Biblical Studies: No More Corrupt Than Any Other Discipline
A response to Joshua Berman’s critique of academic biblical scholarship, “The Corruption of Biblical Studies.” This reply is self-standing, but you are encouraged to read his piece before reading this response.
The National Library of Israel. Wikimedia
Published: July 12, 2017
|
Last Updated: September 7, 2026
I would like to thank Adele Berlin, and several other colleagues, who commented on an earlier draft of this response; final responsibility for these comments is solely mine. In the interest of responding to Berman’s piece in a timely manner, the footnotes in this response are limited.
See my The Creation of History in Ancient Israel (Routledge, 1998), 10.
See discussion in Zev Farber, “The Law of the Hebrew Slave: Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy,” TheTorah.com (2015); Aaron Koller, “The Law of the Hebrew Slave: Reading the Law Collections as Complementary,” TheTorah.com (2015); Marvin Sweeney, “The Bible’s Evolving Effort to Humanize Debt Slavery,” TheTorah.com (2016).
For another approach to the distinctive approach to adam in each story, see David Frankel,“Rosh Hashanah: Celebrating the Creation of the Individual or the Community?” TheTorah.com (2013).
Furthermore, each creation story is continued separately later in Genesis. See, for example, the different images of God and God’s relationship to humanity in the Noah story, when divided into J a P versions: TABS Editors, “A Textual Study of Noah’s Flood,” TheTorah.com (2014).
See especially the change mid-verse from two actors to one in Exodus 7:20:
וַיַּֽעֲשׂוּ־כֵן֩ מֹשֶׁ֨ה וְאַהֲרֹ֜ן כַּאֲשֶׁ֣ר ׀ צִוָּ֣ה יְהוָ֗ה וַיָּ֤רֶם בַּמַּטֶּה֙ וַיַּ֤ךְ אֶת־הַמַּ֙יִם֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר בַּיְאֹ֔ר לְעֵינֵ֣י פַרְעֹ֔ה וּלְעֵינֵ֖י עֲבָדָ֑יו וַיֵּהָֽפְכ֛וּ כָּל־הַמַּ֥יִם אֲשֶׁר־בַּיְאֹ֖ר לְדָֽם׃
“Moses and Aaron did just as the LORD commanded: he lifted up the rod and struck the water in the Nile in the sight of Pharaoh and his courtiers, and all the water in the Nile was turned into blood”
I wish Berman had properly acknowledged the source of this image and phrase—the British social anthropologist, Edmund Leach.
See discussion of this in, David Glatt-Gilad, “Deuteronomy: The First Torah,” TheTorah.com (2015); Itamar Kislev, “Understanding Deuteronomy on Its own Terms,” TheTorah.com (2015).
See Jeffrey H. Tigay, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic (Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1982).
See Daniel E. Fleming and Sara J. Milstein, The Buried Foundation of the Gilgamesh Epic: The Akkadian Huwawa Story (Cuneiform Monographs 39; Leiden: Brill, 2010).
See Naomi Koltun-Fromm, “The Diatessaron and Its Relevance to the Study of the Pentateuch,” TheTorah.com (2014).
For additional models for source-criticism, see Jeffrey H. Tigay, Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).
