Processing the Pentateuch

As a happy coincidence, the project to read the entire Pentateuch coincided with a series of Stanford lectures on the Second Punic War. The context for something this old and foreign is invaluable. It’s worth remembering that the Levant and North Africa in the several centuries BCE were Phoenician territory. (Canaanites, Hittites, Minoans, etc.) The mention they usually get in History class is “maritime people, invented cuneiform,” and not much else. Their rarely-mentioned religion forms the background against which both the Greeks and the Hebrews must be seen. The primary custom to note was the Cult of Baal (the thunder-god,) which apparently involved the sacrifice of children (preferably first-born boys,) by burning them alive; probably important as a display of being able to dispense with the most valuable thing you had. The secondary Phoenician practice was the Cult of Astarte. While eventually developing into the Greek Aphrodite, this fertility goddess was worshipped through ritual prostitution, which seems to have been fairly inclusive.

Knowing all of that, the text of the ancient jews takes on a slightly different color. Simply as a matter of text one thing that jumped out is that the four-character name for the deity doesn’t actually make an appearance until Exodus, which means I’m not sure what. (read the footnotes carefully) In fact, restoring the original name into the euphemism traditionally substituted by translators makes the reading both more immediate and strangely older. What was striking was the amount of information that is already assumed. Much like the Pauline Epistles, you can almost learn as much about the story by noting which things are chosen as forbidden as by the actual instructions. For instance, that Leviticus feels a need to include not one, but two complete prohibitions of sacrificing children to Molech (i.e. the Baal Cult) speaks to what must have been its prevalence. Passage after passage almost cries out for a clause that says “as opposed to what you’re used to doing, which is . . . “ The near-sacrifice of Isaac becomes no longer one of extreme commitment, but of a more humane prohibition of human sacrifice (with the implied, “from now on. . . .”)

There does seem to be an awful lot of emphasis on animal sacrifice. It begins to make more sense if the whole thing is cast as an instruction manual for an ad-hoc mobile civilization. There are instructions for hygiene, dispute resolution (despite what a modern might think of some of the nature of the disputes,) property rights, organizational structure, feeding the priest class, and even the geographic layout of the campsite down to order of march. If it’s not heretical to say so, one can almost see the sacrifice quota as taxes and fines.

The only thing I don’t really get was the intent of Deuteronomy. It’s part summary, part valediction, and part press release. One wonders if the intended audience wasn’t originally different. (After all, these were originally read aloud, not published as we think of them now.) - that and the whole scapegoat thing.

One page added to generations of scholarship.