Abstract
Cataldo argues that ‘restoration’ and law are envisaged through a collective anxiety (a word he tends to prefer to the ‘fear/terror’ of the title) by a minority group who created much of the Bible. This group was the returnee community in the Persian period who wanted to establish its identity over against those who remained in the land but was despairing of its place in Yehud society and anxious that its ideals of a utopian society would not be realized. Although biblical scholars have colluded with the text in giving priority to religious motives, the driving force was the survival strategy of this socio-political movement against their marginal position in the land. Cataldo is especially influenced by the social theories of Slavoj Žižek, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. There is much to be said for Cataldo’s argument, and the provocative language he uses has value in drawing attention to the main issues. Yet there are some weaknesses: he does not always know recent writings on the Persian period Yehud (e.g., he cites only one short writing of mine and then misconstrues it), and his correct emphasis on sociology nowhere seems to recognize that this is an academic discipline with its own controversies and disputes. I would argue that few biblical scholars of the Persian period currently hold the ‘underlying assumptions’ that he outlines on p. 226. He is quite right to show that religious language is often a cloak for socio-political ideology, but can one really reduce it to the likely role ‘played in Yehud during the Persian period and later: a profoundly paranoid mechanism of self-preservation’ (p. 50)? I would doubt that religion can be separated from the socio-political at this time, but for Cataldo’s reduction of religion to the socio-political is simply to force his own ideology on us. Some readers will resent the unrelenting demand that much of the Bible be reduced to the socio-political ideology of a minority group and that this, not religious beliefs, was the origin of monotheism. Yet there are some important points here that we should all take on board.