Jon Levenson and his "Esthetic Hermeneutics"

koot van wyk Seoul South Korea 20 January 2009

The Jewish scholar Levenson, seems to be opting for [what I would call] an esthetic hermeneutics. This means that what is important of the books of the Old Testament is not its historicity but its beauty. It is not the context (singular) of the past that is important but the contexts (plural) which in his view is both implicit and explicit. Explicit is what the author intended and implicit is a message that the author did not intended.

Levenson writes his articles, books and commentaries with a bifocal eye, for Jews and for Christians (Catholic Christians). He is against biblicism and against fundamentalism. He is against trying to uncover the historicity of the Old Testament.

Levenson's skepticism is in line with the hermeneutics of suspicion that has a long history. Some scholars wrongly suggested that the father of the hermeneutics of doubt or suspicion is Feuerbach. In our view the hermeneutics of suspicion started at the Fall of Man.

Seventh Day Adventism can get some support for their views on the Resurrection in the Old Testament from Levenson's article in 2002. His view of Esther as structurally indicating the unity of the book, is also favorable for Seventh Day Adventists. However, his denial of the historicity of Esther is contrary to the articles of William Shea, Van Wyk and Shea [in press 2009], Siegfried Horn and other Adventist scholars. The non-SDA's believing in the historicity of Esther are listed below.

About Textual ontology Jon Levensohn said:

"Personally, I believe that the danger of projecting the forms of one's own religious life onto the ancient data, though real, is only half the story. The other half is the impoverished religious imagination that so easily results when those who study the religious literature are themselves a-religious. Secularity does not guarantee objectivity; sometimes it can impede it."

It simply means that if you are a good Christian you are going to put a good grid over the Bible and if you are a-religious or secular you are going to put a terrible grid over the Bible.

Source: http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/bulletin_mag/articles/35- 4_levenson.html

Jon Levensohn, "Teach the Text in Contexts," Havard Divinity Bulletin Vol 35 no. 4 (Autumn 2007)

jon d. levenson is the Alfred A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at HDS

He taught at Wellesley (1975-1982) and at the University of Chicago (1982-1988).

His own stances are explained.

van wyk notes:

1. There are a couple of things we can learn from his autobiography or his own view of himself from the above source.

2. Levensohn says that he is a product of the Albright school. It means that four of his professors were people that graduated under Albright at John Hopkins.

3. Levensohn studied under Frank M. Cross who was his mentor for his dissertation.

4. Levensohn reacted to those applying Biblical criticism since he could not ask what the Bible meant and mean today in continuity.

5. Historical-critical methods did not allow the Bible to be taken out of context so that ongoing tradition or contemporary experience could not be brought to the hermeneutics of the text. This Levensohn felt was not correct "Of course, when the theologians or preachers interpreted the book in light of ongoing tradition and contemporary experience, the historical-critical scholars were none too reluctant to accuse them of taking the Bible out of context" (Levensohn 2007).

6. For Levensohn as a Jew, the Old Testament had more than one context.

7. Levensohn rejects that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch or Torah "My problem was not the standard problem Jewish traditionalists have with the proposition that the Torah, the Pentateuch, has a complicated compositional history and is not a unitary composition of Moses. That I readily accepted. I had never been a fundamentalist" (Levensohn 2007).

8. Levensohn argues that previous text became interwoven with later texts and one should give proper attention to this web of text by a holistic reading similar to "redaction criticism". He says "My problem, rather, was that by assigning meaning only to the intention of the original authors, the whole into which the antecedent texts had come to be woven became meaningless, and the interaction of the parts with that whole became at best a matter of secondary importance" (Levensohn 2007).

9. Levensohn feels that the text says more than what the author meant it to say: "There are dimensions of the text that it cannot help us understand very much, because a text can say more than any individual author meant; the whole is larger than the sum of the parts" (Levensohn 2007).

10. Levensohn feels that the Oral Torah of Midrash and Talmud was just this, namely a process of extracting from a text more than what the author meant to say. Catholic traditions did the same, he thinks and historical-criticism and Protestantism's sola scriptura did the opposite, namely to limit the role of discovering the larger [Levensohn's non- author-intended] context "Although historical-critical scholars often see Protestant fundamentalism as their principal enemy (and with good reason), they have historically shared with the fundamentalists a conviction that tradition must be bracketed or even ignored altogether if we are to uncover the meaning of scripture" (Levensohn 2007). Judaism and Catholicism sharing the same analogy of scripture plus tradition, Levensohn admitted: "The torah shebbe'al peh, the Oral Torah, consisting principally of Talmud and midrash, is an essential—and, I would add, an endlessly fascinating and enriching—component of Judaism.... but there is an analogy of sorts with the Roman Catholic ideas of apostolic succession and the magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church" (Levensohn 2007). As a result? of his positive link between Judaism and Catholicism as a system of tradition, he received an honorary doctorate from St. Mary's Seminary in June of 2007.

11. Levensohn utilizes the historical-critical method but he laments that "It implies that one can become a perfectly adequate biblical scholar without locating the Bible within any larger religious framework or seeing oneself as a generational link in any ongoing tradition" (Levensohn 2007). He of course is pleading for relevance of midrash and talmud in all this.

12. Levensohn also criticizes a secular approach in the hermeneutics, saying that "secularity does not guarantee objectivity; sometimes it can impede it" (Levensohn 2007).

13. To neglect midrash and Talmud results in an impoverished reading of Scripture.

14. The relationship between Judaism and Christianity is not for Levensohn a mother and daughter relationship but twins each from their own reaction of the Old Testament process which was rewritten, reworked "If we look at Judaism and Christianity from that historical perspective, we see them not as mother and daughter but as two siblings, descended from the common parent that was the Judaism that preceded them both and, more distantly, from the Hebrew Bible, which their common parent had long been reworking, rewriting, and reinterpreting" (Levensohn 2007).

15. Levensohn analysed Chritian and Jewish dialogue as follows: "On the Jewish side, the danger lies in a major difference between the purposes for which Christians and Jews go into the dialogue in the first place. If I may generalize (with due allowances for the exceptions), Christians go into it because of religious motives, whereas Jews go into the dialogue because of motives of communal self-defense and in pursuit of better intergroup relations—to prevent defamation, persecution, pogroms, and Holocausts" (Levensohn 2007). Christians go to evangelize but Jews goes in to stop another potential holocaust.

16. About resurrection Levensohn wrote:

"My central claim here is that if one takes the understanding of the self of the older Israelite literature into account, the affinities of biblical narrative with the later doctrine of the resurrection of the dead are much greater than first appears to be the case" (Levensohn, "Resurrection in the Torah: A second look" 2002-2004 Center of Theological Inquiry Princeton, New Jersey.

J. Levensohn, "The Resurrection of the Dead and the Construction of Personal Identity in Ancient Israel." in Congress Volume: Basel 2001, Leiden, Netherlands, ed. André Lemaire, 2002, pp. 305-22

Source: http://www.ctinquiry.org/publications/reflections_volume_6/levenson.htm

Caird is of the opinion that in earlier texts resurrection language is really just national recovery but later it became that way applied.

G. B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible, London, 1980, p. 246. " . . . the language of resurrection was used metaphorically of national recovery from disaster long before Israel had any belief in life after death," Caird writes, citing Hos. 6:1-2 and Ezek. 37:1-14. "Centuries later, almost certainly under the impact of persecution and martyrdom, the possibility began to be mooted that this language might have a more literal reference." This move from metaphorical to literal reality is rather different from the move from the finality of death to the expectation of resurrection that scholars usually see in this process.

17. Levensohn does not want to strongly argue for an equivalence between later reurrection texts and hints about resurrection in earlier texts. He says:

"My central claim here is that if one takes the understanding of the self of the older Israelite literature into account, the affinities of biblical narrative with the later doctrine of the resurrection of the dead are much greater than first appears to be the case. Lest I be misunderstood, I must immediately register some disclaimers. The first is that I am arguing only for a certain degree of functional equivalence between the later idea of resurrection and the Pentateuchal phenomena that I shall discuss. I am not arguing for the historically indefensible notion that the older literature expected a resurrection of the dead along the lines of what would much later come to be the Jewish and the Christian orthodoxy, mutatis mutandis. Nor, needless to say, am I about to give an account of all the complex factors that occurred over the centuries of the Second Temple period that eventually yielded that enduring doctrine" (Levensohn 2004).

van wyk notes:

Although Levensohn is not argueing for an equivalence between later resurrection text and early notions, van wyk does. There is no polarity here and neither a tension.

18. Levensohn analyses modernity as follows:

"[Using] Charles Taylor’s highly suggestive study of the Sources of the Self, Robert Di Vito points out in a recent article that "salient features of modern identity, such as its pronounced individualism, are grounded in modernity’s location of the self in the ‘inner depths’ of one’s interiority rather than in one’s social role or public relations" (Levensohn 2004). One is reminded of Jaap Durand's analysis of liberalism and modernism in the same lines in his 2006 book: Dead-end Streets of Faith.

Sources: Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989.

Robert A. Di Vito, "Old Testament Anthropology and the Construction of Personal Identity," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61, 1999, p. 220.

19. For Levensohn identity survives death "For even though the subject’s death is irreversible—his nepes having died just like the rest of him—the fulfillment of his life may yet occur, for identity survives death. Thus can God keep his promise to Abraham even after Abraham as an individual subject has died" Levensohn 2004).

20. Lloyd R. Bailey, when he writes in his survey of Biblical Perspectives on Death that "mortality as the Creator’s design for humans . . . seems to be the basic perspective of the O[ld] T[estament] literature" (Bailey 38).

21. "Similarly, Deuteronomy 30 portrays Moses as he puts before Israel the great covenantal decision between blessing and curse, obedience and disobedience, life and death. "Choose life," the preacher exhorts, "if you and your offspring would live" (Deut. 30:19)" (Levensohn 2002 and 2004).

van wyk notes:

1. In Adventist theology as presented also by Ellen White in her book Patriarchs and Prophets 478 "The power of the grave had never been broken, and all who were in the tomb he [Satan] claimed as his captives, never to be released from his dark prison house".

2. Thus, with Moses' resurrection in 1411/1410 BCE, we have the first time in history that someone was resurrected.

3. Commenting on Jude 9 Ellen White says, "The Saviour entered into no dispute with His adversary, but He then and there began His work of breaking the power of the fallen foe, and bringing the dead to life" (PP 479).

4. Resurrective act did not exist before 1411/1410 BCE, but resurrective promise did. In Genesis 3:15 the promise of the death of Death implies Life or Resurrection if death already occurred.

5. This resurrection of Moses gave evidence to the unfallen worlds that life after death was possible if God so wills it.

22. Levensohn on Ezechiel

"Is it my desire that a wicked person shall die?—says the LORD GOD.

It is rather that he shall turn back from his ways and live. (Ezek. 18:23)

But what does Ezekiel mean when he says that God wills not death but repentance? Did the prophet seriously believe that only the unrepentant die and everyone else lives forever? The obvious answer, rather, is that the authors of all these texts (with the exception of Genesis 3) expected the righteous to experience neither deathlessness nor resurrection, but only a long, happy life, one that knows the presence of God37 and ends in dignity, presumably with many descendants left to carry on" (Levensohn 2002-2004).

23. M. Dahood and immortality in the Old Testament

"It has been argued, most notably by Mitchell Dahood, that a notion of immortality appears in the Hebrew Bible. E.g., see M. Dahood, Psalms, Garden City, NY, three vols., 1965, 1968, and 1970, on Pss. 16:11, 21:5, 27:13, 69:29, 116:9, 133:3, and 142:6. Against this, see Bruce Vawter, "Intimations of Immortality and the Old Testament," Journal of Biblical Literature 91 (1972), pp. 158-71. In any event, even if Dahood’s unlikely arguments are credited, the difference between immortality (freedom from death) and resurrection (the reversal of death) should not be missed" (Levensohn 2002-2004).

24. Resurrected people

"These include perhaps Enoch (Gen. 5:24) and certainly Elijah (2 Kgs. 2:4-12) as individuals who mysteriously escape death. Those resurrected include the boys whom that prophet and his disciple Elisha restore to their bereaved mothers (1 Kgs. 17:17-24; 2 Kgs. 4:31-37) and the man who comes into contact with Elisha’s bones (2 Kgs. 13:20-21). There is no reason to believe, however, that any of these three individuals do not experience a second death" (Levensohn 2002-2004).

25. Levensohn calls the following a difficult rendering:

"The death of His faithful ones/is grievous in the LORD’s sight" (Ps. 116:15) (Levensohn 2002-2004).

Van Wyk notes

1. That this verse should be seen in the light of the Great Controversy theme.

2. There is nothing difficult in it. God willed not the death of his loved ones but they must die for His decree is that disobedience brings surely death for He cannot assimilate or accommodate sin. In SDA theology this is clear as Edward Heppenstall indicated in his book, Christ our High Priest.

 

Levenson, Jon D.

26. Levenson wrote a commentary on Esther in 1997. Levenson, Jon D. Esther: A Commentary. The Old Testament Library (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997).

27. Levenson does not see the work as historical. He sees it as fiction as he says: "Here, too, the motive may be to imitate an archivistic or annalistic style in order to endow a most unlikely tale with an air of historical veracity" (Levenson 1997: 11). He sees Esther as a prose of historical fiction. Levenson is not the first one to design the hermeneutics of suspicion. It is just an enormous bus on which scholars have conveniently hopped on in order to write a book quickly without getting entangled in enormous research for Old Persian and Elamite cuneiform connections. In essence his approach is a cop-out.

28. Evangelical groups are interested in the historicity of Esther, but the Jew Levenson of Harvard format are not.

29. Levenson focusses on structuralism and contribute to the work of Esther in this way that he used chiastic structures to find pivotal points and came to

the conclusion that the book is a unity. That the book is well designed is no secret and that can be said about Moses' work the historical epic Job as well. Well designed books does not take away from the historicity of a description.

30. What Levenson is overlooking is that chiastic structures was a common ANE feature, it is even present in the historical description of Sennacherib of his Third Campaign against Hezekiah in 701 and 689 BCE where the narrator has placed Hezekiah in the focus point of the cuneiform structure.

31. Levenson thinks that the banquet motif is the main center of the book and that all other events are arranged around it. Chapter 6 is seen by him as the pivotal scene where negative examples in the story is compared to positive examples later in the story.

29. Radday wrote a book of Esther focussing on the humor in the book, called Esther with Humor. Levenson mentioned that "celibacy not being Ahasuerus's forte..." (Levenson 1997: 2) is no speculation but is based on history since Xerxes was known to have troubles in that regard. Levenson regard 7:8 as the "funniest scene in the whole book of Esther" (Levenson 1997: 104).

32. For Levenson there are reversals in the story of Esther, from grief to joy, the reversal of the status between Mordecai and Haman in chapter 6.

33. Keywords, verbal dyads, legal language and chains of synonyms are structural elements that are semantic in nature according to Levenson. Levenson believes that the vocabulary that was used was done in order to make the story sounds more historical.

34. Levenson argues for a multi-message work, namely, an implicit message and an explicit message. The explicit message is the one found in most commentaries that the book was written to explain the origin of the Purim festival. The implicit message is seen as a proof that providence will help the underdog [proverbially, not realistically] to achieve when they face problems "In a world in which arrogant regimes seek a control of events that they have not been granted, and in which the differentness of the Jews provokes murderous hostility, the Jews can, through their own wisdom and courage and with lucky happenstances ordained by a sovereign and favoring providence, defeat their would-be murderers, secure their position, rise to eminence, and even benefit Gentile kings in the process" (Levenson 1997: 22).

35. Levenson tries to discuss historicity of the book and date under the umbrella of his own suspicion and thus, non-historicity. He argues as fable the 127 satrapies, Esther, Vashti, Mordecai, the irrevocability of the law of the Persians and minor detail.

van wyk notes:

a. Levenson will do well to look at R. T. Hallock, Persepolis Fortification Texts and also George Cameron on the Treasury Texts. Many nations can be witnessed on these texts, Egyptian, Babylonian, Old Persian, Elamite, Aramaic, Greek or Ionians to name a few.

b. Levenson is trying to please an audience rather than doing historical analysis. Notorious scholarship are those who are entrenched in secularism and who thus threw away all forms of normativism (consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition) and then with a superficial "ethical" new norm, wants to be "kind to all" by walking a socalled middle of the road or ecumenical position between conservatives stressing historicity and liberals stressing non- historicity.

36. Levenson feels that the dating of Esther is "unknown" (Levenson 1997: 25). Levenson sits with the problem of scepticism since he cannot believe that he is working with a final form and insist that there are earlier forms of the work, albeit different in form and earlier than the one he is using.

37. Levenson dates the book as sometime in the fourth or third century BCE. It is nearly 100 too late. If he is insisting on a fable creation with archaic language why not throw all out and argue for the time of Antiochus Epiphanes or even later? What is the odd of argueing 100 years later than the real date in the time of Xerxes?

38. On the versions he suggest that there are differences in the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint and the Greek Alpha Text. He concludes that Proto-Esther was written in Hebrew, and then a redactor reworked Proto-Esther into what is today the Masoretic Text.

39. He says that Proto-Esther was originally written in Hebrew and translated into Greek and this became the Proto-Alpha Text.

40. The Masoretic Text is translated into Greek and this becomes the Septuagint which had additions included.

41. The final Alpha Text is a byproduct of the Proto-Alpha Text redactional material and the Septuagint.

42. Levenson's problem is that he takes Tov et al too serious. He follows the approach that an ecclectic decision must be made for or against a text. They are all equal and one "pick and choose" your way out. The reconstruction lies within the brain of the investigator, quite a subjective enterprise. He works with the theory of Tov of a multiplicity of texts. That is the problem. Normativism is thrown out and they have no outside norm but only the subjective inside norm of selfselection. That is why he tries to accommodate with an eclecticism an ecumenical understanding of the origin of a text based on his hermeneutical suspicion. The endresult is a fable construction, inevitably.

43. What is the alternative to Levenson? Van Wyk's paradygm.

a. The normative approach that the consonantal text of the Masoretic Text is the only true Word of God and historical data.

b. Its form is ancient and was not reworked and elaborated as scholars on Qumran are trying to say but rather the opposite, that Qumran displays sometimes 100% or 99% exactness of form and where it differs it is due to a number of reasons, parabiblical texts, slips of the eye, ear, tongue, hand and memory.

c. All other versions are later reworkings of this original.

d. The original Septuagint was very close to the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition but at Alexandria during the days of Antiochus Epiphanes the plusses and minusses were added and the text became corrupt so that two texts existed: a true and corrupt Septuagint.

e. The one that survived is the corrupt one with its duplicates in variety.

44. The weakest part of Levenson's commentary on Esther is his discussion of the versions of Esther.

a. Levenson has done no investigation of the problems of scholarship in Homeric works at the school of Alexandria earlier and later as evidenced in M. Frazer, Ptolemaic Alexandria (in two volumes).

b. His romanticist view of the Septuagint is extremely superficial.

c. The earliest manuscripts of the socalled LXX does not predate the third century CE and none of the later manuscripts agrees with these ones exactly in form or length. A myriad of variations. The preservation of the Greek Septuagint is the worst scenario of copying in the history of duplication. Babylonian cuneiform copyists did better.

45. Contra Levenson one has to say that the current Septuagint is not authoritative unless it agrees with the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition.

All versions are derivative and are witnesses to the degenerative nature of textual transmission.

46. Just because an certain audience considers the LXX as authoritative is no academic reason to shift one's views of analysis of the data. It is not necessary for the scholar to try to ride two horses at the same time!

47. It is not a sign of brilliancy to argue that additions by the socalled LXX is just logical implications that evolve from taking the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition serious at some point. The interpolations and emendations in the corrupt Homer texts at Alexandria in the Ptolemaic Period after Antiochus Epiphanes displayed the same problems! At Pella a traveler asked in the Ptolemaic Period where he can get a good text of Homer and the person

answered and said: "As long as you don't get one of these recent edited ones".

48. It is not the consonantal text of the Masoretic Text of Esther that receives its final form in the mid-second century BCE, but it is the reworking of the Greek literal translation of Esther that were corrupted with emendations and reworkings ended up in the later Byzantine preserved LXX during and after the days of Antiochus Epiphanes, 164 BCE. It is not a final redactor of the Hebrew work in this time, but the final redactor of the emendations and elaborations.

49. Levenson's theory that the "final redactor" was in the mid-second century BCE is also under dispute if one compares the additions and omission in the early Patristic books like the Shepherd of Hermas and the works of Irenaus. Additions and omission must have continued also in later periods of the early church.

50. Justin the Martyr was complaining of additions and omissions by Jews of the books of the Old Testament ca. 140 CE.

51. Levenson thought that the author of Esther depended on the early Bible stories of Joseph, Moses, Daniel and Judith as other scholars like Berg and Gerleman has also suggested before him.

52. That Levenson is operating with the hermeneutics of suspicion or doubt is seen in the words: "the historical problems with Esther are so massive as to persuade anyone who is not already obligated by religious dogma to believe in the historicity of biblical narrative to doubt the veracity of the narrative"

(Leveson 1997: 22). One can also see his suspicion in: "The multiple difficulties in squaring the historical information in Esther with the evidence from ancient historiography and the presence in the book of symbolic figures suggest that Esther is seriously misinterpreted if it is taken as literal historical reportage" (Levenson 1997: 43).

53. Historicity of Esther scholars are: Edwin Yamauchi, Karen Jobes, Mervin Breneman, Joyce Baldwin, Wiliam Shea, Koot van Wyk, Siegfried Horn, Edwin Thiele, Gerhard Hasel.

54. Levenson argues that historicity does not matter since the beauty matters more. In this the Jewish scholar Levenson approach the Hermeneutical School of Idealism popular in Protestantism's interpretation of prophecy closer. Historicity versus a literary work is a articificial or false dichotomy.