Jacob's Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation by Mary Douglas

Author:Mary Douglas [Douglas, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199265237
Amazon: 0199265232
Goodreads: 7336062
Published: 2007-01-05T07:18:45+00:00

III

Before and After Exile:

The Gap in Learning

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5

Problems in Reading the Priestly Books

The political argument gains strength when we remember the high culture of the priestly editors. At the time of the redaction Jerusalem had inherited a very learned tradition. The editors would have shared their love of learning with their colleagues in priestly circles around the Mediterranean hinterland, and admired the famous libraries of their nearest neighbours in Samaria. Their mutual high regard supports the argument about their wish to preserve the unity of Jacob’s sons. They were writing for each other, not trying to persuade political enemies, but to affirm their common values. The high quality of their work shows at all times, but especially when we go beyond the prose to consider the construction of Leviticus and Numbers. This field of study explains why these two volumes have been so little understood; they had a style of work that had been fashionable but was fast becoming esoteric and obscure.

In his study of Hebrew poetry G. B. Gray1 says that by the second century c e ‘poetry based on parallelism had recently become an obsolete type—pushed out by the new art of rhymed, metrical poems … contemporaries of Josephus were still employing parallelism skilfully … later only meagre traces of parallelism were to be found’. In this judgement he was certainly overestimating the erosion of the old I first glimpsed the topic of this chapter as I prepared the essay ‘Poetic Structure in Leviticus’, in the Festschrift for Milgrom (D. Wright, D. Freedman, and A. Hurvitz, Pomegranates and Golden Bells, (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns 1995) ). I am especially grateful to the editor of that volume, David Wright, for his criticisms and advice. In a sense this whole book is based upon it, and upon Leviticus as Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). I gratefully acknowledge the inspiration and help I have had from Richard Coggins, Milena Doloze-lova, Christos Doumas, and John Van Sickle, who were so good as to read the early draft of the article, and to others who helped me on background problems: Wendy Doniger, Ronald Hendel, Douglas Lewis, Robert Murray, and Wolfgang Roth.

In this chapter on literary structures I will focus mainly on Leviticus, because I have written at length on the structure of Numbers, In the Wilderness (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993).

1

G. Buchanan Gray, The Forms of Hebrew Poetry (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1915), 18, 37.

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Before and After Exile

style. He claimed that he could find parallelism in certain ‘poems’ of the Bible, in Psalms, the book of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and Canticles, but he declared it absent in the Pentateuch, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, etc. Thanks to Jacob Milgrom’s commentaries on Leviticus and Numbers we now know that this was an oversight and that both books definitely use verbal and thematic parallelism extensively. The style was not obsolete yet, but becoming archaic, an indication that the intellectual climate changed radically between the time of redaction and the later post-exilic period.

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