A New and Living Way: A Study of Leviticus as Rhetoric: A Multi-Disciplinary Critique of Moshe Kline’s Approach to the Reading and the Writing of the Book Hardcover – 28 Oct. 2021

This is a first-rate PhD thesis, recently awarded by the University of Chester (2021), in which Paul Hocking makes a convincing case for accepting Moshe Kline’s ground-breaking composition proposal for the literary structure of Leviticus. What is at stake here is a paradigm-shift in the study of Torah generally, and Leviticus specifically, that rivals in its implications the tectonic upheavals brought to the discipline by Mary Douglas.In, A New and Living Way: A Study of Leviticus as Rhetoric, Hocking focuses on the synchronic/internal literary/structural composition and suasive intent of Leviticus as a bounded book – as well as on the epistemological question of how we can know if Leviticus has any such structure and intent. Several literary compositional structures and purposes for Leviticus have been proposed by scholars since Milgrom. But can literary- or rhetorical-critical tools be deployed to assess their comparative plausibility?Hocking specifically focuses on a proposal for the compositional structure of Leviticus made by Hebrew scholar, Moshe Kline. Herein Hocking hopes to demonstrate how a suite of literary- or rhetorical-critical tools can be deployed to assess the plausibility of any given composition proposal – his case study here, though, being Kline’s compositional proposal (KCP). Of particular note is that Kline posits ‘a new paradigm of writing in certain ancient texts’, including the Torah as a whole, Leviticus in particular, and other ancient near eastern Semitic texts, such as the Mishnah. Kline’s new writing-paradigm posits that units of pericopes within a book such as Leviticus were composed – at least by the final redactors – not linearly, but in a two-dimensional ‘tabular’ manner within which there are certain symmetries and conceptual links both horizontally and vertically between units of pericopes, which become visible to interpreters once these are correctly arranged in tabular form.Crucially, what emerges from Kline’s approach is an additional ‘esoteric’ layer of textual meaning that, whilst not immediately obvious on a linear reading, was (according to Kline) engendered by normal and very deliberate ancient scribal compositional practices, yet to be appreciated by many scholars – and is therefore embedded in the textual horizon, and not merely an artefact of interpretative processes. This esoteric layer of textual meaning in the case of Leviticus has to do with the individual’s transformational journey ‘into’ and the community’s journey ‘out of’ the holy of holies in the tabernacle, with the central unit in Leviticus (and thus in the Torah as a whole), being focussed on the ark of the covenant. Such an understanding of the journey assumes the reader-hearer is enculturated or initiated—not actually participating in the ritual itself, but in the ‘scripturalized’ ritual. The journey is activated by reading or hearing the text of Leviticus, which relies ‘on ekphrasis and activating the power of the imagination.’ The outcome is ethical or moral transformation, making holy community a real possibility.Hocking argues that KCP solves many of the existing problems with other proposals for the composition of Leviticus offered by previous scholarship. Here, Hocking embeds Kline’s oeuvre within the scholarly context of proposals for the composition of Leviticus offered since 1990 - highlighting and detailing readings by Milgrom, Wenham, Hartley, Knohl, Sailhamer, Smith, Warning, Douglas, Luciani, Nihan, Zenger, Morales, and of course, his case study, Kline. This overview is essential reading for anybody studying Leviticus, and is helpfully illustrated with literature maps of proposed literary units.Hocking carefully distinguishes between what he calls traditional, modern, and postmodern definitions of rhetoric, before highlighting similarities and differences between Semitic, classical Greco-Roman and constitutive rhetorics. Considering rhetorical symmetry in the Hebrew Bible, Hocking focuses on parallelism, prose archetypes, alternation and inversion, and two-dimensional alternation of prose pericopes.Hocking advocates what he calls ‘triangulation’ when it comes to the deployment of various rhetorical-critical tools in combination as a way of minimizing cognitive-bias and of maximizing objective appraisals of compositional structure. If multiple critical models reinforce certain conclusions, then there is a greater likelihood of a degree of objectivity having been attained in the interpretative process or hermeneutical spiral.This is not at all to banish diachronic source-critical studies of ‘P’ (priestly) and ‘H’ (holiness code) sources – but it is to prioritize the compositional structure edited into literary being by the final redactor or redactors. And it is to allow emerging literary considerations and structures potentially to challenge compositional conclusions arising through diachronic approaches.Moving on to his multi-disciplinary critique of Kline’s compositional proposal, Hocking deploys eight critical models or angles-of-view of assessment: boundedness, genre, literary profiling using TAPJLA (Typology of Anonymous and Pseudepigraphic Jewish Literature from Antiquity), repetitions as markers of architecture, text linguistics, compositional literary analogies from antiquity, content-related literary analogies from antiquity, and palaeographic and archaeological considerations.Since Leviticus is arguably ‘bounded’ then an examination of Kline’s approach, which presupposes this, is warranted. Since Leviticus is a ‘narrativised ritual’ (Bibb) or micro-narrative analogous to a sanctuary journey, in and out of the tabernacle, but presented as instructive discourse or wisdom-law literature, and embedded within the Exodus macro-narrative, then KCP is affirmed. Similarly, KCP is consistent with literary profiling using TAPJLA, and is affirmed in its two-dimensional configuration by literary repetitions in the Units and across the book. KCP also manifests ‘cohesive and coherent lexical, syntactic and semantic relationships’, and helps us to see how a two-dimensionally structured Leviticus (and Torah) could give rise to similar structuring in the Mishnah. Crucially, ‘the Mishnah’s authors were aware of an ancient tradition of writing that has not generally been retained or observed by Jewish or non-Jewish interpreters.’ KCP’s projection of a tabernacle journey also squares with in-some-respects-similar, if not identical, transformative journeys adapted from Leviticus in ‘the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, Hebrews, Yoma and the Hekhalot literature’. Whilst there are no known (to the author) extant texts ‘laid out in actual tabulated form’, ‘secondary evidence’, ‘ancient scribal practices’, ‘architecture, sculpture and weaving’ suggest that KCP still needs to be taken seriously.Hocking also argues that KCP credibly sheds light on the suasive intent or purpose of Leviticus as being the transformation of Israel from being a slave-people in Egypt, or from being the returning exiles, into being a torah-based ‘holy nation fit for the land’. The enculturated/initiated hearer-readers would, through continual ‘deep reading, memorizing and study’ undertake a ‘sanctifying journey’ out of Egypt, into ‘divine nearness through imitatio dei (Lev 1–19), and on to become a holy nation, walking with YHWH in his land (Lev 19–27).’ Hocking concludes that ‘KCP has a plausible compositional history, that shows respect for all the proposed purposes for the book, the cultic-procedural, the ethical, the legal, the liturgical, the educational and the theological’.