Tora in der Hebraischen Bibel: Studien zur Redaktionsgeschichte und synchronen Logik diachroner Transformationen.

• Author: Zahn, Molly M.
• Position: Book review

Tora in der Hebraischen Bibel: Studien zur Redaktionsgeschichte und synchronen Logik diachroner Transformationen. By REINHARD ACHENBACH, MARTIN ARNETH, and ECKART OTTO. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur Altorientalische und Biblische Rechtsgeschichte, vol. 7. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2007. Pp. viii + 387. [euro]78.

As Eckart Otto explains in his introductory remarks, the purpose of this volume is to explore literary and theological connections within the Hebrew Bible in light of the idea of "Torah." By examining differences in the way "Torah" is conceptualized in various scriptural texts, light is shed on the ways in which scribal processes of expansion and revision of texts correlate with debates over theological issues, primary among them the nature of revelation and the means of access to God's will.

At the heart of the volume, physically and conceptually, are one essay by Reinhard Achenbach and two by Eckart Otto. Achenbach ("Die Tora und die Propheten im 5. und 4. Jh. v. Chr.") explores the connections between the redaction history of the Pentateuch and that of the Prophets as reflected in the various usages of the word [TEXT NOT REPRODUCABLE IN ASCII] in each corpus. Otto's first essay ("Die Rechtshermeneutik im Pentateuch und in der Tempelrolle") demonstrates how the Pentateuch itself, as we now have it, employs a complex legal hermeneutic in order to allow multiple, sometimes contradictory, legal corpora to exist alongside one another. He argues that the Temple Scroll, which presents itself as direct divine speech from Sinai, undoes this hermeneutic, according to which all record of divine revelation was now textualized in the written Torah. While Otto provides a helpful corrective to the idea that the Temple Scroll "paradoxically" depends on and undermines the authority of Torah simultaneously, more consideration could have been given to another paradox that his study reveals: even as the Temple Scroll rejects the Pentateuch Redactors' position that direct divine revelation is coterminous with the Sinaitic laws of the written Torah, it tacitly endorses the pentateuchal hermeneutic insofar as the bulk of its "new" Sinaitic law in fact results from interpretation of the Torah--just as the Pentateuch Redactors would have it. Otto's second major essay ("Jeremia und die Tora. Ein nachexilischer Diskurs") focuses on a series of relatively late texts in Jeremiah (1:4-19; 36:1-32; 26:1-24; 7:1-8:3; 11:1-17; 31:31-34) that in various ways...