A Witness Forever: Ancient Israel's Perception of Literature and the Resultant Hebrew Bible.

• Author: Levine, Baruch A.

This posthumous collection of essays by a Semitist of the old school is an intriguing specimen of semiology, unembellished by the terminology or methodology characteristic of this discipline. Rabinowitz possessed a semiological vocabulary of his own, one largely of his own making. He speaks of "the extracommunicative power of words," (p. xv, etc.), and of "cultural assumptions" (p. 1). Briefly stated, the present monograph is an attempt to understand how the ancient Israelites understood language and literature, linguistic communication, and the literary process. This inquiry is justified by the premise that the ancients thought differently of words, and did not regard them as mere symbols or representations, as we presumably do.

The first chapter is devoted to a discussion of dabar, the most frequent Hebrew word for "word." Through numerous examples, Rabinowitz attempts to show that the dabar, the spoken word, exhibits a life of its own; that it connotes both the word and its effects, the word and the reality it denotes. The second chapter is about literacy in ancient Israel and presents examples from the Hebrew Bible which illustrate the proposition that, when spoken words were committed to writing, they achieved a new authority.

Chapter three deals with the generative power of words, especially prophetic words, which Rabinowitz sees as the actual instruments of destruction and upbuilding. In chapter four, the author discusses the redactional and rhetorical methods evident in the formation of the biblical texts as we have them. Chapter five considers one of the literary sources cited by the Hebrew Bible itself, Seper Hayyasar "The Book of the Upright," in Rabinowitz' translation (see Josh. 10:12-14; 2 Sam. 1:18). Rabinowitz maintains that this was not merely a collection of heroic poems but an authoritative collection of divine instruction, a kind of torah. Finally, chapter six presents the view that the Hebrew Bible possesses unity in its entirety; that one can discern in its overall composition and structure an expression of its meaning.

Isaac Rabinowitz' own bibliography, presented in this volume (pp. 137-42), shows that, in a monograph and in over forty scholarly articles and reviews, he sustained an abiding interest in Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, and Greek; in Qumranic and other literatures of the period of the Second Temple; in Biblical Hebrew lexicography, medieval texts, and the subject of the present volume, the power of the word...