The Backdrop: Late Ancient Views on Biblical Authorship
The author of the Pentateuch is famously unknown. There are various ancient speculations about the relative roles of God and Moses in the production of the text,Footnote 1 and there is a plethora of modern investigations into the Bible's constituent documents and the authors responsible for them, but the biblical text itself is silent. The biblical narrator never identifies himself or herselfFootnote 2 and never narrates in the first person; rather he or she speaks “out of the void, in an authoritative voice that masks any authorial presence.”Footnote 3
This aspect of biblical narration has been defined as a “monopolization of omniscience,” something which was as revolutionary in the literary and ideological context of its dayFootnote 4 as it is strange and frustrating to our own contemporary literary expectations.Footnote 5
Already in the first centuries of the common era, during the period in which the very notion of authorship in the form now familiar to us was in the process of being articulated,Footnote 6 there was a range of responses to the Bible's omniscient, yet absent, narrating voice.
As a rule, Jewish and Christian writers of this period agreed in assigning dual responsibility for the text of the Pentateuch to Moses, on the one hand, and to God, or the Holy Spirit, on the other hand. Opinions differed as to the precise relationship between the human and divine agents. Was Moses to be conceived as an active, creative, but divinely inspired, author? Or was Moses a mere vessel, a passive conduit for the message authored by God? Philo summarizes these two attitudes at the opening of his Life of Moses. According to the account of some people, writes Philo, Moses was the lawgiver of the Jews, but according to others he was no more than an interpreter of the sacred laws.Footnote 7
A history of the various ancient conceptions of biblical authorship has yet to be written,Footnote 8 but it seems safe to say that by Late Antiquity both Jewish and Christian interpreters of Scripture had reached a consensus in favor of the second view, emphasizing the divine role in the production of the Scriptures at the expense of Moses' human role. Beginning around the mid-second century, biblical exegetes, both rabbinic and Christian, increasingly minimized Moses' active authorial role.
Rabbinic rhetoric of citation attributes verses to God or, in some strands of the tradition, to an active personification of Scripture itself,Footnote 9 but not to Moses. The common rabbinic dogma views Moses as the receiver, or, in some accounts, the recorder, of an already established divine text.Footnote 10
Early Christian writers habitually apply to their biblical exegesis the technique of “speech-in-character” known from the contemporary culture of rhetorical composition and literary scholarship. Justin and Origen propounded the theory, eagerly embraced by subsequent patristic writers, that the biblical text was authored by the Holy Spirit. According to this theory, the Spirit was responsible for the entire text. Working in the manner of a literary author, the Spirit intermittently allowed its various characters to speak in their own voices.Footnote 11 Moses, according to this account, is reduced from the position of author in charge of the story to just one more character within the story.
It is within this context of late ancient responses to the question of biblical authorship that I would like to situate my discussion of Moses Bar Kepha's treatise On Paradise. This work was written in the ninth century, in a period which signaled the transition between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages proper. In certain respects Bar Kepha's work is more similar to literature written four centuries after him, at the height of the Middle Ages, than to the literature written four centuries before him, at the height of Late Antiquity.
Bar Kepha's intellectual context was very different from that which produced the late ancient conceptions of biblical authorship. Islamic scholasticism, not Hellenistic rhetoric, was the dominant intellectual frame of reference.
In some ways Bar Kepha's work is traditional, inasmuch as it builds largely upon a wealth of sources inherited from Late Antiquity, but when it comes to the question of biblical authorship Bar Kepha diverges from his late ancient patrimony by tipping the scales back in favor of a strong human involvement in the production of the Pentateuch. Furthermore, although already some Hellenistic writers had conceived of biblical authorship in human terms, Bar Kepha goes a step further. He not only incorporates humanity in his conception of the biblical author, but he suffuses it with historicity and a certain degree of fallibility as well. It was not only that the man Moses wrote Genesis, but he wrote it at a specific time in history, in a particular language, for a particular audience. This fact can, according to Bar Kepha, explain certain difficulties in the biblical text, which previous commentators, wedded to the conception of divine authorship, could not have explained or would have explained differently.
Before delving further into Bar Kepha's new stance on biblical authorship as reflected in his treatise On Paradise, I will first explain who Bar Kepha was, what the historical context in which he worked was, and what his treatise is all about.
The Life and Works of Moses Bar Kepha
Although Bar Kepha is ranked among the most prolific and influential writers in the history of Syriac literature, we know little about his life. From a short, semi-hagiographical account of his life,Footnote 12 we are able to piece together the following bits of biographical information: Moses, scion of a family of Syriac scholars, was born either in 813 or in 833 C.E. in his mother's hometown, Balad, just north of Mosul. He entered a monastery by the name of Mar Sargis in the vicinity of Balad and completed his studies there. In 863 C.E. Moses was consecrated bishop of Beth Raman, a city located on the Tigris, about halfway between Mosul and Tagrit. As bishop, Moses took on the name of Severus. He held this position for forty years, until his death in 903 C.E. During ten of these years he also occupied the post of suffragan bishop of the community of MiaphysiteFootnote 13 Tagrites in Mosul, a city that was dominated by the competing East SyrianFootnote 14 Church.Footnote 15 Unfortunately, the paucity of biographical information about Bar Kepha and the Miaphysite circles in which he moved make a social description of Bar Kepha's world a difficult task. Previous scholarly attempts to tackle this task have relied mostly on later historiographical reports.Footnote 16 We can glean some information from the theological texts themselves, but only very rarely do these texts refer to contemporary political and social circumstances.Footnote 17 Despite the difficulties in establishing Bar Kepha's precise historical circumstances, his theological milieu is clear.
Bar Kepha's main opponents on the contemporary polemical battlefield were East Syrians and Muslims. He polemicizes against views he associates with Nestorius and Theodore of Mopsuestia, a popular author in the East Syrian Church,Footnote 18 as well as views on the subject of free will put forth by contemporary Muslim theologians.Footnote 19
On other theological matters Bar Kepha has been shown to have directly participated in the Mu‘tazilite discourse of his day. The opening chapters of Bar Kepha's Hexaemeron, which discuss issues such as God's unity and eternality and the createdness of the world, follow the same patterns and reproduce the same arguments as contemporary Muslim and Jewish Kalamic theological treatises in the genre known as the Kutub al-Tauḥīd.Footnote 20
A variety of sources testify to Jewish presence in Mosul in the ninth and tenth centuries,Footnote 21 but Bar Kepha does not polemicize against the Jews, nor does he use the Jews in order to polemicize against others.Footnote 22 On the other hand, several of the interpretations presented by Bar Kepha can be paralleled only in rabbinic sources.Footnote 23
Although we know relatively little about Bar Kepha's life, we can piece together a rather detailed picture of his vast literary activity. Bar Kepha's prominent position in the history of the Western Syrian tradition has long been recognized. His work forms a key link in the chain stretching from the sixth-century authors Philoxenus of Mabbug and Jacob of Sarug to the main actors in the Syriac renaissance of the High Middle Ages—Dionysius bar Salibi and Barhebraeus.Footnote 24 In recent years western scholars have become increasingly aware of the sheer magnitude of Bar Kepha's literary output—colossal even within a tradition known for its massive literary productivity.
Bar Kepha authored works of liturgy, logic, patristic commentary, historiography, and heresiography in addition to commentaries on most books of the Old and New Testaments, but his specialty was treatises in a genre that may be classified as systematic theology. His longest works, almost all still unpublishedFootnote 25 and mostly unstudied,Footnote 26 are systematic treatments of particular subjects, such as: “On the Soul,” “On Resurrection,” “On the Antichrist,” “On Angelology,” and “On Paradise.”Footnote 27
Bar Kepha's Treatise On Paradise
Probably written towards the end of the ninth century or at the very beginning of the tenth,Footnote 28On Paradise was frequently copied throughout the Middle Ages and into modern times.Footnote 29
Translated into Latin in the mid-sixteenth century, On Paradise was Europe's very first exposure to Syriac literature.Footnote 30 Published in 1569 by the Flemish humanist and Hebraicist Andreas Masius,Footnote 31 the Latin translation enjoyed a degree of popularity among seventeenth-century writers on the subject of Paradise.Footnote 32 But when compared with the Syriac original, it proves, in many places, to lack precision.Footnote 33 Indeed, already in his own day, Masius's De Paradiso was considered unworthy of him.Footnote 34
Textual witnesses of the Syriac original disappeared from the hands of western scholars for several centuries. It was only in the 1970s that manuscripts first resurfaced.Footnote 35 In 1980 François Graffin called for a thorough study of the Syriac original “en raison de son sujet, des questions qu'il pose et des nombreuses citations des Pères.”Footnote 36 But, with the exception of a Hungarian translation of the treatise,Footnote 37 Graffin's call was, to the best of my knowledge, not answered. The recent realization that the manuscript housed at Yale University's Beinecke Library predates the next earliest known manuscript by close to a century and a half has provided further incentive for work on this treatise.Footnote 38 It is the Beinecke manuscript upon which the present study is based.
Beinecke Syriac 10 has been described in detail elsewhere.Footnote 39 Suffice it to say here that the manuscript, close to 250 folios long, contains eight works by Bar Kepha and a short account of his life. On Paradise is the first, and longest, work. It occupies over half of the codex. A colophon at the end of the treatise indicates that it was written by a monk named Joseph in the “Little Monastery” of Barsauma near Kfartuta in the region of Mardin (southeastern Turkey),Footnote 40 in Nisan, 1536 A.G., that is, 1225 C.E.Footnote 41
The treatise is divided into three books, each of which is subdivided into chapters and subchapters. The text also incorporates summarizing charts and maps (including several maps of paradise!). The first book, by far the longest, contains a systematic exposition of the concept of paradise in twenty-seven chapters followed by a lengthy final chapter offering a literal, verse-by-verse interpretation of Genesis 2–3. Book 2 provides a spiritual interpretation of the same text. Book 3 refutes various opinions about paradise that Bar Kepha deems heretical.
Bar Kepha worked within a rich Greek and Syriac tradition of commentary and speculation on paradise. He draws primarily on Athanasius, Ephrem, Basil, Gregory Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Severus of Antioch, Jacob of Serugh, and Philoxenus of Mabbug.
There is much overlap between Bar Kepha's treatise and a cluster of interrelated East Syrian commentaries on Genesis by Theodore bar Koni,Footnote 42 Isho‘ bar Nun,Footnote 43 Isho‘dad of Merv,Footnote 44 and two anonymous commentaries.Footnote 45 Bar Kepha does not refer to these East Syrian authors by name. The problem of determining the precise relations within this cluster of texts is complex, especially considering the fact that Theodore bar Koni, Isho‘ bar Nun, and Isho‘dad of Merv seem to have drawn on an independent source that is no longer extant.Footnote 46
Bar Kepha's Scholasticism
Most of the material Bar Kepha presents in On Paradise he has gotten from others. His innovation consists in his method of argumentation and mode of presentation. To the best of my knowledge, Bar Kepha offers the first systematic treatment of paradise as a concept, an independent theological and literary unit that does not merely form the incidental part of a biblical commentary or a polemical treatise on some other topic. In terms of style and form Bar Kepha's work reads much more like a Medieval Latin summa than like any of the many late ancient Greek and Syriac sources from which he draws.Footnote 47
This state of affairs should not come as a surprise given the scholastic character of Bar Kepha's general cultural milieu. As argued by George Makdisi, the rise of medieval scholasticism in Western Europe was tied to similar, and preceding, forms of Islamic scholasticism. In the ninth century, the scholastic method, while far from developed in the Byzantine and Latin milieus, was already full-blown in Abbasid Mesopotamia.Footnote 48 Mention has already been made above of structural and thematic parallels between Bar Kepha and works of the early Mu‘atazila. To this we may add certain structural parallels between Bar Kepha's exegesis and the Quranic exegesis of his Sunni peer, al-Tabarī.Footnote 49
Three elements conspire to create the decidedly scholastic manner of Bar Kepha's writing. They may be called: systema, ratio, and auctoritas.Footnote 50 The systematic nature of his treatise was mentioned above. Bar Kepha treats paradise as a discrete concept, breaking it down into different logical components such as the following questions: Is paradise material or spiritual? Where is it located? How is it different from related concepts like the kingdom of heaven and the resurrection? What were the trees of knowledge and life? How long did Adam and Eve spend in paradise? What would have happened had they not sinned?
It is instructive to compare Bar Kepha's treatment to the parallel treatment of many of the same questions by Ish‘odad of Merv, Bar Kepha's older contemporary. Isho‘dad, according to the judgment of his modern editor, was a mere compiler.Footnote 51 The same cannot be said of Moses Bar Kepha.Footnote 52 Both authors cite many of the same traditions and opinions, but Bar Kepha does so in a systematic and organized manner, whereas Isho‘dad cites opinions, often without name attribution, only as part of the unstructured flow of his commentary.
Ratio, the second component of Bar Kepha's scholasticism, is manifested in his logical and dialectical mode of presentation. Continuing a genre going back to the Hellenistic commentary tradition, which became increasingly popular in several different domains of late ancient Christian literature,Footnote 53 arguments are presented in the form of questions and answers, objections and solutions: “Should someone say X,” “we respond Y.” Every argument is supported by demonstration, and in most cases several proofs are given.Footnote 54 Here too, comparison with his predecessors shows that Bar Kepha's style of question and answer, objection and response, citation in the names of others, and expression of views in propria persona, conspire to form a new literary constellation.Footnote 55
The third component of Bar Kepha's scholasticism, auctoritas, is his heavy reliance on a rich array of patristic sources that he cites as proofs for various claims. The authority of these patristic proofs is variously negotiated. In some cases conflicting patristic opinions are synthesized.Footnote 56 In many other cases Bar Kepha leaves conflicting opinions to stand as they are. He either expresses his preference for a particular option or leaves it up to the reader to decide.Footnote 57
Indeed, even on that rare occasion, noted above, in which Bar Kepha describes an event that was part of his own life, he models his description on the report of a similar event by Jacob of Edessa two centuries earlier.Footnote 58
Besides treating Bar Kepha's work as a mine for patristic traditions not preserved elsewhere,Footnote 59 we must give attention to the very fact that Bar Kepha makes such ample and explicit use of his predecessors. A careful reading of Bar Kepha's usage of his predecessors and his meaningful divergences from them shows that Bar Kepha had, in the process, redefined the conception of authorship—not only of patristic texts but of the Pentateuch itself. It is to this subject, with which we began, to which we may now return.
Moses on Moses: Bar Kepha's Idea of Biblical Authorship
According to Bar Kepha, the author of the book of Genesis, as well as the rest of the Pentateuch, is Moses. At first glance, there is little innovation in this view. Bar Kepha's rhetoric of scriptural citation continues a longstanding tradition, dating back to Jewish Hellenistic authors and carried on by writers throughout the Christian world, which cites verses from all books of the Pentateuch in the name of Moses.Footnote 60 But such continuity is true only at the rhetorical level. On the level of explicit, programmatic statements and particular exegetical applications, the earlier writers are ambivalent about stressing Moses' active authorial role.Footnote 61 Bar Kepha is not ambivalent. He carries the idea of Mosaic authorship to its full logical conclusion, embracing both the human limitedness and the historical situatedness that this idea entails.
Unlike Philo and Josephus, who, in some places, cast Moses in the role of interpreter (ἑρμηνεύϛ) of the divine laws,Footnote 62 Bar Kepha views Moses as the author (maktbānā) who is, by definition, distinct from the interpreter:Footnote 63
If Satan entered the serpent and spoke through him, why did Moses not say this? We say that this is because Moses is an author of events and not their interpreter (meṭṭul d-mūšē maktbānā ʾītaw d-sūʿrānē w-law mpašqānā dīlhōn). He spoke and wrote about things as they were seen and not as they were interpreted. In the manner in which Eve saw and heard a serpent, so this is what Moses wrote. Similarly, he calls the three men whom Abraham saw men, even though they were not men … The author only needs to write the work; it is the interpreter's responsibility to interpret what was written by the author. Therefore, since Moses was the author and not the interpreter, he says that the serpent spoke with Eve and not that Satan spoke with Eve by means of the serpent.
This programmatic passage firmly distinguishes between the realms of the author and of the interpreter. The author is in charge of the realm of events. “Events” for Bar Kepha denote material phenomena and visible occurrences: the “literal” meaning. This realm carries its own weight; it is not merely a cover-up for something else.Footnote 64 A nonliteral interpretation of the text is possible and indeed desirable—Bar Kepha dedicates the second book of his treatise to a symbolic interpretation—but responsibility for it lies solely in the hands of the interpreter, not the author.
Bar Kepha's view stands in contrast with the position variously articulated by his late ancient predecessors. Although significant differences exist between the various representatives of the late ancient position, all agree in associating their interpretations of the text and Moses. The classic rabbinic position views all legitimate interpretations of the Torah as part of God's original revelation to Moses.Footnote 65 Augustine imagines that Moses intended all future interpretations of the text at the time that he, or the Holy Spirit which guided him, composed the Pentateuch.Footnote 66 Jacob of Serugh, whom Bar Kepha frequently cites, conceives of the entire Pentateuch as Moses' symbolically veiled communication of the prophecy he received of Christ and the Church.Footnote 67
Bar Kepha, by contrast, drives a wedge between Mosaic authorship and sub-sequent interpretation. The interpreter's role is to bring out what is not in the text, what the author did not know due to his historical circumstances, or what he knew but chose to suppress, for reasons to be discovered by the interpreter. A series of specific exegetical moves made by Bar Kepha reveal that he conceived of Moses as a recorder of events that have had their own independent existence outside of the text. Like any record of any event, Moses' account is partial. More than the text alone is needed to expose the whole truth. The common late ancient position views interpretation as discovering meaning within the text, but Bar Kepha views it as generating meaning outside of the text.
Bar Kepha's approach is demonstrated by his novel treatment of an exegetical question which engaged the attention of many of his late ancient predecessors. There are several discrepancies between Gen 2:17, the narrator's report of God's command not to eat from the tree of knowledge, and Gen 3:3, which is Eve's report of the command.
The late ancient sources unanimously attribute the discrepancies to Eve's willful addition to God's original commandment. Some, like AmbroseFootnote 68 and some of the rabbis,Footnote 69 view Eve's addition in a negative light. Others, like Procopius of Gaza, read it positively.Footnote 70 But all agree in holding EveFootnote 71 responsible for the discrepancies between the two reports.
Bar Kepha turns the tables. It is not Eve, but the narrator, Moses, who is responsible for the discrepancies between the two accounts:Footnote 72
One must know that the woman did not only tell the serpent, i.e., Satan, that the tree was in the middle of the garden, but she also told him that it is [the tree] of the knowledge of good and evil; even if Moses left this part out (wāpen mūšē šabqāh l-hādē) [in reporting God's command]. For, we know that God said all these words in the commandment he gave Adam, i.e., the fact that the tree was in the middle of Paradise, the fact that it was the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the part about “do not approach it.”
By allowing the author Moses the possibility of textual omission, Bar Kepha can easily dismiss many of the classic defectus litterae, the text's gaps and bumps which instigated earlier interpreters to discover new meanings within the text.Footnote 73
Another example of this is Bar Kepha's attitude towards non-sequential narration, cases where elements within the biblical narrative seem to appear out of place. The common late ancient assumption is that these unexpected cases of jumbled order are repositories of deeper meaning within the text,Footnote 74 but Bar Kepha is satisfied with noting the lack of order, associating it with Moses' mode of narration, and with proposing options for the “correct” location of the given element within the narrative.Footnote 75
And Adam called his wife's name Eve, for she was the mother of all living” (Gen 3:20): This verse seems to be situated out of the order of events (dāmyā … melltā hādē d-law ʾak ṭeksā w-zabnā d-sūʿrānē sīmā). For until these words Moses stated the events according to their order of occurrence (ʾak teksā d-zabnayhēn ʾemar ʾennēn mūšē laylēn da-hway);Footnote 76 in the same manner as he mostly everywhere seems to keep the order of narration (nṭar ṭeksā d-tašʿīteh). But there are occasions when he states events at the time of their occurrence, and there are other occasions when he is merely concerned with making record of them and not [concerned] with the time of their occurrence (ʿal ʿūhdānhēn balḥūd bṭīl leh w-law ʿal zabnā da-hwāyhēn).
Contradiction, omission, disorder—in short, all the elements which make a text fallible—do not necessarily hide some deeper truth or conceal some moral lesson. In some cases the text's bumps and gaps are there just because the human author “is merely concerned with making record” of the events, at the expense of perfect order and consistency.
This is not to say that Bar Kepha rejected allegorical interpretation. The entire second book of On Paradise is dedicated to an allegorical interpretation of the same verses which the first book interprets literally. But Bar Kepha keeps these realms of interpretation separate, attributing an active authorial role to Moses only in the literal realm.
It is all the more surprising that Bar Kepha should depart from his late ancient patrimony given the decidedly scholastic nature of his work. Cases where Bar Kepha reflects an earlier exegetical tradition but asserts, by means of a subtle variation, the principle of historical, human authorship are of special interest.
A good example of this is provided by the commentaries on Gen 2:21–22. God is described there as creating Eve by removing Adam's rib in his sleep, closing up its place with flesh, and forming Eve out of the rib.
A late-fourth-century comment preserved in the Greek catenae on Genesis and attributed in the manuscript tradition to Antiochus of PtolemaisFootnote 77 reads as follows:Footnote 78
Whence did he fill up [the place of the rib]? The statement is unrealizable, but not so for the [divine] Power. Moreover, [you could ask about] “And the rib which he had taken he built into a woman”: how did he build one bone? [Or you could ask:] How did the parts of Adam come back together into a whole? No, you would not be able to say the way [all these things happened].
Typical of late ancient hermeneutics, this response to the question of Eve's creation appeals to apophaticism. Scripture refers to something that we do not understand due to our language's inability to describe it. “’Απορεῖ ὁ λόγοϛ ἀλλ’ ἡ δύναμιϛ οὐκ ἀπορεῖ”: “language is at loss, but the divine power is not.” The inadequacy is attributed to the second person, to “you,” the reader: you would not be able to say the way it all happened.Footnote 79
Isho‘dad of Merv, Bar Kepha's older contemporary, stresses the simultaneity of God's actions in creating Eve:Footnote 80
[“And he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh”]: Thus at the same time as the removal there occurred the completion and fulfilling of that which was taken away. Namely, flesh and bones were removed and flesh and bones were replaced, it all being completed in the twinkling of an eye. If the Apostle says concerning the resurrection (1 Cor 15:52) that it will happen in the twinkling of an eye, why not be assured that the creation of woman happened in an even shorter instant than that?
Bar Kepha combines these two traditions, adding a twist of his own:Footnote 81
God did not do these three things as three different actions. Moses is not saying that first God took the rib and that then he closed it with flesh and that only then did he fashion woman. Rather, swiftly and immediately, at the twinkling of an eye, the rib was removed, flesh was closed upon it and the woman was created. For if the universal resurrection can occur at the twinkling of an eye, as Paul says, we may observe that an [even] greater swiftness happened with Adam, in the removal of the rib and in the closing of the flesh and in the creation of woman. But Moses was not able to express these significations as one thing (lā ʾeškaḥ da-l-hālēn šūdāʿē nîmar ʾennōn ba-ḥdā melltā), since it is impossible to express all these things, either verbally or in writing, in just one statement. Due to his inability he was forced to say (meṭṭul lā meškḥānūteh ʾetʾallaṣ d-nîmar) that God removed the rib, and that he closed it with flesh and that he created woman.
The same limitedness of language associated with the reader in Antiochus of Ptolemais is attributed by Bar Kepha to the author, to Moses. Moses' account is, by definition, partial since there are certain things in the original “story”Footnote 82 that he could not express because of the limitations of his language.
Bar Kepha's view of Moses as an independent, human author goes one step further. Not only does Bar Kepha hold Moses responsible for some of the text's gaps and bumps, but he also views him as a historically located author, with a concrete historical audience. The following examples illustrate the point.
Bar Kepha devotes a lengthy discussion to Adam and Eve's garments of skin mentioned in Gen 3:21. After citing a range of patristic opinions regarding the identity of these garments—tree bark; fig leaves; animal skins; bodily passions and corruptibility; creation ex nihilo—Bar Kepha expresses his preference for the opinion of Athanasius and Ephrem that the garments were made of animal skins. But he also raises a problem not yet raised in the earlier tradition: The Syriac word used to describe these garments is kūtīntā, which in normal Syriac usage denotes a linen tunic, not a leather garment. Bar Kepha solves the problem by an appeal to the historical development of language. In Moses' day (b-zabneh d-mūšē) garments were called “tunics” (kūtīntā), even if they were not made of linen.Footnote 83 The language that Moses spoke and wrote in must have been different from the language familiar to Bar Kepha, since language changes over time. Moses, like any human being, was conditioned by his historical circumstances.
Another example of Bar Kepha's historicization of Moses is his comment introducing the list of four rivers in Gen 2:10–14. Prior to recapitulating the various opinions that identify these rivers with the major rivers of the late ancient world, Bar Kepha adds a comment not to be found in any of his predecessors. He observes that Moses provided the details of the names and locations of these four rivers “since they were known in his day.”Footnote 84
Bar Kepha further applies this awareness of historical relativity to Moses himself. He reads Gen 2:25: “And they were both naked, Adam and Eve, and they were not ashamed” as a note by Moses in comparative historiography:Footnote 85
Moses the prophet thereby compares the time of his writing [of the book] with the time of the creation of Adam and Eve (l-zabnā hākīl d-maktbānūteh ʿam zabnā da-brīthōn d-bēt ʾādām mpaḥḥem mūšē nbīyā), saying: Not as you see today that people are ashamed of their nakedness, were Adam and Eve also ashamed of their nakedness [rather they were not ashamed].
Much in the manner of the earlier distinction between the historical periods of the reader and the author, there now appears a distinction between the period of the author and his immediate audience and the period of the story which the author is telling his audience.
Perhaps Bar Kepha's most subtle application of these historical distinctions is to be found in his treatment of the question, posed by several of his predecessors, as to why the biblical narrative does not explicitly identify the serpent with Satan. In order to appreciate the subtlety of Bar Kepha's interpretation, I begin with his predecessors.
Theodore of Mopsuestia, perhaps the first exegete to raise the question, is cited in the catenae as saying:Footnote 86
Narrating the events according to the knowledge which he received by grace of the Holy Spirit, Blessed Moses necessarily omitted mention of the Devil, since [the Devil] was unknown to the deceived ones [scil. Adam and Eve]. Rather [Moses] talks about the serpent whom Adam and Eve saw at that time, not recognizing at the time whom it was that spoke in him, inasmuch as they did not know that there is anything invisible outside of God.
Theodore sees Moses as a conduit of the Holy Spirit, narrating the events as they happened from the perspective of the characters within the story. Satan is absent in the narration of the story, since he was not revealed to Adam and Eve. Subsequent commentators further develop this idea, noting that God intentionally refrained from making the existence of supernatural beings known to the generations prior to Abraham. It was only in the time of Abraham, when an angel appeared to Hagar, that the biblical text first mentions an invisible being that is not God (Gen 16:7; 21:17).Footnote 87 The biblical text, according to this understanding, reflects the perspective of the characters within the story. Divine inspiration suggested to Moses not to write about the angels prior to the time in history when angels became known to humanity. Had Moses written about the angels at the beginning, the future reader would have been misled into thinking that these invisible beings were known to the early generations of humanity.
In responding to a related but slightly different question, namely, why only the serpent was punished and not Satan himself, Bar Kepha begins by referring to the late ancient consensus, but then he goes on to offer a different perspective.Footnote 88
We say to them [who ask why Satan was not punished]: This was so that Adam and Eve would not realize that there is something invisible within the serpent, [something] that would lead them astray and overwhelm them. For at this point they had not yet perceived that there is something invisible outside of God. He also concealed this because of the weakness of the Hebrews, (mḥīlūtā d-ʿebrāyē) lest they think that there is another force outside of God, who opposes him, and because he [Satan] is more powerful than him [God] he does things against his [God's] wishes. Moses also did not mention at all the angelic race until the era of Hagar, so that the Jews might not think that there are many gods.
Bar Kepha's second answer, beginning with the words “he also concealed this,” stands in contrast to the traditional interpretation found in his first answer. Unlike the traditional interpretation, in which Moses was passively inspired to leave outFootnote 89 Satan, here Moses actively conceals him. And unlike the traditional interpretation, in which Satan is left out in order to conform to the perspective of Adam and Eve, the characters within the story, here the author consciously conceals him out of consideration for the Jews, his historical audience at the time of the telling of the story.Footnote 90
Bar Kepha's exegetical move here is in line with the view of Moses' authorship of Genesis which he had previously explained in his Hexaemeron.Footnote 91 According to this view, Moses orally narrated the book of Genesis to the Israelites in the desert, sometime subsequent to the revelation at Sinai and the utterance of the books of Exodus through Numbers and prior to his utterance of the book of Deuteronomy.Footnote 92 Having told the story, Moses then wrote it down, and Joshua subsequently rearranged the books by placing Genesis at the beginning.
Bar Kepha relies on two main distinctions in the array of passages under discussion. The first distinction, which he states explicitly in his earlier treatment of the question of Satan's absence from the narrative, is between the roles of the author and the interpreter. The second distinction, which is implied several times throughout his commentary, is between the story and the author's account of it (the “discourse”). This distinction is commonplace in contemporary literary criticism, in which it has taken various forms.Footnote 93
There is a close relationship between these two distinctions: between author and interpreter, on the one hand, and between story and discourse, on the other hand. The interpreter is able to excavate the story underlying the discourse precisely because the author does not have a monopoly over that story. The author's account is but one version of the story. The author chooses to shape the story according to the needs of his or her particular historical circumstances. The role of the interpreter, living in historical circumstances different from the author, is to expose the story underlying the text and to translate it into terms familiar to her or his own generation.
In keeping with the active role he assigns to Moses in the composition of the biblical narrative, Bar Kepha, in his verse-by-verse interpretation of the paradise account, makes a point of noting the ways in which Moses has strung the verses together. He prefaces each verse with an explanation as to why Moses chose to situate it where he did.Footnote 94
Bar Kepha's rhetoric of citation may also reflect this view. The language Bar Kepha uses to cite from Moses is often the same he uses to cite from patristic authors. The citation, “The prophet and author Moses, in his discourse on Paradise, said the following (ʾemar hākīl nbīyā w-maktbānā mūšē b-mellteh meṭṭul pardaysā hākannā),”Footnote 95 mimics, for example, “The Blessed Cyril, in his Third Oration against Julian, said the following,” and “The Blessed Athanasius, in his Treatise on the Incarnation, said the following.”Footnote 96 Similarly, Bar Kepha applies the same rhetoric of double citation to Moses as he does to the patristic authors. For example, he places “Moses says … and the same Moses says” alongside “Gregory says … and the same Gregory says.”Footnote 97
The similarity between Bar Kepha's treatments of Moses and of the patristic authors encompasses more than just rhetorical citation techniques. A case can be made for connecting Bar Kepha's historicization of Mosaic authorship and his scholastic mode of inquiry and presentation discussed earlier.
Scholasticism, Quranic Exegesis, and Bar Kepha's View of Biblical Authorship
The history of Christianity in Late Antiquity shows a gradual proliferation and democratization of textual exclusivity. As time progressed patristic texts came to share some of the authoritative stature previously held only by the Bible. Beginning in the late fourth century, texts written by church fathers of the second century C.E. and onwards became subject to processes of citation, interpretation, and argumentation much like the Bible was.Footnote 98 Bar Kepha's mode of discourse signals an extreme stage in this development. If textual culture is thought of as a zero-sum economy, we may postulate that in a text so superbly “patrified” as Bar Kepha's On Paradise, the Bible comes to occupy a place similar to all the other fallible, yet authoritative, texts of the fathers.
We find proof for this hypothesis in certain passages in On Paradise in which Bar Kepha in fact seems to be placing the biblical and patristic texts at the same level of discourse. In the course of his argument for the two-fold nature—material and spiritual—of paradise, Bar Kepha cites a battery of patristic sources: John of Dara, Severus of Antioch, Gregory Nazianzus, Cyril of Alexandria, and John of Apamea. Bar Kepha then adds one more demonstration from Moses' “book of Genesis.”Footnote 99 Moses, and his book Genesis, is cited as the last witness in the list of patristic testimonia.
Bar Kepha also applies the same hermeneutical keys of context and audience when interpreting a patristic text as when he interprets Scripture. We saw above how Bar Kepha resolves hermeneutical problems arising from the biblical text by imagining Moses as having spoken in a particluar historical context and as having tailored his message to a particular audience. Bar Kepha subjects patristic texts to the same mode of interpretation.
For example, he notes a contradiction between two statements of Gregory Nazianzus's: in his Apology Gregory interprets the tree of knowledge physically, while in his Homily on Nativity he interprets it spiritually. Bar Kepha resolves this contradiction by noting the Homily on Nativity's performative context. Gregory speaks of paradise spiritually because he wants to instruct his audience to celebrate the Nativity in a spiritual manner.Footnote 100
It will be remembered that alongside his appeals to historical context for the resolution of contradictions, Bar Kepha sometimes preferred to leave the gaps within the Mosaic narrative unresolved. We may observe this other pattern also in Bar Kepha's interpretation of patristic texts. Thus he notes a contradiction between one place in which Gregory Nazianzus claims that the coats God made for Adam and Eve were of tree bark and another place where Gregory says that they were none other than our bodies of flesh.Footnote 101 Bar Kepha allows the contradiction to stand without attempting to resolve it.
This pluralistic exegetical stance seems to reflect a position in which each author, each text, and each tradition provides its own particular vantage point. According to this position, it is the interpreter's role to weave together the variety of vantage points that came before him, in order to arrive at a fuller picture of the “reality,” or the “story,” behind the “discourse.” There is no contradiction in the fact that some Fathers taught that paradise is spiritual and that others taught that it is material. According to Moses Bar Kepha, the interpreter, they are all correct. There is no contradiction between Moses' assertion that it was a serpent who beguiled Eve and the assertion of subsequent tradition that Satan was the beguiler. Once again, both sides are correct, each emanating from its proponent's particular historical circumstances. Moses can occupy the same space as Gregory since both Moses and Gregory are authors who need to be interpreted in order to get at the reality behind their texts. Bar Kepha would disagree with the deconstructionist dictum “il n'y a pas de hors-texte.” Precisely because there is for Bar Kepha some reality, some truth, outside of the text, the multiplicity of texts may be taken as signposts towards that reality. Breaking away from the late ancient model which seeks truth through multiple interpretations of a single text—the Bible—Bar Kepha seeks truth through the singular interpretation of multiple texts—the Bible and the range of patristic texts, traditions, and opinions that densely populate every page of his work.
Moreover, Bar Kepha's interpretive stance both reflects and conditions his own authorial practices. Just as Moses the prophet was telling an extant story, having to shape it in a certain form, with attention to his audience and to the lessons he wanted to impart, so Moses Bar Kepha—writing for his own audience, whom he explicitly addresses throughout the treatise—works with pre-existent material, having to recast and rearrange it, with questions and answers, with introductions and summaries. As a voluminous writer and compilator Bar Kepha attributed to the text he was commenting on, and to its perceived author, concerns similar to those he may have had himself as an author.
The inner link between Bar Kepha's scholasticism and his view on biblical authorship may be taken one step further. Earlier I contextualized Bar Kepha's scholasticism within the realm of contemporary Muslim literature and education and mentioned the parallels in methodology between the works of Bar Kepha and his contemporary al-Tabarī. Further examination reveals that the similarities go beyond methodology alone. Quranic exegesis of the type practiced by al-Tabarī and many of the earlier commentators cited by him can provide a possible background for Bar Kepha's historicizing view of the Mosaic authorship of the Bible.
From very early on in the history of the Qur'ān's interpretation, although interpreters believed it to be a unique, divine revelation, they also conceived it as a book bound by history. Andrew Rippin in fact has cited the historicization of the text of the Qur'ān as the aspect through which “the genius of Muslim tafsīr can best be seen.”Footnote 102 Interpreters studied the language of the Qur'ān by reference to the languages at the time and place of Muhammad; they explained contradictions by recourse to historical differences between the different circumstances of revelation (i.e., varying historical conditions produce different textual messages). More so than in the late ancient interpretation of the Bible, Quranic interpretation, almost from its very inception, sought to establish the specific historical and biographical circumstances in which each pericope was revealed. Interpreters saw the historicization of the text of the Qur'ān as theological proof of God's ongoing concern for his creation.Footnote 103
This vein of interpretation is attested in al-Tabarī's commentary on the Qur'ān. Discussions introduced by such phrases as: “the commentators disagree as to the cause (sabab) for God's sending down (anzala) the record of this verse (dhikr hādhihi'l-āya) to his prophet,” are commonplace in al-Tabarī.Footnote 104
This type of historicization of the scriptural text is mostly absent from the late ancient biblical exegetical paradigm. Late ancient Jewish and Christian commentators are normally uninterested in exploring the circumstances in which particular revelations occurred. Bar Kepha's location of the telling of the Genesis story to a specific audience and its recording in a specific time and place and may be more indebted to the exegetical practices of his Muslim contemporaries than to the exegesis of his Christian predecessors.
Bar Kepha, however, parts company with his Muslim contemporaries in his attribution of the agency responsible for the scriptural text to a human, rather than a divine, actor.
The rhetoric of Muslim tafsīr is very clear about the passivity of Muhammad in the process of the Qur'ān's textualization. The Qur'ān is comprised of various texts arising from various historical occasions, but they were all composed and revealed by God. Bar Kepha, on the other hand, ascribes an active role in the authorship of the biblical text to Moses, a man living in specific historical and linguistic circumstances.
This is not to suggest that Bar Kepha denied the divine source of Scripture. In two places he explicitly states that Moses was speaking through the Holy Spirit.Footnote 105 Bar Kepha seems to have upheld a notion of divine inspiration, but this notion plays no practical role in his exegesis. In the balance between human and divine responsibilities, Bar Kepha preferred in his exegetical practice to make more use of the human aspects of the text, that is, the text's historical embeddedness and its limitations.Footnote 106
Conclusion
Moses Bar Kepha's treatise On Paradise signals several innovations. It is the first systematic treatment of paradise as a concept. Reminiscent of the genre of the Medieval Latin summa, which it predates by several hundred years, it is structured around a series of questions and answers, and it draws heavily on the authority of numerous patristic sources. Perhaps it was On Paradise's systematic character, familiar-seeming to early modern European expectations that led Andreas Masius, in the middle of the sixteenth century, to choose it as the very first Syriac text to be introduced, in Latin, to the western world.
On Paradise's central innovation discussed in this article is its conception of Mosaic authorship. Late ancient patristic writers had viewed Mosaic authorship as an extension of divine revelation and conceived of interpretation as an act of discovering the truths wrapped within the biblical text. Bar Kepha's innovation consisted in the humanization and historicization of Moses' authorial role. Truth was not to be sought in the text itself but in the historical reality of which the text was but one reflection.
Adopting poststructuralist terminology, we may view Bar Kepha's innovation as an early construction of the “author function.”Footnote 107 The author, according to this “function,” is taken in his or her particular location and perspective and is considered a key to the interpretation of his or her work. This view, which came into its own in the Latin West only in the thirteenth century,Footnote 108 became over the centuries so ensconced in Western cultural assumptions that only in the past few decades has it been called into question.Footnote 109
Now that the “author function” is being called into question, we are in a better position to retrace its history. Moses Bar Kepha's view of Moses the prophet signals an early station in this history, which students of ancient and medieval exegesis, as well as literary theorists, might want to take into account.
