From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel.

• Author: HENDEL, RONALD S.
• Position: Review

From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel. By FRANK MOORE CROSS. Baltimore: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1998. Pp. xv + 262. $45.

Frank Moore Cross is a name to conjure with in modem biblical scholarship. The quality, scope, and erudition of his work are unparalleled Since the glory days of his teacher and mentor, William F. Albright. The fields to which he has made permanent contributions include Qumran studies. Ugaritic studies, Northwest Semitic epigraphy, biblical textual criticism, Hebrew linguistics, and--not least--the history of Israelite religion. On the latter subject, his 1973 work, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (hereafter CMHE), set a new standard in the field. His new book, From Epic to Canon, consists of essays written since 1973 which, he says, "fill interstices in my earlier study." Nine of these essays have been published before and have been revised and expanded, and three appear here for the first time. These essays are apt heirs to those in CMHE. While they do not redefine the field as did the earlier work, they advance our understanding on several important frontiers and shore up some of the arguments in CMHE.

The essays are organized according to six general topics. The first two. "Epic Traditions of Early Israel," and "Priestly Lore and Its Near Eastern Background," extend the analyses in CMHE. The following three topics, "Studies in the Structure of Hebrew Verse" "Return to Zion," and "Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text," bring in areas of Cross's expertise not much covered in CMHE. The last topic, "Typology and Historical Method," is an apt coda to his work and to the pursuit of historical scholarship, a task that is sadly embattled in our day. Taken as a whole, these essays remind us that historical scholarship is indeed possible, and occasionally even magnificent. Cross's essays exhibit such precision and vigor that one can forget that much of our field is sunk in the mires of the politics of resentment and postmodern self-doubt. A skillful historian at work is a welcome antidote to the histrionics of the current scene.

Each of these essays is a feast for the mind. I will comment on a few points where Cross's analysis deserves to be savored, nuanced, or contested. I should caution, however, that my remarks may be entirely unreliable, since lam a student of Cross. But, as Cross shows, the historian must try to hold such biases in check.

The Category of "Epic"

One of the lacunae in CMHE is a proper explication of the use of the term "epic" to describe the genre of Pentateuchal narrative. The essay "Traditional Narrative and the Reconstruction of Early Israelite Institutions"...