The system of “higher criticism” of the Bible represented by such scholars as Julius Wellhausen (1844-1917) was firmly established by 1900, and by now, half a century later, has percolated down to the textbooks, encyclopedias, and college courses. Ironically, as H. L. Ginsberg points out, this version of the “higher criticism”—iconoclastic and peculiarly fond of multiplying “documentary sources” of the Biblical books—has become widely accepted just at a time when the tide of scholarship has turned against it towards a newer Biblical research, which Dr. Ginsberg here predicts will have a profound effect on our future understanding of the Book of Books. 

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It can reasonably be said that there have been only two periods of true, scientific Bible research. The first began in the 10th century, flowered spectacularly in the 11th, 12th, and early 13th, and then lingered on until the 16th century. This may aptly be called the Jewish period of Bible research. The second period, which began in the 18th century, and saw its golden age dawn early in the 19th century, is the one in which we are still living. It was for long an almost purely Christian enterprise, and, for that matter, a preponderantly Protestant one. With the notable exceptions of Abraham Geiger and Samuel David Luzzatto, it counted not a single ranking Jewish investigator until the tail end of the 19th century, when Arnold Ehrlich entered the field. He has not, however, remained the last, and one of the new trends of the 20th century is precisely—the return of the Jew.

Until a generation or two ago, there were few Jews who did not have some knowledge of Hebrew and were not familiar with considerable sections of the Hebrew Scriptures. It was therefore only natural that Bible research should have originated among the Jews. This Jewish research of the medieval period had as its premise the divine origin of Scripture as well as of the oral tradition which was, in some measure, a commentary on Scripture. Such a premise might seem to some moderns an unpropitious starting point for research. But to the medieval Jew, who looked to the Bible for guidance in his everyday life, it acted as a spur. The task of research was to unfold the accurate and complete intention of the divine text.

To begin with, there was the matter of Hebrew grammar: the forms a word could assume, their connotations, and the rules for their use and for their combination with each other. Then there was lexicography: how words are formed, and the meanings of the less common ones. And finally, there was exegesis, the determination not only of the bare sense of the words, but of the implications of a passage by the collation of parallels, by common sense, guesswork, and analogy.

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Bible studies of a character which may be called scientific made their appearance early in the 10th century among Jews living in Arabic-speaking countries; there can be little doubt but that the example of Arabic philology, which was highly developed, was a factor of the first importance. Saadia ben Joseph (882-942), the versatile Gaon of Sura, wrote the first Hebrew grammar and two of the first Hebrew lexicons. He further translated the Scriptures into Arabic—this translation is still held in high esteem and utilized by Oriental Jews—and composed commentaries upon them in that language. A Hebrew lexicon was also composed by Saadia’s older North African contemporary Judah ibn Qoraish, whose discussion of the Arabic, Aramaic, and post-Biblical affinities of Biblical words entitles him to be called the father of comparative Semitic linguistics.

After some groping and arguing among North African and Spanish scholars, one of the former, Judah ben David Hayyuj, in the second half of the 10th century, was able to apply, thanks to his thorough knowledge of Arabic grammatical literature, the theories of the Arab grammarians to the elucidation of the structure of the Hebrew language. All later Hebrew grammars are ultimately based upon his, and most of the technical terms coined by him are still in use. His work was completed by the 11th-century scholar Abulwalid ibn Janah, whose grammar and dictionary, rich in exegetic observations, are equivalent to a comprehensive Bible commentary. Often, by means of forced theories of grammar and rhetoric, he attributes to the received text, where modern scholars declare it to be corrupt, the sense of the emendations proposed—on the basis of the context—by the moderns. Thus, since the Hebrew words for “wood” and “bones” are very similar, modern scholars do not hesitate to read “wood” instead of the first “bones” in Ezekiel 24:5; while Ibn Janah obtains the same sense by claiming that among Biblical writers it is a deliberate rhetorical device to say atsamim, “bones,” and mean etsim, “wood”!

Among Spanish Jews of the first half of the nth century who contributed to Bible exegesis, Moses ibn Gikatilla and Judah ibn Balaam are outstanding. The former asserted that the prophets did not actually describe in detail events lying many centuries ahead. He therefore referred all the predictions in the first thirty-nine chapters of Isaiah to Isaiah’s own time, and those in the last twenty-seven to the period of the Second Temple. It would have been only another step to assign the second half of the book of Isaiah to a later prophet (the “Second Isaiah”), as moderns do.

Since the scholars of the Oriental-Spanish school had produced by far the greater part of their works in the Arabic language, Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac) of Troyes, in northern France, knew little of its achievements. Yet this brilliant Talmudist of the second half of the 11th century became the founder of a new, French, school of Bible exegesis. His commentary on the Pentateuch became a classic because rather than in spite of its considerable dependence upon the midrash (i.e., arbitrary, if often edifying, exegesis) of the rabbis of the Talmudic period. Nevertheless, Rashi very frequently rejects tradition in favor of common sense, and his French successors in the 12th century even advanced beyond him towards an understanding of the purport of the Scriptural texts.

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The Bible scholarship of Spanish Jewry reached its high-water mark with Abraham ibn Ezra, who, by writing, like the French Jews, in Hebrew rather than Arabic, mediated Spanish Bible scholarship to the Jewry of Christian Europe. Heir to the achievements of his distinguished Spanish predecessors, he was both an exact linguist and an acute critic (which latter quality compelled him to have recourse to doubletalk more than once). A student of the Scriptures today may still find an original interpretation of his own, or an important observation of modern criticism, anticipated in the commentaries of Ibn Ezra. Thus, the initial phrase in Leviticus 11:3 is currently rendered something like this (I quote from the translation of the Jewish Publication Society): “Whatsoever parteth the hoof.” Citing analogous Hebrew expressions, a bright young man once suggested to me that all the phrase meant was “everything that has hoofs.” I said I was sure he was right, but that it would be well to make sure nobody had said it before. It turned out that Ibn Ezra had. A famous passage is Ibn Ezra’s comment on Deuteronomy 1:2, where Pentateuch passages reflecting a post-Mosaic situation are slyly alluded to.

A contemporary of Ibn Ezra who also propagated Spanish Jewish scholarship abroad, was Joseph Qimhi. Like Ibn Ezra, Joseph Qimhi was born in Spain and knew Arabic, but he made his home in Narbonne in southern France, where he was active as a teacher and a versatile writer (in Hebrew) on grammar and exegesis, and a translator of Judeo-Arabic books. His son Moses wrote the grammar which became in the 16th century, when the interest of Christian scholars in Hebrew studies was awakened, their shortest and most useful textbook. Joseph Qimhi’s youngest son, David (“Redaq,” 1160-1235), was an outstanding scholar. Though his strength lay in systematization rather than in originality, his dictionary and grammar rendered those of his predecessors obsolete; and his commentaries were much esteemed by Christians in the Middle Ages, their influence being still evident on every page of the English Bible.

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In Jewish Bible science, the 14th and 15th centuries were characterized by stale repetition, the 16th and 17th by stagnation and decline. It is worthy of note, however, that the excommunicated Jew, Spinoza, published in his magnum opus, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus—in Latin, the Christian tongue—some opinions on the nature of prophecy and on the origin of the Biblical books which were to become momentous in general Biblical learning. It was he, for example, who first surmised that Ezra was the compiler of the Torah, a belief which was common until not so long ago.

Meanwhile, the late 15th and 16th centuries were for Christian Europe the age of humanism, the Reformation, and the Renaissance. Men of intellect took up the study of Hebrew either from a desire to understand antiquity better for its own sake, or for the purpose of invoking the support of Scripture for the Protestant point of view against the authority of the Catholic Church, or (less frequently) the reverse. At first dependent on its Jewish predecessors on the one hand, and cramped by doctrine on the other, the new Christian Bible scholarship, spurred on by the boldness of the Enlightenment, in the course of time gave birth to a modern Biblical science of unprecedented vigor which, by the end of the 19th century, had rendered the classics of medieval Jewish Bible science obsolete. Its outstanding achievements down to that point may be summarized under a few headings.

1. Linguistics. When European scholars took to studying not only Arabic but all the modern and ancient Semitic languages and dialects, there developed the discipline of comparative Semitics, which showed the Hebrew texts in a new light and made possible new observations. Early in the 19th century, Wilhelm Gesenius wrote the grammar and dictionary which, revised time after time until not a single line of the original editions has been retained, have remained the standard handbooks to this day.

2. Textual criticism. In the 18th century Kennicott and de Rossi collated hundreds of manuscripts and editions of the Hebrew Scriptures, while at the end of the 19th, Christian David Ginsburg (a converted Jew) edited a text based upon extensive collations and wrote his useful Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible. Other scholars meanwhile labored to establish the correct text of the Greek Septuagint, the oldest translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, as an aid to restoring the original Hebrew text.

3. Analysis of the Pentateuch. In 1711, the German Witter observed that there were in Genesis accounts which were parallel but employed different appellations for the Deity (“God” and “the Lord”). This insight went almost unnoticed until the Frenchman Astruc made the same observation, independently, in 1753. The analysis was carried further by a number of scholars in the course of the next hundred years, until it was extended to the Pentateuch as a whole, which was shown to consist essentially of three documents called JE, P, and D. The last (comprising the bulk of Deuteronomy) was shown to have been formally adopted as authoritative in the year 622 BCE. The others were believed to be older, and P, the bulkiest and most legalistic of all, to be the oldest.

However, in the second half of the 19th century Reuss, Graf, Kuenen, and especially the brilliant stylist Wellhausen, gained the adherence of a majority of scholars to the view that P was a product of the 6th and 5th centuries BCE. This dating was connected with a certain theory of the history of the Jewish religion. Since JE did not contain anything which “proved” that its author(s) insisted not only on the exclusive worship of the Lord by Israel but that He was the only real God, the Wellhausians—as they are called—maintained that the official religion of early Israel was not monotheistic but monolatrous (worshiping one god, without prejudice to the existence of others), and that monotheism was a creation of the prophets of the 8th or 7th centuries, a creation which, they averred, was not yet triumphant even in the D document. No wonder the Wellhausians dated practically all the psalms late—many as late as the Greek period—and that they likewise chopped up the Prophets and ascribed late dates to them. The gradual emancipation from the spell of Wellhausen is one of the most striking developments of the past thirty years.

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In the 20th century, it came gradually to be realized that there were many flaws in the house that Wellhausen built. To begin with, it is not unfair to say that Bible scholars as a class were handicapped by the fact that, being Christians, they had begun to learn Hebrew as young men instead of as infants. Many of them have made more important contributions than Arnold Ehrlich, but it is difficult to conceive of anybody but a Jew acquiring the feeling for Hebrew which enabled him to make his particular observations on the subtleties of Hebrew idiom. Furthermore, it must be said that towards the end of the 19th century many scholars were devoting far too much time to an ever more minute dissection of the books—especially the narrative books—of the Bible into documentary “sources,” and far too little time to the study of their content and its utilization for history. As a matter of fact, they heavily underestimated the tremendous value of the Hebrew Scriptures as a historical record. This, in turn, was largely because they failed to make adequate use of the data on the ancient Orient which Assyriologists and Egyptologists had already made available, and still more because much of the material now available had not yet been made known and a good deal of it had not even been discovered—notably the archeology of Palestine. For these and for other reasons, their knowledge of the political history of Israel was deficient by present standards, while their notions of its literary and religious history were topsy-turvy.

In contrast to this, new trends in Bible research that have emerged during the first half of the 20th century reveal the following characteristics:

Bible research has become interested in history to a degree which was hardly imaginable at the beginning of this century.

This research aims to utilize every scrap of information now available on events, conditions, and institutions in the ancient Orient as a whole. For this reason, every ranking Bible scholar today is also a student of the ancient Near East.

The carving up of the Bible into “source” documents has lost much of its once paramount interest for Bible scholars, their main efforts being directed toward determining what actual course of events accounts most plausibly for all the divergent traditions preserved in the various sources.

The value of the books of the Bible as sources for history is rising sharply in the estimation of those who study them.

Jews are beginning to play a significant part in this field.

Such a bald summary is inevitably vague and rather unenlightening. It can, however, be made meaningful by means of illustrations taken from the work of the two most brilliant exponents of the new trends. They are the German Protestant, Albrecht Alt, on the one hand, and the Israeli Jew, Yehezkel Kaufmann, on the other. It is convenient to deal with them in that order for several reasons: because it is the alphabetical order; because it is the order of seniority (Alt has sixty-six years of life behind him to Kaufmann’s sixty); because Kaufmann specialized in Bible late in life, having previously devoted himself to the philosophy of Jewish history and the ideology of Jewish nationalism; and, finally, because in a sense Kaufmann carries on from where Alt and his disciples leave off. Alt’s forte is political and especially—to use a term coined by him—territorial history. He and his school give much less attention to literary and religious history. And it is precisely in these fields that Kaufmann shines.

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The genius of Alt consists in (a) the mastery of a formidable scholarly equipment embracing classics, Egyptology, Assyriology, and Palestinology (including many topographical trips in Palestine), and (b) an unmatched gift for combining data in perspective. It is largely because he has made important contributions to our knowledge of a much wider area than Palestine and of a much longer period than the Biblical age, that his contributions to specifically Palestinian and Biblical scholarship are of such a high quality. Let us take first, by way of example, the following bird’s-eye view which he has sketched of the political and territorial history of Palestine from the beginning of the second millennium BCE to the coming of the Israelites, circa 1200 BCE.

A people known as the Hyksos invaded and conquered Palestine and Egypt about the year 1730 BCE. Pre-Hyksos Egyptian sources usually speak of Palestine as one region, Rtnw; but the epitaph of an officer who lived about 1860 BCE tells of an expedition to Palestine in which he participated and in which the decisive event was a battle against two entities, Shkmm and Rtnw. Now, Shkmm is obviously related to Shechem, while Rtnw, Alt was able to prove, is connected with the place that is today Lydda. But if, in pre-Hyksos Palestine, a state which had its center at Lydda bordered on a state which had its center at Shechem, it follows that the country at that time, if not united in a single realm, was not split up into dozens of midget states either. The dwarf kingdoms which we encounter in the book of Joshua were a creation of the Hyksos, and appear for the first time in the annals of Thutmose III, the Pharaoh who drove the Hyksos from Syria-Palestine.

But why did the Hyksos so atomize the country? Because it was they who introduced chariot fighting into that part of the world. This type of warfare calls for a small, professional warrior class, usually aristocratic, and socially privileged. How was this class to be supported? Since in early antiquity both goods and services were to a large extent still purchased with other goods, and money economy was undeveloped, the obvious way for the Hyksos kings to provide for their charioteers was by bestowing estates upon them in fief. In this manner the king not only provided for the economic needs of this class, but also governed the subject population through them. Whether or not such arrangements are intended to be hereditary, in practice they tend to become so. Then the leader of the aristocracy of a district becomes “king,” and you have the kind of city-state found in the book of Joshua. Often, however, the aristocracy of such a “kingdom” will depose their king and constitute an oligarchy. Thus, for the time of Joshua we are assured that “Gibeon was a great city like one of the royal cities” (Josh. 10:2); but it is not listed among the thirty-one royal cities taken by Joshua (Josh. 12:9-24), and in the entire account of the negotiations between Gibeon and Israel no king is ever mentioned.

The Hyksos were not driven out of Egypt until about 1560 BCE. The Egyptians pressed on behind them into Palestine and Syria—and they committed the political blunder of taking over the system of centrifugal baron-kingdoms. Since the original recipients of these fiefs had included Semites, Indo-Europeans, and Asians, the Tell el-Amarna correspondence (14th century BCE) shows us the land divided up among dynasts bearing the most heterogeneous names, each with his chariot aristocracy; the rest of the population were serfs. By the time the Israelites arrived, circa 1200 BCE, Egyptian suzerainty was little better than nominal over no fewer than thirty-one independent kinglets.

Thus, by recognizing with a sure eye and combining with a sure hand related data in pre-Hyksos Egyptian sources, in post-Hyksos Egyptian sources, in the Tell el-Amarna correspondence (which is in the Accadian language—the then international language of Assyria and Babylonia), and in the Hebrew Scriptures, Alt is able to construct a convincing, organic historical narrative.

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One could cite innumerable other instances of how Alt breathes meaning and coherence into every detail in the history of the age of the judges, the rise of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, their temporary personal union under David and Solomon, their separation after Solomon’s death, and their subsequent separate fortunes. But one more example, from the period of the return from the Babylonian exile, will have to suffice.

We know from the Bible that the returned Judean exiles became involved in an acute conflict with certain notables of the neighboring province of Samaria, and that in the end all Judeans who had wives from the provinces bordering on Judah were compelled by Nehemiah to expel those wives along with the children they had borne. But what was the quarrel all about? And what was the reason for an exclusiveness which the Jewish community had never practiced before and has never practiced since?

The first question is answered convincingly by Alt. Others, notably Ernst Sellin, had already demonstrated before him that the kingdom of Zedekiah (597-587 BCE), the last pre-exilic king of Judah, had been but a rump state, the Negev having been detached from it by the Babylonians (for the benefit of the Edomites), and that, consequently, the same was true of post-exilic Judah. (As a matter of fact the Negev was not rejoined to Judah until it was conquered by John Hyrcanus, around 125 BCE.) Alt advanced one step beyond his predecessors by observing that the nature of the conflict between the repatriated Jews and the officials of Samaria becomes clear the moment it is assumed that this tiny Judah, because of its size and the depletion of its population through Zedekiah’s war with the Babylonians and the subsequent deportations and migrations, was not constituted a new province on its annexation by the Babylonians, or by the Persians after their conquest of the Babylonian Empire, but was attached to the older province of Samaria.

Under the Persians, the entire province of Samaria was governed by officials recruited from the alien ruling class which had been settled in and around the city of Samaria by the kings of Assyria in the 7th century BCE (Ezra 4:2,10). Though Zerubbabel is called “the governor of Judah,” he was in reality merely a sort of commissioner for the resettlement of the exiles, not the governor of a province of Judah detached from Samaria. The alien ruling class of Samaria was not unnaturally apprehensive at the sight of a native aristocracy establishing itself in a corner of their bailiwick. And they were even more perturbed to find that this repatriated native aristocracy had a charter from the king to build a temple to the God of Heaven, which was to serve all worshipers of the God of Heaven in the satrapy of the Trans-Euphrates, especially all those in the province of Samaria, of which Jerusalem and its environs were a part. The Samarian aristocracy asked Zerubbabel and the high priest Joshua to give them a share in this undertaking, so that they, too, might bask in the tremendous prestige that was bound to attach to the Temple, but they were rebuffed.

These rebuffed officials of the city of Samaria, having jurisdiction over the whole province of Samaria, of which Judah was a part, were able to make trouble for the repatriated Jews and to frustrate the rebuilding of the Temple for a long time. Eventually, the Temple was rebuilt by the Jews alone, though the gentlemen in Samaria saw to it that the city wasn’t fortified. Finally, in the time of Nehemiah, Judah was detached from Samaria. But during the century that they had lived under the jurisdiction of Samaria, many members of the Jewish aristocracy had found it politically advantageous to ally themselves by marriage with the ruling class of Samaria. It was against these marriages that Nehemiah’s measures were directed.

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The foregoing examples are representative of the solid, original, and revolutionary achievements of Alt, whose approach has been emulated with considerable success both by scholars he has trained and by others who have been impressed by it. But it is not unfair to assert (1) that the school of Alt has failed to realize fully the implications of its own discoveries for the history of Biblical literature and indeed of the Jewish people and (2) that it pays relatively little attention to religious history.

As regards the implications of Alt’s work for the history of Biblical literature and of the Israelite people, they may be formulated as follows: If the data in the books of Joshua and Judges that can be confronted with pertinent external data of any sort dovetail into these with such unexpected neatness, does it not become necessary to reconsider the prevailing critical hypotheses about the other data in the same books? Is it reasonable, for example, as critics have done and Alt still does, to dismiss as unhistorical the book of Joshua’s account of Israel’s conquest of its future home in Palestine as a united national undertaking? The reason for the current denial that the conquest was ever a united national undertaking is its supposed incompatability with the summary of independent tribal successes and failures in Judges I. But this contradiction does not exist. The book of Joshua itself merely asserts that the conquest was carried out under the unified command of Joshua in its decisive initial stages, but that in his old age Joshua divided both the conquered portion and the unconquered remainder of the Promised Land by lot among the tribes (Josh. 13:1-7; 18:1-10). Judges I then relates how, after the death of the aged leader, the various tribes proceeded on their own. Since, therefore, there is nothing in the sources incompatible with a united invasion, the only question the critic may ask is this: is the traditional representation of the course of events plausible? And the answer must be: very much so. Surely the tribes were more likely to realize the advantages of united action at the beginning of the undertaking when none of them had any territory, and indeed their rapid success would have been impossible without it; while the necessity of any wars other than defensive ones became less obvious as soon as most tribes had as much land as they could till.

In broad outline, then, the book of Joshua makes sense everywhere, and it stands up splendidly wherever it can be checked. Does it not, then, become urgently necessary to revise the prevailing literary hypothesis according to which substantial portions of it were composed centuries after the period whose history they purport to record? Legendary elements the book obviously does contain, but can we continue to believe that it consists largely of late theorizing? Alt and his disciple Noth have given up the Wellhausian doctrine that much of the book of Joshua was composed out of whole cloth by a graphomaniac called P who lived seven or eight centuries after the Israelite conquest—but only to place the date five centuries after the conquest. Yet their own discoveries raise the gravest doubts about the plausibility of such a gap.

As regards the neglect of religious history by Alt and his disciples, that can be illustrated from his clarification of the conflict between the returned Jewish exiles and the aristocracy of Samaria. He demonstrates that it was primarily a political conflict and he explains that aspect of it admirably. But on the Jewish side, motives of political expediency alone would have dictated a more conciliatory attitude, like that of the Jews who intermarried with the Samarian ruling class. Political motives alone do not suffice to explain both Zerubbabel’s exclusion of the Samarians from the rebuilding of the Temple and the action of rigorists like Ezra and Nehemiah. Such an act as the expulsion of wives brought in from the neighboring provinces along with the children they had borne to Jewish husbands would have been unthinkable in pre-exilic and in later post-exilic Judah. What was the reason for it?

To answer this question, we must turn to the work of Yehezkel Kaufmann.

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Kaufmann explains the Jewish attitude towards the Samarians in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE very simply. The ruling families of Samaria were undoubtedly genuine monotheists, though a lot of nonsense has been written trying to prove the contrary. But on the other hand, these people were, by their own admission, ethnically aliens, and religious proselytism had not yet been born in Judaism. The gerim for whom the Torah makes so many humane provisions and whom it requires, in turn, to observe most of the ritual laws to which the “native Israelite is subject, are not “converts” but—in accordance with the etymology of the word—“sojourners,” that is to say, aliens who settled in Israelite territory, who thereby became clients, or protégés of Israel, and who adopted the Israelite religion as part of their new nationality. But now the Jews were themselves a subject people, and certainly the ruling caste in Samaria were not their protégés. Proselytism resulting purely from religious conviction was yet to be recognized. The old process of naturalization had become obsolete, and 3 new one had not yet been evolved. That is why Ezra and Nehemiah excluded not just Samarians but all aliens. And by the time religious proselytism had been born, the Samarians no longer desired to be accepted into the Jewish fold, for they had become Samaritans, having developed—out of pique—the doctrine that Mt. Gerizim and not Zion was the chosen site for the only legitimate sanctuary.

Kaufmann’s foregoing solution of the problem of Jewish exclusiveness in the period of the Restoration is taken not from a work of Biblical research but from one which develops a philosophy for the whole riddle of Jewish existence from the beginnings of Israel to modern times. I refer to his monumental Golah we-Nekar (“Exile and Alienation”), which should be read by every cultured Jew. However, Kaufmann’s great contribution to Biblical scholarship per se is his Toledot haEmunah haYisre’elit (“History of Israelite Religion from Earliest Times to the Destruction of the Second Temple”), which has been in process of publication since 1937 and of which three volumes, in seven parts, have appeared to date. At that, he has only come down to the early exilic period, and will probably need as many volumes more to take him down to the end of the Second Commonwealth.

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The basic thesis of Toledot haEmunah is that monotheism was not the creation of the 8thcentury prophets (as asserted by Wellhausen) but was the popular religion of Israel from its infancy. It is true, says Kaufmann, that the earliest Israelites believed that God had forbidden the worship of other gods only to Israel, but the sources leave no room for doubt that they nevertheless regarded Him as the only real God. They believed that He could only be worshiped in the land of Israel, but again they nevertheless believed there was no other God. The testimony of the sources to idolatry in Israel would seem to offer serious objection to this. But Kaufmann further points out that true paganism includes mythology, whereas the sort of paganism of which the historical and prophetic books of the Bible accuse Israel is what Kaufmann calls vestigial paganism (elilut namoshit), i.e., purely fetishistic worship of images—or heavenly bodies—without mythology; whose persistence among the common people is psychologically (if not logically) compatible with the worship of YHWH as the only real God. After all, many a modern monotheist believes that a rabbit’s foot has luck-bringing properties.

And how does Kaufmann prove that this monotheism existed from the day that Israel came into being? Primarily by demonstrating (again in opposition to the theory to which Wellhausen’s disciples’ disciples adhere) that the Pentateuch (Torah) and the books of Joshua and Judges, which are purely monotheistic, are exceedingly ancient. Here is a sample proof:

All of these books share certain notions about the geography of the Promised Land which cannot be anything other than an archaic prophecy. According to this “geography,” the Promised Land of Canaan extends on the west to the Mediterranean Sea and on the north either, according to one group of passages, to the Euphrates (Gen. 15:18; Exod. 23:31; Deut. 1:7; 11:24; Josh. 1:4) or, according to another group of passages, at least to the border of Hamath (Num. 34:8; Josh. 13:5; Judg. 1:31; 2:21; 3:1-3). But on the east it stops dead at the river Jordan (Num. 34:10-22); so that “the other side of the Jordan” is actually an antithesis to the land of Canaan” (Num. 35:14; Josh. 13:32-14:1; 22:9, 11, 32). Consequently, the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and half-Manasseh required a special dispensation in order to settle in Transjordan (Num. 32), which even then remained “unclean” and unfit for the cult of the Lord (Josh. 22:19).

Now, according to Kaufmann, such a view of Transjordan could never have arisen out of the situation that resulted from the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites, but only as a tradition—a prophecy or oracle—from the days before and during the conquest; actually the realities of the conquest rendered it obsolete, for the Jewish conquest included part of Transjordan, and this area, in any contemporary common-sense view, would have been regarded as part of the Promised Land. On the other hand, Philistia, Phoenicia, and Damascene are regions which, during the monarchy, the Israelites rarely dreamed of dominating and never of colonizing. Their inclusion in the “Promised Land” therefore likewise represents an ambition so ancient that it had become obsolete by the time of the judges.

The borders given to the Promised Land are only one of the features of the books from Genesis to Judges which compel a dating partly before the monarchy, partly in the very early monarchy. In all of this literature, Kaufmann recognizes only one stratum from the late monarchy (8th or 7th century BCE), namely the stratum in Deuteronomy which prohibits local sanctuaries. Lack of space prevents me from discussing any more of his arguments, so I can only report that in my judgment he has proved his case.

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It should be emphasized that Kaufmann is the colossal scholar he is precisely because he is not an apologist for Biblical fundamentalism. He does not deny, but on the contrary emphasizes, the composite character of the Pentateuch. However, he shows that source P, like source JE, is older than source D. The last-named was the first to become an authoritative “book” (i.e. the book of Deuteronomy, adopted by King Josiah in 622); but the two former had existed long before as “literature” and had to a large extent become antiquated—especially is this true of P—long before the end of the monarchy. This older, but “non-canonical,” literature—JE and P—was added to D as “canonical” by a soul-searching post-exilic Jewry driven frantic by its sense of guilt. (See the mood of the prayers in Dan. 9; Ezra 9; Neh. 9.) As soon as this was done, Halachic midrash—synthesizing exposition of the legal matter-became necessary. For since the three Pentateuch sources were not outgrowths of each other but parallel boughs sprung from a common stock, the resulting Pentateuch abounds in grave inner contradictions; and while the contradictions among the narratives are of hardly more than academic interest, the harmonization of the laws is a vital necessity for a community which is resolved to live by them.

I am convinced that Kaufmann is absolutely right in all of his major theses about the Pentateuch and earlier Prophets. Some day conscientious scholars will recognize that Israelite history-writing began in the 12th century BCE, and pragmatic historiography—writing history to teach practical lessons—not later than the 11th century BCE. I also believe Kaufmann to be right in most of his original interpretations of the genesis and pre-exilic history of Israel (including his early datings of Psalms, Proverbs, Ruth, and, probably, Job). He may have gone to extremes in denying secondary revisions and expansions in the writings of the prophets, but I do not doubt that Kaufmann comes much closer to the truth than those who—especially in America—chop up the Prophets with a cleaver.

Some day, either Toledot haEmunah will be translated into English so that the world may learn from it, or else every Old Testament scholar of rank will make an effort to read it in the original “Israeli.” There will of course be modifications and qualifications, but the regnant hypotheses of the year 1970 will surely stand incomparably closer to those of Kaufmann than to those which he combats.

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It is primarily through the work of Kaufmann that the Jew has regained the heritage which he lost by default: the scientific study of the Bible. After all, who but the people in which a knowledge of Hebrew and of at least the Pentateuch was all but universal, and a respectable amount of Talmudic erudition not uncommon, who but the people whose literature the Bible is, ought to have been in the van of Bible research? Instead, Jewry as a whole for long contented itself with apologetics or with such epigrams as “Higher criticism is higher anti-Semitism” (Schechter). Like many another epigram, that is only a half-truth, and for the element of truth which it does contain, the “Semites” themselves incurred no small share of the blame by leaving the field to the “Japhetites.”

Fascinating new horizons are beckoning to Bible scholarship today. But unfortunately it also happens to be just the time when we Jews have lost our precious initial advantage. We are no longer the People of the Book: only a minority of our children get a Hebrew education. It is also unfortunately just the time when the Christians have also lost much ground: interest in the Bible in the Western world has diminished enormously. Most Christians today do not know the stories of either the Old Testament or the New. They rarely understand an allusion to Scripture, and are familiar only with a few current Biblical expressions of whose source they are ignorant.

All this notwithstanding, Bible scholarship may continue to flourish in Germany, which has a tradition of scholarship and research for their own sake, regardless of popular demand. The center of Bible scholarship is still the land in which Alt, Eissfeldt, Noth, Rost, Schmidt, von Rad, Hoelscher, Rudolph, and other outstanding scholars live and work, and in which a number of periodicals and monograph series in Biblical and Oriental studies have already resumed publication, and some new ones have been founded. However, after the changes—including spiritual and intellectual changes—that have taken place in that country in the past seventeen years, its future must be viewed with some apprehension. Yet in the rest of Europe there are only three or four top-flight Old Testament scholars, and in America there are even fewer. (For I am not speaking of Orientalists who only indirectly or incidentally enrich Bible scholarship.)

What, therefore, are the prospects? One can only guess. My guess is that the future of world Bible study lies, to a large extent, in the land of Israel. There you have a people who still cultivate Hebrew, and in whose education, moreover, the Bible, with a modern aesthetic and historical approach, occupies a central position. There Palestine geography—including historical geography—is an important subject for study, while Arabic studies (whose value as an ancillary discipline in Bible research is well known) are destined to play an increasingly honored role. Where but in that community could a work like Kaufmann’s magnum opus largely have paid for itself? (Only parts 6 and 7 were published by the Bialik Foundation: up to that point the losses, if any, were apparently not too heavy for Kaufmann—who was, until his appointment to the Hebrew University last autumn, a teacher in a secondary school—to bear himself.) From such a laity, great scholars may be expected to spring.

But I am, not unnaturally, loath to write American Jewry off. It can have an honorable share in the exciting new Bible scholarship, on the one condition which is a sine qua non for its continued fruitful participation in any branch of Jewish scholarship. It must become again the People of the Book. It is true that the prevailing ignorance of Hebrew, the Bible, and Jewish history is only “normal” for a Diaspora today, and that if European Jewry had survived, it would have tended towards a similar situation. The vast improvement which is necessary can perhaps only be achieved by “abnormal” effort of will. Whether such an effort will be made, remains to be seen.

New trends in Bible research are born of an interest which is perennial. The more the Bible is studied critically—in the perspective of earlier, contemporary, and subsequent events, conditions, institutions, and cultures in the Near East and on its borders—the more meaningful and impressive a library it becomes of invaluable records, glorious literature, and immortal religious teachings.

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