Kirjahaku

If we look to the Bible for historical accounts of ancient life, we make a profound error. So contends Calum Carmichael in this original and incisive reading of some of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament’s most famous narratives. Sifting through the imaginative layers of these texts with an uncanny sensitivity and a panoptic critical eye, he unearths patterns connecting disparate passages, providing fascinating insights into how ideas were expressed, received, and transformed in the ancient Near East. Ranging from Jacob’s encounter with Leah to the marriage at Cana to Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well, these readings demonstrate the remarkable subtlety and sophistication of the biblical views on marriage, sexuality, fertility, impurity, creation, and love.

In this work Calum Carmichael—a legal scholar who applies a literary approach to the study of the Bible—shows how each law and each narrative in Numbers, the least researched book in the Pentateuch, responds to problems arising in narrative incidents in Genesis. The book continues Carmichael’s process of demonstrating how every law in the Pentateuch is a response to a problem arising in a biblical narrative, not to an inferred societal situation.

The origin of law in the Hebrew Bible has long been the subject of scholarly debate. Until recently, the historico-critical methodologies of the academy have yielded unsatisfactory conclusions concerning the source of these laws which are woven through biblical narratives. In this original and provocative study, Calum Carmichael-a leading scholar of biblical law and rhetoric-suggests that Hebrew law was inspired by the study of the narratives in Genesis through 2 Kings. Discussing particular laws found in the book of Leviticus-addressing issues such as the Day of Atonement, consumption of meat that still has blood, the Jubilee year, sexual and bodily contamination, and the treatment of slaves-Carmichael links each to a narrative. He contends that biblical laws did not emerge from social imperatives in ancient Israel, but instead from the careful, retrospective study of the nation's history and identity.

In this study of the nature and sources of biblical law, Calum Carmichael focuses on the intimate and little-appreciated relationship between two components of the Bible, namely that the legal material represents a form of commentary or extended exposition of the narratives.After introducing his central views and how they depart from the mainstream, Carmichael addresses the Priestly material in Leviticus, exploring, for example, the theme of incest and the Bible. Subsequent chapters cover such fundamental topics of biblical law as the Decalogue; the formula "life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth"; and the theme of life and death. In each instance, parallels are drawn between specific laws and narratives. Finally, Carmichael traces the influence of the narratives of David's adultery and Saul's suicide on the development of related laws.Approaching his topic from the basic premise that any society's laws do not necessarily relate to its practical problems, Carmichael challenges the long prevailing view that the body of biblical laws and ethical rules grew up in piecemeal fashion over many centuries, in reaction to specific social problems as they arose. Rather, the laws are a work of historical reconstruction, redacted during one relatively concentrated period by Deuteronomic and Priestly lawgivers. Conflating past, present, and future, these redactors embedded the codes of law in the narratives to make what was for them an orderly presentation of the historical life of ancient Israel. This approach, says Carmichael, was driven by needs we can never fully appreciate and underpinned by a very different conception of what constitutes historical knowledge. Only when we relinquish modern notions of historical writing can we comprehend the enormous sophistication of the biblical authors' project.

Calum Carmichael presents a new perspective on how parables unique to Luke's Gospel were composed. These parables took up moral issues that arose out of conflicts among figures such as Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Judah and Tamar as portrayed in Genesis narratives. Providing literary and linguistic analyses, Carmichael demonstrates how Luke, like many of his contemporaries, absorbed the narrative legacy of the Hebrew Bible and used it to express ideas about Jesus. The Joseph story was of particular interest to Luke because Joseph's role during the Egyptian famine resulted in the rescue of his family, thereby giving the Israelite nation a future. Carmichael's radically different approach identifies the influence of ancestral wrongdoing on how Luke portrayed Jesus' moral teaching.

In this study, Calum Carmichael offers a new assessment of the Joseph story from the perspective of the biblical laws in Leviticus 1-10. These sacrificial laws, he argues, respond to the many problems in the first Israelite family. Understanding how ancient lawgivers thought about Joseph's and his brothers' troubling behavior leads to a greater appreciation of this complicated tale. The study of the laws in Leviticus 1-10 in relation to the Joseph story provides evidence that all biblical laws, over 400, constitute commentary on issues in the biblical narratives. They do not, as commonly thought, directly reflect the societal concerns in ancient Israelite times. Through close reading and analysis, Carmichael reveals how biblical narrators and lawgivers found distinctive and subtle ways of evaluating a single development in a narrative from multiple perspectives. Thus, the sacrificial laws addressing idolatry, keeping silent about a known offense, confessing wrongdoing, and seeking forgiveness become readily understandable when reviewed as responses to the events in the Joseph story.