Nomos and Narrative Before Nomos and Narrative

I imagine that when Robert Cover\u27s Nomos and Narrative essay first reached the editors of the Harvard Law Review, their befuddlement derived not so much from Cover\u27s framing of his review of the 1982 Supreme Court term with a philosophically opaque discussion of the interdependence of law and narrative, but from the illustrations that he drew from biblical and rabbinic texts of ancient and medieval times. For Cover, both intellectually and as a matter of personal commitment, these ancient texts evoke a nomian world, rooted more in communally shared stories of legal origins and utopian ends than in the brutalities of institutional enforcement, one from which modem legal theory and practice have much to learn and to emulate. Since my own head is buried most often in such ancient texts, rather than in modem courts, I thought it appropriate to reflect, by way of offering more such texts for our consideration, on the long-standing preoccupation with the intersection and interdependency of the discursive modes of law and narrative in Hebrew biblical and rabbinic literature, without, I hope, romanticizing them. Indeed, I wish to demonstrate that what we might think of as a particularly modem tendency to separate law from narrative, has itself an ancient history, and to show how that tendency, while recurrent, was as recurrently resisted from within Jewish tradition. In particular, at those cultural turning points in which laws are extracted or codified from previous narrative settings, I hope to show that they are also renarrativized (or remythologized) so as to address, both ideologically and rhetorically, changed socio-historical settings. I will do so through admittedly selective, yet telling, examples

Literary composition and oral performance in early midrashim

Three converging factors make the early Rabbinic midrashim (scriptural commentaries) an appropriate place to begin an examination of the complex interplay of oral and textual registers of tradition and its transmission, so much the focus of recent study of other traditional cultures and so much the character of Rabbinic culture from antiquity to the present. First of all, recent scholarship of Rabbinic midrash has tended to vacillate between viewing it as the product of popular oral transmission and sophisticated literary composition. Second, it is in our earliest (so-called "halakhic" or "Tannaitic") midrashic collections that we find the first Rabbinic expressions of what will subsequently be more fully enunciated: the idea of a twofold revelation of Torah at Sinai and a twofold repertoire of its continuous performance and study: written and oral. Lastly, midrashic commentary, by its very structure and rhetoric, provides a glimpse of how Written and Oral Torahs are dialogically combined in a single performative, didactic medium. I shall address each of these in turn, with greatest attention to the second.Not

ENOSH AND HIS GENERATION: SCRIPTURAL TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION IN LATE ANTIQUITY

This study examines how several classical traditions treat the biblical figure Enosh (Adam\u27s grandson) and the time in which he is said to have lived. The Hebrew Bible announces the birth of Enosh with the words (Genesis 4:26): To Seth was, likewise, born a son, whom he named Enosh. It was then that men began to invoke the Lord by name. Most classical exegetes interpret this verse as a praise of Enosh, crediting him with being the originator of divine worship. As such, Enosh is venerated as one of the earliest righteous humans. We trace the development of this motif in the writings of Jews, Christians, Samaritans, and Mandaeans, where we see Enosh regarded as a model of piety, an ideal or godlike man, an angelic figure, and as a prefiguration of subsequent savior figures, such as Moses and Jesus. In each case we try to understand how a tradition is related to Scripture, how it develops, and what concerns of its proponents it expresses. It is against this background that we turn to the interpretation of Enosh and Genesis 4:26 found in the teachings of the early Jewish rabbis, found in collections dating from the early third century C.E. through the middle ages. In these sources we find consistently stated the tradition that in Enosh\u27s time idolatry, that is, the worship of false gods, began, Genesis 4:26 being supplied as the proof text: Then men began to call upon (false gods) with the name of the Lord. Men turned to non-gods to save them, calling them by God\u27s name. Since such activity was understood by the rabbis as an act of rebellion against God, the rabbinic sources describe God\u27s punishing response: He caused the Ocean to overflow its boundaries, flooding a third of the world, a preview of the greater flood in Noah\u27s time. Fundamental changes in man\u27s appearance and character ensued, resulting in additional hardships. This interpretation is striking both because it is radically different from those found in all non-rabbinic traditions of interpretation, and because it seems to express a converse understanding of the meaning of Genesis 4:26. Not divine worship, but idolatrous (alien) worship began. Our study asks two basic questions: How did the rabbis derive their interpretation from the words of Scripture? Why were they motivated to do so? Our first conclusion after examining all of the pertinent passages is that the rabbis were not motivated by any difficulty with the actual words of Genesis 4:26. Nor did they develop their interpretation through the explication of those words. For an explanation we must look elsewhere. We find that the key to understanding the rabbinic difficulty lies in an examination of the rabbinic treatment of the wider biblical context. To the rabbis, earliest universal history as described in Genesis 1-11 is the story of steady human decline. Sin and suffering, according to this view, did not enter the divinely created world as a consequence of one man\u27s misdeeds, or God\u27s capricious response to one generation\u27s misconduct. Rather, the biblical flood in Noah\u27s time follows a consistent pattern of human rebellion and degeneration. God\u27s choosing to establish a covenant with Abraham and to give His Torah to Abraham\u27s descendants only comes after a gradual but long human decline. Within this understanding of the wider scriptural-historical context, it is inconceivable to the rabbis that Genesis 4:26 would announce the origins of divine worship, especially if that verse is understood to refer not only to Enosh but to mankind in general. The rabbis seek an understanding of Enosh and his generation which accords with what they perceive to be Scripture\u27s underlying meaning and message. In so doing they say something significant about their understanding of earliest universal history and the origins of evil as preludes to Israelite-Jewish sacred history

Nomos and Narrative Before Nomos and Narrative

I imagine that when Robert Cover\u27s Nomos and Narrative essay first reached the editors of the Harvard Law Review, their befuddlement derived not so much from Cover\u27s framing of his review of the 1982 Supreme Court term with a philosophically opaque discussion of the interdependence of law and narrative, but from the illustrations that he drew from biblical and rabbinic texts of ancient and medieval times. For Cover, both intellectually and as a matter of personal commitment, these ancient texts evoke a nomian world, rooted more in communally shared stories of legal origins and utopian ends than in the brutalities of institutional enforcement, one from which modem legal theory and practice have much to learn and to emulate. Since my own head is buried most often in such ancient texts, rather than in modem courts, I thought it appropriate to reflect, by way of offering more such texts for our consideration, on the long-standing preoccupation with the intersection and interdependency of the discursive modes of law and narrative in Hebrew biblical and rabbinic literature, without, I hope, romanticizing them. Indeed, I wish to demonstrate that what we might think of as a particularly modem tendency to separate law from narrative, has itself an ancient history, and to show how that tendency, while recurrent, was as recurrently resisted from within Jewish tradition. In particular, at those cultural turning points in which laws are extracted or codified from previous narrative settings, I hope to show that they are also renarrativized (or remythologized) so as to address, both ideologically and rhetorically, changed socio-historical settings. I will do so through admittedly selective, yet telling, examples

The road to zero a vision for achieving zero roadway deaths by 2050

Imagine that, in 2050, not a single person in the United States dies in a traffic crash. This is the scenario described in this article, in which RAND researchers set forth a vision and strategy for achieving zero roadway deaths by 2050. The authors propose that a combination of three approaches can realize this scenario. The first is doubling down on programs and policies that have already been shown to be effective, including laws and enforcement, changes to roadway infrastructure designed to reduce traffic conflicts, reductions in speeds where crashes are likely, improvements to emergency response and trauma care, and more safety education and outreach. The second is accelerating advanced technology, beginning with advanced driver assistance systems (many of which are already in the market) and progressing up to fully automated vehicles. The third is prioritizing safety, which includes both (1) embracing a new safety culture that will lead Americans to think differently about our individual and collective choices and (2) widespread adoption of the Safe System approach, a paradigm shift in addressing the causes and prevention of roadway deaths and injuries. The authors conclude with a list of actions that key stakeholdersincluding professional engineering and planning organizations, public-sector organizations, safety advocates, vehicle manufacturers, technology developers, public health, emergency medical and trauma care organizations, and law enforcement and judicial system representativescan take to bring about the changes needed to achieve zero roadway deaths by 2050. Document type: Boo