Concepts of Scripture in Yehezkel Kaufmann 243Th e Hebrew Bible Reborn: From Holy Scripture to the Book of Books: A History of
Biblical Culture and the Battles over the Bible in Modern Judaism, trans. Chaya Naor
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007).
- Benjamin Sommer, Th e Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2. See also Chaim Potok, “Th e Mourn-
ers of Yehezkel Kaufmann,” Conservative Judaism 18, no. 2 (1964): 1; Moshe Green-
berg, “Kaufmann on the Bible: An Appreciation,” in Studies in the Bible and Jewish
Th ought (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 175; Jon Levenson, Th e
Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in
Biblical Studies (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), 44. - Only part of either work is available in English: Golah, vol. 1, chs. 7 – 9, trans-
lated by C. W. Efroymson as Christianity and Judaism: Two Covenants (Jerusa-
lem: Magnes, 1988); the fi rst three volumes of Toledot, abridged and translated by
Moshe Greenberg as Th e Religion of Israel: From Its Beginning to the Babylonian
Exile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); the fourth volume of Toledot,
translated by C. W. Efroymson as History of the Religion of Israel, vol. 4, From the
Babylonian Captivity to the End of Prophecy (New York: Ktav, 1977). - Kaufmann’s lifestyle and scholarship led his contemporaries to regard him
as a secular Jew. However, Kaufmann seems to have been profoundly religious in
his own way; see Zalman Shazar, “Yehezkel Kaufmann of Blessed Memory” (in He-
brew), Ha-Do’ar 43, no. 4 (1963): 59 – 61, esp. 61. - Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel, trans. J. Sutherland
Black and Allan Menzies (Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1885). For Kauf-
mann’s objection to Wellhausen’s seminal thesis, as well as his position on the dat-
ing of the so-called priestly source, see Baruch Schwartz’s chapter 12 in this volume.
See also Moshe Weinfeld, “Pentateuch,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1st ed., 13:231 – 62,
esp. 239 – 42. Kaufmann notes time and again in his Toledot that modern biblical
scholarship in general and Wellhausen’s work in particular are replete with Protes-
tant preconceptions, so much so that he refers to it as “Protestant biblical scholar-
ship.” On this, see Moshe Weinfeld, Th e Place of the Law in the Religion of Ancient
Israel (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2004), 3 – 74; Levenson, Th e Hebrew Bible. - As Sommer notes, one can consider much of the great, modern Jewish bib-
lical scholarship — i.e., the works that are consciously Jewish — as a dialogue with
Kaufmann; see Benjamin Sommer, “Dialogical Biblical Th eology: A Jewish Ap-
proach to Reading Scripture Th eologically,” in Biblical Th eology: Introducing the
Conversation, ed. Leo Perdue (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2009), 1 – 53, 265 – 85, esp.
266 – 67n. 11. On the reception of Kaufmann by American Jewry (especially in the
Conservative movement), see Ismar Schorsch, “Coming to Terms with Biblical
Criticism,” Conservative Judaism 57, no. 3 (2005): 3 – 22. - Kaufmann’s letter to his former teacher Joseph Klausner (1874 – 1958), as
quoted in Emanuel Green, “Universalism and Nationalism as Refl ected in the Writ-
ings of Yehezkel Kaufmann with Special Emphasis on the Biblical Period” (Ph.D.