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July 11, 2009
Five Influential Primary Sources
Here we go again. James Spinti wants me to join the five influential primary sources parade. Perhaps if I had purchased more books from Eisenbrauns I could have avoided this.
While I had a small problem transcribing it, here is the cadence for this week's march.
1. List the 5 primary sources that have most affected your scholarship, thoughts about antiquity, and/or understanding of theUgaritic literatureNT/OT.2. Books from
Ugaritthe Bible are off limits unless you really want to list one, I certainly will not chastise you for it.3. Finally, choose individual works if you can. This will be more interesting than listing the entire corpus of Cicero as one of your choices.
I take NT to mean any one of a couple of slightly differing collections of Hellenistic Greek works that Christians treat as having some special authority and OT to mean Tanakh even if some traditions would supplement it in various ways. For this post, I will focus on Tanakh.
The easiest answer to this question is, "The last five primary sources that I read are the most influential." If our minds are basically Bayesian machines, as I think they are, then the only things that really influence our priors are the most recent things encountered. Yes, I'm still wound up about epistemology. But I suppose this won't be fair because I didn't walk that way in the another recent parade. So I'll try to standup and march to the beat as best I can. Before I do, I want to waste your time by pointing out a few sights along the parade route.
First, I've always been a little confused about the expressions "primary source" and "secondary source." It seems to me that every secondary source is itself a primary source for something. Few would dispute my claim that Dever's Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? is a secondary source for the origins of ancient Israel. We might, and should, debate its reliability as a secondary source but no one would confuse it for a primary source for the topics Dever discusses. But it is a primary source for the ongoing debate over Israelite origins. How about the Hexagonal Prism's account of Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem? At one level, its hard to deny that it is a primary source for what took place in Judah at the same time as the accounts described in 2 Kings 18. But was it composed by an eyewitness? I doubt that it was. If I am wrong, how reliable was that witness? The Hexagonal Prism is, however, a great primary source for one Assyrian prospective on those events. To what extent is Herodotus II:141 a primary source for the problems that Sennacherib's army faced against Egypt? Not much, I think but who knows. Is it even a primary source for how later Egyptians remembered the events? Or is it only a primary source for how Herodotus saw the matter? A final example, what are the Khirbet el-Qom inscriptions primary sources for? Narrowly, and not taking into account their linguistic value, they are primary sources for the burial practices of those who buried their dead at Khirbet el-Qom. Are they primary sources for anything else? I'm not so sure but Khirbet el-Qom 3, when taken together with other inscriptions, is sure suggestive of a much broader cultural issue. Are they secondary sources for anything? Who knows?
Second, when it comes to the many subdivisions of the various books of Tanakh's, which of them are primary sources? Which are secondary sources? Which are both? It is usually extremely hard to say. The same questions apply when we consider any one book or Tanakh as a whole. I'm not only, or even primarily, referring to historical sources but sources for all types of cultural and literary phenomena, even theology and anthropology. I'll let these questions stand with only one comment. My server doesn't have enough memory for a full discussion of this issue and you don't have enough time to download it. Here's that single comment in the form of three questions that often drive our desire for these extra biblical primary sources. When we read a passage in Tanakh are we dealing with a primary or secondary source? If it is a primary source, for what is it a primary source? If it is a secondary source, for what is it a secondary source? I wonder if this is the best motivation for such a quest. I think it isn't.
Third, when I read a contemporary novel by an American author written in English, I am generally able to understand it with a fairly high reliability. When I read a nineteenth century work, even in English, my ability to understand it reliably is not quite as great. If it is in the French or German language, languages I supposedly know how to read, the reliability of my understanding goes down considerably. I may think I understand a nineteenth century novel set in Paris and written in French but my understanding may be wrong in important ways. I'm just not as immersed in nineteenth century French culture as I am in twenty-first century (or maybe I should say twentieth century) American culture and I can never be. The only way I can improve the reliability of my understanding is to immerse myself in nineteenth century French culture to the best of my ability. Among other things, I would need to read very broadly - history (political but also economic and art history), novels, biographies, business documents, newspapers. In short, I'd need to get my mind around as much of the culture as I could and I'd still not be as reliable a reader of a nineteenth century French novel as I am of a twenty first century American English novel. If I have this problem when I turn to works that are only slightly over one hundred years old, in languages cognate to my own and which share significant elements with my subculture, how much harder is it to reliability read a set of works in a truly foreign language, from over two thousand years ago that, while being part of my cultural heritage, is none the less representative of a culture that, if I am honest, I can barely imagine? My problem is further impaired by there being next to nothing from the same time in the same language and the same subculture on which I can hone my intuitions. Yes, I am avoiding what it might mean to be a reliable reader. Again there's not enough memory or time.
With all that off my chest, I will now get back in step with the parade.
For reasons stated above, the Hebrew epigraphic material, as modest it is, is high on my list of influential primary sources. It hard to pick out any single text but administrative texts like Arad 31 may have an importance well beyond their surface value. What is the cultural and historical significance of the use of hieratic numerals in these texts? How might that influence our understanding of Iron Age culture in the southern Levant?
Because I want to read Tanakh reliably and because the contemporary epigraphic material is so limited, I draw on the material from the wider Near Eastern culture out of which Israel and Tanakh were born. But this is fraught with dangers. Because of the several direct contacts, I have little choose but to turn to Babylonian and Assyrian sources. It is all too easy to limit oneself to the undisputable parallels. If Carr and van der Toorn have taught us anything, it is the importance of scribal schools and therefore school texts for our understanding of the culture out of which all or part of Tanakh arose. So if on this day, at this time, I were forced to choose a single Akkadian text as a primary source for understanding Tanakh it just might be the Sa Vocabulary Series. But remember, I have abnormal interests.
The next place one must turn is Egypt. Again, it's easy to focus on things like the Instruction of Amenemope with its rather obvious, if somewhat curious, relationship to Proverbs 22:17-24:22. But I think it wrong to stop there, maybe even wrong to start there. Ancient Egypt produced a vast and difficult collection of writings. I doubt if anyone can even touch it all in a single lifetime. The fact that very few contemporary biblical scholars have trained in the Egyptian language does not help. Still, Tanakh frequently mentions relationships of various sorts with Egypt. Part of Tanakh tells us that the Israelites themselves were both masters and slaves in Egypt at one time. Holy Moses, one of Israel's most important ancestral leaders had an Egyptian name. And then there are those hieratic numerals. So what would I chose if I were forced to choose only one Egyptian work? For reasons that will need to await another post on another day, on this day I would pick the The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor.
And how can I fail to mention the texts in the Ugaritic language as important elements in the development of my still very limited cultural intuition. Perhaps ever more than elsewhere, one must be careful when approaching these texts. If one comes to them from a study of Hebrew, their language seems strange but at the same time familiar. It is sometimes hard to remind oneself that Ugaritc is not some kind of proto-Hebrew. The other problem is that the Ugaritic texts represent a very narrow chronological snapshoot that barely, if at all, overlaps the history out of which most of Tanakh developed. If Akkadian is my right hand, then Ugaritic is my left (I think I got this expression from Loren Fisher but I'm not sure). Again, we must consider the whole corpus - the administrative texts, the school texts no less than the mythological and the ritual texts. Today's choice? I'd say the Ba'al Cycle but that choice is subject to change without notice and likely without memory that I ever made it.
Since I need five to be allowed to continue to march along, I guess I should mention the corpus of Aramaic, Phoenician, Moabite and other inscriptions from the ancient Levant. If I needed to choose one, I'd go for the Balaam text from Deir 'Alla. There's a world of linguistic and cultural background in this most difficult text. Balaam is just a small part of it.
Two things become apparent from this exercise. First, with all there is to know, there is still not enough, and what there is is too fragmented, to raise reading reliability of Tanakh or any other set of works from antiquity above the most modest level. Second, because of the immensity of what is available, the effort must be a team effort. So if you are on the team and haven't shared your Five Influential Primary Sources consider yourself tagged.
Posted by Duane Smith at July 11, 2009 1:18 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |
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