Friendship in the Hebrew Bible.

• Author: Leib, Ethan J.
• Position: Book review

Friendship in the Hebrew Bible. By SAUL M. OLYAN. The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2017. Pp. xiii + 191. $50.

Saul Olyan's monograph argues that our Western tradition of friendship should not be thought to commence with Plato and Aristotle. Instead, he exposes a rich set of reflections throughout the Hebrew Bible's many varied texts, which can provide clues for how people conceived of friendship well before the Lysis and the Nicomachean Ethics. Why this should be of more than antiquarian interest for the modern friend is not always made clear in the book. But for friendship theorists and scholars, the book delivers the thrill of genuine discovery. Although we all know about Ruth and Naomi's apparent friendship from The Book of Ruth and David and Jonathan's close relationship from Samuel, it turns out there is a whole lot more to learn about friendship and non-familial interpersonal intimacy in the compendium of sources that make up the Hebrew Bible, right in plain sight.

Still, methodological questions nagged me right from the beginning. Although it is a worthy task to be able to develop a sketch of friendship from within a singular work in a dominant and important tradition, it is hard to weave coherence from a set of edited narrative works, prophetic works, and wisdom literature, components of which were likely drafted one thousand years apart by many different authors. To pick a random example, the book looks at usages from Numbers, Jeremiah, and Proverbs essentially in the same breath (p. 18), without any real sense that there may be a hierarchy of sources for those who view the compendium as authoritative and treat it as a guide for living.

Indeed, if someone were to write a book several thousand years from now in a post-Apocalyptic society trying to unpack "our" concept of friendship from a surviving copy of the latest Norton Anthology of English Literature, would it make sense to run a concordance on texts as diverse as Beowulf (the root word "friend" appears thirty-six times) and Zadie Smith's "The Waiter's Wife" ("friend" appears nine times)? I am not certain this would be a defensible methodology without substantial argument and framing. And Olyan does not really offer a sustained defense of his method, which treats all these books as one text.

It certainly makes sense that Olyan does not want to lead with interpretive readings of the textured and developed narratives of friendship from...