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  • From: Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Iron and Curses in Deuteronomy 28
  • Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2009 09:08:06 -0800

Karl,

It seems from your curious (to me) assertions that Deuteronomy is "informal" and "off the cuff", that you are taking the option I characterized as sloppiness on the part of Moses (as opposed to scribal mangling at a later time). This is surprising to me because I am used to people either taking the text as "perfect" (inspired in such a way that every word and its order matters), or as the product of all-too-human scribes. But your way, whose uniqueness I have only slowly come to appreciate, allows for some amount of inspiration (such as that which allowed Isaiah to talk about Cyrus) mixed with human editorial processes (Moses using older documents, and putting things together in his own words). I take it that God Himself never speaks "off the cuff" or informally. (I am still in the dark as to many details of your view; for example, whether the documents Moses used for Genesis were themselves inspired and perfectly accurate, or he was inspired to select the true documents and perhaps correct their errors, or what.) Therefore the text of Deuteronomy is not divinely dictated (except perhaps where explicitly quoting God's words). And you must reject the view that the whole Torah was given on Sinai, for example (the view that, just as God there predicted everything that Rabbi Aqiba would say, He also described what would be happening in the next 40 years, including the farewell address that Moses would give, and Moses' death).

Now the main point I want to make is that our view of the conditions surrounding the composition of a text, and the intentions of its author, affect our view of the meaning of the text. This is true in literature, where alternative versions of a text and details of the author's experience while writing it make a difference (does the green statue in line 4 refer to something the author saw while in Venice in 1903, or is it a pure image? etc.), and of course in history, where it matters what the author was in a position to know directly or indirectly. And my perception of the meaning of that email in my inbox will be different if I think that the Nigerian prince is really eager to give me a million dollars, or someone is scamming me.

So now in Deut.28, it matters whether the seemingly independent subtexts ever existed as such, and whether Moses intended for the blessings and curses to be strictly parallel. It matters whether verse 25 is out of order (belonging between 19 & 20), or whether something extra is signified by it being so. And of course it matters greatly whether Moses intended the curses as true prophecies, or simply as a kind of legal boilerplate found in many ordinary treaties, as you and George Athas seem to think. (Perhaps God had caused all those court scribes to use those formulas for all those centuries just in anticipation of the fact that He would need to have them in the mouth of Moses at the farewell speech?) It matters whether Moses intended us to think of Sin and Shamash (that is, the moon and sun) when hearing the curses that (as per you and George) were known by many people to be associated with them, or whether he "demythologized" the familar terminology.

(By the way, the diversity of curses in Assyrian documents leads me to believe that these "formulas" were not so formulaic after all, and that each document allowed for a range of scribal creativity. What was fixed was the order of deities more than the specific words describing the deitiy's curse. Therefore I do think there's a direct connection between VTE and Deuteronomy. But that's another argument.)

Even on the assumption that the speech was "off the cuff", I must still assume that (lacking superhuman mental abilities) Moses had gone over some of it in his mind or in notes beforehand. I assume that he had thought through the parallelism of blessings and curses, perhaps making notes that listed the blessings roughly as they appear in verses 2-14.
If you grant me that, I then propose that we have the following versions of the text:
1) notes or mental rehearsal
2) oral delivery
3) transcription (by Moses himself? that would be rather superhuman) of the oral speech
4) incorporation into Pentateuch
5) copying by scribes (probably at least 100 times, wouldn't you say?)

Is it your view that there was a certain sloppiness obtaining between steps 1 and 2, but no further modifications occurred during any of the last 3 (or 103) steps? Common sense and the evidence of scribal errors in the existing text (omitted half-lines, duplications, resh/daleth, etc.etc.) make it hard to believe that our text would correspond exactly to either 2 or 3, absent continuing miracles guiding scribal hands. But even putting that aside, it is significant to me that there might already be a gap between 1 and 2.


Gabe Eisenstein




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