Law and Ideology in Monarchic Israel.

Friedman, Richard Elliott

This book is composed of three works of non-standard size, longer than articles, shorter than books. It thus serves a useful purpose, and it serves as a useful model for others to consider when publishing their research: one need not always cut a longer work to make it into an article nor stretch it into a book. The result here is a fruitful volume both for the content of the research and in regard to method. The contributions focus on the period between the destruction of Israel and the destruction of Judah. Each is valuable in a different way.

Paul Dion's contribution, "Deuteronomy 13: The Suppression of Alien Religious Propaganda in Israel in the Late Monarchical Era" (pp. 147-216), treats a single text with great specificity. It involves painstaking philological analysis: textual criticism, form criticism, and source criticism. It is particularly valuable for Dion's use of ancient Near Eastern parallels that shed real light rather than provoke mere parallelomania. Dion's case for tracing Deuteronomy 13 to the Josianic era (especially against Holscher) is meticulously argued and extremely strong.

Brian Peckham's contribution is "The Function of the Law in the Development of Israel's Prophetic Tradition" (pp. 108-46). Those familiar with other recent works by Peckham know that he has formulated a rather idiosyncratic picture of Biblical composition. This piece builds on and extends his earlier work. He identifies the order in which he thinks a number of works of history, law, and prophecy were written, and he contends that at several key junctures these works were responding to those which came before them. Historiography (always including some law) comes first, prophecy responds to it, and prophecy itself is overtaken by subsequent history and law. The order, Peckham contends, is: J, Isaiah, Dtr(1), Amos, P, E, Hosea, Micah, Jeremiah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Ezekiel, Dtr(2). He traces a series of relationships among some of these works as well as second and third Isaiah, who, he says, added lines to Isaiah until his text was "gradually overwhelmed by intricate interpretations."

Peckham does not refer to various other models that are well within the mainstream of scholarship, and so it is hard to know how to address his picture. His work is possibly brilliant but so self-contained as to be unserviceable to anyone else. To fashion one's own model without a full defense of that model's departures from its predecessors puts the burden on the readers. It leaves them to make that defense themselves. What reader will be moved to do that? As one who respects Peckham's intellect, I offer this not only as a critique but also as a plea that he go back and lay out his model comprehensibly, without assuming that what seems obvious to him will be obvious to all, and with a proper response to the major models with which it disagrees.

Baruch Halpern's contribution, "Jerusalem and the Lineages in the Seventh Century BCE: Kinship and the Rise of Individual Moral Liability" (pp. 11-107), is by far the longest of the three. It is an exceptional and notable piece of work in our field, both in content and with regard to method, containing a complex but tightly argued thesis. In the eighth century a consciousness of distinctiveness between elite and popular culture arises in the Near East. In Judah this involves a rejection of popular culture by the elite. This is accomplished by the destruction of local places of worship. The real goal of this centralization is to urbanize on an emergency basis, to get the country population into fortified cities as a strategic policy, but the authorities seize on this recent ideology to justify this policy. This strategy leads to the depopulation of the countryside in the wake of Sennacherib's campaign of 701. The result is that the country clans lose their economic, geographical, and spatial bases. The communal (i.e., clan) organizations never reassert themselves, and this leads ultimately to a morality of individual responsibility.

With regard to method, Halpern's study is a model, drawing on a perhaps unprecedented range of disciplines and bodies of data to construct a history of religion in the eighth and seventh centuries. Halpern combines Biblical and archaeological research extremely fruitfully. His archaeological analysis is set in a strong anthropological context: kinship networks, population studies, regional industries, diet, clan structure, burial customs - all of these figure in his reconstruction of that age. Halpern also brings his usual economic and political acumen to the analysis, including attention to international trade and demography, plus a sophisticated understanding of military strategy and its political and social implications. He then connects these fields to the history of religion in a novel but compelling synthesis. The analysis involves a substantial use of ancient sources, from the records of Tiglath-Pileser III to Thucydides, plus examples drawn from world history - from Rome to Cromwell's England - not as a show of erudition, but to provide meaningful analogies and demonstrations of possibilities. All of these extra-textual elements are tied to a thesis that is still grounded in the text in a way that is sensitive to detail and context. Law, narrative, and prophecy all figure compatibly in this picture. It is a tour de force of synthesis of all the tools of our trade. His connections between the archaeological record and the Biblical accounts involve such a substantial marshalling of evidence as to put to rest some current claims that the Biblical historians, especially Dtr, were engaging in mere invention. What emerges is the most vivid picture of life at a particular time in the Biblical world that we have ever encountered.

This work is significant. It sets a standard. If one disagrees with Halpern, such disagreement should be pursued at this level of mastery of the data, the previous scholarship, and the process of analyzing and interpreting it.

As a group, the three works are both enlightening and provocative, appealing to the reader for greater appreciation of method and synthesis.

1 Both of these essays are included in the volume, Studies in the Zohar (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1993), a collection of Liebes' writings on the Zohar.

2 (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1941), 156-204.

RICHARD ELLIOTT FRIEDMAN UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO