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The Bible without theology: The theological tradition and alternatives to it
Robert A. Oden, Jr.
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987) 198 pp., $18.95
Twentieth-century biblical analysis has been governed by the interpretive principles of 19th-century European theology. This critical idea connects the five essays and epilogue that compose The Bible Without Theology, a sophisticated and insightful book concerning contemporary biblical study.
In his first chapter, Oden wears the hat of the intellectual historian. He traces the theological bent in biblical studies back to the German tradition of historiography. This may appear to be tough going and a far cry from the biblical world, but Oden is admirably direct about his enterprise. With both clarity and brevity, he guides the reader through the maze of 19th-century academe. Oden demonstrates that ancient Israel has traditionally been analyzed from the viewpoint of a 100-year-old European theological tradition. This essay may now be added to an earlier one by Jack Sasson, concerning American historiography.1 Together they place much of the standard and popular work of biblical scholarship into an historical context.
In the second chapter, Oden summarizes theories used by folklorists, anthropologists and biblical scholars in the study of myth. He sifts through these theories, designating some as outdated, preserving aspects of others and suggesting further testing of a few more. He is especially interested in the structural method of Levi-Strauss, and his careful outline and critique of structuralism is a highlight of this chapter. Oden is careful to point out that many theories concerning myth and the Bible were the product of the theological presuppositions discussed in chapter one. In short, this relatively brief essay on myth and the Bible is the equal of some book-length studies that are now years old.2
After these two preliminary chapters, the book concludes with three essays. Each is offered as an example of biblical study free of the particular theological presuppositions endemic to previous work. The first deals with the clothing of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:21. Oden compares this seemingly minor incident to similar incidents in the Mesopotamian stories of Adapa and Gilgamesh and refers to the classic anthropological work of Petr Bogatyrev, The Functions of Folk Costume in Moravian Slovakia,3 as well as to Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. He concludes that God’s gift of clothing to Adam and Eve does not represent God’s theological Grace or generosity so much as it represents an attempt to define what is human about the primeval couple. By clothing them, God is separating them from the realm of animals and setting them apart from the divine realm as well. Here, as in the other essays, Oden’s breadth of interest is combined with a careful analysis of the biblical world, its languages and cultures.
The remaining two essays present the Patriarchal Narratives and the problem of sacred prostitution in the light of recent anthropology and comparative religion. Oden deliberately places the biblical material in as wide a context as possible in an attempt to refute the theological notion that biblical religion is unique among human cultures.
All of the essays, and especially the final three, are pointed attempts at steering biblical studies in a new direction. After establishing where biblical studies has come from, Oden wants to press for new avenues of research that rely on humanistic and social-scientific disciplines outside the theological tradition. Each essay leads to more questions than it answers and directs the reader to innovative approaches to the Bible. This book is bursting with ideas and resources for further study. One hopes it will achieve the impact it strives so intelligently to make.
Bits, bytes and Biblical studies
John Hughes
(Grand rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1987) 750 pp., $30.95
John Hughes’s Bits, Bytes and Biblical Studies is the first of a new kind of Bible study tool: an encyclopedia of existing Bible-related computer topics. The book begins with an introduction to the computer’s design and function—a formidable introduction for the 009beginner, but the chapter does contain only, essential topics.
The second chapter deals with available word processors and related programs. Word processing is the most common use for almost any personal computer (PC in user’s jargon). The main problem for the biblical scholar is the need to type English interspersed with Greek and Hebrew. Various computer systems handle this problem in different ways. The Apple Macintosh4 is the easiest to use for multilingual word processing because the letter shapes (fonts) are installed in the operating system. Speaking from my own experience, I can type in Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Ugaritic, Phoenician and more than a dozen other languages on my Mac by pushing a couple of keys.5 On my IBM6 machines, this is much more difficult. Hughes’s second chapter is devoted mostly to the IBM-based word processors that try to address the problems of multilingual word processing, although the few programs for the Apple 2, 7 NEC, Kaypro, TRS 80, 8 etc., are also included. A couple of right-to-left word processors for the Macintosh are also listed. There are some really excellent programs available, and the book lists a nearly exhaustive collection. Hughes notes each program’s features and price and information about where to obtain it.
The next chapter describes 20 concordance and Bible text software packages. This chapter will be especially interesting to the Bible student or clergyman who uses bound concordances frequently. Such programs as GodSpeedTM9 for the IBM (which searches the entire Bible for a word or combination of words in less than three seconds) or The Perfect WordTM10 for the Macintosh are available for little more than the price of a good concordance. Without a computer, you might look up two different words and then cross reference to see where they occur together; an electric concordance, by comparison, can gather all the occurrences of any word or combination of words together in a file for word processing almost instantly. With such programs as GRAMCORD11 (for the Greek NT) and COMPU-BIBLE12 (for the Hebrew OT), I can find all the occurrences of various grammatical constructions in the Greek or Hebrew Bible. This saves me hundreds of hours of combing through pages of Greek or Hebrew text to find all of those constructions.
Chapter four, though not exhaustive, reviews most computer programs of interest to the Bible student, including some in 044another exciting category of PC use—Computer Aided Language Learning. Now the PC user can study paradigms and vocabulary, read passages and be tested in an enjoyable, self-paced environment.
The least-appreciated resources available to the computer-using community are discussed in chapter five: “On-line” services. By adding a device called a modem to a personal computer, the user has inexpensive phone access to libraries of information. Over 300 different databases are accessible through DIALOG (an electronic information service). The user can search for titles in any database from the Academic American Encyclopedia to the Zoological Record. I recently searched the Religion Index for bibliography related to a Syriac article I was researching and found 75 book, article and dissertation titles in less than three minutes. The total cost was $3.02—less than the price of the gas required for a trip to a research library where I would have spent hours finding the same information.
The modem can also put scholars in touch with one another. Recently I sent an “Electric letter” (known as E-Mail) to, a scholar in Israel. He happened to be sitting in front of his computer at the time. Within five minutes I received a reply to all my questions. He also had some questions. I wrote a reply and sent it back to him. We went back and forth about seven times in two hours. Since it takes about ten days for airmail to go to Israel, this exchange would have taken more than two months by mail. We could have used the telephone, but with a nine-hour time difference between us, it is hard to catch each other near the phone—and the cost is a dollar a minute. (Using Bitnet, an academic network, this E-Mail cost us nothing.)
Chapter six addresses the professional archaeologist. Since the science of archaeology deals with collecting and organizing data, the computer is ideally suited to this work. Large databases can be created, allowing the archaeologist to ask the computer complex questions. For example: “List all the animal figurines from this site that were found within two meters of incense burners.” Such a search of correlative data would take days using traditional filing methods; the computer reduces this time to milliseconds. Computer engineers are on the verge of being able to automate the laborious process of drawing each and every artifact discovered at a site. A device called a light pen can be pointed at a piece of pottery, and instantly a three-dimensional representation of the piece is produced in a data base. Although the chapter is only five pages long, it includes many helpful sources of information. Two such sources are the Newsletter of Computing Archaeology, c/o Sylvia W. Gaines, editor, Department of Anthropology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, tel.: (602) 965–7516, and Archaeological Computing Newsletter, c/o Department of Computing, North Staffordshire Polytechnic, Blackheath Lane, Stafford ST1 80AD, United Kingdom.
Chapter seven discusses databases of texts that can be read by computers. As a professional computer teacher and Bible scholar, I thought that I had a pretty good idea of what texts are available for computers, but I was overconfident. Hughes describes many projects—covering everything from Eblaite to Syriac—about which I was totally ignorant.
Because the world of computer hardware and software changes so rapidly, this book was virtually impossible to write and, once written, was immediately out of date. However, it is the most impressive collection of computer-related biblical information that has ever been assembled. An excellent bibliography follows each chapter, and Hughes notes an address for each project reviewed. No serious Bible student can go without a computer any longer, and every computer user should have a copy of this book before undertaking any Bible related computer project.
