Benno Jacob - Biblical Studies

Biblical Studies

Benno Jacob was a scholarly liberal rabbi (with a University degree in Semitics) in Germany until World War II. Before leaving Germany, he produced a monumental commentary on Genesis. Recently, a German edition of his commentary on Exodus has been published. Generally, Jacob is linked with Umberto Cassuto as one of the great twentieth-century opponents of the Documentary Hypothesis.

Jacob was not a fundamentalist and did not believe in Mosaic authorship. His rejection of the Documentary Hypothesis was based on his sense that the Pentateuch presents so much literary unity and spiritual harmony that a search for its "sources" could only be an exercise in futile hypothesis.

Melding a traditionalist (if not traditional) view of the Torah with a knowledge of Semitics and applying a Germanic thoroughness to his conviction that no word in the Torah is out of place, he produced two commentaries which attempt to explain nearly every nuance of every word in the Bible.

The programmatic statement in his 1916 book, Quellenscheiden und Exegese im Pentateuch, illustrates his concerns:

means of representation may be termed the semi-poetic or dichotomistic. It proceeds like poetry, but without its strict measure, employing instead paired thoughts, patterns of words and clauses and syntax, in doublets, parallels and contrasts; it is rooted, when all is said and done, in the Semitic, which grasps matters dichotomously. This manner of seeing, conceiving and representing dominates the Hebrew language and literature in its entirety, to its subtlest manifestations.