For this assignment you are to analyze the following article: Daniel and the Origins of Jewish Biblical Interpretation (ATTACHED)
1) Your analysis must be a minimum of two pages double spaced in length
2) be a thought-out critical analysis of the material, discussing both its positive and
negative qualities, why we think these are things are either positive or negative, and
why these things are important
3) show how the information gleaned can be applied to scholarly studies
Daniel and the Origins of Jewish Biblical Interpretation
S E T h L . S a n d E R S U n i v e r s i t y o f C a l i f o r n i a , d a v i s
It has become a commonplace that by the Hellenistic period Judaism was a “religion of the book,” with scriptural interpretation at its heart. As the result of a so-called Interpretive Revolution, reading of the Torah and Prophets had come to provide the warrant for both religious creativity and established practice. This article reexamines a key area of evidence for this assumption: the use of an explicit term for “interpretation” (pēšer) in the book of Daniel. None of the cases of explicit interpretation of revelation in Daniel fit the modes we find in Qumran or rabbinic literature. First, except for two words probably cited from Jeremiah in Dan 9, all the revealed material subject to explicit exegesis comes from Aramaic popular culture of the Babylonian and Persian periods or Second Temple historical speculation, not biblical texts. Second, exegesis here never involves reading a text, reflecting on it, then interpreting it. Instead, it is the result of two revelations, with the second providing a revision of and reflection on the first. If an interpretive revolution swept over the Jewish world during this period, it managed to bypass the book of Daniel. What Daniel tells us about Jewish interpretation during the watershed of the second century BCE is that it drew on scriptural language and ideas, but did so in order to interpret a wider world than the “native” Jewish patrimony of Scripture typically imagined in scholarship.
Interpret or perish—is the voice Israel hears incessantly since Sinai; still earlier, since its beginning, since the covenant with Abraham. . .
—Simon Rawidowicz, “on inteRpRetation”
. . . to what may the matter be compared? It is like a spring which bubbles up and brings forth water, and it is able to bring forth more than it brings in. So you are able to speak more words of Torah than Moses received at Sinai.
piRqe deRabbi eli‘ezeR 2:5–61
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How far back does biblical exegesis go? Torah study is often taken as the essential cultural practice of rabbinic Judaism, and interpretation—of Torah and its rabbinic legacy—has in turn been seen as essential to all later Judaism and its survival.2 Given the high stakes involved in the idea of interpretation and its continuity, then, it would seem natural for the idea to be extended backward into Israel’s past as well. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, it became a com- mon view that this characteristic feature of scriptural interpretation as the primary mode of cultural creativity was not, in fact, an innovation of the rabbinic period but was already the dominant cultural practice of earlier Judaism, to the extent that the interpretation of Scripture may have been continuous with the creation of biblical literature itself.3
Gershom Scholem argued forcefully against this idea: the techniques and ide- ology of midrash are an original historical formation, and it is this originality and historicity, their anchoring in historical change, from which their significance as a religious formation derives.4 But if interpretation is truly a Jewish essence such that all reuse of religious texts in Judah was midrash from the very beginning, then paradoxically it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to understand its distinctive- ness, because all human culture reuses and contests a preexisting body of texts and utterances. Have Jews always had Scripture, even before there were Jews? Has their survival always been based on the need to “interpret or perish!” to perform exegesis on an exclusive treasury of fixed texts?
The status of the book of Daniel as part of both the so-called biblical and post- biblical worlds makes it a particularly helpful point of investigation in this regard. The conventional wisdom is that, when it comes to interpretation, “we should view the late biblical period as proto-rabbinic”5 because “[e]very chapter, every verse took on a new meaning in the great Interpretive Revolution that began in the late bib- lical period.”6 While scholars continue to dispute what exegesis is (as opposed to allusion or reuse), Daniel stands as a watershed in the history of biblical interpre- tation because it is the first and only biblical book to contain a set of explicit tech- niques for the exegesis of revealed texts which we know to have been in practical use at the time.7 Explicit interpretations of revelation stand at the center of all but three of Daniel’s twelve chapters. This marks Daniel as the most blatantly interpretive of all Hellenistic Jewish narratives.8
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More specifically, Daniel is the only biblical book to systematically employ a technical term for the interpretation of revelation that was actually used in the earliest known Jewish biblical commentaries.9 These commentaries—texts that quote and explain the contemporary relevance of passages of Scripture—appear at Qumran, where modern scholars term them “peshers” after their characteristic form: the phrase in question is followed by the term pišrô (“its interpretation [is]”) and an explanation.10 Scholars have long suggested that the background of this technique must lie in the exegesis of ominous dreams, pointing to Joseph’s dream interpretation (Gen 40–41) as well as suggestive parallels from Mesopotamia to Egypt scattered over almost three thousand years. Because Daniel is the only book of Scripture that employs this term in the explanation of revelation, as well as the closest to the Qumran commentaries in date, it is both formally and historically the most explicit evidence for the transition from innerbiblical to extrabiblical interpretation.11
Yet as Matthias Henze’s incisive survey of the use of scripture in Daniel points out, we are just beginning to understand the book’s hermeneutics historically.12 Despite—or perhaps because of—its position as a crucial transition point in a larger narrative with high stakes, the relationship among Scripture, revelation, and inter- pretive technique in Daniel has remained blurred, and its historical context vague. First, a very wide range of intertextual relationships have been recognized in Daniel and treated together with the narrower range of evidence for explicit exegesis. For example, Dan 9, which cites Jeremiah’s prophecy of a sevety-year exile as written in “books” and then revises it, has long been recognized as the only piece of explicit biblical interpretation (as opposed to allusion) in Daniel, and one of the few in all of Scripture. But the widespread ancient narrative motif of dream interpretation has then been taken as direct evidence for the interpretation of canonical scriptural texts, despite the fact that in Dan 9, at least, the biblical text is not actually subject to such interpretation. Instead, the text to be understood (9:23) is the subsequent vision, a new revelation in which the angel Gabriel discusses the original prophecy! If this central link is a misreading, would a systematic investigation of what is inter- preted in Daniel, as well as how, imply a different history of exegesis?
Second, the background of the techniques of explicit exegesis evident in Daniel, including the term pēšer in the Aramaic chapters, the key terminological link with
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the earliest attested biblical commentaries, has remained ahistorical. For the past forty years, scholars drawing on largely the same set of evidence have referred to it in the timeless, placeless language of “the ancient Near East,” a term spanning a histor- ical period around three thousand years and no fewer than ten genetically unrelated language groups. How would new evidence for the time periods and genres in which older Near Eastern divination and exegesis circulated in Aramaic affect this picture?
This article shows that evidence within Daniel coheres with that of the Babylonian and Aramaic texts of the Hellenistic period and can bring greater pre- cision to our understanding of what early Jewish interpretation was and how it changed. The primary task of the article is to ask what sorts of material are sub- ject to explicit “close reading”—by which I mean the text’s specialized exegetical techniques—in Daniel.13 By contrast, what sorts of culture are evoked in other ways, such as allusion and reuse? The results of this investigation are read in light of current evidence for historical and cultural context: what linguistic developments produced the exegetical terminology in Daniel, and what historical evidence can provide a context for these developments? Hermeneutics must be recognized as an activity carried out by human beings in history, and it is only when history and hermeneutics each are given their due that the interaction and transformation of scribal cultures that created the first known Jewish commentaries can be fully understood.
T H E C u R R E N T u N D E R S T A N D I N G : T H E V A N I S H I N G P A R A D O X
Over half a century ago, Scholem addressed what he saw as one of Judaism’s most vital paradoxes, namely, the presupposition that “[e]very commandment given to Moses at Sinai was given together with its interpretation (בפרושו),” exemplified at the beginning of Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah. The innovation and productivity of rabbinic literature was actually not the product of the late antique periods in which we find the first recognized midrashic collections such as Genesis Rabbah and the Mekhilta deRabbi Ishmael; it was vastly more ancient, already contained in the original revelation of the Torah:
underneath this fiction lies a religious attitude which is interesting and which had significant results. I refer to the distinctive notion of
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revelation including within itself as sacred tradition the later commentary concerning its own meaning. This was the beginning of a road which, with a full measure of inherent logic, was to lead to the establishment of mystical theses concerning the character of revelation as well as the character of tradition.14
Scholem understood this view as a vital religious myth: a native Jewish theory of interpretation rather than a historically attested phenomenon. Speaking of the assumption of continuity, even identity, between ancient revealed text and later midrash, he wrote that “[t]his, of course, is something which no longer has anything in common with the notion of revelation with which we began.”15
But a remarkable reversal began soon after Scholem articulated this paradox: it has since become axiomatic that a sort of exegesis much like like midrash was itself essential to the creation of the Bible. As James Kugel sums up this view, “scriptural exegesis was not only an important activity . . . within biblical Israel for a very long time before the Exile, but it is very much what has shaped our Bible; indeed, it is what not a little of that Bible is about.”16
Eschewing the language of revelation, what Scholem proposed as ideology has now become understood in more or less measured terms as a historical proposi- tion.17 Far from being a distinctive feature of postbiblical Judaism, a response to a fixed and exclusive canon of Scripture, midrash is often understood as the most important means by which Scripture itself developed. This view was laid out in a clear and influential early form in a 1970 contribution to the Cambridge History of the Bible by Geza Vermes titled, “Bible and Midrash: Early Old Testament Exegesis.”18 Speaking of the commandments to “meditate on, recite, and rethink the Law,” Vermes argued that this type of midrashic process was partly responsible for the derivation of the Deuteronomistic and Priestly legal collections in response to earlier Israelite law like the Covenant Code, a process that becomes most marked in postexilic literature such as Daniel.
Michael Fishbane’s Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel became the hand- book for this concept by providing a detailed answer to Scholem’s claims through a sweeping study bolstered with hundreds of brief, dazzling case studies. Going far beyond Vermes’s position, Fishbane powerfully and strategically posed the question
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of intellectual continuity between the Hebrew Bible and postbiblical Judaism.19 In footnotes, he briskly alluded to and moved past his most theoretically challeng- ing predecessors while focusing on more narrowly philological collections. He cites the works of Isaac Leo Seeligmann and Renée Bloch as “seminal early attempts to provide a positive articulation of this question” but explains that “[t]he present study will attempt to review the issue more comprehensively on the basis of firm methodological criteria.”20 He presents the current state of research as an opposi- tion between an unscholarly, theological view of the Oral Torah as entirely early, already given to Moses at Sinai, and a narrow scholarly view that sees Jewish exe- gesis as entirely late, essentially borrowed from Greek scholarship and lacking any real connection with earlier Israelite thought. Having set up something of a false opposition, he promises to resolve it.
Fishbane ends his introduction with this thesis (which he confesses is already his conclusion): “that the origins of the Jewish exegetical tradition are native and ancient, that they developed diversely in ancient Israel . . . and that these many tributaries met in the exile and its aftermath to set a new stage for biblical cul- ture which was redirected, rationalized, and systematized” in the Hellenistic period.21 His arguments were then developed programmatically by Yair Zakovitch, who expanded and nuanced them particularly in the literary analysis of biblical narrative.22
A similarly sweeping survey with a very different form was later undertaken by Kugel.23 His 1997 The Bible as it Was is an anthology of Second Temple Jewish responses to the Pentateuch, mainly Genesis and Exodus.24 It breaks the strict bounds of scholarship and historical proof to make its main point literarily: in collecting disparate Jewish traditions about the Torah into the form of a running commentary, it performatively constitutes a kind of proof that the genre of midrash must have already existed even if there is no evidence of it; it paints a picture of midrash as already the definitive Jewish concern of the Hellenistic period before the rabbis.25
Scholem’s vital paradox seemed to have vanished into a smooth continuity. For scholars like Fishbane and Kugel, Vermes’s statement that “[i]n short, the Bible, correctly interpreted, became the legal charter of national life” already in the Persian period had become a settled matter.26
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But more focused examinations of pentateuchal law and narrative, late bib- lical literature, and the first securely datable evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls and Hellenistic literature suggest that this consensus was formed too quickly. As anthologies of selected examples, the foundational works of Fishbane and Kugel were not based on sustained contextual readings of whole texts—nor were they intended to be, although their magisterial presentation can imply otherwise. But, by not addressing how any particular biblical source works, Scholem’s paradox may have been avoided rather than refuted. More detailed recent work suggests that the gaps in the assumed continuity between preexilic, Second Temple, and rab- binic text-making techniques are great enough that the whole question needs to be reconsidered.
While Vermes used the versions of the Covenant Code slave law (Exod 21) in Deut 15 and Lev 25 as evidence for a midrashic process, more rigorous recent studies have concluded that the authors of the Deuteronomistic and Holiness laws intended not to resolve the Covenant Code’s contradictions but to subvert, abrogate, or replace the code entirely.27 More challenging is the bare fact of the Torah itself: once these sources tried to outmode each other, they were placed embarrassingly side by side with their starkest contradictions exposed. It is a little difficult to argue that the same processes that attempted to replace revelation, and then exposed its contradictions, also then worked so hard to reconcile them. The striking incoherence of the Pentateuch, which provoked the labors of so many meforshim and, later, the discipline of biblical criticism in the first place, has not gone away. Instead, it has seen fresh scholarly attempts at accounting for how its sometimes sharply contradictory laws and narratives were woven together without comment: the very opposite, it should be reemphasized, of the midrashic impulse to compare and reconcile.28
In terms of later biblical literature, new studies of the reuse of biblical material in Daniel’s visions have not confirmed Fishbane’s characterization of it as essentially exegetical. Methodical study of legal and narrative exegetical techniques at Qumran has shown that, both formally and intellectually, they present striking discontinu- ities with rabbinic midrash, as well as important affinities with the interpretation of canonical texts used by Jewish and Greek scholars at Alexandria.29 Scholars continue to uncover fascinating conflicts and continuities between Qumran and rabbinic
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thought, but, as Hindy Najman incisively points out, this project always runs the risk of reinforcing a “teleological orientation towards the goal of later Midrash, instead of thinking through the vibrant and variegated interpretive imaginations and scriptural productions of the tradents of Second Temple and post-destruction Judaism.”30
The continuity-seeking investigations discussed above raise crucial questions but share a certain methodological circularity: a sufficiently energetic search of a postexilic text, or, worse, a large swath of them, for biblical interpretation will tend to produce the results it was intended to. In addition to the danger of cherry picking examples, such studies tend not to see texts as wholes and ask about the full range and main goals of a text’s interpretive energy.31 One viable, if old-fashioned, way to begin solving this problem is simply to read a pivotal text carefully for what it says it is interpreting. If there is, in fact, direct continuity between earlier and later Jewish biblical exegesis, it is in texts like Daniel that we should expect to find the clearest evidence of it.
T E C H N I q u E S O F E X P L I C I T E X E G E S I S I N D A N I E L
Much study of ancient exegesis is carried out, as Michael Stone said of the study of apocalyptic literature, in the midst of a semantic confusion.32 What distinguishes the exegetical techniques distinctive of a specific culture, time, and place from more general patterns of allusion and reuse, or from the universal phenomenon of dialogue with past language and texts that characterizes every human culture? As Kugel put it: “Is the relationship between two texts, even when undeniable, neces- sarily an indication of ‘inner-biblical exegesis’?”33
The key point here, addressed glancingly by Simon Rawidowicz and passed over by both Fishbane and Kugel, was made by the greatest theorist of dialogue, Mikhail Bakhtin, through a biblical allusion.34 The point is that every utterance responds explicitly or implicitly to prior utterances and works to evoke subsequent ones. All living discourse is oriented toward other discourse, and “[o]nly the mythi- cal and totally alone Adam, approaching a virgin and still unspoken world with the very first discourse could really avoid altogether this mutual reorientation.”35 Both Kugel and Benjamin Sommer point out that, for all its tremendous achievement, Fishbane’s handbook still does not follow clear or consistent criteria to distinguish
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allusion from interpretation, let alone implicit exegesis. And, startlingly, as most later treatments have clearly recognized, such criteria still do not exist.36
Here the book of Daniel provides us with the basis to set a modest answer in a specific historical context. Modern scholars, especially those with a commitment to discovering the fullest and earliest possible range of ancient interpretation (and nei- ther Fishbane nor Kugel make any bones about being among them), have found a variety of interpretive relationships among texts. But what texts did ancient scholars themselves identify as interpretive?37 It is here that it is so important for us to begin by identifying conventional ancient terms and techniques for explaining texts— metalanguage and metalinguistic discourse—as our best methodological defense against anachronism. With the rise and development of the pesher form and related syntax we are uniquely able to plot a trajectory from previous biblical literature and an earlier historical background to the first datable and contextualizable evidence of Jewish interpretive practice in the commentaries of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
As is well known, the earliest related terms within biblical literature occur in the dream interpretations given by Joseph, where, strikingly, the term takes the form ptr, expected in Aramaic rather than Hebrew.38 The term then appears in chapter 8 of Qohelet in the linguistically standard form pšr as the interpretation of a traditional saying. It is then used repeatedly in the Aramaic chapters of the book of Daniel, where surprisingly it takes not the expected Aramaic form but pšr, with the conso- nantal outcomes found in the late Hebrew of Qohelet and earlier Akkadian. As we shall see, the shared form it takes in Aramaic, late Hebrew, and Akkadian is a key to understanding its context. It then finds its first physical context of use in the manu- scripts of commentaries in the Dead Sea Scrolls, where it is applied to prophetic and apocalyptic texts, as well as texts that came to be read that way, a pentateuchal text, sectarian teachings, and apocalypses.39 While a full study of explicit exegetical syntax within biblical texts would require a monograph, it is worthwhile to begin here.
“ Te l l m e t h e d r e a m , t h e n I w i l l k n o w t h a t y o u c a n d e c l a r e i t s m e a n i n g ! ” T h e S u b j e c t s o f E x p l i c i t E x e g e s i s i n D a n i e l
The role of the book of Daniel in the history of interpretation remains contested: while scholars such as Fishbane have claimed that Dan 9–12 provides the basis for
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presenting him as a new kind of prophet-interpreter, a “pneumatic exegete, guided by divine instruction into the true meaning of ancient oracles” and that his exegesis is “mantological,”40 scholars have also noted that there is only one direct citation of an ancient oracle in the entire collection, in Dan 9, which exists in significant tension with its context. No biblical texts are actually mentioned in Dan 10–12.41 As Henze puts it, “[t]he biblical author’s reworking of earlier material is altogether different from Daniel’s acting as an inspired exegete (which, it turns out, he does not), and the two should not be confused.”42
Reinvestigation of Daniel should be provoked by the fact that in late biblical literature’s only explicit explanation of a scriptural text, the authors of Dan 9 did not choose to use the language of reading or interpretation. Rather, they present the “reinterpretation” as the result of a new, unsolicited revelation: “In the first year of [Darius’s] reign, I, Daniel, noted43 that in the written accounts, the number of years that were (prophesied in) the word of the Lord to the prophet Jeremiah until the ruin of Jerusalem would be brought to an end: seventy years.” The book of Daniel is full of—indeed, dominated by—demands to understand revelations: they provide dramatic turning points in chapters 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 10–12. But here Daniel recites a long penitential prayer, asking not to further understand the oracle or even to know how long it will really go on, but for action: an end to the exile. And his answer comes in a new vision (Dan 9:20–27), where the angel Gabriel decrees a new period of “seventy weeks” (Dan 9:24), without explicit reference to Jeremiah’s number. Daniel has begged God to turn back his wrath but made no request for revelation.
Daniel’s lack of interest in interpretation here is so striking because the rela- tionship between divine knowledge and political history is probably the main theme of the whole book; history and one’s place in it is certainly the central subject of the book’s revelations. The book of Daniel treats the fate of a Jewish scholar—and Jewish knowledge—in exile, in the context of foreign knowledge and power. While the book is not structured as a continuous composition but as a multilingual anthol- ogy, it nonetheless reflects a set of central themes.44 In every chapter, Jewish heroes who maintain their distinctiveness have access to divine revelation and rescue that allows them to thrive in the heart of the Babylonian and Persian empires. Most of these are stories about revelation and its decipherment, and what is demonstrated in every case is a twinned pair of propositions: the Jewish mode of knowledge is
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superior because it can reveal what the empire’s modes cannot; and what is revealed in every case is a trajectory of history in which the empire whose knowledge and politics dominates the Jews and the world is doomed.45
The Daniel collection is introduced with the downfall of Jerusalem and the captivity of four members of a Jewish scholarly aristocracy: Daniel and his three friends. Unlike all of the following chapters, this Hebrew tale lacks any overt super- natural element but plays the important role of placing Daniel’s tales at the his- torical watershed of the exile. Daniel 1 establishes the distinctiveness of these elite young scholars as following some Jewish dietary restriction (somehow related to the kashrut of Leviticus or Deuteronomy, although there are not enough points of comparison to know how): their diet is tested, and they are shown to be healthier by having only water and vegetables, not defiling themselves (yitga‘al).
T h e R e v e l a t i o n o f t h e O m e n a n d i t s I n t e r p r e t a t i o n i n D a n i e l 2
It is in Dan 2 that a signal switch occurs: a baffling event is presented in Hebrew, but discussion of its answer triggers a switch in the whole story’s language.46 Specifically, the narrative follows the characters in switching to Aramaic at the very moment when the court scholars begin speaking about its resolution, and when that resolution comes, as well as the resolutions of the next three visions, it is presented in the Aramaic framework and terminology of the pesher. This linguistic switch begins a series of six Aramaic stories (Dan 2:4b–Dan 7), and it is here in chapters 2, 4, 5 and 7 that this term appears. The narrative about the role of divine knowledge in political history is itself framed in the language of cosmopolitan knowledge.
Nebuchadnezzar has a dream which fills him with anxiety, yet which he can- not remember. He summons a court of scholars: h. arṭummîm (< Egyptian h. ry.tp), ʾaššāpîm ( “interpret a dream.” This near-total dependence on Oppenheim is not unrelated to the fact that, until recently, his survey constituted the only detailed account of the verb’s derivatives for an audience who did not study Akkadian—the one on which all subsequent Second Temple scholars depended. But in 2012 the Assyriologist Uri Gabbay proposed that the relevant form was in fact the noun pišru (“interpretation”), a long-lived Akkadian term unique to astral divination, not dream interpretation.109 His expla- nation is not only more precise but also more convincing because, unlike dream interpretation or exorcism, the pišru of an observed omen is always an important historical event. The pragmatic patterning of a pišru interpretation is its political relevance to the fate of an empire.
But it is worth noting that Oppenheim had dismissed this explanation in 1956 for a different reason. He points out that the Assyrian court scholars often provide both the text describing the ominous event itself and its portent together as the pišru for a given ominous event.110 Such full excerpts, citing multiple entries with both protasis and apodosis from the divinely revealed text of Enuma Anu Enlil (the canonical celestial divination series of the first millennium), cannot possibly be the interpretation of the event but must be the solution to the question.111
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Recall, however, how explicit interpretation with pēšer works in Daniel: in two of the four chapters (2, 5), Daniel is surprisingly required to produce not only the omen’s meaning but the omen itself to prove his authoritative knowledge and ability to solve the problem: “tell me the dream and I will know that you can explain it!” In a third, his pēšer begins by retelling part of the king’s dream, shifted in person to apply to him. In all cases, the pragmatics are political: the rise and fall of empires. Daniel, as much as the Assyrian court astrologers, functions as a political scientist in that he has access to authoritative knowledge that formulates the omen itself as well what it portends about the direction of history.
It is not in dream interpretation but in the pragmatics of Mesopotamian div- ination as a political science that we can understand the rise of the pēšer as a way of interpreting both history and canonical texts. Not only were many of the late Assyrian scholars Aramaic speakers—to the extent that one of Esarhaddon’s ances- tors already complained that a scholar should not write him in Aramaic—but the vigorous interest of Aramaic-speaking Babylonian astrologers in the political cor- relates of omens did not abate until after the death of Babylonian and the compo- sition of Daniel, extending well into the Seleucid period. Local versions of Aramaic scholarship were the high culture in which writers from Mesopotamia and Egypt to the Levant were trained, and, for the Qumran interpreters, it was not a Babylonian or Aramaic borrowing but part of a common culture.112
In light of the nature of exegesis in Daniel, we can venture an explanation of the historical origins of the earliest biblical commentary that integrates the linguis- tic form of its terminology with the content of the visions. It is based in a multilin- gual scribal culture that was pan-Aramaic rather than narrowly Jewish. The point is not how Judean scholars could have met and studied with Babylonians but how both Judean and Babylonian scribes shared a culture: Standard Literary Aramaic. This broad Aramaic culture is evident at Qumran, and the significant formal breaks between Daniel, Qumran, and the earliest rabbinic interpretive genres are evidence that significant rethinking occurred between them.113
Devorah Dimant pointed out that the twenty-six-odd previously unknown Aramaic works discovered at Qumran had immense value because they let us redis- cover “segments of an unknown Jewish Aramaic literature from Second Temple times,” and Annette Yoshiko Reed sharpened the point for our understanding
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of cultural production: “Insofar as much of this material appears to pre-date the sectarian community of the Qumran yaḥad, it opens a new window onto the prominence of Aramaic pedagogy among Jews in pre-Maccabean Palestine.”114 As Ben-Dov and Henryk Drawnel have shown, significant portions of that pedagogy were part of a Babylonian Aramaic heritage. The conventional story has been that the pesher is a middle step between the ancient Near East and rabbinic midrash.115 The more surprising and important conclusion is that there was a third dimension to this trajectory: the pesher is a relic of a mostly lost moment when Jews used their cosmopolitan Aramaic scribal culture as a basis for the creation of new knowledge.
C O N C L u S I O N
In his survey of “Comparative Biblical Exegesis—Interpretation, Influence, Appropriation,” David Stern incisively identifies the “Midrash all the way down” position, so strongly argued by Fishbane, as a nativist polemic over “the purity of genealogy.” “In this case,” he writes, “the polemic touches upon an even more fun- damental debate about the nature of change in Jewish tradition. Are new develop- ments (like the emergence of midrash) impelled by imminent internal forces? Or are they shaped by historical context, namely, the influence of the foreign host cultures in which Jews have lived since the time of the Babylonian exile?”116 Attempting to give this vexing historical problem a clean theoretical resolution, Stern concludes that, “[i]f the study of ancient exegesis over the last two decades has taught us any- thing, it is the lesson that interpretation is inevitably overdetermined,” concluding with the compromise solution that both sides are right. He provides a list of over- lapping motives that can reliably be assumed to be at work in interpretation, from innerbiblical exegesis to authorial ideology to cultural environment.117
But what if early Jewish biblical interpretation was a more dynamic entity than either Fishbane or Stern give it credit for, characterized as much by rupture and reinvention as continuity? We have seen that none of the cases of explicit interpretation of revelation in Daniel fit the modes we find in Qumran or rab- binic literature, although the intellectual framework which chapters 10–12 give the whole book matches that of the Dead Sea Scrolls sect. First, except for the two words of Jeremiah’s prophecy in Dan 9, all of the revealed material subject
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to explicit exegesis is based in Aramaic popular culture of the Babylonian and Persian periods or Second Temple historical speculation. Second, exegesis never follows the model of a text that is read, reflected on, and then interpreted; it is always two revelations, with the second providing a revision of and reflection on the first.
If the techniques and foci of exegesis in Daniel tell us anything about Jewish interpretation during the watershed period of the second century BCE, it is that it drew heavily on scriptural language and ideas but used them in order to interpret a wider world of imagination and discourse than has typically been recognized. If an interpretive revolution swept over the Jewish world during this period, it managed to bypass every one of Daniel’s sources.118 Instead, Daniel finds its place with the Enochic Watchers, Astronomical Book, Giants, and Animal Apocalypse as part of a Jewish Aramaic popular culture and pursuit of knowledge.
How does this change our picture of what early Judaism was? Branding it as “Enochic Judaism” (as does Gabriel Boccaccini) or “Mosaic discourse” (as does Najman) recognizes an important reality that the midrash-before-the-rabbis con- sensus fails to address. But this can lead too far, into misrecognizing these as discrete sects or varieties of Judaism (Boccaccini) or centered around one figure (Najman). Indeed, Najman’s theory was broadened to conceptualize the religious function of pseudepigraphy as a whole.119 Can our theories of exegesis do the same? The evi- dence of Daniel and the Hellenistic Jewish literature of Qumran shows that the authority and interpretation of diverse forms of revealed knowledge—cosmic and scriptural, including much that came to be biblical and much that did not—was characteristic of what we should simply call “Judaism.” More, explicit interpretation in this period, of both old texts and new visions, was not so much midrash as a kind of political science.
Should we simply return, then, to Scholem’s old articulation of the paradox? In a word: yes. Because he articulated not a pat solution but an immensely rich prob- lem to explore, seeing the relationship between Judahite text and Jewish tradition as fraught, as consisting as much of gaps and reinventions as umbilical connections that would let us ask the question about the life of biblical literature anew. More, it insists that we treat Israelite and Jewish literary creativity historically while avoid- ing the problem Najman pinpoints: the anachronism of “treating ancient Judaism
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as leading inevitably to the telos of the rabbinic corpora.”120 For, from what we have seen here of this history, it consists of more than one trajectory and multiple rela- tionships, while still constituting a history.
N O T E S
1 My translation is of the text as given in the edition of Chaim Meir Horowitz, Pirke de Rabbi Eli‛ezer: A Critical Edition, Codex C. M. Horowitz ( Jerusalem: Makor, 1972), 23. The definitive history of the concept of innerbiblical exegesis has yet to be written, but the annotated bibliography found in Bernard Levinson, “The Phenomenon of Rewriting within the Hebrew Bible: A Bibliographic Essay on Inner-Biblical Exegesis in the History of Scholarship” in Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008): 95–182 provides an insightful and balanced foundation. My attention was drawn to this midrash by the hint in Simon Rawidowicz, “On Interpretation,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 26 (1957): 97 n. 28 and the shrewd comment by Levinson, Legal Revision, 99–101 on its role in the debate about the creativity of postbiblical Judaism. Rawidowicz implicitly deploys it against the famous terminal metaphor used by Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel, trans. J. Black and A. Menzies (London: A & C Black, 1885), 410: “When it is recognized that the canon is what distinguishes Judaism from ancient Israel, it is recognized at the same time that what distinguishes Judaism from ancient Israel is the written Torah. The water which in old times rose from a spring, the Epigoni stored up in cisterns.” I thank Eva Mroczek for a careful reading of the paper in light of recent Qumran studies, as well as Jonathan Ben-Dov, Bernard Levinson, and Benjamin Sommer for important suggestions on the history and problems of innerbiblical exegesis. Paul-Alain Beaulieu and John Wee expanded my horizons on the history and interplay of Babylonian and related scribal cultures.
2 For study of Torah, my wording echoes the statement found in Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 22; for a particularly vigorous and influential statement about creative interpretation of its First and Second Temple legacy as the key to the survival of Judaism, see Rawidowicz, “On Interpretation,” 118–23.
3 We shall see how the pre-Christian centrality of legal interpretation of Torah was argued early on by Geza Vermes, “Bible and Midrash: Early Old Testament
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Exegesis,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 199–231 and in a more measured way by, e.g., James Kugel, The Bible as It Was (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1997).
4 Gershom Scholem, “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971), 282–303.
5 Marc Zvi Brettler, How to Read the Bible (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 2005), 215.
6 James Kugel, “Kugel in JQR” n.p. (cited August 1, 2013) and p. 16 of online pdf: http://www.jameskugel.com/kugel-jqr.pdf. Cf. James Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (New York: Free Press, 2007), 597. “Conventional wisdom” is a slippery concept but one to which both Brettler and Kugel explicitly aspire, given the identical titles of their books.
7 In a lucid and judicious treatment, Benjamin Sommer, “Exegesis, Allusion and Intertextuality in the Hebrew Bible: A Response to Lyle Eslinger,” Vetus Testamentum 46 (1996): 479–89 both laid out the importance of studying the modes of reuse within biblical literature and conceded that no rigorous account of exegesis yet existed, a conclusion that led him to later suggest avoiding the term in Sommer, A Prophet Reads Scripture: Allusion in Isaiah 40–66, Contraversion: Jews and Other Differences (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 23–25, 29–31.
8 The action of 2, 4, 5, and 7 hinges on finding the pēšer “interpretation” or perhaps “portent” of an earlier revelation, 9 is based on a revealed rereading of Jeremiah’s “seventy years” prophecy, and revealed interpretation is a key moment in the visions of 8 and 10–12.
9 Cf. the description of Daniel as a locus classicus of innerbiblical exegesis in Matthias Henze, “The Use of Scripture in the Book of Daniel,” in A Companion to Biblical Interpretation in Early Judaism, ed. Matthias Henze (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 279–80: “Since its exegetical techniques anticipate similar ways of reading Scripture at Qumran, in the Apocrypha, the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, and in rabbinic literature, methodological considerations about Daniel’s use of Scripture will be immediately relevant for, and applicable to a much broader corpus of early Jewish literature and its engagement with the Hebrew Bible.” See also the treatment by Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 479–95.
http://www.jameskugel.com/kugel-jqr.pdf
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10 I use “pesher” for the modern scholarly genre term and pēšer for the Hebrew/Aramaic word. All translations of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Akkadian texts are mine except where noted.
11 Henze’s account of the nouns from the root pšr and ptr as “only attested in Genesis 40–41 and Daniel 2–7” (Henze, “Use,” 283) is slightly confusing because it is unclear what he makes of Eccl 8:1, the only explicit marking of a traditional text with pšr within the Hebrew Bible.
12 Henze, “Use.”
13 While the whole collection is taken into account, the chapters analyzed in depth are 2, 4, 5, 7 and 9. These comprise all the scenes of exegesis of revelations using explicit terminology: the riddle-solving scenes set in the Babylonian and Persian courts, as well as the paradigmatic apocalyptic vision of Dan 7 and the famous case of scriptural citation and exegesis in Dan 9. The Hebrew visions involving interpreting angels, which draw more directly on the old traditions interpreting angels and divine explanation in Zechariah, Amos, etc., are dealt with only insofar as they are relevant to the central question.
14 Scholem, “Revelation and Tradition,” 288.
15 Scholem, “Revelation and Tradition,” 288 suggested it was to some extent fictional even in the eyes of the rabbis themselves, pointing to a “significant tension in the religious consciousness of the scholars themselves, between the process by which the tradition actually developed and the interpretation of that process,” signaled by famously sly parables like that of Akhnai’s oven (b. Bava Metzi’a 59b) and Moses in Akiva’s academy (b. Menaḥot 29b).
16 James Kugel, “The Bible’s Earliest Interpreters,” Prooftexts 7 (1987): 283. Cf. the claims in Esther Menn, “Inner-Biblical Exegesis in the Tanak,” in A History of Biblical Interpretation, ed. Alan J. Hauser and Duane Frederick Watson, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 1:55–79, mostly repeating Fishbane’s categories, and reiteration of these points in James Kugel, “The Beginnings of Biblical Interpretation,” in The Companion to Biblical Interpretation in Early Judaism ed. Matthias Henze (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 3–23. The dominance of the interpretation of effectively canonical texts for the production of new ones is then taken as axiomatic for the investigation of other issues. E.g., Michael Segal, “The Chronological Conception of the Persian Period in Daniel 9,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 2 (2011): 298 assumes that “the process of rewriting and reuse is perhaps the most fundamental of literary activities in ancient Israelite
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and Jewish culture” for the related question of “identifying biblical interpretation in parabiblical texts.” The result is a potentially extreme circularity: the conceptual foundations of Second Temple exegesis are explained simply by assuming that they already existed in this form in First Temple exegesis.
17 Of course, this idea in its academic guise takes the form of continuity stretching back to the time of origins rather than revelation. Such a scholarly version of the concept is nicely presented by Kugel’s statement that most of the key assumptions of Midrash “extend back even to parts of the Bible written before the Babylonian exile”; see James Kugel, Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 19.
18 Vermes’s is the most influential early version of the thesis in English, but the issue had been seriously investigated by at least five scholars by the early 1960s. Levinson’s foundational survey (“The Phenomenon of Rewriting”) discusses the earlier arguments made in German by Isaac Leo Seeligmann, “Voraussetzungen der Midraschexegese,” in Congress Volume: Copenhagen, 1953, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1953), 150–81; in French by Renée Bloch, “Midrash,” in Supplément au dictionnaire de la Bible, 4/5 (Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1957), 1263–81; and in English by Samuel Sandmel, “The Haggada within Scripture,” Journal of Biblical Literature 80 (1961): 105–22. To these should be added H. L. Ginsberg, “The Oldest Interpretation of the Suffering Servant,” Vetus Testamentum 3 (1953): 400–404. Timothy Lim, “The Origins and Emergence of Midrash in Relation to the Hebrew Scriptures” in The Midrash: An Encyclopaedia of Biblical Interpretation in Formative Judaism, ed. Jacob Neusner and Alan J. Avery- Peck (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 595–612, draws attention to the work of André Robert, who already implied such a process in the 1930s and by 1955 had identified Ezek 16 as an “[e]xemple parfait du procédé midrashique dans la Bible.” See André Robert, “Les attaches littéraires bibliques de Prov. I–IX,” Revue Biblique 43 (1934): 42–68, 172–204, 374–84 and 44 (1935), 344–65 and Robert, “Ezéchiel XVI. Exemple parfait du procédé midrashique dans la Bible,” Cahiers Sioniens 9 (1955): 193–94. Most, although not all, of these are reviewed by David Stern, “Introduction: On Comparative Biblical Exegesis—Interpretation, Influence, Appropriation,” in Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange: Comparative Exegesis in Context, ed. Natalie B. Dohrmann and David Stern (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 1–19. Sandmel’s proposal that narrative doublets in Genesis are “Haggadic” supplements to the original stories was perhaps the boldest, and it has had a significant influence on debates in pentateuchal theory. But it is also the most controversial and difficult to demonstrate; cf. the survey and
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counterarguments by Joel Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis, Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). It is also less relevant here because it does not claim to be explicit exegesis.
19 Strangely, without mentioning him. While Vermes’s work is cited in Fishbane’s bibliography, his name appears neither in the book’s index nor in the programmatic introduction and history of scholarship. By contrast, an earlier article of Fishbane’s in the flagship journal of biblical studies claims a different genealogy for his project. This article, which announces and theorizes the project of Biblical Interpretation, directs its title towards Scholem’s problem, implicitly presenting it as the resolution of Scholem’s paradox; see Michael Fishbane, “Revelation and Tradition: Aspects of Inner-Biblical Exegesis,” Journal of Biblical Literature 99 (1980): 343–61.
20 Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, 2 n. 5. The full extent of his discussion of the indispensable essays by Scholem and Rawidowicz, which put the problem so clearly and acutely, is that they are “two contributions of particular profundity” (Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, 2 n. 3). Both are treated in more depth, still briefly but in a way that does justice to their challenges, in Levinson, Legal Revision.
21 Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, 19.
22 Yair Zakovitch, Mavo le-farshanut penim-miqra’it (An Introduction to Inner-Biblical Interpretation) (Even Yehudah: Rekhes hotsaʼah le-or proyeqṭim ḥinukhiyim, 1992) (Hebrew).
23 Kugel’s work on this issue includes a sharp critique that contests the core claim of Fishbane’s work: “Is the relationship between two texts, even when undeniable, necessarily an indication of ‘inner-biblical exegesis’?”; see Kugel, “Bible’s Earliest Interpreters,” 280. Yet Kugel oddly accepts the unargued assumption at its root, that “[l]ong, long before the Exile, Israel possessed sacred writings, Scripture, and possessing such writings it could not but go about interpreting them, reworking them, reunderstanding them” (282).
24 A more accurate, if awkward, title for Kugel’s book would be Most of the Torah as It Was because, unlike its predecessor, Louis Ginzburg, Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1909–38), it makes no attempt to cover the Bible as a whole but devotes the first twenty chapters to Genesis and Exodus, divides Leviticus and some passages from Numbers among three chapters, and leaves a final chapter for Deuteronomy. My comments below refer to the fully
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annotated version, released the following year (Kugel, Traditions). Kugel’s project stands in contrast with Ginzburg’s, which covers the entire Hebrew Bible from the creation to the return from exile.
25 I owe the insight about the genre of “reconstructed Midrash” to Eva Mroczek (personal communication, 7/2013).
26 Vermes, “Bible and Midrash.” For Kugel’s general agreement with Fishbane on this, see Kugel, “Bible’s Earliest Interpreters,” 282.
27 For subversion and abrogation in this law, see Bernard Levinson, “The Birth of the Lemma: Recovering the Restrictive Interpretation of the Covenant Code’s Manumission Law by the Holiness Code (Lev 25:44–46),” Journal of Biblical Literature 124 (2005): 617–39 and, more broadly, Levinson, Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), and Levinson, Legal Revision, 256–75. For replacement, see Jeffrey Stackert, “The Holiness Legislation and Its Pentateuchal Sources: Revision, Supplementation, and Replacement,” in The Strata of the Priestly Writings: Contemporary Debate and Future Directions, ed. Sarah Shectman and Joel S. Baden; Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments 95 (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 2009), 187–204. And for a literary analysis of this law’s role in the corpus of the Covenant Code in light of its reuse in Deuteronomy and Leviticus.
28 Cf. Baden, Composition and David M. Carr, The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
29 On Daniel, see Henze “Use” and Andrew Teeter, “Isaiah and the King of As/Syria in Daniel’s Final Vision: On the Rhetoric of Inner-Scriptural Allusion and the Hermeneutics of ‘Mantological Exegesis’,” in A Teacher for All Generations: Essays in Honor of James C. VanderKam, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 153, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 1:169–99. For discontinuities with rabbinic legal midrash, see Steven Fraade, “Looking for Legal Midrash at Qumran,” in Biblical Perspectives: Early Use and Interpretation of the Bible in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Proceedings of the First International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 12–14 May, 1996, ed. Michael E. Stone and Esther G. Chazon, Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 28 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 59–79. For discontinuities with rabbinic aggadic midrash, see Fraade, “Looking for Narrative Midrash at Qumran,” in Rabbinic Perspectives: Rabbinic Literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 7–9 January, 2003, ed. Steven D. Fraade, Aharon Shemesh, and Ruth A. Clements,
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Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 62 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 43–66. For affinities with Alexandrian exegesis, see Maren Niehoff, “Commentary Culture in the Land of Israel from an Alexandrian Perspective,” Dead Sea Discoveries 19 (2012): 442–63. On the careful response to Fraade, “Looking for Legal Midrash” by Vered Noam, “Embryonic Legal Midrash in the Qumran Scrolls,” in The Hebrew Bible in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Dávid, Nóra et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 237–262, see my note 92 below. Armin Lange and Zlatko Pleše, “Qumran Pesharim and the Derveni Papyrus: Transpositional Hermeneutics in Ancient Jewish and Ancient Greek Commentaries,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls in Context: Integrating the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Study of Ancient Texts, Languages, and Cultures, ed. Emanuel Tov and Armin Lange, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 2:895–922 offer a fascinating comparison of the pre-Hellenistic Orphic lemmatic commentary in the Derveni papyrus that raises the glaringly unaddressed issue of the phenomenology of commentary. Why are the Derveni papyri assumed to be relevant comparanda when no one has seriously explored the extent to which any given feature in this literature may be part of a general typology of commentaries? If a feature is shared between biblical or rabbinic and Alexandrian or Orphic exegesis and also found in historically unaffiliated Chinese or Sanskrit scholarly traditions, it would suggest that the Alexandrian or Orphic parallel may be historically meaningless. Such exploration might either destroy the legitimacy or brightly illuminate the specificity of a number of apparently significant historical connections in the history of Jewish exegesis.
30 Hindy Najman, “The Vitality of Scripture within and beyond the Canon,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 43 (2012): 512.
31 Such studies are to be sharply differentiated from investigations of texts for their authors’ specific responses to specific texts, such as Benjamin Sommer, “New Light on the Composition of Jeremiah,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61 (1999): 646–66 on Second Isaiah’s use of elements of Jeremiah or Levinson, “Birth” or Stackert “Holiness Legislation” on use of the Covenant Code in Deuteronomy or the Holiness Code.
32 Michael Stone, “The Book of Enoch and Judaism in the Third Century B.C.E.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 40 (1978): 479–92.
33 Kugel, “Bible’s Earliest Interpreters,” 280.
34 Ibid. The point about Bakhtin was shrewdly noted by Boyarin, Intertextuality, 22 in his more sophisticated discussion of the fundamental problems of theorizing midrash.
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35 Tzvetan Todorov, trans., Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, Theory and History of Literature 13 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 62, cited in Boyarin Intertextuality, 23. For a complete translation of “Discourse in the Novel” from which the line is taken, see M. M. Bakhtin and Michael Holquist, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, University of Texas Press Slavic Series 1 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 279, which has a somewhat different rendering of this line. In fact, Boyarin, Intertextuality, 22 introduced Bakhtin’s biblical allusion precisely in response to the claims of Rawidowicz about the nature of Jewish interpretation.
36 Kugel “Bible’s Earliest Interpreters,” esp. 278–79; Sommer “Exegesis,” 488 n. 23, 489; Jeffrey Leonard, “Identifying Inner-Biblical Allusions: Psalm 78 as a Test Case,” Journal of Biblical Literature 127 (2008): 241–65; and Menn, “Inner-Biblical Exegesis,” 57.
37 Kugel’s epistemological point deserves emphasis here: “Reflections of this process appear here and there in early biblical texts, but these may well be only the tip of the iceberg; and if the bulk of obviously exegetical works appears in postexilic writings, indeed if explicit exegesis as we know it by and large appears only rather late in the postexilic period, this ought to be understood as the result of a complex interaction of circumstances, including the fact that our ability to recognize what constitutes exegetical activity has been somewhat skewed by these later, overt forms, as well as because the politics of the Exile and early postexilic period caused some of this activity to assume a more prominent place and visible form in the writings of this time” (Kugel, “Bible’s Earliest Interpreters,” 282–83). But this cuts both ways: the fact that most explicit evidence for exegesis appears only in the late postexilic period suggests how much of a larger earlier world was lost, a world which would have included much in addition to the exegetical—a point made powerfully by such major Second Temple scholars as Michael Stone and Robert Kraft; see Stone, “Book of Enoch”; Michael Stone, Ancient Judaism: New Visions and Views (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011); and Robert Kraft, “Para- mania: Beside, Before and Beyond Bible Studies,” Journal of Biblical Literature 126 (2007): 5–27. This would include things that might trigger false or misleading identification of interpretive relationships such as variants, shared stories and phrases, and—most daunting of all—traditional narrative. For as Nagy pointed out, “one of the most important lessons to be learned” from the work of Parry and Lord is that literary allusion, let alone exegesis, may not even exist in the oral-traditional realm: “[W ]hen we are dealing with the traditional poetry of the Homeric (and Hesiodic) compositions, it is not justifiable to claim that a passage
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in any text can refer to another passage in another text”; see Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, rev. ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 42, which is incisively compared to biblical literature by Robert Kawashima, “Comparative Literature and Biblical Studies: The Case of Allusion,” Prooftexts 27 (2007): 324–44.
38 From proto-Semitic *ptr; for etymological discussion, see “The Pragmatics of pēšer” below and Seth L. Sanders, From Adapa to Enoch: Scribal Culture and Religious Vision in Judea and Babylon, Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 167 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), chapter 5. The ptr root appears as a verb in the qal six times in the Hebrew Bible, with examples restricted to the Joseph narrative in Gen 40–41, and five times with the nominalizing –ôn ending in the same two chapters.
39 Prophetic texts include the peshers on Micah, Habbakkuk, Zephaniah, Isaiah, Nahum, and Hosea. Those interpreted as prophetic are the pesher on Psalms. For the pentateuchal text, see the version or retelling of Genesis with commentary 4Q252. Sectarian teachings are the Damascus Document, 4QOrdinances, 4QFlorilegium (including a passage from “the prophet Daniel” [Dan 12:10] as one of the texts), 4QCatena, and 4QMiscellaneous Rules. On apocalyptic texts, see 4Q180 and 181 concerning the teachings of the fallen angel Azazel and the sectarian pesher on the periods, which combines the exegetical form with sectarian “scientific” classification of people according to “lot” (גורל) and a prophecy of seventy weeks (בשבעים השבוע) as in Dan 9 within the Book of the Giants and 11QMelchizedeq.
40 Michael Fishbane, “From Scribalism to Rabbinism,” in The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics. Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 69; on Daniel as mantological exegete see, e.g., Fishbane, “Biblical Interpretation,” 482–90.
41 Michael Fishbane, The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics, Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 69. This point is emphasized in recent critiques by Teeter, “Isaiah” and Henze, “Use” despite the prevalence of echoes and reused themes and ideas.
42 Henze, “Use,” 300.
43 The most plausible reading of the verb byn in 9:2 is “take note, understand, perceive”; cf. Henze, “Use,” 301; John J. Collins, Daniel: With an Introduction to Apocalyptic Literature, Forms of the Old Testament Literature 20 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984); and Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel, Semeia (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1993), ad loc; and BDB, HALOT, NRSV ad loc.).
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The paraphrase as “inquiring” in Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, 482 is at once strategic for his presentation of Daniel as exegete and philologically implausible: byn in the qal with b- attached to the direct object is telic, marking a completed act rather than a process. A number of translations render the verb based on the assumption that Daniel must be working as an exegete here without consideration of its attested meanings in Daniel and in the qal suffix form; cf. “was considering in the Scriptures,” in Louis Hartman and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, Anchor Bible 23 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 239 and “consulted the books” in Brettler, How to Read, 214, where the initial verb (“consulted”) really means “looked at and investigated carefully.”
44 A form that, as Tawny Holm, Of Courtiers and Kings: The Biblical Daniel Narratives and Ancient Story-Collections (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013) has shown, was current in the Hellenistic world and beyond.
45 The exceptions follow their own pattern: the stories that do not present revelations are Dan 1, 3, and 6, each of which connects Jewish practices and faith to physical survival.
46 For the role of Aramaic as a language of knowledge, see Seth L. Sanders, “‘I Was Shown Another Calculation’: The Language of Knowledge in Aramaic Enoch and Priestly Hebrew,” in Ancient Jewish Sciences and the History of Knowledge in the Second Temple Period, ed. Jonathan Ben-Dov and Seth L. Sanders (New York: New York University Press and ISAW, 2014), 69–101. For the interweaving of Aramaic and Babylonian in the culture of the Babylonian and Persian empires, see the survey by Paul-Alain Beaulieu, “Official and Vernacular Languages: The Shifting Sands of Imperial and Cultural Identities in First Millennium BC Mesopotamia,” in Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures, ed. Seth L. Sanders (Chicago: University of Chicago Oriental Institute Press, 2007), 185–215. On the composite nature of this chapter, see Hartman and Di Lella, Book of Daniel, 139. For a detailed and plausible reconstruction of its literary history, see Michael Segal, “From Joseph to Daniel: The Literary Development of the Narrative in Daniel 2,” Vetus Testamentum 59 (2009): 123–49.
47 The authenticity of the king’s statement—that it represents not some twisted divinatory test in which the omen itself is demanded of the diviner alongside its meaning but is instead a sincere desire to know—is confirmed by the language of the text, where his own description of his internal state (pʿm + rwh. y in niphal) precisely echoes the narrator’s “objective” description within the text’s framework of reality (pʿm + rwh. w in hithpael).
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48 Cf. 4:19 “it is you”; 4:21 “this is its interpretation”; 5:26 “this is its interpretation”; and 7:16 “I requested the truth about all this (I had just seen) and he spoke to me, making known to me the interpretation of (this) matter.”
49 For narrativization as a mode of traditional text production distinctive of Judah in contrast to Mesopotamia, see Sanders, From Adapa to Enoch, 232–33 and Seth L. Sanders, “What If There Aren’t Any Empirical Models for Pentateuchal Criticism?” in Contextualizing Israel ’s Sacred Writings: Ancient Literacy, Orality, and Literary Production, ed. Brian Schmidt (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2015), 200 n. 29.
50 André Lacocque, The Book of Daniel (Atlanta, GA: John Knox, 1979), 36. John Goldingay, Daniel Word Biblical Commentary 30 (Dallas, TX: Word, 1989), 7 describes it in more detail as a midrash on Dan 3–6 (!) in light of Gen 41, Isa 40–66, and other passages.
51 An early catalog of resemblances among the Joseph story, the Daniel stories, and Esther was made by Ludwig Rosenthal, “Die Josephsgeschichte, mit den büchern Ester und Daniel verglichen,” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 15 (1895): 278–84. For a concise recent list, see Segal, “From Joseph to Daniel,” 142. In keeping with a contemporary German Tendenz, Rosenthal, “Die Josephsgeschichte,” 284 sees Joseph as a template for the two later stories due to the death of Hebrew as a living language, while Segal plausibly if not conclusively argues for direct literary dependence. The difficulty here parallels Fishbane’s: precisely how to distinguish common genre features from literary dependence.
52 As Segal, “From Joseph to Daniel,” 142 points out, it is precisely the literary connections between the rest of Dan 2 and Gen 40–41 that “further supports the suggestion that the passage in Dan 2:15–24a should be viewed as secondary. That passage describes how upon hearing the king’s challenge to the sages, Daniel requested more time, which was granted by the king. He returned home, informed his companions of the decree, and then received a night vision in which the contents of the king’s dream and its interpretation were revealed to him. It is precisely in these final details that the narrative in Daniel 2 departs from the story in Genesis 41.”
53 Kraft, “Para-mania,” 19. Compare his incisive statement that, “[f ]or the study of Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures, the Dead Sea Scrolls have opened more widely a window that already existed through the study of the Greek translations—for those who were paying attention.” (21).
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54 For the basic study, see Lawrence Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King: Ancient Jewish Court Legends, Harvard Dissertations in Religion 26 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1990). But a non-Jewish Aramaic version starring Ahiqar was likely the most popular ancient version, which existed alongside a whole variety of Aramaic court tales such as those preserved in Papyrus Amherst 63 and the Sheikh Fadl inscriptions. For Papyrus Amherst, see Richard Steiner and Charles Francis Nims, “Ashurbanipal and Shamash-Shum-Ukin: A Tale of Two Brothers from the Aramaic Text in Demotic Script,” Revue Biblique 92 (1985), 60–81 and note the complete critical edition in preparation by Tawny Holm (Critical Edition of Papyrus Amherst 63: Aramaic Text in Demotic Script, Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming). For the Sheikh Fadl inscriptions, see Tawny Holm, “The Sheikh Fadl Inscription in Its Literary and Historical Context” Aramaic Studies 5 (2007): 193–224. Early Jewish tradition assimilated Ahiqar into the Israelite family of Tobit.
55 “A historical sequence of empires presented as Assyria, Media, Persia, Greece originally represents an Iranian (or perhaps an Eastern Anatolian) perspective. Two points indicate this: only Iranian lands experienced such a sequence, and Herodotus’s presentation of the said sequence explicitly names Persian sources. . . . However, the sequence attested in Daniel replaces Babylon for Assyria. While from a Mesopotamian point of view this is problematic, it is less so from two of the likely sources for the Danielic author, viz., Iran or Greece.” See Jason Silverman, Persepolis and Jerusalem: Iranian Influence on the Apocalyptic Hermeneutic (New York: T & T Clark, 2012), 158.
56 Stephen Kaufman, The Akkadian Influences on Aramaic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 110, HALOT ad loc.
57 It is found in a pseudepigraphic letter used as a school text at Sippar, claiming to be an edict from Samsu-Iluna; see the translation and analysis by Paul-Alain Beaulieu, “The Babylonian Background of the Motif of the Fiery Furnace in Daniel 3,” Journal of Biblical Literature 128 (2009): 283–85. For a thorough study of the phenomenon of royal pseudepigraphy in Babylonian scholarly culture, see Mary Frazer, “Akkadian Royal Letters in Later Tradition” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2015).
58 The restoration is from Benno Landsberger and T. Bauer, “Zu neuveroffentlichten Geschichtsquellen der Zeit von Asathaddon bis Nabonid,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 37 (1927): 90 n. 2.
59 The writing here is a scribal pun: ud-ma-dA-num-Adapa can be read either as the name u-An-Adapa or as an epithet ummânu Adapa (“the scholar Adapa”); see Landsberger and Bauer, “Zu neuveroffentlichten Geschichtsquellen,” 90 n. 4.
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60 BM 38299 V 2–3. This presentation follows the edition of column V by Paul-Alain Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon, 556–539 B.C. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 215. For a complete edition, see Hanspeter Schaudig, Die Inschriften Nabonids von Babylon und Kyros’ des grossen Samt den in ihrem Umfeld entstandenen Tendenzschriften: Textausgabe und Grammatik (Münster: Ugarit, 2001), and for its context in discourse about Mesopotamian scribal heroes, see Sanders, From Adapa to Enoch, chapter 2.
61 “According to the Verse Account, this reform included the making of a new statue of Sîn for the temple Ehulhul in Harran, a cult image deemed improper and sacrilegious by Nabonidus’s opponents. That acts of rebellion against the king’s order became widespread seems obvious not only from the tone of the Verse Account but also from the fact that Nabonidus alludes to them openly in his Harran Stela” (Beaulieu, Reign, 286).
62 Paul-Alain Beaulieu, “Official and Vernacular Languages: The Shifting Sands of Imperial and Cultural Identities in First Millennium BC Mesopotamia,” in Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures, ed. S. Sanders (Oriental Institute Seminars 2; Chicago: University of Chicago Oriental Institute Press, 2007), 286.
63 This is especially obvious in contrast with Dan 5:13, which is particularly explicit about the position of Daniel as the king’s captive: he is one of the exiles, whom the king’s father brought from Yehud. By contrast, in Dan 4:6 he is already a prominent Aramaic court scholar (rb h. rṭmyʾ) like Ahiqar. Here there is no story of Daniel’s promotion: his integration into the Babylonian court is presented as unremarkable, his role as chief diviner stated without background or comment.
64 This is a dominating feature of the genre of the Jew in the court of the foreign king, found in the Joseph novella and the book of Esther, and representing the conclusion to all the other court stories of Daniel and his friends. It occurs in Dan 1:19–20; 2:48; 3:30; 5:29; and 6:29 and is visible as a seam in Dan 2, where he is appointed not only head of scholars but also governor of Babylon. Here his position is immediately modified in the next line by an added segue in which he transfers rule of Babylon to his companions so he can stay at court and more court tales can follow, creating an awkward contrast with the ending of Dan 3, where they are promoted to that position for the first time.
65 For trees and their destruction as a prevalent image in Standard Literary Aramaic dream symbolism, far more than in biblical literature, see Esther Eshel, “The Dream Visions in the Noah Story of the Genesis Apocryphon and Related
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Texts,” in Northern Lights on the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. A. Klostergaard Petersen, T. Elgvin, C. Wassen, H. Von Weissenberg, and M. Winninge (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 41–62.
66 Jonathan Ben-Dov, “Iconography and Myth: From Nebuchadnezzar to the Fallen Angels,” lecture at University of Pennsylvania Department of Religious Studies, November 2013.
67 Da Riva, The Twin Inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar at Brisa ( Wadi Esh-Sharbin, Lebanon). A Historical and Philological Study. Archiv für Orientforschung: Beiheft 32 (Vienna: Institut für Orientalistik der Universität Wien, 2012).
68 For discussion of this text, Cyrus’s Verse Account of Nabonidus, in the context of Babylonian and Aramaic scribal culture see Sanders, From Adapa to Enoch, chapter 2. For the text and historical context see the treatment of Beaulieu, Reign.
69 Despite his initial cartoonish wickedness, the king listens to reason and offers a reward for the explanation rather than the threat of dismemberment as in chapter 2.
70 The most recent detailed study is Michael Segal, “Rereading the Writing on the Wall (Daniel 5),” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 125 (2013): 161–76 (with useful bibliography), who argues that the story’s real problem is that the writing is actually invisible to everyone except the king and Daniel, forming an attractive parallel with the secret dream of Dan 2. But there is a difficulty with the argument that this is the point of the scene. When authors of this period write about the relative visibility of visions, they can clearly state it; this is the case when writing about Daniel being able to see visions that others cannot: “I, Daniel, alone saw the vision, but the men who were with me did not see the vision” (Dan 10:7). If it is important to the plot, it is unclear why the creators of Dan 5 would not have mentioned it when the creators of Dan 10 did.
71 It is worth noting that the reuse of Exod 21:2, 6 in Lev 25:44–46, brightly illuminated by Levinson, “Birth,” is a lemma in a figurative sense rather than in the standard technical sense of a headword or phrase that is explicitly cited and then subject to following explanation. Only two words of the Covenant Code’s phrase כי תקנה עבד עברי appear in the Holiness Code, and then only in grammatically shifted implicit citation at the end of the phrase. In fact, Levinson has done much to illustrate how the rhetorical power of the Holiness Code’s reuse of the Covenant Code stems precisely from the fact that it presents the Covenant Code not as an independent authoritative text but as a tacitly understood and invoked forerunner.
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72 Alternatively, as Otto Eissfeldt, “Die Menetekel-Inschrift und ihre Deutung,” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 63 (1951): 105–14 points out, the first instance of mǝnēʾ reads equally as a passive participle, “counted.”
73 Mina appears twice, Shekel once, and Pars in the plural. Each word is not only an icon of an object with a different value but also appears in a different quantity.
74 “It is now widely held that the words originally expressed monetary values, which were implicitly applied to the last Babylonian kings” (Collins, Daniel: With an Introduction, 69).
75 On the discrepancy between the number in the vision and in the interpretation, see, e.g., Collins, Daniel: With an Introduction, 69 and Collins, Daniel: A Commentary, 248.
76 Its independence is made clear not only by its narrative form but also by its separate genre and participants (no kings, courts, or wise men are involved) and separate time sequence (we return to the first year of Belshazzar).
77 The most detailed discussion of their structural relationship is A. Lenglet, “La structure littéraire de Daniel 2–7,” Biblica 53 (1972): 169–90.
78 Daniel Boyarin, “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John.” Harvard Theological Review 94 (2001): 243–84.
79 For identification as “Canaanite,” see Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 16–17 and Collins, Daniel: A Commentary, 286–87.
80 A. 1968, A. 1121 + A. 2731, first published by Jean-Marie Durand, “Le mythologème du combat entre le dieu de l’orage et la mère en Mésopotamie,” Mari: Annales de recherches interdisciplinaires 7 (1993): 41–61. In the most detailed and compelling analysis of the text, Aaron Tugendhaft, Baal and the Politics of Poetry, Ancient Word 1 (London: Routledge, 2018), 47 points out that already the storm god, in whose voice the letter speaks, “is not telling the story of his battle; he is using it. As Durand rightly recognizes, by alluding to the mythic narrative in this way the letter provides valuable evidence for how the story of the Storm-god’s combat with the sea could function politically within Amorite culture.”
81 While the violent conflict between storm god and sea is an essential theme in the earlier texts, the young god never fights here. As Michael Fishbane, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 34–35 notes, there is a variant, which he aptly terms the logos-myth, where the world is ordered
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and the sea brought under control purely by God’s word, as in Ps 114, an image perhaps also suggested in Gen 1.
82 Because no Aramaean narratives earlier than the fourth-century Papyrus Amherst 63 have survived, however, it is impossible to know whether this image is distinctively Canaanite or more broadly Amorite.
83 The conceptual framework is the brilliant thesis of Herrman Gunkel, Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1895). The role of Canaanite myth in apocalyptic was eloquently argued by Cross, Canaanite Myth. For a useful summary of recent discussion see Collins, Daniel: A Commentary, ad loc.
84 Its status has long been recognized as interpretive of Dan 7, but scholars have found it hard to specify a precise exegetical relationship. Thus, while asserting that the Fortschreibung of Dan 7 anticipates the genre of “rewritten Bible,” Henze, “Use,” 289 concedes that “there is no indication in chapter 8 of a sustained reading of chapter 7.” Instead, we find reminiscences of Ezek 1 in the location by a river and the angel’s address to the seer as “human,” as well as the conquest of the stars in Isa 14, although playing more or less opposite roles: in Dan 8, they are part of the cosmic order that the enemy disturbs; in Isa 14, the enemy who attempts to disturb the cosmic order is an astral being.
85 The last interpretive phrase (Dan 8:21) breaks the sequence by equating not an animal but a part of an animal with a king, which may be why it adds the copula: the large horn on his forehead, that is (hûʾ) the first king.
86 Quote from Collins, Daniel: A Commentary, 359.
87 Argued in Segal, “Chronological Conception.” Chronologically, this is 432 BCE, although the claim that he inherited the kingdom of the Chaldeans rather than the Persians, who had in fact been ruling for over a century at this point, suggests that the purpose of this reference is not to place the text at a precise historical point.
88 E.g., R. H. Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1929), 226: “Here a prayer for illumination and not a liturgical confession is required by the context.”
89 For Fishbane’s artificial “exegetical” depiction of the passage, see Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, 487–88. The closest parallel to the qal usage of byn within this text is Dan 9:23’s imperative to “note well, understand!”; contrast the intensified form of the command with hiphil in the same speech.
90 This is often assumed to be our Bible, e.g. the habit of referring to “the Scriptures (canonical books)” in BDB. But there is no evidence that the plural of spr with the
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definite article means anything more specific than a collection of writings: for Jer 32:14, hassǝpārîm are simply legal documents and, for Ezra 6:1 siprayyāʾ are the archives they search. Segal, “Chronological Conception” proposes to explain the plural form of sēper as referring to two specific letters of Jeremiah that Daniel is imagined to be reading, each of which has a version of the seventy-year prophecy. This would provide a neat solution but would require us to assimilate the clear reading of Jer 29:1, which refers directly to a letter, to the ambiguous reading of Jer 25:13, which refers to a scroll or document without any mention of it being sent. This chapter’s literary form is an orally proclaimed prophecy to which an editor has added a note explaining that it was also written down. However, Segal’s essential point is convincing: sēper is a highly distinctive way to refer to the form of a prophecy in Jeremiah. Outside of these chapters, it appears only in Jer 30, 36, 35, and 51. It is therefore plausible to understand the two sǝpārîm not as letters but as distinct documents in Jeremiah, each linked to an instance of the seventy-year prophecy.
91 For the common conception, see, e.g., Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, 489 and Henze, “Use.” Cf. the interesting treatment of Jacob Wright, “Seeking—Finding— Writing,” in Unity and Disunity in Ezra-Nehemiah: Redaction, Rhetoric and Reader, ed. Mark J. Boda and Paul L. Redditt; Hebrew Bible Monographs 17 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2008), 277–305, which is, however, based around the English semantic range of “seeking” rather than a study of each Hebrew or Aramaic term. His only statement on the precise language used may raise as many questions as it answers: “The terminology for seeking and finding in Ezra–Neh is usually בקר/ is replaced בקש .in the Hebrew sections מצא/בקש in the Aramaic sections and שכח by דרש in Ezra 7:10 and 10:16, by שכל in Neh 8:13–14, and by קרא in 13:1–3. Occasionally, one part of the word-pair can be elliptically omitted, as in Ezra 7:10 and Neh 7:5” (3 n. 7).
92 By contrast with repeated references to single authoritative texts elsewhere, as in the kǝtab of Dan 6.
93 Theodor Nöldeke, Die alttestamentliche Literatur: in einer Reihe von Aufsätzen dargestellt (Leipzig: Quandt and Händel. 1868), 224.
94 Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, 488–89.
95 Esarhaddon claims to have freed the enslaved (lit. “bought”!) Babylonians, clothed them, and sent them back to Babylon while proclaiming andurāru (“freedom, debt release”) for them. One widely distributed text, Babylon Prism A—which is a near duplicate Bab Prism C; see Erle Leichty, The Royal Inscriptions of Esarhaddon, King
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of Assyria (680–669 BC), Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period 4 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011), no. 105—was done around 674 (no. 104). This text then states (in Leichty’s translation) that “The merciful god Marduk wrote that the calculated time of its abandonment (should last) 70 years, (but) his heart was quickly soothed, and he reversed the numbers and (thus) ordered its (re)occupation to be (after) 11 years.” The pairing of the seventy-years language and the slavery release is distinctive to this set of texts; it does not appear in the other commemorations of the rebuilding of Babylon (nos. 107–10), which are admittedly more fragmentary.
96 Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation, 515. The critique of Teeter, “Isaiah,” 192 is that “it must be recognized that the vision in Daniel 10–12 is not overtly presented as exegesis at all. This is not to say that the vision fails to reflect interpretations of earlier texts. But the presence of a pattern of borrowed locutions and allusive language does not necessarily translate into a claim regarding the ‘true meaning’ of the referenced texts.” Cf. Henze, “Use” 294 n. 37.
97 Or “great army” (צבא גדול), as in the heavenly armies of Dan 8. Less likely is the reading “a great labor (to understand)” in NJPS.
98 Collins, Daniel: With an Introduction, 99.
99 In every other case of revelation in Daniel (2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9), there is a delay between revelation and explanation, and the subject of each chapter’s narrative is how “understanding” of an initial omen arrives.
100 “From the moment you set your mind to understanding by fasting before your God, your words were heard and I have been sent in response to your words,” says Gabriel (Dan 10:12), excusing himself because of the delay caused by his battles with the divine being representing Persia.
101 Incorrectly cited in BDB ad loc. as “Ezk 1:6.”
102 Ginsberg, “Oldest Interpretation.” For discussion of the way the social role of maśkîl was “read” off of Isaiah and Daniel, see Sanders, From Adapa to Enoch, 212–14.
103 Michael Fishbane, “The Qumran Pesher and Traits of Ancient Hermeneutics,” in Proceedings of the VIth World Congress of Jewish Studies, 2 vols. ( Jerusalem: World Congress of Jewish Studies, 1973), 1:98.
104 He suggested a sixth, gematria, but found “no certain case at Qumran”; see ibid., 1:100.
105 Daniel Machiela, “The Qumran Pesharim as Biblical Commentaries: Historical Context and Lines of Development.” Dead Sea Discoveries 19 (2012): 313–62
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and Alex Jassen, “The Pesharim and the Rise of Commentary in Early Jewish Scriptural Interpretation,” Dead Sea Discoveries 19 (2012): 363–98. See further Shani Berrin, “Qumran Pesharim,” in Biblical Interpretation at Qumran, ed. M. Henze (Grand Rapids, M: Eerdmans, 2005), 110–33, with useful references to studies of the Tannaitic mpšr ʿlyw and the Amoraic petirah forms.
106 Mladen Popović, “Networks of Scholars: Transmission of Astronomical Knowledge between Babylonians and Jews in the First Millennium B.C.E.,” in Ancient Jewish Sciences and the History of Knowledge in the Second Temple Period, ed. Jonathan Ben-Dov and Seth L. Sanders (New York: New York University Press and ISAW, 2014), 153–93. In terms of the data involved, one sees, for example, more or less exactly the same range of Mesopotamian instances from the third (Gudea’s dream), to the second (Gilgamesh’s dream), through the first millennium (the Assyrian dream book edited by Oppenheim in his study), which Fishbane had drawn from Oppenheim’s great 1956 study on dream interpretation. In each case, starting with Fishbane, recent editions are independently consulted, but the mostly unchanged inventory of sources suggests that Oppenheim’s database functions as a sort of Qumran-and-ancient-Near-East chrestomathy. See Leo Oppenheim, “The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East. With a Translation of an Assyrian Dream-Book,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 46 (1956): 179–373.
107 For a view of the Persian period in media terms as the “Parchment Period,” see Sanders, From Adapa to Enoch, 231–32. This important shift in material culture, still flatly ignored after the so-called material turn in discussions of ancient scribal culture, was already demonstrated in a pair of still-neglected articles by Menahem Haran, “Book-Scrolls in Israel in Pre-Exilic Times,” Journal of Jewish Studies 33 (1982): 161–73 and Haran, “Book-Scrolls at the Beginning of the Second Temple Period: The Transition from Papyrus to Skins,” Hebrew Union College Annual 14 (1983): 11–22.
108 The noun form means “explanation, solution” and the verb “to interpret, explain,” as in ptr lh tryn pytryn (“he gave two solutions”), PT Pe’ah 7:2;20a, cited in Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period, 2nd ed., Dictionaries of Talmud, Midrash, and Targum 2 (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 456. It is likely to be native given that the dominant Hebrew form in the preceding period is pšr and the presence of the related ptwr in Nabatean. Yet an Aramaic variant form pšr with a broader semantic range has a wide currency in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic as
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well as other Aramaic varieties, suggesting that, rather than the simple outcome of proto-Semitic *t > Hebrew and Akkadian š, Aramaic t we have to do here with a form or cluster of forms that had multiple outcomes. In this case one cannot simply “do Semitics” on the data, in the sense of establishing a simple, rule-bound direction of linguistic change. And part of the answer lies precisely in this.
109 Uri Gabbay, “Akkadian Commentaries from Ancient Mesopotamia and Their Relation to Early Hebrew Exegesis,” Dead Sea Discoveries 19 (2012): 267–312.
110 “[T]he word pišru refers in nearly all instances not to the interpretation which a described phenomenon requires, but to the omen-passage which refers to the situation in question. Such omen-passages are excerpted from omen-collections by the writers of these letters and quoted verbatim. . . This procedure can in no way be considered an ‘interpretation’, nor can pišru be translated as such. The word refers in this context, as has just been stressed, simply to the answer, given in the form of a quotation, which ‘solves’ the query of the king” (Oppenheim, “Interpretation,” 220).
111 Because they were not the focus of his article, Gabbay, “Akkadian Commentaries” does not discuss these instances, but a number appear in the reports of the scholars to the kings of Assyria edited in the State Archives of Assyria series and it would be interesting to add them to the scope of his argument.
112 Jacquelyn Sanders (personal communication, 7/2013).
113 In addition to the replacement of contemporizing pesher form by explicit midrash, Noam, “Embryonic Legal Midrash” has provided a further striking instance of the formal discontinuities between rabbinic and Quman exegesis. Despite her avowed intention to provide evidence of formal continuity, the remarkable phenomenon she uncovers cuts both ways. The comparative kaf, of which she finds three clear instances in Qumran legal literature (a fourth is claimed but is not physically preserved), used to claim that one legal category falls under the rules of another, is described as analogous to the gezerah shavah and hekkesh of later rabbinic interpretive measures. Yet, despite her convincing arguments that this comparative kaf is applied to broadly known Second Temple legal issues of which the later rabbis were aware, she makes no claim that the form or genre of this kaf bears any direct resemblance or relation to either rabbinic technique. Here again, Qumran legal interpreters display formal techniques that were lost or transformed in late halakhah.
114 Devorah Dimant, “The Qumran Aramaic Texts and the Qumran Community,” in In Flores Florentino: Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Early Jewish Studies in Honour of Florentino García Martínez, ed. A. Hilhorst, E. Puech, and E. Tigchelaar; Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 122 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 200
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and Annette Yoshiko Reed, Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), 27.
115 Henryk Drawnel, An Aramaic Wisdom Text from Qumran: A New Interpretation of the Levi Document, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 86 (Leiden: Brill, 2004) and Jonathan Ben-Dov, Head of All Years: Astronomy and Calendars at Qumran in Their Ancient Context, Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 78 (Leiden: Brill, 2008). Although, as we have seen even in the Amoraic period, there is significant local difference between Jewish Palestinian and Babylonian usages.
116 Stern, “Introduction,” 19.
117 “Multiple forces and sources seem always to feed into it—in the case of midrash, for example, inner-biblical compositional tendencies turned into exegetical habits; modes of Greco-Roman literary and legal interpretation; oneirological and esoteric techniques of interpretation; problems and clues in the biblical text demanding explanation and clarification; the rhetorical and ideological needs of ancient interpreters and of their audiences that required authoritative licenses and justifications from the biblical tradition” (Stern, “Introduction,” 13).
118 An axiom on which Kugel insists repeatedly—that is to say, he literally repeats it: “You can’t act as if that great Interpretive Revolution didn’t happen and that what Judaism is somehow flows directly from the Torah’s own words. Repeat: You can’t act as if that great Interpretive Revolution didn’t happen and that what Judaism is somehow flows directly from the Torah’s own words [sic]” (Kugel, “Kugel in JQR,” 15).
119 Gabriele Boccaccini, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Parting of the Ways between Qumran and Enochic Judaism. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998). The initial conception offered by Hindy Najman, Seconding Sinai: The Development of Mosaic Discourse in Second Temple Judaism, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 77 (Boston: Brill, 2003) was similarly historically narrow. But Najman, “Vitality,” 513 subsequently moved away from limiting the theory to the single ideal figure of Moses and broadened the concept of “Mosaic discourse” into a theory of the function of pseudepigraphy: “ascribing a discourse to a founding figure, and as expressing the belief that the divine encounter of this figure remains both generative and accessible.” This model is powerful for the Daniel apocalypses, although it is not designed to account for the court tales or other elements of Aramaic popular culture with which the Daniel literature is intertwined such as the Enochic Book of the Giants or the Prayer of Nabonidus.
120 Najman, “Vitality,” 511.
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