First of all, I’d like to thank Joel Kaminsky for taking the time to offer such an extensive and exegetically rich response to my recent monograph, How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture. For the sake of ease, I will respond to Joel’s points in the order in which they were written.

Joel begins with a reflection on pedagogical practice, characterizing my book as in keeping with his own process of urging students to consider the possibility that they are imposing a modern mindset “distant from what that text might have meant in its ancient context.” This concern for anachronism is not an inaccurate depiction of the book, but it falls short somewhat of the book’s full intention with important implications for the rest of what Joel has to say. Joel’s concern is formulated as an attempt to uncover the original ancient context of the biblical texts. My concern is that we should come to learn deeply about the exact ways in which we read texts today, what we impose upon the Bible and how we use it, and then ask whether we have alternatives available that can challenge and enter into dialogue with our dominant presuppositions. I prefer this language of dialogue, because I believe that imagining we can free ourselves from mistakes in our existing mindset condemns us to doggedly repeating them. In the case of repentance, Joel casts the chief concern of the book as whether or not there is repentance (however, that is defined) in the Bible. He then seeks to defend its presence. On the contrary, I begin from a different starting point. I’m interested in what the use of the concept of repentance among readers reveals about how contemporary forms of biblical interpretation seek to valorize the inner life, render most forms of communication as pedagogical or moralistic, and accentuate forms of human agency. Along the way, I show alternatives to these readings as they present themselves. We certainly share some goals with regard to our study of antiquity, but not the language of positivism for getting there. For me, “repentance” does not exist as a set concept, an absolute universal, and it is therefore not a meaningful statement to declare whether it is or is not in the Bible. Rather what’s interesting here is to turn continuously to the question of how we read and how we use a certain “concept” like repentance to help us engage in our readings. While I am grateful for Joel’s sense that my analyses should lead readers to “rethink many long-held understandings of the biblical text,” I find that Joel’s own exegetical analyses remain excellent examples of the type of hermeneutical lenses, what I group under the term the “penitential lens,” that dominate biblical studies. I appreciate those readings, but I also believe that there are an alternative series of presuppositions with which we might proceed that would produce a very different looking Bible for those who are ready to receive it.

Joel begins his review by critiquing another, much older study, that of Klaus Koch. Koch makes important observations but is a nice example of how I would not go about examining such an issue. Is there divine retribution in the Bible or is there a more mechanistic sense of punishment following sin? I think Koch’s question is the wrong one. Instead, I would start out by describing the nature of divinity among the communities of interpreters who have defined what the Bible means, showing how their presuppositions about divinity (especially their preoccupation with divine omnipotence, omniscience, and justice) inform their interpretations and then look to see if alternatives present themselves, cracks in our present day readings that cannot be readily filled within the existing paradigms (in this case, a more mechanistic, decentralized system of distributing justice). In short, Koch’s critique is substantive, and we need to recognize the dueling interpretive horizons that it points to without resorting to binary forms of argumentation.

Without further ado, I would like to consider some of the passages that Joel discusses. Again, he wishes to contend that “Lambert’s contention [is] that very few if any of the early texts he discusses contain any psychological interiority and therefore they cannot signal a penitential turn.” That way of framing the issue is appealing because it makes any interpreter who does not accept its presuppositions—the centrality of interiority to the biblical narrative—simply seem narrow, dull, or atomistic. In fact, “Lambert’s contention” is not a contention at all but the demonstration of a certain interpretive sensibility, the contemporary concern to infuse interiority into ancient biblical texts through recourse to a concept of repentance, which is assumed to be universal or, at the very least, biblical, and to juxtapose it with alternatives. (In a sense, the direction of the argument is the exact opposite of the one suggested. I use repentance to show how interpreters impute interiority, not deny interiority in order to deny repentance.) Let’s see how this works through Joel’s reading of the Joseph narratives. The key to Joel’s reading is the idea that the brother’s various speech acts upon their initial encounter with Joseph in Egypt (Genesis 42) can be explained through the psychological concept of “latent feelings of guilt.” Now, I have to admit that, when I read this, I had to suppress (repress?) the feeling of being back in my grandparents’ prewar Vienna or, even more pertinent, the postwar Freudian psychoanalytic circles in which my grandmother participated in New York. What’s extraordinary about attributing certain actions to guilt, speech or otherwise, is that it is very hard to prove wrong. But let’s see what else the text offers us. Joel first contends that the brothers’ response to Joseph’s accusation that they are spies includes the extraneous information that they have one brother and another that is no longer. Joel wants to see this as latent guilt. That’s what our (some of our?) version of humanity today looks like. But there are, of course, other possibilities. The best response to an accusation of spying is to reveal your lineage. Furthermore, it is essential in terms of how the plot develops that they reveal the existence of an additional brother. As for the brother that is no longer, isn’t the irony of his standing there enough to explain the narrator’s choice to formulate matters thus? The guilt-bubbling-over narrative seems a bit much. It’s as if, no, it is the case according to this argument, that the first stranger to come across their path and cause trouble provokes them to blurt out: “We did it! And we feel terrible about it!” What I proposed was, I think, a subtler reading and closer to the available wording. The brothers realize, through Joseph’s irrational actions, that their goose is cooked. Some deity, some hidden power, is against them. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why. That’s why Reuben’s first impulse is to shift blame in Gen 42:22: I told you not to do it but you did it any way and now נדרש הנה דמו, literally: “his blood is being sought.” This is not an outpouring of latent feeling; this is a process of connecting the dots. They are in trouble because of what they did, which they then proceed to spell out; they are doomed because of their past actions toward Joseph. You can call that an atomistic reading, but I think the more striking move here is the insistence on imputing interiority and avoiding reading the actual words used in the passage. This is not to deny interiority. Did they feel badly? Sure, perhaps. They’d be stupid not to. After all, their action got them into a lot of hot water. They’ve got to regret it now. But that’s not what the text chooses to focus on in its own words, and yet we choose to focus on something else.

And then we arrive at Judah’s speech, which for Joel, demonstrates the brothers’ engagement in “deep psychological introspection,” a term that brought me past Freud right into the nineteenth-century mussar movement. In Genesis 44, when Joseph threatens to imprison Benjamin, Judah pleads with him to take him instead. For Joel, that means that Judah has experienced remorse for his actions toward Joseph and has reconciled himself to Benjamin. In other words, he’s doing it for love of Benjamin and guilt over Joseph. But, again, that reading requires us to not read what Judah actually says. Judah gives two reasons for his plea: (1) the well-being of his father: if you take Benjamin away from him, he’ll die, and (2) the fact that he’s made an oath to his father to return Benjamin to him: “Now your servant has pledged himself for the boy to my father, saying ‘If I do not bring him back to you, I shall stand guilty before my father forever.’” Now, of course, that guilt would have long-term implications not only for him, which doesn’t matter as Joel points out because he’d be in prison, but for Judah’s progeny as well. But let’s take a step back here. What Joel’s saying is that Judah’s feelings are what matter the most here. What I’m asking is why we can’t take Judah’s commitment to the well-being of their father, as well as commitment to his own word, seriously enough to accept them as the likely explanations for Judah’s actions when Judah himself explains his actions that way and not in terms of guilt? The answer is clear. We’re much more focused in today’s world on our own private moral status than filial piety or any commitment to a pledge we may have made, and so we interiorize this passage and do away with both. If he has learned anything from the sale of Joseph and Jacob’s refusal to accept consolation, it is that he better get Benjamin back to his father or his father really will die this time, and Judah will risk the sort of fate that befalls Jacob’s three other prodigal sons—Reuben, Simeon, and Levi—all of whom by right of birth should have received Judah’s blessing, but who end up being cursed instead.

With regard to the phrase “return to YHWH,” I argue that it is possible to see a threefold development in its usage that has hitherto been neglected in favor of what I argue is its postbiblical identification with the concept of repentance. In the first stage, the key term shuv appears in vicinity to other terms of appeal and focuses on matters of loyalty. To whom do you turn when in trouble? That is how it is used in Hosea, Amos, and Isaiah. Jeremiah innovates and sees it as an offer extended by YHWH to return to a productive relationship with him. Later on in Ezekiel and other exilic and postexilic texts, the actual phrase changes, becoming negative, as in “turn away from sin,” and here we see a stepping stone toward the eventual concept of repentance as it ultimately emerges in the late Second Temple period. My claim is that our commitment to interiorization and moral, pedagogical readings has prevented us from seeing this differentiation. This hardly requires “emptying these metaphors” as Joel suggests. Jeremiah uses them productively. The father invites the son to return. Hosea doesn’t use the metaphors of marriage and parenthood in connection to the phrase “return to YHWH.” He uses the phrase instead, as stated above, in the context of political alliance. Will Israel turn to Egypt and Assyria for help, or will they turn back to their old loyal deity, YHWH? Joel’s reading is an essential part of the Bible’s reception history. Both Jews and Christians identified the prophets’ phrase “return to YHWH” with the idea of repentance. In fact, the Rabbis invented their term for repentance, teshuva, on the basis of this phrase, but that doesn’t mean that we can only look at the biblical text on the basis of that homogenization.

For passages discussing “circumcision of the heart” language and related phrases with Israel as agent, I would refer the audience to p. 212n21. There are two more substantive issues in Joel’s comments, however, both of which require further thought and exposition. One is the view of Deuteronomy as sermon literature designed, in Joel’s words, to “probe the potential psychological resistance of the listener.” I find this to be a fascinating framework for reading Deuteronomy, one that is very much in keeping with the later phenomenon of public moralistic teaching. It works fairly well with Deuteronomy but other subtler possibilities present themselves. Some of this is explored in chapter 6 where I show that the earliest readings of Deuteronomy did not view it as instructive moralistic sermons but rather as predictions of what was to befall Israel and why. In that view, the many charges to Israel in Deuteronomy to “serve,” “love,” “fear,” etc., the deity would serve to justify and explain Israel’s eventual exile. Furthermore, it should be pointed out that, for years now, very strong arguments have been put forward to understand this seemingly psychological terminology on the basis of covenantal agreements as primarily concerned with loyalty and obedience. That consideration awaits further study as does the question of the meaning of “heart” in biblical Hebrew, which underlies what I take to be Joel’s psychological rendering (in this case in keeping with standard translations) of Deut 8:17 and Deut 15:9. Indeed, I don’t believe that “heart” in biblical Hebrew, as in English, is meant as a way of focusing on interiority. The emphasis in these passages is not so much on Deuteronomy’s attempt to ferret out improper thoughts, as it is in prohibiting certain kinds of private plans, i.e., depriving others of material benefit because of the approach of the seventh year or claiming to have accrued wealth through one’s own agency. Again, the concern here is not with what you are thinking as much as what you are doing in private or what you are claiming in private, whether you are properly marking your wealth as the product of YHWH. In short, as my book claims and as these examples suggest, psychologization is not just a matter of how certain overall passages are read but how particular words are read as well. I treat this further with additional examples in a new study, “Refreshing Philology: James Barr, Supersessionism, and the State of Biblical Words” (Biblical Interpretation 24:3 [2016], 332–56).

Problems with our usual rendering of biblical lev addressed in that article are also relevant to the importance Joel attaches to Ezek 18:31’s supposed interiority on the basis of its use of the term “heart.” In any event, it seems quite clear, contrary to Joel’s suggestion, that the concern at the heart (if I may) of Ezekiel 18 is the cessation of sin, not the experience of guilt, which is not alluded to at all. As long as you stop, you can live. If you don’t stop, don’t blame your ancestors, it’s your fault that you’re going down. More importantly, as I suggest in a discussion of Ezekiel 18 and related material in chapter 5, the significance of these passages needs to be measured against Israel’s ultimate failure and exile. In terms of the transmission of the book of Ezekiel as a whole, such passages serve to reinforce the reasons for Israel’s exile. They sinned, they were warned, they failed to act, and therefore they were punished. Again, my argument here is not that there are no passages in Ezekiel where the prophet seems to call on the people to change their ways, but that we have overemphasized their role because of our own moralistic preoccupations. In context of the book as a whole, they served much more the purposes of theodicy, explaining ow YHWH could have let his people down and allowed them to be sent off into exile.

Ultimately, what I want to suggest lies between my readings and Joel’s is the place that the Bible occupies in our lives. For Joel, it seems to be vitally important that it accords with many of the basic principles of humanity that he believes to be fundamental to our functioning as human beings. I respect that but I believe in trying to use the Bible to generate a contest or dialogue between moral ideals. I recognize the strength, the fascination, and the history of our penitential readings of the Bible. At the same time, I believe that we have arrived at a place in our contemporary lives where we are able to start to see some of the cracks, some of the apparent failures, of such a framework. What emerges is a different notion of the human, of human agency, and of the relationship to the divine, one, for instance, that focuses more on the body, moving away from the standard dichotomy between mind and body, as well as one that moves away at times from the strong Enlightenment sense of human beings as free moral agents. The implications of such a move remain to be fully worked out but are hinted at in the pages of my book. It is my hope that the book will yet enable us to become critical of our own presuppositions, to recognize their control over how we read texts and, indeed, the world around us, which hardly means, however, that we must abandon the moral commitments that lie behind them or the biblical readings that undergird them. Instead, we are free to relocate those readings temporally and recognize that they too are part of the Bible, but only via the communities of interpreters that for millennia have given the Bible its meaning.

Susanne Scholz engages none of the specific points in How Repentance Became Biblical, but she does our collective endeavor to reflect on the book a service by raising broader questions of not just methodology but of the place and definition of biblical studies. As these issues of disciplinarity very much animate the book and, in particular, its introductory chapter, I welcome the opportunity to discuss them further. At stake is the fundamental question of how we are to proceed in biblical studies in a time in which we have come to recognize some of the problematic aspects of the modernity in which much of biblical criticism has been bound up. I find her comments to be both profound and well written, though, as we shall see, we have very different responses to the place of the modern in the postmodern.

“The Historical Quest”

Susanne operates with a clearly negative view of the tradition of biblical studies as pursued in the United States and Europe. What is wrong with the historical critical enterprise? “This project,” i.e., “the historical quest” that is biblical criticism, “is divorced from its origins in Christian theological discourse.” Furthermore, it “defines the scholarly task as being objective, universal, and value-free.”

Now, I suspect I find myself a bit closer to Susanne in certain respects in our assessment of historical criticism than many people in the field of biblical studies, but I do think that a few words in favor of biblical criticism are in order just to put things into perspective. To begin with, biblical criticism has produced incredible and fascinating insights into the text and world of the Hebrew Bible. Whatever its effects or limitations, it is safe to say that it has stoked our imaginations and given us novel, creative discoveries. In that sense, it is not so very different from a field such as, say, modern-day physics. Here too, we have an absolute explosion of knowledge since the Enlightenment that has produced amazing discoveries but also generated some of our most disturbing present-day realities, such as the production and deployment of nuclear weaponry. Furthermore, the study of physics and other “hard” sciences have helped to generate, at times, a one-sided dominant narrative through their claims of objectivity and totality that can make continued adherence to religious tradition seemingly outdated and incoherent. That said, it seems hard to imagine a postmodernism, even one aware of the limits of modern-day science and its own historicity, that should want to turn back the clocks and operate completely without it, as if that would even be a possibility.

Furthermore, modern-day biblical studies has enabled people like me, by which I mean, Jews, to participate in the field. It’s actually an extraordinary accomplishment of this “objective, universal, and value-free” endeavor that is “divorced from its origins in Christian theological discourse” that it has given us a mode of talking about the Bible that holds out the prospect, at least, of inclusivity. My ancestors used to discuss the Bible with their Christian counterparts as part of medieval disputations, with the fate of their entire community in the balance. But now, Jews attend the Society of Biblical Literature and openly discuss matters (such as some of the Christian bias that remains in biblical studies, a chief concern of my own volume) without fear of retribution, even while many of the jobs in the field remain closed off to us because we lack a Christian affiliation. Of course, this is not only about Jews versus Christians, but most Christian denominations as well would hardly be able to talk with one another if they took their own faith claims and authoritative interpretations seriously without the platform that, historically, was provided by the “objective, universal, and value-free” endeavor of biblical criticism. Indeed, I marvel every year as two hundred forty undergraduates shuffle into my Introduction to Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Literature course and are able to engage in respectful shared discourse around the Bible based on an interest in its historical, ancient Israelite contexts as well as the history of its later interpretive frameworks.

Finally, what modern biblical criticism has generated, again, despite its difficulties which I will consider below, is a space for critique, a possibility to differ from dominant narratives, precisely the space that is now occupied by so many strands of biblical studies that stand against both modern biblical criticism but also strictly traditional forms of interpretation.

On the Possibility of Freedom

If modern biblical criticism has failed it is because it has reproduced some of the prejudgments of traditional readers, e.g., supersessionist tendencies, while laying claim to being an “objective, universal, and value-free” endeavor. The possibility of such an endeavor, it is now clear, is a chimera. Even more importantly, it ultimately produces results that are of interest to no one, a field of biblical meaning that doesn’t accord with the very modes of meaning making employed by those communities of Jews and Christians who have made this collection of ancient Israelite texts the Bible. Certainly, Susanne’s depiction of my motivations as an attempt to “free” the biblical text and “uncover original biblical meanings” are so far from what I associate with my own motivations that I wonder at the nature of the hermeneutic with which she was reading my text.

Years ago, I had a chance to envision myself in the terms with which Susanne describes my work, but it rang hallow. At the time, I was a graduate student at Harvard and had just finished a deceptively straightforward seminar paper with the title “Was Fasting a Penitential Act in the Hebrew Bible?” In it, I surveyed the biblical material where I discovered something surprising. Despite the longstanding association between fasting and penitence in Judaism and Christianity (whether as an expression of contrition, e.g., Yom Kippur, or as an atoning act, e.g., sacrament of penance), fasting didn’t really seem to go together with repentance in the Hebrew Bible. Instead, it appeared consistently alongside forms of appeal. In short, it seemed to be a way of manifesting distress so as to attract the attention and sympathy of the deity. What happened next threw me into a tailspin. My professor said he liked the paper, that I should publish it, and that he would take me on as his advisee.

The problem was that, while I recognized I had moved biblical studies forward through my series of observations, I failed to grasp why it mattered. I had “freed” the biblical text from “years of prejudice” but so what? What of value was left in this restored Bible when we are done mourning our slain prejudices, for the penitential reading (at least at first) certainly seems grander? That we should dance around in sackcloth and fast when we are in distress so as to get the deity (or our advisor’s) attention? That the ancient Israelites did? No, if this was success, it was not enough. I started exploring other career options.

But I also started to read. I looked for volumes that sought to put critical history to some use for the purposes of the present: Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, but, in particular, lots of Nietzsche and Foucault. Indeed, Nietzsche’s “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life” seemed to be a way of playing out my exact concerns and with the “critical” mode, history as an untimely meditation on the present, it seemed to point toward a way out of my difficulty.

What was of real interest in my account of fasting was not the rejection of prejudice, the prejudgments of readers, but their very study. What went into a penitential reading of fasting and, for that matter, the Bible as a whole—a series of interpretive strategies that I came to label the “penitential lens?” What view of the human, society, and religion did such readings both reflect and bring forth? As I write in the introduction to my book, “In this account, the Bible makes its contribution to humanistic inquiry as the West’s most definitive interpretive object, a chaotic mass, whose current form stands to reveal much about those who, by taking it in their hands, have given it shape.” Is the attempt to understand the non-inevitability of present presumption thoroughly “modern?” Perhaps, but if so the task seems so crucial that I would be ready to shoulder that charge. After all, I’m hardly one to believe that we can escape the frameworks that produce us.

As I state in my introduction, I do not believe that my readings of the biblical text are genuine “retrievals,” but are rather alternatives to dominant readings that cracks in present presuppositions allow us to glimpse. In fact, what unfolds over the pages of my book is ultimately a contest of contemporary values. Do we want to continue the project of imagining the divine as a benevolent pedagogue or to recognize the very real discourse of power that runs throughout prophetic literature? Should we continue to deny the centrality of body and material forms of affliction by continuing our dualistic readings of ritual as outward expressions of inner emotions, or should we give voice to accounts of our beings that allow for more profound portrayals of the body and the potential of its transformation to define our beings? Do we want to see confession as a drama surrounding the interiority of the victimizer, a view that allows for a maintenance of current power relations, or to recognize it as an act of submission whereby the victimizer subjects themselves to the victim, “I have sinned against you,” allowing the victim to impose some form of restitution. Is this a “safe” project as Susanne suggests? Overturning tens if not hundreds of our conventional readings of the Bible certainly didn’t feel safe as I was developing my insights, nor did countering dominant notions of the self that are deeply engrained with contemporary senses of morality or piety. I think reactions to both of those aspects of my work are reflected in readers’ responses to this symposium. More to the point, I think there are specific interventions in contemporary politics and ethics that can be made my mining my research for alternative conceptualizations of matters such as sin and forgiveness. I have only begun to embark on that project but an initial example can be seen in my opinion piece for Religion Dispatches (http://religiondispatches.org/repent-trump-the-problem-with-apology/), where I specifically take on the role apology has played in the current presidential campaign, arguing that apology can ultimately become the tool of enabling the privileged who abuse their power to develop a narrative whereby that power is maintained. I contrast the present preoccupation with apology with the sort of the model of the actual substantive diminishment of the person that I believe can be found in the biblical texts.

Clearly historical criticism has significance as a sort of language game that we can play with ancient texts, a game that allows us to have glimpses of alterity, genuine differences that we can use to critique ourselves in a manner that has not yet been done by biblical scholars who have otherwise turned to the Bible as a source of values. Can the Bible be both a source of our values and at the same a critique of them? That suggestion does not sound to me like a modern proposition. Should postmodernism be an utter abandonment of all modernism in a vast re-embrace of Christian theology? Or can it allow for an embrace of the Bible in its totality, allowing for both affirmation and critique?

Two Further Clarifications

My reference to a “paradigm shift currently taking place in biblical studies” with the increased focus on historical readers refers, as noted in the footnotes, to the work of extremely productive scholars such as Michael Fishbane and James Kugel, who have helped open up biblical studies to the study of the history of interpretation, as well as the field of late Second Temple Judaism.

My reference to “collective nonsense” in the postscript of my work should not be taken out of context as a negative judgment of how readers have read the Bible. Instead, I’m paying homage there to Judith Butler’s notion of “pastiche.” In the same way that drag, in Butler’s argument in Gender Trouble, parodies the essentialist view of gender through showing the potential variability of its boundaries, so too the process that I engage in the book of parading before us various reading moments in light of the “penitential lens” as not inevitable, natural, and inherent is aimed at revealing the potential for thinking through alternative notions of self through our biblical readings.

I want to thank Reed Carlson for his careful engagement with my book. I would like to offer several points of clarification before taking up his important query regarding the nature of the self in late biblical and Second Temple Judaism.

On “Misreading”

Reed uses a variety of terms to describe the “penitential lens,” the tendency of interpreters of the Bible to import categories of interiority and agency bound up in the concept of “repentance,” normative within Judaism and Christianity, in their reading of the Hebrew Bible, that I do not use: “misreading,” “imposition,” and “tampering of Greek thought.” The choice, on my part, is deliberate and, I believe, important to understand. I speak of the tendency to read repentance into the Bible as an interpretive “lens” rather than as a mistake. It has its own legitimacy, based on how the Bible has been configured by (literally) millennia of Jewish and Christian communities. Furthermore, it is coherent and produces readings that are profound and, for many, compelling. It is also largely inescapable, as I think some of Reed’s own comments, discussed below, will reveal. Finally, to declare the “penitential lens” a “misreading” is to deny that all readings, even those that would challenge this particular dominant mode of hermeneutics, are themselves the product of what Gadamer would refer to as the interpreter’s own horizon.

On the Use of Theory

I also want to take up a very brief comment of Reed’s, because I think it has significant implications for how we envision the field of biblical studies and, in particular, its relationship to theory: “He [i.e., Lambert] presents only the fruits of his theoretical work in the main text, burying his roots in the endnotes.” The image, of course, only works so well. I have “fruits,” I have “roots,” but where is the tree? That points though to a larger problem with the place of theory in the field. We see theory as a beginning point. It is supposed to ground you methodologically and determine the interpretive framework with which you will proceed. However, I don’t think this is the way reading works, at least, not good reading. Reading, rather like ethnography, is an encounter. It is an encounter in which all sorts of things can occur, based on an individual’s training, background, and assumptions, as well as the contours of the text itself. It is scarcely an encounter that we can or should control. It’s an encounter that gets interesting precisely when it produces insights, realizations, or intuitions that differ from what others before us have seen. It’s at that point that it comes to be important to explain why. Why have I as reader seen this text differently than others? What defines their hermeneutics and what defines mine? Can I relate my observations to other sorts of developments and insights transpiring elsewhere within the humanities today to understand what lies behind my own reading predilections? I, therefore, see theory more as “fruit” than “root.” It’s the moment where we look at what we have done, what we have seen, and formulate our insights in a manner that takes them beyond the immediate stage of the text that we have been examining to engage the points of connection with the encounters of others.

On the Self

I should lay down my cards right away. I believe that all ideas are the product of their own time and place. They are part of the discursive possibilities of the present. They are not an essence that travels through times as such. When people relate to previous texts, they may take certain language with them, but they are reconstituting it for the purposes and needs of their present. I am therefore not sure what it would mean to call “repentance” a “joint semitic/Hellenistic project.” Such a label, it would seem to me, does more for our own sense of belonging as contemporary interpreters than speak to the historical origins of a concept that we might call “repentance.” Clearly, there is an extensive and significant discourse around “repentance” in both early Christianity and Judaism. In many of its particulars, that relates to what must have been an equally vibrant discourse around “repentance” in Greek moral philosophy, traces of which are clearly present in Philo, Plutarch, and a variety of other Hellenistic sources. Within Judaism and Christianity that discourse around “repentance” makes claims for itself by maintaining that “repentance” can be found, in fact, already in the Bible and adducing biblical language in support of a biblical origin for the concept. That is part of the naturalization of the concept as a part of Judaism and Christianity.

In a sense, Reed and, perhaps, Carol Newsom, though the article he refers to is not published so I haven’t seen it, are engaged in a similar endeavor, trying to make a case for the biblical origins of this concept. I’m skeptical of that endeavor because I see it as part of an overall trajectory of trying to ground concepts and their validity through recourse to the Bible and because I find specific differences between the way the discourse of “repentance” situates itself in the postbiblical period and between the sort of language that it claims for itself from the Bible. What we have, I think, is a new form of discourse that is engaged starting in the late Second Temple period within the broader context of Hellenistic culture, where key features are shared among Greek “pagans,” Christians, and Jews. For this discussion, I also believe that my comments in response to Jeffrey Stackert’s review with regard to continuity and discontinuity are relevant.

Before spelling this out further in the context of Reed’s argument about the nature of the self in the late biblical material, it seems necessary to point out that, while doing a great job of summarizing and engaging much of my book, Reed does not seem to have engaged the chapter that is most relevant to his interests, namely, chapter 6, “Agency and Redemption.” There is, first of all, his statement that “his treatment of New Testament and early Christian texts is relatively thin compared to his discussion of rabbinic literature.” My discussion of early Christianity spans two chapters, chapter 6 and chapter 7. By my count, I published fourteen pages on the New Testament and early Christianity and only ten on rabbinic literature. In any event, the problem becomes more paramount in his subsequent discussion of the self, where he adduces evidence for a self that is front and center after exile, “aspects of the self become objectified in new ways,” a self that requires a “hardware upgrade,” and notes that “in early Judaism, these upgrades are accomplished almost always through God’s impetus.” Well, this is precisely the point of chapter 6. Yes, we have the emergence of an interest around the self, that I never deny, but it is an interest that looks at the self as an object requiring divine intervention or what I label divine re-creation. My claim in that chapter is that scholars have failed to recognize what Reed properly recognizes, namely, that the agent of change in these scenarios is almost invariably God. By describing these transformations with the concept of “repentance,” they consistently impute a degree of agency to the texts that doesn’t seem to be there. So I think we’re quite in agreement on the matter of agency.

That also brings front and center what might be another source of confusion. As I mentioned, I never deny the presence of a vibrant sense of self in the Bible. Rather, I question whether it can be properly comprehended according to the modern dualism of mind and body with its peculiar privileging of interiority. Is such a privileging present in the biblical material, even the late biblical material? Indeed, sometimes Reed seems to conflate a sense of self with interiority, assuming that one must entail the other, which is precisely the assumption that I’m trying to free us from through the idea of the “penitential lens.” Reed’s case revolves around Psalm 51, the locus classicus for such claims. Interestingly enough, his claim also revolves around the phrase the “willing spirit,” which is based on the Hebrew root, נדב. What’s unusual about that choice is that I specifically engage that verb and its use, particularly at Qumran, and understand it as a way of indicating an inherent compulsion, as opposed to an outside external force, but not necessarily an actual concept of “freewill” (135). My understanding has been recently upheld by the eminent Hebraist Menahem Kister in a recent article of his. The point of Ps 51:14 would seem to be that the psalmist is asking to be made into the sort of being (“self”) that readily and easily does God’s will. Surely, this is an important and vital sense of self that is exhibited in this late psalm, but it’s not clear to me why categories of interiority help us in rendering its sense.

In fact, I applaud Reed’s suggestion that a broader study must be done on “spirit” language and “spirit possession,” which I hope indeed is something he’s considering, but I must object that it is likely to turn up a “much more nuanced and complicated notion of the self than Lambert allows.” What my study is meant to do is to free further study from the constraint the overwhelmingly dominant language of interiority and the dualism that attends it has imposed upon us. So, often, in contemporary Judeo-Christian discourse, the focus on interiority is simply assumed to be the “more nuanced and complicated notion,” because it is considered to be essential and inherent to the particular form that a life of piety has taken within those traditions. But actually, once you recognize with me the existence of the “penitential lens,” now the exciting work begins of being able to rethink the self in new ways by engaging in an encounter with this rich collection of ancient texts. The claim that I make is that we tend to impose interiority, that “interiority” is a modern category, and that we ought to search for new language, modifications, or better yet, new formulations, to give voice to the complex and multifaceted sense of such a term as “spirit” (רוח). I would encourage Reed to look for such vibrant formulations of the “self” without presupposing that they must be located “inside” to be meaningful and profound. Again, the claim is not that there is no interiority in the Bible, but that we have a committed hermeneutic whereby we find it there. As for the Bible itself, it may speak in a different language altogether, one which we might continue to comprehend with the rubric of interiority, but, ultimately, one that does not seem to lend itself to this sort of dichotomous thinking when we allow it to speak to us anew.

I want to thank Jeffrey for his rich and insightful response to my book. He raises several points of interest that are worth pursuing further on their own terms.

How Are We to Write about Religion in the Hebrew Bible?

Jeffrey notes that the book is aimed at a broader academic audience than mere specialists in the various subfields that today comprise biblical studies and that this mode of writing relates to my working within the context of a department of Religious Studies. The book does indeed aim at an interdisciplinarity of sorts, but it also useful to explain why. I believe that biblical studies as a field has lurked for too long in the shadows of certain kind of antiquarianism: this given observation about a specific text is inherently interesting because it is about something ancient / because it is about the Bible. Rather than merely aiming at a more “popular” audience, we, in biblical studies, need to seek to establish for ourselves, by addressing others as well, the justifications for what we do and how we go about doing it. In other words, the topic of our disciplinarity, rather than interdisciplinarity, needs to be addressed. Of course, to situate the field, we must step outside of it at times. What I have tried to emphasize is biblical studies as a certain mode of reading that stands to run counter to many contemporary ontological and interpretive assumptions, biblical studies as offering the potential for an “untimely meditation” upon the present. For that reason, I have avoided, for instance, referencing biblical scholars in the body of my text, preferring to show my sources and conversation partners in the footnotes instead. The aim is to give a sense to the reader of my text that he or she, indeed, is coming face to face with himself or herself as a reader. How have we tended to read this text, and how else might we imagine it using the various contextual tools of biblical criticism? It asks readers, in conversation with the text, to find within themselves this sort of potential for productive dialogue. Citing other biblical scholars as authorities would not allow us to shift our gaze in this way.

Lamentations, Suffering, and Hierarchy

I was particularly pleased to see that Jeffrey found my observations about the material and theurgical elements of appeal in ancient Israel to be useful for the light they shed on the biblical book of Lamentations, which I, otherwise, only attend to in a few, scant paragraphs in the book. And, again, this sort of application is particularly important to my project because I see myself ultimately as trying to teach a sort of alternative reading sensibility—one that stands out against the dominant interiorizing tendencies of modern-day notions of the self—rather than merely making an argument about a few specific texts.

I’d like to add two further observations or areas for further thought to Jeffrey’s own points about Lamentations. One has to do with the word “suffering,” i.e., Lamentations as a book that includes descriptions or expressions of “suffering.” I may have used this word myself at times in the book, and, in general sense, it is hardly inaccurate. But it’s important to be specific about what we mean by it and, perhaps, to shift to a newer vocabulary to rectify a potential error. Lamentations, strikingly, is not about a people’s pain; it is about a city’s diminishment. Unlike in contemporary modes of filming, photographing, and otherwise capturing the suffering of others, these biblical accounts do not focus on individual subjectivities. We do not hear about the pain of hunger or the sorrow of mothers in the face of their dead children, though lack of food and the death of children are all addressed. We do not know how humiliation felt to the elders with dust strewn upon their heads. What comes into view, instead, is a society that has been decimated, cut down, diminished. Again, we are asked to consider entities and their status, rather than the projection of subjective states that lies behind our concept of suffering. This is a fine line, but I think it goes a long way toward explaining why repentance doesn’t figure in these texts in the manner that we might expect. The city and the people have been utterly reduced. It is their hope that the verbal performance of mourning that is bound up in these lament texts will present such a desperate, deprived image of the people before their god that he will have to respond. Of course, such an appeal presupposes that their god is justified in his prior actions, hence their occasional reference to their sin. They must have sinned for their appeal today to be effective; the alternative is a powerless or unjust deity. In that sense, an element of justification may be more prominent than one of hierarchy in the book.

Continuity between the Biblical and the Postbiblical

I found Jeffrey’s discussion of continuity versus discontinuity between the biblical and postbiblical periods, along with his comparison of my work to the recent work of our colleague Benjamin Sommer to be most insightful, and I thank him for making a conversation that was only implicit in my book more explicit. I would only add one additional point. For me, looking over the expanse of biblical and rabbinic literature, in the manner in which I have been trained, I see both similarities and divergences. Most of us could agree on that. But, I think that, to a certain extent, we’ve been working with the wrong theory when we try to process these observations. Ideas, traditions, and, even, texts are not essences that travel through time. Rather like human beings who pass away and must replenish themselves through reproduction, they must be copied, transmitted, and ultimately reconstituted as a part of new forms of discourse to survive at all. It is certainly true that Jewish forms of discourse have continually turned to and employed biblical texts. This use of the past can certainly give the impression of continuity, but, in many respects, on a fundamental level it is not. The situation has changed; the use has changed; and, therefore, the meaning has changed. In other words, they are part of a discourse situated in the participant’s present, not a genuine retrieval from the past.

Synchronic versus Diachronic Presentation of Biblical Material

Jeffrey is right that my book tends toward a synchronic presentation of the biblical material. As he points out, this does not stem from any opposition per se to the Documentary Hypothesis or other source critical theories. This choice proceeds from two different angles, both of which are worth exploring. (1) The inherent uncertainty surrounding source critical distinctions should not deter us from serious study. However, we should be clear in each and every case whether the inquiry at hand necessitates staking out a position on matters of uncertainty. In the case of Jeremiah, questions related to my own study made it productive and indeed necessitated a consideration of a common source critical theory regarding the book, one which I felt my observations affirmed. In other instances, I did not find these distinctions to be intimately connected to my argument, and, therefore, while acknowledging division, I did not choose to go beyond its recognition in my argument. So, in short, I think the consideration of source criticism should depend on the type of argument that we are running and that we should always strive to present an argument in relationship to the body of texts with which we are working that requires as little speculation as possible, while not denying the inherent fractured nature of the text. To put it differently, I don’t believe that all analysis should proceed with a master theory of biblical literature, but rather that analysis should become an avenue to consider specific aspects of the history of biblical composition in light of the particular insights produced by our analysis. (2) The Bible, as a text, draws from an incredibly diverse range of sources, a complexity that we should not deny. However, as I write in the introduction, “The aim [of my approach] is not to address individual agendas, that is, each text’s difference, but to use large-scale comparisons to perceive broad, previously unobserved divergences with contemporary practices” (7). In other words, the kinds of basic differences that I am trying to highlight, that is to say, completely different constructions of the self, reveal themselves most readily through a broad-based comparison between different sorts of readings practices around ancient texts. Undoubtedly, other differences exist between the texts, but these are sometimes overplayed in scholarship that is hyper-focused on the biblical period alone, while the comparison with the contemporary is left out, with the result that contemporary forms of analysis are unwittingly imputed to the text.

Chronicles and Its Prophets

Jeffrey’s question about the apparent similarity between the Wisdom of Solomon, in which “an opportunity to repent” is offered to miscreants, and Chronicles, where prophets confront kings with their sin, is certainly apt. The prophet declares, for instance, “You have abandoned me, so I am abandoning you to Shishak” (2 Chr 12:5), and the king and his retinue then “submit” themselves to YHWH and are given a reduced form of punishment. The non-penitential meaning of this process of submission (נכנע) is addressed in the book and need not detain us here, but it’s the pattern that’s interesting. I would suggest, however, that here too, as in prophetic literature in general, we find an insistence first and foremost on explaining events, why destruction falls upon the king and why, as well, he is not entirely destroyed by Shishak. After all, the prophet’s statement is, first and foremost, an explanation, not a plea to “repent,” which isn’t to say that it doesn’t invite a submission to the deity as a way of mitigating punishment, in precisely the same way that the people are ultimately made to submit to Shishak. So, what’s at stake, at least in this instance, is the deity’s assertion of his power over his vassal king, Rehoboam.

Defining Repentance

Finally, I note, in response to the question raised by Jeffrey’s graduate students, that I avoid defining “repentance” in the beginning of the book, because my interest there is how it figures in current readings of the biblical material. In other words, my emphasis was on how we read, hermeneutics, rather than a historical positivist claim that the thing we call “repentance” is not in the Bible. As such, I allowed those who have read the Bible according to a broad series of practices that I label the “penitential lens” to speak for themselves. My aim was then to show that these various strategies, which ranged from imputing interiority into texts to attributing agency to ancient actors, can be roughly collected under a rubric labeled, for heuristic purposes, the “penitential lens,” even while their own definitions of repentance differ to some degree. Later in the book, when I discuss the emergence of repentance as part of a certain discourse within Judaism and Christianity, I find that the sources themselves are quite interested in a relatively defined sense of what “repentance” is. It’s at this point, when repentance figures as part of a coherent discourse that I find its strict definition to be meaningful. I hope that helps! I can see why this particular theoretical stance could be frustrating or difficult for the reader, but it’s the only way forward that I found for dealing broadly with the full range of reading practices.