Hebrew Studies 38 (1997) 100 Reviews The book is highly repetitious, which may be helpful to some readers but disturbing to others. There are very few misprints. Just to mention two of them: "Mein" (p. 63, n. 50) should be "Main," and "d'object" (p. 138, n. 96) should read "d'objet." landeWaard Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands SAGE, PRIEST, PROPHET: RELIGIOUS AND INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP IN ANCIENT ISRAEL. By Joseph Blenkinsopp. Library of Ancient Israel. Pp. xi + 191. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1995. Cloth, $19.00. Joseph Blenkinsopp locates the present work "at the interface of social and intellectual history" (p. 7) and attempts to identify the various social roles and the various kinds of intellectual leadership which were performed by ancient Israel's sages, priests, and prophets. The decision to focus on these three particular classes or groups and not others derives from his contention that "they are the classes that in their different ways were responsible for the biblical texts and therefore for the symbolic-conceptual world from which the texts derive, which gives the texts their distinctive character" (pp. 2-3). An overarching concept informing Blenkinsopp's present work is that of "tradition." As such, he asks: what constitutes a tradition, how do traditions originate, how do competing traditions interact , and how does leadership shape and how is it shaped by tradition? To facilitate the study, Blenkinsopp draws both on sociological insights concerning "role theory" and "role performance," and on Max Weber's (whose influence is acknowledged throughout the book) concept of the "ideal type." Questions deriving from these ideas are then put to the sources, namely, the relevant biblical texts, the archaeological record, and comparative data. When it comes to the handling of sources, Blenkinsopp is extremely cautious. He constantly reminds the reader of how little we actually know about ancient Israel. In his own modest words, he claims only to be able to make "some headway" (p. 7) in the task at hand. Blenkinsopp turns first to the sage (or scribe) and argues, against R. N. Whybray, that in spite of the relatively small amount of material that has Hebrew Studies 38 (1997) WI Reviews survived from ancient Israel's sages, one is justified nevertheless in positing an intellectual tradition which was institutionally grounded. He locates the origins of this tradition in the development of a "common ethos" which was fonnulated in the pre-state period and which emerged out of a non-literate society based on kinship networks. He sees strong connections between the fonnulation of proverbial sayings and the development of Israel's legal tradition, a point which he develops further in his discussion of Proverbs. The emergence of the state system, however, and its need for educated and literate civil servants, is what made it possible for the society to produce a genuine literary and intellectual tradition, but Blenkinsopp finds little evidence for such an identifiable tradition prior to the time of Hezekiah. Beginning then, we see evidence of a "class of literati" (p. 32) located in the royal court. In the editorial history of the book of Proverbs, insofar as it can be known, Blenkinsopp sees "a trajectory along which the consolidation of the intellectual tradition of the sages can be traced" (p. 45). Proverbial sayings from the pre-state and early state period, rising Yahwistic orthodoxy, and the national cult all come together under the rubric of "the fear of Yahweh" (p. 45) personified as Female Wisdom, which in turn is later identified with Torah. He then goes on to examine how, in response to the fall of Jerusalem, the intellectual tradition of the sages was challenged from within by Job and Ecclesiastes. He concludes this section by noting how strikingly different "the intellectual world of Judah and the contemporary Greek-speaking world" were, the former heavily focusing on the "practical and ethical" and the latter on "speculative thinking and the acquisition of scientific knowledge." He attributes this significant difference to the fact that "Greece never came under the rule of the Persians" (p. 64). Blenkinsopp's next task, the issue of priests, is a difficult one given the seemingly endless debates over the history of the priesthood in Israel...
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Jan 1, 2004
Danny Ben-Moshe 
Open Access