Thinking of Water in the Early Second Temple Period

Ehud Ben Zvi, Christoph Levin, Ehud Ben Zvi, Christoph Levin

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9783110386554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Water is a vital resource and is widely acknowledged as such. Thus it often serves as an ideological and linguistic symbol that stands for and evokes concepts central within a community. This volume explores 'thinking of water' and concepts expressed through references to water within the symbolic system of the late Persian/early Hellenistic period and as it does so it sheds light on the social mindscape of the early Second Temple community.

“But into the Water You Must Not Dip It” (Jeremiah 13:1) – Methodological Reflections on How to Identify the Work of the Deuteronomistic Redaction in the Book of Jeremiah

HERMANN-JOSEF STIPP

1. A Word on Redaction Criticism

The book of Jeremiah has been the subject of intense redaction-critical scrutiny, especially since Bernhard Duhm’s ground-breaking commentary from the beginning of the 20^th century.³⁹⁴ This is unsurprising, given the wide scale of genres and diverging theological outlooks sitting side by side in this book. In addition, the Septuagint represents an edition considerably shorter than the canonical Masoretic text. Moreover, in chapter 36, the book itself offers a narrative that implies that the current version evolved throughout successive stages of completion. So, for a long time, an increasing number of scholars tended to subscribe to the view that this prophetical book arose from an extended history of growth which can be recovered to a certain degree by redaction criticism.

But for quite a while now, redaction criticism has been given a bad name in certain quarters of our discipline. Many biblical scholars, while not denying the composite nature of most of our biblical books, seem to consider diachronic agnosticism a token of a superior level of methodological awareness. Redaction-critical studies are written off as being based on too flimsy evidence, and producing an ever-mounting number of mutually exclusive theories that are unable to garner widespread support, which is why the approach should better be abandoned altogether. However, as far as the book of Jeremiah is concerned, it is interesting to note that a defense of redaction criticism has recently seen the light of day in a rather unlikely place, namely, in a collection of papers explicitly devoted to post-modern readings of the book.³⁹⁵ Taking a cue from “ideological criticism, rhetorical criticism, and postcolonial theory” Carolyn J. Sharp undertakes to “gesture toward a reconfigured notion of redaction criticism that responds to absence, erasure, and rewriting in Jeremiah.”³⁹⁶ The aim of such an enterprise is “to take account of the irresolvable dynamics of foreignness that animate redacted biblical texts such as Jeremiah.”³⁹⁷ Therefore, redaction criticism is not a line of research that scholars are free to disregard at whim; on the contrary, it “is essential […] for persuasive negotiation of the multiple moments of interrogation and ‘resistant traces’ that shape the book of Jeremiah.”³⁹⁸ Ultimately, following Sharp, redaction criticism is a necessary requirement for complying with the demands of “hermeneutical ethics,” because it prevents contemporary interpreters from being “complicit in dynamics of marginalization.”³⁹⁹ What used to be dismissed as a baseless intellectual gamble is suddenly championed as a pressing moral duty.

It is fascinating to see how Sharp’s plea is taken up by A. R. Pete Diamond and Louis Stulman in their introductory summary of the essays in Jeremiah (Dis)Placed.⁴⁰⁰ In their initial “assessment of the current guild,” they echo the usual prejudice against redaction-critical efforts. On pages 3 to 4, they gaze deeply into the poor traumatized soul of the historical-critical scholar:

In the encounter with the scroll of Jeremiah, the guild has been traumatized by inconcinnity. To manage such textual trauma recourse was taken to historicist tools focused on textual genetics rather than poetics. Schooled in the assumptions of modernity, the guild has sought to overcome the scroll by abandoning it. And thus in the process created a reader who must either create a biographical figure around whom to rehabilitate coherence for the disparate traditions or create a compositional biography which renders inconcinnity invisible by reading serialized Jeremiahs prior to the congealed scroll in its traumatizing form.

In doing so, historicist methods have created a type of reader ill equipped to handle aberrant textuality – that is, one alien to modernity’s aesthetic imagination. The scroll has become an open wound that wounds in return.

Rather than rigorously interrogate the adequacy of its aesthetic imagination, the guild, all too often, continues production of increasingly complex and intricate compositional hypotheses often lacking methodological common sense and theoretical clarity.

A reader emerges incapable of imagining ideological complexity and artistic cunning. Instead, this reader atomizes the scroll, dissolves it in the search for procrustean coherence. The resulting compositional portrait offers an illusion of historical precision and detail founded upon unverifiable speculation; profoundly unstable, such hypotheses are capable of multiple subjective reconfigurations based upon too many unknowns. The available data are just too thin.⁴⁰¹

Two pages further on, Diamond and Stulman recapitulate Sharp’s paper as follows:

Rather than abandon the Redaction Critical reader, Sharp seeks to reconstruct it via ideological criticism and rhetorical criticism through the lens of post-colonial theory. […] She grants the Redaction Critical reader’s vision of ideological diversity and conflict. Reading hidden authors and the clash of voices founded in party politics remains a central task. But then Sharp reconfigures the process of evaluating those voices by appeal to post-colonial concepts of the foreigner, of hybridity and of resistance in the face of imperial, monological domination. […] For Sharp, the reader must honor the hybridity of the resultant redacted scroll by not privileging any one redacted voice over another. Thus emerges a type of ethically motivated reader who refuses complicity in the politics of domination and marginalization. ⁴⁰²

In a collection of papers, the task of the introductory essay is not to criticize the contributors but to present an overview of what the volume offers the reader. So it is in line with common practice that Diamond and Stulman avoid commenting on Sharp’s position openly. But if we were to share their judgment on diachronic theories, we would have to reject Sharp’s point entirely. The available data—to borrow a phrase from Diamond and Stulman, used in the above quotation—are unlikely to have grown any thicker within the brief moment it takes to peruse those two pages. Hence, we would have to conclude that Sharp’s endeavor was doomed from the outset for its sheer lack of methodological feasibility, regardless of the ethical merits of her struggle against the “dynamics of marginalization” operative in Biblical texts. Anyway, it should be clear that the viability of an approach does not depend on the nobility (or lack of thereof) of the cause pursued by the scholar, but instead on the availability of data and criteria. Or else the problem of method would transmogrify into a mere matter of labeling: as soon as you could guise your scholarly endeavor in the garb of an august concern or a fashionable theory, you could dispense with worries about facts.

In what follows, I will discuss a methodological issue of the redaction criticism of the book of Jeremiah. In so doing, I side with Sharp in maintaining that diachronic studies in the OT are viable–to a reasonable degree of course, as with all kinds of investigations affecting our subject. On the other hand, I see no need to resort to high-flying theoretical constructs—as for instance postcolonial theory—in order to bolster my enterprise. I take the position of the autonomous reader, who identifies problems and seeks solutions appealing to his mind, while refusing to be lectured on how his imagination is somehow not up to the task, in contradistinction to other readers who confidently celebrate the superiority of their own theoretical stance. I take mere curiosity about the driving forces behind these developments as sufficient justification for trying to clarify the processes involved. In fact, even though fundamental doubts regarding the practicability of diachronic inquiry ha...

Table of contents

• Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Thinking of Water in Late Persian/Early Hellenistic Judah: An Exploration
• Sacred Springs and Liminal Rivers: Water and Prophecy in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean
• Water(s) of Abundance in the Ancient Near East and in Hebrew Bible Texts: A Sign of Kingship
• The Nile in Biblical Memory
• Polluted, Bitter, and Sweet Water as a Matter of Ethnic Identity-Formation in Persian Yehud
• The Song of the Sea and Isaiah: Exodus 15 in Post-monarchic Prophetic Discourse
• Imagining Water: The Overflowing Stream in Isa 66:12
• “But into the Water You Must Not Dip It” (Jeremiah 13:1) – Methodological Reflections on How to Identify the Work of the Deuteronomistic Redaction in the Book of Jeremiah
• Drought and Locust Plague in Joel 1–2
• Coping with Drought and Famine in some Post-Exilic Texts
• Adad’s Overflowing Scourge and the Weather God of Zion: Observations on Motif History in Isa 28:14–18
• Thinking of Water in the Book of Job: A Fluvial Introduction to the Job Literature
• Water in 1–2 Kings
• Water Control and Royal Propaganda: Sennacherib’s Boast in 2 Kgs 19:24 (= Isa 37:25)
• Manasseh in Paradise? The Influence of ANE Palace Garden Imagery in LXX 2 Chronicles 33:20
• Dew in the Enochic Literature
• Living Water by the Dead Sea: Some Water Metaphors in the Qumran Scrolls
• The Fluid Boundaries of Life,the Universe and Yahweh
• Drawing Out Moses: Water as a Personal Motif of the Biblical Character
• Fluvial Fantasies
• Author Index
• Reference Index