The headline message of this notable book is simple. Despite the common consensus of Jews and Christians down the ages, the Hebrew Bible does not contain the idea of repentance as generally understood. Rather the idea of repentance emerged in the Hellenistic period, was found appealing by both Jews and Christians, and was subsequently used as a hermeneutical lens for (re)reading the Hebrew Bible, such that “repentance became biblical.”
In general approach, Lambert contributes in vintage mode to the now often-sluggish mainstream of historical-critical biblical scholarship, by arguing that a proper historical understanding of the biblical text shows that it did not originally mean what subsequent religious thought and practice took it to mean. The paradigmatic example is the recognition that the Hebrew Bible does not “foretell the messiah.” If Lambert's thesis be granted, it would be in important ways comparable to the rethinking of messianic interpretation, and also would be paradigmatic of the continuing ability of modern historical-critical scholarship to challenge accepted religious understandings and contribute to rethinking how classic religious traditions apply today.
However, Lambert does not just replicate an older historical-critical paradigm, but rather brings a welcome sophistication (in principle) to the task of good historical scholarship. He recognizes both the importance of the conceptual categories that interpreters bring to their work whereby they frame their enquiry, and the nature of the outcome of the enquiry: “not actual retrievals of an ancient past, but new encounters with its material remains” (7).
Central to his work is a critique of a dualism of body and spirit, which has (he contends) usually permeated biblical interpretation. Lambert proposes a more “material”/“materialist” mode of construal, based on a contemporary understanding of human language and society. Thus, for example: “… language is … conventional and interpersonal, a matter shaped by society and its needs, not an essence or expression of individual consciousness” (73). We are invited to read “through the prism of an ontology that would consider the self not as a spiritual being with a variable moral status but as a material expanse of power and possession, albeit one subject to the demands of justice” (57–58). The result is a fresh and unprecedented reading of familiar biblical texts. For example, appeals to God are seen not to express innermost feelings but to be concerned with the securing of physical well-being: “appeal does not appear to derive its logic as a verbal expression of internal states. It is rather a series of strategies for encapsulating material realities” (49). With prophetic uses of shuv (repent), “the issue at stake is not morality and personal transformation but concerns for how power is generated through systems of material exchange, how turning to another for support produces hierarchy” (88).
Accompanying this critique is a concern to show that certain understandings of the human are more particular and contingent than usually recognized. Scholars too often treat what the prophets say “as if these were basic human conditions, applicable in all times and places, and not rather particularistic expressions of institutional power in the West” (93). In place of positing “a universal, present in all times and places”—a “penitential self”—Lambert argues that it is important “to configure ideas otherwise, to recognize their basis in discourse, in power relations,” the result of which “is to expose the non-inevitability, the contingency of current religious formations, while simultaneously undermining their claim to uniqueness” (187).
Although Lambert shows that it is possible to reread familiar texts in the way he proposes, he does not really test his thesis by asking where his readings are stronger or weaker, or by raising possible objections or counterarguments. In addition, despite Lambert's recognition of the importance of the conceptual categories that the interpreter brings to bear, he does not reflect sufficiently on his own practice. Throughout the book he advances a critique of a dualism of body and spirit, articulated in terms of individual subjectivities, or outward expressions of internal feelings, or a cultural privileging of interiority; and he wants to replace appeal to interiority with accounts of the material in varying forms of social construction. Yet nowhere does Lambert offer any conceptual analysis of “interiority” or discuss the differing ways in which it might be construed. The lack of proper conceptual reflection on interiority is evident from the dismissive ways (with an eloquent “merely”) in which Lambert regularly poses the positions he rejects: that fasting is “merely an outward expression of internal feelings” (31), that “the privileging of interiority” means “looking at all material representations as merely surface phenomena expressing some more essential reality” (191). Lambert nowhere even raises the possibility that there might be ways of construing interiority as real and important without dismissing the material or appealing to “dualism”—either in terms of the categories that Jews and Christians have brought and may still bring to their readings (he rhetorically brings the charge of dualism, but does not substantiate it evidentially), or in terms of what kind of interiority might have been meaningful within the frame of reference of those responsible for the Hebrew Bible. Lambert always treats interiority and materiality as either/or, never as possibly both/and, but does not justify this approach other than by rhetorical assertion.
These two concerns regularly overlap. A prime term for whatever the Hebrew Bible might understand by “interiority” is lēv/lēvāv (heart/mind). This term receives no discussion, either in itself or in terms of how possible “interiority” as depicted by lēv relates to public action and/or interaction with the deity. (And although Lambert does discuss lēv, among other things, in a recent essay in Biblical Interpretation 24, no. 3 [2016], he is still unduly prepossessed with critiquing modern interpreters who impose their own categories of interiority onto the biblical text.) Likewise, although we are told that Israel's deity is not one who knows the hearts of those who pray, but is a powerful being who needs to be directed to rearrange material realities in favor of a person praying, there is no discussion of famous passages such as Yhwh’s rebuke of Samuel, “man sees only what is visible, but the Lord sees into the heart [lēvāv]” or a related sentiment on Job's lips, “Will it go well when He examines you? Will you fool Him as one fools men?” (1 Samuel 16:7, Job 13:9, NJPS). Alternatively, Psalm 51, the most famous “penitential” psalm, is touched on thrice, and Lambert's main proposal is to use the psalm heading to see “sin” as “distress from which the king requires relief” (39). But the language and thought of the psalm receives no sustained analysis in its own right, and there is no mention at all of its famous “true sacrifice to God is a contrite spirit; God, You will not despise a contrite and crushed heart [lēv]” (Psalm 51:19 [ET,17], NJPS).
Lambert's book is intellectually stimulating and well worth reading. Readers can learn from Lambert's account of the possible material and social dimensions of religious language and practices as long as they are not mesmerized by his polemic against interiority. This polemic is one-dimensional and means that the book's main thesis is not established.
