The story of Massah-Meribah is a pluriform tradition within the Hebrew Bible. Part One of this book uses redaction analysis to assess diachronically the six reminiscences of this tradition within Deuteronomy (Deut 6: 16; 8: 15; 9: 22; 32: 13, 52; 33: 8). The relative chronological relationship of these texts, and the tradition components they preserve, reveals a framework of five formative stages of this story's tradition-history from the perspective of the tradents responsible for the production of Deuteronomy. Part Two is a redactional study of the tradition's narratives in Exod 17: 1-7 and Num 20: 1-13. Special attention is devoted to the texts that anchor the Massah-Meribah narratives into the Pentateuch. In the end, Part Two not only corroborates the framework detected in Deuteronomy for the formative stages of the Massah-Meribah tradition, but it also carries broad implications for the formation of the Pentateuch in general and the Wilderness Narrative in particular.
Frequently asked questions
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access Mirages in the Desert by Roy E. Garton in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Teología y religión & Referencia bíblica. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Few traditions are so prevalent in the Hebrew Bible, and yet have garnered so little direct scholarly attention, as that of the divine provision of water from a rock during ancient Israel’s desert sojourn. The narrative forms of this tradition occur in Exod 17:1–7 and Num 20:1–13, with the former set at Massah and Meribah and the latter at the waters of Meribah. Beyond these two narratives, numerous texts within the Hebrew Bible explicitly evoke the Massah-Meribah tradition (M-Mt)3: Num 20:24; 27:12–14; Deut 6:16; 9:22; 32:51; 33:8; Ezek 47:19; 48:28; Ps 81:8, 17; 95:8–11; 106:32.4 As well, allusions to this tradition occur in many other biblical texts: Num 33:14–15; Deut 8:15; 32:13; Isa 48:21; Ps 78:15– 16, 20; 105:41; 114:8; Neh 9:15, 20. Finally, there is evidence of intertextual echoes in Isa 7:10 –14; 43:20; Jer 14:1–12, 19–22; and Ezek 16:13, 19 (cf. Deut 32:13).5 Together, these texts show the power of the M-Mt within the collective, imaginative memories of ancient Israel, the force of which is detectable not only in the Pentateuch, but in the Prophets and Writings as well.
The challenges of reconstructing the stages of the M-Mt’s tradition-historical development are formidable, three of which merit preliminary consideration. First, unlike the widely attested exodus tradition,6 it is clear that the M-Mt did not achieve consistent formulation prior to, or even immediately after, its codifications. Instead, the M-Mt continued to be a “living” tradition, the imaginative reflections and appropriations of which extend well beyond the confines of the Hebrew Bible.7 The fact that the M-Mt continued to be malleable after its codifications leads one to expect a certain level of diversity within the Hebrew Bible itself. Even so, the pluriformity of the M-Mt within the Hebrew Bible is staggering (cf. §1.2).
A second challenge to reconstructing the developments of the M-Mt is a logical outgrowth of the first challenge: namely, the question of where to begin. The last three decades have witnessed the erosion (if not collapse) of the classic historical-critical foundations upon which one could reconstruct the preliterary and literary developments of the Pentateuch and its traditions. Indeed, left in the wake of the revisionist work of the last thirty-five years is a foundational void, one which diachronic scholars must carefully and modestly negotiate if progress is to be made in uncovering the complicated prehistory of the biblical text.6 No longer can the tradition historian afford to presume the validity of source critical reconstructions, the primacy of etiology, or evolutionary growth models. Granted, a number of studies have engaged the M-Mt to limited extents from other vantage points, such as tradition blocks or form-critical patterns. Yet for various reasons, none have successfully accounted for the diversity of the M-Mt in the biblical texts themselves. Toward this end, it is necessary to survey past research on the M-Mt, with particular attention paid to the methodological frameworks so far employed toward explicating its developments (cf. §1.3).
A third challenge meriting preliminary concern is the issue of defining this study’s method (cf. §1.4). Among the approaches of critical biblical inquiry, tradition-history remains notoriously difficult to define procedurally on account of what Douglas Knight calls the “the multiplicity of the phenomenon.”9 As I have summarized elsewhere, by this turn of phrase, he means that “tradents can pass down practically any inheritable datum (traditum), whether oral or written, through an array of techniques that constitute the traditioning process (traditio).”10 Such a dynamic process at least partly explains why no consensus has emerged regarding the parameters of tradition history’s scope and method.11 Is the subject of investigation oral or literary in nature, or both? On the one hand, if oral, does it pertain only to the oral prehistory of a specific literary work (Überlieferungsgeschichte), or should it concern itself more broadly with the evolution of the ideas, motifs, or themes within a tradition (Traditionsgeschichte)?12 As well, one ought to question whether these two methods of inquiry are as mutually exclusive as formative practitioners have made them out to be.13 On the other hand, if one’s study extends into the literary stages, at what stage of literary production and development does one transition from the concerns of tradition history to those of another discipline? This last question then raises the issue of tradition history’s relationship to other critical methods. Should it be one characterized by sharp distinctives apart from the other methods, or should one expect a certain level of overlap?
The present study is not concerned with resolving these issues, so there is no attempt to do so. Rather, the challenge at hand merely requires the limning of a tradition historical approach that, despite this lack of methodological uniformity in the field, is nevertheless both transparent and capable of consistent application, and yet is sufficiently flexible to account for the diversity of the M-Mt itself. It is to the matter of this immense diversity that this study now turns.
1.2The Diversity of the Tradition in the Hebrew Bible
Just within the Hebrew Bible, the iterations of the M-Mt demonstrate a startling diversity. The narratives in Exodus 17 and Numbers 20, though deriving from the same oral tradition, have had separate, yet at times intertwined literary developments, the results of which have come to embody the precedent failures of both ancient Israel and her leaders respectively. In Exod 17:1– 7, the people use the absence/provision of water as a divining rod determining Yahweh’s absence/ presence among them; in Num 20:1–13, however, the tradition has evolved to explain why Moses and Aaron were forbidden to enter the Promised Land (cf. Num 20:24; 27:12– 14; Deut 32:51). One can see further diversity in the different geographical locations associated with these narratives. The Exodus narrative not only has the dual etiologies of Massah and Meribah, but is also set at Rephidim near the wilderness of
(Exod 17:1; cf. Num 33:14) and is somehow proximate to Horeb (Exod 17:6). The Numbers narrative, however, has the single etiology of Meribah situated at Kadesh within the wilderness o f
(Num 20:1; cf. 33:36).
The six reminiscences of this tradition within Deuteronomy demonstrate even greater diversity. In Deut 6:16, the people’s testing Yahweh at Massah is the archetypal failure of the wilderness generation; while in Deut 8:15–16, it is Yahweh who tested the people, leading them into the wilderness without water, and slaking their thirst with water from the flinty rock
The location of Massah within ancient Israel’s wilderness sojourn becomes an issue in Deut 9:22, Deuteronomy’s third remembrance of the M-Mt. Here, Massah appears in a historical recitation that spans from the exodus out of Egypt to the failed initial entry into the land (Deut 9:7–23). Along the way, the failure at Massah occurs after the Horeb event, and between two similar provocations that occurred at Taberah and then at Kibroth-hattaavah. The narratives that correspond to these additional provocations are in Numbers 11, where the story of Massah is noticeably missing. The fourth instance in Deuteronomy lies couched within the Song of Moses (Deut 32:1–43). Here the bard portrays Yahweh as the divine
(32:4, 15, 18, 30, 31), who not only found and guided his peopl...
Table of contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Chapter One: Introduction
Part I Deuteronomy as the Foundation
Part II Beyond Deuteronomy: The M-Mt in the Remainder of the Pentateuch
