Benjamin G. Wright

Joining the Club: A Suggestion about Genre in Early Jewish Texts

Biblical studies has traditionally worked with a classificatory or definitional approach to genre. Recent scholarship in genre studies, however, has pointed out the shortcomings of a classificatory system. Among the different theories about genre that are current in genre studies, prototype theory, derived from advances in cognitive science, offers the possibility for thinking differently about genre as a classificatory tool and about what questions we want considerations of genre to answer. Rather than listing necessary features, prototype theory focuses on the way that humans categorize through the use of prototypical exemplars that reflect an idealized cognitive model of a category. Within this approach, genres have indeterminate boundaries and can be extended to include marginal or atypical examples. This paper takes up the categories of apocalyptic and wisdom as examples of how prototype theory can be used to describe a genre, to provide a more effective way to accommodate what are usually thought of as problematic cases, and to think about the generic relations of texts to one another.

Wisdom and women at Qumran

Israelite and Jewish wisdom texts form a tributary of a larger stream of ancient wisdom that flowed through the Near East. The primary concerns of these traditions were with interpersonal relationships, with how to live a good life, with humankinds place in the created order and with the way that the created order works. Furthermore, the wisdom traditions particular to ancient Israel and later to early Judaism drew heavily on the larger common stock of ancient Near Eastern wisdom. This chapter focuses on the following questions: Can the Qumran wisdom texts tell us anything about whether women were present at the community along the shores of the Dead Sea, and if they were, were they members of the sect? Do they provide any evidence for the attitudes of this particular community toward women?.Keywords: biblical wisdom texts; Qumran wisdom; Qumran women

Ben Sira and Hellenistic Literature in Greek

Much has been written about Ben Sira’s relationship to Hellenism and how much he was influenced by Hellenistic culture. In fact, there really is no dispute on this score. Of course Hellenistic culture had an impact on Ben Sira. If one accepts Martin Hengel’s analysis, however, Ben Sira had a confrontational relationship with what Hengel calls “Hellenistic liberalism.”1 On the other end of the spectrum, if one agrees with Theophil Middendorp’s assessment, “Ben Sira wrote a schoolbook according to a Greek model.”2 To see the problem this way misses the mark, however, as I have argued elsewhere.3 Ben Sira lived in a period in which one of two Hellenistic kingdoms, Ptolemaic or Seleucid, controlled Judea and Jerusalem, and culture was often wielded as a weapon of imperialist policy. For Ben Sira, foreign control over the people of God caused him the most concern, not whether Hellenistic culture per se was either beneficial or harmful.4 That is not my topic in this paper, however, although it does bear on how we think about Ben Sira and things Greek.

YHWH’s Agents of Doom The Punishing Function of Angels in Post Exilic Writings of the Old Testament

In narrative writings of the OT (Exod 12, 2Kgs19, Gen 19, 2Sam 24) a single punishing agent (only in Gen 19 there are two of them operating more in detail) occurs who kills a great number of people. At least in Exod 12 and Gen 19 the texts also say that God himself effects destruc tion. This ambiguity seems to mirror the genesis of these stories. Within Ezekiel’s second vision (Ezek 8 11) the prophet takes a glimpse behind the celestial scenes: He witnesses how God reacts to the cultic aberrations in the Jerusalem Temple. God calls a group of seven men, celestial personifications of the Babylonian destroyers mentioned in Jer 22:7. God orders six of them to kill the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the seventh is originally commissioned to set the city on fire. A later afterthought also made him mark the innocent within the city with a protective sign. “The satan” in Job 1 2 and in Zech 3:1 2 pleads that Job viz. Joshua are in fact doomed to judgement because they are potential viz. actual sinners. Throughout these texts the readers get the impression that God does not execute destruction / doom himself.

Were the Jews of Qumran Hellenistic Jews

The people who produced and used the scrolls offer us a particularly fascinating example of the extent to which we might call the people/communities of the scrolls “Hellenistic Jews.” The default concept of antiquity that scholars use, the way the term “sectarian” gets employed, and the geography of the Hellenistic world all separate the yaḥad from the larger Hellenistic world. Yet, the scrolls compare well with Hellenistic discourses and practices of collection, textual scholarship, and scientific knowledge. Moreover, if we read the scrolls alongside of other Jewish texts usually considered Hellenistic, we see similar patterns of thought and common interests. In this sense, then, the yaḥad and the scrolls fit well into their Hellenistic environment.

Torah and Sapiential Pedagogy in the Book of Ben Sira

Besides, however one might construe the relationship between Wisdom and Torah in Ben Sira, the author is struck by three considerations: (1) Torah functions in Ben Sira as one of several sources for sapiential teaching, albeit an indispensible one; (2) Ben Sira does not explicitly cite material from the Torah; and (3) both of these realizations make sense when we view them through the lens of Ben Siras pedagogy. These observations deserve more thought, because, as he sees it, they result from and are indicators of significant trends in Second Temple Judaism. For Ben Sira, the Torah, in its legal and narrative aspects, possessed authority both as the commandments of God, which must be followed in order for someone to be wise, and as sacred history, which offered paradigmatic examples of positive and negative types. Keywords: Ben Sira; Sapiential Pedagogy; Second Temple Judaism; Torah

The Use And Interpretation Of Biblical Tradition In Ben Sira’s Praise Of The Ancestors

In Ben Siras praise of important figures in Israels history, all the way from Adam to Simon II, he would have had numerous opportunities to display his mastery of the textual traditions about them that he had inherited. Indeed, throughout this section he demonstrates just how much of a master of the texts he was. In order to outline some of the ways that Ben Sira executes all these tasks, this chapter selects four examples of ancient Israelite heroes for whose descriptions Ben Sira takes different tacks: Noah, Moses, Aaron and David. The Praise of the Ancestors, and particularly the examples that are examined in the chapter, however, show that Ben Sira certainly knew the Israelite textual tradition extraordinarily well. The specific details of the language and contexts in the Praise demonstrate that much at least. Keywords: Aaron; Ben Sira; David; Israelite textual tradition; Moses; Noah; Praise of the Ancestors

J. Edward Wright. Baruch Ben Neriah: From Biblical Scribe to Apocalyptic Seer . Studies on Personalities of the Old Testament. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. xii, 186 pp.

The purpose of Wrights study is to trace “the evolution of the depictions of Baruch ben Neriah . . . from the biblical materials through the early Jewish and Christian texts and traditions that either mention Baruch or were allegedly written by him” (xi). The book succeeds admirably. In three main chapters, Wright collects and analyzes most of the material about Baruch from the first mention of him in Jeremiah as the prophets scribal assistant to works as late as 3 Baruch that picture him as a recipient of apocalyptic visions. A fourth chapter contains traditions about Baruch in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources into the Middle Ages.