Book of Numbers

Running Head: Book of Numbers

Inscription, Defeat, Utopia:

A Dialectical Look at the Book of Numbers

Joseph Benavides

Professor Jacob Wright

Emory University

February 19, 2015

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List of In-Text Citations

PH — Bloch, The Principle of Hope

AC — Bloch, Atheism in Christianity

WT — Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart

CDTH — Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl

EC — Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia

GP — Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed

PN — Najman, Past Renewals

CD — Wright, “The Commemoration of Defeat and the Formation

of a Nation in the Hebrew Bible”

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You survivors of the sword,Go, do not linger!Remember the Lord in a distant land,And let Jerusalem come into your mind.

Jeremiah 51:50

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In what follows, I will attempt to keep my claims humble

and my steps small. Such is my obligation, approaching my

subject from two degrees of remove. These two degrees are

the personal and the professional. As a student of

philosophy, Hebraic scholarship is not something with which

I am very familiar—my recent attempts to familiarize myself

with it have been fruitful, but have in no way effected a

transition from a state of unfamiliarity to vague (if

amicable) acquaintance. Rather, I have been guided by

others, to whom I owe a great intellectual debt, through a

body of literature with which I am still unfamiliar, but

amidst which I have tried to pick out single elements,

individual articles, and slim volumes that I could read

slowly, carefully, and seriously. The authors around whose

work this paper is structured are David Carr and Jacob

Wright. Responding to and evaluating some of their claims is

how I hope to engage study of the Hebrew Bible from a

philosophical perspective.

The core question that most of the literature addresses

is a simple, but very thorny one: what does the Hebrew Bible

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do? The peer group of texts with equal or longer

intellectual and cultural careers is a small one. In order

to learn the most from such texts, it is perhaps even more

important to ask not only what the Hebrew Bible does, but

what it has been doing for so many centuries. Answering this

question is not something that will be attempted here, but

what will be attempted is a review of different

methodologies of answering that question. Differentiating

‘kinds’ of answers to these questions is not a strictly

academic exercise. The stakes are no more (and no less) than

those of how to understand the Hebrew Bible, an enterprise

that stands little chance of yielding much of worth if the

words are read through cloudy goggles. The first moment to

be reviewed is that of reading the Hebrew Bible as an

educative text, a position advanced by David Carr in his

2005 book, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and

Literature: Origins of Scripture and Literature. There, a methodological-

pedagogical unity is argued to exist among several different

cultures in the ancient world—Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece,

and ancient Israel. Carr’s argument is compelling, in large

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part owing to the magnitude of archaeological evidence he

uses to support the finer details of his argument (the

documentation of Mesopotamian scribal culture is

particularly thorough). However, the commonalities between

Mesopotamia and Egypt are difficult to extend to Greece and

Israel, and the links from ancient Israel to Greece are

particularly difficult to establish in terms of a commonly

held conception of textuality and pedagogy. Evaluating

Carr’s argument will serve to bring relevant historical and

archaeological material to the conversation, and

contextualize another hermeneutic approach to the Hebrew

Bible, that of Jacob Wright.

Wright’s is an approach that refuses to separate the

text of the Hebrew Bible from the history of the peoples and

societies that birthed it—namely, the ancient tribal

communities of ancient Israel, and the states of Israel and

Judah. Unlike Carr, who attempts to set Israel into a

constellation with other scribal cultures in antiquity, and

then reads the Hebrew Bible through that matrix, Wright

attempts to read the Hebrew Bible as the document of a

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national consciousness grounded in the anticipation and

commemoration of defeat—defeat meant here as political

disaster, as the sort of thing that happens to cities,

armies, and states. The Hebrew Bible, Wright suggests, is an

answer to the question of ‘who we are’ after the material of

‘our’ state has been scattered and broken. Keeping in mind

that there is good reason to think that much of the material

in the Hebrew Bible significantly predates the foundation of

a state in Canaan, one of Wright’s initial observations

regarding the Hebrew Bible makes a lot of sense: “Much of

the historical narrative treats the period before the rise

of the monarchy, and portrays Israel existing as a people

long before it established a kingdom—or to use later

European political terminology, it portrays Israel existing

as a nation before it gained statehood.” (CD 435) The

formulation is attractive, but it may provoke a certain

terminological skepticism: what, after all, is the

difference between nation and state, and how does the idea

of a ‘people’ relate to either? If I’ve taken Wright’s

meaning accurately, ‘states’ are really-existing

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geopolitical entities, with cities, walls, armies, and laws.

A ‘nation’ differs from a state in the sense that a state

can get on quite well without a ‘national consciousness.’1

So long as a city-state, republic, or empire can enforce its

laws and maintain its territorial integrity, it exists. The

necessary and sufficient conditions for qualification as a

state overlap almost entirely—either it exists or it

doesn’t. A state is happening or it is not happening.

‘Nation,’ similarly, is or is-not, and like a state, has

its own social reality. The difference between nation and

state in Wright’s argumentation is very much dependent on

‘national consciousness,’ a feature that states can

certainly cultivate to their benefit, but that is not a

feature of statehood as such. The national consciousness

inaugurated and maintained by the study of biblical

literature is characterized by a collective memory, a

feature that states do not merely lack, but which is even 1 The distinction is made explicitly by Wright at CD 461, in a footnote:“I treat a state here as a political association with effective sovereignty over an extensive geographic area … I use the term [nation] more in the sense of Meinecke’s Kulturnation: as a group of people that shares a common homeland, language, religion, legal traditions, calendar, festivals, canon of literature, and so on.” (CD 461)

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corrosive to the project of state-making. Rewriting history

and controlling popular remembrance of the past is, after

all, one of the more powerful tools that sovereigns have at

their disposal. Victories can be popularized with grand

monuments, defeats can be edited out of the histories, the

origins of the state can be tweaked or altogether rewritten

to legitimate the rule of the ruler. A national

consciousness cannot be so arbitrarily adjusted, which keeps

its relation to states tense—the communal historical

perspective of a national consciousness is different in kind

from the single ‘I’ narrative of the monumental histories

set down by state sovereigns. The very existence of a

community with its own national consciousness is unsettling

to a state making do without it. Turning back to the Hebrew

Bible with all of this in mind, then, allows one to make a

distinction between the ancient state of Israel and the

Israelite national consciousness, whose most important

contents are the popular memories of 1) anticipation of the

impending fall of the state, and of 2) the actual experience

of being-defeated.

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Wright’s method is admirable for the way it engages the

text of the Hebrew Bible as more than an archaeological

piece of evidence, as Carr, at times, does. The text,

precisely because of it’s nearly-impenetrable history of

redaction, reorganization, and commentary, has a wealth of

memories preserved, memories that are not smoothed out or

resolved into each other, whose very discord is a testament

to how faithfully the cultural memory of antiquity is

preserved in those texts. It is both productive and

instructive to read the Pentateuch as a document formative

of a national consciousness, to understand the

characteristic content of its collective memory as one of

defeat. Doing so “challenges increasingly popular claims

that ‘the Jewish people’ was invented under the influence of

modern European nationalism in order to pave the path for

statehood.”2 (CD 459)

2 An important aspect of Wright’s claim that this paper will not be ableto explore is that the prioritization of ‘nationhood’ over ‘statehood’ implicitly denies the importance of Zionism for contemporary members of the Jewish religion. Taken even further, reading ‘national consciousness’ as a more powerful social-formative force than ‘statehood’ is straightforwardly critical of the premise of Zionism, namely, that (as Herzl writes in his diaries), “a Jewish State is a world necessity!” (CDTH 171) Insistence on a state is tantamount to missing the point, or devaluing the national consciousness whose core is

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The one further step I would offer is, I hope, a

constructive addition to Wright’s project. Using the tools

of 20th century critical theory of the utopian variety,

particularly the work of Ernst Bloch, it is possible to add

one more layer to Wright’s mode of interpretation. Wright’s

recognition that the memory of defeat is kept alive in the

Hebrew Bible, and that its living memory is, in turn, what

sustains and has always sustained an Israelite national

consciousness, brings his rhetoric very close to the kind

Bloch uses to describe the utopian imaginaries of

civilizations throughout history. Bloch, in his three volume

Principle of Hope and elsewhere, is fond of insisting that the

past is full of ‘uncashed checks,’ and ‘embers that are

still burning.’ When he turns his attention to the Hebrew

Bible in Atheism in Christianity, he will discuss the project of

bible criticism as ‘detective work.’ Bloch’s approach is one

I offer here as a further step and a contribution to

Wright’s project because it seems to me that maybe what is

nation-formative about the Hebrew Bible is not primarily its

the national memory preserved in the Hebrew Bible.

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commemorations of defeat, but the revolutionary and utopian

forces that stir within it. By this I mean that the Hebrew

Bible is exceptionally good at keeping the idea of a

changing world open. The books are full of strangers and

misunderstandings and compromise, unexpected victory and,

quite often, defeat. The supremely unlikely event, of

course, is that the Israelite nation might finally catch a

lucky break, and this unlikeliest of arrivals at the end of

an insufferably long series of misadventures is glimpsed—

twice. Numbers and Deuteronomy both end with differently

recounted endings to forty years of wandering in the

wilderness. Moses dies at the end of both, and in both

Joshua is named Moses’ successor. By closing the curtain at

the last days of wandering, the biblical authors preserve

the utopian promise of that moment: the evening before

Israel sets itself to the work of claiming the land it was

promised. The evening before things change.

What I mean to suggest is that defeat and the

anticipation of defeat do have some nation-formative power,

but that the anticipation of victory, or the promise of

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entering a new social order is an even more powerful bond

for a national consciousness. Experiences of defeat bind a

nation together only when the national consciousness

survives those defeats, which is to say that the defeats

that are commemorated were incomplete. Where Moses ends,

Joshua begins. Preserved indelibly at the endings of Numbers

and Deuteronomy is no mere ‘promise’ of a new morning.

Below, I will agree with Wright that much of what the Hebrew

Bible serves to do is commemorate impending, ongoing, and

freshly experienced defeats. But the last step that will be

offered is that these memories are only the prelude or set-

up for the real cement of the Israelite national

consciousness, which is, “the concretely and utopianly comprehended

correlate in real possibility.” (PH 199) Without a concrete utopian

image in hand, a defeated Israel would be no different from

the other ancient peoples describes in Carr’s book on

scribal cultures: that is to say, it would no longer exist,

neither as nation nor as state.

INSCRIPTION, ENCULTURATION

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David Carr’s Writing on the Tablet of the Heart is a book that

has to walk a fine line. On the one hand, he presents a

wealth of archaeological evidence on the basis of which he

can draw specific conclusions about specific ancient

cultures. On the other, he attempts to argue that

Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Israel all shared common

features in their scribal cultures. The argument, put

differently, is that the function of text in all of those

civilizations served roughly the same purpose, that of

‘inscribing’ wisdom, history and other cultural material

into the literate minorities that could read it and were

tasked with reproducing it. Carr emphasizes the spoken and

recitative elements of text in the ancient world, and the

evolution of recitation and memorization that accompany

higher-order modes of literacy is what links the four

cultures together. “The fundamental idea,” Carr writes, “is

the following: as we look at how key texts like the Bible

and other classic literature functioned in ancient cultures,

what was primary was not how such texts were inscribed on

clay, parchment, or papyri. Rather, what was truly crucial

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was how those written media were part of a cultural project

of incising key cultural-religious traditions—word for word—

on people’s minds.” (WT 6) The progression goes

approximately like this:

The case of ancient Mesopotamia sets the tone for all of

the analysis that will follow, which makes good sense for at

least two reasons. Chronologically it predates the other

cases, and its scribal culture is the one about which

scholars know the most today. This is the case because

scribes in Mesopotamia, like all scribes since then, have

had to practice. But because they needed to practice on clay

tablets (that then had to be fired) instead of papyrus or

vellum or paper, literally “tens of thousands of student

exercises have been preserved, mostly from the Old

Babylonian period. These rage from very rough, oblong copies

of lexical lists and small literary excerpts to larger

copies of parts or all of major Mesopotamian compositions.”

(WT 16) Hardly any material of this kind has survived from

Greece or Israel, owing to the fragility of the media they

would have practiced on. The significance of this is not so

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much the excerpts or reproductions of the epics or poems,

but the writing exercises themselves. Many of the tablets

are nothing more than a single letter, inscribed and then

signed by a master (or father—ummia), which was then

practiced by the scribe until the tablet was full. This is

also the case with combinations of letters, names, and lists

of words. Carr describes these lists of words in great

detail: “Many of them [the scribes] would then move on to …

the famous ur5-ra-H6 UBULLU list of 3,000 to 3,500 Sumerian

nouns, organized by subject. Advanced students would learn

lists like Proto-Ea, which gave an overview of all possible

(and a few impossible) values for cuneiform signs and sign

combinations.” (WT 21)

The accomplishment of such feats of memorization, while

impressive, is but a window onto Carr’s main point, which

has to do with the particular pathos of the Mesopotamian

scribes. Of the practice tablets in evidence, those that do

successfully execute these elaborate sequences sign their

work, as the ummia would sign the example character that

would start the exercises of the junior scribes. Having

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achieved a certain literacy, the scribes begin to compose

works of their own, and even to write about each other, and

about their masters. There is at least one case in which “a

scribe boasts of being ‘more human’ than his master. In

other texts, educational competence is equated with being

‘Sumerian.’” (WT 29) The end game of mastering script and

retaining very long sequences of Sumerian characters

(characters likely not even understood until very advanced

stages of training!) is not merely to preserve cultural

materials, but to ingrain them so deeply into the psyche

that one is changed, the scribe becomes more human, and

becomes properly Sumerian. (The scribal exercises in

question are dated to period of Akkadian rule of

Mesopotamia, at which time Akkadian had replaced Sumerian as

the common tongue. Preservation of the Sumerian texts

required the scribe to acquire knowledge of a dead language

and the peculiarities of its poetic idioms. “In sum, a

master scribe was not just taught an actual second language,

Sumerian, but also an overlay second ‘language’ of standard

texts, words, and motifs/themes from them.” (WT 33-34)) The

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case of Mesopotamia is one point at which Carr’s thesis

should most likely be accepted as unambiguously correct. The

practices of learning the Sumerian language, memorizing the

wisdom literature, and passing it on as a scribal virtuoso

were understood by those involved in the process as steps

toward receiving the inscription of those texts on one’s

very self.

Carr’s presentation of Egyptian scribal culture is not

far removed from the one he gives of Mesopotamia.

Acquisition of a functionally dead language is still

features prominently, and the process of mastery is

similarly linked to ascendance into a cultural (priestly)

elite. But in the case of Egypt, the process of

enculturation through scribal practices is an even deeper

process. Where the Sumerian texts granted adept scribes a

status of proper ‘humanity’ or made them ‘Sumerian,’ the

Egyptian scribes were dealing with a kind of script whose

recitation was integral to the institutionalized practices

of the state religion. Internalizing the text was required

to say the words properly, and only a properly executed

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recital of the text would realize its magical potentials.

The move Carr makes here is interesting: the social function

of text in Egypt is not the same as it is in Mesopotamia,

but many features of Mesopotamian scribal training appear in

the scribal culture of Egypt. The claim is not that the

written word does the same thing in both Mesopotamia and

Egypt, but that the social institutions that produced

literate people were trying to effect similar results for

very similar reasons. Writing, recitation, and dedication to

the national literatures were practices thought to effect a

change in the one who took up such a course of study—the

real ‘content’ was not the written word itself, but the

‘inscription’ of cultural wisdom on the heart of one who has

mastered it. This is what I take Carr to mean by

‘enculturation.’ Calling this ‘transmission of the inner

life of a text’ would not be radical or esoteric enough:

interpretation is not what is at stake. Any obscure meanings

buried deep in the form or content of these texts was safe

so long as it was physically preserved. The real challenge

was not the challenge faced by modern educators, who need to

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initiate young people into the inner circle of people who know

what Shakespeare really meant. In antiquity the power of the

written word was resident in its ability to effect an

esoteric surplus in the personality of the one who became

intimately familiar with its every syllable.

Carr distinguishes the Mesopotamian scribal culture from

the Egyptian by saying that both—as civilizations in which

literacy was quite limited—related to writing as a

“semimagical technology,” but that Egypt took the extra step

of thinking of writing as a gift from the gods. “The scrolls

of the House of Life,” he says, “were designated ‘emanations

of Re,’ while those who mastered them were ‘the great

knowers of the things learned in the emanations of Re.’” (WT

68) Carr’s description of the Egyptian word as divine and

‘semimagical’ is no exaggeration. Spells were also an

important part of Egyptian religion, and even if not the

sort of spell the had a literal ‘effect,’ (such as those in

the Book of the Dead, which prevent a ‘second death’ and

secure passage to the afterlife) speaking the divine word

served as an offering of the same sort as incense. Success

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of such an offering was dependent on correct recitation of

the words, and on the purity of the body—particularly the

mouth—offering it.3 A priest tasked with uttering the divine

syllables served as a pure vessel or conduit for the truth

and power potential in the text, and actual in his speech.

The way one could become that sort of purified conduit

depended, of course, on knowing how to purify oneself,

knowledge only had by those that could navigate the wisdom

literature. The empirical question of how Egyptian scribes

were educated is an important piece of support for Carr’s

broader claim that the four scribal cultures he discusses

had the same ultimate purpose: to ‘inscribe’ the content of

national literatures (or the literature of a state religion)

onto successive generations of apprentices. The continuity

between Mesopotamian and Egyptian scribal education lends a

great deal of credibility to what might otherwise look like 3 Carr notes several examples of texts that forbid a priest to read themaloud without the proper cleansing rituals. These extend to “[purification] of the mouth with myrrh or incense.” (WT 79) As his translation of “the scroll of the heavenly cow” says:When it is the wish of Thoth to read this for Re,then should he purify himself with a ninefold purification for three days. (WT 78-79)

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a purely speculative argument. The use of ‘red letters,’ for

example, is common to both Egyptian and Mesopotamian scribal

education.4 Both practiced writing in much the same way, and

while there is less surviving scribal practice material from

Egypt than there is from Mesopotamia owing to the relative

fragility of wood panels and papyrus as opposed to fired

clay, there is enough for Carr to credibly infer that they

are materials produced under similar conditions.5 The

biggest difference between the Egyptians and Mesopotamian

scribes is, on Carr’s account, that the Egyptian texts had a

literally magical effect when spoken on account of their

divinity.6 Whether secular or priestly, the case for a great

deal of continuity in the form of scribal training in both

cultures is one that Writing on the Tablet of the Heart argues for

4 See Carr, 49, and 75-77. The ‘red letter’ is literally a letter, or a first phrase, painted red to set the beginnings of distinct sections of text apart from others. 5 The most telling similarity between the Mesopotamian and Egyptian scribal practice materials is, I think, their treatment after being finished: both of the large discoveries of these materials were garbage dumps. (WT 65)6 This point is difficult to establish. Most of the literature Carr refers to when discussing Mesopotamia is epic or lyric, but he also says, in a footnote toward the end of that section, that, “Along with some broader claims for Mesopotamian literature in some colophons, I find implausible the arguments of some that the Old Babylonian corpus was a relatively nontheological ‘literary’ canon.” (WT 29)

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quite convincingly.

Things get tricky when this model is applied to the

ancient Greeks and Israelites, and Carr’s efforts to bring

the scribal cultures of these latter two societies into a

historical continuity with the former is burdened with two

distinct problems. The first is that the archaeological

evidence that constitutes the core of the analyses of

Mesopotamia and Egypt is not available in the subsequent

cases, so all attempts to link the former text-cultures to

the latter ones depends largely on conjecture. The second

problem is that drawing a parallel between ancient Greece

and ancient Israel is very difficult for an entirely

independent set of reasons. Aristocratic Greek education

(paideia) is significantly different from the methods of

social enculturation characteristic of ancient Israelite

culture, which are themselves distinct in kind from those of

Egypt and Mesopotamia. Neither the text cultures of Greece

and Israel are equivalent to those of the older cultures.

Additionally, the text cultures of Greece and Israel are

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even less like each other than they are unlike Mesopotamia.7

“Together with Greece,” Carr writes of Mesopotamia and

Egypt in his conclusion to his chapter on ancient Greece,

“they present a range of distinctive textually supported

enculturation systems. They share a focus on memorization,

oral performance, and enculturation of a generation of

leaders. In each case, there is a focus on class formation—

the separation of a group of students from the whole by

their mastery of an older cultural tradition.” (WT 109)

Here, Carr’s argument for cross-cultural continuity is

stretched especially thin. The ultimate purpose of paideia

was not to inscribe a dedicated heart with cultured

‘programming’ as was the case with Mesopotamian and Egyptian

scribes8 but to cultivate the development of a personality

7 For a thorough exposition of this point, see Werner Jaeger’s Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Belknap, 1961). The analysis is a bit dated, butis very decisive regarding disconnects between paideia and the Israelite conception of proper enculturation, a contrast most evident in the Hellenistic period.8 From Carr’s introduction: “The aim of the educational process was ultimately the scribe’s memorization of the cultural tradition and cultivation of his (or occasionally her) ability to perform it. To use ametaphor from computers, the main point in ancient cultures was not the written texts. They were the floppy disks. The point was using such texts, such ‘disks,’ to transfer the software—key cultural traditions—from one generation of scribal administrators and elite leaders to another.” (WT 7)

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in the correct and ideal way. Exposure to the classic texts

of archaic Greece, particularly Homer, was certainly part of

classical Athenian education, but so were studies of music

and gymnastics. And these educational norms were in no way

standard in Greek antiquity: one need only look at another

polity, such as Sparta, to find radically different

approaches to the proper education of youth. So long as the

focus here is 5th-4th century Athens, however, there is still

little in the way of support that the paideia whose end

result was supposed to be an able bodied and able-minded

citizen had text-memorization at its core or recitation at

its apex.

The support that Carr does offer is not particularly

strong: there are depictions of students reading and writing

on red vases, and small citations of Plato in which he has

characters say that young students were required to learn

the poets “by heart.” (WT 96) Aristophanes, in Clouds,

presents a clash of generations in which a public recitation

of poetry devolves into vulgarity when a youth, asked to

recite something, opts for Euripides rather than Aeschylus:

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“‘All right, then, recite something from these modern poets,

that brainy stuff, whatever it is.’ And he right away tossed

off some speech by Euripides about how a brother, god save

me, was screwing his sister by the same mother! I couldn’t

put up with it any longer, but right away started pelting

him with lots of nasty, dirty words.” (WT 97, Aristoph. Cl.

1353) Though Carr is well within the bounds of historical

accuracy to observe that ancient Athenian education included

a heaping spoonful of memorization, it is far from the case

that this memorization would re-format the student into a

ruling elite or a standardized ‘type.’ The end of classical

Athenian education was the production of the best possible

citizens—‘citizens’ in their case being those born into the

aristocracy. Of those born into this narrow demographic,

only boys were subject to paideia, whose purpose was not to

effect character development through scribal training, but

to promote the development of personality through a holistic

education of the mind (through literature, mathematics,

music) and the body (gymnastics, martial education), all

toward the end of competent participation in the democratic

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proceedings of the city.

Geared as it was toward participation in the life of the

city, the textual aspect of Greek paideia was not maintained

in the implicitly (Mesopotamia) or explicitly (Egypt)

religious fashion cultural texts of older Mediterranean

cultures were. They were constantly changing and evolving.

So, while the Homeric epics certainly remained classic

fixtures of Athenian cultural life, there also existed a

range of emergent new literary forms, such as lyric poetry,

tragic drama, comedy, oratory, history, and philosophy. Carr

is correct when he comments that there existed a link

between familiarity with Homer and “moral excellence,” (WT

99) but in his urgency to use memorization and recitative to

link Greece with Mesopotamia and Egypt, he overlooks the

turbulent discourse of Athenian letters regarding what

excellence really is, and how to best attain it. The passage

from Aristophanes’ Clouds that Carr quotes is one he reads as

supporting evidence that Greek youth were expected to have

learned literary classics by heart, and to have derived

moral edification from that memorization. Aristophanes’

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joke, however, is that there existed little in the way of

cultural consensus about what the canonical works were (or

ought to be). Hence, those who grew up with Aeschylus get

into brawls with their juniors over what is appropriate to

recite in public as ‘poetry.’

The fragmented conception of ‘excellence’ in Greek

antiquity can be illustrated in a number of other ways. The

emergence of lyric poetry, such as that of Archilochus, was

an aggressive break from Homer’s themes and his Ionian

verse. Excellence in oratory became mandatory in the context

of Athenian democracy, where the success of any proposal

depended on convincing the assembly of citizens to approve

an initiative. This is how Sophistry came to rise to such

importance in Athenian political life, much to the chagrin

of the philosophers who followed Socrates. Undermining the

pretense of Sophists to be ‘teachers of virtue’ is a

prominent feature of the Platonic dialogues, and an entire

work of Sophistic Refutations is attributed to Aristotle. Even

Homer is not immune from these sorts of struggles with the

history of Greek text culture. Plato infamously has Socrates

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argue for the erasure of Homer’s poems from Greek culture in

the third book of Republic. For one thing, the grisly

depictions of Hades in his poems might instill a fear of

death into people that a good city needs to function as

brave warriors. If not exiled outright, Socrates will say,

let Homer be kept around, but only as a chronicle of the

events in the stories, bereft of meter and imagery. (R III

393c) I raise such contradictions and conflicts in the

history of Greek letters to call attention to how difficult

it is to establish exactly what, on Carr’s account, would be

‘written’ on the tablet of an ancient Athenian heart. It is,

I think, methodologically and substantively hazardous to

claim, as Carr does, that “epic texts like Homer took the

place of the lexical lists of Mesopotamia or the key wisdom

instructions of Egypt.” (WT 104)

Carr’s case for the continuity of ancient Israel with

the scribal cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt is stronger

than the one made for Greece, but, as I will go on to

explain, still proves unable to complete the full circuit of

continuity by failing to connect Israelite text-culture with

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Greek paideia. That said, a compelling thread of commonality

Carr finds running through the earlier scribal cultures to

Israel is that of preserving text through memorization.

“There are crucial instances in Israelite history, first and

foremost the Babylonian exile, when Israelite scribes

probably had no access to reference copies of key traditions

on which to base their reproduction or revision of the

corpus.” (WT 160) Carr’s hypothesis makes sense, inasmuch as

there has to be some way to account for how the various

materials that were eventually subject to many redactions

during the Second Temple Period survived the Babylonian

conquest of Judah. It is reasonably safe to defer to Carr’s

hypothesis here, that it is unrealistic to imagine that

scribes brought cumbersome libraries of scrolls out of

Jerusalem into exile, then brought them back, and then

assembled them by editing heaps of old manuscripts

together.9 More realistically, and more in line with other

9 It should be noted that much of Carr’s argumentation on this point follows Susan Niditch’s Oral World and Written Word, in which a simplistic form of the documentary hypothesis is subject to critique—namely, that the J, E, D, and P sources cannot be supposed to have been discrete texts that redactors ever (literally) had open on a large table all at the same time.

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Near Eastern scribal cultures, “Israelite scribes most

likely would have drawn on their verbatim memory of other

texts in quoting, borrowing from, or significantly revising

them [texts].” (WT 160)

Another potential link between the Sumerian/Egyptian

scribal cultures and the Israelite is that text does carry a

certain talismanic power in the Hebrew Bible. There is the

obvious example of the tablets given to Moses on which the

commandments are written, but Numbers has at least two

instances of writing having more quotidian magical

functionality. In the fifth chapter, a procedure is

described for determining the faithfulness of a wife whose

husband suspects infidelity. A litany of curses are written

out, and the text is then washed off into “the water of

bitterness,” (Num. 5:23) which she then drinks. If innocent,

nothing will happen, but if guilty, “the water that brings

the curse shall enter into her and cause bitter pain, and

her womb will discharge, her uterus drop, and the woman

shall become an execration among her people.” (Num. 5:27)

Text again performs a magical function in the aftermath of

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Korah’s rebellion and the subsequent plague in chapter 17.

To do away with the murmurings against Moses and Aaron after

the rebellions and the plague, the Lord instructs Moses to

collect a staff from each of the twelve ancestral houses of

Israel, and to “inscribe each man’s name on his staff, there

being one staff for each head of an ancestral house; also

inscribe Aaron’s name of the staff of Levi.” (Num. 17.16)

The staves are all left in the Tent of Meeting, and it is

said that the one on which the name of the Lord’s favored

people is written will sprout (Num. 17.20). When Moses

checks on the staves the next day, the staff of Levi “had

brought forth sprouts, produced blossoms, and borne

almonds.” (Num. 17.23) The sprouted staff of Levi is a sign

that confirms the status of the Aaron and his descendants as

the high priests of Israel, and is also a means by which the

Lord to rid himself “of the incessant mutterings of the

Israelites against you [Moses].” (Num. 17.20)

One even more explicit instance of text having magical

powers is to be found at the beginning of Ezekiel, in which

Ezekiel receives a vision of a scroll with writing on both

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sides that the Lord instructs him to eat. “And he said to

me, ‘Son of man, eat this scroll that I give you and fill

your stomach with it.’ Then I ate it; and it was in my mouth

as sweet as honey. And he said to me, ‘Son of man, go, get

you to the house of Israel, and speak with my words to

them.” (Ezek. 3:3) These are but a few instances in which

the Hebrew Bible describes the written word in magical terms

similar to those found in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

There is, then, a measure of similarity between the

ancient Israelite relation to text and that described by

Carr in his chapters on Egypt and Mesopotamia. Text

functions as a ‘semimagical technology’ (to an extent) in

all three cases, and there are reasonable grounds on which

to claim that memorization and recitation played a major

role in the literate cultures of each society. The evidence

does not allow one to say much more than this rather

schematic claim, but, as in the case of ancient Greece, Carr

makes a far more substantive claim (despite a similar lack

of evidence,10 as was the case for Greece): “From the 10 “Ancient Israel, like ancient Greece, lacks clear examples of the higher level of student exercises. Many such exercises were probably

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earliest period of their use as Scripture, such (proto)biblical

texts served as authoritative reference texts for use in

education of literate elites in Israel. There are

significant differences between early and later use of such

texts, but the similarities are more significant.” (WT 109)

Regarding this claim, there is simply not much that can be

said by way of affirmation or contradiction. Without

evidence pertaining to the scribal training of the literate

elites in question, there are no grounds upon which to

proceed.

What can be said by way of getting around Carr’s

assertion is that while many instances of semi-magical

writing as can be found in the Hebrew Bible, there are

plenty of counterexamples. Wisdom is often not reducible to

writing, and writing is not always magical. Take, for

example, the last words of David: “Now these are the last

words of David: The oracle of David, the son of Jesse, the

oracle of the man who was raised on high, the anointed of

the God of Jacob, the sweet psalmist of Israel: ‘The Spirit

inscribed on papyrus or leather, which does not generally survive in thebetter watered areas.” (WT 121)

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of the Lord speaks by me, his word is upon my tongue.’” (2

Sam. 23:1-2) Commenting on this verse, Moses Maimonides, in

his Guide for the Perplexed, identifies it as a kind of prophecy

in which, “a person feels as if something came upon him, and

as if he had received a new power that encourages him to

speak. He treats of science, or composes hymns, exhorts his

fellow men, discusses political and theological problems;

all this he does while awake, and in the full possession of

his senses. Such a person is said to speak by the holy

spirit. David composed the Psalms, and Solomon the Book of

Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon by this

spirit.” (GP 2 XLV, 242) This kind of self-possessed

prophecy is one Maimonides distinguishes from the highest

sort performed by Moses11, and at other times by David,

which consists in decisive action, and from lower kinds

(such as the prophecies of Ezekiel, the seventy elders12, 11 “We must content ourselves with that which is within our reach, and that which cannot be approached by logical inference let us leave to himwho has been endowed with that great and divine influence, expressed in the words: “Mouth to mouth do I speak with Him” (Num. 12:8)” (GP 2 XXIV,198)12 Num. 11:24-25: “Moses went out and told the people the words of the Lord; and he gathered seventy men of the elders of the people, and placed them round about the tent. Then the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of the spirit that was upon him and put

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and Balaam13) that appear in dreams and overpower the person

uttering them.

Maimonides’ is by no means a definitive read on the

matter of prophecy, but what it demonstrates is that the

neither the text of the Pentateuch itself nor the role text

plays in the Pentateuch need be understood primarily as an

instrument for elite scribal education. Reducing the book to

such an instrumental role glosses over the distinct kind of

‘divine’ text found in the Hebrew Bible: even the lower

forms of prophecy Maimonides describes, in which one is

‘filled’ with the divine word, are not divine words of the

Mesopotamian sort. Prophetic utterance is not delivered so

that it can be copied over and over toward the end of

‘enculturating’ scribes. In those earlier cases, the

divinity of the text mattered because of the results a

scribe might glean from a lifetime of diligent exercise—the

Mesopotamian becomes a proper ‘Sumerian,’ and the Egyptian

becomes pure enough to channel the inner magic of the cultic

it upon the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did so no more.”13 Num. 23:26: “Balaam answered Balak, ‘Did I not tell you, All that theLord says, that I must do?’”

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scrolls. The deity of the Pentateuch, by contrast, is not so

distant, and is not so mediated. His word comes directly,

and his word is to be heeded, not endlessly copied and

mindlessly recited. Should his word not be heeded, this

deity goes so far as to threaten to retract his own words, a

notion that does not easily fit into Carr’s model of scribal

education/enculturation. As the Lord says to Moses after the

incident with the Golden Calf, “Whosoever hath sinned

against me, him will I blot out of my book.” (Exod. 32. 33)

In sum, the Hebrew Bible is not well represented as one

instance among many others of a text that inscribes its

essential cultural content on the hearts of a dedicated

scribe-caste. What the next section on Jacob Wright’s

evaluation of the Hebrew Bible as a commemorative (and

thereby nation-formative) document of defeat will argue is

that such a position is reductive and deficient. Though the

Hebrew Bible might be many things, it is not primarily a

text whose social function was to be memorized and recited

toward the end of altering the heart of the one who

successfully memorizes it.

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What works about Carr’s book is, in important ways, what

doesn’t work. The particular details of Egypt and

Mesopotamia reveal some very plausible reasons for thinking

of them as two important ‘moments’ in the history of ancient

scribal cultures. Carr’s comparison of Mesopotamia and Egypt

is an early instance of where he gets lost in the evidence:

having committed himself to the rhetoric of text being

deposited into the hearts of literate elites, he has to

concede to the archaeological evidence that written texts

were stored in many other ways, going so far as to describe

the media and sorts of containers in which those texts were

kept (sometimes wooden boxes, or jars, sometimes in homes,

temples, libraries, even caves). These sorts of details are

interesting, but are also wholly beside the point Carr is

trying to make. The claim is that the ancients believed

certain texts ought to be preserved, the most obvious

evidence of which is that many different cultures put a lot

of energy into cultivating many different kinds of scribal

education. Some were more alike than others, but the

commitment to keeping some key texts alive was one all of

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them had in common, the Mesopotamians as the Egyptians as

the Greeks as the Israelites. Further, texts were kept alive

not because they were national favorites, but because they

did something special: they effected changes in people who

committed them to memory. The reasons why these changes came

about, or what kind of changes did come about is variable,

and that makes sense. Committing Gilgamesh to memory will

have a different effect than memorizing The Iliad, knowing

Egyptian spells is a different sort of internalized

knowledge than is intimate acquaintance with the Torah.

Carr, I think, veers off the path of sound argumentation

when he attributes the same kind of change to all the

different subjects of scribal initiation, a sort of change

legible in the title of the book—Writing on the Tablet of the Heart.

The text-effect he finds in the scribal culture of ancient

Mesopotamia has a wealth of evidence supporting it, and that

part of the book is a spectacular piece of scholarship. But

the other civilizations do not have the same sort of

evidence testifying to the same sort of enculturation

process, nor do they describe their respective conceptions

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of ‘mastering’ texts in the same terms.

DEFEAT

Jacob Wright, in “The Commemoration of Defeat and the

Formation of a Nation in the Hebrew Bible” offers another

approach to the Hebrew Bible. Wright argues the primary role

of the Pentateuch to be that of a nation-formative document

that is so by preserving cultural memories of both the

anticipation of as well as the experience of defeat.

Wright’s approach has many advantages over that proposed by

Carr. The text is still written about as a historical

document, but what matters is the national history of the

entire Israelite people it contains.

This is an advance over Carr’s interpretive approach

insofar as it is more attentive to the text itself. Where

Carr argues that one can understand the Hebrew Bible as a

participant in a (tenuous) continuum of scribal cultures,

Wright emphasizes the aspect in which it is a communal

history of the entire nation of Israel. That history spans

periods before during, and after the existence of an

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Israelite state. Were there not still a community of Jewish

people active in the world, this would be nothing more than

historical observation, but the perseverance of communities

oriented around the Hebrew Bible are evidence that its

function serves, and has long served, to form a national

consciousness around itself. As Wright says, “This literary

arrangement underscores the point that Israel constitutes a

people not limited to its historical territory and

longstanding monarchies, and it can survive without its

temple and armies. A simple equation between people or

nation, on the one hand, and the state and land, on the

other, is therewith radically severed.” (CD 444)

The Hebrew Bible is a national document, and serves as

the basis for the social norms that members of the religious

community abide by and hold each other to. Among other

things, it is a record of the binding covenant between the

people and their deity. ‘Covenant’ needn’t be read as a word

with excessive theological baggage. Though it does have

theological significance, it also serves as the constitution

for an Israelite state, a ‘constitution’ in the pragmatic

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and secular sense of the word. Said rather more extremely,

and more faithfully to Wright’s argumentation, the Hebrew

Bible does not only initiate and maintain a national

consciousness by codifying a relation of God-to-people, as

states codify relations of citizen-to-sovereign. By couching

Israel’s covenant with the deity in the compiled histories,

songs, and traditions of the entire nation—rather than the

state-establishing history of a victorious party14—the

Hebrew Bible (ostensibly) preserves a holistic history of

the entire nation of Israel, inclusive of all its tribes and

reflective of its interactions with foreign enemies and

friends. Nation, state, people, and defeat, then, relate to

each other in the following way: the people who founded the

ancient Israelite states are the subject of the histories

compiled into what became the Pentateuch. Those histories of

hardship and defeat are also law-establishing episodes in

which defeats are indexed to specific episodes of

transgression against the deity. Divine wrath descends

14 Cf. the Mesha Stele, which proclaims the victory of Mesha, King of Moab, over Israel (approx. 800BC, during the reign of Ahab.)

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either immediately15 or is manifest in the outcome of human

events.

In Numbers, the latter form is less frequent—most of

Israel’s military efforts in that book are successful.

Numbers 20:21, however, recounts Israel’s attempt to pass

through the land of Edom en route to the promised land,

passage that Edom denies. Jacob Milgrom, in The JPS Torah

Commentary: Numbers, notes that the account of this same

incident in Deuteronomy, as narrated by Moses, is slightly

different: there, Israel does not simply turn away from

Edom. The biblical authors have Moses recount God’s telling

him quite explicitly that, “[the descendants of Esau] will

be afraid of you, so be very careful not to engage in battle

with them, for I will not give you even so much as a foot’s

length of their land, since I have given Mount Seir to Esau

as a possession.” (Deut. 2:4-5) It does not feel quite

correct to assume that one book of the Hebrew Bible can be 15 As is the case in Num. 11, where the children of Israel complain about the manna provided them, to which God responds by showering them with quail, demanding they eat of it for “a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you.” (Num. 11:20) There is also a direct punishment by God at Num. 16:31-34, where the rebellionof Korah results in “all Korah’s people and all their possessions” (Num.16:32) being swallowed up by the earth.

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used to fill in content in another, but this particular

example is only meant to illustrate how the displeasure of

God can manifest in guises other than his direct punitive

fury. As in this case, it can manifest as the withholding of

blessing that results in continued hardship. With Wright, it

is certainly correct to reflect on the Hebrew Bible as a

document that chronicles the great defeats of the children

of Israel. It is, moreover, the actual experiences of being-

defeated on scales such that political stability was

threatened that generate much of the nation-making history

that the Hebrew Bible records.

UTOPIA

The last thought I would offer in this context is what I

hope to be an addendum to Wright’s interpretation of the

Hebrew Bible. While I agree that that text is remarkable in

its success in forming and preserving a national

consciousness, it seems inadequate to attribute that success

primarily to the commemoration of defeat. The reason I say

so is that national literatures that primarily document

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defeats are generally those of defeated civilizations.

Defeated states, nations, and peoples, precisely because

they have been defeated, do not survive. On the basis of

this observation, it may be possible to read the Hebrew

Bible in yet a third way: as a document of utopian yearning,

and of an open future. In the words of Ernst Bloch,

“Totality in the religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom is

solely of a totally transforming and exploding kind, is

utopian; and confronted with this totality, not only our

knowledge, but also the whole of what has previously become,

to which our conscience refers, then appears as unfinished

work.” (PH 221) If Wright’s reading of the Hebrew Bible as a

document of defeat is correct, and I think it is, Bloch’s

reading of it as a document of utopian yearning relates to

it as does one side of a coin to another. The ‘whole of what

has become,’ the entire history of defeat that binds the

Israelite national consciousness together, is more than

memory or chronicle. It transforms and explodes into an

appearance of unfinished work. That this is so appears

clearly at the endings of Numbers and Deuteronomy with the

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death of Moses and the incipient rise of Joshua as leader of

the children of Israel.

To develop this point further and to hit the note on

which I would like to conclude, our attention will turn

again to ancient Greece. The Hebrew Bible, as Wright says,

should be read as the foundation of a national

consciousness. In large part, that national consciousness is

informed by the commemoration of defeats, but I would like

to hazard the claim that those memories of defeat are not

nation-formative in themselves. What really counts is not the

defeat, but the promise of a new, changed world that follows

those defeats. I would defend this by way of a comparison of

the Hebrew Bible with another ancient body of literature

that thematizes defeat without pointing to a new future (at

any rate, not as explicitly): that of the Greeks.

An anticipatory consciousness of ruin is evident in

Plato—Republic’s elaborate discussions regarding the ideal

polity are introduced by way of Socrates’ loosely structured

exchanges with Cephalus, his son Polemarchus, and

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Thrasymachus, and in the company of Lysias, another of

Cephalus’ sons (R 328c). The anticipation of ruin is subtle,

but potent. Plato includes Polemarchus as a historical

figure—he was but one of many victims of the Thirty Tyrants,

an oligarchic regime installed in Athens by Sparta. Lysias,

explicitly included as present, but who does not speak,

survived the reign of the Tyrants (it lasted less than a

year, spanning 404-403) and spent the remainder of his life

composing and delivering speeches in court. One of these

speeches, known today as Against Eratosthenes, contains Lysias’

grievances against Eratosthenes, one of the Thirty, for

forcing his brother Polemarchus to drink hemlock and for

many other abuses against his father, his own person, and

their household.16

16 “…I went to the house of Archeneus the shipowner and sent him to the town to find out about my brother. He came back and told me that Eratosthenes has caught him in the street and dragged him off to prison.After hearing this, I sailed the following night to Megara. As for Polemarchus, the Thirty sent him their customary instruction to drink hemlock, without telling him why he was to die. He did not even get a hearing and a chance to defend himself. His body was brought back from the prison, but they would not allow us to conduct the funeral from any of our three houses. Instead, we had to hire a shed in which to lay him out. We owned plenty of cloaks, but when we asked, they would not give us a single one for the burial. Instead, one of our friends gave us the cloak for he burial, another the pillow, and others what each happened to have. The Thirty had seven hundred shields of ours. They had a huge amount of silver and gold, bronze and ornaments, and furniture and

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That Plato would choose to populate Republic with

interlocutors who were well-known victims of a violent

political regime is certainly telling about the political

questions raised in Republic. But more important in this

context is that much of the Greek literature has a penchant

for reflecting upon great defeats. In Plato, they add an

ominous gravity to a discussion concerning the nature of

justice, in the sense that Periclean Athens was, before the

Peloponnesian War, a powerful military empire that seemed

unlikely to fall anytime soon. All of the great tragedies,

particularly those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, take up the

anticipation of disaster as their central theme. Of the

historians, Thucydides has a similar tendency to dwell on

the downfall of states. Reflecting on the ruins of Mycenae,

he reflects further on what one might think of the ruins of

Sparta were it to be found in the future:

Now seeing Mycenae was but a small city, or if any other of that age seem but of light regard, let not any man for that cause, on so weak an argument, think that fleet to have been less than the poets have said and fame reported it to be. For if the city of Lacedaemon were now desolate and nothing of it left but the temples and floors of the

women’s clothing, more than they ever hoped to obtain; and also one hundred and twenty slaves, of which they kept the best but handed over the remainder to the treasury.” (AE 119)

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buildings, I think it would breed much unbelief in posterity long hence of their power in comparison of the fame. For although of five parts of Peloponnesus it possess two and hath the leading of the rest and also ofmany confederates without, yet the city being not close built and the temples and other edifices not costly, and because it is but scatteringly inhabited after the ancient manner of Greece, their power would seem inferior to the report. Again, the same things happening to Athens, one would conjecture by the sight of their city that their powerwere double to what it is. We ought not therefore to be incredulous [concerning the forces that went to Troy] nor have in regard so much theexternal show of a city as the power; but we are to think that that expedition was indeed greater than those that went before it but yet inferior to those of the present age, if in this also we may credit the poetry of Homer, who being a poet was like to set it forth to the utmost. And yet even thus it cometh short. (Thuc. 1.10)

That the Greeks were able to contemplate the prospect of

their own destruction with such lucidity was, at least in

part, what attracted so many German philosophers of the

Romantic persuasion. Recovery of the Greeks, as a theme,

manifested in German thought in many ways, and this is not

the place to review all of them. So I would like to finish

with the following suggestions. The first suggestion is

already in place: that Israel does not stand alone as a body

of cultural memory that has survived the journey from

antiquity to modernity by commemorating its own defeats.

Another body of national memory that has outlived its state

is that of ancient Greece, albeit with less success. There

are still Jews, but no ancient Greeks. Both were, therefore,

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both subjects that fascinated a 19th and 20th European

philosophical climate that was insecure about its lack of a

national consciousness. I agree with Wright completely when

he says that:

“… The greatest argument against Wellhausen’s view—that defeat destroyedthe nation and formed a “Jewish church” in its stead—is the history of Germany itself. Nationalist thinkers in German-speaking lands looked to the biblical descriptions of Israel existing without a state as a model for the German nation, which due to a long history of wars had forfeitedsovereignty over a unified territory. Moreover, in treating the questions about whether Jews can be counted as Germans, they often pointed to the role played by biblical memories in preserving a distinctive Jewish national identity. For those, such as Fichte, who were concerned with the lack of a strong national identity consolidating the German Volk, the strong national identity they witnessed—or at least claimed existed—in contemporary Jewish communities sparked jealousy and hostility.” (CD 454-455)

If the Israelite national consciousness is one that has

survived without a state, and the Greek one has not, despite

a similar tendency to chronicle its defeats and to

anticipate those that are coming, the case of German

nationalism presents itself as an odd third option: a state

that had outlived its national identity. It makes sense, as

Wright observes, that a nationalistic urge without a

national consciousness to orient it would regard a real

national consciousness with malevolence. The turn in German

letters toward the Greeks, then, is one that this mode of

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analysis lays bare as a doomed project: it certainly is the

literature of a state which had, at one time, a robust

national consciousness. But what the Greek lacks is the

open, utopian, ‘unfinished work’ of the Israelite national

literature. “Hence the ultimate seduction,” Bloch says of

the Greek texts, “to nothing but rounding, but hence also

Greek balance as a secularized form of the totally pagan,

i.e., crackless world-picture: the astral myth.” (PH 218) The Greeks

certainly had their own utopian horizon, a beautiful one

with great aesthetic appeal to German writers and artists,

Wagner and Schlegel as much as Goethe and Hegel (not to

mention Heidegger). But what they sought to recover in the

Greeks—a national consciousness—was long since expired.

The Hebrew Bible, unique among national literatures,

exists beyond this problem. As a nation-formative document

of utopian yearning, it cracks the edges of the world that

other literatures smooth over. Keeping the commandments of

the deity, and remembering the long histories of defeats

bind the national consciousness in solidarity and in

preparation for the real possibility of the future being

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different. The explosive novelty of that which is coming is

sometimes hardship, but sometimes liberation. Sometimes the

law is enforces to keep the deity’s wrath at bay, sometimes

it is to unleash it upon dangerous enemies. In a book so

full of travail and death, making the case might seem far

fetched, and the suggestion that it functions as a

commemorative document of defeat might seem far more

plausible. But I would nonetheless argue that what the

Hebrew Bible preserves is concrete utopian knowledge of real

possibility, and it is looking forward in the same direction

that makes a national consciousness, not looking back. Even

in the darkest of times, such as those recounted in the book

of Jeremiah, shards of novelty-to-come are snuck in between

long descriptions of calamity. Amidst the judgments on the

Philistines and Egypt and Babylon, all of whose destruction

is assured in the wake of the fall of Jerusalem, there is a

promise: that God will save Israel.

“But as for you, have no fear, my servant Jacob,and do not be dismayed, O Israel;for I am going to save you from far away,and your offspring from the land of their captivity. …I will make an end of all the nations Among which I have banished you,

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But I will not make an end of you!I will chastise you in just measure,And I will by no means leave you unpunished. (Jer. 46 : 27-28)

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References

Ernst Bloch. The Principle of Hope, Vol. 1. Cambridge: The MIT

Press, 1986.

Ernst Bloch. Atheism in Christianity. London: Verso, 2009.

David Carr. Writing on the Tablet of the Heart. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2005

Theodor Herzl. The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Vol. 1 (trans. H.

Zohn). New York: Herzl Press, 1960

Jacob Howland (2004). Plato’s Reply to Lysias: Republic 1 and

2 and Against Eratosthenes. The American Journal of Philology. Vol.

125, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 179-208

Werner Jaeger. Early Christianity and Greek Paideia. Cambridge:

Belknap, 1965

Lysias. The Oratory of Classical Greece, Vol. 2: Lysias (trans. S. C.

Todd). Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000

Moses Maimonides. The Guide for the Perplexed (trans. M.

Friedländer). Skokie: Varda Books, 2002

Hindy Najman. Past Renewals: Interpretative Authority, Renewed Revelation,

and the Quest for Perfection in Jewish Antiquity. Leiden:

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Koninklijke Brill NV, 2010

Plato. Republic (trans. A. Bloom). New York: Basic Books,

1991

Jacob Wright (2009). The Commemoration of Defeat and the

Formation of a Nation in the Hebrew Bible. Prooftexts.

Vol. 29 (2009), pp. 433–473.

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