{"id":1665,"date":"2018-05-13T16:08:37","date_gmt":"2018-05-13T14:08:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/buch.jehovah-shammah.de\/?p=1665"},"modified":"2018-05-13T16:33:28","modified_gmt":"2018-05-13T14:33:28","slug":"studies-in-biblical-interpretation-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/buch.jehovah-shammah.de\/index.php\/2018\/05\/13\/studies-in-biblical-interpretation-iii\/","title":{"rendered":"Studies in Biblical Interpretation – III"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rashi the Commentator
\nIt is well known that the name Rashi is an acronym formed by the initial consonants of \u201cRabbi Shelomo (Solomon) Yitshaki (son of Isaac).\u201d Another explanation was attached to it, once he became famous: \u201cRabban shel Yisrael\u201d (Master Teacher of Israel). His tombstone was discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, but by then the year of his death was no longer legible. However, several sources record that it occurred on the twenty-ninth day of the Hebrew month of Tammuz in the year 4865 Anno Mundi, which corresponds to the third day of July 1105, of this era. When was he born? Most traditions place it in 1040. This happens to coincide with the year of the demise of one of the greatest Jewish luminaries of the Middle Ages, Rabbenu Gershom. People later cited in this connection the verse from Ecclesiastes 1:5, \u201cThe sun rises and the sun sets,\u201d which was reinterpreted to mean \u201cThe sun rises as the sun sets,\u201d referring to the sun of Rashi rising as that of Rabbenu Gershom set.
\nIn the course of his sixty-five years of life, from 1040 to 1105, he was a contemporary of three great scholars of the \u201cGolden Age\u201d of Spanish Jewry: the poet-philosophers Solomon ibn Gabirol, who died in 1070, and Judah Halevi, who passed on in 1083, and the polymath Abraham ibn Ezra, who entered this life in 1092. When Rashi was twelve years of age, he might have heard that the building of Westminster Abbey had begun under King Edward the Confessor in 1052 and later, at age twenty-five, he might have been told that it had been completed. He could have heard that the Normans had invaded England in 1066, and that the cleavage between the Roman and Eastern churches had become permanent in 1054. Rashi was probably well aware of his contemporaries, the great Christian scholars Peter Abelard (d. 1142) and Bernard of Clairvaux, and he certainly knew of the start of the First Crusade in 1096, and the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. He was thus born into a world in ferment.
\nAs we noted, Rashi died in the year 1105. Within a century of his death, his Hebrew Commentaries on the Bible and Talmud had spread from the communities of France and Germany to Spain and Africa, to Asia and Babylon. Considering the enormous expense and the mighty energies entailed in the production of hand-copied books, the high cost of paper and parchment, and the great difficulties and obstacles encountered in their distribution in the eleventh and twelve centuries, the early popularity of Rashi, and the wide and unprecedented dissemination that his commentaries on the Bible achieved, are nothing short of remarkable.
\nThe first dated Hebrew printed book comes form Reggio di Calabria in Italy in 1475, and it is Rashi\u2019s commentary on the Torah. The first Hebrew printed book from the Iberian Peninsula was the same, deriving from Guadalajara in 1476. Again, the first Hebrew text of the Pentateuch, printed in 1482, was accompanied by Rashi\u2019s commentary. It may quite safely be asserted that, in the entire history of the written, let alone printed, word, no other commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures in any language had ever attained comparable recognition, acceptance, and sustained popularity or similar wide geographic distribution, or ever equaled it in its profound impact on human lives. It literally shaped the education, character, and behavior of every generation of Jews since its first appearance, at least until fairly recent times.
\nA commentary on a text must, by definition, be a secondary production, ancillary to the master text that it seeks to illuminate. Yet Rashi\u2019s commentary to the Torah practically became an independent work in its own right. It acquired an integrity of its own, and an absolute indispensability quite apart from the function it was originally intended to fulfill. It is worth nothing that it has engendered to date over two hundred super-commentaries.
\nWho was this person who assembled such a remarkable record? We know nothing about his parents, but tradition has it that he was a descendant of King David. We do know that Troyes, the capital of the Duchy of Champagne in northeastern France, was the place of his birth. Legend surrounds his entry into this world. It is said that his father owned a precious jewel, which was greatly desired by the local authorities in order to adorn what he regarded as an idol. His father refused to sell it for such a purpose, no matter how high the offer. As a result, he was entrapped to board a ship and was then badgered to sell the precious stone. Thereupon, Rashi\u2019s father threw it overboard. A heavenly voice was heard to proclaim: \u201cYou have lost a brilliant jewel that the Name of Heaven may not be profaned; you shall have a son who will illumine the eyes of all Israel in the Torah, and the Name of Heaven will be sanctified through him.\u201d
\nLittle is know of Rashi\u2019s life. He is said to have started school at the age of five on the festival of Shavuot (Pentecost), traditionally the festival celebrating the receipt of the Torah on Mount Sinai, as well as the birth and death of King David. He records in his Responsa, written later in life, that he married while still a student and pursued his studies in Troyes in great poverty. When he had exhausted the intellectual resources of his local teachers in Bible and Talmud, he left for the Rhineland, and entered the great Jewish academies of Mayence and Worms. In the year 1070, or a little before, he returned to Troyes where he established his own academy. Students flocked to him from all over. I should add that in those days, rabbis were not paid for their services, but engaged in various occupations. Rashi never held any formal position in the community. Tradition has it that earned a living from growing vines and from making and selling wine.
\nWhen we contemplate the phenomenon that is Rashi, our spontaneous reaction is wonderment. We stand almost incredulous at the sheer magnitude of his intellectual and literary achievements. In an age of limited sources of night-time illumination, of inefficient means of indoor heating, devoid of the typewriter, fountain pens or ball-point, without means of mechanical copying, unsupported by governmental funding or any institutional financial aid, and at the same time engaged in his scholarly writing only at odd hours stolen from earning a living, he managed to produce his commentaries to practically the entire Hebrew Bible as well as to the Babylonian Talmud. No one before or since can lay claim to a comparable achievement. What shall we say when this vast bulk, produced under these inherently adverse conditions, also features unmatched qualitative excellence in both content and style? We can only marvel at the phenomenon, bow our heads in reverence, and in all humility profess our boundless admiration for the man.
\nThen again, in weighing and assessing Rashi\u2019s achievement from a historical perspective, we are overwhelmed by the realization that this scholar single-handedly, and without in anyway so intending, actually fashioned the classical Jewish educational curriculum that was to last nearly one thousand years. The study of his commentaries to the Torah introduced the masses at an early age to the characteristic phraseology, vocabulary, technical terminology, style and thought processes, themes and contents of rabbinic literature. Through him, the language, law, and lore of the rabbis inextricably entered into the warp and woof of the fabric of Jewish culture. We must not forget that fully three quarters of his comments on the Torah are drawn from rabbinic sources. He transformed and immeasurably enriched the vocabulary of Jewish life.
\nThe celebrated contemporary of Rashi, Abraham ibn Ezra (1092\u20131167), renowned grammarian, poet, and biblical scholar, humorusly bestowed on our hero the title \u201cparshandatha.\u201d This word appears once in the Bible as the name of the eldest son of the wicked Haman who was killed after his father\u2019s downfall, as related in the Book of Esther 9:7. The name is Persian and has actually turned up on an Aramaic cylinder seal from the Achaemenid period. Scholars are divided as to its true meaning, whether it conveys \u201ccreated for war,\u201d \u201cone given to questions,\u201d or \u201cborn multicolored.\u201d However, Ibn Ezra took it as a hybrid of Hebrew and Aramaic indicating \u201cExpounder of the Law,\u201d which he applied to Rashi in a laudatory poem: \u201cAn awesome commentary he affixed to the Torah, therefore he is dubbed Parshan Datha.\u201d This epithet, taken up by subsequent generations, was doubly apt because it had been noted that it was Rashi himself who originally coined the Hebrew word parshan for \u201cexegete.\u201d It is not to be found anywhere earlier than Rashi\u2019s commentary to tractate Keritot 4a.
\nThis brings me to another insufficiently appreciated aspect of Rashi\u2019s accomplishments. He was one of the pioneers of the revival of literary Hebrew in the Middle Ages. At that time, Hebrew had been a non-spoken language for hundreds of years. The superb contributions to the revival of Hebrew on the part of the Spanish Hebraists have been generously and rightfully acknowledged. Those of Rashi have barely been recognized. No less a master of Hebrew style than the modern national Jewish poet laureate, Chaim Nachman Bialik, expressed his admiration for the marvelous elasticity and flexibility of Rashi\u2019s Hebrew. Bialik pronounced his unambiguous verdict that the commentator \u201cproduced a wonderful linguistic achievement.\u201d
\nThat poet actually placed Rashi on a par with the great liturgical poet Eliezer Kalir and with Moses Maimonides in that respect. He urged that a dictionary of Rashi\u2019s Hebrew be made. Yitshak Avinery took Bialik\u2019s advice seriously and produced his Dictionary of Rashi\u2019s Commentaries to the Bible and Talmud (Hebrew, Tel Aviv, 1949) recently expanded and revised in the magnificent second volume of his Hekhal Rashi (Hebrew, Jerusalem, 1985). This important work is indispensable for a proper assessment of Rashi\u2019s enormous contribution to the development of the Hebrew language. By means of Avinery\u2019s work, it is calculated that our hero may be credited with about thirteen hundred neologisms. Large numbers of now every-day, common Hebrew words are all found for the first time in his writings. Thus, the terms for \u201cjester,\u201d \u201cerudition,\u201d \u201csupport,\u201d \u201cambition,\u201d \u201cagreement,\u201d \u201csuccess,\u201d and for \u201cJudaism,\u201d to mention but a very few, appear there initially. Moreover, we are only just beginning to appreciate fully the great variety, richness, and noble simplicity of Rashi\u2019s Hebrew style, the naturalness of his harmonious and smooth blending of biblical and rabbinic Hebrew.
\nAnother aspect of Rashi\u2019s commentaries is his extraordinary penchant, almost unique for the Middle Ages, for attempting to explain the realia of life in biblical and talmudic times. He was a very keen observer of nature and of human activities. His innate intellectual curiosity was fueled by the cosmopolitan atmosphere that pervaded the regions of Troyes and Worms. The commercial fairs in the Champagne region in his days attracted merchants from all over Europe. Worms was a port city on the left bank of the Rhine and an expanding commercial center. So Rashi learned an enormous amount from observing and conversing with the visitors to these cities. Leopold Zunz compiled a register of the items of every-day life that Rashi dealt with. The variety of data is astonishing. The list includes methods of wine-making, animal husbandry, agriculture, the manufacture of cloth, the treatment of leather, differing currencies and standards, banking practices, metal soldering, engraving, procedures at fairs, shipbuilding, seafaring, and a host of other items. Of course, most of this abundance of information from eleventh-century Europe can hardly be relevant to biblical or talmudic culture. But Rashi\u2019s historical approach, his attempt to understand and illuminate the every-day life and customs of Israel in biblical and talmudic times, as a contribution to the understanding of the texts, was hundreds of years before its time and marks him a forerunner of modern exegetes in that respect. As a matter of fact, it is known that in his original manuscript, he sometimes included drawings to illustrate his explanations. This is clear from medieval manuscripts in which the copyist left a blank space after writing \u201clike this.\u201d The early printers omitted the phrase and left no space.
\nIn a similar modernistic spirit, he made ample use of his French vernacular to interpret obscure or difficult words in the Hebrew and Aramaic texts. The local Jews of his day spoke French as the language of every-day discourse, and Rashi often transliterated the appropriate French rendering into Hebrew script. In his commentaries he made use of some eleven hundred French glosses, and a vocabulary of about three thousand different words appear in his works. Occasionally, he combines his observations on realia with glosses in Old French. Thus, in describing, the ephod in Exodus 28:4, one of the priestly garments, he comments that \u201cit is like a kind of apron which is called \u2018poinceint\u2019 in French, which women of rank tie on when they ride horseback.\u201d In describing the ordination of Aaron and his sons, as reported in Exodus 28:41, he explains the phrase \u201cyou shall fill their hands\u201d as follows: \u201cWhen someone is appointed to take charge of anything the ruler places a leather glove in his hand. They call it \u2018gant\u2019 in French, and by this means he empowers him. They term that transmission of the glove \u2018revestir\u2019 in French.\u201d These glosses are indispensable for the study of Old French, of which, I understand, not much had survived. The late professor of French at Columbia University, David Blondheim, collected and analyzed them. Rashi\u2019s unintended, significant, and enduring contribution to the history of the French language has been increasingly recognized and appreciated by scholars in recent years.
\nSome other distinguishing features, characteristic of Rashi\u2019s work deserve special emphasis. One is the innate modesty and singular humility of the man. When the resources at his disposal left him unsatisfied as to the true meaning of a word or phrase, he was not ashamed to admit ignorance. His writings are spiced with such comments as \u201cI am unable to explain it\u201d or \u201cI do not know what it teaches us\u201d or simply, \u201cI do not know\u201d (e.g. Gen. 28:5; 35:13; 43:11; Exod. 22:28; Lev. 8:11; 13:4; 27:3; Num. 21:11; 26:13 etc.). Moreover, he showed no vested interest in his exegesis. He was quite prepared to revise his work in the light of new scholarly research, which came to hand. We possess the unambiguous testimony of his grandson, the eminent Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (b.ca. 1085\u2014ca. 1174) to that effect in the latter\u2019s commentary to Genesis 37:2 in which he states: \u201cOur master Solomon, father of my mother, who illumined the eyes of the exile, who expounded the Torah, the prophets, and the Hagiographa, was bent on explaining the sensus literalis of Scripture. I, Samuel ben Meir (his grandson), argued with him face-to-face, and he admitted to me that, had he the time, he would need to produce other commentaries, based on the innovative meanings that appear daily.\u201d Not only so, but Rashi was quite prepared to admit to having erred in making a certain comment. Thus, in a letter found in the collection of his Responsa he freely states in regard to Ezekiel 40:17: \u201cI erred in that comment.\u201d Such confessions are practically unparalleled among the great medieval Jewish exegetes and, I might add, are virtually nonexistent among modern scholars. Moreover, Rashi was not only a non-dogmatic seeker of the truth, but he displayed intellectual honesty and scholarly integrity.
\nIt is quite certain that his goal was not simply to write a commentary, but rather to expound the text in accord with rabbinic sources. He had in mind to create a running commentary drawn from the vast, variegated and sometimes mutually exclusive rabbinic observations. However, he is not an anthologist. His material is highly selective, carefully winnowed, and meticulously reworked rabbinic source material based upon the problematics of the text, its language and its context. But he is no slavish copier. Intellectual daring and independence of mind are strikingly original features of his work. There are some three hundred instances in his comments on the Hebrew Bible when he does not accept an interpretation of the rabbinic sages and says so. It is not that Rashi rejects in principle the midrashic or homiletic interpretation of a biblical text. On the contrary, he certainly agreed with the cardinal rabbinic, exegetical, rule that there may be several layers of meaning embedded in a verse. This doctrine of the multiple sense of Scripture is clearly and specifically enunciated in the Talmud in two statements: the first is \u201cOne text may yield several meanings\u201d (that is, simultaneously), an observation that accompanies a proof-text citation of Ps. 62:12: \u201cOne thing God has spoken, two things have I heard.\u201d The other exegetical rule is \u201cA biblical text may not depart from its straightforward meaning.\u201d This principle occurs three times in the Talmud (Shab. 63a; Yebam. 11.bB; 24a). Rashi combined both of them. In his introduction to Canticles he declares that \u201ca single biblical text may yield several meanings, but (in the long run) the text may not depart from the sensus literalis, (\u2018the plain, straightforward meaning\u2019).\u201d This statement is another way of saying that the latter must take preference over all other interpretations. To state this specifically in connection with Canticles seems to me to be especially significant. These two modes of exegesis have come to be known in Hebrew as pesha\u1e6d and derash. I point out, however, that Rashi himself, never uses these terms. As far as I know, they appear for the first time in the commentary of his grandson, the Rashbam. How important the sensus literalis was to Rashi may be gauged by the fact that he emphasizes it more than forty times in his commentary to Genesis alone, even though it is cited only three times in the Talmud. Rashi was also the first Jewish commentator we know of to have left a commentary on most of the Bible that exhibits as its distinguishing feature a conscious attempt to explain the Hebrew text according to its linguistic characteristics and its context as an independent level of meaning to which he gave the descriptive term peshu\u1e6do shel miqra\u2019 (the straightforward meaning of Scripture, e.g. Gen. 3:8).
\nIs it credible that Rashi, a Jewish exegete, who lived and taught in Troyes in the eleventh century, and who wrote in Hebrew, could have had any influence on the King James Version produced in English in 1611? Yet the sober and prestigious John Rylands Library in England once published a serious monograph entitled Rashi and the English Bible. Behind this phenomenon hangs a long tale.
\nIt is little appreciated that prior to the First Crusade of 1096, Jews in many communities in Europe were fairly well integrated into the societies in whose midst they resided. They were generally indistinguishable from their non-Jewish neighbors in language, dress, and in most of the occupations in which they engaged, except, of course, in religious beliefs and observance. In general, between the seventh and eleventh centuries, fairly cordial relationships prevailed between Jews and Christians. It has been demonstrated that many Jewish scholars, especially of the school of Rashi, such as Joseph Kara (ca. 1050) and Rashi\u2019s own grandson, the Rashbam, were familiar with Latin and with the Latin Bible and with contemporary Christian exegesis. The reverse situation was also true. Latin scholars would approach Jews for guidance in the study of Hebrew and to be informed about traditional rabbinic exposition of the text.
\nIn the case of Rashi, it was the priority he claimed to give to the sensus literalis, the plain sense of Scripture as he understood it, that primarily attracted Christians to his works. In addition, it was also his clear Hebrew style, his uncomplicated exposition, the avoidance of issues of faith, and its wide popularity among Jews, which also meant its ready availability, that were all factors which made Rashi\u2019s works especially accessible and appealing to Christian scholars.
\nHugh of the Abby of St. Victor in Paris (d.1141), like the Church Father Jerome before him (347\u2013419\/20), not only emphasized the superiority of the Hebrew text over the Greek and Latin translations, but also insisted on the primary importance of the literal understanding of the Hebrew text as the basis of the exposition of Scripture. Hugh of St. Victor was quite familiar with Rashi\u2019s comments, and sometimes translated them word-for-word even though he does not cite his source by name, to the best of my knowledge. He does, however, employ such phrases as Hebraei dicunt (the Hebrews say) and Judaei dicunt (the Jews say).
\nAnother important Christian Hebraist and biblical commentator who exhibited considerable knowledge of Rashi\u2019s exegesis was Andrew of St. Victor, who died in 1175. More remarkable is the fact that Rashi\u2019s works had become well-known in England among Christian scholars in less than a century after his death. Herbert of Bosham, who died in 1190, a superb Hebraist, made abundant use of them in his own writings. Another erudite scholar, Raymundus Martini, whose Pugio Fidei (Dagger of Faith) appeared in 1278, cites freqently from Rashi in Latin translation.
\nThe dissemination and careful study of Rashi\u2019s commentaries among Christian Hebraists eventually exerted a profound influence upon vernacular translations of the Bible. One individual more than any other was responsible for this development. It is most curious that the first dated Hebrew printed books from both Italy and Spain were Rashi\u2019s commentaries to the Pentateuch, and the first printed Christian commentary to the Bible in Latin was a work that drew heavily on those same masterpieces and which cited them on every page. I refer to the commentaries of the great Christian Hebraist and biblical exegete, Nicholas of Lyra (1270\u20131349). He was a Franciscan monk, who came to head the Franciscan Order, and was a member of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris. He authored the Postillae, marginal notes, actually a continuous commentary on the entire Hebrew Bible and New Testament, first published in Rome in 1471\u201372. This work of vast erudition in fifty volumes became the most widely used and most influential of all medieval Latin commentaries on the Bible.
\nNicholas of Lyra mastered biblical Hebrew. He made an intensive and close study of Rashi\u2019s commentaries, and was quite captivated by them. He wrote in the Introduction to his Postillae: \u201c\u2026 I intend, for making clear the literal sense, to introduce, not only the statements of the Catholic doctors, but also of the Hebrews, especially of Rabbi Solomon who, among the Hebrew doctors, has spoken most reasonably.\u201d
\nIndeed, Nicholas of Lyra frequently cities Rashi word for word. He often uses the phrase, \u201cdicit Rabbi Solomon \u2026\u201d According to Herman Hailperin, in his extremely important study entitled Rashi and the Christian Scholars (1963), there is hardly a page on which Rashi is not cited by name.
\nThis profuse utilization of Rashi, the Jew, disturbed some people. A professor of Hebrew called Jean Mercier of the Royal College at Paris in 1550 dubbed Nicholas of Lyra simius salomonis, \u201cthe ape of (Rabbi) Solomon.\u201d Especially angry was a person named Pablo de Santa Maria (ca. 1350\u20131435), an apostate Jew, originally Salomon Halevi, better known as Paul, Bishop of Burgos, Spain. This bishop penned a work entitled Additiones ad Postillium Magistri Nicolai Lyra. It severely attacked Nicholas of Lyra\u2019s profuse citations from the Jewish commentator. The great German humanist, Johannes Reuchlin, wrote that not many pages would remain if one were to cut out Rashi from Nicholas of Lyra\u2019s Postillae. Reuchlin himself knew the work of Rashi first-hand. His De Rudimentis Hebraicis (1506) drew heavily on Rashi as well as on Kimhi\u2019s Book of Roots (printed 1480).
\nAs early as ca. 1388 the first comprehensive English translation of the Bible, the so-called Lollard Bible, produced by the Wycliffite movement, acknowledged in the Preface its indebtedness to the Postillae of Nicholas of Lyra. In this way, that scholar served as the intermediary through whom Rashi indirectly influenced the English Bible. This influence was reinforced and extended by Martin Luther who relied heavily on Nicholas of Lyra and incorporated Rashi\u2019s interpretations into his own version. Again, the four new Latin translations that appeared in the sixteenth century, those of Pagninus (1528), Leo Juda of Zurich (1545), Sebastian Munster (1534), and Tremellius (1579), all utilized Rashi. Pagninus, in particular, often cited Rashi in his Hebrew glosses (published in Lyons 1529; Antwerp 1570). No wonder then that the translators of the classic English rendering known as the King James Version made abundant use of Rashi directly from the original Hebrew, indirectly from Latin versions, and from the earlier Christian Hebraists.
\nTo return to Rashi himself. His commentary on the Talmud breaks off in tractate Makkot 19b on the Hebrew word \u1e6dahor (pure). His grandson, the Rashbam, added a note at that point: \u201cOur master, pure of body\u2014his soul departed in purity.\u201d In his comment to Psalm 49:11: \u201cFor one sees that the wise die, that the foolish and ignorant alike perish,\u201d Rashi takes note of the variant verbs used here for the demise of the wise and for that of the foolish and ignorant. He appropriately observes that in respect of the wise, only their bodies expire in this world, but in respect of the foolish and ignorant both body and soul perish. We may confidently assert that Rashi\u2019s body alone died in this world, but that his soul went marching on throughout the ages. Rabbi Isaac Halevi of the academy at Worms, Rashi\u2019s teacher, once wrote to his outstanding student, perhaps having in mind the horrors of the Crusades: \u201cThe generation in which you are present is by no means orphaned. May the likes of you increase in Israel.\u201d The first part of this encomium was true, the second not, for the likes of Rashi never again arose. He was sui generis.
\nAbraham Ibn Ezra as an Exegete
\nIt can hardly be contested that in the entire star-studded galaxy of medieval Jewish Bible commentators not one can compare with Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra (1092\u20131167) in respect of vast erudition, broad range of disciplines, subtle sophistication, intellectual daring, and sensitivity to linguistic and stylistic phenomena in all their manifestations. Grammar, syntax, lexicography, literary strategies, elements of style, sparkling witticisms, and felicitous use of the Hebrew language\u2014mastery of all these accord him a unique place in the history of Jewish exegesis.
\nWe may pay whole-hearted tribute to his undoubted copious natural talents; yet it is quite uncertain that they would have germinated and flourished had not several external factors converged to cultivate and develop them to maturity, and to direct them upon the path they finally took. On account of the adversity which dogged his way through life, and the poverty which was his perpetual lot, by dint of his restless temperament and extensive wanderings, and because of the particularly tragic times in which he lived, he was able to leave an indelible mark on the history of Jewish literature, and to gain lasting fame as an unusual scholar of first rank, an ironic twist of fate which Ibn Ezra himself would have appreciated.
\nHis ill-fortune is registered in a short poem which he composed. In it he concludes that the moment of his birth happened to coincide with a deviation of the celestial bodies from their fixed paths. As a result, however much he struggles, he can never succeed. Were he perchance a candle maker, the sun would never set; if he dealt in shrouds, no one would die as long as he lives. In another poem, he laments with sardonic humor his tattered, threadbare cloak.
\nOne major consequence of this ne\u2019er-do-well\u2019s unvarying state of penury was that he perforce became directly dependent for economic support and facilities upon individual sponsors. There is much evidence to show that many of his grammatical and exegetical works were commissioned by his patrons or were produced for the benefit of his students who were often their sons. These circumstances help to explain certain peculiar features which his works exhibit. The system of patronage in the Middle Ages was notoriously unreliable, just like the government support of the arts and humanities in our own day. Ibn Ezra vividly illustrates his predicament in another poem in which he reports that whatever the time he calls upon his patron it proves to be inopportune, and he laments, \u201cwoe to the poor man, born to ill fortune.\u201d
\nThe uncertainties and limitations inherent in patronage, and the frustrations which it generated, meant that periodically Ibn Ezra needed to be in search of fresh sponsors. This, in turn, led him to find them wherever he could, a reality which spurred his peregrinations. The incidental beneficial effect was the exposure to diverse cultures, the enrichment of his life\u2019s experiences, and encounters with scholars and their works in many fields of human endeavor. All this added immeasurably to his store of knowledge and enhanced his versatility. The results are abundantly evident in his biblical commentaries. To cap it all, his wanderings took him from Moslem Spain to Christian countries, so that instead of Arabic he was forced to employ Hebrew as his linguistic medium. His works were therefore largely saved from oblivion, a fate which overtook much of Jewish literature written in Arabic. On the other hand, the life of an itinerant left its mark on his work. It frequently meant lack of access to book collections, even to his own compositions. He often had to rely on his memory, and his citations are not always dependable. Also, his work is characterized by a certain lack of ordered arrangement and by much duplication, and often gives the impression of having been hastily written.
\nNothing is known for certain of any attempt by Ibn Ezra to write works on Hebrew grammar or to compose commentaries to the books of the Bible during the first fifty years of his life, which were spent in Spain. At age fifty, he abandoned his native land, never to return, and he made his way to Rome where he arrived in 1140. This traumatic episode apparently stimulated introspection and self-judgment. A poem by Ibn Ezra on the ages of man may well carry an autobiographical echo of his state of mind at this time of life, for he writes:
\nAt fifty, one takes note of one\u2019s days of futility, grieves that the days of mourning approach, scorns the precious things of this world, fearful that one\u2019s time has come.
\nIt was only in the course of his last twenty-four years that he undertook the serious pursuit of systematic biblical exegesis, on which his reputation and claim to lasting fame have rested. Surprisingly, it took another crisis in his life to stimulate his commenting systematically on the five books of the Torah. An oath taken during a severe illness proved to be the incentive experience. The author twice refers to this critical stimulus, once in a poem, and again in his introduction to Genesis. In the former, entitled \u201cMay the Lord be Blessed,\u201d which was dedicated to a patron, Rabbi Moses ben Meir, he states, \u201cIn my illness, I made a vow to God to expound the Law given on Mount Sinai\u201d; in the latter, he promises to explain some of the mysteries of the text \u201cif God will help me pay my vow.\u201d
\nWhy Ibn Ezra delayed so long\u2014until age sixty-four\u2014to compose his commentary to the Torah, is unclear. Whether he first wished to hone his exegetical skills by expounding other biblical books before tackling the Pentateuch, or whether he underwent some psychological restraint in applying his gifted though somewhat spirited pen to the exposition of the Torah, can no longer be determined. Possibly, accusations of heresy, which had been hurled against him in Rome, were a contributory factor. At any rate, his dire sickness alerted him to the peril of further procrastination.
\nIbn Ezra did not manage to complete commentaries to the entire Bible. What are extant are those to the Torah, Isaiah, the Twelve Minor Prophets, Psalms, Job, the Five Megillot, and Daniel. This corpus in itself would be an astonishing scholarly achievement within a span of just twenty-five years. In addition, we have the author\u2019s own testimony to having compiled commentaries to many other books. He mentions Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Proverbs, Ezra\u2013Nehemiah, and Chronicles. None of these has survived, and they must have disappeared quite early, for the supercommentaries on Ibn Ezra\u2019s works do not mention them.
\nIn attempting to evaluate Ibn Ezra\u2019s exegetical work, the loss of so many of his productions must be taken into account. So must another factor in dealing with the commentaries, namely, the often problematical state of their texts. No autograph exists. Apart from corruptions in medieval manuscripts, and later in the printed editions, not to mention tampering by Church censors, there are clear indications of copyist initiatives. In some cases, the scribe openly inserted into his manuscript what he claimed to be oral interpretations from Ibn Ezra himself. Thus, at one point, the fragmentary commentary to Genesis carries this preliminary note:
\nI, Joseph son of Jacob of Moreil, heard this interpretation of the section in London, and I recorded it in my own language.
\nAnother note by this same scribe appears at the end of a manuscript of Ibn Ezra\u2019s commentary to the Twelve Minor Prophets:
\nI, Joseph son of Jacob of Moreil, copied from the author\u2019s manuscript; I also added a brief explanation to his text (just) as he had explained [it] to me while he was composing.
\nHe adds that he had indicated such glosses by means of colons. These, however, have long disappeared in the printed editions. There are also clear indications of unacknowledged scribal interpolations of explanatory glosses on the part of later scribes.
\nThere can be no doubt that Ibn Ezra knew exactly what he was about when he undertook to compose systematic commentaries to the biblical books. In his introduction to the Torah he critically surveyed four different approaches which characterized previous exegetical endeavors. The first is that pursued by the Geonim; their commentaries, he says, are diffuse and contain an excess of extraneous matter drawn from the secular sciences. The second approach is that of the heretical Karaites who reject the tradition and authority of the oral law and arbitrarily interpret the Torah. The third is the \u201cbenighted way\u201d of the Christians to whom the biblical text is wholly esoteric and who interpret it subjectively and allegorically. Here Ibn Ezra observes that \u201cthe Torah was not given to the unintelligent; the intellect must be the intermediary between man and his God.\u201d The fourth type of commentary is that of the Jewish exegetes in the lands of Christendom. They erroneously take literally the homiletics of the Sages of the Talmud, who themselves had no such intentions, and they pay no heed to the requirements of grammar. This review is capped by Ibn Ezra\u2019s own system. To him, the plain, straightforward meaning of the text, as determined by grammatical, philological, and contextual research, is decisive. However, in regard to the legal portions of the Torah, the expositions of the Rabbis are authoritative.
\nHow seriously Ibn Ezra viewed his mission may be seen from the prefatory poem to the introduction to Genesis in which he effectively, if succinctly, epitomizes his basic approach. It rests, he explains, on the twin foundations of grammatical analysis and intellectual acceptability. It is no wonder then that one of the most unusual features of the commentaries, unmatched by any other in the field, is the attention to grammatical detail. Our author had a passion for the Hebrew language, which he calls, \u201cthe sacred tongue\u201d or even \u201cour language,\u201d although Arabic was his native tongue. He was the first Spanish Jewish Bible commentator to compose his works solely in Hebrew, forced to do so, as we have pointed out, by his sojourning in the lands of Christendom, where the Jews were ignorant of Arabic. It is not easy to gauge the extent of their Hebrew learning, for the sources are contradictory. The chronicler, Abraham ibn Daud (1110\u20131180), goes so far as to say that Hebrew had become forgotten throughout the Diaspora, but Solomon ibn Parhon (c. 1160) asserts that the diversity of tongues characteristic of Christian lands stimulated Jews to use Hebrew as the one common language of communication. At any rate, Abraham ibn Ezra\u2019s pioneering role in the transmission of the Jewish scholarship of Moslem Spain to Christian lands cannot be gainsaid. This was recognized by Judah ibn Tibbon (c. 1120\u2013c. 1190), the great translator, who testified that \u201cthe exiles in France and throughout Christian lands do not know Arabic so that these [Arabic] works were a sealed book to them, inaccessible, unless translated into the sacred tongue \u2026 until the sage Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra arrived in their lands and aided them with short compositions.\u201d What Ibn Tibbon is referring to is that Ibn Ezra influenced the intellectual lives of the Jewish communities of both the Moslem and Christian worlds. He personally translated from Arabic into Hebrew the three basic grammatical works of Judah ben David Hayyuj (c. 950\u2013c. 1000), the real founder of the scientific study of biblical Hebrew whose researches inaugurated a new era in Hebrew scholarship.
\nIbn Ezra also compiled his own grammar books in Hebrew. It may be true, as Prophiat Duran (d. 1414) noted, that these contributed little new to the accumulated store of Hebrew grammatical knowledge; nevertheless, this does not diminish his achievement in educating generations of Jews in Christian lands in the basics of scientific Hebrew grammar and philology and in sensitizing them to the importance of these studies for the proper understanding of the biblical text, and for the advancement of the Hebrew language in general.
\nThe agenda of Ibn Ezra is quite clear. As noted above, the prefatory short poem to the introduction to the commentary on Genesis clearly states that his work \u201cis bound with cords of grammar.\u201d In the body of the introduction, in which he classifies the different approaches to biblical exegesis, his own system, he says, is first to explain the grammatical form of each difficult word before expounding the text as a whole. He kept to his plan for Genesis, but abandoned it for Exodus, perhaps because it was too innovative and not favorably received. He still injected a considerable amount of grammatical information into his verse by verse commentary, but integrated it into the broader exposition. His reliance on the productions of his predecessors, and his thorough familiarity with the field, are illustrated by the authorities he cites. In the historical preface to his Sefer Mo\u2019znayim he listed the \u201cdoyens of the holy tongue\u201d from Saadiah (882\u2013942) to his own day, sixteen in all. Of these, all but one are cited, with varying frequency, in his commentaries, whether favorably or critically. This meticulous regard for the correct understanding of the rules of Hebrew grammar led him, occasionally, to use his commentaries for wider instructional purposes. Thus, in his exposition of Ecclesiastes 5:1, he takes the opportunity to excoriate the liturgical poetry of the paytanim. The most prominent target of his verbal arrows is the renowned Eleazer Kallir (7th cent.?) whom he accuses of introducing egregious errors into Hebrew.
\nIt is clear that grammatical and philological research must rest upon manuscripts of undoubted accuracy, and Spanish Bible texts and Talmud editions early acquired enviable reputations for exactitude. By the tenth century, scholars could refer to the \u201caccurate and ancient Spanish-Tiberian Bibles.\u201d In the thirteenth century, the German-Jewish talmudist, Meir Ha-Kohen, in his commentary on the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides, spoke of the \u201cexcellent and exact books of Spain.\u201d Jews would travel from Germany to Toledo just to acquire model Torah codices. The great grammarian and masoretic scholar, Elijah Levita (1468\u20131549), at the very close of Spanish Jewish history, attested to the pre-eminence of Spanish Bibles, and Jedidiah Solomon Norzi (1560\u20131626) used the Toledo Bible manuscript of 1277 for his great critical masoretic commentary.
\nThe foregoing quotations illustrate the tradition in which Ibn Ezra was reared\u2014the meticulous attention to every detail of the revered Hebrew text of Scripture. An excellent example is his note to Exodus 25:31:
\nI have seen copies which the scholars of Tiberias examined, and fifteen of their elders swore that they thrice inspected every word and dot, every plene and defective [spelling], and lo, the word tey\u2018aseh is written with a yodh; but I have not found the like in the books of Spain, France, and England (lit. \u201cbeyond the sea.\u201d).
\nDespite such careful precautions, it must be stated that, on account of his wanderings, Ibn Ezra did not always appear to have had access to the best codices since his commentaries contain erroneous spellings and vowels in biblical quotations. Nevertheless, to him it was axiomatic that the masoretic vocalization and cantillation notes constituted the authoritative guide to the understanding of the text. In one of his early grammars, he admonishes the reader to follow the accentuation signs and to reject any interpretation not in accord with them. This principle is reiterated several times, although he, himself, occasionally departs from it. Surprisingly, he attaches no exegetical significance to the plene and defective spellings, even though the orthography plays an important role in both halakhic and midrashic interpretation. At the same time, he daringly asserts that there is a scribal error in the text of 1 Chronicles 28:17. On the other hand, in taking note of such variants as Dodanim and Rodanim in Genesis 10:4 and 1 Chronicles 1:7, and of Deuel and Reuel in Numbers 1:14 and 2:4, Ibn Ezra rejects out of hand the suggestion that the graphic similarity of the consonants resh and daleth was a cause of confusion. He prefers a midrashic harmonization that each of the individuals concerned possessed two names. On contextual grounds, he also prefers the masoretic text of Lamentations 4:18 over a proposed emendation based on assumed scribal inaccuracy in respect of the same two letters, and apparently supported by Proverbs 4:12. His reverence for the received Hebrew text is so great that he even dismisses the notion of \u201cscribal corrections\u201d (tiqqunei soferim) mentioned in several rabbinic sources.
\nIn this connection, Ibn Ezra\u2019s reaction to the \u201csubstitution theory\u201d of Jonah ibn Jana\u1e25 (Abul Walid ibn Merwan, c.985\u2013c. 1040) is most instructive. This scholar had emphasized that the meaning of a given text must be established by the larger context in which it is set, and not simply by the import of the individual words. Barring textual emendation, contradictions between text and context could be resolved by the presumption that the biblical writers \u201chad in mind one thing but wrote another,\u201d not mistakenly, but deliberately. This \u201csubstitution theory\u201d could take care of a large number of textual difficulties. Ibn Ezra refers to this theory, derogatively, several times: \u201cTake special care not to believe the words of the grammarian who, in his book, mentions more than one hundred terms, all of which, he says, are in need of substitution\u2014perish the thought! This would not be correct in secular speech, let alone regarding the words of the living God. His book deserves to be burnt.\u201d Again, in another of his grammatical works, he cites several examples of Ibn Jana\u1e25\u2019s substitutions, and concludes, \u201cIt is not as the blabberer says, and his book deserves to be burnt.\u201d In his comment on Psalm 77:3, once more referring to Ibn Jana\u1e25\u2019s substitution to explain this verse, Ibn Ezra writes, \u201cA great scholar authored an important book, but it contains errors,\u201d and he goes on to observe, \u201cNo intelligent person speaks in this manner even in everyday speech let alone in the sacred books.\u201d
\nWhat is intriguing about these responses is that Ibn Ezra attacks the substitution theory on rational, not dogmatic grounds. He does not explain why Ibn Jana\u1e25\u2019s book should be consigned to the flames. After all, no emendations of the text were suggested, nor does he accuse that author of heresy. But he must have sensed that the theory, precisely on account of its implausibility, would be interpreted as camouflage for recognition of textual corruption and the need for emendation. And Ibn Ezra would have no part of it.
\nNo other commentator on the Bible pays as much attention to matters of usage, style and rhetoric as does Abraham ibn Ezra, and in this too he was far ahead of his time. His favorite hermeneutical tool is ellipsis. He advises: \u201cKnow that there are places in the Bible which lack a word; I cannot count them because they are more numerous than locusts.\u201d By this he does not mean that the text is in need of correction, but that it is a characteristic of Hebrew style to use an economy of words, that is, to omit a word or a phrase when such can easily be inferred by the reader. One example is in Exodus 6:3: \u201cI appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them [by] My name YHVH.\u201d Another is the extension of the negative particle in the first clause of a compound sentence to the second clause without needing to repeat it, as in Deuteronomy 33:6: \u201cMay Reuben live and not die, and may his numbers [not] be few.\u201d This type of stylistic concision may cause an entire word or phrase to be left to the imagination of the reader. For instance, Ibn Ezra understands Genesis 24:67 to be, \u201cIsaac brought her to the tent, [the tent of] Sarah his mother.\u201d He applies this rule of ellipsis to explain many varieties of textual difficulties.
\nAnother feature of biblical style, according to Ibn Ezra, is transposition, whether of the natural or rational order of words, verses or even of pericopes. He cites the talmudic rule that \u201cthere is neither anteriority nor posteriority in the Torah,\u201d and he repeats it verbatim and in his own variant formulations, such as, \u201cThere are many verses in the Torah which more fittingly belong earlier,\u201d or \u201cThis is the way of the Torah\u2014to pre-position or to postpone.\u201d By these observations he means that the present sequence is not necessarily a governing factor in the interpretation of a passage. On other occasions he uses the term \u201cinverted\u201d or \u201cinvert!\u201d in regard to the present word order. He also notes that chronologically Genesis 11:29 and 12:1 are in reverse order, and similarly, that the report of the arrival of Jethro at the \u201cmountain of God,\u201d as told in Exodus 18:1\u201312, is not in its proper time sequence within the larger pericope.
\nNotwithstanding the foregoing rule, Ibn Ezra also, selectively, adheres to the idea that the juxtaposition of verses or pericopes is meaningful and exegetically significant. Here, again, he could fall back on talmudic precedent. Yet he is cautious in its application. He writes, \u201cBefore I begin to expound, I will articulate a rule: each norm and each commandment stands on its own; but if we can find a reason as to why this norm is juxtaposed to that, and this commandment to that, we shall [explain] the association as best we can. However, should we be unable to do so, we shall reckon that the deficiency is due to our own intellectual shortcoming.\u201d This would seem to mean that Ibn Ezra fully accepts the notion that there is always an underlying reason for the immediate interconnections of the biblical passages and, indeed, he employs this principle as an exegetical tool many times. In Deuteronomy 16:18 he goes as far as to say that even though each commandment stands by itself, their juxtaposition is meaningful even if the explanation is redolent of homiletics. Quite inconsistently, however, he vehemently attacks the Karaites for using the same interpretive device, and he rejects Saadiah\u2019s attempt to explain the sequence of the psalms by means of the same principle.
\nChiasmus is another rhetorical figure which Ibn Ezra often highlights. This device was implicitly recognized in the Talmud in a passage explaining the structure of a mishnah. Our author observes that \u201cit is a rule in Hebrew that when two items are mentioned, the second is mentioned first,\u201d when repeated. Ingeniously, he also applies this principle to explain the reversal of sequence in the repetition of an entire pericope.
\nResumptive repetition following an interval or interruption, the importance of which has only recently been properly recognized in biblical scholarship, is also a literary feature to which Ibn Ezra draws attention. For instance, Exodus 14:8 tells that Pharaoh gave chase to the Israelites, but verse 9 repeats that the Egyptians gave chase to them. Ibn Ezra comments that such is \u201cthe habit of the language.\u201d To reinforce this assertion, he cites Exodus 20:15 that \u201cthe people stood at a distance\u201d and the repetition of the phrase in verse 18. Similarly, when the Gaddites and Reubenites petitioned Moses for land beyond the Jordan, the text in Numbers 32:2 and 5 twice has \u201cthey said.\u201d Ibn Ezra observes that this is due to the length of the intervening data.
\nIn light of Ibn Ezra\u2019s independence of mind and intellectual integrity, his attitude to rabbinic exegesis is of particular interest. As we saw, in the introduction to his commentary on Genesis, he sets forth his position quite unambiguously. He excoriates the Karaites and other sectarians \u201cwho do not believe in the words of the transmitters [of the tradition]\u201d and who arbitrarily interpret the biblical text. He tries to show the absurdity of attempting to understand and fulfill numerous biblical commandments without the oral tradition. In describing his own approach, he admits that the Torah can bear multiple levels of meaning, but with regard to the halakhic material he plainly states, \u201cIf we determine two possible explanations [of a biblical passage], one of them being as the Rabbis expounded, we shall firmly rely on their true [understanding] \u2026 for our ancestors were true, and all their words are the truth.\u2026\u201d In the introduction to his shorter commentary on Genesis he states, \u201cwith regard to the commandments and laws, I shall rely on our ancient [Sages].\u201d
\nIbn Ezra repeats these convictions many times in the course of his commentaries which are laced with statements such as these: \u201cUnless one relies on the words of the oral law, a cultured person is powerless properly to understand one commandment in the Torah.\u2026 All the commandments require the traditional explanation of our ancestors;\u201d \u201cWe cannot fully explain a commandment in the Torah unless we rely on the words of our Sages, for when we received the Torah from our ancestors we similarly received the oral law; there is no difference between them;\u201d \u201cIn a matter about which we find no tradition there is no point to our theorizing;\u201d \u201cWe shall rely on the received tradition and not depend on our deficient intellect;\u201d \u201cThe truth is as our Sages handed down;\u201d \u201cWe rely on the received tradition of our ancestors;\u201d \u201cWe believe solely in the words of our ancient [Sages].\u201d A particularly instructive observation is to be found in Ibn Ezra\u2019s comment to Exodus 21:20\u201321. This passage legislates that the slave who has been irreparably injured by his master must go free. The ethnic identity of the slave is not specified, and Ibn Ezra notes that the Karaites apply the law to an Israelite slave, contrary to rabbinic interpretation. He then comments, \u201cIf two interpretations are equally possible, the received tradition will determine the truth.\u201d
\nThere is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Ibn Ezra in expressing these sentiments even though they often occur in the context of anti-Karaite polemic. There is abundant, independent evidence to show that he was a deeply religious man, thoroughly committed to the binding authority of rabbinic halakhah. His works on theological subjects, his Iggeret ha-Shabbat in defense of the traditional rabbinic interpretation of when the day begins, not to mention his religious poetry, all eloquently confirm this judgment.
\nAt the same time, Ibn Ezra\u2019s reverential attitude to the rabbinic Sages does not lead him to accept their interpretations uncritically when matters of halakhah are not involved, and sometimes even when they are. He makes a distinction between transmitted tradition (qabbalah) and what the Sages derived from the text by means of the exercise of logic and argumentation (sevarah). In the fourth exegetical approach, as set forth in his introduction to Genesis, he deals at length with midrashic interpretations of various kinds which are mistakenly taken literally. In his theological work Yesod Mora\u2019 he states, \u201cHe who has a mind is able to recognize when they (the Rabbis) speak homiletically and when they say the straightforward meaning.\u201d Thus, in reference to rabbinic interpretations, he notes that their citations of biblical passages may merely be to find scriptural support (\u2019asmakhta) and is not the real source of their exegesis.
\nRevealingly, he may imply that a traditional interpretation cannot be reconciled with the sensus literalis as he sees it. Thus, on Exodus 12:24 he comments that \u201cwere it not for the decisive, authentic tradition,\u201d reason would indicate that the daubing of the blood on the doorpost on the eve of Passover was intended to be an annual rite. Similarly, on Exodus 15:22 he states, \u201cIn my opinion,\u201d which he then conveys, such is the case, but if what the rabbinic sages understood is tradition then \u201cwe shall abandon our own logical conclusion and rely on tradition.\u201d In presenting his own views in contrast to that of the Sages, it is difficult to avoid the inference that he is critical of the latter, and that in passages such as these his acknowledgment of tradition is more a matter of form than conviction.
\nThere are instances of outright rejection of a well known rabbinic interpretation, but with no mention of its source. An example of this is the midrashic rendering of Genesis 28:11 which tells that when Jacob fled before his brother Esau, \u201che came upon a certain place.\u201d The Rabbis reinterpreted this phrase to mean, \u201che entreated the Omnipresent,\u201d based upon a varying signification of the verb and a rabbinic epithet for God. Ibn Ezra dismisses this midrash on the ground that \u201cplace\u201d as designation for God is never found in the Bible. Another instance is his denial that \u201chouse\u201d is ever used as a figurative for a \u201cwife\u201d although this is explicitly stated in Mishnah Yoma 1:1, citing Leviticus 16:6 in support. In connection with Exodus 33:18\u201323, which tells that Moses asked to see God\u2019s Presence, and God replied, \u201cYou shall see My back but My face must not be seen,\u201d the Sages interpreted the \u201cback\u201d to refer to \u201cthe knot of the tephillin.\u201d On this midrash, our commentator observes, \u201cTheir words are correct, but not literally, as contemporary scholars [take it], for it is a deep mystery.\u201d
\nIbn Ezra\u2019s clearest statement on his attitude to rabbinic homiletical exegesis is to be found in the Safah Berurah. He writes as follows:
\nYou, my son, be mindful that our ancient [Sages], transmitters of the commandments, by themselves expounded pericopes, verses, even words and consonants by the method of homiletics, whether in the Mishnah, the Talmud or the baraithot. Without doubt, they knew the straightforward path as it is. Hence, they framed the rule that (the scriptural verse may not depart from its straightforward meaning.\u2019 The homiletical explanation imparts an additional meaning. But subsequent generations made the homiletical paramount.\u2026
\nIn sharp contrast to his deferential respect for the classical Sages, Ibn Ezra often exhibits irreverent detachment from the post-Talmudic exegetes. In his introduction to Genesis he asserted, \u201cThe Lord alone do I fear, and I show no partiality in [interpreting] the Torah.\u201d It was precisely this mettlesome quality that appealed to the author of the apparently spurious letter supposedly sent by Moses Maimonides (1135\u20131204) to his son, recommending that he concentrate exclusively on the commentaries of Ibn Ezra, among the virtues of which he cited the latter\u2019s dauntless independence: \u201cFor the aforementioned scholar fears no man and shows no partiality to anyone.\u201d
\nThis bold stance of our exegete expresses itself in diverse ways, not least in caustic comments about those with whom he disagrees. This is immediately apparent in his introduction to Genesis where he casts a scornful eye upon the modes of scriptural interpretation pursued by his predecessors. He had familiarized himself with the works of a vast array of earlier scholars in the field, had subjected them to critical scrutiny and had formed very definite opinions about them. No previous or subsequent commentator on the Bible throughout the Middle Ages cited the works of so many authorities. Often he does so without mentioning a name, simply referring to the views of \u201ca scholar\u201d or \u201cscholars,\u201d to \u201ca great Spanish scholar\u201d or \u201cone of the scholars of Spain,\u201d to \u201ca scholar in Rome,\u201d or \u201cone of the scholars in Egypt,\u201d to \u201cthe scholars of Israel in the land of Greece\u201d or \u201cthe books of the scholars in France.\u201d More often, he cites them by name, about forty authorities in all, including several Karaites. The entire roster covers an astonishingly wide range of geographic origins: Persia, Iraq, Tiberias, Egypt, Kairouan, France, Italy and Spain.
\nThe interpretations of such luminaries as Saadiah, Jonah ibn Jana\u1e25 and Samuel b. \u1e24ofni, although greatly admired, are rejected at times. The illustrious Rashi is mercilessly criticized: \u201cHe expounded the Torah homiletically believing such to be the literal meaning, whereas his books do not contain it except once in a thousand [instances].\u201d About other prominent French exegetes, like Samuel ben Meir (RaShBaM 1085\u20131160) and Joseph ben Simon Kara (b. c. 1160\u201370), both of whom belonged to the school of literal exegesis (peshat), Ibn Ezra has nothing to say although it is certain that his Iggeret ha-Shabbat was composed in response to RaShBam\u2019s interpretation of Genesis 1:5, 8. Apparently he did not value their exegetical contributions.
\nThroughout his commentaries, and even in his grammars, he habitually injects derisive epithets about other exegetes, describing them as \u201cintellectually deficient,\u201d \u201cmindless,\u201d \u201clacking in faith,\u201d \u201cpurblind,\u201d \u201cempty-headed.\u201d This polemical strain finds particularly harsh expression in his dismissal of heterodox and Karaite interpretations. He cites \u201ca certain heretic, may his bones be ground to dust.\u201d The same malediction is attached to the notorious freethinker, Hiwi Al-Balkhi (9th cent.), who is referred to by word-play as ha-kalbi, \u201cthe dog,\u201d with the additional imprecation \u201cmay his name rot.\u201d A certain Yits\u1e25aqi is ridiculed with the question, \u201cWas he given the name Yits\u1e25aqi so that all who hear [his comment] will laugh at him?\u201d He is also given the epithet \u201cthe blabberer.\u201d Karaites are called \u201cSadducees\u201d and also \u201cthe deniers.\u201d
\nIt may be asked why Ibn Ezra wanted to circulate, through his polemics and gibes, the names of commentators and their\u2014in his opinion\u2014misguided views and interpretations rather than consign them to oblivion by disregarding them. It may be supposed that he had in mind when citing them the educated elite segment of his readership among whom those writings had presumably gained currency. As a pedagogue, he felt it his duty to combat them. One may also speculate whether an additional motivation was not at work. He had to endure hostility and charges of heresy while in Italy, so that his overdrawn demurrers and overstated criticisms of others may have served as a device for deflecting such accusations.
\nThis brings us to the matter of Ibn Ezra\u2019s involvement in historical criticism, an issue made prominent through Spinoza\u2019s interpretations, in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), of some of his comments on passages that give the appearance of being anachronisms in the Torah, and so later interpolations. On Deuteronomy 1:2 Ibn Ezra cryptically comments, \u201cIf you understand the deep meaning of the twelve, and also \u2018That day Moses wrote down this poem,\u2019 \u2018The Canaanites were then in the land,\u2019 \u2018In the mountain of the Lord it will be seen,\u2019 \u2018His bedstead is an iron bedstead,\u2019 you will recognize the truth.\u201d
\n\u201cThe twelve\u201d refers to the closing chapter of Deuteronomy; unlike the body of the book, which is couched in autobiographical style, these twelve verses speak of Moses in the third person, indicating that they were not written by him. In fact, on Deuteronomy 34:1 our commentator explicitly says, \u201cIn my opinion, Joshua wrote from this verse on, for once Moses ascended the summit of Pisgah, (where he died), he wrote no more; or he wrote prophetically (about himself).\u201d
\nHaving stated his own considered opinion about the last chapter of the Torah, Ibn Ezra gives a list of the other passages he must also have taken to be later interpolations. He includes Deuteronomy 31:22, which also refers to Moses in the third person, and Genesis 12:6 (cf. 13:7) which verse implies that the Canaanites were no longer in the land at the time of the writer. On this last verse, Ibn Ezra comments, \u201cPossibly, Canaan (grandson of Noah) seized the land of Canaan from someone else, but if it is not so, then I have a deep meaning, and the prudent one will keep silent.\u201d Genesis 22:14 records that in consequence of Abraham\u2019s naming the site of the binding of Isaac, Adonai-yireh, there arose a saying, \u201con the mountain of the Lord there is vision.\u201d But such an appellation would be applicable only subsequent to Solomon\u2019s Temple building. The reference to the iron casket of the king of Bashan, Deuteronomy 3:11, mentions that the relic survived in Rabbah of the Ammonites. The Israelites would not have placed it there after defeating the monarch. Hence the archaeological note suggests that it was written from the perspective of a later age, and is an interpolation.
\nIn the light of his acceptance of the existence of anachronisms within the Torah, albeit an admission expressed cautiously and allusively, it is surprising that Ibn Ezra preferred a forced interpretation for another crux. Numbers 21:1\u20133 mentions the \u201cking of Arad\u201d who waged war on Israel, was soundly defeated, and his city utterly destroyed. Ibn Ezra points out that the \u201cking of Arad\u201d is included in the list of Joshua\u2019s captive kings given in Joshua 12:14, and he comments, \u201cMany have said that this section (in Numbers) was written by Joshua \u2026 but the truth is that there were two sites (bearing the same name).\u201d In another comment, this one to Genesis 36:31\u201339, which lists \u201cthe kings who reigned in the land of Edom before any king reigned over the Israelites,\u201d he severely condemns the unidentified Yits\u1e25aqi. He writes, \u201cThere are those who maintain that this section was written prophetically. Yits\u1e25aqi said in his book that this section was written in the days of (king) Jehoshaphat (of Judah) \u2026 Perish the thought \u2026 His book deserves to be burnt.\u201d
\nIt is hard to establish the criterion by which Ibn Ezra differentiated acceptable from inadmissible anachronisms unless it be that his own esoteric mode of expression was directed to the cognoscenti who would know to separate matters of faith from matters of scholarship, whereas the explicit, unrestrained formulations of others who lacked the same sensitivity were felt to pose a threat to the common reader who would surely confuse the two,
\nIbn Ezra engages in historical criticism in commenting on the Book of Isaiah. Here he was obviously influenced by Moses ha-Kohen ibn Chiquitilla (d. c. 1080) in attributing the second part of the book, chapter 40 on, not to the eighth century b.c.e. prophet Isaiah, but to an anonymous prophet who lived centuries later, at the end of the period of the Babylonian exile when Cyrus of Persia was overthrowing the Babylonian empire and would soon liberate the Jewish captives and allow them to return to their homeland.
\nThe influence of Ibn Chiquitilla also shows itself in Ibn Ezra\u2019s commentary to the Book of Psalms. That scholar had assigned several of the compositions to the exilic period, and although Ibn Ezra does not accept all his interpretations, he, himself, cautiously explains Psalms 69 (verse 10), 85, 120, 137 as pertaining to the Babylonian exile.
\nIt must be pointed out that Ibn Ezra is not always consistent in keeping to the strict limitations that he set for himself. He is often guilty of the very things which he regards as defects in the works of others. For instance, in his comment to Genesis 14:14 he rejects outright as homiletical the notion expressed in Talmud and Midrash, that the \u201c318 retainers\u201d of Abram were really one individual, his servant Eliezer, the \u201cproof\u201d of which is that the numerical value of the Hebrew consonants of that name add up to 318. He explicitly maintains that \u201cScripture does not speak in (terms of) gematria.\u201d A remark of a similar kind is made in his comment to Exodus (short commentary). Yet in a long excursus to Exodus 33:21, the same author utilizes this very device in connection with the tetragrammaton, and again in his comments to Isaiah 21:8 and Zechariah 3:8. As to his criticism of the Geonim for introducing extraneous information from the secular sciences, he does the same thing by inserting digressions on such subjects as the Hebrew calendar, the sacred divine names, mathematics, astronomy, and astrology, as well as some personal reminiscences. Nevertheless, these discursive comments testify to a conviction that the Bible cannot be properly understood without recourse to a wide spectrum of varied branches of human knowledge. In this, too, he was quite ahead of his time. Furthermore, as was customary among the medievals, he made use of his commentaries as vehicles for the expression of his philosophic ideas. He did not author any systematic work on philosophy. He did compose a few booklets of minor significance on some specific theological matters. However, numerous observations of a philosophic nature are scattered throughout his commentaries. When collected and collated, these discursions demonstrate that he was essentially a Neoplatonist much influenced by Solomon ibn Gabirol whose allegorical expositions he cites, even though in his introduction he discounts allegorical and symbolic interpretations. Apart from this, Ibn Ezra designates a biblical passage by the Hebrew term sod which conveys that it carries an esoteric meaning. What that may be is generally unexplained, and the language that he uses is so veiled and succinct as to leave in doubt any interpretation placed upon it.
\nOf course, all this makes Ibn Ezra\u2019s commentaries that much more intriguing. He left plenty of room for supercommentary. Abraham ibn Ezra died in 1167. By mid-fourteenth century Judah Leon ben Moses Moskoni from Ocrida, Bulgaria, was able to report having inspected about thirty such supercommentaries, and in the first half of the seventeenth century Joseph Solomon Delmedigo (1591\u20131655) testified that he had seen twenty-four in Constantinople. The most important of all is the Safenat Pa\u2018nea\u1e25 authored by Joseph ben Eliezer Bonfils in Damascus (second half of the fourteenth century).
\nAbraham Geiger and Biblical Scholarship
\nAbraham Geiger as a biblical scholar. How can we appraise his role except within the general context of his contemporary biblical scholarship? How can one form a balanced judgment without consideration of the attitudes of nineteenth-century J\u00fcdische Wissenschaft to the discipline? How can we achieve a proper understanding of his investigations into the biblical text unless we probe the animating forces that imparted meaning and motivation to the \u201cScience of Judaism\u201d in his day?
\nBy the time Geiger had reached the age of religious maturity in the eyes of the Jewish people, biblical criticism had already achieved respectability in Protestant university circles. Even the term \u201chigher criticism,\u201d borrowed from classical scholarship, had gained currency by this time. The Introduction to the Bible of Johann Gottfried Eic\u1e25orn (1752\u20131827), which was largely responsible for bringing this about, had run through three editions, and the fourth was just beginning to appear. The results of previous scholarship, summarized and systematized, were readily accessible to anyone who wished to be informed on the source-critical dissection of the Pentateuch and the theological stance of each document. Wilhelm M. L. De Wette (1780\u20131849) had eight years earlier published his revolutionary dissertation on Deuteronomy, which he had isolated as a distinct document within the Pentateuchal complex and had assigned to the time of King Josiah of Judah in the seventh century b.c.e.
\nThe formative years of Geiger\u2019s life, his student days at the universities of Heidelberg and Bonn between 1829 and 1832, and his first decades in the rabbinate, thus coincided with an era of intense productivity in biblical studies, and the most illustrious personalities in the field were his contemporaries. What a galaxy of scholars he could have known! K. D. Ilgen (1763\u20131834), Heinrich Ewald (1803\u20131875), Ferdinand Hitzig (1807\u20131875), E. W. Hengstenberg (1802\u20131869), Wilhelm Vatke (1806\u20131882), Franz Delitzsch (1813\u20131890), August Dillman (1823\u20131894), Eduard Reuss (1804\u20131891), Paul de Lagarde (1827\u20131890), Abraham Kuenen (1828\u20131891) and K. H. Graf (1815\u20131869)\u2014all these founders of the science of biblical criticism taught and wrote and disseminated their latest theories in his day. Only Julius Wellhausen (1844\u20131918) is missing from the list of worthies in that he did not publish his magnum opus until two years after Geiger\u2019s demise.
\nTo how much of all this was Geiger really exposed? We learn that he began to read Hebrew at the age of three, and that his half-brother, Salomon, had early in his youth introduced him to the study of the Bible\u2014along traditional lines, of course. When he first tasted of the forbidden fruit of the new learning is uncertain, but he lists as his \u201cearly guides through the realm of the Bible\u201d none other than Johann Gottfried Herder (1744\u20131803) and Eic\u1e25orn himself, and he admits that he did not find them altogether satisfying, although they did succeed in \u201cbroadening his perspective.\u201d We shall later return in greater detail to Geiger\u2019s own views. Revolutionary that he was, he was yet a child of his times, and it is highly instructive to observe him against the background of nineteenth-century Jewish scholarship.
\nMoses Mendelssohn (1729\u20131786) himself had been familiar with the recently developed school of critical biblical scholarship, but he never allowed the critical theories to intrude upon his Biur, and he was careful to avoid anything that might cast doubt on the traditional viewpoint. Leopold Zunz (1794\u20131886) had been a student of De Wette, yet his epoch-making essay containing a plea for the recognition of Jewish scholarship as a discipline (1818) concentrated on rabbinic literature. His self-justification for this was that since biblical literature was also the property of Christians, much effort had been devoted to it. Rabbinic literature on the other hand, being an exclusively Jewish domain, had therefore been neglected. This rationalization for the disregard of biblical studies in the program of J\u00fcdische Wissenschaft implies an identification and satisfaction on the part of Zunz with the biblical scholarship then current. Nevertheless, when Zunz edited a new German translation of the Hebrew Bible (1837\u201338) it was largely dependent on Mendelssohn and entirely faithful to tradition. His great work on the history of the liturgical addresses of the Jews commences with the postexilic books. Not until the age of seventy-three did Zunz seriously take up critical biblical studies, and here he openly subscribed to contemporary source-critical theories. It is highly significant that he did not publish his researches in his own journal or in any other Jewish periodical. It is true that Moses Moser, at the opening of the Verein f\u00fcr Kultur und Wissenschaft des Judentums, called for a thorough study of the Bible, but his was a lone voice and went unheeded. The movement of the \u201cScience of Judaism\u201d produced practically nothing original in this field, and those Jews who did trespass upon it mainly confined themselves to problems of canonization, the ancient versions, the Masorah, and the like innocuous subjects.
\nJewish historiographers fared no better when it came to the history of the preexilic period. Writing in the Jewish Encyclopaedia at the turn of the century, Joseph Jacobs observed: \u201cAs regards the historical treatment of the Biblical phases of Jewish history, this has become part of general Biblical exegesis, and does not call for treatment in this place, especially as scarcely any Jewish writers have produced works of importance on this subject.\u2026\u201d
\nIsaac Marcus Jost (1793\u20131860), who in nine volumes produced the first comprehensive history of the Jewish people, really began his story with the Maccabees. The first Jewish economic historian, Levi Herzfeld (1810\u20131884), commenced his major work with the fall of Jerusalem, although he had separately published some studies on biblical problems and had lamented the neglect of biblical studies by Jews. The great Heinrich Graetz (1817\u20131891) began his publication schedule in 1853 with volume 4 of his history, dealing with the Talmudic period. He tarried twenty years before producing the two volumes on the biblical era. His professed reason was that he needed a measure of first-hand authority about the background and could not attain this until he had the opportunity to visit the Holy Land. Some scholars, however, believe that Graetz was actually long afraid to deal with the subject of biblical history. Actually, from 1871 Graetz concentrated on biblical research and pursued a very radical approach in his work on the Prophets and Hagiographa, freely indulging in both higher and lower criticism. Nevertheless, he refused to apply the same to the Pentateuch, and he insisted on the unity and preexilic origin of the entire Torah. Moritz Steinschneider (1816\u20131909) reviewed Jewish literary creativity, but he began with Ezra, and he had little to report on the achievements of biblical historiography.
\nTo sum up: the Jewish scholarship of Geiger\u2019s time generally avoided biblical studies. Scholars who did happen to venture into those perilous waters steered clear of the Pentateuch. By and large, they simply had no conception of any possibility of a specifically Jewish contribution to the field.
\nThis highly disappointing, thoroughly ambivalent, and deliberately self-restrictive approach to biblical scholarship contrasts sharply with the brilliant efflorescence of the same in that earlier golden age of Jewish scholarship in Spain. The explanation must largely be sought in the soterial role that nineteenth-century scholars had assigned to J\u00fcdische Wissenschaft. Given the dual crises in which Jews and Judaism found themselves in that period, scientific scholarship was supposed to be the instrument for the achievement of Nirvana\u2014the successful emancipation of Western Jewry. Zunz had made this clear in no uncertain terms in his pioneering, programmatic vision of 1818. Jewish literature was to be exploited, honestly exploited, for political ends. Wissenschaft would gain non-Jewish recognition for postbiblical Jewish intellectual creativity as an academic discipline for its own sake. This, in turn, would perforce effectuate the civic equality of the Jews, which was the ultimate eschatological goal. Eduard Gans (1798\u20131839), one of the cofounders of the Verein, had echoed the same sentiments. J\u00fcdische Wissenschaft was to be a contrivance by means of which the Jews might be integrated into European society. It is true that Immanuel Wolf, another co-founder, did demand that the scientific pursuit of Jewish culture must be thoroughly objective and free of tendentiousness, but he was out of tune with the times.
\nIt is in the light of this pervasive soterial intent that nineteenth-century J\u00fcdische Wissenschaft, and particularly its meager biblical ingredient, must be viewed. The strongly held, if naively mistaken, belief that the dissemination of the knowledge of Judaism would inevitably cause prejudice to dissolve and the barriers to emancipation to disintegrate simply could not fit the Bible into its scheme of things. Moreover, by concentrating on postbiblical literature, Jewish scholars could avoid uncomfortable and delicate issues of faith, such as the problem of divine inspiration. They could also, by the simple device of benign neglect, de-emphasize the Pentateuch, which symbolized to them Jewish halakhah-bound particularism and national and ethnic identity, both of which were regarded as undesirable qualities. It was the theological and political nature of J\u00fcdische Wissenschaft that largely determined its attitude and direction in the field of biblical studies.
\nThis verdict is decisive when it comes to evaluating Geiger\u2019s place in the movement of the \u201cScience of Judaism.\u201d Being the supreme activist, he, more than all the others, subordinated scholarship to practical ends, and in so doing he promoted the proposition that the transfiguration of Judaism was indispensable to the achievement and security of emancipation. Thus, in 1841 he expressed the fear that \u201cthe more profound minds who are active within Judaism \u2026 may withdraw into the field of scholarship and be utterly lost for all the practical ends of Judaism.\u201d He freely admitted that the \u201cscientific foundation\u201d of Judaism had \u201ca practical purpose.\u201d He wanted to justify his reforms in worship and Jewish law on the basis of historical research. Nothing is more instructive than his observation that the era of Moses Mendelssohn, while highly beneficial for the individual, had shaken the foundations of Judaism without replacing it with something new and vigorous.
\nIt was this urge to create a new Judaism and so a new Jew, this largely practical aim, which scholarship had to serve, that led Geiger to biblical studies but also circumscribed his field of interests. In both respects he was a highly original figure in the hall of fame of Jewish scholarship in the last century.
\nWhat was Geiger\u2019s attitude to biblical criticism? We have already cited his admission that he had been early influenced by Herder and Eic\u1e25orn, although they did not entirely satisfy him. Again, in his famous Open Letter to Holtzmann, dated 1865, he expressed dissatisfaction with the present state of scholarship in relation to the origin and completion of the Pentateuch, and he promised to make his own contributions to the subject. As early as 1836 he had very strongly lamented what he termed the \u201cdeceit\u201d of presenting to the public as historical events of a supernatural nature what were clearly to be regarded as nothing but legends, and he gave vent to his conviction that what he felt to be the true spirit of Judaism does not shine forth with sufficient clarity from the Pentateuch. On another occasion and in a popular work, he quite matter-of-factly expressed the view that the first four books of the Pentateuch reflect the thinking of the Northern Kingdom.
\nThere can thus be no doubt of Geiger\u2019s commitment to the radical biblical scholarship of his day. He was the first Jewish scholar to incorporate the modern systematic study of the biblical books within the program of J\u00fcdische Wissenschaft, and he was the first to introduce this into the curriculum of a rabbinical seminary. How are we to account for Geiger\u2019s departure from the contemporary pattern of Jewish scholarship in respect of the Bible? It was not simply a matter of his personal courage or intellectual daring, although, doubtless, these were factors. Rather, we must look for an explanation to the pragmatism we have already discussed. In order to find the historical basis for his reforms, he had to adopt the conception of Judaism as a religion that had been steadily evolving from its inception to his own day. He wanted to prove that his reformism did not constitute a sundering of the past, a rupturing of tradition, but simply the latest stage in a process of natural growth entirely consistent with the long history of Jews and Judaism. He therefore felt constrained to construct an imposing, comprehensive, scientific system in which intellectual honesty and the broader purpose demanded that no valid distinction could be made between the Bible and the Talmud in respect of critical judgment.
\nSo far so good. But the inherent weakness in a scholarship designed to serve an ideological and practical purpose extrinsic to itself lies in its inevitable selectivity and eisegesis, and both are transparently present in Geiger\u2019s biblical studies. Take, for example, his attitude to the Pentateuch. It was no different from that of the Protestant theologians, and he had little original to add to the literary criticism it had produced. However, while other Jewish scholars felt uncomfortable with the heterogeneity and declared lateness of the Pentateuch, Geiger obviously saw these views as scientific support for his own intuitive early dissatisfaction with the Pentateuch as a religious document. If we wonder, then, why Geiger neglected the study of the Pentateuch, the answer is not embarrassment or cowardice, but that Protestant scholars had already largely preempted the field and had produced the conclusions he needed. The presumed scientific demotion of the Pentateuch served to de-emphasize the authority behind its laws and made easier the assault on the national and particularistic aspects of its religion. It enabled Geiger to emphasize and magnify the ethical monotheism of the Prophets, which to him constituted the true Jewish universalism, and provided a natural meeting-ground between Jews and Christians.
\nIn this respect, it is a fascinating exercise to examine the inconsistency to which Geiger the Jew was driven in his views on the development of biblical religion. On the one hand, he is critical of the conception of God found in the Pentateuch and is apologetic about certain aspects of biblical Judaism, such as the sacrificial system and the existence of a priesthood. He accepts the critical view of Israelite paganism. Yet at the same time, in his division of the historical development of Judaism into four periods, he can designate the first, which ends with the canonization of the Bible, \u201cthe period of revelation.\u201d Of this period, Geiger can actually write:
\nNor does Judaism claim to be the work of individuals but that of the whole people. It does not speak of the God of Moses or of the God of the prophets, but of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of the God of the whole race, of all the patriarchs who were equally endowed with the gift of the prophetic vision, the genius of revelation which was latent in the whole people and found concentration and expression in individuals.\u2026
\nJudaism arose within the people of revelation \u2026 an illumination proceeding from a higher mind and spirit which cannot be explained; which is not a compound produced by a process of development even if it is further developed afterwards; which all at once appears in existence as a whole, like every new creation proceeding from the Original Spirit.\u2026
\nGeiger even invokes Yehuda HaLevi, who, he says, \u201cemphatically designated revelation as a disposition that was present in the whole people.\u201d Moreover, Geiger asks the crucial question:
\nHow did it happen that such a people, a mere tribe surrounded by so many mightier nations, which had no opportunity of having an unobstructed view of the great events in the world, which had to fight many battles for its bare existence, which was confined within a limited territory and had to employ all its resources to defend itself against its powerful enemies\u2014how did it happen that such a people rose to those sublime conceptions? It is an enigma in the world\u2019s history. Who will give us a complete solution?
\nIt is amazing that Geiger here parts company with his contemporary Christian scholars, who saw in the biblical descriptions of idolatry in Israel the true national religion, and in the concept of Israel\u2019s infidelity the fruit of later retrospection. Several scholars have independently noted the striking similarity between Geiger\u2019s idea of the original, intuitive, spontaneous, and national character of Israelite monotheism and the basic premise of the great History of the Religion of Israel by Yehezkel Kaufmann. Unfortunately, Geiger did not develop his remarkable insight and did not seem to realize its shattering implications for the contemporary source-critical reconstruction of the religion of Israel. He had the distinction of being the first to include biblical studies within the scope of J\u00fcdische Wissenschaft, but he missed the opportunity to make a truly Jewish contribution to the subject.
\nNevertheless, it is true to say that without the insight about the inextricable relationship between the Bible and the people, Geiger could not have given birth to his magnum opus, the Urschrift, published in 1857. At the root of that great work lies the basic presupposition that the history of the biblical text is interwoven with the history of the people, that the text itself, being a response to life, constantly adapted itself to the needs of the people so that it is possible to reconstruct the inner history of Israel\u2019s faith from the external history of the biblical text. In other words, Geiger believed that what the process of midrash and exegesis accomplished in a later age, was achieved through textual manipulation in the period before the final stabilization of the biblical text.
\nIn support of his thesis about the onetime fluidity of the biblical text, Geiger could point to the variants between our received text and the Septuagint, the Targumim, and the Samaritan Pentateuch. He could also show that in some instances the interpretation of a biblical passage in older halakhic sources presupposes a reading different from ours. Of course, none of these observations was original to him. Zecharias Frankel and Samuel David Luzzatto had addressed themselves to the same problems. But only Geiger constructed a coherent thesis that assumed a different Hebrew Vorlage behind the translations and versions rather than a simple ascription to copyist errors and imperfections and mere tendentiousness on the part of the translators. Geiger penetrated even deeper to devise an explanation as to how the variants arose in the original Hebrew texts he believed the versions to reflect. He concluded that the social, political, and religious conditions and intellectual cross-currents of the period of the Second Temple\u2014more specifically, the challenge of Hellenism and the Maccabean revolt and the subsequent struggles between the Pharisees and the Sadducees\u2014were the prime causes. It was only after the destruction of the Temple, with the final victory of the Pharisees, that the pristine text was gradually recovered to achieve final fixation in the time of Rabbi Akiba.
\nGeiger\u2019s Urschrift predictably aroused great controversy, but Theodore N\u00f6ldeke called it an \u201cepoch-making work,\u201d and Moritz Steinschneider praised it highly, while the otherwise critical Solomon Schechter admitted it to be \u201cmonumental.\u201d If, after the passage of a century, it can still merit scholarly appreciation and evaluation\u2014this in itself is tribute indeed, irrespective of the results of our investigation and quite apart from the original ideological motives of the author. The immense erudition, the astonishing command of a vast scholarly apparatus, and the author\u2019s wide catholicity of interests cannot fail to arouse our admiration and more. But how much remains of his general presuppositions and conclusions?
\nThere can now be no doubt as to the correctness of Geiger\u2019s insight into the fluid state of the text in early times, for the Dead Sea Scrolls have abundantly confirmed the existence of a multiplicity of text-types in the period between 300 b.c.e. and the first century c.e. These same documents further prove that Geiger was absolutely right\u2014at least for the historical books\u2014in contending that the Septuagint accurately reflects a Hebrew Vorlage current in the third and second centuries b.c.e., and that its divergences from the received Hebrew text are in the main not due to the idiosyncrasies of the translators. Geiger has been proven correct, once again, in his evaluation of the Samaritan Pentateuch. He challenged the prevailing view, which had the great prestige of W. Gesenius behind it, that the Samaritan text was a corrupt and relatively late recension of an inferior Jewish version, and thus a useless witness to the Hebrew. Geiger boldly and, as it now turns out, correctly insisted that the Samaritan Pentateuch represented a very ancient textual tradition which is indeed a valuable tool for reconstructing the history of the biblical text. His instinct was once again unerring in detecting the direct link between the Sadducees and the Karaites. Here, too, the Dead Sea Scrolls have amply illustrated the truth of the point.
\nStill, the Qumran and other finds have also exposed the great complexity of the issues involved, far beyond what Geiger could possibly have imagined. There is absolutely no evidence that the textual diversity can be attributable to the Sadducean-Pharisaic rivalries. The mere fact that the sectarian community at Qumran could embrace a variety of manuscripts of the same biblical book, diverging one from the other in respect of orthography and readings, proves that the explanation for textual diversity must be sought elsewhere than where Geiger located it. This argument is strengthened by the fact that although this sect pursued its own halakhic tradition, which was certainly close to that of the Sadducees, the Masoretic text-type still figures prominently in its library. Furthermore, there is nothing to warrant the notion of sectarian manipulation of the text to give expression to certain ideas. To accomplish this purpose, the men of Qumran made use of the pesher, or quasi-midrashic exegesis, leaving the scriptural citation intact.
\nFinally, it is worth mentioning one other point of interest that arises from Geiger\u2019s biblical studies, and this is the repeatedly positive evaluation of our received Hebrew text. True, he does not think it is free of error, but he has a high estimation of its authenticity, and of its \u201ccloseness to the original\u201d and its superiority over the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch. This view is quite surprising, given the reckless emendation of Scripture indulged in by Geiger\u2019s contemporaries, but it is consonant with his own cautious approach to textual emendation, as is evident from his Hebrew philological studies. In one of these he explicitly warns against the facile tampering with the text in order to explain away difficulties. The history of the biblical text certainly has not turned out to be as Geiger imagined, but it is of great interest to note that the position of biblical scholarship in the latter half of this century is far closer to Geiger\u2019s view than to that of his contemporaries.
\nIn summation: any evaluation of Geiger as a biblical scholar must take account of the fact that his scholarship was incidental to his practical and ideological goals. He wrote no commentaries and did not deal with preexilic biblical history. His supreme interest was the history of the Halakhah. He was not afraid to investigate issues of biblical research that intimidated others. If his broader theories have not stood the test of time, he was possessed of brilliant and original insights in several areas that modern discoveries have confirmed. Perhaps his greatest achievement in the field was to reclaim biblical studies as the legitimate concern of Jewish scholarship.
\nJewish Bible Scholarship and Translations in the United States*
\nFor two thousand years, the Hebrew Bible has been studied by Jews not simply as a self-contained, sacred work on its own terms, but largely as a body of religious literature that has been filtered through a continuous process of rabbinic interpretation and reinterpretation within the community of practice and faith from which its immediate authority derived. Already in 553 c.e., the emperor Justinian (527\u2013565 c.e.) took note of this fact in his novella constitutio concerning the Jews to whom he granted permission to read their sacred scriptures in Greek, Latin, or any other language. He stipulated, however, that they should \u201cread the holy words themselves, rejecting the commentaries,\u201d by which he clearly meant rabbinic exegesis. As he put it, \u201cthe so-called second tradition (deuterosis) we prohibit entirely, for it is not part of the sacred books nor is it handed down by divine inspiration through the prophets, but the handiwork of men, speaking only of earthly things and having nothing of the divine in it\u201d (Baumgarten: 37).
\nJustinian\u2019s motives and intentions are irrelevant to the present theme, for they belong within the category of medieval Jewish-Christian polemics. But his specified restriction has illustrated a historic fact of cardinal importance that differentiates the Jewish study of the Scriptures from the Christian approach, which, of course, has its own venerable tradition of theological reinterpretation of the Bible of the Jews. The educated, committed Jew to whom study of the Bible is at one and the same time a religious obligation, a spiritual exercise, a mode of worship, and a moral as well as an intellectual discipline, is confronted with a vast array of texts which, if not of equal authority, and most have no authority at all, yet command his attention, his concentrated thought and study. It is a literature that has long been endowed with a life and energy of its own, and in its independent existence the light of the Hebrew Bible has become refracted through a thousand prisms. In discussing the role of the Bible in any Jewish community, this circumstance must be taken into account.
\nAnother factor that requires recognition is the term \u201cAmerican Judaism.\u201d It is an appellation that well-nigh defies meaningful definition. The variable, restless, frequently chaotic, and always kaleidoscopic configurations of American Jewish life do not easily yield to procrustean generalizations. American Judaism is not, strictly speaking, simply a peer group of the Protestant and Catholic faith communities, for it encompasses a considerable number of individuals who possess no affiliation with religious institutions but whose sense of Jewish self-identity is strong and for whom \u201cJudaism\u201d carries with it a humanistic, secular nuance and\/or nationalistic orientation. Nevertheless, it appears to be an incontrovertible fact that the ultra-Orthodox and the ultra-Reform, as well as those who represent the variegated shadings of religiosity between these poles, together with the secular Jew, all accept the Hebrew Scriptures as the bedrock of Jewish civilization, and all share a common recognition and conviction that the Hebrew Bible is a living force within the community of self-identifying Jews from which the structure of values to which Judaism subscribes ultimately derives. That this consensus omnium may also be accompanied by a commonality of ignorance of the biblical text itself is beside the point. What is pertinent is that the peculiar makeup of American Judaism distinguishes it from Protestantism and Catholicism in a very significant way.
\nStill another, no less important, singularity is that the received Hebrew text forever remains the sole authentic and valid basis for Jewish study and interpretation. Translations of the Bible have no authority for Jews. Particular English versions, like those of Isaac Leeser and of the Jewish Publication Society of 1917, achieved universal acceptance by English-speaking Jews, as will doubtless the new JPS translation. However, in no instance was the version initiated, sponsored, authorized or sanctioned by any official Jewish ecclesiastical body. In each case, the English version was a decidedly lay production even though learned rabbis representative of the three organized wings of American Judaism actively participated in the work.
\nTHE LEESER TRANSLATION
\nAmerican Jewish Bible translations date back to the foremost Jewish religious leader in early America: Isaac Leeser (1806\u20131868). Born in Westphalia and orphaned as a child, Leeser studied both at the gymnasium in Muenster and with Rabbi Abraham Sutro (Grossman). He arrived in this country in 1824 to work with his uncle, Zalma Rehine, a storekeeper in Richmond, Virginia. There he learned English, assisted on a volunteer basis at Congregation Beth Shalome, studied with Richmond\u2019s three most learned Jews, and in 1829 undertook to defend Judaism in print against the strictures of a British critic. Shortly thereafter, Congregation Mikveh Israel called him to Philadelphia to serve as its \u1e25azan. He spent the rest of his life in Philadelphia, first at Mikveh Israel, later on his own, and still later at Congregation Beth El Emeth. He never married and never made much money. His time, energy, and resources went exclusively to the congregation and the Jewish community, which he served faithfully as spiritual leader, writer, organizer, translator, and publisher. The magnitude of his achievements defies easy summary. Merely to read Bertram Korn\u2019s list of Leeser\u2019s \u201cfirsts,\u201d however, is to gain some appreciation of his formative role in American Judaism:
\nThe first volumes of sermons delivered and published by an American Jewish religious teacher (1837); the first complete American translation of the Sephardic prayer book (1837); the first Hebrew primer for children (1838); the first Jewish communal religious school (1839); the first successful American Jewish magazine-news journal (1843); the first American Jewish publication society (1845); the first Hebrew-English Torah to be edited and translated by an American Jew (1845); the first complete English translation of the Ashkenazic prayer book (1848); the first Hebrew \u201chigh school\u201d (1849); the first English translation of the entire Bible by an American Jew (1853); the first Jewish defense organization\u2014the Board of Delegates of American Israelites (1859); the first American Jewish theological seminary\u2014Maimonides College (1867). Practically every form of Jewish activity which supports American Jewish life today was either established or envisaged by this one man. Almost every kind of publication which is essential to Jewish survival was written, translated, or fostered by him. (1967: 133)
\nLeeser\u2019s scholarly equipment was somewhat limited. The more learned and often more religiously radical Jewish religious leaders who followed him to America\u2019s shores had no trouble confounding him with intricate Talmudic arguments. Leeser\u2019s energy, however, was boundless, and likewise boundless was his desire to strengthen the Jewish community against assimilation and protestantization. Reanimating Jews\u2019 \u201calmost expiring desire for critical inquiry into the sacred text\u201d formed part of Leeser\u2019s program for stimulating Jewish revival (Leeser, 1856: vii). His other activities\u2014educational, religious, philanthrophic and political ones\u2014similarly related to his broad mission, that of preserving Jewish identity in the face of Christian conversionism and Jewish apathy.
\nWhile Isaac Leeser\u2019s decision to translate the Bible largely stemmed from these domestic concerns, it was also partly influenced by Moses Mendelssohn\u2019s translation of the Pentateuch from Hebrew to German (1780\u20131783), an epoch-making event whose reverberations spread throughout post-Emancipation Jewry (Weinberg; Billingheimer; Altmann). Mendelssohn served as one of Leeser\u2019s early role models, and when he first contemplated a Bible translation, the young \u1e25azan may have wanted to carry forward the master\u2019s work in a new language. But by the time he actually began his work in 1838, Leeser was less enamored with Mendelssohn, and he had a better conception of his own community\u2019s needs. Mendelssohn had translated the Bible as part of his program to enlighten the Jews of his day. Leeser\u2019s translation, by contrast, aimed to fight too much enlightenment; it sought to help Jews preserve their own identity intact.
\nThe average American Jew in Leeser\u2019s day did not read Hebrew and, therefore, studied the Bible, if at all, from the venerable King James Version obtained cheaply or at no charge either from missionaries or from the American Bible Society. These Bibles contained the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament bound together, in one volume according to the Christian canon, and in a thoroughly Christological format. Every page and every chapter of the Bible society\u2019s Bible bore a brief summary heading, many of which read Christian interpretations into the text. Jews who used these Bibles often condemned, as Leeser did, the \u201cunfairness\u201d of those who chose such headings as \u201cthe Prediction of Christ\u201d (Psalm 110), \u201cA Description of Christ\u201d (Song of Solomon 5), and \u201cChrist\u2019s Birth and Kingdom\u201d (Isaiah 9) (1867: 41). Innocent Jews seeing these headings had, Leeser feared, \u201cno means of knowing what is Scriptural and what is not\u201d (1867: 42)
\nFormat aside, the King James Bible translated many verses in a manner that Jews found thoroughly objectionable. As Leeser saw it, (Occident, 1851: 480) \u201cwherever it was possible for the translators to introduce Christianity in the Scriptures, they have uniformly done so,\u201d in order, he said on another occasion, (1853: iii), \u201cto assail Israel\u2019s hope and faith.\u201d He found particularly galling what he called the \u201cperversions\u201d introduced into the standard English text of the Prophets and the Psalms.
\nLeeser was not alone in his wrath. English Jews, as early as David Levi, had penned critiques of the Authorized Version, while Selig Newman\u2019s Emendations of the Authorized Version of the Old Testament (1839) filled seventy-two closely-printed pages with examples of where \u201cthe translators were either decidedly wrong, or \u2026 have not given the happiest rendering\u201d (iv). Particularly troubling from a Jewish point of view were such readings as \u201cvirgin\u201d for the Hebrew \u2018alm\u00e2 (Gen. 24:43, Isa. 7:14), or young woman; repeated capitalization of the word \u201csaviour,\u201d and the like.
\nHad Leeser\u2019s objections to the King James Version only been confined to these kinds of Christological biases, he might have composed a Jewish revision without undue difficulty, simply by deleting the headings, repairing offensive verses, and rearranging the order of the books to conform with Jewish tradition. Just as the Ferrara Bible of 1553 appeared in a Christian edition where \u2018alm\u00e2 in Isa. 7:14 was translated \u201cvirgin,\u201d and a Jewish edition where the same word was rendered \u201cyoung woman\u201d or transliterated as \u201cla alma\u201d (Margolis, 1917: 62), so there could have been Jewish and Christian editions of King James. But a Judaized version of a Christian translation would not have satisfied Leeser. To his mind, Jews were the guardians of Scripture, bearers of a long interpretive tradition of their own. They had no reason to defer, as subordinates, to a translation authorized by, as he put it, \u201ca deceased king of England who certainly was no prophet\u201d (1856: v). Nor did he agree that the Authorized Version created the standard from which all subsequent revisions derived. He rather staked Jews\u2019 claims on the Bible in the original; that was their source of legitimacy. By publishing a translation \u201cmade by one of themselves,\u201d he placed Jews on an equal footing with Protestants. To the extent that his translation could claim to be a better approximation of the original, he could even insist that Jews were more than equals.
\nLeeser was not alone in seeking independent legitimacy through a Bible translation. His Philadelphia contemporary, Bishop Francis P. Kenrick, was making a new Catholic translation of the Bible at roughly the same time (1849\u20131860), though whether the two men knew each other is not clear. Kenrick\u2019s translation principles, of course, differed from Leeser\u2019s, since the Catholic translator, though informed by the Hebrew, \u201cdid not always feel at liberty to render closely where it would imply a departure from the Vulgate\u201d (Fogarty: 171). But the two translators shared a common desire: to translate the Bible into an English version that was both visibly different from, and arguably better than, the Authorized (Protestant) Version that the majority of Americans held dear.
\nThe translation that Leeser finally produced in 1853, after fifteen years of work, derived from the original Hebrew, and depended, according to the preface, only on traditional Jewish commentators and \u201cthe studies of modern German Israelites\u201d (including that of the German Reform leader, Ludwig Philipson). Leeser avoided making use of Christian or English language scholarship, boasting with only slight exaggeration that \u201cnot an English book has been consulted except Bagster\u2019s Bible\u201d (even this exception was deleted in a later preface.) Although he was more familiar with Christian works than he admitted, he wanted to stress that his was a Jewish translation. When he was done, he pridefully pointed to the many differences which distinguished his version from the authorized one. His only concession to the King James was to follow its old English style, which, he felt, \u201cfor simplicity cannot be surpassed,\u201d and to conform to many of its spellings (Sussman, 1985).
\nLeeser strove to render the Hebrew text into English \u201cas literally as possible,\u201d even at the expense of stylistic beauty (1856: vi). This immediately set his translation apart from the flowery King James, and simultaneously ensured that it would face criticism on literary grounds, criticism that was frequently deserved. Leeser provoked Israel Abrahams\u2019s scorn (1920: 254\u201359) by abandoning the standard translation of Ps. 23:2: \u201cHe maketh me to lie down in green pastures,\u201d for the awkward, if slightly more literal \u201cin pastures of tender grass he causeth me to lie down.\u201d \u201cThe heavens relate the glory of God; and the expanse telleth of the work of his hands\u201d (Ps. 19:1) rang similarly awkward, especially when contrasted with \u201cthe heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork,\u201d the King James reading. Leeser did carry over the standard and to his mind literal \u201cuntil Shiloh come\u201d for his translation of the controversial passage in Gen. 49:10, which Christians have interpreted as foreshadowing Jesus. (The new Jewish Publication Society translation, by contrast, reads \u201cSo that tribute shall come to him,\u201d following the Midrash.) Rather than deviating from the plain meaning as he saw it, he appended a long explanatory footnote, which concludes by asserting that \u201cthe pious and intelligent reader will have enough to satisfy all doubts.\u201d
\nMatitiahu Tsevat (1958) has pointed out that in his quest for literalism \u201cLeeser wanted the impossible.\u201d Translation by its very nature involves interpretation. Furthermore, all Bible translators are heir to interpretive traditions which, consciously or not, shape their scriptural understanding. Calls for \u201cliteralism,\u201d or movements \u201cback to the Bible,\u201d Tsevat shows, really seek to cloak with legitimacy efforts aimed at replacing one mode of interpretation with another.
\nIn Leeser\u2019s case, literalism usually meant resorting to rabbinic exegesis. Thus, in Exod. 21:6, dealing with the laws for servants; the King James translation reads straightforwardly \u201chis master shall bore his ear through with an awl; and he shall serve him for ever.\u201d Leeser, influenced by rabbinic interpretation of Lev. 25:10 and, likely as not a raging American debate over the relationship between the biblical form of slavery and the Southern one, translated the last clause \u201cand he shall serve him till the jubilee\u201d\u2014which, of course, is not what the verse literally says. It must be admitted that this is an unusual instance. It was more often the case that Leeser encased his interpolations in parentheses. Instead of halving Samuel \u201clying down in the temple of the Lord,\u201d for example, he more demurely had him sleep \u201cin (the hall of) the temple of the Lord\u201d (1 Sam. 3:3)\u2014a bow to decorum that the commentators endorsed, but that literalists assuredly would not.
\nIsaac Leeser labored initially under the assumption that Jews alone would be interested in his translation. In 1845, when his Hebrew-English edition of the Pentateuch appeared, he presented the volume only to his \u201cJewish friends,\u201d explaining that \u201cI speak of my Jewish friends in particular, for however much a revised translation may be desired by all believers in the word of God, there is no probability that the gentiles will encourage any publication of this nature emanating from a Jewish writer\u201d (1845: iii). Leeser, however, was mistaken. By the time his full Bible with notes appeared in 1853, he himself realized that those \u201cwho are of a different persuasion\u201d might indeed find the work valuable \u201cas exhibiting \u2026 the progress of biblical criticism among ancient and modern Israelites\u201d (iv). When Rev. Charles Hodge, a leading Presbyterian theologian at Princeton Theological Seminary, recommended his (Leeser\u2019s) translation in the Princeton Review, and called for \u201ca work on a similar plan from a competent Christian scholar,\u201d Leeser happily reprinted the review in the Occident (1854: 360), the Jewish monthly that he founded and edited.
\nChristian interest in Leeser\u2019s work reflects yet another aspect of the Jewish-Christian relationship that deserves attention. More than it is generally recognized, American Protestants in the nineteenth century sought out and respected Jewish expositions of the Hebrew Scriptures. The roots of this interest, of course, lay in Europe, where Christian scholars had overtly or covertly been studying the Bible with Jews for centuries. They knew, as did their nineteenth-century successors, that Jewish religious leaders understood Hebrew, read the Bible in the original, and studied traditional Jewish commentators\u2014or at least claimed to. But beyond this, especially in America, many Protestants saw Jews as lineal descendants of the biblical figures they read and heard about. According to the Richmond Constitutional Whig in 1829:
\nWhen we see one of these people, and remember that we have been told by good authority, that he is an exact copy of the Jew who worshipped in the Second Temple two thousand years ago\u2014that his physiognomy and religious opinions\u2014that the usages and customs of his tribe are still the same, we feel that profound respect which antiquity inspires. (Ezekiel and Lichtenstein: 56)
\nProtestants who adhered to this view naturally assumed that Jews preserved special knowledge of the biblical world that others did not share. Acting on that basis, they often turned to Jews when Hebrew or Old Testament questions arose.
\nTwo early American Jews, Jonathan (Jonas) Horwitz and Solomon Jackson received non-Jewish encouragement when they sought to publish Hebrew texts of the Bible\u2014a much needed task considering that in 1812, by Horwitz\u2019s estimate, fewer than a dozen Hebrew Bibles were available for purchase in the whole United States. Horwitz, a scholarly European immigrant who brought Hebrew type with him when he came to Philadelphia, collected recommendations from twelve Christian clergymen and numerous subscriptions for his work, but eventually transferred his rights to the edition to Thomas Dobson who completed the task based on the text of van der Hooght\u2019s Hebrew Bible that Horwitz had prepared. The Dobson Bible (1814) is the first independently produced edition of the Hebrew Bible in the United States (Vaxer; Wolf and Whiteman: 308\u2013311; Fein: 75\u201376).
\nJackson, better known as editor of The Jew, an antimissionary periodical and the first Jewish magazine in America, planned an even more ambitious undertaking: a Hebrew-English linear Bible. His earlier vituperative attacks on leading Protestants notwithstanding, three clergymen, including the Episcopal Bishop of New York, John Henry Hobart, joined six leading Jews in recommending him and urging support for his work. One of the clergymen specifically praised the fact that the \u201cauthor and editor belong to the literal family of Abraham,\u201d suggesting that this improved the proposed volume\u2019s credibility (Jackson). Apparently, the recommendation did not help, for the book never appeared.
\nAmericans also looked to Jews from time to time to defend the Bible against \u201cinfidels.\u201d Letters of Certain Jews to Monsieur Voltaire (1795), a French work defending both Jews and the integrity of Scripture, appeared in two American editions, as did England\u2019s David Levi\u2019s A Defence of the Old Testament in a Series of Letters Addressed to Thomas Paine (1797). Thomas Jefferson, who read Levi\u2019s earlier Letters to Dr. Priestly, noted in 1816 that Levi \u201cavails himself all his advantage over his adversaries by his superior knowledge of the Hebrew, speaking in the very language of divine communication, while they can only fumble on with conflicting and disputed translations\u201d (Lipscomb: 469\u201370; Abrahams and Miles). Three decades later, when the Bible was \u201cthreatened\u201d by new discoveries in geology, Jonathan Horwitz, who since the appearance of the Dobson Bible had become a medical doctor, published A Defence of the Cosmogony of Moses (1839), a \u201cvindication\u201d of the Bible \u201cfrom the attacks of geologists,\u201d based on a close reading of the Hebrew text (which, he lamented, was so little known), a cursory reading of geological theory, and a firm conviction that \u201cnot the slightest foundation is to be seen in the Holy Record for any interpretation lengthening the age of the world beyond 6,000 years\u201d (29). Later still, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the leading figure in American Reform Judaism, attempted to defend tradition against what he called the theory of \u201chomo-brutalism,\u201d as expounded by Charles Darwin (1876: 47\u201369).
\nMore commonly, Americans looked to Jews to teach them the language of the Bible: Hebrew and Hebrew grammar. Many of the Hebrew grammars used by Americans were composed by Jews or Jewish converts to Christianity, and numerous Jews taught Hebrew to Christian students (Chomsky; Fellman). Isaac Nordheimer, the most notable early American Hebrew grammarian, wrote the highly original Critical Grammar of the Hebrew Language (1835\u20131841) and was the first Jew to teach Hebrew at New York University (Pool; Neill). Joshua Seixas, son of the famous Shearith Israel minister and also the author of a Hebrew grammar (1833, 1834), taught Hebrew at various colleges in Ohio. His best known student was Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, who held Seixas in high regard (Davis, 1970: 347\u201354). Jews continued to be associated with Hebrew and Hebrew studies later on in the century, in a few cases at the university level.
\nThe fact that these Jews were exceptional\u2014most American Jews could not understand Hebrew\u2014detracted not at all from the image of all Jews as biblical experts. McGuffey\u2019s Eclectic Third Reader taught school children to \u201cconsider the Jews as the keepers of the Old Testament. It was their own sacred volume, which contained the most extraordinary predictions concerning the infidelity of their nation, and the rise, progress, and extensive prevalence of Christianity\u201d (Westerhoff: 139). Seeing Jews in this light, Christians periodically called on Jews to offer biblical views on questions of the day. Jewish leaders presented widely publicized testimony regarding \u201cThe Biblical View of Slavery\u201d (the question divided Jews as much as it did non-Jews), the biblical view of temperance, the biblical view of capital punishment, and even on the biblical view of baptism (Kalisch: 37). Biblical magazines, particularly late nineteenth-century ones like The Old Testament Student, welcomed Jewish participation. Jewish lectures and books on biblical subjects received respectful Christian attention. Even those who considered Jews misguided and doomed recognized that Jews preserved important traditions and could be valuable assets in the battle against infidelity. Not surprisingly, therefore, Leeser\u2019s Jewish Bible translation met with considerable approbation.
\nTHE RISE OF JEWISH BIBLE SCHOLARSHIP IN THE UNITED STATES
\nThe decades following the publication of Isaac Leeser\u2019s translation saw the first flickering of Jewish biblical scholarship on American shores. Harry Orlinsky, in his valuable survey (1974), highlights the pioneering efforts in this area of Isidor Kalisch, Adolph Huebsch, Isaac Mayer Wise, Michael Heilprin, and Benjamin Szold. All of these men were trained in Europe, all but Heilprin were active rabbis, and all immigrated with the great wave of central European Jews that swelled America\u2019s Jewish population from less than 15,000 in 1840 to about 250,000 just forty years later. A desire to strengthen the hands of the faithful against missionaries and biblical critics motivated some of these men, notably Kalisch in his Wegweiser f\u00fcr rationelle Forschungen in den biblischen Schriften (1853), and Wise in his Pronaos to Holy Writ (Kalisch, 1891: 14\u201318; Wise, 1954: 180; Sandmel). Others, especially Michael Heilprin, best known as an editor for Appleton\u2019s Cyclopaedia, \u201caccepted, not grudgingly, but with enthusiasm and delight, those views of the Old Testament which have been defended by Graf and Kuenen and Wellhausen and Reuss\u201d (Pollak: 9). Indeed, Heilprin\u2019s articles about biblical criticism in the Nation helped familiarize Americans with what these European scholars were doing, and his magnum opus, The Historical Poetry of the Ancient Hebrews Translated and Critically Examined (1879\u20131880), carried critical scholarship forward and won considerable academic acclaim.
\nThe lonely efforts of these scholarly pioneers contrast with the widespread neglect of biblical studies on the part of the mass of American Jews. Heavily engaged as most were in mercantile pursuits, they found little time for any kind of study; critical scholarship was certainly beyond them. Immigrants did sometimes send their intellectually gifted youngsters back to Germany for advanced degrees, a practice that continued down to World War I. Once there, however, few American Jews took the opportunity to gain mastery in biblical scholarship\u2014and for good reasons.
\nFirst of all, they found the subject of the Bible heavily freighted with Christian theology, if not anti-Judaism, and particularly with the dogma of the Hebrew Scriptures as praeparatio for the New Testament. Second, they learned that the Jewish renaissance movement known as Das Wissenschaft des Judentums generally excluded biblical studies from its purview. It concentrated instead on rabbinic literature, which had been sorely neglected and stood in dire need of redemption for scientific research. Leopold Zunz, programmatic founder of the Wissenschaft movement, was content to leave biblical scholarship in Christian hands. Many American Jews followed suit, believing that the Bible was, as Max Margolis put it, \u201ca non-Jewish subject\u201d (Gordis: 2). Finally, American Jews knew that biblical studies held open to them almost no promise of gainful employment. Positions in biblical studies at major American universities remained generally the preserve of Protestants, many of them ministers. Jews\u2014witness the case of Arnold Ehrlich or Israel Eitan\u2014found themselves excluded, even if their contributions did win recognition elsewhere. This may help explain why no Jews numbered among the founders of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), and only a mere handful (notably the father and son teams of Rabbi Marcus Jastrow and Prof. Morris Jastrow and Rabbi Gustav Gottheil and Prof. Richard J. H Gottheil) took out membership during its first decade, even though the regulations of the society explicitly specified that conditions of membership were to disregard what it termed \u201cecclesiastical affiliation.\u201d By the semicentennial meeting, the roster of members included at least forty-three Jews, of whom, it would seem, seventeen bore the title \u201cRabbi,\u201d and twenty were professional Jewish scholars. Whether the proportionately large number of rabbis may be taken as indicative of broader intellectual horizons and deeper scholarly interests on the part of the Jewish clergy of two generations ago than is the case with their modern successors or whether it means that a relatively large number of would-be Jewish biblical scholars turned to the rabbinate as the outlet for their thwarted aspirations in an era of complete lack of opportunity of academic employment is hard to say. What is worthy of more than the mere passing mention possible here, is that a half-century ago Jewish scholars in Talmudics and the traditional branches of medieval learning maintained an abiding and serious interest in biblical studies, something apparently made all but impossible today due to the unprecedented explosion of scholarship and research, pursued with ever-increasing degrees of specialization. We refer to the presence on the 1930 membership rolls of such illustrious names as Cyrus Adler, Salo Baron, Israel Davidson, Alexander Marx, Ralph Marcus, Chaim Tchernowitz, Harry Wolfson and Solomon Zeitlin (Journal of Biblical Literature, ii, xvii, xx, lii).
\nTheoretically, of course, Jews and Christians could join together on a scientific basis to study the Bible. Rabbi Bernhard Felsenthal made this clear in 1884 when, in an article in The Old Testament Student, he declared that \u201ca Bible scholar should free his mind from all misleading preconceptions, from all sectarian bias;\u2014truth, nothing but the truth, should be his aim.\u201d In fact, however, this proved easier said than done. William Rainey Harper, although agreeing with Felsenthal\u2019s \u201cprinciple \u2026 that, whether Jews or Christian, we are to seek the truth\u201d nevertheless reminded the rabbi that \u201cOur paths diverge. Our conceptions of the Old Testament must, of necessity, be largely molded by what we find in the New.\u201d
\nAmerican Jewish scholars found themselves more easily welcomed as fellows in the broader realm of Semitic studies, a field which was from a theological point of view far safer than biblical studies, yet did nevertheless still bear on the biblical text and history. Cyrus Adler (1926), in his cursory survey of \u201cThe Beginnings of Semitic Studies in America,\u201d mentions several very early American Jewish contributions to the subject, most of them dealing with language and grammar, as well as the valuable if amateurish pre-Civil War work of Mendes I. Cohen who brought to America a large collection of Egyptian antiquities, later deposited at Johns Hopkins University. More rigorous works of scholarship began to appear only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when, as part of a larger movement to upgrade American higher education, Semitics programs were initiated, first at the graduate level at Johns Hopkins, and later at other major universities. At Hopkins, under the direction of Paul Haupt, brought over from G\u00f6ttingen in 1883, such Jewish students of Semitics as Cyrus Adler, William Rosenau, and Aaron Ember embarked on their first serious scholarly endeavors. At the same time, Maurice Bloomfield, already a professor at Hopkins, was beginning his pioneering studies of Sanskrit, which also held important implications for students of Semitics. Other Jewish Semitists of this period included Richard J. H. Gottheil, who became chairman of the Semitics Department at Columbia University; Morris Jastrow, who became Professor of Semitic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; and Max L. Margolis, of whom more below, who from 1909 until his death occupied the chair in biblical philology at Dropsie College. Gottheil, Jastrow, and Margolis all served terms as president of the Society of Biblical Literature: Gottheil as its first Jewish president, in 1903, and the other two, respectively, in 1916 and 1923.
\nThat so many Jews found a home in Semitic studies is not accidental. Jews, particularly the great Jewish philanthropist Jacob Schiff supported Semitic studies with liberal endowments in the belief that Jews were, in Schiff\u2019s words, \u201cthe modern representatives of the Semitic people.\u201d To combat \u201csocial prejudice and ostracism\u201d against Jews, Schiff felt that \u201copportunities should be created for a more thorough study and a better knowledge of Semitic history and civilization, so that the world shall better understand and acknowledge the debt it owes to the Semitic people\u201d (Adler, 1929: 21). To this end, Schiff supported archeological acquisitions and excavations in the Near East, built the Harvard Semitics Museum, and founded the Semitic and Hebrew departments of the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress. Other Jews supported Semitic studies at Yale and the University of Chicago (Chiel; Fever: 433). Although for the time being biblical studies remained a separate domain, outside the realm of Semitic studies, in fact, albeit through the backdoor and under the guise of a more acceptable rubric, the groundwork for Jewish Bible scholarship in America had been laid. A new era was about to begin.
\nTHE FIRST JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY TRANSLATION
\nAs biblical and Semitic studies developed in Jewish scholarly circles, popular pressure mounted within the American Jewish community for a new Bible translation to replace Isaac Leeser\u2019s. The late nineteenth century witnessed a great upsurge of general interest in the study of the Bible. In Jewish circles, as also in Christian ones, the demand for Bibles that embodied \u201cthe Jewish point of view\u201d reached unprecedented levels. A Jewish cultural revival took place\u2014a fact that the onrush of East European Jewish immigration during this period usually overshadows\u2014and during one stunning decade the Jewish Publication Society, the American Jewish Historical Society, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the Jewish Chautauqua Society all came into being, while at the same time preparations began for publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia. Except for the American Jewish Historical Society every one of the above had as one of its aims the furthering of biblical scholarship or the encouraging of Bible study by the laity. \u201cThere has been, during the past ten years, a great awakening among our people,\u201d Daniel P. Hays correctly noted in 1901. He considered the change \u201ca realization that the Jew has not become great by his material achievements, but by his contribution toward the higher ideals of life and by his endeavors toward the uplifting of the race\u201d (American Jewish Year Book, 1902: 216).
\nChristian interest in Jewish work on the Bible also reached new heights during this period. Rabbis, notably Emil G. Hirsch, Bernhard Felsenthal, and Gustav Gottheil received invitations to teach the Bible to Christian audiences, while Rabbi Moses Gries in Cleveland reported having \u201cmany requests from non-Jews who wish to secure a translation accepted by Jewish scholars\u201d (JPS Annual Reports, 1897: 24).
\nIn the face of all this popular interest in Jewish biblical exegesis, the Leeser Bible, although it had become the standard Anglo-Jewish Bible, nevertheless proved totally inadequate. First of all, it was too expensive. The smallest edition cost one dollar, much more than the equivalent Protestant edition, and more also than many people were apparently willing to pay. Over and over Jews called for \u201ca cheap edition of the English Bible.\u201d The Central Conference of American Rabbis, in 1909, thought that a fifty-cent Bible was all that the market could bear (CCAR Year Book, 1895: 25; 1909: 155).
\nEven had the price been right, however, the Leeser Bible would still have proved unsatisfactory. Its English style was embarrassing and in some cases unintelligible. Its \u201cliteral\u201d approach to the Bible along with Isaac Leeser\u2019s professed belief \u201cin the Scriptures as they have been handed down to us, as also in the truth and authenticity of prophecies and their ultimate literal fulfillment\u201d (1856: v) found fewer and fewer adherents. It was also antiquated; biblical scholarship had advanced enormously since Leeser\u2019s day, permitting new translations of formerly obscure passages. Most important of all, a new Protestant translation of the Bible had appeared, the (Anglican) English Revised Version (1885), which was produced by some of the greatest Christian scholars of the day, and from the point of view of biblical studies was relatively up-to-date. Leeser\u2019s translation paled by comparison.
\nIt did not follow, however, that a whole new Jewish translation had to be produced from scratch. As had been true with the King James, so too with the English Revised Version Jews could simply have issued a \u201cJewish revised version,\u201d repairing offensive renderings (the ERV continued such Christological King James readings as \u201cvirgin\u201d for Isa. 7:14), and putting the biblical books into a traditional Jewish order and format. The Jewish Religious Education Board in London made the task of composing a Jewish revision easier by publishing sixteen pages of corrections titled Appendix to the Revised Version (1896). In 1907, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) resolved to carry out the project:
\nBe it resolved, that in view of the immediate need of a cheap edition of the English Bible in the best available translation, the C.C.A.R. enter into negotiations with the publishers of the Revised version for an issue of the Old Testament exclusively (CCAR Year Book, 1907: 35).
\nNegotiations proceeded, and before long, Oxford University Press agreed to issue a special edition of its translation, complete with a sixteen-page appendix prepared by the CCAR, containing \u201ccorrections and emendations of the text necessary from the Jewish standpoint\u201d (CCAR Year Book, 1908: 149).
\nRabbi Samuel Schulman of Temple Beth EI in New York rejoiced at the \u201cimplied recognition of a Jewish body by the Christian world, in so important a matter as changes in a widespread version of the Bible.\u201d But at the last minute, the CCAR backed out of the undertaking. Instead, it accepted an invitation from the Jewish Publication Society to cooperate in \u201cissuing an English translation of the Bible under Jewish auspices\u201d (JPS Publication Committee Minutes, 5 April 1908). Whatever benefits cooperation with Oxford University Press might have promised faded before the renewed possibility of a translation produced by Jews independently.
\nThe Jewish Publication Society (JPS) had been talking about a new Jewish Bible translation since 1892. Three years later, in the very midst of the heady revival already described, it proudly announced that a new translation was underway. Specialization and division of labor, concepts much discussed at the time, seem to have left their impact on the JPS, for it decided to produce its translation as a series of independent volumes, each one by a different person\u2014mostly rabbis with European training. Marcus Jastrow, who had immigrated to America in 1866 and become one of American Jewry\u2019s leading luminaries (author of a Hebrew-Aramaic-English dictionary that is still in print) was appointed general editor. He was aided by Kaufmann Kohler and Frederick de Sola Mendes: both rabbis, both trained abroad. Rhapsodic reports of progress\u2014descriptions of editors \u201cbusily pursuing the work of revising and editing the books of the Bible as they came to them from the hands of the translators\u201d\u2014had to be tempered annually by tedious reminders that \u201cthe work is necessarily slow, and \u2026 a considerable time must elapse before the entire Bible can be ready for publication\u201d (JPS Annual Reports, 1899: 17). By the time Jastrow died in 1903, only Kaufmann Kohler\u2019s translation of Psalms, revised by the editors, had actually been published. Although work on a few other books had proceeded, a new translation of the whole Bible seemed more distant than ever.
\nSolomon Schechter, freshly arrived from Cambridge University and viewed in his day as America\u2019s preeminent Judaic scholar, replaced Jastrow as translation chairman, but he soon wearied of the task. The endlessly complex and hopelessly disorganized manner in which the translation was being pursued and a chronic scarcity of funds led him to submit his resignation in mid-1907. But just as the project seemed in danger of collapse, the CCAR overture to Oxford University Press became public. At first, Judge Mayer Sulzberger (1843\u20131923), chairman of the JPS Publication Committee and a lay scholar in his own right (Davis, 1965: 362\u201365), considered the CCAR scheme a good one, and wrote to Rabbi David Philipson that \u201cit might be well for the Publication Society to consider the question of joining the Central Conference in its project of disseminating the Revised Version as widely as possible.\u201d A few months of reflection, however, convinced him that \u201cofficial recognition\u201d by Jews of the English Revised Version could be inappropriate (Philipson Papers). Since Philipson was coming around to the same view, Cyrus Adler, long the power behind the throne at JPS, stepped in and hammered out an agreement that both the JPS and the CCAR accepted.
\nBoth sides agreed on \u201cthe desirability of issuing an English version of the Bible under Jewish auspices,\u201d and both sides agreed on the need to produce the new Bible as quickly as possible (\u201ctwo years would be an outside limit\u201d). Secretly, both sides also agreed that the only way to accomplish this feat was \u201cthat the text of the Revised Version be used as the basis, and that the revision of it \u2026 be primarily of such a nature that it will remove all un-Jewish and anti-Jewish phrases, expressions, renderings and usages\u201d (JPS Publication Committee Minutes, 5 April 1908). The new Bible, in short, would conform to the latest Protestant fashion but would still be distinctive enough to bear a separate Jewish label.
\nAlthough it is likely that nobody noticed the fact at the time, the discussions between Adler, Sulzberger, and Philipson evidenced the growing Americanization of Jewish scholarship in the New World. All three of the men were products of the American educational system (Sulzberger, though born abroad, immigrated with his parents as a young boy) and had obtained the bulk of their Jewish knowledge in the United States. Perhaps it is not surprising that the man selected to be the new editor-in-chief of the Bible translation was also, at least in part, American trained: Max L. Margolis. Born in Russia, Margolis immigrated to America from Berlin in 1889 at the age of twenty-three, and two years later under Richard Gottheil received the first Ph. D. in oriental studies ever awarded by Columbia University. His subject was \u201can attempt to improve the damaged text of the Talmud through reference to variant readings in Rashi\u2019s Commentary on the Talmud, demonstrated through the tractate Erubhin,\u201d and Margolis wrote the thesis in Latin. But given the difficulty of obtaining rabbinic sources in the United States, he then shifted his focus to Semitics, and quickly gained scholarly recognition. The depth and breadth of his learning, coupled with his fine command of the English language, made him the ideal person to head up the translation effort (Gordis; Orlinsky, 1974: 305\u201310).
\nAs editor-in-chief, Margolis singlehandedly prepared all of the first drafts of the Bible translation \u201cwith the aid of previous versions and with constant consultation of Jewish authorities.\u201d More than anyone originally expected, he also proceeded to deviate from the English Revised Version, sometimes on scholarly, not just religious, grounds. Only when he was done did he submit his drafts to an editorial committee consisting of six scholars, perfectly balanced so as to span both the Jewish academic world (two each from the Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College, and Dropsie College) and the spectrum of Jewish observance. Cyrus Adler, well known for his administrative capabilities, chaired the translation committee, thereby ensuring that the work progressed and that the deliberations remained at least relatively peaceful.
\nViewed retrospectively, the Bible translation committee, aside from Margolis himself, represented much less than the best that Jewish Bible scholarship in America had to offer. Morris Jastrow, Casper Levias, William Rosenau, Moses Buttenwieser, Julian Morgenstern, Jacob Hoschander, and, the most talented of all, Arnold Bogumil Ehrlich (Kabokoff), although recognized by their peers as qualified biblical and Semitic scholars, were conspicuously absent (several had contributed to the abortive 1895 JPS translation effort). Scholarly rabbis representing the CCAR (Samuel Schulman, David Philipson, and Hebrew Union College President Kaufmann Kohler), and wide-ranging Jewish scholars (Solomon Schechter, Joseph Jacobs, and Cyrus Adler) representing the JPS were deemed more suitable for the task. Religious politics, personality factors, facility in the English language, and, above all, the desire to move ahead expeditiously without becoming bogged down in scholarly fine points may explain this decision; evidence is lacking. Still, and despite all good intentions, unforeseen, highly delicate problems continually cropped up.
\nTo cite just one example, at the very end of the translation process, a fierce and quite revealing dispute broke out over how best to render Isa. 9:5 (9:6 in Christian texts). The King James translation exuded Christology:
\nFor unto us a child is born, unto us a son, is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.
\nThe English Revised Version followed suit, with only minor modifications in style. Jewish translators properly insisted that nothing in Isaiah\u2019s original referred to the future (Leeser\u2019s text read \u201cgovernment is placed on his shoulders and his name is called \u2026\u201d), but they had trouble with the translation of \u201c\u015bar \u0161\u0101l\u00f4m.\u201d Leeser employed the phrase \u201cprince of peace,\u201d using the lower case to avoid (presumably) misinterpretation. Samuel Schulman of the JPS translation committee urged his colleagues to follow the same practice, since \u201cit calls attention to the fact, that we wish to avoid any possible Christological interpretation of the phrase.\u201d Max L. Margolis and Cyrus Adler, by contrast, insisted that using the lower case would imply that the \u201cprince of peace\u201d was a human being, \u201cexactly the thing we wished to avoid.\u201d Strongly worded letters flew back and forth. The final translation, clearly influenced more by the desire to instruct Christians and defend Jews than by considerations of scholarship, banished \u201cprince of peace\u201d altogether:
\nFor a child is born unto us,
\nA son is given unto us;
\nAnd the government is upon his shoulder;
\nAnd his name is called
\na Pele-joez-el-gibbor-Abi-ad-sar-shalom
\nThat is, Wonderful in counsel is God the Mighty, the
\neverlasting father, the Ruler of peace.
\nMany similar compromises had to be hammered out by the committee before it could, as a group, pronounce itself satisfied.
\nSeven years after it was promised, The Holy Scriptures finally appeared in print in 1917. The event received considerable publicity and this was fitting, since the Bible would sell more copies than any other JPS volume: over one million to date. The impact of the new Bible, however, went much further. As Abraham Neuman put it retrospectively:
\nIt was a Bible translation to which American Jews could point with pride as the creation of the Jewish consciousness on a par with similar products of the Catholic and Protestant churches. It was a peace-offering to the Jewish and the non-Jewish world. To the Jews it presented a Bible which combined the spirit of Jewish tradition with the results of biblical scholarship, ancient, mediaeval and modern. To non-Jews it opened the gateway of Jewish tradition in the interpretation of the Word of God. (156)
\nNeuman\u2019s comment encapsulates the major reasons why Jews felt that the enormous expenditure of time, energy, and money that the Bible translation represented had in the end been thoroughly justified. Having a Bible they could proudly call their own, the product of their community\u2019s scholars, in some cases native born and native trained, American Jews felt better both about themselves and about their relations with non-Jewish neighbors. The new Bible translation served, in a sense, like a rite of passage. With its completion, Jews looked forward hopefully toward a coming new era.
\nWith respect to non-Jews, the community proved with its new Bible that it could successfully compete. The fact that Jews actually formed only three percent of the population made no difference. They acted as if they held complete parity with Protestants and Catholics. The others had long had official English Bibles; now Jews had an \u201cofficial\u201d Bible too. It took only a few more decades for this myth of the \u201ctriple melting pot\u201d\u2014Protestant-Catholic-Jew, all three equivalent\u2014to gain acceptance on a broad level, a development of enormous importance in American and American Jewish history (Herberg).
\nThe new Bible translation also allowed Jews to compete with Christians on the level of religious scholarship. The scholarly trappings of the English Revised Version had formerly given its Christological renderings an air of authority, which Leeser\u2019s \u201cold fashioned\u201d Bible could not pierce. In the formidable scholarship behind the new Jewish version, however, the English Revised Version met its match. Indeed, the Jewish translators, by boasting in their preface that they \u201ctook into account the existing English versions,\u201d as well as \u201cthe standard commentaries, ancient and modern, the translations already made for the Jewish Publication Society of America, the divergent renderings from the Revised Version prepared for the Jews of England, the marginal notes of the Revised Version, \u2026 the changes of the American Committee of Revisers, \u2026 the ancient versions,\u201d \u201cTalmudic and midrashic allusions, \u2026 all available Jewish commentators, [and] all the important non-Jewish commentators,\u201d implied that their translation was even better than the Christian version. This triumphalist magniloquence was somewhat tempered by the pluralistic expression of gratitude, also found in the preface, \u201cfor the work of our non-Jewish predecessors, such as the Authorized Version with its admirable diction, which can never be surpassed, as well as for the Revised Version with its ample learning.\u201d But it still remained distant indeed from the near syncretism propounded by those who had earlier advocated that a modified version of the authorized Anglican revision be given a Jewish imprimatur.
\nBeyond competition lay the matter of internal Jewish pride. Solomon Schechter had long insisted that the Jew needs \u201chis own Bible, not one mortgaged by the King James version\u201d (American Jewish Year Book, 1914: 173). Though he was dead by the time that the JPS Bible appeared, its preface echoed his sentiments: \u201cThe Jew cannot afford to have his Bible translation prepared for him by others. He cannot have it as a gift, even as he cannot borrow his soul from others\u201d (vii). More clearly than before, Jews stressed here their belief in a special, deeply spiritual Jewish relationship with the Tanakh, one that set Jewish and Christian readers of the Bible apart from one another. Since, as we have seen, American Christians had long before accepted the notion that the Old Testament was the Jews\u2019 \u201cown sacred volume,\u201d for Jews to defend their separateness on this basis was thoroughly acceptable. Separateness, of course, did not imply strict exclusiveness. Indeed, the new Bible translation\u2019s preface specifically hoped that \u201cthe non-Jewish world\u201d would \u201cwelcome\u201d the translation. Instead, the Jewish Publication Society\u2019s Bible translation, like Leeser\u2019s before it, reflected the ambivalent nature of Jewish-Christian relations in America, the countervailing forces that on the one hand pushed Jews and Christians together and on the other hand kept them separate and distinct.
\nAs a symbol, the new Bible also went further. It boldly announced the American Jewish community\u2019s emergence on the world stage as a center of Jewish life and creativity. \u201cThe historical necessity for translation was repeated with all the great changes in Israel\u2019s career,\u201d the new Bible\u2019s preface significantly declared. Then, with growing exuberance, it proclaimed that \u201cthe greatest change in the life of Israel during the last two generations\u201d had taken place in the New World:
\nWe have grown under providence both in numbers and in importance, so that we constitute now the greatest section of Israel living in a single country outside of Russia. We are only following in the footsteps of our greatest predecessors when, with the growth of our numbers, we have applied ourselves to the sacred task of preparing a new translation of the Bible into the English language, which, unless all signs fail, is to become the current speech of the majority of the children of Israel (vi).
\nThe \u201csacred task\u201d alluded to, akin to the biblical injunction that a king write for himself a copy of the law (Deut. 17:18), signified legitimacy, seeming confirmation of American Jewry\u2019s momentous destiny. Along with the publication of Jewish Encyclopedia completed in 1906, the founding of the American Jewish Committee in the same year, and other developments in the years immediately before and after World War I, the new Bible translation reflected American Jewry\u2019s changing self-image, its growing cultural independence, its quest for preeminence. The community had arrived and was seeking the recognition that it thought it deserved.
\nTHE NEW JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY TRANSLATION
\nThe years that followed the publication of the JPS translation confirmed the prescience of those who had predicted that a new era in American Jewish scholarship was aborning. The development of great Jewish libraries in the United States, the availability of positions in Jewish studies at American Jewish institutions of higher learning, particularly Hebrew Union College, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Dropsie College, Yeshiva University, the Jewish Institute of Religion, and Hebrew Theological College, and the mass migration of Jewish scholars from Europe to America\u2019s shores, particularly in the 1930s, adumbrated America\u2019s emergence as the center of Jewish scholarship in the diaspora even before the destruction of European centers of Jewish scholarship in World War II. After Hitler had wreaked his terrible toll, the only question remaining was how well American Jewry would measure up.
\nIn terms of biblical scholarship, the answer was quite well. As early as 1930, Jews comprised some nine percent of SBL members (by contrast, they formed three and one-half percent of the population), and as indicated above, these were about evenly divided between professional Jewish scholars and scholarly-inclined rabbis. To be sure, few of these scholars actually held positions in biblical studies. Most were either Semitists or scholars of later periods of Jewish life, who nevertheless maintained an abiding and serious interest in biblical studies. Still, biblical studies had acquired a greatly elevated status among American Jews, far outstripping Talmud and rabbinics, which had held pride of place among traditional Jews in Europe. Indeed, the first full set of the Talmud was not printed in America until 1944 (Eidelberg), and not a single native-born professor of Talmud could be found in this country until recently. By comparison, Bible scholarship fared well.
\nAt least three factors account for this interest in biblical studies among American Jews. First, Reform Judaism laid heavy stress on the Bible, particularly the prophetic writings, which were held up as ethical exemplars to contemporary Jews and non-Jews alike. Having declared themselves independent of rabbinic legislation, Reform Jews sought legitimacy in the Bible, frequently using it in proof-text fashion against conversionists on the one hand and traditional Jews on the other. This, of course, sometimes made for tendentious scholarship, but it did at least direct greater Jewish attention to the Bible than had hitherto been the case (Plaut: 224\u201331; Agus: 282\u201333).
\nThe Zionist movement was the second factor that lay behind the revival of biblical studies among American Jews. Although Zionists tended to stress different chapters from the Bible than did Reform Jews, they too turned to the Bible for inspiration and ideological justification. The Bible legitimated the Jewish claim to a homeland. Biblical archaeology linked the Jewish past and the Jewish present. Spoken Hebrew, revived by the Zionist movement, was modeled on biblical Hebrew, not rabbinic Hebrew. Secular Zionists may have disdained works of Jewish law and scorned theology, but they respected the Bible. They also respected biblical scholars.
\nFinally, the interfaith movement led to greater Jewish attention to the Bible. As it emerged in the post-World War I era, the interfaith movement stressed elements common to Jews and Christians, particularly the Hebrew Bible. Not only did the Bible serve to legitimate efforts aimed at promoting \u201cbetter understanding,\u201d it also frequently provided the central themes for dialogue groups and clergy institutes. Bible study led Jews and Christians to better appreciate the roots of what was termed \u201cJudeo-Christian civilization.\u201d Indirectly, it also stimulated Jews to deepen their own knowledge of what the Bible was all about (Sussman).
\nNotwithstanding American Jews\u2019 growing interest in the Bible, Jewish Bible scholarship still remained largely the preserve of those born and trained abroad. There were already some important exceptions to this rule, among them Julian Morgenstern, Sheldon Blank, H. L. Ginsberg, and Harry M. Orlinsky (the last two were born in Canada, and all but Orlinsky received their advanced degrees abroad), but as late as 1948 only six of twenty-five prominent American Jewish scholars in the field of Bible, as enumerated by Ralph Marcus, could actually be termed both native-born and native-trained\u2014the last time this would be true. The growth of academic opportunities in the postwar period, coupled with the coming-of-age of American-born children of immigrants soon resulted in a preponderance of locally produced scholars. Of thirty-one Jewish contributors to the Interpreter\u2019s Dictionary of the Bible (1962), for example, all but four were Americans. In the Encyclopaedia Judaica, published in Jerusalem in 1972, the divisional editor, associate divisional editor, and half of the departmental editors in Bible were all American Jews, and the other half was Israelis\u2014an accurate reflection of the two mutually interacting centers of Jewish Bible scholarship in the world today.
\nThis latter point deserves more notice than it is usually given. There exists today a huge and ever-increasing body of high caliber scholarly literature in the Hebrew language produced by Israeli-trained scholars, mainly native born, who think and express themselves naturally in Hebrew, and whose researches appear in a variety of Hebrew scholarly journals, in the various annuals of the five universities, in the multivolumed Encyclopaedia Biblica Hebraica, in a large number of doctoral dissertations, and in the numerous volumes turned out annually by Israeli publishing houses. The Israelis are in daily contact with the land, its geography, topography, and geology, its climatic conditions, the nature of its soil, its flora and fauna, its natural resources. Archaeology of the biblical period is a national Israeli pastime. Inevitably, all this must leave, and it surely does, its impress on the direction and coloration of biblical scholarship in Israel. The history of the Hebrew language, the history of the land (especially geopolitical conditions), biblical history, military history, the realia of biblical life, the literary artistry of the narrative, masoretic studies\u2014all these topics are fruitfully pursued with a vigor and a passion that is characteristic of those exploring their own civilization on their and its native soil.
\nAmerican Jewish scholars take it for granted that a knowledge of modern Hebrew is today as essential a tool of scholarship as is the ability to handle French and German. They are in continuous communication with their Israeli colleagues on social, intellectual, and scholarly levels. They send their students to study in Israel. There is frequent intercontinental travel in both directions. There is no doubt about the powerful impact that Israeli biblical scholarship will increasingly have on its American Jewish counterpart. The point may be illustrated by random reference to one aspect of research that is a specifically and typically Jewish contribution to the field, namely, the study of the biblical cult.
\nThat nineteenth-century German Protestant theological presuppositions colored the study of this subject and predetermined the parameters and approach of research everywhere is hardly deniable. Since Yehezkel Kaufmann reopened the topic, Menahem Haran in Israel and Baruch Levine and Jacob Milgrom in the United States have powerfully challenged the prevailing theories and reconstructions. They have shown how the sacrificial system, the laws of purity and impurity, and the notions of sin and atonement must all be understood within a broad framework of religious ideas, inside a structure of biblical theology and law. They have demonstrated that the pure and the impure are complementary to the moral and the immoral and are not in opposition to them, and they have been progressively uncovering the ethical supports upon which the sacrificial system was raised. Furthermore, very constructive use has been made of rabbinic sources in the exploration of these themes. In short, Jewish scholars would emphasize that biblical theology is not just story and prophecy but is equally law and cult.
\nAnother development that needs to be recounted is that Jewish Bible scholarship in America is no longer restricted to those who teach at Jewish-sponsored institutions of higher learning. A large percentage of those presently engaged in Jewish studies generally, and biblical studies in particular, now teach at secular institutions\u2014a function of the proliferation of Jewish studies during the 1960s and 1970s. Over ninety North American colleges and universities currently offer undergraduate concentrations in Jewish studies and almost fifty sponsor programs of graduate study. The Association for Jewish Studies, the professional organization devoted to the advancement of the academic standing and scope of Judaic studies, boasts one thousand members (1982), including emeriti, associate members, and students. Many of these members specialize in the Bible, as evidenced both by the large number of sessions devoted to biblical subjects at the association\u2019s annual meetings and by a survey of the fourteen largest graduate programs in Jewish studies in North America (1980), which found that \u201cBible and Ancient Near East\u201d was the most popular of all fields of specialization for Ph.D. candidates. Harry M. Orlinsky (1974: 331), who has monitored the state of the field for many years, summarized succinctly the situation as he found it in the early seventies, and his words hold equally true a decade later: \u201cJewish biblical scholarship \u2026 is currently flourishing in America-Canada as never before.\u201d
\nThe Jewish Publication Society\u2019s new translation of the Bible, completed in 1982, stands as one of the great achievements of modern American Jewish Bible scholarship. Appearing as it did in the very midst of the Jewish cultural efflorescence already described, a burgeoning Jewish religious revival (Sarna, 1982), and heightened nationwide interest in the Bible and its teachings, it seemed a most natural development, one almost to have been expected. In fact, however, the Bible translation was planned long before any of these developments were envisaged.
\nAlthough the full history of the New Jewish Publication Society\u2019s translation cannot be recounted here, we need look no further than Harry Orlinsky\u2019s famous 1953 address at the annual meeting of the Jewish Publication Society\u2014\u201cWanted: A New English Translation of the Bible\u201d (Orlinsky 1974: 345\u201362)\u2014to see that the original call for a new Jewish translation of Scripture stemmed from many of the same motivations that had precipitated earlier undertakings. For one thing, the 1917 translation had become, in Orlinsky\u2019s words, \u201cno longer as intelligible as it should be.\u201d Old-fashioned King James English had lost the last of its appeal; what was needed, Orlinsky said, was a \u201csimplified and modernized\u201d style and vocabulary, \u201cwithout undue loss of majesty and dignity.\u201d In addition, Orlinsky pointed to \u201cthe increased knowledge which archaeology and refined methodology have made available.\u201d New discoveries had cleared up old mysteries; the 1917 translation no longer reflected the best scholarship available. Finally, and perhaps what was most important, a new Protestant translation had appeared, the Revised Standard Version (1952), and a new Catholic translation (published as the New American Bible) had been announced. Just as the 1885 English Revised Version stimulated Jews to prove that they could do as well or better, so too did these new revisions. The new Protestant Bible still contained Christological elements (a capital \u201cS\u201d in \u201cspirit,\u201d for example), and it still remained Christian in origin. \u201cThe Jew,\u201d Orlinsky said, echoing Max Margolis before him, \u201ccannot afford to have his Bible translation prepared for him by others\u201d (361).
\nIn retrospect, Orlinsky has admitted (1970: 10) that there was \u201cstrong sentiment among several important members of the Jewish Publication Society\u2019s Board of Trustees\u201d for the society to issue only a \u201cmodest revision of \u2026 the Revised Standard Version of 1952\u201d (1970:10). It was predictable, however, that those sentiments went unheeded. Most American Jews, in the 1950s as before, used the Bible to demonstrate their apartness, their insistence on a Jewish identity separate from Protestants and Catholics. Consequently, in 1955, after years of discussion, the Jewish Publication Society finally set up a committee of seven\u2014three scholars, three rabbis (one representing each of the major wings of American Judaism), and the editor of the JPS translation, Solomon Grayzel\u2014and mandated it to translate the Bible afresh from a Jewish point of view.
\nThe composition of the new translation committee is instructive. Two of its three scholars, Harry Orlinsky (editor-in-chief for the Pentateuch) and H. L. Ginsberg, were born in North America, and the third, Ephraim A. Speiser, immigrated to the United States in his teens. Orlinsky and Ginsberg, who taught respectively at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and the Jewish Theological Seminary, both in New York, held chairs in Bible. Speiser, who taught at the University of Pennsylvania, was Professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures. All three of the rabbis on the committee (Max Arzt, Bernard Bamberger, and Harry Freedman) trained in the United States. Grayzel, an accomplished historian, immigrated to the United States at the age of twelve and received all his degrees in this country. The contrast with the earlier translation committee, which had a much larger number of immigrants and only one biblical scholar, Margolis himself, is striking indeed.
\nThe mechanics of producing the Torah translation also were quite different from what they had been in Margolis\u2019s day. Harry Orlinsky has described the process in a recent interview (1982: 39\u201340):
\n(W)e would work one day, usually a Thursday, usually in my office at the Jewish Institute of Religion in Manhattan.\u2026 I prepared the draft of the entire Chumash. I hardly ever would prepare more than two or three chapters ahead of the committee so that I would be able to benefit from the decisions that the committee members reached. Unlike the Revised Standard Version, I would prepare a draft of a chapter or part of a chapter with a tremendous amount of commentary culled from the readings and translations from sources going back to the ancient Near East, the Septuagint, Targum, Vulgate, Syriac translation, Talmud, the medieval commentators, medieval grammarians, Sa\u2019adia\u2019s translation, the rationalist Protestant translation of the 16th century, the Catholic, and of course, the modern translations. So that, for example, when I handed in the draft of the first five verses of Genesis, the first day of creation\u2014and believe me I worked much harder than God did, the first day anyway\u2014I had a half a page of the text and about 12 or 13 pages of all lands of notes for my other six colleagues to consult. So that they didn\u2019t have to, unless they wanted to, go and examine these things. I would send that off to the JPS where it would be run off and sent out to my colleagues. They, in turn, would react, verse by verse or word by word, with counter suggestions. They would type that up and send that into JPS where, again, it would be run off and sent out, so that when we got together to do Genesis, and then all the way through, we would have the draft, we would have the comments of each of the committee members, as many as had reacted. We had it all before us, and we could all study it before we came. On the other hand, however, once we got together, the argument and the discussion pro and con would go far beyond what anybody had on any sheet of paper. We were very stimulated by the oral arguments back and forth. Not infrequently what came out as our final draft was something that none of us had envisaged to begin with. It was often quite different. Maybe not always necessarily better, but different. More than once, I was convinced that my draft was not as good as I had thought originally\u2014but my committee colleagues would disagree with me and outvote me in favor of my draft. Not infrequently, it was the other way around. No one is every fully satisfied with a translation because no one ever gets all his ideas accepted. It is a compromise translation.
\nTwo principles underlay every facet of this translation process. First, the translators insisted on basing their work strictly on the original Hebrew Masoretic text. Although they consulted other versions, translations, and commentaries, they refused to see themselves as \u201crevisers\u201d of any previous translation, not even the previous Jewish one. In this they openly distinguished their effort from that of the Revised Standard Version, which was a revision in name and in fact.
\nSecond, the translators insisted on rendering their text into English idiomatically, rather than mechanically and literally. Convinced that word-for-word translation did violence to the spirit of the Hebrew original, the translators permitted themselves wider latitude than their English language predecessors ever had. They spoke of their fidelity to the deeper meaning of the biblical text, in contradistinction to the surface meaning, which they in some cases felt free to ignore.
\nIn 1962 the new translation of the Torah appeared, after seven years of unstinting labor. (A revised version appeared in 1967, and to date over 350,000 copies have been sold.) The preface paid ritualistic tribute to \u201cthe work of previous translators,\u201d and praised earlier scholars. But having done that, the editors insisted that this translation\u2014The Torah: A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text\u2014was not only different but better. In an article in the Journal of Biblical Literature, for example, Harry Orlinsky argued that the new translation\u2019s rendering of the initial verses in Genesis was the first \u201ccorrect rendering\u201d: \u201cWe are now, finally, in a position to understand exactly what the writer of the first three verses of the Bible meant to convey to his readers\u201d (1974: 402).
\nOrlinsky also boasted, both in his article and in his published Notes on the New Translation of the Torah, that the new translation\u2019s policy on textual criticism (\u201ctranslate the Hebrew text directly, and offer in a footnote the proposed emendation and its translation\u201d) was \u201cbest,\u201d and that its manner of translating Hebrew particles improved upon all that preceded it. To his mind, the New Jewish Version marked \u201ca complete break with the past history of Bible translation.\u201d He compared it to Spinoza\u2019s philosophical revolution in that it \u201cset out to discard\u201d a 2,200 year tradition \u201cof literal, mechanical translation,\u201d in order to capture the text\u2019s original meaning. Speaking in the name of the entire translation committee, he hoped that this \u201cbreak with the past\u201d would \u201cset a new pattern which authorized Protestant and Catholic translations of the future will tend to follow\u201d (1970: 12\u201314).
\nThe trailblazing image that Orlinsky\u2019s comments conjured up found no parallel in earlier American Jewish versions. Expressions of pride and distinctiveness, claims of superiority, evocations of destiny, and hopes for Christian approval had, as we have seen, all been heard before, but in no previous translation had American Jews so triumphantly expressed the belief that Protestants and Catholics might follow their lead. That, as Orlinsky himself realized reflected American Jewry\u2019s heightened self-confidence, its \u201cverve, growing maturity, and optimism,\u201d \u201cits new status \u2026 unprecedented in the two and one-half millennia of Jewish Diaspora life\u201d (1970: 11, 14). Whereas the 1917 translation announced American Jews\u2019 cultural emergence, the new translation displayed heady awareness of their cultural influence and impact, their capacity as innovators and leaders on the national and religious scenes. The Prophets translation, published in 1978 by the same committee with H. L. Ginsberg as senior editor, though E. A. Speiser was no longer alive, carried forward this mood of self-confidence in its very language. It then went further, boldly proposing in footnotes a host of possible emendations designed to render texts judged to be corrupt more intelligible than they had ever been before.
\nHaving monitored the pace of the Bible translation for a full decade, the trustees of the Jewish Publication Society realized, in 1965, that the undertaking would be both more arduous and more time-consuming than anyone had originally envisaged. Determined that the translation should nevertheless appear within \u201ca reasonable time,\u201d they decided to create a new committee, charged with the task of translating the third division of the Bible, known as the Kethubim (the Writings), with the exception of the five Megilloth, which had already been translated by the original committee.
\nIn 1966, the new committee, younger by a full generation than the earlier one, and overwhelmingly American trained, came into being. Like the earlier committee, it consisted of three scholars (Moshe Greenberg, Jonas C. Greenfield, and Nahum M. Sarna), three rabbis, one representing each major wing of American Judaism (Saul Leeman, Martin Rozenberg, and David Shapiro), and the editor of the Jewish Publication Society, later better-known as a bestselling novelist, Chaim Potok. It is revealing that all of the scholars selected taught at secular universities, a fact that reflected both the growing acceptance of Jewish studies as a legitimate academic discipline and the increased willingness on the part of universities to permit biblical studies to be taught by Jews. It is also revealing that two of the three scholars on the committee (Greenberg and Greenfield) eventually assumed positions at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. This illustrates the point made above that American Jewish Bible scholarship has in the last three decades been in close touch with its Israeli counterpart on social, intellectual, and scholarly levels. The fact that the new committee met in Jerusalem on numerous occasions both symbolized and reinforced this spirit of harmony.
\nIn its procedures, the Kethubim translation committee generally adhered to the practices established for the translation of the Torah and Prophets. Each professional scholar undertook the preparation of an annotated draft, which was circulated to all concerned, and everyone then had an opportunity to criticize the rendering and to offer detailed suggestions at the regular, periodic gatherings of the committee. In its style, however, the new committee struck a decidedly more cautious and conservative stance. Unlike the older committee, it stressed (in the preface) the inherent difficulties in translating the Hebrew, and the \u201cas yet imperfect understanding of the language of the Bible.\u201d It refused to hazard emendations, and its favorite footnote read \u201cmeaning of Heb. uncertain.\u201d Instead of exuding confidence, it admitted right from the beginning that its translation had \u201cnot conveyed the fullness of the Hebrew, with its ambiguities, its overtones, and the richness that it carries from centuries of use.\u201d It made no triumphalistic claims.
\nFrom a broader perspective, the scholarly caution expressed in the translation of the Writings may be more in harmony with the new mood that overtook Americans generally in the 1970s and 1980s, a mood at once both more hesitant and less self-confident. Americans seemed less self-assured in 1982, when the translation of the Writings appeared, than two decades earlier, at the time of the publication of the Torah. The translation of the Writings seems to have reflected this fact, even if those involved may not have realized it.
\nIn light of past experience this should not prove surprising. As we have seen, a Bible translation is much more than just a scholarly effort to render a sacred text into a form easier for all to understand. Since it is created by human beings, a translation is also a child of history, a product of its times. It cannot escape the impact of contemporary concerns.
\n.
\nweiter<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rashi the Commentator It is well known that the name Rashi is an acronym formed by the initial consonants of \u201cRabbi Shelomo (Solomon) Yitshaki (son of Isaac).\u201d Another explanation was attached to it, once he became famous: \u201cRabban shel Yisrael\u201d (Master Teacher of Israel). His tombstone was discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, … <\/p>\n

\u201eStudies in Biblical Interpretation – III\u201c <\/span>weiterlesen<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allgemein"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/buch.jehovah-shammah.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/buch.jehovah-shammah.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/buch.jehovah-shammah.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buch.jehovah-shammah.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buch.jehovah-shammah.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1665"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/buch.jehovah-shammah.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1691,"href":"http:\/\/buch.jehovah-shammah.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665\/revisions\/1691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/buch.jehovah-shammah.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buch.jehovah-shammah.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buch.jehovah-shammah.de\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}