The Invention of Hebrew (Traditions)

By Seth L. Sanders

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 The Invention of Hebrew

(Editor's note: we welcome, and are grateful, that Kevin was willing to do a review of this volume. He brings a world of knowledge and insight to the table. Thanks, Kevin, for taking the time to do this.)

The Invention of Hebrew is the fifth and latest volume in the series "Traditions", edited by Gregory Nagy, which is devoted to major scholarly works on the "Old World" from which contemporary Western traditions arose. Prior works in this series are Baby and Child Heroes in Ancient Greece, C.P. Cavafy: The Economics of Metonymy, Homer's Text and Language, and Indo-European Sacred Space: Vedic and Roman Cult. The author of the volume under review, Seth L. Sanders, received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1999 and is presently an assistant professor of religion at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He serves as the editor of the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions.

This is Sanders' first published book, and its thesis is essentially that Hebrew was the first successful vernacular literature, which helped create ancient Israel and the Bible as both historical and imaginative possibilities.

Between front and back matter the book consists of four chapters. The first, titled "Modernity's Ghosts: The Bible as Political Communication," begins by describing the developing sense of modernity and the contrast of such with the non-modern. The problems and potentials of biblical studies are often traced only back to the monumental work of such 19th century German scholars as W.M.L. de Wette and Julius Wellhausen, but what they accomplished would not have been possible without earlier seismic shifts in how we view scripture. The Bible long had been the supreme textual warrant for both church and king, a situation which early modern political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza attacked with their devastating critiques of the Bible. They demonstrated that the texts cannot be rationally seen as having inherent authority in and of themselves, that they speak to their own times, but not to the current age. This paved the way for such men as Bishop Robert Lowth and Johann Gottfried Herder, forebears to what would become modern biblical scholarship, which examines the Bible rigorously, but usually quite apart from the political concerns of contemporary society. We have reached a point in scholarship where it is now possible, combining the insights of political theorists, anthropologists and philologists, to examine the political communication inherent in early Hebrew writing, and to see therein a new form of self-representation.

The second chapter is titled "What Was the Alphabet For?" and focuses on the rise of written vernaculars. To us today it seem natural that French people should read and write French, and German people German, and so forth. But this was not the situation in the Ancient Near East. People spoke Hebrew for a long time before it ever occurred to anyone to try to write it down. Communication in the second millennium B.C.E. was dominated by classical Mesopotamian syllabic cuneiform, which generally was only learned by scribes sponsored by the state. The linear alphabet existed during this time, at first used by soldiers for graffiti in desolate, out of the way places. We tend to think of the alphabet as technologically superior and of its eventual rise as inevitable, but this was not the case. The first alphabetic vernacular--Ugaritic--arose due to specific state sponsorship. The later rise of linear alphabets in the Levant was linked with political efforts. Alphabetic vernaculars opened up new possibilities of more widely-spread participation, as illustrated by ritual texts that assume the people--not just the subjects of the king, but imagined as agents in their own right--as a central protagonist. Vernaculars such as Hebrew originated as political communication in which power flows from the ability to recruit kin-based groups of people into relationships, thus breaking the monopoly of the state in writing and communication.

The third chapter is titled "Empires and Alphabets in Late Bronze Age Canaan." This chapter tells the story of two different worlds that existed side by side. The world of political prestige was that of imperial syllabic writing (mostly Babylonian cuneiform), used as a tool of bureaucracy for administration and control of large areas of land, people and objects. In contrast alphabetic texts were much more humble, and almost always simply related to the object on which they were inscribed, with scarcely a complete sentence among them. But neither form of writing deliberately or consistently represented any one language, nor spoke to a public. Sanders' focus in this chapter is on the epigraphic evidence, a wise choice that largely allows him to avoid the thorny issues entailed in trying to date biblical texts and unwind them from their later editing. A major example he discusses is the Amarna Letters--reflecting communication networks among political entities. In the Levant, these letters reflect a local West Semitic influence, sometimes called Canaano-Akkadian. The movement from the prestigious East Semitic cuneiform texts to West Semitic alphabetical ones did not reflect an easy or simply evolution. The late Iron Age vernaculars such as Hebrew that arose in the Levant were the result of the intersection of these two textual worlds. The first tentative meeting of these writing systems was at Ugarit in 13th century Syria, where cuneiform symbols were used to represent an alphabetic writing system.

The fourth and final chapter is titled "The Invention of Hebrew in Iron Age Israel," and details the rise of written vernaculars in the southern Levant. These can be studied based on inscriptions that appear in specific archaeological contexts. Such writing ushered in a new ideal of collective participation in the texts, as opposed to their being merely instruments of top-down sovereignty. Beginning with the twelfth century B.C.E., Sanders goes century by century examining the inscriptions and how they eventually gave rise to local vernacular literatures. From arrowheads inscribed with the signature of a local warlord, to educational abecedaries and the bureaucratically useless Gezer Calendar, to the inscription of Mesha, king of Moab (the first known West Semitic royal monument), to the engineering of Hebrew itself from the ninth to the sixth centuries B.C.E., Sanders traces the rise of non-monarchic writing in Israel. The Siloam Inscription well illustrates the movement from a presentation of the king to a presentation of the text itself as such. Prophetic monuments show how individuals other than the king were able to communicate directly with the people.

I will admit that the political philosophy stuff in the first chapter was a bit of a grind for me to work my way through, but once I got past that point (rather like surviving Second Nephi, I suppose) I quite enjoyed the book. Sanders has taken existing knowledge and looked at it comprehensively from an entirely new angle, and thus has provided substantial insights into our understanding of the background making the Hebrew Bible possible as a text.

Although the book does not have specific relevance to Mormonism, there were a few things in which I took a personal interest viewing them through a Mormon lens. P. 131 talks about the rise of literacy and scribalism in Israel, and it was not based on state sponsorship as was the case in Mesopotamia, but on more of a kinship model. People didn't learn to write in special state-sponsored schools so much as in out of the way places like tombs, desert shrines, way stations, palace steps, caves. The Hebrew scribes were less like monks or clerks and more like potters or metalworkers. Literacy travelled through trade networks among craftsmen of various types. Craft scribalism could be turned to the state's purposes but was not bound by it. In Israel, Late Bronze Age sites like Taanach and Beth Shemesh, which produced no diplomatic texts at all, attested both bronze forges and texts in local alphabetic writing side by side. This picture put Nephi's familial and craft-based scribalism into a realistic historical context for me.

I published an article, "How to Worship Our Mother in Heaven (Without Getting Excommunicated)" in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 40/4 (Winter 2008), in which I began by cataloging Old Testament allusions to Asherah, the Canaanite mother goddess figure that was also worshiped in Pre-Exilic Israel. So I was interested to find that on p. 31 Sanders mentions one that I missed. Isaiah 51:9-10, following the translation of Umberto Cassuto, reads as follows:

"Arise, arise, clothe yourself in might, Arm of the Lord! Arise as in days of old, as in ages past! Are you not he who cut Rahab, who pierced Tannin? Are you not he who dried up Sea, the waters of the great Deep?"

Sanders points out, contra Cassuto, that this text is actually addressing a personified female being: "despite the translation 'he' in English, the Hebrew uses the third-person feminine singular pronoun and feminine singular participles in a sequence of addresses to a personified female being." Of course, since the Hebrew noun rendered "arm" is feminine, one could make the argument that the feminine forms are simply used in agreement with that noun and do not countenance a female being. But given the close parallel of this passage with Ugaritic myth, I'm inclined to accept Sanders' reading. So here "Arm of the Lord" is a personified female being--presumably Asherah, the mother goddess herself.

A number of times Sanders points out that Hebrew made possible a discourse directly aimed at the people themselves using a collective "you." I was interested in this point given my work on the phenomenon of enallage in the Book of Mormon. Enallage, Greek for "interchange," refers to various grammatical interchanges of form made intentionally for rhetorical effect. In the classic example, the material in Exodus is framed using second person plural pronouns, "you," but when we come to the Ten Commandments the plural all of a sudden shifts to a singular form of address, "thou," as if to emphasize that the commandments are binding on each and every person as if directed to him alone. Sanders mentions this example at p. 163. Anyone interested in reading further about this should consult my "Enallage in the Book of Mormon," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 3/1 (1994), and my "Divine Discourse Directed at a Prophet's Posterity in the Plural: Further Light on Enallage," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 6/2 (1997). My studies both focused on rhetorical shifts in number; for an example involving a rhetorical shift in person, see David Bokovoy, "From Distance to Proximity: A Poetic Function of Enallage in the Hebrew Bible and the Book of Mormon," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 9/1 (2000).