Ronald S. Hendel

Reading Genesis : ten methods

Introduction Ronald Hendel 1. Literature Robert Alter 2. Cultural memory Ronald Hendel 3. Sources and redaction Robert S. Kawashima 4. Gender and sexuality Ronald Hendel, Chana Kronfeld and Ilana Pardes 5. Inner-biblical interpretation Yair Zakovitch 6. Rabbinic interpretation Dina Stein 7. Interpretation in the early church Richard A. Layton 8. Translation Naomi Seidman 9. Modern literature Ilana Pardes 10. Modern theology John J. Collins.

Sibilants and sibbolet (Judges 12:6)

The phonetic problem of the šibbōlet incident in Judges 12 has long defied easy solution. After a consideration of the historical sibilant in question, this article proposes that the evidence from the Ammonite seal of Baʿlîšaʿ, an Ammonite king of the sixth century B. C. E., provides access to a solution. The biblical writing of this Ammonite name with a samek instead of a šin provides a phonetic parallel to the writing of šibbōlet with a samek instead of a šin. The problem, in short, is resolved as the graphemic expression of a phonetic contrast between Cisjordanian and Transjordanian realizations of the phoneme š.

The Exodus as Cultural Memory: Egyptian Bondage and the Song of the Sea

This essay situates the cultural memory of the Exodus in a dialectic between historical memory and ethnic self-fashioning. Memories of the Egyptian Empire in Canaan have been transformed into a memory of liberation from Egyptian bondage, with this political transition mapped onto the geographical space of Egypt and Canaan. The mnemohistory of the Exodus has roots in the LB/Iron Age transition, which has been narrativized as an ethnic myth of origins. The oldest expression of this ethnic myth, the Song of the Sea, transmutes the memory of Egyptian collapse into a song of the Divine Warrior, wherein Yahweh is the sole king and Pharaoh is chaos vanquished.

The Oxford Hebrew Bible: Its Aims and a Response to Criticisms

Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel is a new, peer-reviewed, quarterly journal focusing primarily on the biblical texts in their ancient historical contexts, but also on the history of Israel in its own right. Each issue has a topical focus. The primary language is English, but articles may also be published in German and French. A specific goal of the new journal is to foster discussion among different academic cultures within a larger international context pertaining to the study of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel in the first millennium b. c. e.

Worldmaking in Ancient Israel

The work of Nelson Goodman has increased our understanding of the processes involved in the construction of new world-views out of old ones. In this paper I survey some of the major themes in Goodman’s work on this subject and then sketch the dominant social and religious trends involved in the creation of an Israelite world out of the antecedent Canaanite world. Issues of kingship, monotheism, the aniconic tradition and covenant ideology are considered in their relationships with the processes of worldmaking.

Comparing Critical Editions: BHQ Proverbs and HBCE Proverbs

Abstract The recent appearance of two critical editions of Proverbs affords an opportunity to weigh their strengths and to examine their different concepts of the book of Proverbs and the task of textual criticism.

From Polyglot to Hypertext

The Hebrew Bible is a text that is not one. First, it is a library of books, as the Greek τὰ βιβλία (“the books”) announces. Second, for each book there is a plurality of manuscripts and translations, which are related in a dizzyingly complex genealogical web. Part of the task of the biblical textual critic is to explore this network ofmanuscripts and versions in order tomake sense of it, to historicize the relationships and to uncoverwhatwe can of each book’s historia texti. This is an attempt to manage diversity, to tame the sheer abundance of biblical texts. Yet while we seek to master the plethora of manuscripts, we also savor their very unmanageability. The textual critic’s heart yearns for even more abundance and leaps at the discovery of new manuscripts. It doesn’t matter whether they were moldering in caves or a synagogue genizah or miscataloged in an air-conditioned library. We crave new texts, even as they drive us to distraction. The superabundance of texts is our joy and our burden. And so we make editions of the Hebrew Bible. This is a way of taming diversity, in which we attempt to make the relationships among the texts intelligible and, to the extent possible, restore the earliest readings of each book (including, ideally, the earliest inferable state of each edition of a book). The idea of a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible has taken many forms over the centuries, and it continues to evolve. In the following, I explore the aims

The Contribution of Frank Moore Cross to Textual Criticism

Frank Crosss work on the biblical texts from Qumran Cave 4 yielded a new synthesis of the history of the biblical text and a new framework for the theory and practice of textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. This paper describes and assesses these contributions, focusing on 4QSama, including criticisms and prospects for future scholarship.

Linguistic Evidence for the Pre-Exilic Date of the Yahwistic Source (review)

number of instances, it is easy to gloss over here what I think is a significant point with diachronic implications.) In brief, Snyman’s introduction of c-command over appropriate X-bar structures does in fact generate the correct distinctions demanded by the syntax and scope of the Biblical Hebrew negative lo}. Snyman makes an important contribution to the study of Biblical Hebrew grammar by formally and theoretically clarifying the asymmetric distinctions between sentencenegation and constituent-negation.

The Text of Genesis 1-11, Textual Studies and Critical Edition

This re-examination of the text of Genesis 1-11 is based on a strongly positive valuation of the Septuagint as a reliable witness to the original Hebrew. This position is contrary to that taken in most existing studies of the text of Genesis, including some that constitute parts of standard editions and reference works. Nevertheless, Hendel shows, there is an accumulating mass of evidence showing that his position is correct. He presents his analysis as the first step towards an eclectic critical edition of the books of the Hebrew Bible.