Concepts of Scripture in Moshe Greenberg 251Greenberg’s Biblical Text: Final Form versus Prehistory
Much of biblical scholarship is concerned with recovering the prehistory of
biblical texts — in understanding what sources have been combined to form
the current text, how texts have grown through additions over time, how
various “schools” have adapted and added to earlier documents. Greenberg
has some interest in the fi rst of these issues, especially in source criticism
of the Torah, but polemicizes against these other eff orts to understand a
work’s prehistory. His position has gained some traction in the scholarly
world, in part because of the development of the literary study of the Bible,
but it is not the majority position.
Greenberg is highly critical of scholars who rearrange prophetic units
based on their personal aesthetic of what sounds best. As early as 1958, he
attacked the important German scholar Georg Fohrer for off ering a “des-
perate solution” to the structure of Ezekiel and not considering the prob-
lem of making the redactor of the book into a person who “violently de-
stroyed” “an originally continuous and eminently sensible arrangement.”20
Th e main place where Greenberg shows some interest in what is some-
times called excavative methods21 is in Understanding Exodus, in which
he shows in a masterful fashion the composite nature of Exodus 1 – 11. His
main goal, however, is to understand “the present form of a given text.”
Although the text is composite, composed of sources, he is primarily in-
terested in “the inner coherence of the book’s elements,” which he believes
was created by what I call a strong redactor, who did not merely use a set
of simple principles and scissors and paste but “created a structure whose
design is his own.” Th is was a very innovative position in the late 1960s,
when the redactor was oft en seen as a hack. Instead, Greenberg’s redac-
tor, although he “did not venture to iron out inconsistencies,” engaged in
“skillful fusion,” exhibited “art,” and produced a work that “enrich[ed]”
his earlier sources. Studying this fi nal product is decisive since it “has had
a continuing, profound eff ect on its readers for thousands of years.” Th is
shows clear connections to the canonical approach, especially as practiced
by Brevard Childs.22
Greenberg’s redactor created a new book by combining sources, and the
meaning of the fi nal product is more important than that of its constituent
elements. In the case of Ezekiel, Greenberg does not believe that it is pos-
sible to fi nd an original book that was supplemented by a school of Ezekiel,
the predominant scholarly position when he was writing. Instead, in 1980,
Greenberg created the term “Holistic Interpretation” to refer to his method