Holiness School Unveiled, Wife-Sister, Homosexuality, Van Seters and Friedman, Disobedient Son

I focused more on reading articles today, and that meant me sitting in front of my computer screen a lot, without the entertainment of my television set (since my computer and TV are in separate rooms). So I'm tired and want to get this post written! And, because I try to comment on every item that I read, I have five topics in this post for you to enjoy.

Here they are:

1. I finished Israel Knohl's Sanctuary of Silence yesterday. So who was the Holiness School? According to Knohl, they were priests. Knohl dates the origin of the Holiness School to eighth century Judah. Northern Israel had just been subjugated by Assyria, shattering any sense of complacency within the South. And Judah was rife with oppression and social injustice, as the writings of Isaiah and Micah indicate.

During this time, you had the prophets, who prioritized social justice over the cult, even going so far as to lambaste ritual. And you had the priests, who were in their own little world, worshipping their numinous and transcendent God. The Holiness School emerged within the priesthood as a middle ground between these two extremes, to address the concerns of their time. These reformist priests agreed with the prophets on the importance of social justice, yet they also sought to preserve the rituals. And they tried to reach out to the Judean people by incorporating popular customs into their law. So the Holiness School reflected an attempt by priests to speak to the fears of the people, something they could not do in their priestly Ivory Tower. The Judeans experienced societal instability and feared that their nation would fall to the Assyrians. The Holiness School came forward with a way for them to please God and get their moral acts together, while also preserving the rituals that the priests deemed important.

One issue that deserves more study is whether or not the Priestly School (from whom the Holiness School seceded) believed in morality, or instead concentrated predominantly on ritual. Knohl somewhat equivocates on this issue. He says that the priests held that God had moral concerns before the time of Moses: God established a moral order and sent the Flood to punish violence, after all! And Knohl states that the priests believed that morality was valid even after Moses, but they chose to focus on their numinous God, one who should be worshipped for his own sake, apart from human concerns.

Yet, I get the impression from Knohl that the priests focused on the cult to the exclusion of morality. Knohl's debate with Jacob Milgrom concerns the priestly definition of sin: Milgrom says that it encompasses the ritual and the moral, whereas Knohl limits it to the cult, or sins against God, as opposed to sins against other people. And, interestingly, Knohl defines adultery (which the Priestly Torah criticizes) as a sin against God, on the basis of such passages as Psalm 51:4, in which David tells God that his sin with Bathsheba was against God alone.

But isn't every sin a sin against God? I don't know. In Jewish Yom Kippur liturgy, there's a distinction, for Jews affirm that the Day of Atonement atones for sins against God, but not sins against man, meaning Jews must make restitution to those they have harmed. And, when I did a search under "sin against God" and "sin against the LORD," the focus was largely on idolatry, or swearing falsely in God's name, which are against God. Adultery turned up too, but, as we saw above, Knohl treats that as a sin against God, not others.

Those are just my thoughts so far, and they're subject to correction.

2. The first article that I read was by Samuel Greengus, who teaches at Hebrew Union College. It's entitled "Sisterhood Adoption at Nuzi and the 'Wife-Sister' in Genesis," and it appeared in the Hebrew Union College Annual 46 (1975) 5-31. In Genesis, Abraham and Isaac tell rulers that their wives are actually their sisters so that the rulers won't kill them (Abraham and Isaac) to get at their wives. A biblical scholar named E.A. Speiser tied this with laws found in the Mesopotamian city of Nuzi in the second millennium B.C.E., the time when Abraham supposedly lived. According to Speiser, these laws allowed a man to adopt his wife as his sister, endowing her with status and privilege. Consequently, Sarah and Rebecca were showcased before the foreign kings on account of their status as "wife-sisters."

"But the kings in the story don't know they're wife-sisters," you might say. "As far as they're concerned, these women are just sisters, not wives, or 'wife-sisters.'" Speiser's response is that the authors of the biblical stories didn't understand the ancient "wife-sister" custom: they saw that Abraham and Isaac had wife-sisters, were puzzled because that didn't coincide with their own social mores, and chose to explain it away by saying that Abraham and Isaac lied to save their own skins.

Speiser's aim was probably apologetic: he wanted to show that the Abraham story coincided with the second millennium B.C.E., giving it an air of authenticity and (thus) historicity. But he ends up compromising the Bible in his attempt to uphold it. He may have been part of the school of thought that held that God's activity in history was more important than what the Bible had to say. I don't know.

Greengus' argument is that the Nuzi laws have nothing to do with wife-sisters. Rather, they pertain to men who choose to adopt women as sisters. The men get someone who can do menial work, and they can also make money off of her on the bridal market. And the woman gets a family that will protect her.

3. The second article I read was also by Dr. Greengus. It's called "A Textbook Case of Adultery in Ancient Mesopotamia," and it appeared in Hebrew Union College Annual 41 (1970) 33-43. Greengus discusses a court case in ancient Sumeria. According to J. van Dijk, what's going on is this: the woman is suing her husband because she caught him doing the nasties with another man (my paraphrase). Greengus contends, however, that the woman was actually the defendant: her husband was suing her for adultery.

Greengus notes that there is no evidence that homosexuality was a crime in Sumer or Babylonia. The only ancient Near Eastern law punishing homosexuality that he cites is from the Middle Assyrian Laws 19-20 (1097 B.C.E., according to Martha Roth), in which the penalty for sodomy is to be sodomized (sort of an "eye for an eye" deal!).

I'm not sure what to say about that. I just found it interesting.

4. The third article I read was David Carr's "Controversy and Convergence in Recent Studies of the Formation of the Pentateuch," which appeared in Religious Studies Review (1997) 22-31. Carr discussed scholars who dissent from the Documentary Hypothesis, which holds that the Pentateuch was composed of four sources: J, E, P, and D. For most advocates of this hypothesis, D came after J and E. For the dissenters from the hypothesis, however, J came after D in terms of date.

Carr criticizes these dissenters because they don't always defend why we should assume that J depends on D, rather than vice-versa. What intrigued me, though, was something in Carr's description of John Van Seters' position. For Van Seters (a dissenter), J obviously draws from the Deuteronomistic History, for the Golden Calf story and Moses' flight from Egypt parallel details in the Deuteronomist's story of Jeroboam, who set up golden calves and fled to Egypt. Van Seters dates J to the sixth-fourth centuries B.C.E., when nations were producing histories. Advocates of the Documentary Hypothesis, however, tend to date J to the tenth-ninth centuries B.C.E., and D to the times of Josiah (seventh century B.C.E.) and the Judean exile.

What interested me was that a defender of the Documentary Hypothesis, Richard Elliott Friedman, actually resembles Van Seters in an argument he makes, notwithstanding their disagreement on the Documentary Hypothesis. Friedman says that the Golden Calf story is really about the calves that Jeroboam set up. For Friedman, however, the Golden Calf story in Exodus is referring to the event of Jeroboam setting up the calves, not to the story in the Deuteronomistic History (Van Seters' position). So Friedman believes that J came before the Deuteronomistic History in date, in accordance with the Documentary Hypothesis, even though he also holds (like Van Seters) that the Golden Calf story is about Jeroboam.

I hope that's clear...

5. The fourth article I read was Joseph Fleishman's "Legal Innovation in Deuteronomy," which appeared in Vetus Testamentum 3 (2003) 3113-27. Fleishman argues that Deuteronomy 21:18-21 fleshes out and expands upon the law in Exodus 21:17, which is about stoning a disobedient son. Deuteronomy specifies that the son's not merely disobedient, but is continually disobedient, a glutton and a drunkard. Fleishman appeals to Proverbs to explain what a gluttonous drunkard is and why that's bad: basically, he's a person who's concerned only about eating and drinking and nothing else. His goal in life is to party, party, party, all of the time.

That has its downsides, but I don't think it merits being stoned to death! That's why I tend to agree with a scholar whom Fleishman cites yet disputes. She was detailing how the son was not only hurting himself with his gluttony and drunkenness, but also others. Gluttony costs money, and drunkenness can influence people to pick fights, which can result in retaliation not only against the drunkard, but against his family and tribe as well! Fleishman cites Scriptures about the bad effects of drinking, but I think that the scholar hit home for me why the disobedient son was such a menace, who needed to be dealt with (in some manner). He was like a ticking time-bomb, endangering everyone around him! Personally, I think stoning is a little extreme, and I like the concept of a second chance. But he was still a problem for society.

Those are my thoughts for the day! Time for a break.