James A Sanders, DR Craig A Evans (Editor) - Scripture in Its Historical Contexts - Volume I - Text, Canon, and Qumran (Forschungen Zum Alten Testament) - Mohr Siebeck

Forschungen zum Alten Testament
Edited by
Konrad Schmid (Zürich) · Mark S. Smith (Princeton)
Hermann Spieckermann (Göttingen) · Andrew Teeter (Harvard)
118
James A. Sanders
Scripture in Its
Historical Contexts
Volume I:
Text, Canon, and Qumran
edited by
Craig A. Evans
Mohr Siebeck
James A. Sanders, born 1927; sometime professor at Union Theological Seminary and
Columbia University. Unrolled and published the large Scroll of Psalms from Qumran
cave eleven; Professor of Biblical Studies emeritus at Claremont School of Theology in
California; founder and long-time president of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center.
Craig A. Evans, born 1952; 1983 PhD; 2009 D. Habil; has taught at Universities in
Canada for 35 years; since 2016 he is the John Bisagno Distinguished Professor of Chris-
tian Origins at Houston Baptist University.
ISBN 978‑3‑16‑155756‑9
eISBN 978‑3‑16‑155967‑9
ISSN 0940‑4155 (Forschungen zum Alten Testament)
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliogra-
phie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar.
© 2018 Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, Germany. www. mohr.de

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Table of Contents
Prologue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VII
Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XIII
Permissions and Publication History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XVII
Part 1: Text and Canon
1. Hebrew Bible and Old Testament:

Textual Criticism in Service of Biblical Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. What’s Critical about a Critical Edition of the Bible? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
3. Hermeneutics of Text Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
4. Text and Canon: Concepts and Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
5. Stability and Fluidity in Text and Canon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
6. Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon . . . . . . . . . . 93
7. Canonical Criticism: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
8. Canon as Shape and Function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
9. Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
10. The Exile and Canon Formation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
11. The Stabilization of the Tanak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
12. The Integrity of Biblical Pluralism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
13. Text and Canon: Old Testament and New . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
14. Torah and Christ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
15. Torah and Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
16. The Gospels and the Canonical Process:
A Response to Lou H. Silberman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
17. The Bible and the Believing Communities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304
18. Scripture as Canon in the Church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
19. Canon as Dialogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336
20. The Issue of Closure in the Canonical Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354
VI Table of Contents
Part 2: Qumran
21. Habakkuk in Qumran, Paul and the Old Testament . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

22. The Old Testament in 11Q Melchizedek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387
23. The Qumran Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) Reviewed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 398
24. Cave 11 Surprises and the Question of Canon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 416
25. The Modern History of the Qumran Psalms Scroll
and Canonical Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 430
26. Psalm 154 Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 446
27. The Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457
28. The Judean Desert Scrolls and the History of the Text
of the Hebrew Bible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 471
29. The Impact of the Scrolls on Biblical Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 482
30. The Scrolls and the Canonical Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 492
Appendix
The History of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center 1976 – 2003 . . . . 511
Index of Modern Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529
Index of Ancient Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 539
Prologue
I am deeply grateful to Prof. Craig Evans, the editor of this collection, to the
copy-editor, Dr. Lois Dow, and to the outside proof reader, Dr. James Dunkly,
for their dedicated work in bringing these essays into a form accessible to current
students and future generations of scholars. I very much hope that it will be help-
ful to see how a (late) first-generation student of the Dead Sea Scrolls perceived
the new situation their discovery and study have affected in two areas of critical
study of the Bible: (1) the art and practice of textual criticism of the Hebrew
Bible; and (2) the rise and development of canons of Scripture in the various
believing communities, Jewish and Christian, in antiquity.
Interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls (also known as the Judean Desert Scrolls)
was piqued for the writer upon the first publication of them in the spring of
1950 when Vanderbilt University School of Religion (now Divinity School)
Prof. James Philip Hyatt brought to our advanced Hebrew class Vol. 1 of The
Dead Sea Scrolls of St. Mark’s Monastery, edited by Prof. Millar Burrows of Yale
University Divinity School, under whom Hyatt had studied. Though Burrows
had transcribed the text column by column into modern printed Hebrew, Hyatt
opened the volume to the Plate XXXII photograph of the ancient scroll itself,
set it in front of the three of us, pointed to the bottom line of the ancient column
where Isaiah ch. 40 began, and said, “Read!” I was hooked!
Hyatt later informed me of a new federal-government program instigated
by Arkansas Senator William Fulbright that I should apply for. He knew that
I taught French in Vanderbilt undergraduate classes and suggested I apply for a
year’s study in Paris as my third year of seminary. At the Faculté Libre de Théol-
ogie Protestante and the École des Hautes Études of the University of Paris
I continued study of the DSS in 1950 – 51 under André Dupont-Sommer and
Oscar Cullmann, and thereafter in the doctoral program at the Hebrew Union
College during 1951 – 54 under several scholars there.
During eleven years teaching at Colgate Rochester Divinity School (1954 – 65)
I diligently studied the early publications of the various scrolls as they appeared
and published a paper tracing the understandings of Hab 2:4 at Qumran, in the
LXX, and in the New Testament, comparing them with current scholarship’s
understanding of the verse. No two understandings were alike! On the contrary,
each clearly functioned to serve the needs of the later communities, religious or
scholarly.1 This was later to be called “reception history,” but there was none
1
See below, essay 21.
VIII Prologue
such at the time. It clearly indicated that any understanding of a text largely
depends on the reader.
As the studies collected in these volumes indicate, the work continued while
I was on the faculties of the Union Theological Seminary / Columbia University
(1965 – 77) and The Claremont School of Theology / Claremont Graduate Univer-
sity (1977 – 97), and thereafter during “retirement.” While still in Rochester I had
the honor of being invited to unroll and publish the large Scroll of Psalms from
Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa = 11Q5). The work appeared in two different publica-
tions: The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa) (DJD 4. Clarendon, 1965),
and in The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll (Cornell University Press, 1967). The latter,
though intended for a lay readership, included critical responses to reviews and
critiques of the earlier publications. Soon after joining the faculties in New York
City I was invited to join the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project (HOTTP) in
Germany, sponsored by the United Bible Societies of Stuttgart and New York,
that continued for me until 1990.
Those two experiences cast me deeply into the discipline of textual criticism
of the First Testament (especially of the so-called Hebrew Bible), while critical
study of the Psalms Scroll and related psalms fragments caused me to see that the
field needed a new sub-discipline of canonical criticism that was woefully lack-
ing. The first, textual criticism, was in need of considerable reconceiving, and the
second, canonical criticism, needed launching. Canonical criticism needed to be
created in order better to understand how, when, and why the concept of canon,
or a group of ancient texts shared by various early believing communities viewed
as normative by them, arose and developed. Up to the discovery of the Judean
Desert Scrolls the common view was that the concept of “canon” was devel-
oped out of the deliberations of the surviving rabbis at Jamnia (Yavneh) around
90 CE, who supposedly decided what would constitute the third section of the
Tanak, the Ketuvim or Writings. There was also a search on the part of some
scholars for a similar gathering of authoritative leaders that focused on earlier
Maccabean / Hasmonean efforts at “canonizing” ancient writings. Careful study
of the texts that mention the gathering at Jamnia showed that it had nothing to
do with what was in and what was out of a “canon.” Further study of the few
texts available concerning the reign of Judas Maccabeus indicated the same mis-
conception.2 It became more and more clear that the concept of a “canon” arose
out of the needs of the communities that found their identity and ethos in certain
groups of common texts.
Critical study of the biblical manuscripts (about a third) among the Judean
Desert Scrolls showed the need for a complete revision of the history of the
transmission of the text of the Tanak, while study of a number of the biblical
scrolls and fragments showed the need to rethink the traditional view of the ori-
gins of the concept of a canon of Scripture.
2
See now the masterful review of the whole issue in McDonald, Formation of the Biblical
Canon, vol. 1.
Prologue IX
One’s understanding of the history of transmission of the text is of necessity

the basis of one’s work in the art of textual criticism. A new understanding of
the history of transmission came about because of the importance of Fr. Dom-
inique Barthélemy’s study of the Greek Minor Prophets Scroll, discovered in
1952 in the Wadi Habra (Nahal Hever) not far from the Wadi Qumran, and how
it impinged on that history.3˙ It caused
˙ the field to write a new history of trans-
mission that allowed for the gradual shift from limited fluidity of the text in the
early periods of transmission to the markedly stable texts (Aquila and Theodot-
ion) that preceded by centuries the amazingly stable Masoretic Text of the classi-
cal, medieval Tiberian codices (Leningradensis, Aleppensis) that had themselves,
along with the Samaritan Pentateuch, gradually come to light during the first half
of the twentieth century.4
This new history, with an apparent “Great Divide” at the end of the first
century CE5 between fluidity and stability of text, allowed for the re-dating of a
number of ancient witnesses to the text and a new understanding of the value of
them for establishing the critically most responsible text of the Hebrew Bible. It
also led to a new appreciation of the work of Origen’s late second-century CE
Hexapla, as well as the need to appreciate the value of “rivulets” of true variant
texts alongside the standard Masoretic Text.6 It also showed that even the very
stable medieval Masoretic Texts still had variables in the order of the books in the
Ketuvim of the Hebrew Bible (Tanak). It in effect showed that there is no such
thing as “a final form” of the text.
The work of collating and publishing the texts and true variants fell on two
major text-critical projects, the HOTTP in Europe, and the Hebrew University
Bible Project (HUBP) in Jerusalem. The former instigated the current compiling
of the Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ) using Leningradensis as base text, and
the latter the current compiling of the Hebrew University Bible (HUB) using
Aleppensis as base text. The older view, that permits of an eclectic text of the
Hebrew Bible that attempts to reach back to a common origin, is being pursued
at the same time in the current compiling of the Oxford Hebrew Bible (OHB).
All three are still in progress at this writing.7
The launching of the sub-discipline of canonical criticism was intended also as
an attempt to separate study of the history of the formation of the text from the
rise of the idea of a “canon,” the sharing of common texts by ancient communi-
ties. The earlier view of the rise of a canon of Scripture was that it was in essence
the final stage in the history of the formation of the text. Close study of the
scrolls indicated that a more reliable view was needed and the new understand-
ing of the history of transmission of the text was instigated that also clarified
3
Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila. The full text is published in Tov, Greek Minor
Prophets Scroll.
4
See the English translation of Barthélemy’s history of the transmission of the text in “Text,
Hebrew, History of.”
5
See Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible.”
6
See Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 17.
7
See below, essay 2.
X Prologue
the origins of the concept of canons of Scripture. The work was not intended to
offer a mode of interpreting Scripture in canonical context, as was that of Bre-
vard Childs. Childs’s purpose was to enhance the older Barthian understanding
of Scripture as the Word of God over against strictly historical interpretations
of Scripture. Mine, on the contrary, was to enhance historical interpretations
of Scripture that gave rise to the concept of canons of Scripture in the process
of the shift of various biblical texts from the province of editors and schools to
the advent of shared Scriptures – the “aim” of textual criticism – within varying
ancient communities.
The text critic’s “aim” is crucial to his / her understanding of when to establish
the critically most responsible text for scholars and translators to use in their
work. The older view was / is that the aim for the Torah and the Prophets may
for some texts pierce back as far as the exilic period. The newer is that the aim
should be whenever the various texts became functionally “canonical” for whole
communities (Gruppentexte), understanding that up to that point biblical texts
were essentially still in formation under the aegis of schools and editors. The
Torah became “canonical” at the point that Ezra brought it to Jerusalem from
the large Babylonian Jewish community and read it about 445 BCE to the Pal-
estinian Jewish community in the Water Gate (Neh 8) in Jerusalem.8 For the
various prophetic books and some of the Writings it would have been the point
at which each would have become Gruppentexte sometime during the Persian or
later Greco-Roman period.
The following studies are not offered in chronological order of their appear-
ance but rather in an order hopefully helpful to current and future students inter-
ested in how these two fields of study have been shaped by critical study of
the Dead Sea Scrolls and the recovery in the same time period of the classical
Tiberian Masoretic codices. Included in the collection (especially volume 2) are
also exegetical studies based on the newer understandings of text and canon,
including those that explain the recovery of the biblical launching and develop-
ment of the monotheizing process – the Bible’s prime and urgent message for all
generations.9 The essays are reproduced here basically as previously published,
though style conventions have been harmonized; however, where it has been felt
necessary to add updating, current information has been added inside square
brackets. Note that the bibliographies for the essays do not reflect the republi-
cation of essays in the current two volumes. For this information, please consult
the Tables of Contents.
Bibliography
Barthélemy, Dominique. Les devanciers d’Aquila: Première publication intégrale du texte
des fragments du Dodécapropheton. Leiden: Brill, 1963.
Barthélemy, Dominique. “Text, Hebrew, History of.” IDBSup 878 – 84.
8
See Sanders, Torah and Canon.
9
See Sanders, Monotheizing Process.
Prologue XI
Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. The Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition with Introduction. Je-
rusalem: Magnes, 1965.
McDonald, Lee. The Formation of the Biblical Canon. Vol. 1. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Sanders, James A. The Monotheizing Process. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014.
Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. 2nd ed., Eugene, OR:
Cascade, 2005.
Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Textual Study of the Bible – A New Outlook.” In Qumran
and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon,
321 – 400. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Tov, Emanuel. The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever (8HevXIIgr). DJD 8.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.
Abbreviations
AB Anchor Bible
ABD Anchor Bible Dictionary. Edited by David Noel Freedman. 6 vols. New
York: Doubleday, 1992.
ABMC Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center, Claremont, California
ACF Annuaire du Collège de France
ANE Ancient Near East
AOAT Alter Orient und Altes Testament
ARNA Abot de Rabbi Nathan (version A)
ASOR The American Schools of Oriental Research
AT Alte Testament or Ancien Testament
BA Biblical Archaeologist
BAR Biblical Archaeology Review
BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research
BBB Bonner biblische Beiträge
BBET Beiträge zur biblischen Exegese und Theologie
BHK Biblia Hebraica. Edited by Rudolf Kittel. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1905 – 6.
BHK3 BHK, 3rd ed. Completed by Albrecht Alt and Otto Eissfeldt. Stuttgart:
Privilegierte Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1937.
BHQ Biblica Hebraica Quinta
BHS Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. Edited by Karl Elliger and Wilhelm
Rudolph. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1983. (= BHK4)
BHT Beiträge zur historischen Theologie
Bib Biblica
BJRL Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
BJS Brown Judaic Studies
BRev Bible Review
BTB Biblical Theology Bulletin
BZ Biblische Zeitschrift
BZAW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
BZNW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft
CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly
CBQMS Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series
CRINT Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum
CTAT Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament. Edited by Dominique Barthélemy.
5 vols. OBO 50. Fribourg: Éditions universitaires; Göttingen: Vanden-
hoeck & Ruprecht, 1982 – 2016.
CTM Concordia Theological Monthly
CurBS Currents in Research: Biblical Studies
DBSup Dictionnaire de la Bible: Supplément. Edited by Louis Pirot and André
Robert. Paris: Letouzey & Ané, 1928 – .
DJD Discoveries in the Judaean Desert
DSD Dead Sea Discoveries
XIV Abbreviations
DSS Dead Sea Scrolls, also referred to as Judean Desert Scrolls

ET English Translation
ExpTim Expository Times
EvQ Evangelical Quarterly
EvT Evangelische Theologie
f. (pl. ff.) and following page(s)
Folio The Folio: The Bulletin of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center for Preser-
vation and Research
FOTL The Forms of Old Testament Literature
G Old Greek First Testament
HB Hebrew Bible
HBT Horizons in Biblical Theology
HKAT Handkommentar zum Alten Testament
HOTTP United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text Project
HSS Harvard Semitic Studies
HTR Harvard Theological Review
HTS Harvard Theological Studies
HUB Hebrew University Bible
HUBP Hebrew University Bible Project
HUCA Hebrew Union College Annual
IB The Interpreter’s Bible: The Holy Scriptures in the King James and Revised
Standard Versions with General Articles and Introduction, Exegesis, Expo-
sition for Each Book of the Bible. Edited by George Arthur Buttrick et al.
12 vols. Nashville: Abingdon, 1951 – 67.
IDB Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. Edited by George A. Buttrick. 4 vols.
Nashville: Abingdon, 1962.
IDBSup Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Supplementary Volume. Nashville:
Abingdon, 1976.
IEJ Israel Exploration Journal
Int Interpretation
IOSOT The International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament
ISBE International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Edited by Geoffrey W. Bromi-
ley. 4 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979 – 88.
JAAR Journal of the American Academy of Religion
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JBR Journal of Bible and Religion
JJS Journal of Jewish Studies
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies
JNSL Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages
JQR Jewish Quarterly Review
JR Journal of Religion
JSJ Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman
Periods
JSJSup Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism
JSNTSup Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series
JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
JSOTSup Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series
JSPSup Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series
JSS Journal of Semitic Studies
JTC Journal for Theology and the Church
Abbreviations XV
JTS Journal of Theological Studies

KKTS Konfessionskundliche und Kontroverstheologische Studien
LHBOTS The Library of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament Studies
LQ Lutheran Quarterly
LTQ Lexington Theological Quarterly
LXX Septuagint, Greek Old Testament
McCQ McCormick Quarterly
MS manuscript (plural MSS)
MT Masoretic Text
NAB New American Bible
NEB New English Bible
NorTT Norsk Teologisk Tidsskrift
NovTSup Supplements to Novum Testamentum
NRSV New Revised Standard Version
NT New Testament
NTA New Testament Abstracts
NTS New Testament Studies
OBO Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis
OLZ Orientalistische Literaturzeitung
OstKSt Ostkirchliche Studien
OT Old Testament
OtSt Oudtestamentische Studiën
PEQ Palestine Exploration Quarterly
RB Revue biblique
RevQ Revue de Qumran
RGG Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Edited by Kurt Galling. 3rd ed.
7 vols. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1957 – 65.
RSV Revised Standard Version
RTP Revue de théologie et de philosophie
SBL Society of Biblical Literature
SBLDS SBL Dissertation Series
SBLMS SBL Monograph Series
SBLSS SBL Symposium Series
SBLSBS SBL Sources for Biblical Study
SBS Stuttgarter Bibelstudien
SBT Studies in Biblical Theology
SE Studia evangelica
SJSJ Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism
SJT Scottish Journal of Theology
SOTSMS Society for Old Testament Studies Monograph Series
SSEJC Studies in Scripture in Early Judaism and Christianity
ST Studia theologica
STDJ Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah
Textus Textus: Annual of the Hebrew University Bible Project
TDNT Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Edited by Gerhard Kittel
and Gerhard Friedrich. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. 10 vols. Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964 – 76.
ThTo Theology Today
TLZ Theologische Literaturzeitung
TOB Traduction oecuménique de la Bible. Paris: Éditions Cerf, 1975.
TP Theology and Philosophy
XVI Abbreviations
TZ Theologische Zeitschrift
UBS United Bible Societies
USQR Union Seminary Quarterly Review
UUÅ Uppsala Universitetsårskrift
VT Vetus Testamentum
VTSup Supplements to Vetus Testamentum
WMANT Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament
YJS Yale Judaica Series
ZAW Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
ZTK Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche
Permissions and Publication History
1. “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament: Textual Criticism in Service of Biblical Studies.” In
Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Studying the Bible in Judaism and Christianity, edited
by Roger Brooks and John J. Collins, 39 – 68. Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity 5.
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. Used by permission of Univer-
sity of Notre Dame Press.
2. “What’s Critical about a Critical Edition of the Bible?” by David Marcus and James A.
Sanders. From Biblical Archaeology Review 39, no. 6 (November 2013) 60 – 65. Used by
permission of Biblical Archaeology Review and David Marcus.
3. “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism.” Textus: Studies of the Hebrew University Bible Proj-
ect 18 (1995) 1 – 26. Used by permission.
4. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” The Presidential Address delivered 19
November 1975, at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, held at the
Marriott Hotel, New Orleans, Louisiana. JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29. This version from From
Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.
Used by permission of Journal of Biblical Literature, and of Fortress Press.
5. “Stability and Fluidity in Text and Canon.” In Tradition of the Text: Studies Offered to
Dominique Barthélemy in Celebration of His 70th Birthday, edited by Gerard J. Norton
and Stephen Pisano, 203 – 17. OBO 109. Fribourg: Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Van-
denhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991. Used by permission.
6. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In Magnalia Dei: The
Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright,
edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. New York:
Doubleday, 1976. Introduction from From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sand-
ers, 9 – 10. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. Used by permission of Fortress Press.
7. “Canonical Criticism: An Introduction.” In Le canon de l’Ancien Testament: Sa forma-

tion et son histoire, edited by Jean-Daniel Kaestli and Otto Wermelinger, 341 – 62. Geneva:
Labor et Fides, 1984. Used by permission.
8. “Canon as Shape and Function.” In The Promise and Practice of Biblical Theology,
edited by John Reumann, 87 – 97. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991. Used by permission of For-
tress Press.
9. “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism.” Horizons in Biblical Theology 2 (1980)

173 – 97. Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 153 – 74. Phil-
adelphia: Fortress, 1987. Used by permission of Koninklijke Brill NV and Fortress Press.
XVIII Permissions and Publication History
10. “The Exile and Canon Formation.” In Exile: Old Testament, Jewish, and Christian
Conceptions, edited by James M. Scott, 39 – 61. JSJSup 56. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Used by
permission.
11. “The Stabilization of the Tanak.” In A History of Biblical Interpretation. Vol. 1, The
Ancient Period, edited by Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson, 225 – 52. Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2003. Used by permission.
12. “The Integrity of Biblical Pluralism.” In “Not in Heaven”: Coherence and Complexity
in Biblical Narrative, edited by Jason P. Rosenblatt and Joseph C. Sitterson Jr., 154 – 69.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Used by permission of Indiana University
Press.
13. “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.” In Mélanges Dominique Barthélemy:
Études bibliques offertes à l’occasion de son 60e anniversaire, edited by Pierre Casetti,
Othmar Keel, and Adrian Schenker, 373 – 94. OBO 38. Fribourg: Presses universitaires;
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981. Used by permission.
14. “Torah and Christ.” Interpretation 29, no. 4 (1975) 372 – 90. This version republished
in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 41 – 60. Philadelphia: Fortress,
1987. Used by permission of Fortress Press and SAGE Publications (http://journals.sage-
pub.com / doi / pdf / 10.1177 / 002096437502900403).
15. “Torah and Paul.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 107 – 23.
Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. “Torah: A Definition” section from “Torah,” IDBSup
909 – 11. “Paul and the Law” section from “Torah and Paul,” in God’s Christ and His Peo-
ple: Studies in Honour of Nils Alstrup Dahl on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday,
edited by Jacob Jervell and Wayne A. Meeks, 132 – 40. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1977.
Used by permission of Fortress Press.
16. “The Gospels and the Canonical Process: A Response to Lou H. Silberman.” In The
Relationships among the Gospels: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, edited by William O.
Walker Jr., 219 – 36. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1978.
17. “The Bible and the Believing Communities.” In The Hermeneutical Quest: Essays in
Honor of James Luther Mays on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Donald G. Miller,
145 – 57. Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1986. Used by permission.
18. “Scripture as Canon in the Church.” In L’Interpretazione della Bibbia nella Chiesa:
Atti del Simposio promosso dalla Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, 122 – 43. Rome:
Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1999.
19. “Canon as Dialogue.” In The Bible at Qumran: Text, Shape, and Interpretation, edited
by Peter W. Flint with assistance of Tae Hun Kim, 7 – 26. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001.
Used by permission.
20. “The Issue of Closure in the Canonical Process.” In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee
M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, 252 – 63. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002. Used
by permission of Baker Publishing Group.
Permissions and Publication History XIX
21. “Habakkuk in Qumran, Paul, and the Old Testament.” In Paul and the Scriptures of
Israel, edited by Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders, 98 – 117. JSNTSup 83. SSEJC 1.
Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993. A revised form of JR 39 (1959) 232 – 44.
22. “The Old Testament in 11Q Melchizedek.” The Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern
Society of Columbia University 5 (1973) 373 – 82. (The Gaster Festschrift). Used by per-
mission.
23. “The Qumran Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) Reviewed.” In On Language, Culture, and Reli-
gion: In Honor of Eugene A. Nida, edited by Matthew Black and William A. Smalley,
79 – 99. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. Used by permission of De Gruyter.
24. “Cave 11 Surprises and the Question of Canon.” In New Directions in Biblical Archae-
ology, edited by David Noel Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, 113 – 30. Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1971. Originally published in McCormick Quarterly 21 (1968) 1 – 15
(284 – 98). Used by permission of McCormick Theological Seminary.
25. “The Modern History of the Qumran Psalms Scroll and Canonical Criticism.” In
Emanuel: Studies in Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, and Dead Sea Scrolls in Honor of Emanuel
Tov, edited by Shalom M. Paul, Robert A. Kraft, Lawrence H. Schiffman, and Weston
W. Fields, with the assistance of Eva Ben-David, 393 – 411. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Used by
permission.
26. “Psalm 154 Revisited.” In Biblische Theologie und gesellschaftlicher Wandel: Für Nor-
bert Lohfink SJ, edited by Georg Braulik, Walter Groß, and Sean McEvenue, 296 – 306.
Freiburg (im Breisgau): Herder, 1993.
27. “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Studies.” In “Shaʿarei Talmon”: Studies in the
Bible, Qumran, and the Ancient Near East Presented to Shemaryahu Talmon, edited by
Michael Fishbane and Emanuel Tov, with the assistance of Weston W. Fields, 323 – 36. Win-
ona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992. Used by permission.
28. “The Judean Desert Scrolls and the History of the Text of the Hebrew Bible.” Pub-
lished as “The Judaean Desert Scrolls and the History of the Text of the Hebrew Bible.”
In Caves of Enlightenment: Proceedings of the American Schools of Oriental Research
Dead Sea Scrolls Jubilee Symposium (1947 – 1997), edited by James H. Charlesworth, 1 – 17.
North Richland Hills, TX: Bibal, 1998. Used by permission of James H. Charlesworth
and ASOR.
29. “The Impact of the Scrolls on Biblical Studies.” In The Provo International Confer-
ence on the Dead Sea Scrolls: New Texts, Reformulated Issues, and Technological Innova-
tions, edited by Donald W. Parry and Eugene Ulrich, 47 – 57. STDJ 30. Leiden: Brill, 1999.
Used by permission.
30. “The Scrolls and the Canonical Process.” In The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A
Comprehensive Assessment, edited by Peter W. Flint and James C. VanderKam with the
assistance of Andrea E. Alvarez, 2:1 – 23. Leiden: Brill, 1999. Used by permission.
Part 1: Text and Canon
1
Hebrew Bible and Old Testament:
Textual Criticism in Service of Biblical Studies
The title of this book, Hebrew Bible or Old Testament?, presents us starkly with
the basic problem of what we study. The thinking world at large seems to be
settling on the expression “Hebrew Bible” (Biblia Hebraica). One sees it now
in Christian seminary catalogs. Yet Jews among themselves simply say “Bible”
or use the acronym Tanak. Christians have become uncomfortable with “Old
Testament,” largely because we think Jews are uncomfortable with it, but also
because some Christian scholars are reaching for a hermeneutic other than the
traditional ones of Christocentrism or promise-fulfillment. A few Christian
scholars and even a few Jewish scholars have recently focused exclusively on a
theology of the Hebrew Bible.1 And yet Jacob Neusner has persuaded not a few
other scholars that the real canon of Judaism is in the rabbinic corpus of forma-
tive Judaism and not in the Bible.2
The board of editors of the Biblical Theology Bulletin decided a few years ago
to experiment with the expressions “First Testament” and “Second Testament,”
noting that the solution is not without its own problems, but that it might offer a
viable alternative.3 After all, while Hebrew Bible may vaguely suffice as reference
to the First or Old Testament of Protestants and to the Bible of Jews, it is inad-
equate for Catholics and Orthodox Christians. And those whose work includes
focus on the Septuagint cannot use the expression “Hebrew Bible” everywhere
they used to say “Old Testament.” And we all feel a little discomfort when we
ignore the Aramaic portions of the thing!
Emanuel Tov recently remarked that we work in a field that has no database.
He, Johann Cook, and the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center have begun to
rectify the situation by constructing computerized databases of the Judean Des-
ert Scrolls.4 And that is in large measure the reason for the establishment of the
Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center, to provide at least a raw but highly accessi-
ble data base on which we can all work and no longer be dependent, as Barbara
* First published 1990.

1
See Knierim, “Task of OT Theology”; the responses by Harrelson, “Limited Task”;
Towner, “Is OT Theology Equal”; and Murphy, “A Response”; and Knierim’s response to
them, “On the Task.” See also Rendtorff, “Biblical Theology,” 40 – 43; and Tsevat, “Theology of
the OT.” See as well Levenson, “Why Jews Are Not Interested.”
2
See Neusner, Formative Judaism. Orthodox Jews probably take the Responsa as function-
ally canonical and Reform Jews only the Bible.
3
Sanders, “First Testament and Second.”
4
Tov and Cook, “Computerized Database”; Tov, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts.”
4 Part 1: Text and Canon
Aland of the Hermann Kunst Stiftung recently wrote, on “chance knowledge”

of manuscripts.5 This is a point to which we shall return, but one might well ask:
How does the question of what to call the very elastic book we study relate to
issues of textual criticism?
A beginning to an answer lies in the observation that even if we should some-
day attain something like a complete raw database in our field, with films of
all extant biblical manuscripts available at Münster (in the case of the Second
Testament) or at Claremont (in the case of both Testaments), we shall still have
only apographs with which to work. There is no such thing as a monograph, or
an Ur-text, of any biblical literature, a point underscored by the sensationalism
attached to the Greek papyri found in Qumran Cave 7.6 This observation obtains
whether the reference is to texts or versions.
I suggest this as a starting point for what to call pre-Christian Scripture, in part
because that was where Martin Luther found himself when in 1523 he began his
program of translation of the Old Testament. It is very interesting to start with
Luther because the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marked the beginnings of
biblical criticism in which there was still some dialogue, or at least open disputa-
tion, between Protestants and Catholics and a few Jews – a situation that would
not return until a century ago. Luther’s principle of sola Scriptura began almost
immediately to become problematic for him.7 Without the magisterium and tradi-
tions of the church to fall back on, following Jerome’s principle of Hebraica veri-
tas forced him to elaborate a hermeneutic of textual criticism and translation that,
it would appear, he had not yet thought necessary. The hermeneutic, which he
called res et argumentum, would provide for him the key both to choice of words,
in the case of variants, and to choice of meaning of crucial words.8 Words, he
insisted, must be in service of meaning, not meaning in service of words. Res for
Luther was the gospel of Jesus Christ. Argumentum included three themes: oeco-
nomia, politia, and ecclesia. If a passage did not accord with ecclesia, or the gospel,
then one dealt with it in terms of the political or economic systems of antiquity.
Luther had great respect for Hebrew grammar and the great Jewish grammarians
through the work of Elias Levita, but if a word in the text was multivalent, then
the meaning that accorded with the res of the gospel was to be chosen. If the Jew-
ish grammarians and commentators gave the word a meaning not in accord with
the gospel, the Christian interpreter and translator was to reject it and work with
the grammar, altering vowel points where necessary, to make it do so.
By 1541 Luther had come to view some texts as corrupt.9 Luther thus came
to a basic hermeneutic of suspicion with regard to the Hebrew text as received
5
Aland, “New Instrument and Method.”
6
See Fitzmyer, “New Testament at Qumran,” 119 – 23.
7
Apparently first stated clearly in the preface to the 1522 publication of his translation of
the New Testament. See Luther, D. Martin Luthers Deutsche Bibel 1522 – 1546, 2 – 11.
8
See Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*4 – *9. An English translation of the first five vol-
umes of OBO (50 / 1 – 5), including Critique textuelle (vol. 1), is in process [Barthélemy, Studies
in the Text].
9
See Luther, “Vom Schem Hamphoras,” 646 – 48; and Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*5.
Hebrew Bible and Old Testament: Textual Criticism in Service of Biblical Studies 5
and transmitted in Judaism. His suspicion of the work of the Masoretes he also
learned in part from Levita.10 He finally advised that Christian students of the
text should modify vowel points, accents, conjugations, constructions, and
meanings – in fact, anything outside Hebrew grammar itself – and turn it from
Jewish interpretations toward accord with the gospel. It became his view that
Jews had for fifteen hundred years turned the Bible away from witness to “our
Messiah and our faith.”11 While he allowed for textual corruptions due to the
incompetence of scribes and to the deformity of letters, as some earlier Chris-
tians had said, his suspicions of the history of transmission of the text since the
first century deepened.
A much more moderate hermeneutic of suspicion had been evident already in
medieval Jewish exegesis. As early as the ninth century Ismail al-Ukbari (ca. 840)
suggested that there was a scribal error at Gen 46:15.12 While Ibn Ezra appeared
scandalized at the suggestion of an earlier grammarian that there were more than
one hundred places in Scripture where a word should be replaced by another, he
himself cited six of the same hundred. By the time of Yefet ben Ely, and certainly
by the time of Judah Hayyug and David Qimhi, the principle of substitution of
one word for another was accepted practice where˙ the text seemed otherwise to
13
be incomprehensible. Sanctes Pagnini, toward the beginning of Luther’s pro-
gram of translation (1526 – 29), published a grammar and a thesaurus refining the
method. These were the great grammarians whom Luther and other Christians
respected, to the degree that they respected the Hebrew grammar they had ana-
lyzed. The next two centuries would see almost complete denigration among
Christians of the work of the Masoretes, especially the vowel points and the
accents (K‫טעמים‬K). But among serious students of the text, Hebrew grammar, based
precisely upon the transmitted text, was held in high regard. As Richard Simon
went to pains to point out, the rabbinic and Qaraite grammarians had learned
their art from their Arab neighbors; indeed, the greatest ones wrote their gram-
mars and discourses in Judeo-Arabic.14
The Seventeenth Century
J. Buxtorf Sr., in 1620, challenged Levita’s thesis that the work of the Tiberian
Masoretes, especially in regard to the vowel points, had little historical value and
was not authoritative.15 He blamed the 1539 translation of Levita for Luther’s
attitude toward the vowel points. Buxtorf defended the Masoretes, claiming that
while the vowel points did not have divine or prophetic authority, they were
10
Simon, Histoire, 132.
11
Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*5 – *7. See Greenspahn, “Biblical Scholars.”
12
Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*2; Simon, Histoire, 166.
13
Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*2 – *3; Simon, Histoire, 167 – 69.
14
Simon, Histoire, 166 ff. Aspiring students of First Testament textual criticism would be
well advised to learn Judeo-Arabic in depth.
15
Simon, Histoire, 6, 136 ff.
received by tradition from high antiquity and should be respected lest Scripture
become as malleable as wax.16
Louis Cappel, in his Critica Sacra of 1634, responded that the points had been
invented five hundred years after Christ, and that the danger in ignoring them
would be limited by literary context. J. Buxtorf Jr. then took up where his father
had left off and in his Anticritica of 1653 further defended the Masoretes as tra-
ditionalists of the first order.
Jean Morin, in a letter of 1653, in turn defended Cappel, not for being the
Protestant heretic that he clearly was, but because his work showed precisely the
importance of the church’s magisterium and the falsehood of Luther’s principle
of sola Scriptura.17 Morin’s hermeneutic, stated in his Exercitationum, would put
Hebrew manuscripts at the service of the church’s translations in order to clarify
text and meaning but not to dominate or obfuscate their clear meaning. Hence,
traditional versions should not be corrected on the basis of the Masoretic Text
since the Masoretic Text may have become corrupt (after all, the Septuagint is
much older), and the defects of the texts on which the traditional versions were
made have since been authenticated by church usage. Errore hominum providen-
tia divina, indeed!
Cappel, on the Protestant side, was consistent in stressing the importance of lit-
erary context. Not only would this not leave the unpointed consonantal text mere
wax; contextual reading, on the contrary, should be the final arbiter of meaning of
obscure words and passages. Whatever rendered “the most appropriate and useful
sense” would always be the preferred variant to choose. Warnings even from fel-
low Protestants that criticism had always followed the principle of lectio difficilior
went unheeded. Cappel’s principle of facilitating readings, it may be said, has been
a mainstay of textual criticism until recently. While one may not finally agree with
the younger Buxtorf, he needs to be heard, even today, in his challenge to Cappel:
One would eventually come to the point that when a certain passage will not appear clear
enough to a translator, to a professor, or to some critic, the latter will start to look about
him to see if he could not find something whatever more appropriate, whether in the ver-
sions or in his own mind and capacity to invent conjectures. And thus will one become
further removed from the traditional Hebrew reading for no matter what motive, or even
without the least motive.18
Cappel followed the very carefully wrought arguments in the second part of Bux-
torf Jr.’s Anticritica, as seen in his posthumously published Notae Criticae, and
he was sometimes convinced by them. The remarkable thing is that much textual
criticism, at least until quite recently, has not followed them. One need not agree
with some of Buxtorf’s basic suppositions and principles, as Simon indeed did
not;19 but one must agree that his warning to Cappel rings true as a prediction of
what was to follow in much text-critical work for three centuries to come.
16
Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*10 ff.; Simon, Histoire, 9.
17
Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*17 – *20.
18
Buxtorf Jr., Anticritica, 258; Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*22.
19
Simon, Histoire, 9 and passim.
It might be noted that while Catholics on the whole felt secure in their sec-
ond ground of truth, the church and its magisterium, over against the Protes-
tants’ focus on Scripture, it is difficult to draw clear lines in all these debates
between individual Protestant and Catholic scholars. What George Lindbeck has
recently called the classic hermeneutics – what prevailed in the premodern period
before the advent of rationalism and empiricist literalism – bound all Christians
together. Scripture was constitutive of Christian communities by a kind of sensus
fidelium. They read Scripture “as a Christ-centered narrationally and typologi-
cally unified whole in conformity to a trinitarian rule of faith.”20 But, according
to Lindbeck, the Reformed churches after Calvin so focused on finding “a sin-
gle, all-embracing, and unchanging system of doctrine in the Bible,” that they
became ritually impoverished over against not only Catholics but also Luther-
ans. Their disciplined reading and study of Scripture, and skill in its uses, proba-
bly made them the most influential single group in shaping what Lindbeck calls
modernity.21
What emerges then out of the seventeenth-century debates is a more or less
clear distinction between Lutherans and Calvinists, or those of the Reformed
faith. The Reformed churches of Zurich, Basel, Bern, and Geneva published in
1675 the Formula Consensus Ecclesiarum Helveticarum Reformatarum, directed
specifically, apparently, at Cappel’s school at Saumur. In it the vowel points were
said to be included also in the inspiration of Holy Scripture. What God gave
Moses and the prophets to write, God guarded over with paternal affection, con-
sonants and vowels, to the very hour of the creation of the Formula Consensus.
While they had eventually to back down from such a rigid stance, it should be
noted that Lutherans, following Luther’s own differentiated views of the various
portions of Scripture, never approached such rigidity in defense of Luther’s own
principle of sola Scriptura.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, critics and anticritics alike had
agreed that, if the autographs of Moses and the prophets were available, they
would be the norm, or true canon, for the text of the Hebrew Bible, indeed, of
the Old Testament as well. The anticritics held that by a special divine assistance
the Masoretic Text had been preserved identical, or nearly so, to the autographs.
The critics maintained that the available apographs contained serious errors and
corruptions in a number of readings; some also held that there was evidence of
different Vorlagen behind the Masoretic Text and Septuagint traditions.
Benedict de Spinoza
A major contribution of the seventeenth century had been that of Benedict de
Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670).22 His was a free spirit indeed,
condemned both by synagogue and church. In the background of his thinking
20
Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, and Community,” see esp. 7.
21
Ibid., 10.
22
were Thomas Hobbes and Isaac de La Peyrère. While Hobbes focused on what
of the Pentateuch Moses actually contributed, de La Peyrère, a Calvinist who
converted to Catholicism and knew Simon at the Oratoire, dismissed any hope
of finding biblical autographs and stressed that critics must be content with cop-
ies of copies of literature that represented but abstracts and abbreviations of orig-
inals in the first place. De La Peyrère clearly wanted to diminish the authority
of Scripture in order to put the Messiah and the salvation of the church in bold
relief. In this he followed Jean Morin’s hermeneutic, and searched for prooftexts
to support his messianic and christological views.
Spinoza reacted not only to de La Peyrère but to all theologians who, accord-
ing to Spinoza, for the most part extorted from Scripture what passed through
their heads. He insisted that true critics must liberate themselves from theolog-
ical prejudices and develop a valid method for expositing Scripture, and that
required elaborating an exact history of the formation of the text so that the
thoughts of the original authors within their ancient contexts could be discerned.
Spinoza was not the first to focus on original authorial intentionality, but he did
so in such a way that his influence has been felt ever since. Out of those individ-
ual authors’ ideas could be extrapolated those doctrines and teachings on which
they all agreed. Authority, for Spinoza, clearly rested in the intentions of the
authors, much of which was lost in obscurity. Only what is intelligible remains
authoritative, but this must be deemed sufficient for the salvation, or repose, of
the soul. The rest is not worth the bother. Until such a history could be written,
and he seriously doubted if one would ever be complete, Spinoza deemed the
double commandment of love of God and love of neighbor to be the true Torah
of God, and to be the common religion of all humankind. That was what was
incorruptible, not some books called holy.
Richard Simon
Richard Simon took Spinoza seriously and wrote the Histoire critique du Vieux
Testament, published in Paris in 1678. Though Simon mentions Spinoza’s name
only a few times in the “Préface de l’auteur,” it is clear from the first ten or so
chapters that Simon was addressing issues that Spinoza had raised. Simon had
access to all the efforts that had gone before and to the rich resources of the Ora-
toire and of the royal library. His was the mind needed at the end of the seven-
teenth century to make sense of all that had gone before in the abrupt starts and
stops of attempts to establish biblical criticism as a fine art and a science. Spino-
za’s call for a critical history of the formation of the text was heeded by the man
who could do the most about it at the time. I disagree with Henri Margival that
Simon was the father of biblical criticism.23 He could have been, but he was not,
simply because some of his major points were lost in the battles he had to fight
with Bishop Bossuet and against the rationalist optimism of the eighteenth cen-
tury. We cannot today agree with all his principles, but we can regret that some
23
Margival, Essai sur Richard Simon, viii, passim. See Auvray, Richard Simon.
of the major ones have been largely overlooked in the three centuries since he
wrote. Johann David Michaelis might rather be seen as the father of the kind of
biblical criticism that has been practiced until quite recently.24
Simon responded to Spinoza’s pessimism about recovering the history of
the formation of the Bible with a two-fold hermeneutic. First, authority lies
not in the intention of the individual authors, which one might then appropri-
ate through a harmonizing reductionism, but in the inspiration of Scripture by
God’s Holy Spirit continuing from the very beginnings of the creations of Scrip-
ture in all its parts, through to the closure and fixation of text. Second, while the
Holy Spirit used the imagination and the intention of the prophets in their orig-
inal settings, there were second and further meanings available for later times.
These two points in his hermeneutic require considerable unpacking.25
Simon expressly did not agree with the Calvinists and anticritics that the Holy
Spirit guarded with parental providence what the autographs had contained. His
point was totally other. Simon spoke of the inspiration of “public scribes” who
contributed to the texts in the process of their transmission; theirs was a pro-
phetic authority equal to the original authors’ authority.26 The Spirit can valorize
the ignorance of original authors beyond their limited intentions. (If some of
this sounds like postmodern literary criticism, it is, nonetheless, from Simon and
from the late seventeenth century.)27 Two senses of a passage may be discerned,
the literal / historical and the spiritual, a further meaning. Some of this is recog-
nizable in the concept of the sensus plenior of Scripture. A psalm was intended
for an original Sitz im Leben, but it was valid for totally different situations in
later times. In canonical criticism this is called the resignification of a passage;
and while Simon often wrote of the possibility of two senses of a passage, there
were other, further meanings beyond authorial intentionality that were made
valid in believing communities.
Simon stressed that it is impossible fully to understand Christianity with-
out a knowledge of Judaism and its history. In addressing the issue of the value
of consulting Jewish understandings of Scripture, Simon boldly stated that the
authority God had given the Hebrew Republic through Moses and the eighteen
judges had never been withdrawn. In one stroke Simon dealt with the problem of
supersessionism, and of the need of comparative Midrash. Comparative Midrash
is the exercise whereby one may discern the latitude early believing communities
allowed themselves in understanding or resignifying a figure or passage of Scrip-
ture and the hermeneutics whereby they did so. When then one reaches the Sec-
24
I am very much tempted to nominate Simon as the godfather of canonical criticism (as I
understand it).
25
Simon, Histoire, “Préface de l’auteur,” and passim.
26
Adumbrating the important statement about biblical scribal activity as a part of the ca-
nonical text in Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible,” as well as the view of canonical criticism
held by the present writer (see Sanders, Canon and Community; Sanders, “Canonical Context
and Canonical Criticism”). See also Talmon, “Heiliges Schrifttum.”
27
See, e. g., Fowler, “Post-Modern Biblical Criticism,” 8. And see Lindbeck, “Scripture,
Consensus, and Community.”
ond Testament and how Scripture, Septuagint or Hebrew, functioned there, one
has already a perspective on the function of that passage in Jewish believing com-
munities up to that point. One can then truly discern so-called similarities and
dissimilarities because one has built a database of function of that passage up to
its appearance in the New Testament. Simon’s emphases on the continuing work
of the Holy Spirit all along that path, and on the continuing authority within the
Hebrew Republic, provide the base for the hermeneutic of canonical criticism
when it focuses on canon as norma normans and not only as norma normata.
We must know, he wrote, both the literal and the developed meanings within
Judaism and then within Christianity. When faced with the question of whether
the Sanhedrin had divine authority to condemn Jesus, his response was that God
can indeed use what we call corruption. Once more, errore hominum providen-
tia divina, but this time much more fully thought through than by Morin. In the
monotheizing hermeneutic of canonical criticism (as I understand it), Simon’s
point would be understood as perceiving that God is the God of life and death,
risings and fallings, victories and defeats, protagonists and antagonists.28
While I would disagree that it is “inutile de rechercher qui ont été les auteurs,”
canonical criticism (as I understand it) would applaud this significant challenge
to Spinoza’s idea of resting authority solely in the intentionality of the orig-
inal individual authors. Simon’s understanding of the further authority of the
public scribes, who also contributed to the text and adapted it in some measure
to their later situations, is also our understanding of the need to see canon and
community in the same light and as inseparable.29 The variants functioned in
some believing communities though not in others, and it is important to know
as many as there were, if possible, and to understand them in their textual con-
texts – another point that canonical criticism stresses, the need to appreciate the
integrity of each manuscript or family of manuscripts before pillaging it or them
to correct what appears to be a corruption or error in another. Thus Simon’s
respect of the Septuagint witness brought him to criticize even Jerome: “Je n’ex-
cuse pas même Saint Jérôme, qui n’a pas rendu aux Septante toute la justice qu’il
leur devoit.”30
Finally, Simon disagreed with Spinoza’s distinction between reason and
enthusiasm. Spinoza viewed prophetic authority, that is genuine authority, as
practically devoid of reason. Whereas Spinoza minimized the contribution of
individual reason and imagination, Simon stressed how the Holy Spirit used such
gifts first in the so-called original contributors and then all along the path of the
formation of the Bible, and, to be sure, all along the church’s understanding of
Scripture in the magisterium since canonization. This was the reason he agreed
with Spinoza that a critical history of the formation of the biblical texts had to
be attempted. While canonical criticism must disagree with Simon’s understand-
28
See Sanders, “Canon, Hebrew Bible,” and Sanders, “Deuteronomy.”
29
See Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible”; Sanders, Canon and Community; Sanders, “Ca-
nonical Context and Canonical Criticism.”
30
ing of the goal of the Spirit being only the New Testament’s messianic, second
meaning, making the New Testament in effect the key to understanding what
the Spirit was doing, Simon alone provided an adequate response to Spinoza in
his stress on the continuing work of the Spirit all along the path of formation of
the texts, not guarding original readings in their purity, but inspiring the “public
scribes” who added to texts as well as subtracting from them, adapting them in
various though limited ways for their later communities. Of course, there is a
sense in which Luther and Simon were right that Christians would read the First
Testament in terms of its goal being the gospel, if that means that we grant that
rabbinic Jews would read it in terms of its goal being rabbinic Judaism.31 In that
case we would need to say “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament.”
The Eighteenth Century
The eighteenth century began with the rationalist optimism in these matters for
which it is noted otherwise. Hard work combined with intelligence and reason
would open a clear path to the establishment of the best text possible. Numer-
ous German scholars worked on as many manuscripts as were available to them.
Johann H. Michaelis studied manuscripts in and around Erfurt and published his
results in a Biblia Hebraica with critical apparatus published in Halle in 1720;
Theodor Christoph Lilienthal worked on those in Königsberg, which he pub-
lished in 1770; Georg Johann Ludwig Vogel worked on those available in Helm-
stadt, which he published in 1765; and then entered the probable father of textual
criticism as we have known it since, Johann David Michaelis, who published his
work on the manuscripts available in Kassel beginning in 1771.32
Simon had noted that while nearly anyone could amass variants from the var-
ious printed editions of the Hebrew Bible, very few people had the resources
available to consult “les vieux manuscrits.”33 Cappel had worked almost exclu-
sively, apparently, on printed editions for his Critica Sacra; and Morin, who
had access to the rich library of the Oratoire in Paris, consulted very few man-
uscripts and did so only with negligence. It was Charles François Houbigant
who exploited in depth the holdings of the Oratoire, as well as other scattered
manuscripts, to publish his magnificent Biblia Hebraica in four folio volumes
in 1753.34 Houbigant, of course, had the polyglots of London (Walton) and of
Paris, which provided him comparisons with the Samaritan Pentateuch and its
targum, as well the Peshitta.
But Houbigant largely disregarded vowel points, the accents, and the maso-
rah, arguing that human faculties of memory were incapable of retaining all the
31
See Barr, Old and New in Interpretation, 26 – 33; Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; Sanders,
“Text and Canon: Concept and Method.”
32
Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*28.
33
34
minutiae. The Buxtorfs had agreed, ironically, on this point, arguing that they
must therefore have come from sacred authors, at least from Ezra. Houbigant
took the other position that they derived only from the Masoretes who invented
all but the consonants.
This was the stage onto which the young Oxford scholar, Benjamin Kenn-
icott, entered to begin his work of collation. His first publications (of 1753 and
1759) were limited to the manuscripts available in Oxford, Cambridge, and the
British Museum. He then sought royal patronage and traveled broadly in Europe
engaging collaborators, and he finally published in 1776 and 1780 the two vol-
umes that continue to be consulted in textual criticism today.35 Kennicott’s work
came under severe criticism, especially from Johann David Michaelis.36 Not only
had Kennicott disregarded the vowel points and accents, he also showed pref-
erence for facilitating readings. He had been persuaded, apparently, not only by
the arguments of Cappel and Houbigant. He also agreed with Morin.
G. B. de Rossi published in 1784 – 88 four volumes on some 1,793 codices that
Kennicott and his team had missed.37 Still, little work would be done on oriental
manuscripts until the work of Paul Kahle on Leningradensis, the Cairo Codex
of the Prophets, and Orientalis 4445. Kahle, by the way, apparently agreed with
Levita and Cappel on the late date of the vowel points. Then came the discovery
of the Qumran manuscripts, which seemed to confirm the opinion of Morin and
Cappel that the Vorlage of the Septuagint represented a different textual tradition
from that of the Masoretic Text.
Apographs and the Text
We indeed have but apographs with which to work. This is but a part of what
Reinhold Niebuhr called the ambiguity of human reality. For one suspects that
if an autograph were to be found two things would happen. First, its authentic-
ity would be immediately disputed. And second, by some criteria, some critics
would find it inferior to what we already have. This will not deter us in efforts
to try to identify autographs, as in the case of Qumran Cave 7. But what we
actually have are apographs of texts and versions, each having its own story, each
having a history of textual and literary transmission lying back of it and its many
Vorlagen.
But there is a new situation today in which to view those apographs. For now
we have copies of copies in a new sense, that is, there is now the possibility of
having image-enhanced photographs gathered and collected in one place so that
comparative study can be carried out in ways never done before. In addition,
35
Kennicott, Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum. See Goshen-Gottstein, “Hebrew Biblical
Manuscripts.”
36
In the periodicals, Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen (1760) and Orientalische
und exegetische Bibliothek (1771); Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*30 – *32.
37
de Rossi, Variae Lectiones Veteris Testamenti.
computer technology permits more and more accurate collating of the manu-
scripts to form a significant database on which to make more sound judgments.
When we began our work in Freudenstadt on the some five thousand textual
problems given us by the United Bible Societies, we developed an understanding
of what we were doing in terms of the calls enunciated by Johann David Michae-
lis, Paul Volz, Henrik Samuel Nyberg, and Rudolf Kittel for an international and
interconfessional team to work out concepts and methods for textual criticism.38
The United Bible Societies had brought us together for one reason: however, we
set about our work not only to do the task asked of us, but also to attempt pre-
cisely to answer the call Michaelis had made some three hundred years earlier.
It is clear from the various reviews of our work that it has not created a consen-
sus.39 And I will not make this the occasion to mount a defense of what we have
done. On the contrary, we continue to learn.
One of the lessons we can learn from the history of textual criticism since
Luther is the respect that scholars aware of their work have had for the rabbinic
and Qaraite grammarians; and the work of our colleague Dominique Barthélemy
in that regard may well be the strongest contribution we shall have made. I think
it safe to say that no prior effort has probed so deeply into the great grammarians
on so many problems.40 It requires an in-depth working knowledge of Hebrew
and Aramaic in all their phases and of Judeo-Arabic. Very valuable also was the
work of Norbert Lohfink and his assistant on the committee, Clemens Locher,
in terms of more recent critical work on the passages dealt with, as well as all
the accumulated knowledge from archaeology, architecture, geography, ancient
Near-Eastern military history, flora and fauna, metallurgy, etc. No stone was
consciously left unturned in any of these areas. And we had the cooperation
of the scholars working on the Judean Desert Scrolls and fragments, especially
Frank Cross, Patrick Skehan, and Eugene Ulrich.
A direct result of our labors was the decision in 1977, before we had com-
pleted our basic work in Freudenstadt, for me to leave New York to go to Cla-
remont to help found the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center. It was clear that
there had to be a place where image-enhanced films, and eventually computerized
and digitized databases of all the manuscripts, texts, and versions, could be well
preserved and available and accessible for full comparative study. The technology
is there, both in photography and climate control [and digitization], for indef-
inite preservation of film [and text]. The observations made earlier about how
38
Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*60 – *70. See Greenberg’s perceptive Review of Critique
textuelle, “Since biblical literature was produced by, and transmitted in faith communities, it is
not permissible to ignore that fact in reconstituting its text. This work . . . will serve its highest
purpose if it compels the critic, who alone can appreciate it and judge it, to confront the elemen-
tary questions of his profession” (140).
39
See, e. g., Albrektson’s critique, “Difficilior lectio probabilior”; Ulrich’s notice “News and
Notes,” 5; and his “Canonical Process.” The last would provide a good base on which to have a
genuine dialogue about where textual criticism should go now, and especially about its relation
to higher criticism.
40
So Greenberg, Review of Critique textuelle, 138: “Jewish scholarship has not canvassed
Jewish exegesis for text-critical purposes on this scale.”
collations and apparatus have been compiled still obtained; the scholar worked
on the manuscripts available. Even Kennicott and de Rossi collated only Euro-
pean manuscripts, and Kahle’s work early in this century on the Oriental was
only a beginning. The discovery of the Judean manuscripts made it mandatory to
broaden the database as far as possible, and modern technology was developing
the means for doing so. Barbara Aland of Münster has stated the case very well:
In the history of our field of scholarship, by now a very long history, all work done in tex-
tual criticism of the New Testament has encountered a problem that still remains unsolved
today. Each editor . . . could choose for the basis of his edition only those manuscripts
which he knew by chance. Starting with the first editors, Erasmus and Ximenes, and con-
tinuing up to the great ones of our discipline, Tischendorf, Westcott and Hort, and von
Soden, it was the general practice to use what was individually known . . . Up to our times
the following unquestionably holds true: the selection of manuscripts on which we base
our work – especially in the field of the minuscules – is founded on our chance knowledge
of these codices.41
While textual criticism of the First Testament is configured differently from that
of the Second, the same observations hold true. At the Manuscript Center we
intend to correct that situation. We have the intention, and the acquisition pro-
gram in place, whereby eventually, as funds are available, to make accessible all
the manuscripts, texts, and versions pertinent to the task of textual criticism.
The Biblisches Institut in Münster has collected some fifty-three hundred Greek
New Testament manuscripts; that category grows as each new papyrus is discov-
ered.42 The Manuscript Center by the close of the millennium [2000] hopes to
have twenty thousand manuscripts, mainly texts, of both Testaments, as money
becomes available. It will take perhaps another twenty years thereafter to come
anywhere close to having substantially what is extant, but there are already core
collections in both Testaments. And whenever a scholar proposes a project of
research on nonbiblical but cognate manuscripts, we interrupt the basic acqui-
sition program to collect what is specifically needed. The present situation of
scholars being dependent on prior collations and apparatus, or even on critical
editions that have been shaped and formed by variable biases, competences, and
interests of earlier editors can be corrected. The day of perpetuating earlier errors
and biases can be brought to a close.
The lesson learned from the work of our United Bible Societies committee
that impressed me the most is the need to respect the integrity of each manu-
script, or at least family of manuscripts, before pillaging it to correct a different
one. The relative textual fluidity characteristic of the manuscripts, texts, and ver-
sions (and presumably their Vorlagen) that date before stabilization of text and
canon requires keeping in mind the communities from which they came and the
needs they served.43 This is the case in New Testament textual criticism as well,
41
See Aland, “New Instrument and Method.”
42
Aland and Aland, Text of the NT, 72 ff.
43
Note the common emphases in Simon, Talmon, and Sanders: Simon, Histoire; Talmon,
“Textual Study of the Bible”; Sanders, Canon and Community; Sanders, “Canonical Context
and Canonical Criticism.”
where relative fluidity is also a characteristic of the textual situation before the
fourth century.44 Thinking in terms of scribal errors and corruptions should be a
final resort and should come only after careful work on the literary and historical
context of the text in which the variants occur.
Respect should precede suspicion. Where possible, the fuller contexts of each
variant textual reading, including the community from which it came, if that is at
all possible, should be studied to see whether a seeming variant was a true one or
a reading engendered for other reasons, such as the hermeneutics of the tradent
or translator, his or her conceptuality of what was going on in the larger context
of the text, and his or her desire to serve the need for understanding by the com-
munity for which the copy or translation was being made.45
Three factors need to be identified, where possible: hermeneutics, conceptu-
ality, and community needs. Ancient copyists and translators, like their modern
counterparts, wanted their work appreciated. They wanted their communities
to understand the text; that was why they took on such labor. Of course it was
their understanding of the text they tried to convey. Modern critics and transla-
tors have the same aspirations. In the case of modern scholarship, a sociology of
knowledge may be necessary for us to be able to discern whether the community
for which we ultimately labor is the scholarly guild or the faith community. The
self-identity of the scholar is a factor in the work we do; the current debates in
this regard are not merely academic exercises.46
In order to appreciate communities’ understanding of the text, full literary
contexts of texts or translations must be studied to see the role that the apparent
variant played in the whole passage and to understand how it served the larger
conceptuality lying back of the text, as well as the hermeneutic at play in the
recreation of the text in the receptor language, or in the new copy being made.
Discernment of the conceptuality of the larger literary context can be arrived
at by the steadily improving methods of structural analysis being developed by
my colleague, Rolf Knierim, and by his colleagues in the Forms of Old Testa-
ment Literature (FOTL) project.47 What was learned on the text-critical proj-
ect of the United Bible Societies has been matched by what has been learned
since the move to Claremont. My students are required to do careful macro- and
microstructural analyses of their work in comparative Midrash. A student who
recently defended his dissertation on a detailed comparison of the three forms
in which the book of Esther is available in Greek (Gʹ, L, Jos) did detailed liter-
44
See Aland, “New Instrument and Method,” 42: “The early manuscripts also have a higher
degree of independence than the texts copied very strictly in Byzantium later on.” The same
point was made in Sanders, “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.”
45
This should be as much a concern in the ongoing work of establishing the history of the
text as that of discerning original intentions. Simon’s Histoire truly initiated this continuing task.
Objections that there are dark periods must be steadily addressed by further work, such as the
project now proposed by Talmon to write a history of Judaism in the Persian period.
46
Fowler, “Post-Modern Biblical Criticism,” 8; Lindbeck, “Scripture, Consensus, Com-
munity.”
47
Rolf Knierim and Gene Tucker are editing it, published by Eerdmans, 24 volumes pro-
jected, 5 published so far (end of 1988) [19 by 2017].
ary analyses of G’ and L and was thereby able to account for almost every plus,
minus, and so-called variant among them. These were then compared with the
Masoretic Text of Esther with the question left open as to whether it represented
a form of Esther earlier than those in Greek, or not.48 Another student did a
tradition analysis of the components of the Gibeon story of Solomon’s dream
(1 Kgs 3:2 – 15) and then a study of its Nachleben through Chronicles, the Old
and later Greek versions, the targumim, the Peshitta, and the Vulgate, then its
pilgrimage into Qohelet, Wisdom of Solomon, and Q (Luke). He did a careful
structural analysis of each, noting the hermeneutics involved in each resignifica-
tion.49 Stanley Walters has recently defended the integrity of the two stories of
Hannah, the one in the Septuagint and the other in the Masoretic Text.50 Once
one has discerned the integrity of each, it becomes very difficult to pillage one
to “correct” the other. The recent publication of the correspondence and debate
among four textual scholars of the two accounts of the encounter between David
and Goliath is an example of the kind of respect needed in such cases before pil-
laging begins.51 Johan Lust concluded for the four that “both versions are valu-
able ones and stand in their own right. The one should not be corrected by the
other.”52 A number of modern versions now translate the Hebrew Esther in the
canonical section and a full Greek Esther in the Apocrypha.
Whether the case must rest there or not depends on further consideration and
on other factors. Theoretically, one must allow for a later, completely unknown
author / editor to have had the true literary genius that a given structural analysis
exposes. Then one must go on to a macrostructure of the fuller contexts of each
of the variant accounts to see if that same genius was at work elsewhere. Often,
we shall have to confess that we do not know whether the literary genius we can
perceive in our present context is the one that our students, or theirs, will per-
ceive. William F. Albright is quoted as saying that the archaeologist should leave
more of a tel undug than dug, because the next generations will have sharper
tools to use and better questions to ask of the tel with all its ancient secrets. My
colleague, Eugene Ulrich, has pondered some of these issues in a recent study,
“Double Literary Editions of Biblical Narratives.” And he poses good questions.
I am not sure whether simply translating for a community of faith will decide the
issue. In that case, conceivably, the Greek Esther only should be translated for
Christian Bibles and the Hebrew Esther only for Jewish Bibles; but that would
be an impoverishment for both at this late stage. The Western churches, Catholic
and Protestant, all inherit Jerome’s principle of Hebraica veritas and must work
with it in the best and most improving text-critical mode possible. One might ask
whether, as we move into the twenty-first century, those churches are not ready
48
Dorothy, “Books of Esther.” Another dissertation, McCrory, “Composition of Exodus
35 – 40,” indicates a possible break in the impasse of the history of formation of both the Maso-
retic Text and the Septuagint version of Exod 35 – 40.
49
Carr, “Royal Ideology.”
50
Walters, “Hannah and Anna.”
51
Barthélemy, Gooding, Lust, and Tov, Story of David and Goliath.
52
Ibid., 156.
for a pluriformity of texts where double editions are available, even in transla-
tions. We have the Masoretic Text pluriformity of two sets of Ten Command-
ments, as well as Samuel–Kings and Chronicles in the First Testament (besides
numerous doublets in prose and poetry), and four Gospels in the Second. The
United Bible Societies in Stuttgart has entertained a proposal to provide modern,
critically based translations of the Septuagint. Marguerite Harl and others have
begun to do so in French.53
The work of the United Bible Societies’ committee is well suited to estab-
lish a conservatively based “best critical text” for translations of the First Tes-
tament. We chose to work only on the Hebrew of Esther, Jeremiah, Proverbs,
Exod 35 – 40, and Ezek 40 – 48 precisely because of the quite different inner-liter-
ary developments in the Greek and Hebrew of those quite obvious cases. And
where there were double literary editions we tended to respect each, and hence
usually chose the Hebrew form with its own Wortschatz.54 Thus our work has a
conservative cast as Albrektson and Greenberg have noted – conservative in the
sense not of Christian theological Tendenz (in that case we might have chosen
many more Septuagint readings), but conservative in the masoretic sense. One
must concede that where such considerations did not come into play, we chose a
fair number of non-Masoretic Text readings.
Conclusions
I conclude these observations by noting that there is a new day in textual criti-
cism marked by (a) the availability and accessibility, due to modern technology,
of as much as there is extant of texts to work on; (b) revisions in the history of
transmission of the Hebrew and Greek texts; (c) full respect for the integrity
of differing manuscript traditions and the ancient believing communities from
which they come; and (d) new techniques such as literary and structural analy-
sis whereby to discern as much as is possible the reality and conceptuality lying
back of the work of our tradent ancestors, both copyists and translators, and of
their Vorlagen. The new day and the new skills do not preclude some basic ques-
tions that will still plague us, such as how close to some kind of autograph all
these apographs and our carefully wrought and improving text-critical methods
will permit us to approximate. We will and must have a continuing passion to
hear original voices where possible, but we will need to ask what authority we
attribute to each layer of textual formation and transmission.
53
Harl, La Genèse, the first in the series La Bible d’Alexandrie.
54
There are portions of the Septuagint that are targumic translations based on an apparently
proto-masoretic text, as in the case of Isaiah and some of the Minor Prophets; other portions
are formal-equivalence translations (e. g., the Pentateuch), even literalist or Theodotionic (e. g.,
Qohelet); the so-called double editions, of course, involve literary as well as textual histories, as
well as a case like the Septuagint version of Proverbs.
One might envisage a round table, in the center of which would be a biblical
text, perhaps Isa 28:16. Around the table one might imagine numerous readers:
first there would be the First Isaiah as discerned by biblical historical criticism,
then members of the school of Isaiah such as Deutero-Isaiah and Habakkuk,
there would be the Septuagint and Old Latin Isaiah, and the Vulgate Isaiah, the
Syriac Isaiah, and the targumim, all those who quote and allude to the passage in
early Judaism, including Qumran and the apostle Paul, indeed any who quoted
or alluded to Isa 28:16 within the period of early canonical process. That should
be quite a conversation! And it would afford a good perspective on the breadth
of resignification that a canonical passage may support. Even so, I would want
to give a weighted vote to the meanings of Isa 28:16 itself as discerned by schol-
arship since the Enlightenment – as many as that might be; for so-called original
meanings often change as scholarship evolves in its increased knowledge of the
Iron Age and in the methods it uses in exegesis. But everyone should be heard,
or at least not be ridiculed, as succeeding generations of scholars come and go.
We must at the very least put respect for the work of our ancestors (even
recent ones!) in the “traditioning process” before suspicion. We may end up with
more pluriformity than ecumenism can bear, or we may arrive at a state of humil-
ity and respect for one another and our various current traditions.
Whether we restrict our understanding to the Hebrew Bible and the best read-
ings of that we can achieve, or if we think of the more elastic Prime or First Tes-
tament in its various forms and with its greater pluriformity, we need to adopt a
posture of learning and listening to others’ stories, texts, and traditions, familiar
perhaps to each in other forms, which can mean enrichment for all. The theological
ground of such a state might well be the recognition that the true Reality that lies
behind all of our apographs is beyond the grasp or comprehension of any one line
of tradition, but has spoken in many and sundry ways to our ancestors of old.55
We already have modern translations that put the Masoretic Text of Esther
in the Old Testament and a Greek Esther in the Apocrypha or deuterocanonical
section. Why not also have the Masoretic Text of Daniel in the Old Testament
and a Greek Daniel in the Apocrypha?56 We could go further and supply trans-
lations of the differing stories of Anna and Hannah, the latter in the text and
the former in the margin (as is done in some translations for John 8:1 – 11 and
the long ending of Mark); the same could be done with selected cases of literary
doublets such as those in the so-called Lucianic Samuel, the night vision of Sol-
omon in 1 Kgs 3, the death of Josiah perhaps, and even of significant portions of
Septuagint Isaiah where it differs considerably, as in Isa 6. These could be judi-
ciously and carefully chosen so that faithful Jews and Christians, as well as secu-
lar readers, could see the pluriformity we truly inherit instead of only what some
55
See Sanders, “Challenge of Fundamentalism.”
56
Along with Jerome’s principle of Hebraica veritas we have also inherited his unfortunate
solution of putting the larger pluses of the Greek Esther and Daniel in the Apocrypha as “ad-
ditions,” almost eliminating respect for the Septuagint, as Richard Simon lamented. See Simon,
Histoire, 232.
scholars think most approximates a supposed original. Again, such respect for
the pluriformity we inherit would not eliminate but would include a continuing
passion to strive for original readings.
What is needed is a new phronesis for the twenty-first century. I have called
that phronesis “monotheizing pluralism” – God is One: that is, reality has onto-
logical and ethical integrity, even while we humans are many, separated by dif-
fering identities and traditioning processes. That phronesis might be expressed
by stressing reading our texts in a global context instead of denominational con-
texts. A beginning would indeed be made by reading any of our texts, even when
alone, as though Jews and Christians were present. But that context should be
expanded globally so that Muslims and Buddhists, men and women, and all races
would become the context in which we seek understanding of our texts and tra-
ditions, and of ourselves in them.
Can we not at least pretend that God is One? If we do so enough, we might
come truly and significantly to believe that God is One, with all that that could
mean for living in the twenty-first century’s global village. That would be a her-
meneutic of respect indeed!
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Frerichs, 281 – 307. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.
Lindbeck, George. “Scripture, Consensus, and Community.” This World 23 (Fall 1988) 5–24.
Luther, Martin. D. Martin Luthers Deutsche Bibel 1522 – 1546. Weimarer Ausgabe 6. Wei-
mar: Böhlau, 1929.
Luther, Martin. “Vom Schem Hamphoras (1543).” In D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritisch
Gesamtausgabe. 1. Abteilung. Schriften 1542 – 43, 573 – 648. Weimarer Ausgabe 53. Wei-
mar: Böhlau, 1920.
Margival, Henri. Essai sur Richard Simon et la critique biblique au XVIIe siècle. Paris:
Maillet, 1900.
McCrory, Jefferson H. “The Composition of Exodus 35 – 40.” PhD diss., Claremont
Graduate University, 1989.
Murphy, Roland E. “A Response to ‘The Task of Old Testament Theology.’” HBT 6
(1984) 65 – 71.
Neusner, Jacob. Formative Judaism. 2 vols. BJS 37, 41. Chico, CA: Scholars, 1982, 1983.
Rendtorff, Rolf. “Must ‘Biblical Theology’ Be Christian Theology?” BRev 4, no. 3 (1988)
40 – 43.
Sanders, James A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In From
[Original in Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeol-
ogy in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and
Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.]
Sanders, James A. Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism. Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1984.
Sanders, James A. “Canon. Hebrew Bible.” Forthcoming [in ABD 1:837 – 52].
Sanders, James A. “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism.” In From Sacred Story
to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 153 – 74. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original
HBT 2 (1980) 173 – 97.]
Sanders, James A. “The Challenge of Fundamentalism: One God and World Peace.” Im-
pact 19 (1987) 12 – 30.
Sanders, James A. “Deuteronomy.” In The Books of the Bible. Vol. 1, The Old Testa-
ment / The Hebrew Bible, edited by Bernhard W. Anderson, 89 – 102. New York: Scrib-
ner’s, 1989.
Sanders, James A. “First Testament and Second.” BTB 17, no. 2 (1987) 47 – 49.
Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” In From Sacred Story to Sa-
cred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original JBL 98
(1979) 5 – 29.]
Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.” In Mélanges Dominique
Barthélemy: Études bibliques offertes à l’occasion de son 60e anniversaire, edited by
Pierre Casetti, Othmar Keel, and Adrian Schenker, 373 – 94. OBO 38. Fribourg: Presses
universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981.
Simon, Richard. Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. Rotterdam: Leers, 1685. Reprint,
Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971.
Spinoza, Baruch. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Hamburg: H. Künrath, 1670.
Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Heiliges Schrifttum und kanonische Bücher aus jüdischer Sicht –
Überlegungen zur Ausbildung der Grösse ‘Die Schrift’ im Judentum.” In Mitte der
Schrift? Ein jüdisch-christliches Gespräch: Texte des Berner Symposions vom 6. – 12. Jan-
uar 1985, edited by Martin Klopfenstein et al., 45 – 79. Bern: Lang, 1987.
Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Textual Study of the Bible – A New Outlook.” In Qumran and
the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon,
321 – 400. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Tov, Emanuel. “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts from the Judaean Desert: Their Contribu-
tion to Textual Criticism.” JJS 39 (1988) 5 – 37.
Tov, Emanuel, and Johann Cook. “A Computerized Database for the Qumran Biblical
Scrolls with an Appendix on the Samaritan Pentateuch.” JNSL 12 (1984) 133 – 37.
Towner, W. Sibley. “Is Old Testament Theology Equal to Its Task? A Response to a Paper
by Rolf P. Knierim.” HBT 6 (1984) 73 – 80.
Tsevat, Matitiahu. “Theology of the Old Testament – A Jewish View.” HBT 8, no. 2 (1986)
33 – 59.
Ulrich, Eugene C. “The Canonical Process, Textual Criticism and Latter Stages in the
Composition of the Bible.” In “Shaʿarei Talmon”: Studies in the Bible, Qumran, and
the Ancient Near East Presented to Shemaryahu Talmon, edited by Michael A. Fish-
bane and Emanuel Tov, with Weston W. Fields, 267 – 91. Winona Lake, IN: Eisen-
brauns, 1992.
Ulrich, Eugene C. “Double Literary Editions of Biblical Narratives and Reflections on
Determining the Form to be Translated.” In Perspectives on the Hebrew Bible: Essays
in Honor of Walter J. Harrelson, edited by James L. Crenshaw, 101 – 16. Macon, GA:
Mercer University Press, 1988.
Ulrich, Eugene C. “News and Notes.” Bulletin of the International Organization for Sep-
tuagint and Cognate Studies 16 (1983) 5.
Walters, Stanley D. “Hannah and Anna: The Greek and Hebrew Texts of 1 Samuel 1.” JBL
107 (1988) 385 – 412.
2
What’s Critical about a Critical Edition of the Bible?
David Marcus and James A. Sanders
Although it is not widely known, all printed Hebrew Bibles in common use
today contain textual difficulties, corruptions, and – yes – even errors. Modern
translations tend to smooth out difficulties in the original Hebrew. Occasionally
some translations, such as the New Jewish Publication Society translation, tell
the reader in a footnote that the Hebrew is difficult or that the meaning of the
Hebrew is unknown, but this only emphasizes that the text is not perfect.
How can there be errors in a text that is venerated as the inspired word of
God and carefully transmitted for centuries?
The answer is that most texts, ancient and modern, that are transmitted from
one generation to the next get corrupted in one way or another. For modern
compositions, the process of textual transmission from the writing of the original
to its final printing is relatively short, thus limiting the possibilities of corrup-
tion. But even so, every student of English literature knows, for example, that
many mistakes were inserted into editions of James Joyce’s Ulysses as a result of
misunderstandings of the author’s corrections in the book’s proof sheets.
Our earliest complete manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible postdate their com-
position by more than a thousand years. All of these manuscripts, including the
famous Leningrad Codex and the Aleppo Codex, contain errors suffered during
the long process of transmission. Scholars have endeavored by various means to
correct these errors and ascertain the best possible Hebrew text. Such a text is
called a critical edition because it includes a critical apparatus explaining the rea-
sons for the textual decisions.1 The current critical edition of the Hebrew Bible that
is used by most students and scholars of the Hebrew Bible throughout the world
is the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS). This edition is now being revised by
an international and interconfessional team of scholars under the auspices of the
United Bible Societies. This new edition, called Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ),
is being produced in stages, and to date six volumes have appeared.
The rabbis long ago recognized the possibility of human error when a text
was being copied. They warned scribes of the dangers of confusing similar letters
like beth and kaph (K‫ב‬K / K‫כ‬K) or resh and dalet (K‫ר‬K / K‫ד‬K) or yod and waw (K‫י‬K / K‫ו‬K). They rec-
ognized that haplography (omission of a letter or a word) or dittography (dupli-
cation of a letter or word) sometimes occurred. A scribe could make an incorrect

1
See Sanders, “Art and Science of Textual Criticism.”
What’s Critical about a Critical Edition of the Bible 23
division of letters, especially in a text where letters were written close together,
thus producing different words. An ancient scribe, like a modern one, could
make an error of metathesis, that is, transposing letters within a word, writing
cavalry instead of calvary or brid instead of bird.
Working largely in Tiberias in the early Middle Ages from around the seventh
to the tenth centuries, a group of rabbinic scribes later called Masoretes made
valiant efforts to protect the text, safeguarding it by supplementing the text with
thousands of notes called masorah written on the top, bottom, and sides of man-
uscripts. Their effort became known as the Masoretic Text and is the standard
Jewish text of the Hebrew Bible to this day.2
Yet despite the labors of the Masoretes, the text still contains corruptions,
changes, and erasures. The reason for this is primarily that the Masoretes made
their contribution at a relatively late stage in the development of the biblical text.
At that time, the text already contained corruptions. Paradoxically, the Maso-
retes carefully preserved a text that was already corrupted, and no changes or
corrections were permitted.
Why didn’t the Masoretes start from a better text? The answer is that the text
the Masoretes chose to work from was itself selected toward the end of the first
century. At that time there were many texts circulating (see the Dead Sea Scrolls),
none of which was letter perfect. The Dead Sea Scrolls include more than 200
biblical manuscripts (mostly small scraps), evidencing different types or cate-
gories of Hebrew texts, many of which contain scribal corrections or additions
written on the manuscripts themselves. The people of Qumran (where the Dead
Sea Scrolls were found) who created these texts certainly believed their texts con-
tained the meaningful words of a living God, but their belief was not dependent
on any notion of a letter-perfect text.
The variety of biblical texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls may seem astound-
ing to modern readers. These texts even tend to fall into groups. Some conform
in general to the Masoretic Text and are referred to as pre-masoretic. Others
seem to conform more closely to other ancient biblical text traditions. Hebrew
biblical texts were translated into Greek as early as the third century BCE. This
ultimately complete Greek text is known as the Septuagint (or LXX) because tra-
dition has it that 70 translators of the Hebrew text came up with exactly the same
Greek translation. Some of the Bible texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls provide
the Hebrew base text of the Septuagint, comprising another group of Dead Sea
Scroll texts of the Bible. Still other biblical texts from Qumran seem to conform
more closely to the pentateuchal text that was preserved by the Samaritans and is
known as the Samaritan Pentateuch. And still other biblical texts from Qumran
preserve texts that seem to combine more than one of these traditions.
After the Roman destruction of the temple in 70 CE, this array of text-
types gradually disappeared in rabbinic Judaism; the masoretic-type text alone
remained, errors and all. But other text-types did not disappear completely. They
2
See Brettler, “Masoretes at Work.”
can be found in the Hebrew texts (what scholars call the Vorlagen) underlying
translations into Greek, Latin, and other languages (i. e., in the Greek, Latin, and
Syriac Aramaic translations known respectively as the Septuagint, the Vulgate,
and the Peshitta). The Vorlagen of these translations differs from the Masoretic
Text in many respects, some minor and others quite significant.
A critical Bible translator tries to survey and evaluate all these surviving wit-
nesses to the Hebrew text, ascertain the best possible Hebrew text, and justify
the results in the form of a critical apparatus that is usually found in the bottom
margin of each page.
At the present time, three different critical Bible projects in various stages are
trying to do this. One, the Oxford University Bible, sponsored by Oxford Uni-
versity Press, is still in its formative stages. Another at the Hebrew University
in Jerusalem is the Hebrew University Bible Project, HUBP, which has so far
issued three volumes containing the Major Prophets. The third, with which the
two authors of this article are associated, is the Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ),
which has so far issued six volumes.
While there are many similarities among these three projects, they differ in
conception, scope, and editorial control. The HUBP is based on the oldest text
of the complete Bible, the Aleppo Codex, dated to about 950 CE, though unfor-
tunately about one third of it is missing.3 BHQ is based on the Leningrad Codex,
which is dated a little later than the Aleppo Codex (to 1008 CE). HUBP is a
major critical edition that compares not only all Hebrew manuscripts, but also
quotations from rabbinic sources not covered by BHQ.
For its part, BHQ is intended to be a handbook, literally to be able to be held
in one’s hand.
HUBP operates on a team approach with individual scholars responsible for
all its specialized areas under the guidance of an overall editor. BHQ, on the
other hand, assigns books to individual authors who are responsible for every
aspect of the book, including preparing the masorah, the Hebrew manuscripts,
and all the other various witnesses. An editor of BHQ, not being an expert in all
these subjects, literally has to learn all these areas on the job, so to speak.
BHQ is the latest edition in the Biblia Hebraica series. Biblia Hebraica (BH),
Latin for “Hebrew Bible,” is a term denoting all printed editions of Bibles in
Hebrew, but in a more specific sense it denotes the series of critical Bible editions
published in Germany since 1905. The main innovator of this critical Hebrew
Bible series was the German biblical scholar Rudolf Kittel of the University of
Leipzig. The first edition of BH appeared in 1905 – 6, the second in 1913. Both
were published by the Württemberg Bible Institute, a predecessor of the Ger-
man Bible Society, which had taken upon itself the responsibility of producing
scholarly Bibles and has continued with this duty to this day. The base text for
these two editions of BH was the Second Rabbinic Bible of Jacob ben Hayyim
(1524 – 25), which, with improvements over the years, had become the textus
receptus for students of the Hebrew Bible for nearly 500 years. However, with
3
See Ofer, “Shattered Crown.”
What’s Critical about a Critical Edition of the Bible 25
the third edition of BH, which commenced publication in 1929, Kittel used as
the base text the Leningrad Codex.
The reader will recall that we earlier said that the Masoretes preserved in the
Masoretic Text of the tenth century thousands of notes on the text written on the
top, bottom, and sides of manuscripts, called masorah. A small or short masorah
is referred to as a masorah parva (or mp); a large masorah or masorah magna is
abbreviated mm. The third edition of BH was completed in 1937 and for the first
time included the masorah parva (mp) written in the side margins of the Lenin-
grad Codex.
The fourth edition of BH, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia or BHS, uses the
name of its publishing place Stuttgart, rather than the number four. BHS includes
the mp (masorah parva) from the Leningrad Codex but relegates the mm (maso-
rah magna) to a separate volume.
Biblia Hebraica Quinta (Quinta = 5; BHQ) is the latest revision of BH. It is
being edited by a committee of scholars under the editorship of Adrian Schenker
of the University of Fribourg. This project, unlike its predecessors, is interna-
tional and interconfessional. For the first time in the history of the BH proj-
ect, Jewish editors are included. Instead of being entirely composed of primarily
German Protestant scholars, there are now Catholics as well as Jews among the
22 editors. These scholars come from Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, Ger-
many, Ireland, Spain, England, Norway, Finland, France, the United States, and
Israel.
BHQ includes careful study of color transparencies, the use of a new facsimile
edition of the Leningrad Codex and all of the biblical texts among the Dead Sea
Scrolls, as well as new editions of the Septuagint (Göttingen), Vulgate, and the
Peshitta (Leiden).
The language of discussion is English, not, as in previous editions, Latin or
German. And the sigla that are used are English sigla, not the Gothic letters that
often puzzled American students.
The critical apparatus of BHQ also represents a major change. Witnesses from
the Septuagint, the Peshitta, and the targum are given in their original language
scripts (thus Greek for the Septuagint, Syriac for the Peshitta, etc.) rather than
using modern retroversions to an assumed original. Witnesses that agree with the
MT are listed first. The preferred text is usually the MT, and witnesses that, in the
editor’s opinion, do not represent the preferred text are given critical evaluations.
Where the MT is not the preferred text, it too is given an evaluation, and the case
is discussed in the accompanying commentary. BHQ also contains separate com-
mentaries for problematic passages.
In-depth study of the Dead Sea Scrolls caused a basic revision in the history
of the transmission of the text and hence more respect for the MT than earlier
editions had shown, so that BHQ delves deeply into classical Hebrew grammar
and syntax and does not resort so easily to emendations in the Hebrew text.
Finally, BHQ includes the mm (masorah magna) on the same page where the
masoretic note occurs. By this placement of the mm, the reader can see quite
clearly the relationship of the mm to the mp.
This new critical edition is likely to open up for nonexperts exciting new
dimensions to the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible.
Bibliography
Brettler, Marc. “The Masoretes at Work: A Tradition Preserved.” Sidebar in “The Lenin-
grad Codex: Rediscovering the Oldest Complete Hebrew Bible,” by James A. Sanders
and Astrid Beck. BRev 13, no. 4 (1997) 32 – 41, 46.
Ofer, Yosef. “The Shattered Crown: The Aleppo Codex Sixty Years after the Riots.” BAR
34, no. 5 (2008) 39 – 49.
Sanders, James A. “The Art and Science of Textual Criticism.” Review of Textual Criti-
cism of the Hebrew Bible, by Emanuel Tov, 3rd ed., 2011. BAR 38, no. 3 (2012) 61 – 63.
3
Hermeneutics of Text Criticism
Today, as not since the seventeenth century perhaps, biblical text critics and
translators are finding their consciousness raised about the hermeneutics oper-
ative in their work. By hermeneutics is meant conscious understanding of what
the nature, or ontology, of the Bible is, and the effect text-critical decisions have
in view of that understanding. In postmodern terms, one realizes that differ-
ent hermeneutics are operative according to what one, or one’s identity commu-
nity, believes or thinks the text actually is; and different communities, including
schools of thought, may hold quite different views about the nature of the text.
It was when Martin Luther started translating Hebrew biblical texts in 1523
that he began to realize the problems involved in the principle of sola Scriptura.
Out of wrestling with the text-critical problems that have to be addressed before
wrestling with the equally difficult problems in rendering a responsible transla-
tion of the textual readings chosen, Luther came up with the hermeneutic princi-
ple of res et argumentum. Words, he said, must be in the service of meaning and
not meaning in the service of words.1
Res for Luther was the gospel of Jesus Christ, while argumentum had three
themes, oeconomia, politia, and ecclesia. If a passage did not accord with ecclesia,
then it belonged to the category of either the politics or the economy of the time
from which the text arose. Where there was multivalency in a word or text, even
after grammar had been fully respected, one chose the possibility that accorded
with the res. Wherever the rabbis gave a meaning not in accord with the res,
one rejected it; and if the translator could work through the rules of grammar
or with vowel points to make a passage accord with the res, he was to do so.
Thus, Luther’s hermeneutic led eventually to the denigration of the authenticity
of vowel points and to the long debate that would endure through the eighteenth
century, at least, about the authority of vowel points. Luther was convinced that
the vocalization of the consonantal text was a masoretic invention designed in
part to thwart “original” readings favorable to New Testament understandings
of them.
With some variations among the various reformers, Luther’s hermeneu-
tic became the attitude held by most Christian scholars toward the text of the
Hebrew Bible. This eventually led the young Oxford scholar, Benjamin Ken-
nicott, inspired in part by Houbigant, to make his collations in the latter half

1
Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*4 – *9; Sanders, “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament,”
49 – 50.
of the eighteenth century without regard, for the most part, to vowel pointing.
As Luther continued his program of translation, especially in the years 1529 to
1541, he came to view some texts as inherently corrupt. A result of Luther’s
hermeneutic may be seen in the Latin translation of the Bible in 1551 by Sebas-
tien Chateillon (Castalio, Castellio); wherever the Hebrew seemed to Chateillon
corrupt, he retroverted a Hebrew text from Greek or Latin witnesses, or simply
emended by conjecture.
Modern text criticism, as practiced by many scholars until recently, was
thereby launched. Luther’s attitude toward masoretic vocalization, and even
his view of the extent of corruption in transmission of the text, have persisted
into modern scholarship long after Luther’s basically Christian hermeneutic
was abandoned. Chateillon’s conjectures were followed in nine specific textual
cases by Louis Cappel (Cappelus), sixteen by Charles François Houbigant, and
some also by Wellhausen.2 In most cases those indebted to Chateillon did not
acknowledge the debt but simply perpetuated the new reading, and another
aspect of modern text criticism was initiated: perpetuating unattributed conjec-
tural readings, and even errors in actual readings, from one apparatus to another
as though they had somehow become a part of the textual tradition.
The debates precipitated by Luther’s hermeneutic, as well as his attitudes
toward the textual situation of the First Testament, would continue to flare up
from time to time, especially into the eighteenth century but also until recently.
By the time of Johann David Michaelis in the latter part of the eighteenth cen-
tury, the concept of text criticism and its methods were fairly well set for two
centuries to come. Text criticism had as its task to establish a Hebrew text as
close to what could be thought the original as possible, but without regard to
a res in either the Second Testament or in non-Christian Jewish literature. The
hermeneutic of Louis Cappelus in his seventeenth-century Critica Sacra was by
Michaelis’s time adopted in the field generally: one should study Scripture as one
would any ancient secular literature, that is, one should work toward establish-
ing a text that reflected the thought of the original author as closely as possible,
without regard to a sensus plenior or a “messianic second sense.” Clearly the shift
in hermeneutics enunciated by Luther had been critically modified, though not
abandoned.
The difference was in the fact that most Christian text critics, whether they
cited him or not, had clearly heard Baruch Spinoza’s call of 1670 to write a his-
tory of formation of the biblical text – because therein only, he insisted, would
the truth of the Bible be found, namely in the original thoughts and intentions
of ancient biblical authors.3 Confidence in scholarly ability to reconstruct the
history of formation of the biblical text, and with it, authorial intentional-
ity (“truth”), became an integral part of “modern” modes of thought. Biblical
“higher criticism” as a modern discipline was thereby launched.
2
Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*9; Sanders, “Task of Text Criticism.”
3
Spinoza, Tractatus, 87 – 88.
Hermeneutics of Text Criticism 29
Before the discovery of the Judean Desert Scrolls, which have by now affected
nearly every aspect of text criticism, the basic scholarly hermeneutic at work in
text criticism had begun to come under scrutiny. The so-called history of the for-
mation of the text was constantly under revision, with the intentions of ancient
biblical authors varying according to the scholar, or the school of thought of
which he or she was a part, or on external information concerning a historical
period or site. One scholar’s or one school’s attitude or conviction about what a
biblical author “surely intended” would differ considerably from that of another,
and it was that attitude or hermeneutic that influenced the way by which a tex-
tual or versional witness was selected, or a conjecture proposed. Every tradent
of the text, past and present, brings his or her hermeneutics to the text.4 In effect,
there has not been a clear differentiation between higher and lower criticism,
that is, between a history of the formation of texts and a history of the transmis-
sion of texts. The former has tended to overshadow the latter, if not overwhelm
it. There can be little question that exegesis plays an important though limited
part in text criticism, but by the beginning of the twentieth century exegesis had
begun to dominate text criticism.
The attempts at reform of BHS over against BHK1–3, even by some of the
same editors, reflected the newer, more sober attitude. The number of outright
conjectures suggested in the apparatus was considerably reduced. And with the
introduction of Gérard Weil’s masorah there was in evidence a growing respect
for the text of Leningradensis, and of the Tiberian Ben Asher traditions, but still
almost total disregard of the te’amim, particularly in the parsing of poetry, as
may be seen in the page layout of anything construed to be poetry.5
The history of transmission of the text has been dominated in this century
by the debate between Kahle and de Lagarde, and whether that history demon-
strated a move from the one to the many (de Lagarde) or from the many to the
one (Kahle). Early decisions based on the plurality of text forms, particularly
from Qumran Cave 4, were based on the Kahle-Lagarde debate; one or the other
was declared to have been right.6 But by the late 1960s the scene had consider-
ably changed: the history of transmission of the text of the First Testament was
being reviewed, revised, and rewritten, so that the two current principal First
Testament text-critical projects are based firmly on that revision, the Hebrew
University Bible Project (HUBP) and the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project
(HOTTP) of the United Bible Societies.
4
This is an important aspect of intertextuality; see Boyarin, Intertextuality, 12, and Sanders,
“Intertextuality and Dialogue.”
5
The whole issue of constraints entered into a text needs full discussion. Every presenta-
tion of a text, including word spacing, open and closed line spacing, paragraph division, vowels,
accents, superscriptions, paragraph headings, titles, stichometric arrangements, etc., whether in
antiquity or in more recent modes of mis-en-page (page layout), stems from an understanding
of the text.
6
See the considerably different contributions by Cross and by Talmon in Cross and Talmon,
Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text; Tov, Textual Criticism, 164 – 97.
Two Projects
The Hebrew University Bible Project was instigated by the recovery of Alep-
pensis in 1948, but also in part by the recovery of Qumran Cave 1 at about the
same time, the period of the Israeli War of Independence. Moshe Goshen-Gott-
stein, Shemaryahu Talmon, and Chaim Rabin formed the HUBP and launched
the journal Textus.7
The United Bible Societies’ HOTTP was launched in 1969 when Eugene Nida
formed a six-person committee to deal with the new situation in First Testament
text criticism comparable to the four-person committee he had formed in 1955
to work on Second Testament text-critical problems of particular concern to
the translation program of the UBS. The principal reason for the formation of
the two UBS projects stemmed from problems encountered by the hundreds of
translation committees around the world, especially committees made up largely
of nationals in the so-called third-world countries. In historical perspective, the
problems the translation committees faced were a direct result of the lack of clear
distinction in Western scholarship between the two histories, the history of for-
mation of the texts of the Bible and the history of transmission of the texts. This
is not a criticism leveled at any one group or school of thought but is basically an
observation of what had been happening for at least a century and a half. The dis-
tinction between the literary history of the formation of a given text and its his-
tory of transmission is rarely neatly drawn. But it is equally clear that some text
critics allow the lack of clear distinction to permit exegesis to affect text-critical
judgments considerably more than should be. When difficult texts were encoun-
tered, the national translation committees would inevitably turn to recent West-
ern translations of either Testament and immediately run into the confusion. In
the cases of the problematic textual problems they needed help on, the trans-
lations consulted would almost always reflect different text-critical solutions,
which resulted in widely varying translations based on them. The situation engen-
dered confusion among the committees, especially those who had been led to
believe in the “objectivity” of Western scholarship. They needed help and Gene
Nida and the UBS tried to provide it by establishing the two text-critical projects.
The basic reason they needed help stemmed from the fact that the confu-
sion was patent in the popular Western translations done around mid-century.
Whereas the RSV (1952) was still basically a formal-equivalence translation based
on its being the authorized heir in the USA of the King James Version, and hence
constrained by the latter’s hermeneutic of translation based on the received MT,
the first two editions of the Bible de Jerusalem, the Revidierte Luther Bibel, and
the New English Bible, among others, tended to present translations based on a
high percentage of variant readings, and especially conjectures. And, of course,
these varied widely according to the text-critical views of the translators as to
what a passage “ought to have said,” given “modern” attitudes about consistency
7
See Ben-Zvi, “Codex of Ben Asher”; Goshen-Gottstein, “Authenticity of the Aleppo
Codex.”
and coherency in ancient compositions, and the ability (or lack of it?) of modern
scholars to discern what the “original” text should have said. The situation multi-
plied the problems that indigenous committees encountered when they turned to
the recent translations in the old colonial languages of their newly independent
countries, where they often found translations of biblical passages only recently
composed. Fortunately, translations by the 1970s had begun to become consid-
erably more sober and text-critically responsible; note especially the third edi-
tion of BJ (the New Jerusalem Bible) and now the Revised English Bible.
In a strange turn of history, the NRSV went in the opposite direction and
abandoned the formal-equivalence type translation of the KJV that had been
retained by the RSV. The NRSV changed character essentially, and incorporates
translations of a much higher percentage of emended and conjectured texts than
its predecessor. This was undoubtedly due to the considerable influence in the
USA, and on the NRSV committee, of a current school of text-critical theory
that is centered in “modern” efforts to reconstruct history based on a text-critical
method that seeks to establish, as far as possible, “original” biblical texts.
The first discussions we had on the HOTTP, beginning in 1969, indicated the
need to arrive at a consensus on the history of transmission of the text, which
would then be the foundation of everything else we did. The amazing thing, as I
look back, is how soon the consensus emerged. Dominique Barthélemy had been
working on the history of the stabilization of the Hebrew text since well before
the publication of his Les devanciers d’Aquila (1963) based on his early work on
the Greek Dodecapropheton from Nahal Hever.8
˙ ˙with his work but did not accept its
The committee was, of course, familiar
consequences for understanding the history of transmission of the text without
some initial resistance; there was considerable debate. I am convinced that the
similar reconstruction on the part of the HUBP played a minor role in the con-
sensus; we had to work it through ourselves.9 With no collusion or direct influ-
ence, the two groups arrived at similar conclusions based on the data available
to both.
History of Transmission
The history of transmission of the text falls into four periods: (1) that of the
so-called Ur-text; (2) that of accepted texts; (3) that of the received text; and
(4) that of the Masoretic Text.
8
See Tov, Greek Minor Prophets Scroll, ix: “Scholars will always associate the name of
R. P. Dominique Barthélemy, OP, of Fribourg with the Minor Prophets Scroll because of his
masterly treatment of its contents in Devanciers, a book which in many ways has revolutionized
scholarship.” See Sanders, “Stability and Fluidity,” esp. 202 – 6.
9
See Barthélemy, “Histoire du texte hébraïque”; an abbreviated form had appeared earlier
in English: Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of.” For the same history as understood by the
HUBP, see Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 12 – 13; Talmon, “Old Testament Text,”
and his earlier observations in Talmon, “Aspects of the Textual Transmission.”
Both groups agree that Period 1 falls outside the province of text criticism in
sensu stricto. There are no autographs of any portion of biblical literature, and
even if there were, there would undoubtedly be radical discussion about their
status as witnesses, and that would depend directly on one’s hermeneutic of text
criticism. While the text critic needs to be aware of everything that goes on in
discussions of so-called original texts, as well as aware of all the disciplines of
biblical criticism and their ever-changing results, it is not the province of text
criticism to reconstruct original texts before they became the kind of community
property that repetition and recitation create.
Period 2 begins with the earliest extant biblical manuscripts and extends
through to the completion of the first phase of stabilization of the text, that
is, the destruction of the Second Temple and the conquest of Jerusalem, what
Talmon has called “The Great Divide.” These are texts accepted by believing
communities as authoritative and functionally canonical for them. They are no
longer in the province only of schools or other narrowly defined groups respon-
sible for their preservation and existence. This period is marked by a limited
degree of textual fluidity. Even within groupings of texts (not to say families or
recensions) there is a measure of textual fluidity, including inner-Hebrew and
inner-Greek literary developments. This is the period of the Qumran literature,
the Greek translations of various books (so-called Septuagint), citations and quo-
tations of Scripture in early Jewish and Christian literature.
It is crucial to the whole text-critical enterprise to understand the nature of
the witnesses in Period 2, and their relative fluidity. Tradents of all sorts, copy-
ists, midrashists, translators, teachers, and preachers had and have two equally
important responsibilities, the one to the past and the other the present – the one
to the Vorlage and the other to the community the tradent serves. In the period
from which we now have so many manuscript witnesses, the second period, the
interest Scripture and tradition held for the people of the time was in their rele-
vance to their hopes and fears in the culturally strange, enticing and yet threaten-
ing Hellenistic-Roman world. Tradents were not simply academic types who had
some time on their hands. Their interest was in tapping wisdom and light from
the past, specifically the “prophetic past,” to understand the present. Tradents
wanted their communities to understand what they were copying or translat-
ing for them. Paraphrases and facilitating translations of texts, accepted by the
community as authoritative, or truly derived from that “prophetic past,” were
common in the period. These are what the text critic calls intentional changes.
The tradent knew the text was relevant to community problems and concerns
and wanted the people to understand the text being transmitted. And, of course,
it was the tradent’s understanding of the relevance of the text that would be con-
veyed. What other understanding would he or she have shared?
On the other hand, such textual fluidity was of necessity limited. If, in order
to make a text sound relevant, that text was altered to the point of obscuring rec-
ognition of it by the community, the whole point would have been lost. What
one sees in preexilic references to earlier authoritative traditions, such as the exo-
dus wanderings – entrance traditions, the Davidic traditions, the patriarchal tra-
ditions, etc., is sufficient fluidity to be easily adaptable in the newer speech or

composition, but also sufficient stability to be recognizable by the community
as their own authoritative identity-granting traditions.10 No two recitals in the
prophets, for instance, of the exodus event are alike, and yet they all are clearly
recognizable for what they are. It is no different from the balance the modern
tradent must strike in current similar traditioning processes such as preaching,
writing a commentary, or translating. In fact, one of the major aspects of canon-
ical criticism, in its emphasis on canon as function (norma normans), is recogni-
tion of the similarities, as well as differences, between ancient tradents and more
recent ones.11 What goes on in modern believing communities with regard to the
traditioning process is not unlike what went on in antiquity. This kind of fluid-
ity continues even after stabilization of the text, as can be seen in dynamic- and
functional-equivalent translations as well as in homilies and commentaries. The
difference is that stabilization induced different modes of adapting the stable text
to render it once more relevant and fluid, with the concomitant rise in generally
accepted hermeneutic rules to gain some control over the exercise.12
Period 3, the era of the received text, was characterized by the remarkable
stability of all extant witnesses by the end of the first century of the common
era. These are the biblical manuscripts from the non-Qumran caves (and a few
from Qumran such as 1QIsab), which date from late in the first century into the
second, and from Masada, as well as Aquila and Theodotion, and citations in rab-
binic literature (in contrast to those in the Second Testament and other early Jew-
ish literature). These mark the beginnings of formative Judaism, in Jacob Neus-
ner’s terms. This is also called the proto-masoretic period in text-critical terms,
in contrast to the earlier pre-masoretic manuscripts. It extended until the ninth
century when we begin to have codices extant from the Ben Asher family.13 In
the gap between the second-century witnesses and the Tiberian, there is precious
little, mainly Jerome’s work and citations in rabbinic and patristic literature. The
stabilization process of rectifying fluid texts to the proto-masoretic, which one
sees so clearly in the Dodecapropheton from Hever, continues in Jerome’s belief
in Hebraica veritas. ˙
Period 4 is then the period of the Masoretic Text proper, especially the
remarkable work in the five generations of the Ben Asher family. There are some
31 MT manuscripts that date up to 1100.14 The trajectory from limited fluidity
10
See Sanders, Torah and Canon, 15 – 30; Sanders, Canon and Community, 21 – 45; Fishbane,
Biblical Interpretation; Hays, Echoes of Scripture; Boyarin, Intertextuality; Evans and Sanders,
Luke and Scripture; Sanders, “Hermeneutics.” [See now Sanders, Monotheizing Process, 12 – 25.]
11
See Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible,” esp. 847 – 51.
12
See Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method”;
Sanders, “From Sacred Story.” See the earlier perceptive study in this regard by Rabin, “Trans-
lation Process.” See as well Bickerman, Studies in Jewish and Christian History, 1:190: “Every
translation was an adaptation of the original to the needs of its new readers.”
13
A convenient list of the classical Tiberian MSS is provided in Yeivin, Introduction to the
Tiberian Masorah, 15 – 31.
14
This figure will be considerably expanded in the light of the work currently being done
by M. Beit-Arié and his team in the National Public Library in St. Petersburg (Leningrad) where
in text form, in the second period, to almost complete stability in the third, is
amazing to behold.15 There is no other literature in any culture quite like it.
Constraints inserted into the text, both for understanding and for stability, make
it truly unique as a body of literature. The Masoretes, despite Luther’s and most
Christian exegetes’ doubts, clearly inherited a system of reading the text that
reached back into antiquity.16
Modus Operandi
Our UBS committee worked almost from the start with the dual perspective of
the history of stabilization of the text and the history of stabilization of canon.
We always started with the assumption that the MT meant something intelligible,
whether or not it was anywhere near what an “original” reading supposedly had
been; and we obligated ourselves first to understand what meaning the MT con-
veyed, whether we finally accepted the MT or a variant.17 We formed the distinct
impression that modern preference for a variant or conjectured reading often
had led scholars to rush to the judgment that a MT reading was corrupt or unin-
telligible. Then we would do the same for other witnesses, especially the Judean
Desert Scrolls and the versions. We respected each witness enough that we were
reluctant to judge a reading corrupt or “uncertain” until we had exhausted every
other possible avenue. We attempted to discern the conceptuality lying back of
a variant text or reading in each witness we deemed of value. This sometimes
required doing a structure analysis of the pericope in which a variant apparently
lurked. The basic tenet of canonical criticism works in text criticism as well:
respect for the conceptual world on which a supposed variant is based, not only
the concept of the individual scribe or translator, or later writer citing the text
in question, but also the conceptual world of the community for which the text
copied or translated was intended.
Because we dealt with problems referred to us by the UBS translations depart-
ment, our first task was always to trace in modern scholarship the origins of sug-
there are apparently thousands of uncatalogued manuscripts, many fragmentary, of the MT.
Beit-Arie claims that it should now be possible to write a detailed history of the masoretic
movement; see “Exhuming the Hebrew Secrets.”
15
M. J. Mulder is, however, undoubtedly correct to point out that even so the process of sta-
bilization is not yet totally complete; see Mulder, “Transmission of the Biblical Text,” 132. This
observation should be made in conjunction with Goshen-Gottstein’s landmark study “Hebrew
Biblical Manuscripts,” which clearly showed that the later MSS, with precious few exceptions,
of the sort collated by Kennicott and de Rossi, have little text-critical value.
16
One of the unexpected results of our work on the HOTTP was the gradual realization
that in some of the Tiberian MSS the masoretic contributions are more reliable than those of the
scribe who penned the consonants; see Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 3:ccxxviii – ccxlii. This
evaluation will be reflected in the current preparation of BHQ by our successor committee.
Note also our observation that while the Masoretes were rabbanite, they enjoyed close relations
with and underwent influence by Qaraites in the Galilee at the time.
17
There are, of course, some generally recognized improbabilities in the MT.
gested emendations and conjectures in the translations the UBS nationals con-
sulted. These were usually found already in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century
criticism. After researching the scholarly reasoning offered for rejecting a MT
reading and accepting a variant or conjectured text, we then turned to the ancient
witnesses to discern as well as possible why a supposed variant appeared in those
cases. This sometimes led to a judgment as to whether we were dealing with a
text-critical or an ancient literary problem. In conjunction with that work we
researched pertinent modern studies that involved archaeological, philological,
and other data relating to the passage at hand.
At the same time, we also turned to the great rabbinic and Qaraite commenta-
tors of the Middle Ages to see their judgments about the morphological and syn-
tactic situation of the text. We came to have especially high regard for the Qaraite
lexicographers, especially those who wrote in Judeo-Arabic. Because they had
learned the basic concepts and principles of grammar from Arabic grammarians
(and not from classical Greek / Latin grammarians, as European scholarship has)
they often had far sharper observations to make about a word or phrase than
scholars since the Renaissance. Their knowledge of the Hebrew language was
based on a CD‑ROM-like knowledge of the entire text of the Tanak – which
Western scholars simply do not have. Since we operated as a team, different
members of the committee and their assistants took on the research work neces-
sary to come up with all these data. We agreed from the start that printed critical
editions of texts often betray the biases of competence, interest, and hermeneu-
tics of the modern editor, no matter how renowned.
An Analogy
A major problem in text criticism was one addressed every time the committee
met. Since we eschewed purely scholarly conjectures with no basis in the wit-
nesses, but obligated ourselves to suggest for translators only what can be found
in actual ancient and medieval manuscripts of texts and versions bequeathed
to us by ancient believing communities, we could only work with extant texts
from Period 2 through Period 4, that is, the Judean Desert Scrolls and the Greek
and other witnesses through to the great Tiberian codices. The policy that we
adopted was that we would attempt, by the most scrupulous text-critical meth-
ods possible, to arrive at suggesting the most responsible extant reading, that is,
from when the texts had become functionally canonical for believing communi-
ties in early Judaism, and were no longer the peculiar province of individuals or
schools. This meant, as noted above, that we needed to know as much about the
history of formation of the text, that is, what scholarship since Spinoza could tell
us about the text, as we knew about the history of transmission of the text. But
in truth, we found that the best we could do, or any current scholarship could
do, in discerning the intention of “original authors” was elusive and fraught with
indeterminacy. Because of what we had learned about early Judaism from study
of the Judean Desert Scrolls, we found ourselves in a postmodern frame of mind
fully conscious of the fact that observers, like ourselves, are always a part of the
observed. We sought rather to choose the most critically responsible available
reading that had become functionally canonical for early Judaism.
In fact, we all brought all we knew about current scholarship on the problems
addressed to bear on our discussions, but only after we had done all the neces-
sary work of a text-critical nature. We tried to make judicious judgments about
what seemed really valuable for us in modern scholarly study. When potentially
true variants loomed on the horizon, we obligated ourselves to debate issues
and take sides, to make sure we had before us the full data and the strongest
arguments possible about them. This was the reason we finally voted on each
evaluation. This was in part to make sure we did not perpetuate the tendency in
scholarship to arrive at a reading attractive to a particular hermeneutic, or view
of the text, and make hasty judgments about which readings were “corrupt” or
“genuine.” We all had the experience of arriving at our annual four-week ses-
sions with a clear view about some of the readings we had prepared work on,
only to be persuaded in session of quite a different view, precisely because we
obligated ourselves collectively to build up arguments as strong as possible on
both sides of a variant reading (after eliminating pseudo-variants), often to the
point of seeing the legitimacy of both, but having to make a decision. Not a few
times we decided on a particularly difficult reading as text-critically responsible
but suggested to the translators the wisdom of an early and frequent facilitating
option for current believing communities that had well served ancient (or medi-
eval) such communities.
The best way to illustrate the exercise is by analogy to an archaeological dig.
Sometimes we came to the point of admitting that what were left, in the MT
and / or other witnesses, were but “beautiful ruins” of what we could judge was
probably the “original” literary composition in question. After we had probed
as far back into the beginning of Period 2 as our data permitted, we would then
reconstruct from those ruins what we felt might have been the original liter-
ary structure – just as an architect on a dig does from the surviving ruins of
an ancient monument, in the light of the available pertinent history involved.
But once we had looked at the proposed conjectured “drawing” of what might
have been, we would prescind from the retrojection to look once more at what
ancient believing communities had actually bequeathed us, that is, at what could
be called functionally canonical, and on the basis of that and rigorous text-crit-
ical method, make our judgment on what reading to choose. We admitted on
occasion that if we were working alone as scholars in the historian’s workshop
we might not be so constrained. But in such commentaries or studies we would
make it clear that we were working as historians, attempting with imagination to
reconstruct “original” moments, and not as text critics. This, of course, induces
comments about what history means in postmodern terms.18
18
For an overview of the current situation, see Perdue, Collapse of History.
Parallel Texts
Such discussions were informed by the observation that we not infrequently have
among early witnesses parallel texts that recount the same story but are quite dif-
ferent in conceptuality, each with its own integrity. Because Emanuel Tov targets
a much earlier date than we as the aim of text criticism, that is, the sixth century
BCE, he deemphasizes the number of parallel texts among the witnesses.19 I have
elsewhere argued that structure analysis of passages containing variants that have
been otherwise tested as true may reveal quite different concepts lying back of
the two or more witnesses, concepts that support the variants in the different
witnesses where found, but not necessarily in a projected Vorlage or “original.”20
A prime example of such a “true” variant is in the almost universal acceptance
of the Septuagint (and 1QIsaa?) reading K‫ואומר‬K in Isa 40:6. However, structure
analyses of Isa 40:1 – 11 in MT (Qumran?) and in the Septuagint indicate two
quite different concepts of what is going in the Isa 40 text. It is a good example
of disregarding the integrity of the two witnesses in order to pillage one to cor-
rect the other. The MT presents itself as minutes of a meeting of the heavenly
council with reports about what was said (40:3 and 6) in council in response to
the commission given by God to the council (40:1 – 2), followed by specific com-
mands to a single member (40:9). In that context, MT Isa 40:6 clearly reports that
after one voice had cried, “Proclaim,” another voice asked what he should pro-
claim. The Septuagint, on the other hand, reports a totally different scene in
which the deity addresses priests in 40:2, one of whom apparently speaks up in
the first person in 40:6. Modern scholarship brings to Isa 40 the modern critical
knowledge that this is where the Second Isaiah begins, a prophet distinct from
the First Isaiah; therefore, he should have a personal prophetic “call” passage
recorded as well.21 Some scholars who otherwise follow the work of Frank M.
Cross in seeing in Isa 40:1 – 8( – 11) a report of a meeting of the heavenly council,
still see within it, as in Isa 6:1 – 13, a “prophetic call” to the exilic prophet that
scholarship since the late eighteenth century has come to call the Second Isaiah.22
But neither MT nor Septuagint, in and of itself, supports such a concept. This
has led other scholars to deny that a call passage is even hinted at within the
report of the heavenly council deliberations of Isa 40.23 Christopher Seitz has
offered the most probing study of Isa 40:1 – 11 to date, reading it in the full con-
19
Tov, Textual Criticism, 313 – 49.
20
Sanders, “Stability and Fluidity,” esp. 211 ff., where I also argue for a pluriform Bible.
Similar arguments have recently been advanced by others: Barthélemy, “L’enchevêtrement de
l’histoire textuelle,” 39; Aejmelaeus, “Translation Technique,” 30 – 31.
21
See Habel, “Form and Significance of the Call Narratives,” esp. 314 – 16.
22
Cross, “Council of Yahweh in Second Isaiah,” following Rowley, “Council of Yahweh”;
Westermann, Isaiah 40 – 66, 32; Westermann, Sprache und Struktur, 82 – 84; Clifford, Fair Spoken
and Persuading, 71 – 76; Melugin, Formation of Isaiah 40 – 55, 84 – 86.
23
See Vincent, “Jesaja 40,1 – 8”; Petersen, Late Israelite Prophecy, 20; Ackroyd, “Isa-
iah 36 – 39,” 6, translates 40:6b in acceptable British idiom, “And one said, ‘What should one
cry?’”
text of the sixty-six chapters of the book of Isaiah, and in a redactional-critical

mode without resorting to pre-critical views.24
An equally critical probe with structure analysis of Isa 40:1 – 11 in the Septua-
gint and Qumran (1QIsaa) witnesses shows that those texts also exhibit concepts
of what their tradents thought was going on in the text. The crux reading in
1QIsaa 40:6, K‫ואומרה‬K, is indeterminate. It can be read like the Septuagint at that
point, “And I said.”25 Or it can be read in a postexilic mode as a feminine singu-
lar participle referring appositionally to the herald, Zion or Jerusalem (40:9).26 A
structure analysis of the Qumran witness, whether including only the first scribal
hand at vv. 7 – 8, or including the insertion by the second hand that brought it into
agreement with the MT at that point, would indicate no difference in concept
from that perceived in the MT, except for how one reads the indeterminate K‫ואומרה‬
K in 40:6.
These observations do not necessarily invalidate a text-critical judgment that
a scribal error has occurred in the MT reading. But they place burdens of proof
on arguments no one has yet convincingly advanced: and that is, first, how the
MT “error” came about, and, more importantly, second, why the concept lying
back of the MT text should be cast aside in emending the text on the basis of
other witnesses exhibiting their own conceptualities. Since the Qumran witness
is indeterminate, the emendation basically rests on the Septuagint reading in a
context that deserves to be heard in its own right before it, too, is pillaged and
then set aside.
There are many passages in the Bible, not just those usually listed,27 that,
when probed carefully, exhibit different understandings of what was going on in
the passage. This does not necessarily mean that the different witnesses (usually
MT, LXX, and Qumran) had different Vorlagen. On the contrary, the likelihood
is that the ancient tradents did what modern ones do: they transmitted what they
and their communities understood the passage was about and chose the appro-
priate language to convey it. Not until the stabilization process was basically
accomplished by the beginning of the second century of the common era did tra-
dents intertextually restrain themselves to the point of accurate copying without
regard to story line.28
24
Seitz, “Divine Council,” shows clearly how the MT reports a meeting of the heavenly
council without a call narrative in ch. 40, but fails to probe what is going on in the Septuagint
account. It would have strengthened his case. Exemplary of current studies of the book of Isa-
iah as a whole by two former students are Sweeney, Isaiah 1 – 4, and Carr, “Reaching for Unity
in Isaiah.”
25
With Kutscher, Language and Linguistic Background, 39, 326, 357, and Qimron, Hebrew
of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 44.
26
D. McBride, following Petersen, Late Israelite Prophecy, 20. Both Cross and Westermann
also see the feminine participles in 40:9 as appositional with Zion or Jerusalem as the herald.
27
Ulrich, “Double Literary Editions,” 113 – 14; and Tov, Textual Criticism, 316 ff.
28
Sanders, “From Sacred Story.”
Hermeneutics
Since my thesis, in postmodern terms, is that one’s understanding of the bibli-

cal text, or of a passage within it, is affected by the hermeneutics brought to it,
I feel obligated to be clear about my own. When Jerome pursued his regard for
Hebraica veritas he created a situation that has yet to be resolved. When the
Reformers then accepted his position, and tried to validate the idea of sola Scrip-
tura, the situation became exacerbated. As long as there was the magisterium and
tradition of the church to fall back on, the situation was quite tolerable. When
that was removed, for Protestants, all sorts of anomalies were created. This was
apparently the reason a person like Isaac de La Peyrère reverted to Catholicism
after having converted to Protestantism. The Western churches were left with a
text based principally on the Hebrew, but with an order of books based vaguely
on Septuagint tradition, creating a section called the Apocrypha.
The MT order of books made sense for Judaism. There was a theological his-
tory that went from creation in Genesis to the failures of the United Kingdom,
the Northern Kingdom, then the Southern Kingdom by the close of 2 Kings.
The story that started with two promises to Abram and Sarai saw them glori-
ously fulfilled by 1 Kgs 10, after which everything went downhill to complete
defeat by 2 Kgs 25. As the great anthems of the Torah (Exod 15 and Deut 32)
declaim, and as the Song of Hannah stresses (1 Sam 2), God is the God of risings
and fallings, what humans call success and what they call failure, what they call
good and what they call bad. The one really stable part of the Bible in terms of
sequence of books, Genesis to 2 Kings, is a radical presentation of that view of
Reality. Then follow the Prophets, the books of the Three and the Book of the
Twelve, to explain the (hi)story just recited. (1) It is not God who let us down;
(2) it is we who let God down by all sorts of idolatry; (3) God sent prophets early
and late to tell us how it really is in the divine economy; and (4) we have another
chance if in exile we take it all to heart that this is indeed the case as stressed in
Deut 29 – 33 and finally in most of the prophetic books themselves.29 Thereupon
follows Chronicles as the first book of the Ketuvim, with its new, optimistic atti-
tude about the opportunities for individual responsibility in the New Israel, or
Judaism. Chronicles presents a revisionist history that offers hope for obedience
and repentance, even the repentance of a Manasseh who was the scapegoat in
the Deuteronomic history (2 Chron 33:12 – 13; see Prayer of Manasseh in some
Apocrypha).30 Not only does it, in contrast to Kings, end on the optimistic note
of the edict by Cyrus, thus stressing the continuing covenant relationship with
the people corporately, it also suggests that some of the individual characters in
the earlier drama were not totally without redeeming qualities. The Psalter then
follows Chronicles with its opening declaration that the person whose delight is
29
See Sanders, “Deuteronomy,” esp. 91.
30
See Sanders, introduction and notes to the “Prayer of Manasseh.”
in Torah and not in the way of the wicked is blessed indeed.31 Jubilees and Sirach
move even further in the direction of emphasis following Ezek 18 on individual
responsibility.
A Jew is called to the service of God, and Judaism is the expression of that
service. A major tenet of Judaism became the belief that it is possible to obey and
please God, even though the primary history in Genesis to Kings (and eventually
a theologian from Tarsus) leaves the clear impression that none was righteous,
no not one. This was a new day; there was a new chance to be God’s people. The
old Abram-Sarai promises were still operative, but now God’s Israel had had its
heart circumcised by God (Deut 30:6), effecting what the people had not been
able to do themselves despite prophetic pleas to do so (Jer 4:4; Deut 10:16). God,
as great physician, through the pain and adversity wrought by the power flows
of the eighth to sixth centuries BCE, conducted open-heart surgery on the peo-
ple corporately (Jer 30:12 – 17; 31:33; Ezek 36:26 – 27; cf. Exod 15:26). This mode
of signifying the defeat and the suffering of the people corporately was accom-
panied by the new possibility of individual responsibility (Jer 31:29; Ezek 18).
After the Psalter usually comes the book of Job, which stands as a monument
to the poet’s exposure and refutation of the friends’ attempts to apply the old
prophetic principles of corporate responsibility to an individual’s suffering. And
then comes Proverbs, with its many suggestions as to how to live under One
God in all those nooks and crannies of life unaddressed in the laws of Torah. And
then before the upbeat “new history” is resumed at the end of the codex in Dan-
iel and Ezra – Nehemiah, in which individual responsibility within the corporate
is demonstrated dramatically, there are the five scrolls to be read at the special
feasts and a fast, that relate the faith of individuals, and of the people as a whole,
to the joys and sorrows of existence under One God. When the tripartite canon
as indicated by the great Tiberian MSS became stabilized, it all cohered and made
a clear statement about the nature of Judaism as understood by surviving Phar-
isaic-rabbinic Jews.32
The Septuagint, according to most surviving codices, exhibits quite a different
understanding of the Bible’s theological history. Instead of the prophetic corpus
coming after the Deuteronomic history, where it gives case after case history
of God’s having indeed sent prophets to tell the people well in advance what
the divine economy was all about, most Septuagint MSS put Chronicles, Esdras,
Ezra – Nehemiah, Esther, Judith, Tobit, and the Books of Maccabees right after
Kings. The Septuagint thus presents a theological history that goes from creation
through to the Hellenistic period just before Roman domination. And it was
to that long stretch of theological history that the early church understood the
31
While in some LXX MSS the Psalter at least follows close on Chronicles after Ezra – Ne-
hemiah, the sequence is entirely lost in most Christian Bibles, and of course, finally also in the
Baba Bathra 14b listing, hence the Second Rabbinic Bible. In the NRSV’s drive to use gender-in-
clusive language for humans it obscured the celebration of individual responsibility in Ps 1.
32
See the not dissimilar sketch by Rofé, “Nomistic Correction.” Cf. Morgan, Between Text
and Community.
Gospels, Acts, and Epistles to be attached.33 Whereas the distinct section called
Ketuvim in the basic MT order provided a canonical base for the New Israel
Judaism to live lives of obedience in stasis whether in Palestine or diaspora, the
Septuagint, on the contrary, was still presenting God as very active on the inter-
national scene, very much as God had been since creation in the biblical story.
The Prophets were placed after the Psalms and various types of wisdom books to
explain how God signifies history and how God’s people can live through it and
still have hope. The function of the very same books of the Bible became quite
different in the different canonical contexts as rather dramatically is the case with
the differing placements of Daniel.34
Augustine did well to ask his friend, Jerome, why he went to such pains as
he did to provide a Latin text of the Bible based on the (proto-MT) Hebrew
text in the MSS of his rabbinic tutor in Bethlehem. The Holy Spirit, Augustine
claimed, had used the Septuagint throughout the history of the church and had
done quite well thank you. But Jerome did indeed provide the church a direct
translation from the Hebrew, which eventually replaced the Vetus Latina based
on the Septuagint. Of course, Jerome knew that he would have to retain certain
familiar phrases and passages to gain acceptance. Clearly the largely independent
integrity of books such as Samuel, Jeremiah, Esther, and Proverbs, as well as por-
tions of other books, needs to be respected. I suspect that when further study is
done we shall see the Greek forms of these books casting their light on a fuller
Septuagint context than has heretofore been seen.
And that again puts the focus on hermeneutics. Jesus’ answer to the expert’s
question in Luke 10:26 about how to inherit eternal life is to the point; the
answer was a double question: “What is written in Torah, and how do you read
it?” One selects the pertinent passage to the issue at hand, but then it is a ques-
tion of the hermeneutics by which one reads the selected passage. While the Pen-
tateuch shares in part the form of a biography of Moses, it is caught up into a
much larger theological history whether in its MT guise or its Septuagint ver-
sion, just as what looks like a biography of Jesus is caught up into a genre called
“gospel.” Judaism set the Pentateuch apart as Torah, and it has been the Written
Torah for Judaism ever since. Whether the Pentateuch is viewed as Torah, or as
the beginning of a longer Deuteronomic theological history, or an even longer
Septuagint “history,” the various human biographies are caught up into some-
thing much larger than themselves.
Hermeneutically it makes a difference which way one reads the Pentateuch: as
a collection of laws embedded in a narrative, or as a narrative with laws contained
33
What order of books (scrolls) the pre-Christian Greek versions had we may possibly
never know. Since the church preserved the LXX, and its basic order in extant LXX MSS served
the church so well, it is likely that it is a result of early Christian interest. See Swartley, Israel’s
Scripture Traditions.
34
See Talmon, “Oral Tradition.” Talmon makes the very engaging point that while com-
parison of the Gospels with rabbinic literature is questionable, comparison with other forms of
Judaism, as represented in the Judean Desert Scrolls, may be very fruitful.
in it.35 The concept one has in mind of what a text is and does makes a difference
in how one makes text-critical decisions. Luther counseled that where there are
multivalencies one should choose the text that leads to the res, or the gospel as
Luther understood it. The translator’s choice of words, then, is inevitably deter-
mined by the translator’s hermeneutics, or understanding of what the text is and
conveys.
Two Recent Publications
The year 1992 saw the publication of two major contributions to First Testa-
ment text criticism, Emanuel Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, and
Dominique Barthélemy’s Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament, vol. 3. The
former is the result of years of text-critical study by one of the most respected
and widely read scholars in the field. The latter is the third in a projected set of
five volumes of which Barthélemy is author, based on the work done by the UBS
HOTTP since 1969. The latter is the result not only of our committee but of the
mind of one of the most arresting geniuses in the field of text criticism. The latter
resonates well with the concepts and method of the HUBP; the former reflects
less of Tov’s early roots of study at Hebrew University in favor of his later work
at Harvard. The two move in quite distinct directions in terms of concept and
method.
Tov’s book is a model for how to present some of the best of recent work in
text criticism. It can be read with great profit by a beginning university student
and by the most seasoned text critic. It is clear and lucid, and moves through the
basics of text criticism to the more complex aspects of it. There are constant very
helpful cross-references throughout the book to earlier or later portions that
explain terms and concepts.
Tov, however, does not wrestle seriously with the interrelation between text
and canon, nor indeed with most of what is presented and argued in Critique tex-
tuelle.36 While Barthélemy is cited in bibliographies to almost every section, large
35
See Sanders, Review of The Garments of Torah. Fishbane claims that the theophany on
Sinai is that which gives authority to the whole of Torah. My question is why he selects that par-
ticular theophany as the authorizing moment. Why not the pastoral call on Abraham and Sarah
in Gen 12? For Christians, the Torah is the beginning of a wondrous gospel story that reaches its
climax in God’s work in Christ. For Jews, it is the beginning of a wondrous halakic traditioning
process that continues in Oral Law, responsa, etc., all celebrations of the belief that it is possible
to obey and to please God. See Sanders, “Torah and Christ.” Recognition of this basic difference
in hermeneutics in reading the same text provides a firm basis for interfaith dialogue; again, see
Sanders, “lntertextuality and Dialogue.”
36
There seemed to be more recognition of the importance of understanding the text as
canon in Tov’s earlier work, such as “Original Shape of the Biblical Text,” 355 – 57; even so, like
Cross, he defends in all his work the position of de Lagarde and therefore argues strongly for
making the attempt to recover where possible the single textual form that stood at the beginning
of textual transmission (not, of course, “the” original). See his carefully wrought discussion of
the development of the biblical text, Tov, Textual Criticism, 187 – 97 (“A New Description”), for
how he understands text as canon.
and small, of the book, there is precious little dialogue with his or our position.
Tov ignores the implications of the history of transmission of the text espoused
by both the HUBP and the HOTTP, but instead, following the Albright / Cross
school, rests discussions of the task and aim of text criticism on the old debate
between Kahle and de Lagarde that informed the field before the discovery of the
Judean Desert Scrolls. In doing so he departs from most text critics in making the
“aim” for establishing the critically most responsible text of a majority of bibli-
cal books the fourth- to third-century BCE stage, and argues instead for the aim
being the sixth century BCE in many cases.
Doing so permits Tov to admit of, or allow evaluations of, the historical worth
of certain texts to influence his text-critical decisions, a continuing interest of the
Albright / Cross school. Such a position causes Tov to brush aside certain criti-
cisms and to fail to dialogue seriously with differing positions, such as those of
the HOTTP and even the HUBP. As judicious as most presentations in Tov’s
book are, there is a general lack of wrestling with those positions. To illustrate
the importance of recognizing the issue of hermeneutics of text criticism and
translation, it might be well to conclude with a comparison of Tov’s treatment of
an important text-critical problem, with ours.
The problem is in the last verse of 1 Sam 10 and the beginning of 1 Sam 11.
“The original, longer text of 1 Samuel 11 is probably preserved in 4QSama, while
the text of the MT, Aramaic, Theodotion and Vulgate is based on a scribal error,
the omission of an entire section. According to this view, 4QSama preserves not
an early stage in the growth of the book but what appears to be the original
text, which was subsequently corrupted in the MT, Aramaic, Theodotion and
Vulgate.”37 The Qumran witness has about five and a half lines found nowhere
else, but they appear to explain what appears to be an abruptness in the MT and
daughters. The MT (10:27 – 11:1) reads, “But some ne’er-do-wells asked, ‘How
can this one save us?’ and they reviled him (Saul) and did not bring him a gift;
but the latter made like he did not hear. Then Nahash, the Ammonite, went up
and encamped at Yabesh Gilead . . .” The Septuagint reads, “But some ne’er-do-
wells asked, ‘How can this one save us?’ and they reviled him and brought him
no gifts. And it came to pass about a month later that Naas the Ammonite went
up and encamped against Yabis Galaad . . .”
The plus in 4QSama provides an introduction to Nahash’s proposal of goug-
ing out the right eyes of all the able-bodied men of Yabesh Gilead as a condi-
tion of a treaty that would spare Yabesh Gilead from probable total destruction
(11:2). The introduction says Nahash had already gouged out the right eyes of
the children of Gad and the children of Reuben, thus striking terror in all the
children of Israel beyond the Jordan who still had their right eyes, namely seven
thousand who had fled the Ammonites and found refuge in Yabesh Gilead. It
goes on to say, presumably in 11:1, that “About a month later” Nahash went
up and besieged Yabesh-Gilead . . .” What had seemed too brutal a condition for
37
Tov, Textual Criticism, 342.
the proposed treaty between Nahash and the people of Yabesh Gilead now has
a fitting explanation in that it was a policy of Nahash’s toward archenemies or
rebels, apparently a punishment well known from ancient documents. Nahash
thus demands the same treatment for the men of Yabesh Gilead who had earlier
escaped. Tov then gives four data that indicate the originality of the 4Q plus: (1) it
was apparently known to Josephus as were some other 4Q Sam texts; (2) the 4Q
text introduces Nahash in a more typical and formal manner than MT, or any
other witness; (3) the 4Q text eliminates the “contextually difficult” phrase at the
very end of 10:27 relating Saul’s pretending not to hear the taunts and reviling of
the “ne’er-do-wells” by having a graphically similar expression serve as the first
words of 11:1, “About a month later,” very similar to the Septuagint reading;
(4) 4QSama reflects a reliable text generally while MT Samuel has many corrup-
tions generally. Tov denies that the 4Q plus could be composed out of similar
passages elsewhere, a phenomenon that was common in early Jewish literature.38
The 4Q plus would have been accidentally omitted at a very early stage since it is
preserved in only one witness. Its omission would have been accidental.
Critique textuelle vol. 1 was published in 1982. The problem of 1 Sam 10:27 –
11:1 is dealt with in six tightly composed pages. The presentation starts as usual
with the modern history of the problem and the provenance of variants and con-
jectures. Cappellus was the first to suggest that K‫כמחדש‬K was what the Septuagint
had read instead of K‫כמחריש‬K of MT. This was picked up by Ewald. Graetz ridiculed
the conjecture as a grammatical monster. Driver felt it justified by a similar
expression in Gen 38:24, but this has been seriously questioned. H. P. Smith con-
jectured K‫כמו חדש‬K, the reading in 4Q. But Budde had objected to Smith’s conjecture
since it does not conform to Hebrew prose Neh 9:11 being a quotation of
Exod 15:5, and the phrase in Gen 19:15 being conjunctival. F. M. Cross calls the
expression archaic, where K‫כמחדש‬K was paraphrased and “modernized” in 4Q to K‫כמו‬
‫חדש‬K. Cross cites km in Ugaritic as often written with the noun that follows with-
out word divider, but gives no example.39 Cyrus Gordon cites a number of exam-
ples in Ugaritic where it is linked to pronominal suffixes. But when it precedes a
noun it is regularly separated by a divider. There is one example without a divider
with a noun, but it is probably a scribal error. These observations make it diffi-
cult to accept Cross’s affirmation on the face of it; his citation of Gen 38:24 as the
only example in the Hebrew Bible has its own problems.
It is uncertain whether Josephus (Ant. 6.68) read a text with the word as it is
in 4Q or in the Septuagint. But all three read it as the beginning of 11:1 rather
than the end of 10:27. Josephus apparently also knew of the introduction offered
in 4Q, but the latter, not Josephus, includes information about the 7000 escaping
to Yabesh. All four witnesses pick up with 11:1, but Josephus places the intro-
ductory material (4Q plus) between Kʹ‫ויהי כ‬K and Kʹ‫ויעל נ‬K, whereas 4Q places it before
the first of the two elements. Actually then, all four of the witnesses have distinc-
38
Rofé, “Acts of Nahash,” sees the 4Q plus as a relatively late midrashic composition.
39
Cross, “Ammonite Oppression.” Cross’s and Tov’s interest in the historical value of the
text is clear. But see Pisano, Additions or Omissions, 91 – 98.
tive and different elements. Cross thinks that 4Q is the primitive witness, and
that Josephus’s Vorlage had a double accident, a vertical dittography in which K‫ויהי‬
‫כמחדש‬K occurred before the 4Q plus, and a homoeoteleuton (homoeoarchton?)
resulting from the first accident. Josephus would have been personally responsi-
ble for putting the phrase before the plus or introductory material. This seems to
be quite a complicated theory to explain how to move from the 4Q text to Jose-
phus. Cross does not offer an explanation as to why the MT and G lack the plus.
Ulrich has explained that the Old Greek had the plus, which was then excised
under influence of the MT, purely a conjecture.40 Kyle McCarter explains the
lack as an extraordinary case of scribal inadvertence; there would have been no
haplography, nothing in the text would occasion it. The scribe simply skipped a
paragraph.41
The Cross/Ulrich/McCarter/Tov hypothesis could be argued thus: The Old
Greek would have had the plus, followed by the archaic expression ‫ל‬K ‫ויהי כמחדש ויע‬K
:K‫יבש גלעד‬K. 4Q would have modernized the crucial phrase to K‫ויהי כמו חדש‬K. Josephus
somehow acquired the 4Q plus mutilation after a dittography, and then arbi-
trarily displaced the element in the Greek account that had occasioned the dit-
tography. In the pre-masoretic text, the whole introductory plus of 4Q preceding
the K‫ויהי כמחדש‬K would have been extirpated by inadvertence, without any pretext
of a textual accident or clear motive for the extirpation. All the actually extant
Greek witnesses derive from a Greek textual situation in which the extirpation
had taken place, based on the pre-masoretic text. Finally, the proto-masoretic
text would have undergone a corruption from K‫כמחדש‬K to K‫כמחריש‬K and a transfer of
this word (with its preceding phrase) to the end of the preceding verse. This cor-
rupt form would have penetrated as a doublet into the Antiochian recension
of G.
Cross views 1 Sam 11:1 – 11 as an independent narrative that has as motive the
installation of the monarchy at Gilgal. McCarter well notes that the narrative is
bracketed by textual flags (10:16 – 27a and 11:12 – 15) bearing on the reaction of
the people to the choice of Saul as king. What we have is an old narrative inte-
grated by Deuteronomic redaction into its account. Cross then underscores two
arguments in favor of the “originality” of the introductory plus attested by 4Q
and by Josephus. (1) There is no parenetic or theological motive involved, just
history: Nahash threatened the folk of Yabesh because they had given refuge to
7000 fugitives; (2) the style of the introductory plus accords with the Deutero-
nomic historian’s style, and he gives three expressions of the sort.
The response of the committee, enhanced by Barthélemy’s own searches, was
as follows. First Samuel 11:2b gives Nahash’s motive as a gratuitous threat
designed to put fear into all Israel. Adding a story about Gad and Reuben would
not have increased the threat. Judges 10:8, 17, and 11:4 had already stressed the
aggressive attitude of the Ammonites toward Gilead. It is quite possible that
Nahash arrogated to himself the right to punish Yabesh, which had earlier
40
Ulrich, Qumran Text of Samuel and Josephus, 169 – 70. G indicates the Old Greek text.
41
McCarter, 1 Samuel, 202.
belonged to the Ammonites. These may be the ties uniting Yabesh to Benjamin
(Judg 21:8 – 12) that drove Nahash to choose Yabesh as ideal for targeting a threat
generally to all Israel. Cross’s second argument could be turned the other way
around; the 4Q plus could have been added by a later editor. Tov stresses Deu-
teronomic amplifications that characterize Edition II of Jeremiah (MT). Since
current criticism has the tendency to see multiple redactional levels in the Deu-
teronomic history, nothing would hinder seeing the introductory plus of 4Q as
added even after MT, and G. That tradent simply would have wanted to facilitate
the passage from ch. 10 to ch. 11. Such Deuteronomic amplifications are done in
the style of what was already there. The late and unstable character of the gloss
could, therefore, be seen attested by two witnesses who differ on its point of
insertion. G would have put K‫כמחדש‬K from the end of ch. 10 to the beginning of
ch. 11 to provide a smoother transition.42
There are five arguments in favor of the MT. (1) C. F. Keil stressed the syntac-
tic relations between 10:26ab and 27ab: they form contrasting statements about
loyalty to Saul of most of the army but the disdain of the ne’er-do-wells. (2) The
expression Kʹ‫היה כ‬K before a participle, or a nomen agentis, usually indicates a
description of a manner or mode of action of the subject person. A number of
examples can be given in which the word introduced by kaf does not indicate an
object of comparison but the formal mode of the action (Exod 22:24; Hos 5:10;
Job 24:14; Hos 11:4). (3) The hiphil of K‫חרש‬K most often has the meaning of “con-
trol oneself, keep silence” (2 Sam 13:20; 2 Kgs 18:36 = Isa 36:21; Isa 42:14;
Jer 4:19; Ps 32:3; 50:21; Prov 11:12; 17:28). This meaning is quite in place here:
“And when the ne’er-do-wells said, ‘How can this guy save us?’ and when they
showed him their contempt in not bringing him a present, he conducted himself
as one who keeps silent.” (4) Saul then in 11:12 – 13 complements the disdain of
his silence by refusing to take vengeance on the ne’er-do-wells; he would be king
of all the people, even pre-election opponents, when installed. The theme of sal-
vation of all Israel from the aggressiveness and enmity of Ammon is the link
between the two passages, 10:17 – 27a and 11:12 – 14. Scholars have seen the hand
of the Deuteronomists in the two passages. The redactor who inserted 11:1 – 11 in
the course of his account interpreted it as a response to those who had doubted
Saul’s ability to save them. And it was by Saul that Yahweh effected K‫תשועה‬K (11:13)
in Israel. His detractors have been confounded. (5) The principal argument in
favor of the MT, finally, is in its arresting heterogeneity. G facilitated the account
somewhat; then 4Q and Josephus went further in the same direction. With recent
German exegetes (Rehm, Hertzberg, Revidierte Lutherbibel 1967, Stoebe [1973],
and Die Bibel, Einheitsübersetzung [1980])43 the committee decided rather deci-
sively that MT should be retained.
I use this as an example, not only because of the fact that Tov nowhere in his
otherwise very impressive book takes seriously what the UBS HOTTP commit-
42
See Goshen-Gottstein, “Book of Samuel.”
43
Rehm, Die Bücher Samuel; Hertzberg, Die Samuelbücher; Stoebe, Das erste Buch Sam-
uelis, etc.
tee and Barthélemy in Critique textuelle have done, but also because the herme-
neutic operative in his concept of text criticism determines his choices as well as
his view of the basic aim of the discipline. In postmodern terms, the latter com-
ment must be made of all positions, including one’s own.44 Tov, however, does
not openly wrestle with it, or clearly state his hermeneutical position vis-à-vis
other positions, even though it emerges as evident in his concern for the histori-
cal value of the biblical text and the effect that has on the views he holds and the
decisions he makes. Tov’s is a very important contribution to the history of text
criticism in this century. It represents in effect a compromise between the views
of the HUBP and of the Albright / Cross school. It will be influential throughout
the discipline for decades to come, even though it virtually ignores other posi-
tions, as well as the possibility that a paradigm shift is currently taking place in
the history of the concept, and hence the hermeneutics of text criticism.
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Wayne A. Meeks et al., 1746 – 48. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993. rev. ed. Edited by
Harold W. Attridge et al, 1568–70. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.
Sanders, James A. Review of The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics, by
Michael A. Fishbane. ThTo 47, no. 4 (1991) 433 – 35.
Sanders, James A. “Stability and Fluidity in Text and Canon.” In Tradition of the Text:
Studies Offered to Dominique Barthélemy in Celebration of His 70th Birthday, edited
by Gerard J. Norton and Stephen Pisano, 203 – 17. OBO 109. Fribourg: Presses univer-
sitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991.
Sanders, James A. “The Task of Text Criticism.” In Problems in Biblical Theology: Essays
in Honor of Rolf Knierim, edited by Henry Sun and Keith L. Eades, 315 – 27. Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.
Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29. Re-
printed in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia:
Fortress 1987.
Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR:
Cascade, 2005.]
Sanders, James A. “Torah and Christ.” Int 29 (1975) 372 – 90. Reprinted in From Sacred
Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 41 – 60. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.
Seitz, Christopher R. “The Divine Council: Temporal Transition and New Prophecy in
the Book of Isaiah.” JBL 109 (1990) 229 – 47.
Spinoza, Baruch. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Edited by Günter Gawlick and Fried-
rich Niewöhner. Opera, Werke lateinisch und deutsch 1. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1979.
Stoebe, H. J. Das erste Buch Samuelis. Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1973.
Swartley, Willard M. Israel’s Scripture Traditions and the Synoptic Gospels. Peabody, MA:
Hendrickson, 1994.
Sweeney, Marvin A. Isaiah 1 – 4 and the Post-Exilic Understanding of the Isaianic Tradi-
tion. BZAW 171. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988.
Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Aspects of the Textual Transmission of the Bible in the Light of the
Qumran Manuscripts.” Textus 4 (1964) 95 – 132. Reprinted in Qumran and the History
of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 226 – 63. Cam-
bridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Old Testament Text.” In The Cambridge History of the Bible.
Vol. 1, From the Beginnings to Jerome, edited by Peter R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans,
159 – 99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Pp. 164 – 70 reprinted in Qum-
ran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu
Talmon, 8 – 12. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Judaism, or the Heard
and the Seen Word in Judaism of the Second Temple Period.” In Jesus and the Oral
Gospel Tradition, edited by Henry Wansbrough, 121 – 58. JSNTSup 64. Sheffield: JSOT,
1991.
Tov, Emanuel, ed. The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever (8HevXIIgr).
DJD 8. Oxford: Clarendon 1990. ˙ ˙
Tov, Emanuel. “The Original Shape of the Biblical Text.” In Congress Volume: Leuven
1989, edited by John A. Emerton, 345 – 59. VTSup 43. Leiden: Brill, 1991.
Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992.
Determining the Form to be Translated.” In Perspectives on the Hebrew Bible: Essays
in Honor of Walter J. Harrelson, edited by James L. Crenshaw, 101 – 16. Macon, GA:
Ulrich, Eugene C. The Qumran Text of Samuel and Josephus. Atlanta: Scholars, 1978.
Vincent, Jean M. “Jesaja 40,1 – 8: Berufungsbericht des Propheten Deuterojesajas?” In Stu-
dien zur literarischen Eigenart und zur Heimat von Jesaja, Kap. 40 – 55, by Jean M.
Vincent, 197 – 250. BBET 5. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1977.
Westermann, Claus. Isaiah 40 – 66. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969.
Westermann, Claus. Sprache und Struktur der Prophetie Deuterojesajas. Stuttgart: Calwer,
1981.
Yeivin, Israel. Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah. Translated and edited by Ernest J.
Revell. Atlanta: Scholars, 1980.
4
Text and Canon: Concepts and Method
Introduction (1987)
The following chapter was delivered as the presidential address at the annual
meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) that convened in New Orle-
ans in November 1978. In it I tried to pull together my two major interests in an
attempt to describe how I understood them to relate to each other, and how the
two disciplines – study of texts and versions and study of the Bible as canon –
had changed over the course of the previous twelve years. I turned fifty-one
during the conference and was attending my twenty-fourth annual meeting of
the society, but I felt as excited about the occasion as I had when, exactly seven-
teen years earlier, I unrolled the large Psalms Scroll from Qumran Cave 11! The
earlier experience opened up a treasure of raw primary material; this one would
hopefully provide an evaluation of their value in these two areas.
Both fields, text and canon study of the OT, have changed considerably since
the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I wanted both to explain those changes
and to celebrate them. I wanted to share my view that there had come a much
earlier change in ontology of canon in the two centuries prior to the Common
Era that would explain many phenomena in both Judaism and Christianity.
Introduction (1979)
Study of text and canon of the OT has taken on new life and direction over the
past twenty-five years, and especially in the last ten (1968 – 78). Concepts and
method for study of text and canon have changed rather dramatically in that
time. Manuscript discoveries have contributed to rephrasing of old questions as
well as to discovery of new questions. We are now far enough into the history
of modern biblical criticism that we are able, with or without the tools of the
sociology of knowledge, to see with some clarity why earlier generations of bib-
lical students asked certain questions and viewed the evidence in certain lights,
but failed to ask other questions, nor saw even the evidence they already had in
ways we now have of looking at it. To make such an observation is not to belittle
the work of our predecessors; it is rather to try to account for what is happening
to us now. We are in quite a new day in both fields, and I have suggested that
they might each be grouped with other biblical disciplines rather than together.1

1
See Sanders, Torah and Canon, ix.
I would like instead to argue now that they still belong together in certain aspects
of biblical study, and in fact, study of one throws considerable light on the other
in ways perhaps not thought of when they were paired in introductory hand-
books or lectures as perhaps the most boring class or chapter to endure. Schol-
arship, in order to meet its own needs, had made of textual criticism a first stage
of literary criticism, and had made of study of canon a final stage of literary
criticism. Text criticism was either something to settle before getting on with the
important business of original source, provenance, and shape of a passage, or was
used to reflect the latter; and study of canon was viewed as the last stage in a lit-
erary history of how the larger literary units of the Bible (discrete books thereof)
got together in a given order.
The very ground of concept in OT text criticism, the history of transmission of

the text, has recently had to be rewritten,2 and this has been due in large mea-
sure to new viewpoints gained from study of the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls, of
provenance from Qumran south to Masada. The first stage of revision of OT
text history due to the scrolls came in the mid-1950s with the work of Moshe
Greenberg, who argued convincingly from study of the early publications of
biblical texts among the scrolls that a process of stabilization of biblical texts
took place with increasing intensity between the first centuries BCE and CE, a
process largely complete by the beginning of the second century CE.3 The work
of M. Goshen-Gottstein, S. Talmon, F. M. Cross, and D. Barthélemy on the same
and other texts supported the thesis.4 But it received its greatest boost in 1963
from the work of Barthélemy on the Greek Dodecapropheton, Les devanciers
d’Aquila: the more or less literalist translations of Theodotion and Aquila had
apparently had antecedents in a process extending back into the first century
BCE.5 The gathering data suggested to Cross a theory of three text families.6
One was now able to range the newly discovered biblical texts on a spectrum
from fluid to fixed, placing the earliest Qumran fragments at one end and the
biblical texts from Murabbaʿat, Hever, and Masada at the other. Whether there
were three basic local families of ˙texts or there were numerous types of texts,7 it
2
Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of.” See the unabridged version of his original French
typescript in Barthélemy, Études, 341 – 64.
3
Greenberg, “Stabilization of the Text.”
4
The pertinent essays by these four scholars are conveniently published together in Cross
and Talmon, Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text.
5
Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila.
6
First expounded by Cross in “History of the Biblical Text”; see also the other essays by
Cross in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, especially “Evolution of a Theory of
Local Texts,” 306 – 20.
7
For a viable alternative to Cross’s theory, see the incisive essay by Talmon, “Textual Study
of the Bible”; see also the “central stream” theory of Goshen-Gottstein expounded in Isaiah:
Sample Edition.
Text and Canon: Concepts and Method 53
became quite clear that up to and including most of the Herodian period the text
of the Hebrew-Aramaic Bible was relatively fluid.
Running parallel to and congruous with study of the text in this same period
was study of ancient biblical interpretation. Making many of the same obser-
vations as the text critics but studying all the various texts available from the
scrolls as well as many known previously, some students of biblical interpre-
tation formulated new questions and a new sub-discipline that has come to be
called comparative midrash.8 One of the basic interests of the new students of
biblical interpretation in the period was in how the biblical text was adapted
to the needs of the context in which it was cited. Observations about the text’s
adaptability matched what text critics at the same time were calling the text’s flu-
idity. They, too, noticed that the biblical text where it surfaced in documents of
biblical interpretation appeared to become more standard, as it were, in literature
datable to the end of the period in question. By contrast, interpretive literature
from earlier in the period seemed free to remold or reshape a biblical text in light
of the need for which it was cited, not only in allusions to a text but even in cita-
tion of the text. The common body of relatively new observations between the
disciplines, OT text criticism and comparative midrash, was growing. Study of
the one in some ways involved study of the other and a few scholars saw how
each discipline needed the other.9
The next development came about as almost a single-handed achievement. In
1967 Goshen-Gottstein published a pivotal study in which he argued that the
medieval manuscripts collated by Kennicott and de Rossi, and so often cited
by text critics to support textual emendations, were essentially derivative of the
masoretic tradition, often reflecting late ancient and medieval midrashic inter-
pretations of Scripture, and had little value for reconstructing pre-masoretic text
forms.10 The challenge of Goshen-Gottstein’s essay was directed at the very con-
cept of text criticism as understood in biblical criticism until recently.
II
It might be well here to signal the rather radical shift in concept that has taken
place in OT text criticism in the twenty years just past, before turning to look at
the two major projects currently active in the discipline. It has long been agreed
8
The bibliography is already quite extensive: see Miller, “Targum, Midrash,” as well as his
more recent and more general article, “Midrash.” It is generally agreed that there was a new
departure in study of midrash with the work of Renée Bloch, especially her article “Midrash.”
9
See Barthélemy, “Problématique.” This essay evolved directly out of our work together
for ten years on the UBS Hebrew OT Text Project. I agree with his statement of the issues. In
fact, the present paper in a manner presupposes what Barthélemy there says and attempts to go
back behind the issues to the reasons one must state the problematic in that way. I want to ex-
press my profound gratitude to Fr. Barthélemy for reading the manuscript of the present chapter
in first draft form and for his helpful suggestions in doing so. Indeed, I owe the idea of the topic
of the address to a suggestion from him during our session in Freudenstadt in August 1977.
10
Goshen-Gottstein, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts.”
that the task of text criticism is “to establish the text.” This means that it is the
province of text criticism to determine the best readings of texts and versions of
the Bible, whether OT or NT, from which translators render the text into cur-
rent receptor languages. Such may still be said to be the task of text criticism. In
the case of the OT the almost universal practice has been to use a basic single
text such as that of Jacob ben Hayyim, Leningradensis (L), or now Aleppensis
(A). In the case of the NT the common practice since the eighteenth century has
been to establish an eclectic text for printed editions. In the case of the OT, the
apparatus of a critical edition has had the purpose of considering and evaluating
ancient variants in texts and versions and proposing emendations even where
variants did not exist. In the case of the NT, the apparatus of a critical edition has
had the purpose of defending the reading chosen in the eclectic text above, and
also offering conjectures proposed by modern scholars. BHK stands as the great
exemplar of this understanding of text criticism.
In BHK there are two apparatus. The first signals interesting variants in
ancient manuscripts which are not considered superior to the L text. The sec-
ond signals variants and modern scholarly conjectures that the editor considers
more or less preferable to the reading in L. BHS differs to no great degree even
though it (1) has combined these two into one apparatus, and (2) has eliminated
some of the rather private and particular conjectures of scholars of the latter part
of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The really significant difference
between BHK and BHS is in the apparatus keyed to the masorah magna added in
the bottom margin of BHS as well as in the masorah parva in the lateral margins.
All of this is the work of Gérard Weil to which we shall return later.
The essay of Goshen-Gottstein addressed itself to the practice exemplified
and most effectively propagated in BHK – and not greatly changed in BHS – that
of citing a medieval Jewish manuscript to support an emendation arrived at by
scholarly conjecture based on scholarly disciplines outside the province of text
criticism. Because one could felicitously point to one or more manuscripts col-
lated in Kennicott or de Rossi, or lesser-known sources, to support a reading that
had actually been arrived at by other means altogether, such as philology, form
criticism, or poetic analysis (or simply what the ancient author in his or her right
mind ought surely to have said), it was felt that scientific confirmation had been
offered from another quarter, the medieval manuscripts. It was this practice on
which Goshen-Gottstein shone a rather harsh and revealing light.
The light of Goshen-Gottstein’s essay shed its broad beams on the larger con-
cept and practice of text criticism, that of the abuse of text criticism for purposes
of rewriting the Bible. The scholars cited above, and a few others, were arriving
at the same observations as Goshen-Gottstein, but it was he who provided the
clear voice of the time. Text criticism was being called upon to do tasks outside
its competence to do, nor was it doing well the job it should do: it is a consider-
ably more limited discipline than indicated in practice and capable of being far
more precise than most work in it had to that point indicated.
This is the position taken now by the two current, active OT text-critical
projects: the Hebrew University Bible Project and the United Bible Societies’
Hebrew Old Testament Text-Critical Project.11 The former is the older of the
two and was given impetus by the accessibility after 1948 of the Tiberian man-
uscript recovered from the burning of the synagogue in Aleppo, a magnificent
facsimile edition of which was recently published by Magnes Press.12 The recov-
ery of Aleppensis was only an initial impetus. The discovery of the Judean Des-
ert Scrolls and the newer attitudes mentioned above caused the launching of the
project, which has to its credit not only the beautiful facsimile edition of pho-
tographs of A just noted, but also the thirteen (to 1986) volumes of the annual
Textus founded as a forum for the newer work being done as a result of the
new finds, as well as sample editions based on the text of Isaiah of what Gosh-
en-Gottstein and Talmon hope to do in a fully critical edition (with four [five?]
separate apparatus) of the Hebrew Bible using Aleppensis as text.13
The younger of the two projects is that of the UBS committee. This commit-
tee was established by Eugene Nida for the same purpose for which the com-
panion NT committee had been formed and from which we now have a fourth
edition of the UBS Greek New Testament in preparation.14 The OT committee
began its work in 1969 and completed in August 1978 its tenth annual session.
The scope of its work is less ambitious than that of the HUBP: its principal
raison d’être is to offer help to the scores of translation committees sponsored
by or affiliated with the UBS. But, nonetheless, to do such a task well the UBS
committee has had to work just as much in depth on the questions of concepts
and method of text criticism as their colleagues in Jerusalem. The younger com-
mittee has benefited considerably from the published work of the members of
the HUBP, whether in Textus or elsewhere, but it has consistently done its own
work forging its own concepts and method in the light of the new developments.
To its credit are five volumes of preliminary and interim reports of decisions
taken on specific passages. After completion of that preliminary series, it will,
under the direction of Barthélemy, publish five volumes of in-depth discussion
of all the major aspects of text criticism, as a scholarly and scientific discipline
today, as well as detailed reports of the data considered and evaluated in arriv-
ing at its decisions. It plans eventually to publish a successor to BHK and BHS
using L and Weil’s work on the masorot but constructing a totally new apparatus
otherwise [BHQ].
The two projects agree completely on three basic concepts in OT text criti-
cism: (1) limitation of its work to textual options actually extant in ancient texts
11
The HUBP is explained in the introduction to Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition,
11 – 45. The UBS-HOTTP is explained in the introductions to vols. 1 – 5 of Barthélemy, Prelim-
inary and Interim Report; see also Barthélemy, “Problematique,” and Barthélemy, Critique
textuelle. [The Oxford Hebrew Bible had not yet been proposed.]
12
Goshen-Gottstein, Aleppo Codex.
13
Textus is published irregularly by Magnes Press. In addition to Goshen-Gottstein, Isa-
iah: Sample Edition, see also Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah, Parts One and Two, which extends the
“sample” and includes Isa 1:1 – 22:10 (almost).
14
The first edition of the UBS Greek New Testament appeared in 1966. The fourth edition
(1990) will include corrections and modifications in versional evidence and in citations of the
Fathers [5th ed. 2014].
and versions with the concomitant elimination of modern scholarly conjectures

from consideration in text criticism; (2) a four-stage history of the transmission
of the Hebrew text; and (3) a revised and renewed appreciation of the process of
stabilization of the text begun in the first century that culminated in the work of
the Tiberian Masoretes. Each of the three areas is very important to understand-
ing what is going on currently in OT text criticism. I shall attempt to signal the
importance of each before noting less important areas of disagreement between
them. I shall discuss the masoretic phenomenon and its historical antecedents
and background, and finally focus on the second period of the history of text
transmission and some basic concepts necessary to understand the data available
from that period. It is at this last point especially that one must relate basic con-
cepts of text and canon: each illumines the other.
III
The new appreciation of the limits of text criticism goes hand in hand with the
need for the discipline to be considerably more thorough and precise in its work.
Here the HUBP is very clear. This point perhaps characterizes its purpose and
goals better than the others. An apparatus should note only the genuine vari-
ants in ancient texts, versions, and citations, and it should be arranged in such a
way as to exhibit the genuine variants in the several categories of ancient liter-
ature in which they appear. The apparatus should be as neutral as possible and
as thorough and as precise as possible. The importance here of working with
photographic [and digital] images is stressed. For not only the expert but even
a good beginning student who has access to the actual manuscripts, in one form
or another, is able to make significant corrections in the apparatus of both BHK
and BHS. John Wevers’s report in Göttingen on the unreliability of the apparatus
in BHS to LXX Deuteronomy came as no surprise to critics who work with the
manuscripts themselves. HUBP, as can be seen in the facsimile editions of Isaiah
already published, plans to be as exhaustive as possible in reporting variants in
ancient texts, versions, and citations, and it plans to group the variants according
to the ancient literature where found. The apparatus of Biblia Hebraica (up to
BHS) is not only often inaccurate in terms of what is there but cites only what
it deems necessary and does so in such a way as to confuse evaluation of the
sources cited. HUBP will consciously refrain from specific evaluation but will
provide clear information as to the provenance and type of provenance of the
ancient variant. The UBS project agrees in concept with this procedure but will,
in its final scholarly publications, show how significant variants were evaluated
in the terms of the problems treated. HUBP will rest its case simply in the format
of the four apparatus projected.
Our base of agreement here is so strong that I shall not elaborate this point
further, except to stress the need now to have available, on as wide a base as
possible, photographic facsimiles, in one form or another, of the actual ancient
manuscripts. This is the reason, in part, that we have founded in Claremont the
Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center for Preservation and Research. We plan

there eventually to collect and make available, on as wide a base as possible,
microforms of all manuscripts pertinent to biblical study, not only actual biblical
texts but those texts from the Bronze Age to the close of antiquity necessary for
full biblical study. This is admittedly ambitious, and we recognize that; but we
hope that with the cooperation of similar centers in this country and in Europe,
and of our blue-ribbon board of advisors, we will be able to amass an interna-
tionally visible and significant collection. The importance of scholars being able
to do comparative work on as many different texts and versions as possible with-
out reliance on prior apparatus and footnotes is gaining wide recognition.
The importance of working on the ancient manuscripts themselves need not
be belabored. And yet I wish I had the time to tell what I have learned personally
in the past year by simply being able now to compare the facsimile editions of
L and A, thanks to the Maqor and Magnes Presses, the Israeli government, and
Goshen-Gottstein. Working on them, and on similar documents, underscores
the point that critical editions of texts are filtered through the interests and ques-
tions of the editor, no matter how scrupulous or ingenious he or she may have
been. If one’s work gives rise to new questions one must have the original to turn
to, to seek the answers; and turning to them gives rise to more questions. Gosh-
en-Gottstein, Weil, and others had written many important things about A, but
it was not until I opened the new facsimile edition of A a year ago that I was able
to formulate hundreds of questions the manuscript itself gives rise to.
This observation underscores also the absolute need for the scholarly com-
munity to reform itself and revise its attitudes about dissemination of photo-
graphs of new finds. I thoroughly agree with my colleague James Robinson, in
his address in San Francisco last year, and with David Noel Freedman (also a
member of the board of trustees of our center in Claremont), who has written
in a similar vein in a Biblical Archaeologist editorial.15 We must no longer per-
mit ourselves, for whatever refined reasons, to withhold publication at least of
microfilms of new finds. When one thinks of the great minds deprived of work-
ing on texts discovered since World War II, who have since died, never to be able
to share their observations about the texts, withholding of publication of at least
photographic reproductions becomes morally questionable.
A final point needs to be made about the focus of text criticism and the lim-
itations of the discipline. Conjectures about what might have been the original
text have no place in textual apparatus and only a limited value in a final stage
of text-critical method. Conjectures about a nonextant Ur-text of any biblical
passage have their place elsewhere in biblical study – form criticism, philol-
ogy, perhaps archaeology, the general domain of “higher criticism” – but not in
15
See the entire issue of BA 40 (1977), esp. Freedman, “Letter to the Readers,” where he
says, “Therefore I propose that newly discovered inscriptions and documents be presented in a
suitable format – namely, photographs, handcopies, and preliminary transcriptions as soon after
discovery as is physically feasible” (97). We heartily concur and offer the services of the Ancient
Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont to scholars for that purpose.
text criticism in the strict sense. The one area of function of such higher critical
method in the work of text criticism is at the final stage, if very pragmatically
the text critic must come up with a relative evaluation of which ancient reading
he or she would recommend to translators. But even there, the text critic should
be constrained to enter into discussions of literary form of the original, or even
philology or geography, only after all the other work is done and only in the
most circumspect way using only the most widely accepted observations out of
those other fields. This is an area of difference between the groups in Jerusalem
and in Freudenstadt: the HUBP apparently will not enter this realm at all! But,
then, they are not related to a translation project. We in the UBS project have
to do so because our basic mandate, when all our other work is said and done,
is to provide finally some kind of Hinweis für die Übersetzer (suggestions for
translators), but we do so only in constraint and circumspection, usually insist-
ing that the other options be left open if the text-critical work properly speaking
indicates so.
IV
The work of OT text criticism centers primarily in the second phase of the four-
stage history of the Hebrew text. The third and fourth phases receive due atten-
tion where need be and in perspective, but the first phase is left to the other dis-
ciplines of biblical research. The four phases are: (1) the Ur-text; (2) the accepted
texts; (3) the received text; and (4) the Masoretic Text. This is the second area of
basic agreement between Jerusalem and Freudenstadt. While Goshen-Gottstein
published his historical schema a short while before we began our own work,
we started from scratch, as it were, and arrived at almost an identical view of the
history of text transmission.16
Reconstruction of the Ur-text entails most of the biblical-critical disciplines
developed up to about 1960, for biblical criticism since its inception in the sev-
enteenth century has been primarily interested in reconstructing biblical points
originally scored. This is especially the case with philology and form criticism
as they have been generally practiced, but also to a great extent with source crit-
icism, tradition criticism, and even to some significant degree with redaction
criticism. Certainly, all those disciplines are properly concerned with what text
critics now call the first period. The fact that biblical criticism for some two hun-
dred years has mainly been concerned with the most primitive aspects of bibli-
cal study – the so-called ipsissima verba (the very words) of authors at the first
stages of the Bible’s formation and development – interests students of canonical
criticism today, as we have tried to state elsewhere in other contexts.17 Since the
16
See the introduction to Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 12 – 18, and Talmon,
“Old Testament Text”; see also Sanders, “Text Criticism and the NJV Torah.” Talmon’s four
periods are only apparently different from ours; they actually fit into the same basic scheme.
17
In Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.”
late 1950s a few scholars, in increasing numbers, have been turning their atten-
tion to the Nachleben of biblical passages and the fact that the nature of canon-
ical literature lies in its adaptability as well as its stability, and certainly as much
in the later resignification of biblical images, traditions, and textual passages as in
their most primitive meanings.
When one turns toward use of a biblical tradition within the Bible, interest
is roused by the function of the tradition in the new context and the modes
whereby the tradition was conveyed to and applied to the later biblical con-
texts.18 And those modes are evident even in the first repetition or copying of a
literary unit that later ended up in the Bible. We do not have biblical autographs.
Everything we have went through the experience of the need of an early com-
munity, Jewish or Christian, to hear or see again what had been heard or seen by
the parents or ancestors of that community. There is no early biblical manuscript
of which I am aware, no matter how “accurate” or faithful it is thought to be to
its Vorlage (the text before it), that does not have some trace in it of its having
been adapted to the needs of the community from which we, by archaeology or
happenstance, receive it. Such observations are relative and pertain not to method
in text criticism, but to the concepts on which method is based. All versions are
to some extent relevant to the communities for which translated: it was because
the Bible was believed relevant that it was translated. Much of the so-called Sep-
tuagint is midrashic or targumic.19 But even biblical Hebrew texts are to some
extent, greater or less, adapted to the needs of the communities for which they
were copied. Again, I stress that these are relative observations. Their pertinence
for text criticism lies in the fact that the earlier the date of biblical manuscripts
the greater variety there are in text types and text characteristics.
One of the salient observations we have to make about the significance of the
Dead Sea Scrolls is that though they are approximately a thousand years older
than the Hebrew Bible manuscripts we had had before (except the Nash Papy-
rus?), they have by no means displaced the great masoretic manuscripts from the
ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. The older the biblical manuscripts are, the
more fluidity they seem to exhibit in actual text. Hence, the period from which
we actually have the oldest handscripts is characterized by the textual fluidity
of the period of the accepted texts (period 2 in the historical schema arrived at
independently by both projects). The standardization process that took place
in the first centuries BCE and CE was apparently so pervasive and complete
for Hebrew texts of the Bible that variants in biblical manuscripts, and even in
rabbinic citations after the event, drop dramatically to the point of underscoring
this prime characteristic of the second period. The manuscripts deriving from
the second period, that of relative textual fluidity, may possibly have readings
superior to anything in any Tiberian manuscript: that judgment has to be made
18
See, e. g., Ackroyd, “Original Text and Canonical Text.”
19
Cf., e. g., Seeligmann, Septuagint Version of Isaiah, and more recently the work of Good-
ing, e. g., Relics of Ancient Exegesis; cf. Gordon, “Second Septuagint Account of Jeroboam”; and
Bogaert, “Les rapports du judaïsme.”
ad hoc in each case and cannot be prejudiced by observations dealing with basic
concepts, such as historical schema. The matter of method in text criticism has
come to the fore quite dramatically in part because of the new sense of how fluid
the text of the Bible was in the second period, that of the earliest manuscripts.
And it is largely because of having to develop those methods to a fine point that
we have now to be very careful in using work in text criticism since the seven-
teenth century.
The third period in the history of OT text transmission is called the period of
the received text. It is not improper to use the singular “text” here, as the stabi-
lization that had begun in the first century BCE seems by 100 CE to have been
essentially complete. As Goshen-Gottstein puts it, only “a thin trickle contin-
ues” of non-proto-masoretic texts.20 The salient observation here is the amazing
uniformity of consonantal text form in the biblical manuscripts dating from the
end of the first century CE through the second Jewish revolt. In contrast to texts
datable before 70 they are almost consistently proto-masoretic. The biblical texts
from Murabbaʿat, Hever, Mishmar, Seʾelim, and Masada present minimal vari-
˙ masoretic manuscripts of the fourth period. The process
ants against the great
of stabilization that had begun in the first century with the cessation of scribal
changes of the sort called tiqqunê soferîm (the errors of the scribes) as indicated
in the work of Barthélemy,21 or of the sort brilliantly studied by Talmon,22 in the
Qumran manuscripts, was essentially complete by the end of the first century
CE. Barthélemy’s work on the Dodecapropheton has shown some of the process
by which the standardization took place leading to the Greek texts of Theodot-
ion and Aquila.23 As Goshen-Gottstein puts it, “. . . the period of the Destruc-
tion of the Temple – that is, the last third of the first century CE and the first
third of the 2nd century – is the main dividing line in the textual history . . .”24
We shall return to further observations about the phenomenon of stabilization
after consideration of the fourth period of text transmission and the masoretic
phenomenon.
The third area of basic and fundamental agreement in concept between the Jeru-
salem and Freudenstadt projects is appreciation of the process of standardiza-
tion of text form that finally culminated in the work of the Masoretes. There is
an interesting difference between us in the value attached to the masorot parva
(mp) and magna (mm). While the HUBP dutifully records the corrected mp and
mm of A in the proper margins, no coordinating apparatus is provided for the
20
See Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 17.
21
Barthélemy, “Les tiqquné sopherim”; McCarthy, Tiqqune Sopherim.
22
Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible.”
23
24
Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 15.
masorah.25 By contrast, the UBS committee makes careful and judicious use of
the masorah wherever it is pertinent. The great contribution of BHS is in Weil’s
work connected with it. After the facsimile edition of L was published I offered
a reward to any student who could discover in the masorah parva (mp) of BHK
any discrepancy between the mp in the lateral margins of L and BHK.26 Even
beginning students of the Hebrew Bible often observe how blurred the mp seems
in recent printings of BHK; but 99 percent of them can tell you that their teach-
ers never refer to the mp any more than they refer to the masoretic teʿamin. The
point in these observations is that throughout the history of BHK in the first
two-thirds of this century few Western scholars were interested in the masorot of
Hebrew manuscripts, even of L, those Aron Dothan calls “keepers of the flame”
and Harry Orlinsky calls “Masoretes of our time.”27 As every historian knows,
in those periods when there is little interest in a form of literature, that literature
has a chance of being copied accurately, that is, no one attempts to make it rele-
vant to the needs of those periods. So, through most of the history of BHK, edi-
tions 1 to 3, the mp in Kittel is printed quite accurately, from the margins of L. If
one wants to know what is in the mp of L, one for the most part has but to check
the lateral margins of BHK (in contrast to BHS). A few like Paul Kahle and his
students, among them Weil, now of the University of Nancy II, were interested
in the masorot. If one compares the mp as it appears in BHS with the mp of any
ancient MT manuscript one will find many differences. It is basically the mp of
L, but Weil is, in fact, a latter-day Masorete! He has considerably edited the vari-
ous entries of mp in L in the light of other mp entries and of the mm of L, and of
his own study of the discrepancies between the two and the text itself.28
Weil well points out that there was no canon of the masorah. In fact, he has
proved that the masorah in L was added by a hand (Samuel ben Jacob) later than
that of the basic consonantal text. Traditions contributing to the great maso-
rot, especially of L, extended considerably back into masoretic history; but as
C. D. Ginsburg frequently reminded S. Baer and H. L. Strack, there was never a
process of standardization of the masorah as there had been earlier of the conso-
nantal text. There are no two masorot that are the same. Hence Weil composed
the mp for the lateral margins of BHS in the best and finest tradition of the Mas-
oretes themselves. He did his own basic work in order to render the mp of L in
BHS really usable.29 It has a few errors in it30 but it is essentially a rich source of
information for anyone who will take the little amount of time necessary to learn
25
Ibid., 20 – 21.
26
See Weil’s own comment in “Foreword II,” xiii.
27
Such as S. Baer, S. Frensdorff, C. D. Ginsburg, and Paul Kahle. See Aron Dothan’s prole-
gomenon in Ginsburg, The Massorah, xix; and Orlinsky’s prolegomenon in Ginsburg, Intro-
duction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition. See as well the proof by Dothan that neither Moses
nor Aaron ben Asher was a Qaraite, in Ben Asher’s Creed.
28
Cf. Weil, Initiation à la Massorah; Weil, “Foreword II,” xiii – xviii, and Weil, Massorah
Gedolah, xiii – xxvii.
29
See Weil, “La nouvelle édition.”
30
See, e. g., Lam 3:20, where the mp qere should read wĕtā-shôah.
˙
how to read it. It makes the masorah available to students less expert than those
who could use Solomon Frensdorff or Christian Ginsburg.31
By contrast, as Weil makes clear in the introduction of volume 1 of his Mas-
sorah Gedolah (MG), the lists he provides there are essentially the mm lists pro-
vided in L in the top and bottom margins of the manuscript.32 Here his restraint
is clear: he omits from the lists only the obvious repetitions and he does that
only because the printed mode employed to publish the lists and key them to the
mp makes exact duplication of all the lists costly and useless. No one can fault
him in this. Volume 1 of MG is a rich mine of information much more accessible
to most students of the Bible than ever before, simply because of the mode of
keying the lists to the mp in BHS. Weil has corrected the errors of the scribe of
the mm in L, but made, so far as I have been able to detect, very few of his own.
Volume 2 of Weil’s MG will compare the masoretic marginal commentaries in L
with other great manuscripts such as others from Cairo and the Aleppo manu-
script and provide a paleographic and philological commentary on the mm lists.
As noted above, there was no canon of masorah, and volume two will explore
and study the differences among the masorot themselves. Volume 3 will analyze
and study the divergences between the mp and mm, and between the masorah
and the consonantal text. Volume 4 will discuss the final masorah (mf) and will
include a general introduction and history of the masorah.
The debt that we owe Weil for this work is considerable. He has by his mode
of presentation and publication made study of the masorah available to all stu-
dents, and he has focused attention on a heritage of biblical study that only a few
have heretofore carefully studied. It brings us to appreciation of the real con-
tribution of the Masoretes to textual study. It is often said in the introductions
and handbooks that their great contribution was in the system of vocalization
that they appended to the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible. As great as that
contribution was, and as great as the contribution of the teʿamim to understand-
ing how the Masoretes inherited their reading of the text, these pale beside the
outstanding fact that the masorot parva and magna stand on all sides of the text,
right margin, left margin, top margin, and bottom margin, as sentinels to guard
the particularities of the text. They provide not only a fence around the Torah,
they constitute an army guarding the integrity of the text. Our appreciation of
this fact simply must increase to the point of realizing our immense debt to the
whole tradition that began at the end of period two and increased through period
three culminating in the masorot in the great Tiberian manuscripts.
31
See Frensdorff, Das Buch Ochlah Wochlah, and Frensdorff, Massoretisches Wörterbuch;
Ginsburg, The Massorah; Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the He-
brew Bible, Ktav reprint including Orlinsky, “Prolegomenon.” Orlinsky observes that the rise
of archaeology pushed out the classical approach to the study of the text of the Bible but that
discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has helped restore it. While we disagree with Snaith, “Ben
Asher Text,” 10, that Ginsburg’s herculean labors are largely a monument of wasted effort, his
The Massorah is indeed difficult to use: Barthélemy calls it “le cocktail de Ginsburg” (in a pri-
vate note). And Frensdorff’s work was but a beginning of what he had wanted to do.
32
Weil, Massorah Gedolah, xiii – xxvii.
A lamed in the mp, keyed by the Masoretes to a word in the line indicated,
stands like a soldier to remind the next scribe that the word in question must be
copied precisely as written or corrected in the Vorlage. The text critic who takes
the masorot seriously and pursues each case far enough soon realizes that there
was often good reason for them. The word in question with a lamed in mp is a
hapax in the detailed form in the text. There is no other quite like it anywhere
else in the Bible and it must be guarded in its particularity; it must retain its pecu-
liarity and not be assimilated to another form of the word more common in the
Bible or elsewhere. In the Psalter, the mp in Weil’s BHS has a yod-alef in each
case beside each hallelujah at the end of a psalm. That means that the next scribe
had better not start or complete any other psalms with hallelujah than those so
marked.33 This may well illustrate the point someone made that “not a jot or a
tittle shall pass away . . .”
Pursuit of such cases will usually result in the observation that some other
manuscript tradition may have had more or fewer hallelujahs – as indeed is the
case in the Qumran Psalter and in the LXX – and that the masoretic tradition
insists that the next scribe not be seduced by such variant texts or traditions.
Often one can find in the LXX or the Syriac a variant that the masorah warns the
next scribe to be cautious not to emulate. Not infrequently the scrolls will indi-
cate the kind of text the masorah wants to insulate the standardized masoretic
text against, sometimes a later midrash or a targum reading will indicate the kind
of reading guarded against. In many cases, of course, we simply do not know
what specific problem scribes might have faced, but herein is the invaluable aid
of the masorah to the text critic. Even the beginning student trained to see the
circellus over a word or phrase in the MT notes how often they appear precisely
over words emended in the apparatus of BHK or BHS!
One day in a class in Deutero-Isaiah I noticed, while a student was translat-
ing Isa 43, that there was a gimmel in the mp keyed to the expression ʿam zu in
v. 21, “this people.” I had never before noticed the gimmel. Of course, it means
that the expression ʿam zu appears three times in the Bible and the next scribe
had best watch carefully that he or she not put four into the Bible, or indeed
omit one of the three. I thought to myself: I do not have a masorah magna here
to see the full list of where the three occurrences are, but I know where one of
them is myself. And while the student continued to recite I turned to Exod 15
and began to compare the text there with the one in Isa 43. Not only did I note
that the other two occurrences are precisely in Exod 15:13 and 16, but I began to
see, as I had never seen before, that the pericope in Isa 43:16 – 21 was a beautiful
contemporizing midrash done by the prophet of the exile on the great Song of
the Sea. The prophet was resignifying the great anthem of the liturgy of redemp-
tion in the exodus tradition for his people in his day. He was claiming in good
midrashic fashion that God was doing for ʿam zu another mighty act in their
day comparable to the one the people sang about in celebration of the exodus.
33
This, incidentally, is Weil’s own mp. Note the inexact notation at Ps 135:3; there are, in
fact only ten masoretic psalms in L that begin with hallelu-jah.
When the student had finished his laborious translation, I gave a lecture on Isa-
iah’s mode of midrash in Isa 43 on the Song of the Sea, a lecture I had only that
moment perceived – all due to the fact that the Masoretes put a gimmel in the
margin of the Isaiah text.34 The lists in the mm fill out the knowledge of the text
as a whole which the mp instigates and signals. The integrity of the text is safe-
guarded. Why?
What lies back not only of the masorot parva and magna but also of the lists
of numbers of letters, words, verses, sedarim, parashot, petuhot, and setumot
provided in some MT manuscripts at the ends of the several books, as well as
at the ends of the several sections of some manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible?
What lies behind all this madness for scrupulous count of words in the masoretic
tradition? One of the reasons few modern scholars since the eighteenth century
have been interested in the masorah is that it seems to run counter to their own
interests. Modern scholarship’s great interest in the Ur-texts of the Bible, in what
this or that great thinker-contributor of the Bible actually said, has meant that
most of us over the past two hundred years have been doing what the Masoretes
themselves feared most: we have been changing the text because of our knowl-
edge of other matters. For instance, our tendency has been to assimilate 2 Sam 22
and Ps 18 in our attempts to get back of both to an Ur-text:35 the apparatus in
BHK and BHS attest to the tendency. Because of the criteria we bring to bear
upon these texts in search of their common origin, we choose a word or phrase
in the one or the other, according to the best lights we have from philology, form
criticism, poetic analysis, archaic speech, archaeology, geography, extrabiblical
literature, etc., in order to reconstruct a semblance of what might have been the
original. The apparatus in each case tends to homogenize the two into one psalm.
Translators then use the apparatus and try to present the same psalm in both
Samuel and the Psalter.
It is precisely this result that would have horrified the Masoretes – no matter
our noble motivation. In antiquity a scribe might assimilate two such passages
out of an innocent but intimate knowledge of the one while copying the other.
Today we apparently do so out of an innocent but intimate knowledge of what
we think an early form of such a poem ought to have been like. The result is
much the same. Before we ask the obvious question why the Masoretes were so
intent on preserving the integrity of each individual text – nay, each individual
verse, word, and letter in place – let us first ask why we moderns like to press
back to some supposed original.
Such questions almost invariably open up into the question of authority as
it is framed and posed by any given generation. The attempts of the secularized
mind to devalue the question of authority require perhaps the greatest skill of
the sociologist of knowledge, but it is perhaps an attempt to evade looking at
what the so-called secular scholar really holds dear. The modern period since the
34
Anderson, “Exodus Typology,” notes Exod 15 in passing, parenthetically on p. 183, but
fails to see how Isa 43:16 – 21 is a poetic midrash on Exodus.
35
Cross and Freedman, Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry.
Enlightenment has apparently been as interested in the ipsissima verba of the ori-
gin of a biblical text as the Masoretes were interested in the ipsissima verba of the
received text. One of the reasons that Johann Salomo Semler’s attempt to devalue
the concept of canon in the eighteenth century to a kind of final stage in a liter-
ary-historical process was so successful was that he was willing to shift ground in
precisely the question of authority. He and his Enlightenment colleagues needed
what Semler did to continue their then exciting work viewing the whole process
of formation of the Bible in one literary-historical light from beginning to end.36
Once they had reduced the question of canonization of the Bible to study of lists
of books and councils where big decisions would have been made, they had the
question of authority reduced to what the historian could cope with. The bottom
end of the canonical process could then be bracketed so that focus could con-
tinue on the earliest (and hence really authoritative?) biblical forms and content.
A part of this attitude emerges in our use of the words “secondary” and “spu-
rious.” To call a passage in Amos or Paul secondary is to diminish its importance
in some measure. We tend to think of it as less important, for our purposes –
whatever the purposes might be – than passages we call “genuine.” Notice the
choice of words. It might be one thing to call a passage genuine with regard
to reconstructing as historians what we think Amos might actually have said,
but it is quite another matter to leave the impression with students that what is
“secondary” has no authority otherwise. And yet that is what has been taught,
innocently or otherwise, in most seminaries and departments of religion. Until
recently even the historian found it less interesting to give so-called spurious pas-
sages their just value. This attitude is fortunately being corrected in many ways.
Yet still, the legacy of Enlightenment biblical scholarship includes a fairly clear
system of values: one of these is that the most primitive is the most authentic.37
Among the students of W. F. Albright there was a tendency to revalue much of
what the liberals had called secondary and to view as authentic or primary much
that had earlier been devalued. But that tendency only underscored the basic
view that the first or earliest was best. There is a clear line between our modern
attitude toward secondary passages and our attitude toward the masorah: we
have tended to ignore both in our concern for the most primitive values in the
text. The basic Enlightenment tenet that “nothing is spurious to the scholar” has
not always been observed.
36
See Childs, “Canon and Criticism,” his Sprunt lectures of 1972, as yet unpublished. Much
of this appears in his Introduction to the OT as Scripture. See also Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”;
Sanders, “Biblical Criticism and the Bible as Canon,” esp. 160 – 64.
37
This is seen especially in the work of philologists, and in bold relief in that of Mitchell
Dahood; cf. Barr, Comparative Philology. For a critique of the position, see also the discussion
of the two sides of the issue, as well as of what the expression “original meaning” may itself
connote, in Sawyer, “Original Meaning of the Text”; the debate by Dahood and Barr is resumed
in the same volume: Dahood, “Northwest Semitic Texts,” and Barr, “Philology and Exegesis.”
VII
The answer to the question why the Masoretes were so intent on preserving
the integrity of the text down to the least detail lies in a careful study of what
happened in the history of the transmission of the text during the course of the
second period, that of relative textual fluidity, from the Persian Period till late
in the first century CE. In 1961 an essay appeared in our journal titled “Mat-
thew Twists the Scriptures.”38 The author expressed the consternation of many
excellent OT and NT scholars of the period over how the NT seems to “distort”
the OT texts it cites. But the same can be said of nearly all Jewish and Christian
literature in the NT period. While there was a certain measure of respect for the
constraints inherent in the text,39 the hermeneutics of the second period were
quite different from those that characterize use of Scripture after the first cen-
tury. The remarkable thing in the NT is the high respect for the text of the LXX
in the Epistle to the Hebrews, not the other way around. The so-called Apocry-
pha, Pseudepigrapha, and all sectarian literature clearly datable to the pre-70 CE
period may all be seen in the same light with regard to their attitude to biblical
texts. I include in the category of sectarian also the so-called proto-rabbinic liter-
ature of the period: the great problem is, as Jacob Neusner has brilliantly shown,
that there is very little there that can be dated early enough in the form received
to include it in the second period.40 Most ancient rabbinic literature, on the con-
trary, is a prime example of the attitude toward and use of Scripture in the third
period, that of the basically stabilized text after 70 CE.41
Whether it was a matter of copying an actual biblical text, citing a biblical
text for comment, rewriting a whole segment of the biblical story as in the case
of Chronicles, the targumim, Jubilees, or the Genesis Apocryphon, the inher-
ent constraints of the text were balanced over against another factor that was
apparently equally important – the utter conviction of the time in the immediate
relevance of Scripture. What they perceived God was doing in their time had as
great a bearing on their thinking as the text that reported what God had done in
earlier times. They knew how to identify God’s dealings with them because they
had Scripture, but most of that Scripture had not yet become “sacred text.” The
colophonic character of the prohibitions stated in Deuteronomy against adding
to or subtracting from the text of that book was still far from the same as the
utter taboo later to arise when the concept of sacred text became the dominant
38
McCasland, “Matthew Twists the Scriptures.”
39
Miller’s apt phrase in “Directions.”
40
Much of what Jacob Neusner has written would illustrate the point: it is clearly stated in
his Development of a Legend. See also Neusner, Redaction and Formulation.
41
Goshen-Gottstein uses the metaphor of “central current” for the proto-masoretic text
before 70, “with rivulets flowing side by side with it.” After the destruction of the temple “the
rivulets that flow by its side are almost dried up . . . but a thin trickle continues . . .” Isaiah: Sam-
ple Edition, 17. Robert A. Kraft finds a parallel phenomenon in Greek Jewish Scriptures: “As
a rule tendencies to tamper with the texts would tend to date from relatively early times . . .”
“Christian Transmission of Greek Jewish Scriptures,” 221.
concept. The period bracketed by the fall of the First Temple and the fall of the
Second, from the sixth century BCE to the end of the first CE, precisely from the
time of Deuteronomy to the time of Rabbi Meir and the beginnings of the oral
codification of the Mishnah, was marked by a coexistence of two distinct ideas
about the Word of God, the idea of the living word of God ever dynamically new
and fresh, and the idea of traditions that were becoming stabilized into certain
forms but were generation after generation in need of being adapted to and heard
afresh in new historical contexts.
Traditionally, the spirit of prophecy ended sometime between the time of
Ezra and the men of the Great Synagogue, and the time of the Era of the Con-
tracts, that is, the time of the Seleucids.42 Such efforts to account for the shift of
which we speak in understanding the very concept of the Word of God testify
to the ambiguity of attitude held toward Scripture in the period. Barthélemy
has shown that the phenomenon of the cessation of scribal changes in the early
first century CE, those called tiqqunê soferîm, was a stage in the development
of the shift in basic concept of Scripture in the period.43 This is surely correct.
Talmon has capably shown that other kinds of scribal activity, actually adding
to the biblical text poetic doxologies and other types of biblical literary forms,
extended down to approximately the same time frame.44 Talmon remarks that
such scribes considered themselves to be contributing to the biblical process.
All of this scribal activity came to a halt sometime in the first century CE. The
shift from understanding Scripture as sacred story to sacred text45 was long and
gradual; but it took place precisely in what in text criticism we call period two,
that of the accepted texts. And we say texts for the time precisely because of the
pluralistic character of the texts in the period before the standardization process
took place.
I have called these different understandings of the nature of Scripture a ques-
tion of the ontology of canon.46 It was apparently not until the first century
BCE that the concept of the verbal inspiration of Scripture either arose or began
to take hold in Jewish thinking. Prior to that time there had been various mantic
or shamanistic concepts of inspiration of tradition and early Scriptures, such as
attributed to the words of a dying patriarch (the very form of the book of Deu-
teronomy [and hence the Torah?]); but the concepts of verbal, and soon there-
after literal, inspiration did not become operative for the function of Scripture
in Judaism until the first century BCE, and that at about the time of the cessa-
tion of the two kinds of scribal activity in changes and alterations in the texts
of which Barthélemy and Talmon speak in the first century BCE. Phenomeno-
logically, this new view of inspiration was linked to the concurrent conviction
of the demise of prophecy. Even so, the older attitudes still held on and did not
42
Cf. Weil, “La nouvelle édition,” 329.
43
Barthélemy, “Les tiqquné sopherim.”
44
Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible.”
45
Miller, “Directions.”
46
Sanders, “Biblical Criticism and the Bible as Canon.”
completely die out until the final period of textual standardization after 70 CE.
Those attitudes were in point of fact the salient and characteristic ones of the
second period, that of fluidity and flexibility. For them, as seen in Qumran and
Christian literature for example, the greater piety was expressed in moderately
reshaping the text within the limits of their view of textual constraints in the light
of the greater conviction of what God was doing in their time.
Once the concept of verbal inspiration arose, those adhering to it needed a
whole new set of hermeneutic axioms and techniques to render the stable text
adaptable to new situations. And it was these very proto-rabbinic circles in
which the scribal activity of alteration of text ceased in the first century that the
first efforts were made in developing the new rules of the game. And one can see
some of the new techniques coming to play to a limited extent in Qumran com-
mentaries (most of which came late in the history of the sect) and in the NT. But
it was in the proto-rabbinic denominations and groups that the so-called seven
hermeneutic rules of Hillel were developed supposedly by the end of the first
century BCE. These were extended and developed considerably by the end of
the first century CE into the thirteen rules of Ishmael and finally into the tradi-
tional thirty-two rules by the time of Judah ha-Nasi in the second century CE.
Such rules could not have arisen and would not have done so except that the
very ontology of Scripture had changed from sacred story to sacred text as well
as the fundamental understanding of its inspiration or authority. What happened
and why?
VIII
The answer to these questions lies in an understanding of Torah. Increasingly in

the exilic and postexilic periods Torah came to have a very special meaning and
a very special function in Judaism. There is a manner of speaking in which one
may say that Torah was Judaism and Judaism was Torah.47 The very concept of
Torah shifted from that of being the story of God’s dealings with the world and
with his people Israel (with legal suggestions included within it as to how the
people should shape their society and their lives) to being a quite stable and dis-
crete body of literature. But the function of Torah remained the same as it had
been in its process of literary formation, the source of the believers’ knowledge
of who they were and what they should do with their lives. What changed was a
shift from highly adaptable living traditions such as those to which the early bib-
lical writers themselves referred in whatever manner and mode they needed to do
so, to a highly stable body of literature. If, however, the function was to remain
the same then methods had to be developed to render the stable adaptable, to
make it relevant to ever-changing situations, and that at a time when Judaism was
becoming more and more pluralistic due to the fact of dispersion and the fact of
47
See Sanders, Torah and Canon, 52; and Sanders, “Torah: A Definition.” See also Neusner,
First-Century Judaism in Crisis.
Jewish communities facing widely differing problems according to where and

when they lived.48
If nothing now was to be added to or subtracted from the text of Torah – in
that colophonic sense to which we referred in looking at Deuteronomy – how
could the old Bronze Age and Iron Age legal systems be made relevant to all the
new problems? We sophisticated children of the Enlightenment know that those
legal systems embedded within the Torah story were actually already adapted
much earlier from the codes of Hammurabi and of Shamshi Addad of Eshnunah,
and from the Hittite legal system. But how were our friends in the postexilic age
to manage if they could not adopt legal systems much closer to their own needs
(whether homegrown Jewish laws or the best of their neighbors’) right into the
text of the Torah as their ancestors had done? As long as Persia was the dominant
political and cultural force surrounding them, the problem was not too bad.49
But once Judaism faced the Hellenistic challenge something had to be done, for
here was truly the first really serious threat to the suppositions on which Jewish
existence rested – no matter what denomination to which one might adhere or
how eschatologically oriented or not one’s immediate identity group might be.
On the one hand the text of Torah had become stable to a large degree, at least
to the point that no major alterations could be made; while on the other hand
cultural clash was at every hand.
Torah, which had precisely become Torah because its central traditions had
given life in the earlier challenge of the discontinuity of the old cultic and cultural
symbols in the Babylonian destruction of temple and city, was still the source
of life for Judaism. It had done it before, it could do it again, even though the
literary form of Torah had become basically stable. But how? The first answer
came in the form of torah she-bĕ-ʿal peh. God had given Moses more laws on
Sinai than were contained in the scrolls Ezra brought with him from Babylon to
Jerusalem. These had been passed down generation to generation from Moses
to Joshua to the prophets to the sages, and could now be called on to continue
to render Torah relevant to ongoing life situations. Those new situations had
pointed up two shortcomings of a literarily stable Torah in pentateuchal form:
(1) there were not only new problems in no way addressed in the laws in Torah,
but (2) it was becoming more and more evident that there were an increasing
number of laws in written Torah apparently no longer relevant to the new situ-
ations. Mirabile dictu, the oral law contained all kinds of relevancies to meet the
first apparent shortcoming of stabilized Torah.
But what about the other shortcoming? What to do about all the old laws
apparently outdated? Were they simply to lie there unused? Here was where the
laws of written Torah had their continuing part to play. Where they were clearly
applicable, fine and good. But those that were in danger of falling out of usage
also needed attention. And here is where the shift from peshat exegesis of laws to
48
See Sanders, “Adaptable to Life”; Sanders, “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.”
49
Bickerman and Smith, Ancient History of Western Civilization, 113 – 45; Smith, Palestinian
Parties and Politics, 57 – 81.
other forms of interpretation began to take place. If the obvious syntax of a pas-
sage did not render relevant value of an ancient law, then maybe a value needed
could be found, not in the plain sense of the verse in question, but in focusing on
key words within it. Once this process started, literary context became less and
less a restraint inherent in the text, and single words needed could be drawn from
verses in different literary contexts.
This process meant not only a moderate diminishing authority attached to the
syntax of the ancient text but the ability of the new interpreter to make a new lit-
erary context where needed. One could take a verse out of one context and put it
with another out of another and thus create an entirely new literary context. This
was undoubtedly done at first by the ancient and continuing literary technique
of word-tallying or Stichwörter. This came to be called gezerah shavah (word
tally) after qal vahomer (argument from lesser to greater), perhaps the most basic
of the seven hermeneutic rules of Hillel, and the rule most seriously developed
by Akiba. Clearly once this mode of biblical interpretation was accepted and
ancient syntax and integral literary context were devalued to that extent, there
were nearly infinite possibilities of rendering legal Torah relevant to new prob-
lems whenever and wherever they might arise.
These two means of assuring the relevance of Torah as law guaranteed the sur-
vival of Judaism and of Torah itself. A third way of handling the problem is exem-
plified in the NT, which exhibits an attitude toward Torah already clearly mani-
fest in some Jewish eschatological circles: to view the Torah story as of continuing
value (Rom 7:12), but to view the Torah laws as abrogated.50 A fourth way of han-
dling the situation was at Qumran in its open-ended attitude toward the canon:
to include in its canon whatever was needed to meet the new situations as it per-
ceived them.51 Witness the canonical dimension of the Temple Scroll, as viewed
by Yigael Yadin. This scroll might well be called Tritonomos or Tritonomy.52
Here were the laws Qumran apparently needed in its self-understanding as the
True Israel of its day with a special mission of preparedness for the eschaton. A
fifth mode of dealing with the problem was allegory, a spiritualizing hermeneutic
that permitted, if need be, a total revaluation of apparently outmoded passages.
In the Judaism that would close its canon by the end of the second period of
text transmission, that is, by the end of the period of intense standardization of
text and the closing-off of normal textual adaptation in that Judaism, new herme-
neutic techniques had been developed for rendering the old stable text adaptable
to whatever situation might arise. For them sacred story had yielded to sacred
text almost completely. The fact that the Torah itself was basically a story and not
basically a legal code was for them no longer in focus. It was now basically sacred
text. The ontology of Scripture had shifted. And in the process of that shift one
can see how Scripture interpretation presupposed aspects of the shift. Scripture
50
See Sanders, “Torah and Paul.”
51
See Sanders, “Qumran Psalms Scroll”; and see Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of,”
880.
52
Yadin, Megilat ha-Miqdash, 1:295 – 307.
began to be viewed, Merrill Miller points out, as oracle, sign, and riddle, as well
as story.53 If one reads a passage of Scripture as though it were an oracle, one
reads it entirely differently from when one views it as a story. Each word of an
oracle or a riddle is assumed to have significance whether one understands it
right away or not. One needed now a raz or kleis, some key, to unlock its mean-
ing. Mystery enters in in new ways and the meaning God intends for one’s time
may depend on external factors such as a denominational secret tradition.54
Even so, it was all in the realm of hermeneutics, and hermeneutics depends
in part on one’s view of the text being rendered relevant. No wonder then that
once the new views of verbal inspiration, and soon thereafter literal inspiration,
took hold, one could entertain the idea of a closed canon. It already contained
all the possibilities ever needed to give value to the communities as they needed
it, wherever they might be. As A. C. Sundberg has correctly pointed out, the
Christian communities, which split off from Judaism definitely in 70 CE, did
not benefit from closure of canon but could carry on with the older attitudes and
the larger OT canon for considerably longer.55 Christians had already fallen heir
to the thinking about Torah of denominations other than the Pharisaic-rabbinic
anyway.56 For them it was basically a story about what God had done in the
past with promise of what he would do in future and not basically a set of laws
in the first place. But no group or denomination was insulated from the others,
and some of the basic concepts in the shift of ontology of Scripture became com-
mon to all groups. Among these was the new view of verbal inspiration. This
gradually took hold also in Christianity, so that one sees an increasing difference
between how the NT writers adapted Scripture and how patristic writers ren-
dered it relevant to their times. The idea was there to stay, and it manifested itself
in how texts of Scripture were copied and treated and read thereafter.
IX
Those sentinels standing in the lateral margins of masoretic manuscripts thus

have a long prehistory. The whole concept of masorah developed directly out
of the shift in ontology of Scripture that took place in the second period of text
transmission, with accelerated pace after 70 CE. No matter whether one thinks
the right text was selected in the late second period to be the standard text,57 we
can only be grateful to the rabbis, the proto-Masoretes, and finally the Masoretes
53
Miller, “Directions.”
54
The MT of Daniel, in contrast to that of the LXX and even Theodotion Daniel, presents
enigmatic readings that perhaps are due to the writer’s desire to be less than clear to the general
reader but convey a sense of reality through mystery to an in-group. Some passages seem to be
of the character of riddle or oracle and purposely written so. Ezekiel was probably not written
in this way, but much of the text lends itself to oracle-type interpretation.
55
Sundberg, OT of the Early Church.
56
Sanders, “Torah and Christ.”
57
See Talmon, “Three Scrolls of the Law.” Greenberg, “Stabilization of the Text” is perti-
nent here as well.
themselves for so zealously guarding the particularities, peculiarities, and anoma-

lies in the text as received in the process. They have preserved for us a pluralistic
text that has remarkably resisted assimilations and homogenization of readings.58
What we, in our sophistication, might call contradictions and discrepancies were,
for them, latent possibilities for meaning at some future time that they them-
selves might not yet have discerned. After all, texts full of oracles and riddles
implanted there by God himself by verbal inspiration, no one generation could
possibly understand. Let future generations have a chance. Parallel to apprecia-
tion of the work of the Masoretes and the earlier standardization of the Hebrew
text of the Bible is renewed appreciation of the integrity of the LXX. Note that
the NEB and the new TOB offer two Esthers, the LXX Esther in its full Greek
form as well as Esther in its Hebrew form. Whatever one may decide about the
original Esther, from a very early date there were extant side by side two Esthers
each having its own integrity. Here was another form of pluralism by which we
may benefit, never mind the discrepancies between them. The same may be said,
perhaps, of the LXX texts of Samuel, Jeremiah, Proverbs, and Ezek 40 – 48.
The craze of the Masoretes for textual ipsissima verba and ipsissimae litterae
can now be seen for what it was. They had their own reasons for preserving the
integrity of the text, but we may have ours for appreciating now their labors.
They have richly enhanced the pluralism of the Bible by their care for the text
and by their preserving the multiple possibilities thereof not only in the maso-
rah but also in the ketiv-qerē, sebîr, hillufîm, teʿamim, and tiqqunê sopherîm
˙ pluralism of the Bible, rather than its
traditions. And it is in part the (limited)
obvious unities, that canonical criticism also celebrates.59 Though we have bene-
fited by the apparent madness of the Masoretes, beyond even our current ability
perhaps to evaluate it, theirs was not a scholarly craze for simple scrupulosity or
scientific accuracy. Theirs was a faith in an ontology of Scripture (did not some
say Torah was even preexistent?)60 that meant there was always more there than
any one person or any one generation could fully understand. We may not be
able to share the faith. But can we deny the insight? Are we not ourselves far
enough into the history of Enlightenment study of Scripture to see for ourselves
that scholars, too, are subject to the Zeitgeist of their times? And are we not a
little wiser because of the sociology of knowledge to know that none of us, no
58
Infrequently this is not the case: cf., e. g., Jer 49:19 and 50:44 where some Masoretes seem
to have done what we tend to do – assimilate a yĕʿōdennu to yōʿîdennî. See the list at the end of
the Ben Hayyim Bible, Mikraot Gedolot. A study needs to be made of oriental ketivs. See the
notes by Barthélemy in Critique textuelle, vol. 1, the first full technical report from the UBS
HOTTP committee.
59
See Sanders, Torah and Canon, 116 – 21, and Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.” The diversity
or pluralism in textual tradition is preserved in many ways by the several masoretic marginal
traditions. When the limit of function of such traditions was reached then hermeneutics stepped
in to continue the work: e. g., the step from notation of a hilluf to use of ʾal tiqrēʾ as a hermeneu-
˙
tic technique is very slight indeed. (On the qere-ketiv traditions indicating ancient variants, see
Orlinsky, “Origin of the Kethib-Qere System”; Gordis, Biblical Text in the Making.
60
As in ʾAbot Nathan 31; see Goldin, Fathers according to Rabbi Nathan, 126; b. Ned. 39b;
etc.
school of us, nor any one generation of us is ever likely to have all the answers?
Once we realize that we have hardly asked all the questions, we may be able to
see Enlightenment study of the Bible as a part, a remarkable part to be sure, but
indeed a part of a much longer history of study of Scripture. The questions we
most often put to Scripture about its most primitive and original meanings have
been asked before and they will be asked again. But they are not the only ones to
ask. Perhaps when we can gain an attitude of seeing ourselves in a line that goes
back much further and deeper than two hundred years, the eighteenth century
may not have to be seen as the watershed of discontinuity in Bible study it has
sometimes been seen to be.61 Such a view requires a bit more humility than we
have sometimes been wont to practice.
Perhaps one of the gifts we of the SBL might celebrate in our centennial
anniversary would be the lines of continuity, wherever they might lie, between
ourselves and our early antecedents. Let us face it: we now know that we did
not have the elephant by the tail starting in the eighteenth century. Neither has
any other period of biblical study. Practicing honesty, humility, and a sense of
humor62 about our own limitations in Bible scholarship might permit us to see
ourselves more clearly as beneficiaries of a very long line of students of these
texts, and even to see the texts in newer lights than we today can perceive.
Such a stance might permit us to hear clearly and evaluate soberly the increas-
ing clamor of indictments against biblical criticism, for the good uses of which
this Society was founded and continues to exist. Whether we agree or not that
historical and literary criticism have locked the Bible into the past or are bankrupt
or corrupt or have eclipsed biblical narrative, we in this society especially must
hear the indictments for what they are really worth.63 Perhaps we have in part
shifted our faint faith from the substance of our study to the methods we use.
Perhaps we have permitted the method to become an end in itself. Perhaps we
have unwittingly subscribed to a hermeneutic of primitivism where only the most
original of anything has been worthy of really serious attention. Perhaps we have
placed faith in history or even archaeology and expected them to bear burdens
they were never meant to bear. Or, perhaps, we are guilty of none of the above.
Perhaps revival of a pluralistic sense of canon and of a deep appreciation of
the pluralistic texts that have been entrusted to us from many generations, and of
their functions through the ages in the believing communities that have passed
them on, may allow us to perceive a more limited and yet greater value of the
tools of biblical criticism developed and honed over the past three centuries.
Study of text and canon today focuses increasing attention upon the intra-bib-
lical hermeneutics at every stage in biblical antiquity – how the biblical authors
and thinkers themselves contemporized and adapted and reshaped the traditions
they received and how those traditions functioned for them when called upon.
The earliest to the latest biblical literature we have made points by citing or
61
Cf. Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.
62
Sanders, “Hermeneutics.”
63
See Sanders, “Biblical Criticism and the Bible as Canon.”
alluding to earlier traditions, whether the peculiar traditions of the community

or the international wisdom of the laws, myths, legends, and proverbs of many
peoples. How did Israel adapt what she received? How did Israel and the church
crack open once more, each time, the shell of the old, tried and true, and make it
live and derive value from it to speak to a new situation, a new problem?
We have now the tools to work on the unrecorded hermeneutics that fill the
Bible from beginning to end. How did Israel and the early church from problem
to problem and from time to time, passing through the five culture eras from
the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic-Roman, adapt what she received? How did
she depolytheize, monotheize, Yahwize, and Israelitize, or Christianize, the wis-
dom received from the past, whether homegrown tradition or international wis-
dom? How did they do it? The answers are lying there awaiting valid sober uses
of biblical literary and historical criticism to recover them. How did Israel and
the church find the value needed in a tradition without absolutizing the cultural
trappings in which they were received, and without being bound by the cultural
mores and givens of the past? The Bible is a veritable textbook of unrecorded
hermeneutics, of the way in their time our predecessors, the biblical tradents
themselves, did what it is we ourselves struggle to do.
To view our biblical antecedents as radically different from or inferior to us
in this regard is to practice a kind of latter-day arrogance and hubris without
warrant that cuts us off from them and impoverishes us. To deny the trappings
of their insights is not to be better than they. It may but deafen us to the genius
they enjoyed. We have set the Enlightenment up as a sort of humanistic resur-
rection experience back of which we sometimes feel we cannot go and before
which there is perhaps not very much to learn. I suggest that the block is illusory,
dependent upon a kind of triumphalism that we can ill afford to entertain.
We are heirs of a very long line of tradents and not necessarily more worthy
of the traditions than they.
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5
Stability and Fluidity in Text and Canon
Publication of the Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from the Wadi Habra (8HevXI-
Igr) provides the primary data for the revolution in Old Testament text criticism
launched by Dominique Barthélemy’s Les devanciers d’Aquila, published almost
thirty years ago.1 Barthélemy argued, and Tov, the editor of the scroll, agrees,
that the version the scroll presents is a revision of an earlier Septuagint transla-
tion that sought to bring the Greek text of the Minor Prophets closer to a pro-
to-masoretic form of the Hebrew text.2
Barthélemy provided a theoretical and conceptual framework in which he
sought to understand the place of the Dodecapropheton Scroll, which he at first
dated to the late first century CE3 but later redated to the middle of the same
century.4 (Peter Parsons of Oxford University persuasively argues “for a date in
the later i B. C.”5 – enhancing Barthélemy’s thesis even further.) The framework
he offered has provided the basis for the revolution to which Tov refers. It was
a recasting of the history of transmission of the text of the First Testament.6
Within that history the scroll represented the transition from the earlier period
of textual fluidity (represented by the Qumran biblical scrolls and fragments, and

1
Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila. Plates, transcriptions and notes to the scroll are now
available in Tov, Greek Minor Prophets Scroll. The editor introduces the volume with the apt
statement, “Scholars will always associate the name of R. P. Dominique Barthélemy, OP, of
Fribourg with the Minor Prophets Scroll because of his masterly treatment of its contents in
Devanciers . . . a book which in many ways has revolutionized scholarship.”
2
Tov, Greek Minor Prophets Scroll, says, “R [the revision the scroll presents] depends on the
LXX. . . R revises the LXX in a certain direction . . . towards a Hebrew text close to MT . . .”
(103). “R adheres to a system of fixed equivalents . . . R has a certain preference for the simplex
forms of the [Greek] verb . . .” (128). “R seeks to correct imprecise renderings in the LXX by
matching a part of speech in Hebrew with the corresponding part of speech in Greek . . .” (134).
“The literal, even pedantic character of R is obvious . . . with the tendency to represent consis-
tently every Hebrew word with a corresponding Greek equivalent . . .” (140). “R is a consistent
and literal translator (reviser) . . . (but) often not consistent . . .” (141). “R’s Vorlage was similar
to, rather than identical with MT . . .” (145). “R shares more agreements in vocalization with the
LXX (against MT) than with MT (against the LXX) . . . The proximity between R and MT is . . .
explained in terms of R’s revision of the LXX towards a different Hebrew text (similar to MT)”
(146). “R agrees especially with Sym, Aq, the so-called ThKʹK and the so-called Quinta, as well as
with codex W of the LXX, the biblical text quoted by Justin . . . and the Coptic translations”
(158).
3
Barthélemy, “Redécouverte d’un chaînon manquant.”
4
5
Tov, Greek Minor Prophets Scroll, 26.
6
Barthélemy, “Histoire du texte hébraïque”; an abbreviated form appeared earlier in En-
glish, “Text, Hebrew, History of.”
Stability and Fluidity in Text and Canon 79
the Septuagint, as well as citations in the literature of the period) to the textually
more stable proto-masoretic period of the late first and early second centuries
CE (represented by the biblical scrolls and fragments from Masada, the Murab-
baʿat and other caves, as well as by the Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion
Greek translations, and citations in the literature of the period).7
The history of text transmission Barthélemy proposed provided the frame-
work within which the United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text
Project (HOTTP), beginning in 1969, agreed to do its text-critical work8 and
was not dissimilar to, certainly not in conflict with, the history within which
the Hebrew University Bible Project was working.9 Both projects agree that the
earliest period, that of autographs and Ur-text, is beyond the province of text
criticism; that belongs to historical, source, and literary criticism. The second
period is that of the accepted texts, or the earliest we now have, and is marked by
a considerable degree of textual fluidity; it is well called the pre-masoretic period,
which extended into the first century CE. The end of the first century / beginning
of the second CE marks the transition from relative fluidity to relative stability
and is well called the proto-masoretic period. The third period is that of the
received text, marked by relative stability, and extends to the end of antiquity.
The fourth period is the masoretic and continues to today.
The discovery of the Greek Dodecapropheton Scroll and Barthélemy’s under-
standing of its significance provided the evidence necessary to establish the
conceptual framework of textual transmission into which all presently known
Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of the First Testament can take their place. The
Hebrew text to which the Dodecapropheton Scroll was adjusted, over against the
Vorlage(?) to the Septuagint, is now seen to have been not only pre-masoretic but
also largely proto-masoretic, or a text type moving in that direction.
This revised history of text transmission led to a reformulation of the task of
text criticism. The goal of text criticism had usually been formulated in terms of
establishing the “original” text. This had been the case at least since the time of
Johann David Michaelis.10 Emanuel Tov has well stated the new understanding:
In contrast to the textual criticism applied to many works of literature, that pertaining
to the Old Testament (the same holds for Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey) does not seek to
reconstruct the original form of the complete text of the biblical books, let alone try to
determine the ipsissima verba of the authors of these books. The most that this could
achieve would be to determine the text of the Old Testament current in a particular period
7
The same basic observation can be made about Second Testament texts: “A new rule in
method in text criticism, common to work on both Old Testament and New Testament texts,
seems now to be emerging: the older the texts or versions the less likely they were copied accu-
rately.” Sanders, “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New,” 379. See the similar observations
on the history of transmission of the Greek New Testament text in Aland and Aland, Text of
the NT, 48 – 71.
8
Barthélemy, Preliminary and Interim Report, vi – vii; see also the first volume of the final
report by Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, esp. 1:*107 – *11.
9
Clearly stated by Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 12 – 13, as well as by Talmon,
“Old Testament Text,” 164 – 70.
10
Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*1 – *63, esp. *1 and *30 – *32.
(usually one thinks of the 4th or 3rd century B. C.) and to reconstruct individual ‘original’
readings.’ . . . Not all scholars agree that at one time there was an original text of a biblical
book.11
The goal of the comparison of Hebrew readings is to determine whether one of the
transmitted readings is more ‘original’ than the other, that is, whether this reading was a
part of the ‘original’ text of the Old Testament (as defined on p. 156).12
Quite clearly “original” in this sense does not mean what a speaker said or an
author wrote, and it is probably best not to use the term.13
A better formulation of the task of text criticism is the quest for the most
critically responsible text. But such a formulation is not in itself clear enough,
for obviously this cannot mean simply accepting, or even putting exceptional
value on, the earliest texts we have; they exhibit considerable fluidity. Nor should
it mean that text criticism throws in the towel and accepts willy-nilly a textus
receptus. M. J. Mulder asserts that even the great codices, Leningradensis and
Aleppensis, are but “monuments of the stabilization and standardization of the
Hebrew text on the long road of its transmission.” He goes on to say that the
“stabilization has not yet been closed.”14
Mulder begins his perceptive survey and evaluation of the present state of
understanding of the transmission of the text, and its standardization, by noting
the several stages through which the formation of the text passed: the oral stage;
the stage of collection of the various forms and their commitment to writing; and
then: “Thirdly, one may distinguish the stage of the canonization of the various
books into what is now called the ‘Bible.’ At this point, the religious aspect of the
written fixation of the text becomes obvious: it is this text in this specific form,
which is looked upon as authoritative.”15 Mulder concludes his study by noting
that “the stabilization of the biblical text which we now call the MT . . . must have
taken place at a time in which this text was already considered to be of canonical
value, with respect to both form and content. It is therefore at this time that the
text-critical work of Barthélemy and his colleagues sets in, already called, after
BHS and HUBP, ‘the third (text-critical) way.’”16
This raises the question of the differences between BHS and HUBP. Simply
stated, BHS continues the novelty, begun in BHK1–3, of including in the appa-
ratus to the text suggestions for textual emendations on purely literary grounds;
it goes beyond the text of L by adducing literary emendations and conjectural
readings.17 In other words, the apparatus in BHK / S reaches back into the first
period of supposed and conjectured “originals.” By contrast the HUBP, in strong
objection to that twentieth-century culmination of text criticism as conceived
since the end of the seventeenth century, offers, in addition to the text and maso-
11
Tov, “Text of the Old Testament,” 156.
12
Ibid., 189.
13
See Ulrich’s slightly different use of the term in “Double Literary Editions,” 113 – 14.
14
Mulder, “Transmission of the Biblical Text,” 132.
15
Ibid., 87 (emphases Mulder’s).
16
Ibid., 132.
17
Cf. ibid., 129 – 30.
rot of L, four apparatus without a single suggestion for preference, or certainly

for emendation. This does not mean that Goshen-Gottstein is reluctant or scru-
pulous about offering personal judgments; on the contrary, these are included in
what is essentially a fifth apparatus, critical notes at the bottom margin of each
page (in modern Hebrew and in English) offering his own observations about
what may have been going on in one or the other of the witnesses signaled in the
four apparatus (especially in the first two, the ancient versions, and the Qumran
and rabbinic witnesses).18
The third way, that of Barthélemy and the UBS HOTTP, is to probe into the
history of understanding of the text, especially in the great grammarians and
commentators on the text. What we often found, in working almost twelve years
on the some 5000 problems assigned to us, was that these so-called pre-criti-
cal masters of the text and its grammar provided clues to understand the MT
often lacking in European “critical” scholarship, especially since the beginning
of the eighteenth century. The debates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
about the value and authority of the contributions of the Masoretes and rabbinic
and Qaraite grammarians had, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, been
resolved for most European Christian scholars: only the consonantal text was
truly authoritative and it was to be studied in the light of the new criticism and
philology developing in literary studies generally. We found that this attitude
prevailed in the history of critical study of the biblical text and had culminated
in the apparatus of BHK / S.
Goshen-Gottstein had begun the cry against facile emendations based largely
on the literary and historical quest for the “original” text, and we found ourselves
in agreement.19 Text criticism in large measure had become an exercise supple-
menting so-called higher criticism, discerning what a biblical author must surely
have meant, said, or written, then casting about among the ancient versions and
medieval texts (collated by Kennicott and de Rossi) looking for readings to sup-
port what had already been otherwise decided. It was also clear that judgments
about corruptions and meaningless readings in the MT were often hasty, and
such judgments usually preceded suggestions for emendation or conjecture.
Probing into the ways that the great rabbinic and Qaraite grammarians and
commentators struggled with such texts indicated that many readings were not
as corrupt or meaningless as had been judged by the critical scholarship of the
last three centuries.20 Ever-increasing knowledge through modern archaeology
and science of ancient flora, fauna, minerology, metallurgy, military and political
18
Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 11 – 45. The “fifth apparatus” is greatly ex-
panded in the actual critical editions, Goshen-Gottstein, Book of Isaiah, Part One, Part Two,
and Volume Two, increasing in size with each publication.
19
See Talmon, “Old Testament Text,” 164 – 70, and all the items in the previous note; see also
Goshen-Gottstein, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts,” and various articles in the annual Textus,
especially Goshen-Gottstein, “Theory and Practice.”
20
Richard Simon stressed this point in noting that the rabbinic and Qaraite grammarians
had learned their skills from their Arab mentors; indeed, some of the great grammarians wrote
their grammars and commentaries in Judeo-Arabic; see Simon, Histoire critique, 166 ff.
history, etc. has also reduced the number of apparently corrupt readings. The
debates in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries about the authority of the
masoretic contributions to the consonantal Hebrew text can now be re-read with
appreciation of the arguments of those who viewed them as carefully transmitted
ancient traditions.21
The interface between text criticism and canonical criticism needs careful
attention, as Barthélemy has often observed. One of the major factors in under-
standing the canonical nature of biblical texts is that of the interrelationship
between their stability and their adaptability.22 While there are almost as many
canons, in the sense of canon as norma normata, as there are major communi-
ties of faith (and hence little agreement among those communities about precise
macro-structure of content and order), they all agree that what is canonical is by
nature adaptable or relevant to the ongoing life of the believing community and
to the world in which it exists. But the two factors are actually two sides (yin
and yang) of the same issue; they go together. While canon as norma normata
bespeaks its stability, canon as norma normans bespeaks its adaptability, and
both have been operative since the earliest days of oral transmission, reaching
back to the Late Bronze and early Iron Age.
The very fact that a story or poem was repeated in a time and space beyond
its inception meant that it was adaptable and relevant to more than one situation;
but if it did not have a recognizable measure of stability, or sameness, it was not,
by definition, a repetition / recitation or even an allusion, but a new composi-
tion. One can see in the numerous recitations in the Bible of early authoritative
traditions, whether Mosaic, Davidic, international wisdom,23 or other, in many
different literary forms, that while both factors were present (adaptability and
recognizability), the feature of adaptability is sometimes the more impressive at
the early stages of formation of biblical literature.24 These were the beginnings of
what was to become canonical literature; these early, varied forms got on a sort
of tenure track toward what would become “canon.”
Crucial to the survival of such traditions, and eventually texts, was their mul-
tivalency, the vehicle of their adaptability.25 Within the Bible itself the functions
21
Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*5 – *40; see also Sanders, “Hebrew Bible and Old Tes-
tament.”
22
See Sanders, “Adaptable for Life,” and Sanders, “Canonical Criticism: An Introduction.”
23
Note the sensitive way in which Robert Davidson discerns the intertwining of interna-
tional wisdom with Israel’s precious traditions and relates it to the church’s task today, in Wis-
dom and Worship.
24
Sanders, Torah and Canon, 1 – 30.
25
Justice William J. Brennan Jr., of the United States Supreme Court, is quoted in the Los
Angeles Times of 22 July 1990 as having earlier stated in an address to the Georgetown Univer-
sity Law School: “The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have
had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with
current problems and current needs.” Sometimes in the history of US constitutional law the
adapting has been more under the constraints of original meanings of “the time of framing” [of
the Constitution] and can be called interpretation; sometimes the adapting has been less under
those constraints and can be called resignification of the Constitution’s terms and principles. So
it was and has been in Scripture and tradition.
of such authoritative traditions are many and varied.26 The mid-term between a
text’s stability and its adaptability is the hermeneutics by which the re-applica-
tion takes place; it has been suggested that this canonical process, including the
hermeneutics by which it has taken place all along the path of formation of a
canon (the struggle by which the past has engaged the ever changing present), is
what should be considered truly canonical.27
In the earliest periods of text transmission, the oral and then the early written
stages down through the period of relative textual fluidity, the adaptability factor
is evident in the texts and manuscripts themselves, so that the multivalency factor
was, so to speak, patent. Tradents of all types (traditionists, redactors, scribes,
midrashists, and translators) have always been committed to two responsibili-
ties – the past and the present, the texts and the communities they served, the
Vorlage and the very reason they did what they did for their communities. As the
stabilization process, which Barthélemy has so well described,28 became intense
in the first centuries BCE and CE, and the text became more and more fixed,
hermeneutic rules were advanced to control the canonical process of adaptability
(first seven middot, then thirteen, then thirty-two, etc.). Advance in belief in ver-
bal inspiration, which accompanied the stabilization, did not stem the process, it
simply changed the way the game was played.29
Even a stabilizing consonantal text is still multivalent. One sees this precisely
in the function of First Testament texts (Hebrew and LXX) in early Jewish liter-
ature through the New Testament. All modes of intertextuality exhibit the mul-
tivalency of the older word appearing in the newer; they also exhibit the herme-
neutics by which the process happens. This is intensely the case with canonical
literature because the life and the lifestyle of ongoing believing communities
vitally depend on it.
An important question in the light of such observations is what constraints
lie in the texts themselves. It becomes a poignant question when one sees, e. g.,
how First Testament texts and traditions function in the epistles of Paul.30 One
can well imagine how much the need for further constraints must have been
felt in Jewish houses of study.31 And indeed, the stabilizing of the consonantal
26
See the recent work of Michael Fishbane, such as Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel,
and Fishbane, Garments of Torah, esp. 121 – 33.
27
Sanders, “Canonical Hermeneutics”; Sanders, Canon and Community, 21 – 60.
28
See Barthélemy, “Histoire du texte hebraïque” and its abbreviated form, Barthélemy,
“Text, Hebrew, History of.”
29
Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concept and Method,” and Sanders, “From Sacred Story.”
30
See the brilliant work in this regard by Hays, Echoes of Scripture, especially how
Deut 30:11 – 14 functions for Paul in Romans over against the way the same text functions in
Baba Mesia 59b; for elaboration of how it functions in the Talmud, see the introduction to the
forthcoming compendium, Rosenblatt and Sitterson, Not in Heaven. Intertextuality in the liter-
ature of early Judaism and Christianity is evident in seven ways: citation with formula; citation
without formula; weaving of words and phrases into the new composition; paraphrase; allusions
to stories, episodes and figures; literary structure imitation; and echoes. The purpose was to
“ring in the changes” of authority of the older word to authenticate the newer word.
31
A prime example of textual multivalency without masoretic constraints (and before read-
ers’ hermeneutics are applied) can be seen in the 11QPsa col. 28 text of Ps 151. First published
text in the first centuries BCE and CE was eventually complemented by the
threefold contribution of the Masoretes to the received consonantal text by the
tenth century: vowel pointing, teʿamîm, and masorot. One can understand the
debate, mentioned earlier, that took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries among Christians as to the antiquity and authority of these contributions, a
debate that has abated but not ceased.
The text critic who broaches the text first as a masoretic phenomenon and lis-
tens carefully to the meaning conveyed by means of these masoretic constraints
inserted into the consonantal text (assisted if need be by the medieval gram-
marians), rather than listening first to the meaning conveyed by the constraints
inserted into the text by modern scholarship (the parsing of poetry, arrange-
ments of lines that ignore the teʿamîm, petuhot and setumot, directions of how to
read the text in the modern apparatus, etc.), will often find that what might oth-
erwise be considered corrupt or meaningless readings have meanings consonant
with the full context of the passage. Rarely, arguably never, will he or she find a
distinctly anti-Christian Tendenz in the masoretic understanding of a text, as sus-
pected by those Christians who argued four and three centuries ago against the
antiquity of the masoretic constraints. What one finds by means of comparative
midrash, in study of the Nachleben of any First Testament passage or figure, is
considerable pluralism of intertextual understandings in the early Jewish period
from inception down to the Second Testament, and indeed beyond.32 Rabbinic
midrashim, the Mishnah and the Talmud are exercises in Jewish pluralism.
Most of modern scholarship (even non-traditional Jewish scholarship) still
ignores the accentuation and cantillation marks, the section markings, and the
masorot. This has largely been due to the Tendenz of modern biblical scholar-
ship to search for the pre-canonical “original” forms of text and readings – even
authorial intentionality. This combined with a high regard for modern philolog-
ical study of individual words in their Bronze and Iron Age contexts has meant
some degree of devaluation of the masoretic traditions.
The UBS HOTTP often found that if it strove first to understand what the
Masoretes intended, before declaring a text corrupt or senseless, many so-called
ancient variants were not true variants at all but were facilitating or translational
attempts to make the apparently difficult text make sense for their communities
in their times (exercising the tradent’s sense of responsibility to community more
than to Vorlage). On the contrary, we found that attention to the fuller context
where the difficult text appeared often indicated the viability and appropriate-
ness of the MT reading over against the so-called variants. This certainly was not
in 1963, the psalm has received seventeen distinct readings by seventeen world-class scholars;
see Sanders, “Multivalent Text.” Even the addition of masoretic constraints to the consonantal
text has not eliminated the multivalency of biblical texts; the genius of great literature, no matter
how great a fence (seyog) is constructed around it, is located in part in its multivalency.
32
Comparative midrash, as I understand it, is succinctly defined and explained in Sanders,
Canon and Community, beginning at the top of p. 26. See also Sanders, “From Isaiah 61 to
Luke 4,” as well as numerous student dissertations, such as Carr, “Royal Ideology,” on Solo-
mon’s dream vision in 1 Kgs 3.
always the case, as can be seen by the decisions made by the committee, but it
often put us at odds with modern scholarship on apparently difficult passages.
It became clear to the committee that while exegesis of the larger textual unit
in which a problem is found has its place in making responsible text-critical deci-
sions, exegesis should follow and not precede the basic text-critical exercise, and
it should be applied equally to all the texts and versions where the unit is found,
especially the text or version from which a “correction” is sought.
Structure analysis has emerged as a valuable tool of text criticism and needs to
become standard in its practice. This tool of biblical exegesis is one the writer has
learned after joining the faculties in Claremont and perceiving the importance of
the exercise as developed by his colleague, Rolf Knierim.33 Careful analysis of
the structure of a passage as it appears in the MT, at the same time paying careful
attention to the masoretic constraints in the text, provides the primary and valid
framework for dealing with what appear to be textual problems in the passage
addressed. This “final form” of the text is, as Professor Knierim insists, the place
to begin work on any passage. It is usually best to submit one’s first attempt at a
structure to the scrutiny of peers and colleagues for refinement, for there is a nec-
essary element of subjectivity to the exercise. Once this is done one can perceive
the conceptuality that lies back of the text or version.
Discernment of the conceptuality of the text itself provides the only truly
authentic context for understanding the textual readings that make up the pas-
sage, including the perceived textual problems. If at this point a reading seems
intractable, and possibly corrupt, then one needs to turn to the various other
means of cracking the shell of seeming intractability, such as philology pertinent
to the time period (properly and carefully used), knowledge available to scholar-
ship of the flora, fauna, oeconomia, and politia of the time period involved, and to
the grammarians. If at that point the problem remains, one turns to the apparent
variants in texts and versions. Then the other text or version (scrolls and LXX),
in which a solution to the problem seems viable, is subjected to the same exeget-
ical analysis as was done for the MT, precisely to discern what the conceptuality
of the text was to the tradent of the other text or version, and to determine if the
“solution” in it is appropriate to the problem in the MT.
A simple example is the apparent problem in Isa 40:6a where the MT reads,
“A voice says, ‘Call,’ and one replied, ‘What shall I call?’” Both 1QIsaa and the
Septuagint (and Vulgate) read “. . . and I replied . . .” The weight of having a Qum-
ran and a Septuagint reading in agreement over against the MT is impressive.
Furthermore, to have the prophet himself injected into the text at that point
reflects well the scene familiar from Isa 6:5, in the same prophetic book, where
the report of an earlier meeting of the heavenly council records an intervention
on the part of the prophet. The evidence seems clear and weighty in the direction
33
See Sanders, “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament.” While Knierim has not published a
handbook explaining concept and method in structure analysis, one can see what is intended in
his article “Criticism of Literary Features,” 143n14; and his work on Num 1 – 10 in the forth-
coming Knierim and Coats, Numbers.
of emendation, so that Rudolf Kittel and D. Winton Thomas, editors of Isaiah in

BHK3 and BHS, direct the reader to read “. . . and I replied . . .” (lege vaʾomar).
Case closed?
Not quite. Structure analyses of MT and LXX Isa 40:1 – 11 result in two dif-
ferent conceptions of what lies behind each text. Quite simply, the MT passage is
a consistent report of a meeting of the heavenly council with no human involved
except in the mission given the council (see Ps 82). The Septuagint presents a
different picture. There is no heavenly council presented in the Septuagint. On
the contrary, priests are the subjects addressed by God already in 40:2: “Speak,
priests, to the heart of Jerusalem; comfort her, for her humiliation is fulfilled,
her sin is set aside . . .” The tradent translating the Hebrew for the Septuagint
had a different conception of what was going on in his Vorlage; for him, the
scene was one in which God was addressing humans from the start. Nor is Isa 6
directly comparable, since the prophet there is without question the narrator of
the whole report of the heavenly council meeting beginning in 6:1.
Logically, if one is going to adapt the Septuagint reading in 40:6, one should
also adapt the reading in LXX 40:2; for the Septuagint passage has its own integ-
rity, just as the MT passage has its. Each conveys its own concept of what was
going on in the text. Whether the Septuagint had a Vorlage different from the
pre- and proto-MT 1QIsaa at 40:2 we do not know. Agreement between the
Qumran text and Septuagint over against the MT is limited to the disputed
reading in 40:6. The violence done to the MT text of Isa 40 – 55 by interjecting
a totally isolated and unique first-person report of the prophet in 40:6 should
outweigh the so-called text-critical evidence of agreement of the Septuagint and
Qumran against MT at 40:6. To do so is to pillage the Septuagint, violating its
integrity and the conception its tradent had of the full passage, as well as the
sense of responsibility he had to his community, in order to “correct” the MT
and thus violate its integrity. In effect, it is probably not a correction at all; it is
probably a rewriting of the MT.34
The question that we had to address every year in our work on the UBS com-
mittee was to what stage of the text our decisions should be oriented. As noted
above, one cannot accept willy-nilly either the earliest texts available or the text
under the most constraints (whether masoretic or modern scholarly).35 Each
year the discussions, always coming out of weeks of work addressing the prob-
lems we were assigned, came around to focus on the pre- and proto-MT period,
34
See now the perceptive study of Isa 40:1 – 11 by Seitz, “Divine Council.” It is regrettable
that Seitz apparently did not consult Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 2:278 – 80; it would have
strengthened his case.
35
Modern scholarly constraints often exhibit the hermeneutic bias of the scholar or school
of scholars. This is especially notable in the Greek New Testament where each pericope (deter-
mined by the scholars involved) is given a title, as in synopses of the Gospels; these often betray
a Tendenz that may be difficult for the neophyte to resist. Modern translations, with the desire
to assist the infrequent reader, often insert titles of sections within books of the Bible in italics;
note that the NRSV continues the practice but in some editions places such titles in the bottom
margin in brackets – supposedly so that they may still be available yet appear less authoritative.
whichever provided the most critically responsible readings with all the evidence
in hand. But in those sessions, though we always took account of the full context
in which the problems appeared, we had not yet come fully to appreciate the
proper role of exegesis or use of the tool of structure analysis of the pericopae
addressed. Whether use of structure analysis would have changed a significant
number of our actual decisions is a matter for review. I am now arguing that it
should always be used, where indicated and feasible, to avoid violating the integ-
rity of the tradents and witnesses consulted, all of whom were engaged in acts of
devoted responsibility to ancient believing communities.36
To do so would put emphasis on the fact that all the textual witnesses we have
are bequeathed to us by believing communities, and not simply by the individ-
ual tradents who served those communities. Attempting to establish the most
critically responsible readings, in the early period of increasing stabilization of
the text, puts emphasis on the canonical nature, especially in the sense of norma
normans, of all the witnesses. And it puts into relief the pluriformity and even
pluralism, not only within a given canon, but between texts as witnesses.
Canon makes the difference,37 not in the sense of a closed, invariable “canon”
(norma normata),38 but in the sense of a body of literature, probably still open-
ended, in periods of intense canonical process, or stabilization, of text and canon.
To attempt to reconstruct an “original” (pursuing individual authorial intention-
ality – the aim and Tendenz of most modern scholarship) may in effect decanon-
ize the text by pressing back to a point before it had become the communities’
text. On the other hand, facilely to accept some “final form,” after a high degree
of stabilization of the text and all the constraints injected into it, could possibly
burden some passages with a history of traditioning that may have become rigid,
preserving intervening misunderstandings and even errors, and unrelated directly
to the life of a believing community.39
The valid middle term is to strive to establish a text near the beginning of the
intensive stabilization process. Comparison of witnesses may help in discerning
36
This is not to say that tradents were free of error or that texts are free of corruption. They
were and are not. Note factors 8 through 13 in the preliminary and final reports (Barthélemy,
Preliminary and Interim Report, vi – vii; see also the first volume of the final report by Barthé-
lemy, Critique textuelle, esp. 1:*107 – *11). The concept and method of text criticism advanced
by the HUBP, but especially by the UBS HOTTP and in this essay, do not facilely resort to the
argument of “scribal error” or textual corruption, but withhold such a judgment until all other
possibilities are exhausted. All tradents, ancient disciples, students, school members, tradition-
ists, scribes, translators, midrashists, and copyists wanted to be responsible to the communities
they served; they wanted them to understand the text they were traditioning. Naturally, the
understanding they wanted them to have was the “right” one (theirs, quite obviously); this is a
sense of responsibility that must be respected and exposed for study. Sometimes, in doing so,
they made errors. It is a question of attitude, even hermeneutic, on the part of the modern text
critic.
37
Sanders, Torah and Canon, xv.
38
As in Beckwith, OT Canon of the NT Church; see the writer’s critique of Beckwith in
Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible.”
39
Remarkable as the MT is, when fully appreciated as the medieval grammarians indeed did,
it nonetheless preserves some universally recognized improbabilities.
a text partly preserved here, partly preserved there; if neither witness is violated,
reconstruction based on the two lines of witness may be valid so long as the
readings chosen are textually attested and modern conjectures held to an absolute
minimum, if not totally eliminated. At this point text and canon (a text received
from an actual ancient believing community) join forces against translating for
the faithful, or the general public, what modern scholarship thinks an original
author “ought to have said,” which often has changed through recent decades as
scholarship has changed.
In using the tool of structure analysis, if one finds there were two (or more)
quite valid concepts of the text in the second period of text transmission, nei-
ther should be pillaged to “correct” the other, or to reconstruct in effect a third
(modern) text, if to do so would be to violate both. In that case, I would like to
argue that both witnesses, viz., the MT and the Septuagint (with an eye on other
pre-MT witnesses such as the DSS), be honored and respected, and passed on by
translation to current believing communities. For both pre-MT and proto-MT
witnesses were functioning in believing communities at the time of the formation
of the NT and at the nascence of formative Judaism.40
In the case, for instance, of the Isa 40:1 – 11 passage, it might possibly be
decided that a modern translation offer both texts, horizontally or vertically par-
allel, on the same page. The decision to do so would need to be taken with great
care and only after full debate by a responsible text-critical group. One thinks,
for instance, of the quite different stories of Hannah and Anna in 1 Sam 1 – 2.41
Both tradents had quite different conceptions, probably culturally conditioned,
of the story. Both were extant in the period of canonical focus. Another exam-
ple would be the stories of David and Goliath reported in MT 1 Sam 16 – 18 and
LXX 1 Kgdms 16 – 18.42 Others would include portions of Genesis and Isaiah,
and the books of Jeremiah and Daniel; and there are more. Such double literary
editions, unless it can be shown otherwise, which served different ancient believ-
ing communities over a period of time, should both be accorded the respect of
being shared with believing communities today.43
There is ample canonical warrant for such a practice. The canonical biblical
text includes many doublets, such as two forms of the Decalogue, Ps 18 and
2 Sam 22, Pss 14 and 53, 2 Kgs 18:13 – 20:19 and Isa 36 – 39, and numerous oth-
40
See the writer’s attempts to alter subsumed theories of inspiration (or the point at which
a text was considered “original” [canonical?]) from that of God (or Holy Spirit or Shekinah or
Truth) impacting only original “authors,” to God’s working all along the path of formation of
these texts, not simplistically or just “paternally” preserving the “original,” as the early Cal-
vinists claimed, but also developing and unfolding the texts along their pilgrimages in intense
canonical process of stabilization and adaptation in believing communities: Sanders, Canon and
Community, xv – xvii, and Sanders, “Biblical Criticism.”
41
Walters, “Hannah and Anna.” Arguably one might attempt to indicate also the concep-
tion of the story witnessed in 4QSama, but not mix them up in some brave attempt to decide
what was “original” (pace the NRSV ad loc.).
42
Barthélemy, Gooding, Lust, and Tov, Story of David and Goliath.
43
This suggestion would be a friendly alternative to that made by Ulrich in “Double Liter-
ary Editions,” 101 – 16; see also Ulrich, “Biblical Scrolls,” 221 – 24.
ers.44 The canon includes two distinct histories of the period from the united
kingdom to the exile, and four distinct Gospels.45 Some modern translations
include the Hebrew Esther among the canonical books and the Greek Esther in
its entirety in the deutero-canonical section.46
Are the faithful ready to have a Bible that is pluriform to such an extent?
The answer to that depends in large measure on how truly ecumenical Christian
leaders have become and are willing to instruct the people in the pluriformities
of Judaism and Christianity as they are adumbrated in the Bible itself, since the
Bible already includes many doublets and dialogues within its canonical guises.
One would not expect “leaders” who, for their own political purpose, insist on
“biblical inerrancy” (whatever is meant by the term) to disturb their constituen-
cies; but certainly Catholic and mainline Protestant leaders47 should by now be
prepared to offer under one canonical cover, so to speak, the pluriform riches
bequeathed us in the several canonical texts of ancient believing communities,
and not continue the pretense that each is offering, in whatever authorized trans-
lation, the true Bible.
Fortunately, efforts are under way to provide modern translations of the Sep-
tuagint, benefitting from recent text-critical work on the Septuagint text, so that
students and pastors can see for themselves the sorts of Old Testament texts
reflected in much of the New Testament, as well as compare the so-called double
literary editions in their full integrity.48
Jerome was able to convince the church, eventually, that the First Testament
should reflect Hebraica veritas in its text but retain a vaguely Septuagint order
of books. In doing so he denied the integrity of, e. g., the Greek forms of Esther
and Daniel49 by including their larger literary pluses only as addenda, thus elim-
inating the many smaller but significant literary differences throughout; he failed
also to keep the canonical thrust of the tripartite Jewish canonical order. But he
dared something far greater than we are here proposing; he affirmed the pro-
44
The apparatus in BHS to Ps 18 and 2 Sam 22, e. g., tends to lead the reader to deny the
integrity of each and instead reconstruct in both cases some kind of single Ur-text (in effect, a
third, modern text), whereas the masorot in the MT strive to preserve each doublet with its dif-
ferences as received. Cf. Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concept and Method,” 135 – 40.
45
See also Nelson-Jones, Double Redaction. Tatian attempted to “harmonize” the four Gos-
pels in his Diatesseron, which was rejected by the churches.
46
See TOB. Others, especially Catholic translations, include one Esther integrating the
Greek pluses at the appropriate places in the translation of the shorter Hebrew text; see the
NAB, Die Bibel: Einheitsübersetzung, and the NEB. The integrity of each should be respected.
For a thorough structure analysis and comparison of three forms of Esther, the MT, and the GKʹK
and L in Greek, see Dorothy, “Books of Esther”; each has its own structure, conception, and
integrity.
47
Those who believe that the Enlightenment was a gift of God in due season and that the
Holy Spirit continues to work surprises in the ongoing canonical process (though of course
there are some universally recognized improbabilities in the text).
48
See Marguerite Harl (and colleagues), the first three volumes in the series La Bible d’Alex-
andrie: Harl and Alexandre, La Genèse; Le Boulluec and Sandevoir, L’Exode; Pralon and Harlé,
Le Lévitique. Such a project is urgently needed in English.
49
As well as other bodies of canonical literature such as Proverbs, Jeremiah, and Exod 35 – 40.
to-masoretic Jewish text of the First Testament extant in his time in Bethlehem,
still retaining some of the riches of the Septuagint in his Latin translations of the
canonical literature, and, of course, in the deutero-canonicals.50 The faithful are
accustomed to seeing the long ending of Mark as well as John 7:53 – 8:11 in the
margin [or in brackets] in some translations.51
Those who actually read the Bible know of the doublets, triplets, and other
dialogues within a single canon. They know that the Bible is made up of all sorts
of human responses to divine revelations. And they know the fluidity of text
and canon that exists among the several recent translations they have on their
shelves in churches and homes. For scholarship to continue tacitly to pretend to
offer translations of some supposed “original” form of the text, each supposedly
closer to it than the other, can only continue to sponsor denominationalism. The
continuing process of stabilization should not deny the fluidity and adaptability
that are equally integral parts of the same canonical process.
Bibliography
Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982, 1986, 1992. [Now
5 vols. to 2016.]
Barthélemy, Dominique et al., eds. Preliminary and Interim Report on the Hebrew Old
Barthélemy, Dominique. “Redécouverte d’un chaînon manquant de l’histoire de la Sep-
tante.” RB 60 (1953) 18 – 29.
Barthélemy, Dominique, David W. Gooding, Johan Lust, and Emanuel Tov. The Story of
David and Goliath: Textual and Literary Criticism. Fribourg: Presses universitaires,
1986.
Beckwith, Roger T. The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its
Background in Early Judaism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985.
Carr, David M. “Royal Ideology and the Technology of Faith: A Comparative Midrash
Study of 1 Kgs 3:2 – 15.” PhD diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1988.
50
See Sanders, Review of OT Canon of the NT Church by Beckwith, and Sanders, “Canon.
Hebrew Bible.” Jerome’s text, presumably the one he worked on in Bethlehem, was proto-mas-
oretic, a result of the stabilization process that began in the first century BCE commensurate
with Barthélemy’s thesis; the Vulgate is a rare, precious witness to the history of transmission
of the text in the late fourth century CE, even though Jerome apparently retained a number of
familiar Septuagint / OL readings against the Hebrew (as in Isa 40:6, noted above).
51
This is distinctly preferable to simply adding to the MT what another witness includes
as though pretending thereby to reconstruct an “original” fuller text, as in the case of the para-
graph that follows 1 Sam 10:27 in the NRSV; see ad loc. note r.
Davidson, Robert. Wisdom and Worship. Philadelphia: Trinity International, 1990.

Die Bibel: Einheitsübersetzung der Heiligen Schrift. Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk,
1980.
Dorothy, Charles V. “The Books of Esther: Structure, Genre, and Textual Integrity.” PhD
diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1989. [Now JSOTSup 187. Sheffield: Sheffield Ac-
ademic, 1997.]
Fishbane, Michael A. The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics. Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H., ed. The Book of Isaiah. Vol. 2, Chapters 22 – 44. HUBP.
Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H., ed. The Book of Isaiah, Parts One and Two. HUBP. Jeru-
salem: Magnes, 1975.
Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “Theory and Practice of Textual Criticism.” Textus 3 (1963)
130 – 58.
Harl, Marguerite, and Monique Alexandre, trans. La Genèse. La Bible d’Alexandrie 1.
Paris: Cerf, 1986.
Knierim, Rolf P. “Criticism of Literary Features, Form, Tradition, and Redaction.” In The
Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters, edited by Douglas A. Knight and Gene M.
Tucker, 123 – 65. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985.
Knierim, Rolf P., and George W. Coats. Numbers. [FOTL 4. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2005].
Le Boulluec, Alain, and Pierre Sandevoir, trans. L’Exode. La Bible d’Alexandrie 2. Paris:
Cerf, 1989.
Mulder, Martin J. “The Transmission of the Biblical Text.” In Mikra: Text, Transla-
tion, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early
Christianity, edited by Martin J. Mulder, 87 – 135. CRINT 2. Philadelphia: Fortress,
1988.
Nelson-Jones, Richard. The Double Redaction of the Deuteronomistic History. JSOT-
Sup 18. Sheffield: JSOT, 1981.
Pralon, Didier, and Paul Harlé, trans. Le Lévitique. La Bible d’Alexandrie 3. Paris: Cerf,
1988.
Rosenblatt, Jason P., and Joseph C. Sitterson Jr., eds. “Not in Heaven”: Coherence and
Complexity in Biblical Narrative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. New York: Doubleday, 1976.]
Sanders, James A. “Biblical Criticism and the Bible as Canon.” In From Sacred Story
USQR 32 (1977) 157 – 65.]
Fortress, 1984.
Sanders, James A. “Canon. Hebrew Bible.” Forthcoming [in ABD 1:837 – 52].
Sanders, James A. “Canonical Criticism: An Introduction.” In Le canon de l’Ancien Testa-

ment: Sa formation et son histoire, edited by Jean-Daniel Kaestli and Otto Wermelinger,
341 – 62. Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1984.
Sanders, James A. “Canonical Hermeneutics.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by
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Fortress, 1984.]
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Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.]
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view 8 (1984) 167 – 84.
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Roger Beckwith. ThTo 44 (1987) 131 – 34.
(1979) 5 – 29.]
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the Book of Isaiah.” JBL 109 (1990) 229 – 47.
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Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971.
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DJD 8. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990. ˙ ˙
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in Honor of Walter J. Harrelson, edited by James L. Crenshaw, 101 – 16. Macon GA:
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107 (1988) 385 – 412.
6
Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon
Introduction (1987)
“Adaptable for Life” (1972) was written as a follow-up to Torah and Canon
(1972) soon after the manuscript for the latter had gone off to press. There I had
addressed the problem of why “Joshua” or, at least, the traditions it represents,
did not end up in the Torah that Ezra brought back with him from Babylonia
to Jerusalem (Neh 8), whereas almost all the recitals of Israel’s epic history in
the prophets, psalms, and historiography included and often concluded with the
entrance into the land. But I felt I needed to address an equally important ques-
tion, and that was how the Ezra Torah could so quickly claim the authority it
did, and, furthermore, how that same Torah could maintain that authority in and
for Judaism for centuries to come.
In the introduction to Torah and Canon I had said:
This essay began as an effort to look at the Bible holistically – not to seek its unity (no one
is doing that these days), but to describe its shape and its function. It soon became clear
that the origin and essence of the Bible lay in the concept of Torah, those early traditions
of ancient Israel which not only had a life of their own but gave life to those who knew
them and molded their own lives around them. It was soon also clear that in that life pro-
cess lay the meaning of canon.1
But I had written the introduction, like all authors I think, after I had written the
book. The introduction represented thinking already somewhat beyond the con-
tents of the book. I felt I needed to address the question of authority in a really
fresh way. “Adaptable for Life” was that attempt. It addresses both questions:
how that authority arose and how it was thereafter maintained.
I knew I had to get away from the conscious intentions and decisions of early
Jews in dealing with the question. There was also the other problem, dealt with
to some extent in Torah and Canon, of how it was that only the Bible folk, the
heirs of old Israel and Judah, survived the successive power flows of the late Iron
Age before stability once more was assured, not this time by Egypt but rather
by Persia. Why did Judaism alone survive? The Samaritan question could be
bracketed for two reasons: the origin and early history of the Samaritans was and
still is somewhat uncertain; but more important, they, too, were Torah folk. The
others, Israel’s neighbors, subject to the same power pressures for assimilation
and therefore identity extinction, succumbed and disappeared.

1
Sanders, Torah and Canon, ix – x.
Even so, it was not Israel and Judah that survived. It was a new Israel, Juda-
ism, born out of the ashes of the old in exile. “Adaptable for Life” advances the
thesis that the resurrection of Judaism out of the death of the old was due to the
relecture, the rereading or reciting of old preexilic traditions, indeed, pre-con-
quest or pre-identity-with-the-land traditions, that gave survival power to those
who elected because of that to keep what identity they could of their preexilic
existence. Torah, indeed, had survival power. It was being read and reread all
through the diaspora by what we now know was a remnant, precisely those who
retained the old, but adapted, identity. But that same power for life also trans-
ferred to the readers of those traditions: they refused to assimilate.
That death-and-life experience became thereafter indelibly imprinted on
the corporate Jewish psyche or lēb (heart). It was serious reading and re-read-
ing of the old traditions that provided the staying power for that remnant. The
non-remnant assimilated just as other national identities were dissipating and
assimilating.
But that very act, or process, of reading and re-reading in diaspora – and even
life in Palestine was a form of diaspora under dominant Persia – where Ezra’s
Torah was edited and shaped, indicated the considerable malleability of the shap-
ing of the traditions. There was a core. There was an essence. There was continu-
ity or stability in those traditions. But there was also adaptability.
These observations raised the question of hermeneutics in a poignant way.
Not hermeneutics in the way most exegetes, interpreters, and theologians were
talking about hermeneutics in the early 1970s or since, but the hermeneutics of
those very believing communities that experienced what Ezekiel called the resur-
rection (Ezek 37). How did they read the traditions that they yielded such exis-
tential power for them? The old traditions that survived and were shaped by the
death-and-life experience of exile became Torah for all time, but a Torah adapt-
able and stable enough to be, indeed, not only a lamp and a light on life’s pilgrim-
age, but also life in the land when Torah is not forgotten but rather is imprinted
for joy on the heart (Ps 119:105 – 12) just as Jeremiah had hoped (Jer 31:31 – 34).
Such was the origin, then, of the old Jewish concept of Torah being the Book of
Life.
Its power for life, then, is not to be thought of in philosophical existentialist
terms primarily; for its life-giving power, which had been “proved” in the resur-
rection experience, continued to nourish Judaism and to provide it with a sure
guide to lifestyle. It was not just a matter of survival; it was also a matter of life’s
ethos. The authority of such power was there for the remnant to behold and
wonder at before that authority was expressed in terms of Mosaic authorship or
acceptance by some sort of authoritative council. It was indelibly imprinted on
the corporate soul of Judaism.
Of note since the original article was written are Wilson, The Editing of the
Hebrew Psalter; Wise, “The Dead Sea Scrolls, Part 1.” On the new impetus in
the study of the Pseudepigrapha, see Charlesworth, The OT Pseudepigrapha, and
Denis, Introduction aux pseudépigraphes grecs.
Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon 95
The study of the canon of the Bible, and especially of the OT, is today in a state
of flux. One senses this especially if one re-reads, at the present moment, the
standard introductions and handbooks on the subject. For the most part they
exhibit consensus on the meaning of canon without broaching the problems of
canon as they should be put today. Discrepancy in judgment may appear on how
early or how late one may speak of closure of the three sections of the OT; but,
save for a few hints otherwise, standard discussions of canon deal almost exclu-
sively with last things in the canonical process rather than with the early factors
that gave rise to the phenomenon of canon as Judaism inherited it.
The sense of flux comes in reading such discussions in the light of what has
been happening in the last several years in biblical studies generally. Today, I
am convinced, we cannot deal adequately with the question of the structure of
canon, or what is in and what is out, until we have explored seriously and exten-
sively the question of the function of canon. It is time to attempt to write a
history of the early canonical process.2 Out of what in ancient Israel’s common
life did the very idea of canon itself arise? The concept of canon is located in
the tension between two poles: stability and adaptability, but discussions since
Semler3 in 1772 have dealt almost exclusively with the former and rarely with
the latter. Hence, all the brave efforts to work on hermeneutics in the past fifteen
years have failed, I think, for the lack of work on canonical criticism, for herme-
2
In a manner of speaking, George Ernest Wright has been doing this, from his perspective
of a canon within the canon, all along. If one reviews his published work in biblical theology
from 1937 to the present [to 1969] one witnesses a process at work: “Exegesis and Eisegesis”;
“Terminology of OT Religion”; “How Did Early Israel Differ”; Challenge of Israel’s Faith;
“Neo-Orthodoxy and the Bible”; “Interpreting the OT”; “Christian Interpreter as Biblical
Critic”; OT against Its Environment; “Unity of the Bible”; God Who Acts; “Wherein Lies the
Unity of the Bible?”; Biblical Doctrine of Man in Society; “Unity of the Bible,” JRT; “Unity
of the Bible,” SJT; with Fuller, Book of the Acts of God; Rule of God; “History and Reality”;
OT and Theology. A beginning on a history of the canonical process is attempted in Sanders,
Torah and Canon (1972). From a different perspective but congruous in certain presupposi-
tions and basic theses is Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics. From the NT perspective, see
Sundberg, OT of the Early Church; Sundberg, “‘OT’: A Christian Canon”; Sundberg, “Toward
a Revised History of the NT Canon.” The trend of discussion on canon in the NT can be seen
in Appel, Kanon und Kirche; Käsemann, “Canon of the NT”; and esp. in Käsemann, Das Neue
Testament als Kanon. Käsemann’s own contributions to the latter (pp. 336 – 410) are especially
valuable. I would still insist that the problem of whether the OT was Christian did not arise in
the church until the second century CE. The problem of the first century, and hence of the NT,
was whether the NT was biblical, i. e., whether God really had done another righteousness, in
Christ. Brevard S. Childs, while intensely and rightly interested in the nature and function of
canon, is not primarily interested in a history of the early canonical process; see Sanders, Re-
view of Biblical Theology in Crisis; Sanders, Review of Old Testament and Theology. Childs’s
position was anticipated in part in Sanders, “Habakkuk in Qumran.” Similar kinds of probing
may be seen in Barr, Old and New in Interpretation, 149 – 200; Lohfink, “Die historische und
christliche Auslegung des AT”; and Stuhlmacher, “Neues Testament und Hermeneutik.” See
also Wright, “Historical Knowledge and Revelation” (surely, in part, misunderstanding).
3
Semler, Abhandlung von freier Untersuchung des Canon. Cf. Hornig, Die Anfänge der
historisch-kritischen Theologie; Schmittner, Kritik und Apologetik.
neutics must be viewed as the middle term of the axis that lies between stability
and adaptability.
Robert Pfeiffer’s chapter in his Introduction is one of the finest of the older
liberal discussions of canon.4 And yet, Pfeiffer started with the finding of the
scroll in the temple in 621 BCE: he started with the concept of stability and the
necessary observations about Deut 31:26. It seemed quite normal at the time, I
am sure, and one can understand it today even though we are in a quite different
Zeitgeist, to cast about for the earliest evidence of when a certain body of tra-
ditional literature became stabilized; and Deuteronomy seems to provide that
evidence for the Pentateuch. The work of the exilic or priestly editors then is
usually mentioned, followed by observations about the work of Ezra with evi-
dence to substantiate it in the Chronicler. So much for the Law. In the case of
the Prophets the discussions start with citations from Ben Sira 48 and 49, written
about 190 BCE, to show that the books of the Three and the Dodecapropheton
must have become by that time the prophetic corpus as we know it now – with a
door left ajar to allow for the embarrassing results of literary and historical criti-
cism that some isolated passages in the Prophets may have dated from Ptolemaic,
Seleucid, or even Maccabean times.
What is rather remarkable is the tendency to read back as far as possible the
closure of some portions of the Writings. This has especially been the case for the
Psalter. Before the discovery of the large Psalms Scroll from Qumran Cave 11 a
general consensus had been reached placing the stabilization of the masoretic col-
lection of 150 psalms (give or take Ps 151) in the late Persian period. Supported
by what I suppose one might call a general neo-orthodox atmosphere, at least
certainly a conservative one, conjoined with a growing nationalist hermeneutic
in Jewish scholarship, assertions outreached the evidence for such a judgment.
A review of the evidence advanced by even the greatest names in scholarship for
such an early dating of the closure of the MT‑150 Psalter exposes rather dramat-
ically the paucity of basis for it, as well as the range played by impertinent data.5
The only sound thesis that can be built on the now-available evidence is that
while the MT‑150 collection may well have stabilized for some sects in Judaism
already in the middle of the second century BCE (considerably after the Persian
period), for other segments of the Jewish community the Psalter was open-ended
well into the first century CE. The prevailing view that the proto-MT text of the
Law and the Prophets became the official text, and became largely stabilized,
in the period of the some hundred years from Hillel to the fall of Jerusalem in
69 CE, may possibly be a parallel and analogous historical picture for what hap-
4
Pfeiffer, Introduction to the OT, 50 – 70; cf. his article in the IDB, s. v. “Canon of the OT.”
5
See Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises.” The real value of the very flaccid references in the Ben
Sira prologue, in Philo (De vita contemplativa 25), and Luke 24:44, must now be reviewed in the
light of present evidence. See the excellent remarks of Roberts, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms
Scroll, 185, in this regard, contra his earlier thesis in Roberts, “OT Canon: A Suggestion.” Cf.
Ackroyd, “Open Canon.” For an early pre-Christian date of closure and a very conservative
reconstruction of the meager available evidence in the light of it, see Beckwith, OT Canon of
the NT Church.
pened to the Psalter in that same all-crucial period.6 At any rate, the question
of the dates of the individual psalms remains uninfluenced by the independent
question of the stabilization of the contents and order of the MT Psalter, just as
the text-critical question of the individual variants for the several psalms has to
be dealt with on its own methodological grounds.7 Social and political factors
were at work in the period of Roman hegemony that just simply had not been
there in such degree before and that caused an intensive, concentrated amount of
scholarly effort on the part of Palestinian Jews resulting in the sorts of evidence
of stabilization in the period available to us today.
Despite the apparent lack of clear reference to Jabneh,8 there is abundant indi-
rect evidence for the convening, at the end of the first century CE, of a group
of rabbis who felt constrained by the compelling events of the day, largely the
threat of disintegration due to the loss of Jerusalem and her religious symbols,
to make decisions regarding the contents of the Hagiographa.9 The remarkable
thing about the assumed council at Jabneh is not that it did not settle absolutely
all questions. The remarkable thing, in the light of the way the question of canon
should be broached today, is that so few questions remained after Jabneh about
what was in (soiled the hands) and what was out. When one looks at the whole
question of canon, from its inception in preexilic days, the authority of the sup-
posed council of Jabneh is remarkable indeed. And the fact that some scattered
debate continued into the second century about the canonicity of Esther, Song of
Songs, Ecclesiastes, and even Proverbs and Ezekiel, should, in that perspective,
properly be viewed as minimal in the extreme. The effectiveness of the conciliar
decisions at Jabneh (or what we extrapolate from the plethora of evidence for a
Jabneh council) points as does very little else to the enormity of the fall of Jerusa-
lem in 69 CE in the religious (not to speak of the social, economic, and political)
history of Judaism. And it should caution us today against reading back into the
earlier period what Judaism became in the first century.10 Dramatic changes took
place in Judaism in the first century of the Common Era that affected the bottom
end of the canonical process.
6
I here reaffirm my judgment as stated in “Cave 11 Surprises,” 106 – 9 – to dismiss 11QPsa
as the earliest example of a Jewish prayer book is unwarranted: the Psalter itself, in whatever
early form, is the earliest example of a Jewish prayer book. To the evidence adduced in “Cave 11
Surprises,” 105n10, see now other evidence, especially from 4QIsac, adduced by Siegel, “Em-
ployment of Palaeo-Hebrew Characters.”
7
On the dating of individual psalms by linguistic criteria, see the recent work of Avi Hurvitz
of Hebrew University. In regard to the larger question of text transmission see Cross, “History
of the Biblical Text”; Cross, “Contribution of the Discoveries at Qumran”; Talmon, “Aspects of
the Textual Transmission.” What is really needed now, as I tried to point out in Sanders, “Text
Criticism and the NJV Torah,” is a critical review of method in text criticism – actually how to
make a judgment in “establishing the text.” This is sharply indicated now by the work of the
Hebrew University Bible Project and the International Old Testament Text Critical Committee
of the United Bible Societies as over against the results now emerging in the fascicles of the BHS.
8
See Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?”
9
See the work of Neusner, including Development of a Legend and Rabbinic Traditions
about the Pharisees.
10
Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 157 – 59.
Current discussions of the canon of the OT have to begin, therefore, from a

different perspective. This new approach to the question of canon I have called
canonical criticism.11 A new departure for the study of canon is necessary for a
number of reasons: the need to move away from the peculiar views offered by
the Jabneh mentality; the need to account for the fluidity (to a greater or lesser
extent) both in text and content of the Prophets and Writings right up to the
period of Pharisaic hegemony under Salome Alexandra;12 the need to account for
the great pluralism in Judaism in the early Jewish period; and the need to account
for a basic shift in hermeneutic techniques in proto-Pharisaic circles away from
contextual to atomistic midrash.13
Largely because of the recovery of the Qumran literature, but also in part
because of the intensive review that recovery has caused scholarship to engage
in of the other Jewish literature datable to early Judaism (including apocryphal,
pseudepigraphic, and neotestamental),14 we now know that the Jabneh mentality
cannot dominate the way we must now think about the canonical process up
to the first centuries BCE and CE. Not only is there no clear evidence of such
punctiliar and conciliar decision making in the period before Jabneh,15 there is
also no evidence prior to the first century CE of the kind of standardization of
norms by which that century is now so well characterized. A new attitude is
indicated in thinking about the canonical process and must be at the heart of
canonical criticism.
II
Current thinking on the OT exhibits a kind of frustration about what is in and

what is out of the canon. Behind the frustration is a tension between the Jabneh
mentality and the modern question arising out of the ecumenical movement:
what shall we say in answer to the question of what is canonical for church and
synagogue today? Some of the deuterocanonical books that Roman Catholics
value to some degree as authoritative, but that Jews and most Protestants do not
consider at all canonical, were quite clearly authoritative for many Jews in the
pre-Jabneh period. Are they in or out? Should they be graded separately and
11
Sanders, Torah and Canon, ix – xx.
12
See Barthélemy, “Les tiqquné sopherim.”
13
See the pivotal article by Bloch, “Midrash.” Parenthetically, it should be noted that be-
cause it is the nature of canonical or authoritative communal traditions that they are adaptable
to the needs of the ongoing communities, computer analyses of style for determining authorship
that do not use for control data literature (1) that is not canonical and (2) of absolutely known
single authorship, are limited in value.
14
Pseudepigraphal studies have received a new impetus both in this country and abroad in
the past ten years. See Denis, Introduction aux pseudépigraphes grecs, ix – xx.
15
Pace Finkelstein, “Maxim of the Anshe Keneset ha-Gedolah”; cf. Hoenig, Great Sanhe-
drin. This is not to deny the need to explain what Finkelstein cites as his evidence, e. g., ARNA,
folio 65 n23 in Schechter’s edition of Vienna, 1887; see Goldin, Fathers according to Rabbi Na-
than.
individually? Nor do these questions touch on the very sensitive problem for
us of what is in the canon in the Eastern churches.16 These modern, “relevant”
questions serve but to stress the need for canonical criticism to turn, for the
present, to the other pole of the canonical process. Let us begin at the beginning.
Exorcising the Jabneh mentality and turning our back on the frustrations it has
engendered requires concentration on the basic concept of canon itself.
Because nearly all discussions of canon start with some etymological obser-
vation about the word “canon” (Qaneh-kanon), the aspect of “normative rule”
provides a mindset from the beginning. Attention is drawn immediately to the
question of the size of the rule. How long is it? Why is it that long? What were
the criteria that determined its length? This is the pole of stability. But the other
aspect of the idea of canon, always in tension with it, is not its length or struc-
ture, but rather its nature and function. And it is on the nature and function of
canon that canonical criticism puts the prior emphasis. What does it do? How
did it get started in the first place? A priori, the first consideration of canonical
criticism is the phenomenon of repetition. Repetition requires that the tradition
be both stable and adaptable. Minimally speaking, it is the nature of canon to be
“remembered” or contemporized. The fact that begs explanation is that of the
earliest rise of a tradition.
Otto Eissfeldt is right to begin his chapter on canon with what he calls pre-
history. “It was only in the second century AD . . . that the formation of the
Old Testament canon came to an end. But its prehistory begins centuries or
even millennia earlier. Its starting-point is the belief that particular utterances
of men are in reality the word of God and as such can claim for themselves spe-
cial authority.”17 But because Eissfeldt limited himself in his prehistory to the
concept of “word,” he goes on only to speak of “[s]ix different kinds of words
which rank as divine words.” And in doing so he further limits his thinking to
three of them, judgment, word, and directive (mishpat, dabar, and torah), which
narrows his cursive prehistory to collections of legal material and how they grew,
“the replacement of older bodies of law by newer ones.” And then, forthwith, he
deals with the single aspect of inclusion-exclusion and leaves aside a discussion
that could have been very fruitful indeed.
Aage Bentzen, in his introduction to the OT, has a very pregnant sentence
in his chapter on canon that he, too, fails to develop: “Another germ of a for-
mation of Canon is probably also found in what has been called ‘the historical
Credo of Israel.’”18 Bentzen is surely right, for concentration on how little legal
codes became larger legal codes is not only a Holzweg for understanding the
canonical process in general, it overlooks the essential nature of the Torah itself
in which those codes are embedded. Two of the essential observations one must
make about the OT are (1) there are no laws, with the status of law, outside the
16
See the trenchant article on the complex situation with the Enoch materials by Milik,
“Problèmes de la littérature hénochique.”
17
Eissfeldt, OT: An Introduction, 560.
18
Bentzen, Introduction to the OT, 24.
Torah; and (2) the Torah itself is not primarily legal literature. It was in part to
probe such observations that I wrote Torah and Canon, and I do not want to
repeat all that here. But canonical criticism must deal with the observation that
it is the Torah that gives authority to the laws within it, and not the other way
around. Building on the observations of Gunnar Östborn, and on one’s own
unbiased reading, one must insist that a primary definition of Torah cannot be
“law.”19 It is a story, first and foremost, with Yahweh, the God of Israel (in all his
syncretistic makeup),20 as the prime actor and speaker. Biblical scholarship has
clearly shown that the laws in the Pentateuch actually date from widely varying
times and were in some measure the common property of the ancient Near East.
Ancillary observations such as that of the lack of laws in Joshua (despite the for-
mulary introduction in 24:25 ff.), or in Samuel or Kings, despite the insistence
therein that Israel’s kings constantly made judicial decisions and ruled largely by
royal decree, simply force the question of why Eissfeldt’s “collections of judg-
ments” are to be found only in the Pentateuch. (Ezekiel’s so-called Temple Torah
in chs. 40 – 48 did not make it in.)
III
The Torah is best defined as a story (mythos) with law (ethos) embedded in it.21
The observation that has imposed itself most strongly in the past generation is
that this Torah story is to be found in scattered places in the Bible, in shorter
or longer compass – without the laws (or, to put it the way it is usually put,
without Sinai). Gerhard von Rad has called these passages, especially those in
Deut 26:5 – 9 and Josh 24, ancient Israel’s ancient credo,22 and George Ernest
Wright has called them confessional recitals of God’s mighty acts.23 Touching
directly on the question of the nature of canon, Wright calls the Bible the Book
of the Acts of God.24 Martin Noth in turn built on von Rad’s thesis by a rather
far-reaching tradition-critical study of the Pentateuch.25
19
Östborn, Tōrā in the OT; Östborn, Cult and Canon.
20
See Alt, “God of the Fathers”; Eissfeldt, “El and Yahweh,” 35 ff.; Cross, “Yahweh and the
God of the Patriarchs”; Cross, “Divine Warrior”; Wright, OT and Theology, 70 – 150. From a
different perspective, see Smith, “Common Theology of the ANE.”
21
Sanders, Torah and Canon, 31 ff.
22
von Rad, Problem of the Hexateuch, 1 – 78.
23
Wright, God Who Acts. Wright has clarified his confessional position vis-à-vis the system-
atic approach of Eichrodt on the one hand, and the form-critical approach of von Rad on the
other, in OT and Theology; see my review of the latter in Sanders, Review of The Old Testament
and Theology.
24
Wright and Fuller, Book of the Acts of God.
25
Noth, History of Pentateuchal Traditions. The ET is admirably done by B. W. Ander-
son. He has enhanced the volume with a critical introduction (pp. xiii – xxii) and an analytical
outline of the Pentateuch based on the source-critical and tradition-critical methods combined
(pp. 261 – 76).
The position generally shared by these three scholars and those that follow
them is that the Pentateuch, or Torah, is the credo, or confessional recital, writ
large. To it have been added, according to Noth, a number of other traditions,
including Sinai. Wright’s position differs largely in his insistence that the Torah
including Sinai stems from actual historical occurrence indicated (though not
proved) by archaeology.
Von Rad’s work on the credo, and his and Noth’s form-critical and tradi
tion-critical work on the Hexateuch, have come under careful scrutiny in recent
years.26 The bulk of the criticism is to the effect that the so-called credo is not
ancient at all, but rather Deuteronomic, and that in form Deut 26:5 – 9 is not a
Gattung at all; but rather all such passages are historical summaries embedded
within larger forms such as the covenantal formulary, or simply parts of prayers
of thanksgiving, petition, catechesis, or the like.27
These main points of criticism are in large part justified, especially the obser-
vation that the recitals are not ancient in the form that we inherit them. Surely
Deut 26:5 – 9 is in every crucial turn of phrase Deuteronomic.28 The neo-ortho-
dox Zeitgeist of the 1930s permitted the use of the term “credo” without criti-
cism until 1948.29
Wright’s term “recital” is a more felicitous word for, as the critics of von Rad
have pointed out, the summaries seem to be largely catechetical in form. But crit-
icism of the main point of the summaries must itself not be permitted to get out
of hand. The history of scholarship shows that often the pendulum-swing from
one Zeitgeist to the following tends to annihilate what ought to remain of earlier
work as well as what was tenuous about it. (One wonders if some of the fine
work done in the last ten years on wisdom in the OT will be forced to languish
for a while when the mood changes once more.) Critics of von Rad have seemed
content to leave the impression, almost in the manner of assumptions made in the
era of source criticism, that the Deuteronomists created the historical summary
form without probing the question of where it had itself come from.
26
See, e. g., Hyatt, “Ancient Historical Credo.” In addition to the criticism of Artur Weiser,
C. H. W. Brekelmans, Leonhard Rost, Georg Fohrer (ibid., 156 – 65), and Calum Carmichael
(ibid., 169 – 70), see Perlitt, Bundestheologie im AT, and Lohfink, “Zum ‘kleinen geschichtlichen
Credo.’” Lohfink’s is perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of the lot. Note also Lohfink’s
felicitous emphasis on the Nachleben, or continuing life, of a tradition. Hyatt’s argument (“An-
cient Historical Credo,” 168) that Judaism “came to consider its confession of faith as embodied
in the Shema . . . and . . . the Shema in the narrow sense says nothing about a saving act in history;
only in Num. 15:14 . . .” is something of a tour de force. It is the same sort of observation as that
of Sinai’s not being mentioned in the recitals. The centrality to Judaism of the Torah mythos can
be seen in Neh 9, Dan 9, and throughout the Jewish prayer book. Is it possible to have a syna-
gogue service without mention of it? Cf. Goldin, Song at the Sea.
27
On OT catecheses, see Soggin, “Kultätiologische Sagen und Katechese”; Laaf, Die Pas-
cha-Feier lsraels; and Loza, “Les catéchèses étiologiques.”
28
But this means only that the story was adaptable to seventh / sixth-century idiom, not that
Deuteronomy created the story.
29
Weiser, Einleitung in das AT; ET: The OT: Its Formation and Development, 81 – 99.
Without faulting Wright’s term “recital,” I prefer the term mythos, or “Torah
story.”30 The idea of mythos admits of a wider range of questions concerning the
function of the summaries. Form criticism is a useful tool in biblical criticism,
or within any criticism of any literature, but it can never stand alone. The form
of a literary passage cannot possibly answer all the questions necessary concern-
ing it. Indeed, its form may be deceptive, for the ancient speaker or writer may
well have intended to pour new wine into an old wineskin, precisely in order to
make a point that literary conformity might not have permitted him or her to
make.31 But more than that, as in the case of the larger question of canon, one
must always ask what function a literary piece served, originally as well as in its
subsequent contexts. What did these recitals or Torah stories do? The answers to
that question will, I think, preclude any suggestion or assumption that the school
of Deuteronomy invented them. There can be little question that Deuteronomy
underscored their importance, just as there is little question the intrusion of Deu-
teronomy into the old JE story line (between Numbers and Joshua, and then
eventual displacement of Joshua) had a profound effect on Judaism and its ability
in exile, by God, to arise out of the ashes of the old nationalist cult.32
30
The term mythos is chosen to avoid the problems of other words used to date. But I
do not thereby wish to prejudice the question of historicity. So far as I am concerned Israel’s
mythos was at base historical. See Childs, Myth and Reality in the OT, 101 – 2, and Wright, OT
and Theology, 39 – 69. I should really prefer the word “gospel,” but since the form-critical study
of “gospel” continues to be in a muddle, one simply cannot use it. Dennis McCarthy’s sugges-
tion of “commonplace” (from Greek rhetoric, topos) in “What Was Israel’s Historical Creed?”
is a possibility, but not immediately appealing. I prefer the manner in which Jacob Neusner
uses the term “Torah-myth”: see Neusner, History and Torah; Neusner, Way of Torah; Neusner,
There We Sat Down. See also the way Amos Wilder uses “story” as the means of God’s speaking
and the typically biblical medium of man’s relating God’s actions, in Language of the Gospel,
64 ff. Martin Buber used the word “myth” in the way I mean it in his Legend of the Baal-Shem,
xi: “The Jews are a people that has never ceased to produce myth . . . The religion of Israel has at
all times felt itself endangered by this stream, but it is from it, in fact, that Jewish religiousness
has at all times received its inner life.” The thesis being advanced by F. M. Cross Jr. and Paul D.
Hanson, that ancient Near Eastern myth was, according to the period and the needs of the com-
munity, more or less historicized, is not, I think, contradicted by this use of the word mythos:
cf. Hanson, “Jewish Apocalyptic”; Hanson, “OT Apocalyptic Reexamined”; Hanson, “Zecha-
riah 9.” If Immanuel Kant and Max Weber described Western humanity’s maturity as transition
from mythos to logos, and a process of rationalization of thought processes and structures (cf.
O’Dea, Sociology of Religion, 41 – 47), then it must be admitted that there are many forces today
contradicting the truth or validity of that transition as maturation. One thinks of the sociolo-
gists of knowledge (Karl Mannheim, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann), on the one hand, and
the structural anthropologists on the other, especially the work of Lévi-Strauss, Structural An-
thropology, and of his student François Lacan; cf. Barthes et al., Analyse structurale et exégèse
biblique. From another direction, there is also the work of Campbell, as in his Myths to Live By.
31
Sanders, “Dissenting Deities,” n. 12.
32
IV
If one reflects on the basic idea of canon, what he or she must probe is the fact
of repetition – a priori, the first time an idea was taken up again it passed the
immense barrier from a first telling to a second. One must dwell on that phe-
nomenon above all others. My colleague Theodor Gaster insists that it may have
been only for its entertainment or aesthetic value. And that is right, perhaps, in
the case of songs and certain types of stories and proverbs. They afford distrac-
tion and release, or alter moods to some desired end. Aesthetics would clearly
have been a determinant in the phenomenon of repetition. But there are many
collections of such materials that do not a canon make.33 One then must add
the other criterion, function. Whatever else canon does, it serves to engage the
two questions: who am I, or we, and what are we to do? This is the classical
understanding of the function of canon, and it has not been improved on. Canon
functions, for the most part, to provide indications of the identity as well as the
lifestyle of the ongoing community that reads it. The history of the biblical con-
cept of canon started with the earliest need to repeat a common or community
story precisely because it functioned to inform them who they were and what
they were to do even in their later situation.
But in the case of identity stories (and it is out of some sort of self-under-
standing that lifestyle is derived; a community’s ethos issues from its mythos) it is
most unlikely that there was ever a set form, either at the beginning or in the sub-
sequent stages of repetition. Here Wright is surely correct: the basic elements in
the recitals derive from history. And those basic elements were both the common
property of the people and the constant factor in whatever form they might take,
whether song, hymn, prayer, catechesis, covenant formulary, “creed,” or what
not. The more important such stories are to the life and existence of a people
(that is, the more they are remembered or repeated) the less valuable they are apt
to be to modern historians with their rather peculiar needs – since, of necessity,
each repetition invites, so to speak, an increase of history, something from the
period in which retold. Whenever a history belongs to the people and has exis-
tential value for them, it, of necessity, becomes legendum in some sense. There-
fore, what we observe in the OT is that Israel had a story of existential value for
them communally, a historical mythos that took on a number of forms, and that
functioned for the people in certain types of reflective situations. Since there
might be several different forms, the aesthetic factor in repetition was clearly at
best secondary. A quest for the reason for repetition has to be sought elsewhere.
33
Extreme caution should be used in treating ancient Near Eastern parallels to biblical mate-
rial; the one has only in modern times been retrieved from some very ancient and remote moment
in antiquity while the other is embodied in a canonical and cultic collection that has survived the
“repetition” and handling of many generations, before becoming stabilized in the form we have
it. The former might possibly be an autograph; the latter could never be. But more important
still, precisely because the biblical material has been passed down through many generations of
cultic usage, it has had to pass all sorts of tests (precisely of its adaptability-stability quotient) in
that canonical process to which the other may never, or only rarely, have been submitted.
The primary authority of Israel’s central tradition, that of the escape from
Egypt and entrance into Canaan, lay in its power to help the people answer the
two questions of self-understanding and life pattern. The fact that the story, in
whatever form, passed the barrier from one generation to the following is, in this
light, evidence enough of its validity. It spanned a generation gap at some point
in Israel’s early history. What scholars who try to meet their own needs (seeking
answers to narrowly defined questions about history) must remember is that
the needs of the people whom they study were for the most part quite different
from theirs. And it is highly unlikely that a tradition arises and persists simply
because there is a need to fill out a cultic order of service (the narrow sense of
Sitz im Leben). As conservative as cults tend to be, they were formed because of
some gut-level existential need of the people they served, and from time to time
demonstrated the ability to meet the people at that level again.
A story that succeeded in passing from one generation to another did so,
therefore, not because it had a set form or primarily because it distracted the
people, but because (1) it spoke to a majority of the community; (2) it communi-
cated to them a power they sought; and (3) this power met a common need of the
community, probably the need to recapitulate their common self-understanding
and to transcend a challenge borne to it. The challenge would have been some
newness or strangeness that had to be dealt with – usually either by rejection or
integration, by retaining a status quo, or by effecting some change. The challenge
might range from the subtlest sort of threat to the existing societal structure, to a
clear and present danger of its total disintegration.
In all such circumstances the imperative to any community is to review its
understanding of who it is (1) to know if in the moment of the review (and
according to its Zeitgeist) the society should or can adapt to the measure indi-
cated (shalom), or (2) in the event of rejection and violence at the other extreme
(milhamah; cf. Jer 28:8 – 9), to relearn, in the new situation presented by the
˙ exactly who they are, so that when they emerge on the other side of the
threat,
sword (Jer 31:2) they will know (to put it very simply) if indeed they survived.
Survival is not a matter of living only, or breathing, or blood flowing through
individual veins; for assimilation to another culture (which has another and dif-
ferent identifying mythos) is death as sure as slaughter is death. (What happened
to the so-called northern ten tribes of Israel? They were assimilated into the
dominant culture of the eighth-century neo-Assyrian Empire. The majority lost
their identity, though most of the individuals involved survived and had chil-
dren.)34 So whether the whole of a society lives, or only a remnant, a dynamic
source of identity provision is absolutely necessary for that measure of conti-
nuity, within discontinuity, that can mean survival. Other factors may seem of
equal or greater importance at the moment, such as the foreign policy or state-
craft of the threatening power: Assyria’s sponsored disintegration of subject peo-
34
The relation of some of these assimilating survivors, the “enemies of Judah” and “the peo-
ple of the land” (of Ezra 4), to the Samaritans of later date is still problematic.
ples, Babylonia’s sponsored remnant or ghetto-type survival.35 But statecraft in

the sixth and fifth centuries BCE was not, in fact, the more important factor, for
many of the victims changed to such a point that many of the peoples existing
in the Palestinian area from the late Bronze Age through the Iron Age simply
passed from the scene under Babylonian and Persian hegemony.
Why did Israel survive? That is the immense historical question that begs
explanation. That which happened to some of the other victim nations did not
happen to Israel. Israel changed rather radically, to be sure, from being a nation
with its own government and a highly nationalist cult, to being a dispersed reli-
gious community (whether in Palestine or outside it) called Judaism. But the
point is that Israel survived whereas others did not.
Why? What was Israel’s dynamic identity source? It would have been (1) an
indestructible element in society, (2) a commonly available element, (3) a highly
adaptable element, and, if necessary, (4) a portable element. It would have been
indestructible or the likelihood of its own survival in the midst of violence is pre-
cluded or greatly reduced. It would have been commonly available so that widely
scattered segments of a remnant emerging from violence could consult it wher-
ever they might be. It would have been adaptable so that it sponsored survival in
new and strange situations and did not preclude it. And it would have been por-
table so that territory loss or forced emigration could not sever the community
from the survival power it needed.
Obviously, a temple, or an elaborate cult, fails all four tests, though a portable
shrine (Exod 25 – 40) meets (4), and perhaps (3). An ark meets (3) and (4) beau-
tifully, and in small communities that stay together may do for (2). Tradition
affirms that the ark served identity purposes in the midst of violence very well
indeed in Israel’s early days.
But only a story meets all four criteria. It is, to the exclusion of all other reli-
gious “vessels,” indestructible, commonly available to scattered communities,
highly adaptable, and portable in the extreme.
The primary characteristic of canon, therefore, is its adaptability. Israel’s canon
was basically a story adaptable to a number of different literary forms, adaptable
to the varying fortunes of the people who found their identity in it, adaptable to
widely scattered communities themselves adjusting to new or strange idioms of
existence but retaining a transnational identity, and adaptable to a sedentary or
migratory life.
It is in this sense, therefore, that the study of canon cannot begin where the
handbooks now start, with stability and the concept of inclusion-exclusion.
There was no set creed, like Deut 26:5 – 9, that was expandable. But there was
a story existing in many forms from early days. In all likelihood, there were a
35
Cf. Holladay, “Assyrian Statecraft.”
number of such stories, but the Law and the Prophets as we inherit them high-
light two basic themes, those we call the Mosaic and the Davidic.36 Only these
survived, other traditions adhering to them; and only the Mosaic, less the con-
quest, became the Torah. The nature of such an identifying story demanded that
it be told in the words and phrases and sense-terms of the generation and local
community reciting it. Adaptability, therefore, is not just a characteristic; it is
a compulsive part of the very nature of the canonical story. The story, in some
part, is probably quite old, though no one form of it surviving in the Bible need
of necessity be.37 It is at least as old as Amos (Amos 2:9 – 11; 3:1 – 2; 4:10 – 11; 5:25;
9:7; cf. 6:5; 9:11). But it is Amos’s use of the story, as we shall see, that precludes
any thought of its being invented by him or later inserted into the text of Amos.38
The second, and equally important character of a canonical story, is its abil-
ity to give life as well as survive in itself. One can characterize survival in any
phenomenon as adaptability. And so canon. But that is only a part of the truth
of canon. Another part is that canon is canon not only because it survives but
because it can give its survival power to the community that recites it. It not only
has survival qualities for itself; it shares those life-giving qualities with the com-
munity that finds identity in it.
Life, therefore, is the supreme character of canon. It has it and it gives it. It
provides survival with identity to those who “remember” and repeat it, either in
the essential demands of peace or the existential threat of upheaval. It can provide
continuity within discontinuity because it offers to the community an essential
identity that permits the people to adapt. Israel’s story undoubtedly served this
function many times from her origins until the Torah was shaped definitely in
the exile, and the Torah, as we know it, emerged therefrom. But its power for
life was so crucial to the remnant in Babylon in the sixth century BCE that there
was surely burnt into the community memory, indelibly, the knowledge that
Torah both had life and gave life. To this Judaism in its later literature many
times attests (cf. John 5:39; Pirqê Abot 2.8; 6.7).39 Professor Lewis Beck, of the
University of Rochester, is an excellent example of the modern philosopher who
has purposefully abandoned his Christian origins. Beck is one of the best of the
anti-Christian polemicists today.40 But Beck often points out that Judaism and
36
Rost, “Sinaibund und Davidsbund,” cols. 129 ff.; von Rad, OT Theology, 1:308 ff; New-
man, People of the Covenant.
37
Even Rost, Das kleine Credo und andere Studien zum AT, in his critique of von Rad, ad-
mits the antiquity of some parts of the summary.
38
Amos 2:9 – 11 is an integral part of Amos’s address in 1:3 – 3:2 (though other parts of the
pericope may conceivably be from later hands; See Paul, “Amos 1:3 – 2:3: A Concatenous Liter-
ary Pattern”). The argument of the “sermon” is clearly that though Yahweh had taken Israel’s
head out of the dust of the earth of Egypt and set her in a land of her own, Israel, when estab-
lished in the land, instead of acting as indicated by Yahweh’s acts in Egypt, treated the poor of
the land as Pharaoh had treated her. The function of the mythos was to provide a basic identity
and lifestyle pattern for Israel in terms of her own responsibility.
39
John 5:39 uses the expression tas graphas (the writings). In OT of the Early Church, Sund-
berg attempts to distinguish between “Scriptures” and canon in his cogent thesis that the canons
of both the OT and NT were fluid until dates considerably later than generally assigned.
40
Cf. Beck, Philosophic Inquiry, and Beck, Six Secular Philosophers.
Christianity simply cannot die. Even, he says, if earthlings should find life on a
distant planet, the Bible religions would adapt to the new knowledge and prob-
ably flourish in it.
This is, in part, due to the high pluralism resident in the Bible.41 But the qual-
ities of survival and adaptability date from the earliest repetition of the story that
became the essence or core of Israel’s self-understanding. Wright’s concept of
there being in the Bible a canon within the canon is rather inescapable.42 Brevard
Childs has attacked the notion and argued for thinking of the Bible’s authority in
terms of the full canonical context.43 I have argued that they are both right.44 A
canon-within-the-canon idea that does not perceive its high adaptability as essen-
tial, or as put above, a compulsive part of its nature, but too much relegates other
parts of the final closed canon (such as the Jamnian) as of less power or author-
ity, overlooks the dynamic nature of the canon’s adaptability.45 A crucial part of
the canonical process, at all stages, were the historical accidents that caused the
people to put certain questions to the traditions and not others. They did not rest
back and, like scholars, make choices as to which questions they would ask of the
story. Theirs was an existential dialogue, ongoing, of greater or lesser moment,
and no question, no part of that dialogue was, at the moment, of less importance
or had less power than another. A full-canonical-context idea about the Bible,
however, that does not appreciate the life-giving qualities of the central tradition
and its own nature of adaptability that ultimately afforded the vast pluralism in
the Bible can be misunderstood as a kind of unfortunate biblicism.46
VI
A new method of approach to the question of the relation between the Old and
New Testaments is called comparative midrash.47 If one studies the various ways
in which Second Temple Judaism contemporized OT traditions, one can actu-
41
Sanders, Torah and Canon, x ff. and 116 ff.
42
This is Wright’s major thesis about the canon. Eissfeldt uses the same expression in OT:
An Introduction, 568.
43
Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis. Two very instructive responses to Childs’s book are
by Landes, “Biblical Exegesis in Crisis: What Is the Exegetical Task,” and Anderson, “Crisis in
Biblical Theology.”
44
Sanders, Review of Biblical Theology in Crisis; Sanders, Review of Old Testament and
Theology. Childs’s position was anticipated in part in Sanders, “Habakkuk in Qumran.” Similar
kinds of probing may be seen in Barr, Old and New in Interpretation, 149 – 200; Lohfink, “Die
historische und christliche Auslegung des AT”; and Stuhlmacher, “Neues Testament und Her
meneutik.”
45
Wright states its adaptability, obliquely, in relativistic terms in his OT and Theology,
183 – 85.
46
Wright’s criticism of Childs in Wright, “Historical Knowledge and Revelation,” is surely,
in part, misunderstanding.
47
See Bloch, “Midrash”; Le Déaut, “Apropos a Definition of Midrash”; Miller, “Targum,
Midrash.” See also Vermes, “Bible and Midrash.” Barr, “Le judaïsme postbiblique et la théologie
de l’AT,” seems unaware of some of this new thrust.
ally trace the history of such midrashic tendency back into the OT itself. In
fact, since the older discipline of tradition criticism has begun to include in its
purview the question of why a tradition would be repeated, or taken up again in
another form, it has begun to sound more and more like the study of midrash.48
This raises the question of what the difference between them (and redaction crit-
icism in certain phases) actually is. Geza Vermes rightly says the difference is
canonization.49 But that difference needs clarifying.
As stressed above, certain traditions in ancient Israel bore repeating. Among
these traditions, allowing for some aesthetic factor, the most important were
those that told Israel’s story about who she was and what her salient character-
istics were.50 Even stories that had little or nothing to do with Israel originally
(such as common ancient Near Eastern myth, Canaanite legend, etc.) became
attached to the growing number of such traditions. They were adapted by the
fourfold process (where and when needed) of depolytheizing, monotheizing,
Yahwizing, and Israelitizing. Sometimes one or more of these treatments did not
take too well and the scholar today easily perceives beneath only a very slight
veneer the original non-Israelite and polytheistic shape of the material. Some of
this material shows up in the OT more than once, and is hence available for tradi-
tion-critical work on it. The moment one asks why such material bore repeating,
however, he or she is engaged in the question of authority. Such material, which
met a need in one situation, was apparently able to meet another need in another
situation. And that is precisely the kind of tradition that becomes canonical –
material that bears repeating in a later moment both because of the need of the
later moment and because of the value or power of the material repeated (the
dialogue between them).
Early material repeated in this manner attains the status of tradition. Eventu-
ally it may attain the status of canon. Only the traditional can become canoni-
cal. One of the very real existential factors in the canonical process is that of the
value or power of tradition, that is, material that had proved its worth in more
than one situation had already shown a measure of historical transcendence in its
ability to address itself to two or more space-time parameters. One observation
that impresses itself time and again in the study of history is that in crisis situa-
tions only the old, tried, and true has any real authority. Nothing thought up at
the last minute, no matter how clever, can effect the necessary steps of recapitu-
48
See in this regard the probing study by Nicholson on the prose material in Jeremiah com-
posed by disciples in Preaching to the Exiles; see also his Deuteronomy and Tradition. Similarly,
see Wanke, Untersuchungen zur sogenannten Baruchschrift.
49
Vermes, “Bible and Midrash,” 199; see also Roberts, “OT Canon: A Suggestion”; but
see Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises”; Roberts, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 185, contra
his earlier thesis in Roberts, “OT Canon: A Suggestion.” Cf. Ackroyd, “Open Canon.” For an
early pre-Christian date of closure and a very conservative reconstruction of the meager avail-
able evidence in the light of it, see Beckwith, OT Canon of the NT Church.
50
This is, of course, the nature of the patriarchal blessings, Gen 27:27 – 29 and 39 – 40;
Gen 49; and Deut 33. This appears to be the function of Melchizedek’s blessing of Abraham in
Gen 14:19 – 20. And it should be noted that the final or redactional form of the book of Deuter-
onomy (hence, the Torah?) is that of a patriarchal blessing.
lation and transcendence needed by the threatened community, if it is to survive

with identity. A new story will not do; only a story with old, recognizable ele-
ments has the power for life required, because it somehow can pierce beneath the
immediate and apparent changes taking place to recover the irreducible core of
identity left unthreatened, that which can survive the crisis. The early canonical
process was precisely one of selectivity of such materials, and the major factor of
selectivity was existential. In this sense may the criteria of antiquity, inspiration,
and popularity be understood.51 The older material, which had already shown its
value in more than one situation, had in effect proved its status of being inspired.
And certainly no private story or tradition would measure up in the breach: it
had to have been widespread, or at least not esoteric.
The relationship, therefore, between the older (tradition-critical) materials
within the OT and the later midrashic use of those traditions, as well as of any-
thing else available in the final canonical mass, is obviously very close indeed. To
put it another way, one can extend tradition-critical study of the OT well into
postbiblical times simply by continuing on without an artificial or arbitrary halt.
In the same manner, the student of midrash can push his or her work back into
the earlier biblical period simply by continuing on without an artificial or arbi-
trary halt, even though he or she may be invading the tradition critic’s territory.
And what both disciplines find above all else, throughout the whole biblical
and postbiblical period, is that the major characteristic of canonical material is
its adaptability – not its rigidity. One of the major results of the new method of
approach to early Jewish literature, including Qumran and the NT, is the obser-
vation that adaptation of canonical material to a midrashic need (the old problem
of “inaccurate quotation” that lies outside even new observations about fluid-
ity in text criticism), far from being impious, was a sign of the greater piety of
the period – especially for eschatological groups.52 In the long period before the
marked tendency toward stabilization and standardization became the dominant
trend among proto-rabbinic Jews, convictions about God’s activity in their own
time brought them frequently to adapt the available text to the conviction. Again,
the salient character of canon was adaptability. And this was indeed its major trait
from the earliest “moment” far back up the line in the canonical process until the
other need, that of stabilization, became the more dominant in the later period.53
Morton Smith, in a book on the canonical process, stresses the political factor
in selectivity almost to the exclusion of all others.54 The existential factor may
be thought of, academically, in political terms. That is, whenever a community
51
Josephus, Ag. Ap. 1.38 – 42.
52
This is a major, axiomatic observation of work in Jewish exegesis clearly datable to the
early Jewish period. See Bloch, “Midrash”; Le Déaut, “Apropos a Definition of Midrash”;
Miller, “Targum, Midrash.” See also Vermes, “Bible and Midrash,” as well as Roberts, “Bible
Exegesis and Fulfillment in Qumran.”
53
See the works of Talmon, esp. “Aspects of the Textual Transmission of the Bible”; and
“OT Text”; Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila; Cross, “History of the Biblical Text”; Sanders,
Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 157 – 59.
54
Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics.
or society has a need of any sort and tries, through one or more of its influential
members or groups, to meet that need, there is without question a political situ-
ation in the broad sense. The difficulty with Smith’s thesis is that it reads back a
situation of fragmentary politics of a later period into the late Iron Age problem
of whether old Israel ought not to have passed from the scene of history the way
some of her neighbors did.55 That is an existential problem, a life-and-death situ-
ation that informs the political, if not transforms it. Smith’s political theory also
does not allow sufficient appreciation for the theological or mythic dimension in
the exilic process of canonization; this is in contrast to the existential that under-
scores it. Smith’s other major observation, however, is correct. We should assume
that what we inherit in the OT is only a fraction of what had been available, and
that they were the needs of the community that shaped the surviving, earlier
traditions into the Bible as we know it. I would see the process, however, dating
well back into preexilic times and concentrating in the all-encompassing life-and-
death situation of the sixth century BCE, instead of, with Smith, as beginning in
postexilic times, for the most part, and concentrating in Hellenistic times.56
If adaptability was an abiding character of the canonical process well into
Hellenistic times, and was completely overcome by the need for uniformity and
stability of text only finally in the period of Roman occupation,57 then von Rad’s
inability, in the light of all the recent criticism, either to establish a single form
for his credo or to prove its high antiquity linguistically, should occasion no
surprise. A basic story about a migration from Egypt to Canaan under Yahweh’s
tutelage pervades much of the literature of the OT.58 It would be utterly and
55
Smith’s thesis fits well into the situation as we know it in the Persian and Hellenistic peri-
ods (those parallel to the Golden and Hellenistic periods in the Greek culture). See Smith, “Das
Judentum in Palästina in der hellenistischen Zeit,” and “Das Judentum in Palästina während der
Perserzeit.” And there were surely religious parties (Palestinian Parties and Politics, 15 – 56) in
the preexilic period. But Smith practically ignores the period all-important for the canonical pro-
cess – the crucible of destitution and exile where the existential factor overshadowed all factious
politics. See Smith’s brilliant chapter on hellenization in Palestinian Parties and Politics, 57 – 81.
56
The most challenging section of Smith’s book is the chapter on Nehemiah (Palestinian Par-
ties and Politics, 126 – 47). I think it will cause a major review of our understanding of the work of
Ezra and Nehemiah. Most scholars agree that the Torah Ezra brought with him from Babylonia
to Jerusalem was essentially (though still unclosed, or adaptable) the Pentateuch. Smith thinks
not. He argues that what is reported in Neh 8 violates pentateuchal regulations on Yom Kippur,
and assigns the stabilization of the Torah to the period 330 – 180 BCE (ibid., 187) to combat the
“assimilationists.” I would still hold that the Torah received its shape in the exilic period due
to the existential question there faced, and that what Ezra brought from Babylon to Jerusalem
was the Torah (though not yet closed) very much as we know it: cf. Sanders, Torah and Canon;
Freedman, “The Law and the Prophets”; and Ackroyd, Exile and Restoration, esp. 201 – 37.
57
Dynamicality, adaptability, and stability work hand in hand: it is only a question of which
is needed the more in given historical circumstances. Barthélemy’s thesis that tiqqunê sopherîm
were halted in the period of Salome Alexandra, when hermeneutics could begin to shift to non-
contextual techniques, is a parallel observation; cf. Barthélemy, “Les tiqquné sopherim.”
58
There is no room or need to list all the passages: cf. von Rad, Problem of the Hexateuch,
3 ff.; Noth, History of Pentateuchal Traditions, 46 ff.; Wright, God Who Acts, 70 ff.; Sanders,
OT in the Cross; Hillers, Covenant; Baltzer, Covenant Formulary. Even criticisms of von Rad
(largely from the Georg Fohrer school) confirm the point here made: cf. Vollmer, Geschichtliche
Rückblicke.
completely foolhardy to gainsay that basic attainment of the work of the past
generation. And it is with such traditions that the work of canonical criticism
proceeds.
At the heart of canonical criticism will be not those introductory questions
of source and unity that have so occupied the tradition critics, but rather the
questions of the nature and function of the tradition cited. When a tradent is
deposited in a particular situation, we must assume that it was found useful to
that situation: it had a function to perform there and that is the reason it was
called upon. At the heart of canonical criticism are the questions of the nature of
authority and the hermeneutics by which that authority was marshaled in the sit-
uation where needed. What was the need of the community and how was it met?
VII
One of the remarkable observations one has to make about early biblical canon-
ical materials is that the manner in which they were called upon to meet the peo-
ple’s need was not necessarily popular. On the contrary, there is much evidence
in the biblical process to indicate that authoritative traditions were used in par-
ticular situations to challenge the way the majority of the people and their politi-
cal representatives, the establishment, or any political group, thought their needs
ought to be met. (Did the phenomenon of the lectionary arise for this reason?)
Partly in response to Smith’s otherwise very logical and cogent theory,59 and
partly in response to George Mendenhall’s otherwise engaging theory about the
place of the prophets in his five-part schema of OT history,60 the balance of this
essay will center in on the question of how the great judgmental prophets of
ancient Israel marshaled the authority by which they declaimed their messages
of pending change in Israel’s basic self-understanding. Clearly Smith is right
that “Yahweh-only” thinking won the day at the crucial junctures of Israel’s
history, and especially in the all-important exilic period, with respect to what
finally became canon. But two decisive factors must not be overlooked in that
process: (1) it won the day not because of some unknown political clout certain
parties may have had, but because the theological view they espoused most met
the existential needs arising out of historical circumstance; and (2) the Law and
Prophets as they emerged through that process (even though not stabilized for
some time to come) do not present a single clear-cut political program. This sec-
ond point is as important as the first. The Bible is highly pluralistic. A few years
back many scholars were looking for the unity of the Bible, or of the OT. They
did not succeed. Today, the challenge for any student who thinks he or she has
59
There is a lack of clarity in Smith between the shaping of traditions in the postexilic period
and the creation of literary materials in the same period. Shades of Wellhausen’s reconstruction
of the literary history of the OT lie scattered on Smith’s otherwise valid thesis about shaping.
Cf. Wellhausen, Prolegomena.
60
Mendenhall, “Biblical History in Transition.”
found a definite system, especially political program, in the Bible, is to return

to the Bible and locate its contrapositive. Politicians can always prooftext their
position from the Bible. That is one of the reasons, the historian must avow, that
the Bible has lasted so long. And whatever cannot be found there by one set of
hermeneutic rules can almost certainly be located by another. This is the history
of biblical interpretation, from the beginnings until today. And every party or
denomination seeking authority in the Bible has been “right.”
In Mendenhall’s five-stage schema there is much that is still valid. He, rest-
ing his case largely on the work of William F. Albright, names the five stages
thus: Praeparatio (the Bronze Age or Genesis period), the Creative (or Mosaic)
period, the Adaptive (or tribal federation–monarchic) period, the Traditional (or
prophetic) period, and the period of Reformation (or exilic and early postexilic
era).
Much of what Mendenhall writes is in reaction to an earlier emphasis on the
prophets having been the principal creative force in Israel’s history as well as
in the OT as a whole. He scores the thinking of Wellhausen that the prophets
introduced ethical monotheism into the religion of Israel. A historian might well
say that Mendenhall was responding to the Zeitgeist of the neo-orthodox period
by reacting to the Zeitgeist of the liberal period.61 Be that as it may, Menden-
hall is right to attribute both the monotheizing process in Israel’s history and
the concern for ethics to the so-called Mosaic period. And he is right to insist
that the prophets were dependent on authoritative traditions they inherited from
the earlier period. What is questionable is his limiting their contribution to “the
preservation and transmission of a tradition which was necessary to the preser-
vation of the group.” One needs to explore carefully his assertion that “in all the
furor and violence of the whole period, there is no reason, no evidence, for the
belief that anything important was added to the religious tradition.” This is so in
part because Mendenhall himself says, in the same section of his own work, “The
prophets were proclaiming the necessity of change in the unchangeable,” and
again, “the prophets added much of value to the tradition through their message
to their own time.”
The resolution between these apparent contradictions can perhaps be found
in Mendenhall’s claim that the message of the prophets “consisted largely of the
fact that a group which was called into existence (chosen) to serve Yahweh ceased
to have any excuse for being when it ceased to serve.”62 The difficulty with such
an assertion can be found in recent work on the so-called false prophets, or
establishment prophets. For it is now abundantly clear that the so-called false
61
Mendenhall himself rightly stresses the limitations of past scholarship in this regard, ibid.,
28. I could not agree more. We, too, in our generation, must recognize our being children of our
own time and not pretend to be free of Zeitgeist ourselves: cf. Eccl 3:11. W. F. Albright in his
great wisdom advised his students of archaeology to leave more of a tell intact than dug because
the next generation will have a different perspective, and perhaps improved tools. The Reform
principle of learning God’s truth for any age and situation through Word and Spirit is a classical
recognition of the canon’s adaptability.
62
All these quotations are from ibid., 46 – 48.
prophets relied on the same authoritative traditions as the so-called true prophets
in propounding their message of no change, or status quo, or continuity. They
claimed that Israel was serving Yahweh. The utterly engaging aspect of current
study of the false prophets is that their arguments, based in large measure on the
same traditions from the exodus-wanderings-entrance story, were very cogent
and compelling.63 And they apparently won the day!
The “false” prophets could and did cite Israel’s story to support their view
that the Yahweh who had brought Israel out of Egypt could surely maintain
her in Palestine. On the basis of the same authority, the “true” prophets argued
the opposite – that the Yahweh who brought Israel out of Egypt could also take
her out of Palestine.64 Hananiah chided Jeremiah for not having enough faith in
Yahweh’s power to sustain his people (Jer 28:2 – 11). The “false” prophets must
not be viewed as having been somehow intrinsically wrong. They too believed
in the “presence of God” and interpreted that presence to mean providence for
continuity (Mic 2:6; 3:11; Jer 5:12; 14:9; Isa 36:15). The story itself was adapt-
able to whatever hermeneutics were employed. Hermeneutics must be histori-
cally viewed as arising out of the need to keep a stabilized tradition adaptable.
The difference between the hermeneutics of continuity and the hermeneutics
of discontinuity, that is, between the hermeneutics of shalom and of milhamah
(Jer 28:8 – 9 and 38:4), lay not so much between the Mosaic and Davidic˙ views
of the covenant with Yahweh, as between theological axioms.65 Both the true
and the false prophets offered hope, but the former held the higher view of God
(Jer 23:23; cf. Isa 22:11) that he could offer continuity even in radically altered
forms of the common life, that is, he could give by taking away. Amos rested his
whole view of the taking away (Amos 1:3 – 2:8) on the authority of what God
had done for Israel in the beginning (Amos 2:9 – 11; 3:1 – 2), as did Hosea (11:1 – 5;
13:4 – 8). Micah rested his three-point sermon on what Yahweh required of Israel
out of the same Torah story (Mic 6:3 – 5) of what it was Yahweh had done for
Israel, while Isaiah cited God’s grace to David on giving him Jerusalem, precisely
to give authority to his message of judgment and salvation (Isa 1:21 – 27; 5:1 – 7;
63
The most arresting of recent studies on the false prophets is that of van der Woude, “Micah
in Dispute with the Pseudo-prophets.” Earlier valuable studies include Quell, Wahre und falsche
Propheten; Jacob, “Quelques remarques sur les faux prophètes”; Osswald, Falsche Prophetie
im AT; Fichtner, “Propheten: Amos,” 621 – 22; Rendtorff, “Erwägungen aus Frühgeschichte”;
Clements, Prophecy and Covenant, 11 – 44, 119 – 29; Barr, Old and New in Interpretation,
149 – 70; Freedman, “Biblical Idea of History.” A fair review of the problem in terms of cultic
prophecy is Jeremias, Kultprophetie und Gerichtsverkündigung, cf. esp. 192 – 93 on the herme-
neutic difference between true and false prophets. Overholt, Threat of Falsehood, provides a
good introduction to the whole problem by concentrating on sheqer in Jeremiah.
64
The “true” prophets had two bases or references of authority: (1) their own call and (2) Is-
rael’s call (the Torah mythos); cf. Sanders, Torah and Canon, 73 ff. We should assume that the
“false” prophets did as well.
65
John Bright’s view of this, especially in Isaiah, needs critique. Cf. Bright, History of Israel,
271 ff. I am convinced that Isaiah interpreted the Davidic covenant as conditional to the sov-
ereign will of Yahweh without combining it with the Mosaic: Isa 1:21 – 27 and chs. 28 – 31 offer
ample evidence of this.
22:2; 28:4; 28:21; 29:1 – 7; 32:13 et passim).66And Ezekiel, who had a developed
view of what the old story meant (ch. 20) could adapt it with no difficulty to
drive home his message of judgment (chs. 16 and 23). And it was the same Torah
story that was called on to support the prophetic view of salvation in judgment
(Hos 2:16 – 17; Isa 1:21 – 27; 32:1 – 18; 33:1 – 22; Jer 16:14 – 15; 23:7 – 8; 31:31 – 34).67
VIII
The perspective that is needed here is that of canonical criticism. When would
the criterion of “popularity,” or widespread acceptance, have come to play in the
case of the judgmental prophets? Manifestly not in the preexilic period. There
can be no doubt that these prophets had followers, or even small schools, to pre-
serve their material. The family of Shaphan, as well as Baruch, would have been
essential at the point of earliest preservation of the Jeremiah materials. And we
must posit such small continuing groups, perhaps schools, for the others from
Amos on. But, in contradistinction to Smith’s thesis, I cannot see these groups
as forming a political movement or group. If so, they were not strong enough
to prevent Jeremiah’s being tried twice and imprisoned several times during the
sieges of Jerusalem in the early sixth century.68 That a few continuing followers
66
A brilliant example of Isaiah’s basing his message of judgment squarely on the Davidide
tradition is Isa 28:21. The “providence” or status quo of “false” prophets would have cited the
traditions we know from 2 Sam 5:17 – 25 and 1 Chron 14:10 – 17 to argue that Yahweh would act
in their day as he had for David on Mt. Perazim and in the Vale of Gibeon – to prosper Israel.
Isaiah agreed that Yahweh would act as he had on Perazim and in Gibeon but this time to judge
his own people – a strange deed, and quite alien, as he says, to those who would employ the her-
meneutic of false providence. Isaiah referred to the Davidide traditions only precisely to counter
the view that all one had to do was believe Yahweh was strong enough to save them, exactly
what he himself had earlier thought (Isa 7:9, etc.). Isaiah 36 – 39, if studied carefully to determine
references of authority, shows itself to be largely alien to Isaiah. (This latter point is apart from
the question of whether Isa 36 – 39 reflects historical events.)
67
Second Isaiah is omitted from the list partly because Isa 40 – 55 is so obviously full of ref-
erences to both the Mosaic and Davidic traditions; for there both the judgment and the salvation
must be seen in the light of Israel’s history: cf., e. g., Isa 42:24 – 25 and 54:7 – 8; and see Sanders,
Suffering as Divine Discipline; Sanders, OT in the Cross, and Sanders, Torah and Canon.
68
Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics, 46. If the great families who befriended Jeremiah
early in his career were like the Whig party of England, Jeremiah must have disappointed them
gravely to have been tried twice (Jer 20 and 38) and imprisoned at least three times (Jer 20:2;
36:26; 37:4, 15, 21; 38:6, 13, 28; 39:15; 40:1). I suggest that the family of Shaphan were pro-Bab-
ylonian in political leanings and that they thought Jeremiah was also (Jer 37:9 – 10). Nothing
could be further from the truth as Jeremiah’s attitude and response to Nebuzaradan show
when the defenses of the city were finally broken. The Babylonians naturally thought Jeremiah
was politically anti-Egyptian and pro-Babylonian, because of his identifying the foe from the
north with themselves, and hence offered Jeremiah what he willed as soon as the city was taken
(Jer 39:11 – 14; 40:2 – 5). But Jeremiah’s allegiances were neither to Egypt nor to Babylonia but
to a vision of an Israel free to serve Yahweh by surrendering their enslavement to his gifts: he
elected to stay in the destitute land and refused a pension and comfort in Babylon (40:6). Jer-
emiah’s relations to Jehoiakim and Zedekiah were informed by an impolitic theological vision
of Israel’s identity (chs. 36 – 37), not by a politic quest for accommodation to a pro-Babylonian
policy. The prose sections of Jeremiah are secondary in importance to the poetic oracles, in
were convinced enough to preserve (and adapt) the records of their masters’
words and deeds is the most the evidence suggests.
When then did what the prophets had to say come to be perceived for its
great value for Israel? Clearly the answer is the exile, when what they had pre-
dicted occurred.69 But even a prediction-fulfillment phenomenon is not sufficient
to understand the canonical process so vigorously at work in the disintegrative
experience of the national existence in the sixth and early fifth centuries. For
some of what they predicted did not take place, and yet it too was preserved.
The first step surely was the recognition in adversity that these men had been
“right.” But the next step in the process, gradually dawning on and pervading
the consciousness of the remnant, was the really crucial one. And here is where
the positive-thinking message of the old so-called false prophets, when recalled,
would have turned to bitterness in their mouths. Both groups, so-called true and
so-called false, had offered hope.70 And they had both offered hope based on
the old traditions about what God had done so effectively in the past. The great
difference was that the judgmental prophets had offered an existential under-
standing of “Israel” that could survive the death of the body politic and that
offered the means whereby a new corporate life could be accepted, though radi-
cally changed in form and venue.
The POWs in Babylon after 586 BCE, under either Babylonian or Persian
hegemony, had two alternatives: life or death, not so much for themselves indi-
chs. 1 – 23, for judging the prophet’s real alienation from all Judaic society (Jer 5:4 – 5; 9:1; 15:17;
16; et passim). Smith himself at two points takes so much away from the word “party” that one
is not altogether sure how he uses it in all instances; cf. Palestinian Parties and Politics, 13, 29.
69
Cf. Jer 28:9 and Deut 18:22. Jeremiah’s conviction was that God’s message through
prophecy was a challenge to, and judgmental of, existing structure and customs; only if proph-
ecy sponsored a status quo, shalom, was it subject to historical proof. By exile I mean not only
the narrow period of 586 to 520 BCE, but the fuller experience of destitution plus the failure
of Second Isaiah’s vision, the failure of the Zerubbabel pretension, the destructive campaigns of
Xerxes I throughout the area in the first quarter of the fifth century, up to the final successes
of Ezra and Nehemiah within the apparently severe limitations imposed by Persian statecraft,
and especially its rule of its provinces. Above all what must be accounted for is that not only
was the final form of the Torah shaped by the Babylonian diaspora but that it was upon that
community that most of the hard decisions fell that shaped Judaism as it eventuated in rabbinic
Judaism after 70 CE. Perhaps the historical way to put it is that what survived as the essence
of “normative” (Pharisaic / rabbinic) Judaism was the thinking about survival and identity and
practice that went on among Babylonian Jewish communities of the “exilic” period, that is, from
the time of Ezekiel until the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. See esp. Neusner, Parthian Period. In
this regard it would be well to ponder at great length the observation of Morton Smith at the
close of his very challenging chapter on Nehemiah (Palestinian Parties and Politics, 147): “. . . the
connection between Judaism and the worship of the restored temple was, in the philosophical
sense of the word, ‘accidental.’ It was demanded, indeed, by the traditions and aspirations of the
religion, but was not essential to its nature. The national, political, territorial side of Judaism,
by which it differed from the other Hellenistic forms of oriental religions, was, as a practical
matter, the work of Nehemiah. He secured to the religion that double character – local as well as
universal – which was to endure, in fact, for five hundred years and, in its terrible consequences,
yet endures.” (italics added).
70
Sanders, Torah and Canon, 66 – 90. This hope is sometimes rendered more explicit by later
hands, in typically doxological and comforting closing verses in the prophetic books.
vidually, but in terms of communal identity. They could pass from the scene the
way others were doing – by assimilation to the dominant culture. There is a good
bit in the Bible to suggest that this is what happened to many normal, rational
Jews (Ps 137:1 – 4; Ezek 8:12 – 13; 18:25; 33:17, 20; Jer 17:15; Isa 40:27 et passim;
Mal 2:17). The evidence was in: Yahweh was bested in a fair fight. Israel’s ancient
Holy Warrior was defeated. One could not fly in the face of such proof as the
utter defeat of Zedekiah’s forces and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple,
especially the latter, afforded.
But a few, stunned and bewildered, asked a very crucial question: ʾek nihyeh?
“How shall we live?” (Ezek 33:10). In what now does life obtain? All the˙ sym-
bols of the covenant relation were gone. What now? A fugitive ran with the
message all the way from crumbling Jerusalem to the camp where Ezekiel was
interned with the awful message, “The city has fallen” (Ezek 24:26; 33:21). Some
say the news arrived the morning after Mrs. Ezekiel had died (Ezek 24:18). Be
that as it may, Ezekiel used the occasion of the passing of the “delight of his
eyes” to speak of the passing of the temple, which Ezekiel called the delight of
the eyes of the people (24:21; cf. 7:24; 16:24). They felt that as long as the temple
was standing there was still hope. Therefore, when the impossible and unthink-
able happened, that hope was dashed, and they turned to the resident, judgmen-
tal prophet with the question, “How shall we live?” Ezekiel answered it in the
way we should have expected him to: Israel lives, moves, and has its being in the
judgments of God (Ezek 33:10 – 16).71 But following the thinking of Jeremiah
(31:29 – 34), and his own development of that thought (Ezek 18), Ezekiel stressed
the responsibility of the individual in the new dispersed situation. Between the
thinking of Jeremiah and Ezekiel in this regard, the exiles had a real vehicle for
understanding “Israel” corporately. Each stressed individual responsibility, but
in two different ways: Jeremiah horizontally, as it were, and Ezekiel vertically.
Jeremiah’s “new covenant” idea provided the means for understanding how
Israel could be scattered in far-flung places and still be Israel: because each per-
son would be responsible, wherever he or she was, for being “Israel.” Thinking
of an individual as standing for the whole, wherever he or she was, was already
a part of royal tradition.72 Ezekiel then stressed the vertical aspect of individual
responsibility, by generations, as it were. He spoke of how the child would not
suffer for the parent’s sin, and indeed, how within a generation each person had
to maintain rather strict obedience.
These two views of individual responsibility provided the means for Israel to
be Israel in diaspora.
It is clear that a great deal of reflection went on, in agonizing reappraisal, of
what Israel meant now that the temple and “holy city” were gone. A number of
exiles reflected on the old story, the old adaptable canon. Whether or not they
recited the Deuteronomic form of the ʾArami ʾobed ʾavi we do not know. But
they surely came very close to it: “Abraham was one man and came into posses-
71
See the brilliant article by Gese, “Idea of History.”
72
See Otto Eissfeldt’s seminal study, “Promises of Grace to David in Isaiah 55:1 – 5.”
sion of the land. We are many: therefore, the land is surely (all the more so) ours”
(Ezek 33:24; cf. Isa 51:2). I have inserted the expression in parentheses to indicate
that this is a typical midrashic qal vahomer (argument from lesser to greater) or
argumentum a fortiori. If the old story, or authoritative tradition, started out
talking about one man (wandering and perishing), then the disintegrative expe-
rience of defeat and dispersion may not be the end but yet another beginning.
I am quite convinced that it was precisely this kind of reflective dialogue, as
indicated in Ezek 33 and Isa 51, that formed the remnant in Babylon (cf. Hab 2:4).
These would have been the ones whom Deutero-Isaiah addressed as “those who
know righteousness, the people in whose heart is my law” (Isa 51:7) – as over
against those whom he addressed as “stubborn of heart, far away from righ-
teousness” (Isa 46:12).73 Those who knew righteousness were those who could
recognize a righteousness, that is, a mighty act of God, when they saw one, and
had been able to affirm the sovereignty of Yahweh in Israel’s terrible adversity
and upheaval. They were also those who, like the earlier prison mates of Eze-
kiel, reflected on God’s initial work through Abraham (Isa 41:8 – 9) and figured
that if God had done such things with Abraham he could surely do them with a
remnant folk who remembered God’s mighty acts well enough that they could
recognize a new one if they saw it (Isa 52:8).
It is in the light of such agonizing reflection (Ezek 4:17 et passim) that the
canonical process with respect to the earlier judgmental prophets must be under-
stood. When the positive-thinking message that God would never, no never, let
them go, or let them down – precisely because he was powerful enough – had
turned bitter to the decimated folk, and they had turned either to worship the
gods of the Babylonians, or to engage in the traumatic reappraisal of their faith
and experience, then a few also asked, I think, to hear the messages of those ear-
lier prophets whom they had called meshugaʿim (Jer 29:26), madmen, unpatri-
otic, blasphemous, seditious, and traitorous. I imagine that at some point after
Ezekiel had given his famous answer to their existential question, one of the
inquirers (Ezek 36:37; contrast 14:7), asked to hear once more what they had so
recently called unpalatable. Was there not a disciple of Amos around the camps
the other day talking that nonsense again? And disciples of Hosea, Micah, Isaiah,
and the others? Let us hear it once more, now.
And with the new ears to hear and the new eyes to see (every religious and
national symbol now gone) they perceived in a way they had never been able
to understand before. Was it that the prophets had predicted this? Yes, that was
surely a primary factor. But within that was a far deeper element. For the mes-
sages of the madmen of God now offered a hope that no simple, magical pre
diction could possibly afford. For what they had said could not be fully appreci-
ated until in the canonical process of agonizing reflection they were “heard” by
many for what was existentially the first time: God was in charge of the adver-
sity; God was challenging Israel’s basic self-understanding; God was re-forming
73
These two phrases, in Isa 46:12 and 51:7, are not only antithetic but chiastic in form, and
were surely Isaianic epithets for the two groups, faithful and apostate.
his Israel (Jer 18:1 – 11) and reshaping his people into a new Israel (Ezek 36 – 37).
Those who embraced such an outrageous program before the discontinuity
took place were viewed as traitorous, seditious, blasphemous, and mad. Does
God want only masochists? But after the old national vessel had been broken
to smithereens (Isa 30:13 – 14), two options were open: either to join the First
Church of Marduk (assimilate) or in agony to reflect on Israel’s basic identity, to
ask, who are we and what are we to do?
It was then also that the anticultic and antiroyalist strictures of the judgmental
prophets made “canonical” sense. What the prophets had kept saying, in effect,
was that the cultic and royal institutions and practices did not derive from the
Torah mythos, that is, they were unauthorized by the tradition the prophets
adhered to (Amos 5:25; Hos 8:4 et passim; Mic 6:6 – 7; Isa 1:12 – 17; Jer 7:22; etc.)
as authoritative.74 In the preexilic period, that simply represented one of two
points of view that one might hold: either cult (as practiced) and palace were
authentic and properly authorized in Israelite society, or they were not. But in
the period of intensive canonical process these strictures took on a much dif-
ferent meaning. When you are a POW pondering the awful experience of des-
titution, and are squarely facing the choice of whether your identity as “Israel”
should live or die, then the prophetic strictures provide a means of survival as
Israel, without temple or palace. If they did not derive from the Torah story
(preconquest) period, then they were not essential to identity. The community
need not lose its identity because they were lacking. Because certain prophets
had been saying this even when those institutions stood, their words bore all the
more power for survival to those in destitution. If need be, Israel could be Israel
even if reduced to one destitute man (Abraham, servant, Job, Christ). That this
is canonical does not mean that Israel should be one destitute man, but it does
mean that “Israel” can survive calamity with identity. The canon is adaptable to
the worst and the best. It is for life.
IX
It is as though the old story, as well as the preexilic prophetic interpretations of

it, were most vital in the death-and-resurrection experience of the exile.75 That
was the crucible for the old traditions, in which those that really spoke to the
people’s existential problems of identity and lifestyle became the core of the
canon. If one thinks of all that we have called the Yahwist tradition or cycle of
materials (including both the Mosaic and Davidic traditions) out of the monar-
chical period of preexilic Israel, then the Torah as it received its basic shaping
74
The harmonistic efforts, in the recent neo-orthodox period, to see the prophets as mor-
alizing in favor of an ethical cult, are now seen as impertinent from the perspective of canonical
criticism.
75
Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 138, observes, “Death and rebirth are the great moments of
religious experience.” And with most Jews today, Rubenstein sees the modern state of Israel as
the modern “rebirth” experience of Judaism.
(neither its creation nor its final form) is surprisingly apocopated: it is all pre-
conquest.76 But it is precisely a Torah that would have offered life to a dispersed
Israel, a transforming Israel, an emerging Judaism. The Joshua materials about
the conquest are left to be the first book of the Prophets, a hope integral to Juda-
ism and all it meant, but not a part of the basic canon within the canon – not in
the Torah. This is the greatest surprise of the canonical process, since none of von
Rad’s or Wright’s ancient recitals lacks the conquest as part of the confession. But
it is understandable that it could be the new Israel anywhere at all. This did not
preclude a return. Far from it. The return has been an integral part of the hope
of Judaism.
From this point, the canonical process continued. Whatever Ezra brought
back with him from Babylonia, it was surely the essential Torah (though not
yet closed) as we know it (Neh 8:1 – 12). It had been shaped by and edited in the
agonizing reflection, and out of the existential questions, of the crucible of exile.
The major judgmental prophets were gathered, read, and reread in the light of
the new perspective of the shedding of false hopes that the crucible provided.
The canon of the Prophets was not closed until much, much later. It is becoming
more and more difficult to suggest a probable date for its closure, but the basic
gestalt of the Law and the Prophets was being formed in the crucible.77 Not
only had some of the old traditions (some, but by no means all) survived, but
they survived because they offered life in that crucial time. It was the old story
reviewed in the shedding experience of exile that infused slain Israel with the
spirit of life of which Ezekiel spoke (37:6). The whole of the passage on resurrec-
tion in Ezek 37 is told with the covenantal verbs of the old Exodus story (37:1, 2,
5 – 6, 11 – 14).78 No one in antiquity who heard him would have missed the point
Ezekiel was making: if Yahweh had created for himself a people out of slaves in
Egypt, he was now creating for himself a renewed Israel. His use of those verbs
was his authority for his idea of the resurrection.
It was surely in this same period that other old traditions took on new vibrant
meaning: an old story about child sacrifice; whatever else Gen 22 had said orig-
inally or in the preexilic period, it now said that the God who had given Isaac
to the aged Abraham and the barren Sarah had every right to ask for him back;
but instead, he gave the child a second time. Such a story, no matter what form
criticism and source criticism can show it originally meant, to the exiles surely
meant that the future of the believing community, of Israel, the question of the
continuation of the people, the anxiety about whether there would be another
generation, rested in the hands of the life-giver, of him who gives and gives
again.79 And no matter what form and source criticism can show the Garden of
Eden story originally meant, to the exiles it was viewed in the light of their own
76
77
Freedman, “Biblical Idea of History,” 41 – 49.
78
Ezek 37:1 wywsʾny; 37:2 whʿbyrny; 37:5 mbyʾ; 37:6 whʿlty and wntty bkm rwh whyytm;
˙
37:12 whʿlyty and whbʾty; 37:14 wntty and whnhty. ˙ ˙
79 ˙
Cf. Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism.
expulsion from the garden of Canaan (Ezek 36:35 – 36; cf. Isa 5:1 – 7; Jer 11:16 – 17;
12:10; Ezek 28:12 – 19; Isa 27:2 – 5). And no matter what must or must not be said
about a Bronze Age Abraham, to the exiles when the canonical process was most
decisively at work, he meant God’s starting again: “Abraham was one man . . .”
(Ezek 33:23 – 29; Isa 51:2).
Adaptability and stability. That is canon. Each generation reads its author-
itative tradition in the light of its own place in life, its own questions, its own
necessary hermeneutics. This is inevitable. Around this core were gathered many
other materials, as time went on, adaptable to it.80 There are many contradictions
within the Bible; it is a highly pluralistic document. Hence, no tyranny can be
established on its basis, for there is always something in it to challenge whatever
is constructed on it. Its full context is very broad and very wide and sponsors
serious dialogue.81 No single program, political, social, economic, or otherwise
can escape the challenge of something in it. As the rabbis say, in another con-
text, “It is the book with everything in it.” There appears to be only one cer-
tainly unchallenged affirmation derivable from it: a monotheizing tradition that
emerges through the canonical process. It gives the impression that Israel always
doggedly pursued the integrity or sovereignty of God, his oneness.82 The Bible
is replete with polytheism often only thinly veiled. But it was finally the affirma-
tion of the old Mosaic story, as well as the judgmental-prophetic insistence on
it, that God is one, both Judge and Savior, saving as he judges, that afforded the
true hope that disintegrated Israel in exile needed lemihyah, for life (Gen 45:5;
Ezra 9:8 – 9). It is abundantly clear that once the crisis ˙had passed and Judaism
was established, internal, normal, fractious politics came once more to the fore
in the decision-making process. But by that time the existential experience of
death and resurrection had burned itself forever into the cultic memory of Juda-
ism. Torah was for life.83 And that, in the final analysis, is the authority of canon.
80
As Wright often points out, cf. e. g., OT and Theology, 180. This was the early process of
“dialogical revelation,” of the necessary complementarity: “Word” and “Spirit.”
81
This is what is right about Childs’s thesis in Biblical Theology in Crisis. And it is surely
the meaning for today of the old principle of “salvation only through judgment.”
82
As Yehezkel Kaufmann apparently thought all ancient Israel did: cf. Kaufmann, Religion
of Israel, and the very open critique of Kaufmann’s magnum opus, from which the work cited
is extrapolated, by Talmon, “Yehezkel Kaufmann’s approach to Biblical Studies.” The major
thrusts of the canon within its pluralism indicate for the believing communities today, I think,
(1) an ever-expanding and syncretizing view of God (he is neither Jew nor Christian), and (2) a
bias in favor of the powerless.
83
That the force of this historic memory should eventuate in the Pharisaic and Christian
belief that God could give life again even after death, tehiyat ha-metim, should occasion no sur-
prise: it was a (theo)logical issue of Torah. According to Sir 45:5, the Torah brings life; according
to Masseket Avot 2.8, acquiring the words of Torah acquires life in the world to come; Avot 6.7,
Torah gives life, now and in the world to come to those who practice it; cf. Rom 7:10, Gal 3:21,
and John 5:39 – all indirect witnesses to the same Jewish conviction of the period.
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Loza, José. “Les catéchèses étiologiques dans l’Ancien Testament.” RB 78 (1971) 481 – 500.
McCarthy, Dennis. “What Was Israel’s Historical Creed?” LTQ 4 (1969) 46 – 53.
Mendenhall, George E. “Biblical History in Transition.” In The Bible and the Ancient
Near East, edited by George Ernest Wright, 27 – 58. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965.
Milik, Józef T. “Problèmes de la littérature hénochique à la lumière des fragments ar-
améens de Qumrân.” HTR 64 (1971) 333 – 78.
Miller, Merrill P. “Targum, Midrash and the Use of the Old Testament in the New Testa-
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Neusner, Jacob. Development of a Legend: Studies on the Traditions concerning Yohanan
ben Zakkai. Leiden: Brill, 1970.
Neusner, Jacob. History and Torah. New York: Schocken, 1965.
Neusner, Jacob. A History of the Jews in Babylonia. Part 1, The Parthian Period. Leiden:
Brill, 1969.
Neusner, Jacob. The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70. 3 vols. Leiden:
Brill, 1971.
Neusner, Jacob. There We Sat Down. Nashville: Abingdon, 1972.
Neusner, Jacob. The Way of Torah: An Introduction to Judaism. Belmont, CA: Dickenson,
1970.
Newman, Murray. The People of the Covenant. Nashville: Abingdon, 1962.
Nicholson, Ernest W. Deuteronomy and Tradition. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967.
Nicholson, Ernest W. Preaching to the Exiles. New York: Schocken, 1971.
Noth, Martin. Überlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuch. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,
1948. ET: A History of Pentateuchal Traditions. Translated by Bernhard W. Anderson.
Sheffield: JSOT, 1972.
O’Dea, Thomas. The Sociology of Religion. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966.
Osswald, Eva. Falsche Prophetie im Alten Testament. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1962.
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Östborn, Gunnar. Tōrā in the Old Testament. Lund: Ohlssons, 1945.
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JTS 18 (1967) 183 – 85.
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Quelle & Meyer, 1965.
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(1971) 299 – 304.
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ser, 1963.
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at Qumran in the Light of Tannaitic Sources.” HUCA 42 (1971) 159 – 72.
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Fischer Weltgeschichte 5. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1965.
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341 – 47.
Stuhlmacher, Peter. “Neues Testament und Hermeneutik – Versuch einer Bestandsauf-
nahme.” ZTK 68 (1971) 121 – 61.
Sundberg, Albert C., Jr. “The ‘Old Testament’: A Christian Canon.” CBQ 30 (1968)
143 – 55.
Sundberg, Albert C., Jr. “Towards a Revised History of the New Testament Canon.” SE 4
(1968) 452 – 61.
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van der Woude, Adam S. “Micah in Dispute with the Pseudo-prophets.” VT 19 (1969)
244 – 60.
Vermes, Geza. “Bible and Midrash: Early Old Testament Exegesis.” In The Cambridge
History of the Bible. Vol. 1, From the Beginnings to Jerome, 199 – 231. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1970.
Vermes, Geza. Scripture and Tradition in Judaism. Leiden: Brill, 1961.
Vollmer, Jochen. Geschichtliche Rückblicke und Motive in der Prophetie des Amos, Hosea
und Jesaja. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971.
von Rad, Gerhard. Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuchs. Stuttgart: W. Kohl-
hammer, 1938. Republished in Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament, 1 – 78. Mu-
nich: Kaiser, 1958. ET: The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays. Translated by
E. W. Trueman Dicken. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.
von Rad, Gerhard. Old Testament Theology. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Row, 1962,
1965.
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mation and Development. Translated by Dorothea M. Barton. New York: Association,
1961.
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land Black and Allan Menzies. Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1885.
Wilder, Amos. The Language of the Gospel. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
Wilson, Gerald H. The Editing of the Hebrew Psalter. Chico, CA: Scholars, 1985.
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BA 49 (1986) 140 – 54.
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Wright, George Ernest. The Challenge of Israel’s Faith. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1944.
Wright, George Ernest. “The Christian Interpreter as Biblical Critic.” Int 1 (1947) 131 – 52.
Wright, George Ernest. “Exegesis and Eisegesis in the Interpretation of Scripture.” Exp-
Tim 48 (1937) 353 – 57.
Wright, George Ernest. God Who Acts. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952.
Wright, George Ernest. “Historical Knowledge and Revelation.” In Translating and Un-
derstanding the Old Testament: Essays in Honor of Herbert Gordon May, edited by
Harry T. Frank and William L. Reed, 279 – 303. Nashville: Abingdon, 1970.
Wright, George Ernest. “History and Reality: The Importance of Israel’s ‘Historical’ Sym-
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Bernhard W. Anderson, 176 – 99. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.
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Wright, George Ernest. The Old Testament against Its Environment. London: SCM, 1950.
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Wright, George Ernest. “The Terminology of Old Testament Religion and Its Signifi-
cance.” JNES 1 (1942) 404 – 14.
Wright, George Ernest. “The Unity of the Bible.” Int 5 (1951) 131 – 33, 304 – 17.
Wright, George Ernest. “The Unity of the Bible.” JRT 13 (1955) 5 – 19.
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NY: Doubleday, 1957.
7
Canonical Criticism: An Introduction
A new subdiscipline is emerging in biblical studies. It is called canonical criticism

and bodes well for valorizing honesty about biblical pluralism and finding an
up-front place for it in formal critical method.
The need for canonical criticism has been addressed elsewhere.1 It has emerged
in part as a way for the guild of biblical scholarship to respond to a number of
stimuli: (1) the increasing charges by many theologians, lay and professional,
that biblical criticism has tended to lock the Bible into the past as well as make
it a kind of archaeological tell that only experts can dig, what has been called the
“strange silence of the Bible in the churches”;2 (2) the vastly increased knowledge
about the great variety of theologies and denominations in early Judaism and the
early church and their differing canons of Scripture; (3) the modern ecumenical
movement that makes it impossible any longer to ignore the great variety of the-
ologies and denominations today as well as their differing canons of Scripture;
(4) increasing awareness of the hermeneutics that the ancient biblical authors
themselves used when they contemporized and called upon traditions they had
inherited, in both the Old Testament and the New; (5) increasing respect for the
theological depths in the hermeneutics of biblical tradents; (6) increasing honesty
and consciousness on the part of serious students of the Bible that biblical plu-
ralism simply will not go away but begs to be formally recognized as a blessing
equal to any other the Bible has to offer; (7) increasing awareness on the part of
serious students of the Bible that only in its ongoing dialogue with the believing
communities that produced it and that continue to find their identity in it does
the Bible have its proper Sitz im Leben and hence its life-giving potential; and,
finally, (8) the problem of biblical authority precisely for the serious student of
the Bible who refuses to bracket intellectual honesty in biblical study.
Canonical criticism has emerged as the mode by which even the most rigorous
biblical scholar, usually preoccupied with what the Bible meant, can respond
to such stimuli responsibly. It is also the means by which that scholar can find
responsible links between what he or she finds in the biblical past to what the

1
Cf. Sanders, “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism.”
2
Cf. Smart, Strange Silence.
Bible can say to the ongoing believing communities who are the proper heirs of
the biblical legacy. Biblical criticism can simply no longer ignore the charges that
it has atomized the Bible in its own special way, then stuffed the pieces back into
antiquity while acting quite irresponsibly for the most part about the very nature
of the Bible itself. The claim to objectivity and thoroughness rings hollow when
the Bible as canon is ignored.
Its nature as canon had to be bracketed early on in the history of modern
biblical criticism in order for scholars to focus on the history of its formation.
In the eighteenth century, canon meant primarily authority, and that authority
was the province of the churches. By the end of the eighteenth century, Johann
Salomo Semler and others had reduced the concept of canon to the final stage in
the history of literary formation of the Bible. Then, by the end of the nineteenth
century, what started out as J, E, D, and P ended up at Jamnia as the complete
Torah, Prophets,and Writings. Western minds needed some authoritative council
to wrap it up, and they found it, or so they thought, in Jamnia. Hence canon-
ization meant the means whereby the largest literary units, the several books,
got included and others were left out. Authority was superimposed upon the
resultant compilation by an assembly of rabbinic scholars not totally unlike
themselves. Thus reduced to what was manageable by the tools of literary and
historical criticism, the concept of canon was tamed and remained docile until
recently. Views of the canon of the New Testament and how it took shape have
been similar.
All that has had to be critically reviewed. Recent work has shown that Jamnia
was not a council at all in the sense that Western minds needed,3 and the concept
of canon is so integral to the very nature of Bible that it would not stay tamed.
Consciousness has recently been raised in the minds of scholars that biblical
criticism has all along subscribed to a view of authority of Scripture even while
it tried to set the problem of inspiration and authority aside as improper for crit-
icism as such to handle. One of the major characteristics of biblical criticism has
been its pursuit of the ipsissima verba (or vox) of the original speakers, writers,
and contributors to Scripture. As an exercise in historical research, such a pursuit
has been quite legitimate. That is, it is right for the historian to attempt, insofar
as possible, to recover what really was said and done by personages the Bible
depicts. In so doing the historian has to try to determine what in a given passage
derives from that person and what seems to be added by a later hand. Then the
searcher has the data at hand to reconstruct the moment in history under study,
in order to present a cohesive and reasonably accurate account of what really
went on back there.
Unfortunately, the exercise has spilled over its normal bounds and become
confused with the question of authority. When the textbook or the professor
claims that such and such a passage is “secondary” or “spurious,” the designation
3
Cf. Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?” See also Leiman, Canon and Masorah,
254 – 63.
Canonical Criticism: An Introduction 129
is supposed to be limited to the exercise in historical research; but almost invari-

ably the student is left to believe that the passage is also spurious with regard to
its authority for the liturgical and instructional life of the believing community
today. One wonders how many preachers who have been educated in the main-
line seminaries, when preparing lessons and sermons, avoid those passages they
were taught were “secondary.” There was the tacit assumption that if the words
of the passage should be denied to the original speaker or writer, then they did
not have the authority necessary to be sermon material.
In effect, that assumption presupposes a view of authority shared with fun-
damentalists and literalists, namely that inspiration of Scripture was from God
or Holy Spirit to the ancient person vertically, which was then horizontally pre-
served by disciples, preachers, and scribes more or less “accurately.”4 The differ-
ence between biblical critics who fall into this confusion, and fundamentalists
and the inerrancy folk, is quantitative. The one claims that only a certain per-
centage of the passage or the biblical book goes back to the ancient personage
in whose name it is recorded, while the other claims that all of it does. Again,
as in so many other areas, liberals and fundamentalists really subscribe to the
same basic presuppositions, the difference between them often being superficial,
though seemingly irreconcilable.
The Princeton theologians Archibald Alexander Hodge and Benjamin Breck-
inridge Warfield, sometimes called the thoughtful fundamentalists, put their
position clearly in an article titled “Inspiration” published in The Presbyte-
rian Review in 1881 (vol. 2, pp. 237 – 38): “It must be remembered that it is not
claimed that the Scriptures any more than their authors are omniscient . . . They
are written in human languages, whose words, inflections, constructions, and
idioms bear everywhere indelible traces of human error . . . Nevertheless the his-
torical faith of the Church has always been, that all the affirmations of Scripture
of all kinds, whether of spiritual doctrine or duty, or of physical or historical
fact, or of psychological or philosophical principle, are without any error, when
the ipsissima verba of the original autographs are ascertained and interpreted in
their natural and intended sense.”5 While the value of such a statement clearly
does not lie in its view of church history, it is an invaluable statement of the view
of biblical authority held by the rationalist fundamentalists in the midst of the
modernist-fundamentalist controversy.
Canonical criticism brings a corrective to the confusion by facing up to the
question of authority within the guild of biblical criticism and by valorizing a
firm observation of historical criticism: the Bible comes to us out of the liturgical
and instructional lives of the ancient believing communities that produced and
shaped it.6 What is there, is there not only because someone in antiquity was
inspired to speak a needed word to his or her community, but also because that
4
Cf. Achtemeier, Inspiration of Scripture, 22 – 32.
5
Cf. March, “Biblical Theology,” 115.
6
Cf. Lemaire, Les écoles et la formation de la Bible.
community valued that communication highly enough to repeat it, eventually

reciting it in one way or another, and recommend it to the next generation and to
the next community nearby. So-called secondary passages represent the appreci-
ation of the community in adapting the message to its needs and they show us,
using the critical tools necessary, how indeed they did so. The Bible as canon
is a community product in this sense. We simply would not have the words of
the great genius back there if his or her listeners and neighbors did not preserve
them. In the case of the judgmental prophets as well as some other literature,
there was apparently a span of time when only a few so valued what had been
said. But invariably there came a point when the larger community or commu-
nities valued the words enough to set them on a kind of tenure track toward
canon. Archaeology often discovers the literary product of ancient geniuses
whose words were not so valued. What is in the canon is what “made it,” so to
speak, in contrast to what has only recently been found in holes in the ground in
the eastern Mediterranean area.
All this is to say that canon and community must be thought of as belong-
ing together, both in antiquity and today. The heirs of the ancient tradents con-
tinue their dialogue with those traditions as recorded in the Bible. The believing
community always was and always will be the proper Sitz im Leben of canon,
and that community has always included both the geniuses and the learners, the
leaders and the followers. Each has always needed the other. It matters little how
much of a genius an ancient author was, or how inspired, if there was not a
community to appreciate at some point what was done, said, or written. The
question of the authority of canon lodges in the ongoing dialogue between the
believing community and its canon. And that canon includes both the original
words and the early community responses to them. The community’s appreci-
ation and adaptation of what the original person had said is comparable to the
latter’s appreciation and adaptation of the community traditions he or she had
cited in the “original” speech or writing. The Bible is full, Old Testament and
New, of older authoritative community traditions called upon and adapted to the
newer historical contexts of community need. It is often said that the Old Tes-
tament is the largest component part of the New in its citations of and allusions
to Scripture and tradition. But the Old Testament is also replete with repetition
and citation of older community traditions as well as of tried and true interna-
tional wisdom. The prophet or the psalmist rarely goes for long without ringing
in the changes on the Torah story. And even the wisdom writers, such as Job and
Qohelet, while never citing the Torah story, over and over again indirectly reflect
upon the theological traditions of ancient Israel and Judah. The so-called later
hands and editors are true heirs of the masters themselves in this regard, for they
simply have gone and done likewise. As Brevard Childs says of Walther Zim-
merli’s work on Ezekiel, it is the Ezekiel book that is canonical, not the prophet
Ezekiel.7 Indeed, the faithful in the believing communities today simply go and
7
Cf. Childs, Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 357 – 70.
do likewise when they take the canonical heritage and adapt it and apply it to
present need. One might say, in traditional terms, that the Holy Spirit has been
at work all along the path of believing communities ever since.
II
If the point is established that canon and community go together, then we can
speak of seven salient characteristics of Scripture as canon. I shall list and explain
each briefly and then focus on one.
Let me hasten to say that this emerging subdiscipline has by no means
matured. It is still growing and much work needs yet to be done. It is only some
fifteen years old by the most liberal reckoning. Nor is it intended to displace its
older siblings in criticism. It is intended as a corrective to abuses of biblical his-
torical criticism, as noted above, but this author clearly sees it as complementary
to form, tradition, redaction, and rhetorical criticism. It is criticism’s effort to be
more scientifically thorough than it has been to date. Biblical literary and histor-
ical criticism can be viewed as a gift of God in due season if its limits are observed
and if it is not abused. It is an instrument by which God may continue to speak
to his people today – if the professional interpreter in the believing communities
today carefully honors the process of adaptation that the Bible itself indicates the
biblical authors and speakers followed in the formation of Scripture. Canonical
criticism aids the modern interpreter to do so.
The seven characteristics are: repetition or relecture, as the French put it; resig-
nification; multivalency of single texts; pluralism within the Bible as a whole; the
adaptability-stability quotient of canon; the textual restraints that guard against
abuse of Scripture; and hermeneutics. I want to explain each succinctly and then
focus on canonical pluralism.
1. The first characteristic of canonical Scripture is repetition. What is there got
there because somebody way back there repeated something, starting a process
of recitation that has never ceased. Nothing anybody said or sang could have
made it into canon unless somebody else repeated or copied it, and then another
and another.
2. The fact that each time it got repeated it got resignified slightly to fit the
new context of repetition or recitation goes without saying. Someone says won-
deringly, “Every time I read that passage I get something new out of it.” Right.
Why? Because each new situation in which we read it gives us slightly different
ears to hear and slightly different eyes to see what the passage can say. The orig-
inal author may have had one thing in mind, but once what he or she said is out
there, especially once it has hit the tenure track toward canon, it has a life of its
own (to use traditional terms if you will) for the Holy Spirit to use as she sees
fit, or (to use critical terms) subject to the hermeneutics applied to it in the new
context in which cited.
3. Canonical literature is multivalent. The very fact that it made it on that
track would indicate that. Actually, nearly any intelligible group of words held
together by syntax is multivalent, but it is especially true of canon. This obser-

vation applies to single passages within Scripture. Just think of all the sermons
preached on the same Sunday on a given passage selected by lectionary. Any two
alike probably became so by collusion. It depends on the hermeneutics applied.
Look at how differently Hab 2:4 is understood at the various places it shows up
in Scripture.8 Examples are endless.
4. Pluralism is the fourth characteristic, but because I want to focus on it later,
we’ll skip over it for the moment. This observation pertains to Scripture as a
whole.
5. The fifth characteristic is canon’s dual nature of being both adaptable and
stable, its adaptability-stability quotient. Until the emergence of canonical criti-
cism, biblical scholarship focused almost exclusively on the stability factor when
thinking of Scripture as canon, that is, the question of what books are in what-
ever canon and what books are left out. Why is the Hebrew Esther, which never
mentions God explicitly, in the canon, whereas Judith, which is quite orthodox,
was left out? I mean that sort of question. But actually, the stability factor is
quite relative. It depends on which denomination in antiquity, or today, one is
viewing. The ancient Essenes apparently had an open-ended canon with many
more books in it than the canon of the Pharisees, and certainly with many more
than that of the Sadducees. But today also it depends on which denomination
one considers. Protestants have a short canon; Roman Catholics have the deute-
ro-canonicals in addition; Greek Orthodox have yet more; and the ancient and
venerable Ethiopic church has 81 books in its canon!9 While they do not agree on
the stability factor, they all believe that Scripture is relevant or adaptable.
6. Even so, the texts have built-in constraints that must be observed. While it
is true that certain hermeneutic techniques, such as numerology, allegory, and
tropology, can make a passage say just about anything the interpreter using them
wants it to say, canonical criticism draws attention to the limits imposed by the
texts. Apocalypticists today, writing and speaking on the airways, usually can
twist biblical passages to say pretty much what will draw the attention they want,
but even very well-meaning critically trained preachers sometimes take a passage
beyond its clear limits. As heirs of the early tradents and scribes, it behooves us
in our turn to honor their labors to respect the texts they have passed on to us.10
This is in large measure the purpose of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center
for Preservation and Research in Claremont, of which the writer is president. By
preserving the contents of ancient manuscripts on film [or digitally], and storing
that film in a climatized vault, we feel we are honoring the care ancient scribes
took in their respect for biblical textual restraints, as well as providing a place the
modern researcher can come to read all he or she wants in one place.
8
Cf. Sanders, “Habakkuk in Qumran.”
9
Cf. Cowley, “Biblical Canon.”
10
Cf. Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method,” esp. 29; Sanders, “Text and Canon:
Old Testament and New,” esp. 388 – 93.
7. The Bible is full of unrecorded hermeneutics, the seventh and perhaps the
most important characteristic of the Bible as canon. Elsewhere we shall focus on
canonical hermeneutics. These are discernible through responsible use of critical
tools. Nearly every biblical speaker or writer repeats or cites older traditions, or
in the case of the New Testament, Scripture. And they all, of course, used herme-
neutics in doing so. We can now, for the most part, ferret them out.11 By herme-
neutics we do not mean principally hermeneutic techniques or rules, though we
want to know those as well. Rather we mean the hermeneutic axioms they used,
that is, their theology. Gerhard Ebeling has said that hermeneutics is theology
and theology is hermeneutics. In the case of canonical hermeneutics it is the
author’s or the tradent’s view of God that makes a tremendous difference in how
a passage is read and made relevant. There are two major hermeneutic axioms
discernible in the Bible: the one stresses the grace of God as the faithful promiser
and the other stresses the freedom of God, as creator of all peoples, to judge and
even transform or recreate his own people. Luke makes clear his view that the
principal reason Jesus offended so many of the religious establishment of his day
was that he read old familiar passages stressing God as God of all peoples. This
Luke establishes already in his report of the sermon at Nazareth (Luke 4:16 – 30)
and then continues to make clear through the central section of the Gospel.12
Luke even puts God’s grace in the light of God’s freedom to express this grace
elsewhere as well as among the faithful, as, for example, in the three parables in
Luke 15. Corruption of Christian consciousness in its apologetic need to feel
unique has tried to limit God’s freedom in this regard to what he did in Christ in
the first century. The task of ferreting out the hermeneutics used by the ancient
biblical thinkers and authors themselves may be the most important task canon-
ical criticism has. The work continues.
III
But for the balance of this statement, I want to focus on canonical pluralism.
Liberal Christians have failed to valorize the pluralism in the Bible even while
agreeing that it is there. This is a point totally unrecognized by literalists and
fundamentalists for whatever reason, but while it is recognized by liberals no one
has clearly formalized biblical pluralism into a system of understanding of the
Bible. It is time to do so, and canonical criticism provides the means for doing so.
The fact that the Bible has multiple ways of saying things, different accounts
of the same thing, and a healthy dose of contradictions does not need rehearsal
here, so that we do not need to waste time belaboring the obvious. Liberals usu-
ally pride themselves on their honesty. To fail to recognize pluralism in the Bible
is to be dishonest. But have we been as fully honest as we should be? One of
11
Cf. Sanders, “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.”
12
Cf. Sanders, “From Isaiah 61 to Luke 4,” esp. 92 – 104; Sanders, “Ethic of Election,” esp.
254 – 56.
the reasons fundamentalism is abhorrent to many Christians is its dogmatic dis-

honesty. Nothing called Christian should require dishonesty at the very heart of
what it professes.
Well and good. Let us banish it altogether then. Even Karl Barth until his
death in December 1968 still believed that if he dug deep enough and worked
long enough on a passage he would find its consistent biblical core. “What dis-
tinguishes the witness of the prophets and the apostles, so that it can have signif-
icance for the existence of the congregation and its proclamation to the world?
. . . They told all sorts of sagas and legends and at least made free use of all kinds
of mythological material. In many things they said – and in many important
propositions – they contradicted each other . . . They had only their election and
calling to commend them. Their many-sided testimony has, in its own way and
in its own place, one and the same center, subject and content.”13 Yes, but one has
the feeling that the last sentence clouds the issue and prevented him from fully
valorizing the pluralism Barth otherwise clearly saw.
Many intellectual Christians retain an uninvestigated conviction that certain
biblical themes ought to be discoverable everywhere in the Bible. I often tell
my students that if they feel they’ve discovered a “biblical” idea or theme they
should go back and look for its contrapositive: it will probably be there. The
same Gospel that quotes Jesus as saying he came to bring peace (John 14:27 et
passim) also quotes him as saying, “For judgment come I into the world . . .”
(John 9:39). Each statement must be read in its own context, but our facile and
subtle attempts at harmonization only serve to blunt the Word.
The Bible comes to us from five ancient culture eras: the Bronze Age, the Iron
Age, the Persian Period, the Hellenistic Period, and the Roman. It also comes
in three languages with all the various idioms and cultural givens derived from
those eras and languages. Isaiah 2:4 says there will come a time when Judah will
beat her swords into plowshares and her spears into pruning hooks, but Joel 3:10
(MT 4:10) says the Lord commands Judah to beat her plowshares into swords
and her pruning hooks into spears. Each statement should be read in context.
These riches must not be harmonized out of existence. As Qohelet 3:5 says, there
is a time for picking up stones and a time to put them down. We know these
things, and if we are honest enough to admit of biblical pluralism, then we ought
to find a way to celebrate it and formalize it.
The perspective of canonical criticism on biblical pluralism is that it provides a
built-in corrective apparatus so that we not absolutize any one agenda, or that we
not think we have God boxed into a set of propositions. When a student gets into
Jeremiah enough to get excited about his hermeneutics and his theology, I then
advise her or him to read Qohelet. For Qohelet might be said to offer a critique
to any effort to absolutize or generalize Jeremiah. Prophetic rhetoric is such that
it tends at times to be hyperbolic, and one should simply not expect the Jeremiah
book to touch all the bases necessary to contain full canonical truth. The sharper
13
Barth, God Here and Now, 48.
the prophetic challenge the less theological burden it can bear. So Qohelet is
there as a corrective to any tendency we might have to lay too much on Jeremiah.
Instead of thinking through carefully the tendency to charge books we like,
such as Isaiah or Jeremiah or Romans, with the full weight of canonical truth,
we tend also to squint at a book like Nahum or ignore it altogether, or simply
regret it. But look at the riches of having both Nahum and Jonah in the same
prophetic corpus: one speaks of God’s judgments against the Ninevites and the
other of God’s grace toward them. Canonically speaking that is not essentially
different from having Amos speak harsh words of God’s judgment against his
own people as well as their neighbors, followed by an Obadiah who speaks harsh
words of God’s judgment against Edom. God is creator and judge of all peoples,
including his own, and God is redeemer of all peoples, even Assyria and Egypt
(Isa 19:24 – 25, and the book of Jonah). Deutero-Isaiah is amazingly pluralistic
in itself as may be witnessed by all the efforts to claim he was a universalist fol-
lowed by all the efforts to assert he was a nationalist. Thank God we have not
only Romans from Paul but also Galatians.
The multiple-Gospel tradition is a canonical treasure as was recently shown
by Professor Eugene Lemcio in the 1981 Weter Lecture at Seattle Pacific Univer-
sity.14 It is time we went ahead and celebrated the significant differences among
the Gospels. The early churches have given us four; why not stress the differ-
ences where it is right to do so and where they are genuine differences so as to
reap the blessings in store? Lemcio pointed out that we usually either harmo-
nize the difference away, prefer one Gospel over the others, or engage in a kind
of reductionism to find consistent themes. Matthew sees poverty as a spiritual
quality and Luke sees it as an economic condition that Christians should tackle
in society – and we today need both emphases, maybe not on the same day or
in the same historical context of our own existences, but they have always been
there when the churches through the ages have needed the challenge to hear the
one, or the challenge to hear the other. Did the centurion say Jesus was the Son
of God (Matthew) or simply innocent (Luke)? Canonically speaking we have the
richness of both and we need to affirm the wisdom of the early believing com-
munities in handing both down to us. Tatian’s harmonizing Diatessaron did not
win out nor did Origen’s reductionist efforts.
Whereas Mark (6:1 – 6) and Matthew (13:53 – 58) place Jesus’s sermon at Naz-
areth toward the end of Jesus’ Galilean ministry, Luke (4:16 – 30) puts it at the
very beginning. And whereas in the others it is Jesus who marvels at the con-
gregation because of their unbelief, in Luke it is the congregation that rejects
Jesus because of his hermeneutics in interpreting Isa 61. The differences are
significant and decisive and must not be glossed over or harmonized. Whereas
Matthew’s report of Jesus’ parable of a great supper concerns a marriage feast
(22:1 – 10), Luke’s report of the same concerns an eschatological victory banquet
(14:15 – 24). Each significantly tells of how those who had been invited in the first
14
Cf. Lemcio, “Gospels and Canonical Criticism.”
place (keklēmenoi) did not attend when the time came. They clearly stem from
the same basic story but the differences are significant and decisive. In each the
“invited” represent those in society who felt they were elect (also keklēmenoi)
but at the end do not partake of the feast. The reasons they do not finally attend
are radically different in the two stories and those differences should not be lost
because of a misguided pious desire to harmonize the two accounts – which is
what has often happened in the history of Christian interpretation of the two. In
order fully to understand the Matthean version one needs to know the targum or
early Jewish interpretation of the feast in Zeph 1:7 – 13, which clearly lies back of
his version. But in order fully to understand the Lukan version, one on the con-
trary needs to know the Septuagint of Deut 20:1 – 9 and the ways the Holy War
legislation there was understood in Hellenistic as well as Pharisaic Judaism in the
period before the New Testament.15 The riches of this sort of canonical pluralism
must be preserved and even celebrated.
There is no one view of Scripture that exhausts its blessings or its riches. On
the contrary, canonical pluralism assures that there is no construct that can be
built on Scripture that is not judged, and hopefully redeemed, by something else
in it. God is God.
God is God, and not the Bible or the canon within the canon of any one
construct built on it – no matter how sincerely fervent on the one hand or how
sophisticated on the other. God is One and we are many. And canonically the
Bible may be seen as an ongoing prophetic voice that can keep us from absolu-
tizing any one biblical viewpoint or running out of the theological ballpark with
a pet biblical theme. This is a part of what I long ago chose to call monotheiz-
ing pluralism.16 The greatest challenge the Bible has for us all is the challenge to
monotheize – to affirm the integrity of God both ontologically and ethically.
And that may very well be the toughest challenge the human mind has ever met.
The simple truth is that none of us does it right all the time, or even most of the
time. Morning by morning we have to try again because part of what is meant by
human depravity (a term liberals need to hear more clearly) is our natural bent
toward polytheizing. We really can’t get it all together in our heads at once, but
the challenge of Scripture is that we must try. We’d much rather have a bad god
do all the things we don’t like and the good God (ours, of course) to do all the
good things we like, with the assurance that ours will win out in the long run. We
read Paul’s struggle with the hardening of the heart of Pharaoh and Isaiah’s pro-
phetic call by denominational hermeneutics and at best pity the ancient Egyp-
tians and Judahites. Christian anti-Semitism stems largely from our almost total
failure to grasp fully the concept of the ongoing freedom of the God of grace.
But the promise of these canonical traditions, taken whole, is that if we make
the effort to monotheize, nothing in all creation can claim us: there are no idols;
on the contrary, polytheism is reduced to pluralism that, submitted to the judg-
ments of God, can be a blessing beyond belief. But it is not easy: the dark side
15
Cf. Sanders, “Ethic of Election.”
16
Cf. Sanders, Torah and Canon, x.
of Yahweh becomes repugnant, to liberals and conservatives alike, and we lose

even our tremulous hold on Reality. (Conservatives have the devil to thank for
absolutely everything they don’t like but he never seems to challenge their own
most precious premises.)
Can we be truly honest and valorize biblical pluralism? If so, it will require
the other two H’s as well: not only a thoroughgoing honesty but also humility
and humor.
IV
Lay folk can get in on a canonical way of reading Scripture too. They don’t
have to wait until scholars have finished working out all the unrecorded herme-
neutics. One can simply read a passage consciously identifying with some one
or group in it that one would not usually identify with. For instance, Joseph’s
brothers instead of Joseph. Can we believe that the brother we sold into slavery
has become our savior and kept us alive with the food he later had to give? Can
we believe that the one we sold to Caesar has become our savior? If we continue
always identifying with Joseph, Jeremiah, and Jesus while reading the texts, we’ll
continue to miss the challenges and the blessings. One can read Luke’s account
of our Lord’s sermon at Nazareth, by identifying with the little congregation
that became so incensed at the way he interpreted Scripture (Jesus’ hermeneutics)
that they became a lynching mob. To identify with Jesus in the New Testament
accounts is to engage in falsehood, for a certainty, and yet we have almost always
done so, consciously or unconsciously.
The first H is honesty, and we have dwelt on that in this essay, in terms of the
pluralism in the Bible. But it also means making the effort, on reading any pas-
sage in the Bible, to theologize about it first rather than moralizing about it first.
We should not only ask what the passage says we should do, but ask first what
it indicates God can do with such a situation as described in the biblical story.
Then it strikes us sharply that God can also manage to redeem our situations,
too, and that is the first note of salvation. If Pharaoh’s heart had been soft, and he
had issued an emancipation proclamation for the Hebrew slaves, there might be
a stele or monument of gratitude to Pharaoh for archaeologists to discover near
Goshen, but there would have been no Torah – not out of that situation. One
should theologize first, then moralize upon the result of that reflection. This
liberates the reader from absolutizing Bronze Age, Iron Age, Persian Period,
or Hellenistic-Roman mores, and helps us focus on what God can do with, and
then we can do in, our own current situations.
The second H is humility, and that means precisely the ability to identify in
the biblical accounts with Rameses, Nebuchadnezzar, and Herod, or with the
well-meaning false prophets, soft-headed polytheizers, and godfearing Pharisees,
in order to hear the challenge of Scripture.
The third H is humor, and this means taking God a little more seriously each
time we read Scripture and ourselves a little less so. If so, the blessings are innu-
merable. The Bible as canon is a monotheizing literature, Old Testament and

New, as indeed the Christian trinitarian belief confirms and reaffirms. It is also
a theocentric literature, and that is liberation abundant. Its perspective is to cele-
brate what God can do with most any fouled-up situation we can devise or offer
up, for none could be worse than those the canon describes in its utter realism
about the struggles back then. The Bible gives us a paradigm of that realism cov-
ering some fifteen centuries in antiquity. Isn’t that enough for our poor limited
human brains to get the point? On the strength of the belief that God continues
to respond with creative redemption today to what we offer up, cannot we con-
tinue as heirs of the biblical tradents and attempt in our day to pursue the Integ-
rity of Reality, the oneness of God, in our equally real situations? Might not then
some of that Integrity rub off on us?17
Reflections
It is impossible to express fully my gratitude to those responsible in the Univer-

sities of Fribourg, Geneva, Lausanne, and Neuchâtel for inviting me to launch
the troisième-cycle monthly seminars for 1981 – 82 on the topic of the biblical
canon. I wish to take this opportunity to thank all those, both faculty and stu-
dents, who took part in the seminar of 30 – 31 October 1981 in Fribourg, espe-
cially for their sympathetic interest in canonical criticism and for their critical
response to the above paper. Their questions and interventions during the course
of the seminar, both during session and in spontaneous conversations around it,
advanced my own thinking considerably and have provided me the opportunity
to reflect on several matters of importance critical both to concept and method
of canonical criticism.
No other such group has caused me to feel the need to press on beyond canon-
ical process to canonical closure as the Fribourg seminar. I received the clear
impression there that it is now time to focus on clôture. I think that I came to
agree with this point because I felt during the course of the two-day discussions
that the issues we have been dealing with up to this point over the past decade
had been clearly heard, understood, and broadly accepted. This was gratifying as
well as challenging: gratifying because a great deal of my thinking about text and
canon was shaped in peripatetic conversations with Dominique Barthélemy, of
Fribourg, in walks in the Black Forest during the summers 1969 – 79 while work-
ing together on the United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text Project,
challenging because of the responsibility implicit in the support given and the
expectations expressed in future work.
It has been clear all along that canonical criticism has so far focused on the
function of canon in the believing communities, both those that shaped the
Bible through the periods of intense canonical process and those since that have
17
Much of the above appeared as Sanders, “The Bible as Canon” and was copyright 1981
by the Christian Century Foundation, which has granted permission to reprint it here [1984].
devised the hermeneutics necessary to keep it adaptable and relevant to the

ever-changing contexts and needs of the faithful in the ongoing communities.
This focus has been the case in part because of the debate within the United
States between those led by Brevard Childs, who have focused almost exclu-
sively on a final form of the biblical text and by “canonical context” mean the
literary context provided by the stabilized Masoretic Text of late antiquity, and
those, like myself, who have wanted to valorize the results of historical biblical
criticism of the past two and a half centuries both by observing its limitations
and its felicitous results. Childs eschews the term canonical criticism, and rightly
so, since it aptly relates to views and work quite alien to his expressed stance.18
That term, which Childs attributes to this writer,19 has indeed focused on pro-
cess rather than on a single stabilized text. It has largely done so because of the
shift of attention, which Childs fully agrees with, from the ancient individual
author of and contributor to biblical literature, as the focus of “inspiration,” to
the ancient believing communities of which those authors and redactors were
part. It has been difficult for this writer to understand the full value of Childs’s
emphasis on the believing community because of his denial of contributions to
the text by the communities who helped shape the Bible up to the community
responsible for the final form of the text. We have, therefore, put most of our
labors and emphasis on valorizing the efforts of all the communities of the bibli-
cal past to whom we are indebted.
The kinds of concerns expressed by B. W. Anderson20 are fully accounted for
by canonical criticism, which focuses on the canonical function of early stages of
authoritative traditions, both oral and written, within believing communities that
received, commented on, perhaps, and passed on what they had received as hav-
ing community value. Anderson’s concerns about Childs’s position are shared by
many of Childs’s critics and reviewers of his Introduction.21 It is in large measure
because of the appearance of Childs’s book and the shared widespread reaction
to it that we are free now, perhaps, to move on in our thinking to the question
of closure.
The major challenge of the Fribourg seminar was to take the concepts and
method developed in canonical criticism focusing on the function of canon in
the believing communities and apply them in a rigorous and thoroughgoing way
to the question of closure. Canonical criticism, responding to the stimuli listed
above, in a manner of speaking leapt back over redaction criticism to pick up a
18
Childs, “Canonical Shape,” esp. 54.
19
Cf. Sanders, Torah and Canon, ix – xx.
20
Cf. Anderson, “Tradition and Scripture,” esp. 14 ff.
21
Cf. discussion in HBT of Childs’s Introduction to the OT as Scripture in Birch, “Tradi-
tion, Canon”; Knight, “Canon and the History of Tradition”; Mays, “What Is Written”; Polk,
“Brevard Childs’ Introduction”; Sanders, “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism”; and
Childs, “A Response”; and in JSOT, Barr, “Childs’ Introduction”; Blenkinsopp, “New Kind
of Introduction”; Cazelles, “Canonical Approach”; Kittel, “Brevard Childs’ Development”;
Landes, “Canonical Approach”; Murphy, “OT as Scripture”; and Smend, “Questions”; with a
response by Childs, “Response to Reviewers”; see also Harrelson, Review of Introduction to
the OT as Scripture.
major observation of form criticism, namely, that everything in the Bible comes
to us out of the liturgical and instructional lives of the early believing commu-
nities. That point, while not in any way denied, has not been in the foreground
of thinking in the work of redaction criticism. The latter has tended to focus on
the theological thinking and message of the final or major redactor of a biblical
book or section of biblical literature – an individual. The importance of individ-
ual contributors to biblical literature can never be denied and must never be lost
sight of, but it can be overstressed when the community to which that individual
belonged is ignored. Without it and its successors and neighbors we would not
have a sentence of what the individual had said or written: archaeologists would
have to find it in holes in the ground in the eastern Mediterranean area, as indeed
they have done frequently in modern times. What is in the canon is what made
it with the communities of the faithful in antiquity, and anonymous members
thereof frequently showed their appreciation of what had been said or written,
adapting it to their later moments by resignifying it or altering it to make it rel-
evant. Canonical criticism seeks not only to validate each of those “later hands”
as well as the first and original speaker or writer, it seeks to discover, insofar as
possible, the hermeneutics of each contributor to the text from first to last.
Biblical historical criticism has developed the tools necessary to ferret out
those pervasive unrecorded hermeneutics that lie in and through all the texts of
the Bible. Those tools have so far been used mainly to recover points originally
scored by the first contributors to a text. They have also been used to a lesser
extent to recover the points of the later hands laid to the same text. But not until
canonical criticism have they been consciously used to ferret out the hermeneu-
tics whereby each of those series of contributors to a text adapted what they had
received and had found value enough in to re-apply and adapt to the community
at the moment of adaptation.22 Even the first speaker or writer, the one on whom
historical criticism has for two and a half centuries focused most of its attention,
often was applying some oral or written community tradition, or international
wisdom tradition, in the first place. That very first “repetition” began a process
of adaptation and re-adaptation that continues today. It began in the layers that
make up a biblical text and it continues through today in sermons and lessons
and “lectures” throughout the world. That is what we mean by canonical pro-
cess.
And it was what I meant in the seminar, on the Saturday morning, when in
answer to the question, When did “canon” begin? I immediately responded:
“From the first moment of ‘repetition.’” I was, of course, focusing on the func-
tion of canon as process. And unless one wishes somehow to absolutize my
response, I would still give it in answer to the same or similar question.
But from that moment in the seminar I began to realize that in order to make
the response valid we must now go on to work on the question of closure in the
light of it. This will take time and work, but the direction it will take is already
22
Cf. Sanders, “Hermeneutics,” IDBSup; Sanders, “Hermeneutics in True and False Proph-
ecy.”
indicated in work done to date. The shape of the Torah was set in the sixth-cen-
tury exilic period and stabilized in the fifth-century events of Ezra’s return to
Jerusalem.23 The shape of the prophetic corpus was indicated in the sixth-cen-
tury exilic period, set soon after Ezra’s return, and stabilized ne varietur finally
in response to the Hellenistic challenges of the third century. When one says ne
varietur, however, one can no longer mean unchanging for all denominations
in Judaism and one can no longer ignore the fact that biblical texts in the early
Jewish period were still relatively fluid in comparison to the strict stabilization
process that began in the first century BCE and was completed by the end of
the first century CE.24 One can mean ne varietur only with regard to the old
question of how far editors and redactors could go in reshaping and altering and
adding to what they received. The Torah clearly became stabilized for all the
Jewish believing communities, in a very real sense ne varietur, soon after Ezra’s
promulgation. The “Torah” event has to be seen as a remarkable response to the
universal need of all the surviving Jewish communities of the Persian period to
know who they were and how they should live in the light of that identity in
ever-changing contexts scattered throughout the known world. Nothing in Juda-
ism or elsewhere can quite compare to the Torah event in this regard.
Hence, when it then became a question of preserving the teachings of the
prophets after it was believed that the spirit of prophecy ceased, the pressure to
stabilize the prophetic corpus that began to take shape in the exilic experience
was simply not as great. It could remain relatively fluid until the needs engen-
dered by the Hellenistic challenge became so great that pressure built for closure
there. Finally, it was the horrendous needs spawned by the demise of the Second
Jewish Commonwealth and the oppression of Roman occupation and universal
rule over every Jewish community in the Empire that caused the pressures that
resulted in steady stabilization of both text and canon from the second half of
the first century BCE through to the stunning and shocking catastrophe of the
fall of Jerusalem.25 We have suggested that there were similar political and social
pressures that later brought about the more relative stabilization and closure of
the New Testament text and canon in the fourth and fifth centuries CE.26
The work that needs to be done now is that of applying the method of canon-
ical criticism to the questions of closure. That method is indicated by the tri-
angle first developed in my article of 1977.27 The three foci of text or tradition
being applied or adapted, the context in which the adaptation took place, and
the hermeneutics by which it was effected would need also to be fully explored
and understood in study of the final stages of closure. Obviously, the stimuli
and pressures of the historical context of closure would need to be explored
23
Cf. Sanders, Torah and Canon, 52 – 53.
24
Cf. Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of”; Barthélemy, “Histoire du texte hébraïque”;
Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.”
25
Cf. Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of”; Sanders, “Canonical Context and Canonical
Criticism.”
26
Cf. Sanders, “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.”
27
Cf. Sanders, “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy,” 21 – 22.
carefully. But equal care would need to be used in discerning the hermeneutics
at play in the questions of inclusion and order, and, obviously in the question of
what “text” or “texts” were finally accepted by the surviving communities. The
same three foci of the triangle should be kept in mind when tracing a diachronic
history, by comparative midrash, of the function of a tradition from its inception
through to closure or to a particular citation or allusion under study.28 Com-
parative midrash includes a synchronic perception of the function of an author-
itative tradition as well. The hermeneutics by which that tradition functions is
always in purview: so also would it be in probing closure. The question also of
what part gatherings or assemblies of leaders of those communities played in the
process would need to be probed very carefully in the light of the fact that we
have become disabused of the idea that we can think of the ability to superim-
pose authority that later church councils apparently had. Nonetheless, the role
of “leaders” appreciated by the scattered believing communities and the measure
of authority granted them by the circumstances would need to be very carefully
reviewed, as well as the extent to which their deliberations were acceptable by
the communities at large.
None of this work can or should be done hastily. It will take time. What
Fribourg did, in part, was to show the need and indicate the new opportunity
now to approach the questions of closure and structure of canon with the tools
already developed in working on the function of canon in the believing commu-
nities.
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Sanders, James A. “The Bible as Canon.” Christian Century 98 (2 Dec 1981) 1250 – 55.
Sanders, James A. “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism.” HBT 2 (1980) 173 – 97.
[Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 153 – 74. Phila-
delphia: Fortress, 1987.]
Sanders, James A. “The Ethic of Election in Luke’s Great Banquet Parable.” In Essays in
Old Testament Ethics: J. Philip Hyatt in Memoriam, edited by James L. Crenshaw and
John T. Willis, 245 – 71. New York: Ktav, 1974. [Revised in Luke and Scripture: The
Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke – Acts, by Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders,
106 – 20. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.]
co-Roman Cults: Studies for Morton Smith at Sixty. Part 1, New Testament, edited by
[Reprinted in Luke and Scripture: The Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke – Acts, by
Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders, 46 – 69. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.]
Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29. [Re-
Fortress, 1987.]
Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. French Translation:
Identité de la Bible: Torah et Canon. Paris: Cerf, 1975. [2nd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade,
2005.]
Smart, James D. The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Church: A Study in Hermeneutics.
Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1970.
Smend, Rudolf. “Questions about the Importance of the Canon in an Old Testament In-
troduction.” JSOT 16 (1980) 45 – 51.
* In addition to the works cited in the footnotes, the basic bibliography on the question of
“Canonical Criticism” addressed by the author also includes the following studies, in alphabet-
ical order:
Ackroyd, Peter R. “Original Text and Canonical Text.” USQR 32 (1977) 166 – 73.
Harper & Row, 1966. [Rev. ed., 1985].
Carroll, Robert P. “Canonical Criticism: A Recent Trend in Biblical Studies?” ExpTim 92 (1980)
73 – 78.
Jacob, Edmond. “Principe canonique et formation de l’Ancien Testament.” In IOSOT Congress
Volume Edinburgh 1974, edited by George W. Anderson et al., 101 – 22. VTSup 28. Leiden:
Brill, 1975.
Maier, Gerhard. The End of the Historical-Critical Method. St. Louis: Concordia, 1977.
Mays, James L. “Historical and Canonical: Recent Discussion about the Old Testament and
Christian Faith.” In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God. Essays on the Bible and Ar-
chaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and
Patrick D. Miller, 510 – 28. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.
Östborn, Gunnar. Cult and Canon: A Study in the Canonization of the Old Testament.
UUÅ 10. Uppsala: Lundequistska, 1950.
Outler, A. C. “The Logic of Canon-Making and the Tasks of Canon-Criticism.” In Texts and
Testaments: Critical Essays on the Bible and Early Church Fathers, edited by W. Eugene
March, 263 – 76. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1980.
Sanders, James. A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In Magnalia
Dei: The Mighty Acts of God. Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest
Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 531 – 60. Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A.
Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.]
Sanders, James A. “Response” [to Eugene Lemcio’s “The Gospels and Canonical Criticism.”]
BTB 11 (1981) 122 – 24.
Sundberg, Albert C., Jr. The Old Testament of the Early Church. HTS 20. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1964.
8
Canon as Shape and Function
The classical phrases that express the uses of the word “canon” as applied to the
Bible are norma normata and norma normans, the first indicating canon as shape,
the latter canon as function. I have tried over the past twenty years to contribute
to both understandings.
Introduction
I entered the field in 1968 with an attempt to understand the variant kinds of
biblical literature recovered from Caves 4 and 11 at Qumran, not only the dif-
fering orders and contents evident in several scrolls of psalms from those two
caves, but also the place of the Temple Scroll in whatever one should call the
authoritative literature at Qumran.1 It has become broadly accepted since that
time that the canon was still open-ended, at least at Qumran, by the beginning
of the first century CE. While some, such as our late, beloved colleague, Patrick
William Skehan, and Moshe Goshen-Gottstein, view the variant scrolls of psalms
as benign liturgical aberrations from an already accepted canon of the Psalter,
others such as Rudolf Meyer and John Barton have taken the extant evidence to
mean that no denomination in early Judaism had a closed Psalter at the begin-
ning of the first century of the common era.2 In any case, it would appear that
the Writings or Ketuvim, the third section of the eventual Jewish tripartite canon,
like the Psalter, was not yet closed, but probably would be by the time of the
Bar Kochba revolt at the beginning of the second century CE. The various codi-
ces of the Septuagint, preserved by the churches after the split of Christianity
from Judaism, would further indicate that, while there was no Alexandrian canon
over against the Palestinian, the churches went on using and copying Greek First
Testaments without knowledge of, or without regard for, closure of the Jewish
canon. My entry into the field of canon study was at first limited to such issues
and questions.
But I had long had a second interest, which emerged four years later in Torah
and Canon. It catapulted me into canon studies in its other aspects as well. A
recent report written at the request of the Pontifical Biblical Commission
in Rome cites the call I sounded in the introduction to Torah and Canon for

1
Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises.”
2
See Barton, Oracles of God, 86.
engagement by biblical scholarship in canonical criticism as the beginning point.

In the report, Dominique Barthélemy cites Brevard Childs’s 1964 article, “Inter-
pretation in Faith,” as well as his 1970 volume Biblical Theology in Crisis, as
antecedents and forerunners to what Childs calls reading the Bible in canonical
context; he also cites my work with the Dead Sea Scrolls as antecedent to what
I termed canonical criticism.3 Barthélemy correctly notes that Childs has often
objected to the term canonical criticism, one point among others that James Barr
has failed to grasp.4
A realization I came to in 1972 as respondent to Brevard Childs’s Sprunt Lec-
tures at Union Seminary, Richmond, however, was that Childs and I, while using
some of the same terms, were addressing the question of canon from quite dif-
ferent perspectives. That conference was enlightening to me, not only in what I
heard Childs coming to in the Sprunt Lectures but in the very lively discussions
revolving around the lectures. Childs and I served together in those years on the
advisory council of Interpretation so that being together at Union Richmond
was not a new experience; what was different was hearing in a systematic way
what he understood by reading the Bible in canonical context.
While work on early Jewish canons, or accepted collections of Scriptures,
entails problems involved in norma normata, in Torah and Canon we were
working in the areas of both norma normata and norma normans. We addressed
the inverse of the question Gerhard von Rad had addressed in 1938 in his “Prob-
lem of the Hexateuch.”5 Von Rad had asked why in the early recitals or creeds
in prophets, psalms, and histories in the Bible there is no mention of the stop at
Sinai, which is so central to the Pentateuch. I turned the question on its head and
asked, since the entrance into the land is mentioned in nearly all the preexilic
recitals of Israel’s epic history, why is the book of Joshua not in the Torah? I was
asking a question about the shape of the Pentateuch or Torah, and in so doing I
was also asking about the function of Torah in believing communities.
The thesis we advanced was that one of the functions of Torah recited annu-
ally (or perhaps, for a while, triennially in antiquity) as canon was to give Jews
their identity in ever-changing situations and circumstances in history so that
wherever they might be they would know who they were and not assimilate
to the dominant culture of their time and place. We also suggested that since
the largest Jewish community in the world from the sixth century BCE to the
Middle Ages was in Babylonia, it was important to note that both the Torah that
Ezra brought with him to Jerusalem (Neh 8) as well as the official Talmud of
later formative Judaism were shaped in the very powerful Jewish communities
in Babylonia.
3
Barthélemy, “La critique canonique.”
4
Barr, Review of From Sacred Story to Sacred Text. By contrast see the perceptive review by
Anderson and Towner, Review of From Sacred Story to Sacred Text.
5
von Rad, Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuchs. See the very fine critique in
historical perspective by Groves, Actualization and Interpretation, and Sanders, Review of Ac-
tualization and Interpretation.
Canon as Shape and Function 147
Canon as Function: The Problems
Torah and Canon thus dealt with canon both as norma normata and norma nor-
mans. From that point on until recently I dealt largely with canonical process, or
canon as function. The principal reason was that I was very much impressed with
how many so-called canons there had been in Judaism and Christianity and how
much they varied in order, if not in both order and content. I agreed with Childs
that canon as function had been largely set aside in biblical scholarship since
the eighteenth century, precisely to accommodate the needs of biblical criticism
in its task of working out the history of formation of the Bible, which Baruch
Spinoza had so clearly called for in his Tractatus of 1670. But I could not go on
with Childs to affirm “the final form of the text,” which is essential to his system
of thought. The reason was that my work with the Dead Sea Scrolls had taken
me into First Testament text criticism, which was being revolutionized precisely
because of their discovery and assessment for determining the history of trans-
mission of the Hebrew text of the Bible.
In 1969, five scholars from Europe and Britain and I embarked on the United
Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text Project (HOTTP). We accepted
the assignment because we not only believed in Eugene Nida’s program in the
Translations Department of the Bible Societies through observation of what the
Greek New Testament committee had been doing, but also because we knew
that First Testament text criticism needed radical overhauling. The recovery
in 1948 of the famous Tiberian Manuscript of the Bible called Aleppensis had
inspired the founding of the Hebrew University Bible Project not long after the
founding of the State of Israel and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Their
work, as reported in the annual Textus and then in the Sample Edition of Isaiah
in 1965, followed by Goshen-Gottstein’s now famous 1967 article on Hebrew
manuscripts, needed to be heeded and evaluated as much as possible in any such
project as Nida had in mind.6
Moving into text criticism as deeply and critically as required by work on
such a project as the HOTTP clearly meant that I could not follow Childs
into his understanding of canonical context. Looking upon all the apparatus
in BHK1–3 (Biblia Hebraica, edited by R. Kittel) and in BHS (Biblia Hebraica
Stuttgartensia) with considerable suspicion, we found we had to do our own
work on as many microfilms of ancient manuscripts as feasible. Beginning with
Luther, and especially Morin and Cappellus, despite the strenuous objections by
the Buxtorfs, father and son, Christian text criticism of the First Testament had
moved decisively, by the end of the seventeenth century, into facilitating emen-
dations and conjectures. While the field did not follow Luther’s hermeneutic
of res et argumentum (deciding problem readings in the light of the gospel), it
definitely moved in the direction of making text-critical decisions based on high-
er-critical criteria. It also was striking to us how random had been the selection
6
The annual Textus has been published irregularly by the HUBP since 1961; Goshen-Gott-
stein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 11 – 45; Goshen-Gottstein, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts.”
of manuscripts used in the great text-critical compendia. Even Kennicott and

de Rossi’s collations did not solve the problem: they worked only on European
manuscripts, and they largely disregarded the work of the Masoretes in so doing.
Johann David Michaelis’s criticisms of Kennicott’s work are still pertinent; and
yet Michaelis, probably the father of First Testament text criticism as it is largely
practiced today, must take a great deal of the responsibility for the still preva-
lent method of text criticism in which a scholar decides contextually what Isaiah
ought to have said and then emends the text in the light thereof.7
All this caused me in 1977 to leave the faculty of Union Seminary in New
York to go to Claremont to help found the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center
so that scholars would no longer have to rely on the biases of interest and com-
petence of earlier scholars who edited the so-called critical editions of crucial
texts and versions of the Bible. In doing so and in investigating as many manu-
scripts as feasible, I have become more and more impressed with the lack of sta-
bility in order of books, even in the Jewish canon, after 2 Kings.8 As Israel Yeivin
rightly put it in his Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah: “The order of the
Books in the Torah and the Former Prophets has been established from earliest
times; however, the order of the books in the Latter Prophets and the Writings is
not fixed.”9 A simple observation in this regard is that whereas the lists in Baba
Bathra 14b and the much later Second Rabbinic Bible of Jacob ben Hayyim
place Chronicles at the end of the Ketuvim, and hence of the Bible, both great
Tiberian manuscripts, Aleppensis and Leningradensis, place it first. Sometimes,
however, Ruth is placed first. Whereas there is stability in the extant medieval
manuscripts in placing the Books of the Three before the Book of the Twelve,
and those before the Writings, it has now been established that the whole concept
of the tripartite Tanak cannot be affirmed before the sixth century CE, if then.10
This does not at all address the problem of the great variety in order of books
after the Pentateuch in Septuagint manuscripts, the Bible of the early church,
until well after Jerome’s work of Hebraica veritas in the Vulgata. When one
speaks of canonical context, one must do so very cautiously and with due regard
to the facts. Then when one moves on to the Second Testament one must be
equally cautious. No fewer than six different lists of the contents of the two Tes-
taments were officially received in the Greek church in the tenth century. Most
eastern churches have always included 1 and 2 Clement. The Ethiopian Ortho-
dox church has 35 books in its New Testament. According to the Alands in Mün-
7
For a cursory review of the hermeneutics of First Testament text criticism from the six-
teenth to eighteenth centuries, see Sanders, “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament.”
8
Where the (hi)story line is continuous, that is, from Genesis to 2 Kings, there is stability
in all Hebrew manuscripts as well as in lists in Jewish literature where available. Even before
the widespread use of the codex, after the second century CE, control of the order of Torah and
Early Prophets scrolls was simple.
9
Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, 38.
10
Georg Eicher, Die Schrift in der Mischna (1906) cited in Pettit, “Comparative Study of
Torah Citations.”
11
Aland and Aland, Text of the NT, 78 – 79.
ster, only 3 uncials and 56 minuscules contain the whole of the New Testament.
And if one looks at their holdings, which are as complete as possible, while there
are 2328 manuscripts of the Gospels, there are only 287 of the book of Revela-
tion.11 As Bruce Metzger recently observed, “It is obvious that the conception of
the canon of the New Testament was not essentially a dogmatic issue whereby
all parts of the text were regarded as equally necessary.”12 Despite Athanasius’s
and Origen’s lists of 27 New Testament books, both in the fourth century, it was
not until 1546 that the Roman Church issued an absolute article of faith (the De
Canonicis Scripturis), sealed by anathema, concerning the canon of the Christian
Bible.13 The various Reformed confessions at the end of the sixteenth and begin-
ning of the seventeenth centuries list 27 books; and the sixth of the 39 Articles of
Faith of the Church of England, issued in 1563, lists the 27. Apparently none of
the Lutheran confessional statements includes such a list.
Whether one turns to lists or to actual manuscripts of either Testament, then,
one has to be cautious and clear about the meaning of canonical context. This is
also true when getting into text criticism of either Testament. In fact, one should
probably not speak of a canonical text of either Testament, nor even some final
form of the text. One can admire and appreciate the Masoretes and all their work,
as I came to do in work on the Dead Sea Scrolls and on the United Bible Societ-
ies’ HOTTP. Such appreciation, however, does not eliminate the need for sound
method in text criticism, such as one can see in the two volumes so far published
of Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament.14
Canon as Function: A Proposal
Then what can be said about canon as shape, or norma normata? I suggest that,
despite the uncertainty of order in the Jewish canon after 2 Kings, the consid-
erable variety in order in the various Septuagint manuscripts also after 2 Kings
(granting that Ruth is often placed after Judges), and despite the uncertainties
about the content and order of the New Testament, there is a hermeneutical
shape to the Jewish and Christian canons. The shape, however, is discernible
largely in work on canon as function.15 I even dare to suggest that what may
truly be called canonical are the unrecorded hermeneutics that lie among all the
pages of Scripture, and that this canonical hermeneutic derives from Scripture’s
basic, intertextual nature. Scripture is full of itself. Wherever one discerns an ear-
lier tradition being recited or alluded to, one must ask what the ancient herme-
neutics were by which the later tradent caused the earlier tradition to function.
And there are very few passages of Scripture, outside the recording of ancient
court and temple (civil and cultic) documents, that do not in some sense build
12
Metzger, Canon of the NT, 217.
13
See Sanders, “Scripture, Canon of.”
14
Barthélemy, Critique textuelle.
15
See Sanders, “Deuteronomy.”
on scriptural traditions. And where Israel’s authoritative traditions seem not to

be called on, there is plenty of international wisdom alluded to and with which
one may do the triangulation necessary to discern the hermeneutics by which the
wisdom tradition, whether Israelite, foreign, Christian, or international, func-
tions in the biblical setting.
I further dare to propose that the basic canonical hermeneutic – of whatever
canon that has in actuality functioned in historically verifiable believing commu-
nities, Jewish and Christian – was “theocentric monotheizing pluralism.” Clearly
some of the literature monotheizes more thoroughly than others, and clearly
some of so-called sectarian literature, whether at Qumran or at Nag Hammadi,
tends to polytheize. And, indeed, some of the literature within some of the can-
ons, including the current Protestant canon, does not seem to monotheize very
well at all. The question becomes that of whether recognizing a hermeneutical
shape permits the reader to read the parts in the light of the whole. I believe that
it does.
Is it canonically fair to monotheize in reading a passage that does not exhibit
authorial intentionality to monotheize? One must first grant that the first of
the Ten Commandments does indeed reflect the basic hermeneutic thrust of
what ended up in the canon. If one grants that, then one must still speak only
of a theocentric monotheizing thrust that permits one to go back and read the
apparently polytheizing and tribalizing passages in the light of the whole. I am
satisfied that the canon as a whole, of whichever Jewish or Christian believing
community, pursues ultimately the “Integrity of Reality,” that is, the ontological
and ethical oneness of God. I do not believe that the vast majority of people or
their leaders in either ancient Israel or Judah managed to monotheize very well.
The evidence is that they were as much polytheizers as modern Christians, and
for that matter most ancient Christians. We are here concerned with the Bible as
canon, not as a literature that accurately reflects the vox populi. On the contrary,
if the number of laws against polytheizing and the number of prophetic indict-
ments against it are any indication, most of the people were normal; they were
polytheizers. But what got onto a tenure track toward canon, the literature that
talked about God being the God of death as well as of life, of fallings as well as
of risings, of defeats as well as victories, that was the literature, for the most part,
that made it into the canon.
Again, the question is not whether some of it tends to polytheize; some of it
surely seems to do so. The question rather is whether it is canonically fair to read
the parts hermeneutically in the light of the whole.
Another question I wish to address is that of whether, if a canon is read as
paradigm, and not as a box of ancient jewels that are somehow still valuable and
negotiable, there is warrant for us to do today what the canonical authors did in
their time. That is, should we engage in active syncretism and adapt the wisdom
of others, of nonbelievers?
First, is it canonically fair to monotheize while reading an apparently poly-
theizing or tribalizing passage? In Israel’s monotheizing pilgrimage, Israel at its
best, while denying the existence of other gods, steadily added the attributes and
job descriptions to Yahweh of most of the gods of the peoples they encountered.
The names of the gods of the fathers, as Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth pointed
out, became simply epithets of Yahweh. El Elyon and El Shaddai, as well as
names of many other deities, became other names for Yahweh. There is a rab-
binic tradition that God has seventy names. Hosea said that Israel did not know
that Yahweh had given them the grain, the wine, and the oil (MT Hos 2:10; ET
Hos 2:8). They had assumed that such a reputable and reliable agricultural deity
as Baal had given them their flocks and crops. But now they were supposed to
learn that one God, Yahweh, was not only their redeemer from slavery in Egypt
and their holy warrior God; Yahweh was also creator. Learning that God was
creator as well as redeemer would bring the prophets to say that, even as holy
warrior, Yahweh might be at the head of enemy troops invading Israel and Judah.
This would cost them dearly, but they accepted the monotheizing thrust of the
traditions they received and applied it to the life-and-death situation Israel and
Judah faced.
There is a short pericope in Exod 4:24 – 26 that puzzles many scholars. Schol-
arship generally agrees that it is a pericope. It can thus be excised without damage
to the context in which it is presently found in Exod 4. It clearly appears to be
based on polytheizing thinking. A destroying deity threatens Moses’s life, but
Zipporah circumcises their son, touches Moses’s own genitals with it, and thus
saves Moses’s life. But note, v. 24 clearly says that the destroying deity or demon
(ʾel mashhit) was Yahweh! The editor or redactor Yahwized the story, and in
effect monotheized it. It makes it all the more an embarrassment, or so some say.
And yet, is not Yahweh the same ʾel mashhit when later God passes over Egypt
and kills the Egyptian first-born, and again later causes the death and defeat of
the Egyptian army at the Reed Sea? Why is it more embarrassing to have Yahweh
attack our guy, Moses, than their guys? I suggest that if we take the clue given,
we should ourselves monotheize in reading the whole of the book and see the
theological validity of the three-verse snippet in Exod 4:24 – 26. Otherwise, we
too polytheize when we consciously or unconsciously think it all right for our
God to kill their people for our sake.
What of the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart? I recently suggested that it is our
polytheizing hermeneutic in reading Exodus that causes us to translate the seven
occurrences of the piel of hazaq, in which God affects Pharaoh’s heart, as God
hardening Pharaoh’s heart. And that hermeneutic began with the Septuagint
translators’ using sklērynō. Everywhere else the same verb occurs with regard to
God’s somehow affecting Israel’s heart, it is translated by such words as “encour-
age” and “hearten.”16 Anyway, why should Rameses go soft-headed all of a sud-
den and abandon the responsibilities of his office to the Egyptian economy by
letting all that cheap labor go free? Pharaoh had a lot of projects to complete.
Have Christians who hold power in this country or in South Africa or anywhere
16
See Sanders, “Strangeness of the Bible,” as well as Sanders, “Challenge of Fundamental-
ism.”
else hastened to share their wealth and political power with blacks or other dis-
possessed folk? And what if Pharaoh had done so? There would have been no
exodus. There might have been a monument of stones set up outside Pithom,
Raamses, and Goshen in gratitude to Pharaoh for Pharaoh’s “emancipation proc-
lamation” but there would have been no departing in haste, no eating of lamb by
midnight, no miracle at the crossing of the waters. The Bible is a book of realism
in whatever canon, Jewish or Christian, we know of. That means that it well
reflects the ambiguity of reality in which humans live, but also witnesses to the
impingement and intrusion of the Integrity of Reality at crucial junctures in our
lives. And it means that God works with that ambiguity, with all its antagonists
and protagonists, all the pros and cons, all the yins and yangs. The Integrity of
Reality, Scripture insists, works with the ambiguity of reality to redeem it.
We Christians can say that the same God who chose one particular slave rebel-
lion in the Late Bronze Age to make God’s paradigm of liberation and redemp-
tion also chose one heir of the Abraham-Sarah family in the first century CE in
whom to dwell fully and vulnerably. We do not know why God chose the one
slave rebellion to make into God’s gospel, any more than we know why God
chose one particular Jew in whom to bring that gospel to its paradigmatic cli-
max. Even christological statements of Christ’s preexistence do not answer that
question.
But if we Christians were to take seriously the canon’s monotheizing thrust
we would learn to read the New Testament a bit differently from the way we
normally do. We would learn to read in the New Testament of God’s Christ, not
our Christ. We would learn to celebrate God’s revelation of Christ in due season
and in the fullness of time, and not celebrate how our Christ revealed God, or
how our boy tamed the big, mean old God. We would learn to translate the verbs
of resurrection in the theological passive, instead of in the middle voice: Christ
“was raised,” not Christ “arose,” unless we clearly mean God’s Christ. We would
learn and teach that resurrection is a further act of Creation by the one, true
God of all Creation. And even in those passages that seem to retribalize Christ,
we would learn to reread in a monotheizing mode. John 14:6 would turn from
an exclusivist’s tribalizing dream into a prophetic indictment of how we have
trivialized the concept of God’s Christ into a Christian idol. It is true that no
person comes to the parent God save through Christ; but it is not our precious
idol, which we dearly clutch, who is the route to God, but rather God’s Christ,
always and ever far and near, always and ever strange and dear, always and ever
deus absconditus as well as deus revelatus. How might Jeremiah or Luke’s Jesus
preach on such a Johannine passage, or even on the one in Acts 4:12 about there
being “no other name”? Would not Our Lord himself challenge our assump-
tions that we have exhausted the meaning of God’s Christ? Would he not chal-
lenge our tendency to think that our Christ domesticated God, that our Christ
boxed God in for us? Would he not remind us that we are commanded to fear
God as well as love God? Would he not teach us a fuller view of the incarna-
tion than one that turns Christ into an idol, and God into a doting, avuncular
figure?
Conclusion
If the canon is viewed as paradigm of the monotheizing process might it not

provide us with clues as to how we should go on learning from others of God’s
children? And if we truly believe that God is the God of all creation, might we
Christians not need to learn real humility and awe in speaking and thinking of
God? Could we go on denying the work of God other than in our understanding
of the gospel? To learn from others’ wisdom and experience is to honor God. A
true evangelism derived from a monotheizing reading of the Bible would result
in the joy of living, speaking, dancing, and singing the gospel. It would issue in a
healthy fear as to whether we might not be lost in our own tribalizing tendencies
(our own corruption of consciousness) rather than in the self-serving fear that
others are lost. And if God is ever more than we can think or imagine, is it not
precisely that important to learn with respect and humility from others, as well
as to share with enthusiasm and joy our ever-evolving and ever renewing under-
standing of the gospel?
Bibliography
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nah.” Unpublished major paper for Claremont Graduate School doctoral program in
Biblical Studies.
Sanders, James A. “Cave 11 Surprises and the Question of Canon.” McCQ 21 (1968)
284 – 98. Reprinted in New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by David Noel
Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, 101 – 16. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.
Sanders, James A. “The Challenge of Fundamentalism: One God and World Peace.” Im-
pact 19 (1987) 12 – 30.
ner’s, 1989.
Christianity, edited by Roger Brooks and John J. Collins, 41 – 68. Notre Dame: Univer-
sity of Notre Dame Press, 1990.
Sanders, James A. Review of Actualization and Interpretation in the Old Testament, by
Joseph W. Groves. CBQ 51 (1989) 329 – 31.
Sanders, James A. “Scripture, Canon of.” Forthcoming in The Coptic Encyclopedia, edited
by Aziz S. Atiya, [2108 – 12. New York: Macmillan, 1991].
Sanders, James A. “The Strangeness of the Bible.” USQR 42 (1988) 33 – 37.
Sanders, James A. Torah and Canon. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972. Translated as Identité de
la Bible: Torah et Canon. Paris: Cerf, 1975, and into Japanese (1984). [2nd ed. Eugene,
OR: Cascade, 2005.]
von Rad, Gerhard. Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuchs. Stuttgart: W. Kohl-
hammer, 1938. Republished in Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament, 1 – 78. Mu-
nich: Kaiser, 1958. ET: The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays. Translated by
E. W. Trueman Dicken. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.
9
Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism
Introduction (1987)
The following is one of five reviews of Brevard Childs’s Introduction to the Old
Testament as Scripture (1979) that were published together with a response by
Childs in HBT 2 (1980). Rarely has an introduction to Scripture commanded
so much immediate attention. A similar bevy of reviews appeared in Britain in
JSOT (1980). Individual reviews have been given major status in some journals.
Professor Bernhard W. Anderson’s presidential address in JBL (1981) was given
in part to a critique of Childs’s position seen in a broad context.
In my review essay, I tried to provide a substantive answer to the many ques-
tions often posed as to the similarities and differences in Childs’s and my under-
standings of the concept of canon as applied in the Bible. I took the opportunity
afforded to draw a detailed tally of where we agree and where we disagree.
Of considerable importance in my mind is the sort of debate Childs and I
perhaps symbolize in revitalizing the concept of canon as applied to Scripture.
The inclusion of my assessment of Childs in this volume will, I hope, serve that
purpose, and will help to clarify for students the really important differences
between the two positions.
A concern I have that is not here addressed is that of critics who see my
position as being existentialist. I regret that, as it might convey to students the
impression that I hold an existentialist philosophy. The discussions would really
go awry if that is not corrected. I do indeed discuss the dimension of life-giving
power Torah and canon have had since their inception for the believing commu-
nities that find their identity in them; but that is not “existentialism.”
Brevard S. Childs has brought to fruition a perspective on biblical understand-

ing and interpretation first suggested, to my knowledge, in an article published
in 1964.1 There he raised serious objection to a basic and fundamental tenet of
modern biblical scholarship in its attempts to engage in exegesis of biblical texts.
Modern scholarship assumes that it must first strike a posture of neutrality in
probing a text in order to be as descriptive as possible in reading it in terms of
the thought of the ancient writer and his or her ancient audience; thereafter, one
may, if indicated, move to a theological understanding of the text. Childs was
particularly concerned with how this “scholarly” attitude dictated the manner in

1
Childs, “Interpretation in Faith,” 434 ff.
which biblical commentaries have been shaped, written, and edited. No one was
clear on how to move from the descriptive task to the theological one: embar-
rassment seemed a proper attitude, or at least none other seemed respectable for
a real scholar if he or she felt he or she had to go on and “preach” or exposit.
Childs argued that “the genuine theological task can be carried on successfully
only when it begins from within an explicit framework of faith,”2 not when it
begins with a neutral description of what they back there thought. “Theological
exegesis is a disciplined method of research fully commensurate with its mate-
rial.”3 Childs was equally critical of the scholarly attitudes of form critics in this
regard and of the biblical archaeologists who claimed that their tools opened the
true avenue to what really happened and thus provided a means of bypassing the
biblical witness to God’s redemptive purpose with Israel.
Childs made three basic points in that early article. The first was to affirm
a hermeneutical circle in movement from a single text to the whole canonical
witness. This he claimed was a descriptive task true to the Bible itself as canon.
(It should be noted, however, that Childs back then did not yet use the word or
concept of “canon”: that was to come later.) His second point was that the exe-
gete must interpret the OT in the light of the NT and vice versa; in so doing one
illumines the ontological relation of the two, the differences between which must
be respected and guarded. Both Testaments nonetheless witness independently
and together to the one purpose of God. The correspondence between the two
Testaments is ontological, pointing to the reality of the one purpose of God.
Typological exegesis, so pervasive in both Testaments, is understood as part of
the witness to the ontological relationship. Thus, his third point was that the her-
meneutical circle (of the dialectic between single text and whole) moved from the
level of the witness in the text to the reality itself. Theological exegesis penetrates
to that reality that called forth the witness.
Childs then fleshed out these ideas in Biblical Theology in Crisis (1970), stress-
ing particularly the importance of the hermeneutical circle in dialectic movement
between single text and full canon. His position was clearly staked out: The Bible
and its single texts must be understood and interpreted in full canonical context
rather than in original historical context. Emphasis was laid on full literary con-
text and what emerges from reading the Bible and its several single texts, not in
terms of whence and thence they arose, but in terms of an inner literary relation-
ship defined by the believing communities who shaped the canon and passed it
on.4 The picture Childs painted was of a canonical process in which ultimate,
final redactors and shapers of what had been received divorced it from the his-
2
Ibid., 438.
3
Ibid., 440.
4
Childs’s focus has varied since Biblical Theology in Crisis. There he seemed to stress the
inner dialectic of canonical themes within the OT and between the Testaments. In Exodus he
was constrained by the commentary form to focus on the larger literary units within a single
book (even though he failed in it to suggest what the canonical shape of the book as a whole
was). And in his Introduction to the OT as Scripture he focuses almost entirely on the herme-
neutical shape of each individual book, constrained again, perhaps, by the introduction form.
Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism 157
tory that had produced the literature in its varied formation, and, in Childs’s
terms, made it thus available to all the believing communities thereafter in their
historical contexts.
Then in 1974 Childs gave us The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological
Commentary, in which he tried to put back together what the form and tradition
critics had torn asunder. The fact that Childs did a better job there of show-
ing how the parts of Exodus discerned by criticism related to other parts of the
canon than of showing us the canonical shape of the whole of the book of Exo-
dus need not detain us here.5 His various short studies that appeared in the 1970s
prepared us quite well for the present work. Superscriptions, idiomatic formu-
lae, etiological tales, and the like came under review in an effort to recover their
significance in the light of their function in fuller literary context rather than as
the textual throwaways criticism had tended to make them.6 And then we had
Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (1979).
There is no question in my mind that Childs has been responding to a very real
need created by biblical criticism itself. What is that need?
Biblical criticism was generated in the excitement of application of Enlighten-
ment insight to the question of the origins of the faith. Enlightenment within the
fold of traditional religious identity unleashed intellectual honesty in ways that
seemed to give new life to old truths. One could question the provenance of the
most precious premises of tradition – and not be struck dead! On the contrary, a
blow had been struck for honesty within the faith, and it was felt that only good
could come from it. Much good has come from it, but as with all such move-
ments problems have arisen as well.
One of the charges being leveled with increasing frequency at the guild of
biblical criticism is that we have locked the Bible into the past. Protestantism
may have cut the chains that had bound the Bible to the church lectern, but it
proceeded to sponsor, at least to some degree, Enlightenment study of the Bible
that seemed in turn to chain the Bible to the scholar’s desk; it went from being
the peculiar province of priests to being the special subject of scholars, who made
it into a sort of archaeological tell that only experts could dig! A new breed of
priest arose to replace the old. The degree of expertise needed to enter the new
guild became sufficient to make it quite exclusivist. The professor of homiletics
trembled to preach in chapel out of dread that her colleagues in Bible might be
present. Tooling up to gain credentials in the guild took so long and began to
be so expensive that many otherwise faithful folk tended to avoid the Bible in
5
Childs, Exodus. See my review, Sanders, Review of The Book of Exodus.
6
Childs, “Traditio-Historical Study”; Childs, “Psalm Titles”; Childs, “OT as Scripture
of the Church”; Childs, “Etiological Tale”; Childs, “Reflections”; Childs, “Sensus Literalis”;
Childs, “Canonical Shape.”
preaching, lecturing, and study. As long as liberalism and then neo-orthodoxy

remained in fairly widespread consensus in Western Christianity (which had
nourished historical criticism) there was a shield around the guild that protected
it from such charges and even prevented it from hearing them. In the meantime,
skillful members of the guild were in constant demand for lecturing and writ-
ing to reveal to the faithful the fruits of their clandestine digs. It was the same
in other fields and did not seem too strange in ours: every human discipline of
inquiry was becoming specialist.
Except that neo-orthodoxy fell a casualty to the radical upheavals of the
1960s. But instead of another equally discrete and commanding consensus tak-
ing its place, many and varied theological postures were struck, none sufficiently
cohesive to shield the guild from the ever-increasing charges. Several responses
have been forthcoming to the charges, and I have listed those with discussion
elsewhere.7 They range from the various pneumatic and charismatic movements
of left and right to structuralism, symbolism, political (Marxist), and psycholog-
ical (Jungian), and language event hermeneutics to functionalism. And they range
all the way from disdain for biblical criticism to abandonment of the Bible alto-
gether in theologizing (liberal pneumatic personal storytellers). Biblical criticism
has been cited as bankrupt.8
There is truth in the charges, even if some have been caricatures. We in the
guild cannot and must not hide behind pitiful countercharges that some of the
potshots have been rhetorically overcharged. We hid behind the shields of liber-
alism and neo-orthodoxy long enough. It is time we reform ourselves. How can
we retain the solid advances made in biblical study since the Enlightenment and
yet correct what has gone wrong?
Childs has a clear answer to the question, and it is well worth hearing and
to a large extent heeding. His own statement of the problem varies somewhat
from the above, though it is quite congruous with it. He stated the problem bril-
liantly in his Sprunt Lectures in Richmond, Virginia, in 1972.9 Biblical criticism
in the eighteenth century in the work of Johann Salomo Semler had redefined the
concept of canon “in strictly historical terms as an external ecclesiastical valida-
tion without any real significance for the shaping or interpretation of the bibli-
cal literature.”10 It had indeed. My own work brought me to a similar observa-
tion.11 The concept of canon up to that point had meant authority, and as used in
church tradition was simply a concept criticism could not cope with. It reduced
its semantic impact to an idea manageable by the tools of historical inquiry being
developed in the guild. Childs cites his former student (and my former colleague)
Gerald T. Sheppard to clear effect: “Little wonder that once the biblical text had
7
Sanders, “Biblical Criticism and the Bible as Canon.” See Maier, End of the Histori-
cal-Critical Method, and Stuhlmacher, Historical Criticism.
8
Wink, Bible in Human Transformation, 1.
9
Childs, “Canon and Criticism,” unpublished, though much of what Childs did there ap-
pears in his Introduction to the OT as Scripture, e. g., 17.
10
Childs, Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 45.
11
Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.”
been securely anchored in the historical past by ‘decanonizing’ it, the interpreter
has difficulty applying it to the modern religious context.”12 To locate biblical
meaning in the past is in effect to decanonize it. Biblical historical criticism in
large measure succeeded in taming the concept of canon and making it a proper
subject of critical study. How was this managed? How had criticism managed to
decanonize the Bible?
As Childs says, canon was defined in strictly historical terms. My own way
of putting this is that criticism reduced canon to the last and ultimate stage in
literary formation of the biblical text – how the larger literary units, the several
books, got together. One could then write a history of the literary formation of
the Bible in critical terms, all the way from the earliest sources discerned by crit-
icism right up to the so-called Palestinian and Alexandrian canons.13 Criticism
was happy now, for it could write a history of the origins and development of
biblical literature from J, or J’s own earlier sources, to the Palestinian canon, and
then do the same for the NT from Q to Chalcedon. And it was able to do it by
focusing on phenomena malleable to critical search lists of biblical books in non-
canonical literature, such as Sirach, Philo, Josephus, the Talmud, Marcion, church
fathers, fragments (Muratonian), and the like. But another achievement came in,
importing to early Judaism and Christianity the Western understanding of coun-
cils. A real breakthrough occurred when enough references were discovered to
a gathering of rabbinic Jews in Jabneh or Jamnia in Palestine in the decades after
the fall of Jerusalem to Rome in 70 CE. The Western critical mind could really
latch on to that. What a discovery!14 The needs of criticism were served. If the
faithful still needed some notion of “authority” involved with canon, here it was:
the authority was superimposed from the outside by ecclesiastic councils. It was
their authority that rubbed off on the canon and sealed its content and order. The
quest for other councils was soon satisfied in Christianity: there were enough of
those to go around. But what of earlier councils in Judaism for the Pentateuch
and Prophets? Jabneh dealt only with the Hagiographa. It took a while, but one
was found: the anshê knesset ha-gedolah convened by Ezra in Jerusalem in the
late fifth century BCE!15 That took care of the Writings and the Pentateuch; the
Prophets would behave until something showed up.
But it did not. Instead, the Dead Sea Scrolls and other such discoveries showed
up, like Nag Hammadi, for instance, and the assured results of criticism in this
regard seemed less sure. Then there was the ecumenical movement that brought
to consciousness the question: whose canon? If canon is reduced to the question
of what books are in the canon (and what books are out) and in what order, then
one had to ask which canon? Qaraites and Samaritans were still around on the
Jewish side with their narrower views of canon; and triumphalist Protestants all
12
13
The work of Albert C. Sundberg has thrown serious doubt on the concept of a separate
Alexandrian canon in the sense criticism needed it: see Sundberg, OT of the Early Church.
14
A discovery shown false by Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?”
15
Finkelstein, “Maxim of the Anshe Keneset ha-Gedolah.”
of a sudden became aware of other Christian communions with their broader

views of canon, all the way to the eighty-one item Ethiopian canon.16 Without
question the concept of canon had returned to haunt us. It would not behave.17
Something clearly had to be done.
But wait! Along with all the discoveries of ancient and modern communities
having different canons came something called the sociology of knowledge. His-
torical criticism had had a very definite view of authority all the time it thought
it was being descriptive and neutral, to use the terms of Childs’s early article.
While it was consciously trying to bypass the question of authority it was
unconsciously subscribing to a view of authority with the vigor of hot pursuit –
the pursuit of points originally scored and the ipsissima verba of whoever in
antiquity had made them. Not a received text but a hypothetical Ur-text became
the bearer of authority. Whatever could be shown to be “secondary” or “spu-
rious” or “added by a later hand” and hence of no value in reconstructing the
original moment of speech or of writing was also viewed, until recently, as of
no value theologically or even homiletically. It was because of this last view that
the seminary preacher dreaded seeing the Bible scholar in chapel. The latter was
quite likely later to say something like: “That was very nice, but you apparently
did not read von Rinkeldinck’s latest monograph on that passage in which he
completely rewrote the text in the light of the latest discoveries at Tell el-Mish-
mash!” The comment would have had the effect of depriving the sermon of its
authoritative base. It is one thing to determine that a text has no direct value in
reconstructing a particular historical moment, and quite another to imply that it
has no value for other purposes, but that is unfortunately what had happened in
large measure.
Another problem historical criticism has spawned is that of fragmentation,
even atomization, of the text. As Childs shows in this book, even as sensitive
and fine a scholar as Walther Zimmerli contributes to the problem. Form and
tradition criticism come in for as much scolding from Childs as the stance and
view of the archaeologists. They both tend to atomize the text even as the ancient
exegetes did whom they both deplore – though in quite different ways and for
different reasons. If Biblical Theology in Crisis tended to castigate the archaeol-
ogists, especially the school of W. F. Albright, and more especially the work of
G. Ernest Wright, who epitomized biblical theology in this country, Introduc-
tion does the same for the form and tradition critics. While Childs recognizes
that Zimmerli, in contrast to most other scholars, takes seriously the so-called
secondary passages in what he calls amplification of the Ezekiel text, he none-
theless reserves some fairly sharp words for the result. He accuses Zimmerli of
having “missed the significance of the canonical process in which the experience
of Israel with the use of its authoritative writings has been incorporated into
the text itself as part of the biblical witness.” He feels Zimmerli “disregards this
16
Cowley, “Canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church”; Kealy, “Canon.”
17
It should be noted that Childs does not address all these problems. I feel he might modify
his position if he did.
fundamental canonical decision by substituting a pre-canonical stage in the texts’

development for the normative canonical text, and by judging a significant part
of the canonical text as merely commentary.” “Zimmerli’s method of working
from a reconstructed Grundtext [foundational text] to which has been appended
commentary runs the danger of losing the inner dynamic of the full canonical
passage. To divide a passage historically into stages often destroys the synchronic
dimension of the text. A literary entity has an integrity of its own which is not to
be identified with the sum of its parts.”18
Childs is largely right. Even with the efforts increasingly made in the past
thirty years to rehabilitate “later hands” in the texts, through redaction criticism
and focus on the Nachleben (continuing life) or Nachgeschichte (later appear-
ance) of certain “messages,” the penchant for attributing a greater authority to
(often hypothetically reconstructed) “original” cores and forms is still in us.
Whether they should be dismissed as Childs tends to seem to say is another mat-
ter and will be addressed below.
And so we stand accused of locking the Bible into the past by our subscrib-
ing subconsciously to a kind of primitivism (the earliest or the original bore the
authority), by subscribing to a kind of fragmentation of the text (to get back to
the original we had unregrettably to tear the text apart); and by reducing the con-
cept of canon to what was manageable in the historian’s shop and would yield
to its tools.
II
Childs’s response has been to focus on the concept of canon in understanding

Scripture. He stresses the observation that the Bible as whole is far more than the
sum of its parts. The phrase most aptly associated with Childs’s work is “canon-
ical context,” and by this he means literary context, not historical. On the con-
trary, that to which he most objects in criticism is its fragmentation of the text
and its basic tenet or dogma that each fragment can be understood properly only
in its original historical setting. He sees in this Enlightenment move an usur-
pation of the question of authority: we have destroyed the text as molded by
the early communities in the canonical process and then manipulated the pieces
according to our own best lights brought in from outside the text. Criticism has
bypassed the canon, going back up the stream of “history,” and pinned the frag-
ments discerned by criticism to this, that, and the other historical moment from
which each supposedly originated. Childs is especially critical of form and tradi-
tion criticism in this regard, his own basic training as a student.
But it must be made as clear as possible that Childs is not against use of the
tools of literary criticism in this manner. Much light, he feels, comes by proper
use of all we know in this regard. What he strongly objects to is leaving the
question of authentic meaning of the text at that point of work on it. Some of
18
Childs, Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 367 – 70.
Childs’s own best work has been in tradition criticism as may be seen in articles19
and in those books in which he lodges his protest, but he is intent on show-
ing that one must now move beyond all that to discern the further meanings of
those fragments or pericopes when they were indeed put together in the manner
received. They say other things in canonical context than what they said orig-
inally as smaller units in conjunction with a particular historic moment. Nay,
more! They say yet other things when read in full canonical context. The canon
is full of many dialectical theological conversations going on at all times within
its covers. The historical context that is really important is that of the present
(whenever) reader. The present reader with his or her particular concerns and
problems should read any passage totally aware of the full shape of the larger
context in which it is found, the book where located, and even the entire canon.20
Awareness of the theological movements framed by canonical context pro-
vides one with the hermeneutics necessary for reading the passage under eye.
Childs allows for some limited pluralism in this regard when he speaks of dialec-
tical movement within the larger text.21 But what he seems to be affirming is that
the Bible, when read in canonical context, provides some basic uncontested theo-
logical statements, even doctrines, in the light of which each passage should be
read. Each passage apparently should be read by the hermeneutics of the whole,
and those hermeneutics are clearly theological statements: God is Creator, Elec-
tor, Sustainer, Judge, Redeemer, and Re-Creator. And no passage should be read,
or applied by the present reader, without that affirmation clearly in mind.
Isaiah, perhaps, provides Childs’s strongest example. Isaiah was finally shaped
in such a way that one must read it as a literary whole to discern its full canonical
message. He makes much of the editors adjoining Second Isaiah without super-
scription or indeed mention of any historical context. While Cyrus is definitely
there, and Childs would never take it out of the text as some historical critics
have done who wanted to date it late, Cyrus does not matter that much. What
matters is what the full book of Isaiah says, when it is altogether whole, about
God’s Word and its function in the believing community. God is both Judge and
Redeemer at all times, not a Judge in preexilic times and a Redeemer in exilic
times. And so God is, for the present person or community that reads Isaiah at
any time. And so Isaiah should be read at any time, no matter which portion, by
lectionary or otherwise.
Childs sees canon as God’s Word. This should be seen as an issue of his long
debate through the 1960s with G. Ernest Wright, whose canon within the canon
was a story or recital about the God who acts in history.22 Childs constantly
devalues the mighty acts of God, for that throws one right back to the historical
19
See Childs’s excellent “Traditio-Historical Study.”
20
See Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis; Childs, Exodus; Childs, Introduction to the OT
as Scripture.
21
Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis, 149 – 219.
22
See Wright, OT and Theology, and my review, Sanders, Review of The OT and Theology;
and Childs’s Biblical Theology in Crisis, and my review, Sanders, Review of Biblical Theology
in Crisis.
contexts of antiquity when God acted. God’s Word is for all time. Typology is
put in its place in this manner. The problems with typology are exacerbated by
stress on God’s acts rather than on his Word which returns not void, the overar-
ching theme finally of the book of Isaiah in its wholeness.
Childs levels the same criticism at a Zimmerli (for instance) as he did at a
Wright: they both located an inner canon within the canon that was authorita-
tive, to which all accretions were commentary. Childs stresses that commentary
in this sense is not to be found in the Bible: all that follows canon may be thought
of as commentary, but nothing that is in it (in the sense of being secondary or
less authoritative). Wright’s canonical recitals as core of canon and Zimmerli’s
Grundtext as literary core both denigrate some portions of the biblical text and
lift up others as authoritative.
Childs does not confuse Wright and Zimmerli in terms of what they did
to arrive at their positions; it is just that Childs feels they are both wrong. By
emphasizing that the recitals can be verified in huge measure by history and
archaeology and hence are “true,” Wright bypassed canon per se and Israel’s own
witness to its faith. His real canon was archaeologically verified “history” that he
imported to the Bible, according to Childs. By emphasizing that a Grundtext can
be isolated and verified by the best tools of literary analysis, especially tradition
criticism, and hence was the original insight of a passage, Zimmerli also bypasses
canon per se and the full experience of the early communities of faith that shaped
the whole passage as received and heard and believed over a period of time –
again by-passing Israel’s own witness to its faith. That Word that speaks out of
the text again and again may have gotten its start with, say, Ezekiel, but Ezekiel
the prophet is not and was not canonical. The Ezekiel book is canonical and had
many contributors, without any one of which the text is not yet canonical.
This brings us to another element of Childs’s view of the canonical process:
the relation of text or tradition and community. That which is canon comes to
us from ancient communities of faith, not just from individuals. One of the solid
observations of what I prefer to call canonical criticism and what Childs prefers
to call canonical perspective or stance was also a basic observation of form crit-
icism: the whole of the Bible, the sum as well as all its parts, comes to us out of
the liturgical and instructional life of early believing communities. Childs often
insists that nothing there can be seen as “fact” plus interpretation. It is all inter-
preted, by definition. By the same token, it is all finally a community product.
The tools of criticism can help us discern perhaps the literary history of a text
from kernel to final form, but it is the final form, according to Childs, that is
canon – and nothing in its history of formation.23 Childs also stresses the func-
tion of Scripture in believing communities, both ancient and modern. The final
shape was determined by how the text functioned in the community along its
path toward canonical text. The understandings of the communities, of the tra-
23
Contrast James Barr’s view of inspiration that would “apply to the formation of tradition
that finally comprised Scripture rather than to the formation of Scripture.” Barr, Bible and the
Modern World, 130 – 31, and see my review, Sanders, “Reopening Old Questions.”
dition as layered in the texts, are an integral part of canonical text. Says Childs,
“The modern hermeneutical impasse which has found itself unable successfully
to bridge the gap between the past and the present has arisen in large measure by
its disregard of the canonical shaping.”24 “A basic characteristic of the canonical
approach in regard to both its literary and textual level is its concern to describe
the literature in terms of its relation to the historic Jewish community rather than
seeing its goal to be the reconstruction of the most original literary form of the
books, or the most pristine form of a textual tradition.”25 The canonical shaping
took place in community determined by how the tradition being shaped func-
tioned in community. The tradition or text that was moving toward canonicity
was always in dialogue with the community. The community shaped the text as
it moved toward canon and the text or tradition shaped the communities as it
found its way along its pilgrimage to canon.
The final element I want to emphasize in Childs’s schema is the form of the
text. I have been doing this all along since it is so integral to his position, but it
needs focusing. In a manner somewhat similar to the structuralists, Childs calls
canon only the text in its full and final canonical form. This includes not only the
contributions of the later editors, the superscriptions, the subscriptions, and all
the redactional seams, but even all that could possibly fall outside such a literary
history of a text. He cites R. Rendtorff to the effect that “the present form of the
Pentateuch can be attributed neither to traditional connections made on the oral
stage nor to the literary strands of the Pentateuch, whether to J or P. A hiatus
remains between the shape given the material by the last literary source and its
final canonical shape.”26 This is what the communities contributed to and this is
what they passed on. The canonical perspective is not just a redactional perspec-
tive. It moves on beyond redaction criticism.
III
There is much in Childs’s position with which I agree. Historical criticism in its
handling of the Bible has bypassed the ancient communities that produced it and
shaped it. It has focused, in good modern Western fashion, on individual authors.
Liberals and conservatives alike have done the same: the one simply attributes
less of a text to the early “author” than the other. They both located authority
almost solely in individuals and original speakers: conservatives claim the indi-
vidual said all the words of a book or passage while liberals peel away accretions.
But they have both bypassed the communities in one way or another. And his-
torical criticism has been primitivist, locking the Bible into the past, even decan-
onizing it thereby, as Sheppard aptly put it. And criticism has in large measure
24
25
Ibid., 96 – 99.
26
Ibid., 132. This observation seems to be congruous with the thesis of Talmon, “Textual
Study of the Bible.”
tended to fragmentize the text, though redaction criticism has corrected the ten-
dency to some extent. Finally, criticism has felt free to rewrite the text in the light
of what it could bring to study of the text in an effort to reconstruct an Ur-text.
Rewriting the Bible with such conviction caused a shift of locus of authority
from what the early believing communities received, shaped, and passed on, to
what scholars were convinced was said or written in the first place. What per-
haps had started as a historian’s exercise to see what the history of formation of
a passage or book or literary corpus had been, became a focus of authority. This
became so much the case that Bible translations done in this century, and espe-
cially those done in the 1930s through 1960s, reflected the new topos of author-
ity. Many rewrote the Bible.27 Matters had clearly gone too far.
It was time to move beyond redaction criticism and criticism’s focus upon
individual geniuses, to the early believing communities that found, in their new
contexts, value enough in what some of those geniuses had said, thought, and
written, to apply what they received to their own situation – adapting it as need
be and going on to recommend it to their children as well as to neighboring com-
munities. It was time to focus upon communities rather than upon “editors,” or
rather to focus on the communities in which these editors participated and in
which they served. Many “editors” have undoubtedly done much editing that
was never passed on. There were undoubtedly many geniuses whose works we
have never seen, or see now only because of modern discoveries, simply because
the ancient communities – without malice aforethought – did not find value in
them and did not commend them to others or to the next generation. We know
of some of these for two reasons: some Eastern Christian communities have
more in their “canons” than the Western; and modern archaeology, accidental,
clandestine, or scientific, has recovered others from long burial.
Because of loss of attention to the early communities that shaped and passed
on what they found of value, and therefore loss of attention to why they did so,
criticism followed a radical and major shift in epistemology that accompanied
the Enlightenment and hence caused a radical and major shift in ontology of
canon. Whereas, up to the Enlightenment, it was the Bible that generation after
generation had shed light on the world and helped the believing communities
and the faithful to understand their problems and find solutions to them, after
the Enlightenment criticism tried to bring light from the world to understand the
Bible and the problems it found in it. This observation is not to deny that there
were problems: there are discrepancies, anomalies, anachronisms, and inconsis-
tencies in the text. There can be no retreat from the excitement of honesty the
Enlightenment brought to biblical study. That is not the point. The point is that
focus on those problems and quest for solutions to them brought about a radical
27
Such as the first edition of Jones, The Jerusalem Bible (the subsequent editions in French,
La Bible de Jérusalem, have become more responsible to the extant texts), NEB, NAB, and
others. Contrast now the recent Traduction oecuménique de la Bible (TOB, 1976) and Die Ein-
heitsübersetzung der heiligen Schrift (1974). Contrast also the New Jerusalem Bible (1985) and
the revision of the NEB [called the Revised English Bible (1989)].
shift in epistemology and ontology of canon that lost sight of why those early
communities had canonized the text in the first place. My own way of putting
it is as follows: There had been a relationship between tradition, written or oral,
and community, a constant, ongoing dialogue, a historical memory passed on
from generation to generation, in which the special relationship between canon
and community resided. There was a memory that this particular body of tradi-
tion had at crucial junctures throughout the centuries of that relationship given
life to the communities – just as the communities had given life to it by passing
it on and keeping it alive. Torah, and then Christ, was viewed as the way, the
truth, and the life. One searched Scripture because in it one found even eternal
life (John 5:39). Why? Because in the very conception and birth of canon was the
historic event of death and resurrection of the community of faith when it other-
wise should have passed from the scene of history like everybody else.28
That had happened in the sixth century BCE when the concept of canon in
this sense arose (though it had a prehistory that gave it momentum), and it hap-
pened time and again thereafter with the message of the Gospels giving the old
idea a fresh boost and even a new dimension. The communities and the canon
(of whatever length) understood each other; they gave each other life. The fact
that their understanding of canon was no longer historically “accurate” from our
perspective is beside the point. The believing communities were no longer his-
torically “accurate” either. Neither was the same as at the beginning. Each had
adapted to ever-changing situations, but they understood each other, and up to
the Enlightenment the relationship had never been broken even though it had
gone through numerous adjustments. Childs puts all this differently, but in these
observations we largely agree.
It was time to focus on the early communities that received and shaped the
traditions and the application of them into canon. Criticism had skipped over
this crucial link, jumping from redaction to conciliar decision. There was a tacit
recognition of community in the quest for decision-making councils, but it was
wrongheaded, for it assumed authority was brought to canon by an ecclesiastic
or community body, rather than arising out of an ongoing intimate relationship
between canon and community that a council could but ratify. Whatever Jose-
phus meant by popularity being a criterion of canonization, it at least means that
no single council of men, undoubtedly sitting in the midst of one set of problems
(those uppermost in their minds) could foist off onto the communities some eso-
teric literature. At most they affirmed what the communities, scattered in space
and drawn out in time, in their corporate wisdom (including the geniuses and
leaders as well as followers and faithful) found valuable and gave life.29 It was
time in study of Scripture to vitalize what Childs calls the canonical process and
what I call the periods of intense canonical process.
On all this Childs and I largely agree. We also both sponsor an emphasis now
on the function of canon rather than on its form or structure. The point is not
28
29
that literary form is unimportant. Neither of us has any desire to denigrate the
excellent, continuing work of form criticism. The future of structuralism will
undoubtedly be in the way form critics like Rolf Knierim have adapted the better
observations of the structuralists. Stress on function in the believing communi-
ties is the proper province of focus on canon. When a tried and true tradition
is called upon by a tradent for the sake of his or her community, we ask how it
functioned for them. What was the purpose of the relecture, what was its effect,
and how was the tradition or Scripture resignified when cited? Study of canon
should not focus too much on its structure since there have been so many differ-
ent canons, both in the past and still in the present, depending on which believing
community is under purview. Beyond a certain core the lists vary considerably
in terms of both content and order. Focus on function has brought a felicitous
review of the import of canon and its prehistory. It is indeed adaptable for life.30
We also agree on the full text of a canon, of whichever community. Here
Childs is quite insistent. The expression “full canonical context” will always be
associated with his position. We both agree that the terms “spurious,” “second-
ary,” and “not genuine” should be dropped from serious biblical study. They
may have started out having a valid function, but they have become symbols
of criticism’s peculiar doctrine of authority: only the original is authentic. See-
ing how the early communities shaped what they received and resignified it for
addressing their later situations and problems is very important to understand-
ing how and why we have a canon in the first place. Redaction criticism is not
enough. If what the several geniuses did right on up to the final editor did not
speak to the people and address their needs, we would either not have their work
or we would be digging it up in holes in the ground in the Near East. Not only
so, but the matter of juxtaposition of the larger units, right on up to the various
sequences of books, may often have evolved, as Rendtdorff rightly sees, out of
a history of corporate liturgical and instructional life of the communities. Of
course, some individuals perceived the communities’ needs better than others,
and what they did in the shaping of canon was more enduring than what others
did, but focus on individuals in that process is no longer sufficient in itself.
IV
But there are crucial differences between us, so crucial that we both feel it import-
ant that students not bracket our work on canon beyond a certain point. One of
the beautiful things that happened in my last year of teaching at Union Theolog-
ical Seminary in New York, before moving to Claremont, was that the seminary
invited Childs down in the spring of 1977 from Yale to have an open conversa-
tion on canon. I think we both enjoyed celebrating the differences between us
as much as the agreements. Not that they are not genuine differences – on some
30
Ibid.
points we differ sharply – but because I think we both see ourselves in a very
long line of tradents and neither of us is under the impression that truth will fal-
ter if we listen to each other. I feel a deep kindred spirit with Bard Childs. Our
roots go deep in the faith. I truly believe that he, too, is a monotheizing pluralist,
and that is, as all my students know, the highest compliment I can pay the man.31
My greatest problem with Childs’s position is his divorcing the development
and growth of canonical literature from its historical provenances. When Childs
says “context,” he means literary context; when I say it, I most often mean his-
torical context. He focuses, almost exclusively, in his work on canon, on the final
form of the text. To do that, he has to choose one text, and he has chosen the MT.
That is already an immense problem for me. It is to read back into canonical his-
tory a post-Christian, very rabbinic form of the text. By “very rabbinic” I mean
a text unrelated to the Christian communities until comparatively late. While
Jerome learned a lot from his Bethlehem rabbi, the Vulgate is a far cry from the
MT! Focus on the MT leaves the NT, whose Scripture was the Septuagint, out
in the cold for the most part. Childs devotes a full chapter to this problem;32 but
he does not solve it, because his problem is a prior one, his insistence on a text
at a singe frozen point, and that is simply not my view of canon. Far from it.
Canon, by its very nature, is adaptable, not just stable. One must keep in mind
all the texts and all the canons and all the communities. While Childs speaks of a
canonical process he apparently means those moments in past history precisely
between the final redactors and the stabilized text of the MT only. By canonical
process I mean both that and all the history of function of canon before that and
ever since. To distinguish the early history to which Childs refers, I speak of
periods of intense canonical process.
This is in large part the reason I have chosen to use the phrase canonical crit-
icism, rather than canon criticism, precisely because the same thing is going on
now in the believing communities as went on back then. Another reason I use
it is to try to account for the phenomenon of canon itself; it is the link between
those early believing communities that produced the canon and the present ones
in which it continues to function. Canonical criticism in my view is both a sub-
discipline, albeit new and developing, of biblical criticism, and the way I think
we can best and most carefully and most judiciously unlock the Bible from the
past, into which criticism has tended to seal it, and unchain it from the scholar’s
desk. That is, we must give it back to the current believing communities, but give
it back responsibly, that is, with the scientific thoroughness of recognition of its
proper Sitz.
Childs does not want to use the term “criticism” at all. He feels that to use
the word relegates what he is doing to the category of another technique, as he
puts it, in humanistic study of the Bible.33 I have no such fear. On the contrary,
I view what is happening as evolving out of critical study of the Bible and as the
31
Despite his skepticism about it: Childs, Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 57.
32
Ibid., 96 – 99, 659 – 71.
33
Childs, “Canonical Shape,” 54; and Childs, Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 56 – 57.
next stage in its development. We are moving on, still fully employing all the
valid tools of criticism to date, to bring also into focus the next stage of forma-
tion of canon, its reception and shaping in the several believing communities
before the periods of intense stabilization.34 Not only so, but I feel that it may
be an important way for the guild of biblical critics to respond to the charge that
we have locked the Bible into the past, precisely by recognizing that as a guild
we did have a particular, even narrow, view of authority and that we can reform
ourselves as historians and scientists. We simply were not being as scientific and
as thorough as we thought we were in our “objective” work. The solution to the
problem of giving the Bible back to the churches is not only for scholars to do
more continuing education and do more writing normal folk can understand,
though these are important, but it must include our confessing the error of our
ways and then going on to construct a history of function of canon that links
past to present. Childs is at his best when he does a history of interpretation right
on through church and synagogue history, and I mean this aspect of his work in
part when I speak of a history of function of canon.35
But that point leads to my strongest objection to Childs’s work. He focuses
on one form of stabilized Scripture, and what he calls its inner theological dialec-
tic and conversation, and dissociates it from history altogether. That is, I do not
see any really clear evidence that what he claims is canonical context functioned
as such in any believing community until perhaps the Reformation. One might
possibly extrapolate from a few pieces of intertestamental literature evidence that
portions of the Bible were read as a continuous story, such as Jubilees, the Gen-
esis Apocryphon, some of Philo’s retelling, and other such paraphrases, and that
canonical context of larger units was so honored. But it is not clear that any of the
writers of such documents derived the hermeneutics by which they read the text
from canonical context. On the contrary, each such retail displays hermeneutics
imported from elsewhere. The speeches in Acts and the recital in Heb 11 would
support Wright’s views considerably more than demonstrate Childs’s thesis, and
there is nothing in Paul to encourage it. Nothing in the pesher or midrashic lit-
erature goes so far. Origen? Hardly. It would not be until the Reformers’ com-
mentaries arrived on the scene that one could argue such a point, it seems to me.
I honestly cannot see that what Childs claims in this regard ever really happened.
One is tempted to see in Childs’s canon a Reformation perspective both in its
MT versus LXX (Vulgate) form and in his insistence on full context.
Childs indicates a canonical shape that few if any subsequent tradents heeded.
On the contrary, careful study of the history of text and canon during the period
of canonical process and immediately thereafter indicates a shift in ontology of
canon and the rise of new kinds of hermeneutics in all the denominations of
Judaism that practically prove that very few tradents, if any, read Scripture in
the way Childs theorizes.36 The shift in ontology can best be signaled by seeing
34
35
See esp. Childs, Exodus.
36
Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method,” 140 – 42.
it as a move away from viewing scriptural traditions primarily as stories, and

hence from viewing Scripture as story, to treating Scripture as oracle. The NT is
a product from the period of the shift, containing both lengthy recitals of holy
history and numerous examples of the newer view of Scripture as oracle.37 Even
when one says that Matthew viewed himself as the Christian Ezra and wrote his
Gospel with that model in mind, or when one says that Luke viewed himself as
the Christian Deuteronomist, or when one says Paul viewed himself as the new
Jeremiah, none of these indicates they read Ezra–Nehemiah, or Deuteronomy
to 4 Kingdoms, or Jeremiah, in Childs’s full canonical context.38 These are mod-
ern theories that have some limited validity, but they do not bear out Childs’s
thesis. Nor does he claim such. In a genuine effort to test Childs’s thesis, and
with the hope he was right, my students and I thought precisely of the above
kinds of hypotheses about the composition of the NT, and proceeded to probe
in that direction. But in no case did it work out in Childs’s favor. Certainly there
was evidence that some NT writers sometimes thought in larger terms than iso-
lated passages. C. H. Dodd had shown that in According to the Scriptures: The
Sub-Structure of New Testament Theology.
But it is not the same. Ezra may have been taken as a model by Matthew in
thinking of himself as a scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven, but it would
have been Ezra, the human figure that emerges from Scripture, not what he may
have written. What Johannes Munck meant by Paul’s self-understanding being
that of the Christian Jeremiah was limited to Paul’s understanding of his vocation
being expressed in Jeremiah’s terms of his own call.
Luke presented the best test. If those of us are right who see Luke as shaping
his Gospel in terms of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic history (1 – 4 King-
doms), here would have been the support we needed for Childs’s thesis. For
Luke is remarkable in this regard. Of all the NT writers, he appears to have
read Scripture in larger literary units than anyone else. But close scrutiny indi-
cates that Luke’s interest was not in an overall thesis presented (only) by the
Deuteronomist but rather in presenting Jesus as fulfilling Deut 18:15. Luke thus
arranged what he received in his special section by Stichwörter derived from
Deut 1 – 26. But it would be very difficult to say that Luke presents evidence of
having read Deuteronomy in canonical context in the manner Childs describes.
Luke was very interested in the ethic of election expressed not only in Deuter-
onomy but as received from Scripture generally, but that can be discerned in
selected short passages as well: it cannot be securely introduced as evidence of
his reading Scripture in full canonical context.
For the sake of argument one might want to grant Childs Luke and a few oth-
ers in the period, but the overwhelming evidence simply points in another direc-
tion. Precisely concurrent with the final shaping of OT Scripture was the shift
37
A point well made by Merrill Miller in an unpublished paper, “Directions in the Study of
Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity.”
38
Cope, Matthew; Evans, “Central Section”; Sanders, “Ethic of Election”; Munck, Paul and
the Salvation of Mankind.
from viewing Scripture as story to viewing it as oracle. The bulk of the evidence
is in the direction of reading Scripture in very short literary units, or fragmentiz-
ing it. God was thought to speak through each passage and each verse, and if one
could cite a passage from each section, Torah, Prophets, and Writings, one scored
big.39 The Habakkuk Pesher from Qumran Cave 1 evinces no interest whatever
in reading Habakkuk in canonical context. Each verse was taken as divine oracle
speaking in this, that, and the other Essene historical context. Habakkuk had to
be disjointed in order to speak to the new historical context, and whatever verse
or phrase did not fit the new context was simply bypassed. All Scripture was
resignified in this manner in order to derive light from it for the new situations.
And herein lies another anomaly in Childs’s thesis. How can one be so con-
cerned with rehabilitating the function of Scripture in the believing communities
when he effectively denies the importance and humanity of those very commu-
nities by ruling out ancient historical contexts in discerning ancient texts – not
only the original ones but the subsequent historical contexts through the periods
of intense canonical process? One cannot deal effectively with the question of
canon by ignoring the very important work being done in the early histories of
resignification or relecture, as the French say, of Scripture. One has to work con-
tinually in historical criticism, insofar as possible in each sequential generation,
to the history of shaping of canon up to full stabilization of text and canon.40
Where is the force of argument in favor of the importance of believing commu-
nities when one argues for dissociating Scripture from historical contexts?
One certainly can and should view Scripture synchronically as well as dia-
chronically. And one can surely theorize about a hypothetical moment when a
fluid canonical redaction gave the text the shape it finally attained – in order to see
it then synchronically. But to dissociate it from history altogether as though that
final canonical redaction had a timeless theology in mind for all generations and
centuries to come is unrealistic. It is an overreaction to the excesses of historical
39
A technique sometimes called hariza. See Goldberg, “Petiha and Hariza.”
40
Elsewhere I respond more fully ˙
˙ (Sanders, “From Sacred Story”) ˙ two of Childs’s con-
to
cerns expressed in such a way as to indicate uncertainty on his part. In Introduction to the OT
as Scripture, 56 – 57, he speaks of our insistence on working as fully as possible on the histories
of the periods of intense canonical process, with all the tools of criticism, as “speculative.” All
historical reconstruction is speculative to some extent, and the Persian period perhaps more than
most. But to use this as an excuse to give up entirely and to absolutize in great degree a partic-
ular form of literature unrelated to the trials and tribulations and other facets of history of the
believing communities that shaped it would be to me both intolerable in terms of our common
claims about function of Scripture in those communities, and very limited in terms of concept
of canon. To call the work of quest for the hermeneutics of the faithful who found value in
these traditions and texts enough to create the very concept of canon “speculative” is evidence
of uncertainty of one’s own position – especially when that position stresses function of canon
among those faithful. The other concern is expressed in Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 589,
where Childs calls the quest for points scored by the resignification of traditions in antiquity “a
romantic understanding of history,” which might perhaps best be left to fall of its own weight.
Must we not look for the Word or point made by these words (in text and tradition) so as not
to confuse the two? Childs’s best support for his whole position is perhaps in the Reformers.
But I know of no Reformer who focused on text without historical context as appears to be the
case in Childs’s position.
criticism. One should work both synchronically and diachronically. As one moves
through the history of formation of text and canon diachronically, one should
work on each stage synchronically. And that requires all the tools of biblical exe-
gesis and historical criticism at one’s command for each period of formation.
The overwhelming evidence points to the moment of final shaping as not
particularly more important than any other. The hard fact is that once text and
canon were stabilized, a new ontology of Scripture arose with new modes and
techniques of hermeneutics to crack it open once more.41 When the text was
still fluid before stabilization and it was still viewed primarily as sacred story, a
peshat exegesis and hermeneutic were sufficient. But once it got frozen into the
state Childs wants apparently to absolutize, other types of hermeneutic arose to
break it open for application to new circumstances, to derive light from it and
to find life in it. Final stabilization was but a stage in the history of formation of
Scripture, and an elusive one at that. The believing communities, the actual ones
in history, apparently did things quite a bit differently from the way Childs sug-
gests. And if one is truly going to honor those believing communities, one has to
engage in full historical criticism at each stage of shaping.
Another anomaly in Childs’s argument occurs in studying his excellent efforts
at rehabilitating so-called later additions, including superscriptions and the like.
Childs seems to argue that these indicate the shaping process. But I cannot find
where Childs deals with the obvious question arising out of such observations.
Does not most such editorial work indicate the intense interest of such redactors
in date lines and historical contexts? They seem to be saying fairly clearly, if the
reader wants to understand the full import for his or her (later) situation of what
Scripture is saying, he or she had best consider the original historical context in
which this passage scored its point. Childs may be right to some extent that the
editors of the Psalter wanted their readers to view David as an example of the
way God can deal with any leader or any person, but the way they did it was to
draw attention to historical situations in which David supposedly composed his
songs. One cannot read the Torah or the Prophets without the clear impression
from the text that one had best know the historical contexts into which Moses
and the prophets said what they had to say. Only wisdom literature gives the
appearance of being unrelated to historical context, but even there some of the
ancient redactors and tradents insisted on a particular author who wrote in a
particular historical framework (whether criticism says they were right or not).
How available to future generations of believers is Scripture when the histo-
ricity of the ones that gave it to us is denied? Childs is right about so much that
he says that it is disturbing to me that he leaves so many such questions unan-
swered. Yes, biblical criticism has fragmentized the text, but that simply means
that we are in a long line of tradents who did the same, in their day and way. Yes,
biblical criticism has too much gone back behind Scripture as canon to the points
scored at early stages in its formation to seek its authority. This is perhaps his
strongest point.
41
See Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.”
In contrast to Childs’s contention, I want to say loud and clear, that I consider
biblical historical and literary criticism a gift of God in due season. It is only
when it is abused or taken as an end in itself, or when it does not keep issues of
authority clear, that it generates problems. It has generated such problems, and I,
with Childs, feel that the proper antidote to those ills is a revival of the concept
of canon as applied to Scripture. But in contrast to Childs, I am convinced that
the revival must be seen as a proper extension, in due season, of biblical criticism.
Criticism, which began in the Enlightenment, is now evolving to its next stage
of development after redaction criticism. It is also my conviction that only by
developing this further subdiscipline within the guild of criticism can the guild
respond adequately to the charges noted at the beginning of this chapter or can
biblical criticism redeem itself and become scientifically thorough.
Elsewhere I spell out the task of canonical criticism with its concepts and
method.42 Suffice it here to say that it has already discerned characteristics that
must be taken into account for full appreciation of Scripture as canon: those
salient characteristics are repetition or relecture, with concomitant resignification
for the later believing community; multivalency of canonical literature – its abil-
ity to say different things in different contexts; pluralism or canon’s own built-in
self-critical and self-corrective apparatus; its adaptability-stability quotient with
concomitant built-in textual restraints on resignification; and finally, and perhaps
most important of all, its unrecorded hermeneutics discernible throughout canon
by means of proper use of historical and literary criticism. The Bible is full of
unrecorded hermeneutics recoverable by use of a triangle of interrelationship of
ancient traditions or texts repeated in particular historical contexts of the believ-
ing community by use of certain hermeneutics.43
hermeneutics
texts / contexts /
traditions situations
Canonical criticism focuses on the function of Scripture in the believing commu-

nities. Its exact structure, or length and order of contents, is not unimportant but
is secondary. It was produced by early believing communities, handed down by
believing communities, and still has its only proper Sitz im Leben in the continu-
ing believing communities. Canon owes its life to its dialogue with those believ-
ing communities; and the believing communities owe their life to their dialogue
with it. The kinds of repetition of text and tradition in ever-changing contexts,
42
Sanders, Canon and Community.
43
Sanders, “Canonical Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy,” 89 ff.
the evidence of its multivalency or pregnant ambiguity, the evidence of its adapt-
ability-stability factor, and the power of the hermeneutics that helped shape and
reshape its traditions are all still operative in the continuing believing communities
today. The canonical process that started way back with the first case of repetition
long before Scripture was fully penned continues today in the believing communi-
ties that find their identity in it, as well as indications for their lifestyles. It provides
a paradigm for how to learn from the communities’ traditions and for how to learn
from the rest of the world as well. Just as the biblical tradents not only reapplied
community traditions to ever-changing contexts but also adapted international
wisdom and made it their own, so modern believing communities continue to do
the same. Canon provides the paradigm or the guidelines for how to carry on.
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by D. E. Nineham, 37 – 53. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955.
Finkelstein, Louis. “The Maxim of the Anshe Keneset ha-Gedolah.” JBL 59 (1940) 455 – 69.
Goldberg, Arnold. “Petiha and Hariza.” JSJ 10 (1979) 213 – 18.
Jones, Alexander, ed. The˙ Jerusalem
˙ Bible. 1st ed. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966.
Kealy, Sean P. “The Canon: An African Contribution.” BTB 9 (1979) 13 – 26.
La Bible de Jérusalem. Paris: Cerf, 1973.
Maier, Gerhard. The End of the Historical-Critical Method. St. Louis: Concordia, 1977.
Munck, Johannes. Paul and the Salvation of Mankind. Richmond: John Knox, 1959.
New Jerusalem Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1985.
Revised English Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
USQR 32 (1976) 157 – 65.]
Fortress, 1984.
Sanders, James A. “Canonical Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy.” In From Sacred
Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 87 – 105. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Orig-
inal “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.” In Canon and Authority, edited by
George W. Coats and Burke O. Long, 21 – 41. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977.]
Sanders, James A. “Reopening Old Questions about Scripture.” Int 28 (1974) 321 – 30.
Sanders, James A. Review of Biblical Theology in Crisis, by Brevard S. Childs. USQR 26
(1971) 299 – 304.
Sanders, James A. Review of The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary, by
Brevard S. Childs. JBL 95 (1976) 286 – 90.
Sanders, James A. Review of The Old Testament and Theology, by George Ernest Wright.
Int 24 (1970) 359 – 68.
(1979) 5 – 29.]
Cascade, 2005.]
Stuhlmacher, Peter. Historical Criticism and Theological Interpretation of Scripture. Phil-
adelphia: Fortress, 1977.
Traduction oecuménique de la Bible. Paris: Cerf, 1976.
Wink, Walter. The Bible in Human Transformation: Toward a New Paradigm for Biblical
Study. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973.
Wright, George Ernest. The Old Testament and Theology. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.
10
The Exile and Canon Formation
The Loss of a Gift
The experience of the loss of the land Yahweh had given Israel would have been
traumatic in the extreme. According to the old traditions that were edited into
the form we call the Torah, Yahweh had made two promises to Abraham and
Sarah, progeny and land. Now one of them, the land, has been painfully snatched
away, first by Assyria and then by Babylonia. The trauma endured, as told in the
horror stories recounted in Jeremiah (32 – 45) and 2 Kings (23 – 25), was enough
to obliterate other peoples in the area, mainly by assimilation to another identity.
But this people kept the memory and meaning of the nightmare alive in the rec-
itations of a remnant in exile who refused to assimilate to the dominant cultures
of their victors.1
The more one learns of the foreign policies of Assyria and Babylonia in their
treatment of conquered peoples, the more one wonders at Israel’s survival, albeit
in a dramatically altered state. Other folk in the region, also conquered by the
Mesopotamian powers, apparently did not have strong enough traditions and
stories to provide a remnant with identity sufficient to survive. Cultural anthro-
pologists have shown the importance of a community’s identity-giving stories
to their survival. Michael Taussig, speaking at the University of Florida in 1988,
quoted Columbian Indians explanation for imperialism’s success in the Ameri-
cas: “The others won because their stories were better than ours.”2 In that light
alone the Bible as a whole is a powerful life-giving story for surviving remnants –
but especially the Torah.
Genesis 1 – 12 in effect says that God, who created all that is, made a pastoral
call on Abraham and Sarah with a plan for migration and settlement accompa-
nied by the two promises. One of the truly remarkable things about what ends
up in the Jewish canon is that it includes stories that put Israel, the recipient
of God’s grace, in a bad light. “It tells it like it is.” The Torah and the prophets
do not spare Israel’s image as a people. The Ketuvim modify the picture con-
siderably, but the first two parts of the tripartite Jewish canon are designed in
large part to explain the defeats. The promises made by God in Genesis become
failed promises by the end of Kings. After the horrors of defeat and destruction,

1
Chronicles softens the recitation considerably in its need to revise Israel’s history for the
sake of survival (2 Chron 36).
2
Cited in an unpublished paper by my colleague Professor Jack Coogan, “Moving Image.”
The Exile and Canon Formation 177
Judah’s last king (Mattaniah / Zedekiah) was forced to witness the death of his
sons, then had his eyes gouged out.
The surviving member of the royal household, Jehoachin, Zedekiah’s young
nephew, was already imprisoned in Babylon, having been deported after only
three months’ reign in 597 BCE. He was in prison there for thirty-seven years,
but when a new king, Evil-merodach, took the throne in Babylon he released
Jehoiachin in about 560 BCE to be the king’s house guest for his remaining years.
Jehoiachin would have been fifty-five years old when released. But note, while
he spent his declining years as a house guest and not a prisoner, he still was none-
theless totally powerless and lived more comfortably only by the good graces of
the new king. There the story that began with God’s promises in Genesis ends
in disgrace barely relieved. As Lou Silberman has sadly but wisely observed,
loss of identity through absence of community, as in prison or exile, gives rise
to despair. Despair then gives rise to torpor, out of which one gives in to a death
wish, or turns to eschatological thinking in an apocalyptic mode, which is actu-
ally a rallying cry for a return to history, albeit seeking a favorable fulfillment or
conclusion to it.3
The most stable part of the Jewish canon is precisely the story that goes from
Genesis through Kings. The reason for its stability, even before the invention of
the codex, was that the nine scrolls containing the Torah (five) and Early Proph-
ets (four) told a story that had a beginning, middle, and end, and being out of
order hardly mattered. Beginning with the books of the Three major prophets,
order remains somewhat fluid in the actual manuscripts until the invention of the
printing press. Even so, the interrelationship of Torah, Early Prophets, and Lat-
ter Prophets is an intimate one. They form a powerful statement in the sequence
offered in the Jewish canon, quite different from any Christian canon of the First
Testament. While the mood changes considerably beginning with the Ketuvim
in the Jewish canon, it is obvious that Torah and Prophets hang together in con-
veying a clear message for surviving Judaism.
Torah and Prophets
A major task of the Bible is explaining defeats. The Torah and the Prophets, as a
discrete section of the Jewish canon, have in part the mission to explain to sur-
viving Jews why they had experienced the devastating defeats at the hand, first
of the Assyrians, and then the Babylonians, but then survived them, albeit in
a mutated form. In like manner, the Christian Second Testament, especially its
“sacred history” section, the Gospels and Acts, had the burden of explaining the
ignominious arrest and crucifixion of Jesus as well as his “survival,” albeit in a
mutated (or resurrected) form.
3
In contrast to withdrawal from history or society into privacy and community. See Silber-
man, “Human Deed.”
Most Jews remained scattered in the diaspora well after the so-called return
to Jerusalem after Cyrus defeated Nabonidos, the final neo-Babylonian king,
about 540 BCE. In fact, Babylonia, where the authoritative Talmud was edited
about the sixth century CE, was home to the majority of the world’s Jews from
the exile until the end of antiquity. Indeed, the diaspora has been spread through-
out the world from the time of the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE until the pres-
ent. While there have been periods of flow of Jews back to Palestine, Judaism
has until the twentieth century largely been a diaspora religion, always with the
prayer and hope of returning to Jerusalem.
The Ketuvim, which probably became stabilized into something like their
current form after the Bar Kochba revolt of 132 – 35 CE, present a Judaism with-
drawn for the most part from the plane of history into a contemplative faith
designed to induce obedience and the desire, on the part of Jews scattered wher-
ever they might have been, to please God. Even the “history” presented in
Chronicles / Ezra–Nehemiah is a history with a mission – to get surviving Jews
to understand that Judaism, despite all the adversity and defeat in its past history,
was meant to be a priestly theocracy centered in Jerusalem, minding its own
business under the hegemony of whatever power they had to live under. The
Ketuvim, as a stabilized section of the Jewish canon, provided an attitude and
mode of behavior for Jews that survived the Bar Kochba revolt to understand
that God meant Judaism, in order to please God, to withdraw from the world
that had so abused it, and study and teach Torah (in sensu lato) to future genera-
tions, and indeed, to any of the outside world willing to learn.4
But the scattered Judaism that survived the exile seven centuries earlier was
not entirely ready yet to settle down into a community in stasis, as it were. One
of the major points we have learned from the literature of the Qumran com-
munity, the Dead Sea Scrolls generally, and then from reviewing all the massive
Jewish literature of the Second Temple Period in the light thereof, is that Judaism
was highly pluralistic in the period from the fall of the First Temple until after
the Bar Kochba revolt.5 The stabilization of the Ketuvim into the form that the
third section of the Jewish canon took thereafter would not have represented the
other forms of Judaism of the earlier period. On the contrary, many forms of
Judaism would have strongly disagreed with the idea underlined in the Ketuvim
that prophecy or revelation had ceased in the time of Ezra / Nehemiah.6
The theological review of the risings and fallings of the Iron Age that the Ketu-
vim provided, with the thrust of withdrawing into a closed, priestly community in
which the principal name among them was Ezra the Scribe (see also First Esdras
in some Christian canons), was easily understood as the principal message the sur-
viving Pharisees/rabbis after the Bar Kochba revolt wanted to send of what Juda-
4
5
Stone, “Judaism at the Time of Christ”; Stone, Scriptures, Sects and Visions.
6
The placement of Daniel in the Ketuvim in the Jewish canon, but among the Prophets in
the Christian, indicates the different hermeneutics by which the different communities read the
same book. See the discussion in Sanders, “Intertextuality and Canon.”
ism was about from their point of view. But the message of the Ketuvim as a cor-
porate document (not necessarily its individual parts) was not one that the other
Judaisms of the Persian/Hellenistic/Roman period wanted to hear, or would have
believed was true. For most Jews, indeed, it would appear that prophecy or rev-
elation had not ceased in the time of Ezra/Nehemiah. It certainly had not ceased
for the Qumran Jewish community, the Christian Jewish community, or the other
Jewish communities that produced most of the literature of the so-called apocry-
pha and pseudepigrapha.7 There is no way they would have accepted the latent
message of what later became the stabilized Ketuvim, even though they probably
all viewed some forms of some of the separate, individual Writings as inspired.8
I earlier advanced the thesis that the explanation for Joshua’s not being in the
Torah, in sensu stricto, is that the Torah was edited in exilic Babylonia by Ezra
and the “men of the Great Synagogue,” with a perspective on it that made sense
to them. A Jew did not have actually to reside in Palestine to be a Jew; it was
acceptable to be a Jew in Babylonia, or in diaspora, looking forward to the full
return. Gerhard von Rad had earlier asked the question why the early recitals
did not include the stop at Sinai for reception of the Torah; I asked, instead, why,
though the entrance is included in the early recitals, the account of it is in the
prophetic corpus, as though the return was not yet fully complete, but still to be
consummated.
The Torah was then brought to Jerusalem in the middle of the fifth century
BCE to be read in the Water Gate (Neh 8), and thereafter promulgated as the
Torah of Moses edited by Ezra.9 The Water Gate account reports that the people
wept upon hearing the Torah read in Hebrew and interpreted for them in Ara-
maic, the language of the Persian Empire (Neh 8:9). The weeping was testimony
to the fact that the people deeply appreciated hearing so clearly who they were
under God, and what God expected of them. They had a communal identity.
The function of regular recitations of Torah, and eventually of the various
canons, was and always has been twofold: to remind the people who they were,
and to remind them what they should stand for, that is, identity and lifestyle,
mythos and ethos, story and stipulation, haggadah and halakah.10 Those are the
two principal elements of Torah.11 Some of the Judaisms of the ensuing period
emphasized the haggadic element, and others the halakic element. Those that
did not believe that prophecy or revelation ceased at the time of Ezra stressed
the importance of the story aspect of Torah, such as the communities that pro-
duced most of what we call the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, preserved even-
tually by the churches but left aside by surviving rabbinic Judaism. The latter has
clearly left its stamp on the Ketuvim, the former on the New Testament. The one
was added by rabbinic Judaism to the Torah and the Prophets, and structured by
7
See Talmon, “Oral Tradition”; Talmon, “Die Gemeinde des erneuerten Bundes.”
8
McDonald, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon.
9
In Sanders, Torah and Canon.
10
See Sanders, “Torah and Christ.”
11
them as the third part of the Jewish canon; the other added to the Torah, Proph-
ets and “other writings,” and structured as a continuation of the story of God’s
power and work in and through Israel.12
Genesis to Kings
If one then reviews the story that is told in Genesis to Kings, the Torah and Early
Prophets, the message becomes clear. God’s promises made to the patriarchs of
land and progeny are fulfilled magnificently by 1 Kings 10. The Queen of Sheba
visits Solomon in Jerusalem, ostensibly to admire his wisdom and wealth. But in
the full sweep of the story the good queen, laden with gifts for Solomon, paid
a visit to Jerusalem as the international witness to God’s having indeed fulfilled
those promises. One could not want in all the Bible a story of fulfillment more
engaging and convincing than one sees in 1 Kings 3 – 10, the beginnings of the
reign of Solomon. It was a city of gold, silver being as common as stones (10:27).
The route to that fulfillment was full of vicissitudes and problems; it was not a
smooth road. On the contrary, it may well be said that the Bible is a textbook in
how in live in the gaps between God’s promises and their apparent lack of fulfill-
ment. Even God’s promise of progeny was not easily fulfilled (Gen 15 – 22). But
the fulfillment came, and it came in gold, silver, and precious gems.
Beginning with 1 Kings 11, however, the same bumpy route continued, but
now toward defeat. God appointed satans or testers to Solomon, but he failed all
the tests (1 Kings 11); from there (late tenth century BCE) it was largely down-
hill to the events of the eighth and seventh centuries when the neo-Assyrian
Empire, followed by the neo-Babylonian Empire, brought about the destruction
of all Israel’s institutions in ignominious defeat and exile. God had withdrawn
all the gifts God had so lavishly heaped on his people, and even the promise of
progeny was in doubt because of the thorough assimilation of northern Israel
into Assyrian culture, and the threat of assimilation and absorption of the con-
quered Judahites into the dominant, victorious cultures of Babylonia and Persia.
But a message comes through the whole of Torah that is epitomized in
Deut 29 – 31. Deuteronomy had displaced Joshua in the Torah story. One can
read from the end of Numbers to the beginning of Joshua and not miss a beat.
Deuteronomy intruded between the two to cast its light backward to Genesis
and forward to the Prophets. It purports to be a farewell address by Moses on
the east banks of the Jordan in which he reviews their journey to that point,
as well as the further laws of Deuteronomy, which begin in ch. 12 and extend
to ch. 26. Deuteronomy 26 is an appropriate climax to the body of the book in
12
See the thesis of Chilton and Neusner in Judaism in the New Testament, xii – xix. As of
this writing, one eagerly awaits their second book authored together, titled Trading Places, in
which they changed places after Constantine, Judaism becoming private and communal and
Christianity public and political. One wonders if surviving rabbinic Judaism had not begun
moving toward being private and communal already after the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt
in mid-second century.
its depiction of the Thanksgiving Service that Israel should engage in when it
arrives in the Land at the place God will chose to have his name dwell. Deuter-
onomy 26:5 – 11 records the ceremony in such a way that Israel’s identity, Israel’s
essential story, becomes her confession of faith. Confession of identity (“My
father was a wandering Aramean who went down into Egypt . . .”) becomes con-
fession of faith. That is followed by a confession of obedience (Deut 26:12 – 15).13
Chapters 27 and 28 then list the curses ensuant on disobedience, but the blessings
that come with obedience, to the laws by those whose identity is found in the
Torah story. The two confessions in Deut 26 form a fitting conclusion to the legal
section of Deuteronomy, as a bridge to the curses and blessings of chs. 27 – 28.
Then Deut 29 – 31 states clearly the purposes of the divine judgment of desti-
tution and exile: (a) it is not God who let us down in these defeats; (b) it is Israel
who has let God down with all sorts of polytheism and idolatry; (c) it will be
God’s greatest joy to restore all God’s gifts of land and progeny if, in destitution,
Israel takes the prophetic / Deuteronomic message to heart; and (d) God sent
prophets early and often to explain how it really is in the divine economy.14 And
those prophets made their points about God’s using foreign powers to execute
judgment against his own people well before it happened. One cannot escape into
theories about vaticinia post eventum to explain how the prophets could speak
in advance of God’s use of Assyria and Babylonia. God is the God of risings and
fallings, victories and defeats, what humans may call good, and what they may
call evil. Destruction and death do not stump God. Herein lies the remarkable
message of the Torah and the Prophets. Death stumps humans; indeed humans
tend to fear death more than God. But God is the God of life and death.
That theological point bears directly on the issue of hope. What is hope? In
a polytheistic mentality, hope lies in a people’s gods being powerful and strong
enough to preserve them and their institutions. But in a monotheizing way of
thinking, hope lies in the one God of all, and in God only. If God has seen fit to
assign adversity to his own people, it is with a purpose. In fact, adversity, accord-
ing to the prophets, might have two purposes, one to effect judgment for Israel’s
sins, but the other to bring correction or modification in Israel’s way of thinking.
The message of the Torah and the Prophets is clearly that God is One, the God
of all creation, who chose Israel for a purpose in regard to all the families of the
earth (Gen 12:3). Israel was God’s special servant, and Israel had a purpose in life
and history.
That humans were created to be servants of the gods was a part of the com-
mon theology of the ancient Near East.15 The Torah and the Prophets press the
13
It is often overlooked that the confession of identity or faith in Deut 26:5 – 11 is followed
by a confession of obedience in 26:12 – 15, not unlike the “Declaration of Innocence” in the
Egyptian Book of the Dead, for the pharaoh to recite as he approached the divine Hall of Judg-
ment. It is quite clear that the Pharisee praying in the temple in Luke 18:11 – 12 was attempting
to obey Deuteronomy’s command to engage in a confession of obedience; the teacher’s lesson
was that the confession had become abused by slipping over into bragging and self-justification.
14
See Sanders, “Deuteronomy.”
15
See Clifford, Creation Accounts, 42 – 53.
issue further and claim that Israel was created by divine promises to be the One
God’s special servant in regard to all the rest of God’s creation.16 When God is
the One and Only God, as the Torah story insists,17 then hope does not nec-
essarily lie in the protection and preservation of Israel’s present institutions. It
must have been a heady thing to realize that the future lay in God’s working in
and through the destruction of the present institutions to re-create the servant
in another form. One cannot assume that God will follow Israel’s agenda, even
her best (most critical and scholarly?) thinking, as to what is best for her. Belief
in One God requires total surrender and obedience. To try to politicize such a
belief, or for one party of the people to have advocated and chosen destruction
and re-grouping, would have totally missed the point.18
Hope for Israel lay beyond all human understanding of hope. The hope the
Torah and Prophets offered, in the light of the foreign policies of ancient Assyria
and Babylonia, was not one by which any party could grasp power for itself.
One had to understand that God was the God of enemies also. God might curse
whom God wanted to curse, and bless whom God wanted to bless, self, friend,
or foe. What distinguished monotheism from belief in a whimsical god, the
prophets also made clear. God’s promises were sure, but the route to their fulfill-
ment might be very rough, even threatening of present institutions. The agenda
was God’s, not Israel’s, and not that of a political faction in Israel.19 God had,
however, imposed constraints on herself out of love of creation, and especially of
humans. God is of a different order of being from humans, but, in human terms,
God is afflicted with love. No power or force outside God imposed the afflic-
tion. Theologically, Israel had to try to understand God’s love for humanity as a
self-imposed limitation. At the same time, God is a God of justice and righteous-
ness. God is both creator and redeemer, righteous and loving. How can this be?
16
See Sweeney, “Book of Isaiah.”
17
Even though it incorporates early, polytheistic and henotheistic stories barely modified.
See the four steps in adapting international wisdom into Israel’s narrative in Sanders, Canon and
Community, 56 – 60.
18
See Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics. Smith was attempting to explain how mono-
theism emerged as the faith of Judaism by positing a “Yahweh-Only Party.” The real question is
not why such a party won out, but why the people responded to the “tough stuff” advocated by
the monotheizing hermeneutic in reviewing the old traditions that survived the canonical pro-
cess of reading and rereading the traditions newly edited. Smith also saw Jeremiah as a member
of the Pro-Babylonian Party in the period before the destruction (Jer 40:1 – 6). To stop at such
political observations without asking why such tough stuff then went on to survive the canon-
ical process in the communities of faith is to fail to go on to address the crucial issues of why
Jeremiah’s message survived in the prisoner-of-war camps, and not Hananiah’s. Why did the
Yahweh – Only Party win out – in Smith’s terms?
19
It may well be that locating the political (in sensu lato) factor in history is as far as critical,
inductive searches should go, but the biblical theological historians of both Testaments would
have responded that God was capable of using the political situation of any given moment to
weave a larger picture of reality, especially the Integrity of Reality. In postmodern terms, the
real factor is that of human humility in doing historical searches; see Sanders, “Scripture as
Canon for Post-Modern Times.”
The Covenant Lawsuit Tradition
The prophets struggled with the paradox. What issued was about as good as
humans with their limited minds can manage. Abraham Heschel explained the
paradox as stemming from “divine pathos.”20 As one reads through the preexilic
prophets it becomes clear that the prophets used the metaphor of a covenant law-
suit to explain God’s judgments.21 God’s covenant with Israel had been violated
by the people, therefore God had to bring judgment upon them, even out of
love for them. Had God not cared for his people, he might have simply let them
continue to alienate themselves from Reality and become nothing. But care he
did, and that involved sending prophets in advance of the suffering to explain the
adversity as having two purposes: judgment and salvation.
In the covenant lawsuit tradition, the prophet was a kind of court officer
who announced God’s appearing in the life of the people, to enumerate their
erring ways, to exhort them to repent, to declaim their enemies’ greedy moves
as God’s punishment of them, and to explain God’s uses of adversity to trans-
form Israel into a more obedient servant. The texts of the prophets exhibit the
divine pathos in the very fact that the prophet urged the people to repent, and
throw themselves on the mercy of the court, all the while the prophet declaimed
God’s judgments as corporate and inescapable. The indictments, or listings of
sins, were both theological and ethical. They accused the people of the normal
human bent toward polytheism (a way humans try to be in control of their own
lives) and idolatry (loving the gift rather than the Giver), as well as oppression
of the weak and powerless in their own society. They contrasted what God had
done for them when their heads were in the dust of the earth in Egypt as slaves,
to what they were doing now that they had some power (God’s gifts) of their
own (Amos 2:6 – 11). What emerges theologically is that while God is One, the
only God of all creation and all creatures, indeed, of risings and fallings, God is
also biased toward the powerless and the dispossessed.
The prophets appealed to two authorities to substantiate what they had to say
to the people. The one was to share their “call” to ministry in answer questions
about how they had the right to speak in the name of God. The other was refer-
ence to Israel’s “call” or story of what God had done for them in the past, their
special “history” as they understood it, in becoming Israel – the people who con-
stantly seemed to wrestle with God. It was that story, as later recited in the Torah
as Pentateuch in the liturgical year, that gave them their identity in ever-changing
circumstances and situations. The function of recitation of variant forms of that
story was to contrast what God had done for Israel, when they themselves were
poor and dispossessed in Egypt and in the wanderings, with what they now did
to their own poor and indigent in their own land. They also served to establish
the authority of the judgments the prophet declaimed against the people in the
name of God.
20
Heschel, The Prophets, 92, 190, et passim.
21
Most of the rest of what the preexilic prophets are recorded to have said to
the people were pleas for repentance, indictments for their sins, explanation of
the horrors to ensue if they did not repent, and then the kind of hope that lay
through and beyond the judgment – because they believed that God was One.22
While critical scholarship has until recently concluded that the prophet Amos
did not hold out any hope beyond destruction, the book of Amos, as shaped in
subsequent communities, insists that God will, in due course, restore the fallen
booth of David (Amos 9:11 – 15). Actually, all the prophetic books originating in
preexilic times offer some kind of future hope due to (the early, or, later?) belief
in God’s intention to transform Israel beyond the adversity.
What is more important is that all of the prophetic books (with the possible
exception of Amos) also suggest that the adversity had transforming powers for
the people if they accepted the judgment as from God, and not as an accident of
history.
Expressions of transformation include the understanding that the suffering
was a correction or discipline of the people so that they could once more be
God’s people.23 Other expressions were that the suffering should be viewed as
purgational. This metaphor is frequently found in the book of Isaiah; the purga-
tion might be by water or flood (Isa 8:5 – 8; 28:2, 14 – 22), or by fire to smelt the
dross from the alloy the covenant relation had become (Isa 1:24 – 27). The most
poignant expression of the positive effect of judgment is that of surgery. God, the
great physician, would conduct open heart surgery on the people corporately to
suture God’s Torah, God’s will and ways of thinking (cf. Isa 55:8 – 9), onto the
heart of the people (Jer 31:31 – 34, cf. 30:12 – 17). Or, God would replace Israel’s
heart of stone with a heart of flesh, thus giving Israel a new heart (Ezek 37:26); or
God would give the people a new spirit and see to it that they obey (Ezek 37:27).
In an era when there was no anesthesia this would have been a powerful explana-
tion of suffering. One of the most common expressions of the metaphor of sur-
gery to understand the effects of destitution is that of circumcision of the heart.
Jeremiah and Deuteronomy both exhorted the people to circumcise their hearts
to the Lord (Jer 4:4; Deut 10:16), which was in the form of pleas for repentance,
something the prophets apparently thought the people could do for themselves.
Deuteronomy finally, however, says that the circumcision of the heart of Israel
corporately would be effected by God herself as part of the effects of adversity,
destitution, and restoration (Deut 30:56). This was part of what Abraham Hes-
chel meant by divine pathos: the prophets’ continuing to plead with the people to
repent when it had become clear that God was going to have to go through with
the transforming effects of exile and destitution.
22
Ibid. The appeals to authority constitute categories 1 and 2. Category 3, the pleas for
repentance, offered the people the opportunity to throw themselves on the mercy of the court.
Categories 4 and 5 indicated the indictments and sentences, and category 7 the kind of resto-
ration God had in mind beyond judgment. Category 6 is the all-important statement in the
prophets that God will effect in judgment and adversity what the people failed to do in response
to category 3.
23
See Sanders, Suffering as Divine Discipline.
These expressions and metaphors for the transforming powers of adversity

in the hands of God are quite radical. They imply that God needed to engage in
continuing acts of creation / re-creation (Torah on the heart, new heart, new spirit,
circumcision of the heart) in order to effect the needed redemption if God’s pur-
poses for Israel were to be realized. This would eventually develop into various
kinds of eschatology and apocalyptic speculations of what God would yet do
to rescue the faithful even when things seemed bleakest. In the prophets, the
concept of a remnant meant those in Israel in whom the re-creative acts took
effect. It did not imply escape from the effective powers of God’s judgments, but
rather, acceptance of the adversity as purposive: both punishment for their sins
and transformation of their ways of thinking. The metaphors involving the heart
meant Israel would undergo a radical change in the way they thought about God
and the world.24
The heart in Semitic languages, as well as in Greek, meant the seat of think-
ing, not of emotion primarily. If God was going to suture his Torah and ways of
thinking onto Israel’s heart, it meant they would thenceforth intimately know
the will of God, or as Jeremiah says, they would all “know God” (31:34) without
their having to teach each other. God’s acts of redemption were also, therefore,
acts of continuing creation.25 In fact, these expressions of the redemptive power
of judgment would later develop into the apocalyptic idea of God’s effecting a
whole new creation as the ultimate act of judgment / salvation.
A powerful example from the prophets of the claim that God can reach in and
through destitution, even death, to create new life with new institutions, is in
Isa 28. There is almost universal agreement that chs. 28 – 33 address the Assyrian
threat to Judah’s existence.26 Chapter 28 specifically should be seen against the
backdrop of the siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib in 701 BCE. The first part of
the chapter presents judgment speeches by Yahweh against northern Israel, and
the second part, at least vv. 14 – 22, against Judah and Jerusalem. Isaiah was con-
vinced that Assyria would take Jerusalem as it had taken the northern kingdom,
and all of Judah right up to Jerusalem. Such speeches include indictments and
sentences, and hopefully a suggestion of what effect the adversity would have
toward transformation. The judgment speech against the leadership in Jerusa-
lem is devastatingly harsh. The overwhelming scourge, the purgation by flood
(one of Isaiah’s favored metaphors for judgment) would sweep away the lies and
deceit the leadership had buried itself in. They were convinced that the covenant
with Yahweh, and, of course, the alliance with Egypt alongside it, would save
Jerusalem and themselves. Isaiah tried to convey to them as clearly as possi-
24
Pilate said to Christ in Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation that Christ did not want peo-
ple merely to change the way they lived or acted, Christ wanted people to change the way they
thought; and Rome, Pilate said, does not want that.
25
The radicality of the hope expressed in such transformation is perceived when it is real-
ized that human freedom of will seems infringed upon in the new creation God would effect
in adversity. That, too, is a part of the divine pathos involved in understanding God’s love for
his people.
26
See now my colleague, Sweeney, Isaiah 1 – 39, 353 – 73.
ble that that would not be the case. On the contrary, the present institutions of
state, cult, and culture would be swept away in a cleansing act of Assyrian wrath,
under the aegis of Yahweh himself.27
Isaiah then, however, revealed Yahweh’s plan. Understanding that plan would
require some effort on the part of his hearers. One can imagine the threat of
Assyrian siege stones being catapulted into the city from the war machines the
Assyrians would surely establish for the purpose from their camp just north of
the city. Isaiah then claimed that Yahweh would eventually take one of those
Assyrian siege stones and convert it into a “precious cornerstone of a sure foun-
dation” (28:16). Hope was thus injected into the otherwise completely desolate
picture. Only an act of God could do it, but Isaiah had no doubt God could
convert an enemy’s siege stone into a precious cornerstone of a new construc-
tion, in which justice would be the line and righteousness the plummet (28:17).
This is exactly what Isaiah’s programmatic statement of God’s purposes in the
whole matter of the Assyrian onslaught had proclaimed (Isa 1:21 – 27). The effort
necessary, on the part of the hearers of the time, and on the part of readers and
hearers of the passage ever since, was actually to believe that God could convert
an enemy’s siege stone into a precious cornerstone of new life for Israel / Judah.
Egypt’s storming up to rescue Jerusalem and its besieged, isolated people
(Isa 1:7 – 9) would have been easier on the belief mechanism, as in any age: Isa-
iah, however, had made it clear that Assyria was acting under the aegis of God.
Assyria was the instrument of God’s judgments against his own people, said
Isaiah, but Assyria would herself be severely checked if the axe with which Yah-
weh was hewing vaunted itself into thinking it was acting under its own power
alone (Isa 10). But that did not deter the leaders and people in Jerusalem, facing
the threat of destruction raining in upon them, from believing more in Egypt’s
chariotry than in God’s purposes. They were human. The effort required on their
part challenged normal, human thinking. Isaiah was asking if they believed that
God could subvert the intention of the enemy and turn the desperate situation
into a door of hope (cf. Hos 2:14 – 15, as well as Joseph’s statement to his brothers
in Gen 50:20).
Isaiah then said, lest some hear him wrongly, that this did not mean that God
would stop the siege. Isaiah may have come to think that way later after the
siege was indeed lifted before its goal was reached, though I doubt it. But for
now, he had to convince the people that the Assyrian siege had first to effect its
task of purgation. The lies and falsehood that ran deep would first have to be
swept entirely away by the instrument of Assyrian expansionism. Then, at that
point, God’s new construction upon the converted cornerstone could take place
(28:17 – 22). Therefore, Isaiah says, the precious cornerstone will have upon it an
inscription. Archaeology has shown that cornerstones in antiquity had inscrip-
tions, as they do today. But this inscription would not give glory to some king
or official, or provide a date of the laying of the cornerstone. On the contrary, it
would have the words, “Those who believe will not panic” (28:16).
27
Not just “swept clean” (cf. Isa 28:17).
Here is where a second major hermeneutic effort came in. How should the
inscription be understood? As with any other text, that depends on the herme-
neutics brought to it, and by which it is understood. Clearly the temptation
would be to believe that God was going to take care of and spare them and the
city (and hurry the Egyptians along?). The sparing did, in fact, happen, according
to the later Deuteronomic historians (2 Kgs 19:32 – 37; Isa 37:33 – 38), suggesting,
pace Isaiah, that the siege had not even been mounted. The text indicates Isaiah
was so disappointed that the complete purgation did not finally take place, that
he wept when the people rejoiced at the lifting of the siege (Isa 22:1 – 4), because
now they were even further deceived (Isa 30:8 – 17).
But there was another hermeneutic by which to read the inscription, the her-
meneutic the Isaiah text engenders throughout. “Those who believe will not
panic” could also mean that one ultimately fears God only and not the loss of
God’s gifts. It meant that one believed that God is the God of risings and fallings,
of victories and defeats, and that God can reach through death and destruction to
create new life. They who believe do not panic at the loss of the institutions on
which they have relied in the present structures, because they believe that God
can rebuild after the purging through the instruments of justice and righteous-
ness. Salvation, according to Torah and Prophets, is not in God’s gifts; it is in
God alone. One of the most common understandings of sin in the Bible is that of
loving God’s gifts rather than God the giver of those gifts – and all future ones in
restoration. But the transformation must come before the restoration, or nothing
is gained. The preexilic prophetic message, as related in the canonical shape of the
Torah and the Prophets, understood adversity in the hands of God as a newly
creative, as well as redemptive, experience.28
A similar hermeneutic effort is required to understand Isaiah’s reference in
28:21 to 2 Sam 5, God’s rising up to assist David to defeat the Canaanites on Mt.
Perazim and in the valley of Gibeon. The leaders and the people would have been
tempted to understand this historical reference as assurance of a rescue operation
of Jerusalem for them, such as Yahweh had effected for David. But Isaiah says,
“No.” Right enough, God is a holy warrior and will be involved, but this time
he will be at the head of the enemy troops entering the city—“to do his deed,
strange his deed, and to work his work, alien his work” (28:21). Redemption
through judgment was at work, in and through which the transformation and
restoration were firmly assured. The New Israel that emerged from the “resur-
rection” experience (Jer 31 – 33; Ezek 36 – 37) was the Judaism indicated in the
Ketuvim, which in their turn were shaped and confirmed by the subsequent
experiences under Rome.
28
The Exile and the Tough Stuff
The shock of defeat and submission to Babylonia in 597 BCE still would not
have fully prepared the leaders and people remaining in Jerusalem for their expe-
rience of complete destitution in 586. The hostages taken in 597 did not think
of their Babylonian prison camp as a permanent residence, or even as having
ultimate meaning for them. This is clearly indicated in the experiences recorded
in both Jeremiah (chs. 24 – 29) and Ezekiel (chs. 33 – 34, 36 – 37). They could not
believe what was happening to them. But when the POWs began to arrive in
Babylonia after the cataclysm of utter devastation in 586, realization that they
had lost everything, as well as corporate depression over the disaster, began to
set in.
Psalm 137, the only clearly datable psalm in the Psalter, poignantly reflects
the despair. “By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remem-
bered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps . . . How could we sing
the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” To sing one of the old songs, that probably
lauded God’s guarantee of the inviolability of Zion, would have been as depress-
ing as recalling one of Hananiah’s sermons doing the same (Jer 28).
Jeremiah was taken down to Egypt by Johanan, son of Kareah, and his party,
much against Jeremiah’s will. When he got there, he found other refugees from
Judah and Jerusalem, some of whom were worshipping the Queen of Heaven
because they felt Yahweh had indeed abandoned them. Polytheism was the mode
by which they thought about reality. If one god can’t do the job, find one that
can. And “the job” was clearly whatever gave the people the greatest sense of
security against the forces of chaos from whatever quarter. They had not heard
the “true prophets” like Jeremiah; they had heard and been convinced that Hana-
niah and his viewpoint were right. The only alternative they felt they had was
also to abandon Yahweh. The “false prophets” had preached “blessed assurance,
Yahweh is ours, what a foretaste of glory divine.” But all that turned out entirely
wrong. The tough message Jeremiah and the other “true prophets” preached still
would have made little sense to most of them at that point. They had not learned
to monotheize.29
It makes it all the more remarkable that what survived through a process of
review, repetition, and recitation in Jewish communities was the monotheizing
tough stuff. The canonical process might well be thought of as the survival of
the toughest thinking about God and reality, those traditions and reflections
on them that stressed the Oneness of God. The prophetic literature that made
it onto a tenure track toward canon was that which began in exile gradually to
make sense to them by re-reading in the new context. Yahweh was really a uni-
versal God who alone made sense of what was happening to them. God was
One. God was a God of universal justice, righteousness, and grace, who made
29
See Sanders, “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy”; Sanders, “Canonical Herme-
neutics”; Sanders, “Biblical Criticism and the Bible as Canon”; Sanders, “Canonical Hermeneu-
tics: True and False Prophecy.”
sense of the power flows in the Near East that had been taking place since the
mid-eighth century BCE, and used those terrible events to reshape and trans-
form his people into God’s servant and teacher of Torah to the world. So-called
defeat and failure had not stumped God; they were part of a plan that made sense
of the birth of Judaism in exile, and its survival as the true heir of the traditions
of old Israel and Judah.
Polytheism, by contrast, would have sealed the fate of Yahweh, so to speak; he
simply had not measured up. Yahweh had not acted in his own interest in letting
his people be defeated; he had not acted for his own name’s sake, or reputation
among the gods.
Ezekiel’s response to that was to say that God was indeed acting for his
name’s sake in stepping in where the human leaders of the people had failed; and
acting as his own shepherd of his own people, he would save the lost and gather
the scattered (Ezek 34). This was a totally different twist on the idea of a god’s
being obliged to benefit his people for his name’s sake among the gods. God had
judged his people: now he would gather them to himself. And it was this kind
of reflection on the old traditions that gave shape to God’s New Israel, Judaism
born in exile, and gave rise to the concept of a canon that could explain the ups
and downs, blessings and disasters.30
Corporate and Individual Worth and Responsibility
Another thread of rather new thinking needs to be brought in at this point. The
Bible, both Testaments, is basically Semitic in hermeneutic and mentality. Cov-
enants, though made through “individuals” (Noah, Abraham, Moses, David),
were and are corporate in understanding. In fact, the Semitic base of all biblical
thinking is corporate. God’s relationship (Emanuel) with Israel was corporate.
“Is it not in your going with us that we are distinct, I and your people, from all
other peoples on the face of the earth (Exod 33:12 – 16)?” Generations are made
up of leaders and followers, but covenant is with the people diachronically, as it
were. The preexilic prophets’ indictments of the leaders of peoples of their time
were declaimed in corporate terms. Semitic ways of thinking did not yet allow for
dividing the people into sheep and goats, good and bad, not yet. In this manner,
the Deuteronomic historians were able to account for the complete destruction
that came about at the hands of the Assyrians in the North and at the hands of
the Babylonians in the South. Manasseh was singled out as scapegoat, but mainly
as a symbol of the people’s having misunderstood the true nature of covenant.
A later theologian from Tarsus would say that none was righteous, no not one
(Rom 3:10, echoing Eccl 7:20 and Ps 14). Biblical prophets and historians had had
to explain the defeats as coming under the aegis of the One God of all. Much of
the literature that ended up in biblical canons was engaged in explaining adversity
30
See Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; Sanders, “From Sacred Story.”
and defeat (the tough stuff – even the crucifixion of a teacher from the Galilee
had to be explained). The whole people had come under the judgments of God.
But beginning in the late preexilic period, concepts of the worth and respon-
sibility of individuals began to play a role in the thinking of the people. Jere-
miah (31:29) and Ezekiel (ch. 18) insisted that the people should no longer cite
the proverb to the effect that later generations paid for the sins of ancestors (cf.
Exod 34:6 – 7). The dialogue between Moses and Yahweh about the fate of Sodom
in Gen 18:16 – 33 apparently reflects the debates of the late preexilic period. The
book of Job stands as a monument to rejection of laying corporate views of guilt
on an individual. Ecclesiastes as a piece of literature describes a monumental
struggle between individual and corporate views of worth and responsibility. In
fact, as noted earlier, the Ketuvim generally reflect the new thinking of individ-
ual worth and responsibility within the corporate. And much of it came about
because of Greek influence in the sixth to fourth century BCE, well before the
hellenization process after Alexander. It was important that nascent Judaism,
scattered over the whole eastern Mediterranean world, understand that it would
not have again to endure the kinds of corporate judgment that the prophets and
the Deuteronomists had declaimed on the people as a whole.
After Alexander, Judaism had to face up to how to relate its corporate tradi-
tions to Jews becoming more and more focused on the worth and responsibility
of individuals. Precious community literature that had gone through traditioning
processes, diachronically reflecting the importance of that literature to commu-
nities along the way, became attributed to great names in Israel’s past: all the
Psalter to David, all the Proverbs to Solomon, etc. The Greeks knew that Homer
wrote the Odyssey and that their great literature came with authors’ names. So
newer literature that was written in the old style nonetheless became attributed
to individuals, like the Song of Songs to Solomon, the Gospels to individuals,
most epistles to Paul, etc.31
The point was that while Semitic cultures easily tolerated anonymous, com-
munity literature, Greeks wanted to know who the individual author was.32 This
move toward including individual worth and responsibility within the corporate
affected all forms of Judaism, some more than others. The New Testament is
basically Semitic but heavily influenced by European / Greek concepts. One of
these would have been the derived Christian idea of God’s incarnation in one
Jew, rather than the Semitic notion of God’s incarnation in the People, Israel
(Abraham Heschel, following Maimonides), or God’s incarnation in Torah or
Scripture (Michael Fishbane, following Rosenzweig and Buber). To claim God’s
incarnation in one person would have been still sufficiently alien to repel many,
if not most, Jews who survived the Roman destructions of Jerusalem with con-
tinuing identity as Jews.
31
See Sanders, “Intertextuality and Canon.”
32
See Gorak, Making of the Modern Canon, especially the discussion of how the concept
of canon arose in ancient Greek culture in the first chapter, “The Early History of the Canon”
(9 – 41); and see Sanders, “Scripture as Canon for Post-Modern Times.”
When then the Renaissance arose in Europe, it affected biblical study and
the question of authority. Until that time the Bible was clearly a community
book, the church’s and synagogue’s book. But with the Renaissance came inter-
est in authorial intentionality and the belief (and it was a belief) that the truth
of the Bible would be found in a history of its formation with focus on autho-
rial intentionality within ancient contexts.33 The Sitz im Leben of study of the
Bible moved from the believing community to the university. In the minds of
an increasing number of students of the Bible, the ties to faith communities had
been severed so far as discerning the truth of the Bible. Herein lies the strain
between so-called conservatives and so-called liberals in biblical study today, the
latter by-passing the importance of the communities out of which biblical litera-
ture, anonymous and pseudepigraphic for the most part, had arisen, and creating
images of authors and giving them sigla and signs, if not fictive names.
It is little short of remarkable that early Judaism was able to mutate into forms
that would endure every imaginable onslaught and threat to its existence for cen-
turies to come. It then finally mutated into two forms that have endured since
the Roman destruction of early Judaism: rabbinic Judaism and Christian Juda-
ism (three, with the surviving tiny Samaritan community in Israel), the Christian
finally becoming so Greek in make-up and mentality as to go its way unrelated
to the rabbinic.
It had been in the exile and the early post-exilic period that the Torah and
Prophets took shape. One can imagine that all the old traditions were reviewed
to be understood now in a totally different context, that of the transformation
the prophets had envisioned. Restoration of the Davidic monarchy failed with
the Persian acceptance of a Judaism that focused on the temple and the priest-
hood.
After the Job poet had struggled with the new issues of theodicy and the
undeserved suffering of a righteous individual (note that the book of Job pres-
ents the readers with one who was righteous, contrary to the Deuteronomists),
the so-called Second Isaiah addressed the issue of excessive suffering, suffering
beyond what any amount of sin might have indicated, and offered the idea of
vicarious suffering, and the wounded healer (Isa 53). The authors of the creation
account in Gen 1 addressed the question of how to understand the Jewish desire
to have a proper theogonic liturgy like the Enuma Elish, by recounting a story
of creation done by God in six days. And in that liturgy (Gen 1) all items created
in the six days were actually symbols of ancient Mesopotamian (and Egyptian)
deities – the message being that they were not deities at all but precisely only
items in creation.34
The Deuteronomists looked back and explained what had gone wrong.
Things had gone badly wrong, but the end of the Deuteronomic history focuses
on God’s being the God of risings and fallings, fallings and risings. The Priestly
33
The contribution of Baruch Spinoza. See Sanders, “Scripture as Canon for Post-Modern
Times.”
34
See Sanders, “God Is God”; Sanders, “Mysterium Salutis.”
theologians reworked the traditions that would make up the Torah and looked
backward and forward toward a viable Judaism, whether in exile or in the Land.
And the Chronicler looked back over the old traditions with an eye on the kind
of future that would permit Jews anywhere, corporately and individually, to
believe that they could be obedient, and could please God, by being commit-
ted to the newly rebuilt temple wherever they might live, living lives of obe-
dience “not walking in the way of the wicked . . . but in the Torah of Yahweh”
(Ps 1:1 – 2).35
Tripartite and Quadripartite Canons
When all else was lost, when all God’s tangible gifts had been retracted, in effect
because of violation of the first three Commandments, Judaism had one gift from
the past to which they could cling, and that was Torah. And whether one agreed
eventually with the belief that prophecy or revelation had ceased in the time of
Ezra, Torah displaced the preexilic oracular priests and prophets in Judaism as
that which they would drash to seek guidance and help in ever-changing cir-
cumstances. In nascent Judaism, one no longer consulted priest or prophet for
“a torah” or instruction. Jews now consulted or drashed God’s Torah, edited
in Babylonia and brought by Ezra to Jerusalem in mid-fifth century BCE. The
exercise became known as “midrash,” the function of searching Scripture for
guidance, indeed for life itself (John 5:39).36 Torah became known as the Book of
Life (sefer hayyim), because it had life and gave it as well. That is, it was Torah,
˙
shaped in exile, that was the core of Judaism’s being a mutated form of old Israel
and Judah, and the very center of Judaism’s continuing identity and existence
as heir of the old preexilic traditions, now reviewed and resignified for the new
situation. Most, if not all, other peoples conquered by Assyria and Babylonia
were assimilated to the new dominant cultures and lost their continuity with
their past. Not so Judaism. Judaism was able to bring its past with it (reread and
resignified, of course), hence its identity.
Torah, those wonderful old traditions that had their own continuity because
of re-reading and repetition, now would get on a track of regular recitation,
annual or otherwise, so that the people would know who they were no matter
where they lived, and would know what they stood for (haggadah and halakah).
Torah became the core of Judaism’s canon, of no matter what form. Canon, by
definition, is adaptable for life; and Torah functioned in that way for Judaism.37
35
Note that even Manasseh, the prime symbol of the reasons for the defeat and exile, in
Chronicles repents, his repentance is accepted by God, and he is restored (2 Chron 33:10 – 17).
Then, a later poet, noting that Chronicles omitted Manasseh’s prayer of repentance, supplied
the words of Manasseh’s change of heart; see Sanders, “Prayer of Manasseh.” If Manasseh could
repent and be restored, any Jew could; there was hope indeed.
36
See Evans and Sanders, Luke and Scripture, 1 – 13; also, Callaway, Sing, O Barren One.
37
See Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.”
The so-called Former Prophets (Joshua to Kings) provided the historical

sequels to the story line of the Pentateuch, and with it became the most sta-
ble part of Jewish Scripture. Genesis to Kings follows a story line, and whether
scrolls or codices were used for copying out that portion of the Jewish canon, it
has always been the most stable part of it. The latter Prophets, the Books of the
Three and the Book of the Twelve, served as fifteen case histories to support the
four-point message conveyed by the story. God had indeed sent prophets early
and often to explain the divine economy, and the will of God, well in advance
of the judgments they declaimed against leaders and people for polytheism and
idolatry of all sorts; and that included the promise of restoration if in destitution
the people took the message of God’s judgments to heart. Because of the crucial
role played by the prophetic corpus in support of the message, one can well
imagine the addition of that corpus (whether exactly in the form we receive it, or
not) soon after Torah took on the role of canon for early Judaism.38
Clearly many Jews found other writings inspired and worth recitation, but
the phrase from the prologue to Sirach, “and other writings,” remains amor-
phous through the early Jewish period.39 Septuagint codices show the uncer-
tainties of order, and to some extent content, beginning with the Early Prophets.
Since the Qumran manuscripts are in scroll form there is little certainty there
except to observe that the canon simply was not yet fixed by the first century of
the common era. The Ketuvim reflect clearly the Pharisaic / rabbinic understand-
ing of Judaism and that of other Judaisms from the period, and offer a review of
the situation since the exile from the point of view of surviving rabbinic Judaism
in the middle to late second century of the common era. For them, prophecy or
revelation had indeed ceased at the time of Ezra. All the massive Jewish literature
stemming from others of the diverse forms of Judaism that are found in Septu-
agint codices, at Qumran, and elsewhere, that engaged so heavily in speculation
about what God would do in history to bring it to fulfillment or closure, was
simply to be set aside. What one added to the Torah and the Prophets showed
clearly what Judaism meant to those who did the adding.40
The quadripartite canons of various Christian communities show what could
be added, and even arranged in sequence of books of the Christian First Tes-
tament, to make a quite different statement as to what God was about in the
human experiment. The quadripartite Christian canons were so arranged as
to make adding the Gospels and Acts to the Jewish canon in its Greek guise
a (theo)logical statement about God’s continuing activity in Christ and in the
38
Whether one can accept the dates assigned by David Noel Freedman to the addition of
the Prophets to the Torah as canon, the thrust he perceived seems right. See Freedman, “Canon
of the OT.”
39
Pace F. F. Bruce, Earle Ellis, Roger Beckwith, and Sid Leiman, whose arguments are well
reprised in McDonald’s excellent book, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon, 32 – 50.
40
Adding a chapter to any writing throws light back on the earlier writing, and can even
change its message and thrust; note what Deuteronomy did to the Tetrateuch, the Writings to
the Torah and Prophets, and the Gospels and Epistles to the “Old Testament.”
early churches.41 The placement and the additions made even the Torah and the
Prophets make quite different statements from those of the Jewish canon, as to
what God was doing. The Prophets, as the fourth part of the Christian canon,
were now put into the role of being those who primarily predicted or foreshad-
owed Christ, rather than primarily explaining what judgment and salvation are
all about in the divine economy. What is at stake in the additions, whether the
Ketuvim by rabbinic Judaism or the Gospels by Christianity, is nothing short of
views of God and Reality that form the core of each religion. Rabbinic Judaism
and Christianity share the same basic text of the First Testament, but in forms
that make different theological statements, even before the adding of the Chris-
tian Second Testament. In this way one can see the vast importance not only
of the destruction of the First Temple, but also of the Second by Rome. Each
catastrophe caused reviews of the old literature that shaped the past in ways that
made vital sense to those who did the arrangement of the books, and also did the
adding of others. But it was the exile that had formed the crucible from which
Judaism arose as God’s New Israel, no matter what expression one form of Juda-
ism, or another, eventually gave to it thereafter.
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See Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism,” esp. 16 – 20.

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Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism.” Textus 18 (1995) 1 – 26.
Sanders, James A. “Intertextuality and Canon.” Forthcoming. [In On the Way to Nineveh:
Studies in Honor of George M. Landes, edited by Stephen L. Cook and Sara C. Winter,
316 – 33. Atlanta: Scholars, 1999.]
Sanders, James A. “Mysterium Salutis.” Year-Book 1972 / 73, 103 – 21. Jerusalem: Ecumen-
ical Institute, 1974.
Wayne A. Meeks et al., 1746 – 48. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993. [rev. ed. Edited
by Harold W. Attridge et al, 1568 – 70. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.]
Sanders, James A. “Scripture as Canon for Post-Modern Times.” BTB 25, no. 2 (1995)
56 – 63.
Judaism. Rochester, NY: Colgate Rochester Divinity School Bulletin, Special Issue (28),
1955.
Cascade, 2005.]
Silberman, Lou H. “The Human Deed in a Time of Despair: The Ethics of Apocalyptic.”
In Essays on Old Testament Ethics: J. Philip Hyatt in Memoriam, edited by James L.
Crenshaw and John T. Willis, 191 – 202. New York: Ktav, 1974.
Stone, Michael E. “Judaism at the Time of Christ.” Scientific American 288 (January 1973)
80 – 87.
Stone, Michael E. Scriptures, Sects and Visions. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980.
Sweeney, Marvin A. “The Book of Isaiah in Recent Research.” CurBS 1 (1993) 141 – 62.
Sweeney, Marvin A. Isaiah 1 – 39. FOTL 16. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.
Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Die Gemeinde des erneuerten Bundes von Qumran zwischen rab-
binischen Judentum und Christentum.” In Zion: Ort der Begegnung: Festschrift für
Laurentius Klein zur Vollendung des 65. Lebensjahres, edited by Ferdinand Hahn et al.,
295 – 312. Bodenheim: Athenaeum, 1993.
Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Oral Tradition and Written Transmission, or the Heard and the
Seen Word in Judaism of the Second Temple Period.” In Jesus and the Oral Gospel
Tradition, edited by Henry Wansbrough, 121 – 58. JSNTSup 64. Sheffield: JSOT, 1991.
11
The Stabilization of the Tanak
The Meaning of “Canon” and the Notion of Authorship
The word “canon” can be used in either of two ways. Most commonly it is used
to mean a closed list of writings in a certain order (Latin norma normata, “norm
normed”). The second usage indicates how such writings function in a believing
community (in Latin, norma normans, “norm norming”). It is important to dis-
tinguish between the two meanings and to be aware of how the word is used in a
given instance. The first indicates shape, the second function.
The first meaning connotes a five-foot shelf of literature that is considered
some kind of standard by the community that holds that literature in high
regard.1 The word itself derives from Semitic Greek roots that designated a rod
or reed that was firm and straight (see also Latin canna, English “cannon”). In
Greek, the word might indicate a stave, a weaver’s rod, a curtain rod, a bedpost,
a stick kept for drawing a straight line, or a reference for measuring, such as a
level, a plumb line, or a ruler. Thereafter it took on metaphoric meanings such as
model, standard, paradigm, boundary, chronological list, or tax and tariff sched-
ule. In the New Testament, it means “rule, standard” (Phil 3:16 in some man-
uscripts; Gal 6:6) or “limit” (2 Cor 10:13, 15 – 16). In early church literature, it
came to refer to biblical law, an ideal person, an article of faith, doctrine, catalog,
table of contents, or a list of persons ordained or sainted.2 Athanasius (d. 373) is
the first known to have used the word for a list of inspired books, though Ori-
gen (d. 254) may have done so earlier (Letter to Africanus). In his Easter letter of
367 Athanasius listed the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. It is clear
from these early, varied uses of the term that it could indicate either an instru-
ment used for measuring or the act of measuring itself – shape or function. Both
senses have continued ever since as denotations of the word “canon.”3
Some religions are scriptured (Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity, Islam,
Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism); others are
not.4 Whereas the Scripture of Islam, the Qur’an, designates the record of divine
revelation to one individual, in Judaism and Christianity Scripture designates an
anthology of human responses to divine revelations, in dialogue with each other.

1
Gorak, Making of the Modern Canon; Bloom, Western Canon.
2
Metzger, Canon of the NT, 289 – 93; McDonald, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon,
1 – 5.
3
Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible,” 839.
4
W. Smith, What Is Scripture?
Most documents in the Jewish and Christian canons are anonymous. Because of
the growing influence of Greek culture on Judaism in the pre-Christian period,
pressure grew to assign “canonical” literature to great names in the particu-
lar community’s past. Greek culture, considerably more than Semitic cultures,
stressed the worth and responsibility of individuals. Everyone knew who wrote
the Iliad and the Odyssey, and other great Greek literature. By the same token,
Jews and early Christians felt they had to come up with names of individuals as
authors of well-known literature, whether “canonical” yet or not. Thus ensued
the attribution of anonymous literature to great names of Israel’s past.
As strange as it may seem to the Western (Greek-influenced) mind, the four
canonical Gospels are basically anonymous. For example, not only do we not
know who Luke was, the Gospel that bears his name did not even have an attri-
bution (kata Loukan, “according to Luke”) until well into the second century
CE, when Christianity was beginning to leave its Jewish matrix to become a sep-
arate religion. It is a very Western notion, due to the Renaissance of Greek cul-
ture in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, to think that we would know more
about the third Gospel if we knew who its author was. It is only an assumption
that the Luke whose name was affixed to the Gospel was the “beloved physi-
cian” to whom the writer of Colossians refers (4:14). It is the same with the other
Gospels and some of the letters attributed to Paul.
Greek cultural pressure was so great that Jews felt they had to answer the
question of individual authorship in order to gain respect for their community
literature and for Jewish culture in general. The kinds of apologetic arguments
that Philo and Josephus engaged in were directed toward seeking acceptance of
Judaism in the Greek cultural world. It was not until some time in the third
to second centuries BCE that Jews began to attribute the whole Pentateuch to
Moses, all the Psalms to David, the whole of the anthology of wisdom in the
book of Proverbs to Solomon, etc. The Western, Greek-shaped fears suggest that
if Paul did not write Ephesians or Colossians, for example, those books would
have less authority. Even the superscriptions to the books in the prophetic cor-
pus of the Hebrew Bible did not indicate authorship so much as what God was
doing for Israel and the world through certain charismatic persons in their par-
ticular time-space frames. The focus was not on the worth and authority of those
individuals but on the work of God through them and their contemporaries.
The Repetition of Traditions in Early Israel
Long before there was anything close to an agreed-upon table of contents spec-
ifying the literature that the Jewish community held to be “canonical,” certain
common traditions gave the community identity and norms of conduct in the
light of that identity. They functioned in much the same way as later canonical
Scripture, except that they were remembered and transmitted in fluid, oral forms.
That they were not set in stabilized forms in no way diminished their authority.
Consider, for instance, the innumerable times the exodus event is referred to in
The Stabilization of the Tanak 199
preexilic literature. Such references were not casual but intentional, undergird-
ing the points otherwise made by prophets, psalmists, or historians possessing
community authority. That the stories of those community-defining events were
recited in different ways for different purposes did not diminish that authority.5
Reference to two great events in Israel’s past powerfully conveyed such
authority. One, the exodus, created the people called Israel: “the people come
out of Egypt.” The other was the call of David and the establishment of his
dynasty. In addition, the patriarchal traditions, and eventually the belief in cre-
ation as God’s initial great act of grace, also functioned canonically as references
of authority.6 The great preexilic prophets (with the possible exception of the
eighth-century Isaiah) referred to God’s freeing of the slaves from Egypt to sub-
stantiate their claims that the God of the exodus could and would free the peo-
ple from their slavery to and idolatry of God’s gifts of land, city, and temple. In
doing so, these prophets brought a different hermeneutic to bear in understand-
ing the authority of the Mosaic and Davidic traditions, since the common people
chose instead to understand these same community traditions as guaranteeing
those gifts. Largely because of their quite unpopular application of those sacred
traditions, “no prophet was acceptable in his own country” (Luke 4:24).
It is often assumed that most prophetic books record some kind of “call of the
prophet” so that subsequent disciples or “schools” could thereby establish the
prophet’s authority, and the authority of his later followers, to say the kinds of
things they claimed he said and did. While this is basically correct, the prophets
also referred to Israel’s corporate “call” to claim authority for what they said
and did. That is, in order to lend authority to their ministry and message, they
referred “canonically,” as it were, to the common traditions that gave the peo-
ple their essential identity. That same kind of appeal to authority later would be
made to those traditions, and many others, when they had become stabilized in
a written canon.
One example of prophetic reference to the exodus events may suffice to illus-
trate the point. The book of Amos records a sermon that extends from 1:3 to 3:2
(probably the sermon referred to in 7:10 – 11, when Amos was in the royal sanc-
tuary at Bethel). It is a remarkably powerful sermon in a number of ways, not
the least being its rhetorical style, which was drawn to some degree from inter-
national wisdom thought. The sermon starts out with numerous oracles against
Israel’s surrounding neighbors. Each indictment and sentence against those peo-
ples begins with an incipit common to them all. The same incipit then intones
indictments and sentences not only against Judah, but even against northern
Israel, where the sermon was delivered. The indictments against the neighbors
(with the exception of Judah) are all directed against some act of inhumanity
committed toward a neighbor. The sentences all include fire as part of the pun-
ishment. In the case of neighboring Judah, however, the indictment is simply that
Judah had rejected the Torah of Yahweh and believed in the lies by which they
5
Cf. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism.
6
lived (2:4 – 5). In the case of Israel itself, the indictment is about acts of inhuman-
ity, but not acts directed against neighbors but against the poor and dispossessed
in Israel’s own land, as well as acts of idolatry against God (2:6 – 8). The sentences
declaimed against Israel do not follow the indictments directly, as in all the other
cases, but come after a reference to what God did for Israel in the exodus, wan-
derings, and entrance events of Israel’s sacred story (2:9 – 11).
The power in the utilization of the “canonical” reference to the exodus events
lies in the contrast between what Israel was doing to the poor in its own land
and what Yahweh had done for the Israelites when their heads were in the dust
of the land of Egypt (2:7). When Israel was powerless in Egypt, Yahweh stooped
in grace to release them from the suffering and shame to create a people out of
slaves. Israel, on the other hand, when it gained some power and a place to call its
own, failed to follow the way of Yahweh, following instead the way of Pharaoh.7
Israel was selling the righteous for silver and the needy for sandals, trampling
into the dust of the earth the heads of the poor in their own land (Amos 8:4 – 6).
The power Israel attained corrupted Israel.
Hosea and Jeremiah, alone among the prophets, expressed the view that Israel
had been devoted and dedicated in the wilderness period after the exodus, up
to the point of entering the promise and settling the land (Hos 2:14 – 15; 9:10;
Jer 2:2 – 3). Amos does not say it quite that way, but he clearly implies that when
Israel came into the heritage of the land and hence into power of their own,
they became corrupt. The reference to the “gospel” (God’s story) of the exodus,
wanderings, and entrance provides a marked contrast between what God has
done for Israel and what Israel is doing to her own powerless and poor people,
her own in-land neighbors. To reinforce the point at issue, the entrance into the
land is mentioned first, and then the exodus and the forty years in the desert
(Amos 2:9 – 11).
Recitals of Israel’s identifying past can be found throughout the Bible. The
shortest such recital is in 1 Sam 12:8, part of a speech that Samuel addressed to
the assembly gathered at Gilgal to anoint Saul. That one verse covers Israel’s
story from Jacob to the entrance into the land. In the immediately preceding
verse Samuel titles the little recital “the saving deeds of the Lord” (RSV / NRSV),
literally “the righteousnesses of Yahweh.” The same title is also used in Judg 5:11
and Mic 6:5. The implication is clearly that each act of God was a righteousness.
In Hebrew, the word translated “righteousness” can indeed have the very con-
crete meaning of an act of God as it appears in these little “canonical” recitals.
One knew what a righteousness was because Israel’s identifying stories, which
came to be repeated regularly, told one so. It was an act of God for Israel and
the world.
The recitals could also be very long, with more details of the story included.
For example, at the climax of Deuteronomy, Moses gives instructions to each
Israelite who has entered the promised land, and these include reciting Israel’s
story (26:5 – 9). The recitals clearly became confessions of Israel’s identity. Regu-
7
Muilenburg, Way of Israel.
lar recital of this story meant that Israel’s people would always know their essen-
tial identity no matter what happened to them or where they were. At the sum-
mit conference at Shechem after settlement in the land, Joshua recites a fuller
account (Josh 24:2 – 13). Even longer ones appear in Pss 105 – 106 and 135 – 136,
Sir 44 – 50, Acts 7, Heb 11, and other passages.
Recitals of the Davidic traditions of the election of David as king based on
1 Sam 16 – 17 and 2 Sam 7 are found principally in the Psalter and in the book of
Isaiah. Psalm 78 and Exod 15 combine the two traditions, as does the fuller story
contained in the Torah and the Former Prophets (Genesis to 2 Kings). In fact, the
fullest recital of the Mosaic traditions is actually the whole of Exodus through
Joshua, with Genesis as a kind of global introduction.
In preexilic times there was no stabilized and uniform way of referring to
Israel’s common identifying past. Nevertheless, the function of the traditions
worked in the same authoritative way that later Scripture would work when the
Torah and the Prophets became Israel’s Scripture.
In the exilic and postexilic period we find the beginnings of more stabilized
references to Israel’s past and to the growing body of Israel’s traditions. Fishbane
has brilliantly described the development of the process in the earliest Jewish
(or postexilic) portions of Scripture.8 Most likely, the literature that ended up in
the Jewish canon was only about 10 percent of the literature Israel had created
over the centuries. The Hebrew Bible itself refers to twenty-four noncanonical
works.9 In an extended history of repetition and recitation of the sort described
above in the book of Amos, some of Israel’s traditions landed on a kind of tenure
track toward what would eventually be Israel’s canon as norma normata. There
was no council of authoritative persons who made the decisions about what was
to be in or not in the canon.10 Rather, it was the common and frequent repetition
of certain traditions in community that determined the content of the eventual
canon.
Characteristics of the Bible as Canon: The Hermeneutical Triangle
Such repetition and recitation are together only one of the major characteristics
of canonical traditions or literature. Another is the resignification that took place
whenever Israel’s identifying stories were repeated in ever-changing circumstances
and socio-political situations. This is true also for Scripture whenever it is recited.
Resignification is a constant and steady characteristic of Scripture as canon. While
there are as many canons as there are distinct communities of faith, and their sta-
bility is therefore to that limited extent uncertain, all canons are viewed by their
adherents as constantly relevant to their lives. This characteristic may be called
its adaptability-stability quotient. Literature that is canonical for a community
8
Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation.
9
Leiman, Canonization, 19 – 20.
10
Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?”
of faith is by its very nature adaptable.11 The properties of resignification and

adaptability have their limits, however. If the tradition or Scripture is resignified
or adapted beyond recognition by the community, it loses its power in that use.
It cannot be so bent to purpose that it gets out of recognizable shape. Canonical
shape and function work together and neither can overwhelm the other.
Canonical traditions and literature are also both multivalent and pluralistic.
These are the main properties that render them relevant. They are multivalent in
the sense that all really good poetry and most prose have the ability to speak to
widely different situations. This is the principal literary reason canonical litera-
ture has lasted so long and continues to draw people to its messages. Literature
as canon is also pluralistic – in the case of the Jewish and Christian canons, if
perhaps not the Muslim. The Bible was formed over a period of time lasting at
least twelve hundred years. As noted earlier, the Jewish and Christian Bibles are
dialogical anthologies that may be viewed as collections of numerous human
responses to divine revelations.
The Hebrew Bible has two distinct histories, the one that goes from Gene-
sis through Kings and the other in the books of Chronicles. Both tell the same
basic story, but in quite different ways with distinctly different emphases and
theological points of view. Similarly, since Tatian’s Diatessaron did not gain wide
acceptance within Christianity, the Christian canon has four distinct Gospels,
four different points of view on what God was doing in Christ. The churches in
the late second and early third centuries said, in effect, that one should not har-
monize God’s truth so that it can be called coherent by human standards. God
cannot be fully comprehended by the limited human intellect. God, the churches
said, is as much absconditus (hidden from human reason) as revelatus (under-
stood by human reason), and that has been the classical theological position of
Christianity through the ages. Human limitations are thus taken into account in
the shape and function of the canons, Jewish and Christian. The juxtaposition
of Gen 1 and Gen 2 is a felicitous hermeneutical statement by which to read the
rest of the text: God is both transcendent and immanent, awesome and pastoral.
The two divine traits cannot and should not be collapsed into a proposition that
humans can reasonably comprehend; each is fully and completely true. God is
both a high god who inhabits only the heavens and a local deity who conde-
scends to grant his presence among the people; God is both transcendent and
itinerant, both ineffable and personal.
The Bible as canon includes constraints that prevent readers from making it
say whatever they want it to say,12 and it bears within it, between its lines from
beginning to end, the hermeneutic by which it should be read and applied to
ever-changing situations. The thrust of the whole, both Jewish and Christian,
is in its monotheizing hermeneutic. The canonical process, through which its
various parts passed, filtered out any serious or meaningful polytheistic reading
of its texts. Truth is presented as having its own integrity, the oneness of God.
11
12
Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism,” 4.
This is the hermeneutical message not only of the first three of the Ten Com-
mandments but also of the whole, including the Christian New Testament. The
trinitarian effort to understand the oneness of God must never be confused with
polytheism; it was simply an effort to meet humans where they were in their
Greco-Roman limitations to comprehend truth. Like the heavenly council in
the Hebrew Bible, the trinitarian formula was a clear way of denying power and
authority to the many who were thought to serve the heavenly courts.
The natural human bent is toward polytheism because it seems to grant to
humans more control of the world in which they think they live. Idolatry, pro-
hibited in the Second Commandment, is the self-serving tendency of humans to
worship what God has given them instead of worshiping God the giver. Co-opt-
ing God’s name for one human point of view, whether in courts of law or courts
of theology, violates the Third Commandment. The Bible’s pervasive mono-
theizing hermeneutic is not to be thought of only as a major theme or message of
the Bible; it is the mode by which all its parts should be read and reread in order
to hear clearly what the Bible continues to say to a world constantly threatened
by chaos.
At the close of Amos’s sermon at Bethel (3:1 – 2), the prophet apparently (by
inferential exegesis) was interrupted by a hearer, perhaps Amaziah, the priest
of Bethel (7:10). This person protested vigorously against Amos’s message of
God’s judgments against the people of Israel: “Sir, we are the only family of the
earth with whom God has a covenant relationship; therefore God will prosper
us!” Amos’s recorded response is sharp and clear: Quite correct! says God. The
tradition is right, but the conclusion is wrong. “You only have I known of all
the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities” (3:2).
Three factors must always be kept in mind in reading any passage of Scripture:
the tradition being recited, the socio-political situation to which it was (and is)
being applied, and the hermeneutic by which it was (and should be) applied to
that situation. These three factors form the hermeneutical triangle of any truly
critical reading of the Bible. The hermeneutic Amaziah used was that of God
as Israel’s redeemer God. Amos used the hermeneutic that God was also cre-
ator of all peoples (9:1 – 8), on the basis of which he declaimed God’s judgments
against Israel’s neighbors in the Bethel sermon (1:3 – 2:5) before he indicted and
sentenced Israel (2:6 – 16).13
These basic characteristics of the Bible as canon – repetition, recitation, resig-
nification, adaptability; stability, multivalence, pluralism, constraints on its read-
ers, and the monotheizing hermeneutic – and the hermeneutical triangle – should
be kept in mind in order not to violate the Bible’s true integrity, the oneness
of God, which is discernable in and through its pluriformity.14 In our day of
the apparent triumph of criticism and reason, it is only in the combination of
a critical and faithful reading of the Bible that the mystery of its staying power
13
Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 87 – 103. [= “Canonical Hermeneutics: True
and False Prophecy.”]
14
Sanders, “Stability and Fluidity.”
through the centuries can be discerned. A critical reading alone may reveal only
the differentness and irretrievability of its past.15 A faithful reading alone may
only confirm the hermeneutic (like Amaziah’s) that the community brought to it.
The Coalescing of the Traditions from Genesis to 2 Kings
The discovery and promulgation of an early form of the scroll of Deuteron-

omy, found in the temple in 621 BCE during King Josiah’s reformation, most
likely marked the first time a written document functioned in a canonical way (as
norma normans) in ancient Israel / Judah. Josiah is reported to have accepted the
scroll as authentic and to have made it the basis of his Mosaic / Yahwistic reforma-
tion (2 Kgs 22 – 23). In the story line that runs from Genesis through Kings in the
Jewish canon, Deuteronomy purports to be the last will and testament of Moses
before his death on Mount Pisgah, near where Israel made its last camp site on
the east bank of the Jordan River. In the old pre-Deuteronomic story-line the
narrative clearly had gone from traditions now contained in Numbers directly
to the story of the entrance into the land, as described in Joshua. The acceptance
of Deuteronomy, most importantly by the exilic communities that received the
old traditions, caused it to disrupt the old sequence by its insinuation between
Numbers and Joshua.16
Exilic adherents to the Deuteronomic point of view (sometimes called the Deu-
teronomistic historians) probably edited the older versions to bring them into line
with the exilic-Deuteronomic point of view. That point of view was not greatly
modified when the later priestly editors put their stamp on the whole before it was
finally edited in Babylonia and brought back to Jerusalem by Ezra in 445 BCE (cf.
Neh 8). In fact, as one reads the whole story that runs now from Genesis through
Kings, one can discern, among other points made, a clear four-point message that
is affirmed vigorously in Deut 29 – 31. Those four points strongly reflect the expe-
rience of destitution and exile: (a) it is not God who let us down; (b) it is we who
let God down by polytheism, idolatry, and foolishly co-opting Yahweh’s name
for a self-serving theology; (c) if we take the whole experience to heart, as the
prophets and Deuteronomy interpreted it, it will be God’s great joy to restore us
not only to our former estate but to even better and more prosperous conditions;
and (d) God sent prophets early and often precisely to tell us how this truly is in
the divine economy and what our theology ought to have been.17
This four-fold message came to reside at the heart and at the climax of the
Torah as it was edited and stabilized in the Babylonian exile at the height of
the Persian hegemony of the ancient Near East. The traditional date assigned
to Ezra’s return to Jerusalem, with the edited Torah in hand, is 445 BCE.18 It
15
Johnson, Fire in the Mind.
16
Sanders, Torah and Canon.
17
Sanders, “Deuteronomy”; Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible.”
18
For recent discussion concerning the date, see Eskenazi, “Current Perspectives.”
is recorded that Ezra read the Torah from morning until noon on a dais built
for the occasion in the Water Gate of Jerusalem (Neh 8). The people had lost
the ability to understand Hebrew, so it was translated passage by passage into
Aramaic by Levites standing on either side of Ezra as he read. The Deuteron-
omy scroll had the function of canon for Josiah’s Judah, but now Ezra’s Torah
had both the function and the shape of a community’s canon. This was truly the
beginning of the Bible as norma normata, as well as norma normans.19
The Torah that Ezra brought to Jerusalem, edited in exile, was clearly the
Torah as we know it in both the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint, with the
possibility of a bit of editing yet to be done. The Torah that Ezra read in commu-
nity that day was basically stable for all time to come. Its message included not
only the already-mentioned four Deuteronomic points but other points as well.
Yahweh, the God of Israel, was actually the creator God of all heaven and earth,
indeed of everything in creation. Yahweh established creation as a divine order
that would keep the forces of chaos and outer darkness at bay. Righteousness and
justice were the marks of God’s creation, that is, of the order God had wrought
out of the morass of chaos.20 God was the sole god of all creation. What others
thought of as the many gods of polytheism were really only ministering servants
of God in the heavenly order or chthonian (underworld) deities who represented
chaos but who had no ultimate power of their own (Ps 82; Gen 1:26 – 28; Job 1 – 2;
et al.). Genesis 1 – 11 set the stage of creation’s order of justice and righteous-
ness. Because of the human tendency to violate the order of God’s creation, God
engaged in a pact with a couple who lived in Haran in Mesopotamia. Abram and
Sarai were invited to accompany God on a journey going where they knew not.
They were given therewith two promises: progeny and a place for them and their
progeny to live (Gen 12:1 – 3).
Though the promises often seemed to fail, or seemed continually not to come
true, eventually they were indeed fulfilled. In fact, if one is looking for a biblical
theme of promise and fulfillment, it is found within the broader Torah story that
finds completion, not in the Moses / Ezra Pentateuch but in the Former Prophets,
which soon were added to the Torah Ezra read in the Water Gate. The promises
of both progeny and land were fulfilled by the end of the book of Joshua, though
they were not yet secure. The security of fulfillment, of the sort humans seek,
is clearly assured by 1 Kings 10. The Queen of Sheba visited Jerusalem to wit-
ness for herself the great wisdom for which Solomon had become internationally
famous, according to the immediate text. In the larger context of the broader
Torah story, the Queen of Sheba plays the role of the international witness to
God’s fulfillment of the two promises to Abraham and Sarah, progeny and land.
The borders of the united kingdom under Solomon were as extended as ever they
would be, and the land was teeming with heirs of the Abraham / Sarah promises.
“All the king’s vessels were of gold; none was of silver . . .” (1 Kgs 10:21).
19
Gorak, Making of the Modern Canon, 9 – 43.
20
Clifford, Creation Accounts.
But alas, God appointed three satans (testers) to Solomon, and he failed all
three tests. By the end of the next chapter (1 Kgs 11:14, 23, 26) the kingdom
had split and there was dissension on every side. Solomon succumbed to poly-
theism and idolatry, apparently due in part to the flattery of foreign adulation.
In the story line that runs from Genesis through 2 Kings, the movement after
1 Kgs 11 is downhill all the way to the dissolution of the whole experiment – the
defeat of the northern kingdom in 722 BCE and of the southern kingdom in
587 BCE (1 Kgs 11 – 2 Kgs 25). In the Jewish canon, this is where the story line
ends. King Jehoiachin, who is taken hostage in 597 BCE at the end of 2 Kings, is
invited by the new Babylonian monarch to dine at the king’s table. He would at
that time have been fifty-five years of age. The move from prison to more com-
fortable quarters, with board at the king’s table, was surely welcome; neverthe-
less, the surviving king of Judah still lived only by the graces of Evil-merodach
(2 Kgs 25:27 – 30). The story that began in Genesis thus ends in total defeat and
subjugation.
At this point one poignantly remembers that the whole Torah story insists
that God is the God of fallings as well as risings, of defeat as well as of victory,
of both honor and shame, of what humans call evil or bad, as well as of what
they call good (Deut 32:39; 1 Sam 2:6 – 7; 2 Sam 22:27; Isa 45:7; Luke 1:52 – 53).21
In fact, much of the Bible is devoted to explaining defeat under the sovereignty
of God – the defeat of the northern kingdom by Assyria and of the southern
kingdom by Babylonia, tight hegemony by the Persians, conquest by Greece
and subjugation by the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, conquest and oppression by
Rome, the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the crucifixion of a teacher from Galilee,
persecution of Christians on all sides, and the apparent failure of the parousia in
the first century CE.
In Christian canons, one can go on to read the books of Chronicles imme-
diately after Kings and sense some relief from the disaster, but not so in the
Tanak, or Jewish canon. In the Tanak this strange story of beginnings and end-
ings, fulfillment and subsequent disappointment, is immediately followed by fif-
teen prophetic books, the books of the Three, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel (in
that order in most manuscripts), and of the Twelve, the so-called minor prophets.
In other words, the fuller Torah story, in its full canonical extent, including the
so-called Former Prophets (ending in 2 Kings), is followed by the so-called Lat-
ter Prophets, fifteen case histories that substantiate the fourfold message noted
above in the Deuteronomic history. God had indeed sent prophets early and
often to tell the people and their leaders how it was in the divine economy. Those
prophets, in one way or another, made the same points: it was indeed the peo-
ple who had broken the covenant, not God; but there was a second chance, in
destitution, to learn what God had by the prophets tried to teach them, that if
they repented and came to their senses, God would restore them more hand-
somely than before. There would be resurrection on the corporate level, as Eze-
kiel affirmed (Ezek 37).
21
See Sanders, “Strangeness of the Bible”; Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible.”
The Prophetic Perspective on Israel’s Future
Of these fifteen case histories that as a whole substantiate the fourfold message
of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronom(ist)ic history, a few arose in the exilic
period reflecting on the catastrophes and their aftermath, but most of them pre-
sented the words and actions of prophets who date from before the final fall of
Jerusalem and the defeat of Judah in 587 BCE. The preexilic prophets consis-
tently convey the message that God was God in the defeats of Israel as well as in
Israel’s earlier fulfillment. They fairly consistently indict the people as a whole,
beginning with their leaders, for polytheism and idolatry, especially the idolatry
of loving God’s gifts more than God the giver, or, just as bad, adhering to their
view of God as one obligated by the covenant to prosper them. But the prophets
also consistently offer hope beyond the disaster, if the people, in destitution, take
the prophetic message to heart. In one way or another they interpret the coming
disasters as having not only punitive effect because of the people’s sins, but also
transformative effect that would prepare them for the subsequent restoration –
if they would take it all to heart (Deut 29 – 31). Even the book of Amos (if not
the historical person Amos) offers hope beyond disaster (Amos 9). Hosea very
clearly says that the defeat of Samaria may be looked at as a Valley of Achor that
God will turn into a Door of Hope – if the people return to the devotion of their
youth (Hos 2:14 – 15; 5:15 – 6:3). Jeremiah has much the same message, suggesting
that in adversity God is in effect a surgeon suturing God’s Torah onto the heart
of the people corporately (Jer 31:31 – 34). The book of Isaiah is a virtual paradigm
in how God’s judgments may be understood as preparing Israel to be God’s
teacher of Torah to the world (especially Isa 1:21 – 27; 28:14 – 22).22
Ezekiel presses the surgical metaphor used by Hosea and Jeremiah further,
affirming that in adversity God is conducting a heart transplant, taking out the
old heart of stone and putting in a heart of flesh, giving the people a new heart
and a new spirit so that they can be obedient and faithful when restored to the
land God gave them in the first place (Ezek 36:25 – 28). Ezekiel goes on to affirm
that God is resurrecting the bones of old Israel and Judah and making them into
a new united people under God’s pastoral oversight (Ezek 37).
Each of the preexilic prophets in one way or another affirmed that defeat and
even death would not stump God; God was indeed the God of fallings and ris-
ings, as well as of risings and fallings. A remarkable thing to note about historical
biblical criticism is that it has not been able to date these prophets, as individuals,
after the catastrophic event. When New Testament scholarship sees Jesus, in the
Gospels, speaking prophetically of the coming fall of Jerusalem, it usually claims
that this is a vaticinium post eventum placed in the mouth of Jesus by the Gospel
writers. Not so with the prophets. They state clearly that God is the God of both
victory and defeat. This is a (theo)logical consequence of belief in one God only.
Adversity in the monotheizing thrust of the Bible cannot be ascribed to a bad
22
See Sweeney, Isaiah 1 – 4.
god, and prosperity to “our good God.” Nothing in the Bible, in either Testa-
ment, would affirm such a position. In fact, it is reasonable to speculate that Jesus
may have believed that the first-century Jewish world in Palestine would even-
tually fall to the Romans. Given that Jesus was apparently born just before the
turmoil of the War of Varus, which followed the death of Herod, and witnessed
personally the cruel oppression of Roman occupation thereafter, the fall of Jeru-
salem might have been for him, just as for the preexilic prophets, a (theo)logical
consequence of belief in one God. The key to understanding it all was the Torah
story and its belief that death does not stump God, that God can indeed reach in
and through defeat and death to new life, for both belong to God.
The Tension between Corporate and Individual Focus
It is helpful to understand that the Bible resides in a kind of tension between

focus on corporate worth and responsibility, on the one hand, and focus on indi-
vidual worth and responsibility, on the other, and that this tension pervades both
Testaments. Most of the literature in the Bible, as noted above, is anonymous
and was viewed as corporately owned. To call passages in biblical literature “sec-
ondary” because they were “added by a later hand” is to deny the community
dimension of the Bible. The names of the patriarchs in Genesis are largely epony-
mous. Scholarship has long since accepted the corporate dimension of names like
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The current conservative (actually Greek-shaped)
mind feels that authority is somehow denied to the Bible by recognition of this
Semitic dimension of it. Skilled historians know that when we deal with history,
we deal with a very different and irretrievable past.23 The Bible is indeed a book
very strange to the Western mind, whether it recognizes this or not.24 Its strange-
ness provides a dimension of authenticity that familiarity denies: we can never
claim to comprehend it fully or dismiss it. Like Jacob with the “man” at Peniel,
one wrestles with the text as with a human, later to find that one had somehow
been wrestling with God (Gen 32:22 – 32). The concept of its being, or convey-
ing, the word of God means that, like God, it cannot be fully comprehended.
The history of modern historical criticism of the Bible has indeed shown that the
“assured results” of one generation of biblical criticism are often challenged by
the next. Modern thinking perceives the challenges as improvements on the way
to claiming the truth of the text. Postmodern thinking, on the contrary, under-
stands that the process of challenge and response, even within the most rigor-
ous pursuit of critical method, is the nature of inquiry. The very strangeness of
Scripture challenges the assumption that “the best” in modern, Western cultural
awareness is what God wants. The best thinking, conservative or liberal, of any
generation will always fall short of truth in ultimate terms.
23
Johnson, Fire in the Mind.
24
Sanders, “Strangeness of the Bible.”
As noted, much of the Bible is engaged in explaining adversity and defeat. The
Deuteronomic historians portray all preexilic Israel and Judah as sinful, for that
alone would explain such a catastrophe. Yet, they were not saying that each indi-
vidual was sinful so much as saying, with Paul citing Scripture, “none was righ-
teous, no, not one” (Rom 3:10). It was necessary to explain the disaster. In fact,
it has been noted that the Bible presents many mirrors for identity, but hardly
any models for morality.25 The popular tendency would have been to blame God
for letting the people down, but the prophets, historians, and psalmists who end
up in the Bible clearly state that it was the fault of Israel, not God. The Deutero-
nomic historians laid special blame on the leaders, notably the kings of Israel and
Judah, eponymically representing the people as a whole. King Manasseh, who
reigned through most of the seventh century BCE in Judah (2 Kgs 21:1 – 18), was
a primary example. For the Deuteronomists, Manasseh was a kind of scapegoat
explaining the destitution. The focus was corporate, however, for the king repre-
sented the whole people. The indictments of the preexilic prophets were directed
at Israel as a whole, the entire nation. None would escape the righteous judg-
ments of God. The concept of a remnant was not that some would escape the
judgment but that some would be reshaped by it into monotheizers even while
retaining their Yahwistic identity in and beyond the disaster.
Not long before the fall of Jerusalem to Babylonia in 587 BCE, both Jere-
miah and Ezekiel told the people that they should no longer quote the old
proverb that the children’s teeth were set on edge because their ancestors had
eaten sour grapes (Jer 31:29 – 30; Ezek 18). Ezekiel developed the idea of gen-
erational responsibility in ch. 18 in a way that contradicted the clear statement
in the Torah of corporate responsibility (Exod 34:7). This caused questions to
be raised in early rabbinic literature as to whether the book of Ezekiel “soiled
the hands,” that is, was inspired. The book of Job stands as a monument to the
tension between understandings of corporate and individual responsibility. Job’s
friends laid the full blame for his low estate on Job himself, in effect, laying on
him, as an individual, what the prophets and the Deuteronomists had called the
corporate sins of Israel as a whole. Job, throughout the poem (chs. 3 – 31), resists
the implication with all his being. He tends to blame God for his disasters, sure
that he will again experience the intimate relation with God in destitution that
he has experienced in comfort, just as Jeremiah experienced it in both comfort
and apparent abandonment (Jer 15:15 – 21; Job 13:20 – 28; 19:23 – 29; 29:1 – 4). The
whirlwind speeches, on the contrary, call Job to humility and recognition of
his limited human understanding of God’s work in nature, and hence in history
(Job 38 – 42).26 They thus herald belief in God’s increasing remoteness, transcen-
dence, and inaccessibility, both in Semitic and in Greek religious thought of the
time.
25
Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 69 – 73.
26
Lundberg, “So That Hidden Things.”
The Growing Dominance of Focus on the Individual
As Greek culture became more and more influential in Semitic, and especially
Jewish thinking, increasing attention was given to the moral struggles of the indi-
vidual, as in Ecclesiastes and the Psalter. This became so much the case that the
Chronicler told of King Manasseh’s repentance and of God’s acceptance of his
repentance to the point of restoring him to the throne (2 Chron 33:10 – 17). The
Chronicler, however, failed to record a prayer of repentance for Manasseh. Even-
tually such a prayer was attributed to Manasseh, and today is present in Greek
and Slavonic Orthodox canons, but not in Protestant or Catholic canons.27 God’s
acceptance of the repentance of individuals, no matter how heinous their sins or
character, became a cornerstone of Judaism, which focuses on the belief that God
can be obeyed and pleased by human effort. A Jew is not expected to be perfect,
but s / he is not permitted to stop trying.
The expansion and rapid growth of Christianity in the Greek world was due
in large part to its core message contradicting the generally accepted view that
God was remote, transcendent, and ineffable. Christians went about the Medi-
terranean world claiming that, on the contrary, God had just been sighted on the
hills of the Galilee and had succumbed in crucifixion to the numbing cruelty of
Roman repression – for the sake of all humanity. Christianity’s dramatic spread
was also based on the Greek idea that an individual could choose his or her basic
identity and convert from whatever had been his religious identity at birth to
take on a different identity. Indeed, Judaism had become so influenced by Greek
thought that in the centuries immediately before the birth of Christianity, it was
said that Pharisees would go to great lengths to seek converts to Judaism.28
The New Testament, like other early Jewish literature, is a splendid mix of
Semitic and Greek cultures. The concept in Paul and John of the church being
“in Christ” is basically Semitic. Paul arrived at his ecclesiology through mid-
rash on Gen 21:12 (Rom 9:7), which states that all Israel was “called in Isaac.”
The Christian idea that the church is the body of Christ resurrected is basically
Semitic in concept. Nevertheless, Christians, even today, need to acknowledge
that the idea of God’s being incarnate in one person appeared, and appears, to
less hellenized or Greek-influenced Jews, to be too Greek or pagan a notion to
accept seriously. Some Jewish philosophers, like Rosenzweig, Buber, and Fish-
bane, have advanced the idea of God being incarnate in Scripture.29 Others, like
Maimonides and Heschel, sponsored the belief that God is incarnate in Israel as a
people (haʿam).30 Those ideas are compatible with Semitic cultural thinking. The
notion that God was incarnate in one individual needed a sufficiently cross-cul-
turally hellenized Jewish mind to find acceptance.
27
Sanders, “Prayer of Manasseh.”
28
Lieberman, Greek in Jewish Palestine.
29
Fishbane, Garments of Torah.
30
Heschel, Maimonides.
The Transformation of Israel’s Identity
It is quite probable that something like the present prophetic corpus of the sec-
ond part of the tripartite Jewish canon functioned canonically for many Jews
not long after Ezra brought the Torah back with him from Babylon in about
445 BCE. These texts go together as a statement of what early Judaism under-
stood itself to be. Together they would have provided the identity Judaism
needed to survive as a discrete religion in the period of Persian dominance and
hegemony in the ancient Near East. As Yeivin has noted, the most stable part of
the Jewish canon, from the earliest manuscript evidence through to the very sta-
bilized printed editions of the Tanak, was and is the Genesis to Kings sequence.31
This story line guaranteed the community’s stability – even when scrolls were
used, before common use of the codex in Jewish communities some time in the
third or fourth century CE. The fifteen-book section that follows, called the Lat-
ter Prophets, was not so stable in order, but it nonetheless was probably fairly
well set in the Persian period in terms of what was included.
Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was commonly believed
that the Pentateuch was canonized by about 400 BCE, the Prophets around
200 BCE, and the Writings, or Ketuvim, at the council of Jewish leaders held at
Yavneh / Jamnia around 90 CE.32 The date for the Pentateuch or Torah is about
right, or could be advanced to the middle of the fifth century. The date for sta-
bilization of the prophetic corpus should probably be set back to the late fifth
century, soon after the Torah. But the date for the stabilization of the Ketuvim
should be advanced to some time after the Bar Kochba revolt, more toward the
middle of the second century CE.33 As argued above, the Torah and the Proph-
ets hang together as a basic statement of God’s dealings with the world and with
Israel in fairly clear theological tones. Yahweh, the God of ancient Israel, turns
out to be the one God of all the world, who is the God of all and of everything,
the God of risings and fallings, what humans call good and what they call evil
(according to the limited time and circumstances in which they live). The Pen-
tateuch, indeed the Hexateuch, can be called an apologia for the Landnahme, or
Israel’s taking over the land of Canaan.34 The Law and the Prophets as a two-
part unit, on the other hand, when taken in tandem, present the panorama of rise
and fall of the preexilic adventure called Israel, God’s apparent plan for bringing
salvation to a fallen world.
One of the functions of the anthology called Isaiah was to resignify that
divine plan in the light of Israel’s Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian experiences.
Looking back from the vantage point of Persian hegemony, and all that meant,
31
32
Leiman, Canonization; Beckwith, OT Canon of the NT Church; contrast Carr, “Canon-
ization in the Context of Community.”
33
Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?”; McDonald, Formation of the Christian Biblical
Canon; Carr, “Canonization in the Context of Community.”
34
Knierim, Task of OT Theology.
the school of Isaiah perceived the loss of self-government as divine discipline and
instruction transforming Israel into God’s teacher of Torah to all the world.35 By
that time Israel had settled into accepting and understanding her survival not as
an autochthonous nation but as an international religion, in part shaped by Per-
sian policy and expectations. Its mission had become rather clear to those whose
literature would itself survive the canonical process of repetition / recitation, as
well as adaptation / stabilization. Israel, apparently in contrast to all her neigh-
bors, survived with an identity based on the enduring preexilic traditions, but
transformed into God’s new Israel with a mission to the rest of the world.
The prophetic corpus provides several metaphors enabling the reader to
understand the adversity that had befallen Israel and Judah, not only as pun-
ishment for Israel’s corporate sins, but also in the more positive sense of trans-
forming Israel from common nationhood (like all the nations round about) into
a people with a God-given mission to the rest of the world. The people of Israel
could not simply accept their survival in their transformed state as the will of
God, but had to understand why they survived in and through all the adversity.
This survival, in contrast to the assimilation of their neighbors into Assyrian or
Babylonian dominant cultures, had to be explained, but the adversity had to be
explained as well. Various metaphors were used, and the basic one depicted God
disciplining his people for a purpose. Other metaphors were purgational and
surgical. The book of Isaiah stresses the purgational metaphor, that the adver-
sities suffered under Assyria and Babylonia were to be understood as God’s
purging of his people, either cleansing by flood or smelting by fire (Isa 1:21 – 26;
8:5 – 8; 28:17 – 19). Jeremiah and Ezekiel suggest surgical metaphors, God suturing
Torah onto the collective heart of Israel corporately (Jer 30:12 – 17; 31:31 – 34) or
replacing Israel’s heart of stone with a heart of flesh, and indeed implanting the
divine spirit into Israel so that in the transformed state Israel would be obedi-
ent (Ezek 36:16 – 37:14). Whether the metaphor for understanding the survival
through suffering was disciplinary, purgational, or surgical, the statement was
the same: Israel survived disaster, whereas other peoples had not, and survived
for a purpose.36
As long as Israel subsisted under the foreign domination of Egypt, Assyria,
Babylonia, or Persia, there was no drastic cultural challenge to its people’s think-
ing, for all four powers were also Near Eastern in culture, two of them also
Semitic. It was in and through those experiences of rising, falling, and rising again
in a transformed state that the Torah and the Prophets were forged and shaped in
the canonical process. This was the literature that survived with Israel. With the
stabilization of Judaism in the postexilic period as essentially a priestly religion
came the stabilization of a bipartite Scripture that, if recited regularly no matter
where they lived, reminded Jews of who they were, how they got that way, what
they essentially stood for, and what they should do with their lives.
35
Sanders, Suffering as Divine Discipline; Sweeney, Isaiah 1 – 4.
36
The lives of the Jews were to change rather dramatically, however, with the
rise of Greek political and cultural influence on most aspects of Jewish life.
For the first time a dominant European culture provided challenges to Jewish
self-understanding. The most salient contributions of Greek culture to Semitic
culture were the Greek focus on the polis, or city, and on individual worth and
responsibility, with the attendant humanism that was sponsored by both foci. As
noted above, Greek philosophy raised the worth of the individual, and of indi-
vidual thinking, to a degree unheard of in Semitic culture.
The book of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus as it has been called in its Latin transla-
tion and hence in most English translations, brought a new dimension to Jew-
ish thinking about individuals. In contrast to Semitic practice, the Jewish writer
signed his name to his work – Jesus ben Sira – hence the Greek-derived title of
the book, Sirach. More than that, the writer, although he wrote in Hebrew, bor-
rowed Greek literary devices, one of which was the encomium, a form of writing
in which individual humans were praised. Chapter 44 begins with the startling
clause “Let us now sing the praises of famous men.” It was the first time such
a phrase was used in known Jewish literature, and it would have been shocking
to the traditional Jewish ear, which would have expected instead, “Let us now
sing the praises of God.” The poem then goes on for seven chapters reciting the
expanded Torah story (noted above as occurring frequently in biblical literature),
but does so focusing on the great deeds of the individuals in the story. There had
been no such form in the famous old recitals.
Ben Sira praises God and frequently mentions God as approving or disap-
proving of this or that act of the humans involved, but God is not the focus of
praise in the encomium. The author weaves together, in magnificent cadences,
the old Torah story recital and the newer Greek emphasis on the worth of indi-
vidual humans.37 Such weaving together of the Semitic Jewish and the Greek was
part of the hellenization process, and from that time forward for several centu-
ries it would be a major trait of Jewish literature, to a greater or lesser degree.38
Nearly all Jewish literature from the early Jewish period, including the New
Testament, exhibits, to one degree or another, a weaving together of the Semitic
and Hellenistic traits in Judaism. In fact, the New Testament is a prime example
of Hellenistic Jewish literature.
Late Movement toward the Canonization of the Torah
One of the major results of extensive study of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been
the realization that while rabbinic Jewish literature may not be a major help in
understanding the birth of Christianity, the Qumran literature on the other hand
is very helpful.39 The discovery and study of the scrolls have induced a dramatic
37
Mack, Wisdom and the Hebrew Epic.
38
M. Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics, ch. 3.
39
Talmon, “Oral Tradition”; Talmon, “Die Gemeinde des erneuerten Bundes.”
modification of our understanding of the history of early Judaism. Two major

revisions are: (a) Judaism in the pre-Christian period was very diverse, and not
limited to the “parties” listed in the classical sources, and (b) for some Jewish
groups of the time, prophecy had not ceased at the time of Ezra and Nehemiah
in the fifth century BCE.
Here at Qumran there existed an eschatologically-oriented Jewish community
that, like the Christian community, was looking for divine intervention to deal
with all the forces of evil in a world dominated and repressed by Rome and did not
believe that prophecy or revelation ceased at the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. Prior
to the finding of the scrolls, it had been commonplace for scholars to assert that
almost everyone within Judaism had come to believe that divine revelation ceased
at the time of Ezra. Now, however, we see that such was not the case for all forms
of early Judaism. The Qumran and Christian communities are two forms of early
Judaism that contradict this idea. In fact, much of the so-called intertestamental
literature from early Judaism, later set aside by rabbinic Judaism, came from Jew-
ish communities that believed that God was still very active in history and could
indeed bring it to a satisfactory close in the face of all the evil abroad at the time.
The literature discovered in Palestine since 1947 has caused a number of revi-
sions in the history of early Judaism, the rise of Christianity, and the birth of
rabbinic Judaism. In addition to highlighting the pluralism of early Judaism, the
finds have caused a major revision of the history of transmission of the texts of
the Bible, as well as a major revision of the history of the stabilization of the Jew-
ish and Christian canons. It is now clear that the history of the transmission of
the text and the history of the canonical process go hand in hand.40 It is also clear
that the third section of the tripartite Jewish canon, the Ketuvim, was not stabi-
lized until after the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt in the second century CE.
If one compares the Jewish and Christian canons of the Tanak,41 one sees
major differences in the structures. Whenever one speaks of canon, one must
state clearly which community’s canon is being discussed, Jewish or Christian,
and, within that community, which subgroup’s canon one has in mind. The
Qumran literature has shown that the Qumran community’s canon contained
two major sections, the Torah and the Prophets, but beyond that was amor-
phous or not yet stable. Thirty years of study of the Psalms Scrolls from Qum-
ran has shown that the Psalter itself was not yet stable at Qumran, whether or
not it was in other forms of Judaism.42 The situation with the Septuagint (LXX)
is similar. In 1964, a year before publication of the large Psalms Scroll and the
Temple Scroll, both from Qumran Cave 11, Sundberg demonstrated that there
was no stabilized canon reflected in the LXX manuscripts of the Tanak.43 What
he found can now be rephrased to indicate that there was not yet a clear stabili-
40
Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; Sanders, “Text and Canon.”
41
See the parallel lists in Hauser and Watson, “Introduction and Overview,” 34 – 35 [and in
Torah and Canon 2nd ed., 15].
42
Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll; Wilson, Editing of the Hebrew Psalter; Flint, “Of Psalms
and Psalters”; Flint, Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls.
43
zation of anything beyond the Pentateuch and the Prophets. At about the same
time, Barthélemy’s magisterial study of the Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from
Wadi Habra showed that the text of the LXX was, in the first century of the
common era, in the process of being stabilized from its rather fluid, early transla-
tions of the Prophets, to conform more closely to the stabilization process going
on at about the same time with Hebrew texts of the Tanak.44 By the end of the
first century CE, certainly the beginning of the second century, translations of
Jewish Scripture into Greek would be very literal and rigid, parallel to the rise of
belief in verbal, and even literal, inspiration of Scripture.45
A clear pattern has emerged from review of the situation of Scripture in the
first century. The third section of the Jewish canon was not stabilized into its
rabbinic, proto-masoretic form until after the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt.
Apocalyptic thinking remained vital in the forms of Judaism that survived the
fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple by Rome in 70 CE.46 Of this
there can be little doubt when one remembers that Rabbi Akiba supported Bar
Kochba as the messiah. Bar Kochba’s revolt failed miserably. Jerusalem was sown
by Rome with salt, and what was left received a Roman name, Aelia Capitolina.
A growing consensus sees Rome’s forceful suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt
as the principal event that caused closure of the rabbinic Jewish canon.47
The Ketuvim, the Tanak, and the Christian Old Testament
A careful look at the Tanak as we have inherited it from the Masoretes shows that
its tripartite structure makes a very different statement from that of the Christian
quadripartite First (Old) Testament. In the case of comparison of the Jewish and
the Christian Protestant canons,48 the two structures (norma normata) are quite
different, although the texts of the two are essentially the same. This was not
always the case. The texts are the same because Jerome, in the fourth century CE,
was convinced that the Latin translation of the Christian First Testament should
be based on the Hebrew text (his principle of Hebraica veritas) and not on the
Greek translation. Since the early churches were so influenced by Greco-Roman
culture, the first Scriptures of the early Christian movement were Greek trans-
lations of Jewish Scriptures. Paul knew the Jewish Scriptures in both forms, as
did probably the contributors to Mark, Matthew, and John. But Luke and others
in the New Testament used only the Greek translations. As the churches moved
further out into the Greco-Roman world, Greek came to be used almost exclu-
sively. Even Bibles in Syriac (a Semitic language) in eastern churches were con-
siderably influenced by the Greek translations of Jewish Scripture.
44
45
Sanders, “Text and Canon.”
46
Silberman, “From Apocalyptic Proclamation.”
47
McDonald, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon; Carr, “Canonization in the Con-
text of Community.”
48
See again Hauser and Watson, “Introduction and Overview,” 34 – 35.
The Torah had been translated into Greek by the end of the third century BCE,
and the Prophets soon thereafter, with portions of the rather amorphous third sec-
tion of the Jewish canon being translated as Greek-speaking Jewish communities
needed them in the pre-Christian period.49 It is crucial to remember that we have
the text of these Greek translations only because the churches copied, preserved,
and used them. We are really not sure what the structure (norma normata) of a
Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible would have looked like in the world of the
Hellenistic Jewish synagogue. What we know is that the structure of the Greek
First Testament is very different from the structure of the Hebrew Bible, once one
goes outside the Pentateuch. Comparison of them is very instructive.
The considerable difference between the message of the Torah and the Proph-
ets, the first two parts of the Jewish canon, and the Ketuvim, the third part, is
striking. As argued above, the Torah and the Prophets make a fairly clear state-
ment about how to understand the world under one God, the God of both ris-
ings and fallings. But the third section of the Jewish canon is quite different.
Whereas the Torah and the Prophets deal in some depth with God’s involvement
and revelations in world affairs, the Ketuvim at best offer reflections on that
involvement as a thing of Israel’s past. Outside the book of Daniel, there is no
speculation on how God might intervene in history to sort things out, and how
one reads Daniel is open to debate. Whereas Daniel is always counted among the
Prophets in Christian canons, it is but one of the Ketuvim in the Jewish canon.
In other words, the Ketuvim clearly reflect the view of Pharisaic / rabbinic Juda-
ism, as it survived and emerged out of the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt in the
mid-second century of the common era, that prophecy or revelation had ceased
at the time of Ezra and Nehemiah.
Extant classical, Tiberian, masoretic manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible all place
the book of Chronicles at the beginning of the Ketuvim, although the Babylo-
nian Talmud at Baba Bathra 14b puts it last in the Ketuvim. Placed at the begin-
ning, Chronicles sets the tone for the Ketuvim in a way that the Psalter does
not. Chronicles makes the reader reconsider the Deuteronomic view of what
happened in the experiment called Israel. Chronicles treats the beginnings of the
world, not as in the Torah, but rather by a genealogy from Adam through nine
chapters straight to the situation in the restored temple in postexilic Jerusalem.
All the families of the various priests, Levites, and other temple functionaries are
described and set in place by the authority of genealogy. The postexilic author-
ity of the priesthood of the restored temple is thus validated. Then Chronicles
moves to the political arena and offers a revised history of what happened from
the united kingdom of Israel to the fall of Jerusalem and the beginning of the
exile (1 Chron 10 – 2 Chron 36), with a paragraph added about the restoration of
the temple authorized politically by King Cyrus of Persia (2 Chron 36:22 – 23).
Several revisions of the perspective of the old Deuteronomic history are note-
worthy. Whereas the Deuteronomic history was designed in large part to affirm
49
Bickerman, Studies in Jewish and Christian History.
that God was the God of risings and fallings and could reach through defeat
and death to create new life, the Chronicler’s interest built on that, delineating
more specifically where God was going with the new rising of Israel: Judaism as
it took shape in the postexilic restoration of the temple with authority vested in
the temple’s priests and functionaries. Another major revision was the emphasis
on individual worth and responsibility, thus establishing Judaism’s firm belief
that individual Jews, though scattered around the Persian (and later Greco-Ro-
man) Empire, could obey God and could repent of their sins and be restored as
individual Jews.
Chronicles thus sets the tone for the remainder of the Ketuvim with its
emphasis on how Jews, though clearly having a corporate identity within the
covenant of God with Israel, could manage, as individuals, to obey and please
God wherever they were. That was precisely the ancient authority needed, after
the traumatic Bar Kochba revolt of the second century CE, for Jews to live lives
pleasing to God wherever they found themselves. One can move directly from
Chronicles to the Mishnah to see how Jews could live their lives wherever they
were, no matter the repression and outside rejection, in stasis in Jewish commu-
nities anywhere. In the Mishnah, time is measured in terms of the activities that
would have gone on in the temple, were it still standing. The Jewish liturgical
calendar is based on living lives as though the temple were still functioning in
Jerusalem.
The Psalter follows Chronicles in the great Tiberian manuscripts. In the great
codices one moves from 2 Chron 36 to Ps 1:1 – 2: “Blessed is the person who
walks not in the way of the wicked . . . but delights in the Torah of Yahweh, and
on that Torah meditates day and night.” In other words, one moves from a revi-
sionist history that emphasizes individual worth and responsibility, directly to
a psalm that encourages individual obedience and responsibility. Even though
much of the Psalter dates back to preexilic times, recounting God’s mighty deeds
in the covenant relationship with Israel, some of the early royal psalms that sang
of God’s relationship with Israel through their king proved to be directly adapt-
able, in the postexilic period, to recitation by individual Jews wherever they were
scattered. In fact, there was a strong taboo against reciting the royal psalms in
their preexilic manner until the Messiah came.50
The wisdom literature that makes up a good bit of the Ketuvim targets indi-
viduals who sought to live lives of obedience and probity. As noted above, the
book of Job stands as a monument to the struggle in early Judaism to adapt pre-
exilic prophetic theology to the postexilic Jewish situation. The Ketuvim include
the “Five Scrolls” (Ruth, The Song, Qoheleth, Lamentations, and Esther), which
were recited at feasts and a fast in the early Jewish calendars. Daniel would have
been read, not as eschatological literature as Christians do, but as a book of
encouragement to Jewish individuals to live lives obedient to the one God. In the
Ketuvim, Esther and Daniel usually appear one after the other as stories about
50
Sanders, “NT Hermeneutic Fabric.”
brave young Jews, like Joseph in Genesis, who remained faithful to Yahweh even
though they functioned in foreign courts, where polytheism was viewed as nor-
mal. Ezra–Nehemiah conclude the books of the Jewish canon with a message of
strict resistance to assimilation and foreign influence.
There can be little doubt that the message of the third section of the Jewish
tripartite canon was one that the surviving Pharisaic / rabbinic Jewish leaders felt
was needed after the disastrous failures of the three Jewish revolts against Rome:
the War of Varus after the death of Herod, the major revolt in 66 – 73 CE, and the
Bar Kochba revolt of 132 – 35 CE. Belief that revelation or prophecy had ceased
at the time of Ezra and Nehemiah was the keystone of the new rabbinic Judaism
born out of those disasters, and the Ketuvim sponsor that view.
By contrast, Christian quadripartite canons make a totally different statement.
The four sections are the Pentateuch, the Historical Books, the Poetic Wisdom
Books, and the Prophets. Ruth, Esther, Daniel, and Chronicles / Ezra–Nehemiah
in most manuscripts of the Septuagint were put together following the Former
Prophets or books about the history of preexilic Israel and Judah (with Ruth
after Judges because of its first sentence). A glance at the Catholic and Ortho-
dox canons show that other books deemed historical also appear in the second
section, in effect stretching the history of God’s dealings with Israel and the
world as far down to the beginnings of Christianity as possible. The message
was clear: revelation had not ceased, but God, on the contrary, continued to
work in history and did so climactically in Christ and the early church. The third
section contained the poetic-wisdom literature and the fourth the Prophets. The
Prophets are no longer placed to explain the uses of adversity and the righteous-
ness judgments of God, but rather are understood as foretelling the coming of
Christ.51
Even though the texts of the Jewish Bible and the Protestant First Testament
are essentially the same, the structures of the two canons (in the sense norma nor-
mata) convey very different messages. The text of the First Testament in Roman
Catholic canons is also essentially the same as the text of the Jewish canon, with
the addition of a few books, whereas the texts of the Orthodox canons still
reflect the old Greek and other church translations and compositions. But no
matter how the content differs among the several Christian canons, the structure
and message of the Christian canons, as a group, contrast significantly with those
of the Jewish canon. The Tanak provides a way to move on to Mishnah and Tal-
mud, while the First or Christian Old Testament provides a way to move on to
the New Testament. Modern historical biblical criticism frequently reads partic-
ular parts of the canon in ways that create tension with the overall structure of
both the Jewish and the Christian canons. Taken positively, this can be seen as a
gift from biblical criticism whereby the Bible, in either canonical form, may be
enhanced as a dialogical literature open to the future.52
51
Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism.”
52
Weis and Carr, Gift of God in Due Season.
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages. New York: Har-
court Brace, 1994.
Carr, David M. “Canonization in the Context of Community: An Outline of the Forma-
tion of the Tanakh and the Christian Bible.” In A Gift of God in Due Season: Essays
on Scripture and Community in Honor of James A. Sanders, edited by Richard D. Weis
and David M. Carr, 22 – 64. JSOTSup 225. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996.
Clifford, Richard J. Creation Accounts in the Ancient Near East and in the Bible.
CBQMS 26. Washington: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1994.
Eskenazi, Tamara C. “Current Perspectives on Ezra–Nehemiah and the Persian Period.”
CurBS 1 (1993) 59 – 86.
Flint, Peter W. The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms. STDJ 17. Leiden:
Brill, 1997.
Flint, Peter W. “Of Psalms and Psalters: James Sanders’s Investigation of the Psalms
Scrolls.” In A Gift of God in Due Season: Essays on Scripture and Community in Honor
of James A. Sanders, edited by Richard D. Weis and David M. Carr, 65 – 83. JSOTSup
225. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996.
Gorak, Jan. The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea.
London: Athlone, 1991.
Hauser, Alan J., and Duane F. Watson. “Introduction and Overview.” In A History of Bib-
lical Interpretation. Vol. 1, The Ancient Period, edited by Alan J. Hauser and Duane F.
Watson, 1 – 54. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.
Heschel, Abraham J. Maimonides: A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux,
1982.
Johnson, George. Fire in the Mind. New York: Knopf, 1996.
Knierim, Rolf P. The Task of Old Testament Theology: Substance, Method, and Cases.
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995.
Leiman, Sid Z. The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture: The Talmudic and Midrashic Evi-
dence. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1976.
Lieberman, Saul. Greek in Jewish Palestine: Studies in the Life and Manners of Jewish
Palestine in the II – IV Centuries. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America,
1942.
Lundberg, Marilyn. “So That Hidden Things May Be Brought to Light: A Concept Anal-
ysis of the Yahweh Speeches in the Book of Job.” PhD dissertation, Claremont Grad-
uate School, 1995.
Mack, Burton L. Wisdom and the Hebrew Epic: Ben Sira’s Hymn in Praise of the Fathers.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Hendrickson, 1995.
Metzger, Bruce M. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Sig-
nificance. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.
Muilenburg, J. The Way of Israel. New York: Harper & Row, 1961.
Sanders, James A. The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967.
ner’s, 1989.
Sanders, James A. From Sacred Story to Sacred Text: Canon as Paradigm. Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1987.
Sanders, James A. “The Impact of the Scrolls on Biblical Studies.” In The Provo Inter-
national Conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls: New Texts, Reformulated Issues, and
Technological Innovations, edited by Donald W. Parry and Eugene C. Ulrich, 47 – 57.
STDJ 30. Leiden: Brill, 1999.
Sanders, James A. “The Integrity of Biblical Pluralism.” In “Not in Heaven”: Coherence
and Complexity in Biblical Narrative, edited by Jason P. Rosenblatt and Joseph C. Sit-
terson Jr., 154 – 69. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Sanders, James A. “Intertextuality and Canon.” In On the Way to Nineveh: Studies in
Honor of George M. Landes, edited by Stephen L. Cook and Sara C. Winter, 316 – 33.
Baltimore: ASOR, 1998. [Atlanta: Scholars, 1999.]
Sanders, James A. “A New Testament Hermeneutic Fabric: Ps 118 in the Entrance Nar-
rative.” In Early Jewish and Christian Exegesis: Studies in Memory of William Hugh
Brownlee, edited by Craig A. Evans and William F. Stinespring, 177 – 90. Atlanta: Schol-
ars, 1987.
Wayne A. Meeks et al., 1746 – 48. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993. [rev. ed. Edited
by Harold W. Attridge et al, 1568–70. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.]
Judaism. Rochester, NY: Colgate Rochester Divinity School Bulletin Special Issue (28)
(1995).
Fortress, 1987.]
Wipf & Stock, 2005.]
Silberman, Lou H. “From Apocalyptic Proclamation to Moral Prescript. Abot 2,15 – 16.”
JJS 40 (1989) 55 – 60.
Smith, Wilfred C. What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.
Sweeney, Marvin A. Isaiah 1 – 4 and the Post-Exilic Understanding of the Isaianic Tradi-
tion. BZAW 171. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988.
Taussig, Michael T. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1980.
Weis, Richard D., and David M. Carr, eds. A Gift of God in Due Season: Essays on Scrip-
ture and Community in Honor of James A. Sanders. JSOTSup / LHBOTS 225. Shef-
field: Sheffield Academic, 1996.
Wilson, Gerald H. The Editing of the Hebrew Psalter. SBLDS 76. Chico, CA: Scholars,
1985.
12
The Integrity of Biblical Pluralism
The current decline of literature and the attendant rise of literary theory in
English graduate programs was anticipated by the curricula of theological sem-
inaries, which have long emphasized scholarly-critical methodologies over the
biblical text itself. The future pastor, rabbi, or priest has been expected to know
the latest theories in the history of the formation of the various literary units of
the Bible, but so far as the academically reputable seminary is concerned, Bible
content is left almost entirely to the student.
Such a curriculum may have worked well up to the liberal period, the first
half of the twentieth century (though I wonder even about that); however, it has
produced a generation of ministers reasonably adept at reciting basic histories
of the formation of the Bible but ignorant for the most part of the Bible itself.
The common seminary curriculum in Bible presupposes that Bible content was
learned at home, or in synagogue or church. Such curricula were designed to be
built on a student’s basic knowledge of Bible content but are currently continued
despite the patent lack of it. And I suspect that part of the reason for increasing
specialization in guilds of biblical scholars is that many of those who now teach
Bible in seminary are largely ignorant of Bible content beyond their areas of spe-
cialization. I often tell students that we must stop attributing our ignorance of
Scripture to the New Testament writers.
What knowledge there is of Bible content among lay folk usually comes by a
route other than sitting and reading the text. Jacob Petuchowski, distinguished
professor of rabbinics at the Hebrew Union College (’alav ha-shalom), once
remarked that an orthodox Jew knows the Bible by the folio in the Talmud on
which it is cited. Similarly, a Protestant usually knows the Bible by the hymn
in which it is paraphrased or perhaps a Gospel tractate in which a verse is cited
totally out of context. And these are the very people who go to seminary or take
courses in Bible in college. Bible taught as literature in college has become per-
haps the best entry point for basic knowledge of Bible content. The supposition
that Bible is learned at home or in the place of worship is largely a false one, and
yet seminaries continue to make this assumption in making their curricula.
Most students today come to seminary without having read the Bible. Those
rare arriving students already familiar with the text have been taught to believe
in its harmoniousness and to suppress their inevitable questions about discord.
It is for these rare students that current seminary curricula are designed – and
with the specific purpose of “defundamentalizing” them. These students learn

The Integrity of Biblical Pluralism 223
what form-historical critics have to teach them, and often what they learn is what
European-trained scholars think certain biblical texts originally meant, or what
the original speakers, writers, and sources really said; and often these constitute
a canon within the canon consonant with scholars’ needs and presuppositions.
Not only do most seminary students not know what the Bible itself says, they
also do not know why the formation or source-critical theories were devised;
that is, they know neither the content nor the discrepancies, anomalies, and con-
tradictions that an honest reading of the Bible exhibits and that so-called higher
criticism is supposed to explain.
George Steiner’s lament of current general ignorance of the Bible, in his
review of the Alter-Kermode Literary Guide to the Bible, could have been sad-
der than it was. He wrote, “The lapse of the scriptural from the everyday in the
commerce of ideas and proposals, of warning and of promise in our body politic
in the West entails a veritable breakdown of solidarity, of concord within dissent
. . . As a result . . . the Bible is today an active presence not in the everyday but in
historical and theological scholarship, in comparative anthropology, and, most
recently, in the study of semantics and of literature.”1 But it is not even very
active in theological scholarship since the triumph of so-called Biblical Higher
Criticism, as Hans Frei and David Kelsey have noted.2
There is simply no substitute for reading the Bible itself, preferably in Hebrew
and Greek but at least in a responsible, formal-equivalence translation such as the
New Revised Standard Version. A firm knowledge of Bible content, thereafter
conjoined with the best of what the form-historical method has discerned of how
to account for the anomalies, discrepancies, and contradictions that abound in
biblical texts, provides the best possible standpoint from which to deal with the
Bible’s pluralism. The student is then in a position to perceive how the pluralism
that exists in the early Jewish literature of the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman
periods emerged forthrightly and “honestly” out of the pluralism of the First
Testament itself.
The invidious substitution of biblical criticism for biblical content, or even
biblical thinking, brought Brevard Childs of Yale in 1964 to decry the current
state of affairs and to launch by 1970 his mode of studying and reading Scripture
in canonical context.3 The main point of this mode of reading Scripture is that of
respecting the final form of the Masoretic Text of the First Testament as the con-
text in which to read its parts, instead of reading layers of the text discerned by
the form-historical deconstructionist exercise and then attributing authority only
to the earliest levels – those that might possibly have derived from the so-called
original authors.4
1
Steiner, Review of A Literary Guide to the Bible, 97.
2
Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative; Kelsey, Uses of Scripture.
3
Childs, “Interpretation in Faith”; Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis.
4
I have argued for a canonical-critical reading of the Bible (as both shape and function)
in Torah and Canon and in numerous publications since: Sanders, “Deuteronomy”; Sanders,
“Canon. Hebrew Bible”; Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts
and Method.”
Early believing communities, according to the available manuscript evidence

and according to early postbiblical literature, appear not to have been as con-
cerned as we about such origins. There appears to have been a denomination
in early Judaism for which the Psalter was not yet closed, but like the Third
Section, the Writings or Ketuvim of the Tanak, was still open-ended.5 We had
already learned, largely due to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that Juda-
ism was quite pluralistic in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, and if there was a
stabilized Psalter for parts of Judaism it could have been open-ended for others.
It would be difficult, furthermore, for anyone to deny that these non-masoretic
psalms functioned authoritatively or canonically for the faithful at Qumran.
This clearly raises the issue of a dual understanding of the word “canon.”
Canon implies both norma normata, its internal and external shape – the ques-
tions of inclusion and order – and norma normans, its function in a believing
community. Function helps us to answer an important question about shape:
since the entrance into the land of Canaan was such an integral part of the early
recitals of the Torah story, Israel’s epic history, in prophetic books, psalms, and
histories, why was Joshua not included in the Torah, which is also called the
Pentateuch? The Torah could just as well have included Joshua, the story of the
fulfillment of the promises to Abraham and Sarah, and encompassed what is
called the Hexateuch.
A viable answer lies in the fact that a primary function of the recitation of
the Torah was to keep the identity of the faithful ever fresh in their minds no
matter where they lived.6 When, according to biblical tradition, Ezra the scribe
brought the Torah in its final edited form from Babylonia to Jerusalem in about
445 BCE (Neh 8), the many Jewish communities outside Palestine, especially the
very large community in Babylonia (whence the official Talmud would even-
tually come), required assurance that they could retain their religious identity
outside of Palestine / Israel. The hope for return to the land would henceforth be
forever an integral aspect of the promises to Abraham and Sarah in the first place,
while the primitive story of its original fulfillment in Joshua would become the
first book in the prophetic corpus. The focus was both on the shape of the Torah,
which would eventually be recited in full in annual or triennial cycles, and on
its function in Jewish believing communities. The story of the entrance into the
land was joined with the Early Prophets as the beginning of the venture in Israel
rather than as the climax of the Abraham-Sarah story and its promises.7
Canon in the sense of norma normans, or function, focuses on the interrela-
tionship of a canon’s stability and its adaptability, as well as on the hermeneutics
that would render the stable adaptable in the ongoing lives of believing commu-
5
Sanders, Psalms Scroll; Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll. See also Sanders, “Cave 11 Sur-
prises.” Note that 4Q430 and 431 contain only non-masoretic psalms: Schuller, Non-Canonical
Psalms from Qumran; cf. Baillet, Qumran Grotte 4, III.
6
See Sanders, Torah and Canon.
7
The (hi)story that began in Genesis seems to end in the failure of those promises in
2 Kgs 22 and 25, the demise of the northern and southern kingdoms. See Sanders, “Deuteron-
omy,” as well as Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible.”
nities in ever-changing circumstances. While differing denominations might have

canons that differ in content and order of books, from Protestant to Orthodox,
from Jewish to Christian, they all have found ways to seek their Bible’s relevance
to their ever-changing lives. The hermeneutics by which they do so is the middle
term between adaptability and stability. Canon in this sense is best understood as
a paradigm of the monotheizing process compiled over a period of fifteen hun-
dred years, from the Bronze Age to the Roman, and compressed into a disparate
but single body of literature.8
Text and Canon
These and similar observations have led to a near revolution in the technical
exercise of “text criticism,” which tries to determine the critically responsible
best text of the Bible from the hundreds of ancient and medieval manuscripts
available today. From the beginning of the eighteenth century until recently, text
criticism mostly was understood to have as its task the establishment of “the
original text” of a specific portion of Scripture. Text criticism therefore was ser-
vant to and part of historical criticism. One decided by critical theory what a
given biblical author probably ought to have written or said, and then one cast
about among the available texts and early versions to try to reconstruct the text
in the light of the theory advanced. The goal was to come as close as possible
to what the ancient individual contributor actually said or wrote. A number of
English translations done in the middle of the twentieth century, such as the
New English Bible and the Jerusalem Bible, exhibit that desired goal; they are
full of scholarly emendations and conjectures about how texts might originally
have read, whether there is existing manuscript evidence for such readings or not.
Such a procedure in effect decanonized the text because it bypassed the actual
manuscripts inherited from ancient communities of faith, instead attempting to
reach back of them to so-called original speeches and compositions.
To counter this procedure, the United Bible Societies Hebrew Old Testament
Text Project in Stuttgart and the Hebrew University Bible Project in Jerusalem
undertook to rewrite the history of the transmission of the text.9 The former
project, launched in 1969, intended for the First Testament what had been done
for the Second, which has produced The Greek New Testament and ancillary
literature. HOTTP has produced five volumes of preliminary report, and Domi-
nique Barthélemy has so far written and published two volumes of the projected
six volumes of the final report.10 The reasons each of the six invited scholars
joined the project varied, but for the most part it was because it had become clear
that text criticism as it was currently practiced was deeply flawed. The appartus
8
9
Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of”; Talmon, “OT Text.”
10
Barthélemy, Critique textuelle. [The fifth volume was published in 2015. See Sanders,
review of BHQ fascicle 18.]
in the four editions of Biblia Hebraica reinforce the hermeneutic of suspicion

toward the Masoretes that began with Luther in the sixteenth century.11
The importance of the relation of studies in canon to studies in texts became
increasingly clear. The availability of a plethora of biblical manuscripts through
the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls indicated quite clearly that before there had
been stabilization of the text into a proto-masoretic form, by the end of the first
century of the common era, there had been a lengthy period of textual fluidity
reaching back through the earliest manuscripts available. The practice of render-
ing the texts adaptable and relevant to the needs of believing communities was
evident in the copying and translating done for those communities. The process
of stabilization of the Hebrew texts became rather intense in the period begin-
ning in the middle of the first century BCE and culminating in the proto-maso-
retic biblical manuscripts discovered in the caves other than at Qumran, princi-
pally at Murabbaʿat and Masada.
The so-called hermeneutic rules or techniques of Hillel, Ishmael, and finally
the official thirty-two rules associated with Judah ha-Nasi, were devised and
came about to bring controls on the totally natural and ongoing efforts in the
believing communities to render the increasingly stable text as adaptable as it
had been in the earlier oral period and then in the period of textual fluidity.
One aspect of the stabilization process was a decisive move in nascent rabbinic
Judaism toward belief in verbal inspiration of Scripture away from earlier, more
shamanistic views.12 The move to a view of literal inspiration soon followed,
which led to the practice of gematria and other such interpretations, and to the
ultimate masoretic concern with ever more accurate modes of scribal copying of
texts as witnessed by the introduction of scribal masorot in the lateral, top, and
bottom margins and as end-notes, and by the counting of words and even letters,
recorded in end-notes for later scribes to utilize.
The more one works on facsimiles and microfilms of ancient manuscripts,
the more one sees misconceptions and perpetuation of errors in critical appara-
tus and in commentaries. After the narrative (hi)story related in the Torah and
Early Prophets (Genesis to 2 Kings) the order of books is only relatively stable
until printing was invented. Printing provided as great a stimulus to stabilizing
the order of books after Kings as had the invention of the codex (replacing use
of scrolls) centuries earlier. The order of the Five Scrolls in the Ketuvim varies
considerably in the various manuscripts, with no apparent pattern evident. Ruth
often is the first book in the Ketuvim. With the advent of printing, early editions
of the Jewish Bible placed the five in the calendar order of the four feasts and
one fast at which each was read (the Song of Songs at Passover, Ruth at Weeks,
Lamentations on the Ninth of Ab, Qohelet at Tabernacles, and Esther at Purim);
but apparently no medieval manuscript so ordered them. A simple example of
the perpetuation of a late custom is that of Biblia Hebraica Kittel (3rd edition)
11
See Sanders, “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament,” in a compendium from the conference
“Hebrew Bible or Old Testament” held at Notre Dame University, 9 – 11 April 1989.
12
and Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia continuing to place Chronicles at the end of

the Ketuvim, whereas the great Tiberian manuscripts including Aleppensis and
Leningradensis (the latter being the single text used in Biblia Hebraica, and the
former the single text used by the Hebrew University Bible Project) both place
Chronicles first in the Ketuvim. Israel Yeivin recently affirmed, “The order of
the books in the Torah and the Former Prophets has been established from ear-
liest times; however, the order of the books in the Latter Prophets and the Writ-
ings is not fixed.”13
One cannot entirely trust any of the apparatus in BHK1–3 or BHS; a major
reason for the establishment of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Clare-
mont. Scholarship has too long been captive of the conceptions of earlier scholars
as well as their errors. Printed critical editions of any manuscript of necessity
reflect the interests, concerns, and biases of competence of their editors as well as
the scholarly Zeitgeist of the time of the editor.14
Canon as Paradigm
Studies in text criticism thus led to the conviction that the results of earlier stud-
ies in the history of canon formation were also flawed. A new look was required
at how canonization actually took place. It became clear that those earlier stud-
ies had been largely based on extracanonical references in Sirach, 2 Maccabees,
Josephus, the Second Testament, and the Talmud.15 Careful study of the actual
manuscripts bequeathed to us by ancient believing communities gives a different
picture from that which the earlier focus on extrabiblical lists and supposedly
authoritative councils had yielded. This led to the question of what a canon really
is.
Whereas the Qur’an may be characterized as a human record of a revelation
from God, the Jewish and Christian Bibles may be viewed as human responses to
divine revelations. When one uses the word “canon” one must specify to which
denomination or community of faith it refers, even within Judaism and Christi-
anity; within both there is now and was in antiquity more than one canon in the
sense of limited lists of sacred books considered canonical. The literature con-
sidered canonical by the Jewish denomination at Qumran was apparently open-
ended. The library there reflects the prestabilization period quite well, both in
terms of some individual books, such as the Psalter, and in terms of the high
13
14
Chadwyck-Healey Inc. has announced publication of The Collective Catalogue of He-
brew Manuscripts on microfiche covering 262,500 items in some 700 collections around the
world; it purports to include catalogue data on the majority of Hebrew manuscripts (presum-
ably other than the remaining unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls). Critical data of this sort is now
more accessible than ever before.
15
A good recent example is Beckwith, OT Canon of the NT Church. Cf. Beckwith, “For-
mation of the Hebrew Bible”; by contrast see Mulder, “Transmission of the Biblical Text” – a
felicitous counterbalance to Beckwith.
respect shown there for what we call apocryphal books. Some scholars think
that the Torah or Temple Scroll from Qumran Cave 11 was deemed to be as
authoritative as the Pentateuch itself.16 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter
Day Saints is perhaps the latest Christian denomination to claim the canon to be
open-ended, and Jacob Neusner (and not a few orthodox Jews) uses the word
“canon” to refer to the rabbinic corpus of literature. If one looks for clues in
actual extant manuscripts for the closure of the Christian canon, one may be
somewhat disappointed: there are only three uncials and fifty-six minuscules that
contain the whole of the Catholic-Protestant New Testament; and while there
are 2,328 manuscripts of the Gospels, there are only 287 of the book of Revela-
tion.17
Jewish and Christian Bibles may best be understood as paradigms of the
struggles of Israel, early Judaism, and early Christianity to pursue the integrity
of reality, or the Oneness of God. The popular concept of canon as a closed box
of ancient jewels, which somehow continue to be valuable and negotiable, needs
re-examination. Since canons have varied so much through the ages, even within
orthodox Judaism and Christianity, one needs to take seriously not only the
shape (norma normata) of canon, but also the function (norma normans) of what
is considered canonical.
Intertextuality
Consideration of the function of the canonical begins with appreciation of bib-

lical intertextuality from the earliest discernible strata to the last editorial hands.
Important to sound exegesis of any biblical passage is discerning the function
of recognizable traditions. The key word is function, and in order to be able to
perceive how the tradent wanted his or her appeal to the tradition to work, one
has to try to discern the ancient hermeneutics by which the tradent understood
that tradition and how he or she marshalled it to the point of the new compo-
sition. There is hardly a passage in the Bible outside reports of court or temple
(civil or cultic, even wisdom) records that does not build upon older traditions,
and invariably they are fluid in reference and citation (except for Mic 3:12 in
Jer 26:18, which is almost verbatim). The fluidity of citation that marks most of
the First Testament functioning in the Second is standard within the First and
common in early Jewish literature. That which was commonly viewed as author-
itative from the past was first and foremost relevant and adaptable; its relative
stability of phrasing was important largely for the recognition of its authority.
The stability and the adaptability of authoritative and eventually of canonical
traditions must be seen as complementary. Paraphrase of the canonical or older
word in the composition of a new word can only go so far, or the authority of
16
Schiffman, Sectarian Laws in the Dead Sea Scrolls; Wacholder, Dawn of Qumran; and
Sanders, Review of Dawn of Qumran.
17
Aland and Aland, Text of the NT, 78 – 79; Metzger, Canon of the NT, 217.
community recognition of the older word is lost. This was undoubtedly a factor
in the move toward stabilization in the first century BCE. While biblical exegetes
are not prepared to say with some literary critics that every time a text is reread
it is rewritten, some of us nonetheless recognize that every time a text or tradi-
tion is cited it is resignified to some extent. This recognition is quite important
in understanding the canonical nature of biblical literature. And each time one
observes the resignification of the older word in the newer, one must try to dis-
cern the ancient tradents’ hermeneutics; in the Bible that entails discerning their
view of reality, that is, their view of God.18
There are many passages in the Bible where the Torah story is referred to,
whether in the histories, the prophets, the psalmists, or the Second Testament.
The tradents’ views of God, or reality, determined how they applied the text or
tradition. This is especially evident in working on the phenomenon of true and
false prophecy in either Testament; for in those instances where ancient contem-
poraries disagreed on the significance, or resignification, of a common text or
tradition, it was hermeneutics that divided them.19 Neither personal character,
nor good or bad theology, is a criterion for discerning true and false prophets;
the hermeneutic they exhibit in applying authoritative texts and traditions to the
situations they face makes the crucial difference. The very sorts of interpretations
opposed by the so-called true prophets in the preexilic period are presented in
Isa 40 – 55 and other exilic prophets as prophetic truth. The hermeneutics evident
in the preexilic prophets could, however, include declamations of judgment not
only against Israel but also against foreign nations.
Studies in biblical intertextuality led to the view that three factors, which may
be thought to form a triangle, have to be considered together to understand the
function of the canonical in the new situation: the written text or oral tradi-
tion called on, the socio-political situation to which the adaptation is made, and
the hermeneutics by which the older word functions in the new. Other factors
are multivalency and pluralism. Multivalency is important because the nature of
canonical literature is that it passed the tests of value and cogency over a number
of generations, and in a number of communities, before it finally was considered
sacred. Everything that made it into a canon had first to pass through and func-
tion in the lives of believing communities, specifically the liturgical and instruc-
tional programs of believing communities. Nothing made it in by a side door,
not even if attributed to an ancient, highly regarded name. It has been observed
that much of biblical literature is pseudepigraphic, and that is true.20 But so is
much of nonbiblical or noncanonical literature. Attributing a piece of literature
to a famous ancient name would not have been sufficient to establish it with the
18
The characteristics discerned in the canonical process have now been affirmed for the
continuing canonical process in the early church by Robeck, “Canon, Regulae Fidei, and Con-
tinuing Revelation,” esp. 73, 80, 85 – 91.
19
Sanders, Torah and Canon, passim; Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; Sanders, “Canonical
Hermeneutics: True and False Prophecy.”
20
Pokorný, “Das theologische Problem der neutestamentlichen Pseudepigraphie.”
people of a believing community if the composition itself did not interest them
or meet their needs.
Equally important is recognizing the Bible’s pluralism. It has been argued that
pluralism is too modern a term to apply to the Bible.21 Nevertheless, the Bible,
whether Jewish or Christian, is a collection of literature deriving from five dif-
ferent cultural eras from the Bronze Age to the Roman. It bears in it the cultural
traits of the west Semitic and Hamitic worlds, the Persian, the Hellenic, and the
Hellenistic. It is expressed in the idioms and mores of those cultures and of many
locales.
Four points about its pluralism need to be made: (a) the Bible has its own
internal self-corrective apparatus; (b) no theological or social construct based on
the Bible long endures without a prophetic challenge to it from within the Bible
itself; (c) no one community of faith or mode of theology can encompass the
whole canon any more than one theology can encompass the concept of God:
some communities need to say “debts” in the Lord’s Prayer so others can say
“trespasses” or “transgressions”; some need to stress that Christ’s sacrifice was
“once for all” so that others can celebrate Christ’s perpetual sacrifice in the mass;
and (d) if the Bible as canon is viewed not as a box of jewels but as a paradigm of
ancient struggles to monotheize, then its (limited) pluralism may provide a suffi-
cient model or paradigm for modern efforts to pursue the integrity of reality in a
seemingly more pluralistic world.
The fact is that the Bible contains multiple voices, and not only in passages
clearly recording differences between disagreeing colleagues (so-called true and
false prophets). It preserves differences between the priestly and the prophetic,
between wisdom and tradition, between the orthodox and the questioning voices
of prophets such as Jeremiah in his confessions, between Job and his friends
who represented aspects of orthodoxy, between Qohelet and the Torah, between
Jonah and Nahum (both of whom addressed God’s concern for Nineveh), among
varied voices within a book like Isaiah, between Paul and James, and even among
the Gospels with their varying views of what God was doing in Christ. And
these are only a few of the intra-biblical dialogues one might mention. One needs
also to recognize the measure of pluralism in the doublets and triplets in the
Bible, the same thing told in quite different ways, making different, even contra-
dicting, points. We should celebrate the fact that the Second Testament includes
four quite different Gospels and all the riches of their differences.
It is in large measure because of this kind of limited pluralism that the Bible
has spawned some six hundred denominations. The Bible has steadily through
the centuries given rise to dissenting voices about what it says on crucial matters.
Challenges to the orthodoxy of one view come in their turn to be challenged by
others.
Honesty demands recognition of the Bible’s internal dialogues. It is healthy
to listen in on them and learn just how impossible it is to limit God or reality
21
White, Review of From Sacred Story to Sacred Text.
to any one set of propositions. To insist that the Bible is harmonious or even
homogeneous has led to diabolical abuses. If someone challenges a dogma or
view based on portions of the Bible, the response is often that “the Bible” sup-
ports or teaches the view espoused, meaning thereby that the Bible is totally
consistent on the point; and often those making the claim simply refuse honestly
to admit biblical pluralism out of fear of loss of the kind of authority they think
the Bible apparently gives them. What results is that the dogmatist has both God
and the Bible reduced to a certain schema in support of what he or she believes
independently to be true. If a countervailing view from the Bible is submitted,
the biblicist then resorts to the ploy that the contradictory passage is not yet
fully understood. Fundamentalism of this sort becomes almost purely a political
ideology.
Canonical Hermeneutics
In our understanding of canon as paradigm, the ancient hermeneutics that lie

unrecorded in almost every page of the Bible may be as canonical as the ancient
texts themselves.22 Not only are such intra-biblical hermeneutics discernible
where clearly recognized older traditions and texts are resignified in a later text,
they are also discernible in three other ways: in the adaptation of non-Israelite
traditions or international wisdom into biblical literature; in the determination
of a text’s eligibility to progress toward canonical status; and in what can only be
called the monotheizing process.
When duplicate literary materials are available from other ancient Near East-
ern cultures, one has a control factor for discerning how such international wis-
dom was adapted to biblical use. There was apparently a four-fold process: it
was depolytheized, Yahwized, monotheized, and Israelitized.23 Not all the steps
were fully carried out, fortunately, so that we often get a glimpse of the process
at work.
Mention of gods other than those who could be resignified as Yahweh, or
at least as one God, was eradicated. Where suggestions of a number of gods
remained, they were relegated to membership in a heavenly council. The heav-
enly council, the biblical accommodation to pantheon and to the human ten-
dency to polytheism, but actually the best guarantee against it, was probably
made up of gods Israel came in contact with in her long journey and history
from the earliest days. Such gods were retired, as it were, put on a pension and
consigned to duty in the heavenly council under the aegis of the One God who
alone had power and authority (see, e. g., Pss 82 and 89, 1 Kgs 22, Isa 40:1 – 11,
and Job 1). They could serve either as ministering angels, or in the heavenly
army, or in the heavenly choir (see, e. g., Ps 148).
22
Sanders, “Canonical Hermeneutics.”
23
Sanders, Canon and Community, 47 ff.
Those Albrecht Alt called tutelary deities, such as the Shield of Abraham, the
Fear of Isaac, and the Mighty One of Jacob, would simply give their names over
to the One God as epithets. The rabbinic tradition that God has seventy names
derived from the monotheizing process. El Elyon, or God Most High, was prob-
ably the high god of ancient Jebus, or Canaanite Jerusalem. El Shaddai would
perhaps have been a mountain god. The One God took over the attributes and
functions of the gods and goddesses of other peoples. Yahweh thus has male and
female attributes as well as the functions of the otherwise heavenly, earthly, and
chthonian deities, the last accounting for what has been called the dark side of
Yahweh.
It is clear from the discovery of many female goddess figurines, as well as
from some inscriptions, that popular theology in ancient Israel was about as
polytheistic as elsewhere. The canonical process filtered out what in itself did
not have a monotheizing thrust or could not itself be monotheized in one way
or another. If one takes seriously all the laws against polytheism and all the pro-
phetic declamations against it, one must allow for an actual history of polytheism
in popular and even official thought (see, e. g., Jer 44 and Ezek 16).
The next step was to call Yahweh, or at least God, what other peoples called
by another name or by other names. Stories familiar in international wisdom
became Yahwistic stories, whether creation stories, flood stories, lists of ancient
worthies, stories of child sacrifice, tales of royal courts and their courtiers, dra-
mas about foreign magi, etc.24 It is interesting to note the texts where the word
“God” seemed sufficient without invoking the name Yahweh; but it is also inter-
esting to note the texts where foreigners call upon Yahweh, as in the case of
Balaam (Num 22 – 24). The exilic Isaiah was satisfied to say that Cyrus of Per-
sia did not know Yahweh even while Yahweh was acting in and through Cyrus
(Isa 45:4).
The third step is the most interesting, the monotheizing. It would not be suf-
ficient simply to reduce many gods to the status of pawns in heaven or collapse
them into one; nor would it have been sufficient to superimpose Yahweh’s name
over names of other gods. Where the monotheizing step is most impressive is in
those instances where Yahweh takes over the work of destroying deities, as in
Exod 4:24 – 26, and indeed in the killing of Egypt’s firstborn in the exodus as well
as the Egyptian army at the Red Sea. In the latter cases, one might simply take
it that Yahweh was a highly partisan denominational deity who fought as Holy
Warrior for his own chosen people, but, that Yahwistic function is anticipated
and adumbrated in the Exod 4 passage where Yahweh threatens to kill Moses
himself.
Though some source critics claim that these three short verses could easily be
excised without disturbing the rest of Exod 4, in fact they render the “saving”
work of Yahweh, in the Passover and at the sea, theologically acceptable and
not simply a polytheizing story of national superiority. Exodus 4:21 – 26 reads
as follows:
24
Rylaarsdam, Revelation in Jewish Wisdom Literature.
21 And Yahweh said to Moses, “In your proceeding to return to Egypt, note carefully
all the miracles which I have placed in your power, and execute them in Pharaoh’s pres-
ence; but I will encourage his own thinking so that he not let my people go. 22 And you
shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says Yahweh: Israel is my son, my first born. 23 And I said
to you, “let my people go that they may serve me,” but you refused to let them go; hence
I am going to kill your son, your first born.’” 24 Then on the way, at a lodging, Yahweh
encountered him and sought to kill him. 25 But Zipporah took a flint, cut off her son’s
foreskin, touched his [Moses’] genitals [with it] and said, “You are thus a bridegroom of
blood to me.” 26 Then he left him alone. Whereupon she recited, “A bridegroom of blood
for circumcisions.”
Just as interesting is how the text insists that Yahweh hardened the heart, or bet-
ter, encouraged the thinking of Pharaoh, when considering the demands of the
community organizer who was himself already guilty of murder and had been
a fugitive from justice.25 Pharaoh is impressed over and over again by Moses’s
demonstrations but each time remembers his duty as Pharaoh and his responsi-
bility to the Egyptian economy. He would finally back off each time from letting
Moses pull the rug of cheap labor out from under his economy. What were they?
Ingrates? After all, Egypt had supplied food to them when they had had droughts
in Palestine. The text allows us to do the monotheizing ourselves because the text
itself moves in that direction. The Torah story is about God’s emancipation procla-
mation, not Pharaoh’s. And ultimately it will be God’s Torah and not Israel’s alone.
Why? Because Exodus as canon can and, I think, should be read as a paradigm of
God’s signifying one of the many slave rebellions in the late Bronze Age as “the
exodus,” and not as one denomination’s box of jewels that others come and steal.
The prophets later would agree with the so-called false prophets that God was
indeed Holy Warrior, but in the massive power flows in the ancient Near Eastern
Iron Age, God would be at the head of the Assyrian or the Babylonian armies
attacking Israel and invading Jerusalem. Isaiah would present perhaps the hardest
thinking of all when he said that God actually commanded him in his early min-
istry to preach comfort to the people so that their hearts would be fat, their ears
heavy, and their eyes closed (Isa 6:9 – 10).
The first three Commandments of the Ten are against polytheism (the frag-
mentation of truth or reality), against idolatry (worshipping anything in creation
instead of the Creator), and against taking the name of God in vain (co-opting
the One God of all for a particular group, party, or point of view). They are per-
haps the greatest challenge to the workings of the human psyche that it has ever
confronted. The human mind just does not want to monotheize; it is repelled
by aspects of it. But the Bible as canon does so, not in all its parts equally well,
but the thrust is there. And I am prepared to say that nothing that ends up in the
Jewish or Christian canons can escape a rereading by a monotheizing hermeneu-
tic. This is not to say that it was the intention of all the original authors. Clearly
not. The question is whether one cannot take the monotheizing thrust of the
Bible as a whole, that is as a canon, and go back and read the parts in the light of
25
See Sanders, “Strangeness of the Bible.”
the whole. Unfortunately, those who claim to find their identity in these texts,
including current believing communities, while commanded to do so rarely have
ever done so.
The fourth step of Israelitizing was not always followed. Indeed, the Flood
story is a fine example of the failure to adapt this international story all the way.
Instead of the ark’s landing on Mt. Zion, as one might think it should, it lands on
Ararat. The story remained universal even as Yahweh was being universalized.
These four steps are extrapolated from close study of many instances of
borrowing from others, or simply claiming what was common wisdom of the
ancient Near East and the later Hellenistic cultures. Graphically they might be
seen as forming an arc. The move to depolytheize a non-Israelite or common bit
of wisdom, law, proverb, or story might be seen as a thrust from the particular
culture whence it came toward the universal; the move to monotheize consti-
tuted the further thrust toward affirming the integrity of reality beyond the frag-
mentation of truth inherent in polytheism; the moves to Yahwize and finally to
Israelitize, while still affirming the monotheizing thrust, nonetheless should be
seen as paradigmatic of reapplying the universal to the particular, in this case, the
Abraham-Sarah story.
The Bible’s hermeneutic bent toward the universal in its monotheizing thrust
is thus matched by a countervailing incarnational thrust. The Bible, when viewed
as God’s story, presents a series of divine pastoral calls, in judgment and in
grace – on God’s first parishioners in Eden’s bower, on Abraham and Sarah in
Haran, on Pharaoh to release Sarah from his harem, on Jacob at the Jabbok, on
Joseph in the pit, on the slaves in the huts and hovels of Egypt, on Moses on the
mountain and in the desert, on David behind the flock, and finally, perhaps, on
and in a baby Jew threatened by Herod’s jealous sword. Without the particular,
the universal would be lost, and vice versa: without the Yahwizing the mono-
theizing would have no particular base in the human experiment; and without
the monotheizing the Yahwizing would remain tribalistic.
The source-critical view that the two principal appellatives for God, ʾelohim
and yahweh, derive from two distinct written or even oral sources in Israelite
antiquity, while quite possibly historically true, must finally be absorbed into
the Bible’s canonical pluralism, which alone can exhibit its overarching integ-
rity. This hermeneutic clue pervades the Bible. For example, the two accounts of
creation, in Gen 1 and in Gen 2, even though they may indeed come from quite
different ancient cultic sources in Israel, make by the sheer fact of their succes-
siveness a uniquely poignant statement that could not be made otherwise, either
by one of the chapters alone or by a homogeneous blend of both: God is at once
awesome, transcendent, and majestic, and pastoral, immanent, and self-giving.
Nor should the two be harmonized; for it is in the plerosis and the kenosis they
suggest that the integrity of reality is indicated even though it can never be fully
contained by doctrine.
The title of the volume [in which this essay was first published] is derived
from Deut 30:12 through a story recorded in the Talmud in which the phrase
is cited as affirmation that once God had given Torah to Moses and Israel it
took on a life of its own. Lodged neither in Platonic ideal nor Aristotelian form,
Torah lives instead among those of the divinely circumcised heart (Deut 30:6); it
is in their mouth and in their heart to do it (30:14). Israel had been exhorted to
circumcise their own hearts (Deut 10:16; cf. Jer 4:4); but they could not do it by
themselves, so God in the adversity of exile and deprivation has done it for them,
performing through adversity a kind of divine operation, an open-heart surgery
(Jer 30:12 – 17; 31:31 – 34; cf. Hos 6:1 – 3; Ezek 36:26 – 27; Isa 51:7). The operation
has rendered Israel as a whole, corporately, similar to the prophets earlier in
whose mouths God had placed the divine Word or words (Jer 1:9; 15:16; 20:9;
Ezek 2:8 – 3:3) that needed to be said in their situation and in their times. That
Word, or Torah, though stable enough, is not statically to be found in a heavenly
treasure, but is ever alive and adaptable to new situations, as and when they arise.
Paul’s understanding of Deut 30:12 – 13 lies along the same trajectory, but in
celebration of the incarnation of Torah in Christ (Rom 10:6 – 10).26 Rabbi Joshua
appeals to the ongoing exegetical process of Torah in Israel; Paul bases his Chris-
tology on the nearness of the Word of God (“in your mouth and in your heart”),
Jesus Christ as experienced in the Christian community. Both Christologies,
Paul’s and Joshua’s, have wrested the whole concept of Torah, hence canon, from
those who would lock God into particular boxes, and have placed it securely in
dynamically conceived processes responsive to ever-changing needs.
The Canonical Process
What became canonical was not only that which was multivalent and pluralistic
enough, but also that which had the rugged power for life that would see Israel
and Judah through their death throes and into the resurrection called Judaism,
God’s first New Israel (Ezek 37). That power claimed that God was One, not
only the God of life but also of death (Deut 32:39; 1 Sam 2:6), not only the God
of risings and successes but also the God of defeats and fallings (1 Sam 27 – 28
Luke 1:52 – 53). The climax of the story of the two promises to Abraham and
Sarah in Genesis is reached in 1 Kgs 10, which tells of a famous sovereign of a
foreign land, the Queen of Sheba, coming to Jerusalem to be an international
witness to the fulfillment of the promises of progeny and a place to live.27 But
beginning with the next chapter, 1 Kgs 11, it is all downhill until both Israel and
Judah are destroyed. In the Jewish canon, Kings is followed not by Chronicles
but by the Latter Prophets to explain the defeat and to affirm that God could
restore the fallen and could resurrect the dead, even turn an Assyrian siege-stone
into a precious cornerstone of a sure foundation (Isa 28:16).
26
See Hays’s brilliant study, Echoes of Scripture, esp. 1 – 5.
27
1 Kings 10 begins in majestic cadences. The alliterations in the Hebrew suggest a picture
of the grand, royal caravan described in v. 2. But v. 1 ends with the statement, “but she came to
test him with riddles,” already anticipating the several human satans God will appoint to test
Solomon beginning in ch. 11.
Such is the monotheizing process that became the Bible’s own basic canonical
hermeneutic. And it is so not because some final great redactor waved an edito-
rial wand over all the disparate but compressed literature called Bible.28 It is so
because what got picked up and read again and again, and was recommended to
the children and to other communities nearby, and continued to give value and
to give life, was what made it into the canon. Morton Smith seems satisfied to say
that the reason the Bible was finally monotheistic (a term I prefer not to use) was
that the “Yahweh-only political party” won out in the fifth and later centuries
BCE.29 Perhaps. But we have to ask a further question: Why did that party win
out, if party it was? The word “canon” is often used in a largely political sense;
even so such users occasionally recognize the factors contributing to canoniza-
tion of emulation, by artists of earlier artists, and of timing, but rarely recognize,
except implicitly, the factor of readers themselves.30
What deep-seated need of ancient Jewish and Christian communities did the
monotheizing remembrances and recitals meet? They needed to know there was
integrity to reality, both ontological and ethical, that good and bad, winning and
losing, light and darkness could be seen as parts of a whole. Human experience of
reality is its ambiguities, as Reinhold Niebuhr was wont to say, and as the Bible
in its limited pluralism realistically portrays. But what the Bible also very realis-
tically witnesses to in the splendor and the squalor, the risings and the fallings of
life, is the human need for belief in the integrity of reality, the very Oneness of
God. In this canonical view, God thus becomes vulnerable to the human scene of
protagonists and antagonists, pros and cons, by granting divine fellowship and
even sharing human suffering.
Christians would add to the paradigm that such fellowship and vulnerability
took an ultimate shape in another defeat and fall, the crucifixion of the Christ, and
in another rising, the resurrection through and beyond death. One does not need
to affirm Christ’s resurrection as historical event to assert the canonical paradigm
that affirms that God is the God of death as well as of life. If the Second Testament
is read by a monotheizing hermeneutic, then the Jews and Romans portrayed in
it would be read as humans in another not uncommon but deeply moving and
poignant paradigm of acceptance and rejection, of protagonists and antagonists,
and not as the ancestors of current Jews and gentiles. And Christ would be read as
the deity’s Christ and not as the Christians’ Christ. In such a rereading, Pharisees
might mirror Presbyterians or Catholics, and Romans might mirror Americans
in yet another monotheizing rereading of the Second Testament text. Just as the
28
Pace Childs, Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 46 – 106.
29
Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics.
30
It is something of a shock for a student of the Bible and other centuries-old religious can-
ons to see the word “canon” used in fields other than religion, such as European and Western
literature, as in vol. 10, no. 1 of Critical Inquiry (September 1983), the issue on “Canons,” as
well as articles in subsequent issues (December 1983, 301 – 47; March 1984, 462 – 542). As used by
such scholars it apparently means lists of books that emerge as most often recommended as the
“best” of Western letters; and such lists are apparently political in the sense that they represent
the dominant and standard culture.
Torah in monotheizing reading is God’s Torah and God’s emancipation proclama-

tion for humanity, so the Christ is God’s Christ. To fail to monotheize these two
great canonical events is to tribalize them and engage in what R. G. Collingwood
called human corruption of consciousness, which is human sinfulness.
To go back and read all the parts in the light of the whole would revolutionize
reading of the text. Such a rereading would, for most people, amount to a rewrit-
ing of the text but without changing a single word preserved on leather, parch-
ment, and papyrus. It could revive Judaism as Judaism and not only as Zionism,
and it could revive Christianity apart from its deepest sin of all, the tendency to
make Christ an idol of a new though mixed tribe.
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531 – 60. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred
Fortress, 1984.
Sanders, James A. “Canonical Hermeneutics.” In Canon and Community: A Guide to Ca-
nonical Criticsm, by James A. Sanders, 46 – 60. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Reprinted
in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 61 – 73. Philadelphia: For-
tress, 1987.
Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 87 – 105. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Re-
printed from “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.” In Canon and Authority:
O. Long, 21 – 41. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977.]
284 – 98. [Reprinted in New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by David Noel
Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, 101 – 16. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.]
ner’s, 1989.
lical Studies.” [In Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Studying the Bible in Judaism and
sity of Notre Dame Press, 1990.]
Sanders, James A. The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa). DJD 4. Oxford: Clar-
endon, 1965.
Sanders, James A. Review of The Dawn of Qumran, by Ben Zion Wacholder. JOAS 105
(1985) 146 – 48.
Sanders, James A. “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.” JBL 98 (1979) 5 – 29. Re-
Fortress, 1987.
Cascade, 2005.]
Schiffman, Lawrence H. Sectarian Laws in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Courts, Testimony and the
Penal Code. Atlanta: Scholars, 1983.
Schuller, Eileen. Non-Canonical Psalms from Qumran: A Pseudepigraphic Collection. At-
lanta: Scholars, 1986.
Steiner, George. Review of A Literary Guide to the Bible, by Robert Alter and Frank Ker-
mode. New Yorker (11 January 1988) 94 – 98.
Wacholder, Ben Zion. The Dawn of Qumran: The Sectarian Torah and the Teacher of
Righteousness. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1983.
White, Leland. Review of From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders. BTB 18
(1988) 37.
13
Text and Canon: Old Testament and New
What follows was presented as the Ernest Cadman Colwell Lecture for 1979 at
the School of Theology at Claremont where Colwell was the founding president
from 1957 until his retirement in 1968. Colwell’s consuming interest in his pro-
fessional life was New Testament text criticism. In his own words, “I have pro-
gressively narrowed the areas in which I read and study until nothing is left but
the study of the manuscript tradition of the Greek New Testament. My expertise
is limited to the area of lower criticism: for example, I am an authority on Byz-
antine paleography. I can date undated Greek manuscripts from the medieval
period as well as anyone in the western hemisphere. But outside the manuscript
world I am an amateur.”1 Colwell, who died in 1974, was entirely too modest.
The very book in which those words appeared is a stimulating probe into the
question of canon, though Colwell did not label it as such.
I never knew Colwell, but I know Dominique Barthélemy well, both as col-
league and friend. We have worked together for over a decade as members of the
United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text Project, and I know that
Barthélemy is interested not only in Old Testament textual problems and history
but also in Scripture as canon. I am heavily indebted to Barthélemy for many
stimulating ideas shared during many Spaziergänge in the Black Forest after our
work sessions in Freudenstadt. I have expressed that indebtedness elsewhere,2
but take great delight in dedicating the following suggestions about how disci-
plines of text and canon in Old Testament and New Testament study can inform
each other. Barthélemy and I are among a growing number of students of the
Bible who are concerned to break down the middle wall of partition that modern
scholarship has unfortunately built between the Testaments. It is a great honor
for me to be identified with him in that concern as well as in the Freudenstadt
project; and I hope it will not embarrass him for me to record here what I con-
sider a fact: Dominique Barthélemy is one of the greatest teachers I have ever had.
Colwell said in his Sprunt Lectures, “In these chapters I struggle with the prob-
lem of continuity and discontinuity, of tradition and change, of old and new. I

1
Colwell, New or Old, 7.
2
Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method,” 7n10.
Text and Canon: Old Testament and New 241
confess that I see no reality in these as alternative options. The reality I know as
a historian and as a reflective human being is a continuum, a process – one that
includes both past and future in the present.”3 Precisely so, for study of canon is
not only study of lists of what books were viewed as in or out of the canon for
early believing communities, Jewish and Christian – that is, the bottom end of
a study of the literary formation of the Bible, how the largest literary units, the
books, finally got together. Canon must be viewed as a process that began very
early in that formation and functioned significantly in it as a continuum that con-
stantly included past and future in its on-going present tenseness.
Colwell’s last volume on New Testament text criticism contains eleven
papers, all of which had been previously published.4 In his landmark paper titled
“Hort-Redivivus: A Plea and a Program,”5 he offers a five-stage program for
New Testament textual study.
The five-stage program Colwell proposed is clearly the result of a professional
life of careful study of a plethora of New Testament manuscripts and cognate
documents and will undoubtedly serve the field for decades to come. The stages
are as follows:
1. Begin with readings
2. Characterize individual scribes and manuscripts
3. Group the manuscripts
4. Construct a historical framework
5. Make a final judgment on readings.6
Colwell made it clear that the stages are just that and should be followed in the
order given.
The points of contact between work in Old Testament text criticism and that
in New Testament text criticism have often seemed minimal. But the more we
learn about them both the more parallels we can find, at least in some of the
problems faced in each.
Colwell advised beginning with gathering readings from as broad a base of
early manuscripts of Greek texts and then versions as possible, but also strongly
advised not making final judgments until the fifth stage of study. In terms of the
actual mode of operation when a particular textual problem is addressed, these
are also the first and final stages of work in Old Testament text criticism. In our
actual mode of operation in our work each year in Freudenstadt, Professor Peter
Rueger of the University of Tübingen begins the process by gathering all the
readings in the pertinent ancient texts and versions on the particular problem
addressed. Our own responsibility on the committee at that stage of preparation
is to provide the pertinent readings from the various Palestinian manuscripts,
published and unpublished, that have been discovered since 1947. Rueger then
groups the readings according to those that would have had our Masoretic Text
3
4
Colwell, Studies in Methodology.
5
Ibid., 141 – 71.
6
Ibid., 160.
as Vorlage and those that had variants. Some patterns develop out of this stage
of work: e. g., the Syriac often seems a faithful daughter of the Septuagint, the
Vetus Latina a faithful daughter of Septuagint or Old Greek, the Vulgata a mix
between following the Septuagint and Jerome’s desire to follow what he called
Hebraica veritas. The targumim follow the MT for the most part, though there
are often interesting readings in the Palestinian targumim, and Aquila and The-
odotion attest fairly accurately to the emergence of the stabilizing Received Text
after the First Jewish revolt of 66 – 70 CE. Readings in the Hebrew biblical man-
uscripts from Murabbaʿat and Hever also attest to that same emerging standard
Received Text while those from˙Qumran reflect the earlier period of textual flu-
idity and the possibility in that time of families of texts and / or local texts.
Colwell’s stages 2 and 3 figure into Old Testament textual work, but less so
than for New Testament work and in different ways. Individual scribes and man-
uscripts do need to be characterized in a few instances, but not prominently so,
due to the masoretic phenomenon in Old Testament textual history; and manu-
scripts do have to be grouped in a few instances, especially the Septuagint man-
uscripts, on the one hand, and late ancient and medieval synagogue manuscripts
on the other. The stage in New Testament work most strikingly similar to work
in Old Testament text criticism is Colwell’s fourth, that of constructing a histor-
ical framework.
In fact, it is here that the most salient observation common to both fields
emerges most clearly. Old Testament text criticism has recently undergone some-
thing close to a revolution in method.7 The history of Old Testament text trans-
mission has had to be rewritten. Both current Old Testament text projects dis-
covered the need for the revision out of their own independent work, the UBS
project already mentioned and the Hebrew University Bible Project. The best
history now available in this regard is that by Barthélemy himself.8 The keystone
in the structure of that history is the recently discovered fact of relative fluidity
of text form prior to the end of the first century CE, along with the fact of rela-
tive textual stability emerging after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE.
Colwell and others, without collusion with their Old Testament colleagues,
arrived at similar observations in New Testament textual history about the same
time. In both instances the reason for the relative lateness in arriving at the obser-
vation on both sides has been the recent multiple discoveries of manuscripts per-
tinent to each. In his discussion of his stage 4, that of constructing a histori-
cal framework, Colwell puts the following sentence in italics: “The story of the
manuscript tradition of the New Testament is the story of progression from a
relatively uncontrolled tradition to a rigorously controlled tradition.”9 In a later
sentence, he says, “In the early centuries of the New Testament period accurate
copying was not a common concept.”10 Finally, Colwell states:
7
8
Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of”; Barthélemy, Études.
9
Colwell, Studies in Methodology, 164.
10
Ibid., 165.
The progression from no concept of control for accuracy to some control is clearly visible
in the quotations of the New Testament by the Fathers in the early centuries. In the earliest
block, quotation is so free that it makes the demonstration of knowledge of a particular
book difficult. Moreover, it is highly significant that the first expression of scholarly con-
cern for an accurate text was concern for the text of the Old Testament. The same Origen
who produced the Hexapla quotes the New Testament now from one strain of the tradi-
tion, now from another. At the beginning, the Old Testament was the Christian Scripture;
and that beginning lasted longer than we think. It influenced concepts and attitudes at least
into the third century. Granted that the Fathers were worse than the scribes, the scribes
still enjoyed a remarkable freedom from control.11
I am sure that I cannot convey to you adequately the rapport an Old Testament
text critic feels in reading Colwell on this point.
The same rapport is experienced when one reads Robert Kraft’s recent study:
Christian Transmission of Greek Jewish Scriptures is still in its infancy, without adequate
tools or enough trained workers to take more than slow, short steps in progressing toward
its goals. Knowledge of the Jewish world(s) from which Christianity derived has rapidly
increased in the past generation and will continue to do so as more new data is made
available and digested. Early Christianity also is being viewed from new perspectives, and
our appreciation for variety and diversity within both Judaism and Christianity in the
Greco-Roman world has increased greatly . . . Our suppositions about what is or is not
possible or probable in pre-Christian and non-Christian Jewish circles need to be carefully
re-evaluated and reformulated . . . For the topic at hand, overtly Christian influences on
the transmission of Jewish Scriptures, most of the older claims can be dismissed because
the assumptions on which they were based are no longer convincing . . . – As time went
on, and as Christianity won its battles for social acceptance and legitimation as well as
for inner consolidation, the sort of motivation which at one time might have encouraged
the introduction of “Christian interpolations” into transmitted texts (whether Jewish or
pagan) became less influential. Jewish Scriptures could be accepted for what they were,
and should be preserved as such. As a rule tendencies to tamper with the texts would tend
to date from relatively early times, from periods of stress with respect to self-identity
(especially vis-à-vis Judaism or perceived “heresy”). This also seems true for textual criti-
cism in general, where the earliest period in the transmission of written materials is likely
to be the period of greatest variety, before sufficient distance and appreciation has been
achieved to produce a more self-consciously deliberate treatment of the material.12
A new rule in method in text criticism, common to work on both Old Testament
and New Testament texts, seems now to be emerging: the older the texts or ver-
sions, the less likely they were copied accurately. The period of fluidity in text
transmission obtains for the early period of extant texts for both Testaments: it
lasted longer for the New Testament (a) because the New Testament was a late
starter and (b) because the crisis periods for early Christianity, comparable to
the Roman conquest in the first century BCE and the destruction of Jerusalem in
70 CE, did not effect stabilization of text form until later. The earlier the date of a
biblical manuscript, the further back into a period of belief in fluid living words
and traditions ever adaptable to new contexts; the later the date the more likely
11
Ibid.
12
Kraft, “Christian Transmission,” 225.
the need in the several believing communities for some stability in text trans-
mission. This new rule needs continued testing, but it is emerging with remark-
able clarity in both disciplines, Old Testament and New Testament text criticism,
without collusion between them.
Colwell, however, ventured the guess that the earliest efforts at stabilization
of text in New Testament circles were due to a desire on the part of scribes for
better exemplars to copy. “The chances are high that the first controls were intro-
duced by scholarly Christians.”13
I wonder. Work on the Old Testament side has produced a different obser-
vation. No group in the history of transmission of any texts anywhere could
have been more concerned for accuracy in copying than the Tiberian Masoretes:
they created a masorah in the lateral and top and bottom margins of their man-
uscripts, as well as in the final folios of their codices, the sole purpose of which
was to attain accuracy in text transmission so that not a word or a letter was
changed from Vorlage to copy. But their motivation for accuracy in the ipsissima
verba of a manuscript was not “scholarly,” as Colwell suggests for their opposite
numbers, the Christian scribes. On the contrary, the process of stabilization of
Old Testament text, which started in the first century CE and continued with
increasingly stringent demands on scribes until the emergence of the great Ben
Asher manuscripts of the tenth century, can now be traced to quite a different
motive from that of scribes looking for “good” copies from which to copy. And
I wonder if what we have learned on the Old Testament side might be helpful on
the New Testament side.
II
What we are about to suggest will need considerable testing. It comes out of the
recently discovered common history of Old Testament text transmission and
Old Testament canon. Stabilization of Old Testament text and canon had paral-
lel developments, each informing the other. The crucial discovery has been that
stabilization of both came about because of a radical shift in views entertained
about the nature of tradition. There came a point in Judaism, in the first century
BCE, when tradition was no longer viewed primarily as sacred story adaptable to
many different forms, but became viewed primarily as sacred text. In some cir-
cles, especially in those in which eschatology played a significant role, tradition,
even written tradition, continued to be viewed primarily as sacred story readily
adaptable to ever-changing new circumstances. But a gradual shift began to take
place in Hasidic-Pharisaic circles that became quite radical in nature: it might
even be called a change in ontology of canon. The shift from relative fluidity of
text form to relative stability was accompanied by the rise of a whole new con-
cept in hermeneutics. The rise of the new hermeneutic evident in the techniques
13
Colwell, Studies in Methodology, 165.
and rules of the Seven Midot of Hillel in the last quarter of the first century BCE,
followed by the Thirteen of Ishmael at the end of the first century CE, and cul-
minating in the Thirty-Two that became acceptable by 200 CE, has been quite
clear all along. But until recently we had not been able to account properly for
the appearance of such new rules. It is becoming abundantly clear that they arose
out of the necessity of being able to continue to render an increasingly stable text
adaptable to the on-going life situations of Judaism. The rule here, amounting
almost to a law, can be put thus: the more texts became stable the more the need
for hermeneutic techniques that would keep them flexible and adaptable.
But along with the increasing stability of texts and the concomitant flourish-
ing of the new hermeneutics went a radical shift of understanding of the nature,
or indeed ontology, of Scripture – that is, of canon. The more stabilization
increased the more scriptural tradition came to be viewed as verbally inspired.
Earlier fluid, rather shamanistic, views of inspiration of patriarchs, prophets, and
psalmists gave way to the more formal view of the inspiration of each word of
those scriptural traditions that were considered old and that were recognized as
widespread among the various scattered Jewish communities in the Mediterra-
nean world. This rather radical shift in views of inspiration went hand in hand
with the increasing development of stabilization of text and canon that began to
accelerate in the first century CE. By that time convictions about verbal inspira-
tion in Pharisaic-rabbinic Jewish circles – the very denomination of Judaism that
survived the disaster of 70 CE – were joined by convictions about literal inspira-
tion. The move from verbal to literal in this regard went rather rapidly.
And the reason it did so was that the radical break had already been effected
by the mid-first-century BCE in the Hasidic-Pharisaic groups. The move from
viewing tradition, even scriptural tradition, as basically a story that was ever rel-
evant to the on-going believing communities and free to be cast and re-cast as
need be, to viewing it as traditional Scripture, every word of which had a vestige
of authority, was immense. It was only a matter of the new move running its
course through to acceptance of literal inspiration of Scripture. We have sug-
gested elsewhere that the reason for this radical shift in ontology of canon lay in
the necessity of Judaism to meet the Hellenistic challenge on the level of Torah’s
function as legal tradition. Jewish thought and lifestyles were being radically
affected by the spread of Hellenism, and the old Bronze and Iron and Persian
Age laws embedded in Torah, which had (relatively) stabilized earlier than other
portions of tradition, were running into two major problems: (a) the old laws
were no longer adequate per se in their plain meanings to meet many of the
new challenges; and (b) there was an increasing number of the old laws becom-
ing obsolete. This problem was especially felt in those denominations of Juda-
ism that emphasized Torah as law, as over against the other denominations that
still understood Torah as story of what God had done since creation; the latter
were the eschatological denominations for whom Torah functioned primarily as
a paradigm for perceiving how God was continuing to act and would act defin-
itively in the end-time. They, too, eventually embraced the new views of verbal
and literal inspiration but largely for different reasons. For the Hasidic-Pharisaic
groups, the Hellenistic challenge was met in two ways: (a) the rise and develop-
ment of the concept of Oral Law transmitted by Moses to the prophets to the
sages, thus keeping alive the old concept of Torah as the living, vibrant, ever-new
Word of God for ever-changing circumstances, while permitting the scriptural
tradition to continue to stabilize; (b) the other way the challenge was met was in
the radical shift in focus on Torah as Scripture from its peshat or plain meaning to
viewing each word, then each letter, as forever valid and available for adaptation
to new needs. The latter new focus permitted scribes and Pharisees and scholars
of Torah to bypass the plain meaning of a passage and concentrate on the single
words in it, drawing those needed from whatever passage, by the new hermeneu-
tic techniques of Hillel-Ishmael to create new passages and new scriptural con-
texts. The old received syntax in those passages could now be ignored. A parallel
and similar development was the rise of testimonia lists and so-called florilegia in
the more eschatologically oriented denominations.
Once the new ontology of canon became accepted in such circles, those
scribes charged with copying scriptural texts accepted a whole new burden, the
transmission of text in as accurate a manner as possible. They, too, could ignore
whether a passage made sense to them as they copied, for now they were copying
words and letters rather than thought-conveying language. The relative rigidity
of text form beginning in the final third of the first century CE in Hebrew Old
Testament texts, in contrast to the relative freedom we witness in biblical texts
up to that time, attests to the new situation. This rigidity of text form increased
in intensity through antiquity until the emergence of the great Tiberian masoretic
manuscripts of the ninth and tenth century CE with their elaborate masoretic
apparatus designed to protect each jot and tittle even in the texts most difficult to
understand per se. The ontology of canon had indeed changed.
III
In the light of this remarkable development on the Old Testament side, the full
history of which has only recently become clear, one wonders if it is sufficient
in the case of New Testament manuscript transmission to say with Colwell that
the similar shift in Christian scribal circles in the third and fourth centuries CE
was due simply to controls introduced by scholarly Christians seeking better
exemplars to copy. Is it not considerably more likely that factors comparable to
those now visible in the history of Old Testament text transmission were opera-
tive in the churches of the third and fourth centuries CE? They would not be the
same, but they might have been comparable in terms of categories of pressure:
the continuing failure of the parousia, the increasing need for ordered church life
in the light thereof, the constant struggle with new heresies that an unstable text
and canon would engender and sponsor, and the need finally to respond to the
new needs and problems of the churches as Christianity became a religio licita
and then a state church. The kinds of pressures that Constantine exerted on the
Council of Nicaea might be instructive in terms of the pressures expressed or
unexpressed but nonetheless very real that eventually produced a more or less
stable New Testament text and canon.
Helmut Koester has noted that Christianity was a religious movement that
was syncretistic in appearance and conspicuously marked by diversification
from the beginning.14 Viewed from the standpoint of the scattered scene of the
churches from Easter on, so to speak, and the pluralism that marked them from
the beginning, the historian must seek out those forceful factors that would ren-
der the modest amount of stability in text and canon of the New Testament that
did eventuate. To put it sharply, only four Gospels made it into the New Testa-
ment canon of the churches western and eastern. But to put it another way, the
great differences among those four Gospels were glossed over by the churches at
a fairly early date. The harmonization that the churches apparently needed was
effected by something very like the atomization that resulted from the triumph
in Judaism of the new hermeneutics and ontology of canon there. As Colwell
says, “Whatever its intention was, the publication and canonization of the Gos-
pel in four books – According to Matthew, According to Mark, According to
Luke, and According to John – saved the Gospel of John for the church. Reading
the four together blurs and blots the distinctive elements of John. Most Christian
ministers read the other Gospels between John’s lines and are unaware of how
relevant his Gospel was to the social group for which it was written.”15 For all
the churches eventually to accept the four Gospels showed response to stimuli
to stop the process of diversification and seek unity. Those same stimuli induced
Christians to go further and gloss over the immense differences among the four
Gospels. Just as the rabbis could use their new view of canon and their new
hermeneutics to gloss over the provenance in the Bible of the word or phrase
needed from here, there, and yon to create the new law or the new midrash, so
Christians atomized the New Testament to break up its received form and com-
bine verses from wherever needed to meet whatever problem needed addressing.
Paradoxically, it was the emphasis of thinkers like Irenaeus and Tertullian on the
consonance or unity of Scripture in all its parts that saw the triumph of the idea
of verbal and literal inspiration in Christianity.16 The idea that the tongues of all
the biblical authors were but ready pens in the hand of the Holy Spirit glossed
over the diversity and pluralism of the Bible and permitted the introduction of
the same kind of atomistic exegesis, first of the Old Testament and then of the
New Testament, in Christianity that had gained ascendency already in Judaism.
The difference between surviving Judaism and Christianity in this regard was
in their radically different ways of looking at Scripture as a whole, no matter the
length or quantity of canon. The one, rabbinic Judaism, had the basic, pervad-
ing hermeneutic of seeking in Scripture indications for lifestyle and obedience
in home, synagogue, and ghetto. Christianity, on the other hand, had the basic,
pervading hermeneutic of seeking in Scripture indications for theological dogma.
14
Koester, “ΓΝΩΜΑΙ,” 281; cf. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 4.
15
16
Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 40.
We have elsewhere expounded the thesis that Torah and hence canon is a combi-
nation and balance of mythos and ethos, story and laws, gospel and law, haggadah
and halakah.17 Throughout the history of early Judaism from its inception in the
sixth century BCE, one can see and trace the rise and development of denomina-
tions within Judaism, some of which stressed reading Scripture asking primarily
what good Jews should do and what forms obedience should take, and some
of which stressed reading Scripture asking primarily what God has done and is
doing and will do and what forms history and the eschaton will take. Christi-
anity should be seen as heir of the hermeneutics of the latter type. It should be
stressed that those who engaged in reading Torah as God’s story in past, present,
and future eschaton did not ignore biblical ethics; nor did the Pharisees and oth-
ers like them ignore theology entirely. Nothing in history is ever that simple, and
I do not wish to imply such. But the enigma in Paul’s attitude toward the Law –
at once saying it was abrogated but also saying it was good, holy and eternal – is
best resolved, as I have tried to state recently in the Nils Dahl Festschrift, along
these very lines: the Torah as God’s story is good and eternal, but the Torah as
legal stipulation is abrogated in the New Age.18
The history of the early church is best viewed in terms of its doctrinal strug-
gles, debates and resolutions, as J. N. D. Kelly has brilliantly shown, and not in
terms of whatever efforts it may have expended in ethicizing.19 That it had strict
moral codes and strove toward acceptable forms of piety as witness to the faith,
one need not doubt. But the history of the early church does not lie in such striv-
ings. Par contre, that Pharisaic-rabbinic Judaism had a haggadic tradition along-
side its halakic history, and even some effort expended on theologizing, one need
not doubt. But the history of rabbinic Judaism does not lie in such strivings, but
in its focused concern, as evidenced in Mishnah and Talmud, on lifestyle, that is,
on living lives of Torah.
Our suggestion is that the history of the canonical process, culminating in
the emergence of the 27 books of the New Testament as canon, is comparable
in basic outline to that of the canonical process, as recently conceived, for the
Old Testament. Whereas the stabilization of text and canon came about for the
Old Testament largely as a result of attempts to meet the Hellenistic challenge to
Jewish lifestyle, the same came about for the New Testament largely as a result of
attempts to meet the Hellenistic-Roman challenge to Christian theology, espe-
cially Christology and ecclesiology.
Christianity’s ability to absorb and assimilate the better features of the waning
mystery religions and cults of the Mediterranean world is a marked feature of the
first centuries of its life. The great pluralism of Scripture, first the Old Testament
and then the nascent New, always admitted of some passage or idea that proved
sufficient vehicle for such absorption. The exercise was quite wide-spread, as
more and more gentiles became attracted to Christianity and as Christianity,
17
Sanders, “Torah and Christ.”
18
Sanders, “Torah and Paul.”
19
Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 29 – 78.
because of its practice of active syncretism, thus became attractive to highly

diverse ways of thinking. An exponent of that history was the struggle within
the churches with such efforts that seemed to be on the fringes of its essence – the
heresies. The canonical process, the shift in ontology of Scripture, and the rise of
the new hermeneutics sufficient to meet the challenge, can all be traced along the
path of the churches’ struggle with Gnosticism in the second century, with Ari-
anism in the early third century, and finally the big debate between the Alexan-
drians and the Antiochenes that resulted in the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth
century CE. Says Aland, “The setting up of a barrier (read ‘canon’) was further
necessitated by the appearance, on the one hand, of Montanism and Gnosticism
. . . and of Marcion and his disciples, on the other.”20 Scripture was cited as the
base of both the heresies and the orthodoxies, as each developed. Both in order
to curb the so-called heresies, and in order to develop a strong orthodoxy to
resist further such challenges, the same two phenomena took place as we have
seen in the case of the Old Testament earlier: the need for stabilization of text
and canon, a shift in view of Scripture, and the adoption of the idea of verbal and
literal inspiration.
The quest for better exemplars to copy came about, therefore, not out of
scribal scruples simply but out of the broader needs of the believing communities
as they faced the challenges of the larger culture.21 Some of the challenges came in
periods of persecution of the churches, and some came later when the churches
faced the problems and challenges of being a religio licita and then, indeed, the
state church.
IV
Revision of the history of stabilization of text and canon of the Old Testament
came about as a direct result of having photographic reproductions readily
available of the manuscripts necessary to study. As photographs of the Dead
Sea Scrolls and of New Testament papyri became available for study through
the 1950s and 1960s, more and more scholars became dissatisfied working with
printed critical editions of ancient biblical manuscripts. The technological devel-
opment of photography along with the decreasing cost in securing microfilm
copies of manuscripts encouraged scholars in the use of film and microreaders
[and eventually digital images of manuscripts]. Critical editions of manuscripts
will continue to have their usefulness, but study of a critical edition alone of an
ancient manuscript leaves the student subject to the limitations and biases of the
editor. And no matter how much of a genius the editor of a printed critical edi-
tion may be, he or she is of necessity subject to the interests and questions of the
period in which they themselves studied the original and published their work.
20
Aland, Problem of the NT Canon, 14.
21
Ibid., 18.
Study of images of the actual manuscripts gives rise to questions that no study of
critical editions elicits.
Two simple examples may suffice to illustrate the point. The new Biblia
Hebraica Stuttgartensia edition of the Hebrew Old Testament follows the prac-
tice of the earlier Kittel edition, which in turn had followed the practice set in
the Second Rabbinic Bible of Jacob ben Hayyim of the early sixteenth century,
namely, that of placing the book of Chronicles at the end of the third and last
section of the Hebrew Old Testament. Karl Elliger and Wilhelm Rudoph, in the
Foreword to BHS, state that this is the only deviation from the order of the bib-
lical books in Leningradensis but they give no reason for continuing the practice.
Nor do they state where in Leningradensis Chronicles actually occurs. The stu-
dent is not told where it appears despite the fact that both Leningradensis (L) and
Aleppensis (A) place it at the very beginning of the Ketuvim. Grandiose theories
about the significance of Chronicles coming at the end of the Hebrew Bible as
a balance to the Torah, of which Chronicles is a rewrite, collapse in the face of
having actual facsimiles of the two great masoretic manuscripts.
Likewise, theories about how the Elizabeth Hay Bechtel Psalms Scroll of
Qumran Cave 11 may have been a liturgical edition of Psalms or the first exam-
ple of a Jewish prayerbook (because of the arrangement of some of the material
in it) are far more difficult to maintain in the face of the fact that both L and A
set significant portions of Scripture, notably Exod 15 and Deut 32, in a patently
liturgical format. Also, theories that the same Psalms Scroll was not viewed as
canonical at Qumran (because the scroll contains a notation in prose about how
many songs and psalms David wrote and for what purpose) need to be scruti-
nized in the light of the fact that all the great masoretic manuscripts of the Bible
contain many such notations in prose about numbers of words and verses and
sections scattered throughout the manuscripts and especially in the great maso-
rah at the end of each.22 Column 27 of the Psalms Scroll can now be viewed as a
part of the pre-history of the masorah. Such observations cannot be made other
than on examination of the original manuscripts themselves, and access to them
is best effected by photographic [and digital] reproduction.
Scrutiny of original manuscripts in like manner also reveals the embarrassing
number of errors one finds in critical editions of texts and accompanying appa-
ratus. Scholars, even the great ones, without some kind of facsimile have been
forced to copy errors in the work of earlier scholars and thus perpetuate them.
Even scholars who are known for their scrupulosity and attention to detail have
been guilty of this simply because they often have had only critical editions to
which to refer. Work now on the originals will gradually eliminate such errors.
A seminar on the book of Job on one day alone located three errors in the BHS
printed text of Job 17 and 18.
The Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center for Preservation and Research has
been established at the School of Theology at Claremont through the vision and
22
generosity of Elizabeth Hay Bechtel. Not only we here in Claremont but bibli-
cal scholarship around the world owes her a resounding vote of gratitude. While
there are similar centers at the Universities of Fribourg in Switzerland, Lyon in
France, and Münster in Germany, no other is quite so ambitious or encompass-
ing as the Claremont Center. It is established for the preservation of all ancient
manuscripts related to biblical study, not only the actual biblical manuscripts
but also those cognate to Bible study. The core of our collection will be the some
700 microfilms collected by Ernest Cadman Colwell and others for the Interna-
tional Greek New Testament Project. But we hope eventually to be able to have
it all, as it were, for Old Testament, Intertestamental Studies, and New Testa-
ment. We are affiliated and work closely with Barthélemy’s Institut biblique in
Fribourg, and Barthélemy is on our Board of Advisors.
The reasons for such a Center grow in importance with each passing year.
Ancient manuscripts removed from their original site of discovery deteriorate
in modern museums and archival storage areas quite rapidly. They soon discolor
and become very nearly illegible. Photography [and digital imaging] are the best
means of preservation of them, as Dr. John Trever has proved by his careful
preservation of the negatives he took in February 1948 in Jerusalem of three
of the large scrolls from Qumran Cave 1. The manuscripts themselves have in
these intervening years discolored and disintegrated to some extent. Technolog-
ical advances permit us to preserve images in a good state for unknown periods
of time while the same advances have so far failed to preserve the originals in
as good a state. Without a prohibitive travel budget, no one can possibly go to
study each of them in the widely scattered museums and archives around the
world. The rise of nationalism in the areas formerly governed by the imperial
powers and Mandate countries makes collection of originals impossible even
for the richest of philanthropists: each country wants to keep the manuscripts
and artifacts found there; and this is only right. Collection of all pertinent man-
uscripts by imaging in one place will permit for the first time full diachronic
and synchronic study of biblical traditions by the competent scholar sitting and
working in one place. The collection will greatly advance the work of text criti-
cism, tradition criticism, and canon criticism.
In addition to the collection, the Center will provide the latest means for pre-
serving the film and the latest means of studying the texts they expose. A cli-
matized vault in the Center maintains relative specifications of temperature and
humidity on a year-round basis with graph readouts for verification and eventu-
ally a back-up generator in case of power failure. In addition, we have a contract
with the Secured Storage Vault of the Heart of California Corporation in Tahoe
City for more permanent preservation of the master copies of each acquisition.
And, of course, we will provide microfilm and microfiche readers [as well as dig-
ital images] for the use of scholars.
Very exciting for us, and quite unique, is our working relation with The Jet
Propulsion Lab at Caltech where our colleagues there are working on image
enhancement processes by microdensitometer and computer, as well as an elec-
tronic camera for original film work. The former permits scholars to read por-
tions of discolored or decomposed manuscripts beyond even the capabilities of

infrared or ultra-violet film. This is still in the experimental stage, but Drs. John
Benton and James Soha, who are also on our Board of Advisors, have already
produced dramatic results: we are working with them on further possibilities.
The idea of the electronic camera is actually very simple but the possibilities
boggle the mind: it is essentially an adaptation of the amazing camera hardware
that has been used at JPL to shoot Jupiter or Mars. The scientists are working on
reducing the bulky hardware to the size of a suitcase in order to do field work.
Finally, the Center plans to provide not only a catalog of all its holdings but
a Scripture index as well. This, in its own way, is mind-boggling and will require
many hours of many people working in the Center. If it works out as I hope
it will, a scholar should be able to consult the index file and locate every bib-
lical manuscript, both texts and versions, and insofar as possible, citations in
the non-biblical holdings, that contains any given verse of the Bible. A student
will now be able to do a full diachronic and synchronic study of a given passage
sitting at one microfilm reader [or computer] at the Center. Just imagine being
able to trace the full history of a tradition from its inception through its various
functions and appearances through to the close of antiquity. Imagine being able
to trace the complete pilgrimage of a tradition through all its travels in the bibli-
cal orbit, texts, versions, commentaries, and treatises! That is the most ambitious
project ever undertaken by people who still claim sanity. But it excites us and we
hope it attracts future students to even more competent study of our common
biblical heritage. [See the Appendix to this volume for the history of the Ancient
Biblical Manuscript Center.]
Bibliography
Aland, Kurt. The Problem of the New Testament Canon. Contemporary Studies in The-
ology 2. London: Mowbray, 1962.
Colwell, Ernest C. New or Old? The Christian Struggle with Change and Tradition. Phil-
adelphia: Westminster, 1970.
Colwell, Ernest C. Studies in Methodology in Textual Criticism of the New Testament.
New Testament Tools and Studies 9. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,1969.
Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. New York: Harper & Row, 1960. [5th rev. ed.
1978].
Koester, Helmut. “ΓΝΩΜΑΙ ΔΙΑΦΟΡΟΙ: The Origin and Nature of Diversification in the
History of Early Christianity.” HTR 58 (1965) 260 – 84.
Kraft, Robert A. “Christian Transmission of Greek Jewish Scriptures: A Methodologi-
cal Probe.” In Paganisme, Judaïsme, Christianisme: Influences et affrontements dans
le monde antique. Mélanges offerts à Marcel Simon, edited by André Benoit, Marc
Philonenko, and Cyrille Vogel, 207 – 26. Paris: Boccard, 1978.
Fortress, 1987.]
14
Torah and Christ
Introduction (1987)
For six years, from 1973 to 1976, I was a member of and participated in the
theological discussions and planning of the advisory council of the journal Inter-
pretation. The first meeting of the council I attended involved developing and
planning the October 1975 issue, which was to be on “the Bible as canon.” I was
asked to write a follow-up to Torah and Canon focusing on the NT and espe-
cially on Christ. The result was “Torah and Christ,” Int 29 (1975) 372 – 90.
The basic hermeneutic of the chapter is the same, in my opinion, as that of
most of the NT, especially of Paul, in working out its Christology and its eccle-
siology – theocentric. If one focuses on what the OT says God was doing in and
through creation and Israel up to the Hellenistic era, taking account of all the var-
ious cultural idioms by which that was expressed, then one can far better under-
stand the arguments concerning Christ and the church one finds in the NT. Again,
if one thinks of Torah as a narrative with some laws recorded in it rather than as
records of laws set in a narrative framework, then one can perceive the continuity
the early Christians saw between Scripture (the OT, largely for them in Greek
translation) and what they believed God was doing in Christ and the church in
the first century. That which is called gospel in the NT is perceived there as having
begun in Genesis, in Torah, and coming to climax in God’s work in Christ.
The old dichotomy between law (OT) and gospel (NT) is turned on its head,
as it were. The Torah-Christ story, or the gospel as a whole, is made up, from
beginning to end, of both story and stipulation, or gospel and law. Read in this
way, Paul was not presenting a choice between faith and works, but was rather
asking in whose works we have faith, God’s or ours? If we can learn to recite
God’s words and works as recorded in Scripture, then we should be able to see
that Christ was God’s climatic act of righteousness; that is, we should be able to
have the hermeneutic eyes to see and recognize God’s culminating work in Christ.
“Torah and Christ” was a direct sequel to that part of the argument of Torah
and Canon that was less concerned with Gerhard von Rad’s question of why
Sinai (law) is never mentioned in the short recitals or kerygma in the OT (gospel)
but was concerned to ask why the story of the entrance into the land (Joshua)
did not end up in basic Torah (Pentateuch). The NT, therefore, presents not so
much a christocentric theology as a theocentric Christology. It is the same God
continuing his own story at work in Christ that was at work in creation, redemp-
tion, and so forth, of the OT.
Torah and Christ 255
But NT ecclesiology is also presented with a theocentric hermeneutic read-

ing of Scripture (OT). In Christ God was creating a New Israel. Or, Christ was
God’s gift to the world whereby gentiles, too, might enter into God’s Israel.
While the Christian celebrates the whole of the gospel from Genesis through the
NT, the Torah-Christ story, and hopes everybody who listens will share the joy
of the celebration, there can be and should be no special mission to the Jews. In
fact, the proper attitude of Christians engrafted into Israel through Christ should
be to listen for the voice of God through what Jacob Neusner aptly calls God’s
first love, Judaism.
What is the continuity between the Old Testament and the New? What is the
relationship between gospel and law? Why do Jews not accept Christ? These are
frequently asked questions in the churches today.
In Torah and Canon, the time-honored question of the relationship in the
biblical story between gospel and law was bypassed in favor of addressing the
quite different question of why the story of the conquest of Canaan, the book
of Joshua, was not included in the Torah or Pentateuch. Here we shall revert to
the question of the relation of the law to gospel and suggest, perhaps, a fresh
approach to an old problem.1
From a canonical perspective, the Torah is a balanced intermingling of story and

law: they go together; they belong together; and Torah means both. This is so
clearly the case that a simple diagram is possible:
⎧⎪ mythos – gospel – story – identity – haggadah

Torah = ⎨ plus
⎪⎩ ethos – laws – ethics – lifestyle – halakah
Torah may mean simply the Pentateuch; or it may have the extended meaning
of divine revelation generally; or it may, in some texts, be a symbol for the iden-
tity of Jews (as over against Christ having the symbolic meaning of identity for
Christians). But Torah never lost or loses the mythos-ethos dual character noted
above.2
1
The question has usually been posed in terms of why the ancient recitals of Israel’s faith in
the mighty acts of God (1 Sam 12:8; Deut 26:5 – 9) seem not to mention Sinai and the giving of
the law. Two answers have been given: the one by the German form critics, notably Gerhard von
Rad and Martin Noth, and the other by the archaeologists and traditionalists, notably the so-
called “Albright school.” Walther Eichrodt has associated himself with the latter: see Eichrodt,
“Covenant and Law”; Sanders, Torah and Canon.
2
See Sanders, “Torah and Paul”; Pasinya, La notion de NOMOS. Wisdom should not be
seen as a separate or third element of Torah, but as a part of both mythos and ethos, esp. the lat-
ter. See von Rad, Wisdom in Israel, and Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School.
Early Judaism (from the sixth century BCE to 70 CE) was not a monolithic
religion. By the third century BCE it was a complex, pluralistic phenomenon. To
simplify the complexity, for the purposes of this chapter, we need but observe
that some denominations in early Judaism emphasized the mythos aspect and
some the ethos aspect of Torah. Jewish pluralism in the period of the Second
Temple (early Judaism) is well attested to in the early Jewish literary complex
represented by the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, Elephantine
Papyri, Tannaitic literature, and others.3
But only two of those Jewish denominations survived the second great
destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, which occurred in 70 CE: the Phari-
sees, who became what we know as rabbinic Judaism, and the Christians of the
early church. They may be viewed as two daughters of the mother faith of early
Judaism, but each going in quite different directions, the Jewish, ethos, and the
Christian, mythos, after 70 CE.
The thesis of this chapter is that those different directions are best understood in
the light of the above diagram. Rabbinic Judaism, following the emphasis of Phari-
saism, stressed the ethos or halakah aspect of Torah, while Christianity emphasized
the mythos or haggadah aspect. Neither, however, emphasized one to the exclusion
of the other: the Torah was for both a mix of gospel and law. The answer, therefore,
to the question of how Christianity and late Judaism (after 70 CE) developed in
such disparate ways must primarily be located in this basic observation of the gos-
pel-law mix of Torah, the central and unifying concept of early Judaism.
But there was another very important factor as well. Some of the sects of early
Judaism, like the Qumran Essenes, firmly believed that the eschaton was near;
others, like the Pharisees, devalued eschatology in large measure. Christianity
believed that it was born in the end time of God introduced by Christ himself,
and, hence, was even more eschatologically oriented than the Essenes! Eschato-
logically oriented Jews of the time believed that God was working in their time a
mighty act of grace, of the sort recited in the old Torah story, but an even greater
one, a sort of final one, that would sort out everything on earth and in history
and inaugurate a quite different kind of life. The difference between the Qumran
For this use of the word ethos, see Neusner, Way of Torah, 7 – 8. For the possible relation of the
pattern here suggested to the “visionary” and “realistic” heritages of Torah, see Hanson, “Jewish
Apocalyptic,” esp. 57.
3
The concept of normative (Pharisaic-Tannaitic) Judaism in the pre-70 CE period, over
against heterodox, aberrant sects, is under steady challenge. The concept received considerable
impetus in the arguments formulated by George Foot Moore in his debates with the old histo-
ry-of-religions school (Judaism in the First Centuries, 3:17 – 22). Following the lead of Saul Lieb
erman, Elias Bickerman, and Morton Smith, others have challenged the Moore synthesis in its
oversimplified forms. Opposite Moore, on a spectrum of opinion on the matter, is now Hengel,
Judaism and Hellenism, who contends that all Judaism from the mid-third century BCE was
“Hellenistic” to a greater or lesser extent, with stirrings of clear opposition in Ben Sira, wisdom
speculation, the Hasidic movement, and perhaps the Essenes. The work of Neusner (see From
Politics to Piety) also challenges the synthesis. A fine, succinct statement of the pluralism in
Judaism prior to 70 CE can be seen in Stone, “Judaism at the Time of Christ.” For a mediating
point of view, see Davies, “Contemporary Jewish Religion.”
sect and Christianity was a more intensive sense of the eschaton among early
Christians than even among the Essenes, because they believed that the new age
had been introduced in its first phase by the coming, passion, and resurrection
of Christ.4
Early Christians stressed the haggadic-story aspect of Torah since it provided
such a strong argument for their claim concerning the authority of Christ and his
place in the work of God as its eschaton.5 This is the basic reason that Torah as
Heilsgeschichte (salvation history) plays a more prominent role in the NT than
does Torah as law.6 Early Christians, like Paul, could correspondingly devalue
Torah as law since halakot, which had been developed for obedience in an ongo-
ing lifestyle, might not all be pertinent in the intense atmosphere of anticipation
of the end. But Torah as story was important to the early churches as they moved
out into the Mediterranean world because of its adaptability to the gentile men-
tality of Hellenistic culture.7
The combination, therefore, of an eschatological faith plus a haggadic view
of Torah distinguished early Christianity from surviving rabbinic Judaism. Here
were two related but different modes of recapitulating Torah, and transcending
the cataclysm of 70 CE. Because early Christians seemed to Jews to overstress the
gospel aspect of Torah (as story of God’s deeds), and because they seemed to insist
that Christ provided a new identity symbol (over against Torah), and because they
seemed to insist that it was necessary to recognize the new act of God in Christ
as being like the ones in the Torah story but somehow climaxing them, rabbinic
Jews were able to resist Christian claims and in doing so deny the validity of the
Christian argument. Torah, which for them had since the second century BCE
been principally a divine guide for obedience and lifestyle, became all the more so
God’s law for their lives in response to Christianity. Even so, Torah for Judaism
has never been only law. It has always been a combination of mythos and ethos.8
Paul’s conversion may be seen, in these terms, as a move on his part from
emphasis on the ethos aspect of Torah to the mythos aspect. This was so much
the case that he seems to dwell considerably on the Torah story of ancient Israel’s
election (Genesis) and to bypass Moses (Exodus to Deuteronomy).9
In an article in the New York Times Magazine of December 23, 1973, Andrew
M. Greeley, head of the Center for the Study of American Pluralism of the
4
See Stendahl, “Introduction,” and Sanders, “Habakkuk in Qumran.”
5
Rössler, Gesetz und Geschichte, sketches the Nachleben of the two aspects of Torah in
early Judaism; see Sanders, “Torah and Paul.”
6
This observation is quite congruous with the programmatic scheme proposed by Han-
son, “Jewish Apocalyptic.” What he calls the “visionary” may be seen as heir to what I call the
mythos heritage in early Judaism; and what he calls “realistic,” heir to what I call the ethos heri-
tage. See Sanders, “Torah and Paul,” for Paul’s uses of the word nomos (Torah). Very important
now to that discussion is the monograph by Pasinya, La notion de NOMOS.
7
8
It is in the light of this development that Judaism’s resistance to developing a full theology
should be seen, as well as the overstated Christian polemics about Jewish “legalism.”
9
See, e. g., Longenecker, Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period, an inadequate treatment
that is nonetheless on the right track.
National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago, wrote, “While

the NT critics probe back toward the basic message and behavior of Jesus, the
‘intertestamental’ – or ‘second temple’ – historians have made considerable prog-
ress toward understanding the fantastically creative religious era of which Jesus
was a part. Judaism during the last century BCE and the first CE was a vigorously
heterogeneous, diversified phenomenon.”10 This is a good way of putting the sit-
uation today.11 The NT is being approached from several directions and from the
standpoints of several types of expertise. Those of us who approach it from the
standpoint of the highly diversified history of early Judaism seem at times to have
more confidence in the possibility of reconstructing the historical Jesus than our
colleagues who approach the NT from other directions; but we need each other.12
II
What was the thinking of Paul (1) about the place of Jesus Christ in the biblical
story and (2) about the place the story of Jesus Christ should have in the Chris-
tian life? The watershed event of the NT is the resurrection of Christ. It is often
said that everything reported of the Christ in the NT is reported in the light of
that final and ultimate event, and this is the principal reason that it is so difficult
to reach behind that event to get a really clear picture of Jesus the Jew. It is also
often said that the Bible, and especially the NT, is the churches’ book. It comes
to us through the faith of the early church in Christ established by the ultimate
event reported in it of the resurrection. Much of it comes to us through the early
worship and instructional materials, especially liturgies, didache, catechism, and
kerygma of the early churches. The Bible is not primarily grist for the historians’
mill. It is primarily a theological library.
And yet the NT is about Jesus Christ. One of the important perspectives on
the NT and Christianity that is brought into sharp focus by the Qumran liter-
ature of the Dead Sea Scrolls is the central place of Jesus Christ in the Christian
faith. The Qumran Essenes also had a great leader whose name we do not know
but whose title appears as the Teacher of Righteousness. Many scholars are of
the opinion that it was the Teacher of Righteousness who shaped the essential
theology of the Qumran sect; many scholars also think that he himself composed
the Thanksgiving Hymns contained on a large scroll discovered in the first cave
(in 1947). One scholar, André Dupont-Sommer of Paris, went so far as to say in
the 1950s that this Teacher could be compared in a number of ways with Jesus
Christ. Dupont-Sommer has claimed that this Teacher not only shaped the theo-
logical thinking of the sect, and gave the sect the key for interpreting the OT
(Law, Prophets, and Psalms) aright in their time, but that he, like Jesus (and only
10
Greeley, “Christmas Biography.” See also Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism; Neusner,
From Politics to Piety; Stone, “Judaism at the Time of Christ.”
11
See also Sanders, “Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter Century.”
12
Sanders, “Vitality of the OT.”
a century before Jesus), was crucified and was believed by the Qumran sect to
have been exalted or resurrected. Dupont-Sommer has retreated from some of
his more extreme views, but his own research on the life of this Teacher rendered
the great service of giving us a new shade of light for viewing the place of Jesus
Christ in the NT.
By outside count, the Teacher is mentioned some twenty times in the Qum-
ran scrolls. In most of the manuscripts he is not mentioned at all, and it is highly
doubtful that he was either crucified or was believed to have been resurrected.
By contrast, the whole of the NT is about Jesus Christ, so much so that counting
the times he is mentioned would be pointless. Also, by contrast, was it even pos-
sible to speak of Christianity in those days, or today, without mention of Jesus
Christ, indeed, without putting him precisely in the center of what Christianity
means? The pagan writers of the Hellenistic and Roman world, whenever speak-
ing favorably, neutrally, or unfavorably of Christianity, always addressed them-
selves to what they understood of the central figure of Jesus. As Oscar Cullmann
pointed out in 1955, in response to Dupont-Sommer’s early work on the Teacher,
“Would it be possible to describe primitive Christianity without naming Christ?
To ask the question is to have answered it.”13 There are important passages in
Philo, Josephus, Pliny, Dio Chrysostom, and Hippolytus on the Essenes, but
never once do they mention the Teacher of Righteousness. By contrast, there is
no treatment of Christianity by any writer of the Hellenistic or Roman world,
pro or con, without mention of the centrality of Jesus Christ in the new faith,
even in the earliest such notices in Josephus, Tacitus, and Suetonius.
All this but underscores the point that the NT is about Jesus Christ. But what
does that mean? What does it mean that Jesus Christ is central to the NT and the
Christian faith? Many Christian commentators and theologians in the two thou-
sand years of our history have taken this observation so seriously as to assert that
Christ figures also in the OT. This was affirmed as recently as 1934 by the Ger-
man OT scholar Wilhelm Vischer, who wrote a book on the witness of the OT
to Christ.14 He even suggested that in Genesis 32 it was not an angel with whom
Jacob wrestled but Jesus Christ himself. To make such assertions, of course, is to
go about as far as one can to de-historicize Jesus and to deal with the centrality
of his person in an exclusively mythical or theological manner. We cannot do this
ourselves, of course, but it is important that at times the church has engaged in
just that sort of exegesis of the whole Bible – even if we cannot.
The word “Christ” was originally a title. It is based on the Greek word mean-
ing “anointed,” or “Messiah,” and it stems from the earliest Christian efforts to
relate Jesus to the OT and to show his authority therein.15 Much of the NT is
apologetic in the sense of wanting to demonstrate the authority of Jesus Christ.
And the only authority that the NT writers consciously acknowledged as author-
itative was the OT, or the Torah, Prophets, and Psalms. It was the conviction of
13
Cullmann, “Significance of the Qumran Texts,” esp. 225.
14
Vischer, Witness of the OT to Christ.
15
Vermes, Jesus the Jew.
the early church that Jesus was God’s long-awaited Messiah, the anointed one to
come to bring salvation to his people.
And this brings us to the observation that the name Jesus itself means “sal-
vation.” Its OT form is Joshua, meaning “Yahweh [or God] saves.” Matthew, in
his account of the annunciation to Joseph (1:20 – 21), reports that the angel said,
“Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is con-
ceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a son, and you shall call his name
Jesus, for he [God] will save his people from their sins.”
As Frederick Grant has observed, Jesus was a common name in the first cen-
tury, one that Josephus attributes to nineteen different persons in his writings.16
For parents to name a son Joshua was an expression of their faith in the saving
power of God for his people. And I think we can be confident that Jesus’ earthly
name was indeed Jesus. But the NT writers found in it a far greater significance;
as Matthew asserts, it was not Mary and Joseph who bestowed the name but an
angel with authority from the heavenly courts.
James Barr, in a book titled The Bible in the Modern World, claims that the
Bible is “soteriologically functional.”17 He means by that a number of important
things, but the point he makes for us today is that the whole Bible functions in
the believing communities to effect salvation; this is and always has been its job
description for synagogue and church in their recitation and interpretation of it
through the ages. This is to speak of the nature and function of canon. The Bible
as the churches’ book is not primarily a historical document (though I am among
those who insist that it is full of historical fact, that is not the point). It is primar-
ily a canonical document, functioning in the believing communities as canon to
assist the ongoing believing communities to seek answers in their times to the
questions Who are we? and What are we to do? In dialogue with believers, the
Bible as canon addresses itself to the questions of identity and obedience – and in
that order – first identity and then lifestyle. To know who we are and to act like
it is to experience and engage in salvation.
In Hebrew, and to a limited extent in biblical Greek, the words “salvation”
and “righteousness” mean the same thing in certain contexts. Paul claims that
Jesus Christ is God’s righteousness and God’s salvation for humankind, and
when he does so he is saying the same thing in each case. In certain contexts in
the Bible, both salvation and righteousness mean a saving act or a victory of God.
And the claim of the NT is that Jesus Christ is God’s righteousness or salvation
for us all. He is our salvation in that sense. And, according to Paul, he is our righ-
teousness as well. Paul says both things and means the same thing by each. Jesus
is God’s victory for us.
But how are we to understand such biblical claims? What do they mean to
us? I think we can suggest answers to these questions by looking closely at
Rom 9:30 – 10:4 and then at Phil 2:1 – 13.
16
Grant, “Jesus Christ.”
17
Barr, Bible in the Modern World, 30 – 34.
III
In Rom 9 – 11 Paul takes up what surely for him was the most important and
delicate question of his theological thought, the work of righteousness or sal-
vation by God in Christ and the response of Jews and gentiles to that work. As
Johannes Munck has shown in his pivotal study of these chapters, Paul accepts
the fact that Jews rejected that work by asserting that they would later say yes
after gentiles had responded to Christ; and he does so by showing that even the
early rejection of Jesus by the Jews was part of the story or history of salvation.18
Unless one is a close student of the Bible one can easily misunderstand Paul here
and be gravely offended by him. It was a great frustration for the early church
that Judaism, by and large, did not accept the Christ; and Paul in these chap-
ters exhibits that frustration in a glaring light. Paul was, of course, wrong in his
schema, for Judaism has not, after two thousand years, acceded to the superses-
sion of Christianity any more than Christianity has acceded to the supersession
of Islam.19 And the reason is not that Jews do not read the NT the way we do,
but that they do not read the OT the way Paul and early Christians did. The
frustration for Paul did not stem so much from a lack of affirmation of Christ by
the majority of Jews of his day, but that he could not get them to read the Torah
and the Prophets correctly, that is, in the way he read them. For he was certain
that if they would review the Torah story with him in the way he viewed it, they
would then accept the Christ.
To join Paul at this point in his thinking, it is necessary to read this section of
Romans, as I think it is necessary to read most of the NT, in the light of the way
the writer engages in midrash of the Torah and the Prophets. Midrash means sim-
ply the manner in which one reads passages of the OT, especially to render them
relevant or functional. This is not the place to go into the exciting subdiscipline
of biblical studies we call comparative midrash, but I cannot imagine a period of
greater excitement in biblical studies than the present one because of some of the
newer emphases in comparative midrash and canonical criticism.
It was Paul’s conviction that if one read the Torah story emphasizing it as a
story of God’s works of salvation and righteousness for ancient Israel, then one
18
Munck, Christ and Israel. Munck’s work, which first appeared in German in 1956, influ-
enced Krister Stendahl who wrote “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the
West.” A vigorous rejoinder to Stendahl is in Käsemann, Perspectives on Paul, 60 – 78. Stendahl
tries to move away from Lutheran tradition in understanding Rom 9 – 11 while Käsemann insists
that the issue is indeed justification by faith and that Stendahl has not succeeded. (See Stendahl’s
counter-response, Paul among Jews and Gentiles, 129 – 32). I prefer not to enter that debate, nor
the older one about whether “righteousness” in Paul means “right relation” or “act of God.” See
Ziesler, Meaning of Righteousness, for an emphasis on the first meaning. In the NT and in Paul,
it can have both meanings, especially in this section in Romans. Käsemann says (Perspectives on
Paul, 63): “l would even say it is impossible to understand the Bible in general or Paul in partic-
ular without the perspective of salvation history.” See Davies’s comments on Munck in Davies,
Christian Origins and Judaism, 179 – 98.
19
This observation I owe to an oral presentation by the late Thomas O’Dea in Jerusalem at
the Ecumenical Institute, Tantur, in 1973.
could not escape seeing that God had wrought another salvation, and committed
another righteousness, in Christ just like the ones of old but an even greater one!
In order to understand Paul here, one must recall the full concept of Torah.
The Torah is primarily a story and not primarily a set of laws. There are indeed
several codes of law embedded in the Torah, but they derive their authority from
the story – not the story from the law. And that story is of the mighty acts of
God, something like a divine odyssey,20 in creating a people for himself, electing
the patriarchs and matriarchs, freeing slaves from Egypt, guiding the refugees
through the desert, conducting them across the Jordan, and leading them to vic-
tory in settling Canaan. If the final shape of the Torah had gone on to include its
Davidic aspect, then we can be sure that its climax would have been David’s con-
quest of Jerusalem, perhaps even Solomon’s access to the throne. In fact, there
is reason to think that a very early nationalist form of the Torah story extended
that far (the Yahwist tradition). But, interestingly enough, not only is the Davidic
aspect left to the section of the canon called Prophets, but so is the conquest part
of the story. The book of Joshua is in the Prophets, not the Torah.21
But whether the word Torah signifies the Pentateuch only or all authorita-
tive tradition, it does not primarily mean law; but, as the rabbis know very well
indeed, it means primarily revelation. In fact, it came to mean Judaism – the
whole covenant concept of God’s relation to his people. When ancient Israel lost
their land and their temple, in fact all of their religious and national symbols,
to the Assyrians (and then to the Babylonians in the Iron Age), Judaism was
born out of these ashes because the concept of Torah was both indestructible and
portable. It could be taken either on scrolls or in memory to whatever foreign
land where Jews lived in diaspora. Torah means the Jewish gospel which, in dia-
logue with the ongoing believing communities of Jews wherever they might be,
gives Jews both identity and a basic understanding of obedience. Torah alone is
responsible for the twenty-five hundred years of survival power Jews and Juda-
ism have. Being indestructible and portable it provides the mythic power for life
that a dispersed and beleaguered people have had.
If one studies Jewish midrash long enough, that is, the Jewish insistence that
the Torah is relevant to all ages and all situations (for questions of identity and
lifestyle), then one comes to appreciate the fact that no other people had anything
quite like Torah.22 In the Gospel of John, Jesus said to the Jews that they search
20
The suggestion of the divine odyssey is based on the actual canonical shape of the biblical
story. It is close to another suggestion by Barr (Bible in the Modern World, 179n11) who speaks
of God’s own history. Since a major characteristic of the OT is its monotheizing tendency, Yah-
wism was highly adaptable (syncretistic) and Yahweh, himself, a growing God. See Eissfeldt,
“El and Yahweh,” 35 – 37; Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, 3 – 75; and esp. Mendenhall,
Tenth Generation, 198 – 214.
21
Sanders, Torah and Canon, 36 – 45. In 1 and 2 Chronicles, the Torah story is retold from
a Davidic point of view in what was apparently an effort to counter the thoroughly “Mosaic”
Torah (Pentateuch); see North, “The Chronicler,” 403.
22
This is the opinion of such classicists and students of Hellenistic rhetoric as Henry A.
Fischel. See his Rabbinic Literature and Greco-Roman Philosophy.
the Scriptures because in them they think they find eternal life. Such statements
and affirmations can be found elsewhere in rabbinic and apocryphal Jewish liter-
ature.23 The ancient traditions that make up Torah proved their true power and
worth in the sixth century BCE destruction of Israel and Jerusalem. It was those
traditions that gave the survivors, the remnants all over the Babylonian and Per-
sian empires, the power for life to survive as Jews and not lose their identity to
the dominant cultures of the age, that is, not assimilate. And it was in that event
of exile and restoration that some of Israel’s early such traditions were shaped
together and interwoven in the experience of exile to become what we basically
call Torah, that is, the Pentateuch, the canon within the canon of Judaism. Torah,
as a general term, goes on to mean all the later oral traditions and interpretations
of the early Torah including the Talmud, and as we have seen, came to mean
Judaism itself.
To put it another way, Torah was by the time of Christ and Paul the symbol
par excellence, incomparable, indestructible, and incorruptible, of Judaism. It
meant Judaism’s identity and way of life. This is still the case today.
Torah is concerned first and foremost with salvation and righteousness, the
two words mentioned earlier about Christ. But, and this must be understood
aright, it is first about God’s righteousness, or better, his righteousnesses, and
then about the sort of righteousness of which humankind or Israel might be
capable.24 It is first mythos, and then ethos. It is gospel and then law – both
completely intertwined, inextricable one from the other. There is no such thing
in the concept of Torah as law without the story. It simply would not exist; it
would have no base of authority or authenticity or even existence. Torah is first
and foremost a story about the mighty acts of God in creating a covenant people
for himself; it is then, and immediately thereupon, a paradigm for understanding
how Israel should live from age to age in varying circumstances and in differ-
ing contexts. It is first about God’s righteousness and immediately thereupon
about humanity’s putative righteousness or duty to pursue. When Deuteron-
omy (16:20) says, “Righteousness, righteousness shalt thou pursue,” it does not
only mean to obey the laws of the book of Deuteronomy, it means constantly in
all circumstances, in all and varying situations and contexts, to contemplate the
Torah story of God’s great love for humankind, how he chose a motley crew of
slaves in Egypt to escape from there so they could go forth to bless the world.
The laws in Deuteronomy, then, are a paradigm for how to arrive at answers to
the pursuit of God’s righteousness in particular situations and at particular times.
It is not that Israel should imitate God. That would be impossible. Rather, the
story of what God did suggests faithful human action. The Torah story is first
and foremost adaptable, like a paradigm, to assist in properly conjugating the
23
John 5:39. See also Sir 45:5; Sayings of the Fathers (Abot) 2.8 and 6.7; Rom 7:10; Gal 3:21;
and Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.
24
The mighty or gracious acts of God in creating Israel are called “righteousness of God” in
1 Sam 12:7; Mic 6:5; Dan 9:16; cf. Acts 2:11. See Sanders, Torah and Canon, 15 – 27; and Neusner,
Way of Torah, 9 – 26.
verbs of God’s continuing presence and activity in the world (Deut 4:9). If par-
ticular answers of a given moment in turn get frozen, then a prophet – prophets
precisely like Jeremiah and Jesus – turns up to remind us that the Torah once
more must be internalized and contemplated, as on the heart and inside person-
hood.
Now whether or not Paul was right in his schema about Jewish rejection
and then eventual acceptance of God’s work in Christ, he shows sheer genius at
points in his argument in Rom 9 – 11 and especially at 10:4 and 10:10. In 10:4 Paul
says the following: “For Christ is the telos of the Torah righteousness-wise for
all who believe.” Telos means end in the sense of finis, but it also means climax,
main point, or purpose.25 Paul in this statement summarizes the central belief of
the early church: God had committed another righteousness in Christ, that the
Christ event was like the exodus event, or the wanderings-in-the-desert event, or
the conquest event, and like them was a mighty act of God. It was different only
in the fact that it was climactic to them; it brought all those chapters of the Torah
story to completion, fulfillment, and made sense of them all. Paul in this whole
section from the beginning of Rom 9 has been saying that to concentrate on the
righteousness, or ethics, of which humankind or Judaism is capable, can be to
miss the main point of the Torah story, namely, the righteousness of salvation or
mighty acts of God in the Torah story.
Now, marvellously and wonderfully, the words for righteousness, both in
Hebrew and in Greek, can mean either human righteousness or divine righ-
teousness. The Greek word dikaiosunē can mean either God’s right relation with
humanity or humanity’s right relation with God. Hebrew tsedakah has the same
wonderful ambiguity except that the Hebrew has the very concrete connotation
of a specific act, either mighty act of God or act of obedience of humankind.
In other words, Paul is here saying if you really have in mind the Torah story
and that point of view then you can discern the righteousness of God. If you
really know the Torah and know what righteousness of God is, then you know
that Christ is precisely that kind of act of God. And you know also that in Christ
God really committed an ultimate kind of righteousness, he came all the way
this time. The God who had crouched down into the huts and hovels of dispos-
sessed slaves in Egypt and led them across the Reed Sea to freedom is the same
God who crouched down into the cradle in Bethlehem. Both acts of God are of
the same order, that is, they are both Torah-story kinds of acts of God. Paul says
that if all Jews would read the Torah in that way, concentrating on God’s mighty
acts, then they could clearly see that “Christ is the climax of the Torah for all
who believe in the righteousness of God.” I think this is one of the things he is
saying in Rom 10:4.
25
The position taken here is close to that of Davies in Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 147 – 76;
for a more precise statement of my own position, as well as for a review of scholarship on the
question of Paul and the law, see Sanders, “Torah and Paul.”
IV
Some people wanted to add to the Torah story back in OT times. Jeremiah twice
(16:14 – 15 and 31:31 – 34) said he was quite sure that the events of his day, about
the destruction of Jerusalem and God’s regathering the exiles, would be added
like another chapter to the Torah story. Ezekiel was quite sure of it, and also the
Second Isaiah; and the Chronicler rewrote it, shortly thereafter elevating David
above Moses. But the final edition of the basic Torah itself only includes the parts
up to Moses’ long sermon on the east bank of the Jordan (Genesis to Deuter-
onomy). That was so that Jews, if they happened to be scattered, would not feel
they had to change and become something else just because they were not living
in Palestine. And that is one reason, I am sure, Judaism has lasted so long, these
twenty-five hundred years, because the basic Torah, the Pentateuch, in effect says
that if you happen to be wandering and in dispersion, like Abraham, Jacob, and
Moses, you do not have to fret about not being Jews. You do not have to be on a
particular piece of real estate to be identified with the people God chose to bless
the whole world.26
Now what we can see from the point of view of the divine odyssey is that
the NT really makes this quite bold and scandalous claim that in Christ God
committed another salvation or righteousness, and that it should be added to the
Torah story as a climax, as the ultimate chapter of the whole story or odyssey. To
put it another way, while the arguments and debates in the churches of the sec-
ond century CE, spurred by the heretic Marcion, were on the point of whether
or not the OT was biblical, the great concern of the whole early church of the
first century (including most of the NT writers) was to try to show that the New
Testament-Christ story was biblical. Most of Judaism said no.
But the argument of the NT and the early church was that God’s divine odys-
sey did not stop with David in Jerusalem. In rhetorical terms they put it this
way: If God could go with Abram from Ur of the Chaldees to Palestine, down
to Egypt, out of Egypt with a motley crew of refugee slaves, through the desert,
conquer Palestine with Joshua and take Jerusalem with David – why not Bethle-
hem? After all it is only five miles down there out the Jaffa Gate on the old road
that runs by Rachel’s tomb! If God could go all the way from Ur to Jerusalem by
way of Egypt and the Sinai desert, do you not suppose he could make it another
five miles to Bethlehem? And if he was with Joseph in prison, and granted his
presence in the huts and hovels of slaves in Egypt with Moses, do you not sup-
pose he could crouch down into the cradle of a Jew baby in Bethlehem?
Paul’s point, though he himself never refers to the Bethlehem or birth-in-
fancy traditions, would be that you just do not know what God has already been
through if you think he could not get into the cradle and onto the cross, if it was
his mind to do so, and on his own agenda to bring righteousness and salvation
to the world. Paul was so excited by his belief that God had committed a new,
26
mighty act in Christ, that he just could not understand why everybody did not
see it the way he did. For Paul, as for Jeremiah, it was a question of how you
think.27
What we have to understand is that in Hellenistic Greek, as in biblical Hebrew
(and in other Mediterranean languages of antiquity too) the heart was the seat
of thinking. The saying, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he,” is the key here.
It is a question of identity. That is, whatever story completely captivates you is
the way you are going to see life and perceive problems and look for solutions
to them. So, as Jeremiah and Deuteronomy and nearly everybody else in the
OT insists, the person with the true Torah-identity is one who loves the Lord
his or her God with all his or her heart, first and foremost. And to love God
in this manner, as Deut 6:5 and following go on to say, is to fill your heart (we
would say head) and surround yourself with this story. This is the most import-
ant thing of all. That way you know who you are, no matter where you may be
or what problems you face. And the story is one of God’s righteousness first, and
then one of how, in pursuing his “righteousness,” that is, pondering the story of
God’s passionate love for humankind, one can work out one’s own obedience,
or the church can work out its program in obedience – in whatever age or in
whatever circumstance.
In this view, then, it is a mistake to take the specific legal codes embedded
in the Torah story, in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, as absolute laws
valid for all time. For Paul, as for Jeremiah and some others in the Bible, they
are not the most important point about the Torah at all, precisely because obe-
dience has to be worked out by the believer in God’s righteousness who studies
the problems he or she faces in the light of the story of those righteousnesses
and tries to be obedient in that situation. For Paul, the specific points of the
law, if overstressed or if absolutized, were the surest way to overlook the Torah
story itself, that is, God’s righteousness. So Paul makes a big distinction between
concentration on the sort of righteousness of which humankind is capable and
the righteousness of God that is the heart of the Torah story. This is precisely
what he is saying elsewhere in Romans and Galatians, and when he appears to
be anti-legalistic. But where the church and Christianity have sadly gone amiss
is in thinking that all Judaism was therefore legalistic. This is an immense mis-
take. Every Pharisee (1) knew that the Torah was about God’s righteousness. But
it was the special vocation of Pharisaism, the most liberal denomination in the
Judaism of the time, to try to find ways, in the light of the specific expression of
the will of God on Mount Sinai, in the legal codes of the OT, to discern through
them the will of God for first-century Judaism.28 And (2) given that point of
27
Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind, has shown how Paul’s OT model for his own
vocation was Jeremiah.
28
So Pharisaism in developing the so-called oral tradition or Mishneh-Torah understood
the later halakot to take precedence over the biblical stipulations. Another way Pharisaism had
of rendering the specific laws adaptable was by a shift in hermeneutics, between 70 BCE and
70 CE, from peshat (contextual meaning) to the rapidly developing rules, from those of Hillel in
the first century BCE to those of Ishmael at the end of the first century CE, following the rise
view on the Torah and that emphasis, no Pharisee and very few really good Jews
knowledgeable in Torah would accept the church’s and Paul’s essential argument
that a cradle in Bethlehem and a cross on Golgotha constituted the same sort of
mighty act as the exodus from Egypt. In fact, I dare say that if we had lived then
and were good members of the first-century Jewish church to the same measure
we are today, by dynamic analogy we would have felt the same way as did the
good Presbyterians, I mean Pharisees, of first-century Palestine: We would have
looked on the idea of additions to the old Bible very skeptically indeed!
This makes it all the more remarkable that so many people in the Hellenistic
world, including not a few Jews out in the eastern and middle Mediterranean
lands, accepted the point of view Paul here outlines and did believe with their
heart in God’s righteousness and did confess with their lips the salvation thereof,
as he says in Rom 10:10. Paul believed that if people would look at the Torah
story from the standpoint of God’s activity and journey, they would believe in
and confess Jesus Christ as Lord, or Kyrios.
Kyrios was an important title for Christ in Paul’s mind. And nowhere in his
letters does it figure more prominently than in the Song of Christ that Paul
recites in his epistle to the church at Philippi. I am of the opinion that nowhere
in the Bible (except perhaps Mic 6:1 – 8) do we find a clearer statement of the
crucial relation between mythos and ethos, or between the Torah-Christ story
and the kind of life of obedience the Christian should try to live – that is, the
relation between the Christian identity and the Christian lifestyle or between
God’s righteousness and humanity’s possible righteousness or, again, in Lutheran
terms, between faith and works, than the way Paul presents this famous hymn
in Phil 2:1 – 13.29
In this passage not only does Paul provide a very vivid picture of divine righ-
teousness, but he also, I think, suggests what the foil to that righteousness would
be. The hymn celebrates the work of Christ as humility. One of the best ways we
have of making clear what we mean when we make a point, such as Paul is here
trying to make, is to present a foil to that point or to clarify what the opposite
of that point would be. And in this passage he uses three words: one intrinsic to
the hymn itself in v. 6 and two in his introductory remarks before it, in v. 3, as
antonyms of what he means by Christ’s humility. He says, “Do nothing from
selfishness or conceit” in v. 3 to make clear what is meant in the first strophe of
of the concept of verbal or literal inspiration. Once the concept of verbal or literal inspiration
became accepted the (often irrelevant or impossible) plain meaning of a law could be bypassed
by focusing on a single word or letter within the law or sentence. Once the sentence structure of
Torah was thus broken down, it received new life in its adaptability to the problems faced in the
Hellenistic world, the greatest challenge Torah had ever faced. See Sanders, “Text and Canon;
Concepts and Method.”
29
See Sanders, “Dissenting Deities,” where what follows was argued in technical terms.
the hymn by Christ’s not counting equality with God as a thing to be grasped.
The word in the hymn itself is harpagmos, translated in the RSV as “a thing to
be grasped.” It signifies a prize of war or a position to be won, and Paul specifies
that equality with God is what the Christ figure never sought. The two words
in v. 3 further clarify the negative quality as eritheia and kenodoxia, translated as
selfishness and conceit or ambition. These express what the motives would be
for seeking equality with God. And these are precisely the motives of the fallen
angels who, according to Gen 6 and Jewish literature widespread in the first cen-
tury CE, descended from heaven, or from the heavenly council, to set up a king-
dom to rival that of God. In other words, Paul signals for his readers at Philippi
a story they would have known very well indeed about another kind of descent
from the heavenly heights, that of the fallen angels, as the opposite of what the
hymn he recites indicates as the mind of Christ, or the motive of the Christ when
he descended from on high. Christ’s motive was humility, pure humility, seek-
ing nothing for himself but to do the will of God. He, like the fallen angels,
descended, but for entirely different reasons. We ourselves know of the myth of
the fallen angels from the pre-Christian Jewish writings called the Book of Enoch,
the Secrets of Enoch, the Life of Adam and Eve, and the Dead Sea Scroll Essene
work called Ages of Creation. And Paul, in using these words, aptly describes
their motivation for descending from the heavenly heights. They fully and con-
sciously intended to set up a government and realm in opposition to God. We
even know from these writings some of the names of the fallen angels: Azazel,
Samjaza, Satan, Jeqon, Asbeel, Gadreel, Penemue, Kasdeja, Kasbeel, and others.
Now, in the picture that Paul is here painting for the congregation at Philippi,
these angels, otherwise called sons of god or sons of heaven, would have origi-
nally been, like the Christ figure, members of God’s heavenly council. In other
words, Paul says, there have been two descents from the heavenly heights to
earth, the one by these fallen angels out of selfishness and ambition, and the
other by the Christ figure out of humility and obedience to God.
Now, in this section Paul five times uses a form of the verb phroneō, to have
a mindset, or have a mentality, a way of thinking, or to use the more biblical
expression, to have a certain kind of thinking in the heart. “Have this mind in
you,” Paul says; think this way. It is not that we can ourselves do what the Christ
figure himself did, or even that we can acquire the Christ’s mind, I think; but
rather, Paul bids us to have the story of the humble descent of the Christ figure
as our mentality. That is the kind of thinking in the heart we should do.
The story itself is beautifully simple and simply beautiful. The Christ fig-
ure out of humility descended from the heavenly council to earth in an act of
self-emptying and servanthood, taking on human form. His humility extended
all the way to death on the cross, says Paul. In other words, not only did he
descend to earth to take humility upon himself, he even descended to the chtho-
nian regions, or the bottom story of the three-story universe, the region where
death obtains and Mot and Abaddon reign supreme. That is the heaven-to-earth-
and-hell trip described in the first strophe of the hymn (Phil 2:6 – 8). The second
strophe describes the hell-to-earth-to-heaven return trip (2:9 – 11). But this time
the active agent is the high God himself: “God has highly exalted him.” The pic-
ture here is thrilling indeed, for we see the humble Christ figure lifted by God
out of the depths of death and set upon a coronation route that wends its way
through the three-story universe back up to the heavenly heights. Two things
here are important to note. Along the parade route every knee, in heaven, on
earth, and under the earth, bends and every tongue confesses that Christ is Lord,
or Kyrios. And who are those who kneel along the route? Surely not only all
humanity, for it clearly says every knee in heaven and under the earth as well.
No, here we see all of those fallen angels also on bended knee acknowledging the
reign of the humble Christ figure whom they had left behind and whom they
surely had totally discounted. Their descent was for nought, his for the glory of
God the Father. They who had descended to gain a kingdom now must kneel in
homage to him who descended in humility.
What does Paul say then is the relationship between God’s righteousness and
our obedience or putative righteousness? It is clearly not in imitation of Christ.
As Ernst Käsemann has rightly said, that cannot be, for we cannot get up to
the heavenly heights in the first place to make any kind of descent, much less a
humble descent. Nor do I think it can be simply acquiring the mind or mental-
ity of the Christ figure. Would not that be also a form of harpagmos? No, the
relation between mythos and ethos, or gospel and law, or the Christian story and
our obedience, is rather that of so filling our heart and mind with this story, this
Torah story completed by the righteousness of God in Christ, that this becomes
the way we think. This is surely what the Shemaʿ in Deut 6 means by loving the
Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and might, to which the NT adds “all our
mind” (meaning the same thing as heart). This Torah story should be upon our
heart as Deuteronomy and Jeremiah said.
This is our access to the thoughts of God, which Isaiah said are as high above
our thoughts as the heaven is above the earth (Isa 55:8 – 9). We cannot think his
thoughts, says Paul, but we can believe in his righteousness. We can tell and
retell the words of this story with our children, and speak of them when we sit
in our houses, when we walk by the way, when we lie down, and when we rise
up and make them as a sign upon our hands and as frontlets between our eyes
and as mailboxes on our doorposts (Deut 6:7 – 9). This story is our topos (place)
on this earth. It is our identity. And out of that identity, constantly and dynam-
ically told and retold, considered and reconsidered, we go on, as Paul says, to
work out our obedience with fear and trembling (Phil 2:12) in the context of
our situation and of the problems we face. To think that way, says Paul, to have
eyes to see like that and ears to hear like that, is to have God at work among us
both to will and to work his good pleasure. Not our good pleasure, thank God,
not our agendas and programs, but to know, even in our limited lives and in our
circumscribed existence, that God can and does use us to work out that plan of
salvation and reconciliation he has had in mind since he first called Abraham out
of Ur in Babylonia.
And this brings us back to the first verse of Phil 2. There Paul uses four
expressions describing the enabling power of God for living lives of obedience
and for working out the putative righteousness of which we in our limited and
frail condition are capable. “So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any
incentive of love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy . . .”
All these nouns: encouragement, incentive, participation, and the phrase “affec-
tion and sympathy,” are divine gifts available to us if we have this mind of the
Torah-Christ story in us. All of them signify God’s mercy and grace available to
us in Christ, in God’s agapē or love, and in the Spirit. The word participation,
among them, stands out as indicative of what Paul is saying. The word in Greek
is koinonia – participation or fellowship. This is the link, the bridge, the means of
drawing upon the power of God to live lives in accord with his will and pursuant
to his righteousness. We can participate in that power through having this Torah
story, which Christ has brought to its full force, in our heart and mind.
VI
So it is just as important, if we take Paul seriously, to know the righteousness

of God prior to Christ as it is to know God’s righteousness in Christ.30 For to
know the Torah story aright, says Paul, we can also know that Christ is God’s
final righteousness. It is not so much that Christ reveals God as it is that God
revealed Christ. And it is really not a question of faith and works, because these
still emphasize salvation by humankind’s faith or by humankind’s work. What
the Torah-Christ story says is that God has worked for us in this divine odyssey.
Nor is it that Christ was God’s last righteousness. Not at all. The canon, this full
Christian-Torah story, is the paradigm God has given us so that we too can con-
jugate the verbs of his activity today and know his participation in our lives now
and recognize a righteousness when we see one.
For us gentiles, Christ is our entryway into membership in God’s Israel, says
Paul. But Paul makes it abundantly clear that “disobedience” on the part of
Israel, or Judaism, or failure to recognize the Christ as the climactic chapter of
the Torah story, does not excommunicate them. Paul maintains his perspective
here quite consistently. Jews are already in Israel, or in the Israel of God as he
put it in Galatians (6:16); and since they are, they ought to read the Torah story
the way he, also a Jew, reads it so that they can recognize Christ as a true addi-
tion, nay, as the true climactic chapter. But even if they do not, God can and does
use their “obduracy” or lack of recognition of Christ, says Paul, to work out
his overall scheme begun in Abraham without ever cutting them out of the true
Israel. It is we gentiles who must enter Israel by the door Christ has provided,
not the Jews.
I would make several comments on this point in closing. (1) There is nothing
wrong in continuing to hope, as Paul did, that Jews acknowledge the work of
God in Christ so long as we do not go on then to insist that they “become Chris-
30
See Sanders, “Torah and Paul,” for an understanding of Paul’s apparently ambiguous at-
titude toward Torah.
tian.” It is we who have in Christ become Israelites, so to speak, says Paul, not
the other way around. (2) If we really want Jews, or anyone, to recognize that
God committed a righteousness also in Christ, then we must do two things: (a) as
Christians, take the trouble to know who we are; and (b) try to live attractive
lives reflective of the passionate love of God for humankind instead of practicing
prejudice against Jews or Muslims. This does not mean we all live the same kind
of life. It means, in my way of thinking, that we must concentrate on broadening
our theology. This is the work that needs doing. It means that God is neither Jew
nor Christian nor Muslim. He is God and he loves us all passionately and equally
well. If he has chosen an Israel (or more than one?) it is to use as instruments
of his blessing humankind. This emerging theology is what I call monotheizing
pluralism. But names and rubrics are not important. What is important is to
regain a sense of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called the reality of God. The heart
of the biblical message is not so much that we should believe in God but that
God believes in us.31
We have tried to explore Paul’s thinking about the place of Jesus Christ in the
biblical story and his thinking about the place the story of Jesus Christ should
have in our lives today.
What, then, is the relation between the Torah-Christ story of God’s righteous-
nesses and the obligation laid upon us by it to pursue them, or as Paul says, to
work out the gift of our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil 2:12 – 13)? What
is the connection, in other words, between mythos and ethos in Paul’s think-
ing? We should be careful not to assume that we can have in us the mind of
God. As Isaiah says, God’s ways are as high above ours as heaven is above earth:
his thoughts are not ours (Isa 55:8 – 9). They are strangely and wonderfully of
another order. What I think Paul suggests, however, is in essence what Deuter-
onomy had already suggested, that our hearts or minds be crammed full of this
story of God’s humble condescensions to live and work among us. The Greek
metanoia, often translated “repentance,” means a change of mind, actually, a
change of head in modern pop idiom. It indicates a real change of identity, a
basic, fundamental shift from one way of thinking to another. Kenneth Boulding
put it well when he suggested that to receive the biblical message is to experience
a restructuring of our whole mental apparatus.32 The Bible uses the metaphors
of rebirth and conversion to express the radical nature of attaining this Torah-
Christ mind in us.
Peter Berger said in an oft-quoted speech, delivered at the September 1971
Tenth Anniversary meeting of the Conference on Church Union (COCU) in
Denver, that the churches must remember in their dialogues with other faiths and
philosophies that they, too, have something to say: The authority of the churches
is that they have a story to tell. That story is the Torah-Christ story.
31
See Robinson, Cross in the OT, 47.
32
Boulding, The Image, esp. the introduction.
Bibliography
Barr, James. The Bible in the Modern World. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
Boulding, Kenneth E. The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1956.
Cross, Frank M. Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion
of Israel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973.
Cullmann, Oscar. “The Significance of the Qumran Texts for Research into the Beginnings
of Christianity.” JBL 74 (1955) 213 – 26.
Davies, W. D. Christian Origins and Judaism. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962.
Davies, W. D. “Contemporary Jewish Religion.” In Peake’s Commentary on the Bible,
edited by Matthew Black and Harold H. Rowley, 705 – 11. London: Nelson, 1962.
Davies, W. D. Paul and Rabbinic Judaism. 4th ed. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980.
Eichrodt, Walther. “Covenant and Law.” Int 20 (1966) 302 – 21.
Eissfeldt, Otto. “El and Yahweh.” JSS 1 (1956) 25 – 37.
Fischel, Henry A. Rabbinic Literature and Greco-Roman Philosophy. Leiden: Brill, 1973.
Grant, Frederick. “Jesus Christ.” In IDB 2:869 – 96.
Greeley, Andrew M. “A Christmas Biography.” New York Times Magazine (Decem-
ber 23, 1973) 8:28 – 30.
(1971) 31 – 58.
Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the
Early Hellenistic Period. Translated by John Bowden. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974.
Käsemann, Ernst. Perspectives on Paul. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971.
Longenecker, Richard N. Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period. Grand Rapids: Eerd-
mans, 1975.
Mendenhall, George E. The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition. Bal-
timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
Moore, George Foot. Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The Age of the
Tannaim. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927 – 30.
Munck, Johannes. Christ and Israel: An Interpretation of Romans 9 – 11. Philadelphia: For-
tress, 1967.
Munck, Johannes. Paul and the Salvation of Mankind. Richmond: John Knox, 1959.
Neusner, Jacob. From Politics to Piety: The Emergence of Pharisaic Judaism. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972.
1970.
North, Robert. “The Chronicler: 1 – 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah.” In The Jerome Bib-
lical Commentary, edited by Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Roland E.
Murphy, 1:402 – 38. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
Pasinya, Laurent Monsengwo. La notion de NOMOS dans le pentateuque grec. AnBib 52.
Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1973.
Robinson, H. Wheeler. The Cross in the Old Testament. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1955.
Rössler, Dietrich. Gesetz und Geschichte: Untersuchungen zur Theologie der jüdischen
Apokalyptik und der pharisäischen Orthodoxie. 2nd ed. WMANT 3. Neukirchen: Neu-
kirchener Verlag, 1962.
531 – 60. New York: Doubleday, 1976. [Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text,
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109 – 48.
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Sanders, James A. “The Vitality of the Old Testament: Three Theses.” USQR 21 (1966)
161 – 84.
Stendahl, Krister. “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West.”
HTR 56 (1963) 199 – 215.
Stendahl, Krister. “Introduction.” In The Scrolls and the New Testament, edited by Krister
Stendahl, 1 – 17. New York: Harper, 1957.
Stendahl, Krister. Paul among Jews and Gentiles. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976.
80 – 87.
Vermes, Geza. Jesus the Jew – A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels. London: Collins,
1973.
Vischer, Wilhelm. The Witness of the Old Testament to Christ. London: Lutterworth, 1949.
von Rad, Gerhard. Wisdom in Israel. London: SCM, 1972.
Weinfeld, Moshe. Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972.
Ziesler, John A. The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1972.
15
Torah and Paul
Introduction (1987)
The question of the meaning of the Greek word nomos among Greek-speak-
ing Jews in early Judaism and in Paul’s correspondence with his congregations –
including and especially perhaps with one he loved but had not founded, the one
at Rome – heats up at times to a boiling point. It is an important question but
also a very difficult one for moderns who like to think we have orderly minds.
It is exacerbated, however, when we insist that Paul was like us in such matters!
The history of efforts to address the problem would indicate that we should not
make such an assumption when attempting to make sense of a concept like “law”
over the whole of the Pauline corpus.
This chapter includes two modest efforts to look at the problem from the
standpoint of one who approaches it from viewing Scripture in canonical per-
spective, moving toward Paul’s letters from study of the OT (MT and LXX) and
from study of early Judaism – not by perceiving the problem then going back to
the earlier literature. The first part of this chapter is a statement in short compass
about the very concept of Torah from its inceptions in the Iron Age into early
Judaism, with particular attention to its translation into the Greek term nomos.
The second is a bold suggestion, on that basis, for understanding that Paul used
the term in his writings with the same sort of latitude perceived earlier.
A person such as Paul, like other Jewish writers of the era and since, would
think of Torah as made up of both story and stipulation. Abraham Heschel stated
clearly in one of the last articles written before his untimely death that Torah, and
indeed Judaism, is made up of equal parts of haggadah (story) and halakah (law).1
Its two basic ingredients remain forever essential to its nature.
Nils Dahl’s understanding of Paul had always interested me and seemed to
make a great deal of sense to one who had learned as much from rabbinic instruc-
tion as from Christian, and as much from Catholic scholarship as from Protes-
tant. Thus, it was a timely opportunity for me to contribute what I felt I had to
say about Torah and Paul to the Festschrift being prepared in his honor.
Everyone recognizes that most words have several meanings. The needs of
Christian apologetics seemed to me to have colored scholarship to some extent
from reading Paul in a fully canonical way: Paul certainly knew Scripture and
tradition very well indeed. How could he say here in his writing that nomos was

1
Heschel, “Time for Renewal.”
Torah and Paul 275
abrogated and there that it was holy, eternal, and good? What if it was not a real
contradiction in the context of early Jewish literature?
What if nomos was a word well chosen by the Septuagint translators to reflect
the multivalency of the word “Torah” as understood in Judaism? What if Paul
was also addressing the same problem that proto-Pharisaic Judaism had already
confronted in the Hellenistic crisis of the third and second centuries BCE? How
could Judaism make the old Bronze and Iron Age laws frozen in a stabilized
Pentateuch apply to the totally new problems arising out of the hellenization of
the whole Mediterranean world – and beyond? Judaism had found two import-
ant ways to tackle the problem.2 Paul’s was a third! The old Bronze and Iron
Age laws, as well as those worked out during the Persian period, were abrogated
while the Torah story was eternal, holy, and good, precisely the beginnings, from
Creation onward, of the gospel, God’s story. Those laws had a role as pedagogue
for the non-Jewish Christian, and indeed for the world perhaps as a whole, if one
was convinced of the great value of the Septuagint in general culture; and certain
of the ethical laws, and perhaps others, were still authoritative for the nascent
church, or at least instructive.
But in God’s barely introduced Jubilee or kingdom, they were basically over-
ridden precisely because the new age or Jubilee had begun. Paul would have
known very well of the practice in Pharisaic parlance and debate: if two different
sets of laws in Judaism were in conflict, largely because of a calendar accident
such as when the eve of Passover fell on a Sabbath, then the decision had to
be made as to which laws were overridden and which operative. But when the
arrival of the eschaton in Christ meant that the big Sabbath, the Jubilee, had been
introduced, then it took precedence over all laws up to that point.3 Essentially it
was a third solution to the very problem already faced in Judaism earlier because
of its new Hellenistic context. But the Jew who could not believe the prior and
basic Christian point that in Christ God had indeed introduced the eschaton, or
new age, then this third solution had to be rejected. The rejection by those Jews
of the Christianity that survived the destruction of the temple would follow per-
force. On the other hand, Christianity thereafter became even more hellenized.
The solution, therefore, proved decisive and effective.
After review of some of the current discussion about Paul and the law (as it is
still being put) over the intervening years, I feel that reaffirmation of these points
2
As argued in J. A. Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method,” and J. A. Sanders,
“From Sacred Story.”
3
A crucial point I failed to make in J. A. Sanders, “Ethic of Election” was the reason for the
“wrath” of the householder in Luke 14:21. One notes that Fitzmyer, Luke, fails also to address
the issue. The reason for the “wrath” was that those who had sent in the excuses submitted for
exemption from service in the war did not yet believe that the battle, indeed the eschatological
battle, had been won. What they were invited to was the victory banquet; the old laws, such as
those in Deut 20, were now indeed overridden and had to be read in quite a different way, that
is, with a hermeneutic that was based on the belief that in Christ the victory was won. This is
clearly a Lukan restatement of whatever had been received of such a parable.
is indicated.4 Like other Jews of the time, Paul sometimes meant ethos or stip-
ulation by his use of Torah-nomos; at other times he meant mythos or gospel –
God’s story. The fact that he used the term to mean stipulation in a third way5 is
quite understandable. One might think of Calvin’s expression “third use of the
law,” not only as a pedagogue to faith, but also as guide for obedience. Such mul-
tivalency of crucial and important terms was and is common.
Torah: A Definition
Torah (perhaps from “to throw,” “to point the way,” or “to cast lots”; perhaps
related to Akkadian tērtu, “oracle”) is a word in the Hebrew Bible meaning
“instruction, guidance, oracle”; in Deuteronomy and postexilic literature it also
means “law” or “law code.” In early Judaism it had a wide range of connota-
tions, from Pentateuch, Torah par excellence, to all divine revelation in biblical
and postbiblical literature; in some contexts it is a designation for Judaism itself.
In the OT, Torah can mean a priestly or prophetic oracle, a divine response
to a particular question, a directive sign; it can also mean instruction by a parent
or wise person. In Isaiah, it seems to designate the prophet’s system of teaching.
Generally in prophetic speech, it is used as a synonym for Yahweh’s Word or
Way. In the broadest sense, it designates the divine will for Israel in the covenant
relationship – both specific directive and the entire body of tradition that relates
God’s gracious acts and anticipates Israel’s obedient response.
The entire range of meanings is retained in postbiblical Judaism. Torah
includes not only halakah (the rules of conduct: commandments, statutes, and
ordinances) but also haggadah (religious teaching in a more general sense). It thus
includes the whole of revelation, preserved in writing or orally – all that God has
made known of his character, purpose, and expectation. “Talmud Torah” (study
of Torah) includes reading a postbiblical midrash or a medieval commentary. “In
a word, Torah in one aspect is the vehicle, in another and deeper view it is the
whole content of revelation.”6 Whether in the Bible or in Judaism, Torah was
clearly viewed as a mixture of two equally essential elements: story and stipula-
tion, haggadah and halakah, mythos and ethos, gospel and law.
How and when was this balance misperceived, so that Torah came to be
viewed largely and in essence as halakah (or “law”)? One point of view places
the blame upon the translators of the LXX: too consistently they rendered the
word torah by the Greek nomos instead of varying the translation according to
the contextual demand (e. g., as didache, didaskalia, dogma, etc.). In any case,
there has been consistent agreement that their rigidity in the use of nomos has
been misleading, since it conveys only the narrower sense of the word torah. But
4
See Räisänen, “Paul’s Theological Difficulties”; Räisänen, Paul and the Law; Hübner, Law
in Paul’s Thought; E. P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People.
5
See E. P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, 161.
6
Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries, 1:235 – 80.
Torah and Paul 277
more recent study suggests that they chose precisely the word that they should
have chosen. In the Hellenistic world that early Judaism inhabited, nomos had
at least the same breadth of meaning that torah had for Judaism. “Nomos in the
Pentateuch . . . means divine revelation, considered as a whole, composed of a
doctrinal part and of a legislative part.”7
However, there is a general recognition that Judaism, in some aspects and
expressions, had tended to stress halakah (and the necessity for obedience) as a
condition for survival. This would have been a major lesson of history for those
who experienced the exile of the sixth century BCE. One view is that it was the
priestly writers and editors of the exilic period who began to equate Torah with
law and to use the word interchangeably with statute, commandment, and so
forth.8 A more recent view would place the narrowing of meaning in the book of
Deuteronomy, especially in its exilic redaction.9 In any case, it would be a mis-
take to think that Judaism as a whole concentrated on halakah to the neglect of
haggadah. In Pharisaic-rabbinic Judaism, as in all Jewish denominations, Torah
has always retained the meaning of revelation in a general sense. This observa-
tion has led to the view that it was in Hellenistic Judaism that Torah came to be
understood primarily as law.10 This view cannot be maintained.
It is becoming increasingly clear that sharp distinctions along such lines
between Palestinian and Hellenistic Judaism (or between so-called normative
and heterodox Judaism) did not exist. Early Judaism (i. e., that of the period
before 70 CE, when Jerusalem fell to the Romans) was remarkably diverse, not
only in Palestine but also in the diaspora communities.
An intense struggle took place in Palestine ca. 175 – 164 BCE as the result of
efforts to accommodate Jewish cult and life to “modernization” (hellenization).
The zeal of the reformers was matched and countered by reactionary forces who
feared the loss of Jewish identity. The reaction was marked by a distinct zeal for
Torah as a countermeasure to assimilation. Out of this crisis arose such tradi-
tionalist adherents as the Hasidim and Essenes, who, Hippolytus noted, were
characterized by zeal for Torah. The reaction led to a successful armed revolt
against the Seleucid domination of Palestine (see 1 and 2 Maccabees). Thereafter,
the fortunes of such traditionalists waxed and waned under the political and cul-
tural ambitions of the Hasmoneans and Romans.
The destruction of the First Temple (sixth century BCE) had already necessi-
tated the study of the ancient authoritative traditions for answers to the questions
of identity and lifestyle in that destitute situation. While many exiled Judeans
assimilated to the dominant Babylonian and Persian culture, others turned to
the old stories for reaffirmation of their ancient identity, and drew from them
survival power. This quest resulted, not only in a singling out of the Pentateuch
for special emphasis (a Torah within the Torah, a status that it has had ever since)
7
Pasinya, La notion de NOMOS, 89.
8
Östborn, Tōrā in the OT.
9
Lindars, “Torah in Deuteronomy.”
10
Dodd, Bible and the Greeks, 25 – 41.
and its final shaping, but also in its receiving the enduring designation, the “Book
of Life” (sefer hayyim). Torah became stable textually and adaptable canonically.
In contrast to ˙the (destroyed) temple it could be taken anywhere (Palestine or
the diaspora) and made relevant to changing contexts by whatever hermeneu-
tics were necessary to make it so. Of secondary authority were other traditions
(Prophets and Writings) that were part of Torah in its wider sense.
Such Torah zealotry gave rise to the oral Torah (as with the Pharisees, the
Mishnah, and the Talmud). When the written Torah no longer seemed relevant
to some aspects of the new situation under the challenges of Hellenism, oral tra-
ditions were collected and expanded in order to address the question of identity.
Emphasis was placed upon recognizable practices in personal and communal life,
that is, upon halakah. An enduring attitude of self-examination and correction
arose that sought not only to maintain identity but also to prevent a repetition of
past and present catastrophes. The lessons of the past must not go unheeded. No
detail of the Torah was so insignificant as to warrant neglect. Out of such desire
for obedience and dedication to righteousness arose what, from another point
of view, came to be viewed as the pursuit of righteousness based upon works of
the law (Rom 9:31 – 32). There is no basis, however, for thinking that the more
the Pharisees emphasized halakah the more they neglected haggadah. On the
contrary, Torah for them always meant both the story of God’s gracious acts in
creating and preserving a people for himself and also God’s will for the way that
people should shape their lives in the light of those acts.
The wide spectrum of Jewish belief and practice prior to 70 CE included
groups who were preoccupied with scenarios of how God would act in their
own time. Just as he had acted at the exodus or at other times in the Torah story,
perhaps he would act now for a final settlement of the struggle between right
and wrong, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. Belief that he
could and would do so took precedence for some over the other rightful Jewish
concern to reflect God’s righteousness in daily life.
Concentration on the traditions of God’s free acts to effect righteousness
resulted in an apparent emphasis on Torah as precisely that type of story; con-
centration on the traditions of Israel’s proper response to those acts resulted in
an emphasis on Torah as precisely a call to response. But Torah itself was always
a balance between the two.
In order to understand Paul’s attitude toward the “law” (nomos), it is neces-
sary to remember that this term, after all, is used in the LXX to express the full
range of meanings that the word torah expressed in Hebrew. In some NT pas-
sages, and especially in Paul, nomos is used in the sense of Torah story as well
as Torah stipulations. Paul possibly does not set faith over against works (as is
commonly thought), but asks in whose works one should have faith – those of
God, or those that humans perform in obedient response to God’s works. If the
former, argues Paul, then one could recognize in Jesus another climactic work of
God (Rom 10:4). If the latter, then one might fail to recognize the work of God
in Christ for what Paul was sure that it was. Thus the early church should be
seen as an heir of those denominations in early Judaism that focused on Torah
Torah and Paul 279
as the story of the free acts of God that he performed in order to establish righ-
teousness on the human scene. Rabbinic Judaism should be seen as an heir of
those denominations that focused on Torah as indicative of how one should live
in obedient response to those free acts of God. In either case, Torah was the way,
the truth, and the life for Israel.11
Paul and the Law
On the one hand are a number of passages in the epistles that seem clearly
to say that the law has been abrogated or abolished: Rom 7:1 – 10; Gal 2:19;
2 Cor 3:4 – 17; Eph 2:14 – 16. Paul uses in this regard a verb, katargeō, which is
rather unequivocal in meaning. It can, according to context, range in connotation
from “abolish” to “fade away” but there seems no way to alter its basic deno-
tation.12 Along with these assertions one must align Gal 3:19 – 4:5 where Paul
apparently says that the law had been valid from Moses only until Christ.
On the other hand are a number of other passages that apparently contradict
such assertions. While in Rom 7:6 Paul says, “We are discharged from the law . . .”
in the same epistle at 3:31 he asks, “Do we then abolish the law by this faith? By
no means! On the contrary, we affirm the law.” The words “discharged” and
“abolish” are both forms of katargeō. The apparent contradiction is lodged in
one and the same epistle so that solutions sought by means of audience criticism
would not seem valid. At Rom 7:22 Paul claims that he delights in God’s law in
his inner self; and in Rom 13:8 – 10 he seems to say that stipulations of the law
must still be obeyed, and are indeed obeyable through agapē.
At the heart of the problem stands Rom 10:4, which seems to belong to the
first group of passages: “Christ is the end of the law . . .” And yet the word trans-
lated “end,” telos, can also mean “purpose, goal, accomplishment, or climax.”
The problem, therefore, is that Paul apparently contradicts himself in the atti-
tudes he expresses toward the law. Solutions have been sought for the dilemma
in a number of directions: to deny the dilemma by rejecting the OT entirely; to
attenuate it by putting the two Testaments on different levels of authority; to
distinguish between the oral and the written Torah; to see the death sentence of
the law as abrogated; to shift the emphasis from the troublesome word katargeō
11
Further on these matters, see Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 147 – 76; Davies, Torah
in the Messianic Age; Dodd, Bible and the Greeks, 25 – 41; Engnell, Israel and the Law, 1 – 16 (a
review of Östborn); Gutbrod, and Kleinknecht, “νόμος,”1022 – 85; Hengel, Judaism and Hel-
lenism, 1:58 – 254; Lindars, “Torah in Deuteronomy”; Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries,
1:235 – 80; Pasinya, La notion de NOMOS; Neusner, Way of Torah, 1 – 52; Östborn, Tōrā in the
OT; Rössler, Gesetz und Geschichte; J. A. Sanders, Torah and Canon; J. A. Sanders, “Torah and
Christ”; Smith, “Palestinian Judaism”; Stone, “Judaism at the Time of Christ”; Tcherikover,
Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews, 1 – 265; Würthwein, “Der Sinn des Gesetzes im AT”; Han-
son, “Jewish Apocalyptic.”
12
Cf. M. E. Dahl, Resurrection of the Body, 117 – 19. He attacks the problem by focusing
on katargeō. The question of the authorship of Ephesians need not arise for the purpose of this
study since a judgment about it would not actually affect the discussion.
to the more pliable telos, and to see Christ as the New Torah in an eschatological
age; to see idolatrous abuses of Torah as abrogated; to see Christ as displacing an
older, invalid hermeneutic; to see the function of Torah in isolating and separat-
ing Jews from gentiles as ended; and to understand that all Paul meant was that
the curses of Deuteronomy were suspended for the gentile Christian only.
After cataloguing the solutions proposed to date (as of 1977 and insofar as
I have been able to identify them) I will suggest that a fruitful approach to the
dilemma might be to focus, not on katargeō or on telos, but on the binary nature
of Torah that research on nomos also indicates.
II
Perhaps the earliest solution, after the apostolic age, was that of Marcion. Mar-
cion took Paul’s use of the verb katargeō in its strictest sense and decided that it
meant that the OT itself should be eliminated from the Christian canon. To cling
to one horn of a dilemma, however, does not eliminate the problem it poses.
Marcion’s “solution” found expression again in the liberal period of the late nine-
teenth century in Adolf von Harnack, who also concluded that the OT should
be removed from the Christian canon. While Luther would by no means have
abrogated the OT from the Bible he apparently distinguished in some of his
writings between the two rather sharply by saying that we have law in the OT
and gospel in the NT. In his commentaries on the OT, however, he looked upon
the OT as promise and the NT as fulfillment, agreeing with Augustine that the
law demands what the gospel gives. In Lutheran tradition the OT is valid for the
Christian as a guide for morality.13
Another early solution to the problem, in part prompted by Marcion’s severe
surgery on the canon, was that of Origen, more or less followed in later times by
Jerome, Calvin, W. Bousset, and G. Bornkamm among others. In this view, only
a limited number of OT commandments were abolished in the work of Christ,
such as circumcision, kashrut, and the laws about festivals, while the ethical and
moral laws were “elevated and raised to their proper glory and place.”14
A third solution has been to distinguish between the written law of Moses
in the Bible, and the oral law developed thereafter. The latter, also called Mish-
neh Torah (Torah she-bĕ-ʿal-peh), should be regarded as “commandments of
men learned by rote” (Isa 29:13) and “the false pen of the scribes” (Jer 8:8), and
accordingly be abrogated. It would, however, be very difficult to attribute such
a distinction to Paul.15
13
See Davies, “Law in the NT”; Bring, “Paul and the OT”; and the full discussion by von
Campenhausen, Formation of the Christian Bible, 1 – 102.
14
See the discussion of the problem in this regard by Barth, Ephesians 1 – 3, 287 – 91, esp.
287 – 88. The distinction between ceremonial and moral laws in the thinking of Paul has been
denied by Gutbrod, “νόμος,” 1063; cf. Whiteley, Theology of St. Paul, 1086.
15
Cf. Barth, Ephesians 1 – 3, 288.
Torah and Paul 281
A fourth possible solution is to view the sentence of death issuing from the
law as that which was abrogated in the work of Christ. Its role in bringing
knowledge and an increase of sin, and in inflicting curse and death upon human-
ity has been abrogated.16 Related to this would be the suggestion that Paul, in
this case, meant something like fate, in speaking of the law, and that it was this
evil fate in general that was abrogated.17
A fifth solution is that advanced and developed over the past thirty-five years
by W. D. Davies.18 Centering his thesis in Rom 10:4, Davies understands Christ,
for Paul, to have been the New Torah. Out of a depth of knowledge of rabbinic
literature Davies brings to bear on Paul’s view of salvation history discussions
by the rabbis of the fate of Torah in the messianic age. There were three dispen-
sations in some rabbinic thinking of world history: the age of chaos (Gen 1:2);
the age of Torah; and the age of Messiah. And in Paul there were three similar
periods: that from Adam to Moses; that from Moses to Christ; and that from
Christ to the Parousia (Rom 4:15; 5:13; 10:4). In the first, the world was law-
less (Torahless); in the second Torah reigned; and the third had begun in Christ.
Christ, for Paul, was not only the Second Adam, accounting for the first period
(typologically); but he was also the New Torah.
The Torah did its noble work in its time leading history right up to the age
of Christ (Gal 3:24; Rom 10:4). Paul lived in that moment when the second and
third ages met (1 Cor 10:11). In Rom 10:4 Christ is the telos (end) of the law; in
1 Cor 10:11 the telē (ends) of the ages meet. Davies picks up on earlier work done
on wisdom in the Christ figure in Paul and suggests that this had been the wis-
dom already seen in Judaism incarnate, if that is the right word, in Torah. At any
rate, it is now incarnate (admittedly a non-Pauline word, says Davies) in Christ.
Davies’s position is the most developed of those viable today and in it he is fol-
lowed by many current scholars, at least in certain aspects.19
Very close to Davies’s position as it centers in Rom 10:4 is one that under-
stands telos in that passage to mean “goal” or “purpose,” so that Christ for Paul
was the exponent of the Torah’s fulfillment in unifying all humanity.20
A sixth suggestion has come recently from Ragnar Bring, who nowhere men-
tions Davies; nor does he attempt to review the literature at all.21 “For Paul faith
in Christ is faith in the Torah, God’s revelation in the Scriptures.” Bring centers
much of his thought in Gal 3:24 – 25. The law leads to Christ in that it clearly
shows right from wrong, but it did not give righteousness. God does that; and
he did so in Christ. Following Odeberg he views the telos in 2 Cor 3:13 as just
as important as that in Rom 10:4. This passage speaks not only of the end of the
16
Klein, Studien über Paulus, 62 – 67, cited by Schoeps, Paul: The Theology of the Apostle,
179; cf. Whiteley, Theology of St. Paul, 83 – 85.
17
Refuted by Barth, Ephesians 1 – 3, 290.
18
Davies, Torah in the Messianic Age; Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 147 – 76; Davies,
Setting of the Sermon on the Mount, 161 – 90, 447 – 50.
19
See, e. g., Fitzmyer, “Pauline Theology.”
20
Howard, “Christ the End of the Law”; cf. Cranfield, “St. Paul and the Law.”
21
Bring, Christus und das Gesetz, summarized in his “Paul and the OT.”
fading splendor of Moses’ shining face on the mountain but also of the end of
Torah – precisely that which the Israelites could not see at that point. The law
is good in that it leads to Christ, but becomes idolatrous when the election of
which it speaks is taken as privilege. This idolatry of Torah is what God has
abrogated in the coming and work of Christ. The law itself is still valid, however,
in that it reveals the extent of humanity’s fall and sin, and liability to judgment.
There is much in Bring’s position to commend it, especially his seeing that
law means not only legislation but includes also the story of Israel’s election. He
does not carry through on the idea, however, as does G. E. Howard. His work is
considerably less valuable than it otherwise would be had he attempted to locate
his own thoughts in relation to those of others, especially Davies.
Rather close to Bring’s position is the view that what Paul considered abro-
gated were misinterpretations and misuse of Torah. And the reason these have
now been ruled out is that Christ has brought a new, the true, hermeneutic
whereby to read Scripture and understand Torah.22
A seventh solution is that of Markus Barth in his work on Ephesians, espe-
cially Eph 2:15, which has commanded his attention for some years. That aspect
of Torah that created a separation of Jews from gentiles is now abrogated or set
aside. What Paul viewed as annulled was the middle wall of partition indicated
by such central passages as Exod 33:16; 1 Kgs 8:53; and Exod 19:5 – 6. Insofar as
God’s gift of Torah rendered Israel separate or distinct, or a priestly and holy
folk, to that extent is Torah set aside.23
An eighth solution has been advanced by Michael Wyschogrod, an Orthodox
Jewish scholar who openly approaches the problem Paul poses from an Ortho-
dox point of view. Dismissing earlier Jewish (scholarly) attempts to address the
problem, Wyschogrod disarmingly states, “. . . I would like to confess that it is
difficult for me to see how a thinking Orthodox Jew can avoid coping with the
Paul-Luther criticism of the law. For me it has been the only criticism that I have
found really interesting.”24 Wyschogrod, in a paper as yet unpublished, centers
his argument in Gal 3:13; 5:2; and especially in Acts 15.25 His argument is that
Paul was an Orthodox Jew and remained one. Hence Paul knew that the gentile
was not subject to the laws of Torah but only to the Noachide Laws, just as the
ger toshav (resident alien) was not subject to the same stipulations as the ger
tsaddik (full convert). For Paul, then, Christ had taken on himself the curses for
disobedience to the law, of Deut 28 (cf. Gal 3:13), thus eliminating the threat
thereof, or God’s Measure of Justice (middat ha-din), for gentile converts to
Judaism through Christ, who remain subject only to the Noachide Laws, like
the ger toshav. What has been abrogated, then, is simply the effect of Deut 28 in
the case of gentiles who have been engrafted onto the stock of Israel through the
22
Cf. Barth, Ephesians 1 – 3, 288, no reference given.
23
Ibid., 290 – 91.
24
Wyschogrod, “The Law, Jews and Gentiles.” Wyschogrod approaches the problem fresh,
like Bring, without relating his suggestions to those of others.
25
Wyschogrod, “Paul, Jews and Gentiles.”
Torah and Paul 283
agency of Christ. The conciliar decision at Jerusalem, reported in Acts 15:20 and
29, proves this because there it is clearly stated first by James and then by mes-
sage from the apostles and elders that “gentiles who turn to God” are obligated
only to the Noachide Laws. All Paul was trying to do was to provide access for
gentiles to membership in Israel in good, Orthodox mode. In no way did he
really depart from Orthodox practice.
This is not the place for a full critique of Professor Wyschogrod’s position.
There will be time for that when he will have published his intriguing paper.26
Interestingly enough, it is not as hors cours as might first appear: for it is not very
distant from Markus Barth’s emphasis on Paul’s search for a way to tear down
the middle wall of partition between Jew and gentile, noted above.
III
There is a phrase, however, in Professor Wyschogrod’s paper that arrests one’s

attention. “Just as Judaism . . . cannot claim on a priori grounds that God could
not have become incarnate in a Nazarene carpenter, since to do so would be to
make of Judaism a philosophic system rather than the story of the free acts of
God, so, it seems to me, Christianity cannot argue on a priori grounds that God
could have admitted the gentiles to the house of Israel and suspended the wages
of sin only by means of an incarnation and crucifixion.” The intriguing questions
that such a generous view prompts must be bracketed for the time being. To
introduce another view of Paul’s position with regard to Torah, I want to lift out
of Wyschogrod’s context the phrase he uses to describe Judaim—“the story of
the free acts of God” – and suggest that it can also be used to describe one aspect
of Torah. And that is as it should be if Torah is Judaism and Judaism Torah in the
broad sense.27
All of the above solutions, it seems to me, stress the halakic aspect of what
Torah meant to Judaism in the time of Paul almost to the exclusion of its hag-
gadic aspect. Davies, Bring, Howard, and D. E. H. Whiteley recognize broader
meanings of Torah, but only Howard perceives this aspect of Paul’s thought in
the way I think it should be pursued; and yet he has done so only briefly, cen-
tering in Rom 10:4 exclusively. Wyschogrod, save for the one sentence quoted
above, consistently uses Torah in the sense of legal stipulations for the faithful;
and even there he uses it of Judaism, not of Torah.
I think there is a clue here to our problem in understanding Paul. All scholars
agree that the NT rests its case for Christ and the church (as the true and new
Israel) on a basically heilsgeschichtlich (salvation-historical) view of Scripture,
26
At this point I would simply note that Gal 4:21 – 31 is clearly a midrash on Gen 21:10 – 12,
a passage central to Paul’s understanding of Christ, with the curse of Deut 21:23 seen as devolv-
ing upon Christ in the light of his being the New Isaac. Cf. Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in
Judaism, in conjunction with the dissertation of Bossman, “Midrashic Approach.”
27
Cf. J. A. Sanders, Torah and Canon, 1 – 8, 117 – 21.
including Torah.28 The NT views the OT largely in terms of a story of God’s

mighty acts of creation, election, and redemption, and within that view Torah
also as the expression of God’s will for how to live before him. And yet, so-called
normative Judaism, that which Professor Wyschogrod assumes in his writings as
true Judaism, seems to have stressed Torah largely as the latter, and considerably
less as the former.29 In fact, as one reviews the problem of Paul’s attitude to the
law one senses, after considerable reading, that though most scholars are pre-
pared to recognize the two basic facets of Torah, the story and the stipulations,
greater weight is given the latter than the former where the word nomos appears
in the NT, especially in Paul.
Since the work of Gunnar Östborn, in modern times, there has been general
recognition of the multiple meanings of the word Torah.30 Östborn’s work was
seminal in that it showed clearly that the word Torah, as applied to the Penta-
teuch, already had a long history of bearing the two connotations: message or
instruction, and law. A similar service has been rendered the Greek word nomos,
going considerably beyond the work of C. H. Dodd and H. Kleinknecht.31 The
tendency among scholars working in the field to express regret that the Septua-
gint overemphasized the legal aspect of Torah can be put into perspective.32 On
the contrary it appears that nomos in the Hellenistic age had at least the full range
of meaning that Torah had, perhaps more. It appears that the LXX translators
chose precisely the word indicated to translate Torah.
It has long been recognized that Paul used the word nomos in several senses.
Rudolf Bultmann outlined five: OT law without distinguishing between the legal
and nonlegal parts of the Pentateuch; the OT as a whole; the general sense of
norm or principle; the sense of constraint or necessity; and finally: in the phrase
the “Law of Christ.”33 To these one must add nomos (Torah) in the sense of
Judaism itself, the identity symbol, over against Christos, for those Jews who
maintained their identity “in Torah” rather than changing it to “in Christ.” Just
as nomos apparently meant “religion” in the Hellenistic world, so I think Paul
could use nomos to mean the Jewish religion, in that sense of the use of Torah,
and make himself clear to his Greek-reading correspondents.
28
Even Käsemann, Perspectives on Paul, 63, says, “I would even say it is impossible to un-
derstand the Bible in general or Paul in particular without the perspective of salvation history.”
Cf. von Campenhausen, Formation of the Christian Bible.
29
Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries, 1:265, clearly states that early Judaism held both
aspects of Torah in balance: “‘Law’ must, however, not be understood in the restricted sense of
legislation, but must be taken to include the whole of revelation – all that God has made known
of his nature, character, and purpose, and of what he would have man to do.”
30
Östborn, Tōrā in the OT, is well reflected in Harrelson, “Law in the OT.”
31
Pasinya, La notion de NOMOS; cf. Dodd, Bible and the Greeks, 25 – 41, and Kleinknecht,
“νόμος,” 1022 – 35.
32
Cf., e. g., Dodd, Bible and the Greeks, 33, followed by Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism,
149: “It is unfortunate that its rendering in the LXX by the Greek nomos should have over-em-
phasized its legal connotation.” See, too, the misleading statements in Gutbrod, “νόμος.”
33
Bultmann, Theology of the NT, 1:259 – 60; cf. Cranfield, “St. Paul and the Law,” 44 – 50.
Torah and Paul 285
IV
What this means is that the problem of Paul’s attitude toward the law devolves
upon each passage in the problem-dilemma posed above. There is no question
but that in many passages he meant by nomos specific legal stipulations. But it is
becoming increasingly clear that the question of what Jewish laws gentile con-
verts to Christianity had to obey depended on factors other than Paul’s view that
the nomos-Torah had somehow been abrogated. To this extent I think Wyscho-
grod is right: Paul could conceivably have been as Orthodox as Wyschogrod
himself and have argued that many of the specific laws did not apply to gentile
converts to Israel. Where one must differ from Wyschogrod is in his viewing
Orthodox Judaism as normative in the first century, and in his viewing Christi-
anity as a kind of Reform Judaism subject only to the Noachide Laws.34 On the
contrary, Paul may have viewed certain laws as abrogated for gentile converts
(and for Jewish converts),35 but still have viewed nomos-Torah as abrogated as
well, in the limited sense that the new era had arrived, that Christ was the Torah
Incarnate, the New Torah, the new identity symbol that opened God’s work of
election-redemption to all people who would believe. Christ as the New Torah
inaugurated the messianic era and to that extent superseded the Torah era, but
also to that extent did not eradicate or annul Torah. Torah was caught up in
Christ in a new age.36
Paul’s argument in this regard is basically a salvation-historical argument in
an eschatological mode. As has been shown by Dietrich Rössler, intertestamen-
tal Judaism, in its variety of religious expression, emphasized the Torah story
on the one hand in some sects or denominations, and the Torah stipulations on
the other in others.37 Of the two Jewish denominations that finally survived the
destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Christianity fell heir to the empha-
sis on the history-of-salvation-story aspect of Torah in the broad sense while
Pharisaic-rabbinic Judaism fell heir to the emphasis on Torah as the divine will
expressed for lifestyle.
Just as the function of canon for the believing communities has always been,
in dialogue, to answer, ever anew, the two questions of who we are and what we
are to do, so the several meanings of Torah can be ranged under the two rubrics:
mythos and ethos, or story and laws, or haggadah and halakah.38 Torah is and
always was a balance between the two: to emphasize one to the exclusion of the
34
Stone, “Judaism at the Time of Christ.” The problem whether the stipulations in
Acts 15:20 and 29, incumbent even upon gentile Christians, relate to the Noachide Law, or, as
usually seen, to the laws for the ger (alien) in Lev 17 – 18, needs further exploration.
35
Cf. Gal 5:2 – 6; 6:15 – 16; Acts 15:11.
36
The kainē ktisis for Paul introduced a new kanōn for the Israel of God to walk by
(Gal 6:15 – 16). One simply cannot avoid the fact, Rom 9 – 11 notwithstanding, that Paul saw the
New Israel of God in some sense superseding the Old.
37
Rössler, Gesetz und Geschichte.
38
See J. A. Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.”
other would be to misunderstand both Christianity and Judaism.39 But perhaps

the best way, now, to broach the problem of Paul and the law is to make the prior
observation here indicated, and to acknowledge that Paul, with others in the
early church, but especially Paul in facing his mandate (which he strongly felt he
had received “from the Lord”: Gal 1 – 2; 1 Cor 9:1; 15:5 – 9; Phil 3:5 – 11; 2 Cor 4:6)
to preach the gospel to gentiles, found it well to emphasize Torah as the story
of divine election and redemption, in the eschatological conviction that God’s
recent work in Christ had made that election and that redemption available to
all humankind, while at the same time to deemphasize those specific stipulations
that seemed to present stumbling blocks to carrying out the mandate, and that
seemed to detract from the Torah-gospel story of God’s righteous acts that had
found their culmination, goal, and climax in God’s eschatological act in Christ.
The combination of Torah story and eschaton was adaptable for life wherever it
was told to the extent that the story was emphasized and the laws seen as dynam-
ically or spiritually enforced (2 Cor 3:4 – 6).40
Bibliography
Barth, Markus. Ephesians 1 – 3. AB 34. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974.
Bossman, David. “A Midrashic Approach to a Study of Paul’s en Christo.” PhD diss.,
St. Louis University, 1971.
Bring, Ragnar. Christus und das Gesetz. Leiden: Brill, 1969.
Bring, Ragnar. “Paul and the Old Testament.” ST 25 (1971) 21 – 60.
Bultmann, Rudolf. Theology of the New Testament. 2 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 1965.
Cranfield, C. E. B. “St. Paul and the Law.” SJT 17 (1964) 43 – 68.
Dahl, Murdoch E. Resurrection of the Body. SBT 36. London: SCM, 1962.
Dahl, Nils. “New Testament Eschatology and Christian Social Action.” LQ 22 (1970)
374 – 79.
Dahl, Nils. “The Social Function and Consequences of the Doctrine of Justification.”
NorTT 65 (1966) 284 – 310, in NTA (1967) 851.
Davies, W. D. The Gospel and the Land. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
Davies, W. D. “Law in the New Testament.” In IDB 3:95 – 102.
Davies, W. D. Paul and Rabbinic Judaism. 4th ed. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980.
39
Davies, Gospel and the Land, 24n19, asks if I have not stressed the story aspect of Torah
too much. I trust that the present study may redress the balance. I find on the contrary, how-
ever, that the Torah problem is dealt with throughout biblical studies with too much stress on
the law aspect of Torah.
40
See J. A. Sanders, “Torah and Christ.” There these observations are carried forward with
an exploration in Paul of the relation of dikaiosynē to nomos, and of the relation of mythos to
ethos, with observations on how Paul indicates the believer, in Christ, can move dynamically
from gospel to law, or from identity to ethics, in ever new and ever-changing contexts. Cf.
N. Dahl, “NT Eschatology.” For Paul, it was not a question of faith or works; it was con-
sistently a matter of faith. The question he posed, if seen in the light of these observations,
was rather: in whose works (righteousnesses) should one have faith, those of God in the To-
rah-Christ story, or those of which the believer is capable when one attempts to respond to
that story and reflect it in one’s own life? Nils Dahl comes close to saying something similar (in
Norwegian) in “The Social Function and Consequences of the Doctrine of Justification.” See
the abstract in NTA (1967) 851.
Torah and Paul 287
Davies, W. D. The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1964.
Davies, W. D. Torah in the Messianic Age and / or the Age to Come. SBLMS 7. Lancaster,
PA: SBL, 1952.
Dodd, C. H. The Bible and the Greeks. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1935.
Engnell, Ivan. Israel and the Law. Symbolicae Biblicae Upsalienses 7. Uppsala: Wretmans,
1946.
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Gospel according to Luke. 2 vols. AB 28 and 28A. Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1981 – 85.
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. “Pauline Theology.” In Jerome Biblical Commentary, edited by Ray-
mond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Roland E. Murphy, article 79. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
Gutbrod, Walter. “νόμος, κτλ.” In TDNT 4:1036 – 91.
(1971) 31 – 58.
Harrelson, Walter J. “Law in the Old Testament.” In IDB 3:77 – 89.
Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during
the Early Hellenistic Period. Translated by John Bowden. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Fortress,
1974.
Heschel, Abraham. “A Time for Renewal.” Midstream 18 (May 1972) 46 – 51.
Howard, George E. “Christ the End of the Law.” JBL 88 (1969) 331 – 37.
Hübner, Hans. Law in Paul’s Thought: Studies in the New Testament and Its World. Ed-
inburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1983.
Käsemann, Ernst. Perspectives on Paul. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971.
Klein, Gottlieb. Studien über Paulus. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers, 1918.
Kleinknecht, H. M. “νόμος, κτλ.” In TDNT 4:1022 – 35.
Lindars, Barnabas. “Torah in Deuteronomy.” In Words and Meanings: Essays Presented
to David Winton Thomas, edited by Peter R. Ackroyd and Barnabas Lindars, 117 – 36.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.
1970.
Östborn, Gunnar. Tōrā in the Old Testament. Lund: Ohlssons, 1945.
Räisänen, Heikki. Paul and the Law. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986.
Räisänen, Heikki. “Paul’s Theological Difficulties with the Law.” In Studia Biblica 1978.
Vol. 3, Papers on Paul and Other New Testament Authors, edited by Elizabeth A. Liv-
ingstone, 301 – 20. JSNTSup 3. Sheffield: JSOT, 1980.
Rössler, Dietrich. Gesetz und Geschichte: Untersuchungen zur Theologie der jüdischen
Apokalyptik und der pharäischen Orthodoxie. 2nd ed. WMANT 3. Neukirchen: Neu-
kirchener Verlag, 1962.
Sanders, E. P. Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983.
(1979) 5 – 29.]
Cascade, 2005.]
Sanders, James A. “Torah and Christ.” In From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A.
Sanders, 41 – 60. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987. [Original Int 29 (1975) 372 – 90.]
Schoeps, Hans Joachim. Paul: The Theology of the Apostle in the Light of Jewish History.
Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961.
Smith, Morton. “Palestinian Judaism from Alexander to Pompey.” In Hellenism and the
Rise of Rome, edited by Pierre Grimal, 250 – 66. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968.
80 – 87.
Tcherikover, Victor. Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews. New York: Atheneum, 1970.
Vermes, Geza. Scripture and Tradition in Judaism. Leiden: Brill, 1961.
von Campenhausen, Hans. The Formation of the Christian Bible. Translated by J. A. Baker.
Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972.
Whiteley, Denys E. H. The Theology of St. Paul. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964.
Würthwein, Ernst. “Der Sinn des Gesetzes im Alten Testament.” ZTK 55 (1958) 255 – 70.
Wyschogrod, Michael. “The Law, Jews and Gentiles – A Jewish Perspective.” LQ 21
(1969) 405 – 15.
Wyschogrod, Michael. “Paul, Jews and Gentiles.” A paper presented to the Columbia
University Seminar on Studies in Religion, 11 November 1974.
16
The Gospels and the Canonical Process:
A Response to Lou H. Silberman
Lou H. Silberman’s essay attacks some of the basic assumptions underlying

source criticism as inherited from the nineteenth century and criticizes the whole
exercise of this discipline as it might apply to various bodies of Jewish literature
in the Hellenistic cultural area, including the Gospels. Here, Silberman joins a
growing company of students of the Bible, Old Testament and New, who are
scrutinizing not only the results of source criticism but also its assumptions and
methods. He puts his case sharply: “A century ago, scholars assumed unques-
tioningly that a literary work had its sources in literary works (for, after all, were
not these scholars themselves ransacking literary works to fabricate new literary
works?)” (p. 215).1 Silberman notes that even when we now speak of oral tra-
ditions “we still manipulate such traditions as though they too were ‘literary’
work,” suggesting that we need to “come to terms with a fecund world of ideas”
(p. 215) and “to focus . . . on the gospels as manifestations of the storyteller’s art”
(p. 218).
Silberman speaks of “a large body of thematic materials” that “at various
times, in various ways, with various emphases,” “came into expression for par-
ticular occasions” (p. 195). He stresses themes, or using Eric Werner’s phrase,
“wandering motifs” (p. 217) on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the many
and varied particular contexts to which these themes and motifs were applied. In
the different applications “the various uses of particular themes may be entirely
inconsistent one with the other” (p. 195). The same theme in two different con-
texts or literary deposits may be very different, even contradictory.
Earlier this century, at a time when source criticism of the Old Testament had
become almost a caricature in the hands of its most devoted adherents, Hermann
Gunkel made some of the same observations about it. Source critics had begun
to split infinitives and slice off conjunctions in pursuit of the kind of consistency
that Silberman denies to his ancient themes.2 Gunkel brought to bear another
kind of criticism on the book of Genesis, however, which but substituted the
method of form criticism for that of source criticism. At about the same time,

1
The page numbers here refer to Silberman’s essay, “‘Habent Sua Fata Libelli’: The Role of
Wandering Themes,” in the same volume in which this article by Sanders first appeared.
2
For an example of how far source criticism went, see Simpson, “Growth of the Hexa-
teuch,” and Simpson, “Book of Genesis.” Hermann Gunkel wrote voluminously, but for an
easily accessible statement of his approach, see his Legends of Genesis. See also Gunkel, “Fun-
damental Problems.”
source criticism was being attacked by archaeologists and philologists, and in

Germany, form criticism soon developed into tradition criticism.3 There were
parallel developments in work on the four Gospels.4 The result of such critical
dialogue within biblical criticism has been the continued use of the sigla devised
by source criticism, such as “J,” “E,” “D,” “P,” “Q,” “logia,” and the like, but
only as indicating possibilities of traditions rather than discreet palpable docu-
ments. Certainly, in the case of the Pentateuch, one cannot now find a serious
scholar anywhere arguing for the date and provenance of “J” or of any putative
stratum within it. Attention is now focused elsewhere.
Old Testament Textual Fluidity and Canonical Open-endedness
The observations that Silberman makes are congruous with some basic develop-
ments today in Old Testament text criticism and canonical criticism.
The recovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has revolutionized Old Testament text
criticism. Until their impact was absorbed by the field, text criticism was under-
stood to be the exercise of biblical criticism that engaged in establishing the bib-
lical text. By nearly universal agreement, this meant recovering the original text.
One was free to mix philological observations with archaeological discoveries,
literary critical analysis with scrutiny of ancient texts and versions, in order to
come up with more and more brilliant and ingenious scholarly conjectures as to
what the original of a difficult text was. One has but to look at the apparatus in
the various editions of Rudolf Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica5 and now also in that of
the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia6 to see the purpose of text criticism as it has
been understood until recently. Examples of the end result of this view of text
criticism can be found in The Jerusalem Bible (English version based on the first
French edition)7 and The New English Bible.
The older view was part of a general “primitivist” tendency within biblical
studies. Biblische Wissenschaft, whether source criticism or text criticism, was
dedicated to recovering points originally scored. The first of anything was the
best. The closer one could tune into the ipsissima vox of Jeremiah or Jesus, for
example, the closer one approached truth. How could it be otherwise?
The assumption was that an ipsissima vox would in utter clarity convey the
speaker’s intention. The full impact of the meaning of “context” for understand-
ing “text” seems to have struck us fully only in recent times. While we may be
a bit overwhelmed now with the scepticism forced upon us by the sociology of
knowledge, it is nonetheless wise to be aware of assumptions. Even some earlier
critics who insisted most strongly that the Bible was a product of history did not
3
See, e. g., Bright, Early Israel, esp. 34 – 55.
4
See, e. g., Kümmel, Introduction to the NT, 35 – 247.
5
The 15th edition (1968) is a revised and augmented reprinting of BHK3.
6
BHS was first published 1968 – 76 in 16 fascicles.
7
Jones, The Jerusalem Bible.
The Gospels and the Canonical Process: A Response to Lou H. Silberman 291
always take into account that whatever we might have from Jeremiah or Jesus
had of necessity come through the understanding and formation of early believ-
ing communities.
Form criticism made such observations with a sort of vengeance, but text crit-
icism continued to include conjecture about original readings until the realiza-
tion dawned that in the period up to about 100 CE, an important characteris-
tic of biblical texts was not only their relative stability but also their relative
fluidity. The degree of fluidity varied between Torah, Prophets, and Hagiog-
rapha, with Torah considerably more stable than the others, but it has become
increasingly clear that a marked change took place in the course of the first cen-
tury CE. Moshe Greenberg was the first to call attention to this change in 1956,
and he was followed soon thereafter by Dominique Barthélemy, Shemaryahu
Talmon, Frank Moore Cross, and Moshe H. Goshen-Gottstein.8 In the so-called
“Accepted Texts Period,”9 that is, up to about 100 CE, there were different fami-
lies of texts (Cross) or autonomous local texts (Talmon). Even handsome, official
copies of biblical books had been adapted by textual alteration to the major theo-
logical beliefs of those who copied and read the books. As Talmon has shown,
even proto-masoretic or Pharisaic scribes in the Persian-Hellenistic period con-
tributed to the Scriptures they copied.10 But they did so within their understand-
ing of piety and faith. Whatever tiqqunê sopherîm (corrections by the scribes)
there were would have taken place in this period: Scribes could alter the text in
the light of a major theological belief.11 Especially at Qumran the fluidity of bib-
lical texts was exploited. As Talmon has so brilliantly shown:
In contradistinction [to the later rabbis], the Qumran Covenanters did not subscribe to the
idea that the biblical era had been terminated, nor did they accept the concomitant notion
that “biblical” literature and literary standards had been superseded or replaced by new
conceptions. It appears that the very concept of a “canon of biblical writings” never took
root in their world of ideas, whatever way the term “canon” is defined. Ergo, the very
notion of a closing of the canon was not relevant. This applies to the completion of the
canon of Scriptures as a whole, and also to the closure of its major components. It would
seem that not only did the complex of the Hagiographa remain an open issue, but also the
collection of prophetic books was not considered sealed.12
Talmon goes on to recognize my own arguments about the open-endedness of

the Psalter at Qumran.13
8
Greenberg, “Stabilization of the Text”; and see the several articles by Dominique Barthé-
lemy, Shemaryahu Talmon, Frank Moore Cross, Moshe H. Goshen-Gottstein, and others, all to
the point, in Cross and Talmon, Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text.
9
For sketches of the history of transmission of the Hebrew text, see Goshen-Gottstein,
“Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts”; Sanders, “Text Criticism and the NJV Torah”; the brilliant
reconstruction by Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of.”
10
See the incisive and pivotal paper by Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible.”
11
See Barthélemy, “Les tiqquné sopherim”; see now also Nielsen, “Tqwny Sprym,” the
most complete study of the topic to date.
12
Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible,” 379.
13
Ibid., 379 and n. 254; cf. Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises.”
In other words, the Gospels were shaped and then written precisely at the
end of the period when in Judaism both the text and the canon of Scripture were
to an extent fluid and open-ended. S. Vernon McCasland was wrong: Matthew
did not twist the Scriptures when he so often reshaped his citations of the Old
Testament to suit his overriding theological convictions concerning Christ and
the church.14 Neither did the other New Testament writers. This was the thing to
do. It was the greater piety. Here Qumran and the early church shared the same
eschatological belief that God was doing another righteousness in their day like
the ones recounted in Scripture, but even more important in that he was now
eschatologically bringing all the earlier episodes of his holy history to comple-
tion, to climax and fulfillment.15
At Qumran, the Psalter was open-ended because of the belief that David
wrote 4,050 psalms, and the greater piety was to be sure not to deny to him
some psalm he might indeed have written. The idea of cutting the Psalter back
to a “paltry psaltry” of 150 psalms would have been blasphemy for the Qumran
community, whether other branches of Judaism had done so or not. It would
have been as much a betrayal of their essential identity as God’s True Israel (the
right denomination) as using a different calendar.16 In study of the Psalter we can
see well what Eric Werner meant by “wandering motifs” in religious music,17 for
in the non-masoretic psalms at Qumran, as well as in some of the 150 masoretic
psalms, we find refrains, incipits, and many phrases deposited in more than one
psalm. It would appear sheer folly to try to bring the methods of source criticism
to bear on such phenomena, for what often happened was that many psalmists
used common liturgical phrases and words. These wandering motifs and liturgi-
cal phrases belonged to everybody.
Fifteen years after Albert C. Sundberg Jr. wrote his dissertation at Harvard
University on the Old Testament in the early churches, his main point has been
amply confirmed: whereas Judaism was able at the Council of Jamnia to stabilize
its canon (with lively discussion continuing about a few literary units: Esther,
Song of Songs, Qohelet, and even Proverbs and Ezekiel) at the end of the first
century, Christianity, whose break with Judaism was definitive by the year 70,
did not benefit from such standardization, so that the churches continued to have
many of the books that some Jewish denominations before 70 had held sacred.
The churches in the East retained the so-called Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha
and those in the West the so-called Apocrypha.18 Published in the same year as
Sundberg’s dissertation was a paper by Jack P. Lewis that showed that the occur-
14
McCasland, “Matthew Twists the Scriptures.”
15
See the basic statement by Elliger on the hermeneutics of the author of the pesher on Ha-
bakkuk in his Studien zum Habakuk-Kommentar, 275 – 87; see also Sanders, “From Isaiah 61 to
Luke 4”; Patte, Early Jewish Hermeneutic, 209 – 314.
16
See col. 27 of 11QPsa in Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 91 – 93; also, Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms
Scroll, 15 – 21, 134 – 35, and esp. 155 – 59.
17
Werner, A Voice Still Heard, 83 – 84 (“Cantillation of Esther”) and 38; see also “General
Index,” s. v. “Motifs, wandering.”
18
rence of the so-called Council of Jamnia in 90 CE cannot be supported by hard

literary evidence.19 Sundberg’s principal thesis remains valid, however: the stabili-
zation that took place in Judaism by the end of the first century, and that is amaz-
ingly attested to in the biblical manuscripts now available from between the first
and second Jewish revolts, simply did not take place in Christianity. On the other
hand, the standardization and stabilization of text and canon that took place in
Judaism between 70 and 135 cannot be read back, as was done until recently, into
the pre‑70 period. For Judaism, the pre‑70 period was one of comparative textual
fluidity and canonical open-endedness. Whatever antecedents to standardization
there were before 70 cannot be viewed as official, normative, or the like.20
Old Testament Stabilization and Standardization
The New Testament, then, came into being precisely at the end of the period
of Old Testament textual fluidity and canonical open-endedness, that is, at the
end of what Talmon calls “the biblical period.” For Christianity, the process of
stabilization and standardization was less intense and was to continue for some
time. Not until the Reformation would Christianity attempt to limit the Old
Testament to the radically curtailed canon of Judaism. To the degree that Christi-
anity remained eschatologically oriented into the second century CE, it remained
open to whatever God might momentarily do, through the parousia or perhaps
through some other re-creative or apocalyptic act. All of the New Testament
literature, with only the possible exceptions of a few of the latest epistles, would
have come from such an eschatological ethos in the churches. Judaism had for
the most part turned the corner of stabilization after the catastrophe of 70, but
Christianity continued largely in the same eschatological vein of thinking with
which we are familiar from the vast resources of non-masoretic Jewish literature
either preserved by the churches in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha or dis-
covered by archaeology at Qumran and elsewhere. If I read Hans von Campen-
hausen, Werner Georg Kümmel, Kurt Aland, and others correctly, Christianity
did not even attempt to turn its corner of stabilization until the middle of the sec-
ond century when Marcion shocked it into doing so. Until that time the churches
in their christological and ecclesiological arguments not only engaged in midrash
on Scripture (the “Old Testament”) but firmly believed in listening to the voice
of the living Lord and of the Spirit in determining what could be used in worship
and instruction.21 The dangers that Jeremiah was apparently willing to live with
in his time, when, as a part of his polemic against Deuteronomy, he insisted on
continually listening to the voice of Yahweh (Jer 7:23 et passim) became too great
for the churches in the face of the disintegrating forces of multiplying heresies.
19
20
See Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of.”
21
See esp. von Campenhausen, Formation of the Christian Bible, esp. 103 – 63; Kümmel, In-
troduction to the NT, 475 – 84; Aland, Problem of the NT Canon, esp. 8 – 18.
But we should also note that as the New Testament thinkers and authors made
use of the Old Testament, they retained well past the year 70 the type of freedom
that characterized the era of textual fluidity that we know from the Qumran
literature. The kind of narrow sense of midrash that was introduced after 70 in
Judaism, in which the midrashist cited the biblical text accurately but then could
use all sorts of rules to break it up and make it relevant and adaptable, did not
take hold in Christianity until after Marcion and probably not until the time of
Origen.22 This observation is parallel to that by Sundberg concerning the canon
of the Old Testament in the early churches. Christian thinkers still had the ear-
lier conviction of the ontology of canon: it was both relatively adaptable and
relatively stable tradition. They cited it and adapted it and wove it into their new
literature just as most Jews had been doing since the beginnings, way back into
biblical times.23
The shift in ontology of Scripture, from being primarily adaptable to being
primarily stable, which culminated by the end of the first century CE with an
almost stable text and canon for Judaism, had antecedents in the first century
BCE. Beginning in the reign of Salome Alexandra, with the activity of the Phari-
sees when they had some power, and culminating in the Pharisaic survival of the
First Jewish revolt when they alone remained after the destruction of Jerusalem,
the ontology of the Bible made the shift it would retain for 1800 years thereaf-
ter, until the rise of biblical criticism. The idea of verbal inspiration of the Torah
was introduced by the proto-masoretic Pharisees beginning in the first century
BCE and then not long thereafter the concept of literal inspiration.24 There had
long been shamanistic ideas of inspiration, especially of Torah. But the concepts
of verbal and literal inspiration were new and helped to solve some of the prob-
lems of relevance. The concepts were applied first, and primarily, to laws within
Torah.
The problem of relevance of the old Bronze and Iron Age laws was met in
two basic ways. The first, as Silberman has noted (p. 191), was Torah šebě ʿal peh
(“oral Torah”). To attribute laws to Moses was the basic means of legitimatizing
them. To do so, the tradition arose, as noted in Pirqê Abot, that Moses, after his
consultation with God on Sinai, passed much more on to Joshua in oral form
than in written form. The concept of Torah šebě ʿal peh then guaranteed the con-
tinuing adaptability and relevance of the Law. But along with this concept also
rose that of verbal inspiration. If the peshat (plain meaning) of a passage did not
make sense in a new situation, or if no peshat of any passage met a new problem
arising out of new situations, then the peshat had to be by-passed in some way.25
In its inception, verbal inspiration must have been one of the most “radic-lib”
ideas ever to arise; if the plain meaning of a verse was not relevant then one could
22
Le Déaut, “Apropos a Definition of Midrash.”
23
24
See Goshen-Gottstein, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts”; Sanders, “Text Criticism and the
NJV Torah”; Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of.”
25
See Loewe, “‘Plain’ Meaning of Scripture.”
break up the syntax of the verse, focus on one word in it, and find a vehicle to a
solution by locating the same word in another passage and bringing the two pas-
sages together. Once the peshat was thus by-passed to focus on isolated words,
one could then create a new literary context by taking separate verses out of
their original contexts and combining them. Actually, the literary aspect of the
practice had been going on a long time. Many larger literary units in the Old Tes-
tament were formed because two smaller units both had the same word in them.
This was the old redactional technique we call Stichwörter, and we should not
be surprised to find the practice continued in this new and different way. What
was new was the gradual shift in ontology of the Bible to its verbal inspiration,
which eventually triumphed in both synagogue and church. But in our period,
which Silberman calls the “Hellenistic cultural area,” the shift had but begun and
at first only among Pharisees or, generally speaking, the proto-masoretic thinkers
of early Judaism. To accompany the new view of Scripture there soon developed
the seven hermeneutic rules of Hillel, the thirteen of Ishmael, and the final tra-
ditional thirty-two rules, each set accommodating itself more and more to the
view of verbal inspiration as over against peshat exegesis. But even so, these rules
never entered Christianity because they apparently did not become a part of
the thinking of any of those eschatological denominations of early Judaism that
fed into Christianity and because it all happened too late. Early Christians, like
many other Jews of the time, fully believed that they lived still in the period of
textual fluidity and canonical open-endedness, or what Talmon calls “the biblical
period.”
Torah as Halakah and Torah as Haggadah
Some of the hermeneutic techniques that were developed to render new halakot
(legal interpretations) from old laws came to be applied also to biblical narra-
tive to render haggadic midrashim.26 Silberman correctly notes that Torah was
not limited in reference to the Pentateuch. As I tried to say in a recent article,
Torah also meant all divine revelation, including the targumim, developing com-
mentaries, the Talmud, and midrashim.27 Indeed, in some biblical passages Torah
meant oracle or instruction and not law at all. It can even be affirmed that Torah
has always included both narrative and stipulation, gospel and law, haggadah
and halakah. Abraham Heschel, in one of the last articles he wrote before his
untimely death in 1972, makes the point so beautifully in his inimitable way.
What we know about Abraham and of Rabbi Akiba is not only law. In fact, most of what
is contained in the Chumash or Tenach is non-legal ideas or tales. Similarly rabbinic litera-
ture contains both halacha and agada, and the thinking of Judaism can only be adequately
understood as striving for a synthesis between receptivity and spontaneity, a harmony of
halacha and agada . . . Halacha gives us norms for action; agada vision of the ends of living.
26
See Gertner, “Terms of Scriptural Interpretation”; and Miller, “Midrash.”
27
Sanders, “Torah: A Definition.”
Halacha prescribes, agada suggests; halacha decrees, agada inspires; halacha is definite;
agada is allusive. The terminology of halacha is exact, the spirit of agada is poetic, indefin-
able. Halacha is immersed in tradition, agada is the creation of the heart. To maintain that
the essence of Judaism consists exclusively of halacha is as erroneous as to maintain that
the essence of Judaism consists exclusively of agada. The interrelationship of halacha and
agada is the very heart of Judaism. Halacha without agada is dead, agada without halacha
is wild.28
To observe with Philo, therefore, “dass die Thora mit der Weltschöpfung be-
ginnt,”29 is to make but an elementary statement about the basic nature of Torah.
Not only does Torah begin with creation, it goes on to deal with many important
biblical topics including human sin, the relations among the nations, the election
of Israel’s ancestors, God’s dealing with a family that sells its brother into slav-
ery, God’s work as liberator, redeemer and desert guide – all before anything
at all is said about the will of this God as to how his people should shape their
society and conduct their lives. And if Gerhard von Rad’s form-critical analysis
of many traditions in the Bible is correct, the stop at Sinai (where, according to
tradition, the Law was given) was not considered important enough to be men-
tioned anywhere in the extra-pentateuchal recitals of the whole Torah story.30
The question is not whether creation begins the Torah, but rather how and when
certain denominations in Judaism came to focus so much on Sinai that the nar-
rative portions, the whole setting into which Sinai was placed, were devalued. I
have tried to answer this question elsewhere.31
In early Judaism, almost from its inception in the exile, there seem to have
been two major groupings of the scattered and multiplying Jewish denomina-
tions: those that focused on Torah as halakah and those that stressed its nature
as haggadah. None stressed one to the exclusion of the other, but the one group
searched the old preexilic traditions for light on what Jews scattered about the
Persian Empire should do to retain their identity; the other searched these tradi-
tions for indications of what God would do to alleviate their burdens and liberate
them once again from oppression. The latter developed into the heavily escha-
tological denominations, whose works we know in the Apocrypha, the Pseude-
pigrapha, and the newly recovered literature from Qumran. The former devel-
oped into those denominations, particularly the Hasidim and Pharisees, whose
works we know as preserved by later rabbinic Judaism. We have far more of the
literature of the eschatological denominations datable to the pre-70 period than
of the Pharaisaic literature precisely because Christianity is heir to the former
and, as noted, did not benefit from the intense stabilization and standardization
process that culminated for Judaism around 100 CE (the discoveries of archaeol-
ogy have also added to the store of this eschatological literature). Furthermore,
the proto-rabbinic traditions are notoriously difficult to date: very little can be
28
Heschel, “Time for Renewal.”
29
The words are from the notes to the German translation of Philo: Cohn, Heinemann,
Adler, and Theiler, Die Werke Philos, 1:28n1.
30
von Rad, “Form-Critical Problem”; cf. Sanders, Torah and Canon, ix – xx.
31
See Sanders, “Torah: A Definition,” and Sanders, “Torah and Paul.”
dated surely before 70. Jacob Neusner’s form-critical work on these traditions
but underscores the point.32
Jewish denominations that were extant before 70 can be placed at the two ends
of the spectrum just described: those that emphasized Torah, and hence Judaism,
as a story of what God has done and will do, and those that emphasized Torah
as stipulations for what Jews have done and should do. There were many shades
between, with some perhaps preferring to stress the role of wisdom in Jewish
heritage, but the great preponderance of the literature datable to the period indi-
cates the two major groupings.
After Marcion, the central question of canon for Christians may well have
been whether the Old Testament was to be retained as Scripture. But the central
question about the New Testament, precisely in the period of which Silberman
writes, was whether, so to speak, the New Testament was biblical.33 Paul and
the Evangelists had the chutzpah to claim that the God who created the world,
redeemed the slaves from Egyptian bondage, gave them the law at Sinai, guided
them through the desert, brought them into the Promised Land, and occupied
Jerusalem with David, has just now brought this haggadah to its fulfilment and
climax: the Torah story is now complete. Paul puts it succinctly: Christ is the
telos of the Torah righteousness-wise for all who believe (Rom 10:4), i. e., for all
who read the Torah as a record of what God has done, as haggadah. As Silberman
very movingly stresses, the specific haggadah for the Passover Seder insists that
God was the principal actor in the story of Israel’s redemption (p. 208). So also,
if the New Testament is read theocentrically, rather than anthropocentrically or
christocentrically, in continuity with the Old Testament, one can see its central
argument: God has done it again, this time a mighty act of redemption and cre-
ation in one, in Christ.
Conclusion: Reading the Gospels Midrashically
I am constrained to agree with the overall thrust of Silberman’s essay: source

critical work on the formation of the Gospels does not now seem to be the most
fruitful avenue of approach to them (p. 218). All the earliest Christians knew and
applied the Old Testament (Law, Prophets, Psalms, and other writings) to their
christological and ecclesiological claims. In addition, they had traditions about
Jesus’ words and parables, as well as some form of the basic kergyma of the early
church about the work of God in Christ. These latter grew in authority through
the middle third of the first century to have weight equal eventually to that of the
Old Testament Scriptures.34 Knowing what we do about the period (considering
the observations brought by Silberman and those that I have tried to bring, about
32
Neusner, Rabbinic Traditions.
33
Sanders, “Torah and Christ,” esp. 372 – 75; also, see Sanders, “Torah and Paul.”
34
See von Campenhausen, Formation of the Christian Bible, esp. 103 – 63; Kümmel, Intro-
duction to the NT, 475 – 84; Aland, Problem of the NT Canon, esp. 8 – 18.
comparative scriptural fluidity and open-endedness), it is simply very difficult to

imagine Mark or Matthew, Luke or John, at their desks copying great reams of a
Gospel Vorlage or to imagine that these literary works had their sources in pre-
vious literary works, at least not quite in the way source critics have supposed.
On the other hand, it cannot be ignored that there is an amazing amount of
verbatim agreement in detailed phrasing among the Synoptics. We cannot agree
with Birger Gerhardsson that memory work among early Christians would
account for this phenomenon: he simply did not convince very many of us.35
Silberman’s suggestion about free-floating themes will not suffice by itself to
account for the Synoptic phenomenon, nor will my observations alone halt the
perennial debate regarding the priority of Mark, or Matthew, or even Luke.
But I do have a suggestion to make, and it evolves out of the hint that the cen-
tral christological and ecclesiological arguments of the New Testament become
clear if the New Testament is read theocentrically rather than christocentrically.
My suggestion is that the New Testament be studied midrashically, through the
disciplines of comparative midrash and canonical criticism, before the methods
of source and form criticism are applied. I am convinced that we need all the
subdisciplines of biblical study so far developed but that they are complemen-
tary to each other. I am equally convinced that New Testament students need to
see the New Testament as the product of a denomination of Judaism in the first
century and to approach it in the light of the history of all the Jewish literature
from the fourth century BCE to the end of the first century CE. Of course, the
New Testament has a lot of Hellenism in it, but as Martin Hengel has brilliantly
shown, so did much of the rest of the Judaism of the period have a great deal of
Hellenism in it.36 For that matter, the Old Testament has a lot of Bronze, Iron,
and Persian Age cultural idiom in it. But none of these should be absolutized. If
one studies the Bible holistically, or canonically, in the stream of history, and if
one approaches the New Testament “from its top side,” one gets a perspective
that the great bulk of New Testament source and form criticism has hardly con-
sidered.
My students, among themselves, call the work of comparative midrash on the
New Testament “coming up through the floorboards of the New Testament.”
New Testament scholars agree that Scripture, or the Old Testament, was the first
reference of authority for all New Testament writers, and especially for Jesus
himself. The Old Testament cuts across the whole question of Gospel sources,
whether the source was Jesus, his sayings, “Q,” logia, Mark, Matthew, or what-
ever. One need but ask of the Old Testament citation or allusion (and sometimes
it is only an Old Testament theme woven into the fabric of a Gospel passage
or, as Silberman notes, floating themes of the Jewish times, which nonetheless
nearly all have roots in Old Testament tradition) what its function is in the pas-
sage. And one does this first by drawing up a history of the function of this same
Old Testament passage or theme since its inception in Old Testament times right
35
Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript.
36
See Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism.
through early Judaism, until it shows up in the New Testament. The job would
not be complete, of course, until the work of the other subdisciplines had also
been brought to bear on the New Testament passage in question.
One of the poignant observations that one makes, when he or she has com-
pleted an exercise in comparative midrash, is one of Silberman’s first points in
his paper: when an old tradition or theme comes into expression for a particular
occasion it may be quite inconsistent with the way it functioned on another par-
ticular occasion. Often, as he rightly says, “the same is not the same” (p. 196).
We can observe this far back in biblical times. The reference to the theme of
Abraham being one person and inheriting the land is utterly rejected by Ezekiel
(33:24 – 29) but is advanced as divine truth by Deutero-Isaiah fifty years later
(51:1 – 3). And many other such examples in the Bible can be given. Such a plu-
ralistic observation can be expanded to the general insight brilliantly stated by
James Barr: “It is the shape of the tradition that leads Jesus to the finding of
his obedience; but it is also the shape of the tradition that leads his enemies to
see him as a blasphemer and to demand that he should be put to death.”37 The
student of the Qumran scrolls often gets excited when he or she observes the
entirely different functions of the same Old Testament passage or theme in a
Qumran commentary over against its appearance in the New Testament. They
sometimes serve in the two different contexts to say precisely opposing things.38
Can we be surprised to observe that some of the very traditions of the Old Testa-
ment that the New Testament calls upon to support its christological claims were
called upon by other Jews of the period to reject these claims? There are two
observations here: (1) The Bible is highly pluralistic; and (2) its traditions are by
their very nature as canon adaptable to differing contexts and needs. Whatever
was not ambiguous enough to have meaning or value in at least two generations
and in more than one context simply was not picked up, read again, and passed
on. I hope that this point about canon is abundantly clear by now.39
But the Bible is also pluralistic. In the Neo-Orthodox period, when I was a
student, we were on constant quest for the unity of the Bible. Today my students
know that when they think they have found a point clearly scored in biblical
literature, they must then begin a search for its contrapositive. Isaiah 2:4 and
Mic 4:3 say that at some future point Judah will beat her swords into plowshares
and her spears into pruning hooks, but Joel 3:10 (4:10 in Hebrew) says that she
will beat her plowshares into swords and her pruning hooks into spears. Little
wonder that the Fourth Gospel says Jesus gave peace (John 14:27), whereas Luke
says he came to bring not peace but dissension (Luke 12:51 – 53).
Study of true and false prophecy in the Old Testament has taken a new turn
in the past few years and is one of the more exciting areas of biblical study at
the moment, especially the disputation passages, where two ancient theologians
or colleagues can call on the same ancient tradition and apply it to the same
37
Barr, Old and New in Interpretation, 27.
38
See Sanders, “Habakkuk in Qumran,” and Sanders, “Ethic of Election,” esp. 248 – 53.
39
historical and political context in ancient Israel or Judah but do so in opposing

ways.40 Isaiah’s colleagues could say that even though the Assyrian forces were
gathering outside the city gates and setting up their siege works to attack Jeru-
salem, God would at the right moment rise up as on Mt. Perazim and be angry
as in the valley of Gibeon back there when he helped David defeat the Philis-
tines (2 Sam 5:17 – 25) and helped Judah repel the Assyrians in 701 BCE. Isaiah
responded that God would rise up right enough as on Mt. Perazim and be wroth
as in the valley of Gibeon to do his deed, but strange would be his deed and alien
his work, for this time he would as Holy Warrior be at the head of the enemy
troops attacking his own people (Isa 28:21). Incidentally, Isaiah’s colleagues, the
so-called false prophets, were right and Isaiah wrong in terms mechanically of
what happened in 701. Their hermeneutics were different. But it is Isaiah that is
in the canon and not the others.
So in New Testament study I am much more interested in determining the
function of Old Testament themes in a given New Testament passage than in
determining which Evangelist was copied by the others. There are always three
variables in the study of the function of an authoritative tradition: the old text
or tradition called upon, the historical context into which it is cited, and the
hermeneutics used in doing so. The Bible is full of unrecorded hermeneutics
from earliest Old Testament times to the last New Testament book, and we have
only begun to ferret them out and look at them. The believing communities,
synagogues and churches, have for so long imported hermeneutics to the Bible
to render it relevant to ongoing generations that we have failed to see that the
Bible is one long record of adaptation of authoritative traditions or themes in
many shapes, forms, and styles to ever-changing situations and contexts. Could
it not be that recovery of these hermeneutics might give us a clue as to the herme-
neutics we might use today to hear afresh what some of these themes might say
to the believing communities that find their identity in them?41 My suspicion is
that if we do just this, we may recover the power for life that the canon has had
for these believing communities for nearly three thousand years, including the
power to liberate ourselves from ancient and modern cultural forms and mores
that sponsor repression of the weak and corrupt the consciousness of the pow-
erful. To focus on the Gospels as manifestations of the storyteller’s art could
begin with a consideration of how the various stories update and contemporize
the Old Testament traditions and themes they held to be authoritative. To read
the New Testament theocentrically, rather than christocentrically, might indicate
how biblical it really is despite the odd, sometimes puzzling Hellenistic idiom in
which its stories are recited. To do so might also help us become liberated from
absolutizing the equally odd Bronze, Iron, and Persian Age idioms of the Old
Testament.
40
See Crenshaw, Prophetic Conflict; Hossfeld and Meyer, Prophet gegen Prophet; Sanders,
“Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.”
41
See Sanders, “Hermeneutics” (IDBSup).
The early churches in their astounding wisdom provided themselves four

quite different Gospels so that we might not get hung up on any one of them.
Nor should we permit ourselves to get hung up on any of the ancient Near East-
ern idioms in which the Bible recites its story of the way God does what he does
and says what he says in any age. To experience this liberation might indicate
how we can also be liberated from the recent Modern Near Western idioms that
serve us so well in this and other scholarly gatherings, whether the idiom be lit-
erary criticism, or source criticism, or form criticism, or rhetorical criticism, or
redactional criticism, or canonical criticism.
Bibliography
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ology 2. London: Mowbray, 1962.
Harper & Row, 1966. [Rev. ed. 1985.]
Barthélemy, Dominique. “Les tiqquné sopherim et la critique textuelle de l’Ancien Tes-
tament.” In Congress Volume, Bonn 1962. IOSOT, 285 – 304. VTSup 9. Leiden: Brill,
1963. [Reprinted in Études d’histoire du texte de l’Ancien Testament, by Dominique
Barthélemy, 91 – 110. Fribourg: Éditions universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1978.]
Bright, John. Early Israel in Recent History Writing: A Study in Method. SBT 19. London:
SCM, 1956.
Cohn, Leopold, Isaak Heinemann, Maximilian Adler, and Willy Theiler, eds. Die Werke
Philos von Alexandria in deutscher Übersetzung. 6 vols. Schriften der jüdisch-helle-
nistischen Literatur in deutscher Übersetzung. Breslau: M. & H. Marcus, 1900 – 1937.
Crenshaw, James L. Prophetic Conflict: Its Effect upon Israelite Religion. BZAW 124. Ber-
lin: de Gruyter, 1971.
Elliger, Karl, ed. Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. 16 fascicles. Stuttgart: Privilegierte Bibel
anstalt, 1968 – 76.
Elliger, Karl. Studien zum Habakuk-Kommentar vom Toten Meer. BHT 15. Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 1953.
Gerhardsson, Birger. Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission
in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity, translated by Eric J. Sharpe. Acta Seminarii
Neotestamentici Upsaliensis 22. Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup; Copenhagen: Ejnar Munks-
gaard, 1961.
Gertner, Meir. “Terms of Scriptural Interpretation: A Study in Hebrew Semantics.” Bulle-
tin of the School of Oriental (and African) Studies 25 (1962) 1 – 27.
Greenberg, Moshe. “The Stabilization of the Text of the Hebrew Bible: Reviewed in the
Light of the Biblical Materials from the Judean Desert.” JAOS 76 (1956) 157 – 67. [Re-
edited by Sid Z. Leiman, 298 – 326. New York: Ktav, 1974.]
Gunkel, Hermann. “Fundamental Problems of Hebrew Literary History.” In What Re-

mains of the Old Testament and Other Essays, translated by A. K. Dallas, 57 – 68. New
York: Macmillan, 1928.
Gunkel, Hermann. The Legends of Genesis: The Biblical Saga and History, translated by
W. H. Carruth. New York: Schocken, 1964. [Reprint of 1901 edition.]
Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the
Early Hellenistic Period. Translated by John Bowden. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974.
Heschel, Abraham. “A Time for Renewal.” Midstream 18 (May 1972) 46 – 51.
Hossfeld, Frank Lothar, and Ivo Meyer. Prophet gegen Prophet: Eine Analyse der alttesta-
mentlichen Texte zum Thema wahre und falsche Propheten. Biblische Beiträge 9. Fri-
bourg: Verlag Schweizerisches Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1973.
Jones, Alexander, ed. The Jerusalem Bible. 1st ed. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966.
Kittel, Rudolf, ed. Biblia Hebraica. 3rd ed. Completed by Albrecht Alt and Otto Eissfeldt.
Stuttgart: Privilegierte Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1937.
Kümmel, Werner Georg. Introduction to the New Testament. Rev. ed. Translated by How-
ard Clark Kee. Nashville: Abingdon, 1975.
Loewe, Raphael. “The ‘Plain’ Meaning of Scripture in Early Jewish Exegesis.” In Papers
of the Institute of Jewish Studies, 140 – 85. Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1964.
McCasland, S. Vernon. “Matthew Twists the Scriptures.” JBL 80 (1961) 143 – 48.
Miller, Merrill P. “Midrash.” In IDBSup 593 – 97.
Neusner, Jacob. The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70. 3 vols. Leiden:
Brill, 1971.
The New English Bible with The Apocrypha. London: Oxford University Press; Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
Nielsen, Bruce. “Tqwny Sprym.” MDiv thesis, Union Theological Seminary in the City
of New York, 1977.
Patte, Daniel. Early Jewish Hermeneutic in Palestine. SBLDS 22. Missoula, MT: Scholars,
1975.
co-Roman Cults: Studies for Morton Smith at Sixty, Part 1, New Testament, edited by
[Reprinted in Luke and Scripture: The Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke – Acts, by
Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders, 46 – 69. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.]
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Simpson, Cuthbert A. “The Book of Genesis: Introduction and Exegesis.” In IB 1:437 –
829.
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von Campenhausen, Hans. The Formation of the Christian Bible. Translated by J. A. Baker.
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von Rad, Gerhard. “The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch.” In The Problem of the
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McGraw-Hill, 1966.
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Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976.
17
The Bible and the Believing Communities
It gives me great pleasure to join with others in this manner to express gratitude
to Jim Mays for his years of work as author and editor; the world of biblical
scholarship is greatly in his debt.1
The need to rethink the relationship between the mainline denominations and
the seminaries that serve them is urgent even to the most casual observer on
either side of the relationship. James Hopewell has addressed the inadequacy of
models followed in those relationships, especially models that view congrega-
tions as static constituencies. His was an important contribution to the impetus
to rethink the role of the mainline seminary in the complex of American Protes-
tant Christianity in the late twentieth century.
The present essay explores that relationship, focusing on the role of the Bible
in congregations and how it is taught in seminary.
The seminaries addressed in what follows are those that consciously under-
stand themselves as serving congregations or communities that view the Enlight-
enment as a gift of God and a part of revelatio generalis – whether all such con-
gregations and their members are fully conscious of such a theological position
or not. By the Enlightenment I mean not only its intellectual heritage but also its
basic characteristic of liberation from all forms of feudalism and the shackles of
ignorance, subservience, and superstition.
We are not addressing the problems of so-called fundamentalists or any oth-
ers that understand revelation to have ceased with the Bible or to be limited to
hierarchical inspiration, or that do not believe in revelatio generalis in sensu lato.
Nor are we addressing humanists or others that understand truth to derive
only from inductive search or from human intellectual reflection with no refer-
ent beyond it.
Rather we are consciously addressing those who have endeavored to incorpo-
rate the Enlightenment into an understanding of the ongoing self-revelation of
Reality as rooted in Scripture and tradition, that is, those who have endeavored
to wed academia, in its broadest and best sense of freedom in the quest for truth,
to ecclesia, precisely those who have maintained a hermeneutic of God both as

1
Mays is also a contributor to canonical criticism; see, e. g., “Historical and Canonical: Re-
cent Discussions.” Mays is a dedicated churchman as well, whose concerns about seminary and
church I trust are expressed to some extent in the present essay. The essay was originally written
for the Consultation on the Congregation and Theological Education at the Candler School of
Theology, 3 – 5 June 1985. James Hopewell’s paper, “Congregational Paradigm for Theological
Education,” was a point of reference for the Consultation.
The Bible and the Believing Communities 305
universal continuing creator and as particular continual redeemer in Israel and

in Christ.
Within that broad rubric, the present essay addresses more specifically those
seminaries whose faculties have come to find their professional and vocational
identities more in academia, in its narrower sense, and its guilds than in the
believing communities they are designed to serve.
In other words, the seminaries in mind in what follows are those that are a
part of secular universities, independent seminaries affiliated with secular univer-
sities, as well as more distinctly church-related and church-supported seminaries.
In yet other words, the seminaries in mind are those that, for the most part,
have more or less consciously followed the model established by William Rainey
Harper in the early years of the twentieth century, those “training the scholarly
pastor.”
The problem addressed, that of the role of the Bible in the ongoing believing
communities that find clues to their identity and their lifestyle through ongoing
dialogue with it, is exacerbated in the late twentieth century as much as it was
in the late nineteenth century, though in different modes. The so-called mod-
ernist-fundamentalist tension was not resolved by either liberalism or neo-or-
thodoxy. The tension does not dissolve either by focusing almost exclusively on
God as creator of all or by focusing almost exclusively on God as redeemer of all
through a particular kerygma.
A primary focus of the emerging discipline called canonical criticism is pre-
cisely that of the relationship between Scripture and a believing community.
While it has not yet, to my knowledge, addressed the specific problem of the
relationship of mainline seminaries to mainline churches in the late twentieth
century, it is undoubtedly time to do so.
The Bible, as canon, comes to us from and through ancient believing commu-
nities. Its various parts as well as the whole were formed and shaped principally
in the liturgical and instructional programs of the early communities. While most
of its literature may have been written by or derived from ancient individuals,
nothing in it should be understood to have been contributed directly by an indi-
vidual without its having been filtered through communities that appreciated it
and began the heritage of repetition / recitation, which set it upon a tenure track
toward canon. One of the major problems in mainline seminary instruction in
Bible has been a focus on ancient individuals, either “original” writers or redac-
tors. Redaction criticism has underscored the focus. Canonical criticism provides
a corrective in this regard.
The mode of understanding the formation of canon since Johann Salomo
Semler and his students toward the end of the eighteenth century has been to
see it as principally the final stage in the literary formation of the canon, that is,
how the larger literary units, the several books, were decided upon as either in or
out of the canon.2 The only attention paid in that mode to the role of the com-
2
Cf. Semler, Abhandlung von freier Untersuchung des Canons. For further references, see
Sanders, “Adaptable for Life,” 552n2; and Childs, Introduction to the OT as Scripture, 30 – 60.
munity was limited to the positing of councils at certain moments that decided
such issues; this is now seen as anachronistic in its importing later notions of
authoritative consistories that had the power to make such decisions for all the
communities. Little attention was apparently paid to the implications of such a
view, which would have presupposed certain models of inspiration and authority
that are now seen as hardly realistic – groups of men (sic) making momentous
decisions for all time with their minds shaped and focused on a limited and par-
ticular set of problems and concerns and perceptions of them!
Conjoined in the model was a criterion for inspiration or canonicity stated
by the Jewish historian, Josephus – a great name ancient and revered enough to
bear authority in the ongoing memory of the community.3 Recent work on the
Semler model has shown that passages in ancient noncanonical literature that
fit the model, such as lists of books compiled by well-known individuals, pas-
sages mentioning gatherings of leaders, passages that stressed the importance of
inspired individuals in antiquity, were those that were cited to describe canoniza-
tion. The Western scholar’s need to envisage the role of individuals in the process
gave scholarship the eyes to see such references but blinded it apparently to the
common sense needed to perceive the importance of the believing communities
in the canonical process. No individual in antiquity, no matter how “inspired,”
slipped something he or she had written into the canon by a side door! It has all
come through the worship and educational programs of ancient believing com-
munities or we would not have it. The newly revised concepts and methods in
text criticism have indicated a more realistic view of what actually happened. The
focus must now be on communities and the individuals within them, rather than
almost exclusively on individuals. The so-called secondary or spurious passages
in the Bible, even those “added by a later hand” are also canonical.
Along with the new realism concerning the formation of canon has come
a revised model for understanding the inspiration of Scripture. Heretofore,
whether for literalists or liberals, the model has been that of inspiration of an
individual in antiquity whose words were then more or less accurately preserved
by disciples, schools, and scribes. The only difference between liberals and con-
servatives in this regard has been quantitative.
The critical search for the ipsissima verba of the original speaker or writer has
been a major focus of biblical criticism. And that focus is fully justified insofar
as the scholar is working in her or his shop as a literary historian. So far as I am
concerned it should never stop: the tools for recovering original moments in
antiquity are improving constantly and should continue to be developed.4 But
3
Josephus, Ag. Ap. 1:37 – 46.
4
These same tools are currently being applied to the formation of Qumran literature with
considerable effect in reconstructing the history of the Qumran settlement as related to and
distinct from the Essenes. Canonical criticism can be applied only in a limited way to study
of the Qumran literature since (a) we do not know for sure all they considered canonical, and
(b) they ceased to exist as a discrete believing community with the destruction of the Qumran
settlement. See the recent discussion by Davies, “Eschatology at Qumran.” His n. 9 on p. 41 is
inexact; Davies should not refer there to canonical criticism but to Brevard Childs’s work on
canonical context.
that original moment was only the beginning of a process of transmission that
took place not only in preserving “schools” but in ancient believing communities
that so believed in the value of the original “moment” that it began a process of
re-presentation of relevance to the problems of the ongoing community.
Such early schools engaged as much in the re-presenting process as in the pre-
serving process: the two factors of stability and adaptability emerge as of very
real importance in understanding the canonical process as well as in understand-
ing today any valid model of the relationship between Bible and believing com-
munity.5
The new model for understanding inspiration of Scripture is that of the Holy
Spirit at work all along the process of formation of Scripture (of whichever
canon of whichever believing community – Jewish, Protestant, Roman, Greek
Orthodox, all the way to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church) as well as through its
textual and versional transmission into the ongoing preserving and re-presenta-
tional process. This should and must include Enlightenment modes of study of
Scripture, discovery of ancient manuscripts, and recovery of apparently sharper
information about ancient historical, political, and social contexts and cultures
that nurtured the texts at all the layers of its formation.
What emerges from viewing the whole of a community’s Bible as canon (again,
whichever canon of whichever community) is honesty about its wholeness. In
contrast to selecting a canon within the canon on which to base the theological
construct of whatever denomination, canonical criticism eschews efforts at either
harmonization or reductionism and admits from the outset that, like the awe-in-
spiring Cathedral of Chartres, the Bible as canon is a glorious mess.6 There can
be no avoidance of recognition of its anomalies and discrepancies, that is, of its
pluralistic richness. The fact that different generations of even a single believing
community have different eyes with which to read it and derive value from it
must not blind responsible study of it to its canonical pluralism. Different gen-
erations as well as different communities have different needs that permit them
to see different values on which to base their self-understanding as well as their
worldview. This is a part of human humility and limitation so well described in
most of its literature.
The most pervasive images that emerge from the canon as a whole, by which
believing communities may understand who they are, are those of church and
synagogue as pilgrim folk, witnesses, servants, and stewards.
The model for understanding the called people of God that seems most per-
vasive in Scripture, whether in the Jahvist, the Deuteronomic historians, the
Chronicler, the psalmists, Evangelists, Paul, or the writer of Hebrews, is that
of the pilgrim folk. “We are strangers and sojourners as all our forebears were,”
David is wont to have prayed (1 Chron 29:15). The ongoing dialogue between
canon and community is based in large measure on that understanding of iden-
5
See the discussion in Sanders, “Adaptable for Life.”
6
James, Chartres, 9: “When you examine the cathedral closely, you discover to your im-
mense surprise that the design is not a well controlled and harmonious entity, but a mess.”
tity. As Hopewell apparently saw, the believing community should be perceived

in dynamic terms rather than static. Surely such a view is firmly based in this
image of understanding the believing community as a pilgrim folk in serious dia-
logue with Scripture. The image of the church as on a pilgrimage is not the only
one discernible in Scripture, but its importance puts it perhaps first in any such
list of images.
The called witnesses of God are those who inherit a vision, a peculiar manner
of seeing the world and their place and function in it. St. Paul and others called
this phronēsis, a mindset; others speak of it as vision. St. Luke, in two volumes of
excellent theological history writing, rang in the changes in fugue and counter-
point on God’s providing for himself “eyewitnesses and servants of the word”
(Luke 1:2) through the generations so there might be a folk to witness to what
was Reality and its role in human affairs. The prophets cannot be fully under-
stood only as spokespersons and covenant mediators; they were also witnesses
to how God was signifying the power-flows in the Iron Age Near East from the
middle of the eighth century BCE to the end of the sixth, precisely the time of
rise and fall of empires most impinging on the life of Israel, bringing about both
its death and its resurrection as Judaism.
Luke’s other term, hupēretai, means “servants,” not “ministers” as the current
RSV would have it. This image for understanding the believing community or
called folk of God is also pervasive in Scripture. It ought to rule out all self-serv-
ing readings of Scripture but apparently does not when insufficiently stressed.
Election is to service not to rewards. Whether the servant be suffering or not, the
service centers in being a vehicle for God’s blessing all his creatures, all the fam-
ilies of the earth [Gen 12:3].
A fourth pervasive image for self-understanding of the believing community
is that of stewardship. As pilgrims, witnesses, and servants we are also stewards
of whatever we perceive ourselves to have control of or power over. I actually
know some Christians who think they own something in this brief passage from
womb to tomb! We are but stewards where power lurks – the body, the mind,
the spirit, family, friends, or ought of worldly goods. Idolatry is not only some-
thing ancient Canaanites engaged in; it is the persistent temptation of the called
people of God, community and individual – loving God’s gifts so much that we
forget they are gifts, that we let ourselves think we have possession of them.
Finally, the called people of God believe unstintingly that there is a moral
dimension to the universe, that there is Integrity to Reality (oneness in God),
and that there is and will be accountability. Canonical pluralism does not permit
writing a scenario of how that accountability is or will be expressed; but dialogue
with Scripture renders belief in it firm and unshakeable.
The ongoing dialogue between canon and community is understood as cen-
tering in the two questions dynamically conceived: that of faith and that of obe-
dience – identity and lifestyle.
The Bible, as canon, may be viewed in essence as the authoritative record
of that dialogue as pursued from the inceptions of the believing communities,
Jewish and Christian, through to the establishment of formative Judaism, on the
one hand, and of the early church, on the other. It may be viewed as the received
record of the struggles of those early believing communities, through five culture
eras, to pursue the Integrity of Reality (oneness of God). The idioms, mores, and
customs of those five eras form the expressions of the struggle. The expression
includes numerous types of literary genres; but none fails to monotheize. While
some portions monotheize more thoroughly than others, or appear to do so, the
literature that makes up any of the canons of the believing communities, Jewish
and Christian, monotheizes more or less well. It would indeed appear that those
portions most embarrassing to the modern or Enlightenment mind are those that
monotheized most thoroughly (the hardening of the heart of Pharaoh, the com-
mission to Isaiah, Peter’s sermon at Pentecost).
Central to the concept of the Bible as canon is the hermeneutics by which the
early communities of faith engaged in the struggle to monotheize. The tools of
criticism by which to ferret out those hermeneutics are in hand and improving.
There is even the possibility on the horizon that we may need to say that the
intrabiblical hermeneutics so recovered may be viewed as being as canonical as
the actual texts.
The Bible as canon of the believing communities is the paradigm whereby
they may learn how to engage dynamically in the same struggle to monotheize
today as our ancestors in the faith did in their time. The first commandment
is not simply the first of ten, it is prōton in every sense one may imagine. The
canon is therefore not to be viewed as a box of ancient jewels still valuable and
negotiable, but rather as the paradigm whereby current believing communities
may resist polytheizing, or fragmentizing of truth, but rather learn in our several
cultural spaces to pursue the Integrity of Reality.
The forms of polytheism rampant today may be more insidious and perhaps
less clear than they were in antiquity, but they are just as forceful and pervasive
as ever they were. It is perhaps more rampant today because we heirs of Judaism
and Christianity think we are monotheists. Christianity is especially vulnerable
at this point precisely because of the centrality of the concept of the incarna-
tion – the most precious and the most dangerous concept in Christianity. We
have permitted ourselves to think that our Christ revealed God. We have permit-
ted ourselves to think that our Christ in the incarnation domesticated God. We
have permitted ourselves to think that God is a Christian. Polytheism of various
sorts is rampant in the thinking of Christians: the concept of the Trinity is usu-
ally expressed in polytheistic terms; the concept of the satan, or tester, is often
expressed in polytheistic terms. We permit ourselves in reading the New Testa-
ment to identify with Christ and thus entirely miss the blessing of his prophetic
and challenging words and life and death and resurrection. We have denigrated
Paul’s concept of the Christian’s being en Christō to the point of identifying with
Christ and at best pitying the poor benighted Jews and Romans who rejected
him.
A salient function that the Bible as canon can have in the believing communi-
ties today is that of a prophetic voice challenging the witnessing, serving stew-
ards of the pilgrim folk to take the next step on the journey begun by Abraham
and Sarah. I suggest that hearing the Bible as God’s prophetic voice is its most
important function in its dialogue with current believing communities.
In order to hear that voice, so necessary to the pilgrimage, we must learn to
read the Bible on its own terms, that is, by the canonical hermeneutics embedded
in it at all layers of its formation.
To what purpose? To fulfill the vocation of the heirs of Abraham and Sarah,
whether by blood or by Christ, of being instruments whereby God may indeed
bless all the families of the earth. Current suggestions that incorporate Amer-
icanism into Christianity with its idols of success and prosperity need to hear
the challenge. I recently saw a bumper sticker stating, “Prosperity is your divine
right”! The rampant polytheism in the current electronic church is so patent as to
be shocking. The current form of hard-core politicized evangelicalism is perhaps
the most idolatrous and polytheistic.
The hermeneutics that emerge from within Scripture itself, both those by
which we see community traditions continually represented and those by which
we see international wisdom continually adapted, are precisely the monotheizing
view of God as both universal creator of all peoples and particular redeemer in
Israel and in Christ. But even that redemption must finally be seen in the light of
God as universal creator, and God’s being creator must finally be seen in the light
of God’s being redeemer. The final redemption is eschatologically a re-creation.
If the Bible is read with God as primarily redeemer, then it easily is falsified as
a text into denominationalism and ultimately a new tribalism. This is Christian-
ity’s greatest failing, especially wherever the New Testament is viewed as more
authoritative than the Old or whenever Marcionism intrudes.
If the Bible is read with God as universal creator solely, then it easily is falsi-
fied as a text into a flaccid kind of universalism that lacks reality.
Recent study of true and false prophecy in the prophetic corpus has shown
that the real difference between the so-called true and the so-called false prophets
was in their hermeneutics.7 Falsehood crept in when God was seen only as the
peculiar God of Israel, only as Israel’s redeemer; there are no instances of God
being seen only as universal creator, even in the purely wisdom literature, and
certainly not in the prophetic corpus. But even if one should want to assert that
the wisdom literature fails to ring in the changes on God as redeemer, that liter-
ature must be seen as but a part of the canon as a whole.
There clearly are portions of the church or segments of the believing com-
munities that need a reading of Scripture that might be called constitutive or
supportive of what they are already thinking and doing or have embarked upon.
One thinks of those communities made up of nondominant culture constitu-
encies, minorities, third-world communities under oppression, many of whom
are in main-line denominations! One of the evolved or developed hermeneutic
visions that emerge from such study of the Bible as here described is that of
God’s bias for the weak and dispossessed, the powerless, indeed, for the slave
7
Sanders, “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.”
people come out of Egypt up to the point of entering into the gifts of the promise
and the sin of corruption induced by the power of the blessing.
But the mainline communities described above hardly fit into such a category.
Where they might, then adjustment to a constitutive hermeneutic is in order.
Nonetheless, for most of those we address in our concern about the relation of
seminary to congregation it is a prophetic reading of Scripture that is in order
at the community level. At the individual level, as in the case of those who lack
power to oppress as community, adjustment in hermeneutic is indicated.
The believing communities that I understand to be in the purview of our
study desperately need to learn to read the Bible on its own terms, by the herme-
neutics that emerge from the canon itself, so that they may hear a prophetic voice
that challenges: (a) their very concept of God, or Reality; (b) for Christians their
very concept of Christ; and (c) their very concept of church or election. There
are surely other challenges that are needed but most certainly are they needed
in terms of the actual understanding of Christianity one finds in most mainline
churches concerning precisely God, Christ, and the church.
My understanding of the Bible as canon, or as the churches’ book, has been
developed over the past thirty years as much in actual congregations and pastors’
groups as in the seminary classroom. What I have arrived at in this regard8 has
been forged over those years not only on the anvils of mainline seminary cur-
ricula and of mainline, white power-centered congregations and judicatories. I
have for some fifteen years been an affiliate member under watch-care of a black
church in Bedford Stuyvesant (largely to try to maintain some kind of Chris-
tian sanity) and preach perhaps twice a year in black pulpits; and some of these
experiences are a part of my understanding of canon and community. But there
have been the two anvils, not just academia, but also ecclesia of the sort we can
experience in this country and to some extent abroad.
It is my conviction, out of these experiences, out of viewing the ancient believ-
ing communities that bequeathed us these texts we call sacred, through what we
know of modern believing communities, and out of viewing the latter in the light
of what I have assiduously tried to learn about the former, that something like a
complete revision of our concepts of seminary and church needs to be attempted.
Hopewell was quite right that those in seminaries need to revise their under-
standing of congregations. The latter, like ancient Israel and the early church, are
continually changing and continually evolving, ever moving from one cultural
and political context to another, even though imperceptibly perhaps at times. But
it is far from certain that those congregations enjoy a self-understanding based
on responsible dialogue with Scripture; they certainly do not have a self-con-
scious identity based on the hermeneutics herein suggested. Hopewell, of course,
did not claim they did.
Is it possible for the seminaries so to relate to the community they serve that
they might both understand themselves as a part of one and the same pilgrimage,
8
In Sanders, Canon and Community; Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text.
in sensu lato, both needing accurately to hear the Word of God available through
a prophetic hermeneutic reading of Scripture? Both? As noted above, the sem-
inaries we serve and address tend to view themselves, through their faculties, as
a part of academia more than as a part of ecclesia. Even so, they have a largely
static view of seminaryhood. Oh, we all like to say we are constantly learning
and hopefully improving but this is said for the most part in terms of our iden-
tity in our guilds. Is it possible for the seminaries more faithfully to exhibit a
self-understanding that transcends academia, to conduct themselves as though
they really believed they were a part of a called community as well as the practi-
tioners of Enlightenment thinking and study?
By the model here espoused, the seminaries would attempt to provide through
dynamic theologizing and reflection models for hearing the voice of God not
only through paradigmatic readings of the Bible but also through paradigmatic
readings of Enlightenment culture, taking cues precisely from the biblical authors
and contributors both in their re-presenting authoritative community traditions
and in their adapting the best of international wisdom to ever-changing contexts.
By this model, the seminaries would attempt consciously to show the way for
the communities to listen for the dynamic Word that expresses the Integrity of
Reality. They would by the same model consciously attempt to show the way to
sift through cultural stimuli and adapt new wisdom as a part too of the gifts of
God. They would consciously attempt to show the way to search Scripture for
the challenge and guidance needed, as well as for the encouragement needed to
take another step on the pilgrimage.
Humankind is in AB 40 [now in 2016, 70!], the fortieth [seventieth] year of
the bomb. Earth hangs by a thin but firm thread of divine grace. (Surely these
forty [seventy] years are not attributable to human sagacity.) As children of the
Enlightenment we live between the pride thereof and the fear of its most impos-
ing product. Hope can be derived only from the belief that there is Integrity to
Reality. That belief can be due only to the vision that is the gift of Word and
Spirit; we can but grope about it inductively like the three blind persons around
the elephant. Final hope is that that Integrity continues to reach out for us to
integrate us unto itself and continues to grant us the grace that enables us to pur-
sue that Integrity in our lives. The promise is that some of it may rub off on us as
witnessing communities and even as individuals.
To monotheize while reading the Bible in order to hear the prophetic voice
that the seminaries and communities need to hear can start at the simple point
of refusing to read the Bible or history by the hermeneutic of good-guys-bad-
guys but to read it by dynamic analogy. American believing communities need
to understand that God’s hardening the heart of Pharaoh is not all that difficult
to understand if we read Exodus identifying with Raamses II and the Egyptians.
His argument to Moses was ours: hold on, you’re moving too fast! If Pharaoh’s
heart had been soft, there might be a stele of stones out near Goshen for an
archaeologist to dig up honoring Pharaoh’s emancipation proclamation; but we
would have no Torah. That requires theologizing, precisely monotheizing, while
reading Scripture, and not moralizing. Torah, hence gospel, is God’s emancipa-
tion proclamation for all the world. Just as it was not Pharaoh’s proclamation,
neither was it intended for Israel or church alone.
Monotheizing while reading the New Testament would mean refusing to
identify with Jesus in doing so, but rather seeing ourselves in the Pharisees and
the Romans. A theocentric hermeneutic that monotheizes, emphasizing God as
the universal creator of all peoples, as well as redeemer in Israel and in Christ,
would permit us to hear the challenging words of Christ’s prophetic ministry
and life, and permit us to take the further steps we must on the pilgrimage on
which we are embarked. I wager that anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, as well as
other forms of bigotry would very nearly disappear from the Christian soul if
we learned to read the New Testament with the basic hermeneutics by which the
New Testament writers read what was Scripture for them up to their time, the
Old Testament. But so would our self-serving readings, our tendencies to sepa-
ratism and exclusivism, and especially our own American forms of hardhearted-
ness as viewed by much of the rest of the world.9
Seminaries must learn to practice the paradigm and show the way for the
believing communities to pursue the Integrity of Reality, not only in the “train-
ing” of their future pastors and other ministers, but as paracommunities of faith
whose role in the ongoing mutual pilgrimage is in part that of providing a con-
sciously working paradigm for reading Scripture, tradition, and the ongoing
world in which we live so as to discern the guiding Torah or Word of Reality’s
Integrity on the pilgrimage.
The seminary as a paracommunity of faith would not be church any more
than a church should try to be a seminary. Their roles would be quite distinct.
The model would not provide the larger community of faith with the answer
or Word, but would provide the paradigm for how to see and hear both the
ancient struggles to monotheize and the ongoing ever-changing modern strug-
gles to be witnesses to that Integrity that alone claims and redeems humanity.10
Bibliography
1979.
Davies, Philip R. “Eschatology at Qumran.” JBL 104 (1985) 39 – 55.
Hopewell, James. “A Congregational Paradigm for Theological Education.” Theological
Education (Autumn 1984) 60 – 70.
James, John. Chartres: The Masons Who Built a Legend. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1982.
Mays, James L. “Historical and Canonical: Recent Discussions about the Old Testament
and Christian Faith.” In Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible
9
See a list of seventeen possible results in Christian congregations if canonical hermeneu-
tics were to be used in them and by their members in reading the Bible, in Sanders, Canon and
Community, 74 – 76.
10
A full working bibliography on current discussions on canon is included in Sanders, From
Sacred Story to Sacred Text.
and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E.

Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, 510 – 28. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.
Fortress, 1984.
Fortress, 1987.
Semler, Johann Salomo. Abhandlung von freier Untersuchung des Canon. 2nd ed. Halle:
Hemmerde, 1776.
18
Scripture as Canon in the Church
Scripture and Tradition
Every Christian faith community has two basic references of authority: Scripture
and tradition. While there is a common structure shared by all Christian biblical
canons, each believing community has its own body of traditions that distinguishes
it as unique and provides the hermeneutics by which to read its particular canon.
This is true whether the community be one of the Orthodox communions, the
Roman Catholic, a Reformation church, or indeed rabbinic Judaism. The major
difference between the Jewish canon and the Christian First Testament is the dif-
ference between a tripartite and a quadripartite structure.1 Whereas the prophetic
corpus, for instance, is situated in the Jewish canon to explain the uses of adversity
in the hands of One God, in the Christian canons the Prophets are placed last, just
before the Second Testament, to predict the coming of Christ – thus changing the
very nature of prophecy itself.2 One would be hard pressed to say for which com-
munity, Jewish or Christian, its magisterium or body of tradition is more domi-
nant. Heirs of left-wing Reformation movements tend to call themselves conserva-
tive today, such as Fundamentalists and Evangelicals in the United States, whereas
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries their predecessors were the most radical
in accommodating the cultural tenets of the time, especially the Renaissance of
Greco-Roman stress on individual worth and responsibility.
The Reformation was a child of the Renaissance, which stressed individ-
ual reading of Scripture. As early as the fourteenth century in Europe, monks
became scribes in order to produce enough copies of the Vulgate for the increas-
ing numbers of individuals who were becoming literate. By the sixteenth cen-
tury individual readings of Scripture engendered resistance to reading it solely
through the Catholic Magisterium. Individual readings of Scripture began to
challenge the meanings the Church had assigned to crucial passages. It was this
wide-spread growing Renaissance belief in individual worth and responsibility
that gave the rebellion in the sixteenth century of one such monk, Martin Luther,
the social and cultural hearing he increasingly received in Western Europe and
Scandinavia that rapidly produced the Reformation. Viewed in this manner it is

1
Sanders, “Stabilization of the Tanak.”
2
Sanders, “Spinning the Bible.” Whereas a prophet in the Bible is presented as a spokesper-
son, for God to the people and for the people to God (in intercessory prayer), early Christianity
turned the prophet into one who predicted Christ; apocalypticists have made the prophet one
who foresaw Armageddon.
not surprising that Luther rejected the Magisterium of the Catholic Church as
the sole way to read Scripture, and went on to develop the idea of sola Scriptura
as the sole authority for salvation. But stress on Scripture as the sole reference of
authority gave rise to different sets of new traditions or hermeneutics by which
to read it. It was clearly the diversity within Scripture itself that gave rise to dif-
ferent readings of it, but that same diversity also gave rise to the quest within
each community of readers for a canon within the canon, or unity within diver-
sity, or a biblical magisterium, by which to make sense of it as a whole.
Severing Scripture from the Magisterium of the Roman Church and reading it
independently of it was revolutionary in itself. But doing so exposed the diver-
sity within Scripture, which had necessitated the Magisterium in the first place.
If Scripture was to be the sole authority in the quest for human meaning and sal-
vation, each faith group had to be able to say what Scripture teaches. What hap-
pened was that the Magisterium of the Church Catholic gave way to the many
magisteria of Protestantism. The diversity within Protestantism that ensued put
the long-standing differences between Catholic and Orthodox canons and mag-
isteria into a far broader perspective.
The Corporate and the Individual
It is interesting to range Christian communities today on a spectrum between

corporate worth and responsibility and individual worth and responsibility. All
faith communities, of course, give evidence of both, but the differences among
them are pronounced. The traditions that distinguish a faith community provide
the particular hermeneutic by which it reads Scripture. Salvation of the believer
is a common message of all Christian communities, but the locus of that salvation
ranges from the corporate to the individual. For Orthodox and Catholic commu-
nions, salvation is in the Church, but for left-wing Protestant groups, salvation
is purely an individual matter, for whom the “church” is the sum of all the indi-
viduals who claim similar but personal saving experiences. This was a part of the
dramatic shift that took place because of the Renaissance in Europe of gradual
de-emphasis on corporate, with concomitant growing emphasis on individual,
worth and responsibility. After all, ancient Greece had been the birthplace of
Western democracy. Accompanying this shift was a change in understanding of
the nature of church and the nature of authority.
It is commonplace to note that authority in the West derives either from above
by special revelation, from below by the consent of the majority of those over
whom authority is exercised, or by some combination of the two.
The idea that the church was founded by Christ in the Gospels, having been
called into being by God’s pastoral call on Abraham and Sarah in Genesis, and
is a mighty flowing stream into which individuals are initiated by baptism and
instruction offered by priests ordained by that mighty flowing stream, is Ortho-
dox, Catholic and mainstream Protestant. Baptism of each child of the church is
mandated by a corporate view of covenant.
Scripture as Canon in the Church 317
But this gave way for left-wing Reformation groups to the Renaissance or
democratic idea that church derives its authority from the consent of the “saved”
individuals who make it up, hence presbyterian and congregational forms of
church governance, or polity. Authority derived from the Holy Spirit working
through individuals and the courts of the church they constituted. Votes taken in
duly-constituted congregations, dioceses, synods, presbyteries, and conferences
are taken as binding because they are viewed as authorized by the Holy Spirit
impacting each individual member. Such courts of the church, whenever they
meet for decision-making, are constituted by prayer for guidance of the Holy
Spirit.
Communions that derive from the early Anabaptist movement stress the sav-
ing experience of each member for whom the acid test is whether s / he professes
“the Lord Jesus Christ as personal Savior.”3 There are numerous left-wing Ref-
ormation heirs today who do not practice infant baptism or follow a common
lectionary, the two practices that most clearly sponsor among the laity a sense of
the corporate nature of faith and salvation. Such communities also minimize the
importance of the Christian calendar, some to the point of elimination of all but
Sunday (the Lord’s Day) and the holidays that have become part of the general
culture. Of the two most binding factors of community, canon and calendar,
left-wing Reformation Protestants focus on canon or Scripture only, read at will.
An important strain of the current neo-Puritan revival of Christian Funda-
mentalism in the United States denigrates corporate ties or denominations and
sponsors congregational authority solely, even the spawning of “community
churches,” which proudly declare themselves as totally autonomous congrega-
tions. Most members of such churches are typically dependent for their knowl-
edge of the Bible on the preaching and teaching of the charismatic pastor who
founded the church, with emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit through the
pastor’s gifts and graces as their leader.4 Though individuals are encouraged to
read the Bible for themselves, they do so by the hermeneutic absorbed from
the pastor’s preaching and teaching. Characteristic of the preaching and teaching
of Fundamentalist and Evangelical communities are the three-pronged tenets of
(a) believer’s or adult baptism, (b) choosing Scripture passages at will to preach
and teach, and (c) the dogma that all Scripture is harmonious and therefore auto-
matically supports whatever the pastor or leader teaches about the passage(s)
chosen. Even where denominational ties are apparently strong in the Fundamen-
talist churches, such as those of the Southern Baptist Convention, the three tenets
of adult baptism, free choice of Scripture passage, and belief in the harmony of all
Scripture, are solid dogma. The combination of the three tenets works together
to provide for the magisteria of Fundamentalist groups the scriptural authority
necessary for their work. The charisma of the pastor is his authority because it
3
Knowledge among believers that such individualistic stress on salvation probably derived
from later forms of the Mithraic cult, or from the various mystery or imperial cults of ancient
Rome is nil, or minimal at best.
4
See Todd, “Not Your Father’s Church.”
convinces his followers that the Holy Spirit works in him. Typical also is the
denigration of theology, with heavy emphasis on moralizing when reading Scrip-
ture.
Historically speaking, such groups derive from the Anabaptist and Puritan
streams of Protestantism, which incorporated the most left-wing or advanced
cultural developments of the Renaissance. Yet such groups have some of the
most dogmatic traditions by which they read and understand the nature of Scrip-
ture, as well as the meanings of passages within it.
Two stories illustrate the point. I was recently invited to address two such
Protestant groups. In one I asked a class of students who in the class were mem-
bers of churches that used a lectionary. Of the some fifty students not one raised
a hand. While I was hurriedly trying to think of what to say in such a situation,
one hand went up. Relieved, I asked him what church he belonged to. He asked
instead, “What is a lectionary?” There were four faculty members attending the
lecture, one of them a former student of mine.
The other experience was later the same year with a group of ninety Southern
Baptist pastors in North Carolina who had invited me, as one said, to bring “a
breath of fresh air to their stifled lives.” One of the pastors there told me that the
president of the Southern Baptist Convention that year, in a speech to the faculty
of Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, told them that if “we tell
you a pickle has a soul, that is what you will teach.” These two stories illustrate
the point that all Christian communities have magisteria that arise because of the
diversity within Scripture and hence the need to read Scripture by some kind of
external authority, some regula fidei.
Hermeneutics
The hermeneutic brought to reading the Bible, conjoined with its multivalency
and diversity, essentially determines what one will find there. All branches of
Christianity apparently agree that the Bible is in one understanding or another
“the Word of God.” But how this is understood varies considerably. The Ortho-
dox and Catholic understandings of Scripture are that it is essentially the revela-
tory story of the founding of the church, which itself is the resurrected (corpo-
rate) body of Christ as it is manifest on earth. The understanding of the Bible in
Protestantism is quite varied. The Lutheran view is that Scripture is the textbook
of God’s work in history, culminating in Christ, which leads to the justification
of each individual sinner by faith in that divine work. The Calvinist view is that
Scripture is the “Word of God and the only infallible rule of faith and order for
Christians,” but often sees the Bible as largely a Rule Book (Regelbuch) to guide
the Christian’s personal moral and social ethical existence as a witness to belief in
God’s work in Scripture and in Christ. They include churches in the Reform tra-
dition and Fundamentalist neo-Puritan communities. Other more left-wing Ref-
ormation churches put emphasis on different aspects of Scripture. Many view it
as the “old, old story” of salvation that leads to belief in Christ as one’s personal
savior. Other groups see it as “a box of jewels” of ancient wisdom that leads the
believer to the abundant life of faith and obedience.
American Christian Fundamentalism harbors various views of Scripture
within a narrow range of understanding it as a kind of code book for those who
accept the five basic tenets, as they view them, of faith, including literal and his-
torical understandings of the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection of Christ.5
For them the Bible reveals to the true believer what God will do in the eschaton,
both to judge evil in others and to guarantee salvation, even instant rapture, to
individual believers of the in-group. There is a consuming interest in the battles
they believe will take place at Armageddon to destroy the forces of evil and
bring in the eternal Kingdom of Christ. On tours to the Holy Land organized
by Fundamentalists, rarely anything is heard about the Sermon on the Mount
but much is taught about Mount Megiddo where Armageddon will take place.6
The hermeneutic by which they teach Scripture is very clear: the Bible addresses
the end-time; we live in the end-time; therefore, the Bible speaks directly to us.
Interesting is the fact that this was largely the hermeneutic by which the ancient
pre-Christian Jewish sect at Qumran read Scripture.7 There was no interest at
all in what Scripture passages meant originally, but only in how they addressed
them and the battles they believed would eventually destroy the forces of evil, as
the Qumran sect understood evil, of course. Most current Christian apocalypti-
cists read Scripture by the same hermeneutic.
Biblical Criticism
The Renaissance, with its emphasis on individual worth and responsibility,

brought with it also, however, the belief that authority derives from inductive
reasoning and critical inquiry democratically pursued. This gave rise in Prot-
estant circles to the phenomenon of biblical criticism. While Origen, Jerome,
and Luther had shared openly with the literate church the text-critical problems
stemming from different texts and versions of Scripture, it was not until the sev-
enteenth century that so-called higher biblical criticism began to be conceived
in Europe as necessary to probing the truth of Scripture. After all, Scripture
had been set loose in Europe from the moorings of a common magisterium to
address the pluralism that individual readings of Scripture exposed.
The Critica Sacra movement and the Anti-Critica Sacra reaction to it in the sev-
enteenth century eventually led the great genius, Benedictus (or Baruch) Spinoza,
to declare, in his Tractatus of 1670, that the truth of the Bible would be found in a
5
See Longfield, Presbyterian Controversy, cited in Wheeler, “Auburn Affirmation.” The
five “fundamentals” insisted on by such Fundamentalists are: the inerrancy of Scripture, the
virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement, the literal bodily resurrection, and the factuality of
the miracles worked by Jesus Christ.
6
Halsel, Journey to Jerusalem.
7
Elliger, Studien zum Habakuk-Kommentar. The same hermeneutic was operative in other
early Jewish interpretation of Scripture; cf. Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, 16 – 17.
history of the formation of its texts, providing thereby the impetus for the devel-
opment of historical/critical study of the Bible.8 Spinoza went on to say that such
a history should thereby recover the authorial intentionality of authors of biblical
texts. In his genius he added that in all probability recovering individual authorial
intentionality would prove futile. Due to Spinoza’s being persona non grata to
both synagogue and church, his influence far outweighed later specific reference
to his work. From the efforts of Richard Simon at the Oratoire in Paris beginning
in 1675, in response to Spinoza’s call, until those of Johann David Michaelis in
Germany a century later, the hermeneutic of biblical criticism took a course it
would follow well into the twenty-first century – to identify as much as possible
the “original” words of the writers and speakers represented in the biblical text.
Individual scholars would thereafter for nearly three centuries seek out the indi-
vidual contributors to the Bible. So powerful had been the rebirth of Greco-Ro-
man culture in the Renaissance that the Bible came to be regarded as the product
of individual minds rather than as a collective, community literature. It is here
that both scholars and Fundamentalists share the same goal, the ipsissima verba of
the biblical authors; the difference is that scholars say only some are the ipsissima
verba, while Fundamentalists say they all are. Both positions have problems.
The anonymous or community dimension of biblical literature, of both Tes-
taments, was almost entirely set aside. The heritage of the Renaissance in Europe
in Christian, largely Protestant, circles, was in effect a massive reprise of the hel-
lenization process that had gone on in early Judaism after the conquests of Alex-
ander the Great.9 The dominant Asian Babylonian and Persian cultures prior
to Alexander were similar enough in this regard to the Early Jewish world that
the largely anonymous nature of a community’s identifying literature presented
no great problem. But because the European Greco-Roman world needed to
know who had written this Jewish epic literature that had become available in
Greek translation, the biblical phenomenon of community anonymity gave way
to authorial pseudepigraphy.
In Semitic Jewish communities, the Torah and the Prophets, the Psalms and
other writings were their community literature. It told them who they were in
ever-changing circumstances and what they should stand for as God’s people in
the ever-changing non-Jewish world in which they were forced to live.10 But the
need to answer the questions of gentiles, and of increasingly hellenized Jews,
who knew who wrote the Odyssey or the Aeneid, made the phenomenon of
scriptural pseudepigraphy widespread. Certain forms of focus on individual
worth and responsibility had already entered the ethical thinking of ancient
Judah near the end of the First Temple Period, or Iron Age (Jer 31:29; Ezek 18),
but now there was interest in knowing who the individuals were who wrote
the Pentateuch, who wrote the Prophets, Early and Latter, and who penned the
Psalms. And this issued in answers that would make sense to the Greeks and
8
Spinoza, Tractatus, 87 – 88.
9
Sanders, “Impact of the Scrolls.”
10
Sanders, “Exile and Canon Formation.”
the Romans, that is, ancient individual “heroes” of Israel’s past. Thus arose the
conventions that Moses wrote all the Torah, David all the Psalms, individual
prophets all of each prophetic book, Solomon the bulk of biblical wisdom litera-
ture, and individual apostles each of the Gospels. It also encouraged writing new
literature pseudepigraphically.11
And thus arose the need after the Renaissance of Greco-Roman culture in
Europe to know exactly what the original authors of biblical literature, whether
those heroic figures or not, had written. What could not be attributed to an orig-
inal author was called secondary, even spurious. The focus on the verifiable his-
tory of the formation of the biblical text (which Spinoza had called for) has been
so great that the community dimension of the Bible often got lost in the effort.
The Sitz im Leben of the Christian Bible veritably shifted from the church
to the university. Its historical dimension took precedence in some European
Protestant intellectual circles over its actual cultic and theological functions in
the church. When critical historical study of the Bible entered into and became
an integral part of seminary study of the biblical text in the Western world, the
crisis of the authority of the Bible came to the fore. This has been the case for at
least a century and a half in Protestant seminaries.
Criticism and Crisis
A case in point was the New School / Old School schism that took place in the
Presbyterian Church in the USA in 1832. It provides a mirror for reflection on
similar controversies in other Christian communions in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Simply put, the New School argued that the Bible should
be studied historically in order to plumb the depths of its riches, while the Old
School insisted that the Bible should be read through the prism of the Westmin-
ster Confession, that is, through the post-Calvinist magisterium of the Presbyte-
rian faith, to retain its authority. The conviction was strong that the Westminster
Confession had been an accurate reading of Scripture – precisely the hermeneutic
circle. Convictions were deep-seated on both sides of the issue, and the Presby-
terian Church was in schism from 1832 until 1870.12
Because Secession and the American Civil War caused a different, more divi-
sive schism between churches in the North and the South on other pressing
issues, an atmosphere of goodwill about the earlier schism brought about con-
ciliation in the separated northern Presbyterian churches in 1870. But when the
intellectual forces of nineteenth-century theories of evolution entered the scene
in the last third of the century the old pre-war lines of division asserted them-
selves once more, almost precisely along the same issues as earlier, namely, the
authority of Scripture and how to understand that authority. Heresy trials were
conducted and intellectual giants in the church were condemned and rejected.
11
Sanders, “Why the Pseudepigrapha?”
12
Sanders, “Bible at Union.”
New School thinking was quite clear about the pertinence and relevance of
historical / critical study of biblical, and indeed human, origins. God had yet
more wonderful things to reveal and it was possible and even exciting to recon-
cile the results of scientific study of nature and the human experiment with his-
torical / critical study of the Bible, or at least put the two in fruitful dialogue. The
Bible was indeed “the Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and order”
for the New School, but only when read in the original Hebrew and Greek, and
read and understood critically in its “original” contexts of numerous anonymous
authors and editors. Biblical Criticism for them meant critique of the hermeneu-
tic brought to the Bible, not criticism of the biblical content itself.
New School thinkers had been considerably influenced by the Enlightenment
of the eighteenth century in Scotland and America and rested their case on the
continuing revelatory work of the Holy Spirit, who meted out God’s evolving
truth as humans became capable of understanding it. The Old School, on the
contrary, rested their case on the Bible’s being the totally sufficient base for faith
and order and that it contained, according to the Westminster Confession, all the
revelation humans needed to understand God’s truth. Adherents of both schools
of thought were folk of great faith and piety; no difference or accusation on that
score seriously arose between them. Personal faith and piety were not the issue.
At issue was the nature of the authority of Scripture and how to read it for appli-
cation to the on-going life of the church and of individual Christians.
In Protestantism generally, New School thinking, though in a distinct
minority in the nineteenth century, became the mode of biblical studies in the
twentieth. By the end of the First World War almost every mainline Protestant
seminary was teaching Scripture through the same historical / critical methods
the “heretics” had espoused only a few decades earlier. Old School positions
that survived embraced what was left of nineteenth-century Fundamentalism.
But even so they lost most adherents after the Scopes Trial in Tennessee in 1925.
Fundamentalism turned inward, as in Pentecostalism, to stress the salvation of
individual souls as the way to address issues of church and society. Basic Fun-
damentalism did not reassert itself until the mid-1970s in neo-Fundamentalist
movements such as the Moral Majority. Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on the
authority and power of the Holy Spirit, as in the Assemblies of God churches,
specifically opposed Fundamentalism in the fifty-year interval. But by 1980 it
had joined it, losing much of its distinctiveness.
Evangelists like Billy Sunday, Amy Semple McPherson, Dwight Moody,
Charles Fuller, Billy Graham and others were exemplars of focus on salvation of
the individual soul as the business of Christianity in the interim before the rise
in the last quarter of this century of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coali-
tion. These Fundamentalist movements tried to turn personal morals into corpo-
rate and social-ethical issues in a “Christian nation” by calling, with the implied
arrogance of being the only “Scriptural Christians,” for government legislation
at all levels that would prohibit abortion, criminalize homosexuality, mandate
prayer in schools, sacralize the national flag, and censor art and literature. In
the view of many, however, they tacitly support bigotry, greed, and hypocrisy,
including outlawing certain drugs while tacitly shielding the most lethal of them
all, that of the (Southern) tobacco industry. The failed impeachment trial of Pres-
ident Clinton in 1999 may become that same sort of historical marker of the
current decline of Fundamentalism as the Scopes Trial in 1925. Some of the most
prominent Fundamentalist leaders have begun to call for a retreat from politics
and a return to “spreading the gospel” so that individuals would be converted
and do what is “right.”13
Historical / critical study of the Bible and tradition was well enough estab-
lished in universities and some seminaries in the American Northeast by the
fourth quarter of the nineteenth century that the Society of Biblical Literature
was founded in 1880, and the American Society of Church History in 1888,
both at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, the seat of New School
thinking. Such guilds soon found adherents and members outside the Northeast,
and their influence spread steadily until they became national in scope by the
second quarter of the twentieth century. But the membership was largely limited
to Protestants. Some Jews in America, who had been influenced by the rise of the
Jüdische Wissenschaft (Enlightenment) movement in Germany beginning in the
middle of the nineteenth century, became members of the guilds before the turn
of the century. But Roman Catholics were not free to join such societies until the
encyclical of Pope Pius XII, the Divino Affiante Spiritu, in 1943.14 Thus Renais-
sance and Enlightenment study of Scripture, that is, individual critical readings,
which had given birth to the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century,
gradually spread to Jews by the late nineteenth century, and to Catholics by the
middle of the twentieth century.
Criticism and Authority
Efforts to reconcile historical / critical study with basic tenets of Christian faith
begged the question of the authority of Scripture. Most adherents of Enlighten-
ment study of Scripture and tradition refused to abandon some form of Christian
identity and therefore were confronted personally with the issue of authority. It
is interesting to note that the minutes and records of the Society of Biblical Lit-
erature give little or no evidence of the bitter modernist / fundamentalist debates
raging outside the guild in the country at the end of the nineteenth century.15 But
personally its members could not escape the issues involved.
13
See the op-ed article by Cal Thomas and Edward Dobson in the Los Angeles Times Metro
Section of 24 March 1999, commented on in a Times editorial in the Metro Section of 3 April
1999.
14
See the report on the Requiem Mass for Fr. Raymond Edward Brown, celebrated at
St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park on 14 August 1998, in the booklet published for the Me-
morial Service held for Fr. Brown at Union Theological Seminary 2 October 1998, republished
in the spring 1999 issue of USQR 52, nos. 3 – 4 (spring 1999).
15
Saunders, Searching the Scriptures.
The crux of the issue of biblical authority was the place of revelation (author-
ity “from above”) in understanding that authority. Most biblical scholars retained
some form of specific faith identity and could not escape the task. Those who
opted entirely for Enlightenment views of authority often let their faith identity
lapse. But most could or would not. The New School of “evangelical liberals,”
as they liked to be called, were very clear that revelation was an integral part of
understanding scriptural authority, but insisted that revelation had not ceased
with the close of the Christian canon but that God continued to reveal higher
truths, even making “old truths uncouth.” The emphasis on the continuing and
challenging work of the Holy Spirit in the Great Revival of the early nineteenth
century emerged among Christian progressives as the key to being able to stay in
the faith, broadly conceived.
Interesting in this regard was the doctrine in nascent rabbinic Judaism, begin-
ning in the second century of the common era after the Bar Kochba revolt, that
prophecy or revelation had ceased centuries earlier in the time of Ezra–Nehe-
miah. This new teaching explained why the messianic movement of Bar Kochba,
which the famous Rabbi Akiba had supported, failed disastrously, but also
explained why surviving rabbinic Judaism chose to depart from history. Rabbinic
Jews would thereafter live in stasis in closed Jewish communities throughout the
Roman world. God had become distant and remote and thus had departed from
history centuries earlier for many Jews, as for many Greeks, and surviving Juda-
ism should go and do likewise. Judaism, indeed, did not re-enter history until the
Jüdische Wissenschaft movement in the nineteenth century, noted above, and did
not fully do so until the founding of the State of Israel.16
Other Jewish communities in pre-Christian early Judaism, however, did not
agree that prophecy or revelation had ceased, but continued to believe in and to
write of God’s work in the political events of their time, that is, in history. These
were the communities that produced much of the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha,
and the Qumran literature, which show belief in God’s continuing and future
involvement in history. One of these Jewish sects called “The Way” (Acts 9:2;
19:9) quite clearly believed in God’s continuing revelation. In fact, most early
Jewish communities did not believe that God had departed from history or had
ceased all further revelation. Even rabbinic Judaism after the revolts against
Rome believed in the Shekinah, the presence of God’s spirit in Jewish commu-
nities. But the concept of Shekinah did not involve either further acts of God in
secular history, or in apocalyptic speculation. The Shekinah was God’s support
for individual Jews and for Jewish communities that strove to be obedient and
faithful to Torah despite the hostility all around them, but not further revelation
in political or common history.
16
Sanders, “Spinning the Bible,” 27 – 29; Sanders, “Hebrew University Bible and Biblia He-
braica Quinta”; and Sanders, “Judaean Desert Scrolls.” David Hartman of the Shalom Hartman
Institute in Jerusalem asserts, with others, that the founding of the State of Israel was not a re-
sponse to the Holocaust but to the Jüdische Wissenschaft movement.
Christianity, in other words, was among those early Jewish communities that
fully believed in God’s continuing revelation, both in Christ and in the nascent
church. And revelation is a concept to be reckoned with in Christianity today.
If critical inquiry and inductive thinking were the only base of authority for
understanding Scripture, the question of the continuity of Jewish or Christian
identity would sharply arise. Even belief in the so-called quadrilateral nature of
Christian authority entails belief in Scripture and tradition as well as in current
human reason and experience. The concept of divine revelation in Scripture and
in Christ needs to be addressed even by the most critical of scholarship. What has
been added since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment is increasingly strong
belief in inductive research and critical reasoning. This brought me, early on, in
contrast to Brevard Childs of Yale, who also works in the area of the meaning
and nature of Scripture as canon, to assert belief in biblical criticism as a “gift of
God in due season.”17
Critical inquiry and biblical criticism explain increasingly well both the his-
tory of formation and the history of transmission of Scripture without reference
to the concept of revelation – if treatment of the source of prophetic quotes of
God is left a mystery, or a matter of the thinking of the individual biblical tradent
solely. Critical inquiry should be thoroughly pursued before asking the question
of the authority of Scripture for believing communities today, and its results
should be the basis of the formulation of any theory of authority, thus continu-
ing the program Spinoza launched over three centuries ago. The sub-discipline
of Canonical Criticism, developed since the early 1970s, is hence an extension of
biblical criticism.18 Our work to date can be characterized, if not summarized,
rather briefly.
Scripture as Canon
Whereas the Qur’an purports to be a record of revelation by God to one per-

son, Muhammed, the Bible, Jewish and Christian, on the contrary, purports to
be records of human responses to divine revelations to numerous people, many
anonymous, over a course of about fifteen hundred years.19 This observation
illumines critical readings of the biblical text that indicate a high level of diver-
sity, or limited pluralism, of points of view stemming from its long history of
formation. This is the reason there are so many different views of what it says,
17
E. g., in Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 171. See Weis and Carr, Gift of God in
Due Season, 13 et passim.
18
Beginning with Sanders, Torah and Canon, ix – xx. Contrast Brevard Childs’s literary
focus on “canonical context.”
19
See Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible.” Manuscript evidence has recently been found in
the Great Mosque of Sana’a, in Yemen, that indicates the Qur’an was also a text that evolved
over time, albeit a much shorter period, indicating that it, like the Bible, has a textual history;
see Lester, “What is the Koran?” Words in italics that follow are the salient characteristics of
canonical literature.
and so many denominations to give varying emphasis to the different voices in

it. And it is not a compendium of similar voices compiled by one editor. On the
contrary, the Bible, Jewish or Christian, is a dialogical literature. The richness of
the Bible’s diversity lies in part in its providing in itself prophetic challenges to
any and all efforts to build theological constructs on parts of it. Critically read, it
harbors its own self-corrective apparatus, discerned through critical readings of
the Bible independent of magisteria.
And, like much of the world’s greatest literature, especially good poetry, it is
largely written in multivalent language. This observation illumines the fact that
the Bible has spoken for at least two thousand years to very different situations
and contexts in the history of its transmission and function in diverse cultural
communities around the globe. The discipline of Comparative Midrash illumines
in critical terms the widely variant, even opposing, understandings of single pas-
sages down through early Judaism into early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism.
In fact, no two understandings of the same passage are ever exactly the same.
This is true even for critical readings of the same text since the rise of biblical
criticism and the efforts to respond to Spinoza’s call; and it is true according to
different schools of critical thought about the same passage.20
Because of these two pervasive traits in biblical literature, the limited plural-
ism and the multivalency, the Bible is inherently adaptable to address innumer-
ably different conditions. In fact, the Bible is in this sense “adaptable for life.”21
In the period before stabilization of the text of most of the Bible came about,
the texts of both Testaments were relatively fluid in nature. The Judean Desert
Scrolls have dramatically changed our understanding of the early history of the
transmission of the Hebrew Bible. The earliest period of textual transmission
is now seen as characterized by textual fluidity. Scribes copying texts as well as
translators could slightly alter the reading of a passage to make it more com-
prehensible and adaptable to concerns in their communities. Such intentional
scribal changes in the texts of the earliest biblical manuscripts indicate clearly
that the focus was on the community and its dependence on the text, rather than
on accuracy of transmission. That would come later, for both Testaments, for
socio-political reasons.22
To speak of the Bible as canon is, in effect, to speak of its relevance and adapt-
ability to many different communities, in many cultures, over thousands of
years. Christian believing communities differ over canonical stability, that is, the
number and order of books to include in the Bible, but they all agree that it is
relevant and adaptable to them and their condition. Stability, however, is equally
important for understanding canon. The stable structure of a canon indicates the
20
Sanders, Canon and Community, 21 – 45; Callaway, Sing, O Barren One, 1 – 12; Carr, From
D to Q, 1 – 5; Evans and Sanders, Luke and Scripture, 1 – 13. See now Kugel, Traditions of the
Bible, who, however, fails to acknowledge most of the work in this area of the past thirty years.
21
22
Sanders, “Text and Canon;” Sanders, “Stability and Fluidity.” See also Colwell, New or
Old?
hermeneutics by which the community is expected to read it.23 Not only so, but
recitation of a Scripture passage must be recognizable by the community for it
to have the rhetorical authority sought in applying it. If it is so paraphrased that
the community does not recognize it, it fails to provide the authority sought. It is
commonplace to observe that every time a literary passage is recited it is resigni-
fied to some extent (relecture), simply because the hearers understand the passage
from within the unique condition of each hearing. While there are constraints
in the text and must also be, of necessity, in its recitation, even so, the “word of
God” that occurs in the recitation is at the juncture of text and context, not in
the stabilized text alone.24
Three factors are essential in study of the relevance / adaptability factor of a
biblical passage re-read and re-applied to a new situation: the text cited; the new
situation in which it was heard and applied; and the hermeneutic by which the
passage was applied to the new situation. This may be called the hermeneutic
triangle, which often challenges the hermeneutic circle closed when the biblical
text is read solely through community traditions and magisteria.
When asked what one needed to do to inherit eternal life, Jesus answered the
question with two further questions: What is written in Torah and how do you
read it? In other words, one needs to know what in Scripture is pertinent to the
question asked, and one needs to be aware of the hermeneutics (the “how”) by
which to read that passage. The inquirer responded by citing from the Jewish
Shemaʿ, which is a recitation of Deut 6:4–5 (Luke 10:25–27; Mark 12:29–31; cf.
Luke 18:18), adding the paraphrase of Lev 19:18 about loving the neighbor, a con-
vention in Judaism by that time. And Jesus approved of the response. The Shemaʿ
focuses on the heart of Jewish faith: God is One and should be loved by the faith-
ful with all the heart, all the self, and all one’s wealth or power. Thus the herme-
neutic by which the passage should be read is clearly a theocentric-monotheizing
hermeneutic. The passage itself indicated the hermeneutic: loving God as One
ruled out loving God as a national, ethnic, or denominational deity only. The third
factor was the situation in Judaism and Judea in the time of Christ, the first third
of the first century of the common era. In fact, probing the socio-political situa-
tion out of which a passage arose, and for which it was relevant, is of vital impor-
tance in understanding what Jesus meant. The meaning assigned to the passage by
later tradition is often challenged by a critical or historical reading of that passage.
On the other hand, if a passage is read critically only, there is the danger that
the Sitz im Leben of the Bible as canon becomes academia or the university, rel-
evant only to discussions of the history of the formation and transmission of the
text, and becomes irrelevant to the believing communities that gave us these texts
and continue to recite them, irrelevant also to interfaith dialogue today.25
In order for believing communities to benefit from and be challenged by crit-
ical readings of the text, those critical readings must be brought back into the
23
Sanders, “Spinning the Bible,” 25 – 29.
24
Sanders, “Hebrew Bible and Old Testament.”
25
Sanders, “Intertextuality and Dialogue.”
setting of the believing community by the current tradent who would address
its relevance for that community (cf. the encyclical Divino Affiante Spiritu). The
metaphor Canonical Criticism has suggested is that of the beadle in the Church
of Scotland, who “bears the Bible” critically read from the pastor’s study to the
communion table in the chancel at the beginning of the weekly Sunday worship
service. Thus the Bible symbolically recovers its true Sitz im Leben in the con-
tinuing, believing communities (Jewish or Christian) whence it arose and devel-
oped, and continues to have its relevance; that is where it reaches its full stat-
ure promised in critical study of its meanings when it got onto the tenure track
toward canon, which brought it to the current communities today.
Faithfully read only, Scripture bears the full burden of whatever magisterium
has become attached to it in the multiple believing communities of either Judaism
or Christianity. Critically read only, the Bible becomes the history of the foun-
dation of those communities today, largely buried in the past, and largely irrele-
vant to their ongoing existence.26 The true or trustworthy relevance of Scripture
is in reading the text both critically and faithfully, critically first, and then faith-
fully brought back into the believing community. An example of the false and
untrustworthy relevance of Scripture today is reading it as an apocalyptic code
that, when broken, reveals to the current reader the date of the end of the world.
The falsehood of such readings, though obviously popular through the ages, is
demonstrated in a history of such readings: they have never been right in their
predictions based on the Bible, but each time believe anew that they have now
found the right key that can break the “code” and get it right. The third millen-
nium of the common era will encourage further such efforts. It is testimony to
the popular attraction of the view that the Bible addresses the end-time and that
the present, constantly updated, is always a candidate for the eschaton.27
Canonical Hermeneutics
The hermeneutics by which the text is read determines the interpretation given.
Consistently applying the critical hermeneutical triangle in reading the Bible it
is possible to discern a pattern in the hermeneutics used by the biblical tradents
in antiquity, the prophets, psalmists, historians, sages, evangelists, apostles, and
rabbis in applying an earlier text or tradition to a new situation.28 Nearly thirty
[now fifty] years’ work in Canonical Criticism offers some clarity about what
might thus be called canonical hermeneutics – the hermeneutics critically dis-
cerned that lie between the lines throughout the biblical text.29 Succinctly, the
hermeneutics discerned by use of the triangle point to the authority of the first
26
Smart, Strange Silence.
27
Clouse, Hosack, and Pierard, New Millennium Manual; Kyle, Last Days Are Here Again.
These are written from a “conservative” stance.
28
Sanders, “Scrolls and the Canonical Process.”
29
Sanders, Canon and Community, 46 – 60.
three of the Ten Commandments as the basic biblical view of reality, a theocen-
tric monotheizing hermeneutic: God is One; idolatry is worshipping or fearing
any of God’s gifts instead of the Giver of all gifts; and vanity is co-opting God’s
name for one point of view whether in courts of law or of church.
God is the principal actor in the Torah / Christ story. The Bible, no matter
the canon, is not really a monotheistic literature. On the contrary, much of the
cultural polytheism of the ancient eras through which the Bible was formed is
lodged in biblical texts. But its thrust is clearly a monotheizing one. Not as in
a clear progression from polytheism to henotheism to pure monotheism, or the
like, but rather in the remarkable observation the biblical historical critic must
make, that what became canon out of all the literature of ancient Israel and the
early church has had a monotheizing thrust. What ended up in the canon is only
about 10 percent of the known early Jewish and early Christian literature. The
history of the canonical process is marked by a kind of “survival of the tough-
est,” what people may not have liked when first uttered or written but was
“adaptable for life” to later surviving early Jewish and Christian communities.
This is especially clear in study within the Bible of true and false prophecy.30 The
so-called false prophet generally had the popular message, the vox populi, while
the true prophet, the one whose words got onto the tenure track toward canon,
was unpopular at the time. Why? Because the true prophet insisted that it was
the same God who had chosen Israel who was judging Israel, and then later that
the very God who had punished Israel was restoring her. God, as presented from
the Torah through the whole Bible, is the God of risings and fallings, victories
and defeats, what the people would call good and what they would call evil, at
any given time in its history.
God’s Oneness may be seen as the Integrity of Reality – all evidence to the
contrary notwithstanding. God’s Reality has integrity, ontological and ethical.31
God is One. The concept of the Heavenly Council in the First Testament, and
the later concept of the Trinity in Christianity, may be seen as the guarantors of
God’s Oneness, easement buffers, as it were, against the chaos of polytheism to
prevent disintegration into it. Human reason resists the idea that, with so much
evil abounding, God is One and has integrity beyond human reason and expe-
rience. But that is the matter and the heart of faith, as seen by Jesus’ response to
the inquirer. The Trinitarian formula of understanding God is for human needs,
an effort to grasp the incomprehensible. God is Deus Revelatus for Christians;
but God is in equal measure Deus Absconditus. To believe that God, or Truth, is
completely revealed, through Scripture or in Christ or in the church, is idolatry.
A way of expressing the authority of Scripture in postmodern times is to see it
as seasoned and proven witness to the Integrity of Reality. The Bible was formed
over a fifteen-hundred-year period through five ancient culture eras, the Bronze
Age, the Iron Age, the Persian Era, and the Greco-Roman-Hellenistic Period,
and is hence a dialogical literature. Read critically and faithfully by the theocen-
30
Sanders, “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.”
31
Sanders, “Integrity of God.”
tric-monotheizing hermeneutic that comes from its own pages, the Bible emerges
through it all as a powerful witness to the moral fiber of God’s creation. It is a
powerful dialogue partner with current natural science that continues basically to
subscribe to Chance or Fortuna as the “god” of creation.32 Judaism and Christi-
anity, while learning from inductive science and current critical study of nature,
say No to the authority of chaos or chance, and Yes to the Integrity of Reality,
all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
For the Christian that moral fiber is expressed nowhere more powerfully than
in the biblical story that begins with creation and reaches its climax in the con-
descension of the God of all Creation to submit “personally” to the inhuman
cruelty in the clash between European and Near Eastern Jewish cultures that
occurred during the Roman occupation of Palestine and led to three devastating
revolts against Rome in Palestine alone. The story of the crucifixion and the res-
urrection of Jesus epitomizes that clash with a story of God’s love unbounded
and undeterred by human fear, bigotry, and greed. Striking is the observation
that though the two finest and most developed legal systems of antiquity, Torah
and Lex Romana, were both in place and functioning in first-century Palestine,
this story says that is when God came to dwell fully in one person, a Jew, and
that is when we humans, caught up in a culture clash of stupendous proportions,
crucified him – that God’s glory might be made manifest. Christ’s own power
was in his willingness to be condemned to the greater glory of God, that is, to
witness dramatically to the Integrity of Reality, to God’s being the God of ris-
ings and fallings, victories and defeats, what humans call good and what humans
call evil. The Torah / Christ story from beginning to end testifies to God’s abil-
ity to take what humans call evil and convert it into what humans call good
(Gen 45 – 50, Isa 28:16, etc.).33
In one of the most inspiring and beautiful recent books in Jewish theology,
Michael Fishbane writes that the authorizing moment of the Torah story is the
descent of God on Mt. Sinai to give Moses the Law.34 In a review, I asked why
Fishbane had chosen that theophany in the Torah story as the authority of Scrip-
ture.35 Fishbane explores Jewish views of incarnation, that of Maimonides and
Abraham Heschel as God’s incarnation in Israel, the Jewish people, and that of
Rosenzweig and Buber as God’s incarnation in Torah or Scripture. Why then
not choose instead an earlier theophany, the pastoral call of God on Abram and
Sarai in Gen 12? That was the beginning for Israel of the story of God’s sojourn
with humans. If the authority of Scripture is in a theophany the Bible describes,
why choose one and not the other? The answer is that Fishbane’s “hermeneutic
circle,” his identity as a contemporary rabbinic Jew, brings him to see the one
32
See Gould, Rocks of Ages. Timothy Ferris, of UC Berkeley, in his The Whole Shebang,
is an apparent exception. Chance or Fortuna for Ferris is “Life,” which provides surprises even
for God.
33
Sanders, “Torah and Christ”; Sanders, God Has a Story Too, 41 – 56.
34
35
Sanders, Review of The Garments of Torah.
theophany as the core expression of biblical authority, while my hermeneutic

circle, my identity as a Christian, brings me to see the earlier theophany as the
genesis of the Torah / Christ story that reaches its climax in Christ, not only in a
pastoral call but in an incarnation in one person.36 For all the inductive study of
Scripture that Fishbane and I have both done and trust on the historical level, it
is clear to us both that biblical criticism is not our true home, and cannot express
our real identity. And there can be no umpire between us; biblical criticism alone
is incompetent to decide between us or bring either of us to the whole truth
about the Bible – a testimony to its multivalency and diversity.
Scripture as Paradigm
Biblical criticism was a gift of God in due season, and it is a gift that can be
shared by Jew and Christian. But it cannot afford us our complete identity; it is
[a tool to use,] not a place to stand. Fishbane stands, on the contrary, at the foot
of a mountain, and I at the foot of a cross, and biblical criticism clarifies for both
of us not only the origins but the power of each biblical image.37 The one focuses
on faith in what the Bible indicates God has done with humans, while the other
focuses on what humans can do to obey and please God – without either denying
the validity of the other focus. Abraham Heschel stressed that Judaism is made
up of both haggadah and halakah, not just the latter.38 And his older colleague,
Reinhold Niebuhr, stressed that Christianity is made up of both gospel and law,
not just the former. Heschel further insisted that no religion is an island.39 The
two Israels need each other. Neither alone can comprehend all that Scripture has
bequeathed us.
It is in this sense that Scripture cannot finally be seen only as a story of God’s
ways with humans, or only as God’s will for how humans should live to God’s
glory. It is both, if critically read in terms of the cultural differences and histor-
ical givens that were the vehicles of its formation and transmission through the
ages. It is the Word of God receptus – but only as it is comprehended by humans
where they live, conditioned by their own cultural givens. It therefore cannot
essentially be a Rule Book. It cannot be belittled as a Code to be broken to pre-
dict an apocalypse. It cannot only be a casket of jewels of ancient wisdom still
negotiable. Nor should it be abused as prooftext of the various magisteria that
developed out of its diversity and multivalency. A critical and faithful reading of
Scripture challenges every theological construct built upon it since there can be
36
Sanders, “Intertextuality and Dialogue.” See also Sanders, “Spinning the Bible” for a dis-
cussion of the almost universal belief in early Christianity, among so-call Judaizers and hellen-
izers alike, that it had superseded Judaism as God’s Israel.
37
Sanders, “Identity, Apocalyptic, and Dialogue.”
38
For references see Sanders, “Torah and Christ.”
39
Heschel, “No Religion Is an Island,” his inaugural address as Fosdick Visiting Professor
at Union Theological Seminary in New York in the fall of 1965, published in USQR in January
1966.
no single theology that escapes the judgments of other parts of Scripture. Scrip-
ture critically and faithfully read induces reverence for its power in the lives of
untold millions through the ages, and still today. Wherever and whenever that
power has been abused to claim partisan gain, exclusive claims on God, to dehu-
manize others because they are different genetically or culturally, or to practice
bigotry, racism, or greed, God continues to suffer. God suffers in Israel for the
sake of the world, and God suffers in Christ for the sake of the world – as the
prophets and Jesus clearly taught, if they are read both critically and faithfully.
The Bible then becomes for us today a dialogical paradigm of the divine-
human encounter.40 We have been given in Scripture, with all its seams and frac-
tures critically perceived, the means to conjugate the verbs of God’s ways with
humans, and to decline the nouns of God’s wisdom so generously shared in these
texts. Scripture does not contain the whole truth about God, or about us, but
offers a paradigm, forged in suffering through the ages, whereby we may con-
tinue in dialogue to seek the truth about ourselves, and about our yearning for
the One who first sought and continues to seek us in a form of love that is at
once both incomprehensible and transforming.
Addendum
Re-reading the Bible by a theocentric-monotheizing hermeneutic, both critically

and faithfully as the Christian paradigm of the divine-human encounter, would
issue in a theocentric Christology. It might be seen as the contrapositive of the
effort of Karl Barth early in the twentieth century to write a biblically based
christocentric theology. By this hermeneutic one theologizes in reading the bib-
lical text before moralizing. That is, one focuses first on what God has done with
the (sinful) humans who populate the story from beginning to end, before one
asks what humans should do or should have done. And when one does then mor-
alize, after celebrating what the text says God has done with humans, one uses
the principle of dynamic analogy to discern the ethics indicated for the reader,
who thereby finds her / himself mirrored in the dramatis personae of the biblical
story. Nor does one decide who in the text is the protagonist or the antagonist
until the dynamic reading is complete.
The gospel thus begins in Genesis with God’s first act of righteousness and
justice, the creation of heaven and earth. That same God, both august and per-
sonal (Gen 1 – 2), paid a pastoral call on Abram and Sarai (Gen 12) inviting them
on a journey of great promise with God. They would not be apostles of God but,
on the contrary, companions on the biblical (Emanuel) journey. God’s presence
with Israel would be its distinguishing mark (Exod 33:14 – 16, et passim) [both
for its well-being and for its downfall when abused to claim national exception-
alism].
40
Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, suggests that Scripture may be understood as
model. The concept of paradigm seems to me more apt for the reasons noted above and below.
For the Christian, this journey finds its climax in God’s incarnation in one
person, a Jew from the Galilee. A careful, critical reading of the story indicates
that it was not until the hellenization process after Alexander’s conquests of the
Near East had reached a crescendo that the full story could be heard by some
Jews. Most of the Bible focuses on community worth and responsibility, God’s
intimate relationship with Israel as a people. Beginning in the late Iron Age
individual worth and responsibility began to find expression within the corpo-
rate (Jer 31:29 – 34; Ezek 18), but it was not until the hellenization process had
affected much of Judaism that the message found ears to comprehend that God
would come finally to dwell in one person for the sake of all the world.
Many Jews, even so, would not be able to hear the message or accept it because
it was for them too Greco-Roman, too pagan. Jewish theology would accept the
idea of incarnation, not in one person but in Israel as a People (ha-ʿam, so Mai-
monides, Heschel) or in Scripture (Rosenzweig, Buber, Fishbane). Christianity’s
maintaining a double-Testament Bible after Marcion and other efforts to reject
the First Testament was not a pro-Jewish move, but an affirmation of the almost
universal Christian belief of the first centuries of the common era that the church
had succeeded Judaism as God’s True Israel (whether Judaizers [conservatives] or
hellenizers [liberals] in the churches). For the rabbinic Jew, the Christian under-
standing of the double-Testament Bible was too pagan.41 For the Christian it
provided a glorious climax to the story that began in Genesis. The God who cre-
ated the whole world and accompanied Israel on her journey became accessible
to the larger world through God’s work in Christ and in the church.
Bibliography
1986.
Carr, David M. From D to Q: A Study of Early Jewish Interpretations of Solomon’s Dream
at Gibeon. Atlanta: Scholars, 1991.
Clouse, Robert G., Robert N. Hosack, and Richard V. Pierard. The New Millennium
Manual: A Once and Future Guide. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998.
Colwell, Ernest C. New or Old? The Christian Struggle with Change and Tradition. Phil-
adelphia: Westminster, 1970.
Elliger, Karl. Studien zum Habakuk-Kommentar vom Toten Meer. BHT 15. Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 1953.
Ferris, Timothy. The Whole Shebang. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
41
Torah in its broad sense includes both haggadah and halakah, that is, both story and stip-
ulation, or gospel and law, from beginning to end, by its very nature (see Sanders, “Torah and
Christ” and Sanders, “Torah and Paul”). Christianity emphasizes the story or gospel aspect of
Torah, while rabbinic Judaism stresses the halakic aspect. Dialogue between the two is mandated
to honor the full nature of God’s gift of Torah as well as God’s gift of Christ.
Gould, Stephen Jay. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. New York:
Ballantine, 1999.
Halsel, Grace. Journey to Jerusalem. New York: Macmillan, 1981.
Heschel, Abraham. “No Religion Is an Island.” USQR 21, no. 2 (1966) 117 – 34.
Kugel, James L. Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the
Common Era. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Kyle, Richard G. The Last Days Are Here Again: A History of the End Times. Grand
Rapids: Baker, 1999.
Lester, Toby. “What is the Koran?” Atlantic Monthly (January 1999) 43 – 56.
Longfield, Bradley J. The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists and
Moderates. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Sanders, James A. “Adaptable for Life: The Nature and Function of Canon.” In Magnalia
Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G.
Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller,
531 – 60. Garden City: NY: Doubleday, 1976. Reprinted in From Sacred Story to Sacred
Text: Canon as Paradigm, by James A. Sanders, 9 – 39. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.
Sanders, James A. “The Bible at Union, 1835 to the Present.” USQR 52, nos. 3 – 4 (spring
1999) 19 – 21.
Fortress, 1984.
Sanders, James A. “The Exile and Canon Formation.” In Exile: Old Testament, Jewish,
and Christian Conceptions, edited by James M. Scott, 37 – 61. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
Fortress, 1987.
Sanders, James A. God Has a Story Too: Sermons in Context. Philadelphia: Fortress,
1979.
sity of Notre Dame Press, 1990.
Sanders, James A. “The Hebrew University Bible and Biblia Hebraica Quinta.” JBL 118
(1999) 518 – 26.
Sanders, James A. “Identity, Apocalyptic, and Dialogue.” In Echoes of Many Texts: Reflec-
tions on Jewish and Christian Traditions. Essays in Honor of Lou H. Silberman, edited
by William G. Dever and J. Edward Wright, 159 – 70. BJS 313. Atlanta: Scholars, 1997.
Sanders, James A. “The Integrity of God.” Concern (December 1976) 9 – 10.
Sanders, James A. “The Judaean Desert Scrolls and the History of the Text of the He-
brew Bible.” In Caves of Enlightenment: Proceedings of the American Schools of Ori-
ental Research Dead Sea Scrolls Jubilee Symposium (1947 – 1997), edited by James H.
Charlesworth, 1 – 17. North Richland Hills, TX: Bibal, 1999.

Sanders, James A. “The Scrolls and the Canonical Process.” In The Dead Sea Scrolls after
Fifty Years, edited by Peter W. Flint and James C. VanderKam, 2:1 – 23. Leiden: Brill,
1999.
Sanders, James A. “‘Spinning’ the Bible: How Judaism and Christianity Shape the Canon
Differently.” BRev 14, no. 3 (1998) 22 – 29, 44 – 45.
Studies offered to Dominique Barthélemy in Celebration of His 70th Birthday, edited
Sanders, James A. “The Stabilization of the Tanak.” In A History of Biblical Interpretation.
Vol. 1, The Ancient Period, edited by Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson, 225 – 52.
Cascade, 2005.]
Sanders, James A. “Why the Pseudepigrapha?” In The Pseudepigrapha and Early Bibli-
cal Interpretation, edited by James H. Charlesworth and Craig A. Evans, 13 – 19. JSP-
Sup 14. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993.
Saunders, Ernest W. Searching the Scriptures: A History of the Society of Biblical Litera-
ture, 1880 – 1980. Chico, CA: Scholars, 1982.
Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. In Memory of Her. New York: Crossroads, 1994.
Smart, James D. The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Churches: A Study in Hermeneu-
tics. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970.
Spinoza, Baruch. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Edited by Günter Gawlick and Fried-
rich Niewöhner. Opera, Werke lateinisch und deutsch 1. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1979.
Todd, Richard. “Not Your Father’s Church.” Civilization (April / May 1999) 44 – 46.
Wheeler, Barbara. “An Auburn Affirmation: Reflections for a 75th Anniversary.” Auburn
Views [Auburn Theological Seminary, New York] (Spring 1999).
19
Canon as Dialogue
Introduction
Some religions are scriptured while others are not. Within the three monotheistic
religions now surviving, the Qur’an purports to be a record of divine revelation
to an individual, while the Bible, Jewish or Christian, purports to be records of
human responses to divine revelations.1 While others must say how much dia-
logue there is in the Qur’an, the Jewish and Christian canons are replete with
dialogue within a literary context of a rough, monotheizing process evident in
approximately 10 percent of Israel’s ancient literature, or the literature of the
early churches that ended up in canons.
Within Judaism and Christianity there are multiple canons, with most books
within the First Testament shared by all the canons, but they differ one from
another in both structure and content – from the smallest, that is, the Jewish and
Protestant canons, to the eighty books of the Ethiopian Orthodox canon. All the
Christian canons betray structures, as does the Jewish, that are interpretations in
themselves. All manuscripts of the Septuagint that we have came through Chris-
tian communities so that we have no idea quite how the Hellenistic-Jewish com-
munities in pre-Christian times thought of a structure, or canon as norma nor-
mata, for the Greek scrolls of their Bible. While all such structures started with
the Torah or Pentateuch, for that was the most stable part of the Jewish canon
or the Christian First Testament, after this we have only theological clues about
the LXX before its departure from surviving rabbinic Jewish hands. In the age of
scrolls, before the codex came into Jewish use, the question, of course, is moot.
For these reasons, and for other equally important reasons we shall explore,
the Bible is full of dialogue. In fact, Scripture, of any canon, Jewish or Chris-
tian, is a dialogical literature. Dialogue, or discourse, takes different forms within
Scripture. Some were between contemporary colleagues who disagreed with each
other about a major issue or crisis in the life of Israel, such as dialogues between
so-called true and false prophets, or between Jesus and the religious leaders of his
day. Contradictions within the text of a prophet need not necessarily be seen as
stemming from different ancient sources but may indicate debates engaged with
so-called false prophets who were contemporaries. Those are very interesting in
part because what the false prophets said had the support of the leaders and the
people of the time, but they are not the ones that made it into Scripture. For false

1
Cf. Smith, What Is Scripture, 45 – 91; Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible.”
Canon as Dialogue 337
prophets, God’s promises and commitments to Israel were sort of credits that
they could cash in according to the need of Israel in crisis, as they thought. True
prophets firmly believed in God’s promises and commitments but clearly taught
that God, as the creator of all peoples, was free to fulfill those promises accord-
ing to God’s agenda, and not a human agenda; and the route to the fulfillment
of the promises might be very rough and painful. True prophets always said the
tough things, which, when remembered later, however, were very helpful for the
people’s later survival and existence. These pronouncements hence got on a kind
of tenure track of repetition and recitation and thus became a part of canonical
Scripture.
In nearly all these cases, literary-historical criticism has shown that heresies
or dissent often later became “orthodox.” “Heresy as discourse” is rooted in
understanding canon as dialogue. In Scripture’s monotheizing context, God is
presented as sponsor of ongoing discourse.2
Dialogue also occurs in Scripture between two points of view that, while lit-
erally contradictory, often addressed quite different problems and situations in
antiquity. This kind of silent dialogue, as it were, provides Scripture with an
internal corrective device, which should prevent the reader from absolutizing
one or the other, or from harmonizing away the dialogue.
Another type of ongoing dialogue in Scripture derives from Scripture’s being
multicultural. The Bible is an anthology of literature produced over a span of
roughly twelve hundred years, from the Semitic Bronze and Iron Age world
through the non-Semitic Persian period into the European Hellenistic-Roman
world. The Bible contains not only literature influenced by the cultures of those
periods but also literature adapted from non-Hebrew and non-Jewish cultures.
Careful study of the hermeneutics by which Israel adopted the wisdom of others
reveals a hermeneutical process of adaptation that is instructive for the canonical
process. Keeping the First Testament in Scripture, or in the canon, provides a
framework for Christian dialogue with the Semitic and early non-Semitic worlds
that guards against absolutizing the cultural traps and trappings of the Hellenis-
tic age.
A fourth kind of dialogue in the Bible occurs wherever later Scripture cites,
quotes, or echoes earlier Scripture within a canon. This kind of dialogue often
provides a depth to the point the passage makes, which one, however, misses
if one ignores the allusion or gives credence only to the interpretation of the
later passage in which the citation occurs. Christians tend to do this in reading
the Second Testament because they somehow believe that the Second Testament
supersedes the First, which one can then safely ignore. On the contrary, the Sec-
ond Testament presupposes and relies on the First; it doesn’t go through all the
monotheizing struggles of the First Testament that affirm belief in One Creator
God who chose Israel for a purpose and a mission.
Often otherwise reputable theologians will base an idea on one passage in the
Bible and then go on to assume that it is supported by the whole of the Bible.
2
See Sanders, “Canonical Hermeneutics.”
So-called conservatives especially insist that the entire Bible is totally harmoni-
ous. At the close of a century when the general population has become more and
more ignorant of the contents of the Bible, such a view can be abused to persuade
the faithful of one point of view – a clear violation of the third commandment,
which prohibits taking God’s name in vain, by calling upon God’s name to sup-
port one single point of view, in court or in theological debate. The insistence
that Scripture is totally harmonious is usually politically motivated.
Since the Second Testament reflects clearly the period of textual fluidity in the
history of transmission of the text of the First Testament, before full stabiliza-
tion of the Hebrew text, one must first attempt to discern what form of the text
is cited or echoed in the Second Testament passage. All forms must be reviewed
whether in Greek, or in Hebrew and Aramaic from the Dead Sea Scrolls, or in
Syriac and Latin from other early witnesses. Even then one has to allow the Sec-
ond Testament writer a measure of fluidity within those forms in citations of the
First, all the more so in paraphrases, allusions, and echoes of the earlier passage.
(We shall later look at the seven modes of this form of intertextuality.) Then one
should trace the Nachleben of the First Testament passage from its inception in
the Tanak, through the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and indeed all Ear1y
Jewish literature, down to the New Testament. This exercise is called Compara-
tive Midrash, to which we shall also return.
The Dead Sea Scrolls and Religious Identity
There have been remarkable, even revolutionary, developments in the study of

early Jewish and Christian origins as a result of fifty years of study of the Dead
Sea Scrolls. The intense interest on the part of the general public in the scrolls
derives from the fact that they date to the period of the birth of early Christianity
and the emergence of formative or rabbinic Judaism. Many (especially hard-me-
dia) manuscript discoveries from other sources – but important to biblical study
in this century3 – have not yet been published, and yet there has been no such
clamor calling for their release. None, however, touches so directly on existential
questions of spiritual identity in the public at large.
Many Jews and Christians feel personally involved in the information the
scrolls contain about the origins of these two major faiths; theirs is apparently
an existential interest. There is the fear as well as the hope that the scrolls are
going to prove or disprove their faith, or major tenets in it. One who is asked
to lecture to lay and pastoral groups is steadily barraged with questions about
Jesus, or James his brother, or John the Baptist, because of theories about the
scrolls that get into the popular media; and most such theories are either totally
unfounded or dubious at best because of the multivalent nature of the languages
of the scrolls. The very nature of the scrolls demands careful and scrupulous
3
[References to “this century” in this essay are to the twentieth century.]
discussion by scholars fully aware of their multivalency. Along with the cry for
open access, a commendable cry in itself, has gone, unfortunately, a less than
scholarly rush to the popular press with preposterous or poorly founded theo-
ries that feed the hopes or fears of lay folk.4
One’s religion is the essence of one’s identity, even in the Western world that
emphasizes individual worth, merit, and responsibility. Confession of faith is a
confession of community identity. Some lay people have suspected for some time
that their faith was not as historically well founded as they had once thought.
Skepticism among Jews and Christians has been building among lay people
during the course of the twentieth century, and they come to lectures on the
Dead Sea Scrolls hoping to hear confirmation either of their skepticism or of
their faith, their fear or their hope. Some have already decided to leave synagogue
or church and want the decision bolstered; some have left the mainline religions
and sought refuge in fundamentalist groups that traffic in simplistic views of
biblical authority; and some are in the throes of deciding just what they should
think.
That is a heavy burden to place on the scrolls or any other archaeological
find. In the 1950s, when the scrolls were first coming to light, they appeared on
a scene in which there already was an intense discussion of whether archaeology
could in some way verify or falsify historically founded faiths like Judaism and
Christianity. This was especially the case in the United States, where archaeol-
ogy has been somewhat overvalued and even romanticized due in part to the
massive influence of William F. Albright and his student, Frank M. Cross, who
with immense expertise and imagination combined the fields of archaeology and
philology to address the basic question of how to bridge the gap between bibli-
cal record and historical event. Albright’s tendency was to date biblical sources
earlier than other scholars and thus reduce the gap, apparently increasing the
level of credibility of the biblical sources over what source and form criticism,
developed and refined in German scholarship, had determined were their later
dates in antiquity. He developed an organismic view of history that seemed to
support conservative views of the historical reliability of the biblical record. It
was considered fairly safe to study Bible in the Albright mode, and administra-
tors and trustees of conservative seminaries felt it prudent to hire such scholars
on their faculties; it was a mode that brought focus to the question of the relation
of history and faith. It seemed to be a way to avoid heresy.
Earlier in the century the German pan-Babylonian school of biblical study
had claimed that archaeological findings were showing how dependent the Bible
was on extrabiblical Near Eastern sources. This apparently served in an earlier
day to raise similar questions of history and faith. Paul Tillich once said that
when he was a young theologian in Dresden in the late twenties he dreaded read-
ing the paper each morning for fear that he would have to take another step
backward in his faith. Such an attitude indicates that archaeology can enhance or
4
Betz and Riesner, Jesus, Qumran, and the Vatican, have provided solid correctives to such
theories; see Sanders, Review of Jesus, Qumran, and the Vatican.
discourage faith by affirming or denying its historical origins, and hence archae-
ology became a force to contend with by the beginning of this century. Today the
situation has considerably changed, so that one tends now to thank God for the
Canaanites and others who have contributed to Scripture in various ways, and
one expects considerably less from archaeology either to prove or to disprove the
faith. It has become more and more difficult to define heresy.
Part of the comparatively new postmodern perspective on reality since the
1960s is a renewed interest in the Bible as canon, or what makes Scripture Scrip-
ture.5
Spinoza and Biblical Criticism
The history of biblical criticism may be viewed as a continuing response over

a span of 330 years [by 2016 almost 350 years] to answer Benedict or Baruch
Spinoza’s call (1670) to write a history of the formation of the Bible. When in
1523 Martin Luther began to translate the Hebrew Old Testament into German,
he immediately encountered the necessity to engage in text criticism because of
the differences in readings in the few manuscripts available to him around Erfurt,
and in the First, then Second, Rabbinic Bibles. He developed a hermeneutic of
text criticism he called res et argumentum, whereby the Christian text critic
would choose the variant that pointed to the “gospel of Jesus Christ.” Of course,
this meant Luther’s understanding of Paul’s understanding of the gospel of Jesus
Christ. He denigrated the value of the contributions of the Masoretes, including
the vowel pointing, to permit revocalization of words in crucial “christological”
passages. In other words, Luther allowed textual choices and emendations in
order to adjust the text to point to the res, or Christian gospel as he understood
it. Thus was established the denigration of the work of the Masoretes and the
legitimacy of emendation of the received text.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, critics and anti-critics alike had
agreed that if the autographs of Moses and the prophets were available, they
would be the norm, or true canon, for the text of the Hebrew Bible, indeed, of
the Old Testament as well. The anti-critics held that by a special divine assistance
the MT had been preserved identical, or nearly so, to the autographs. The critics
maintained that the available apographs contained serious errors and corruptions
in a number of readings; some also held that there was evidence of different Vor-
lagen behind the MT and LXX traditions.
The definitive contribution of the seventeenth century was that of Spinoza’s
programmatic Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670). His was a free spirit of dis-
sent condemned by both synagogue and church. In the background of Spinoza’s
thinking were Thomas Hobbes and Isaac de La Peyrère. While Hobbes focused
on what of the Pentateuch Moses actually contributed, de La Peyrère, a Cal-
5
See Sanders, “Scripture as Canon for Post-Modern Times.”
vinist who converted to Catholicism and knew Richard Simon at the Oratoire,
dismissed any hope of finding biblical autographs, stressing that critics must be
content with apographs, or copies of copies of a literature that was made up of
abstracts and abbreviations of originals in the first place. De La Peyrère dearly
wanted to diminish the authority of Scripture in order to put the Messiah and
the salvation of the Church in bold relief. In this he followed Jean Morin’s her-
meneutic and searched for proof-texts to support his messianic and christological
views.
Spinoza reacted not only to de La Peyrère but to all theologians who, accord-
ing to Spinoza, for the most part extort from Scripture what passes through
their heads. He insisted that true critics must liberate themselves from theolog-
ical prejudices and develop a valid method for expositing Scripture. Such a goal
required elaborating an exact history of the formation of the text in order to dis-
cern the thoughts of the original authors within their ancient contexts. Spinoza
was not the first to focus on original authorial intentionality, but he did so in
such a way within the Enlightenment that his influence has been felt ever since.
Out of those individuals’ ideas then could be extrapolated those doctrines and
teachings on which they all agreed – the origins perhaps of the modern search
for the “unity” of Scripture within its pluralism. Authority, for Spinoza, clearly
rested in the intentions of the authors, much of which, he said, was lost in obscu-
rity. Only that which is intelligible remains authoritative but must be deemed
sufficient for the salvation, or repose, of the soul. The rest is not worth consider-
ing. Until such a history could be written, and he seriously doubted if one would
ever be complete, Spinoza deemed the double commandment of love of God and
love of neighbor to be the true Torah of God, and to be the common religion of
all humankind. It was that which was incorruptible, and not some books called
holy.
Spinoza’s call was in effect programmatic for the ensuing three centuries of
biblical criticism. Since Spinoza was declared a heretic, many in the seventeenth
century who felt the power of his reasoning would not openly cite Spinoza or
even recognize his influence. They nonetheless heeded the call to write a history
of the formation of Scripture, both Testaments, with the goal being to discern
authorial intentionality. As the Renaissance and the Enlightenment moved into
the Age of Reason, Greek classical modes of thinking about reality with empha-
sis on the worth and authority of the individual gradually displaced, over the
next three centuries, the biblical focus on truth residing in confessional com-
munity understandings of biblical stories and traditions. The “heretic” Spinoza
eventually became the father, or at least the godfather, of modern biblical criti-
cism.
For Spinoza, if authorial intention could be recovered, it needed but to pass
the further tests of intelligibility and reason to gain acceptance “for the salvation
or repose of the soul.” Though Spinoza doubted that such a history could ever be
fully recovered, scholarship would henceforth focus on devising the disciplines
necessary to recover the historical origins of biblical literature, hoping thereby
to reconstruct the actual thinking of the individuals who contributed to what
became the literature of the Bible. The word exegesis became a byword of the
focus, and the word eisegesis became a pejorative term largely indicating how
various communities of faith had read what they wanted into the text. Thus the
time-honored relation of Scripture and faith community was severed in bypass-
ing contemporary communities, Jewish and Christian, and instead reconstruct-
ing original authorial intentionalities of the various individuals, ancient speakers,
authors, compilers, and editors – precisely Spinoza’s search for the truth of Scrip-
ture in the history of its literary formation.
The first efforts focused on the early sources that lay behind the larger literary
units, with a quest where feasible for the individual geniuses most responsible
for those sources. This became a game that, in the hands of some scholars, by the
beginning of this century had become a drama of the absurd, with hypotheses
about distinct sources lying behind smaller and smaller fragments of blocks of
Scripture.
Form criticism entered the picture with efforts to probe behind the literary
sources to the oral transmission of literary forms and their functions in the cultic
and cultural life of ancient communities. Tradition criticism developed then as
a discipline when it was perceived that community traditions were shaped and
reshaped in the course of transmission toward the written literary texts we now
possess. In this way, the importance of ancient communities was recognized,
though not stressed, in the history of formation of the biblical texts. Focus on
the individual came once again with redaction criticism and the effort to perceive
the texts received as shaped by the consistent theological thinking of individual
redactors, but all the while rhetorical and audience criticism kept at least minimal
focus on ancient communities.
Interfaith Dialogue
In April 1989 there was a conference at the University of Notre Dame titled
“Hebrew Bible or Old Testament,” where Jewish and Christian scholars gave
papers and responses. While the Christian scholars generally expressed the need
and importance of the Jewish-Christian dialogue, James Kugel and Jon Leven-
son, both of Harvard, insisted that there is no real base for such dialogue because
when we think we agree on something it is on matters based on common West-
ern-cultural academic premises, that is, on biblical criticism, and not on identities
as Jews and Christians.
Both sides in the discussion in effect fully recognized the common ground of
critical study of religion, but Kugel and Levenson denied that this was a sound
base on which to have a truly interfaith dialogue because it was not a genuine
identity stance but a learned one common to us all. Social location, to use a cur-
rent term from cultural anthropology, undoubtedly played a role in the positions
taken. Kugel and Levenson brought the perspective of the minority to the dis-
cussion; the Christians expressed the openness facilitated by cultural dominance.
There was no pretense at finally arriving at a resolution; each person stated her
or his position, each hoping to be the one to break the impasse – to no avail. Hei-
delberg’s own Rolf Rendtorff was there and made a strong presentation of the
view he and I both share that Christians must learn Jewish interpretations of pas-
sages otherwise dear to them and cease the centuries-long tendency to denigrate
Jewish understandings of Scripture either by supersessionism or by anti-Jewish
polemic.6
A similar impasse had been arrived at not long after the Six-Day War in New
York when Abraham Heschel and I invited professors from Union Theological
Seminary, where Heschel had been Fosdick Visiting Professor the year I went
on the faculty (1965), and from Jewish Theological Seminary across the street, to
engage in dialogue about Jewish-Christian relations. Some internationally visible
folk gathered for the first and only meeting. It did not work. While the Chris-
tians were generally willing to agree with Reinhold Niebuhr’s earlier statement
that there should be no special mission to the Jews, Heschel drove so hard for a
common statement from the group supporting the State of Israel that the Chris-
tians simply fell silent. They had not thought they would be asked to sign, as
they later put it, a political document about Near Eastern foreign policy
Jacob Neusner has recently put it very well: “The fusion of the ethnic, the
religious, the cultural, and the political (in Judaism), to Christians presents woe-
ful confusion.”7 Heschel had thought he was asking for common theological
support for God’s fulfillment of promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
The two sides talked past each other, and the group dissipated. There seemed no
common ground on which to continue at least to explore why they thought they
had different goals. I in my innocence had thought that Heschel’s theology of
God’s incarnation in the Jewish people would bring needed correctives to some
formulations of Christian incarnational theology. I even later reiterated the hope
in Jerusalem on the occasion of Heschel’s sheloshim (memorial) service in Janu-
ary 1973.
Though he had earlier written and spoken in the same discouraging ways as
Kugel and Levenson, Jacob Neusner has recently suggested a way out of the
impasse.
My answer commences with a necessary recognition, which is that, after all, we really do
worship one God, who is the same God, and who is the only God, we and the Muslims
with us. Dialogue is required [emphasis his] among the three faiths that claim to worship
one and the same God, the only God. Within that common ground of being, a human task
emerges. It is to see in the religious experience of the other, the stranger and outsider, that
with which we, within our own world, can identify.8
The human task that our common belief in One God necessitates, as Neusner
perceives it, is “. . . to feel and so understand what the other feels and affirms in
the world of that other. So the critical challenge . . . begins not with the negoti-
ation of theological differences, or with intellectual tasks, but with the pathos
6
See Rendtorff, Kanon und Theologie; and note Sanders, Review of Kanon und Thologie.
7
Neusner, “Different Kind of Judaeo-Christian Dialogue,” 36.
8
Ibid.
of alien feeling.”9 He notes that the concepts of Israel (as both people and land,
Gen 12:2, 7) and Christ, so central to Judaism and Christianity, are each quite
alien to the other. For there to be a dialogue, he contends, each side must try to
understand the alien concept of the other.
Out of all these experiences, and a lifetime of dedication to Jewish-Christian
dialogue, I now perceive that the lack of common ground comes from the ten-
sion between individual (Greek) and community (Semitic) views of identity and
responsibility. Is there a way out of the impasse? Can there be a genuine inter-
faith dialogue between these two religions that, on the one hand, have so much in
common, and, on the other hand, are so alien at their centers, Israel and Christ,
each to the other?
Scripture and Intertextuality
Does one have to completely abandon one’s community identity and affirm only
a critical reading of traditions to have dialogue? Would that not be to create
another modern believing community with the faith stance that only deconstruc-
tion of the past can address present issues? Is it possible to read the past criti-
cally from within a present, continuing, traditioning community? Our thesis is
that not only is it possible but that it is the only kind of dialogue that can truly
address present and future issues, and that only dialogue, learning from dissent,
can enrich the human experiment and broaden and expand human conceptuality.
God is always bigger than we can think.
One of the ways in which the Dead Sea Scrolls have illuminated early Jewish
literature, including the Second Testament, is in their scriptural intertextuality.
There are three principal ways in which the term intertextuality is currently
used in the literature. First, it is used to focus on the chemistry between two con-
tiguous blocks of literature, large or small. A prime example here is the interrela-
tionship between the two quite disparate accounts of creation in Genesis chapters
one and two. In the one, God is majestic, awesome, and transcendent; in the sec-
ond, God is presented as making a pastoral call on his first parishioners in Eden’s
bower. The two stand side by side, each making its own valid theological point:
God is both transcendent and immanent, creator and redeemer, not just one or
the other. Nor should one harmonize or collapse the two into one to speak of a
redemptive creator God, or a creative redeemer God. They relate intertextually in
a powerful hermeneutical statement by which to read all that follows. Many other
examples within the Bible could be offered between quite distinct bodies of liter-
ature. This is largely what is meant by the canonical context of biblical literature.
A second way in which the term is used is recognition that all literature is
made up of previous literature and reflects the earlier through citation, allusion,
use of phrases, and paraphrases of older literature to create newer literature, ref-
9
Ibid., 35 – 38.
erence to earlier literary episodes, even echoes of earlier familiar literature in the
construction of the later. “The texts cited (alluded to) are the generating force
behind the elaboration of narrative or other types of textual expansion.” “Every
text is absorption and transformation of other texts.”10
The third most common way the term is used is recognition that the reader is
also a text, and that reading is in essence an encounter between texts human and
written, the present and the past. The reader is a bundle of hermeneutics, as it
were, engaging a text that, noting the second meaning of intertextuality, is itself
a bundle of hermeneutics.
The Dead Sea Scrolls and Intertextuality
Aside from the strange Copper Scroll from Cave 3, there are three basic types
of literature from the Qumran caves: traditional canonical, deutero-canonical or
apocryphal, and previously unknown literature. About a quarter of the scrolls
are biblical, as can be clearly seen in volumes nine through sixteen of Discoveries
in the Judaean Desert. So far, every book of the Jewish canon is represented, at
least by a fragment or two, except Esther. Even those like the Psalms, of which
there are more copies (forty at last count) than of any other biblical book, are not
entirely complete; a few psalms are not represented, but this may be by accident
of survival in the caves. Of the deutero-canonical or apocryphal books known
heretofore only in ancient Christian-translated Old Testaments (Greek, Latin,
Ethiopic, Slavonic, etc.), a number are represented for the first time in their orig-
inal languages, Hebrew or Aramaic.
The third type of Qumran literature is previously unknown in any form and
is varied and rich. It is this third type of previously totally unknown literature
that takes painstaking skills to reconstruct when, as in the case of Cave 4, they
survive only in fragments, most of which do not even join. This is the principal
reason for the slow pace of publication of some of the Qumran materials.
The reasons it is even possible to reconstruct this third type of totally un-
known ancient denominational literature are, first, that seasoned experts learn to
recognize scribal handwriting as distinct to a single scribe so that it is possible
to execute triage of the some ten thousand fragments from Cave 4 and get all the
fragments belonging to one ancient document on one table under glass in accor-
dance with whose handwriting each fragment belongs to. It takes experience to
recognize distinctive handwritings of ancient scribes. The other reason it is pos-
sible to piece fragments belonging to the same document in proper positioning
under glass is that all early Jewish literature was largely written scripturally, that
is, intertextually in the second sense noted above. In other words, early Judaism
was in constant dialogue with its past and for the most part resignified or recon-
ceptualized its past in doing so.
10
These are two typical remarks about intertextuality. See, for instance, Kristeva, Σημειω-
τική, 146, and Boyarin, Intertextuality, 11 – 19.
The observation that all early Jewish literature was written more or less scrip-
turally has always been operative in study of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigra-
pha, as well as Josephus and Philo. Yet the scrolls have enhanced this observation
in ways that make it one of the major factors in their study. Again, it takes years
of reading and knowing the whole of the Hebrew Bible, and its early Greek
translations, to recognize the scriptural forms, phrases, and paraphrases with
which most early Jewish literature was composed. It underscores the fact that
one cannot study early Jewish literature, including the Second Testament, with-
out knowing the First Testament quite thoroughly indeed. So much of the Jew-
ish literature of the period is composed of phrases and paraphrases of Scripture,
whether in Hebrew or Greek, that the seasoned scholar is able to piece together
scattered fragments having the same handwriting by discerning what Scripture
passages the writer had in mind while composing the new material. The scholar
truly immersed in Hebrew Scriptures can usually discern what is going on in
a fragmented but heretofore unknown document and thus juxtapose unjoined
fragments under glass for photography and study. Without absorption in Scrip-
ture one is reduced to constantly checking Hebrew and Greek concordances of
the Bible to see what passage or passages the ancient author had in mind while
composing.
The observation is generally true for all early Jewish literature, whether com-
posed of Hebrew biblical phrases and paraphrases or of their translated Greek
forms in the case of original composition in Greek. In some instances, as with
the Second Testament, one should know both the Tanak and the LXX since
the books of Matthew, Mark, John, and Paul show knowledge (at one level or
another of formation) of both; for Luke one must know early Greek transla-
tions of Jewish Scripture. Why? While the Second Testament is not in fragments
needing triage like most of the scrolls, it often resembles a montage or collage of
scriptural fragments, rhythms, and cadences.
There are seven basic modes of the second type of intertextuality, and they
all appear in most early Jewish literature, including the Christian Second Tes-
tament. I shall simply list these; we then will look at how some of them work.
They are: (1) citation with formula; (2) citation without formula; (3) weaving of
scriptural phrases into the newer composition; (4) paraphrasing Scripture pas-
sages; (5) reflection of the structure of a Scripture passage; (6) allusions to scrip-
tural persons, episodes, or events; and (7) echoes of Scripture passages in the
later composition. Since the Second Testament itself was composed and shaped
in the period of textual fluidity, one has to be quite discerning in locating modes
of intertextuality of this sort. The most obvious constraint on a speaker or writer
who echoes Scripture in these manners is the factor of recognizability; the com-
munity addressed would have to be able to recognize that the paraphrase or echo
was indeed from Scripture for the reference to have authority.11
11
Two especially fine books exploring biblical intertextuality of the second type are Fish-
bane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, and Hays, Echoes of Scripture.
Comparative Midrash
Recognizing the intertextual nature of the Second Testament and pursuing what
that means not only in terms of composition but also in terms of meaning pro-
vide many unexplored lodes of intertextuality and dialogue in the Second Testa-
ment. Most New Testament scholarship focuses on Christian sectarian sources
in the formation of Gospels and Epistles and rarely mines the fuller richness of
their intertextual nature. There has rather been a tendency to regret the amount
of Scripture woven into the literary formation of the Second Testament, and also
largely to dismiss it as proof-texting, or dicta probantia. Studying early Jewish
literature intertextually leads in quite other directions.
The discipline of comparative midrash permits one to discern the intertextual
function of earlier literature in the later by focusing on the receptor hermeneu-
tics by which the later early Jewish writers caused Scripture to function in the
poetry, narratives, or arguments being pursued, and to compare them in terms of
the range of hermeneutics involved through the whole exercise.
The term midrash, like the term intertextuality, is used in different senses.
It is used to refer to a mass of literature from the formative and classical Jewish
periods as a recognizable literary genre, the Tannaitic and rabbinic midrashim.
It is also used in a broader sense to mean the function of searching Scripture to
seek light on new problems, as the Hebrew verb K‫דרׁש‬K (meaning “search” or
“seek”) indicates. In other words, it may be used to indicate a literary form, or to
indicate a literary function. The midrashic function of drashing goes far back into
biblical times. Its earliest uses in Scripture had to do with seeking an oracle or
instruction (a torah) from a prophet, priest, or other oracle. Upon the demise of
prophecy, for some Jewish communities, in the sixth to fifth centuries BCE, and
the introduction of the Pentateuch as Torah, edited by Ezra in Babylonia and
brought to Jerusalem somewhere around 445 BCE, one then began to drash the
Torah as text instead of drashing spiritual leaders to seek light on and guidance
for new and ever-changing situations and circumstances. One finds ancient tra-
ditions in some of the earliest biblical compositions as well as in later Jewish lit-
erature. One also finds international wisdom absorbed and adapted into biblical
literature from the earliest scriptural compositions through to the last. One also
attempts to discern the reader’s or receptor’s hermeneutic (view of reality) by
which the later writer caused the earlier Scripture to function in the newer com-
position.
Comparative midrash is the exercise by which one can probe the depths of
intertextuality and its significance for scriptural and other Jewish literature. One
first does exegesis on the passage cited or echoed in its primary location at incep-
tion in the Hebrew Bible, noting carefully the earlier traditions and wisdom
thinking borrowed and structured into the cited passage in the first place. One
then traces the Nachleben or pilgrimage of that passage throughout early Jewish
literature, within the Tanak, through the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the
Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, and the Second Testament – attempting always
to determine the receptor hermeneutics used by the various tradents all along the
path. One can pursue the exercise not only with discrete passages but also with
episodes and figures.
At every instance along the pilgrimage of the earlier passage pursued one can
listen in on dialogues within each later text studied by not letting the later tradent
overwhelm the passage cited or echoed, but by keeping in mind the earlier mean-
ings and modes of function in early Jewish literature, including its “original”
meanings at inception in the Hebrew Bible. One might think of a round table
with the cited or echoed passage from the Tanak in the middle, and all the tra-
dents who used it in early Jewish literature, down through the New Testament,
seated around the table in imaginary dialogue about the significance of the Scrip-
ture traced, even debating what hermeneutics were appropriate in what circum-
stances in reapplying the passage along its pilgrimage.12 One might even grant the
“original” meaning(s) of the Old Testament passage a place of some prominence
at the dialogue table, but only limited prominence, for, after all, those earliest
meanings are those assigned to the passage by modern, critical scholarship. And
that meaning usually differs according to modern school of thought or Zeitgeist.
Reading the Second Testament itself as a part of early Jewish literature in such
a manner issues in veins of wealth of intracanonical dialogue otherwise unavail-
able. A crucial point to keep in mind is that early Christian communities were a
part of diversified early Judaism until the Bar Kochba revolt. In other words, not
only were Jesus and the apostles, including Paul, Jews, but Christian “churches”
viewed themselves as Christian Jews, including gentile converts, until well into
the second century CE. Viewing the Gospels and Paul in the light of their all
being Jewish, albeit the hellenized forms of the pluriform Judaism of the time,
throws quite a different light on how to read the challenges and criticisms in the
Gospels and the Epistles of Jewish leaders of the first century. The strictures
attributed to Jesus of the Jewish leaders of his time are similar to, but pale in
comparison with, the many challenges and criticisms the prophets leveled against
the leaders of their times centuries earlier. This time, however, Christian syna-
gogues separated from Torah-centered synagogues so that the Gospels, written
at the end of the first century in the language of the polemics of separation, were
not included, as the prophetic books had been, in the Jewish canon, but the Jew-
ish canon became the base, in its Greek forms, of the Christian canon. Surviving
rabbinic Judaism rejected the heresy.
Two Testaments in One Bible
One of the remarkable traits of the Bible as a whole, however, is its self-critical
component. There is no other body of literature quite like it, quite disparate yet
compressed into canons. This is not just an occasional trait, it is characteristic of
large portions of the Bible. Understanding Jesus’ criticisms of his fellow Jewish
12
See Sanders, “Vitality of the OT.”
leaders in the first third of the first century, in the light of similar prophetic criti-
cisms in earlier times, puts them in a far different light from reading his strictures
about scribes and Pharisees and others as though Jesus were somehow gentile, a
visiting foreigner, or not even human. Many Christians have read the Gospels in
that way and thus totally misread them as anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic.
To read the expression “the Jews,” which occurs often in Paul and especially
John, as though the term referred to a totally different entity as a group, which
was the case by the middle of the second century of the common era but was
not in the first century, is to misread it entirely. The Jewish historian Josephus
used the term “the Jews” in very similar ways. Paul insisted that he was a Jew
but had become a Christian Jew. There were many hellenized forms of Judaism
in the first century, and Christian Judaism was viewed as one such form until it
became so heavily influenced by the great influx of gentiles that they no longer
understood, by the middle of the second century, that they were converting to
a Jewish denomination. Christianity finally was a different religion with little
connection to Judaism.13
Reading the Second Testament within its canonical context can prevent mis-
understanding it as anti-Jewish polemic. Even when the churches finally broke
away from any form of Judaism, or from being part of the hellenized branches of
Judaism, they still insisted against Marcion that the Christian sectarian literature
belonged to the Jewish Bible. A usefully corrective attitude here would be to
view the churches in the first century as daring to add the Gospels and Epistles
to the Jewish Bible, and then in the mid-second century insisting on keeping the
“Old Covenant” as essential and integral to the Christian Bible.
By the time of Marcion in the middle of the second century CE it was possible
to think of whether to keep the First Testament in the new, developing Chris-
tian Bible, but up to that point the argument was rather that the new witnesses
to what God had just done in the first century, in Christ and the early church,
should be viewed as part of the continuing story of God’s revelations that had
begun in Genesis. That was chutzpah enough, so to speak, adding to the Bible,
but other Jewish denominations of the period, notably the Jewish denomination
at Qumran, apparently viewed some of their own literature with the same respect
as some of the Writings, at least. It has been argued that the large Temple Scroll
from Cave 11 was thought to have been as authoritative as the Mosaic Torah.
Apparently, no form of Judaism had a rigidly closed canon in the first century
CE. Efforts at closure would come as Judaism became more narrowly under-
stood to be fairly unified into rabbinic forms of Judaism only, while the various
hellenized forms of Judaism merged with the separating Christian communities
or assimilated to other religions in the dominant Hellenistic-Roman culture.
Regardless of the reasons, the churches came to view the particularly Chris-
tian literature as forming a Second Testament within the Greek Jewish Bible. Or
to put it in mid-second-century terms, they all kept the Greek First Testament as
13
See Sanders, “The Hermeneutics of Translation.”
canonical. Eastern churches kept more early Jewish literature than others, thus
the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, which rabbinic communities scoffed at as
they indeed did at the “Christian” sectarian literature.
Keeping the First Testament, in whatever form, meant that Christians would
continue to understand what God did, in the first century in Christ and the early
church, in the light of what God had been doing since Genesis. The Septuagint
provided a textbook for the increasingly gentile churches to continue to learn
what it meant to believe in One God, so contrary to everything in the culture of
the time. It also provided a textbook for how to live in the gap between God’s
promises and the apparent failure of their fulfillment. The hope for the Second
Coming was directly comparable to the Jewish continuing hope for the Messiah
yet to come. The First Testament provided a textbook to understand that God is
the God of fallings as well as risings, of death as well as life, of what humans call
failure as well as of what they call success, of what humans call evil as well as of
what they call good.
It ought to have prevented what gradually came to be the way the churches
read the Second Testament, namely, by a christocentric hermeneutic. Yet it did
not in and of itself, because Christians began to fail to heed the first three com-
mandments, which prohibit polytheism, idolatry, and co-opting God’s name for
one point of view (whether in court or in life). Whereas the trinitarian formula
was designed to be a guard against polytheizing with its emphasis on the one
Triune God,14 it has consciously or unconsciously been understood with a poly-
theizing hermeneutic. Idolatry is not simply having human-form sculptures in
church, or the like. Idolatry is worshipping the gift instead of the Giver, even
Christ, the Christian God’s most precious gift. Christianity has a penchant for
making an idol of Christ, thinking of Christ as Christian, and as a god in himself,
even though the church has through the centuries denounced both idolatry and
docetism (the hallmarks of Christian fundamentalism).
Dialogue within Scripture
Rereading the Second Testament intertextually, listening in on the dialogue that

occurs every time a First Testament passage is woven into the fabric of the Sec-
ond, might possibly save Christianity from its perennial flirtation and dance with
polytheism, idolatry, and anti-Semitism. If Christians could remember in read-
ing the Gospels and Epistles that they speak of God’s gift, of God’s work in
and through Christ, but never of a Christian Christ, then, in reading them, they
might resist identifying with Christ but rather identify with those around him,
namely, their fellow early Jews, and thus begin to hear the Christian Bible in
ways quite different from the way most Christians read the Bible and have read
it for nearly two thousand years.
14
See Richardson, Doctrine of the Trinity.
A first step would be to take the hermeneutical stance that the Second Testa-
ment is largely about “heretical” Jews in the first century searching Scripture to
try to understand what was happening to them in their experience of Christ in
their lives, and what God was doing through Christ and themselves. This would
be to read it as literature mainly written and addressed by Jews to Jews.
The next step would be to take the further hermeneutical stance that the Bible
is not canonically and ultimately about Jews and non-Jews. Historically, to be
sure, it is about pharaohs and patriarchs, Canaanites and Israelites, Philistines
and Judahites, Romans and Jews, etc. Yet canonically and ultimately, at least
for the Christian, it is about God and human beings. It is a paradigm of the
divine-human encounter; it is a gallery of mirrors in which humans can continue
today to see themselves in all their foibles and follies, strengths and weaknesses,
being confronted with questions about truth, justice, grace, and righteousness.
An integral part of interfaith dialogue between Jews and Christians would be
reading Scripture, and each other’s traditions about it, together. Even if not, there
should be a pledge on the part of all who join the dialogue, whenever Scripture
is read, to imagine that the other is overhearing what is said and thinking about
what is read. I have recently asked if those of us who think that interfaith dia-
logue is important cannot at least pretend that there is but One God, and hence
read Scripture as though others were present and listening.
Hopefully, the dialogue would be in a tripartite mode with Islam, but the
tripartite mode should not detract from the Jewish-Christian dialogue, which
needs special attention because of the origins of Christianity within Judaism and
the shared First Testament. Reading Scripture together dialogically would then
be supplemented by reading the other’s traditions in the extended canons, the
Second Christian Testament, Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrash, and beyond.
Reading Scripture dialogically through intertextuality provides rich lodes
within Scripture that are rarely explored. Since Scripture is transcultural and
intertextual in nature, all parts of it have depths that can reach into the very
essence of the human experiment. One should read Scripture intertextually,
keeping in mind contributions to any given text from international wisdom as
well as from Israel’s and Judaism’s own traditions, written and oral. The Bible as
a whole comes from five cultural eras, from the Bronze Age through to the Hel-
lenistic-Roman, and includes riches untold from all of them. Jewish and Chris-
tian Bibles in fact may both be read as paradigms for dialogue. Each partner in
the dialogue should then consciously read the text under scrutiny both critically
and faithfully – in the light of the results of the historical and analytical work on
the history of formation of the text of the past three centuries, and in the light of
each faith’s traditioning process.
Reading Critically and Faithfully
If, as I firmly believe, the Enlightenment was a gift of God in due season, then
we must read the Bible critically. But if, as I also just as firmly believe, faith itself
is a gift of God, then each partner may remain faithful to his and her faith-com-
munity’s traditioning process, all the while using the enduring results of bib-
lical criticism. Recognition of such a hyphenated identity opens up Scripture
and tradition from within. Just as ancient intercultural wisdom opened tradition
from within for the classical prophets, so dialogue with the wisdom of today can
broaden human conceptual horizons. Or, in prophetic terms, God is always big-
ger than humans can perceive or imagine.
Wherever an earlier “text” functions in a later text, whether it be home grown
within “Israel” or transcultural in scope, the dialogue should be pursued criti-
cally and faithfully, that is, in postmodern terms, with both suspicion and con-
sent. Genuine interfaith dialogue requires that all partners to it admit of such
hyphenated identity. In this way, the understanding of a passage indicated by
one’s tradition would be in dialogue with both the critical reading and with the
other’s traditioning process about the passage. In this way, Paul’s or Akiba’s
understanding of a given passage, as well as critical understandings of its “ear-
liest meanings,” would be honored and studied, compared and analyzed her-
meneutically. The earlier word must still have a voice at the round table: it has
not been somehow superseded, and critical scholarship keeps it alive by con-
stantly striving to reconstruct original settings and meanings, as well as each
of the subsequent recitations and echoes of a passage in its pilgrimage through
early Judaism into formative Judaism and Christianity. A feast of meaning can
then be savored while the hermeneutic range by which each passage continued
to speak to ever-changing situations is gauged in the canonical process. Dissent
requires norm for its very identity, while norm invites dissent and is enriched by
it, reflecting perhaps the essence of the human experiment.
Bibliography
Betz, Otto, and Rainer Riesner. Jesus, Qumran, and the Vatican: Clarifications. New York:
Crossroad, 1994.
Boyarin, Daniel. Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
Kristeva, Julia. Σημειωτική: Recherches pour une sémanalyse. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969.
Neusner, Jacob. “A Different Kind of Judaeo-Christian Dialogue.” The Jewish Specta-
tor 56 (Winter 1991 – 92) 34 – 38.
Rendtorff, Rolf. Kanon und Theologie. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1991.
ET: Canon and Theology. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark,
1994.
Richardson, Cyril C. The Doctrine of the Trinity. New York: Abingdon, 1958.

inal “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy.” In Canon and Authority: Essays in
Old Testament Religion and Theology, edited by George W. Coats and Burke O. Long,
Sanders, James A. “The Hermeneutics of Translation.” In Removing the Anti-Judaism
from the New Testament, edited by Howard Kee and Irvin J. Borowsky, 43 – 62. Phila-
delphia: American Interfaith Institute, 1998.
Sanders, James A. Review of Jesus, Qumran, and the Vatican: Clarifications, by Otto Betz
and Rainer Riesner. Int 49 (1995) 300 – 302.
Sanders, James A. Review of Kanon und Theologie, by Rolf Rendtorff. JSS 42 (1997)
145 – 46.
56 – 63.
Sanders, James A. “The Vitality of the Old Testament: Three Theses.” USQR 21 (1966)
161 – 84.
Smith, Wilfred C. What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach. Minneapolis: Fortress,
1993.
20
The Issue of Closure in the Canonical Process
The recovery of ancient biblical manuscripts in the middle of the twentieth

century has prompted critical scholarship to reconsider what it means when it
applies the word “canon” to Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Following the lead
of Johann Salomo Semler and others in the eighteenth century, and Heinrich
Graetz, Samuel Davidson, Frants Buhl, H. E. Ryle, and others in the nineteenth
century, a general consensus formed: A council of rabbis meeting at Yavneh or
Jamnia on the Palestinian coast within a decade or two of the disastrous failure
of the Jewish revolt against Rome of 66 to 73 CE, had decided the content and
extent of the Jewish canon.1 The historical outline of the development of a closed
canon of early Jewish literature was fairly clear: the Pentateuch was canonized
by 400 BCE, the Prophets by 200 BCE, and the Hagiographa, the third and final
section of the Jewish canon, was determined by the Council at Jamnia around
90 CE. Well into the late twentieth century, until the Judean Desert Scrolls
were absorbed and evaluated in this regard, the major textbooks of colleges and
seminaries throughout most of the Western world reflected this consensus and
equated “canon” with closure.
This schematic view was largely dependent on two points: the concept of
canonization, and the authority of extrabiblical data. The term “canonized”
implies something officially or authoritatively imposed upon certain literature.
Even those who spoke of a gradual process (Otto Eissfeldt, A. Bentzen, and
H. H. Rowley) still saw closure as imposed upon select literature by an authorita-
tive body for all Judaism.2 The quest for closure spawned a corresponding quest
for lists, or what could be construed as lists, in ancient Jewish literature outside
the Tanak: Sirach, 2 Maccabees, Jubilees, Philo, Josephus, and Luke. Similarly,
work on the New Testament canonization process looked to “lists” in Tertullian,
Eusebius, the Muratorian Fragment, Athanasius’s Easter Letter, etc.3 Such lists

1
Semler’s attachment to biblical theology, based on the developing historical-critical
method at mid-eighteenth century, led him to limit the concept of canon to the final stage of the
formation of biblical literature; see Hornig, Die Anfänge der historisch-kritischen Theologie. See
also Graetz, “Der alttestamentliche Kanon”; Davidson, Canon of the Bible; Buhl, Canon and
Text; Ryle, Canon of the OT.
2
See the references in Lewis, “Jamnia Revisited.” Even Albert Sundberg, who denied that
there was a canon of the Septuagint, still reflected the Jamnia view of the Ketuvim; see Sundberg,
OT of the Early Church.
3
See the critical discussion of them in McDonald, Formation of the Christian Biblical
Canon, esp. 268 – 76.
The Issue of Closure in the Canonical Process 355
were taken to indicate closure for all of Judaism, or all of Christianity, instead of
reflecting the distinctive purposes of a particular school or faction at a specific
time. Ancient lists, or perceived lists, that contradicted or failed to support even-
tual official canons could be ignored as uninformed or irrelevant to the quest.
Even after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi documents, the Judean Desert
Scrolls, and many New Testament Greek papyri, the consensus tended to hold
on despite questions raised by the new discoveries.4 Some scholars attempted
to superimpose the old view on the new evidence. A blatant example was an
attempt to read a reference to the whole of the Ketuvim (Hagiographa) in a vague
phrase about “the writings of David” in 4QMMT (if that is indeed the correct
reading of a very fragmentary witness).5
History of Formation
The recovery of hundreds of actual biblical manuscripts in Hebrew, albeit mostly

fragmentary, a thousand years older than any known previously has necessi-
tated a thorough review of the consensus. The discussion of the New Testament
canon is undergoing similar changes.6 One result has been a closer look at the
significance of Jamnia for the canonical process. Shedding the “Jamnia” mental-
ity has not been easy for the Western mind, which looks for decisions imposed
by authorities, and often finds them where they do not exist.7 In early efforts to
come to grips with the impact of the DSS on the concept of canon, the present
writer still assumed the importance of Jamnia.8 But an article by Jack P. Lewis,
“What Do We Mean by Jabneh?” forced me to drop Jamnia from my think-
ing about “canonization.”9 Sid Leiman questioned the importance of Jamnia in
his dissertation at Hebrew University, but he viewed the significance of Lewis’s
work differently from the way I did.10 Leiman took it to mean that the Tanak had
already been canonized by the second century BCE, whereas I took it to mean
that the Ketuvim were not stabilized until later.11 In fact, if one means by “can-
4
See Flint, Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls, for an excellent discussion of the new evidence; see
also Sanders, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls, as well as Talmon, Review of The Dead
Sea Psalms Scrolls.
5
See Qimron and Strugnell, Qumran Cave 4.V, 59n10, and the discussion of it in McDon-
ald, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon, 41 – 43.
6
See the masterful articles by Epp, “Issues in the Interrelation,” and Schmidt, “Greek New
Testament as a Codex,” who reach the same conclusion.
7
In Scribes and Schools, Davies belittles the role of communities in “canonization.” He, like
most Western thinkers, focuses on individual scribes and leaders. But leaders need followers as
much as followers need leaders, and without continuing community support leaders have no
effect in the canonical process.
8
Sanders, Torah and Canon, and Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; both were written before
1972.
9
10
Leiman, Canonization, 131 – 32. The dissertation had been written a few years earlier.
11
Leiman’s view is shared by Beckwith, OT Canon of the NT Church; Davies, Scribes and
Schools; and Steinmann, Oracles of God.
onized” that the content and order of the Ketuvim were rigidly set, that occurred
only recently: note the great Tiberian codices of the Hebrew Bible place Chron-
icles first among the Ketuvim, whereas Baba Bathra 14b and printed rabbinic
Bibles place Chronicles last. The Biblia Hebraica series used the Second Rab-
binic Bible as its base text in the first two editions (1902 and 1927) but retained
the rabbinic order even after it adopted the masoretic Leningradensis, the oldest
complete Hebrew Bible in the world, as base text in the third and fourth editions
(1937, 1977). While one may argue that the difference did not affect the text of
the Ketuvim, it certainly affected its hermeneutic structure.12 Consequently, I
prefer the terms “stabilization” and “canonical process” to “canonization.”
Since it was now clear that Graetz, Buhl, Ryle and other nineteenth-cen-
tury scholars had read too much Western thinking into the various references
to Yavneh / Jamnia, the terms of the debate shifted to what Lewis’s work really
implied. The field was divided between those who took it to mean that “canon-
ization” of the Ketuvim predated Jamnia, and those who took it to mean that the
canonical process was not yet complete at that time.13 The former still looked for
confirmation primarily from external references, while the latter examined the
plethora of manuscripts now available for both Testaments, and considered their
implication for the history of the transmission of the text.14 Most scholars took
Lewis’s work to mean that the release from Jamnia mentality signified release
from the neat three-stage scheme of the canonization of the Hebrew Bible as
well. The terms of the debate were re-formulated, as it were.
History of Transmission
Prior to the discovery of the Judean Desert Scrolls, the history of transmission of
the text of the Hebrew Bible was largely formulated in terms of Vorlagen under-
lying variant texts. The text critic explained the significant differences between
the MT and the Septuagint primarily in terms of there having been a different
Hebrew text lying back of the Septuagint. When in the seventeenth century the
Samaritan Pentateuch apparently showed yet a third kind of text lying back of it,
a theory about three families of texts arose. This theory was well stated by Wil-
liam F. Albright and given prominence by his student, Frank Moore Cross, after
12
See Sanders, “Intertextuality and Canon”; Sanders, “Spinning the Bible”; Sanders, “Sta-
bilization of the Tanak.”
13
See Cohen, “Significance of Yavneh.” For Cohen, Yavneh meant the creation of a (rab-
binic Jewish) society that tolerated disputes; challenges to reigning ideas did not have to come
from sects and heresies. Such openness contrasted with early Judaism before Yavneh, and, one
assumes, Christianity thereafter. Sometimes, of course, rabbinic Judaism has not tolerated dis-
sent.
14
Bovon, “Canonical Structure,” argues against the importance of outside forces in the ca-
nonical process; and Ferguson, “Factors Leading to the Selection,” asserts that councils did little
more than ratify, as it were, what was already custom in believing communities. See also Cross,
“Stabilization of the Canon.”
the discovery of the scrolls.15 The MT would have derived from Babylonian Jew-
ish communities, the Samaritan from Palestinian, and the Vorlage of the Septua-
gint from the highly hellenized Egyptian Jewish communities around Alexandria
that produced the Septuagint. Debates then centered on whether there had been a
pristine “original” text out of which the three streams flowed, or numerous texts
developed in many isolated communities, which then gradually developed into
the proto-MT, which became dominant by the beginning of the second century
of the common era.16
The Qumran scrolls, despite their relatively fluid texts, clearly showed the
validity and high antiquity of the MT. Some of them, however, witnessed to texts
underlying the variant readings in the Septuagint. Support for Samaritan readings
in the Pentateuch was minimal. But where the Septuagint and the MT have the
greatest diversity of readings, as in Samuel and Jeremiah, Qumran fragments of
varying sizes indicated that there may have indeed been distinct Hebrew Vorla-
gen lying back of some of the Septuagint. In some cases, where there are lengthy
pluses as in Septuagint Samuel, or lengthy minuses as in Septuagint Jeremiah, the
scrolls have provided similar ancient Hebrew texts. Other Septuagint variants
also find some support in the scrolls. The Qumran caves, thus, seemed to con-
firm the existence of families of biblical texts deriving from pristine “originals.”
But the general fluidity in biblical texts from Qumran gave rise to a different
view as well. At the same time that Frank Cross was developing the three-family
theory of texts of the Hebrew Bible out of his work on the scrolls, especially the
early fragments of Samuel, Dominique Barthélemy was working on the Greek
Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever.17 Barthélemy’s work brought unprec-
˙ ˙of transmission of the text.18 What Barthé-
edented clarity to the early history
lemy saw in the Hever Minor Prophets Scroll was a missing link in the history of
˙ text of the Hebrew Bible. The scroll, which dates to the late
transmission of the
first century BCE or to the early first century CE, clearly shows that the early,
rather fluid Greek translations were being brought closer to a text of the Hebrew
Bible that was moving toward the MT. The Hever Minor Prophets Scroll came
at a historical mid-point, so to speak, between ˙ the older, more dynamic Greek
translations, characteristic of much of the so-called Septuagint, and the very lit-
eral Greek translations of the second century CE known as Aquila, Theodotion,
and Symmachus.
15
Albright, “New Light,” and Cross, “History of the Biblical Text.” Talmon, “Textual
Study of the Bible,” presented a quite different theory and formally opposed the creation of
an eclectic text of the Hebrew Bible such as is the forthcoming Oxford Hebrew Bible. See my
response to Ronald Hendel’s call for creation of an eclectic text in Hendel and Sanders, “Most
Original Bible Text,” 40 – 49, 58.
16
See the lucid discussion of the opposing theories of P. A. de Lagarde and Paul Kahle in this
regard by Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 181 – 97.
17
See again Albright, “New Light”; Cross, “History of the Biblical Text”; Talmon, “Textual
Study of the Bible”; also more recently, Cross, From Epic to Canon.
18
Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila, and Tov, Greek Minor Prophets Scroll.
The history of Greek translations ran parallel to the history of early Hebrew
texts from Qumran, on the one hand, and the later more stable Hebrew biblical
texts, also from Qumran, dating from the late first century to early second cen-
tury CE. The Hever scroll provided evidence of a gradual movement toward a
˙
more stable, proto-masoretic text in the course of the first centuries BCE and
CE. Barthélemy identified three stages in the history of the transmission of the
text: the pre-masoretic, which was relatively fluid, extending to the late first cen-
tury; the proto-masoretic, which exhibited a stage of stabilization of the text,
dating from the late first century on; and the Masoretic Text, which we have in
the great, classical Tiberian codices, like Aleppensis and Leningradensis, dating
from the early ninth to the early tenth centuries CE. His understanding of the
history of transmission is now widely accepted.19
The MT should thus be seen as an advanced stage in the stabilization process
that had begun in the first centuries BCE and CE.20 The MT is itself a system of
preservation and interpretation of five interrelated elements: the consonants, the
vowels, accent markings, spacings, and marginal notes designed to keep scribes
from altering the text either intentionally or unintentionally. There is no other
literature in the world quite like it, designed so guardedly to guarantee accurate
transmission and interpretation.
What this means is that the Jewish understanding of the authority of Scrip-
ture gradually but firmly shifted from a kind of shamanistic or dynamic view of
inspiration (the message of Scripture), to verbal inspiration (the words), and then
literal inspiration (the letters). One can witness this shift in the progression from
Hillel’s seven middôt (hermeneutic rules) at the end of the first century BCE, in
the thirteen middôt of Nahum of Gamzu by the end of the first century CE, to
the thirty-two middôt in use by 200 CE. The middôt clearly apply to a stabilized
text, and render it relevant to new situations.
Stability and Adaptability
The major characteristic of Scripture as canon is its relevance to the ongoing life
of the community that passes it on from generation to generation; second to this
is the characteristic of stability.21 In the early history of transmission, tradents
of the text, that is, both scribes and translators, could focus on the need(s) of the
community to understand the messages of the text, even to the extent of modestly
altering or clarifying archaic or out-moded expressions so that their community
could understand what it might mean to them.22 This is not significantly different
19
See Talmon, “Aspects of the Textual Transmission”; Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample
Edition, 12 – 13; and Barthélemy’s own statement in “Text, Hebrew, History of.”
20
See Sanders, “Stability and Fluidity.”
21
See Sanders, Canon and Community, 21 – 45, and Sanders, “Canonical Criticism: An In-
troduction.”
22
See Bickerman’s penetrating observations in this regard in his Studies in Jewish and Chris-
tian History, 1:196.
from what went on in the earlier period of the formation of the text. Clearly, they
could not alter either the tradition or the text to the point that the community
being served did not recognize what the tradition was. The need for commu-
nity recognition of the tradition led to constraint in the handling of the text, and
helped keep it stable at all stages of formation and transmission. As the stabiliza-
tion process intensified, the basic Jewish hermeneutic of the biblical text changed
from divine inspiration of the messages in the text to verbal inspiration of the
text itself, precisely during the course of the first century of the common era. The
change also occurs in citations and echoes of the First Testament (largely Septu-
agint) in the Second; in early New Testament literature; such citations exhibit all
the traits of textual fluidity one sees in early Jewish literature generally, but later
New Testament citations appear to have been rectified or edited to reflect a more
stable Septuagint text (as in the long citations in Matthew and Luke).23
All biblical tradents had and have two responsibilities: to the past and to the
present, i. e., to the Vorlage being copied or translated, and to the community
being served thereby. But as Jews were forced more and more to live in the
strangely European, Greco-Roman world, the old laws and wisdom simply were
not enough to help them address the new problems and issues that arose in such
a very different cultural environment. The peshat or plain meaning of the old
texts was often inadequate to new situations, no matter how relevant one tried
to make them read or sound. This gave rise both to the dramatic shift in herme-
neutic of the biblical text, and to the concept of Oral Torah in Pharisaic / rabbinic
forms of Judaism. Oral Torah, resulting eventually in Mishnah and Talmud, was
also eventually believed to derive its authority from Moses’s encounter with God
on Mt. Sinai. The relation between Written Torah and Oral Torah was imbedded
in the shift from dynamic to verbal understandings of inspiration.24 Where Oral
Torah roots its wisdom in the Tanak it follows hermeneutic principles and rules
that in effect make the text of Scripture say what peshat or critical readings of it
cannot support. A new kind of “exegesis” of Scripture was needed. This was part
of the genius of rabbinic Judaism that Qumran Judaism resisted. The latter, like
the Sadducees, rejected the concept of Oral Torah and insisted that all new leg-
islation addressing new problems in the Greco-Roman world had to be derived
from traditional exegesis of the biblical text. But it was rabbinic Judaism that
survived as Judaism, not the others.
The hellenization process forced Jews to decide what to do with the increas-
ing irrelevance of much of the old Bronze and Iron Age wisdom and laws in the
Tanak. Acceptable modifications of the text, as in the early period of relative tex-
tual fluidity, no longer sufficed. The Judaisms of the first century of the common
era addressed the hellenization problem in various ways, ranging from attempts
such as that at Qumran to live apart in a closed community, designed to look and
act like the desert community that had gathered at the foot of Mt. Sinai, all the
way to highly hellenized or “modernized” communities, such as first-century
23
See Evans and Sanders, Luke and Scripture.
24
See Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.”
Christianity, which more and more simply dropped the old laws and customs
(as in Paul’s letters) and created new ones, reading the old texts in other ways,
allegorizing, spiritualizing, or eschatologizing them, so as to support new ideas.
The shift from the pre-masoretic period of textual fluidity to the proto-masoretic
period of a more stabilized text (accurately copied and passed on), together with
the shift in understanding the nature of the biblical text, heightened the need for
a stabilized or closed canon by the late first century of the common era.
Closures
Accompanying the hermeneutic shift from dynamic to verbal understandings of

inspiration was rabbinic Judaism’s belief that revelation or prophecy had ceased
at the time of Ezra–Nehemiah. Very clearly not all the Judaisms of the time held
the belief; on the contrary, both the Qumran and the Christian forms of Judaism
based their whole belief systems on God’s continuing involvement in history.
And Rabbi Akiba’s support of Bar Kochba as the Messiah to save Israel from
Roman oppression, in 132 – 135 CE, raises serious questions as to when rabbinic
Judaism itself embraced the belief in the cessation of divine involvement in his-
tory. Arguably, the belief took hold seriously only after the disastrous failure of
the Bar Kochba revolt. Given that the Ketuvim of the Jewish canon, excepting
only of the book of Daniel, have as a major common trait reflection on God’s
past involvements in Israel’s history, or on wisdom, but none on any further or
future divine intervention in history, the closing of the Jewish canon would make
most sense after the Bar Kochba debacle. Most of the Ketuvim reflect on God’s
involvement in Israel’s past history, but only Daniel anticipates God’s involve-
ment in future battles or historical struggles; but Daniel is precisely in the Ketu-
vim and not in the prophetic corpus in the Jewish canon, and can therefore be
read as dealing with God’s interventions in history in the Babylonian period,
and not, as in Christian hermeneutics, predicting future divine involvement in
the affairs of later nations. The disaster of the Bar Kochba revolt soon brought
about the departure of Israel from history, concomitant with the increasingly
widespread belief that God had already become more and more transcendent,
distant, and remote.25
Rabbinic Judaism would henceforth live in stasis, in closed communities, in
the Greco-Roman world.26 In those communities the calendar, even the clock,
revolved around the rituals of the temple that no longer stood, but still contin-
ued to exist in the hearts and worship of rabbinic Jews wherever they might live.
Apart and to themselves Jews could live lives of obedience, as they understood
obedience to Torah written and oral, in, but not of, Greco-Roman culture, there-
25
See the work of Lou Silberman in this regard, reviewed in Sanders, “Identity, Apocalyp-
tic, and Dialogue,” esp. 165 – 66.
26
See the work of Jacob Neusner in this regard in much of his corpus of writing, e. g., Juda-
ism in the Matrix of Christianity.
after in but not of the Christian world around them. As David Hartman of the
Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem rightly observed, the founding of the
State of Israel in the mid-twentieth century was possible only after the re-entry
of modern Jews into common-cultural history, beginning with the Jüdische Wis-
senschaft Movement in mid-nineteenth-century Germany.
The new understanding of the history of transmission of the text is important,
therefore, to understanding the canonical process. While the history of transmis-
sion of the text of the New Testament has its own contours, it is similar to that
of the First Testament in that the early period of New Testament textual trans-
mission was also one of relative fluidity, but by the fourth century CE, with the
emergence of Christianity as a state religion, it evolved into the desire for accu-
rate transmission of the text and verbal stability.27 Even so, the primary charac-
ter of canon was still its relevance to the communities it served. Once the text
could no longer be modified to show relevance, hermeneutic rules were devised
to break open the frozen text, as it were, and make it applicable again to the
needs of believing communities.28 When new stories could no longer be added
to the old, or new songs to the old hymns, the stabilized canon was subjected
to new ways of reading what was there so that it could continue to guide the
ever-changing communities.
Relevance
Relevance or adaptability has always been the primary trait of a canon, early and
late. When one speaks of canon, in fact, one has to ask which canon of which
community is meant, whether in antiquity or today. The Protestant canon is the
smallest and the Ethiopian Orthodox canon the largest. While canons differ, all
believing communities agree that their canon is relevant to their ongoing life. The
concept of canon cannot be limited to a final stage in the history of the formation
of a Bible, as it has been until recently. It must, on the contrary, be understood as
part of the history of transmission of the text. Even the issue of its closure must
be so understood. Clearly neither Qumran nor Christian Jews believed “the
canon” was closed since both added to it, and claimed canonical status for their
contributions.29 Peter Flint has shown that the Psalter was not yet closed for all
Judaism in the first century;30 and it is clear to many that for the Qumran com-
munity the Temple or Torah Scroll was as canonical as the Five Books of Moses.
Other works found at Qumran were also functionally canonical for the commu-
nity. Christians added the Gospels and Acts to whatever Jewish canon they had
27
See Sanders, “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.”
28
See Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; see also the discussion above of the rabbinic herme-
neutic middôt.
29
See Harrington, “Old Testament Apocrypha,” which discusses the early church’s uncer-
tainty as to whether to follow the Jewish canon or the more open Septuagint.
30
Flint, Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls; Sanders, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls; Talmon,
Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls.
at the time, and eventually created a second Testament to argue the claim that
Christ’s new Israel had superseded the old. In response to Marcion, they insisted
on keeping a double-Testament Bible. But the Christian Second Testament was
not added to an already closed Jewish canon. The Jewish Bible that Christians
worked with was in Greek translation, and, as Albert Sundberg asserted forty
years ago, the so-called Septuagint was not in itself formally closed.31 Jewish
use of the Septuagint ceased after the Jewish revolts against Rome, and the Sep-
tuagint survived only as the Christian First Testament. But, as Septuagint man-
uscripts show, it was not stabilized or closed until it became the Christian First
Testament, and then only gradually.
Just as there were many forms of Judaism in the Second Temple Period so,
as David Carr has demonstrated, there were numerous tracks in the canonical
process.32 The case of the Psalter illustrates the point. As Flint has shown, there
were perhaps three forms of the book of Psalms at Qumran, just as there were
two forms of the book of Jeremiah in Hebrew there. Focusing on the manuscript
evidence now available, instead of on “lists” in external literature, brings a mea-
sure of realism to the present discussion of canon, just as the old historian’s pur-
suit of “economy of explanation” has given way to the more realistic historian’s
quest for the “ambiguity of reality.” About the only unifying principle among the
varieties of Judaism before the Bar Kochba revolt, or indeed among the various
forms of Judaism through the ages, was and is Torah. Even Sabbath observance
and circumcision were not unifying factors for all forms of Judaism, especially in
the Hellenistic era. As my teacher, Samuel Sandmel, often said, “Judaism is Torah,
and Torah is Judaism; and until one understands that, one can never understand
Judaism.” By Torah, of course, he meant not only the Pentateuch but all tradi-
tion that has derived from it. But once one has grasped that fact, the varieties of
interpretation of Torah and tradition begin. And so it is with canon. Even after
a canon became completely stable for a community, interpretations and under-
standings of it continue the canonical process of adapting the old to the new.
In contrast to the Qur’an, which claims to be the record of divine revelation to
an individual, the most that can be claimed for Jewish and Christian Bibles is that
they are made up of records of various human responses to divine revelations
over a period of some twelve hundred years. The Bible is pluralistic in a num-
ber of ways, intrinsically containing its own contradictions and discrepancies. In
addition, the language of the Bible is inherently multivalent. That is, in order for
a literature to get onto a tenure track toward canon it had to have been couched
in multivalent language. All good poetry is multivalent, but so is good prose. It
must be able to speak to many different communities in many different circum-
stances to get into a canon, and to function in it. The raison d’être of new trans-
lations is largely to make the Bible understandable and relevant to ever-changing
situations. A canon’s adaptability is its primary characteristic, stability its second.
31
See the pivotal study of Sundberg, from his dissertation at Harvard, OT of the Early
Church. Also, Hengel, Septuagint as Christian Scripture.
32
Carr, “Canonization in the Context of Community.”
Diversity
Because the Bible, Jewish and / or Christian, grew over such a long period in
antiquity, it includes a number of sources, and different points of view of the
same events. The Bible harbors a number of doublets, even triplets, conveying
the same story or account from different periods composed for different pur-
poses. The most obvious are the history that ranges from Genesis to Kings retold
in a totally different way in Chronicles; and the four Gospels. In a remarkable,
recent book, Donald Harmon Akenson, an expert in Irish history and literature,
looks upon the compiler of the history that runs from Genesis through Kings as
the world’s first true historian, a genius who pulled the sources of preexilic Isra-
elite history into a coherent story, without trying to harmonize them.33 This his-
tory, which scholars call the Deuteronomistic history (DtrH), Akenson sees as
having given the surviving Judahites in exile a way to understand the disaster that
occurred to them and hence sufficient reason to form a remnant to continue that
history, in a transformed manner. This editor-inventor thus provided, according
to Akenson, a model for later biblical historians to do the same in their time,
including the Gospel writers, especially of Luke – Acts. Their respect for their
sources was such that they did not attempt to harmonize them, but used them in
order to address the particular problems of their time.
Akenson, an expert in an entirely different field, is well read in biblical schol-
arship but does a remarkable job not getting bogged down in it. He provides an
excitingly fresh way of looking at the history of the formation of the various
parts of the Bible, Jewish and Christian, and the Talmuds. The editor-inventors
took accounts already accepted and respected in their communities and, instead
of editing them into a harmonious whole, added their own perspective in order
to make the older stories and accounts pertinent to and relevant for the prob-
lems and issues of their own time. The new thus was rooted in the old. “New
ideas are given legitimacy by their being burnished with the patina of history: the
newer an idea or practice is, the more it is claimed to be old.”34 That statement
recurs many times in many ways throughout the book. If the editor-inventors
had harmonized the old accounts too thoroughly to make their points, those
accounts would no longer have been recognized by the communities as their
old, old stories, and would have lost the authority sought in using them. But as
vehicles for the new points being made, they were powerful instruments for the
change-in-continuity needed in the new situations addressed. The old was resig-
nified or reconceived to address the new, honored but not harmonized. Thus,
the contradictions and discrepancies inherently imbedded in biblical literature
testify in powerful ways to the canonical process itself and can serve as its own
self-corrective apparatus. Add to that observation the masoretic tradition (maso-
33
Akenson, Surpassing Wonder. While I would dispute several points, I commend Akenson
to anyone who would like to read an overview of the formation of the Bible, including the New
Testament, and the Talmuds, in beautiful, engaging English.
34
Ibid., 94.
rah) of jealously guarding the variants and discrepancies in the various doublets
and triplets in the First Testament, and one is drawn, indeed, to surpassing won-
der at the whole canonical process that has issued in different canons.
Canonical Process
Several chapters in the present symposium [The Canon Debate volume] in vari-
ous ways also illumine the canonical process. Joseph Blenkinsopp’s study on the
changing meanings of prophecy within the Bible, with Isaiah as a showcase for
the changes, illustrates the point.35 The meaning of prophecy underwent sev-
eral transformations, including critical readings of the prophetic literature itself,
the understanding of prophecy in Deuteronomy, Chronicles, Ben Sira, and then
in Josephus. The prophet, once understood as “the social conscience of society
and the preacher of social reform,” eventually becomes a miracle worker who
predicts the outcome of history. The older view was not eliminated when the
newer was added; on the contrary, the new was built on the old, and the diver-
gent understandings were thus sustained together in the same canonical context.
Consequently, Blenkinsopp rightly observes that a canon’s “normativity is not
at all a straightforward concept, and that there are tensions within what counts
as normative which cannot be disregarded or set aside, which theological hon-
esty requires us to take seriously. Acceptance of these tensions and antinomies
would, one suspects, lead to a richer and more complex appreciation for the
biblical canons by the faith communities within which they came into existence
and still function.” Shaye Cohen’s view that “the sages of Yavneh . . . created a
society based on the doctrine that conflicting disputants may each be advancing
the words of the living God” is a brilliant reflection on the canonical process
as it evolved in the Bible on into the Mishnah and the Talmud.36 But it is an
apt way also of reflecting on the process that issued in the highly diverse, even
contradictory, expressions in the four Gospels of what Christians have believed
God was doing in Christ. The difference is that Judaism’s stress on the corporate
nature of covenant within which individual worth and responsibility can be fully
expressed, even in contradictory ways, keeps it from appearing as splintered as
Christianity with its many denominations.37
35
Blenkinsopp, “Formation of the Hebrew Bible Canon.”
36
See Cohen, “Significance of Yavneh.”
37
See McDonald, “Identifying Scripture and Canon”; Wall, “Significance of a Canonical
Perspective”; Dunn, “Has the Canon a Continuing Function?” which also warn against seeking
a canon within the canon, but as Wall says, let “a full chorus of their voices” sing – an apt meta-
phor if “modern” dissonance is allowed as well as “classical” harmony.
Canonical Closures
The Bible is a dialogical literature that in turn gave rise to two dialogical religions
based on it. The issue of the date of closure of the various canons of the two reli-
gions, the Tanak and the Talmud, and the double-Testament Christian Bible, is
elusive and difficult to pinpoint, now that we are freed of the Yavneh / Jamnia or
conciliar mentality. Is it so important after all? Whatever a church council has
done to declare its canon closed served to recognize and ratify what had come
to be practiced in the majority of believing communities, as well as to curb the
intra-canonical dialogue. Any such effort within rabbinic Judaism would sim-
ply have become part of further debate. The closures enveloped enough inter-
nal dialogue for the process of repetition / recitation, which had started it all, to
continue unabated in the communities that find their embracing identity in their
canon. No closure can curb the dialogue that is inherent in a canon of Scripture,
which, over against the magisteria and regulae fidei that developed after closure
in all churches, mandates dialogue about its continuing relevance and authority.
A canon is basically a community’s paradigm for how to continue the dialogue in
ever-changing socio-political contexts. Leaders within a community, the scribes,
the translators, the teachers, the preachers, the midrashists, and the commenta-
tors, precisely those convinced of its continuing relevance, have been and are
tradents of the text, those who bring the text’s past into the present in the con-
temporary terms of their on-going community.38
Akenson concludes his engaging study thus, “One of the great vanities of
human beings is that they have ideas. Little ideas maybe, but when it comes to
big ideas, it is the ideas that have people.”39 Indeed.
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485 – 515. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002.
Ferguson, Everett. “Factors Leading to the Selection and Closure of the New Testament
Canon: A Survey of Some Recent Studies.” In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M.
McDonald and James A. Sanders, 295 – 320. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002.
Brill, 1997.
Graetz, Heinrich. “Der alttestamentliche Kanon und sein Abschluss.” In Kohelet oder der
Salomonische Prediger übersetzt und kritisch erläutert, 147 – 73. Leipzig: C. F. Winter,
1871.
Harrington, Daniel. “The Old Testament Apocrypha in the Early Church and Today.” In
The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, 196 – 210. Pea-
body, MA: Hendrickson, 2002.
Hendel, Ronald S., and James A. Sanders. “The Most Original Bible Text and How to Get
There.” BRev 16, no. 4 (August 2000) 27 – 49, 58.
Hengel, Martin. The Septuagint as Christian Scripture: Its Prehistory and the Problem of
Its Canon. Translated by Mark E. Biddle. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2002.
Hornig, Gottfried. Die Anfänge der historisch-kritischen Theologie: Johann Salomo
Semlers Schriftverständnis und seine Stellung zu Luther. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1961.
Leiman, Sid Z. The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture: The Talmudic and Mishnaic Evi-
Lewis, Jack P. “Jamnia Revisited.” In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M. McDonald and
James A. Sanders, 146 – 62. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002.
Lewis, Jack P. “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?” JBR 32 (1964) 125 – 32. Reprinted in The
Leiman, 254 – 61. New York: Ktav, 1974.
Hendrickson, 1995.
McDonald, Lee M. “Identifying Scripture and Canon in the Early Church: The Criteria
Question.” In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders,
416 – 39. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002.
Neusner, Jacob. Judaism in the Matrix of Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986.
Qimron, Elisha, and John Strugnell, eds. Qumran Cave 4.V: Miqsat Maʿaśe ha-Torah.
DJD 10. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. ˙
Ryle, Herbert E. The Canon of the Old Testament. New York, London: Macmillan, 1895.
Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G.
Ernest Wright, edited by Frank M. Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller,
Fortress, 1984.
Sanders, James A. “Canonical Criticism: An Introduction.” In Le canon de l’Ancien Testa-
ment: Sa formation et son histoire, edited by Jean-Daniel Kaestli and Otto Wermelinger,
341 – 62. Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1984.
Sanders, James A. “Identity, Apocalyptic, and Dialogue.” In The Echoes of Many Texts: Re-
flections on Jewish and Christian Traditions. Essays in Honor of Lou H. Silberman, edited
by William G. Dever and J. Edward Wright, 159–70. BJS 313. Atlanta: Scholars, 1997.
Sanders, James A. “Intertextuality and Canon.” In On the Way to Nineveh: Studies in
Honor of George M. Landes, edited by Stephen L. Cook and Sara C. Winter, 316 – 33.
Atlanta: Scholars, 1999.
Sanders, James A. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms, by Peter
W. Flint. DSD 6, no. 1 (1999) 84 – 89.
Sanders, James A. “Scripture as Canon in the Church.” In L’Interpretazione della Bibbia
nella Chiesa: Atti del Simposio promosso dalla Congregazione per la Dottrina della
Fede, 122 – 43. Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1999.
Sanders, James A. “The Stabilization of the Tanak.” In A History of Biblical Interpretation.
Vol. 1, The Ancient Period, edited by Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson, 225 – 52.
(1979) 5 – 29.]
Cascade, 2005.]
Schmidt, Daryl D. “The Greek New Testament as a Codex.” In The Canon Debate, ed-
ited by Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, 469 – 84. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson,
2002.
Steinmann, Andrew. The Oracles of God: The Old Testament Canon. St. Louis: Concor-
dia, 1999.
Talmon, Shemaryahu. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms, by
Peter W. Flint. JBL 118 (1999) 545 – 47.
Wall, Robert W. “The Significance of a Canonical Perspective of the Church’s Scripture.”
In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders, 416 – 39.
Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002.
Part 2: Qumran
21
Habakkuk in Qumran, Paul, and the Old Testament
The Qumran expositor of Habakkuk firmly believed that Habakkuk spoke to

Qumran’s day and time, to the situation and to the crisis that the Qumran sect
believed marked the beginning of the divine eschaton. He was a modernizer in
the ageless sense of the term. He sought the meaning of Scripture and the word
of God for his time. With the best will in the world, he wanted to know what
God was saying to his people through his ancient prophet.
What the Qumran commentator was doing was normal and, even in some
secondary sense within his own group of fellow believers, inspired. He brought
Habakkuk to his people in their time and in terms that they undoubtedly under-
stood clearly.
The type of exegesis found at Qumran is largely the same as is found in the
New Testament.1 They each employ a kind of historical typology. They find in
ancient Scripture a situation analogous to their own, a crisis described much as
they would describe their own, and they proceed to link the two, the old and the
immediate, in a pattern of ancient “type” and present “antitype.” Once such an
analogy is established, then a present situation can be illuminated by an older.
Typology, however, goes much further and tends thus to interpret not only pres-
ent facts but also the future. Nor does it stop there; it goes on to cloak the new
situation in an imaginary aura that finally responds more to the factors of the old
than to those of the new. The result is frequently a report of the new so couched
in terms of the old that an innocent eyewitness would not recognize the account
when finally recorded. For example, the Second Isaiah’s account of the new exo-
dus from Babylon would be unrecognizable to the poor straggling Jew who wan-
dered home in the reign of Cyrus or Darius.
Typology as a means of modernizing has the other, opposite, effect as well,
where the antitype dominates and enhances the type, or older event. For instance,
Matthew, who frequently employs typology as a means of stating the church’s
claim to Old Testament faith, quotes Hos 11:1, “Out of Egypt have I called my
son.” In so doing, the first Evangelist attributes to an Old Testament passage
a meaning it did not originally have. Hosea speaks of the event of the exodus
using the father-son figure to describe the relationship of God and Israel (cf.
Exod 4:22). Matthew uses the same father-son figure in describing the relation-
ship of God and Jesus and thereby enhances the Hosea passage with the aspect
of prediction or foreshadowing of Jesus’ trip with Mary and Joseph to and from

1
Cf. Allegro, Dead Sea Scrolls, 137; Davies, “Paul and the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
372 Part 2: Qumran
Egypt. Since the father-son figure dates from the earliest days of the church, the
Hosea passage was tailor-made to Matthew’s purpose.
Many other examples could be given of the uses of typology and of the other
principal exegetical method – promise and fulfillment – to show the interaction
that takes place between the Old and New Testament statements.2 Invariably,
each will give a little to and take a little from the other.
A crucial instance of this interaction is Paul’s use in Rom 1:17 and Gal 3:11 (cf.
Heb 10:38) of a phrase in Hab 2:4, “The righteous [person] will live by his faith.”
Paul, of course, says, “He who by faith is righteous will live.”
The Habakkuk passage is used by Paul to bolster his theological doctrine
of justification by faith, that is to say, his contention as thoroughly set forth
in Rom 3:21 – 26, Phil 3:9, and elsewhere that our righteousness comes of God
through faith in Christ, and not by our works. While the emphasis in Habak-
kuk is on acceptance of the divine judgment and commitment to the sovereignty
of God in adversity, the emphasis in Paul is on faith in the person of Christ.
For Paul, to say “righteous” was to say “God in Christ,” the cornerstone of the
Christian (particularly Pauline) faith. This is an example of a New Testament
use of Old Testament Scripture, though not strictly typological, where the New
Testament is at a distinct advantage. Paul develops his meaning and use of the
phrase to the point of total clarity; Habakkuk is at a great disadvantage, in that
his meaning of the phrase is almost totally without explanation in its context.
The Qumran understanding of the same phrase (Hab 2:4b) has its affinities
to that of Paul as well as its marked differences: “This means all doers of the
law in the house of Judah whom God will deliver from the house of judgment
because of their labor and their faith in the Teacher of Righteousness.”3 The
method of exegesis, however, is the same. The “righteous” for Paul’s counterpart
in Qumran means all who in the house of Judah practice the law. All such will
be spared the final judgment. Thus, in Qumran, as in the other expressions of
Judaism in this period, righteousness has to do with works. “Faith” or “faithful-
ness” means those who maintained through their labors and affliction their faith
in the Teacher of Righteousness. Here we see, as in Paul, that faith is centered in
a person. This certainly is not a person similar to Paul’s “God in Christ,” but it
is a person, the leader of a sect. Nor is it the same faith, the belief that involves
commitment and perseverance in the face of adversity and suffering.4
2
For recent discussions of the problem, see especially Eichrodt, “Ist die typologische Ex-
egese sachgemasse Exegese?”; Westermann, “Les rapports”; Lampe and Woollcombe, Essays
on Typology; von Rad, “Typologische Auslegung”; Patte, Early Jewish Hermeneutic, 159 – 67;
Drane, “Typology”; Goppelt, Typos; Osborne, “Type”; and Evans, “Typology.”
3
1QpHab 7:14 – 8:3. For critical commentary, see Brownlee, Midrash Pesher of Habakkuk,
125 – 29; Horgan, Pesharim: Qumran Interpretations, 10 – 55.
4
That ʿamalam here implies labor of pain and adversity was recognized as early as in Du-
pont-Sommer, Aperçus préliminaires, 56, and del Medico, Deux manuscrits hébreux, 114.
Habakkuk in Qumran, Paul, and the Old Testament 373
The Major Premise
What must not be lost sight of in our understandable excitement over how Qum-
ran and Paul used Habakkuk is the abiding necessity to let Habakkuk speak
for himself.5 To deny to Habakkuk his problems and his own solution to those
problems is to commit an error almost as great as that of Marcion and the early
Gnostics, whom the early church condemned as heretics. Marcion attempted
to deny the Old Testament as valid for Christian faith. Just as erroneous is the
attempt to force the Old Testament to be seen solely through the eyes of New
Testament faith. The church has wisely and constantly through the ages insisted
on the “whole Bible” as the valid rule or canon of faith.
If the Old Testament is to be read only as the New Testament reads it, we will
have to admit that we are cheating the New Testament itself of the very basis of
its arguments and claims, which, as Krister Stendahl has pointed out, rest solidly
and solely on Old Testament faith:
In the New Testament, the major concern is to make clear that all is “old,” in accordance
with the expectations of the prophets . . . Thus the issue between the Essenes and the early
Christians was not one of “originality,” but a searching question about who were the legit-
imate heirs to the prophetic promises and who could produce the most striking arguments
for fulfillment.6
In marked agreement, his colleague Frank Cross states that “the New Testament
faith was not a new faith, but the fulfillment of an old faith . . . The New Testa-
ment does not set aside or supplant the Old Testament. It affirms it and, from its
point of view, completes it.”7
If this position is an accurate one – and I am convinced that it is – then it
follows logically and convincingly that the faith that the Old Testament itself
propounded must never be permitted simply to be seen in the light of the New
Testament’s understanding of it. The Old Testament was the New Testament’s
major premise. If that be so, then the Old Testament case for faith must be seri-
ously examined on its own terms: To do anything less makes the New Testament
claim a sham and a farce!
The minor premise in the New Testament’s argument is its own claim to the
fulfillment, in Christ and his church, of the promise of the Old Testament (the
major premise). To put it otherwise, both the Old Testament statement of faith
referred to in the New, and the New Testament claim based on that statement,
must be taken equally seriously.
However, biblical faith is not finally proved or disproved on the basis of the
rational logic of a syllogism. To claim such a criterion would be to submit logic
as superior to faith, which is a position bearing its own contradiction in terms
and its own inherent fallacy. To stay on the plane of faith, suffice it to say that
5
Hays, Echoes of Scripture, 39 – 41, has recently and rightly underscored this very point.
6
Stendahl, “Scrolls and the New Testament,” 6.
7
Cross, Ancient Library of Qumran, 183 – 84.
374 Part 2: Qumran
the New Testament lays a claim based on Old Testament faith; therefore, to deny
the major premise of that claim would be to deny the faith of the New Testament
itself. Furthermore, to force an Old Testament statement into a position other
than its own, in order to bolster a New Testament argument, not only would be
a logical fallacy but would be evidence of a lack of faith. The Old Testament can
best serve the New Testament by standing on its own two feet.
To call the Old Testament a “torso,” as does Otto Procksch in his Theologie
des Alten Testaments, damages the New Testament argument.8 Procksch further
says that Christ cannot be understood without the Old Testament and that the
Old Testament cannot be understood without him. Simple statements such as
these can be greatly misleading. What we can say is: to understand Christ as
the New Testament would have us understand him, the Old Testament is the
sine qua non, the only stance from which one must perceive the New Testament
statements about him. Other stances, other bases, are also needed to appreci-
ate the full New Testament picture, such as the Hellenistic mystery cults (and
social / cultural setting) or, indeed, one’s own life situation. To lose sight of the
variety of New Testament perspectives does not become the Old Testament stu-
dent.
But Procksch’s other dictum concerns us more: the Old Testament cannot
be understood without Christ. Such a statement cheats the New Testament of
the forcefulness of its argument. If Procksch is right, then the New Testament is
wrong, and the minor premise becomes the major.
The New Testament seems to say something like this: the Old Testament itself
is the only single criterion to determine the validity of a claim to fulfill its prom-
ise; Christ meets the test of that criterion; therefore, Christ is the fulfillment of
that promise. Procksch and many other recent biblical theologians would turn
the syllogism around to read: Christ is the only single criterion to determine the
validity of a claim to be the divine promise; the Old Testament claims to contain
the divine promise; therefore, only Christ validates the Old Testament.
Christ is our criterion and, figuratively, our crisis as well. Christ is our judge
and our judgment. He, by Scripture and the Holy Spirit, is the canon of our
faith and our lives. And, in some sense, all that historically preceded must sub-
mit to his judgment. He is the Christian’s canon of what in the Old Testament is
relevant and valid to the life of faith. But the Old Testament stands in a special
relationship to Christ, which nothing else can claim. Before it, too, finally came
under his judgment, the Old Testament was the criterion by which to identify the
Christ, the only single criterion. The Old Testament was not only Jesus’ Scrip-
ture, hence his canon of faith, but, in the end, the major premise of the church
in its claim that Jesus was the Christ. All the while that we insist that nothing is
exempt from the judgment of Christ – even our faith-understanding of the Old
Testament – we must remember that the Old Testament was and, in some sense,
8
Procksch, Theologie des Alten Testaments, 8, cf. 1 – 19, 45 – 47. See G. E. Wright’s view of
any futile separation of the Testaments and his different use of the word “torso” in Wright,
“Faith of Israel,” 389.
is the criterion whereby Christ is Christ. Without the Old Testament, Christ is
innovator, not fulfillment.
Any attempt to do away with the Old Testament, as in the Marcionite sense,
is therefore to do away with the peculiar New Testament image of Christ. Fur-
thermore, any attempt to take away from the Old Testament its unique relation
to the New Testament as the New Testament itself accepts it – namely, as the
only single criterion of its claim – is to reduce the Old Testament to nothing
more than any other literature or phenomenon of history. While Christ is the
krisis of all things for the life of faith of the Christian, the Old Testament stands
in a peculiar relation to the New Testament and hence to Christ. Not only does
it submit, for the Christian, to the canon of Christ for what is valid in Christian
faith, it also has the unique and distinct role of forever standing in judgment over
our understanding of Christ. The New Testament image of Christ, by its own
admission and insistence, depends on the Old Testament; and the New Testa-
ment claims about him submit uniquely and only to the Old Testament judgment
of them.
To argue that the Old Testament no longer enjoys this distinction or has lost
its significance as canon for the New Testament is to declare the New Testament
argument outdated and, in some sense, therefore, to destroy the whole concept
of the canon of Scripture. When one denies to the Old Testament this dual rela-
tionship to the New Testament, one has denied to the first-century argument
of the New Testament any abiding significance. In so doing, one has denied the
relevance of Scripture altogether. The New Testament accepts no other criterion
than the Old Testament in its claims for Christ and his church. If we rid the Old
Testament of that role of criterion to the New Testament, we have pulled the
teeth out of the New Testament argument and claim. If we rid the New Testa-
ment of the power of its claim, we discard it altogether, or we find ourselves in
the position of the child unwilling to believe his balloon is burst, who keeps try-
ing to blow air into scraps of rubber.
Emending Procksch, I assert that for the Christian, the Old Testament can-
not be accepted as canon of faith without Christ. But we must with equal force
assert that, without the Old Testament, the New Testament image of Christ and
the New Testament claims made for him and his church are without foundation,
without context, without force, and without meaning. In other words, without
the Old Testament, Christ is not Christ at all in the New Testament sense. It is,
therefore, not just a question of understanding Christ, it is a question of having
him at all. The New Testament is the New Testament because of the Old Testa-
ment, in some sense both absolute and relative. Therefore, I assert: Christ cannot
be the New Testament Christ without the Old Testament, and the Old Testament
cannot be the Christian Old Testament without Christ. Out of such an assertion
the Old Testament looms forth as critical to the New Testament in an absolute
sense inapplicable to any other claim. The Old Testament is subject to New Tes-
tament judgment, as are all other phenomena of the Christian experience, but the
New Testament is subject to Old Testament judgment as is nothing else in the
Christian experience.
376 Part 2: Qumran
The question immediately arises as to whether New Testament revelation sur-

passes Old Testament revelation. For the Christian it does, since the Old Testa-
ment does submit to the Christ krisis or judgment. It is the faith of the Christian
that nothing is exempt in all history from the judgment of this one historical fig-
ure we call the Christ. For the Christian, the Old Testament is Christian because
of Christ, and it is to be understood as canon from the Christian perspective.
Christ judges the Old Testament in all its parts. But this does not mean that the
New Testament has superseded the Old Testament. Revelation is not progressive
in the sense of superseding all that historically precedes. That would render not
just history but the passage of time as superior to all revelation. No such idea
is to be seriously entertained by the thinking Christian. Revelation and history
stand in such a relationship to one another that, though history does affect reve-
lation in its form and content, revelation stands forever in judgment on history.
The greatest hurdle of the whole story that the Christian has to tell is the incar-
nation, where revelation itself entered nature and became history. Not only does
the Christian tell that story, he or she believes it. But commitment to it involves
the admission and recognition that revelation is dynamic, vital, and alive, and
that it is subject to the nature it entered and the history it became at the same
time that it stands in judgment on that very history. Faith is affected by history
all the while it stands in judgment on history.9
New Testament faith, therefore, surpasses, but does not supersede, Old Testa-
ment faith. The Old Testament, like nothing else in the Christian experience, has
a unique and special relationship to the New Testament; for without the major
premise of its own argument, there is no biblical foundation to the New Testa-
ment claim.
Faith and History
The very crux of the Christian faith, the very heart of the incredible story that
Christians have to tell the world, is at the point of the relationship of faith to
history. In a review in the New York Times of Edmund Wilson’s Scrolls from
the Dead Sea,10 Frank Cross put it succinctly by stating that it is the Christian’s
belief, not that God has from time to time suspended history, but that he has
given significance to it. That faith affects history is the Christian statement to the
world. If this is so, then it is plausible to think that the opposite holds: history
affects faith. For both statements there is ample evidence. If this be the case, then
there is as much spirit of faith as historicism in the liberal attitude that the bibli-
cal historian in his or her work should let the chips fall where they may. To put it
theologically, it would seem that there is more faith in the sovereignty of God as
9
See the still pertinent article by Hyatt, “Ministry of Scholarship,” esp. 215. Note Jeremi-
as’s discussion of the implications of the incarnation for historical research, “Present Position.”
10
Wilson, Scrolls from the Dead Sea.
Lord of history in evidence among the historians than among some existentialist
theologians who would discount historical research as important to faith.
If faith affects history and history affects faith, and if this faith and this his-
tory are truly dynamically related and not abstracted one from another, then,
though the faith expressed in one historical circumstance can be modernized or
made relevant to a later historical circumstance, that expression of faith must be
fully examined in its own Sitz im Leben, within the problems to which it first
responded. That is to say, specifically, that, while we must allow Paul his use of
Hab 2:4b and the Qumranian expositor his use of the same, we must also allow
Habakkuk his meaning in his situation.
However, to use Habakkuk’s meaning as the sole criterion of the validity of a
later application would simply be to ignore the problem of the relevance of the
canon. Neither Qumran nor the New Testament can be expected simply to echo
Old Testament faith. While both the Qumran and the New Testament exegetes
were committed to the then extant Old Testament’s functioning as canon, they
were certainly not limited to a simple rehashing of Scripture. The problem of the
relevance of the canon is at best complex, certainly exceeding the simple problem
of finding analogous historical situations in which to reiterate exactly the canon-
ical faith. As stated above, New Testament faith surpasses, but does not super-
sede, Old Testament faith – by its own commitment to it. The same was true of
the faith professed at Qumran. For at Qumran it is quite clear that, while there
was a commitment to the Old Testament as canon, there was certainly no hesi-
tancy in asserting the peculiar election of the sect and its particular role within
Israel in its own day. In a sense equal to what we have seen for the New Tes-
tament, the faith of the Qumran community was a faith surpassing that of the
Old Testament, though not superseding it. The difference, it would appear, was
the same for both, namely, the belief that each was heralding the eschaton. Both
Qumran and the early church firmly believed itself the chosen evangelist of the
good news of the inbreaking eschaton, of the divine intervention in history that
would mean the immediate sovereignty and reign of God and his will on earth.
The task of each was conceived as crucial to world history, not just to the ongo-
ing life of the sect. Their task was to proclaim the eschaton and to prepare for it. To
execute the task, each made use of its Scripture, the Old Testament as it was known
to them. Both groups felt not only free to modernize Habakkuk, but obliged to do
so. If, in so doing, Habakkuk’s historical situation was obscured, it was because of
the belief that the eschaton would consummate and affirm, not deny, prior history.
For, surely, not only Habakkuk’s history but all history was about to be fulfilled.
The relevance of Habakkuk was in what the prophet had to say to the most crucial
and important event of all history, the immediate and inbreaking eschaton. Qum-
ran and the early church believed that Habakkuk was addressing himself primarily
to that moment in history to which each community believed itself to bear wit-
ness. However, there is no evidence whatever to think that they denied a meaning
in Habakkuk to Habakkuk’s own situation. Their belief was that Habakkuk’s faith
was a canonical faith, and, if canonical, then its application was not limited to its
original expression; indeed, it had an especial application in the eschaton.
378 Part 2: Qumran
Contemporary Hermeneutics
The rapprochement of New Testament and Qumranian hermeneutics has been

an object of study since the Habakkuk Scroll was first published.11 It is beyond
doubt that the closest link between the Qumran scrolls and the New Testament
is their hermeneutics. This is so much the case that we now describe the prin-
cipal exegetical method of Qumran, of Matthew, and even Paul, as the midrash
pesher, taking the word pesher from the scrolls themselves. The use of the word
pesher was hardly noticeable before the discovery of the scrolls but, since Krister
Stendahl’s dissertation, is freely applied to the New Testament, where the herme-
neutics resemble that of Qumran Habakkuk.
Stendahl deals particularly with variant readings and the differing quotations
of the Old Testament, especially of Habakkuk, found in Qumran and the New
Testament.12 One observation that has emerged from such comparative stud-
ies is outstanding: there was no established authoritative text of the Old Tes-
tament before the masoretic collations beginning in the second century CE.13
Paul’s usual vade mecum was the Septuagint, while the Qumran commentator’s
was chiefly a pre-MT Hebrew text very close to the MT. Stendahl’s interest in
1QpHab centers on the variants between it and the MT. He says, “We must . . .
presume that [1QpHab] was conscious of various possibilities, tried them out
and allowed them to enrich its interpretation of the prophet’s message, which in
all its forms was fulfilled in and through the Teacher of Righteousness.”14 Such,
Stendahl feels, was also the case for Matthew. Earle Ellis applies the same reason-
ing to Pauline hermeneutics and states:
Taken as a whole, the Pauline citations reflect in substantial measure a pesher type mould-
ing of the [Old Testament] text which in some cases is determinative for the New Tes-
tament application of the passage. While this at times involves a choosing and rejecting
between texts and / or targums known to the apostle, more often the interpretive para-
phrase appears to be created ad hoc by Paul or by the early church before him.15
To illustrate this point further, consider the diversity of readings of Hab 2:4b,
some from texts that obviously preceded Paul’s time, some from later periods
that may reflect earlier readings, and some from the apostle himself:
1. MT: K‫ ְוצַדִ ּיק ֶבּאְ ֶמּונָתֹו י ְחיֶה‬K
2. Targum: K‫וצדיקיא על קוׁשטהון יתקיימון‬K
3. LXX: ὁ δὲ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεώς μου ζήσεται
4. Vulgate: iusus autem in fide sua vivet
5. 8HevXIIgr 17:30 καὶ δίκαιος ἐν πίστει αὐτοῦ ζήσεται
6. Paul (Rom 1:17): ὁ δὲ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεως ζήσεται
7. Paul (Gal 3:11): ὁ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεως ζήσεται
11
One of the earliest of such studies was Roberts, “Some Observations,” esp. 367 ff.
12
Stendahl, School of St Matthew, esp. 185 – 90.
13
See Albright, “New Light”; Cross, Ancient Library of Qumran, 124 – 45.
14
Stendahl, School of St Matthew, 190.
15
Ellis, “Note on Pauline Hermeneutics,” esp. 131 – 32.
8. Heb 10:38 (P46, K‫א‬K, A): ὁ δὲ δίκαιός μου ἐκ πίστεως ζήσεται

9. Heb 10:38 (D*, itd,e): ὁ δὲ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεώς μου ζήσεται
10. Heb 10:38 (P13, D2): ὁ δὲ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεως ζήσεται
The diversity is plainly evident. What is also of interest is to observe that Habak-
kuk’s theology influences targumic readings elsewhere. For example, Targ.
Zech 2:17 reads, at least according to one MS (Parma 555), “The righteous and
the meek shall live by their upright deeds.” It is likely that this targumic reading
has been directly influenced by Hab 2:4. What we have, then, are variant readings
and exegeses; and it is not always possible to distinguish them.
Hence, while we are faced with the freedom of Qumran and the early church
to choose and select among equally viable Old Testament readings in their period,
these variants do not limit the problem. They both felt free to adapt the prophet’s
message to their respective situations and, as I have shown above, on the grounds
of simple logic, to let the prophetic word be thereby enriched. In other words,
they were not constrained only to quote the prophet and modernize; they had
the freedom to modernize first and then to quote the adapted version.
This would be a dangerous, even frightening, observation without the sort of
wisdom to accompany it that T. W. Manson affords:
We are long accustomed to distinguish carefully between the text which – in more senses
than one – is sacred, and the commentary upon it and exposition of it. We tend to think of
the text as objective fact and interpretation as subjective opinion. It may be doubted whether
the early Jewish and Christian translators and expositors of Scripture made any such sharp
distinction. For them the meaning of the text was of primary importance and they seem
to have had greater confidence than we moderns in their ability to find it. Once found it
became a clear duty to express it; and accurate reproduction of the traditional wording of the
Divine oracles took second place to publication of what was held to be their essential mean-
ing and immediate application. Odd as it may seem to us, the freedom with which they han-
dled the Biblical text is a direct result of the supreme importance which they attached to it.16
The modern critical student is faced not only with the first-century hermeneutics
of modernization but with the freedom of the early exegetes to quote the Old
Testament in the light of modernization.
Contemporary Interpretations
We are now prepared to accept these two interpretations as legitimate exegeti-

cal attempts to modernize what is equally canonical for both in the Old Testa-
ment prophetic corpus. Their respective interpretations are amazingly similar.
As has been noted, they both expound upon faith in, or fidelity to, a person: for
Paul, Christ; for 1QpHab, the Teacher of Righteousness. However, whereas Paul
denies works or obedience as a means of salvation, Qumran insists on the neces-
sity of obedience to the law to escape the judgment.
16
Manson, “Argument from Prophecy,” 135, as quoted in Ellis, “Note on Pauline Herme-
neutics,” 132.
380 Part 2: Qumran
Erich Dinkler has more or less convincingly shown the conjunction of the
doctrines of predestination and individual responsibility in both Romans and the
Dead Sea Manual of Discipline.17 But the value of Dinkler’s discussion is more
distinct in his work on Paul than on Qumran. The documents from Qumran
give abundant evidence of the general election of Israel and the peculiar election
of the sect, as well as the necessity of responsibility and obedience. It is good to
realize, with Dinkler, Paul’s insistence on responsibility and obedience for the
person already under grace in Christ. The difference is not in the call to obe-
dience, it is in Qumran’s view that obedience to the law will put off the day of
judgment; or, rather, the distinction here, in view of the varieties of Judaism of
the period, is Paul’s.
However, one of the most exciting facets of recent study has been that of dis-
covering Paul’s doctrine of the righteousness of God in at least one of the psalms
of Qumran, the closing hymn of praise appended to the Manual of Discipline.
Sherman Johnson has said, “How startling it is that a narrow and harsh law ends
on such a note of hope and justification.”18 The following is a fresh translation of
a few selected lines from the Manual of Discipline:
And in his righteousness will my sin be blotted out . . .
For the truth of God, that is my stepping stone . . .
. . . A source of righteousness . . . God has given to whom he has chosen.
As for me, if I should slip, the loving faithfulness of God is my salvation forever,
And if I should stumble because of the sins of the flesh,19
My vindication will be forever established through the righteousness of God . . .
In his mercy he has drawn me near
And by his loving deeds my vindication approaches.
In the righteousness of his truth has he judged me
And in his abundant goodness he forever atones for all of my iniquities.
And by his righteousness he cleanses me from human filth and sin
In order that I may thank God for his righteousness and the Most High for his beauteous
majesty (1QS 11:3 – 7, 11, 12, 13 – 15).
Johnson goes on to say, “The new materials show, furthermore, that the issue of
justification and the means whereby God accepts the sinner, are not creations of
Paul’s brain, above all not ad hoc creations for occasional sermons to the Gala-
tians and Romans, but real issues about which people were concerned, at least
in sectarian circles.”20 It seems fairly certain that the theologians of Qumran and
Paul have many thoughts in common relating humanity’s sin and God’s righ-
teousness. Very cautiously Johnson says that it would be tempting to think of
our phrase in 1QpHab to Hab 2:4b as meaning “faith in the Teacher of Righ-
teousness.” Johnson rightly recoils from such a meaning and translates the phrase
“fidelity to the Teacher of Righteousness.”
17
Dinkler, “Historical and Eschatological Israel,” esp. 120 – 25.
18
Johnson, “Paul and the Manual of Discipline,” 165.
19
On the meaning of “flesh” here and elsewhere in the scrolls, see Kuhn, “New Light,” esp.
101 – 3; Davies, “Paul and the Dead Sea Scrolls”; cf. Hyatt, “View of Man.”
20
Johnson, “Paul and the Manual of Discipline,” 165.
Let us look again at the two pesher interpretations of the Habakkuk passage.
Obedience and responsibility are to the point for both. The great distinction lies
in Paul’s interest in responsibility after justification by faith, not as a necessity
for justification. Furthermore, Paul’s universalism and general struggle against
the Petrine church distinguishes him clearly from Qumran’s “all who fulfill the
law in the house of Judah.” But in the matter of justification itself, Qumran and
Paul have many affinities. In Paul, faith in Christ seems to make the difference.
Here, then, are two similar, yet distinct, applications of one Old Testament
verse in two approximately contemporary writers, each firmly believing the
eschaton to be at hand. Each views the Old Testament phrase from his eschato-
logical perspective. Neither could ever be convinced that he had done any injus-
tice to Habakkuk. Each believed that he had drawn from Habakkuk its true
meaning, each using what we have seen as a pesher-type interpretation.
Not only does the recovery of the ancient library of Qumran afford us a com-
parison of the beliefs and arguments of two contemporary eschatological denom-
inations in Judaism, but it also affords us a comparison of their use of what for
both was equally sacred and canonical – their Scripture, the Old Testament. In
all probability, a comparison of their beliefs will ultimately force us to a simple
statement of what the essential difference between them really is.
Krister Stendahl has issued the simple statement that, “It is Jesus that makes
the difference.”21 He is compelled to state that the fundamental distinction
between them is not one of kind but one of degree. They were both eschatolog-
ically oriented. They both lived in anticipation of the fullness of the eschaton.
Stendahl says:
The Teacher of Righteousness suffered persecution and injustice and the community held
a high doctrine about its Council as the ones chosen to atone for the people. But in the
light of the resurrection, the death of Jesus was transformed into an atoning suffering of
an ultimate and cosmic significance. Thus, it was the higher degree of anticipation, i. e., a
relative difference.
He later adds, “The relative difference in anticipation led to what appears to us

an absolute difference in ideas.”22 What he means by this relative difference being
really and finally absolute can only be, it seems to me, again, that the atoning
Christ makes the difference.
The real difference between Paul’s exegesis of Hab 2:4 and Qumran’s is Paul’s
application of the passage to Christ’s atoning death.23 This, then, is the distinc-
tion between Qumran’s “fidelity to the Teacher of Righteousness” and Paul’s
“righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ . . . whom God put forward
as an expiation . . .” (Rom 3:22, 25).
21
Stendahl, “Scrolls and the New Testament,” 17; cf. Jeremias, “Qumran Texts.”
22
Stendahl, “Scrolls and the New Testament,” 17.
23
See Cullmann, “Significance of the Qumran Texts,” esp. 225 – 26. However, see the results
of work on recent finds from Cave 4 by Allegro, “Further Light,” and the criticism of them by
Rowley, “4QpNahum,” and Rowley, “Teacher of Righteousness.”
382 Part 2: Qumran
Habakkuk Himself
Now let us look once more at Habakkuk himself. What was the faith of which
Habakkuk spoke? Was it only a faithfulness to divine will or law? Was it only a
fidelity to Yahwism? Rather, Habakkuk was speaking of faith in God – the star-
tling, shocking faith that God does not die; that Marduk, the principal god of the
Babylonians, had not defeated Yahweh, but that Yahweh had used the Babylo-
nians to judge and discipline his own people (Hab 1:12). Habakkuk meant more
than fidelity or obedience, he meant a radical faith in the sovereignty of God not
only over Judah, but over the Babylonians as well – indeed the whole world. This
was the kind of faith that Isaiah preached; and it seems to me that Habakkuk’s
famous phrase means precisely the same thing as an equally famous phrase of
Isaiah’s: “The person of faith need not haste” (Isa 28:16).24 Habakkuk’s faith was
in the universal sovereignty of God. The righteous person was distinguished by
his faith in God’s lordship over the current events of history. This was not just a
fidelity to Yahweh as against Marduk; it was a faith perception that God was in
full control of the situation, the judge of his own people by means of another. If
he judged them, he was not just their god, he was God.
Such an assertion was too commonplace for either Paul or our Qumranian
exegete. They both applied it to their time, to the inbreaking eschaton of which
they were both certain. For Paul, it meant faith in God’s work in Christ, in God’s
righteousness through Christ. For the Qumran exegete, it was quite as likely also
faith in God’s work in the Teacher of Righteousness. The difference, as noted
above, was the atoning death of Christ, the relative difference which has for
Christians today become absolute.
Habakkuk was modernized by both and rendered messianic, or at least eschato-
logical, by both. But the faith of Habakkuk, and of the Old Testament in general,
while surpassed by the work of God in Christ’s expiatory death, was not super-
seded, nor is it yet superseded. It is the foundation faith of all our faith. It is Isaiah’s
precious cornerstone of a sure foundation: God is lord; he lives and he reigns.25
Just as the first assertion of faith for the exiled Jews of the sixth century BCE was
that God had not died but yet lived, so it was the first assertion of the followers
of Jesus after the crucifixion: he lives; and, just as the fullness of the sovereignty of
God was revealed to the Second Isaiah a few years later (Isa 52:7), so the fullness of
the reign of the grace of God in Christ (Rom 5:21) was revealed to Paul.26
But Habakkuk did not have this Christ, nor did he consciously point to him.
He consciously pointed to and witnessed to his God, the living and reigning
God whose power was universal and whose judgment of his people was a righ-
teous judgment.27 To say that Habakkuk unconsciously witnessed to Christ is
24
Cf. Blank, Prophetic Faith in Isaiah, 37 – 39, where Blank, too, suggests, though with dif-
ferent emphasis, that Isa 28:16 informs the meaning of Hab 2:4b.
25
Cf. Sanders, “Thy God Reigneth.”
26
By simple analogy, not typology.
27
I agree with Hays, Echoes of Scripture, 39 – 41, that the basic issue to which Habakkuk
addressed himself was theodicy.
a burden for Paul and the modern theologian to bear. To say that Habakkuk
witnessed to the judging and redeeming God – hence, by definition, Christ – is
to deny the historical aspect of the incarnation. We cannot say with J. K. S. Reid,
“If God saves in the time of the Old Testament, Jesus Christ is there, by whom
He saves.”28 Trying to hold to the historical aspect of the incarnation and also
to Christ doing God’s work of salvation in a history prior to that incarnation is
more than a dynamic paradox; it violates the monotheizing process.
The Old Testament Today
The Old Testament does not need such desperate handling to belong to the
church. The Old Testament stands on its own two feet. Old Testament faith
bears witness to God within the history of a people, which history has become
the prehistory of the church and whose faith is the foundation of the Christian
faith. While there are parts of the Old Testament that are an embarrassment to
the church and would never have formed the phraseology of the major premise
of the Christian argument and claim for Christ, there are equally embarrassing
parts of the New Testament that do not speak to our modern day. Such portions
of either Testament are good only for allegorization, and if we must resort to
allegory to save them, we might as well canonize all the world’s literature and
allegorize Rabelais’s Gargantua, as well as the Song of Songs.
Paul picked and chose. He chose as his text for his most thorough treatment
of the Christian soteriology and Christology Hab 2:4b, a passage well suited to
his purpose. He did not give a historical exegesis of the passage; he proclaimed its
relevance to the work of the same God in Christ. The claim that the Old Testa-
ment bore witness to the righteousness of God formed the basis of his argument.
To this extent, it seems to me, as it seemed to Professor Ropes of Harvard back in
1903, that Paul’s idea of the righteousness of God arose from the Old Testament
itself, where Paul had his firmest roots.29 To say that Paul gives us a pesher quo-
tation of the verse and an application relevant to the work of God in Christ is to
say that he has at least done more than rehash his Old Testament text; he has seen
its dynamic relevance to what he firmly believed was a historical event surpass-
ing the event to which Habakkuk himself spoke – namely, the eschaton of God’s
saving history. In other words, Paul said something more than Habakkuk said.
But because he added to Habakkuk, is Habakkuk therefore to be denied the
meaning his own statement had for him, and can also have for us? Never. Habak-
kuk and the Old Testament in general (though not equally in every part) must be
permitted to say what they say, to stand on their own two feet. Only then does the
New Testament stand a chance to state its claim and propound its argument. The
Old Testament is the Old Testament to the Christian because of Christ. But the
New Testament is the New Testament, and Christ is Christ, because the Old Tes-
28
Reid, Authority of Scripture, 257.
29
Ropes, “Righteousness.”
384 Part 2: Qumran
tament is its foundation and its major premise. To deny to the Old Testament its
faith in its time is to deny that God acted in that time, which is equally to deny the
basic New Testament argument of the eschaton of that divine activity and history.
Christ is the Christian’s criterion of what in the Old Testament is relevant.
But the Old Testament must forever remain the only single criterion of the New
Testament claim that Jesus is the Christ; for the Old Testament can and must be
understood apart from Christ, that it may fulfill its role as witness to the New
Testament argument. For the Christian the Old Testament must continue to play
this dual role. If not, then Christ becomes solely innovator, not fulfillment, and
hence no longer the New Testament Christ. If these conclusions are correct, then
it follows that the task of historical research, of close study, of the facts and
factors of the history to which God has given significance, must be pursued as
objectively as possible, letting the chips fall where they may. Only then is our
faith real and not a sham.
Stendahl with candid force has said:
The task of biblical studies must be confined to the presentation of the original. To be a
good historian in this field is not only to give date and theories of authorship. It includes
the empathic descriptive analysis of the ideas and the synthetic description of the patterns
of thought. The task of biblical studies, even of biblical theology, is to describe, to relive
and relate in the terms and presuppositions of the period of the texts what they meant to
their authors and their contemporaries.30
Millar Burrows makes the same point equally well:

Objectivity does not mean treating another person like a laboratory specimen, to be dis-
sected and described; it means respecting his dignity and freedom, allowing him to be him-
self and to say what he wants to say: without that kind of self-denying objectivity, genuine
exegesis is impossible. The exegete must treat Paul or Isaiah with respect and allow him
to be himself.31
Archaeology is the exegete’s most essential tool and certainly the most valuable.
To furnish the original, as Stendahl says, or to practice objectivity, as Burrows
insists, the biblical exegete and theologian are obligated to archaeology. How-
ever, contrary to popular opinion, archaeology is not going to prove (or dis-
prove) anything in matters of faith. To make archaeology or any other method
of historical research the criterion of faith is to assert commitment to history,
and that is precisely what faith frees us from.32 Nonetheless, archaeology can and
does help clarify that which is history or myth or legend, and clarify the details
of each. Even if archaeology should show the Bible to be mostly good history,
that would not prove the priority of the Christian faith as over against, say, the
30
Stendahl, “Implications of Form-Criticism,” 37 – 38. In the same issue of JBL, see the simi-
lar points made with different emphasis by Muilenburg, “Preface to Hermeneutics,” esp. 21 – 24,
and by Rylaarsdam, “Problem of Faith and History,” esp. 31 – 32. “Original” here means what
extant texts permit of recovery of early understandings of events.
31
Burrows, “Thy Kingdom Come,” 3.
32
Cf. Steele, “Archaeology and the Bible”; Wright, “Archaeology and Old Testament Stud-
ies.”
priority of the Qumranian faith, though it might make us feel better about how
things have turned out. If it should show the Bible to be mostly poor history,
that could not disprove Christian faith, though it might in our Western minds
increase the risk we normally run by being committed to our Christ and increase
the doubt that inevitably accompanies faith. Archaeology and historical research
have achieved both these things. In the one case we heave a sigh of relief, and in
the other we are forced to dig deeper into what faith really means. The latter has
often been the healthier eventuality, and we should never cease to welcome the
challenging study or the daring work of the historian. Only when we are willing
to run the risks of doubt is our faith relevant, dynamic, and alive. Anything less
is not worthy of Paul’s faith or Habakkuk’s faith, or, for that matter, the faith of
the ancient theologians of Qumran.
Bibliography
Albright, William F. “New Light on Early Recensions of the Hebrew Bible.” BASOR 140
(1955) 27 – 33. [Reprinted in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by
Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 140 – 46. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1975.]
Allegro, John M. The Dead Sea Scrolls. Baltimore: Penguin, 1956.
Allegro, John M. “Further Light on the History of the Qumran Sect.” JBL 75 (1956)
89 – 95, 174 – 87.
Blank, Sheldon H. Prophetic Faith in Isaiah. New York: Harper, 1958.
Brownlee, William H. The Midrash Pesher of Habakkuk. SBLMS 24. Missoula, MT:
Scholars, 1975.
Burrows, Millar. “Thy Kingdom Come.” JBL 74 (1955) 1 – 8.
Cross, Frank M. The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Biblical Studies. Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, 1958.
Cullmann, Oscar. “The Significance of the Qumran Texts for Research into the Beginnings
of Christianity.” JBL 74 (1955) 213 – 26.
Davies, W. D. “Paul and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Flesh and Spirit.” In The Scrolls and the
New Testament, edited by Kister Stendahl, 157 – 82. New York: Harper, 1957.
del Medico, Henri E. Deux manuscrits hébreux de la Mer Mort: Essai de traduction du
“Manuel de discipline” et du “Commentaire d’Habakkuk” avec notes et commentaires.
Paris: Geuthner, 1951.
Dinkler, Erich. “The Historical and the Eschatological Israel in Romans Chapters 9 – 11.”
JR 36 (1956) 109 – 27.
Drane, John W. “Typology.” EvQ 50 (1978) 195 – 210.
Dupont-Sommer, André. Aperçus préliminaires sur les manuscrits de la Mer Mort. L’Ori-
ent Ancien Illustré 4. Paris: Maisonneuve, 1950.
Eichrodt, Walther. “Ist die typologische Exegese sachgemasse Exegese?” TLZ 81 (1956)
641 – 54. ET: “Is Typological Exegesis an Appropriate Method?” In Essays on Old Tes-
tament Interpretation, edited by Claus Westermann, 224 – 45. London: SCM, 1963.
Ellis, E. Earle. “A Note on Pauline Hermeneutics.” NTS 2 (1955 – 56) 127 – 33.
Evans, Craig A. “Typology.” In Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels. Forthcoming. [Edited
by Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight, and I. Howard Marshall, 862 – 66. Downers Grove,
IL: Intervarsity, 1992.]
Goppelt, Leonhard. Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the
New. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982.
386 Part 2: Qumran
Horgan, Maurya P. Pesharim: Qumran Interpretations of Biblical Books. CBQMS 8.
Washington: Catholic Biblical Association, 1979.
Hyatt, J. Philip. “The Ministry of Scholarship.” Crozer Quarterly Review 28 (1951)
212 – 16.
Hyatt, J. Philip. “The View of Man in the Qumran ‘Hodayot.’” NTS 2 (1955 – 56) 276 – 84.
Jeremias, Joachim. “The Present Position in the Controversy concerning the Problem of
the Historical Jesus.” ExpTim 69 (1958) 333 – 39.
Jeremias, Joachim. “The Qumran Texts and the New Testament.” ExpTim 70 (1958) 68 – 69.
Johnson, Sherman E. “Paul and the Manual of Discipline.” HTR 48 (1955) 157 – 66.
Kuhn, Karl G. “New Light on Temptation, Sin, and Flesh in the New Testament.” In The
Scrolls and the New Testament, edited by Krister Stendahl, 94 – 113. New York: Harper,
1957.
Lampe, Geoffrey W. H., and Kenneth J. Woollcombe. Essays on Typology. SBT 22. Lon-
don: SCM, 1957.
Manson, T. W. “The Argument from Prophecy.” JTS 46 (1945) 129 – 36.
Muilenburg, James. “Preface to Hermeneutics.” JBL 77 (1958) 18 – 26.
Osborne, Grant R. “Type.” In ISBE 4:930 – 32.
Patte, Daniel. Early Jewish Hermeneutic in Palestine. SBLDS 22. Missoula, MT: Scholars,
1975.
Procksch, Otto. Theologie des Alten Testaments. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1950.
Reid, John K. S. The Authority of Scripture. London: Methuen, 1957.
Roberts, B. J. “Some Observations on the Damascus Document and the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
BJRL 34 (1951 – 52) 366 – 87.
Ropes, James H. “‘Righteousness’ and ‘The Righteousness of God’ in the Old Testament
and in St. Paul.” JBL 22 (1903) 211 – 27.
Rowley, Harold H. “4QpNahum and the Teacher of Righteousness.” JBL 75 (1956)
188 – 93.
Rowley, Harold H. “The Teacher of Righteousness and the Dead Sea Scrolls.” BJRL 40
(1957) 114 – 46.
Rylaarsdam, John C. “The Problem of Faith and History in Biblical Interpretation.”
JBL 77 (1958) 26 – 32.
Sanders, James A. “Thy God Reigneth.” Motive (February 1956) 28 – 31.
Steele, F. R. “Archaeology and the Bible.” Christianity Today 2, no. 4 (25 November 1957)
15 – 17.
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Interpretation.” JBL 77 (1958) 33 – 38.
Stendahl, Krister. The School of St Matthew and Its Use of the Old Testament. Lund:
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York: Harper, 1957.
von Rad, Gerhard. “Typologische Auslegung des Alten Testaments.” EvT 12 (1952) 17 – 33.
Westermann, Claus. “Les rapports du Nouveau Testament et de l’Ancien Testament.” In
Le problème biblique dans le Protestantisme, edited by Jean Boisset, 105 – 30. Paris:
Presses universitaires de France, 1955.
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22
The Old Testament in 11Q Melchizedek
It is a great pleasure to dedicate the following translation of 11QMelch to my

friend and colleague, Theodor Gaster, whose index to biblical quotations and
parallels in his The Dead Sea Scriptures in English Translation has been a boon to
many students and scholars.1
Gaster included in his list not only explicitly and clearly cited Old Testament
passages in the Qumran documents, but also, from his intimate acquaintance
with the whole corpus of MT and LXX, the allusions to, and extrapolations
from, Old Testament passages of the sort I call warp woven with the sectarian
woof to produce the very weftage of Qumran literature. It was in just such a
manner that Jewish denominations of the period rang the changes, when needed,
on the authority behind their several claims to be the true Israel. That authority
was invariably and singularly the Old Testament, and textual weaving was one
of the ways they had of contemporizing, as well as appealing to, that authority.
Since J. T. Milik has recently submitted articles to both the Journal of Jewish
Studies and the Revue Biblique as editiones principes of manuscripts on Melchize-
dek, in both Aramaic and Hebrew, it may seem out of season to probe further
at this point on the Cave 11 Melchizedek.2 And yet there are a few observations
that ought to be made independently, perhaps, of the Cave 4 material.
The bibliography on 11QMelch is not extensive considering the amount pub-
lished in the early days of the Qumran discoveries; but quantity of comment, in
this case, is no indication of importance of the manuscript.3 It is clearly one of
the most important Qumran documents yet to appear on the subjects of ange-
lology and Qumranian eschatology;4 it is important, too, for its implications for
New Testament study.

1
Gaster, Dead Sea Scriptures in English, 412 – 20; cf. Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 148n5,
for an earlier, similar tribute.
2
van der Woude, “Melchisedek als himmlische Erlösergestalt,” plates 1 and 2. Milik, “4Q
Visions” and Milik, “Milkî-sedeq et Milkî-rešaʿ (I).”
3 ˙
Yadin, “Note on Melchizedek and Qumran”; Dupont-Sommer, “Hébreu et Araméen,”
348 – 50; de Jonge and van der Woude, “11Q Melchizedek and the NT”; Fitzmyer, “Further
Light on Melchizedek”; Miller, “Function of Isa 61:1 – 2”; Carmignac, “Le document de Qum-
ran”; Miner, “Suggested Reading.”
4
Despite the otherwise probing study of Carmignac, “Le document de Qumran.” Carmi-
gnac is right to raise the question of what is meant by eschatology at Qumran, but his efforts
to read the 11QMelch references to Melchizedek in other than divine terms will soon be seen,
when Milik’s 4Q materials are published, as misguided. In those, Melchizedek is clearly a heav-
enly redemption figure and Milkiresha, his antagonist.
388 Part 2: Qumran
11QMelch is also interesting in terms of the midrashic techniques it employs

in weaving the Old Testament into its own fabric. Two of my students have
already published on this aspect of the manuscript. Merrill Miller found
Stichwörter from Isa 61:1 – 2 throughout the document (lines 4, 9, 13, 18, 20),
whereas others had seen the passage reflected only in line 4.5 11QMelch is now
a prime example of the midrashic technique of weaving found also in the New
Testament,6 simply because it is clear, since Miller’s work, that each Scripture
passage explicitly or clearly cited and interpreted, develops a theme based on
Isa 61:1 – 2a, the eschatological jubilee year acceptable to Yahweh. Daniel Miner,
also in a seminar paper, has attempted to show that line 17 of 11QMelch con-
stitutes a typically modified citation of Isa 56:7 in support of (as asmakta to)
Isa 52:7 in the preceding lines 15 and 16.7
In addition, it is now clear that Isa 8:11, which the author in excellent mid-
rashic fashion wove into line 25, must be viewed as an important Old Testament
text for the special self-understanding of the sect at Qumran. The phrase, “those
who turn aside from walking in the way of the people,” from Isa 8:11, appears
in 1QSa 1:2 – 3; CD 8:16; 19:29; 4QFlor 1:14, and now 11QMelch 25.8 In each
of the five passages it is a question of a formula not derived from the MT Isa-
iah tradition but from that known to us in the LXX (apeithousin tē poreia, cf.
Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotian, and Peshitta), and in 1QIsaa, where the reading
is ysyrny (from sûr) instead of the MT ysrny (yāsar). Clearly the sect at Qumran
understood themselves to be separatists, refusing to walk in the way of “the peo-
ple.” This self-understanding was central to their special vocation.9
The Old Testament passage cited or woven into the text is presented in italics
with the reference in the margin. The brackets indicate lacunae; and the extraor-
dinary capital letters signal dissociate or indeterminate readings on the leather.
5
Miller, “Function of Isa 61:1 – 2.”
6
A prime example in the New Testament, of course, is the Passion account, of which Ps 22,
Ps 118, and Isa 52 – 53 make up most of the warp. In a forthcoming study, I intend to show
how Ps 118 is woven into the fabric of Luke 19, the Entrance Narrative. [See now also Sanders,
“Hermeneutic Fabric.”]
7
Miner, “Suggested Reading.”
8
Caution is advised in consulting Allegro’s note to 4QFlor 1:14 in Qumrân Cave 4; most
of the references there are wrong. CD 1:13; 2:6; 8:4; 1QS 9:20 and 10:21 all include phrases such
as sôrerê derek, which derive from other biblical expressions in Isa 65:2; cf. Isa 30:1 and Jer 6:28.
9
11QPs 154 (11QPsa 18) should undoubtedly be seen as an early proto-Qumranian poem,
even Hasidic, which was viewed by the sect as expressing in hymnody their understanding of
their vocation; cf. Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 64 – 70, and Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 103 – 9.
The Old Testament in 11Q Melchizedek 389
11QMelch according to van der Woude10
1. ...
2. [and wh]at he said, In [this] year of ju[bilee each of you will return Lev 25:13
to his possession]
3. [and what he said] Let every creditor [re]lease that which he lent Deut 15:2
[to his neighbor; he shall not exact it of his neighbor or his brother
for he has proclaimed] God’s release.
4. [Its meaning for the en]d of days concerns those taken captive Isa 61:1
whom [he] imprisoned
5. . . . MH . . . YH . . . and from the heritage of Melchizedeq K[ ] . . .

their BW . . . [Melchize]deq who
6. will restore them to them, and he will proclaim liberty to them Isa 61:1
to set them?
free [and to atone] for their iniquities and . . . [ ] this word. Lev 25:10
7. In the year of the la[s]t jubilee he sai[d] S[ ] BLY [ ] and [tha]t is

the d[ay of Atone]ment [ ] the [t]enth [ju]bilee
8. to atone in it for all sons of [light and] men [of the l]ot of
Mel[chi]zedeq [ ] M upon [th]em HT[ ] LG[ ]WTMH for
9. that is the end-time, as the year of favor of Melchize[deq] L[ ] and Isa 61:2
the holy ones of God for a re[ig]n of judgment. As it is written
10. concerning him in the Songs of David, who said, Elohim has Ps 82:1
[ta]ken his stand in the as[sembly of El], in the midst of gods he Ps 7:8 – 9
gives judgment. And about him he sa[id, A]bove them
11. take your throne in the heights; let God judge the peoples. And Ps 82:2
he s[aid, How long] shall you judge unjustly and li[ft up] the face
of the wic[ke]d? [Se]lah.
12. Its interpretation concerns Belial and the spir[it]s of his lot
whi[ch ]M in the boo[k of] . . . WQYʿL . . . [ ]
13. And Melchizedeq shall exact the ven[ge]ance of the jud[g]ments Isa 61:1
of God [from the hand of Be]lial and from the hand of all [the
spirits of] his [lot].
10
van der Woude, “Melchisedek als himmlische Erlösergestalt,” plates 1 and 2.
390 Part 2: Qumran
14. And all the [heavenly] gods are for his help. [Th]is is wh[at he said,
. . . A]ll the sons of mi[gh]t ? and the P[ ]
15. this. This is the day of the [ . . . about wh]ich he said [for the end Isa 52:7
of days through Isai]ah the prophet who sai[d, How] beautiful
16. upon the mountains are the feet of the heral[d proclaiming peace;
the herald of god, proclaiming salva]tion, and saying to Zion,
Your God [is king]!
17. Its interpretation: the mountain, [of which he says,] I will bring Isa 56:7
them t[o my holy mountain, for my house will be called a house
of pr]ayer for all [peoples.]
18. And the herald i[s th]e [an]ointed of the spir[it] of whom Dan[iel] Isa 61:1
said [ the herald of]
19. good, proclaimin[g salvation.] This is what is wr[itt]en about him, Isa 52:7
what [he said
20. to conso [le ] L [will in]struct them about all the periods of wra[th Isa 61:2
21. [ ] truth for [ ]
22. [ ]
23. [ ] H she turned from Belial and she [ ]
24. [ ] through the judgment[s of] God, as it is written concerning Isa 52:7
him, [Saying to Zi]on, your elohim is king. Now Zion i[s ]
25. [ ] the establisher[s of] the covenant are those who turn away from Isa 8:11
walking [in the p]ath of the people. And as for your elohim, he [is]
26. [ ]L[ ] D Belial, and what he said, And you shall sound the horn Lev 25:9
[loud] in the [seventh] mo[nth ]
Addendum
Since the above was submitted to the editor, the articles referred to, by J. T. Milik,
have appeared. In them Milik has published several fragments from Qumran
Cave 4 that considerably amplify the available Qumran literature about angels.11
11
Milik, “4Q Visions”; Milik, “Milkî-sedeq et Milkî-rešaʿ (I).” For further bibliography,
˙
see Sanders’s revised list in “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1972”; the first edition, “Palestinian
Manuscripts 1947 – 1967” appeared in JBL in 1967.
In them Milik finds not only confirmation of the view that Melchizedek at Qum-
ran was a divine being,12 he claims to have found Melchizedek’s opposite num-
ber, Melchi‑ (or, as he prefers, Milki‑) reshaʿ.
In presenting his new material, Milik undertakes an intensive review of
11QMelch and provides a fresh transcription of the text from a photograph
provided him from the Palestine (Rockefeller) Archaeological Museum. Milik’s
reading of the main column of the document differs about 40 percent from previ-
ous readings. Normally one grants to the original editor the benefit of the doubt
in disputed readings, since it was he who had access to the manuscript itself. But
in this case, Milik, a member of the Cave 4 team of scholars, claims to have been
provided “an excellent photograph” from the museum for careful examination.
One must assume that Milik’s photograph is better than the plates provided by
the original editor, which are all the rest of us have to work with: one can only
hope that some day Milik’s “excellent photograph” will be made available to all.
Milik’s readings include a considerable amount of conjecture in filling in the
lacunae of the manuscript. They will engender debate in the scholarly com-
munity in due course, in a number of areas. They stem largely from his thesis
that 11QMelch, 4Q180, and 4Q181 are but three copies of one work, the title
of which was “Pesher on the Periods.”13 The interest here, however, is for the
moment a limited one: namely, the biblical passages that the author of 11QMelch
wove into his text.
Again, as above, biblical citations and allusions are in italics; lacunae are indi-
cated by square brackets; and translational and clarifying phrases are put in
parentheses.
11QMelch 3 II according to Milik14
1. ...
2. [and wh]at he said, In [this] year of Jubilee [each of you will return Lev 25:13
to his possession. That (has the same meaning as) what is written:
This is]
3. [the ma]nner of [the Release]. Let every creditor release that which Deut 15:2
he lent [to his neighbor; he shall not exact it of his neighbor or his
brother for] Release [has been proclaimed]
12
Contra Carmignac, “Le document de Qumran,” esp. 369 – 70.
13
Milik, “Milkî-sedeq et Milkî-rešaʿ (I),” cf. esp. 122, and note his reading bekôl qisšê
hāʿôlām in line 20 of˙ 11QMelch. I had already suggested the necessary relationship between ˙
4Q180 and 181, and 11QMelch, in Sanders, “Dissenting Deities,” 284 – 88; cf. especially my own
readings of 4Q180 and 181 in nn. 31 and 32; Milik was apparently unaware of this.
14
Milik, “Milkî-sedeq et Milkî-rešaʿ (I),” 96 – 126, plates 1 and 2.
˙
392 Part 2: Qumran
4. for Go[d. And (the Release) will be proclaimed in] the end of days Isa 61:1
concerning those taken captive, as [He said: to proclaim Liberty to
the captives. This is its interpretation: (God) is going] to declare
5. that they will become part of the sons of heaven and (that they will
participate) in the heritage of Milki-sedeq, f[or he is going to assign]
˙ edeq who
them a pa[rt in the portion of Mi]lki-s
˙
6. is going to make them enter into this [Lot] and proclaim Liberty Isa 61:1
for them while relieving them [of the burden] of all their iniquities. Lev 25:10
And this event [will take pl]ace
7. in the first week (of years) of the jubilee following the ni[ne] jubilees. Lev 25:9
And the d[ay of aton]ement is the e[nd of] the tenth [ju]bilee
8. when atonement will be effected for all the sons of [God and] for
men of the lot of Mil[ki‑]sedeq, [and] a decree (will be issued)
˙
concerning them [to provi]de re[com]pense for them. Indeed,
9. it is the Period of the Year of Favor for Milki-sedeq [and he], by his Isa 61:2
˙
force, will ju[dg]e the holy ones of God by effecting (the sentences)
of judgment. As it is written
10. concerning him in the Songs of David who said: God stands in the Ps 82:1
divine assembly, in the midst of gods he will give judgment.
And concerning him he said: Above the congregation of the peoples Ps 7:8 – 9
11. in the heights, repent! God will judge the peoples. As for what he Ps 82:2
said: How long will you judge unjustly and honor the face of the
wicked? Selah.
12. Its meaning concerns Belial and the spirits of his lot, who
[have re]mained rebels, because they have turned away from the
commandments of God [to act in an impious manner].
13. And Milki-sedeq is going to execute the vengeance of the judgments Isa 61:2
˙ men] and he will rescue [them from the hand] of
of God [among
Belial and from the hand of all the sp[irits of] his [lot]
14. and all the gods of [justice] (will come) to his aid to contemplate the Isa 61:3
de[struction] of Belial; for the heights [are the sup]port of the sons Ps 7:8
of God; and he (Milki-sedeq) will mar[vellously] execute this
˙
15. [pla]n. It is the day of [peace about] which [God] said [in the words
of Isa]iah, the prophet, who said: [How] beautiful
16. upon the mountains are the feet of the heral[d who] proclaims peace, Isa 52:7
who h[eralds good, who proclaims salvati]on, [who s]ays to Zion,
your God [has become king!]
17. This is its interpretation: the mountains [are] the prophet[s], Isa 52:7
wh[ose words are the feet, which] they prophe[sied] to all [those
who heed God].
18. And the herald is the anointed of the spiri[t], of [whom] Dan[iel] Isa 61:1
spoke: [Until (the event) of an Anointed One, of a Prince, seven Dan 9:25
weeks (will pass). And he who proclaims peace,] Isa 52:7
19. a good (man)who proclaim[s salvation], he it is who is in[scri]bed Isa 61:2 – 3

with the (Anointed One in the Book of Life), [about whom He said,
To comfort all who mourn, to grant to all who mourn in Zion.]
20. To comfo[rt] those [who mourn means]: to instruct them in all the Isa 61:2
periods of the w[orld . . .]
21. in truth to m[ake . . .]
22. (23.) [. . . she (the congregation?) will rema]in apart from Belial and
she [. . .]
23. (24.) . . . by the judgment[s] of God, as it is written about him: Isa 52:7
[He who says to Zi]on, your God has become king. Zion i[s]
24. (25.) [the congregation of all the sons of justice] of those who firmly Isa 8:11
establish the covenant, of those who turn aside from walking [in
the w]ay of the people. And your God that is
25. (26.) [Milki-sedeq who will sa]ve [them from] the hand of Belial. Lev 25:9
As for what ˙He said: You shall [sound the horn] (loud in the land)
in the [seventh] mo[nth]
– Col 3 line 1 – the tenth day of the month.
If Milik is right in his arrangement of the “croquis” of 13 fragments belonging

to 11QMelch, and in his conjectures otherwise, there are biblical allusions and
citations in lines 7, 14, 17, 18 and 19 undetected heretofore.15 In line 7 Milik sees
the phrase “the day of atonement” as a reference to Lev 25:9, where it occurs in
the context of the celebration of the fiftieth or jubilee year. This is but a further
precision, if correct, of the observation made by others that 11QMelch is to some
extent a pesher on Lev 25:8 – 13.16
15
I expressly reserve judgment on whether Milik is right or not for the reasons cited below.
16
Actually, the whole piece is an excellent example of what H. Stegemann calls “thema-
tischer Midrasch,” which one encounters also in Tannaitic sources – a beautiful midrashic
mix centering primarily on an idea (here the messianic divine figure Melchizedeq) rather than
primarily on a single Scripture passage. Cf. Stegemann, “Weitere Stücke von 4QpPsalm 37,”
213 – 17. Milik suggests that Lev 25:8 – 24 may have been the scriptural base of the three original
columns. Just as strong an argument, however, has been made that Isa 61:1 – 3 served that role: cf.
Miller, “Function of Isa 61:1 – 2,” and Sanders, “Dissenting Deities,” 286n29.
394 Part 2: Qumran
In line 14 Milik sees the phrase “the gods of justice” as an allusion to Isa 61:3
and the phrase “the heights” an allusion to the same expression in Ps 7:8 (lam-
mārôm). Isaiah 61:1 is already alluded to in lines 4 and 6, and 61:2 in lines 9 and
13 (though Milik fails to note those in lines 6 or 13).17 Line 14 is a focus of the
differences between what Milik sees on his “excellent photograph” and what van
der Woude saw on his and on the leather. Leaving aside some five letters or ink
markings that they simply read differently, Milik supplies in line 14 eleven letters
from line 3 of fragment 4. Milik claims to have been able to locate properly, in his
11QMelch 3 II (actually the only column of the manuscript really in question),
two of the four fragments of leather (out of a total of 13) that van der Woude had
apparently failed to locate.18 One can only be frustrated until Milik’s rearrange-
ment is properly controlled on the leather under glass. The whole process raises
questions. One must ask why there cannot be full collaboration and cooperation
among the editors of Caves 4 and 11. What Milik does here with 11QMelch he
does also, in this same article, with 4Q180 and 4Q181, published by J. M. Alle-
gro. But van der Woude is not Allegro. Everyone who does any serious work
on the DSS knows that much of Allegro’s Qumrân Cave 4 (DJD 5) is in need of
revision.19 And what Milik does with 4Q180 and 181 is clearly a marked advance
on what had been done before.20 But in the case of 11QMelch there are unan-
swered questions. Why did John Strugnell supply Milik the “excellent photo-
graph” and not van der Woude? Is it the same photograph van der Woude had?
Was it simply poorly reproduced by the Dutch? How much do we owe now
to Milik’s unbounding genius (which no one denies) and how much to van der
Woude’s scrupulous scholarship and perspicacity (which are widely recognized)?
Above all, why was there not collaboration between these two esteemed col-
leagues before publication of Milik’s findings?
What Milik sees in line 14 is actually very gratifying from the standpoint
of the limited interest of this study. Early in line 14 Milik reads ʾēlêy hassędęq,
drawn from Isa 61:3. Milik has absolutely no evidence for this reading˙ ˙but it
makes a great deal of sense and is quite appealing.21 Also, his suggestion to sup-
17
Cf. Miller’s article, cited above, which Milik overlooked.
18
Milik, “Milkî-sedeq et Milkî-rešaʿ (I),” 96 – 97. One sees all 13 (14?) fragments on Plate 1
˙
in van der Woude, “Melchisedek als himmlische Erlösergestalt.” Milik admits that his arrange-
ment will have to be verified at the museum. He accounts for the 13 fragments in this manner:
11QMelch 1 (frg. 11); 11QMelch 2 (frg. 5); and 11QMelch 3 I, II, III (frgs. 1 – 4, 6 – 10, 12 – 13).
The only portion really under discussion is Milik’s 11QMelch 3 II, which van der Woude had
signalled simply 11QMelch. All this will indeed have to be verified and should have been veri-
fied before publication. [All of the lines I cite are now assigned to col. ii.]
19
It is necessary to use Strugnell, “Notes en marge” as a sort of vade mecum. Even so, one
must actually do one’s own work very nearly from scratch. One of the felicitous aspects of
Moraldi’s translation of the scrolls, I Manoscritti di Qumran, is that he includes all the signifi-
cant material from Allegro, Qumrân Cave 4, but does so using Strugnell’s review.
20
Milik, “Milkî-sedeq et Milkî-rešaʿ (I),” 109 – 26; and plates 18 and 27 in Allegro, Qumrân
Cave 4. ˙
21
Again, see Miller’s thesis about the place of Isa 61 in 11QMelch in “Function of
Isa 61:1 – 2.”
ply from line 3 of fragment 4 a further reference to Ps 7:8 (ûmārôm; cf. line 11)
later in line 14 strikes one as precisely the midrashic style of our author.
For lines 17 to 19 there are no rearranged fragments to appeal to, though Milik
fills in all the lacunae, most of which van der Woude leaves blank; this amounts
to more than half of each line. In the three lines Milik sees two letters van der
Woude did not see and reads four differently; the rest is conjecture. Unfortu-
nately, Milik overlooked the work of D. F. Miner on line 17 just as he overlooked
that of M. Miller on the whole piece.22 Both reconstructions of line 17, Miner’s
and Milik’s, are attractive, each following the rules of Qumran midrashic method
in certain particulars. Neither scholar refers, however, to the ancient midrashic
conceit where “mountain” in Scripture may refer to the messianic king,23 which
would be more appropriate here than what either suggests. In any case, the Scrip-
ture references in Milik’s line 17 are still both to Isa 52:7, continuing the specific
pesher begun in line 16.
In line 18 Milik supplies what could be a very important link in the midrashic
argument of the ancient author. Lines 13 through 20 exhibit a beautiful para-
digm in the midrashic techniques known as gezera shava and asmakta. Through-
out this section the ancient author plays with a hermeneutic mixture between
Isa 61:1 – 3 and Isa 52:7, with, if Milik is correct, the word mārôm from Ps 7:8
woven into line 14. It was obviously the burden of line 18 to identify the her-
ald (cf. Isa 61 and 52) with the messiah, as shown by Yadin’s suggested reading,
“anointed of the spirit,” in line 18.24 Milik proposes filling in the lacunae of the
end of line 18 with five words drawn and modified from Dan 9:25. Their impor-
tance is that one of the words is “messiah,” and others refer to the jubilee year.
This is more than sufficient, midrashically, to forge the link between mebaśśēr
and māšiah needed at this juncture of the argument, since Isa 61:1 might have suf-
˙ regard. The midrashic link between Isa 52:7, Isa 61:1, and Dan 7:13
ficed in this
is known elsewhere.25
Finally, Milik’s supplying further phrases from Isa 61:2 – 3 in line 19 can only
be welcomed as what was needed at that juncture to make sense of the citation of
61:2 at the beginning of line 20.
22
Miner, “Suggested Reading.” There is a printer’s error in line 17 of Milik’s transcription: a
closing bracket should be supplied before the word lekôl.
23
E. g., the well-known midrash that begins and ends with the citation from Ps 121:1,
“I lift up my eyes to the mountains. Whence will come my help?” and includes a beautiful
midrashic mix of Zech 4:7, 9 and 10; Isa 52:13; Dan 2:34 – 35, 7:13; 1 Chron 3 and other passages
including Isa 61:1. But the whole pericope is about the messianic king as a topic and not about
any one of the Scripture passages basically. This is indicated by the fact that this one midrashic
pericope is found (with varia lectionis, naturally) in eleven different ancient sources attached
to different Scripture passages: Tanhuma (Buber, ed.), toldot 20; Tanhuma (Poremba, 1970),
toldot 14; Aggadat Bereshit (Buber, ed.), (Krakau, 1902), chapter 44; Yalkut Mekiri (Greenup,
London, 1909), at Zech 4:7; Yalkut Mekiri (Spira, Berlin, 1894), at Isa 11:4; Yalkut Shim’oni,
vol. 2 (Pardes, 1944), to Zech 4:7; Ps 121:1; and Isa 52:13; Yalkut Mekiri (Buber, ed.), at Ps 121:1;
and in the Pugionis Fidei in four loci, pp. 389, 413 – 14, 428, and 637. I am grateful to my student,
Merrill Miller, for ferreting out and verifying for me the above references.
24
Yadin, “Note on Melchizedek and Qumran.”
25
See note 23 above, about the midrash on Ps 121:1.
396 Part 2: Qumran
Taking Milik’s work at face value for the time being (later debates about it
should be rather stimulating) he has added two further Scripture passages to the
woven fabric of 11QMelch: Isa 61:3 and Dan 9:25, in lines 14, 18, and 19. About
Isa 61:3 there can be little doubt from any standpoint – the need of a citation
prior to line 20, the general context of the whole document, and, more impor-
tantly, the midrashic method of the author. About Dan 9:25 there will be some
question: only the uncertain reading of “Daniel” in line 18 indicates it surely.
Midrashically it is not needed de rigueur, for the author already had his mix
between Isa 61:1 and 52:7. In Milik’s favor is the tradition of linking these pas-
sages in Isaiah with material from Daniel, and the fact that a good midrashist
did not hesitate to secure his main point by a kind of triangulation process if he
could locate a third passage.
Milik, however, fails to note the following scriptural and midrashic points of
reference: line 6 presents an exemplary case of allusion to two Scripture passages
by one modified biblical phrase, qārāʾ lāhęm derôr. Midrashically it was this
phrase that linked, indissolubly for our author, the two passages, Lev 25:8 – 13
and Isa 61:1 – 3. It was this phrase that, found in both passages, permitted him
to continue his exploitation of other phrases in the two passages, precisely as
he continues to do throughout the rest of the document. That the phrase qārāʾ
derôr was close to the phrase qārāʾ šemittāh in Deut 15:2 did not hurt his case in
the least! ˙˙
Milik also fails to note the allusion to Isa 61:2 in the phrase “vengeance in the
judgments of God” in line 13. It would have strengthened his own argument at
that point.26
Finally, Milik, like those before him who have worked on 11QMelch, fails
to see the importance of Isa 8:11 in line 24 (old line 25), or, for that matter, its
place in the general history of the self-understanding of the Qumran sect. As
lines 23 – 24 (formerly 24 – 25) apparently say, “Zion is . . . those who turn aside
from walking in the way of the people.” Here would have been an early and
different sort of Zionism: Zion was a separatist movement that saw itself as the
true Israel, even in Diaspora. It was an Israel within Israel: those who truly kept
the covenant were those who had left Jerusalem and whose halakah was quite
distinct from that of those who lived there.
Bibliography
Allegro, John M. Qumrân Cave 4. DJD 5. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968.
Carmignac, Jean. “Le document de Qumrân sur Melchisédeq.” RevQ 7 (1970) 343 – 78.
de Jonge, Marinus, and Adam S. van der Woude. “11Q Melchizedek and the New Testa-
ment.” NTS 12 (1966) 301 – 26.
Dupont-Sommer, André. “Hébreu et Araméen.” ACF 66 (1966) 347 – 72.
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. “Further Light on Melchizedek from Qumran Cave 11.” JBL 86
(1967) 25 – 41.
26
Again, cf. Miller, “Function of Isa 61:1 – 2.”
Gaster, Theodor H. The Dead Sea Scriptures in English Translation. 2nd Anchor ed. New
York: Doubleday, 1964.
Milik, Józef T. “4Q Visions de ʿAram et une citation d’Origène.” RB 79 (1972) 77 – 97.
Milik, Józef T. “Milkî-sedeq et Milkî-rešaʿ dans les anciens écrits juifs et chrétiens (I).”
JJS 23 (1972) 95 – 144.˙
Miller, Merrill P. “The Function of Isa 61:1 – 2 in 11Q Melchizedek.” JBL 88 (1969) 467 – 69.
Miner, Daniel F. “A Suggested Reading for 11Q Melchizedek 17.” JSJ 2 (1971) 144 – 48.
Moraldi, Luigi. I Manoscritti di Qumran. Turin: Unione Tipografico – Editrice Torinese,
1971.
Sanders, James A. “A Hermeneutic Fabric: Psalm 118 in Luke’s Entrance Narrative.” In
Luke and Scripture: The Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke – Acts, edited by Craig A.
Evans and James A. Sanders, 140 – 53. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.
Sanders, James A. “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1967.” JBL 86 (1967) 431 – 40.
Sanders, James A. “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1972.” JJS 24 (1973) 74 – 83. [Reprinted
in Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shem-
aryahu Talmon, 401 – 13. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.]
endon, 1965.
Stegemann, Hartmut. “Weitere Stücke von 4Qp Psalm 37, von 4Q Patriarchal Blessings
und Hinweis auf eine unedierte Handschrift aus Höhle 4Q mit Exzerpten aus dem
Deuteronomium.” RevQ 6 (1967) 193 – 227.
Strugnell, John. “Notes en marge du volume V des ‘Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of
Jordan.’” RevQ 7 (1970) 163 – 276.
van der Woude, Adam S. “Melchisedek als himmlische Erlösergestalt in den neugefunden
eschatologischen Midraschim aus Qumran Höhle XI.” OtSt 14 (1965) 354 – 73.
Yadin, Yigael. “A Note on Melchizedek and Qumran.” IEJ 15 (1965) 152 – 54.
23
The Qumran Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) Reviewed
It has been a little more than a decade since the first publications based on the
large scroll of Psalms from Qumran Cave 11 first appeared. In that period over
eighty titles, including text editions, reviews, and specific studies on the texts
have appeared. I am pleased to take the occasion this volume affords to provide
in one locus the necessary bibliographical data stemming from the discussion
that the scroll has occasioned, and to offer some comment on certain aspects of
the discussion. I know from personal conversation that, though Qumraniana are
not strictly at the center of his scholarly interest, Eugene Nida has been keenly
interested in work being done on the scroll and in its significance for understand-
ing the biblical Psalter. I take great pleasure, joining with others, in paying hom-
age to Eugene Nida’s own scholarship as well as to his dedication to the quest
today for the most reliable text available of the Bible, especially of the Psalter.
Because this study is in large measure bibliographical, the order generally fol-
lowed will here be reversed – the bibliography will come first instead of last. It
will be arranged alphabetically by author; where needed, a brief indication of its
subject matter will accompany an entry. Such a procedure seems here to be pref-
erable to arranging the titles primarily by their subject matter as was done in the
Cornell edition on the scroll.1 In point of fact, the present list grows out of the
earlier one and includes all the pertinent titles from it. The list intends to include
all pertinent scholarly discussions, insofar as possible; the writer would be most
grateful to receive both corrigenda and addenda from readers. Since the list of
editiones principes of all Palestinian manuscripts2 includes the text editions of
all Psalms fragments, as well as 11QPsa, titles not strictly pertaining to the large
Psalms Scroll are not included here.
Bibliography
Ackroyd, Peter R. “Notes and Studies.” JTS 17 (1966) 396 – 99. (On col. 16.)
Ahlström, Gösta W. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sand-
ers. JR 47 (1967) 72 – 73.
Albright, William F. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sand-
ers. BASOR 182 (1966) 54 – 55.
Anderson, Albert A. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sand-
ers. JSS 12 (1967) 142 – 43.

1
2
Sanders, “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1972.”
The Qumran Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) Reviewed 399
Bardtke, Hans. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. TLZ 95
(1970) cols. 2 – 4.
Barthélemy, Dominique, and Otto Rickenbacher. Konkordanz zum hebräischen Sirah.
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973.
Brownlee, William H. “The 11Q Counterpart to Psalm 151,1 – 5.” RevQ 4 (1964) 379 – 87.
Bruce, F. F. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. PEQ 102 (1970)
71 – 72.
Bruce, F. F. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders.
PEQ 98 (1966) 118 – 19.
Carmignac, Jean. “La forme poétique du Psaume 151 de la grotte 11.” RevQ 4 (1964)
371 – 78.
Carmignac, Jean. “Précisions sur la forme poétique du Psaume 151.” RevQ 5 (1965)
249 – 52.
daean Desert.” HTR 57 (1964) 281 – 99. (On 11QPsa and Canon.) [Reprinted in Qum-
Dahood, Mitchell. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders.
Bib 47 (1966) 142 – 44.
Delcor, Mathias. “Le texte hébreu du cantique de Siracide LI,13 et ss, et les anciennes ver-
sions.” Textus 6 (1968) 27 – 47.
Delcor, Mathias. “L’hymne à Sion du rouleau des Psaumes de la grotte 11 de Qumran
(11QPsa).” RevQ 6 (1967) 71 – 88.
Delcor, Mathias. “Zum Psalter von Qumran.” BZ 10 (1966) 15 – 29. (On Pss 151, 154, and
155.)
di Lella, Alexander A. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders.
CBQ 29 (1967) 284 – 86.
di Lella, Alexander A. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A.
Sanders. CBQ 28 (1966) 92 – 95.
Driver, Godfrey R. “Psalm 118:27 – ʾasurê hag.” Textus 7 (1969) 130 – 31.
Dupont-Sommer, André. David et Orphée. ˙ Institut de France 20. Paris: Firmin-Didot,
1964. (On Ps 151.)
Dupont-Sommer, André. “Explication de textes hébreux et araméens récemment décou-
verts près de la Mer Morte: Commentaire du Psaume VII et du Psaume XLV.” ACF 69
(1969) 395 – 404 (review essay on Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll).
Dupont-Sommer, André. “Le Psaume cli dans 11QPsa et le problème de son origine es-
sénienne.” Semitica 14 (1964) 25 – 62.
Dupont-Sommer, André. “Le Psaume hébreu extra-canonique (11QPsa xxviii).” ACF 64
(1964) 317 – 20.
Dupont-Sommer, André. “Notes quomrâniennes.” Semitica 15 (1965) 74 – 77. (On col. 22,
the Apostrophe to Zion.)
Dupont-Sommer, André. “The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa) col. xxi – xxii.”
ACF 67 (1967) 364 – 68. (On the Sirach acrostic.)
Dupont-Sommer, André. “Recherches sur quelques aspects de la Gnose essénienne à la
lumière des manuscrits de la Mer Morte.” ACF 69 (1969) 383 – 95.
Dupont-Sommer, André. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A.
Sanders. ACF 66 (1966) 358 – 67.
Eissfeldt, Otto. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. OLZ 65,
no. 3 – 4 (1970) cols. 149 – 50.
Eissfeldt, Otto. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders.
OLZ 63, no. 3 – 4 (1968) cols. 148 – 49.
400 Part 2: Qumran
Flusser, David. “Qumran and Jewish ‘Apotropaic’ Prayers.” IEJ 16 (1966) 194 – 205. (On
col. 19, Plea for Deliverance.)
Fohrer, Georg. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. ZAW 79
(1967) 272 – 73.
Fohrer Georg. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders.
ZAW 78 (1966) 124.
Goldstein, Jonathan A. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A.
Sanders. JNES 26 (1967) 302 – 9.
Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “The Psalms Scroll (11QPsa): A Problem of Canon and
Text.” Textus 5 (1966) 22 – 33.
Gurewicz, S. B. “Hebrew Apocryphal Psalms from Qumran.” Australian Biblical Re-
view 15 (1967) 13 – 20.
Hoenig, Sidney B. “The Qumran Liturgic Psalms.” JQR 51 (1966) 327 – 32.
Hoenig, Sidney B. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. JQR 58
(1967) 162 – 63.
Hurvitz, Avi. “The Form of the Expression ‘Lord of the Universe’ and Its Appearance in
Psalm 151 from Qumran.” (In Hebrew) Tarbiz 34 (1965) 224 – 27.
Hurvitz, Avi. “The Language and Date of Psalm 151 from Qumran.” (In Hebrew) Eretz
Israel 8 (1967) 82 – 87.
Hurvitz, Avi. “Observations on the Language of the Third Apocryphal Psalm from Qum-
ran.” RevQ 5 (1965) 225 – 32. (On Ps 155.)
Hurvitz, Avi. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. IEJ 21 (1971)
182 – 84.
Jongeling, Bastiaan. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. JSS 27
(1972) 271 – 72.
Laperrousaz, Ernest-Marie. “Publication en Israel d’un fragment du ‘Rouleau des Psau-
mes’ provenant de la grotte 11Q de Qumrân, et autres publications récentes de frag-
ments de psaumes découverts dans les grottes 11Q et 4Q.” Revue de l’histoire des reli-
gions 171 (1967) 101 – 8.
Lehmann, Manfred R. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A.
Sanders. Tradition 8 (1966) 76 – 78.
L’Heureux, Conrad E. “The Biblical Sources of the ‘Apostrophe to Zion.’” CBQ 29 (1967)
60 – 74.
Lührmann, Dieter. “Ein Weisheitspsalm aus Qumran (11QPsa xviii).” ZAW 80 (1968)
87 – 98. (On Ps 154.)
MacKenzie, R. A. F. “Psalm 148bc: Conclusion or Title?” Bib 51 (1970) 221 – 24.
Meyer, Rudolf. “Bemerkungen zum vorkanonischen Text des Alten Testaments.” In
Wort und Welt: Festsgabe für Prof. D. Erich Hertzsch anlässlich der Vollendung seines
65. Lebensjahres, edited by Manfred Weise, 213 – 19. Berlin: Ev. Verlagsanstalt, 1968.
Meyer, Rudolf. “Die Septuaginta-Fassung von Psalm 151:1 – 5 als Ergebnis einer dogma-
tischen Korrektur.” In Das Ferne und Nahe Wort: Festschrift, Leonhard Rost zur Vol-
lendung seines 70. Lebensjahres, edited by Fritz Maass, 164 – 72. Berlin: Töpelmann,
1967.
Osswald, Eva. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders.
TLZ 91 (1966) cols. 729 – 34.
Ouellette, Jean. “Variantes qumrâniennes du Livre des Psaumes.” RevQ 7 (1969) 105 – 23.
Ovadiah, Asher. “The Synagogue at Gaza.” (In Hebrew) Qadmoniyot 1 (1968) 124 – 27.
(On the Orphic David in Ps 151. See page 135 of Jean Leclant, “Fouilles et travaux en
Égypte et au Soudan, 1964 – 1965.” Orientalia 35 [1966] 127 – 78.)
Philonenko, Marc. “David-Orphée sur une mosaïque de Gaza.” Review d’histoire et de
philosophie religieuses 41 (1967) 355 – 57. (On Ps 151.)
Polzin, Robert. “Notes on the Dating of the Non-Massoretic Psalms of 11QPsa.” HTR 60
(1967) 468 – 76.
Priest, John. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders.
JBL 85 (1966) 515 – 17.
Qimron, Elisha. “The Psalms Scroll of Qumran – A Linguistic Study.” (In Hebrew).
Leshonenu 35 (1970) 99 – 116.
Rabinowitz, Isaac. “The Alleged Orphism of 11QPss 28, 3 – 12.” ZAW 76 (1964) 193 – 200.
(On Ps 151.)
Rabinowitz, Isaac. “The Qumran Hebrew Original of Ben Sira’s Concluding Acrostic on
Wisdom.” HUCA 42 (1971) 173 – 84.
Roberts, B. J. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. JTS 20 (1969) 573.
Roberts, B. J. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sanders. Book
List of the British Society for Old Testament Study 60 (1966).
JTS 18 (1967) 183 – 85.
284 – 98. Reprinted in New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by David Noel
Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, 110 – 16. Garden City. Doubleday, 1969.
(Editio secunda.)
109 – 48.
Sanders, James A. “Pre-Masoretic Psalter Texts.” CBQ 27 (1965) 114 – 23.
Sanders, James A. “Ps. 151 in 11QPss.” ZAW 75 (1963) 73 – 86.
endon, 1965. (Editio princeps.)
Sanders, James A. “The Scroll of Psalms from Cave 11 (11QPss): A Preliminary Report.”
BASOR 165 (1962) 11 – 15.
Sanders, James A. “The Sirach 51 Acrostic.” In Hommages à André Dupont-Sommer, ed-
ited by Marc Philonenko and André Caquot, 429 – 38. Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et
d’Orient, 1971.
Cascade, 2005.]
Sanders, James A. “Two Non-Canonical Psalms in 11QPsa.” ZAW 76 (1964) 57 – 75. (On
Pss 154 and 155.)
Sanders, James A. “Variorum in the Psalms Scroll (11QPsa).” HTR 59 (1966) 83 – 94.
Segert, Stanislav. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A.
Sanders. Archiv Orientální 35 (1967) 129 – 33.
Shenkel, James D. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. Theologi-
cal Studies 28 (1967) 836 – 37.
Siegel, Jonathan P. “The Employment of Palaeo-Hebrew Characters for the Divine Names
at Qumran in the Light of Tannaitic Sources.” HUCA 42 (1971) 159 – 72.
Siegel, Jonathan P. “Final mem in medial position and medial mem in final position in
11QPsa: Some Observations.” RevQ 7 (1969) 125 – 30.
Skehan, Patrick W. “The Acrostic Poem in Sirach 51:13 – 30.” HTR 64 (1971) 387 – 400.
Skehan, Patrick W. “The Apocryphal Psalm 151.” CBQ 25 (1963) 407 – 9.
Skehan, Patrick W. “The Biblical Scrolls from Qumran and the Text of the Old Testa-
ment.” BA 23 (1965) 87 – 100.
402 Part 2: Qumran
Skehan, Patrick W. “A Broken Acrostic and Psalm 9.” CBQ 27 (1965) 1 – 5. (On Ps 155.)
Skehan, Patrick W. “A Liturgical Complex in 11QPsa.” CBQ 35 (1973) 195 – 205.
Strugnell, John. “More Psalms of ‘David.’” CBQ 27 (1965) 207 – 16. (On Pseudo-Philo 59.)
Strugnell, John. “Notes on the Text and Transmission of the Apocryphal Psalms 151, 154
(= Syr. II) and 155 (= Syr. III).” HTR 59 (1966) 257 – 81.
Talmon, Shemaryahu. “The Apocryphal Psalms in Hebrew from Qumran.” (In Hebrew).
Tarbiz (1966) 214 – 34. ET: “Pisqah Beʿemsaʾ Pasuq and 11QPsa.” Textus 5 (1966) 11 – 21.
Talmon, Shemaryahu. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa), by
James A. Sanders. Tarbiz 37 (1967) 99 – 104.
Tournay, Raymond J. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by James A. Sanders. RB 74
(1967) 605.
Tournay, Raymond J. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A.
Sanders. RB 73 (1966) 258 – 65.
Ufenheimer, B. “Psalms 152 and 153 from Qumran: Two More Apocryphal Psalms.” (In
Hebrew). Môlad 22 (1964) 191 – 92, 328 – 42.
van der Ploeg, J. P. M. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11 (11QPsa), by James A. Sand-
ers. Bibliotheca Orientalis 23 (1966) 133 – 42.
Weiss, Raphael. Ha-Boqer of 28 May, 5 – 6, 1963. (On Ps 151.)
Weiss, Raphael. Herut of 28 September 1962. (On Preliminary Report.)
Weiss, Raphael. Herut of 1 May 1964; Massa of 15 May and 7 August 1964. (On Pss 151
and 154.)
Weiss, Raphael. Massa of 29 January 1965. (On Ps 151.)
Yadin, Yigael. “Another Fragment (E) of the Psalms Scroll from Qumran Cave 11
(11QPsa).” Textus 5 (1966) 1 – 10. (Editio princeps.)
Yadin, Yigael. “Psalms from a Qumran Cave.” Môlad 22 (1964) 193 – 94, 463 – 65. (Critique
of Ufenheimer.)
Psalm 151
The first text from the Psalms Scroll published was that of Ps 151, from col-
umn 28.3 The text itself immediately attracted interest and the treatment some
considerable reaction. Within a year five studies had appeared, two agreeing in
substance with the writer’s treatment, two modifying it at crucial points, and one
disagreeing rather strongly.4 Soon thereafter, one of the scholars who had agreed
with the original treatment revised his reading of the psalm to meet Rabinowitz’s
objections.5 All these titles are grouped together, for the student’s convenience,
in the Cornell edition of the scroll.6 Insofar as major studies of the psalm are
concerned, the list there is complete except for an article by Professor Rudolf
Meyer.7
In the Cornell edition of the scroll the writer presented the several studies
of Ps 151 that had appeared at the time of writing.8 Those were still early days,
3
Sanders, “Ps. 151 in 11QPss.”
4
Rabinowitz, “Alleged Orphism.”
5
Carmignac, “Précisions sur la forme poétique.”
6
Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 152.
7
Meyer, “Die Septuaginta-Fassung.”
8
and I attempted to present each reading, side by side with mine, as objectively as
possible, leaving it to the student himself or herself to judge as to which reading
most fits texts and context. I did not press my own case over the others but was
content to suggest that, while not abandoning my reading, I recognized other
possibilities that had their own integrity. Indeed, I still see three basic ways pos-
sible to scan the text of the psalm, as indicated in the Cornell edition discussion.
But, far from conceding the other readings premier lieu, I now, after a decade
of discussion and review, wish to take this opportunity to respond to the major
objections advanced to my reading, as well as to reaffirm the latter as the most
valid rendering.
B. Jongeling in his review of the Cornell edition concentrates on Ps 151.9 The
effect of his criticism is that I did not pay sufficient attention to the earlier crit-
ics. What I have found, by contrast, is that reviewers have overlooked the fresh
arguments I advanced for my reading in the notes in the Cornell edition.10 The
most consistent critique in the reviews of the Cornell edition has been that it is
not truly a popular edition, as announced, but has much technical material in it. I
must concede that I used the editio secunda as a means of advancing the scholarly
discussions of particular texts in the scroll.
The student who comes fresh to the dispute must first realize that the text of
Ps 151 itself does not settle the crucial questions: no two scholars agree on all the
crucial readings involved, but rather tend to cancel each other out, point by point.
Hence, the student should also be aware that there is no single grouping of schol-
ars reading the text consistently over against the original rendering. What this
situation signifies, above all else, is that the poem found in the scroll (in contrast
to that received in the versions) lends itself to more than one mode of scansion.
The versions, however, beginning with the Greek, present a greatly condensed
recension of the poem; all scholars agree that the Hebrew psalm in the scroll is
the original. It still seems to me that no other reading or treatment of Ps 151A
sufficiently accounts for the reduced recension lying back of the versions.
My first response to the various critics, therefore, is that it would appear that
insufficient attention has been paid in the variant renderings to comparison with
the Greek text. It was for this reason that I provided, a second time, a synoptic
line by line juxtaposition of the Hebrew and Greek texts.11 Why does the recen-
sion omit the portions contained in the original, especially lines 5 and 6 of col-
umn 28 of the scroll? Clearly the omission was not due to mechanical or scribal
accidental means. Equally clearly some other reason must be advanced.
Tempting, of course, is the possibility of reading all the personal pronominal
suffixes in those two lines, beyond benafshi, consistently either waw or yod,
including the reading ʿalaw (defectivum)12 or ʿalay13 instead of ʿillû. But tempt-
9
Jongeling, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll.
10
Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 96 – 97, 100 – 102.
11
Ibid., 96.
12
As Strugnell, “Notes on the Text.”
13
As Rabinowitz, “Alleged Orphism.”
404 Part 2: Qumran
ing as consistency may be, it has little place in vocalization of ancient Hebrew
poetry. More important, in this instance, it rids the poem of the potentially offen-
sive statements, which would explain the recensional activity. A number of critics
have objected to the poem’s saying that hills and flocks cannot or do not witness
to God, because the Bible so often says they do. One is tempted to suggest that
some modern scholars have precisely expressed, in this regard, the thinking of
the ancient revisionist. Is there any evidence elsewhere, therefore, that would
suggest an offense in antiquity? Professor John Strugnell found the answer to
that question in an Arabic poem published in 1909 by O. C. Krarup:14
O David, if the mountains did not glorify me then would I surely pluck them out. And
if the trees did not glorify me then would I surely reduce their fruit. But there is nothing
which does not render me glory. . . . Act so then, ye people, for I see everything . . .
As Strugnell has remarked, “Our Arab had access to Psalm 151A and corrected
‘David’s’ unorthodox thoughts.” Strugnell’s own rendering concurs essentially
with ours in this respect.15
The Arabic poem agrees with Ps 151A that God sees everything, if one fol-
lows the rendering here reaffirmed. Some scholars, including Weiss16 and Rab-
inowitz17 and others who have followed them, read the words ʾadôn and ʾělôah
of line 7 of the scroll as construct to the word ha-kôl that follows each, render-
ing the phrases “Lord of the Universe” and “God of the Universe.” This is, of
course, quite possible, though to do so quite alters the scansion of the lines and
renders the syntax awkward. Here, however, we have not only the Arabic poem
to support our original reading but also the Sinaiticus manuscript of the Septua-
gint and a portion of the Old Latin tradition of Ps 151, in both of which ha-kôl
is translated as accusative of the verb “to hear” in LXX Ps 151:3. Actually, most
scholars agree with us here. The introduction of the idea of the Lord of the Uni-
verse into a poetic midrash on 1 Sam 16, which clearly stressed the biblical idea
of God’s seeing everything, even what was in David’s heart, or, in the poem, in
his nefesh, is both unnecessary and inappropriate. It is, in fact, because it is so
clear that this was the very purpose of the original poem that the recensionist
preserved it. Far from being offensive like lines 5 and 6, this aspect of the whole
poem, and God’s consequent action of choosing David over his brothers, made it
indeed worth keeping. The question whether the recension took place in Hebrew
before translation into Greek or took place in the process of translation is diffi-
cult to answer. At this point one can only conjecture that the reason we have had
it all along in recension and not in the original is that it was the latter that took
place, but there is no clear evidence either way. Orthodox thinkers in antiquity
apparently chose, because of the offensive nature of the poem, either to expur-
gate it or to revise it.18
14
Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 100n20.
15
Strugnell, “Notes on the Text.”
16
Weiss, Herut of 1 May 1964; Massa of 15 May and 7 August 1964.
17
18
Meyer, “Die Septuaginta-Fassung,” agrees on this point.
The most disputed reading in the original rendering is that of ʿillû in line 6 of
the scroll. Other renderings of ʿillû have been ʿālay, ʿālāw and ʿălê. They are all
quite possible, but seem to me (a) to render the scansion difficult and (b) for rea-
sons cited above, to abort the central reason for the recensional activity resulting
in the versions. This dispute lies at the crux, as I see it, of the offense of the poem.
Normal scansion would indicate that the word be read as a verb serving a double
function with the phrase that follows. The one verb available in the Hebrew of
the period, and in the Qumran literature (CD v. 5), is the piel form of the verb
ʿālāh. It occurs only rarely in the literature, as we stressed from the beginning,
but it fits the context perfectly: “The trees have cherished (or, appreciated, or,
held in esteem) my words and the flock my works.” This reading provides the
contrast indicated to the first offense, that nature, or the mountains and hills,
cannot or do not witness to or proclaim God; and it provides the second and
greater offense to later or non-Qumran orthodox sensibilities. But to the original
author I am confident that these two observations, offensive as they might be to
other eyes and ears, were quite in line with another point of view, which in its
own eyes was as “conservative” as any other.19 Mountains and hills, like nature
in general, cannot witness, as man can, to the mighty acts of God. Who actually
remembers and recites the epic history of God’s dealings with Israel – such as the
choice of leaders and kings (2 Sam 7)? Man can, Israel ought to, and David did
so – out on the mountains and hills among the trees and his flocks, by creating
a lyre and composing psalms about those wonderful deeds in his mind (line 5),
and singing them in such a manner that the plants and the animals listened in rapt
attention. He did what the mountains and hills could not do. He created, already
in his mind (or heart or soul), the Psalter, which later came to be written down
in so many copies including 11QPsa. But at that early moment, as much as later,
Israel, and especially the faithful at Qumran, came to appreciate every psalm he
wrote (4,050 according to the preceding column); only the trees and the grazing
flocks had the great privilege of hearing him compose his earliest psalms and sing
out in his shepherd’s loneliness.
This, it seemed to me, was the genius of the poem that later disturbed those
who no longer shared the vision of the lonely shepherd whose music in praise
of God’s mighty acts was so wondrous as to arrest the attention of mute nature
about him, and whose intention in composing it was so pure as to arrest the
attention of God who looks upon the heart. Surely what God saw in David’s soul
was not a complaint that nature did not bear witness to his, David’s, words and
deeds, and a plea that someone would recount his deeds.20 It is clearly more in
line with normal usage for the phrase “Said I within my soul” to introduce some-
thing that follows it rather than to complete a preceding thought. But that usage
also indicates the sense “I had wrongly thought,” and then follow the “wrong”
thoughts. But most of the scholars who have insisted that the phrase must intro-
duce what follows have also expunged in the text the offense of what follows.
19
20
Rabinowitz, “Alleged Orphism”; Carmignac, “Précisions sur la forme poétique.”
406 Part 2: Qumran
And if what he thought was wrong, was the thought in his mind the basis for the
divine selection (1 Sam 16)? All of this left me with the somewhat uncomfortable
but far preferable alternative of attaching the phrase “Said I within my soul” to
the clear expression of intent of composing psalms in the preceding phrase. The
one improvement I might make at this juncture would be to render that preced-
ing phrase, “And (so) may I render glory to the Lord,”21 instead of “And (so)
have I rendered glory to the Lord.”22
Such a poetic image of David as the shepherd-musician par excellence, based
precisely upon 1 Sam 16 – 17, cannot but call to mind Hellenistic traditions of
the period about Orpheus so well attested to David in later art forms.23 Is it
not a form of apologia thus to coopt (and deny) a facet of the mythical figure of
Orpheus in order to laud the historical figure of David?
The Sirach 51 Acrostic
It will not be possible here to deal with all the features of the scroll that have
aroused interest. There is a growing consensus following Hurvitz24 and Polzin25
that though the non-masoretic psalms in the scroll are somewhat archaizing in
form, that is, scan more like biblical psalms than like the Thanksgiving Hymns
from Qumran, the language would indicate a comparatively late dating for
most if not all of them, probably postexilic Persian to early Hellenistic times.
W. F. Albright at one point suggested a seventh to sixth century BCE dating for
Ps 151,26 but he never developed the idea. The discussions about dating will con-
tinue, but their direction seems indicated.
In the space remaining here, remarks will be limited to two other issues arising
out of the scroll and its contents.
In 1971 three quite independent studies of the acrostic poem in columns 21
and 22 were published (Skehan, Rabinowitz, and Sanders). None of the three
was aware that the others were working on the same material and hence was not
able to take advantage of the others’ findings. Earlier studies of this particular
text were those of Dupont-Sommer,27 which none of the three mentioned above
had apparently seen, and of M. Delcor,28 which Skehan does not mention. In
addition to these, the reviews of Sanders’s Psalms Scroll by M. Dahood29 and by
A. di Lella30 should be mentioned, since both contain important statements con-
21
With Sanders, “Ps. 151 in 11QPss.”
22
Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll.
23
Sanders, “Ps. 151 in 11QPss”; Ovadiah, “Synagogue at Gaza”; Philonenko, “David-Or-
phée sur une mosaïque.”
24
Hurvitz, “Observations on the Language.”
25
Polzin, “Notes on the Dating.”
26
Albright, Review of The Psalms Scroll.
27
Dupont-Sommer, “Psalms Scroll col. xxi – xxii.”
28
Delcor, “Le texte hébreu.”
29
Dahood, Review of The Psalms Scroll.
30
di Lella, Review of The Psalms Scroll.
cerning this acrostic poem. Following the editio princeps31 the regnant position
(as Rabinowitz puts it) anent the poem, with only di Lella’s voice dissenting, has
been that it, like a number of biblical passages, was poetically composed in mots
à double entente bearing both erotic and pious meanings, and that it was most
probably not written by Ben Sira, author of the first fifty chapters of Ecclesias-
ticus, or his grandson. While there are considerable differences in readings and
scansion between Skehan32 and Rabinowitz,33 and while Rabinowitz does not
attempt, like Skehan and me, 34 to reconstruct the second half of the poem, they
both agree, following di Lella, that neither of these major conclusions about the
poem is correct. Neither perceives any erotic ambiguity in it, and both defend
Ben Sira as its author. Skehan does not, like Rabinowitz, stress these points, but
it is clear from his work that he wants to be counted on the side of his student,
di Lella. Also unlike Rabinowitz’s paper, Skehan’s is quite free of rhetoric and
constitutes a serious challenge to the so-called regnant position.
I feel it is in order to try to respond to Professor Rabinowitz’s comments,
which are of a general nature. First of all, I am genuinely sorry that my work has
now twice provoked a colleague to the sort of response Rabinowitz has made.35
I have always appreciated his work and read it with care. I have not been able
to agree with the position concerning the scrolls that Rabinowitz took rather
early – that the Qumran sect were a pre-Maccabean group who viewed any and
all hellenizing influence as highly heterodox. While he has modified this posi-
tion, one can only assume that the rhetoric, to the measure that it was present in
his response36 to my work on Ps 151,37 was in reaction to the thesis advanced that
Ps 151 reflected tenuously an Orphic image of the shepherd David. A decade of
discussion of this point has not erased that possibility, as I think the above dis-
cussion of the psalm has shown.
Rabinowitz’s phrases of a similar nature in his study of the Sirach acrostic
poem are even more puzzling. In his paper, he rightly brackets the work of Del-
cor38 with mine, which “though differing here and there are in thorough agree-
ment in main conception.” He might also have bracketed Dupont-Sommer39 and
Dahood40 with us. In fact, most of the conversations I have had with colleagues
about this “precious fragment of the Hebrew original”41 have made me feel I had
been entirely too reluctant to see the full amount of erotic overtone in this stir-
ringly beautiful poem. I am grateful, incidentally, to Rabinowitz42 for pointing
31
Sanders, Psalms Scroll.
32
Skehan, “Acrostic Poem.”
33
Rabinowitz, “Qumran Hebrew Original.”
34
Sanders, “Sirach 51 Acrostic.”
35
Rabinowitz, “Alleged Orphism”; Rabinowitz, “Qumran Hebrew Original.”
36
37
38
Delcor, “Le texte hébreu.”
39
Dupont-Sommer, “Psalms Scroll col. xxi – xxii.”
40
41
di Lella, Review of The Psalms Scroll, followed by Rabinowitz.
42
Rabinowitz, “Qumran Hebrew Original,” 184.
408 Part 2: Qumran
out that, well before the discovery of the scroll, W. Baumgartner, on the basis of
the Cairo manuscripts and the versions, was the first to advocate the position
later advanced on the basis of the original. It is difficult to know how to handle
phrases in Rabinowitz’s study, such as “bowdlerization of the ‘obscene’ origi-
nal,” “fundamentally (and grossly) mistaken,” and “to thus convict Ben Sira of
ungentlemanliness.” My response to such rhetoric, when seen in Rabinowitz in
1964,43 was to bide the time and let scholarly discussion take its course.
In the present instance, I deem it better, because others are more directly
involved, and because the original text has now been available for some nine
years, to respond more directly. It should be made quite clear that no one has at
any point suggested that this poem is in any sense obscene. Delcor, Dupont-Som-
mer, and I have all insisted that it, like some biblical poetry and like other poetry
of the highest quality, far from being obscene, takes the language of natural love
and presses it into the service of piety. We have stressed that, like much poetry
of the greatest artistic ability, it bears most admirably the burden of literary
ambiguity. The student needs but to refer to the studies cited, reading not only
the interpretive comments but also the apparatus to words and phrases in the
text. Rabinowitz reports that Delcor and I take tub in the zayin verse in “the
restricted meaning ‘pleasure.’” On the contrary, with ¯ great care, as in the case
of the numerous other occasions of ambiguity, it was pointed out that the word
meant both “pleasure” and “good,” the meaning Rabinowitz prefers.
With caution I have underscored in all three of my publications of the poem44
that the task of translation of such literary ambiguities is fraught with difficulty,
even painful in the sense that the receptor modern language rarely carries in one
word the same dual burden. As Dahood avers in his critique,45 I have erred (sic) on
the side of piety rather than eros in much of my own effort. In fact, it is not certain,
since Dahood and others who have discussed the poem with me personally have
not published direct studies of the text, whether there might not be some scholars
who would, in contrast to Rabinowitz and Skehan, want to deny the side of the
ambiguity that the latter two wish to affirm alone! For my part, I would continue
to insist on the high quality of literary ambiguity in the poem with the attendant
translational difficulties. The man whom we honor in this volume [Eugene Nida,
in On Language, Culture, and Religion] knows better the translational difficulties
of such material than those of us whose linguistics are limited to certain disciplines.
At no point has there been the least suggestion that the author – Ben Sira or
another – was ungentlemanly in his thoughts in composing the poem. Professor
Rabinowitz must, I suppose, decide for himself if Ben Sira himself was ungen-
tlemanly when he composed the metaphoric poetry in Sir 24, or the authors of
Proverbs in chs. 8 and 9, or the author of Wisdom of Solomon 8,46 and what
about the author of Song of Songs?
43
44
Sanders, Psalms Scroll; Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll; Sanders, “Sirach 51 Acrostic.”
45
46
Finally, one somewhat begs the question of authorship if he turns to passages

in Sirach itself, as Rabinowitz does in his notes, to contest the meaning of par-
ticular passages and whether or not they bear the literary ambiguities. Monsi-
gnor Skehan’s appendix to his article, a reconstruction of Sirach 6:18 – 37, bears a
number of similarities to the acrostic poem in question; and, though he does not
state it, I am sure he intends to offer the passage as indication of authorship of
the acrostic. But aside from the short passage in Sirach 24:19 – 22, which pursues
the same metaphor of Wisdom as a harlot as does Prov 9, there is nothing in all
of Sirach that displays the delicate balance of literary ambiguity that our acrostic
poem maintains so admirably. On the contrary, as I have argued from the begin-
ning, such passages in Sirach show clearly why the poem would become attached
to the work of Ben Sira. This problem is now illuminated by the appearance of
Barthélemy and Rickenbacher’s work.47 Finally, neither Rabinowitz nor Skehan
addresses the obvious question of how a poem known to have been by Ben Sira
was included at Qumran in a Davidic Psalter.48
Let us turn now to the text itself, with the 1971 studies of it by Skehan and Rab-
inowitz in hand, to discern the improvements that should be made to my efforts of
1965, 1967, and 1971.49 All scholars who have worked on the text agree that (a) the
scroll presents the original Hebrew of the poem where it is extant, and (b) the
medieval Cairo Hebrew is, following Israel Lévi,50 in principle, a retroversion
from the Syriac version. The minor points of difference that do not touch on the
basic meaning of the text will be by-passed in favor of putting in relief the essential
differences among us and the judgments that they require. After careful study of
the work of both colleagues, I must reaffirm all of my earlier readings of the extant
portion of the poem in the scroll, but am pleased to acknowledge indebtedness to
Professor Skehan for points of improvement in the scansion. Skehan and I disagree
on three readings of the scroll text; Rabinowitz and I disagree in our readings at
four points. In only one of these do my colleagues agree with each other.
In the waw verse of the acrostic, Skehan and Rabinowitz both read hôdô
against my hôdî. 11QPsa, as Rabinowitz rightly notes, does not distinguish
clearly between waw (their reading) and yod (mine). Mechanically speaking it
can be rended either way. Skehan (also Delcor) reads it as the noun “praise” with
3pm suffix, citing pertinent biblical parallels, but translates it simply “grateful
praise,” presumably meaning praise due to God. Rabinowitz reads it as a verbal
noun, citing rare parallels in Isaiah and CD, and translates it simply as “praise.”
Both readings disrupt the Verlauf of first person suffixes throughout the poem
and seem to me to avoid the obvious. Hôdî here means both “the praise I have to
offer” and the poet’s ardour in quest of wisdom.
In the zayin verse, the second verb in the scroll all agree rends WʾSHQH.
I take this, with the immediately preceding zammôtî, in hendiadys to˙ mean
47
Barthélemy and Rickenbacher, Konkordanz. See also Meyer, “Bemerkungen,” 217.
48
See especially Skehan, “Liturgical Complex,” 195.
49
Sanders, Psalms Scroll; Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll; Sanders, “Sirach 51 Acrostic.”
50
Sanders, “Sirach 51 Acrostic,” 437n1.
410 Part 2: Qumran
“I lusted to play.” Skehan says that the verb śāhaq here is “incongruous,” and
emends the text, following the Cairo B reading˙(which he admits is secondary)
to vaʾehšěqah and adds to the text bah, translating this innovation, “I became
˙ devoted to her.” Rabinowitz, who fails to recognize the hendiadys
resolutely
construction, keeps the textual consonants but reads vaʾešhāqeha, translating it
(by adding a word not in the text) “and constantly trod her˙ (path).” I see no rea-
son for either of these efforts to avoid what the text says. I, on the other hand,
am willing to alter my 1971 translation and revert to the earlier, “I purposed to
make sport,” referring the student to the critical notes of my earlier publications.
In the tet verse, Skehan agrees with me that tāratî derives from tārad, whereas
Rabinowitz ˙ ˙ takes the verb to have been tārah˙ti. Neither, of course,
˙ agrees with
˙ ˙
Delcor and me that the sense of the phrase is “I bestirred my desire for her.”
In the same tet verse, Rabinowitz agrees completely with my reading of the
˙ ˙
second colon whereas Skehan deems ûberûmèha51 to be “meaningless” and
emends the text to read ûberômemāh, a complementary infinitive construction
¯
that he translates, “never weary of extolling her.” I completely agree with Rab-
inowitz that the phrase, on the contrary, means, “and on her heights I am not
at ease.” Of course, I maintain that the phrase bears a double meaning including
Rabinowitz’s, while he would understand only the sense of not “free from the
never-ending labor imposed upon all who would reach wisdom’s heights.”
In the yod verse Skehan and I agree on the reading of the letters that are at the
decomposed bottom of column 21 of the scroll, and I deem his judgment to be
correct, against the possibility of the reading di Lella advanced and Rabinowitz
sustains. The third word of that line I reconstructed from the Syriac as šaʿărèhā.
Skehan is surely right that it should read the singular, šaʿărāh, rather than the
plural. My translation should, therefore, be altered to read, “My hand opened
her gate,” with all my various explanatory notes standing as to its double mean-
ing and significance.
The second colon of the yod verse begins with the word ûmaʿărumèhā. Ske-
han and Rabinowitz read the preposition bet between the conjunction and the
noun. Skehan seems to claim he can see the top of it on the leather (though his
comments are not clear here); Rabinowitz does not claim so but puts the prepo-
sition with the conjunction before the bracket, in lacuna. I do not think the bet
is there at all, either on the leather or by assumption. Whereas they see only the
sense of “secrets” in the noun, I see also the sense of “secret parts.”
Only the first colon of the kaf verse is discernible on the leather. Skehan and
I read it exactly the same, except that I think the accusative of the phrase should
read “my hand” and he “my hands.” Rabinowitz’s readings here are far afield.
Rabinowitz does not attempt to reconstruct the second half of the poem.
Therefore the remainder of these comments will deal with the differences
between Skehan and myself in our attempted rehabilitations of the remaining
verses, and in the improvements I am grateful to accept from his work.
51
Note printer’s error in Sanders, “Sirach 51 Acrostic,” 432.
In the second colon of the kaf verse Skehan by-passes the Cairo B reading
ûbetāhărāh for his own ûbeniqqayôn. There is a certain sensitivity in Skehan’s
˙
further decision that the purity involved is “her wooer’s” rather than “Wis-
dom’s.” From the context it might indeed seem that Wisdom could not be
entirely pure if she lets herself be pursued in the manner the poem has indicated.
And it should again be stressed that while Skehan nowhere actually states his
recognition of the poem as in any sense a Liebesgeschichte, in a few covert hints,
as here, he clearly refrains from denying this aspect of it. Since Wisdom’s purity,
in all such texts as this, is ever new, ever fresh, and ever available to all wooers, I
prefer to keep the Cairo reading and point the hē at the end as feminine suffix.52
I am truly puzzled, however, by Skehan’s rejection of the first colon of the
mem verse in Cairo B in favor of his own creation. He is, of course, right, on the
other hand, to reject the suggestion of D. W. Thomas,53 who completely ignored
the scroll in his consideration of the phrase. My arguments remain the same.
For this verse as a whole, however, I am grateful to follow Skehan’s lead in his
manner of scansion of the alef, gimmel, nun, and resh verses and see this one also
(which he fails to do) as composed of three colons, instead of two:
My loins would burn like a firepot

from gazing upon her,
hence I took her as a pleasant possession.
Similarly, in the alef verse beterem tāʿîtî should be taken as the second of three
˙
colons; in the gimmel verse bibšôl ʿănābîm as the second of three colons; in the
nun verse śākār śiftôtāy as the second of three colons; in the resh verse kî qātān
hāyîtî as the second of three colons; and in the shin verse limmûdî binʿûray.
In the samek verse I think Skehan’s petāyîm preferable to my sekālîm, but
would suggest the typical 11QPsa orthography petāʾîm. I was not able¯ before to
decide between these.54 I am pleased now to follow Skehan in this reading. With
Segal, however, I prefer to retain bet midrāšî rather than Skehan’s bet mûsār.
In the qof verse Skehan’s yimsāʾ ehā is clearly preferable to the periphrastic
môsāʾ ʿôtāh. But while I accept ˙Skehan’s scansion of the resh verse, as already
˙
indicated, I would, for the reasons advanced,55 retain my reconstruction of the
verse.
The shin verse, as indicated above, should now be seen as a tricolon. Whether
the last word of the verse should read bāh with Skehan or bî as in my reconstruc-
tion is difficult to decide. Either will serve.
I see no basis on which to change the taw verse and hence it should remain as
is. Skehan’s reading completely overlooks the reference of this verse back to the
poem as a whole. By contrast, I am inclined to accept Skehan’s coda verse, with
52
Note the printer’s error in ʾěʿezvennāh in Sanders, “Sirach 51 Acrostic,” 432 in the lamed
verse.
53
Ibid., 429 – 31.
54
As indicated in Sanders. “Sirach 51 Acrostic,” 435.
55
Ibid., 436.
412 Part 2: Qumran
the exception of one word, in place of my own. His own work elsewhere, which
he does not mention in this article, has shown that such coda verses often begin
with pe. Thus his paʿălû paʿălekem would suit well. And in the second colon
my vehûʾ nôtēn lākem (Cairo) must give way to Skehan’s far simpler and better,
veyittēn. But I consider besedeq at the end of the first colon more preferable than
˙
beʿittô. The verse would now read, “Work your work in righteousness and he
will grant your reward in due season.”
I permit myself to quote, in concluding this review of work on this remark-
able poem, my earlier estimates of the acrostic as a whole:
The strong indication, therefore, is that the last part of the song was an exhortation by
the supposed Wisdom teacher to his students that they follow his example and in their
puberty dedicate themselves also to the pursuit and acquisition of Wisdom, so that as they
mature they, like their teacher, may direct their human passions toward righteousness!56
The first part of the poem is the Wisdom teacher’s confession of his youthful experi-
ence with Wisdom as his nurse, teacher and mistress, a commendable manner of sublima-
tion in celibacy and undoubtedly highly meaningful in every spiritual sense for the celibate
at Qumran.57
The Question of Canon
The concluding part of this review of work done on the Psalms Scroll will con-
cern its place in the canonical process as it relates to the Psalter. I have dealt
with this question on three other occasions,58 and shall not here repeat what is
available elsewhere except when clarification concerning the general thesis seems
needed. The principal reason I wish to deal here with the problems raised by the
Psalms Scroll in regard to canon, aside from the immense importance of the sub-
ject, is that Professor Skehan has recently published a significant study that deals
directly with the question.59
Skehan continues in this article the work begun in my 1966 article,60 and espe-
cially in the article of 1968,61 and in large measure builds upon it. He has suc-
ceeded where we did not, however, in making some significant redaction-critical
observations about the scroll, and in passing, about the masoretic Psalter as well.
Skehan, who is charged with the publication of most of the Cave 4 Psalms man-
uscripts, has been intensely interested in the Cave 11 Psalter materials and has
been a gracious consultant for my work since the beginning.62
56
57
Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 84.
58
Sanders Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 157 – 59; Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises”; and Sanders,
“Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter Century,” 134 ff.
59
Skehan, “Liturgical Complex.”
60
Sanders, “Variorum in the Psalms Scroll.”
61
62
For a listing of what he has published to date of Cave 4 Psalter texts, as well as of all Qum-
ran Psalter texts, see Sanders, “Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter Century”; for a catalog and index
to all pre-masoretic Psalter texts, published and unpublished, see Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms
Scrolls, 143 – 49.
Skehan early on,63 followed by me,64 suggested that explanations needed to

be sought for the variant order and content, as well as addenda (over against the
masoretic Psalter), in the Qumran Psalter. With the subsequent publications65 of
4QPsd, 4QPst, 11QPsb, and 11QPsApa it was clear that 11QPsa was not a private
or maverick collection but indicated a valid, variant Psalter. But it still was not
clear how one was to relate the Qumran Psalter to the later masoretic Psalter. In
1966, M. H. Goshen-Gottstein and S. Talmon suggested that it represented the ear-
liest example of a Jewish Prayerbook. Talmon, at least, has abandoned this posi-
tion, and in a public conference in Jerusalem on May 30, 1973 announced that he
now agrees with the position I had advanced that the Qumran Psalter was viewed
at Qumran as “canonical” and that it was, as we know it, an open-ended Psalter.
Skehan prefers to call 11QPsa a “Library Edition” of the Psalter, which pre-
supposes the Psalter as we know it in the Masoretic Text. Such a thesis would
be quite viable, it seems to me, if 11QPsa were the only copy of the Qumran
Psalter that we possess. But it is not. It is not at all clear to me, from the catalog
and index compiled of all published and unpublished Psalter manuscripts from
Qumran66 and from transcriptions of unpublished Psalter texts in Skehan’s care
(e. g., 4QPsk and 4QPsn), how many different arrangements of the Psalter there
were in the Qumran library; but it is quite clear that 11QPsa was not a unique,
single issue there. Skehan’s thesis is that this scroll presupposes the order and
content of the MT‑150 collection (my term, not his). I sincerely wish that this
were as clear to me as it is to him.
Skehan’s 1973 article67 probes deeply into the redactional and liturgical aspect
of the scroll and offers some valuable suggestions as to the arrangement of mas-
oretic psalms in it, “addenda” within them, and their relation to the non-mas-
oretic psalms included in the scroll. His overall conclusion68 is that “what we
have basically in 11QPsa is a collection of Pss 101 – 150 with liturgical regroup-
ings and ‘library edition’ expansions.” There is not the space here to enter into
details. Suffice it to say that some of his work is extremely helpful: it is the sort
that should be applied to that other liturgical collection of psalms, the MT‑150
collection! Other observations are doubtful, however, and the whole study will
have to be scrutinized carefully at another opportunity. Some of his observations
I had already made in the earlier efforts cited. But there should be no doubt in
the student’s mind that Skehan has considerably advanced the cause of search for
the liturgical sense of the scroll.
But I must still demur as to Skehan’s assertion that “the standard collection of
150 Psalms was fixed before the 11Q form was derived from it.” It could well have
been that what we know as the MT‑150 collection was already known, and indeed
that copies of it, too, existed in the Qumran library. We shall have to wait until
63
Skehan, “Biblical Scrolls,” 100.
64
Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 10 ff., 157 ff.; Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises,” 122 – 27.
65
See Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 144 – 45.
66
Ibid., 143 – 49.
67
Skehan, “Liturgical Complex.”
68
Ibid., 201n24.
414 Part 2: Qumran
we have photographs of all the Cave 4 Psalter fragments, and of all the Cave 4
hymnic fragments, to determine that question. Certainly what is clear is that even
if the MT‑150 collection was already current, it was not viewed at Qumran as
“standard” and so “canonical” that it could not be added to or subtracted from!
Professor Y. Yadin, who is editing the Temple Scroll from Cave 11, is convinced
that it was viewed as canonical at Qumran. In the same sense, I am convinced,
the Qumran Psalter was viewed as canonical at Qumran. The argument that since
the tetragrammaton always appears in the scroll in the archaizing palaeo-Hebrew
script it was not held to be biblical or canonical at Qumran has fallen of its own
weight.69 The manner in which the scroll was copied by the scribe argues on the
contrary that there is no facile way in which it can be set aside; on the contrary,
it challenges our assumptions about the canonical process by which the Psal-
ter came to be limited to the 150 psalms ordered in the received manner. Rudolf
Meyer70 has argued this point in an extremely forceful way that cannot be easily
dismissed. His name must now be added to those already mentioned.71
It is our current view of “canon” that needs to be modified in treating these
materials. It was largely out of dissatisfaction with the currently available
approach to the whole concept of canon, and especially as it pertains to the
Psalter, that I called recently for serious, fresh efforts in canonical criticism.72
That effort will be supplemented shortly by two forthcoming essays. And I am
pleased to say that the quarterly Interpretation plans to respond to the call by
assigning a number of articles to the topic in forthcoming volumes. I am con-
vinced that the Psalter at Qumran was open-ended. It was not yet closed in its
latter third. It was a working Psalter, as I think Skehan’s work clearly indicates.
What is not clear from Skehan’s findings is his confidence that the MT‑150 lay
back of the Qumran Psalter as a “standard” or closed Psalter. On the contrary,
one can take each of his valuable findings and state the opposite, that 11QPsa lies
back of the masoretic Psalter, which developed out of the fuller edition, paring
down unnecessary liturgical matter. One can almost detect our current bias for
the post-70 CE situation in that I am sure all of us ask the question, “Why did
the Qumran sect add x, y, and z?” We have to exercise special scientific caution
to admit also of the question, “Why did the MT omit x, y, and z?” And yet we
must attempt to do so.
S. Talmon, in the May 30, 1973 public address mentioned above, suggested
some comparisons with the Chronicler. One of the many ancient sources of the
Chronicler was the work of the Deuteronomistic history we have in the books
of Kings. In fact, says Talmon, Chronicles could be described as a midrash on
his sources. In like manner, he suggests, the Qumran Psalter might be viewed as
a midrash on its source. See, for instance, the psalm in 1 Chron 16:8 – 36, which
is made up of portions of Pss 105, 96 and 106; and note also the liturgical bits of
69
Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises,” 288n10; Siegel, “Employment of Palaeo-Hebrew Characters.”
70
Meyer, “Bemerkungen.”
71
Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises,” 288n10.
72
Sanders, Torah and Canon.
poetry in 1 Chron 29:10 – 13 and 2 Chron 6:41 – 42. I think especially interesting
the notations in 2 Chron 5:13 and 20:21 where the familiar refrain from Ps 118:1
and 29 (11QPsa xvi 1 – 2, 5 – 6) is cited as sung at the dedication of the Temple:
“Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his mercy endures forever.” Also
pertinent is the note in Ezra 3:10 – 11 that psalms were recited and sung “in the
manner of David.” Is it not possible that some Psalters included these notations
of the fifth century, which were later excised in the MT‑150 Psalter? It seems
to me that one must not assume that such floating bits and portions of liturgi-
cal literature are from the MT Psalter psalms. The most one should say is that
they are also found there, but in different arrangements and combinations. Our
first reaction quite understandably is that the psalm in columns 26 and 27 of
the Qumran scroll, identical (so far as we know) with 2 Sam 23:1 – 7, was taken
from Samuel and added to the Qumran Psalter. Is it not just possible that, in the
canonical process moving toward the MT‑150 collection, it had been present in
many Psalter collections but was finally omitted, whereas Ps 18, almost identical
with 2 Sam 22, was, for other reasons, kept? Similarly, one is gravely tempted to
ask why the Qumran Psalter added the constant refrain it has to each verse of
Ps 145. Should not one also ask, scientifically speaking, whether it was not the
process leading to the MT‑150 Psalter that dropped the refrain in a tendency
toward a leaner collection? And should one not ask why the MT retains the
refrain of Ps 136 (11QPsa xv)? Even a leaner edition of the Psalter, such as the
MT, cannot limit a refrain so integral to the psalm.
I would refer the student once more to our earlier position.73 Until proved
otherwise, I would hold open the questions there posed, especially that of the
“canonical priority” of the MT Psalter. In the meantime, I should say that I think
the field is moving toward affirming that the Qumran Psalter, represented by
11QPsa but also by other more fragmentary Psalter manuscripts from Caves 4
and 11, was revered at Qumran as being as authoritative as any other Psalter
present there: it was “canonical” at Qumran though by no means closed; on the
contrary, it was, while authoritative, still open-ended. And following Skehan’s
recent study, I would stress a point I have made earlier: certain smaller groupings
of psalms, such as the Songs of Ascents and the Passover Hallel, were possibly
in some collections viewed as units, but in others, such as the Qumran Psalter,
clearly had not yet attained the status of fixed groupings. Is not this in reality
a more sober, rather in fact more “conservative,” view than that the faithful at
Qumran rearranged their sectarian Psalter at will out of various materials includ-
ing an already fixed Psalter? I am convinced that we much need thorough, careful
work in canonical criticism, to disembarrass ourselves of post-70 CE assump-
tions about “canon.” It seems to me that the Qumran Psalter manuscripts indi-
cate that in the first century BCE and early first century CE Judaism had simply
not yet arrived at that uniform point for the Psalter, just as it had not yet arrived
at stabilization of the remainder of the Hagiographa or Ketuvim.
73
The position taken in Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises.”
24
Cave 11 Surprises and the Question of Canon
The last Qumran cave, the one designated Cave 11, has yielded a bonanza of sur-
prises. Material from it first came into Jerusalem through the Bedouin of the area
in February 1956. As the various pieces were identified and studied, it became
clear that new possibilities in Bible study, and in the study of the Qumran sect,
were being opened. For a variety of reasons, financial and otherwise, detailed
scientific work on the Cave 11 materials did not begin until the fall of 1961. The
preliminary reports published the following year, on the Psalms and on Job, pro-
voked considerable interest and many questions.1
Since 1962 a scroll of Ezekiel, three scroll texts of Psalms, and a florilegium on
the figure of Melchizedek have been published.2 Only the Job and Ezekiel pieces
have so far failed to generate some excitement: the Ezekiel because what little is
legible from the ossified knot of leather on which it was written seems identical
to the received text, and the targum of Job because it turns out to be a simple
Aramaic translation rather than a full targum.3
The importance of the text dealing with Melchizedek, on the other hand, can
hardly be exaggerated, for it reaches beyond the linguistics of New Testament
study into its christological thought forms. The preserved fragment is a mid-
rash on a cluster of ten Old Testament passages centering in Isa 61 and the Jubi-
lee-year text in Lev 25; but it also quotes, or alludes to, and interprets verses
from Pss 8 and 72 as well as Isa 25 and Deut 15. It is a rich storehouse of mate-
rial, along with similar texts from Cave 4, showing how some Palestinian Jews
contemporized Old Testament texts. But its importance for Christianity, espe-
cially for understanding the Epistle to the Hebrews, is as yet beyond reckon-
ing. Melchizedek is presented as a heavenly redemption figure who will execute

1
van der Ploeg, Le targum de Job; van der Woude, “Das Hiobtargum.” Sanders, “Scroll of
Psalms.”
2
Brownlee, “Scroll of Ezekiel”; Sanders, Psalms Scroll; Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll; van
der Ploeg, “Le Psaume XCI”; van der Ploeg, “Fragments”; van der Woude, “Melchisedek als
himmlische Erlösergestalt.”
3
If the Job piece is the same as that interdicted by Rabban Gamaliel in the first century, as
the Dutch scholars both think, it is something of a disappointment rather than an excitement.
Its importance, however, along with the Genesis Apocryphon of Cave 1, as a primary source
for study of the Palestinian Aramaic Jesus might have spoken, cannot be gainsaid; see now the
excellent edition of the latter by Fitzmyer, Genesis Apocryphon, esp. 17 – 25 and 171 – 206, on
first-century Palestinian Aramaic.
Cave 11 Surprises and the Question of Canon 417
divine judgment and salvation in the drama to take place in the anticipated escha-
tological Jubilee year. He is presented as a member of the heavenly council of the
holy ones of God and even exalted above them, fulfilling, in the judgment and
salvation drama, the role later associated with the archangel Michael. In the same
text the bearer of good tidings (Isa 52) appears to be identified with one anointed
(a Messiah) by the Spirit (Isa 42 and 61). This same cluster of scriptural figures is,
of course, related in the New Testament to Christ, but we have now in this very
important Cave 11 fragment the evidence of their first being interwoven in this
manner. The heavenly Son of God of Heb 7, who rules above all heavenly and
earthly powers, and lives forever to make intercession for those who put their
trust in him, has his counterpart now in the heavenly Melchizedek at Qumran.4
There are still two manuscripts brought in from Cave 11 in 1956 which have
not yet been worked on: a fragmentary copy of the Apocalypse of the New Jeru-
salem also known from Caves 1, 2, and 4; and fragments of the Book of Leviti-
cus written in the archaic Hebrew script. Professor David Noel Freedman, dean
at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, is scheduled to begin work on the
Leviticus materials soon.
The Six-Day War brought further Cave 11 surprises. Professor Yigael Yadin,
of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, had somehow learned in the early
1960s about a cache of scrolls that were still in the hands of an antiquities dealer
in Jordanian Palestine. While we are not absolutely certain, it is highly probable
that they were also part of the Cave 11 library. One of the scrolls turns out to
be the largest yet found at Qumran, which Professor Yadin has entitled “The
Temple Scroll.”5
II
But the greatest surprise provided by the amazing Cave 11 is in its Psalter mate-
rials.6 Three manuscripts of Cave 11 Psalms have been published to date, and
they all three exhibit very interesting variations in the order and content of the
psalms they include. Two of the manuscripts are copies of the same recension or
edition of Psalms; of the third so little has to date been published that it is diffi-
cult to judge whether it reflects the same revision, or collection, or not. The large
Psalms Scroll from Cave 11 (11QPsa) has been published in two editions, in 1965
and early in 1967; the other copy of the same recension (11QPsb) has only just
recently appeared in print. The fact that 11QPsb, where it is extant, duplicates
11QPsa in both order and content of psalms is highly significant; it proves at the
very least that the recension of Psalms to which they witness was not a private or
maverick collection. 11QPsb includes psalms found in column 16, 18, 19, and 23
4
de Jonge and van der Woude, “11Q Melchizedek and the NT,” esp. 322 – 23.
5
Yadin, “Temple Scroll,” 156.
6
See on 11QPsa (the large Psalms Scroll), Sanders, Psalms Scroll; Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms
Scroll; on 11QPsb (its identical mate but only parts of three columns preserved) van der Ploeg,
“Fragments”; and on 11QPsa (or possibly 11QPse) van der Ploeg, “Le Psaume XCI.”
418 Part 2: Qumran
of 11QPsa. Column 23 of the larger scroll contains Pss 141, 133, and 144 in that
order, and that is precisely the order of the same psalms on a single column in
11QPsb. Just as interesting is the fact that in the very words of the psalms where
11QPsa differs from the received Masoretic Text (MT), 11QPsb agrees with its
Cave 11 companion. In fact there is good reason to think that the 11Q texts were
identical even where 11QPsb has lacunae, except in the minor and obvious scribal
errors.7 Column 19 of the larger scroll contains a non-masoretic and heretofore
unknown psalm to which we have given the title “Plea for Deliverance.” 11QPsb
includes the same psalm in a more fragmentary form, except that it provides us
now with a line at the top, which in the larger scroll was in the lost lower third of
the previous column 18.8 The two copies of the psalm are identical (even to the
point of almost having the same line divisions on the leather) with the exception
of two very minor and very similar orthographic variants.
Finally, column 16 of the larger scroll contains what is possibly a new
non-masoretic psalm composed of floating bits of liturgical material familiar
from Pss 118, 136, and elsewhere. In this regard it rather approximates the psalm
in 1 Chron 16:8 – 36, which is itself a pastiche of Pss 105:1 – 15; 96:1 – 13; 106:1 and
47 – 48. Its close relation in the scroll to Ps 136 reminds one of the very short
Ps 117, which many scholars have suggested should be seen either as coda to
Ps 116 or an incipit to Ps 118; and it should be remembered that Ps 117 is itself
reminiscent of Pss 67:4 and 103:11. Professor Peter Ackroyd has made a very
worthy translation of the little poem:
Praise Yahweh for he is good,

his mercy is for ever.
The sound of a shout of salvation
is in the tents of the righteous.
The right hand of Yahweh acts valiantly
the right hand of Yahweh is exalted
the right hand of Yahweh acts in power.
It is better to trust in Yahweh
than to trust in men.
It is better to confide in Yahweh
than to trust in noble men.
It is better to trust in Yahweh
than to trust in a whole army.
7
Careful measurements across fragments d and e of 11QPsb (Plate XVIII, in van der Ploeg,
“Fragments”) indicate, pace van der Ploeg, that hayyim was lacking in Ps 133:3b there as well
˙
as in 11QPsa. (Note that it has long been questioned by scholarship because of scansion.) By
contrast, 11QPsb does not duplicate the obvious scribal goof of 11QPsa in the following line
(ha-melammed of 144:1). Finally, again pace van der Ploeg, I am not at all sure that MT ledawyd
can be presumed in the immediately preceding lacuna where 11QPsa lacks it.
8
ʾebyon / ʿany wedal ʾanoky ky . . . “Humble and poor am I, for . . .”
Praise Yahweh for he is good,

his mercy is for ever.
Hallelujah.9
This same new psalm also appears in 11QPsb. What is preserved of it in the
smaller scroll is verbatim what appears in 11QPsa. The sum of it is that our sur-
prising Cave 11 contained two copies of the one really imposing witness to the
Hebrew Psalter in pre-masoretic times.10
The titular designation “Psalm of David,” familiar from the seventy-three
psalms where it appears in the masoretic Psalter, provides interesting observa-
tions in the Qumran Psalter. It appears at the head of a non-masoretic psalm in
11QPsApa, and a variant of it also appears in the first line of Ps 151 in the large
Psalms Scroll. Also in the larger scroll, Pss 104 and 123 begin “Psalm of David,”
whereas the masoretic Psalter does not have the title for either. Conversely, the
designation is lacking in the Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) for Ps 144; there is a lacuna
at that point in 11QPsb and no secure way of knowing if it originally had the
Davidic ascription, but the two scrolls are so identical in most other respects
that it is best not to assume it simply because the received masoretic Psalter has
it. Similarly, the interjection “Hallelujah” is omitted from the superscriptions
in Pss 135, 148, and 150 where MT has it, but appears in Ps 93:1 where it does
not. It appears, therefore, either that there was fluidity in the first century even
in the Davidic ascriptions or that the Qumran Psalter represents, in complex
ways, another text tradition or stage of Psalter canonization earlier than any we
had heretofore. For, on the face of it, if there had already been a closed canon
of Psalms since the fourth century, or since late Persian times, in which such
matters were already invariable, even a “liturgical collection” of canonical and
non-canonical psalms would surely reflect the accepted canon where it existed.11
Composers of the pesharim and midrashim of the age did, apparently, “con-
9
Ackroyd, “Notes and Studies.”
10
It should be very carefully noted, pace Yadin, “Temple Scroll,” 156, and Talmon, Review
of The Psalms Scroll, 100, that the Tetragrammaton whether in archaic or block script is inde-
terminate for judging if a scroll was considered “canonical” at Qumran. Where 11QPsa always
has it archaic, 11QPsb (identical otherwise) has it block (frag. d). 11QPsApa (?11QPse) appar-
ently has it block, according to van der Ploeg, “Le Psaume XCI,” 211; and 4QPsf has it block
(columns vii 5, ix 5, ix 14, x 13) precisely in the non-masoretic psalms. In point of fact, I am not
actually disagreeing with Yadin’s conclusion; I would, however, disagree with Talmon’s conclu-
sion that the divine name in archaic script always indicated that the manuscript was considered
somehow non-canonical at Qumran. The simple fact of the matter is that we can no longer read
our post-70 CE concepts back into the earlier period at all points. Contra the conclusions of
Goshen-Gottstein, “Psalms Scroll,” 22 – 23, and Talmon, Review of The Psalms Scroll, in this
regard, see the more cautious remarks by Ackroyd, “Notes and Studies”; Roberts, “Review
of The Psalms Scroll; van der Ploeg,”Le Psaume XCI,” 216 – 17; and Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms
Scroll, 156 – 58.
11
The suggestions that 11QPsa is to a “proper” Psalter what 1QapGen is to Genesis, and a
pesher text to canonical texts, are comforting but misleading analogies. The matter is much more
complex as we shall attempt to indicate. The suggestion that it is evidence of another “first,” that
is, a forerunner of later Jewish and Christian prayer books, is so attractive in certain ways as to
deserve careful criticism (Goshen-Gottstein, “Psalms Scroll”).
420 Part 2: Qumran
temporize” biblical texts, and thus mold them to their convictions; but these
Qumran Psalters are simply not sectarian in that sense, nor are they “sectarian”
in any sense in which we have yet used that word in Qumran studies. To suggest
that they are sectarian liturgical collections, forerunners of Jewish and Christian
prayer books, far from being a simple, conservative, self-authenticating solution
to the problem of Qumran psalmody, is a bold, venturous hypothesis fraught
with as many difficulties as any other yet suggested.
The highly liturgical type materials in the Psalms Scroll that appear as addenda
to known masoretic psalms seem at first blush to lend themselves to the pro-
to-prayer book suggestion. The new psalm at the top of column 16, made up of
many liturgical phrases from a number of sources, especially those familiar from
Ps 118, has already been cited. Psalm 135 has two apparent insertions, in vv. 2 and
6, that commend themselves as cultic anacolutha. In italics in the following are
the words peculiar to 11Q:
What the Lord pleases he does in heaven,

and on earth to do, he does;
there is none like the Lord,
there is none like the Lord,
and there is none who does as the King of gods,
in the seas and in all deeps (11Q Ps 135:6).
That is, of course, liturgical material very similar to what one finds in later Jewish
prayers and songs. But it is also like what one finds in 1 Sam 2:2, which is not
better syntactically related to the rest of the Song of Hannah than the above ital-
icized material to MT Ps 135:6.
There is none holy like the Lord,

indeed there is none beside thee,
and there is no rock like our God (1 Sam 2:2).
There is a similar spate of material in 11Q Ps 146 between vv. 9 and 10 that is so
poorly preserved that it is untranslatable, but that reflects the same biblical-li-
turgical type literature. Other such bits and pieces should undoubtedly also be
viewed in the same manner.12
The most interesting, perhaps, and the most obviously liturgical aspect of the
scroll is in the refrain and the subscription to Ps 145. The subscription is very
frustrating because in it we have, for the first time, a suggestion as to ancient cat-
egories of psalm types: in it Ps 145 is called a zikkaron, a “memorial psalm,” but
that is as far as the text goes at the bottom of the column of decomposed leather.
We can imagine all sorts of possibilities, especially since the word zikkaron is so
central to our current understanding of the theology of ancient Israel and her
cultic life at all stages. But the refrain presents no difficulties in reading: after
12
each verse of the psalm, as after each verse of Ps 136, a constant refrain recurs
through all the verses: “Blessed be the Lord and blessed be his name forever and
ever.” If one assumes an invariable canon of Psalms from the Persian period, then
one is inclined to view this refrain as an addition to the masoretic psalm, whereas
the refrain to Ps 136 one is inclined to view as more ancient.13 However, the
problem is considerably more complicated, for v. 21 of the masoretic recension
of Ps 145 contains a clear historic memory of the last two words of the Qumran
refrain, whereas v. 21 in Qumran Ps 145 lacks the two words precisely because it
has the whole refrain. One wonders if the refrain now available for Ps 145 is not
just as ancient as that available all the while for Ps 136, relative only perhaps to
the date of composition of the two psalms. Why, then, if the masoretic Psalter
has a refrain to Ps 136, does it not have the refrain to Ps 145? At first glance, one
feels comforted to say that someone at Qumran simply added the Ps 145 refrain
to an already set Psalter. And yet the cautious student knows that one must leave
very much open the possibility that it was the masoretic, or proto-masoretic,
tradition that omitted the Ps 145 refrain because the refrain would have been
retained in liturgical memory and signaled otherwise in the psalm.14 So far, only
Ps 136, of all Hebrew psalmody, has even the suggestion of a refrain after each
hemistich or colon rather than after a full bicolon. To transmit Ps 136 without
its refrain could have created a gross misreading: the refrain in Ps 136 is integral
to the scansion of the psalm in a way not the case with Ps 145, or with any other
psalm for which we might posit an ancient refrain.
The greatest “addendum” of all in 11QPsa is in column 27, the prose composi-
tion that says that David composed “through prophecy” 4,050 psalms and songs.
The paragraph indicates the liturgical usage of the songs (shir) that David com-
posed, and follows the calendar in use at Qumran and elsewhere in the late Sec-
ond Temple period. It might be comforting to suppose that all the non-masoretic
materials in the Qumran Psalter could be relegated to the category of “song”
and thus dismiss the problem that it presents. No supposition could be more
unscientific: there are songs so designated in the masoretic Psalter (cf. Pss 18, 92,
120 – 134, etc.). And 11QPsa includes forty masoretic psalms all from Books IV
and V, or the last third of the Psalter.15 To point out that later prayer books
13
van der Ploeg reports that 11QPsApa (or, in my designation, 11QPse) has Ps 118 also with
a constant refrain.
14
Precisely in the overloaded MT Ps 145:21. Note the presence of the enigmatic Selah, after
Ps 91:4 in 11QPsApa, lacking in MT 91:4.
15
As is carefully noted by Goshen-Gottstein, “Psalms Scroll,” 32n42. Apropos Professor
Goshen-Gottstein’s further (less careful) remark on the same page, n43, that the term “Psalms
Scroll” itself uncritically influenced early judgments, it should be noted that our first designa-
tion was “Scroll of Psalms” and the first siglum assigned was 11QPss, as attested in Sanders,
“Scroll of Psalms,” 11. Interesting in this regard is a conversation I had in May 1963 with Pro-
fessor Brownlee in Claremont. He asked, after a lecture I gave on the non-masoretic psalms,
why I used the confusing siglum 11QPss, and why not 11QPsa. I told him that the decision
had since been made, in conjunction with the Dutch (van der Ploeg and van der Woude), to
use 11QPsa. I had decided that the presence of thirty-six (now forty) masoretic psalms in the
scroll could not be ignored; and that since the style of the non-masoretic psalms was “biblical”
422 Part 2: Qumran
include forty psalms to be recited at a single service is less than illuminating, for
no prayer book service would exclude all psalms from the first two-thirds of the
Psalter. What is more than abundantly clear is that all psalters are liturgical col-
lections, masoretic and non-masoretic; that is not the point. The real question is
whether the Qumran Psalter as we now have it is a variant form of that liturgical
collection that came to be called masoretic or is it an aberration from it, perhaps
the earliest Jewish prayer book? Does it reflect on its past or anticipate its future?
III
The clue may lie just as much in how stable the first two-thirds of the Qumran
Psalter appear to us, as in how unstable the last third (or slightly more) appears.
The only really significant non-masoretic features in the first half or so of the
Qumran Psalter appear in two manuscripts from Cave 4, 4QPsa and 4QPsq.
Both of them appear to omit Ps 32, and so far there is no explanation for the
omissions. 4QPsa places Ps 71 after Ps 38, but this has been explained quite well
by Monsignor Patrick W. Skehan as simply exhibiting the similarity that exists
between Pss 8 and 70; that particular scribe, on finishing copying Ps 8, would
have erred in thinking he had just copied Ps 70 and thus went on to Ps 71, then
later reverted to the received order. All the other variations in order of psalms
at Qumran, even in Cave 11, appear in the last third of the Psalter, and all the
non-masoretic psalms in the Qumran Psalter show up in the same last third.
So far, this observation is only a clue, but, as difficult as reviewing the “assured
results” of scholarship may be, it requires that we think in ways in which we had
not thought about the stages of stabilization of the Psalter.16 The fluidity in the
Qumran Psalter, aside from the two cases just noted, is in the last two Psalter
books, IV and V, Pss 90 and following.17 It has often been pointed out that it is
this section of the MT Psalter that contains most of the highly liturgical psalms,
and not sectarian (compare Hodayot), I had a complex problem on hand not easily solved. The
manuscript for Psalms Scroll had already been mailed, and I was content to have time to give the
problem thought and to hear reactions. My thinking at that time appeared later in tentative form
in Sanders, “Variorum” (1966) after trying to collect the necessary data about all pre-masoretic
psalms in “Pre-Masoretic Psalter Texts” (now outdated). After all, the siglum includes always
the preface 11Q; to have used 11QapPs, or some such designation, would have prejudiced from
the start the necessary discussions concerning canon. Even now, one must say, regret should
be expressed rather against hastily conceived hypotheses than against patience. Concerning the
column 27 prose section, see the tentative suggestions by Brownlee, “Significance.”
16
Reviewing the various attempts to date the MT collection of 150 in Gunkel and Begrich,
Einleitung in die Psalmen, Schmidt, Das Gebet etc., one is struck by how uncertain the “assured
results” are. The observation that 1 Macc 7:17 appears to quote a phrase from Ps 79:2 – 3 is sim-
ply no longer impressive in discussions of the date of the MT‑150 collection, nor the mention
in the prologue of Ben Sira of “the other books.” Roberts has the right of it when he says, “The
departure from [MT] in the order of Pss., the presence of apocryphal Psalms and of pure Qum-
ran compositions in the same scroll needs to be explained, and the old question of canonicity to
be reopened.” Review of The Psalms Scroll, 185.
17
See the full catalogue and index in Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 143 – 49; the early ef-
fort “Pre-Masoretic Psalter Texts” is now outdated and misleading.
whereas the early part of the Psalter contains mostly prayers for individuals.
And this, too, may be a clue to the solutions we seek. We have for so long con-
structed theories about the canonization or stabilization of the Psalter on the
idea of smaller collections being drawn together that we are reluctant to con-
sider any of the smaller collections as fluid beyond a certain date. Books I to
III contain three large collections, the “Psalms of David” (Pss 3 – 41), the “Elo-
him” collection (42 – 83) and the so-called “guilds” collection (84 – 89). But in the
first group Pss 10 and 33 do not bear the name David; in the second the divine
name Yahweh appears forty-three times; and even in the tiny “guilds” grouping
a “Psalm of David” appears (Ps 84). Over against a hypothetical Psalter of rigidly
conceived groupings, these masoretic “aberrations” would have the same psy-
chological effect on us that the Qumran Psalter has had.
We like to think that Books IV and V are composed of four smaller collec-
tions: “Psalms 90 – 104, in which the individual psalms have no special features,
but which is distinguished by the fact that the majority of the songs of ‘acces-
sion to the throne’ are gathered together here. This collection is concluded
with Psalms 105 – 107.” Psalms 108 – 110 would appear to be “poems ascribed to
David, concluding with Psalms 111 – 118.” Psalms 120 – 134 include “the Songs
of Ascents, concluded with Psalms 135 – 136.” And finally, Pss 138 – 145 would
also appear to be “psalms ascribed to David, concluded with Psalm 146 – 150.”18
In the light now of the Qumran Psalter we simply must admit that the sup-
posed “early collections” in the last third of the Psalter are more a product of the
imagination of the rationalist mind than of realities in antiquity. Only the Songs
of Ascents remains attractive as a grouping, but the decision as to whether songs
of similar titles had always been grouped together must be made in the light
of the fragile nature of all such groupings that have heretofore appealed to our
modern minds. One might as easily suggest that such songs were pulled together
artificially at a comparatively late date, as that they were so neatly arranged early
in the Second Temple period and then pulled apart for later, overriding liturgical
reasons by the Qumran sect (which reasons are not at all evident or even sug-
gested in the supposed “rearrangement” of the Qumran Psalter).
Observations concerning such groupings, however, are somewhat more con-
vincing for Books I to III than for Books IV and V – precisely the portion of
the Psalter that at Qumran is most at variance with the masoretic Psalter both in
order and content. Where all such observations may lead is extremely difficult to
say. Avi Hurvitz, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has written a disserta-
tion based on new methods of linguistic analysis of the Psalms in which he con-
cludes that the ten masoretic psalms whose language clearly reflects the postexile
period are all in the last third of the Psalter.19 It will be interesting to see if his
results corroborate our observations about Books IV and V and the suggestion
that “the last third of the Qumran Psalter indicates a still open-ended Psalter in
18
All of these observations are taken directly from Eissfeldt, OT: An Introduction, 449 – 50.
19
Hurvitz, “Identification of Post-Exilic Psalms.” Herewith my gratitude to Dr. Hurvitz
for this information in personal correspondence.
424 Part 2: Qumran
the first century.”20 It is precisely to the first century (at least) that we must trace
the various figures concerning how many psalms the Psalter contained: 150, 151,
155, 200, 3600, or 4050!21 If the stabilization of Books I to III occurred earlier
than the crystallization of Books IV and V, then the fluidity demanded by the
desire to be faithful to the Davidic corpus or heritage had to be expressed in the
later portions of the Psalter and threatened the earlier portions less and less as the
desire and need for stabilization became greater. It must be remembered that the
Psalter cannot be viewed in the same way other biblical books are viewed in the
question of canonization. Each psalm is an independent entity and has its own
existence in a way narratives, oracles, and even proverbs do not have within the
books where they are located. The Psalter was more closely allied to the daily life
of worship and piety of Israel and Judaism than any other biblical book. And a
sect that owed its existence and identity to dissension from the establishment in
Jerusalem would be more likely to maintain the fluidity than not.
Tentatively, one might suggest the hypothesis that the Qumran group arrested
the process of stabilization as it was in the period before they left Jerusalem to
seek their own identity and in the then fluid third portion of the Psalter came
to accept as “Davidic” what were actually Hasidic and proto-Essene (their own
identity) poems, which were at least biblical in style (in contrast to the style of
the Qumran sectarian hymns) and could on the face of it meet the basic standards
of canonical literature. The Jerusalem group, by contrast, would have tended to
arrest the process of fluidity in the interests of stabilizing their own position and
sponsoring the status quo. The more eschatological group would have had little
interest in encouraging stabilization. Those who look constantly to the heavens
for the in-breaking drama of righteousness and vindication have little interest
in five-year, or longer, programs and plans! The Psalter is also distinct, in this
regard, because it bore the authority of the name David, comparable in the late
Second Temple period to the authority of the name Moses.
The difference was perhaps somewhat the difference between the kinds of authority and
loyalty which the names Moses and David elicited in the period in question: the one was
the authority of Law, the other the authority of hope; the one represented God’s theoph-
any in the past, the other his theophany of the future, a future that in the Qumran period
was believed imminent. David’s name both stabilized Psalter collections and prohibited a
universally invariable canon of Psalms. The tragedy of the destruction of the Second Tem-
ple in the failure of the first Jewish revolt put an end to the fluidity of the Psalter, just as it
eventually brought about a stabilization of the Hagiographa, the codification of Oral Law,
the unification of Rabbinic Judaism, the writing of the Gospels, the eventual gathering and
canonization of the New Testament, and the ultimate parting of the ways of Judaism and
Christianity, the only two sects from Early Judaism to survive the tragedy.22
For the Essenes, the open-ended Psalter was the more archaic Psalter, the preser-
vation of an earlier stage of the stabilization process; just as their cultic calendar
was for them the more archaic and authentic calendar.
20
21
Ibid., 157.
22
Ibid., 158.
Until the Temple Scroll is published and its relation to the Qumran Psalter is
established, further discussion would be but premature. One may sincerely hope
that the Temple Scroll, which Yadin describes as believed at Qumran “to be a
part of the Holy Scriptures sensu stricto,”23 will provide the conclusive clues to
the canonical status at Qumran of the Qumran Psalter. Perhaps it will also offer
suggestive clues to the direction our thinking should now take on the general
question of the Old Testament canon, which is being now reopened in numerous
ways.24
IV
Besides the two major Psalter manuscripts from Cave 11 there are so far two oth-
ers that also contain non-masoretic psalms. The one is from Cave 11 as well and
is designated at present by the siglum 11QPsApa, meaning “apocryphal psalms
from Qumran Cave 11.” Actually, all that is so far published of it is Ps 91, but
the editor reports that at least one of the non-masoretic psalms in the scroll
bears the “Psalm of David” title familiar to all Psalter traditions. He also reports
that, like the non-masoretic psalms in the other Cave 11 Psalters, the psalms
in 11QPsApa are “biblical” in style rather than of the hymnic style at Qumran
familiar from the sectarian Thanksgiving Hymns. And he quite rightly suggests
that the manuscript attests a more ancient stage of Psalter tradition than that of
the masoretic Psalter.25 It is for this reason that I have proposed resignaling this
particular manuscript 11QPse. It is very difficult at this point to see why it must
not be considered in the same light as the other Psalms texts from Cave 11.
There are a number of very interesting variants in the Cave 11 Ps 91 which do
not appear either in the received text of Psalms or in the Cave 4 text where Ps 91
also shows up in 4QPsb.26 Since it has never to my knowledge been rendered into
English, I shall append a translation here. Where it differs from the masoretic
psalm, I have indicated the variants in italics.
11Q Ps 91
He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High,
who abides in the shadow of the Almighty
is he who says to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress
is my God,
my confidence in whom I trust.”
23
Yadin, “Temple Scroll,” 159.
24
Cf., for example, Brownlee, “Le livre grec d’Esther”; Roberts, “Old Testament Canon”;
and the various studies of Sundberg, especially “OT: A Christian Canon” and “Towards a Re-
vised History of the NT Canon.”
25
van der Ploeg, “Le Psaume XCI.”
26
Skehan, “Psalm Manuscript.”
426 Part 2: Qumran
For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler,

from the deadly pestilence;
he will cover you with his pinions,
and under his wings will you dwell in his grace . . .,
his truth your shield and buckler. Selah.
You need fear neither the fright of night
nor arrows in flight by day,
neither scourge of destitution at noon,
nor plague that stalks the gloom.
Let a thousand fall at your side,
ten thousand on your right hand,
but you it cannot touch.
You will need but look with your own eyes
and see the fate of the wicked.
Because you have invoked the Lord your refuge,
and made the Most High your delight,
you will behold no evil,
no scourge will touch your tent.
But he will charge his angels for you
to guard you in all your ways.
They will carry you in their hands
lest your foot stub a stone.
On the adder and the asp shall you tread,
both young lion and serpent trample under foot.
The rest of the text, vv. 14 to 16, is unfortunately mutilated, but we can be grate-
ful that most of the psalm is fairly well preserved. While there is less of it pre-
served, the Cave 4 text of Ps 91 is identical with the masoretic as over against our
Cave 11 copy. What strikes one about the Cave 11 Ps 91 is that it relates to the
masoretic text of Ps 91 exactly as psalms in 11QPsa relate to their corresponding
masoretic psalms. That is, the variants exhibit no pattern or tendency, and while
a few appear to be errors, many of the variant readings commend themselves
rather strongly. And if Professor van der Ploeg is right that this text attests a
more ancient stage of Psalter transmission than the Masoretic Text, argumentum
a fortiori 11QPsa.
The fourth Qumran Psalter manuscript that includes non-masoretic psalms
was found not in our Cave 11 of surprises, but in Cave 4, it was not until the
Cave 11 Psalms Scroll was published that Father Jean Starcky identified the
pertinent materials and took account of the fact that he was dealing also with
a manuscript containing both masoretic and non-masoretic psalms. It is a text
that apparently was continuous on one sheet of leather running from Pss 106 to
109, though only portions of Pss 107 and 109 are preserved in it. But beginning,
apparently, on the same column where Ps 109 ends, and continuing through col-
umn 10, are three non-masoretic psalms, the first of which is the “Apostrophe
to Zion” of column 22 of 11QPsa. One must say “apparently” because unfor-
tunately one cannot be absolutely certain, but Father Starcky seems confident
that the fragment on which the “Apostrophe to Zion” begins is to be placed so

as to form a lower part of the original full column 7. This re-identification was
made in the summer of 1965, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that further
such discoveries of non-masoretic Psalter texts may be made when all the Cave 4
materials have been published (they are to fill some nine quarto-size volumes!).
An English translation of the “Apostrophe to Zion” has been published on
the basis of the Cave 11 Psalms Scroll, and then a revision taking account of the
variants between the Caves 4 and 11 copies.27 There is, hence, no need to offer the
“Apostrophe to Zion” here. But, to my knowledge, no translation has yet appeared
in English of the two psalms that follow it in 4QPsf. The second of the three may
be titled “Eschatological Hymn” and the third, “Apostrophe to Judah.”28
4Q Eschatological Hymn
...
Let the (congregation) praise the name of the Lord . . .
For he is coming to judge every deed,
to destroy the wicked from the earth
so that sons of iniquity will be no more.
The heavens (will bless with) their dew
and no destruction will enter their borders.
The earth will yield its fruit in its season
and its produce will never be wanting.
Fruit trees (will offer their figs)
and springs will never fail.
Let the poor have their food
and those who fear the Lord be satisfied . . .
4Q Apostrophe to Judah
...
Let then the heavens and the earth give praise together,
let all the stars of evening sing praises!
Rejoice, O Judah, in your joy,
rejoice your joy and exult your exultation!
Celebrate your festivals, fulfill your vows
for no longer is Belial in your midst.
Lift up your hand, strengthen your right hand,
behold your enemies go perishing
and all workers of evil go scattering.
But thou, O Lord, thou art for ever,
thy glory for e’er and aye.
Hallelujah!
27
Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 85 – 89, and Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 123 – 27.
28
Translated from the text of 4QPsf in Starcky, “Psaumes apocryphe,” 356 – 57 (Plate XIII).
428 Part 2: Qumran
Bibliography
Ackroyd, Peter R. “Notes and Studies.” JTS 17 (1966) 396 – 99.
Brownlee, William H. “Le livre grec d’Esther et la royauté divine: Corrections orthodoxes
au livre d’Esther.” RB 73 (1966) 161 – 85.
Brownlee, William H. “The Scroll of Ezekiel from the Eleventh Qumran Cave.” RevQ 4
(1963) 11 – 28.
Brownlee, William H. “The Significance of David’s Compositions.” RevQ 5 (1966) 569 –
74.
Eissfeldt, Otto. The Old Testament: An Introduction, translated by Peter R. Ackroyd.
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Genesis Apocryphon of Qumran Cave 1 (1Q20): A Commentary.
Biblica et Orientalia 18. Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1966.
Text.” Textus 5 (1966) 22 – 33.
Gunkel, Hermann, and Joachim Begrich. Einleitung in die Psalmen: Die Gattungen der
religiösen Lyrik Israels. HKAT. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1933. ET: In-
troduction to Psalms: The Genres of the Religious Lyric of Israel. Macon, GA: Mercer
Hurvitz, Avi. “The Identification of Post-Exilic Psalms by means of Linguistic Criteria.”
(In Hebrew). PhD diss., Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1967.
de Jonge, Marinus, and Adam S. van der Woude. “11Q Melchizedek and the New Testa-
ment.” NTS 12 (1966) 301 – 26.
Roberts, B. J. “The Old Testament Canon: A Suggestion.” BJRL 46 (1963) 164 – 78.
JTS 18 (1967) 183 – 85.
Sanders, James A. The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1967.
endon, 1965.
Sanders, James A. “The Scroll of Psalms (11QPss) from Cave 11: A Preliminary Report.”
BASOR 165 (1962) 11 – 15.
Schmidt, Hans. Das Gebet der Angeklagten im Alten Testament. BZAW 49. Berlin:
de Gruyter, 1928.
Skehan, Patrick W. “A Psalm Manuscript from Qumran (4QPsb).” CBQ 26 (1964) 313 – 22.
Starcky, Jean. “Psaumes apocryphes de la grotte 4 de Qumrân (4QPsf VII – X).” RB 73
(1966) 353 – 71.
Sundberg, Albert C., Jr. “The ‘Old Testament’: A Christian Canon.” CBQ 30 (1968)
143 – 55.
Sundberg, Albert C., Jr. “Towards a Revised History of the New Testament Canon.” SE 4
(1968) 452 – 61.
Talmon, Shemaryahu. Review of The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa), by
James A. Sanders. Tarbiz 37 (1967) 99 – 104.
van der Ploeg, J. P. M. “Fragments d’un manuscrit de Psaumes de Qumrân (11QPsb).”
RB 74 (1967) 408 – 12.
van der Ploeg, J. P. M.“Le Psaume XCI dans une recension de Qumrân.” RB 72 (1965)
210 – 17.
van der Ploeg, J. P. M. Le targum de Job de la grotte 11 de Qumrân (11QtgJob): Première
Communication. Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers, 1962.
van der Woude, Adam S. “Das Hiobtargum aus Qumran Höhle XI.” Congress Volume:
Bonn 1962, by IOSOT, 322 – 32. VTSup 9. Leiden: Brill, 1963.
van der Woude, Adam S. “Melchisedek als himmlische Erlösergestalt in den neugefunden
eschatologischen Midraschim aus Qumran Höhle XI.” OtSt 14 (1965) 354 – 73.
Yadin, Yigael. “The Temple Scroll.” In New Directions in Biblical Archaeology, edited by
David Noel Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, 156 – 66. Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1971.
25
The Modern History of the Qumran Psalms Scroll
and Canonical Criticism
At its 2001 annual meeting, the international Society of Biblical Literature cel-
ebrated the completion of the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was a gala
occasion with a sense of the miraculous hovering over the some three hundred
who attended. In the previous five decades eight volumes of the Discoveries in
the Judaean Desert series had been published, but during the last decade twen-
ty-eight more have appeared. Emanuel Tov, Magnes Professor of Hebrew Bible
at the Hebrew University, made the difference. In 1990 Tov became the fourth
chief editor of the international team charged with the publications, following
Roland de Vaux, Pierre Benoit, and John Strugnell. Tov increased the team from
twenty scholars to over sixty. Five further volumes are in the pipeline at the
present, which will complete publication of thirty-nine volumes of the scrolls in
the DJD series, over nine hundred ancient texts all told. Reference volumes will
follow.
Tov’s address on the occasion was stunning. It was a tell-all, detailed history of
publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls from his standpoint, and as only he with his
intimate knowledge of the last phases of the enterprise could tell it.1 It was a kind
of oral history of the sort Sterling Van Wagnenen, Weston Fields, and others have
recently been collecting from the earlier generation of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars.
One weeps over the lost, unpublished records that have languished in widows
“and heirs” attics, when the source of the most intimate kind of knowledge has
been totally lost in the deaths of those who failed to complete their work, or who
were too modest to publish their memories of what really happened. This is all
the more poignant in the case of the Qumran scrolls about which much uncon-
scionable nonsense has been published and said simply because there was lack
of access to most of them for so long, not only to the scrolls but also to the real
histories swept away by death and personal modesty. That situation has changed
dramatically in the past ten years since open access has been the policy rather
than the exception to much of the world’s information, through the internet and
through the fall of walls of separation and discrimination around the world. It
seems appropriate to honor Tov’s own openness, as well as labors of the past
ten years, by offering a tell-all, modern history of the Dead Sea Psalms Scroll
(11QPsa = 11Q5).

1
See Hershel Shanks’s interview of Tov: Shanks, “Chief Scroll Editor.”
The Modern History of the Qumran Psalms Scroll and Canonical Criticism 431
Tov’s Address
In his address Tov mentioned that the tendency early on to give names to the
scrolls documents as they appeared meant that some might not finally be the
most appropriate. He then gave examples, one of which was the Psalms Scroll
from Qumran Cave 11. He explained that assigning numbers instead of titles
obviated the problem, and that has been the practice recently. Tov was, of course,
right both that early titles usually endure, and that they can be problematic. One
thinks of “Manual of Discipline,” “Job Targum,” “Wiles of a Wicked Woman,”
and “Temple Scroll.” The situation is true in archaeology generally. When a find
on a dig comes to light, it needs to be discussed by the team and is therefore given
a name or tag of some sort to be referred to, sometimes that very evening when
the day’s work is assessed. Often a name hastily bequeathed becomes the name
that appears in eventual publication.
In the case of the Psalms Scroll, a change was made from the siglum I gave
it in the first two publications. The preliminary report referred to the scroll as
11QPss.2 The editor of BASOR at the time, William F. Albright, made no com-
ment in correspondence about the designation but, on the contrary, ran the arti-
cle as received in the next available issue, which appeared the following spring
while we were still in Jerusalem. The second article issuing from work on the
scroll during the 1961 – 62 winter of recovery in Jerusalem was titled “Ps. 151 in
11QPss.”3 It was not until the third article appeared that I used the more specific
siglum, 11QPsa.4 This came partly out of a conversation with William Brownlee,
but the subtle change in sigla indicated my growing sense that the scroll had been
viewed at Qumran as “canonical” despite its differences from the much later
masoretic Psalter. And thereon hangs a tale.
The Psalms Scroll
During the summer of 1959 I was a member of a New York University seminar
in Israel. After the six-week course I crossed through the Mandelbaum Gate
from Israeli Jerusalem to the Arab Old City where I was expected at the Amer-
ican School of Oriental Research (ASOR, later to be renamed The Albright
Institute) on Salah ed-Dhin Street, north of Herod’s Gate. I had not known
that Frank Cross would be there. He was in Jerusalem along with others of the
Cave 4 team of scholars working on the lots of fragments assigned to each. I was
very pleased to see him at the ASOR that night at dinner. We had met a couple of
years earlier, before he left McCormick Seminary in Chicago in 1958 to succeed
Robert Pfeiffer at Harvard. We had a good conversation at the table, then later he
2
Sanders, “Scroll of Psalms: Preliminary Report.”
3
4
Sanders, “Two Non-Canonical Psalms.”
432 Part 2: Qumran
asked if I would like to accompany him to the Palestine Archaeological Museum

nearby the next morning. I, of course, accepted with delight.
I shall never forget the visit to the museum that morning. After Cross had
introduced me to other members of the team he took me to his table in “the
scrollery.” While there he picked up a fragment with tweezers and asked if I
would identify it. I read it off. It was a portion of Jeremiah 8. I think now that he
was impressed. I was not. I had earned the PhD from the Hebrew Union College
in Cincinnati four years earlier, and my feeling was that if I could not read that
beautiful script I should return the degree! The major emphasis at HUC was and
is reading text, whether Akkadian, Ugaritic, Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek. Many
texts, daily. Reading about the sources was also required, but nothing substituted
for reading original texts.
Still it was a stunning surprise a year later when Cross called my home in
Rochester, New York to ask if I would be interested in going to Jerusalem to
unroll one of the scrolls recovered from Cave 11. I shall never in my life forget
that moment. I, of course, said I would. Other factors made a good fit. I was
planning a year’s sabbatical leave from my post at the Colgate Rochester Divin-
ity School for 1961 – 62, and Cross said that would work fine. I was applying
for a Guggenheim Fellowship for the year, and Cross said he would write a rec-
ommendation. I had applied to be Annual Professor at the ASOR anyway, and
Cross agreed to put in a word there as well.
I pause here to offer my understanding of the politics of selection. Consider-
able amounts of money had been taken from the Palestine Archaeological Muse-
um’s endowment to secure the manuscripts of Caves 4 and 11 from the Ta’amri
bedouin of the area where they were found. Donations were sought from Euro-
pean governments and from American philanthropists to refurbish the endow-
ment of the museum, which at that point was privately owned and endowed
largely by Rockefeller family money.5 The Cave 11 Job Targum, for instance,
was financed by monies from the Netherlands, the sources of which then had the
right to appoint the scholars to work on it. The Psalms Scroll was financed by
Kenneth and Elizabeth Bechtel of San Francisco, who stipulated that the scholar
appointed to unroll and prepare the scroll for publication should be American.
Père Roland de Vaux, the head of the École Biblique Française in Jerusalem,
president at the time of the museum, the Qumran archaeologist, and the “chef
de travail” of the international team working on the massive Cave 4 fragments,
asked Cross to appoint the American. He added the stipulation that the one
appointed should not be Roman Catholic. De Vaux was sensitive already at that
time to the criticism that there were too many Catholics working on the scrolls
in Jordanian Jerusalem. The two stipulations narrowed the field of choice for
Cross.
5
The museum was nationalized by the Jordanian government early May 1967, just before
the Six-Day War, so that when Israel assumed responsibility for it the next month it came under
the authority of the Department of Antiquities of the State of Israel, now the Israel Antiquities
Authority.
Unrolling the Scroll

I departed by ship from New York in September 1961. I had not known it, but
the USS Constitution to Naples that trip was to be a cruise as well as passenger
ship. That gave me plenty of time to reread and practically memorize the mas-
oretic Psalter (in BHK) during the nearly two weeks on board ship. Before I
sailed I visited with Cross about the assignment, and read everything I could find
about how to unroll an ancient scroll. Then when I arrived in Beirut (on the USS
Excalibur from Naples) I consulted with Abbé Milik and with Abbé Starcky at
the École Française there about the task ahead. I had to schlep my gear for the
year by “service” taxi down from Beirut through Damascus and Amman, then
across to Jordanian Jerusalem. There I took up residence as Annual Professor of
the American School for 1961 – 62. Paul Lapp, who had been Acting Director the
previous year, was now the Director. I was alone at that point; Dora and our six-
year-old son, Robin David, would not arrive until spring.
Since the Jordanian Department of Antiquities had not yet issued the official
release of the scroll for unrolling and study, I spent most of the first seven weeks
at the ASOR functioning as Annual Professor (AP). I led archaeological visits to
various important sites in the area for the appointed fellows that year, and served
as AP on a three-week tour led by Lapp, up through Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon
to Turkey and back. Those were the Kennedy years in Near Eastern relations,
the halcyon days of recent history for Americans. We were welcomed every-
where we went. Finally, not long after our return to Jerusalem, official permis-
sion was received in early November from the Jordanian Department of Antiq-
uities in Amman to begin work on the scroll.
On November the 10th I was escorted by de Vaux, Lapp, and Yusef Saʾad, the
secretary of the museum, into the individual lab room that I was assigned in the
museum. It was ample enough in size and looked out three large windows to the
east facing the Mount of Olives and Mount Scopus. There was a built-in table-
shelf that ran the length of the room under the windows. It was covered in clean,
brown wrapping paper. There was an oil-burning stove with a kettle in one cor-
ner of the room, a humidifier, and a camel-hair brush on a small desk with chair
in another. Saʾad brought the scroll, which was in a Jordanian shoe box, from the
Museum vault into the room. De Vaux formally handed it to me, whereupon the
three gentlemen rather somberly backed out of the room and left me to my task.
By their body language they made it clear that either I successfully unrolled the
scroll, or it would unroll me! I was thirty-three years old, but looked considerably
younger. I am sure some were wondering why Frank Cross had sent a kid over to
do a man’s job. In fact, I apparently put them in mind of the young John Allegro
of the Cave 4 team, who only a few years earlier had distinguished himself rather
negatively, in their minds, to the point that Saʾad did not permit Najib Albina, the
museum photographer, to take a photo of myself with the scroll. There is none.6
6
This is the reason that when recently George Brooke of Manchester, who was preparing
a photographic history of the DSS, asked me for a photo of myself with the scroll, I could not
supply him with one.
434 Part 2: Qumran
Left alone in the room I turned to the table under the windows, where the box
lay, and fell to my knees with the prayer that I do as well as I possibly could and
not disappoint or embarrass Frank Cross. When I extracted the scroll from the
box it was daunting, to say the least. Covered in ancient bat dung and caked mud,
it gave an odor that my nose was to live with rather intimately the next ten days.
De Vaux had estimated from the way it looked that it might take three to six
months to unroll. The camel-hair brush helped somewhat in dusting it off, but I
had to borrow a pen-knife from Prof. William Reed, who was also at the ASOR
at the time. One third of the scroll had decomposed during its two-millennia res-
idence in the floor of Cave 11, so that one end was black and hard as ebony. Some
winters during those two thousand years would have had a bit more rainfall than
others, even at 1200 feet below sea level in the stark desert on the northwest
shorewastes of the Dead Sea. It had been found in February 1956 in the floor
of the cave with one end partly buried. The decomposed skin had turned into
a mucous substance that when dried hardened into a very imporous substance,
like black ivory. The skin itself was thick enough that de Vaux thought it possibly
was bovine in origin, rather than ovine or capric like most of the scrolls. DNA
analysis has recently indicated that some of the animal skins were from the ibex,
which might account for the scroll’s thickness.
Day after day I chipped away at the ebony one skin thickness at a time until
I had all five sheets, plus the separable leaves and fragments that had been on the
outer layers of the scroll, under square glass panes on the long table. All told
there were almost fourteen feet of scroll under glass, with an average width (the
length of a column) of over six inches of the extant scroll.7 Albina and I are the
only humans in modern times who have seen the linen threads that linked the
five sheets of skin. By the time I arrived each morning they had disintegrated
into dust. The scroll had been rolled so tightly by its last reader that the threads
were amazingly well preserved until exposure. This accounts as well, I am sure,
for how well the scroll itself was preserved. The DJD and Cornell edition photos
show that quite well. The writing surface has discolored deeply since I first saw it
forty years ago. The outside leaves had probably been part of a sixth sheet at the
beginning of the extant scroll. The top margin of each column in the scroll was
well preserved while about a third of each column was lost in the decomposed
part at the bottom. As I worked I catalogued, and carefully put all the tiny chips
of ebony in the clean cigarette boxes provided by the museum, but I am morally
certain that I lost nothing legible on the scroll that had been handed me. Even so,
loss of a few letters would have been worth recovering the whole scroll for study
after two thousand years. On the morning of the tenth day, November the 20th,
I had arrived at the last sheet deep inside the tightly rolled scroll. It was so tight
that I was having difficulty with it.
7
The exact data can be found in Sanders, “Psalms Scroll,” in Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea
Scrolls.
I had had to use the humidifier only a few times up to then. The point of
the humidifier was to mollify the skin in order to render it supple and pliable
enough to open, but not so much as to cause it to discolor. The glass instrument
had two chambers with a narrow neck between the upper and lower. There was
a sponge to moisten and put in the lower chamber, a screen to put at the neck,
and a lid to cover the top. The scroll would lie on the screen in the top chamber.
De Vaux warned me not to leave it in the humidifier for more than twenty min-
utes at a time. The tenth and last morning, however, I could see that leaving it in
the humidifier for longer periods would not be enough. It would not yield and
lunch time was approaching. So I decided that I would put the kettle on the stove
and leave it for the length of time it would take me to run over to the Ameri-
can School, eat lunch, and run back. I had not told anyone about the progress
I was making during those ten days, nor did I at the table that noon. I certainly
did not tell anyone what I had just done! I knew that de Vaux would be very
upset; he had warned me against doing anything of the sort. When I returned,
the lab room was comfortably warm and humid, but nothing was amiss. I care-
fully chipped away at the bottom edge of the last rolled sheet, which gradually
yielded its treasures. I finally had it all under glass. It formed an arc due to the
drawn, black bottom edge of the sheets, and the table-shelf was the right length
and width for all of it.
On the eleventh morning at about 11:00 a. m. Albina, as was his custom,
brought his photographic equipment into the room. Albina, a Palestinian Chris-
tian, was an artist. Everyone who has worked with his photographs says he was
expert. He knew when the morning sun through those windows would be at its
best angle for exposing infra-red film, the medium he used. Infra-red increases
the contrast between the carbon-based ink on the scroll and the color of the skin
on which it was written. I could read the bottoms of the columns through the
blackened skin better in the prints than on the leather. I worked all winter with
his photographs, mainly in the library at the École Biblique. They were easier to
read than the actual scroll. I would return to the museum only to check to see if
a black dot was scribal or verminous, or for some similar concern.
Publication
Thereafter I worked rather steadily at the job of studying the scroll to prepare
it for publication. It was so beautifully preserved on the inside that I had been
able to read it as I unrolled it, column by column. I then worked on the pho-
tos, mostly at the École Biblique, a few blocks away, because it had one of the
best libraries for biblical and archaeological study, if not the best, in the world.
Without the family at that point I immersed myself in making sense of the scroll.
The École library had a special card-catalogue index to every critical study ever
published for every verse of the Bible. It is now digitized, of course, but it was
paper-published in the 1980s even before it became accessible by computer, and
hence available to all scholars. But back then it was available only at the École in
436 Part 2: Qumran
Jerusalem. It was because of those index cards that I was able to identify Pss 154
and 155 in the scroll, almost as soon as I started work on them.8 During that
winter I twice read papers critically assessing the contents of the scroll for small
gatherings in the American School library, gatherings of Western scholars from
the French and British Schools, which were also situated at that time east of the
wall separating the two Jerusalems. The first paper was on Ps 151 and the second
on Pss 154 and 155, both later published in the ZAW.9 By the time of the second
ZAW article in 1964, I had settled on the siglum 11QPsa as more apt than 11QPss.
A number of other apparently deviant biblical texts had already been published
that used the alphabetic sequential sigla. But more than that, there was and is no
firm evidence of a truly proto-MT Psalter before the second century CE. On the
contrary, there is literary evidence of later ancient Psalters with up to 200 psalms.
The Associated Press ran a very short public notice from Amman in early
February 1962 stating that the scroll had been unrolled and was being studied in
Jerusalem. The New York Times picked up on it and sent their correspondent,
Dana Adams Schmidt, resident in Beirut at the time, down to Jerusalem for an
interview. He cut a rather avuncular figure and put me completely at ease. One
question he asked was what it took to unroll an ancient scroll. I told him the
story above. When I had finished, he asked if that was all. I realized that my
answer did not sound like high science, so I responded by saying, “That, and
guts.” I had in mind the Yiddish word, chutzpah, and should have said “gall”
perhaps. In his article, published on the front page of The Times of 8 March 1962,
he wrote, “Professor Sanders says all it takes to unroll an ancient scroll is a cam-
el-hair brush, a humidifier, a pen knife, and guts.” I was often teased about it. It
apparently became a “College Bowl” quiz question on the radio the following
year, and was included still later in a book of quotations.
After our return to the States in the summer of 1962, I continued to work
preparing the editio princeps of the whole scroll. The administration and faculty
in Rochester were very supportive, as was my family, assisting in many ways.
When I had completed the first draft I took it to the homes of the three scholars
I knew would be most helpful: Frank Cross (at Harvard), John Strugnell (then
at Duke), and Patrick William Skehan (at Catholic University). I showed each
all the sections to that point, but they were especially helpful in particular areas:
Cross the palaeographic section; Strugnell the apparatus to each psalm; and Ske-
han the non-masoretic psalms. I have thanked them in print several times, but
feel I can never express gratitude enough to them, and fortunately two of them
8
I identified Ps 151 because I had read it in the Septuagint as a student, and it was when
looking up literature on it that I saw Martin Noth’s work in the ZAW of 1930 on the Five Syr-
iac Psalms preserved in the fly leaves of a Syrian bishop’s Book of Discipline (Noth, “Die fünf
syrisch überlieferten apokryphen Psalmen.”). Noth’s work in retroverting the Syriac to Hebrew
was so close to the original now available in the scroll that I sent the MSS of the two articles,
Sanders, “Scroll of Psalms: Preliminary Report” and Sanders, “Ps. 151 in 11QPss,” to the ZAW.
The numbering of the five as Ps 151 to 155 comes from a twelfth-century Syriac biblical MS
from Mosul (Mosul 1113), of which P. A. H. de Boer graciously provided me photos before their
publication by the Peshitta Institute in Leiden.
9
See Sanders, “Ps. 151 in 11QPss”; Sanders, “Two Non-Canonical Psalms.”
are still alive. They were very generous and helpful. The point is that none of
them disagreed with the new siglum.
I mailed the draft manuscript for DJD 4 [The Psalms Scroll of Cave 11
(11QPsa)] to Oxford in January 1963, and the volume was published in 1965.
Even so, I had not yet directly addressed the issue of the canonical status of the
scroll at Qumran, or of the Psalter itself at that point in early Judaism; nor did
any of them raise the issue directly. I had, however, been attempting to gather
the data necessary to do so. Not only was Skehan helpful with the manuscript of
DJD 4, he was also very generous with transcriptions of his lot of Cave 4 frag-
ments of Psalms. So was van der Ploeg of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, one of
the scholars appointed by the Dutch government to work on Cave 11 materials.
Van der Ploeg sent me all the information he had about other materials from
Cave 11, as did Yigael Yadin about Psalms fragments he had from Masada. As a
result, “Pre-Masoretic Psalter Texts” was published in the same year as DJD 4.10
I continued to work on and improve that list, which was a catalogue and index
of all known texts of biblical psalms, and included it in the Cornell edition of the
Psalms Scroll two years later [The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll]. In the light of such
evidence, I simply could not bring myself to call the Qumran Psalms Scroll a
liturgical collection of psalms derived from an already canonical, single Jewish
Psalter. That was Skehan’s position.11 We stayed in close touch through all the
debates and he would send me MSS of his work in advance, plus two copies of
them when published (“one to throw darts at” he would graciously say).
Elizabeth Hay Bechtel expressed continuing interest in the scroll. She invited
us to San Francisco, where she lived, to address the City Club there in 1963, and
often came to visit us, first in Rochester and then in New York City where we
moved in 1965. She was supportive of the scholarly work on the scroll, but was
very interested in a second edition that would be more accessible to lay folk.
Before we arrived in July 1965 at Union Theological Seminary in New York,
where I was invited to join the faculty, I had set to work on what I thought and
hoped would satisfy her wish but also afford me the opportunity to address
issues that had arisen from discussions of the early articles published, and from
reviews of DJD 4. Henry Detweiler, president of the American Schools of Ori-
ental Research at the time, and a dean of the school of architecture at Cornell
University, also in upstate New York, suggested that I submit the second manu-
script to Cornell University Press, which I did. It was published in 1967.12 That
edition included Fragment E, a fifth separable leaf from the front of the scroll,
which Yadin had published in Textus 5 in 1966, as well as the improved version of
the catalogue and index to all pre-masoretic Psalter texts, which had appeared in
1965 in CBQ.13 The Cornell edition also has improvements in the apparatus and
10
Sanders, “Pre-Masoretic Psalter Texts.”
11
See, e. g., his argument in Skehan, “Liturgical Complex.”
12
Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll.
13
Sanders, “Pre-Masoretic Psalter Texts.” Yadin wired me on New Year’s Eve in 1965 to
inform me of his forthcoming publication of Fragment E in Textus 5 (Yadin, “Another Frag-
ment”). I was stunned. Here is another case of possibly valuable information lost because so far
438 Part 2: Qumran
notes to the non-masoretic psalms in the scroll, in which I attempted to respond

to the various critiques of the early articles and of the Oxford edition.14 It also
provided translations from the Syriac of Pss 152 and 153, lacking in the Hebrew
scroll.
In Textus 5 (1966) there were three responses to work on the scroll to that
point: Yadin’s publication of Fragment E, a response by Shemaryahu Talmon to
my reading of Ps 151, and a challenge by Moshe Goshen-Gottstein. The chal-
lenge was that I had not in the DJD volume addressed the issue of canonicity.
He was right, but in the Cornell edition, written before I had seen Textus 5, I
did so.15 I had thought long and hard about the issue and could not bring myself
to assume, as the older generation apparently did, that the Psalter as we know
it in the much later MT had already been “canonized” for all Judaism. By that
time, Jack Lewis had published his study of all references to Yavneh / Jamnia and
uncertainty about the stabilization of the Ketuvim was in the air.16 What we had
in hand was a magnificent exemplar of a Psalter from the mid-first century CE,
and a number of fragments of Psalms from Cave 4, which also cast doubt on
such an assumption. There simply was no evidence that I could see to view the
Psalms Scroll as somehow derivative of an already set Psalter; there were only
old assumptions that, in my view, were being called into question in various
ways. Further, Yadin informed me that he thought the Temple Scroll, also from
Cave 11, was probably viewed as canonical at Qumran.17 It seemed to me that
the scrolls generally were calling many old assumptions into question, and this
one in particular. To substantiate the observation, in the same year that the Cor-
nell edition appeared, JBL published my first attempt at cataloguing all publica-
tions of scroll materials to that point.18
as I know Yadin never revealed from whom he had obtained the fragment, other than to say that
it was an anonymous American who wished to remain so. Those were the days of cloak-and-
dagger secrecy surrounding the Scrolls, and I assumed at the time that Yadin would tell me what
he could when he could. He never did. Given where it seems to fit in the scroll, just before col. 1
beneath the first four separable leaves, I am still puzzled because the fragment would have had
to be within the folds of leather under the first four fragments which I had had to pry loose from
the dung-encased crust on the outside. See the discussion with references and dates in Sanders,
Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 155 – 59.
14
This has not been noted by most scholars, who apparently took the Cornell edition to be
merely a popularization of the Oxford. Actually, I tried to answer, in Dead Sea Psalms Scroll,
93 – 117, the objections scholars had had to my readings of Ps 151 and of the Sirach canticle in
col. 21, but I have seen very few references at all to the Cornell volume in the scholarly literature
since. [Nor indeed during the years since!]
15
16
Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?” and a review of discussions it has engendered in
Lewis, “Jamnia after Forty Years.”
17
See Yadin, Temple Scroll, 390 – 92.
18
Sanders, “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1967.” This was supplemented by Sanders, “Pal-
estinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1972.” Since those efforts, Fitzmyer published two editions of Dead
Sea Scrolls: Major Publications and Tools, in 1975 and 1990, so that I could with confidence turn
my attention elsewhere. I understand that he intends to update his lists even though it is a con-
siderably more daunting task at this point. [See Fitzmyer, Guide.]
In the meantime, Ted Campbell at McCormick Seminary in Chicago asked

me to contribute an article to a 1968 McCormick Seminary publication he was
editing. I decided it was time to try again. Abbé Starcky had just published some
Cave 4 Psalter fragments that also included non-masoretic psalms and a different
order of the masoretic ones, two characteristics of 11QPsa that raised the ques-
tions about its canonical status.19 I had become convinced that the new path had
to be explored.20 That new path, I clearly saw, could not be limited to the param-
eters of earlier discussions. I became interested in the whole issue of authoritative
community traditions and Scriptures, how they arose, and how they functioned
in ancient communities. I was trying to gather and share all the data I could
assemble to make informed decisions.21
Further Probes
In 1968 I received two invitations that I accepted because I knew they would
help explore the issue further. The one was from W. D. Davies and Louis Finkel-
stein, who had been asked to edit a multivolume Time-Life illustrated edition of
the Bible, to write the introduction to the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible (HB).
The other was from Eugene Nida, who was forming a research group sponsored
by the United Bible Societies (of New York, London, and Stuttgart) to be called
the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project (HOTTP), and to be a companion to
the one he had formed for The Greek New Testament Project in 1955. The six
members of the HOTTP, plus assistants, met for a month annually from 1969
to 1980 in Germany.22 We dealt with almost 6,000 textual problems through-
out the HB, produced five volumes of a preliminary report on our work, and
have so far published three volumes of the final report authored by Dominique
Barthélemy.23 Having to deal in depth with the textual peculiarities of all the
19
Starcky, “Psaumes apocryphes,” 356 – 57 (Pl. XIII).
20
See Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises,” which was reprinted in three later collections of essays
on the scrolls and on the issue of canon, by different scholars interested in the same question.
21
See Sanders, “Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter Century,” in which I tried to give an overview
of all the scrolls recovered from all provenances, and to address the issue of canon.
22
The six were Dominique Barthélemy, Hans Peter Rüger, Norbert Lohfink,
W. D. McHardy, A. R. Hulst, and myself. All but two years we met in the Erholungsheim in
Freudenstadt. We agreed to participate if we were permitted also to work out and publish a her-
meneutic and method in textual criticism that we deemed indicated by the new situation caused
by recent manuscript discoveries, especially the scrolls. The UBS, including the Württember-
gische Bibelanstalt in Stuttgart, agreed, and the final result will be BHQ. See Sanders, “Hebrew
University Bible and Biblia Hebraica Quinta.”
23
Barthélemy, Preliminary and Interim Report. Three volumes of the final report have ap-
peared with the fourth, on the Psalter, in the press: Barthélemy, Critique textuelle. The intro-
ductions to CTAT are rich in discussions of the whole history of the transmission of the text
from antiquity to the latest critical studies, but are seldom referred to in scholarly literature; see
Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism,” and Sanders, “Hebrew University Bible and Biblia
Hebraica Quinta.” In the few that have made reference to it, one comment has been made that
we dealt with only scattered problems. And yet they represent the most problematic texts in
440 Part 2: Qumran
books of the HB gave us a comprehensive perspective on the effect of the scrolls

on the varying textual situations of all the books of the HB. The hermeneutic
being pursued by Biblia Hebraica Quinta, the fifth volume in the Biblia Hebra-
ica series of critical texts of the HB that started in 1902, is based on the work of
the HOTTP.24
I wrote the introduction for the Time-Life project, which was, however, aban-
doned in 1971. I then sent the manuscript I had generated for it to Fortress Press,
which published it in 1972 as Torah and Canon. In it I tried to deal with how
and why canons arose, and how early oral traditions that later became part of
the Jewish canon had already functioned authoritatively, like later Scripture in
early Jewish communities, which gave shape to the Torah and the Prophets.25
This was followed soon thereafter by a study probing canon as function in order
to respond to ensuing discussions. The presidential address to the Society of
Biblical Literature in November 1978 then probed the relation between text and
canon, and how study in each discipline had changed since the discovery of the
scrolls.26 This was followed by other studies pressing the relationship.27 It was
important to find the interface between the move in early Judaism from oral and
textual fluidity to textual stability, and the move from authoritative oral tradi-
tions to later fixed canons. Work in this area continues.28
Comparative Midrash and the Canonical Process
Seeking that interface as well as the relation between text and canon created the
sub-discipline called comparative midrash. It is important to trace the Nachle-
ben of early oral traditions and of nascent Scripture through the literature of
early Judaism, including early Christian and even Tannaitic literature, in order
to discern the forms and function of citations and allusions, just as we had tried
the HB and gave the committee a comprehensive perspective on the textual situation of all the
books of the HB. Our mandate was to provide assistance to modern translation committees
throughout the world who often do exactly what ancient translators did, follow already extant
translations for difficult textual problems. We have provided critical in-depth studies to each
problem treated in order to break that cycle, which is evident in modern scholarship as well. In
addition, the lengthy introductions provide extensive studies of the whole discipline of textual
criticism unavailable elsewhere. Not only so, but every textual problem will indeed be treated
in the forthcoming BHQ apparatus and in the accompanying critical commentaries to each
biblical book.
24
BHQ should be published by 2006. The first Biblia Hebraica was published in 1902 and
the fourth, BHS, in 1972. See Sanders, “Keep Each Tradition Separate.”
25
Sanders, Torah and Canon, went into eleven printings before it was remaindered. [A sec-
ond edition was published by Cascade in 2005.]
26
27
Sanders, Canon and Community; and Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text. These
are also available through Wipf & Stock.
28
Note the bibliographies attached to Weis and Carr, Gift of God in Due Season, 274 – 85;
and Evans and Talmon, Quest for Context and Meaning, xxv – xxxix.
to do in the preexilic and exilic biblical literature.29 It became clear that the two
were in fact the same exercise or function. Even the citations showed the same
kinds of fluidity, or lack of verbal “accuracy.” References in the earlier literature
to the exodus or Davidic or patriarchal stories exhibited “poetic license,” so to
speak, but were clear enough that the point of the reference was not lost in doing
so. The adaptability of the text to ever-changing situations required a measure
of stability of reference to be effective. Early Jewish literature exhibits the same
adaptability-stability quotient.
Parallel work in textual criticism showed that the early history of transmis-
sion of the text of the pre-masoretic period was one of textual fluidity as well:
tradents could modify or adapt a passage cited to fit the later use not only in cita-
tions but also in translation and in copying; textual stability in this regard was
not clear until the proto-masoretic period beginning in the second century of
the common era. The focus of early tradents clearly was in getting their commu-
nities to understand the text, copied, translated, or cited, in their later contexts.
The focus of the later tradents in the proto-masoretic period shifted to textual
accuracy. The Judean Desert Scrolls have made this point abundantly clear, and
it resonated well with the move in Greek translations from the fluidity of early
Greek translations (the so-called Septuagint) to the stability and even rigidity of
the second century CE Greek translations.30 It was clear that there were many
pseudo-variants in the pre-masoretic MSS and translations, unrelated to distinct
Vorlage, due to the earlier tradents’ freedom to focus on community understand-
ing instead of on verbal accuracy.
The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever provided, according to
Barthélemy, the missing link between the fluidity ˙ and˙ the stability.31 Something
must have happened in the basic Jewish hermeneutic, or understanding of the
nature of the text, evidenced in both textual transmission and in textual citations.
The basic understanding or hermeneutic of the text of Scripture shifted from an
early shamanistic or dynamic understanding of the inspiration or provenance of
the text generally, to a view of the text as verbally inspired, and hence no longer
textually adaptable to new situations.32 The view of literal inspiration of Scrip-
ture followed very soon. The rise of the Tannaitic and rabbinic middot about
the same time give testimony as well to the shift.33 Tradents could no longer
slightly modify or adapt a passage of Scripture to make its message clear, but they
could and did engage in all sorts of midrashic techniques to render the stable text
29
See Sanders, Torah and Canon; Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method”; Sand-
ers, Canon and Community; Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text.
30
See Martin Hengel’s very helpful survey of Greek textual fluidity in Septuagint as Chris-
tian Scripture, 43, 86, 89, et passim.
31
Barthélemy, “Redécouverte d’un chaînon manquant.” This was more fully developed in
Les devanciers d’Aquila. See the critical praise of Barthélemy’s work in Tov’s full edition of the
Dodecapropheton in Greek Minor Prophets Scroll, ix, and throughout the volume.
32
The thesis of Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts and Method,” pursued in Sanders,
“Stability and Fluidity.”
33
See Sanders, “Issue of Closure.”
442 Part 2: Qumran
adaptable and relevant in commentaries to the on-going believing communities.

All this was happening precisely in the crisis period of Roman occupation and
then destruction of Palestinian Jewish institutions.
Comparative midrash developed out of the basic meaning of the term “mid-
rash,” probed by Renée Bloch, followed by Roger Le Déaut.34 The focus was on
midrash as function in early believing communities rather than on the literary
form of the later rabbinic midrashim. The question was how a passage cited or
alluded to functioned in the literature where the reference occurred. The ques-
tion generated the hermeneutic triangle, that is, appreciation of the importance
of three basic factors necessary to seek out in each case studied: (a) the passage
called upon or cited; (b) the socio-political situation of the community for whom
the new writing was intended; and (c) the hermeneutic of the tradent writing it
for that community.35 It applies to early fluid copies of Scripture, to translations
of Scripture, and to new literature based on it. All early Jewish literature was
written scripturally, that is, was based on or arose out of one or more scriptural
books or passages. The later writers knew to base what they had to say for and
to their communities on “Torah” or received Scripture, oral or written. If what
they had to say was important enough in their minds to share it, they told it in
scriptural terms and cadences. The critical triangle proved to be a sharp tool for
understanding this kind of canonical process through the early Jewish period.
It is also an antidote to the hermeneutic circle that entraps most readers of the
Bible, whereby they find in Scripture what their community already teaches
them is there.
Comparative midrash also developed a perspective on biblical intertextuality.
Scripture, even the earliest, is full of echoes, citations, and allusions to earlier
tradition and Scripture. Tradition in this sense would include ancient Near East-
ern literature resignified into biblical literature, creation myths, flood stories,
and the like. No two re-readings and re-applications are ever quite the same.
Each addressed different community needs when retold or rephrased. While it is
often very difficult to reconstruct what those needs were, the result when valid
is well worth the effort. When that is discerned then the hermeneutics, or under-
standing of the tradition, by which the resignification came about, is also dis-
cernable. There are three kinds of intertextuality: the interrelation of blocks of
text; the function of citations and allusions within a text; and the interrelation of
reader and text. When different texts are bound together by redactional activity
or canonical compression they tend to interact in the readings of the communi-
ties for which the binding was effected. A kind of chemistry emerges between
them. When earlier texts are cited or echoed in later writings they obviously
34
See Bloch, “Midrash,” and Le Déaut, “Apropos a Definition of Midrash.” The latter was
in part a response to Wright, Literary Genre Midrash, which opposed Bloch’s broader defini-
tions of “midrash.”
35
Despite the dramatic rise in interest in recent years in the Nachleben of Scripture in early
Judaism and early Christianity, rarely are the reprises of Scripture studied in the light of these
three basic factors. See, e. g., Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, whose focus is on “interpretation”
instead of on the crucial factors of socio-political situations and the hermeneutics used in them.
were intended by the tradent to function in some authoritative mode, and they
cast light on each other. And when a text is read, its own texture interacts with
the texture of the reader, and a kind of chemistry emerges between them as well.
Again, no two readings are ever exactly the same. Because this kind of activity
surrounded texts that made them into a canon, it is important to probe as much
of it as possible. Comparative midrash illumines the canonical process in early
Judaism and Christianity.36
When the debate about the status of the Psalms Scroll seemed to have abated,
an article and a dissertation were published in 1985 that reopened it.37 In
them, Gerald Wilson considerably supported the editor’s view of the status of
the scroll. Not long thereafter another dissertation appeared that provided an
in-depth analysis of all the Psalter manuscripts from Qumran, seeing the Psalms
Scroll as a Davidic Psalter designed to authenticate the solar calendar in use at
Qumran and elsewhere in early Judaism, and a marker on the path toward the
eventual MT‑150 Psalter.38 The Psalms Scroll, dating from the second quarter of
the first century of the common era, highlights both the textual and the canonical
fluidity of pre-masoretic biblical manuscripts. Due to the nature of the Psalter its
canonical fluidity is more in evidence perhaps than in the case of other books of
the Bible.39 It provides a road mark on the multi-track move toward the eventual
MT‑150 collection.40
Bibliography
Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982, 1986, 1992 [now
5 vols. to 2016].
Barthélemy, Dominique, et al., eds. Preliminary and Interim Report on the Hebrew Old
Barthélemy, Dominique. “Redécouverte d’un chaînon manquant de l’histoire de la Sep-
tante.” RB 60 (1953) 18 – 29.
36
The second type of intertextuality, that of reference to earlier tradition and literature,
has seven modes: (1) citation with formula; (2) citation without formula; (3) weaving familiar
phrases into the new composition; (4) paraphrasing; (5) allusion to persons and events of the
past; (6) echoes; (7) mimesis of literary structure. See Sanders, “Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical
Studies.” The canonical process is also described by Sæbø in On the Way to Canon.
37
Wilson, “Qumran Psalms Scroll Reconsidered,” and Wilson, Editing of the Hebrew Psalter.
38
Flint, Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls. The dissertation had been defended at Notre Dame in
1993. See the editor’s review, Sanders, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls, and Talmon, Re-
view of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls.
39
There are only a few fragments of Proverbs that were part of only two exemplars (4QPrva
and 4QPrvb). By contrast there are thirty-nine manuscripts of Psalters among hundreds of frag-
ments plus the Cave 11 Psalms Scroll.
40
See the incisive study of the multi-track canonical process in Carr, “Canonization in the
Context of Community.”
444 Part 2: Qumran

tion of the Tanakh and the Christian Bible.” In A Gift of God in Due Season: Essays on
Scripture and Community in Honor of James A. Sanders, edited by Richard D. Weis and
David M. Carr, 22 – 64. JSOTSup / LHBOTS 225. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996.
Evans, Craig A., and Shemaryahu Talmon, eds. The Quest for Context and Meaning: Stud-
ies in Biblical Intertextuality in Honor of James A. Sanders. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Dead Sea Scrolls: Major Publications and Tools for Study. Atlanta:
Scholars, 1975 – 77. Revised ed., 1990. [Fitzmyer, Joseph A. A Guide to the Dead Sea
Scrolls and Related Literature. Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature.
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.]
Brill, 1997.
Hengel, Martin. The Septuagint as Christian Scripture: Its Prehistory and the Problem of
Its Canon. Translated by Mark E. Biddle. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2002.
Kugel, James L. Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the
Common Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Lewis, Jack P. “Jamnia after Forty Years.” HUCA 70 – 71 (1999 – 2000) 233 – 59.
Noth, Martin. “Die fünf syrisch überlieferten apokryphen Psalmen.” ZAW 48 (1930) 1 – 23.
Sæbø, Magne. On the Way to Canon: Creative Tradition History in the Old Testament.
Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998.
Fortress, 1984.
Sanders, James A. “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Studies.” In “Shaʿarei Talmon”:
Studies in the Bible, Qumran, and the Ancient Near East Presented to Shemaryahu
Talmon, edited by Michael A. Fishbane and Emanuel Tov, with Weston W. Fields,
323 – 36. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992.
109 – 48.
Fortress, 1987.
(1999) 518 – 26.
Sanders, James A. “The Issue of Closure.” In The Canon Debate, edited by Lee M. Mc-
Donald and James A. Sanders, 252 – 66. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002.
Sanders, James A. “Keep Each Tradition Separate.” BRev 16, no. 4 (2000) 40 – 49, 58.
Sanders, James A. “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1967.” JBL 86 (1967) 431 – 40.
Sanders, James A. “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1972.” JJS 24 (1973) 74 – 83. Reprinted
aryahu Talmon, 401 – 13. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Sanders, James A. “Ps. 151 in 11QPss.” ZAW 75 (1963) 73 – 86.
Sanders, James A. “The Psalms Scroll.” In Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, edited by
Lawrence Schiffman and James C. VanderKam, 2:15 – 17. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2000.
endon, 1965.
W. Flint. DSD 6, no. 1 (1999) 84 – 89.
BASOR 165 (1962) 11 – 15.
Fortress, 1987.]
Cascade, 2005.]
Sanders, James A. “Two Non-Canonical Psalms in 11QPsa.” ZAW 76 (1964) 57 – 75.
Shanks, Hershel. “Chief Scroll Editor Opens Up: An Interview with Emanuel Tov.”
BAR 28, no. 3 (May 2002) 32 – 35, 62.
Skehan, Patrick W. “A Liturgical Complex in 11QPsa.” CBQ 35 (1973) 195 – 205.
Starcky, Jean. “Psaumes apocryphes de la grotte 4 de Qumrân (4QPsf VII – X).” RB 73
(1966) 353 – 71.
Talmon, Shemaryahu. Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms, by
Peter W. Flint. JBL 118 (1999) 545 – 47.
1985.
Wilson, Gerald H. “The Qumran Psalms Scroll Reconsidered: Analysis of the Debate.”
CBQ 47 (1985) 624 – 42.
Wright, Addison. The Literary Genre Midrash. Staten Island, NY: Alba, 1967.
Yadin, Yigael. “Another Fragment (E) of the Psalms Scroll from Qumran Cave 11
(11QPsa).” Textus 5 (1966) 1 – 10.
Yadin, Yigael. The Temple Scroll. 3 vols. Jerusalem: The Israel Exploration Society, 1983.
[Hebrew Version: K‫מגילת המקדׂש‬K. Tel Aviv: K‫ספרית מעריב‬
ִ K, 1990.]
26
Psalm 154 Revisited1
The recent publication of Qumran fragment 4Q448 (PAM 43.545) provides an

opportunity to review Syriac Psalm II = Ps 154.2 One recalls that this psalm was
first known to Enlightenment scholarship as the second of five psalms in Syriac
preserved as filler material in a Book of Discipline (ketaba dedurrasa) by the
tenth-century Nestorian Bishop Elijah of al-Anbar, found in a manuscript in
the Vatican catalogued by S. E. and J. S. Assemani in 1759.3 They have since been
published in several editions based on manuscripts in Cambridge, Berlin, Wood-
brooke, London, Rome, and Mosul / Baghdad.4 In 1972 the Peshitta Institute in
Leiden published the five psalms that have been found not only in the bishop’s
handbook but also in two biblical manuscripts, one of which is a twelfth-cen-
tury Nestorian Psalter (Mosul 1113).5 The latter manuscript (12t4) appends the
five psalms to the traditional 150 as Pss 151 to 155 (Syriac Ps I = Ps 151, II = 154,
III = 155, IV = 152, V = 153).
The finest work done before 11QPsa on Syr Pss II = 154, III = 155, and IV =
152, was that of Martin Noth in 1930.6 It was the writer’s privilege to honor
Professor Noth’s study and retroversions into Hebrew of Pss 154 and 155, pub-
lishing in the same journal the preliminary edition of their Hebrew texts from
11QPsa.7 After the first Qumran caves had been found and the Essene hypothesis
had been advanced, but before the Hebrew texts were published, Matthias Del-
cor, André Dupont-Sommer, and Marc Philonenko published studies advancing
the thesis that the Syriac psalms were Essene in origin, a point most students

1
It is an honor to offer the following study to Norbert Lohfink, my colleague since 1969 on
the United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text Project.
2
Eshel, Eshel, and Yardeni, “Composition from Qumran.”
3
Assemani and Assemani, Catalogus, 385 – 86.
4
Descriptions and locations of all extant Syriac MSS containing the five psalms are provided
in Baars, Apocryphal Psalms [III] – [VII], and in German by van der Woude, “Die fünf syrischen
Psalmen,” 31 – 33; see also Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 53.
5
Now located in the library of the Chaldean Patriarchate in Baghdad, designated 12t4; the
other biblical manuscript in which the five psalms have been found is MS Orient. Fol. 3122
found in the German State Library in Berlin, designated 19d1, where the psalms are appended
to a MS of the prophetic books after the colophon. The order of the five in the latter is the same
as in the MSS of the bishop’s handbook; only in 12t4 does the order vary, as described in the
following sentence above.
6
Noth, “Die fünf syrisch überlieferten apokryphen Psalmen.”
7
Sanders, “Two Non-Canonical Psalms.” Prof. Noth did not probe the fifth Syriac psalm, nor
did he treat LXX/Syr Ps 151 (Syriac Ps I) for obvious reasons; see Sanders, “Multivalent Text,”
and note the English translations of Pss 152 and 153 in Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 141–42.
Psalm 154 Revisited 447
since their Hebrew texts were published have disputed.8 Since the publication of
11QPsa there have been several important studies of the Hebrew text of Ps 154,
notably those by André Dupont-Sommer, John Strugnell, Mathias Delcor, Dieter
Lührmann, Jean Magne, Adam van der Woude, and Pierre Auffret.9 And now we
have a preliminary edition of the fragmentary 4Q448, which preserves the begin-
nings of three lines of text corresponding to Ps 154:17 – 20.10
The present revisitation will address issues arising from review of the above
studies and the new publication, principally the text itself.
4Q448
4Q448 is a single fragment, 9.5 cm in width and 17.8 cm in length. It is unusual

in two major respects: it has a leather tab attached on the right edge, typical of
the two manuscripts and some two hundred uninscribed fragments from Caves
4 and 8 having fortified holes to accommodate leather thongs for rolling up and
binding a scroll.11 The available fragment may be but the beginning of what had
been a lengthy scroll.12
Even more interesting is the fact that the fragment contains three columns of
text, one on the upper half of the leather written with ample spacing of letters
and words, and two parallel columns on the lower half written with less spacing.
The script, which is heavy cursive and may date to the middle of the first cen-
tury BCE, may possibly have been by the same hand but with some differences
caused perhaps by the scribe’s being conscious of the differing spacing.13 The
upper column, with the exception of the first line, is indented about 2.5 cm from
the leather clasp described above. The first line appears to be a superscription
and begins, in large letters, about 1.5 cm to the right of the right margin of the
rest of the upper column. The right of the two lower columns begins about 1 cm
directly below the left bottom edge of the fastening. The relation between the
8
Delcor, “Cinq nouveaux psaumes”; Delcor, Les hymnes de Qumran, 299 – 319; Du-
pont-Sommer, Les écrits esséniens; Philonenko, “L’origine essénienne.” They must nonetheless
be given credit for suggesting that they might be found in the Qumran library or collection. See
also Schneider, “Biblische Oden.”
9
Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 64 – 70. Dupont-Sommer, “Hébreu et Araméen,” 359 – 60; Strugnell,
“Notes on the Text”; Delcor, “Zum Psalter von Qumran”; Lührmann, “Ein Weisheitspsalm aus
Qumran”; Magne, “Le asaume 154”; van der Woude, “Die fünf syrischen Psalmen”; Auffret,
“Structure littéraire et interprétation du Psaume 154.” Note also Polzin, “Notes on the Dat-
ing”; Gurewicz, “Hebrew Apocryphal Psalms”; Sen, “Traducción y comentario del Salmo 154.”
10
See Eshel, Eshel, and Yardeni, “Composition from Qumran.”
11
See the discussion and drawings of scroll fastenings by Carswell, “Appendix I: Fastenings
on the Qumrân Manuscripts.”
12
Eshel, Eshel, and Yardeni, “Composition from Qumran,” 296. I am grateful to my col-
league, Professor Bruce Zuckerman, for use of an 8x10 transparency of a photograph of 4Q448
he and Ken Zuckerman personally made in the Rockefeller by permission of the Israel Antiqui-
ties Authority for the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center.
13
Eshel, Eshel, and Yardeni, “Composition from Qumran,” 317 – 24, with comparative pa-
laeographic drawings.
448 Part 2: Qumran
upper column of text and the two lower ones is not clear, while the two bottom
columns seem, according to the editors, to constitute a prayer for the well-being
of a “King Jonathan,” whom the editors identify as Alexander Jannaeus. The
reading and the identification are problematic.14
Psalm 154 in 4Q448
Be that as it may, our interest in the fragment is in the top or first column, the
last three lines of which appear to be the same as Ps 154:17 – 20 (11QPsa col. 18,
lines 14 – 16). The first line of col. 1 begins “Hallelujah, a Psalm of . . .,” and breaks
off at that point on the left edge of the fragment. This appears to be a super-
scription with the “Hallelujah” genre title familiar both in the MT Psalter and
at Qumran. The fourth line of the column appears to have no writing (vacat),
unless there was a deep indentation over 2.8 cm beyond the hanging indent of
lines 2 – 10. Each line beyond the first is from 2 to 4 cm long, and contains only
one to three words. Lines 8 to 10, the last three in the column, contain two to
three words each, for a total of seven, plus two initial letters discernible on the
left edge of lines 8 and 10. Those lines read thus:
Col. 1 Line
]. K‫ועל מפארו‬K (8
]K‫עני מיד צרי ִם‬K (9
]K‫מִש ִכנִ ִו בצי ִ ִוזִ ִב‬K (10
The text suggests four readings over against 11QPsa 154:17 – 20, as reconstructed.
The first is K‫מפארו‬K, indicating the singular rather than the plural: “one who glori-
fies him” rather than “those who glorify him.” Pace the editors, this would
appear not to be a true variant but simply an orthographic variation. The plural
fits the context as well as the singular.
The second is considerably more substantial and immediately acceptable, K‫צרים‬
K in the place of K‫זרים‬K, which I had read following Noth’s reconstruction from the
Syriac at that point, and on the basis of Ps 54:5. Only bare traces of the word are
14
Ibid., 314 – 17. Unfortunately, the name Jonathan, which the editors see in the lower col-
umn 2, line 2, and col. 3, 1.8, is not as clear as I am sure they would like it to be – even on the ex-
cellent transparency before me. The editors are aware of how problematic finding such a prayer
at Qumran would be, and discuss the anomaly if one subscribes to the regnant theory in which
most of the Qumran literature formed a discrete library of a Jewish community opposed to the
Hasmoneans and other authorities in Jerusalem. Rather than follow Norman Golb’s hypoth-
esis that it did not form a discrete library but was disparate literature gathered from Jerusalem
and hidden in the caves, the editors stress what many think who still hold to the library theory
(whether Essene or not) but insist that the acquisition policy, so to speak, permitted inclusion of
literature brought in from the outside by new members on joining the community. Further on
the Golb / Groningen debate see below, esp. Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 68 – 70, 79 – 85, and Sanders,
Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 108 – 9, 112 – 17.
visible on the bottom right edge of col. 18. Strugnell, followed by Lührmann,
read K‫זדים‬K.15
The third is a precious correction to the reconstructed text. In v. 20, totally
reconstructed from the Syriac, I followed Noth’s reading ‫ו‬K ‫אהל‬K. 4Q448 clearly hasK
‫םִש ִכנִ ִו‬K, the same word in the Syriac. Unfortunately, the accompanying verb is lost
at the end of the preceding line of col. 1 of the fragment. I reconstructed it as the
participle ‫ה‬K ‫נוט‬K, following the literary style in the hymnic last strophe of the Hebrew
poem, which Noth had not correctly perceived from the Syriac. I was followed in
this by Magne and Auffret. Strugnell did not address the matter. Lührmann aban-
doned the style of the Hebrew of the final strophe in v. 20 and reconstructed the
two verbs of the last verse as ‫ח‬K ‫יני‬K and ‫ה‬K ‫ויציב‬K.16 The editors of 4Q448 regrettably
suggest the finite verb ‫ה‬K ‫איו‬K for the first of the two, but quite plausibly the participle
‫ר‬K ‫בוח‬K for the second colon of the verse, based on their reading of the fragment.17
The sum of it is that 4Q448 has brought three felicitous corrections to the
reconstructed portions of the text of Hebrew Ps 154: K‫צרים‬K in the second colon of
v. 18; K‫משכנו‬K in the first colon of v. 20; and K‫בוחר‬K in the second colon of v. 20.
Following Noth, I reconstructed the first word of v. 18 (not in 4Q448) as the
imperative plural verb K‫ברכו‬K. Strugnell, on the basis of the Syriac, read K‫ברוך‬K.18 In
this he was followed by Lührmann. But it is more than a matter of retroversion
from the Syriac. I was following the style of the first strophe in suggesting the
imperative plural in the last.
Psalm 154
On the basis of the Syriac, Martin Noth perceived the mixing of genres in the
poem, a hymnic invitation to praise Yahweh, and a wisdom poem. He ques-
tioned the unity of the poem and even rejected what we now see as vv. 10 – 11 as
a foreign body within the poem.19 Delcor saw as well the mix of hymn and wis-
dom poem.20 Lührmann saw the two themes so tightly woven together that they
15
Strugnell, “Notes on the Text,” 275; Lührmann, “Ein Weisheitspsalm aus Qumran,” 90.
Lührmann’s remarks that I had not scrutinized the photographs carefully in two readings (nn. 14
and 41 of his article) were gratuitous and impertinent. Lührmann alone supplies K‫םימת‬K instead of
K‫ םימימת‬Kin the third colon of v. 18. Lührmann also saw a reversion to the wisdom theme in v. 20;
see the negative comments of Auffret, “Structure littéraire et interprétation du Psaume 154,”
544n41, and of van der Woude, “Die fünf syrischen Psalmen,” 45n20 a‑a).
16
Lührmann, “Ein Weisheitspsalm aus Qumran,” 97. See van der Woude, “Die fünf
syrischen Psalmen,” 45n20 b) and c).
17
Eshel, Eshel and Yardeni, “Composition from Qumran,” 303, 305, 310. Judging by the
transparency before me I agree that the last letter visible in line 10 of the column is probably a
bet; the problem is with the preceding word, K‫ציון‬K. Either the waw or the nun is not visible, and
there is no space before the bet following it.
18
See van der Woude, “Die fünf syrischen Psalmen,” 45.
19
Noth, “Die fünf syrisch überlieferten apokryphen Psalmen,” 17 – 20. He called the poem
“ein kompliziertes Gebilde, eine Kombination verschiedenartiger Elemente, die in ziemlich
äußerlicher Weise miteinander verbunden sind” (20).
20
Delcor, Les hymnes de Qumran, 311, 319.
450 Part 2: Qumran
should not be separated; he also rightly observed that the poem exhibits “ein[en]
einheitlicher[n] Interpretationshintergrund in der späten Weisheit,” dating it to
the end of the third century BCE.21 Magne agreed with Noth and saw a fusion
of a psalm of invitation to praise and a wisdom poem transformed into a psalm
of invitation to instruction.
Auffret, who has done the most thorough analysis of the vocabulary and rhet-
oric of the poem, has argued for its unity if, with Noth, vv. 10 – 11 are rejected. He
found in the combination, not separation, of the hymnic and sapiential elements
a global sense of the text: the subordination of the gift of wisdom (vv. 5 – 8) and
of its acceptance (vv. 12 – 14) to praise of the Most High (vv. 1 – 3) and the blessing
of his benefits.22
11QPsa
Nearly everyone now agrees that one cannot extrapolate from a single composi-
tion, nor indeed from a single document, the beliefs of the Qumran community.
In the case of the Psalms Scroll there is a real possibility that it was “acquired”
from outside the community, brought in perhaps as the hon or material dona-
tion, in the place of coins perhaps, that a novice might offer upon entering the
community. The most one can say is that there would have been nothing in it
greatly offensive to their beliefs or detrimental to their self-understanding. In
fact, in a document such as a Psalter scroll it is reasonable to assume that it would
have contained some literary units the community could resignify to their own
purposes even while containing other units they might choose benignly to ignore
or overlook as outside of but not directly offensive to their self understanding.23
21
Lührmann, “Ein Weisheitspsalm aus Qumran,” 97, agreeing with my own general dating
of the poem (Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 70) despite his apparent misunderstanding. I stated clearly
that the poem’s eschatology was not that of Qumran but that the poem would have appealed to
the early Qumran settlers in terms of their own vocation and identity. Lührmann’s observations
about the poem’s affinities with Sirach are well taken.
22
Auffret, “Structure littéraire et interprétation du Psaume 154,” 543 – 45.
23
Herein lies that aspect of Norman Golb’s objections to the regnant (e. g., Groningen) theory
of the origins of the Qumran literature that gains a hearing. As over against those scholars, espe-
cially early on (see Delcor, “Cinq nouveaux psaumes”; Delcor, Les hymnes de Qumran, 299 – 319;
Dupont-Sommer, Les écrits esséniens; Philonenko, “L’origine essénienne”; Schneider, “Biblische
Oden”), who have tended to view everything found at Qumran as being Essene in origin and
doctrine, most scholars have a modified view of Qumran’s “acquisition policy” for its “library”:
some of the non-biblical and apocryphal literature found there was brought in from the outside
but was compatible with their thinking or not offensive to it. Golb, for most of us, seems to cre-
ate more problems than he solves with his thesis that the Qumran caves contain literature from
all walks of Judaism in Jerusalem as it was in the first century in Jerusalem, hidden there because
of the rising threat of war in the middle of the century. His position was first (to my knowledge)
stated in “Problem of Origin”; thereafter in “Who Hid the Dead Sea Scrolls,” and “Dead Sea
Scrolls.” The most decisive responses have been those of García Martínez, “Qumran Origins,”
and García Martínez and van der Woude, “Groningen Hypothesis.” The Groningen hypothesis
accounts for most of the available data in a largely satisfactory way, but with some queries: it
requires subscribing to Essene identification for some who have become cautious about it; it
Psalm 154 might have been meaningful to the community precisely because
it sounds a call to form a community with a purpose and a mission, namely,
to proclaim to the uninformed God’s gracious benefits for which wisdom had
been granted humans in the first place, and to glorify God in the process – since
that is everyone who glorifies God by proclaiming God’s deeds and meditating
upon the story and stipulations of God’s will therein (Torah), while eating and
drinking in community. God receives and accepts all such as warmly as those
who in the temple in Jerusalem can engage in the whole sacerdotal cult. The
poem is a mixture of genres, the combination of which would have been quite
meaningful to the Qumran community. It is similar to the Sirach 51 canticle (in
11QPsa cols. 21 – 22), which might have expressed for some in the community
their understanding of the sublimation of the sex drive to pursuit of wisdom.24
The Psalms Scroll brings to the Qumran collection a strong flavor of wisdom
thinking, notably in Ps 154, the Sirach 51:13 ff. piece, the Hymn to the Creator,
and the prose insert (cols. 18, 21 – 22, 26, 27). In the first editions of Ps 154 I
stressed how weak the eschatological flavor of the poem is, if it is there at all.25
For this reason I am prepared to eliminate the possible ambiguity that might
exist in the reconstruction of v. 19, now reading it with Lührmann and Auffret,
“. . . [who raises the horn of Ja]cob and judges [his people Israel]” instead of the
earlier (with Noth) “. . . [who establishes a horn out of Ja]cob and a judge [of
peoples out of Israel].”
requires a certain view of the early history of the community, distinguishing between a larger
and a more sectarian / protestant group within it; it rightly excepts Cave 7 but tries to keep the
still enigmatic Copper Scroll of Cave 3 in the library; it seems to need to stress that everything
else in the Qumran caves was “compatible” with a sectarian theology / policy. This last point is
perhaps the most delicate. García Martínez / van der Woude stretch a bit for some of us the so-
called non-sectarian literature’s “compatibility” with the group’s thinking (533 – 36). Does this
mean, e. g., that the editors of 4Q448 (Eshel, Eshel and Yardeni) have to be wrong about the
“King Jonathan” they see in the text because van der Woude sees Alexander Jannaeus as one of
a whole succession of Wicked Priests? That would be circular thinking. They would have to be
counted wrong on other bases. Instead of “compatible” one should perhaps say “not offensive
to” or “otherwise resignifiable.” Is the field ready yet for L. Schiffman’s thesis that 4QMMT,
which is not yet at this writing fully or openly published, indicates that halakah at Qumran was
Sadducean in outlook (Martinez and van der Woude, “Groningen Hypothesis,” 538)? Finally,
is the hypothesis that the Roman garrison swept out the community building so well that not a
scrap of MS was found there (ibid., 528) compatible with what archaeology does in unearthing
what the ancients did not or could not see that had in antiquity slipped under floors, walls, and
door-jambs? Even those of us who tend to subscribe to the Groningen hypothesis because of its
manifest strengths feel that there are some unanswered questions in it and are grateful to Golb
for keeping the discussion going, even though his hypothesis raises for us more questions than
it solves.
24
On all these points see Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 68 – 70, 79 – 85, and Sanders, Dead Sea
Psalms Scroll, 108 – 9, 112 – 17.
25
Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 70. See Auffret, “Structure littéraire et interprétation du Psaume 154,”
521. Again Lührmann, “Ein Weisheitspsalm aus Qumran,” 93, shows misunderstanding of my
earlier work.
452 Part 2: Qumran
Psalm 154 at Qumran
Strugnell suggested the Syriac implies that K‫יחד‬K in v. 4 be read adverbially.26 He was
followed in this by Magne, Lührmann, and Auffret. Yet none of these has ade-
quately explained the use of the hiphil form of the imperative.27 If it should be
read “form a community” instead of simply “convene together” then the whole
poem, whatever its original thrust, could have been read at Qumran as a gno-
mic / hymnic expression of their self-understanding and mission.28
Similarly, if v. 18 in the last strophe resumes the imperative mode established
in the first strophe, then its expression of community self-understanding and
mission would be to that measure strengthened. Strugnell against Noth read K‫ברוך‬
29
K instead of K‫ברכו‬K for Syriac K‫בריכו‬K. And yet one is reluctant to perceive the psalm
ending with a simple doxology when it is quite possible that it ends, as it began,
with a call to purpose, namely to bless God aloud in community, thus reciting
his saving deeds and hence doing what the first strophe called a community into
being to do – tell others in doing so.
These observations lead finally to consideration of the number of different
groups mentioned in the poem. I suggested three groups: the senseless and sim-
pletons; the in-group righteous, pure, good, etc.; and the wicked, insolent, and
enemies.30 Auffret agreed on the condition that one distinguishes in the category
of the just those who are already assembled and those called to do so, and to
understand those who offer sacrifices as an element purely for comparison. In
the first point he took clues from Magne, and in the second he found support for
his (and Noth’s) view of the secondary character of vv. 10 – 11.31 Auffret was quite
right that those who sacrifice in vv. 10 – 11 are for comparison only; they are not
a true group in the poem’s expression of purpose and mission but may possibly
be identified with the enemies and the wicked of v. 18.
The point, however, about distinguishing between the righteous who are
already assembled and those who are being called to do so, fails to appreciate the
poem as an expression in the first place of a call to form a community for the pur-
pose of praising and proclaiming. Whether the poem was composed at Qumran
or not, it could have been signified there in such a manner. The voice in the poem
issuing the “call” to community in the first strophe might conceivably be taken
as that of a member of the heavenly council, for instance, not unlike that per-
ceived in MT Isa 40:1 – 11, especially the voices recorded in Isa 40:3 – 11 (and per-
haps other voices in Isa 51 ff.). If the poem was read at Qumran in such a manner,
26
Strugnell, “Notes on the Text,” 274.
27
See the extensive and probing discussion of the problem in Auffret, “Structure littéraire
et interprétation du Psaume 154,” 119 – 20n16, as well as that in Charlesworth, OT Pseudepigra-
pha, 2:617 – 18.
28
Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 69 – 70.
29
Strugnell, “Notes on the Text,” 275.
30
Sanders, Psalms Scroll, 68 – 69; see also Delcor, “Zum Psalter von Qumran,” 25.
31
Auffret, “Structure littéraire et interprétation du Psaume 154,” 540 – 41n36; Magne, “Le
Psaume 154,” 99.
then it spoke to them of three earthly groups: (a) the righteous who respond to
the call to form the community to pursue its mission of praise and proclamation;
(b) the simple who hear the praise and proclamation of the community and are
hopefully persuaded to join the first group as it grows and increases, thus becom-
ing just and righteous by identity with the community; and (c) the wicked and
impious who are hopelessly lost and from whom God redeems the poor and the
pure, appellatives also of the in-group of the community, which viewed itself as
having wicked enemies, for Qumran, those in power in Jerusalem and elsewhere.
What the poem meant to some original author or composer can only be imag-
ined through an abstract analysis of the poem, since there is general agreement
that the origins of the poem, and indeed of the scroll itself, lay outside Qumran.
But to those at Qumran, insofar as we perceive them as a distinct community
called to obedience to the laws of purity and holiness with the mission to be
prepared for God’s decisive acts in their day, the poem was adaptable to their
situation as expressive of their self-understanding and mission, albeit in the most
general terms of an in-group, an out-group, and the masses out there who sup-
posedly needed to hear the truth.32
Psalm 154 Anew
1. [With a loud voice glorify God;

in the congregation of the many proclaim his majesty.
2. In the multitude of the upright glorify his name
and with the faithful recount his greatness.
3. Bind] yourselves together with the good
and with the pure to glorify the Most High.
4. Form a community to proclaim his salvation,
and be not lax in making known his might
nor his majesty to all simple folk.
5. For to make known the glory of the Lord
is Wisdom given,
6. And for recounting his many deeds
she is revealed to humanity:
7. to make known to simple folk his might,
and to explain to senseless folk his greatness,
8. Those far from her gates,
those who stray from her portals.
9. For the Most High is the Lord of Jacob,
32
4Q448 raises other questions it is beyond the scope of this paper to address. Was it citing,
apparently without introductory formula (common enough), the last strophe of our Ps 154?
Or, did both pieces draw on a familiar portion of liturgical literature in the manner of numerous
psalms, especially later ones such as 1 Chron 16 and some of what is now in 11QPsa that cause
some scholars to view it as somehow more liturgical than the MT Psalter itself? Does the stro-
phe’s presence in 4Q448 support questions already posed about the integrity of Ps 154?
454 Part 2: Qumran
and his majesty is over all his works.

10. And a person who glorifies the Most High
he accepts33 as one who brings a meal offering,
11. as one who offers he-goats and bullocks,
as one who fattens the altar with many burnt offerings,
as a sweet-smelling fragrance from the hand of the righteous.
12. From the gates of the righteous is heard her voice,
and from the assembly of the pious her song.
13. When they eat with satisfaction34 is she cited,
and when they drink in fellowship together,
14. their meditation is on the Torah of the Most High,
their words on making known his might.
15. How far from the wicked is her word,
from all insolent folk to know her.
16. Behold the eyes of the Lord
upon the good are compassionate,
17. And upon those who glorify him he increases his mercy;
from an evil time will he deliver [their] soul.
18. [Bless] the Lord,
who redeems the humble35 from the hand of [enemies]
[and deliv]ers [the pure from the hand of the wicked,
19. who raises up the horn of Ja]cob
and judges36 [his people, Israel;
20. who spreads out his dwelling in Zion
and chooses37 Jerusalem forever.]
33
Strugnell, “Notes on the Text,” 274, suggested reading the passive, “is accepted.”
34
Ibid., 273 – 74. Strugnell found both the Hebrew and Syriac “unsatisfactory” and suggests
a corruption from “in their banqueting she is cited with praise” (K‫בשבח‬K > K‫בשבע‬K). It is clearly Wis-
dom that or who satisfies the quest for truth (see Syriac). The image conveyed as read in the
Qumran setting is that of a community meditating on Torah / Wisdom while engaged in commu-
nal meals.
35
Or the afflicted, or the poor. See Fr Lohfink’s beautiful study, Lobgesänge der Armen.
The present study is a humble response to his.
36
This reading, following Lührmann and Auffret, better fits the style at this point, and elim-
inates even a weak eschatological dimension by seeing the participle as attributive of God, with
the rest of vv. 18 – 20, rather than as a noun. If the Qumran community, however, needed to read
the poem with their eschatological hermeneutic, they would have done so by interpreting it as
they did non-eschatological biblical literature.
37
Reading with the editors of 4Q448; to do so retains the parallelism of the last six cola of
the poem and makes good sense in the retrofit of the last strophe of the psalm.
Bibliography
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acos. Rome, 1759.
Auffret, Pierre. “Structure littéraire et interprétation du Psaume 154 de la grotte 11 de
Qumrân.” RevQ 9 (1978) 513 – 45.
Baars, Willem, ed. “Apocryphal Psalms.” In The Old Testament in Syriac. Part 4, fasci-
cle 6, Canticles or Odes, Prayer of Manasseh, Apocryphal Psalms, Psalms of Solomon,
Tobit, 1(3) Esdras. Leiden: Brill, 1972.
Carswell, John. “Appendix I: Fastenings on the Qumrân Manuscripts.” In Qumrân
Grotte 4.II (4Q123 – 4Q157) I. Archaeologie; II. Tefillin Mezuzot et Targums, edited
by Roland de Vaux and Józef T. Milik, 23 – 28. DJD 6. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977.
Delcor, Matthias. “Cinq nouveaux psaumes esséniens?” RevQ 1 (1958) 85 – 102.
Delcor, Matthias. Les hymnes de Qumrân (Hodayot). Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1962.
Delcor, Matthias. “Zum Psalter von Qumran.” BZ 10 (1966) 15 – 28.
Dupont-Sommer, André. “Hébreu et Araméen.” ACF 66 (1966) 347 – 72.
Dupont-Sommer, André. Les écrits esséniens découverts près de la Mer Morte. Paris: Payot,
1959.
Eshel, Esther, Hanan Eshel, and Ada Yardeni. “A Composition from Qumran which In-
cludes a Portion of Psalm 154 and a Prayer for Peace for Jonathan the King and His
Reign.” Tarbiz 60 (1992) 296 – 324, plus plates. (In Hebrew)
García Martínez, Florentino. “Qumran Origins and Early History: A Groningen Hy-
pothesis.” Folia Orientalia 25 (1988) 113 – 36.
García Martínez, Florentino, and Adam van der Woude. “A ‘Groningen’ Hypothesis of
Qumran Origins and Early History.” RevQ 24 (1990) 521 – 41.
Golb, Norman. “The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Perspective.” The American Scholar 58
(1989) 177 – 207.
Golb, Norman. “The Problem of Origin and Identification of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Pro-
ceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124 (1980) 1 – 24.
Golb, Norman. “Who Hid the Dead Sea Scrolls?” BA 28 (1987) 68 – 82.
Gurewicz, S. B. “Hebrew Apocryphal Psalms from Qumran.” Australian Biblical Re-
view 15 (1967) 13 – 20.
Lohfink, Norbert. Lobgesänge der Armen: Studien zum Magnifikat, den Hodajot von
Qumran und einigen späten Psalmen. SBS 143. Stuttgart: Verlag Katholisches Bibel-
werk, 1990.
Lührmann, Dieter. “Ein Weisheitspsalm aus Qumran (11QPsa XVIII).” ZAW 80 (1968)
87 – 98.
Magne, Jean. “Le Psaume 154.” RevQ 9 (1977) 95 – 102.
Noth, Martin. “Die fünf syrisch überlieferten apokryphen Psalmen.” ZAW 48 (1930) 1 – 23.
Philonenko, Marc. “L’origine essénienne des cinq psaumes syriaques de David.” Semitica 9
(1959) 35 – 48.
Polzin, Robert. “Notes on the Dating of the Non-Massoretic Psalms of 11QPsa.” HTR 60
(1967) 468 – 76.
Sanders, James A. “A Multivalent Text: Psalm 151:3 – 4 Revisited.” Hebrew Annual Re-
view 8 (1984) 167 – 84.
endon, 1965.
456 Part 2: Qumran
Sanders, James A. “Two Non-Canonical Psalms in 11QPsa.” ZAW 76 (1964) 57 – 75.

Schneider, Heinrich. “Biblische Oden im syrohexaplarischen Psalter.” Bib 14 (1959)
199 – 202.
Sen, Felipe. “Traducción y comentario del Salmo 154, por primera vez en castellano.” Cul-
tura Biblica 29 (1972) 43 – 47.
Strugnell, John. “Notes on the Text and Transmission of the Apocryphal Psalms 151, 154
(= Syr. II) and 155 (= Syr. III).” HTR 59 (1966) 257 – 81.
van der Woude, Adam S. “Die fünf syrischen Psalmen.” Jüdische Schriften aus hellenis-
tisch-römischer Zeit 4 (1974) 29 – 47.
27
The Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Studies1
I should like to address four areas where the influence of the Dead Sea Scrolls
has been probably most pronounced: (a) they have dramatically altered the his-
tory of early Judaism; (b) they have provided a remarkable store of information
about the inner thinking of a Jewish denomination in existence when Christian-
ity was born, with which to compare Christianity in its early Jewish-Christian
phase; (c) they have revolutionized First Testament text criticism; and (d) they
have helped launch canonical criticism and comparative midrash, as I understand
them. For none of these do I intend to give anything like a thorough review of
what has been said about them; on the contrary, I intend rather to append a few
critical observations to a very general, broadly drawn picture of each.2
The scene has shifted considerably in the past twenty-five years. Literary
critical tools have begun to be used with results that significantly change how
one reads the scrolls. Differentiation has set in with theories advanced about the
history of formation and composition of the various key documents, especially
1QS and 1QH.3 By the time Yigael Yadin published the Temple or Torah Scroll
(11QT) in the late seventies, the literary-critical method was well in place. The
method was variously followed and did not issue always in compatible results,
but it should be noted that there has not been anything since then like the density
of controversy in the earlier period, especially the fifties.
Literary-critical differentiation has affected two main areas, the reconstruc-
tion of the history of the denomination and their relations to other such groups
of the time, and the history of development of theology or beliefs in the group.
Whereas in the earlier period after their discovery it was hotly debated whether
the group was Essene, or zealot, or an apocalyptic sect, or even Qaraite, com-
plexity has set in, hence more accurate reflection of reality. It is now standard to
admit that the denomination associated with the scrolls shifted theological posi-
tions as the generations came and went, and that what was seen in the scrolls in

1
Author’s note: It is with distinct pleasure that I dedicate the following to my friend and
colleague Shemaryahu Talmon. It is over forty years since the discovery of Qumran Cave 1 and
time perhaps for general assessments of the significance for biblical studies of the plethora of
scrolls and fragments found in numerous loci along the west bank of the Jordan Rift.
2
What follows is intended to supplement rather than update Sanders, “Dead Sea Scrolls – A
Quarter Century.” A fine update has been done by Wise, “Dead Sea Scrolls, Part 1” and “Dead
Sea Scrolls, Part 2.” A reassessment of their value especially for history of transmission of the
text has been made by Vermes, “Biblical Studies and the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
3
Stegemann, “Die Entstehung der Qumrangemeinde,” was among the first to use thor-
ough-going literary-critical methods.
458 Part 2: Qumran
the early days may well be there but is now related to aspects of its history. It is
also important to remember that some of the scrolls may have been acquisitioned
from outside the community.4
History of Early Judaism
Even before “economy of explanation” yielded ground to the more realistic his-
torical principle of seeking the complexity of human enterprise (the ambiguity
of reality), the scrolls had begun to have a profound effect on the history of early
Judaism.
Nearly everyone grants that the winner in the debate at the turn of the cen-
tury between Schürer, Bousset, and Gressmann, on the one hand, and George
Foot Moore, on the other, was Moore.5 For Moore, Pharisaic-rabbinic Judaism
was normative or orthodox, while that which is reflected in much of the pseude-
pigrapha (in sensu lato) was heterodox. This was reflected as well in Hermann
Strack and Paul Billerbeck’s Kommentar zum Neuen Testament. On the other
hand, Liebermann’s two volumes on the considerable amount of Greek influence
in Jewish Palestine, and indeed, finally, in the Babylonian Talmud, set the stage
for what was to become a counterpoint to the Moore synthesis.6 Moses Hadas,
Elias Bickermann, and Morton Smith pioneered the position that has become,
in part because of the scrolls, the regnant position associated with the work of
Jacob Neusner in one direction and Martin Hengel in another.7
Traditions in Tannaitic literature from the period of formative Judaism remain
for the most part difficult to date, while we now have a plethora of very datable
literature from the pre-Christian period that indicates a complex picture of early
Judaism in which religious pluralism was its hallmark. The significant term is
relecture. The scrolls emanating directly out of Palestinian soil itself and, accord-
ing to most of those who now work on them, dating to the Hellenistic-Roman
period, have caused a re-reading of all of Jewish literature of the period; and that
re-reading has issued in what Michael Stone of Hebrew University has described
as the broad pluralism of early Judaism.8 As one reads through contribution
by contribution of the various scholars who worked on James Charlesworth’s
4
See Tov, “Orthography and Language”; and now Tov, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts”;
Tov and Johann Cook of Stellenbosch are compiling a computerized database that will be in-
valuable for all future such work; see Tov and Cook, “Computerized Database.” Cook and his
students have done encoding on the basis of the Dead Sea Scrolls film collection at the Ancient
Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont.
5
Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries, esp. 3:17 – 22.
6
Lieberman, Greek in Jewish Palestine; Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine.
7
Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism. The Neusner corpus up to 1984 is in Sanders, “Major
Scholarly Works” (incomplete listing but indicative of his work). A recent title pertinent to the
point here would be Neusner, Mishnah before 70.
8
Stone, “Judaism at the Time of Christ”; Stone, Scriptures, Sects and Visions; Stone and Sa-
tran, Emerging Judaism.
The Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Studies 459
two volume Pseudepigrapha,9 one sees with what firmness the new position has
taken hold. A small but significant aspect of the new picture is that we now have
among the scrolls the original language forms, among others, of Tobit, Sirach,
the Testaments of Levi (Aramaic) and Naphtali (Hebrew), Enoch (Aramaic), and
Jubilees (portions from caves 2, 3, 4, and 11).10 More significant perhaps is the
fact that some previously unknown texts from Qumran can now be classified as
pseudepigraphic in the same sense.
Not only do we know a great deal more about the early Judaism of the Helle-
nistic-Roman period, but we know increasingly more about the Persian period.
The same re-reading of other sources that has issued in greater clarity about
the second half of early Judaism is issuing in some clarity now about the earlier
period, which for so long has resisted probing. Shemaryahu Talmon, whom we
honor in this volume [i. e., “Shaʿarei Talmon”], has undertaken a major study
of early Judaism in the Persian period. This is a most felicitous prospect, since
surely Talmon is the person of the moment who has his hands on the resources
necessary to reconstruct this all-essential link in a history that has heretofore
largely escaped us.
The history of Judaism from its inception in the sixth century BCE, through
what Jacob Neusner calls formative Judaism by the close of the Talmud, has gone
within a generation from uncertainty to increasing clarity. Combined with the
work proceeding in the literatures and history in cognate fields of the same time
frame, work in early and formative Judaism is providing greater possibilities for
responsible theories about the socio-political contexts out of which these many
texts arose. And while secure dating for much of early rabbinic tradition still
eludes us, even there we may hope some day to have firmer theories of dating
than heretofore, precisely because of what has transpired in these forty years.
Second Testament Study
There are a number of areas of Second Testament study in which the scrolls have
been influential. I shall touch on four only.
One of the most foundational impacts the scrolls have had is in study of the
languages of Palestine in the first centuries BCE and CE. Most of the scrolls, of
whichever provenance, are in Hebrew, though a sizeable minority are in Ara-
maic, such as the Genesis Apocryphon, the Job Targum, the Books of Enoch,
Tobit, the Testament of Levi, and others. While finds in Cave 7 may be unrelated
to the Qumran library, the Greek fragments from that provenance as well as the
Greek materials from the caves related to the period between the two Jewish
wars of the late first and early second centuries CE, in addition to continuing
discoveries of hard-media inscriptions, have caused a reassessment of what lan-
9
Charlesworth, OT Pseudepigrapha.
10
See Fitzmyer, Dead Sea Scrolls; Sanders, “Palestinian Manuscripts 1947 – 1972”; Stege-
mann, “Die Entstehung der Qumrangemeinde.”
460 Part 2: Qumran
guages were commonly used in first-century Palestine – just as Liebermann had

found in the more erudite and scholarly rabbinic literature. Nor can the use of
Greek be limited to the Decapolis or Galilean area. Bar Kochba used Greek in
the tense situations of sending commands to his lieutenants in the Judean area
itself. Sevenster, Emerton, Díez Macho, Fitzmyer, Lapide, and Maxey have con-
vincingly demonstrated the widespread and common use of Greek throughout
Palestine in the late Hasmonean and Herodian periods.11 Jesus himself was in all
likelihood trilingual, and I shouldn’t wonder, as Morton Smith has long said, if
he could not also read signs in Latin posted for Roman troops.
One of the widely-recognized areas in which the scrolls have been helpful in
New Testament work is word studies. While this is a disputed area and while it
is not certain whether the new light cast on certain New Testament Greek words
is pertinent in all contexts, there can be little doubt that the scrolls have provided
a glossary of theological terms used in Palestine in the first centuries BCE and
CE. Four come to mind without specific searches. One was the focus of Ray-
mond E. Brown’s dissertation at Johns Hopkins University, which showed that
the word μυστήριον in the New Testament was comparable to the word K‫רז‬K in the
scrolls; in both it is used in certain contexts to mean an ingroup kind of herme-
neutic whereby to read Scripture.12 Light may also be shed on the enigmatic
phrase in 2 Thess 2:7, μυστήριον . . . τῆς ἀνομίας, which shows up in the Cave 1
Book of Mysteries (1Q27) as K‫רזי פשע‬K, the mysteries of transgression or of lawless-
ness. Another was the topic of a study by James Robinson, “Die Hodajot For-
mel,” as it shows up in some New Testament prayers and hymns. Yet another
was the recognition that οἱ πολλοί in the New Testament were not necessarily
“crowds”; that is, the term and its morphological variants in the New Testament
may mean in some passages the same as K‫הרבים‬K in some Qumran passages, where
it designates not crowds but rather an ingroup with decision-making power.
Many more could be listed; these are but acceptable examples. As in the case of
determining the exact contextual meaning of any word in any passage, especially
in the onerous task of having to choose only one for translation purposes, care
must be taken in this type of cross-reference as well. A New Testament writer
may or may not be using a Palestinian adaptation of a Greek word or term; but
the fact that we now have a valuable resource of theological vocabulary used in
Palestine in the first century cannot be gainsaid.
Beyond word study is the area of theological concept. The fact that some of
the Qumran literature seems to verge on dualism on the one hand and deter-
minism on the other may help understand similar difficulties in the New Tes-
tament. It has always been a problem in a theocentric, monotheizing religion to
understand the use of certain non-monotheizing cultural idioms and mores to
11
Sevenster, Do You Know Greek?; Emerton, “Problem of Vernacular Hebrew”; Díez
Macho, “La lengua hablada”; Fitzmyer, “Languages of Palestine”; Lapide, “Insights from Qum-
ran”; Maxey, “Languages of Jesus.”
12
Brown, Semitic Background. For other studies on the bearing of the DSS on Second Tes-
tament issues, see Fitzmyer, Dead Sea Scrolls, 124 – 30.
address the problem of evil. The New Testament at times seems to embrace Hel-
lenistic-era idioms that in other non-Jewish, non-Christian contexts of the time
were patently polytheistic. The fact that the Qumran denominational literature
also does not completely avoid such idioms provides a control study in how to
understand the use of ancient contemporary polytheistic idioms in a monotheiz-
ing context. Once one has addressed that problem, one realizes that all biblical
literature reflects the idioms and mores of the several cultural eras out of which
it has emerged and through which it has passed. Precisely a canonical perspective
evolves from the exercise so that one learns how to understand and exegete liter-
ary expressions from the five cultural eras over some twelve to eighteen hundred
years from the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Persian period, the Hellenistic era,
and the Roman period, no one of which is more important or imposing than
another. Thus, the idioms of the Hellenistic-Roman era no longer stand isolated
but can be addressed in a series of control studies about how to understand the
monotheizing process without tripping over the idioms of the various cultures in
which the monotheizing struggle took place within the biblical paradigm.
Various prominent figures in the New Testament now have counterparts for
control study as well, such as Melchizedek, Enoch, Beliaal / Beelzebub, various
angelic as well as demonic figures, and others that populate the literature of early
Judaism. Perhaps the most important area in which study of the scrolls has influ-
enced New Testament study is that of the function of Scripture and tradition
in early Jewish literature. If one focuses one’s study of the Nachleben of Scrip-
ture and tradition in the Septuagint, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and
the scrolls, one feels right at home when turning to study the same in the New
Testament. It is no more or less apologetic or proof-texting there than elsewhere.
On the contrary, one encounters the same range of function as earlier. The differ-
ences begin to show up not in the New Testament but in later forms in rabbinic
literature, where function of Scripture is at times similar as in the earlier Jewish
literature, but with distinct and describable differences. This is one major reason
some of us find it difficult to limit the concept of midrash to the literary forms to
which the word was later applied in rabbinic literature. Midrash means searching
Scripture for the light it can cast on new situations where applied; it clearly does
not imply commentary on Scripture in the modern sense of the term.
Scripture and tradition function in early Jewish and Christian literature in six
different modes: (a) citation with formula; (b) citation without formula; (c) allu-
sion; (d) paraphrase; (e) echo; (f) literary shape.
The first three modes have been the object of considerable study. In the case of
the first two, one can proceed immediately to the question of the ancient herme-
neutics by which the Scripture or tradition is caused to function in the passage
under study. Whether it is an allusion or a citation, the question of the herme-
neutics whereby the New Testament author or speaker re-presents the tradition
or figure remains the same. How does the newer author or speaker cause the
citation, the tradition, or the scriptural figure to function in the new situation,
and to what effect? Once one has done this, the work has only begun; but I shall
return to this crucial point in a moment.
462 Part 2: Qumran
The fourth and sixth modes, paraphrase and literary shape, require stricter
control measures. If one moves through study of the Qumran literature as well
as other pre-Christian early Jewish literature, focusing on the function of Scrip-
ture and tradition there – and one can hardly avoid it – then one sees clearly that
paraphrase of Scripture into the “other words” of the newer day is normal and
necessary both (a) for understanding the old Bronze or Iron Age idiom, or for
understanding the early Hellenistic Greek of the Septuagint in later koiné speech;
and (b) for the adaptation the tradent wishes to make of it. Then if one moves
on into similar study of Scripture and tradition in the New Testament, one not
only feels quite at home in this regard, but one can apply the same methods of
study.
The observation is inescapable (a) that later believing communities para-
phrased Scripture for clearer understanding of the older mode of speech, and
(b) that later authors and writers, whether orally or in written form, often
wanted to compose what they had to say scripturally. This means not only the
literary phenomenon of rewriting Scripture, such as the Chronicler’s use of the
Genesis-to-Kings literature, or the Genesis Apocryphon and the Temple Scroll;
it also means the phenomenon of writing new material in the mode, style, and
shape of the older literature that had become or was becoming sacred. After
careful study of the products of earlier believing communities, both the highly
hellenized literature and the less so, one recognizes similar literature in the New
Testament. And while there are a few literary forms in the New Testament that
seem dissimilar, there are many that exhibit what must have been a conscious
desire on the part of early Christians, whether previously Jewish or not, to write
up scripturally what they believed God had done in Christ and was doing in the
early church.
While such study may not solve the problem of the genre Gospel, I am con-
vinced that the problems that that genre presents would appear less intractable
if Scripture, including the Septuagint form of it, were understood as a source for
Gospel writing every bit as important as Mark, Q, and whatever other Christian
sectarian source was used in their composition, and if the socio-political situation
and needs of early Christian communities are factored into consideration of what
was written, as much as an individual Evangelist’s intentions or literary redac-
tional and compositional contribution.
First Testament Text Criticism
The area of study that has perhaps been most affected by the DSS is First Tes-
tament text criticism. There are two major text-critical projects in place at the
present time that reflect impact of the discovery of the scrolls: the Hebrew Uni-
versity Bible Project (HUBP) and the United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Tes-
tament Text Project (HOTTP). Due to the new situation, caused by work on the
scrolls rather than on Codex Aleppensis, both projects had to revise the history
of transmission of the Hebrew text. The remarkable thing is that without collu-
sion between them they each reached a similar revision.13 This revision has been
as remarkable as the revision of the history of early Judaism, noted earlier.
The UBS project started in 1969 and published its results as Critique textuelle
de l’Ancien Testament, volume 1 dealing with the so-called historical books and
volume 2 with Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Lamentations; volume 3 is nearly ready with
at least two to follow.14
The basic ground shift took place when it became obvious that the history of
transmission of the text had to be rewritten. The first and clearest observation
from discovery of the scrolls was that a remarkable difference could be observed
between the Qumran biblical scrolls and the supposed Vorlage to the Septuagint,
on the one hand, and the biblical scrolls that were found in the later caves at
Masada and in the Buqeia, ranging in date between the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE
and the defeat of the second Jewish revolt in 135. The Qumran scrolls and the
Septuagint (Vorlage) are now the oldest biblical literature that we have, ranging
in date from the third century BCE (both the LXX of the Pentateuch and the
earliest fragments of Samuel from Cave 4). All these, along with the citations of
Scripture in the scrolls, Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, and the New Testament,
indicate that the earliest biblical literature we have exhibits a certain amount of
textual fluidity. This was the starting point.
The next observation was that we have no biblical manuscripts from the close
of the Bar Kochba revolt until the Cairo Codex of the Prophets (896 CE) and
the great Tiberian masoretic manuscripts in the tenth century CE (925 for A
and 1009 for L; rumors persist about eighth-century manuscripts, but they await
confirmation).
The situation that presented itself, therefore, was that we now have a plethora
of texts and versions from the late early Jewish period, a significant number from
the very beginning of the formative Jewish period, then nothing but versional
evidence, especially the Peshitta and Vulgate, until the ninth / tenth century and
the fruit of the work of the tireless Masoretes. When conjoined with the obser-
vation that we still have no autographs of any biblical document, and that the
debate between de Lagarde and Kahle has not been neatly solved, there emerged
a four-period history of transmission of the text.
The first period may be called the period of the Ur-text, that is, the so-called
and supposed originals. In contrast to earlier concepts of text criticism, this is
simply not the province of text criticism as it is presently conceived. That is the
rightful province of historical criticism, of the historian in the workshop who
continues to be interested in what someone actually said or wrote in the Iron
Age or Persian period. The fact that historical criticism has fallen on relatively
hard days underscores perhaps the point that this is beyond the competence of
13
See Talmon, “Aspects of the Textual Transmission”; Talmon, “Old Testament Text”;
Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition, 11 – 20; Goshen-Gottstein, “Hebrew Biblical Manu-
scripts”; Barthélemy, “Text, Hebrew, History of.”
14
Barthélemy, Critique textuelle. An English translation of the introduction is in prepara-
tion by UBS. [Vol. 3 (1992), Vol. 4 (2005), and Vol. 5 (2015) now complete the series.]
464 Part 2: Qumran
text criticism. It is difficult any longer to say that the task of text criticism is to
establish the original text; in fact, we now wonder how much sanguinity there
was in targeting such a goal. It is better to say that the task of text criticism is to
establish the most responsible critical text available from use of the best methods
now in place based on all the readings now available. This was a point discussed
in the HOTTP annual meetings in Freudenstadt.
The second period extends from the earliest available fragments in the third
century BCE to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. This we call the period of the
accepted texts. It is a period marked not only by (limited) textual fluidity but also
perhaps by different families of texts; this latter point is rather warmly debated
at the moment. The third period is that of the received text, which extends from
the fall of Jerusalem to the close of the pre-masoretic period. The fourth period
is, of course, the masoretic and post-masoretic. Again, the salient observation
is that the fluidity so characteristic of the Qumran / Septuagint texts and of the
citations in the literature of the early Jewish period and in the New Testament
ceases toward the end of the first century CE with the biblical manuscripts from
the period between the revolts and the creation of the Greek texts we call Aquila,
Theodotion, and Symmachus (all of which exhibit remarkable tendencies, Aquila
and Theodotion notably so, not only toward stability of text, and indeed a very
proto-masoretic text, but even literalism, as well).
Following the lead of Moshe Greenberg already in 1955,15 but especially
taking account of evidence in the Dodecapropheton he was assigned to study,
D. Barthélemy in 1963 developed a theory of text stabilization. This stabilization
began with proto-Theodotionic tendencies in the Dodecapropheton (dating to
the middle of the first century BCE) and was complete by the last quarter of the
first century CE. With his publication, the stage was set for revision of the his-
tory of text transmission.16
The next most significant event was Moshe Goshen-Gottstein’s watershed
article that finally dealt the death blow to the earlier modes of “establishing orig-
inal texts.”17 In that article, Goshen-Gottstein showed beyond serious challenge
that the famous collations of medieval manuscripts in Kennicott and de Rossi
were almost entirely post-masoretic and could not be depended on to reflect
pre-masoretic readings. The various efforts to find in those collations the read-
ing one wanted based on literary and historical-critical study were summarily
checked. Such readings as one may find in Kennicott, de Rossi, or even late medi-
eval and Renaissance manuscripts, depart from the MT and for the most part do
not antedate it. This is not to say that one can totally ignore them; there are some
that are more interesting than others and sometimes offer variants worthy of
note, such as Kenn. 248 and others.18
15
Greenberg, “Stabilization of the Text.”
16
Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila; Tov, Greek Minor Prophets Scroll; see Sanders,
“Text and Canon: Concepts and Method.”
17
18
See Barthélemy, Critique textuelle, 1:*65 – *114, for explication of method.
As the new concepts and method develop it has become increasingly clear
that the integrity of the full manuscript context in which a supposed variant
reading is found must be respected before an isolated text or versional reading is
pillaged for emendation of the MT. Fortunately, structural analysis of texts has
now developed to the point that it has become a major tool for discovering the
integrity of an ancient witness in order to perceive how the supposed variant fits
into the text of the witness as a whole, whether the witness be a text or a version;
and it has become a crucial control factor for discerning whether a supposed
variant, or a plus or a minus, reflects true variants, or reflects a different concept
on the part of the copyist or translator of what the text being copied or translated
was actually saying, or indeed should say to his or her community. Clearly most
ancient copyists and translators wanted to convey their understanding of the
Vorlage to their communities; they wanted to do their best for their people. And
that understanding, due to the later problems they faced in their sociohistorical
contexts, was sometimes a resignification of what modern scholarship perceives
“the original” should have said due to our supposed advanced knowledge of the
earlier biblical period. The perception of the later copyist or translator of what
the Vorlage meant would clearly have an influence on how they “corrected” what
they copied or on how they understood a multivalent term being translated. This
is especially the case in the period before textual stabilization, but occurs there-
after as well. A careful structural analysis of each larger unit or pericope in a
manuscript or family of manuscripts, which apparently has “a superior reading”
at a crucial point in it, may simply indicate a different conception of what the
Vorlage meant and not a true variant. This is a major reason the Ancient Biblical
Manuscript Center has been established in Claremont: it has become crucial to
be able to see supposed variants in their fuller contexts, where manuscripts are
available, and not only in prior collations, apparatus, and footnotes – or even in
printed critical editions, which have been of necessity filtered through the biases
of competence and interests of their editors.
There are two worthy questions that need addressing at this point in discus-
sion of recent text-critical developments. The one has to do with the importance
of philology in discerning earliest readings, and the other concerns the range of
readings targeted by the new method in text criticism. They are related questions
having to do with the continuing desire to arrive at a so-called original reading.
Not only philology, but numerous other disciplines enter the picture of deci-
sion making about which reading of those available should be chosen. Both
HUBP and HOTTP agree that outright conjecture is not the province of text
criticism, but of literary and historical criticism, and is the prerogative of the
historian rightly interested in the ipsissima verba of a biblical composition. Such
conjectures will continue to be the base of individual scholars’ translations, just
as dramatic shifts in meanings of Hebrew terms based on philology will continue
to be used in similar scholarly translations. It is the position of both text-crit-
ical projects that such conjectures – that is, outright creations of new readings
based on no firm textual evidence whatever, and variant meanings based on com-
parative philology that in effect amount to conjectures – are not only not the
466 Part 2: Qumran
province of text criticism but are improper in translations designed for believ-
ing communities. Leaps to other meaning based on undifferentiated use of Ara-
bic, Ugaritic, or other languages cognate and contemporary to Hebrew must be
restrained by careful control in comparative philology.19
The text critic of the sort I have been describing takes into account all the
available data and in interdisciplinary discussion around the worktable recon-
structs what an original text might have been in order to be able as well as pos-
sible to understand the beautiful ruins left in the text. But when it comes to
choosing a reading and its meaning, only those readings that ancient believing
communities bequeathed us in the available manuscripts, texts, and versions
are the valid options. Having looked at what scholarly expertise of our day can
reconstruct, the text critic then looks critically, once more and again, at the avail-
able readings and makes a decision based on as sound method as possible, includ-
ing evaluation in terms of the conceptuality and reality lying back of full textual
and versional contexts. What the individual scholar or translator does with all the
evidence and expertise is another matter. The text critic observes the limitations
of the task with the best possible methods that have been honed and developed
in the past twenty-five or so years, largely because of the discovery of the Dead
Sea Scrolls.
Canonical Criticism
The current position of text criticism can only be understood in depth if it is seen
in the light of recent studies in canon, for text and canon have to be seen in the
same light. Stabilization of text and stabilization of canon are interwoven. This is
the case in New Testament text criticism as well if the latest views of the date of
the Muratorian fragment are observed.20 But the important point is the question
of authority and inspiration.
The historian wants to know as well as possible what happened. And as histo-
rians, text critics will continue to reconstruct the history of the formation of the
Bible, including all the original moments it is possible to rebuild. But one must
ask why. Is it only because we are by training and trade historians, or are we his-
torians perhaps because of an uninvestigated theory of authority and inspiration,
namely, that what we want to be in the Bible is what the original contributor said
or wrote because of a tacit understanding of what was inspired, or impacted in
antiquity by Reality (die Realität – a term some theologians use for God).
This whole amorphous area of our work might be illuminated if we were
more self-conscious of our theory of authority and were to modify it to fit the
19
As suggested in Barr, Comparative Philology.
20
Sundberg, “Canon of the New Testament”; for arguments recently advanced for main-
taining the earlier date of the Muratorian fragment, see Metzger, Canon of the NT, 191 – 201; for
the later date (350 – 400 CE) see McDonald, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon, 135 – 39.
On the principal point, see Sanders, “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New.”
givens. The tacit, or expressed, understanding of inspiration has been God or

Holy Spirit (or Shekinah, or Reality) working with an individual in antiquity,
whose words were then more-or-less accurately preserved by disciples, schools,
and scribes. The more responsible theory, given the data and facts we actually
have, would be that of God or Holy Spirit (or Shekinah, truth, or Reality) work-
ing all along the path of formation of these texts.21 This theory of authority could
then include all the so-called spurious or secondary passages (which are in the
Bible whether we like it or not), all the discrepancies and anomalies, and the fact
that more often than not what we have in the beautiful ruins of many passages
is what the Reality of later believing communities bequeathed us.22 This theory
could include the fact that in the canonical paradigm there are numerous cases of
resignification of what a passage might originally have meant, not only the dou-
blets and triplets, but also what Samuel Sandmel called haggadah within Scrip-
ture, the numerous cases of the reappearance of an early idea or passage in which
they are considerably resignified.23
Text and canon go together; they cannot be separated if we are to account
responsibly for the data so far accumulated and move forward to more responsi-
ble study of these texts as the tradents of the current generation and the next to
come. Tradents always engage in the two factors of stability and adaptability if
the texts and traditions studied are to make sense; and they must make sense in
the tradent’s idiom if study of them is responsible. Tradents are always engaged
simultaneously in the two tasks of preservation and re-presentation.24 The basic
reason for having a manuscript center where scholars are no longer dependent
on others’ apparatus and notes, but can do comparative study of as many of the
received texts as possible, is so that each generation can obey its own best lights
and follow its own developed and responsible methods. William F. Albright was
apparently wont to say that the archeologist should leave more of a tell undug
then dug, for two reasons: the next generations will probably have better tools
with which to work, and sharper questions to put to the data. Another way, a
more traditional way of putting that, might be to say that the reason for such a
collection of enhanced images of ancient and medieval manuscripts of the biblical
texts (and nonbiblical for comparative study) is that each generation, and each
scholar, may investigate the primary evidence, confident that they are not per-
petuating past errors but can see for themselves all the possible readings in the
integrity of the full context of the texts and versions in the manuscripts where
found.
Humanists need not shy from a traditional concept such as Shekinah or Holy
Spirit; it is but the acceptance of human humility even while using the most
21
An idea at least already latent in Barr, Old and New in Interpretation, 26 – 27. For an ex-
plicit statement of it, see Sanders, Canon and Community, xv – xviii.
22
See Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible”; Talmon, “Heiliges Schrifttum.”
23
Sandmel, “Haggadah within Scripture,” 110 – 11.
24
See, e. g., Knight, Rediscovering the Traditions, 5 – 20; and Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation
in Ancient Israel, 1 – 19.
468 Part 2: Qumran
advanced tools of the Enlightenment on the received texts, indeed the recogni-
tion that we have much, much more to learn about Reality than we ever “now
know.” The revealing of that knowledge, the combination of types of knowledge,
the coming by it, has an immeasurable dimension that needs to be recognized if
responsibility in any generation is to be recognized by the next, and passed on.
Bibliography
Barr, James. Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1968. 2nd ed., Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testa-
ment with Corrections and Additions. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1987.
Harper & Row, 1966.
Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982 – 86. [Now 5 vols.
to 2016.]
Brown, Raymond E. The Semitic Background of the Term “Mystery” in the New Testa-
ment. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1968.
Díez Macho, Alejandro. “La lengua hablada por Jesucristo.” Oriens Antiquus 2 (1963)
95 – 132.
Emerton, John A. “The Problem of Vernacular Hebrew in the First Century A. D. and the
Language of Jesus.” JTS 29 (1973) 1 – 23.
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Dead Sea Scrolls: Major Publications and Tools for Study.
SBLSBS 8. Missoula, MT: SBL, 1977.
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. “The Languages of Palestine in the First Century AD.” CBQ 32
(1970) 501 – 31. Reprinted in A Wandering Aramean: Collected Aramaic Essays.
SBLMS 25. Atlanta: Scholars, 1979.
Place in the HUBP Edition.” Bib 48 (1967) 243 – 90. Reprinted in Qumran and the His-
tory of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 42 – 89.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Greenberg, Moshe. “The Stabilization of the Text of the Hebrew Bible, Reviewed in the
Light of the Biblical Materials from the Judean Desert.” JAOS 76 (1956) 157 – 67. [Re-
edited by Sid Z. Leiman, 298 – 326. New York: Ktav, 1974.]
Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during
the Early Hellenistic Period. Translated by John Bowden. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Fortress,
1974.
Knight, Douglas A. Rediscovering the Traditions of Ancient Israel. SBLDS 9. Missoula,
MT: SBL, 1973.
Lapide, Pinchas. “Insights from Qumran into the Languages of Jesus.” RevQ 8 (1975)
483 – 501.
Lieberman, Saul. Greek in Jewish Palestine: Studies in the Life and Manners of Jewish
Palestine in the II – IV Centuries. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America,
1942.
Lieberman, Saul. Hellenism in Jewish Palestine. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary
of America, 1962.
Maxey, Z. “The Languages of Jesus.” Unpublished paper for the Claremont Graduate
School.
McDonald, Lee M. The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon. Nashville: Abingdon,
1988. [Rev. ed. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995.]
Neusner, Jacob. The Mishnah before 70. BJS 51. Atlanta: Scholars, 1987.
Robinson, James M. “Die Hodajot-Formel in Gebet und Hymnus des Frühchristentums.”
In Apophoreta: Festschrift für Ernst Haenchen, edited by Walther Eltester and Franz H.
Kettler, 194 – 235. BZNW 30. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1964.
Fortress, 1984.
109 – 48.
Sanders, James A. “Major Scholarly Works of Jacob Neusner.” Special Neusner Issue
BTB 14 (1984) 122 – 25.
cred Text, by James A. Sanders, 125 – 51. Philadelphia: Fortress 1987. [Original JBL 98
(1979) 5 – 29.]
Sandmel, Samuel. “The Haggadah within Scripture.” JBL 80 (1961) 105 – 22.
Sevenster, Jan N. Do You Know Greek? NovTSup 19. Leiden: Brill, 1968.
Stegemann, Hartmut. “Die Entstehung der Qumrangemeinde.” Habilitationsschrift, Uni-
versity of Bonn, 1965.
80 – 87.
Stone, Michael E. Scriptures, Sects and Visions. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980.
Stone, Michael E., and David Satran. Emerging Judaism: Studies in the Fourth and Third
Centuries BCE. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988.
Sundberg, Albert C., Jr. “Canon of the New Testament.” In IDBSup 136 – 40.
Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Heiliges Schrifttum und kanonische Bücher aus jüdischer Sicht –
Überlegungen zur Ausbildung der Grösse ‘Die Schrift’ im Judentum.” In Mitte der
Schrift?: Ein jüdisch-christliches Gespräch: Texte des Berner Symposions vom 6. – 12. Jan-
uar 1985, edited by Martin Klopfenstein et al., 45 – 79. Bern: Lang, 1987.
470 Part 2: Qumran
159 – 99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Reprinted in Qumran and the
History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 1 – 41.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Tov, Emanuel. “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts from the Judaean Desert: Their Contribu-
tion to Textual Criticism.” JJS 39 (1988) 5 – 37.
Tov, Emanuel. “The Orthography and Language of the Hebrew Scrolls Found at Qumran
and the Origin of These Scrolls.” Textus 13 (1986) 31 – 57.
Tov, Emanuel, and Johann Cook. “A Computerized Database for the Qumran Biblical
Scrolls with an Appendix on the Samaritan Pentateuch.” JNSL 12 (1984) 133 – 37.
Vermes, Geza. “Biblical Studies and the Dead Sea Scrolls 1947 – 1987: Retrospects and
Prospects.” JSOT 39 (1987) 113 – 28.
Wise, Michael. “The Dead Sea Scrolls, Part 1: Archaeology and Biblical Manuscripts.”
BA 49 (1986) 140 – 54.
Wise, Michael. “The Dead Sea Scrolls, Part 2: Nonbiblical Manuscripts.” BA 49 (1986)
228 – 43.
28
The Judean Desert Scrolls and the History of the Text
of the Hebrew Bible
The title announced for this presentation may be understood as the broad rubric
under which I wish to share some thoughts about the impact of the Judean Des-
ert Scrolls on our current understanding of the history of the text of the Hebrew
Bible. It seemed to me appropriate to offer a perspective on that history at the
annual meeting of the ASOR, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery
of Qumran Cave 1, because of the role the ASOR has played from the begin-
ning, both in critical study and publication of the biblical scrolls from the eleven
Qumran caves.
While scholars identified with other archaeological schools have made major
contributions to the study of the biblical scrolls found among the Judean Desert
Scrolls, there can be little dispute that scholars associated with the ASOR have
been especially prominent in publication and critical study of the biblical texts.
One thinks of Claremont colleagues William Brownlee and John Trever, who
from the beginning were responsible for recognizing, photographing, and, in
Brownlee’s case, assessing the value of the large Isaiah Scroll from Cave 1, as well
as the biblical text of the Habakkuk Commentary. It is certainly appropriate at
this time to recognize again the crucial contributions of Frank Moore Cross and
Patrick William Skehan, to whom were assigned the lion’s share of the biblical
fragments from Cave 4. And it is my privilege once more to express my personal
gratitude to Cross, Skehan, and John Strugnell for their early scrutiny of my own
effort to study and publish the editio princeps of the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11.
If one went on also to recognize the work of the students of that first generation
of American scrolls scholars, the list would expand beyond the limits of time and
space of the present assignment.
I was honored when the editors of the Hebrew University Bible asked me to
join them last July in Jerusalem to offer a perspective on the work of the Hebrew
University Bible Project (HUBP) on the history of the text of the Hebrew Bible.
After forty years of labor by members of the HUBP and their assistants, The
Book of Isaiah appeared in its entirety in 1995, and just now this past June, The
Book of Jeremiah.1
The perspective from which I reviewed the work of the HUBP was that of
participation on the United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text Project

1
Goshen-Gottstein, Hebrew University Bible: Isaiah; Rabin, Talmon, and Tov, Hebrew
University Bible: Jeremiah.
472 Part 2: Qumran
(HOTTP), of which I have been a member since its inception in 1969, as well as
my own personal work on the history of the text of the masoretic Psalter.
When viewed in terms of the history of textual criticism since the sixteenth
century, the concept underlying the HUBP has been revolutionary. The HOTTP
independently joined the HUBP in that revolution. The two projects had quite
different needs out of which they separately grew, but they converged in concept
as the independent work on each progressed. Both projects are issuing critical
editions of the Hebrew Bible – the Hebrew University Bible (HUB), of which
we now have two impressive volumes; and Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ),
which is scheduled to be published in the year 2002 [whole Bible now in 2025],
with fascicles appearing intermittently in advance. The first fascicle, The Five
Scrolls, should appear next summer in time for the Oslo meeting of the IOSOT.
[It appeared in 2004.]
The HUBP came into being because of the perceived necessity to locate the
newly recovered Aleppo Codex in the history of development of the text of the
Hebrew Bible. The HOTTP came into being because of the perceived neces-
sity to assist national translation committees around the world in dealing with
difficult passages, which often had conflicting solutions in the translations in
the colonial or common Western languages resorted to by the local translation
committees. Because the HOTTP committee was formed by Eugene Nida, the
world-renowned linguist who headed the translations department of the UBS,
its members were selected in large part because of their awareness of the changes
being effected in the concept and practice of text criticism by the recovery of
the Judean Desert Scrolls. Results from the study of the scrolls have profoundly
affected both projects.
The chief result of the study of the Judean Desert Scrolls for text criticism has
been a completely new appreciation of the history of transmission of the biblical
text.2 That history is the only ground upon which a valid and responsible herme-
neutic of text criticism should be established.3 While the terminology used by the
two projects is slightly different, the history perceived is the same. The discov-
ery of the scrolls and the recovery of Codex Aleppensis provided both the near
beginnings of the history of textual transmission and the near climax of its devel-
opment in the hands of the Ben Asher family at the end of the ninth century CE
and the beginning of the tenth. It was now possible to look at that history with
a kind of confidence never before experienced in the annals of text criticism.4
The HOTTP decided early on that a clear distinction should be made between
the history of the literary formation of the text and the subsequent history of the
2
See Goshen-Gottstein’s introduction in Isaiah: Sample Edition, 11 – 20, essentially re-
printed in Goshen-Gottstein, Hebrew University Bible: Isaiah, xi – xx; extensively edited in
Rabin, Talmon, and Tov, Hebrew University Bible: Jeremiah, ix – xiii. See also Talmon, “Aspects
of the Textual Transmission,” and Talmon, “Old Testament Text,” esp. 164 – 66; and Barthélemy,
“Text, Hebrew, History of.”
3
Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism.”
4
The work of Tov on the Qumran system or practice, especially in orthography, morphol-
ogy, and scribal practices, has been especially helpful; see Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew
Bible, esp. 100 – 117.
The Judean Desert Scrolls and the History of the Text of the Hebrew Bible 473
transmission of the text. While those two histories overlap somewhat, it became
clear that text criticism had become servile to the particular hermeneutic of exe-
gesis out of which this or that scholar worked. A received reading would some-
times be condemned as corrupt in order for the scholar to construct a different
text to fit what the scholar thought the text should have said; then would begin
the search for a “variant reading” in the versions, or in Kennicott and de Rossi,
to substantiate the new reading. And if such could not be found, then conjec-
ture filled the bill. This view of text criticism still prevails in some circles, as
can still be seen in commentaries and translations published in the second half
of the twentieth century. The New English Bible (1970), The New American
Bible (1970), the Bible de Jerusalem (1970), the New Revised Standard Version
(1989), and even somewhat the Tanakh (published by the Jewish Publication
Society in 1988), provide examples of translations built in part on the older view
of text criticism. The older Revised Standard Version remained basically true to
the King James Version as a formal equivalence translation. HUBP, HOTTP, and
its offspring, BHQ, reject conjecture as a valid text-critical choice unless such a
conjectural reading can be shown to have been the ancient cause of subsequent
disparate readings; but such cases are rare.
The history of transmission of the text begins with the earliest attested texts
available, and that aspect of the history has been greatly advanced because of
the discovery of the Judean Desert Scrolls. That marks what the HUBP calls the
first stage of the history, which begins with the third-century BCE fragments
from Qumran Cave 4, and with the earliest available Greek translations. Its main
characteristic is textual fluidity – limited fluidity to be sure, but nonetheless quite
distinct from the second stage. That fluidity, which Goshen-Gottstein saw con-
tinuing in a greatly reduced mode into the masoretic period, he called a “main
current” with “rivulets” running alongside,5 but which Talmon calls “dominant
family” and “variant traditions.”6
The UBS committee calls the stage of a retrojected Ur-text the First Period,
and the stage of earliest attested texts the Second Period – with the clear under-
standing that the First Period is the province of exegesis, literary criticism, and
historical reconstruction, but not that of text criticism.7 The HUBP, perhaps
wisely, sees the history of transmission starting only with the period of the earli-
est attested texts, their First Stage and our Second Period. We decided to call the
period of the literary development, or history of formation of the text, the First
Period, toward the end of which textual transmission was admittedly already a
part of the picture, so that the two should not be confused.
There is then a clear demarcation between biblical manuscripts that fit the
first stage and those that date from after the fall of Jerusalem – by and large, the
distinction between biblical texts from Qumran and those from the other prove-
5
Goshen-Gottstein, Hebrew University Bible: Isaiah, xvii.
6
Rabin, Talmon, and Tov, Hebrew University Bible: Jeremiah, xii.
7
See the trenchant discussion of the blurred distinctions between “higher” and “lower”
criticism in Talmon, “Textual Study of the Bible.”
474 Part 2: Qumran
nances covered by the general term, Judean Desert Scrolls. These latter (Murab-
baʿat, Hever, Masada) fit a proto-MT pattern we already knew in the quite literal
Greek ˙translations attributed to Aquila, Theodotion, and, to some extent, Sym-
machus, which date from early in the second century CE. The location of the
Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever in the late first century BCE,
or early first century CE, provided the ˙clear˙ link necessary to see that the first
century of the Common Era was one of intensive textual stabilization, which
resulted in a standard that would be called proto-masoretic.8
In summation, the Judean Desert Scrolls have provided the base for the
new history of transmission of the biblical text. The link in the transition from
pre-masoretic to proto-masoretic thus came to light and became an essential
part of the history of the text as now perceived. The shift from pre- to pro-
to-masoretic is rather dramatic to observe, though “thin layers” of variant read-
ings continue even into citations in rabbinic literature, and can be seen in the
work of Jerome in the fourth and early fifth century CE. At the other end of the
spectrum, it has become clear for many of us (pace Paolo Sacchi and the Turin
School) that the variant readings in post-eleventh-century masoretic manuscripts
collated by Kennicott, de Rossi, and Ginsburg were derivative and, with a few
exceptions, do not have readings that pierce back before the masoretic period.9
The HUBP plans publishing text-critical commentaries later to accom-
pany the fascicles of the HUB,10 whereas the HOTTP has published elaborate
text-critical commentaries authored by Dominique Barthélemy in Critique tex-
tuelle de l’Ancien Testament (CTAT), three hefty volumes of which (of a total of
six projected) have already appeared.11 Each fascicle of BHQ will be accompa-
nied by a succinct text-critical commentary.
Articles in Textus and elsewhere, written by members of the HUBP, stress the
importance of bringing medieval rabbinic and Qaraite grammarians and com-
mentators into text-critical discussions. Each problem dealt with by the HOTTP,
as seen in CTAT, includes the medieval Jewish and Qaraite sources in its discus-
sion of the textual history of each problem. And often we found that the medi-
eval grammarians’ knowledge of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic grammar and
syntax, the philological tools and grammatical theories that they learned from
grammarians of the Arabic language rather than from Greek and Latin classical
grammarians (as is the case with modern European Hebrew grammars) offered
the key to understand the textual problem addressed. Apparatus V to VI in HUB
provides a bare beginning of such a commentary for the books of Isaiah and Jere-
miah, but there can be no substitute for a text-critical commentary to accompany
each biblical book, as is planned also for BHQ.
The HUB offers two distinct innovations, which are very important. I know
of no prior effort in a text edition to cover Scripture citations in the basic rab-
8
Barthélemy, Les devanciers d’Aquila; Tov, Greek Minor Prophets Scroll, ix – x, 1 – 2.
9
10
See the sample offered by Talmon and Tov, “Commentary on the Text of Jeremiah 1.”
11
[CTAT vol. 5 appeared in 2016.]
binic literature: Mishnah, Tosefta, the two Talmudim, and the great Midrashim.
The importance of this will only gradually be seen by some students of the text.
As the editors carefully state, this is a delicate area that requires knowledge of
the rabbinic mind to evaluate, but it certainly belongs in a critical edition of
the text that claims to provide in its apparatus a succinct, but complete, history
of the text of the Bible. If pre-masoretic readings survive into the proto-mas-
oretic period, we need to know it, even if the “rivulets” or “thin layers” have
considerably diminished in number. Citations in rabbinic literature demonstrate
clearly the adaptability of the Masoretic Text even within rather clear-cut limits
of manipulability. Scripture in the NT is virtually ignored in the HUB. Some
formulaic citations of Scripture in the NT, especially in Matthew and Luke, may
give evidence of the late-first-century situation of the stabilization of Old Greek
translations; but most scriptural intertextuality in the NT gives clear evidence of
the earlier period of textual fluidity similar to that in the Qumran literature.12
The other innovation of the HUB apparatus structure is its inclusion of read-
ings from the Cairo Genizah.13 With these two innovations, the history of the
text is presented more fully than in any other critical edition of the Bible so far
attempted. One should note, too, that both the Isaiah and the Jeremiah volumes
have included readings from the newly recovered Firkowitch manuscripts in
Russia, photographed and studied by Malachi Beit-Arié and others.14 One does
wonder, however, if the desire to present a full history of the text is to be realized
if one can essentially overlook Origen’s second column. Despite giving “pride of
place” to the early versions in the first apparatus, the HUB shows a tendency to
privilege the Hebrew language witnesses.
Most prior reviews of the Isaiah fascicles have highlighted the problem
involved in grouping Judean scrolls readings with rabbinic citations, but the
editors are fully aware of the problem, and equally aware of the problems that
would arise in constructing the apparatus if they tried to set the historical shift
from pre-masoretic to proto-masoretic at the beginning of the second century
CE as the basic criterion, ignoring the distinction between text and versions.15
What is truly remarkable about the change that has taken place in the concept
and theory of text criticism since the recovery of the Judean Desert Scrolls and
of Codex Aleppensis at the middle of the twentieth century is the importance of
the classical Tiberian masorah to understanding the text of the Hebrew Bible. It
takes both ketiv and qere to make Miqra!16
A quick glance at the history of modern, or post-Renaissance, text criticism
will help. When, in 1519, Martin Luther translated the NT into German, he sim-
12
See Sanders, “Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Studies,” 326 – 29.
13
BHQ plans to include readings from the Cairo Genizah that date before 1000 CE. The
BHS apparatus indiscriminately included some genizah readings.
14
See Beit-Arie, “Accessibility of the Russian Manuscript Collections.”
15
E. g., reviews of Goshen-Gottstein, Isaiah: Sample Edition by de Boer, Review of The
Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition; and Roberts, Review of The Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition. By
contrast, see Revell, Review of The Book of Isaiah: Parts 1 and 2.
16
See Sanders, “Task of Text Criticism,” esp. 316.
476 Part 2: Qumran
ply used Erasmus’s text. But when, in 1523, he started work on translating the
Hebrew Bible, he ran into text-critical problems. He basically used the Brescia
Bible of 1494 and often used the Vulgate to translate text-critically difficult texts.
He devised a hermeneutic of text criticism in order to choose among variant
readings. That hermeneutic, which he called res et argumentum, was very clear;
one chose the reading that pointed forward to the gospel of Jesus Christ. (Of
course, by that he meant his understanding of Paul’s understanding of the gospel
of Jesus Christ.) Following the lead of Elias Levita, Luther devalued the work of
the Masoretes, which meant one could vocalize and parse the consonantal text
without the masoretic constraints of vowels, accents, and masorot. This gave
license to several generations of scholars to emend the text almost at will, such
as Capellus, Houbigant, Morin, Simon, and the whole Critica Sacra movement.
That situation led Baruch Spinoza in 1670 to publish his now famous tractate
declaring that the truth of the Bible would be discovered in discerning the history
of the formation of the biblical text and the authorial intentionality of its individ-
ual writers. In Spinoza, one saw the full result of the renaissance of Greek phi-
losophy and culture, which had begun in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries:
it was the original individual’s thought that was inspired and authoritative. The
community dimension of biblical literature, in which anonymity of authorship
was common, succumbed to hellenization in many ways, including the pseude-
pigraphic attribution of biblical books to well-known community figures of the
past. The Semitic perspective of community identity was considerably modified.
Spinoza, in his genius, went on to say that such a history would probably never
be complete, and discerning authorial intentionality would more than likely not
be possible. Spinoza was declared persona non grata by both synagogue and
church, but his influence, whether he was cited or not, was considerable.17
By the time of Johann David Michaelis in the eighteenth century, the herme-
neutic had changed from having the aim of pointing to the gospel of Jesus Christ
to reconstructing as far as possible the ipsissima verba of biblical authors, but the
denigration of the work of the Masoretes continued, since it clearly served the
purpose of emending the text as exegesis of so-called original meanings indicated.
In fact, that aspect of Luther’s hermeneutic persists in Old Testament scholarship
today. Paul Kahle, whose work has probably been the most influential of any
scholar in the twentieth century, dismissed the work of the Masoretes as a creation
of the Ben Asher family, in effect continuing to denigrate the oral traditions on
which it drew.18 The Hebrew University Bible, as well as Biblia Hebraica Quinta,
in due course, will finally rectify that sad situation that has obtained since the
sixteenth century. Both projects have, in effect, rehabilitated the worth and value
of the work of the Tiberian Masoretes for understanding the text of the Bible.19
The corrective had begun with Gérard Weil’s work on the masorah for the BHS.
17
Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism,” esp. 2 – 4.
18
Kahle, Der hebräische Bibeltext seit Franz Delitzsch, 51. See the trenchant remarks by
Goshen-Gottstein, “Rise of the Tiberian Bible Text,” 89.
19
See the discussion by Barthélemy in CTAT 3:ccxxviii – ccxxxviii.
The HUBP struggled through a number of problems having to do with the

logistics of constructing a critical text of the Bible. There were two precipices
to avoid: on the one hand drowning the apparatus in innumerable alleged read-
ings; or overworking the tools of analysis in order to pare down the number of
notations.20 The solution they arrived at is probably as circumspect as a critical
edition of the Bible can be: to abandon eclectic apparatus that quote supporting
witnesses if exegesis requires it, but instead to construct five apparatus, four of
which would contain notations of the several types of variant witnesses, and a
fifth that would offer the editors’ subjective judgment as to which is a true vari-
ant. The four apparatus offer: the first, the apparently variant readings in the
ancient versions; the second, those in witnesses to the Hebrew text; the third, the
medieval biblical manuscripts; and the fourth, masoretic variations in spelling,
vowels, and accents. The editors contend that they have presented in those four
apparatus the basic history of the text ad loc., and with very few exceptions they
are very thorough indeed.21
It is the fifth / sixth apparatus, first in modern Hebrew and then the same in
English, that offers the subjective judgments of the editors about the results of
using text-critical tools of analysis. This final apparatus hints at the eventual
text-critical commentary proposed for each volume. In many ways, the com-
mentaries should provide the excitement that the fifth apparatus only teasingly
suggests.22
HOTTP worked the other way round. Through Barthélemy’s analytical
reports in CTAT, we are providing in-depth text-critical commentaries on over
five thousand textual problems of all sorts. Those commentaries offer extensive
analyses of the history of the text for each problem addressed, from the earliest
witnesses through the medieval grammarians and commentators, to the vagaries
of modern critical research on the text. Now the work of constructing a hand-
book critical edition is in the hands of the next generation, the team working on
BHQ.
The task of text criticism is to locate true variants, of whatever literary length,
over against pseudo-variants. The aim of text criticism is to establish the date in
the earliest history of transmission of the text when inner literary developments
are basically complete and when ancient Jewish believing communities accepted
those texts as functionally canonical (Talmon’s Gruppentexte), at which text-crit-
ical judgments are designed to point. The goal of text criticism is finally to pro-
vide the soundest possible base for establishing the critically most responsible
text for reading and translation. And HUB and BHQ of necessity have as their
major job to present the essential, critically considered history of the text for use
by readers of any and all persuasions, no matter their aim.
20
As put by Goshen-Gottstein, Text and Language, xiii.
21
Granting some of the points made by de Boer in his review of Goshen-Gottstein’s Isaiah:
Sample Edition, and the obvious observation that there is the subjectivity factor throughout the
enterprise.
22
See the preliminary effort in Talmon and Tov, “Commentary on the Text of Jeremiah 1.”
478 Part 2: Qumran
A difficulty both projects have is one shared by all efforts to present a fully
critical edition of the text, and that is caused by the constraints imposed by the
goal sought, namely a printed, critical edition. Both projects have to apologize
at the outset that the printed mise-en-page cannot reproduce precisely the man-
uscript used as base text. Instead of the three-column width page or folio of the
manuscript, it is necessary for both to present the text in a single column. The
masorah magna has to be adjusted somewhat to make the printed page legible
for scholars. And there are other adjustments demanded by the requirements of
mise-en-page.
But considerably more important is the fact that due to the constraints of a
printed critical edition, each text-critical problem is presented in words and short
phrases, leaving to the reader the all-important work of seeing those words and
phrases in their fuller literary context. Time and again, we found on the HOTTP,
and I assume this is the case for the teams producing both the HUB and BHQ,
that it was not until we had placed the problem addressed in its fuller context
that we could see what was really going on in the text and the place the prob-
lematic word or phrase had in that larger context. It is not until one can perceive
the concept underlying the fuller text or version that one can understand why
the variant text came to be. As Elias Bickerman pointed out, every translation
was intended to serve the needs of the community for which it was translated.23
This is sometimes the case even for copies of the Hebrew text itself, as with the
large Isaiah Scroll, and most of the Qumran biblical texts. Every tradent, whether
copyist or translator, had a concept of what the text he or she was handing on
meant; and his or her concept of necessity was lodged in the cultural thought
forms of the tradent and the community served.
Commonly, the concept we scholars attribute to a biblical text in its so-called
original setting is not the one operative in the traditions derived from it. The
later tradent may have had a cogent and consistent view of what the text meant
in his or her contemporary cultural terms, and then slightly adapted the copy or
translation at certain junctures in the text to fit that view. Fortunately, there are
now available new sub-disciplines of biblical study that can help us understand
the underlying concept behind a text or translation, as well as better compre-
hend our own understanding of the text – specifically, structure and concept
analysis.24 The fuller text-critical commentaries in CTAT well reflect the use of
such analysis, but it is impossible, as far as I can see, to present the arguments
of such crucial studies in a printed critical edition of a text; only the bare results
can be suggested, as they sometimes are indirectly in the fifth / sixth apparatus of
the HUB. Text-critical commentaries must reflect this aspect of the work of text
criticism far more than they have to date in order to move the art of text criticism
away from the tendency to think in terms of isolated words and short phrases.
This is perhaps not the place for me to present the case for the pluriform
Bible, in which the larger contexts of variant understandings of the same text can
23
Bickerman, Studies in Jewish and Christian History, 1:190.
24
See Sanders, “Task of Text Criticism,” esp. 326 – 27.
be presented in full; but I feel compelled to mention it. This has begun to happen
in Bibles that offer translations of the Hebrew Esther in the canonical Bible and
translations of the Greek Esther, which presents quite a different concept of that
wonderful story, in the so-called apocryphal section. And, of course, it also hap-
pens willy-nilly within the Hebrew Bible where there are doublets, such as the
Ten Commandments, Ps 18 / 2 Sam 22, and many other doublets, even triplets.
Full structure analysis of larger variant passages within biblical books will even-
tually, I think, show the necessity of presenting in parallel columns the Masoretic
Text and the Septuagint understandings of the same story or pericope, simply
because focus on the isolated words and short phrases does not present or even
indicate the full history of the text.
Both the HUBP and the HOTTP fully realize that we have never before had
an editio critica maior of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew University Bible may
be as close to such that we will ever attain, and the fact that it does so permits
BHQ essentially to remain a Handausgabe for more general use. The HUB
places us pretty far down the road toward an editio critica maior, presenting a
history of the text, book by book; and CTAT places us pretty far down the road
toward what a text-critical commentary should be, evaluating the whole history
of textual problems addressed, book by book, from the earliest witnesses to the
latest scholarly treatises.
The concept underlying both projects is based on the same understanding of
the history of transmission of the text. They both agree that while exegesis will
always be a limited part of the text-critical enterprise, it cannot any longer be
permitted to dominate it. And they both agree that the aim of text criticism can
be neither to point to some future goal of history, nor to the primitive historical,
even mythic origins of a text’s authorial intentionality, nor even to the earliest
stages of a text’s transmission while it was still in literary development,25 but to
that point in its history when the text first became the common literature of a
believing community.26 And that point antedates both Christianity and rabbinic
Judaism.
If this is the case, then confessional differences among us should not be a
stumbling block to producing a true editio critica maior together. BHQ, for the
first time in the history of Biblia Hebraica, has Jews on the team preparing indi-
vidual books.27 The postmodern period provides the context in which to have
true dialogue, not in this case about our differing confessional identities, but
about the texts on which those identities are based. Because of the acerbic nature
of the charges and counter-charges in the early centuries of Jewish / Christian
debates about what the text was and what it meant, Origen provided a six-col-
25
Pace Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 313 – 49.
26
See Talmon’s remarks in “Textual Study of the Bible,” 325, in which he rejects the “three
local texts” hypothesis in favor of understanding some texts as accepted by “a sociologically
definable integrated body,” in our terms, a believing community, hence rendering that accepted
text functionally canonical for that community.
27
David Marcus (Ezra–Nehemiah), Leonard Greenspoon (Joshua), Abraham Tal (Genesis),
and Zipporah Talshir (1 – 2 Chronicles).
480 Part 2: Qumran
umn comparison of the texts known to him in his time. He wanted the debate to
become a dialogue.
All of us in this room, Jew, Christian, and secular, are, to some extent or
another, children of the Renaissance in Europe of Greco-Roman culture, or we
would not participate in such a conference as this. And now we are moving into
a period of intellectual history in which we are forced to realize that the observer
is a part of the observed, and objectivity is but subjectivity under constraint.
What better constraint can there be than dialogue in which our own most pre-
cious premises are carefully and thoughtfully critiqued by those who stand else-
where? As Ferdinand Deist aptly put it, critique should not have the purpose of
destroying the other’s position, but to correct and strengthen it for the sake of
true dialogue at a yet higher level.28
Just as both projects agree that textual analysis should lead to the location of
true variants, that is, to a point where the arguments on both sides of a potential
textual variant are equally strong so that neither can be eliminated, thereby indi-
cating the existence of a true variant,29 so we should now move beyond competi-
tion to see who is right, to cooperation to see what is right for the sake of all the
communities we serve, whether confessional or professional. The day when the
idea that individual schools or individual scholars alone can arrive at the truth of
a text, and all others would eventually see the light, is gone.
There is no question that the ASOR has made crucial contributions over these
fifty years to understanding the history of the transmission of the text of the
Hebrew Bible through the work of its members and friends on the Judean Des-
ert Scrolls.
Bibliography
Presses universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982, 1986, 1992. [Now
5 vols. to 2016.]
Beit-Arié, Malachi. “The Accessibility of the Russian Manuscript Collections: New Per-
spectives for Jewish Studies.” Folio 13, no. 1 (Winter 1995) 1 – 7.
de Boer, P. A. H. Review of The Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition with Introduction, by
Moshe H. Goshen-Gottstein. VT 16 (1966) 247 – 52.
Deist, Ferdinand. Witnesses to the Old Testament. Pretoria: NG Kerkboekhandel, 1988.
28
Deist, Witnesses to the OT, 160 – 63. (The writer received the sad news that Deist died in
Heidelberg, on leave from Stellenbosch, on July 12, 1997.)
29
Well expressed by Goshen-Gottstein in Text and Language, 201.
Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H., ed. The Hebrew University Bible: The Book of Isaiah. Je-
rusalem: Magnes, 1995.
Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. “The Rise of the Tiberian Bible Text.” In Biblical and Other
Studies, edited by Alexander Altmann, 79 – 122. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1963.
Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H. Text and Language in Bible and Qumran. Jerusalem: Ori-
ent, 1960.
Kahle, Paul. Der hebräische Bibeltext seit Franz Delitzsch. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1961.
Rabin, Chaim, Shemaryahu Talmon, and Emanuel Tov, eds. The Hebrew University Bible:
The Book of Jeremiah. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1997.
Revell, Ernest J. Review of The Book of Isaiah: Parts One and Two, edited by Moshe H.
Goshen-Gottstein. JBL (1977) 120 – 22.
Roberts, B. J. Review of The Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition with Introduction, edited by
Moshe H. Goshen-Gottstein. JTS (1967) 166 – 68.
Sanders, James A. “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Studies.” In “Shaʿarei Talmon”:
Talmon, edited by Michael A. Fishbane and Emanuel Tov, with Weston W. Fields,
323 – 36. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992.
Qumran Manuscripts.” Textus 4 (1964) 95 – 132. [Reprinted in Qumran and the History
bridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.]
159 – 99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. [Reprinted in Qumran and the
History of the Biblical Text, edited by Frank M. Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, 1 – 41.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.]
Talmon, Shemaryahu, and Emanuel Tov. “A Commentary on the Text of Jeremiah 1: The
LXX of Jeremiah 1:1 – 7.” Textus 9 (1981) 1 – 15.
29
The Impact of the Scrolls on Biblical Studies
After forty-six years of personal study of the Dead Sea Scrolls I would like to
highlight five areas of biblical study in which I think the scrolls have had greatest
impact. Others would choose other areas, but I think few would question the fact
that the following five fields of biblical study have undergone considerable chal-
lenge and change in the second half of the twentieth century because of the scrolls:
A. The history of early Judaism
B. The first-century origins of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism
C. The intertextual nature of Scripture and of early Jewish and Christian litera-
ture generally
D. The concept of Scripture as canon
E. Text criticism of the Old Testament
In the limited time available to me I will elaborate only on the first two.
Pluralism in Early Judaism
When in 1973 Michael Stone published his article on Jewish pluralism in the
First Temple period, it was clearly an idea whose time had come.1 His later book,
Scriptures, Sects and Visions established the concept for many who were not spe-
cialists in the scrolls or in early Judaism. It successfully challenged George F.
Moore’s synthesis, set forth in the early part of the century, that there was in
ancient Judaism a normative center with heterodox off-shoots.2 Ancillary ideas,
such as Morton Smith’s thesis that the Pharisees were a distinct elite minority
in early Judaism without great influence, have been rightly challenged with-
out affecting the overall view of pluralism in the period.3 The thesis has been
refined in the work of Gabriele Boccaccini who, affirming the pluralism, speaks
of a middle Judaism that ranged from 300 BCE to 200 CE.4 The calendar, or
calendars, operative even within Qumran literature itself, witness strongly to
the Jewish pluralism of the time. Since the early fifties, Shemaryahu Talmon has
shown the importance of studying biblical and Qumran calendars to enhance

1
Stone, “Judaism at the Time of Christ.” Note the title and compare with Moore’s title,
Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era.
2
Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries.
3
Smith, “Palestinian Judaism in the First Century.” But see Schwarz, “MMT, Josephus and
the Pharisees.”
4
Boccaccini, “History of Judaism.”
The Impact of the Scrolls on Biblical Studies 483
our understanding of the diversities and discrepancies within the Bible, and the
diversity within Judaism of the Second Temple period.5 Apparently four papers
are scheduled for this conference, including Talmon’s, that deal with the issue of
calendar and its importance for understanding early Judaism. Non-scroll special-
ists, like Jacob Neusner, speak of Judaisms in the early Jewish period.6 Today the
concept of wide diversity in early Judaism is accepted in biblical studies gener-
ally, except in areas of New Testament studies, where old biases seem to persist.
Early Christianity
The fact that Judaism was highly pluralistic in the first century has considerable
implications for Old Testament study. Only four papers at this conference have
titles indicating interest in the Judean Desert Scrolls in New Testament schol-
arship, but that is, unfortunately, a good indicator of the current status of the
field. By contrast, Bruce Chilton and Jacob Neusner have recently affirmed that
“Christianity must be placed within its setting as a Judaism.”7 And yet, when one
mentions “Judaism” in most New Testament scholarly circles one can still sense
the mental agonizing in bravely trying not to revive Moore’s thesis, or Strack and
Billerbeck’s assumptions, but to assert a “common Judaism.”8
Just as some scholars still tend to think of the Old Testament as “Jewish,” so
some scholars still think of the New Testament as “Christian.” We have quite
some distance yet to travel in the field of biblical study before realization fully
sets in that we need to differentiate carefully what is meant when those adjectives
are used to describe the Bible. The uses of the expression hoi Ioudaioi in the New
Testament still need to be sorted out, for the phrase as it appears, especially in the
Gospel of John and the Acts of the Apostles, has contributed sadly to persistent
Christian anti-Jewishness.9
Shemaryahu Talmon has recently entered the field of New Testament study.10
One suggestion he has made needs careful attention in terms of the diversity
in early Judaism, i. e., the distinction among the various Jewish communities of
the period in the belief in the cessation of prophecy or revelation in the time of
Ezra. While Pharisaic / rabbinic Judaism clearly taught the demise of prophecy in
the fifth century BCE, the Qumran and Christian communities, both forms or
systems of Judaism, held no such belief, indeed rejected it. Talmon has forcefully
5
See the several titles from the fifties listed in Fishbane and Tov, Shaʿarei Talmon,
xxvii – xxx, beginning with Talmon, “Yom Hakippurim,” his critique of Dupont-Sommer’s early
theses, based on the Habakkuk Commentary from Cave 1.
6
See, e. g., Neusner et al., Judaisms and Their Messiahs.
7
Chilton and Neusner, Judaism in the New Testament, xviii.
8
See, e. g., E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief.
9
See J. A. Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Translation.” Much of the actual text of the New
Testament comes from the period of the polemics of separation of Christian Jewish synagogues
from Pharisaic / rabbinic synagogues after the fall of Jerusalem.
10
See Talmon, “Oral Tradition and Written Transmission”; also Talmon, “Die Gemeinde des
erneuerten Bundes von Qumran.”
484 Part 2: Qumran
pointed out that while comparisons of the New Testament with rabbinic Jewish
literature have largely failed, for the most part, to help understand the New Tes-
tament as a Hellenistic Jewish document, comparisons with the Qumran com-
munity are helpful, in large part because neither believed that prophecy or rev-
elation had ceased in the time of Ezra, while Pharisaic / rabbinic Judaism firmly
believed that it had. This belief can be discerned in what eventually ended up in
the Ketuvim of the Tanak, where the only book that could be cited to contradict
the belief that prophecy had ceased at the time of Ezra is the Book of Daniel.
And yet, Daniel is precisely not found in the canon of the Prophets in the Tanak,
as it is in Christian Old Testaments, but in the Ketuvim.
In 1953 Karl Elliger pointed out that the hermeneutic demonstrated at Qum-
ran in the community’s reading of Scripture was threefold: (a) Scripture addresses
the End Time; (b) the Qumran community believed they lived at or near the
End Time; and therefore, (c) Scripture spoke directly to them.11 He might have
gone on to note that that is the same basic hermeneutic operative in the Second
Christian Testament. In fact, that is essentially the same hermeneutic used in
fundamentalist or sectarian Christianity today. As Raymond Brown showed in
his Johns Hopkins dissertation, it was believed at Qumran that the community,
perhaps through the Teacher of Righteousness, had been given the raz, or mys-
tery, comparable to Paul’s claim of knowing the mysterion for interpreting Scrip-
ture, and Luke’s use of the term kleis, or key to Scripture (Luke 11:52).12 Clearly
Pharisaic / rabbinic Judaism rejected any such belief in a late revelation of how to
make Scripture relate to on-going history. For rabbinic Judaism, all such specu-
lation about what God was going to do, or was yet to do in history – whether to
end it or not – was to be rejected, in part undoubtedly because of such specula-
tions being prominent in the Qumran, Christian, and other eschatological forms
of Judaism.
Torah, in Judaism, has both broad and strict meanings. While it can refer to
the Pentateuch, it can also refer to Judaism itself. My teacher, Samuel Sandmel,
often pointed out that “Judaism is Torah and Torah is Judaism.” He was referring
principally to rabbinic Judaism. But the same may be said of the various forms of
Judaism of the earlier period. C. H. Dodd, in The Bible and the Greeks of 1935,
expressed concern that the LXX translators had used the Greek term nomos to
translate the Hebrew torah, thereby reducing the multivalent term torah to the
single meaning of “law.” And yet, as Laurent Pasinya pointed out in a study done
at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in 1973, the Greek nomos had the same wide
range of meanings that the Hebrew word torah had – instruction, custom, pat-
tern, as well as what we mean by “law.”13
On the basis of that study I then suggested that Torah can be seen to be made
up of two basic elements: both story and stipulation, both mythos and ethos,
both gospel and law, both haggadah and halakah; so that the apparent contra-
11
Elliger, Habakkuk-Kommentar vom Toten Meer, 275 – 87.
12
Brown, “Semitic Background of the Pauline Mysterion,” 197 – 202.
13
See Pasinya, La notion de NOMOS, 19, 201 – 5, chs. 3, 5.
diction between Paul’s saying nomos was abrogated, and his also saying nomos
was holy, eternal and good, was not necessarily so. For Paul, the solution to the
problem many Jews faced in the Hellenistic period was not solved by subscribing
to a halakic Torah shebeʿal peh, but to highlight Torah as God’s story and to set
aside the old Bronze and Iron Age cultic and dietary laws within Torah as abro-
gated, especially for converted non-Jewish God-fearers.14 Qumran also rejected
the idea of a second oral torah but apparently devised, like the Sadducees, ongo-
ing legislation by exegesis of Scripture.15
Postmodern Reflections
Postmodern reflection on the human enterprise is influenced by humility that

brings with it a form of pluralism in current research and thinking, so that we
can appreciate in our time the pluralism in early Judaism. Michael Fishbane, in
his painfully beautiful book, Garments of Torah, claims that the authorizing,
legitimizing moment for the whole Torah was God’s descent on Mount Sinai
to reveal the law. In my review of Garments, I asked why Fishbane had chosen
that theophany as the authorizing moment of Torah.16 Why not instead choose
God’s pastoral call on Abraham and Sarah in Gen 12 as the authorizing moment
of Torah?
Fishbane made his assertion, and I asked my question, out of our different
hermeneutic circles. He as a Jew would stress the halakic aspect of Torah, and
I as a Christian would stress the haggadic aspect of Torah, neither denying the
other as also important. To try to discern which position is “right” is to pursue
a modern quest for truth. To accept the other position as legitimate for the other
is to pursue a postmodern quest for truth. We both can and do say that God or
Truth is One, but we both must accept human humility as a major factor in the
quest for truth, and hence listen to and try to understand the other’s position and
respect it, all the while adhering to, or at least honoring, the community that nur-
tured us in the first place and brought us to different views of which theophany
in the Pentateuch we would call the authorizing or principal one.
For the Christian, it is the story that begins in Gen 12, as a sojourn with Israel
that culminates in God’s sojourn in one member, Jesus, of the family of Abraham
and Sarah, that is the Bible’s authority.17 For the Jew it is God’s gift of Torah on
Mount Sinai that culminates in halakah and the human desire to please and obey
God that is the Bible’s authority.
Dialogue is possible between Christian and Jew only when Scripture is read
both critically and faithfully. To read it only faithfully is to insist on its meaning
14
See J. A. Sanders, “Torah and Christ”; J. A. Sanders, “Torah and Paul.”
15
See Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the helpful review, Vermes, Review
of Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls.
16
The review is J. A. Sanders, Review of The Garments of Torah.
17
See J. A. Sanders, Torah and Canon, 26 – 27.
486 Part 2: Qumran
being limited to what we learned from our respective communities’ tradition

about it. To read it only critically is to try to persuade the other, on the basis of
the canons of human reason, that one reading only is critically correct. In neither
case does dialogue take place.
Dialogue can ensue only by a combination, on the part of both parties, of
critical and faithful readings; and that requires a healthy measure of humility
on the part of both.18 The principal reason that dialogue is mandated for those
who adhere to these texts is that Scripture, in whatever canonical shape, is itself
a dialogical literature.19
Greek Influence in Antiquity
Historians need to be mindful of the influence of Greek culture upon Judaism

and Christianity in two rather vast waves.
First was the hellenization process of the non-Greek world, which came
from Alexander the Great’s policy of establishing cities after the Greek model
everywhere he went. The process was long and pervasive, extending to the fur-
thest regions of the Mediterranean and western Asian worlds. Morton Smith
has clearly shown that hellenization was a two-way process.20 Greek culture
extended even to villages well up the Nile, though with less intensity. Even so,
there came about a semitization of some aspects of Greek culture in the col-
onies, and the evolution of the Greek language finally into something called
Koine Greek – the language of the New Testament. Greco-Roman influence on
all forms of Judaism, even the Pharisaic / rabbinic in Talmud and Midrash, is well
documented in the works of Saul Lieberman, Elias Bickerman, Morton Smith,
and Moses Hadas – the Morningside Heights School of thought in the early
part of this century. Greek influence can even be seen in scattered portions of
Qumran literature, which is usually characterized as highly resistant to inroads
of Greek culture.21
This brought with it many forms of strain and tension for Judaism, as well
as productive intellectual fervor. The interweaving of European Greek and
Asian Jewish traditions can be seen throughout the Septuagint, Apocrypha, and
Pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, etc. The massive corpus of Jewish literature
composed in the Hellenistic period was sloughed off by rabbinic Judaism but
preserved in translation in the languages of the early churches. Some of these
texts are now available in their original language forms in the Qumran library.
18
See J. A. Sanders, “Identity, Apocalyptic, and Dialogue,” and J. A. Sanders, “Intertextu-
ality and Dialogue.”
19
See J. A. Sanders, “Scripture as Canon.”
20
Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics, 57 – 81. And see now Parente and Sievers, Josephus
and the History of the Greco-Roman Period, especially the evaluation by Cohen of Smith’s cor-
pus, “Morton Smith and his Scholarly Achievement.”
21
See J. A. Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, 93 – 103, 112 – 17, and J. A. Sanders, “Psalms
Scroll (11QPsa) Reviewed.”
Nearly twenty years ago I suggested the reasons for the rise in the late pre-Chris-
tian period of belief in verbal inspiration, swiftly followed by the idea of literal
inspiration, that is, the sacredness of each jot and tittle of Torah.22
There were many ways in which Greek thought had an impact on Judaism,
and one very important way was a stress upon the worth and responsibility of
the individual. Most biblical literature is communal and anonymous, but under
Greek pressures Jews began to feel they had to attribute their traditional commu-
nity-owned literature to individuals, hence the concommitant biblical phenom-
enon of pseudepigraphy – the attribution of community traditional literature to
great names in Israel’s past – all the Psalter to David, all of Proverbs to Solomon,
non-Pauline letters to Paul, and the affixing of names of individuals to the Gos-
pels.23
Focus on individuals in Judaism had started in the late Iron Age, and espe-
cially with the Dispersion (Jer 31:29; Ezek 18), but intensely increased in the
so-called Hellenistic period so that some hellenized Jews could hear a claim of
God’s incarnation in one Jew, while many Jews resisted such a claim as extreme
assimilation to Greek or pagan culture.24 The concept of Emmanuel, “God with
us,” had now extended for some Jews beyond the Semitic belief in God’s accom-
panying the community on their common journey (Exod 33:16), to the idea of
divine incarnation in an individual. This would have been anathema to those
Jews, especially Pharisees, and to some extent the Qumran community, who
effectively resisted the deepest inroads of hellenization. Thus Abraham Heschel,
following Maimonides, could speak of God’s incarnation in the people Israel;
and Michael Fishbane, following Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, writes
eloquently of God’s incarnation in Scripture.25
Greek Influence in Modernity
The second massive wave of Greco-Roman influence came with the Renaissance,
in particular the re-birth of Greek culture with its renewed emphasis on the
worth and responsibility of the individual. This emphasis has been rightly called
the Enlightenment. This, in turn, gave rise to the increasing spread of literacy and
individual readings of the Bible contradicting church traditional interpretations.
Even before the printing press became a vehicle for the spread of the Renaissance
22
J. A. Sanders, “Text and Canon.”
23
See J. A. Sanders, “Introduction: Why the Pseudepigrapha?” Despite popular identifi-
cation of Luke, the Evangelist, with Luke, the beloved physician (Col 4:14), the author(s) of
Luke is anonymous. Henry Cadbury of Harvard did his dissertation there (“Style and Literary
Method of Luke”), searching Attic and Hellenistic literature to determine what the medical
lexicon was in the first century, and determined that the text of Luke – Acts does not reflect any
of the medical terms of the time. My teacher Sam Sandmel once remarked that Cadbury got his
doctorate by depriving Luke of his.
24
The discussions about judaizers and hellenizers in Acts needs now to be reformulated.
25
488 Part 2: Qumran
of Greco-Roman culture, monks in the fourteenth century, working as scribes,

made considerable numbers of copies of the Vulgate for the increasing number
of people who could read for themselves, rather than having the Bible read aloud
only in community. Such older readings were accompanied always, of course, by
a community interpretation.
Baruch Spinoza in 1670 claimed that the truth of the Bible would be found in
the history of its literary formation with focus on authorial intentionality of the
various contributors to the Bible – a clear result of the impact of the Renaissance
of Greco-Roman classical culture with its emphasis on the worth and responsi-
bility of the individual author or speaker. Spinoza went on to say that he doubted
if such a history could ever be completed, or even done well, especially when
attempting to reconstruct the intentions of the authors.26 But his call has inspired
historical, biblical criticism as we know it since Johann David Michaelis in the
eighteenth century – the search for what individual authors intended at the time
they wrote what they did. Any passage in a biblical book not originating from
the individual who was thought to have been the author was, and by some schol-
ars is still, labeled as “secondary,” “spurious,” or “inauthentic,” thereby com-
pletely denigrating the community dimension of biblical literature. The so-called
Jesus of the Jesus Seminar is clearly not the early community view of Jesus in the
canonical Gospels or Paul.
This has been called the modern phase of biblical criticism, the sanguine belief
that original compositions could be recovered and that truth somehow lies in
those original thoughts – precisely Spinoza’s point – but without the doubt
about it he himself expressed. Such a belief is already beginning to be reviewed in
the postmodern world, especially among Old Testament students and students
of early Judaism. It depends precisely on the view of authority consciously or
unconsciously held. While it does not seem yet to have greatly influenced New
Testament scholarship, postmodern thought in New Testament work does have
some valid examples, some represented here in the few New Testament scholars
participating in this conference.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has helped to introduce postmodern
modes of thought in work on the Hebrew Bible and early Judaism. Exposition of
the various ways in which the Qumran community understood and interpreted
Scripture has brought about considerable review of the massive amount of Jew-
ish pre-Christian literature in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. One result
has been a new subdiscipline called comparative midrash – the exercise of tracing
the Nachleben or pilgrimage of a Scripture passage from inception in the Hebrew
Bible, through early translations, such as the Septuagint and Syriac, into citations
and echoes of Scripture in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus,
and the New Testament, even into rabbinic literature and patristics. Such an exer-
cise brings about considerable indeterminacy in thinking about what Scripture
can mean when read in later, very different circumstances, including so-called
26
For data and discussion of the impact of Spinoza’s call for biblical criticism ever since, see
J. A. Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism.”
“modern” critical contexts. It has even brought about considerable indetermi-

nacy about modern scholarly efforts to determine the original meanings of pas-
sages of Scripture. The assured results of scholarly understandings of Scripture
texts seem to change from decade to decade and among schools of interpretation.
The effects of the second great wave of Greco-Roman influence on the Bible,
and how it is read, may possibly be available now for critical review, even by
those who have benefited by it, and that happens to be all of us attending this
conference to one extent or another.
As important as these observations may be about the impact of the scrolls on
the history of early Judaism, and of the births of Christianity and rabbinic Juda-
ism, the other three fields listed at the beginning of the paper are equally import-
ant: the renewed interest in the intertextual nature of biblical and early Jewish
literature, including the New Testament;27 the new light thrown on the canonical
process;28 and the paradigm shift taking place in text criticism.29 The facsimile
edition of Leningradensis published in 1998 is a major landmark in the paradigm
shift. Transparencies of Leningradensis have been in the hands of the editors
now working on Biblia Hebraica Quinta for three years, and the first fascicle of
Biblia Hebraica Quinta (the Five Scrolls) is scheduled to appear based on those
transparencies in August of 1998 in Oslo at the OTS annual meeting there.30 The
whole text and the full masorah of Leningradensis will now be fully accessible to
everyone in addition to those of the Ben Asher codex (where extant) and of the
few others available in legible facsimile or film forms.
It is fairly amazing to see the breadth and depth of the impact the scrolls have
had on biblical studies. I am sure others at this conference would identify other
areas in addition to these five. Now it is to be hoped that New Testament schol-
arship in general will take heed and move on beyond the admittedly important
discoveries at Nag Hammadi in 1945, to those discovered only two years later at
Wadi Qumran, and their vast importance for understanding the rise of Christian-
ity as a form of Judaism in the first century of the common era.31
27
“Scarcely a line of the New Testament is to be fully and exhaustively understood without
reference to pertinent passages in the Old Testament.” Chilton and Neusner, Judaism in the
New Testament, xiv.
28
See J. A. Sanders and Beck, “Leningrad Codex.”
29
See J. A. Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism.”
30
As of this writing (July 1996) the plan was to introduce the first fascicle, The Five Scrolls,
at the OTS meeting in Oslo on 3 August 1998. [See now J. A. Sanders, Review of BHQ, Fasci-
cle 18, the first published].
31
The same point is made by Satran in “Qumran and Christian Origins.” I am grateful to
Martin Abegg for calling this important study to my attention.
490 Part 2: Qumran
Bibliography
Boccaccini, Gabriele. “History of Judaism: Its Periods in Antiquity.” In Judaism in Late
Antiquity, edited by Jacob Neusner, 285 – 307. Leiden: Brill, 1995.
Brown, Raymond E. “The Semitic Background of the Pauline Mysterion.” PhD diss.,
Johns Hopkins University, 1958. [Published as The Semitic Background of the Term
“Mystery” in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1968.]
Cadbury, Henry. “The Style and Literary Method of Luke.” PhD diss., Harvard Univer-
sity, 1914.
Chilton, Bruce, and Jacob Neusner. Judaism in the New Testament: Practices and Beliefs.
London: Routledge, 1995.
Cohen, Shaye. “Morton Smith and His Scholarly Achievement.” In Josephus and the His-
tory of the Greco-Roman Period: Essays in Memory of Morton Smith, edited by Fausto
Parente and Joseph Sievers, 1 – 8. Leiden: Brill, 1994.
Dodd, C. H. The Bible and the Greeks. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1935.
Elliger, Karl. Studien zum Habakkuk-Kommentar vom Toten Meer. BHT 15. Tübingen:
Mohr (Siebeck), 1953.
Fishbane, Michael A., and Emanuel Tov, with Weston W. Fields, eds. “Shaʿarei Talmon”:
Talmon. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992.
Neusner, Jacob, William S. Green, and Ernest S. Frerichs, eds. Judaisms and Their Messi-
ahs at the Turn of the Christian Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Parente, Fausto, and Joseph Sievers, eds. Josephus and the History of the Greco-Roman
Period: Essays in Memory of Morton Smith. Leiden: Brill, 1994.
Sanders, E. P. Judaism: Practice and Belief, 53 BCE – 66 CE. Philadelphia: Trinity Inter-
national, 1992.
Sanders, James A. “Hermeneutics of Translation.” In Removing the Anti-Judaism from the
New Testament, edited by Howard C. Kee and Irvin J. Borowsky, 43 – 62. Philadelphia:
American Interfaith Institute, 1998.
Sanders, James A. “Identity, Apocalyptic, and Dialogue.” In The Echoes of Many Texts: Re-
flections on Jewish and Christian Traditions. Essays in Honor of Lou H. Silberman, edited
by William G. Dever and J. Edward Wright, 159–70. BJS 313. Atlanta: Scholars, 1997.
Sanders, James A. “Introduction: Why the Pseudepigrapha?” In The Pseudepigrapha and
Early Biblical Interpretation, edited by James H. Charlesworth and Craig A. Evans,
13 – 19. Sheffield: JSOT, 1993.
Sanders, James A. “The Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) Reviewed.” In On Language, Culture,
and Religion: In Honor of Eugene A. Nida, edited by Matthew Black and William A.
Smalley, 79 – 99. The Hague: Mouton, 1974.
Sanders, James A. Review of Biblia Hebraica Quinta, Fascicle 18, edited by Adrian Schen-
ker et al. RBL 8 (2006) 1 – 10.
Sanders, James A. “Scripture as Canon for Post Modern Times.” BTB 25, no. 2 (1995)
56 – 63.
Fortress, 1987.]
Cascade, 2005.]
and the Law” in From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, by James A. Sanders, 115 – 23. Phil-
Sanders, James A., and Astrid Beck. “The Leningrad Codex: Rediscovering the Oldest
Complete Hebrew Bible.” BRev 13, no. 4 (August 1997) 32 – 41, 46.
Satran, David. “Qumran and Christian Origins.” In The Scrolls of the Judaean Desert:
Forty Years of Research, edited by Magen Broshi, Sarah Japhet, Daniel Schwarz, and
Shemaryahu Talmon, 152 – 59. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute and the Israel Exploration So-
ciety, 1992.
Schiffman, Lawrence. Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society, 1994.
Schwarz, Daniel. “MMT, Josephus and the Pharisees.” SBL Abstracts (1994) S205, 401.
[Full article published in Reading 4QMMT: New Perspectives on Qumran Law and
Literature, edited by John Kampen and Moshe J. Bernstein, 67 – 80. SBLSS 2. Atlanta:
Scholars, 1996.]
Smith, Morton. “Palestinian Judaism in the First Century.” In Israel: Its Role in Civiliza-
tion, edited by Moshe Davis, 67 – 81. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1956.
80 – 87.
Stone, Michael E. Scriptures, Sects, and Visions. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980.
Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Yom Hakippurim in the Habakkuk Scroll.” Bib 32 (1951) 549 – 63.
Vermes, Geza. Review of Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls, by Lawrence Schiffman.
BAR 21, no. 2 (1995) 6 – 10.
30
The Scrolls and the Canonical Process
Introduction
The area of biblical studies most affected by fifty years’ study of the Judean Des-
ert Scrolls is the history of early Judaism. That history has in effect been rewrit-
ten because of the light shed by the scrolls on an area that had been, we now
know, only vaguely understood. The essential change has come in understanding
the very nature of Judaism in the Persian and Greco-Roman periods: early Juda-
ism was, contrary to earlier views, highly diverse.
Judaism was born as a transformed remnant out of the ashes of the defeat and
dismemberment of the preexilic institutions of old Israel and Judah. The story
of this transformation is remarkable in itself.1 The old traditions that had given
preexilic Israel and Judah their identity were re-read, reshaped, and resignified
in the exile to provide a new identity more intimately tied to the temple and its
priesthood than to the older institutions of prophecy and monarchy. The result
was the Torah and the early Prophets. Hopes for the revival of the Davidic mon-
archy died with the disappearance of Zerubbabel, in one tradition a Davidic heir,
at the time of the building of the beginnings of the Second Temple in 518 BCE
(see Haggai and Zech 1 – 4).
Eventually, many Jews would hold to the belief that prophecy ceased at the
time of Ezra–Nehemiah. The “goodly fellowship of the prophets” of the past
would be more and more revered as time went on, but prophecy itself, like the
monarchy, fell under severe restrictions. Though preexilic history was dominated
by prophets and kings, postexilic or early Judaism would see the rise and promi-
nence of the new temple and its priesthood. Eventually even that would give way
to the rise and dominance of a lay movement called Pharisaism, which in turn
gave birth to rabbinic Judaism, itself a lay movement, after the destruction of the
temple in the first century CE. The biblical concept of God’s sovereign rule, or
theocracy, persisted through the whole biblical period, but the human institution
that gave it dominant expression moved in the course of a millennium and a half
from patriarchy to prophecy to monarchy to priesthood to laity.
Even so, the Judaism that flourished between the fall of Jerusalem to the Baby-
lonians in 586 BCE and the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 and again in
135 CE was highly diverse in character. This diversity cannot be limited, as previ-

1
Ackroyd, Exile and Restoration, 1 – 16; Sanders, Torah and Canon, 1 – 15; Sanders, “Exile
and Canon Formation.”
The Scrolls and the Canonical Process 493
ously thought, to the parties and philosophies listed in the classical sources.2 On
the contrary, diversity is now understood, after fifty years’ study of the Judean
Desert Scrolls, as the essential characteristic of early Judaism. Nearly every area of
Jewish studies pertaining to the period has had to be reconsidered. The question
of prophecy’s demise during the early Jewish period is itself complex, for clearly
there were Jewish communities in the period who did not believe that prophecy
or revelation had ceased, notably those that produced much of the apocryphal
literature of the time, as well as the Qumran and the early Christian communities.
Early Jewish Diversity and Canon
An important area of inquiry in which early Jewish diversity has only gradually
made a clear impact is that of the history of the canon. Most if not all studies of
how “canonization” took place in early Judaism have openly or tacitly assumed
a unified Judaism in the period. It has been commonplace to begin with the pro-
to-canonical promulgation of the scroll of Deuteronomy by Josiah in 621 BCE,
then to focus on the Torah that Ezra brought back with him to Jerusalem in
445 BCE, edited in Babylonia. It was then asserted that the Pentateuch was can-
onized by 400 BCE, the Prophets by 200 BCE, and the Writings at the Council
of Jamnia / Yavneh around 90 CE.3 The assumptions made in the exercise were
numerous, especially that there was a single track of canonization for all Jewry.
Other assumptions were based on the meagre references in extra-canonical lit-
erature to Prophets, or Writings, or Psalms, or the writings of David.4 These, it
was assumed, referred to the corpora of biblical literature in the tripartite Jewish
canon we know from the Talmud and in the great medieval manuscripts of the
Hebrew Bible. Another assumption was blatantly anachronistic, borrowed from
later Christianity, that authoritative ecclesial councils, or even royal or scribal
decisions, would or could decide such questions for all Jews for all time.5
The scrolls brought to light a number of surprises and raised questions about the
history of the canon as then understood.6 This did not begin to happen, however,
until about a decade after the last of the Qumran caves had yielded its treasures.
2
Philo, Josephus, Hippolytus, and Pliny the Elder. See the references in Collins, “Essenes.”
3
Buhl, Kanon und Text des AT, 40; Ryle, Canon of the OT; Pfeiffer, Introduction to the
OT, 50 – 70; Eissfeldt, OT: An Introduction, 562 – 71. Eissfeldt was the first, to my knowledge,
to speak of a canonical process as distinct from the traditional views of canonization, and he did
so in the light of the earliest finds at Qumran (ibid. 570 – 71); but he did not develop the idea
or work out its implications. I have tried to do so. Leiman, Canonization, 16 – 30, rightly noted
that numerous non-extant early works directly and indirectly witnessed to in preexilic and ex-
ilic biblical literature became a part of the canonical process. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation
in Ancient Israel, has brilliantly shown the process at work in exilic and postexilic biblical texts.
4
See the summary review in Carr, “Canonization,” esp. 24 – 28, with references. Older as-
sumptions find reference to the whole of the Ketuvim in the uncertain phrase “(the writings of)
David” in 4QMMT C‑10; see Qimron and Strugnell, Qumran Cave 4.V, 59n10, 111 – 12.
5
See the discussion in Davies, Scribes and Schools, esp. 169 – 84. Davies, following the older
unilinear thinking, supports the view that the masoretic canon was set for all Judaism in Has-
monean times largely because of scribal activity in schools of Jewish learning.
6
494 Part 2: Qumran
The eleven Qumran caves came to light in three waves of discovery. The seven
scrolls from Cave One were quite well preserved because they had been wrapped
in linen and stored in ceramic jars for preservation in the cave. The questions these
seven scrolls raised were sufficient enough to keep the field occupied with other
important issues such as the identity of those who hid the scrolls and of epithets
mentioned in them, and other areas of study, but not issues related to the history
of the canon. Of the seven Cave 1 scrolls, four were basically intact but still did
not raise significant questions about canon. The Habakkuk Scroll piqued some
minimal interest in canon because there was no text of Habakkuk 3 in the basi-
cally well-preserved scroll; but since it was a pesher scroll, or commentary, on
Habakkuk and not a biblical scroll, the interest in its importance for “the Jewish
canon” was minimal. The second major discovery came in February of 1952 when
Cave 4 yielded over ten thousand fragments, none of which was complete enough,
however, to raise serious questions at the time about the regnant view of the for-
mation of “the canon.” Since the codex had not yet come into use for the Jewish
Bible, the question of the order of biblical books preserved on scrolls was moot.
Then, however, when Cave 11 came to light in February 1956, once more
there were scrolls well enough preserved and pertinent enough to raise questions
relating to issues of canon. Publication of its contents did not begin, however,
until the mid-sixties. The prize of Cave 11, the massive Temple or Torah Scroll
(11QT), raised the question of the contents of “the canon,” but not seriously
until its publication twenty years later.7 The reason the question of the canoni-
cal status of 11QT was posed in the way it was, stemmed from the assumptions
noted above. But the important thing to note is that now the question of the
received biblical canon listed in the Talmud and presented in the classical maso-
retic manuscripts had to be addressed.8 It was, however, not until the large scroll
of Psalms from Cave 11 (11QPsa) was published in 1965 that discussions about
canon came sharply to the fore.9 The Psalms Scroll included eight compositions
that are not in masoretic Psalters, and the order of the masoretic psalms in it dif-
fered from the traditional.
In the early years of the debate most of the old assumptions still held sway.
Three scholars who addressed the issue disagreed with the editor of the Psalms
7
Yadin, Temple Scroll, 1: 390 – 92.
8
b. B. Bat. 14 – 15a lists the books in the Tanak, putting Chronicles last. However, the classi-
cal Tiberian masoretic manuscripts, where pertinent, have Chronicles first in the Ketuvim. The
first four editions of Biblia Hebraica published by the Bibelanstalt in Stuttgart put Chronicles
last, with the explanation offered in the Praefationes of BHK and BHS (the third and fourth edi-
tions) that though Leningradensis has Chronicles first in the Ketuvim the editors for continuity
kept it in the traditional order. BH Quinta (the fifth edition), now in preparation, will follow L
in placing Chronicles first among the Ketuvim.
9
The preliminary report was Sanders, “Scroll of Psalms (11QPss) from Cave 11.” The edi-
tio princeps is Sanders, Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa). M. Goshen-Gottstein, in
“Psalms Scroll,” asked why the editor had not dealt with the question of canon and strongly
urged the view that the scroll was a liturgical collection derived from an already stabilized Psal-
ter. Shemaryahu Talmon essentially agreed with him in an article in the same issue, “Pisqah
Beʾemsaʿ Pasuq.” The editor responded in part in the Cornell edition of the scroll (Sanders,
Dead Sea Psalms Scroll), and again in “Cave 11 Surprises.”
Scroll, and argued strongly that the scroll was either maverick, a “library edi-
tion,” or a special “liturgical collection.”10 There were essentially two choices:
either the scroll deviated from an already “canonized” Psalter; or it was a marker
on the way to stabilization of the MT Psalter. Either the old assumptions, though
poorly based in actual hard evidence, still held, and the peculiar collection of
psalms in 11QPsa had to be explained in the light thereof; or the new evidence
called for considerable revision of the history of “the canon.” The editor opted
for revision. The opposition to revision was rather formidable in terms of the
international reputation of those resisting it, but even at the risk of appearing
stubborn the editor held to the belief that the primary evidence of actual manu-
script materials now carried considerably more weight than earlier assumptions
based on extra-biblical references and data.
The editor, the present writer, beginning in 1967 pointed also to the unpub-
lished fragments from Cave 4 as evidence of the need to rethink the issue.11 Fresh
views of the history of “the canon” were advanced as well for debate.12 The heart
of the thesis was the concept of the canonical process in which the various com-
munities in early Judaism played crucial roles. The writer’s position has more
recently been affirmed in two in-depth studies of all the Psalms manuscript evi-
dence available, and broadly reassessed in a summary review and critique of his
work.13
Based on a review of the massive amount of literature from early Judaism
known before the scrolls were discovered but in the light of the first twenty-five
years’ study of the scrolls, Michael Stone of Hebrew University published an
essay in 1973 arguing that early Judaism was highly diverse.14 Stone’s essay stated
clearly what the field in general was beginning to see, based on the new, accumu-
lating evidence. In the same year, the writer published a review of the first twen-
ty-five years of scholarship on the scrolls affirming the point, and also addressing
the issue of canon.15 This was soon followed by a review of all work done on the
Psalms Scroll and the questions it had given rise to up to that time.16
10
See Goshen-Gottstein, “Psalms Scroll,” and Talmon, “Pisqah Beʾemsaʿ Pasuq.” P. Skehan
agreed in essence with them in several articles published between 1973 and 1978: for specific
references, see Flint, Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls, 8nn57 – 58.
11
Sanders, “Variorum in the Psalms Scroll”; the Cornell edition of the scroll: Sanders, Dead
Sea Psalms Scroll, 141 – 49; Sanders, “Cave 11 Surprises”; and Sanders, “Qumran Psalms Scroll
(11QPsa) Reviewed.” The 1968 article that appeared in the McCormick Quarterly (“Cave 11
Surprises”) offered the first translations in English of portions of 11QPsApa (also denoted
11QApPsa) and of 4QPsf.
12
Sanders, Torah and Canon; Sanders, “Adaptable for Life”; Sanders, “Torah and Christ”;
Sanders, “Torah and Paul”; Sanders, “Biblical Criticism”; Sanders, “Text and Canon: Concepts
and Method,” 29; Sanders, “Text and Canon: Old Testament and New”; Sanders, “Bible as
Canon”; and Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text.
13
Wilson, Editing of the Hebrew Psalter; Flint, Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls; Carr, “Canoniza-
tion.” See also Flint, “Of Psalms and Psalters,” and Sanders, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms
Scrolls. Note also Flint, “11QPsa-Psalter in the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
14
Stone, “Judaism in the Time of Christ.” See also Stone, Scriptures, Sects and Visions.
15
Sanders, “Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter-Century.”
16
Sanders, “Qumran Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) Reviewed.”
496 Part 2: Qumran
The Canonical Process
An important factor in the formulation of the idea of a canonical process was a

study published in 1964 by Jack P. Lewis.17 Lewis reviewed all the references in
rabbinic literature to “council of Yavneh (Jamnia)” after the Jewish revolt against
Rome in 66 – 73 and found that there was no real evidence of decisions being
made there about “the canon” in the sense of a canonizing council. His study
made it clear that the concept of a canonizing council at that time affecting all of
Judaism was an anachronism borrowed from later church councils after Christi-
anity had become a state religion in the early fourth century. Lewis’s work was
almost universally accepted, but the two overall reactions were basically contra-
dictory. Those still following the old assumptions revised the date of the “canon-
ization” of the Ketuvim, or Writings, back to the Hasmonean Period.18 Others,
including the writer, revised the date of the conclusion of the canonical process
to after the Bar Kochba revolt, that is toward the middle of the second century
CE, or even later.19 A crucial factor in the latter view is the newly understood
and otherwise widely accepted diversity in early Judaism.
Peter Flint set out in his major study of the shape of the Psalter in Qumran
and in early Judaism to critique the writer’s thesis about the place of the Cave 11
Psalms Scroll in the canonical process. His work began as a dissertation at Notre
Dame under the direction of Eugene Ulrich, a student of Patrick W. Skehan, who
had opposed the writer’s views in this regard. Whereas the writer had had early
access, because of Skehan’s graciousness, to the Cave 4 Psalms manuscripts, all
more or less fragmentary, and used them in the formulation of his position, Flint
had full access to them due to the fact that it fell Ulrich’s lot to pick up Skehan’s
work and bring it to publication (in DJD 16). Flint, basing his work on the earlier
study of Gerald Wilson in a dissertation done at Yale, brought massive support
to the writer’s thesis.20 In fact, he improved it in several respects.21 Flint refines
the view of the gradual stabilization of the Psalter into two distinct stages. Where
I had suggested there might have been more than one Psalter at Qumran, Flint
sees three editions in evidence there. Flint proposes that the original complete
11QPsa contained 52 psalms plus four pieces asserting Davidic authorship, and
calls it “David’s Solar Psalter.” Flint’s study brings considerable support to the
view of there having been a canonical process at work in early Judaism in regard
to the gradual stabilization of the Psalter.
17
18
See Leiman, Canonization, 131; Beckwith, OT Canon of the NT Church, 406; and Davies,
Scribes and Schools, 169 – 74.
19
See, for example, two recent studies, Sanders, “Spinning the Bible,” and Sanders, “Exile
and Canon Formation.” This position is supported by a growing number of scholars, most
recently Carr, “Canonization in the Context of Community”; McDonald, Formation of the
Christian Biblical Canon, 250 – 57; and Flint, Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls, 237 – 41.
20
See Wilson, Editing of the Hebrew Psalter; Flint, Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls; Carr, “Canon-
ization.” See also Flint, “Of Psalms and Psalters,” and Sanders, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms
Scrolls. Note also Flint, “11QPsa-Psalter in the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
21
See Sanders, Review of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls.
David Carr’s critical review of the writer’s thesis about the canonical process
in general broadened Flint’s observations, as well as those of the writer, into a
thesis of there having been multiple tracks to the canonical process generally
in the early Jewish period, marked by its considerable diversity. Whereas most
studies of canonization have been unilinear, growing knowledge of the diversity
of early Judaism indicates that the process was “highly multiform.”22 Carefully
examining all the arguments, usually based on extrabiblical references, brought
forward to date for a unilinear view of canonization as distinct from the function
of Scripture in early Jewish communities, Carr rejects them all in favor of there
having been several tracks to the canonical process in early Judaism.
The factor of the function of Scripture in community was determinative in
the process that led to what we call canon. The Jewish tripartite canon may have
been stabilized for the majority of rabbinic Jewish communities some time after
the Bar Kochba revolt, while the quadripartite Old Testament found in the dou-
ble-Testament Christian Bible became fixed soon after Constantine in the fourth
century.23 The canonical process was the route by which stories, traditions, and
some original literary works got on a sort of “tenure track” by repetition and
adaptation in believing communities that found value in them for the on-going
life of the community. The “fractures” in a biblical text due to editing and redact-
ing are precious evidence of communities’ adapting earlier literature that they
were traditioning.24
Josephus mentioned three factors that he considered determinative in the
selection of canonical literature – anonymity, antiquity, and popularity.25 Most
biblical literature is anonymous because of its being basically community lit-
erature.26 Antiquity would indicate the length of time involved in the canoni-
cal process, and popularity would indicate the breadth of use and repetition in
the canonical process. The messages of the so-called false prophets, for instance,
were undoubtedly popular when uttered, while the messages of the so-called true
prophets (represented by those that ended up in the canon) were highly unpop-
ular when uttered. Hence popularity would clearly not be a sufficient criterion
by itself. On the other hand, when in the long term the messages of the true
prophets were reviewed, after their unpopular messages were seen to have been
basically right and to have come true, these were the messages that were later
repeated, reviewed, and found by enough people to be helpful to the on-going
life of the surviving Jewish communities. Each, the communities and the recited
traditions, gave continuity. Nor would antiquity alone be a sufficient criterion.
22
Carr, “Canonization,” 24.
23
See Sanders, “Spinning the Bible,” as well as Carr, “Canonization,” and McDonald, For-
mation of the Christian Biblical Canon. Davies’s point that the Christian “Old Testament” an-
tedated the “Hebrew Bible” can be sustained in the view that the Christian First Testament did
indeed contain much Jewish literature sloughed off by later rabbinic Judaism, but not in its
being a stable quadripartite “Old Testament.”
24
Carr, Reading the Fractures of Genesis.
25
Josephus, Ag. Ap. 1.37 – 43.
26
Sanders, “Impact of the Scrolls.”
498 Part 2: Qumran
There are at least thirty-five ancient works referred to in the Bible that did not
survive the canonical process, though they are echoed in it.27
The Torah and the Prophets
Study of true and false prophecy in the Bible is helpful in understanding the
canonical process.28 The prophet, in biblical terms, was a spokesperson, one who
spoke in the name of God to the people, but also spoke in intercessory prayer for
the people to God. Jeremiah at one point seems to have made intercessory prayer
a criterion for distinguishing true and false prophets. He forcefully argued that
false prophets, instead of misleading the people into thinking God would take
care of them (because he was their national deity), should be engaging instead in
intercessory prayer. They should have been praying to God to relent and avert
the pending disaster the true prophet said was coming, usually by foreign inva-
sion in their time (Jer 27:18). At another point Jeremiah seems to have made
prophetic messages of God’s judgment of the people a basic criterion of truth,
and at another, he indicated that history would determine if prophetic messages
of peace were right (Jer 28:8 – 9). But in-depth study has shown that there are no
such criteria for discerning the difference between truth and falsehood in the
actual situation. If there is a criterion it would be in the hermeneutic by which
the prophet interpreted the relevance of tradition to current events: whenever it
is forgotten that God is creator as well as redeemer, falsehood threatens. False-
hood threatens where God is seen as a tribal, national, denominational or one
religion’s deity, and not the creator of all peoples, of all heaven and earth. God
was redeemer of Israel, right enough, but God was also the God of All, and
hence free to judge his own people as well as bless them, and free to bless other
peoples as well as judge them.
And it was precisely that kind of challenging, prophetic message that, when
the disaster of defeat and exile befell Israel and Judah, made sense to those who
reviewed them and gave them hope. The messages of the false prophets, on the
other hand, which they had liked so much back in the pre-war days, would now
have been like ashes in their mouths. The prophetic corpus is made up largely
of the unpopular messages delivered when the people were still deceiving them-
selves into thinking that faith in God’s gifts, instead of in God himself, would
suffice. Why? As Vaclav Havel says in his Letters to Olga, when one is in prison
one is remarkably able to focus thought on the essentials and the truth of life.29
When Israel had been deported and incarcerated in prisoner-of-war camps in
Babylonia, they had time to think and to reflect not only on what had happened
to them, but on all the old traditions, including the messages of the preexilic
prophets.
27
Leiman, Canonization, 16 – 26.
28
Sanders, “Hermeneutics in True and False Prophecy,” 21 – 24.
29
Havel, Letters to Olga, 1 – 10.
What helped at that crucial moment, when Israel was on the verge of corpo-
rate death, like all her neighbors who had suffered the same fate, was the rep-
etition and review of the tough stuff they had despised when they were back
home and still enjoying God’s gifts of land and city. The canonical-critical pro-
cess indicates that what got on the canonical tenure track was the monotheizable
literature (God is not “our God” only) from Israel’s earlier existence, a sort of
survival of the toughest, so to speak. What happened in those camps in exile
would continue for centuries to come – reviewing, re-reading, repeating, and
resignifying the old traditions and the old stories that now gave them hope and
life. When there were apparently no more prophets to consult in the postex-
ilic period, there was now Torah to drash (search) to seek light on ever-chang-
ing problems; and Torah, though not a strictly monotheistic literature, was very
monotheizing in thrust. The process in antiquity of reviewing earlier messages
and traditions and adapting them to new situations started much earlier.30 The
scroll of Deuteronomy, for instance, showed adaptation of the old Book of the
Covenant (Exod 20 – 23) and many other traditions to the needs of the late sev-
enth century under King Josiah.31
The prophets also adapted the old traditions about the exodus wanderings
and entrance into Canaan to lend authority to their messages of God’s judgments
against his own people.32 Isaiah adapted the old traditions about God’s choosing
David as his son and as king of Judah and Israel. The universal human tendency
to recapitulate old truths in order to transcend new crises lies at the heart of the
canonical process. What is interesting for our focus is what was chosen to repeat
and adapt, for it was in that selective process that a canon would take shape.
Hermeneutics
Essential to the process also was the hermeneutic by which the old was adapted
to address the new. The so-called false prophets also cited old traditions to lend
authority to their messages. There are, in fact, three factors always at play in the
process, the hermeneutic triangle: the old tradition or text being recited, the new
situation being addressed, and the hermeneutic by which the old was adapted to
speak to the new.
An interesting example is in Amos’s sermon at the royal sanctuary in Bethel
in northern Israel in 750 BCE (Amos 1:3 – 3:2). Amos cited his “text” for his ser-
mon near the end of it (2:9 – 11). After he had declaimed God’s judgments against
Israel’s neighbors all around her, including Judah, Amos then with the same rhet-
oric and in the same cadences declaimed God’s judgments against Israel herself
30
See Weis, “Definition of the Genre Massaʾ.”
31
See Sanders, “Deuteronomy.” As mentioned above, Leiman, Canonization, 16 – 30, rightly
noted that numerous non-extant early works directly and indirectly witnessed to in preexilic
and exilic biblical literature became a part of the canonical process.
32
500 Part 2: Qumran
(1:3 – 2:8). The hermeneutic, of necessity, was based on belief in God as creator
of all those peoples, hence their judge, as well as Israel’s judge (Amos 9:2 – 7).
The indictments against the neighbors all around was that they had committed
inhuman acts against their neighbors (1:3 – 2:5). But the indictments against Israel
were that she had committed inhuman acts against the poor and powerless in
her own land while engaging in various forms of idolatry in doing so (2:6 – 8).
When they did call upon Yahweh it was in his role as redeemer: they expected
Yahweh, the warrior God, to save them when they got into trouble. But Amos’s
message was the shocking one that God was judging them on the same basis that
he judged other peoples. God was Creator of All and hence free to judge as well
as bless his own people (9:2 – 7).
To support his argument, he cited the old, familiar story of Israel’s redemption
from slavery in Egypt to occupy the land of Canaan. He cited the entrance into
the land first followed by citing the exodus and wanderings (2:9 – 11), to empha-
size that God had given them the land; they had not taken it by their own power.
The government and religious leaders were incensed to hear the precious story of
Israel’s very identity cited to support the notion that they too were to be judged
by God (7:10 – 15). Normally it was cited to argue that God was their redeemer
God; what he had done in the past he could and would do again; that, for them,
was faith. But Amos repeated / resignified it in order to show the stark contrast
between how God had treated them when they were slaves in Egypt and how
they had been treating the poor in their own land – actually God’s land.33
At the end of the sermon someone must have intervened with the objection
that they were the only family on earth with whom God had a covenant, and that
he would therefore take care of them during this rising Assyrian crisis. Amos,
by contrast, states clearly, God speaking through the prophet: “Right on, you
only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you
for all your sins” (3:2). The old tradition recited by each was the same. But their
hermeneutics, or views of reality, were radically different. According to the true
prophets, the situation called for a different hermeneutic by which to adapt it
and keep it alive: God is both judge and redeemer, not just savior and redeemer.
Amos had probably learned the hermeneutic through the international wis-
dom traditions undoubtedly recited by the folk in his home town of Tekoa,
where the “wise woman of Tekoa” had lived (2 Sam 14:1 – 20).34 God would,
through the aggression of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in their time, judge them
and reshape them for the new day (Isa 28 – 31). Those, like the false prophets,
who had argued that God was in effect obliged to take care of his own people
(a tenet of polytheism) would be heard from no more, except by adverse cita-
tion in the canonical prophets. On the contrary, it was the canonically prophetic
message, repeated and recited in exile, that gave the people the hope that God,
having judged and reshaped them, would now revive them: the adversity had had
both a reason and a purpose. The reason was their sins in the eyes of God; the
33
For an evaluation of this point, see Barthélemy, “La critique canonique.”
34
See Terrien, “Amos and Wisdom,” followed by Wolff, Amos the Prophet, 56 – 59.
purpose was not to destroy Israel but to transform it. God had a plan for them.
And the remarkable thing is that the review in exile of earlier traditions such as
the monotheizing message of Amos is what undoubtedly did provide them with
the power for survival as a remnant, albeit reshaped into the new covenant peo-
ple called Judaism. It at the same time secured a place for the Amos book in the
Jewish canon.
This same process can be seen in the reviewed and adapted traditions that
make up the Torah and the Prophets. Isaiah’s appeal to authority for his message
a few decades after Amos down in Judah was not so much the exodus – entrance
traditions as the Davidic traditions. Just as God had chosen slaves in Egypt as
his corporate son, so God also chose David, the son of Jesse, as his royal son,
to be king of Judah and then all Israel. That was the dominant theology in the
south, and Isaiah appealed to it in the same shocking manner Amos had done
with the exodus traditions, to support his message of God’s judgments of surviv-
ing Judah at the end of the eighth century. It was by the instrument of the same
aggressive Neo-Assyrian Empire. Isaiah’s message may have been even more
shocking because the well-established Davidic theology in the south held that
God would keep his promises no matter Judah’s conduct. God was the faithful
promiser. But Isaiah used the precious Davidic memories to undergird his mes-
sage of judgment. God was indeed faithful, he said, and there would be a Zion,
but it would be a Zion painfully purged of the dross by which it had become
impure (Isa 1:25). In one instance he even appealed to the popular tradition
about how God as Holy Warrior assisted David in defeating the Philistines in
two crucial battles – on Mount Perazim and in the Valley of Gibeon (Isa 28:21;
cf. 2 Sam 5:17 – 25) – but this time not to fight for Judah as God had for David,
but to command the enemy forces invading Judah (1:4 – 27; 28:7 – 22). Again, the
hermeneutic triangle of three factors needs to be applied to appreciate the repeti-
tion and the adaptation of the traditions about David to the new situation at the
end of the eighth century: the tradition being adapted (2 Sam 5); the new situa-
tion (the Assyrian invasion); and the monotheizing hermeneutic of God as both
judge and redeemer.35
Similar examples can be drawn from all the preexilic prophetic literature. A
crucial point in the common human process of adapting older stories to new
situations is that the prophets showed how the adversity as judgment would
also have a positive effect. They used metaphors to make the point that God’s
judgment would have transforming power if the people let it happen in them-
selves. The pain and suffering would instruct and discipline them in God’s ways,
would purge their sins as by fire or by water (Isa 1, 7, 28) or would effect a
kind of surgery whereby their ways of thinking (the heart in Hebrew) would he
transformed. Jeremiah said the adversity was like open-heart surgery in which
God would suture his Torah directly onto the heart of his people corporately
35
Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text, 89. The hermeneutic triangle only can success-
fully challenge the hermeneutic circle whereby a community reads the biblical text only through
the lens of its peculiar traditions about it.
502 Part 2: Qumran
(Jer 31:31 – 34; cf. 30:12 – 17; Hos 5:15 – 6:3; Isa 51:7), and Ezekiel claimed that the
adversity was to be understood as a heart-transplant operation in which Israel’s
old heart of stone would be replaced with a new heart and a new spirit implanted
within them corporately (Ezek 36:26 – 27). Jeremiah urged the people at one
point to circumcise their hearts, but they did not (Jer 4:11; cf. Deut 4:16); so God
in effect did it for them through the adversity of Babylonian defeat and destruc-
tion (Deut 30:6).
Thus the process of repetition and adaptation of preexilic traditions that went
on in the camps in Babylonia was nothing new. It had been a part of Israel’s
life- and identity-giving process. A people’s corporate identity is in the stories it
tells generation to generation, and the more commanding the stories, the more
cohesive and effective the corporate identity.36 Judah / Israel’s rebirth as Judaism
in the exile was undoubtedly due to this canonical process of selective review
and adaptation of the old stories that were keeping them alive as Jews and giving
them purpose. Apparently no other people of the area who experienced the same
discontinuity as Judah survived with their former (even though transformed)
identity intact the way Judah / Israel did. Disappearance from the stage of his-
tory is rarely by wholesale slaughter, but rather by absorption and assimilation
to the triumphant, dominant culture. Babylonia’s foreign policy was a key fac-
tor, of course. In contrast to the earlier Neo-Assyrian policy, Babylonia did not
practice forced integration of masses of conquered peoples. On the contrary,
Babylonia allowed conquered folk to live together in prison camps where they
could, if they chose, engage in the kind of corporate review and adaptation of
the old traditions that reminded them of who they were and what they stood
for. Persian policy went further and sponsored repatriation of captive peoples
(2 Chron 36:22 – 23; Ezra 1:1 – 4).
Early Jewish Literature
It is clear that the preexilic literature and traditions that survived, edited and
adapted, as the basic literature of early Judaism had certain necessary charac-
teristics. It would have been the “tough stuff” that bore repeating and reciting
when there was the threat of extinction among those who still had hope of sur-
vival with identity. Biblical literature is amazing in large part for its self-critical
component. It is a dialogical literature that “tells it like it is.” No final redactor
went through and cleaned it up to make Jews look good to others or to them-
selves; that would be left for apologists like Philo and Josephus to do for the
Greco-Roman world. The focus on individual worth and responsibility within
the corporate that became a mark of postexilic early Judaism, with the felt need
36
The cultural anthropologist Michael Taussig, in conversations with Peruvian tribal lead-
ers, whom he had asked why they thought the Europeans had conquered their people, said the
response was that “their stories were better than our stories.” I am indebted to my colleague,
Prof. Jack Coogan, for this point; cf. Ray, “Avant-Garde Finds of Andy Hardy,” 234.
to provide the people with models of morality, is by and large limited to the revi-
sionist history in Chronicles, and indeed much of the Ketuvim. Chronicles, in
fact, provides a rich field for study of how in the canonical process earlier stories
(of Genesis through 2 Kings) were adapted to the increasing focus on individual
worth and responsibility in early Judaism.
Israel lived on a land bridge among three continents, commonly called Pal-
estine, which had important routes for caravan trade and military movement
between Egypt, Asia, and Europe. This small area of the globe at the eastern end
of the Mediterranean was strategically important to commerce and to conquest,
and was frequently coveted by all the countries of the area that could raise sur-
plus economy enough to take it. Hence much of the historiography of the Bible
was forced to explain why Israel was clobbered so often, and why God permitted
so much adversity. The prophetic / Deuteronomic thesis was, as already noted,
that God through the prophets signified and gave meaning to the adversity as
God’s judgment of his own people in order to transform them into the people
God truly wanted them to be.
The story-line that runs from Genesis through 2 Kings, precisely the most
stable part of the Jewish canon until the printing press,37 ends in utter and dev-
astating defeat with the final king of the Davidic line, Jehoiachin, under house
arrest in Babylon living by the grace of Evil-Merodach, one of the last kings of
the Babylonian Empire. What survived of the old stories were those, edited and
adapted, that could explain that Israel’s God was really the God of all creation
and of all history, the God of victories and defeats, risings and fallings, what
humans call good, from their stand-point, and also what they call evil. This was a
threat to those who believed in God’s gifts, but a promise to those who believed
in God the giver of all gifts. Furthermore, the story that runs from Genesis to
2 Kings focuses on the corporate covenant relation between God and the people
as a whole, and makes it clear that “none was righteous, no not one” (Rom 3:10;
cf. Ps 14:1).
In the Jewish canon, then, the prophetic corpus of fifteen books comes next
precisely to explain the uses of adversity in the hands of One God. In that nascent
canon of Judaism, the Law and the Prophets, there were no models for morality,
only mirrors for identity, for those who would continue to find their identity
and faith in that canon.38 And since the major functions of any canon are to tell
the faithful who they are and what they should do, wherever and whenever they
live, those who found their identity in its stories continued to repeat / recite and
to drash such a canon for light on their plight. That way they could explain to
their children what God was doing in judging and transforming his own peo-
ple into Judaism. Judaism was for them the continuing witness in a polytheistic
world to the tough faith in One God of All.
When the first major technological revolution affecting the question of canon
took place, the use of the codex for copying the canon (probably about the sixth
37
Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, 38 – 39.
38
Sanders, “Hermeneutics,” esp. 406.
504 Part 2: Qumran
century CE for Judaism), the question of the order of biblical books had to be
addressed. Whereas the Talmud places Chronicles last in the third section of the
Jewish canon, the earliest masoretic codices all place Chronicles at the beginning
of the Ketuvim. That is quite significant, for it is the third section, the Ketuvim,
that reflects the Jewish emphasis, within the on-going corporate covenant, on
individual worth and responsibility. The book of Chronicles begins the tendency
that will be seen more and more clearly in early Jewish literature to provide some
models from the past of individual faith and obedience. One can understand the
need in Judaism, scattered as it was in communities throughout the known world
after the Babylonian conquest, to inspire widely dispersed Jews who were to be
faithful and obedient to the One God in a basically polytheistic world – essen-
tially the burden of Torah.
The book of Psalms contains a number of old royal hymns from the preexilic
monarchies, but they were easily adapted in the new non-monarchic situation of
early Judaism to individuals’ reading them for personal inspiration and guidance
in the faith in One God. The first psalm, which many believe was placed in that
position at the end of the redactional process of the Psalter, stresses faith and
obedience of the individual. “Blessed is the person who walks not in the counsel
of the wicked, nor stands in the ways of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers,
but whose delight is in the Torah of Yahweh.”39 For such a psalm to follow
immediately the story of old preexilic Israel, revised by the Chronicler to make
almost pious heroes of David and Solomon, and even to allow for the repentance
and restoration of Judah’s King Manasseh (2 Chron 33:10 – 13), the very symbol
of Israel and Judah’s polytheistic evils, indeed the worst scoundrel of all accord-
ing to 2 Kings (21:1 – 18) would serve to stress the need for individual worth and
responsibility within the corporate covenant.40 Greco-Roman cultural emphasis
then on individual worth and responsibility would further open the way for the
concept of the individual deciding for him / herself what or which god to worship
and to find identity in, no matter their prior heritage. Before Christianity moved
out of Palestine into the Western world, growing dramatically by proselytiz-
ing individuals and core families, Pharisees had already been seeking converts to
Judaism among non-Jews, probably under the same cultural influence.
Good literature in any language or culture has a high degree of multivalency,
especially poetry. The same text when read in different contexts can convey
meanings quite different from so-called “original” intentions.41 The sub-disci-
pline of comparative midrash focuses on the different understandings that the
same text had from inception through citations and echoes in early Judaism into
39
So the Hebrew of Ps 1:1, as reflected accurately in the RSV. The NRSV removed the
stress on individual responsibility by pluralizing the third person singular masculine pronouns,
to avoid sexism. The apparent needs of current believing communities thus overshadowed the
needs of the earlier communities as reflected in the MT and all early witnesses.
40
See Sanders, “Prayer of Manasseh.”
41
See Sanders, “Dead Sea Scrolls – A Quarter-Century,” esp 145 – 48, where the issue of
canon is addressed.
Christianity and rabbinic Judaism.42 It is almost commonplace to note that every

time a text is re-read it is also resignified. No two understandings are ever quite
the same. This is a clue to two variables: the new context in which it is read or
cited and also the hermeneutic that the later reader brings to the text – again the
hermeneutic triangle.
On the other hand, all texts have some built-in constraints that work against
complete subversion of a text. Very common in early Judaism was the practice of
paraphrasing ancient texts so that (a) they could be more clearly understood in
the later cultural setting and (b) so that they would fit the later context the way
the community needed and the tradent wanted.43 But if the older text cited or
echoed was so modified that it could not be recognized by the community for
which the newer writing was intended, the point of reference was lost and the
authority sought in making it vanished.44
Adaptability must be matched by a measure of stability for the canonical pro-
cess to be effective. One of the reasons biblical literature has lasted so long in the
process of recitation / adaptation is that it is highly multivalent, more so undoubt-
edly than the literature that did not make it onto some canonical tenure track.
Judaism and Christianity have both through the ages insisted that Isaiah’s voice
had (re‑)significance beyond the eighth century BCE. Canonical literature, by
its very nature of being “canon,” is relevant to many different situations and cir-
cumstances, therefore adaptable to later communities in quite different circum-
stances, sometimes saying different things along the way.
The concept of canon therefore cannot he limited to its stability factor alone,
that is, to a list of writings in a certain order; its relevance to the on-going and
ever-changing life of a believing community is its very nature. Its function as
norma normans is as important as its being a list of norma normata.45 There have
been and are numerous canons in Judaism and Christianity. Different denomi-
nations within a single faith may have different canons; thus they may not agree
on its stability factor as canon. But all religions and denominations within them
agree that their “canon” is relevant and adaptable to their on-going life. This
is so for the most orthodox communities as well as the most reforming. It was
that compelling belief that drove the canonical process before various forms of
42
See Sanders, Canon and Community, 21 – 41; Callaway, Sing, O Barren One, 1 – 12; Evans,
To See and Not Perceive; Evans and Sanders, Luke and Scripture, 1 – 13; and the series of publi-
cations out of the SBL Section on “Scripture in Early Judaism and Christianity,” e. g., Evans and
Sanders, Paul and the Scriptures of Israel; and Pettit, “James Sanders and Comparative Midrash.”
43
See Sanders, “Hermeneutics of Text Criticism”; Sanders, “Task of Text Criticism”; and
Sanders, “Hebrew University Bible and Biblia Hebraica Quinta.” Most “variants” in ancient
versions and even texts up to the end of the first century CE are “false” due to this very factor;
they do not necessarily represent different earlier Vorlagen. The earliest manuscript evidence
we have indicates that the text of the Hebrew Bible up to about 100 CE was relatively fluid;
accurate copying had not yet become a major factor in scribal activity; see Sanders, “Text and
Canon: Concepts and Method.”
44
Sanders, “Stability and Fluidity.”
45
Sanders, “Canon. Hebrew Bible,” 839 and 847 – 51.
506 Part 2: Qumran
stability became necessary; and it is that same compelling belief that drives the
continuing canonical process today within the constraints of a given canon.
Every Jewish and Christian canon has had points at which significant portions
of it became stabilized before the whole and then at which the whole became stabi-
lized as canon. And the processes involved in those points were parts of the on-go-
ing canonical process. Stabilization and closure of the formative canonical process
occurred most likely because historical and cultural factors demanded it. But the
process clearly was not on a single track. The diversity within early Judaism and
then early Christianity clarifies the evidence indicating a multiple-track canonical
process. But the narrowing down of the sheer numbers of functional canons to the
several within Judaism and Christianity was a reaction to historical and cultural
factors that challenged the diversity.46 The principal factors were surely the two
destructions of city and temple in the sixth century BCE and in the first CE, and
then the disaster of the Bar Kochba revolt and its cataclysmic blow to apocalyptic
within surviving rabbinic Judaism.47 The persecutions and threats of extinction
experienced by both Judaism and early Christianity, and the effect of the conver-
sion of and conquest by Constantine – for both faiths – were also decisive critical
events leading to closed canons. Royal programs, scribal decisions, or ecclesial
councils could only reflect what the communities needed, or they did not survive.
While the effect of such events was a closing of ranks and a diminishing of
diversity in both faiths, the canonical process nonetheless continued even after
closure. When the fluid becomes stable, comparative midrash shows, the issue
of the hermeneutics brought to the stabilized text to render it once more fluid
and adaptable comes to the fore.48 When the tradent can no longer paraphrase or
gloss or alter the text itself, the need of the community s / he serves demands that
the stabilized text continue to be broken open and rendered understandable and
relevant for the on-going life of the community. That which the earliest biblical
editor, or prophet or psalmist or historian or evangelist or apostle, did for his / her
community was not all that different from what later and current tradents in
any community have done and do, who seek to make the text understandable
in various cultural and contemporary terms, whether those tradents focus on its
contemporary relevance or focus on so-called “original” meanings.
What Amos did for the folk in the royal sanctuary in Bethel one day over
twenty-seven centuries ago continues today. All tradents have done and do their
jobs in their own contemporary and cultural terms, which do not necessarily
last very long; that is the principal temporizing constraint they have had and
now have as tradents. Even the process of quest of “original” meanings in the
past three centuries since the Enlightenment has its own history of dependence
on cultural factors.49 As long as a canon continues to function as the ongoing
46
McDonald, Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon, 250 – 57.
47
Apocalyptic, however, did not entirely die in rabbinic Judaism; see the work of Lou Sil-
berman as noted in Sanders, “Identity, Apocalyptic, and Dialogue,” esp. 165 ff.
48
49
See Sanders, “Scripture as Canon for Post-Modern Times.”
source of identity and of ethics (faith and obedience) for a believing community,
the canonical process, begun at the very headwaters of canon formation, will
continue.
Bibliography
Ackroyd, Peter R. Exile and Restoration. London: SCM; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968.
Barthélemy, Dominique. “La critique canonique.” Revue de l’Institut Catholique de
Paris 36 (1990) 191 – 220.
Buhl, Frants. Kanon und Text des Alten Testaments. Leipzig: W. Faber, 1891.
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David M. Carr, 22 – 64. JSOTSup / LHBOTS 225. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996.
Carr, David M. Reading the Fractures of Genesis: Historical and Literary Approaches. Lou-
isville: Westminster-/John Knox, 1996.
Collins, John J. “Essenes.” In ABD 2:620 – 21.
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terpretation. JSOTSup 64. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1989.
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thoritative Tradition in Luke – Acts. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.
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SSEJC 1. Sheffield: JSOT, 1993.
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Flint, Peter W. “The ‘11QPsa – Psalter’ in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Including the Preliminary
Edition of 4QPse.” In The Quest for Context and Meaning: Studies in Biblical Inter-
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ִ K, 1990.
Appendix
The History of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center,
1976 – 20031
This meeting of the board of trustees of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center
(ABMC) marks the end of twenty-five years of operations. Normally the annual
president’s report covers events and personnel of the immediate past year. But
this time it seems appropriate to record as much accurate data about the history
of the Center as possible, because of its transition process from an independent
corporation to a subsidiary of the Claremont School of Theology, and my retire-
ment as president in May 2003.
John Trever, later the Center’s first director, arrived in Claremont in 1976 from
Baldwin Wallace College, and brought with him a collection of artifacts relating
to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and especially his experience in their discovery and pho-
tographing three of the Qumran Cave 1 manuscripts. Mrs. Sanders and I arrived
from Union Theological Seminary / Columbia University in New York City in
August 1977, at which point construction began on the west wing of the Clare-
mont School of Theology (CST) library in which the Center would be housed.
Trever and I both came with the support of Elizabeth Hay Bechtel. He and Pro-
fessor William Brownlee, already at the Claremont Graduate School, had been
graduate fellows at the American School of Oriental Research (ASOR) in East
Jerusalem (now the Albright Institute) during the Arab – Jewish War of 1947 – 48
in British-Mandate Palestine. Brownlee and Trever recognized the authenticity
of the scrolls they were shown during the momentary absence from Jerusalem
of the director of the ASOR, Professor Millar Burrows of Yale, who was at the
time in Baghdad where the ASOR maintained a presence. In February 1948, John
Trever photographed the cache of three scrolls from Qumran Cave 1, which had
been brought to the American School for confirmation, and sent a few of the
prints to Professor William Foxwell Albright of Johns Hopkins University, who
immediately agreed with Brownlee and Trever’s assessment of them.
The Manuscript Center was conceived during a series of meetings Elizabeth
Hay Bechtel and I had in New York and Jerusalem beginning in the mid-1960s.
1
This Appendix is an expanded version of my final report, as President of the Ancient
Biblical Manuscript Center, to the Board on 12 May 2003. I am indebted to former directors
and others who have provided memory and details from personal files to make it as accurate
as possible: Richard Weis, George Whipple, Marvin Sweeney, Peter Pettit, Peggy Woodruff,
William Yarchin, Sheila Spiro, Randy Merritt, Stuart Simon, Steven Delamarter, Michael Phelps,
and others.
512 Appendix
Elizabeth and Kenneth Bechtel of San Francisco had in 1960 donated to the
Palestine Archaeological Museum (PAM) in Jordanian Jerusalem, through the
ASOR, the funds necessary to release the large scroll of Psalms from Qumran
Cave 11, which I was then assigned to unroll, study, and publish.2 The museum,
a private institution with its own board of directors at the time, had expended
large sums of its Rockefeller endowment to secure the scrolls materials that had
come in to the museum through Bedouin since 1949, and especially the mass of
fragments recovered in 1952 from Cave 4, and needed to recoup as much of it as
possible to keep the museum functioning.
Dora and I met Mrs. Bechtel in 1962 soon after we returned from Jerusalem,
where I had opened and studied the Psalms Scroll for publication. That meeting
started a friendship that would last nearly twenty years. We often talked about
how important the scrolls were to biblical studies, and to Western civilization
generally. She was keen on seeing that photographic images of them be preserved
outside Palestine / Israel in case of further disturbances there. I shared her con-
viction, so that we traveled to Jordanian Jerusalem in May of 1967 to talk with
the authorities there about doing so. We both stayed at the ASOR; John Mark of
Princeton was director and very helpful to us. The chef de travail, Père Roland
de Vaux, of the international team of scholars working principally on the massive
cache of fragments from Cave 4, agreed that something should be done, but the
decision would have to come from the Jordanian Department of Antiquites in
Amman. While we were there the tension was building between Egypt and Israel
that resulted in the “Six-Day War” of early June. I helped to evacuate Americans
out of East Jerusalem to Amman, then to Beirut, then to Rome. The PAM had
been nationalized by the Kingdom of Jordan in the early 1960s, so that when
Israel assumed responsibility for the PAM in June of 1967 the museum became
Israel Museum II. Little came immediately of the purpose of our trip because of
the radical change of political authority, but the seeds had been planted in the
minds of de Vaux and of the international team of scholars. In 1970, copies of
about three-quarters of the scrolls photographs in the PAM were deposited, for
preservation only, in the library of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati at
the urging of its president, my former teacher, Nelson Glueck. Betty Bechtel and
I, however, were still not satisfied.
Meanwhile, in 1969 I was invited to join a research team sponsored by the
United Bible Societies, for a long-term project in Germany. The team, called The
Hebrew Old Testament Text Project (HOTTP), had its first meeting in Arnold-
shain but thereafter met for twelve years every summer for a month in Freuden-
stadt at the Erholungsheim there. There were six of us on the team, the other
five all European, plus several assistants (one of whom later became the doctoral
advisor at Leiden to my successor here on the CST faculty, Prof. Kristin De
Troyer). Our primary task was to make fresh decisions about the text-critical
problems most modern translation committees throughout the world find most
2
Sanders, Psalms Scroll, and Sanders, Dead Sea Psalms Scroll.
The History of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center, 1976 – 2003 513
difficult, and to cut through the endless circle in which they would often turn to
recent Western translations for solutions (just as the ancients who did not know
Hebrew or Aramaic well turned to the Septuagint, or early Greek translations).
Equally important to the team of scholars was the opportunity, after the first
scrolls had been published, to probe their true significance for the task of textual
criticism. One of our number was Père Dominique Barthélemy of l’Université
de Fribourg en Suisse, who had published scroll fragments from Qumran Cave 1
and from Nahal Hever. He had a personal library of microfilms of widely-scat-
˙ ˙ manuscripts pertinent to the task of textual criticism of the
tered unpublished
entire Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint. That library became the model in my
mind for our eventual Manuscript Center collection.3
Mrs. Bechtel and I wanted to press on to secure the complete inventory of
copies of scrolls photographs in the two museums in the newly unified Jerusa-
lem. We talked through many conversations about establishing an institute to
maintain copies of the scrolls photographs, but she would not give money in
New York, only in California where she lived. Mrs. Bechtel had in mind a Dead
Sea Scrolls preservation project, but I made it clear that I was not interested in
moving to California simply to oversee a vault for purposes of preservation only.
While we were still in New York she and I reached the decision that it would
be a center for both preservation and research, where scholars any- and every-
where would have inexpensive and open access to our holdings of photographic
images of biblical manuscripts for study, on site or by interlibrary loan. The pur-
pose was to stop the endless cycle of scholars copying errors from one apparatus
(scholarly footnotes) to another because of the lack of available, clear images of
the actual manuscripts to check their research.
Invitations soon came from two California institutions. In August 1976 we
chose the School of Theology at Claremont (STC, now Claremont School of The-
ology, CST) and the Claremont Graduate School (CGS, now Claremont Gradu-
ate University), largely because STC was text-oriented from its inception under
its first president, Ernest Cadman Colwell, and the Claremont Graduate School
(now University) was home to the equally text-oriented Institute for Antiquity
and Christianity (IAC) and had Prof. William Brownlee on its faculty. It was
a logical decision. Trever thereupon moved from Ohio to establish the Trever
Center for Dead Sea Scrolls, and was here a year before we arrived in August
1977 when construction began on the west wing of the library, including a clima-
tized vault built by the firm of Joseph Battinger to the specifications indicated by
friends at Eastman Kodak. I was named the Elizabeth Hay Bechtel Professor of
Biblical Studies at STC, a chair that Mrs. Bechtel partially funded through annual
donations. The Trever Center is still located in the north wing of the library of
CST, separate from the Center. Trever became the first director of the ABMC.
Mrs. Bechtel established through her lawyer, Arthur Henzel in Santa Barbara,
a private operating foundation as the legal identity of the Center. We assembled
3
See Sanders, “Tribute to Jean-Dominique Barthélemy.”
514 Appendix
a board of trustees for the foundation, with Mrs. Bechtel as president and myself
as executive vice-president and CEO. Because Mrs. Bechtel wanted full control
of the board, the other members were essentially scholars, academic administra-
tors in Claremont, and her personal friends. These included Frank Cross of Har-
vard University and Noel Freedman of the University of Michigan, with both of
whom I served at the time on the Ancient Manuscript Committee of the ASOR.
Suggestions I made of folk who could help with funding were all set aside by
Mrs. Bechtel, but for the first three years we had her own generous funding
(when she approved of expenditures). The mission of the Center had been clari-
fied: we would acquire images of ancient and medieval manuscripts of the Bible
and related literature; we would preserve the images with the latest technology;
and we would distribute them to all scholars who requested copies – always, of
course, adhering to whatever stipulations were set by institutions around the
world that provided us copies of their films. The only requirement to be a user
was and is that the person requesting use of our images be able to read the manu-
script sought; there was never a fee or other stipulation. The International Greek
New Testament Project asked that their important collection of films of New
Testament manuscripts also be housed in and administered by the ABMC.
Richard Cain, who became president of STC the year we arrived in 1977,
served on the board until several years after he retired in 1990. To our great good
fortune, Joseph Platt, president of the Claremont Graduate School (now Clare-
mont Graduate University), was a member of the board since its beginning and
remained one of the most active and generous of our board members. His wis-
dom and long-time experience in administration and in fund-raising have been
among our greatest assets. Joe served as acting president when I took my first
sabbatical leave since coming to Claremont in 1985 – 86, then when I was visiting
professor for a semester first at Stellenbosch University in 1989 and then at the
University of Glasgow in 1991, and has been the invaluable chair of the commit-
tee effecting the transfer of leadership of the Center under CST. The librarian of
STC / CST had traditionally been the secretary of the board, until recently. Under
the new plan the librarian of CST became director of the Center.
I had an office in the IAC our first year in Claremont (1977 – 78) but moved to
the newly constructed Center in the late spring of 1978. The Center was housed
in the top two floors of the new west wing of the STC / CST library, while the
bottom floor was ceded to the library, which provided it expansion area for peri-
odicals, deliveries, and cataloguing. The offices of the ABMC were located in the
middle floor while the top floor contained my office, as well as study and storage
space for the Center. In 1997 the top floor was also ceded over to the seminary to
house the Multi-Cultural Center of CST.
We began at inception an ambitious program of acquisitions from libraries,
museums, and monasteries around the world. But we also pursued our long-stand-
ing interest in producing copies of the photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls from
the museums in Jerusalem. After our formal and gala “opening” in the fall of
1979, a year after operations had begun, Mrs. Bechtel and I returned to Jerusalem
and finally had success in getting the permission of the authorities there to pho-
tograph the Dead Sea Scrolls for our purposes. By that time, the chef de travail
was Père Pierre Benoit of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, who worked well with
the Israeli Department of Antiquities (IDA) under Avi Ethan, soon to change its
name to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) under Amir Derori, which had
charge of all the DSS in the two Jerusalem museums. Agreements and covenants
were signed by Mrs. Bechtel and myself with the Department and with each mem-
ber of the international team of scholars. They restricted use of the films we would
acquire and forbade making further copies except by the explicit agreement of the
IAA and of the particular scholar assigned whatever lot of DSS we might want
to duplicate; and they specified that we maintain a complete copy of the films in
the Secure Storage Facility, with which we already had a contract in Tahoe City.
That set the stage for sending a photographic team to Jerusalem in September
1980. Our basic dream was coming true. We received a grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, which funded the project, but Mrs. Bech-
tel also contributed to making the project a class operation. We asked Robert
Schlosser of the Huntington Library in San Marino to be the project photog-
rapher, undoubtedly the best in the area. William Yarchin, a graduate student
in Claremont at the time, later to serve as director of the ABMC for a year, was
sent as Schlosser’s assistant. Bill had received a Rotary Foundation Scholarship
to support his appointment as Research Fellow at the American School in East
Jerusalem (re-named the Albright Institute), and was going to be there anyway.
He was very helpful during the three weeks the team was there at work. This was
to be our first major project, aside from the steady acquisition by mail of films of
manuscripts begun two years earlier.
In the meantime, Mrs. Bechtel, who had moved in May 1980 to Claremont
and was coming to the Center daily, and I had disagreements about personnel
and the Center’s future that came into the open at an executive committee meet-
ing of the Board of Trustees in late September 1980, while the team was in Jeru-
salem. If she had continued to reside in Santa Barbara, when she came down to
Claremont only every other week, I am confident we could have continued to
function even with her tendency to micro-management of the Center. Instead,
Mrs. Bechtel treated all of us connected with the operations of the Center as
employees. She demanded that I fire (she wouldn’t do it herself) each of the first
three directors of the Center, and she was never fully satisfied with any of the
staff. When she moved to Claremont she bought three condos in a row near the
Center and urged Dora and me to move into one of them. I knew that simply
would not work and our turning her down clearly baffled and even irritated
her. When then she offered to hold the mortgage on a home in Claremont she
would herself select we said, No thank you. The next time we were together at
a bank in town she said rather irritably, “You can stand on your head for all I
care.” Her various efforts to gain as much control of our lives as possible were
thwarted. I knew then that I would probably be next to be fired, or if not “fired”
then shunted aside. I soon thereafter heard from graduate students that she was
talking with Professor James Robinson about running the Center. During her
move from Santa Barbara to Claremont, John, one of her two sons, came down
516 Appendix
from his ranch in Northern California to help with the move. At one point after
John and I had lugged boxes to her new home and helped in other ways, while
Mrs. Bechtel was busy otherwise, John and I took a break in my office on the sec-
ond floor. After we were settled and resting John said, “Well, she’s yours now.” I
did not know exactly what he meant but had a good idea. I asked him to clarify
and he responded that the only friends she really had were those she “bought.” I
was shocked but not surprised. I had seen it myself. After a brief respite he and I
resumed our labors helping her move into her new home.
Upon the team’s return from Jerusalem in late September the films were to be
brought directly to the vault at the ABMC for storage, classification, and catalogu-
ing. On the contrary, Mrs. Bechtel met Schlosser and the team at the Los Angeles
Airport and took the films to the Huntington Library where she had privately
made prior arrangements for their reception there. The Huntington Library had
and has no interest in the ancient Near East or biblical history, nor does it have a
Semitist on its staff, but Mrs. Bechtel saw fit to deposit them there because of her
interpretation of the disagreements on the ABMC board; and, of course, she made
it interesting for the Huntington to house them for her. The Center immediately
informed the Jerusalem authorities and Frank Cross at Harvard, all of whom were
in dismay at the turn of events, and wrote Mrs. Bechtel, insisting that the films be
taken to the Center. Not only did she not heed their demands, she had the same
contractor, Joe Battinger, build a vault at the Huntington for permanent storage
and even had Schlosser make a complete set of copies for herself, again violating
the covenants and agreements she had signed with the IAA and with the interna-
tional team of scholars. While generous when things went the way she wanted,
Betty Bechtel had a will of iron when they did not. The films remained at the
Huntington until acting director Peter Pettit and I were permitted to retrieve, in
early December 1983, those taken in Jerusalem. We verified that we were given the
ones actually taken in Jerusalem, and had the complete set. Because of Mrs. Bech-
tel’s assigning personal motives to our split she told many people that I wanted to
use the DSS films to my own advantage. As a result, I did not thereafter let any
of my doctoral students use unpublished films of the DSS for their dissertations,
much less publish any myself. The only way I had to counter her false claim was
quietly and persistently to make a record of no abuse of privilege.
Using the films brought home to the Center in December 1983, plus others
we carefully acquired in the interval from DSS materials in Amman and else-
where, we embarked in 1988 on the laborious project of compiling a catalogue
and index to all the DSS films so that scholars everywhere would know exactly
how to identify them and request use of them. The Dead Sea Scrolls Catalogue,
compiled by Stephen Reed, revised and edited by Marilyn Lundberg with the
collaboration of Michael Phelps (later to be director), was published by Scholars
Press, Atlanta, in 1994. These were all doctoral students at the graduate school at
the time. I was very proud of that. Reed was the major compiler and worked in
1989 in Jerusalem on the project and later at the Center.
The copies Mrs. Bechtel had made at the Huntington remained there until
2003 when the current administration there agreed they should be brought,
twenty-three years later, to the ABMC in Claremont. Trustee Joe Platt was the
liaison with Dr. Scottheim of the Huntington, the outgoing president there, and
persuaded him that the films belong in the ABMC. I am especially pleased, here
at the close (2003) of my tenure at the Center, that the Dead Sea Scrolls Duplica-
tion Project begun in 1980 has finally been completed.
At a called meeting of the board of the Center in December 1980, Frank Cross
of Harvard attended and nominated myself president of the Ancient Biblical
Manuscript Center in Mrs. Bechtel’s stead. Mrs. Bechtel, who was present with
her lawyer, was urged to stay on the board to help accomplish the mission of the
Center, but she refused. She insisted that her name be withdrawn from my chair
on the CST faculty, and from any use of it by the Center. We, of course, com-
plied with her request immediately. Mrs. Bechtel withdrew all support for the
Center including the shopping center built in Montecito, a suburb of Santa Bar-
bara, to provide income for the Center indefinitely. Her lawyer in Santa Barbara,
Arthur Henzel, assured us that the contract he drew up stating Mrs. Bechtel’s
support of the Center was firm, so that we could have sued to claim the support,
but the board of trustees rightly, I think, decided that the Center did not want to
be in the position of suing former donors. In order to make it possible for us to
move from New York to Claremont, Mrs. Bechtel had pledged annual donations
toward my salary, which she also withdrew. STC’s lawyer, at President Richard
Cain’s direction, did sue and the seminary was awarded a lump sum of $80k. It
was now clear to all who knew the facts that Mrs. Bechtel would not tolerate
anything but complete control of the Center even though she had little knowl-
edge of its essential work.
Richard Weis, a graduate student who had come out from New York with us
in 1977 to continue work on his doctorate here, was made director from January
1981 and remained director until June 1985. Weis was my research assistant both
at the IAC and in the Center from the beginning. During the time Mrs. Bechtel
was president, Rich actually served both as cataloguer and as assistant director
but without those titles. After he became director we together read and mastered
as much as we could on how to raise money. We soon established The Folio as the
quarterly newsletter of the Center, and as a vehicle of fund-raising. Rich created
the cataloguing system almost from scratch as we could not simply use normal
library cataloguing systems for images of ancient and medieval manuscripts. He
also established the basic policies and procedures for all phases of the Center’s
operations. It was a daunting job, since we had no clear models for our situation
anywhere. I traveled to the Hill Monastic Library at St. John’s in Collegeville,
Minnesota, the closest in the country to what we were chartered to do, but it
was of limited help because it is essentially different in mission and operations;
and I visited others in Europe, the summers I was there working on the HOTTP,
and also the National Jewish Archive at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Most
of what Weis did in those early days is still in place at the Center, a tribute to
his vision of its mission and his dedication despite personal sacrifice. What he
established as a system of cataloguing manuscripts was then passed on to Mar-
vin Sweeney, Peter Pettit, Garth Moeller, Stephen Reed, Marilyn Lundberg,
518 Appendix
and Michael Phelps through the 1980s and into the 90s. Cataloguing of quality
must be resumed when funds become available. Thus, while I was shackled from
advising my students to work on unpublished DSS materials, I set students to
work on cataloguing and other aids for study of the scrolls.
One of the tacit but firm agreements we made was to avoid competing with
other institutions in Claremont for funds. Fortunately, I was often invited
around the country to lecture on the DSS and on my work in biblical studies
affected by the scrolls. I devised the plan of requesting, in my first response to
such invitations, the privilege of taking a few minutes to present the case for
the Center and to pass “a yellow pad” around each audience asking those who
wanted to receive The Folio to pen in their names, and addresses, and “don’t
forget the zip code!” In addition, I would ask each host if there was someone
or a family of means in their area whom I might visit during the lectureships to
whom I could make appeals. When I passed the yellow pad I assured those who
signed that they would receive The Folio with an appeal to support the work and
mission of the Center so that they would know what they were signing onto.
None turned me down. This was standard procedure for the next fifteen
years, but a few years before retirement I was discouraged by the staff from con-
tinuing the practice of passing the yellow pad, apparently because the list was
becoming difficult to manage and only a percentage continued as donors. But in
this way we had compiled a list of some three thousand names from around the
country and abroad for mailings of The Folio, attached to each of which was an
appeal letter with personal news from the president.
After we had met the requirements of the Internal Revenue Service, we con-
verted on 1 June 1986 from being the private operating foundation Mrs. Bech-
tel had set up to being a public charity. Mrs. Bechtel had always insisted on the
Center’s being “autonomous” even though we were housed in the wing of the
library she had donated to STC. STC / CST has been our gracious host through
the years. The agreement was that we would pay $ 500 a month maintenance fee,
but after Mrs. Bechtel withdrew her support the seminary in essence waived the
fee. Our basic budget has always been met by mailings of The Folio with appeal
letters attached, plus personal contacts with individuals around the country. The
appeal letters have sometimes offered premiums, such as a special printing of my
translation of Ps 151, or prints of already published scrolls provided by Bruce
Zuckerman, a member of our board.
In the early 1980s many donors were members of the Pasadena Presbyterian
Church, some of whom continued to support the Center. Dora and I were com-
municants there from when we arrived in the area from New York until into the
1990s. Jim and Helen Elgin in that church were major donors in the 1980s, and
without them I am sure the ABMC would not have survived. Jim became our chief
financial officer after Betty Bechtel left us. A former colleague at Union Seminary
in New York, Robert Lynn, had become director of the religion section of the
Lilly Foundation in Indianapolis. At our request Bob came out to visit us in 1981
to give us advice on how to keep the Center alive and pursuing its mission, and,
in addition to excellent advice, pledged $ 5k a year for five years from his discre-
tionary funds at the Lilly. In the meantime I was introduced by hosts and friends
to folk of means around the country who became substantial supporters. Among
these were Jack Dempsey of Greiff Containers in Delaware, Ohio; the Omaha
Presbyterian Seminary Foundation for which I had taught a number of summer
pastors schools; Henrietta Arnold of Iowa Electric in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Dr.
Layne and Minny Carson of Little Rock, Akansas; Mrs. Philip Renick of Rancho
Santa Fe, California; Marion Gifford of Birmingham, Minnesota; William Albert
of Amoco in Chicago; and others. In fact, Henrietta, of blessed memory, served
as a faithful and very generous member of our board for about five years. A major
donor was Joy Ungerleider-Mayerson, head of the Dorot Foundation and the Jew-
ish Museum in New York. I cannot remember the number of times I telephoned
Joy’s home telling her personally of a need we had, and a discretionary check for
up to $ 10k would soon arrive. Effie, her housekeeper in New Canaan, Connecti-
cut, came to know my voice after a while and would tell me the best times to call.
Joy never turned me down except once when I asked her, as I had previ-
ously asked Jack Dempsy and Henrietta Arnold, if we could discuss setting up
an endowment for the Center. That was not in her plans, nor apparently was it
in theirs, but their continuing support was crucial in the 1980s and 90s. After Joy
died, the Dorot Foundation, under the directorship of Professor Ernie Frierichs,
continued to be supportive.
Our first director, John Trever, soon displeased Mrs. Bechtel (I was not sure
over what) and was summarily fired. Trever was followed by George Whipple, a
Greek New Testament scholar in the area who had retired. Whipple lasted about
three months in 1980, before Mrs. Bechtel had me sack him, again I did not know
the reason. Peggy (Mrs. Richard) Woodruff, our first office manager beginning
in October 1978, who had the title “administrative secretary,” fortunately sur-
vived and served the Center faithfully and effectively until she retired in the
early summer of 1986. Rich Weis and I were very pleased she agreed to stay on
after Mrs. Bechtel left. She was professionally trained and a gift to the Center the
whole time she was with us. As with all members of the staff before Mrs. Bechtel
left us, I had to be a pastoral counselor because of the tension created every time
she appeared. Mrs. Bechtel simply did not trust employees; and she viewed us all
as her employees. At one point soon after we had moved into our offices in 1978,
Rich, the director, and I asked limited funding for certain small office supplies.
Mrs. Bechtel’s response was immediate but not to me; she turned to a visitor to
the Center and said, “You see, they’ll nickel-and-dime you to death if you’re
not careful.” That and other such comments and attitudes made me early on
feel like a vulnerable employee rather than the colleague she liked to say I was.
At an executive committee meeting in early September 1980 one of the trustees
in attendance pointed out to Mrs. Bechtel that “Jim is living in a fish bowl with
three dead fish.” He was referring to the series of firings she had me do that sum-
mer, but she clearly had no idea what he was referring to. She was unaccustomed
to any form of criticism.
When Rich Weis took a leave of absence as director in 1983 – 84, Peter Pettit,
also a graduate student who succeeded Marvin Sweeney as cataloguer, became
520 Appendix
acting director. Sweeney was research assistant in 1979 – 80, and research asso-
ciate in 1980 – 81, and followed Weis as head cataloguer in 1981 – 83. Then when
Rich, after he had received the PhD, left the Center in June 1985, Pettit became
director. Pettit trained another graduate student, Garth Moeller, to do the cata-
loguing, who served in the position from 1984 until 1989. Peter served as acting
director the year Rich was on leave, and then as director from 1985 until 1989.
While Peter Pettit was director he trained Michael Phelps as cataloguer, who held
that position from August 1993 through October 1995.
Beginning in the late 1980s, when Steve Delamarter was director, trustee
Bruce Zuckerman proposed that he embark on a project of “re-formatting” the
DSS films in our vault. He claimed that it was important to have the two formats
for proper usage. Trusting his judgment as a photographer, and as a trustee, the
board approved of the project since he himself provided the funding through the
generosity of his mother in Beverly Hills. At a meeting with the administration
of the Huntington Library, Robert Schlosser asked Zuckerman directly why he
was doing such a project because he did not see the need of it. I recall that Zuck-
erman’s response did not make sense, but I laid that to the jargon that photog-
raphers use. I still trusted Zuckerman largely because Schlosser had told us in
1983 that he had not made a duplicate copy of the DSS films while Mrs. Bechtel
kept them at the Huntington even though he had actually done so at her request.
Zuckerman and Marilyn Lundberg worked weekly in my office upstairs at the
Center “re-formatting” our collection of the DSS films until I realized that they
were making a copy also for Zuckerman’s West Semitic Research project at USC.
This was not authorized by me or by anyone at the Center, and so I called a halt
to the “re-formatting” project before it was completed. I was told that all pho-
tographers keep a file of their work, but photographs of potentially very valuable
ancient documents are substantially different from photographs of newly weds,
and the like. A convention in one custom may be piracy in another. I discov-
ered it from others; he had not told me. Here was a second time we could have
brought a lawsuit but continued, on the contrary, the policy of not suing for-
mer friends and supporters. We hadn’t the financial means to do so anyway. The
funds we raised we needed to fulfill the mission of the Center.
In late September 1991 we received a phone call from colleagues at station
WGBH in Boston informing us of a press release pending from the Huntington
Library of San Marino in which William Moffit, its librarian at the time, was
announcing a new policy of open access to their set of DSS films. This too was
in violation of signed documents and agreements but in the light of the campaign
for open access by Hershel Shanks, editor and publisher of Biblical Archae-
ology Review, it eventually forced the hand of the authorities in Jerusalem by
November of that year to announce that their policy had changed. Other such
efforts were afoot as well to force the issue. Martin Abegg and Professor Ben
Zion Wachholder were preparing computerized texts of the unpublished massive
numbers of Cave 4 fragments based on the concordance (on 3x5 cards) prepared
in the late 1950s in Jerusalem by Frs Joseph Fitzmyer and Raymond Brown (now
being completed by Marty Abegg of Trinity Western University). In addition,
Robert Eisenman of San Diego State University, with James Robinson of the
IAC, was preparing a diplomatic, unedited publication of films of the DSS Eisen-
man had somehow acquired. Clearly the older mode, since the nineteenth cen-
tury, of official assignment of new discoveries to specific scholars exclusively to
study indefinitely and then publish at will was being challenged. Political walls
were falling or being challenged at the time in Europe, South Africa, and China.
The ABMC, which had been established to provide free and open access (and
not just preservation) to all scholars, was coming into its own; the ABMC had,
however, also consistently shown respect for covenants and agreements solemnly
signed, and this point was not lost on those from whom the Center continued to
acquire images of their manuscript treasures. By this time we had already insti-
gated a policy of “responsible access”4 by embarking on the catalogue and index
of the DSS films project, which was published in 1995, and by exploring the
technologies of digitization and multi-spectral imaging, and by taking advantage
of the new openness in Soviet and then Russian policy.
While continuing to acquire images of manuscripts from varied sources, in
1990 we embarked on another ambitious project of acquisition. Steve Delamarter
was director. The moment Chairman Gorbachev introduced the Soviet policies
of “glasnost” and “peristroika” in the USSR, we began making plans to field
yet another photographic team, this time to Leningrad, to photograph the old-
est (ca. 1010 CE), complete Hebrew Bible in the world, Codex Leningradensis.
Delamarter initiated correspondence with the Russians. Visits were exchanged
between the Saltikov-Shchedrin Library in Leningrad and the ABMC in Clare-
mont. Garth Moeller and Firpo Carr of IBM represented the Center there, and
Dr. Bogalyubo of the University of Leningrad and Dr. Viktor Lebedev of the
Library came here to visit the Center.5 The photographic team we sent this time
was not that of the Huntington but of West Semitic Research at the University
of Southern California. The team consisted of acting director at the time, Bruce
Zuckerman, also a trustee of the ABMC, assistant director Marilyn Lundberg,
and Ken Zuckerman, Bruce’s brother, also a trustee of the Center. Garth Moeller,
cataloguer at the time, accompanied the team as translator and facilitator.
The basic funding was provided by Joy Ungerleider-Mayerson, of the Dorot
Foundation in New York, supplemented by funds from West Semitic Research.
The results were amazingly clear films of every folio of the codex, including the
so-called carpet pages of scribal artwork. We made them available in transpar-
ency form to several institutions, including the Korean Bible Society, and in fac-
simile form as The Leningrad Codex, a stunningly beautiful publication of over
1010 pages, plus front matter and title pages. Trustees Noel Freedman and Astrid
Beck did an excellent job of editing the volume. Special donations from support-
ers in Michigan funded the publication. Sheila Spiro, our director from September
1994 until August 1995, and thereafter a trustee, negotiated the contract with Eerd-
4
See Sanders, “Qumran Update.”
5
See the article by Sanders, and then trustee Professor Astrid Beck of the University of
Michigan, “Leningrad Codex.”
522 Appendix
mans Publishers and all that entailed. Details of the whole project are recorded in
several articles published in The Folio 10/2–3, the combined Aug/Nov issue of
1990. It was during Delamarter’s tenure that the John Trever Dead Sea Scrolls
Image Preservation Project was implemented. Zuckerman noted illegible parts of
the Genesis Apocryphon, which Greg Berman, physicist at the Jet Propulsion Lab
in Pasadena (and Sheila Spiro’s husband), deciphered with multi-spectral imaging,
the first use anywhere of the space technology on ancient manuscript images.
Everyone involved in the whole project, from beginning to end, was either a
trustee of the Manuscript Center or was formally connected with it, and the basic
funding was provided by the Center. And yet, West Semitic Research decided
that the ABMC did not merit copies of the transparencies or the films for its
vault. The Center asked an intellectual property rights lawyer in Los Angeles,
Stephen Rohdy, to determine rights in the matter, and his judgment was that
we had the clear property rights since the license agreement that permitted us to
pursue the project was signed by the Saltikov-Shchedrin Library in Leningrad
(now the National Public Library in St. Petersburg) and by the Ancient Biblical
Manuscript Center, and not by West Semitic Research, even though Bruce Zuck-
erman signed it as director of the Center at the time. He also said we were neg-
ligent in letting WSR duplicate our DSS films. Vice president Marvin Sweeney,
using the lawyer’s judgments, went to great lengths to try to persuade WSR to
grant the Center at least a copy of the transparencies, but to no avail. The ABMC
board made the decision not to sue, despite Rohdy’s clear judgment, because it
would be very costly in terms of finances and reputation. To this day the Center
has copies only of the facsimile publication, like any purchaser of books.
While writing the above-mentioned article with trustee Astrid Beck on the
codex for Bible Review, I learned for the first time in a telephone call from her
that none of the four ABMC trustees on the photographic team or the publication
project viewed it as a project of the Manuscript Center, but as their own. This
came as a shock to me, and still is. That was a moment in the Center’s history of
which I am not proud but am still in dismay at the attitude of those trustees. My
implicit trust in members of the ABMC board was betrayed, as it had been in the
“re-formatting project,” also by the WSR. William Yarchin, who had accompa-
nied the photographic team to Jerusalem in September 1980 to duplicate the DSS
films there, served for the year 1993 – 94 as director after Bruce Zuckerman, and
just before Sheila Spiro was hired as director in September 1994. All four trustees,
the Zuckermans, Beck, and Freedman, resigned from the Board in 1994. We later
invited Freedman to become a life-time honorary trustee, but he did not respond.
Earlier we had asked Frank Cross and Richard Cain to become life-time honorary
trustees and they accepted with grace. Cross and Cain are still the only life-time
honorary trustees we have. [Joe Platt’s name and mine were added later, in 2003.]
In 1990 the ABMC board, encouraged by the new president of CST, Rob-
ert Edgar, decided that the Center should have a full-time professional direc-
tor rather than continue to hire graduate students, and over the next few years
made several attempts to achieve this. With Zuckerman’s skill at fund-raising by
offering scrolls photographs to donors, combined with the president’s frequent
travels and lectures around the country, that period was probably the best in
terms of unrestricted gifts to the Center. It left no mechanism, however, for con-
tinuing a healthy pace of fund-raising. It was at this point, after Bill Yarchin’s
year as director, that the board, again with Bob Edgar’s strong support, hired
Sheila Spiro from the development department of Cal Tech. Sheila was hired in
August 1993 at a professional level of salary to focus on setting up a mechanism
for fund-raising for the Center, and to work as well in the business office at CST.
The plan did not work as expected, and Sheila decided it best to step down in
August 1995. She was then elected to serve on the ABMC board of trustees in
March 1996 and immediately came on its executive committee where she served
until I left the Center, both as CFO and then as secretary. Sheila then nominated
Michael Phelps as associate director, rather than director, in keeping with the
board’s 1990 decision that the director should be a full-time professional posi-
tion. Sheila was very generous and rendered outstanding service to the Center
by coming to the office for several months without pay to train Mike Phelps in
the position. She has been scrupulous in reading documents and contracts, espe-
cially in revising the by-laws when we merged with CST, which had not yet at
that time formally approved of them. She nominated Stuart Simon to the board
in 1998, and Simon served as CFO from 2002 until the merger with the seminary.
Board development has always been difficult, largely because we inherited
a board formed and shaped by Mrs. Bechtel’s desire to have sole control of the
Center’s policies and finances. Business folk we have approached simply fade
away when introduced to our board, which lacks the kind of people they them-
selves are and expect to meet on such a board. Given this situation and the fact
of my retirement from the faculty of CST in 1997, we entered into conversations
about merger with CST in the late-90s while Bob Edgar was president of CST
and Jack Fitzmier was newly appointed academic dean. After in-depth discus-
sions with principals on both boards and administrations, merger documents
were signed effective 1 July 1999. While ABMC board development still needs
serious attention, the merger has brought advantages to both institutions. The
ABMC now has a parent corporation that is in good financial standing and this
should help considerably in approaching foundations and major donors. With
the ABMC collections as a part of the CST library, CST greatly expanded its
holdings. We believe there are advantages for both, and hope that it was the right
move to make. The ABMC retains its own board and raises its own budget and
has the responsibility for carrying out the mission of the Center, but the CST
board has final authority in policy issues.
Michael Phelps, who had been cataloguer from August 1993 through October
1995, and associate director from October 1995 until June 1996, became director
in July 1996 and served in that capacity until 1 March 2003, the longest service
as director the Center has had. Mike, working with President Bob Edgar (of
CST) and myself, attempted directly to address the issue of board development,
trying to enhance the presence on the board of business and professional peo-
ple. Stan Kukawka, of the CST board, joined the ABMC board while Spiro was
director, and tried valiantly to bring some business sense to it, but, alas, to no
524 Appendix
avail; Stan left the board after about a year. William Albert of Amoco in Chicago
served on the board during the 1990s and effectively raised monies by setting
up small matching grant programs. During this period Jan Miller, Lynne Kogel,
Dr. Douglas Pay, Stuart Simon, and Rich Weis were added to the board. William
Schniedewind was nominated by Marvin Sweeney and Dr. Stewart Dadmun by
his colleage in San Diego, Dr. Pay. The board in effect did not change much, and
it still had no clear sense of its own purpose and mission. In the meantime, Bob
Edgar resigned as president of CST to become secretary general of the National
Council of Churches in New York City (and later director of Common Cause),
and Philip Amerson became the fifth president of CST in 2001. President Amer-
son of CST and Dean Jack Fitzmier seemed at the time to have a clear sense of
the value of the ABMC both for Claremont and for the world of scholarship.
Therefore, in January 2002, following discussions with others, Michael Phelps,
Joe Platt, and I proposed to the CST administration that the ABMC board be
dissolved and that the board of the now-parent corporation, CST, appoint an
interim board with an eighteen-month charge to identify four to six leaders to
form the nucleus of a new board. The interim board would be composed of
four to five members of ABMC’s existing board, two members of CST’s board,
serving ABMC perhaps as a committee assignment, and two or three external
persons added to bring new ideas and new links to potential board members. Ini-
tial conversations with ABMC board members showed enthusiasm for the idea;
Sheila Spiro knew the need very well and offered privately to step down herself
if that would help it happen. Sheila’s dedication to the Center has always been
unstinting and unselfish. She and her husband, Greg Berman, physicist at the Jet
Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, have generously given the Center its reputation in
multi-spectral imaging, working together in Jerusalem and here. It was Sheila
who opened the dialogue with FARMS at BYU in Provo, Utah, that resulted in
digitizing our collection.
Tension had arisen between Professor Kristin De Troyer and director Mike
Phelps that gave rise to a misunderstanding. Because of that situation, and because
it had become imperative that he complete work on the PhD, Mike Phelps agreed
to step aside as director of the ABMC and become director of special projects
centering on the Mount Athos Manuscripts Digital Library Project. Laura Yavitz
served brilliantly as Office Manager while Mike was associate director in 1996.
Following Laura Yavitz, Joyce Merritt (1996 – 97), Katie Oxx (1998 – 2000), Lupe
Baca (2000 – 2001) and Dolly Bush (2001 – 2003) have faithfully and effectively
served as office managers during the seven years Mike Phelps served as director.
During Mike Phelps’s tenure the major projects have been the Dead Sea Scrolls
Jubilee Digitization Project in 1997, the Dead Sea Scrolls Database Project, and
the Mount Athos Digital Library Project.
Center projects have become more and more emphasized as the history of
the Center has developed, for two reasons: (1) there is more than enough to
be done in this field, and (2) projects are the necessary and unavoidable vehicle
for institutional growth and fund raising. This was underscored by Judge David
Thomas of CST’s board, who attended a few ABMC Board meetings in 1997 but
decided, though invited, not to join it. Judge Thomas urged the ABMC board,
nonetheless, that if it wanted to grow it needed outstanding projects, and every-
one agreed. Trustee Noel Freedman had made the point several times during his
tenure on the board. Clearly the direction had to be digitization. It is simply a
fact that the future of manuscript research is digital. Every major library in this
country and in Europe is digitizing its manuscripts. Photographing the Dead Sea
Scrolls and Codex Leningradensis were at the heart of the Center’s growth and
development as an internationally recognized institution, but if it does not move
vigorously into the new technology and its promises we will unfortunately fade
in importance and lose our place in the scholarly world. The ABMC was already
in the forefront in 1990 when it sent director Steve Delamarter to Toronto to a
conference there on computing and literary studies in the humanities, and we
must keep apace. The ABMC is a research center and quite appropriately now
an active wing of the CST library, which itself sponsors no interpretation of
any of its holdings or collections. The ABMC makes its holdings available in as
advanced a mode as feasible to all qualified researchers; in this way it is essen-
tially different from so-called faculty centers on campus.
With his fellow student at the graduate school, Nikos Zarkantzas, Mike
Phelps developed the idea of our current major project, digitizing the holdings of
the libraries in the twenty monasteries on the Mount Athos peninsula in north-
east Greece. This is by far the most ambitious project we have ever undertaken
in terms of the time and the funding it will require. Mike and Nikos made three
exploratory trips to the Mount Athos community and secured the interest and
trust of leaders among the monks there. The Patriarchal Institute in Thessalon-
iki has been supportive, even enthusiastic, from the start. The community itself
has been more difficult to persuade, but even they are becoming supportive,
some enthusiastic after seeing the pious sincerity and determination of Nikos
and Mike. Nikos has been crucial in the whole venture. He grew up in Greece
and frequently visited the community as a lad in the Greek Orthodox Church,
so that some of the monks knew him from his boyhood. He speaks their lan-
guage in more ways than one. The first big breakthrough in funding came when
Michael Huffington, a convert to the Greek Church in Los Angeles and con-
tender for the US Senate in 1998, donated seed money of $ 25,000 as a matching
grant. Through personal efforts, that was more than matched in a few months
time, so that Nikos could gather a team in Thessaloniki to begin cataloguing
films already available in the Patriarchal Institute. Other funding has happily
followed, especially a major grant from the Seaver Foundation, so that quality
equipment for the digitizing process has now been purchased in Greece and the
project is well under way to do digitization in the libraries themselves. Placing
technological hardware permanently in Greece and using it for remote projects
to digitize monastery libraries in Europe and the Near East, where most biblical
manuscripts are still found, provides the base for such projects in the future, and
the Seaver Foundation has clearly seen that promise and potential for the Center.
A televangelist, Dr. Gene Scott, who views himself as a teacher more than as
a preacher, this winter approached us about providing help funding the Mount
526 Appendix
Athos Project; he is interested in acquiring paper copies of certain published

manuscripts in Aramaic and Syriac through the Center. Questions arose on the
ABMC board about the advisability of accepting monies from such a source,
but our argument for accepting it stems from our long-time three-fold mission
statement coupled with the firm policy we have always followed: we sponsor
no interpretation of the manuscript images we acquire, preserve, and distribute,
one way or another. In that regard we are completely neutral. We do not even
sponsor critical interpretations of them, including our own as biblical scholars.
When we have offered lecture series sponsored by the Center for fund-raising
purposes we have always made clear that the ABMC as an institution was not
sponsoring, and did not necessarily agree with, what the various scholars said
in the lectures. We have entered into several projects with Mormon scholars at
Brigham Young University and with Christian Scientists in the Crisler Biblical
Institute in Monterey. Mrs. Bechtel herself was a dedicated Christian Scientist,
but never suggested that we adopt a Christian Scientist view of Scripture. She
was very strong about that. We are now an integral part of the Claremont School
of Theology, which is affiliated with the United Methodist Church, but CST,
which is chartered as an ecumenical seminary, fully understands that the Center
does not support or sponsor any interpretation of the images we house.
At last year’s annual meeting, in May 2002, the ABMC board appointed a
transition team or committee to look to the future. The Chair is Joe Platt, and
Sheila Spiro, Marvin Sweeney, and myself from the ABMC board, and Jack Fitz-
mier, John Dickason, and Bronnie MacNab from the CST administration, serve
as members. Pat Youngquist, of the CST business office, has been very helpful
on the transition of financial records from the ABMC office to the CST busi-
ness office. The executive committee of the board has affirmed several moves the
team has proposed. One was the move of Phelps to director of special projects
on 1 March of this year. John Dickason, CST librarian, was asked to assume the
directorship of the ABMC with the assistance of Pat Youngquist in the CST
business office in finances. Since the office of president was inherited from an
entirely different board situation in 1980, the new ABMC board needs to elect
a chair of its own choosing after being constituted largely of business folk, with
the two CST scholars, Marvin Sweeney and Kristin De Troyer, serving as guar-
antee that the mission of the Center is honored and served.
It is with great hope for the Center’s future that I now step aside as president,
confident that with the expected new configuration on the board and on the
staff, and with the future of the Mount Athos Digital Library Project apparently
secure, the Center will continue vigorously to pursue its mission in service to
biblical scholarship the world over.
Respectfully submitted,
James A. Sanders
PostScript
On 28 May 2003, after I had written the above, I was invited by CST President
Phil Amerson to his office to meet with him and Dean Jack Fitzmier. I had no
idea why I was invited but as I made my way to the meeting I fantasized that per-
haps there were plans to celebrate my retirement after 25 years as an occasion to
raise funds for the Center. This was the kind of support I understood CST could
provide the ABMC when after twenty-two years of independence (Mrs. Bech-
tel used the word “autonomy”) the ABMC became a subsidiary of CST. On
the contrary, President Amerson asked me to be “uninvolved in the Manuscript
Center for two years.” I sat stunned but responded that I would be uninvolved
indefinitely. I was so shocked that I could not think beyond the moment. During
the ensuing conversation I tried once more and again to stress the importance
of the long-standing mission of the Center to “acquire, preserve and distribute”
images (photographic and digital) to any scholar capable of working on them
without charge. I stressed that the Center was aptly a part of the CST library for
the ABMC is a library of ancient and medieval biblical (Old and New Testament)
manuscript images at the service of any and all students and scholars capable of
studying them, and not a faculty center. I felt when I left his office that President
Amerson still did not understand the difference.
And that was right. The ABMC has become a “faculty center,” whose prin-
cipal mission under Professor Marvin Sweeney now is to enhance the profes-
sional work of local and visiting scholars in biblical studies. Though the Center
still acquires images by mail of manuscripts from more established institutions
around the world, the mission of continuing acquisition projects of rare manu-
scripts has been dropped. If one views the website of the ABMC (www.abmc.
org) one can see that it states that its mission is “preservation and research,”
interpreted now however to mean enhancement of current faculty and of others
who avail themselves of the collection accumulated. Like a faculty center, the
ABMC now sponsors lectures by visiting scholars that can only benefit local
scholars and students – never its purpose or mission until now.
The words “preservation and research” have been a part of the title of the
Center since its launching in 1977: The Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center for
Preservation and Research. But a title does not a mission make. Mrs. Bechtel and
I originally had different conceptions of what we were about; she wanted me to
leave New York to be curator of a “go-down,” as she called it, for preservation of
the Dead Sea Scrolls for use by the team of scholars working on them. I refused
to do that but said that my dream had long been to provide images by free access
to as many manuscripts as possible to the world of scholarship to reduce depen-
dence in their text-critical research on earlier apparatus and critical editions of
manuscripts, which often have errors because the authors and editors had not
had personal access to such images. The mission we originally agreed on was that
of acquiring, especially acquiring by sending teams wherever indicated, to make
images, preserving, and providing those images of ancient and medieval biblical
manuscripts free of charge to any scholar who requested copies for their research
528 Appendix
wherever they were, or at the Center itself if feasible. The fifth edition of Biblia
Hebraica (Quinta) is currently being prepared by scholars around the world
based on the ABMC’s publication (1997) of the oldest complete manuscript of
the Hebrew Bible currently housed in the National Library in St. Petersburg.
The service rendered to the world of scholarship by the ABMC from 1978 to
2003 will always be a source of pride for all those who have labored in and with
it to sponsor accuracy in biblical scholarship.
Bibliography
Freedman, David Noel, Astrid Beck, et al., eds. The Leningrad Codex. Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill, 1998.
Reed, Stephen, Marilyn J. Lundberg, and Michael B. Phelps. The Dead Sea Scrolls Cata-
logue: Documents, Photographs, and Museum Inventory Numbers. Atlanta: Scholars,
1994.
endon, 1965.
Sanders, James A. “Qumran Update: What Can Happen in a Year?” BA 55, no. 1 (1992)
37 – 42.
Sanders, James A. “A Tribute to Jean-Dominique Barthélemy.” Folio 19, no. 1 (2002) 1, 3,
8; online: http://www.abmc.org / PDFs / Folio_Vol_19_No_1.pdf
Sanders, James A., and Astrid Beck. “The Leningrad Codex: Rediscovering the Oldest
Complete Hebrew Bible.” BRev 13, no. 4 (1997) 32 – 41, 46.
Index of Modern Authors
Abegg, M. G. 489, 520 Barr, J. 11, 19, 65, 74, 95, 107, 121, 139,
Achtemeier, P. 129, 142 142, 144, 146, 153, 163, 174, 260, 262,
Ackroyd, P. R. 37, 47, 50, 59, 74, 77, 272, 299, 301, 467 – 68
92, 96, 108, 121 – 23, 125, 144, 238, Barthélemy, D. ix, x, 4 – 7, 11, 13, 16, 19,
287, 398, 418 – 19, 428, 470, 481, 492, 27 – 28, 31, 34, 37, 42, 45 – 47, 52 – 53, 55,
507 60, 67, 70, 72, 74 – 75, 78 – 83, 86 – 88, 90,
Adler, M. 296, 301 98, 109 – 10, 121, 138, 141 – 42, 146, 149,
Aejmelaus, A. 47 153, 215, 219, 225 – 26, 237, 240, 242,
Ahlström, G. W. 398 251 – 52, 291, 293 – 94, 301, 357 – 58, 365,
Akenson, D. H. 363, 365 399, 409, 439, 441, 443, 463 – 64, 468,
Aland, B. 4, 14 – 15, 19, 74, 79, 90, 148, 472, 474, 476 – 77, 480, 500, 507, 513
153, 228, 237 Barth, K. 134, 142, 332
Aland, K. 14, 19, 74, 79, 90, 148, 153, 228, Barth, M. 280 – 83, 286
237, 249, 252, 293, 297, 301 Barthes, R. 102, 121
Albrektson, B. 13, 17, 19 Barton, D. M. 125
Albright, W. F. 16, 43, 47, 65, 112, 160, Barton, J. 145, 153
339, 356 – 57, 365, 378, 385, 398, 406, Baumgarten, W. 408
431, 467, 511 Beck, A. 489, 491, 521 – 22, 528
Alexandre, M. 20, 89, 91 Beck, L. W. 106, 121
Allegro, J. M. 371, 381, 385, 388, 394, 396, Beckwith, R. T. 87, 90, 92, 96, 108, 121,
433 193, 227, 237, 355, 365, 496, 507
Alt, A. 100, 121, 302 Begrich, J.,, 422, 428
Alter, R. 223, 238 Beit-Arié, M. 33 – 34, 47, 475, 480
Altmann, A. 121, 481 Bengtson, H. 124
Anderson, B. W. 21, 49, 64, 74, 100, 107, ben Hayyim, J. 54, 72, 75, 250
121 – 23, 125, 139, 142, 146, 153 – 54, Benoit, A. 76, 252
195, 220, 238, 398, 508 Benoit, P. 430, 515
Anderson, G. W. 121 – 22 Bentzen, A. 99, 121, 354
Appel, N. 95, 121 Ben-Zvi, I. 30, 47
Assemani, J. S. 446, 455 Berger, P. 102, 271
Assemani, S. E. 446, 455 Bernstein, M. J. 491
Atiya, A. S. 154 Betz, O. 339, 352 – 53
Attridge, H. W. 49, 195, 220, 509 Bickerman, E. 33, 47, 69, 75, 216, 219,
Auffret, P. 447, 449 – 52, 454 – 55 256, 358, 366, 458, 478, 480, 486
Auvray, P. 8, 19 Biddle, M. E. 367
Billerbeck, P. E. 458, 483
Baars, W. 446, 455 Birch, B. C. 139, 142
Baer, S. 61 Black, J. S. 125
Baillet, M. 237 Black, M. 74, 77, 272, 490, 509
Baker, J. A. 288, 303 Blank, S. H. 382, 385
Baltzer, K. 110, 121 Blenkinsopp, J. 139, 142, 364, 366
Bardtke, H. 399 Bloch, R. 53, 75, 98, 107, 109, 121, 442 – 43
530 Index of Modern Authors
de Boer, P. A. H. 436, 475, 480 Childs, B. S. 65, 75, 95, 102, 107, 120 – 21,
Bloom, H. 197, 219 130, 139, 142 – 43, 146 – 47, 153, 155 – 64,
Boccaccini, G. 482, 490 166 – 75, 223, 236 – 37, 305, 313, 325
Bogaert, P.‑M. 59, 75 Chilton, B. D. 180, 194, 483, 489 – 90
Bonhoeffer, D. 271 Clements, R. E. 113, 121
Bornkamm, G. 280 Clifford, R. J. 37, 47, 181, 194, 205, 219
Borowsky, I. J. 353, 490 Clouse, R. G. 328, 333
Bossman, D. 283, 286 Coats, G. W. 77, 85, 91, 143, 175, 195,
Boulding, K. 271 – 72 238, 303, 314, 334, 353, 508
Bousset, W. 280, 458 Cohen, S. J. D. 356, 364, 366, 490
Bovon, F. 356, 366 Cohn, L. 296, 301
Bowden, J. 302 Collingwood, R. G. 237
Boyarin, D. 29, 33, 47, 345, 352 Collins, J. J. 49, 92, 153, 238, 334, 493, 507
Bradley, J. E. 237 Colwell, E. C. 240 – 44, 246 – 47, 251 – 52,
Brekelmans, C. H. W. 74 – 75, 77, 101 326, 333, 513
Brennan, W. J. 82 Coogan, J. 176, 194, 502
Brettler, M. 23, 26 Cook, J. 3, 21, 458, 470
Bright, J. 113, 121, 290, 301 Cook, S. L. 195, 220, 367
Bring, R. 280 – 83, 286 Cope, O. L. 170, 174
Brooke, G. J. 433 Cowley, R. W. 132, 143, 160, 174
Brooks, R. 49, 92, 153, 238, 334 Cox, C. E. 47
Broshi, M. 491 Cranfield, C. E. B. 281, 284, 286
Brown, R. E. 272, 287, 323, 460, 468, 484, Crenshaw, J. L. 21, 50, 92, 143, 175, 195,
490, 520 287, 300, 301 – 2
Brownlee, W. H. 372, 385, 399, 416, Cross, F. M. xi, 13, 20 – 21, 29, 37 – 38,
421 – 22, 425, 428, 431, 471, 511, 513 42 – 50, 52, 64, 75 – 77, 91, 97, 100, 102,
Bruce, F. F. 193, 399 109, 121, 125, 144, 174 – 75, 194, 220,
Buber, M. 102, 121, 190, 210, 333, 395, 487 238 – 39, 262, 272, 287, 291, 301 – 3, 314,
Budde, K. 44 334, 339, 356 – 57, 365 – 68, 373, 376,
Buhl, F. 354, 356, 366, 493, 507 378, 385, 397, 399, 401, 431 – 34, 436,
Bultmann, R. 284, 286 444, 468 – 71, 481, 508, 514, 517, 522
Burrows, M. vii, 384 – 85, 511 Cullmann, O. 259, 272, 381, 385
Buxtorf, J. 6, 19, 147
Dahl, M. E. 279, 286
Cadbury, H. J. 487, 490 Dahl, N. A. 248, 286
Callaway, M. 192, 194, 326, 333, 505, 507 Dahood, M. 65, 75, 399, 406 – 8
Calvin, J. 276, 280 David, R. 433
Campbell, J. 102, 121 Davidson, R. 82, 91
Campbell, T. 439 Davidson, S. 354, 366
Caquot, A. 401 Davies, P. R. 306, 313, 355, 366, 493,
Carmichael, C. 101 496 – 97, 507
Carmignac, J. 387, 391, 396, 399, 402, 405 Davies, W. D. 256, 261, 264, 272, 279 – 81,
Carr, D. M. 16, 19, 38, 47, 84, 90, 211, 283 – 84, 286 – 87, 371, 380, 385, 439
218 – 19, 221, 325 – 26, 333, 335, 362, Davis, M. 491
366, 440, 443 – 45, 493, 495, 497, 507 Deist, F. 480
Carroll, R. P. 144 Delamarter, S. 511, 520 – 22, 525
Carruth, W. H. 302 Delcor, M. 399, 406 – 10, 446 – 47, 449,
Carswell, J. 447, 455 452, 455
Casetti, P. 21, 92, 144, 335, 368, 469, 509 del Medico, H. E. 372, 385
Cazelles, H. 139, 142 Delsman, W. C. 47
Charlesworth, J. H. 94, 121, 334 – 35, 452, Denis, A. M. 94, 98, 121
455, 459, 468, 490 De Troyer, K. 512, 524, 526
Index of Modern Authors 531
Detweiler, H. 437 Fishbane, M. A. 33, 42, 48 – 49, 83, 91,

Dever, W. G. 334, 367, 490, 508 190, 201, 210, 219, 330 – 31, 333, 335,
Dicken, E. W. T. 125, 153, 303 346, 352, 444, 467 – 68, 481, 483, 485,
Díez Macho, A. 460, 468 487, 490, 493, 507
di Lella, A. A. 399, 406 – 7, 410 Fitzmyer, J. A. 4, 20, 272, 275, 281, 287,
Dinkler, E. 380, 385 387, 396, 416, 428, 438, 444, 459 – 60,
Dobson, E. 323 468, 520
Dodd, C. H. 170, 174, 277, 279, 284, 287, Flint, P. W. 214, 219, 335, 355, 361,
484, 490 366 – 68, 443 – 45, 495 – 96, 507, 509
Donner, H. 174 Flusser, D. 400
Dorothy, C. V. 16, 89, 91 Fohrer, G. 101, 110, 400
Dothan, A. 61, 75 Fowler, R. M. 9, 15, 20
Dow, L. K. F. vii Frank, H. T. 122, 125
Drane, J. W. 372, 385 Freedman, D. N. 57, 64, 75, 110, 113, 119,
Driver, G. R. 399 122, 124, 153, 193 – 94, 238, 253, 302,
Driver, S. R. 44 401, 417, 429, 444, 508, 514, 522, 525,
Dunkly, J. vii 528
Dunn, J. D. G. 364, 366 Frei, H. 73, 75, 223, 237
Dupont-Sommer, A. vii, 258 – 59, 372, Frensdorff, S. 61 – 62, 75
385, 387, 396, 399, 406, 408, 446 – 47, Frerichs, E. S. 20, 490
450, 455 Fuller, R. H. 95, 100, 126
Eades, K. L. 49, 481, 509 García Martínez, F. 450 – 51, 455

Ebeling, G. 133 Gaster, T. 103, 387, 397
Eicher, G. 148 Gawlick, G. 49, 335
Eichrodt, W. 100, 255, 272, 372, 385 Gerhardsson, B. 298, 301
Eisenman, R. 521 Gertner, M. 295, 301
Eissfeldt, O. 99 – 100, 107, 116, 121 – 22, Gese, H. 116, 122
262, 272, 302, 354, 399, 423, 428, 493, Ginsburg, C. D. 61 – 62, 75 – 76, 474
507 Glueck, N. 512
Elliger, K. 250, 301, 319, 333, 484, 490 Golb, N. 448, 450 – 51, 455
Ellis, E. E. 193, 378 – 79, 385 Goldberg, A. 171, 174
Emerton, J. A. 50, 460, 468 Goldin, J. 72, 76, 98, 101, 122
Engnell, I. 279, 287 Goldstein, J. A. 400
Epp, E. J. 355, 366 Gooding, D. W. 16, 19, 76, 88, 90
Eshel, E. 446 – 47, 449, 451, 455 Goppelt, L. 372, 385
Eshel, H. 446 – 47, 449, 451, 455 Gorak, J. 190, 194, 197, 205, 219
Eskenazi, T. C. 204, 219 Gordis, R. 72, 76
Evans, C. A. vii, 33, 47, 124, 143, 175, Gordon, C. H. 44
192, 194, 220, 273, 288, 302 – 3, 326, Gordon, R. P. 59, 76
333, 335, 359, 366, 372, 385, 397, 440, Goshen-Gottstein, M. H. ix, xi, 20,
444, 490, 505, 507 30 – 31, 34, 46, 48, 52 – 55, 57 – 58, 60,
Evans, C. F. 50, 77, 92, 125, 170, 174, 238, 66, 76, 79, 81, 91, 145, 147, 153, 291,
470, 481 294, 301, 358, 366, 400, 413, 419, 421,
Ewald, G. H. A. 44 428, 438, 463 – 64, 468, 471 – 73, 475 – 77,
480 – 81, 494 – 95, 507
Ferguson, E. 356, 366 Gould, S. J. 330, 334
Ferris, T. 330, 333 Graetz, H. 44, 354, 356, 366
Fichtner, J. 113, 122 Grant, F. C. 260, 272
Fields, W. W. 21, 430, 444, 481, 490 Greeley, A. M. 257 – 58, 272
Finkelstein, L. 98, 122, 159, 174, 439 Green, J. B. 385
Fischel, H. A. 262, 272 Green, W. S. 490
Greenberg, M. 13, 17, 20, 52, 71, 301, Jacob, E. 113, 122, 144
464, 468 Jacobson, C. 122
Greenfield, J. C. 124, 238, 253, 291, 302, James, J. 307, 313
401, 429, 444, 508 Japhet, S. 491
Greenspahn, F. E. 5, 20 Jeremias, J(oachim). 376, 386
Greenspoon, L. 479 Jeremias, J(örg). 113, 122
Gressmann, H. 458 Jervell, J. 77, 195, 253, 273, 303, 335, 491,
Grimal, P. 124, 288 509
Groves, J. W. 153 – 54 Johnson, G. 204, 208, 219
Gunkel, H. 289, 302, 422, 428 Johnson, S. E. 380, 386
Gurewicz, S. B. 400, 447, 455 Jones, A. 165, 174, 290, 302
Gutbrod, W. 279 – 80, 284 de Jonge, M. 387, 396, 417, 428
Jongeling, B. 400, 403
Habel, N. C. 37, 48 Joyce, J. 22
Hadas, M. 458, 486
Hahn, F. 196, 221, 491 Kaestli, J.‑D. 92, 367
Halsel, G. 319, 334 Kahle, P. 12, 14, 29, 43, 61, 357, 463, 476,
Hanson, P. D. 102, 122, 256 – 57, 272, 279, 481
287 Kampen, J. 491
Harl, M. 17, 20, 89, 91 Kant, I. 102
Harlé, P. 89, 91 Käsemann, E. 95, 122, 261, 269, 272, 284,
Harper, W. R. 305 287
Harrelson, W. J. 3, 20, 74, 122, 139, 143, 287 Kaufmann, Y. 120, 122
Harrington, D. J. 361, 366 Kazantzakis, N. 185, 194
Hartman, D. 324 Kealy, S. P. 160, 174
Hauser, A. J. 214 – 15, 219, 335, 367 Kee, H. C. 302, 353, 490
Havel, V. 498, 507 Keel, O. 21, 92, 144, 335, 368, 469, 509
Hays, R. B. 33, 48, 83, 91, 235, 237, 346, Keil, C. F. 46
373, 382, 386 Kelly, J. N. D. 247 – 48, 252
Heinemann, I. 296, 301 Kelsey, D. 223, 237
Hendel, R. S. 357, 366 Kennicott, B. 12, 14, 20, 27, 34, 54, 81,
Hengel, M. 258, 272, 279, 287, 298, 302, 148, 464, 474
362, 367, 441, 444, 458, 468 Kermode, F. 223, 238
Hertzberg, H. W. 46, 48 Kittel, B. 139, 143
Heschel, A. 183, 190, 194, 210, 219, 274, Kittel, R. 13, 24, 25, 86, 147, 290, 302
287, 295 – 96, 302, 331, 333 – 34, 343 Klein, G. 281, 287
Hillers, D. R. 110, 122 Kleinknecht, H. M. 279, 284, 287
Hobbs, T. 340 Klopfenstein, M. 21, 469
Hodge, A. A. 129, 143 Kohl, M. 352
Hoenig, S. B. 98, 122, 400 Knierim, R. P. 3, 15, 20, 85, 91, 167, 211,
Holladay, J. S. 105, 122 219
Hopewell, J. 304, 308, 313 Knight, D. A. 139, 143, 467 – 68
Horgan, M. P. 372, 386 Koester, H. 247, 252
Hornig, G. 95, 122, 354, 367 Kraft, R. A. 66, 76, 243, 252
Hort, F. J. A. 14 Krarup, O. C. 404
Hosack, R. N. 328, 333 Kristeva, J. 345, 352
Hossfeld, F. L. 300, 302 Kugel, J. L. 319, 326, 334, 342–43, 442, 444
Howard, G. E. 281, 283, 287 Kuhn, K. G. 380, 386
Hübner, H. 276, 287 Kümmel, W. G. 290, 293, 297, 302
Hulst, A. R. 439 Kunst, H. 19
Hurvitz, A. 97, 400, 406, 423, 428 Kutscher, E. Y. 38, 48
Hyatt, J. P. vii, 101, 122, 376, 380, 386 Kyle, R. G. 328, 334
Laaf, P. 101, 122 Maas, F. 400

Lacan, F. 102 Mack, B. L. 213, 219
de Lagarde, P. A. 29, 357, 463 MacKenzie, R. A. F. 400
Lampe, G. W. H. 372, 386 Magne, J. 447, 449 – 50, 452, 455
Landes, G. M. 107, 122, 139, 143 Maier, G. 144, 158, 175
Lapide, P. 460, 468 Mannheim, K. 102
Lapp, P. 433 Manson, T. W. 379, 386
Laperrousaz, E.‑M. 400 March, W. E. 129, 143 – 44
Le Boulluec, A. 89, 91 Marcus, D. 22, 479
Leclant, J. 400 Margival, H. 8, 20
Le Déaut, R. 107, 109, 122, 294, 302, 442, Marshall, I. H. 385
444 Maxey, Z. 460, 469
Lehmann, M. R. 400 Mays, J. L. 139, 143, 304, 313
Leiman, S. Z. 76 – 77, 122, 128, 143, 175, McBride, D. 38
193, 201, 211, 219, 301 – 2, 355, 367, McCarter, P. K. 45, 48
468, 496, 498 – 99, 507 McCarthy, C. 60, 76
Lemaire, A. 129, 143 McCarthy, D. 123
Lemcio, E. E. 135, 143 McCasland, S. V. 66, 76, 292, 302
Lemke, W. E. 20, 48, 76, 91, 144, 174 – 75, McCrory, J. H. 16, 20
194, 220, 238, 272, 287, 302, 314, 334, McDonald, L. M. viii, xi, 179, 193 – 94,
367, 508 197, 211, 215, 219, 354 – 55, 364,
Lester, T. 325, 334 366 – 68, 466, 469, 496 – 97, 506, 508
Levenson, J. D. 3, 20, 342 – 43 McHardy, W. D. 439
Levine, B. A. 20 McKnight, S. 385
Lévi, I. 409 Meeks, W. A. 49, 77, 195, 220, 253, 273,
Lévi-Strauss, C. 102, 122 303, 335, 491, 509
Lewis, J. P. 97, 122, 128, 143, 159, 175, Melugin, R. F. 37, 48
201, 211, 219, 292 – 93, 302, 354 – 55, Mendenhall, G. E. 111 – 12, 123, 272
367, 438, 444, 496, 507 Menzies, A. 125
L’Heureux, C. E. 400 Merritt, R. 511
Lieberman, S. 210, 219, 256, 458, 469, 486 Metzger, B. M. 74, 149, 153, 197, 220, 228,
Lilienthal, T. C. 11 237, 466, 469
Lindars, B. 123, 277, 279, 287 Meyer, I. 300, 302
Lindbeck, G. 7, 9, 15, 20 Meyer, R. 400, 402, 404, 409, 414
Lischer, R. 49 Michaelis, J. D. 9, 11 – 13, 28, 79, 148, 320,
Livingstone, E. A. 287 476, 488
Locher, C. 13 Michaelis, J. H. 11
Loewe, R. 294, 302 Milik, J. T. 99, 123, 387, 390 – 91, 393 – 97,
Lohfink, N. 13, 95, 101, 107, 123, 439, 433, 455
446, 454 – 55 Miller, M. P. 53, 66 – 67, 71, 76, 107, 109,
Long, B. O. 77, 143, 175, 195, 238, 303, 123, 170, 295, 302, 387 – 88, 393 – 95,
314, 334, 353, 508 397
Longfield, B. J. 319, 334 Miller, P. D. 20, 48, 76, 91, 144, 174 – 75,
Longenecker, R. N. 257, 272 194, 220, 238, 272, 287, 302, 314, 334,
Loza, J. 101, 123 367, 508
Luckmann, T. 102 Miner, D. F. 387 – 88, 395, 397
Lührmann, D. 400, 447, 449 – 52, 454 – 55 Moeller, G. 517
Lundberg, M. J. 209, 219, 516 – 17, Moore, G. F. 256, 272, 276, 279, 284, 287,
520 – 21, 528 458, 469, 482, 490
Lust, J. 16, 19, 88, 90 Moraldi, L. 394, 397
Luther, M. 4, 6 – 7, 20, 27, 28, 42, 340, Morgan, D. 40, 48
475 – 76 Muilenburg, J. 200, 220, 384, 386
Mulder, M. J. 34, 48, 80, 91, 227, 237 Philonenko, M. 76, 252, 400, 401, 406,
Muller, R. A. 237 446 – 47, 450, 455
Munck, J. 170, 175, 261, 266, 272 Pierard, R. V. 328, 333
Murphy, R. E. 3, 20, 139, 143, 272, 287 Pietersman, A. 47
Pisano, S. 44, 48 – 49, 220, 335, 367, 445,
Nelson-Jones, R. 89, 91 509
Neusner, J. 3, 20, 66, 68, 76, 92, 97, 102, Pokorný, P. 229, 237
115, 123, 143, 180, 194, 228, 255 – 56, Polk, D. P. 139, 143
263, 272, 279, 287, 297, 302, 343 – 44, Polzin, R. 401, 406, 447, 455
352, 360, 367, 458 – 59, 469, 483, 489 – 90 Pralon, D. 89, 91
Newman, M. 106, 123 Priest, J. 401
Nicholson, E. W. 108, 123 Procksch, O. 374 – 75, 386
Nida, E. 30, 55, 398, 408, 439, 472
Niebuhr, R. 12, 236, 331, 343 Qimron, E. 38, 48, 355, 367, 401, 493, 508
Nielsen, B. 291, 302 Quell, G. 113, 123
Niewöhner, F. 49, 335
Nineham, D. E. 174 Rabin, C. 30, 33, 48, 471 – 73, 481
Norton, G. J. 49, 220, 335, 367, 445, 509 Rabinowitz, I. 401 – 10
North, R. 262, 272 Räisänen, H. 276, 287
Noth, M. 100, 101, 110, 123, 255, 436, Ray, R. B. 502, 508
444, 446, 449 – 52, 455 Reed, S. 516 – 17, 528
Nyberg, H. S. 13 Reed, W. L. 122, 125, 434
Rehmn, M. 46, 48
O’Dea, T. 102, 123, 261 Reid, J. K. S. 383, 386
Odeberg, H. 281 Rendtorff, R. 20, 113, 123, 164, 167, 343,
Ofer, Y. 24, 26 352 – 53
Orlinsky, H. 61 – 62, 72, 76 Revell, E. J. 50, 153, 221, 239, 475, 481, 510
Osborne, G. R. 372, 386 Rhodes, E. F. 19, 153, 237
Osswald, E. 113, 123, 400 Richardson, C. C. 350, 352
Östborn, G. 100, 123, 144, 277, 279, 284, Rickenbacher, O. 409
287 Riesner, R. 339, 352 – 53
Ouellette, J. 400 Robeck, C. M. 229, 237
Outler, A. C. 144 Roberts, B. J. 401, 419, 425, 428, 481
Ovadiah, A. 400, 406 Robinson, H. W. 271 – 72
Overholt, T. W. 113, 123 Robinson, J. M. 460, 469, 515
Rofé, A. 40, 44, 48
Parente, F. 486, 490 Roberts, B. J. 96, 107, 109, 123, 378, 386,
Parry, D. W. 220, 334, 509 422, 475
Parsons, P. 78 Ropes, J. H. 383, 386
Pasinya, L. M. 257, 272, 277, 279, 284, Rosenblatt, J. P. 91, 220
287, 484, 490 Rosenzweig, F. 190, 210, 333, 487
Patte, D. 292, 302, 372, 386 de Rossi, G. B. 12, 19, 34, 54, 81, 148,
Paul, S. 106, 123 464, 474
Perdue, L. G. 36, 48 Rössler, D. 257, 272, 279, 285, 287
Perlitt, L. 101, 123 Rost, L. 101, 106, 124
Petersen, D. L. 37 – 38, 48 Rowley, H. H. 37, 48, 272, 354, 381, 386
Pettit, P. 148, 153, 508, 511, 516 – 17, Rubenstein, R. L. 118, 124
519 – 20 Rudolph, W. 250
Petuchowski, J. 222 Rueger, P. 241
Pfeiffer, R. H. 96, 123, 431, 493, 508 Rüger, H. P. 439
Phelps, M. B. 511, 516, 518, 520, 523 – 25, Rylaarsdam, J. C. 232, 238, 384, 386
528 Ryle, H. E. 354, 356, 367, 508
Saebø, M. 443 – 44 Shanks, H. 430, 445, 520

Sanders, E. P. 276, 287, 483, 490 Sharpe, E. J. 301
Sanders, J. A. x, xi, 3, 9 – 11, 14 – 15, 18, 20, Shenkel, J. D. 401
22, 26 – 28, 31, 33, 37 – 39, 42, 48 – 49, 51, Shepherd, G. T. 158
58, 65, 67 – 73, 76 – 77, 79, 82 – 85, 87 – 93, Siegel, J. P. 97, 124, 401, 414
95 – 98, 100, 102, 107 – 8, 110, 113 – 15, Sievers, J. 486, 490
119, 123 – 24, 127, 132 – 33, 136, 138 – 46, Silberman, L. H. 177, 195, 215, 220, 289,
148 – 49, 151, 153 – 54, 158, 162 – 63, 166, 294 – 95, 298, 303, 360, 506
169 – 70, 172 – 73, 175, 178 – 79, 181 – 84, Simon, R. 5, 6, 8 – 11, 14 – 15, 18, 21, 81,
187 – 92, 194 – 95, 197, 199, 202 – 4, 206, 92, 320, 341, 476
208 – 10, 212, 214 – 15, 217 – 18, 220, Simon, S. 511
223 – 25, 228 – 29, 231, 233, 238 – 40, 242, Simpson, C. A. 289, 303
248, 250, 253, 255, 257 – 58, 262 – 65, Sitterson, J. C. 91, 220
267, 270, 272 – 73, 275, 279, 283, Skehan, P. W. 13, 145, 401 – 2, 406 – 7,
285 – 88, 291 – 92, 294 – 97, 299 – 300, 409 – 15, 422, 425, 428, 436 – 37, 445,
302 – 3, 305, 307, 310 – 11, 313 – 15, 471, 495 – 96
320 – 21, 324 – 31, 333 – 37, 339 – 40, 343, Smalley, W. A. 77, 490, 509
348 – 49, 353, 355 – 61, 366 – 68, 382, Smart, J. D. 127, 144, 328, 335
386 – 88, 390 – 91, 393, 397 – 99, 401 – 17, Smend, R. 139, 144
419 – 22, 424, 427 – 28, 431, 434, 436 – 41, Smith, H. P. 44
443 – 48, 450 – 52, 455 – 59, 464, 466 – 67, Smith, M. 69, 75, 77, 95, 109 – 11, 114, 124,
469, 472, 475 – 76, 478, 481, 483, 182, 195, 213, 220, 236, 238, 256, 279,
485 – 99, 501, 503 – 9, 521, 528 288, 458, 460, 482, 486, 491
Sandevoir, P. 89, 91 Smith, W. C. 197, 220, 336, 353
Sandmel, S. 467, 469, 484, 487 Snaith, N. 62, 77
Satran, D. 489, 491 Soggin, J. A. 101, 124
Saunders, E. W. 323, 335 Spinoza, A. 7 – 8, 21, 28, 35, 49, 191,
Sawyer, J. F. A. 65, 77 319 – 21, 326, 335, 340 – 41, 476, 488
Schechter, S. 98, 124 Spiro, S. 511, 521 – 23, 526
Schenker, A. 21, 25, 92, 144, 335, 368, Starcky, J. 426 – 28, 433, 439, 445
469, 509 Steele, F. R. 384, 386
Schiffman, L. H. 228, 238, 445, 451, 485, Stegemann, H. 393, 397, 457, 459
491 Steiner, G. 223, 238
Schmidt, D. A. 436 Steinmann, A. 368
Schmidt, D. D. 355, 368 Stendahl, K. 257, 261, 273, 373, 378, 381,
Schmidt, H. 422, 428 384, 386
Schmittner, W. 95, 124 Stinespring, W. F. 220
Schneider, H. 447, 450, 456 Stoebe, H. J. 46, 49
Schniedewind, W. 524 Stone, M. E. 178, 196, 256, 258, 273, 279,
Schoepf, B. G. 122 285, 288, 458, 469, 482, 491, 509
Schoeps, H. J. 281, 288 Strack, H. L. 458, 483
Schuller, E. 224, 238 Strugnell, J. 355, 367, 394, 397, 402 – 4,
Schürer, E. 458 430, 436, 447, 449, 452, 454, 456, 471,
Schüssler Fiorenza, E. 332, 335 493, 508
Schwarz, D. 482, 491 Stuhlmacher, P. 95, 107, 124, 158, 175
Scott, J. M. 334, 508 Sun, H. 49, 481, 509
Seeligmann, I. L. 59, 77 Sundberg, A. C. 71, 77, 95, 106, 124 – 25,
Segert, S. 401 144, 159, 175, 214, 221, 292, 303, 354,
Seitz, C. R. 37 – 38, 49, 86, 92 362, 368, 425, 428, 466, 469
Semler, J. S. 65, 95, 124, 158, 305, 314, 354 Swartley, W. M. 41, 49
Sen, F. 447, 456 Sweeney, M. A. 38, 49, 182, 185, 196, 207,
Sevenster, J. N. 460, 469 221, 511, 517, 519 – 20, 522, 524, 526 – 27
Tadmor, H. 48 von Rad, G. 100, 101, 106, 110, 119, 125,

Tal, A. 479 146, 153, 179, 254 – 55, 273, 296, 303,
Talmon, S. ix, xi, 9 – 10, 14, 21, 29 – 32, 41, 372, 386
48 – 50, 52, 55, 58, 60, 67, 71, 75, 77, 79, von Soden, H. 14
81, 92, 97, 109, 121, 125, 164, 175, 179,
196, 213, 221, 225, 238 – 39, 291, 301, Waholder, B. Z. 228, 238 – 39, 520
303, 355, 357 – 58, 361, 365 – 66, 368, 385, Walker, W. O. 303
397, 399, 401 – 2, 413 – 14, 419, 428, 438, Wall, R. W. 364, 368
440, 443 – 45, 457, 459, 463, 467 – 74, 477, Walters, S. D. 16, 21, 88, 92
479, 481, 483, 491, 494 – 95, 507, 509 Wanke, G. 108, 125
Taussig, M. T. 176, 199, 221, 502 Wansbrough, H. 50, 196, 221, 491
Tcherikover, V. 279, 288 Warfield, B. B. 129, 143
Terrien, S. 500, 509 Watson, D. F. 214 – 15, 219, 335, 367
Theiler, W. 296, 301 Weber, M. 102
Thomas, C. 323 Weil, G. 29, 54 – 55, 61 – 63, 67, 77, 476
Thomas, D. W. 86, 411 Weinfeld, M. 48, 273
Tillich, P. 339 Weis, R. D. 218 – 19, 221, 335, 366, 440,
Tischendorf, C. 14 444 – 45, 499, 507, 509, 511, 517,
Todd, R. 317, 335 519 – 20, 524
Tournay, R. J. 402 Weiser, A. 101, 125
Tov, E. ix, xi, 3, 16, 19, 21, 29, 31, 37 – 38, Weiss, M. 400
42 – 45, 47, 50, 78 – 80, 88, 90, 92, 357, Weiss, R. 402, 404
368, 430 – 31, 441, 445, 458, 470 – 74, Wellhausen, J. 28, 111 – 12, 125
477, 479, 481, 483, 490 Wermelinger, O. 92, 367
Towner, W. S. 21, 146, 153 Werner, E. 289, 292, 303
Trever, J. C. 251, 471, 511, 513, 519, 522 Westcott, B. F. 14
Tsevat, M. 3, 21 Westermann, C. 38, 50, 372, 385, 386
Tucker, G. 15 Wevers, J. 56
Wheeler, B. 319, 335
Ufenheimer, B. 402 Whipple, G. 511, 519
Ulrich, E. C. 13, 16, 21, 38, 45, 50, 80, 88, White, L. 230, 239
92, 220, 334, 496, 509 Whiteley, D. E. H. 280 – 81, 283, 288
Wikgren, A. 74
VanderKam, J. C. 335, 445 Wilder, A. 102, 125
van der Ploeg, J. P. M. 402, 416 – 19, 421, Willimon, W. H. 49
425 – 26, 428, 437 Willis, J. T. 143, 175, 195, 288, 302
van Wagnenen, S. 430 Wilson, E. 376, 386
van der Woude, A. S. 92, 113, 125, 387, Wilson, G. H. 94, 125, 214, 221, 443, 445,
389, 394 – 97, 416 – 17, 421, 428 – 29, 447, 495 – 96, 510
449 – 50, 456 Wink, W. 158, 175
de Vaux, R. 430, 432 – 35, 455, 512 Winter, S. C. 195, 220, 367
Vermes, G. 107 – 9, 119, 125, 259, 273, Wise, M. 94, 125, 470
283, 288, 457, 470, 485, 491 Wolff, H. W. 500, 510
Vincent, J. M. 37, 50 Woodruff, P. 511
Vischer, W. 259, 273 Woollcombe, K. J. 372, 386
Vogel, C. 76, 252 Wright, A. G. 442, 445
Vogel, G. J. L. 11 Wright, G. E. 95, 100, 102 – 3, 107, 110,
Vollmer, J. 110, 124 119 – 20, 123 – 26, 160, 162 – 63, 175, 374,
Volz, P. 13 384, 386
von Campenhausen, H. 280, 284, 288, Wright, J. E. 334, 367, 490, 508
293, 297, 303 Würthwein, E. 279, 288
von Harnack, A. 280 Wyschogrod, M. 282 – 85, 288
Yadin, Y. 70, 77, 387, 395, 397, 402, 417, Zarkantzas, N. 525
425, 429, 437 – 38, 445, 457, 494, 510 Ziesler, J. A. 261, 273
Yarchin, W. 511, 515 Zimmerli, W. 130, 160 – 61, 163
Yardeni, A. 446 – 47, 449, 451, 455 Zuckermann, B. 447, 518, 520 – 22
Yeivin, I. 33, 50, 148, 153, 211, 221, 227, Zuckermann, K. 447, 521
239, 503, 510
Ancient Sources Index
Old / First Testament
Genesis 15:26 40
1 – 12 176 19:5 – 6 282
1 – 11 205 20 – 23 499
1–2 332 22:24 46
1 191, 202, 234 25 – 40 105
1:2 281 33:12 – 16 189
1:26 – 28 205 33:14 – 16 332
2 202, 234 33:16 282, 487
6 268 34:6 – 7 190
12 42, 332, 485 34:7 209
12:1 – 3 205 35 – 40 17, 89
12:2 344 40 – 48 17
12:3 181, 308
12:7 344 Leviticus
14:19 – 20 108 17 – 18 285
15 – 22 180 19:18 327
18:16 – 33 190 25 416
19:15 44 25:8 – 24 393
21:10 – 12 283 25:8 – 13 393
21:12 210 25:9 390, 392, 393
22 119 25:10 389, 392
27:27 – 29 108 25:13 389, 391
27:39 – 40 108 28:8 – 13 396
32 259
32:22 – 32 208 Numbers
38:24 44 1 – 10 85
45 – 50 330 15:14 101
45:5 120 22 – 24 232
46:15 5
49 108 Deuteronomy
50:20 186 1 – 26 170
4:9 264
Exodus 4:16 502
4:21 – 26 232 – 33 6 269
4:22 371 6:4 – 5 327
4:24 – 26 151, 232 6:5 266
15 39, 64, 201, 250 6:7 – 9 269
15:5 44 10:16 40, 184, 235
15:13 63 12 – 26 180
15:16 63 15 416
540 Ancient Sources Index
15:2 389, 391, 396 11:1 43, 44

16:20 263 11:2 43
18:15 170 11:12 – 15 45
18:22 115 11:12 – 14 46
20 275 11:12 – 13 46
20:1 – 9 136 11:13 46
21:23 283 11:26 45
26 180, 181 12:7 263
26:5 – 11 181 12:8 200, 255
26:5 – 9 100, 101, 105, 200, 255 16 – 18 88
26:12 – 15 181 16 – 17 201, 406
27 – 28 181 16 404, 406
28 282 27 – 28 235
29 – 33 39
29 – 31 180, 181, 204, 207 2 Samuel
30:6 40, 235, 502 5 187, 501
30:11 – 14 83 5:17 – 25 114, 300, 501
30:12 – 13 235 7 202, 405
30:12 234 13:20 46
30:14 235 14:1 – 20 500
30:56 184 22 64, 88, 89, 415, 479
31:26 96 22:27 206
32 39, 250 23:1 – 7 415
32:39 206, 235
33 108 1 Kings
3 – 10 180
Joshua 3 18, 84
24 100 3:2 – 5 16
24:2 – 13 201 8:53 282
10 39, 180, 205, 235
Judges 10:1 235
5:11 200 10:2 235
10:8 45 10:21 205
10:17 45 10:27 180
11:4 46 11 – 2 Kgs 25 206
21:8 – 12 46 11 180, 206, 235
11:14 206
1 Samuel 11:23 206
1–2 88 11:26 206
2 39 22 231
2:2 420
2:6 – 7 206 2 Kings
2:6 235 18:13 – 20:19 88
10 43, 46 18:36 46
10:16 – 27a 45 19:32 – 37 187
10:17 – 27a 46 21:1 – 18 209, 504
10:26ab 46 22 – 23 204
10:27 – 11:1 43, 44 22 224
10:27 44, 90 23 – 25 176
10:27ab 46 25 39, 224
11 43, 36 25:27 – 30 206
11:1 – 11 45, 46
Ancient Sources Index 541
1 Chronicles 10 423
3 395 14 88, 189
10 – 2 Chron 36 216 14:1 503
14:10 – 17 114 18 64, 88, 89, 415, 421, 479
16 453 22 388
16:8 – 36 414, 418 32 422
29:10 – 13 415 32:3 46
29:15 307 33 423
38 422
2 Chronicles 42 – 83 423
5:13 415 50:21 46
6:41 – 42 415 53 88
20:21 415 54:5 448
33:10 – 17 192, 210 67:4 418
33:10 – 13 504 70 422
33:12 – 13 39 71 422
36 176, 217 72 416
36:22 – 23 217, 502 78 201
79:2 – 3 422
Ezra 82 86, 205, 231
1:1 – 4 502 82:1 389, 392
4 104 82:2 389, 392
9:8 – 9 120 84 – 89 423
10:10 – 11 415 84 423
89 231
Nehemiah 90 – 104 423
8 x, 93, 110, 146, 179, 204, 90 422
205, 224 91 425, 426
8:1 – 12 119 91:4 421
8:9 179 91:14 – 16 426
9 101 92 421
9:11 44 93:1 419
96 414, 418
Job 101 – 150 413
1–2 205 103:11 418
1 231 104 419
3 – 31 209 105 – 107 423
13:20 – 28 209 105 – 106 201
17 – 18 250 105 414
19:23 – 29 209 105:1 – 15 418
24:14 46 106 – 109 426
29:1 – 4 209 106 414
38 – 42 209 106:1 418
106:47 – 48 418
Psalms 107 426
1 40 108 – 110 423
1:1 – 2 192, 217 109 426
1:1 504 111 – 118 423
3 – 41 423 113:3b 418
7:8 – 9 389, 392 116 418
7:8 392, 395 117 418
8 416, 422 118 388, 418, 420, 421
118:1 415 6:5 85

118:29 415 6:9 – 10 233
119:105 – 12 94 7 501
120 – 134 421, 423 7:9 114
121:1 395 8:5 – 8 184, 212
123 419 8:11 388, 390, 393, 396
133 418 10 186
135 – 136 201, 423 11:4 395
135 419 19:24 – 25 135
135:2 420 22:1 – 4 187
135:3 63 22:2 114
135:6 420 22:11 113
136 415, 418, 421 25 416
137 188 27:2 – 5 120
137:1 – 4 116 28 – 33 185
138 – 145 423 28 – 31 113, 500
141 418 28 185, 501
144 418, 419 28:2 184
144:1 418 28:4 114
145 415, 420, 421 28:7 – 22 501
145:21 421 28:14 – 22 184, 185, 207
146 – 150 423 28:16 18, 186, 235, 330, 382
146:9 – 10 420 28:17 – 22 186
148 231, 419 28:17 – 19 212
150 419 28:17 186
28:21 114, 187, 300, 501
Proverbs 29:1 – 7 114
8–9 408 29:13 280
9 409 30:1 388
11:12 46 30:8 – 17 187
17:28 46 30:13 – 14 118
32:1 – 18 114
Ecclesiastes 32:13 114
3:5 134 33:1 – 22 114
3:11 112 36 – 39 88, 114
7:20 189 36:15 113
36:21 46
Isaiah 37:33 – 38 187
1 501 40 – 55 86, 114, 229
1:1 – 22:10 55 40 37, 38
1:4 – 27 501 40:1 – 11 37, 38, 86, 88, 231
1:7 – 9 186 40:1 – 8 37
1:12 – 17 118 40:1 – 2 37
1:21 – 27 113, 114, 186, 207 40:2 37, 86
1:21 – 26 212 40:3 – 11 452
1:24 – 27 184 40:3 37
1:25 501 40:6 37, 38, 86, 90
2:4 134, 299 40:6a 85
5:1 – 7 113, 120 40:7 – 8 38
6 18, 86 40:9 37, 38
6:1 – 13 37 40:27 116
6:1 86 41:8 – 9 117
42 417 15:17 115

42:14 46 16 115
42:24 – 25 114 16:14 – 15 114, 265
43:16 – 21 63, 64 17:15 116
43:21 63 18:1 – 11 118
45:4 232 20 114
45:7 206 20:2 114
46:12 117 20:9 235
51 117, 452 23:7 – 8 114
51:1 – 3 299 23:23 113
51:2 117, 120 24 – 29 188
51:7 117, 235, 502 26:18 228
52 – 53 388 27:18 498
52 417 28 188
52:7 382, 388, 390, 392, 393, 28:2 – 11 113
395, 396 28:8 – 9 104, 113, 498
52:8 117 28:9 115
52:13 395 29:26 116
53 191 30:12 – 17 40, 184, 212, 235, 502
54:7 – 8 114 31 – 33 187
55:8 – 9 184, 269, 271 31:2 104
56:7 388, 390 31:29 – 34 116, 333
61 135, 394, 416, 417 31:29 – 30 209
61:1 – 3 393, 395, 396 31:29 40, 190, 320, 487
61:1 – 2 388 31:31 – 34 94, 114, 184, 207, 212, 235,
61:1 389, 390, 392, 393, 395, 265, 502
394, 396 31:33 40
61:2 – 3 393, 395 31:34 185
61:2 389, 390, 392, 393 – 96 32 – 45 176
61:3 392, 394, 396 36 – 37 114
65:2 388 36:26 114
37:4 114
Jeremiah 37:9 – 10 114
1 – 23 114 – 15 37:15 114
1:9 235 37:21 114
2:2 – 3 200 38 114
4:4 40, 184, 235 38:4 113
4:11 502 38:6 114
4:19 46 38:13 114
5:4 – 5 115 38:28 114
5:15 113 39:11 – 14 114
6:28 388 39:15 114
7:22 118 40:1 – 6 182
7:23 293 40:1 114
8 432 40:2 – 5 114
8:8 280 40:6 114
9:1 115 44 232
11:16 – 17 120 49:19 72
12:10 120 50:44 72
14:9 113
15:15 – 21 209 Lamentations
15:16 235 3:20 61
Ezekiel 2:14 – 15 186, 200, 207

2:8 – 3:3 235 2:16 – 17 114
4:17 117 5:10 46
7:24 116 5:15 – 6:3 207, 502
8:12 – 13 116 6:1 – 3 235
14:7 117 8:4 118
16 114, 232 9:10 200
16:24 116 11:1 – 5 113
18 40, 116, 190, 209, 320, 333, 11:1 371
487 11:4 46
18:25 116 13:4 – 8 113
20 114
23 114 Joel
24:18 116 3:10 (MT 4:10) 134, 299
24:21 116
24:26 116 Amos
28:12 – 19 120 1:3 – 3:2 106, 199, 499
33 – 34 188 1:3 – 2:9 500
33 117 1:3 – 2:8 113
33:10 – 16 116 1:3 – 2:5 203, 500
33:10 116 2:4 – 5 200
33:17, 20 116 2:6 – 16 203
33:21 116 2:6 – 11 183
33:23 – 29 120 2:6 – 8 200, 500
33:24 – 29 299 2:7 200
33:24 117 2:9 – 11 106, 113, 200, 499, 500
34 189 3:1 – 2 106, 113, 203
36 – 37 118, 187, 188 3:2 203, 500
36:16 – 37:14 212 4:10 – 11 106
36:25 – 28 207 5:25 106, 118
36:26 – 27 235, 502 6:5 106
36:26 40 7:10 – 15 500
36:35 – 36 120 7:10 – 11 199
36:37 117 7:10 203
37 94, 119, 206, 207, 235 8:4 – 6 200
37:1 – 2 119 9 207
37:5 – 6 119 9:1 – 8 203
37:6 119 9:2 – 7 500
37:11 – 14 119 9:7 106
37:26 184 9:11 – 15 184
37:27 184 9:11 106
40 – 48 72, 100
Micah
Daniel 2:6 113
2:34 – 35 395 3:11 113
7:13 395 3:12 228
9 101 4:3 299
9:16 263 6:1 – 8 267
9:25 393, 395, 396 6:3 – 5 113
6:5 200, 263
Hosea 6:6 – 7 118
2:8 (MT 2:10) 151
Habakkuk Zechariah
1:12 382 1–4 492
2:4 117, 132, 372, 377, 378 – 83 4:7 395
3 494 4:9 – 10 395
Zephaniah Malachi
1:7 – 13 136 2:17 116
New / Second Testament

Matthew 15:11 285
1:20 – 21 260 15:20 283, 285
13:53 – 58 135 15:29 283, 285
22:1 – 10 135 19:9 324
Mark Romans
6:1 – 6 135 1:17 372, 378
12:21 – 31 3:10 189, 209, 503
16:9 – 20 18, 90 3:21 – 26 372
3:22 381
Luke 3:25 381
1:2 308 3:31 279
1:52 – 53 206, 235 4:15 281
4:16 – 30 133, 135 5:13 281
4:24 199 5:21 382
10:25 – 27 327 7:1 – 10 279
10:26 41 7:6 279
11:52 484 7:10 120, 263
12:51 – 53 299 7:12 70
14:15 – 24 135 7:22 279
14:21 275 9 – 11 261, 264, 285
15 133 9:7 210
18:11 – 12 181 9:30 – 10:4 260
18:18 327 9:31 – 32 278
19 388 10:4 264, 278, 279, 281, 283,
24:44 96 297
10:6 – 10 235
John 10:10 264, 267
5:39 106, 120, 166, 192, 263 13:8 – 10 279
7:53 – 8:11 90
8:1 – 11 18 1 Corinthians
9:39 134 9:1 286
14:6 152 10:11 281
14:27 134, 299 15:5 – 9 286
Acts 2 Corinthians
2:11 263 3:4 – 17 279
4:12 152 3:4 – 6 286
7 201 3:13 281
9:2 324 4:6 286
15 282 10:13, 15 – 16 197
Galatians 2:1 269 – 70

1–2 286 2:3 267
2:19 279 2:6 – 8 268
3:11 372, 378 2:6 267
3:13 282 2:9 – 11 268
3:19 – 4:5 279 2:12 – 13 271
3:21 120, 263 2:12 268
3:24 – 25 281 3:5 – 11 286
3:24 281 3:9 372
4:21 – 31 283 3:16 197
5:2 – 6 285
5:2 282 Colossians
6:6 197 4:14 198, 487
6:15 – 16 285
6:16 270 2 Thessalonians
2:7 460
Ephesians
2:14 – 16 279
Hebrews
2:15 282
7 417
Philippians 10:38 372, 379
2:1 – 13 260, 267 11 169, 201
Apocrypha
1 Macc 7:17 422 24:19 – 22 409
44 – 50 201
Ps 151 83, 96, 402 – 5, 407, 419, 44 213
436, 438, 446 45:5 120, 263
Ps 151:3 404 48 – 49 96
51 406 – 12, 451
Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 51:13 ff 451
6:18 – 37 409
24 408 Wisdom of Solomon 8 408
Pseudepigraphal Psalms
151 – 155 436, 438, 446 154:12 – 14 450
152 438 154:17 – 20 447 – 48
153 438 154:18 – 20 453
154 436, 446 – 56 154:18 449, 452
154:1 – 3 450 154:19 451
154:4 452 154:20 449
154:5 – 8 450 155 436
154:10 – 11 450, 452
Josephus
Ag. Ap. 1.37 – 46 306 Ag. Ap. 1.38–42 109
Ag. Ap. 1:37 – 43 497 Ant. 6.68 44 – 45
Rabbinic Sources and Targums

Abot 2.8 106, 120, 263 B. Bat. 14b 40, 148, 216, 356
Abot 6.7 106, 120, 263 B. Mes. 59b 83
b. Ned. 39b 72
Abot R. Nat. 31 72
Tg. Hab 2:4b 378
Tg. Zech 2:17 379
Qumran
1QapGen 419 436, 439, 446 – 48,
1QH 457 450 – 51, 453, 494 – 95
1QIsaa 37, 38, 85, 86, 388 11QPsa col. 15 415
1QIsab 33 11QPsa col. 18 388
1QpHab 378 – 80 (= Ps 154)
1QpHab 7:4 – 8:3 372 11QPsa col. 27 250, 292
1QS 457 11QPsa col. 28 83
1QS 9:20 388 11QPsb (= 11Q6) 413, 417 – 19
1QS 10:21 388 11QPse (= 11Q9) 417, 419, 421, 425
1QS 11:3 – 15 380 11QPsApa 413, 419, 421, 425,
1QSa 1:2 – 3 388 (= 11QapocrPs 495
1Q27 460 = 11Q11)
11QPss see 11QPsa
4QFlor 1.14 388 11QMelch 387 – 97
4QIsac 97 (= 11Q13)
4QMMT 355, 451 11QMelch ii.2 389, 391
4QMMT C‑10 493 11QMelch ii.3 389, 391, 394 – 95
4QPrva 443 11QMelch ii.4 388 – 89, 392, 394
4QPrvb 443 11QMelch ii.5 389, 392
4QPsa 422 11QMelch ii.6 389, 392, 394
4QPsb 425 11QMelch ii.7 389, 392 – 93
4QPsd 413 11QMelch ii.8 389, 392
4QPsf 419, 427, 495 11QMelch ii.9 388 – 89, 392, 394
4QPsk 413 11QMelch ii.10 389, 392
4QPsn 413 11QMelch ii.11 389, 392, 395
4QPsq 422 11QMelch ii.12 389, 392
4QPst 413 11QMelch ii.13 388 – 89, 392, 395 – 96
4QSama 43 – 46, 88 11QMelch ii.14 390, 392 – 96
4Q180 391, 394 11QMelch ii.15 390, 392
4Q181 391, 394 11QMelch ii.16 390, 392, 395
4Q430 224 11QMelch ii.17 390, 393, 395
4Q431 224 11QMelch ii.18 388, 390, 393, 395 – 96
4Q448 446 – 49, 451, 453, 11QMelch ii.19 390, 393, 395 – 96
454 11QMelch ii.20 388, 390, 395 – 96
11QMelch ii.21 390, 393
11Q5 see 11QPsa 11QMelch ii.22 390, 393
11QApPsa see 11QPsApa 11QMelch ii.23 – 24 396
11QPsa (= 11Q5) vii, viii, 51, 96, 97, 11QMelch ii.23 390, 393
398 – 415, 417 – 19, 11QMelch ii.24 390, 393, 396
421, 426, 430, 431, 11QMelch ii.25 388, 390, 393
11QMelch ii.26 390 CD 2:6 388

11QT (= 11Q19) 457, 494 CD 8:4 388
CD 8:16 388
CD 1:13 388 CD 19:29 388
Nahal Hever
8HevXIIgr 78 8HevXIIgr 17.30 378
Peshitta
Mosul 1113 446 Mosul 1113 12t4 446
(Nestorian Psalter) Mosul 1113 19d1 446
ARNA
folio 65n23 98
Church Fathers
Athanasius, Festal 197, 354 Muratorian 354, 466
Letter 39 Fragment
(Easter letter) Origen, Letter to 197
Africanus

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Forschungen zum Alten Testament

© 2018 Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, Germany. www. mohr.de

Part 1: Text and Canon

1. Hebrew Bible and Old Testament:

21. Habakkuk in Qumran, Paul and the Old Testament . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

One’s understanding of the history of transmission of the text is of necessity

DSS Dead Sea Scrolls, also referred to as Judean Desert Scrolls

JTS Journal of Theological Studies

7. “Canonical Criticism: An Introduction.” In Le canon de l’Ancien Testament: Sa forma-

9. “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism.” Horizons in Biblical Theology 2 (1980)

* First published 1990.

Aland of the Hermann Kunst Stiftung recently wrote, on “chance knowledge”

The Seventeenth Century

The Eighteenth Century

Apographs and the Text

* First published 2013.

* First published 1995.

ditions, etc., is sufficient fluidity to be easily adaptable in the newer speech or

text of the sixty-six chapters of the book of Isaiah, and in a redactional-critical

Since my thesis, in postmodern terms, is that one’s understanding of the bibli-

Two Recent Publications

History, Historiography and Interpretation: Studies in Biblical and Cuneiform Litera-

Sanders, James A. Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism. Philadelphia:

* First published 1979.

The very ground of concept in OT text criticism, the history of transmission of

and versions with the concomitant elimination of modern scholarly conjectures

Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center for Preservation and Research. We plan

The answer to these questions lies in an understanding of Torah. Increasingly in

Jewish communities facing widely differing problems according to where and

Those sentinels standing in the lateral margins of masoretic manuscripts thus

themselves for so zealously guarding the particularities, peculiarities, and anoma-

alluding to earlier traditions, whether the peculiar traditions of the community

Barthélemy, Dominique. Études d’histoire du texte de l’Ancien Testament. Fribourg: Édi-

Ginsburg, Christian David. Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the He-

* First published 1991.

rot of L, four apparatus without a single suggestion for preference, or certainly

of emendation, so that Rudolf Kittel and D. Winton Thomas, editors of Isaiah in

Davidson, Robert. Wisdom and Worship. Philadelphia: Trinity International, 1990.

Sanders, James A. “Canonical Criticism: An Introduction.” In Le canon de l’Ancien Testa-

* First published 1976.

Current discussions of the canon of the OT have to begin, therefore, from a

Current thinking on the OT exhibits a kind of frustration about what is in and

ples, Babylonia’s sponsored remnant or ghetto-type survival.35 But statecraft in

lation and transcendence needed by the threatened community, if it is to survive

found a definite system, especially political program, in the Bible, is to return

It is as though the old story, as well as the preexilic prophetic interpreta­tions of

Eissfeldt, Otto. The Old Testament: An Introduction. Translated by Peter R. Ackroyd.

A new subdiscipline is emerging in biblical studies. It is called canonical criticism

* First published 1984.

is supposed to be limited to the exercise in historical research; but almost invari-

community valued that communication highly enough to repeat it, eventually

together by syntax is multivalent, but it is especially true of canon. This obser-

the reasons fundamentalism is abhorrent to many Christians is its dogmatic dis-

of Yahweh becomes repugnant, to liberals and conservatives alike, and we lose

merable. The Bible as canon is a monotheizing literature, Old Testament and

It is as though the old story, as well as the preexilic prophetic interpretations of