Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel by Bernard M. Levinson (review)

As an interdisciplinary journal, Shofar is an ideal forum in which to feature Bernard Levinson’s most recent book, Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel. For in spite of the title’s emphasis on the past, the book does not begin in Iron Age Israel, but rather in the humanities departments of the modern university. Central to Levinson’s argument is the assertion that the notion of canon “might provide a meeting point for the humanities” (2).

Collections of prestigious literature, of course, are utilized throughout the humanities. Levinson observes, however, that as various disciplines reexamine, and sometimes even reject, their own canonical literature, one voice is strangely absent from the conversation: Biblical Studies (2). This is an odd lacuna, especially given the fact that Biblical Studies is “the one discipline devoted to exploring what a canon is, how it emerges historically, how its texts relate to one another, and how it affects the community that espouses it” (4). But contemporary theory, Levinson observes, objects to the notion of canon, “for being exclusive; for encoding class, race, or gender bias; for silencing competing or less prestigious voices; for ignoring difference; for arresting social change; for enshrining privilege” (10). This view of canon, however, is “blind to its own lack of historical ground” (11), for it assumes that criticism lies outside the biblical canon itself. But in point of fact, Levinson asserts, the biblical canon “models critique and embeds theory” (11). The canon, he maintains, is a “sponsor” of innovation.

Taken as a whole, Levinson’s argument can be summarized in four brief statements. First, exegesis in the Hebrew Bible provides a strategy for religious renewal. Second, renewal and innovation are almost always covert rather than explicit in ancient Israel. Third, in many cases exegesis involves not the passive explication but the radical subversion of prior authoritative texts. Fourth, these phenomena are found in the literature of ancient Israel before the closure of the canon (20–21).

But the presence of a canon in any religious tradition—whether Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Islam, or Theravāda Buddhism—poses a problem: How can a closed literary corpus address the challenges faced by later generations? Levinson’s answer: exegesis. If the canon represents stability, then exegesis represents “vitality” (15). This strategy renders the canon infinitely applicable. “Canon” and “exegesis,” however, are not stages in a process, as if exegesis were limited to the time after the establishment of the canon. Rather, “the ingenuity of the interpreter operates even in the formative period of the canon” (18). Levinson demonstrates this claim in a study of exegetical revision of pentateuchal legal texts.

Pentateuchal law is certainly an appropriate body of literature on which to test his theory, for it poses a special problem. Contrary to the manifold legal materials from the surrounding Near Eastern world (e.g., Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia), pentateuchal law claims to be divinely revealed—either directly through the deity’s words or indirectly through Moses, his servant (22). The result is that the human scribes responsible for composing pentateuchal laws are effectively devoiced (28). With such a metaphysical warrant in view, Levinson asks, “How can legal texts, once viewed as divinely revealed, be revised to fit new circumstances without compromising their—or God’s—authority?” (29). While legal revision is explicitly acknowledged in the legal texts of Israel’s neighbors (see his discussion of Hittite law on 29–33), there is an “inherent tension within the biblical laws between renewal and conservatism” (48). In response to this conundrum, Israelite scribes developed a “rhetoric of concealment” (48). These strategies allowed scribes to innovate without appearing to disregard or disrespect the prestige of the tradition.

The rhetoric of concealment is brilliantly illustrated in a study of four texts that revise the Decalogue’s doctrine of transgenerational punishment: “For I, Yahweh your God, am an impassioned God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, upon the third and fourth generation of those who reject me...