247Chapter 14
Concepts of Scripture in Moshe Greenberg
Marc Zvi Brettler
Introduction
Moshe Greenberg was born on July 10, 1928, in Philadelphia to Rabbi Si-
mon and Betty (Davis) Greenberg.1 His parents were observant Jews who
spoke Hebrew to their children, and he received private tutoring in Jewish
texts in the early mornings, before attending public school. His father was
the rabbi of a prominent Conservative synagogue, served as vice chancel-
lor of the Jewish Th eological Seminary, and was active in some progres-
sive social causes. Greenberg studied as an undergraduate and completed
his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. Greenberg’s dissertation, com-
pleted in 1954 and published one year later, was on the H
̆
ab/piru, an ancient
Near Eastern group connected by some scholars to the Hebrews. It was an
Assyriological dissertation, which dealt with the possible etymological sig-
nifi cance of this term in relation to the ancient Hebrews in only six pages.
In 1954, the same year he completed his Ph.D., Greenberg received rabbinic
ordination at the Jewish Th eological Seminary.
Greenberg’s adviser at the University of Pennsylvania was Ephraim
Avigdor Speiser,2 a master linguist, known for his work in Hebrew, Ak-
kadian, and Hurrian languages and texts. Speiser believed that the He-
brew Bible was “the capstone” product of ancient Near Eastern civiliza-
tion, a notion expressed in his Anchor Bible Genesis commentary in 1964.3
Th ese ideas are refl ected in Greenberg’s writings. Greenberg likewise fol-
lowed his teacher in “integrat[ing] philological details into larger con-
ceptual wholes” and in an interest in the “enduring impact” of the ideas
of antiquity. A picture of Speiser hangs in Greenberg’s Jerusalem study.4
Adjacent to that photo is a picture of Yehezkel Kaufmann, the towering