Revelation restored : divine writ and critical responses /

Writing with an unsurpassed command of the full span of rabbinic sources, Halivni (Columbia Univ.) has produced a tremendously important book, confronting the "maculation" of Scripture, those blemishes that have accrued to the revealed text. Combining critical and traditionalist approaches, he investigates his subject with uncommon clarity. In one tack, he rescribes the process of canonization, in which he has assigned Ezra the central role, as paradoxically preserving those textual imperfections that had come under scribal suspicion. Yet moving into a theological register, Halivni also posits that such imperfections result not from divine error but because Israel sinned, and he contends that Sinaitic revelation is effectively restored by tradition. Accordingly, scriptural maculation is not overcome by emending the written text, but rather by extending it through the interpretive agencies of the oral law. Extending his own reading beyond historical reconstruction to postempiricist midrash, Halivni attempts, in ways similar to Michael Fishbane's, to intellectually retrieve the notion of a sacred text. As a sustained meditation on scripture and tradition, this book should be read with great profit by anyone, Jew or gentile, interested in critically engaging the Bible and its exegesis. Upper-division undergraduate; graduate; faculty. G. Spinner Tulane University