Committee Speak

Robert Alter

Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible by Karel van der Toorn
Harvard, 401 pp, £22.95, March 2007, ISBN 978 0 674 02437 3

This scrupulous study by the Dutch scholar Karel van der Toorn of how the Hebrew Bible was written and then evolved over time is in most respects finely instructive. Some of what Toorn has to say involves concepts long familiar to Bible scholars, though even in this regard he provides many fresh insights. Nearly all the book’s argument, moreover, offers a strong corrective to popular misconceptions about the Bible.

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Vol. 29 No. 14 · 19 July 2007 » Robert Alter » Committee Speak (print version)
Pages 16-17 | 3557 words

Letters

From Frank Conley

In his review of Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible, Robert Alter claims that Psalm 104 reads like the work of an individual ‘master’, and so undermines Karel van der Toorn’s contention that the Hebrew Bible was produced by a group of scribes rather than a series of gifted individuals (LRB, 19 July). There is an equally strong case for arguing that this psalm supports Toorn’s thesis. Most scholars now accept that it is based on an Egyptian hymn to the sun dating from the time of Akhenaten (1352-36 BCE). If an individual Hebrew scribe was involved, it was as compiler and redactor of a much older poem.

Frank Conley
Folkestone

From Peter Burgess

Robert Alter criticises Karel van der Toorn’s argument concerning the possible collaborative origins of the Bible on the grounds that psychologically sophisticated plot turns and resonant verse would be beyond a ‘scribal school’ (LRB, 19 July). In fact, many oral traditions have yielded written material of the highest order through transcription, and the more functional the scribe the better. Lady Gregory sometimes diminished the Irish cycles by imposing her own judgment. The Grimm brothers did a better job of keeping out of the tales they collected, and the result is a stark, strange record of the traditional experience of the otherworldly. Grimm’s fairy tales are burnished by hundreds of retellings and reimaginings, and although individual minds were no doubt responsible for particular details, the power of the versions we know today is the result of a process which allowed only the most telling of these haphazard additions to survive. Such collaborative processes are not only capable of producing outstanding literature but may even favour the production of works capable of ‘spiritual’ import.

Peter Burgess
Sos, France