A second example of how the ancient Near East shaped the Pentateuch has to do with the Persian empire. In B. Persian rule was perceived by many peoples in the Levant as peaceful, with the era seen as a quiet one, where various peoples could live according to their own culture, language, and religion. In the Hebrew Bible, nearly every foreign nation is addressed with very harsh curses except for the Persians, probably due to their tolerant policy towards those whom they subdued.
In the Pentateuch, we can locate some indications of Persian imperial ideology. A very telling piece is the so-called table of nations in Genesis This text explains the order or the world after the flood, and it structures the seventy people of the globe according to the offspring of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, including three, nearly identical refrains: [46]. At first glance, these texts may not look very interesting.
But they are quite revolutionary insofar as they tell us that the world is ordered in a pluralistic way. After the flood, God intended humanity to live in different nations, with different lands and different languages. Genesis 10 is probably a Persian period text reflecting this basic conviction of Persian imperial ideology. The same ideology is also attested, e.
This is a radically different political view when compared to the Assyrians and Babylonians, both of whom strove to destroy other national identities, especially by means of deportation. The Persians deported no one, and they allowed people to rebuild their own sanctuaries, such as the temple in Jerusalem that the Babylonians had destroyed.
Once again, though, Genesis 10 is not merely a piece of Persian imperial propaganda. It also includes important interpretive changes. Specifically, it is not the Persian king who determines world order; rather, the God of Israel allots every nation its specific place and language. Of course, the Pentateuch eventually makes clear that Israel has a specific function in the world, but it is important to see that the Bible acknowledges and allows cultural and religious variety in the world.
These examples highlight how the Bible interacts with imperial ideologies from the ancient Near East, a point that is crucial to see if we are to reconstruct its formation. But how do such different ideologies and theologies go together in the Bible?
It is important to see that the Pentateuch in particular and the Bible in general are not uniform pieces of literature.
They instead resemble a large cathedral that has grown over centuries. Its content is not the result of one, but rather of many voices. And these different voices establish the overall beauty and richness of the Pentateuch. The literary history of the Pentateuch and the reconstruction of the redactional processes that led to its final shape constitute the main focus of his research. In —13, he co-directed a research group on the formation of the Pentateuch at the Israel Institute of Advanced Study, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Gertz et al. Papers presented at an international conference at Lund University, october , ed. Studien zur Anthropologie des Alten Testaments. Geburtstag ed. See also Ron E. Tappy and P. Could any hebrew literature have been written prior to the eighth century B. Philip S. Muraoka on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday ed. Martin F. Baasten and Wido Th. James D. Andrew Dearman, ed. Politics, Culture, and Identity eds. Psalm 8,5. Aspekte einer theologischen Anthropologie.
Memorization is permitted for the writing of other ritual items. Whenever he writes the name of God, the scribe focuses on the task by declaring out loud his intention to honor God by writing the holy name. One other ritual item written by a scribe is the megillah Book of Esther , which is read on Purim.
However, in addition to ritual items, scribes also write legal documents such as a get bill of divorce or ketubah marriage contract. The writing of all these items requires strict adherence to traditionally established form. The only place where the scribe has artistic license is in doing calligraphy for and decorating the ketubah.
In this instance, creativity fulfills the precept of hiddur mitzvah , enhancing the joyous commandment by beautifying the item associated with fulfilling it. The Talmud Gittin 45b states that scrolls written by certain groups of people, such as women or minors, cannot be used.
The traditional understanding of this passage is that only those obligated to bind the teachings on their hand — that is, to wear tefillin — may write a Torah. In other words, being a sofer is restricted to adult Jewish males.
Later commentators relate the obligation to study Torah with the writing of one. This raises the question: since women are not traditionally obligated to study, does this fully prohibit them from writing a Torah, or merely exempt them from it?
Today, there is recognition that women do study Torah and so there are those who argue that this permits women to write a Torah scroll. In addition, supporters of this position argue that numerous commentators in the past never put women on the list of those prohibited from fulfilling this sacred task. The majority of scribes today are Orthodox men, though there are a few female and liberal scribes.
It is only in the past few years that a traditionalist woman, Aviel Barclay, has become a scribe, and has been commissioned to write a Torah scroll. Josiah's reforms centralized the Jewish cult in Jerusalem and banned its practice anywhere else. It created a powerful oligarchy of temple priests, which took over and became the cultural elite of Judah from then on.
It is these Judean temple priests and their descendents who are the Priestly Source. Theirs is not only by far the largest portion of the bible but was the last added — which doesn't mean the texts were added to the "end". For example, the first account of creation that opens the bible was written by these priests.
Possibly the priests felt uncomfortable erasing ancient texts that came before theirs. They may have feared a force would punish them for editing of early text. While the Israelite priests saw themselves as descendants of the great Moses, the temple priests believed they descended from Zadok, the first High Priest to serve in King Solomon's Temple.
Put otherwise, the temple priests — the "priestly writer" — are suspected of adding Aaron to the story of Moses in order to legitimize their standing in society. Anyway, it was they who wrote all those laws in Leviticus. It was they who wrote most of the Bible. The earliest parts of this priestly writing were carried out in the final decades of the Kingdom of Judah, but most would be written during the exile in Babylonia, after Judah's destruction in BCE.
These temple priests led the Jews in their exile and continued to write in Babylon. Some even believe that Judaism as we know it today was forged in the crucible of the Babylonian exile. Ezra is called a scribe, a writer of books, and likely wrote at least some parts of the Priestly Source.
He is also a good candidate for the Redactor, who edited the whole library preserved during the exile into a single book, though some further edits and changes evidently took place later as well.
Nehemiah, also a Jewish leader and contemporary of Ezra, seems to imply that at least some of the "book of the law of Moses" read to the people by Ezra on Rosh Hashanah upon the return from Babylonia was new: "And they found written in the law which the Lord had commanded by Moses, that the children of Israel should dwell in booths in the feast of the seventh month.
There are some parallels between this story of the people learning about sukkot "booths" and the discovery of Deuteronomy, discussed above.
In the first case they learned that they should celebrate Passover for the first time; now in the case of Nehemiah and Ezra, they are told to celebrate Sukkot. Whether or not these holidays existed before the writings of Ezra and Deuteronomy is unknown. The scribes are skilled calligraphers who work in a traditional way. The letters are written on specially prepared parchment known as klaf, made from the skin of a kosher animal - goat, cattle, or deer.
A sofer must know more than 4, Judaic laws before he begins writing a Torah Scroll. He has to be very careful, because even a single missing, damaged or misshapen letter invalidates the entire Sefer Torah.
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