Joshua Berman

Supersessionist or Complementary?: Reassessing the Nature of Legal Revision in the Pentateuchal Law Collections

Scholars studying the evolution of the biblical law corpora are today divided into two camps. One camp argues that the authors of these corpora revised earlier law collections with the aim of superseding them. A growing countermovement has challenged the classical paradigm. This camp maintains that, as biblical authors revised an earlier code, they did not reject the authority and standing of the earlier collection. Rather, they viewed their own literary works as complements to the earlier ones. Scholars routinely adopt one position or the other and demonstrate how that position produces constructive readings of the passages at hand. One is hard put, however, to find studies that systematically set the methodological claims of each camp in conversation with each other to measure and mediate the validity of these respective approaches. This study seeks to remedy this situation. In considering the positions of the two camps, I emphasize how each relates to five critical issues: the ubiquitous use of lemmatic citation; their respective understanding of the reasons for the redaction of the Pentateuch; the ubiquitous blending of legal materials elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible; a consideration of the legal terminology and models each uses to assess the texts; and the phenomenon in Deuteronomy of cross-referencing other legal sources. With these underpinnings revealed, I assess each position, concluding that the complementarian position held by the more recent camp is the more cogent of the two.

The Legal Blend in Biblical Narrative (Joshua 20:1–9, Judges 6:25–31, 1 Samuel 15:2, 28:3–25, 2 Kings 4:1–7, Jeremiah 34:12–17, Nehemiah 5:1–12)

In the 1980s scholars identified the “legal blend”—the phenomenon in Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles whereby the practice of a law is expressed as a conflation of two earlier iterations of the law as found in the legal corpora of the Pentateuch. The phenomenon is thought to reflect upheaval in Israel’s history and the need to reach a great compromise between competing strands of legal tradition. Discussions have identified legal blends in the books of Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles in descriptions of normative practice. This study claims that we also find the legal blend employed toward “haggadic” or rhetorical ends, whereby the law is extracted from its original focus and emerges within a new configuration of meaning. This study identifies seven narratives that blend iterations of the same law from across what are normally construed as distinct legal corpora. These examples are found in a broad range of narrative texts, most from the so-called Deuteronomic History. Trends that emerge from these examples are identified. The findings complicate the claim that the legal blend was exclusively a postexilic phenomenon.

The Narratological Purpose of Aramaic Prose in Ezra 4.8 – 6.18

Regnant documentary theories do not account for the large amount of Aramaic narrative framing seen in Ezra 4–6. The discourse employed by this narrator shows him to be a Samarian in orientation. The implied author constructs this narrative perspective as a poetic device through which the reader/listener learns that the foes of his time—Samarian and Persian—are not as formidable as he may have thought them to be, and that the God of Israel works in ways that he may not have appreciated without this external testimony.

Law Code as Plot Template in Biblical Narrative (1 Kings 9.26–11.13; Joshua 2.9–13)

This article explores a particular fashion through which biblical narrative in the so-called Deuteronomistic History employs legal passages toward rhetorical ends: the narrative references a legal text and uses its language, laws and motifs as a template through which to compose a homiletic tale. Invoking a phrase from a legal passage, the text calls upon us to read the narrative in light of that passage as a whole. 1 Kings 9.26–11.13 engages the whole text of the law of the king (Deut. 17.14–20) to describe Solomons downfall, in a more thorough way than has heretofore been recognized. Rahabs soliloquy in Josh. 2.9–13 employs a tight weave of references to the first commandments of the Decalogue, demonstrating that she is worthy of being spared. In each, the law is extracted from its original focus and emerges within a new configuration of meaning.

What does the Ox Know in Isa 1:3a?

Many modern expositors of the image of the knowing ox in Isa 1:3a do not address the pastoral reality that animates the image. Drawing from the glosses of two medieval rabbinic exegetes and from studies of bovine ethology this study explores the suggestions that have been raised concerning this reality. The study probes the implications of each suggestion for a fuller understanding of the oracle of Isa 1:2-3 and its place at the beginning of the book of Isaiah.

Histories Twice Told: Deuteronomy 1-3 and the Hittite Treaty Prologue Tradition

The many discrepancies between the historical accounts in Deuteronomy 1-3 and the parallel accounts in Exodus and Numbers led classical scholarship to conclude that the author of Deuteronomy could not have intended his work to be read together with those alternative traditions. An ancient literary model for precisely such activity, however, was available to the author of Deuteronomy in the Hittite treaty prologue tradition. Reviewing successive treaties between the Hittite kingdom and the kings of Amurru, and between the Hittite kingdom and the kings of Ugarit, we see in each case history retold again and again and that the various retellings of the same event differ markedly one from another. Even as the Hittite kings redrafted their historical accounts in accord with the needs of the moment, both they and their vassals would read these accounts while retaining and recalling the earlier, conflicting versions of events. Studies of the El Amarna letters from the vantage point of international relations offer a social-science perspective to explain why the Hittite kings composed such conflicting histories and how, in turn, these were read and interpreted by their vassals. This literary practice has implications for our understanding of the historical accounts of Deuteronomy 1-3 in the context of the Pentateuch, where other, conflicting versions of those same stories are found.

In Conversation With Joshua A. Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke With Ancient Political Thought (Oxford University Press, 2008).

This contribution emerges out of a session devoted to a critical assessment of the book that took place at the 2009 SBL Annual Meeting. It includes Joshua Berman, “ Created Equal : Main Claims and Methodological Assumptions,” Susan Ackerman, “Only Men are Created Equal, ”Norman Gottwald, “Between Diachronic and Synchronic Approaches,” Saul M. Olyan, “Equality and Inequality in the Socio-Political Visions of the Pentateuch’s Sources,” and Joshua Berman, “A Response: Three Points of Methodology”