Exodus and Deuteronomy

Introduction

xix introduCtion This is the second Hebrew bible volume of the Texts@Contexts series. Like its predecessor, Genesis (2010), it is arranged around several clusters of topics on which contributors comment from their different individual and communal contexts. Such contexts may be geographical, but they may also be social, economic, religious, secular, otherwise ideological, and so on. The issue at hand is to explore how reading the bible critically influences life at a certain location—“location” being understood in a broader sense than only geographical—while, at the same time, it is conditioned by the life experience of the reader. Exodus and Deuteronomy in One Volume—Why? We have chosen to include essays on Exodus and Deuteronomy in one volume because of the many parallels between these two biblical books. Each one has the trope of a journey from Egypt to Canaan, a myth of becoming a nation through wanderings over the stereotypical time span of forty years, at its epicenter. The similarities are many, but so are the apparent differences in viewpoint, telling and retelling; both include reflections, in the forms of narrative and legal prescriptions, on issues of leadership; and both present materials that, for lack of a better term, can be called laws. Accordingly, these are the three clusters of topics in focus in this volume. That each of the two Torah books here discussed was written or compiled in a different context, in different frames of ideology, time, and place, is an agreed convention of biblical scholarship even if no agreement obtains as to their exact provenance. Historicity and historical investigation are not at the forefront of this volume, Athalya Brenner xx Introduction which deals with biblical reception as it leads up to contemporary life and cultures in the twenty-first century. But even without the historical location being overtly at the center, treating the two books in one volume shows how context matters, not only for us in the here and now but also in antiquity, in retelling or [re]inventing the lives of individuals and of communities. Putting Exodus and Deuteronomy together, side by side so to speak, affords different perspectives on similar events and issues. Each book, whatever the identity of its literary components, contains—when read as a whole—a specific focalization.1 In Deuteronomy, the trope is having Moses as narrator and focalizer. In Exodus, focalization falls to several narrators in the text. Hereby some serious questions arise. Why retell the exodus myth twice, extensively, from two focal points at least, with both accounts celebrating Moses as the optimal leader, the same Moses who is prominent in the Torah and in Joshua but almost absent from the rest of the bible (apart from some mentions in the prophetic and psalmic literature: see below under part 2)?2 The double presentation, as well as the issues it raises, can in turn be a dual cluster of focalizations: from the perspective of the author, compiler, or editor, or from the readers’ perspective. While a contextual interpretation may seem purely or nearly readerly rather than relating to investigations of matters authorial and editorial, it would seem from the articles in this volume that the fascination of bible scholars with authorial intent is, albeit diminished in recent decades, not altogether gone. Surprisingly, because many contextual readers, including the contextual readers gathered here, wish to justify their ideological and societal positions from the biblical texts, there is a mini-revival of interest in the texts’ producers and in what “they” could have intended, so that contextual readings that diverge widely from one another can be upheld. 1. The technical terms “focalization,” “focalize,” “focalizer,” and the like are here used in the sense developed by Mieke Bal, after Gérard Genette, in her book about narratology. The terms refer to the manner in which an author, or textual figure, variously direct and change their narrative viewpoint, thus directing and redirecting the reader’s involvement in multiple facets of the plot, as it unfolds (Bal 20093 : 142–60, and elsewhere in the book). But see also the criticism of Bal later by Genette himself (1988: 76–78). 2. The author of this Introduction uses a lowercase first letter for “bible,” “god,” and “yhwh,” as she does also in the Genesis volume of this series and in all her writings. xxi Introduction Part One. Between Egypt and Canaan: To’s and Fro’s In Part One, contributors...