A reexamination of the Pentateuch in light of the complex social, religious, and political conflicts of the Persian period During the last several decades, scholars in pentateuchal studies have suggested new compositional models to replace the Documentary Hypothesis, yet no consensus has emerged. The ten essays in this collection advance the discussion by shifting the focus of pentateuchal studies from the literary stratification of different layers of the texts to the social, economic, religious, and political agendas behind them. Rather than limiting the focus of their studies to scribal and community groups within Persian Yehud, contributors look beyond Yehud to other Judahite communities in the diaspora, including Elephantine and the Samaritan community, establishing a proper academic context for setting the diverse voices of the Pentateuch as we now understand them. Contributors include Olivier Artus, Thomas B. Dozeman, Innocent Himbaza, Jürg Hutzli, Jaeyoung Jeon, Itamar Kislev, Ndikho Mtshiselwa, Dany Noquet, Katharina Pyschny, Thomas Römer, and Konrad Schmid.

For centuries, scholars and interpreters of the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament have read those Scriptures as if they spoke of a God whose desires, concerns, and interests were essentially no different than those of the other gods of antiquity known to us. Like those gods, what the God of Israel supposedly sought above all else was the honor, worship, and obedience of human beings and their submission to his will as his faithful and devoted servants. While he undoubtedly demanded the practice of what was good, right, and merciful among his people in a way that set him apart from other gods, ultimately he did so for his own sake in order to bring about in them the type of behavior that pleased him and compel them to live in conformity with his justice, holiness, and righteousness. Those who sought to enjoy his blessings and avoid his fierce wrath and punishments had no choice but to strive to keep him content by observing all that he had commanded and making atonement for the sins and offenses they committed by offering him the sacrifices that appeased him. Although he loved his people deeply, his righteous and holy nature placed limits on that love and prevented him from showing them his favor unless the demands of his nature were satisfied. When we abandon such an understanding of the God of Israel and instead read the Hebrew Bible on its own terms in order to grasp the logic underlying its narratives, however, a very different portrait of God emerges. The God of whom the biblical texts speak is a God who desires nothing but the good for all those whom he has created and refuses to back down from his efforts to bring them to live in ways that will allow them to enjoy the wholeness and well-being he desires for all when they insist on filling their lives with injustice, suffering, and violence. When he demands that they obey all that he has commanded by practicing justice and compassion and avoiding behaviors that do them harm, he does so not for his sake but for theirs. If he jealously refuses to let his people serve and worship other gods, it is only because those gods bring death and destruction rather than the life that is found in him alone. While at times he must himself resort to violence and even bring down evil on human beings in order to put a stop to oppression and injustice, he does so only because his passionate and unbending commitment to the well-being of all of the families of the earth together with his beloved people Israel will not allow him to hold back or relent in his efforts to save them, not from him, but from themselves. Christian and Jewish readers alike will find in the present volume a God who is very different from the God they have been taught to encounter previously in the biblical texts, a God whose ultimate concern is not for his own glory, honor, or worship or for the demands of a righteous and holy nature that holds him captive, but for the healing, wholeness, and well-being of all of his creatures. Such an understanding of God not only calls into question traditional interpretations of the Hebrew Bible but also lays the basis for a fresh reading of the many difficult passages that have long challenged biblical interpreters due to the violent and troubling image of God that they convey.

The volume focuses on variants between the Masoretic Text and the Samaritan Pentateuch prompted by graphic similarities between letters. As a phenomenon that occurs during the transmission of ancient texts, an in-depth study of the linguistic and paleographic background of these variants provides fruitful ground for the exploration of the Pentateuch transmission. This volume gathers all the relevant variants from the Masoretic Text and the Samaritan Pentateuch, comparing them to further witnesses, primarily the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint. Each case is examined independently through a linguistic analysis of the variants, their process of development and an evaluation of which version is preferable (when possible). It then presents a statistical analysis of the data. Moreover, the volume offers a paleographic analysis of the interchanging letters in the three relevant scripts – Hebrew, Jewish, and Samaritan script. Through this process it determines the script in which the variants have occurred and estimates the chronological framework of the variants. This study has implications for the textual history of the Samaritan Pentateuch and, more broadly, for the distribution of the Pentateuch and the extent of its transmission in the late Second Temple period.

A revised view of the Pentateuch with consequences for the broader literary history of the Bible This collection of thirty-one studies on the Pentateuch represents more than twenty years of Konrad Schmid’s research and publications advocating for a new view of the Pentateuch’s formation. Schmid’s essays present the case for a Persian period Priestly document that provided a basic narrative thread to the Torah, which included separate, pre-Priestly components of narratives in Genesis and the Moses story. Schmid’s open discussion includes evidence from various fields, such as literary history, comparative cultural history, historical linguistics, epigraphy, and archaeology. The essays are divided into eight sections usefully structured around the themes of the Pentateuch in the Enneateuch, the history of scholarship, the formation of the Torah, Genesis, the Moses story, the Priestly document, legal texts, and the Pentateuch in the history of ancient Israel’s religion.

For many years, the historical-critical quest for a reconstruction of the origin(s) and development of the Pentateuch or Hexateuch has been dominated by the documentary hypothesis, the heuristic power of which has produced a consensus so strong that an interpreter who did not operate within its framework was hardly regarded as a scholar. However, the relentless march of research on this topic has continued to yield new and refined analyses, data, methodological tools, and criticism. In this spirit, the contributions to this volume investigate new ideas about the composition of the Pentateuch arising from careful analysis of the biblical text against its ancient Near Eastern background. Covering a wide spectrum of topics and diverging perspectives, the chapters in this book are grouped into two parts. The first is primarily concerned with the history of scholarship and alternative approaches to the development of the Pentateuch. The second focuses on the exegesis of particular texts relevant to the composition of the Torah. The aim of the project is to foster investigation and collegial dialogue in a spirit of humility and frankness, without imposing uniformity. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Tiago Arrais, Richard E. Averbeck, John S. Bergsma, Joshua A. Berman, Daniel I. Block, Richard Davidson, Roy E. Gane, Duane A. Garrett, Richard S. Hess, Benjamin Kilchör, Michael LeFebvre, Jiří Moskala, and Christian Vogel.

The Achaemenid period (550-330 BCE) is rightly seen as one of the most formative periods in Judaism. It is the period in which large portions of the Bible were edited and redacted and others were authored--yet no dedicated interdisciplinary study has been undertaken to present a consistent picture of this decisive time period. This book is dedicated to the study of the touchpoints between Yahwistic communities throughout the Achaemenid empire and the Iranian attributes of the empire that ruled over them for about two centuries. Its approach is fundamentally interdisciplinary. It brings together scholars of Achaemenid history, literature and religion, Iranian linguistics, historians of the Ancient Near East, archeologists, biblical scholars and Semiticists. The goal is to better understand the interchange of ideas, expressions and concepts as well as the experience of historical events between Yahwists and the empire that ruled over them for over two centuries. The book will open up a holisitic perspective on this important era to scholars of a wide variety of fields in the study of Judaism in the Ancient Near East.

In this study, Jürg Hutzli analyses all Priestly texts in Genesis-Exodus. He evaluates crucial questions concerning P, namely inner stratification, literary profile, historical setting, and relationship to the non-P "environment" separately for each Priestly unit or section. An important result of the author's study is the conclusion that the Priestly texts form a stratum that is more composite and less homogeneous than previously thought. Single units like Gen. 1, the Priestly flood story, and the Priestly Abraham narrative have their own distinct theologies that do not fit that of the comprehensive Priestly composition in every respect. Furthermore, as recent studies point out, the literary profile of P is not the same in every section (either a source or a redaction). The author evaluates these observations diachronically for an inner differentiation of the Priestly strand.