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December 11, 2007
Is the Book of Numbers Still In the Torah?
Ever since John Hobbins posted a somewhat critical review of Ziony Zevit's recent paper "Scratched Silver and Painted Walls: Can We Date Biblical Texts Archaeologically?" and Jim West wrote an even more critical post on John's post, I've been thinking about Ketef Hinnom Amulet 2 and the so called Priestly Benediction in Numbers 6:24-25. If you don't know what the Ketef Hinnom Amulets or the Priestly Benediction are, John tells a little about them in his post. You can find Zevit's paper in the most recent Hebrew Studies. Among my random neuron firings on this subject a pattern emerged that might explain the linguistic and perhaps professional (as opposed to theological) origin of the Priestly Benediction and the couple of verses that precede it.
The problem is that someone else has already had and published 99.9999% of my great, original, ideas. So I decided to spend some quality time at School of Theology's library and check out a few commentaries on the Book of Numbers. I own several commentaries myself and none of them mentioned my idea. But they are all obsolete old mature so it doesn't matter much what they don't mention. Well, I got to the library soon after it opened this morning and all the recent commentaries and a few of the more mature ones were checked out. So this afternoon, I dropped by the Honnold/Mudd Library. There was nothing between Leviticus and Deuteronomy on the shelves. Numbers was gone, wiped out! There in lies the problem with such libraries; other people get to use them. It turns out the Marvin Sweeney is teaching a course on Numbers this semester and there is a term paper due soon.
So I started a literature search. There is a fairly large literature on the Priestly Benediction. Some of it is more useful then others of it. I still haven't found my bright idea anywhere but I am just beginning.
I do intend to post my idea in the next day or two but it sure would be nice to know how many people had this idea before I did. If you are wondering what the idea is, I think Numbers 6:22-25, with a couple of things put to the side as late(r) additions, has the form of the opening of a letter including an initial address and a greeting with extended blessing. Most, but not quite all, of the individual phrases occur, some word for word, in various letters from the Levant: details and examples to follow.
Posted by Duane Smith at December 11, 2007 4:02 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |
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