Genesis. Jan-Wim Wesselius Protestant Theological University Kampen, The Netherlands

Transcription

1 RBL 08/2009 Arnold, Bill T. Genesis The New Cambridge Bible Commentary Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Pp. xxi Hardcover. $ ISBN Jan-Wim Wesselius Protestant Theological University Kampen, The Netherlands This is an eminently readable and enjoyable commentary on the book of Genesis by a scholar who is a moderate adherent of the idea that Genesis is a book that has been put together from various sources, which can be connected with historical realities, and who makes liberal use of ancient Near Eastern sources to throw light on Genesis. He makes his own point of view clear in the first chapter of his book, an Introduction (1 19), where he sets forth his view of the origin of the book; a condensed version of this introduction appeared on the Bible and Interpretation website: /genesis.shtml. The section on Literary Studies in the second chapter, Suggested Readings on Genesis (20 26), is very brief, covering barely two pages, like the other sections in this chapter, but in contrast with these other sections I would have liked to see more consideration of literary issues. I think that here the author is hindered by the historical-critical tradition he is in, for while the work of several of the authors whom he mentions may not address historical issues in the text at all or in a manner that is not entirely satisfactory, they not rarely raise issues that should be addressed in any case and that receive little and sometimes no attention in this commentary. A good example is the well-known literary

2 connection between Gen 37:32 33 and 38:25 26, which is indirectly referred to in note 573 on page 325, without the reader being informed what this connection is about. Though the signature of the book is not outspokenly Christian, it is a more or less pious publication: sections often conclude with an appraisal of the action of God in history. I imagine the typical reader or peruser of this commentary to be a theologian or layperson with considerable theological interest, and I can in fact warmly recommend it to such readers. The main part of the book is taken by a succint commentary on the text of Genesis, preceded by a new translation, and provided with many references to secondary literature that I found to be up to date to a high degree. Throughout the volume there are short sections of one to two pages on various special subjects, such as Creation Accounts in the Ancient Near East or Genealogies in the Bible, which provide useful background information but which would drown in the stream of information if they had been given in the main text of the commentary. I would have liked, however, separate introductions to larger units in the text, such as the life of Abraham or the story of Joseph, the information about which must now be retrieved from the commentary itself. The book is concluded by a scriptural index, an extrabiblical texts index, and indexes of authors and subjects. I would also have liked to see a full bibliography, though I can imagine that it would be an objection that it would have added pages to an already sizeable book. Thus far about the commentary within its scholarly context: a balanced and erudite work. Precisely this balanced character, however, poses its own problems. For some parts of Genesis, the contradictions and duplications in the text are assumed to represent originally distinct texts that have been joined together, more or less as in the original Documentary Hypothesis, while others supposedly have been composed more or less as a unity, though a comparable kind of contradictions and duplications are present in the text. The story of the life of Joseph is taken to be a unity in spite of the signs in the text that some decades ago used to be taken as uncontroversial evidence for the Documentary Hypothesis, such as the symmetrical roles of Judah and Reuben in part of it and rightly so, for it proves impossible to divide the story into two competing parts or threads, as we can do, for example, with the life of Abraham in Gen Unfortunately, however, this does not remove these signs, and it is still on the scholar to explain them, more so than ever, I would say, for in comparison with the classical Documentary Hypothesis the very same type of contradictions and frictions are here taken to be, well, somewhat accidental features of the story. It should be added that the author supposes that parts of Gen do not originally belong with the story of Joseph, on the basis of a reconstructed literary

3 and historical profile of the original story, and one can hesitate about the legitimacy of such a procedure if one rejects the other signs of a complex origin of this work. It may be worthwhile to examine precisely this aspect of the story of Joseph: Why did scholars in the past assume that it has a complex origin, and what can we do with their observations? The ambiguity of Gen 37:28, literally translated, and Midianite traders passed by, and they drew up Joseph out of the pit, and they sold him to the Ishmaelites, so leaving open the question whether the Midianites or the brothers sold Joseph, was already noted in rabbinical literature and (as hailing from a different source, of course) in historical-critical scholarship, from where it even reached some Bible translations. See, for example, the Jerusalem Bible and its French equivalent, the Bible de Jérusalem, both text and notes. What I proposed in an article quoted by the author 1 is that it is a deliberate ambiguity and that a comparable phenomenon occurs in nearly every longer biography in the so-called Primary History (Genesis 2 Kings). Each of these biographies starts with such an ambiguous situation, in spite of the enormous differences in contents and style, which the author rightly points out. Thus in Genesis we perceive that, beside the two potentially contradictory accounts of creation of humanity, we are kept in uncertainty whether Abram is called by the Lord in Ur of the Chaldees or in Haran, whether Jacob goes to Mesopotamia out of fear for Esau or for marriage with his cousin, and, as noted above, whether Joseph is stolen by the Midianites or sold by his brothers; the beginning of the description of the lives of Moses in Exodus and of Samuel, Saul, and David in the books of Samuel exhibits the same characteristic feature. In each of these cases, various instruments of ambiguity establish and maintain this remarkable situation. This literary strategy, of course, lends itself very well for an explanation along the lines of traditional historical-critical studies: basically, the two narrative lines are taken to be the reflex of various different sources. In the above-mentioned article I therefore proposed very briefly to consider whether such irregularities in the text are to be explained from a completely different view, which would be equally valid for the story of Joseph and for other cases in the book of Genesis; in 2006 I returned at some length to this idea in an article in the Festschrift for Cornelis Houtman. 2 The book of Genesis can be shown to consist of a number of biographies, which together with the above-mentioned examples from other biblical books form a literary emulation of the biographies of the Persian royal house in the Histories of 1. Language Play in the Old Testament and in Ancient North-West Semitic Inscriptions: Some Notes on the Kilamuwa Inscription, in The Old Testament in Its World (ed. R. P. Gordon and J. C. de Moor; Leiden: Brill, 2005), ; cited in Arnold, 321 n From Stumbling Blocks to Cornerstones: The Function of Problematic Episodes in the Primary History and in Ezra-Nehemiah, in The Interpretation of Exodus: Studies in Honour of Cornelis Houtman (ed. Riemer Roukema; Leuven: Peeters, 2006),

4 Herodotus, 3 and each of these biographies starts in an ambiguous way, which develops into a system of two narrative threads that contradict and duplicate each other. A fascinating picture of the origin and nature of a large part of the biblical literature evolves in this way. On the one hand, the Primary History and some other biblical books thus at first appear as a discontinuous collection of texts; on the other hand, there are features that make them appear as a unity. In other words, the author or authors balanced continuity and discontinuity in a very subtle way. There are several literary techniques that serve to express this unity. They are usually not found in the narrative continuity or in the literary genre, which show only a limited degree of continuity, but in areas where we would not expect them. I will briefly review three of these techniques that are especially relevant for the book of Genesis. First, some biblical books emulate other works that have a related subject matter: Daniel emulates the book of Ezra and the story of Joseph; Ezra and Nehemiah exhibit a mirrorlike reciprocal emulation; and the Primary History surprisingly emulates the Histories of Herodotus. This is apparently a deliberate literary strategy. It does not matter whether there is allusion in details (though there is, of course) or whether the emulated book belongs to the same literary genre; what is important is that there is an emulation of the entire book. Some critics attacked my proposals for recognizing allusions to certain aspects of Herodotus s Histories in the Primary History, unfortunately without realizing that, first, if an entire book functions as an emulation of the narrative outline of an entire other book it does not matter whether one can cast doubt on some details, nor whether there may be books that have more agreements between them, and, second, it is only halfdone work to reject one such case of emulation without giving attention to the other cases that I studied. 4 Even worse, some authors omit any reference to the idea of such emulation, apparently because there is a convenient alibi for this in the form of some critical reviews, though there is not a single instance in which they dared to second the reasoning of such a review. Second, certain subdivisions of these books have been composed on a common model. The biographies that, as noted above, are the constituent parts of the majority of the Primary History (humanity, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Samuel, Saul, and David) each contain two narrative threads that start at the beginning of each biography through 3. Discontinuity, Congruence and the Making of the Hebrew Bible, SJOT 13 (1999) 24 77; The Origin of the History of Israel: Herodotus Histories as Blueprint for the First Books of the Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002). 4. One review that suffers from these deficiences was by Bob Becking in RBL: _3303.pdf (2003). See for Daniel, for example, my article The Literary Nature of the Book of Daniel and the Linguistic Character of its Aramaic, Aramaic Studies 3 (2005):

5 two alternative accounts of the first movement in space of the main person. These accounts are connected in an ambiguous way, which allows the reader either to choose one of the versions or to harmonize them. These versions are continued throughout the biography and sometimes even beyond it. Usually one of the two is explicitly denied near the end of the main person s life. Thus we see the two threads of Gen 1 2 represented in Genesis and the beginning of Exodus through the well-known alternation of the designations for God, YHWH and Elohim, and the YHWH-version is denied in Exod 3 and 6, where we are told that this name was not known before. This observation accounts for the large majority of the features that have traditionally been taken as evidence that the text of Genesis as we now have it is the result of an editorial process. Third, passages in the same work are made to belong together through comparable words, expressions, and events in order to connect them, though they do not belong together in the narrative field. This phenomenon, which I called supercontinuity, also serves to increase the coherence of the entire work. Good examples are the so-called duplicate stories in Genesis, which not only treat comparable episodes but also use a considerable number of the same words and expressions, and the supposed interruptions of the main narrative line in the episode of Melchizedek (Gen 14:18 20) and in the story of Judah and Tamar (Gen 38), where we see a fascinating play with continuity and discontinuity. 5 Of course, it is shocking to discover and difficult to accept that parts of the Bible are of a completely different literary nature than we used to think, that they were composed as consummate unitary literary works in which continuity and discontinuity were carefully balanced, and we might even wish that this would not be true, if only because it means an enormous loss of intellectual effort by many researchers. That may not, of course, entice us just to omit discussion of such observations: they must be confronted. The conclusion of all this is that the Primary History (and within it the book of Genesis) shows no sign of having been joined together from various originally independent pieces: the supposed reason for this assumption issues from the peculiar literary nature of the book. Unless proof to the contrary would come forth, we are to assume that Genesis and the Primary History as a whole in their present form, as well as Daniel and Ezra-Nehemiah, are a literary product of the dark age of Judaism in the late Persian and early Greek period, and are connected only indirectly with the history of ancient Israel (though this does not exclude that the information which they contain is basically correct). And this is the reason why in spite of my recognition of the merits of this commentary I cannot accept its view on the book of Genesis. 5. See my From Stumbling Blocks, passim.