Israel Knohl. The Divine Symphony: The Bible's Many Voices. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003. xv, 207 pp.

Abstract

In this wide-ranging overview of biblical literature, Israel Knohl argues that the Hebrew Bible does not present a consistent or monolithic viewpoint concerning ancient Israel's or Judaism's understanding of God, itself, and the world in which it lived. Rather, Knohl contends that the Bible presents a pluralism of viewpoints that to a great degree anticipates the pluralistic outlook of Rabbinic Judaism. This will hardly come as a surprising thesis to anyone familiar with modern biblical and theological scholarship. Indeed, it takes up the classic question of unity and diversity within the Hebrew Bible that might be illustrated by Gerhard von Rad's well-known Old Testament Theology. Von Rad recognized the diversity of traditions that informed the various writings and viewpoints now gathered in the Bible while simultaneously trying to systematize them into a general concept of Heilsgeschichte, that is, “salvation history” or “sacred history.” Such Heilsgeschichte moved inexorably to what von Rad believed would be the ultimate culmination of human history. Knohl's contribution comes not in relation to the model of pluralism in the Bible per se, but in relation to his argument that so much of the priestly literature that engages in pluralistic debate with other biblical works is rooted in the monarchic period of ancient Israel's (or Judah's) history. In this respect, Knohl's own work—although original in its own right—owes much to an earlier model advocated by Yehezkel Kaufmann, one of the founding fathers of modern Israeli biblical scholarship.