Bernard Malcolm Levinson | |
---|---|
Born | 1952 |
Nationality | American |
Title | Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Studies and of Law |
Academic background | |
Education | York University, McMaster University |
Alma mater | Brandeis University (PhD) |
Thesis | (1991) |
Doctoral advisor | Michael Fishbane |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Biblical studies |
Institutions | Middlebury College The Pennsylvania State University Indiana University University of Minnesota |
Notable works | Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation |
Bernard Malcolm Levinson serves as Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Studies and of Law at the University of Minnesota,where he holds the Berman Family Chair in Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible. [1] He is the author of Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation,"The Right Chorale":Studies in Biblical Law and Interpretation, and Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel;and is the co-editor of The Pentateuch as Torah:New Models for Understanding Its Promulgation and Acceptance. He has published extensively on biblical and ancient Near Eastern law and on the reception of biblical literature in the Second Temple period. His research interests extend to early modern intellectual history,constitutional theory,the history of interpretation,and literary approaches to biblical studies. [2]
Levinson earned an Honors B.A. from York University in 1974,where he majored in Humanities and English and graduated with first class honors. He received his M.A in Religious Studies from McMaster University in 1978. Following his two years at McMaster,he spent a year as Visiting Researcher in Bible and Semitic Languages at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1991,under the advisor Michael Fishbane,he received a Ph.D. in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University.
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]
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
The Bible is a collection of religious texts or scriptures, some, all, or a variant of which are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, Islam, the Baha'i Faith, and other Abrahamic religions. The Bible is an anthology originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek. The texts include instructions, stories, poetry, prophecies, and other genres. The collection of materials that are accepted as part of the Bible by a particular religious tradition or community is called a biblical canon. Believers in the Bible generally consider it to be a product of divine inspiration, but the way they understand what that means and interpret the text varies.
Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Torah, where it is called Devarim and the fifth book of the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament.
Midrash is expansive Jewish Biblical exegesis using a rabbinic mode of interpretation prominent in the Talmud. The word itself means "textual interpretation", "study", or "exegesis", derived from the root verb darash (דָּרַשׁ), which means "resort to, seek, seek with care, enquire, require".
The Old Testament (OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by the Israelites. The second division of Christian Bibles is the New Testament, written in Koine Greek.
The Torah is the compilation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, namely the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The Torah is known as the Pentateuch or the Five Books of Moses by Christians. It is also known as the Written Torah in Rabbinical Jewish tradition. If meant for liturgic purposes, it takes the form of a Torah scroll. If in bound book form, it is called Chumash, and is usually printed with the rabbinic commentaries.
The documentary hypothesis (DH) is one of the models used by biblical scholars to explain the origins and composition of the Torah. A version of the documentary hypothesis, frequently identified with the German scholar Julius Wellhausen, was almost universally accepted for most of the 20th century. It posited that the Pentateuch is a compilation of four originally independent documents: the Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priestly sources, frequently referred to by their initials. The first of these, J, was dated to the Solomonic period. E was dated somewhat later, in the 9th century BCE, and D was dated just before the reign of King Josiah, in the 7th or 8th century BCE. Finally, P was generally dated to the time of Ezra in the 5th century BCE. The sources would have been joined at various points in time by a series of editors or "redactors".
The Samaritan Pentateuch, also called the Samaritan Torah, is the sacred scripture of the Samaritans. Written in the Samaritan script, it dates back to one of the ancient versions of the Torah that existed during the Second Temple period. It constitutes the entire biblical canon in Samaritanism.
The oldest surviving Hebrew Bible manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, date to c. the 2nd century BCE. Some of these scrolls are presently stored at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. The oldest text of the entire Bible, including the New Testament, is the Codex Sinaiticus dating from the 4th century CE, with its Old Testament a copy of a Greek translation known as the Septuagint. The oldest extant manuscripts of the vocalized Masoretic Text date to the 9th century CE. With the exception of a few biblical sections in the Nevi'im, virtually no biblical text is contemporaneous with the events it describes.
Biblical studies is the academic application of a set of diverse disciplines to the study of the Bible. For its theory and methods, the field draws on disciplines ranging from ancient history, historical criticism, philology, theology, textual criticism, literary criticism, historical backgrounds, mythology, and comparative religion.
The Ritual Decalogue is a list of laws at Exodus 34:11–26. These laws are similar to the Covenant Code and are followed by the phrase "Ten Commandments". Although the phrase "Ten Commandments" has traditionally been interpreted as referring to a very different set of laws, in Exodus 20:2–17, many scholars believe it instead refers to the Ritual Decalogue found two verses earlier.
John Van Seters is a Canadian scholar of the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East. Currently University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, he was formerly James A. Gray Professor of Biblical Literature at UNC. He took his Ph.D. at Yale University in Near Eastern Studies (1965) and a Th.D. h.c. from the University of Lausanne (1999). His honours and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH fellowship, an ACLS Fellowship, and research fellowships at Oxford, Cambridge, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and National Research Foundation of South Africa. His many publications include The Hyksos: A New Investigation (1966); Abraham in History and Tradition (1975); In Search of History ; The Edited Bible (2006); and The Biblical Saga of King David (2009).
The Covenant Code, or Book of the Covenant, is the name given by academics to a text appearing in the Torah, at Exodus 20:22–23:19; or, more strictly, the term Covenant Code may be applied to Exodus 21:1–22:16. Biblically, the text is the second of the law codes said to have been given to Moses by God at Mount Sinai. This legal text provides a small but substantive proportion of the mitzvot within the Torah, and hence is a source of Jewish Law.
Gerhard von Rad was a German academic, Old Testament scholar, Lutheran theologian, exegete, and professor at the University of Heidelberg.
Gerald "Gary" Neil Knoppers was a professor in the Department of Theology at University of Notre Dame. He wrote books and articles regarding a range of Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern topics. He is particularly renowned for his work on 1 Chronicles, writing I Chronicles 1 – 9 and I Chronicles 10 – 29, which together comprise a significant treatment of the work of the Chronicler. In May 2005 the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies granted the R. B. Y. Scott Award to Knoppers for his two-volume Anchor Bible commentary on I Chronicles
Mosaic authorship is the Judeo-Christian tradition that the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, were dictated by God to Moses. The tradition probably began with the legalistic code of the Book of Deuteronomy and was then gradually extended until Moses, as the central character, came to be regarded not just as the mediator of law but as author of both laws and narrative.
Ancient Hebrew writings are texts written in Biblical Hebrew using the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.
James Washington Watts is an American professor of religion at Syracuse University. His research focuses on the rhetoric of Leviticus. His publications also compare the Bible with other religious scriptures, especially in their ritual performances, social functions, and material symbolism.
The composition of the Torah was a process that involved multiple authors over an extended period of time. While Jewish tradition holds that all five books were originally written by Moses sometime in the 2nd millennium BCE, leading scholars have rejected Mosaic authorship since the 17th century.
Thomas Christian Römer is a German-born Swiss biblical scholar, exegete, philologist, professor, and Reformed minister. After teaching at the University of Geneva, he became professor of the Old Testament at the University of Lausanne. From 2007, has held the chair "Biblical environments" at the Collège de France, of which he became administrator in 2019. The Collège de France is considered to be France's most prestigious research establishment.
Benjamin D. Sommer is an American biblical scholar and Jewish theologian. He is a Professor of Bible at The Jewish Theological Seminary of America and a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. He is a former director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish Studies at Northwestern University.
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