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Humanities
Donald Harman Akenson.
McGill-Queen's University Press. 1998. xii, 658. $39.95
There was a time in ancient Israel when scripture, as Jews and Christians know it, did not exist. But the emerging sacredness of texts can be traced. Twice, under the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the Romans in 70, destruction of the Jerusalem temple challenged the faith of Israel. Each time, the surviving community recast its religion, generating writings to provide continuity in place of ritual institutions now disrupted. In the exile of Judaeans to Babylonia there emerged the Torah, the five opening books of the Hebrew Bible, and from the aftermath of the revolt against Rome there emerged rabbinic Judaism, with its elaboration of Torah in the Talmudic literature.
Donald Akenson, a wide-ranging historian at Queen's, has done his homework on textual authority covering a dozen centuries from the Exile onward. Modern scholarship in the past 150 years has inferred the development of that authority from the historical context, and the internal references, of the documents themselves. He covers various fields - Hebrew Bible, Hellenistic Judaism, New Testament, and rabbinics...