Empirical Models Challenging Biblical Criticism eds. by Raymond F. Person Jr. and Robert Rezetko

Abstract

Reviewed by: Empirical Models Challenging Biblical Criticism eds. by Raymond F. Person Jr. and Robert Rezetko David M. Carr raymond f. person jr. and robert rezetko (eds.), (AIL 25; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016). Pp. xiii + 415. Paper $51.95. This book aims to provide a balance to the similarly titled multiauthor work Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism (ed. Jeffrey H. Tigay; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), with an extensive introduction and eleven essays that use documented cases of transmission history to raise cautions about excessively confident source or redaction criticism. Though the editors allow that "there may be some limited cases in which empirical controls appear to provide relatively sound judgments concerning sources and redactional layers," the volume is intended to use empirical evidence to show that "future studies in source and redaction criticism must accept much more limited goals and objectives" (p. 35). This broader perspective is introduced in a co-authored introduction by Raymond Person and Robert Rezetko entitled "The Importance of Empirical Models to Assess the Efficacy of Source and Redaction Criticism." They begin with an argument that Tigay's Empirical Models volume could be understood to undermine as well as to confirm traditional models and methods in biblical studies. Person and Rezetko then offer brief summaries of the overall foci of the essays in their volume and show how they connect the diverse essays to the overall theme of empirical models challenging biblical criticism. In particular, they argue against the development of theories about the textual growth of biblical texts that do not have "empirical controls" (p. 23). Moreover, a common theme that they [End Page 355] highlight across multiple contributions is the addition of studies of oral traditions to the database for empirical models for biblical criticism. These studies raise significant questions about models of stematic textual growth that are more appropriate for exclusively written (or even printed) versions of texts. This introduction is helpful, because the essays that follow, read on their own, display varying levels of connection to the overall agenda of the volume to challenge biblical criticism. Indeed, some essays actually support the idea that scholars could successfully use text-internal criteria, for example, repetitions or contradictions, to reconstruct certain stages in the literary development of biblical texts. For example, in her excellent contribution, "Outsourcing Gilgamesh," Sara J. Milstein notes (p. 51 n. 26) that Morris Jastrow successfully identified Tablet XII of the Gilgamesh Epic as a later addition to the standard edition of the epic well before later Sumerologists found manuscript evidence that this was the case (Morris Jastrow Jr., The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria [Boston: Ginn, 1898], 513). She argues that the (partial) incorporation of material from an originally separate Sumerian composition (Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld) in Tablet XII shows how, in some cases, scribal authors could add blocks of recognizable material to a given text, even as in other cases (e.g., the incorporation of Gilgamesh and Huwawa material into earlier editions of Gilgamesh) earlier source material is too seamlessly incorporated into a given text to be recognizable. So also, Julio Trebolle Barrera's essay, "Division Markers as Empirical Evidence for the Editorial Growth of Biblical Books," attends to manuscript markers (e.g., medieval petuhah and setumah divisions, vacats in Qumran manuscripts) that might be used as additional concrete data that one might consider in formulating theories of textual development. Bénédicte Lemmelijn ("Text-Critically Studying the Biblical Manuscript Evidence: An 'Empirical' Entry to the Literary Composition of the Text") notes ways that textual irregularities often used for literary reconstruction by literary critics prompted a complex process of scribal coordination that is documented in diverse textual witnesses for the plague narratives (esp. Exod 11:1-3), a process that then problematizes neat divisions between text and literary criticism. On the other end of the continuum, some essays particularly focus on how the dimension of orality might complicate traditional models for literary development. Two essays argue that parallel versions of biblical texts that are documented in the textual tradition might testify to parallel oral instantiations of a broader tradition complex, rather than being genetically dependent on a common written Vorlage. Raymond F. Person's "The...