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On: 07 December 2014, At: 06:08
Publisher: Routledge
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Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
To cite this article: K.L. Noll (2011) Did Scripturalization Take Place in Second Temple
Judaism?, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament: An International Journal of Nordic
Theology, 25:2, 201-216, DOI: 10.1080/09018328.2011.608541
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09018328.2011.608541
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1. The session was sponsored by the group, Orality, Textuality, and the Formation
of the Hebrew Bible, at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature,
November 21, 2010, with Jon Berquist, presiding. Participants included William
Schniedewind, Nascent Scripturalization in the Neo-Assyrian Period; James W.
Watts, The Scripturalization of Torah in the Persian Period; Charlotte Hempel,
The Social Matrix that Gave Rise to the Hebrew Bible and the Scrolls; and, of
course, the essay you are now reading. I thank the organizers of this forum, especially David M. Carr, for honoring me with an invitation to participate on a panel of such
distinguished scholars.
Taylor & Francis 2011
10.1080/09018328.2011.608541
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as authoritative Jewish scripture; that idea did not yet exist.21 Fifth, Martin
Jaffee notes that evidence for the functional application of written Torah texts
appears only toward the end of the Second Temple era.22 Sixth, Seth
Schwartz remarks on evidence for the lack of textual influence among Jews
even as late as Roman times.23 Seventh, James VanderKam and Eugene
Ulrich have demonstrated that the very word Torah was not yet associated
with any specific body of literature until after the Roman destruction of
Jerusalem.24 Eighth, we are all aware that any technological capacity for
widespread dissemination of literature among mostly illiterate people was
severely limited. We are also all aware that the one institution that could
begin to do this effectivelyI refer of course to the synagogueonly begins
to emerge in Alexandria in the third century BCE.25 Ninth, in a prior publication, I have cited data that demonstrate an interesting phenomenon, namely
that no one really had a clear idea of how to render the old Hebrew scrolls
religiously authoritative even as late as Qumran and the early Christians.26
That is why this era is marked by the kind of experimentation one usually
associates with the formative period for an innovatively new movement. And,
tenth, my thesis could have predicted precisely what Julio Trebolle had, in
21. Arie van der Kooij, Canonization of Ancient Hebrew Books and Hasmonean
Politics, in The Biblical Canons (eds J.-M. Auwers and H. J. de Jonge; Leuven:
Leuven University Press, 2003), pp. 27-38.
22. Martin S. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian
Judaism, 200 BCE-400 CE (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 79-83,
cf. pp. 98, 124.
23. Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 68-71 and passim. Schwartz characterizes
the Torah of the Roman era as a series of negotiations between an authoritative
but opaque text and various sets of traditional but not fully authorized practice
(p. 68).
24. James C. VanderKam, Questions of Canon Viewed through the Dead Sea
Scrolls in The Canon Debate (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002) pp. 91-109. Eugene Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Hebrew Scriptural Texts, The Bible and
the Dead Sea Scrolls, vol. 1, Scripture and the Scrolls (ed. J. H. Charlesworth; Waco,
TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), pp. 77-99.
25. For recent discussion and bibliography on this era, see: D. Urman and P.V.M.
Flesher (eds.), Ancient Synagogues: Historical Analysis and Archaeological Discovery (two volumes; Leiden: Brill, 1995); S. Fine (ed.), Jews, Christians and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue: Cultural Interaction during the Greco-Roman Period
(London: Routledge, 1999); A. Runesson, The Origins of the Synagogue: A SocioHistorical Study (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2001); B. Olsson
and M. Zetterholm (eds.), The Ancient Synagogue from Its Origin until 200 CE: Papers Presented at an International Conference at Lund University, October 14-17,
2001 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2003).
26. Noll, The Evolution of Genre in the Hebrew Anthology, in Early Christian
Literature and Intertextuality. Pt.1, Thematic Studies (edited by Craig A. Evans and
H. Daniel Zacharias. London: T&T Clark International, 2009), pp. 10-23.
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adjudicate. But adjudication of Bible stories logically requires external control. Therefore, any hypothesis built on Bible stories alone is likely to be a
house of cards.
Permit me to elaborate on two points about the process by which we adjudicate Bible stories. Neither point bodes well for the Bible stories. My first
point deals with epigraphic data, and the second with the social sciences.
First, if one observes the epigraphic data, it is clear that proto-biblical
scrolls, even if they existed as early as the Iron Age II, were not influential.
On the contrary, any influence moved in the opposite direction, from local
custom (such as Ketef Hinnom amulets) into literary anthology (such as
Numbers and Deuteronomy).31 Consider the Yabneh Yamm ostracon. This
text suggests a legal situation that a biblical text attempts to legislate, but it
does not suggest that any biblical text was functionally operative in daily
life.32 More significantly, ritual observances later to be identified as biblical
began as local customs unrelated to any proto-biblical document. For example, Late-Bronze-Age Ugarit observed a ritual that seems quite similar to
Yom Kippur.33 This demonstrates that common Canaanite customs later gave
rise to the earliest Hebrew texts commanding these observances. But the texts
were merely elitist conceptualizations of what hoi polloi were already doing.
James Watts has advanced a plausible thesis that ritual represents the first
step for the elevation of texts to scripture.34 He believes the ritual use of the
scrolls reinforced their authority. I have a hunch that Watts is correct. But if
Watts is correct, then this first ritualized step toward scripturalization clearly
did not take place until the Hellenistic period.
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My second, last, and longest point deals with the light that social sciences
can shed on these Bible stories.35 I refer to those passages routinely invoked
by researchers who want to believe that scripturalization took place prior to
Hellenistic times. Deuteronomys provision for a seventh-year public reading
seems to be a favorite proof-text. But also, Ezras public recitation before the
people in Nehemiah chapter 8 is mentioned frequently. Sometimes the account of King Jehoshaphats circuit-riding Torah-teachers in 2 Chronicles 17
has been mentioned as a possible Persian-era policy. Exegetical treatment of
these stories is irrelevant, for the problem lies with the researchers a priori
assumptions and not with the texts.
My point is this: if one were to accept, purely for the sake of argument,
that these and similar Bible stories are accurate accounts of real events, then
they cannot provide evidence for the thesis that scripturalization began with
these events. Quite the contrary, social science research demonstrates that
these events would be insufficient to generate the inculcation of religious
authority, textual or otherwise.36
35. The remainder of this essay elaborates on the thesis advanced in K. L. Noll, Was
There Doctrinal Dissemination in Early Yahweh Religion? Biblical Interpretation:
A Journal of Contemporary Approaches 16 (2008), pp. 395-427.
36. I refer to the school of research associated with studies in human cognition, including: Pascal Boyer, Religious Thought and Behaviour as By-Products of Brain
Function, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (2003), pp. 119-24; Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic, 2001).
See also, Justin L. Barrett, Cognitive Science of Religion: What Is It and Why Is
It? Religion Compass 1/6 (2007), pp. 768-86; Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe In
God? (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004); Ilkka Pyysiinen, Supernatural
Agents: Why We Believe in Souls, Gods, and Buddhas (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009); Pyysiinen, How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of
Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2003). Also see the following for critical evaluation of this
research and a variety of supplemental considerations: M. Afzal Upal, Lauren Owsianiecki, D. Jason Slone, and Ryan Tweney, Contextualizing Counterintuitiveness:
How Context Affects Comprehension and Memorability of Counterintuitive Concepts, Cognitive Science 31 (2007), pp. 1-25; Thomas E. Tremlin, Minds and Gods:
The Cognitive Foundations of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006);
Ryan D. Tweney, M. Afzal Upal, Lauren O. Gonce, D. Jason Slone, and Katie Edwards, The Creative Structuring of Counterintuitive Worlds, Journal of Cognition
and Culture 6 (2006), pp. 483-98; Ara Norenzayan, Scott Atran, Jason Faulkner, and
Mark Schaller, Memory and Mystery: The Cultural Selection of Minimally Counterintuitive Narratives, Cognitive Science 30 (2006), pp. 531-53; Scott Atran, In Gods
We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002). This older volume remains quite useful: Stuart E. Guthrie, Faces in the
Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Justin L.
Barrett recently provided a model for the coding of agent concepts, so that greater
nuance in this research can be achieved: Barrett, Coding and Quantifying Counterintuitiveness in Religious Concepts: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections,
Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 20 (2008), pp. 308-38.
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social context and, above all, the average persons cognitive capacity.40
Viewed from this Darwinian perspective, [t]o explain religion we must explain how human minds, constantly faced with lots of potential religious
stuff, constantly reduce it to much less stuff.41 The dynamics of religious
social interaction are wholly determined by the interchange of, and competition generated by, each individuals use of the cognitive optimum.
In light of these considerations, every sophisticated religious doctrine
faces a perpetual threat of extinction because few in the population possess
the intellectual capacity for working with maximally counterintuitive ideas,
and fewer still possess the motivation to bother. The majority are evertempted to regress to the cognitive optimum. Moreover, even many seemingly sophisticated religious concepts cluster around, or travel not distant from,
the cognitive optimum, for that is the most efficient way to avoid extinction.
For example, Jesus Christ exists on the same cognitive level as common
folklore about a vampire. Each is an ordinary human who has been tagged
by a finite cluster of counterintuitive ideas. By the power of a greater supernatural agency, a dead human has risen to enjoy a level of power over
ordinary humans. On this minimally counterintuitive framework, any number
of doctrines that require little intellectual effort can be hung. One agent embodies evil while the other embodies good, but these relative values are irrelevant to the capacity of a minimally counterintuitive agent to maintain its
grip on the human imagination. More significantly, each agent is able to perform tasks that cluster into the universal human category of miracle. The
specific attributes associated with each agent come and go with the whims or
needs of those who conceptualize them, and even the literary models for each
figure have little impact on this free-wheeling cognitive process. Many early
Christians conceived Jesus as an angel, so much so that the New Testament
must warn against this heretical Christology (Hebrews 1-2).42 From the
perspective of cognitive studies, this was inevitable. As soon as the name of
Jesus had been equated with something supernatural, the human mind was
able to experiment with just about any variation of a minimally counterintuitive, supernatural agent. Anthropologists and cognitive psychologists have
presented a number of valuable studies that illustrate how this universal
40. Noll, Investigating Earliest Christianity; cf. Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity,
p. 23.
41. Quotation from Boyer, Religion Explained, p. 32. See Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity, pp. 15-17, 23-24, 64, 76, 129-31. Pyysiinen notes that even an intensive
intervention by elites to impose a structured religious doctrine will never produce the
level of orthodoxy that the elites desire. See Pyysiinen, Corrupt Doctrine and Doctrinal Revival: On the Nature and Limits of the Modes Theory, in Theorizing Religions Past, pp. 173-94 (186, 189).
42. Angelic Christologies survived for centuries, as is attested by this fourth-century
inscription: First I shall sing a hymn of praise for God, the one who sees all; second
I shall sing a hymn for the first angel, Jesus Christ. See Stephen Mitchell, Anatolia:
Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor (Volume 2; Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993), p. 46.
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process of quite simplistic cognition operates even among those who consider
themselves to be philosophically sophisticated theologians or experts in the
esoteric aspects of a religions doctrine and rituals.43
Tanak is singularly incapable of competing in this Darwinian arena, and
therefore requires constant defense and promotion by an organized group of
well-trained religious experts (rabbis, priests, and so forth), whose authority
is said to rest on sacred or revealed literature, but actually resides in complex,
and frequently hierarchical, social structures. Although generations of believers have affirmed the Tanak (or one of the Christian Bibles) as primary or
even sole authority for their faith and practice, it has never exerted that
authority because it is really just an anthology of eclectic Hebrew and Aramaic texts originally composed for a variety of purposes, some of which cannot be described as religious in any meaningful sense.44
In other words, Tanak is a cultural artifact and, as such, is subject to the
whims of utility to which all artifacts are subject. Any cultural artifact, such
as a wheel or a text, can be replicated like a DNA-sequence, either perfectly
or imperfectly, but the survival and use of the artifact depends on the cultural
equivalent of natural selection, a process in which ever-changing ideas about
the artifacts usefulness are transmitted from one human brain to another.45
The majority of participants in religious communities claiming a biblical
foundation fail to study this anthology with any degree of depth, or choose to
ignore much of its content, reducing their preferred cluster of religious
stuff to a few concepts that are personally or socially useful. This relative
irrelevance of the Tanak occasions no surprise for those who have studied it,
considering the self-evidently false, and often internally incoherent claims the
anthology makes. Tanak was not designed to be religiously authoritative and
remains authoritative only through intensive efforts by trained community
leaders. It is no surprise, for example, that the earliest evidence for the use of
the literature now known as the Former Prophets consists of Hellenistic historians (e.g., Demetrius, Eupolemus) who change the literatures content as
needed, as well as early Roman-era ad hoc citations, quotations, and allusions
that make little use of any larger literary context or themes and instead fragment or atomize the cited lines (e.g., Qumran, New Testament). That the
43. An excellent example is Justin L. Barrett, Theological Correctness: Cognitive
Constraint and the Study of Religion, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion
11 (1999), pp. 325-39; see also Boyer, Religion Explained, pp. 85-87.
44. Definitions of religious vary in scholarship, of course, but I usually define a
work of literature as religious if it appears to be designed to define, proclaim, defend, or advance a set of ideas about supernatural agency or an ultimate reality. Mere
mention of a god or use of a supernatural agent as a character in a tale does not necessarily constitute religious literature, as the god or agent is frequently nothing more
than a narrative necessity. By this definition, significant portions of the Tanak do not
qualify as religious literature, although aggressive readers have managed to find
religion in all Tanaks texts, nevertheless.
45. Noll, Is There a Text; cf. Noll, Evolution of Genre in the Hebrew Anthology.
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