Freedman on the Hebrew Bible

David Noel Freedman ‘s book, The Unity of the Hebrew Bible contains a number of fascinating and compelling suggestions about the structure of the OT.

1) He suggests that the Hebrew Bible can be neatly divided into 4 sections of almost equal length:

Torah, 5 books, 80,000 words
Former prophets, 4 books, 70,000 words
Latter prophets, 4 books, 72,000 words
Writings, 11 books, 84,000 words

He then suggests that the Former Prophets be included with the Torah, making a nine-book sequence (Genesis – 2 Kings) that takes up approximately half of the OT (in terms of word count). He calls this the “Primary History.”

2) With this structure in place, he points to the prominence of the exile in the structure of the Hebrew Bible: “For the Hebrew Bible as a whole, the center comes at the end of the Primary History and at the beginning of the Latter Prophets ?Eat which point the Bible tells of the captivity of the people of Judah, the loss of nationhood, and the destruction of the capital city of Jerusalem and the Temple. In a similar way, if we look at the corpus of the Latter Prophets, the same melancholy series of events is at the center, in the latter part of Jeremiah and the first part of Ezekiel. Even in the Writings, with its great diversity of materials, the central point is held by the book of Lamentations, which, while very brief (five chapters ?Eabout 1,500 words), is also devoted entirely and exclusively to the same series of events.”

3) Not only does the Primary History end with exile; it begins there, with a series of stories of sin and exile. “Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is a story of disobedience and rebellion against the commandment of God. The upshot is banishment from the Garden to the life of exile in the world. How could those in captivity in Babylon, as described at the end of Kings, miss the point or fail to compare the story in Genesis with theirs? The next story, that of Cain and Abel, makes essentially the same point. If you are guilty of a crime against a neighbor/brother, then you deserve the same punishment. The sentence, however, is commuted to exile, and thanks to the kindness of a merciful deity, the exiel is not without some modest mitigation of its harsh conditions.” Similarly, the story of the flood is about the Lord’s rescue of a small remnant from the great judgment, a message that would be relevant and comforting to exiles. That this linkage of beginning and end is not accidental is shown in a couple of ways: First, Israel’s history begins and ends with Babylon (Gen 11; 2 Kings 25); and “The use of the word ‘Chaldeans’ (Hebrew KASDIM), which in the Primary History is restricted to Genesis and 2 Kings (Genesis 11:28, 31; 2 Kings 24:2, 25:4 passim ), reinforces the view that the opening and closing are carefully fitten together to reveal the end from the beginning, and ot compel the thoughtful reader to acknowledge that the seeds were planted at the beginning and fruits were revealed at the end.”

4) Freedman’s suggestion that the Primary History is structured by the 10 Words is strained, but intriguing. The main argument is that the history shows that Israel systematically violated all the basic stipulations of the covenant, and that was the reason for her eventual exile.

5) Freedman comments on the oddly weighted chronological organization of Kings (and of the entire Primary History): “The countdown of the Ten Commandments described in the first lecture brings us to the halfway point in the Book of Kings [the sin is Ahab’s seizure of Naboth’s vineyard] . . . ; at this point the story is almost complete, leaving somewhat less than 10 percent of the narrative yet to be told. Nevertheless, the period remaining covers more than 250 years. So the narrative moves quite rapidly and laconically from this point on. In fact, the first half of 2 Kings is taken up with the violent rebellion generated by Elijah and Elisha, the prophets who led the opposition to the House of Omri (and Ahab), which was carried out by the general of the armies, Jehu. The latter put an end to the dynasty of Omri and Ahab and made himself king instead. It is not until the reign of the third successor of Jehu, his great-grandson Jeroboam (II), that the Latter prophets come into the picture (2 Kings 14ff) early in the eighth century B.C.E. Only a quarter of the ninth and last book of the Primary History remains when the juncture with the Latter Prophets is reached, although almost two centuries of Israelite and Judahite history remain to be covered.”