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Law, Legend, and Incest in the Bible: Leviticus 18-20 - Review

Cross Currents, Winter, 1998 by Gail Corringtron Streete

Calum M. Carmichael. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997. 209pp. $35.00 (cloth)

Carmichael, a professor of comparative literature at Cornell University, has an admirable objective, to provide a single thesis that will explain all the "puzzles" of the bewildering complexity of laws in the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch (15), without resort to the traditional forms of biblical criticism, particularly source criticism, which he labels "conventional" and "rather depressing" (9). Disappointingly, Carmichael's latest work is filled with the kind of obfuscation that makes all other attempts to explain the "chaotic placement" of the biblical laws on incest appear translucent by comparison.

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Carmichael's thesis, following those of Malcolm Clark and Meir Malul, is that the Levitical rules against incest are, even more than other biblical rules, "a purely ideal literary construct without institutional realization" (15). Proof of this bold claim involves Carmichael in some inventive maneuvers, themselves complex and often contradictory.

One of the more bizarre examples is his discussion of the rules against intercourse with an aunt, mother's or father's sister, in Leviticus 18:12 and 13. According to Carmichael, these rather straightforward prohibitions are actually oblique references to the ancestral narratives of Sarah, Isaac, and Moses. The lawgiver here is not thinking about aunts at all, apparently, but alluding to the story in Genesis 18:1-15, God's promise that the elderly Sarah will conceive, and beyond Genesis 18 to Isaac, the son of her old age. The allusion is to the extreme possibility of sex with (much) older women, given that Sarah becomes fertile in her old age, and bears a son (Isaac) who is also her nephew, since according to Genesis 20:13, Abraham and Sarah are half-brother and half-sister. Carmichael admits, "Although it was never a possibility that Isaac would have a sexual relationship with Sarah, the lawgiver nonetheless took up the issue of a nephew's relationship to an aunt" (28). Why then did the possibility occur to him? Because Moses' parents, Amram and Jochebed, are nephew and aunt (Exodus 6:20)! Lest the bewildered reader not see the connection, Carmichael provides one: this is the lawgiver's deft way of connecting the "generations of the Exodus" (Moses) to the "generations of Genesis" (Isaac back to Abraham).

Such ingenious absurdities abound in Law, Legend and Incest, interspersed with some solid biblical scholarship. Few conversant with the history of ancient Israel or with the Pentateuch would find fault with Carmichael's assertion that many of the rules of Leviticus 18-20 concern the preservation, if not the creation, of ethnic identity, and that this concern "may point to the lawgiver's own social reality" as a member of a distinct, displaced minority living in a foreign land. But such an assertion undercuts another of Carmichael's tenets, that "there is no . . . easy correlation between institutions in the law codes and what may have happened in the history of ancient Israel" (191).

In the final analysis, the idea of a lawgiver setting up an elaborate system of laws that had no "real meaning" for the lawgiver's actual or even ideal society, but that served instead as highly complex literary allusions to ancestral legends, makes the Priestly lawgiver less an ancient scribe than an early Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot. It's an intriguing and ingenious theory, but one that has no ancient analogue. It taxes the patience, as well as the credulity, of the reader, even one who slogs through the web of circular arguments and complex back-references. If, as Carmichael asserts with good reason, the biblical and other ancient law codes look "different" to us because of the circumstances of their formation, surely there are explanations far less involved than the fictive "didactic" law codes he posits. This is especially perplexing because of his claim to have picked up "so precisely" the factors that created the rules of Leviticus and to have worked out "exactly" what motivated their order and construction. In so doing, he has created a structure so complicated that it must be bent, twisted, and at times even mangled in order to achieve any relationship, even a tangential one, to biblical law and to biblical narrative.

GAIL CORRINGTON STREETE

Law, Legend, and Incest in the Bible: Leviticus 18-20 - Review

Cross Currents, Winter, 1998 by Gail Corringtron Streete

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