Die Tora des Mose: Die Geschichte der literarischen Vermittlung von Recht, Religion und Politik durch die Mosegestalt

Abstract

Die Tora des Mose: Die Geschichte der literarischen Vermittlung von Recht, Religion und Politik durch Mosegestalt, by Eckart Otto. Berichte aus den Sitzungen der Joachim Jungius-Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften E.V., Hamburg 19/2. Hamburg: Joachim Jungius-Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001. Pp. 74. euro12.90 (paper). ISBN 352586311X. Eckart Otto, respected for his stimulating books and essays on the and its connections to the ancient Near Eastern intellectual and political world, offers in this too brief tract a persuasive argument that the image of Moses served the various tradents of the Pentateuch, in part, as a device for political opposition to Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian rule. Standing in the central European (primarily German) tradition of redactional analysis of the Pentateuch, Otto moves from questions of the purely literary development of the text to larger historical ones. Framing the discussion are a brief introduction to the idea of the book (pp. 5-6, which includes a disavowal of the search for the historical Moses) and an abbreviated conclusion that connects the political speculation of the Pentateuch's tradents to early modern political philosophy and the birth of the idea of human rights (pp. 58-60). An excellent bibliography, chiefly of German works, closes the volume. The core of the book consists of four lengthier chapters exploring literaturhistorische Voraussetzungen einer Geschichte des literarischen im Pentateuch (pp. 6-11), Mose als Antitypus zum neuassyrischen Groskonig im spatvorexilischen (pp. 11-33), Mose als Kristallisationsgestalt judaischer Identitat in spatbabylonischer Zeit (pp. 33-48), and die Vermittlung von Recht, Religion und Politik durch Mosegestalt in persischer Zeit (pp. 49-58). Working with texts identified as belonging to each period by previous scholarship (going back at least to Martin Noth), Otto locates each stratum of the Moses tradition within the ideological contests of the geopolitics of its day. This approach, which is promising and deserves to be worked out in much greater detail than Otto can do in such a circumscribed format (but see his Das Deuteronomium: Politische Theologie und Rechtsreform in Juda und Assyrien [BZAW 284; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999]), offers an important corrective to English-language scholarship that overemphasizes the Achaemenid-era influence on the Pentateuch's final form to the detriment of readily isolable earlier connections to extra-Israelite events. Moreover, Otto's effort to ground the argument in Near Eastern texts and other data, rather than in speculation about the life of postexilic Yehud, should exert a salutary influence on future research. Now to the details of the case. Otto is most convincing when he treats the Assyrianperiod evidence. He persuasively argues both that the well-known parallel of the birth story of Moses to that of Sargon of Akkad is the result of an Israelite cooptation of the older story, that is, a political statement, and that Assyrian propaganda (notably Esarhaddon's Vassal Treaty) influenced the Moses tradition more broadly. While one might wish for an exploration of possible elements of the tradition antedating contact with Assyria (after all, the Zadokite priests chose Moses as the vehicle for their theological work, a fact that presupposes his earlier importance in the culture), the case that the seventh century B. …