Rethinking Biblical Scholarship

Changing Perspectives 4

Philip R. Davies

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781844657278
• eBook ISBN: 9781317544432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

"Rethinking Biblical Scholarship" brings together seminal essays to provide readers with an assessment of the archaeological and exegetical research which has transformed the discipline of biblical studies over the last two decades. The essays focus on history and historiography, exploring how scholarly constructs and ideologies mould historical, literary and cultural data and shape scholarly discourse. Most of the essays illustrate the development of what has been called a "minimalist" methodology. Among the many central topics examined are the formation of the Jewish scriptural canon and how the concepts of "prophecy" and "apocalypse" illuminate the emergence of Judaism in the late Persian and Hellenistic periods.

I

Method

1

Do Old Testament studies need a dictionary?

I had better start with an apology for any misunderstanding there may be about the topic. I am not going to talk about the Classical Hebrew Dictionary, nor even about primary languages like Hebrew or English. My topic is a metalanguage, the language of biblical scholarship. In fact, what I am ultimately investigating is the nature of biblical scholarship – and in this context, Old Testament scholarship. What does biblical scholarship have in common with other kinds of scholarship, on the one hand, and what does it have with other biblically related pursuits which are not scholarship, on the other hand? Even to approach this topic on a broad front is well beyond a short paper such as this one, and so I have chosen to focus on the language of biblical scholarship as one particularly important and useful aspect. Examining the language not only involves concrete data, but also responds to the philosophical view that analysis of language is the only way to analyse thought. According to this philosophy, language is seen not as reflecting the real world, but as constituting the world, or, better, constituting worlds. This view of language has dominated most recent work on parable, of course, and is therefore no stranger to biblical scholarship itself. In the light of such an understanding of language, or metalanguage, or discourse (for the terms are often used interchangeably), it is reasonable to ask what kind of world is constituted by the language of biblical scholarship, and what is the relationship of this world to other worlds created by other forms of discourse, such as nonacademic biblical study or non-biblical scholarship.

One basic way of describing relationships between languages is through a dictionary, in which words and phrases in one language are given their correspondences in another. In the second part of this essay I shall offer some sample entries for such a dictionary. But first, I offer some comments about the language of biblical scholarship. As I have said, I am confining my remarks to Old Testament scholarship, and indeed, I do not prejudge the issue of whether Old Testament and New Testament scholarship exhibit the same dialect.

Academic Bibspeak

I begin with an obvious point about the genesis of the language of biblical scholarship, which I shall call Academic Bibspeak. It has a mixed character, in which at least three main components can be identified. First, biblical terms and concepts – ‘prophets’, ‘wisdom’, ‘sin’, ‘salvation’, ‘righteousness’, ‘covenant’, ‘holiness’, ‘God’. Second, terms drawn from the discourse of Christian doctrine and ecclesiology – the ‘theology’ of books, persons and authors in the Old Testament (and of the Old Testament itself!), prophets ‘preaching’ or ‘exercising a ministry’, ‘piety’ (in the Psalms, for example), ‘worship’ in the Temple. Most obvious among these elements is the term ‘Old Testament’ itself. Third, Academic Bibspeak also uses terms and concepts from other critical disciplines – text criticism, structuralism, historical criticism, social-science modelling.

Now each of these sets of terms belongs to a language or type of language – biblical, Christian, critical – which has its own distinct way of construing the world – or, if you like, constitutes its own distinct world. And when Academic Bibspeak takes over these terms it inevitably imports some elements of these worlds into its own world. For example, in using the word ‘prophet’ scholars are adopting a biblical classification of a function or type of person. But scholars who deal with such social functions recognize the total inadequacy of such a term for social description. ‘Prophets’ can be ‘true’ or ‘false’, and essentially the only qualification a prophet has for being so regarded is that the Old Testament calls a person one. To argue in other terms what a prophet is involves first and foremost abandoning the term ‘prophet’ and replacing it by, for example, ‘intermediary’. The terms ‘tribe’, ‘covenant’, and ‘Gentile’ also carry special biblical resonances. The ‘tribes’ of Israel are not tribes in any non-biblical, i.e. anthropological, sense. Parallels drawn to the biblical covenant are not with Hittite ‘covenants’ but with Hittite treaties. ‘Gentile’ accepts a distinction which makes no sense in any world which is not Judaeo-centric.

Likewise with Christian terminology; ‘messiah’, ‘the Fall narrative’, ‘salvation’ are terms impossible to subtract from the world-view of Christian doctrine; they inevitably import the categories and values of that religion. The use of the term ‘God’ with a capital letter implies a belief in one god and, I think most would agree, implies the god of Christianity. Must biblical scholarship be monotheist, even deist? Finally, the use of critical terminology implies an acceptance of a world-view which rejects supernatural explanation and privileged access to knowledge, and which affirms natural cause and effect, the autonomy of texts, the value of sociological modelling, and so on. Functionally, it can also be said to be non-theist: divine activity does not play a role in critical language.

The problem arising from the adoption of the terminology and conceptuality of three other languages into Academic Bibspeak is simply this: have they been assimilated into a language which exhibits its own (reasonably) coherent worldview, or have they resulted in a language which has no clear world-view of its own, but drifts in and out of three different world-views? And if the latter (as I believe is the case), is such drifting deliberate or unconscious? If deliberate, the difficulty lies with the practitioner; if unconscious, the language itself is the disease.

The socio-religious factor

One way to approach the questions just raised is by considering Old Testament study from a sociological point of view (in however elementary a fashion). I don’t know whether there is any other language with the same sort of composition as Academic Bibspeak. It may be claimed that other academic discourse is equally mixed. Whether this is true or not (and I doubt that it really is), the question of the status of the language we use is a matter for our own concern. What we need is a clear understanding among ourselves of what kind of worldview we as biblical scholars express, or wish to express through our language. Such a consensus has not come into being, however, and indeed the problem of language itself has scarcely been raised, let alone debated. One reason for this, I propose, lies in the social status of biblical studies, where one can see a relationship of biblical study to other academic subjects and to non-academic biblical studies which parallels the linguistic relationship and may very well reinforce it.

The socio-religious aspect of the problem itself has two dimensions. First, academic study of the Bible – or at least what is claimed to be academic study – is taught in both universities and seminaries (or theological colleges, in British parlance), and these two types of institution are not themselves necessarily devoted to the same description of reality, at least insofar as that reality is the object of academic study. The two types of institution would not in the last analysis want to pursue academic study for the same ends and would not want the same kind of language in which to express that study. The second dimension is that even in the university sector biblical scholarship is pursued, and the subject taught, largely by persons who are Christian, and most of these ordained. The Old Testament is studied mostly by, and taught mostly by, people who in admittedly varying ways and to varying extents, accept biblical values for themselves.

Neither of these sets of circumstances is to be deplored in itself. Religious denominations are entitled to train their ministrants and the holding of religious beliefs does not in itself render any person unfit for scholarship. But these considerations do not efface the problem, though they often provide a convenient pretext for complacency. If one were to ask why a practising orthodox Muslim might not be employed to teach Islam in a British university one might very well be told that his religious beliefs would inform his academic work and that he would be promoting his religion rather than analysing it critically. Are Christians exempt from this, especially when they are ordained? The problem is that Muslims do not have an equivalent of Academic Bibspeak in which the elements of Islamic doctrine can be blended in with critical terminology so as to disguise the fact that the critical work is conducted in Islamic categories, with Adam and Jesus as prophets, the Quran as word of God and the five pillars of Islam adopted into the vocabulary of the analysis of Islam. If it is true (as it seems to me at least) that Old Testament scholarship has hitherto been essentially male, white, Western and Christian, then the feminist, black and Third World challenges to the traditions of our craft – and especially its language – do not go far enough, at least insofar as these operate within the boundaries of Christianity.

Academic Bibspeak in the university system in Britain and in many other countries belongs where Old Testament scholarship is found, namely in faculties or departments of divinity or theology. That means, of course, Christian theology, since when any other theology becomes included in the curriculum the terms ‘religious studies’ or ‘comparative religion’ are used. The ethos in which academic Old Testament study takes place is religious if not confessional. This is a unique situation for an academic discipline, and it is buttressed by external as well as internal prejudices. Many if not most of our fellow academics in other disciplines, and nearly all of our students, take it for granted that theology/biblical studies is rather different from other subjects in the way it is pursued. Colleagues are benignly suspicious of academic Bible study: a Sheffield University pro-vice chancellor (the equivalent of an American college vice-president) once asked, on a visit to my department, whether it was possible to do research in biblical studies. On another occasion, the British Secretary of State for Education stated publicly that a university lecturer in theology who ‘lost his faith’ should not expect to be entitled to insist on his tenure.

Prospective students, too, usually tell me that they want to do Biblical Studies to strengthen or inform their religious (Christian) faith with more knowledge. This is a reasonable aim in life, but what is odd is that they assume that a British university is a normal place to expect to do this. And why not? In many Western countries everybody assumes that. Germany is the other extreme: the German system does not yet pretend that theology in the university is not at the service of the Church.

Hence it appears that the ambiguities of Academic Bibspeak persist at least partly because they are needed in order to allow colleagues in seminaries and in universities to speak the same language (even when the two institutions know perfectly well that they exist to serve different ends); they permit students to pursue a religious quest in the belief that they are being academic at the same time; and they also permit what is a religiously based discipline, theology, to justify itself as a critical discipline. The ambiguities of the language of biblical scholarship are, then, sustained by the ambiguity of biblical scholarship in the academic community, as a branch of a peculiar discipline called ‘theology’ which – unlike other disciplines – has for its content not a body of data but an unverifiable theory, and which can mix descriptive and prescriptive language without too much difficulty.

Now, I do not overlook the immense benefits biblical scholarship enjoys by virtue of this privileged status. Without the external prejudices, particularly of our students, most of us who teach the subject would be out of a job. The number of people who want to study the Old Testament out of sheer intellectual curiosity is very small. It is an enormous pity, but there we are. It seems that the Bible is interesting as ‘word of God’ but otherwise rather boring. In Britain at least, it is necessary to explain on nearly every occasion, even to the most intelligent lay person, that one can be a biblical scholar without professing any religious commitment. It would not however seem to be in our interests to change the socio-religious circumstances; the price to pay, nevertheless, may be that we shall never be practising in a truly critical environment. The only other obvious alternative is to persuade people that the Bible is something which is intellectually rewarding in its own right, a proper object for academic curiosity, and that its treasures are open for the general public to marvel at. As far as I can see, novels, television, radio and the cinema occasionally treat the Bible in this way (as well as the opposite at other times!); why don’t biblical scholars? The answer: a large number of us don’t really believe in the (non-Christian) religious value of the Bible anyway.

What is a critical language?

I am not going to give a full definition of a critical language. That is itself a major task. However, I shall assume that all academic biblical scholars wish to think of themselves as being critical. I shall just put forward one essential requirement. It seems to me a basic principle that a critical language cannot adopt the terminology and conceptuality of its subject matter. If one is using biblical terms to analyse the Bible itself one cannot possibly avoid a biblical solipsism. Interpreting scripture by scripture is good rabbinic doctrine and good Reformation doctrine, but very bad academic criticism. The starting point, it seems to me, of all biblical criticism is a criticism of its language: in other words, a determination to impose a non-biblical language upon the subject matter and not to take over the terms that the subject matter gives. As I said earlier, it is impossible to take over the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Haft Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Method
• Part II: History
• Part III: Prophecy and Apocalyptic
• Part IV: Canon
• Bibliography
• Index of ancient sources
• Index of authors