James Kugel on Post Torah Judaism

Quint Buchholz, Mann mit Spazierstock

James Kugel responded to the reviews of his book in the Jewish Quarterly and it’s starting to pick up the blogosphere buzz. Without the benefit of actually reading the JQR one can imperfectly gleam the objections from Kugel’s own polemic, specifically his virtual debate with Professor Benjamin Sommer.

James Kugel observes the conflict of a believer and a biblical scholar. On one hand one is compelled to accept the “four or more anonymous authors, all of whom lived long after the time of Moses”. On the hand there is a rhetoric to infuse the different authors with a divine origin and inspiration, as Kugel quotes Benjamin Sommer: “There is no contradiction between the austere God of P and the immanent God of J;there is no contradiction between the way P describes the miracle at the Reed Sea in a naturalistic way while J describes it in a supernatural way.”

James Kugel is basically saying that the search for the divine origin in Torah is a waste of time, it’s a hodgepodge. But then he proposes something even more radical: “These texts started out as one thing (etiological narratives, royal propaganda, divine instructions to the king, and cultic recitations) and then, thanks to the great Interpretive Revolution of the closing centuries BCE, they became something else entirely (moral tales, historical fact, timeless truths offered to all Israel, and the heartfelt psalms of King David).” To be sure Professor Kugel maintains there is a succession of the Interpretive Revolutions all the way to the Rabbinic Judaism. That process or re-imagining the texts is “divine” enough for James Kugel to the point of him basing his own Orthodoxy on this very proposition.

Is this argument not as contradictory that of Benjamin Sommer? In fact by the way of a pertinent detour there are letters that James Kugel published on this web site, comments about his book. Scroll in the middle there is a letter from some DH, Orthoprax or Orthodox, read it. Can James Kugel accuse anyone of being conflicted, inconsistent or contradictory?

But let me mine some value here. All these scholars don’t care about the truth, they toss in just enough demagoguery to explain the conflicts of their dubious practices and the tribal standings. But yet there is some geshmak to be found in their own unrestrained “interpretive revolutions”, firm and toned mental gymnastics, like this one:

“Let’s look at the one case that Sommer does examine in detail, the insertion of the Judah-Tamar episode in the middle of the Joseph story. Both narratives, Judah-Tamar and at least some parts of the Joseph story, come from “J.” Sommer notes – so obviously they were meant to go together (p. 160). I suppose that argument would have more force if “J” were indeed one person. But nobody (except possibly the late Gerhard von Rad) really maintains that – indeed, the whole Tendenz of recent European Pentateuchal studies has been, to quote the title of a 2006 collection of essays, A Farewell to the Yahwist. Even Wellhausen insisted that “J” was really a collection of different writers, J1, J2, J3, and so forth, and Rolf Rendtorff, H. H. Schmid and others subsequently made the same case in great detail. So drop that argument – it was false to begin with. And come to think of it, why shouldn’t Sommer want to consider the Judah-Tamar episode an interpolation?

Surely he subscribes to some form of the Documentary Hypothesis, nor, therefore, does he likely have any objection in principle to identifying Judah-Tamar as an interpolation.

What is more, this episode clearly announces itself as such, starting as it does with that all-purpose editorial transition, “At this same time…” and ending with a staple of nearly all insertions, the resumptive repetition (Wiederaufnahme), found here in Gen. 39:1, “Now [as I was saying,] Joseph had been brought down to Egypt.” The Judah-Tamar narrative further identifies itself as an interpolation by its disjunction from the surrounding story of Joseph, most notably in its picture of Judah, who is here an at least middle-aged paterfamilias with three grown sons, indeed, a grandfather by the end of the story, whereas much later in the Joseph story, Reuben, the oldest brother, can say to his father, “You may kill my two sons if I do not bring him [Benjamin] back to you” (Gen. 42:37). It certainly sounds as if he is talking about two minor children, not mature adults with a will of their own. If so, how can Reuben’s younger brother Judah have been the father of grown, married sons still earlier? (Not impossible, surely, but a rather unlikely detail for the unitary author “J” to have stuck in.) The Judah of the Judah-Tamar episode also seems to be a rather different character from the Judah who appears in the chapters that follow it. The former is a loutish bully who is prepared to condemn his daughter-in-law to death despite the reasonable inference that it was his own cruel prevention of her marrying that led her in desperation to an extramarital pregnancy. By contrast, the Judah of the Joseph story is the moral hero of the entire affair, a man prepared to sacrifice his own welfare in order to allow his brother Benjamin to go free. As many have argued, the only reason for Judah-Tamar’s insertion into the Joseph narrative was that it preserved an ancient tradition concerning the ancestry of two allegedly Judahite clans, Perez and Zerah. And if it was inserted where it was, this was simply because there was no other place to put it: it could not come after the Joseph story, at the end of which Judah and his brothers have all immigrated to Egypt, because the events of Judah-Tamar takes place when Judah is still living in the land of Israel; and to put the story before the Joseph narrative would only compound the problem of Judah’s middle-aged persona in Judah-Tamar. It had to be inserted somewhere in the middle.”

It would be nice to farbreng one day with all the Js, the original bloggers. You see the anonymity is the root cause of all the evil in the world. If they signed their darn “trees of life” the world would have been different, better.

P.S. Wait, what’s going down here? So the reason for the insertion of the Judah-Tamar story was the need to establish the Judean family tree of non other than the future (or is it past?) King David himself and by extension every serious messianic contender known to man and the only thing they came up with is the incestuous, random fling with a whore? Wow! Even if this was true, given the editorial control, they would have kept it all in the family rather than deliberately mess up the story line?

Here what really happen. Some nerd going by the name J7 was sitting doing what he or she usually does on a Thursday afternoon, writing Humash that is. Suddenly several Judean rich goons showed up to make sure J7 spins something nice about their families. It was then that J7 remembered when his was a kid schlepping around his scrolls, the bullies would kick him, spill his ink and draw obscene pictures on the back of his scrolls. Now was his chance to get even. J7 wrote the worst lurid tale he can think of, knowing too well that the illiterate shepherds from the Perez and Zerah families would never find out. And the rest like they say is history.