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P RO F I L I N G J EW I S H L I T E R AT U R E I N A N T I Q U I T Y
This page intentionally left blank
Profiling Jewish Literature
in Antiquity
An Inventory, from Second Temple Texts
to the Talmuds

A L E X A N D E R S A M E LY
in collaboration with
Philip Alexander
Rocco Bernasconi
Robert Hayward

1
 3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries.
© Alexander Samely, Philip Alexander, Rocco Bernasconi, and Robert Hayward 2013
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First published in 2013
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013938322
ISBN 978–0–19–968432–8
As printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
 Acknowledgements

This book is based on a five-year collaboration of four scholars. In 2007

Philip Alexander, Rocco Bernasconi, Robert Hayward, and I began work on
the creation of a new conceptual framework for the analysis of ancient Jewish
literature. The new conceptual framework was to be based on a fresh
empirical investigation of a large body of complex literary documents, the
anonymous and pseudepigraphic extra-canonical Jewish literature of
antiquity between the dates of approximately 200 bce and 700 ce. We
developed the new descriptive framework which is presented here, the
Inventory of Structurally Important Literary Features, in frequent meetings
between 2007 to 2010. We also collaborated on a database of literary profiles
of individual ancient Jewish works, which is available online (Samely et al.
2012).
Our original motivation was dissatisfaction with the way undefined genre
labels were used in the scholarly discussion of ancient Jewish texts. Such labels
often appear to hinder, rather than help, a clear perception of the actual shape
and literary surface of the documents. The antidote to this dissatisfaction, we
discovered, was not to produce a new, competing set of global genre labels,
but rather to make the terms of the analysis more detailed. We moved our
analysis down to the level of the single potentially significant literary feature
of a text. The result, the Inventory of Structurally Important Literary
Features, is a schema for description constituted in a modular manner. Some
five hundred generic categories derived from the project texts are put together
in a systematic order. They constitute a menu of historical possibilities for
text-constitution, each realized somewhere in the corpus. For describing any
particular text then, one has to select from the Inventory possibilities those
categories that actually apply to that text. As a result, a text’s surface receives
a schematic classification consisting not of one genre label, but of a set of 80
to 120 literary features. The literary profiles of individual corpus texts con-
tained in the database are a halfway house between the irreducible complexity
of any one unique text, and the oversimplification of a single genre label.
The conceptual framework for producing such literary profiles is the result
of many discussions among the core members of the team, devoted mainly to
the structures and details of specific texts. In due course the conversation
began to involve a wider circle of colleagues working in ancient Jewish
literature. We garnered helpful responses in particular from a symposium in
Manchester in early 2009, from a number of conferences between 2008 and
2011 at which we presented papers, and during a workshop in Manchester
July 2011. We are grateful in particular for encouragement and criticism
vi Acknowledgements

received from George Brooke, John Collins, Shamma Friedman, Bernard

Jackson, Duncan Kennedy, Armin Lange, Bernard Levinson, Chaim
Milikowsky, Günter Stemberger, Loren Stuckenbruck, and Avraham Walfish.
Prof. Stemberger was an adviser from the start of the project. Prof. Friedman
joined the project later as a consultant for the analysis of Talmudic Tractates.
It became clear that there was a great readiness from many scholars to
engage with the ideas of the project. Among the refinements and modifica-
tions we made in response to suggestions from colleagues are the following.
We adopted a clearer strategy for explaining the theoretical concepts behind
some Inventory categories which, in particular insofar as they relate to text
linguistics, tend to be more familiar to European-trained scholars than to
those from an Anglo-American background. We narrowed down the notion
of what we originally called ‘intertextuality’ to what can be usefully presented
through Inventory categories, namely specific and well-defined phenomena
of correspondences and verbal overlap (Inventory section 7). We took on
board the uncertainties that surround the time after which the texts now in
the Hebrew Bible became fixed, and ‘biblical’. We came to realize that the
Inventory categories could not, as such, define ‘genres’, because genre terms
usually imply a social function as well as a certain literary surface or content,
and the Inventory categories are exclusively devoted to the latter. We accepted
that the boundaries of the project corpus of texts are neither self-explanatory
nor wholly consistent. Pragmatic factors enter into defining them and are
acknowledged at various points of this book. On the other hand, the basic
parameters of the Inventory have stood firm, and so has its grounding in
an empirical re-examination of the ancient Jewish texts as envisaged at the
beginning of the project.
The central document here explained, the Inventory of Structurally
Important Literary Features, was composed by all four of us, with myself
as the lead author. The present book was drafted by me and corrected and
modified in the light of the comments from my collaborators. For all
remaining inaccuracies, however, I bear sole responsibility.
A very substantial grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research
Council made this project possible, and is acknowledged with gratitude.
Thanks are also due to our respective academic homes for institutional
support: Manchester University’s Departments of Middle Eastern Studies
and of Religions and Theology, as well as its Centre for Jewish Studies; and
Durham University’s Department of Theology and Religion.
Alex Samely
Manchester
September 2012
 Contents

List of Abbreviations ix
Table 1. Alphabetical List of Texts Considered in the Creation of the
Inventory xiii

I. INTRODUCTION: A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR

LITERARY DESCRIPTION 1

II. THE INVENTORY 29

III. COMMENTARY ON THE INVENTORY 87

1. The Self-Presentation of the Text as a Verbal Entity 89
2. The Perspective and Knowledge Horizon of the Governing Voice 103
3. The Poetic and Rhetorical-Communicative Constitution of
Texts 135
4. Narrative Coherence and Narrative Aggregation 147
5. Thematic Coherence and Thematic Aggregation 179
6. Meta-Textual Structuring of Texts 213
7. Correspondences and Verbal Overlap with Other Texts 255
8. Small Forms in the Governing Voice 287
9. Small-Scale Coherence Relationships 309
10. The Juxtaposition of Part-Texts in a Compound 329
11. Dominant Subject Matter and Scholarly Genre Labels 343
Concluding Remarks 349

IV. SAMPLE PROFILES 355

1. Jubilees 357
2. Temple Scroll 373
3. Mishnah 389
4. Genesis Rabbah 409
viii Contents
Bibliography 427
Index of Subjects and Names 441
Index of Authors 446
Index of Examples in the Inventory 449
Index of Ancient Works and Passages 454
 Abbreviations

As used in the Example Column of the Inventory and elsewhere in this book.
1QH Hodayot
1QpHab Pesher Habakkuk
1QpNah Pesher Nahum
1QS Community Rule
4QMMT Miqtsat Maaseh Ha-Torah
Ah.iqar Aramaic Ah.iqar (Elephantine Recension, ed. Porten and Yardeni)
Arak Arakhin
ARN Avot de-Rabbi Nathan (followed by version A or B)
AZ Avodah Zarah
b in front of a Tractate name: Babylonian Talmud Tractate
Bar Baruch
Baraita Ishmael Baraita de-Rabbi Ishmael
Bavli Babylonian Talmud
BB Bava Batra
Bekh Bekhorot
Ber Berakhot
BerR Bereshit Rabbah, Midrash Genesis Rabbah
BM Bava Metsia
BQ Bava Qamma
Dem Demai
Deut. Deuteronomy
Eccl. Ecclesiastes
Ed Eduyot
En Enoch
EnWatchers 1 Enoch Book of Watchers
Epistola Anne Epistola Anne ad Senecam
EsthR Esther Rabbah
Ex. Exodus
Gen. Genesis
GenApoc Genesis Apocryphon
Git Gittin
x Abbreviations
Gk Greek
Hag H
. agigah
Hal H
. allah
Heb. Hebrew
Hor Horayot
JosAsen Joseph and Aseneth
Jub Jubilees
Jud Judith
Ket Ketubot
Kil Kilaim
LAB Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum
Lam. Lamentations
LamR Lamentations Rabbati, Midrash Lamentations
Lev. Leviticus
LevR Leviticus Rabbah
LXX Septuagint
m in front of a Tractate name: Mishnah Tractate
Mac Maccabees
Mak Makkot
Makh Makhshirin
Meg Megillah
Mekhilta Ishmael Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael
Men Menah.ot
Mid Middot
Miqw Miqwaot
MQ Moed Qatan
MS Maaser Sheni
MS, MSS manuscript, manuscripts
Naz Nazir
Ned Nedarim
Num. Numbers
Pes Pesah.im
PR Pesiqta Rabbati
PRE Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer
PRK Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana
Ps.Sol. Psalms of Solomon
Qid Qiddushin
 Abbreviations xi
Qin Qinnim
QohR Qohelet Rabbah, Midrash Ecclesiastes Rabbah
RH Rosh Hashanah
RuthR Ruth Rabbah
San Sanhedrin
Sheq Sheqalim
Shevu Shevuot
Sibyl.Or. Sibylline Oracles
Sifra Midrash Sifra on Leviticus
Sifre Deut. Sifre Deuteronomy
SOR Seder Olam (also, Seder Olam Rabbah)
Sot Sotah
Suk Sukkah
t in front of a Tractate name: Tosefta Tractate
T12Pat Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
Taan Taanit
Tam Tamid
TanB Midrash Tanh.uma, ed. Buber
Ter Terumot
TJob Testament of Job
Tob Tobit
TReu Testament of Reuben
TY Tevul Yom
Wisdom Wisdom of Solomon
y in front of a Tractate name: Palestinian Talmud Tractate
Yad Yadayim
Yerushalmi Palestinian Talmud
Yev Yevamot
YK Yom Kippur
Zav Zavim
This page intentionally left blank
 Table 1. Alphabetical List of Texts Considered
in the Creation of the Inventory

This alphabetical list identifies the texts whose literary structures helped to
inform the categories of the Inventory of Structurally Important Literary
Features. Most of them have already received an entry (a ‘Profile’) in the
database which accompanies this book (Samely et al. 2012). Their names
are in regular-sized type. A substantial number of texts have not yet been
profiled, but are taken into account in the concepts of the Inventory. These are
here presented in smaller type.
The scholars responsible for the relevant database Profile are indicated by
the following abbreviations: AS = Alex Samely, RB = Rocco Bernasconi, RH =
Robert Hayward, PA = Philip Alexander (core team); AD = Alinda Damsma,
ASt = Aron Sterk, HA = Hedva Abel, KK = Katharina Keim, MH = Maria
Haralambakis, SL = Simon Lasair. Four examples of Database Profiles are
presented at the end of this book (Part IV); these are marked in bold.

1. Ah.iqar (Aramaic narrative and proverbs) AS

2. Apocalypse of Abraham PA
3. Apocalypse of Elijah (Hebrew) PA
4. Artapanus [fragment] RH
5. Ascension of Isaiah PA
6. Avot de-Rabbi Nathan A/B PA
7. Babylonian Talmud; plus all Tractates AS et al.
8. Baraita de-Rabbi Ishmael RB
9. 1 Baruch RH
10. 2 Baruch PA
11. 3 Baruch PA
12. 4 Baruch (Paralipomena Jeremiae) PA
13. Bereshit Rabbah (Genesis Rabbah) AS (see Part IV)
14. Community Rule (1QS) [Fragment] PA
15. Copper Scroll [Fragment] AS
16. Damascus Document [Fragment] RH
17. Deuteronomy Rabbah RH
18. 1 Enoch PA
19. 2 Enoch PA
20. 3 Enoch PA
21. Epistola Anne ad Senecam ASt
22. 1 Esdras RH
xiv Alphabetical List of Texts
23. Esther Rabbah (Midrash Esther) AS
24. Eupolemus [Fragment] RH
25. Exodus Rabbah RH
26. Extracanonical Tractates of the Talmud:
a. Abadim RB
b. Derekh Erets Rabbah PA
c. Derekh Erets Zutta PA
d. Ebel Rabbati PA
e. Gerim RB
f. Kallah RB
g. Kutim RB
h. Mezuzah RB
i. Pereq ha-Shalom RB
j. Sefer Torah RB
k. Soferim Version A and B RB
l. Tefillin RB
m. Tsitsit RB
27. Ezekiel the Tragedian [Fragment] RH
28. 4 Ezra (2 Esdras) RH
29. Genesis Apocryphon [Fragment] RB
30. Hekhalot (Manuscript Vatican 228) PA
31. Hodayot [Fragment] AS
32. Joseph and Aseneth AS
33. Jubilees AS + PA (see Part IV)
34. Judith AS
35. Lamentations Rabbati AS
36. Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum (Pseudo-Philo) RH
37. Letter of Aristeas RH
38. Letter of Jeremiah PA
39. Leviticus Rabbah AS
40. Life of Adam and Eve PA
41. Lives of the Prophets AS
42. 1 Maccabees RH
43. 2 Maccabees RH
44. 3 Maccabees PA
45. 4 Maccabees RH
46. Megillat Taanit RH
47. Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael HA
48. Midrash on Psalms (Shoh.er Tov) PA
49. Miqtsat Maaseh Ha-Torah (4QMMT) [Fragment] AS
50. Mishnah; plus all Tractates RB, AS, PA, RH,
SL (see Part IV)
51. Numbers Rabbah RH
 Alphabetical List of Texts xv

52. Palestinian Talmud; plus all Tractates AS et al.

53. Pesher Habakkuk (1QpHab) [Fragment] RH
54. Pesher Nahum (4Q169) [Fragment] RH
55. Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana PA
56. Pesiqta Rabbati PA
57. Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer PA + KK
58. Prayer of Joseph RH
59. Prayer of Manasseh AS
60. Psalm 151 AS
61. Psalms of Solomon PA
62. Qohelet Rabbah (Midrash Qohelet) AS
63. Ruth Rabbah (Midrash Ruth) AS
64. Seder Olam (Seder Olam Rabbah) RH
65. Seder Olam Zutta RH
66. Sefer Ha-Razim PA
67. Sefer Yetsirah RB
68. Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah (Canticles Rabbah) PA
69. Sibylline Oracles PA
70. Sifra RB
71. Sifre Deuteronomy RH
72. Sifre Numbers RH
73. Sifre Zutta RH
74. Sirach RH
75. Tanh.uma (Buber Edition) PA + AS
76. Targum Canticles PA
77. Targum Esther I PA
78. Targum Esther II RH
79. Targum Jonathan to the Prophets RH
80. Targum Lamentations PA
81. Targum Neofiti RH
82. Targum Onkelos RH + AS
83. Targum Proverbs RH
84. Targum Psalms RH
85. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan RH
86. Targum Qohelet PS
87. Targum Ruth RH
88. Temple Scroll [Fragment] AS (see Part IV)
89. Testament of Job MH
90. Testament (Ascension) of Moses [Fragment] PS
91. Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs RH
92. Tobit AS
93. Tosefta; plus all Tractates RB et al.
94. Treatise of Shem PA
xvi Alphabetical List of Texts

95. Visions of Ezekiel AD

96. War Scroll [Fragment] AS
97. Wisdom of Solomon RH
 Part I
Introduction
A New Framework for Literary Description
One may perhaps find, and quite rightly, that such a schematization does
not account for the ‘beauty’ of this page; but such is not its purpose.
Genette 1980, p. 137
 A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR THE DESCRIPTION
OF ANCIENT JEWISH LITERATURE

This book presents a new framework for analysing the literary features
of a specific historical body of literature. This body of texts is limited by
cultural, literary, and contextual features, and consists of the anonymous and
pseudepigraphic works of Jewish antiquity. The framework aims to formulate
categories specifically for describing these ancient texts, but is grounded
in the modern academic study of texts in general. It strives to identify and
define every structurally important feature that occurs in any one text in
the corpus. It captures features of texts devoted to storytelling, sapiential and
philosophical discourse, normative promulgation and discussion, com-
mentary, homily, poetry, and works which collect smaller texts. The new
descriptive categories do not depend on existing genre terms. In particular,
the framework does not characterize whole texts by the use of single genre
terms, such as ‘midrash’, ‘wisdom’, ‘apocalypse’, ‘law code’, ‘rewritten
Scripture’, ‘anthology’, or similar expressions. It addresses texts on a level
of detail where independently verifiable literary features emerge which, co-
ordinated with each other in the new framework, produce a complex
and modular description of any given document. The literary features are
identified in the first instance from their occurrence in real texts, but
their conceptualization and systematic ordering are indebted to the modern
disciplines of linguistics, literary studies, hermeneutics, and specialist fields
within them. This book describes the new framework and all its descriptive
categories. This Introduction constitutes Part I, followed by the actual text of
the new framework (Part II), a detailed commentary on its categories
(Part III), and four sample descriptions, which illustrate how the framework
is applied to specific texts, namely, Jubilees, Temple Scroll, Mishnah, and
Genesis Rabbah (Part IV).1
A team of researchers at Manchester and Durham Universities developed
the new framework, with the benefit of substantial funding from the AHRC.2

1
These are shortened versions of the database Profiles that appear in A. Samely, R. Bernasconi,
P. Alexander, R. Hayward (eds.), Database for the Analysis of Anonymous and Pseudepigraphic
Jewish Texts of Antiquity (http://literarydatabase.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/), 2012 (hence-
forth, Samely et al. 2012).
2
Project ‘Typology of Anonymous and Pseudepigraphic Jewish Literature of Antiquity, c.200
bce to c.700 ce’ funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council between 2007 and
2012. The researchers involved are the collaborators of this book: Philip Alexander, Rocco
4 Introduction

The project from which the new framework arises was meant as a response to
three areas of perceived weakness in the current study of ancient Jewish texts.
First, there appears to be a lack of conceptual rigour and consistency in much
of the labelling and discussion of genres of anonymous and pseudepigraphic
works. Second, the literary traits of Jewish texts tend to be treated in too
much isolation from each other, partly in consequence of the necessary
division of the field into academic specialisms. This makes it difficult to
recognize literary similarities and dissimilarities in independence from postu-
lates of historical influence. Third, reconstructive speculation regarding a
text’s earlier stages of development is widely accepted as part of the scholarly
routine before using it as evidence. But the same is not true for the obligation
to articulate how the text—as it is—actually works as a whole. Yet, an
intuition of the whole text must be presupposed in all diachronic analysis,3
and explication of that intuition may be necessary to properly justify the
results of diachronic analysis. In the case of many anonymous and
pseudepigraphic Jewish texts, there is a ready scholarly acceptance, often
even a starting assumption, that they do not work as whole texts, or that
the manner in which they work does not affect the validity of the scholar’s
argument. This leads to a situation where very substantial parts of scholarship
are concerned with interpreting, as if they constituted primary evidence,
hypothetical texts not attested in the transmission evidence, while ignoring
the text that is there.
The combined effect of routine reliance on unquestioned genre labels, lack
of communication between specialists in certain text groups, and perfunctory
interest in whole texts as transmitted, has the potential to introduce serious
inaccuracies and distortions into the historical picture of ancient Judaism.
It seems to indicate the need for three scholarly advances. First, the forging of
a common language for speaking about literary phenomena across ancient
Jewish texts, and whole texts in particular. The new descriptive framework
here presented is designed to meet that need. Second, the grounding of that
common language in the evidence of a body of texts that have some basic
similarities in their literary constitution and share historical-cultural links,
but which transcends the limits of only one research specialism. The
anonymous and pseudepigraphic Jewish texts of antiquity constitute one
such corpus, and furthermore harbour sufficiently serious problems of
literary analysis to merit urgent investigation by a new methodology. Third,
the creation of literary descriptions of whole ancient texts on a large scale.
This is attempted in the database of literary profiles which accompanies this

Bernasconi, Robert Hayward, and myself. Information on the Project is available from the
website: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/ancientjewishliterature. Scholarly papers have appeared
since 2010, some of which are cited below; a volume of Aramaic Studies, 9:1 (2011), was devoted
entirely to the Project methodology.
3
See Samely 2010.
 Introduction 5

book (Samely et al. 2012). The database contains descriptions of the primary
evidence of hundreds of texts belonging to the corpus, and presents thereby
also the body of data from whose empirical investigation the new descriptive
framework arose in the first place.
The common language for describing whole texts is realized as an Inventory
of textual features. The Inventory consists of stand-alone generic definitions
of literary features, coordinated with or subordinated to each other. While the
terms of the definitions are general, the contents of the Inventory are almost
entirely limited to literary phenomena that actually occur in at least one text
of the corpus. The Inventory thus encapsulates the totality of literary options
available to text-makers of several periods of Jewish history, abstracted from
what is actual at least once.4 I will use the term ‘Inventory’ as shorthand for:
Inventory of structurally important literary features of anonymous and
pseudepigraphic Jewish texts of antiquity. Previous attempts to create a
descriptive grid for the literary description of ancient Mediterranean cultures
have tended to be heavily indebted to the rhetorical tradition and ter-
minology of Greece and Rome.5 Scholars have also suggested lists of the
literary forms and structures of the New Testament.6 Unlike these earlier lists,
however, the Inventory is an attempt to develop from scratch a whole system
of description which is large-scale, comprehensive, and empirically based.
The Inventory’s conceptualizations are not directly dependent on ancient
genre theory or rhetorical tradition, but base themselves instead on con-
temporary scholarly notions of linguistic meaning and textuality. They also
start from rereading the texts, not from any existing theory.

INVENTORY, CORPUS OF TEXTS, PROFILES

The Inventory has three main characteristics. First, it embodies a methodology

for identifying literary features in ancient Jewish texts, which I will explain
below. Second, it provides a systematic terminology for defining such literary
features. The framework constitutes a technical agenda for describing whole
texts, including features that undermine their unity as texts. Using it as the
checklist for specific individual Jewish texts of antiquity, one can produce a

4
Genette 1980 speaks of his analysis of a particular work (the Proustian narrative), as being a
comparison ‘with the general system of narrative possibilities’ he outlines in his book (p. 265;
emphasis in the original). The Inventory is such a system of possibilities also; but, in contrast to
the grid of categories developed by Genette, it includes non-narrative texts, while being less
detailed for narrative texts.
5
The tradition represented for example in Quintilian 1968, as illustrated by the modern
example of Lausberg 1998.
6
These include Reiser 2001 and Berger 1984. For a critique of their methodologies, see
Alexander forthcoming 2013.
6 Introduction

‘Profile’ which captures their literary surface in a modular manner. And third,
the Inventory, using the same detailed grid of literary options for every work,
has an inbuilt comparative perspective. It allows structural and synchronic
similarities and dissimilarities to emerge in a modular fashion, irrespective of
the historical differences in time and place of origin, social function, or over-
all literary type. It thus allows comparison of literary traits across known
or assumed historical influences, opening up new avenues for the under-
standing of historical connections. We hope that the integrative approach of
the Inventory will stimulate the inter-disciplinary dialogue about literary
constitution between scholars of diverse specialisms.
The Inventory stands in a three-way relationship to other aspects of the
research project from which it arose. There is the corpus of texts on which
the Inventory is empirically based; there is the theoretical background of its
descriptive categories; and there are the literary descriptions of individual
texts—the ‘Profiles’—which emerge when the categories of the Inventory are
applied to a given work.
I will first address the ideas of a corpus and of a Profile. The Inventory is
based on a large-scale reading of anonymous or pseudepigraphic Jewish texts
from late biblical times to the end of the Talmudic period, insofar as they can
be considered sufficiently complete to testify with some degree of certainty to
their literary constitution. This corpus is the empirical basis for discovering
literary features; considered as a totality, it is the pool of literary surface
characteristics from which the Inventory is a selection, the ‘structurally
important’ ones. But the texts in the corpus are also the ultimate target of the
Inventory, for it is a tool for the profiling of real texts. Once the categories
of the Inventory are established from reading the texts and collecting their
features, the Inventory acts as a checklist or a descriptive agenda for any given
text. If one deletes from the full Inventory all features that do not occur in the
text to be described, one is left with that text’s Profile: a set of characteristics
in a systematic order. Using the Inventory as a descriptive grid, the members
of the project team and collaborating scholars have created hundreds of
Profiles, covering many of the anonymous and pseudepigraphic Jewish
works of antiquity. Each Profile is effectively a schematic presentation of a
text’s structure, a summary of its literary surface. These Profiles are published
in the online database Samely et al. 2012 (http://literarydatabase.
humanities.manchester.ac.uk).
The database presents a Profile for most texts in the original corpus.7
We started with a sample of 40 corpus texts during the Autumn of 2007,
discussing each text in group meetings and making as few prior assumptions

7
The texts of the corpus are listed in Table 1 above, also displayed on the database website.
Texts that have not yet been profiled, but which we hope to profile during 2013–14, are dis-
tinguished graphically in both lists.
 Introduction 7

about their ‘genre’ or specific historical context as possible.8 We collected

all literary features that appeared—to us—to have a bearing on the overall
presentation of a given text,9 tried to produce precise definitions of each
feature, and experimented with putting them into a systematic order of some
kind. After a first rough version of the document now called the Inventory
had emerged from these discussions, we continued to refine the Inventory by
reading through hundreds of further texts. We thus began to use the emergent
Inventory as a checklist in producing actual descriptions of corpus texts.
Over time the project thus generated, on the one hand, the final version of a
hierarchical list of literary features, that is, the Inventory; and on the other
hand, a series of Profiles of individual corpus texts, now published in the
database Samely et al. 2012.
The corpus boundaries were determined in such a manner that they con-
tained a very substantial number of texts, and that they shared some very
global characteristics that we considered to be important, while also including
the prima facie genres of ancient Jewish literature: narrative, poetry, dis-
course, and commentary. The criteria for including a text into the corpus
were: (a) certainly or arguably Jewish; (b) complete or near-complete; (c)
anonymous or pseudepigraphic, that is, not authored by a publicly known
persona referring to itself in the text as such; (d ) falling into the period
between c.200 bce and c.700 ce; (e) not canonical in terms of the Hebrew
Bible of rabbinic Judaism. Criterion (c) defines a text which presents itself as
having a voice that is collective, anonymous, or impersonal; or a voice that
belongs to an earlier literary figure. I shall discuss the meaning of anonymity
and pseudepigraphy in Chapter 2 below. This criterion excludes in particular
the works of Philo and Josephus, on which more will be said in a later section
of this Introduction. Furthermore, the corpus is restricted to works that, from
the modern historian’s perspective, are ‘literary’, in the sense that they can
be understood as interventions into the formation of cultural, religious, or
hermeneutic positions within ancient Judaism. This excludes documents
created or transmitted primarily to perform, record, or commemorate trans-
actions of everyday life, commerce, politics, military activity, religion, or law;
and texts only preserved as inscriptions.
This set of criteria raises a number of conceptual and historical problems.
Applying them consistently to ancient Jewish sources is far from straight-
forward. We decided to handle the limits imposed on the corpus in a

8
A list of this initial set of texts is available from: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/
ancientjewishliterature.
9
There is a very small number of categories in the Inventory which are not found in any
corpus text, but are included merely to clarify by contrast the meaning of some of the other
features. These include categories 2.2.2.1, 5.5.1.2, 5.10.5, and 6.4.1. These will be explained in
Part III. On the question of selection of features for inclusion in the Inventory, see below.
8 Introduction

pragmatic manner. The project corpus overlaps prima facie with four conven-
tional corpora of Jewish literature of antiquity, namely the Pseudepigrapha
of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha of the Old Testament; the near-
complete Dead Sea Scrolls; and the works of rabbinic Judaism approximately
to the end of the Talmud. The corpus often referred to as the Pseud-
epigrapha10 has no agreed definition. Of the many works so titled in the
collection edited by J. Charlesworth,11 a substantial number are included in
our project corpus, but others are not because either their Jewish character,12
their pre-700 ce date,13 or their status as stand-alone text14 was in serious
doubt. Occasionally we included texts that are on the margins of the corpus
because they provided potentially important markers in the development of
literary genres.15 Two groups of texts are absent that could be argued to fall
within the boundaries of the corpus. The first are certain books of the Greek
Bible. The so-called Apocrypha, insofar as they consist of texts that are
entirely absent from the Hebrew Bible, are all included. But Greek-biblical
texts which have a corresponding text in the Masoretic Hebrew Bible are not
part of the corpus. I will speak about this in more detail at the end of Chapter
6 below, but the reason for this is, in a nutshell, that where these Greek texts
exhibit structural differences to Hebrew Bible texts now extant, this can and
often clearly does arise from a recensional difference to the Masoretic text.
This means that differences of structural importance cannot be interpreted
en bloc as the result of a translational or wider hermeneutic engagement
with the biblical text as we know it, which is how the Targums are defined in
the Inventory point 6.13. Rather, such Greek Bible texts are to be treated at
least prima facie as of the same kind and independent status as the texts of
the Hebrew Bible, and the categories of their empirical description will
most fruitfully be developed as part of a literary analysis of all biblical texts,

10
On the history of this term in modern scholarship, see Yoshiko Reed 2009.
11
Charlesworth 1983–5a.
12
We have included Lives of the Prophets, despite the real possibility that this is substantially
a Christian text. Similarly, the Elephantine Aramaic Ah.iqar is clearly not a Jewish text, but
included for its apparent Jewish reception and manifest availability in the cultural realm from
which the other corpus texts emerged, illustrated further by the mention of the figure of Ah.iqar
in Tobit (e.g. Tob. 1:21).
13
We have included Pesiqta Rabbati, despite the near-certainty that it is post-Talmudic, and
the same goes for some other rabbinic texts whose dates are uncertain but could be later than
700 ce.
14
We have excluded the additions to Esther and Daniel, but included the Prayer of Manasseh.
This criterion also affects potentially independent pieces of the Jewish liturgy which are referred
to (but never quoted in full) in rabbinic literature: the Shema with its blessings, the Eighteen
Benedictions, the Passover Haggadah, and similar works whose fixed text can be found only
in the post-Talmudic prayer books of Amram and Saadia; see Tabory 2006a, pp. 281 and 308 f.;
Tabory 2006b.
15
Thus Sirach/Ecclesiasticus is included, although the manner in which this text names its
own author at Sir 50:27 means it cannot be said to be anonymous or pseudepigraphic.
 Introduction 9

including the Masoretic ones, as well as translational traits.16 Another group

of texts excluded from the current descriptive project are works of liturgical
poetry, Piyyut, some of which are early enough to belong chronologically
to the Talmudic period proper.17 In contrast to many other genres of the
rabbinic period, this branch of literature continued to be productive in the
post-Talmudic period and thus could not be completely represented within
the project corpus. Furthermore, many authors of Piyyut are known and
appear to have acted as publicly known authors of whole texts (here,
poetic pieces) in their social settings, although our knowledge of this today is
fragmented. The artful, rule-governed, and individually creative constitution
of Piyyut promotes the text’s literary ‘surface’ as such. It points to a different
culture of text-making from that prevailing in almost all other texts in this
corpus, although this intuition would have to be tested by some future large-
scale empirical description of the Piyyut using the same methodology as the
current Inventory.
My discussion of the Greek Bible and Piyyut presupposes a feature of
the Inventory which now needs to be explicated. The logic of a corpus-based
Inventory of structurally important literary features implies a plurality of
corpora and thus of Inventories. There are as many corpus-based potential
Inventories as there are fruitfully defined bodies of literature. Ultimately
whole literary corpora could be compared, on a general level, through the
Inventories which encapsulate their literary options. The body of texts on
which the current Inventory is based, defined above, already invokes three
other bodies by contrast, which arise in the same larger historical context: the
canons of the Hebrew/Greek Bible, the publicly authored oeuvres of Philo and
Josephus, and the New Testament. How fruitful it was to draw an initial
boundary for a first Inventory in this manner depends to some extent on how
fruitful the other, thereby implicitly defined, corpora will turn out to be when
subjected to a similar analysis. But it seems important to have drawn some
boundaries around an initial corpus, rather than aim for comprehensive
coverage of everything—say, all Jewish or Bible-related ancient literature,
which would have included the other three corpora. Apart from the fact that
‘comprehensiveness’ is a matter of perspective, and that there are no natural
boundaries for cultures and periods, the contrast of texts and of whole bodies
of literature is itself an important aspect of the methodology. The more
comprehensive a corpus-based Inventory, the less distinctive it is for a culture
and period. The main ‘literary’ criteria used in the definition of the current
corpus are important here: anonymity and pseudepigraphy. The texts in this

16
We have in fact included one work in the profiling where the Greek attests to a text shape
different from the Masoretic Bible, namely 1 Esdras profiled by R. Hayward.
17
See Fleischer 2006; Lieber 2010. Yannai, the most important early author, is dated to the
6th cent. ce.
10 Introduction
corpus are defined as not projecting public ‘author’ personas; and they
already relate to an existing earlier corpus, namely that of ‘biblical’ works or
of works which resembled them in some way, thus constituting in some sense
a literary response to texts not entirely divergent from the ones today known
as biblical. The homogeneity provides a certain measure of underlying
literary homogeneity to the corpus. This is manifest and reinforced also by
shared cultural reference points, embodied in particular in common references
of personal and geographical names, as well as in perceived and actively
constructed ethnic–religious traditions across generations. It is likely that
each of the contrasting literary corpora mentioned above—Hebrew Bible,
New Testament, and Philo and Josephus—contains some features not present
in the current Inventory, while sharing many others. And some features in the
current Inventory will be absent from them. Thus section 6, insofar as it is
devoted to explicit commentaries, would have no place in an Inventory for
texts of the Hebrew/Greek Bible. But many features defined in the current
Inventory are immediately applicable to works of the other sets of texts just
mentioned. This also means that nothing stands in the way of using the
current Inventory as a starting point for describing texts that are outside the
current corpus, perhaps as the first step towards developing new Inventories
tailor-made for other corpora. That the current Inventory categories avoid
making reference to the specific boundaries of the corpus will make this
easier.
The Inventory here presented went through many versions. We dis-
tinguished these by version numbers counting down from the arbitrary
starting point of −500 to the envisaged end point of version ‘zero’. Amongst
the team of researchers, and in early conference presentations, we used to
speak of the Inventory document initially as ‘the Organon’. This self-
deprecating homage to Aristotle was dropped later in favour of the gravitas
of ‘Inventory’, which is short for ‘inventory of structurally important
literary features’ and was, we decided, less likely to provoke sniggers among
academic colleagues. The first Inventory draft, version −500, dates from
October 2007. The Inventory was refined and considerably extended
throughout 2008 and 2009, as more and more corpus texts were added to
its empirical base. During 2010, revisions became mostly restricted to the
arrangement of the categories, but there were also some radical cuts. With big
numerical jumps reflecting major revisions, we reached version number
minus 354 in October 2011. The version presented here is, effectively, the
last and will be treated as unmarked version zero, but is substantially the same
as the PDF archive version −354 that can be downloaded from the project
website (n. 2 above).
From the second project year onwards, the task of profiling individual
works was shared out beyond the core team consisting of P. Alexander, R.
Bernasconi, R. Hayward, and myself, as a number of Manchester University
 Introduction 11

doctoral students and scholars from outside the project joined us in the task.18
While during the first two years team members discussed and agreed on how
to apply the categories of the Inventory to a given text, this later became
impractical. Even in earlier stages, however, the scholar who was assigned a
text had full control and responsibility. Each Profile in the database is signed
by the name of the scholar who produced it, and constitutes the interpretation
of the original text, as well as of the Inventory categories, to which the
individual is committed.
The total number of Inventory points and sub-points is about 560; most
texts require the application of about 80 to 110.19 Inventory features tend to
be clustered together by conceptual similarity, meaning that each selected
point stands in a tacit contrast to its neighbours. Which points are absent
from a text’s Profile can therefore also be very informative. In the database
(Samely et al. 2012), two Profiles may be displayed side by side to make direct
comparisons possible. The database offers different types of searches of the
Profiles, allowing scholars to gather literary data on a wide range of topics.20
Each point of a Profile starts with the generic definition of the category
that applies to that text, a formulation taken directly from the Inventory
document, although sometimes shortened. Where the generic definition is
supplemented by further information specific to the text, a colon separates it
from the generic wording. The additional information can be an illustration,
an indication of frequency, or an explanation of why or how the category
is thought to apply, and can occupy considerable space.21 Inventory and
Profile points are numbered by the same system of numbers; but Profiles also
constitute readable prose documents, albeit rigidly structured and formulaic
ones, as the samples in Part IV below illustrate. The online database Samely
et al. 2012 offers the option to save Profiles as PDF documents.

18
Beyond the core team, who created the bulk of the Profiles, the following scholars have
contributed to the database: Simon Lasair (Mishnah Shabbat and Sukkah), Hedva Abel
(Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael), Alinda Damsma (Visions of Ezekiel), Maria Haralambakis (Tes-
tament of Job), Katharina Keim (collaborator on the Profile of Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer), and
Aron Sterk (Epistola Anne ad Senecam); Andrew Wilshere (project administrator) proofread
most of the Profiles.
19
Thus the Profile of Jubilees has 100 points applied; that of the War Scroll, 81; that of
Midrash Esther Rabbah, 109; that of the Babylonian Talmud Tractate Sotah, 118.
20
The software which was developed to create the database is being made available to the
academic community. See the database website for contact details.
21
Some of the Profiles are very substantial documents in their own right, in particular where
marked ‘detailed’ as opposed to ‘selective’ in their title. Thus Genesis Rabbah and Jubilees
have Profiles—found in a shortened version in Part IV below—of c.13,000 and 11,000 words,
respectively, while the War Scroll has c.7,000 and Midrash Esther Rabbah c.5,900 words. The
Profile of Babylonian Talmud Tractate Sotah, marked ‘selective’, on the other hand, consists
of c.3,700 words, mostly constituted by the applicable generic definitions. In addition to the
Sample Profiles in Part IV of this book, a theme issue of Aramaic Studies, 9:1 (2011), contains
discussion and the Profiles of Targums Onkelos Genesis, Esther Sheni, Canticles, Qohelet, and
Lamentations, as well as of Genesis Apocryphon.
12 Introduction

Profiles contain a selective bibliography. This is largely devoted to critical

and popular editions of the text, manuscript facsimiles, online texts, and
translations. All Profiles are based on work with the original text in the
original languages, using critical editions, manuscripts, or manuscript
facsimiles where available.22 The bibliography of a Profile will also list some
secondary literature, usually selected from a very much larger body of
scholarly work. The bulk of the datababase of Profiles was created by only
the four core members of the Project team. They had to traverse a large area
of existing scholarship, and could do so only in a highly selective manner.
The only reason this was feasible at all is that the Profiles are doing a very
specialized, though important, job for the ancient Jewish works. They
provide an explicit, systematic, and comparative description of a text’s literary
constitution and nothing else. They furnish no historical context, detective
work on authorship, diachronic separation of earlier sources, editorship,
philological criticism, exploitation for historical information, aesthetic,
cultural, or theological appreciation, or religious appropriation. The
Inventory as the agenda for doing this narrow job is very detailed, but
the resulting portrait, the Profile, is nevertheless schematic. If the Profile of a
text makes a contribution to the existing specialist scholarship on that work,
as we hope it will, this effect derives primarily from the descriptive power of
the schematism itself, and from the fact that it has been applied to hundreds
of other works also, allowing comparative perspectives. To be sure, the
insights contained in a Profile depend on the modern critical scholarship
regarding that text and others like it; but the Profile text makes no attempt to
engage with or summarize that scholarship. A Profile will often appear to take
sides in an ongoing scholarly argument about how best to understand the
text, based on the literary analysis itself, but Profiles mostly try to ask new
questions or answer earlier questions from a different perspective. In any case,
the Profiles make no claim to be based on a survey, integration, or critical
evaluation of all the potentially relevant existing scholarship on a given work.

THE SECTIONS OF THE INVENTORY

The Inventory is divided into twelve main sections. The significance and
conceptual basis for dividing the Inventory in such a manner, and the nature

22
Where necessary, limitations of linguistic competence of one researcher (mostly mine)
were overcome by collaborating with another (mostly Philip Alexander and Robert Hayward)
when producing the Profile. Thus my Profile of Jubilees, found in Part IV below, would not have
been possible without the opportunity to discuss with Philip Alexander the constitution of the
original Ethiopic text generally, as well as the wording of specific passages in particular.
 Introduction 13
of the sections, will concern us throughout this book. The Chapter titles of
Part III repeat these sections (Table 2):

Table 2

Explanation of Section Title of Section

How does the text speak about itself, if at all? 1. The self-presentation of the text
What knowledge does the text take for granted? What 2. The perspective of the governing
perspective does the text’s governing voice place itself into, voice
by saying what it says?
First basic text type: texts defined by a poetic or rhetorical- 3. Poetic or rhetorical-
communicative form (e.g. a homily). communicative formation
Second basic text type: texts that tell a story, that is, report 4. Narrative coherence or narrative
emplotted and time-indexed events. aggregation
Third basic text type: texts that treat a ‘timeless’ topic by 5. Thematic coherence or thematic
way of discourse or description. aggregation
Fourth basic text type: texts that treat another text as their 6. Lemmatic coherence or lemmatic
topic, in the sequence of that other text’s parts (i.e. aggregation
commentaries).
Parallels in specific substance or wording between a text 7. Correspondences and wording
and other texts, including the Hebrew Bible. overlap between texts
An inventory of small literary forms and stereotypical 8. Characteristic small forms
sentence formats.
Methods for creating coherence or aggregation between 9. Characteristic small-scale
adjacent text parts other than narration. coherence or aggregation for
thematic discourse
Arrangements of whole texts in a large-scale compound. 10. Compounds of juxtaposed
part-texts
Approximate characterization of the main subject matter 11. Dominant contents
of a text.
Examples of the genre terminology scholars have applied 12. Sampling of scholarly genre
to the text. labels

Each section gives its number to the first digit of any point appearing within
it. Thus the first point in section 1 is 1.1, the first in section 6 is 6.1. How
many points there are within sections varies dramatically, with sections 4, 5,
and 6 being the largest. The hierarchy expressed in the Inventory numbering
can go six levels deep and is represented by numbers separated by full stops.23

23
A point with a lower-level number (e.g. 2.2.1) entails application also of the higher-level
point (2.2). For a handful of exceptions to this rule, see the introduction to the Inventory in
Part II below.
14 Introduction

The fundamental distinction between narrative, thematic discourse, and

commentary is addressed at the beginning of Chapter 4.24

USES AND LIMITS OF THE INVENTORY AND

THE DATABASE OF PROFILES

The Inventory is a practical tool for the study of ancient Jewish texts, but it
also favours certain angles in the analysis of the literary constitution of a text,
and a certain methodology. It postulates that scholars are under an obligation
to explicate their understanding of the literary surface of the whole of a text
when they use it, in whole or in part, as evidence. Strictly speaking the literary
surface is all we have by way of integrated primary evidence. Every extraneous
piece of information about historical context needs to be connected to the
text by the scholar. But every piece of a given text is connected by the text
itself with the other pieces it contains, at least partly reflecting the physical
boundaries and layouts of manuscripts. The evidence of what constitutes the
inside of the text, and the fact that passages which are of special interest to
the scholar are thus found alongside others, is precious and often under-
valued. What the text is, in its transmitted existence, is what every scholarly
interpretation interprets, whether it sets out to do so or not. Its historical
context, on the other hand, is for anonymous and pseudepigraphic texts
usually uncertain or unknown. Scholars of ancient Judaism have in fact long
been obliged to read the literary surface of texts as indirect evidence for their
date and provenance, authorship, original purpose, reception, Sitz im Leben,
and so forth, because there is often no direct evidence for those. All the more
important to take into view the whole literary evidence. The Inventory and
the Profiles aim to place this on the routine scholarly agenda, by suggesting
systematic categories for doing it.
The Inventory can act as a prompt for the analysis of any text arising from
historical backgrounds similar to those of the corpus texts. Indeed it can be
the starting point for providing alternative Profiles for texts that already have
a Profile in the database, and for alternative versions of the Inventory itself.
Profiles constitute an interpretation, both of the text in question and of the

24
W. W. Hallo has proposed a classification for the ancient texts of Mesopotamia, Asia
Minor, and Egypt along very different lines: (a) part of the scribal curriculum (what he calls
‘canonical’), (b) monumental, and (c) archival. Here the criterion of distinction seems to
be the mode of preservation or transmission, that is, the ‘medium’. It is thus conceptually
different both from the criteria of content and form effectively used in the Inventory, and also
from putative social function, to which ‘genre’ terms are otherwise often tied. See Hallo 1991.
In Foster 2005, pp. 37–44, ‘celebratory, didactic, narrative, effective, and expressive’ are dis-
tinguished as major categories for Akkadian literature.
 Introduction 15

categories of the Inventory. Other interpretations are bound to be possible

and sometimes they may be more accurate, or more fruitful, for a certain
scholarly purpose. Scholars may encounter literary features that they consider
important, but that the Inventory does not contain. We may have considered
those features but decided that they do not affect the text’s overall structure,
are not ‘structurally important’. Certain ‘stylistic’ traits of a text’s language
fall into this category, as do certain small-scale repetitions that constitute
potential structures of inclusio or chiasmus in narrative. These do not, to our
mind, occur sufficiently often or prominently within any project corpus text
to be interpreted as ‘structurally important’ for it. Another area where one
might suspect that the current Inventory is lacking is in categories for
passages where the quoted language of narrative characters in some way
illuminates a speaker’s ‘character’.25 Such apparent gaps in supplying
categories for the description of a text’s literary surface are, however, partly a
function of the distance from the text’s details which the idea of ‘structurally
important’ implies, and for this distance it is hard to provide an objective
measure. Had we ‘zoomed in’ more, features in certain areas of text con-
stitution might have become structurally important which, from the distance
at which we in fact held the texts, did not appear to be. Thus many ‘stylistic’
and potentially artistic features of texts are absent from the Inventory, which
detailed scholarship examining the literary surface might concentrate on, in
particular if it is influenced by biblical literary studies. But a substantially
distant perspective from the textual detail, except where it directly concerns
the whole text (as in the case of category 1.1), is indeed necessary for the
Inventory’s methodology. So while the Inventory defines more than 500 traits,
such decisions allow much room for disagreement. Other features we
might simply have overlooked. Since the Inventory has its origin and ultimate
justification in a reading of the sources in the corpus, it must in principle
remain open to constant reinvention on the basis of further close readings of
these sources.
As for the database of Profiles (Samely et al. 2012), it provides a conceptual
platform for large-scale comparative scholarly work. The Inventory’s descrip-
tive schema, highly complex as it is in itself, reduces the otherwise infinite
complexity of individual texts to a common grid. Where the Inventory’s
categories are new, or have not been systematically applied to ancient Jewish
texts before, the database allows comparison of new aspects of texts. Where
the categories are already part of the scholarly discussion, the database pro-
vides large-scale instant access to the comparative picture. It constitutes a

25
See Polak 2001 and point 4.13.4 in Ch. 4 below. I expect that, in any future Inventory
concerned with the texts of the Hebrew Bible, both of these types of features will play a more
prominent role. A comparison of whole corpora will then be possible which will indicate
whether their absence from the current Inventory is reasonably justified or not.
16 Introduction

laboratory for conducting experiments in the study of literary and cultural

features of ancient Jewish literature.
Certain types of engagement with the texts lie beyond the horizon of the
Inventory’s descriptive categories. This is true in particular of the religious
and existential encounter with the texts. Even critical scholarship narrowly
defined, however, knows of more integrative and substantive, ultimately also
more evaluative approaches to texts, than the one embodied in the Inventory.
More profound appreciations of texts will welcome and emphasize the
unpredictable and unique dimension of every text. Connecting verbal and
structural characteristics with an evaluation of the contents, engaging with
intangible features resulting from a complex network of reflections—all this
goes beyond the Inventory’s analysis of the literary surface, just as it goes
beyond the information contained in a critical apparatus. The Inventory
provides the categories for a technically restricted commentary on any one
text. The Inventory is not about what makes a text unique; but a text is
indeed, just like a single language, a unique entity, not a universal one.26

TEXT HISTORY

The Inventory addresses partly the same evidence that is considered by

textual criticism and the study of text history. It includes categories for
literary features that have tended to prompt modern scholars to postulate
pre-existent sources for a particular text. But the Inventory does not formu-
late these phenomena in the first instance as problems, and not even as
traces of the text’s history: it takes them simply as characteristics of the text
that affect its coherence and are thus structurally important. Problematic
literary structures, like discontinuities, internal contradictions, changes of
perspective, and unexplained repetitions, are taken as important features to
be noted and defined. As such features they are initially (and perhaps forever)
indistinguishable from deliberate structures, although the idea of ‘deliberate’
upon which I rely here is a structuralist one. The term here does not entail
that authors would have been able to identify and explain the literary
structures which the Inventory identifies and defines, any more than
native speakers without special training can identify and explain the ‘rules’ of

26
Coseriu 1994, making this point, also notes that there is no science of individuals (pp. 112–
13). The following remark by G. Steiner, using the word ‘canonic’, has interesting connotations
in the context of the project corpus: ‘However conventional, however imitative of its canonic
forerunners, each and every literary text, each and every painting or sculpture, is a “singular-
ity” ’; Steiner 1989, p. 76. Even filtered through the Inventory generalizations, uniqueness re-
emerges: it seems to be extremely rare for two database Profiles to be matched completely in
their numerical constitution.
 Introduction 17
phonology which they implement when speaking. From the point of view
of modern scholarship we do not know how to tell the deliberate in the
structuralist sense, from the accidental in the text critical sense. The reason
for this is simple. In most cases we only have access to the historical and
cultural context of production by way of the results, the texts themselves. We
have no contemporary descriptions of how the texts came about, at least not
in the case of anonymous and pseudepigraphic works. Furthermore, we have
no access to readerly intuitions that come from the period of the texts. Our
strongest intuitions on what makes sense or what is coherent in a text come
from our own time and place, reader expectations that we learned before
becoming scholars and which are reinforced by being scholars and writing
academically. At least to the degree that this is possible, the Inventory renders
itself independent precisely of those expectations. It does so by defining
problematical literary features not in terms of the problem they cause us, but
in terms of what their nature and relationship to the rest of the text is (say, an
unexplained switch of the narrator’s perspective). So the definition will relate
the feature to the overall economy and coherence of the text, as for most other
Inventory categories. But it leaves to other scholarly projects the judgement
that a particular literary structure indicates that the text was once different
from what it is now, and thus the move towards a description of that other
text, the text that stands behind the text as attested in the transmission evi-
dence. The categories of the Inventory are not concerned with hypothetical
earlier texts, the ghost of texts past. This facilitates a separation of the descrip-
tion of the text from the description of its stages of production. It allows
providing the information: ‘This is what the text looks like if its parts are read
in each other’s light’, without at the same time having to make a judgement
(which may well follow) like: ‘This text does not form a coherent whole’
or ‘This text was put together from pre-existing sources A, B, C.’ Thus
observations on text history are in principle fully compatible with the infor-
mation contained in the Profiles and the Inventory (see the final section
‘Incoherence in the Project Corpus and Other Corpora of Texts’), insofar as
such observations rely on analysing the literary surface.
It is the modular structure of the Inventory that makes this separation
possible. It allows treating features which cause us to doubt the text’s
‘coherence’ in exactly the same way as features which do not. Each feature
is recorded independently of the others, even though it is defined in terms
that respect the togetherness of text parts in a whole text. The mutual
independence of features allows exploring what may have constituted, for
ancient readers, the experience of a coherent text—the ‘tolerances’ for
incoherence may have been quite different from those we take for granted in
our own reading. The database of Profiles makes visible how frequently a
particular feature occurs, and where exactly it occurs in the corpus. It thus
assembles, for the first time, the large-scale empirical data that modern
18 Introduction
scholars need to make judgements also about the frequency and distribution
of a particular feature of ‘incoherence’. And the database may also show that
features which produce ‘incoherence’ can, and usually do, occur alongside
other features that produce ‘coherence’ in the same text. Those are often
ignored by the scholar when diachronic reading kicks in, just as they are
taken for granted when nothing takes place in the text that looks, to us,
incoherent. Perhaps the database’s fuller array of empirical evidence will in
the future make a contribution to reconstructing what actually were the
reader expectations or common reader experiences of Jewish antiquity in
proper independence from our own.

THE INVENTORY AND THE MODERN STUDY OF

LITERATURE AND DISCOURSE

The methodological orientation of the Inventory is, broadly speaking,

structuralist. As I said above, the term structuralist here means in particular
the assumption that a text’s production and reception can be quite regular,
on certain high levels of abstraction to be determined by empirical trial and
error, without thereby implying that authors, readers, and listeners could
formulate the ‘rules’ which produced that regularity. The ‘rules’ of verbal
production are usually learned through repeated exposure, familiarity, and
intuitive imitation within a shared cultural and historical context. On a more
concrete level, the Inventory’s descriptive categories are indebted to the spirit
and in some cases specific concepts of text linguistics, discourse analysis,
various branches of literary studies, and narratology. Debts of this kind will
be acknowledged in the footnotes of Part III. There is, however, no single
approach which has been adopted wholesale for the Inventory. The reason for
this is that there exists no comprehensive, concrete, and unified discipline
which could have supplied the Inventory’s conceptual needs all at once, partly
because those are comprehensive. The Inventory wishes to make visible all
aspects of the literary surface in one go, and there is no comprehensive
‘science of texts’ in the current landscape of academic disciplines. Thus its
concepts are inspired by a variety of academic disciplines and schools, each
usually specializing in different aspects of textuality. The concepts could
therefore not be combined into a new framework without modifying them to
some extent. In this labour of modification, the orientation we took from the
primary evidence was a great help. We had the freedom to beg, borrow, and
steal tools from all branches of the academic study of language and texts,
and to change them as necessary, because we had a need to describe concrete
literary phenomena. We also had to reconstitute the conceptual tools in
such a way that they became compatible with each other in the Inventory, a
 Introduction 19

document aiming for an integrated account of all structurally important

aspects of a text in one course of analysis.
The Inventory’s greatest conceptual debts are to text linguistics and dis-
course analysis, although the latter is primarily interested in spoken language
and conversation.27 Deconstruction and post-structuralism have provided
occasional inspiration for the Inventory, but their philosophical under-
pinnings have not been accepted, for the reasons to be explained below,
namely that meaning crucially depends on boundaries so that all close readers
rely on text boundaries as constraints in the construction of meaning,
including those who practise the art of deconstruction. Literary studies also
were a great source of ideas. The Inventory has sections on narrative (section
4), and poetic and rhetorical-communicative compositions (section 3), text
types that have provided the staple of literary analysis in European culture
since antiquity. But the modern study of narrative is heavily influenced by
the existence of the modern novel. Thus Genette’s Narrative Discourse (1980)
uses Proust throughout as its reference point, although narratological
approaches such as his have also been adapted to include ancient or biblical
storytelling, as in the work of Mieke Bal and others.28 There has also been an
explosion of critical and theoretical interest in the ancient ‘novel’, with pro-
ject texts such as Joseph and Aseneth figuring prominently. Yet the Inventory
also deals with discursive or non-narrative texts (sections 5 and 6), which
have traditionally played no role in literary studies. In fact works constituting
themselves as thematic discourse or commentary provide the bulk of the
project corpus, and those have generally attracted much less theoretically
informed study.29 Deconstruction and related approaches have regularly
addressed texts that belong to the academic and scholarly discourse, but have
read them as part of a critique of Western rationality.30 It is therefore hardly
possible to use these approaches as the basis for a systematic description and
categorization of scholarly thematic texts, a task that continues the historical
project of rationality. Discourse analysis, which also takes an interest in non-
narrative texts, is not usually concerned with linear and historically fixed
texts, that is, with internally fixed sequences of sentences that constitute long
and complex verbal entities; it concentrates on spontaneous spoken language
or dialogue. Text linguistics, on the other hand, has contributed to the study
of scientific genres and technical discourses in fixed and extended texts, but its

27
Syntheses of these various branches of scholarship may be found in the following works:
Beaugrande and Dressler 1981, Halliday and Hasan 1976, Coseriu 1994, Adamzik 2004, Brown
and Yule 1983, Genette 1980, and Barthes 1988. Other works will be mentioned in connection
with specific points of the Inventory.
28
Bal 2009 contains only a sprinkling of biblical references, e.g. pp. 114–15; but see Bal 1988.
29
For some of the comparatively rare theoretical approaches to such texts before the rise of de-
construction, see, e.g. Ingarden 1960, pp. 350–3; and 1973, pp. 13–14, 36–7, 147–67; IJsseling 1983.
30
This is illustrated by Derrida’s engagement with texts by Rousseau and Hegel, in Derrida
1976 and 1986, and there are now many other examples. Cf. on this also Thiel 1990.
20 Introduction

analyses tend to explore primarily European writing.31 As for the special kind
of thematic text that is a commentary on another text, this text type has
recently often been framed by the notion of intertextuality. However, that
term, in its technical sense, is so general that the specific textual phenomena
that distinguish commentaries from other texts do not matter, as any text can,
and does, stand in intertextual relationships to others, through its reader.
Otherwise the study of commentaries as a textual genre tends to be primarily
concerned with their contents, historical impact, and influences. So while
there are many important ideas in these various branches of the academic
study of texts, it was usually impossible simply to take over a specific concept
and apply it to the evidence of the ancient Jewish texts. Rather, keeping in
view the concrete phenomenon in ancient Jewish texts to which they helped
direct our attention in the first place, the categories had to be defined again
from scratch. After initial formulation, the definitions then underwent a
usually lengthy period of testing, team discussion, and revision. Their
wording is both aligned with, and differentiated from, neighbouring
definitions, so the grid of the Inventory itself produces certain conceptual
effects. The categories of the Inventory are couched in a language that is
technical because it defines features, but not because technical vocabulary has
been imported, with some very rare exceptions to be explained in this book.
The language of the definitions is mostly that of the general academic dis-
course in the historical humanities, and most of them are self-sufficient and
self-explanatory. But this only holds true if the Inventory is read as one
whole document. Casual or fragmented reading of the document will miss
how the points illuminate each other, sometimes over great distances,
although there is some cross-referencing. In the pursuit of conceptual
precision and concision, Inventory formulations sometimes have to become
rather complex; the main route to practical understanding is to see them
applied, and Part III of this book will refer to hundreds of illustrations, albeit
often presupposing knowledge of the texts referred to, rather than quoting
and interpreting a concrete passage.

THE THEORETICAL BACKGROUND OF THE

INVENTORY AND THE DEFINITION OF A ‘TEXT’

Why insist that all aspects of a text need to be considered together for an
understanding of its literary constitution? The Inventory does not seek to
justify the unity of any verbal entity transmitted as ‘one’ text. It collects

31
See also the introduction to Ch. 5 and the literature mentioned there in n. 6; also
Beaugrande and Dressler 1981.
 Introduction 21

features of prima facie incoherence as much as of coherence, and contains

categories which allow describing insurmountable obstacles to the modern
scholar reading the text as a unity (e.g. 5.7.5). Why then claim that an
approach to the unity of a work is necessary, even for discovering reliable
evidence of its disunity? The justification of this claim, just as that of its
denial, must arise from philosophical rather than historical considerations.
The philosophical foundations of the Inventory are basically phenomeno-
logical, in the sense in which Husserl used the word, and can be sketched out
as follows.32 Understanding an extended text is an activity of construction by
a consciousness, and that makes the search for unity pivotal. First, unity plays
a role as a postulate of reading itself. Why would one read a text beyond any
randomly selected sentence? Because the meaning of every single sentence has
the ability to be made more precise by the meaning of the other sentences in
the same text. This is the expectation under which all close reading of texts
begins. It furthermore presupposes a fundamental distinction between the
sentences in this text and sentences in all other texts. Only the sentences in
this text have the primary promise of illuminating each other, because they
were ‘meant’ to be together and thus can be expected to accommodate their
meaning to each other’s presence. Reading a text—and listening to a text is
similar—is to make a sharp distinction between meanings that arise from
‘inside’ it and meanings that do not. So the noise of the dog that barks while
I read the text, or another, different text on the same topic, will not, as a
matter of the principle of reading, be mistaken for the meanings of this text in
front of me while I read it. Second, unity is the assumption that shapes the
actual methods of close reading. The text is read in the expectation of its
end, both conceived as the final sentence, and as the text’s status as a finite
object. Close reading tends to reread the text, or parts of it, after its end
has been encountered, precisely so as to make the meaning adjustments to
earlier passages that have become necessary in the light of its ending, that is,
in the light of certain knowledge of what the text contains and what it does
not contain. Thus the interpretation of single sentences is informed by an
experience of the limits of the text. This knowledge helps fine-tune the
meaning of any one particular passage, if fine-tuned reading is the goal.
The mutual adjustment of meaning within a limited verbal entity—turn-
ing that verbal entity into a text—is the reason a sentence in a text is capable
of conveying a much richer meaning than the same sentence considered on
its own. The reader thus experiences the text’s meaning as that of a prima
facie bounded, finite verbal entity. This means that the meaning boundaries
of the text are constructed in initial dependence on its de facto boundaries.
This, at least, goes for the acts of constructing meaning in a text insofar as
these are accessible to the reader/listener herself or himself, by introspection

32
For an earlier account with a different emphasis, see Samely 2005.
22 Introduction

and memory. I do not deny that text-transcending factors contribute to

the meaning so constituted without the reader/listener recognizing them
as being text-transcending. But this is a different aspect of the question.
The fact is that even deconstructive reading practices, famous for their
postulate of intertextuality, tacitly depend on the readerly experience of a
very fundamental distinction between ‘this text’ and ‘all the rest/all the
other texts’.
It follows that the perceived boundaries of a text make a crucial contri-
bution to the construction of its meaning in all its parts. The dynamic of part
and whole is fundamental to the analysis of the experience of a ‘text’.33 This
notwithstanding the fact that the search for the ‘whole’ of which any piece of
the text is a ‘part’, is complicated by the experience of temporal difference
between the moments of experienced meaning (namely that of parts of the
text, from sentences upwards). Nor does this deny that we can read a text
selectively whenever we wish to do so. So here is an attempt to say what a
text is. It defines a text as that kind of a verbal entity for which it makes
a difference whether we read it selectively or not:
A text is a complex verbal entity, usually a plurality of sentences34 or other units
of meaning, whose de facto boundaries or verbal and literary signals invite
constructing the meaning of any one of its sentences/units in the light of the
meaning of all others.
Reading or listening to a text is here taken to be a response to an invitation
extended to the reader to keep awareness of the presence of a multiplicity of
discrete meanings across successive sentences, paragraphs, sections, chapters,
or whatever other units of meaning suggest themselves as being important.
What is to be emphasized here is that, when a verbal entity is from the start
not expected to form a unity, and thus, not expected to be a text in the above
sense, no such reading/listening is likely to take place; while when a verbal
entity is expected to form a unity, then this mode of looking for continuity
will be at work, effectively projecting, for the time being, unity in advance

33
Defining the text as a plurality of sentences (or equivalent units) distinguishes the
approach here pursued sharply from that of certain branches of linguistics and pragmatics,
which align the notion of ‘text’ to that of ‘utterance’ and speak of one-sentence or one-word
‘texts’. See Raible 1972; Crystal 1985, pp. 107–8. A list of criteria for, and suggested definitions
of, ‘text’ can be found in Adamzik 2004, pp. 38–9. It includes the following two interesting ones:
‘The word “text” is used in linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever
length, that does form a unified whole’, Halliday and Hasan 1976, p. 1; emphasis mine; and ‘We
do not see an advantage in trying to determine constitutive formal features which a text must
possess to qualify as a “text”. Texts are what hearers and readers treat as texts’, Brown and Yule
1983, p. 199. Lotman (not quoted by Adamzik) stresses three criteria for textuality: explicitness
(‘expression’), limitedness (‘demarcation’), and structural organization; see Lotman 1977,
pp. 51–3.
34
Whatever definition of ‘sentence’ might be assumed.
 Introduction 23

of finding it, in advance of having read or listened to the whole of the text,
and with regard to any part of the text not yet encountered.35
What happens after the reader has reached the end at least once, and so
the whole text is known to the reader from a first encounter, depends
on the purpose of the reading, as well as the reader’s context and cultural
background. The experience of the whole can lead to and guide subsequent
acts of rereading the text, in part or in its totality. How does the first reading
guide the reader in making a judgement on the existence of an overall
meaning, or in retaining an impression of its overall meaning? If the reader
assumes an attitude of ‘critical’ reading, then any initial projection of
coherence is constantly kept under review and capable of being rescinded,
should evidence to the contrary be encountered. And very importantly, in
a critical reading the expectation that the text ‘hangs together’ is capable of
being disappointed for good. The reader is critical because equipped with
reasons for deciding to stop looking for unity, and therefore giving up the
attempt of understanding the text. This option must always be available to
the modern scholar reading ancient sources. This despite the risk of ‘missing’
the coherence which might have been experienced by ancient readers, or of
applying a modern standard of expected coherence which is anachronistic for
ancient texts. For the alternative would be even worse, namely that scholars
blindly claim to see a textual unity where they can see none. That would be
an abdication of responsibility, even if it takes place out of a mistaken sense of
fairness to a different culture or because of a wish to avoid Eurocentrism. The
modern interpreters need to be able to explain and account for the unity of a
text in terms that make sense to them. The critical attitude also has a counter-
part in everyday reading. Such everyday reading is not one of critical care, but
is merely a reader’s indifference to the question whether the text ultimately
makes sense. It is an everyday experience that we can give up the attempt to
construct a text’s coherence under the pressure from other priorities or other
texts, or read the text selectively, aware of running a risk of misunderstanding
it by doing so.36 The critical attitude also has an opposite pole, uncritical
reading as an investment of faith. The investment of individuals or social
groups in a text’s importance can be so high that any internal discontinuities
or contradictions it may have are not perceived as such at all, or only
experienced as a spur to read more closely and carefully, keeping the assump-
tion of its coherence open ad infinitum. Such an attitude can be found in

35
I will from now on speak only of the reader and reading, but only for the sake of less
cluttered formulations; there is no need for a text to be written in order to meet the above
definition, so reading includes listening and all other forms of communication.
36
Here arises perhaps a universal definition of the ‘everyday’ text, relative to the reader: a text
which the reader sees as sufficiently unimportant for her or him to deliver to the fate of
incomprehension without labour of interpretation, and without compunction at having
avoided such labour.
24 Introduction

the hermeneutics of holy text cultures, including those of the Judaism that
created the works of Midrash. In such cases the expectation of coherence is
never abandoned for good, and therefore incapable of being disappointed. It
functions as a dogma of reading. The labours of interpretation, and the
expected complexity of devices of meaning, are raised to such heights
that simple glaring inconsistencies, contradictions, or repetitions within a
text are unlikely to be accepted as such. Ad hoc solutions are accepted for
the time being, because the search for absolute meaning in holy texts tends
to be experienced as an open-ended collective project, ever ongoing and
inter-generational.
But holy text hermeneutics merely exaggerate what are the hallmarks of all
careful reading.37 For a limited period all close reading, including that of
ancient sources by the modern critical scholar, has to invest up front in the
coherence of the text. For the reader, in particular the reader encountering a
text across a historical and cultural depth yet to be plumbed, must first
acquire sufficient experience in the ways of the text before she or he has the
‘right’, so to speak, to stop looking for the text’s unity. The ways of the text
cannot even be explored adequately without first investing in the text’s
unity.38 Small linguistic units like the single word or the single sentence do not
have a definite meaning without a larger whole, that is, without something
with boundaries into whose economy they can be placed.39 So the ways of the
text do not become visible without the expectation that it forms an internally
complex but bounded whole, without investment in coherence. This is true in
particular for texts whose ways are unfamiliar to the reader—the situation of
the modern scholar reading ancient sources. The alternative, namely giving
up on coherence too soon, is hard to remedy. Just as the expectation of
coherence can be self-fulfilling for uncritical readers, so the expectation
of incoherence can be self-fulfilling for readers who give up too early.
The definition of ‘text’ suggested above emphasizes the importance of the
factual boundaries of a text. What role do these play in the reading process?
The text’s boundaries must be allowed to define and limit the meaning

37
For the Midrashic approach, see Samely 1992; see also, Steiner 1989, pp. 89 f.
38
Put differently, the more familiar I as reader am with the conventions and context of the
text, or the more ‘of my time’ a text is, the quicker I can recognize it as making no sense or as
not hanging together properly. The reason for this is that I intuitively share the conventions
and habits of meaning embodied in the text, and have a right to measure it against them
immediately. In the case of a text from an alien and unknown context, it is its de facto
boundaries which provide the primary guidance. The de facto boundaries are thus functionally
parallel to, and have to stand in for, a direct knowledge of the cultural and literary context.
39
The lack of determination of single words or single sentences has often been stressed and is
a fundamental assumption of most branches of modern linguistics. It is also occasionally
stressed as being central to literary studies; see e.g. Lämmert 1988, pp. 95–9 following Stenzel
and with reference to a maxim by W. von Humboldt: ‘Es gibt nichts Einzelnes in der Sprache,
jedes ihrer Elemente kündigt sich nur als Theil des Ganzen an’; von Humboldt 1843, p. 252
(repr. von Humboldt 1999, p. 31).
 Introduction 25

options, in particular for the reader who is unfamiliar with the ways of the
text. The factuality of boundaries is what permits the text to make sense in
unexpected ways, but only if the reader takes them seriously. I will permit
myself an analogy here. To understand an unfamiliar kind of textuality with
the help of a text’s boundaries is like going through three stages in losing
and finding one’s keys. First one looks in all the likely places. Then one looks
in all places, regardless of how likely they are, even though one cannot tell a
plausible story of how the keys could have got there. Finally, after finding the
keys in an unlikely place, any possible story of how the keys might have ended
up there suddenly changes from being implausible to being plausible. In the
light of the brute fact that the keys were indeed in that place, the implausible
story ceases to be implausible, and may even turn out to fit together with
other evidence or suddenly remembered actions, hitherto not taken into
account. This is how the brute factuality of a text’s boundaries limits and
informs the construction of the meaning of a text, in particular if the text is
from an unknown context or in an unknown genre. For the critical reader
who is not familiar with the ways of the text by virtue of shared cultural
intuitions, the text itself has to become the primary evidence for its ways and
its methods of coherence. And for the text to be able to testify to its own
manner of textuality, the evidence of its boundaries is indispensable. The
modern scholar has to reckon with the possibility that standards of coherence
are historically contingent and that those embodied in the text under con-
sideration are not yet known. Therefore where the text begins and where it
ends, and what it thus ‘contains’, defines the options of reading. Any meaning
structure that is possible within those limits, whether familiar to the reader or
not, is worth trying out. Any meanings that are excluded by the text’s limits
must be excluded, at least for the time being.40 In the absence of reliable access
to the text’s historical context, the factuality of what is inside it and what
is absent from it, where it starts and where it ends, may be the text’s only
defence against anachronistic expectations of coherence on the side of the
modern scholarly reader.
What the Inventory is looking for are those signals which the text itself
sends out, of which any coherence-weakening features may be only one part.
Effectively this means that the verbal entity transmitted from antiquity is
treated, until decisive discontinuities make that impossible for the modern
interpreter, as not conceding that any part of it ought to be read as if the other
parts did not exist alongside it. Their existence ‘alongside’ of other parts is
what the text, as defined above, wishes to stress, exists to present. When

40
Mieke Bal (2009, p. 114) makes a similar point in relation to constructing the portrait of
narrative characters given in a text, stressing the importance of accepting the limits of the
information inside the textual boundaries, something that is in her view as important for
biblical characters as it is for characters in Proust.
26 Introduction

this approach is followed, it turns out that few single works,41 among the
hundreds that make up the project corpus, appear not to invite, at least in
some ‘weak’ fashion, an interpretation of its constitutive units in the light of
the presence of the other units within the same de facto boundaries, thus
meeting the definition of ‘text’ above. But to say that they do so does not
mean that their textual nature is the same as that of many modern genres, in
particular those of scholarly text production itself.
The theory of textuality embodied in the Inventory rejects postmodern
beliefs that the reader’s expectations and context must always impinge, in
uncontrollable ways, on the historical meaning of a source. Nevertheless,
the Inventory presupposes that modern habits of how to construct textual
meaning will profoundly influence the academic reader of ancient Jewish
sources. Thus the modern scholarly perspective on textuality necessarily
limits the Inventory, even as it strives to make visible something that may lie
beyond that modern perspective.

INCOHERENCE IN THE PROJECT CORPUS AND

OTHER CORPORA OF TEXTS

In the light of the preceding section, it is possible to be more precise about

what constitutes the synchronic approach to text unity taken by the Inventory.
I have claimed that some understanding of the simultaneous presence of
parts in a text is always already at work in reading, including in the diachronic
methodologies of reading of the modern text critic.42 Yet from this it does not
follow that the Inventory’s methodology must be to justify a text as unified by
looking only for literary features that make its parts hang together. Rather
the synchronic approach is predicated on the need to bring to light features
that weaken the coherence in the modern reader’s eyes, alongside those
that do not, or that strengthen it. For instance, where a text is an aggregate of
semi-independent parts, synchronic analysis must bring to light just this
structure: it is how the text works, even if to a modern reader this might not
give the text a strong coherence. Many of the literary phenomena that trigger
the modern scholar’s impulse to think of a text as being composite, or as
containing secondary layers, will be defined as literary features somewhere
in the Inventory. The following are the most important ‘problematic’
phenomena defined in the Inventory: mere aggregation of text units or parts

41
Single works in contrast to verbal entities that are compilations of independent texts,
treated under section 10. Compilations are defined as not being unambiguously ‘texts’ in the
sense defined.
42
See Samely 2010.
 Introduction 27

in a larger whole,43 imbalance of text quantities,44 switch of narrator,45

employment of stereotypical forms or units,46 juxtaposition of text parts
that are functional alternatives of each other,47 and thematic discontinuities
mediated by formal patterns.48 So the Inventory does not assume the
coherence of a text as an act of faith and then tries to justify it.49
The Inventory also allows describing a text overall as weakly coherent or as
incoherent. Even though this can only be done in terms of the modern
scholar’s own experience of coherence, not in terms of the ancient audience’s
coherence expectations—these are an ultimate goal of reconstruction, not
already known to us—it is nevertheless necessary. The modern scholar’s
coherence expectations cannot be ignored or circumvented; otherwise they
will simply reassert their dominance in unacknowledged ways. We are not free
to discard them, because they determine what we currently can understand.
Rather, we need to explicate and address them, in particular where the text
‘disappoints’ them. The main manner in which the Inventory reflects these
expectations is through its definition of what constitutes a ‘structurally
important’ feature to be included in the Inventory. Every feature that poses
problems for the modern reader’s understanding of a text’s unity will auto-
matically be structurally important—to us. So the inclusion of such a feature
in the Inventory will reflect the modern scholarly reader’s prejudices on how
a text ought to be constructed, even if the feature itself is not defined in those
terms.50
How does the Profile of a verbal entity indicate that, in its de facto
boundaries, it appears to offer no invitation to read all of its parts in the light
of the others, and thus does not meet the definition of a ‘text’ above? For
certain thematic texts, point 5.7.5 spells this out, and for certain narratives,
4.14.3.3. Large-scale compilations, which juxtapose whole texts without
connecting them, are also prima facie doubtful with regard to their status as
texts, and are treated as such in section 10. The absence of points 1.1–3 and
1.5 from a Profile will usually also indicate that the verbal entity in question
may not be a text in the sense defined above, and point 1.7 offers the
researcher an opportunity to elaborate. These are ways to indicate that
a verbal entity transmitted from antiquity in fixed boundaries is not,
conceptually speaking, a text as defined.

43
See points 4.3, 5.7/8, and 6.1.4. Aggregation of whole texts is treated in section 10.
44
See points 4.15 and 6.12.
45
See 2.3 and 4.14.
46
See the categories under 8 in conjunction with 5.8, 6.1, and points under 9.
47
Point 9.8.
48
Usually conceptualized as thematic digressions or shifts of topic ‘by association’; see point
9.9.
49
I am grateful to Bernard Levinson for drawing my attention to the possible misunder-
standing, here addressed, of the word ‘synchronic’.
50
See further the overview at the end of Ch. 10 below.
28 Introduction

The fact that the project corpus is defined by pseudepigraphy and

anonymity makes it likely in itself that it contains a high proportion of texts
that to the modern scholar pose problems of unity. This may be true in
particular in comparison with the ‘canonical’ works of the Hebrew Bible. The
contrast may extend also to works that project a historically defined, publicly
known person as author, like some by Philo and Josephus, and which contain
explicit self-references in which the authorial voice relates its persona to the
projected addressee as contemporary. The acknowledgement of the author
persona as a unique and uniquely known individual—a category of text voice
that is neither the interchangeable divine mouthpiece, prophet, nor the
anonymous mediator of tradition—appears to be a crucially important dif-
ference in stance, as well as in historical and cultural circumstance.51 We have
no direct evidence for knowing if and how these differences between the
corpora also made a difference for specific acts of text composition, reception,
and transmission. But it seems reasonable to accept the scholarly consensus
that many, perhaps most, pseudepigraphic and anonymous works attracted
substantial development subsequent to some initial act or acts composition.
If so, that may have happened to them to a greater extent than it happened to
publicly ‘authored’ works, and perhaps in different ways than it happened
to those that already were, or later became, accepted as ‘biblical’. It is thus
possible that the project corpus has a bias towards ‘messy’ literary structures,
due to historical layering. If so, this would confirm the need, met by the
Inventory, for conceptual tools that can handle textual shapes that are—to
us—problematic. There are many examples of problematic shapes in the
project corpus text. Indeed their sheer number may indicate that the usual
historical explanations of purely accidental accretion and change are not
quite adequate to account for them. For these texts clearly worked in some
sense for many audiences. So there is a prima facie need for supplementing or
educating our intuitions of coherence by scrutinizing the large amount of
available evidence of what texts are actually like in their best transmission
evidence. Of course every scholar in the field who has widely read across these
documents already has an intuition of what they are like. It is more a question
of gaining, on the one hand, a certain distance from which to see them all
together (partly now met by the database of Profiles); and, on the other hand,
of raising the intuitions to the explicitness of definitions, which can be
applied again and again, and which can be criticized (partly provided for by
the Inventory). Ultimately a comparison of whole corpora analysed along the
lines of the methodology of the Inventory, that is, a comparison of whole
Inventories, would provide more answers.
51
Paradigmatic for this is the introduction, in personal terms (their topos character not-
withstanding!), of Josephus to his Jewish Antiquities. See further the literature on the meaning
of anonymity and authorship cited in n. 42 of Ch. 2 below (also n. 13 in Ch. 4). See also the
Concluding Remarks below.
 Part II
The Inventory
Inventory of Structurally Important
Literary Features in the Anonymous and
Pseudepigraphic Jewish Literature of Antiquity

A. Samely, P. Alexander, R. Bernasconi, R. Hayward

 A corpus-based list of generically defined literary features occurring in at
least one text of the Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, the Apocrypha of
the Old Testament, selected Dead Sea Scrolls, and Rabbinic Literature1

1
This version of the Inventory (version ‘zero’) is a revision of the latest numbered version,
−354 which was published on the Project website in 2011 and is archived there in form of a
PDF. The html version on the website is updated to conform to this text with respect to the
definitions and the numbering, but not with respect to the illustrations column, which is much
fuller here.
 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON THE TEXT
OF THE INVENTORY

The Inventory has grown, in the course of the project, from an initial list of
some 50 basic categories to a system of c.560 hierarchically organized points.
It is divided into the 12 main sections explained in the Introduction. Beneath
the level of the 12 sections, there are several levels of sub-points. These are
expressed by full stops, so that 1.1 will have subordinate points 1.1.1, 1.1.2,
etc. The maximum amount of levels is six. With some important exceptions,
spelled out below, the relationship between higher-level points and lower-
level points is strictly hierarchical: the category lower down entails the
category further up. The grouping of the twelve main sections also follows
a logic:
A. Self-Presentation (Section 1)
B. Perspective (Section 2)
C. Form of the main body of the text (Section 3)
D. Types of how a subject matter is treated (Sections 4–6)
E. Relationships between texts (Section 7)
F. Small forms and small-scale coherence relations (Sections 8 and 9)
G. Higher-Level aggregates (Section 10)
H. Labels for classifying the contents and general character (Sections 11
and 12)
Each Profile opens with a record on any meta-textual information which
a text may contain (A) and closes with modern classifications of its content or
character (H).
In the following presentation of the Inventory, the left-hand column con-
tains the definition of the feature, while the right-hand column names some
of the texts which contain it. The latter names are usually purely illustrative.
The full picture of which features occur where is available from the database
itself, Samely et al. 2012.
As explained above, most Inventory points govern their subordinate points
by logical subordination, so that, say, point 7.1.1 will entail logically point 7.1.
One may apply 7.1 without applying 7.1.1, but not the other way round.
There are a small number of exceptions to this rule, explained at the
appropriate places in this book. In particular, point 1.1.5 does not entail 1.1;
point 2.1.1.2 does not entail 2.1.1; point 2.2.4.3 does not entail 2.2 and 2.2.4;
point 8.1.4.1 does not entail 8.1.4; and point 8.2.3.1 does not entail 8.2.3.
32 The Inventory

Some neighbouring points are compatible with each other (e.g. 2.4.1.1–6),
while others are formulated so as to be mutually exclusive (e.g. 4.1.1 versus
4.1.2). Where the latter is the case, this does not necessarily mean that both
features cannot be found in the same text. A text may contain one feature in
one of its parts and the other in another part. In that case, the text’s Profile
will contain both points, but make clear their distribution.
Most texts will only require use of one of the three sections 4, 5, or 6, with
the clearly marked exceptions 4.7 and 5.1. Points 3.5 and 3.6 can be combined
freely with sections 4, 5, or 6. Every Profile will have information under the
headings 1, 2, 11, and 12, plus at least one of 3, 4, 5, or 6. Most will have
something under 7, 8, and 9, and some will have an entry in section 10. The
sections of the Inventory which have the potential to exclude each other,
if the text is unified in that way, thereby define the most basic text types found
in the corpus. These ‘genre’-defining sections are 3 (poetic or rhetorical-
communicative form), 4 (narrative), 5 (thematic discourse), 6 (sequential
commentary), and 10 (compound of independent texts). Table 3 offers an
overview of those five text types in their mutual relationship.
Poetic shaping (3.4–6) can co-exist with any content or arrangement
pattern, although no sequential commentary, section 6, is found in poetic
format in the project corpus. Texts which have a rhetorical-communicative or
poetic form (3.1–4) can in principle have a content that admits additional
description in terms of arrangement patterns, such as narrative (section 4) or
thematic discourse (5).

Table 3
 The Inventory 33

A.
Self-Presentation
1. THE SELF-PRESENTATION OF THE TEXT AS
A VERBAL ENTITY

Selected texts
Definition of the literary feature illustrating the
feature
1.1. The text refers to itself as a verbal entity; its boundaries
are implied or explicit.
1.1.1. The text refers to itself using a genre term, speech 4QMMT, Sibyl.Or. 1:1
act term, verb, or other term implying verbal
constitution (with or without using a self-
referential discourse deixis, such as ‘This is’).
1.1.2. The text speaks of itself as dealing with an overall 4Mac 1:12
theme (subject matter) or purpose, or as consisting
of coordinated parts making a whole. See 9.12.
1.1.3. The text presents its subject matter as bounded, by mMid 5:1, Sibyl.Or., 4Mac.
using expressions such as ‘all’, ‘beginning’, ‘some 1:12, 4QMMT, [extraneous
example: Genesis 1:1]
of’, etc.
1.1.4. The text introduces its governing voice, thereby
indirectly marking its own boundedness.
See 2.2.
1.1.4.1. The text has a superscription concerning ‘to War Scroll (uncertain
whom’ it is addressed or for whose use it is reading), 1QS
meant (e.g. la-maskil ). (reconstructed); cf. Psalm
superscriptions
1.1.5. Important text witnesses attest to a heading which Mishnah Tractates, BerR
provides information of the kind 1.1.1–4, but
which is not integrated with the body of the text
or any introductory frame (for subheadings, see
9.12).
1.2. The text presents its internal sequence of sentences (or Sefer Yetsirah, Treatise
larger parts) as mirroring the objective relationships of of Shem
components in the projected world; or it projects its
subject matter as self-limiting (see 5.3). It thereby also
implies its own boundedness by subject matter (further
under sections 4, 5.2–5 or 6).
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lives of
Famous Indian Chiefs
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
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Title: Lives of Famous Indian Chiefs

Author: Norman B. Wood

Release date: January 27, 2019 [eBook #58781]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Roger Burch with scans from the Internet Archive.

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIVES OF

FAMOUS INDIAN CHIEFS ***
 {Transcriber's Note: Quotation marks
have been standardized to modern usage.
Footnotes have been placed to immediately
follow the paragraphs referencing them.
Transcriber's notes are in curly braces;
square brackets and parentheses indicate
original content.}
LIVES of FAMOUS
INDIAN CHIEFS
FROM COFACHIQUI, THE INDIAN
PRINCESS, AND
POWHATAN; DOWN TO AND
INCLUDING
CHIEF JOSEPH AND GERONIMO.
Also an answer, from the
latest research, of the query,
WHENCE CAME THE INDIAN?
Together with a number
of thrillingly interesting
INDIAN STORIES AND ANECDOTES
FROM HISTORY

COPIOUSLY AND SPLENDIDLY ILLUSTRATED,

IN PART,
BY OUR SPECIAL ARTIST.

By
 NORMAN B. WOOD
Historian, Lecturer, and Author of "The White Side of a Black
Subject" (out
of print after twelve editions) and "A New Negro for a New Century,"
which has reached a circulation of nearly a hundred thousand copies.
 PUBLISHED BY

AMERICAN INDIAN HISTORICAL PUBLISHING

COMPANY

Brady Block, Aurora, Ill.

Copyrighted in 1906 by American Indian Historical Publishing Co.,
Aurora, Illinois.

All rights of every kind reserved.

PRINTING AND BINDING BY THE HENRY O. SHEPARD CO.
ENGRAVING BY THE INLAND-WALTON CO.
CHICAGO.
TO
 THEODORE ROOSEVELT,
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES,
Who has observed closely and recorded justly the
character of the Red Man, and who, in the words
of Chief Quanah Parker, "is the Indian's President
as well as the white man's," this volume is respectfully
dedicated by

THE AUTHOR.
 CONTENTS

page
Introduction, 11

CHAPTER I.
Cofachiqui, The Indian Princess, 21

CHAPTER II.
Powhatan, or Wah-Un-So-Na-Cook, 41

CHAPTER III.
Massasoit, The Friend of the Puritans, 65

CHAPTER IV.
King Philip, or Metacomet, The Last of the Wampanoaghs, 85

CHAPTER V.
Pontiac, The Red Napoleon, Head Chief of the Ottawas and
Organizer of the First Great Indian Confederation, 121

CHAPTER VI.
Logan, or Tal-Ga-Yee-Ta, The Cayuga (Mingo) Chief, Orator and
Friend of the White Man. Also a Brief Sketch of Cornstalk, 173

CHAPTER VII.
Captain Joseph Brant, or Thay-En-Da-Ne-Gea, Principal
Sachem of the Mohawks and Head Chief of the Iroquois 191
Confederation,
 CHAPTER VIII.
Red Jacket, or Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha, "The Keeper Awake." The
Indian Demosthenes, Chief of the Senecas, 237

CHAPTER IX.
Little Turtle, or Michikiniqua, War Chief of the Miamis, and
Conqueror of Harmar and St. Clair, 283

CHAPTER X.
Tecumseh, or "The Shooting Star," Famous War-chief of the
Shawnees, Organizer of the Second Great Indian Confederation
and General in the British Army in the War of 1812, 317

CHAPTER XI.
Black Hawk, or Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, and His War, 363

CHAPTER XII.
Shabbona, or Built Like a Bear, The White Man's Friend, a
Celebrated Pottawatomie Chief, 401

CHAPTER XIII.
Sitting Bull, or Tatanka Yotanka, The Great Sioux Chief and
Medicine Man, 443

CHAPTER XIV.
Chief Joseph, of the Nez Perces, or Hin-Mah-Too-Yah-Lat-Kekt,
Thunder Rolling in the Mountains, The Modern Xenophon, 497

CHAPTER XV.
Geronimo, or Go-Yat-Thlay, The Yawner, The Renowned Apache
Chief and Medicine Man, 529

CHAPTER XVI.
Quanah Parker, Head Chief of the Comanches, With, an
Account of the Captivity of His Mother, Cynthia Anne Parker, 563
Known as "The White Comanche,"

CHAPTER XVII.
A Sheaf of Good Indian Stories From History, 589

CHAPTER XVIII.
Indian Anecdotes and Incidents, Humorous and Otherwise, 673

CHAPTER XIX.
Whence Came the Aborigines of America? 721
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

page
1 Frontispiece.
2 Cofachiqui, The Indian Princess, 19
3 American Horse, Sioux Chief, 29
4 Powhatan, 39
5 Captain Smith and Pocahontas, 49
6 Pocahontas, or Lady Rebecca, 59
7 Ope-Chan-Ca-Nough, 69
8 Massasoit and Pilgrims, 79
9 Nellie Jumping Eagle, 89
10 King Philip, or Metacomet, 99
11 Philip Rejecting Elliot's Preaching, 109
12 Pontiac, The Red Napoleon, 119
13 Montcalm at Massacre of Quebec, 129
14 Hollow-Horn Bear, Sioux Chief, 139
15 Major Campbell and Pontiac, 149
16 Hollow Horn, 159
17 Starved Rock, 169
18 Logan, The Mingo Orator, 179
19 Logan and the Two Hunters, 189
20 Joseph Brant, Mohawk Chief, 199
21 King Hendrick, Mohawk Chief, 209
22 Sir William Johnson and the Mohawks, 219
23 Leading Hawk, 229
24 Red Jacket, Seneca Chief and Orator, 239
25 Massacre at Wyoming, 249
26 Corn Planter, Seneca Chief, 259
27 Adolph Knock and Family, 269
28 Red Jacket Presenting Deer, 279
29 Little Turtle, Miami War-chief, 289
30 Little Turtle's Warriors Chasing St. Clair's Scout 299
31 Ouray, Late Principal Chief of Utes, 309
32 Tecumseh, The Noblest Indian of Them All, 319
33 Tecumseh Rebuking Proctor, 329
34 The Prophet, Brother of Tecumseh, 339
35 Red Cloud, Noted Sioux Chief, 349
36 Death of Tecumseh, 359
37 Black Hawk, Sac and Fox Chief, 369
38 Buffalo Hunt, 379
39 Keokuk, Sac and Fox Chief, 389
40 Shabbona, "The White Man's Friend," Pottawatomie Chief, 399
41 Fort Dearborn Massacre, 409
42 Annie Red Shirt, Indian Beauty, 419
43 Waubonsie, Pottawatomie Chief, 429
44 Plan of Sitting Bull's Tepee, 440
45 Sitting Bull, Noted Sioux Chief and Medicine Man, 441
46 Sitting Bull's Family, 451
47 Chief Gall, Sioux War-chief, 461
48 Chief One Bull and Family, 471
49 Rain-In-The-Face, Noted Sioux Warrior, 481
50 Sitting Bull's Autograph, 486
51 Indian Village, 491
52 Chief Joseph, of the Nez Perces, Greatest Indian Since 501
Tecumseh,
53 Buckskin Charlie, War-chief of Utes, 511
54 "Comes Out Holy," Sioux, 521
55 Geronimo, Noted Apache Chief and Medicine Man, 531
56 Group of Apaches, 541
57 Naiche, Apache Chief, 551
58 Quanah Parker, Comanche Chief, 561
59 Quanah Parker and Two of His Wives, 571
60 Comanche Indians Stealing Cows, 581
61 Needle Parker, Indian Beauty, 591
62 The Mohawk's Last Arrow, 601
63 Lone Wolf, Orator and Principal Chief of the Kiowas, 611
64 Kiowa Annie, Noted Indian Beauty, 621
65 Se-Quo-Yah, The Cherokee Cadmus, 631
66 Big Tree, Second Kiowa Chief, 641
67 Satanta, Kiowa Chief and Noted Orator, 651
68 Chief Simon Pokagon, Pottawatomie, 661
69 Dr. Charles A. Eastman, 671
70 Dr. Carlos Montezuma, 681
71 The Last Shot, 691
72 Chief Charles Journey Cake, 701
73 Indian Maiden in Japanese Costume, 713
74 Japanese Maiden in Indian Costume, 725
75 Map Showing How America Was Peopled, 737
76 Japanese Man in Garb of Indian, 749
77 Indian Man in Japanese Garb, 761
 INTRODUCTION.
We do not propose to apologize for writing this book, for the reasons
that those who approve would not consider it necessary and those who
oppose would not accept the apology. Therefore, we can only offer the same
explanation as that made twenty-four centuries ago by the "Father of
History" when he said: "To rescue from oblivion the noble deeds of those
who have gone before, I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, write this chronicle."

We deem it well, however, to mention a few of the many reasons

which impelled us to attempt the somewhat laborious but congenial task of
preparing this work.

First of all, we were gratified and inspired by the kind reception

accorded our first literary venture, "The White Side of a Black Subject,"
which is now out of print after reaching twelve editions. Added to this was
the still more generous treatment of our second production, "A New Negro
for a New Century." Nearly a hundred thousand copies of this book have
been sold up to date, and the demand is still increasing.

Having done what we could to vindicate the Afro-American, we next

began to consider the First American, when by chance a copy of Thatcher's
"Indian Biography" fell into our hands. We read this book with much
interest, and were impressed with two facts. First of all, we noticed that
while the author gave the lives of a few chiefs well known to this
generation, he filled the book up with village or sub chiefs, of whom even
historians of this age never heard. Then, too, the book in question was
seventy-four years old.

Thatcher's biography tended to create an appetite for that kind of

literature, and we inquired for other lives of noted Indians, but, strange to
say, could only hear of one other book devoted to that subject. This was a
small volume written by S. G. Goodrich, sixty-two years ago, and he gave
only short sketches of perhaps half a dozen Indians of the United States, but
the greater portion of the contents was devoted to the Indians of Peru and
Mexico.

We now concluded that if there were only two books giving the lives
of famous Indians, and both of these published so many years ago, there
was certainly room for another book on the subject, which should be
confined to the Indian tribes of the United States and cover their entire
history from Powhatan to the present time.

We trust we will not be misunderstood. We know that many Indian

books have been written since the date of those mentioned, but they were
on "The Indian Wars," "The Pioneer and the Indian," "The Winning of the
West," "The Manners and Customs of the Indian," "Folklore Tradition and
Legend," and many other phases of the question. We know that Pontiac,
Brant, Red Jacket, Tecumseh, Shabbona, Black Hawk, Sitting Bull, and
perhaps others, have had their lives written, but in each of these cases an
entire book is devoted to one Indian and his war. Our claim is that we have
written the only book giving in a condensed form the lives of practically all
the most famous Indian chiefs from the Colonial period to the present time.

Lest it be thought that we have an exaggerated idea of our people's

interest in the Indian, we will digress long enough to prove the statement to
our own satisfaction, and we trust also to that of the reader.

Mrs. Sigourney has well said with reference to this point

"Ye say they all have passed away,

That noble race and brave,
That their light canoes have vanished
From off the crested wave
That 'mid the forests where they roamed
There rings no hunter's shout,
But their name is on your waters
Ye may not wash it out.

"Ye say their cone like cabins

That clustered o'er the vale
Have fled away like withered leaves
 Before the autumn gale.
But their memory liveth on your hills,
Their baptism on your shore;
Your everlasting rivers speak
Their dialect of yore."

We have ventured to add a third verse

Ye say no lover wooes his maid,

No warrior leads his band.
All in forgotten graves are laid,
E'en great chiefs of the clan;
That where their council fires were lit
The shepherd tends his flock.
But their names are on your mountains
And survive the earthquake shock.

The mark of our contact with the Indian is upon us indelibly and
forever. He has not only impressed himself upon our geography, but on our
character, language and literature.

Bancroft, our greatest historian, is not quite right when he says, "The
memorials of their former existence are found only in the names of the
rivers and mountains." These memorials have not only permeated our
poetry and other literature, but they are perpetuated in much of the food we
eat, and every mention of potatoes, chocolate, cocoa, mush, green corn,
succotash, hominy and the festive turkey is a tribute to the red man, while
the fragrance of the tobacco or Indian weed we smoke is incense to their
memory.

On one occasion, according to Aesop, a man and a lion got into an

argument as to which of the two was the stronger, and thus contending they
walked together until they came to a statue representing a man choking and
subduing a lion. "There," exclaimed the man, "that proves my point, and
demonstrates that a man is stronger than a lion." To which the king of beasts
replied, "When the lions get to be sculptors, they will have the lion choking
and overcoming the man."

The Indians are neither sculptors, painters nor historians.

The only record we have of many of their noblest chiefs, greatest

deeds, hardest fought battles, or sublimest flights of eloquence, are the poor,
fragmentary accounts recorded and handed down by their implacable
enemies, the all-conquering whites.

It is hard indeed for one enemy to do another justice. The man with
whom you are engaged in a death struggle is not the man to write your
history; but such has been the historian of the Indian. His destroyer has
covered him up in an unmarked grave, and then written the story of his life.

Can any one believe that the Spaniards, cruel, hard-hearted and
remorseless as the grave, who swept whole nations from the earth, sparing
neither men, women nor children, could or would write a true story of their
silent victims?

Is it not reasonable to believe that had Philip, Pontiac, Cornstalk,

Tecumseh, Black Hawk or Chief Joseph been able to fling their burning
thoughts upon the historic page, it would have been very different from the
published account?

We believe that God will yet raise up an Indian of intellectual force

and fire enough to write a defense of his race to ring through the ages and
secure a just verdict from generations yet unborn.

In the preparation of this work we have honestly tried to do the subject

justice, and have endeavored to put ourself in the Indian's place, as much as
it is possible for a white man to do.

We have prosecuted the self-imposed task with enthusiasm and interest

from its inception to its completion. We fully agree with Bishop Whipple
when he said: "Our Indian wars were most of them needless and wicked.
The North American Indian is the noblest type of a heathen man on the
earth. He recognizes a Great Spirit; he believes in immortality; he has a
quick intellect; he is a clear thinker; he is brave and fearless, and until
betrayed, he is true to his plighted faith; he has a passionate love for his
children, and counts it joy to die for his people. Our most terrible wars have
been with the noblest types of the Indians, and with men who had been the
white man's friend. Nicolet said the Sioux were the finest type of wild men
he had ever seen. Old traders say it used to be the boast of the Sioux that
they had never taken the life of a white man. Lewis and Clark, Governor
Stevens and Colonel Steptoe bore testimony to the devoted friendship of the
Nez Percé for the white man."

One evidence that our Indian wars were unnecessary is seen in the fact
that while our country has been constantly involved in them, Canada has
not had any; although our Government has spent for the Indians a hundred
dollars to their one.

They recognize, as we do, that the Indian has a possessory right to the
soil. They purchase this right, as we do, by treaty but their treaties are made
with the Indian subjects of His Majesty, the King, while our Government
has enacted the farce of making treaties with Indian tribes or their
representatives, as if they were sovereign nations. Those tribes of blanket
Indians, roaming the wilderness and prairie, living by hunting, trapping,
fishing or plundering, without a code of laws to practice, or a government to
maintain, are not nations, and nothing in their history or condition could
properly invest them with a treaty-making power.

There are other lessons we can learn from Canada concerning the
Indian question. They set apart a permanent reservation for them; they
seldom move them, while our Government has continually moved whole
tribes at the demand of greedy white men who were determined to have the
Indian's land by fair means or foul, generally the latter. Moreover, the
Canadian government selects agents of high character, who receive their
appointments for life; they make fewer promises, but they fulfil them; they
give the Indians Christian missions, which have the hearty support of
Christian people and all their efforts are toward self help and civilization.

In 1862 Bishop Whipple visited Washington, and had a long talk with
President Lincoln. Said he: "I found the President a willing listener. As I
repeated the story of specific acts of dishonesty (on the part of Indian agents
of that period) the President said: 'Did you ever hear of the Southern man
who bought monkeys to pick cotton? they were quick; their long, slim
fingers would pull out the cotton faster than Negroes; but he found it took
two overseers to watch one monkey. This Indian business needs ten honest
men to watch one Indian agent.'" In speaking of this interview with the
Bishop, Lincoln afterwards said to a friend "As I listened to Bishop
Whipple's story of robbery and shame, I felt it to my boots;" and, rising to
his full height, he added: "If I live this accursed system shall be reformed."
But unfortunately he did not live to carry out his plans. However, we are
glad to note an improvement in the condition of our Indians, of recent years,
which shows that the public conscience has at last been aroused, and one
object of this book is to further that good work.

Another object is to disprove the oft-quoted saying of General

Sherman that "the only good Indian is a dead one." {FN} We have written
the biographies of twenty or more famous chiefs, any one of whom was a
good Indian, or would have been had he received kind treatment from the
whites, who were almost invariably the aggressors. It makes one's soul sick
to read of the white men selling the Indian "firewater," to brutalize and
destroy; of violated treaties; of outrageous treatment which aroused the
worst passions of the Indian's nature.

{FN} General Sherman used this phrase at a banquet at Delmonico's, New York, in
the winter of 1879.

In selecting the subjects for our biographical sketches, we were

confronted with an embarrassment of riches. And while there are none in
the book which could well have been omitted, yet there are many outside
richly deserving a place in it. There are so many famous chiefs, we found it
impossible to give them all a place in one volume. So we tried to select
those who, in our judgment, were the greatest, those who for special reasons
could not be omitted, and those whom we thought would make the most
interesting sketches.

We may say in this connection, that we refrained from writing the

biographies of mixed breeds, such as Osceola Powell, Weatherford or Red
Eagle, simply because we knew, from our experience with other books, that
people would be prone to say that their greatness was due to the infusion of
the blood of the superior white race. As far as we know, all of our subjects
treated at length were full-blooded Indians, except Sequoyah and Quanah
Parker, and most of them, as we shall see, were nature's noblemen.

We have enjoyed peculiar facilities for prosecuting our studies on

Indian biography and history, having free access to the four great libraries
of Chicago.

For the benefit of others interested in the same subject, we will

mention a few of the many books we found helpful, in the preparation of
this work, besides the two already named.

At the head of the list we place Roosevelt's "Winning of the West,"

Parkman's "Conspiracy of Pontiac," Mason's "Pioneer History," Ellis's
"Indian Wars of the United States." In our judgment these are about the
strongest books we have read on the subject, especially in relation to the
Indian, the pioneer, and the border wars.

In the next group we place Dunn's "Massacres of the Mountains,"

Finerty's "War-path and Bivouac," Helen Hunt Jackson's "Century of
Dishonor," and Eggleston's "Biographies of Brant, Red Jacket, Tecumseh,"
etc.

In addition to our library work, we spent much time traveling among

the Indian tribes and making the acquaintance of many of the most famous
living chiefs, and cultivating their friendship, so we record many of the
incidents in the book as an eye-witness.

We referred to the Indian in this introduction as a so-called "vanishing

race." As a matter of fact the Indian is not vanishing at all but slowly
increasing in numbers. The census of 1890 gave the number of Indians in
the United States as 248,258, while that of 1900 gave the total as 270,544, a
net gain of 22,291 in ten years.

Another erroneous conception many people have of the Indian we can

only call attention to here. They somehow have come to believe that the
Red Man is very dignified and solemn, has no appreciation of the ludicrous,
or conception of a joke. Never was a greater mistake. No one enjoys what
he considers a good joke more than an Indian. You will find some evidence
that he can be as funny as his white brother, in the chapter on "Indian
Anecdotes."

We determined to have the illustrations one of the very best features of

the book, fully in keeping with the subject matter; and, wherever possible,
absolutely authentic. For this reason alone, the publication has been held
back several months, the publishers sparing neither pains nor expense in
procuring pictures from photographers and collectors, who made a specialty
of the Indian, such as D. F. Barry, Drake, the Field Museum, the Newberry
Library and the Ethnological Bureau at Washington; some of the latter
being copies of paintings made before photography was known. We also
procured photographs of several rare paintings never published in any book
before.

Should the book prove instructive in demonstrating that there is a

brighter, better side to Indian life and character than is usually seen, the
author will feel that he has not written in vain, and he will be gratified if, in
addition to this, it also gives pleasure.
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