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Testament—The
Formation of the Jewish Bible
The initial segment talks about the importance of the Babylonian Exile, which had a profound effect on the Jews—drove them to figure out what went wrong, but also struggle to retain their identity. In 586 BCE, Solomon’s temple and the Jewish kingdom were destroyed, and King Zedekiah and his priests and court were dragged in chains to Babylon. At that point the history of Israel had come to a full stop—become a finite thing. As the Jews in Babylon struggled to retain a Jewish identity, they wrote history in the light of their experience, and especially in light of their convictions about their covenant (when they had kept it, things had gone well, but when they hadn’t….). He compares a poem by W.H. Auden with Psalm 137: both written by exiles, both marked by nostalgia, but we know very little about the psalm writer’s context.
Mightier Than the Sword (2nd cassette).
Begins with a description of the requirements for a synagogue Torah scroll (must be written on parchment made from skins of animals fit for food, the parchment must be lined, the ink must be black, the scribe must first take a purifying bath and wear ritual clothing, the scribe must work from a true copy, writing nothing from memory)—all specific points of religious law. These strict requirements show the importance of the written text, as does the story about the arguing rabbis who disregarded all the signs from God.
The Jewish Bible took final form between 587 BCE-70CE, and was particularly spurred by the experience of exile in Babylon (see above). The Bible itself give clues to earlier texts—especially a reference to a law book held by King Josiah’s priest, but the emphasis on the importance of the text comes out more clearly after the return from the exile, when the prophet Ezra read the Bible to the people in a public square (essentially reading them the riot act, since the rest of the book of Ezra tells how the Jews in Judea were NOT keeping to the obligations as described in the book).
Ezra’s notion of Judaism was one in which Jews faithfully followed the rules given in the Bible, and kept themselves apart from their neighboring communities. This was the view that eventually became the dominant view, but excavations at a Jewish settlement on the Nile show a very different sort of Judaism--one in which other Gods played a role, and in which Jews intermarried with the local people.
The narrator talks about the spread of Greek cities and the influence of Greek culture, both of which profoundly affected the Jews. There were Jewish communities in all the Hellenistic cities of the Mediterranean (such as Ephesus about which he goes on for awhile, and they played significant roles in these communities. There was considerable pressure to acclimate to Greek culture—one result was that the Bible was translated from Hebrew into Greek, another was that people started to take on Greek culture (as at the gym).
Tensions between the desire to acclimate and to retain a Jewish identity built until the 2nd c. BCE, when Antiochus (the governor of Syria) essentially tried to stamp out Judaism—he up a pagan altar in the Temple, and forbade circumcision and Torah Study. He was resisted by the Maccabees (country priests) who led a successful revolt, and who founded a Jewish kingdom that ruled until 63 CE, when the Romans conquered Palestine.
Romans usually ruled through client kings, and the most important of these was Herod the Great, who finished rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem. In 70 CE, after 4 years of war, Jerusalem and the temple were completely destroyed (gives an archaeological look at a small priestly apartment, to personalize the destruction. This was a terrible trauma to the Jewish community, not least because the loss of the temple forced them to seek other ways to “be” Jewish—in particular stress on studying the sacred texts, and on deeds of loving-kindness.
The state of the Bible at the time can be seen from the Dead Sea Scrolls—nearly 1000 documents, dozens of copies of some of the Biblical books, as well as some of the rule books of their religious order (describing the sons of Light and the sons of Darkness). When the documents were found, scholars were quick to claim that the Dead Sea community was the Essenes (who are described in ancient texts), since this would allow any strangeness in the texts to be written off to Essene wierdness. But according to Pliny (an ancient historian) the Essenes had no money, no women and lived near palm trees on the Dead Sea (and the excavation at Qumran has found money and women’s skeletons, but no palm trees).
Furthermore, the texts of the Dead Sea scrolls are more or less identical to those from Masada (where Jewish rebels held out against the Romans for several years). Did the Essene monks suddenly turn militaristic and go off to Masada, or is there another explanation? His claim is that in 70 CE, there was no Bible yet—but lots of books and versions waiting to be put together.
This “putting-together” happened in 90 CE at a rabbinic conference in Yavneh. Some of the choices (the Torah and the Nevi’im) were automatic, but others were subject to controversy…some of these controversial books got left out of the Jewish Bible, but put in the Christian ones, and became the apocrypha. There’s no verifiable account for the proceedings of this conference, only a lot of stories, such as the one about Rabbi Akiva, through whose pressure the Song of Songs got into the Bible. Rabbi Akiva was later martyred in the Second Jewish War (132-35).
Later times saw some changes in the text, namely the use of accents and vowel points as people grew further away from Biblical Hebrew (the text was originally written only with the consonants—and there was also originally no punctuation). The greatest revolution came with the advent of print technology—get a page exactly right, then make limitless copies. Christians were a little reluctant to let Jews print their own Bibles, but the earliest printings came from the little town of Sanchino in 1480. The man behind these Sanchino Bibles (which were small, and easily transported) sent people with portable presses all over Europe. There were some textual problems with this Bible, so in 1520 a Tunisian Jew named Yakov Ben Chaim (living in Venice) fixed the Hebrew text—paid by and worked for a Christian.
Ends with further requirements for writing the Torah scroll.
These pages are in progress.
Page maintained by James G. Lochtefeld.
Last modified 8 September 2003