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2. A number of recent works have especially helped me in writing this chapter, including Olyan (2005) and the other essays contained in Brakke et al. (2005), the various contributions in Lipschits et al. (2011), and most recently the monograph of Susan Niditch (2015).
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3. On this much researched question, see in particular Fishbane (1985), 335–50; Kaminsky (1995); Levinson (2010), 57–88.
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4. In discussing the case of Achan, Robert Di Vito contrasts the sense of self it implies with our own, modern one: “Over against the relative atomism, self-sufficiency, and disengagement of the modern self—which demands recognition as an individual even in the context of family—the ancient Israelite stands at the center of ever-widening circles of relation defined by kinship, beginning with the ‘family’ . . . Personally, socially, economically, and legally the individual Israelite was embedded in the family and enmeshed in obligations of kinship extending even beyond the father’s household”: Di Vito (1999), 221, 224.
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5. Note that Achan is called Achor in the Septuagint and 1 Chron 2:7. But in biblical name etymologies, a similarity of two consonants is in any case often deemed sufficient. See Zakovitch (1980).
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6. This identification of the immediate, patriarchal family as the significant unit may have found architectural expression in the early Israelite hilltop settlements in Canaan; see Stager (1985).
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7. I have argued elsewhere that this tale was originally set in the period of the Judges and transferred from there to Genesis in order to account for the (otherwise unjustified) charge in Gen 49:5–7 that Simeon and Levi had used their “tools of violence” to murder. See Kugel (2007a), 169–75.
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8. David Lambert has argued that such gestures are significantly not those of “repentance,” a later phenomenon; see Lambert (2016a).
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9. See further 2 Kgs 9:23–26 and Weinfeld (1972), 318. For a counterargument, Levinson (2010), 74, n. 19.
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10. Two further examples: the slaughter of all of Nob (1 Sam 22:19) and that of Saul’s sons (2 Sam 21:7–9). See the overall discussions in: Robinson (1964), 25–44; Wolff (1974); Rogerson (1989). Note also Mauss (1985).
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11. Indeed, some scholars have suggested that “those who hate Me” in this passage may be a later qualification of an originally simpler assertion that God in general punishes to the third and fourth generations. See Weinfeld (1972), 318.
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12. Fishbane (1985), 342–50, goes on to examine the various biblical instances of rewordings and modifications of this passage intended to soften the promised punishment. These are numerous: see in particular Num 14:18; Jer 18:7–8; Joel 2:12–14; Jonah 3:9; Mic 7:18–20; and various psalms (though among those listed by Fishbane, only Pss 78:38, 86:5, 99:8, 111:1, and 145:8–9, seem relevant to the afterlife of Exod 34:6–7). To these might be added Pss 86:15, 103:7–10, 112:4, as well as Neh 9:17, 31; and 2 Chr 30:9. In addition, notice should be taken of the rich continuation of this theme in various biblical apocrypha and pseudepigrapha: see Kugel (1998a), 723–27, 739–41, to which should now be added 4Q504 Words of the Luminaries frag 6:10–14.
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13. Note that this verse is cited in 2 Kgs 14:6: “But he [Amaziah] did not put to death the children of the assassins, in accordance with what is written in the Torah of Moses, where the LORD commanded, ‘Fathers shall not be put to death for sons, nor sons be put to death for fathers; but a person shall be put to death only for his own offense.’”
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14. Cf. Jer 31:29–30: “In that time, people will no longer say, ‘The fathers ate unripe grapes, but it is the children’s teeth that ache.’ Because each person will die for his own sin: anyone who eats unripe grapes will have aching teeth.” Many scholars see this as a redactional addition.
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15. Again, see Lambert (2016a), 85–89.
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16. See further Ezek 33:12–20.
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17. See Mauss (1985), 3. (Note that his use of “sense of self” is quite different from that of the present study—he uses this phrase to refer to a universal and unchanging entity, otherwise called the moi in his taxonomy.)
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18. As previously noted, this subject, our subject, is sometimes treated under the rubric of the “anthropology” of ancient Israel, as, for example, Di Vito’s study (chapter 3, note 18). But sometimes this same term is used to designate the academic study of peoples and cultures, past and present. Thus, for example, H. W. Wolff’s classic study (Wolff 1974) has almost nothing to say about our subject, nor, for that matter, does Rogerson (1989), excellent as these works may be. A useful attempt at the taxonomy of self-reflection is Carasik (2006), an important book for our subject in general, even though I hope I have disproved the author’s stated premise that the human mind is fundamentally the same in all human populations (p. 9, citing D. E. Brown [1991]), leading to a chronological blurring of the material he has assembled. Whatever one might conclude about the “human mind,” the sense of self has certainly changed within the biblical period.
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19. Kugel (2007a), 492. An excellent sorting of the literary and historical reality: Halpern (2001).
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20. Robert Di Vito (1999) dismisses from the Bible as a whole any consideration of a person’s “inner depths” (231–34), and he is certainly right about such early texts, “where identity is given with one’s social role and the status it offers, whether one is a lay person or a cleric, a master or a slave, rich or poor. In a way foreign to modernity, one simply is one’s social role in the OT.” But my point here is precisely that this seems to have changed as time went on through the Second Temple period.
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21. Cf. R. Graves (1925).
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22. The overlapping vocabulary of the two itself seems to argue for direct influence; see B. Sommer (1998).
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23. Or even: the way that later writers conceived of these prophets and their self-presentation.
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24. Two recent overviews: S. Weeks (2010), 9–47, and the recent introduction and selected translations in Shupak (2016), esp. 30–51. See also Kugel (1997a).
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25. I mean by this the speakers of the various subsections of the biblical book of Proverbs. Nonetheless, Job’s starting point is, in a broader perspective, hardly unique: he seems to be connected to the ancient Mesopotamian “righteous sufferer,” a figure going back to the Sumerian composition entitled “Man and His God,” whose connection to Job was, I believe, first argued by S. N. Kramer in 1954; see Kramer (1959), 114–18. A bit more convincingly, the Akkadian poem Ludlul bēl nēmeqi (“I will praise the lord of wisdom”) has been compared to Job, along with the “Babylonian Theodicy.” For translations: “Poem of the Righteous Sufferer with His God” in Foster (1995), 305–25; W. G. Lambert (1996), 63–89. The matter of literary genre has been taken up (and sometimes questioned) by subsequent scholars; note in particular Jacob Klein’s recent study (Klein 2006), 123–44. For all Job’s possible generic links to these earlier compositions, he is nearly unique in the Israelite context, though Klein has suggested that the Mesopotamian sufferer (Akk. eṭlu) is actually rather similar to the gever who is the speaker of Lamentations 3. See further Kugel (2015b).
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26. See on this G. Anderson (1991), esp. 84–87; Olyan (2004); D. Lambert (2015).
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27. Among others, Davila (1990).
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28. Further arguments for this dating: Kugel (1989).
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29. Ullendorf (1962).
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30. Worthy of mention here is Machinist (1995). P. Machinist seeks to argue that Koheleth’s ideas are “the product of systematic, consc
ious, abstract reasoning” (167): “What is significant in Qohelet is not simply the concern with the subject matter on which human reason focuses and the conclusions which it yields, but an awareness of, a reflection on, the reasoning process itself” (173). I believe this is slightly off the mark, insofar as it fails to mention the how of Koheleth’s reasoning. His conclusions arise out of a sustained contemplation of his own life, that is, out of his own intellectual autobiography: “First I thought this, then I realized this, after that this thought occurred to me,” and so forth. This is the book’s most striking feature. Moreover, I believe that Machinist’s assessment of the book as a “still early, incomplete exposure to Greek tradition” would require some evidence of this exposure to escape the circularity of its claim.
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31. Longman (1990).
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32. Further: Kugel (1999a) and (2007a), 511–14. On the root sh-b-ḥ in “I rate the dead,” see Kugel (1999a), 339–40.
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33. On the translation “giving birth” rather than “to be born,” see Kugel (1999a), 312–13.
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34. It may be that this is part of an overall effort on the part of Jubilees’ author to fill out the personality and role of various women; see on this Halpern-Amaru (1999); also Van der Horst (1998), 73–92; Rosen-Zvi (2006). (He notes on p. 88, however, that “we cannot exclude the possibility of two competing ideologies combined here”; no, indeed.) See more generally, William Loader’s ongoing study of attitudes toward sexuality in Second Temple writings, including Jubilees: Loader (2007). A review essay by Endres (2015) refers to “the centrality of Rebekah in Jubilees.”
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35. Note that Jubilees devotes almost as little to Rebekah’s reaction to the events of Gen 29 as the original Genesis narrative. But on the eve of her death, we see a real person.
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36. Kugel (2007a), 143–46.
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37. On this translation: Kugel (1998a), 323.
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38. On this sentence, see Kugel (2010d). Note also that “memorial” here corresponds to Heb zekher, that is, “name.”
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39. On this motif of Potiphar’s wife having her “own little private dungeon in the basement,” see Kugel (1990a), 51–55.
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40. This subject is explored in a series of studies by Louis Feldman, some of which are contained in Feldman (1998a) and (1998b). The great theme of both is indeed the Hellenization of biblical figures, though both books sometimes skip the role of traditional exegetical motifs in shaping Josephus’s picture of his heroes and heroines.
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15. HUMANS IN SEARCH
1. These overlap to some extent with the category of “learned psalmody,” a term introduced by Gunkel’s student Sigmund Mowinckel; see Mowinckel (1962), 104–25.
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2. Individual lexical items have been thoroughly investigated by Avi Hurvitz (1972), 70–107.
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3. In addition, it should be mentioned that this psalm is composed as an alphabetical acrostic, that is, each new line begins with the letter of the alphabet following the first letter of the previous verse. Alphabetical acrostics could, and no doubt were, composed in various periods and for a number of different purposes, but one particular use stands out: arranging successive lines in alphabetical order could help people learn, and then remember, the composition by heart. To accomplish such a purpose, however, the person involved would have to first be able to recite the letters of the alphabet in order; while we take this simple ability for granted, in times when reading and writing were still specialized skills, an alphabetical acrostic could be of little help to the unlearned. True, it has become a mantra of modern scholarship that this mnemonic purpose is to be judged insignificant or even discounted entirely, but this conclusion seems to me highly unlikely (especially when put forward by scholars who, in my own unofficial survey, have never undertaken to learn a single psalm in Hebrew by heart). In any case, few would argue that the four alphabetical acrostics of Lamentations are pre-exilic, since they all seem to be about the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and thus belong, at the earliest, to the first half of the sixth century BCE. Various lexical items in the alphabetical Prov 30:10–31 point to a late date: shalal in the sense of “wealth,” ṭeref in the sense of “food” (also found in another alphabetical composition, Ps 111:5 and Ps 119). See Hurvitz (1972), 130–52.
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4. In his only reference to Ps 145, S. Mowinckel fixed on v. 13, asserting that “the idea of His ‘eternal kingdom’ has more of the character of a rationalized general tenet”: Mowinckel (1962), 1:187.
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5. Not very long after, laus perennis did indeed become a form of piety, in keeping with the New Testament urging, “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17).
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6. The great Psalms classifier Hermann Gunkel listed Psalm 145 along with twenty-five other psalms as belonging to the literary genre (Gattung) of “hymn,” but within this overall category, the placeless and occasionless psalms seem to constitute a separate (and very small) subcategory.
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7. Among the canonical psalms mentioned by Gunkel, there are, apart from lexical and syntactic indications, other signs of lateness: note that Ps 103:7 asserts that God “made known His ways to Moses”; God is said to be “gracious and merciful” in Ps 111:4 as in 145:8, both echoing Exod 34:6 while changing the word order; see on this Hurvitz (1972), 104–6; also Fishbane (1985) as well as the divine near-omnipresence found in Ps 139.
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8. See Niditch (2010). For a broad survey of motives and motifs: A. Y. Collins (2012), 553–72.
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9. To be sure, Isa 6 contains a description of the heavenly throne, but it gives no account of how Isaiah saw it or of any “tour of heaven,” such as the ones mentioned below. The same is true of Micaiah’s vision in 1 Kgs 22:19–23. Note that “one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven” is presented to God in Dan 7:11–14, but this figure is certainly a supernatural being.
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10. The subject has been examined several times since the influential essay of W. Bossuet, “Die Himmelsreise der Seele,” ARW 4 (1901), 136–69, 229–73. See Himmelfarb (1993), Niditch (2010).
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11. The scriptural warrant for this heavenly ascent is found in Mal 2:5–8. See further: Kugel (1993). The urtext of this section is the Aramaic Levi Document (ALD), which, in somewhat fragmentary form, seems to have included an account of Levi’s ascent: “Then I was shown visions [. . .] in the vision of visions, and I saw the heaven[s . . .] beneath me, high until it reached the heaven[s . . . opened] the gates of heaven to me, and an angel [. . .] (4:4–6)” See further, Greenfield, Stone, and Eshel (2004), 66. The ALD, I believe, is actually a composite text commissioned by the Hasmonean priests to legitimate their claims to political and spiritual leadership of Judah; the composite was basically made of two separate pieces of writing, “Levi’s Apocalypse” (consisting of T Levi 2:3–5:3) and “Levi’s Priestly Initiation” (corresponding to T Levi chap. 8–9). See Kugel (2006a), 115–68.
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12. Translation here follows the version in Feldman et al. (2013), 1725.
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13. The heavenly temple may, or may not, be related to the earthly temple in Jerusalem. Hindy Najman has insightfully distinguished four sorts of relationships between the earthly and heavenly shrines, as follows: (1) the earthly temple is said to represent the entire cosmos, while its Holy of Holies represents the heavens themselves or some feature thereof, or an idea of the cosmos or the heavens (she identifies this first category in the writings of Philo and Josephus); (2) the earthly temple corresponds to a heavenly temple in which angels serve before God (a rabbinic conception); (3) those who participate in the earthly temple service or in prayer can, under certain conditions, participate in the angel
ic service in the heavenly temple, which is conceived to be in operation in the skies (also found in rabbinic sources and underlying such Qumran texts as the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, as well as the Jewish Kedushah and the Christian Trisagion/Tersanctus); (4) a heavenly temple, prepared before creation in Eden, will ultimately be revealed on earth: “This can be described as an edenic and paradigm of the ultimate heavenly temple” (found in “Testament of Levi,” 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, NT book of Revelation and Hebrews, etc.). Further: Najman (2014), esp. 116–23; Himmelfarb (1993).
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14. Kugel (2015a).
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15. Second Temple writers came to include Moses among those who ascended to heaven: see Kugel (1998a), 635–36. Note that some exegetes associated the tower of Babel with an attempt to invade heaven: ibid., pp. 228–29, 238–40.
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16. See A. Y. Collins (2012).
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17. I hesitate to use the word “mysterious,” since it might seem to imply a close proximity to the “mystery religions” in the Greco-Roman orbit. These, however, were generally of a different character, though I would not deny the possibility, or even probability, of some crossover or influence. In general, however, the mustērion of Greco-Roman religions concerned religious ritual and esoteric practices shared by their members, who were often sworn to secrecy. The heavenly ascents discussed above were, beyond their particulars, an assertion that God is indeed enthroned in heaven and that He has in fact been approached by this or that biblical hero.
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18. For Isaiah, see this chap., n. 9. There are a few partial exceptions—Balaam has to walk an apparently short distance away from Balak’s altar in order to meet God (Num 23:3, etc.); Ezekiel is dragged from place to place, and so forth—but in general, prophetic revelations come to pre-exilic prophets where they are.
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19. Najman (2014), 133.
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20. But see Kugel (1999a), 271–78, and (2007a), 514–17.
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16. OUTSIDE THE TEMPLE
The Great Shift Page 54