The Political Myth of the Humanized State I: “The Enemy King is a Monster”

An old story in anthropology has it that in the 20s’ a Native Canadian went knocking door-to-door in Ottowa because he wanted to meet the State, who he’d heard so much about. The personhood of states is probably the most powerful modern myth. It’s not just that it lets the different groups using the state as a forwarding address (as it were) get away with so much, as that it encourages everyone to act as if they really live there.

Naturally hypersensitive to the mythology of state power, Carl Schmitt put the problem succinctly: is it any accident that Hobbes chose the giant monster God created and defeated, the Leviathan, as his personification of the state?

Alex Golub conceptualizes the historical arc of this myth succinctly: in the famous old political myths of dragonslaying, God’s defeat of the enemy Leviathan is the original act of sovereignty, allowing him to found his kingdom. After the early modern dethronement of God’s monopoly over the right to violence, the state itself becomes Leviathan.

In Iron Age and later Near Eastern myths, God gained the right to rule by defeating the cosmic dragon and sacrificially carving her body–logic that interestingly correlates with cross-cultural patterns of hierarchy and sacrifice. But the myth’s political meaning lay in God’s conferring his powers of sovereignty and violence on his microcosmic correlate, the king. Different versions of this act are narrated in the Babylonian Enūma Elish epic and Psalms 74 and 89. But Aaron Tugendhaft shows that earlier versions–in the diplomatic correspondence of Old Babylonian Mari and the Ugaritic Baal epic–already manipulate or question the neat correspondence between God and his mortal mini-me.

It is this logic that explains a series of strange biblical texts. In both Exodus 32 and the archaic poetry of Psalm 68, a remarkable level of violence is directed at a calf. It is defeated in some of the same ways the war-goddess Anat triumphs against cosmic enemies like Death and the “divine young bull” in Ugaritic myth. Cristiano Grotanelli’s “The Enemy King is a Monster: A Biblical Equation” showed that each is an instance of a larger mythic motif, in which a monstrous non-human creature must be dismembered to protect the cosmos.

Most striking was Grotanelli’s demonstration of how this old myth was transferred to human enemies: in both Judges 3 and 1 Samuel 15 a human king–Eglon of Moab and Agag, King of Amalek, are dismembered with similar cosmic significance. As Dumézil writes, explaining the absence of myths about gods and the presence in early Roman historical writing of themes typical of Indo-European myth,

The myths have been transferred from that great (macrocosmic or divine) world to this (Roman) world, and the protagonists are no longer the gods but great men of Rome who have taken on their characteristic traits.

Red-Letter Relics

I first arrived at Hebrew University bursting with excitement to study with the razor-sharp, gnomelike and blue-eyed Aramaist Jonas Greenfield and what felt like the last generation of great Israeli philologists. At our orientation lecture someone told us we’d be learning the very language King David spoke and my eyes narrowed. I was here to study precisely that fascinating evidence of historical diversity and change that proved this wasn’t true. I commented to a friend–or maybe just whoever was standing next to me–that if we could recover King David’s language it would sound like Arabic to us. I now realize this was my initiation into the tension between what we say and how we speak, the historical dialectic of language structure and linguistic ideology that makes every linguistic history also a social history.

I was asked to do a piece for Religion Dispatches on the recent brief exchange between the Pope and the Prime Minister of Israel.  Netanyahu asserted Jesus’ language was Hebrew, but backpedaled when the Pope corrected him that it was Aramaic (“He spoke Aramaic but he knew Hebrew”). I argue that it reflects centuries of attempts to claim Jesus through speech, making his native language and original words into sacred linguistic relics. What is interesting about this isn’t Netanyahu’s use of language to claim territory, a function of the political reptilian brain stem (you could ask, what else has he ever done?) as his defenders. Until recently, the scholarly debate about ancient Hebrew’s lifespan had split along ethnic-religious lines. Most major studies of the continuing life of Hebrew have been by Jews, and the “Aramaic approach” to the original words of Jesus was the province of Christians. It seems the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction.

But any attempt to pin this early Jewish holy man down to one language ends up concealing him and his world from us–as Steven Fraade has argued it does for the early Rabbis in general and Willem Smelik has argued it does for their ideas of scripture.

Since their site is down, here is a footnoted version.

Hebrew or Aramaic?

The linguistic identity of a single word is as much a question of culture as it is of language structure, as exemplified here by the single appearance of the originally Aramaic term rabbuni “my master” in the early Hebrew base of Mishna Ms. Kaufmann. The word added above the second line shows where it has been corrected to the later standard Hebrew ribbono shel olam “master of the world.”

You’d be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap! Simon Schama and Dolly Parton

What do Simon Schama and Dolly Parton have in common?

For us, the greatest value of popular histories like Simon Schama’s Story of the Jews is the impossible positions they take. Responsible history can’t be light entertainment because the two have mutually exclusive requirements. Not only do they have contradictory technical needs (substantial footnotes vs. quick take-homes that really can be summarized in a soundbite or image) but they are mutually antagonistic genres. There is something in the very form of entertainment that must feel existentially insulting to responsible historians. Responsible history, then, takes as a requirement that it stay buried. Part of the game when you cross the two is to take heat and inspire reflection.

In this way Schama’s position reminds me of nothing so much as Dolly Parton playing Knoxville, TN. Her range includes raunchy, burlesque-like sex and glam numbers as well as heartfelt gospel and she has a huge gay following. She jokes about this apparent conflict between personae all the time–though not so much about the conflict between the audiences themselves. But last week, playing for family and friends as well as a more conservative hometown audience, she came down very firmly on one side. She damn well knew her audience and goals, and her self-presentation was dominated by churchy sincerity, with a few trashy, glammy winks and nods.

And so asking Schama to do a truly incisive and critical history show free of apologetic translation and positioning might be a tad like asking Dolly to play full-blast glam in Knoxville.

Sometimes, success at navigating truly conflicting audiences requires that the performer not acknowledge the very fact that they have them. Dolly Parton would probably not see the point in saying “I especially want to thank all my out of town queer fans who drove for miles into what might look like hostile territory.” And it is probably no accident that Schama minimizes how he’s hamming it up to “humanize” the Jews, and instead make it look like he’s “telling it like it is” as a scholar. In an uneasy time in the history of Jewish people in Europe, his strategy helps the ham (as it were) go down easier.

a possible beginning to a possible book

Why We Can’t Read the Torah: The Form of the Pentateuch and the History of Ancient Hebrew Literature

As a book, the Hebrew Bible makes offers and demands that seem to speak from nowhere, with no upper limit. It decrees laws which need no police, though some are punishable by death. Its prophets announce the overthrow of governments, as a voice speaking through the text anoints their new rulers. Its poetry places you in a dismembered and reanimated version of the present world. The last thing it seems to want you to do is appreciate it as literature, read it as art for art’s sake, musings for your spare time. The stakes are too high for that.

The Bible was allowed into the academy at the price of its disarmament. Critical scholarship drastically lowered its stakes, defusing the promises and threats with which it was armed. What is surprising is what was left.

For every hard look at the Law and Prophets revealed an incoherence at their heart: Genesis begins with the world created twice, in different ways: Isaiah disappears from the second half of his own book to be replaced by someone speaking from a new world some century and a half after his death. And for almost anything scholarship has claimed to prove about these texts, a scholar has argued the opposite: we can demonstrate that they are authentic traditions or false memories, lofty speculations or hard-nosed reforms. We can identify the pieces, but we can’t agree on where they come from or what they are for.

The Bible’s writing was not normal anywhere in the ancient world, and it did not inspire normal sorts of readership. Audiences have, since the beginning, seen the text as speaking directly to them. Since the beginning, something in the alchemy of the text’s own voice and what its audiences expect to hear has made people read it as permanently relevant…

Just uploaded: On Mesopotamian Contact with Judah, Aramaic Scribal Culture, and the Creativity of Second Temple Judaism

By popular demand, just uploaded this paper I gave at Yale last Friday. A version is in the works for the Journal of the American Oriental Society.

The poetics and politics of revolt in 2 Samuel 15-19

Just submitted an article building on the arguments of The Invention of Hebrew:

Since at least Caspari (1909), the literary quality and historical value of the Succession Narrative have been seen as existing in tension. This paper reconsiders the relationship between literariness and historicity by examining two kinds of evidence for the political audience of the story of Absalom’s revolt (2 Sam 15-19): West Semitic rhetoric and the distribution of the standardized Hebrew script. First, the narrative of Absalom’s stand employs a culturally distinctive type of political rhetoric. This vocabulary and set of tropes, specific to West Semitic literary cultures over at least a millennium, help explain the plausibility and appeal of the story’s events to an audience familiar with its ideals. Second, inscriptional evidence demonstrates that by the eighth century northern and southern Hebrew scribes shared the foundations of a common literary culture, being trained to write in precisely the same way. The data for this shared training are widely agreed on but still neglected in treatments of early Hebrew literature and historiography. Taken together, these factors suggest that the most plausible explanation of “northern” perspectives in this Judahite story is connected with the early role of Hebrew narrative prose: to circulate beyond any one narrow party to a public interested in imagining a shared, if fascinatingly disturbing past. This account also helps explain the story’s success as both literature and memory, how it found an audience beyond royal courts.

 

 

 

 

The Primeval History and Ancient Hebrew Philology in the Persian Period

It has long been noted that biblical authors did not typically sign their work. Most worked as participants in a stream of tradition that is to us frustratingly fluid, where contributors anonymously reshaped existing texts. While most major works of biblical literature are products of this anonymous, fluid “authorship,” from the narratives of Samuel to the prophecies of Isaiah, the Pentateuch is the most challenging because it also breaks with it. The Primeval History of Genesis 1-11 is a clear example of how the Pentateuch departs from this common biblical mode of transmission. Here one previously reshaped, complete and coherent strand has then been taken and interwoven with another, sharply different but coherent strand. While literarily obvious, this departure has never been satisfyingly theorized as philology: what new kind of textual transmission does it represent? What history of text-building and reading practices was it part of?

The goal of this panel is to find ways to answer Sheldon Pollock’s call: “If we are ever to make an argument for philology’s disciplinary identity, coherence, and necessity, it must be now.” This paper responds with evidence addressing a rather large gap in his paper: his histories of European, Indian and Chinese philology begin in the early modern period.  But what did philology look like in the ancient world? How did people make sense of texts in the Persian period, for example?

Interestingly, the earliest ancient Near Eastern evidence of a signature–a claim of individual participation and responsibility via the writing of one’s name–is Jewish, occurring in Persian-era legal documents. And it is connected with a strikingly new image of verbatim textual transmission, which can be tracked across different first-millennium Near Eastern scribal cultures. This paper will examine some contrasting attitudes toward textual transmission in biblical narrative with further external evidence from the Persian period to suggest a picture of the Primeval History, and perhaps the Pentateuch, as the product of a historically distinctive type of ancient Hebrew philology.

This November in the The History and Methods of Philology in Hebrew Bible Research session, which will respond to Sheldon Pollock’s 2009 “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World” (Critical Inquiry 2009, 931-63). 

The Republic of Letters in the Babylonian and Second Temple Periods

Decades ago, scholars like Michael Stone pointed out ways that the intellectual milieu of the Aramaic Enoch literature was Mesopotamian. The question, as scholars like Mladen Popovic emphasize, has always been exactly who shared what with whom, how.

In recent years scholars have been getting more specific about who was writing what, when in the Babylonian and Second Temple periods.

Among the useful new resources and works are this database of

Cuneiform texts mentioning Israelites and Judeans

and Paul-Alain Beaulieu’s masterful treatment of the interface between cuneiform and Aramaic, and how it shifted with the drastic political changes over the first millennium, available for download here as part of the Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures conference volume.

Jonathan Ben-Dov produced a groundbreaking study of the nature and dating of the Babylonian astronomy in the Enoch and Qumran literature, and with Ben-Dov I assembled a study of one aspect of this problem, the emergence of science–often Babylonian-based–in early Judaism, in our Ancient Jewish Sciences conference and volume, online here.

The rich archives are still being studied and scholars like Michael Jursa have revealed remarkable things about everything from Aramaic and Babylonian writing to the prosopography of scroll-writing scribes. New work is underway from the Leiden “Rivers of Babylon” Project and young scholars like T. E. Alstola.

My forthcoming book on Textual Production and Religious Experience: The Transformation of Scribal Cultures in Judea and Babylonia brings some of these lines of research together.

 

 

 

Beyond Borrowing: Aramaic Scribal Culture and the Creativity of Second Temple Judaism, at Yale

This Friday at the Yale University Ancient Societies Workshop:

What would it mean for a Jewish writer to “borrow” from Mesopotamian culture? Scholars have often pointed to Babylonian influence to help explain what is new about Second Temple literature. A flowering of new genres, connected with new forms of thought, appear: apocalypses, scriptural commentaries, even astronomy and perhaps science. And after all, by the Hellenistic period Judah had been a vassal or colony of no less than three different Babylonian-writing empires for almost 400 years. But precisely how would these ideas get there? in contrast to the many studies comparing the literary patterns of Mesopotamian and Jewish writings, little has been done on the historical relationship between actual Babylonian and Judean writers, and the connections have seemed difficult to trace. We tend to talk about contact between literatures rather than people, as if tablets and scrolls could speak to each other.
Methodologically, this problem is tied up with the concept of influence, a powerful but problematic concept in the study of the ancient world. It implies a zero-sum economic model of culture: When one culture begins to resemble a nearby one with respect to a certain feature, we say one has “borrowed” from or “exchanged” with the other. This dead metaphor reveals a common lack of precision in our explanations of cultural change. In fact, our use of “borrowing” and “exchange” hides a different model–one of broader membership and productivity.
This concept will be explored through the Hebrew, Aramaic and Babylonian evidence for Judean-Mesopotamian contact during the Persian and Hellenistic periods. This contact has been assumed to be almost a black box, but there is in fact siginficantly more useful data than has been applied. I will survey some of it and suggest conclusions about the nature of cultural exchange between Babylonia and Judea and its impact on Second Temple Judaism. I will argue that Jewish and Mesopotamian scholars often did not need to “exchange” or “borrow” because in certain concrete ways they were part of the same culture, one in which Aramaic had moved from being an imperial cosmopolitan language to a shared cosmic one. Second Temple Judaism came to share a widespread type of ancient knowledge, but one with a distinctive concern to correlate human practice with the revealed nature of the cosmos.