Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>]

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