffer, R. H. 246–247 Pietersma, A. xv, 342–344, 346 Powis-Smith, G. M. 82 Pury, A. de 226, 260 Rad, G. von xvi, 5, 7, 10–12, 24, 26, 157, 250, 256–260, 262–278, 280, 292, 294, 296, 390, 394–395, 399 Radjawane, A. N. 260 Rahlfs, A. 340 Ranger, T. 376 Rendtorff, R. 5, 270–278, 281, 370–371, 375 Revell, E. J. 63, 304 Reynolds, L. D. 48–49, 54, 57, 69, 185 Rofé, A. 235

409

Rogerson, J. W. xv, 191, 193, 196, 202– 205, 214–216, 218, 220–221 Römer, T. xv, 226, 260, 275, 280 Rosenmüller, E. F. C. 300 Rosenthal, E. I. J. 103 Rossi, G. B. de 60, 200 Rudolph, W. 261 Sanders, J. A. 25, 362, 364, 374–377, 379, 383, 388–389, 397 Sanderson, J. E. 337–339 Sarna, N. 377 Schmitt, J. J. 290 Schwartz, E. 153, 158–159, 253 Seidel, B. 192, 196–199 Semler, J. S. 185 Shakespeare, William 144, 162 Shils, E. 376, 384 Simon, R. 24, 129–130, 132–133, 185– 192, 195, 198, 206, 238, 243, 245, 254, 297, 299–300, 322, 347, 394– 395, 398–400 Ska, J.-L. 199, 271 Skeat, T. C. 69 Smend, R. 205, 207, 209, 211, 214, 220, 231, 233, 236–237, 270 Smith, M. 208 Smith, W. R. 160, 205 Sparks, H. F. D. 105 Steck, O. H. 3, 128, 292–295, 297 Stegeman, H. 332 Stein, R. H. 283–284 Steinmann, J. 185 Sundberg, A. C. 63, 352–353, 359 Sutcliffe, E. F. 105 Talmon, S. 65–66, 68, 76, 299, 308– 315, 332, 337, 347 Tanselle, G. T. 15, 400 Thenius, O. 237 Thomas, R. 31, 36, 183 Tov, E. 65, 76–77, 79–80, 120, 281, 298–301, 304, 307, 314–328, 330– 334, 340–341, 347–348, 362, 395 Turner, F. M. 154–156, 159–160, 163 Ulrich, E. 90–91, 299, 326, 332–333, 337, 347 Van Seters, J.

262, 267–268, 270, 399

410

Index of Authors

Vance, N. 154–155 Vater, J. S. 134, 153, 202–204, 206, 208–211, 238, 286 Veijola, T. 270 Veyne, P. 384 Visotsky, B. L. 103 Weber, M. 376 Weingreen, J. 377, 390 Weippert, H. 260, 328 Wellhausen, J. 2–3, 5, 11, 24, 139, 153, 156, 159, 205, 210, 216, 220–221, 223–232, 236–237, 240–242, 244– 246, 249–253, 260, 270, 273, 279– 280, 288–292, 296–297, 303, 385, 387, 394–395, 399 West, M. L. 184, 317 Wette, W. M. L. de 128, 132, 134, 202, 204–215, 217–218, 220, 223–224, 226, 239–240, 248–249, 286, 384, 399 Wevers, J. W. 344, 346, 349, 396 Wharton, J. A. 3 Whitman, C. H. 169, 171 Whybray, R. N. 267

Wilamowitz, U. von 156–160, 163–167, 174, 176, 178, 184 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von 125, 133, 146, 153, 156, 158, 163, 173, 241, 253 Wiles, M. F. 87, 93–94, 102, 104 Wilson, N. G. 48–49, 54, 57, 69, 185 Winterer, C. 122, 134 Wolf, F. A. xiv, 17, 19, 23, 30, 32, 34– 35, 42, 61, 127, 129, 131–151, 153– 155, 157–158, 162, 165, 167, 169, 173–176, 178, 184, 188, 192, 194– 196, 198–199, 201–202, 206, 214– 215, 218, 223, 227, 231, 234–235, 239, 241–243, 249, 253, 269, 294, 297–299, 318, 347, 368, 393–395 Wolfenson, L. B. 71 Wolff, H. W. 271 Wright, D. P. 385 Wright, J. 91 Würthwein, E. 301–302 Zeitlin, S. 65 Zetzel, J. E. G. 52–56, 58, 83, 133

Index of Scripture Genesis 6:9 229 7:1 229 7:6–9 229 12:10–20 3–4 14 228 17 222 18:17–19 252 20 4 22:16 370 23:6 370 24:7 370 25 204 26 4 26:1 3 26:2–5 252 26:3 370 50:24 370 50:24–26 371 50:25–26 280 Exodus 4:18 216 13:5 370 13:11 370 13:19 280, 370–371 16 237 19–24 227 19:4–6 210 20 337, 339, 348 21–22 385 24 365, 388 24:1–11 365 24:3 372 24:5 66 32:11–13 370 33:1–3 370 33:7–11 208 34:27 372 Leviticus 17–26

228

Numbers 10:35–36 11:11–15

79 370

Numbers (cont.) 11:13–14 370 33 374

Judges (cont.) 16:31 224 17:1–21:24 224

Deuteronomy 1:3 229 4:7–8 210 4:12 210 4:15 210 4:32–36 210 5:21 210 5:23 210 6:4 332 7:6–8 210 8:3 210 11:12 210 18:16 210 26:5–9 10, 257 27 388, 396 27:4 337–338 31 365, 372 31:14–15 278 34 280 34:10–12 278

2 Samuel 9–20 254–255 21–24 226

Joshua 1 270 1–11 268 1:1–18 265, 270 8 388, 396 8:30 337–338 8:30–35 338 21:43–22:6 265, 270 23 270 23:1–16 265, 270 24 280 24:2–12 280 24:2–13 257 24:28–33 219 24:32 280, 371 Judges 1:1–2 226:5 2:6 224 2:6–10 219 2:6–23 4

- 411 -

224

1 Kings 1–2 254–255 2:3–4 208 13 226 3 Kingdoms 2:12 346 16:28 346 22:41–51 346 2 Kings 17:7–41 4 22 207 23:1–3 388 4 Kingdoms 10:36 346 Ezra 7 279, 388 Nehemiah 8 365 Isaiah 53:2

98

Jeremiah 1–25 330 25:1–7 330 25:8–14 330 48:47 312 51:64 312 Zechariah 2:12 80

412

Index of Other Ancient Sources

New Testament Luke 1:63

70

John 8:1–11

2 Corinthians 10:13–16 357

Galatians 6:16 357, 365 7:2 357

10

Index of Other Ancient Sources ªAbot R. Nat. B, 46 65 Apollonius of Rhodes Against Zenodotus 38 Arognautica 38 Augustine De Civitate Dei 108 Callimachus Pinakes 38–39 Dionysius Antiquities of Rome 101 Eusebius Chronicle 99–100 Chronological Canons 99–101 Ecclesiastical History 99, 101–2 6.24 359 Onomasticon 99 Hesiod Shield of Heracles 172 Homer Iliad 44, 47, 132, 134, 137–138, 142, 149, 151–154, 156–157, 160–161, 163, 172, 174, 176–177, 179–183, 196, 199, 241–242 18.356–68 140 24 141 Iliad (Venetus A) 42, 47 Iliad B 53 50

Homer (cont.) Odyssey 44, 47, 132, 134, 140, 151– 154, 156, 160–161, 163, 169, 174, 176–177, 179–180, 196, 199, 220, 239, 241–242, 253 23.297 141 Josephus Antiquities of the Jews 101 Letter of Aristeas 344, 349 Mishnah m. ªAbot 1:1 187 m. Kelim 15:6 70 Origen Contra Celsum 95 Hexapla 43, 50, 84–87, 89–91, 96, 98, 106, 111 Homilies 96 Letter to Africanus 89 Origin Comm. in Matt. 15:14 89 De principiis 95 P. Rylands Gk. 458 344 Pirqe ªAbot 1.1 383 Sipre Deut. 356 65 Sop. 6:4 65 Talmud b. Ketubbot 106a 71 y. Sanhedrin ii 6.20c 70 y. Sheqalim 4.48a 71 y. Taºanit 4.2 65

Index of Topics Africanus 88–89, 101 Akiba, Rabbi 61, 73, 83, 94, 302 Alexandrian and Masoretic textual traditions 195 Alexandrian Library 28, 35, 39, 57, 64, 109, 130, 164, 198, 316 see also Museum Alexandrian scholars and canon of lyric poets and orators 39–41, 371 as editors 4–5, 16–21, 35–49, 51, 57– 58, 63–64, 67, 73, 78, 82, 85–86, 90, 109, 111, 136–37, 140–45, 147, 149–51, 164–73, 188, 195– 96, 234, 242, 276, 301, 305, 307, 312, 314, 316, 328, 336, 338, 340, 355–56, 361, 368, 387, 391, 393, 395, 398 as grammarians 17, 64, 73, 90, 127, 151, 170–71 as philologists 28, 301 as poets 28 Alexandrian scholarship 35, 45 and philology 28 and textual criticism 4 Alexandrian school of criticism 86 allegorical method 93–94, 98, 102–3, 357–58, 360–61 and philosophical interpretation 45, 93 and the Stoics 45, 361 ancient classics 37, 39–41 ancient editing of biblical texts 241, 243, 300, 305, 316 of Greek classics 15, 17, 35–46 of Latin classics 52–57 ancient historians/historiography 26, 100, 102, 112, 276, 287, 394, 399– 401 ancients vs. moderns 123–25 Antimachus 35 n. 35, 50–51, 144, 167 recension of Homer 35 Antiochene school 102–5 method of exegesis 104

antiquarian learning and Homeric scholarship 31, 34 Apollonius of Rhodes 38 Apostolic age 355 apostolic tradition 359, 376, 389 apparatus criticus 53, 58 see also critical marks/signs Archaiologia 34 archetype(s) 16, 60–63, 69, 71, 74–76, 115, 156, 164–65, 300, 304, 309, 317–18 archives and archival documents 66, 68–69, 130, 186–87, 193, 196, 198, 394 archivist 219 Aristarchus (scholar and librarian) as editor of Homer 17 n. 28, 18, 38– 46, 49–50, 53, 56, 73, 85, 93, 115, 136, 138, 145–49, 166–67, 171–72, 368, 393 as model editor 25, 147, 395 recension of Homer 42 Aristonicus 46, 167 Aristophanes (scholar and librarian) 39–41, 43–44, 49, 50 n. 87, 82, 136, 145–48, 356 Aristotle 34–37, 39, 44, 57, 138–39, 148 recension of Homer 45 asterisk 86, 89, 109, 171, 340 athetesis 44, 47, 49, 80, 86, 110 Atticization of Greek literary works 345 Atticus (bookseller) 55–56 Augustine 108–9 authentic historical sources 192 author(s) 75, 301, 317–18, 323, 365, 388, 397–98 and authorial intentionality 295 Chronicler as 224–25, 240 as compiler 197, 203, 208, 219–20, 246 as copyist 312–13 as distinct from editor 3, 5–6, 8, 12– 14, 18, 114, 116, 203, 210, 242, 269, 281, 312–14, 391–92, 399– 400

- 413 -

414

Index of Topics

author(s) (cont.) Dtr as 239, 262–65, 269, 271, 380, 394, 399 as editor/redactor 3, 5 n. 6, 6–9, 222, 280, 282–95, 297, 312–14, 322, 391 as exemplars of style and method 355, 395 and the final form of the text 116, 164–65 as historian 5, 9, 11, 197, 219–20, 225, 228, 245, 250, 258, 262–63, 267, 269, 271–72, 275–76, 279, 399 JE as 227–28 Moses as 372–74 P as 251, 259 Pentateuchal sources as 197, 202, 245, 247, 250–51, 258–59, 265, 267, 271 poet (Homer) as 175–80, 393–94 and the printed text 115 and social context 138 usage of language and style 18 Yahwist as 5, 7–8, 24, 26, 256–59, 262, 264–69, 271–72, 274, 292, 294, 296, 371, 394, 399 see also Verfasser authorized editions/texts 19, 23, 25, 301, 307, 326 see also standard text(s)/edition(s) authorized revisers and redactors 61 authorship and forgeries 128 of Homer’s poems 151, 154–55, 158, 161, 163, 175–80, 182, 394 of J 5–8, 257–59, 265–67, 271–73, 275, 296, 394 Mosaic, normative role of 371–74, 390 of P/Q 230, 246 of Pentateuch 195, 201, 206 Babylonian recension see local text theory battle of the books 123–25, 144 n. 50, 148 Bearbeiter 155, 158, 160 Bearbeitungsschicht 275, 371 Ben Asher, text of 20, 119

Ben Lakish, Rabbi Simeon 65 Ben Naftali, text of 119 Beth Maºon 68 biblical editing in antiquity 83 biblical theology 351, 376, 390, 396 block model 271 blocks of tradition 249, 258, 266– 67, 271, 273, 277 confessional themes 265–68, 274, 277 see also patriarchal traditions Bomberg Bible 119 see also Second Rabbinic Bible Book of the Covenant 216, 228, 279, 322 Book of the Covenants (Ewald) 216 Book of the Four Covenants (Q) 229–30 book trade in antiquity 15–16, 32–33, 46–48, 143–44, 168 book production 14–15, 18, 32–33, 37, 135, 163, 346 booksellers 47, 55–57 circulation at Rome 57 distribution 55 book trade in modern times 18 booksellers in Renaissance 130 Callimachus (scholar and librarian) 38– 39 canon (kanon) 62, 207, 276, 351–76, 382, 397 as apostolic tradition 389 body of doctrine as basis for 360 and canonical text 62, 83, 86–87, 108–11 Christian 382, 390 of the Church 83, 357–60, 389 definition of 351–52 as an exclusive list of (sacred) books 82, 103, 310, 351–53, 355, 359, 389 gnostic 357–58 of Greek literature 39–40, 43, 82 Hebrew/Jewish/rabbinic 353, 360– 61, 375, 389–90 Josiah and Ezra as founders of 231–32 as mode of interpretation 359–61, 389, 397 as model of excellence 122, 356

Index of Topics canon (kanon) (cont.) number of books in the Hebrew canon as twenty-two or twentyfour 353–55, 360, 375–76 of Origen 84, 87 prophetic, of interpretation 360 as the “rule of faith” 357–59, 361, 389, 397 as rules of allegorizing Scripture 357 secular 122, 155 as standards of truth 357 of Torah 70, 360 see also Hebrew canon; kanon canonical analysis 365 canonical approach 362, 367, 370, 374, 397 canonical authors and texts see canon canonical criticism 7, 25, 281, 351, 360, 362–76, 390, 396–98 canonical editors 364 canonical function and authorship 371 canonical intentionality 367 as work of the Holy Spirit 375 canonical method 351, 362, 365, 376 canonical process 351–52, 360, 362–76, 382, 397 historicity of 362 identity and lifestyle as function of 375 postbiblical interpretation as part of 374 and redaction criticism 7, 347, 367–68 see also editorial process, ancient canonical reading 370 canonical shaping 366 as redactional shaping 368 canonical text 83, 86, 108, 111, 321, 324, 349, 351, 362, 367, 369–70, 378–79, 383 as final form 1, 2, 41, 118, 147–48, 281, 351–52, 365–66, 370–71, 396 as Masoretic Text 369–70 canonical Torah 279 canonization 367 of classical works 41 and normative “segment of human history” 366 of Scripture 7, 11, 367

415

canonizers, as editors 25, 373–74, 376– 77 see also editor/redactor canons of style, grammar, and modes of thought 356 catalogs 34, 52 and bibliographies 130 as list of sacred books 360 Chaucer 144 Christian editing of scripture 83 Chronicle (Eusebius) 99–101, 112 Chronicler/Chronicles 8, 193, 206–8, 210, 218–20, 223–26, 232, 240, 244–45, 255, 260, 269–70, 296–97, 306–7, 322, 384, 388, 394, 399, 401 derived from state annals 193, 218 as parallel revisionist history 8, 207, 223–26, 240 Chronography 100 Chronological Canons 99 see also Eusebius of Caesarea Cicero 55, 141 city-editions of Homer 51, 170, 242 classical scholarship ancient 84, 111, 392 modern 61, 163, 173, 196, 198, 231, 262, 301 classics (classici) 28, 40, 49, 65, 74, 78, 82–83, 95–96, 122, 125–30, 164–65, 187, 191, 195–96, 198–99, 214, 301, 312, 361, 373, 375, 389, 392–93, 396 as basis of modern culture 155 Greek and Latin 52, 56, 59, 121–22 as list of selected works 40–41, 375 Clement of Alexandria 45, 84, 95, 357– 58, 360 Clement of Rome 357 codex, codices 62, 66–67, 69–71, 74– 75, 110, 164, 172, 325 n. 84 collation of texts 42, 46, 49, 52–54, 58, 65, 67, 69, 71–72, 79–80, 109, 113– 14, 119, 130, 137, 143, 167, 200– 201, 333, 340, 392–93 collection and editing of oral tradition/ folklore 213, 239, 248 collections of ancient texts 113, 130 collections of biblical texts (Sammlungen) 192–93, 215, 238, 260, 377

416

Index of Topics

collections of story-tellers ( J and E) 248 commentaries 67, 111, 119, 360–61 of Eusebius 98 of Homeric editors (hupomnemata) 17, 38–39, 41– 46, 49, 52–53, 57–58, 81, 164, 170–72, 196 see also hupomnemata of Jerome 108–9 of Origen 83–87, 90–91, 94–96 rabbinic 64–68, 360–61, 377, 385 of Renaissance scholars 116 commentary-like additions 295 Commentary to Matthew (Origen) 90 comparative folklore 248, 253 compilations see collections compiler(s) (Sammler) 208–12, 217, 219–20, 238–40, 244–46, 251, 258, 262, 275, 286 n. 148, 394–95, 399 as author(s) 197, 208, 219, 222, 227, 246 as editor(s) 4, 7, 130, 197, 217, 203– 5, 210, 217, 219, 222, 239–40, 251, 275 Deuteronomistic 219–20, 239, 244– 45 final compiler 197–98, 203, 209, 217, 219, 238 Homer as 175 J and E as collectors of tradition 251, 258, 286 n. 148 of myths and legends (Sagen) 212, 251, 262 of Pentateuchal documents 192, 197–98, 238–39, 245–46, 251 Complutensian Polyglot 118 composition and compositional history of the Bible 323, 386 of the Hexateuch 227 of Homer (with the use of writing) 179 of the Old Testament 185 composition criticism (of NT) 284 confessional themes see block model conflate readings 307 conflation of documents 217, 221–22, 239–40, 282

conjecture and conjectural emendation(s) 66, 105, 114–15, 121, 126–27, 129, 135, 162, 165, 313, 393 constructing parallel sources 203–4 contradictions in the text 222 copying and collating texts 72 and correction of classical texts 114 copyists 312–13, 322–25, 337, 340, 389 correctors of biblical texts 69–71 Council of Trent 107 Crates 45, 93, 138, 145 credo (little) 265–67 critical editions of ancient texts 113, 115–16, 124, 126, 131, 316–17, 349, 392 of Homer 37, 39, 41, 46, 49, 52, 90, 141, 149 see also diorthosis critical marks/signs 17, 20, 42–43, 47, 50, 52–53, 58, 79–81, 86, 89–91, 106, 109, 171, 398 see also apparatus criticus criticism of Homer 31, 144, 154 of literary works 33 of the editors and editions of a previous age 114 “higher” and “lower” see historical criticism cultural memory 378 Cycle/Cyclic poets 139–40, 145, 168 daybooks 263 Dead Sea Scrolls see Qumran Scrolls defile the hands, biblical scrolls that 70 derash 103 Deuteronomic compiler 245 Deuteronomic Reformation of Josiah 159–60, 218 Deuteronomist and the Chronicler, comparison between 225–26 as editor/redactor 4–7, 11, 24, 26, 208, 216–20, 224, 226, 228, 239– 40, 245, 259, 269–71, 274, 276, 283, 318, 321–22, 328–29, 339, 347–48, 394

Index of Topics Deuteronomist (cont.) of the Hexateuch 216–17, 219, 228, 239, 242, 274 of Judges–Kings 208, 218–20, 224, 226, 228, 239, 255, 283 Deuteronomistic Composition (KD) 277–80, 371 see also Yahwist ( J) Deuteronomistic Historian (Dtr) as author and historian 4–7, 11, 24, 26, 225, 240, 260–69, 276, 278, 283, 285, 292, 294, 296, 347, 380, 394– 95, 399 Deuteronomistic History (DH) 4–5, 210, 240, 260–70, 276, 278–79, 282, 294, 296, 346, 380, 384, 400 double redaction of 218–20, 270 as popular text-book 193 Deuteronomy (D) 160, 227–29, 231, 234, 236, 240, 279 as a forgery 128 as midrash 210 as proto-rabbinic halakah 390 n. 103 reform movement of 207 diadosis 15, 18, 58, 116 diaskeuastes, -ai (diasceuast, diaskeuast) 38, 140, 150, 169, 235, 238, 269, 280, 381, 394 diaskeue 141, 150, 233, 236–37, 242 Diatessaron of Tatian 234, 282 Didymus 46, 50 166, 167, 170 digamma 127, 149 Diodore of Tarsus 104 Dionysius of Halicarnassus 101, 356, 400 diorthosis 114, 116, 141, 144, 233, 242, 316 diorthotes, diorthoteis 38, 115–16, 150 diple 17 diplomatic style 222 distribution of books see book trade divination as method of textcriticism 126–27 Documentary Hypothesis 2–7, 12, 24, 153, 156, 159–60, 195, 197, 201, 204, 210, 221, 223, 228, 231, 238, 240, 245–47, 254, 271–73, 275, 279–80, 282–83, 294, 296–97, 371, 385, 394, 399

417

Documentary Hypothesis (cont.) and Synoptic Gospels 285, 290–92 see also source criticism Donation of Constantine 128 Donatus 83, 105 double readings 307 see also variant readings DtrG 270 DtrN 270 E see Elohist ecclesiastical canon 357–60, 397 Ecclesiastical History (Eusebius) 99, 101 editing Bible as product of 1, 2 of historical documents 100 history of 391–93 in the Roman world 52–57, 59 see also editor, subscriptions editions of the New Testament see Erasmus editio princeps, editiones principes 19, 25, 113–17, 121, 125, 242, 294, 370 editor/redactor 80, 115–18, 129–30, 254, 297, 298–300, 385, 387–88 as archivist 186, 190 as author 3, 6–7, 11, 261–63, 282, 285–92, 294–95, 311–13 bad editors 19, 393 and book production 15–18, 392 and canonical process 364–66, 368 as “canonizer” of the text 118, 231, 351, 366–67, 370–71, 377, 397– 98, 400 as compiler of fragments of tradition 202–5, 209, 211–13, 239, 251, 275, 290 as compiler of historical documents 5, 8–9, 130, 191– 99, 394, 400 as compiler of literary texts 216–43, 245–47, 251, 299 as composer of final form 247, 252– 53, 279, 296, 366–67, 374, 392 as composer of first edition 19–23, 188, 247 as conflator of documents 3–4, 5, 7–9, 221, 245–46, 258–59, 280, 394 as court historians 190, 218

418

Index of Topics

editor/redactor (cont.) as creator of a recension 316, 335, 346 definition and method of 2–13, 391 deity as 367, 375 as “editor-inventors” 374 n. 68 etymology and meaning of 13–15, 391 Evangelists as see Evangelists first use in biblical criticism 185–87, 350, 394 in Homeric studies 12, 19–20, 23, 109, 133, 151–52, 155, 161, 169, 176, 391 as innerbiblical exegete 377, 381, 390 of “last revision” 22 as mode of literary analysis 1, 12 one who abridges official records for popular use 193, 218, 228 one who emends the text 6 one who reproduces diplomatic copies 190, 219, 238 as proto-rabbis 398 as publisher of ancient literary works in standard editions 19, 219, 321, 392–93 as reviser of Bible texts 8, 22–23, 71, 224–26, 242–43, 269–71, 275– 76, 294, 346, 394 as scholarly invention 1, 4, 400–401 as theologians 275, 281 theological interpretation by 27 see also editing; final editor; final form editorial activity 1, 3, 7, 13, 57, 59, 140, 188, 223, 233, 269, 292, 307 editorial and scribal practice 338 editorial artistry 290, 292 editorial history of Homer 23, 150, 368 of literary work 8, 12, 19, 284, 397 see also redaction criticism/history; textual criticism editorial practice 13, 19–20, 68, 81, 117 and bad editing 393 and printer 117 editorial process, ancient 2, 18–19, 24, 30, 110, 116, 120, 146, 187, 228, 246, 249, 296, 322, 327, 333, 347, 398

spread is 6 points long

editorial process, ancient (cont.) as canonical process 352, 367 in Homer 137, 144, 146, 161 in New Testament 291–93 see also canonical process editorial revision 323, 337, 345 unconscious revision 344, 349 editorial technique 246, 289 education of the elite 122 ekdoseis kata poleis 37 ekdosis, ekdoseis 15–18, 87, 116, 138, 144, 393 elegant copies of texts see vulgar texts Elohist (E) 192, 197, 209, 211, 216, 221, 228, 234, 241, 245–46, 248–52, 258, 267–68, 272–73, 278–79, 286, 290, 394, 399 Elzevir brothers 118 emendatio, emendation 18, 23, 25, 42, 53–54, 71, 138, 153, 164, 189 n. 13, 305, 313, 316–17, 333 epic poetry 213 see also oral poetry epic technique 157 epic usage 42, 48 Epistles of Phalaris 124–25, 128 Erasmus 117–18, 120–21, 125, 128, 130 n. 52, 153, 166 n. 135, 305, 392 Essenes 75–76, 332, 347–48 see also Qumran sect ethos 18, 42, 392 Euripides 165–66, 356 Eusebius of Caesarea 71 n. 39, 81, 83– 84, 87, 90–91, 97–103, 111, 356, 359 Eusebius of Emesa 104–5 Evangelists of Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) 5, 9–11, 11 n. 20, 70 n. 32, 166 n. 136, 285– 90, 341–42, 349, 367 n. 48, 395 as authors and historians 24 as editors/redactors 5, 9, 11, 285–92, 395 see also Synoptic Gospels exegetical methods of the rabbis 209 exodus-conquest/settlement traditions, 267–68, 275 expansionistic, explicating, and harmonizing pluses 307, 314, 331, 334, 336, 338–39, 343, 348 see also textual correction(s)

Index of Topics Ezra

60, 70–71, 110, 142, 186–88, 190, 230–31, 235, 241–42, 304, 313, 355, 365, 373, 388 as final redactor 230, 242, 311

family of texts see text-families final editor, compiler, redactor 3, 7, 10, 116, 202, 217–19, 227, 241, 247, 252–53, 279–81, 321, 327, 370, 375, 396 see also editor final form 2–3, 7, 10, 22, 25, 47, 84, 111, 113, 116, 118, 129, 137, 139, 197, 207, 217, 220, 223, 226 n. 130, 247, 250, 253, 256–57, 265, 269, 272–73, 279–81, 293, 312, 317, 321–24, 328, 346–47, 349, 351–52, 365–66, 370–71, 374, 386, 393, 395–98 of Homer 156, 158, 167 see also editor final process of canon-formation 382 final redaction, revision 7, 252, 280–81 of the Hexateuch 7, 229 of the Pentateuch 7 final redactor (R) 116, 203, 210, 217, 220, 222, 228–30, 233–35, 239, 241–42 of Homer 158 Fingal by Ossian see Ossian folk tradition(s) see oral tradition forgery(-ies) 125, 128–29, 132 form criticism of Genesis 212, 247–49 of the Hexateuch 2, 10, 12, 24, 201, 223, 256–58, 264–66 of NT Gospels 283, 285–92 formulaic language 181 see also Parry-Lord Fortschreibung 295 fragmentary hypothesis 202, 209–10, 394 in Homer 149, 153–54 Froben 117 G see Septuagint Gemeindebildung 378, 382 glossai 31 Gospel harmonies 221, 234 grammateis 78 grammatikos, -koi, of Alexandria

78, 95

419

Greek tragedies 18 Grundlage 266–67, 273, 278 halakah 313, 377, 385 hapax legomena 44 harmonization see expansionistic, explicating, and harmonizing pluses Haupttypen see archetype Hebraica veritas 106–9, 111, 343–44, 349 Hebrew canon 122 see also canon Hebrew text, without points and Masora 200 Hellanicus of Lesbos 101 hermeneutical method 93–95, 102–5 allegorical-philosophical 93–95, 98, 102–4 historical-literal 93–95, 102–4 typological 102–3 Herodian 46 Hesiod 40–41, 51, 52, 168 Shield of Heracles 172 Hesychius 85, 91 Hexapla 20, 43, 50, 83–91, 96–97, 106– 7, 111, 305, 311, 316, 326 n. 90, 341, 344, 392 Quinta 341 purpose of 87–88 Hexaplaric LXX 89–91, 106 Hexaplaric recension 89, 97–98 Hexateuch, redactor of 7, 219, 280, 371 higher criticism see historical criticism Hillel, Rabbi 306, 311 Hipparchus 135 Hippias of Elis 34, 101 historical-critical evaluation of Pentateuch 212, 370, 384 historical-critical method 127–31, 205 historical criticism 15, 18, 22–24, 185– 86, 197, 201, 205–6, 209, 211, 215, 243, 281, 289, 297, 351, 362–64, 370–71, 376, 382, 384, 386, 390, 393, 397 as “higher criticism,” 12, 19, 23, 25, 28, 61, 111, 132, 134, 142, 156, 158, 161, 165, 191, 196–98, 211, 217, 249–50, 253, 268, 271, 312, 393–94 historical documents, the Bible as 192, 197–98, 206, 248, 254

420

Index of Topics

historical-literal interpretation of Scripture 102 historical writing see historiography historiography, ancient conventions of 112 historiography, Israelite/Hebrew/ biblical 26, 244, 253–54, 256, 263– 64, 296, 399–400 antiquarian 102, 257 of DH 26 of the Pentateuch 26, 256 rise of 253 historiography, Greco-Roman 102, 261–62, 276, 287, 392, 399 history of scholarship 2, 13, 391 classical 27–59, 133 history of the biblical text 299, 301, 304, 321, 326, 333, 352 Holiness Code 228 Homer 27–52, 133–84, 368, 384, 388, 396 ancient editors of 201 ancient scholarship on 27–52 basis of Greek education 354–55 canonicity of 309, 323, 327, 334, 356, 371, 389 comparison with the Hebrew Bible 20, 188, 194–96, 198–99, 213, 227, 235, 237, 239, 241–43, 249, 253, 281, 299, 303, 305–9, 312, 316–18, 323, 327–28, 334, 336, 338, 347–48, 398 division into twenty-four books 354–55, 375 documentary hypothesis of 199 fragmentary hypothesis of 199 as illiterate poet 180 long, medium, and short texts of 305–8, 334, 336, 348, 396 and Moses 199, 373 and the oral poetry debate 173–84, 393 and redactional analysis 151–63, 235, 237, 241–43, 347 Rhapsodes 29–31 rise in the critical study of 133–51 text and textual criticism of 163–73, 189 n. 15, 281, 305, 307–8, 316– 18, 328, 336, 338, 348, 367, 369, 381, 391, 393

Homer (cont.) see also Iliad; Odyssey; oral tradition; plus verses in Homer; scholia of Homer; text-history of Homer; unitarians of Homer Homeric Cycle see Cycle/Cyclic poets Homeric idiom and usage 105 Homeric papyri 171 Homeric Problem/Question 12, 23, 35, 57, 133, 139, 142, 150, 153, 156, 158, 163, 168, 173–74, 176 Homeric scholarship 27–52, 133, 250 homilies 360–61 see also Origen, commentaries and homilies Horace, edition of 126 humanitas 122 hupomnemata 17, 171 see also commentaries, of Homeric editors Ibn Ezra 119 Iliad 30, 35, 38, 42, 44, 46–47, 199 see also Homer Iliad, Venetus A 42 illiterate singers 174 innerbiblical exegesis 7, 30, 281, 376– 90, 398 and the dynamic of traditumtradition 378–82, 384–87 and interpretive additions 380–81 and interpretive method of midrash, 25, 377 and interpretive process 379, 381 see also midrash; tradition-history, and innerbiblical exegesis interpolations 4, 10, 19, 23, 26, 44, 51– 52, 58, 81, 86–87, 89, 125–26, 128, 192 n. 20, 203, 226, 240, 246, 251, 253, 268, 279–81, 380–81, 387, 393–95, 398 in Homer 138, 140–41, 145–46, 148, 151, 158, 162, 176, 180, 324, 328, 334, 336–37 see also textual correction(s) interpretation of Scripture see canon; innerbiblical exegesis ipsissima verba 397 Isaiah, Old Greek text of 307 Isaiah scrolls of Qumran 303, 307, 326

Index of Topics iuxta Hebraeos

106

J ( Jahwist) see Yahwist Jacob ben Chayim 63, 118–19, 392 JE ( Jehovist) 3, 160, 216, 223, 227–31, 234, 236–37, 240–42, 245, 251–52, 273, 290 see also Rj; Rje Jeremiah edition I and edition II 327–32, 348 rolling corpus of 328–31, 339, 348, 395 Jerome 20, 28, 43, 50, 81, 83, 87 n. 88, 88, 90–92, 95, 97–99, 102, 104–9, 111–12, 208, 307, 310, 343, 392 and ancient scholarship 81, 83, 92 commentary on Jeremiah 108 work as editor and translator 20, 28, 43, 99, 104–9, 111–12, 310 Jewish exegetical tradition 377, 383 Josephus 75, 78, 95, 101, 341, 349 Judaism, normative/rabbinic 310, 325 n. 86, 382, 392 Justin Martyr 341 K (a source in Kings) 268 kaige recension 316, 341–44, 396 kaige-Theodotion recension 341 Kalewala 157 n. 105 kanon 356–59 see also canon Karaites 311, 326 n. 90 KD see Deuteronomistic Composition Kennicott and de Rossi see medieval Hebrew mss Kethib-Qere system (also QereKethib) 64–65, 82, 189 Kimhi, Rabbi David 64 King James version 118 koine editions 38 koine text 38, 50–51, 56, 73, 83–88, 91, 111, 307, 326, 344 KP see Priestly Composition kritikos 35, 45 Kynaithos 162 land promise formulas see patriarchal promise formulas land promise theme see block model Law and the Prophets 352, 357–58

421

law of Ezra as the whole Pentateuch 230, 232 Law of Moses 206, 247, 361, 365, 388 see also Moses lectio recepta 115–17, 294–95 Levitical redaction (RIII) 263 liberti 52 librarii 56 Library in Alexandria see Alexandrian Library literacy and orality 142, 178, 181, 183 in age of Moses 195 literal and historical meaning of the text 95 literary composition of the Bible 318–20, 323–24, 368 of Homer 180 literary criticism 2–4, 7, 15, 20–21, 111, 116, 202, 210, 218, 241–42, 273, 282, 289, 292–93, 297–99, 320–21, 327, 335, 346–48, 351, 368, 390 and canonical criticism 396–97 of Homer 142, 144, 156, 163, 175, 393 and literary development 248 and literary independence of sources 2–4, 227 role in biblical scholarship 15 role of editor/redactor in 391, 393, 395–96 Livy 154 local text theory 302–10 Babylonian text 304, 306–7, 312 Egyptian text 302–4, 306 Palestinian text 305–6 of the Pentateuch 302–8, 310 see also recension(s); text-families long and short texts of the Bible 306–7, 312, 328, 334, 348, 396 of Homer 50–51, 58, 170, 172, 189 n. 15, 305–8, 334, 336, 348, 396 lower criticism see text criticism Lucian 85, 91, 316 Lucianic recension 341, 343–46, 349, 396 see also proto-Lucianic recension Luke see Evangelists of Synoptic Gospels

422

Index of Topics

LXX see Septuagint Lycurgus 135 M see Masoretic Text manuscript collections 130 Mark see Evangelists of Synoptic Gospels Masorah 20, 62, 71 n. 44, 109, 119–20, 137, 196 Masoretes 60–63, 68, 71, 75, 109, 188– 90, 194–96, 200–201, 299, 316 Masoretic Text (MT) 20, 60–83, 110–11, 119–20, 164–65, 171, 188–91, 195, 200, 203, 208, 232, 281, 299–41, 346–49, 387, 395–96 as archetype 60–63, 74–75, 300, 304–5, 309, 321 as authoritative/canonical/sacred text 20, 77, 110–11, 302, 309, 320–21, 323–24, 347, 349, 369– 70, 383 and the book of Jeremiah 327–32, 339–40, 348 comparison with text of Homer 64, 67–68, 164–65, 305, 309, 334, 347–48 as conservative text 308, 311, 324 as defective text 200–201 as edited text (recension) 188–91, 203, 281, 299–301, 303, 315–16, 323, 333, 340, 346, 348 as original (Urtext) text of the Bible 319–21, 323, 326–27 and rabbinic revision of 337–39, 348 as standardized text 60–63, 75, 77, 82, 171, 302, 325, 333 as text-family 315, 327 as Textus Receptus 119–20, 232, 332 see also proto-Masoretic family of texts Masoretic tradition 20, 43, 63 Masoretic scholarship 189, 200 Matthew see Evangelists of Synoptic Gospels medieval Hebrew manuscripts 60, 200– 201, 299–301 medieval manuscripts of Homer 37, 46–47 medium texts of Homer 50–51, 58, 168, 170–72

spread is 6 points long

Meir, Rabbi 73–76, 80, 110, 313, 387 and his Torah scroll 305, 326 men of the Great Synagogue 187 midrash 68, 80–81, 92, 96, 210, 224, 240, 360, 377–79, 384, 386–87 based on problematic readings 387 and midrashic exegesis 25 and midrashic interpretation 94 and midrashic methods 45 as postbiblical/rabbinic commentary 386 rabbinic process of 379 see also innerbiblical exegesis Milton, Paradise Lost 127–29, 138, 144, 295, 364, 393 Minor Prophets scroll, Greek 319, 342 Minor Prophets scroll, Hebrew 304 Mishnah 25, 70, 361, 377, 383 moderns see ancients vs. moderns mongrel texts 114 Moses 41, 150, 161, 386 as author of Pentateuch (Torah) 142, 192–93, 197–98, 201–2, 204, 355, 360, 370–74, 388 biography of 216 as editor 322 as founder of Israelite religion 211 historicity of 220 and laws of Sinai 384–85 and literacy 195 as model (“canon”) to be imitated 357 and oral Law 358, 360, 378, 383, 390 prophets as successors to 352, 361 as rival of Homer 354 and transformative revelation 382 see also Law of Moses Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal 334, 337–39, 348, 396 see also Samaritan Pentateuch (SamP) and ideology MT see Masoretic Text multiple texts theory 314–15 Murabbaºât scrolls 304 Museum 17, 28, 36, 38, 40 see also Alexandria Library myth 193, 212–14, 259 in Genesis 133

Index of Topics myth (cont.) primitive thinking about the world 193 myth-ritual school 159 Nash papyrus 77, 325 Nehemiah founding a library Nibelungenlied 149, 153 Nicanor 46 Nonnus 138

198

obelus (obelos) 17, 38, 68, 80, 85–86, 89, 96, 109, 146, 171, 340 Odyssey 24, 30, 35, 38, 39, 44, 47, 127, 132, 134, 139–40, 151–52, 154–56, 158, 160–61, 163, 166, 169, 173 n. 173, 176–77, 179–80, 196, 199, 220, 239, 253, 258 see also Homer Old Latin Bible 106–9, 344 Onomasticon of Eusebius 99 oral composition 152, 173, 176–78, 181–84 extemporaneous 178 improvisation 177 techniques of 152 oral law (Torah) 96–97, 355, 360, 378, 383, 385, 387 halakah 313 oral literature 181 oral performance 30–32, 176–78, 181 poetic 174 oral poetry 138, 173–84 see also epic poetry oral style 177, 181 oral tradition 223, 241, 269, 273, 393– 94, 399 and collectors/editors 8–9, 136, 142, 150, 239, 249–50, 291 in early Judaism 97, 377–80, 383 and historiography 101 and Homer 1, 24, 30–33, 136, 142, 150, 158, 163, 173–84, 239, 249–50 and Pentateuch 24, 239, 296 and Sagen of Genesis 202, 211, 214– 15, 249–50, 294 as secret tradition 358 traditio and traditum 379–80 see also tradition

423

oral transmission 178, 249, 294 from oral poetry to written composition 180, 213 oral stages of traditio 379 orality vs. literacy 139, 182–83 Origen 20, 23, 28, 43, 45, 50, 52, 53, 57 n. 113, 58, 81–98, 102–9, 111, 208, 234, 307, 310–11, 316, 333, 341, 343, 357–60, 362, 376, 392 commentaries and homilies 84–86, 88–89, 91 see also homilies as a grammarian 83 Hexapla 305, 311, 316, 326 n. 90, 341 see also Hexapla; textual criticism, and early Christian scholars origin traditions 267 Ossian 135–36, 149, 153 P see Priestly Writer paleography 113, 130 Palestinian text see local text theory Pamphilus 87, 90–91, 97–98 papyri of Homer 36–38, 46–48, 51, 52, 147, 167, 170–72, 301, 306, 308, 333 of LXX 344, 349, 396 Paradise Lost see Milton paradosis, -seis 15–16, 18, 32, 58, 97, 116, 223, 249 Parry-Lord theory and analysis 174, 181–84 see also formulaic language patriarchal promise formulas (land promise formulas/theme) 268, 274 patriarchal traditions 257, 261, 274 see also block model Peisistratus recension 30, 64, 127, 134– 35, 140–42, 144, 150, 153–54, 158, 160, 162, 169, 195, 241–43, 303, 307, 368, 393 Pentateuchal criticism 8, 133, 218, 259, 283, 291 Pentateuchal editor/redactor 235 Pentateuchal sources 7, 159, 259, 271, 278, 296 Pentateuchal tradition(s) 267, 273, 275, 379 Pergamum 15, 45, 52, 93, 138 peshat 103

424

Index of Topics

Pharisees 60, 74, 332, 348 Philo 45, 75, 78, 93–96, 341–42, 344, 349, 357–58, 360–61, 367, 388 philological method 44, 113–14, 125, 361–62, 378 pinax, pinakes 38–39, 69, 130 Pindar 151–52 n. 74 Plato 16, 18, 33–34, 37, 142, 165–67, 312, 354 plus verses in Homer 37–38 see also Homer Pope Damasus 108 popular texts 301–2 see also koine text; vulgar texts post hoc ergo propter hoc 48, 51, 77, 171 pre-Hexaplaric Greek text 108 pre/proto-Samaritan texts 76, 306, 315, 325, 334–35, 337, 340, 348–49 see also Samaritan Pentateuch (SamP); Samaritan type texts Priestly Code/Writer (P) 3, 160, 221, 227–31, 237, 240–41, 245–47, 258– 59, 268, 273–74, 290, 296, 365, 370–71, 386 as author 251, 259, 283, 285 as “Book of Origins” 218 and Chronicles 225, 240, 255 dependence on JE and D 227–28 as editor/redactor/revision 7, 276 and Ezra 230 as historian 228, 231, 245 language of 245 as Priestly Composition (KP) 277–79 as Q 223 relationship to Rp 228–30, 233, 235, 246–47, 251–52 as source and supplement 228–30, 241, 247 as theocratic narrator 211 as a theological interpretation 210 as Urschrift 221 Priestly Composition (KP) 277–80 and priestly tradents 279 priestly redactor in Kings (RI) 263 printers and printing 18, 21, 23, 113– 14, 117–19, 165, 295, 323, 391, 395 invention of printing press 37, 55, 114, 118, 392 production of books 13 in antiquity 15, 32–33 and printing press 21

spread is 6 points long

promises to the fathers formulas see patriarchal promise formulas Prophetic Book of Kings (Ewald) 218 prophetic redaction of Kings (RII) 263 proto-Lucianic recension 345 see also Lucianic recension proto-Masoretic family of texts 77–78, 165, 304–5, 325, 334, 341, 348 see also Masoretic Text proto-Theodotion see kaige recension publication of new editions 145 Q (abbreviation for quatuor—the four covenant source) see Priestly Code Q (Quelle) 287, 289–90 Qere-Kethib see Kethib-Qere Quellenscheidung 290 Quinta see Hexapla Qumran library 111 Qumran scribal school 80–81 Qumran scrolls, biblical 62, 282 n. 137, 301–2, 305–8, 321–22, 360, 387, 396 diversity of text-types in 60, 77, 314–15, 247, 306, 310–11, 333, 341, 348 evidence of proto-MT in 305, 307 Greek texts in 343–45, 349 Isaiah scrolls in 303, 307, 326, 347 Jeremiah scrolls in 307–8, 327 pentateuchal redaction in 233 scribal modification of texts in 306, 325, 332–40, 348 scribal signs in 79 vulgar texts in 76–77 Qumran sect 324, 332 see also Essenes R see final redactor rabbinic Judaism 310, 325 n. 86, 358, 361, 365, 377, 389 canon of 321, 360, 365, 389 and rule of faith 361 secret tradition of 358 tradition of 60, 70, 96, 103, 313, 371, 378 Rd 3, 234, 242, 246 received text see Textus Receptus recensio 14, 25, 153, 164, 189 n. 13, 393

Index of Topics recension(s) 62, 64, 97, 100, 232–34, 284 n. 141, 294, 298–306, 308, 312– 17, 334–35, 340–49, 395–96 of Antimachus 35 in antiquity 53–54 of Aristarchus 42 of Aristotle 45 closed recension 317 definition of 314–17, 321, 335 diversity of 249, 306, 312–17, 348 of Greek biblical texts 316, 340–46, 349, 396 of Homer 138, 142, 166, 169, 173, 195, 305 as local texts 302–6, 308, 312 major biblical (MT, LXX, SamP) 34, 165, 190, 242, 232–34, 298–306, 308, 314–15, 347 open recension 317 of the Pentateuch 190, 232–33, 238, 299–301, 334–35, 340 as task of editing a text 137, 141–42, 144–47, 150, 190, 242–43 see also local text theory; redaction; text-types; textual witnesses recensional activity 316 recentiores 87 n. 88, 106 n. 146 redaction as archetype 300, 317 as authoritative/standard text 118– 19, 238 definition of 315–16, 334–35 of the Hexateuch 231–35, 241–42 as interpretive addition 4 and “Joshua 24” revision 280 method of 116, 131 of Origen 106 n. 146 of Peisistratus see Peisistratus recension as a process of supplementation 240 as text-type 314–15 as a theological process 281 and unconscious revision 344, 349 as work of editors 190, 242, 299– 300, 317, 321 see also recension(s) redactional activity 7, 22, 37, 308, 312 redactional analysis of critics 135 redactional contexts 368 redactional framework 365 redactional intentionality 295

425

redactional proceedings 295 redactional profile 294–95 redactional shaping of the text 7, 367–68 redaction-critical analysis 2–13 redaction criticism/history 45, 112, 133, 161, 165–66, 173, 204, 250, 256, 262, 268–71, 297, 298 and canonical criticism 7, 25, 351, 374–75, 390 definition and method 269–70, 292–95, 391 of DH 4–5, 7–8, 10–12, 24 as history of textual revision 235, 242, 393 and history of tradition 7–8, 227, 248, 269, 351 of Homer 19, 20, 23, 173 as innerbiblical exegesis 381, 390 in New Testament studies 3–4, 8–13, 24, 166, 283–92, 297, 367 n. 48, 395 of Pentateuch 3–13, 23–24, 128 redactor see editor redactor hypothesis 12, 276 n. 120 Redaktionsgeschichte see redaction criticism/history revisionary hermeneutics 390 Rhapsodes see Homer Rj 246 see also JE Rje 3, 242, 246, 251–52, 259, 286, 290 see also JE Rjep 252 see also Rp rolling corpus of Jeremiah see Jeremiah Royal Society 123 Rp (final priestly redactor) 3, 160, 227, 234, 241–42, 246–47, 251–52, 282 n. 137 see also Rjep rule of faith see canon rules of allegorizing Scripture see canon Sagen 194, 249, 253–56, 279, 296, 399 Samaritan Pentateuch (SamP) 7, 165, 189–91, 195, 200, 208, 232, 238, 281, 299–303, 306–7, 315, 323, 325, 334, 336–40, 346–48, 396 dating of 207, 335, 348

426

Index of Topics

Samaritan Pentateuch (SamP) (cont.) and ideology 334–39 see also Mount Gerizim and interpolations from parallel passages 189, 334–38 Samaritan type texts 306, 315, 334–40 see also pre/proto-Samaritan texts Samaritans 75, 348 Sammler see compiler(s) Sammlung, -en see collections of biblical texts scholia of Homer 16, 18, 20, 35 n. 35, 39, 42, 46–51, 53 n. 99, 56, 58, 67– 68, 73, 81, 93, 96 109, 136–38, 140– 41, 145–47, 164, 170–72, 196, 242, 307, 326, 347 scholiasts on Homer see Homer schools of editors (D and P) 276 scribal activity 387 scribal exegesis 382, 387, 390 scribal interpolations and additions 387 scribal marks 78, 110 scribes and interpreters of the tradition 390 and rabbis 78–80 taking dictation 177 see also sopherim script plenums 189 scriptorium, -a of Jerusalem 311 monastic 113 of Qumran 310 Roman 40, 48 Scroll of Ezra 70 scroll of the king 69–70 scroll of the Minor Prophets, Greek see Minor Prophets scroll, Greek scroll of the temple court/precincts 70, 109 Second Rabbinic Bible 20, 63 see also Bomberg Bible secret tradition 96–97, 357–58 of the Church 357 of “gnosis” 358 and oral Torah 358 Septuagint (LXX) 25, 50, 53, 62–63, 75, 77, 83–94, 96–99, 104–9, 160, 165, 188, 190, 195, 200–201, 208, 233,

Septuagint (LXX) (cont.) 242, 299–301, 303–8, 315–16, 320– 21, 324–25, 327, 330–31, 338–49, 376, 395–96 as targum-like translations 342 Severus Torah scroll 72, 76–77, 325–26 see also Synagogue of Severus Shakespeare, William 144, 162 sociological factors in text criticism 309 sola scriptura 190, 397 Solon 135, 160 sopherim (soferim) 20, 43, 53, 60–61, 63–64, 72, 74, 78–81, 94, 109–10, 232, 234, 242, 279, 301, 316, 338, 340, 348, 362, 387, 392, 398 as authorized revisers and redactors of the Bible 61 sophists and Homeric criticism 31–34 source criticism 7, 12, 132, 185, 253, 273, 283, 289, 292, 394 see also Documentary Hypothesis spiritual or allegorical meaning of the text 93 stabilization of Hebrew text 367 standardization of biblical text 22, 25, 61–64, 88, 231, 249 of Homeric text 151, 164–65, 171 standard text(s)/edition(s) 67, 70, 72– 73, 76, 82–83, 109–11, 113–14, 116, 120, 166, 188, 190, 238, 308, 316, 323, 333, 342, 392 scholarly activity in publishing 298 see also authorized editions/texts Stoic philosophers 45 subscriptions 54–55 see also editing Suetonius 52 supplementary hypothesis 154, 160, 209–10, 215, 221, 230, 236 Symmachus 84, 87 n. 88, 89, 98, 104, 106 n. 146, 316, 341 Synagogue of Severus 76 see also Severus Torah scroll Synoptic criticism 11, 24 Synoptic Gospels 11, 270, 283, 285–92, 295, 297, 395 see also Evangelists of Synoptic Gospels

Index of Topics Talmud 25, 70–71, 74, 78, 95, 186, 377, 383 Tatian 221, 234 temple archives 187, 196–97 temple library 192, 198 Temple Scroll (Qumran) 282 n. 137 text-families 53, 188, 300, 308–9, 311, 313, 315–16, 326–27, 334 see also local text theory; text-types text-history of Homer 137, 168, 172, 195 See also Homer text-types 188, 325, 299–300, 303, 309, 310, 314–15, 333, 336, 347 see also recension(s); text-families textual correction(s) 19, 80–81, 114, 201, 280 intent of improving the text 339 minor expansions and alterations 338 see also expansionistic, explicating, and harmonizing pluses; interpolations textual criticism 4, 10, 14–15, 18–21, 23, 25, 56, 60, 63, 69, 94, 98, 187– 89, 191, 196, 200–201, 232–33, 238, 241–42, 280, 285, 297, 298–350, 390 and adnotatio 52 Alexandrian scholars and 18–20, 35–49, 51, 57–58 and canonical criticism 362, 368, 370 and canonical text 323–27, 349–51, 370 of classical texts 137, 145, 147, 153, 161, 163–66 and early Christian scholars 94, 98 see also Origen and literary criticism 298–99, 318– 23, 327–32, 335, 346–48 as lower criticism 19–20, 26, 150, 191 n. 20, 243, 298, 311–12, 335, 393 and restoration of author’s original work 4, 18, 298, 343 and rise/practice of editing 4, 15, 25, 113–17, 121, 130–32 and single original text 319–20 and stemmata 16, 317

427

textual criticism (cont.) text-history as editorial history 187– 90, 195, 200–201, 207, 232–34, 242, 298 and variant text traditions 105, 302, 308, 318, 333 see also editorial history textual multiplicity 315 textual witnesses 393 to Hebrew Bible 300–301, 314–15, 318, 320, 327 to Homer 137 to Septuagint 341 see also recension(s) Textus Receptus of the Hebrew Bible 20, 62, 118–20, 232, 295, 305–6, 310, 326, 332, 379, 392 of the New Testament 117–18, 120, 153, 166 n. 135, 392 Theodore of Mopsuestia 102–5 Theodotion 84, 87 n. 88, 89, 98, 107, 316, 341–42 three scrolls of the temple 65–70 Thucydides 33, 166–67, 201, 255, 400 as model historian 356 traditio and traditum see innerbiblical exegesis traditiohistorical method 379 tradition blocks of, in Pentateuch 273–75, 277 formation and transmission of 12, 383–84 social role of 383–84 solidification of the biblical traditum 382 transformation of 377 see also oral tradition tradition-history 10, 12, 212, 227 and canonical process 374, 376 and innerbiblical exegesis 378–81, 390 see also innerbiblical exegesis of oral tradition 7–8, 10, 266, 283 and redaction criticism 7–8, 248, 269, 351 in Synoptic Gospels 286, 291–93 of text 269

428

Index of Topics

tradition-history (cont.) as transmission-history 2, 8, 11–12, 19, 178, 249, 260, 269, 277, 295, 370, 393 tradition-scripture-canon 375 tragedies, Greek 32 transformative revelations 382 translation of an exemplar 190 style and techniques 343–45, 349 twelve-tribe amphictyony 265–67, 273 typology 102 and typological exegesis 95, 390 n. 102 Überlieferungsgeschichte see traditionhistory unitarians of Homer 158, 163, 174, 192 n. 20 Urschrift 221, 318 Urtext 111, 120, 280, 309, 317–18, 321, 323, 327, 347, 349, 351 variant readings 113, 121, 189, 200, 207, 251, 312, 326, 338, 345 Eusebius’s treatment of 98 genetic and alternative readings 319 in Homeric texts 28, 47, 143, 165, 171–72 in Latin texts 52–54 Origen’s interpretation of 92 parallel readings 336 rabbinic treatment of, 64–68, 74–76 unique readings 314 see also double readings; text criticism variant text forms 302, 308, 318, 333 Venetian scholia see Iliad, Venetus A Verfasser 197, 203, 222 see also author(s) Virgil 138, 155, 356, 388 Vorlage of the Septuagint (LXX) 188, 190, 238, 392, 396

vulgar texts 50, 188, 307, 324–26, 332, 347–48, 396 and nonvulgar or elegant texts 50, 56, 59, 172, 300, 305, 311, 324– 26, 347, 349, 396 and text-types 299–300 see also koine text Vulgate, Latin 82, 106–8, 126 vulgate text 10, 16, 18–20, 22 as authoritative popular text 72, 307 of the Bible 10, 20, 25, 72–78, 82– 83, 85, 90–91, 105–6, 109–11, 220, 237, 242, 249, 269, 316, 325 n. 84, 334, 347, 388, 391–92 and first printed editions 125 of Homer 1, 18, 39–41, 46–52, 58, 64, 138, 145–48, 150, 166–67, 170–71, 196, 301, 303, 305, 308, 317, 323, 328, 333–34, 347, 393, 395 written and oral Law 355, 358, 378 as canon in Judaism 358 n. 22 Yahwist ( J) 3, 24, 157 n. 105, 187, 211, 216, 234 as collector of traditions, a storyteller 248–53, 286, 290, 296 as historian and author 5, 7–8, 24, 26, 256–59, 262, 264–69, 271– 72, 274, 292, 294, 296, 370–71, 373, 394, 399–400 as Pentateuchal source 3, 6–7, 10, 245–48, 273, 285, 296 as redactor 5–10 as schools of editors 274–77, 283 see also Deuteronomistic Composition (KD) Yehowist see JE Yose, Rab 68 Zenodotus 18, 35–39, 43, 49, 50, 73, 81, 136, 140, 142, 144, 146, 171 n. 163