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Jewish Studies on Premodern Periods
Jewish Studies
on Premodern
Periods
A Handbook

Edited by
Carl S. Ehrlich and Sara R. Horowitz

Assistant Editor — Rabbinic & Medieval Periods:

Yedida C. Eisenstat
ISBN 978-3-11-041939-9
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-041887-3
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-041898-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022944282

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Cover image: A reconstruction of the Second Temple from a model of Herodian Jerusalem that was
formerly at the Holyland Hotel and is currently at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Israel. Photo by
Carl S. Ehrlich.
Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

www.degruyter.com
In honor of
Sydney Eisen z”l
and
Michael Brown
Founders & Builders of Jewish Studies at York University
Figure 1: The first five directors of the (Israel and Golda Koschitzky) Centre for Jewish Studies at
York University celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary. From left to right: Michael Brown, Martin
I. Lockshin, Sydney Eisen z”l, Sara R. Horowitz, and Carl S. Ehrlich. Photo by Gary Beechey,
courtesy of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies.
Acknowledgements
This volume developed from a symposium on The State of Jewish Studies: Perspec-
tives on Premodern Periods convened at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for
Jewish Studies at York University on December 7–8, 2014. The editors are grateful to
the participants in that symposium, as well as to the chairs of the five panels that
were the centerpiece of the symposium. Special thanks to Jonathan D. Sarna of Bran-
deis University and to Michael Brown of York University, who gave public plenary
lectures during the symposium that are not part of this volume but inform its spirit.
The preparation of this volume has taken much longer than anticipated. As the
volume took shape, we felt the need to reach beyond the essays contributed by con-
ference participants to give it the breadth and depth that the field of Jewish studies
demands. We are most grateful to those who met tight deadlines to cover needed
areas. We regret that time constraints did not allow for the essay we envisioned on
the history of the Rabbinic Period to be included in this volume.
The time that elapsed between the first and last submissions to the volume
means that the essays reflect a range of years of preparation. While all of the au-
thors were given the opportunity to update their contributions to reflect newly pub-
lished work in the field, other commitments meant that some of the authors only
managed to update their bibliographies but not the substance of their essays them-
selves. Others were able to do more extensive revisions.
We are grateful to De Gruyter Press for accepting this volume for publication and
wish to extend our thanks to our contacts at the Press, who have shown exemplary
patience with us and with whom it has been a delight to work: Sabina Dabrowski,
Dr. Albrecht Döhnert, Alice Meroz, Katrin Mittmann, and Dr. Sophie Wagenhofer.
A special word of thanks to our former colleague Dr. Yedida C. Eisenstat, who
lent her expertise in helping to edit the contributions relating to the Rabbinic and
Medieval periods.
For her meticulous copyediting, we are most grateful to Andrea Knight, and, for
his excellent indexing, we are very grateful to Stephen Ullstrom both of whose work
on this volume was supported by a generous grant from the Israel and Golda Ko-
schitzky Centre for Jewish Studies.
The director of the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology in Jerusalem
(Deutsches Evangelisches Institut or DEI), Dieter Vieweger, generously provided us
with high-quality photos to illustrate one of this volume’s chapters at very short notice.
Both the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
and the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University
generously supported the original symposium out of which this volume grew.
While both of these institutions provided financial support, the latter also pro-
vided all the logistical support needed for the efficient running of a symposium.
Also providing financial support for the symposium were the following units at

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-202
VIII Acknowledgements

York University: the Department of History, the Department of Humanities, the De-
partment of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, the Faculty of Liberal Arts
and Professional Studies, and the Graduate Program in Interdisciplinary Studies.
In addition, we gratefully acknowledge those individuals whose support and as-
sistance were vital to the 2014 symposium. Our faculty’s outstanding Research Officer,
Janet Friskney, provided invaluable help in shepherding us through the application
for a SSHRC grant. For his invaluable help in the grant application and for overseeing
the logistics of all aspects of this symposium, we are most grateful to our colleague
Randal Schnoor, who was serving as the Koschitzky Centre’s Research Associate at
the time. In addition, we were most ably aided in the logistics and planning by our
former Graduate Research Assistant, Francine Buchner, to whom we would also like
to express our deepest gratitude. No one knows more about the workings of York Uni-
versity and navigating one’s way through its labyrinthine administrative structures
than does our administrative staff. Our thanks go, therefore, to both Merle Lightman,
our long-serving (and now retired) Centre Coordinator, and to Christine Vivaldo, her
replacement while she was recuperating from knee replacement surgery. According to
the famous rabbinic dictum ‫( אם אין קמח אין תורה‬without food there is no scholarship),1
and so we are grateful to Alona Tamsout and her crew for seeing to our culinary de-
sires in a delicious manner during the symposium. Nourishment for the soul was pro-
vided by Judith Cohen and Demetrios Petsalakis, who performed Sephardic music for
the symposium participants. We are most grateful to them for sharing their musical
talents. And a special shout-out of thanks to our student helpers, who made sure that
we all managed to get where we had to get and that everything there was set up
correctly.
Most importantly, our heartfelt thanks to all the participants in the symposium,
who helped to make the symposium a truly memorable and productive event, and
to all the excellent contributors to this volume.
Sadly, one of the contributors to both the symposium and to this volume has
passed away in the interim. Vivian B. Mann was a wonderful scholar and human
being. May her memory be a blessing! In light of this sad situation, we gratefully
acknowledge the invaluable contribution of Vivian’s former Research Associate, Ga-
briel Goldstein, who was kind enough to proofread her contribution to this volume.
In the planning of the symposium and the production of this volume, we are
grateful as always for the encouragement and support of our respective spouses,
Michal Shekel and Jonathan Richler, who are always there for us with a ready ear
and whose influence on our academic careers is immeasurable.
Finally, we dedicate this volume to the two people to whom Jewish Studies at
York University owes its existence: Sydney Eisen, who worked to establish Jewish
studies at York as an integral field of humanistic inquiry, and Michael Brown, who

 m. Avot 3:21.
 Acknowledgements IX

developed the field of Jewish studies in Canada and led the Centre during its forma-
tive years. We owe these two foundational figures an immeasurable debt.
Alas, Sydney Eisen (1929–2022), one of our dedicatees, passed away as we were
going to press. Syd’s death was preceded only a few days earlier by that of Julia
Koschitzky (1939–2022), one of the world’s leading supporters of Jewish education
at all levels, whose engagement with our Centre inspired us and helped Jewish
studies flourish at York University. May the memory of the righteous be a blessing
(‫)זכר צדיקים לברכה‬.

Carl S. Ehrlich & Sara R. Horowitz

Shushan Purim 5782

While this volume was in press one year after the above words were written, we
received the sad news that our other dedicatee, Michael Brown (1938–2023), had
also passed away. May his memory be a blessing (‫)יהי זכרו ברוך‬.
X Acknowledgements

Figure 2: The late Vivian B. Mann z”l, preparing for her lecture at the symposium on “The State of
Jewish Studies: Perspectives on Premodern Periods” at York University in December 2014. Photo by
Gary Beechey, courtesy of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies.
Contents
Acknowledgements VII

Carl S. Ehrlich
Introduction 1

Section 1: The First Temple Period

Mary Joan Winn Leith

Biblical Israel: History and Historiography to 586 BCE 13

Konrad Schmid
Hebrew Writings and Literary Works from the First Temple Period
(Until the Sixth Century BCE) 27

Beth Alpert Nakhai

Revisiting Iron Age Israel: New Archaeological Approaches 37

Ronald Hendel
Religion, Theology, and Thought in the First Temple Period: The Great and
Little Traditions 63

Section 2: The Second Temple Period

Steve Mason
Second Temple Studies: The Past, Present, and Future of the Ioudaioi 79

Eileen Schuller
Second Temple Literature and Texts 109

Benjamin D. Gordon
The Archaeology of the Second Temple Period in Judea: New Discoveries and
Research 123

Angela Kim Harkins

Changes in the Study of the Religion, Theology, and Thought in the Second
Temple Period: A Reappraisal of the Teacher of Righteousness 149
XII Contents

Section 3: The Rabbinic Period

Robert Brody
The Study of Classical Rabbinic Literature in the Last Quarter-Century 165

Steven Fine
Rabbi Akiba in 3D: Artifact, Text, and the Recent History of Judaism in Late
Antiquity 183

David Kraemer
Rabbinic Religion and Thought 199

Section 4: The Medieval Period

Judith R. Baskin
Medieval Jewish Social History: Three Areas of Gender-Conscious
Research 215

Martin I. Lockshin
A Retrospective Look at the Modern Study of Medieval Jewish Bible
Commentaries 241

Vivian B. Mann
The New in Medieval Jewish Art and Architecture 257

Eric Lawee
Scholarship in Recent Decades on Jewish Religion and Thought in Medieval
and Early Modern Times: Changing Paradigms, New Perspectives, Future
Prospects 275

Sara R. Horowitz
Afterword 293

Contributors 299

Author Index 303

Subject Index 309

Primary Sources Index 321

Carl S. Ehrlich
Introduction
Jewish Studies: Why Now and How?

Our world changed in 1989. The Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union imploded. I re-
member turning to my wife and remarking to her that the binary East/West or capital-
ist/communist world in which we had grown up would not be the world that our
children would know and eventually inherit. Their global perceptions would be differ-
ent from ours. On the other hand, as I do a final edit on these words in March 2022,
Russia has invaded Ukraine. Maybe the world my grandchildren will inherit will not
be so different from the one in which my generation grew up after all.
And yet, unbeknownst to us at the time, another event took place that year that
was to have as great an impact on our lives – if not a greater personal impact – than
the dramatic fall of the Eastern Bloc. It was an event that would ultimately cause us to
uproot our family and move from our native New England to Toronto, a city geograph-
ically situated in the Midwest but intellectually still a part of the east-coast world we
had abandoned. This event, which turned us from Yankees into Canucks, did not
have the global impact of the parting of the Iron Curtain nor the drama of the parting
of the Red Sea as interpreted by Hollywood.1 Indeed, this event – the founding of
York University’s Centre for Jewish Studies (later to be known, thanks to the generos-
ity of the Koschitzky family, as the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Stud-
ies) – has served as the catalyst for the present volume and the symposium on which
the latter is based. However, it wasn’t until I had begun my eighteenth year of employ-
ment at York that I even became aware that this additional event had taken place in
1989.
When I was appointed director of the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at
York University in 2013, a position I held until 2021, I had occasion to read my way
through a number of supporting documents that served to orient me in my new posi-
tion. It was in this manner that I learned that York’s Centre for Jewish Studies had
been founded in 1989, a fact that surprised me at the time, since I knew that the first
appointments in Jewish studies here had already been made in 1968. In that year, Mi-
chael Brown and the late Sol Tanenzapf were hired to teach the field at Sydney Ei-
sen’s initiative, marking York as one of the trendsetters in the establishment of
Jewish studies as an academic discipline in the non-sectarian North American univer-
sity. Indeed, when my late father, Leonard H. Ehrlich, and a handful of his colleagues
at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst set about establishing their own Judaic

 See, most famously, the two versions of The Ten Commandments directed by Cecil B. DeMille in
1923 and 1956.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-001
2 Carl S. Ehrlich

Studies Program (now the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies) in the
early 1970s, one of the institutions they turned to for advice was York University.
Besides being somewhat surprised by this historical datum, I was struck by a nu-
merical coincidence that seemed to leap off the page I was reading, namely that we
would be celebrating our twenty-fifth anniversary in a few months and no one had
realized it! What to do? I found my answer in the immortal words of . . . no, not the
Bible, which is my field of specialization, but of The Little Rascals (if memory serves
me right): “Let’s put on a show!” But what type of show could an academic like me
possibly put on? Like Puccini’s nefarious Baron Scarpia, Non so trarre accordi di chi-
tarra, né oròscopo di fior (I don’t know how to conjure chords from a guitar, nor horo-
scopes from flowers).2 Therefore, the inescapable answer to my question was obviously
to put on a conference or a symposium that would include a celebration of our Centre’s
silver anniversary.
We thus had the structure, but what about the content of the event? Two possibil-
ities occurred to me. One would have been to mount a conference about some aspect
of my specific field of biblical studies; but, as the director of a center for Jewish stud-
ies, I felt that this would be too narrow a focus to represent the Centre, its mission,
and its interests to the broader academic and non-academic communities. Hence my
thoughts turned to the central subject of our institutional existence, namely Jewish
studies as a discipline, and I developed the idea of devoting a symposium to some
collaborative self-reflection on the state of the field, how it has developed over the
quarter-century of the Centre’s existence, and what its prospects are for the future.
The initial plan was for a three-day conference encompassing as much of the
broad interdisciplinary field of Jewish studies as possible. However, on the advice
of Janet Friskney, our home faculty’s outstanding Research Support Officer at the
time, we made the decision to divide the subject in two. In this manner, the origi-
nally planned conference on The State of Jewish Studies morphed into two sympo-
sia dedicated respectively to Perspectives on Premodern Periods and to Modernity
and Methodology, the first of which took place on December 7–8, 2014, with the
latter scheduled for a later date. The publications emerging from these symposia, of
which this volume is the first, reflect this temporal bifurcation.
The aim of the first symposium, and of this volume, was to bring into conversa-
tion scholars who deal with diverse periods of Jewish studies on the basis of various
methodological frameworks. While older generations of scholars, such as the teach-
ers of many of the contributors to this volume, were trained as generalists who en-
compassed vast temporal and methodological perspectives, over the course of the
years the torrential proliferation of knowledge has forced us into ever-narrower
areas of specialization. Oftentimes we attend conferences dedicated to these tightly
defined themes. Or, when we attend conferences of a more general nature, such as

 Giacomo Puccini, Tosca, Act II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH1xDRIH824.

 Introduction 3

the Association for Jewish Studies Annual Conference, we naturally gravitate to the
sessions that deal with our little corners of the academic world. While I wouldn’t
disparage the deep-knowledge approach that this represents, there is also some-
thing to be said for an engagement with broader views in order to gain a greater
sense of perspective. This symposium was, therefore, structured to allow for both
synchronic discussions, with each panel dedicated to a specific era, and diachronic
debates that addressed the same four overarching themes in each panel across the
temporal divide. This attempt to allow for both synchronic (coetaneous) and dia-
chronic (thematic) approaches to the field has also been central to the conceptuali-
zation and organization of the present volume, which is structured to allow for both
ways of engaging with the field of Jewish studies.
Human history, as we know, is not neat; it is a messy proposition that is resistant
to our puny attempts to impose order on it. Nonetheless, in our attempt to under-
stand and make sense of it, we try to categorize it and place it within our somewhat
subjective little boxes; so, too, were we faced with the question of how to divide up
Jewish studies into neat temporal categories. The designations for eras were relatively
easy to choose owing to their wide diffusion in the discipline: First Temple, Second
Temple, Rabbinic, Medieval, and Early Modern.3 Unsurprisingly, the temporal param-
eters proved to be a bit more of a bugaboo. I had originally wanted to leave this ques-
tion open. But, when my colleague and coeditor, Sara R. Horowitz, asked me what I
was thinking of, I quickly jotted down some approximate dates. Notwithstanding the
problems inherent to assigning names and dates to eras, these categories eventually
became the parameters for this volume.
There are obvious problems in defining all of these eras. The First Temple wasn’t
built – supposedly – until the reign of Solomon (nor presumably in one day), which
would, by a strict definition, mean that everything dating before this time shouldn’t
be encompassed by the term First Temple. So, what do we do with Moses and David,
among other foundational biblical figures, and where do we group them?
The First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, but the Second
Temple wasn’t dedicated until 515. So, where does that leave the intervening seventy
years of first Babylonian and then Persian domination? Does the Second Temple pe-
riod end with its destruction by the Romans in 70 CE? Where do we then put the Bar
Kochba Revolt of 132–135 CE? Although it postdates the destruction of the Second
Temple, this revolt represents the last gasp of the Jewish or Judean nationalism that
was characteristic of the Second Temple rather than of the Rabbinic period. And can
we truly speak of a Jewish people or religion before the rise of the rabbis?
According to rabbinic literature, the archetypal rabbis Hillel and Shammai lived
about a century before the destruction of the Temple, thus indicating an overlap

 Although the Early Modern period was included in the original symposium, the decision was
made to save its published treatment for the planned second volume of this series.
4 Carl S. Ehrlich

between the late Second Temple and early Rabbinic periods, as the archaeological
and inscriptional evidence also indicates.4 Where does one draw the line? Or does
one not do so? For the sake of this volume, we defined the Rabbinic period as lasting
until the Muslim conquests of the early seventh century, about a hundred years after
the completion of the compilation of the Babylonian Talmud. But did this truly repre-
sent a caesura in Jewish history or thought? After all, rabbinic literature did not stop
being written at that time, and the rabbis continued to hold sway over Jewish life.
And what about the amorphous Jewish Middle Ages? If we take Jacob Rader Mar-
cus’s maximalist perspective, as expressed in his seminal collection of documents The
Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791,5 these lasted from the rise of
Roman Christianity and its attendant restriction of Jewish rights in the fourth century
CE until the legal emancipation of the Jews at the time of the French Revolution in
1791, thus putting a Eurocentric spin on the temporal definition. However, at the front
end, rabbinicists would object that this would collapse the vast formative era of all
subsequent Judaisms into a mere couple of centuries. And at the back end, political
and intellectual historians may argue for an end to the Medieval period at the time of
the rise of the Renaissance, the fall of Byzantium, the Age of Exploration, the discovery
of the New World, the expulsion from Spain, the Enlightenment, the age of Spinoza,
or the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment.
The four thematic areas chosen for each temporal period represent three tradi-
tional discourses within Jewish studies and one more recent addition. The traditional
discourses include History and Society, the social scientific approach; Texts and Litera-
ture, the literary and literary-critical approaches; and Religion, Theology, and Thought,
the religious studies approach. The more recent discourse is Art, Architecture, and Ar-
chaeology, the visual or material approach. The centrality of this latter discourse for
Jewish studies, so often relegated to the sidelines in the past, no longer needs to be
defended and complements the historically more traditional disciplines of history, liter-
ature, and religion.
What apparently does need to be defended is the very enterprise around which
this volume revolves. In the year of the symposium, Jewish studies as a discipline
came under vociferous attack by Aaron Hughes, most (in)famously in an article in
The Chronicle of Higher Education that bore the provocative title “Jewish Studies Is
Too Jewish,”6 itself based on his book on The Study of Judaism: Identity, Authenticity,

 Eric M. Meyers and Mark A. Chancey, From Alexander to Constantine, Archaeology of the Land of
the Bible 3 (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2012), 203–217.
 Jacob Rader Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791 (Cincinnati: Union of
American Hebrew Congregations, 1938). This work has been reprinted multiple times and has most
recently been extensively revised and republished as Jacob Rader Marcus and Marc Saperstein, The
Jews in Christian Europe: A Source Book, 315–1791 (n.p.: Hebrew Union College Press, 2015).
 Aaron W. Hughes, “Jewish Studies Is Too Jewish,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 60/28
(March 28, 2014).
 Introduction 5

Scholarship.7 In this article, as in his book, Hughes condemns Jewish studies for
being parochial, focused on identity politics, and of little interest to anyone outside
of the Jewish community. Certainly, much of his critique of the field is valid, even if
he does engage in inflammatory hyperbole. There are too few non-Jews in the field
and it has on occasion been difficult for them to get Jewish studies positions. But this
is not a problem unique to Jewish studies. Without defending it, one may observe
that this is a problem endemic to all area or ethnic studies, in which identity politics
oftentimes come into play when making hiring decisions, particularly in this era of
enforced equity, diversity, and inclusion.
One could turn the tables, however, and ask where Hughes has been these last
twenty-five years or so. Contrary to the impression conveyed by his article, scholars
of Jewish studies have become much more engaged academically with the world
outside the confines of the allegedly narrow interests of the Jewish community,
which oftentimes engenders conflicts between donors and the recipients of their
largesse.8 Hughes ignores the trend that has developed within Jewish studies to en-
gage with the scholarship, study, and methodologies of the non-Jewish world in
order to situate Jewish studies within a broader cultural, historical, and theoretical
context. In addition, in his short presentation Hughes leaves out of consideration
the fact that Jewish studies intersects with and is of interest to other fields of schol-
arship. In the same manner in which women’s studies and gender studies have
shifted the focus from the traditionally dominant male population to take note of
the contributions and lives of those historically marginalized, so too does Jewish
studies oftentimes help shift the focus from the dominant culture to minority popu-
lations living in and interacting with it. While it cannot be gainsaid that there are
certain areas of Jewish studies that are more likely to attract the attention of non-
Jewish scholars, such as biblical studies and Second Temple studies, on account of
their importance for the genesis of Christianity, or Holocaust studies, whether
owing to their paradigmatic nature in genocide studies or in the process of Vergan-
genheitsbewältigung (coming to grips with the past), Hughes sets up a somewhat
artificial us-versus-them dichotomy that is neither truly reflective of the field nor
reflective of many of the students involved in Jewish studies. Indeed, to paraphrase

 Aaron W. Hughes, The Study of Judaism: Identity, Authenticity, Scholarship (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 2013).
 See, for example, Nina Shapiro, “UW returns $5M to donor after disagreement over professor’s
views on Israel,” The Seattle Times (March 5, 2022) https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/uw-
returns-5m-to-israel-studies-donor-unhappy-with-professors-views/; Francie Diep, “‘It’s Outrageous’:
2 Donor Conflicts Reveal Tensions for Jewish-Studies Scholars,” The Chronicle of Higher Education
(March 10, 2022) https://www.chronicle.com/article/its-outrageous-2-donor-conflicts-reveal-fraught-
tensions-for-jewish-studies-scholars; Lila Corwin Berman, “When Gifts Come with Strings Attached:
Philanthropic Coercion Strikes Jewish Studies – and the Academy at Large,” The Chronicle of Higher
Education (March 15, 2022) https://www.chronicle.com/article/when-gifts-come-with-strings-
attached.
6 Carl S. Ehrlich

a famous ad campaign from the past, “You don’t have to be Jewish . . . to study
Jewish studies.”9 As a matter of fact, you don’t have to have studied Jewish studies
or even view yourself as a Jewish studies scholar in order to make a contribution to
one or more of the subfields that comprise Jewish studies.
In addition to the work of Hughes discussed above, an unscientific examination
of my personal library reveals only a handful of volumes that combine the words
“Jewish” and “study/studies” in some sort of permutation, which should make the
necessity for a reflective volume on the state of the field, such as the present one,
evident. Jewish studies is a relatively young field, which has not yet had sufficient
opportunities to take stock of its rapid development and the changes in methodol-
ogy that older and more established fields have had.
Shaye Cohen and Edward Greenstein’s The State of Jewish Studies10 provided
the most immediate inspiration for the present one. Based on a symposium held at
the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1987, The State of Jewish Studies in-
cludes a number of essays surveying the state of – and important discussions in the
field of – Jewish studies from biblical studies to ancient and medieval Judaism, to
modern Jewish history, literature, and thought, and from Jewish art to education.
Each essay is complemented by a response, which gives some sense of the discus-
sion that the original presentations provoked. In all, this collection of essays pro-
vides a valuable benchmark of the state of the field in the late 1980s.
Jewish Studies at the Turn of the 20th Century, edited by Judit Targarona Borrás
and Angel Sáenz-Badillos, is a two-volume collection of papers – including some by
contributors to the present volume – from the 6th Congress of the European Associ-
ation for Jewish Studies.11 While the volumes include many significant works of
scholarship, the volumes themselves are just a collection of miscellaneous narrowly
focused academic papers delivered in Toledo, Spain, in 1998 and have no overarch-
ing thematic structure other than that they all fall within the field of Jewish studies.
Zev Garber’s edited collection on Academic Approaches to Teaching Jewish Stud-
ies,12 a follow-up to and partial reprint of his 1986 Methodology in the Academic

 Cf. the slogan of Levy’s Real Jewish Rye Bread: “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real
Jewish rye.” See also Andrew Silverstein, “It was the most successful Jewish ad campaign of all
time – but who was the model?,” Forward (February 14, 2022) https://forward.com/culture/482193/
levys-jewish-rye-you-dont-have-to-be-jewish-model-joseph-attean-native/.
 Shaye J.D. Cohen and Edward L. Greenstein, eds., The State of Jewish Studies (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1990).
 Judit Targarona Borrás and Angel Sáenz-Badillos, eds., Jewish Studies at the Turn of the 20th
Century: Proceedings of the 6th EAJS Congress, Toledo 1998, 2 vols. (Leiden/Boston/ Köln: Brill,
1999).
 Zev Garber, ed., Academic Approaches to Teaching Jewish Studies (Lanham/New York/Oxford:
University Press of America, 2000).
 Introduction 7

Teaching of Judaism,13 addresses the field of Jewish studies. However, the perspec-
tive is not on the field per se but on how to teach it within an academic context.
The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, edited by Martin Goodman,14 which
weighs in at over one thousand pages, is the most ambitious volume to attempt to do
what we are doing in this volume. Indeed, it is an indispensable reference work. And
yet, leaving aside the fact that it is by now two decades old, the logic of its subjective
allocation of the volume’s thirty-nine chapters is not always self-evident. While the
first half of the Oxford Handbook is arranged temporally and the second thematically,
the relative space devoted to the various topics, particularly in the first half, seems to
privilege some periods and subjects to the detriment of others. Thus, there is one chap-
ter devoted to the Biblical period, two to the Second Temple period, two to the Rab-
binic period, six to the Medieval period, two to the Early Modern period (defined as
1492–1750), two to the Modern period (defined as 1750 to the Holocaust), and then one
each on the Holocaust, Israel, and American Jewry, leaving aside the more themati-
cally oriented second half of the volume, which skews the results even more toward
certain periods. And as for the material aspect that plays such a central role in the cur-
rent volume, there is but one chapter of limited scope devoted to it.
Moving to the second decade of the twenty-first century, Melanie Wright’s post-
humously published Studying Judaism: The Critical Issues combines the two terms
under consideration but is to be understood more as an introductory text to the study
of Judaism than it is a critical engagement with Jewish studies.15 Aaron Hughes’s The
Study of Judaism: Identity, Authenticity, Scholarship has been alluded to above in his
criticism of the field of Jewish studies. More comprehensive are The Bloomsbury Com-
panion to Jewish Studies edited by Dean Phillip Bell (2013)16 and the Handbuch Jüdi-
sche Studien edited by Christina von Braun and Micha Brumlik (2018).17 Both of these
works attempt to survey the field of Jewish studies and to point it in new directions.
The former work, the Bloomsbury Companion, is divided into three sections of unequal
length. The first, comprising seven contributions filling close to two-hundred pages, is
devoted to “Judaism and Jewish Society from the Bible to Modernity.” The second part
comprises five chapters totalling close to 150 pages and is entitled “Reorienting Jewry
and Jewish Studies.” The brief final section consists of five “Resources,” including a
glossary, maps, a timeline, a select bibliography, and an index. It thus presents a

 Zev Garber, ed., Methodology in the Academic Teaching of Judaism (Lanham, MD: University
Press of America, 1986).
 Martin Goodman, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies (Oxford & New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2002).
 Melanie J. Wright, Studying Judaism: The Critical Issues (Studying World Religions Series; Lon-
don/New York: Continuum, 2012).
 Dean Phillip Bell, ed., The Bloomsbury Companion to Jewish Studies (London/New Delhi/
New York/Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013; 2015).
 Christina von Braun and Micha Brumlik, eds., Handbuch Jüdische Studien (UTB 8712; Köln/Wei-
mar/Wien: Böhlau, 2018).
8 Carl S. Ehrlich

comprehensive chronological overview of the field, deals with a handful of contempo-

rary methodological issues, and provides basic resources of value for the student of
the field. The approach of the Handbuch Jüdische Studien is both deeper and narrower
than that of the Bloomsbury Companion. Eschewing a comprehensive chronological
presentation of the field, this volume emphasizes modernity and thought. Like the
Bloomsbury Companion, the Handbuch Jüdische Studien has a tripartite arrangement.
The first section is devoted to basic questions (Grundsatzfragen), the second to theol-
ogy, and the third to culture and modernity. The essays are heavily weighted toward
Jewish thought, culture, and modernity, reflecting the interests of the volume’s edi-
tors. The Biblical or Israelite period finds only incidental mention, while the Second
Temple period is of interest only insofar as it allows a discussion of the origins of
Judaism, which in the presentation of the volume is equated with rabbinic Judaism
and its offshoots.
Other works dealing with the discipline of Jewish studies include Andrew Bush’s
theoretical introduction to the field,18 which is more a theoretical reflection on the
state of Jewish studies in the modern world. Quite consciously following in his foot-
steps, Adam Zachary Newton deals with the intellectual history and literary place of
Jewish studies as a discipline as of the nineteenth century.19 Somewhat older is Lynn
Davidman’s and Shelly Tenenbaum’s edited collection of essays on Feminist Perspec-
tives on Jewish Studies.20 Comprising essays that cover the full temporal range of Jew-
ish studies, this volume’s authors include many of the foundational figures engaged
in Jewish studies from a feminist perspective. Finally, the fiftieth anniversary issue of
AJS Perspectives is devoted to “New Vistas in Jewish Studies” and includes essays on
various aspects of Jewish studies written by scholars who had received their PhDs
during the decade before this issue’s publication in 2018.21
More self-consciously than the above works, through its diachronic and syn-
chronic organization, the present volume offers an approach that allows for both syn-
chronic and diachronic analyses and should serve as a valuable reference work in
establishing the current state of the field and in laying the foundation for its future
development. Although we are according more or less equal space to every period of
Jewish studies touched upon, which is something that rarely happens in the field,
when combined with the anticipated volume on “Modernity and Methodology,” the in-
evitable impression gained will be of one that slightly favors the more modern periods.

 Andrew Bush, Jewish Studies: A Theoretical Introduction (Key Words in Jewish Studies; New
Brunswick, NJ/London: Rutgers University Press, 2011).
 Adam Zachary Newton, Jewish Studies as Counterlife: A Report to the Academy (New York: Ford-
ham University Press, 2019).
 Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tenenbaum, eds., Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies (New
Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1994).
 Jonathan M. Hess and Laura S. Lieber, eds., AJS Perspectives: The Magazine of the Association
for Jewish Studies, The 50th Anniversary Issue: New Vistas in Jewish Studies (Fall 2018).
 Introduction 9

If Jewish studies at one time conjured up images of rabbinic scholars poring over
their dusty tomes, today the growth industry in the field is in modernity, whether the
subject of study be the Holocaust, Israel, hyphenated Jewish identities, oftentimes of
a national character, or cultural studies of various types. These will be the subject of
the second volume.
The structure of the current volume is quite simple. There are four temporal sec-
tions, devoted respectively to the First Temple, Second Temple, Rabbinic, and Medie-
val periods. Within each section are chapters devoted to history, literature, religion,
and material culture.22 This structure allows both for the synchronic examination of
particular periods and for the diachronic investigation of particular themes/approaches
across different periods, with the exception of the history of the Rabbinic period.
In the planning of the original symposium and in the preparation of its ensuing
volume, I have been aided by many of my colleagues at York University’s Koschitzky
Centre for Jewish Studies, in some cases probably more than they would have liked,
and in others less. My main sounding board and partner in this enterprise has been
Sara R. Horowitz, my much more experienced predecessor as director of the Koschitzky
Centre. Owing to her term as president of the Association for Jewish Studies, an organi-
zation heartily critiqued by Hughes, and to her experience in organizing conferences
and symposia, I have had to lean on her for constant support. Her knowledge of the
people in the field has been particularly helpful, although it has been supplemented
by input from additional colleagues at York and elsewhere.
When I started studying this field more than four decades ago, it was possible to
know who all the major players in Jewish studies were. Now, however, the field has
grown so vast and intersects with so many other academic disciplines that it is impos-
sible for one person to have a complete grasp of who’s who in the field and what the
current debates are. Hence, I have had to rely on the kindness of my colleagues to
help put together a list of people to invite to the original symposium and to fill in the
gaps in the volume. Looking now at the contributors assembled in this volume, we
can take great pride in having gathered together la crème de la crème in our respec-
tive fields, encompassing both established and emergent scholars. In an unintended
but serendipitous rebuke to Hughes, our collegium includes both Jewish and non-
Jewish scholars. Another point of pride is the gender mix of the contributors, which
is reflective of the development not only of Jewish studies but of the humanities as a
whole over the course of the last generation or so. Ultimately, this volume is part of
an ongoing discussion. The hope is that it will help guide it into the future.

 The one exception to this rule is the section on the Rabbinic period, where we were unable to
find anyone to submit a chapter on the history of that time.
Section 1: The First Temple Period
Mary Joan Winn Leith
Biblical Israel: History and Historiography
to 586 BCE
1 Introduction
Designating the endpoint, what historians call the terminus ante quem, for a history
of the biblical First Temple period is easy.1 On Tisha b’Av in the summer of 586 BCE
the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Jerusalem and its temple
and sent the surviving elite Judeans to exile in Babylon. The Hebrew Bible/Old Tes-
tament,2 ancient nonbiblical texts, and archaeology all converge tidily around this
chronological marker. On the other hand, defining a starting point poses numerous
challenges. One might take the term “First Temple” literally and begin with the
First Temple, the structure that, according to 1 Kings 6–7, King Solomon built in the
late tenth century BCE. Outside of the Bible, however, there are no extant ancient
written sources that can prove Solomon or a tenth-century temple even existed. The
problem is the same for the ancestors in Genesis, for the exodus from Egypt, for the
delivery of the Torah at Mt. Sinai, for Joshua’s conquest of the Promised Land of
Canaan, for the pre-monarchic period of the judges, and for King Saul.
David comes next in the biblical narrative, and with David a faint light at last
glimmers on the historical horizon. This is significant because in the 1990s a group
of biblical scholars began to promote the theory that David had been the invention
of post-exilic Jewish elites rather than an actual tenth-century BCE king of Israel.3
The proposal stemmed from their idea that the Bible had been composed in the Per-
sian period, after the exile to Babylon.4 According to this theory, Jews who had re-
turned home from Babylon created the story of David to support their claim against
rival Jewish groups to be the legitimate colonial administrators of the Persian prov-
ince of Yehud/Judea. In 1993, however, at the site of Tel Dan in the far north of Israel,

 For comprehensive biblical histories, see Michael D. Coogan, ed., The Oxford History of the Biblical
World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and J. M. Miller and J. H. Hayes, A History of Israel and
Judah, 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006).
 Unless otherwise indicated, “Bible” in this chapter refers to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.
 Representative works of the so-called minimalists include Philip R. Davies, In Search of “Ancient
Israel” (London/New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1995); and Keith W. Whitelam,
The Invention of Ancient Israel (London: Routledge, 1996). Although unnecessarily polemical (his defi-
nition of “postmodern” amounts to a caricature), William G. Dever’s “Excursus 1.1” in Beyond the
Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature,
2017), 45–58 outlines the controversies.
 In Syro-Palestine, the Persian Period (Iron Age III) begins in 539 BCE, when Cyrus allowed peo-
ples exiled by Babylon to return home, and ends in 332 BCE, when Alexander the Great captured
the east coast of the Mediterranean and Egypt.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-002
14 Mary Joan Winn Leith

archaeologist Avraham Biran unearthed a fragmentary Aramaic inscription dated to

the late ninth or early eighth century that mentions a “king of Israel” as well as a
“house of David” (bet David) (Figure 1). “House” in this case means “dynasty” and
most likely refers to the ruling family of the southern kingdom of Judah.

Figure 1: Tel Dan Stele. Fragments of a ninth-century Aramaic inscription discovered in 1993 and
1994 during excavations at Tel Dan, northern Israel. According to the reconstructed text accepted by
most biblical scholars, a king of Damascus (perhaps Hazael; cf. Kings 8:15) claims to have “[killed
Jeho]ram son [of Ahab] king of Israel” and “[Ahaz]iahu son of [Jehoram kin-]g of the House of David
[bet David].” This is the only nonbiblical reference to David – albeit to David’s dynasty and not David
himself – contemporary with events in the Hebrew Bible. Israel Museum, KAI 310;Photo by Oren Rosen,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JRSLM_300116_Tel_Dan_Stele_01.jpg This file is licensed
under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Does this prove the existence of King David? At the very least, a ninth- or eighth-
century textual reference to the “House of David” from a secure archaeological con-
text means that David could not be a late sixth-century invention. It also implies that
Judah’s kings did indeed trace their lineage back to someone named David. But con-
trary to History Channel hype, this is not a case where “archaeology proves the Bible.”
The inscription certainly adds to the body of indirect evidence for the existence of
David, but in fact, archaeology – or rather, the paucity of archaeological evidence –
has generated more doubt than certainty regarding the biblical David, not to mention
his son Solomon and a tenth-century Israelite empire.5 Not only is there no extra-

 Compare, for example, “Was There a King David? Extrabiblical Sources,” Chapter 1 of Steven
L. McKenzie, King David: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 9–24; on the textual
 Biblical Israel: History and Historiography to 586 BCE 15

biblical textual evidence; there is no good archaeological evidence for the existence of
Kings David and Solomon or the First Temple in the tenth century BCE.
Despite decades of excavation in Jerusalem, tenth-century remains are still mea-
ger and/or ambiguous. For example, the claim first made in 2006 by archaeologist
Eilat Mazar to have identified the walls of King David’s palace is disputed by a major-
ity of archaeologists who date the structure to the time of the Judges (Iron I, i.e.,
1200–1000 BCE), before David’s capture of Jerusalem, although, David perhaps put
the pre-existing building to some use.6 Another example is a luxury item, a thumb-
sized ivory (actually, hippopotamus bone) pomegranate with a paleo-Hebrew inscrip-
tion that mentions the “house of Yahweh” – here “house” means temple – that ap-
peared on the antiquities market and for which the Israel Museum paid half a million
dollars in 1988.7 The ivory comes from the fourteenth or thirteenth century BCE, too
early for Solomon, but the eighth-century form of the letters indicate the inscription
was added later, maybe in the First Temple period; but serious doubts persist that it
is a forgery, doubts that would not arise had it been found in an archaeological exca-
vation.8 Even were the pomegranate genuine, nothing requires that it came from Jer-
usalem rather than from a contemporary shrine of Yahweh elsewhere, a possibility
sanctioned by the biblical text itself.9 Another type of archaeological uncertainty
arises with regard to 1 Kings 9:15, which reports that in addition to the walls of Jeru-
salem – for which there are no material traces from Solomon’s time10 – Solomon also
fortified the cities of Hazor, Gezer, and Megiddo, where almost identical ashlar (cut

side, Lester Grabbe, Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? rev. ed. (London:
Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017),138–146 argues that apologetic rhetoric in 1–2 Samuel’s account of
David’s career point to a real-life David.
 Avraham Faust, “Did Eilat Mazar Find David’s Palace?” Biblical Archaeology Review 38/5 (2012):
47–52, 70.
 For images, a Google search for “ivory pomegranate” suffices. Eran Arie assembles clear evi-
dence that the inscription was forged in “Pomegranate and Poppy-Capsule Headings from Ivory
and Bone in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages: Putting the Famous Inscribed Ivory Pomegranate in
Context,” Israel Museum Studies in Archaeology 9 (2018–2019) 2–39. A tiny uninscribed ivory pome-
granate topped by a bird was recovered from a late-ninth-century fill by excavators: see Ronny
Reich, Eli Shukron, and Omri Lernau, “Recent Discoveries in the City of David, Jerusalem,” Israel
Exploration Journal 47 (2007): 160–161.
 Andrew G. Vaughn and Christopher A. Rollston, “The Antiquities Market, Sensationalized Tex-
tual Data, and Modern Forgeries,” Near East Archaeology 68(1/2) (2005): 61–65; Shmuel Ahituv,
Aaron Demsky, Yuval Goren, and André Lemaire, “The Inscribed Pomegranate from the Israel Mu-
seum Examined Again,” Israel Exploration Journal 57/1 (2007): 87–95.
 Diana Edelman, “Cultic Sites and Complexes Beyond the Jerusalem Temple,” in Religious Diver-
sity in Ancient Israel and Judah, Francesca Stavrakopoulou and John Barton, eds. (London: T&T
Clark, 2010): 82–103. In 2012 a temple complex was excavated at Tel Motza near Jerusalem, appar-
ently contemporary with Solomon’s temple: Shua Kisilevitz and Oded Lipschits, “Another Temple
in Judah!” Biblical Archaeology Review 46/1 (2020): 40–49.
 Ezekiel 40:10’s description of Jerusalem’s gates matches the excavated gates of Hazor, Megiddo,
and Gezer, but Ezekiel, writing in the sixth century BCE, was not contemporary with Solomon.
16 Mary Joan Winn Leith

stone) gates all of the same period were indeed discovered. The old consensus that
these gates demonstrated Solomonic central planning has given way before thus-far
intractable stratigraphic uncertainty. The gates might be tenth-century Solomonic, or
they could be ninth-century.11
Lacking solid archaeological or nonbiblical textual evidence that Jerusalem
was a city substantial enough to be the capital of a tenth-century polity of any size,
the question of Jerusalem and the United Monarchy is a flashpoint for biblical max-
imalists and minimalists; in a simplified nutshell of the charges and counter-
charges, maximalists are accused of believing everything in the Bible, minimalists
of believing that nothing in the Bible has any basis in fact. Most biblical scholars
and archaeologists fall somewhere on a spectrum between these two ideological ex-
tremes. (The minimalists should nevertheless be credited with stimulating greater
rigor in biblical studies.) Among other problems with their arguments, minimalists
don’t believe the Hebrew language preserved in the Bible can be accurately dated
and some even dismiss the evidence of pre-exilic excavated inscriptions. Here I re-
sort to the usual comparison of the Bible to an archaeological tell: an artificial hill
composed of the layered remains of a city built and rebuilt over centuries in the
same location. The Bible is similarly layered with texts from different periods. Some of
it, like Exodus 15 or Judges 5, contain passages of archaic Hebrew. To draw another
analogy, compared to other parts of the Bible, these passages read like Chaucer beside
the English of The New York Times,12 and there’s plenty of eighth- to early sixth-
century Hebrew in the Bible that is easily distinguished from the later Hebrew found in
Chronicles.13 Over the last two decades, methodological refinements in dating biblical
Hebrew have not succeeded in dismantling the general premise that early Hebrew can
be distinguished from late.14 Many minimalists also have seemed to ignore or at best
barely condescend to consider archaeological evidence, although in recent years some
have taken the archaeology seriously and adjusted their views commensurately.15
So, where are we with Jerusalem and David and Solomon and the temple? Histo-
riographically, we enter the realm of the “art of doing history” and the “philosophy of

 Joshua J. Bodine, “Gates, Dates, and Debates: A Review of Megiddo’s Monumental Gate and the
Debates over Archaeology and Chronology in Iron Age Palestine,” Studia Antiqua 8 (Spring 2010):
5–23.
 Avi Hurvitz, “The Historical Quest for ‘Ancient Israel’ and the Linguistic Evidence of the Hebrew
Bible: Some Methodological Observations,” Vetus Testamentum 47 (1997): 301–315; and Ziony Zevit,
“What a Difference a Year Makes: Can Biblical Texts Be Dated Linguistically?” Hebrew Studies 47
(2006): 83–91.
 Ronald Hendel, How Old is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
 Aaron Hornkohl, “Characteristically Late Spellings in the Hebrew Bible: With Special Reference
to the Plene Spelling of the O-vowel in the Qal Infinitive Construct,” Journal of the American Orien-
tal Society 134 (2014): 643–671.
 Compare, for example, Grabbe, Ancient Israel.
 Biblical Israel: History and Historiography to 586 BCE 17

history.” For example, does lack of written and material evidence require a negative
judgment? What constitutes evidence? How much does circumstantial evidence count?
Just because something is mentioned in the Bible doesn’t mean it has no relation to
history. There are plenty of instances where the Bible preserves an authentic histori-
cal memory, as it does for the Neo-Assyrian devastation of Judah at the end of the
eighth century.16 Excavations show a pattern of destruction for this period at relevant
sites in southern Judah and 2 Kings 18:13 reports, “In the fourteenth year of King Hez-
ekiah, King Sennacherib of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah
and captured them.” King Sennacherib chose his victory over Judean Lachish to exult
over in the famous reliefs that covered the walls of a large hall in his palace in Nine-
veh (Figure 2). The ruins of Lachish itself reveal striking archaeological evidence of
the Assyrian siege and the city’s failed defense.

Figure 2: Lachish Relief. Part of a monumental series of reliefs, King Sennacherib of Assyria sits on
his throne, supervising his army’s attack on the city of Lachish in 701 BCE (cf. 2 Kings 18:13). Like a
cartoon bubble, the cuneiform text reads in part, “I give permission for its slaughter.” Located
today in the British Museum, the reliefs decorated the walls of Room XXXVI in Sennacherib’s
palace in Nineveh, Iraq. Photo:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lachish_inscription.jpeg
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Again, this evidence doesn’t prove the Bible; rather, 2 Kings 18’s account of Senna-
cherib’s invasion is one item of evidence for reconstructing a viable historical narra-
tive about the Assyrians in the southern Levant at the end of the eighth century.17

 See Mordechai Cogan, The Raging Torrent: Historical Inscriptions from Assyria and Babylonia
Relating to Ancient Israel, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Carta, 2015).
 K. L. Noll, Canaan and Israel in Antiquity: A Textbook on History and Religion, 2nd ed. (London:
Bloomsbury, 2013), 40–42.
18 Mary Joan Winn Leith

Archaeology can also mislead. Sometimes, what excavators don’t find may be
contradicted by other, more compelling data. Without the fourteenth-century Amarna
letters,18 no one would have deduced from archaeological remains that Jerusalem at
that time was not only an armed and fortified Canaanite city-state (if a modest one),
but that its leader commanded a scribal bureaucracy that kept him in regular contact
with the Pharaoh.19 It was only recently that Mazar reported the excavation of two
fragmentary “Amarna-like” cuneiform tablets in Jerusalem, supplying physical evi-
dence from the city itself for what the Amarna letters had indicated.20 Given the cen-
turies of building and rebuilding in Jerusalem, where the bedrock is already high,
preserved pockets of tenth-century remains may yet turn up, even if the Holy Grail of
Jerusalem archaeology – the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif – remains off-limits.
Thus far, the much-publicized Temple Mount Sifting Project has turned up only a few
small items and sherds from the period.21 Fortuitously, in 2007 near Jerusalem’s
Gihon Spring, Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron found a cache of previously unattested
late ninth-century sherds along with ten fragmentary seals and scarabs and some 170
bullae (clay seal impressions) bearing the imprints of the papyrus documents or con-
tainers they sealed.22 It is possible that the ninth-century authors of all the long-lost
documents once sealed by these bullae were heirs to a scribal tradition in Jerusalem
with links all the way back to the fourteenth-century Amarna period.23 Michael Coogan
argues that the growing number of inscriptions from tenth-century contexts at settle-
ments outside Jerusalem such as Khirbet Qeiyafa, Beth Shemesh, and Tel Zayit makes

 William M. Moran, The Amarna Letters (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992); and
Anson Rainey, et al., The El-Amarna Correspondence (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
 Michael D. Coogan, “Assessing David and Solomon,” Review of Israel Finkelstein and Neil-
Asher Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the
Western Tradition in Biblical Archaeology Review 32/4 (2006): 56–60; see also Nadav Na’aman,
“Does Archaeology Deserve the Status of a ‘High Court’ in Biblical Historical Research?” in Bob
Becking and Lester L. Grabbe, eds., Between Evidence and Ideology: Essays on the History of Ancient
Israel (Leiden: Brill, 2011): 165–183.
 Eilat Mazar, Wayne Horowitz, and Takayoshi Oshima, “A Cuneiform Tablet from the Ophel in
Jerusalem,” Israel Exploration Journal 60 (2010): 4–21; Eilat Mazar, Yuval Goren, Wayne Horowitz,
and Takayoshi Oshima, “Jerusalem 2: A Fragment of a Cuneiform Tablet from the Ophel Excava-
tions,” Israel Exploration Journal 64 (2014): 129–139.
 Temple Mount Sifting Project, “Rare 3,000-Year-Old Seal Discovered within Earth Discarded from
Temple Mount,” Sept. 25, 2015, http://tmsifting.org/en/2015/09/24/special-media-release-rare-3000-
year-old-seal-discovered-within-earth-discarded-from-temple-mount/ (accessed Jan. 16, 2018).
 Reich, Shukron, and Lernau, “Recent Discoveries,” 156–157, 161–163.
 Alan R. Millard dates an alphabetic jar inscription from Jerusalem to the eleventh century in
“The New Jerusalem Inscription – So What?” Biblical Archaeology Review 40(3) (2014): 49–53,
which further diminishes the writing gap between Amarna and Iron II Jerusalem. See also Matthieu
Richelle, “Elusive Scrolls: Could Any Hebrew Literature Have Been Written Prior to the Eighth Cen-
tury BCE?” Vetus Testamentum 66(4) (2016): 555–594.
 Biblical Israel: History and Historiography to 586 BCE 19

a scribal bureaucracy in tenth-century Jerusalem increasingly likely.24 He also finds

compelling data in the names of scribal officials that appear in what he plausibly
reasons are genuine lists of tenth-century royal functionaries in 2 Samuel 8:16–18;
20:23–26, and 1 Kings 4:1–6; as he points out:
The first two lists are for David’s reign, but these two different lists make little sense in a fictional
creation of a later time: One would have been sufficient if the writer simply wanted to give the
impression of a royal bureaucracy. An alternate explanation, then, is that the three lists are what
they appear to be: genuine archives from the tenth century B.C.E.25

To summarize, in the reasonable words of Lester Grabbe:

The biblical text should not be rejected just because it is part of a theological/religious docu-
ment – nor should it be accepted for the same reasons. It has to be evaluated, carefully and
critically, in each individual situation. A case needs to be made for whatever position one
takes, and the case needs to be made for each individual text. Generalized judgments, whether
pro or con, will not do.26

I would, then, provisionally submit that in the tenth century, Jerusalem was a modest
(perhaps twelve-acre) city with about one thousand inhabitants. There, a king named
Solomon, son of David, built a temple – or embellished an already-existing temple. In
the Ancient Near East, temple-building – including temple-expanding or face-lifting –
was what you did if you were a king. We must be content with maybes and probabili-
ties. As humans, we are meaning-makers and recoil from uncertainty, but in the case
of history, we have to be content with the provisional nature of all conclusions.

2 New Evidence, New Methods and New Questions

Beyond the greater rigor with which the biblical text is now scrutinized, the two
biggest game changers over the last quarter-century in what could be called “the
biblical story historically examined” are first, that before the exile Israelites were
not monotheists, and second, that the identity of “Israel” before the sixth-century

 Yosef Garfinkel, Mitka R. Golub, Haggai Misgav, and Saar Ganor, in “The ʾIšbaʿal Inscription
from Khirbet Qeiyafa,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 20 (2015): 217–218, note
that “Since 2008, six inscriptions dated to the [Iron IIA] late 11th–10th centuries have become
known: three from Khirbet Qeiyafa and three from various sites in the [Judah] region: Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi
[Gath], Beth Shemesh, and Jerusalem. They are all on pottery, either written in ink or incised.”
 Coogan, “Assessing David and Solomon,” 58–59.
 Lester L. Grabbe, “‘The Exile’ under the Theodolite: Historiography as Triangulation,” in Lester
L. Grabbe, ed., Leading Captivity Captive: “The Exile” as History and Ideology (Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic, 1998): 80–100.
20 Mary Joan Winn Leith

exile to Babylon is exceedingly complex. In both cases, archaeological discoveries

provided a strong incentive to re-examine the biblical text.
With regard to both these issues the “minimalists” deserve credit for bringing
postmodern skepticism to the study of the Bible. At its most basic and jargon-free,
postmodernism does not mean that a text has no “meaning.” Rather, it is an ap-
proach that requires readers to stay alert to the ideological perspective of a text. By
reading with a hermeneutic of suspicion, asking cui bono (who stands to benefit?),
one may read “against the grain” and bring to the text a sensitivity to who is being
left out. The reader asks what assumptions are made by the writer that reveal biases in
the text. The Bible is, after all, the product of elite men in a patriarchal society. We
can, however, look and listen carefully to catch the echo of other voices and even intuit
the perspectives of other Israelites: male and female, rich and poor, slave and free.
This realization enables readers to delve much more deeply than ever before into what
the Bible can reveal about ancient Israelite history and society. For example, if, in Jere-
miah 44, the prophet fulminates at Judean women-exiles for worshiping the Queen of
Heaven, one can deduce that the text likely provides a window onto a religious activity
commonly practiced by pre-exilic Judean women. References in 2 Kings 21:6–7 and
Ezekiel 8:14 reinforce this. In other words, Jeremiah’s point of view is not something
we are compelled to accept as normative among his fellow Judean refugees; his could
easily be a minority perspective for the time.27

3 Monotheism
Past certainties about pre-exilic Israelite monotheism were seriously challenged by the
discovery in the 1970s of eighth-century inscriptions linking Yahweh and Asherah.28
These inscriptions were located in both northern Israelite and southern Judean con-
texts and they sent scholars back to the Bible, where, aided also by new sensitivity to
feminist perspectives, they found what only outlier scholars had perceived before:29
namely, evidence of what may well have been customary goddess-worship in Israel.
Additional archaeological evidence pointing to a female divine figure in pre-exilic Israel
is found in the so-called pillar figurines (also called Judean pillar figurines); these clay
statuettes date to the eighth to sixth century and depict women clutching their nude
breasts. They have been found by the thousands in a wide range of archaeological

 See Steven L. McKenzie and John Kaltner, eds., New Meanings for Ancient Texts: Recent Ap-
proaches to Biblical Criticisms and Their Applications (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2013).
 William G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005). For a cautious assessment of the evidence for a goddess, see John
J. Collins, The Bible After Babel: Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerd-
mans, 2005), 75–98.
 Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (New York: Ktav, 1968).
 Biblical Israel: History and Historiography to 586 BCE 21

contexts (domestic, burial, cultic) in Judah and especially Jerusalem.30 Their nudity
likely indicates supra-human status on the basis of comparison with ancient Near East-
ern goddess imagery and consequent association with some aspect of divine power.
More numerous than pillar figures and still enigmatic are clay figurines of a horse and
rider; the evidence now suggests they also continued in use in Jerusalem after the
exile.31 As Erin Darby has shown, the Decalogue’s prohibition of “idols” was not com-
prehensive, nor was it consistent.32
All of these discoveries open a window onto the piety of everyday Israelites;
they also raise important questions about official versus popular or domestic versus
public religious praxis. At the same time, it is important to note that scholars have
grown wary of using binary categories like “official” versus “popular,” recognizing
that they create their own distortions by not allowing for more fluid and nuanced
understandings.33 Thus, divine beings such as the “sons of God” in Psalm 29:1 or the
“sons of Elyon” in Psalm 82:6 have merited renewed attention, as have appeals to
divine and/or ancestral intercessors, child sacrifice, and traditions formerly dis-
missed as “magic,” such as divination and necromancy. Israelite household religion,
where women exercised greater authority, has moved to the forefront of scholar-
ship.34 The consequences of these discoveries for our understanding of ancient Israel-
ite religion and history are potentially enormous.35

4 “Israel”
As for the complexities of the name “Israel” in biblical and non-biblical texts, here
again new archaeological data and new approaches have problematized (postmod-
ern for “made more complicated”) long-held assumptions. In the Bible, “Israel” can

 Erin Darby, Interpreting Judean Pillar Figurines: Gender and Empire in Judean Apotropaic Ritual
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014); and Aaron Greener, “What are Clay Female Figures Doing in
Judah during the Biblical Period?” The Torah.com, August 16, 2016: http://thetorah.com/what-are-
clay-female-figurines-doing-in-judah-during-the-biblical-period/ (accessed Jan. 23, 2018).
 Isaak J. de Hulster, Figurines in Achaemenid Period Yehud: Jerusalem’s History of Religion and
Coroplastics in the Monotheism Debate (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017).
 Darby, Interpreting Judean Pillar Figurines, 259–300.
 Saul Olyan, “Family Religion in Israel and the Wider Levant of the First Millennium BCE,” in
John Bodel and Saul Olyan, eds., Household and Family Religion in Antiquity (Malden, MA/Oxford:
Blackwell, 2008), 113–126.
 Carol Meyers, Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2013); see also Beth Alpert Nakhai elsewhere in this volume and her “The Household as
Sacred Space,” in Rainer Albertz, Beth Alpert Nakhai, Saul M. Olyan, and Rüdiger Schmitt, eds.,
Family and Household Religion (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014), 53–72.
 Francesca Stavrakopoulou and John Barton, eds., Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah
(London: T&T Clark, 2010).
22 Mary Joan Winn Leith

refer to the eponymous ancestor Jacob-Israel, to a collection of tribal groups vari-

ously aligned with each other, “to a kingdom in the northern highlands of Canaan
or a kingdom in the central highlands, or even a substitute label for the kingdom of
Judah and the city of Jerusalem.”36
What is difficult to determine is how any of the social groups called “Israel” in
the Bible would have identified themselves and, conversely, what these groups
might have looked like at any one period in the centuries before the exile (or after
the exile, for that matter). Equally tricky is determining to what extent biblical writ-
ers have retrojected their own ideas about what Israel means into narratives of their
past. Potential answers to these questions are related but not the same. Studies of
ethnicity, in particular, have demonstrated that socio-ethnic self-definition is re-
markably fluid.37 For example, Israeli archaeologist Aren Maeir calls for a fuller ap-
preciation of the contextual basis of expressions of ethnic identity. He stresses that
within any group, understandings of identity can have highly variable modes of
self-presentation. This can be in marked contrast to an external view, in which the
group is seen as a homogeneous unit by an outside observer.38 A case in point:
more nuanced perspectives on Israelite identity might resolve ongoing debates over
whether the late-tenth-century site of Khirbet Qeiyafa was Israelite or not.39
In all periods, Israel, like other social groups, was what political scientist Bene-
dict Anderson has designated an “imagined community” embedded in a mesh of
memory, tradition, and sometimes contentious power-relationships, whose nature
can shift according to time and circumstance.40 Ron Hendel’s Remembering Abraham
contemplates precisely these issues.41 By the Persian period – the era in which the
Bible was approaching its final form – the different socio-religious perspectives re-
flected in the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles, Jonah, and Ruth make it clear that
various groups were contesting the right to be called Israel, so potent had the name
become. Contention over “Israel” continued not only in Samaritan and Christian claims
to be the “true Israel,” but in contemporary debates in the State of Israel.

 K. L. Noll, Canaan and Israel in Antiquity: A Textbook on History and Religion, 2nd ed. (London:
Bloomsbury, 2013), 10–11.
 Geoff Emberling, “Ethnicity in Complex Societies: Archaeological Perspectives,” Journal of Ar-
chaeological Research 5/4 (1997): 295–344; and Naose MacSweeney, “Beyond Ethnicity: The Over-
looked Diversity of Group Identity,” Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 22 (2009): 101–126.
 Aren M. Maeir, review of Avraham Faust, The Archaeology of Israelite Society in Iron Age II (Wi-
nona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012) in Review of Biblical Literature (09/2013): https://www.bookre
views.org/pdf/8631_9464.pdf.
 Yosef Garfinkel, Michael Hasel, and Martin Klingbeil, “An Ending and a Beginning,” Biblical
Archaeology Review 39/6 (2013): 44–51; and Nadav Na’aman, “Was Khirbet Qeiyafa a Judahite City?
The Case Against It,” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 17 (2017): 1–40.
 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of National-
ism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2016).
 Ronald Hendel, Remembering Abraham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
 Biblical Israel: History and Historiography to 586 BCE 23

Careful scrutiny of the term “Israel” in the written record over time bears out this
complexity. A people called “Israel” first materializes on history’s stage on the Mer-
neptah Stele in a list of Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 BCE) Canaanite groups report-
edly defeated by Pharaoh Merneptah around 1204 BCE. In the ensuing Iron I period
modest new settlements appeared in the previously unoccupied central hill country
of Canaan, more or less where people, later identifiable through the Bible and Iron II
(i.e., 1000–586 BCE) inscriptions as Israelites, lived. However, it now appears that
much of the material culture (such as pottery) of these settlers is in a direct contin-
uum with Late Bronze lowland population centers of Canaan. Even the supposedly
distinctive aspects of these central highland dwellers, such as collar-rim jars and the
four-room house, are attested outside this core area, including in Transjordan.42 Most
recently, the absence of pig bones, formerly all but canonical as an indication of Isra-
elite identity, now appears to reflect environmental factors – i.e., whether the local
ecosystem could support pig breeding – rather than ethno-religious boundary-
building.43 Even Philistines, who may have imported the first pigs to Syro-Palestine,
44
did not breed pigs when they settled the northern Negev.45
Not only the archaeology but also the fact that Israelite religion developed out of a
Canaanite matrix46 indicate that the Israelites essentially began as Canaanites, in di-
rect contradiction of dominant biblical rhetoric. Most Israelites (or, rather, the people
who settled in the areas that became the kingdoms of Israel and Judah) were likely not
immigrants from any farther away than the Canaanite lowlands, while perhaps includ-
ing, as Avraham Faust and others suggest, the semi-nomadic Shasu.47 The Merneptah
Stele antedates the hill country settlements, so the “Israel” that Merneptah supposedly

 Benjamin Porter, Complex Communities: The Archaeology of Early Iron Age West-Central Jordan
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013): 90–96, 143.
 Lidar Sapir-Hen, Meirav Meiri, and Israel Finkelstein, “Iron Age Pigs: New Evidence on their
Origin and Role in Forming Identity Boundaries,” Radiocarbon, 57/2 (2015): 307–315; and the popu-
lar version: Lidar Sapir-Hen, “Pigs as an Ethnic Marker? You Are What You Eat,” Biblical Archaeol-
ogy Review 42/6 (2016): 41–43, 70.
 Meirav Meiri, Philipp W. Stockhammer, Nimrod Marom, Guy Bar-Oz, Lidar Sapir-Hen et al.,
“Eastern Mediterranean Mobility in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages: Inferences from Ancient DNA
of Pigs and Cattle,” Scientific Reports 7/701, April 6, 2017, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-
017-00701-y (accessed Jan. 25, 2018).
 Lidar Sapir-Hen, Guy Bar-Oz, Yuval Gadot, and Israel Finkelstein, “Pig Husbandry in Iron Age
Israel and Judah New Insights Regarding the Origin of the ‘Taboo,’” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palä-
stina-Vereins 129/1 (2013): 1; see also Aren M. Maeir, Louise A. Hitchcock, and Liora Kolska Hor-
witz, “On the Constitution and Transformation of Philistine Identity,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology
32/1 (2013): 5–6.]
 Michael D. Coogan, “Canaanite Origins and Lineage: Reflections on the Religion of Ancient Is-
rael,” in Patrick D. Miller and Paul D. Hanson, eds., Ancient Israelite Religion (Philadelphia: For-
tress Press, 1987), 115–125.
 Avraham Faust, Israel’s Ethnogenesis: Settlement, Interaction, Expansion and Resistance (London:
Equinox, 2007). See also the RBL review by Kenton Sparks (7/2008). Faust draws too sharp a line
24 Mary Joan Winn Leith

defeated in Canaan lived somewhere other than the hill country. It is worth remember-
ing that the divine element preserved in the name, Israel, is the name of the head of
the Canaanite pantheon, El, and not Yahweh. One textual tradition may preserve a
memory of El-worship: the Priestly source represents Yahweh’s name as an innova-
tion, revealed to Moses in Exodus 6.
Furthermore, in the archaeological record not the smallest trace has turned up to
link the Iron Age I hill country population with Egypt, raising new questions about
the source and development of the exodus traditions. It has certainly struck biblical
historians that the Bible’s narratives of the conquest and the era of the judges seem
to be ignoring what was, so to speak, a huge elephant in the room: Egypt. The Egyp-
tian imperial presence in Canaan may have been on the wane, but Egypt was still the
foremost “fact on the ground” in Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Canaan, the time of
the putative conquest and the judges. This is a real conundrum: the Bible’s exodus
tradition has no clear connection to historical and archaeological evidence, while
demonstrated historical and archaeological facts about the Egyptian presence in Late
Bronze/Iron I Canaan make no appearance in the biblical text. Yet, in the words of
Ann Killebrew,48 “the ethnogenesis of Israel can be understood only within the
framework of the political and economic decline of Egyptian influence in Canaan in
the Twentieth Dynasty.” It now appears that the biblical exodus tradition developed
from a variety of historical experiences including indigenous Canaanite memories of
resistance to Egyptian domination in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages.49
Another point: since few people had to be displaced for the new Iron I hill country
settlements, there was little call for concerted military campaigns to conquer it. Most
biblical historians now propose that most of the Joshua conquest account dates to the
later seventh century, composed to serve the propaganda program of King Josiah – the
similarity between “Joshua” and “Josiah” is likely no coincidence – in his bid to con-
solidate his authority and annex the territory of the Northern Kingdom in the wake of
the Assyrian imperial collapse.50 King Josiah’s propaganda efforts exemplify the con-
tested construction of Israelite identity, since in his case a king of Judah is conceivably
co-opting the identity, name, and prestige (not to mention the territory) of Israel, its
former rival state.
In fact, one of the newest areas of historical inquiry these days addresses the
meaning of Israel vis-à-vis Judah and aims at disentangling the history and tradition
of Israel, the northern kingdom, from the Judah-centric rhetoric of the biblical text.

between urban and rural or sedentary and pastoral Canaanites in positing the source of the hill coun-
try occupation. Many Canaanites would have moved back and forth between these circumstances.
 Ann Killebrew, Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), 22.
 Nadav Na’aman, “The Exodus Story: Between Historical Memory and Historiographical Compo-
sition,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 11 (2011): 39–69.
 Lori Rowlett, Joshua and the Rhetoric of Violence: A New Historicist Analysis, Journal for the
Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 226 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996).
 Biblical Israel: History and Historiography to 586 BCE 25

Daniel Fleming is one of the scholars who is trying to tease out strands of northern
Israelite traditions by source analysis based on political grounds. He identifies dis-
tinctly different power structures that obtained in Israel over against those of Judah
and comes to the intriguing conclusion that “All primary phases of the Bible’s ac-
count of the past before David originate in Israel (the north) and reflect Israel’s politi-
cal perspective.”51 My own work has focused on restoring the Israelite identity of the
northern territories after 722 BCE from the all-but inescapable negative impression –
thanks to the Judah-curated account of the conquest of Samaria in 2 Kings 17 – that
“northerners post 722 were at best corrupt Yahwists on the way to becoming Samari-
tans.”52 On the contrary, there are good indications that traditional Iron Age Israelite
religious practices and self-definition survived after 722’s defeat to a remarkable de-
gree, and they were still a vital tradition in the Persian period when Judeans returned
from exile to rebuild the temple.53
This brief historiographical survey has brought us back to where I began: the
end of the First Temple period. I have indicated here and there how important the
study and recovery of the Bible’s development in the Second Temple period has be-
come to our understanding of what the Bible has to say about pre-exilic Israel, but
this is a topic to which a later chapter of this volume is dedicated.

For Further Reading

Albertz, Rainer and Rüdiger Schmitt. Family and Household Religion. Winona Lake, IN:
Eisenbrauns, 2014.
Bodine, Joshua J. “Gates, Dates, and Debates: A Review of Megiddo’s Monumental Gate and the
Debates over Archaeology and Chronology in Iron Age Palestine.” Studia Antiqua 8/1 (2010):
5–23.
Cogan, Mordechai. The Raging Torrent: Historical Inscriptions from Assyria and Babylonia Relating
to Ancient Israel, 2nd ed. Jerusalem: Carta, 2015.
Collins, John J. The Bible After Babel: Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age. Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 2005.
Coogan, Michael D., ed. The Oxford History of the Biblical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998.

 Daniel E. Fleming, The Legacy of Israel in Judah’s Bible: History, Politics, and the Reinscribing of
Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 28.
 Mary Joan Winn Leith, “Religious Continuity in Samaria/Israel: Numismatic Evidence,” in
Christian Frevel, Katharina Pyschny, and Izak Cornelius, eds., A “Religious Revolution” in Yehûd?
The Material Culture of the Persian Period as a Test Case; Orbis biblicus et orientalis 267 (Fribourg:
Academic Press/Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 268–269, 275.
 Gary R. Knoppers, Jews and Samaritans: The Origins and History of Their Early Relations (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013). The “Ten Lost Tribes” tradition does not appear until after the end
of the Second Temple period; see Pamela Barmash, “At the Nexus of History and Memory: The Ten
Lost Tribes,” AJS Review 29 (2005): 207–236.
26 Mary Joan Winn Leith

Dever, William G. Beyond the Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah. Atlanta:
Society of Biblical Literature, 2017.
Ehrlich, Carl S., ed. From an Antique Land: An Introduction to Ancient Near Eastern Literature.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011.
Grabbe, Lester L. Ancient Israel What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? Rev. ed. London:
Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017.
Greener, Aaron. “What are Clay Female Figures Doing in Judah during the Biblical Period?” The
Torah.com, August 16, 2016: http://thetorah.com/what-are-clay-female-figurines-doing-in-
judah-during-the-biblical-period/ (accessed Jan. 23, 2018).
Hendel, Ronald. Remembering Abraham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Killebrew, Ann E. Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005.
King, Philip J. and Lawrence E. Stager. Life in Biblical Israel. Louisville/London: Westminster John
Knox, 2001.
Knoppers, Gary R. Jews and Samaritans: The Origins and History of Their Early Relations. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013.
McKenzie, Steven L. King David: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
McKenzie, Steven L. and John Kaltner, eds. New Meanings for Ancient Texts: Recent Approaches to
Biblical Criticisms and Their Applications. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2013.
Meyers, Carol. Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013.
Miller, J. M. and J. H. Hayes. A History of Israel and Judah. 2nd ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John
Knox, 2006.
Rollston, Christopher. “Scribal Curriculum During the First Temple Period: Epigraphic Hebrew and
Biblical Evidence.” In Brian B. Schmidt, ed. Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings: Ancient
Literacy, Orality, and Literary Production, 71–102. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2015.
Schneider, Thomas and William H. C. Propp, eds. Israel’s Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective:
Text, Archaeology, Culture and Geoscience (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2015).
Smith, Mark S. The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the
Ugaritic Texts. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; paperback edition, 2003.
Stavrakopoulou, Francesca and John Barton, eds. Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah.
London: T&T Clark, 2010.
Konrad Schmid
Hebrew Writings and Literary Works
from the First Temple Period
(Until the Sixth Century BCE)
1 Introduction and Overview
The most important texts of ancient Hebrew literature that stem from the First Tem-
ple period are preserved in the Hebrew Bible but only as copies of copies. The earli-
est manuscript that includes the full text of the Hebrew Bible is Codex B 19 A from
St. Petersburg, which dates to 1000 CE. Some 5 to 10 percent of the biblical text is
attested in the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls.1 The Hebrew Bible itself is a library including
twenty-four different books – according to the Jewish reckoning – that are usually,
but not always, composite literary units that have grown over some time through the
hands of many different authors and redactors.2 They were written between the tenth
and second centuries BCE, though oral pre-stages may date to even earlier periods. In
their present literary and theological shape, the books of the Hebrew Bible reflect
the Second Temple period more than the First Temple period. In other words, it is
likely that all the books of the Hebrew Bible in our possession received their current
shape during the Second Temple period. Yet many of them contain not only memo-
ries but also literary precursors that date back to the First Temple period.
Other ancient Hebrew texts have survived in epigraphical form and are thus
fragmentary in nature. However, the total literary production of monarchic Israel
and Judah may have been even more comprehensive since the Hebrew Bible only
includes texts that, on the basis of selection and/or reinterpretation, have become
“biblical.” There are even references within the Bible that indicate that other liter-
ary works existed in ancient Israel and Judah, but they are now lost and we know
nothing further about them. Taken together, it is the the pre-exilic layers of the He-
brew Bible and the epigraphical writings that constitute the Hebrew literature from
the First Temple period.

 See Eugene Ulrich, The Biblical Qumran Scrolls: Transcriptions and Textual Variants, Vetus Testa-
mentum Supplements 134 (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
 See in detail Konrad Schmid, The Old Testament: A Literary History, trans. Linda M. Maloney
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012); and Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter, The Making of the Bible:
From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture, trans. Peter Lewis (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 2021).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110418873-003
28 Konrad Schmid

2 Epigraphy
It is helpful to start with the epigraphical materials since they provide some exter-
nal evidence for understanding Hebrew writing/texts at the very beginning of their
literary history. These epigraphical remains are not representative of ancient Israel
and Judah’s literature, but they nevertheless provide insight into basic develop-
ments regarding language, style, and script. They, in turn, help provide an impor-
tant point of comparison for assessing reconstructions of potentially monarchic text
elements in the Hebrew Bible.3
Firstly, it is important to note that the epigraphical finds datable to the tenth
century BCE – e.g., the Gezer calendar, the Qeiyafa inscription – are clearly not He-
brew in language or script. The most plausible explanation for this is that an identi-
fiable Hebrew language did not yet exist. One can observe different local languages
like Israelite, Judahite, Moabite, and Ammonite written in kindred yet slightly dif-
ferent scripts, each of which developed from the Phoenician alphabet. Some schol-
ars ask whether these languages should be viewed as dialects instead, but this is a
difficult and blurred differentiation that in the end is not very important.
Epigraphy from the ninth century is puzzling as well. The most extensive liter-
ary texts in the region are the Mesha stele, which is a Moabite inscription, and the
Balaam inscription from Tell Deir ‘Alla, which is an Aramaic text.4
Beginning only in the eighth century do we have literary texts from Israel and
Judah, such as the Khirbet el-Qom texts and the Siloam inscription.5 From this time

 A very helpful evaluation of Hebrew epigraphy in ancient Israel and Judah is provided by Chris-
topher Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Liter-
ature, 2010). The epigraphical material is presented, for example, in Frederick W. Dobbs-Allsopp
et al., Hebrew Inscriptions: Texts from the Biblical Period of the Monarchy with Concordance (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). See also Ron E. Tappy and P. Kyle McCarter, Literate Culture
and Tenth-Century Canaan: The Tel Zayit Abecedary in Context (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2008);
Matthieu Richelle, “Elusive Scrolls: Could Any Hebrew Literature Have Been Written Prior to the
Eighth Century BCE?” Vetus Testamentum 66 (2016): 556–594; Omer Sergi, “On Scribal Tradition in
Israel and Judah and the Antiquity of the Historiographical Narratives in the Hebrew Bible,” in Joa-
chim J. Krause et al, ed., Eigensinn und Entstehung der Hebräischen Bibel: Erhard Blum zum siebzigs-
ten Geburtstag, Forschungen zum Alten Testament 136 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020), 275–299;
Israel Finkelstein, “The Emergence and Dissemination of Writing in Judah,” Semitica et Classica 13
(2020), 269–282.
 See John Andrew Dearman, ed., Studies in the Mesha Inscription and Moab, Atlanta: SBL, 1989;
Erhard Blum, “Die altaramäischen Wandinschriften aus Tell Deir ̕Alla und ihr institutioneller Kon-
text,” in Friedrich-Emanuel Focken and Michael Ott, eds., Meta-Texte. Erzählungen von schrifttra-
genden Artefakten in der alttestamentlichen und mittelalterlichen Literatur; Materiale Textkulturen
15 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 21–52.
 See Silvia Schroer and Stefan Münger, eds., Khirbet Qeiyafa in the Shephelah: Papers Presented
at a Colloquium of the Swiss Society for Ancient Near Eastern Studies Held at the University of
Bern, September 6, 2014, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 282 (Fribourg: Academic Press/Göttingen:
 Hebrew Writings and Literary Works from the First Temple Period 29

onward, there is a significant increase in the amount of epigraphic material. At the

same time, Israel and Judah were perceived as politically relevant entities by the Mes-
opotamian empires. The earliest mentions of the kings of Israel and Judah are from
the time of Shalmaneser III., who reigned from 859–824 BCE. King Jehu of Israel is not
only mentioned in inscriptions but also portrayed iconographically in the famous
Black Obelisk from Niniveh, which is the earliest known portrait of an Israelite.6
What can one deduce from these observations? First, in the eighth century BCE
there seems to be significant development in both the possibilities and extent of He-
brew writing. The numbers of texts increase significantly; there is a clear standardiza-
tion of language and script; and the states of Israel and Judah are perceived as such
by their neighbors. These points are all relevant hints at the development of a scribal
culture.
With regard to the biblical traditions, it may be assumed that, while they may
reach back to earlier times, their earliest literary forms likewise took shape in the
eighth century (or at least not much earlier). The earliest period in ancient Israel
and Judah when extensive texts become possible is apparently the time of Amos,
Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah in the latter part of the eighth century. This also seems to
be the reason why there are “books” of Amos or Isaiah, but no equivelant “books”
of Elijah, Elisha, or other earlier prophetic figures mentioned in the books of Sam-
uel and Kings. Again, this is not to say that no biblical text predates the eighth cen-
tury BCE – especially if one accounts for oral pre-stages or memories that have
been reworked and included in the texts as they now stand. But the eighth century
seems to mark a caesura regarding the evolution of Israelite and Judahite scribal
culture and, therefore, also of its literature.

3 Biblical Texts From the First Temple Period

What biblical texts might reach back into the First Temple period and how can they
be identified? To consider this question, a very basic distinction needs to be intro-
duced: the differentiation between the biblical and the historical Israel.7

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017); Martin Leuenberger, Segen und Segenstheologien im Alten Israel:
Untersuchungen zu ihren religions- und theologiegeschichtlichen Konstellationen und Transformatio-
nen, Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments 90 (Zürich: TVZ, 2008),
138–149; and Ernst Axel Knauf, “Hezekiah or Manasseh? A Reconsideration of the Siloam Tunnel
and Inscription,” Tel Aviv 28 (2001): 281–287.
 See Othmar Keel and Christoph Uehlinger, “Der Assyrerkönig Salmanassar III. und Jehu von Is-
rael auf dem Schwarzen Obelisken,” Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 116 (1994): 391–420.
 See Reinhard G. Kratz, Historical and Biblical Israel: The History, Tradition, and Archives of Israel
and Judah, trans. Paul Michael Kurtz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
30 Konrad Schmid

According to the biblical perspective, most texts of the Hebrew Bible date to the
First Temple period or even earlier. All sixty-six chapters of the book of Isaiah were
written by the prophet Isaiah in the eighth century; the books of Ecclesiastes (Qohe-
let) and Song of Songs (Shir ha-Shirim) are of Solomonic origin; and the Pentateuch
was already known at the time of Joshua. These assignments are very traditional,
but they nonetheless highlight the noteworthy point that the Hebrew Bible develops
its own perspective on its literary history: not everything in the Bible goes back to
the same origin. The biblical writings instead stem from different periods, even ac-
cording to the Bible itself. This also has repercussions in the famous table of author-
ship in the Babylonian Talmud in Bava Batra 15a.
Nevertheless, since the rise of historical-critical scholarship in the late eigh-
teenth century, it has become apparent that the biblical perspective on the Bible’s
literary history is not identical with the historical one. What the Bible presents as
the oldest material is in fact not necessarily the earliest, but rather the most impor-
tant. The biblical authors seem to have anchored basic normative elements of Juda-
ism from later centuries – e.g., legal and cultic material in the books from Exodus
through Deuteronomy – in Israel’s prehistory during the exodus from Egypt. The
reason is the fundamental significance of these events. What comes first is what
matters most, not what dates to the earliest times. Accordingly, it is also conspicu-
ous that the Torah is not the founding charter for a monarchic Israel in its own
land. Instead, the Torah largely takes place outside the land and seems to address
an audience acquainted with life in the diaspora. As David J. A. Clines once put it:
“The Torah is an exilic document in terms of its content, regardless of how one
dates its texts.”8
In order to identify and evaluate biblical texts that might go back to the First
Temple period, there are three criteria for gaining methodologically controlled re-
sults. However, each one is fraught with some difficulty and uncertainty. Such are
the limits within which historical research must always be carried out. Neverthe-
less, by combining these three considerations, a quite reliable picture of the peri-
od’s literature is attainable.9
The first criterion is the relation of a specific text to Deuteronomy, and this has
been of tremendous significance in the history of scholarship. As early as 1805, Wil-
helm Martin Leberecht de Wette argued that the literary core of Deuteronomy con-
stituted a relatively fixed point in the history of the literary growth of the Hebrew
Bible.10 He dated it to the time of Josiah’s reform, a proposal that had already been

 David J. A. Clines, The Theme of the Pentateuch, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Sup-
plement Series 10 (2nd edition; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 103–104.
 A detailed and very helpful assessment can be found in John Day’s In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel,
The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 406 (New York: Continuum, 2004).
 See his Dissertatio critica qua Deuteronomium a prioribus Pentateuchi libris diversum, alius cujus-
dam recentioris auctoris opus esse monstratur (1805), published and translated in Hans-Peter
 Hebrew Writings and Literary Works from the First Temple Period 31

made earlier by Jerome and Thomas Hobbes.11 The arguments that de Wette articulated
two centuries ago have been refined and, to a certain extent, replaced by others – espe-
cially the Neo-Assyrian background of Deuteronomy. Despite these changes, Deuteron-
omy, with its programmatic cult centralization and theology of intolerant monolatry, is
a comparably safe reference point in the late First Temple period, i.e., the late seventh
century BCE. It therefore provides a good starting point for identifying First Temple pe-
riod texts. Julius Wellhausen carried out his analysis on the basis of this criterion with
regard to the pentateuchal Priestly texts, which he allocated to the post-Deuteronomic
period because they presuppose Deuteronomy’s program of cult centralization.12
On the other hand, if Jacob in Genesis 28:20–22 vows to tithe a tenth to his god in
Bethel, then such a text most likely originated before the centralization of the cult
advocated by Deuteronomy at the end of the seventh century.13 By the same token, if
clear allusions to the Deuteronomic ideology are detectable in books like Amos or Jer-
emiah (e.g., Am 1:1, 9–12; 2:4–5; 2:10–12; 3:1, 7; 5:25–26; Jer 5:19; 2:5b; 7:1–8:3; 8:19),
but the alluding passages seem to be redactional expansions of pre-existing material,
then it is fair to assume that these books go back to a pre-Deuteronomic core.
For the Torah, it is therefore reasonable to assume that the non-Priestly parts of
the ancestor stories in Genesis 12–36 are basically pre-Deuteronomic. They are aware
of and accept different sanctuaries and altars in the land of Israel. By contrast, the
Priestly narrative, especially in Exodus 25–40, Leviticus, and Numbers, is basically

Mathys, “Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wettes Dissertatio critico-exegetica von 1805,” in Martin
Kessler and Martin Wallraff, eds., Biblische Theologie und historisches Denken: Wissenschaftsge-
schichtliche Studien aus Anlass der 50. Wiederkehr der Basler Promotion von R. Smend, Studien zur
Geschichte der Wissenschaften in Basel Neue Folge 5 (Basel: Schwabe, 2008): 171–211, particularly
182–211.
 See further Hans-Peter Mathys, “Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wettes Dissertatio critico-
exegetica von 1805,” 176–181. On Josiah’s reform, see Michael Pietsch, Die Kultreform Josias. Studien
zur Religionsgeschichte Israels in der späten Königszeit, Forschungen zum Alten Testament 86 (Tü-
bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013). For the date of Deuteronomy, see the discussion in Juha Pakkala,
“The Date of the Oldest Edition of Deuteronomy,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissen-
schaft 121 (2009): 388–401. Pakkala’s article is in line with Reinhard G. Kratz, “Der literarische Ort
des Deuteronomiums,” in Reinhard G. Kratz and Hermann Spieckermann, eds., Liebe und Gebot:
Studien zum Deuteronomium. Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Lothar Perlitt, Forschungen zur Re-
ligion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments 190 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2000): 101–120. See further Nathan MacDonald, “Issues in the Dating of Deuteronomy: A Response
to Juha Pakkala,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 122 (2010): 431–35; and Juha Pak-
kala, “The Dating of Deuteronomy: A Response to Nathan MacDonald,” Zeitschrift für die alttesta-
mentliche Wissenschaft 123 (2011): 431–436.
 Julius Wellhasuen, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Berlin: G. Reimer, 61927). For the En-
glish translation, see Julius Wellhasuen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Atlanta: Scholars
Press, 1994).
 See Konrad Schmid, “Shifting Political Theologies in the Literary Development of Jacob Cycle,”
in Benedikt Hensel et al., eds., The History of the Jacob Cycle (Genesis 25–35), Archaeology and
Bible 4 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), 11–34.
32 Konrad Schmid

post-Deuteronomic. It presupposes one central albeit mobile sanctuary. However, its

traditional legal material may well reach back into the First Temple period.
The second criterion investigates the historical or archaeological realities pre-
supposed by a text that points to the First Temple period. Here are a few examples:
the story of David in Gath (1 Samuel 27) likely presupposes a still-existing city in
Gath, which the Arameans destroyed in the late ninth century. The story could have
been set elsewhere. Indeed, the setting in Gath seems like a random choice because
it bears no specific rhetorical significance within the story. It is, therefore, reason-
able to conclude that these tales about David in Gath reach back to the time of the
historical Gath. Furthermore, the historicity of David himself in the tenth century
BCE is nearly undisputed in current scholarship because the Tel Dan inscription at-
tests to a “house of David” in the ninth century, which is certainly no invention of
its authors.14 True, this is not direct evidence for a historical David in the tenth cen-
tury, but the evidence for his dynasty in the ninth century presupposes such a fig-
ure at an earlier date.
In addition to its pre-Deuteronomic shape, the pre-exilic date of the core of the
Jacob cycle can also be corroborated by the prominence of the Bethel sanctuary in
these texts. Bethel existed as an operating sanctuary only until the end of the eighth
century, as Israel Finkelstein and Lily Singer-Avitz have shown.15 It is hardly imag-
inible that the Jacob texts, with their strong affiliation with Bethel, were written
after the sanctuary had been abandoned.
A final example can be found in the historical situation assumed by Isaiah 6–8.
Aram and Israel’s threatening of Judah is a very specific political conflict (the Syro-
Ephraimite war) that took place in the last third of the eighth century BCE. The
texts in Isaiah 6–8 do not explain this situation; they just presuppose it. The literary
core of Isaiah 6–8 is apparently more or less contemporaneous with this situation.
This theory also finds support by the reception of Assyrian propaganda in these
chapters, as Peter Machinist demonstrated as early as 1983.16
The third criterion involves attending to specific religious-historical traits of some
texts that may indicate an origin in the First Temple period. For example, in Isaiah 6,
the prophet Isaiah encounters God in the sanctuary. Only the seams of God’s gar-
ments are perceived in the temple itself because God himself is presumably much

 See George Athas, The Tel Dan Inscription: A Reappraisal and a New Interpretation, Journal for
the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 360 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003).
 Israel Finkelstein and Lily Singer-Avitz, “Reevaluating Bethel,” Zeitschrift des deutschen Palä-
stina-Vereins 125 (2009): 33–48; but see also Oded Lipschits, “Bethel Revisited,” in Yuval Gadot,
Oded Lipschits, and Matthew J Adams, eds., Rethinking Israel: Studies in the History and Archaeol-
ogy of Ancient Israel in Honor of Israel Finkelstein (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2017), 233–246.
 Peter Machinist, “Assyria and Its Image in the First Isaiah,” Journal of the American Oriental
Society 103 (1983): 719–737; see also Konrad Schmid, “Theological Interpretation of Assyrian Propa-
ganda in the Book of Isaiah,” in Jacob Stromberg and J. Todd Hibbard, eds., The History of Isaiah,
Forschungen zum Alten Testament 150 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), 493–502.
 Hebrew Writings and Literary Works from the First Temple Period 33

greater, probably conceived of as towering up into the heavens. Be that as it may, ac-
cording to Isaiah 6, God dwells in the temple. In a number of texts from the Second
Temple period, we find instead the notion of God as the God of heaven who dwells
exclusively in heaven.17 Some examples are 2 Chr 36:23/Ezra 1:2; Ezra 5:12; 6:9–10;
7:21, 23; Neh 1:4–5; 2:4, 20; Jonah 1:9; Dan 2:18, 37, 44; Jub. 12:7; 20:7; 22:19; and 1QS
11:5–9. One could also mention the Elephantine texts in this connection. To be sure,
God also covers the heavenly realm in texts like Isaiah 6, but his presence is grounded
in the temple. With the loss of the temple, however, God’s dwelling place seems to
have moved completely into the heavens. One may, therefore, assume that texts not
yet presupposing this move belong to the First Temple period. This is especially im-
portant with regard to Psalms (such as Psalm 46 or 48) that speak of God’s presence
in Jerusalem, be it in the temple or even the city.
Another approach to dating biblical texts to the First Temple period needs to be
mentioned, namely linguistic dating. Since the seminal work of Wilhem Gesenius,18
the project of linguistic dating is based on differentiating between Classical Biblical
Hebrew (CBH) on the one hand and Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH) on the other. Classi-
cal Biblical Hebrew is usually seen as pre-exilic, Late Biblical Hebrew as postexilic.19
If applied in this way to the Hebrew Bible, then the biblical perspective of the literary
history of the Bible would basically be corroborated, as most of the biblical books
playing out in the pre-exilic period, especially all of Genesis through Kings, is written
in Classical Biblical Hebrew. According to scholars such as Avi Hurvitz, Ron Hendel,
Jan Joosten, and William Schniedewind, these books emerged in the First Temple pe-
riod, essentially as they appear today, with only occasional later additions.20
However, the debate over the conclusiveness of historical-linguistic arguments is
only in its early stages. At this time, some reservations are justified about too nar-
rowly handling the historical-linguistic evaluation of the Bible, which often coalesces
with an overall pre-exilic dating of all CBH texts. This approach is inconclusive for a
variety of reasons.

 See Christoph Koch, Gottes himmlische Wohnstatt: Transformationen im Verhältnis von Gott und
Himmel in tempeltheologischen Entwürfen des Alten Testaments in der Exilszeit, Forschungen zum
Alten Testament 119 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018).
 Wilhelm Gesenius, Geschichte der hebräischen Sprache und Schrift (Leipzig: Vogel, 1815).
 See Dong-Hyuk Kim, Early Biblical Hebrew, Late Biblical Hebrew, and Linguistic Variability: A
Sociolinguistic Evaluation of the Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts, Vetus Testamentum Supple-
ments 156 (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Claudia Miller-Naudé and Ziony Zevit, eds., Diachrony in Biblical
Hebrew, Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic 8 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2012).
 See Avi Hurvitz, A Concise Lexicon of Late Biblical Hebrew: Linguistic Innovations in the Writings
of the Second Temple Period, Vetus Testamentum Supplements 160 (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Ronald
Hendel and Jan Joosten, How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); and William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became
a. Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Another random document with
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 II
THE DRAMATIC ACADEMY

This academy is not an entire single building, but a continuation of

several houses on both sides of a street, which growing waste
(owing to changes in fashion), was purchased and applied to that
use. I was received very kindly by the warden, and went for many
days to the academy.
This was composed in three parts; one for research professors,
another for play-makers, or fairfussers, and the third for students; the
first being trained psychologists, the last, young men and women
remarkable for beauty, fine feeling and intelligence, as they are in
our own day. The notion was for the professors to find out facts, for
the fairfussers to apply them, and for the students to carry them out:
and if it may occur to the reader that the workers in one side paid
small heed to the discoveries of the rest, a little consideration will
show that this is all to the good; for slavishly to accept the opinions
of others can never lead to clarity of thought, and the warden was
anxious to maintain in every inmate that active spirit of self-reliance
without which no advance can be made in any of the sciences. I saw
many of each division, but to write of them all would be to take up
inordinate space in these memorials, since the arts are not of large
importance to the state or to the public. I shall, therefore, confine
myself to describing one or two of each kind, choosing those which
throw most light on the methods of those days, and the great
progress we can shortly expect.
My first visit was to a small, active professor, with a tiny clean-
shaven chin, and unusually bright weasel eyes, who, speaking very
fast, and with vivid gesture, easily convinced me of the usefulness of
his discoveries. He had applied his mind for fifteen years to proving
that there was no such thing as thought, for, he said, the
conversation he had to listen to, or the acts he was able to observe,
could be accounted for without supposing such a thing existed.
Speech, he explained, was merely a habit, like that of scratching
when something causes our skin to itch; and, moreover, all our
deeds were like scratching, which we do thoughtlessly, however
much we may flatter ourselves that we prepare great things far
ahead. He did not go to the lengths of some of his colleagues, who
denied the existence of consciousness: for, so as not to be too
positive, he preferred to regard ‘awareness of the emotions’ as a
fiction convenient to his purpose, or, to put it differently, as words
merely to describe a sequence of events. By his system, when
impulses are set up, something occurs, such as eating, and we are
‘satisfied,’ as we say: or we are ‘disappointed,’ as when prevented
from a kindly action.
I paid close heed to this part of his discourse, because he begged
me not to confuse his theory with that of a rival professor, who
believed that allusive gestures gave rise to a corresponding emotion.
This, he pointed out, was merely the out-of-date heresy that “A dog
does not wag his tail because he is happy; but that he is happy
because his tail wags.” This rival believed that if he made the
gestures which usually go with certain emotions, he would undergo
these feelings; and the spectator would, by ‘in-feeling’ or ‘empathy’
(such were his barbarous terms) put their muscles in readiness to go
through these movements, and so, in their turn, experience these
emotions. For his part, when he had been to see this professor
acting woe, far from feeling unhappy, he had barely been able to
master his mirth. But, so as to give the theory a fair trial, he had
wished with one of his pupils to observe the result of moving the tail
of a dog quickly from side to side, but that unluckily, the pupil had
been bitten before the experiment had reached a stage from which
anything could be learnt.
His own idea, he informed me, was to set up a known order of
stresses and strains in the watchers’ nerves, and this could be done
by cunning movements performed in front of them. I was not,
however, to tax him with inconsistency, for his motto was ‘Not
miming but movement,’ and though an actor had to use gestures,
they must by no means be after the naif manner of his rival. He
himself had spent over four years in the abstract study of the
movements proper to the passion of benevolence—abstract,
because nothing is more misleading than what people relate of their
own feelings: cruelty, for instance, they often describe as a wish to
better their neighbours. Indeed, another of his mottoes, he declared
chuckling, was ‘No motion, no emotion’; and I could not but agree
with him when I considered that after all, to lie in one’s bed all day
and simply ‘think,’ as we stupidly call it, is no life at all.
Yet I could not help trying to argue, feebly enough, that the
showing of dreadful acts would call forth feelings of horror, as we
may judge from the murder of Desdemona, and that fitting words
would arouse pity in us, as they do in the same play. But, smiling at
the clumsiness of my example, he remarked that just there lay the
error; for if we were truly to see a Moor, however splendid, plunging
a knife into the body of a beautiful lady, our emotions, if we knew her
to be guiltless, would be very different from those we feel in a
theatre; and that, instead of sitting still, we should most certainly
interpose, or run to fetch the police. Again, while we were children,
before our minds are distorted by what we erroneously call thought
(but which is only an idle luxury-habit), Mr Punch beating his wife
causes us to laugh very loudly. This instance, he said, would also
prove how much more useful movements were than words, since for
ten who would laugh at a Punch and Judy show, hardly one would
smile at the wittiest things in Pascal. It was only on reflection that I
could altogether make his views my own, for it is not easy for us to
give up opinions we have held ever since we can remember.
To test the movements appropriate to various emotions, this
professor had invented a machine, which, by reason of the changes
in electrical resistance a body undergoes under the action of the
passions, recorded the feelings of any person subjected to it. This
machine he had just brought to perfection, and to give me a
demonstration, he sat me in a chair made of some amalgam
unknown to me, and fitted with sockets into which my head, hands
and feet were clamped. A piece of wireless apparatus, supplied with
a diaphragm such as make a part of our telephone receivers, was
placed over my heart, and, my loins being bared, my lumbar
vertebrae were played upon by a peculiar ray. Above my head,
where I could not see it, was placed a marker, much like our
telegraph morse-code dials, but corrugated and rayed after the
manner of a fan. The professor could watch this while evolving
before me the strange movements I could connect with nothing I had
ever seen, and so could vary his gestures according to the results
shown. After about a quarter of an hour of erudite passes, the
professor, wiping the sweat from his brow, triumphantly announced
the successful issue of his experiment, and asked me what emotion I
felt. At that moment, having overcome my awe, I was filled with a
profound sense of pity, and on my confessing this, the professor
danced with glee. Crying “Typical! Typical!” he pointed at the dial; but
as the needle showed ‘Lust tempered with Sentimentality’ I could not
but feel that his wonderful invention needed alteration in a few
details to perfect it. Nevertheless, while doing up my braces, I
framed a few remarks to make known my pleasure at seeing the
drama make such strides in his hands; and promising to meet at a
later day we parted with many expressions of esteem. I must also
add this tribute to his ability: when I did visit him again, very fast, on
my backward journey through time, even when all the motions were
reversed, I once more felt very deeply the compassion his gestures
had provoked.
I next went to see a fairfusser, though not one in the service of the
government, and was much impressed by his freedom from doubt as
to the way in which the best result was to be reached. He said, with
justice, that the artist’s desire was to communicate with his fellow
creatures, and that the object of an actor was to place his soul in
touch with that of others. Man, being in each case a unique
individual, was fitted for work more noble than that of a mere
interpreter, or conduit pipe from an author to an audience, and the
contrary view had been the grand error of all producers from the time
of Shakespeare almost to his own day. The aim of an actor was to
express himself (as a part of universal nature) and reveal a cup
overbrimming with passions. Any ideas introduced by an author were
to be deprecated, for his business was strictly to provide the raw
material; and so the teacher’s main efforts were to be directed
towards training his pupils to rid the author’s words of any meaning
they might contain, simply by the manner of speaking them. In this
way nothing was allowed to come between the actor and the
audience. This he claimed to be the especial discovery of his age,
and one which he could not help regarding with more than a little
pride.
I made bold to tell him that his notion was not so new as he
imagined, and that we too had actors who disbelieved that words
had any plausible meaning apart from the emotion the actor could
register through them: men (as a rule well set up, or even bulky,
since these are always the most passionate) who by a clever
alteration in stress, or an abrupt cleavage of a sentence in the
middle, could effectively cancel any extraneous idea the words of an
author might interpose between the feelings of the player and the
minds of the audience. This constructor was good enough to say that
he was quite sure our age had not been so dark as was commonly
supposed, but that, at least in our classical plays, which had been in
verse, a form which compels a certain manner of speech, he thought
the ‘pure’ actor must have met with difficulties hardly to be
overcome. I was able to assure him that this was not so, and that,
indeed, it was just in these very plays many of our actors had shown
their highest genius; that one might know Hamlet, for example, quite
well by the book, and yet go to two or three versions of the play and
hardly recognise any of the speeches, so much were they
heightened and made subtle in the speaking of them.
I was also much taken by an investigator who had made a highly
diverting play simply with scenery, and a few mutes who now and
again varied their place. It was his view that we had always been
astray in making people the centre of our dramas: it was their
surroundings that mattered—for who, he said, given the choice of
seeing Brown eat his dinner, or a thunderstorm on Mount Everest,
would not prefer to look at Mount Everest? A modern producer could
not help laughing at the remark of Aristotle, if he ever read it, that
‘the spectacle was the least artistic part of a drama.’ A comely
staircase, he averred, or even a rickety ladder, if it was tall enough,
had more significance than a tale of hopeless love; and he was
about to design a series of scenes in a logical order of forms and
colours, green following pink, which would make a spectator sadder
than even a play by Sophocles. This I could well believe: but I found
it hard to understand how it was right to allude to pink as though it
were a premiss, for after all, nobody dreams of calling a rainbow a
syllogism, any more than they do of saying ‘paradox’ when they
mean a hill.
On another day I was taken to see a fairfusser at work on an old-
fashioned play which was to be ‘acted,’ in our sense of the word, by
students. He made his actors rehearse a scene; and then all sat
down on chairs and took up stereoscopic glasses. Immediately, at
the other end of the room, two coloured films appeared, exactly
reproducing the movements of the actors, while at the same time a
gramophone repeated the words they had uttered, in such a manner
as to seem to come from the mouth of each actor who spoke. With
the glasses the illusion was complete, and I could hardly believe I
was not re-dreaming the scene I had just witnessed, except that the
producer could stop the play at will, or even go back to a phrase or
gesture to point out the errors of voice or movement of which the
actors had been guilty. He could also show how a gesture would be
more effective if performed at a greater or less speed; and how
admirable this method was I could judge from the looks of pleasure
or mortification on the actors’ faces as they saw themselves
displayed.
There was one handsome young actor who seemed by his
vehemence and assurance to be more talented than the rest, and to
him I asked to be introduced, that I might learn his views from him.
He led me aside, and with great earnestness explained to me how
experience had shown that one could not take for granted the least
intelligence in an audience. Words, he said, conveyed nothing to
them unless accompanied with appropriate action: and this he
ascribed to the fact that an audience was a crowd, and therefore
followed the normal law of mass psychology in being much stupider
and more primitive than a single person. The actor, therefore, had to
deal with the simplest objects or ideas, indicating them by a kind of
airy drawing. The connection between them, the grammar or the
syntax as it were (so he was kind enough to phrase it for my
understanding) was portrayed by the actors’ emotion as expressed
in gesture or tone. That was why plays with few words were better
than plays with many words, as in the latter case the number of
gestures became very tiring both to the eyes of the audience and the
muscles of the actors. He had a noble, yet reasoned, scorn for any
player who stood still and with hardly a movement allowed
sentences merely to trundle out of his mouth, and he considered his
place could very well be taken by a gramophone.
To illustrate the stages of his art, he took me to a room to see a
young actress practice an easy passage, and I was much gratified
by the manner in which she expressed by gesture the meaning of
the words she was uttering; and I could not but admire the subtle
difference she made in pointing to the floor when she said in one
case ‘down’ meaning merely downstairs, in another the infernal
regions. The same variation was introduced in her rendering of ‘up,’
and I did not fail to note that each gesture emphasised a new beauty
in her arms. She also practised some ‘tone-work’ as they call it, and
for my benefit declaimed an old-fashioned line “To lie in cold
obstruction and to rot,” and it is hard to imagine, as it is impossible to
describe, the frigidity she put into the word ‘cold,’ or the horror and
loathing with which she vivified the word ‘rot,’ so making their
meaning quite clear to any audience.
My actor friend afterwards told me that she had sadly bungled the
word ‘obstruction,’ because she had not yet reached the year in
which abstract terms were studied; and being himself nearly at the
conclusion of that period, he gave me a finished version of the line
“The quality of mercy is not strained,” which quite transported me,
and which I should not know how to praise sufficiently. The gesture
for ‘quality,’ initially too simple, was raised to a high state of
complexity by the young man’s genius, and I should no doubt have
understood it perfectly had I been more used to the method.
I later asked the young woman if such interpretation did not
involve work almost too arduous, since nothing is more tiring than to
bring one’s ideas to the level of common minds; and she told me that
though the intellectual labour was harder than in any other
profession, their task was lessened by the fact that so few authors
had any idea of what they really meant that the actors could
substitute such phrases as lent themselves more readily to their
temperament.
There was another actor, with a mobile mouth and masterful
manner, whom I saw practising for his thirty-third performance of a
part, and therefore engaged in working out a thirty-third reading. I
was amazed at this, which is so contrary to our own method, but was
soon persuaded of its rightness. For a work of art, this actor said, did
not exist apart from the observer—it was a collaboration; and as no
observer was ever twice in the same mood, he could never
experience the same sensation from the identical thing. One might
say, to adapt the words of an old Greek sophist, “No man can go to
the same play twice.” He then went on to argue very brilliantly that
since the actor made the work of art, was indeed himself a piece of
it, his share of the collaboration was to make it on each occasion as
different as possible from the last, so as to help any observer who
might come more than once to any play. (He knew several ladies
who had been to see him no less than seventeen times in the same
character). This also had the extra advantage of avoiding that dull
monotony—for what is art without an element of surprise?—so often
to be seen in our actors, who think they have achieved a final
rendering, and attempt day after day to repeat a thing which can
never really occur even twice.
I was much satisfied at what I had seen and learnt at the
Academy, but was made slightly melancholy by the thought that if
ever I should return to my own time, I should find our actors and
actresses much below the level of what I had come to expect from
their calling.
 III
OTHER THEATRES

The National theatre which I have described was not, of course,

the only kind, though it had many imitators; and I shall now pass to
some others, beginning with that which I think will most interest
readers of the present day, but which was rarely mentioned in the
polite society of the age. This was the Cathartic Theatre, where
people went to be cured of the passion of love. In our day, as has
been for many generations past, we often refer to love-sickness but
it is half in jest, and there are few of us who do not think the
undoubted pains of the state amply repaid with its joys. Its dangers,
however, now only beginning to be recognised, were fully taken into
account in 2,100, for it was seen that the claims of society were
incompatible with an emotion then relegated to the songs of
derivative poets. Already we know that the battle between the self
and the ideal social self gives rise to the most frightful diseases, but
in our day we only try to cure the unhealthy symptom instead of
going to the root of the matter and abolishing the cause. At this time,
though the malady was well in hand, its approaches were so
insidious that patients going to a doctor for what they thought was
one sickness would often be surprised by a diagnosis which
convicted them of love, and would later be seen entering the
Cathartic Theatre with shamed faces or that air of studied
indifference we assume when we do not wish to be noticed, thinking
that by this method we shall appear to have no face at all.
The theory of this theatre was very simple; and this too, I was
proud to think, had been foreshadowed by writers of our own time,
one of whom had written, “We have lost the orgy, but in its place we
have art,”[7] and another “Poetry acts as a physician.”[8] The aim of
the performance was to break down the obstacles we wrongly
oppose to our thoughts in rude attempts to fit ourselves to social life,
and so allow to drain away those impulses which in any really
harmonious nature should never be set up. I must warn the reader of
this age not to confuse the method with one of ‘sublimation’ as we
say, for this involves the ‘will,’ a fiction of which the futility had long
been exposed. It is true that I did not very clearly grasp these
matters, which are too far beyond our time—just as Dryden would,
perhaps, have found it hard to grasp the true subtleties of
Expressionism—but I hope I do not err in saying that an element of
vicarious fulfilment also entered into these dramas, on the ground,
which no one will contradict, that it is the function of art to provide
what everyday life denies us. The name of the theatre, I found
indeed, had arisen from that reading of Aristotle which confuses the
meaning of Catharsis with that of ‘purgation by excess’: for even in
those days the Faculty of Medicine was not always happy in the
names it chose for the ills and remedies it invented.
[7] Havelock Ellis, Affirmations.
[8] Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason.
The authorities were, of course, fully aware of the risks run in
using such a specific, and its abuse was hindered in the same way
as we curtail the buying of opium and other drugs, which wrongly
applied prove harmful; and a man was only able to buy a ticket if he
showed a paper signed by a doctor to declare him a fitting subject.
Medical men were themselves allowed to buy as many tickets as
they liked, and a large percentage of the audience was always
composed of them, because they wished to observe the effects of
the cure upon their patients. It was not without difficulty that Fabian
was able to get us the needful pass, and it was only after
representing to the authorities that any account of their age which
omitted so beneficial a device would be very faulty, that I was
granted it.
Before entering the theatre Fabian told me to abandon myself
freely to any impulse to laugh, as that was a condition of perfect
purging: and of this I was very glad, for I have often, not only before,
but since my visit to this time, felt the pain of constraint at light plays,
especially if I was with relatives, or else friends with whom I did not
wish to become too intimate. But what was my surprise to find,
instead of the fescennine jesting I was prepared for, a play I had
already seen in Manchester, a drama of the most correct sentiment
by one of our notably respectable, even titled playwrights, which
might call forth smiles and tears alternately, but not those crude
outbursts of mirth I now heard on every side. So little was I able to
enter into the spirit of the thing that after the first act Fabian took me
out, whispering to me that my callous behaviour might have the
worst effect upon the patients seated near me. He seemed to think
my bearing had been of set purpose, and only grudgingly gave the
explanation I longed for, which was that the people in these times
saw a wealth of allusion lurking beneath the innocent phrases; and
that what the audience so much relished and admired in our author
was the simplicity with which he had hidden the ‘latent content’ under
the ‘manifest.’ When I protested my belief that nothing had been
more remote from the writer’s mind, Fabian looked coldly at me, as
though he were sure I was trying to dupe him.
It was in vain that I pleaded with him to be allowed to attend
another of these plays, one of later date, for Fabian would by no
means recommend me for a pass, saying that the sense would
certainly be beyond me. There was, however, another level of play of
the same nature, designed for the stupider sort of people, such as
members of Parliament, wardens of libraries, teachers in science or
religion at the Public Schools, municipal architects and so on, for
which, not without a contemptuous word, he recommended me. He
excused his own absence, however; for even, he said, if he could
obtain permission, which he doubted, he would not care to go. And
indeed, after I had seen the piece, I could not blame him. For
determined as I was, this time, to behave with propriety, I allowed
myself the license of which we are all guilty sometimes, when our
conscience, or ‘censor’ to use the modern term, is off its guard; and
laughing very heartily, I have since felt ashamed at my acquiescence
in a remedy that must prove so greatly worse than the disease. The
least things there were such as make us keep some of our Callot
etchings locked in a drawer, and to leave certain portions of Mr
Loeb’s excellent library in the original tongue, though some I am told,
regard this only as an ingenious device to outwit the laziness of
students. At all events, since I was not ill, the performance, I fear, did
me no good: whether it would have done so in less happy conditions
I am unable to tell, and I dwell upon it no longer, as in any case the
experiment will not, I think, be tried in our day, even in the hospitals.
Nor would I be convinced of the wisdom of the venture if it were.
In going about the streets I had often noticed, especially in the
business quarters, what appeared to be shops or booths, not unlike
those places one may see abroad, where men sit in rows to have
their boots polished. Above them was displayed a sign on which was
written “Two Minutes,” or “Thirty Seconds,” or some like period of
time. I had seen the backs of men standing in lines, with pads
clamped over their ears and their faces pushed forward into a sort of
camera, and had supposed these retreats to be telephone boxes. I
was much surprised when Ierne told me they were “Hurry Theatres,”
and invited me to accompany her to one of them.
They were erected, as the name implies, for those without the
leisure to attend longer performances, and were found very
beneficial to brokers and such, who, hurrying from their offices to
snatch their midday meal, could pause for the declared number of
seconds, and gain, without waste of time, a modicum of ‘organised
emotion,’ as Ierne called it; and this was often a great relief to them.
For when we are too much troubled by our affairs we may usefully
go to art for escape or refreshment. There were a few booths in the
more fashionable parts, for errand boys, journalists, and taxi-drivers,
while it was found that those in the dentists’ quarter were much
patronised: for in going to have our teeth seen to, if we do not like to
be late, yet we shrink from entering the place until the last moment,
although the waiting rooms are made homely and cheerful with time-
tables, comic papers, and copies of Academy pictures. These
theatres were also agreeable to those who had arranged to meet
friends at a certain spot and were kept waiting, and some had even,
in the early days, gained a notoriety as rendezvous.
The camera through which one looked was simply a stereoscopic
glass directed on a double film screen, and the pads were the
telephone receivers through which one heard the voices of the
actors, which seemed to come from their mouths. The plays
themselves were most dramatic in character, since their object was
to endue the spectator with a highly disturbing emotion in a minimum
of time. They were therefore very allusive, and I should have found it
hard to understand many of them if the gestures and tones of the
actors had not been profoundly striking. I grew to be fond of them
and, indeed, with weakly emotional men, they readily become a vice;
for when thrills are as easily obtained as cocktails, and as rapidly
swallowed, if I may use the term, they form a tonic as difficult to
resist as any digestive, and are perhaps as harmful.
It would be useless for me to write down a typical drama, for the
reader of to-day would not follow it, nor, for that matter, relish it more
than he does those quaint old seventeenth-century plays where
women dress up as men, and blood so freely flows. There were,
indeed, a few from our own era, known as ‘classics,’ and sometimes
acted as curiosities in the neighbourhood of museums, but the
earliest of these must date, I think, from at least 1940, and was a
comedy with the strange title The Psycho-Fans. A young man
wishing to make a girl his bride, she puts him through a number of
scientific, but comical tests, to prove his worth and his affection: she
was afraid, I gathered, that he might turn out to be an ‘introvert,’ and
not at all a suitable mate for an ‘extravert’ such as she was. All I
remember of the words is the opening of a sort of epilogue he spoke:

Oh had I wist
Before I kissed,
That you were a Behaviourist....

Normally, however, these dramas aimed at producing dread, and I

naturally avoided one which was advertised as “Guaranteed to make
your soul writhe.” We are not yet made of such stern stuff as to
derive courage to face the battle of life from art of this sort, though I
have seen robust clerks stagger from these booths with white faces
and a much increased zest for their humdrum labours. This being so,
I had the temerity to suggest that one of these theatres might be
installed in each government office for the use of civil servants, and
am gratified to be able to say that my proposal was acted upon, only
the Inland Revenue Department being excepted.
 There was one theatre which several young people told me was
the best, but as it did not meet with general favour, I did not go there
until the end of my visit, for I have always felt an abhorrence of what
is at all precious, and avoided the highbrow and snobbish. It was
quite a mean place, not in the capital but in a small provincial town,
and was regulated by a fairfusser who had never been able to make
his way in a decent centre, owing to his poor skill in the art of
advertisement.
The stage was much like that which we know, but though built in
pleasant enough proportions was too simply decorated to be striking.
The settings were so unobtrusive that at the end of a scene one
could hardly say whether the framing had been good or bad, which I
thought a pity, for one was in this manner robbed of a subject for
conversation. The effects were obtained chiefly by the lighting, but
unfortunately this was kept uniform throughout each scene, and thus
one lost the pleasure of admiring the agility of the electrician, who
nowadays, is, with his switches, as great a virtuoso as an organist
with his stops. The most noticeable difference was the stage being
only about two-thirds the size of ours, the reason for it that the actors
were not people, but puppets, rather smaller than human beings.
I have always regarded these dolls as a mistake, for they must
needs be anonymous, and how can one tell if the acting is good if
one does not know the name of the performers? I think too, that if
one is to have puppets at all, they should be either grotesque or
fairy-like, and these were neither, resembling instead those early
Egyptian or Indian sculptures we have so far out-distanced, or those
Byzantine paintings, which, once thought beautiful, would look so
oddly on the walls of Burlington House. I must confess that their
movements were graceful, their deftness above that of any human
being, but not more so than one could imagine human beings
capable of. They were actuated, not by strings, but by some invisible
power, and everything they did seemed to be of such happy
invention that one felt they had all nature at their command to use.
But I detected a grave error in the way the fairfusser made the words
issue from their lips, for they did not speak at all like actors, but
simply and swiftly, as we all try to do in real life, and it is not for that
we go to the theatre. Their speeches were so cadenced that they
dwelt in the ear like a harmony in music, which is contrary to all
experience, so that the characters did not seem like men ennobled,
but, rather, fleshly embodiments of the thought or feeling it was their
purpose to express. One enthusiast, eager to convert me, quoted to
me the words of some foreign actress of our time:[9] “To save the
Theatre, the Theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses
must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art
impossible,” which is cruel and absurd, and in any case should not
have come from an actress. For these semblances of mankind by
their remoteness banished all the accidental things which make a
play realistic and warmly human, and all the personal emotion which
makes us feel for an actor, and applaud him for the pain he has gone
through. But we cannot feel for a puppet, or applaud him, even if he
has played King Lear, for we know his sufferings were not real.
[9] Eleonora Duse (Ed.).
These plays were always made entirely by one man—for this
fairfusser actually had one or two disciples—who directed each
movement, whether of single persons or crowds, either tumultuous,
or in the dances, which met with much applause, though they
seemed to me even less comprehensible than some of the later
Russian ballets which were lately in vogue for a short time. I was told
he was always very careful about the ‘rhythmic order’ of the piece,
whatever that may mean, and its groupings. All was done first on a
little model, which in the end became a record repeated on the larger
scale. For the voices he took human beings, going over and over
each phrase until he got exactly the tone he wanted, and these he
recorded, timing them afterwards with the movements, so that the
whole play went, as it were, by clockwork. Thus there was nothing
spontaneous about it, and this is a fault, since art, according to many
serious philosophers, is a kind of game, and thus, surely, if any
notion of being drilled creeps in, the pleasure evaporates.
The same man also, as a rule, wrote the words, which did not
remain in my memory because I understood them so little, seeing
that they dealt with thoughts and feelings which in our day we take
small notice of. That this must be so is easy to see; for every age
concerns itself with a different relation of man to what is outside him.
We are now, to be sure, beginning to do what they were doing,[10] in
dealing with man’s relation to man’s idea of what he is; that is, so to
say in the plain words of Albertus Magnus, seeking “the causation of
causes in the causes of things.” But these plays bewildered me, as I
own without shame, for would not Dr. Johnson himself have been
adrift at a play by Signor Pirandello? And since there was so much I
could not fathom, I should only impart a false twist to the meaning
however much I tried to give a true account.
[10] In 2,100 O. S.
But I fear these plays disordered me, for the unnatural is a sort of
poison, and I have never since been able to feel real pleasure at any
drama of to-day even in the best theatres in Paris, New York, or
London. Indeed I have almost conceived an aversion from our stage;
and it is only the importunities of my friends that make me go to a
play once or twice in a year, so as not to seem unsociable. If the
choice is left to me, we go to the English version of a French farce,
for these are usually free from any meaning at all: and if one expects
nothing, one cannot be disappointed.

Transcriber’s Notes:
Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently
corrected.
Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
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