Abstract
Kratz sets out the thesis of a clear distinction between the Israel (we should really says ‘Israels’) of the Bible and of history. This is not novel in the English-speaking world, but he nicely repatriates it through Wellhausen’s (or de Wette’s) insight that the Mosaic law stands at the beginning of Judaism and not of Israelite religion. But, of course, both ‘ancient Israel’ and ‘Judaism’ now need redefinition. We now have, thanks to archaeology, a better description of ‘historical Israel’ (and Judah, which we must now distinguish) than Wellhausen’s assumptions or inferences from conjectured Pentateuchal sources and a richer profile of a creative and more diverse ‘Judaism’ than his legalistic system bereft of religious vitality. However, this profile creates a new and complex problem, of relating ‘Judaism’ in all its forms, to the ‘biblical Israels’.
Kratz sets off relating the ‘normal history’ of two kingdoms of the Iron Age and their successor provinces, up to the kingdom of Herod the Great; then he offers an outline of the history of religious belief and practice, which he divides into three phases: Israelite-Judahite religion, biblical tradition, and Jewish religion. The biblical ‘Israel’ he considers as the result of the development of five traditions: ‘prophetic’, ‘narrative’, ‘legislative’, ‘Psalmic’, and ‘wisdom’, amplifying this by a ‘literary-historical sketch’ of the formation of the biblical literature.
Turning finally to Judaism under the heading of ‘Jewish Archives’, Kratz reviews archaeological and documentary traces of several communities, and follows with a section, ‘from Elephantine to Qumran’, covering these two sites alongside Gerizim, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. A reflective chapter entitled ‘Israel and Judaism’, deals first with ‘History and Tradition’ and then ‘Biblical and non-Biblical Judaism’.
Kratz is lucid and persuasive in describing the problem, but less so in his answers. The creation of a ‘biblical Israel’, that is, incorporating Judah, and redefined, not politically but religiously as a ‘people’ constituted by descent and deity, is a fundamental issue, and Kratz’s explanation (p. 150) is that reflection on Israel’s destruction in 722 bce, and the southern extension of Assyrian power prompted the ‘prophetic tradition’ in Judah to grasp the unity of Yahweh, and thus the unity of his followers. But whence this ‘prophetic tradition’? Is it not essentially a component of a ‘biblical (Deuteronomistic) Israel rather than Wellhausen’s repository of the true religion of Israel? Equally problematic is the distinction between ‘biblical’ and ‘non-biblical’ Judaisms. And do the five ‘traditions’ he identifies as the ingredients really coalesce into a single system, or do D and P, wisdom and torah, cult and custom, Qoheleth and Daniel, suggest a centrifugal rather than a centripetal trajectory? In omitting any mention of the Enochic writings (surprising for a scholar so interested in in Qumran), Kratz also leaves a major gap in his portrait. The impression in the end is of a neat quasi-theological synthesis instead of the complex, historical one to which the evidence he has assembled actually points.