In announcing their creation of the series Critical Studies in the Hebrew Bible, Eisenbrauns stressed three criteria for any prospective volumes: meticulous scholarship, conciseness, and affordability. The inaugural volume in this series, Bernard M. Levinson's A More Perfect Torah, easily meets these three criteria. This slim tome contains just over 150 pages—and that includes front matter, appendices, bibliography, and indices—but those pages pack in quite a bit of scholarly heft.

The book consists of two studies focusing on the relationship between the laws of Deuteronomy and the Temple Scroll from Qumran. The first is a lightly revised version of a 2002 article coauthored with Molly M. Zahn that appeared in Dead Sea Discoveries.Footnote ¹ It examines how the Temple Scroll formulates casuistic law, and in particular how it deploys the particles כי and אם to introduce the protasis in conditional sentences. In the so-called “Deuteronomic Paraphrase” of the Temple Scroll (cols. 51–66), the editor sometimes substitutes אם in places where the source text in Deuteronomy (both in the Masoretic Text and the surviving witnesses) has כי. Previous scholars have suggested that this may have been an attempt to update or disambiguate the language, as כי had lost this particular nuance in post-Biblical Hebrew. Levinson notes, however, that this fails to account for all the places in the Temple Scroll where כי is retained, and provides a more nuanced approach that even takes into account the physical layout of the text on the manuscript. He begins by describing how the Covenant Code (Exodus 21–23) and the laws of Deuteronomy systematically use כי and אם to mark conditions and subconditions. For example, Exodus 21:2, which gives the general law for Israelite slaves and the manumission thereof, begins with כי. Exodus 21:3–4 provide three variations or subconditions on this general law with regard to the slave's marital status, each of which begins with אם. The Covenant Code and Deuteronomy, however, use slightly different systems, and in adapting the material from these sources, the editor of the Temple Scroll devised his own internally consistent system of marking conditions and subconditions.

The second study focuses on Deuteronomy 23:22–24 and the laws of vow-making. The crux interpretum here concerns the verses' sequence, as vv. 22 and 24 assert that one must assiduously pay one's vows or else be liable for sin, whereas v. 23 states that one who refuses to ever make a vow would not accrue any sin. Because v. 23 is not a subcondition of v. 22, one could seemingly produce a more logical sequence by having v. 23 and v. 24 swap places. Levinson surveys the reception history of this pericope in Second Temple Judaism, Early Christianity, and rabbinic Judaism and through a careful reading demonstrates that each of the different interpreters was troubled by this crux and handled it through his own subtle exegetical methods. He further notes that the conditional sentences in vv. 22 and 23 begin with כי and וכי, respectively, which according to the system he describes in the first part of this volume would indicate two main conditions rather than a condition and subcondition. Such a sequence would be highly unusual given that v. 24 returns back to the first condition and thus, given the other issues he raises, would seem to be the exception that proves the rule. Levinson also brings in inner-biblical exegesis and considers how Deuteronomy 23:22–24 is read by the authors of Numbers 30 and Ecclesiastes 5 (both of which he assumes to be later compositions). He ultimately concludes that Deuteronomy 23:23 was a late interpolation.

The volume concludes with a brief afterword that surveys some of the work that has been published since 2002 on how the Temple Scroll interacts with the Pentateuch, focusing rather critically on Simone Paganini's habilitation thesis.Footnote ²

The stated goal of this volume is to provide case studies on how certain methodological approaches in biblical studies can illuminate others in innovative ways, and Levinson achieves this goal with resounding success. Here, we have reception history of Scripture illuminating its compositional history and historical linguistics illuminating biblical hermeneutics. Levinson's meticulous analysis in all aspects of his subject matter allows the reader to transparently sample the possibilities of the various methodologies in use. Indeed, even where one might disagree with him, his overall thoroughness sets the terms for any debate.

That all being said, as I read through the second study in this volume, I kept returning to one concern. Throughout his study, Levinson shows the postbiblical tradents to be careful and scrupulous readers of Scripture, and he himself is no slouch in this regard as he masterfully extracts meaning through close attention to detail. The one figure who fails to adhere to this standard of exegetical rigor is the editor whom Levinson believes created the problems in the first place by interpolating Deuteronomy 23:23 so clumsily! To be fair, Levinson does address this point in his conclusion, though he still seems to let his interpolater off the hook for his lack of syntactic precision.

One other minor point: in describing how the first study had been revised since its initial 2002 publication, Levinson states that he “clarified the analysis of the morphosyntax of cuneiform law” (xi, n. 1). Nonetheless, the study includes a rather peculiar claim (substantially unchanged from the original article) about the use of Akkadian verb forms in the Laws of Hammurabi (LH). According to this claim, just as the Covenant Code alternates between כי and אם to differentiate between conditions and subconditions, LH alternates between preterite verb forms and perfects in the protasis of laws to mark conditions and subconditions, respectively (24, esp. n. 73). The evidence, however, simply does not bear this out. For example, LH §9 gives a main condition and §§10–12 give related subconditions, but in the protasis of LH §9, the verbs are all perfect forms.

Even so, this claim is marginal at best to Levinson's overall arguments, and when scrutinizing these arguments, one is hard-pressed to find fault. Instead, one can only feel admiration for how the author with his typical aplomb manages to draw from a variety of subdisciplines to produce a stimulating pair of case studies.