One of the most famous verses of poetry in the Bible concerns the experience of time passing:
For a thousand years in Your eyes
are like yesterday that has passed
and like a watch of the night.
(Psalm 90:4)
In the poetic movement of this verse, two temporal perspectives are juxtaposed. The first is the human perspective, for the speaking voice is human, uttering a psalm of prayer to God. (The psalm superscription identifies the speaker as Moses.) To human eyes, “a thousand years” is an enormous amount of time, far longer than a lifetime.
But the psalm quickly switches to consider God’s perspective on this vast span of time. From God’s point of view, temporal duration has an entirely different sense. The psalm describes God’s sense through similes comprehensible to humans: “like yesterday that has passed,” and even more evanescent, “like a watch in the night,” a period of only a few hours. Through this doubled simile, what is an eon to humans is reduced to a day or less in God’s sense of time. Temporal duration is relative to perspective, and God’s perspective is vastly different from humans’. God lives in eternity, while we live in small packets of time, bounded by fleeting mortality.
The relative or perspectival quality of time in this verse leads me to several layers of the topic I wish to address: how biblical scholarship has changed over the past twenty years. In the large view of time, scholarship has changed very little. We still study, teach, learn, argue and sometimes (or too often) publish. Our students and readers are edified, puzzled, offended, bored or some combination of all of these. The field is rife with arguments among the professors, and sometimes the arguments escalate into name-calling or worse. Some of the scholars are brilliant, many are very capable and others are mediocre or even incompetent. Topics and methods of study come in and out of fashion. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
From a more local point of view, however, as one swimming around in the daily rush of temporal experience, biblical study has changed enormously in the last twenty years. A sense of firm foundations and common consensus in the study of the Hebrew Bible has passed. Biblical scholars used to be nearly all historians and theologians of one sort or another. They used to be nearly all white, male and ordained as Protestant clergy. There used to be a consensus that the Bible should be studied in its ancient cultural and historical context, and that the Bible’s own history—its compositional and textual history, its “history of ideas,” and the history of Israel—should be primary, and the explication of the Bible’s meaning should be based on that historical foundation.
But all of that is gone. Now there are a plethora of ways to study the Bible.a Feminist criticism, canonical criticism, postcolonialist and ideological criticism, liberation theology, reader-response criticism and other ways of reading the Bible now have chairs at the table of biblical scholarship. Many practitioners of one type of scholarship deride the validity of other types. Even within the cadre of historically oriented scholars, the old consensus no longer holds. Some are minimalists, some are maximalists, some are moderate-minimalists, some are extreme moderates and so on. Sometimes it seems that biblical scholarship is like the exclusive cliques of high school, with no group paying attention to any other, and each group talking only to itself. Sometimes it seems like pure chaos, as William Yeats wrote of another time of upheaval: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
The reality lies probably somewhere between these two perspectives, or swings like a pendulum back and forth between them. Biblical scholarship has changed drastically and not much at all in the last twenty years. Every era seems chaotic to those living in them, and every era is much like every other—with good and bad, tragedy and goodness, achievement and failure. The passage of time and the importance of its events can seem to change with one’s perspective. Twenty years of biblical scholarship sometimes seems like a time of enormous change, like a thousand years, but I know that in other eyes it is as if almost nothing has changed, as if it all happened yesterday or in a few hours last night.
One of the most famous verses of poetry in the Bible concerns the experience of time passing:
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See Stephen Haynes and Steven McKenzie, eds., To Each Its Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and Their Application, second edition (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1999).
