254 M a r c Zvi Brettler
Defying Illegal Orders: Amasa, Abner, and Joab” was fi rst off ered at a gath-
ering marking the Vietnam Moratorium in New York. In an essay from a
1980 meeting of Peace Now, the Israeli organization set up in 1978 to urge
the Israeli government to remain engaged in the peace negotiations, he
notes that when he was in the States, he was forced to think about civil
rights and Vietnam issues. Greenberg, however, decided to devote more
time and energy to such social issues within Judaism and Israel, and it is to
that audience that most of his writing in the past thirty years is explicitly
addressed. Th is is especially so in his essay “Biblical Grounding of Human
Value,” which he published four times in three languages; there he notes to
an inclusive audience, “Of all the treasures of Judaism, there is scarcely one
that deserves more publicity in our time than this emphasis on the value
of a single human life.” Th us, he believes that his goal as a Jewish bibli-
cal interpreter involves “systematic search for its ‘truth,’ in the universal-
human sense as well as the particularistically Jewish.” In fact, it is oft en
unclear whether Greenberg, in off ering particular value judgments in his
Hebrew essays, is speaking only to a Jewish-Israeli audience or to a gen-
eral audience. Such is the case, for example, when he addressed students
at Ben-Gurion University in 1991 and talked about biblical studies and the
students’ quest for “self-understanding” and the importance of addressing
“the inner-life of students,” observations that are equally valid for univer-
sity students outside of Israel.31
Greenberg quotes from a large number of sources of wisdom — Jewish
and non-Jewish, ancient, medieval, and modern. Th e Bible is not his only
source for existential values. It is an important source, and following both
Speiser and Kaufmann, it is superior to its ancient Near Eastern sources.
Th is may be seen in the laws of the Bible, especially those concerning capi-
tal punishment; in biblical prayer, which according to Greenberg “is the
blissful experience of God that motivates praise, not the anxiety of need
[found in ancient Near Eastern prayers]”; and in various short prophetic
statements about justice.32 For Greenberg, like his mentors, Israelite soci-
ety is the pinnacle of the ancient Near East.33
A Hierarchy of Values
Th is claim that we must fi nd these “existential values” is problematic: Given
that the Bible is not a single text but is an anthology written by various au-
thors over a millennium and contains a wide variety of values, to which