Richard Hayes proposes seven
criteria. The first, “availability”, is rephrased by Christopher Hays as asking
“was the proposed source of the echo available to the author and/or his
original readers?” As Christopher Hays has noted, this is a particularly important
question to raise about dependence of biblical texts on non-biblical ones. For
example, we can ask when and how the author of Proverbs 22-24 might have had
access to the Instruction of Amenemope. We could draw on evidence for Israelite
dependence on Egyptian scribal traditions through reference to Judean use of
Egyptian hieratic numeral notations and we might even note the possibility that
David’s scribe was referred to by the Egyptian word for scribe.
Conversely, one reason many scholars
have been less inclined to consider Greek literature as possible source texts
for the Bible is the presupposition, vigorously contested by some, that Greek
literature was not widely available to authors of Hebrew biblical texts, particularly
during earlier periods of the Bible’s composition. So also, there is much room
for debate, I believe, about whether the Babylonian exile, when Judeans were
living in relatively isolated communities in Babylon, is the most likely time
for encounter with Mesopotamian literary traditions, as some suppose. Or might
the late pre-exilic period of Neo-Assyrian domination have been a more likely
time when some Judean youths might have been exposed to the Assyrian
educational system and Mesopotamian literature, much as youths in some other Assyrian-dominated
areas were?
The third criterion, “recurrence
or clustering” is related to this question of availability (I address his
second criterion in the following paragraph). This third criterion asks: “[H]ow
often elsewhere does the author cite or allude to the same text.” For example,
the more one can build a case that different parts of Deuteronomy allude to the
Neo-Assyrian treaty tradition, the more one can conclude that the treaty tradition
was available to the author of those parts of Deuteronomy. And this, in turn,
can bolster arguments for the likelihood that Neo-Assyrian treaty traditions
influenced Deuteronomic laws and/or terminology even when evidence is slight and
subtle. The same also could be true for the Amenemope tradition. Although
scholars have focused most on potential echoes of Amenemope in Prov 22:17-23:11,
some have found echoes of Amenemope elsewhere in the Bible as well. Insofar as
these proposals are compelling they build a case that Amenemope, though a
relatively obscure Egyptian instruction, was available to some Judean authors,
and furthermore that such authors were inclined to adapt parts of it in writing
Judean wisdom.
Richard Hays’ second criterion is
one of volume: “How ‘loud’ is the echo; that is how explicit and overt is it?”
For Richard Hays, this meant looking in Paul’s letters for verbatim repetition of
words and syntactical patterns found in the Greek versions of the Old
Testament. Other scholars, such as Michael Fishbane, for example, have likewise
focused on verbal overlap, in his case searching for “multiple and sustained
lexical linkages between two texts.” As Christopher Hays noted, it often is far
more difficult to identify such specific lexical linkages between biblical and
non-biblical texts specially because most non-biblical texts are written in languages
other than Hebrew, some of which are distant from Hebrew linguistically. This
is not just a technical issue of Hebrew scribes needing to translate a given
non-biblical text into Hebrew. Rather, my own non-systematic survey of possible
cases of cross-linguistic borrowing in the Ancient Near East suggests that ancient
authors gave themselves even more freedom to adapt traditions across language
barriers than they did in adapting traditions in their own language.
Often they draw on foreign traditions
from memory. Thus, when using foreign texts, they typically accessed them in
their own memory, recalling their content (as translated in their mind)
rather than reproducing them in a word-for-word translation. Consequently, when
an Israelite author drew on a text written in a foreign language, such as
Amenemope (which is written in Egyptian), the output in Hebrew would be a vague
set of topical parallels, aside, perhaps from an occasional specific borrowing,
as in the case of the reference to 30 sayings in Prov 22:30. This stands in
contrast to inner-language borrowing. In these cases, a Hebrew author could,
when writing a new literary text, draw on Hebrew proverbs, psalms, and the like
that he had memorized verbatim. IN such cases, the new composition would
overlap the memorized one lexically, albeit with occasional exchanges of
semantically equivalent words/phrases (memory variannts).
And this does not account for the
diverse ways that biblical authors might have been exposed to non-biblical
texts, a question that returns us to the issue of availability. Not only would
such authors often have needed to have competence in the other language such as
Aramaic and Akkadian, but they may, in some cases, have been exposed to these
foreign language texts purely orally, as opposed to being able to read and
memorize them. This possibility of oral exposure (to foreign texts) has been
raised in particular in recent work by William Morrow. He explores modes by
which Judean scribes might have been exposed to Neo-Assyrian treaty traditions (in
Akkadian or Aramaic) through recitation of such traditions.
All this is not to suggest that Hebrew
biblical scholars therefore should ignore questions of volume in evaluation of
cases where a biblical text may be dependent on a non-biblical text or
tradition. After all, there is very little to support any case for genetic
dependence aside from places where a receptor text echoes themes, topic, and
even specific words and phrase of a possible source text. That said, however,
we must recognize that the search for such echoes in the Hebrew Bible can be
complicated by the linguistic gap, a gap that in turn probably prompted a
greater degree of creativity in adaptation of non-biblical, non-Hebrew source
texts than was characteristic of adaptations of Hebrew texts.
Finally, considerations of availability
dictate one final tweak to the criterion of volume when considering non-biblical
texts. It is not enough that a potential non-biblical source text thematically
or topically parallels a biblical receptor text. The volume of these potential
echoes of the non-biblical text should surpass that of potential inner-biblical
source texts. After all, if a biblical text has a close parallel within Hebrew
literature, we are generally on firmer ground in believing that a potential
Hebrew source text was available to our Hebrew author than in hypothesizing
multilingual dependence of that author on a distant scribal tradition. Perhaps
in some cases, we might be so sure of dating that we could rule out certain
potential biblical source texts because we know them to post-date our receptor
text. That said, as a specialist in history of Israelite literature, I think we
rarely have such surety in dating biblical texts. (David M. Carr, “Method in
Determining the Dependence of Biblical on Non-Biblical Texts,” in Ziony Zevit,
ed., Subtle Citation, Allusion, and Translation in the Hebrew Bible [Sheffield:
Equinox, 2017], 41-53, here, pp. 42-45)
