Ritual Innovation in the Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism by Nathan MacDonald

Author:Nathan MacDonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2016-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The understanding of ritual innovation has two aspects: on the one hand, the textual process of redaction and composition, and, on the other, the ritual performance and its relation to religious history. For the first aspect, we may observe in general, that adaptation, adjustment, and alignment, or in other words “innovation”, has been an explanatory approach to the arrangement of laws in the book of Numbers for a long period. Quoting, for instance, Heinrich Holzinger with regard to Num 5:5–10:

Für eine Vermutung darüber, warum die Novelle nicht an Lev 5 26 angeschlossen wurde, sind keine bestimmten Anhaltspunkte ersichtlich. Am nächsten liegt die Vermutung, dass ein RS Novellen zu den Sinaigesetzen, die vielleicht nach der Redaktion des Korpus des Esra oder erst nach dessen Vereinigung mit JED aus praktischem oder theoretischem Bedürfnis in den maßgebenden Schriftgelehrten Kreisen angewachsen waren, vielleicht aber auch schon vorher vorhanden gewesen sind und bei der Redaktionsarbeit Rjedp bei Seite gelassen worden sind, ohne Eingriff in das gegebene Gefüge der Sinaigesetzgebung einfach als Nachträge zu dieser noch vor dem Aufbruch vom Sinai unterbrachte.306

This assumption has evolved into something like the standard hypotheses for the compilation of Num 5 in modern research. Diether Kellermann conjectures, for instance, that since this supplement was not attached to Lev 5, the author was writing at a time when Lev 5 was already embedded in a larger context. For him the only docking place for this supplement was after Num 1–4, which was not as stable as the antecedent material.307 We can find the same idea in Jacob Milgrom’s commentary that Num 5:5–10 is a supplement to Lev 5:20–26.

That this law assumes and supplements the law of Lev. 5:20 –26 bears momentous weight in determining the redaction of the Book of Numbers. The fact that the redactor could not merely attach this supplement to the main body of the law on Leviticus can only mean that, for him at least, the text of Leviticus was already fixed. Thus, if this supplement was incorporated into the Book of Numbers, the only possible conclusion is that it was assembled after the Book of Leviticus had achieved its final form.308

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