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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2010
To sin or transgress, according to one dictionary definition, is to go beyond a limit, to cross what is supposed to be a clear border. In this sense, one can say that Gary Anderson has succeeded in writing a very sinful book. Like Sennacherib as the rabbis describe him, Anderson is 
(he “erases boundaries between nations”)—only I use this phrase to describe Anderson in rather a more positive sense than the rabbis intended it when they applied it to the Assyrian emperor.2 Throughout this book we are discussing, Anderson crosses boundaries between academic disciplines: biblical criticisms that study the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Qumranic scholarship, rabbinics, patristics, the study of both medieval Catholic and early Protestant theology. He crosses boundaries within some of these fields, as well: for example, by attending to modern Israeli biblical scholarship in a way that is, alas, all too rare among non-Jewish scholars in North America and Europe; or by showing scholars of rabbinics what they can learn from the study of the New Testament, especially when that study is conscious of its roots in medieval and early modern theology. Most importantly, Anderson tears down artificial barriers that separate historical, philological, descriptive scholarship on the one side from constructive theology and inter-religious dialogue on the other.
2 See Tanḥ., Meṣoraʽ-4; cf. m. Yad. 4.4, t. Qidd. 5:6, b. Ber. 28a, and b. Yoma 54a.
3 Solomon Schechter, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology (New York: Macmillan Co., 1909; 1961; repr., Aspects of Rabbinic Theology (Woodstock, Vt., Jewish Lights Publishing, 1993).
4 George Foot Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, the Age of the Tannaim (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927–1930).
5 One might have phrased this more precisely, “Take the memory of Abraham's only-begotten son and give it on your behalf.”
6 Or, according to some rabbinic and medieval texts, an actual sacrifice; see, e.g., Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice: The Akedah (trans. Judah Goldin; New York: Behrman House, 1967), and Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) 193–99. If a recent proposal is correct, then these rabbis in fact recover the original form of the story: Tzemah Yoreh, The First Book of God (BZAW; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010) 65–70, argues that in the original E version of the narrative, Isaac was in fact killed, and his survival was a revision introduced by a J revision of the story.
7 See Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1955) 281–84. The midrashic motif to which Heschel refers is a common one; see Rabbi Elazar's remark on Exod 24:7 in b. Shabb.88a; the comment of R. Huna in the name of R. Aḥa in Lev. Rab.1.1 and in Midr. Tehillim to Psalm 103:20 and 104:1; Seforno to Exod 24:7, and further parallels and discussions in Menahem Kasher, Torah Shelemah (48 vols.; Jerusalem: Beit Torah Shelemah, 1979) 19:261–62 n. 59 [in Hebrew].
8 For further examples of the defense of what, with a nod to Solomon Schechter, we might call Catholic Israel against Protestant misrepresentations of both Judaism and Christianity, see pp. 231–32 nn. 41–42, as well as the “Christian critique of rabbinic religion” on pp. 105–7 discussed above.
9 Heschel, God in Search of Man. ch. 29.
10 Ibid., ch. 31
11 I borrow a phrase here from Harold Stern, “A. J. Heschel, Irenic Polemicist,” Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly45 (1983) 169–77.
12 Breaking down scholarly barriers of this sort represents a leitmotif in Anderson's work. It is central to Gary Anderson, The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), in which Anderson insists on constantly attending to four genres of interpretive work: commentary, retold Bible, art, and liturgical writings. In the same work, Anderson also points to the importance of correlating findings regarding the history of composition with those regarding the history of exegesis, though he does not pursue that question as thoroughly there as he does in Sin: A History.One might contrast Anderson's insistence on this correlation with James Kugel's thesis that these two areas of study must remain quite independent of each other; see James Kugel, How To Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (New York: Free Press, 2007) 681 and passim. For other examples of the attempt to correlate them, see my own work: Benjamin D. Sommer, “Revelation at Sinai in the Hebrew Bible and Jewish Theology,” JR79 (1999) 422–51; idem, “Reflecting on Moses: The Redaction of Numbers 11,” JBL118 (1999) 601–24; idem “The Source Critic and the Religious Interpreter,” Int60 (2006) 9–20; idem, “Dialogical Biblical Theology: A Jewish Approach to Reading Scripture Theologically,” in Biblical Theology: Introducing the Conversation (ed. Leo Perdue; Library of Biblical Theology; Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 2009) esp. 29–50.
13 The importance of this broad perspective, which attends to the history of both composition and reception and uses them in concert with each other, is another leitmotif in Anderson's work. See, e.g., Anderson, Genesis of Perfection, xv–xvi, where he furthermore points out how this broad perspective can help rescue scholars from the historicist reductionism so common among modern academic scholars of religion.
14 Isaiah Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History,” in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998) 436–98 (the essay was originally published in 1951).
15 Ibid., 436
16 Ibid.
17 See Claude J. Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) 165–66, esp. n. 2; Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998) 7, 173, 284–86.
18 Gary Anderson, Sacrifices and Offerings in Ancient Israel: Studies in Their Social and Political Importance (HSM; Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1987).
19 I quote here from Sin, 226 n. 22, where Anderson quotes from his 1992 article on sacrifice (“Sacrifice and Sacrificial Offerings: Old Testament,” in Anchor Bible Dictionary[6 vols.; New York: Doubleday, 1992] 5:870–86; citation from 872).
20 Anderson, “Sacrifice,” ABD, 872.
21 Anderson, Gary. The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001).
22 A similar argument has been proposed regarding the character Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost; see Geoffrey Hartman, “Milton's Counterplot,” English Literary History25 (1958) 1–12.
23 On the theme of the happy sin in Catholic thought and its deep roots in scripture, see Gary Anderson, “Necessarium Adae Peccatum: An Essay on Original Sin,” Pro Ecclesia 8 (1999) 319–27. esp. 329–36.
24 Sacrifices and Offerings in Ancient Israel.
25 The Genesis of Perfection.
26 Sin: A History.