Date of Torah Stories, and Other Cool Stuff

I finished David Aaron's Etched in Stone. I'll probably revisit pieces of it in the future---either on my own or on this blog---since there were nuances that I missed in my reading this time. But I'll be moving on to other books, including another one by Dr. Aaron.

Dr. Aaron dates much of the Torah to Israel's Diaspora and post-exilic period. In terms of the Ten Commandments that we encounter in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, Dr. Aaron believes that they were modeled after law codes of Mesopotamia, such as that of Hammurabi, which focus on order in society (i.e., don't kill, don't steal) rather than cultic matters. Priests, upset at this, developed a story with a different set of Ten Commandments---which we find in Exodus 34---ones that emphasize cultic matters and Israelite ethnicity. The Golden Calf narrative was inserted to protest against those who modeled their conception of covenant on law codes of Mesopotamia, for aniconism in the Torah and in Nehemiah is strongly associated with an opposition to Israelite assimilation into other nations. The Golden Calf narrative did not originate with these priests, however, but it was developed by marginalized Levites who were exalting the authority of the Levites at the expense of Aaron.

(I'm not sure if Dr. Aaron is saying the same thing as Richard Elliott Friedman, who states that the Golden Calf narrative came from Northern Elohists, who consisted of non-Aaronic Levites claiming descent from Moses---explaining why the Golden Calf story exalts Moses at Aaron's expense. My impression is that Dr. Aaron appears to agree with S. David Sperling's thesis that Aaron was considered a wonder-worker at a certain stage of the biblical narrative, not a priest, and that later layers made Aaron into a high priest.)

Dr. Aaron argues that the Ten Commandments and the Sinai story were developed to preserve the ethnicity of people who lacked land, cult, and king---huge factors in nationhood. He refers, for example, to a scholar who argues that the Sabbath developed when the Jews lacked a temple---as a family ritual that compensated for the absence of cultic celebrations. At the same time, Dr. Aaron dates a number of stories in the Torah to Israel's post-exilic period---when she had land and a cult. He associates the manna story---in which the Israelites are to trust God to provide for them, even when they rest on the Sabbath and don't gather manna on that day---with the Nehemiah story in which the Israelites do not allow merchants into the city on the Sabbath (which was the big market day). And Dr. Aaron reads many stories in light of post-exilic attempts by Israelites to prevent their own assimilation. Intermarriage was a big sub-category of assimilation, and we see this issue in the Book of Nehemiah's story about Israel's post-exilic period.

That's my understanding of the big picture of what Dr. Aaron is saying---though there are source critical nuances that I have left out of this post and may need to review in the future. Right now, I went to mention two interesting points in Dr. Aaron's book:

First, Deuteronomy 16:21-22 bans the Israelites from planting an asherah of any tree by God's altar, and from erecting for themselves a standing stone. Joshua 24:26, however, presents Joshua erecting a massive stone beneath a tree in the holy place of the LORD. So there is diversity within the Bible.

Second, Dr. Aaron offers an interesting interpretation of the law against cooking a kid in its mother's milk. He notes that the word translated "milk," chalav, often means "fat," and that Exodus 23:18-19 discusses the fat of the offering before prohibiting cooking a kid in its mother's chalav. Dr. Aaron concludes that the passage is saying that one should not cook a kid with its mother's fat, which is similar to the Torah's law against killing a mother animal and her child on the same day.