The Invention of Hebrew.

• Author: Tugendhaft, Aaron
• Position: Book review

The Invention of Hebrew. By SETH L. SANDERS. Urbana: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. Pp. xvii + 259. $50.

Seth Sanders' book might best be read as an extended commentary on the call of Deuteronomy 6, "Hear, 0 Israel!" What made it possible, Sanders asks, that for more than two thousand years the Bible's audiences--"from the first Jews and Christians to the kingdoms of Christendom and colonial pilgrims, to Rastafarians and U.S. presidents" (p.1)--continuously see themselves as addressed in this call? Sanders finds his answer in the Bible's form of political communication, the way the text addresses its audience as a public. It is not obvious or inevitable that writing would be used in this way; The Invention of Hebrew is the story of how this came about.

Rather than focus attention on the biblical texts themselves, for which we possess only late manuscripts, or the proto-texts that biblical criticism must reconstruct from those manuscripts, Sanders turns his attention to the epigraphic record. Scholarship has often been paralyzed by intractable conflicts over the dating and context of biblical texts; Sanders' strategic avoidance of such questions by turning attention to the less controversial epigraphic data opens fruitful new avenues for research. Sanders is able to mine this corpus of Late Bronze and Iron Age inscriptions for culturally valuable insights by studying it through the lens of linguistic anthropology. Whereas previous scholarship on this material has tended to limit itself to the history of scripts and languages, Sanders brings discussion to a new level by asking about genres and participants. The result is a refreshingly original approach to the epigraphic corpus and an invigoratingly novel perspective on the often-tired discussion of biblical origins. It furthermore lays a historically specific foundation for the uniqueness of biblical discourse.

The core of Sanders' study begins in chapter two: "What Was the Alphabet For?" Debunking the prejudice that nations naturally write in their own language and their own script, Sanders rightly treats the adoption of vernacular writing and the alphabet--first at Ugarit, then among Israel and her neighbors--as a deliberate choice that must be explained "neither as a fraud without existing basis, nor as an effortless, natural reflection of culture, but as a historical process that created new historical possibilities" (p. 37). The two following chapters--"Empires and Alphabets in Late...