Probing the Frontiers of Biblical Studies

Ellens, Greene

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781498275491
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Probing the Frontiers of Biblical Studies is a seventeen-chapter anthology on biblical studies. It has been crafted as an extended and respectful thank you note to one of the most insightful scholars of biblical studies, David J. A. Clines of Sheffield University in England. He is credited with providing guidance to, and shaping the thought of, two generations of scholars who focus on essential approaches to understanding the Bible, with particular attention given to the Old Testament and allied literature. The anthology is directed toward those readers with pastoral, analytical, ancient intercultural, as well as contemporary cultural perspectives.Essays address a wide range of topics: the so-called Documentary Hypothesis, prophecy, divination, and magic, the wisdom themes in the Book of Job, the Egyptian influence on New Testament, the issue of non-sexual love between two men during combat conditions, character development in a biblical novella, rhetorical questions and their role in the Psalter, and the ways of God in the world. By combining these various topics, Probing the Frontier of Biblical Studies has addressed many of the outstanding issues in Old Testament study and ancillary disciplines.

part one

Pastoral Perspectives

1

Introduction

Hebrew Bible and New Testament as Scholarly Vocation

J. Harold Ellens

The Hebrew Bible or Tanak is paradigmatic for the entire Western World, and has been for 2,000 years. Its configuration as Old Testament, in Christian Scriptures, is somewhat different from the standard order of its component elements, the books of the Bible, in the Tanak. However, the content of both canons is similar, and it is clear that devout Jews and Christians have always valued the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament with a similar high level of intensity, since soon after the time of Philo, Josephus, and Jesus Christ.

However, when I claim that the Hebrew Bible is paradigmatic for the entire Western World, I am not referring primarily to the function of the Tanak as religious text in shaping personal piety or communal liturgies. It has been important in those regards, of course, throughout the entire 2,000 year history of its existence as a canon of sacred scripture. Moreover, it promises to be of towering permanent value in that regard, as long as humanity lasts. However, its literary, philosophical, and psychological influences have been widely pervasive throughout all the layers of the fabric of Western Culture, as well.

It is impossible, for example, to read with any coherent understanding or aesthetic appreciation, the literature of the New Testament, Chaucer, Schiller, Goethe, Donne, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bunyan, Blake, Mann, Updike, DeVries, Percy, or O’Conner without a deep awareness of the metaphors and archetypes that shape the cadences, characters, and claims of the Hebrew Bible. All the classics of literature, the principles of political theory, the ideals and conundrums of philosophy, and the enigmas of ethics and aesthetics in the West are rooted and grounded in the Tanak.

There are some positive values that we derive from that. First, it is the ethical claims of the Hebrew Bible that shape Western religions as action religions. The three major faiths, which may be called the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, derive their core systems from the ancient Israelite religion described in the Hebrew Bible. These Western faith systems are distinguishable from Eastern religions mainly by the fact that Western religions externalize their ethical claims and thus become action religions which tend and intend to build structures in societies that reach for ideal states of being, structures, and institutions in the culture. Eastern religions, in contrast, tend to be interior and not conscious and intentional builders of idealized external social cultures.

Western societies tend to build good sewers and medical systems, for example; while Eastern religions tend to be religions of withdrawal instead of externalized cultural action, and in what they do accomplish in beneficial infrastructure is simply emulate the West. Eastern religions value interiority and personal spirituality as a mode and method toward transcendence of material reality and the achievement of Nirvana. They, consequently, tend to have bad sewers and medical systems. It is interesting that the exception to this has always been Confucianism; however, it is not a religion but an ethical philosophy. It has no inherent theism, as religions do by general definition. Good sewers, for example, are the product of the Hebrew Bible and its emphasis upon responsible culture building, social idealism, and care of the community as a divine requirement. The Hebrew Bible moves from the image of the ideal farm or garden to sacral space, ideal city, and sacred community.

Another strongly positive value that the Tanak has contributed to the shape of things in the Western World, indeed the entire world these days, is the hopeful sense of optimism inherent in the remarkable theology of grace. That is the main stream of the ideology of the Hebrew Bible. The history of world religions is the history of humans cowering before the face of divine threat and devising strategies for placating monstrous gods. There is much of that in the Hebrew Bible also. However, its mainstream flows from Abraham’s incredible insight that God might just happen to be on our side, a God of good will and unconditional grace, acceptance, and forgiveness. It is the only religious good news ever sounded on this planet. Out of that sense of things came the positive and optimistic side of the Psalms, the prophets, the religion of Jesus Christ, and the idealizing theology of St. Paul.

The prophet Micah put it all together in his remarkable words that should be carved in stone somewhere so nobody can miss them. “Who is a God like our God, he pardons iniquity, passes over transgressions, delights in steadfast love, will not be perpetually angry, is faithful to us when we are unfaithful to him, tramples all our iniquities under his feet, and casts all our sins into the depths of the sea. Moreover, he guaranteed this to us all before we were born” (Mic 7:18–20). So there it is, theological and psychological metaphors under which a person cannot lose. This is a win-win world.

However, the hell of it is that it is not that set of metaphors, symbols, and archetypes from the Hebrew Bible that tend to stick with us and dominate our culture today. We seem much more inclined by nature to relish and remember the negative ones. Of those there are far too many in the Tanak. Playing around the edges of the mainstream of grace ideology throughout the Hebrew Bible is a large set of very destructive metaphors that form and inform our inherent psychological archetypes with content that can kill.1

Bishop Oxnam of the Methodist Church remarked in 1900 that the God of the OT is a big bully and in no sense the God whom we see in the face, person, and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Well, this is not a very good comment on the OT, but it is a telling indicator about the bishop. He was like a lot of folks. He could not keep in focus the mainstream of grace in the Hebrew Bible and kept sliding into preoccupation with the destructive scenes and stories he found there. He did not know how to read the OT for his own good. However, there is plenty there to make a person and a culture sick and hopeless.

For example, one of the things that most readers and non-readers of the OT have stuck in their minds is the image of God as the Warrior. He seems to be awfully busy in the Tanak fighting enemies and stirring up the Israelites to fight their enemies, and to create enemies even where there were not any. In fact, when God ran out of enemies he turned on the Israelites themselves and beat the living daylights out of them a number of times. It seemed like God was so bloody ticked off about something or other that he just could not get his head screwed back on right until he found an excuse to kill somebody: Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, Israelites, you, me, or his own unique son, Jesus.

What is that all about, and why does it appeal to us so much that it is the message that sticks in our minds, rather than the word of grace? There is an answer to that question. The answer is that in the Hebrew Bible, behind the Warrior God metaphor is a far more dangerous set of word pictures. The Tanak starts to paint this picture already in the third chapter. It is the picture of a cosmic conflict being waged between God and the forces of evil. These forces take on the shape of an alternative God. So the Hebrew Bible creates the assumption that the God of grace is up against an equivalent evil god and that the warfare between them takes place on the battleground of history and the human heart. Moreover, it remains to be seen who will win.

Consequently, it is the imperative spelled out in the Tanak that we are all called to fight God’s fight so as to insure that evil does not win. That is what the Israelites thought they were doing when they exterminated the Canaanites in their ancient story about 1,200 years before Christ. That is what the Christians thought they were doing when they mounted the crusades against the “infidel Turks” about 1,200 years after Christ. That is what the Muslim Jihadists think they are doing today.

Of course, it is all based upon a lie. There is no cosmic evil force. There is no opposing evil God. God is not a Warrior. There is no cosmic conflict, no war of the worlds. There is not a shred of empirical evidence in all of human experience that such an evil force or warfare exists, and there is no basis in the sacred scriptures for taking those horrible metaphors seriously. It is all a lie. However, unfor...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Abbreviations
• Part One: Pastoral Perspectives
• Part Two: Analytical Academic Perspectives
• Part Three: Ancient Intercultural Perspectives
• Part Four: Contemporary Cultural Perspectives