Thinking Old: The Study
of Hebrew Scripture
September 7, 2007
When reading about the fluid composition strategies that go into ancient texts, I often try to think of music CDs. Books are fixed entities for us.. so fixed that they offer poor parallels with what we know about the genesis of earlier texts. A music CD is something else; it can be added to in a casual manner and our sensibilities are hardly ruffled. A Philip Roth novel is a Philip Roth novel.. no one is going to insert a short story or essay and tack it onto a novel entitled American Pastoral. But this happens often with CDs: for re-releases of classic albums by the Byrds, the Who, or the Beach Boys it is common for additional songs to be added. These extra songs may be marked on the packaging but in the listening experience these all bleed into one new and larger album. A few classic musical texts (such as Sgt. Peppers) have attained a "no touch" status.. but mostly we allow tampering with albums (the whole premise of iPod).
Karel Can Der Toorn's Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible will be a strange book unless one is able to keep an open mind with respect to the meaning of a book:
...the prophets who gave their names to the books wrote neither those books nor the oracles they contain... The scribes who composed the books used written records based on the recollections of partisans and supporters of the prophets; separate oracles existed in written form before the collections took shape. [203]
Van Der Toorn is not saying that Amos never delivered any of the prophecies that are credited to him; he is claiming that Amos had nothing to do with the composition of the book of Amos. The books of prophecy are thus similar to the music CDs that collect the songs of popular artists who released 45 singles. Chuck Berry released singles, but he had nothing to do with the later compilation of the CD entitled The Great 28 (a collection of his greatest hits). Such a CD becomes canonical, but it is hardly a final product that Chuck Berry could have envisioned. Berry's original view was limited to the 45 single, which had its own market and formal demands.
Van Der Toorn's work is part of a growing body of texts that take as their subject the way particular systems of knowledge (in this case the place of the scribe in the Near East) shape and decisively change traditions. In the penultimate chapter "Inventing Revelation" we learn how the idea of revelation, once the privilege of oral communication, was connected to the written page. As so often in religious history, great conceptual changes are not driven by geniuses, but rather material changes in technology that put the past in a wholly new light. The emphasis here on "scribal culture" allows us to see the changes in the Hebrew Bible as reflective of social changes.
One issue I have is Van Der Toorn's treatment of the so-called Confessions of Jeremiah (pgs. 188-93). These are a series of passages that sound like the prophet is speaking of himself and his experiences with an intimate and personal voice. Van Der Toorn makes short work of this idea and demonstrates that all these passages that seem autobiographical borrow heavily from the stock motifs of the Psalms and wisdom literature. Now, it may be true that these Confessions were written by a scribe.. and not Jeremiah.. but I have never understood why stock language is an argument against the presence of authentic personal expressions. Plenty of Hallmark cards speak the true emotions of its purchasers. Plenty of bad poets speak from the heart when they recycle earlier expressions. So why could not a prophet speak through the language and images he knows so well?
