UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Reading Ceremonies In The Hebrew .

2015 Mellon Pre-dissertation Fellowship University of California, Los Angeles 2015 Roter Research Fellowship Center for Jewish Studies University of California, Los Angeles 2015 Dissertation Year Fellowship, University of California, Los Angeles 2016 Adjunct Instructor, Biblical Hebrew George Fox Evangelical Seminary Portland, OR 2016 Research Fellow, Aramaic Papyri Elephantine Digitization Project, ERC Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Presentations and Publications Cleath, Lisa J. “Public Reading in Joshua 8:30-35: Fluidity and Continuity in an Oral-Written Text.” Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting. (San Antonio, Texas). November 2016. . “Public Reading in Nehemiah 8: Authorizing an Oral-Written Text.” European Association of Biblical Studies Conference. (Leuven, Belgium). July 2016. . “And All of the People Joined in the Covenant: A social study of public reading audiences in the Hebrew Bible.” European Association of Biblical Studies Conference. (Córdoba, Spain). July 2015. . “Towards an Israelite Theory of Public Reading.” European Association of Biblical Studies Conference. (Córdoba, Spain). July 2015. . "Reading Ceremonies in the Hebrew Bible: Text As Ritual Performance." International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. (Vienna, Austria). July 2014. . "The Materiality of Text in Deuteronomy." International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. (St. Andrews, Scotland). July 2013. . "Manasseh, Prayer of." The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Books of the Bible. (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press). 2012. .“Ben Sira as Hellenistic Scribe-Redactor.” European Association of Biblical Studies Conference. (Thessaloniki, Greece). August 2011. xii

CHAPTER ONE Introduction Scenes of public readings of “the book of the law” in the Hebrew Bible present a unique opportunity to access ancient ideologies of the social dynamics of authoritative texts. In the Hebrew Bible, Joshua 8:30-35, 2 Kings 22-23, and Nehemiah 7:72b-8:18 narrate key public reading events. The construction of each narrative emphasizes the characterization of the audience by listing out the groups of the populace and their leaders who participate in the reading event. These people groups serve as the addressees of the book of the law, which in turn acts to form the identity of the group. After crossing over into the land, in Josh 8, Joshua inscribes the book of the law and pronounces it to the people, including the resident aliens, women, and children with the citizens of Israel. The Josiah narratives in 2 Kgs 22-23 and 2 Chr 34-35 recount exilic and post-exilic versions of the finding of the book of the law in the temple, and its royal enactment through a covenant reading to all socio-economic classes of the Judahite populace. Finally, Neh 8 affirms the reconstruction of Persian period Judean identity, including both men and women, through the reading and study of the law under priestly leadership. In each of the instances depicting a public reading in the Hebrew Bible, it is in a covenant renewal scene at a transitional point in history for the Israelites. These narratives imbue a purpose in the ceremony that sets both the document and the event apart from a common scribal reading. The covenant renewal element of the ceremonies is common to each, but the accounts also select strikingly similar performative context elements. Insofar as all of these accounts emphasize the geographical venue and social addressees of the reading, this raises the question “How do these chronologically disparate narratives each utilize an authoritative text to construct 1

social reality?” Taking a historical-literary analysis of the narratives highlights which characteristics biblical redactors selected to portray the people and the text on these noteworthy occasions. This study will argue that each narrative presents the authoritative text in reflexive relationship to its audience, while manipulating the specific functions of the text and its locus of authority according to the ideology of each chronologically and politically differentiated context. The reading ceremonies portray the authoritative texts as co-forming their social environment in a specific manner. Although they share an emphasis on “all of the people” joining in the reading, each of the ceremonies in Josh 8, 2 Kgs 23, and Neh 8 describe this public with a particularized list of subgroups in attendance. In each case, the defined composition of “the people,” and thus the entire delimited community, identifies key characteristics of the sociohistorical perspectives in each text – the projected geographical, institutional, socio-economic boundaries of the covenant’s addressees. The conception of the covenant as addressing the entirety of the people has roots in the ancient Near Eastern loyalty oath genre, but loyalty oaths have the purpose of establishing a suzerain’s authority over the addressees. It is evident in these narratives that the Israelite community utilized a document-based public address to redefine the limits of its own community boundaries throughout the exilic and post-exilic periods and thus to refocus the purpose of covenant upon internal unity. Although these ceremonies as a set are unique because they alone bring together elements of communal unity and collectivity as executed via a written document, the exilic and post-exilic narratives differ in the way they wield the documents. For example, the exilic-redacted Josiah account in 2 Kgs 22-23 authorizes the book of the law as an oral word from God, and wields its authority to particularize the textual impact for the present day of the Judahite community. By contrast, Neh 8 depicts the book of the law as a written law transmitted from God through Mosaic agency, which serves in the narrative 2

to define the Persian period Judean community specifically as southern descent Babylonian exiles returned to the land. I. Relationship to Previous Scholarship Since the late nineteenth century, biblical scholarship on these narratives has focused on reconstructing history: the source-critical history of each account, and the historicity of the reported events.1 For example, Frank Moore Cross established a line of inquiry which purposed to unite the question of an original edition of the Deuteronomistic History with the historicity of biblical events, by dating such an edition to the reform of Josiah. Several generations of scholarship have followed his lead in this pursuit: We are pressed to the conclusion by these data that there were two editions of the Deuteronomistic History, one written in the era of Josiah as a programmatic document of his reform and of his revival of the Davidic state The second edition, completed about 550 B.C., not only updated the history by adding a chronicle of events subsequent to Josiah’s reign, it also attempted to transform the work into a sermon on history addressed to Judaean exiles.2 Cross exemplifies a biblical scholarship that tended to limit the exploration of the Deuteronomistic History and post-exilic literature to questions of historicity. This scholarship established the historical contexts in which biblical literature should be interpreted, so in each chapter I provide an overview of the main arguments of previous scholarship that are pertinent to the social contexts constructed in the respective narratives. This study works with the goal of examining the rhetoric of the final form of biblical accounts, while respecting the foundation that historical critical scholarship has provided for literary work. I will build upon historical critical 1 Archaeologist Lawrence Stager minimizes the value of literature for historical investigation, stating, “Documents become a source of information about the human past only insofar as they can be made ‘relevant’ to the question or problematic posed by the historian” (“The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel,” BASOR, no. 260 (1985): 1). 2 Frank Moore Cross, “The Themes of the Book of Kings and the Structure of the Deuteronomistic History,” in Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 287. 3

scholarship, but diverge in method by applying literary analysis. Through this departure, I do not hope to reconstruct historical events or text sources, but rather the ideology of authoritative text that is represented in the literature. One key point of divergence from previous scholarship will be my interpretation of the social significance of written documents. When it comes to the chronological trajectory of authoritative texts within Hebrew literature, writing becomes markedly more common in the Jewish community from the Hellenistic period forward. It is the pre-exilic, exilic, and Persian periods represented within the Hebrew Bible that present a more enigmatic tangle of data.3 It is more difficult to confidently date the composition and redaction of those texts, and there is less comparative data for the exilic and pre-exilic periods. This study will attempt to fill out exilic, if not pre-exilic, ideologies of authoritative text through analysis of the Josh 8 and 2 Kgs 22-23 accounts. In doing so, however, I will seek to move beyond previous definitions of textual significance, since they have primarily taken the book of the law as solely having semantic value. Recent studies such as James W. Watts’s work on the iconic and performative functions of texts and Webb Keane’s observations regarding the potentially reflexive interpretation of objects have offered valuable insights into the characteristics of texts beyond their semantic functions. These works, however, have not yet been brought to bear upon the analysis of public readings in the Hebrew Bible. I will delve into the iconic, performative, as well as semantic, means by which the narratively-portrayed texts co-create their communities in pre-exilic through post-exilic literature. 3 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, for one, has identified the advent of scripturalization as the focal point of religious practice in the late antique Mediterranean world, starting from the Hellenistic period and a second century BCE concept of a sacred book with supreme authority (“Scripture as Form andConcept: Their Emergence for the Western World,” in Rethinking Scripture, ed. Miriam Levering (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 29–57). 4

II. Method: Characterization as Literary Analysis The literary analysis that I propose as a method is a study of characterization deriving from the world of narrative criticism. Although I will take historical context into account, this analysis takes the final form of the narratives as the point of departure: “Narrative criticism works with the text as ‘world-in-itself.’ Other approaches tend to fragment, in part because their purpose is to put elements of the text into contexts outside the text Narrative criticism brackets these historical questions and looks at the closed universe of the story-world.”4 For each reading ceremony narrative, I will examine the characterization of the people and the characterization of the text. Past studies of Josh 8 and 2 Kgs 22-23 have not utilized literary analysis to address how the narratives construct the authority of the text in its relationship to the people. Tamara Cohn Eskenazi has only cursorily examined the characterization of the text in light of the characterization of the people in Ezra-Nehemiah.5 This study posits that the people and the book of the law in the Hebrew Bible merit an examination of their place and functioning within the narrative framework of the reading ceremony accounts. Some contemporary literary theorists, particularly structuralists, have declared the individual character “dead,” but Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan asks, “do not even the minimal depersonalized characters of some modern fiction ‘deserve’ a non-reductive theory which will adequately account for their place and functioning within the narrative network?”6 In 4 David Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism and the Gospel of Mark,” JAAR L, no. 3 (1982): 413. 5 See, for example, Tamara Eskenazi, In an Age of Prose: A Literary Approach to Ezra-Nehemiah (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1988); Tamara Eskenazi, “Ezra-Nehemiah: From Text to Actuality,” in Signs and Wonders: Biblical Texts in Literary Focus, ed. J. Cheryl Exum (Atlanta, 1989), 165–98; Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, “Imagining the Other in the Construction of Judahite Identity in Ezra-Nehemiah” (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 6 Rimmon-Kenan’s work has been influenced by Anglo-American New Criticism, Russian Formalism, French Structuralism, and the Tel Aviv School of Poetics and the Phenomenology of Reading. Hers is one of several handbooks that present narrative fiction according to its themes rather than specific schools of thought (Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (New York: Routledge, 1983), 31). 5

this endeavor, the characters need not exist in some objective personal sense, especially since I am primarily concerned with the people as a collective and the text as a concept – both abstractions within the narrative. The character, therefore, is a construct accessed through its portrayal in the narrative. Structuralist and text critic Roland Barthès explored how the reader puts the character together from the network of character traits given in the narrative.7 For Rimmon-Kenan, narratives express character traits in three basic modes: direct definition, indirect presentation, and reinforcement by analogy.8 Direct definition in the biblical covenant ceremonies starts with the terminology applied to the character.9 For example, in Josh 8, the people are called “the sons of Israel,” whereas in 2 Kgs 22-23, they are “the residents of Judah.” Likewise, the book of the law is variously referred to as “the book of the covenant” or “the law given to Israel through Moses.” The differences between these terms and their usage in their narratological contexts communicate the ideological perspectives constructed by the final form of the narratives. In addition, the direct characterization of the people in each of these reading ceremonies is also given through a list of the subgroups of participants. This study examines their characterization via analysis of the lists and comparison of the lists to other populace lists in ancient Near Eastern loyalty oaths. 7 Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1974). 8 Utilizing Rimmon-Kenan, Tamara Cohn Eskenazi discusses these categories for analyzing characterization in In an Age of Prose: A Literary Approach to Ezra-Nehemiah, 128; see also Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 59–69. 9 Rimmon-Kenan defines direct definition as naming “the trait by an adjective (e.g. ‘he was good-hearted’), an abstract noun (‘his goodness knew no bounds’), or possibly some other kind of noun (‘she was a real bitch’) or part of speech (‘he loves only himself’).” This method must be adapted to the ancient literature and genre with which we are dealing, which often does not employ these kind of statements in the historical narratives of the reading ceremonies, but nevertheless, they contain other direct descriptions (Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 59). 6

Indirect presentation of a character “does not mention the trait but displays and exemplifies it in various ways, leaving to the reader the task of inferring the quality they imply.”10 In each reading ceremony, one of the prominent means of indirect characterization is the geographical environment, which firmly establishes a socio-political setting for the narrative. Josh 8 takes place at Shechem, while 2 Kgs 22-23 and Neh 8 are set at venues in Jerusalem. In each of these three cases the specific location communicates a great deal regarding the boundaries of the community and their hierarchy of leadership. The people’s indirect characterization is portrayed through the relationships constructed between them, their leaders, and the text of the law. Indirect presentation furthermore includes examination of any actions executed in the course of the narrative. Theorists like Vladimir Propp and Algirdas Greimas subordinate the character to their actions, while some structuralists assert the primacy of the character over any actions they take.11 I will seek to avoid imposing either model upon these selective narratives, but rather inquire whether the narrative emphasizes action on the part of the people or the book of the law, or whether they are more passive in the events as they are described. As Rimmon-Kenan states, “Different hierarchies may be established in different readings of the same text but also at different points within the same reading Hence it is legitimate to subordinate character to action when we study action but equally legitimate to subordinate action to character when the latter is the focus of our study.”12 In addition to indirectly depicting the characters through their ceremony setting and the actions taken therein, the covenant reading ceremony accounts also characterize the book of the 10 Ibid., 60. 11 Ibid., 34–35. 12 Ibid., 36. 7

law through reference to its physical appearance (i.e., on stone, as in Josh 8, or as a sēpher scroll in Neh 8). Due to the sensory descriptions of the reading venue and textual artifacts, analysis of the narratological indirect characterization will be conducted with reference to portrayed materiality. This emphasis on “materiality” has been well developed by Keane and his fellow anthropologists.13 Just as performance theory would suggest consideration of the environmental factors of the reading,14 so materiality encourages analysis of all sensory descriptions within the depicted scene, the selective fictional materiality the narrative creates. Since written texts by nature have a physical form, human interactions with their material properties may be analyzed to discern underlyin

University of California, Los Angeles 2012-2015 Teaching Associate University of California, Los Angeles 2013 Adjunct Instructor, Biblical Greek George Fox Evangelical Seminary Portland, OR 2013 Roter Research Fellowship Center for Jewish Studies University of California, Los Angeles 2014 Visiting Lecturer, Religious Studies