I received Andre Lemair’s The Birth of Monotheism in the mail today, but when I opened it up I noticed something peculiar. (I throw the dust jackets out with the rest of the packaging.) That’s right, the cover is upside down. The book begins on the other side of the book. I don’t know how I feel about this.
The month of February is almost over. Make sure you send your top 10, 9, 8 (or whatever) biblioblogs in to bibliobloggesrtop10 (a) yahoo.com.
Like any respectable graduate student, I’m a little light on the yen, which is why it frustrates me that my school charges me $5 to request a book through interlibrary loan. Additionally, they don’t have JSTOR (just EBSCO and a few other scattered collections), and articles cost $2 through interlibrary loan. Anyway, like any respectable grad student I’m also working to pad my bibliography for my thesis, and I’ve got a long list of books to buy or borrow through interlibrary loan. To facilitate that, I’m pruning the book shelves a bit and trying to sell some stuff. Some of it I never really used, some of it I’ve acquired in digital format, some of it was necessary for a class and that was it. The books are in great condition, save for a bit of highlighting in some of them (and the hardcover books don’t have dust jackets). I’m listing them for roughly 1/2 to 3/4 of what I originally paid for them, and I may be flexible on some of them.
Pierre Brodreuil and Dennis Pardee, A Manual of Ugaritic ($50 – four lines of highlighted text in foreward and erased pencil underlining in grammar section. Includes CD-ROM)
Richard Hess, Israelite Religions ($15 – scattered light highlighting [<20 pages] and occasional marginal note [<5])
Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia ($30 – light shelf wear on the cover, clean interior)
Liddell & Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon ($20 – clean interior [as far as I can tell] and light shelf wear)
Blass, Debrunner, and Funk, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament ($30 – scattered light highlighting [<10 pages])
Lee Martin McDonald, The Biblical Canon ($15 – scattered light highlighting [<10 pages])
Douglas Stuart, Old Testament Exegesis ($7.50 – like new, mine’s the third edition)
Sacred History Sacred Literature: Friedman Festschrift ($25 – some scattered underlining in pen [<10 pages])
The Context of Scripture, 3 vol set paperback ($125 – occasional highlighting [<20 pages total] and light shelf wear)
Koehler & Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, 2 vol set ($175 – clean interior [as far as I can tell] and light shelf wear)
Alfred Rahlfs, Septuaginta ($40 – clean interior and very light shelf wear)
Paul D. Wegner, A Student’s Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible ($10 – clean interior and some light shelf wear)
If anyone happens to be in need of anything on this list, shoot me an email (address is at the bottom of the page here) and we can arrange something.
James McGrath shares some reflections on that all-too-common trump card appealed to by fundamentalists: trusting the Bible vs. trusting human reason. He makes two good points, and I think the cartoon he shares is representative of pretty much all of fundamentalism (and not just Christian).
Joel Watts recently pointed out that he was able to take academic advantage of my attempts at self-promotion, which is always nice to hear. Joel has pointed out that I need a wish list, which is something I’ve thought about in the past. With this new theme I don’t have the sidebar, which is unfortunate, but I otherwise really enjoy the style of the theme and the space it gives me. I’ve put another page up next to the About Me page with my Amazon and PaperBackSwap wish lists, and I’ve updated both.
The British Academy describes its Proceedings publication as follows:
Since 1905 this series has provided a unique record of British scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, through its memoirs of the lives and achievements of deceased Fellows of the Academy. Since 1992 the series has included thematic volumes stemming from symposia specially convened to address particular subjects. And there have been annual volumes of lectures given at the Academy.
Volumes are published by Oxford University Press.
Biblical studies is only occasionally the topic of these symposia and lectures, and the 2007 volume, Understanding the History of Ancient Israel, is particularly fascinating. The entire volume can be downloaded here. Most of the papers from these volumes can be downloaded for free, so look around (here) for your favorite scholar/s.
I think this grammar is very helpful in that it provides transliterations and a very good glossary (both weaknesses in Schniedewind, even though he provides Hebrew cognates in his glossary). It’s also very thorough. However, a couple things have jumped out at me over the first few weeks of using it in a class. First, there is no table which transliterates the cuneiform signs. The student who wishes to make use of the cuneiform script on the hand-drawn copies of the tablets (pp. 98–156) must supplement their research with Schniedewind, Gordon, or Segert, or, as the foreword suggests, compare the facsimiles with the transcriptions in order to create their own chart. This seems like an unnecessary step. Most frustratingly, however, the texts for translation start with the long mythological texts and then progress toward the abecedaries at the very end, placing the texts in the opposite order that most (read: all) students are moving. This in and of itself is no big deal, except for the fact that the textual notes do not repeat themselves; so the further into the texts you get, the fewer notes you find, meaning the students starting off at the back of the book have few, if any, notes, while the students finishing up at the front have dozens. This kind of pedagogy seems counter-intuitive to me. Has anyone else had similar concerns, or found a better way to go through the book?
Chapter 3 in Dunn’s book is entitled “Monotheism, heavenly mediators and divine agents.” The purpose of this chapter is the “clarify how restricted was Israel’s worship.” In it he discusses the monotheism of Second Temple Judaism and other possible objects of Jewish worship, namely angels, the Spirit of God, the Word of God, the Wisdom of God, and exalted human beings. In the end, Dunn will conclude that the divine intermediary figures he discusses are actually literary conceptualizations of God’s own presence, and thus in line with his conception of monotheism.
The first section discusses the Shema and Second Temple Jewish monotheism. Dunn follows the consensus of the last two decades in treating Deuteronomy as not-yet-fully-monotheistic, while asserting Deutero-Isaiah’s fully developed monotheism. A comparison of the two verses he shares from each book, however, reveals something peculiar.
Deuteronomy:
4:35: “Yhwh is God; there is no other besides him”
4:39: “Yhwh is God in heaven above and on earth beneath; there is no other”
Isaiah:
45:21: “There is no other god besides me, a righteous God and a Saviour; there is no one besides me”
45:22: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other”
The problem is that there’s no difference in the rhetoric here (Robert Gnuse makes the same comparison on facing pages on pp. 206–07 here). These texts say the same thing, and yet for Dunn, Gnuse, and others, they represent opposing sides of a very significant threshold. Why is Deuteronomy not yet monotheistic in saying “there is no other,” and Deutero-Isaiah is the “clearest exponent” of monotheism in saying, “there is no other”? It’s because Deuteronomy elsewhere makes frequent mention of other gods (4:19; 17:3; 32:8, 43), and Deutero-Isaiah does not. Can we really conclude that “there is no other” evinces strict monotheism as long as it doesn’t accompany the mention of other deities? I don’t believe we can, and an increasing number of scholars agree (Barr, MacDonald, Heiser). Oddly, none of these scholars, or any others focused on monotheism in the Hebrew Bible (Smith, Gnuse, Kaufmann) are found in Dunn’s bibliography. In his discussion of monotheism he only cites scholars that are first focused on Christian monotheism (Bauckham, Hurtado, Stuckenbruck). While that’s the arena in which he’s operating, if he intends to discuss monotheism prior to the Hellenistic period I would expect him to cite the standard scholarship.
Moving on to the New Testament and Josephus, Dunn makes the point that whether or not Judaism in the Second Temple Period was monotheistic or monolatrous, what was most important was that “only one was worthy to be worshipped as God, the God of Israel” (65). 1 Cor 8:5–6 states that though there be many gods, for Christians there is one God, namely the Father. Here I would like to raise another issue I see with Dunn’s presentation of this material. He uses the word “God” here with the capital “G.” Elsewhere he is careful to note that a semantic difference exists between “god” and “God” (62, 91), and even between “the god” and “God” (51). He appears to understand “Israel’s god” as the semantic equivalent of “God” with the capital “G” (62; although on p. 66 he seems to fumble the distinction in his reference to Exod 4:16). Using “God” with the capital “G” presupposes monolatry at the very least, but with Dunn more likely presupposes strict monotheism, so to say only one deity was worthy to be worshipped as the one deity worthy to be worshipped is not helpful. His statement on p. 65 is tautologous. Were other beings worthy to be worshipped as “gods” (with a little “g”)? Dunn’s not saying. He can only conclude that any discussion of “gods” that lay outside the bounds of the monotheism affirmed by Philo and Josephus is hyperbolic or symbolic, such as the statement that Moses was to act as a god to Pharaoh. Dunn does not discuss the scholarship regarding Moses’ apotheosis on Sinai (pp. 72–73 here, for instance). Notice he also refuses to address problematic texts like 4Q246, which states that every nation will worship (yisgedun) the people of God, and Rev 3:9, which says the “synagogue of Satan” will worship (proskuneisousin) the Christians in Philadelphia.
In his next section, Dunn addresses the important issue of angels in Second Temple Judaism. Immediately he asserts that angels are extensions of the divine identity. Several pericopes seem to confuse the identity of the angel with that of God himself (Judg 13:22; Gen 16:13; 32:30; Judg 6:22–23). This indicates the angel participates in God’s identity and is more of a hypostasis or an avatar than a distinct entity. He states that we can reach two conclusions about this usage of the biblical angel (emphasis in original):
Perhaps we should say they were abandoning the simplicities of an anthropomorphism that could speak of God as such appearing to human sight (as in Gen. 2—3). But a more sophisticated way of putting it would be to say that by speaking thus of the angel of the Lord they had found a way of denoting the reality of divine presence in such theophanic encounters without diminishing the holy otherness of Yahweh. The angel of the Lord in such stories was a way of speaking of God’s immanence without detracting from his transcendence. The angel of God both was God and was not God.
This reading follows a fairly standard understanding of these texts (espoused also by Friedman, Gieschen, and Hurtado), but it ignores a critical aspect of the text’s interpretation, and that is its textual stability. The relevant pericopes show a bit of confusion in the versions. Judg 6:11–23 describes Gideon’s interlocutor as an “angel of Yhwh/God” (11, 12, 20, 21, 22) and as “Yhwh” (14, 16), but the Septuagint has “angel of Yhwh” throughout. Josephus describes him as a phantom in the form of a young man. When Moses speaks with Yhwh in the burning bush, the pericope is prefaced in Exod 3:2 with “an angel of Yhwh appeared to him in a blazing fire.” It is God himself who speaks in the rest of the story. In the Vulgate, however, verse 2 only mentions Yhwh. Where Yhwh comes to kill Moses in Exod 4:24, the Septuagint, Jubilees, and some Rabbinic material call him an “angel of Yhwh.” Where God comes to visit Baalam in the night in Num 22 and 23, the Samaritan Pentateuch interpolates “angel” in 22:9 and 23:4 to insist it is the “angel of God” visiting him. In the Targums “angel” frequently appears where the Hebrew has God himself speaking to humanity, appearing to humanity, or operating in moral gray areas.
We see in later versions the tendency to interpolate the “angel” where it protects God’s transcendence and invisibility. This is what’s taking place in the stories Dunn cites (that earlier editors were above the textual manipulations of later editors is ludicrous). In most of the pericopes discussed above the humans at some point fear that they will die because of their theophany (Gen 16:13; 32:30Judg 6:22–23; 13:22). This is a clear allusion to Exod 33:20, but that text does not prohibit seeing an angel, it prohibits seeing God himself, and specifically his face (cf. LXX Exod 33:20). The people in these narratives were originally said to have seen God himself. The “angel” was added later when it became unacceptable for God to personally visit humanity (during the exile and after). Dunn’s reading accepts the final form of the text without argument. His interpretation is artificial. Now, during the first century CE these texts certainly appeared in much the same way we have them now, so his reading works for this time period, but he certainly shows no sign that he is aware of this issue, and his attempt to read this anti-anthropomorphism into the texts’ original composition is misguided (see here for an argument that God’s total incorporeality wasn’t asserted until the middle ages). His reference to the “simplicities” of such an anthropomorphism as being confined to the first chapters of Genesis is astonishingly myopic. Even if we omit the texts above, Abraham fed God; Jacob wrestled with God; God stood before Moses in Exod 17:6, spoke with him “face to face,” and appeared to the elders of Israel on Sinai; Ezekiel saw him in vision, as did Isaiah, Micaiah, and even Stephen. Dunn’s position is blatantly modern.
His discussion moves on to mysticism in Second Temple Judaism, but his section avoids discussing the possibility that angels were worshipped or were made the objects of cultic activity somewhere in Second Temple Judaism. This is peculiar considering the point of the chapter is to “clarify how restricted was Israel’s worship” (60). The other sections directly address whether or not the spirit, word, or wisdom of God were worshipped, and yet here it is omitted (there is only an oblique reference to the fact that apocalypses characteristically have angels warn people about worshipping them). Stuckenbruck’s Angel Veneration and Christology is cited in this section (71, n. 33), but no page numbers are given, and it is not cited in relation to anything involving angel veneration. Certainly he’s aware of the debate (he cited one of the debate’s landmark publications), and it would be quite simple for him to just accept Stuckenbruck’s conclusions without fully engaging his antagonists, but he doesn’t even do that. He just ignores the question.
In the next section, focused on the spirit, wisdom, and word of God, worship is central to the discussion. As with his section on angels, Dunn’s primary thesis is that these entities were not conceived of as distinct from God’s identity, but rather as literary extensions of it. I believe he’s correct in most of his analysis, but one cannot help but notice the contrast in this section’s treatment of worship and the lack thereof in the previous section. Note conclusions from each of the three subsections: “Notably, we do not find any hint that worship was offered to the Spirit of God” (74, emphasis in original) “Perhaps most significantly of all, we know of no cult of Wisdom within Israel” (78). “The thought of worshipping the Logos as a divine being other than God would never have entered Philo’s head” (84; note the discussion continues to move outside the New Testament evidence where Dunn’s argument has too little data within it).
The final section before this chapter’s conclusion discusses the possible worship of exalted human beings. Dunn reviews the evidence associated with Moses, Elijah, and Enoch. All three have rich traditions associated with their ascents to heaven. In each case these humans are recognized as having been raised to some level of divinity, but, again, there is no sign they were worshipped. Dunn discusses 2 Peter 1:4 and notion of theosis, mentioning that this is a significant doctrine within Orthodox Christianity. Here, again, Dunn exposes his Protestant bias by flippantly dismissing the legitimacy of theosis, asserting,
No doubt this can be attributed to the influence of Greek thought, particularly the Platonic idea that there is a spiritual part of humanity that really belongs to the heavenly worlds and that can recover its true, godlike nature. Such influence is evidence already in Second Temple Jewish literature. So it is hardly surprising to find it in the New Testament, even though 2 Peter 1:4 is an isolated example.
Dunn again ignores Revelation, which not only states that the Philadelphians will be worshipped, but that he who overcomes will sit down on Christ’s throne as Christ is sat down on the Father’s throne. Numerous early Church fathers also favorably address the notion of divinization (see here for one Catholic blogger’s collection of these quotes). The dismissal of theosis on the grounds that it derives from Platonism is also rather perplexing given the fact that Dunn’s anti-anthropomorphism is almost entirely derivative of Platonism, as is much of his Trinitarian doctrine.
Dunn’s conclusion in this chapter reveal even more of his biases. His penultimate paragraph reads as follows:
In no case was the thought of worshipping other than God entertained. Or, to be more precise, when the thought did arise (worshipping a great angel?) it was quickly squashed. We can see, then, that for all that Second Temple Judaism had already created an atmosphere in which the question of Jesus being worshipped could arise, and arise as a natural corollary to the status attributed to him, it had provided no precedent to which the first Christians could appeal.
Dunn is arguing here that Jesus occupied an entirely unique and new station within Judaism. There was no precedent for his worship. I’m reminded of Jonathan Z. Smith’s book, Drudgery Divine, which discusses the historical view of Christianity as originally “unique,” but very quickly corrupted by “paganism.” Smith attributes this view to a Protestant bias and the apologetic need to reject any degree of outside influence on the development of Christianity. Dunn’s volume increasingly seems to me to be aligning with this position.
Göttingen University is hosting a one week “summer school” (June 27–July 1) focused on LXX 2 Sam 11–12 (the Bathsheba Narrative). Kristin De Troyer, of St. Andrews, will direct the study. The flyer is here. The cost of the program is €350, and travel and most dining costs are not included.
According to Alexa, my blog is ranked #1,559 in Knoxville, Tennessee. For Jim West and James McGrath it’s New Zealand. Joel’s blog is ranked #249 in Charleston-Huntington, West Virginia. Where is your blog ranked the highest?
