Abstract
Kim’s revised doctoral dissertation, completed at Catholic University of America under the supervision of Professor Bradley C. Gregory, explores moral agency in the divine and human relationship as witnessed by the deuterocanonical work of Sirach (also known as the Wisdom of Ben Sira or Ecclesiasticus), the pre-sectarian wisdom text commonly known as 4QInstruction (also known as Musar leMevin or ‘Teaching for the Understanding One’) found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the sectarian poetic text Hodayot or Thanksgiving Hymns (1QH) of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Kim’s careful attention to the elements of moral agency (and agency’s implications for early religious thought systems) lead to a balanced approach in search of both differences and similarities between disparate Second Temple texts. After all, one cannot just read Josephus alone that for the Essenes, ‘fate is the mistress of all things’ (Antiquities 13.172), nor assume too much about Jewish theological diversity. In this respect, Kim’s stratified, cross-textual approach is crucial for permitting dialogue between texts without melding them together. Kim neither unfairly problematizes nor oversimplifies the picture of what we can know about Second Temple theological ideas like free will.
Triadic comparison is explained as Simon Gathercole’s system for resemblance (pp. 6-7). Chapters 2-5 are organized in a thematic layout, allowing for better cross-textual comparison. Chapter 2 outlines how moral agency can be described across various terminology. Chapters 3-5 examine the three main elements for tracing moral agency: religious knowledge, desire/inclination (yetzer), and the potential ability to act upon knowledge and desire (agency proper). The context of Hebrew biblical and nonbiblical texts such as Proverbs and Dead Sea Scrolls literature is treated sensibly.
The monograph’s textual and philological analysis is excellent throughout and has been carefully organized, with more emphasis placed upon secondary scholarship, particularly North American scholarship, and slightly less emphasis placed upon manuscript practices and the challenges of textual reconstruction, a problem that is more of an issue for the fragmentary 4QInstruction. The challenges of managing different versions of Sirach are well navigated. A small typesetting issue is present that for example the Hebrew text of Proverbs (e.g. p. 50, 65) is given without stichographic layout. The non-stichographic MS A of Sirach 15:14 is usually presented as running text, but on p. 90 is presented in stichographic layout. Kim’s English translations are freestyle rather than metric but all three texts (Sirach, 4QInstruction, and Hodayot) are poetic. These typesetting issues do not detract from the quality of insightful analysis on concepts of moral agency and free will.
The analysis is founded on solid philological and textual comment. Theoretical frameworks are refreshingly kept to a minimum. Kim’s conclusions are persuasive on the similarities and differences between the texts’ worldviews insofar as they can be reconstructed. Kim’s discussions about dualism and determinism throughout this accomplished piece of scholarship contribute much to early Jewish and Christian studies.