Eva Mroczek, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Introduction

This book (2016, cf. 2012 dissertation) attempts to situate the study of ancient Jewish literature (including the Psalms) in a pre-canonical period before concepts like "Bible" and "book" crystalized in the forms in which they are familiar today.

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Summary

In The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity, Eva Mroczek lays out a sustained case that ancient Jewish literary production was conceptualized by its creators less as rewriting or interpreting a core corpus of scriptural works and more as creative and innovative writing drawing on an amorphous and limitless body of heavenly writing that could never be fully accessed or exhausted (8). To categorize ancient Jewish literature around a perceived canonical or even scriptural core obscures the creative contributions of the authors and wrongly gives the impression that a small group of well-defined written scriptures formed the center of ancient authors’ literary worlds and served as their primary source of inspiration. Instead, she emphasizes that ancient Jewish texts were more like snapshots in ongoing and open collaborative projects that were always under development, rather than modern concepts of books as finished products of authors in control of their own material (41).

Mroczek sets out to accomplish her task of reimagining ancient Jewish literary conceptions on their own terms with extensive literary-critical engagement and three major test cases:

the psalms
Ben Sira
Jubilees

She concludes that modern scholars retroject canonical and bibliographic (that is, relating to books as books) assumptions onto the ancient material that were foreign to ancient Jewish writers. The result is that modern scholars often ask questions and provide explanations that would have been irrelevant or even unthinkable in earlier contexts.

Most significant for our purposes is Mroczek’s use of the psalms as her primary example from the traditional biblical corpus. From the variation in contents and order in MT, 11Q5, and other psalm collections from the Judean desert she comes to the conclusion that there was in this period no "book" of Psalms, but rather a wide assortment of different psalm collections and other contexts in which psalms could be incorporated. These psalms were not drawn primarily from a well-defined, written, and fixed sourcebook of inspired psalms (i.e., a "psalter"), but rather from an amorphous and limitless body of psalmody associated with David, the sweet psalmist of Israel.

Outline

The Mirage of the Bible: The Case of the Book of Psalms
The Sweetest Voice: the Poetics of Attribution
Like A Canal from a River: Scribal Products and Projects
Shapes of Scriptures: The Non-Biblical Library of Early Judaism
Outside the Number: Counting, Canons, and the Boundaries of Revelation

Key Arguments

Mroczek builds her case on three major arguments: book historical assumptions, literary evidence, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Here we will focus on her arguments regarding the psalms.

Canonical and Bibliographical assumptions

According to Mroczek, the very categories of 'Bible' and 'book' are, respectively, religious and bibliographic anachronisms that obscure the picture of ancient literary production (4).

Bible

While Mroczek accepts that psalms were "widely copied and used as revealed literature" (38) and authoritative Scripture (34-35), she argues that this must be understood in a pre-canoanical context. Before the crystallization of the canon, ancient Jewish authors did not restrict Scripture to a well-defined and limited collection of texts, but rather the history of divinely inspired, written revelation started long before Moses and continued in many texts, including those that were not incorporated into later canons (4).

Book

Mroczek also argues that the idea of the "book" is actually a conceptual metaphor laden with anachronistic concepts such as set contents, arrangements, boundaries, and forms, as well as a close relationship between authors and their texts (11). Modern attempts to reconstruct ancient "books" in a writing culture that lacks standard forms are thus inappropriate and distorting, imposing the assumptions of modern book cultures on ancient Jewish writing culture. Mroczek asserts,

The imagined concept behind the multiform manuscripts was not a "book of Psalms" with particular boundaries and contents, but a large, yet indeterminate, number of compositions that are imagined to exist somewhere, but are not fully definable or available (43).

Instead of the "book," Mroczek proposes imagining literary production in ancient Jewish writing culture as a collaborative project of organizing and presenting a vast array of textual information without a standard form. She concludes,

Perhaps we may also consider the concept of text as project, which brings human agency and a sense of ongoing development and use back into the production of texts. The presence of textual variants and diverse configurations of psalms is no longer a problem to be solved— no longer to be studied as deviations from a preexistent "book" to which we compare them. Instead, they are part of the very shape of early Jewish literary expectations before that "book" emerged as such (41).

Literary evidence

Mroczek surveys discussions by ancient writers that reflect their own emic perceptions of psalmody in the Second Temple period. Particularly relevant in this regard is the section in 11QPs^a called David's Compositions (col. XXVII 2-11):

And David, son of Jesse, was wise, and a light like the light of the sun, /and/ learned, and discerning, and perfect in all his paths before God and men. And YHWH gave him a discerning and enlightened spirit. And he wrote psalms: three thousand six hundred; and songs to be sung before the altar over the perpetual offering of every day, for all the days of the year: three hundred and sixty-four; and for the sabbath offerings: fifty-two songs; and for the offerings of the first days of the months, and for all the days of the festivals, and for the «Day» of Atonement: thirty songs. And all the songs which he spoke were four hundred and forty-six. And songs to perform over the possessed: four. The total was four thousand and fifty. All these he spoke through (the spirit of) prophecy which had been given to him from before the Most High (García Martínez and Tigchelaar 1997, 2:1179).

According to Mroczek, this implies that Davidic (prophetic) psalmody was conceived of as a vast body of psalms that could be numbered typologically but could never actually be encompassed in a single written collection. She concludes,

Instead, it presents us with an open series, overwhelmingly prolific divine writing and speech with no upper boundary. This imagined Davidic repertoire is a divine archive of revealed songs that exists in no single location, but is reflected only piecemeal in the various collections known and available to ancient scribes. This theory of unbounded revealed text makes it possible for new work to emerge that would continue the tradition of Davidic revelation (42-43).

A similar picture emerges from the addition of Ps 151 to the Greek psalter, where a scribe added a superscription observing that it was written by David himself and that it was "outside of the number" of psalms. In this case, "the scribe who wrote this superscription recognizes an established number of 150 psalms—here, a specific set, not an ideal number; at the same time, he pointedly asserts the presence of an authentic Davidic composition beyond that corpus" (173). And the so-called apocryphal Syriac psalms are similarly understood as "inspired but not canonical" (175).

Thus, while many different written collections existed, ancient writers seem to recognize a wealth of psalmody outside of these written forms. That is, "psalms were not definable by either biblical or bibliographic boundaries, but were imagined as an open archive partially instantiated in texts of various scopes and genres" (52).

Dead Sea Scrolls

Another major pillar in Mroczek's argument comes from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which betray a universally acknowledged diversity of forms in terms of contents and arrangement. Mroczek accepts the common opinion that the earlier parts of the psalter (Pss 1-89) may have stabilized earlier, while the later parts (Pss 90-150) were in flux at the end of the Second Temple period (25-26, 45). This attested pluriformity, according to Mroczek (and others, e.g., Pajunen, Willgren), means that there was no single standard form of a "book of Psalms," but only diverse representations of subsets of the full body of psalmody. Mroczek writes,

The imagined concept behind the multiform manuscripts was not a "book of Psalms" with particular boundaries and contents, but a large, yet indeterminate, number of compositions that are imagined to exist somewhere, but are not fully definable or available (43).

Working out the ramifications of this interpretation, she explains,

The Qumran manuscripts, then, have broken the vial of the stable and contained "book," presenting us instead with multiformity, smaller textual clusters, and continuing rearrangement and expansion. But to say that no sense of a "book of Psalms" as a coherent and bounded work emerges is not only to make the chronological argument that the Psalter was still fluid, not fixed or closed, in the Second Temple period. This observation is crucial to reconstructing the history of the book of Psalms, and to placing its precursors onto a timeline of how the Bible came to be. But to describe the evidence on its own terms—-to imagine how the landscape might have looked to a person in the first century, who did not have access to such a timeline—-we must make a stronger claim: the "book of Psalms" did not exist as a conceptual category in the Second Temple period. This was not the way that psalms traditions were imaginatively construed (33).

Impact

Reception

The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity has been highly influential in Psalms studies and the study of ancient Jewish literature, especially in anglophone contexts. With further support from other scholars like Pajunen (2014) and Willgren (2016), it is now common among specialists studying the Dead Sea Psalm scrolls to reject the meaningful existence of a standard "book" of Psalms in the Second Temple period.

Critical appraisal

The most sustained critical response to The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity has come from works by Longacre (2021; 2022) on the Dead Sea Psalm scrolls. Though sympathetic in some ways to Mroczek's presentation of a large and unbounded tradition of psalmody, Longacre contends that the manuscript evidence does indeed reflect a situation where a specific, early, written collection of classical psalms (i.e., a Psalter) was compiled, transmitted, and frequently reused in diverse ways within the context of Second Temple psalmody.

Longacre argues (as do others) that the 11Q5 Psalter and the Old Greek translation are dependent upon the proto-MT form of the Psalter. He further argues that the importance of the Psalter is evident in conventions of ancient Jewish material book culture. Many of the largest and most aesthetic Dead Sea Psalm scrolls seem to attest to the Psalter in its proto-MT or 11Q5 versions. On the other hand, most alternative collections of psalms and manuscripts with only one psalm show evidence of informal manuscript production and presumably had diverse functions. On this alternative interpretation of the manuscript evidence, ancient scribes and readers widely recognized a traditional written Psalter, while at the same time being open to its supplementation and reuse in diverse contexts.

Ramifications

Mroczek appropriately emphasizes the breadth and vibrancy of Second Temple Jewish psalmody beyond the Psalter, which is important to understanding the conceptual world of ancient Jewish writers and readers. Thus, it is important for modern exegetes and readers to be aware of the broader world of Jewish psalmody for contextualizing the biblical psalms and their ancient interpretations.

On the other hand, it is doubtful that this (re)conceptualization undermines the existence and importance of the proto-MT Psalter in the Second Temple period. The ancient manuscript and textual evidence suggests that the proto-MT Psalter is the earliest attested large written collection of traditional Hebrew psalms and that it was highly regarded as sacred (indeed prophetic) scripture in the late Second Temple period (even if not exclusively). Thus, modern Bible translators have good historical warrant for including translations of the limited corpus of 150 MT psalms in their translations, even while recognizing the value of non-canonical Hebrew psalms.

References

García Martínez, Florentino, and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar. 1997. The Dead Sea Scrolls: Study Edition. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill.

Longacre, Drew. 2021. "Paleographic Style and the Forms and Functions of the Dead Sea Psalm Scrolls: A Hand Fitting for the Occasion?" VT 2021: 1-26.

________. 2022. "The 11Q5 Psalter as a Scribal Product: Standing at the Nexus of Textual Development, Editorial Processes, and Manuscript Production." ZAW 134, no. 1: 85-111.

Pajunen, Mika S. 2014. "Perspectives on the Existence of a Particular Authoritative Book of Psalms in the Late Second Temple Period." JSOT 29, no. 2: 139-163.

Willgren, David. 2016. The Formation of the 'Book' of Psalms: Reconsidering the Transmission and Canonization of Psalmody in Light of Material Culture and the Poetics of Anthologies. FAT.2 88. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity