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The Pentateuch: SCM Core Text
The Pentateuch: SCM Core Text
The Pentateuch: SCM Core Text
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The Pentateuch: SCM Core Text

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This book introduces students with a little background in biblical studies to the scholarly study of the Pentateuch (Genesis to Deuteronomy). Existing introductions to the Pentateuch are either mainly concerned with historical criticism or taken up with a survey of the contents of the five books, or both. This book is distinctive in that every chap
LanguageEnglish
PublisherSCM Press
Release dateOct 22, 2013
ISBN9780334052142
The Pentateuch: SCM Core Text

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    The Pentateuch - Walter Houston

    Pentateuch

    SCM CORE TEXT

    Pentateuch

    Walter J. Houston

    SCM-press.jpg

    © Walter J. Houston 2013

    Published in 2013 by SCM Press

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    SCM Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd (a registered charity)

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    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press.

    The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work

    British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

    A catalogue record for this book is available

    from the British Library

    978-0-334-04385-0

    Typeset by Regent Typesetting, London

    Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Croydon

    Contents

    Preface

    Abbreviations

    1. Approaching the Text

    What is the Pentateuch and why is it worth reading?

    The significance of the Pentateuch

    The shape of the Pentateuch

    Questions

    The task ahead

    Part A

    2. The Pentateuch as Narrative

    Genre

    Plot

    Narrative discourse

    Overall theme

    Further reading

    3. The Pentateuch as Torah

    Torah and law

    The unfolding of the revelation to Israel

    Law, moral exhortation and ritual instruction: the teaching viewed analytically

    Torah and life: the teaching viewed thematically

    Further reading

    4. Covenant-making in the Pentateuch

    The covenants in the Pentateuch

    The meaning of the word

    Cultural models

    Covenant promises by God in the Pentateuch

    Covenants of obedience to YHWH by Israel

    The treaties and the covenants

    Further reading

    Part B

    5. The composition of the Pentateuch

    The problem

    The emergence of historical criticism

    The production of texts in ancient Israel

    A review of theories

    Testing the theories

    Conclusion

    Suggested exercises

    Further reading

    6. The Coming to Be of the Torah

    When was the Torah completed and authoritative?

    The authority of the Torah

    Historical context

    The issues at stake

    What was the Torah needed for?

    Beyond Jerusalem

    The theory of imperial authorization

    How was the Pentateuch completed?

    The Pentateuch becomes a prescriptive legal code

    Further reading

    7. The Historicity of the Pentateuch

    History as cultural memory

    Finding history in the Pentateuchal traditions

    Further reading

    Part C

    8. The Pentateuch in Judaism and Christianity

    The Torah in Judaism

    The Pentateuch in Christianity

    Further reading

    9. The Modern Reader and the Pentateuch

    Reading from this place

    Reading for contradiction

    Feminist readings

    Queer readings

    Readings from a class point of view

    Postcolonial readings

    Ecological readings

    Further reading

    10. The Theology of the Pentateuch

    The nature of the task

    A thematic outline of the theology of the Pentateuch

    Further reading

    Bibliography

    Preface

    This is not a book-by-book survey. It is an introduction to scholarship on the Pentateuch as a whole, in three main areas, concerning the text in itself, its historical origins and the ways in which it has been and is being read. Where there is no existing work to draw on, I have offered my own observations. I hope that the material for reflection and exercise and the suggestions for further reading, which are reasonably comprehensive, will make it suitable for use both by the individual student and the general reader, and in class. I assume readers will have a basic knowledge of the history of ancient Israel and Judah and of the Old Testament generally, but scholarly approaches are explained as required.

    The Bibliography is intended partly for reference – the works given by author and abbreviated title in the footnotes refer to it – and partly to back up the sections on further reading with general works and commentaries. Only works in English are listed; of course, that includes articles in foreign-language periodicals and collections.

    The book should be used with the Bible open beside it. References are to the English versions, where the numbering of verses in the Hebrew text differs. However, quotations, unless otherwise stated, are given in my own translation from the Hebrew. I do not want to privilege any particular English version of the text.

    A word on language and gender. Human beings are always referred to in inclusive language, where appropriate – so ‘the ancestors’ rather than ‘the patriarchs’, unless the reference is exclusively to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. However, God will frequently be found referred to with masculine pronouns. Most references to ‘God’, and all references to ‘YHWH’, which is how I render the divine name, occur in discussion of the text of the Pentateuch, where Israel’s God is treated as masculine, so it is realistic to follow this usage. But I have tried, particularly when discussing the theology of the Pentateuch in Chapter 10, to be sparing in the use of pronouns.

    This work has occupied the bulk of my time for the past three years, and the road has been harder going than I expected. The work still has its defects, but they would have been far more numerous than they are without the generously given advice of several friends and colleagues, including the two anonymous peer reviewers, who saw a sample chapter as well as the outline of my proposed work. Those whose names I know are Graham Davies, Cheryl Exum, Walter Moberly, John Sawyer and the late and much missed Roger Tomes. I warmly express my gratitude to them all. I am also grateful to the SCM Press commissioning editor, Natalie Watson, who gave me the opportunity of writing the book and was very patient in waiting for it. My wife Fleur, as always, has been constant in her interest and encouragement. Without her this would have been a much harder and more lonely road to travel.

    Walter J. Houston

    Abbreviations

    This list does not include abbreviations of the names of books of the Bible, or of states of the USA, or the best-known general abbreviations.

    1. Approaching the Text

    What is the Pentateuch and why is it worth reading?

    The first five books of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, have always been recognized as a distinct unit, often known as the ‘five books of Moses’ or as the Pentateuch, from the Greek, meaning ‘the five scrolls’. For Jews it is the ‘Torah’ or ‘teaching’.

    Why is it worth reading? That depends on the reader. I am assuming that the majority of readers of this book will be Christians. Many of the foundations of the Christian faith are found here, foundations that are taken for granted in the New Testament. It speaks of creation, of sin and the fall, of God’s promise, of the calling of God’s people, of liberation and of hope. Many readers, it is true, are put off by the numerous pages of laws and cultic regulations. But they should persevere. After all, the ‘Law’ includes the Ten Commandments, and the two ‘great commandments’ identified by Jesus: ‘You shall love the LORD your God’ and ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ And those are by no means the only passages of moral value in these pages. That is to say nothing of the stories – Adam and Eve, Jacob and Laban, Joseph, Moses and the burning bush …

    For Jews this text has an even greater importance. It is this text and no other that is written to this day by hand on a great scroll and kept in the Ark in prominent view at the end of every Orthodox synagogue. It is this text, this scroll, that once a year is carried with high rejoicing round the synagogue. It is this text that is taken out to be read through, Sabbath after Sabbath, right through from beginning to end every year, with no exceptions for the duller parts of Leviticus. No other part of the Hebrew Bible is treated in this way, only selected portions of the prophets being read alongside the allotted passage of the Torah.

    This central place of the Torah in the Jewish community is already illustrated in the Bible itself, when in Nehemiah 8 Ezra reads from it for an entire morning to the people gathered in the square in front of the Water Gate, with the Levites assisting the people to understand it. The narrator implies that this was the first time the people here gathered had heard it. It makes a tremendous impression on them: they weep when they hear the words, but the Levites encourage them to rejoice instead.

    In the light of this, we might describe the Torah as the foundation document of a community. We could compare it to the Gospels in Christianity, to the Qur’an in Islam or in a different way to the US Declaration of Independence. It enables the Jewish community to understand themselves and their place in the purposes of God: it gives them their identity and their meaning, tells them where they have come from and where, in the purposes of God, they are going and prescribes their way of life and behaviour.

    Not only the Jewish community: the Samaritans also recognize the Torah as Scripture and use it in similar ways. The Samaritans are today a very small community, only a few hundred strong. But it is likely that at one time they were more numerous. For them it is their only Scripture, and it is their foundation document as much as that of the Jews. Jews and Samaritans dispute the claim between them to be the inheritors of the tradition of Israel.

    Is there any reason why non-religious people should be interested in these books? If they are interested in knowing something of the roots of western civilization, yes, of course there is. It is simply not possible to understand western art and literature without knowing the Bible, and that means above all the Pentateuch and the Gospels.


    So don’t go beyond this chapter without setting to and reading the Pentateuch itself. Read it fast. It’s no longer than a modern novel. Don’t stop to puzzle over difficulties. Read a book at a sitting, or half a book, depending on the time you have available: Genesis one evening, Exodus the next, and so on. And when you carry on with this book, have the Bible open beside it. I quote some important texts in full, but usually I just give a reference.


    The significance of the Pentateuch

    The significance of the Torah for Israel is far more than what is conveyed by the name ‘law’, which is used to refer to it in the New Testament (see Chapter 3, p. 42), precisely because it is basically a story. According to this story, Israel was chosen and called by God, through their ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to be God’s peculiar possession or ‘special treasure’ (Exod. 19.6; Deut. 7.6), and God delivered them from state slavery in Egypt. With them God made a covenant, by which they committed themselves to observe the commands for their life, national and individual, which God gave them, which are set out in the Torah.

    It is this last feature that may be thought to justify the name ‘law’, and much of traditional Jewish scholarship is devoted to elucidating these commandments and working out how precisely they should be observed. It is the conviction of many Jews that it is Israel that has taught the world justice and compassion, which are taught in the Torah and are the essence of the character of God (Exod. 34.6–7).

    Christians also regard the Pentateuch as part of Scripture, and Christians too claim the name ‘Israel’ (see Gal. 6.16). It does not on its own play the foundational part in their traditions that it does in those of the Jews and Samaritans. But it is indispensable, furnishing the basis of such central doctrines as those of creation and the fall. As for the story of Israel, the promises to the patriarchs, the exodus from Egypt and the covenant of Sinai, these have often been seen as the first stage in a ‘history of salvation’, leading eventually to the coming of Christ (see below, pp. 172–6). The way the Pentateuch is understood by Jews and by Christians is the subject of Chapter 8 in this book.

    The foundational function served by the Pentateuch for ‘Israel’ enables us to begin to understand why it contains such diverse materials. For both story and law or moral instruction are relevant to this function: both origins and custom or moral ethos help to define a community.

    The shape of the Pentateuch

    All the same, this only enables us to understand it in the most general terms. It does not elucidate the precise shape that confronts us, let alone explain the details. It is divided into five ‘books’, originally scrolls, hence the Greek name Pentateuch. The writing of the entire Torah on one scroll is a more recent development, subsequent to the biblical period. There is a fairly new start at the beginning of each book, although the breaks before the beginning of Exodus and Deuteronomy are much more pronounced than those at the beginnings of Leviticus and Numbers, where the narrative is more directly connected to what has gone before.

    The structure of the content is that of a story, which begins in Genesis with the creation of the world, with the failure of the first humans and the world’s narrow escape from un-creation in the Flood. Genesis goes on to the story of the promises made by God to Israel’s ancestors, to be their God and to give them a country to live in. It ends with their migration to Egypt. Exodus relates the story of Israel’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt through the agency of Moses and their arrival at Mount Sinai. There God makes a covenant with them and gives them commandments and laws, and instructions for the erection of a movable sanctuary in which God may dwell with them. In Leviticus God speaks from this ‘Tabernacle’ or ‘Dwelling’ to give cultic regulations and moral laws; and in this book the sacrificial cult is initiated. In Numbers we have further laws and an account of the wandering of the Israelites after they have failed to take the opportunity to enter the promised land. In Deuteronomy, standing once more on the borders of that land 40 years later, they hear Moses give them a very long sermon including more laws and moral exhortation, concluding with the announcement of another covenant; Deuteronomy and the Torah as a whole ends with Moses’ death. Israel’s taking possession of the land is left to the book of Joshua, which is not part of the Torah, though there is no radical break in the narrative.

    Questions

    Summarizing the contents of the Torah in that way draws attention to some of its unusual features. There is not only the combination of narrative and law, which I have already pointed out. The points where the text begins and ends raise questions. If this story is the foundation story of Israel, why does it begin with the creation of the world and ten more chapters concerning the early history of humanity? And why does it end where it does, without relating the fulfilment of one of the promises God had made to God’s people far back in the text? These questions suggest the basic question ‘What is the Torah about?’, ‘What is its theme?’

    Closer examination raises questions of different kinds: why are there two accounts of creation? Was the divine name revealed in primeval times, as Genesis 4.26 suggests, or only to Moses, as Exodus 3.15 suggests and Exodus 6.3 more definitely asserts? Are the Israelites permitted to sacrifice in many places, as Exodus 20.24 suggests, or only in one, as Deuteronomy 12 commands?

    The questions raised suggest two different kinds of answer. Some can only be answered by investigating the history of the text. Others demand that we try to understand its present meaning. And many can be answered in different ways as the reader changes stance. As with other biblical texts, the scholarly study of the Pentateuch includes ‘synchronic’ study, which treats the text in its final form (or forms), as a literary text; ‘diachronic’ study, which attempts to discover the circumstances and motives of its writing, the historical process by which the text has come into being; and the study of ‘reception history’, the study of how it has been read and understood and responded to by actual readers, past or present. One common way in which these three aspects are described is as, respectively, ‘the world of the text’, that is, the world which is created in the reader’s mind by reading it, ‘the world behind the text’, and ‘the world in front of the text’.

    The task ahead

    The three parts of this book correspond to these three modes of reading or study. I am not offering studies of the individual books in this guide. I aim to enable an understanding of the Pentateuch as a whole. We shall start in the synchronic mode, with the world of the text, because we should start with what is known before we move on to what is unsure, and with that text which we are required to understand before we can form hypotheses about its origin. Then we shall tackle some approaches to the historical study of this text, before returning to look in more detail at what it has meant to its readers through the ages and today.

    Part A

    Here we shall try to form as clear a picture as we can of the Pentateuch as it stands, of what it appears to convey as a finished work and the genres, methods and forms it uses to convey it.

    There are two fundamentally different types of material in the Pentateuch, using different styles, structures and literary forms, and requiring different approaches and methods in their study: that is, narrative and ‘law’. But I want to suggest that these are not simply two separate parts of the Pentateuch as a whole. Rather, the whole Pentateuch is a narrative, which includes laws and instructions as part of the story, spoken by characters in the story (God and Moses) and helping to drive the plot. And at the same time the whole Pentateuch is Torah, commonly translated ‘Law’: part of the purpose of the story is to validate the commandments and instructions as obligations on the hearers. Therefore Chapters 2 and 3 are ‘The Pentateuch as Narrative’ and ‘The Pentateuch as Torah’.

    The overall structure of the Pentateuch is narrative, so we deal with the Pentateuch as narrative first, in Chapter 2. Modern literary study has developed concepts and methods for the analysis of narrative. Much work of this kind has been done on various parts and passages of the Pentateuch, but biblical scholars seem generally to have fought shy of the ambitious task of applying it to the Pentateuch as a whole. An exception is David Clines’s work on the theme of the Pentateuch.¹

    In Chapter 3 we ask how the Pentateuch functions as Torah, and we look in detail at passages of commandment and instruction. One question that arises here is whether ‘law’ is indeed the right description for much of this material, or, if it is, how its function differs from that of written law in modern society. Recent scholarship on law in ancient Near Eastern societies will be drawn on to illuminate the issue. But the primary question is how the Torah defines the identity and responsibility of Israel, in relation to God and to each other, or in other words the religious and moral commitments demanded of them. In the chapter I will show how this is done both narratively, as the body of covenant commandments builds up, introduced by the Ten Commandments, and thematically, as many areas of life are addressed in widely separated parts of the Pentateuch.

    We shall move next, in Chapter 4, to that key feature of the text which relates and links narrative and law, the promises of God and his commandments, and thus makes the genre of Torah comprehensible to the reader. This feature is the series of covenants between God and humanity which occur throughout the story. A great deal of work has been done on the concept of a covenant in the Hebrew Bible. Simply understood, a covenant is a solemn promise made in the context of a relationship – we shall go into the definition in more detail in the chapter. It is certainly significant that the making of a covenant is an action, and so it is the natural way of presenting a relationship of commitment in narrative form.

    Part B

    Here we move into the realm of historical criticism, and the historical criticism of the Pentateuch is a dominant and indeed foundational aspect of modern Old Testament scholarship. One of the difficulties in introducing people to this aspect is the ‘so what?’ question. Suppose – to take the example of the best-known and still dominant conception of the literary history of the Pentateuch – the hypothetical documents J, E, D and P existed (see below, p. 94), what difference would that make, either to the way we read the Pentateuch, which remains the same Pentateuch regardless of what hypothesis we may adopt about its origin, or to the scriptural authority that may be ascribed to it, or to the theological teaching drawn from it? If the Torah functions in the hearers’ present as a world of reality, its own past must surely be an irrelevance.

    From one point of view that is true; but that answer will not satisfy you if you are interested not just in the world created by the text but in the world that produced the text, and particularly if you believe, as many readers of this book will, that this world, the world of ancient Israel, was confronted by a revelation of God. If that really happened, it is important to know when and how it did.

    Apart from the obvious problems of contradictions and inconsistencies, which I referred to above, and which were the initial stimulus for forming hypotheses about the origins of the Pentateuch, the mainspring of Pentateuchal criticism has always been a historical one. Julius Wellhausen, renowned as the scholar who set the classic source hypothesis of the Pentateuch on a firm foundation, was interested in the question only because of its bearing on the history of Israel’s religion, and the epoch-making work of 1878 in which he argued for his theory is called Prolegomena to the History of Israel (the Greek word prolegomena means ‘things which have to be said beforehand’). On almost the first page of this book he describes how as a young student in the 1860s he felt dissatisfied with the standard view at the time (it has been revived again since) that the Torah was the foundation of the whole Old Testament: he just could not see the evidence for this in the prophets and historical books. So when he discovered in a casual conversation that a certain scholar believed that in fact the preaching of the Prophets came before the writing of the Law, he seized on the idea, and set himself to argue the case in detail. The main thesis of his work is that the Torah is the starting point for Judaism, not for the history of monarchic Israel.

    For anyone who believes in divine revelation, it must be a question of critical importance whether the account of the origin of Israel’s life with God that we find in the Torah is (a) based on ancient tradition, however embellished, or (b) expresses in story form a theological insight of prophets and writers of a much later time. If (a) is true, that key revelation which placed Israel under obedience to a single sovereign transcendent God took place at the beginning of their history. If (b) is true, the key revelation, however it may have been prepared for, took place in the course of Israel’s history and in part as a response to historical events. Many believers will be disturbed by the implication that some of the key episodes in the Torah’s story must be more or less inventions. The issue is most serious as regards the covenant, because of the central significance of the covenant in the story, structurally and theologically.

    The historical criticism of the Pentateuch is therefore of serious importance historically and so possibly theologically, depending on one’s theological assumptions. In this book I shall deal with it in three chapters.

    The first two of these, Chapters 5 and 6, deal with the historical process by which the Pentateuch came into being. Since we have no direct evidence, we are wholly reliant on hypothesis about it, and much of the chapters will necessarily consist in the review of competing theories. Chapter 5 is concerned with the composition and redaction of the text, and when and why this may have taken place. ‘Composition’ refers to the hypothetical elements – sources, documents, editorial comments, whatever they may be – from which the text has been composed or put together. ‘Redaction’ means the process of editing that has produced the present text or a hypothetical earlier text.


    The word ‘redacted’ in the media tends to mean ‘deleted’ or ‘censored’. This is not what biblical scholars mean by it. Redaction may involve among other moves the deletion of parts of a source text, but adding material is probably much more frequent.


    We shall not be able to look at all the theories about these processes, but I shall try to identify the main points of divergence and run a few test cases which may indicate how one might decide between them. In this chapter I also touch briefly on theories about the origins of the material; but scholars today recognize that we know next to nothing about this.

    If Chapter 5 is concerned with the coming to be of the Pentateuch, Chapter 6 asks about the circumstances in which it was finally redacted and accepted as Torah. What were the social, religious and political situations in which this occurred? What were the motives which led community leaders to produce the texts? In what way were their own interests involved? How did the Pentateuch become authoritative Scripture for the Jewish and Samaritan communities? The questions have attracted a good deal of attention in recent years, and recent theories will require evaluation.

    Chapter 7 asks: given the complex history of the Pentateuch, how much, if anything, of it has some chance of being historical fact? Although the discussions in the previous two chapters will have made it difficult to be sanguine about this, I shall look first at what it would have meant as history for its first readers and then at serious scholarly arguments for its historicity or that of individual narratives in it, and ask how convincing they are and whether it is possible to disengage a kernel (or more) of historical fact from the narratives.

    Part C

    The final section of the book looks at our text from the point of view of the reader. The study of the way in which the text has been interpreted in the course of history is known as ‘reception history’, and it is a fast-growing branch of biblical study. The whole field of reception history is enormous, and we are only able to look at three restricted aspects here which may be the most important for readers of this book. Chapter 8 is concerned with the traditional reader, Jewish or Christian, and the way in which their communities have understood the text and related it to their lives. In previous chapters we shall sometimes have referred to traditional readings of the text, but here I shall approach the matter more systematically. The aim will be to show how the same text in the context of different traditions and different situations has been taken to authorize very different theologies and practices. We shall try to select examples that serve to illustrate attitudes towards and understanding of the whole Pentateuch, although much pre-modern exegesis tends to be atomistic.

    Chapter 9, in contrast, deals with the growing mass of readings in recent times representing the responses of modern readers with their own secular concerns or influenced by secular ideologies: feminist, liberation-theological, ecological and other readings of the kind. Again, it will only be possible to bring forward a very few examples in the space available.

    The final aspect, in Chapter 10, is an approach to an understanding of the theology of the Pentateuch taken as a whole: how it presents the character and actions of God and God’s relationship with humanity, particularly Israel. I argue here that it is right to put this in the section dealing with the response of the reader because that is essentially what any biblical theology is. The way in which we systematize the varied theological material of the Bible, or the Pentateuch, reflects our own commitments and our larger theological framework; that is why works of biblical theology differ so much. I explore some of these differences before offering my own outline of the theology of the Pentateuch in the context of my own concerns. Hence this chapter has a more personal aspect than any of the previous ones.

    The Pentateuch stands at the fountain-head of what is often referred to as the ‘Judaeo-Christian’ tradition, and is the source of many of its sometimes acclaimed and sometimes reviled values. It is my hope that the material studied in this book will enable the reader to understand how and why that tradition originated and view it with sympathy as well as critical attention.

    Notes

    1 Clines, Theme.

    Part A

    2. The Pentateuch as Narrative

    The title of this chapter is ‘The Pentateuch as Narrative’, not ‘The Narrative of the Pentateuch’. The Pentateuch as a whole is a narrative, and the blocks of law or instruction are integrated into it as speeches of characters in the story, rather than being mere interruptions. The aim is to explain the narrative as a structure including these sections, rather than excluding them in order to explain it. In Chapter 3 we shall reverse the procedure and explain the Pentateuch as Torah, instruction or ‘law’, with the narrative parts supporting and validating the commandments. We shall tackle the work under four main headings: genre, plot, narrative discourse (including the narrator and the characters), and overall theme. See the following table for these and other technical terms.

    Terms used in the study of narrative²,

    ³

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