A Critical Engagement With the Methodology of Dalit Rom-Shiloni
book response, to Rom-Shiloni's Voices From the Ruins: Theodicy and the Fall of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible
Right, it’s been a while, but here’s something a bit different: one of the assignments for my honours seminar on the Fall of Jerusalem from last semester. I think this one is kind of cool, but it’s also a bit idiosyncratic - let me know what you think. The Book is well worth reading.
Edit: wow, Substack is not good for formatting RTL and LTR text together, apologies for that.
During a recent bible study with friends, I found myself thinking of G-d’s nature as often depicted “like the weather.” Even in the relatively late Ruth, oriented around the word חסד, Naomi says of G-d that הרע ל[ה], he has done רע, evil, disaster, or calamity to her (1:21). Likewise, Deutero-Isaiah, in asserting the sovereignty of G-d over all things announces, in G-d’s name, that:
יוצר אור ובורא חשך עשה שלום ובורא רע אני ה' עשה כל-אלה
Making light and creating darkness, making peace and creating רע; I, ה' do all these things (45:6).
That G-d is the source of all things here (or, in earlier texts, the master of all that occurs in/to Israel) is clear. The question becomes, rather that one of the origins of evil or suffering, what this means regarding the relationship between this conceptualization of G-d and the one presented within the covenantal context. In a post-Biblical context, it is often assumed that the universalization of Israelite religion is an unproblematic good, however the negotiation of this universalization itself contributes to theological problematics that persist even into the present.
Recognition of the negotiation of these divine characteristics allows us to situate the dialectic identified by Dalit Rom-Shiloni within the diachronic development of the religion of Israel, rather than being either a solely descriptive account, as Rom-Shiloni describes her project in Voices From the Ruins,1 or abstracting it into the simple negotiation of a transhistorical theological problem. In this way we can reframe Rom-Shiloni’s discursive categories outside of the postbiblical philosophical lens of Hume’s Trilemma, which is foreign to the Bible.2 This in turn allows us to read the texts in question as not solely responding to and proposing solutions to problems, but as the record of a developing culture, simultaneously producing the problems in question and tools for their navigation and negotiation – for, perhaps, thinking speculatively.
This essay will outline and critically assess Dalit Rom-Shiloni’s discursive model, proposing a series of modifications, followed by an application of this revised model to key passages responding to the crisis of the Babylonian conquest. The results of this, in leu of a conclusion, will be followed by a proposed mode of reading informed by the dialectical philosophy of Gillian Rose.
Critical Models
To orient this analysis, it is necessary to briefly outline Biblical religion prior to the Babylonian invasion.3 The orienting framework is the covenantal relationship between Isarel and their G-d, which is predicated on an explicitly contingent presence in the land.4 This is represented throughout Deuteronomy, in its reframing of the prior narrative of E5 in the form of a vassal treaty.6 The following is representative:
והיה אם-שמע תשמעו אל-מצותי אשר אנכי מצוה אתכם ... ונתתי מטר-ארצכם ...ואכלת ושבעת ... השמרו לכם פן יפתה לבבכם וסרתם ועבדתם אלהים אחרים ... וחרה אף-ה' בכם ועצר את-השמים ... ואבדתם מהרה מעל הארץ
Thus, if you truly obey the commandments that I enjoin you … I will give you rain in your land … and you will eat and be satisfied… Guard over yourselves, lest your hearts be deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods … for the anger of [ה'] will rise up against you, and he will shut up the heavens… and you will quickly perish from upon the land (Deut 11:13-17).
This is a call to obedience, but obedience is tied to reciprocal Divine action. The leverage of this paradigm to justify both the earlier conquest of the Northern Kingdom by the Assyrians and the later Babylonian destruction of Judah appears to be a natural outgrowth of this framework, most clearly represented in the theodic-teleological account of the book of Kings: Israel is destroyed for the sins of Jeroboam (2 Kings 17:5, 21-3), and Judah for the sins of Manasseh (24:1-4). These charges mirror those in the Pentateuch: the sin of the Golden Calf, the continual charge of stiff-necked disobedience, and the blessing and curse formulas that frame the Deuteronomic and Levitical laws.7 In this way we can read the theodical position of justification of G-d as the foundational position of the Hebrew Bible. It is from this position, when the framework undergirding justification fails to sustain itself that the “dialogue” incorporating doubt and protest described by Rom-Shiloni emerges.8 But what does this dialogue do?
To answer this question, we can analyse this discourse as a dialectic.9 Rom-Shiloni’s paradigm can be diagrammed as two antitheses mediated by a third term:
Doubt ↔ protest ↔ justification
The mediatory term (protest) can be seen as a product of the contradiction between the first term (Justification) and the second term (doubt, arising from incongruence between the first term and its object). However, the terms presented by Rom-Shiloni lack objects. Doubt of what? Justification of whom? The implication (by way of Leibniz) is that the object is G-d, but the lack of explicit objects can also imply something broader. All three terms can take both Israel and their Deity as their objects.
Within the covenantal relationship there is a mutual justification which is conditional and constitutive, in that it is the discourse that is creating the identities which are its subject. We can characterise this additional, underlying dialectic as such, with the arrows denoting mutual, relative constitution, with the middle term mediating between the former and latter:
The identity of Israel ↔ the covenantal relationship ↔ the identity of the Deity10
As the identities are constituted within history, there must be a constant upkeep of both the three elements that subsist within this dialectic, and the constitutive relationships between them. However, the dialectic is predicated on conditionality: both sides are constituted via the conditional and relational third term, and as both sides are abstract identities, neither is identical with its object. This non-identity is the negative moment produced within the justificatory assertion: the contingency of the assertion, the discursive need for it, sows its own doubt. As obligation is mutual, the conditionality of Israel’s identity as a polity with tenure in the land is likewise projected onto the Deity via the mediation of the covenant. If the covenant fails, the constitution of both poles collapses.11 This makes Moses’ choice of language during his intercession on Sinai following the Golden Calf incident particularly perceptive, given the direct appeal to the identity of the Divine:
למה יאמרו מצרים לאמר ברעה הוציאם להרג אתם בהרים ולכלתם מעל פני האדמה
Will not the Egyptians say with רעה he lead them out, to kill them in the mountains, and wipe them off the face of the earth?
G-d’s identity is constituted by G-d’s actions toward the People. Thus, regarding the discourse as a whole, Brueggemann is correct that Theodicy is a central concern of the Bible,12 however this concern is an internal product of the discourses that constitute the Biblical texts. The remainder between concept and object – the inability of the discourse to subsume that which it describes – is the mechanism by which the discourse unfolds; the motion of the concepts in their diachronic unfolding is likewise impelled to account for their presence within and constitution by history.
This framework allows for analysis that acknowledges textual features like those which Rom-Shiloni identifies as not according “with the paradigms of linear development from concrete to abstract, nor with distinctions of religious development among Judean authorial circles”13 while not reducing contradiction into mere differing “perspectives” (particularly important as these different features are often present in the same texts), and not bracketing diachronic development in favour of purely descriptive analysis. While indebted to Sommer’s “dialogical” approach14 it also allows for engagement with historical, philological, and sociological paradigms simultaneously, and can be extended into reception history and modern religious thought.
Reading Crises
Addressing the provenance of covenantal mediation is beyond the scope of this essay, but this is presupposed by the 8th century prophets.15 Responding to an earlier crisis, these Prophets provide a model for the later discourse, with features that complicate this national-religious domain. Firstly, there is the covenant lawsuit, or ריב (riv).16 While this mode can be read as theodicy in the Leibnitzian sense, in Rom-Shiloni’s paradigm this is complicated by the justification of G-d being predicated on negation of the justification of the people. In this form two different forms of identity-justification are placed in opposition to one another.
While these prophets present oracles against the surrounding enemy nations, these nations are also presented as the tools by which divine judgement is enacted.17 This is most explicit in Isaiah, where the prophet describes Assyria as the “rod of [G-d’s] anger (10:1). Likewise, under the shadow of Assyrian domination and within a literary mode shared with Assyria,18 Deuteronomy includes in the penalty for breaking the covenant:
יתנך ה' נגף לפני איביך ...פרי אדמתך וכל-יגיעך יאכל עם לא-ידעת והיית רק עשוק ורצוץ כל-הימים
[ה'] will put you to rout before your enemies… the fruit of your land and all your produce will be consumed by a people you do not know, and you will be exploited and broken for all time (28:25-33).
In the face of imperial expansionism, we find the counter-expansion of the power of the national Deity to include the very empire that threatens the continuity of the nation, in a text that is legitimizing the Judahite state and authorizing the centralization of the cult. It is not so large a jump from here to היה אדוני כאויב [the Lord has become like an enemy] (Lam 2:5; cf. Jer 21:4-5).19 It appears that the geopolitical situation of the Levant under Assyrian domination has a destabilizing effect on the balance between patron deity and nation. The result is an early manifestation of the contradictory impulse toward on one hand, particularism, and on the other, a nascent universalism that will characterize much of the following developments in Israelite/Jewish religion.20
There are two additional modes within the prophetic literature that accord with Rom-Shiloni’s paradigm. The lament for the iniquity of Israel can be seen as an assertion of Divine doubt in G-d’s people, and the inversion of the doubt in Divine justice found in Lamentations and the Psalms of lament. Secondly, the appeals to Divine mercy can be read as protest against imminent judgement.21
All these features are present in Jeremiah. Chapter 2 contains the explicit invocation of ריב:
לכן עד אריב אתכם נאם-ה' ואת בני בניכם אריב
Therefore, I will continue to accuse you, declares ה', and accuse your children’s children (2:9).
While the structure is different from other examples, a witness is called in the following verse:
שמו שמים על-זאת ושערו חרבו מאד נאם-הי
Be appalled, Heavens, by this – be horrified, be greatly desolated, declares ה' (2:12).
Chapters 2-5 continue with accusations, an announcement of impending doom, and the justification of the latter as punishment for the former. This includes material directly mirroring Deuteronomy:
הנני מביא עליכם גוי ממרחק בית ישראל נאם ה' גוי איתן הוא גוי מעולם הוא גוי לא תדע
Behold, I bring upon you, House of Israel, a nation from afar, declares ה'. It is an enduring nation, it is an ancient nation, a nation that you do not know (5:15).
However, intertwined with the condemnations are passages of lament. Across these passages the speaker shifts. Ch 3 contains a series of complaints by G-d, addressing Israel in the second person. However, v21 shifts into the third person, and the voice shifts again in vv22-5, where Israel mourns their own unfaithfulness: כי לה' א-להינו חטאנו [because against ה' our G-d we have sinned]. The following chapter returns to G-d as the speaker, taking up the lament form. Here the genre marker עד-מתי [how long] appears, attached to both action and consequence:
עד-מתי תלין בקרבך מחשבות אונך... עד-מתי אראה-נס אשמעה קול שופר
How long will you house within you your thoughts of iniquity? … how long will I see banners and hear the voice of the shofar? (4:14, 21).
G-d mourns not only the sins of Israel, but also the Judgment he himself is responsible for – implying that G-d’s actions are somehow determined and beyond his direct control, presumably by the conditions of the covenant.
Combining the communal lament and the appeal for mercy is the series of passages opening in Jer 14.22 Unusually, the superscription describes this passage as an oracle, “the word of ה' that came to Jeremiah.” vv1-6 describe drought in the third person but shift into the first person plural in v7.23 These passages are penitential, but also call upon G-d to act למען שמ[ו] [for the sake of his name] )7, 21) expressing doubt in divine power – למה תהיה כאיש נדהם כגבור לא יוכל להושיע? [why are you like a weak man, a warrior who cannot save?] (9). This is interwoven with dialogue in which Jeremiah and G-d exchange pleas, and G-d demands of Jeremiah that he not pray for the people, producing a significant level of semantic ambivalence. Heightening this is the conclusive condemnation at the end of this passage, where the remnant will be given over to the sword (15:7), restated in chs 24-8, but also contradicting other passages (23:3, 31:2-36,24 39:2ff etc). Rather than attempting to rationalise or harmonize these tensions, they themselves should be taken as meaningful.25 The certain and total doom, and impossibility of divine mercy so repeatedly and emphatically stated throughout the text is not quite to certain or total, and divine mercy is not quite such an impossibility.
The attempts to resolve these discursive breaches and to maintain the identities constituted by the underlying dialectic are evidenced most clearly in the Exilic prophets. Deutero-Isaiah is an extended example, but for brevity’s sake I will concentrate on Ezekiel. While Ezekiel 14 and 18 emphasize individual responsibility for actions, both righteous and transgressive, and have been read through an individualist lens,26 Ezekiel is engaged in a significant reimagining of communal identity.27 This individual responsibility has limits, as shown by Ezekiel’s call as a “watchman” (צפה, 3:16-21, repeated in 33:1-20).28 While others are responsible for themselves, the Prophet is held accountable for the failings of others if he has not warned them.29 The presentation of this in ch 33 directly precedes another passage addressing responsibility. The oracle to the shepherds (34:1-31) is an indictment of failed communal leadership.30 In tandem with the announcement of a new model of leadership, the promise that the future David will be נשיא, but not מלך (v24) reads as an indictment of royalty – and perhaps of a system in which it is possible for Israel and Judah to be destroyed for the sins of their respective kings.31 The recalibration of responsibility in 14:6-23, 18:1-22, and 33:12-20 can be read as a call to communal responsibility, in which responsibility for the moral/religious sphere and communal identity is no longer held by a caste of leaders, but rather distributed across the community which now, in exile, constitutes itself horizontally.32 Placed in context, this can be read as responding to Deuteronomic theology, particularly as represented in the theodicy of Kings and in Jeremiah.
Modelling Rom-Shiloni’s dialogue as a dialectic tied to the adjudication of identities allows for an assessment of discursive function and the production of meaning, while also moving analysis forward toward the identification of further, underlying tensions, such as the tension between the particular and the universal.
A Concluding Speculative Demonstration
I wish to conclude with a further illustrative example. In his commentary on Ezek 33, Walther Zimmerli, in identifying what he calls “divine logic,” writes:
The complete irrationality of the divine activity is discernible from this announcement: [ה'], the enemy of the people, who draws the sword against them to annihilate them because of their disobedience – [ה'], at the same time, however, [the Deity] who sets up a watchman for his people, who will warn them of the sword in which he himself comes, and thus tries to make that sword ineffectual.33
One could retort as G-d does out of the whirlwind (Job 38:1-40:2), but this would leave things just as unresolved as they are in Job – meaning the tension here appears to be the point. If the interpreter of a text posits that what the text expresses is “complete irrationality” then they have failed in interpretation by simply declaring such impossible. Instead, one must ask of the irrationality what it does.
To illustrate this, I want to turn to a far more recent text, in turn an interpretation. In Hegel Contra Sociology, Gillian Rose interprets a line from Hegel to make a point about Hegelian thought. Relevant to Ezekiel, that line reads:
In general religion and the foundation of the state is [sic] one and the same thing; they are identical in and for themselves.34
Rose elaborates the many ways that, if read conventionally i.e. as “a grammatical subject and predicate joined by the cupola ‘is,’” the sentence is “empirically wrong… inconceivable, undesirable… impossible” and even “unintelligible.”35
Hegel, however, proposes an alternative, the “speculative proposition.” Rather than predication regarding a fixed, concrete object, a relation between concepts is proposed that calls the identity of the two concepts into question, which propels further thought through the recognition of the negation of the identity between each respective concept and its object. This failure of correspondence requires the “movement of the concept” – the coherence of any statement is not presupposed, but likewise it cannot be entirely empty of meaning. We can see this in the contrast between Rose’s quotation and the Ezekiel that I have previously explicated. Ezekiel’s problem is in the same domain as Hegel’s – that religion persists without a state requires that religion no longer be equated with and thus determined by a state. Religion itself must be rethought.
In the passage that Zimmerli calls irrational, we can find a similar form in action: the incoherence arises from four propositions made about the Divinity. Divine action constitutes the following concepts, rather than simply the attributes of Hume’s trilemma:
1) The peoplehood of Israel, constituted through the mediation of the covenant, which provides self-determination, land, and continuity.
2) The manifestation of justice in the world, by way of both blessing and Divine chastisement, constituting the above, but extending beyond the confines of the covenant. This entails a conception of G-d as contingently operating as both an enemy and an ally.
3) The world as such, which includes within it violent enemies, like the Assyrians and the Babylonians, interpreted as agents of the divine will.
4) The prophet in his role as mediator of the Divine within said world.
These are the issues that arise internal to these discourses. The crisis of the 6th C BCE has caused an identity crisis within this schema. The first proposition has been negated entirely, which throws the second into disarray. This necessitates the confirmation of the third proposition – the assertion of some kind of universalism, but the maintenance of a renegotiated peoplehood within this likewise creates tension. Thus we arrive at 4, in which the prophet stands within the breach between terms (Ezek 22:30), and must think non-identity. Ezekiel does not succeed, but then again neither did Hegel; if Hegel were to succeed according to his own terms, his thought would instantiate perfect Divine self-knowledge and the redemption of the world.36 Deutero-Isaiah likewise takes up this process of radical reimagining of the relationship between people, polity/community and Divinity. This process continues, and some of the later failures in this process have been gestured to in my notes. The charting of this is the work of the philosophy of history, toward thinking a whole that maintains internal diversity. As Benjamin writes:
The chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accord with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history. Of course only a redeemed mankind is granted the fullness of its past-which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.37
True understanding of any record requires the maintenance of all elements that constitute the record. An account must be citable in all its various moments, including the contradictions, incongruencies, and diversity that themselves constitute those records. The whole cannot be thought without all its constitutive parts.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. An Introduction to Dialectics. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.
———. Negative Dialectics. Translated by Dennis Redmond. n.p. , 2021. https://cooltexts.github.io/sources/negative_dialectics.pdf.
Baden, Joel S. The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.
Benjamin, Walter. "[Theses] on the Concept of History." In Selected Writings, edited by Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith, Rodney Livingstone and E. F. N. Jephcott. 2.1:381-400. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1996.
Chopra-McGowan, Cathleen Kavita. "Representing the Destruction of Jerusalem: Literary Artistry and the Shaping of Memory in 2 Kings 25, Lamentations, and Ezekiel."Ph.D., The University of Chicago, 2019 (22585394).
Delorme, Jean-Philippe. "בית ישראל in Ezekiel: Identity Construction and the Exilic Period." Journal of Biblical Literature 138, no. 1 (2019): 121-41. https://doi.org/10.1353/jbl.2019.0007.
Hillers, Delbert R. Micah : A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Micah. Hermeneia: A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible. Edited by Loren R. Fisher and Paul D. Hanson. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.
Holladay, William Lee. Jeremiah 1 : A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, Chapters 1-25. Hermeneia: A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible. Edited by Paul D. Hanson. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986.
Martyr, Justin. "The Dialogue with Trypho." Translated by Thomas B. Falls. In The First Apology, the Second Apology, Dialogue with Trypho, Exhortation to the Greeks, Discourse to the Greeks, the Monarchy or the Rule of God. The Fathers of the Church. 139-366. Catholic University of America Press, 1948.
Muffs, Yochanan. "Who Will Stand in the Breach? A Study of Prophetic Intercession." In Love & Joy : Law, Language and Religion in Ancient Israel 9-11. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992.
Niccacci, Alviero. "The Stele of Mesha and the Bible: Verbal System and Narrativity." Orientalia 63, no. 3 (1994): 226-48.
Niditch, Susan. The Responsive Self : Personal Religion in Biblical Literature of the Neo-Babylonian and Persian Periods. Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. Yale University Press, 2015.
Origen. Contra Celsum. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Rom-Shiloni, Dalit. Voices from the Ruins : Theodicy and the Fall of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible. Chicago: Eerdmans, 2021.
Rose, Gillian. Hegel Contra Sociology. Radical Thinkers. London: Verso, 2009.
———. Mourning Becomes the Law : Philosophy and Representation. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Sommer, Benjamin D. Revelation and Authority : Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition. The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015.
Stackert, Jeffrey. Deuteronomy and the Pentateuch. The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. New Haven ; London: Yale University Press, 2022.
———. "Judah in the Shadow of the Assyrian Empire." Chicago: The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago, 19 April 2024. Public Lecture.
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Wolff, Hans Walter. Hosea : A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Hosea. Hermeneia--a Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974.
Zimmerli, Walther. Ezekiel 1 : A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, Chapters 1-24. Translated by R. E. Clements. Hermeneia. Edited by Frank Moore Cross, Klaus Baltzer and Leonard J. Greenspoon. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979.
———. Ezekiel 2 : A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, Chapters 25-48. Translated by James D. Martin. Hermeneia. Edited by Paul D. Hanson and Leonard J. Greenspoon. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983.
Dalit Rom-Shiloni, Voices from the Ruins : Theodicy and the Fall of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible (Chicago: Eerdmans, 2021), 16-17, 50-4, 101-2.
The Paradigm is elaborated in ibid. 19-37. While Rom-Shiloni doesn’t cite Hume directly, she employs a definition from Ronald Green very clearly extrapolated from or formulated in response to Hume. Likewise, the three categories she proposes correspond to the three points of the trilemma: justification is the negation of ethical imperative relative to suffering, protest is predicated on the imperative that G-d must manifest compassion/goodness, and doubt the inversion of certainty of G-d’s power to act in history. Ibid. 21, 23, 30-3. Rom-Shiloni’s conclusions are clearly framed by this paradigm, as elaborated in 363-5. While this inversion/revision of the Humean paradigm is productive, maintaining a framework conditioned by this modern, static paradigm may hinder understanding the function of the concepts at play.
Note the distinction here from Israelite religion – they cross over, but that which is represented in the bible is partly constructed by said document, and partly a deliniated, narrow part of the broader Israelite religious landscape.
This paradigm is present in the 8th century prophets, most clearly to my mind explicated in Hosea.
Joel S. Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 133-7.
Ibid. 130; Jeffrey Stackert, Deuteronomy and the Pentateuch, The Anchor Yale Bible reference library, (New Haven ; London: Yale University Press, 2022), 94-109. See also the conclusions of Cathleen Kavita Chopra-McGowan, "Representing the Destruction of Jerusalem: Literary Artistry and the Shaping of Memory in 2 Kings 25, Lamentations, and Ezekiel" (Ph.D., The University of Chicago, 2019) (22585394). Chopra-McGowan concludes that “Ezekiel’s frequent use of legal and royal imagery characterizes [ה'] as a divine king whose vassal Judah has broken a covenant … using the legal language of forfeiture” (251). This is argued via reading Ezek’s frequent use of root רח״ק according to its Akkadian meaning, following Frank Moore Cross and Yohannan Muffs, see ibid. 228-31.
The use of “mirror” here is to avoid the question of dependency which is beyond the scope of this essay.
This is not about narrative – the stories of Moses and Abraham’s intercession do not necessarily precede this chronologically.
Contra Brueggemann (cited in Rom-Shiloni, Voices from the Ruins, 56), I am using this in the post-Hegelian sense, as elaborated by Theodor W. Adorno, An introduction to dialectics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017) Lectures 2-4 (4-37), and particularly Adorno’s explication of “the labour of the negative”, in lecture 5, 38-46. Cf. the critique in Gillian Rose, Hegel contra sociology, Radical Thinkers, (London: Verso, 2009), 33-6, ccf. Rose’s uptake of a similar paradigm, thus softening the critique in Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law : Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 139-46.
For the sake of avoiding ambiguity, this latter term is entirely literary, or, at best, perceptual. To avoid overextension into the speculative (and with deference to the above, in both senses), I will be maintaining strict apophasis regarding the Deity. What any reader does with this paradigm beyond this is up to them. As far as I’m concerned, the concept of G-d cannot (fully) apprehend its object, at least בעולם הזה.
The failure of the mediating term is also what is asserted as polemic by Justin Martyr in 11-12, "The Dialogue with Trypho," in The First Apology, The Second Apology, Dialogue with Trypho, Exhortation to the Greeks, Discourse to the Greeks, The Monarchy or The Rule of God, The Fathers of the Church (Catholic University of America Press, 1948), 163-4 and in Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), II.75.
Cited in Rom-Shiloni, Voices from the Ruins, 20.
Here I am generalizing Rom-Shiloni’s description of anthropomorphism in the 6th C literature. Ibid. 113.
Ibid. 51; a demonstration of the paradigm outlined in the Sommer paper cited here makes up the bulk of Benjamin D. Sommer, Revelation and Authority : Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition, The Anchor Yale Bible reference library, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015). Note also, regarding the non-identity of concept and object, Rom Shiloni’s observation that:
This distinction between image and conception is crucial … to explain how a transcendent conception of [ה'] can coexist with anthropomorphic representations of the divine (as in Ezek 1) and how immanence and transcendence can be found simultaneously in Ezekiel’s thought and also be represented in anthropomorphic language (as in Ezek 8–11). Similarly, the distinction between image and conception can explain the juxtaposition of different metaphors for God; at times personal and impersonal metaphors may be brought together in one and the same context (Voices from the Ruins, 115-16)
This awareness of the effects of literary figuration can be extended to the function of the concepts constituted throughout the entirety of the discourses in question.
That the responses to the previous Assyrian invasion are important is acknowledged by Rom-Shiloni, Rom-Shiloni, Voices from the Ruins 15-17, that this response might present a pre-existent model for the responses to the Babylonian invasion is excluded by the focus on a single historical event, and only addressed in passing in 141 & 145-6. Likewise, while Rom-Shiloni provides important quantitative analysis of the distribution of terms over the literatures in question their function in context is at times under-analysed.
See the entry in NIDOT; Hosea 2:4-17, 4:4:19, Hans Walter Wolff, Hosea : a commentary on the book of the Prophet Hosea, Hermeneia--a critical and historical commentary on the Bible, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974) xxvii, xxix, 77-80; Micah 6:1-8, Delbert R. Hillers, Micah : a commentary on the book of the Prophet Micah, ed. Loren R. Fisher and Paul D. Hanson, Hermeneia: a critical and historical commentary on the Bible, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 75-9.
This is not unique to Israelite religion, cf. lines 5-6 of the Meshe Stele, translated as “now, as for Omri king of Israel, he oppressed Moab for many days because Kemosh was angry at his land,” Alviero Niccacci, "The Stele of Mesha and the Bible: Verbal System and Narrativity," Orientalia 63, no. 3 (1994). 228.
The extent of the influence of Assyria on Judah in this period is extensive. Jeffrey Stackert argues that among the effects of this is the Deuteronomic ideology of cult centralization, which may be a rationalization of the abandonment of cultic centres outside Jerusalem during Sennacherib’s campaign, Jeffrey Stackert, "Judah in the Shadow of the Assyrian Empire,"(Chicago: The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago, 19 April 2024), Public Lecture.
see also Stackert, Deuteronomy, 84; 156-8.
Cf. Rom-Shiloni, Voices from the Ruins, 196-201.
If this essay were longer, this point would be followed up by a reading of Psalm 82 as setting the stage for Isa 43:10-45:24’s declarations of absolute divine supremacy.
Such as in Hab. 1:2-4, 12-17; and Amos 7:1-6.
Holladay takes 14:1-15:9 to be a unit, William Lee Holladay, Jeremiah 1 : a commentary on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, chapters 1-25, ed. Paul D. Hanson, Hermeneia: a critical and historical commentary on the Bible, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 419-444. There is no space in this essay for a full assessment of this material. However, as the speakers shift throughout these passages, and the form shifts abruptly, the “unity” is uncertain, as he acknowledges (422). Likewise, the mixing of genres (425), abrupt disjunctions, including the superscription call into doubt the finality of the temporally indeterminate “judgement” that he reads as the natural conclusion of this section (426). It is entirely possible that this form, and its conclusion, is the product of the redaction of multiple disparate sources toward the particular rhetorical goal of said judgement, possibly ex eventu. That, as identified in my previous assignment, the chronology of Jeremiah is strange (recalling Rashi on Ex 18:13) and the repeated juxtaposition of calls to repentance and oracles of certain doom, contributes to a unnerving, contrapuntal poignancy.
I am not so convinced the speaker is Jeremiah, contra Yochanan Muffs, "Who Will Stand in the Breach? A Study of Prophetic Intercession," in Love & Joy : Law, Language and Religion in Ancient Israel (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992) 28. The first-person common plural is extremely unusual for the Prophet’s style. While the prophet’s social role is the mediator between the people and the Divine, this does not preclude the text containing communal prayer the prophet does not participate in.
Note here, however, that the restoration includes Ephraim/Israel, thus the remnant is not solely the product of the Babylonian conquest.
Lamentations 2:9 describes the absence of prophecy in Jerusalem after the destruction, rather than a failure prior to the destruction, which is in 2:14. The rhetoric of that section of the poem reads like an indictment: that this was not foretold, and there was no (effective) call to repentance: “your seers did not expose your iniquity” – and the “decree” of what G-d would do (v17) is placed in the distant, not immediate past. This may be evidence of class stratification and figures like Jeremiah’s possible marginalization – the speaker in Lamentations 2 appears to be saying that there was no warning – or that warning was insufficient. I think reading voices like that alongside the more prominent voices in the Bible is important for understanding the full breadth of responses to the various historical disasters that are described across the tradition(s). אלו ואלו, or the whole that doesn’t negate its parts, if you will.
Susan Niditch, The Responsive Self : Personal Religion in Biblical Literature of the Neo-Babylonian and Persian Periods, Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library, (Yale University Press, 2015), 23-31.
Jean-Philippe Delorme, "בית ישראל in Ezekiel: Identity Construction and the Exilic Period," Journal of Biblical Literature 138, no. 1 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1353/jbl.2019.0007. Passim.
Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel 1 : a commentary on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, chapters 1-24, trans. R. E. Clements, ed. Frank Moore Cross, Klaus Baltzer, and Leonard J. Greenspoon, Hermeneia, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), 143-5 presents an analysis of these parallels and concludes that the passage in ch 3 is a retrojection of content from the original ch 33, dependent also on ch18. This appears to me to be a reasonable conclusion, explaining the partial reproduction.
Cf. Lam 2:14.
Cf. the disgraceful end in captivity of the two royal lion cubs in 19:1-9. The use of נשיא here is addressed in the following note.
Cautiously contra Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel 2 : a commentary on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, chapters 25-48, trans. James D. Martin, ed. Paul D. Hanson and Leonard J. Greenspoon, Hermeneia, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983) 218-9. His rationale for this reading is generalized from his reading of 37:15-28 (which may be pseudepigraphal, to my reading, or is at least substantially later than 33 - the relevant passages are on 227-8). This should also be read in the context of the allegories in chs 17 and 19, which may tie נשיא to a vassal relationship, with G-d as the one true מלך. Cf. Chopra-McGowan, "Representing the Destruction." 235-8. While the messianic vision (or pseudo-messianic, that this is David and not one from the line of David is recognised in BT Sanh 98b) here includes the word “king” projected into an ideal future, that it is not used in the previous passage, existing in a different context containing a repudiation of recent history appears significant. As Zimmerli shows, Ezekiel is not hesitant to use the word מלך when it is appropriate, thus the word choice here should be read as intentional, particularly if Zimmerli is correct that a messianic “formula” invoking kingship was already established by the time of Ezekiel (Ezekiel 2, 279).
Delorme, Beit Yisrael. 126-8, 132-8. See also Chopra-McGowan, "Representing the Destruction." 245: “Ezekiel’s recollections of his interactions with [ה'] emphasize an unstated conviction that the transformation of Israel, particularly its cult, is only possible in a contained setting far from the polluted Judean land with its negligent rulers and sinful population.”
Zimmerli, Ezekiel 2, 185.
GFW Hegel, Philosophy of Religion, cited in Rose, Hegel contra sociology, 51. The [sic] is original to Rose, not to me, despite the ambiguity of reproducing such.
Ibid.
Or at least such is my second hand understanding of the conclusion of the Phenomenology, reproduced in a different form in Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. Dennis Redmond (n.p. , 2021). https://cooltexts.github.io/sources/negative_dialectics.pdf
Walter Benjamin, "[Theses] On the Concept of History," in Selected writings, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock et al. (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1996), Thesis II, 390.