Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds by Donald Harman Akenson (review)

328 letters in canada 1999 ation, and paints the gift economy as preferable; she likes the idea of noblesse oblige. (Thoreau or Ruskin would also have served her purpose in many ways.) Memory and money B and words too, of course, Simonides being a writer, and a writer of rare economy. He is remembered for his epitaphs. Memory too can be bought. And Celan? Memory of the Holocaust is his unavoidable and terrible subject, yet his saving subject: memory that cannot be avoided, memory chosen as a legacy for later generations, like an epitaph. The `Unlost' of Carson's title comes from Celan: the unverloren, what is kept or saved or remembered. Or rather, not that. The `unlost' is rooted in loss, and only by prefix does it become something kept. Celan's words are also of the rarest economy, wrested again and again from the German that was his own language and not his own, being the language of Nazi Germany, including the killers who took his parents' lives. How to make good this language once again?`Economy' in Carson's title refers to the economy of words, yes, but also to monetary economy. How much are words worth in our day? How much do we pay for them in cash? Do words hold good? Can they? The question is implicit at the start, and Carson returns to it at the end. Money holds good only as long as the economy is healthy. What is the economy of words? What is the health of words nowadays? Celan's answer was sombre, as Simonides' was spare. It is a question that others have treated too, but Carson's quick surprising turns, and her juxtaposition of Simonides and Celan, like two gods of Terminus, sharpen the question. Juxtaposition can function as one species of metaphor, and it does so in Carson's hands. The temptation of a gift for juxtaposition is novelty, but Carson is too intelligently self-aware for that. Her work has gone from strength to strength. Economy of the Unlost is her most remarkable essay to date. (ELEANOR COOK) Donald Harman Akenson. Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds McGill-Queen's University Press. 1998. xii, 658. $39.95 There was a time in ancient Israel when scripture, as Jews and Christians know it, did not exist. But the emerging sacredness of texts can be traced. Twice, under the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the Romans in 70, destruction of the Jerusalem temple challenged the faith of Israel. Each time, the surviving community recast its religion, generating writings to provide continuity in place of ritual institutions now disrupted. In the exile of Judaeans to Babylonia there emerged the Torah, the five opening books of the Hebrew Bible, and from the aftermath of the revolt against Rome there emerged rabbinic Judaism, with its elaboration of Torah in the Talmudic humanities 329 literature. Donald Akenson, a wide-ranging historian at Queen's, has done his homework on textual authority covering a dozen centuries from the Exile onward. Modern scholarship in the past 150 years has inferred the development of that authority from the historical context, and the internal references, of the documents themselves. He covers various fields B Hebrew Bible, Hellenistic Judaism, New Testament, and rabbinics B and produces a provocative synthesis. That the textual activity was a creative process B devout followers will say `inspired' B is the implication of the teasing word `invention' in Surpassing Wonder's subtitle. Bible scholars B even those who opt for the most radically late dating of the Pentateuch, as the Genesis-through-Deuteronomy sequence is called B will find Akenson at his most controversial when he theorizes about the first nine books of the Hebrew Bible, Genesis through Kings. For him, these texts come from a single individual, a religious genius, a Judaean exile in Babylonia, working to reconstitute the community's faith. Singlehandedly , Akenson asserts B and he asserts this more than documenting it B that individual assembled fragmentary textual traditions and, so to speak, framed an ideology for the religion of Israel. But just how all the discrete fragments this person allegedly used found their way to...