Genesis and the Moses Story: Israel's Dual Origins in the Hebrew Bible. By Konrad Schmid. Translated by James D. Nogalski. Siphrut: Literature and Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2010. Pp. xiii + 456. $64.50.

2013 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 172-172
Author(s):  
Penelope Barter
2007 ◽  
Vol 100 (4) ◽  
pp. 425-441
Author(s):  
Robert Frakes

Two striking developments in late antiquity are the growing influence of Christianity and the codification of Roman law. The first attempt to harmonize these two developments lies in the late antique Latin work known by scholars as the Lex Dei (“Law of God”) or Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum (“Collation of the Laws of Moses and of the Romans”). The anonymous collator of this short legal compendium organized his work following a fairly regular plan, dividing it into sixteen topics (traditionally called titles). Each title begins with a quotation from the Hebrew Bible (in Latin), followed by quotations of passages from Roman jurists and, occasionally, from Roman law. His apparent motive was to demonstrate the similarity between Roman law and the law of God. Scholars have differed over where the collator obtained his Latin translations of passages from the Hebrew Bible. Did he make his own translation from the Greek Septuagint or directly from the Hebrew Scriptures themselves? Did he use the famous Latin translation of Jerome or an older, pre-Jerome, Latin translation of the Bible, known by scholars as the Vetus Latina or Old Latin Bible? Re-examination of the evolution of texts of the Latin Bible and close comparison of biblical passages from the Lex Dei with other surviving Latin versions will confirm that the collator used one of the several versions of the Old Latin Bible that were in circulation in late antiquity. Such a conclusion supports the argument that the religious identity of the collator was Christian (a subject of scholarly controversy for almost a century). Moreover, analysis of the collator's use of the Bible can also shed light on his methodology in compiling his collection.


Author(s):  
Joshua A. Berman

This chapter seeks to understand the origins of the intellectual commitments that shape the discipline today, and its halting disposition toward empirical models of textual growth. It examines how theorists over three centuries have entertained the most fundamental questions concerning the goals and methods of historical-critical study of the Hebrew Bible. The axioms that governed nineteenth-century German scholarship were at a great divide from those that governed earlier historical-critical scholarship, such as that of Spinoza. From there, the chapter offers a brief summary of the claims of contemporary scholars who are looking toward empirical models to reconstruct the textual development of Hebrew scriptures. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how this vein of scholarship undermines an array of nineteenth-century intellectual assumptions, but would have been quite at home in the earlier periods of the discipline’s history, and calling for a return to Spinozan hermeneutics.


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