Review of Yairah Amit, \u3cem\u3eShoftim (Judges: Introduction and Commentary)\u3c/em\u3e

Let me begin my review of Yairah Amit\u27s Judges volume in the Mikra LeYisra\u27el commentary series by making an admission which, rumor says, more of my fellow reviewers make than do: I have not read this book--not, at any rate, from cover to cover. I make this admission with a clear conscience because of the hybrid nature of the commentary form, part introductory material, part reference work. What I have done, therefore, is to read the book\u27s introduction and to use the rest of the book as its owners and borrowers will do, by consulting the commentary, the fifteen excurses, and the eight indexes (to biblical references, extra-biblical literature, textual witnesses, emendations, structural/redactional terms, religious terms, grammatical terms, and geographical names). My purpose was to get a sense of how useful the volume will be for me--and hence, I hope, for the typical reader of Hebrew Studies

Exegetical Implications of the Masoretic Cantillation Marks in Ecclesiastes

A rabbinic tradition preserved in b. Yoma 52a-b suggests that five biblical verses are undecidable --that is, it is not clear how they ought to be punctuated. This makes evident a fact that is not often noticed: the Masoretic punctuation of the Bible is sometimes exegetical in character. Simcha Kogut, in his recent book Correlations between Biblical Accentuation and Traditional Jewish Exegesis, has shown that the biblical text is sometimes punctuated against the peshat, the meaning which a reasonable reader would assume to have been intended by the author. Such punctuation is a silent commentary. The reason for it is not explained; but it would seem to be prompted by a desire to shape the meaning of the text, often to match it in an interpretation found in rabbinic literature. Choon-Leong Seow\u27s recent Anchor Bible commentary on Ecclesiastes notes over a dozen probable or possible places in that book where biblical scholars have suggested that the Masoretic punctuation does not match the intended meaning of the text. The purpose of this paper is to analyze these cases to determine whether any of these examples were indeed prompted by exegetical concerns. In several cases, the Targum to Ecclesiastes translates the same word twice--that is, they translated simultaneously in accordance with two different decisions about how the verse should be punctuated. I suggest that, in many cases, the Masoretic decision to place a pause in a location that seems to contradict the peshat was similarly made not to contradict it, but to add a second possibility. Despite the restrictive quality of the vowels and punctuation marks which the Masoretes added to the traditional consonants, they may, paradoxically, have been actuated by a desire to preserve the indeterminability of the text

To See a Sound: A Deuteronomic Re-Reading of Exodus 20:15

In his chapter on inner-biblical exegesis in The Garments of Torah, Michael Fishbane says that his purpose is to suggest some of the ways by which the foundation document of Judaism, the Hebrew Bible, not only sponsored a monumental culture of textual exegesis, but was itself its own first product. I believe that this assertion, surprising as it sounds, is indeed correct. In what follows, I intend to sharpen it in two ways: first, by pointing out the locus of the Bible\u27s invention of itself, Deuteronomy 4; second, by pointing to the act of exegesis--a Deuteronomic midrash on the phrase from Exodus 20 that describes the Israelites as seeing the thunder--that provided the creative spark that transformed theological energy into textual matter and (ultimately) gave us the Bible

Review of Joel M. Hoffman, \u3cem\u3eAnd God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible\u27s Original Meaning\u3c/em\u3e

A little learning, they say, is a dangerous thing. Joel Hoffman\u27s background would seem to have left him with more than just a little learning, but a reading of his book And God Said demonstrates that he still falls well within the danger area. It\u27s too bad, because his topic is one that deserves a good book for a general readership; and Hoffman himself has a few worthwhile things to say

Syntactic Double Translation in the \u3cem\u3eTargumim\u3c/em\u3e

It is by now a commonplace to speak of “double” translation in the Aramaic targums of the Hebrew Bible. In its simplest form, this involves “the rendition of a single verb or noun by a translational doublet.”1 In fact, the phenomenon is broader than the translation of single words. Michael Klein has focused on one important aspect of the larger phenomenon. He notes that many biblical phrases and longer passages are duplicated or even triplicated, in comparable but not identical language. “The targumim, in many of these cases, equalize the varying texts by translating one of them in conformity with the other—or, less frequently, by altering both versions in a mutually complementary fashion.”2 But double translation is not restricted to this process of equalization. More often, as Martin McNamara points out, “The point in the double rendering may have been the targumist’s desire to bring out the wealth of the [Hebrew text].”3 One example appears at the very beginning of Targum Neofiti, where the Hebrew word בראשית of Gen 1:1 is translated “From the beginning with wisdom”—that is, once literally and again understanding the word in a midrashic sense based on Prov 8:22.

Review of William P. Brown, \u3cem\u3eCharacter in Crisis: A Fresh Approach to the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament\u3c/em\u3e

In American society renewed interest in the value of character has recently galvanized public and political discussion (p. vii). Now William P. Brown, associate professor of Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, has written a volume which looks at Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes, the three pillars of biblical wisdom literature, through the lens of character. The aim of his study is to demonstrate that the idea of character constitutes the unifying theme or center of the wisdom literature, whose raison d\u27être is to profile ethical character (p. 21). The book is divided into six chapters. An introduction and a brief conclusion surround chapters on each of the biblical books; Job is treated in two separate chapters