This is an important book that outlines an inventory project of ancient Jewish literature at the University of Manchester; this project involved the description and the profiling of literature from the Second Temple period to the Talmuds, from ca. 200 BCE to 700 CE, altogether comprising ninety-seven works of literature. The book provides the analytical tools utilized by the project and the results of its analysis, which offers an integrated and unified system to apply to the literature examined, a major accomplishment considering the vast differences between the texts. The majority of Jewish texts from antiquity are anonymous, that is, they were not composed by individual authors, were composed by authors who did not identify themselves, or are pseudepigraphic, speaking in the voice of a persona known from biblical texts. These issues are addressed in the rationale of the inventory project, which includes Dead Sea Scrolls, apocrypha, pseudepigrapha (“parabiblical” texts), apocalyptic works, targumic and midrashic texts, Mishnah and Tosefta, mystical texts, Talmud Yerushalmi and Bavli, and much more. The strict criteria for inclusion of literary texts were the following: certainly, or arguably, Jewish; completeness; anonymous or pseudepigraphic; not canonical such as the Hebrew Bible; a text with a voice that is either anonymous, collective, or impersonal, or belonging to an earlier literary persona. By applying these criteria Josephus and Philo were excluded. The term “literary” was defined as pertaining to works displaying the above criteria, and functioning as “interventions into the formation of cultural, religious or hermeneutic positions within ancient Judaism” (7).
The texts pose many additional challenges in understanding their literary genre, targeted audience, and readership; purpose of their creation and message; or internal unity. Many of these texts consist of episodes, or seem to address diverse themes. This book lays out a new framework of analysis and formulates categories for describing ancient texts by referring to every imaginable structurally important feature of a text.
The texts analyzed share global characteristics and several global properties, which makes the resulting descriptions more usable in comparative work than pure typological comparisons that usually focus on narrative, exegesis, or a character appearing in a variety of texts. The inventory defines twelve main sections, with multiple subsections in hierarchical order, which results in more than five hundred hierarchically organized points. The following are some limited examples that are part of the main sections and/or subsections: (A) Self-presentation. “The text speaks of itself as dealing with an overall theme (subject matter) or purpose, or as consisting of coordinated parts making a whole” (33). (This is assumed to apply to 4 Maccabees 1:12.) (B) Perspective. “The governing voice explicitly acknowledges that something mentioned in the text cannot be adequately expressed or conveyed to the projected addressee” (36) (1 Enoch 14:16). (C) Form of the main body of the text. “Some functional parts occur more than once with different contents, and are merely juxtaposed to each other” (41) (the Petiḥot in Leviticus Rabbah). (D) Subject matter types and treatments. “The event sequence is projected as being related to the sequence of text parts. …” A subsection that is also applicable is: “There are chronological gaps which are explicitly managed or signposted” (44) (Liber antiqitatum biblicarum). (E) Relationships between texts. “Narrative or thematic correspondence, or overlap of specific wording, occur between the non-biblical text and one or more biblical texts in a manner that is prominent or pervasive …” (64). A subsection: “The text's main character is a minor character in Scripture” and a subsection of the above subsection: “That character is also a first-person narrator of the text” (65) (1 Enoch). (F) Small forms and small-scale coherence in relations; this comprises two main sections: characteristic small-scale coherence and aggregation between adjacent text parts in thematic or lemmatic texts, or thematic parts of narrative texts (Mishnah Berakhot 2:1 and Mishnah Gittin 1:1). A subsection: “In one or more extended passages, making up a substantial portion of the text, a series of situations is created from one hypothetical legal situation, by modifying/adding one situational feature at a time” (77). A subsection of a subsection: “Two distinct parameters of the situation are paired with their opposites or negations, to produce a series of four situations” (Mishnah Gittin 2:1, Mishnah Bava Kamma 3:7, and Tosefta Bava Batra 2:16). The secondary subsection demonstrates that parts of particular works may need additional definitions beyond the definition of the work as a whole. The Genesis Apocryphon has a singular work identity, which requires nestled definitions, because it consists of larger constituent parts that are narrative. There are additional major sections, for example, a particular subsection of a major section is assigned to Sefer Yeẓirah, which, according to the project categories, includes the description of a physical reality. These latter examples indicate that the project is flexible and can accommodate many different text types.
These types of precise definitions could possibly replace the vague terminology other scholars have applied to literary texts of antiquity. Scholars continue to redefine genres found in nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship and in rigid categorizations in library catalogues. For example, genre labels applied to Genesis Rabbah include: aggadic midrash on Genesis, aggadic commentary, Amoraic midrash, exegetical midrash. Contrary to these imprecise labels, the inventory project establishes empirical categories of analysis. In particular, it solves numerous problems of characterizing rabbinic literature, which has strong links between content and form, often lacks connectors between sentences and rabbinic statements, does not firmly establish historical contexts, and speaks with an anonymous reporting voice that merely introduces other voices.
The methodology of the inventory project remotely resembles text-linguistic approaches to literature. Unfortunately, such empirical approaches mainly experience toxic receptions outside Europe, although they address the problems that modern readers encounter when studying ancient texts: the lack of strong coherence of texts that are unlike modern texts, their implicit reliance on information that is not quoted, and the nonlinear order in the texts. In order to understand the very convincing project outcomes, one has to be willing to engage with abstract levels of metalinguistic descriptors. The text of this book is very dense, yet the scholars working on the project are to be praised for their precise, logical definitions. Obviously, a single book cannot contain descriptions of the entire corpus of works that were analyzed. Nevertheless, the excellent results of this project in respect to every single work of literature included may be viewed at www.manchester.ac.uk/ancientjewishliterature.
The book includes a bibliography and an index; it is highly recommended in respect to the study of Jewish texts of antiquity, and should be part of any serious Judaica collection.
