Abstract
This short but ambitious book by Hindy Najman, the Oriel and Laing Professor at Oxford, makes both a negative and a positive argument. Both are compelling, but whereas the negative argument covers ground already pretty well covered by others, the positive argument is strikingly innovative and creates space for others to do new, constructive work on a vast sea of ancient texts. Najman’s negative argument is that Judaism in the Hellenistic period was emphatically not the kind of moribund specimen signified by the old, influential term Spätjudentum (“late Judaism”). Najman is absolutely right on this point, but so have others been before her.
The interesting consequent question, though, is what other, better model we might use for conceptualizing this period. Frühjudentum (“early Judaism”) is an improvement, to be sure, but it is vague and minimalist, doing little more than marking a rejection of the bald supersessionism of its predecessor. How, specifically, can we best conceptualize the cultural and literary developments of this period? Najman’s positive argument is her bold, constructive answer to this question, namely: that the Hellenistic period was a (indeed, the foremost) time of explosive growth of scripture and scripturesque literature in the history of Judaism. Scripture in this period (and, mutatis mutandis, ever after), so far from being a fixed textual deposit, was like a lush plant spilling over out of its pot, climbing up walls, spreading seeds far and wide. It was, in a word, vital.
This theory intends to account not only for the pluriform text of the Torah, Prophets, Psalms, etc., but also for the production of large swaths of the so-called apocrypha and pseudepigrapha and more or less the entire corpus of the Dead Sea Scrolls, “sectarian” or not. (Indeed, Najman consistently rejects the sectarian/nonsectarian distinction as a later, misleading imposition on the contents of the Scrolls.) And what her theory intends to account for, it succeeds in accounting for to a very great extent. It makes powerful sense of Jubilees and the Hodayot—the two test cases discussed at length in this book—and many others, as well. Arguably the closest precedent to what Najman does here is what her own teacher James Kugel did a generation ago in the 1980s and 1990s. Kugel argued that ancient interpreters of the sources comprising the Torah actually brought the Bible into being by the very act of reading these texts as a Bible. Najman, if anything, out-Kugels Kugel, arguing that not only ancient readers of scripture but also ancient writers of new scripture (who were themselves readers of older scripture) burst the confines of the Bible and caused scripture to grow here, there, and everywhere.