The Bible as Political Artifact

On The Feminist Study of the Hebrew Bible

Susanne Scholz

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781506420479
• eBook ISBN: 9781506420486
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Biblical studies and the teaching of biblical studies are clearly changing, though it is less clear what the changes mean and how we should evaluate them. In this book, Susanne Scholz engages some of the issues as she has encountered them in the field over the last twenty years. She casts a feminist, class-critical eye on the politics of pedagogy, in higher education and in wider society alike, decrypting important developments in "the architecture of educational power." She also examines how the increasingly intercultural, interreligious, and diasporic dynamics in society inform the hermeneutical and methodological possibilities for biblical exegesis, whether the topic is rape in ancient Near Eastern legislation or Eve and Adam in the American Christian right's approaches. In bold strokes, Scholz lays out a program for biblical scholarship and pedagogy that connects to current events and ideas, such as the Title IX debate, inclusive language, or film. Taken as a whole, the fourteen chapters demonstrate that the foregrounding of gender, placed into its intersectional contexts, offers intriguing and valuable alternative ways of seeing the world and the Bible's place in it.

II

The Politics of Method

4

“Tandoori Reindeer” Exegesis: On the Limitations of Historical Criticism and Two Alternatives

Powerful political, social, economic, and spiritual-religious developments have been underway since the end of the so-called Second World War in 1945.^[1] Anticolonial movements in the Third World emerged and succeeded in removing colonial rule. Moreover, the Western social movements of the 1960s and 1970s led to major changes in social and cultural dynamics. At the same time the human population exploded to more than six billion. Nuclear and biological-chemical weapons are threatening to destroy our planet several times over. Corporate capitalism has grown exponentially. Wars, famine, and political unrest have created hundreds of thousands of refugees and immigration movements worldwide. Western societies rely on information technology more than ever, while the gap between rich and poor is widening everywhere,^[2] and worldwide 800 million people live in hunger and starvation. At the same time, institutionalized religious traditions, especially the established Christian churches, have seen their power and influence decline in the West. Many Westerners of mainstream Christian, Jewish, and secular backgrounds are looking elsewhere to satisfy their spiritual needs. Consequently, in many Western countries Christian fundamentalism and the New Age movement have risen to become remarkable religious forces in recent decades. Religious fundamentalism is also on the rise worldwide. These and other developments have far-reaching consequences for humanity and nature on planet earth.

Yet the field of biblical studies seems strangely disconnected from these changes in our world, hardly taking notice of them. In fact, biblical research, at least Western biblical scholarship, is a field that has remained mostly unchanged during the past fifty years, and little change is likely to take place in biblical studies in the near future. Despite the crises in the world, both in wealthy countries located mostly in the Northern Hemisphere and in impoverished countries located mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, established scholars of the Bible are not even expected to relate to social, political, economic, and religious developments in our societies. Thus, courses on biblical literature are usually taught as if not much has changed since they were first designed. How is such detachment possible? I suggest that the dominant methodology in biblical studies—historical criticism—is one of the reasons for this lack of involvement in contemporary affairs. Historical criticism allows interpreters to position biblical literature in a distant past, far removed from today’s politics, economics, and religion. Although the exclusion of contemporary questions is not an essential requirement in historical criticism, especially not as understood in the field of history during the last two decades,^[3] biblical scholars often continue using historical criticism in a way that keeps the Bible separate from the intellectual-epistemological insights and developments in the world.

From Subversion to the Status Quo

Not all historical critics have used the method in this way; indeed, some, among them feminist interpreters, have examined the Bible’s historical context with contemporary questions in mind. For instance, Monika Fander, a feminist critic in New Testament studies, insists on the value of historical criticism for a feminist reading of biblical literature. She explains: “It is not the methods of historical criticism as such that are unsuitable for feminist historical research. The tensions between the historical-critical method and feminist historical study are hermeneutical in character. . . . Every scholar addresses a text in terms of a particular pre-understanding that is marked, consciously or unconsciously, by the cultural context and questions of the researcher’s own time.”^[4] Similarly, the pioneer of feminist New Testament analysis, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, sees historical analysis as connected to the hermeneutical interests of the exegete when she states:

A critical feminist analysis takes the texts about wo/men out of their contextual frameworks and reassembles them like mosaic stones in a feminist pattern or design that does not recuperate but counteracts the marginalizing or oppressive tendencies of the kyriocentric text. To that end, one has to elaborate models of historical and socio-cultural reconstruction that can subvert the biblical text’s kyriocentric dynamics and place the struggles of those whom it marginalizes and silences into the center of the historical narrative. . . . This calls for an increase in historical imagination.^[5]

This viewpoint is still not the norm, however, and so younger scholars often accept traditional methodology uncritically. The pressure to promote and protect the dominance of historical criticism is strong even today^[6] because, for the most part, Western biblical scholars do not see the need to engage systematically theological, political, and international issues of our day. This detachment often serves conservative theological and cultural-religious purposes, and so, unsurprisingly, the field of biblical studies is largely dominated by a conservative religious, political, and academic agenda.^[7]

The fact that historical criticism serves conservative purposes is indeed a remarkable development. Initially, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, biblical scholars found in historical criticism a method that liberated them from the religious and academic status quo. At that time, historical criticism was a subversive approach. This was particularly true in Germany, the center from which historical criticism emerged. It began with what we know today as source criticism and expanded into a full-blown method during the first part of the twentieth century, when historical criticism became the standard in many European and liberal US-American schools of theology. Yet, in the nineteenth century, scholars who applied historical method were welcomed neither by the church nor the established theological scene of the day. For instance, in the middle of the nineteenth century a highly influential and powerful theology professor in Berlin, Ernst W. Hengstenberg (1802–1869), made sure that proponents of historical criticism would not gain access to tenured faculty positions.^[8] As a result, the historical critic Johann K. W. Vatke (1806–1882), later recognized as a key figure in the development of historical criticism, did not become a full professor as long as Hengstenberg and like-minded colleagues held influential faculty positions in Berlin. They prevented Vatke’s promotion for decades, as they defended the Christian doctrinal position according to which the starting point for reading the Bible was “the atoning work of Chris...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Feminist Readings of the Bible as a Political Artifact
• The Pedagogical Politics in Academia and Society
• The Politics of Method
• The Politics of Hermeneutical and Cultural Alternatives
• Index of Authors
• Index of Ancient Sources