Introduction to The Five Books of Moses by Robert Alter – 2

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[If you haven’t read it, here’s the link to Part 1:      

• MUST OWN: Robert Alter – The Five Books of Moses 

We are featuring excerpts from the INTRODUCTION of the book to whet your appetite, with the intention of encouraging you to add this excellent translation of TORAH to your library section on biblical studies.   Reformatted for this post and sub-titles added.—Admin1.]

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INTRODUCTION

I. APPROACHING THE FIVE BOOKS

The rabbinic sage Resh Lakish once wondered why the Hebrew text in Genesis used a seemingly superfluous definite article in the phrase—

“And it was evening and it was morning, the sixth day.” (The definite article is not used for the preceding five days.)

He took this to be a hidden reference to the sixth day of the month of Sivan, when according to tradition the Torah was given to Israel:

—“to teach us that the Holy One made a condition with all created things, saying to them, ‘If Israel accepts the Torah, you will continue to exist. If not, I shall return you to welter and waste’”

(Babylonian Talmud: Shabbat 88A).

This is surely an extraordinary notion to entertain about the cosmic status of a book, imagining that the very existence of the world depends on it.  Jewish tradition abounds in such extravagant celebrations of the supreme importance of this book.

• What is it about this text that led to such a vision of its unique standing?
• Are the five literary units it comprises in fact one book or five?
• How were they brought together?
• What are we to call them?

Let us begin with the question of the name for the whole. The fluctuations of the title reflect something of the oscillation of the text itself between multiplicity and unity.

• The Five Books of Moses does not translate any of the circulating Hebrew titles, though it does register the traditional attribution of authorship to Moses.
• The more compact English title, the Pentateuch, derives from a Greek equivalent for one popular Hebrew designation, the Humash.*
• Both names simply mean the Five Books (though “book” element is merely implied in the Hebrew term).
• “Pentateuch” was once the prevalent English title but has come to enjoy less currency, perhaps because faintly forbidding polysyllabic Greek terms are now less in favor. It does sound a little ponderous to the contemporary ear, and on those grounds it has not been adopted for this volume.
• The fuller Hebrew designation is Hamishah humshey torah, literally, the five fifths of the Torah. More simply, these five books are very often referred to in Hebrew and by Jews using other languages as the Torah.

Torah means “teaching,”

or in biblical contexts involving specific laws, something like “regulation” or “protocol,”

i.e., that which is to be taught as proper procedure for a given topic.

Of the Five Books, it is Deuteronomy that most often uses the term torah, sometimes joining it with sefer, “book” (as in “this book of teaching”), so that the reference widens at points from a specific teaching to all of Deuteronomy as a book.  After Deuteronomy was brought together editorially with the four previous books, the designation Torah came to be extended to all five.

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In the traditional Hebrew division, the Torah then constituted the first, foundational unit of the three large units that make up the Hebrew Bible, which is called acronymically the Tanakh—that is,

• Torah,
• Nevi’im* (the Prophets, Former and Latter), and
• Ketuvim (the Writings, which is to say, everything else).

Scholarship for more than two centuries has agreed that the Five Books are drawn together from different literary sources, though there have been shifting debates about the particular identification of sources in the text and fierce differences of opinion about the dating of the sundry sources.  

[Some theories about when it was written.]

• Some extremists in recent decades have contended that the entire Torah was composed in the Persian period, beginning the late sixth century B.C.E., or even later, in Hellenistic times, but there is abundant evidence that argues against that view.
• Perhaps the most decisive consideration is that the Hebrew language visibly evolves over the nine centuries of biblical literary activity, with many demonstrable differences between the language current in the First Commonwealth—approximately 1000 B.C.E. to 586 B.C.E.—and the language as it was written in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. There is very little in the Hebrew of the Torah that could have been written in this later era. (Ronald Hendel provides a concise and trenchant marshaling of the linguistic evidence against late dating in the appendix to his Remembering Abraham.)
• A recent revisionist approach, purportedly based on archeological evidence, places the composition of our texts as well as most of the Former Prophets in the seventh century B.C.E., during the reign of King Josiah, the period when, according to scholarly consensus, most of Deuteronomy was written. This contention, however, flatly ignores the philological evidence that Deuteronomy was responding to, and revising, a long-standing written legal tradition, and that the editors of the so-called Deuteronomistic History (the national chronicle that runs from Deuteronomy to the end of 2 Kings) were manifestly incorporating much older texts often strikingly different from their own writing both in style and in outlook.
• The standard account offered by modern scholars of the Torah identifies four principal literary strands (together with a number of lesser ones):

• J, the Yahwistic strand (the divine name Yahweh is spelled with a J in German);
• E, the Elohistic strand;
• P, the Priestly strand; and
• D, for Deuteronomy.

The first three are unevenly intertwined through Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers;

• P predominates in Leviticus;
• and all of Deuteronomy is D.
• J and E are so designated because of the name for the deity each characteristically uses, respectively, Yahweh and Elohim. J is sometimes thought to be the oldest of these strands, though J and E might have been approximately contemporary, the former a product of the southern kingdom of Judea, the latter deriving from literary activity in the northern kingdom of Israel.
• The composition of J and E, or at least of J, was once often dated to the tenth century B.C.E., perhaps even to the time of Solomon, and this is a view that still cannot be entirely dismissed. It is more common now, however, to put both a little later, perhaps in the ninth or eight century.
• P,  like everything else a bone of contention, seems to be both relatively early and late: some of it may have been written as early as the eight century B.C.E., though the principal stratum is in all likelihood a product of the sixth century B.C.E., when these same Priestly writers were also drawing together editorially all the previous sources with their own work into a single text.
• Deuteronomy, or at any rate the bulk of Deuteronomy, is usually identified with the book purportedly discovered during the Temple renovations in the reign of Josiah in 621 B.C.E. The book presumably would have been written quite close to that date, though it might conceivably have utilized some literary materials going back as far as a century, to

These sundry literary sources were probably edited and fashioned into a single book—the first properly canonical book with binding authority on the national

community—sometime in the sixth century B.C.E., in the Babylonian exile. It has been proposed—not without challenge—that Ezra the Scribe, who instituted public readings of the Torah for the Judeans returned from the Babylonian exile, perhaps soon after 458 B.C.E., may have overseen the final redaction of the Torah. The finished product, as one might expect, exhibits a good many duplications, contradictions, and inconsistencies, which have been abundantly analyzed by modern scholarship. But it

also possesses a degree of cohesiveness as a book, and I would like to sketch out here the general literary design, which will then receive more specific attention in the commentary and in the introductions to the individual books.

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COMMENT ON  GENESIS

• Genesis is the only one of the Five Books that is more or less continuous narrative from beginning to end, the only recurrent but limited exception being the genealogies (the “begats”), which, as I shall try to indicate in the commentary, have a function a structural and thematic markers. If this were the work of a single writer, one would say he begins at the top of his form, not slowly and circuitously, like the late Henry James, but with a tour de force, like Proust in the initial pages of In Search of Lost Time. 

• Genesis opens with a narrative of origins—Creation and the Garden Story—that is compelling in its archetypal character, its adaptation of myth to monotheistic ends, and that has set the terms, not scientifically but symbolically, for much of the way we have thought about human nature and culture ever since. 

• This legendary sequence, which moves from Eden at the beginning to the Tower of Babel in chapter 11, is followed by a different kind of narrative in the Patriarchal Tales that begin with Abraham in chapter 12.  Nowhere else in ancient literature have the quirkiness and unpredictability of individual character and the frictions and tensions of family life—sibling rivalry, the jealousy of co-wives, the extravagance of parental favoritism—been registered with such subtlety and insight.

• These stories were of course written more than half a millennium after the time of the purported events, and many details reflect political considerations of a later era involving power relations among the tribes and Israel’s posture toward neighboring peoples. Yet the literary miracle of the stories is that the chief personages are nevertheless imagined with remarkable integrity and complexity as individual characters—
  • Tamar fiercely resolved to take into her own hands her personal cause of justice;
  • Jacob, relentlessly calculating yet also imprudently loving, who as an old man becomes a histrionic, tragically weakened father of the clan;
  • Joseph, evolving from spoiled brat to mature and shrewd administrator;
  • Judah, at fist impetuous, in the end, penitent and lovingly devoted to his father in all his weaknesses.
  • Only the David story would equal the Patriarchal Tales in psychological insight and in the representation of character growing and changing through long stretches of life-experience.

• Genesis ends with the death of Joseph, and Exodus begins with an Egyptians king who “knew not Joseph” and with a flurry of allusions to early Genesis, so the two are clearly meant to be read in succession as a continuous narrative. The focus of the narrative, however, shifts from the emotionally fraught lives of the founding fathers and mothers to the story of the origins of the nation. The account of the enslavement in Egypt, the liberation from slavery through God’s great signs and wonders wrought against Egypt, and the march of the people led by Moses to the foot of Mount Sinai, is a kind of national epic, narrated in a cadenced prose, punctuated with refrain-like rhetorical flourishes, deploying a grand sweeping style only occasionally evidenced in Genesis. This imposing narrative  has been shaped to show forth God’s overwhelming power in history, exerted against one of the great ancient kingdoms, and the forging of the nation through a spectacular chain of divine interventions that culminates in the spectacle of the revelation on the mountain of God’s imperatives to Israel.

COMMENT ON EXODUS

After the Sinai epiphany, Exodus takes a turn that may seem perplexing to modern readers. Narrative is dropped—to return briefly with the arresting episode of the Golden Calf in chapters 32-34—and is replaced first by the articulation of a code of civil and criminal law and then by elaborate instructions for the erection of that Tabernacle that will be implemented in the closing chapters of the book with word-for-

word repetition.  

Narrative continues to be set aside for almost all of the next book, Leviticus, which is devoted to a complex body of legal injunctions, mainly but not exclusively cultic. Structurally, Leviticus is the capstone of the Five Books, balancing Genesis and Exodus on one side and Numbers and Deuteronomy on the other. It will strike many as odd sort of capstone, given its concentration on sacrificial procedure, and one is inclined to suspect that the Priestly editors of the Torah are furthering the

interests of their own guild in the central placement of this book.

It should be said, however, that if these Five Books are chiefly an account of the origins and definition of the nation from its first forebears who accepted a covenant with God to the moment when the people stands on the brink of entering the Promised Land, the ancient writers conceived three major constituents of national identity and cohesion.

The first, and the one that we can most readily understand, is the trajectory of the collective and of its principal figures through the medium of history. In the tracing of this trajectory, the narrative shows us

• how historical events shape the people,
• how the people achieves a sense of its identity and purpose through the pressure of events.

This, in essence, is the grand narrative arc from Genesis 12 to Exodus 20.  But the biblical writers assumed that Israel’s covenant with God had to be realized through —

• institutional arrangements as well as
• through historical acts;

—-and so the account of national origins and destiny required a body of cultic regulations, in which the people’s relationship with God would be enacted regularly, repeatedly, through ritual, and a body of general law governing persons, property, acts of violence of man against man, social obligations, and ethical behavior.  

Although it is not clear whether all of these laws were actually implemented in ancient Israel, the effect of the lengthy legal passages, both cultic and civil or criminal, is to bridge the distance of the epic illud tempus, the time-back- when, of the narrative and bring the text into the institutional present of its audience.

COMMENT ON NUMBERS

The Book of Numbers begins with a long roll call of the tribes, what might be regarded as a statistically buttressed realization of the imposing extent of the Israelite hosts in the wilderness before the conquest of the land.  After some intervening chapters of cultic and other laws, we at last return, with a few further interruptions, to narrative—a sequence of episodes in which the recalcitrant Israelites “murmur” against Moses and Aaron, the story of the twelve spies with its disastrous outcome, and, late in the book, a series of encounters between Israel and various hostile

peoples of the trans-Jordan region that block their approach to Canaan. The excitements, the grave dangers, and the grand hopes of swimming in the tide of history are all powerfully at play here, and these are vividly brought forth in the evocative poetry of Balaam’s oracles that take up chapters 23 and 24.

COMMENT ON DEUTERONOMY

Although Deuteronomy, as we have already noted, was originally composed quite independently of the preceding four books and actually before a good many of the Priestly passages they contain were even written, in the place it has been given in the process of redaction, it comes to serve as a grand summary of the themes and story we have read up to this point. To be sure, this last book was intended as a fundamental revision of much earlier law, with the emphasis on one exclusive national sanctuary the principal item of revision. Nevertheless, read in sequence with the other four books, it comes across as a strong recapitulation and conclusion.

Moses, standing across the Jordan from the land he will never enter and on the verge of his own death, speaks the message of the book as a long valedictory address or, perhaps more precisely, a series of addresses. He picks up, in first-person singular or plural report, some of the principal narrative elements of the preceding three books (the Genesis stories are not much involved), usually abridging them, sometimes subjecting them to revision according to the overall ideological aims of Deuteronomy.  

Because these speeches are represented as spoken words addressed to the people as audience, rhetoric is spectacularly prominent here in ways that have no counterparts in the first four books with their narrative and legal interests. The rhetoric itself makes this appropriate as a concluding book:  after the narrative and the legislation of Genesis through Numbers, Moses on the rostrum in trans-Jordan delivers a tremendous peroration in which all the themes of liberation, revelation, and theological and ethical imperative of the previous books are deeply impressed on the imagination.

All that I have said here of course does not constitute a claim that the Five Books from—

 “When God began to create…” to

“before the eyes of all Israel”

—form one continuous text. The Torah is manifestly a composite construction, but there is abundant evidence throughout the Hebrew Bible that composite work was fundamental to the very conception of what literature was, that a process akin to collage was assumed to be one of the chief ways in which literary texts were put together.  What we have, then, in the Five Books is a work assembled by many hands, reflecting several different viewpoints, and representing literary activity that spanned several centuries. The redacted whole nevertheless creates some sense of continuity and development, and it allows itself to be read as a forward-moving process through time and theme from book to book, yielding an overarching literary structure we can call, in the singular version of the title, the Torah.

The Torah exhibits seams, fissures, and inner tensions that cannot be ignored, but it has also been artfully assembled through the ancient editorial process to cohere strongly as the foundational text of Israelite life and the cornerstone of the biblical canon.