Kugel, Night Vision

I finished Jacob's Ladder yesterday. Unfortunately, the book closed with a whimper, not a bang.

For me, the most interesting chapter is somewhere near the middle of the book, on how Levi became a priest. There are a tangle of midrashim around this, although I'm unclear how many made it into the Jewish tradition. (Clearly a couple did, since they're mentioned in Pirkei d'R. Eliezer). Kugel argues that there was a tradition that Levi himself was a priest, rather than just the Levite tribe, which became the priestly tribe at Sinai.

He recounts a tradition in which Jacob promises a tithe to God at Bethel, which he never explicitly fulfills in the course of Genesis. The midrashists solve this problem by having Jacob tithe one of his sons to God, and he chooses Levi (I'm jumping past the obvious "why Levi" question here). There are then a tangle of midrashim about when that happened, and Kugel uses them to date a couple of documents which are concerned with the Levite status, the book of Jubilees and the Aramaic Levite Document.

I think that, in the process, he brings up an interesting question about the polemical use of midrash. Clearly, the authors of these documents have a point of view about the Levites, and this shows in the midrashim they use. On the other hand, it's not so clear that they picked the midrashim cynically. If these stories were floating around in the zeitgeist, so to speak, the authors may well have picked them up, feeling that this story or that is correct, because it agrees with what they think is true. The author might then put a bit more of a gloss on the particular midrash to bring it line with his preconceived notions of truth, but more in the sense of "I know that this is hidden in the text, and I'm just bringing it out."

This discussion was also interesting to me, because I finally got around to doing a bit of reading on the Book of Jubilees, and fascinating it was. The author of the book (which is non-canonical) has a solar calendar system that he believes in, rather than the lunar one of the rabbis. Clearly, there was enough currency for this idea that the book was somewhat widespread. But it's so fundamentally at odds with current Jewish practice that it made me realize how much the rabbis winnowed out from then-current practice in creating modern Judaism (if the lunar calendar is up for grabs, then there must've been other large differences).

Unfortunately, the book then ends on a discussion of the Qumran scrolls, where Kugel does a lot of question-begging. There are so many blanks in the scrolls, and there's a lot of "I think the Qumran sect believed x, so the gap is best filled with y," then drawing conclusions about the sect from y.

I also finished Night Vision, but there isn't much to say about it, other than that it was very unsatisfying. I was going to post an analysis of how Levine badly mangles his idea of two serial killers, but the book's just not worth it.