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 legal revision and religious renewal
in ancient israel

This book examines the doctrine of transgenerational punish-

ment found in the Decalogue—that is, the idea that God pun-
ishes sinners vicariously and extends the punishment due them
to three or four generations of their progeny. Though it was
“God-given” law, the unfairness of punishing innocent people
merely for being the children or grandchildren of wrongdoers
was clearly recognized in ancient Israel. A series of inner-biblical
and post-biblical responses to the rule demonstrates that later
writers were able to criticize, reject, and replace this problematic
doctrine with the alternative notion of individual retribution.
From this perspective, the formative canon is the source of its
own renewal: it fosters critical reflection upon the textual tradi-
tion and sponsors intellectual freedom.
To support further study, this book includes a valuable biblio-
graphical essay on the distinctive approach of inner-biblical exe-
gesis showing the contributions of European, Israeli, and North
American scholars. An earlier version of the volume appeared
in French as L’Herméneutique de l’innovation: Canon et exégèse
dans l’Israël biblique. This new Cambridge release represents a
major revision and expansion of the French edition, nearly dou-
bling its length with extensive new content. Legal Revision and
Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel opens new perspectives on
current debates within the humanities about canonicity, textual
authority, and authorship.

Bernard M. Levinson holds the Berman Family Chair of Jewish

Studies and Hebrew Bible at the University of Minnesota. He is
author of Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation
(1997), which won the 1999 Salo W. Baron Award for Best First
Book in Literature and Thought from the American Academy for
Jewish Research. He is coeditor of four volumes, most recently
The Pentateuch as Torah: New Models for Understanding Its Pro-
mulgation and Acceptance (2007), and the author of “The Right
Chorale”: Studies in Biblical Law and Interpretation (2008). The
interdisciplinary significance of his work has been recognized
with appointments to both the Institute for Advanced Study
(Princeton) and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin/Berlin Insti-
tute for Advanced Study.
Legal Revision and Religious
Renewal in Ancient Israel

BERNARD M. LEVINSON
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521513449

© Bernard M. Levinson 2008

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of

relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place
without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published in print format 2008

ISBN-13 978-0-511-42308-6 eBook (EBL)

ISBN-13 978-0-521-51344-9 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls
for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
 Contents

List of Figures page vii

Foreword, by Jean Louis Ska ix
Preface xiii
Abbreviations xxi

1. Biblical Studies as the Meeting Point of the

Humanities 1
2. Rethinking the Relation between “Canon”
and “Exegesis” 12
3. The Problem of Innovation within the
Formative Canon 22
The Legacy of Cuneiform Law 23
Legal History as a Literary Trope in Ruth 33
The Impact of the Idea of Divine Revelation 45
4. The Reworking of the Principle of
Transgenerational Punishment: Four Case Studies 57
Critical Scrutiny of the Principle in Lamentations 57
The Transformation of Divine Justice in Ezekiel 60
The Homily on Divine Justice in Deuteronomy 72
The Interpretation of Divine Justice in the
Targum 84

v
vi CONTENTS

5. The Canon as Sponsor of Innovation 89

6. The Phenomenon of Rewriting within the
Hebrew Bible: A Bibliographic Essay on
Inner-Biblical Exegesis in the History of
Scholarship 95
Approaches to Exegesis in 1–2 Chronicles 176

Author Index 183

Subject Index 188
Index of Scriptural and Other Sources 202
Hebrew Bible/Old Testament 202
Apocrypha 205
New Testament 205
Ancient Near Eastern Literature 205
Septuagint 206
Targumim 206
Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature 206
Rabbinic Sources 206
 List of Figures

1. Ezekiel’s Reapplication of the Principle of

Punishment in Criminal Law page 64
2. Lemmatic Reworking in Support of Doctrinal
Innovation (Deut 7:10) 75

vii
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 Foreword

It gives me great pleasure to introduce a little master-

piece of exegesis. Focusing mainly upon a single sentence
from the Decalogue (Exod 20:5–6), Legal Revision and Reli-
gious Renewal in Ancient Israel enables the reader to follow,
through all their labyrinthine twists, the thought processes
of the biblical authors in their constant rereading and revi-
sion of prior traditions. Bernard M. Levinson’s hermeneu-
tic decoding is fascinating for its unwillingness simply to
highlight the unity of biblical passages, as proponents of
synchronic biblical methods are fond of doing, or to iden-
tify the breaks and contradictions in these same passages, as
advocated by practitioners of the classic diachronic modes
of exegesis. Instead, Levinson’s method demonstrates that
in the Bible the present engages in a ceaseless discussion
with the past, which it adapts, corrects, and even contra-
dicts while claiming to transmit it with utmost respect.
The exchanges between the present and past are courte-
ous: they follow all the rules of etiquette cherished by the
ancients. But behind the formulas of politeness there is
often hidden a firm will to reclaim the venerable traditions

ix
x FOREWORD

of the past to bestow their authority upon new formula-

tions required by changing circumstances. In many cases,
the discontinuity between the new formulation and the
old tradition is obscured by an apparent desire for con-
tinuity. Thus, it takes a trained eye to detect, shrouded
within the complexity of biblical texts, the subtle play that
transforms the recourse to a hallowed past into a powerful
means for justifying the innovations of the present. This
exegetical method surely can enable us to resolve some of
the interpretive cruxes that confront rigidly synchronic or
diachronic approaches.
A second point about this book deserves our atten-
tion. Commentators often make too sharp a distinction
between the composition of the canonical text and the
post-biblical exegetical tradition, whether of the ancient
rabbis or the church fathers. Legal Revision and Religious
Renewal in Ancient Israel amply establishes that such a dis-
tinction does not stand up to a serious examination of the
sources. The exegetical tradition that grew up subsequent
to the closure of the canon sinks its roots deep into the
biblical text itself. Texts imbued with great authority were
reread and modified, sometimes profoundly, to respond
to new questions and to legitimize new choices. The tra-
dition could survive only by adapting itself to the present.
Biblical authors therefore created a repertoire of tools and
strategies that succeeded in transmitting the sacred text in
its integrity while also giving it an acceptable turn. The
schools of rabbinical exegesis merely received this heritage
and developed, adjusted, and refined the instruments that
biblical authors had forged long before.
Finally, Levinson teaches us something else that is abso-
lutely essential for understanding the profession of an
 FOREWORD xi

interpreter at the dawn of the third millennium. His

method, inherited from his masters, Michael Fishbane and
James Kugel in particular, shows the extent to which an
intelligent reading of the Bible is indispensable for under-
standing our Western culture and the richness of its contri-
bution toward the construction of a more humane and just
world. Others have shown that some of the fundamental
values of Western law have biblical origins;1 that, although
Herodotus is certainly the father of history, the “biblical
historians” have also contributed to the formation of the
historical and critical consciousness of our world;2 and
that the Western world’s sense of reality owes as much to
the Bible as to the classical literary inheritance of Athens
and Rome.3 One should also mention here the obvious
importance of the Bible for those who wish to understand
art, whether painting, sculpture, architecture, or music.4

1 To the biblical scholars cited by Levinson (J. J. Finkelstein, Moshe

Greenberg, and Eckart Otto), we might add the work of the legal
scholar Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of
the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1983); and idem, Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the
Protestant Reformation on the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press, Harvard edition, 2003).
2 In particular, I am thinking of Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classi-
cal Foundations of Modern Historiography (foreword by Riccardo
Di Donanto; Sather Classical Lectures 54; Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990), especially the first chapter, “Persian Histori-
ography, Greek Historiography, and Jewish Historiography,” 5–28.
3 Erich Auerbach comes immediately to mind; see his Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Western Literature (trans. Willard R.
Trask; with an introduction by Edward Said; Fiftieth-Anniversary
Edition; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, [1953], 2003).
4 On this topic, let us at least make note of Jean-Christophe Attias
and Pierre Gisel, eds., De la Bible à la littérature (Religions en per-
spective 15; Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2003); Danielle Fouilloux et al.,
eds., Dictionnaire culturel de la Bible (2d ed.; Instruments bibliques;
xii FOREWORD

Furthermore, Levinson reveals the Bible to be close to

the modern world through its critical, creative, and inno-
vative spirit. We must perforce admit that the modern
spirit does not impose its revisionist interpretations as
something external to these ancient texts but rather that
the Bible itself introduced and developed the art of inno-
vative reading of which we are the distant heirs. “Scrip-
tura sacra sui ipsius interpres” (Sacred Scripture is its own
interpreter), the leaders of the Reformation already pro-
claimed. This saying is true in at least two senses. To
understand the Bible, we must first turn to the Bible itself;
at the same time, the Bible provides us with adequate
resources for its interpretation. In this sense, Scripture
anticipates certain contemporary trends in hermeneutical
theory, including Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. To be
sure, it is necessary to qualify this assertion with impor-
tant nuances. But it is astonishing to note the close kinship
between certain currents of contemporary literary theory
and the ways that biblical authors and editors fixed their
gaze upon the past in order to size it up, to weigh it, and
to deconstruct it before reconstructing it so that it could
nourish the present.
The annotated bibliography that accompanies this vol-
ume reveals that modern scholarship from the dawn of
historical-critical interpretation has been sensitive to the
“phenomenon of rewriting at the heart of the Hebrew

Paris: Éditions du Cerf/Nathan, 1999); Olivier Millet and Philippe de

Robert, Culture biblique (Premier cycle; Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 2001); and Anne-Marie Pelletier, Lectures bibliques: Aux
sources de la culture occidentale (2d ed.; Instruments bibliques; Paris:
Éditions du Cerf/Nathan, 2001). Likewise, see André Wénin, “Des
livres pour rendre la Bible à la culture,” RTL 33 (2002): 408–13.
 FOREWORD xiii

Bible.” From Wellhausen (1878) and Seeligmann (1948) to

Veijola (2004) and Carr (2005), numerous authors have
highlighted the presence of exegesis within the canon and
have studied its chief characteristics. These pages on the
history of research into this subject will provide inter-
preters with quite a useful map, enabling them to retrace
the exact itinerary followed by specialists in this field. I
wish readers as much pleasure in traveling through this
book as I had myself.

Jean Louis Ska, S. J.

Professor of Old Testament Interpretation
Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome
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