Vernacular Revelation

These are the lines along which I am planning my book, which is mostly done.

In the Renaissance, the translation of the Bible from the sacred Latin into the common tongues of the day was politically explosive: divine revelation now spoke directly to the people. Vernacular Revelation will argue that this is how the Hebrew Bible itself was created, as the first vernacular literature designed for wide distribution. Thousands of years before the first national languages were written down in Europe, a common language was forged by Israelite scribes in order to create a new audience—the people of Israel. This book expands on the past 20 years of research in anthropology, political science and history to show the invention of Hebrew language and literature not as a socially constructed fiction but as a cultural achievement that produced new political possibilities.

Vernacular Revelation attempts to rethink the Bible in light of recent findings in the history of writing. Discoveries in the 1980’s and 90’s demonstrated the extreme antiquity of the alphabet and the fact that there was not originally just one alphabet, but multiple competing alphabetic systems. This means that the use of the Hebrew alphabet was a deliberate and meaningful choice. Hebrew did more than just transmit information: it was a vehicle of political symbolism and self-representation. Old and sometimes bitter debates over whether the Bible is history or ideology can give way to productive new ones over the relationship between the Bible’s written form and its political power.

Vernacular Revelation suggests new avenues for Biblical scholarship, arguing for the need to move beyond modern scholarly ambitions of “seeing through” the Bible’s conditions of production. 19th and 20th-century Biblical philology focused on reconstructing the conjectural sources behind the text, but resulted in a stalemate since the sources are neither preserved to us nor provable. I wish to find a way past that stalemate: while building on the most solid results of source criticism, the book will argue that philology is most reliable, and illuminating, when it works from actual contemporary documents. By comparing Biblical documents with related ancient texts in Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Babylonian, this book will document distinct ways in which Hebrew was a powerfully self-conscious political language. It was the first successful example of a new project: a local, culturally specific form of writing, opposed to the placeless, universal lingua franca of Babylonian cuneiform.

The book will explore the enduring political stakes of Biblical writing. Texts in Hebrew assumed, and promoted, a source of power previously unknown in written literature: “the people” as the protagonist of religion and politics. The Bible created an audience that could read about itself in its own language. By documenting how this new readership was produced, the book hopes to exemplify how philology can address vital new questions asked by scholars of history and anthropology.