Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bruce Gardner <b.gardner AT abdn.ac.uk>]

Dear Friends,
                    
Following my remarks on Hebrew Bible [HB] redactional growth, while I do
not wish to abuse the list, I think it may be useful background to
mention that what I say about the Priestly Tradition is exemplified in my
forthcoming book on Genesis 1-11.  In it, I reveal the covert,
hieratic style of P's writings, and specifically the inclusion of
sacred calendars hidden in the HB text (MT) but, typically for ANE
hieratic elites, kept from the laity's understanding. 

In this hieratic secrecy we see an original example of the familiar
contrast between nistar and nigleh, i.e. that which is
revealed and that which is hidden. I give full details of the calendars:
in fact, they are parallel luni-solar, solar and sabbatarian schemes
incorporating a clear dimension for mishmarot (1 Chron 24:7f). in
other words, as the perceptive will already have gleaned, they are the
forerunners of the tradition of the Qumran Cave Four scrolls
4Q320-330.  This is not fantasy or 'breaking the Scripture' it is
merely seeing what is there for (now) anyone to see.

My book, The Genesis Calendar: The Synchronistic Tradition in Genesis
1-11 (University Press of America, Lanham, MD, April, 2001) shows
post-exilic Priestly tradition deliberately manipulating numbers and
names for the purpose of giving a paradigmatic (i.e. festal) shape to
community history, in a way that is quite foreign to Greek annalistic
history, and so completely contradictory to ideas of truth derived from
such a simplex approach to biblical tradition. As with the D tradition in
the HB, and the Pauline corpus in the NT, some have tended to adopt, and
apply across the board, a view of historicity which is not feasible in
all cases. The HB is a multi-layered tradition and requires
sensitive, intelligent surgery for each redactional layer; the old
simplistic historicism just does not cut it any more: pure historicity is
'history' (or toast).

If anyone wants more detail about the book, just ask me at
b.gardner AT abdn.ac.uk and I will send the information. In any case,
monolithic historicist religion has just received a body blow and we now
have to open up the storm doors and talk to Jews about progression and
tradition in light of a new discovery, which I have had the good fortune
to make, where a man who was devoted to the truth may well have invented
a story that Methuselah lived for 969 years. If we cannot accommodate
this strange new fact in a multiplex approach to truth, we will have
failed the test of history with an inattention to truth itself, because
God, it seems, is not a historicist.

Sorry to add this so soon after my last post but I thought this news was
well worth giving out.

Cheers,

Bruce.

------------

Bruce Gardner

b.gardner AT abdn.ac.uk