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In the post-exilic period the curriculum in ancient Israel was transferred to the temple au-
thority following the cessation of the monarchy as a real political force. If social and po-
litical authority became the domain of the temple priests at this time, it is conceivable that
texts that were traditionally in the domain of the royal court would have come under the
control of the temple. In this view previously disparate textual collections were formed
into a national curriculum under the authority of the Jerusalem temple.


At the centre of this singularly authoritative scribal curriculum were Leviticus and Num-
bers, priestly literature which originally comprised cultic instructions that are themselves
still visible through the superscriptions that define their composite character.^1344 Such
texts would generally have been reserved for higher scribal circles, but were repackaged
in the late pre-exilic period with earlier education-enculturation texts such as cosmologi-
cal narratives, legal discourse, and poetic compositions. This occurred as part of the Deu-
teronomistic ideal of an encompassing curriculum that promoted education-enculturation
via its singularly authoritative text. This process, which proceeded with greater influence
on the part of the priestly class during the exilic period, in effect drew the priestly materi-
als out of the circles of the educated temple elites and into the wider scribal milieu. By
the time of the early post-exilic period the Mosaic Torah emerged as a conflation of
priestly and non-priestly parts, possibly a “compromise between remnants of royal groups
in early post-exilic Judah and the newly dominant priests.”^1345


(^1344) D.M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart (^) , 152-53.
(^1345) D.M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart, 169-71, and see also G. Boccaccini, Rabbinic Judaism,
44-54.

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