The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book by Idan Dershowitz

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book by Idan Dershowitz Madadh Richey Idan Dershowitz. The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book. Forschungen zum Alten Testament I 145. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021. 203 pp. It is rare that, in reviewing a book published just a year ago, one feels oneself coming late to the discussion, but Idan Dershowitz's Valediction of Moses is an unusual book. It has an unusual central hypothesis: that eight now-lost leather strips offered in 1883 for sale by the antiquities dealer Moses Shapira and bearing a Hebrew text with Deuteronomic parallels were in fact authentic ancient manuscripts, despite substantial paleographic, linguistic, and other problems, and against the scholarly consensus, then and now, that these are nineteenth-century CE forgeries. In part due to the iconoclastic nature of this hypothesis, Valediction has also received an unusual level of sensational media coverage and has provoked an unusual flurry of online posts, tweets, and draft reviews; from these, one gets the impression that few scholars of the Hebrew Bible are convinced of Dershowitz's case for a variety of new and old reasons approached only briefly here. The slim volume's structure is straightforward: Dershowitz introduces the Shapira strips and the history of their surfacing and interpretation (chapter 1). He then turns immediately to his major archival contribution: his discovery of three pages of a "draft transcription" of the strips among the Shapira papers at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (chapter 2). Dershowitz believes these to show an intrepid Shapira struggling to transcribe difficult manuscripts, but it is not clear that even Shapira's apparent mistakes rule out a onetime intent to deploy these as a red herring (other forgers have been more ingenious!) or, of course, that Shapira himself was duped (cf. pp. 39–40). With this exception and additional minor archival sources [End Page 405] (pp. 132–33, nn. 13–17), the basis for Dershowitz's transcription (chapter 7) and analyses remains earlier published transcriptions and drawings. Chapter 3 presents what Dershowitz terms a "philological analysis," mainly a literary critical analysis focused on composition history. He concludes that the Shapira strips attest to a composition that he calls the "Valediction of Moses" (abbreviated "V") and that this composition is a pre-exilic source of Masoretic Deuteronomy. He believes neither the paleographic (script-historical; pp. 21, 28–33) nor the linguistic profiles of the strips challenge this characterization. Chapter 4 claims "V" as an intertext for certain biblical texts, and chapter 5 summarizes. A linguistic analysis (chapter 6; see below), transcription (chapter 7), translation (chapter 8), and debatably useful rendering into a schematic palaeo-Hebrew font (chapter 9) conclude. In the area of my own expertise, Hebrew and related Northwest Semitic paleography and epigraphy, I feel strongly the above-noted belated aspect of this review because Matthieu Richelle has already published an excellent, detailed rebuttal of Dershowitz's claims.1 Richelle shows that the strips' script is not only extremely idiosyncratic but that several especially bizarre letter forms find their closest parallels in nineteenth-century inaccurate drawings and even forgeries, including several traceable to Shapira's associate Salim al-Kari. The detail and complexity of Richelle's treatment overwhelm Dershowitz's sketch, the restricted nature of which is, presumably, partially due to the book's programmatic nature and partially due to the field's technicality. This second aspect indexes a broader phenomenon, namely that Dershowitz's skill set is not an ideal match for the task of authenticating Shapira's strips. In addition to his brevity on paleography, the lengthy linguistic section (chapter 6, pp. 96–130) is an "excursus," co-authored with Na'ama Pat-El, that follows and presumes the conclusion of authenticity. The goal throughout is to find in "V" linguistic features paralleled in ancient or biblical Hebrew. Authenticity, though, is of course not assured only by demonstrating that linguistic features are attested in ancient Hebrew; one must also show that these features do not occur in later manifestations of the language. The authors address this side of the question inconsistently and, when they do, the comparative diachronic dataset on which later periods are excluded as viable compositional backgrounds is...