Sara Milstein: A (Brief) Literature Review

Introduction

Sara Milstein, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Studies in the Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada (see her UBC faculty profile here), is this year’s invited lecturer for the 2024 Samuel Iwry Lecture in Hebraic Studies at Johns Hopkins which will take place on the evening of October 28, 2024. She is a graduate of Bates College (B.A. in English), City College of New York (M.A. in Secondary Education in English) and New York University (Ph.D. in Hebrew and Judaic Studies). In preparation for her visit, and since I am this year’s Iwry Fellow for the JHU Department of Near Eastern Studies, I spent some time reviewing a portion of her academic work. Specifically, I reviewed her three books, which I summarize below: The Buried Foundation of the Gilgamesh Epic: The Akkadian Huwawa Narrative (2010; co-authored with Daniel Fleming), Tracking the Master Scribe: Revision through Introduction in Biblical and Mesopotamian Literature (2016), and Making a Case: The Practical Roots of Biblical Law (2021).

Background on the JHU Iwry Lectureship

Samuel Iwry (1910-2004) was a student of William Foxwell Albright and later a distinguished professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins, as well as a professor and dean of the Baltimore Hebrew College. A direct descendant of the famous Israel ben Eliezer (aka Baal Shem Tov), the founder of Hasidic Judaism, Iwry was born in Bialystok, Poland. After graduating from Warsaw University’s Higher Institute for Judaic Studies in 1937, Iwry fled Poland due to the Nazi invasion in 1939. He fled to Lithuania, then Japan and ultimately Shanghai, China where he was captured by Japanese forces and tortured. After the war, Iwry immigrated to Baltimore where he spent the remainder of his life until his death at 93 years old. Along with Albright, he helped to authenticate the Dead Sea Scrolls on paleographic and linguistic grounds. The obituary and notice of Iwry’s death was published by the New York Times, Washington Post, Haaretz, and Biblical Archaeology Review, as well as the local JHU Gazette. The main source of information about his life, however, is his autobiography titled To Wear the Dust of War: From Bialystok to Shanghai to the Promised Land, an Oral History (see here and here). See also his festschrift, Biblical and Related Studies Presented to Samuel Iwry, edited by Ann Kort and Scott Morschauser (1985).

The Iwry Lecture was endowed by the Blum family which has been held for nearly 40 years (since 1986). The Blum family also endowed the Blum-Iwry Professorship of Near Eastern Studies which is currently held by Prof. Theodore J. Lewis. Although I don’t have the complete list of previous Iwry lecturers, the 2004 lecturer was apparently Hugh Williamson, then the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford University (see here). More recently, from what I can deduce by scouring the internet, the guest lecturers have been Elaine James (2023), Virginia Herrmann (2022), Esther Hamori (2019), William Schneidewind (2016), Jo Ann Hackett (2015), Alan Millard (2011), Daniel Fleming (2010), Gary Knoppers (2009), Martti Nissinen (2008), Jodi Magness (2006), and Joseph Fitzmyer (1989) {n.b., any omissions and gaps in recent years are not intentional, simply a matter of what information is freely available by searching for the past Iwry lectures online.}

Making a Case (2021)

In her most recent book, Milstein challenges traditional, often overly simplistic, views about biblical law as representative of actual prescriptive legal content executed in ancient Israel. Instead, biblical law was shaped by the legal-pedagogical genre best known from ancient Mesopotamia. The “practical roots of biblical law,” as suggested in the book’s subtitle, are the pedagogical exercises such as “sample contracts (‘modal contracts’), fictional court cases, extracts from law collections, independent sequences of casuistic laws, and legal phrasebooks with series of contractual clauses” (pp. 15-16). Israelite scribes creatively repurposed ancient Near Eastern legal conventions for their own societal needs. One such example is what she calls “Hebrew Legal Fictions” (HLFs), all of which originated as independent texts; these include Deut 19:4-6; 21:15-17; 22:13-19; 24:1-4; etc. To take another example, Exod 21:18-22:16 is rooted in a different type of legal-pedagogical material: the scribal exercise on the theme of physical and property damages (see ch. 4). Ultimately, the thrust of the book situates biblical law in the pedagogical background of ancient scribal education, which provides fresh insights into how legal traditions were shaped by practical concerns.

Tracking the Master Scribe (2016)

Milstein’s 2016 book is based on her NYU dissertation under Daniel Fleming and contributes to the ongoing efforts in recent scholarship to understand scribalism and scribal practices in ancient Near Eastern literature. Milstein’s contribution comes by way of an exploration of what she calls “revision through introduction,” a technique wherein master scribes would revise a text of literature by adding something to the front (or on occasion, omitting something from the front). Revision through introduction, as she defines it, is the process of ancient Near Eastern scribes recasting their received material by adding new content to the front, and thus transforming the interpretation of the whole. Scribes edited and modified texts in different ways, one of the most important of which is revision through (re)introduction, whether the introduction came by way of repurposing existing material, appending a completely new introduction, or even removing an introduction to refocus the material. This type of scribal method is evident in both “hard evidence” (chapter two) as well as in at least four more complex cases from Mesopotamian and Hebrew/biblical literature (discussed in chapters three through six): the Myth of Adapa and the Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian and Akkadian literature, as well as Judges 9:1-25 and Judges 19 from the Hebrew Bible. Thus, Milstein advocates for the need to “work backward” (chapter seven) in order to properly understand the multiple voices and perspectives of the text.

The Buried Foundation of the Gilgamesh Epic (2010; co-authored with Daniel Fleming)

The third book to discuss is Milstein’s 2010 co-authored analysis of the Akkadian Huwawa narrative and its relationship to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Fleming and Milstein argue that the Sumerian Huwawa tale inspired an Akkadian tradition of at least two recensions, one of which radically recasts the character and plot of the Huwawa episode. At the heart of the issue was their observation that the so-called Penn and Yale tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh disagreed in narratological details about Huwawa. The authors write, “We propose that the Yale Tablet and the nine other Huwawa texts represent evidence of a once-independent tale that we call the ‘Akkadian Huwawa narrative.’ Rather than envision a primary creative act by a single epic poet, elaborated by countless imitators and copyists, we propose that there were at least two major acts of composition” (p. 5). The intermediate compositional state between the old Sumerian stories and the OB epic represented a period in which the Huwawa story of the narrative was translated and imagined as its own self-contained literary work. “This separate Huwawa story had its own author, with an authorial vision distinct from that of the longer epic” (p. 11). While the Yale tablet preserves the Huwawa narrative with minimal adjustments from earlier versions, the Penn tablet reflects the epic scribe’s significant reimaging of the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu as a heroic and fated partnership. “Enkidu had to undergo a major transformation. Where he had been a hero among herdsmen, expert in the ways of the steppe, Enkidu was now recast as a wild man with tremendous strength, so that he could better serve as the king’s perfect match. By creating and attaching an extensive new introduction to the front of his received story, the epic author managed to transform its reception without eliminating the distinct vision of the older tale” (p. 12). The remainder of the book goes on to tease out these details, including competing portraits of Enkidu in the Yale and Penn tablets (chapter two), reconstructing the bounds of the Akkadian Huwawa narrative (chapter three), major innovations in the Akkadian Huwawa tale (chapter four), reshaping the story in the Penn version (chapter five), and translating afresh the evidence from the early second millennium (appendices). Ultimately, this study contributes to understanding how ancient literary traditions evolved and sheds light on the scribal practices that shaped the history of the Gilgamesh epic as we know it today.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I intended to read a few of Milstein’s articles as well, but haven’t gotten around to them just yet. I’m primarily interested in her work on Mesopotamian literature as well as the book of Judges. In particular, the next few articles/chapters I plan to read by her include “The Role of Legal Texts in Scribal Education: Implications for Biblical Law” (2022); “Teaching with a Dose of Humor in the Mesopotamian Unica” (2022); “Saul the Levite and His Concubine: The ‘Allusive’ Quality of Judges 19” (2016); “The Origins of Adapa” (2015); and “The Magic of Adapa” (2015). I’ll try to get to them before her visit on Monday. I’m excited for her lecture and thankful to my department for choosing me as this year’s Samuel Iwry Fellow.

By the way, here’s the abstract of her talk, titled “From qin’â to ‘Jealousy’: The Complex History of a Hebrew Word”: “Numbers 5 details an elaborate ritual for a woman whose husband has accused her of infidelity but lacks proof. In such a case, if a husband develops a “state of qinʾâ,” he is to bring his wife to the priest, along with a “qenāʾōt-offering.” Translators consistently render the qanaʾ-terms in this text (and elsewhere) in terms of jealousy: so, the man becomes ‘jealous’ of his wife and brings ‘a jealousy offering’ to the priest. When we examine qanaʾ-lexemes outside of this text, however, it becomes evident that the root does not denote the emotion of ‘jealousy.’ Not only do these findings shed fresh light on Numbers 5, but they also have major implications for the notion of Yahweh as a ‘jealous’ god.”

About The Author

Matthew Saunders

Matthew Saunders is a PhD student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He researches the languages and literatures of the ancient Near East, especially Aramaic Studies, Ugaritic Studies, and Comparative Semitics.

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