Intro
While I have done other posts
on biblical studies (Gen 1 here and here)and even one whose title was partially directly
on biblical studies, this is really only the second of my posts on my actual
“career” as a “scholar” in biblical studies (the post on sapientia in biblical studies was at least a much about my theory of literature on the whole,
although the parts of that that relate directly to sapientia in biblical
studies definitely are meant to dovetail with something like this post). And it
is really the only other post I have to write on that “career” … just the two
posts. The first was the Once Upon a Dissertation post, which was the snapshot
of where I saw the research of my dissertation project going. This one, on the
other hand, is a synthesis of what it was I tried to do in the classroom when
teaching Intro to Old Testament while a doctoral student and then PhD candidate
(in a PhD program, at least in the States, your designation changes once you
pass comps and get your proposal passed by the committee). So, this sort of
sums up the other half of what I once was going for in trying to be a scholar
(two halves: writing and teaching), and the teaching should be at least as
important as the writing.
I did not have everything in
this format when I taught, and particularly I had not lit on this concept of a
“twofold Heilsgeschicte.” I don’t
know that it would have been the best concept to introduce in that specific
terminology at the undergrad level (although I probably would have tried to do
so; I tended to have a “pitch” problem, as it was put by the faculty who came
in to review my teaching after several semesters of low numbers on the SEEQs).
But having the basic structure down might have helped in focusing, but such is
life.
So, there is this German term
that gets translated roughly “salvation history,” Heilsgeschicte (I will keep to the German convention of
capitalizing nouns in German): Geschicte
is the noun “history”; heil is the
adjective for “sacred” (yes, as in “Heil Hitler”); in German, the genitive
(possessive) case is made simply by putting an “s” at the end (so, heils = “of sacred” or “of the sacred”);
and German has this thing of slapping noun X on the end of noun or adjective Y
in the genitive such that “XsY” means “the Y of X,” and thus Heilsgeschicte means “history of [the]
sacred.”
[Side note: The German genitive adds the case ending “s” in a way
that is thought of by English speakers as changing the spelling of the word
itself, whereas the tendency of native English speakers with English itself is
to think of our possessive as being simply adding apostrophe-“s” onto a word
that remains pretty much the same in spelling (whereas, say, with “who” we tend
to think of the genitive/possessive “whose” and the objective “whom” as a
different words with different spelling, rather than as the same word with
something simply tagged on). But that apostrophe actually stands in for
something more similar to the German genitive. In old English, which would have
developed from the same parent language as German, sometimes called “Old
German,” the genitive ending was “es.” We still see this in our weekday name “Wednesday,”
which is Odin’s day, or without the apostrophe, Odenes day (the vowel between
the “d” and “n” drops while the “e” of the genitive is retained, which is
unusual for English … funky things happen). Native English speakers who have
not specialized in language have a tendency to think that the apostrophe for
possessive is something completely other than the apostrophe in contractions,
where we replace the second “o” in “do not” with an apostrophe to make “don’t,”
but they’re actually the same function, standing in for a vowel that usually
naturally drops out in actual spoken pronunciation. Also, I have a pet peeve as
a copyeditor that I call the “German Semicolon,” which means when authors use
semicolons to run sentences together with no real connection such that it
starts to look more like a data string than an English sentence (which is fine
for citation grammar in notes, but not for sentence grammar), and I call it
that on the analogy of the German genitive “s” and the fact that, as I like to
quip, the Germans will put fourteen words together using thirteen genitive “s”s,
throw a “-heit” or “-keit” on the end for good measure, and call it a new word.
END SIDENOTE]
So, Heilsgeschicte sometimes gets translated “salvation history.” As
far as I can remember, the firs person to really use the term in this way was
Gerhard von Rad, a nineteenth-century German scholar in Old Testament studies.
What is meant by it is a trait of the Hebrew Bible that distinguished it from
the holy writings and origin stories of all the surrounding nations. At least
in that area of the world, religious thought centered on sacred mythological
topography. There was usually a sacred mountain at the center, as the axis mundi, the center of the world, on
which the gods lived. What von Rad noted in the Hebrew Bible is an emphasis not
on a center, access to which was usually controlled by the priests of that
nation, in a spatial arrangement, but
on a series of saving acts by God, a temporal/historical
emphasis. Deuternomy 29:5b–10 is a prime example in a very tight poetically
structured piece (nice repetition of series of three things … very tight).
The situation of the Hebrew
Bible as a whole is actually a bit more
complex than that and probably best summed up in Jon Levenson’s Sinai and Zion (I use the term Hebrew
Bible here because Levenson is a Jewish scholar and that is what his book is
about, not about the Christian OT reading). The Sinai traditions are the Heilsgeschicte thinking but there are
also the Zion traditions, which are much more like the topographical emphasis
of the mythologies of the surrounding nations (the temple on Mount Zion and the
king as semidivine, although in 2 Sam 7 it is more along the lines of adopted by
the divine). The thesis of Levenson’s book (which well deserves its fame and
the bountiful royalties I am sure it generates as the intro-level book used by
many MA level intro to OT courses, and probably a fair number of upper-level
undergrad courses in OT) is that the real theme of the Hebrew Bible is the
tension between these two perspectives.
[SIDENOTE: In his awesome book The
Discarded Image, which I just finished reading for the Inklings book club I
am in and cannot recommend highly enough, C. S. Lewis took some pretty serious
issue with the idea that Israel was so radically focused on history while
everybody else was so dominated by spatial mythological topography, and he gets
kind of snarky at points. I can see his point, and he does have some good
evidence to offer from outside the ancient Near East, stuff from the northern
European realms that he and Tolkien studied so extensively. While I think his
criticisms should be heard if one takes the Heilsgeschicte
line too radically, thinking that Israel thought only in this way and every
polytheistic religion thought only ever
in the topographical way, as von Rad might himself have thought (hard to tell
sometimes), I think my immediately previous paragraph and Levenson, himself
Jewish, provide a lot of nuance that avoids that. And I do think that it is
true that the lines are much sharper in the Hebrew Bible and produce a unique
tension between the two different models in play, such that it is apt, or at
least allowable, to use the Heilsgeschicte
as the architectural term for my own exposition of my thoughts on the place of
historical critical studies of Scripture under the guiding hand of Christian
theology. END SIDENOTE]
MY THESIS:
My idea is that maybe a
proper relationship between studying the Bible as flowing from living
revelation and studying its compositional history on the human level could be formulated as
studying a dual-layered Heilsgeschicte,
sacred events. The primary is the history of the saving acts of God. The
secondary, though, is the history of the giving of the text, the history of its
composition as a series of divinely orchestrated events, beginning with direct
reception of revelation (Moses on Sinai and the disciples with Jesus) and then
the journey through oral traditions and written traditions and canonization of
text all going on within an institution spawned by that revelational event and
through the authority of that original recipient.
Heilsgeschicte 2 (history of the text) within a Christian
understanding of Heilsgeschicte 1
(history of saving events, including Christ as the definitive revelation)
An important aspect to keep
in mind here is that, in a Christian reading of “history,” the present and the
future are included when speaking of Scripture as a record of “salvation
history.” There is system of medieval exegesis of Scripture called “the
quadriga,” meaning the fourfold sense. It is a rule of typologically
interpreting particularly the Old Testament (I’m going to prescind from the
question of calling it by the distinctly Christian designation “Old Testament”
or by the term “Hebrew Bible,” which I mentioned in passing when talking about
Levenson above and which I’ll address a little bit below in talking about the
difference between the “literal sense” and the “original sense”).
The fours senses are the
“literal,” the “allegorical,” the “moral/tropological,” and the “anagogical.”
To use probably the most common example used in discussing these matters, in the
“literal” sense, the Temple is the real Jerusalem Temple constructed by Solomon
and the Second Temple constructed by Ezra and Nehemiah after the return from
the Babylonian exile. The “allegorical” sense is always about the fulfillment
in Christ, and so we have passages like that in John in which Christ talks
about destroying the Temple and it being raised in three days, with John
interjecting directly that he was speaking of the Temple of his body. The
“moral” sense is seeing the element in the literal sense as a prefiguring of
the individual believer’s life in Christ, and so we have Paul’s famous “do you
not know that your body is the Temple of the HolySpirit.” The anagogical sense
is the eschatological sense, the final sense, the sense of the next age. So,
the Temple is Heaven, the new Jerusalem to which we are traveling as pilgrims.
[SIDENOTE: There is a further sense that is added particularly in
Patristic times called the “mystogogical” sense. This relates to the seven sacraments
of the Church as fulfillment of the foreshadowings in the Bible. So the
Eucharist fulfills the manna in the wilderness and the rock struck in the side
and pouring forth water at Horeb, baptism fulfills the flood and the Red Sea,
and so on. The two volumes that I have had to study on this are Enrico Mazza’s Mystagogy and Jean Danielou’s The Bible and the Liturgy, although
there is a lot of good material in two of Mazza’s other major works: The Origins of the Eucharistic Prayer
and The Celebration of the Eucharist.
Mystagogy is a typological method by nature and Mazza and others detail how and
why it was largely replaced by “sacramental realism” in discussing the
sacraments after about the fourth or fifth century. END SIDENOTE]
Possibly the most important
thing to note in the Christian reading is that all points of history are part of the Heilsgschicte, not just the events in the Old Testament. The Geschicte of events that are heil includes everything from the
creation of the world to the entry into the next world, with Christ at the
center and the Church and individual believers (the moral sense) as equally
important alongside the literal sense of the Old Testament (I haven’t worked
that out into a tight system, but there is no way that that story is not
chiastic).
Thus, since the primary Heilsgeschicte (the actual historical
events) includes all times, it would include any and all events in the giving
and transmitting of a text believed to be divinely inspired (see more below), which
is precisely the secondary Heilsgeschicte
(the history of the texts as record of revelation). The former always has to be
primary and the necessary context of the latter to understand it properly. The
reason to study the history of the transmission and progressive literary formation
of the text is that the giving of the text by God is the point of exploring the
material means by which it came to be; the point is to study the “how” of the
giving, which is one of the many events in the primary Heilsgeschicte.
An important question here is
that of “inspiration” of Scripture by the Holy Spirit: can the workings of the
institution begotten by the Mosaic revelation (the circles of prophets coming
down to the circle of prophets that scholars believe brought with them their
library of traditions carrying what was revealed in the Mosaic encounter from
the north to the south just before the destruction of Samaria, the capital of
the northern kingdom, by Assyria in 721/722 BC … see below for more detail) be
thought of as falling under the operation of inspiration? It’s a tricky
question and one to which I do not have a ready-made answer at present (I have
a very useful volume on my shelf called Catholic
Theories of Biblical Inspiration since 1810, by James T. Burtchaell, but I
did not discover this volume until reading of it in an article I was
copyediting a number of years after having discontinued my degree, but I have
not gotten around to reading and processing it fully). As I said, the primary Heilsgeschicte has to remain primary,
and only in this context does inspiration of Scripture make sense, as an event
within that primary Heilsgeschicte.
Beyond that, whether the hypothetical institutional actions that transmitted
traditions and then formed them into writing and canonized them happened with
guidance at the concrete level id s very nuanced question indeed. It seems to
me that they have to stand in some relation to it, which is why it is important
that they have an institutional authority derived concretely from the one to
whom original revelation was made: Moses (whoever he was historically or
however his factual existence, in which one must believe in some form or
another, as well as the factual existence of a unique and distinct event of
revelation to him, relates to the portrayal of him and the events in the text),
the prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and finally the revelation
to the Twelve apostles through Christ. But I do not pretend to have those
things worked out. I am simply trying to make sense of what I know of the faith
concerning the matter of revelation and the teaching of the Tradition,
especially in the papal teachings beginning with Leo XIII’s Providentissimus Deus (1893, the first
of the encyclicals dealing specifically with the historical critical methods in
the wake of there rise in nineteenth-century Europe) and up through Benedict
XVI’s Verbum Domini, the latter of
which popes (Benedict) has made it pretty clear that there must be some
engagement with the findings of the historical critical methods (some of that
engagement is that careful attention should be paid to whether certain
Enlightenment principles are impacting the findings, but it also includes
taking their findings seriously as possibly true).
I’ll wrap up this section by
giving the distinction (or at least what of it I have been able to process of
what seems to me to be the situation) between the “literal sense” in the
technical quadriga meaning and what I call the “original sense.” The literal
sense is the actual events themselves, and so it can actually include the
fulfillment in Christ, since Christ’s role in creation etc is part of the
ontological being of those events. The “original sense” is what it meant in the
context of the original composition of those texts before the coming of Christ,
their sense particularly as the “Hebrew Bible.” For example, when God says “let
us create man in our own image,” in a
Christian fuller reading, this refers to the Trinity. But we take it seriously
that there is a radically new revelation in Christ of the Trinity as the true
nature of God, and not before Christ. If the “original sense” of that verse in
Genesis 1 meant the Trinity, then a human author before Christ would have had
to have known of the Trinity before it was revealed in Christ, and that makes
the revelation in Christ pointless, reducing the Incarnation to the purely
juridical act of atonement for sin (I’m writing in the only way that I can, as
a Catholic: for at least certain strands of Protestantism, there is viewed to
be nothing wrong with reducing all to the juridical aspect, but the Catholic
Church has always taught that the Crucifixion is the culmination of the whole
process of the Incarnation, not that the Incarnation is simply the mechanical
means to the end of the Crucifixion achieving the juridical act of atonement).
Another example is the doctrine of creation ex
nihilo, which I don’t think is in the original sense of Genesis 1. For one
thing, the particular concepts of “being” in that doctrine were not around
until the Elean school of philosophy, the pre-Sorcatics, about 500 years before
Christ, after the formation of the Genesis material. I don’t think that them
not meaning creation ex nihilo means
that they did mean that matter is eternal, as in the Greek doctrine of
“prime matter.” I think it was simply not on their radar as a question. Their
construct was not “being” versus “non being” (the first instance of which we
get in 2 Maccabees 7, using the language of distinguishing “things that are”
from “things that are not” borrowed from the Elean school); their construct is
order versus chaos. I DO think that, once those categories have been introduced
and developed, and particularly once Christianity has picked them up from Greek
philosophy by way of Jewish thought having intersected with Greek thought in
the 300 or 400 years before Christ (2 Macc 7 being a big piece of evidence for
that), creation ex nihilo is a
distinctly valid translation of the order-versus-chaos thinking in the original
sense of Genesis 1 into those new categories of thought (it should be noted
here that the two primary examples I know of in Patristic thought addressing
the question of Genesis 1 in relation to the creation ex nihilo issue, Augustine’s On
the Creed and Basil’s Hexameron,
are purely negative and defensive moves: they do not argue that Genesis 1
concretely contains the doctrine, but rather that the language of “formless and
void” there cannot be used to support the Greek doctrine of “prime matter” as
eternal, as Porphyry and other pagan thinkers tried to argue that it can be,
saying “see, even your own holy scriptures support our doctrine in this
language of ‘formless and void’”).
Example of
Compositional History Provided by Historical Critical Methods
This is the “broad strokes”
version of the best that I was able to piece together of the compositional
history of the Law and the Prophets, the first two sections of the Hebrew
canon, known as the TaNaK (see below under “Story Time” for a fuller
explanation of that), to which Christ witnesses when he says, “on these two
commandments hang the whole of the Law and the Prophets” (most likely, the
third section, the Writings, was still in a greater state of canonical flux at
the time, there but more fluid), the textual mass containing the history from
creation through the Babylonian exile. Some of my presentation here is
condensing material into the narrative that seems to me to make the most sense
and to be the most widely accepted, but there are always at least some
important voices objecting to any given part, advocating distinctly different
theories (one or two of which I describe at the end of this section).
Historical criticism does not
seriously address Moses as the material source of the content of the Pentateuch
except in the form of dismissing that idea as historical. Some scholars early
on still assumed it and incorporated it, but it pretty quickly dropped out as a
discussion topic, at best. To the best of my knowledge, aside from the sketchy
pictures of the Jahwist source being around 1000 BC in the southern kingdom,
the Elohist source in the northern kingdom in the 9th century BC,
and the more concrete pictures of the Priestly source in the late 5th
century BC in the south after the return from the exile, the most pertinent
material for the formation of major canonical blocks concerns the D source, the
Deuteronomistic source (this is all from the classic four-source theory put
forward most definitively by Julius Wellhausen).
The story goes something like
this. In the northern kingdom there was a circle of prophets who had a
collection of traditions (some written, some orally transmitted) concerning the
giving of the Law, the conquest of the land by Joshua and the twelve tribes,
and the unified kingdom under David and Solomon. Sometime not long before the fall
of the northern kingdom and its capital city, Samaria, to the Assyrian Empire
in 721/722 BC, the prophets realized what was about to happen and flew to the
southern kingdom, Judah, with their collection. There, during the reign of
Hezekiah, who was a righteous king with whom they thought they could work, they
coalesced certain pieces from their traditions into a written work that was the
“Book of the Law,” roughly our present Deuteronomy chapters 12–26 (Wellhausen
was the one to claim that core as the Deuteronomic Law, or DL for short, but
these theories get much more complex in the form of later hands also
interjecting material into the DL, such that no historical critical scholar
sees everything in 12–26 as being original to this northern school’s work under
Hezekiah, but that is the broad line identification).
After Hezekiah, Manasseh came
to the throne in Judah, who was an evil king who basically went on a rampage to
convert the kingdom to polytheism. At this point, the circle of prophets hid
the Book of the Law in the Temple, as it was in disuse by Manasseh. After
Manesseh came Josiah, a truly righteous king. At this time, Hilkiah the priest
found the Book of the Law in the Temple and brought it to Josiah, and Josiah had
it read by Huldah the prophetess and obeyed it and had the people obey it in
what is called the “Josianic reform” movement. So the immediate descendents of
the original prophetic school that came from the north, who still had the
collection they had received from those prophets, went to that collection and
pulled together out of it a narrative work that, as a hypothetical work,
scholars call the “Deuteronomistic History” (DH), the story of the conquest of
the land by Joshua all the way up to the great religious reform of Josiah the
king of Judah. The similarity in the names was not missed: Joshua and Josiah
were the two bookends of this epic. They were the two military leaders who did
what the Book of the Law said (in Deut 17) a king/military leader is supposed
to do: listen to the prophet expounding the Book of the Law (Joshua listening
to Moses and Josiah listening to Huldah) and lead the people in religious
reform. The fact that Josiah is the culmination is seen in the fact that he
receives the highest accolade possible: both Hezekiah and Josiah have the text
say about them that there was no king before or after who was like them, but
only Josiah is described as loving the Lord God with his whole heart and soul
and might, the great commandment given under the Shemah in Deuteronomy 6.
This was all one work not
broken out into the separate books we known now, but it comprised Joshua,
Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings up to the reign of Josiah. But they
didn’t circulate this DH on its own like that. They took the DL that there
immediate ancestors had done and put it on the front as a preface, as a “key”
of sorts to understanding what the key themes were that should be understood in
the (the law of the king in Deut 17, the law of the central sanctuary in Deut
12, which is the basis for the Jerusalem Temple). Over time, this “preface”
also got padded out and better connected with narrative material (also drawn
from the collection of traditions inherited … it is a key component of
religious belief in these matters that none of this material was invented whole
cloth; it all came from the collection of traditions that were attributed,
ultimately, to beginning with Moses, although the material on the kings is
taken from sources that are actually mentioned on the page [“he did much else
that is recorded in the Annals of the Kings of Juda” or Israel … there is even
such a sources listed for the works of Solomon]). Eventually the first five
chapters of Deuteronomy would be a summary version of the history of the people
from the time of the revelation at Horeb (the name in Deuteronomy for the
mountain that is called Sinai in Exodus) to the entry into the land as
described in Joshua.
But the stability under
Josiah didn’t last, and four kings later, the nation was in exile. At this
point, a religious reader in the exile, sitting reading the DH had to ask the
question of why, if Josiah’s reform was so righteous, God had had to send the
people into exile in Babylon. It was not an acceptable thing to say that
Babylon conquered because they were more powerful, since Judah is the nation of
the all powerful Lord God, and so if the people went into exile, it was because
of God’s decision, not Babylon’s power, and it must have been punishment for
some wickedness. So they pull from their materials on the kings after Josiah,
materials collected by them during that time, and added the last four kings as
wicked kings who, along with Manasseh (who was so wicked that not even Josiah’s
righteous reform could make up for it), led the people into an apostasy and
brought God’s wrath in the form of the Babylonians and exile.
Actually, everything I have
just described about the first edition ending with Josiah is called the “double
redaction theory” of the DH. The original form of the theory as put forth by
Martin Noth saw only one redaction, done in the exile, with the point that
monarchy in general is bad. Noth saw no good kings: the people had been slated
for exile ever since they asked for a king in the first place (and, admittedly,
he has some strong support in 1 Sam 8 in Samuel’s speech form God criticizing
the people for asking as a rejection of God himself). There are a lot of things
that intersect here and give rise to numerous theories about, for instance, the
relationships between the DH and the book of Jeremiah, which original prophet
was operating on the ground at the time of Josiah’s sons and remained in the
land after the majority population. For another instance, Isaiah 36–39 are roughly
identical in content to 2 Kings 18–20. So, who borrowed from whom, the
disciples of Isaiah’s school recording his words and forming his book, or the
“author” responsible for 2 Kings?
But one way or another, all
who propose any version of the DH theory, whether single or double redaction,
see it as completed in the exile. So the people return from exile with a book
roughly equivalent to Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2
Kings. In this crowd is one or several members of a “priestly” circle who have
also been carrying around their own small “library” of traditions, mostly from
the Jahwist and Elohist sources, but also thought to go back to the original
revelation to Moses by way of oral tradition. And this group develops a new
project. Treating the book of Deuteronomy now as a final chapter (it ends with
the people just outside the land but ready to go in under Joshua, just as the
people in the exile are about to return to Judah from Babylon with the priestly
class now leading), they fill in the story from Deuteronomy back to the
creation of the world (again, from their received traditions, not whole-cloth
invention). And this is the work that we now call the “Penteteuch” (the
five-book) and ascribe to the authorship of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, Deuteronomy.
There were other
theories—major theories—along the way that are a challenge to the major
narrative of composition I have just described (original D school does the DL
under Hezekiah’s reign; immediate D descendents do the DH under Josiah’s reign
with the DL on the front end as a preface; further descendents of D school in
exile do a second edition with the Manasseh material and last four kings; after
the exile, P combines his own material and J and E with Deuteronomy into our
present Penteteuch). The most prominent one was called the “Hexateuch” theory,
and its main opening advocate was Gerhard von Rad, the lad famous for using the
Heilsgeschicte term. He said that it
made no sense for an original major work to begin with the promise of the land
to Abraham but end before they even enter the land in fulfillment. Therefore,
the original major work must not have been a five-book, but rather a six-book,
a hexateuch, that ended with Joshua finally in the land with the people. And
that theory had a pretty good literary argument in support of its reading in
the form of a very thorough chiasm covering those six books, and anybody who
reads further in my blog or has read it before this should know how much I like
chiastic readings. In the end though, I still side with the DL/DH theory and
the theory of P doing what I call “the tetrateuch that never was.” There was a
theory that what is now contained in the four books of Genesis–Numbers was originally an independent
work that was then appended to the front of the DL/DH combo. I tend not to buy
this, but I do think the four books have a certain cohesion simply from being
what was put together, from the start, to append to the front of the DL/DH, so
I call it “the tetrateuch that never was.”
In all this, I always like to
emphasize the centrality of Deuteronomy as a sort of hinge between these first
to big major parts of the TaNaK: the last book of the Torah but also sort of
(in its contents and in its compositional history, if those theories hold
water) the preface of the Prophets.
Story Time
As with everything I do in
writing posts on this blog, I try to tie things together with other central
posts I have written on the blog in the ongoing (and will be until I die)
project of trying to figure out how all the various parts of what I think of as
“meaning in this world” fit together. Here it relates to the post I once wrote called “Story Time,” but not the particulars of that post (although I did use
some biblical examples there to expound what I meant by kairos and chronos),
mainly just in the importance of “stories,” of plots, to us as humans trying to
process meaning.
The line that I used to give
my undergrads was that “we’re all looking for a story.” There are two primary
canons of the Old Testament: the Hebrew TaNaK, which stands for the Torah,
Nevi’im, and the Ketuvim, the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings (the primary
witness of the TaNaK canon being the Hebrew Masoretic Text, usually referred to
as MT for short, in its primary witness, the text known as codex “Leningradensis”);
and the Greek canon of the Septuagint, the translation commissioned by
Alexander the Great sometime in the third century BC (usually referred to as
LXX for short, which is the Roman numeral for 70, on the legend that 70
translators wore put in70 isolated cells for 70 days and all came up with
exactly the same Greek translation). The
difference in them and their “stories” can be seen in the instance I gave above
of the Deuteronomistic History. This is the books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2
Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings. Notice … Ruth does not appear after Judges as it
does in the Septuagint canon, and thus the Christian canon. In the TaNaK, Ruth
is in the Writings, the third major section, not the Prophets, the second. The
Septuagint has brought Ruth up to after Judges because that is where the
content fits historically. Especially in the Christian use of this canon (there
was a lot of politics going on: at the time of Christ, the two canons were
equally respected in Palestine, but when Christianity began to use the LXX so
prominently, the Jewish council of Javneh in AD 90 made a decisive move, at
least in Palestine [versus other centers of diaspora Judaism, as in Greek
Alexandria] to using only the Palestinian Hebrew canon to sharply distinguish
themselves from Christianity), the story is of everything leading up to
fulfillment in Christ, and therefore the canon that had everything in the order
of the historical setting of its contents was the one used by Christianity.
The TaNaK canon has a
different plot. It is the story of how a revelation and the establishment of a
relationship moves out in concentric circles (as far as I know, this is my own
formulation; if somebody has published it before, I apologize for not
remembering or finding out and crediting them, and conversely, I take full
responsibility for anything erroneous in this formulation, whether it be the
core theory itself or the specific formulation). The Law is revealed to Moses
and this establishes the relationship of the people of Israel to God. This
happens as nomads, on the way to a home promised by God but still wanderers (I
love that Chaim Potok titled his history of the Jewish people Wanderings). Then, they come into,
conquer and inhabit, the land and become a kingdom, and the Prophets, the
second major section, tells the story of that existence as a political nation
being in relation to the other political nations around them, from Joshua’s
conquest to the promise of dynasty to David to he splitting of the kingdom into
two and to the conquering of northern kingdom by Assyria and the southern
kingdom by Babylon. Then, once that political identity has been demoted by the
loss of the throne in the exile, the Writings section is about the interaction
with the broader world in the broader spectrum of thinking in things like the
Wisdom literature.
My endpoint of that little
talk when teaching undergrads was the historical critical methods as developed
in a unique way in the nineteenth century. Those scholars were also looking for
a story: How did this text that has had such an impact on me come to be within
the religion in which it began and how did that religion feed into my own
religion, which is the immediate path by which it has had so great an impact on
me?
Unfortunately scholars from
that school sometimes restrict it to this level, to a level of the “history of
religions” approach, and very often with a strong temptation to seek it in a radically
isolated psychology of religion way. I think that that is a very important
level, and indeed I do think that it sells the project of studying the Bible
short to neglect it. I think it is a valuable tool, but at the end of the day, I
agree with Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI that study of the Bible must go
beyond this level and address the text as communication of record of revelation
by God with a properly theological telos
or goal. It must be taken as theo-logy, as word of God, based in the Word of
God, the revelation of the Trinity in the second person, the Logos, Christ.
Which is to say, as I emphasized toward the beginning of this post, that the Heilsgeschicte of the development and
composition of the text must be put in the true context of the Heilsgeschicte of salvation and full
revelation in Christ.
No comments:
Post a Comment