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 Number
21 - 36: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary
by Baruch Levin
Anchor Bible 4A. Doubleday, New York,
2000. 614 pp. $45.00 (cloth) ISBN 0-385-41256-8.
Numbers traces the march of Israel in the wilderness on its way
from Egyptian bondage to Canaan’s promised land. The book
is filled with lists of numbers, tribal leaders, sacrifices, itineraries,
laws, and cultic instructions along with its core narratives.
Origen observed that Christians in his day tended to read these
sections and then “constantly spit them out as heavy and
burdensome food.” In a long series of sermons on Numbers,
Origen sought to resuscitate it as a biblical book filled with
food for the soul. Baruch Levine, biblical scholar and ordained
rabbi, seeks to do the same in his second of two volumes on Numbers
for the Anchor Bible series. Levine writes that his work on Numbers
has been guided by this line from the Morning Benedictions of
the Jewish prayer service: “O Lord, our God! Please make
the words of your Torah sweet in our mouths” (p. xvi).
Levine’s commentary is a rich and varied feast. He combines
a profound appreciation of law, cult, and ethics nurtured by his
Jewish commitments with a rigorous and historical-critical interest
in the varied literary sources underlying the biblical text, ancient
Near Eastern backgrounds, and the development of ancient Israel’s
religious and political life. After an original translation of
the masoretic Hebrew text, an introduction to critical issues
and themes, and a fifteen-page reference bibliography, there are
500 pages of commentary on Numbers 21–36. Each section of
commentary contains an introduction and detailed notes on grammar
and syntax along with historical and literary analysis. Some of
the most interesting material may be found in extensive “Comments”
on broader issues and themes, with special attention to the wider
ancient Near Eastern backgrounds. For example, when discussing
Moses’ bronze serpent with its healing power, Levine includes
a section on “the phenomenology of ancient Near Eastern magic”
(pp. 88–90). By far the largest section in this commentary
(140 pages) is devoted to the Balaam cycle of narratives and poetic
oracles in Numbers 22–24. Levine guides the reader into the
religious perspectives of the poetic oracles (assuming a polytheism
of gods such as the Shaddai gods along with El as the high god),
which are fundamentally different from the narratives (a monotheism
of Yhwh alone). Levine discusses at length the striking parallels
and differences between this biblical material and recently discovered
eighth-century b.c.e. inscriptions at Deir Alla in the Transjordan.
These remarkable inscriptions include the name of a prophet Balaam
and various gods including El and Shaddai. As Levine observes,
“Rarely has the recent discovery of an extra-biblical source
had so direct a bearing on the interpretation of biblical texts”
(p. 41). One would be hard pressed to find a more thorough discussion
of this Balaam material.
The focus of this commentary is neither literary nor theological
but historical. Levine pays homage to the 1903 ICC commentary
on Numbers by George Buchanan Gray, describing it as his “anchor
and compass” (p. xv). However, Levine is not just after the
historical “facts” but the broader agendas and concerns,
both political and religious, that animated the various sources
and traditions woven together in the rich tapestry of Numbers.
Levine sets forth his basic interpretive stance:
The main function of Torah literature, and of
Numbers even more so, is to lay the foundation for the life
of the Israelite people in its land by defining the “self”
in contrast to the “other,” thereby differentiating
between Israel and its enemies. . . . The Torah contains historical
information, to be sure, but its function is not primarily to
record history, as such, but to present several overlapping
versions of Israel’s formative phase as a people (p. 59).
Levine distinguishes two primary perspectives regarding Israel’s
relationship with the “other” in Numbers. First, the
JE (Yahwist/Elohist) and other earlier poetic and narrative material
in Numbers 21–36 is pre-exilic and dates from the time of
the monarchy in Israel. These early traditions sought to justify
Israelite hegemony over the territory of northern Moab in the
Transjordan area after it had been captured by the Israelite king
Omri in the ninth century b.c.e. (pp. 39–40, 477). These
traditions also wrestled with the issue of whether Israelites
living in the Transjordan were true and full members of Israel
(e.g., Num 32). Second, the later Priestly material which dominates
Numbers 21–36 focused not on the Transjordan but on the temple
and its cult in Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile in the Persian
period. The agendas of the Priestly traditions that Levine detects
are many and complex. For example, the massive killing of the
Midianites in Numbers 31 suggests that “animosity against
neighboring peoples was intense” in the Persian period, which
contrasts with other Priestly traditions in Genesis in which Israel’s
ancestors seek to live in peace with the Canaanites (p. 55). Another
concern is to legitimate Persian period cultic practices in Jerusalem
by rooting them in ancient Mosaic authority from the time of the
wilderness sojourn.
Levine’s two-volume work on Numbers will become the standard
historical-critical commentary on Numbers for years to come. One
will not find much wrestling here with more recent debates about
the Documentary Hypothesis and alternative models or dating for
the sources of the Pentateuch. Nor will one find much help in
bridging Levine’s analysis of history, political agendas,
and Near Eastern backgrounds with contemporary theological exposition.
Other commentaries will need to carry that burden. But Levine
is as reliable a guide as any to the sources, history, and cultural
backgrounds of a book that for Christians may be unfamiliar. Enjoy
the feast of Numbers, and may the words of Torah be sweet in your
mouth!
Dennis T. Olson
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey
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 Speaking
Parables: A Homiletic Guide
by David Buttrick
Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2000.
254 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-664-22191-2.
We have come to expect smart, street-wise scholarship, homiletical
savvy, and biting wit from the pen of David Buttrick. This preacher’s
guide to the parables of Jesus does not disappoint.
Buttrick has provided in Speaking Parables a solid and practical
exegetical resource for the preacher. He has absorbed the complex
and highly conflicted world of contemporary parables scholarship
and translated it into material useful for the preacher. For almost
every major New Testament parable, the reader will find a nicely
crafted interpretive essay followed, in many cases, by a sample
sermon on that parable. At every juncture, Buttrick has his eye
on next Sunday’s sermon and constantly poses the preacher’s
questions: What do you do with this? How do you handle that? What
can you say about this issue? His answers are pertinent and imaginative.
As a preacher, it is difficult to come away from this book without
having been provoked to see something new and to say something
different.
This is a brave book. Instead of choosing sermons from other
preachers, Buttrick includes only his own work. Each of the sermons,
some dating back as far as 1958, was preached by Buttrick to a
congregation at some point during his forty-plus years as a preacher,
and they bear the rough-and-tumble marks of real preaching. Consequently,
not all the sermons are highly polished gems. Indeed, Buttrick
is the first to be critical of them, sometimes overly so, saying
of one that “it does not have much theological depth,”
of another that its conclusion is “dreadfully weak,”
and of still another that its structure is “somewhat clumsy.”
Every experienced preacher who rummages through the barrel of
past sermons has had the same “how could I have ever said
that” feeling. The fact that so gifted a preacher as Buttrick
engages in candid criticism of his own sermons, which are, as
a collection, quite strong, is both instructive and encouraging
to the rest of us.
At the deepest level, though, this book is an extended essay
on the nature and function of the parable genre. In Buttrick’s
view, parables are not moral anecdotes, spoonfuls of wisdom for
daily living, or even “stories of everyday life to help us
grasp the things of God.” They are, instead, spring-loaded
prophetic narrative systems engineered to upset the world of the
reader and to provoke nothing short of conversion to the radical
kingdom of God, a reality that includes “lions and lambs,
burning military uniforms, weapons converted into farm implements,
boys and girls playing in a city’s streets, deserts blossoming,
and lots of full-scale partying.” Thus, parables do not wish
merely to say things; they wish to do things, kingdom things,
and sermons on parables should be no less ambitious.
The only significant quarrel I have with this book concerns Buttrick’s
negative view of the church, a perspective that damages his interpretation
of the parables and restricts his understanding of their contemporary
relevance. Buttrick knows, of course, that the New Testament parables
cannot be equated with the actual sayings of the historical Jesus,
and he is persuaded, together with a long line of scholars from
Jeremias to the Jesus Seminar, that the thrust of Jesus’
original parables—what Buttrick calls the “Jesus scenarios”—can
be reconstructed by starting with the gospels and backtracking
along the redactional trail. The problem comes when Buttrick,
like Norman Perrin before him, assumes that in the hands of the
church the original word of Jesus inevitably undergoes corruption.
For Perrin, the original Jesus parables “survived” the
transmission process; for Buttrick, the gospel writers often do
not so much interpret Jesus’ parables in new contexts as
misinterpret and mangle them—when bad things happen to good
parables.
Therefore, even though Buttrick organizes his book around the
collections of parables in Mark, Matthew, Thomas, Q, and Luke,
he is not as interested in those traditions or the communities
that produced them as he is in getting behind them, getting in
touch with “the mind of Jesus.” By doing this, Buttrick
argues, “we can begin to get hold of his ways of thinking
and speaking and even his theological convictions.” The next
move is to turn this reconstructed Jesus against his first-century
preachers. “Thus armed,” says Buttrick, “we may
judge [the canonical parables] accordingly (these fit, these do
not).” Unfortunately, the reconstructed Jesus seems to have
a limited vocabulary, and whenever the gospels begin to veer off
into allegory or to introduce mysterious and indigestible elements
such as “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” they must be
arrested at the border.
This “good Jesus/bad church” dichotomy keeps rolling
up to the present. Buttrick consistently describes the church
as what the real parables of Jesus are out to destroy: the “settled,”
the “oblivious,” the smugly “self-righteous,”
people who view world poverty only on television while they callously
sanctify the worst excesses of capitalism. This view of the church
as rich, powerful, and proudly contemptuous of the gospel has
had some cachet, of course. Today, however, when the median congregation
in the United States has fewer than 75 members and less than $1,000
in the bank, and there are signs everywhere of the church’s
struggle with the reality of cultural disestablishment, the “fat
and sassy church” script seems dated. Yes, the church comes
under the judgment of Jesus’ parables, but it receives also
the promise, the encouragement, excitement, and hope of those
parables. If preachers are going to do what Buttrick urges us
to do—proclaim the banquet of God—then we will have
to do more than bring a sledgehammer to the sanctuary.
At one point Buttrick describes a certain parable as “blunt,
edgy, and fun.” Come to think of it, so is this book.
Thomas G. Long
Candler School of Theology
Atlanta, Georgia
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