Latest / The Podcast of Jewish Ideas / 83. The Biblical Canon(s) | Dr. Hindy Najman

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83. The Biblical Canon(s) | Dr. Hindy Najman · The Podcast of Jewish Ideas

• 0:20
  Speaker 1: Greetings, friends, and welcome back to the Podcast of Jewish
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Ideas ATRA in Motion Production. I'm J. J. Kimbre. Today
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  Speaker 1: we shall be turning our attention to one of the
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  Speaker 1: most fertile and fascinating eras in Jewish intellectual history. The
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  Speaker 1: Second Temple period. Far from being an age of decline
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  Speaker 1: or repetition, it was a time of extraordinary literary and
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  Speaker 1: theological creativity, when Jewish authors were composing not only some
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  Speaker 1: of the later Biblical books themselves, but also an expanding
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  Speaker 1: constellation of related works known by us today as the
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  Speaker 1: Apographer the Pseudopigrapher, along with various early commentaries and writings,
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  Speaker 1: all of which shaped the course of Jewish text and
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  Speaker 1: ideas until this day. Yet how were these texts composed, transmitted,
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  Speaker 1: and formulated. What do they reveal about the vitel of
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  Speaker 1: Judaism in an age of cultural encounter and philosophical ferment,
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  Speaker 1: And how might re examining this period alter our understanding
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  Speaker 1: of what it means for a tradition to be alive
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  Speaker 1: and thriving in a given period. These are some of
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  Speaker 1: the questions at the heart of our discussion today. To
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  Speaker 1: guide us through these fascinating topics. We are fortunate to
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  Speaker 1: be joined by a leading scholar in the field, doctor
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  Speaker 1: Hindi Nyman, who currently serves as the Oriel and Laying
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  Speaker 1: Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture and Director of
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  Speaker 1: the Center for the Study of the Bible at Oxford University.
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  Speaker 1: Among Professor Nyman's many important works is her latest book,
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  Speaker 1: Scriptural Vitality, Rethinking Philology and Hermonnutics, published by Oxford University
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  Speaker 1: Press in twenty twenty four, a pathbreaking work, indeed, which
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  Speaker 1: shall form the basis of our discussion today. It is
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  Speaker 1: a pleasure to welcome her to the Podcast of Jewish Ideas.
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  Speaker 1: Professor Nyman, welcome.
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  Speaker 2: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here and to
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  Speaker 2: have an opportunity to think with you about the history
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  Speaker 2: of Judaism with a particular orientation towards antiquity, but also
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  Speaker 2: with an eye towards the larger implications for the integration
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  Speaker 2: of antiquity into Torah in motion.
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  Speaker 1: Yes, well, put excellent excess, So let's dive right in.
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  Speaker 1: One of the curious things about this work is that
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  Speaker 1: it starts with a series of critiques of expressors, let's say,
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  Speaker 1: of dissatisfaction concerning the discipline of an ancient textual study and
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  Speaker 1: specifically ways of understanding the Second Temple period and its
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  Speaker 1: text So can you elaborate on that what has been
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  Speaker 1: unsatisfactory about the ways in which scholars until this point
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  Speaker 1: have sought to study, sought to understand the formulation of
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  Speaker 1: texts in this ancient Jewish period.
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  Speaker 2: Great, thank you. So my critique is really not only
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  Speaker 2: about antiquity. My critique more broadly is about the way
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  Speaker 2: in which scholarship has been co opted or limited by
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  Speaker 2: certain scholarly and historical expectations in the history of the field.
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  Speaker 2: And my critique is as central to the history of
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  Speaker 2: Judaism and Japanese udentombs the scientific study of Judaism in
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  Speaker 2: the Academy, but also with a particular orientation or critique
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  Speaker 2: of the way in which biblical study, Second Temple, Judaism,
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  Speaker 2: and even Rabbinic literature is studied in the Academy until
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  Speaker 2: this very day. It is true, of course that the
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  Speaker 2: work that I'm talking about in the critique that I'm
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  Speaker 2: talking about is particularly focused on the Academy, But as
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  Speaker 2: I think we'll be revealed across our interview and conversation today,
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  Speaker 2: this also has implications for the way in which Judaism
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  Speaker 2: is taught in Jewish schools across the globe. Let me
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  Speaker 2: pick three there, Moore, But I want to pick three
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  Speaker 2: points of orientation for critique. One is, you know, the
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  Speaker 2: discourse of scripture alone sola scriptura, or talking about in
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  Speaker 2: a very rigid way, privileging what we would call shot,
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  Speaker 2: which really means kind of the original text or the
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  Speaker 2: original moment, and drash, which could be context, It can
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  Speaker 2: be meaning, It can be interpretation, it can be comprehensibility,
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  Speaker 2: it can be articulation of anything from ayan Takadai and
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  Speaker 2: the lex alionis to you know, ben soa amora, or
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  Speaker 2: other ways of understanding or not understanding a particular text.
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  Speaker 2: And the reason I formulated in this way is because
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  Speaker 2: it's absolutely not the case that Judaism is about originary
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  Speaker 2: moments or a text alone. You know, to quote Robert Brodie,
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  Speaker 2: a well known, brilliant go ownA scholar, you know, the
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  Speaker 2: earliest manuscript is not necessarily the best manuscript. And this
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  Speaker 2: is when he was talking about the transmission and the
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  Speaker 2: transformation of Mishna, which also become a larger project that
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  Speaker 2: he continues to work on Mission into Septa. But let's
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  Speaker 2: just take it one step further right, And here I
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  Speaker 2: want to mention Jeffrey Khan, the previous regis Professor of
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  Speaker 2: Hebrew at Cambridge University. There's not a masoretic singular tradition,
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  Speaker 2: but there are multiple traditions. So even the things that
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  Speaker 2: we take for granted as fixed as set are not
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  Speaker 2: fixed and set. It's literally in motion. It's literally growing.
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  Speaker 2: And this is not a defect in the history of
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  Speaker 2: Judaism that we can't get to the or moment, the
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  Speaker 2: original moment, to the source. But the very reality of
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  Speaker 2: Judaism is that it keeps changing, and it changes over time.
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  Speaker 2: This is a very very complicated critique, and I know
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  Speaker 2: I can't just do it on one foot, but I
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  Speaker 2: want to start there. So I spend a lot of
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  Speaker 2: time critiquing originary moments, as if if we could get
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  Speaker 2: to the earliest moments, somehow the text is redeemed or
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  Speaker 2: we understand something more about the tradition than what the
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  Speaker 2: later interpreters get tell us. And I would say that's
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  Speaker 2: absolutely wrong. There are many moments over time, but Judaism
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  Speaker 2: is about ongoing transformation. Second point, and that is to
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  Speaker 2: try to overcome a bias or an expectation that what
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  Speaker 2: you want to get is to a pure natural religion,
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  Speaker 2: that is, you want to get to Israel before it's
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  Speaker 2: infected or bothered by other religious traditions. There is no
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  Speaker 2: such thing. There aren't moments in the history of Judaism
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  Speaker 2: that aren't inflected by or in conversation with and here.
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  Speaker 2: I want to use a term that's borrowed from physics,
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  Speaker 2: but I really learned it from a medievalist, nam Ronnie Vollant,
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  Speaker 2: who applied it beautifully in some medieval texts. I use
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  Speaker 2: the term in my book entanglement, that is moments of connection,
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  Speaker 2: a moment of connection which doesn't have to last forever,
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  Speaker 2: but there are moments where cultural traditions interact, they touch.
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  Speaker 2: I tried to make a clapping sound so you can
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  Speaker 2: kind of see these two traditions come together on this interview.
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  Speaker 2: And this is a very exciting moment for me. I've
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  Speaker 2: often thought about it philosophically, the moment of sajiica Own
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  Speaker 2: or the earlier moment of Philo, or the moment of Rosenspik,
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  Speaker 2: or the moment of Rambam. But those are philosophical moments.
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  Speaker 2: There are other moments. Also, I could talk about magic
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  Speaker 2: bowls right lived religion and the way in which we
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  Speaker 2: see traditions of magic across a whole variety of religon
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  Speaker 2: just traditions and cultures come together boom, right like, and
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  Speaker 2: integration convergences across across time and across place and across space.
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  Speaker 2: I think again, I think that's really interesting. So the
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  Speaker 2: first point is challenging originary moments. The second is to
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  Speaker 2: recognize ongoing expressions of integration. Hellenism is not a bad thing.
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  Speaker 2: I mean, the way you introduce the interview today was
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  Speaker 2: really beautiful. Not many people would talk about the Hellenistic
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  Speaker 2: period in that way, or Second Temple for that matter.
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  Speaker 2: But I agree completely, as you know, with your formulation
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  Speaker 2: and with your articulation, it's really innovative and it's really exciting.
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  Speaker 2: I think the third point of critique, and then we
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  Speaker 2: can maybe move on to not just points of critique,
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  Speaker 2: but kind of what we do with this critique. And
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  Speaker 2: there are many others in the book as well, I know,
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  Speaker 2: and that is late Judaism in the German spae Ud Tomb,
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  Speaker 2: and there are many different ways of naming it. People
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  Speaker 2: have talked about this and written about it. I've written
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  Speaker 2: about it late Judaism, which is describing, by the way,
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  Speaker 2: what we call Second Temple Judaism, which is not really
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  Speaker 2: a historical period. You know, Second Temple Judaism is part
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  Speaker 2: of the Persian period, it's part of the Hellenistic period.
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  Speaker 2: Of course, historically here I want it to pause for
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  Speaker 2: a moment. It's a sensitive time for the Jewish people
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  Speaker 2: and for the world more broadly. Hear my critique about
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  Speaker 2: vitality and the insistence that the Second Temple period is
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  Speaker 2: a period of life and not only a period of
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  Speaker 2: end and death in Hebrew Yut versus Hamata. Right, of
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  Speaker 2: course there's mortality. Of course there's death and ending, but
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  Speaker 2: there's also a renewing and a determination, a resilience, a
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  Speaker 2: tenacity to continue to make sense of text, to quote
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  Speaker 2: from Nahamia via Vinu Bamikra, right to apply insight in
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  Speaker 2: order to understand the text is itself an intensely innovative practice.
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  Speaker 2: It's not derivative, it's not desperate, and it's not about
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  Speaker 2: a tradition that's about to die. But to insist that
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  Speaker 2: spae you uden tum is not the norm, that the
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  Speaker 2: end of Judaism or late Judaism doesn't just give up nivua, right.
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  Speaker 2: It's not just about giving up prophecy. It's not right.
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  Speaker 2: Sofinnovua is the exception to the rule. Judaism understands itself
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  Speaker 2: to continue to be part of an ongoing inspired tradition.
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  Speaker 2: It's not about becoming legalistic. It's not the scribal versus
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  Speaker 2: the prophetic. You know, I take very seriously this rabbinic
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  Speaker 2: idiom haha adif mina vie. What does it mean that
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  Speaker 2: the wise man or the rabbi or the sage is preferable.
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  Speaker 2: There's a there's a there's a switch that happens. But
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  Speaker 2: that switch also inherits a kind of inspiration. And here
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  Speaker 2: I'm already giving you some of the solutions to the problem.
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  Speaker 2: But the critique that to understand Judaism is not having died,
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  Speaker 2: you know, in one thirty two, or let's go back
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  Speaker 2: or seventy, you know, or go back even earlier. What
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  Speaker 2: happened to the law after the first Horbon, after the
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  Speaker 2: first destruction? My answer in my twenty fourteen book Losing
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  Speaker 2: the Temple Recovering the Future is revelation inflected by destruction.
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  Speaker 2: But and I already began this third point with you know,
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  Speaker 2: signaling towards a contemporary context. There is hope, right, you know,
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  Speaker 2: the Benyaminian narrative, which I've been engaging for many years,
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  Speaker 2: is really too dark for us. Right, it gives up
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  Speaker 2: and it stops in its tracks. I don't think Judaism
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  Speaker 2: stops in its tracks. I think it can find the
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  Speaker 2: space and the hope to write again, to read again,
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  Speaker 2: to think again, but also to recontextualize and make meaning again.
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  Speaker 2: And that's how I understand and in Amaya eight verse eight,
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  Speaker 2: as a kind of if you will, like a template
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  Speaker 2: to think about and to return to again and again.
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  Speaker 2: It's a very important critique. It's a it's a critique
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  Speaker 2: of Old Testament studies, it's a critique of the way
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  Speaker 2: the New Testament reads. But it's also a critique of
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  Speaker 2: Jewish studies that allows itself to forget a pre seventy past,
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  Speaker 2: which ultimately effaces a post seventy present.
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  Speaker 1: All this is fascinating, and I, yes, it is very important.
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  Speaker 1: And I understand that you want to sort of get
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  Speaker 1: past the critique onto onto your claims and development in
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  Speaker 1: the work. But I do want to sort of pause
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  Speaker 1: just for a moment to perhaps explain a little bit
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  Speaker 1: of or deeping a little bit on the third point,
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  Speaker 1: which is that as far as I understand that, you know,
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  Speaker 1: you're critiquing the development or the origin of the study
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  Speaker 1: of this ancient period and Second Temple period, which you
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  Speaker 1: know emerged a say, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
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  Speaker 1: surrounded by or within the context of the Romantic movement
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  Speaker 1: and with sort of Protestant Germanic philology that helped shape
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  Speaker 1: the fields of biblical studies. And I wonder if you
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  Speaker 1: could just explain what exactly were the tendencies of these
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  Speaker 1: scholars to say or think about this Second Temple as
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  Speaker 1: an ancient period, either before seventy c or perhaps just
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  Speaker 1: after seventy C. And what were these destructive elements that,
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  Speaker 1: to your mind have sort of colored perceptions and skewed
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  Speaker 1: the field until this day.
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  Speaker 2: Great, thank you. I'm going to try to answer your
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  Speaker 2: question in three ways, if that's okay. The first is
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  Speaker 2: to kind of offer a little critique of myself, which
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  Speaker 2: is I'm also vulnerable to the Romantic period. You know,
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  Speaker 2: I talking about Novalis on writing or Schlegel and philology.
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  Speaker 2: I mean, I love those guys, and I love the
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  Speaker 2: way they're reading and thinking about philology in the past,
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  Speaker 2: to idealize the fragment and to recognize that we're all
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  Speaker 2: only ever fragmented, but still nevertheless to aspire, you know,
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  Speaker 2: to recover this romantic ideal. The danger in all of this,
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  Speaker 2: and this is my second point, is to what happens
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  Speaker 2: to the history of the development of lived religion, especially
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  Speaker 2: when it's a religion that was supposed to have died
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  Speaker 2: to Christianity, it was supposed to have been replaced. So
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  Speaker 2: my second point in response to you is not again
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  Speaker 2: not a direct answer. I'm going to directly answer it
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  Speaker 2: in a moment, but the narrative that I'm describing is
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  Speaker 2: a very old narrative. It's a narrative, as David Narrenberg
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  Speaker 2: has argued, goes back to my period, right. It goes
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  Speaker 2: back to the Second Temple period when the struggle for
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  Speaker 2: identity and the shaping of new forms of Judaism in
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  Speaker 2: the form of Christianity or Gnosticism or Rabbinic Judaism and
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  Speaker 2: other such expressions are emerging. And they're emerging in time
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  Speaker 2: and in culture, but they're also emerging as they reject
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  Speaker 2: the other to try to create not a two covenant theory,
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  Speaker 2: as Clement is said to have said, but actually a
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  Speaker 2: singular covenant that's linear, which you know, A is replaced
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  Speaker 2: by B, and A then can no longer function, is
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  Speaker 2: no longer part of the world which is vibrant and
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  Speaker 2: promised and dynamic and inspired. So it's a pretty heavy
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  Speaker 2: burden that I'm placing on aris responsibility as scholars, as thinkers,
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  Speaker 2: as public intellectuals in the world today to teach about Judaism,
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  Speaker 2: to teach about Judaism in a way that is alive
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  Speaker 2: to its past and also to its future. Now, to
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  Speaker 2: be very specific, I mean it wouldn't be hard for me.
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  Speaker 2: I've been involved in two different volumes and also in
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  Speaker 2: many talks about anti Semitism in the field of Old
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  Speaker 2: Testament studies. I want to say that some of the
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  Speaker 2: norms that I'm describing could easily be pinned on Velhausen
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  Speaker 2: or de Vetta and many many others Gunkul. But I
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  Speaker 2: want to say that it's not just Christian scholars that
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  Speaker 2: have narrated the death or the end of Judaism, that
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  Speaker 2: many Jewish scholars have also adopted or integrated certain norms
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  Speaker 2: of the field without asking why do you throw the
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  Speaker 2: later material out, or why do you say that anything
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  Speaker 2: after yoshiahu after Josiah's reforms is not interesting, or you
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  Speaker 2: deprecate the law or the way in which Judaism transforms
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  Speaker 2: and retransforms itself across the last centuries before the Common era.
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  Speaker 2: This is this is part of the challenge is to
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  Speaker 2: understand the complexity, but also to understand the intimacy between
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: in emerging Judaism and Christianity, which and ultimately also thinking
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: about the chiroganieson thinking about the world of Islam and Judaism.
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  Speaker 2: Ultimately that can give way to important conversation, conversation that
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: recognizes difference, but also conversation that acknowledges and celebrates the
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  Speaker 2: ongoing growth of a dynamic tradition. It goes to the
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  Speaker 2: very heart of my discipline, and it's not been an
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: easy road for me as a result. It's but it's
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: a road that I'm determined to take, and it's a
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  Speaker 2: road that I've take with many colleagues, Jewish and Christian,
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  Speaker 2: young and old.
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  Speaker 1: Then let me ask you the obvious question, which is, well,
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  Speaker 1: what is your alternative way or alternative set of scholarly
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  Speaker 1: tools and paradigms that you apply to this period. I mean,
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  Speaker 1: in your book you one of the phrases that you
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  Speaker 1: title this with is forward moving philology. So can you
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  Speaker 1: explain how you, as a scholar orient yourself towards the
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  Speaker 1: towards the Second Table period and how you seek to
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  Speaker 1: sort of to avoid the pitfalls that have characterized the
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  Speaker 1: field until this point.
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  Speaker 2: Before I begin to answer the question, which is a
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  Speaker 2: generous question, two things. One is I can't avoid all
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  Speaker 2: the pitfalls, and the responsibility of my students, and I
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  Speaker 2: have many wonderful students in Oxford and from other institutions
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  Speaker 2: where I've taught, is to also recognize the pitfalls of
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  Speaker 2: my own thinking. I mean, it's a radically optimistic narrative
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  Speaker 2: which allows for constant growth and examination and re examination
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  Speaker 2: of the presuppositions that we have. So in this sense,
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  Speaker 2: it's a it's a radically optimistic narrative, which is of
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  Speaker 2: course forward moving. The second part of this is before
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  Speaker 2: I answer the question, is my I tell my students
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  Speaker 2: always and I always invoke the prophet Jeremiah your Miyahu,
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  Speaker 2: where he has five verbs that are not always in
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: the same order, and exactly the same lineup. But it's
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  Speaker 2: basically looks something like, you know, there's destruction and there's humiliation,
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  Speaker 2: there's the decimation, and then there's also the rebuilding and
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  Speaker 2: the replanting and the hope. And those collections of four
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  Speaker 2: or five verbs that repeat themselves again and again is
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  Speaker 2: what I take upon myself to do. In scholarship. We
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  Speaker 2: don't just destroy, we don't just critique. And when we critique,
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  Speaker 2: we critique standing on the shoulders of giants, and we
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: understand it's not just the mistakes that the people we
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: learn from made, but we have to understand where they
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  Speaker 2: came from the world of anyone from Vellhausen who was
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  Speaker 2: a teacher of Lauderbach, you know, or Gunkel or Deveta,
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  Speaker 2: to understand or love to understand where they came from
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  Speaker 2: and to understand where we're going. And the work, the
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  Speaker 2: work before us is very, very big. It's so much
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  Speaker 2: work to heal, to transform, to teach, to repair, but
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  Speaker 2: also to think in a bigger way about the world
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  Speaker 2: of Judaism as part of participating in the world. It's
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  Speaker 2: a kind of tikun olam, if you will. But it
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  Speaker 2: can only be done and this is the part of
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: the where my real answer begins. It has to be
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  Speaker 2: done in conversation. I started a series called The Bible
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: and the Humanities with oup Oxford University Press or the
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: Center for the Study of the Bible and Oriel College
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: in Oxford. Is meant to be a center in conversation
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: with the humanities. That's what it's about, the real reason
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  Speaker 2: I mean, of course I care about interdisciplinarity. It's interesting,
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: but in and of itself it's meaningless. The reason why
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: I'm so committed to this engagement with philosophy and literature
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: and classics and history and material culture is because it's
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  Speaker 2: an essential part of understanding the world in which Judaism functions.
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  Speaker 2: Is also to learn from other disciplines. So in order
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: to grow or to critique my field, I've never stayed
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: within my field. I've always stepped outside in order to
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: address the limitations of Louth or Hairder. On the matter
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: of poetry, what we need to do, I think, is
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: to read more broadly about poetics. Right whether for me
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: I've turned to Peter Sondi and his work on Holderland
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: and Ceylon, or to look at Gerta with all of
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: his problematics. I mean, Bernie Levenson has really opened up
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: how problematic Gerta is for anyone who wants to think
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: about Judaism and Jewish texts. However, we can still learn
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: a lot from him from poetics, I believe, but to
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: open up and to go big and wide and try
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: to think about how poetics is understood in other cultures.
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: So there's a comparative dimension to my work. There's also
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: a scholarly dimension. One problem I've taken on is that
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: of intertextuality, the way in which intertextuality looks me drash it.
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: But it also is not really about reading. It's about
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: deconstructing and isolating and fragmenting. So how do we trace
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: the growth or the composition of text without reducing it
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: to its smallest earliest unit. And how does the historical
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: development of understanding how texts grow help us see a
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: forward moving philology. But here, and this is important because
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: I've been thinking about this now for two, if not
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: even three decades. It comes out of a critique of
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: my work when I was at Harvard about the way
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: in which we do textual criticism. How do we recover
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: and reconstruct texts and part of what I want to
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: say is we don't need to throw the baby out
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: with the bathwater. We don't need to stop thinking about
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: early moments in the history of development of text, but
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: don't think that the later development is somehow uninteresting or
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: unimportant another aspect. And this is one of the reasons
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: why I've worked with so many medievalists who work in
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: Jewish studies and on Jewish composition. First of all, most
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: of our manuscripts are much later their Goonic or medieval,
• 21:23
  Speaker 2: and a lot of the traditions that we talk about
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: as Second Temple are preserved all the way through the
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: early modern period, whether it's Jubilees or it's Enoch, or
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: it's the Masoretic text. So we have earlier iterations, for example,
• 21:33
  Speaker 2: from the Dead Sea scrolls or from translations in Greek
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: and other languages, but we also need to understand the
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: larger context in which these texts are growing and transforming,
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: and to study different moments, if you will, different snapshots,
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: so we can see the growth of the text and
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: allow these different iterations or even different versions to grow.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: And one of my new projects now, one project is
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: actually on poetics from our earliest expression of ancient Israelite
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: poetry or early Jewish poetry, all the way through the
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: medieval period of liturgical poems of piute and even beyond.
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: Another project is about pluriformity, and this is another corrective
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: instead of thinking about the monoform, to think about plural form.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: Maybe I'll pause here, there's a lot more to say,
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: but yeah, please go ahead.
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: I was gonna say that you've hit the point that
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: I do want to drill down in, which is precisely
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: this term pluriformity, which you've employed lout in your work.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: And I want to understand what is the sort of
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: uniform or monoform way of approaching or studying a text,
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: and what is and what is the puriform way of
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: what is performaty in this context? And why is the
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: latter superior to the former?
• 22:48
  Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, that's a great question. So I don't think
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: it's just not realistic to say that we have that
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: the text that we study exists in a single pure
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: form and every thing else is either derivative or an interesting.
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: They're different ways of talking about pluriformity. I'll give you
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: in a typology I've developed, I have seven different ways
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: for the sake of time. I'm going to talk about three.
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: Pluriformity literally means multiple forms of a single text or
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: a single tradition that we're thinking about. One obvious and easy,
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: low hanging fruit example is to fila is liturgy when
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: we think about which is the correct version of the
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: Kaddish of the mourner's prayer that people say to memorialize
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: their loved ones and to honor God. Right, So what
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: version is the correct version? What about when we talk
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: about the Hagada, which is a great example because there
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: are fixed parts of the Hagad, but it grows over time,
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: and it grows in time across traditions. Right, So to
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: talk about liturgy, prayer and its fold forms, it's also
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: to talk about the growth, the dynamic growth of an
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: interpretive community, of a praying community. And it's not better
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: or worse, it's not correct or incorrect, but we allow
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: for the growth of pluralform manifestations of prayer. One could
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: say that there's an oral component, but these texts are
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: fundamentally written with our road like, with notes and with
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: corrections around them. Okay, so that's one form. Another form,
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: which is something closer to the you know, the biblical question,
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: which I think is one of the things you're asking,
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: is we have versions of Biblical texts from antiquity. This
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: is a somewhat disturbing question. It can be disturbing theologically.
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: I don't think it is in the writing down, in
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: the transforming, and in the transmission of Biblical texts. We
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: often have not just creative, not just de scribal correction,
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: but we have preserved in Jewish antiquity at times different
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: versions of the text. And we know that Jewish communities
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: are citing, sometimes slightly, sometimes radically different versions of a text.
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: And this point is not meant to destabilize. It's meant
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: to understand that a textual tradition, however you understand its
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: origin or its inspired nature, might in the hands of
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: communities have slightly different expressions, even scripture. And here is
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: a point where scripture and interpretation or tarash welpena become
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: a little closer together, because we come to understand that
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: there's ongoing growth and development. There might be two forms,
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: there might be ten forms. There might be so much
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: incoherence between the different versions that we can't talk about
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: a singular form of a text. I'll give you one
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: more example, which is possibly a less provocative example, and
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: that's a safer to helium. So safer to helium as
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: we know it exists, you know, in the form that
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: that we know of people who use safer to helium
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: of one hundred and fifty psalms from the later Masoretic tradition.
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: But at Kumran we have a very similar collection, but
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: with additional texts that are included in it. Some one
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: of them looks it is a mesmor that is directly
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: addressed to cion. I mean many of us are familiar
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: with a with a pi ute cion halo tish ali
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: right addressed desion. We already have a sam addressed desion
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: right as Karea bhol leva vi behol Modi. It plays
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: with the shama right in in cave. We have a
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: Cave eleven copy. We have a Cave four copy, and
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: it also rewrites Mismore Kuflamazion by the Waters of Babylon.
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: But there are other texts also that are included a
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: calophon to David that are embedded in what's called Cave eleven.
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: It's from Cave eleven q Kumran five. And then we
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: have other We have other versions of the psalms, collections
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: in other caves and other manuscripts from Kumran, as well
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: as profound differences and the titles in the organization, sometimes
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: in the ordering or the divisions of the psalms. What
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: do you do with collections that exist in a manifold form.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: You might say, well, Hindi, this falls in between your
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: first and second example, right, And I would say, sure, right,
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: it's in between liturgy and what we would call scripture.
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: But it's also important to conceive of collection a growing collection.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: And this is something that I think speaks exactly to
• 27:32
  Speaker 2: a forward moving philology. We have this colophon that talks
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: about no less than four thousand psalms that Melachtavid, that
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: King David wrote, like where does this number come from?
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: We also have wild numbers connected to Solomon, to Shlamahamelach right,
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: So where are they coming from? And the answer I
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: want to say, in a very simple and clear way,
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: is that scriptural traditions, interpretative traditions grow and they continue
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: to grow over time. In this this is the life
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: and breath of a tradition that we come to know
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: as Judaism. It lives in the text and beyond the text,
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: and it's a kind of chefa, if you will. It's
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: an overflow of that space between orality and writtenness that
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: we call performance.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: Interesting and let me let me ask a slightly broader question.
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: What was it about the Second Temple period that was
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: allowing for this or what were the conditions under which
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: this took place? Is this period to have specific attributes
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: or specific characteristics which allow for this kind of development
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: of text in this particular fashion, or is it no,
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: this is just the This is just the period that
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: we have this kind of evidence for, and that there
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: was nothing entirely distinct or remarkable about it, like what
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: was going on in those specific centuries which was allowing
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: for this very creative development, let's say, and live development
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: of texts as we see from the historical record.
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: So part of what I want to say, well, I
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: want to say yes, and yes, I want to say
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: say it's absolutely generalizable to all periods, and it's absolutely
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: distinctive in particular in the context of history. So the
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: generalizable point is Judaism never stops changing and growing, interpreting, reinterpreting, actualizing,
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: and reactualizing. There's a verse from the Book of Esther
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: that took on completely new meaning in the context of
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: October seventh, for example. And that's part of what's remarkable
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: or new pu team written, or new ways of reading
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: and thinking about the Book of Lamentations of Eha. Sure,
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: and there are many many different ways in which is that.
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: This is true for the history of Judaism. And it's
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: not only about about darkness and loss. It's also about joy, right,
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: It's also about joy and hope what Jonathan leear with
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: respect to the crow Indians called a radical hope. I've
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: used to talk about a radical hope in my twenty
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: fourteen book that I mentioned earlier with respect to thinking
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: about life after se or I would even say life
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: after five five eighty seven, five eighty six. So sure,
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: But now let's talk for a few minutes about the
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: period in which I work. So first of all, I
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: already talked about the massoretic tradition as being dynamic and ploroform.
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: We know this from the Kiro Geniza, that there's not
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: one singular correct massoretic traditions, but we have multiple traditions.
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: Of course, they're related to each other, and we can,
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: you know, block them into different communities or traditions scribal traditions,
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: of course, but it's also the case that they continue
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: to bring text to life in new ways. So in
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: a later period, it's articulation, it's nikoud, it's Tommy Ami
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: kra it's cantillation, and it's also massoretic writing around it,
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: like Anthony Grafton's footnote, right, it's the footnotes. It's the
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: marginalia that contextualize and recontextualize the text, where the commentary
• 30:59
  Speaker 2: itself becomes the text becomes the new context. But if
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: we go back, we can also think about the emergence
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: of finalizing a text, of editing, of reciprocally writing and rewriting,
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: for example, the books of Kings Alif Bette Malachim and
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: Di Verreyjamime books one and two of the Chronicles. It's
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: not just that there's a later rewriting of the earlier text,
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: but you can discern, and this is the work that
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: historical hermeneutics has helped us with. As the texts are finalized,
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: as they're being written and rewritten, as they're being refined
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: and commented upon, we sometimes can discern the hand of
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: the scribe or the hand of the of the priest
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: or the hand of an interpretive community, modifying, smoothing, changing,
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: but also contributing and also keeping together traditions. This is
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: another corrective. I'm not alone. I have wonderful colleagues like
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: Conrad Schmeid and Christoph Nihan and others who have fought
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: with me about precisely this kind of work. But to
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: think about even the pentatout traditions which are understood by
• 32:01
  Speaker 2: Bible scholars to be fragmented into pieces, to understand their
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: unity and they're coming together is part of a kind
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: of creative, generative conversation which allows for ongoing interpretation. It
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: both exists as interpretative as they read each other. These
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: different traditions read each other and leave themselves in a
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: state of tension, but they also transform and generate new
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: readings before our eyes, even embedded within what we would
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: call me kraft. Does that answer your question?
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: Yes, largely so. So what I would like to then ask,
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: is you know or let's let's take a very concrete example,
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: an example that you go on at length by in
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: your book, which is the Book of Jubilee Sefayovl, which
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: I think is an excellent example of the various trends
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: and tendencies and sort of tendency of reworking and reconceptualizing
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: text in the second tyvel period. So for audience, perhaps
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: first describe what valuable means, and then describe how this
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: book and the sort of the fingerprints of the scribe
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: or the fingerprints of the various composers and the editors
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: of this text exemplify what you're talking about acts an
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: interesting case study for what is going onto these texts,
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: with these texts in the second table period.
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: Great, I mean, say, for a ovle, the Book of
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: Jubilees is a great example, and it's actually an example
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: that touches on. I would say each one of the
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: points I've mentioned thus far today in our conversation. First
• 33:33
  Speaker 2: of all, our most complete manuscripts are preserved in Ethopic
• 33:38
  Speaker 2: and as not in Hebrew. We have manuscripts seventeen or
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: more versions or plus even other texts that are considered
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: to be rewriting Jubilees or pseudo Jubilees found at Kumran,
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: So we know that this is a text that was
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: very very important. My teacher, my mentor James Kugel and
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: Michael Siegel have also so impose the same kinds of
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: operations on the Book of Jubilees and shown that there's
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: a history of the development embedded within the text itself.
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: You can see seams within the text as it grows
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: and changes, so it is itself a dynamic growing text.
• 34:15
  Speaker 2: And if Ibertikolar is right, and I think he is right,
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: some of the texts that are so called to be
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: like wanna Be or pseudo Jubilees text might also be
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: signs of the growth of the tradition before our eyes.
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: We've looked also backwards. You know, we've tried to use
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: much much later manuscripts to reconstruct the original Jubilees, and
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: Lauren Stuckenbrook has taught us that's not really the way
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: it works. You know, these texts grow and change over
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: time and are transferred and transformed. There is fixity that emerges,
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: but we also have to understand the complexity. Now what
• 34:48
  Speaker 2: is it? So let's call it for the sake of
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: our discussion today, although there are almost certainly earlier traditions
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: embedded in it. A middle second century work which retells
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: the hisory of Israel from the creation of the world
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: just before Mahmad Harsinai, just before the giving of Torad Sinai. However,
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: it also talks about Sinai at the very beginning. It's
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: obsessed you could say, oh, this sounds like vayikrah right.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: Or it's obsessed with numbers. It's obsessed with seven, it's
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: obsessed with calendar. It's obsessed with getting the right practice
• 35:22
  Speaker 2: in place. It's also obsessed with the phrase that we
• 35:27
  Speaker 2: know from the rabbis. And also we even see an
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: iteration of this and Usebius and possibly earlier in Christianity
• 35:34
  Speaker 2: a voute kimu meat's vote that, oh, the patriarchs also
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: kept the meats phote. And if you want to understand
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: how to read the book of Jubilees, if you want
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: to understand how to read sorry, how to read Torah,
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: how to read the Book of Genesis, you read it
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: through the tradition of understanding what you might not have
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: understood from the first first glance. Right, And how do
• 35:56
  Speaker 2: you know that, like, how do we know Jubilees is right?
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: Jubilees tells you, tells you it's authorized by the Angel
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: of the presence that ma la chapanin it comes from
• 36:05
  Speaker 2: heavenly tablets that were before Mosha. Right, it's written as
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: an authorizing tendency, like to say that something is magical
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: and written and holy and divine. It's also received ultimately
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: through a line of priests, ultimately in the hands of Mosha.
• 36:22
  Speaker 2: And there's a first law and a second law. Sounds
• 36:24
  Speaker 2: a lot like in this case they're both understood to
• 36:29
  Speaker 2: be written. But we get emerging if you will, of
• 36:32
  Speaker 2: the texts, and there are many recognizable pzuchem, if you will,
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: that are embedded, or traditions that are embedded, and they're
• 36:39
  Speaker 2: recontextualized again and again and again. Now, early on, figures
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: like Vachholder and Bencion Wachholder and others kind of said, oh,
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: this is a replacement of Genesis to Exodus. And I
• 36:50
  Speaker 2: would say, and I said, and many other people said,
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: this is part of the larger world of interpretation. But
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: here's where I push back a little bit. I want
• 36:59
  Speaker 2: to see Jubilees as an active form of scripture, not
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: because I think it belongs in mikra, not because I
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: think we have to rewrite what is canonical, but because
• 37:08
  Speaker 2: the way in which it's cited and used, we get
• 37:11
  Speaker 2: an eye towards the way in which ancient Jews are
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: thinking about their own text as authoritatively interpreted, So you
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: don't read it without I'm sure you know, many people
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: in the audience will have heard. You don't read Mikra
• 37:25
  Speaker 2: without Rashi. You don't meet Mikra, you don't read you know,
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: you don't meet Tahrah without Tarashbal without the Goolott for example. Right.
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: So it's in a way rad you know, Jubilees is
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: already participating in this one of the things. And you know,
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: I think between my own teacher, James Kugle and Michael
• 37:43
  Speaker 2: Fishbain roughly forty to fifty years ago, kind of they
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: woke up, They woke up the field of Biblical studies
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: to this reality. People ought already, you know, noticed it
• 37:55
  Speaker 2: a little bit, people like all Back and other scholars Ginsburg.
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: But really they're the ones using the Dead Sea scrolls
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: and also using their knowledge of Biblical studies and their
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: sophistication with their own understanding of the history of the field,
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: both of me Drash on the one hand, and let's
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: call it Hebrew Bible or Old Testament on the other
• 38:12
  Speaker 2: bringing it together. And Jubilees is kind of a flash
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: point in that sense because you can see all of
• 38:18
  Speaker 2: it wake up. I mean, I this is an anecdotal
• 38:20
  Speaker 2: but I was going to write my dissertation on Kimu
• 38:24
  Speaker 2: Masha Kiu kfar a little verse towards the end of
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: the Book of Esther as a way of thinking about
• 38:29
  Speaker 2: oral Torah and written Torah. And I didn't. But my
• 38:32
  Speaker 2: first paper and my first article was on the Book
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: of Jubilees again thinking about oral Torah and written Torah
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: and the way in which this discourse across the Hellenistic
• 38:40
  Speaker 2: period explodes in a sense, it kind of opens up,
• 38:45
  Speaker 2: which brings me to one other little point that I
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: didn't properly answer when we were talking about the Hellenistic period,
• 38:51
  Speaker 2: why the Hellenistic period is distinctive. Well, here is where
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: I would talk about Jubilees, and I would talk about Filo,
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: and I would talk about Pesha Haaba Cook, three different
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: works from the late Second Temple period. All of them
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: are really obsessed with hupoemata, with writing and also paraphrasis,
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: with writing and thinking about interpretation, emerging commentary, but also
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: getting the text right and getting the reading of the
• 39:20
  Speaker 2: text right. And this is a particular, a very particular
• 39:24
  Speaker 2: practice in many people. Mari Nihoff and others have made
• 39:29
  Speaker 2: analogies to the Scolia and tried to understand the Alexandrian
• 39:32
  Speaker 2: context for thinking about commentary, not unlike the way in
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: which people will do the same in the Islamic period
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: with figures. You know, the first Grammars are very influenced
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: by the cultural context. The Second Temple period is thinking
• 39:47
  Speaker 2: not just about reading and writing practices in the Hellenistic period,
• 39:51
  Speaker 2: but they're also thinking about the philosophical context, which is not,
• 39:55
  Speaker 2: by the way, only Greek, but it's also Greek and
• 39:59
  Speaker 2: that Greek weakness that Hellenization thinking about let's call them
• 40:05
  Speaker 2: it's too generalizable to say Middle Platonic, but absolutely also
• 40:10
  Speaker 2: it's a period of time where they're a Pythagorean Platonist
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: and other traditions are integrated and interwoven into the history
• 40:21
  Speaker 2: of Judaism in the time in which they're writing. And
• 40:24
  Speaker 2: this also has a lot to do with how composition
• 40:27
  Speaker 2: and fixity works. And here's I think the tension in
• 40:30
  Speaker 2: my book, which I'm trying to resolve in my next project.
• 40:35
  Speaker 2: We have regularity, and we have or monoform, and we
• 40:38
  Speaker 2: have pluriformity. We even hear Philo talk about it's monoform,
• 40:42
  Speaker 2: like we want the right text, and we're getting the
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: correct Greek text and the perfect translation of the perfect Hebrew.
• 40:49
  Speaker 2: It's inspired, so to the Greek text is inspired in
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: the creation of the world again with waters above waters
• 40:55
  Speaker 2: below seventy two breasts go to an island and translate
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: as though it's breataw alam all over again, and that's
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: the way to authorize it. Well, you know, if you
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: think about this whole process of moving and translating and
• 41:08
  Speaker 2: transforming these texts in the face of new creation and
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: new translation, we can begin to see this incredible watershed
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: right of the dissemination of Jewish texts throughout the world.
• 41:23
  Speaker 2: What Glennmost said, one of the most important moments in
• 41:27
  Speaker 2: the history of the helen period is the translation into Greek,
• 41:30
  Speaker 2: not because it's lost, as the rabbi sometimes say, but
• 41:33
  Speaker 2: because it's not lost, because it becomes generative. I don't
• 41:37
  Speaker 2: know if I answered about Jubilees. Jubilees is like the
• 41:40
  Speaker 2: least Hillary Putnam, the philosopher, and I knew him when
• 41:44
  Speaker 2: I was a graduate student at Harvard, and we read.
• 41:47
  Speaker 2: He said, tell me what you're reading, Hindy, So we
• 41:49
  Speaker 2: read Jubilees together, and he said, Hindi, it's the opposite
• 41:53
  Speaker 2: of the have to How can you work on this stuff?
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: It's so rigid, it's so narrow aro with respect to women,
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: it's narrow with respect to other nations. So I also
• 42:04
  Speaker 2: want to say, and also with respect to what the
• 42:06
  Speaker 2: correct practices, I haven't even talked about the way in
• 42:08
  Speaker 2: which Jubilee seems to advocate for practices that we would
• 42:12
  Speaker 2: not recognize as rabbinic practices or practices in tension with
• 42:15
  Speaker 2: later normative rabbinic halaha. First of all, normativity is a
• 42:21
  Speaker 2: topic that I would want to problematize for us, because
• 42:26
  Speaker 2: we need to think and rethink what normativity is, and
• 42:28
  Speaker 2: also the proliferation of law and meaning and practice, of course,
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: but there's something else that's really important here with respect
• 42:36
  Speaker 2: to the period, which is to understand the dynamic complexity
• 42:42
  Speaker 2: of a variety of communities that are emerging in time,
• 42:46
  Speaker 2: but also our culturally are culturally conditioned or historically contingent
• 42:52
  Speaker 2: on the world in which they live. So we have
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: to understand Hellenism and the world of Hellenism in order
• 42:59
  Speaker 2: to understand the formation and the crystallization of what we
• 43:04
  Speaker 2: will eventually call our canon.
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: Well, that's an excellent segue, because'sly where I was going next,
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: which is that you've described in this period a period
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: of great high of activity and of writing and rewriting
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: and formulating and reformulating and sort of this constellation of
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: live text be it you know, in the Coumrand scrolls,
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: be it Philo, be it all sorts of ways that
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: we did to beok of Jubiles, et cetera. Ways that
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: we see this this high activity. But of course, at
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: some point these texts, as you say, do crystallize, or
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: at least a set of text crystallizes and becomes a
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: canon and becomes the Tana. And of course, you know,
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: it's a little bit of a black box historically. I mean,
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: there's you know, very difficult to know exactly how this happens,
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: where this happens, What were the motivations behind those who
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: made it happen, et cetera. But I do want to
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: ask sort of the conditions or the changes and conditions
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: that allowed this to happen. In other words, why was
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: it that for hundreds of years you have so much
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: of this sort of creativity and so much of this
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: diversity pluriformity, of the constructive text and then at a
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: certain point when it be, it's whenever it be. There
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: was the sort of the opposite move. I moved towards rigidity.
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: I moved towards catonization, move towards stopping the process of
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: textual creatives and say, Okay, this is the work that
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: we have, the book that we have, this is holy
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: or special or something, and that's it. And from this
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: point forward we have sort of different textual genres. Like
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: what did that shift look like?
• 44:26
  Speaker 2: So I don't actually think the shift happened. And I'm
• 44:30
  Speaker 2: not alone here. I mean, Jeffrey Kahn would say the
• 44:32
  Speaker 2: creativity I used to think it happened, you know, But
• 44:37
  Speaker 2: what I've come to understand is exactly. I mean, I've
• 44:41
  Speaker 2: stood exactly in your shoes before, thinking that this is
• 44:44
  Speaker 2: wildly creative, and then everything stops, like the world stops.
• 44:47
  Speaker 2: And I want to say that the world never stopped.
• 44:49
  Speaker 2: And we know this, especially from the chiro Geniza. It's
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: extraordinary our manuscripts, the rabbinic imagination, growth and creativity. I'm thinking,
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: for example, about the work of y Shai Rosenspy. He's
• 45:01
  Speaker 2: working on a new book about hermoneutical principles. You think
• 45:04
  Speaker 2: you know the hermon principles from the list of hermonutical principles,
• 45:07
  Speaker 2: but that's not where we learn how the rabbis read.
• 45:09
  Speaker 2: It's constantly growing and changing and developing. And there's so
• 45:13
  Speaker 2: many different ways in which this happens. I'm jokingly summarized
• 45:19
  Speaker 2: an extraordinary body of work of Jeffrey Khan and talking
• 45:22
  Speaker 2: about four dimensional reading where you have I already alluded
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: to this, but you have the consonants, you have the nikud,
• 45:30
  Speaker 2: you have the vowels, you have the cantillation, and then
• 45:33
  Speaker 2: you have the masora. But it's constantly moving and changing meaning.
• 45:37
  Speaker 2: And this is also generative a course for the history
• 45:40
  Speaker 2: of rabbinic interpretation which continues to grow and move in
• 45:44
  Speaker 2: so many different directions. I mean to say that in
• 45:48
  Speaker 2: an environment where mikra is fixed, even though it's read
• 45:51
  Speaker 2: in radically different ways and transformed in new commentaries with
• 45:55
  Speaker 2: new meaning and new contextualization, that the tradition is rigid
• 45:59
  Speaker 2: is not the case I think, and I'm not alone,
• 46:02
  Speaker 2: but I will tell you my view with the what
• 46:05
  Speaker 2: we would call mi kra. First of all, we have
• 46:07
  Speaker 2: many different iterations of law and profits where profits certainly
• 46:12
  Speaker 2: includes Dahlim. People like Larry Shifman have argued we even
• 46:15
  Speaker 2: have a tripartite canon already in the Second Temple period.
• 46:18
  Speaker 2: I'm less convinced, but there's something deep about his insight,
• 46:21
  Speaker 2: which is the canon is forming, and it's forming, perhaps
• 46:25
  Speaker 2: in different ways for different communities, but it's forming. Nevertheless,
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: we don't have to wait to track tape patro when
• 46:31
  Speaker 2: we say who wrote what to really argue that we
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: have something like an emerged canon. We know it's before.
• 46:36
  Speaker 2: We know there's certain texts that are commented upon and
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: certain texts that are forgotten. Even if we continue to
• 46:42
  Speaker 2: see certain texts like Ben Sira ecclesiastic has continue to
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: be cited, it doesn't seem to carry the same authority.
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: I think you called you, you know, kind of kind
• 46:52
  Speaker 2: of alluded to Rajakodash like a spirited text or a
• 46:55
  Speaker 2: holy text. I think you use that language. But if
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: you look within the biblical texts already, you see there's
• 47:02
  Speaker 2: certain texts and certain tropes that are repeated again and again.
• 47:06
  Speaker 2: Certain language about the breed, certain language about the Shamah,
• 47:10
  Speaker 2: certain certain texts that become cited again and again and
• 47:14
  Speaker 2: are played with and are almost meditated U bond right,
• 47:18
  Speaker 2: uva heem ya ya yoman valaila law codes that are
• 47:22
  Speaker 2: written and rewritten. What's happening in Seyferdvarin. It already has
• 47:25
  Speaker 2: a text, and it's rewriting that text, and it preserves
• 47:28
  Speaker 2: that text and the rewritten text alongside. And the history
• 47:31
  Speaker 2: of interpretation describes the priests, the Hahamim, the unshi, kanasadagad llah,
• 47:36
  Speaker 2: whatever body we want to talk about anachronistically or precisely
• 47:41
  Speaker 2: than na vi Aim, for example, they are preserving. And
• 47:44
  Speaker 2: when the text is vulnerable to destruction or destroyed or burnt,
• 47:49
  Speaker 2: right as we see in your Miyahu, it gets rewritten
• 47:52
  Speaker 2: and it's generated again. But that generation. So the fixity
• 47:58
  Speaker 2: or the fact that some text settle and our generate
• 48:01
  Speaker 2: other texts, doesn't mean that the textual tradition itself becomes rigid,
• 48:06
  Speaker 2: nor does it mean that the legal traditions or the
• 48:09
  Speaker 2: normative ritual practice associated with those texts are fixed. In time,
• 48:15
  Speaker 2: it allows for Judaism to define itself again and again.
• 48:20
  Speaker 2: And here's a wild thing, and this is a really
• 48:22
  Speaker 2: wild point, and I just want to leave you with
• 48:23
  Speaker 2: this one point. You think, after the Kurman after the
• 48:26
  Speaker 2: destruction in seventy, whether it's seventy in a Shia Cone
• 48:29
  Speaker 2: very carefully has written, very beautifully, it's retrospectively understood to
• 48:34
  Speaker 2: be the end of you know, the seventy is retrospectively
• 48:39
  Speaker 2: a destruction period. We know that Judaism continues, but the
• 48:43
  Speaker 2: memory and the presence of the temple never ends. In
• 48:48
  Speaker 2: very creative and wild ways. I'm not saying I'm not
• 48:50
  Speaker 2: talking about sacrifice. I'm talking about you know, incense burners
• 48:54
  Speaker 2: and representations of temple on the synagogues, for example, Sipoi
• 48:59
  Speaker 2: right in Sepharis. But it continues even afterwards, you know,
• 49:03
  Speaker 2: in the Avoda service. And I'm not telling you anything
• 49:06
  Speaker 2: you don't know, but I want to say that the
• 49:08
  Speaker 2: memory and the construction and reconstruction of what happened there
• 49:12
  Speaker 2: continues to be read and reread, and the texts themselves
• 49:15
  Speaker 2: continue to be read and reread. So it's meaningful, right,
• 49:18
  Speaker 2: the relationship between texts. And I've done a lot of
• 49:21
  Speaker 2: work on reading practices and the reason why I like
• 49:23
  Speaker 2: reading practices it's because of it's a metaterm that gets
• 49:26
  Speaker 2: around the problems of intertextuality or you know, or early
• 49:30
  Speaker 2: Midrash or rewritten Bible. And I want to talk about
• 49:34
  Speaker 2: practices of reading like that are that contain so many
• 49:38
  Speaker 2: different ways of thinking and reading and breathing texts and
• 49:43
  Speaker 2: borrowing from philosopher Peter Keevy, who's really talking about Christian
• 49:48
  Speaker 2: traditions and the Western tradition, but going back and thinking
• 49:51
  Speaker 2: about what are the practices of reading that we can discern.
• 49:54
  Speaker 2: For example, take a look those of you that can
• 49:57
  Speaker 2: go on Google, you know, for the Dead Sea scrolls,
• 50:01
  Speaker 2: look at the Isaiah scroll. There's a guy named Marcella
• 50:03
  Speaker 2: Fidenzio who's done really wonderful work at looking at over
• 50:07
  Speaker 2: one hundred years of corrections and interpolations and growth of
• 50:12
  Speaker 2: Isaiah in little ways, not big ways, as well as
• 50:16
  Speaker 2: understanding the history the hands that wrote the Bible. There's
• 50:19
  Speaker 2: this wonderful project by Maladin Popovitch at the University of Coroniga.
• 50:22
  Speaker 2: But I think, you know, I think one thing we
• 50:25
  Speaker 2: can really do is understand that as traditions grow, whether
• 50:30
  Speaker 2: we're thinking about time, whether it's Sarreit Gribbitz or Arian
• 50:34
  Speaker 2: Bucker or Sasha Stern, and we're thinking about calendar, whether
• 50:38
  Speaker 2: we're thinking about concepts, of nature, which I've been working
• 50:41
  Speaker 2: a little bit on even in the absence of the
• 50:43
  Speaker 2: word nature, whether we're thinking about Tavnite archetype, you know,
• 50:47
  Speaker 2: where's the ideal? And what do you do with the
• 50:50
  Speaker 2: instantiated or derivative expression of these texts. This is what
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: I think we can learn from the Hellenistic period, that
• 50:59
  Speaker 2: judy is alive and dynamic to what we've come to
• 51:03
  Speaker 2: call Jewish philosophy or marchevet Israel from its earliest inception.
• 51:08
  Speaker 2: And here I include, by the way, the Pentitooch and
• 51:12
  Speaker 2: en psalms. Right.
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: I there's a lot that I do want to dive in,
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: but there's another nest of questions that we must get to.
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: And you know it would be unforgivable we left it out,
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: which is that part of your work. Also it goes
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: beyond the historical into something like the philosophical, right, especially
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: on questions of of what is authorship and and and
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: sort of the the complicated you know, complicated questions and
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: complicated quandaries surrounding that. And and you do go into
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: this a little bit and and sort of invoke philosophical
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: conceptions of it, such as you know, wrestling with Fuko
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: and his conceptions of authorship. So can you give us
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: a little bit of a taste of how your work
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: and how your discovery is in this field shed light
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: or at least interact with the question of what does
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: it mean to write a text in the abstract I suppose,
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: and how the authors in the period that you're focusing on,
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: the Second Temple period, how their works bear on the
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: questions and the difficulty surrounding, defining and pinning down what
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: does it mean to be a composer to be an author?
• 52:22
  Speaker 2: Sure, I mean this really touches on my very first monograph,
• 52:24
  Speaker 2: which is a revised monograph coming out of my dissertation
• 52:28
  Speaker 2: in about fifteen plus articles, and a number of my
• 52:31
  Speaker 2: students who've actually written on this as well in their
• 52:33
  Speaker 2: own dissertations and now monographs. The problem started when I
• 52:39
  Speaker 2: was studying at Harvard and people just assumed that Deuteronomy
• 52:45
  Speaker 2: was a forgery because of course Moses didn't write it,
• 52:49
  Speaker 2: and it's just derivative or its propaganda like the rest
• 52:53
  Speaker 2: of the Deuteronomistic history. And I didn't understand, Like, I
• 52:56
  Speaker 2: just didn't understand, why would you think it's a forgery?
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: We have more creative categories for understanding attribution in antiquity.
• 53:05
  Speaker 2: So I wrote my first book on attribution. I called
• 53:08
  Speaker 2: it mosaic discourse. Really, I married Fuko, who was really
• 53:13
  Speaker 2: pulling lots and lots, especially out of Nietzsche's Homeric question,
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: challenging the question of getting the original Homer, getting and
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: I'm thinking about Eichorn and both getting the original Moses,
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: the original Homer. And I found myself in conversation deeply
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: with classicists who are asking the same question, and we're
• 53:31
  Speaker 2: thinking together about practices and antiquity, about attribution. And of course,
• 53:37
  Speaker 2: I mean, I'm sure you're already thinking about this. I thought, oh, well,
• 53:41
  Speaker 2: there's takanats frame, and there's also halahala moosh miSinai, Like,
• 53:45
  Speaker 2: these are categories that we know about that grow and
• 53:48
  Speaker 2: change texts. We know about this from the rabbis, but
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: we also have come to understand that this claim that
• 53:55
  Speaker 2: materials go back to Sinai or the scribes are are
• 54:00
  Speaker 2: correcting as a way of authorizing and underwriting the practices
• 54:05
  Speaker 2: of writing and correction, or the apologies for Isaiah or Daniel.
• 54:12
  Speaker 2: We know, we know that it couldn't have been the
• 54:14
  Speaker 2: same figure over time unless you know, he was someone
• 54:20
  Speaker 2: who never died, right, he was like a figure who
• 54:22
  Speaker 2: continued to be reborn or you know, lived hundreds of years.
• 54:27
  Speaker 2: So it's not pulling the wool over our eyes. Rather,
• 54:32
  Speaker 2: I argued that there's a very generative interpretative dimension, which
• 54:37
  Speaker 2: now I would say, goes hand in hand with a
• 54:39
  Speaker 2: vitality of Judaism. You know, to say, as Fuco says something,
• 54:43
  Speaker 2: as Shakespearean or Marxist or you know, Nietzsche would say
• 54:47
  Speaker 2: something is Homeric, is not to say that it's a forgery.
• 54:50
  Speaker 2: It's to say that it grows from the tradition. And
• 54:53
  Speaker 2: you know, one of the great moments of a colleague
• 54:55
  Speaker 2: of mine from he's now at Yale, he was at Toronto,
• 54:58
  Speaker 2: Brettanwood gave this great talk about you know, there's Platonic
• 55:02
  Speaker 2: thinking that continued to reimagine itself and the Stoa failed
• 55:05
  Speaker 2: to reproduce themselves. And we had this great conversation where I,
• 55:09
  Speaker 2: you know, and he said, like your tradition, the Mosaic tradition,
• 55:12
  Speaker 2: it continued. I mean, they're very interesting ways in which
• 55:15
  Speaker 2: we could talk about the Kantian tradition as inheriting Platonism
• 55:20
  Speaker 2: and inheriting the philosophical trajectories, and I think the way
• 55:23
  Speaker 2: in which we think about Moses and we think about
• 55:27
  Speaker 2: you know, Ezra, It's such a wonderful line in Toseefta.
• 55:30
  Speaker 2: Had Mosha not received the Torah Ezra could have what
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: does that even mean? Like that's a wild, wild Rabui.
• 55:37
  Speaker 2: It's like he's worthy of it. But this also really
• 55:40
  Speaker 2: opened my eyes to understanding what authorship meant. There's a
• 55:44
  Speaker 2: wonderful new book which thinks and rethinks about authorship in
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: the Rabbinic period by Moui Vidas, also in my series
• 55:50
  Speaker 2: the Oxford University Press by Bone of the Humanities, also
• 55:53
  Speaker 2: where he's thinking about these things with respect to the Rabbi.
• 55:56
  Speaker 2: So one thing is challenging this notion of forgery. The
• 56:00
  Speaker 2: second move was to talk about attribution as an interpretative construct,
• 56:04
  Speaker 2: and I worked especially with a scholar who's now at
• 56:07
  Speaker 2: Harvard University. She's a Latinist and works on literature and
• 56:10
  Speaker 2: philosophical concepts, and we talked about interpretation the growth oft trition,
• 56:15
  Speaker 2: whether it's the Virgilian corpus or it's the year Miyahuu
• 56:18
  Speaker 2: corpus continues to grow and develop. The third move. It's
• 56:22
  Speaker 2: the most recent move very much indebted to two students
• 56:26
  Speaker 2: who've been thinking about this with me. Both finished their
• 56:29
  Speaker 2: PhDs what we call Dephils and Oxford, Hans Decker and
• 56:31
  Speaker 2: Elizabeth Stell. In different ways, they thought about attribution and
• 56:35
  Speaker 2: authorship Hans and Wisdom literature, Lizzie Stell in these fragmentary
• 56:39
  Speaker 2: Jewish text especially Ezekiel the Exagoge, and the growth of
• 56:43
  Speaker 2: liturgy around Pessoch, and we started thinking more and more
• 56:47
  Speaker 2: about the growth of tradition associated with figures, but also
• 56:51
  Speaker 2: also about I don't think the analogy is of good analogy,
• 56:55
  Speaker 2: but I've used it nevertheless, and I've complicated it fan
• 56:58
  Speaker 2: fiction the way we think about collaborative writing and the
• 57:01
  Speaker 2: growth of tradition, and how to differentiate that from what
• 57:05
  Speaker 2: we see in antiquity, which is an ongoing permission, if
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: you will, to grow tradition. So even today I've not
• 57:12
  Speaker 2: really formulated it as clearly as I did right now
• 57:15
  Speaker 2: today to you, I've not properly written this. We have.
• 57:17
  Speaker 2: I have two pieces coming out with Elizabeth style on
• 57:19
  Speaker 2: this very matter, which are not yet seen the light
• 57:22
  Speaker 2: of day. But even then I think I've taken it
• 57:24
  Speaker 2: one step further today, which is vitality of scripture goes
• 57:27
  Speaker 2: hand in hand with how we conceive of authorship. And
• 57:31
  Speaker 2: it's true right that and Fuquot says this, and others
• 57:34
  Speaker 2: many many other people have thought about authorship and authority
• 57:37
  Speaker 2: in this way. There's a scholar, Marcus Hefner in Zurich
• 57:41
  Speaker 2: now who's also written about this. And here this is
• 57:44
  Speaker 2: a moment where I need my colleagues who work in
• 57:47
  Speaker 2: antiquity to help me, like I can't do it myself,
• 57:50
  Speaker 2: because to do it myself is to stay within one lane.
• 57:53
  Speaker 2: We need an eight lane highway here. We need to
• 57:55
  Speaker 2: move in and out of traditions that think about authorship
• 57:59
  Speaker 2: and growth and tradition in order to understand what authority is.
• 58:03
  Speaker 2: And if we find out right you know that Mosha
• 58:06
  Speaker 2: did or didn't write a text right, or that you
• 58:09
  Speaker 2: know it didn't bother the rabbis, for example, that it
• 58:13
  Speaker 2: might have been Joshua Yehoshua who wrote the end of
• 58:16
  Speaker 2: Seyfrid Varreim, this didn't bother them because it wasn't about
• 58:19
  Speaker 2: whether or not he authored it. It was about a
• 58:21
  Speaker 2: word that you used earlier, Holly authorized. That's what these
• 58:26
  Speaker 2: books are in the hands of their trade. Its in
• 58:29
  Speaker 2: the people who received the tradition from them. And I
• 58:33
  Speaker 2: would like this a beautiful little moment in the Idea
• 58:36
  Speaker 2: of Biblical Poetry by James Coogle where he talks about
• 58:41
  Speaker 2: when he's talking about poetry and how to understand early
• 58:44
  Speaker 2: Biblical song, shira try to understand it in its own
• 58:48
  Speaker 2: terms without being co opted. It doesn't mean that I
• 58:52
  Speaker 2: don't understand the problematic of authorship. And also it doesn't
• 58:56
  Speaker 2: mean that there isn't the concept of authorship and antiquity.
• 59:00
  Speaker 2: We don't want to say that, oh, they just didn't
• 59:01
  Speaker 2: understand what we understand, not at all. We have texts
• 59:04
  Speaker 2: where people are named, what to do with those names?
• 59:07
  Speaker 2: That's the stuff. That's something that Mooly's thinking about in
• 59:10
  Speaker 2: very complex ways. Someone like Isaiah Goffney many many years
• 59:14
  Speaker 2: ago thought about this. But we want to go even
• 59:16
  Speaker 2: further than that, because we want to make more complex
• 59:20
  Speaker 2: and more rich our understanding of what it means to
• 59:23
  Speaker 2: generate work. I think we have many in thinking about
• 59:26
  Speaker 2: teaching to your students and your teaching and thinking with
• 59:30
  Speaker 2: them our students, our undergraduates, and our postgraduates, our graduate students.
• 59:36
  Speaker 2: They have a lot of context, you know, to think
• 59:39
  Speaker 2: about notions of authorship and the growth of tradition. I
• 59:42
  Speaker 2: think AI is a great context to think creatively instead
• 59:47
  Speaker 2: of destructively about everything that's lost. Let's think about positive
• 59:51
  Speaker 2: ways of using new opportunities to understand the past, but
• 59:55
  Speaker 2: then reciprocally use the past to teach us about the present.
• 59:59
  Speaker 2: And I think ship is one great way of doing that.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: There was a fascinating and a very rich answer, and
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: I can think of no better way of sort of
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: concluding our discussion there. I do want to ask one
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: final question, which is a question I post all my
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: guests or some version of this, because this is actually
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: a bit of a difficult topic to pose this question.
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: But you know, you deal with and you read a
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: lot of text in antiquity, jubilees and many others that
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: you've mentioned today. If you could, ah now this is
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: a difficult question to any other guest, I would ask
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: the following question, if you could sit with the author
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: of any of these texts and take them to dinner,
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: and you know, approach a question with them or ask
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: a questions who would it be and who would you
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: be asking? But of course, the problem with our conversation
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: today is that it's sort of radically complicated the question
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: of authorship and composition and who would be responsible for
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: the ultimate generation of the text. So I actually don't
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: know how to exactly formulate this particular yeah, but if
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: you could answer it, despite the halting way in which
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: I've asked it, in light of everything we've been discussing
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: for the last hour, I'm going.
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 2: To answer it in a historical way, and I'll tell
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 2: you why. We know that there are people in antiquity
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 2: that we could talk to, and we know of real
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 2: people who lived, and we also know of priests, scribes, prophets,
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 2: and even even if we can't find their exact moment
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 2: in time, I think it's nevertheless the case that we
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 2: know that there were these different offices and that they
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 2: preserved and transmitted tradition. But to get to your question
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 2: more directly today, I would like to sit with Filo
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 2: of Alexandria, because I just wrote a piece about how
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 2: to think about reception, the history of reception of Filo,
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 2: and there's a big, big new book that was just
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 2: written on it. In a few days, I'm going to
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 2: be at a conference where I'm talking about this wonderful
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 2: new book called The Reception of Filo of Alexandria. What
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 2: I say in my response on what I'm going to
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 2: say today is that Filo is an extraordinary example where
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 2: we can't do a line of reception Filo the rabbis
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 2: because we can't do the connections. We can do Filo
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 2: and Clement and Alexandria and maybe moments in some of
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 2: the early church fathers who preserved him. But Filo is
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 2: full as all Beck, as James kg hanof Albeck, James Kugle,
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 2: Samuel Belkin, Naomi Kohane, and many many others have seen.
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 2: Is full of what we would call early rabbinic interpretation,
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 2: and he even tells you how he got access to it.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 2: He also tells you that he's inspired from moments, their
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 2: charismatic moments where Philo himself tells you that he was
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 2: inspired and he saw something, something out of the ordinary.
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 2: And he also gives you commentary, real commentary in the
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 2: questionis you have line commentary? Line commentary, He also tells
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 2: you about this explosion of translation, he contains it and
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 2: he opens it I want to understand, and also he
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 2: himself we know that he went to Gais Killigilla. We
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 2: know that he stepped in for the community in antiquity,
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 2: and we know that like Filo, like Grumbam, like Sajika,
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 2: like perhaps leving Us and Rosen Spike and Harmon Kohne,
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 2: he was embedded and enmeshed and absorbed by the philosophical tradition.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 2: And yet he was still deeply committed to the law
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 2: and to preserving the law. If you look at his
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 2: discussion about thirty eight, the destruction of the Jewish community
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 2: and the earliest Elias Bickerman called it the first pagram.
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 2: He talks about trying to survive, and it has so
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 2: many profound affinities. As Stephen Frod once suggested in a
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 2: seminar with Asarah rug Gey Malhoud, which people have not
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 2: it's a great dissertation. Anyone who's listening, someone has to
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 2: read this text to understand loss. So it's about loss,
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 2: it's about recovery, it's about joy, the joy of reading
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 2: and the joy of interpretation. But nothing about Filo's work
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 2: is straightforwardly interpretative. And I would want to say to him,
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 2: you know, you created a new way of thinking. The
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 2: classicists try to engage in, but they need the Biblicy.
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 2: The Biblicists try to engage him, but they need the philosophers.
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 2: You know, he was so ahead of his time, and
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 2: yet and yet he was very much a person of
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 2: his time. And I think that to talk to Filo
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 2: was also to understand the dead Sea squirrels community. It's
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 2: also to understand these questions of assembly, of refinement, of fixity,
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 2: and of growth of scripture. So in a way I've
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 2: been thinking with Filo now since I was in graduate school.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 2: I was given the assignment by James Kugele to plunder
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 2: his text, to try to identify motifs with James Kugle
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 2: in his the Bible as it was. So I worked
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 2: with the text, and he knew and you know, and
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 2: James Coogle knew that philosophically, I would kind of get
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 2: really taken by Filo. But interpretatively historically and also linguistically,
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 2: it's fascinating what he does with language and with interpretation.
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 2: So I think I would choose Filo also, and this
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 2: might satisfy some of your rather historical questions which I
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 2: appreciated to around me. He's a real figure in time
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 2: and that might help us understand more, even though of course,
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 2: I would love to talk to imaginary figures or figures
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 2: that you know. Maybe there were five different Isaiahs or
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 2: six different people called the mar etsatk the teacher of Righteousness.
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 2: We know there was one Filo. We don't know if
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 2: he was a school that produced some of the work
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 2: or if it was his hand. And in a way
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 2: it doesn't really matter, like the Rembrandt school and its legacy.
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 2: So it's exciting in that sense. And it also opens
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 2: up this world of so called spae unentum and instead
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 2: makes it a Judaism that is alive, as I said
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 2: early on today, to its past and to its future. Wow.
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: Okay, that's a rousing quote upon which to end. Professor
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: Hindy Diamond, thank you so very much for joining us
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: today on the Podcast of Jewish Isaiah. This has been
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: a fascinating conversation and we'll look forward to all your
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: forthcoming scholarship on this particular topic.
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 2: Thank you.
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: This has been the podcast of Jewish Ideas I tell
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: Her in Motion, produced by Alisha Kellman and myself JJ Kimbri,
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: edited and mixed by Alisha Kelman. You can stay up
• 1:06:06
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• 1:06:08
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• 1:06:11
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