Remembering Moshe Greenberg, z"tl

This wonderful tribute to Moshe Greenberg, who died yesterday, on Shabbat, is well worth reading as we contemplate some of the amazing accomplishments and insights of this master of the Hebrew Bible, surely
one of the greatest in our generation...

Thanks to Jeffrey Tigay who wrote it some time ago but it captures the spirit of this great scholar's work...

www.sas.upenn.edu/~jtigay/MGbio.doc

MOSHE GREENBERG

Moshe Greenberg was born in Philadelphia on July 10, 1928. Raised in a Hebrew-speaking, Zionist home, he studied Bible and Hebrew literature from his youth. At the University of Pennsylva nia, where he
received his Ph.D. in 1954, he studied Bible and Assyriology with E.A.
Speiser; simultaneously, he studied post biblical Judaica at the Jewish
Theological Seminary of America. Strongly influenced by the comparative
Biblical-Assyriological approach of Speiser and by the studies of the
Israeli scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann in Biblical thought and religion,
Greenberg's scholarship is characterized by the critical integration of
ancient Near Eastern and Jewish materials in his explication of the
Bible.

Greenberg taught Bible and Judaica at the University of Pennsylvania from 1964-1970 and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1970-1996. The first Jewish Biblical scholar appointed to a position in
a secular university after World War II, Greenberg has had an important
influence on the development of Biblical scholarship, particularly, but
not limited to, Jewish Biblical scholarship. He has devoted most of his
attention to the phenomenology of biblical religion and law, the
theory and practice of interpreting biblical texts, and the role of
the Bible in Jewish thought.

In the area of prayer, Greenberg traced the development of Biblical petition and praise away from their roots in the conception that the deity literally needs to be informed of the worshiper's plight and
propitiated by flattery, into "a vehicle of humility, an expression of
un-selfsufficiency, which in biblical thought, is the proper stance
of humans before God" (Studies, 75-108). In Biblical Prose Prayer he
showed that the prose prayers embedded in Biblical narratives reflect
the piety of commoners. He reasoned that the frequency of spontaneous
prayer must have sustained a constant sense of God's presence and
strengthened the egalitarian tendency of Israelite religion which led
to the establishment of the synagogue. The fact that prayer was
conceived as analogous to a social transaction between persons
fostered an emphasis on sincerity, and may lie at the root of the
classical-prophetic view of worship as a gesture whose acceptance
depends on adherence to the values of God. In his "Reflections on
Job's Theology" (Studies, 327-333) Greenberg observes that Job's
experience of God's inex plicable enmity could not wipe out his
knowledge of God's benignity gained from his earlier experience,
and hence he became confused instead of simply rejecting God.
Accordingly, the fact that the Bible retains Job as well as the
Torah, Prophets, and Proverbs reflects the capacity of the religious
sensibility to affirm both experiences: "No single key unlocks the
mystery of destiny."

In the area of biblical law, Greenberg argued that "the law [is] the expression of underlying postulates or values of culture" and that differences between Biblical and ancient Near Eastern laws were not
reflections of different stages of social development but of
different underlying legal and religious principles (Studies, 25-41).
Analyzing economic, social, political, and religious laws in the
Torah, he showed that their thrust was to disperse authority and
prestige through out society and prevent the monopolization of prestige
and power by narrow elite groups (Studies, 51-61).

In his commentaries on Exodus (1969) and Ezekiel (1983, 1997), Greenberg developed his "holistic" method of exegesis. While building on the source-critical achievements of earli er
scholarship, the holistic method redirects attention from the text's
"hypothetically reconstructed elements" to the bibli cal books as
integral wholes, as the products of thoughtful and artistic
design conveying messages of their own. This approach recalls
scholarly attention to the "received text [which] is the only
historically attested datum; it alone has had demonstrable effects;
it alone is the undoubted product of Israelite creativity." In this
connection argues that since midrashic and later pre-critical Jewish
exegesis operated on the assumption of unitary authorship, they have
many insights to offer the holistic commentator.

Greenberg's studies of Jewish thought include important studies of the intellectual achievements of medieval Jewish exegesis (1988 lecture, forthcoming), investigations of Rabbinic reflections on
defying illegal orders (Studies, 395-403), and attitudes toward
members of other religions (Studies, 369-393; "A Problematic
Heritage"). In the latter he argues that a Scripture-based religion
can and must avoid fundamentalism by being selective and critical in
its reliance on tradition and by re-prioritizing values. In "Jewish
Conceptions of the Human Factor in Biblical Prophecy" (Studies,
405-419), Greenberg shows that from the Talmud to the Renaissance,
classical Jewish exe getes and thinkers who never doubted the divine
inspiration and authorship of the Torah and other prophetic writings
neverthe less acknowledged the literary evidence of human shaping of
the text.

WORKS

The Hab/piru. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1955

The Religion of Israel, abridged English translation of vols. 1-7 Yehezkel Kaufmann's Toldot

ha'Emuna ha-Yisre'lit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960

Introduction to Hebrew. Englewood, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965

Understanding Exodus New York: Behrman House, 1969

Ezekiel 1-20 and Ezekiel 21-37 (Anchor Bible. Garden City: Doubleday, 1983, 1997)

Biblical Prose Prayer. University of California, 1983

Studies in the Bible and Jewish Thought (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995) includes

many of Greenberg's essays. Most notable are the following:

· "Three Conceptions of the Torah in Hebrew Scriptures."

· "Some Postulates of Biblical Criminal Law."

· "Biblical Attitudes toward Power: Ideal and Reality in Law and Prophets"

· "On the Refinement of the Conception of Prayer in Hebrew Scriptures."

· Religion: Stability and Ferment."

· "The Stabilization of the Text of the Hebrew Bible: Reviewed in the Light of the Biblical Materials from the Judean Desert."

· "The Use of the Ancient Versions for Interpreting the Hebrew Text."

· "Reflections on Interpretation."

· "To Whom and For What Should a Bible Commentator Be Respon sible."

· "Another Look at Rachel's Theft of the Teraphim."

· "The Decalogue Tradition Critically Examined."

· "Reflections on Job's Theology."

· "Rabbinic Reflections on Defying Illegal Orders: Amasa, Abner, and Joab."

· "Jewish Conceptions of the Human Factor in Biblical Prophe cy."

· "Bible Interpretation as Exhibited in the First Book of Maimonides' Code."

· See also:

· "Prophecy in Hebrew Scripture." Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973). 3:657-664.

· "Biblical Judaism (20th-4th centuries BCE)." Encyclopaedia Bri tannica: Macropaedia. 15th ed. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1974. 10: 303-310.

· "A Problematic Heritage: The Attitude Toward the gentile in the Jewish Tradition -- An Israel Perspective," Conservative Judaism 48/2 (Winter, 1996):23-35.

· Articles in Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, and New York: Macmillan), 1972: "Decalogue" (5:1435-1446), "Herem" (8:345-350), "Sabbath" (14:557-562).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Moshe Greenberg: An Appreciation," and "Bibliography of the Writings of Moshe Greenberg," pp.

ix-xxxviii in M. Cogan, B.L. Eichler, and J.H. Tigay, eds., Tehilla le-Moshe. Biblical and Judaic

Studies in Honor of Moshe Greenberg. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbraun's, 1997

S.D. Sperling, ed., Students of the Covenant: A History of Jewish Biblical Scholarship in North

America (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), index s.v. "Greenberg, Moshe."

Peras Yisra'el 5754 (Israel Prizes, 1994). Israel: Ministry of Science and Arts; Ministry of

Education, Culture, and Sports, 1994), pp. 5-7 (in Hebrew)

By Jeffrey H. Tigay

University of Pennsylvania