Please join us for the next AMNE departmental seminar of the year by Professor Philip Yoo of UBC, on Wednesday, October 16.
Location: UBC, BUCH C203 (in person)
All are welcome, and no registration is required.
His talk is entitled “Spectres of (the ‘Book’ of) Deuteronomy in the Torah” (an abstract is included below). The official proceedings will start at 3 pm at BUCH C203 and will wrap up around 4:30 pm. We encourage everyone to arrive early and to stay for the Q&A that will follow, to make the most of this opportunity to connect with the speaker and our wider community.
Here is the talk’s abstract:
How did the Bible become the Bible? With this question in mind, in this talk my focus lies on the first five ‘books’ of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy; collectively known as the Torah or Pentateuch. The view that portions in Genesis–Numbers are late, supplemental revisions (dated to the Persian or early Hellenistic periods) by hands sympathetic to the discourse in the book of Deuteronomy continues to inform scholarly discussion on the composition of these books. Oftentimes, this analysis is based on the Hebrew text as presented in the Masoretic Text (MT). This talk aims to offer another reassessment of the influence of the (a?) Hebrew text of Deuteronomy upon Genesis–Numbers. Upon a comparison of inexact parallels between MT, a Greek translation known as the Septuagint (LXX), and another Hebrew textual tradition represented in the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP), it is argued that the use of the Hebrew text of Deuteronomy is quite limited in shaping (what emerges as) MT Genesis–Numbers but more pronounced in ‘non-MT’ recensions of Genesis–Numbers. Some of these inexact parallels among the recensions of Genesis–Numbers reflect not only the prominence but also the (perhaps in the Derridian sense) hauntings of ‘the book of Deuteronomy’ among Second Temple communities as they read and rewrote the Torah to suit their own ideological worldviews.