Najman Hindy. Past Renewals: Interpretative Authority, Renewed Revelation, and the Quest for Perfection in Jewish Antiquity

Brill, 2010. - 292 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 53)In her highly regarded book, Seconding Sinai (JSJSup 77; Leiden: Brill, 2003), Hindy Najman develops a new conception of the connection between interpretation and text-production in Second Temple Jewish literature. Scholars have long been aware that much of this literature
is not only interpretively intertwined with earlier traditions, but also pseudepigraphic, i.e., presenting itself as the work of figures from the
past. But how to conceptualize this fact, without anachronistically treating pseudepigraphic works as forgeries, has long been a matter of
scholarly dispute. Najman proposes that in such cases Second Temple writers are claiming interpretive authority for their works by employing a “discourse tied to a founder.” More narrowly, she employs the notion of “Mosaic Discourse” to make sense of a range of texts, from Deuteronomy to Jubilees, all of which invoke Moses as a pseudepigraphic figure and as an authority for interpretations of Mosaic Law
and tradition.
The proposal is rich with implications, not only for these texts, but also for others that may be ascribed to other discourses tied to founders
such as David, Solomon and Ezra. It also marks a new phase in the interpretive turn taken in the last two decades of biblical and Second Temple scholarship. If Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), showed that biblical texts had an inner, interpretive life, and James Kugel, In Potiphar’s House (San Francisco, Calif.: Harper, 1990) and Traditions of the Bible (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), showed that this life flourished among the ancient interpreters of biblical texts, then Najman has shown how the interpretive life of biblical traditions gave rise to pseudepigraphic texts with specific characteristics