Seth Sanders and the historical uniqueness of the biblical mode of address

The Bible’s mode of address, Seth Sanders emphasizes, “assumes participation in a polity that spans time and space” (2009:35). Apart from the mediation of king or priest, in the name of a deity who speaks through “his servants the prophets,” it calls into being a collective “you” and lays specific claims upon it. Arguably enough, the Bible survives to this day in an unbroken stream of authority-bearing and authority-creating tradition precisely because of its uniquely generative mode of address. On this understanding, when it comes to Hebrew, it is not at all the case, as van der Toorn suggests, that “scribes wrote for scribes” (2007:2; quoted by Sanders 2009:9). Hebrew scribes wrote not for themselves but for a polity of which they were a part. They were publicists whose writings are studded with a collective "you" addressee. As such, the writings are pregnant with a people yet unborn.

In line with an insight of the Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock,¹ Sanders holds that Hebrew as a vernacular and the biblical text as literature [more precisely, components thereof such as the Covenant Code and core Deuteronomy] came into existence in response to the literature and ideology of the neo-Assyrian empire engaged in the process of extending its script, literally and figuratively, to an ever larger number of peoples and territories on the perimeter of its domain. This was part of a larger pattern of interaction that began in the 9^th cent. bce and affected the entire Levant.

On this understanding, the invention of Hebrew, like that of vernaculars in general, was an act of political resistance. For the purpose of polity self-representation over and against a stronger, better articulated, and more firmly entrenched polity, Hebrew in the sense of a cultural medium which expresses itself in particular modes of address and not others came into being. Not ex nihilo of course, but in the sense that all polity markers are invented and cultivated through a process of differentiation in which boundaries that are blurry to begin with are heightened and reinforced.

In a recent volume, Avraham Faust refers to Charlotte Seymour-Smith’s definition of ethnogenesis (2006:19): “The construction of group identity and resuscitation or persistence of cultural features of a people undergoing rapid and radical change. It may also be used to refer to a new ethnic system emerging out of an amalgamation of other groups” [italics mine, JFH] (1986: 97).

However refracted through the prism of folk memory, recollections of such an amalgamative process seem to be contained in the reference to a “mixed multitude” in Exod 12:38 and in the tribal genealogies of 1 Chronicles.

It is an anthropological commonplace that, as Faust puts it, “some traits of material culture” are “chosen to transmit ethnicity [in the sense of a particular social organization, not race], “while others” “cross-cut ethnic boundaries” (2006:134). Furthermore, said choices are not unilateral, but are the distillate of bilateral and multilateral ethnic negotiations. On the other hand, as Sian Jones remarked (1997:125, quoted by Faust):

Ethnic symbolism is generated ... from existing cultural practices … characterizing various social domains, such as gender and status differentiation, or the organization of space within households.

Polity-specific political symbolism, Sanders adds, is generated from language itself, the specific script in which it is expressed, and the modes of address it prefers. Sanders (155):

It is precisely in the Iron Age, that a local literature created a kind of politics beyond the state [and laid the groundwork for the creation of a variety of politeumata thereafter - JFH]. … [A]s written political communication ... speaking primarily to and for a people, not a king, it could speak outside of, and live productively beyond, the life of any kingdom.

Sanders bases this conclusion, not on an analysis of biblical literature, but on a stringent analysis of the extant corpus of texts in epigraphic Hebrew, the chronological distribution of which is, except to die-hard maximalists and die-hard minimalists, of historical significance. The Iron Age of which Sanders speaks is that of the 8^th-6^th cent. bce, the floruit of epigraphic Hebrew according to the archaeological record.

 But how true is it that Hebrew as written political communication lived productively outside of the shade of a powerful political patron? Material evidence for written Hebrew correlates in all periods with the attainment of relatively high levels of political autonomy. It is not by accident that Hebrew first appears in the archaeological record of the 10^th cent. bce (Khirbet Qeiyafa) in the initial period of state formation, and has its floruit during the heyday of the monarchy and the city-state of Jerusalem in terms of settlement, scope, and resilience – the 8^th-6^th cent. bce. Written communication in Hebrew is unattested for most of the Persian period (though it must have existed), until its conclusion, when the province of Yehud strove to gain a measure of autonomy, and coins with Hebrew written on them were struck. It is not by accident that Hebrew as a vernacular busts out again, on papyrus, parchment, coinage, and other media, in the 2^nd cent bce – early 2^nd cent ce, with the establishment of the Hasmonean dynasty and a panoply of resilient socioreligious movements thereafter. It is probably no accident that it is in precisely this time-frame, not earlier, not later, that almost all the texts preserved in the dry environment of the Judean Desert, near Qumran, in the Wadi Murabba‛at, Nahal Hever, Nahal Seelim, and Masada, and discovered in the last century, were copied out or composed. 

It stands to reason that a standardized language requires a strong institutional framework that fosters it if it is to flourish. A state in the strict sense need not be involved. The history of text and canon of the Bible may illustrate. The limits of both the Old and New Testaments within Christendom were established late in the game, in the 4th cent ce and following within the Roman Empire by fits and spurts through joint church-state initiatives. The evidence for standardization of text and canon is centuries earlier within Judaism as known to us via epigraphic finds from the early second cent ce and the literature of the sages. Standardization would seem to require an efficient patriarchate in order to be carried out, but the evidence in hand does not confirm or disconfirm the suggestion.  

Regardless, Sanders’ analysis dovetails nicely with a model of the history of the literature of the Hebrew Bible that assumes that texts like Gen 49; Exod 15, Num 23:7-10.18-24; 24:3-9; Deut 32, 33; and Judg 5 predate the 8^th-6^th cent. bce, the time-frame in which the bulk of the literature found in the Hebrew Bible would have been written down and transmitted for the first time. The early poetry just mentioned and early poetry and narrative in 1-2 Samuel in which political leadership expresses itself primarily in ethnogenesis and battle prowess, breathes forth exactly the kind of tribal ethos that Sanders understands to be foundational to West Semitic culture from Mari and Emar forward. In terms of the epigraphic record, this corresponds to the corpus of arrowheads on which appear the signatures of warlords, limited to Iron Age I (12^th-11^th cent. bce). 

In the period stretching from ca. 750 – 500 bce, that foundation was integrated into a larger vehicle of communication, the history stretching from Genesis to 2 Kings. Alongside that, a prophetic corpus came into existence, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve, denser still with critical reflection. The prophetic corpus and historical narrative are characterized by sustained commitment to the self-representation and cultivation of a polity through the direct address of exhortation and the mirror of history-writing, according to perspectives most easily dated to the time frame already noted.² This body of literature, to which a large number of the Psalms, Proverbs 10-29, and Lamentations also belong, reflects a period in which the institutions of palace and temple were a given or a living memory. In fact, the corpus is replete with etiologies of exile, destruction and desecration of God’s house, and loss of political autonomy, along with understandable but unrealistic expectations of national restoration, of a surclassement to a cut above the former status quo, side by side with the somber note of hope on which Genesis – 2 Kings ends, and the minimal and utterly realistic hope of Lev 26. Again, the etiologies and the expectations of reversal are naturally associated with those who endured exile, looked forward to, and in some cases attempted, restoration in the course of the 6^th cent. bce. In terms of the epigraphic record, this corresponds to a period of intense use of a standardized language across genres within and beyond those directly related to exercise of political power. Non-monarchic power, not just monarchic writing, finds expression.

Without wishing to belittle the merits of Ezra-Nehemiah; Num 24:23-24; Zech 9-14; Joel 3-4; 1-2 Chronicles; Esther; Qohelet; and the copyists of biblical texts whose work is known from the mid 3^rd cent. bce forward, to judge from the archaeological record it is only in the 2^nd cent bce – early second 2^nd cent ce, in the wake of a national revival and in the midst of great internal ferment, that Hebrew became once again a creative medium of the first order, with correspondence, history, law, exhortation, commentary, prayer, hymnody, wisdom, prophecy, and apocalypse all represented. The Hebrew Bible in its full extension took shape. At the same time, a great variety of works were composed in Hebrew, works as diverse as 1 Maccabees, Jubilees, Ben Sira, Daniel, the Hodayot, and the Pesharim. It was a brave new world in which translations into Aramaic and Greek and original compositions in those languages became crucibles in which modes of address forged in Hebrew continued to hold in thrall politeumata of enormous historical endurance and complexity. The media and contexts in which writing in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek occur in this period are extremely variegated.

Nonetheless, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. The use of Hebrew in the sense of a vernacular in which a deity speaks who is at once the principle of justice, the sustainer of all that is, a fire that devours, and the arbiter of the future, continued to coincide with the creation of a collective “you” constituted and elected – election, a political term of the first order, is my word, not that of Sanders - in the act of reception of that address. A more searing and a more enduring form of generative political discourse has never seen the light of day.  

¹ Pollock posits “a strong tendency, perhaps even a law: it is only in response to a superposed and prestigious form of preexistent literature that a new vernacular literature develops” (2006:328; cited by Sanders 2009:102).

² The working hypothesis is that the Covenant Code, P, H, and D law, and the narrative in which said law is embedded, are products, with exceptions of detail, of the 8^th – 6^th cent. bce; that the Deuteronomistic history went through multiple revisions over the same span of time; that the prophets Hosea, Amos, Micah and Isaiah [to which the bulk but not all of Isa 1-39 is attributable], with exceptions of detail, belong, as their superscriptions claim, to the last half of 8^th cent. bce; that Zech 1-8, Haggai, and Malachi belong to the last quarter of 6^th cent. bce; that Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Isaiah 40-66, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, in accord with their superscriptions and referential content where ascertainable, belong to various spans of time within the late 7^th and along the length of the 6^th centuries bce. Ruth and Jonah are assignable with a certain plausibility to the mid-8^th and 6^th cent. bce, respectively. Song of Songs, Job, and Prov 1-9, 30-31 are more difficult to date.

Bibliography

Avraham Faust, Israel’s Ethnogenesis: Settlement, Interaction, Expansion and Resistance (Approaches to Anthropological Archaeology; London: Equinox, 2006); Siân Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present (London: Routledge, 1997); Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Seth L. Sanders, The Invention of Hebrew (Traditions [gen. ed., Gregory Nagy; editorial board: Olga M. Davidson, Bruce Lincoln, and Alexander Nehamas]; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), Charlotte Seymour-Smith, MacMillan Dictionary of Anthropology (London: MacMillan, 1986); Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007)  

For this post in pdf form, along with the one preceding and the one following, go here.

Comments

[Alan Lenzi]

Here's a theory as to why no one is commenting on this important and interesting book: it explains the Bible's unique voice (away) in socio-political terms. It sounds like a wonderful (reductive) theory. I can't wait to get my hands on it.

[JohnFH]

That's possible, Alan. However, the view that this book (or another like it) explains the Bible's uniqueness away because it describes it in socio-political terms is a bridge too far.

It fails to take into consideration the layeredness of reality, such that consistent and exhaustive explanations of phenomena can be offered on several discrete levels simultaneously.

An analogy. Everything that I did this evening, watching my youngest daughter perform in the Christmas concert at school; my participation at the Christmas employee dinner of a local manufacturer where I was given $3000 for the area food pantry (a church project), the food I ate (and didn't eat), the countless conversations I had, can be analyzed on a series of discrete levels.

In terms of mathematical equations descriptive of the physics of the kinesis; in terms of biochemical actions and reactions; the sociobiology of the events might be described; explanations for altruism, love, humor, prayer, and so on offered in terms of human evolution; the class structure, hierarchies, and so on implied in the interactions elucidated synchronically; the speech interactions characterized in terms of modes of address, from prayer to thank you to well-wishing to exhortation, from a linguistic anthropological point of view; from the point of view of political theory; in terms of economic transactions; in theological terms, insofar as what occurred instantiated the three so-called theological virtues, faith, hope, and love (1 Cor 13); etc.

I have no problem with the notion that my interactions this evening are describable on all these levels simultaneously. Scientific knowledge derives its explanatory power via abstraction and reductive analysis, through concentration on the layers of reality one layer at a time.

Without hesitation I would say that an understanding of how the Shema Israel works from the points of view of linguistic anthropology and political theory is compatible with responding to the call the Shema makes on my life in terms of its origin in the one true God, the principle of justice, the sustainer of all that is, a devouring fire, and the arbiter of the future.

What's so hard about that?

I think it's hard only for people who think of their relationship with God as some sort of cheap magic trick. The Wizard of Ox furiously manipulating levers to no avail.

Fine, that may be an accurate description of the God of some fundamentalists. And it would be easy to caricature the God of some liberals as a nice warm fuzzy, cute and cuddly.

But let's be honest, the God of Gen 1, Gen 12, Exod 20, Deut 6, and Deut 26 has an entirely different specificity. There is a deeper magic about it, a magic, finally, that is summed up in works like the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in ways even a complete agnostic will understand even if she withholds her heart's assent in the end.

[Alan Lenzi]

John, I had no illusions that this book would explain anything about the Bible's uniqueness or divinity away for you. Nothing could do that. You're a fideist.

For some, however, these reductive explanations of the Bible are simply too much. That's all I was saying.

BTW, I found some money to buy Tawil!

[JohnFH]

Fair enough.

And perhaps Habakkuk got it right when he heard, of a vision of justice, that "the righteous shall live by its faithfulness." That is, in virtue of faith in its faithfulness.

Wait to see how often Tawil cites Ludlul!

[Seth L. Sanders]

Hi Alan,

Yes, the tension between explaining and explaining away the political power of religious language is absolutely at the heart of the first chapter. Emphasis on tension :-)

[Raymond Van Leeuwen]

John, You put modal analysis in a lovely, non-jargonish way. Nice. Where did you pick it up?
Ray

[JohnFH]

Hi Raymond,

I think I metabolized it back in our Toronto days. Some IVP book by a David Mackay, if I remember correctly, and a popularization or two of Dooyeweerd's thought, or someone of his school.

If you know of a good technical presentation of modal analysis theory, feel free to cite it.