Michael L. Satlow

Then and Now

Old Testament

New Essay: The Meaning and Function of Torah

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In what seems like a lifetime ago (2017), I went to a wonderful conference sponsored by the Enoch Seminar on the meaning and function of “Torah.”  I reported on that conference, and my own paper, here.

I am now happy to report that that paper has been published in the conference volume, Torah: Functions, Meanings, and Diverse Manifestations in Early Judaism and Christianity, edited by William M. Schniederwind, Jason M. Zurawski, and Gabriele Boccaccini, and published by SBL Press (2021).  The volume is an excellent, and unique, exploration of the term and concept of “Torah” through antiquity.  When I receive a pdf copy of my own contribution, if I am permitted I will also post it here.

Canonizing the Christian Bible: A Simulation

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Every couple of years I teach a class called “How the Bible Became Holy” (and no, I do not assign my book).  The past few times I have taught it I have concluded with a simulation exercise – a game, really – in which different Christian groups (and the rabbis!) meet to settle on a canon.  Each time I run it I tweak it a bit so the rules are never quite the same as they were previously.

This year the class will be divided into two groups and each will run the simulation simultaneously.  My teaching assistant for the course, Noah Tetenbaum, will lead one section and I will lead the other.  The simulation will take place on Tuesday, May 1, beginning at 2:30 PM EDT (and going until around 5:30 PM).  We will each live tweet the proceedings under the hashtags #bibsim1 and #bibsim2.  I encourage you to join us (for part or whole) and chime in – students will watch the tweet stream live as the simulation progresses.

Below is a description of the exercise (modified a bit for public consumption):

Canonizing Scripture

BACKGROUND

We are sometime in the fourth century CE in Constantinople.  The Roman emperor, a devout Christian (and also a practical ruler), spurred by the bishops in his court and concerned about both growing Christian diversity and his own eternal salvation, has recently convened a series of synods to hash out “orthodox” Christian theology.  They have not gone particularly well.  While some bishops were able to develop creeds that they could live with, other participants left angry and alienated.  Chastened by the limited success of these synods, he has decided to address an issue that he hopes will be significantly easier to resolve: the confusing state of “scripture” within the Church.  Does the Church need a canon, and if so, what should be in it?  Primarily of interest to the bishops is whether, should it be decided that a canon is desirable, any parts of the Hebrew Bible should be included.

You have been summoned to participate in this Synod.  Representatives of the competing parties will attend; the emperor expects you all to arrive at an agreement.  Representatives of the Jewish community have also been invited to participate.

[N.B.  This Synod is a historical fantasy.  There was no Synod convened at this time to canonize the Christian Bible.  If there was, Jews would not have been invited and some of the other participants would have been long dead.   This is pretend.]

PARTICIPANTS

The Emperor [the instructor, naturally!]

The Bishops within the Royal Court

Marcionites

Montanists

Gnostics

Rabbis

PROCEDURE AND SCHEDULE

Prior to class on April 26:

  1. Everybody should read the following: Eusebius, Church History, 3.24-25; Athanasius, Selection from Letter 39; Harry Gamble, “The Canon of the New Testament”
  2. Due to the size of the class, we will play this simulation in two groups, simultaneously. You will each be assigned to one of these two groups (1 or 2) and a role (A-E).
  3. At the end of this sheet you will see resources to get you started so that you understand your group and your position. Prior to April 26 you must do some research on your group.  It would also be very helpful for you to research some of the other groups so that you understand their positions and motivations.

April 26

Much of this class will be spent in your groups.  By the end of class you should have formulated your “victory objectives.”  This should be a list of three to five goals (outcomes of the Synod) that align with your role.  Each objective should be assigned points; the sum of all the points should be 100.  At the end of the Synod the groups will be scored based on these objectives in order to determine who won.

April 30, 11:59 PM: Paper due.  This is the opening speech that you, in character, would deliver at the Synod.  This is individual, not group, work, and your group presentation might well differ.  It should run about five pages.

THE SYNOD

 Our simulation will take place on May 1, 2:30-5:30 PM.  The locations will be announced.

Procedure

  1. Each group will denote a representative to deliver its opening statement. The statement should run 5-7 minutes, no less.  Each statement will be followed by about 5 minutes of questioning;
  2. After the opening statements, groups will meet/negotiate for about 30 minutes;
  3. A second round of statements (which can be shorter than the first), each followed by Q&A period;
  4. A shorter round of negotiations (10 minutes);
  5. A vote to determine if the Rabbis will get to vote (the Rabbis themselves do not vote);
  6. Each group or “team” of groups gets to make a proposal;
  7. Vote on the proposals (following the rules in [5]; whether Rabbis vote or not depends on the outcome at that stage);
  8. Calculation of winner, followed by general discussion.

FOLLOW-UP

Please submit an assessment of the simulation: how did it go?  What did you learn from it?

 

Simulation Resources 

The resources listed here are meant to serve as a starting point.  You should try to look at as many of these as you can for your role (and may want to split up opposition research).  They each contain extensive bibliographies that you should use to continue your research.  If you go outside of this web of resources (e.g., just start googling) be careful – there is a lot of material of dubious quality and you are not yet in a position to discern between the better and worse resources.

To understand the position of the emperor, you might want to take a look at the following books.  They all discuss Constantine, who serves as something of a model, and his relationship to the emerging “Orthodox” church.

  1. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius
  2. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance
  3. Potter, Constantine: The Emperor

The Bishops

These are those who would come to define “orthodoxy” in the Church and who worked (sometimes in tension) with the imperial court.

  1. Rapp: Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition
  2. Harries, Law and Empire in Late Antiquity
  3. L. Noethlichs, “Revolution from the Top? ‘Orthodoxy’ and the Persecution of Heretics in Imperial Legislation from Constantine to Justinian,” in Religion and Law in Classical and Christian Rome (ed. Ando and Rüpke), pp. 115-125

Marcionites

  1. Barton, Holy Writings, Sacred Text: The Canon in Early Christianity, chapters 1 and 2
  2. Quispel, “Marcion and the Text of the New Testament,” in Vigiliae Christianae 52 (1998): 349-360
  3. Lieu, Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century
  4. Vinzent, Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels

Montanists

  1. De Soyres, Montanism and the Primitive Church: A Study in the Ecclesiastical History of the Second Century
  2. Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority, and the New Prophecy
  3. Denzey, “What did the Montanists Read?,” Harvard Theological Review 94 (2001): 427-448

Gnostics

  1. Painchaud, “The Use of Scripture in Gnostic Literature,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4 (1996): 129-146
  2. King, What is Gnosticism?
  3. Perkins, “Gnosticism and the Christian Bible,” in The Canon Debate (ed. L. M. McDonald), chapter 21

Rabbis

  1. M. McDonald, ed., The Canon Debate, chapters 3, 10, 15, 16
  2. Satlow, How the Bible Became Holy, chapter 15

 

The “Isaiah Seal”

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Biblical Archaeology Review just published this new, tiny find from the excavations at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem: a clay seal (or bulla) that seems to contain the name Isaiah with (a little more doubtfully) the word “prophet” written underneath.  The top register of the seal seems to depict an animal, perhaps a doe.  The article, “Isaiah’s Signature Uncovered in Jerusalem:  Evidence of the Prophet Isaiah”  can be accessed here and has been picked up quickly by a number of news sites.  Paleojudaica also has a nice write-up about this.

How significant is the find?

Popular media tends to keep rewriting the same story for finds of this sort: they prove the veracity of the Bible.  In this case, however, nobody seriously doubts the existence of Isaiah, who is also attested outside of his own book in the Bible in some of the more historical writings (2 Kings 18).  Finding the a seal of the biblical prophet Isaiah would indeed be interesting but the fact that it would then attest to his actual existence is perhaps the least interesting thing about it.  (The headline, incidentally, is slightly misleading.  It is the seal that is the “signature,” not the writing on it, which was probably carved on the stamp by someone else.)

To my mind, there are instead three things of genuine interest about this seal:

  1. It attests to the formal, institutionalized nature of “the prophet.”  Seals tended to go on official correspondence and the fact that Isaiah would have one with his title strongly suggests that he holds some kind of official position, like “court prophet.”  This confirms other evidence from the Bible that prophets were not only, as we tend to think of them, random people who were believed to have received divine communication but that they also could hold official jobs in the court or temple.
  2. It suggests that either Isaiah or (probably more likely) his retinue was literate.  Prophecy was usually an oral phenomenon.  Other biblical books contain examples of prophecies being put into writing (e..g, Baruch writes down Jeremiah’s prophecies in Jeremiah 36) or otherwise thematizing writing (Ezekiel 3) but the process by which the prophet’s words became text is enigmatic.  Some time ago, a seal that may have belonged to Jeremiah’s scribe, Baruch, was found (there remain questions about its authenticity).  This seal, if authentic, would show the prophet sending correspondence in his own name, not that of his scribe.  This has potential implications for understanding the interplay of the oral and written in prophetic circles.
  3. Finally, I’m intrigued by the iconography.  Why would the prophet Isaiah use a doe?  Is there anything significant about this choice or, for that matter, any of the iconography that appears on ancient Israelite seals (of which we have many)?

The seal is hardly earth shattering, but it is also not insignificant.  If it really is what it is being claimed to be.

Selling the Ten Commandments

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I recently read Jenna Weissman Joselitt’s book Set in Stone: America’s Embrace of the Ten Commandments and discussed it with my class.  The book tells a story about how and why Americans made the Ten Commandments a focal point for larger issues – such as American identity, “Judaeo-Christian” values, and even our superiority to the U.S.S.R.- and how those issues changed over time.

One of the book’s motifs that stood out for me was the intersection of the Ten Commandments with capitalism.  Throughout the nineteenth century Americans had a robust interest in the Ten Commandments, although that interest never resulted in the kinds of attempts that we witness today to erect them as public monuments.  Joselitt sees Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 silent version of The Ten Commandments as a turning point.  The release of this movie was significant not because it increased awareness of the Ten Commandments – everybody already knew what they were and in any case the movie was more about Moses than the Ten Commandments – but because it also unleashed the power of capitalism on them.  The movie was accompanied by waves of Ten Commandment kitsch, including a Moses action-figure.  This explosion of commercial interest in the Ten Commandments led to DeMille’s second, and better known 1956 version which in turn created yet a new wave of commercial activity.  The first public displays of the Ten Commandments by the Eagles Fraternal Organization were, in fact, connected to the release of the film.  The Ten Commandments lined the pockets of many.

This intersection of religion and capitalism raises an interesting question: Had capitalism and the motive for profit not driven the production of goods and information related to the Ten Commandments, would they have ever achieved the prominence in our national discourse that they did?  Whatever one thinks of profiting off the sacred, it may well have been the search for profit that enabled its spread.  The Ten Commandments are far from the only example of this kind of intersection (my colleague, Daniel Vaca, researches the role of for-profit publishers of religious texts in America) but they are one fascinating example of its dynamics.

One way to approach this question, which Joselitt does not address, is to compare the roles that the Ten Commandments play in America to that of other countries.  My impression is that interest in and public displays of the Ten Commandments are far less common outside of the United States, perhaps at least in part precisely because they were never ceased upon for profit in the same way.  Whether this is a good or bad thing is in the eyes of the beholder.

The Meaning of “Torah”: A Report from the Enoch Seminar

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A couple of months ago I attended a meeting of the Enoch Seminar in Camaldoli, Italy.  The conference, which included an extraordinary range of scholars, grappled with the meaning of the word and concept of “Torah” from the biblical period through Late Antiquity.  There were a mix of session topics and formats and I have no intention of trying to summarize the many papers and areas of disagreement.  The publication of the papers is being organized by William Schniedewind and Jason Zurawski.  I will focus here on my own contributions to the conference and one important area of what I thought was consensus.

My paper was entitled, “Torah: The Material Evidence.”  In it, I posed a simple question: If we did not have the literature of the rabbis, what we would know about the Torah and its role in Jewish communities in Late Antiquity?  Based on my survey of the artistic, archaeological, epigraphical, (meager) papyrological, and literary (law codes and patristic literature) I developed three main conclusions:

  • Scrolls of the Torah were stored, and most likely read, in the synagogues;
  • Writings from the Torah served an apotropaic role for Jews (and maybe non-Jews) in Late Antiquity;
  • There is no evidence that being learned in Torah was valued by most Jews

As to the first conclusion – well, duh.  This is amply attested in rabbinic literature, so no surprise there.  The second and third conclusions are more intriguing.  At least some Jews saw the Torah as a “magical” text; its actual content could have little to do with this.  The absence of mention of Torah learning among the epithets used in epitaphs was also striking, especially when seen in contrast to Jewish epitaphs from the medieval period.  These conclusions do not (at least yet) add up to an answer to the question of what “Torah” meant to these Jews but they set some important areas to consider.

I also served as a respondent to a paper by Lutz Doehring called “Torah and Halakhah in the Hellenistic Period.”  Lutz’s paper made the case that many Jews during this time used the Torah as a source of “halakhah,” and thus was important, in some sense, to the larger Jewish community.  I was skeptical, not only of the entire notion of “halakhah” in the Hellenistic period (the term is used for the first time by the rabbis, who wrote in the Roman period) but of whether almost every case cited by Doehring cannot be explained at least equally well by appealing to traditional Jewish practices that exist independently of Torah, even if they are also attested there.  So it is clear that Jews (many? most?) observed the Sabbath in the Hellenistic period but that does not mean that they justified or authorized their practice by appeal to a text.  Maybe they did, but there is almost no explicit evidence to this effect.

Now for the agreement:  On the narrow philological question of what did the word “torah” mean throughout antiquity, we all agreed that it shifted depending on the author and time.  “Torah” never had a stable referent.  For most people today, the term is usually taken as referring to a set text (i.e., the Pentateuch).  That usage is attested in antiquity, but this is one of its least popular meanings.  Early Jewish writers frequently used “torah” in the loose sense of wisdom or teaching (its literal meaning) usually having some connection to the divine or to Moses.  For me, some of the more interesting papers argued that in antiquity the word Torah often served as a gerund, denoting a process of transmission rather than its stable contents.  In some cases, it was the Sage whose behavior embodied Torah (a notion that can be found in rabbinic literature as well).  The conference thus successfully destabilized “Torah,” leaving me with the take-away that there is no linear development in how it was understood but rather that it is a core concept whose exact meaning was (and is?) continually renegotiated in each and every Jewish community.