Fishbane Paper: A New Traditum

From my last post on Fishbane: "In Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (New York: Oxford, 1988), Michael Fishbane presents a traditum-traditio model, in which a biblical author interprets an authoritative traditum."

Fishbane treats the traditum as a dominating presence with which interpreters had to deal. If the traditum were not influential, after all, why would they interact with it at all (87)? For Fishbane, the fact that the interpreters elaborate on the traditum or insert their comments into the text demonstrates that the traditum was not a fixed, unalterable account, but rather reflected "the overall traditional version in a very definite formulation" (87). In any case, Fishbane appears to treat the traditum as something that was widely accepted when the interpreter took his crack at it.

Fishbane also treats the traditum as ancient. He states that "it is clear that the imaginative life of the aggadic reformulators of the Israelite tradition was nurtured significantly by these ancient teachings" (409).

But there are other places where Fishbane acts as if someone could create a traditum on the spot. In those cases, it wouldn't be old, and it wouldn't really have had the time to become dominant. Legists could incorporate their interpretations into the traditum itself (262). Prophetic schools formulated new teachings and called them the word of the LORD (262). There are biblical historians who try to present their word as the authoritative traditum, not merely a traditio (interpretation) of already existing narratives (381).

If a person could write a traditum on the spot, what's that do to the idea that there was an ancient, dominant traditum, which interpreters then approached? I suppose it's not overthrown completely, since interpreters did interact with texts, laws, and legends. Someone thought they were important, for the exegetes tried to clarify or correct them. But things appear rather fluid, if someone could write an "authoritative" text on the spot.

This reminds me of the pseudepigrapha. James VanderKam states the following about the Book of Jubilees (second century B.C.E.):

"Jubilees presents itself as the account of a revelation which was disclosed to Moses on Mt. Sinai. After a prefatory chapter in which the Lord tells Moses in advance about Israel’s apostasies and eventual repentance, the book takes the form of a first-person narrative recited by an 'angel of the presence' whom the deity had instructed to tell Moses about everything 'from the beginning of creation till My sanctuary has been built among them for all eternity' (1:27 [quotations from Jubilees are from Charles 1902]). The revelation proves to be a heavily edited rehearsal of the material from Genesis 1 to Exodus 20, all of which is encased in a chronology which divides time into units of 49 years (= jubilees), each of which consists of seven 'weeks of years.' The author does not include all of the biblical text, but he does follow the story line of Genesis–Exodus and often augments his base with additional details and at times with entirely new accounts (e.g., the war between Esau and Jacob [37:1–38:14])."

James VanderKam, "Jubilees, Book of," Anchor Bible Dictionary, volume 3, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York : Doubleday, 1996) 1030.

According to VanderKam, Jubilees presents itself as what God revealed to Moses. Not surprisingly, there are scholars who maintain that Jubilees was an alternative Torah to the Pentateuch. In Etched in Stone: The Emergence of the Decalogue (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), David Aaron states:

"While some scholars think of Jubilees as a kind of 'supplement' to mainstream Jewish literature, I believe the goals of its writers were not to supplement but to supplant. Indeed, Jubilees constitutes a replacement narrative, one that radically undermines the authority and veracity of the older Torah" (17).

Incidentally, Fishbane often treats Jubilees as exegesis of the older traditions (146, 274, 432, 528).

It could be that Jubilees was trying to replace the Torah, while drawing on traditions from that Torah. I-II Chronicles may do the same sort of thing to I-II Samuel and I-II Kings: embrace some of their traditions, while altering them according to its ideology. See Marc Brettler, The Creation of History in Ancient Israel (London and New York: Routledge, 1995) 46-69. The traditions had some measure of authority, but not enough to be unchallenged. This model may explain why they were challenged in the post-exilic period, even as they were treated as authoritative.