Review of:
How the
Bible Became a Book: The
Textualization of Ancient Israel
William M.
Schniedewind
CUP 2004
S.P. Harrison
Linguistics,
University of Western Australia
April 2006[1]
In How the
Bible Became a Book William Schniedewind appears to be offering
us a case study in the change from orality and textuality[2], a
study of the process by which the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, emerged in
canonical written form. For the
most part, what Professor Schniedewind delivers is yet another
hypothesis about when certain sections of the Hebrew Bible
could first have been written down.
Of course, these two issues are not unrelated. The change from orality to textuality as a mode of cultural
transmission could only have arisen in particular historical circumstances. But the danger, to which I fear
Schniedewind has succumbed, is that by focusing on an account of the historical
circumstances in which the Hebrew Bible was textualised, one can easily lose
sight of the original question:
why write the texts down at all?
It is important
for us moderns to understand that asking when a text, particularly an ancient
text, was first written down is not the same as asking when that text was
composed. Much of the material in
the Hebrew Bible may have existed orally long before anyone thought to write it
down. Why then were texts written
down in ancient times? Two
possibilities come to mind:
because they could be (that is, because the technology
of writing was available), or because writing had replaced speaking as the authoritative
mode of transmission for culturally important material. From our standpoint, it
seems natural to write important things down. We homo sapiens have possessed
language for our entire history as a separate species, perhaps 100,000 years or
more, but we invented writing only about 5000 years ago. Perhaps our ancestors
did not immediately trust this new technology. Schniedewind believes that the
prophet Jeremiah's reference to 'the lying pen of scribes' (Jer.8;8) points to
the conflict in Jeremiah's time between orality and textuality, between
memorising the words of a teacher and writing them down.
One infers that
in the ancient Near East some social groups had accepted writing as a mode of
culture transmission, while others had not. Schniedewind suggests that the focal group for textual
transmission was the government bureaucracy. Anyone who knew the script could
write the odd bit of graffiti on a wall, or use a discarded potsherd as an
ancient form of post-it note. To produce and edit lengthy texts such as those
constituting the Hebrew Bible in the ancient world, Schniedewind claims that a
large bureaucracy was necessary.
He maintains that
conditions did not favour the emergence of such a bureaucracy in the central
highlands of Palestine before the destruction of the Northern Kingdom by the
Assyrians in 722 BCE. For the 150
years that followed, the period of the late Judean monarchy, he presents
archaeological and biblical textual evidence for a substantial increase in the
population of Jerusalem and its environs and, one assumes, in the bureaucracy
necessary to administer it.
Why not
earlier? Schniedewind doesn't
directly address the possibility of a literary effort in the northern kingdom before its
destruction, but implies that, since much of the biblical literature has a
southern focus or a southern bias (in that the northern rulers are cast in a
negative light), it is more likely to have been produced in Jerusalem. He attributes those northern references
to refugees in the court of Hezekiah (c. 715 - 690), or to Hezekiah's own
imperial ambitions regarding the former northern kingdom. I confess to being neither a biblical
scholar nor an ancient historian, but that said, I do not find the textual evidence
that Hezekiah had such ambitions all that compelling. And apart from the biblical text itself, the evidence
regarding politics in 1st millennium BCE Palestine is far from weighty.
Why could those
parts of the biblical narrative set prior to the death of Solomon not have been
produced in Jerusalem in the period of the great Davidic-Solomonic empire? Essentially because there is no
evidence, apart from the biblical text itself, that such an empire ever
existed. The archaeological
evidence suggests that at the time in question, Jerusalem was nothing more than
a one horse town. Schniedewind
reminds us that even the pettiest of ancient princes had a scribe or two, as
evidenced by the 14th century BCE Amarna letters, but a major literary effort
is not the odd fawning piece of diplomatic correspondence or even the
occasional monumental inscription, like the 9th century BCE Mesha Stele. A major literary effort, for
Schniedewind, would have required a large bureaucracy in a major urban centre.
A large
bureaucracy is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for a literary
effort like the Hebrew Bible. The
written texts must also have a purpose.
Schniedewind suggests that the biblical texts he ascribes to the late
Judean monarchy reflected the political and religious ideologies of Hezekiah
and of his great-grandson Josiah (640 - 609). HezekiahÕs ideology was imperial, harking back to the
supposed Golden Age of David and Solomon. JosiahÕs was that of the great
religious reform of Deuteronomy, the centralization of the cult in Jerusalem
under the Levitical priesthood. (I
might note my bewilderment at Schniedewind's claim that Josiah's political
constituency was the rural elite, when clearly his religious ideology was
centralist. But I digress!)
Most of the texts
that Schniedewind places in this period do fit these ideologies. That is not quite so clear for the
Tetrateuch (Genesis through Numbers).
Schniedewind seems cautious about discussing the Tetrateuch at all,
though it has been the focus of many other biblical text dating exercises.
He also leaves a couple of crucial questions unasked. Hezekiah and
Josiah may have wanted to collect texts to symbolize their ideologies, but why
did they turn those texts over to the scribes, to write down? Why not continue to pass them on
orally? And who was their intended
audience? The numerous literate
inhabitants of the far-flung far-flung kingdom of Judah, all of perhaps 50
kilometers across? Schniedewind
does not tell us.
Could the
biblical texts not have been written down later. The upper limit is now regarded as the period of the Qumran
materials (c. 200 BCE - 100 CE), since versions of all the books of the
canonical Hebrew Bible except Esther are found in at least fragmentary form
amongst the materials from Qumran.
And of course those texts with Babylonian, Persian, or Hellenistic
settings or references must have been written down after the destruction of
Jerusalem in 586. But why not the
entire biblical corpus?
Schniedewind has a story; the question is whether it is a convincing
story.
Schniedewind is
rather ambivalent about the period of the Babylonian exile. On the one hand he stresses the
continuing influence of King Jehoiachin even after his capture in 597,
suggesting that there was a Judean royal court in exile in Babylon. But for Schniedewind it was a
demoralised royal court that could only produce texts of exile like
Lamentations. Although he doesn't
say so, Schniedewind needs Jehoiachin's court-in-exile, for
how else could the literary output of the preceding two centuries have been preserved? But he doesn't want a particularly
lively court, one that could have actually produced those
texts.
The story of the
Persian province of Yahud, in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, is generally
regarded as unknown territory.
Apart from the narrative in Ezra-Nehemiah, there is little textual
evidence, biblical or non-biblical, about that time. Schniedewind cites archaeological evidence that the southern
highlands of Palestine were depopulated and economically depressed after the
Babylonian conquest, and recovered only slowly through the Persian period, too
slowly to have supported much literary activity. Regarding the
archaeological evidence and his assessment of it I cannot really
comment, except to note that it appears to come from only one source. One wonders just how selective
Schniedewind has been with the archaeological evidence.
I do not voice
that charge gratuitously, because Schniedewind has adopted a totally uncritical
approach to assessing the linguistic evidence bearing on the dating of the
biblical texts, suppressing any voices that conflict with his own
hypotheses. He accepts the widely
held view that that there are sharp differences between the Hebrew of
unarguably late (post-Babylonian) texts and, for example, that of the Pentateuch
and Former Prophets. In this
regard he cites only Professor Avi Hurvitz, whose work is the most detailed and
best organised argument a significant difference between Late and Standard
Biblical Hebrew. To be sure, there
are linguistic differences between sets of texts from the biblical corpus. The question is, first, just how great
those differences are and, second, whether they are of an order that can only
be explained as language change over a period of centuries. (Observe that under Schniedewind's
hypothesis, the time period in roughly is roughly 300 years, from the time of
Josiah to the late Persian or early Hellenistic period, or from Daniel Defoe to
the present. A lot might happen
linguistically in such an interval, or very little at all.) In fact, as many Hebraicists have
observed, the "Biblical language is surprisingly uniform".[3] Most of the variation involves
alternations between competing, often low frequency forms. To my knowledge, no tests of
statistical validity have ever been done on the material. Alternative accounts of the observed
differences, geographical or social dialect, or even individual preference, are
often rejected out of hand or through arguments that really don't stand scrutiny.
You will
undoubtedly have observed that I long ago stopped talking about how writing
came to be the preferred over orality as a means of text transmission, and
shifted to a discussion of when the biblical texts were written. In this I echo Schniedewind. I find the orality-textuality issue a more
original problem, but for Schniedewind it becomes little more than a
leitmotif. And, for what itÕs
worth, I find it more likely that textuality replaced orality in the
Hellenistic world than in the late Iron Age.
The problem of
when the Bible was written provides a well-trodden path, and Schniedewind's
approach to it is less than original and far from non-partisan. Since the late 1980's the problem of
dating the Hebrew Bible has become submerged in a wider debate between the
so-called biblical maximalists and minimalists. The maximalists want to accept the
biblical narratives as history, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary,
while the minimalists demand extra-biblical evidence for the historicity of the
biblical narrative. It is in the
interests of the maximalists to date the biblical texts as early as possible,
in the belief that the closer their reduction to writing to the events they
describe, the more reliable the accounts are likely to be. The minimalists need have no particular
interest in dating at all, but have tended to favour later dating in the
stories they tell about why the texts were written down.
It seems to me
that Schniedewind might not have intended his book to be a critique of the
minimalist school. Nevertheless,
he shows a marked disdain for minimalists when he describes one minimalist late
dating interpretation as a claim that "the Bible [is] an
"invention" of Persian and Hellenistic scribes, asserting that Jewish
nationalists were creating an identity and a connection with the land through
literary invention."[4] He caricatures that view as one that
claims the Bible to be "a fraud perpetrated by clever charlatans"[5] But what Schniedewind, along with many
other biblical scholars, seems to resent most about minimalist interpretations
of the biblical text is that they constrain how one can use the Bible as a
historical tool. He cites with
approval James Barr's critique of minimalism. "If this kind of argument were applied consistently to
everything,", Barr writes, "there could be no knowledge of
anything."[6] I don't see methodological rigour and
high standards of evidence and argument as constraining. Rather, I find it liberating to know
that there are some things I cannot know, given the evidence to hand.
When was the great body
of law, legend and traditional history, foundation myth, wisdom, novella, and
poetry that constitutes the Hebrew Bible first written down? All other things being equal, I would
think that the major shift from orality to textuality is more in the spirit of the
Hellenistic age, the age of the great library of Alexandria, that of the Levant
in the 7th and 8th centuries BCE, when that area was a
patchwork of small states and a battleground for Egypt, Assyria, and
Babylonia. Schniedewind himself
points out that the substantial body of Jewish oral law, the Mishnah, was not written
down until the second century CE.
One might note that classicists continue to debate the date of the
textualisation of the Homeric epics, and that debate is not complicated by the religious significance
of the Hebrew Bible. So I think
the battle is set to continue for some time to come.
[1] This review is a slightly expand
version of a talk broadcast on ABC Radio NationalÕa Lingua Franca on June 22, 2004.
[2] Neither the term textuality
nor literacy is altogether appropriate to
refer to Ôthe property of being written'.
Since literacy has the standard
sense 'property of knowing how to read and write', I grudgingly employ textuality in the other sense.
[3] Blau, Yehoshua. 1978. The historical periods of the Hebrew
language. p.2. in H.H. Paper, ed. Jewish Languages:
Themes and Variations. Cambridge,
Mass.
[4] p.167
[5] p.18
[6] Barr, James. 2000. History
and ideology in the Old Testament:Biblical studies at the end of a
millenium. Oxford: OUP, p.134