John Van Seters - Böcker

The foundation for all scholarly study in biblical law is the shared assumption that the Covenant Code, as contained in Exodus 20:23-22:33 is the oldest code of laws in the Hebrew Bible, and that all other laws are later revisions of that code. In A Law Book for the Diaspora, John Van Seters strikes at that foundation. He argues that those laws in the Covenant Code that are similar to Deuteronomy and the Holiness Code are in fact later than both of these, dependent on them as sources, and therefore cannot be taken as the foundation of Hebrew Law. After setting forth his radical hypothesis, Van Seters proceeds to offer a vigorous defense of it by means of a detailed and systematic comparison of the Covenant Code and the other biblical legal codes. He shows that his chronology provides an entirely new understanding of the laws. Instead of fundamental laws for Israelite society, he argues, the Covenant Code must be placed in the context of the Babylonian exile. In this context they become diaspora laws with minimal cultic requirements, strong humanitarian concerns that include social contact with those outside the Jewish community, and little in the way of independent political structures. They are not village laws or primitive religious laws but laws for a semi-autonomous community within the larger imperial rule. The effect of this reading is to challenge not only the traditional dating of law codes in the Hebrew Bible, but also the conventional understanding of the history of ancient Israel. A persuasive presentation of a controversial thesis, A Law Book for the Diaspora will have a dramatic and far-reaching impact on the study of Hebrew Law. No student of the Hebrew Bible can afford to ignore it.

The volume brings together forty years of agenda-setting scholarship in Israelite and Judean history. The historical essays gathered here were among the first to raise serious questions about the "patriarchal age", the exodus from Egypt and the conquest of Canaan, and the temple of Solomon. The literary essays on the Pentateuch challenged both the classical Documentary Hypothesis and the more recent modifications that support the notion of an extensive Deuteronomistic redaction of the Pentateuch. The final set of essays examines biblical notions of patriarchal religion, myths of human origin, and the legendary origins of Passover within a broad comparative context.

In this magisterial overview of the Pentateuch John Van Seters reviews the various historical-critical attempts to read it that arise from notions about the social evolution of Israel's religion and culture. Is the Pentateuch an accumulation of folk traditions, a work of ancient historiography, a document legitimizing religious reform? In dialogue with competing views, Van Seters advocates a compositional model that recognizes the social and historical diversity of the literary strata. Van Seters argues that a proto-Pentateuchal author created a comprehensive history from Genesis to Numbers that was written as a prologue to the Deuteronomistic History (Deuteronomy to 2 Kings) in the exilic period and later expanded by a Priestly writer to make it the foundational document of the Jerusalem temple community.This social-science commentary on the Pentateuch is renowned as one of the most influential volumes on this group of texts. For the new edition Van Seters has revised several sections of the text, updating and integrating new bibliographical items, and refining the text where necessary. A reflective preface summarizes these changes and developments for the reader's convenience.

In this fascinating study, John Van Seters makes a compelling case for a new reading of Genesis. According to Van Seters, the book of Genesis represents the prologue to a major literary work, conceived and constructed by a single writer--an intellectual and historian. Van Seters argues that the author was a true historian who wrote history in the tradition of the ancient antiquarian.

This book will provide a better understanding of the unity and integrity of Exodus--Numbers in the context of other writings and the general history of the exilic period.

The primary concern of the book is to understand the origins and nature of history-writing in ancient Israel. The investigation is undertaken against the background of history-writing in the Near Eastern and classical worlds. Professor Van Seters begins with a broad survey of all the historiographic material relevant for the study of Israel’s own writing of history. He then turns his attention to the question of Israel’s historiography by focusing particularly on the Deuteronomistic Historian, the first Israelite historian.

There is a generally accepted notion in biblical scholarship that the Bible as we know it today is the product of editing from its earliest stages of composition through to its final, definitive and “canonical” textual form. So persistent has been this idea since the rise of critical study in the seventeenth century and so pervasive has it become in all aspects of biblical study that there is virtually no reflection on the validity of this idea” (from the Introduction). Van Seters proceeds to survey the history of the idea of editing, from its origins in the pre-Hellenistic Greek world, through Classical and Medieval times, into the modern era. He discusses and evaluates the implications of the common acceptance of “editing” and “editors/redactors” and concludes that this strand of scholarship has led to serious misdirection of research in modern times.

The biblical story of King David has been interpreted in many different ways, arising from the variety of methods used in and the intended objectives of the studies: Does the narrative contain insight into and information about the early history of the Judean monarchy, or is it merely a legendary tale about a distant past? Can we identify the story’s literary genre, it sociohistorical setting, and the intention of its author(s)? Is an appreciation for the wonderful literary qualities of the story compatible with a literary-critical investigation of the narrative’s compositional and text-critical history? Van Seters reviews past scholarship on the David story and in the course of doing so unravels the history of these questions and then presents an extended appraisal of the debate about the social and historical context of the biblical story. From this critical foundation, Van Seters proceeds to offering a detailed literary analysis of the story of David from his rise to power under Saul to his ultimate succession by Solomon.

This book on the Yahwist comes at the end of a long career of research on the Pentateuch in general and the Yahwist in particular. Van Seters’s interest in the Yahwist was stimulated by the 1964 presidential address of the Society of Biblical Literature, given by Professor Fredrick Winnett, “Rethinking the Foundations,” which focused on the Yahwist in Genesis. This interest followed a path of work on issues surrounding the Yahwist that culminated in three volumes, Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis (1992), The Life of Moses: The Yahwist as Historian in Exodus–Numbers (1994), and A Law Book for the Diaspora: Revision in the Study of the Covenant Code (2003).Over the last few years, it has become clear to Van Seters that readers of the three volumes on the Yahwist, which total more than 1,000 pages, easily lose sight of the Yahwist’s work as a whole and the way in which it provides a historical prologue and framework for D and the DtrH. In this book, Van Seters seeks to provide a summary sketch of the J history and to make clear how the Priestly corpus has been composed as a supplement to the Yahwist with a radically different form and point of view that has obscured the Yahwist’s historical narrative and theological perspective. Part one lays out in simple terms the basic form, structure, and theological perspective of the Yahwist’s history, where it has been interrupted by the inclusions of P, and how it is integrated into DtrH. The essays in part two are intended to bring the scholarly discussion of Van Seters’s earlier books on the Yahwist more up to date, and their order corresponds roughly to the order of the narrative in the first part of the book. Some of these articles have been published previously, but others are new and quite recent, including “The Yahwist as Historian.