I wrote this post this morning on my Wordpress blog:
I’m at the library right now because the carpet of my apartment is being cleaned today. Why the computer I’m on has a keyboard that inclines backwards is beyond me! It’s certainly not for my benefit, I can tell you that.
Here’s my write-up for yesterday’s reading:
1. For Philip Davies’ Scribes and Schools, I got some of his take on writing in ancient Israel and the emergence of Israel’s scribal class. On page 78, he lists the evidence of writing in Israel under her monarchies. There are ostraca from Samaria that may date to the eighth century recording deliveries of wine and oil, but the area covered is “rather small (a radius of a few miles), which does not suggest a large archive or administrative staff.” There are also “precious few royal inscriptions from the area…” Although Davies is considered a biblical minimalist, he seems to suggest that there’s something to II Samuel 8:16-18, for the passage describes David’s cabinet as rather small; Chronicles, however, embellishes stuff.
This is a debate that I’ve encountered in academia. Sure, there was writing in pre-exilic Israel, but was there enough for us to suggest that Israel could produce a national literature prior to the exile? Maximalists like to date many parts of the Hebrew Bible to pre-exilic times, and the goal of some of them may be to defend their historicity, since, if the writings emerged before the exile, they are closer to the events that they discuss. Not everyone who dates stuff in the Hebrew Bible to pre-exilic times has this agenda, however, for many think that the Hebrew Bible resembles ancient Near Eastern cultures before Israel’s exile or speaks to her pre-exilic situation. There are many examples, but one that comes to mind is Baruch Halpern’s David’s Secret Demons: I-II Samuel try to defend David against charges that he’s a thug, so the books were probably written close to the time of David, since that’s the time when such charges were made.
Minimalists, however, date most of the Hebrew Bible to post-exilic times. And, on page 77, that’s when Davies dates Israel’s scribal class, which would be responsible for the production and preservation of the Hebrew Bible. He states: “The fact is…that scribal and non-scribal schools clearly existed in Judah in the Hellenistic period, and scribal schools probably grew up in the Persian period.” Before that, the scribal class (if it existed) was small. Minimalists are usually open to the possibility that the Hebrew Bible preserves some pre-exilic traditions, though, which could explain why Davies is open to the historicity of II Samuel 8:16-18.
On a different note, unrelated to the maximalist/minimalist debate that grips biblical studies, Davies makes an interesting point on page 69: Davies posits that the Achaemenid religion of Zoroaster in Persia may have viewed “Yahweh as the Judean manifestation of the one great high god Ahura Mazda.” I wonder if this explains Ezra 1:2, in which Cyrus affirms that the LORD gave him all the kingdoms of the earth. Some may say that’s biblical propaganda, and that Cyrus probably didn’t see the God of Israel as the highest god. Maybe he did, in the sense that he thought the God of Israel was a manifestation of Ahura Mazda, the high god in Zoroastrianism. Similarly, the Cyrus Cylinder ascribes to the Babylonian deity Marduk an exalted status, calling him the king of the gods. Could Cyrus have believed that Marduk was a manifestation of Ahura Mazda as well?
This is somewhat of an inclusivist, UU way of looking at things: that everyone worships the same god under a different name. But the Bible also has an exclusivist streak when it comes to Cyrus. In Isaiah 45:4, God says that Cyrus will restore Israel, even though he doesn’t know the LORD. So knowing Ahura Mazda is not the same as knowing the LORD, as far as Second Isaiah is concerned.
2. For Henri Crouzel’s Origen, something on page 63 stood out to me: Origen responds to skeptics who say not all the animals could fit on Noah’s ark. The skeptic was Apelles the Marcionite, who believed the Old Testament was bunk.
Crouzel cites Homilies on Genesis II:2, which I can’t find online. I can, however, find the other source that he cites on the Internet: Contra Celsum IV:41. See here. I’m not sure how, but basically Origen expands the dimensions of the ark. Celsus’ charge was that not all the animals could fit on the ark if it’s the size that Genesis 6:15 suggests: 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. Origen, however, says that the dimensions were bigger: “Why should we not rather admire a structure which resembled an extensive city, if its measurements be taken to mean what they are capable of meaning, so that it was nine myriads of cubits long in the base, and two thousand five hundred in breadth?” He may have thought that Noah was to start out with the dimensions of Genesis 6:15, after which he would build some more.
Speaking of which, I saw Evan Almighty yesterday! Critics panned it as having a simplistic spiritual message of doing random acts of kindness, but I actually liked the movie. I’d give it two-and-a-half stars out of four. I liked the story-line of Evan, a narcissistic Congressman with a vague ambition to “change the world,” who trusts in God and builds an ark, even though that looks crazy to the people around him (though you’d expect them to see the hand of God when all the animals followed Evan, or when Evan’s clothes miraculously changed in the House meeting-room!). Evan’s family also thought he was odd, but they stuck by him, and God came through in the end.