Review
Title: The Jewish Bible: A Material History
Author: David Stern
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Genre: Bible Studies, Jewish Studies
Year Published: 2019
Number of Pages: 303
Binding: Hardbound, sewn in signatures
Price: $34.95
Reviewed by Harlow Clark, August 2019
But thus saith the Lord God: O fools, they shall have a Bible; and it shall proceed forth from the Jews, mine ancient covenant people. And what thank they the Jews for the Bible which they receive from them? Yea, what do the Gentiles mean? Do they remember the travails, and the labors, and the pains of the Jews, and their diligence unto me, in bringing forth salvation unto the Gentiles?
O ye Gentiles, have ye remembered the Jews, mine ancient covenant people? Nay; but ye have cursed them, and have hated them, and have not sought to recover them.
–II Nephi 29:4-5
In 1851, Willard Richards, the president of the British mission, needed a combination of missionary pamphlet and handbook for use among the British Saints. He made a selection from Joseph Smith’s translation of the Bible, beginning with the Vision of Enoch, then moving to a revelation to Moses, then excerpts from the first few chapters of Genesis. He also included administrative instructions from Section 20 of the Doctrine and Covenants, and excerpts from the beginning of Joseph’s 1838 history.
The 1882 American edition of The Pearl of Great Price rearranged the excerpts from the Bible translation, with Moses’ vision first, expanded the excerpts from Joseph’s history, and made other changes, and there are a number of textual variants between the two editions. The most interesting to me is found on page 16 of the 1851 edition, where Cain says, “And it shall come to pass, every one that finds me will slay me because of my oath, for these things are not hid from the Lord.”
The 1882 edition, page 15, reads, “will slay me, because of mine iniquities.”
Notice the my/mine. Richards modernized some of the language, and the 1882 editor returned it to the antique form. There’s an irony in the change from “slay me because of my oath” to “because of mine iniquities,” because Richards didn’t include the oath Cain makes with Satan in the 1851 edition for his readers to refer back to, but it is in the 1882 edition–p. 14, “Swear unto me by thy throat, and if thou tell it thou shalt die”–without the rhetorical link to Cain’s cry to God.
When Cain says that God is condemning him to death because of his oath, he’s saying God has the same ethics as Satan, that he will enforce the oath’s penalty. The 1882 emendation (oath is the original reading according to The Joseph Smith papers) was made by someone who didn’t understand what the Pearl of Great Price and The Book of Mormon tell us about the workings and psychology of secret oath-bound societies that enforce their oaths by murder. I could expand this with a comment about how it relates to the combination of Herodias and Salome against John the Baptist, but I introduced the variant for another reason.
Think about the material nature of these sources. The 1851 edition is cheaply printed and the typeface is not crisp. The 1882 edition has a clearer typeface and a better binding. The Joseph Smith Papers are in manuscript. That’s 3 material forms, but for all my intensive study of these two editions, I have not held either in my hands. I haven’t even laid eyes on them, only on photographs, a fourth material form, but electronic photographs, a fifth form, which have to be viewed through a medium like a tablet, phone or computer, three more material forms.
So, given my interest in the forms of scripture, in emendation and textual transmission generally, I was interested when I heard The University of Washington Press was publishing a book about the material history of The Jewish Bible. The book is based on 4 lectures at the UW in 1999. (“It’s not often you get the big grudge match of the year,” my roommate of decades ago said when the Huskies played the Cougars (BYU, not Wazzu), “and your roommate is an alumni of both schools.”)
The first is about the history of Torah scrolls, the second about manuscript codexes, the third about early printed Bibles in Hebrew, often including the Samaritan Targum or a vernacular translation written in Hebrew characters–and often printed and/or edited by Christians, the fourth about modern translations/editions of the Tanakh.
One theme that runs throughout the book is the way the Jewish culture adopts and adapts the scribal and printing practices of the host culture, whether Babylonian, Islamic or Christian. There is an analog here to the way Joseph Smith adopted and adapted the speech patterns of the King James Bible–the Bible of his host culture–for his translations and revelations.
But adopting can become co-opting. On pages 84-85 there are two sides of a folio from the Leningrad Codex (perhaps the most important source for the text of the Hebrew Bible), approximately 1008 CE, with elaborate designs clearly influenced by Islamic patterns and art, but the geometric lines are words, miocrography. “The early Masoretic Bible appropriated the features of the Islamic book, the Qu’ran in particular, and simultaneously ‘Judaized’ the Islamic influence by making Hebrew micrography the instrument for appropriating Islamic design and decoration” (87-88).
The appropriation of cultures back and forth goes on throughout the book, and I was delighted to learn Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig’s part in it. I first heard about their German translation Die Schrift (“the Writing”) from Robert Alter’s discussion of translation in the introduction to his translation, The Five Books of Moses, (I figure my rusty high school German might get me a little into it if I can find a copy). They meant it to be heard, read aloud, and created German word stems to correspond to the Hebrew word stems in the original, meant to jolt readers away from a comfortable, familiar German (p. 190-191).
In a footnote, Stern draws out one implication of that jolting. The familiar German translation may have been Luther’s, since Die Schrift was to appeal to both Jews and Christians, but one aim was to Hebraize German in the same way Luther had Christianized it, and proclaim that the Hebrew bible was the original (p. 256, note 79).
The second chapter contains a long, interesting discussion of the Masorah, which includes the system of dots telling where the vowels should be and which vowels (see p. 66 for a fuller definition). And if you think masoretes and masoretic derive from the Masorah you may be right, but it may be the other way around, that masorah derives from what the Masoretes did. No one is quite sure.
Indeed, Stern says, “While it is not clear what the word masoret in its original context actually meant–it almost certainly did not refer to the Masorah–some medieval commentators on the Mishnah did understand the phrase in that way, and it is possible that the Masoretes themselves understood it as a description of their own project.”
This discussion of the Masoretes confirmed something I had long suspected. On almost every page (except the prose interlude in chapters 36-38) of the Jewish Publication Society’s Isaiah is at least one note, “Meaning of HEB. uncertain.” Given the emendations Avraham Gileadi makes in The Apocalyptic Book of Isaiah, and the readings from The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran (1QIsaa) in Donald Parry’s translation, Isaiah Harmonized, I suspect that to the Masoretes, the meaning of certain Hebrew words and phrases would have also been uncertain. (Delicious irony, just as the Masoretes may not have understood all the words they preserved, we don’t fully understand the meaning of masoret.) Their task was preservation, not emendation, and they took that task seriously, but even the preservation carries some controversy, because the vowels you choose for the text can change the meaning.
So can chanting it aloud. In fact, rabbinic midrash “abounds in oral/aural puns and on exegeses based on phonetic links between otherwise unrelated verses and passages, all of which point to a knowledge of biblical text based on auditory acquisition” (p. 77).
In contrast, the Masorah is a result of very close reading of the text, and requires visual attention, attention that was made possible by the change from scroll to codex because codices weren’t subject to the very strict rules about textual purity, and not marking up the text (p. 66).
Chapter 3 deals with early printed Bibles, and a format still used today, of printing the Hebrew text in the upper right hand of the page, with the Aramaic translation, the Targum in the left hand column, and commentary and Masorah below. Given how often Alter cites Ibn Ezra and Rashi in his commentary to The Five Books of Moses, I thought of them as friends, but they were from different schools, or cultures or traditions. Ibn Ezra was from Sepharad (Iberian Peninsula and southern France) while Rashi was from Ashkenaz (northern France and Germany).
Stern doesn’t go into great detail about the two groups’ attitudes toward each other (for a fictional treatment of the differences between the two see Chaim Potok’s The Chosen), but does go into some detail about the differences in the bibles they produced. Some Bibles contained both Sephardic and Ashkenazic commentaries, one purpose of which might be unity (another was to attract Christian readers interested in Hebrew grammar and philology (p. 154).
Thinking about this combination of cultures I keep wondering if early Christian canon lists weren’t a way of trying to bring unity to some disparate groups.
I was going to close by saying something about reading this book to get some appreciation of the great pains the Lord’s “ancient covenant people” took to preserve and pass on scripture to us, but reading through my notes I came across another theme that runs through the book. Producing a Torah scroll, or a manuscript codex, or a printed book can be a very expensive process, and the physical objects could become status symbols (as well as talismans).
In a discussion of polemicist Profiat Duran (p. 103-5) who lived as both Jew and Christian Stern quotes a passage in which Duran talks about the aristocratic patrons of his day and how they would commission copies of the Bible to have them around and display their wealth as if that was the same as reading them, and yet “in some way they cause the Torah to be magnified and exalted; and even if they are not worthy of it, they bequeath a blessing to their children and those who come after them.”
Stern comments, “Therein lies the Bible’s real artifactual power. It can help even those who are not worthy of its assistance!”
The Jewish Bible: A Material History will give you a great sense of the gift ancient and medieval scribes and scholars bequeathed to those who came after them. Enjoy it as you contemplate that “real artifactual power.”