"Introduction" from Samely et al. Profiling Jewish Literature in Antiquity (OUP 2013)

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Profiling Jewish Literaturein Antiquity

An Inventory, from Second Temple Textsto the Talmuds

ALEXANDER SAMELY

in collaboration with

Philip AlexanderRocco BernasconiRobert Hayward

1

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A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR THE DESCRIPTIONOF ANCIENT JEWISH LITERATURE

This book presents a new framework for analysing the literary featuresof a specific historical body of literature. This body of texts is limited bycultural, literary, and contextual features, and consists of the anonymous andpseudepigraphic works of Jewish antiquity. The framework aims to formulatecategories specifically for describing these ancient texts, but is groundedin the modern academic study of texts in general. It strives to identify anddefine every structurally important feature that occurs in any one text inthe corpus. It captures features of texts devoted to storytelling, sapiential andphilosophical discourse, normative promulgation and discussion, com-mentary, homily, poetry, and works which collect smaller texts. The newdescriptive categories do not depend on existing genre terms. In particular,the framework does not characterize whole texts by the use of single genreterms, such as ‘midrash’, ‘wisdom’, ‘apocalypse’, ‘law code’, ‘rewrittenScripture’, ‘anthology’, or similar expressions. It addresses texts on a levelof detail where independently verifiable literary features emerge which, co-ordinated with each other in the new framework, produce a complexand modular description of any given document. The literary features areidentified in the first instance from their occurrence in real texts, buttheir conceptualization and systematic ordering are indebted to the moderndisciplines of linguistics, literary studies, hermeneutics, and specialist fieldswithin them. This book describes the new framework and all its descriptivecategories. This Introduction constitutes Part I, followed by the actual text ofthe new framework (Part II), a detailed commentary on its categories(Part III), and four sample descriptions, which illustrate how the frameworkis applied to specific texts, namely, Jubilees, Temple Scroll, Mishnah, andGenesis Rabbah (Part IV).1

A team of researchers at Manchester and Durham Universities developedthe new framework, with the benefit of substantial funding from the AHRC.2

1 These are shortened versions of the database Profiles that appear in A. Samely, R. Bernasconi,P. Alexander, R. Hayward (eds.), Database for the Analysis of Anonymous and PseudepigraphicJewish Texts of Antiquity (http://literarydatabase.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/), 2012 (hence-forth, Samely et al. 2012).

2 Project ‘Typology of Anonymous and Pseudepigraphic Jewish Literature of Antiquity, c.200bce to c.700 ce’ funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council between 2007 and2012. The researchers involved are the collaborators of this book: Philip Alexander, Rocco

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The project from which the new framework arises was meant as a response tothree areas of perceived weakness in the current study of ancient Jewish texts.First, there appears to be a lack of conceptual rigour and consistency in muchof the labelling and discussion of genres of anonymous and pseudepigraphicworks. Second, the literary traits of Jewish texts tend to be treated in toomuch isolation from each other, partly in consequence of the necessarydivision of the field into academic specialisms. This makes it difficult torecognize literary similarities and dissimilarities in independence from postu-lates of historical influence. Third, reconstructive speculation regarding atext’s earlier stages of development is widely accepted as part of the scholarlyroutine before using it as evidence. But the same is not true for the obligationto articulate how the text—as it is—actually works as a whole. Yet, anintuition of the whole text must be presupposed in all diachronic analysis,3

and explication of that intuition may be necessary to properly justify theresults of diachronic analysis. In the case of many anonymous andpseudepigraphic Jewish texts, there is a ready scholarly acceptance, ofteneven a starting assumption, that they do not work as whole texts, or thatthe manner in which they work does not affect the validity of the scholar’sargument. This leads to a situation where very substantial parts of scholarshipare concerned with interpreting, as if they constituted primary evidence,hypothetical texts not attested in the transmission evidence, while ignoringthe text that is there.

The combined effect of routine reliance on unquestioned genre labels, lackof communication between specialists in certain text groups, and perfunctoryinterest in whole texts as transmitted, has the potential to introduce seriousinaccuracies and distortions into the historical picture of ancient Judaism.It seems to indicate the need for three scholarly advances. First, the forging ofa common language for speaking about literary phenomena across ancientJewish texts, and whole texts in particular. The new descriptive frameworkhere presented is designed to meet that need. Second, the grounding of thatcommon language in the evidence of a body of texts that have some basicsimilarities in their literary constitution and share historical-cultural links,but which transcends the limits of only one research specialism. Theanonymous and pseudepigraphic Jewish texts of antiquity constitute onesuch corpus, and furthermore harbour sufficiently serious problems ofliterary analysis to merit urgent investigation by a new methodology. Third,the creation of literary descriptions of whole ancient texts on a large scale.This is attempted in the database of literary profiles which accompanies this

Bernasconi, Robert Hayward, and myself. Information on the Project is available from thewebsite: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/ancientjewishliterature. Scholarly papers have appearedsince 2010, some of which are cited below; a volume of Aramaic Studies, 9:1 (2011), was devotedentirely to the Project methodology.

3 See Samely 2010.

Introduction4

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book (Samely et al. 2012). The database contains descriptions of the primaryevidence of hundreds of texts belonging to the corpus, and presents therebyalso the body of data from whose empirical investigation the new descriptiveframework arose in the first place.

The common language for describing whole texts is realized as an Inventoryof textual features. The Inventory consists of stand-alone generic definitionsof literary features, coordinated with or subordinated to each other. While theterms of the definitions are general, the contents of the Inventory are almostentirely limited to literary phenomena that actually occur in at least one textof the corpus. The Inventory thus encapsulates the totality of literary optionsavailable to text-makers of several periods of Jewish history, abstracted fromwhat is actual at least once.4 I will use the term ‘Inventory’ as shorthand for:Inventory of structurally important literary features of anonymous andpseudepigraphic Jewish texts of antiquity. Previous attempts to create adescriptive grid for the literary description of ancient Mediterranean cultureshave tended to be heavily indebted to the rhetorical tradition and ter-minology of Greece and Rome.5 Scholars have also suggested lists of theliterary forms and structures of the New Testament.6 Unlike these earlier lists,however, the Inventory is an attempt to develop from scratch a whole systemof description which is large-scale, comprehensive, and empirically based.The Inventory’s conceptualizations are not directly dependent on ancientgenre theory or rhetorical tradition, but base themselves instead on con-temporary scholarly notions of linguistic meaning and textuality. They alsostart from rereading the texts, not from any existing theory.

INVENTORY, CORPUS OF TEXTS, PROFILES

The Inventory has three main characteristics. First, it embodies a methodologyfor identifying literary features in ancient Jewish texts, which I will explainbelow. Second, it provides a systematic terminology for defining such literaryfeatures. The framework constitutes a technical agenda for describing wholetexts, including features that undermine their unity as texts. Using it as thechecklist for specific individual Jewish texts of antiquity, one can produce a

4 Genette 1980 speaks of his analysis of a particular work (the Proustian narrative), as being acomparison ‘with the general system of narrative possibilities’ he outlines in his book (p. 265;emphasis in the original). The Inventory is such a system of possibilities also; but, in contrast tothe grid of categories developed by Genette, it includes non-narrative texts, while being lessdetailed for narrative texts.

5 The tradition represented for example in Quintilian 1968, as illustrated by the modernexample of Lausberg 1998.

6 These include Reiser 2001 and Berger 1984. For a critique of their methodologies, seeAlexander forthcoming 2013.

Introduction 5

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‘Profile’ which captures their literary surface in a modular manner. And third,the Inventory, using the same detailed grid of literary options for every work,has an inbuilt comparative perspective. It allows structural and synchronicsimilarities and dissimilarities to emerge in a modular fashion, irrespective ofthe historical differences in time and place of origin, social function, or over-all literary type. It thus allows comparison of literary traits across knownor assumed historical influences, opening up new avenues for the under-standing of historical connections. We hope that the integrative approach ofthe Inventory will stimulate the inter-disciplinary dialogue about literaryconstitution between scholars of diverse specialisms.

The Inventory stands in a three-way relationship to other aspects of theresearch project from which it arose. There is the corpus of texts on whichthe Inventory is empirically based; there is the theoretical background of itsdescriptive categories; and there are the literary descriptions of individualtexts—the ‘Profiles’—which emerge when the categories of the Inventory areapplied to a given work.

I will first address the ideas of a corpus and of a Profile. The Inventory isbased on a large-scale reading of anonymous or pseudepigraphic Jewish textsfrom late biblical times to the end of the Talmudic period, insofar as they canbe considered sufficiently complete to testify with some degree of certainty totheir literary constitution. This corpus is the empirical basis for discoveringliterary features; considered as a totality, it is the pool of literary surfacecharacteristics from which the Inventory is a selection, the ‘structurallyimportant’ ones. But the texts in the corpus are also the ultimate target of theInventory, for it is a tool for the profiling of real texts. Once the categoriesof the Inventory are established from reading the texts and collecting theirfeatures, the Inventory acts as a checklist or a descriptive agenda for any giventext. If one deletes from the full Inventory all features that do not occur in thetext to be described, one is left with that text’s Profile: a set of characteristicsin a systematic order. Using the Inventory as a descriptive grid, the membersof the project team and collaborating scholars have created hundreds ofProfiles, covering many of the anonymous and pseudepigraphic Jewishworks of antiquity. Each Profile is effectively a schematic presentation of atext’s structure, a summary of its literary surface. These Profiles are publishedin the online database Samely et al. 2012 (http://literarydatabase.humanities.manchester.ac.uk).

The database presents a Profile for most texts in the original corpus.7

We started with a sample of 40 corpus texts during the Autumn of 2007,discussing each text in group meetings and making as few prior assumptions

7 The texts of the corpus are listed in Table 1 above, also displayed on the database website.Texts that have not yet been profiled, but which we hope to profile during 2013–14, are dis-tinguished graphically in both lists.

Introduction6

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about their ‘genre’ or specific historical context as possible.8 We collectedall literary features that appeared—to us—to have a bearing on the overallpresentation of a given text,9 tried to produce precise definitions of eachfeature, and experimented with putting them into a systematic order of somekind. After a first rough version of the document now called the Inventoryhad emerged from these discussions, we continued to refine the Inventory byreading through hundreds of further texts. We thus began to use the emergentInventory as a checklist in producing actual descriptions of corpus texts.Over time the project thus generated, on the one hand, the final version of ahierarchical list of literary features, that is, the Inventory; and on the otherhand, a series of Profiles of individual corpus texts, now published in thedatabase Samely et al. 2012.

The corpus boundaries were determined in such a manner that they con-tained a very substantial number of texts, and that they shared some veryglobal characteristics that we considered to be important, while also includingthe prima facie genres of ancient Jewish literature: narrative, poetry, dis-course, and commentary. The criteria for including a text into the corpuswere: (a) certainly or arguably Jewish; (b) complete or near-complete; (c)anonymous or pseudepigraphic, that is, not authored by a publicly knownpersona referring to itself in the text as such; (d ) falling into the periodbetween c.200 bce and c.700 ce; (e) not canonical in terms of the HebrewBible of rabbinic Judaism. Criterion (c) defines a text which presents itself ashaving a voice that is collective, anonymous, or impersonal; or a voice thatbelongs to an earlier literary figure. I shall discuss the meaning of anonymityand pseudepigraphy in Chapter 2 below. This criterion excludes in particularthe works of Philo and Josephus, on which more will be said in a later sectionof this Introduction. Furthermore, the corpus is restricted to works that, fromthe modern historian’s perspective, are ‘literary’, in the sense that they canbe understood as interventions into the formation of cultural, religious, orhermeneutic positions within ancient Judaism. This excludes documentscreated or transmitted primarily to perform, record, or commemorate trans-actions of everyday life, commerce, politics, military activity, religion, or law;and texts only preserved as inscriptions.

This set of criteria raises a number of conceptual and historical problems.Applying them consistently to ancient Jewish sources is far from straight-forward. We decided to handle the limits imposed on the corpus in a

8 A list of this initial set of texts is available from: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/ancientjewishliterature.

9 There is a very small number of categories in the Inventory which are not found in anycorpus text, but are included merely to clarify by contrast the meaning of some of the otherfeatures. These include categories 2.2.2.1, 5.5.1.2, 5.10.5, and 6.4.1. These will be explained inPart III. On the question of selection of features for inclusion in the Inventory, see below.

Introduction 7

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pragmatic manner. The project corpus overlaps prima facie with four conven-tional corpora of Jewish literature of antiquity, namely the Pseudepigraphaof the Old Testament and the Apocrypha of the Old Testament; the near-complete Dead Sea Scrolls; and the works of rabbinic Judaism approximatelyto the end of the Talmud. The corpus often referred to as the Pseud-epigrapha10 has no agreed definition. Of the many works so titled in thecollection edited by J. Charlesworth,11 a substantial number are included inour project corpus, but others are not because either their Jewish character,12

their pre-700 ce date,13 or their status as stand-alone text14 was in seriousdoubt. Occasionally we included texts that are on the margins of the corpusbecause they provided potentially important markers in the development ofliterary genres.15 Two groups of texts are absent that could be argued to fallwithin the boundaries of the corpus. The first are certain books of the GreekBible. The so-called Apocrypha, insofar as they consist of texts that areentirely absent from the Hebrew Bible, are all included. But Greek-biblicaltexts which have a corresponding text in the Masoretic Hebrew Bible are notpart of the corpus. I will speak about this in more detail at the end of Chapter6 below, but the reason for this is, in a nutshell, that where these Greek textsexhibit structural differences to Hebrew Bible texts now extant, this can andoften clearly does arise from a recensional difference to the Masoretic text.This means that differences of structural importance cannot be interpreteden bloc as the result of a translational or wider hermeneutic engagementwith the biblical text as we know it, which is how the Targums are defined inthe Inventory point 6.13. Rather, such Greek Bible texts are to be treated atleast prima facie as of the same kind and independent status as the texts ofthe Hebrew Bible, and the categories of their empirical description willmost fruitfully be developed as part of a literary analysis of all biblical texts,

10 On the history of this term in modern scholarship, see Yoshiko Reed 2009.11 Charlesworth 1983–5a.12 We have included Lives of the Prophets, despite the real possibility that this is substantially

a Christian text. Similarly, the Elephantine Aramaic Ah. iqar is clearly not a Jewish text, butincluded for its apparent Jewish reception and manifest availability in the cultural realm fromwhich the other corpus texts emerged, illustrated further by the mention of the figure of Ah. iqarin Tobit (e.g. Tob. 1:21).

13 We have included Pesiqta Rabbati, despite the near-certainty that it is post-Talmudic, andthe same goes for some other rabbinic texts whose dates are uncertain but could be later than700 ce.

14 We have excluded the additions to Esther and Daniel, but included the Prayer of Manasseh.This criterion also affects potentially independent pieces of the Jewish liturgy which are referredto (but never quoted in full) in rabbinic literature: the Shema� with its blessings, the EighteenBenedictions, the Passover Haggadah, and similar works whose fixed text can be found onlyin the post-Talmudic prayer books of Amram and Saadia; see Tabory 2006a, pp. 281 and 308 f.;Tabory 2006b.

15 Thus Sirach/Ecclesiasticus is included, although the manner in which this text names itsown author at Sir 50:27 means it cannot be said to be anonymous or pseudepigraphic.

Introduction8

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including the Masoretic ones, as well as translational traits.16 Another groupof texts excluded from the current descriptive project are works of liturgicalpoetry, Piyyut, some of which are early enough to belong chronologicallyto the Talmudic period proper.17 In contrast to many other genres of therabbinic period, this branch of literature continued to be productive in thepost-Talmudic period and thus could not be completely represented withinthe project corpus. Furthermore, many authors of Piyyut are known andappear to have acted as publicly known authors of whole texts (here,poetic pieces) in their social settings, although our knowledge of this today isfragmented. The artful, rule-governed, and individually creative constitutionof Piyyut promotes the text’s literary ‘surface’ as such. It points to a differentculture of text-making from that prevailing in almost all other texts in thiscorpus, although this intuition would have to be tested by some future large-scale empirical description of the Piyyut using the same methodology as thecurrent Inventory.

My discussion of the Greek Bible and Piyyut presupposes a feature ofthe Inventory which now needs to be explicated. The logic of a corpus-basedInventory of structurally important literary features implies a plurality ofcorpora and thus of Inventories. There are as many corpus-based potentialInventories as there are fruitfully defined bodies of literature. Ultimatelywhole literary corpora could be compared, on a general level, through theInventories which encapsulate their literary options. The body of texts onwhich the current Inventory is based, defined above, already invokes threeother bodies by contrast, which arise in the same larger historical context: thecanons of the Hebrew/Greek Bible, the publicly authored oeuvres of Philo andJosephus, and the New Testament. How fruitful it was to draw an initialboundary for a first Inventory in this manner depends to some extent on howfruitful the other, thereby implicitly defined, corpora will turn out to be whensubjected to a similar analysis. But it seems important to have drawn someboundaries around an initial corpus, rather than aim for comprehensivecoverage of everything—say, all Jewish or Bible-related ancient literature,which would have included the other three corpora. Apart from the fact that‘comprehensiveness’ is a matter of perspective, and that there are no naturalboundaries for cultures and periods, the contrast of texts and of whole bodiesof literature is itself an important aspect of the methodology. The morecomprehensive a corpus-based Inventory, the less distinctive it is for a cultureand period. The main ‘literary’ criteria used in the definition of the currentcorpus are important here: anonymity and pseudepigraphy. The texts in this

16 We have in fact included one work in the profiling where the Greek attests to a text shapedifferent from the Masoretic Bible, namely 1 Esdras profiled by R. Hayward.

17 See Fleischer 2006; Lieber 2010. Yannai, the most important early author, is dated to the6th cent. ce.

Introduction 9

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corpus are defined as not projecting public ‘author’ personas; and theyalready relate to an existing earlier corpus, namely that of ‘biblical’ works orof works which resembled them in some way, thus constituting in some sensea literary response to texts not entirely divergent from the ones today knownas biblical. The homogeneity provides a certain measure of underlyingliterary homogeneity to the corpus. This is manifest and reinforced also byshared cultural reference points, embodied in particular in common referencesof personal and geographical names, as well as in perceived and activelyconstructed ethnic–religious traditions across generations. It is likely thateach of the contrasting literary corpora mentioned above—Hebrew Bible,New Testament, and Philo and Josephus—contains some features not presentin the current Inventory, while sharing many others. And some features in thecurrent Inventory will be absent from them. Thus section 6, insofar as it isdevoted to explicit commentaries, would have no place in an Inventory fortexts of the Hebrew/Greek Bible. But many features defined in the currentInventory are immediately applicable to works of the other sets of texts justmentioned. This also means that nothing stands in the way of using thecurrent Inventory as a starting point for describing texts that are outside thecurrent corpus, perhaps as the first step towards developing new Inventoriestailor-made for other corpora. That the current Inventory categories avoidmaking reference to the specific boundaries of the corpus will make thiseasier.

The Inventory here presented went through many versions. We dis-tinguished these by version numbers counting down from the arbitrarystarting point of −500 to the envisaged end point of version ‘zero’. Amongstthe team of researchers, and in early conference presentations, we used tospeak of the Inventory document initially as ‘the Organon’. This self-deprecating homage to Aristotle was dropped later in favour of the gravitasof ‘Inventory’, which is short for ‘inventory of structurally importantliterary features’ and was, we decided, less likely to provoke sniggers amongacademic colleagues. The first Inventory draft, version −500, dates fromOctober 2007. The Inventory was refined and considerably extendedthroughout 2008 and 2009, as more and more corpus texts were added toits empirical base. During 2010, revisions became mostly restricted to thearrangement of the categories, but there were also some radical cuts. With bignumerical jumps reflecting major revisions, we reached version numberminus 354 in October 2011. The version presented here is, effectively, thelast and will be treated as unmarked version zero, but is substantially the sameas the PDF archive version −354 that can be downloaded from the projectwebsite (n. 2 above).

From the second project year onwards, the task of profiling individualworks was shared out beyond the core team consisting of P. Alexander, R.Bernasconi, R. Hayward, and myself, as a number of Manchester University

Introduction10

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doctoral students and scholars from outside the project joined us in the task.18

While during the first two years team members discussed and agreed on howto apply the categories of the Inventory to a given text, this later becameimpractical. Even in earlier stages, however, the scholar who was assigned atext had full control and responsibility. Each Profile in the database is signedby the name of the scholar who produced it, and constitutes the interpretationof the original text, as well as of the Inventory categories, to which theindividual is committed.

The total number of Inventory points and sub-points is about 560; mosttexts require the application of about 80 to 110.19 Inventory features tend tobe clustered together by conceptual similarity, meaning that each selectedpoint stands in a tacit contrast to its neighbours. Which points are absentfrom a text’s Profile can therefore also be very informative. In the database(Samely et al. 2012), two Profiles may be displayed side by side to make directcomparisons possible. The database offers different types of searches of theProfiles, allowing scholars to gather literary data on a wide range of topics.20

Each point of a Profile starts with the generic definition of the categorythat applies to that text, a formulation taken directly from the Inventorydocument, although sometimes shortened. Where the generic definition issupplemented by further information specific to the text, a colon separates itfrom the generic wording. The additional information can be an illustration,an indication of frequency, or an explanation of why or how the categoryis thought to apply, and can occupy considerable space.21 Inventory andProfile points are numbered by the same system of numbers; but Profiles alsoconstitute readable prose documents, albeit rigidly structured and formulaicones, as the samples in Part IV below illustrate. The online database Samelyet al. 2012 offers the option to save Profiles as PDF documents.

18 Beyond the core team, who created the bulk of the Profiles, the following scholars havecontributed to the database: Simon Lasair (Mishnah Shabbat and Sukkah), Hedva Abel(Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael), Alinda Damsma (Visions of Ezekiel), Maria Haralambakis (Tes-tament of Job), Katharina Keim (collaborator on the Profile of Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer), andAron Sterk (Epistola Anne ad Senecam); Andrew Wilshere (project administrator) proofreadmost of the Profiles.

19 Thus the Profile of Jubilees has 100 points applied; that of the War Scroll, 81; that ofMidrash Esther Rabbah, 109; that of the Babylonian Talmud Tractate Sotah, 118.

20 The software which was developed to create the database is being made available to theacademic community. See the database website for contact details.

21 Some of the Profiles are very substantial documents in their own right, in particular wheremarked ‘detailed’ as opposed to ‘selective’ in their title. Thus Genesis Rabbah and Jubileeshave Profiles—found in a shortened version in Part IV below—of c.13,000 and 11,000 words,respectively, while the War Scroll has c.7,000 and Midrash Esther Rabbah c.5,900 words. TheProfile of Babylonian Talmud Tractate Sotah, marked ‘selective’, on the other hand, consistsof c.3,700 words, mostly constituted by the applicable generic definitions. In addition to theSample Profiles in Part IV of this book, a theme issue of Aramaic Studies, 9:1 (2011), containsdiscussion and the Profiles of Targums Onkelos Genesis, Esther Sheni, Canticles, Qohelet, andLamentations, as well as of Genesis Apocryphon.

Introduction 11

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Profiles contain a selective bibliography. This is largely devoted to criticaland popular editions of the text, manuscript facsimiles, online texts, andtranslations. All Profiles are based on work with the original text in theoriginal languages, using critical editions, manuscripts, or manuscriptfacsimiles where available.22 The bibliography of a Profile will also list somesecondary literature, usually selected from a very much larger body ofscholarly work. The bulk of the datababase of Profiles was created by onlythe four core members of the Project team. They had to traverse a large areaof existing scholarship, and could do so only in a highly selective manner.The only reason this was feasible at all is that the Profiles are doing a veryspecialized, though important, job for the ancient Jewish works. Theyprovide an explicit, systematic, and comparative description of a text’s literaryconstitution and nothing else. They furnish no historical context, detectivework on authorship, diachronic separation of earlier sources, editorship,philological criticism, exploitation for historical information, aesthetic,cultural, or theological appreciation, or religious appropriation. TheInventory as the agenda for doing this narrow job is very detailed, butthe resulting portrait, the Profile, is nevertheless schematic. If the Profile of atext makes a contribution to the existing specialist scholarship on that work,as we hope it will, this effect derives primarily from the descriptive power ofthe schematism itself, and from the fact that it has been applied to hundredsof other works also, allowing comparative perspectives. To be sure, theinsights contained in a Profile depend on the modern critical scholarshipregarding that text and others like it; but the Profile text makes no attempt toengage with or summarize that scholarship. A Profile will often appear to takesides in an ongoing scholarly argument about how best to understand thetext, based on the literary analysis itself, but Profiles mostly try to ask newquestions or answer earlier questions from a different perspective. In any case,the Profiles make no claim to be based on a survey, integration, or criticalevaluation of all the potentially relevant existing scholarship on a given work.

THE SECTIONS OF THE INVENTORY

The Inventory is divided into twelve main sections. The significance andconceptual basis for dividing the Inventory in such a manner, and the nature

22 Where necessary, limitations of linguistic competence of one researcher (mostly mine)were overcome by collaborating with another (mostly Philip Alexander and Robert Hayward)when producing the Profile. Thus my Profile of Jubilees, found in Part IV below, would not havebeen possible without the opportunity to discuss with Philip Alexander the constitution of theoriginal Ethiopic text generally, as well as the wording of specific passages in particular.

Introduction12

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of the sections, will concern us throughout this book. The Chapter titles ofPart III repeat these sections (Table 2):

Each section gives its number to the first digit of any point appearing withinit. Thus the first point in section 1 is 1.1, the first in section 6 is 6.1. Howmany points there are within sections varies dramatically, with sections 4, 5,and 6 being the largest. The hierarchy expressed in the Inventory numberingcan go six levels deep and is represented by numbers separated by full stops.23

Table 2

Explanation of Section Title of Section

How does the text speak about itself, if at all? 1. The self-presentation of the text

What knowledge does the text take for granted? Whatperspective does the text’s governing voice place itself into,by saying what it says?

2. The perspective of the governingvoice

First basic text type: texts defined by a poetic or rhetorical-communicative form (e.g. a homily).

3. Poetic or rhetorical-communicative formation

Second basic text type: texts that tell a story, that is, reportemplotted and time-indexed events.

4. Narrative coherence or narrativeaggregation

Third basic text type: texts that treat a ‘timeless’ topic byway of discourse or description.

5. Thematic coherence or thematicaggregation

Fourth basic text type: texts that treat another text as theirtopic, in the sequence of that other text’s parts (i.e.commentaries).

6. Lemmatic coherence or lemmaticaggregation

Parallels in specific substance or wording between a textand other texts, including the Hebrew Bible.

7. Correspondences and wordingoverlap between texts

An inventory of small literary forms and stereotypicalsentence formats.

8. Characteristic small forms

Methods for creating coherence or aggregation betweenadjacent text parts other than narration.

9. Characteristic small-scalecoherence or aggregation forthematic discourse

Arrangements of whole texts in a large-scale compound. 10. Compounds of juxtaposedpart-texts

Approximate characterization of the main subject matterof a text.

11. Dominant contents

Examples of the genre terminology scholars have appliedto the text.

12. Sampling of scholarly genrelabels

23 A point with a lower-level number (e.g. 2.2.1) entails application also of the higher-levelpoint (2.2). For a handful of exceptions to this rule, see the introduction to the Inventory inPart II below.

Introduction 13

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The fundamental distinction between narrative, thematic discourse, andcommentary is addressed at the beginning of Chapter 4.24

USES AND LIMITS OF THE INVENTORY ANDTHE DATABASE OF PROFILES

The Inventory is a practical tool for the study of ancient Jewish texts, but italso favours certain angles in the analysis of the literary constitution of a text,and a certain methodology. It postulates that scholars are under an obligationto explicate their understanding of the literary surface of the whole of a textwhen they use it, in whole or in part, as evidence. Strictly speaking the literarysurface is all we have by way of integrated primary evidence. Every extraneouspiece of information about historical context needs to be connected to thetext by the scholar. But every piece of a given text is connected by the textitself with the other pieces it contains, at least partly reflecting the physicalboundaries and layouts of manuscripts. The evidence of what constitutes theinside of the text, and the fact that passages which are of special interest tothe scholar are thus found alongside others, is precious and often under-valued. What the text is, in its transmitted existence, is what every scholarlyinterpretation interprets, whether it sets out to do so or not. Its historicalcontext, on the other hand, is for anonymous and pseudepigraphic textsusually uncertain or unknown. Scholars of ancient Judaism have in fact longbeen obliged to read the literary surface of texts as indirect evidence for theirdate and provenance, authorship, original purpose, reception, Sitz im Leben,and so forth, because there is often no direct evidence for those. All the moreimportant to take into view the whole literary evidence. The Inventory andthe Profiles aim to place this on the routine scholarly agenda, by suggestingsystematic categories for doing it.

The Inventory can act as a prompt for the analysis of any text arising fromhistorical backgrounds similar to those of the corpus texts. Indeed it can bethe starting point for providing alternative Profiles for texts that already havea Profile in the database, and for alternative versions of the Inventory itself.Profiles constitute an interpretation, both of the text in question and of the

24 W. W. Hallo has proposed a classification for the ancient texts of Mesopotamia, AsiaMinor, and Egypt along very different lines: (a) part of the scribal curriculum (what he calls‘canonical’), (b) monumental, and (c) archival. Here the criterion of distinction seems tobe the mode of preservation or transmission, that is, the ‘medium’. It is thus conceptuallydifferent both from the criteria of content and form effectively used in the Inventory, and alsofrom putative social function, to which ‘genre’ terms are otherwise often tied. See Hallo 1991.In Foster 2005, pp. 37–44, ‘celebratory, didactic, narrative, effective, and expressive’ are dis-tinguished as major categories for Akkadian literature.

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categories of the Inventory. Other interpretations are bound to be possibleand sometimes they may be more accurate, or more fruitful, for a certainscholarly purpose. Scholars may encounter literary features that they considerimportant, but that the Inventory does not contain. We may have consideredthose features but decided that they do not affect the text’s overall structure,are not ‘structurally important’. Certain ‘stylistic’ traits of a text’s languagefall into this category, as do certain small-scale repetitions that constitutepotential structures of inclusio or chiasmus in narrative. These do not, to ourmind, occur sufficiently often or prominently within any project corpus textto be interpreted as ‘structurally important’ for it. Another area where onemight suspect that the current Inventory is lacking is in categories forpassages where the quoted language of narrative characters in some wayilluminates a speaker’s ‘character’.25 Such apparent gaps in supplyingcategories for the description of a text’s literary surface are, however, partly afunction of the distance from the text’s details which the idea of ‘structurallyimportant’ implies, and for this distance it is hard to provide an objectivemeasure. Had we ‘zoomed in’ more, features in certain areas of text con-stitution might have become structurally important which, from the distanceat which we in fact held the texts, did not appear to be. Thus many ‘stylistic’and potentially artistic features of texts are absent from the Inventory, whichdetailed scholarship examining the literary surface might concentrate on, inparticular if it is influenced by biblical literary studies. But a substantiallydistant perspective from the textual detail, except where it directly concernsthe whole text (as in the case of category 1.1), is indeed necessary for theInventory’s methodology. So while the Inventory defines more than 500 traits,such decisions allow much room for disagreement. Other features wemight simply have overlooked. Since the Inventory has its origin and ultimatejustification in a reading of the sources in the corpus, it must in principleremain open to constant reinvention on the basis of further close readings ofthese sources.

As for the database of Profiles (Samely et al. 2012), it provides a conceptualplatform for large-scale comparative scholarly work. The Inventory’s descrip-tive schema, highly complex as it is in itself, reduces the otherwise infinitecomplexity of individual texts to a common grid. Where the Inventory’scategories are new, or have not been systematically applied to ancient Jewishtexts before, the database allows comparison of new aspects of texts. Wherethe categories are already part of the scholarly discussion, the database pro-vides large-scale instant access to the comparative picture. It constitutes a

25 See Polak 2001 and point 4.13.4 in Ch. 4 below. I expect that, in any future Inventoryconcerned with the texts of the Hebrew Bible, both of these types of features will play a moreprominent role. A comparison of whole corpora will then be possible which will indicatewhether their absence from the current Inventory is reasonably justified or not.

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laboratory for conducting experiments in the study of literary and culturalfeatures of ancient Jewish literature.

Certain types of engagement with the texts lie beyond the horizon of theInventory’s descriptive categories. This is true in particular of the religiousand existential encounter with the texts. Even critical scholarship narrowlydefined, however, knows of more integrative and substantive, ultimately alsomore evaluative approaches to texts, than the one embodied in the Inventory.More profound appreciations of texts will welcome and emphasize theunpredictable and unique dimension of every text. Connecting verbal andstructural characteristics with an evaluation of the contents, engaging withintangible features resulting from a complex network of reflections—all thisgoes beyond the Inventory’s analysis of the literary surface, just as it goesbeyond the information contained in a critical apparatus. The Inventoryprovides the categories for a technically restricted commentary on any onetext. The Inventory is not about what makes a text unique; but a text isindeed, just like a single language, a unique entity, not a universal one.26

TEXT HISTORY

The Inventory addresses partly the same evidence that is considered bytextual criticism and the study of text history. It includes categories forliterary features that have tended to prompt modern scholars to postulatepre-existent sources for a particular text. But the Inventory does not formu-late these phenomena in the first instance as problems, and not even astraces of the text’s history: it takes them simply as characteristics of the textthat affect its coherence and are thus structurally important. Problematicliterary structures, like discontinuities, internal contradictions, changes ofperspective, and unexplained repetitions, are taken as important features tobe noted and defined. As such features they are initially (and perhaps forever)indistinguishable from deliberate structures, although the idea of ‘deliberate’upon which I rely here is a structuralist one. The term here does not entailthat authors would have been able to identify and explain the literarystructures which the Inventory identifies and defines, any more thannative speakers without special training can identify and explain the ‘rules’ of

26 Coseriu 1994, making this point, also notes that there is no science of individuals (pp. 112–13). The following remark by G. Steiner, using the word ‘canonic’, has interesting connotationsin the context of the project corpus: ‘However conventional, however imitative of its canonicforerunners, each and every literary text, each and every painting or sculpture, is a “singular-ity” ’; Steiner 1989, p. 76. Even filtered through the Inventory generalizations, uniqueness re-emerges: it seems to be extremely rare for two database Profiles to be matched completely intheir numerical constitution.

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phonology which they implement when speaking. From the point of viewof modern scholarship we do not know how to tell the deliberate in thestructuralist sense, from the accidental in the text critical sense. The reasonfor this is simple. In most cases we only have access to the historical andcultural context of production by way of the results, the texts themselves. Wehave no contemporary descriptions of how the texts came about, at least notin the case of anonymous and pseudepigraphic works. Furthermore, we haveno access to readerly intuitions that come from the period of the texts. Ourstrongest intuitions on what makes sense or what is coherent in a text comefrom our own time and place, reader expectations that we learned beforebecoming scholars and which are reinforced by being scholars and writingacademically. At least to the degree that this is possible, the Inventory rendersitself independent precisely of those expectations. It does so by definingproblematical literary features not in terms of the problem they cause us, butin terms of what their nature and relationship to the rest of the text is (say, anunexplained switch of the narrator’s perspective). So the definition will relatethe feature to the overall economy and coherence of the text, as for most otherInventory categories. But it leaves to other scholarly projects the judgementthat a particular literary structure indicates that the text was once differentfrom what it is now, and thus the move towards a description of that othertext, the text that stands behind the text as attested in the transmission evi-dence. The categories of the Inventory are not concerned with hypotheticalearlier texts, the ghost of texts past. This facilitates a separation of the descrip-tion of the text from the description of its stages of production. It allowsproviding the information: ‘This is what the text looks like if its parts are readin each other’s light’, without at the same time having to make a judgement(which may well follow) like: ‘This text does not form a coherent whole’or ‘This text was put together from pre-existing sources A, B, C.’ Thusobservations on text history are in principle fully compatible with the infor-mation contained in the Profiles and the Inventory (see the final section‘Incoherence in the Project Corpus and Other Corpora of Texts’), insofar assuch observations rely on analysing the literary surface.

It is the modular structure of the Inventory that makes this separationpossible. It allows treating features which cause us to doubt the text’s‘coherence’ in exactly the same way as features which do not. Each featureis recorded independently of the others, even though it is defined in termsthat respect the togetherness of text parts in a whole text. The mutualindependence of features allows exploring what may have constituted, forancient readers, the experience of a coherent text—the ‘tolerances’ forincoherence may have been quite different from those we take for granted inour own reading. The database of Profiles makes visible how frequently aparticular feature occurs, and where exactly it occurs in the corpus. It thusassembles, for the first time, the large-scale empirical data that modern

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scholars need to make judgements also about the frequency and distributionof a particular feature of ‘incoherence’. And the database may also show thatfeatures which produce ‘incoherence’ can, and usually do, occur alongsideother features that produce ‘coherence’ in the same text. Those are oftenignored by the scholar when diachronic reading kicks in, just as they aretaken for granted when nothing takes place in the text that looks, to us,incoherent. Perhaps the database’s fuller array of empirical evidence will inthe future make a contribution to reconstructing what actually were thereader expectations or common reader experiences of Jewish antiquity inproper independence from our own.

THE INVENTORY AND THE MODERN STUDY OFLITERATURE AND DISCOURSE

The methodological orientation of the Inventory is, broadly speaking,structuralist. As I said above, the term structuralist here means in particularthe assumption that a text’s production and reception can be quite regular,on certain high levels of abstraction to be determined by empirical trial anderror, without thereby implying that authors, readers, and listeners couldformulate the ‘rules’ which produced that regularity. The ‘rules’ of verbalproduction are usually learned through repeated exposure, familiarity, andintuitive imitation within a shared cultural and historical context. On a moreconcrete level, the Inventory’s descriptive categories are indebted to the spiritand in some cases specific concepts of text linguistics, discourse analysis,various branches of literary studies, and narratology. Debts of this kind willbe acknowledged in the footnotes of Part III. There is, however, no singleapproach which has been adopted wholesale for the Inventory. The reason forthis is that there exists no comprehensive, concrete, and unified disciplinewhich could have supplied the Inventory’s conceptual needs all at once, partlybecause those are comprehensive. The Inventory wishes to make visible allaspects of the literary surface in one go, and there is no comprehensive‘science of texts’ in the current landscape of academic disciplines. Thus itsconcepts are inspired by a variety of academic disciplines and schools, eachusually specializing in different aspects of textuality. The concepts couldtherefore not be combined into a new framework without modifying them tosome extent. In this labour of modification, the orientation we took from theprimary evidence was a great help. We had the freedom to beg, borrow, andsteal tools from all branches of the academic study of language and texts,and to change them as necessary, because we had a need to describe concreteliterary phenomena. We also had to reconstitute the conceptual tools insuch a way that they became compatible with each other in the Inventory, a

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document aiming for an integrated account of all structurally importantaspects of a text in one course of analysis.

The Inventory’s greatest conceptual debts are to text linguistics and dis-course analysis, although the latter is primarily interested in spoken languageand conversation.27 Deconstruction and post-structuralism have providedoccasional inspiration for the Inventory, but their philosophical under-pinnings have not been accepted, for the reasons to be explained below,namely that meaning crucially depends on boundaries so that all close readersrely on text boundaries as constraints in the construction of meaning,including those who practise the art of deconstruction. Literary studies alsowere a great source of ideas. The Inventory has sections on narrative (section4), and poetic and rhetorical-communicative compositions (section 3), texttypes that have provided the staple of literary analysis in European culturesince antiquity. But the modern study of narrative is heavily influenced bythe existence of the modern novel. Thus Genette’s Narrative Discourse (1980)uses Proust throughout as its reference point, although narratologicalapproaches such as his have also been adapted to include ancient or biblicalstorytelling, as in the work of Mieke Bal and others.28 There has also been anexplosion of critical and theoretical interest in the ancient ‘novel’, with pro-ject texts such as Joseph and Aseneth figuring prominently. Yet the Inventoryalso deals with discursive or non-narrative texts (sections 5 and 6), whichhave traditionally played no role in literary studies. In fact works constitutingthemselves as thematic discourse or commentary provide the bulk of theproject corpus, and those have generally attracted much less theoreticallyinformed study.29 Deconstruction and related approaches have regularlyaddressed texts that belong to the academic and scholarly discourse, but haveread them as part of a critique of Western rationality.30 It is therefore hardlypossible to use these approaches as the basis for a systematic description andcategorization of scholarly thematic texts, a task that continues the historicalproject of rationality. Discourse analysis, which also takes an interest in non-narrative texts, is not usually concerned with linear and historically fixedtexts, that is, with internally fixed sequences of sentences that constitute longand complex verbal entities; it concentrates on spontaneous spoken languageor dialogue. Text linguistics, on the other hand, has contributed to the studyof scientific genres and technical discourses in fixed and extended texts, but its

27 Syntheses of these various branches of scholarship may be found in the following works:Beaugrande and Dressler 1981, Halliday and Hasan 1976, Coseriu 1994, Adamzik 2004, Brownand Yule 1983, Genette 1980, and Barthes 1988. Other works will be mentioned in connectionwith specific points of the Inventory.

28 Bal 2009 contains only a sprinkling of biblical references, e.g. pp. 114–15; but see Bal 1988.29 For some of the comparatively rare theoretical approaches to such texts before the rise of de-

construction, see, e.g. Ingarden 1960, pp. 350–3; and 1973, pp. 13–14, 36–7, 147–67; IJsseling 1983.30 This is illustrated by Derrida’s engagement with texts by Rousseau and Hegel, in Derrida

1976 and 1986, and there are now many other examples. Cf. on this also Thiel 1990.

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analyses tend to explore primarily European writing.31 As for the special kindof thematic text that is a commentary on another text, this text type hasrecently often been framed by the notion of intertextuality. However, thatterm, in its technical sense, is so general that the specific textual phenomenathat distinguish commentaries from other texts do not matter, as any text can,and does, stand in intertextual relationships to others, through its reader.Otherwise the study of commentaries as a textual genre tends to be primarilyconcerned with their contents, historical impact, and influences. So whilethere are many important ideas in these various branches of the academicstudy of texts, it was usually impossible simply to take over a specific conceptand apply it to the evidence of the ancient Jewish texts. Rather, keeping inview the concrete phenomenon in ancient Jewish texts to which they helpeddirect our attention in the first place, the categories had to be defined againfrom scratch. After initial formulation, the definitions then underwent ausually lengthy period of testing, team discussion, and revision. Theirwording is both aligned with, and differentiated from, neighbouringdefinitions, so the grid of the Inventory itself produces certain conceptualeffects. The categories of the Inventory are couched in a language that istechnical because it defines features, but not because technical vocabulary hasbeen imported, with some very rare exceptions to be explained in this book.The language of the definitions is mostly that of the general academic dis-course in the historical humanities, and most of them are self-sufficient andself-explanatory. But this only holds true if the Inventory is read as onewhole document. Casual or fragmented reading of the document will misshow the points illuminate each other, sometimes over great distances,although there is some cross-referencing. In the pursuit of conceptualprecision and concision, Inventory formulations sometimes have to becomerather complex; the main route to practical understanding is to see themapplied, and Part III of this book will refer to hundreds of illustrations, albeitoften presupposing knowledge of the texts referred to, rather than quotingand interpreting a concrete passage.

THE THEORETICAL BACKGROUND OF THEINVENTORY AND THE DEFINITION OF A ‘TEXT’

Why insist that all aspects of a text need to be considered together for anunderstanding of its literary constitution? The Inventory does not seek tojustify the unity of any verbal entity transmitted as ‘one’ text. It collects

31 See also the introduction to Ch. 5 and the literature mentioned there in n. 6; alsoBeaugrande and Dressler 1981.

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features of prima facie incoherence as much as of coherence, and containscategories which allow describing insurmountable obstacles to the modernscholar reading the text as a unity (e.g. 5.7.5). Why then claim that anapproach to the unity of a work is necessary, even for discovering reliableevidence of its disunity? The justification of this claim, just as that of itsdenial, must arise from philosophical rather than historical considerations.The philosophical foundations of the Inventory are basically phenomeno-logical, in the sense in which Husserl used the word, and can be sketched outas follows.32 Understanding an extended text is an activity of construction bya consciousness, and that makes the search for unity pivotal. First, unity playsa role as a postulate of reading itself. Why would one read a text beyond anyrandomly selected sentence? Because the meaning of every single sentence hasthe ability to be made more precise by the meaning of the other sentences inthe same text. This is the expectation under which all close reading of textsbegins. It furthermore presupposes a fundamental distinction between thesentences in this text and sentences in all other texts. Only the sentences inthis text have the primary promise of illuminating each other, because theywere ‘meant’ to be together and thus can be expected to accommodate theirmeaning to each other’s presence. Reading a text—and listening to a text issimilar—is to make a sharp distinction between meanings that arise from‘inside’ it and meanings that do not. So the noise of the dog that barks whileI read the text, or another, different text on the same topic, will not, as amatter of the principle of reading, be mistaken for the meanings of this text infront of me while I read it. Second, unity is the assumption that shapes theactual methods of close reading. The text is read in the expectation of itsend, both conceived as the final sentence, and as the text’s status as a finiteobject. Close reading tends to reread the text, or parts of it, after its endhas been encountered, precisely so as to make the meaning adjustments toearlier passages that have become necessary in the light of its ending, that is,in the light of certain knowledge of what the text contains and what it doesnot contain. Thus the interpretation of single sentences is informed by anexperience of the limits of the text. This knowledge helps fine-tune themeaning of any one particular passage, if fine-tuned reading is the goal.

The mutual adjustment of meaning within a limited verbal entity—turn-ing that verbal entity into a text—is the reason a sentence in a text is capableof conveying a much richer meaning than the same sentence considered onits own. The reader thus experiences the text’s meaning as that of a primafacie bounded, finite verbal entity. This means that the meaning boundariesof the text are constructed in initial dependence on its de facto boundaries.This, at least, goes for the acts of constructing meaning in a text insofar asthese are accessible to the reader/listener herself or himself, by introspection

32 For an earlier account with a different emphasis, see Samely 2005.

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and memory. I do not deny that text-transcending factors contribute tothe meaning so constituted without the reader/listener recognizing themas being text-transcending. But this is a different aspect of the question.The fact is that even deconstructive reading practices, famous for theirpostulate of intertextuality, tacitly depend on the readerly experience of avery fundamental distinction between ‘this text’ and ‘all the rest/all theother texts’.

It follows that the perceived boundaries of a text make a crucial contri-bution to the construction of its meaning in all its parts. The dynamic of partand whole is fundamental to the analysis of the experience of a ‘text’.33 Thisnotwithstanding the fact that the search for the ‘whole’ of which any piece ofthe text is a ‘part’, is complicated by the experience of temporal differencebetween the moments of experienced meaning (namely that of parts of thetext, from sentences upwards). Nor does this deny that we can read a textselectively whenever we wish to do so. So here is an attempt to say what atext is. It defines a text as that kind of a verbal entity for which it makesa difference whether we read it selectively or not:

A text is a complex verbal entity, usually a plurality of sentences34 or other unitsof meaning, whose de facto boundaries or verbal and literary signals inviteconstructing the meaning of any one of its sentences/units in the light of themeaning of all others.

Reading or listening to a text is here taken to be a response to an invitationextended to the reader to keep awareness of the presence of a multiplicity ofdiscrete meanings across successive sentences, paragraphs, sections, chapters,or whatever other units of meaning suggest themselves as being important.What is to be emphasized here is that, when a verbal entity is from the startnot expected to form a unity, and thus, not expected to be a text in the abovesense, no such reading/listening is likely to take place; while when a verbalentity is expected to form a unity, then this mode of looking for continuitywill be at work, effectively projecting, for the time being, unity in advance

33 Defining the text as a plurality of sentences (or equivalent units) distinguishes theapproach here pursued sharply from that of certain branches of linguistics and pragmatics,which align the notion of ‘text’ to that of ‘utterance’ and speak of one-sentence or one-word‘texts’. See Raible 1972; Crystal 1985, pp. 107–8. A list of criteria for, and suggested definitionsof, ‘text’ can be found in Adamzik 2004, pp. 38–9. It includes the following two interesting ones:‘The word “text” is used in linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or written, of whateverlength, that does form a unified whole’, Halliday and Hasan 1976, p. 1; emphasis mine; and ‘Wedo not see an advantage in trying to determine constitutive formal features which a text mustpossess to qualify as a “text”. Texts are what hearers and readers treat as texts’, Brown and Yule1983, p. 199. Lotman (not quoted by Adamzik) stresses three criteria for textuality: explicitness(‘expression’), limitedness (‘demarcation’), and structural organization; see Lotman 1977,pp. 51–3.

34 Whatever definition of ‘sentence’ might be assumed.

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of finding it, in advance of having read or listened to the whole of the text,and with regard to any part of the text not yet encountered.35

What happens after the reader has reached the end at least once, and sothe whole text is known to the reader from a first encounter, dependson the purpose of the reading, as well as the reader’s context and culturalbackground. The experience of the whole can lead to and guide subsequentacts of rereading the text, in part or in its totality. How does the first readingguide the reader in making a judgement on the existence of an overallmeaning, or in retaining an impression of its overall meaning? If the readerassumes an attitude of ‘critical’ reading, then any initial projection ofcoherence is constantly kept under review and capable of being rescinded,should evidence to the contrary be encountered. And very importantly, ina critical reading the expectation that the text ‘hangs together’ is capable ofbeing disappointed for good. The reader is critical because equipped withreasons for deciding to stop looking for unity, and therefore giving up theattempt of understanding the text. This option must always be available tothe modern scholar reading ancient sources. This despite the risk of ‘missing’the coherence which might have been experienced by ancient readers, or ofapplying a modern standard of expected coherence which is anachronistic forancient texts. For the alternative would be even worse, namely that scholarsblindly claim to see a textual unity where they can see none. That would bean abdication of responsibility, even if it takes place out of a mistaken sense offairness to a different culture or because of a wish to avoid Eurocentrism. Themodern interpreters need to be able to explain and account for the unity of atext in terms that make sense to them. The critical attitude also has a counter-part in everyday reading. Such everyday reading is not one of critical care, butis merely a reader’s indifference to the question whether the text ultimatelymakes sense. It is an everyday experience that we can give up the attempt toconstruct a text’s coherence under the pressure from other priorities or othertexts, or read the text selectively, aware of running a risk of misunderstandingit by doing so.36 The critical attitude also has an opposite pole, uncriticalreading as an investment of faith. The investment of individuals or socialgroups in a text’s importance can be so high that any internal discontinuitiesor contradictions it may have are not perceived as such at all, or onlyexperienced as a spur to read more closely and carefully, keeping the assump-tion of its coherence open ad infinitum. Such an attitude can be found in

35 I will from now on speak only of the reader and reading, but only for the sake of lesscluttered formulations; there is no need for a text to be written in order to meet the abovedefinition, so reading includes listening and all other forms of communication.

36 Here arises perhaps a universal definition of the ‘everyday’ text, relative to the reader: a textwhich the reader sees as sufficiently unimportant for her or him to deliver to the fate ofincomprehension without labour of interpretation, and without compunction at havingavoided such labour.

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the hermeneutics of holy text cultures, including those of the Judaism thatcreated the works of Midrash. In such cases the expectation of coherence isnever abandoned for good, and therefore incapable of being disappointed. Itfunctions as a dogma of reading. The labours of interpretation, and theexpected complexity of devices of meaning, are raised to such heightsthat simple glaring inconsistencies, contradictions, or repetitions within atext are unlikely to be accepted as such. Ad hoc solutions are accepted forthe time being, because the search for absolute meaning in holy texts tendsto be experienced as an open-ended collective project, ever ongoing andinter-generational.

But holy text hermeneutics merely exaggerate what are the hallmarks of allcareful reading.37 For a limited period all close reading, including that ofancient sources by the modern critical scholar, has to invest up front in thecoherence of the text. For the reader, in particular the reader encountering atext across a historical and cultural depth yet to be plumbed, must firstacquire sufficient experience in the ways of the text before she or he has the‘right’, so to speak, to stop looking for the text’s unity. The ways of the textcannot even be explored adequately without first investing in the text’sunity.38 Small linguistic units like the single word or the single sentence do nothave a definite meaning without a larger whole, that is, without somethingwith boundaries into whose economy they can be placed.39 So the ways of thetext do not become visible without the expectation that it forms an internallycomplex but bounded whole, without investment in coherence. This is true inparticular for texts whose ways are unfamiliar to the reader—the situation ofthe modern scholar reading ancient sources. The alternative, namely givingup on coherence too soon, is hard to remedy. Just as the expectation ofcoherence can be self-fulfilling for uncritical readers, so the expectationof incoherence can be self-fulfilling for readers who give up too early.

The definition of ‘text’ suggested above emphasizes the importance of thefactual boundaries of a text. What role do these play in the reading process?The text’s boundaries must be allowed to define and limit the meaning

37 For the Midrashic approach, see Samely 1992; see also, Steiner 1989, pp. 89 f.38 Put differently, the more familiar I as reader am with the conventions and context of the

text, or the more ‘of my time’ a text is, the quicker I can recognize it as making no sense or asnot hanging together properly. The reason for this is that I intuitively share the conventionsand habits of meaning embodied in the text, and have a right to measure it against themimmediately. In the case of a text from an alien and unknown context, it is its de factoboundaries which provide the primary guidance. The de facto boundaries are thus functionallyparallel to, and have to stand in for, a direct knowledge of the cultural and literary context.

39 The lack of determination of single words or single sentences has often been stressed and isa fundamental assumption of most branches of modern linguistics. It is also occasionallystressed as being central to literary studies; see e.g. Lämmert 1988, pp. 95–9 following Stenzeland with reference to a maxim by W. von Humboldt: ‘Es gibt nichts Einzelnes in der Sprache,jedes ihrer Elemente kündigt sich nur als Theil des Ganzen an’; von Humboldt 1843, p. 252(repr. von Humboldt 1999, p. 31).

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options, in particular for the reader who is unfamiliar with the ways of thetext. The factuality of boundaries is what permits the text to make sense inunexpected ways, but only if the reader takes them seriously. I will permitmyself an analogy here. To understand an unfamiliar kind of textuality withthe help of a text’s boundaries is like going through three stages in losingand finding one’s keys. First one looks in all the likely places. Then one looksin all places, regardless of how likely they are, even though one cannot tell aplausible story of how the keys could have got there. Finally, after finding thekeys in an unlikely place, any possible story of how the keys might have endedup there suddenly changes from being implausible to being plausible. In thelight of the brute fact that the keys were indeed in that place, the implausiblestory ceases to be implausible, and may even turn out to fit together withother evidence or suddenly remembered actions, hitherto not taken intoaccount. This is how the brute factuality of a text’s boundaries limits andinforms the construction of the meaning of a text, in particular if the text isfrom an unknown context or in an unknown genre. For the critical readerwho is not familiar with the ways of the text by virtue of shared culturalintuitions, the text itself has to become the primary evidence for its ways andits methods of coherence. And for the text to be able to testify to its ownmanner of textuality, the evidence of its boundaries is indispensable. Themodern scholar has to reckon with the possibility that standards of coherenceare historically contingent and that those embodied in the text under con-sideration are not yet known. Therefore where the text begins and where itends, and what it thus ‘contains’, defines the options of reading. Any meaningstructure that is possible within those limits, whether familiar to the reader ornot, is worth trying out. Any meanings that are excluded by the text’s limitsmust be excluded, at least for the time being.40 In the absence of reliable accessto the text’s historical context, the factuality of what is inside it and whatis absent from it, where it starts and where it ends, may be the text’s onlydefence against anachronistic expectations of coherence on the side of themodern scholarly reader.

What the Inventory is looking for are those signals which the text itselfsends out, of which any coherence-weakening features may be only one part.Effectively this means that the verbal entity transmitted from antiquity istreated, until decisive discontinuities make that impossible for the moderninterpreter, as not conceding that any part of it ought to be read as if the otherparts did not exist alongside it. Their existence ‘alongside’ of other parts iswhat the text, as defined above, wishes to stress, exists to present. When

40 Mieke Bal (2009, p. 114) makes a similar point in relation to constructing the portrait ofnarrative characters given in a text, stressing the importance of accepting the limits of theinformation inside the textual boundaries, something that is in her view as important forbiblical characters as it is for characters in Proust.

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this approach is followed, it turns out that few single works,41 among thehundreds that make up the project corpus, appear not to invite, at least insome ‘weak’ fashion, an interpretation of its constitutive units in the light ofthe presence of the other units within the same de facto boundaries, thusmeeting the definition of ‘text’ above. But to say that they do so does notmean that their textual nature is the same as that of many modern genres, inparticular those of scholarly text production itself.

The theory of textuality embodied in the Inventory rejects postmodernbeliefs that the reader’s expectations and context must always impinge, inuncontrollable ways, on the historical meaning of a source. Nevertheless,the Inventory presupposes that modern habits of how to construct textualmeaning will profoundly influence the academic reader of ancient Jewishsources. Thus the modern scholarly perspective on textuality necessarilylimits the Inventory, even as it strives to make visible something that may liebeyond that modern perspective.

INCOHERENCE IN THE PROJECT CORPUS ANDOTHER CORPORA OF TEXTS

In the light of the preceding section, it is possible to be more precise aboutwhat constitutes the synchronic approach to text unity taken by the Inventory.I have claimed that some understanding of the simultaneous presence ofparts in a text is always already at work in reading, including in the diachronicmethodologies of reading of the modern text critic.42 Yet from this it does notfollow that the Inventory’s methodology must be to justify a text as unified bylooking only for literary features that make its parts hang together. Ratherthe synchronic approach is predicated on the need to bring to light featuresthat weaken the coherence in the modern reader’s eyes, alongside thosethat do not, or that strengthen it. For instance, where a text is an aggregate ofsemi-independent parts, synchronic analysis must bring to light just thisstructure: it is how the text works, even if to a modern reader this might notgive the text a strong coherence. Many of the literary phenomena that triggerthe modern scholar’s impulse to think of a text as being composite, or ascontaining secondary layers, will be defined as literary features somewherein the Inventory. The following are the most important ‘problematic’phenomena defined in the Inventory: mere aggregation of text units or parts

41 Single works in contrast to verbal entities that are compilations of independent texts,treated under section 10. Compilations are defined as not being unambiguously ‘texts’ in thesense defined.

42 See Samely 2010.

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in a larger whole,43 imbalance of text quantities,44 switch of narrator,45

employment of stereotypical forms or units,46 juxtaposition of text partsthat are functional alternatives of each other,47 and thematic discontinuitiesmediated by formal patterns.48 So the Inventory does not assume thecoherence of a text as an act of faith and then tries to justify it.49

The Inventory also allows describing a text overall as weakly coherent or asincoherent. Even though this can only be done in terms of the modernscholar’s own experience of coherence, not in terms of the ancient audience’scoherence expectations—these are an ultimate goal of reconstruction, notalready known to us—it is nevertheless necessary. The modern scholar’scoherence expectations cannot be ignored or circumvented; otherwise theywill simply reassert their dominance in unacknowledged ways. We are not freeto discard them, because they determine what we currently can understand.Rather, we need to explicate and address them, in particular where the text‘disappoints’ them. The main manner in which the Inventory reflects theseexpectations is through its definition of what constitutes a ‘structurallyimportant’ feature to be included in the Inventory. Every feature that posesproblems for the modern reader’s understanding of a text’s unity will auto-matically be structurally important—to us. So the inclusion of such a featurein the Inventory will reflect the modern scholarly reader’s prejudices on howa text ought to be constructed, even if the feature itself is not defined in thoseterms.50

How does the Profile of a verbal entity indicate that, in its de factoboundaries, it appears to offer no invitation to read all of its parts in the lightof the others, and thus does not meet the definition of a ‘text’ above? Forcertain thematic texts, point 5.7.5 spells this out, and for certain narratives,4.14.3.3. Large-scale compilations, which juxtapose whole texts withoutconnecting them, are also prima facie doubtful with regard to their status astexts, and are treated as such in section 10. The absence of points 1.1–3 and1.5 from a Profile will usually also indicate that the verbal entity in questionmay not be a text in the sense defined above, and point 1.7 offers theresearcher an opportunity to elaborate. These are ways to indicate thata verbal entity transmitted from antiquity in fixed boundaries is not,conceptually speaking, a text as defined.

43 See points 4.3, 5.7/8, and 6.1.4. Aggregation of whole texts is treated in section 10.44 See points 4.15 and 6.12.45 See 2.3 and 4.14.46 See the categories under 8 in conjunction with 5.8, 6.1, and points under 9.47 Point 9.8.48 Usually conceptualized as thematic digressions or shifts of topic ‘by association’; see point

9.9.49 I am grateful to Bernard Levinson for drawing my attention to the possible misunder-

standing, here addressed, of the word ‘synchronic’.50 See further the overview at the end of Ch. 10 below.

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The fact that the project corpus is defined by pseudepigraphy andanonymity makes it likely in itself that it contains a high proportion of textsthat to the modern scholar pose problems of unity. This may be true inparticular in comparison with the ‘canonical’ works of the Hebrew Bible. Thecontrast may extend also to works that project a historically defined, publiclyknown person as author, like some by Philo and Josephus, and which containexplicit self-references in which the authorial voice relates its persona to theprojected addressee as contemporary. The acknowledgement of the authorpersona as a unique and uniquely known individual—a category of text voicethat is neither the interchangeable divine mouthpiece, prophet, nor theanonymous mediator of tradition—appears to be a crucially important dif-ference in stance, as well as in historical and cultural circumstance.51 We haveno direct evidence for knowing if and how these differences between thecorpora also made a difference for specific acts of text composition, reception,and transmission. But it seems reasonable to accept the scholarly consensusthat many, perhaps most, pseudepigraphic and anonymous works attractedsubstantial development subsequent to some initial act or acts composition.If so, that may have happened to them to a greater extent than it happened topublicly ‘authored’ works, and perhaps in different ways than it happenedto those that already were, or later became, accepted as ‘biblical’. It is thuspossible that the project corpus has a bias towards ‘messy’ literary structures,due to historical layering. If so, this would confirm the need, met by theInventory, for conceptual tools that can handle textual shapes that are—tous—problematic. There are many examples of problematic shapes in theproject corpus text. Indeed their sheer number may indicate that the usualhistorical explanations of purely accidental accretion and change are notquite adequate to account for them. For these texts clearly worked in somesense for many audiences. So there is a prima facie need for supplementing oreducating our intuitions of coherence by scrutinizing the large amount ofavailable evidence of what texts are actually like in their best transmissionevidence. Of course every scholar in the field who has widely read across thesedocuments already has an intuition of what they are like. It is more a questionof gaining, on the one hand, a certain distance from which to see them alltogether (partly now met by the database of Profiles); and, on the other hand,of raising the intuitions to the explicitness of definitions, which can beapplied again and again, and which can be criticized (partly provided for bythe Inventory). Ultimately a comparison of whole corpora analysed along thelines of the methodology of the Inventory, that is, a comparison of wholeInventories, would provide more answers.

51 Paradigmatic for this is the introduction, in personal terms (their topos character not-withstanding!), of Josephus to his Jewish Antiquities. See further the literature on the meaningof anonymity and authorship cited in n. 42 of Ch. 2 below (also n. 13 in Ch. 4). See also theConcluding Remarks below.

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"Introduction" from Samely et al. Profiling Jewish Literature in Antiquity (OUP 2013)

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Transcript of "Introduction" from Samely et al. Profiling Jewish Literature in Antiquity (OUP 2013)