Holy Lives, Holy Deaths: A Close Hearing of Early Jewish Storytellers.
Author | Eliav, Yaron Z. |
Position | The Pluralistic Halakha: Legal Innovations in the Late Second Commonwealth and Rabbinic Periods, vol. 22 - Book Review |
Holy Lives, Holy Deaths: A Close Hearing of Early Jewish Storytellers. Studies in Biblical Literature, vol. 1. By ANTOINETTE CLARKE WIRE. Atlanta: SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE, 2002. Pp. x + 420. $49.95 (paper).
The Pluralistic Halakha: Legal Innovations in the Late Second Commonwealth and Rabbinic Periods. Studia Judaica: Forschungen zur Wissenschaft des Judentums, vol. 22. By PAUL HEGER. Berlin: WALTER DE GRUYTER, 2003. Pp. ix + 430. [euro]110.28.
The legal formula and the semi (pseudo)-historical narrative represent two of the most basic and widespread forms of ancient Israelite, and subsequent Jewish, literary expression (joined by the more poetic but less popular vehicles of prophecy and religious hymnography, namely the psalms and later the piyyut). These forms embody contrasting tendencies of human articulation. Legal writing tends to be more rigid and minimalist in style and generally strives to configure (in rather dry terms) people's behavior, demarcating the boundaries between permitted or required and prohibited or undesired actions. In comparison to day-to-day, formal legal proceedings, narratives include a greater degree of feeling and movement; they are more colorful and address a wider spectrum of experience, such as thought and emotion. The authors of tales, anecdotes, and even comprehensive sagas (who, in the ancient world, delivered most of their stories orally) might have wished to affect the lives of their audiences, but they did so in a more subtle way, hiding the moral between the lines of the account, or putting it in the mouth of one of the characters.
Despite, and perhaps because of, their dissimilarity, both of these genres attracted early Israelite authors. The books of the Pentateuch offer a stark example of how the combination of law (or in a broader sense, explicit and practical directives) and story can result in a powerful document with the capacity to carve identity and shape a way of life. Since then, especially in the days of the Second Jewish Temple (516 B.C.E.-70 C.E.) and the generations thereafter, many have followed this winning recipe and reproduced it in numerous variations. The stories about Jesus in the Gospels, for example, replicate the Pentateuchal amalgamation of sequential accounts and instruction (pace those who have wrongly seen them as anti-legalistic).
The rabbis--a small, elitist group of Jewish scholars who were active in Palestine and Persia during the first few centuries of the...
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