Hebrew Life and Literature

Selected Essays of Bernhard Lang

Bernhard Lang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351931151
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Bernhard Lang, known for his contributions over several decades to biblical anthropology, offers in this volume a selection of essays on the life and literature of the ancient Hebrews. The subjects range from the Hebrew God, the world-view of the Bible, and the formation of the scriptural canon, to peasant poverty, women's work, the good life, and prophetic street theatre. The stories of Joseph, Samson, and the expulsion from Paradise are analysed, and in a departure from the Old Testament, the priestly origins of the Eucharist are considered. Insight into the Hebrew mentality is facilitated by the arrangement of the essays, reflecting the three strata of the ancient society: the peasants, with their common concerns of fertility and happiness; warriors, their martial pursuits, and the divine Lord of War; and the wise - prophets, priests, and sages.

PART 1
Introduction

Chapter 1
Biblical Studies as a Vocation: Sketch of an Academic Self-Portrait

Let me begin in 1977, the year in which I started my first academic job at the University of Tübingen in southern Germany – not far from Stuttgart, the city where I was born in 1946. I was the first to receive the then newly established chair of Hebrew language and ancient Judaism. I hoped I was well prepared for the job. I had studied Catholic theology, ancient Near Eastern studies, and Egyptology in Tübingen, Münster, Jerusalem, and Paris. Within nine years, I had produced four dissertations – one in Egyptology, written during a one-year stay at the famous École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem, and three in Old Testament studies, submitted to the faculties of Tübingen and Freiburg, and which earned me a diploma, a doctorate, and a habilitation, i.e., the licence to teach at a university. In Jerusalem, I became very much involved with, and appreciative of, French archaeological research, epigraphy, and biblical studies. My habilitation thesis actually originated in Paris, where I spent a year of intensive study at the École des Hautes Études and the Collège de France.

But then, in 1977, I was back in Tübingen, and it seemed a good idea to teach in a place where I had received my own academic training. The advantage was that I knew the place and my colleagues, most of whom had been my teachers. I also knew what was expected of me, for I was familiar with the role models that had guided the process of nomination and appointment for the chair.

First of all, I was expected to be an ‘orientalist’, and the secret model for this role was William Foxwell Albright. Albright, who died in 1971, was not a biblical scholar himself, though he occasionally contributed to biblical studies. He was an eminent archaeologist and excavator as well as a linguist who had mastered Akkadian, ancient Egyptian, Aramaic and Arabic. Albright published hundreds of articles, but his most influential book was a semi-popular survey entitled From the Stone Age to Christianity, first published in 1940, but subsequently revised and made available in many languages, including German. This book and indeed all of Albright’s work had to do with the cultural and historical context in which the Bible originated. The unmistakable message was that Near Eastern archaeology, combined with ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptological studies, provided the firm historical framework of all serious biblical scholarship. So I was expected to cultivate my interest in ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures, continue my affiliation with the archaeological work of the École Biblique and thus elucidate the biblical text more or less in the way I had done in my published work, especially in my habilitation thesis.

To emulate a role model such as Albright whom one of his biographers calls ‘a twentieth-century genius’ is certainly a full-time job. But in addition to being eminent specialists, the members of the Tübingen faculty were expected to have one more agenda – that of the renewal of Catholic thought and teaching through competent theological criticism. At that time, the Tübingen faculty ranked as one of the world’s leading theological schools, with two Swiss professors being amongst its celebrities – Hans Küng and Herbert Haag. These two men of extraordinary intelligence and courage made the Tübingen faculty a place of theological innovation, arguing, each in his own field, that Catholic theology – and indeed all of Christian theology – needed thorough revision in order to be relevant for today. Küng worked on this revision as a systematic and ecumenical theologian, looking for guidance to Protestant (rather than Catholic) New Testament scholarship. Herbert Haag, who taught Old Testament history and exegesis, challenged traditional Catholic positions on the basis of biblical exegesis as it was informed by archaeology, Hebrew philology, and ancient Near Eastern studies. Thus he wrote controversial books and papers on the primordial state of humans in paradise (a state neither fully described nor properly taught by scripture), on original sin (essentially an unscriptural notion invented by Augustine), on belief in the devil and evil spirits (according to Haag, an archaic superstition, peripheral to scripture, contrary to sound reason, and which led to anachronisms such as the practice of exorcism in the twentieth century).

The role model for all this critical work was the great French Jesuit, Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In the 1970s, Teilhard’s portrait hung in the office of more than one member of Tübingen’s faculty of Catholic theology. Teilhard de Chardin had given Catholic intellectuals the outlines of a new worldview. According to traditional Catholicism, humans had fallen from the original state in paradise and were now struggling in the world of darkness, guided only by a few sparks of divine light brought first by a few Hebrew prophets and sages, and then by Christ. Teilhard reversed this picture. Rather than having fallen from the original state of grace, human history began in darkness, but evolutionbrought more and more light into the existence of men and women, and this development will continue into the future. This process, according to Teilhard, is one of progressive revelation and hominization. Haag saw his own critical work as a contribution to and indeed part of this process. Like Hans Küng, he felt that a new stage of this hominization had been achieved, and the two Tübingen professors felt that they belonged among the great intellectual and spiritual engineers of its breakthrough. Needless to say, impressionable students were fascinated by these teachings and, perhaps even more, by the role they were each assigned – to be the first ones who, as priests, teachers, or professors, were to spread the new ideas among Christian believers and give them, eventually, institutional stability. In the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, this was a springtime of a new theology to be promoted by a new, optimistic generation, one convinced of its extraordinary mission.

I was a member of the Tübingen faculty for five years, and during all of that period I strove to fulfil the expectations people had of me. I strove to be an orientalist, and I also made more than a passing effort to live up to the expectation that I should be a competent critic of traditional ecclesiastical doctrine. However, I came to be disillusioned with the twofold task. Let me explain.

Soon it became clear to me that there was a rift in the faculty, one I had hardly noticed before – between the reformists and those who were more prepared to support traditional Catholic positions. When Hans Küng published his book on papal infallibility (a teaching whose validity he vigorously questioned), things came to a head. A conflict broke out between two members of my Tübingen faculty, in fact between two of my most respected teachers: the more conservative Walter Kasper (now a cardinal in Rome) and the bellicose liberal Hans Küng (now retired and working on volume three of his autobiography). The dispute went out of all proportion and ended, as is well known, with the withdrawal of Küng’s ecclesiastical licence to teach Catholic theology (December 1979) and his subsequent dismissal from the faculty. This event meant, if not the deathblow, then at least a severe blow for those who, like Küng and Haag and myself, sought to establish a new, liberal form of Catholic theology. During this time, I myself had become a target of episcopal criticism because of what I believed to be a rather moderate textbook of biblical introduction written for students. All of this conspired to make me feel miserable. I suffered, while others thrived on controversy. At the age of thirty-three, I saw an intellectual and spiritual world collapse, and my sense of harmony was deeply hurt. A dream world had vanished. John Bunyan would have described my situation – and that of some of my Tübingen colleagues – as the ‘Slough of Despond’. My personal reaction to all of this was, quite simply, to lose interest in the role of being a critic of problematic Catholic teaching.

My disillusionment with the thankless task of being a modernist innovator of Catholic thought meant a certain amount of frustration; but it also had its positive effects, for it enabled me to concentrate more fully on the other, more strictly academic role I was assigned. My first major project in this area had to do with the social sciences. As is known, in the 1960s and 1970s, the social sciences flourished, and in Germany (and presumably elsewhere) many intellectuals considered sociology the leading discipline among the humanities. The study of literature, history, geography, language, education, economics, and philosophy all came into the orbit of the social sciences, and often transformed traditional disciplines into socio-linguistics, socio-economics, the sociology of literature, social philosophy; and so on. Theology was also touched by this trend, but in biblical studies hardly anyone had considered the possibility of applying a social-scientific approach. So I decided to look at the relevance of the social sciences for my specialist discipline, and in my second year of teaching I found myself sitting in seminars and lectures of the department of sociology, for it was there that I hoped to find out what this discipline was all about. And so my love affair with the social sciences began.

The ruling paradigm I encountered among the sociologists of Tübingen was that of Max Weber (another role model) and I was soon caught up in a kind of Weberian renaissance dominated by Friedrich Tenbrock. As it happened, I received an invitation to teach for a semester at the Free University of Berlin, and it was there, under the inspiration of the anthropologist Fritz Kramer, that I discovered anthropology, or ethnology as it is called in German universities. Kramer proved to be an excellent guide in my first attempts to get to grips with the new discipline. I well remember some of the titles that figured on the first reading list he gave me. It included two titles by Mary Douglas – Purity and Danger and Natural Symbols. The second of these I read in the German translation entitled: Ritual, Tabu und Körpersymbolik, a title that was quick to capture my attention, for it highlighted subjects that I had begun to be interested in, and that interest later resulted in the writing of books (see below). Shortly after having received advice and guidance in Berlin, I applied for a an eight-month leave of absence from the University of Tübingen to do research; but what I did in fact was study social anthropology at the London School of Economics. Although works by Max Weber were well represented in the eight suitcases of books that I took to London (for I had just bought a deceased colleague’s library and was unwilling to be parted from my treasures), I spent most of these months reading the works of William Robertson Smith, Emile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, John Middleton, Ioan Lewis, Maurice Bloch, and others – all of them anthropologists, either seminal thinkers of the past or recent contributors. London proved to be a delightful place of exile. Sitting in the classes of, or enjoying conversations with, anthropological luminaries such as Maurice Bloch, Ioan Lewis, Ernest Gellner, Jonathan Parry, Joanna Overing and Meyer Fortes added to my enthusiasm. I also made an academic pilgrimage to Sheffield to meet the biblical scholar John Rogerson, one of the few professional colleagues who had a good grasp of anthropology and its relevance for biblical studies. In London my conversion to anthropology was completed, and within a few months all thought of the depressing state of Catholic theology in Tübingen had disappeared. I thought up new research and teaching projects, wrote a few research papers inspired by anthropology, stopped worrying about the future of Catholic theology; and enjoyed a new lease of life. Fresh air had come to fill my lungs – something one is unlikely to say when speaking of an institution in central London with its dense traffic, but this is how I felt. It may well be that the shift from German to English also contributed to the almost instant reshaping of my intellectual persona. While earlier I had thought of my sojourns in Jerusalem and Paris as the most happy and promising times of my life, now these thoughts were overshadowed by the London experience. At last I had found my approach. I began to use it not only in biblical studies, but also in writing about the history of Christian thought, spirituality, and institutions, thus transcending the limits promoted and imposed by the traditional curriculum of Catholic theology with its preference for clearly demarcated sub-disciplines such as canon law, pastoral theology, and Old Testament exegesis. I had the feeling of having outgrown these limitations and matured or metamorphosed in the space of a few months. The result was the person that I still feel I am – almost thirty years later.

No doubt it was my renewed enthusiasm – the enthusiasm of a new convert – that motivated others to give me an academic home in the University of Mainz and, later, the Universities of Paderborn in Germany and St. Andrews in Scotland. My anthropology-inspired approach may also be the reason for having been invited to teach or give lectures in Philadelphia (USA), Aarhus (Denmark), and in various academic institutions in Paris, including the Sorbonne, the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and the Collège de France. As already indicated, my subjects of research, writing and teaching were no longer limited to biblical studies or even more narrowly to the Old Testament; instead, I felt that I should consider wider subjects, and so I re-defined and indeed re-invented my identity as that of a cultural historian with special interest in biblical religion and the history of Christian life and thought. To substantiate this claim, I will briefly mention four of my most ambitious publications: Heaven: A History, written with Colleen McDannell and first published in 1988, in German translated as Der Himmel. Eine Kulturgeschichte des ewigen Lebens; next came Sacred Games: A History of Christian Worship (1997); more recently, I published The Hebrew God: Portrait of an Ancient Deity (2002). At the time of writing, my study of the biblical story of Joseph as echoed in early-modern European literature has crystallized into a long manuscript entitled Joseph in Egypt: A Cultural Icon from Grotius to Goethe, to be published shortly.

Perhaps more important, however, than the wider subjects of research and writing referred to previously is the new point of view or method that I came to adopt. To explain, I must start with Droysen. In 1977 – my first year of teaching – I chanced upon a newly published book: Johann Gustav Droysen’s Historik. These are the lectures on historical method, given by an important nineteenth-century Berlin ancient historian. Droysen distinguishes four steps in historical research: (1) finding relevant sources, (2) critically examining them, (3) making them meaningful through an act of interpretation, and, finally, (4) the production of an account, generally in narrative form. I felt that I had essentially mastered the techniques of steps 1 and 2. I also thought that writing – step 4 – was not too much of a problem, because the reading of good literature (in German, English, and French) would help. Between steps 2 and 3, however, there seemed to be a yawning gap: how to get from critically examined source material to interpretation? The reading of Max Weber’s Science as a Vocation (1919) only aggravated the problem. Weber seemed to be saying – like many before and many after him – that interpretive insight just happens in a delightful moment, variously called intuition, inspiration, or illumination. This moment cannot be forced, for it arrives spontaneously. Yet, one has to be prepared for it, especially by long-term immersion in the world of one’s sources. This is what Mary Douglas seems to be saying in one of her reviews: The only method that is worth a clever scholar’s time is that which requires him to be soaked for decades in the languages and literatures and historical circumstances in which the myths are told and to assume the humanist task of identifying the intentions of authors and expectations of audiences’ (New York Review of Books, 20 December 1984). To drop the specific example of literary interpretation, of which Douglas speaks, one would have to edit the end of her sentence and write, quite simply : ‘… and to assume the humanist task of interpretation’. Yes; but again, what is interpretation? Droysen invokes the history of ideas, the psychology of leading personalities, and the state of ethical development as possible approaches to interpretation. Writing a generation after Droysen, Weber had moved beyond nineteenth-century historicism, and a generation after Weber anthropologists such as Mary Douglas had come up with fresh ideas. And all of them had contributed to a great repertoire of interpretive ideas.

Figure 1.1 Trees. One non-structural and three structural drawings, by John Ruskin.

A key idea that has become dear to me is that of structure, a notion admirably explained by John Ruskin, the nineteenth-century art critic, in his Elements of Drawing. Carefully looking at a tree that is nearly bare of leaves, Ruskin suggests, is the best way to begin, because the observer is able to study its structure – seeing not only its skeleton formed by trunk and crown, but also how these parts relate to each other within the larger whole, the entire tree. Ruskin tells the student to leave out the little twigs, and to focus instead on the essenti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 Wealth, Fertility, and the Good Life – The Third Function
• Part 3 War and Violence – The Second Function
• Part 4 Rules, Wisdom, and Prophetic Acts – The First Function
• Bibliography
• Index of Biblical References
• Index of Subjects