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Liberation Philology

What was Biblical Hebrew, part 2: C’est de l’Hébreu pour moi!

CASSIUS: Did Cicero say anything?

CASCA: Ay, he spoke Greek.

CASSIUS: To what effect?

CASCA: Nay, an I tell you that, I’ll ne’er look you i’ the face again: but those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me.

-Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

While Shakespeare depicts uneducated Romans as using the phrase “it’s Greek to me” to indicate something beyond their understanding, did you know the French versions is, “it’s Hebrew to me?”

But what was Hebrew and what kind of a linguistic record is the Hebrew Bible? More–was it meant to record a language?

The sociolinguist Sarah Roberts commented, apropos of my previous post, that, in trying to see how complete a picture your written sources give you of a language’s lexicon, looking for spoons is not a bad way to go. That is, the method Ullendorff uses (seeing how well those pedestrian, daily-life words are covered; interestingly, this is not at all the same as making a Swadesh list) proves useful, but “Another approach is to calculate the proportion of hapax legomena (words that only appear once) in the corpus; the higher the proportion, the less representative the corpus usually is. It is also important to pay attention to the kinds of literary genres that comprise your sources…”

Ullendorff is way ahead of me here as well: he cites the great (greatest?) Semitist Noeldeke who had already, in the classic “Semitic Languages” article in the classic 13th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (from 1912, if memory serves, but still unequalled*) noted that the numerous hapaxes are “a sufficient proof that many more words existed than appear in the O.T.” Ullendorff goes on to cite a list of these hapaxes which, at 2,440, would constitute about a third of the vocabulary of the Bible! Others have produced somewhat lower numbers but the point is made.

He also notes words that we would have expected to find in Biblical times, for example the Mishnah’s massu’ot “fire signals,” (as opposed to the Tanakh’s semantically diffuse mas’et, which can be anything from “portion of food” to “tax” to “pillar of smoke”) which we then dug up out of the ground, on an ostracon at Lachish (4:10). His conclusion is that Biblical Hebrew is more of a “linguistic fragment,”

 “To be sure, a very important and indeed far-reaching fragment, but scarcely a fully integrated language which in this form…could ever have been spoken and have satisfied the needs of its speakers. The evidence presented by the epigraphical material contemporary with the OT and by the Mishna, its immediate successor, underlines the essentially fragmentary character of the language of the Hebrew Bible. And there is a strong case, in my submission, for looking upon the language of the Mishna as the developed colloquial–otherwise so largely, though by no means wholly, repressed and curbed–of the predominantly formal and elevated diction of the OT.”

Ullendorff’s article is a shrewd, and remarkably fun piece of work (see the second essay in the volume, “C’est de l’Hébreu pour moi!” a delightful study springing from his discovery that the French expression for the (Shakespearean) “It’s Greek to me!” is “It’s Hebrew to me!”) , but it only scratches the surface. For one thing, he leaves out much of what makes language work: the verbal and deictic systems, the inventory of registers, speech genres, ways of indicating person, status and relationship. In this he is not alone: through the early 21st century the NY Times regularly featured Whitehouse speechwriter and pundit William Safire’s “On Language” columns that gave middlebrow readers a weekly dose of the incorrect folk-theory that language is just a bag of words.

In the case of Biblical Hebrew, casting a wider grammatical net may catch only an even greater sense of vertigo, because while translations generally render the Bible into one type of English, Biblical Hebrew itself is not linguistically uniform. Ullendorff could as well have spoken of “shards” as of a “fragment.” Reading along one encounters not just different sets of vocabulary and spellings, but even different verbal systems that appear to handle tense, mood and aspect in at least three different ways. Scholars have therefore long argued for at least three types of Hebrew: Archaic (usually said to be exemplified by Exodus 15, Deuteronomy 32, and Judges 5, the “Song of the Sea,” the “Song of Moses,” and the “Song of Deborah,” each marked as poetry (Hebrew uses related terms for these, different derivatives of the root š-y-r), Standard (usually taken as the bulk of the Torah plus Joshua through II Kings), and Late (Chronicles, Ester, Ezra-Nehemiah). 

Yet though composed of shards, Biblical Hebrew is not broken. This is because the language was integrated by a group of Jewish Aramaic (not Hebrew!)-speaking scholars near the coast of Palestine, in Tiberias, who provided it with vocalization and speech melody based on ancient traditions of their own around the 7th and 8th centuries C.E., somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 years after the first texts were probably written down in Standard Biblical Hebrew. What is remarkable about this system of vocalization and cantillation is that it gives far more information than necessary for verbal understanding: one of the things that makes the Tiberian vowel system confusing is that, while it almost always gives enough information to tell different words with identical consonants apart, it is obviously not designed to do that; rather, it’s designed to record the exact sounds produced by a tradtionally correct liturgical reader in the synagogue. In other words, it’s more like Sanskrit, with its elaborate notation of strictly phonetic phenomena, than it is like the more matter-of-fact Greek or Arabic.

This linguistic fact has interesting consequences for popular things like the study of Midrash and the always blossoming fields of Biblical interpretation. This is because the cantillation marks, rarely taught in Biblical Hebrew class, in fact seem to set forth a set of very precise instructions for prosody; that is, they tell you how to intone and express the content of the text. In an environment where the significance of the text was, to put it mildly, disputed, the Tiberians produced a text that not only could only be read one way, but that tried to turn its readers into human tape recorders, playback machines that ventriloquized God’s word.

If this is true, could it tell us new things about what the people behind the Masoretic tradition thought Scripture was? One of the great frustrations in reading a wonderful book like Michael Fishbane’s Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel is that he never renders explicit what he thinks the scribes’ precise notion of the text was–what gave them the right to do the things they did to it? What constraints were they under and how did they conceive of what they were doing? His student Bernard Levinson has taken some major, equally wonderful steps towards figuring out a scribal view of the text in Deuteronomy. But what about the people who put the end result together?

As the conclusion to my second book, I volunteered a suggestion–the editors of ancient Hebrew literature identified with divinely illuminated sages like Enoch and (strangely) King David. They felt this gave them the right to intervene so aggressively and creatively in the literature they inherited that they could turn it into…the Bible.

*A rare personal note: the memory in question dates years back, to a cherished moment at the Albright Institute in Jerusalem, sleeping on the floor of the library after reading late into the night and all the buses had stopped running.

Categories
Liberation Philology

Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?

What kind of a question is that?

I have been reflecting on the linguistic status of ancient Hebrew, in both the Bible and inscriptions, for a while now.

“Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?” was the title of a book and essay of many years ago by the great Ethiopicist and Semitist Edward Ullendorff, and it’s a nice way into the question. Rather than arguing that Biblical Hebrew was a priestly hoax on the part of Moses or Ezra, he asked a more straightforward question:

Does the vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible give us a full picture of how people spoke in ancient Judah and Israel? The lexicon is something around 7,000-8,000 words (in the estimation of the Israeli philologist Hayim Rabin, who should know). Compare the combined vocabulary of Rabbinic and modern Hebrew, closer to 22,000 in a compact dictionary, or the small Penguin English dictionary (40,000).

More strikingly, Ullendorff points out, we have Biblical words for “fork” (mazleg) and “knife” (ma’akhelet), but not “spoon” (kaf today, for which the earliest instance he can find is Mishnaic, despite that spoons turn up in the archaeological record quite early). 

In a way, it’s even worse than he thinks: the world of ancient West Semitic kitchen terms is a shadowy realm, which one enters at one’s own peril. I have no confidence that mazleg, which came to mean “fork,” was used that way in Biblical times: it only appears as a priestly tool to move sacrificial meat around, and I Samuel 2:13 specifies that the one in question has “three prongs,” which means we can’t assume it usually did. Similarly, we find the ma’akhelet doing its horribly gruesome work on the body of a concubine in Judges 19:29, and Abraham takes one to sacrifice his son Isaac in Genesis 22, but we never see it used for food! While not a military implement, the only uses of the ma’akhelet in the Bible are to cut people. And while Ezekiel features a “kitchen” (bet hammevashlim in Ezk 46:24), it was a dark secret of the 1990s’ “House of David” inscription controversy that while some people tried to deny that the Aramaic king who claimed to have killed the king of the bytdwd “Dynasty (literally ‘house’) of David,” (their term for the kingdom of Israel,) the Palmyrene Aramaic word for “kitchen” is none other than btdwd’!*

Not only that, but as Ullendorff (and he is not the first) points out, there isn’t even a word for the Hebrew language! Ivrit doesn’t turn up til the Wisdom of Ben Sira, and Yehudit “Judean” and sefat Kena’an “the language of Canaan” are rather more specific: they point to dialects and identities below and above the scale of the nation. So was there a nation? As we will see, that’s a modern concept. Ancient language speakers recognized kingdoms and empires, on the one hand–political entities that often included multiple spoken and even written languages–and peoples on the other, tribes or ethnicities that could not be confined to any one set of borders.

So what kind of linguistic picture does Biblical Hebrew form? In the next post, I’ll weave together some reflections on this critique of Biblical Hebrew’s linguistic status…

*My revered teacher Delbert Roy Hillers edited this btdwd text with Eleonora Cussini as PAT 2743:8, and they cite an original publication in Syria 1926; it was conveniently republished in Rosenthal’s Aramaic Handbook, entry 13 under Palmyrene. Curious readers who examine the original will see that something is indeed being cooked up here, but it is not food :-).

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Liberation Philology

What is the Meaning of Ancient Israel?

The main question in the history of the ancient Levant today is whether the existence of ancient kingdoms in Judah and Israel has modern political implications.

Every excavation and scholarly publication implies this, because it either promotes, unproblematically assumes, or actively critiques the connection between the ancient kingdoms and modern state. The very institution that permits archaeology in modern Israel insists that its discoveries prove continuity with the modern ethnic nation, and the Israeli government’s official position is that modern Israel’s continuity with ancient Israel necessitates the erasure and extermination of Palestinians. To do history or archaeology here is thus inevitably to take a moral and political stand on genocide.

Does the existence of an ancient kingdom of Israel require the genocide of Palestinians, erasing and exterminating villagers who have been living in the land for many centuries? The position is horrifying and morally intolerable (not to mention logically incoherent gibberish) but it’s what Israel’s Environmental Minister says:

In siezing the site of Sebastia (the ancient site of Samaria, capital of the breakaway, non-Davidic kingdom of Israel) from the Palestinian Authority, she stated:

Today, historical justice is finally taking place. We have begun excavations at …the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Israel and a beating heart of Jewish history. For years, they tried to erase our connection to the place, deny our identity, blur the obvious. But there is no Palestinian people and therefore no Palestinian heritage sites. There is a Jewish people, there is Jewish history, and we have a mission to preserve it, expose it, and pass it on to future generations.

And it is implied in the state’s position on all of the archaeology of ancient Judah and Israel–one reason why digging up Iron Age sites in Israel without clear historical and ethical perspective and critique is so morally problematic today.

A recent argument, understandably, tries to push in the other direction: that there was no “Ancient Israel” in the sense of any kind of eternal ethnic state with a direct continuity with the modern one. This connects an incredibly important point–that the idea of ancient Israel justifies modern genocide–to a logically unrelated and historically problematic one: that there was no ancient kingdom of Israel. It’s also inaccurate to suggest it was only documented in Assyrian history…

The problem lies in two contradictory things the phrase “ancient Israel” can do: either 1) flag a polytheistic Iron Age Levantine kingdom that spoke a language far closer to ancient Phoenician than modern Hebrew or 2) to claim a mystical unity between that kingdom and the modern ethno-state.

How can we discuss the powerful relevance of ancient history without retconning it into something false and toxic, a mere fictional prequel to the power politics of modern empires and nationalists? Just avoiding ‘ancient Israel’ is probably not enough because it won’t make the assumptions go away.

We can choose words that emphasize that it was part of an ancient world: “Iron Age Israel” or “the kingdom of Israel”. Bigger picture though, we need to talk about its real history: the documented kingdom of Israel broke away from the kingdom of David and was often at war with Davidic Judah…

Was there an ancient kingdom of Israel? Yes, but we have no literature from it.

Ancient Hebrew literature was the legacy of Judah, not Israel. Proof? If we had Israelite Hebrew literature it would be instantly recognizable as a different language variety; it even spells common words differently, like “wine” (Judahite yayin, as in our Hebrew Bibles, vs. Israelite yên) or “year” (Judahite and biblical šānāh, Israelite šatt). While there seem to be significant pieces of Israelite (and other Hebrew tribal) content in the Bible, not a word of it is direct. This is an established consensus, shown in major works like Daniel Fleming’s The Legacy of Israel in Judah’s Bible.

The northern Levantine kingdom that was called Israel for almost 300 years and ended in 722 BCE is not the same as the idea of Israel, which was already a nostalgic construct in the late Iron Age when Judahites started creating Hebrew literature about it, partly to make up for its loss.

This is the kind of productive contradiction between historical experience and ideology that we see frequently in ancient times- Assyrian kings did their own version of it when they imagined themselves as the true successors to Babylon even as they literally destroyed and erased the real Babylon!

Maybe the most disturbing parallel between the real Iron Age ancient Near East and modern Palestinian and Israelite history is the fact that Assyria claimed to be the “true” Babylon but when the real Babylon rebelled against the Assyrian empire, its ruler Sennacherib had the city physically erased.

How is the ancient kingdom of Israel relevant today–can you still be a part of it?

Politically, no–that horse left the barn in 722 BCE. Religiously yes–but only as a creative imaginative act: for the Gospels, the true Israel is not the Jews but the mostly gentile Christian Church. For the Jews, it’s more complicated as we’ll see. What about nationally?

The problem is that nationalism didn’t exist in the Iron Age, and the Hebrew Bible shows this. Rather than a single political unit that includes exactly one people, language, religion, and culture in one territory, books like Judges and Kings depict shifting clusters of tribes in different areas.

These tribal polities fought over turf and their different shrines and religious ideas. The single tribal kingdom of Judah had at least three different temples in the Iron Age, at Arad, Jerusalem, and Tel Moṣa. Other times they allied (just as Judah or Israel sometimes did with other kingdoms).

If you’re trying to find the closest thing to a modern national ideal around ancient Israel, you would look not in the real time of ancient history but in the imaginative space of literature, on the pages of the ancient Hebrew writings that Judahite writers created thinking about Israel. And you wouldn’t look in the Bible’s account of the kingdom of Israel in Samuel or Kings; in fact you wouldn’t look to any records of actual independence at all. The closest you get is the attempts by Persian imperial governors like Nehemiah to recreate an Israel 500 years after the real kingdoms.

But the very words used to paint this perfect homogeneity testify against it. Nehemiah did not and could not use the ancient Hebrew language to enact a proposal for one people, language, religion, culture, and territory because neither his local audience nor his Persian overlords would have understood it.* Instead the book of Nehemiah like the political and cultural apparatus under him was hybrid, with Aramaic the language of both power and daily transactions (we have almost no Hebrew inscriptions from the Persian period), and Hebrew a combination of spoken varieties and literary artifacts. In this it bears a striking parallel to the later Maccabean revolt and Hasmonean revival. Again you see the invention of an archaizing “antiqued” Hebrew style on official coinage alongside real documents that negotiate between local contemporary Aramaic and Hebrew varieties (the Bar Kokhba letters).

To the extent ancient Judeans imagined nation-like forms in the Persian and Roman period they were, ironically, forged. As the great E. A. Speiser pointed out, it is no coincidence that earlier Hebrew writers refused to name the kin-group (ˁam) Israel with the term later translated as “nation” (gôy).

The most literal religious connection one can make to ancient Israel–Jewish Rabbinic tradition–is also the one with the strongest restrictions on making the political connection. This is because one of the pillars of Rabbinic Judaism is belief in God’s redemption of the world through the Messiah. As the scholar of Jewish philosophy and political thought Shaul Magid points out, exile was “the very context in which Jews and Judaism as we know it today, came to be.” A new state with political sovereignty ruptures the connection to tradition by erasing the need for a Messiah, and exile itself.

You can sum up the historical lesson in the title of the novel, You Can’t Go Home Again. And to sum up the traditional Jewish theology, you wouldn’t want to. In this vision, to be Jewish is to exist in the huge powerful tension between being in exile and anticipating redemption.

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Liberation Philology

Is it Midrash All the Way Down?

A friend writes, about my proposal to write a Counterhistory of the Hebrew Bible: “What if it is strange reception all the way down? Do you ever worry that from the moment of utterance and sacralization that the possibility of recuperating contextual aesthetics was utterly lost?”

So the interesting thing here is I don’t worry about this but it’s because of a special feature of ancient Hebrew lit that I’m trying to respond to in the book. That is, I don’t worry about recapturing any one single original moment of utterance because the Hebrew Bible presents itself as a multitude of moments of utterance, and loudly insists on its quality as retelling. Here ancient Hebrew literature has a quality that departs from most ANE and what I know of most ancient Greek lit: it seems to be constantly looking over its shoulder. 

Our ancient Hebrew texts are so aggressive about their own repetitions and returns that it required a sweeping transformation (into the mythic Bible) to paper over their own sense of belatedness. For example, Abraham enters into something like five different mostly overlapping, partly contradictory covenants between the first one in Genesis 12 and when God changes Abraham’s name in Gen 18, including a further covenant with Hagar and another one involving her offspring. So within what is now supposed to be a canonical unity, a “next update” seems to be constantly arriving. Deuteronomy’s tone is so honking and braying about its quality as a repetition that it might as well have actually called itself deuteros nomos in the first place and had done with it. Speaking to a new generation 40 years after Sinai, after much of the original Sinai audience has died, Moses insists: “It was not with our ancestors that the LORD made this covenant, but with us, the living, every one of us who is here today.”

In fact I’m trying to take a new step building on the specifically Jewish and theological issues of the reception model. –within biblical studies there was a very acute awareness of literature as itself already reception, the idea spearheaded by (Brandeis alum in fact!) Michael Fishbane of inner-biblical exegesis, that it was Midrash and reinterpretation of scripture all the way down. The reason that I think people are hungry to build something new on this is that this idea of the reception of scripture already in ancient Israel (Fishbane’s epoch-making book was Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel which is almost like The Reception of the Peisistratid Recension in Archaic Greece) assumes a kind of canonical Bible-like set of texts already existed before the Roman period, and this turns out to be anachronistic.

In fact you pushing me on this is incredibly helpful because it encourages me to name what is new about what I’m trying to do. In order to keep this from being an e-dissertation I’ll end with this:

The idea of text-making as reception or reinterpretation is on the one hand indisputable and on the other hand not historically specific enough for me–it’s indisputable because this is what it means to take part in culture: Bakhtin has my favorite discussion of how all language use is dialogical, responding to previous discourse.

But it’s not specific enough because the ways people respond to existing discourse change in creative ways over time. Weaving or knotting texts that in turn become threads in other people’s texts is one way, Midrash is another related but later way, we have some amazing evidence of this change and creativity from the ANE and Levant, and that’s the main thing I want to put into play in this book!

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Liberation Philology

“Lonely and Naked… before the throne of God:” On the role of philology in understanding religious experience

For over 1000 years Jews been embarrassed about the opening prayer of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Kol Nidre–already the prayerbook of Amram Gaon calls it a ‘foolish custom,’ because it annuls all vows to God made in the previous year, for fear an unfulfilled ritual oath might be unforgivable

Modern scholarship still describes it as “repetitive and legalistic” or the like but in fact the prayer has the rhythm of an incantation, enumerating seven ancient types of ritual oaths that are undone. The original Aramaic rhymes, as does Franz Rosenzweig’s bold German rendering…

Was an Pflichtung

und Verzichtung,

Anrechtszernichtung,

       Opferersichtung,

         Wortsinnrichtung,

          Bußaufschichtung

                        Wir, und an Schwüren,

Uns anpflichten,

uns aufrichten,

     uns zernichten,

       uns abzichten

But the English prayerbook translations clank like rusty chains. With the help of Gnostic musician David Tibet I translated it thus:

All vows we have bidden,

all things we have forbidden,

oaths given, hinted, hidden,

made taboo or promised to…

Since the middle ages Jewish scholars were worried that retracting vows to God would make them seem dishonest. We rendered it:

“We renounce them all.

May they all be permitted, forgiven, erased and made null…

Our vows are no longer vows, what we forbad was not forbidden, our oaths are hereby ungiven!”

But what if the “vows” weren’t vows in our sense of rational contracts–even if ones made with God–but mainly connoted guilt, failure, and forces of decay–a group of spiritual maladies? It turns out that this is precisely how early Jews understood them, as the corpus of Jewish magic bowls shows.

Already in 1941 the young savant Cyrus Gordon published a set of magic bowls that cast Kol Nidre in an utterly different light. The first in his collection reads: “Overturned are all vows (כל נדרי) and curses and spells and magic and curses and magic and evil blows that may lodge in this man..”

Text 6 says

all you holy…glorious and pious angels; I adjure you with the great oath and I make you swear the great promise that ye will..remove and abolish all the sorceries and all the idols and Istars and vows and curses and evil spirits so that they may not harm Amtur daughter of Šilta!”


‪
As one of the greatest Semitic philologists of his age (who actually offended an older generation of scholars by publishing, at an inappropriately young age, the first coherent grammatical account of the newly discovered Ugaritic language) Gordon would have sensed the deep background of these personified demonic ‘oaths.’ It lies in the medical and spiritual culture of Babylonian Jews, but goes far back into their own past. A thousand years earlier Babylonian exorcists and medical experts diagnosed “the Oath” as a source of stomach ailments caused by anxiety.

A Babylonian diagnostic manual includes: “if the upper abdomen of a man hurts him as if the Oath bound him,” and exorcists worked to counter “The Vow and the Oath that have set his body aflame,” referred to “guilt and Oath that were created to torment mankind.” They understood free-floating guilt.

They could be set on a victim by magicians to curse their target, tainted by cosmic guilt: “my hands are filled with Vow and Oath,”
A powerful incantation could turn them back: “you sorcerers who are trying to undo me through Vow and Oath, may you yourselves come to an end through Vow and Oath!

Today, scholars still echo the oddly anti-Jewish-sounding criticism that the Kol Nidre formula is a mere set of empty technical formulas, echoing Paul’s old attack that “the letter of the law kills but the spirit gives life.” But music and poetry too are made of formulas!

Already in 1919 the Freudian analyst Theodore Reik hinted at its latent meaning and power:

“The deeply affecting melody, to which has been set this apparently prosaic formula, is justified, since it is not related to the present wording, but to the secret feelings which have become unconscious. This music brings adequately to expression the revolutionary wish of the congregation and their subsequent anxiety; the soft broken rhythms reflect their deep remorse and contrition. Thus, the song is really full of terror and mercy…. The high mental tension, the contrition and bewailing of the congregation during this prosaic ceremony, do not refer to the actual formula they are repeating, but to its latent content.”

But the words of Kol Nidre are music too. Perhaps the most rhythmic formula in all Jewish liturgy with an opening three-syllable beat echoed and amplified by six following four-syllable clusters, it is also the libretto of an incantation. Gordon finally laid out what his ancient texts implied, but only in a footnote to his 1966 “Leviathan: Symbol of Evil.” The last two sentences remains the best ones published on the meaning of this still misunderstood prayer.

Its “purpose is to give the community a fresh start by annulling the evil forces set in motion by destructive (if unpremeditated) words. Failure to recognize this has brought on later generations of Jewish leaders endless embarrassment and the needless urge to engage in artificial reinterpretation.”

It blows my mind that we philologists have manged to silo this Jewish history off from Judaism at large and I’m excited to be putting this together for a forthcoming UCLA workshop and Kol Nidre in Performance edited volume from Oxford UP organized by Ruthie Abeliovich and Mark Kligman.

Categories
Liberation Philology

The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Writing as Artificial Consciousness

‘In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes,’ Theodor Adorno wrote in Essays on Music. As I am not keen on considering myself a catastrophe, let’s turn from late style to early style. The world’s earliest writing systems developed independently in four places: the Near East, Egypt, China and Mexico. All began as systems of counting or accounting – a way to keep track of goods or money. Later (i.e. thousands of years later) a concern for the afterlife paved the way for literature by using writing for funerary inscriptions. Death and property, you could say, two of our most basic anxieties, seemed able to be managed, or at least placated, by putting marks on a surface and so inspired the first systematic mark-making.

–Anne Carson, Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind

Accounting and Funerary practices–property and death, in Carson’s breakdown–are good guesses as to why we invent writing. But what about consciousness itself?

Literary historians have often remarked–though nobody seems to remember it or believe them–that prose is unnatural. When people invent writing, they never start with prose. When they first start to write, they usually write receipts and lists–less often oracles–then dictionaries, then hymns and epic poems. Personal letters seem to take some doing to think up; they come later in the game. Proclamations, victory monuments, and official memorials are the closest they got in Mesopotamia for 2,000 years. What they didn’t think to write were stories in our sense–prose about the distant past, about adventures or new experiences, about love or the gods.

By the early second millennium there is already some art–or at least artifice–in official writing. Kings would commission their scribes to imitate their speaking voice, to boast in clay or stone about what they did, but the effect is more or less that of a fancy plaque on a building. One of the early kings of the city-state of Mari, Šamši-Adad I left this inscription around 1800 BCE:

The temple of the god Enlil which Erisum, son of Ilu-summa, had built had become dilapidated, so I abandoned it. I built the temple of the god Enlil, my lord: the fearful dais, the large chapel, the seat of the god Enlil, my lord, which were methodically made by the skilled work of the builders within my city Assur. I roofed the temple with cedar. I erected in the rooms cedar doors with silver and gold stars….

The first taste of imaginative storytelling we have found in prose–the whiff of ‘a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away’– is still in service of a memorial plaque, but one of an eccentric, colorful variety. And it is probably no accident that it comes from the West, the realm of Canaanites and nomads. The Mesopotamian monumental style is here flavored by a very different style of storytelling.

It Was There I First Gained Status

Image

Buried at the Syrian city of Alalakh we find a simply wrought statue of a king with wide-open, staring eyes that has been made to tell its own story. We can date Idrimi–but not, as we shall see, his story–to around 1475 BCE. Written in a regional Akkadian, it tells a story still familiar to us of a prince’s fall from grace, his wanderings with rebels and nomads, and bold struggle to regain it:

I am Idrimi, the son of Ilī-ilimma, servant of the Storm God, Hebat, and Ishtar, Lady of Aleppo–my lady.

Calamity befell us in Aleppo, the house of my father. So we fled to the presence of the people of Emar, my aunts, and we settled there. My brothers, who were older than me, they settled with me. But none of them remembered those matters which I remembered. I said, “Whoever is of the house of his father, he is a great son indeed. But whoever is for the sons of Emar, indeed he just a servant.”

So I took my horse, my chariot, and my driver and crossed into the land of the desert, and joined the company of the Sutean nomads. I spent the night in my chariot, among them. On the second day, I set out. Then I went to the land of the Canaanites. I settled in the land of the Canaanites, in Ammiya. In Ammiya dwelled refugees of my land… They saw me, the one who was the son of their lord. Then they gathered to me. It was there that I first gained status.*

Remarkable here is the combination of political biography–it goes into more depth about an individual’s political fortunes than any previous account we have–and legend. It is not for four years or nine that he wanders, but seven, and outside of home, his rightful leadership is always instantly recognized.

It is only after he has gained recognition among the nomads that he can come home to demand it from his own emperor Pattarna, the “strong king” of the Hurrians:

I settled in the company of the rebels of the Hapiru for a long time–for seven years! I released birds; I inspected lambs. Then, in seven years’ time the Storm God returned to me, so I built ships. I loaded soldiers onto the ships. I approached the land of the Mukishim by way of the sea, and I arrived on dry land, in front of the Hazi mountains. I went up, and my land heard me….within one day, as one person, the people of that land turned to me. …My brothers found relief with me, and I guarded my brothers.

Moreover, for those seven years Parattarna, the strong king, the king of the Hurrians, made an enemy of me. But in the seventh year, I wrote to him. And I spoke about the services of my fathers, when my fathers found relief with his kingdom, and the oath of loyalty they had sworn. The strong king listened to what I said about the services of my predecessors and the oath that was between them. And he respected the oath. …A lost house returned to him. I spoke to him regarding my case and regarding my loyalty, and then I was king.

It is only when he has been made an equal to the jealous local kinglets that they rise up against him. But he is unstoppable in taking his rightful place among equals, and so he strikes them down, to the right and to the left.

The kings to my right and my left rose up against me, against Alalah, for he had made me equal, like them. Just as they piled up my ancestors upon the ground, so I piled up theirs upon the ground. In battle I piled them high. I took an army and I went up against the land of Hatti. I seized seven cities…

I had an estate built. I made my throne like the thrones of kings. I made my brothers like the brothers of the kings, my sons like their sons, and my companions like their companions. I settled the inhabitants who were in the midst of my land in their good dwellings. I settled those inhabitants who previously were not settled. I established my land, and I made my cities equal to those which came before me.

But finally we are reminded who the real speaker is–not the statue, or even the king who it represents, but the craftsman who made it. As Jack Sasson (1982) first suggested, it is actually a generation or two later that Sharruwa seems to have created this memorial to join his fate to Idrimi’s. He did it by telling a stirring tale in a voice that seems to blend scholar and king:

Sharruwa the scribe, the servant of the Storm God, the Sun God, the Moon God, and Ishtar, Sharruwa is the scribe who wrote the inscription on this statue. May the gods of heaven and earth cause him to live; may they guard him; may they be good to him. May Shamash, the lord above and below, the lord of ghosts, cause him to live.

I reigned 30 years. I wrote of my service, about myself. May others look upon the words which I wrote. May they pray on my behalf.

If earlier prose is more or less royal property, voicing a king or occasionally the real speaker, the scribes who made him talk, Hebrew prose invents something new. As the historian Daniel Pioske (2022) writes:

On this point, the difference between the Hebrew prose tradition …and the dominant first-person voice of royal writings in Egypt and Mesopotamia could not be greater. In the prose of the Hebrew Bible, the narratives recounted are not conveyed through the mouth of a ruler, real or imagined, who is a participant in what is portrayed. Instead, these stories are communicated by a narrator who is hidden and who stands apart from the events that unfold

And There It Was, Ruined!

In Hebrew there are not only two different voices–the voice of the characters and the voice of the narrator–but they actually speak two different dialects that seem to come from two different worlds. Unlike the older world of epic poetry, the language of Hebrew prose actually uses a different presentation of time and action for its narrator’s grammar, marked by the wayyitqol “past continuous” form. Thus Pioske:

Whereas both storyteller and characters are part of a singular whole in epic works, unified in how they speak about the past and how they perceive character, motive, and action, the narrator of Hebrew prose is extraneous and removed, distanced from how the biblical characters express themselves and their understandings of the circumstances in which they are embroiled.

The grammar of the narrator is further marked by locating itself precisely nowhere. The identifying and locating language of here and there, now and then, me and you–what linguists call deixis, is absent from the narrator’s voice.

Suddenly, there is no one speaking. Or is there? For as Robert Kawashima (2004) has brilliantly demonstrated, there is one crucial exception that lets the Hebrew narrator’s voice secretly position itself inside the characters’ heads. It does this by keeping one single deictic form, Hebrew hinnê, the “behold!” of the King James. Linguistically a presentative, that can best be rendered depending on context as “here,” “there,” or just with a well-placed exclamation mark, it is this form that Abraham uses to call back to God, hinneni “present!” when God asks him to sacrifice his only son in Genesis 22–and that Leonard Cohen used to mark himself as ready to return to God in “You Want it Darker,” with its chorus of Hinneni quoting Abraham.

‏וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֗ים הִנֵּה֩ נָתַ֨תִּי לָכֶ֜ם אֶת־כָּל־עֵ֣שֶׂב ׀ זֹרֵ֣עַ זֶ֗רַע אֲשֶׁר֙ עַל־פְּנֵ֣י כָל־הָאָ֔רֶץ וְאֶת־כָּל־הָעֵ֛ץ אֲשֶׁר־בּ֥וֹ פְרִי־עֵ֖ץ זֹרֵ֣עַ זָ֑רַע לָכֶ֥ם יִֽהְיֶ֖ה לְאָכְלָֽה׃

Gen. 1:29    God said, “Here, I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon all the earth, and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit; they shall be yours for food.

What, then, is the effect when the narrator uses the very same exclamation?

Gen. 1:31 ‏ וַיַּ֤רְא אֱלֹהִים֙ אֶת־כָּל־אֲשֶׁ֣ר עָשָׂ֔ה וְהִנֵּה־ט֖וֹב מְאֹ֑ד ׃

‎

And God looked at all He had made, and there it was, truly good!

Gen. 6:12‏ וַיַּ֧רְא אֱלֹהִ֛ים אֶת־הָאָ֖רֶץ וְהִנֵּ֣ה נִשְׁחָ֑תָה כִּֽי־הִשְׁחִ֧ית כָּל־בָּשָׂ֛ר אֶת־דַּרְכּ֖וֹ עַל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃ ס ‎

‏

And God looked at the earth, and there it was, ruined! for all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth,

Gen. 6:12

1Sam. 4:13‏ וַיָּב֗וֹא וְהִנֵּ֣ה עֵ֠לִי יֹשֵׁ֨ב עַֽל־הַכִּסֵּ֜א יַךְ [יַ֥ד] דֶּ֙רֶךְ֙ מְצַפֶּ֔ה כִּֽי־הָיָ֤ה לִבּוֹ֙ חָרֵ֔ד עַ֖ל אֲר֣וֹן הָאֱלֹהִ֑ים וְהָאִ֗ישׁ בָּ֚א לְהַגִּ֣יד בָּעִ֔יר וַתִּזְעַ֖ק 

כָּל־הָעִֽיר׃

When he arrived, there Eli was, sitting on a seat, waiting beside the road—his heart trembling for the Ark of God.

From the Image of a King to an Artificial Consciousness

Moreover, precisely because the narrator does not identify where they are speaking from, and therefore where you, the reader, are hearing their voice, this exclamation does one thing more. It bridges the gap between the character and you. You are with the narrator, inside the character’s consciousness. It is this trick, Kawashima argues, that it shares with a more recent invention–the individual-centered novel.

What is striking is how close this analogy is to the use of presentatives in French and English literature, the same trick of creating an anonymous narrator who is nonetheless halfway inside the character’s head. Kawashima brings this beautiful example from Flaubert:

Peut-être, cependant, s’était-il trompé en quelque chose? Il cherchait, ne trouvait pas. Mais les plus fameux chirurgiens se trompaient bien. Voilà ce qu’on ne voudrait jamais croire! On allait rire, au contraire, clabauder!

Perhaps, however, he had made a mistake in something? He considered this, but found nothing. But even the most famous surgeons made mistakes. Here was something no one would ever believe! On the contrary, there would be laughter and derision!

Similar, he reminds us, is how a great modern novelist like Virginia Woolf describes her character Mrs. Dalloway’s day:

There was St James’s palace; and now—she had passed Bond Street—she was by Hatchard’s book shop. The stream was endless—endless—endless. … And there was that absurd book, Soapey Sponge, which Jim used to quote by the yard; and Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

Thus with Hebrew prose we see the discovery of a set of linguistic tools for getting you invisibly inside a character’s head–whether God, Samuel, Flaubert’s Doctor, or Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway—and the invention of a kind of artificial consciousness.

Note and References

*This abridged rendering makes the text a bit breezier than it actually is. I base it on Paul Edgar’s translation.

Edgar, Paul. “A Most Ancient Statecraft: The Idrimi Statue Inscription” Classics of Strategy and Diplomacy December 22, 2021. https://classicsofstrategy.com/2021/12/22/a-most-ancient-statecraft-the-idrimi-statue-inscription/.

Godzich, Wlad. The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Kawashima, Robert S. Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode. Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

Lauinger, Jacob. Labors of Idrimi: Inscribing the Past, Shaping the Present at Late Bronze Age Alalah. Ancient Near East Monographs 33. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2024.

Mortensen, Lars Boje. “The Sudden Success of Prose: A Comparative View of Greek, Latin, Old French and Old Norse.” Medieval Worlds 5 (2017): 3–45.

Pioske, Daniel. “The Appearance of Hebrew Prose and the Fabric of History.” In The Hunt for Ancient Israel: Essays in Honour of Diana V. Edelman, edited by Cynthia Shafer-Elliott et al., Sheffield, South Yorkshire: Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2022.

Sasson, Jack M. “On Idrimi and Sarruwa, the Scribe.” In STUDIES ON THE CIVILIZATION AND CULTURE OF NUZI AND THE HURRIANS In Honor Of ERNEST R. LACHEMAN on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday, edited by David Owen and M.A. Morrison. Eisenbrauns, 1981.

Categories
Liberation Philology

Is Dalhousie having a DOGE moment?

Dalhousie University is the only place on Canda’s eastern seaboard with full-time instruction in Arabic and Chinese–Halifax’s fastest-growing languages. Dalhousie’s administration wants to end that, alongside French–a notoriously unimportant language for Canada (!?)

DOGE, the “Department of Government Efficiency,” is a new Trump administration organization intended to make necessary if tough budget reductions so we can “live within our means.” But de facto and in practice its moves are flamboyant, with sweeping cuts to core capacities like that to USAID that end up withdrawing the US from a global outlook– and international community.

Unlike the US government, Dalhousie University’s leadership appears to have the best intentions in slashing its permanent language teaching; as of this month there will no longer be any long term positions in French, Arabic, Chinese, or Russian (though there is a lamentable proverb noting that the road to hell is also paved with good intentions). But regardless of its fine intentions, Dalhousie is having a de facto DOGE moment–the slashing of that part of its core capacity most vital for global learning, competitiveness and reputation under the banner of efficiency.

The optics of Dalhousie’s administration’s cuts are flamboyant too. As if taking aim at student employment opportunities such as working in the Canadian government, the one remaining long-term French teaching position is being eliminated. The rest end up also targeting the largest nonwhite language communities in Halifax. Over less than a month, Dalhousie has dropped all of its non-Western language programs and highly-skilled long term instructors, leading to “a sudden pulverization of the Arabic programme – ironically, at its 20th anniversary” as well as the disappearance of long-term Chinese teaching.

This “will lead to the demise of high-quality Arabic instruction and of the Arabic Minor at Dalhousie,” according to Dalhousie’s own experts. “It is no secret that students from the Middle East constitute a high percentage of Dalhousie’s international students. Depriving them of an academic home that the Arabic program has always been will further limit the number of international students who see Dalhousie as an attractive educational institution and will cascade to devastating reputational losses to Dalhousie among Middle Eastern, Arab, and Muslim populations locally, nationally, and internationally.”

This aggressive move is not only contrary to but in bold opposition to Dalhousie’s own strategic plan for Arts and Sciences, as well as its goals of supporting cost-effective instruction (our Arabic lecturer is teaching 109 students this semester). The plan sets the goal of developing “a FASS-based international strategy… foregrounding our established expertise in such fields as language teaching.. and intercultural competency.” Again, if you wanted to move Dal away from the international community, slashing capacity in cultural competency and established expertise in languages would be the way to do it.

Maybe the most theatrical apparent rejection of Dalhousie’s overall Strategic Plan is dropping the very source of the Plan’s core image: the Plan is articulated around the trope of “Five Pillars,” a well-known Islamic concept invoked by Muslims around the world as a means of framing their key religious practices. The Dalhousie Strategic Plan authors may have borrowed this term unknowingly from Arabic culture without any awareness of the origin or sensitivity to how this borrowing may be perceived by practicing Muslims, and possibly violates its own “Pillar 2” commitments.

There is an alternative to this bold and decisive but regrettable destruction of Dalhousie’s core capacities, with such severe consequences not just for potential student employability but any credible claim to an international strategy. It is to partner with the community and donors to strengthen key positions in language teaching. In doing this we would actually walk the walk of “forgrounding our established expertise in such fields as language teaching,” to double down on our actual areas of excellence and promise for the community, not just in the Maritimes but the world.

Categories
Liberation Philology

“There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument”

Or: Why There Were No Ancient Monuments

There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument. They are no doubt erected to be seen – indeed to attract attention. But at the same time they are impregnated with something that repels attention, causing the glance to roll right off, like water droplets off an oilcloth, without even pausing for a moment.

Writing in the 1920s of his inner life on walks in Vienna, a city full of monuments to great men like Mozart, Brahms, and Kaiser Wilhelm, the Austrian modernist writer Robert Musil reflected on their weird impotence, their power to achieve meaninglessness.

You can walk down the same street for months, know every address, every show window, every policeman along the way, and you won’t even miss a dime that someone dropped on the sidewalk; but you are very surprised when one day, staring up at a pretty chambermaid on the first floor of a building, you notice a not-at-all-tiny metal plaque on which, engraved in indelible letters, you read that from eighteen hundred and such and such to eighteen hundred and a little more the unforgettable So-and-so lived and created here.

Image

Brick of Ur-Nammu defaced by a dog c. 2100 BCE, courtesy Moudhy Al-Rashid.

“Monument” is connected to the ancient Latin verb monere whose meanings include “to remind, warn, admonish.” Yet in Musil’s 20th-century experience what these big, beautiful monuments had was not a power to remind but to nullify, to not enter into a relationship with the living. As he wrote, even the biggest pieces of rock with the grandest scale became wallpaper:

Many people have this same experience even with larger-than-life-sized statues. Every day you have to walk around them, or use their pedestal as a haven of rest, …But you never look at them, and do not generally have the slightest notion of whom they are supposed to represent, except that maybe you know if it’s a man or a woman.

This is a real problem for what has become a small industry in ancient Near Eastern archaeology and literature, the subfield of monumentality studies. It has produced excellent, influential work such as that of the University of Pennsylvania’s Timothy Hogue, The Ten Commandments Monuments of Memory, Belief, and Interpretation. I feel a deep connection to this work because I am in at least some slight way responsible for its theoretical configuration–though it took a powerful and fresh direction I could not have imagined. As a member of Tim’s thesis committee I first suggested to him that rather than seeing the Decalogue as originating in a specific, historically identifiable stele (for which we have no evidence), we instead ask whether it had monumentality in the sense discussed by the Chinese art historian Wu Hung.

Building on the work of the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl, Wu argues that we don’t need to see monumentality as the quality of being big, permanent, or having a name and message on it. After all, we have literally no idea whether most ancient Near Eastern royal inscriptions were ever even read! On the other hand, the Gettysburg national monument (the site of Abraham Lincoln’s most famous speech) is nothing but a field of grass, to which has been added a whole slew of different plaques and objects over time. But if we see the quality of being monumental as something that happens between people and things, we can understand some surprising facts.

Image

Writing in exactly the same period as Musil, the French writer George Bataille had the totally opposite experience of the monuments around him. For him, they were living, threatening forces, part of an electrified fence of social power:

In fact it is clear that monuments inspire socially acceptable behavior and often very real fear. The storming of the Bastille is symbolic of this state of affairs: it is difficult to explain this impulse of the mob other than by the animosity the people hold against the monuments which are their true masters.

How can these great statues and shapes or small plaques be both dangerously electrified in 1920s Paris and blandly invisible in 1920s Vienna? The key is that the rock does nothing by itself. Its power lies only in a relationship, the question of whether it becomes monumental for a particular group at a particular time. It is, as I wrote here, “a kind of social contract, but not one we’re allowed to freely enter into. An object gets its monumentality from a shared political relationship with a group of people.”

This might explain the astonishing reaction of British people to the idea of World War II monuments, documented in Jeremy Eichler’s remarkable new Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance. After enduring one of the most destructive bombing campaigns of modern times (though recently utterly exceeded by the destruction of Gaza and Syria), most British people absolutely did not give a shit about making any new memorials because the astonishing British death toll of World War I was still on their minds.

…by 1944, when a national survey solicited opinions on preferred styles of commemoration for the more recently fallen of the Second World War, opinion had turned bitterly against the prospect of what the anonymous respondents dubbed “useless monuments” and “stone monstrosities on every street corner and village green.” Existing monuments would simply need to perform double duty.

An archaeological question: why, unlike in the US and the rest of Europe, were there barely any new British WWII monuments? Not because there was no motive or resources for making them, but because they would not have been monumental for their audience.

Turning this question to the ancient Near East would, I suggest, turn us away from some dead ends and toward some more intriguing new pathways.

Categories
Liberation Philology

Why Didn’t Biblical Books Have Titles?

On Ancient Hebrew Literary Values

Sometimes you just start running your mouth, trying to answer a question and going where it takes you and you may not even fully understand where you’ve arrived yet. With the help of Esther Brownsmith and her colleagues I published an essay today and while you should hunt down the book, I wanted to review some of the surprises, and have updated the conclusion.

The Starting Problem:

“the works later assembled as the Hebrew Bible come from not only a history but also a set of attitudes about literature that are almost entirely undocumented.

While we are taught to value ancient Hebrew literature, ancient Hebrew literary values themselves are still often unknown to us. If we want to understand the goals that guided their compositions, they must be reverse engineered from the existing products.

The inviting perplexity I wish to explore today…is the fact that most of the ancient Hebrew literature preserved to us seems to have been something like the opposite of books only known by title. For before the editorial work that produced our canonical Bibles, the literary products of Judah were—to judge from the preserved evidence—composed mostly of works with no stable title at all. Within the biblical and epigraphic Hebrew corpora there are remarkably few allusions to the works we know today. Rather than books known by title, they were known by anything but a title: books known, perhaps, only by themselves.

Ancient Hebrew Literature was thought of as Sources that were Present to the Reader, not Finished, Bounded Past Works.

Why were so many ancient Hebrew writers comfortable with intimately knowing and vigorously using works without indicating title or author at all in our sense? This attitude stands in contrast to both our earlier Canaanite evidence (which is limited) and our contemporary Mesopotamian evidence (which is abundant). In the cuneiform cultures of Ugarit, Babylon, and Assyria, scribes were fairly consistent about naming and referring to their major texts. And [the ancient Hebrew, mostly anti-title] attitude was also rejected by later Hebrew writers: the later Jewish tradition used incipits (that did not necessarily describe the content) for the Pentateuch and more familiar conventions (Joshua, Isaiah, Psalms, Proverbs, etc.) for the rest. While the incipit Bereishit (“At the beginning of”) for Genesis could plausibly be mistaken for a content-based title, the real pattern quickly emerges with Shemot (“Names”) for Exodus, Vayyiqra (“And he called”) for Leviticus, and so on. But remarkably, we know that biblical writers were in fact perfectly capable of referring to works by titles when they chose to.

It may be helpful to relativize our own fixation on titles as well as authors as something of a historical accident. Greek interest in attribution and authorship is related to its peculiar political circumstances of city state and small-scale competitive networks, such as of poets or mathematicians. Pindar’s business model was to be paid for his services, advertised by his poems. Such patterns did not develop in the Near East due to the larger scale and greater consolidation of knowledge: in contrast to the wandering sages of Greece, most Near Eastern wisdom experts worked for the palace

We can better explain the Hebrew Bible’s lack of a sense of rupture by focusing on its modes of creating continuity. One good model for looking at the biblical poem as something other than a bounded text is Jacqueline Vayntrub’s account of how poetic compositions are framed in ancient Hebrew literature through deliberate artistic choice. These framings are representational devices for making the remote past immediate, not inevitable natural facts of orality or poetry. Within biblical prose narrative, poetry is defined not by its meter or rhythm or artfulness but because it is narrated as the performance of a character. We know this framing is a choice because we also find other possibilities for defining poetry:

In the Psalms and Proverbs, poetry often comes to us in the form of anthologies, frequently outside of the voice of a speaking character in a narrative. The staged ‘orality’ of biblical poetry, then, is no more a fact of ancient Israelite and Judean literary culture than any of the other constructions of the text, such as its historical or authorial claims. (Vayntrub, Beyond Orality).

We can deepen this view of framing compositions rather than titling texts by contrasting it with the Bible’s most coherent extended presentation of language, that of the Priestly work. The most extensive identifiable element of the Pentateuch, the Priestly work provides us with the most extended ritual text from the entire ancient Near East. Its almost fanatical consistency with respect to plot, terminology, and ideology has compelled a remarkable level of scholarly agreement on its overall shape as the most unified extended piece of biblical literature we have.

There is no reason to believe the Priestly work ever had a title—what it claimed instead was presence. That is, the organization of the text puts the reader into a relationship with the text where the reader is implicitly cast as a ritualist, implicitly called upon to study and be prepared to enact its ritual prescriptions. Not only does Moses never speak to God during the entire process of the law’s revelation,24 but uniquely among ancient Near Eastern ritual texts, no praise of God accompanies sacrifice in P, and prayer is nearly non-existent. It is instead through signs and bodies that Priestly ritual coordinates human action with divine command. The Priestly work does not need to frame language use for us because after Moses transmitted the commandments, human language no longer matters—except for that of the Priestly work itself, that is fully present to us. P tells us not howto speak but how to act.

And it presents itself not as a bounded and entitled text but as an embodiment of ritual, like the ominous book described by Thomas Ligotti (in his short story Vastarien) “that is not about something, but actually is that something.”

Updated Conclusion:

“You Are Here:” How Ancient Hebrew Writers Created a Literature of Presence

What unites the interesting if unsettling patterns we have uncovered? I suggest that Hebrew writers didn’t need titles to put their texts in context. This was because they had a different way of creating context that seemed better to them, an underlying practice that explains the lack of felt need for titles, what I call their use of characters instead of colophons to designate texts. This is what.linguistic anthropology calls a diagram: a sign—an image or text—that frames the situation in which the sign itself occurs.

Like a map with a “You Are Here” marker encountered by a wanderer in a park, a diagram at once describes and creates the context its users are in. By presenting its own context, it can work to define that context and specify the possibilities for action within it.

The diagram in which the writers of biblical narrative inscribed their characters’ ancient speech is the prose framing of other texts, such as poetic utterances or sources. Devices such as “he took up his mashal and said…” determine the time, genre, and communicative situation of a poetic text as in the direct addresses of Balaam or Moses. In the poetic texts Vayntrub discusses, they frame the poetry as old, virtuosic, and public: “oral poetry,” in contrast to the inherent voicelessness and presentlessness of narrative prose, which necessitated corrective editorial insertions like the Deuteronomistic scribal reminder, “to this day.” It is this practice of the prose diagram that gave ancient Hebrew writers the freedom to let their much more ancient characters speak anew in new texts.

Coupled with this diagrammatic practice was an ideal of written Hebrew discourse as a fundamentally present source (like a spring or well, Hebrew māqôr) rather than a fixed past “text” in our sense of a precise and ideally unchanging set of words. Ancient scholars had a body of practical knowledge including terms they could use to designate these texts. Such knowledge would have been passed down alongside the many technical skills of reading, manuscript preparation and editing, and writing themselves, without the need to fix them into the body of the text itself.*

If we conceive of the great ancient Hebrew works as sources instead of bounded works—sources to be engaged with and utilized beyond the confines or limitations typically presented by fixed authors or texts— this may help us to understand the now-shocking creative liberties that were taken with them up to the early Hellenistic period. These liberties included now-lost literary modes such as the textile-like interweaving that created the Pentateuch, as well as the aggressive human re-revealing of past human revelation that produced both Deuteronomy and Jubilees.

This very particular idea of liberty that ancient Hebrew writers applied to their unbounded texts was a crucial precondition for the process of biblical composition itself. And once this idea changed, drastically new possibilities opened up, including the one we find most definitive of Jewish thought–Midrash or exegesis that is profoundly intertwined with the scriptural text itself.

_______________________

*Much like modern library call numbers, they could have appeared in separate catalogs or lists (as Jeremiah Coogan insightfully pointed out to me in 2024), or unlike call numbers simply been carried in the community’s collective body of technical knowledge.

Categories
Liberation Philology

How can Semitic philology address fundamental human questions?

Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic after 50 Years

A Panel Co-Organized by Seth L. Sanders, Dalhousie University and Daniel Pioske, University of St. Thomas

Just over 50 years ago, Frank Moore Cross presented North-West Semitic philology as a field that could bring the concrete evidence of epigraphy and linguistics to bear on fundamental questions of human expression, making a case for its immediate relevance not just to the history of religions but poetics and political thought. His 1973 Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic argued that scholars could understand historically why Hebrew literature became a new religious and political form if we integrated everything available, from Ugaritic poetry and Amorite divine naming patterns to the literary criticism of the Pentateuch to the new textual variants from Qumran. What was most distinctive about Cross’s method, aside from his great technical skill, was its dialectical quality. He put a typology of how we expect languages and cultures to change in dialogue with ancient empirical evidence of how they did, ranging from scripts to poetic, ritual, and social forms.

Cross was probably the most influential biblical scholar of his generation, but interestingly those questions were not central concerns for most of his students. At Harvard–where I was mesmerized by him as an undergrad–he held a strategic position in the field. As a mentor he was able to define American Biblical studies from the late 20th into the 21st century with students ranging from John Collins and Carol Newsom to Michael Stone, Jo Ann Hackett and Kyle McCarter. Each of these students did defining work advancing areas from Iron Age epigraphy and religion to apocalyptic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Judaism.

But perhaps for the very reason that most of impact, and the success of most of his students, was the result of excellence in one specialty or another, the integrative questions he raised were never fully addressed in the field. We propose to reopen them, inspired by recent work ranging from that of Robert Kawashima and Daniel Pioske on the relationship between Hebrew Prose and historical narrative to Christine Thomas on West Semitic social forms in literature. 1) Cross, following Cassuto and in dialogue with Robert Alter, raised vital questions about why imaginative prose narrative first arose in Hebrew (in contrast to all known earlier Semitic imaginative literatures, which take poetic form) 2) He used typological arguments to connect the genres of myth and poetry, history and prose which was based on evolutionary assumptions that have been refuted in certain key ways but not really replaced. If the assumed teleology of the rise of a superior biblical literature was wrong, the question of why new cultural forms, from vernacular literature in Ugaritic to prose literature in Hebrew remains. Can 50 years of new discovery and thought provide fresh perspectives on these issues of the directions and meanings of change in North-West Semitic language and culture?

Participants:

Robert Kawashima, University of Florida

Peter Machinist, Harvard University

Alice Mandel, Johns Hopkins University

Aren Wilson-Wright, University of Chicago

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