JSP 23.pdf

Volume 23 number 1

September 2013 CONTENTS

ATAR LIVNEH Not at First Sight: Gender Love in Jubilees

3-20

DAVID A. DESILVA The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs as Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism: A Re-Assessment

21-68

FRANCIS M. MACATANGAY Acts of Charity as Acts of Remembrance in the Book of Tobit

69-84

Visit http://JSP.sagepub.com Free acccess to table of contents and abstracts. Site-wide access to full texts for members of subscribing institutions.

Volume 23 number 3

March 2014 CONTENTS

RALPH LEE The Ethiopic ‘AndΩmta’ Commentary on Ethiopic Enoch 2 (1 Enoch 6–9) 179-200 ARIEL FELDMAN Moses’ Farewell Address according to 1QWords of Moses (1Q22)

201-214

ARYE EDREI AND DORON MENDELS Preliminary Thoughts on Structures of ‘Sovereignty’ and the Deepening Gap between Judaism and Christianity in the First Centuries CE

215-238

SHIFRA SZNOL Traces of the Targum Sources in Greek Bible Translations in the Hebrew Alphabet

239-256

Visit http://JSP.sagepub.com Free acccess to table of contents and abstracts. Site-wide access to full texts for members of subscribing institutions.

Volume 23 number 4

June 2014 CONTENTS

ILARIA L.E. RAMELLI A Pseudepigraphon Inside a Pseudepigraphon? The Seneca–Paul Correspondence and the Letters Added Afterwards

259-289

CHRISTFRIED BÖTTRICH Apocalyptic Tradition and Mystical Prayer in the Ladder of Jacob

290-306

CHRIS H. KNIGHTS The Rechabites Revisited: The History of the Rechabites Twenty-Five Years On

307-320

Visit http://JSP.sagepub.com Free acccess to table of contents and abstracts. Site-wide access to full texts for members of subscribing institutions.

Journal for the study of the Pseudepigrapha Vol 23.1 (2013): 3-20 © The Author(s), 2013. Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/JournalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0951820713502410 http://JSP.sagepub.com

Not at First Sight: Gender Love in Jubilees ATAR LIVNEH Department of Bible, Archeology, and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O. Box 653, Beer-Sheva, 8410501, Israel

Abstract This article examines the theme of love in Jubilees, suggesting that the author distinguishes between two types of love: ‘eye-appeal’ and ‘moral-appeal’—that is, that based on a person’s attributes as expressed through ethical conduct. The ¿rst consists of a three-stage cause and effect process in which a person’s outward appearance elicits erotic feelings that frequently lead to transgression of the law. In systematically depicting this sin as a violation of a recorded authoritative instruction Jubilees highlights the gravity of love/desire kindled by eyesight, which threatens the social order. In contrast, love based on moral-appeal is depicted as Àourishing within the marriage bond and grounding familial harmony. The scheme is exempli¿ed in the Jubilean reworking of the Jacob–Rachel–Leah triad and Reuben’s relation with Bilhah, together with other references to love introduced by the Jubilean author. Keywords: Jubilees, love, eye-appeal, virtuous wife, family relations, gender.

1. Introduction The study of the ‘rewritten Bible’ texts discovered at Qumran has become a burgeoning ¿eld within academia over the last twenty years (cf. Falk 2007; White Crawford 2008; Zahn 2011). Among the texts

4

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

falling in this category, Jubilees—represented by 14 Hebrew manuscripts found at Qumran as well as a complete version in Ge!ez—has drawn a signi¿cant measure of scholarly attention.1 Despite the fact that the theme of ‘brotherly love’ has been investigated in depth (cf. Albeck 1930: 45-46; Doran 1989: 5-11; Lambert 2004: 88-91, 99-101; Livneh 2011; van Ruiten 2012: 263-69), other aspects of ‘love’ (fqr) have remained largely unexamined.2 The following comments regarding the love between men and women in Jubilees are presented as a modest contribution to the discussion of the meaning(s) attributed to the phenomenon by the author and the ideology they reÀect.3 Before turning to a detailed analysis of the relevant passages, a few general remarks are in order. Firstly, while Jubilees—like its primary biblical source—only makes occasional reference to love between men and women, its ‘love stories’ frequently differ quite substantially from the Pentateuchal narratives. Thus, for example, Jubilees passes over Isaac’s love for Rebecca in silence, likewise omitting any mention of Shechem’s love for Dinah. Conversely, it states that Reuben ‘loved’ Bilhah (Jub. 33.2) and that Potiphar’s wife ‘loved’ Joseph (Jub. 39.5). Likewise, while the pseudepigraphic author follows Genesis in depicting Jacob’s love for Rachel, he also portrays Jacob as ‘loving’ Leah (Jub. 28.1–32.24; 36.21-24).

1. In addition to the Ge!ez, a Latin translation of a substantial number of verses from Jubilees has also survived, together with citations—or close parallels—from Jubilees embedded in the Greek and Syriac editions. For a detailed discussion of the various versions of Jubilees, together with an English translation, see VanderKam 1989. For its date and provenance, see VanderKam 1997: 3-24. Cf. also the recent bibliographies to Jubilees in Oliver and Bachman 2009: 123-64 and Bachman and Oliver 2009: 441-68. 2. While 3"9 occurs 16 times in Genesis–Exodus, fqr (‘to love’) is employed 57 times in Jubilees. (No concordance for Jubilees exists for Ge!ez, the statistical data are derived from a manual count of the occurrences of fqr in VanderKam’s critical edition [1989, I].) The equivalence between fqr and 3"9 is apparent from 4Q223– 224 2 ii 5, 18, 22 (= Jub. 35.13, 20, 22 respectively)—fqr also regularly rendering 3"9 in the Ge!ez translation of Genesis. As VanderKam notes (1977: 91-95), the Ge!ez translation of Jubilees closely reflects the Hebrew original. Although Grossman (2009) notes the centrality of ‘love’ in Jubilees, she does not examine all the occurrences of the term and/or determine its meaning(s). 3. While Halpern-Amaru (1999) does not discuss gender love directly, she provides important insights into the Jubilean ‘love stories’.

LIVNEH Not at First Sight

5

The Jubilean narratives imply that love derives either from the visual appearance of the ‘beloved’—thus bearing a sexual signi¿cation—or is a result of his/her moral conduct.4 The three ‘love stories’ which fall into the ¿rst category involve a man and a woman with whom—according to Jubilees—the former is legally prohibited from having relations. The ‘eyeing’ of a wo/man and the ‘love’ this act elicits thus lead to transgression against the cardinal laws regulating illicit marriage/sexual relations. In contrast, Jacob’s love for Leah— which develops after their marriage and is due to her ‘perfect ways’— is intimately linked to Leah’s and Jacob’s performance of familial duties and maintenance of familial harmony. Thus, while ‘eye-appeal’ love based on outward appearance threatens the socio-legal order, ‘moral-appeal’ love deriving from a wife’s righteous behavior fosters a well-ordered society.5 Let me begin by examining those Jubilean texts which exemplify ‘eye-appeal’ love, after which I shall discuss Jubilee’s depiction of Jacob’s love for Leah. 2. Love Based on Outward Appearance This group of texts contains three instances of love: Jacob’s love for Rachel, Reuben’s love for Bilhah, and Potiphar’s wife’s love for Joseph (Loader 2007: 201).6 2.1. Jacob’s Love for Rachel (Jubilees 28.1–32.34) The Jubilean account of Jacob, Rachel, and Leah begins long before Jacob encounters the two sisters.7 While Rebecca and Isaac perceive 4. As in the Hebrew Bible, ‘love’ thus carries a wide range of meanings in Jubilees. For a discussion of 3"9 and related roots expressing love/sexual desire between a man and a woman in the Hebrew Bible, see TDOT, I: 99-118 and Brenner 1997: 8-30. 5. ‘The physicality and emotional intensity of the love in Jubilees has a destabilizing potential’ (Grossman 2009: 94-95). For the way in which the social context determines whether love bears a positive or negative valence in the Hebrew Bible, see Blyth 2008: 8-10. 6. Both Loader (2007: 201) and Halpern-Amaru (1999: 110-11) also note that the Jubilean author adduces the element of ‘love’ in his reworking of the stories of Reuben and Joseph precisely before sexual relations are about to take place. 7. For detailed studies of this narrative, see Endres 1987: 73-77, 100-11; HalpernAmaru 1999: 42-46, 64-73, 90-102; and Loader 2007: 262-73.

6

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

Jacob’s journey to Haran as an appropriate solution to Jacob’s bachelorhood (Jub. 25.3; 27.8-11; cf. Gen. 27.46–28.9)—in line with the Genesis narrative—the Jubilean author presents it as a plan conceived by Jacob ¿ve years prior to his stealing of the birthright: Mother, I am now nine weeks of years [= 63 years] and have known no woman. I have neither touched (one) nor have I even considered marrying any women [sic] of all the descendants of Canaan’s daughters. For I recall, mother, what our father Abraham ordered me—that I should not marry anyone from all the descendants of Canaan’s house. For I will marry (someone) from the descendants of my father’s house and from my family. Earlier I heard, mother, that daughters had been born to your brother Laban. I have set my mind on them for the purpose of marrying one of them. (Jub. 25.4-6)8

This extra-biblical passage, which introduces the theme of Jacob’s marriage to Laban’s daughters, emphasizes the importance of endogamy—an idea that informs the Jacob–Leah–Rachel narrative.9 The latter text states that Jacob ‘set out on foot and came to the eastern land, to Laban, Rebecca’s brother. He remained with him and served him in exchange for his daughter Rachel for one week’ (Jub. 28.1; cf. Gen. 29.1-20). Jubilees omits the scene by the well when Jacob lays his eyes on—and opens his mouth to—an unfamiliar lass. 10 At this juncture of the Jubilean story, Jacob thus appears to be guided by legal considerations rather than love/desire (Halpern-Amaru 1999: 42), going directly to Laban’s house and arranging a marriage contract— seven years of service in exchange for Rachel. Without explaining why Jacob—who undertakes the long journey in order to marry one of Laban’s daughters—chooses Rachel, the Jubilean story then proceeds to the consummation of the marriage at the end of the seven years. 8. Unless otherwise is noted, English citations from Jubilees follow VanderKam (1989). Scriptural quotations are taken from the NJPS. 9. This accentuates a notion highlighted in Gen. 29 itself, of course. For the central place of endogamy in Jubilees, see Jub. 20.4; 22.16-20, 30; 34.20-21 (Werman 1997; Hayes 2002: 68-91). 10. This elision corresponds to the earlier Jubilean portrait of Jacob as refraining from touching any woman possibly legally prohibited to him. Jacob’s avoidance of illicit sexual relations in order to obey the law echoes Joseph’s conduct (Jub. 39.1-11; cf. Gen. 39.9-19): see Section 2.3 below. Endres (1987: 100) notes that Jubilees also omits other betrothal scenes by the well (see Gen. 24; Exod. 2.15-22) that suggest that Isaac’s and Moses’ marriages (in Moses’ case to a Midianite, no less) are the result of ‘eyeing’ women, thereby adducing legal considerations—and endogamy in particular—as the primary criteria for wedlock; see also below.

LIVNEH Not at First Sight

7

Ignoring the notation that the seven years seemed to Jacob ‘but a few days because of his love’ (cf. Gen. 29.20), it proceeds to describe Jacob’s asking for the wife for whom he has served—subsequently noting that Laban took ‘his older daughter Leah’ and gave her ‘to Jacob as a wife’ (Jub. 28.3).11 As in Genesis, after ‘coming in’ to his bride, Jacob discovers her identity and objects to the subterfuge (Jub. 28.4; cf. Gen. 29.25). Only at this juncture does the narrator ¿nally reveal why Jacob had speci¿cally requested Rachel: ‘For Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah because Leah’s eyes were weak, though her ¿gure was very lovely; but Rachel’s eyes were beautiful, her ¿gure was lovely, and she was very pretty’ (Jub. 28.5).12 This passage conjoins Gen. 29.1718a—‘Leah had weak eyes; Rachel was shapely and beautiful. Jacob loved Rachel’—with Gen. 29.30: ‘He loved Rachel more than Leah’—albeit altering some of the details.13 The Jubilean expansion explains that the sisters’ beauty is a matter not of contrast but of degree: both Leah and Rachel possess lovely ¿gures—but Rachel is more beautiful. 14 The Jubilean author also explicitly correlates the degree of the sisters’ ‘good looks’ with the measure of Jacob’s love: ‘For Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah because Leah’s eyes were weak…’ (my italics). Hereby, he reinforces the idea of ‘eye appeal’ as arousing the love/desire implied in the biblical story (Gen. 29.17-18).15 The link between eyesight and love is further stressed by the expansion of the motif of Leah’s ‘weak eyes’ 11. Gregory’s (2008: 104) statement that ‘… the author of Jubilees never seems to undermine the biblical motif of Jacob’s intense love for Rachel’ is therefore inaccurate. The second section of Jacob’s demand—‘…that I may cohabit with her’ (Gen. 29.21)—is omitted in the Jubilean retelling, in accord with the earlier portrayal of Jacob as modest (cf. Gen. R. 70.18) (Rothstein 2007: 100). 12. ‘Weak eyes’ renders the Hebrew phrase EHJ]>+E (VanderKam and Milik 1994: 95-140). Cf. the portrayal ‘perfect and right in all her ways’ with (JE (Ezek. 28.15) and (C5 )J>E (e.g. Ps. 119.1; Prov. 11.20; this phrase is also common in the sectarian

14

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013) she lived with him he did not hear a harsh word from her mouth because she was gentle and possessed (the virtues of) peace, righteousness,34 and honor. As he recalled all the things that she had done in her lifetime, he greatly lamented her because he loved her with all his heart and with all his person. (Jub. 36.22-24)35

This account is striking ¿rst of all in its deviation from the biblical characterization of Leah. Rather than portraying her as a quiet, respectful wife, she willfully commands Jacob: ‘You are to sleep with me, for I have hired you with my son’s mandrakes’ (Gen. 30.16). Genesis likewise never explicitly states that Leah was loved by her husband, nor does it mention any mourning for Jacob’s wives (cf. Gen. 35.1920; 48.7; 49.31)—and certainly none of a familial lamenting by Jacob and all his sons. Jubilees’ insertion of these themes into his account— and their intertwining—is unique to this reworking. The theme of Jacob’s mourning of Leah because of his great love for her is stressed by its repetition in the opening and conclusion of the report. In between these two verses, the reasons why Jacob loved Leah so deeply are adduced. Unlike his love for Rachel, Jacob’s love for Leah is due not to her ‘eye appeal’ but to her conduct—in particular, her exemplary comportment within the family. Two chains of adjectives/nouns describe her deportment, both sealed with the theme of ‘honour’: ‘she was perfect, and right…and honored Jacob’ and ‘she was gentle and possessed (the virtues of) peacefulness, righteousness, and honor’. Sandwiched between these encomia is the declaration: ‘He [Jacob] did not hear a harsh word from her mouth’, which elucidates the two general statements. This portrayal echoes wisdom sayings regarding the good/bad wife—‘It is better to live in the desert than with a contentious, vexatious wife’ (Prov. 21.19; cf. 25.24) or ‘The woman who respects her

writings from Qumran: e.g. 1QS 8.10, 9.2; 1QSa 1.28; 1QM 14.7). Leah’s depiction parallels the Jubilean portrayal of Jacob: ‘…he is righteous in his way. He is perfect; he is a true man’ (Jub. 27.17; cf. 19.13) (Berger 1981: 504). 34. VanderKam: ‘truthfulness’. 35. Cf. the encomium of Sarah at her burial in Philo (Abr. 245–54). Unlike Leah’s depiction in Jub. 36.21-24, however, Philo portrays Sarah as ‘loving’ her husband—a virtue exhibited by the good wife, as attested in Greco-Roman literature and epitaphs: cf. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. rom. IV 82.1; Pliny the Younger, Letters 4.19; CIL 12.1211; CIL 12.1221.

LIVNEH Not at First Sight

15

husband will be seen by everyone as wise… But a loud-mouthed, scolding wife can be recognized as a battle trumpet signaling attack’ (Sir. 26.26-27) (Skehan and Di Lella 1987: 345). In the context of the Jubilean literary setting, this observation implicitly contrasts Leah’s behaviour with Rachel’s. While Jubilees represents the barren Leah as being jealous of her sister (Jub. 28.20)—in parallel to Rachel’s jealousy of Leah (Jub. 28.16; cf. Gen. 30.1)—it highlights the divergent consequences. Her jealousy leading Rachel to quarrel with Jacob—‘Give me children’ (Jub. 28.16; cf. Gen. 30.1)—only at this point does she present him with her maid.36 Leah, on the other hand, gives ‘her maid Zilpah to Jacob as a wife’ without any word of complaint (Jub. 28.20). Jubilees likewise omits the mandrake story— including Leah’s harsh words therein. 37 Thus, according to the Jubilean Jacob–Rachel–Leah narrative, Rachel in no sense rivalled Leah’s achievements in maintaining the cardinal Jubilean virtue of familial harmony.38 Signi¿cantly, the Jubilean text posits an implicit correlation between the two sisters’ respective conduct and the depth of Jacob’s love towards each of them. While both Leah and Rachel are said to be ‘loved’—in different stages of Jacob’s life—Jacob loves Leah ‘very much’ and ‘with all his heart and with all his person’ (Jub. 36.22, 24), in contrast to merely ‘loving’ Rachel (Jub. 28.5, 12).39 The lack of any indication in Jubilees of Jacob’s lamenting Rachel when she dies (cf. Jub. 32.34) also contrasts with the two references to Jacob’s mourning

36. The Jubilean reworking of Rachel’s complaint omitting the words ‘or I shall die’ (Gen. 30.1), her objection is thereby softened in line with the author’s tendency to depict the patriarchs/matriarchs in a positive light and their familial relations as harmonious (cf. Halpern-Amaru 1999: 64-65). While the author thus implicitly hints that Rachel is worse than Leah in some aspects, he does not seek to portray her as a bad wife—as is also evident from his treatment of the story of the theft of the teraphim (Jub. 29.1; 31.2); see Endres 1987: 110. 37. Following Endres (1987: 106), Halpern-Amaru (1999: 67 and n. 52) notes that the Jubilean author regards the mandrake scene as offensive. 38. Cf. Loader’s suggestion (2007: 269) that the effect of Rachel’s complaint in Jubilees ‘is to bring Rachel down from having a favoured status in Jacob’s eyes’. 39. Gregory (2008: 108) notes the Jubilean utilization of the Deuteronomistic formula ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul’ (Deut. 6.5) in the context of Jacob–Leah’s relations. For a similar reworking of this formula in the context of maternal love, see Jub. 19.31.

16

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

Leah because of his love for her (Jub. 36.22, 24).40 The respect Leah demonstrates towards Jacob is thus rewarded by her husband’s love.41 This reworking of the biblical text clearly reÀects the Jubilean author’s preference of ‘moral appeal’ over ‘eye appeal’, outward appearance representing an illegitimate criterion for choosing a bride—who might transpire to be a disrespectful wife (cf. Prov. 11.22). In line with the portrayal of the ‘virtuous wife’ of Proverbs, the author of Jubilees implies that countenance is deceptive and beauty illusory: a woman is truly to be praised and valued for her righteousness (cf. Prov. 31.30). 4. Conclusion This analysis of examples of the theme of ‘love’ in Jubilees demonstrates that the author makes an initial distinction between love deriving from ‘eye appeal’ on the one hand and ‘moral appeal’ on the other—subsequently differentiating between the love between an unmarried couple and that between man and wife. These two determinations are interrelated, ‘eye-appeal’ love only occurring between men and women not married to one other and ‘moral-appeal’ love Àourishing exclusively within the marriage bond. A third—related—disparity relates to the gender of the love-subject: while both men and women may love on the basis of beauty, ‘moral-appeal’ love belongs predominantly to the male realm, wives customarily being expected to ‘honor their husbands’ without necessarily loving them. ‘Eye-appeal’ love—that is, desire—is consistently related to grave transgression of the law; it bears a characteristically negative valence. While this is unsurprising in the context of Reuben’s lying with his

40. According to the Jubilean chronology, Jacob loved Leah for 24 years and Rachel only 21; see Jub. 28.2, 10; 32.33; 36.21 (Halpern-Amaru 1999: 71-72; Gregory 2008: 109-10). 41. Women in the Hebrew Bible are customarily not portrayed as loving their husbands, this phenomenon being far more common among the male ¿gures (Brenner 1997). While Jubilees follows this tendency, it also imputes ‘honour’ to the women. The relationship between a wife and her husband therefore parallels that between children and parents: parents are expected to love their children, children to honour and respect their parents. Cf. the interpretation of Exod. 20.12 in m. Ker. 6.9: ‘But: Sages have stated: The father comes before the mother under all circumstances, because both he and his mother are liable to pay honor to his father’ (Neusner 1988: 581).

LIVNEH Not at First Sight

17

father’s concubine or Potiphar’s wife’s attempt to seduce Joseph— incidents which are subject to criticism already in the Hebrew Bible— the sympathetic biblical portrayal of Jacob’s love for Rachel is upended in Jubilees. Although not ignoring Jacob’s love for Rachel, the Jubilean author omits the story of their encounter by the well, reduces the number of occurrences in which Jacob expresses his love for Rachel, and postpones the ¿rst allusion to ‘love’ between them until Jacob has already married an appropriate bride from his family line. Hereby, he indicates that legal considerations—especially endogamy—rather than spontaneous love elicited by ‘eye appeal’ constitute the only proper grounds for marriage. The implicit analogy between Leah and Rachel further points to ‘eye-appeal’ love as an illegitimate criterion for wedlock, the beautiful Rachel transpiring to be a somewhat disrespectful wife. Finally, according to Jubilees, Jacob’s love for Rachel almost leads him to violate a divine law by entering into an illicit marriage with a younger sister. The implications of Jacob’s love for Rachel thus parallel those of Reuben and Potiphar’s wife, all three stories exhibiting the same three-fold cause-and-effect scheme of ‘eyeing’ a wo/man, ‘loving’ him/her, and (almost) violating a written statute. While the three-stage pattern is based on various biblical texts that link appearance with love and/or depict ‘looking’ as leading to sin, Jubilees is unique in its systematic de¿nition of transgression as violation of a recorded authoritative instruction. The gravity of love/desire kindled by eyesight is thereby accentuated by the fact that it is condemned by the ‘heavenly law’. As these examples illustrate, Jubilees embodies the view that the socio-legal order is threatened when the eyes form the principal instruments of love. This conclusion—which emerges from the narratives of ‘eye-appeal’ love—is further stressed by their contrast with the passage depicting Jacob’s love for Leah as deriving from her ‘perfect ways’. This type of spousal love is deep and, drawing in its wake the analogous observance of the familial duty of mourning, consolidates the existing social order. Jacob’s lamenting over Leah’s death and his memories of ‘all the things that she had done in her lifetime’ thus jointly demonstrate the ideal relationship between man and wife. A wife is to honour her husband and maintain domestic peace by refraining from contention. When she acts thus, she ensures that her husband will love her ‘with all his heart and with all his person’.

18

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

References Albeck, H. 1930

Das Buch der Jubiläen und die Halacha (Berlin: Druck von Siegfried Scholem). Bachman, V., and I.W. Oliver 2009 ‘The Book of Jubilees: A Bibliography, 1850–Present’, in G. Boccaccini and G. Ibba (eds.), Enoch and the Mosaic Torah: The Evidence of Jubilees (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans): 441-68. Berger, K. 1981 Das Buch der Jubiläen (JSHRZ, 2/3; Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn). Blyth, C. 2008 ‘Redeemed by his Love? The Characterization of Shechem in Genesis 34’, JSOT 33: 3-18. Brenner, A. 1997 The Intercourse of Knowledge: On Gendering Desire and ‘Sexuality’ in the Hebrew Bible (Biblical Interpretation Series, 26; Leiden: Brill). Doran, R. 1989 ‘The Non-Dating of Jubilees: Jub 34–38; 23:14-32 in Narrative Context’, JSJ 20: 1-11. Endres, J.C. 1987 Biblical Interpretation in the Book of Jubilees (CBQMS, 18; Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association). Falk, D. 2007 The Parabiblical Texts: Strategies for Extending the Scriptures among the Dead Sea Scrolls (Companion to the Qumran Scrolls, 8; Library of Second Temple Studies, 63; New York: T&T Clark International). Feldman, L.H. 2000 Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary. III. Judean Antiquities 1–4: Translation and Commentary (ed. S. Mason; Leiden: Brill). García Martínez, F. 1997 ‘The Heavenly Tablets in the Book of Jubilees’, in M. Albani, J. Frey and A. Lange (eds.), Studies in the Book of Jubilees (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck): 243-60. Goldmann, M. 1956 ‘The Book of Jubilees’, in A. Kahana (ed.), The Apocryphal Books (Tel Aviv: Masada): II, 216-313 (Hebrew). Gregory, B.C. 2008 ‘The Death and Legacy of Leah in Jubilees’, JSP 17: 99-120. Grossman, M. 2009 ‘Affective Masculinity: The Gender of the Patriarchs in Jubilees’, Henoch 31: 91-97. Halpern-Amaru, B. 1999 The Empowerment of Women in the Book of Jubilees (JSJSup, 60; Leiden: Brill). Hayes, C. 2002 Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Heinemann, I. 1954 Darkhei ha-aggadah (Jerusalem: Magnes [Hebrew]).

LIVNEH Not at First Sight Kister, M. 1999

Kugel, J.L. 1990 1995

1998 2012 Lachs, S.T. 1987 Lambert, D. 2004 Livneh, A. 2011 Loader, W. 2007

2010 Najman, H. 1998 Neusner, J. 1988 Niehoff, M. 1992

19

‘Some Notes on Biblical Expressions and Allusions and the Lexicography of Ben Sira’, in T. Muraoka and J.F. Elwolde (eds.), Sirach, Scrolls, and Sages: Proceedings of a Second International Symposium on the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Ben Sira and Mishnah, held at Leiden University, 15–17 December 1997 (STDJ, 33; Leiden: Brill): 160-87. In Potiphar’s House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts (New York: HarperCollins). ‘Reuben’s Sin with Bilhah in the Testament of Reuben’, in D.P. Wright et al. (eds.), Pomegranates and Golden Bells: Studies in Biblical, Jewish and Near Eastern Ritual, Law and Literature in Honor of Jacob Milgrom (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns): 525-54. Traditions of the Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). A Walk through Jubilees: Studies in the Book of Jubilees and the World of its Creation (JSJSup, 156; Leiden: Brill). Rabbinic Commentary on the New Testament: The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke (New York: Ktav). ‘Last Testaments in the Book of Jubilees’, DSD 11: 82-107. ‘Love Your Fellow as Yourself: The Interpretation of Leviticus 19:17-18 in the Book of Jubilees’, DSD 18: 173-99. Enoch, Levi, and Jubilees on Sexuality: Attitudes towards Sexuality in the Early Enoch Literature, the Aramaic Levi Document, and the Book of Jubilees (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). Sexuality in the New Testament: Understanding the Key Texts (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press). ‘Interpretation as Primordial Writing: Jubilees and its Authority Conferring Strategies’, JSJ 29: 379-410. The Mishnah: A New Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press).

The Figure of Joseph in Post-Biblical Jewish Literature (AGJU, 16; Leiden: Brill). Oliver, I.W., and V. Bachman 2009 ‘The Book of Jubilees: An Annotated Bibliography from the First German Translation of 1850 to the Enoch Seminar of 2007’, Henoch 31: 123-64. Rosen-Zvi, Y. 2006 ‘Bilhah the Temptress: The Testament of Reuben and “The Birth of Sexuality” ’, JQR 96: 65-94. Rothstein, D. 2004 ‘Sexual Union and Sexual Offences in Jubilees’, JSJ 35: 363-84. 2007 ‘ “And Jacob Came (in)to [ʠʥʡ+ʬʠ]…”: Spousal Relationship and the Use of a Recurring Syntagm in Genesis and Jubilees’, Henoch 29: 91-103.

20

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

Ruiten, J.T.A.G.M. van 2012 Abraham in the Book of Jubilees: The Rewriting of Genesis 11:26–25:10 in the Book of Jubilees 11:14–23:8 (JSJSup, 161; Leiden: Brill). Segal, M. 2007 The Book of Jubilees: Rewritten Bible, Redaction, Ideology and Theology (JSJSup, 117; Leiden: Brill). Shinan, A., and Y. Zakovitch 1983 The Story of Reuben and Bilhah (Jerusalem: Magnes [Hebrew]). Skehan, P.W., and A. Di Lella 1987 The Wisdom of Ben Sira (AB, 39; New York: Doubleday). VanderKam, J.C. 1977 Textual and Historical Studies in the Book of Jubilees (Missoula: Scholars Press). 1989 The Book of Jubilees (CSCO, 510–11; Scriptores Aethiopici, 87–88; Leuven: Peeters). 1997 ‘The Origins and Purposes of the Book of Jubilees’, in M. Albani, J. Frey and A. Lange (eds.), Studies in the Book of Jubilees (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck): 3-24. VanderKam, J.C., and J.T. Milik 1994 ‘223–224. 4QpapJubileesh’, in H. Attridge et al. (eds.), Qumran Cave 4 VIII: Parabiblical Texts, Part 1 (DJD, 13; Oxford: Clarendon Press): 95140. Werman, C. 1997 ‘Jubilees 30: Building a Paradigm for the Ban on Intermarriage’, HTR 90: 1-22. White Crawford, S. 2008 Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). Wintermute, O.S. 1985 ‘Jubilees: A New Translation and Introduction’, in OTP II, 35-142. Zahn, M. 2011 Rethinking Rewritten Scripture: Composition and Exegesis in the 4QReworked Pentateuch Manuscripts (STDJ, 95; Leiden: Brill).

Journal for the study of the Pseudepigrapha Vol 22.4 (2013): 21-68 © The Author(s), 2013. Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/JournalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0951820713502411 http://JSP.sagepub.com

The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs as Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism: A Re-Assessment* DAVID A. DESILVA Ashland Theological Seminary, 910 Center Street, Ashland, OH 44805, USA

Abstract In regard to the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the pendulum of scholarship has been swinging in the direction of treating these texts as Christian compositions that, therefore, cannot be used to illumine pre-Christian Judaism. This article reassesses this movement in light, ¿rst, of recent methodological propositions regarding determining the faith community in which a text had its origin and, second, of traditional methodological approaches to the question of the Christian material found in extant manuscripts of the Testaments. It also challenges the hyper-Christianization of the Testaments in modern scholarship, arguing that, in many cases, material is being designated as distinctively Christian simply because interpreters are not suf¿ciently aware of how their own lenses are coloring their readings. The Testaments remain an important witness to Hasmonean Jewish readings of Genesis, developments in ethical thought, and re-articulations of Israel’s hope. Keywords: Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Second Temple Judaism, Messianism, textual criticism, literary criticism, tradition criticism.

* An earlier version of this material was published in The Jewish Teachers of Jesus, James, and Jude: What Earliest Christianity Learned from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

22

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

1. Introduction Our understanding of early Judaism is dependent almost entirely on our reading of those texts deemed to represent a voice of early Judaism. There is no doubt that Ben Sira, Tobit, and 1 Enoch represent such voices (rather than Christian voices) since manuscript discoveries place these writings in Judea centuries before Jesus. Locating the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, however, is far more problematic, since all extant manuscripts come from well into the Common Era, produced by Christian scribes. The problem is compounded insofar as there is clearly Christian material in the Testaments as preserved in these manuscripts. Are the Testaments a Jewish composition that has been edited by Christian copyists over the centuries? Or do they represent a Christian composition that makes extensive use of Jewish traditions and even Jewish sources?1 This study engages recent proposals by Robert Kraft and James Davila for introducing greater methodological rigor into the determination of whether a particular pseudepigraphon preserved primarily through Christian scribal activity should be treated as a Jewish or Christian document, arguing that Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs stands up admirably against their criteria. It also engages the debates concerning the origin of the Testaments from both text-critical and literary-critical grounds, also introducing a number of tradition-critical considerations into the discussion. While the ipsissima verba of a Jewish original may continue to elude us, particularly in a few eschatological passages, there remain solid grounds for reading the Testaments 1. Scholars arguing in favor of a Jewish original include Charles, Conybeare, Dupont-Sommer, Becker, Hultgård, Ulrichsen, Kee, and Jervell. Before the eighteenth century, the Testaments were generally viewed as Christian pseudepigrapha, a view that has been forcefully defended by Marinus de Jonge, Harm Hollander, and Robert Kugler. André Dupont-Sommer had linked the Testaments with the Qumran community and its history too con¿dently (see, e.g., his essay on ‘The Testament of Levi and the Teacher of Righteousness’, in The Jewish Sect of Qumran and the Essenes [London: Vallentine, Mitchell & Co., 1954]), a view that Jürgen Becker (Untersuchungen zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Testamente der Zwölf Patriarchen [AGAJU, 8; Leiden: Brill, 1970], pp. 149-51) effectively debunked. Nevertheless, Dupont-Sommer helpfully demonstrated that much more of the messianism of the Testaments could be at home in pre-Christian Judaism than some scholars tend to allow with their own overly con¿dent claims about what must refer to Jesus and therefore could not derive from the pre-Christian era.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

23

as a witness to the ethical, traditional, and even eschatological developments in Second Temple Judaism, and therefore also as a legitimate background to the emergence of early Christianity and its writings. 2. Recent Methodological Challenges Scholars have typically moved from observing that a text lacks distinctively Christian content, or has a few lines of Christian content that can be easily excised, to concluding that the work is therefore of Jewish origin (lightly edited by Christians, in the latter case).2 Robert Kraft and James Davila have objected to this line of reasoning on numerous grounds, suggesting that it has led to the skewing of our understanding of early Judaism by allowing non-Jewish (i.e. later Christian) writings to slip into the corpus of witnesses to early Judaism through a lack of methodological rigor. Robert Kraft has argued that when a text survives only in manuscripts transmitted by Christian scribes, dating from centuries into the Common Era, in languages used by the Christian churches (e.g. Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, etc., as opposed to Hebrew and Aramaic), the ¿rst task is to understand the texts as they functioned within Christian circles at the time of those manuscripts, and to work backwards from there only as the evidence of the text necessitates.3 This burden of proof falls upon those who would argue for a Jewish origin, especially an origin in the pre-Christian era; the assumption of a Jewish origin unless the work is proven to have been composed by a Christian would no longer be allowed. In the case of the Testaments, our earliest manuscript evidence comes from the tenth century CE, a Greek manuscript written by Christian scribes. However, another kind of external evidence—quotation or reference by other known authors 4 —pushes this date back to the third century CE, as 2. James Davila, The Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha: Jewish, Christian, or Other? (JSJSup, 105; Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 3-4. 3. Robert A. Kraft, ‘The Pseudepigrapha in Christianity’, in John C. Reeves (ed.), Tracing the Threads: Studies in the Vitality of Jewish Pseudepigrapha (SBLEJL, 6; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), pp. 55-86; idem, ‘The Pseudepigrapha and Christianity Revisited: Setting the Stage and Framing Some Central Questions’, JSJ 32 (2001), pp. 371-95. 4. Davila (Provenance, p. 5 n. 7) stresses that ‘where the earliest attestation of a pseudepigraphon is an undoubted quotation in another work’, the period of that quotation becomes the starting point for analysis of the text in question.

24

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

Origen refers to these Testaments in his Homilies on Joshua (15.6). Jerome appears to refer to T. Naph. 2.8 less than a century later (Tract. De Ps. 15.7).5 These scholars raise a crucial question: Are the Testaments best treated solely as Christian texts functioning in the early-third century, or can they also be read as sources for investigating pre-Christian Judaism? Scholars turn to a number of methods in an attempt to answer this question, whether af¿rming the Christian origin of the Testaments or arguing in favor of Christian editing of the Jewish Testaments. 3. Manuscript Evidence The Testaments survive largely in two families of Greek manuscripts, the oldest manuscript (b) dating from the tenth century CE, and several Armenian manuscripts. Other translations (the Slavonic, Serbian, and ‘New Greek’) do not play any important role in textual criticism. Distinctively Christian material pervades all the existing Greek manuscripts, but there is notably less of this material in the principal Armenian manuscripts. This raises two salient questions: Was the Armenian version translated from a Greek text of the Testaments that predates the extant Greek manuscripts, bearing witness to a less Christianized form of these texts? To what extent can we rely on the Armenian version for help in the restoration of the original text of the Testaments? R.H. Charles regarded the Armenian version as an important witness to the original wording, relying heavily upon it in his reconstruction of the pre-Christian Testaments. More recent research by Michael Stone con¿rmed that the Armenian version may well depend ultimately upon a Greek manuscript from the ¿fth or sixth century CE.6 Stone also observed, however, that, while the Armenian translation seems to follow the Greek text tradition closely in the opening testaments, it provides increasingly abbreviated readings as the testaments progress, 5. Marinus de Jonge, ‘Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs’, in H.F.D. Sparks (ed.), The Apocryphal Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 505-600 (505). 6. Michael Stone, Selected Studies in Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha with Special Reference to the Armenian Tradition (SVTP, 9; Leiden: Brill, 1991), pp. 14583, esp. 152-53.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

25

especially in the ethical sections.7 Con¿dence in the Armenian version has been eroded by such studies showing the overall tendency of the Armenian version to omit material. 8 Hollander and de Jonge have found little value in it for their own text-critical work.9 Nevertheless, the Armenian manuscripts may still provide important evidence for the incremental Christianization of the Testaments in the history of its transmission at the hands of Christian scribes. Granted that the Armenian translator appears to have wearied of the task of translating this lengthy document, and therefore introduces omissions that appear to result more from indolence than the wording of his or her Greek text, I ¿nd it implausible that the translator would elect to omit precisely those verses or passages that would have been of most immediate relevance to the Christian readers for which he or she was preparing the translation. Christianizing passages would have perked up his or her attention as he or she went about the task. Stone had, moreover, observed that the omissions were most glaring in the lengthy sections of ethical instruction—that is, those parts that neither spun out the tale of the patriarch nor spoke of God’s future interventions. The distinctively Christian material, to the extent that it is present, is almost wholly present in the eschatological sections—a part that should therefore tend to show less in the way of careless or disinterested omission in the Armenian, with the result that omissions in these sections may in fact be due to the absence of this Christianizing material in its underlying Greek text. (Nor can it be said that the Armenian translator sought intentionally to de-Christianize the Testaments, for some distinctively Christian material remains.) On balance, then, while the Armenian versions overall may not have the value for reconstructing the exact wording of the pre-Christian Testaments with which Charles had invested them, they still bear 7. Michael E. Stone, ‘New Evidence for the Armenian Version of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs’, RB 84 (1977), pp. 94-107, esp. 104. 8. See the review of research in H. Dixon Slingerland, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Critical History of Research (SBLMS, 21; Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977). Jürgen Becker and Anders Hultgård continued to value the Armenian version as a witness to an earlier, less fully Christianized Greek text. 9. Harm W. Hollander and Marinus de Jonge, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Commentary (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985), p. 13; so also J.J. Collins, ‘Testaments’, in Michael Stone (ed.), Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period (CRINT 2.2; Assen: Van Gorcum; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 325-55 (332).

26

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

witness to a stage in the development of the Testaments that contained fewer Christian interpolations. The most logical explanation for the absence of explicitly Christian material is the absence of such material in the Greek manuscript he or she used. Decisive in this regard is the Armenian Testament of Joseph, which actually includes substantially more pre-Christian Jewish material than our extant Greek texts (we are entirely reliant on the Armenian for T. Jos. 19.3-7) while also including substantially less distinctively Christian material (notably in the very next paragraph, T. Jos. 19.10-12). The shorter text found throughout the Armenian version may be explained in part by the translator’s waning degree of enthusiasm for the task and in part by his Greek exemplar’s lack of some of the Christian material known from the later Greek manuscripts. The entire Testament of Zebulon has but a single phrase that would not be at home in a non-Christian Jewish composition. In the midst of a passage describing the future deliverance that God would bring following upon the repentance of Israel in exile, the author predicts: Then shall the Lord himself, the light of righteousness, arise for you, and healing and compassion shall be in his wings:10 he shall ransom humankind from their slavery to Beliar; and every spirit of error shall be trampled underfoot. And he shall convert all the Gentiles, so that they are ¿lled with zeal for him. And you shall see God in human form in the house which the Lord will choose (Jerusalem is its name). (T. Zeb. 9.8, de Jonge translation’s)11

The promise that God shall ‘convert all the Gentiles’ could more neutrally be translated ‘turn all the nations around’, and ¿ts very well within the Jewish eschatological expectation that all nations will come to acknowledge the one God, the God of Israel, at the last. It is only the phrase ‘in human form’ that would be out of place in a Jewish composition. The text as it stands does not make the best of sense, as de Jonge implicitly acknowledges by inserting the phrase ‘in the house’ along with the note ‘some such addition is needed’.12 The phrase in question is only present in three Greek manuscripts (b, d, and g). The remaining Greek manuscripts, together with the Armenian translation, render this entire paragraph quite differently 10. The image is drawn again from Mal. 4.2, as in T. Jud. 24.1. 11. I use boldface in quotations throughout to highlight the possible Christian material introduced into the Testaments. 12. De Jonge, ‘Testaments’, p. 561; see also Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, p. 271.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

27

and much more simply: ‘The Lord himself shall arise, the light of righteousness, and you will return to your land, and you will see him (or, you will see the Lord) in Jerusalem on account of his holy (or, allholy) name’. While the textual witnesses for this reading cannot claim to be the oldest (save for the Greek Vorlage of the Armenian), this variant has much to commend it as the original reading. The longer reading in mss. b, d, and g can be explained as the result of scribal expansion, harmonizing the statement of the promised future here with statements in the other Testaments and explaining the promised theophany in terms of the incarnation. It is much harder to explain why Christian scribes responsible for the shorter reading would have abridged the longer reading, stripping this testament of its only distinctively Christian note, and thus its point of greatest relevance to their own social location. ‘In human form’, then, is probably an instance of the kind of explanatory gloss that a Christian scribe might add in the margin of a manuscript, and which would later be copied as if it were part of the text at that point—a common enough phenomenon in textual transmission. For a second example, we may consider a passage in Gad’s testament, where he instructs his descendants to ‘honor Judah and Levi; for from them will the Lord raise up a savior for Israel’ (T. Gad 8.1). This passage might seem to promote a Christian agenda, suggesting that God’s anointed savior was born from the two tribes of Judah and Levi, even as Hippolytus and others sought to demonstrate Jesus’ descent not only from Judah (which is well attested and unanimously af¿rmed in the New Testament) but also from Levi (which is nowhere af¿rmed in the New Testament). However, it is noteworthy that only one Greek manuscript—the one regarded by Hollander and de Jonge as a foremost witness (ms. b)—gives this reading. Six Greek manuscripts (mss. l, d, m, e, a, f ) read ‘out of them will the Lord arise as a savior’, while ¿ve other Greek manuscripts (k, g, c, h, i), along with the Armenian version, read ‘out of them will the Lord raise up salvation’, notably using the more typical idiom of the Testaments (see T. Sim. 7.1; T. Dan 5.10; T. Naph. 8.2). Both of these readings are quite susceptible to a thoroughly theocentric (as opposed to Christocentric) interpretation, the latter unambiguously so.13 13. Similarly, the vision of God’s intervention to bring deliverance in T. Dan 5.911 remains thoroughly theocentric, particularly if the ‘he’ in T. Dan 5.10b-11 remains ‘the Lord’ (i.e. retains the same referent as the pronoun ‘he’ in T. Dan 5.9b).

28

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

Hollander and de Jonge argue in favor of the reading ‘savior’ as the ‘more dif¿cult reading’, over against ‘salvation’ which, they argue, was introduced to harmonize this passage with the many other passages throughout the Testaments that favor speaking of the Lord’s ‘salvation’ rather than a ‘savior’.14 The fact that the verb ‘raise up’ (BOBUFMMFJO) is used only here transitively, against every other use of this verb throughout the Testaments, also suggests to them that this reading be accepted as the lectio dif¿cilior. At this point, however, I ¿nd the lectio dif¿cilior, requiring even a completely uncharacteristic use of a verb, to have become an implausible reading. Moreover, ‘raising up a savior’ could be equally well explained as a Christian scribal harmonization not to other texts in the Testaments, but to general Christian discourse about God’s raising up Jesus as Messiah, and thus a corrupted reading. Far from suggesting Christian composition, the evidence barely suggests Christian tampering in only one stream of the textual tradition. The Testament of Benjamin is probably the most heavily Christianized text within the collection, though, once again, these editorial expansions are limited to the ‘prophetic’ sections of the text (essentially 3.8; 9.2-5; 10.7-9; 11.1-5). Recovery of the wording of a preChristian original is, consequently, very dif¿cult in these sections of this testament. 15 That there was a pre-Christian original, however, remains probable on several counts, not least of which is the witness of the Armenian translation, which preserves no distinctively Christian material save for 9.3-5. 16 A minor Christian interpolation 14. Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, pp. 335-36. 15. On this question, see further Becker, Untersuchungen, pp. 48-57; idem, Unterweisung in lehrhafter Form (JSHRZ, 3; Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1974), pp. 132-33, 135-37; Charles, Greek Versions, pp. 202, 209-17; J.H. Ulrichsen, Die Grundschrift der Testamente der Zwölf Patriarchen: Eine Untersuchung zu Umfang, Inhalt und Eigenart der ursprünglichen Schrift (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1991), pp. 13644. 16. It thus omits the whole chapter that speaks ‘prophetically’ of the ministry of the apostle Paul, himself of the tribe of Benjamin (see Rom. 11.1; Phil. 3.5), the instrument of God which would ‘compensate for the de¿ciencies of [my] tribe’ (T. Benj. 11.1-5). This chapter almost certainly represents a later Christian addition, not only on text-critical, but also on literary-critical grounds. The testament had already expressed the elements typical of the closing of these speeches, namely the injunction to ‘keep the law of the Lord and his commands’ (T. Benj. 10.3-4) and the promise that, if the patriarch’s descendants ‘live in holiness in the Lord’s presence’, they would again ‘dwell in security with me, and all Israel will be gathered to the Lord’ (T. Benj. 10.11).

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

29

appears in T. Benj. 3.8. After Joseph asked Jacob to pray for his brothers, that God would not hold their sin against them, Jacob is so moved that he embraces Joseph and exclaims: ‘In you shall be ful¿lled the prophecy of heaven about the Lamb of God and the Savior of the world—that one without blemish shall be offered up on behalf of sinners, and one without sin shall die on behalf of the ungodly, in the blood of the covenant, for the salvation of the Gentiles and of Israel, and he shall destroy Beliar and those who serve him’ (T. Benj. 3.8). This passage is admittedly well-suited to its literary context. The question still needs to be raised whether all of it is original to that context, or if a pre-Christian (or at least non-Christian) Jewish statement about vicarious death has been glossed and modi¿ed by Christian copyists in the Greek manuscript tradition. The Armenian version is much more subdued: ‘In you will be ful¿lled the heavenly prophecy which says, “the blameless person will be de¿led on behalf of the lawless, and the sinless person will be killed on behalf of the impious” ’. Such a reading does not necessitate a Christian interpretation, but may draw on traditional exegesis of Isaiah 53, particularly under the inÀuence of Jewish martyrology in the Maccabean period. If the Armenian here fairly represents its Greek Vorlage, this would indicate that the passage has been Christianized in keeping with reading Joseph as a type for Jesus. 4. Literary-critical Observations The differences in the manuscript tradition support the theory of the progressive Christianization of the Testaments, perhaps starting with a pre-Christian original, but they do not account for all of the Christian material in these texts. Scholars have therefore turned to literary criticism to advance this conversation.17 This involves, ¿rst and foremost, the detection of literary seams and signs of redaction, particularly around the distinctively Christian material. How well is this material integrated into its literary contexts? Are there internal contradictions between the Christian material and the surrounding text, such that the former appears to interrupt, intrude upon, or even contradict the The structure of the preceding testaments leads the reader to expect the material found in ch. 12—the instructions concerning burial and the narrative of the patriarch’s passing—and not fresh predictive material. 17. Slingerland, Testaments, p. 108.

30

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

latter?18 Does the distinctively Christian material, especially the briefer instances thereof, have the appearance of explanatory glosses that can be easily separated, or is it more fully integrated into the literary fabric of the text? The questions here concern the extent to which the text of the Testaments changed over time as various scribes introduced new material to ‘help’ readers better understand the text, or to ‘solve’ problems posed by the text with respect to the belief system of the scribe and his or her projected readers. Even those who are most adamant about reading the Testaments as a Christian composition are prepared to allow for such changes in the course of transmission. Harm Hollander and Marinus de Jonge, for example, af¿rm the likelihood of development in the text between the time of Origen and the time in which our extant manuscripts were produced, as the nature of the texts encourages ‘marginal notes and small embellishments from readers and scribes’ as well as the omission of obsolete material. 19 They af¿rm on literary-critical grounds that T. Dan 7.3 ‘reads like a gloss of a later scribe’ and that T. Levi 2.10 is a clearly Christian line that is ‘slightly out of place in context’.20 They differ from R.H. Charles, in effect, only in the degree to which they would allow such ‘marginal notes and small embellishments’. These scholars consider it possible that ‘especially the christological and eschatological passages were subjected to later additions and revisions’ during this period, ‘however dif¿cult it is for us to detect them’.21 It is precisely the dif¿culty of performing this literary-critical task with certainty that, in the end, dissuades Hollander and de Jonge from the endeavor altogether in favor of interpreting the Testaments only as Christian texts. Theoretically, however, Hollander and de Jonge must also allow for the possibility of such development in the period prior to Origen, and that such development may account for all the distinctively Christian material. 18. R.H. Charles, for example, found that the Christian additions are marked by their dogmatic character, which is ‘at variance not only with the teaching and the character of that work as a whole, but also at variance with their respective contexts’. He disagrees with those who regard the ethical teachings that have correspondences with the New Testament as further Christian interpolations, arguing that these ‘are in harmony not only with the spirit of the book as a whole, but also with their respective contexts’ (APOT, p. 291). 19. Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, p. 16. 20. Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, pp. 31, 59, 294. 21. Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, p. 85

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

31

The problem of disentangling Christian material from its literary context is only acute in one or two of the testaments. In many instances, it is rather straightforward. For example, near the close of the Testament of Simeon, the author looks forward to God’s future interventions thus: Then Shem will be glori¿ed, because the Lord God is the mighty one of Israel appearing on earth as a man and saving Adam through him. Then all the spirits of deceit will be given to be trodden under foot and human beings will rule over the evil spirits. Then I shall arise in joy and I shall bless the Most High because of his marvelous works, for God, taking a body and eating with human beings, saved human beings. (T. Sim. 6.5-7; Hollander and de Jonge’s translation)

The phrases in bold italics isolate the material that takes this passage in a distinctively Christian direction. Both R.H. Charles and H.C. Kee bracket these brief phrases as Christian interpolations into an otherwise straightforward Jewish description of a theophany—God’s selfmanifestation to bring deliverance. 22 The ¿rst two phrases have the character of brief glosses, quite plausibly added by a Christian copyist to ‘help’ future readers to connect the text’s prophecies with the Christian conviction about the ful¿llment of Israel’s hope in Jesus. Delete them, and the passage coheres with the expressions elsewhere in the Testaments about God ‘appearing’ and bringing salvation (cf. T. Naph. 8.2-4). The longer clause in T. Sim. 6.7 has the character of a secondary addition, since a complete rationale for Simeon’s declaration of intention to bless God has already provided in the previous phrase (‘because of his marvelous works’), an obvious reference back to the litany of God’s future acts on behalf of God’s people Israel begun in T. Sim. 6.3. A Christian copyist has now taken the passage in a new direction, for which the previous material has not prepared the reader, focusing on the incarnation and, in particular, on the proof of the incarnation (in the assertion of this God-in-the-Àesh actually ‘eating’, thus having a real body) in refutation of Docetist or other early Christian heretical claims. 22. Charles, Greek Versions, pp. xlviii, 24-26; see also Kee, ‘Testaments’, p. 787. On the ‘theophany’ as a motif in the Testaments, see also T. Levi 2.11; 5.2; 8.11; T. Jud. 22.2; T. Zeb. 9.9; T. Naph. 8.3; T. Ash. 7.3.

32

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

Similarly, in the Testament of Dan, the author speaks of the eschatological deliverer who will renew Eden and establish ‘new Jerusalem’: No longer will Jerusalem lie in ruins, Nor Israel endure captivity; For the Lord will be in the midst of it, Living together with human beings, And the Holy One of Israel will reign over them In humility and poverty And he who has faith in him will reign in truth in the heavens. (T. Dan 5.13)

The testament looks forward to the ful¿llment of God’s promise in the Jewish Scriptures that God himself would be Israel’s monarch and make his dwelling among the people in Jerusalem. A Christian scribe attempted to adapt this vision of the ‘kingdom of God’ to the Christian understanding of Jesus as the reigning king and of the heavenly locus of the kingdom of God. The ¿rst addition describes the reign of the ‘Holy One’ as manifesting itself ‘in humility and poverty’, thus recalling Jesus’ ¿rst coming ‘in humility’ and embedding this in God’s rule. The second addition speaks of those who have faith sharing in this reign ‘in the heavens’, which is at sharp odds with its literary context: the opening lines of T. Dan 5.13 had clearly depicted God coming to establish God’s reign on earth, centered in Jerusalem, not inviting human souls into a heaven-centered kingdom. In such instances literary-critical observations provide suf¿cient methodological rigor for identifying and bracketing later Christian interpolations. In a number of cases, Christian signature features intrude upon the Deuteronomistic pattern of sin–exile–return or upon the text’s formulation of the roles of Levi and Judah in God’s future interventions in ways that strongly suggest Christian redaction of an originally Jewish text rather than Christian invention de novo. 23 The Testament of Benjamin 9.2b-5 provides such an example. Based on ‘the words of the righteous Enoch’, Benjamin predicts the destruction of the ¿rst Temple and the construction of an even more glorious one. Benjamin speaks of the twelve tribes being gathered together around that last temple, and all the nations as well, ‘until the Most High sends his salvation by the visitation of an only-begotten prophet’, who will be 23. These passages are not, as Robert Kugler (The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs [Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic Press, 2001], p. 35) claims, ‘adapted completely to the Christian aim’ of the collection, but only imperfectly—thus showing their secondary nature.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

33

‘treated with contempt and lifted up on a tree’, with the result that the curtain of the temple will be torn apart and God’s spirit pass over to the nations ‘like a ¿re poured out’, after which the prophet will ascend from Hades into heaven (T. Benj. 9.2b-5). The material regarding the ‘an only-begotten prophet’ and his fate (to be disgraced and cruci¿ed), and the events that follow, is clearly Christian, but it intrudes upon the eschatological scheme otherwise invoked here. The gathering of the twelve tribes and the nations to the restored Temple prior to the appearance, death, and resurrection of this ‘only-begotten prophet’ signals the secondary insertion of the latter. Jewish eschatology might look to the regathering of the twelve tribes and even the ingathering of the non-Jewish nations before the appearing of the Lord (i.e. God), but Christian eschatology consistently considers this eschatological gathering of Israel and the nations to happen as a result of the death and resurrection of Jesus and the mission of the apostles, to be perfected at the second coming of the Lord—but certainly not before the completion of his earthly course.24 The Christian material is thus clearly an intrusion, and an imperfect one at that. 5. Distinctively Jewish Content? Scholars have typically assumed that works grounded in the thoughtand story-world of the Jewish Scriptures, but lacking distinctively Christian features, were of Jewish origin.25 If distinctively Christian features were few and ¿tted loosely into the context, these could be read as Christian interpolations into an originally Jewish text. The argument that the Testaments cannot be of Christian origin because there is too little distinctively Christian material in them is, however, fallacious. Christians who embraced the Jewish Scriptures and preserved the writings of non-Christian Jews like Philo of Alexandria, for example, were clearly not obsessed only with distinctively Christian

24. The remainder of the predictive material in T. Benj. 10.6-11 could then be read as Jewish eschatology adapted to Christian interests with several interpolations. Recovery of that Jewish original would be most dif¿cult in this passage, and de Jonge’s cautions against attempting this too con¿dently would be well taken here. 25. Hollander and de Jonge (Commentary, p. 4) accuse Charles of following the rule that ‘anything that is not clearly Christian can be considered Jewish’.

34

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

questions and interests. 26 James Davila analyzed extended passages from sermons by John Chrysostom and Ephraim the Syrian, showing that Christians could write extensive amounts of material that lacked distinctively Christian signature features.27 Much of the material within the Testaments would be equally at home in Jewish and Christian circles, since the shared heritage of Judaism and Christianity is so extensive. Davila, therefore, formulates a more rigorous method for ‘determining whether an ancient literary work (especially an Old Testament pseudepigraphon) is of Jewish, Christian, or other origin’.28 Beyond general ‘Jewish’ content, he looks for some combination of the following: (1) strong internal evidence that the text was written in the pre-Christian era; (2) compelling evidence that the text was originally composed in Hebrew; (3) evidence of ‘sympathetic concern with the Jewish ritual cult’; (4) evidence of ‘sympathetic concern with Jewish law/Torah and halakha’; and (5) evidence of ‘concern with Jewish ethnic and national interests, particularly self-identi¿cation as a Jew, polemics against gentile persecution of Jews, and internal Jewish polemics’.29 While testing texts against these criteria adds methodological rigor, to be sure, they have an unfortunate side effect of which Davila is himself quite aware. These ‘signature features’ of Jewish literature tend to be features that also more sharply distinguish Jews from nonJews, or one group of Jews from others. In other words, Davila’s methodology makes it dif¿cult to establish that a text is of Jewish origin unless it represents a Judaism of a boundary-maintaining type (and, more speci¿cally, a piece of literature in which these boundarymarkers are topical, or at least explicitly mentioned at some point). Texts representing a Judaism that is more open to the Greco-Roman environment, or simply less concerned with boundary-maintaining issues and with the distinctive, external markers of such boundaries, will tend to be excluded.30 If the Testaments do, in fact, attest to ‘the openness of one of several segments of Judaism during the period of the second Temple to non-Jewish cultural insights and inÀuences, as 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Slingerland, Testaments, pp. 109-11. Davila, Provenance, pp. 74-119. Davila, Provenance, p. 230. Davila, Provenance, pp. 65-66. Davila, Provenance, p. 228.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

35

well as to the inadequacy of the neat division of Jews into the “three philosophies” that historians have inherited from Josephus in his Antiquities (13.171-73)’, 31 that evidence will be lost if we accept Davila’s criteria to the full extent that he has developed them, and our picture of the varieties of early Judaism will be correspondingly diminished. Davila believes that ‘a false negative is less harmful than a false positive’ for the reconstruction of early Judaism,32 but I disagree for many of the same reasons that I ¿nd the negative use of the criterion of dissimilarity ultimately unhelpful as a guide to ¿nding material for the reconstruction of the historical Jesus. Skewing in any direction is equally distorting. Nevertheless, taking to heart the criticism of the assumption that texts that are not distinctively Christian can be assumed to be Jewish in origin, I also ¿nd that the Testaments meet most of Davila’s criteria. (1) An important piece of internal evidence for dating the Testaments points to an origin in the Hasmonean period, before Roman domination began to be felt in Judea. Naphtali sees a ‘holy writing’ that says: ‘Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Elamites, Galachians, Chaldaeans, Syrians, shall in turn take captive the twelve tribes of Israel’ (T. Naph. 5.1-8).33 The appearance of ‘Syrians’ in the ¿nal position in this list, and the absence of mention of the Romans, points strongly to a preRoman-period date. When Jewish and Christian authors writing after the turn of the era mention the succession of empires, particularly with the oppression of God’s people in view, Rome stands prominently in the climactic position. When Josephus or the author of 4 Ezra (11.1– 12.39; see especially 12.10-12) give their political interpretations of Daniel’s beasts, Rome is the fourth (displacing the Greco-Syrian kings, in fact). When John the Seer does the same, all of Daniel’s beasts come together in Rome as the climax of the series (Rev. 13.1-2). The absence of the mention of Rome here suggests composition at a time when Rome was still only barely visible on the horizon.34 31. H.C. Kee, ‘Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Second Century B.C.)’, in OTP, I, pp. 775-828 (778). 32. Davila, Provenance, p. 7. 33. R.H. Charles, ‘Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs’, in APOT, p. 291. 34. Kee (‘Testaments’, p. 778) also incidentally reads this passage as an indication of an origin in diaspora Jewish communities in Syria, since Syria, and not the

36

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

An important traditional-historical question pertinent to the Testaments’ origin concerns the messianism of these texts. In their present state, this messianism is far from uniform—which, in itself, is a fair reÀection of early Judaism. Some of the Testaments articulate an expectation of two messianic ¿gures, a priestly one emerging from the line of Levi and a kingly one coming from the line of Judah, a messianic view also well attested among the Dead Sea Scrolls.35 This is rooted in the Testaments’ vision for the division of power, as it were, between the priesthood and the secular arm. In the Testament of Judah, Judah af¿rms that ‘the Lord gave me the kingdom and [Levi] the priesthood; and he made the kingdom inferior to the priesthood’ (T. Jud. 21.2), with the result that Levi has primacy even over Judah and the monarchical powers in Israel. Issachar echoes this elevation of these two tribes and the differentiation of their roles: ‘Levi and Judah were honored by the Lord among Jacob’s sons; for the Lord gave them each their share, and to the one he gave the priesthood and to the other the kingdom’ (T. Iss. 5.8). Looking ahead to God’s future acts on behalf of God’s people, the Testaments often distinguish the roles that the future leaders from Levi and Judah will play. Naphtali urged his descendants to ‘keep united with Levi and Judah; for through Judah will salvation come to Israel, and in him will Jacob be blessed’ (T. Naph. 8.2-3). Military deliverance and political leadership are here predicated upon a ¿gure that will arise from Judah (in keeping with Jub. 31.19, in the context of Isaac’s blessing Levi and Judah). Simeon also clearly distinguished between the roles of Levi’s descendant and Judah’s descendant in Israel’s future deliverance: ‘And now, my children, obey Levi, and through Judah you will be redeemed. And do not exalt yourselves against these two tribes, because from them the salvation of God will arise for you.’ This deliverance is led by two ¿gures: ‘For the Lord will raise up from Levi someone as a high priest and from Judah someone as king… This one will save…the race of Israel’ (T. Sim. 7.1-2).36 The ¿nal clause, which has its own textual issues, refers to the king from Judah through Egyptian Ptolemies, appears in the list of empires dominating Israel. The Testaments’ knowledge of Palestinian place names, but lack of clarity regarding location, probably excludes a Palestinian provenance (see also Becker, Untersuchungen, p. 374). 35. So Kee, ‘Testaments’, p. 778; John J. Collins, Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1995), pp. 89, 114. 36. The ellipses indicate where the Christian glosses have been removed.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

37

whom physical deliverance is expected (as in T. Naph. 8.2-3; Jub. 31.19). The future role of the descendant of Levi is given due attention in T. Levi 18, where his duties will be complementary to those of his counterpart from Judah.37 In one passage, secular power is ascribed to Levi alone. Reuben predicts that his descendants will be jealous of the sons of Levi and seek to be raised above them, and you will die a cruel death. For to Levi the Lord gave the sovereignty—and to Judah (and with them also to me and Dan and Joseph, that we should be rulers). For this reason I command you to listen to Levi, for he will know the law of the Lord and interpret his precepts and offer sacri¿ce for all Israel until the coming of the anointed high priest, of whom the Lord spoke. I charge you by the God of heaven to deal honestly, each one with his neighbor, and to have love, each one for his brother. And approach Levi with humility, so that you may receive a blessing from his mouth. For he shall bless Israel and Judah, because the Lord has chosen him to rule as king over all the peoples. And accord his sons their proper reverence for they will die in wars on our behalf (seen and unseen), and he will be among you as an eternal king. (T. Reub. 6.5-12)

The elevation of Levi as ‘king’ here stands in tension with most of the other Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, where Levi, though still the superior head of state, is strictly a priest, while Judah is given the role of king and begetter of kings (T. Sim. 7.1-2; T. Jud. 21.2-6; T. Iss. 5.7). The kingship may be inferior to the priesthood in T. Jud. 21.2, but the two of¿ces are still given to different people, quite opposed to 37. Hollander and de Jonge (Commentary, p. 61, followed by Kugler, Testaments, p. 25) are guilty of overly harmonizing these paradigms when they argue that ‘there is no “double messianism” in the Testaments’. They are also employing their own postChristian lens too freely when they declare that ‘whenever a savior ¿gure occurs in [Levi-Judah] passages, there is only one, and clearly Jesus Christ is referred to. He is connected with Judah or with Levi or with both tribes.’ The mention of ‘tribe of Judah and Levi’ in T. Dan 5.10 does not ‘underscore the absence of dual messianism in the Testaments’, as Kugler (Testaments, p. 69) suggests, but results from a scribe’s imperfect editing of this passage. Judah is otherwise almost always named after Levi in acknowledgment of the supremacy of the priesthood over the secular power (even as the distinction between the two is maintained, against the Hasmonean regime), and it is likely that one or the other name has been added here. ‘Salvation’ is elsewhere speci¿cally linked with the one who would arise from Judah, as opposed to the other who would arise from Levi, so it may well be ‘Levi’ that was added (inappropriately in second place). Moreover, the Testaments elsewhere speak explicitly of the tribes of Levi and Judah severally (e.g. T. Sim. 7.1-2), evidence that cannot simply be passed over.

38

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

the vision of T. Reub. 6.11-12, in which the priest who interprets the law and offers sacri¿ce also functions as the ruling power among the tribes of Israel, even as ‘an eternal king’. When we read here that the Lord gave sovereignty also ‘to Judah (and with them also to me and Dan and Joseph, that we should be rulers)’, the claim clearly has the character of an afterthought,38 and quite likely a later Jewish addition intended to bring this passage more in line with the dual focus on Levi and Judah that otherwise pervades the Testaments.39 The lines are more blurred in some Testaments, where God’s future deliverance is expected to emerge from both tribes (T. Levi 2.11; T. Dan 5.4; T. Gad 8.1; T. Jos. 19.7). No doubt, Christian scribes also sought, over the centuries, to shape the text in ways that would suggest that Jesus ful¿lled the expectations of both, since there was no room for ‘double messianism’ in their context,40 contributing to the textual and conceptual confusion. The ‘eschatology’ and historical reminiscences in the Testaments point most clearly to concerns relevant to the Hasmonean period. The Testament of Reuben may reÀect a pro-Hasmonean stage in the development of the Testaments. In this testament, the Hasmonean high priest is greeted as the ‘priest of the order of Melchizedek’, an association made not to justify non-Levitical lineage (as in Christian discourse), but to justify the combination of the roles of ‘priest of the Most High God’ and ‘King of Jerusalem’ in one person.41 Several are more critical of the Hasmonean line. The balance between Levi and Judah in the Testaments, speci¿cally assigning the priesthood to the latter line and the ‘secular authority’ and military power to the former, resembles the anticipation of a ‘messiah of Aaron’ alongside a ‘messiah of Israel’ at Qumran, rejecting the consolidation of the priesthood and kingship in one person during the Hasmonean dynasty. The linking of Judah speci¿cally with ‘salvation’ may particularly 38. Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, p. 106. 39. Charles, Greek Versions, p. xlvii. 40. Collins, Scepter and the Star, pp. 91-92. 41. Psalm 110.4 has been heard to stand in the background for the ‘coming of the anointed high priest, of whom the Lord spoke’ (see Charles, ‘Testaments’, p. 291). Charles (Greek Versions, p. xlix) reads T. Levi 18 as a celebration of John Hyrcanus, later linked to Jesus as the new, greater priest by the simple addition of ‘in the water’ in 18.7, the single phrase that necessarily connects this vision to Jesus’ baptism. The description of the post-exilic priests in 17.11 could well reÀect polemics against the Hellenizing high priests who preceded the Hasmonean high priesthood.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

39

point to disaffection with the Hasmonean ‘solution’ to the problem of Gentile domination. These considerations suggest that the Testaments were originally composed during the Hasmonean period, and that their eschatological hopes took shape under the shadow of increasing discontent with that dynasty.42 (2) Though Hebrew and Aramaic precursors to the Testaments do exist, and though there are clear connections between the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and these earlier testaments, current scholarship weighs against the thesis that the Testaments were composed in Hebrew. 43 Of course, neither was most Jewish literature surviving from the Second Temple period (considering just the expansive corpus of Philo, Josephus, and the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha that were composed in Greek), which makes this criterion especially problematic. 42. Scholars af¿rming a pre-Christian Jewish origin for the Testaments are not uniform in their opinion concerning how the text ¿ts precisely into the landscape of pre-Christian Judaism. Jürgen Becker believed that the original version pre-dated the Maccabean revolt, criticizing the Hellenizing high priests Jason and Menelaus. Charles had located them in the period of John Hyrcanus, before the decline of the Hasmonean house and the rise of rampant disaffection with them. Anders Hultgård read the Testaments as an anti-Hasmonean document, looking forward to proper separation of kingly and priestly roles under a Levitical priest and Judahite king. Within this lack of consensus, however, there is a consensus among these scholars that a pre-Christian Jewish original stands behind, and is more or less recoverable from, the present form of the document. Moreover, there is general consensus (in this regard, Dupont-Sommer’s proposal can be included) that the precise form of messianism as found in the Testaments, focused on the future roles of both Levi and Judah, is a response to the activity of the Jerusalem high priesthood sometime between the early second and early ¿rst century BCE. 43. Charles had argued strenuously in favor of an original Hebrew version (Greek Versions, pp. xxiii-xxxii), though this theory has not won wide assent. Kee (‘Testaments’, p. 777) and de Jonge (‘Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs’, in APOT, p. 522) produce evidence of the Testaments’ dependence upon the Septuagint at several points where the Septuagint version differs in detail from the Hebrew Bible, explaining the Semitisms as a result of imitating Septuagintal style. Such Semitisms would be naturally increased to the extent that the Greek-speaking author relied on Hebrew or Aramaic source material for the Testaments (e.g. Aramaic Levi, found among the Dead Sea Scrolls). Becker (Untersuchungen, pp. 169-72), moreover, claims to ¿nd no evidence of ‘translation Greek’ in the opening and closing sections of each testament, arguing that, at the very least, the ¿nal (Jewish) redaction of the collection of twelve was undertaken in Greek.

40

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

(3) The Testaments evidence ‘sympathetic concern with the Jewish ritual cult’. This comes to expression most clearly in Testament of Levi 9, where, in the tradition of Jubilees,44 Isaac teaches Levi ‘the law of the Lord’, which includes speci¿cally ‘the law of the priesthood, of sacri¿ces, of whole-offerings, of ¿rst-fruits, of freewill-offerings, of peace-offerings’ (T. Levi 9.6-7), the requirements for ritual puri¿cation before and after offering sacri¿ces, the kinds of wood to use for the ¿re of offerings, the requirement of offering only ‘clean’ animals as opposed to ‘unclean’, and even the prescription that salt must be added to every sacri¿ce (T. Levi 9.9-14; Lev. 2.13). Issachar also speaks, in his testament, of his own care in offering the ¿rst fruits to the Lord through the priest throughout his life (T. Iss. 3.6). Moreover, there is no suggestion of the supersession of these sacri¿ces in the death of some Messiah, as ¿gures so prominently in early Christian discourse about the Jewish sacri¿cial system (e.g. in the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Letter of Barnabas). (4) The Testaments also show ‘sympathetic concern with Jewish law/Torah’, although perhaps not with halakha in the extreme detail evidenced, for example, in Qumran’s 4QMMT (‘Some Works of the Law’). The author consistently points the audience to the doing of the law of the Lord as the path to enjoying a bright future. Levi instructs his children to give priority to literacy and to prize knowing the law of the Lord and the wisdom that comes there from above all else (T. Levi 13.1-9). Torah and its wisdom are possessions that cannot be taken away. 45 The law is a light entrusted to Israel, through whom it would come to enlighten all races of people (T. Levi 14.4). Levi calls Israel to choose Torah as the path of light in ways that cannot fail to recall Moses’ invitation at the close of Deuteronomy: ‘Choose for yourselves either darkness or light, either the law of the Lord of the ways of Beliar’ (T. Levi 19.1; cf. Deut. 30.19-20). The identi¿cation of the Torah as the way of ‘light’ throughout this testament (see also T. Levi 14.4), the way that stands opposed to the 44. Isaac claims to teach Levi ‘as Abraham taught me’. In Jubilees, Abraham does indeed give Isaac instruction in all the areas covered in T. Levi 9, though in considerably more detail (see Jub. 21.5-20). This is another sign that the author was thoroughly familiar with Jubilees. 45. These sections closely follow extant fragments of Aramaic Levi. See Appendix III in Hollander and De Jonge, Commentary, pp. 457-69.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

41

path of darkness and the devil, suggests an originally pre-Christian Jewish milieu for the composition of these texts. Judah opens his exhortations with a summons ‘to perform the ordinances of the Lord and to obey the commandment of God’ (T. Jud. 13.1). The language of this thesis statement again recalls Deut. 30.1520, especially Deut. 30.16, which combines ‘ordinance’ (FOUPMI ) and ‘commandment’ (EJLBJX NB). The ¿nal word of Judah’s testament also points squarely to the keeping of the Torah—and the whole Torah—as the path to life and the experience God’s blessings: ‘And so, my children, observe the whole of the law of the Lord, for there is hope for all who make straight their way’ (T. Jud. 26.1). There is nothing here, where it counts most, about faith in the messiah, joining the new Israel of God, or anything that might plausibly suggest Christian invention. Although a Christian scribe has interjected a prediction about God’s going to the Gentiles during Israel’s period of disobedience and an explicit identi¿cation of a deliverer ¿gure as ‘the Savior of the Gentiles’ (T. Dan 6.6-8, 9b), Dan’s concluding instruction highlights inner-Jewish concerns: ‘turn from unrighteousness of every kind and hold fast to the righteousness of the law of the Lord; and your race will be kept safe for ever’ (T. Dan 6.10). This unquali¿ed de¿nition of righteousness in terms of Torah-observance and unquali¿ed parting concern with preserving the race of Israel seem to locate the testament’s original composition in Jewish circles with ethnic interests.46 Naphtali’s concluding exhortation recommends the doing of the law of God, here as the means by which to remain in God’s love: ‘Be wise in God, and prudent; and understand the order of his commandments and the laws of every action, so that the Lord may love you’ (T. Naph. 8.7-10, de Jonge’s translation). The kind of meditation on the application of Torah commended by Naphtali, coupled with the conviction that God’s love for the individual is linked somehow to that individual’s devotion to the law (rather than, for example, trust in or ¿delity toward God’s Son), strongly suggest that this text arose in a pre-Christian (or, at least, non-Christian) Jewish setting. Asher’s exhortation turns his descendants’ focus entirely upon the law of God: 46. De Jonge (Testaments, pp. 91-94; idem, ‘Christian InÀuence in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs’, NovT 4 [1960], pp. 182-235, esp. 225-26) himself acknowledges the probability of a pre-Christian form of this testament.

42

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013) Observe then, my children, the commandments of the Lord yourselves, and follow the truth with a single aspect… Keep the law of the Lord, and do not look on evil as if it were good; but concentrate your attention on what is really good, and persevere in it along with all the Lord’s commandments, and settle yourselves down in it and take your rest in it. (T. Ash. 6.1-3)

This was Asher’s own orientation throughout his own life: ‘I have not strayed from the path of truth which the Lord marked out; and I have examined the commandments of the Most High and lived, so far as I could, with a single aspect directed to what is good’ (T. Ash. 5.4). Similarly, Asher urges his descendants to ‘keep the law of the Lord’ and ‘persevere in…all the Lord’s commandments’ (T. Ash 6.3). Benjamin similarly concludes his testament with the injunction to ‘keep the law of the Lord and his commands. For these things, I tell you, are of greater value than anything else I can bequeath to you: you too, then, must give them to your children as an eternal possession; for so did Abraham and Isaac and Jacob’ (T. Benj. 10.3-4). In keeping with the depiction of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in Jubilees, we ¿nd Benjamin passing on his knowledge of God’s law (which would not otherwise be revealed until the theophany on Mount Sinai), and commanding his descendants to continue to do the same as the most valuable inheritance they, in turn, can leave for their children.47 Given the pervasive emphasis on Jesus and the wisdom and Spirit poured out upon the church through the ‘Son’ throughout early Christian literature, and the limitations placed on the role of Torah particularly in Pauline Christianity, these absolute claims regarding Torah’s value seem to reÀect Jewish rather than Christian ideology. Indeed, it is truly surprising not to ¿nd Christian scribes adding quali¿cations at this point, which con¿rms the view that Christian scribal glosses were largely limited to the eschatological/prophetic sections of the Testaments. It is true that important Jewish signature features are not explicitly promoted. Despite the focus throughout on the value of observing God’s law, the Testaments ‘nowhere teach the observance of the sabbath, or of circumcision, or of the dietary laws’.48 If, however, we demand the presence of these ‘signature features’ in a document we 47. While a Christian scribe might not feel the need to ‘correct’ the claim that the Torah is ‘an eternal possession’ for the heirs of Abraham, it is dif¿cult to imagine a Christian author creating such a claim if composing the Testaments from scratch. 48. Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, p. 43.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

43

will call Jewish, we prejudice our reconstruction of early Judaism toward boundary-maintaining Judaisms only, as Davila acknowledges. The commendation of the ritual law, without any typically Christian attempts to limit the applicability of value thereof, is perhaps a suf¿cient ‘signature feature’.49 Moreover, the patriarchs commend the keeping of the ‘whole’ law (see, e.g., T. Jud. 26.1), at no place suggesting that any parts of the Torah would cease to be valid and binding upon their descendants. The author may not feel the need especially to uphold and promote Jewish ‘signature features’ because they are not being specially called into question in his context. The view of Torah in the Testaments also has more in common with Jubilees, a Jewish text from the second century BCE, than early Christian writings. Hollander and de Jonge attempt to argue otherwise on the basis of a comparison between the Testaments and the works of Justin Martyr: Before Moses these commandments were not in force and after Jesus they are no longer valid for those who worship the one true God and believe in Jesus Christ… Justin’s emphasis on the unity of God’s intentions and the continuity of his ethical commands from the period of the patriarchs to the present time in which Israel and the Gentiles are called to obey Jesus Christ…helps us to understand how in the Testaments the pre-Mosaic sons of Jacob could function as authorities expounding the true meaning of God’s commandments to the twelve tribes of Israel.50

But Justin Martyr’s view, which is also very much Paul’s view (Gal. 3.15-19), does not correlate with the view of the law in the Testaments. 49. Gentile Christian authors or Jewish Christian authors standing in Paul’s tradition would not endorse the Torah as sweepingly as do the Testaments without some limiting rider like ‘until the time when the future priest shall come’ or ‘when the Messiah will teach the new law’, or some words about the time when physical circumcision would cease to be required in favor of circumcision of the heart and abstinence from vice. The more conservative Jewish Christians, on the other hand, could hardly fail to include some explicit mention of the enduring value and importance of circumcision, Sabbath observance, and other boundary-maintaining markers, since these were so directly and explicitly controverted in the early church. Therefore, the Testaments best reÀect a Judaism that is not so attuned to boundary issues as to ethical focus, in part in concert with Greco-Roman ethical conversations, and perhaps in a setting in which those distinctive practices that maintain Jewish boundaries are not the focus of overt criticism or other threat. 50. Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, pp. 70-71. See also Marinus de Jonge, ‘The Pre-Mosaic Servants of God in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and in the Writings of Justin and Irenaeus’, VC 39 (1985), pp. 157-70.

44

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

Like Jubilees, the Testaments assert the eternal validity of the Torah by portraying the pre-Mosaic patriarchs as people who already know and walk in line with Torah’s distinctive commandments (and not merely those that might be described as universally ethical) long before the giving of the law on Sinai. In particular, the attention given to the ritual law in T. Levi 9.5-7 as something passed on from Isaac to Levi resonates with the view of Jubilees that the law in all its particulars—the sacri¿cial cult as well as any so-called natural precepts51— had been revealed to the patriarchs, and was thus not Moses’ innovation. This view of the law contradicts the view promoted by Paul and leading Christian theologians like Justin. In the Testaments, the essentials of Torah were known to the patriarchs, and were passed along by them. Knowledge of the law came with their knowledge of the one God. Therefore those who read the Testaments from this other side of the giving of the law at Sinai know that it is there, in the Mosaic law in its entirety, that they are to look to discover what the patriarchs were learning as they grew in their acquaintance with this same God. The Testaments also adopt the Deuteronomistic interpretation of Israel’s history that runs consistently throughout Second Templeperiod Jewish literature, whereby following Torah leads to the experience of God’s favor and protection while a general neglect of Torah leads to national disaster. Texts like 2 Maccabees, Judith, Baruch, and 4 Ezra promote observance of Torah by means of such an interpretation of Israel’s history, and the sin–exile–return passages running throughout the ‘prophetic’ portions of the Testaments, which link the renewal of the experience of God’s covenant promises with a return to covenant obedience, do likewise. Christian material often intrudes upon these passages, such that in our extant manuscripts ‘the repetition of the pattern serves to describe the history of the descendants of the patriarchs till the coming of Jesus Christ (T.N.), to emphasize the sins of the priests from the tribe of Levi (and others) against Jesus Christ (T.L.; T.Z.; T.A.), and to describe the history of Israel in the years between the ¿rst and the second advent (T.L.; T.Z.; T.A.)’.52 But the Christian material often introduces anachronisms into an otherwise tight and recognizable pattern, giving strong evidence that they are

51. Contra Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, p. 83. 52. Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, p. 56.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

45

secondary additions, distracting the reader from the original goal of the Testaments, namely the promotion of the Torah-observant way of life as a path to individual and national well-being.53 (5) The Testaments also show themselves concerned ‘with Jewish ethnic and national interests, particularly self-identi¿cation as a Jew, polemics against gentile persecution of Jews, and internal Jewish polemics’. 54 The exhortation to cleave to Levi and Judah that runs throughout the Testaments would be read, ¿rst, as a warning against the division of the kingdom after the reign of Solomon and the departure from the ‘authorized’ cult located in the Southern Kingdom, in the Jerusalem Temple. Throughout the reviews of history, ample attention is given to internal Jewish affairs, particularly disaffection with the current state of the priesthood. The hope for future restoration for the whole people of Israel is cast in terms of ‘righting’ this historical wrong, with Levi and Judah emerging at the center of a restored, uni¿ed Israel. They give voice to the hope that God’s future interventions will include the defeat of Israel’s enemies (T. Sim. 6.3-4); where consideration is given to the conversion of the nations to the worship of the One God, it is always alongside and in relationship to ethnic Israel, whose identity and boundaries are never lost to view. The Testament of Judah closes with a vision of Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and the patriarchs rising again to life to be chiefs over their tribes and of the reversal of all ills: There will be one people of the Lord with one language; And there will be no spirit of error of Beliar any more, For he will be thrown into the ¿re for ever. And those who have died in grief will rise again in joy, And those who are in penury for the Lord’s sake will be made rich, And those who are in want will eat their ¿ll, And those who are weak will receive strength, And those who have been put to death for the Lord’s sake will awaken to life. And the harts of Jacob will run with gladness, And the eagles of Israel will Ày with joy. (T. Jud. 25.3-5)

This vision of the future kingdom is strikingly lacking in peculiarly Christian details, and its climactic focus on the destiny of Jacob and 53. See especially T. Levi 10.2-4; 16.1-5. 54. Davila, Provenance, p. 66.

46

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

Israel particularly highlights the ethnic/national concerns of the author. Finally, Levi’s interest in endogamy reÀected in his condemnation of marrying Gentile women and purifying them ‘with an unlawful puri¿cation’ (T. Levi 14.6) voices an inner-Jewish concern and strategy for the preservation of ethnic boundaries. 6. Tradition Criticism Two further questions may help us determine whether or not a text developing Jewish scriptural material is, in fact, of Jewish or Christian origin when obvious ‘signature features’ are lacking or indeterminate. The ¿rst is: Does the text in question develop a topic or ¿gure in ways that are consonant with other known, early Christian texts’ development of the same, or in ways that are contrary to and therefore problematic within early Christian discourse? If the latter, does Christian invention of the Testaments better explain the evidence than Christian redaction (‘domestication’, ‘coopting’) of the same? The second question pertains to the ‘conversations’ reÀected within the particular text: Do the Testaments evidence interaction with identi¿ably Christian traditions, or do they show an awareness, rather, only of pre-Christian Jewish literature? In other words, how can an analysis of the Testaments’ ‘intertexture’ help us locate their origin? To take up the latter question ¿rst, the Testaments betray no acquaintance with early Christian literature. Rather, they reverberate with Genesis, with other Jewish scriptural texts, and with extrabiblical Jewish literature such as Jubilees, 1 Enoch, and literature from Qumran. The expansion of Reuben’s story has much in common with the version found in Jub. 33.1-8, where we also ¿nd Reuben catching sight of Bilhah bathing, entering her tent secretly and laying with her while she is asleep. Judah’s story is developed in ways that recall Jubilees, particularly in regard to the ‘wars’ against foreign and rival tribes, including Esau and his sons (T. Jud. 2.1–7.11; 9.1-8; Jub. 34.19; 37.1–38.14). There are multiple references to books of Enoch (T. Dan 5.6; T. Jud. 18.1; T. Sim. 5.4; T. Naph. 4.1; T. Jos. 9.1; T. Levi 10.5; 14.1; 16.1; T. Benj. 9.1), which emerge as authoritative witnesses to the future rebellion or apostasy of the children of Israel, and the consequences thereof. 55 Reuben blames women as a source of 55. Not all references seem to point to our 1 Enoch, but perhaps to a wider body of Enochic literature.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

47

temptation, speaking of their alluring even the Watchers into fornication (T. Reub. 5.6). While 1 Enoch appears rather to put the full onus on the Watchers themselves, the author of the Testament is still looking to this story to make his point, rather than the story of the Fall (Gen. 3.1-17), as is more typical for Christian authors. Presenting women as active plotters against men’s self-mastery and sexual virtue has more in common with the ethos of Ben Sira than that of the New Testament and Apostolic Fathers. In a manner reminiscent of 1 Enoch 1–5, Naphtali observes how ‘sun, moon, and stars do not change their order’, and his descendants should show the same constancy with regard to ordering their lives according to the law of God. The Gentiles ‘changed their order’ by turning from the worship of the living God to idols; the residents of Sodom ‘changed the order of its nature’; the Watchers ‘also changed the order of their nature’, resulting in the Àood.56 Naphtali desires that his descendants not follow suit (T. Naph. 3.1-5). The Testament of Levi shows clear connections with a pre-Christian, Jewish text, namely Aramaic Levi.57 Extant fragments of Aramaic Levi provide remarkable parallels with T. Levi 11-13, particularly in regard to the chronology of Levi’s life and the births of his children, as well as to several of his instructions, for example the emphasis on teaching literacy to the descendants of Levi. While Hollander and de Jonge caution against assuming that the author of the Testament of Levi used the Aramaic traditions about Levi that we just happen to have discovered, since archaeological chance plays a huge part here, they are also prepared to regard the Aramaic Levi texts as kin to material that the author of the Testament of Levi used and incorporated, and to employ synoptic comparison where the material overlaps to inquire into the

56. The examples of Sodom and the Watchers presumably refer to the transgression of the boundaries between angels and human beings in regard to intercourse. This is certainly the interpretation given in Jude 6-7. 57. In a conference paper (‘Levi in Aramaic Levi and in the Testament of Levi’, http://orion.mscc huji.ac.il/symposiums/2nd/papers/deJonge97 html.), Marinus de Jonge argues that the medieval Aramaic fragments discovered in the Genizah of a synagogue in Cairo (the same repository that gave the modern world its ¿rst glimpses of the Hebrew original of Ben Sira and the ‘Covenant of Damascus’) and the fragments of an Aramaic Levi document found at Qumran ultimately all go back to the same original composition. The Cambridge fragments of Aramaic Levi are provided in Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, pp. 466-68.

48

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

method and purpose of the author of the Greek Testament of Levi.58 Similarly, Naphtali’s testament opens with an account of the genealogy of Bilhah and Zilpah that is found elsewhere, in extant literature, only among the Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q215 1.2-5). The Testaments’ anthropology, which prominently features various ‘spirits’ that invade the person for good or for ill, most closely resembles the ‘two spirits’ of error and truth so prominent in Qumran literature (as, e.g., 1QS 3.13-4.26, though literary dependence is not hereby suggested). The world of ‘textual conversations’ within the Testaments remains very much a pre-Christian Jewish world. The early Christian pseudepigraphon known as 5 Ezra (2 Esd. 1–2), dating from the mid-second century CE, provides an informative contrast. While it contains no explicitly Christian content, 59 it nevertheless clearly echoes the language of speci¿c passages in the Gospel of Matthew and in Revelation, showing that these texts were part of the thought-world of the author, thereby locating the author within the Christian community. The author of 5 Ezra saw no problem with ‘anticipating’ Christian texts (i.e. through intertextual resonances) in a text attributed to Ezra, the sixth-century BCE scribe. If Christians had composed the Testaments, especially after the ¿rst century and the broadening dissemination of authoritative Christian writings, would they fail to introduce (consciously or otherwise) echoes of their own formative literature and tradition? This absence, it seems to me, argues for Christian redacting (with the addition of Christian glosses or commentary), not composition, of the Testaments.60 58. Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, pp. 23-24. 59. Some might object that the reference to the ‘Son of God’ in 5 Ezra 2.47 is distinctively Christian and marks the work as such, but the messiah is also referred to as God’s son throughout 4 Ezra (= 2 Esd. 3–14). See especially 4 Ezra 7.28-29; 13.32, 37, 52). The motif of God’s rejecting the people’s ‘festal days and new moons and circumcisions of the Àesh’ (5 Ezra 1.31) is meaningful within Christian discourse, to be sure, but it is also not foreign to Israelite prophecy (see Isa. 1.13-14; Jer. 9.25). Notably, violence against God’s people is the cause for this rejection in both Isaiah and 5 Ezra. 60. Two expressions merit further discussion here. T. Levi 6.11 closely resembles 1Thess 2.16, both in context and in wording: both speak of God’s wrath coming upon an enemy of God’s people ‘at last’. Hollander and de Jonge (Commentary, p. 147), however, argue that mss. b and h preserve the more original wording, with the other mss. showing the inÀuence of 1 Thess. 2.16 (an instance of Christian scribal harmonization of the text to phrases in the New Testament). Moreover, the expression itself could have been derived independently from LXX Num. 12.9; 2 Chron. 19.2; 25.15;

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

49

It is not, however, merely the case that the Testaments fail to resonate with known early Christian texts. They also contradict early Christian discourse in surprising ways at a number of points. To consider a less weighty example, the Testaments persistently articulate a different vision for the leadership of the twelve tribes in God’s eschatological future. The expectation throughout the Testaments is that the patriarchs themselves would rise to life to govern their tribes in God’s future (T. Sim. 6.7; T. Levi 18.14; T. Jud. 25.1; T. Zeb. 10.14; T. Ben. 10.6-10). This contradicts the probably authentic saying of Jesus that his own disciples would sit enthroned governing the twelve tribes when God’s kingdom comes (Mt. 19.28),61 and stands also in tension with the place accorded to these same twelve apostles in the New Jerusalem in another stream of early Christian tradition (Rev. 21.14). 28.9; 32.26; Ps. 78[77].21, 31; Zech. 7.12 (citations given in Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, p. 147). Second, the expression ‘sin unto death’ (B NBSUJB FJK RB OBUPO, T. Iss. 7.1) is very similar to an expression found in an early Christian text (B NBSUJB QSP@K RB OBUPO, 1 Jn 5.16), but the formulation may again have been developed independently from the frequent correlation of ‘sin’ with ‘death’ in Jewish texts, as for example the ‘death-bearing sin’ of Num. 18.22, or, more strikingly, the ‘sin unto death’ of Jub. 26.34 (see also 21.22; 33.18). 61. The saying has the support of the criterion of embarrassment insofar as Judas is included here with no quali¿cation (such as we ¿nd in Jn 17.12). Second, the episode in Acts in which Matthias is selected to ¿ll up the number twelve after Judas’ defection presupposes a pre-Easter tradition about the importance of there being twelve with a view to some future role. As the ‘Twelve’ as such do not play an important role in the early church apart from the occasional reference (e.g. 1 Cor. 15.5), such that early Christians would invent (problematic) sayings about their eschatological role, this tradition is likely to have come from Jesus himself. See W.D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. III. Matthew XIX–XXVIII (ICC; London: T. & T. Clark, 2004), p. 58; E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), p. 100; T.W. Manson, The Sayings of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1957), p. 217; Craig S. Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), p. 249. The Jesus Seminar designates the saying as inauthentic (Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997], pp. 222-23), but this judgment is based on the Seminar’s a priori position that Jesus did not proclaim an apocalyptic/eschatological message, and, in particular, that all sayings about the ‘Son of Man/Adam’ are ‘the creation of the Christian community’. If ever a phrase met the criterion of dissimilarity in regard to early Christian usage (i.e. outside the body of Jesus sayings), it is ‘Son of Man’.

50

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

A weightier example is the elevation of Levi throughout the Testaments, and the genealogical connection between Levi and the future priest under whom, in conjunction with Judah, God’s future for Israel would be realized. Given early Christian discourse about the priesthood of Jesus and the ways in which it is legitimated, it seems to me impossible to conceive of a Christian composing a collection of texts that would work so hard to redeem Levi (who, together with Simeon, stood under Jacob’s curse and was passed over in favor of Judah; see Gen. 49.5-12), when other Christian leaders had already found perfectly suf¿cient grounds upon which to legitimate Jesus’ high priesthood other than the invention of a genetic link between Levi and Jesus (alongside the generally acknowledged link between Judah and Jesus).62 The genealogies of Jesus found in Matthew and Luke trace Jesus’ lineage back to Judah (Mt. 1.2-3; Lk. 3.33). John the Seer speaks of Jesus under the guise of ‘the lion from the tribe of Judah’ (Rev. 5.5), betraying a complete lack of interest in Levi and any connection between a messiah and that tribe. Paul accepts this Judahite lineage by virtue of af¿rming Jesus’ descent from David (Rom. 1.3). The one author who indirectly introduces priestly branches into Jesus’ extended family tree (Lk. 1.5) makes no explicit claims about the degree of Mary’s relationship to Elisabeth, and therefore Jesus’ connection to a priestly line. Most tellingly, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews explicitly af¿rms Jesus’ descent from Judah and acknowledges his lack of any genealogical pedigree for priesthood through Levi’s line. Indeed, this author believes it to be ‘well known’ (QSP EIMPO) ‘that our Lord sprang up from Judah, in reference to which tribe Moses said nothing about priests’ (Heb. 7.14). The author of Hebrews solves the problem not by inventing a genealogical connection through Mary, but by appealing to an oracle of God that would legitimate a non-levitical priesthood, ¿xing upon Ps. 110.4: ‘The Lord has sworn, and will not change his mind: you are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek’. An appeal to Ps. 110.4 is contrary to an appeal to genealogical descent from Levi, at least in Christian discourse as represented by Hebrews, for the eternal priest must come, according to this text, from an entirely different line than 62. This reversal of the biblical tradition about Jacob’s judgment on Simeon and Levi appears also in Judith and Jubilees, texts reÀective of ‘boundary-maintaining Judaism’ (see Jdt 9.2, 4; Jub. 30.3, 18-20).

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

51

the line of Levi. The rejection of Levi and elevation of Judah in Genesis 49 is much more conducive to early Christian discourse with its promotion of the priest after the order of Melchizedek, the priestly messiah and king from the line of Judah, as attested by every passage concerning Jesus’ genealogy in the New Testament. The concerted effort to elevate the priesthood (Levi) over any other line would be quite foreign to early Christian interests and strategies. Early Christians could co-opt this kind of material, but would scarcely have invented it.63 7. Hyper-Christian Readings of the Testaments An important, and often overlooked, aspect of this discussion pertains to the careful identi¿cation of what truly constitutes Christian material in the Testaments. Scholars are often content to be more impressionistic in regard to this question: if a passage seems to resonate with something read in the New Testament or something that can be predicated of Jesus, then that passage must be Christian in origin. Lack of diligence here leads, in turn, to augmenting the impression that Christian material is pervasive and more integral to the Testaments than truly is the case. The Testament of Judah, which is almost entirely at home within a non-Christian Jewish milieu, expresses this vision for God’s eschatological agent: After this a star will come forth for you out of Jacob [see Num. 24.17] in peace, and a man will arise from among my descendants like the sun of righteousness [see Mal. 4.2], living with people in meekness and righteousness, and no sin will be found in him. (2) And the heavens will be opened over him, to pour out the blessing of the spirit of the Holy Father [see Mal. 3.10]; and he will pour out the spirit of grace upon you.

63. Hollander and de Jonge (Commentary, p. 67) suggest that one of the functions of the Testaments in their Christian setting is to ‘provide arguments which may be used in discussions between Christians and Jews in which the former try to convince the latter with the help of the exhortations and warnings of their own patriarchs’. This is an interesting hypothesis indeed, though a dif¿cult one to prove without the existence of some text in which a church father is actually using the Testaments in this way. Nevertheless, if the Testaments with their exhortations were not already known in Jewish circles as extant Jewish texts, but were rather purely the invention of Christians, how persuasive would the Testaments be in this proposed setting?

52

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013) (3) And you will be his sons [and daughters] in truth, And live in accordance with his commands from ¿rst to last. (4) This is the shoot of God Most High, And this the fountain that gives life to all humankind. (T. Jud. 24.1-4)

The topic of the ‘sinlessness’ of God’s agent automatically suggests that the passage contains distinctively Christian material since, from the earliest period, Christians stressed Jesus’ sinlessness (see, e.g., 2 Cor. 5.21; Heb. 4.15; 7.26-27; 1 Pet. 2.22). The Psalms of Solomon, however, already feature the sinlessness of God’s anointed one within a Jewish messianic paradigm: ‘And he himself is pure from sin, so that he may rule a great people, that he may rebuke rulers, and remove sinners by the might of his word’ (Pss. Sol. 17.36). Christians spoke of the ful¿llment of the prophecy of a ‘star’ coming forth from Jacob (Num. 24.17) in Jesus, but the images of ‘star’ and ‘scepter’ from that prophetic text ¿gured prominently in numerous Jewish messianic texts.64 Later Christians ¿nding this language in the Testaments would naturally have tried to read—and through their editorial work help others read—the Testaments as Christocentric prophecy, but this does not necessarily reÀect the signi¿cance that the original author would have attached to this vision. The Testament of Judah 24.2 is read as a Christian reminiscence of the baptism of Jesus,65 at which, according to Matthew, ‘the heavens were opened [to him], and he saw the spirit of God descending like a dove and coming upon him’ (Mt. 3.16-17; cf. Lk. 3.21-22). But this is not the only plausible frame of reference. The prophet Malachi spoke of God’s promise to open the heavens and pour down blessing upon Israel (Mal. 3.10). In the context of Malachi, this promise is preceded by God’s purifying the descendants of Levi to function as holy, effective priests (Mal. 3.1-14), a major topic of the preceding Testament of Levi. It is also in this context that God promises to make ‘the sun of righteousness’ to rise upon all who revere God’s name (Mal. 4.2; cf. T. Jud. 24.1). This passage in T. Jud. 24.1-6 plausibly represents a non-Christian Jewish messianic reading of Malachi’s ‘sun of righteousness’ as a pure human agent under whom God would open the heavens and upon whom God would pour out God’s blessing—now 64. See Collins, The Scepter and the Star, passim. 65. Thus Marinus de Jonge, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Study of Their Text, Composition, and Origin (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2nd edn, 1975 [1st edn, 1953]), pp. 89-90; Kugler, Testaments, p. 60.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

53

further speci¿ed as God’s spirit (perhaps under the inÀuence of Isa. 11.1-2)—for the bene¿t of the whole people, in whose time the promises that Israel would be God’s sons and daughters and ful¿ll God’s covenant law reliably, so as to experience its blessings consistently, would come to pass. It is only our own location on the recent side of the composition of Matthew and Luke that presses the comparison with Jesus’ baptism upon us, while other plausible frames of reference existed in the period before Jesus.66 Issachar promises his descendants that, if they follow his example of love for God and neighbor, ‘every spirit of Beliar will turn and run, and nothing that wicked people can do will prevail against you; and you will gain mastery over every wild beast, since you have with you the God of heaven, sharing human company [lit., “walking with people”], in simplicity of heart’ (T. Iss. 7.7). Charles suggested that the clause ‘walking with people’ was a Christian interpolation.67 However, the description of God ‘walking with people’ who do good and exhibit simplicity of heart is not distinctively incarnational language. It is a reminiscence—and therefore restoration—of the state of Eden, where God ‘walked’ to seek out the company of those ¿rst human beings God had created, who, in their simplicity, could ‘walk’ with God. Moses asks God to continue to ‘walk’ with the Hebrews despite their waywardness (Exod. 33.16; 34.9) and assures Joshua that God will be ‘the one who walks with you’ (P TVNQPSFVP NFOPK NFUB@ TPV, Deut. 31.8). The entirety of the Testament of Issachar, down to this particular phrase, can be fully understood within the framework of non-Christian Judaism.68 Zebulon urges his descendants ‘to keep the Lord’s commands, and to show mercy to your neighbor and be compassionate towards all people’ (T. Zeb. 5.1), because ‘as a person treats his or her neighbor, so also will the Lord treat that person’ (T. Zeb. 5.3). He repeats this admonition toward the conclusion of his testament: 66. Kee (‘Testaments’, p. 801) similarly does not regard anything in this entire paragraph as distinctively Christian material, presenting it as a messianic development of Num. 24.17, Isa. 11.1-2, and other passages read eschatologically during the Second Temple period. 67. Charles, Greek Versions, p. xlix. 68. Several Greek manuscripts make the ¿nal clause a characteristic of the people who attain victory: ‘you will gain mastery over every wild beast, since you have with you the God of heaven, and since you walk with people in simplicity of heart’ (Charles, Greek Versions, p. 115). Kee (‘Testaments’, p. 804) adopts this reading.

54

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013) Be compassionate and merciful to everyone, that the Lord may be compassionate and merciful to you too. Indeed, in the last days the Lord sends his compassion on the earth, and wherever he ¿nds a merciful heart, he makes his dwelling there. For just in so far as a person has compassion on his or her neighbor, so has the Lord on him or her. (T. Zeb. 8.1-3)

Hollander and de Jonge read this as explicitly incarnational, and therefore Christian, language: ‘The author clearly thinks of God coming upon the earth in the form of a man, sc. Jesus Christ’. 69 The text speaks, however, of God visiting God’s people with compassion, emphasizing an eschatological (compassionate) reversal of their state. That God will dwell wherever God ¿nds a compassionate heart speaks against an incarnational reading, since Jesus was limited to one place at any one time. This is, rather, a statement about the omnipresent God dwelling with, and bringing God’s eschatological manifestation of divine compassion to, people of compassion—an eschatological rationale, moreover, for heeding the exhortation to show compassion. Nothing in this context, then, supports a Christocentric reading of 8.2, let alone the assertion that the author of this line was Christian. Naphtali’s testament also speaks about the eschatological manifestation of God’s ‘compassion’. After a second apostasy, Israel will suffer a second scattering ‘over the whole surface of the earth, until the Lord’s compassion comes’ (T. Naph. 4.1-5). Unlike T. Zeb. 8.2, where the coming of the Lord’s compassion is not linked to the appearance of any human agent, T. Naph. 4.5 appends an interpretation of the ‘Lord’s compassion’ as indicating ‘a man that does righteousness and deals mercifully with all those who are far off and those who are near by’. Hollander and de Jonge read this as ‘clearly referring to the coming of Jesus Christ for the nations and Israel’,70 and, indeed, they are on much ¿rmer ground here than in regard to the Testament of Zebulon. However, this secondary intrusion need not have been introduced by a Christian scribe, nor be taken to represent a Christian perspective. The prophet Isaiah, who lent this passage the idea of someone bringing the word of peace ‘to those who are far off and to those who are near’ (Isa. 57.19), had lauded Cyrus, king of Persia, as the righteous instrument of God’s compassionate deliverance of God’s people. The passage in the Testament of Naphtali could similarly refer to any human ¿gure through whom God’s deliverance would come. 69. Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, p. 269; also Kugler, Testaments, p. 79. 70. Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, p. 56.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

55

The author of the Testament of Naphtali addresses not merely the scattering of Israel and Judah in 721 BCE (Israel) and 587 BCE (Judah), but names a second experience of the curses of Deuteronomy when, after their return from exile, the Jewish people again abandon the Torah. It is impossible to bypass the Hellenization crisis of 175–164 BCE and its disastrous consequences for Jerusalem in particular and Judea in general. Even though it did not involve widespread deportation, the oppression of Judea under Antiochus IV and his local representatives came to be spoken of as a new exile in Jewish memory. The author of this testament may have looked to a member of the Hasmonean house, which had led the nation to political and religious independence for the ¿rst time again since 587 BCE, as the ‘man that does righteousness and deals mercifully’, through whom God’s compassion was poured out again upon Israel. This would comport well with the Hasmonean context generally associated with the origins of the Testaments and its early stages of editing (with the rise of disaffection toward this new dynasty). Naphtali turns to predictions concerning the good future that God will bring about through Levi and Judah: Instruct your children, therefore, that they keep united with Levi and Judah; for through Judah will salvation come to Israel, and in him will Jacob be blessed. For through his [i.e. Judah’s] tribe God will appear, dwelling among human beings on the earth, to save the race of Israel; and he will gather together the righteous of the Gentiles (or, ‘the nations’). If you do what is good, my children, both humans and angels will bless you; and God will be glori¿ed through you among the Gentiles. (T. Naph. 8.2-4)

In T. Naph. 8.2, ‘salvation’ is said to spring up from the tribe of Judah alone (even though Levi is mentioned with Judah in the preceding verse). Scholars have taken this emphasis on Judah as a sign of Christian composition 71 or Christian editing, 72 given the connections

71. Hollander and de Jonge (Commentary, p. 317) claim that ‘Judah is mentioned alone, clearly because the passage announces the coming of Jesus Christ’. But Hollander and de Jonge also contend that references to Levi’s descendant (e.g. in the Testament of Levi) refer just as ‘clearly’ to Jesus, so their explanation of the mention of Judah here as opposed to Levi loses considerable force. 72. Charles (Greek Versions, p. 155) regards ‘through Judah’ as a sign of Christian scribal activity, replacing an original ‘through them’, that is ‘through Levi and Judah’. In several other passages in the Testaments, God’s future deliverance is expected to emerge from both tribes (T. Levi 2.11; T. Dan 5.4; T. Gad 8.1; T. Jos.

56

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

between Jesus and Judah in the New Testament. However, this passage accurately reÀects the pre-Christian thought of Jub. 31.12-20. Upon his deathbed, Isaac takes Levi with his right hand, indicating his superiority, and Judah with his left hand. Isaac establishes Levi in the priesthood with all of its duties, and then turns to Judah, however, and says, ‘In you shall be Jacob’s help, and in you shall be found Israel’s salvation’ (Jub. 31.19). With no prejudice against Levi, who is elevated beyond Judah in Jubilees as in the Testaments, Judah is more speci¿cally named as the vehicle through which God’s political deliverance will come on Israel’s behalf. Some read the promise of God ‘dwelling among human beings on the earth’ in this passage as a Christian interpolation.73 That God should ‘appear’ and effect Israel’s deliverance reÀects both the diction and the themes of Jewish eschatology (see Ps. 102.16; Isa. 40.5; 60.2). The promise of God dwelling with human beings, moreover, is rooted in the Torah and the Hebrew prophets (compare Lev. 26.11-12; Ezek. 37.27). Once again, the incarnational lens is one that modern scholars (and, no doubt, earlier Christian readers) bring to the text, rather than a necessary background for the text. In the Testament of Gad, Gad and Judah sell Joseph for 30 pieces of gold (T. Gad 5.6-11), whereas Joseph is sold for 20 silver coins in the MT version of Gen. 37.28. The change in value is not, however, the result of a Christian author’s or editor’s attempt to make of Joseph a precursor of Jesus.74 Such a possibility is belied by the fact that Joseph is sold for 30 gold coins here, rather than 30 silver coins, as was Jesus. The change in currency from silver to gold coins is the result of the inÀuence of the Septuagint version of Gen. 37.28, where Joseph was sold for 20 gold coins. The author of the Testament of Gad increases this to 30 coins to allow for Judah and Gad’s embezzlement of 10

19.7). Nevertheless, Judah’s tribe appears to be singled out for a special role in T. Sim. 7.1, and Levi’s certainly in T. Reub. 6.8-12; T. Levi 18. It is equally plausible that it is in the blurring of these roles, and the inclusion of Levi alongside Judah in the passages speaking of deliverance, or Judah alongside Levi in passages speaking about sovereignty, that we ¿nd the evidence of redactional activity, whether in the interest of pro-Hasmonean ideology or later Christian interest in joining Levi and Judah together as progenitors of Jesus. 73. See, e.g., Kee, ‘Testaments’, p. 813. 74. R.H. Charles, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: Translated from the Editor’s Greek Text (London: Blackwell, 1908), p. 151; de Jonge, Testaments, p. 101.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

57

coins before showing the 20 remaining coins (the of¿cial price in public knowledge, hence the scriptural record, of the sale) to their brothers. Gad warns that hatred distorts one’s ability to assess matters accurately: ‘it makes small things out to be great, represents darkness as light, calls what is sweet bitter, and breeds slander and wrath’ (T. Gad 5.1). As a result, ‘just as love would bring back the dead to life and revoke a death sentence, so hatred would kill those who are alive and allow no one to live who is guilty of even the smallest crime’ (T. Gad 4.6). Robert Kugler ¿nds ‘the reference to Jesus as a miracle worker and redeemer of the lost’ here to be ‘transparent’,75 but this transparency is the result of the reader’s lens. The argumentative purpose of 4.6a (the wish, out of love, to restore the dead to life or nullify a death sentence) is to provide a contrast to the action of hatred upon the human soul in 4.6b (the tendency of hatred to seek to destroy another’s life, often inÀicting harm way out of proportion to the injury), highlighting by antithesis the difference between love and hate. It is not likely to imply a reference to Jesus, as love ‘incarnate’, actually resuscitating the dead (though readers from the period after Jesus’ ministry may always infer what they will). Kugler also reads the reference to Joseph spending ‘three days and three nights’ in the pit (T. Zeb. 4.4) as a detail that ‘is almost certainly meant to make him a type of Jesus’, hence a sign of Christian authorship.76 Early Christian readers would indeed have been inclined to read through such a lens, but this does not in itself point to Christian invention of the text. The exact phrase ‘three days and three nights’ appears twice in the Septuagint. In 1 Sam 30.12, it refers to the length of time that an Egyptian slave had been left in the desert without food or water before David found him. More famously, Jonah was said to have been in the belly of the great ¿sh for ‘three days and three nights’ (Jonah 1.17). A Jewish author might easily have latched upon this phrase, which was closely associated with times of liminality and hardship, in the course of elaborating upon Joseph’s trials without any need for us to posit an intent informed by Christian typology (though it would be amenable to the same later in its reception history).

75. Kugler, Testaments, p. 76. 76. Kugler, Testaments, p. 65.

58

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

Asher, looking beyond Israel’s predicted disobedience, looks ahead to the day on which God will gather his descendants ‘in faith through hope on [God’s] compassion (FVTQMBHYOJB), for the sake of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob’ (T. Ash. 7.7). Robert Kugler claims that the author thus af¿rms that ‘faith in Jesus alone suf¿ces to please God’, since ‘T. Zeb. 8.2 had previously called Jesus God’s compassion (TQMB HYOPO)’. Therefore, ‘lawkeeping, at least in this instance, is not necessary for salvation; faith in God’s compassion, Jesus, suf¿ces’.77 Such a Christocentric reading is, however, unwarranted. The Testament of Zebulon 8.2 does not support the identi¿cation of Jesus as God’s compassion, which already invalidates Kugler’s argument. He had also mistranslated the preposition EJB in T. Ash. 7.7 as ‘through hope’ when the accusative form of ‘hope’ would rather require ‘on account of the hope of his compassion’. The second EJB clause, ‘on account of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’, provides by way of apposition an explanation of the basis for this hope: it is God’s faithfulness to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (and not anything attributed to Jesus’ intervention) that ultimately provides the basis for Israel’s hope of being gathered and restored to their land. The absence of any distinctive Christian formulation or idea in this verse is almost as striking as Kugler’s Christianizing reading of it. 8. Some More Complicated Passages in the Testaments Testament of Simeon 7.1-2 The Testament of Simeon closes with a ¿nal exhortation to honor Levi and Judah on the basis of God’s future acts of intervention on behalf of all Israel through them: And now, my children, obey Levi, and through Judah you will be redeemed. And do not exalt yourselves against these two tribes, because from them the salvation of God will arise for you. For the Lord will raise up from Levi someone as a high priest and from Judah someone as king, God and man. This one will save all the Gentiles and the race of Israel. (T. Sim. 7.1-2, Hollander and de Jonge’s translation)

77. Kugler, Testaments, p. 79. De Jonge and Hollander (Commentary, p. 269) also suggest that ‘faith in Jesus’ is in view, though they do not present any argument for equating Jesus with God’s ‘compassion’.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

59

Hollander and de Jonge assert that this passage looks forward to one messiah, who is both high priest from Levi’s line and king from Judah’s line. They ¿nd support for this reading in that the following clause refers only to ‘this one’ (PV\UPK) who will save Israel, thus a single redeemer ¿gure. They further af¿rm that this is proof of the Testaments’ Christian origins, identifying ‘this one’ as Jesus, comparing the sentiment here with one expressed by Irenaeus: ‘He was born as king and priest from Levi and Judah, according to the Àesh’.78 De Jonge and Hollander are correct that Christians after Irenaeus would read the Testament this way, but is this the best representation of the text’s original form and meaning for its original audience? The most distinctively Christian material is again only loosely connected to its context, and also at odds with it. Both Charles and Kee mark ‘God and man’ as a Christian gloss,79 and it is indeed easy to imagine how a Christian copyist would thus give greater speci¿cation to the high priest and the king through whom the promised deliverance would come, for, from a Christian point of view, that high priest and king was one and the same person, Jesus (see, e.g., Heb. 4.14-16; 1 Tim. 6.15; Rev. 17.14; 19.16). Without this gloss, the passage is thoroughly at home in Second Temple Jewish eschatology, looking forward to a high priest from Levi and a king from Judah as two end time agents through whom God would restore Israel. Saving ‘all the Gentiles’ appears here to be a Christian addition as well, in keeping with the universal outlook of Christian eschatology. This is all the more likely in light of T. Sim. 6.3-4, which celebrates the eradication (rather than the conversion or redemption) of several ‘Gentile’ nations, including the Canaanites, Amalekites, Cappadocians, Hittites, and the nations of Ham. While a Jewish author could envision the eschatological conversion of the nations to the worship of the One, true God, he or she would not place the nations ahead of Israel in God’s plan, as here. 80 Even Paul, the ‘apostle to the Gentiles’, was emphatic on this very point (Rom. 1.16).

78. Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, p. 126; Irenaeus, Fr. 17. 79. Charles, Greek Versions, p. 25; Kee, ‘Testaments’, p. 787. 80. Charles, Greek Versions, p. 26. Gentiles are also mentioned before Israel in T. Jos. 19.6 and T. Benj. 3.8, in the context of other passages highly suspect on other grounds of being later Christian additions or changes to the text.

60

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

Textual issues are also relevant here. The oldest Greek manuscript (ms. b), the one generally preferred by de Jonge and Hollander, does not read ‘this one (PV\UPK) will save’, but rather ‘thus (PVUXK, “in this manner”) he [i.e. God] will save all the nations and the race of Israel’, referring back to God and God’s plans for saving the race of Israel rather than to either end-time agent. This would represent a thoroughly theocentric eschatology fully consonant with Jewish expectations. But even if the reading ‘this one (PV\UPK) will save’ is correct, the literary context leads us not to read this as an indication that Levi and Judah play exactly the same role (that is, contributing to the begetting of a single person who will hold both of¿ces), but as a claim explicitly and only about the role of the Judahite king in God’s future. The passage had opened with the author making a clear distinction between the obedience due Levi and the promise that redemption will come through Judah (T. Sim. 7.1). The clause ‘this one will save…the race of Israel’ further describes the role of the future king from Judah’s line (through whom redemption comes; cf. Jub. 31.12-20), while others of the Testaments have more to say about the role of the future high priest. Testament of Levi 10.2-4; 14.2-4 The Testament of Levi has been subjected to a good deal of Christian editing, but in several cases these additions can be detected and isolated. In T. Levi 10.2-4, for example, Levi exclaims against his descendants: I am innocent of all your ungodliness and of the sin you will commit at the end of time against the Savior of the world, acting godlessly, leading Israel astray, and stirring up against it great evils from the Lord. And together with the rest of Israel you will sin against the law, so that he will not bear with Jerusalem because of your wickedness, but will tear in two the temple veil so as not to cover your shame. And you will be scattered as captives among the Gentiles and be a reproach and a curse and be trampled under foot. (de Jonge’s translation)

Levi looks ahead to a time when his descendants will contribute to Israel’s apostasy, leading them to ‘sin against the law’, the Torah, the result of which is the destruction of the Temple and the exile, precisely as Deuteronomy predicted. Much has been made about the detail of God’s tearing the veil of the Temple in two as a sign of the testament’s Christian orientation reÀected in this alleged reference to the tradition in Matthew of the

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

61

rending of the Temple curtain at the death of Jesus (Mt. 27.51). 81 However, this alleged echo is more apparent in translation than in the original Greek. Matthew uses the proper term LBUBQFUBTNB to refer to the ‘veil’, the curtain that separates the Holy of Holies from the Holy Place. The author of the Testament of Levi speaks, rather, of the FOEVNB the ‘garment of the temple’, which could be construed as ‘the garment that is the Temple’ (genitive of content), which represents Israel’s honor. This author speaks of the honoring and disgracing of Israel in its national fortunes and, speci¿cally, in the safe preservation of its Temple. The destruction of its Temple is the removal of the ‘garment’ that covers Israel’s shame, or nakedness.82 In its original setting, then, this image referred to the judgment that would come upon Jerusalem and its Temple for in¿delity to the covenant. Early Christians, like recent scholars, would no doubt have read it as a reference to the mysterious events surrounding the death of Jesus, which would have further encouraged them to make the ‘hidden’ Christian message in these Testaments more and more explicit. The phrase ‘against the Savior of the world’, one such scribal gloss, intrudes upon this context as a secondary addition. ‘Sinning against the law’ is the explicit cause of the exile envisioned here, in keeping with the Deuteronomistic framework that runs throughout the collection. In its original context, Levi’s ‘predictions’ might be heard to refer to the destruction of the ¿rst Temple or, possibly, to the conduct of the Hellenizing high priests or the more degenerate Hasmonean high priests, which threatened a new destruction and exile.83 Another such passage is T. Levi 14.2-4, in which Levi acquits Jacob of the evils of his descendants and gives eloquent expression to a very Jewish universalism:

81. See, e.g., Kugler, Testaments, p. 55. 82. Hollander and de Jonge (Commentary, p. 159) do render this as ‘covering’, which is far better than de Jonge’s earlier translation of the word as ‘veil’, with its misleading intertexture in English. T. Benj. 9.4 refers to the rending of the Temple’s BQMXNB, a word of unsure meaning but probably referring to the veil. Here the idea occurs in the midst of a lengthy Christian interpolation. 83. The Deuteronomistic framework was often applied to the fate of the Temple under Antiochus IV and, again, under Pompey the Great, even though neither resulted in actual destruction of the edi¿ce or widespread deportation.

62

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013) Our father Israel will be unsoiled by the ungodliness of the high priests, who will lay their hands upon the Savior of the world. Heaven is unsoiled above the earth, and you are the lights of heaven, as the sun and the moon. What will all the nations do, if you are darkened by ungodliness, and if you bring a curse down upon our race, when on their behalf the light of the law was given among us for the illumination of every person, seeking to kill this one, teaching commandments contrary to the decrees of God? (author’s translation)

What is most striking about this passage is the view of the Jewish Torah articulated therein. It was given as a trust to Israel, with the goal that, by following Torah and thus bearing witness to God’s righteousness in the midst of the world, the light of the law would be extended to every nation. This view is entirely in keeping with the hope expressed by the Hebrew prophets: Israel’s obedience would lead it to ful¿ll its divine calling as a ‘light to the nations’, Torah-observance would be the way in which the blessing of Abraham would extend to many nations.84 The danger inherent in Israel’s disobedience is that the light given for the sake of all the world would be snuffed out. In the history that Levi ‘recalls’, Israel’s disobedience leads in fact to the defaming of God’s name rather than the universal honoring of the God of Israel as the One God (cf. Isa. 52.5). Hollander and de Jonge hear echoes of Jn 1.9 here, where Jesus is celebrated as ‘the light which enlightens every person’. 85 Whereas early Christian readers might make this connection on the basis of their own commitment to their hermeneutical lens for reading Jewish texts, a Christian author would not have created a text that otherwise gives such unambiguous expression to Torah as the light of the world. A Christian scribe has sought to clarify the precise nature of the ‘ungodliness of the high priests’ by adding the phrase ‘who will lay their hands upon the Savior of the world’, and has changed the

84. See, e.g., Isa. 42.6-7; 49.6; 60.1-3; Tob. 13.11; Wis. 18.4. On the law as ‘light’, see also Ps. 119.105; Prov. 6.23; 2 Bar. 17.4; 59.2. A similar conviction may have originally undergirded T. Levi 2.11, a passage beset now with textual dif¿culties. An angelic being promises to Levi that ‘through you and Judah the Lord will appear among [some mss. read “to”] human beings, saving every race of people through them [some mss. read “by” or “in himself”, while some omit]’. God’s manifestation of God’s self in the midst of the Southern Kingdom and its Temple is for the bene¿t of bringing salvation to every nation. 85. Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, pp. 46, 170.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

63

pronoun in another phrase so that now the priests seek ‘to kill this one’ (i.e. Jesus) as opposed to seeking ‘to kill/extinguish this thing’ (i.e. the light of the law), but these changes are insuf¿cient to hide the original meaning of the passage before it fell into his hands. At this point, it is probably the Armenian version that most closely reÀects that original: ‘What will all the nations do if you are plunged into darkness by impiety? Curses will come upon your race, and the light given to you and to every person through the law, this [i.e. the light of the law] you will seek to extinguish and, contrary to it, teach commandments against the righteousness of God’. This passage originally laid out the contribution of the sons of Levi to the disobedience and sinfulness of the nation (giving further speci¿city to those sins in T. Levi 14.5-7, none of which reÀects Christian interests), culminating in the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and the exile to Babylon (T. Levi 15.1-2). The single phrase that awkwardly tries to connect the godlessness of the chief priests with the death of Jesus in T. Levi 14.2 is, again, an intrusion into this more basic Deuteronomistic reÀection on the history of Israel.86

86. T. Levi 16.1-5 would be amenable to a similar analysis. The passage reads: ‘And now I understand in the book of Enoch that you will go astray and profane the priesthood and pollute the sacri¿ces for seventy weeks. And you will set aside the law and discredit the words of the prophets: you will persecute righteous men with a crazy determination and hate the godly and abhor the words of the faithful. And you will brand as a deceiver a man who renews the law in the power of the Most High, unaware of who he is, and you will ¿nally kill him, as you suppose, and through your wickedness bring innocent blood upon your heads. Because of him your sanctuary will be laid waste, leveled to the ground, and polluted. And your land will be unclean; and a curse will rest upon you, and you will be dispersed among the Gentiles until he comes to you and once more receives you in pity through faith and water.’ The ‘prediction’ of the priests’ general opposition to prophets and other righteous critics (16.2) gave a Christian scribe the perfect opportunity to insert a verse about their opposition to the prophet par excellence, Jesus (16.3). If this verse is omitted, the whole paragraph once again looks quite plainly to the destruction of the Temple in 587 BCE. The ¿nal four words have the character of yet another Christian gloss that has made its way into the main text. Charles (Greek Versions, p. xlix) raises the possibility that the passage about the death of the renewer of the law refers to ‘the murder of some Jewish worthy’ from the Hasmonean period. This was later read by Christians as a reference to Jesus, which again encouraged further embellishment (for example, the addition then of ‘as you suppose’ to insinuate that this teacher’s murder was not ultimately effective). The reference to seventy weeks in T. Levi 16.1 suggests that, at some level, Dan. 9.24-27 lies at the heart of the inspiration of this reÀection,

64

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

Testament of Asher 7.1-5 The Christian material in T. Asher 7.1-5 is truly dif¿cult to untangle from its context, and recovery of a Jewish original is highly problematic. The testament ends with predictions of Israel’s disloyalty to the covenant, its consequent experience of the covenant curses of desolation of, and exile from, the land, and God’s restoration: Do not, children, be like Sodom, which did not recognize the Lord’s angels and perished for ever. For I know that you will sin and be handed over to your enemies, and your land will be desolated and your holy places destroyed, and you will be scattered to the four corners of the earth and be dispersed and despised like water that is useless, until the Most High looks with favor on the earth. And he will come himself as a man, eating and drinking with human beings and quietly breaking the head of the dragon through water:87 in this way he will save Israel and all the Gentiles (or ‘nations’)—God playing the part of a man. 88 Tell this, then, to your children, so that they do not disbelieve him. For I have read in the heavenly tablets that you certainly will disbelieve him and you will undoubtedly treat him shamefully [or, ‘you will certainly act impiously toward him’],89 and pay no attention to the law of God but only to the commands of human beings. Because of this you will be scattered like my brothers Gad and Dan, who will forget their own lands and tribe and language. But the Lord will gather you together in faith because of the hope of his compassion, for Abraham and Isaac and Jacob’s sake. (T. Ash. 7.1-7)

This single paragraph in the Testament of Asher has some obviously Christian material, the most blatant being the claims that God ‘will come himself as a man, eating and drinking with human beings’ and will be found ‘playing the part of a man’. The reference to eating and drinking is unmistakably incarnational language. The original, preChristian wording of this paragraph indeed lies beyond our grasp, but R.H. Charles and H.C. Kee are probably correct to posit an original prediction of God’s coming to break the power of Satan (the dragon) though notably it is not developed in any way that reÀects early Christian interpretation of Dan. 9.24-27 (Hollander and de Jonge, Commentary, p. 175). 87. Some mss. read ‘upon the water’, as in Ps. 74.13, the ultimate source for this imagery. 88. This last clause is omitted in one Greek manuscript (ms. a). 89. De Jonge’s translation tilts the text more toward overt Christian resonances. Charles records no variants in the Greek, Armenian, or Slavonic traditions that would support ‘treat him shamefully’, with its obvious resonances with the passion of Jesus, over against the more neutral ‘act impiously’.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

65

and usher in God’s reign, a thoroughly Jewish conception (developed, perhaps, through an eschatological reading of Ps. 74.12-15). 90 The remainder of the passage, then, records the patriarch’s attempt to stave off the almost inevitable disobedience of future generations of Israelites by giving this instruction, despite the fact that their future disbelief of God’s promises and impiety toward God’s commandments is already inscribed ‘on the heavenly tablets’.91 Testament of Joseph 19.1-12 Joseph concludes his testament with an extended vision in which patriarchs, tribes, and other ¿gures are represented by animals (stags, lambs/rams, bulls, and so forth) which are sometimes transformed into other kinds of animals. This portion bears strong similarities to the socalled Animal Apocalypse of 1 Enoch 85–90, where bulls and rams also ¿gure prominently, and where animals morph into other kinds of animals and into human ¿gures. The Testament of Joseph 19.3-7 does not survive in any of the Greek manuscripts, and is necessarily supplied from the Armenian.92 It is striking that we need to turn to this version to supply a major lacuna in every extant Greek manuscript, when scholars favoring a Christian origin for the Testaments consistently de-value the Armenian on the basis of its frequent omission of material, attributing all such omissions to the scribe’s carelessness rather than the state of the Greek text the scribe was translating.

90. Charles, Greek Versions, p. l; Kee, ‘Testaments’, p. 818. 91. The opening reference to the example of Sodom may also reÀect Christian shaping of this passage. In its present form, the bene¿ts of deliverance seem to depend upon the right reception of God’s agent, indeed, the God-made-Human. The citation of Sodom as a historical example within the exhortation, and the description of their essential sin as failing to recognize the messengers of God, already prepares for such a reading, rather than for a warning in general against the kind of covenant disobedience that the patriarch fears for his descendants. 92. The translation is by Michael Stone, in The Armenian Version of the Testament of Joseph: Introduction, Critical Edition, and Translation (SBL Texts and Translations Series, 6: Pseudepigrapha Series, 5; Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1975), pp. 53-55. Hollander and de Jonge (Commentary, p. 407) argue that Armenian T. Jos. 19.3-7 is a secondary addition, but this Àies in the face of their principal argument against the value of the Armenian text, namely its alleged increasing tendency to omit material—and this in increasing volume as the task of translation proceeded. This tendency would surely argue against 19.3-7 being an expansion.

66

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

The opening verses relate the Assyrian and the Babylonian exiles and their reversal, as the twelve tribes are restored to their lands. The following verses are more dif¿cult to decipher, though the elevation of ‘the horns of the fourth bull’ probably aligns with the Testaments’ elevation of Judah, the fourth son of Jacob. The ¿rst verse that appears to have distinctive Christian material, T. Jos. 19.8, shows signs of having been edited. ‘Judah’, presented symbolically in T. Jos. 19.6, is suddenly ‘demythologized’ and named. Up to this point, also, there have been no human ¿gures, so nothing prepares the reader for the appearance of a ‘virgin wearing a linen robe’.93 Given the other transformations of animals into lambs in the passage, Charles reasons that the Jewish original version told of the triumphant calf turning into a victorious ram. This ram is joined by a lion (perhaps a new symbol for Judah, or the scion from Judah elsewhere predicted in the Testaments) and defeats all who attack the Àock of Israel. Again, while the original wording of this verse cannot be precisely recovered, the pre-Christian contours are not dif¿cult to detect. The second obvious instance of Christian material appears in the Greek textual tradition of T. Jos. 19.11, where we ¿nd truly distinctive Christian language such as ‘Lamb of God’ and saving both Gentiles and Israel ‘by grace’: And these things shall come to pass at their proper time, in the last days. So you must, my children, observe the Lord’s commands, and honor Judah and Levi, for from them shall come to you the Lamb of God, who by grace will save all the Gentiles and Israel. For his kingdom is an eternal kingdom, that shall not be shaken. But my kingdom among you shall come to an end like a watchman’s hut in a fruit-garden, for after the summer it will disappear. (T. Jos. 19.10-12)

The Armenian textual tradition of 19.10-12, however, has two glaring omissions at this point—variants that, in de Jonge’s opinion, ‘have not been thought worth recording’, despite the fact that he had to turn to the Armenian entirely for T. Jos. 19.3-7 as the only witness.94 The ¿rst variant omits the obvious Christian interpolation in 19.11; the second omits reference to the kingdom of this savior ¿gure being an everlasting one. The order of naming Judah and Levi also stands in tension

93. So, rightly, Charles, Greek Versions, p. 210. 94. De Jonge, ‘Testaments’, in APOT, p. 593.

DESILVA

Witnesses to Pre-Christian Judaism

67

with the general tendency to elevate Levi above Judah, and in this case it seems more likely that ‘Levi’ is the secondary addition, since the preceding vision has highlighted the role of the ‘fourth bull’, Judah, in effecting God’s end-time deliverance. While this is generally portrayed in more generic terms in the Testaments, a Christian editor has here taken the opportunity, inspired by the animal imagery, to de¿ne the agent of God’s deliverance more precisely—the ‘Lamb of God’ of Christian proclamation. Scholars have not yet taken adequate account of the absence of these Christian glosses from a major textual tradition independent of, and likely dependent on Greek texts prior to, the extant Greek witnesses. 9. Conclusion Should we use the Testaments as a window into Second Temple-period Judaism and, thus, as a window into the ethical and eschatological thought-world that contributed to early Christianity, or should we rather read them merely as a product of early Christianity? The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs in its present form is a Christian text preserved within Christian communities, and there is indeed value in studying them as windows into the concerns of the Christians who preserved them. However, the impossibility of establishing the exact wording of the original, Jewish form of the Testaments with methodological precision at some points has led some scholars only to value reading the Testaments as a Christian document. This position moves well beyond scholarly caution into a counsel of despair. While we may not recover with certainty the ipsissima verba of the pre-Christian version of the Testaments, we do not need therefore to abandon the Testaments as a witness to pre-Christian Jewish reÀection on ethics, eschatology, and the stories of the patriarchs themselves. There are suf¿cient text-critical and literary-critical grounds to certify the fact of Christian glossing and expanding, if not the precise extent. There are also suf¿cient traditional-critical grounds for af¿rming that the Testaments are best explained as a Jewish text that was later adapted to Christian interests than an original Christian composition. Scholars have also tended to exaggerate the extent of the Christian content of the Testaments, not suf¿ciently recognizing the extent to which their own awareness of New Testament traditions has

68

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

colored their reading of the Testaments and, therefore, their assessment of the original author’s or authors’ awareness of early Christian traditions and interest in the Christian messiah.95

95. Kugler (Testaments, p. 38) too con¿dently asserts that de Jonge’s ‘insistence that we cannot achieve suf¿cient consensus on a pre-Christian form of the Testaments to make the pursuit of one worthwhile seems destined to win the day’, while chiding those who disagree for being ‘remarkably slow in coming’ to the proper perspective.

Journal for the study of the Pseudepigrapha Vol 23.1 (2013): 69-84 © The Author(s), 2013. Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/JournalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/ 0951820713502412 http://JSP.sagepub.com

Acts of Charity as Acts of Remembrance in the Book of Tobit* FRANCIS M. MACATANGAY Graduate School of Theology, University of St. Thomas, Houston, TX 77024, USA

Abstract This article argues that charitable acts in the book of Tobit are religious acts of remembrance. On the one hand, the narrative emphasizes the practice of righteousness, the doing of what is true, and the performance of charitable deeds. On the other hand, the remembrance of God is an equally prominent motif in the story. This gives rise to the question of how remembering is linked to acts of charity. The close connection between remembering and almsgiving argues against the commonly held view that the story endorses acts of charity because such acts facilitate social cohesion and mutual support in the Diaspora. Given the theological value the narrative places on almsgiving, the book of Tobit witnesses to the emergence of a horizontal expression of service to God as part of the religious piety in Second Temple Judaism. Keywords: Book of Tobit, almsgiving, remembrance, Diaspora, Second Temple Judaism.

1. Introduction The book of Tobit is a delightful narrative about an Israelite family that experienced misfortunes and deliverance while in exile. This domestic story is notable for its emphasis on the practice of righteousness, * I wish to thank Professors Gary Anderson and Geoffrey Miller for their comments when an earlier version of this study was presented at the 75th CBA meeting.

70

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23.1 (2013)

adherence to truth, and the performance of works of charity (cf. Tob. 1.3; 4.5-7). One equally prominent motif in the book is the notion of remembrance, giving rise to the question of how remembering relates to the book’s exposition of acts of good will and almsgiving. This article seeks to investigate the function of remembering in the book of Tobit and how it links to acts of charity. Moreover, it is claimed that this close connection between remembering and acts of mercy argues against the commonly held view that interprets almsgiving primarily in terms of its social function in the Diaspora. 2. Instances of Remembering in Tobit The book of Tobit has numerous instances of remembering. The words NJNOI TLPNBJ and its cognate NOINPOFVX appear frequently and at times strategically in the narrative.1 As the story opens in Tob. 1.1112, Tobit observes dietary laws because he remembers God with all his heart. As he is about to celebrate a Pentecost meal in Tob. 2.2, Tobit instructs his son Tobiah to search for fellow captives who remember the Lord wholeheartedly so that they may eat with him.2 The son reports that a body of an Israelite is found strangled in the market, prompting Tobit to bury the dead, which stirs in him the bitter remembrance of the prophetic words of Amos in Tob. 2.6. After being blinded and after an altercation with his wife, he prays in isolation and in despair, pleading with God to remember him and to look favorably upon him (3.3).3 Blinded and distressed, a pulse of life beats in Tobit 1. The Hebrew 4Q200 fragment 2, which corresponds to Tob. 4.3-9, employs the verb C