Professional career
Bernard Levinson began his professional teaching career at Middlebury College in Vermont,teaching there for a semester each in 1983 and 1984. In 1987,he received a fellowship as the Stroum Fellow in Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. Subsequently,while working on his dissertation,he taught full-time for two years in the Religious Studies Program at The Pennsylvania State University. Upon the completion of his dissertation,he was appointed to Indiana University in Bloomington,as an assistant professor in its Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures,with adjunct appointments to both Jewish Studies and Religious Studies. Midway through his appointment,he was invited to spend a year as a visiting scholar in the Faculty of Protestant Theology at Johannes Gutenberg University,in Mainz,Germany (1992–1993). After being tenured at Indiana University, [3] he was appointed to the University of Minnesota's Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies as the first inhabitant of the Berman Family Chair in Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible. [4] This position was the first endowed chair in the College of Liberal Arts and was seen as distinctive for confirming the significance of the academic study of religion within a public and state university. [5] Shortly after his arrival,he received an appointment to the Law School as an affiliated faculty member. [2] In 2009,he was promoted to the rank of full professor,and in 2010,honored as a scholar of the College of Liberal Arts 2010–2013.
The interdisciplinary significance of Levinson's work has been recognized with appointments to the Institute for Advanced Study (1997);the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin/Berlin Institute for Advanced Study (2007);and to the National Humanities Center (Research Triangle,NC),as the Henry Luce Senior Fellow in Religious Studies (2011 academic year).
Bernard Levinson seeks to bring the academic biblical scholarship to the attention of a broader,non-specialist readership [6] In this vein,he has recently written on the impact of the King James Version of the Bible upon the American Founding; [7] drawn attention in the national press to the role of early feminist Bible scholars like Elizabeth Cady Stanton in helping win the vote for women; [8] and,in his attention to language,has been cited in the Oxford English Dictionary. [9]
On May 6,2010,he was elected a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research,the oldest professional organization of Judaica scholars in North America. [10] Fellows are nominated and elected by their peers and thus constitute the most distinguished and most senior scholars teaching Judaic studies at American universities. [11]
Levinson was at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem during the 2012–13 academic year. During his time at IAS,he co-directed an international research team on a project titled "Convergence and Divergence in Pentateuchal Theory:Bridging the Academic Cultures of Israel,North America,and Europe" and co-organized an international conference,which was held on May 12–13,2013. The conference featured presentations from a range of scholars and sought to further international exchange and establish a shared intellectual dialogue. [12]
More recently,Levinson has co-organized a second international conference at IAS with the title "The Pentateuch within Biblical Literature:Formation and Interaction." This upcoming conference,scheduled for May 25–29,2014,in Jerusalem,will focus primarily on the formation of the Pentateuch and its interaction with both the prophetic corpus and the historiographic literature of the Hebrew Bible. [13]
Views on the Bible
According to Levinson,standard analysis of the textual development of the Hebrew Bible moves from "oral to written,from individual poem,song,ecstatic utterance,to larger units,to larger collections,to books being combined together by redactors". [14] : 386 Levinson asserts this is a necessary basic understanding,but that it is insufficient to explain how the separate constituent parts of text and tradition became invested with the kind of cultural authority needed to begin the process of creating scripture in the first place. [14] : 390
Cuneiform literature exhibits many of the same characteristics of Hebrew literature,but cuneiform never formed into "anything like a scripture,either with its distinctive textual features, ...[or] its distinctive ideological features,such as the truth claims it mounts,the extraordinary demands for adherence it requires from its audience to uphold the demands it seeks to place upon them,or the polemics it makes opposing competing ideologies". [14] : 387 Levinson says,this makes the Pentateuch unique:"Nothing similar ever took place for the multiple legal collections or epic works of ancient Mesopotamia or the world of classical antiquity". [14] : 388
Levinson writes that the text,theology and culture of the Hebrew Bible "is neither “Jewish”nor “Christian”but distinctively Israelite". [14] : 390 It is different from the text of the Samaritan Pentateuch which embeds material to make the text distinctively Samaritan. In contrast,the Hebrew Bible remains “Near Eastern”in its religious orientation and theological perspective". [14] : 381 One example is Deuteronomy 32 which evidences the elimination of two verses proclaiming Yahweh's rule over a divine pantheon leaving a text that makes little sense. [14] : 382 Such "corrections" were infrequent,and never systematic,and there are many cases where "problem texts" were allowed to remain in the Masoretic text,whereas the Septuagint corrected those texts "to align with normative Second Temple Jewish halakah". [14] : 382 The Septuagint and the Samaritan text evidence changes that promote the point of view of their particular sect. [14] : 382–384 The Masoretic text reflects the distinctiveness of ancient Israelite religion's theological,ethical,and doctrinal content,through the distinctive textual forms it developed. [14] : 392
Rabbinic Judaism in relation to Israelite religion was revolutionary. It transformed tradition as it gathered the complex collection that became the Tanakh during the Second Temple period. [14] : 385 The Tanakh is neither conventionally Israelite nor conventionally Jewish. Its organization is didactic,and in many ways,counter–intuitive. It has a clear focus on Torah,and rejects concern over historical verisimilitude. It rejects consistency with common literary genres. As a narrative,it makes no sense:Deuteronomy ends with Israel not in the Promised land. [14] : 385
Yet its complex narrative brings conflicting texts together into a single larger corpus without privileging or excluding conflicting points of view. This evidences a complex concept of community that integrates competing interests and identities. [14] : 391 "As Morton Smith suggested,the complex redaction of the Pentateuch seems to point to a social compromise between competing sectarian and ethnographic communities during the Second Temple period". [14] : 391 The Tanakh stands as "a valuable heuristic challenge to modernizing attempts to appropriate it too easily into convenient cultural constructions". [14] : 390
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