To the Editor:
When Robert Alter wrote “Interpreting the Bible” [March], on the Jewish Publication Society’s Torah commentaries, I was at a loss to respond to his discussion of my COMMENTARY on Numbers. After all, how could one respond to a review devoted almost exclusively to contesting one oblique point, a theological justification of King Saul in 1 Samuel 15 (not Numbers!), that comprises one-third of one page in a 600-page COMMENTARY? But when Mr. Alter subsequently attributes to me a statement I neither wrote nor implied, it is time to answer.
In a letter to the editor [June], Marc Brettler comes to my defense (on this point) by stating, what is obvious to every novitiate in biblical research, that biblical historiography is frequently rooted in ideological polemics. Mr. Alter counters as follows: “What I mainly objected to in Jacob Milgrom’s reading was the pseudo-scientific assumption that ideological or institutional background is necessarily the decisive element in determining the meaning of the text” (emphasis added). This allegation is false. I neither wrote nor intimated it. My COMMENTARY gives ample testimony to multiple exegetical techniques (especially the literary one which Mr. Alter espouses), but on this one point I conjecture: “[I]t may in fact be” that an ideological motivation best fits the evidence.
It is precisely because I devote myself, at times extensively, to literary issues that I feel personally deprived. Considering Mr. Alter’s vast literary talents and accomplishments, he might have enriched me and his readers had he in fact written an incisive and comprehensive critical review.
Jacob Milgrom
Hebrew University
Jerusalem, Israel
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To the Editor:
In the June letters section your correspondent Ludwig Seligsberger is quite right in rejecting the rendering “dolphin” for the Hebrew tahash in Exodus 24:4 et al. The meaning was already lost in rabbinic times, for the Talmudic tractate Shabbat 28b identified the term with the mythical unicorn. Certainly, “dugong” is more likely. In my forthcoming Jewish Publication Society COMMENTARY on Exodus I cite the highly plausible suggestion of Professor Hayyim Tadmor that tahash is to be connected with the Akkadian tah-si-a, the name of a precious stone of either yellow or orange color. The word is used in that language to describe leather that is dyed the color of the stone.
Nahum M. Sarna
Jewish Publication Society
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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Robert Alter writes:
My observations on Jacob Milgrom’s COMMENTARY were by no means “devoted almost exclusively to contesting one oblique point.” I drew attention to a number of different aspects of his COMMENTARY (its copiousness, its use of Hebrew exegetes, its intricate knowledge of cultic lore, its philological insights), and I duly noted its virtues. At the same time, I was troubled by certain unexamined assumptions informing the Milgrom volume, for all its “multiple exegetical techniques,” and in that regard his explanation of 1 Samuel 15 seemed to me not an “oblique point” but a symptomatic statement worth scrutinizing.
Jacob Milgrom cites one phrase he used that indicates tentativeness. But the very paragraph in which it occurs is studded with unqualified assertions of purportedly historical fact on the most debatable issues: “[T]hese texts stem from a Davidide (that is, anti-Saulide) author”—thus is scholarly conjecture promoted to a flesh-and-blood historical figure with a confidently known politics and assured authorship. “There is, therefore, no reason to doubt Saul’s statement that ‘the troops spared the choicest of the sheep and the oxen for sacrificing to the Lord your god” ”—though both Meir Sternberg and I have adduced a whole set of rhetorical, structural, lexical, and grammatical reasons for doubting the sincerity of Saul’s statement. And at the end of the paragraph: “[I]t is only the tendenz of the anti-Saulide writer who misrepresents Saul’s valid execution of the here as an act of heresy”—that is, the anti-Saulide writer, set up as pure postulate, has a political agenda that explains everything in the story which might contradict Mr. Milgrom’s reading of it. The formulation “it is only” is reminiscent of phrases sometimes used as well by Nahum M. Sarna, implying, as I observed critically in my article, that there is a single hidden key that solves the “crux” or puzzle of the biblical text. That is a fundamental assumption, I felt, that ought to be challenged, for all that is admirable in the new Jewish Publication Society Torah commentary.
