Review: Francis Landy, Leigh M. Trevaskis and Bryan D. Bibb, Text, Time, and Temple: Literary, Historical and Ritual Studies in Leviticus (Hebrew Bible Monographs 64; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2015) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Leviticus: A new translation with commentary
Weatherford, TX: The Cutting Horse Press, 2022
This translation of Leviticus completes my translation of the books of the Torah and follows a similar approach to my other translations. My priority was always to express the ideas in the text in the most natural way in English, and at the same time to capture the energy and rhythm of the original Hebrew. One unique aspect of all my translations is that they jettison the traditional chapter divisions and instead organize the material according to the Masoretic parashot. Organizing the text in this way, I believe, gets us closer to the ancient writers, and yields numerous insights into their composition approach. The commentary accompanying the translation focuses on issues of translation, language, and composition history. After the commentary I provide an essay that summarizes my (necessarily speculative) views on the composition history of Leviticus. In that essay, I assign each of the parashot to one of the five major compositional stages that I identify, which span a period of some 700 years, from the turn of the second millennium BCE to the late fourth century BCE. In my treatment of the composition history, I make a number of unusual proposals. Specifically, I argue (1) that the core of Leviticus consists of eleven ancient cult “rule books” from the northern kingdom and the province of Samaria, (2) that these ancient rule books were brought together with little change into a stand-alone document (a “proto-Leviticus”) by priests in Yahweh's cult at Mount Gerizim in the fifth century BCE, and (3) that this proto-Leviticus was included with the books of the Torah and supplemented and revised in the subsequent one-and-a-half centuries through the collaborative efforts of Yahweh's priesthoods in Mount Gerizim and Jerusalem, resulting in the version of Leviticus that we have today. For those who prefer physical copies of books, the print edition of this book is available at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1733441581/
Additional Notes on Leviticus, 2023
In the 800-page Leviticus ZECOT commentary, I focused on what MUST be said to understand the text. In the Additional Notes on Leviticus book, I focus on what else COULD be said. In these 220 pages you will find: • further interaction with the secondary literature, expanding on discussions in the commentary • even more detail on points of Hebrew grammar, from beginner to advanced • further bibliographical information. You can download a pdf for free here. For those wanting a hard copy, purchases may be made at Amazon.
Provenance of Leviticus and the Composition of the Pentateuch
This article examines the provenance of Leviticus based on ancient Near Eastern parallels, arguing for a pre-exilic or even earlier provenance of its related concepts. It also suggests a possible alternative for the composition of the Pentateuch, in that Pentateuch-Joshua could be an essentially unified composition by two authors working together. See now Biblical Theology Bulletin 45.1 (2015): 3-33 for further details.
James Watts uses rhetorical analysis for this detailed exposition of Leviticus 1-10. In dialogue with a wide variety of contemporary scholarship on Leviticus, this commentary also engages the history of the book’s interpretation and the history of Jewish and Christian ritual practices. Leviticus’s rhetoric aimed to persuade ancient Israelites to make offerings to God. It legitimized the monopoly of Aaronide priests over Israel’s offerings and over determining correct ritual practice. The priests in turn established the Torah containing Leviticus as the authoritative text of Israel’s religion. Rhetorical analysis of Leviticus thus leads to new insights into the role of priests in raising the Pentateuch to the status of scripture and in shaping the biblical canon. It also calls attention to the role of ritual rhetoric in the polities of later Jewish and Christian groups, despite the fact that neither religion makes animal offerings as Leviticus 1-10 mandates.