Abstract
Until recently, study of the Megilloth as a coherent canonical grouping has been minimal. On the whole, the lateness and fluidity of the collection within the Jewish canon has negated its value for biblical scholars, who have long preferred texts and categories thought to be ‘early’ or ‘original’. The state of the field has begun to shift, however, as scholars are giving more attention to connections between individual books of the Megilloth and the coherence of the collection as a whole. This new interest coincides with the growing recognition among scholars that the later (re)uses of a biblical text are constitutive of its interpretation; thus the lateness of the Megilloth (if the collection really is late) does not preclude interpretation but shapes it. Recent studies in the Megilloth as a coherent collection include canon-historical approaches, which trace the formation of the Megilloth within the Jewish canon; intertextual approaches, which focus on allusions to earlier biblical traditions and on literary connections within the five scrolls; and theological approaches, which adopt a synchronic method that puts the Megilloth in dialogue with contemporary theological discourse.
Keywords
Introduction
The Megilloth are a collection of five scrolls within the Jewish canon that are read on the five major holidays of the Jewish liturgical year: Song of Songs on Passover, Ruth on Shavuot, Lamentations on Tisha B’av, Ecclesiastes on Sukkot and finally Esther on Purim (Herzog 2007). In fact, many modern editions of the Tanakh arrange the books in this liturgical order (Berlin and Brettler 2004: 1563; Ginsberg 1974), even though this is not the order found in the earliest references to the five scrolls as a collection. Instead, the Tiberian manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries
Although the Tiberian manuscripts likely represent an earlier tradition (Stone 2013), the lateness and fluidity of the Megilloth as a collection have negated their value for biblical interpretation. Even a canonical critic such as Brevard Childs, while acknowledging that the five scrolls ‘exhibit some degree of inner relationship’, ultimately concludes that ‘this unity [is] from a post-Talmudic liturgical practice, and contribute[s] little to the interpretation of the Hebrew text’ (1979: 501-502). Although it is not uncommon for commentaries to be written on the Megilloth, these volumes rarely consider the scrolls’ coherence beyond some cursory remarks about their use in Jewish liturgy. A commentary on the Megilloth edited by Cohen (1961) has no discussion at all on the significance of the scrolls as a group, and the same is true for Bettan’s The Five Scrolls: A Commentary (1950). In Birnbaum’s (1973: v) translation and commentary one finds a single paragraph on the topic, while there is a page each in a commentary edited by Würthwein (1969: iii) and in Webb’s book of reflections (2000: 135-36). Slightly more substantive are Ginsberg’s (1974: ix-xi) translation of the five scrolls, plus Jonah, which includes an introduction tracing the collection of the five scrolls, and the volume edited by Bronstein and Friedlander (1984: vii-xi), which describes the scrolls’ importance for Jewish life and faith. Of course, there are exceptions to this tendency (Segert 1965; Gladson 2009), but they are rare.
This trend is beginning to shift, however, as the Megilloth are attracting more attention from scholars. This interest has crystallized around a program unit at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature that is dedicated to the study of the Megilloth. The rationale for establishing this new unit was simple: the five books of the Megilloth are a canonical reality in Jewish tradition that should be studied as a collection. The field has long treated these books in isolation from each other, but there are insights to be gained from a critical examination of the individual books in relation to one another and to the whole. This trajectory recalls the emergence of scholarship on the Book of the Twelve (Albertz, Nogalski and Wöhrle 2012; Wöhrle 2006; Nogalski and Sweeney 2000; Nogalski 1993a, 1993b). The papers presented in the Megilloth program unit, which will soon be published as an edited volume (Erickson and Embry forthcoming), have borne out this rationale by bringing into focus literary and theological dimensions of the five books that might go unnoticed or underappreciated when they are treated separately.
The decision to take seriously the—admittedly late—canonical boundaries of the Megilloth is consistent with the aims and interests of methodologies focused on a text’s ‘later’ (re)uses and the ongoing process of reflection on the place and significance of these methods in the field. The determination that the Megilloth constitute ‘a meaningful category’ (or at least meaningful enough to receive legitimation from the SBL) is in line with the—admittedly slow—dismantling of biblical scholarship’s deep-seated preference for ‘the original text’ and the erosion of the distinction between text and reception. Interest in the final forms of biblical books among redaction, canonical and literary critics has meant that the work of later editors and redactors is no longer so easily dismissed as a hackneyed manipulation of the original text. Biblical scholarship’s relatively recent interest in reception history has resulted in an even larger step away from the field’s preoccupation with those texts, contexts and meanings presumed to be ‘original’ (Breed 2012: 302).
The rationale for these new approaches relies on the Megilloth’s origination in the past—albeit at a relatively late date—and its existence as a discrete canonical grouping in Jewish tradition for over a millennium. And yet, prior to the establishment of this SBL program unit, scholarly attention afforded to the Megilloth was minimal. That the creation of the SBL unit precipitated much of the scholarship devoted to the Megilloth as a whole highlights the constructed nature of the category. In a sense, the move to propose the unit in the SBL enacted a (hyper) awareness of the ideological processes that undergird canon formations, reminding us that elite readers with vested interests have always created and advocated for inscribing boundaries around texts in particular ways and in the service of particular ideologies. Awareness of the historical processes of canon formation—that elite readers have always determined canonical boundaries—mirrors the contemporary move to demarcate a canon within a canon.
While the Megilloth as a collection did not originate in a vacuum, the generation of a SBL unit designed to focus on a canon not formerly considered to be significant enacts the knowledge that a canon is nothing more than a group of texts corralled together for some purpose. The unit’s organizers—the majority of whom hold tenured or tenure-track positions—leveraged their combined power in the academy and within the SBL and argued that the lightly drawn canonical boundaries of the Megilloth were worth reinscribing.
The following essay will provide an overview of recent scholarship that has viewed the Megilloth as a coherent collection. This research can be grouped under three main headings: Canon-Historical Approaches, which trace the formation of the Megilloth within the Jewish canon; Intertextual Approaches, which focus on allusions to earlier biblical traditions and on literary connections within the five scrolls; and Theological Approaches, which adopt a synchronic method that puts the Megilloth in dialogue with contemporary theological discourse. This essay will conclude with some remarks on how these research trends correspond to larger conversations that are taking place in biblical studies and, finally, some comments on what the future holds for the study of the Megilloth.
Canon-Historical Approaches
Considerable scholarly energy has been devoted to reconstructing when and why the five scrolls of the Megilloth were brought together in the first place. As noted in the introduction, the earliest attestations of the Megilloth as a distinct collection within the Jewish canon are the Tiberian manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries
Before looking at particular studies, it will be worthwhile to mention a few other textual landmarks that serve as guideposts for scholars who are interested in the formation of the Megilloth as a distinct collection within the Jewish canon. The first text is a passage from the Talmudic tractate Bava Bathra (Epstein 1935), which is regarded by most as the earliest witness to the books of the Ketuvim section of the Hebrew canon. Although the Babylonian Talmud dates to the fifth–sixth centuries The order of the Hagiographa is Ruth, the Book of Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Daniel and the Scroll of Esther, Ezra and Chronicles.
Here the five scrolls are not listed together but are arranged with the rest of the Ketuvim according to the chronology of each book’s traditional author or setting. (The rabbis address the misplacement of the book of Job, whom they regarded as a contemporary of Moses, by stating that the Ketuvim should not begin with suffering.)
Another important Talmudic text is Berakhot 57b, which mentions together four of the five scrolls of the Megilloth and describes what to expect following a dream about one of them (Epstein 1948: 355-56): There are three smaller books of the Hagiographa [significant for dreams]. If one sees the Song of Songs in a dream, he may hope for piety; if Ecclesiastes, he may hope for wisdom; if Lamentations, let him fear punishment; and one who sees the Scroll of Esther will have a miracle wrought for him.
It is not clear why Ruth has been left out of this grouping.
The last noteworthy reference comes from the minor tractate Soferim, which is a collection of laws on the writing and reading of the Bible (Cohen 1984). In a section on benedictions that should accompany such reading is this regulation: In the case of Ruth, the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations and Esther, it is necessary to say the benediction, ‘Concerning the reading of the Megillah’, although it is included in the Hagiographa (14.3 [40b]).
Because the Soferim is a composite work, it is difficult to date particular passages with confidence. Many have dated it to the eighth century
Two recent works which engage these various references in a larger effort to interpret the canonical shape of the Ketuvim are monographs by Steinberg (2006) and Stone (2013). Steinberg argues that the ordering of individual books was significant even before the books were organized in codices; interconnections between the books preceded the physical arrangement of the books in a single codex. For his analysis of the Ketuvim, Steinberg focuses on the order found in Bava Bathra 14b, whose primacy he establishes by showing that other orders imitate it or derive from it. He argues that because the Bava Bathra 14b order cannot totally be explained on literary or liturgical grounds, there is an opportunity to interpret the order theologically. His own reading of the structure found in Bava Bathra 14b identifies two sequences—one wisdom and the other national-historical—which are framed by Psalms and Chronicles and headed by Ruth. The two sequences offer two different paths of fidelity to God. As this summary shows, Steinberg’s monograph does not engage the Megilloth, which he regards as a late phenomenon, but his work is nonetheless significant for the study of the Megilloth because of its attention to the canonical shape of the Ketuvim as expressed in traditional sources.
The status of the Megilloth within the Ketuvim is a central concern of Stone’s work (2013). Contrary to many scholars, including Steinberg (2006), he does not regard the collection of the Megilloth as a late phenomenon, nor does he see the collection as the result of the scrolls’ liturgical usage. He notes, for example, that the Masoretic arrangement of the Megilloth does not match the order of the festivals and that the relationship between certain scrolls and their corresponding festivals is tenuous. Moreover, he argues that although the earliest manuscripts featuring the Megilloth as a distinct collection are late, they represent a tradition that predates the order found in Bava Bathra 14b. Stone makes this argument by analogy to the rule of lectio difficilior in textual criticism: that the Masoretic order is more difficult to explain than the Bava Bathra order is evidence of its priority. As for the structure of the Megilloth, Stone proposes that the scrolls are arranged chiastically, but he also emphasizes that the Megilloth are not isolated from their larger canonical collection. Like Steinberg, Stone emphasizes the links among the books of the Ketuvim; it is against this backdrop that the Megilloth represent a distinct and interconnected collection.
This overview of issues related to the formation of the Megilloth demonstrates that the collection is no longer viewed simply as a liturgical collection. Of course, the use of the Megilloth in Jewish liturgy remains an indispensable part of past and present study of the collection (Stemberger 2003; Brady 2014), but recent work, such as the contributions of Steinberg and Stone, propose that liturgy was not the exclusive impetus for the scrolls’ arrangement.
Intertextual Approaches
Although scholars rarely use methods in pure ways, in biblical scholarship a bifurcation persists between those who espouse historical methodologies and those who embrace synchronic approaches. That scholars using these methods tend to work in separate spheres is evident in the first and last sections of this essay; diachronic concerns and questions motivate the work featured in the canon-historical section, while more synchronic-minded approaches are dominant among those interested in the theological implications of their exegetical work. By contrast, in the scholarship that falls under the broad heading ‘intertextual approaches’, there is more overlap between the diachronic and synchronic camps. Some interpreters attempt to prove that an editor intentionally embedded connecting words, images and/or motifs in order to encourage reading certain texts together. Others are agnostic on the question of an author’s intention, arguing that the (modern) reader is the arbiter who discovers (and deems significant) intertextual links. And yet, at a practical level, the search for connections across texts often results in findings that take comparable shape. Such overlap is evident in Stone’s (forthcoming) essay on the macro-structure of the Megilloth. In light of Barton’s (2005: 311-16) recent re-labeling of canonical approaches as reader-response approaches, Stone leaves it to the reader of his essay to decide whether his approach is better deemed canonical or reader-response.
Diachronic
Even as Stone (forthcoming) hesitates to label his method canon-historical, he bases his argument on what is ‘likely the oldest order’ for the Megilloth, which is reflected in the Leningrad Codex (see also Stone 2013: 80-212). Based on this order, which opens with Ruth and closes with Esther, Stone suggests that the chiastic structure brings into focus ‘the sharp contrast between the two books’. The similarities between the two books and their female protagonists lead Stone to conclude that Ruth and Esther are foils. ‘Ruth is a woman of excellence, who, like Abraham, has left her home, country and parents to seek refuge under the wing of the LORD and is unwavering in her unfailing h.esed to Naomi’ (2013: 173). Esther is a ‘pseudo-hero who has assimilated to Persian culture and forgotten the God of Israel’ (forthcoming: n.p.).
Stone also compares Lamentations with Song of Songs, noting that they share a number of uncommon phrases and literary motifs. Both feature alternating male and female voices, lack a narrative plot and use the phrase, ‘daughter(s) of Jerusalem’ (Song 1.5; 2.7; 3.5, 10; 5.8, 16; 8.4; Lam. 2.13, 15) and ‘daughters of Zion’ (Song 3.11; Lam. 1.6; 2.1, 4, 8, 10, 13, 18; 4.22). However, these similarities prompt the reader to perceive the two books as polar opposites (Stone 2013: 207). While Song celebrates the love between the beautiful Shulamite woman and her beloved, Lamentations features the formerly lovely (now wretched) personified Jerusalem (2.15) and the consequences of her broken relationship with Y
Methodologies deployed by scholars working on the Book of the Twelve have informed scholarship on the nature and shape of the Megilloth. To identify redactor-intended intertextual links between books, Nogalski seeks to isolate and define common themes, catchwords and citations before he considers how they function to weave the individual prophetic books into a collective whole (1993a; 1993b; 2003; 2011). Even as Stone emphasizes the diversity within the Megilloth, his work represents an early attempt to answer one of the central questions posed by the Megilloth Consultation at the SBL; namely, ‘How is the Megilloth a meaningful category?’
Posing questions about the Megilloth’s unity from a redaction-critical standpoint may yield a negative response. A critic of the ‘Twelve Hypothesis’, Ben Zvi (1996) points out that often judgments about independence and priority are governed by preexisting assumptions. Reading Nogalski’s (1993a) monograph closely, Ben Zvi shows that, for Nogalski, an intertextual explanation often does not solve a problem in a book; the recurrence of a single word (as opposed to a phrase) without consistent regard to its contextual meaning constitutes evidence for redactor-intended linkages; and the argument as a whole relies on ‘precise textual reconstructions of the individual redactional processes of a particular book’, which cannot be established with any degree of certainty (Ben Zvi 1996: 146). Although he is skeptical that one can make definitive claims about a redactor’s intentions, Ben Zvi perceives value in the Twelve Hypothesis, in that it generates new questions and affords opportunities to reflect on the limits and potentials of particular methodologies (2009: 51-52). Ben Zvi’s focus is on readers rather than redactors; he argues that communities in ancient Yehud—rather than redactors of books—generated authoritative readings. Scholars working on the Megilloth might engage in comparable methodological self-reflection and ask similar questions about the roles of readers and redactors in the Megilloth’s shaping and interpretation.
Synchronic
As the only two biblical books named for women, a number of commentators on Ruth and Esther have addressed the implicit comparative questions that arise, often concluding that the two women are depicted as heroines even as they represent contrast (Berg 1979: 146-47; Eskenazi and Frymer-Kensky 2011: xxv). Ruth and Esther have been compared to each other as well as to the Joseph story (Gen. 37–50) and Daniel 1–6. All of these stories address the relationship between Israelites and foreigners and ‘insist that human relations are possible across national barriers and even that the Lord works to bring them about’ (Larkin 1996: 11). Berlin indicates that a point of contrast between the two female characters is that while Ruth’s ‘actions [fall] in the domestic and familial spheres’, Esther acts ‘on the national, even international, scale’ (2001: xxv).
In her monograph, ‘Omdot ‘al ha-saf (Liminal Women), Avnery (2015) compares the books of Ruth and Esther as narratives and finds shared plot motifs (reversal of fate), character types (female protagonists [Ruth, Esther] with accompanying foils [Orpah, Vashti] and supporting characters [Mordecai, Naomi]) and stylistic features (see also Larkin 1996: 12). She also points out antithetical elements in the two books that allow for the reader to experience one book as a mirror image or inversion of the other (e.g., contrasting the pastoral landscape in Ruth with the ostentatious setting of the Persian king’s palace in Esther). The fruits of Avnery’s comparative work at the literary level (the identification of comparable and antithetical features) provide the rationale for placing the two books in dialogue, even if it was not the author’s intention to link the books in this way.
In Avnery’s (forthcoming) essay, ‘Ruth and Esther: A Journey through Gender, Ethnicity, and Identity’, she looks at the ways the two books explore the idea of the other and negotiate the tension between ‘otherness and belonging’ from diametrically opposed national positions: as a majority population with its own land and as a minority population in a foreign land. Although Ruth is a foreigner in the land of Judah, and Esther is a Judean in the Persian court, each book depicts a woman in a foreign environment and focuses on the various ways she experiences and challenges ‘the labels of otherness that constrict her’ (forthcoming: n.p.). Avnery isolates two climactic scenes that depict ‘encounters between extremes’, in which the outsider/woman boldly seeks the aid of the insider/male (Ruth 3; Est. 5) and argues that both generate a ‘sense of self reflexivity’ about the identity of the nation itself (forthcoming: n.p.). Avnery concludes that both Ruth and Esther tell ‘the story of the Jewish nation and the challenges it must face in order to define its identity, but from perspectives that are simultaneously opposing and complementary’ (n.p.). As such, both books are fundamentally concerned with the contours of Jewish identity vis-à-vis foreign others.
Greenspoon (forthcoming) also conducts a comparative analysis of the books of Ruth and Esther, examining not just the two main protagonists (Ruth and Esther) but also Vashti and Naomi. He identifies several shared themes and patterns, including intermarriage and its validation, the use of sex as a means to negotiate survival and the importance of food and its lack (famine in Ruth, feasting in Esther). Greenspoon also notes that in both books, one character’s downfall or demise precedes the rise of both Ruth and Esther, and the female characters (Ruth and Esther) change in terms of how they receive—and, eventually, resist—instructions from others. While he does not argue that one book directly influenced the other, Greenspoon concludes that the similarities between the two suggest that there is a ‘complex web’ of intra-Megilloth connections (n.p.).
Branching out from comparative studies of Ruth and Esther, Melton (forthcoming) explores the relationship between Ruth and Qoheleth. She uses the word miqreh (providential ‘patterned time’), which appears in both books, as a means to reflect on how these two books consider fate and time. She concludes that the books’ seemingly different understandings of providence are the result of two perspectives: ‘the human initial experience of seeming fate occurrences and the divine perspective, which can sometimes be reached in the minds of humans through retrospective interpretation’ (n.p.).
Intertextual studies of the Megilloth up until this point have relied heavily on intertextual methods that enable a comparison of individual books’ use of particular words, narrative devices and select themes. Interaction with literary theories that offer different models of intertextuality could be instructive for future study of the relationships between the books in the Megilloth. Genette’s (1997) work is attuned to a fuller range of relationships between texts than many definitions or theories of intertextuality, allowing for an array of possibilities for perceiving and describing relations between texts as well as between texts and non-texts (see also Lange 2010). In Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, Genette distinguishes five types of intertextual relationships (1997: 1-5). In particular, hypertextuality (formerly, paratextuality) refers not just to one text’s references to and re-uses of material from another text but also to texts that draw on other texts to produce new literary genres such as pastiche, parody and translation. Also suggestive is Genette’s exploration of the phenomenon of the paratext, which can take the form of a title, a book jacket, a marginal note, epigraph, illustration and more. As scrolls brought together for liturgical purposes and in material forms, this category is perhaps suggestive for study of the Megilloth and its receptions.
Theological Approaches
The Megilloth present an interesting challenge for theologically minded readers; namely, the relative absence of God as an active presence in the five books. It is well-known that the books of Esther and Song of Songs have no mention of God at all, and various attempts to read certain verses as oblique references to God—Est. 4.14 and Song 2.7; 3.5; and 8.6, for example—offer little help. Such efforts may ironically have the opposite effect of highlighting God’s absence all the more. In the book of Ruth, the God of Israel is mentioned 23 times, primarily with the divine name (18x) but also with Elohim (3x) and Shaddai (2x). (There is one other instance of Elohim which refers to the Moabite god Chemosh [1.15].) Many of these mentions are embedded within formulaic expressions, such as greetings, blessings, oaths, etc. Only two of these references involve God intervening directly in the action of the story: in 1.6 it is reported that Y
Scholarship has tended to respond to this divine absence in two ways. First, biblical theologians have often ignored the Megilloth. Secondly, they have argued for a robust theology of divine providence. Evidence of the first response can be found in the standard theologies of the Old Testament, which rarely draw on the five scrolls. The relative absence of God in the Megilloth has translated into the absence of the scrolls in biblical theology. Although this point has not, to our knowledge, been demonstrated by a systematic analysis of such theological works, the tendency has not gone unnoticed (Strollo forthcoming; Gladson 2009: 15-16). If we take the book of Ruth, which in the Megilloth has a median number of references to God, and compare its prevalence in biblical theologies to that of the book of Exodus, the results are instructive:
Gerhard von Rad’s two-volume Old Testament Theology (1962–1965) lists 232 references to the book of Exodus and only three to the book of Ruth.
Rolf Rendtorff’s The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament (2005) lists 416 references to the book of Exodus and only seven to the book of Ruth.
Horst Dietrich Preuss’s two-volume Old Testament Theology (1991–1992) lists a total of 132 references to the book of Exodus and only six to the book of Ruth.
Walther Eichrodt’s two-volume Theology of the Old Testament (1967) lists 244 references to the book of Exodus and only five to the book of Ruth.
Erhard Gerstenberger’s Theologies of the Old Testament (2002) lists 72 references to the book of Exodus and only six to the book of Ruth.
Finally, in the following works, Ruth does not appear at all in the index of citations: Brevard Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (1993); James Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology (1999); Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament (1997); Reinhard Feldmeier and Hermann Spieckermann, God of the Living (2011).
Although this survey is by no means scientific or comprehensive, it demonstrates the lack of attention to Ruth in synthetic treatments of Old Testament theology. If the book of Ruth, which does mention God, finds little purchase in biblical theology, then the neglect is likely all the more true for other books of the Megilloth where God is even less present.
Those who do engage the Megilloth from a theological perspective frequently read the scrolls as examples of divine providence. This interpretive lens is especially prominent in theological treatments of the books of Ruth and Esther, where divine absence has proven not a challenge but an opportunity to assert God’s constant but imperceptible oversight of human affairs. In his study of Ruth, for example, Hals has written that ‘when we approach the narrative with the awareness that it deals with the hiddenness of God’s acting in human affairs, we can understand even better how the writer fulfills his purpose by leaving things unsaid’ (1969: 16). Gladson offers a similar perspective on Esther when he writes that ‘those who favor a religious interpretation [of Esther] point to frequent reversals in the story that hint of a divine guiding hand or divine providence’ (2009: 370; italics original). Although other books in the Megilloth call this kind of divine care into question, its apparent prevalence in Ruth and Esther has sometimes shaped scholars’ perspectives on the entire collection (Arnold 2014: 381).
More recent theological approaches to the Megilloth, however, have moved away from both of these longstanding trends. First, they have taken seriously the theological import of the five scrolls, not just as individual books but as a collection, and secondly, they have dealt in a more nuanced way with the issue of divine absence. This shift is especially clear in three of the contributions to the forthcoming edited volume containing papers originally presented in the SBL unit. Strollo, while not abandoning divine providence as a meaningful theological category in the Megilloth, argues that the absence or distance of God in the five scrolls puts the focus on human responsibility to maintain the divine order of God’s creation. Not only do humans have more prominent roles in the Megilloth, but the roles they assume are ones ascribed to God elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. This point is especially clear in Ruth and Lamentations where human actors provide the protection and consolation, respectively, with language that is elsewhere used of divine protection and consolation. Strollo situates this emphasis on human initiative within the work of Jewish biblical theologians who likewise focus on humans’ partnership with God (see Sweeney 2012).
Galvin (forthcoming) has connected the Megilloth to the horizontal theology developed by Johann Baptist Metz (2007) and Pier Angelo Sequeri (2007). Unlike a more vertical approach to theology that begins with God’s transcendence, a horizontal approach is rooted in the praxis and particularities of lived faith. Metz has used the book of Exodus to work out this horizontal theology, but Galvin argues that the Megilloth may offer a better opportunity to demonstrate its prevalence in Scripture. For example, Metz’s interest in narratives of endangerment resonates with the books of Ruth and Esther in which both protagonists face dangerous situations. Moreover, Metz’s suspicion of the ‘history of victors’ is consistent with Lamentations, which gives voice to the misery of the defeated and disconsolate Jerusalem. For Galvin this horizontal theology in the Megilloth leads to a more relational biblical spirituality.
Finally, Davis (forthcoming) has argued that the Megilloth share not so much a common theology but a common way of doing theology. Unlike many other books of the Hebrew Bible whose theology is based on God’s presence as a character or on a narrator’s statements about God, the five books of the Megilloth focus almost exclusively on the subjective experiences of human characters. Davis argues against a theology of divine providence for the Megilloth, in which God manages humans and their affairs from a distance. Rather, whatever theology might be gleaned from the collection must come through the lived experiences of those human characters.
Future Directions
As the preceding review of scholarship attests, the bulk of the work done on the Megilloth thus far has centered on the literary relationships between the various books in the collection.
Reception- and Cultural-Historical Methods
Recent scholarship on depictions of gender and ethnicity in the individual books of the Megilloth as well as across the collection might serve to frame and articulate analogous questions about the Megilloth’s reception. In particular, how have later interpreters (re)used these texts in ways that inscribe and implicitly promote particular constructions of gender, identity and ethnicity? How are ‘Others’ (Jews, women, people of color, people of lesser classes) created in and through later readings of the five scrolls? Further, how have the different aesthetic-material forms of the Megilloth reinforced or undermined these ‘images’ of Others?
Attention to the cultural production of the Megilloth in various times and places would press biblical scholars to consider, not just words, themes and narrative devices that create links between the books in these five scrolls, but also the material forms the collection has taken in various times and places. Beal has argued that making a ‘harder cultural turn’ in reception studies would require more sustained attention to the material-aesthetic aspects of the bible/bibles and to the ways bibles and texts are ‘culturally produced as discursive objects’ (2011: 357).
Questions reflecting such a different orientation to reception of the Megilloth might include the following: How are a given culture’s tastes and assumptions reflected in the following material-aesthetic aspects of a Bible: images, illustrations and decorations on the page; color and text type; the visual layout of a page; the size and weight of the object (book, scroll, canvas, etc.) and even the feel and texture of the paper on which the text is inscribed? How have various producers, working within particular socio-historical contexts, sought to influence their readers to adopt a particular aesthetic, ethical stance and/or subject position, not just through encoded meanings, but also through material representation? In the case of the Megilloth, there is an opportunity to explore how texts about women have been mobilized by producers of manuscripts, bibles, art, films, etc. Few biblical studies have explored how material-aesthetic aspects of the Megilloth’s particular physical forms have reinforced or undermined hegemonic constructions of gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality.
Illuminated manuscripts that depict textual connections visually might provide an ideal site for posing materially focused questions about the cultural histories of the Megilloth. Medieval picture bibles such as Biblia Pauperum (13th–15th cent.
Scholarship on the reception and cultural histories of the Megilloth and its parts would benefit from analyzing the collection’s appearance as a discursive object in particular local contexts (Beal 2011) but also from attending to the ways other non-local contexts have adhered to texts and created surplus meanings that exceed their historical contexts. In response to Beal, Breed (2012) has argued that while the task of investigating the cultural context of a text’s reception is essential, the frame of cultural history may be too narrow, potentially resulting in readings that are culturally over-determined. Strict attention to the cultural context that produced a bible as a discursive object might result in missed opportunities to ‘analyze the ways that texts move between cultural constructions—and how they can at times resist cultural overwriting’ (2012: 308). Arguing for an expanded role for reception-oriented studies, Breed suggests that biblical scholars should analyze not only the ‘irreducible differences between bibles’ (the task of cultural history) but also the ‘shared process that creates, sustains, and disseminates those irreducible differences’ (2012: 309). In a study of prophetic oracles and literary prophecy, Lange argues that ‘what puts a text on the way to canon…is the repeated interpretive use of its surplus meaning’ (2009: 47). Future studies might explore how the Megilloth exceed their (re)use in any given local context and resist cultural overwriting. The poetic books (Song, Lam., Eccl.) are arguably particularly well suited for an exploration of excess on account of the inherent ambiguity of poetry (Miller 2000). Densely packed with traces of past contexts (combining images and ideas from other sources and re-deploying and subverting traditional genres and motifs), poetry generates excess—and on account of its terseness, it is especially adaptable to and for new contexts and occasions.
Liturgy, Ritual and Performance
Particularly promising for the Megilloth are questions about the collection’s performative or liturgical uses in later communities. Recent scholarship has focused on how the earliest communities’ concerns—liturgical and otherwise—influenced the ordering of the five books in the Megilloth (Brady 2014; Stemberger 2003; Stone 2013; Elbogen 1993). The scope of such inquiries could be expanded to include the Megilloth’s liturgical uses in later reception.
Lamentations has been compared to a number of liturgical texts, including biblical laments, Mesopotamian city laments (Dobbs-Allsopp 1993) and eršemma and balag prayers (Ferris 1992; Bouzard 1997). As such, the book is marked by a certain degree of adaptability to new contexts. Even as it recalls specifically the destruction of Jerusalem, the range of voices and literary tropes used to express communal and individual suffering in the wake of war have made the book relevant to communities in different times and locations.
Engagement with the field of ritual studies could enrich exploration of the Megilloth’s reception in liturgical performances, shifting the focus from the written text to the performance itself as the primary medium to be investigated (Smith 1987; Bell 1992, 1997; Turner 1982). Stökl Ben Ezra notes that a liturgical reading of a sacred text creates a new, ritual text that incorporates non-verbal elements such as gestures, postures and intonations (2015: 112). Further, ‘the chronological linking of specific liturgical events (festivals, seasons, Shabbats or Sundays) with biblical reading(s)…establishes a fixed ritual and mythological context for these texts that might not have been present in the text before’ (2015: 118).
Explorations of the liturgical and ritual uses of the Megilloth might also shed light on the question of the Megilloth’s authority and status. Liturgical performances in certain contexts signal that the Torah is ranked highest in the hierarchy of textual collections (Langer 2005). How, if at all, do readings of the Megilloth compare with Torah and Haftaroth readings? What cues are embedded in the performances with regard to how the audience is to receive these texts/performances? Langer has argued that the Ashkenazi ritual reading of the Torah effectively transforms the reader of the Torah into Moses and the synagogue into the Israelites at Sinai (Langer 2005: 121-60). Through a given ritual or performance, what role does the reader of a Megillah assume? And what role is the audience invited to play? Finally, how does the physical space in which the text is performed shape the interpretation (see Fine 2005; Mann 2005)?
A focus on performance and liturgy also generates questions about reading practices. How have communal and individual reading practices informed the presentation and use of the five books individually and as a collection? Were the texts read aloud or silently, for devotion or moral edification or study or public performance, with the goal of memorizing or internalizing? Also relevant are the (embodied) ways public readers interact with the physical forms of the text (e.g., scrolls and their handles, books and their bindings and covers) and communicate non-verbally with the audience. Gestures and actions such as standing while reading (or not) or removing one’s shoes before reading (or not) are acts of interpretation (Ehrlich 2004). Nonverbal language can communicate that an interpretation should be viewed as consistent with established traditions or that it is moving in the direction of innovation. Gestures can suggest whether a reading has implications for the life of the community as a whole or if its relevance is more personal and individual.
Scholarship on the Megilloth as a collection is in its infancy, but given the establishment of the SBL program unit and the related forthcoming publications, we imagine the topic of the Megilloth will continue to gain attention.