Did Moses Speak Attic? Jewish Historiography and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period

Abstract

Did Moses Speak Attic? Jewish Historiography and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period, edited by Lester L. Grabbe. JSOTSup 317. European Seminar in Historical Methodology 3. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001. Pp. 352. $84.00. Is the Bible a Hellenistic composition? Niels Peter Lemche posed that question in provocative fashion through an essay published in 1993. His seminal article provides much of the impetus for this volume, ably edited by Lester Grabbe and containing contributions that support, expand upon, modify, challenge, or firmly resist Lemche's conclusions. The volume itself publishes papers from two international meetings of the European Seminar on Methodology in Israel's History, the third publication of that ongoing seminar. Grabbe and his colleagues merit congratulations for focusing attention seriously on the methodological problems and pitfalls involved in reconstructing the historical setting for biblical texts-and in assessing their reliability in turn for the reconstruction of historical Israel. Repeated scrutiny of methodological underpinnings is salutary. But the subject itself possesses hazards. Several of the papers, while offering some acute and stimulating observations, raise questions about their own methodology. Lemche's 1993 paper is reprinted here, but, for some inexplicable reason, appears as the last essay in the collection. Hence, the replies, even replies to the replies, precede the article. Just why the editor preferred this peculiar sequence baffles understanding. But there are more serious issues at stake. Lemche, who wishes to set the composition of the Bible no earlier than the Hellenistic era, disposes successfully of some a priori assumptions and insubstantial arguments by previous scholars. His own approach, however, suffers from similar shortcomings. The method of dating biblical texts by starting from the terminus ad quem instead of the terminus a quo may be perfectly reasonable in principle. But when Lemche insists (pp. 294-95) that the point of departure for dating the books of Samuel must be 350 C.E., the putative time of the earliest manuscript of the LXX, this borders on a reductio ad absurdum, implemented in practice by no one, not even by Lemche. His assertion that the book of Joshua (and the bulk of other biblical texts) were composed in the Jewish Diaspora (pp. 299-300, 308) rests on no argumentation whatsoever, hardly a methodology to be recommended. However unreliable the texts may be for historical purposes, they could as readily have been created (with tendentious purposes) in Palestine as elsewhere. Indeed Lemche goes further to speculate that the prevalence of the motif of the exile in Jewish literature serves as a smokescreen by Diaspora Jews who did not wish to return to barren Palestine (p. 307). In view of the consistent expressions of attachment to Jerusalem and the homeland in the texts (even the acknowledged Hellenistic texts), this claim seems especially paradoxical. And Lemche's rejection of the Persian period as an appropriate setting for composition is equally arbitrary. Having established to his own satisfaction the influence of Greek models on the biblical narratives (again without serious argumentation), he rules out a Persian context on the grounds that Greek authors were presumably not widely read in the Achaemenid empire (pp. 308-9). Lemche, who condemns circular reasoning in others, has here lapsed into it himself. Rainer Albertz engages in a frontal assault on Lemche. He rightly faults him for failing to provide a sociohistorical reconstruction that would make the Hellenistic period a logical time for the invention of the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History. And he makes the telling point that the multiple copies of these texts at Qumran presuppose their existence and authority for a period of some extent prior to the Scrolls (p. 35). But Albertz's supposed refutation of a Hellenistic date rests on some questionable assumptions of his own. …