My View

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Old Testament scholars do not generally lead colorful lives. It will suffice to say that since the late fifties I have been attached to seven different institutions in three countries. Having taught Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and related areas for over three decades, I welcome this opportunity to take a brief backward and forward look before hurrying off.

When asked how I got interested biblical studies, it would be pleasant to answer, as some previous contributors to this column have done, that it all started in my earliest days at home or in school. This, however, was not the case with me. My interest developed gradually while reading history at the University of London, teaching at grammar schools near London and Oxford and studying theology in England and Italy.

This interest developed at least in part as a reaction against the rather jejune version of Christianity to which I had been introduced. In addition, I became intrigued with some historical problems—the early history of the Ark of the Covenant, the Gibeonites and the reign of Saul. Eventually I wrote my D. Phil. dissertation at Oxford on “Gibeon and the Gibeonites from the Settlement Solomon.” I was delighted to have survived the scrutiny of the redoubtable H. H. Rowley.

Since then, my primary focus has shifted to the study of Judean communities during the time of the Second Temple—that is, after the Jews returned from the Babylonian Exile in the late sixth century B.C.E.,^a the so-called post-Exilic period.

If there is one generalization that has impressed itself on me in my three decades of teaching and study, it is the importance situating one’s own scholarly work within the history of the discipline, and therefore in the context of the intellectual history the modern world.

The critical study of the Bible is a product of the Enlightenment of the 18th century and of the historiographical revolution of the 19th century. The postulate of free inquiry according to the dictates of reason then determined how the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament would be studied and its religious ideas evaluated. This postulate of free inquiry according to the dictates of reason was claimed for the Bible by advocates different as Voltaire and Spinoza. But Old Testament theologies were nevertheless written with a distinct bias. Beginning with very bad one in 1796 by Georg Lorenz Bauer, they were aimed at sorting out the good parts of the Hebrew Bible from the primitive parts supposedly containing crude ideas no use to Christians. Some scholars, like Friedrich Schleiermacher at the beginning the 19th and Adolf Harnack at the beginning of the 20th century, even concluded that the Christian church would be better off without the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament altogether. There are still people who think that, although they don’t always say it out loud.

While preparing to lead a doctoral seminar, I forced myself to read most of these 19th-century theologies of the Old Testament. It was less than compelling reading, but the course of the task I noticed a pattern emerging. Most of the theologies followed preconceived idea of development—either simple evolution from lower to higher stages of religious life, or, following the idealist philosophy of Hegel, based on a dialectic that moved from thesis (the nature religion of early Israel) through antithesis (the lofty spiritual religion of the prophets) to a new synthesis (the priestly and cultic religion of the post-Exilic period). The one constant feature in both patterns was a negative evaluation of the Judaism of the Second Temple period, either in contrast to earlier stages in the development of Judaism (especially the period of the prophets) or as a foil to the universalism of early Christianity.

One especially important factor that contributed to the negative assessment of Second Temple Judaism was its supposed emphasis on law (Torah). German Lutheran scholarship had been at the center of Old Testament studies since the Reformation, so it was natural that the contrast between law and gospel, much emphasized in 013Lutheranism, should have exerted an influence. It was nonetheless odd that none of these theologies ever asked why a religion that seeks to regulate human life by law is by definition inferior to other forms of religious life.

In these 19th-century theologies, legalism was also thought to go hand-in-hand with ritualism, a characteristic of priestly thinking supposedly opposed by the prophets and in stark contrast to the spontaneity of Israel’s early religion.

The most troubling aspect I found in these 19th-century theologies, however, was the extent to which anti-Judaism (known as anti-Semitism since the 1870s) predetermined their evaluation of Second Temple period Judaism—the period of the emergence of the Jewish faith in the characteristic form that it still exhibits.

It should come as no surprise that when modern Jewish historical scholarship (Wissenschaft des Judentums) got underway in the early 19th century, it more or less completely abandoned the critical study of the Hebrew Bible to the Christians. If these 19th-century theologies represented what critical study of the Bible was all about, Jewish scholars naturally wanted no part of it. Only in recent years, with the emergence of Jewish biblical scholarship in Israel and the United States, has this situation been reversed.

In the preface to my recent commentary on Ezra-Nehemiah,^b I quoted from an important monograph on Ezra written by Hans Heinrich Schaeder, published in 1930. Schaeder observed that the only problem with the standard view of post-Exilic Judaism was the real history of post-Exilic Judaism. There can be no question about the importance of the post-Exilic period. It is this period to which we must assign the formation of the Pentateuch, the final editing of the prophetic books, the composition of much of the Psalter and major collections of wisdom literature, like Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes.

Recently scholars—both Jewish and Christian—have made significant progress in understanding the post-Exilic period. Many questions, however, still await a satisfactory answer: To what extent and in what ways did Judean society change after the Babylonian destruction and the collapse of Judah as a state in the sixth century B.C.E.? What difference did it make that there were now several geographically distinct Jewish communities? What were the factors and circumstances favoring the emergence of Jewish sectarianism—that is, a variety of different Jewish sects? What changes took place in the way prophecy was understood? Questions like these will probably dominate the scholarly agenda in this area over the next several years.

Let us recall, finally, that Second Temple Judaism was the matrix within which early Christianity was born and from which, over a considerable period of time, it separated. Rather than explaining the Christian separation from Judaism in terms of polarities—that is, gospel over against law, Christian universalism over against Jewish particularism—we should first examine issues internal to Second Temple Judaism, issues that represent changes from earlier periods. For example: How did attitudes to the gentile world and the admission of proselytes change in the Second Temple period? When we compare Second Temple Judaism with earlier Israelite history, what differences do we find in the messianic hope or the binding authority and interpretation of Torah? There is work here to keep us busy for many years to come.

Old Testament scholars do not generally lead colorful lives. It will suffice to say that since the late fifties I have been attached to seven different institutions in three countries. Having taught Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and related areas for over three decades, I welcome this opportunity to take a brief backward and forward look before hurrying off. When asked how I got interested biblical studies, it would be pleasant to answer, as some previous contributors to this column have done, that it all started in my earliest days at home or in school. This, however, was not the case […]