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BETWEEN MYTH & MANDATE
Geopolitics, Pseudohistory & the Hebrew Bible
By MICHAEL NATHANSON AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2013 Michael Nathanson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4918-2310-1
CHAPTER 1
The Making of the Hebrew Bible
On December 1, 1947, two days after the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution for the partition of Mandatory Palestine, anti-Jewish riots broke out throughout Syria. The Great Synagogue of Aleppo, the ancient northern city, was set on fire. Many Torah scrolls were consumed. Surviving, however, was a tenth-century CE manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, which was kept in a wooden box that had been closely guarded by the Jewish community for six centuries. The Aleppo Codex, also called The Crown of Aram-zobah, did not survive whole, however. It is missing 192 leaves, whose fate remains largely unknown. Only two of the missing leaves had been found by 2008, raising the suspicion that in the confusion caused by the riots and conflagration, the leaves were removed, to be used as souvenirs or amulets. Contrary to initial testimonies that suggested fire damage to the manuscript, later investigations showed the damage to have been caused by a fungus of the genus aspergillus. The codex was removed from Aleppo to Jerusalem, and after years of intensive and painstaking restoration, it found a home at the Israel Museum Shrine of the Book.
The codex is the only extant, and oldest, exemplar of the Tiberian Ben Asher Scriptorium, a medieval Jewish learning center on the western shore of the Lake of Galilee. Beginning in the seventh century BCE, the Tiberian school of grammarians and scribes added vocalization signs and accent marks, which allowed the traditional consonantal texts to be voweled accurately and read grammatically. It is said that the Tiberian grammarians took their cues from Tiberians' accents when speaking Hebrew.
Regarding the Aleppo Codex, tradition has it that the consonants were copied by the scribe Shlomo Ben Buya'a in 920 and then verified, vocalized, and provided with Masoretic notes by Aaron Ben Asher, the last member of the Ben Asher dynasty. After his death, his heirs sold the codex to the Karaite community in Jerusalem, where it was captured in 1099 and held for ransom by the first Crusaders. The codex, together with many other Bible codices, books, and Torah scrolls, was redeemed by the Karaite community in Ashkelon, from whence it was transported to Egypt and delivered to the Jerusalemite Synagogue in Fustas (Old Cairo). Maimonides used the codex to write his laws of the Torah scroll, giving it a Halachic seal of supreme textual authority, still in force to this day. The descendants of Maimonides brought the complete codex, which included twenty-four books, to Aleppo at the end of the fourteenth century.
Nonvocalized, consonant-only biblical texts, among many numerous nonbiblical (noncanonized) texts, were discovered in several cliff caves north of Khirbet Qumran, located on a plateau overlooking the northern end of the Dead Sea. Extensive explorations and archaeological fieldwork has taken place since Bedouin shepherds discovered the jars that contained the scrolls in a cave (Qumran 1) in early 1947. Subsequently, other scrolls and many scroll fragments were discovered in adjacent caves; in addition, remains of settlements were unearthed in Khirbet Qumran, Khirbet Feshkha, and Ain el-Ghuweir.
Stratigraphy of the Khirbet Qumran indicates that the site was settled and abandoned several times over a period of eight centuries; between 150 BCE and 100 BCE, it was settled by a new group, which was augmented by yet another new group of settlers between 100 BCE and 31 BCE. This reconstruction of events is based on evidence of new construction activity on the site; some of the buildings likely were workshops, pottery-making studios, and a scriptorium. The site was abandoned ca. 31 BCE for unknown reasons and reoccupied yet again in 4 BCE, remaining occupied until 60/69 CE, when the first revolt was put down by the Romans, who used the site as a garrison until 74 CE. The site might have been occupied by Jews during the BarKokhba revolt (132–B5 CE).
Who were the settlers and were they connected to the Qumran scrolls, which were discovered in the nearby caves? Following the initial evaluation and interpretation of the first seven scrolls discovered in 1947, Professor Eliezer Sukenik concluded that they reflected the writings of a Jewish apocalyptic sect prevalent during the intertestamental period, approximately between 150 BCE and 100 CE. The archaeological community, led by William Foxwell Albright and Père Roland de Vaux, reached a consensus, attributing the nonbiblical texts to members of the isolated and austere Essene sect, which, according to the writings of Josephus, Philo of Alexandria, and Plini, settled in Qumran over several centuries. That consensus held authority for several decades unchallenged, although remarkably, none of the written material discovered, including documentary autographs, attested to any Essene activity.
This deficiency stood in marked contrast "to the discovery in the early 1950s of hastily scrawled sheets of papyrus ... in the caves of the rugged Wadi Muraba'at, [thirteen miles] south of Khirbet Qumran." (Map 5) This cache, which was dated to the period of the Bar-Kokhba revolt (132–135 CE), included letters, legal documents relating to land ownership, place names, names of people, signatures, and dates. The absence of documentary evidence for real-time Essene activity in the Qumran settlement challenged the entrenched consensus that literary output during the intertestamental period was the product of a reclusive Jewish sect in the Judean wilderness. Indeed, scholars should have been alerted by the variety of scripts used in the Qumran texts—Canaanite and Paleo-Hebrew, square Hebrew and Aramaic, and Greek uncial. Many phylacteries found in several caves, particularly Q4, showed great variability in their textual contents; this also cast doubt on the theory of a single Essene sect and the idea of "unity"—a group of "purity-loving brethren" who lived their lives according to the rules of a "manual of discipline" scroll. In addition, two alleged discoveries, centuries apart, of a large number of Jewish manuscripts in or near Jericho, north of the Dead Sea, was reported by Origen, a second-century CE Christian theologian and by the eighth-century CE Nestorian patriarch Thimoteus I of Seleucia, further undermining the theory of a single scribal provenance.
Then there is the Copper Scroll, two copies of which were discovered inside cave 3 in March 1955. It is a documentary autograph arranged in twelve columns that were inscribed with a stylus into the copper. The text, in a nonliterary Hebrew idiom and datable to the first century CE, is an inventory, five to each column, of treasures—silver and other precious metals—that were stored in hideaways throughout the Judean wilderness. Would the austere Essenes, who eschewed worldly possessions, have hoarded and then stashed away these treasures? The initial solution to this dilemma by the Qumran scholars was to declare the scroll a work of fiction.
Cognizant of the incompatibility between the Qumran and Essene concept and the finds, John Allegro from the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, who initially believed that the scroll originated with the Essenes, proposed that the scroll was genuine and was connected with the Jerusalemite Temple treasures rather than with the Essenes. One would therefore venture to place the origin of the other scrolls outside Qumran as well.
Professor K. H. Rengstorf from the University of Münster rejected any claim that the Essenes wrote or copied so many hundreds of books by themselves in the Qumran scriptorium. Alternatively, he proposed that all the diverse manuscripts originated solely in the Jerusalem temple's library, but failed to consider the possibility of other libraries in Jerusalem "whose owners could equally have hidden away their contents."
Archaeological digs in Masada under the direction of Professor Yigael Yadin unearthed fragments of at least fifteen Hebrew texts, including fragments of scrolls of Deuteronomy, Ezekiel, Leviticus, Psalms, Wisdom of Ben-Sira, and Jubilees. Other fragments in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin belonged to unknown texts, including one from "Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice." Remarkably, fragments of these songs but in other handwritings had been found a decade earlier also in Qumran caves 4 and 11. Professor Yadin theorized that Essenes had settled in Masada after the fall of Jerusalem, discounting the unlikely possibility that the militant Zealots and Sicarii joined forces in Masada with the monastic and pacifist Essenes.
The discovery of the Temple Scroll in 1967 has not abated the Essene-and-Qumran-versus-Jerusalem debate about the provenance of the buried texts of the Dead Sea. Sold to Yigael Yadin by an anonymous person in Jerusalem or Bethlehem immediately after the Six-Day War, it was claimed, without substantiation, to have been discovered in cave 11. Regardless, Yadin and other scholars hastened to attribute it to an Essene Qumran scriptorium.
The longest of the Qumran scrolls, the Temple Scroll, was written in the form of a revelation from God in the first person to Moses, instructing him to build an idealized square temple, reminiscent of the rebuilt and imposing Herodian Temple, thus marginalizing the much-smaller Solomonic Temple. The scroll delves in minute detail into rules and regulations that concern temple sacrifices and practices of strict purity in the Temple and in Jerusalem, and its author displays intimate knowledge of the Pentateuchal laws. Lawrence H. Schiffman dates the scroll to ca. 120 BCE, pointing out that the linguistic features exhibit more affinity with rabbinic Hebrew than do the other Qumran scrolls; Schiffman also believes that the Temple Scroll has a Zadokite rather than an Essene provenance. The scroll, as noted, deals in detail with sacrifice rules and practices in which the Essenes never engaged; therefore, they had no incentive or cause to author such a document.
Schiffman admits that "to this day, we still do not know who wrote the scroll or why. Neither do we know how it made its way to the Qumran cave." Norman Golb agrees that the scroll was written outside Qumran's scriptorium, and further that all the Qumran scrolls originated in Jerusalem, from whence, on the threshold of looming catastrophe, they were spirited away by prescient librarians and curators for safekeeping in caves of the Judean Desert; in Jericho, north of the Dead Sea in Qumran; in Wadi Muraba'at, farther south; and in Masada's fortress. Considering that the preponderance of evidence does not support the theory that the Essenes authored or copied and produced the Qumran manuscripts, the fixation of the earlier Qumran scholars on them is incongruent with the disinterest in the Essenes prior to the discovery of the manuscripts, as they were marginalized by mainstream Judaism.
The name Essene was applied to the authors of the extrabiblical Qumran texts by these early Qumran scholars, even though neither Pliny nor Philo nor Josephus have anything to say about the Essenes or about the presence of scribes in the Qumran sect. Nor, for that matter, do the Essenes, the Qumran sect, or whoever wrote the extrabiblical texts or copied the Bible. None of the scrolls have colophons. None of these people call themselves Essenes. The authors of the Qumran texts—describing themselves variously as "the keepers of the covenant," "the perfect of the way," "the way of perfect righteousness," and "the seekers of the smooth things"—were apocalyptically minded, eagerly awaiting the end of the present order, that is to say, the Edomite rule over Jerusalem and the Hasmonean control of the temple. In other words, there was no common ground between them and Josephus' or Philo's Essenes.
Returning to the Qumran finds, the great majority of the caves included a diverse collection of previously known texts of the Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, as well as unknown hymns, psalms, commentaries on biblical texts, wisdom literature, and legal writings. Referred to as "sectarian," these texts are assumed to have been written between 250 BCE and 68 CE. Judged not only by the diversity between and among the scripts used, but also by the diversity of ideas and seemingly conflicting agendas, the texts most likely were written by several scribes, representing disparate authorities. Considering that the two centuries that separated the rise of the Maccabees and the fall of Jerusalem were marked by political instability and religious strife, such diversity should be expected. Of the thousands of fragments, representing some eight hundred disparate texts, almost a quarter are whole or partial (sometimes just a fragment of a single page) copies of "every book in the Bible, except the Book of Esther," which are also included in the Greek Septuagint (discussed later in this chapter).
After the fall of Jerusalem, only twenty-four (protocanonical) texts were chosen to be included in a single-volume Hebrew version of the Bible, to the exclusion of all (deuterocanonical) others. With this act, the national literature of Israel turned into a sacred Jewish scripture; the natural process of creating a national canon was shut down. The decision, made by accepted authority, was most likely based on religious considerations that reflected the political power of the various streams within the Jewish community in Palestine. Both Philip R. Davies and Frank Moore Cross agree that closing, or "fixing," the canon was in response to the growing Hellenizing trends among the Jewish population in Palestine. Although Davies places the time of fixation during the Hasmonean dynasty, Cross believes fixation occurred with Rabbi Hillel between the two Jewish revolts (68–135 CE). Thus, according to Davies, the rabbis inherited a fixed canon, particularly the Pentateuch, which was further augmented by the oral Torah and the Talmud; the latter is still open to exegesis. According to Cross, it was the rabbis, that is to say, Hillel and his "house," who fixed the canon against "rival doctrines of purity, cult, calendar, legal dicta and theological doctrines."
The debate about the origins of the Qumran texts only intensified the question of biblical urtext. The circumstances surrounding the emergence of the Septuagint—the Alexandrian Greek version of the Hebrew Bible—are no less controversial. As legend has it, "about seventy Jewish elders translated the Bible into Greek," hence the name Septuagint, literally meaning "seventy" (septem: seven, gint: ten times). The legend, originating in the Letter of Aristeas, was repeated by Philo, Josephus, and Eusebius. The letter is a second-century BCE text said to be written by an Alexandrian Hellenistic Jew "approximately between 250 B.C. and A.D. 100."
In fact, the letter says that an agreement was reached between King Ptolemy of Egypt and Eleazar the "high priest of the Jews" to translate their Law books from Hebrew into Greek. This was accomplished by seventy-two Jerusalemite sages versed in the Law—six from each tribe!—who finished the task in seventy-two days, producing identical copies.
The Letter of Aristeas says nothing about translation of the Pentateuch or any other books of the Bible, which were translated into Greek at some later time, most likely in stages. The original Hebrew texts of the Bible that allegedly served as the source of the Septuagint are unknown. Nonetheless, Cross states, without evidentiary support, that "we now know that the Hebrew text underlying the old Greek translation in major parts of the Bible derived from a stream of textual tradition represented by a family of Hebrew manuscripts strongly divergent from our received Hebrew text. Unfortunately, early studies of the text of the Greek Bible were without such control." Other studies suggest that the texts of the Septuagint are in fact revisions of a proto-Septuagint or Old Greek translation. Jerome (ca. 347–420) spoke of three Greek translations extant in his time: Heysychius in Egypt, Origen in Palestine, and Lucian in Antioch. The notion of a threefold origin of the Greek Bible was by way of pointing out presumed "errors, alterations, glosses, suppressions and abbreviations" in the disparate transmissions of a Greek urtext, itself allegedly an inerrant translation from a true, single-source Hebrew collection of texts.
The pursuit of a valid, single, authoritative biblical urtext in Hebrew, noble as it was, did not bear fruit. The diverse Qumran manuscripts strongly suggest variant streams of textual traditions; for example, short and long versions of Jeremiah were discovered in Qumran cave 4. The shorter, and older, is a Greek version. The longer is a rabbinic version, chosen by them for subsequent inclusion in the Bible. In addition, two text types each were found in Qumran for many other books, including Isaiah and Job.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from BETWEEN MYTH & MANDATE by MICHAEL NATHANSON. Copyright © 2013 Michael Nathanson. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
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