Numbers (review)

Hebrew Studies 36 (1995) 171 Reviews This is a useful, albeit fairly traditional, commentary. It has no indices (perhaps to come in volume llIb?) which hampers its usefulness. Its lack of attention to social scientific issues will prove disappointing to some. While it can be recommended to students of Leviticus, it will not replace the recent volumes by J. Hartley (Word Bible Commentary), B. Levine (JPS Torah), and J. Milgrom (Anchor Bible). Henry T. C. Sun Lexington Theological Seminary Lexington, KY 40508 NUMBERS. By Jacob Milgrom. The JPS Torah Commentary: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation. Pp. lxi + 520. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1990. Cloth. Students of the Hebrew Bible seeking modern commentaries on the book of Numbers have not had a very large selection from which to choose. This state of affairs can be attributed to the lack of interest among Christian biblicists in the book as a whole. While individual texts have been deemed worthy of investigation, the totality of the text has not attracted much attention . That the level of interest in the book among Jews has always been much higher is amply documented in Jacob Milgrom's masterful new commentary, the first of two major commentaries by Jewish biblicists (Milgrom and Baruch Levine) on this book to appear in this decade. Some of the problems facing the exegete are more daunting in regard to Numbers than in regard to other books of the Bible, for it does not lend itself easily to literary and structural analysis. It appears at first glance to be a miscellaneous hodgepodge of materials, mainly legal and narrative, spanning the period from the revelation at Sinai with its attendant laws (Exodus and Leviticus) until the farewell speech of Moses (Deuteronomy). Basing himself on earlier attempts to understand the structure and organization of the book, Milgrom has argued convincingly for the editorial unity and integrity of Numbers in its Masoretic recension. Beginning with his contribution to the classic understanding of the book's literary divisions as consisting of three major units, defined roughly by their geographical loci at Sinai (Num 1:1-10:10), at Kadesh (Num 10:11-22:1) and in Moab/fransjordan (Num 22:2-36:13), namely in grouping the first two together under the rubric of the "generation of the Exodus" and defming the Hebrew Studies 36 (1995) 172 Reviews final one as "the generation of the conquest," Milgrom has produced a work that places great emphasis on understanding literary units of all sizes and on their internal and external relationships. The commentary begins with an introduction, in which Milgrom states his methodological assumptions and provides background information. While aware of the classic scholarly form, source, and tradition critical methods, Milgrom expresses his dissatisfaction with these and advocates a more holistic approach, which he subsumes under redaction criticism. Indeed, he finds early exponents of this approach among the medieval Jewish exegetes, and one of the-strengths of this commentary is his integration of insights gleaned from them with his more modem literary and critical methods. There is not a page of this commentary that is not enriched by his attention to the full history of interpretation. Milgrom's linguistic and institutional analyses or'Numbers lead him to the conclusion that much of the book consists of pre-exilic materials, which underwent two priestly recensions (pp. xxxi-xxxv). Implicit is his assumption that P is pre-exilic, a hypothesis that not all are willing to accept. Although Milgrom prefers to talk of the composition of the book rather than its redaction (p. xxxi), he believes that the fmal redaction [sic] of the book took place when Numbers was already part of a corpus that included Exodus and Leviticus (pp. xxx-xxxi). Extremely helpful for both the general and the specialist reader are Milgrom's literary and theological analysis of Numbers within the context of the Hexateuch (pp. xviiff.), his discussion of the literary methods employed in the composition of the book (pp. xxii-xxxi), his summary of the theology of Numbers on the basis of both the book's divine and human protagonists (pp. xxxvii-xlii), as well as his capsule biographies of the major...