The History of the Jewish People

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Dream-Visions in the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls: Shared Compositional Patterns and Concerns

This thesis will apply performance criticism to ancient Jewish letters in order to answer two connected questions. First, how do we adequately describe the form and function of letters as they were read in antiquity in order to be able to define the genres of letters in a more precise way and second, to consider how performance theory in conjunction with other approaches can be applied to ancient letters. In order to address these concerns, we will include examples of free-standing letters from Elephantine, embedded Hebrew and Aramaic letters, and embedded Greek letters. By studying these texts, we will gain a substantial perspective on the variety of Second Temple period letters and we will be able to consider how probing the form and function of those letters may be applied for a better understanding of MMT. The intent of this inquiry is to help explain how MMT, or a section thereof, may have been performed in various situations and thereby provide a clearer view of the genre(s) of MMT.

Performances of Ancient Jewish Letters: From Elephantine to MMT

Cover photo: Zev Radovan/BibleLandPictures.com H am ri Sökl PRCH AN CE TO D REAM : D REAM D IV INATIO N IN TH E BBLE AN D TH E AN CIEN T N AR EAST is book examines the interpretation of dreams that were thought to contain divine messages. Each essay addresses questions about dream divination itself within a speci c text or corpus, considering issues such as agency, authority, veri cation, incubation, and literary and political function. Franziska Ede, Esther J. Hamori, Koowon Kim, Christopher Metcalf, Alice Mouton, Scott B. Noegel, Andrew B. Perrin, Stephen C. Russell, Jonathan Stökl, and Haim Weiss contribute essays to this collection, which presents a snapshot of current scholarly ideas about dream divination in a range of ancient Near Eastern, eastern Mediterranean, and early Jewish texts, including the Bible, the Talmud, and writings from Canaan, Mesopotamia, and Hittite Anatolia.

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Perchance to Dream: Dream Divination in the Bible and the Ancient Near East

This thesis engages with the biblical archive and its animals, asking what it means to read the Bible after Jacques Derrida’s “question of the animal”, that is, critical questions directed at the characterisations, representations and utilisations of animals past and present which deem animals distinctly different to humans in order to demarcate their inferiority. At the same time, it is a critical response to Derrida’s Bible. Derrida – arguably one of the most important and influential thinkers of the twentieth century – provides a significant philosophical contribution to the question of the animal. In animal studies, the Bible is treated as a foundational legacy for concepts of the “human” and is frequently held up to blame for a misplaced human hubris. Derrida too draws on the Bible in implicit and explicit ways to underpin his critique of human/animal distinctions. Building on Derrida’s work on animality, I provide close and critical interpretations of four crucial texts of the biblical archive. I argue that these biblical texts are caught up in irreducible tensions: on the one hand, these texts depict and describe how humans and animals alike abide as finite, fellow creatures under God as a justice to come which calls for a radical similitude and solidarity; on the other hand, animals are portrayed as objects that are mastered by humans to demonstrate God’s power over the living. God’s power thus resides in a double bind – it both displaces power from humans to show them as animals, and it simultaneously provides a model for human power over animal others.

In the first chapter I explore the significance of Derrida’s motifs of nakedness and shame over nakedness for his critique of human/animal distinctions, arising from his reading of Genesis. Critically continuing Derrida’s play on myths of origin, I tackle the question of the first carnivorous man, Noah, in Genesis 9 in order to show how this text can both be read as a license to enact the sovereignty of man over animals, and, how this text radically resists such a reading in God’s covenant with all life, human and non-human.

Following my exploration of myths of origin, the second chapter grapples with Derrida’s notion of a deconstructed subject through his emphasis on response and responsibility. Derrida puts forward the biblical response “here I am”, as the mark of vulnerability in every relation with the other. I explore what this responsible response might mean in the context of the Book of Daniel that portrays encounters between human, nonhuman animals and God. Developing Derrida’s injunction to follow the nonhuman other, I argue that the double context of Daniel conveys two distinct visions of the concept of the political as animal: one, in which a fantasy for a harmonious domestication and cohabitation amongst rulers and their human and animal subjects is fostered under the only true ruler, a benign God; and, a collapse of such a fantasy, where rulers – human and divine – are portrayed as carnivorous, ferocious creatures who turn their subjects from pets to prey. 
The third chapter follows this collapse to Derrida’s critique of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” as a commandment relating only to humans and thus a detrimental Judeo-Christian legacy. Derrida draws on the story of Cain and Abel to discuss the way the killing of an animal leads to the killing of a brother. To explore questions of killability I, however, turn to the negotiations of such issues in Acts 10. In the animal vision of Acts 10, questions of clean/unclean animals are suspended and hospitality is apparently opened up between Jewish and non-Jewish Christians. I demonstrate that the universalism associated with this text refers to an exclusive human fellowship which evades the actual implications of the animal vision. Yet, I posit that there are again two ways of reading the animal vision. In the first reading the analogical resemblance set up between animals and Gentiles implies that Gentiles too become killable as “clean” and thus the animal vision allows for indiscriminate killability amongst the living in general. In the second reading the cleanness of all animals is in fact a radical redemption of animal life for fellowship, in the same way that Peter accepts the fellowship and hospitality of Gentiles. Ultimately, the category of the living and the dead draws humans and non-humans together into what I call “mortability”; that is, the capacity for death shared amongst the living in the suspension of judgement until Jesus returns. 
In the fourth chapter, I follow up on the suspension of judgement by analysing Derrida’s thinking of sovereignty and animality in relation to Revelation 17. Crucially, Derrida’s logic of sovereignty includes Christ as lamb, in his logos or reason of the strongest, despite its ostensible weakness as a diminutive animal. I explore this further by turning to the scene of Revelation 17 in which the Lamb is at war with the Beast and the woman riding it. Developing Derrida’s allusions to sexual difference as it relates to the question of the animal, I explore how Revelation 17 denigrates both animals and women by characterising them as the figure of evil: Rome. The logic of the animal representations sets up the divine as the good on the side of the weak in the figure of the suffering Lamb. But as the Lamb becomes a beast-like indivisible sovereignty that asserts its reason of the strongest, the figures of “evil” become the vulnerable weak victims – the animal others. Another image of Rome emerges, then, as a deconstructed sovereignty in the subjects that stand as powerless figures in the political order, namely the animals of the Roman arenas and the prostitutes of the Roman Empire.

The four texts I examine abide in the ambiguous tensions of an archive that can in the end neither be presented as animal-friendly nor as straightforwardly anthropocentric. The biblical archive is a complex compendium fraught with tensions that can, with its animals, only be held in abeyance. There can be no final “ownership” proclaimed of this archive and its animals, nor can any interpretive act dis-suspend them from such an ambivalent state. These very different texts do, however, provide the material and momentum to show central and crucial instances of how the biblical archive characterises its humans, animals and gods. My analysis reveals that the very same spaces in which these characterisations might be fixed as detrimental to animal life, are where the possibilities of seeing animals radically otherwise lie.

The ends of (hu)man : following Jacques Derrida's animal question into the biblical archive

The biblical book of Daniel tells its readers about the life and visions of Daniel, a Judean courtier and visionary, and of three friends of his during various short periods in the reigns of the Babylonian kings Nebuchadnezzar (in about 605-603 BCE, maybe also a little later) and Belshazzar (in about 541-539 BCE), an enigmatic king Darius, ‘the Mede’ (539) and the Persian king Cyrus (in about 539-537). Daniel’s long life (according to the information provided by the book at least ca. 622-537) encloses the entire episode of the Exile of the Judeans and of the inhabitants of Jerusalem (about 587-539), though the Exile is mentioned only implicitly, if at all. ∗Earlier versions of parts of this article have appeared as ‘Daniel’ [in Dutch] in J.P. Fokkelman and W. Weren (eds.), De Bijbel Literair (Zoetermeer: Meinema, 2003), pp. 251-261, and as ‘Hoe de valse beschuldiging een echte beschuldiging wordt. De relatie tussen de beschuldigingen in Genesis 38-44 en Daniel 3 en 6, en de bedoeling van het boek Daniel ’ [Dutch], in C. Houtman (ed.), De leugen regeert. . .Valse beschuldiging in de Bijbel en in de wereld van de Bijbel (Kampen: Kok, 2004), pp. 58-80. Some of the arguments presented here are already in J.W. Wesselius, ‘The Writing of Daniel’, in J.J. Collins and P.W. Flint (eds.), The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, 2 vols. (FIOTL 2; Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 291-310, id., ‘Discontinuity, Congruence and the Making of the Hebrew Bible’, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 13 (1999), pp. 24-77, and in earlier publications quoted there. Detailed discussions of many issues touched upon only briefly here will appear in my forthcoming monograph, Language, Style and Structure in the Book of Daniel. The present article is meant to be a succinct, but basically complete presentation of my new model of the literary and linguistic nature of the Book of Daniel. Biblical texts will be quoted according to the Revised Standard Version (rsv), with a more literal translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic where that is useful for the argument. But it should be noted that according to the chronology of the book itself the

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The Literary Nature of the Book of Daniel and the Linguistic Character of its Aramaic

The unexpected occurrence of the determined state (the noun with article in postposition) in the singular in the Aramaic of the classical Targums of Onqelos and Jonathan, as well as the ending -ē to m. pl. nouns, used to be explained from supposed linguistic influence of Eastern Aramaic. It can be observed, however, that in all or nearly all of these cases these endings indicate the non-countedness of the nouns, uniqueness or amorphousness in the singular or collectives in the plural. The picture is especially clear when the noun is found with cardinal numbers. It is proposed that the noun in Targumic Aramaic had, beside absolute, construct, and determined states, a fourth state which can be designated as the uncounted state. This characteristic linguistic trait of the Targumic dialect probably sets it apart from most other Aramaic dialects, also has a number of consequences in the exegetical field, and may explain the origin of certain grammatical characteristics of Eastern Aramaic.

A Note on Determination and Countability in Targumic Aramaic

The scribe of the Aramaic family correspondence of the fifth century BCE, which was found in Hermopolis in Egypt in 1945, as a kind of language play deliberately presented the same information in these letters in different words, in effect creating parallelisms between the letters and sometimes even within individual letters. In some cases, this observation helps us to find new interpretations of difficult passages in the Hermopolis letters. Such language play is, albeit in different forms, very common in ancient West Semitic texts, both when dealing with mundane and with highly important political and religious subjects.

Jan-Wim Wesselius

Papers

The Literary Nature of the Book of Daniel and the Linguistic Character of its Aramaic

A Note on Determination and Countability in Targumic Aramaic

Language Play in the Aramaic Letters from Hermopolis