A Kingdom of Priests: Ancestry and Merit in Ancient Judaism (review)

Hebrew Studies 49 (2008) 346 Reviews ending with Jehoiakin’s release was added to indicate acceptance of a Diaspora reality. The Deuteronomistic History would ultimatly undergo some further editing, but Römer does not see this editing as any longer “Deuteronomistic,” but calculated to create the current canonical separation between Torah and Former Prophets. This late phase involved the addition of 2 Samuel 21–24 and the Elijah-Elisha cycle. Römer manifests a strange combination of skepticism and confidence about our ability to discern the composition of the Deuteronomistic History. Unlike more detailed works, he does not try to separate a single verse into a half-dozen different sources and redactional layers because ancient Near Eastern evidence suggests that ancient scribal practices were not as mechanical as source critics have sometimes imagined. Rather, the scribes adopted a free attitude to earlier texts. Therefore, “we cannot reconstruct exactly the older texts that have been re-edited in later times, even if some biblical scholars still think they can” (p. 48). Römer’s cautious skepticism here is a welcome relief. However, he still unfolds a relatively specific vision of what his postulated editions of the Deuteronomistic History looked like. Römer often relies on broadly “ideological” criteria to distinguish redactions . Consequently, he sometimes reads narratives as allegories of later events. When he suggests that the negative portrait of David in 2 Samuel 11–12; 15–17; 19 was calculated “to counter messianic expectations linked to the arrival of Zerubbabel” (p. 177) in the Persian period, the reader is left to wonder whether Römer is among the scholars he criticizes for still thinking they can reconstruct older texts re-edited in later times. David A. Bosworth The Catholic University of America Washington, DC 20064 bosworth@cua.edu A KINGDOM OF PRIESTS: ANCESTRY AND MERIT IN ANCIENT JUDAISM. By Martha Himmelfarb. Pp. 270. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Cloth, $59.95. According to a passage in the Palestinian Talmud (Gittin 5.9, 47b), “How do you know that a person shouldn’t say, ‘That guy is an adulterer and a murder, so how could he possibly bless me?!’? The Holy One, blessed be He, said: ‘Who blesses you?! Is it not I who blesses you? As it is written: “And they shall place My name on the Children of Israel and I will bless them”’ (Numbers 5:27).” That is, the priests are mere officials, whose moral status is irrelevant. However, the fact is that the complaint is reasonable. Hebrew Studies 49 (2008) 347 Reviews Given the fact that God is by definition good, just, pure, and holy, it does make sense to think that those who are closer to Him than we are—which is the obvious implication of the fact that they operate as middlemen, passing His blessings to us and our sacrificial gifts to Him—ought themselves to be higher than us run of the mill Jews with regard to goodness, justice, purity, and holiness. As Himmelfarb puts it in her introduction to this interesting volume (p. 7), while probably most ancient Jews lost little sleep over the fact that that was often not the case, her book is devoted to the minority that was truly bothered by it—and she surveys numerous reflections of this in literature of the Second Temple period and down to the rabbis. As she indicates, however , they were bothered not only by priests who did not live up to expectations . They were also bothered by the fact that the Bible expresses more or less the same expectations from all Jews: all Jews, not just priests, were supposed to be good, just, pure, and holy. That, just as human sensitivities in general, puts something of a question mark alongside the significance of the distinction between priests and the laity. As Korah put it, “For all of the community are holy, all of them, and the Lord is in their midst; why then do you raise yourselves above the Lord’s congregation?” (Num 16:3). These two problems both bespeak, in Himmelfarb’s terms, a single issue: the realization that merit and ancestry do not always go together, for those who have...