Chaya Halberstam has produced an ambitious and eloquent first book. Her brief introduction sets the stage, examining the dilemmas presented by the possible incongruities between legally established facts (as determined by a human court) and the truth (as known to and revealed by God). The body of the book is divided into two parts. In Part 1, “Truth and Human Jurisprudence,” Halberstam presents three case studies analyzing biblical and rabbinic approaches to distinct areas of law. Chapter 1, “Stains of Impurity,” focuses primarily on the roles that personal testimony and physical evidence (e.g., bloodstains) play in relation to the determination of when people (women in particular) are deemed ritually defiled. Chapter 2, “Signs of Ownership,” revisits questions concerning the responsibility to return lost objects, and the ability to determine the original ownership of such objects. Chapter 3, “The Impossibility of Judgment,” turns to the rather vexed issue of capital punishment—seemingly the clearest example of the rabbinic tendency to give up on human justice altogether. In Part 2, “Truth and Divine Justice,” the author turns from halakhah to aggadah. Chapter 4, “ Theologies of Justice,” examines biblical and rabbinic approaches to divine punishment, in comparison to its human counterpart. Chapter 5, “Objects of Narrative,” reviews biblical stories and rabbinic interpretations that hinge on questions of evidence and testimony, such as the Judah and Tamar episode and David's slaughter of Saul's self-confessed killer. Although no cumulative summary or conclusion is provided, the last three pages of the final chapter—a section captivatingly titled “Divine Providence and Inner Conviction”—ties a number of the book's threads together. The end matter includes rich notes, a full bibliography, and indices of sources and subjects (authors included).
This book, formerly a dissertation, but substantially revised and expanded, is impressively wide-ranging. In dealing with the Hebrew Bible, the author addresses laws and narratives. For rabbinic sources, she treats tannaitic and amoraic, halakhic and aggadic, mishnaic, midrashic, and talmudic materials. Moreover, the particular topics that Halberstam has selected are hardly simple ones. Still, in each chapter, she presents sensible and sensitive readings of well-selected rabbinic sources, informed by legal theory (e.g., Robert Cover), and in dialogue with recent biblical and rabbinic scholarship. Indeed, although this is not Halberstam's purpose, the book can also be read as an entrée into current scholarship on rabbinic literature. Halberstam has not only learned from her teachers and other established masters. She has, in this volume, also productively engaged a number of field's newer voices, including Beth Berkowitz, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, and Jonathan Schofer. Halberstam thereby not only contributes to recent discussions of, for example, purity and capital punishment, but has, more importantly, reopened and reframed the discussions of these and other topics by virtue of the fascinating way she has juxtaposed her chosen themes, in light of questions regarding law and truth.
By the end of the text, Halberstam has identified a number of differences between biblical and rabbinic approaches to law and truth. The legal texts of the Hebrew Bible, she avers, exhibit a general sense of confidence about human judgment, for divine truth remains theoretically accessible to prophets and priests. Yet the biblical narratives undercut this confidence, frequently challenging human capacities for justice. The rabbinic sources bestow even greater power on human judges by explicitly upholding legal truths as valid, even when factually untrue. Yet rabbinic aggadot are notably reticent about human judgment when compared to its superior, divine, counterpart. Indeed, a refrain throughout the work is Halberstam's emphasis on the rabbis' recognition of their world as uncertain and imperfect—a phenomenon that is often contrasted with the Hebrew Bible's greater degree of certainty (e.g., 3, 12, 77, 105, 109, 178–79).
Wide-ranging works cannot cover everything. Still it is important (and, I hope, fair) to point out the kinds of sources this work chooses not to address, to indicate how this decision has shaped the resulting hypotheses. What is missing throughout—as the title itself suggests—is coverage of that wealth of ancient Jewish literature that is neither biblical nor rabbinic, such as Qumranic law (which includes penal codes and judicial procedures) and other sundry texts addressing worldly, divine justice (e.g., Wisdom of Solomon). For the understanding of rabbinic literature itself, the impact is arguably minimal. Yet to the degree the work claims to shed light on biblical literature too, the selective focus on the rabbinic heritage can be limiting in ways that the author could have acknowledged. For example, Chapter 4 spends some time reviewing biblical and rabbinic approaches to punishment, noting that what the rabbis term “measure-for-measure” punishment is often, in truth, applied inequitably: Punishments can disturbingly exceed the crimes (e.g., M. Sotah 1:7–9; 122–25). While it is no doubt true that rabbinic approaches differ from biblical ones in no small measure, it is also true that the characterization of divine punishment in the Hebrew Bible as “measure for measure” (with the implication of fairness) is one that emerges from rabbinic interpretations of biblical texts, and not necessarily from the biblical texts themselves. Moreover, other ancient understandings of biblical divine punishment are also available to us. For example, the second half of the Wisdom of Solomon is essentially an extended essay articulating an alternative understanding of the ways human crimes and divine punishments are carefully correlated in biblical narrative: “One is punished by the very things by which one sins” (Wisdom 11:16). Long before the rabbis—and even longer before modern scholarship—some Jewish readers recognized that divine punishments could be symbolically meaningful, even when the penalty is severe, disproportionate, or vicarious (cf. 117, 134).
Readers of this book who are anew convinced that the rabbis shape their legal system in light of their recognition of the world's uncertainty can turn back to the Hebrew Bible again—and not just Ecclesiastes and Job—and find various texts that describe divine justice as unfair, untimely, and even vicarious (e.g., 2 Kings 24:3; Isaiah 40:2). Other passages reveal that the failure of human judges (Amos 5:10–15) was appalling or are concerned with the difficulty of discerning truth from among conflicting prophetic messages (Deuteronomy 18:15–22; Jeremiah 26:1–24). To be fair, the author grants a good deal of this (see esp. 110–20). But for Halberstam, the emphasis is placed on the uncertainty recognized by the rabbis, above and beyond any earlier qualms articulated in the Hebrew Bible. The rabbis were no doubt living in an uncertain world, and I for one am grateful for Halberstam's distinctive illustration of this thesis. But I remain unconvinced that the prerabbinic world was so measurably more certain. Much of human history is characterized by ages of anxiety, and these fears are not always eased just because some prophets, priests, or sages claim to be able to discern the divine will.
Readers will derive great profit from grappling with this thought-provoking book, and will likely think differently (and more often) about law and truth in biblical and rabbinic literature. Indeed, for its coverage of themes central to the understanding of biblical and rabbinic literature, and for its productive dialogue with recent works on these topics, Halberstam's volume can and should be read by scholars and students alike.
