This volume is an accessible commentary to the Torah, putting each of the books into its ancient Near Eastern context.
EISBN: 978-1-951498-28-3
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzgb9g4
Table of Contents
The present book is an outgrowth of my work on The Torah: A Modern Commentary, That project was launched by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) in 1966 and completed fifteen years later with the publication of the one-volume edition in 1981. The five separate volumes appeared from 1974-1983, and new editions and other offshoots of the first edition continue to appear.¹ Thus the project is an ongoing one, and one to which its sponsors rightly attach considerable importance. The project enjoyed the guidance of successive directors of the Union's Department of Education beginning with Rabbi Alexander Schindler (1966-8),...
For modern man, religion is at best a part of life, but for ancient man, and notably for ancient Israel, religion was, in a sense, all of life. Characteristically, therefore, ancient Hebrew had no word of its own for it. Later stages of Hebrew supplied the lack by appropriating Biblical words of foreign origin (dat), or of other meanings (emūnā, literally firmness, steadfastness, fidelity), or by coining circumlocutions (yir'at shamāyim, literally the fear of heaven).
For modern man, the Bible is at best one of many books, but for ancient man, and notably for ancient Judaism, the Bible was all...
If it is difficult to reconstruct the physical features of Biblical books in their earliest formats, or the technical procedures that went into their production, it is even harder to arrive at a consensus about the textual appearance of the earliest editions, or the editorial processes by which these were constructed from the available sources, Indeed, in traditional exegesis, these questions are considered beyond the scope, permitted or obligatory, of human inquiry.
Rabbinic exegesis of the Biblical text began as soon as the canon closed in the second century B.C.E.¹ with the Tanna'im (2nd century B.C.E. - 3rd century C.E.),...
The method favored here draws on all those already mentioned, but probably comes closest to the comparative approach. That approach has never ceased to provide startling parallels promising to solve old cruxes and to open new vistas of interpretation, But it has also resulted in some excesses of "parallelomania."¹ And to the extent that comparison implies exclusive attention to parallels, this approach has come under siege more and more, and an emerging preference for the contrastive method has been detected in the work of scholars as diverse as Yehezkel Kaufmann² and Frank M. Cross.³ I myself have long argued for...
The recovery of ancient Near Eastern literature has basically revolutionized our understanding of the Bible and of no book more so than Genesis. A glance at the authoritative volume, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament,¹ will confirm this, Only Psalms and Proverbs outnumber Genesis in the parallels suggested by the various translators.² But the parallels to Proverbs all come from the well-nigh universal tradition of preceptual epigrams, most of them Egyptian. And when it is remembered that the five books of Psalms contain over 2,500 verses, compared to 1,500 in Genesis, it will be seen that, proportionately,...
The literary problems posed by the narratives in Exodus are rather different from those of Genesis. There we dealt with three distinct literary units, each woven together out of discrete documentary sources. The primeval history of man on earth (Gen. 1-11) reflected a mythological tradition shared with Mesopotamia and other parts of the ancient Near East. The patriarchal tales (Gen. 12-36) represented a legendary block of non-historical genre-pieces, intended to convey the essence of a variety of local traditions associated with the shrines and other "sites and sights" of Syria and Palestine. The story of Joseph (Gen. 37-50) was an...
In the primeval garden of Genesis stood the tree of life. Man was bidden to eat of it, along with all the other trees of the garden, excepting only one, the tree of death. He did eat of it and this, "man's first disobedience," created a logical contradiction which even God could not have tolerated, Having tasted of the tree of mortality, mart could not now also redeem the promise of immortality or, as the text puts it, "stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat [of it] and so live forever" (Gen. 3:22)....
A comparative literary approach to the Book of Numbers requires first of all a literary assessment of the book, and this is extraordinarily difficult, Numbers lacks the sweep and grandeur of Genesis, the theological significance of Exodus, the legislative consistency of Leviticus, the literary unity of Deuteronomy. At first glance it hardly appears to be a "book" in its own right at all. Rather it forms the conclusion of the "Tetrateuch" (Genesis-Numbers), essentially the priestly history of Israel from creation to the death of Moses. The canonical text saves the actual account of his death for the end of Deuteronomy,...
Deuteronomy occupies a unique position in the Hebrew Bible and in the history of biblical scholarship. More nearly than any other biblical book, it can lay claim to having been a book in its own right before it was incorporated into the canon; it is the least hypothetical of the documents which the documentary hypothesis claims as the original components of the Pentateuch. Deuteronomy, or at least its central core (4:44-28 end), preserves in its essence the "book of the law" found by Hilkiah the High Priest and turned over to King Josiah of Judah in the eighteenth year of...
History begins where prehistory ends. Physical anthropologists trace the descent of man as a biological species by various evolutionary developments; cultural anthropologists delineate the components of culture and the gradual emergence of that higher form of culture known as civilization. The former rely on skeletal and other natural remains; the latter on artifacts: the mute evidence of man-made objects.
But the historian’s span is more restricted – in time, in space, and in the nature of his evidence. History in the strict sense of the term begins when writing begins; it begins in any given area of the world where...
The selections from ancient Near Eastern literature translated and excerpted below are designed to provide a glimpse, however limited, of the context in which the biblical author(s) lived and wrote. They are the basis for many of the assertions made in the previous chapters, and are identified there in the footnotes. In turn, the biblical text(s) illuminated by each selection will be identified in the upper right-hand corner. Illumination should not, however, be construed as inevitable comparison. Some ancient Near Eastern texts bear comparison with a biblical passage, others contrast with it. Clarification can emerge from silhouetting differences as readily...
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