Journal of Biblical Literature - Society of Biblical Literature

354 Journal of Biblical Literature
Al-Rawi, “Tablets from the Sippar Library VI. Atra-has,” Iraq 58 [1996]: 147–90); and a
reedition of the Mari letters relating to prophecy and other mantic activities (J.-M.
Durand and D. Charpin, Archives epistolaires de Mari I/1[1–2] [ARM 26; Paris: Editions
Recherche sur les civilisations, 1988]). The last decade has also been marked by a
revolutionary sea-change in the study of the Bible and ancient Israel that, in its most
extreme expression, would uproot the writings of the Bible from the Late Bronze and
Iron Age and replant them in the late Persian and even early Hellenistic periods. One
might expect such developments to make any reproduction of articles produced over a
full half century sorely out of date, and one certainly regrets that Moran is no longer
with us to consider the new sources and scholarly perspectives and integrate them into
his writings. All this notwithstanding, Moran’s works, based on sound philology, sensitive
reading, and a regard for theology and ideas not bound by historical circumstances,
stand the test of time retaining their vitality and validity.
Although Professor Moran was fully at home in both biblical and Mesopotamian
literature and qualified like few others to draw comparisons, he respects the cultural and
conceptual autonomy of the two civilizations. Most of the articles are pertinent to biblical
studies, but the relevance is not always investigated explicitly (the major survey of
prophecy in the Mari letters is silent about biblical prophecy), allowing the Mesopotamian
texts to speak for themselves out of their original contexts and leaving the biblical
scholar to apply them independently according to his or her own inclinations.
The readers of JBL are indebted to Ronald S. Hendel for producing this gem of a
monument to an outstanding scholar, humanist (and Celtics fan), and hope for sequels
containing Professor Moran’s remaining studies.
Victor Avigdor Hurowitz
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel 84105
Tobit, by Joseph A. Fitzmyer. Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature. Berlin: de
Gruyter, 2003. Pp. xviii + 374. $88.00 (cloth). ISBN 3110175746.
The book of Tobit is challenging in a variety of ways. The situation of the transmission
of the text is difficult; several text forms in different languages are extant. The genre
is not easy to determine, and the theological content offers various aspects ranging from
ethics to human images of God, from the theology of prayer to eschatological motifs.
Hence it is appropriate to approach this book repeatedly from divergent perspectives.
Fitzmyer’s commentary is a very important contribution to knowledge about and
interpretation of the book of Tobit. Its point of departure, its strength, and its focus can
be seen from the first sentence of the preface: “A modern commentary on the Book of
Tobit must take on a different shape in view of the discovery of the fragmentary Aramaic
and Hebrew texts of it among the Dead Sea Scrolls” (p. v). Indeed, the manuscript evidence
is the focus of a large part of the introduction (pp. 3–17) and determines the layout
and design of the commentary.
The introduction confronts the reader with the unusually complicated manuscript
transmission of the story of Tobit. This is salutary for modern readers of Bible translations,
since every translation smooths the underlying text and at times might give the
wrong impression that there was one clear text from the ancient times up to our era.