The Old Testament: Canon, Literature and Theology 0754654516, 9780754654513, 9780754687603

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 8
List of Figures......Page 10
Acknowledgements......Page 12
Preface......Page 14
General Introduction......Page 16
Part I: Canon......Page 18
Introduction......Page 20
1 ‘The Law and the Prophets’. Who are the Prophets?......Page 22
2 The Canonical Meaning of the Book of the Twelve......Page 36
3 Canon and Old Testament Interpretation......Page 48
4 Canonical Approaches Ancient and Modern......Page 60
5 Unity and Diversity in the Biblical Canon......Page 70
6 Marcion Revisited......Page 84
7 Old Testament or Hebrew Bible?......Page 100
Part II: Literature......Page 108
Introduction......Page 110
8 Classifying Biblical Criticism......Page 112
9 Reading the Bible as Literature: Two Questions for Biblical Critics......Page 126
10 Historical Criticism and Literary Interpretation: Is there any Common Ground?......Page 144
11 What is a Book? Modern Exegesis and the Literary Conventions of Ancient Israel......Page 154
12 Should Old Testament Study be more Theological?......Page 166
13 The Future of Old Testament Study......Page 174
14 Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to the History of Israel: Influences and Effects......Page 186
15 Intertextuality and the ‘Final Form’ of the Text......Page 198
16 The Final Form of the Text......Page 202
17 Thinking about Reader-Response Criticism......Page 210
18 On Biblical Commentaries......Page 218
Part III: Theology......Page 228
Introduction......Page 230
19 Gerhard von Rad on the World-View of Early Israel......Page 232
20 Preparation in History for Christ......Page 252
21 History and Rhetoric in the Prophets......Page 264
22 The Messiah in Old Testament Theology......Page 274
23 Covenant in Old Testament Theology......Page 286
24 The Day of Yahweh in the Minor Prophets......Page 296
E......Page 306
M......Page 307
S......Page 308
Z......Page 309

Citation preview

THE OLD TESTAMENT: CANON, LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY

SOCIETY FOR OLD TESTAMENT STUDY MONOGRAPHS Series Editor Margaret Barker Series Editorial Board Katharine J. Dell; Paul Joyce; Edward Ball; Eryl W. Davies Series Advisory Board Bertil Albrektson; Graeme Auld; John Barton; Joseph Blenkinsopp; William Johnstone; John Rogerson Ashgate is pleased to publish the revived Society for Old Testament Study (SOTS) monograph series. The Society for Old Testament Study is a learned society based in the British Isles, with an international membership, committed to the study of the Old Testament. This series promotes Old Testament studies with the support and guidance of the Society. The series includes research monographs by members of the Society, both from established international scholars and from exciting new authors. Titles in the series include: Jeremiah’s Kings A Study of the Monarchy in Jeremiah John Brian Job Hebrew Bible and Ancient Versions Selected Essays of Robert P. Gordon Robert P. Gordon The Personification of Wisdom Alice M. Sinnott Saul and the Monarchy: A New Look Simcha Shalom Brooks ‘There’s such Divinity doth Hedge a King’ Selected Essays of Nicolas Wyatt on Royal Ideology in Ugaritic and Old Testament Literature Nicolas Wyatt Wisdom: The Collected Articles of Norman Whybray Edited by Katharine J. Dell and Margaret Barker

The Old Testament: Canon, Literature and Theology Collected Essays of John Barton

JOHN BARTON University of Oxford, UK

© John Barton 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. John Barton has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Barton, John, 1948– The Old Testament: canon, literature and theology: collected essays of John Barton. – (The Society for Old Testament Study monographs) 1. Bible. O.T. – Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Bible. O.T. – Canonical criticism 3. Bible. O.T. – Theology 4. Bible as literature I. Title II. Society for Old Testament Study 220.6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barton, John, 1948– The Old Testament: canon, literature and theology: collected essays of John Barton/ John Barton. p. cm. – (Society for Old Testament study) Includes index. 1. Bible. O.T. – Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Bible. O.T. – Canon. I. Title. BS1171.3.B37 007 221.1–dc22 2007001507

ISBN 978-0-7546-5451-3 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

For Charlotte and Annabel

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Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Preface General Introduction Part I

ix xi xiii xv

Canon

Introduction 1 ‘The Law and the Prophets’. Who are the Prophets? 2 The Canonical Meaning of the Book of the Twelve 3 Canon and Old Testament Interpretation 4 Canonical Approaches Ancient and Modern 5 Unity and Diversity in the Biblical Canon 6 Marcion Revisited 7 Old Testament or Hebrew Bible?

3 5 19 31 43 53 67 83

Part II Literature Introduction 8 Classifying Biblical Criticism 9 Reading the Bible as Literature: Two Questions for Biblical Critics 10 Historical Criticism and Literary Interpretation: Is there any Common Ground? 11 What is a Book? Modern Exegesis and the Literary Conventions of Ancient Israel 12 Should Old Testament Study be more Theological? 13 The Future of Old Testament Study 14 Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to the History of Israel: Influences and Effects 15 Intertextuality and the ‘Final Form’ of the Text 16 The Final Form of the Text 17 Thinking about Reader-Response Criticism 18 On Biblical Commentaries

93 95 109 127 137 149 157 169 181 185 193 201

Part III Theology Introduction 19 Gerhard von Rad on the World-View of Early Israel 20 Preparation in History for Christ 21 History and Rhetoric in the Prophets

213 215 235 247

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22 23 24

The Messiah in Old Testament Theology Covenant in Old Testament Theology The Day of Yahweh in the Minor Prophets

Index

257 269 279 289

List of Figures 8.1

Abrams’s scheme

96

8.2

A biblical adaptation of Abrams’s scheme

99

8.3

Barr’s scheme

100

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Acknowledgements I am grateful to the following publishers for permission to reproduce the articles included in this volume: Oxford University Press for ‘Reading the Bible as Literature: Two Questions for Biblical Critics’, Journal of Theology and Literature 1 (1987), pp. 135–53; The Future of Old Testament Study (Inaugural Lecture) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); ‘Gerhard von Rad on the World-View of Early Israel’, Journal of Theological Studies 35 (1984), pp. 301–23; ‘Covenant in Old Testament Theology’, in Covenant as Context: Essays in Honour of E. W. Nicholson, ed. A.D.H. Mayes and R.B. Salters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 23–38. E.J. Brill for ‘“The Law and the Prophets”. Who are the Prophets?’, Oudtestamentische Studiën 23 (1984), pp. 1–18; ‘Historical Criticism and Literary Interpretation: Is there any Common Ground?’, in Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honour of Michael D. Goulder, ed. S.E. Porter, P. Joyce and D.E. Orton (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), pp. 3–15; ‘What is a Book? Modern Exegesis and the Literary Conventions of Ancient Israel’, in Intertextuality in Ugarit and Israel: Papers read at the tenth joint meeting of the Society for Old Testament Study and Het Oudtestamentische Werkgezelschap in Nederland en België, held at Oxford, 1997, ed. J.C. de Moor, Oudtestamentische Studiën 40 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 1–14; ‘Intertextuality and the “Final Form” of the Text’, Congress Voolume Oslo 1998 , ed. A. Lemaire and M. Sæbø (Leiden: Brill, 1998) pp. 33–7. Mercer University Press for ‘The Canonical Meaning of the Book of the Twelve’, in After the Exile: Essays in Honour of Rex Mason, ed. J. Barton and D.J. Reimer (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996), pp. 59–73. Sage Publications Ltd for ‘Classifying Biblical Criticism’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29 (1984), pp. 19–35; ‘Should Old Testament Study be more Theological?’, Expository Times 100 (1989), pp. 443–8; ‘Looking Back on the Twentieth Century 2: Old Testament Studies’, Expository Times 110 (1999), pp. 348–51 (here retitled ‘The Final Form of the Text’); ‘Thinking about Reader-Response Criticism’, Expository Times 113:5 (2002), pp. 147–51. Continuum Books for ‘Canon and Old Testament Interpretation’, in In Search of True Wisdom: Essays in Old Testament Interpretation in Honour of Ronald E. Clements, ed. E. Ball, JSOTSup 300 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 37–52; ‘Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to the History of Israel: Influences and Effects’, in Text and Experience: Towards a Cultural Exegesis of the Bible, ed. D. Smith-Christopher (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), pp. 316–29;

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‘The Messiah in Old Testament Theology’, in King and Messiah in Israel and the Ancient Near East, ed. J. Day (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 365–79; ‘The Day of Yahweh in the Minor Prophets’, in Biblical and Near Eastern Essays: Studies in Honour of Kevin J. Cathcart, ed. C. McCarthy and J.F. Healy, JSOTSup 375 (London: T. & T. Clark International, 2004), pp. 68–79. Leuven University Press for ‘Canonical Approaches Ancient and Modern’, in The Biblical Canons, ed. J.-M. Auwers and H.J. de Jonge (Leuven: Leuven University Press and Peeters, 2003), pp. 199–209. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co for ‘Unity and Diversity in the Biblical Canon’, in Die Einheit der Schrift und die Vielfalt des Kanons/The Unity of Scripture and the Diversity of the Canon, ed. J. Barton and M. Wolter, BZNW 118 (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2003), pp. 11–26. Hendrickson Publishers for ‘Marcion Revisited’, in The Canon Debate, ed. Lee Martin McDonald and James A. Sanders (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2003), pp. 341–54. All rights reserved. The Farmington Trust for ‘Old Testament or Hebrew Bible?’, Farmington Papers, Biblical Studies 2 (1996). SCM Canterbury Press for ‘The A.S. Peake Memorial Lecture: On Biblical Commentaries’, Epworth Review 24:3 (1997), pp. 35–44. Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd for ‘Preparation in History for Christ’, in The Religion of the Incarnation, ed. R. Morgan (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989), pp. 60–73. Taylor & Francis for ‘History and Rhetoric in the Prophets’, in The Bible as Rhetoric: Studies in Biblical Persuasion and Credibility, ed. M. Warner, Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 51–64.

Preface It is flattering but also a little ominous to be invited to compile a collection of one’s papers and essays. It seems to suggest that one’s academic productivity may be nearing its end, and that it is time to compile a ‘canon’ of one’s work. I naturally hope this is not so, but I am glad to have this opportunity to look back on what I have written so far and to try to present it as having a certain coherence. Most of the papers collected here are ‘occasional’: they were never conceived as stepping-stones to any kind of magnum opus. Nevertheless readers are likely to see in them common concerns, which surface also in some of the books I have written. I have tried to trace some of these themes in the General Introduction and in the Introductions to the three sections. I am very grateful to the editorial committee of the Society for Old Testament Study Monographs, and especially to Margaret Barker, for inviting me to gather old essays together in this way; and to Sarah Lloyd at Ashgate for accepting the proposal. All the material here was written in Oxford, the only place I have ever worked, and it owes much to the stimulus of many friends, colleagues and students (by no means three discrete categories). For the most part I have left the essays here in the form in which they were originally written, with just a few changes where a reference is now seriously out of date or the language now inappropriate (I have revised all ‘non-inclusive’ language). With some, such as ‘Classifying Biblical Criticism’, biblical studies have moved on enormously since they were written, and they are now perhaps of mainly historical interest, which I hope does not mean of no interest at all: it can be important to know how things looked in the 1980s. The book is dedicated with love to my two granddaughters, Charlotte and Annabel Walker. John Barton Oxford August 2006

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General Introduction The essays and papers collected here cover about twenty years. They are concerned with three main themes, as the subtitle indicates: canon, literature and theology. Although these may seem to be three unrelated fields, in my own mind they are interrelated. I suppose my first interest in the Bible, when I began to study it as a student, was theological – like many people I studied theology originally because I was heading for ordination (in the Church of England). But my previous experience of study had been in languages and literature, and it was therefore a happy thing for me that the 1960s and 1970s saw the growth of a consciously literary interest in biblical interpretation. In some practitioners of literary reading there was a deliberately anti-theological intention, but this was by no means universal, and scholars soon saw the theological potential of a focus on the Bible as literature. At about the same time there arose, primarily through the work of Brevard S. Childs, the ‘canonical approach’ to biblical study; and though I did not find the theological programme behind this approach very attractive, it did make me intensely interested in the canon as both a theological and a historical question. To me therefore concerns for canon, literature and theology in the study of the Bible – and especially the Old Testament, which is where my main interest lies – form a coherent pattern. My other major interest, biblical ethics (on which I wrote my doctoral thesis), is the subject of a previous collection of essays (Understanding Old Testament Ethics, Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003). Contrary to the popular perception of Old Testament study as a dry-as-dust field in which by now everything must surely have been said that could possibly be said, to its practitioners it is a lively area of debate in which a great deal has changed over the last twenty years. Interest in the canon has gone hand-in-hand with a growing concern for the ‘final form’ of biblical texts on literary grounds, so much so that it is often difficult to disentangle the two factors. And Old Testament theology, after a period in the doldrums following the demise of the particular manifestation known as the ‘Biblical Theology Movement’, is once again a burgeoning field. The danger in the study of the Old Testament at the moment is not that interest will wane, but that the discipline will break up into a set of loosely related separate disciplines. The papers presented here are part of an effort to conceive the field as a unity, however little any individual can nowadays command even a small part of it. My own commitment is to the continuity of modern biblical criticism with the achievements of scholars over the last several hundred years, and I am sceptical of attempts to reconceive the entire discipline. That does not mean, however, that there are not new problems to be tackled, and I hope that some of what is presented here occasionally breaks new ground.

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PART I Canon

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Introduction The Old Testament canon is both a historical and a theological problem. Until the 1970s, it was almost exclusively the historical side that interested scholars – when it interested them at all. ‘Introductions’ to the Old Testament tended to treat it at the very end, as a subject that mattered rather little. In ‘Canons of the Old Testament’, published in Text in Context: Essays by Members of the Society for Old Testament Study (ed. A.D.H. Mayes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 200–222), I pointed out that the various previous survey volumes produced in the twentieth century by the Society for Old Testament Study did not include articles on the canon at all. The work of B.S. Childs and J.A. Sanders in different ways propelled the canon into the spotlight of interest among Old Testament scholars for the first time, and it is now an important focus for much new research, surveyed in two major recent collections of essays The Canon Debate (ed. Lee Martin McDonald and James A. Sanders (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002)) and The Biblical Canons (ed. J.-M. Auwers and H.J. de Jonge (Leuven: Peeters, 2003)). New Testament scholars have also regained an interest in the question of the canon. Apart from the essays presented here, my own main contribution to the canon question is The Spirit and the Letter: Studies in the Biblical Canon (London: SPCK, 1997 = Holy Writings, Sacred Text: The Canon in Early Christianity (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1997)). My first foray into canonical questions is represented by ‘“The Law and the Prophets.” Who are the Prophets?’ (Oudtestamentische Studiën 23 (1984), pp. 1–18), which arose from an invitation to write a general book on the prophets of the Old Testament. I became convinced that this task should be accomplished by working backwards from the reception of the prophets in later Jewish and Christian tradition, in some ways an anticipation of the concern for reception that is now a major growth area. Before this could be tackled, it was necessary to discover what people in later times meant by ‘prophets’, and this, I found, led immediately into the question of the canon, since as now constituted it contains a section known as ‘Prophets’. I subsequently developed the ideas sketched here in my Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1986; New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). The intended book on the classical prophets in their own right has never been written, I am sorry to say. The canon may be not simply a list of books but also, in Harry Y. Gamble’s helpful expression, a ‘locus of meaning’ (see his The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), p. 44), and Brevard Childs has pioneered the quest for the ‘canonical meaning’ of many Old Testament and New Testament books. In ‘The Canonical Meaning of the Book of the Twelve’, from After the Exile: Essays in Honour of Rex Mason (ed. J. Barton and D.J. Reimer (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996), pp. 59–73), I tried to open up the question of whether the Twelve can be seen as having a meaning beyond the individual meanings of each prophetic book taken for itself. Rex Mason himself, who has done

4

THE OLD TESTAMENT: CANON, LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY

so much important work on the Twelve, had raised the question, though without wishing to resolve it in a Childs-like way. Similar issues are discussed in ‘Canon and Old Testament Interpretation’, from In Search of True Wisdom: Essays in Old Testament Interpretation in Honour of Ronald E. Clements (ed. E. Ball (JSOTSup 300, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 37–52), and in ‘Canonical Approaches Ancient and Modern’ from The Biblical Canons (see above; pp. 199–209). In ‘Unity and Diversity in the Biblical Canon’, from Die Einheit der Schrift und die Vielfalt des Kanons/The Unity of Scripture and the Diversity of the Canon (ed. J. Barton and M. Wolter (BZNW 118, Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2003), pp. 11–26), I try to discover how far canonicity necessarily implies consistency, and how far it may coexist with diversity of content. This is not simply a historical question, but is of active concern to anyone for whom the canonical Scriptures are in any sense authoritative, and I here survey various Jewish and Christian attempts to engage with the problem. The Spirit and the Letter contains a chapter on the importance (or non-importance) of Marcion in the formation of the Christian canon. ‘Marcion Revisited’, from The Canon Debate (see above; pp. 341–54), approaches this question from a slightly different angle, focusing on Marcion’s theory of interpretation and his respective attitudes to the Old and New Testaments. Finally, I have included a more informal discussion of the vexed issue of how we should refer to the canonical ‘Old Testament’ in various contexts. ‘Old Testament or Hebrew Bible?’ was a paper originally delivered to a Faculty seminar in Oxford and subsequently published in a series intended for teachers of Religious Education in schools (Farmington Papers BS2, 1996). It expresses my conviction that the term ‘Old Testament’ is still viable. It also raises the question of the faith commitment or lack of it with which the interpreter should approach the study of biblical texts: I argue for a ‘neutral’ approach, which is further developed in some of the essays in Part II.

Chapter 1

‘The Law and the Prophets’. Who are the Prophets? This paper raises some questions, and makes a few tentative suggestions, about the understanding of prophecy in the post-exilic and intertestamental periods. No fresh evidence will be considered, but new ways of looking at familiar material will be suggested; the conclusions are intended as theses that might encourage further discussion of the issue they raise, rather than as the end of the matter. The best way to introduce the lines of enquiry to be followed here is by explaining that they arise from trying to solve a problem I have caused for myself, by deciding to write a book on the Old Testament prophets in a rather new way. General books on prophecy are normally historical in plan, beginning with early prophecy and its roots, and with the phenomenon of prophetic experience in pre-exilic Israel and other ancient cultures.1 For two reasons there might be merit in beginning at the other end: looking at the finished prophetic corpus first, and only then feeling one’s way back to earlier stages in the tradition. First, contemporary biblical studies are veering strongly towards an interest in the final form of the biblical text; and though I should want to see this as a matter of practising historical criticism in the last stages, just as it has traditionally been practised in the earlier ones, rather than as an abandonment of historical-critical method in favour of ‘canon-criticism’ or structural analysis, still a study beginning with what we have would at least make contact with what is going on elsewhere in biblical studies. But secondly, a case could be made for beginning with the finished text on the grounds that it is known, whereas a topic such as the psychology of the pre-classical prophets is very much an unknown, attainable only through very hypothetical reconstruction. And it is usually better to begin with what is known and work from there, even if it means reversing the historical order. So at least I thought when planning a book on prophecy. Further reflection, however, immediately raised a problem, the problem which is the starting point for this paper, and made it clear that the finished prophetic corpus, and the context in which it was finished, is really hardly any more a known quantity than the life and times of Balaam’s ass. This is a problem faced by all writers on prophecy in the end, but I have turned it into a problem of prolegomena by insisting on beginning at the end. The problem is: what is to be done with apocalyptic? Usually it is taken as a given 1

See, for example, J. Lindblom, Prophecy in Ancient Israel (Oxford, 1962); J.A. Bewer, The Prophets (London and New York, 1957); C. Kuhl, The Prophets of Israel (Edinburgh, 1960) (translation of Israels Propheten, Berne, 1956); M. Buber, The Prophetic Faith (New York, 1949); A. Néher, L’Essence du Prophétisme (Paris, 1955); E.W. Heaton, The Old Testament Prophets (2nd edn, London, 1977).

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THE OLD TESTAMENT: CANON, LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY

that apocalyptic is not prophecy in a straightforward sense; but no book on prophecy can ignore it because of at least superficial resemblances. The question as it presents itself to a student of the prophets is generally couched in the form ‘Is apocalyptic a true child of prophecy?’ – meaning, is it a natural development from the thought of the pre-exilic prophets, or does it distort and falsify many of their insights? Old Testament scholars will be familiar with the answers that have been given, ranging from a gradual transformation of prophecy into apocalyptic by imperceptible stages at one end of the scale, to an outright denial that the two movements have anything in common at the other. But if the question about the antecedents of apocalyptic is natural for a historical approach that takes the pre-exilic age as its starting point, a study that began with the canon might find it more natural to ask questions such as: Did apocalyptic writers regard themselves as prophets, and their books as prophecy? Did their contemporaries think of them as prophets? To resolve these questions we should need to know with some clarity what ‘prophet’ meant, not in the earliest times, nor in the era of classical prophecy, but in the age when what we call apocalyptic was flourishing. Despite some work on prophets in the early Christian community,2 I do not believe much attention has been directed to this question. My attempt to begin from the known therefore proves naïve, but it helps to bring to light an important issue which is worth tackling in its own right. 1 What is a Prophetic Book? A hopeful place to start might be by asking what is meant when the second division of the Hebrew Scriptures is called ‘the prophets’. There is no difficulty, I suppose, in understanding why Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve are so called; but as a designation for what we have learned to call the ‘Deuteronomistic History’ it is puzzling. We are accustomed to speaking of the ‘former’ and ‘latter’ prophets, but of course this distinction is quite a late arrival, and within the Hebrew tradition there seems to have been little awareness that there is any kind of natural break between Kings and the last four prophetic books until after the Christian era. The LXX clearly perceives the difference, and assigns the former and latter prophets to quite different parts of its canon. The lack of distinction in the Hebrew tradition can be seen most strikingly in a saying attributed to Johanan b. Zakkai, which is recorded in B. Baba Bathra 14b in justification of the Talmudic ordering of the prophetic books. The latter prophets are there listed in the order Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, the Twelve; and the saying suggests this order is perfectly natural, because Kings ends in destruction, Jeremiah is entirely about destruction, Ezekiel begins with destruction but ends in consolation and Isaiah is all consolation.3 The fact that this is not an entirely satisfactory reading of these books need not concern us; what it does show 2

See especially D. Hill, New Testament Prophecy (London, 1979); also J.D.G. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit: A Study of the Religious and Charismatic Experience of Jesus and the First Christians as Reflected in the New Testament (London, 1975). 3 The most recent discussion of the material on the ‘canon’ in the Talmud is S.Z. Leiman, The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture: The Talmudic and Midrashic Evidence (Hamden, Conn., 1976). My conclusions differ very sharply from his.

‘THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS’

7

clearly is that all the prophetic books are being perceived as the same sort of thing, and that the former/latter distinction is not functional in reading them. (The saying has other points of interest which will concern us later.) We might say, then, that once there is a definite collection called ‘the prophets’, it seems to be perceived as one sort of thing, not two: our sense that two quite different sorts of literature have been lumped together under a heading appropriate to only one of them seems to find no echo in tradition. Why did all these books, ‘histories’ as well as ‘prophecies’, come to be called ‘the prophets’? We may examine two theories sometimes put forward, and then go on to an explanation that somewhat undercuts them both. (1) It could be said that Deuteronomistic History is indeed a ‘prophetic’ history, in the sense that (as von Rad showed4) it works with an elaborate scheme of prediction and fulfilment, and the predictions are often uttered by ‘prophets’. 2 Kings 17 may be said to provide the rationale for the D history – it is the longest passage where the author speaks in propria persona – and it makes much of God’s warnings throughout the people’s history by the hand of ‘every prophet and every seer’ (v. 13). Might not this explanation be rather too modern, however? Classifying a collection of books by theme in this way is a typically modern concern – it is, indeed, just the sort of approach that has produced the term ‘Deuteronomistic History’. There are so many other possible themes, and so many other books that, on such a criterion, could equally well be called ‘prophets’ that the explanation, though of course possible, seems to me rather lame and forced. (2) A second explanation, more commonly adduced, thinks in terms of an attribution of authorship. This is the natural way to take the title ‘Samuel’ – Samuel’s chronicle of his lifetime and a little beyond it. Baba Bathra ascribes Judges to Samuel too; and Kings it attributes to Jeremiah, apparently confirming the hypothesis. But the picture is spoiled by its comments on the other prophetic books: Joshua, it is said, wrote his own book (as well as the section in the Pentateuch about the death of Moses); and apart from Jeremiah, the books we regard as ‘prophetic’ are not said to have been written by what we call ‘prophets’ at all! Hezekiah and his company wrote Isaiah, and the men of the great synagogue wrote Ezekiel and the Twelve. ‘Wrote’ here seems admittedly to mean ‘copied out’ rather than ‘composed’ – or rather it seems to oscillate between the two in hopeless confusion; but at least there does not seem to be any desire to ascribe the books called ‘the prophets’ to authors who were prophets either in the sense that term bears in our usage, or in the sense it bears within the historical and prophetic books themselves. I believe this begins to suggest a way forward. Might it be that ‘prophets’ as the title of the second division of the Scriptures is indeed an attribution of authorship, but we need to make some adjustments in our idea of what kind of person such a ‘prophet’ would have been thought to be? This possibility will gain in definition if we examine the famous passage in Josephus Contra Apionem I.8.41: ‘From the 4 G. von Rad, Deuteronomium-Studien, Teil B (Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments, Neue Folge 40), translated as ‘The Deuteronomic Theology of History in I & II Kings’, in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (Edinburgh and London, 1966), pp. 205–21.

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THE OLD TESTAMENT: CANON, LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY

death of Moses until Artaxerxes … the prophets subsequent to Moses wrote the history of their own times in thirteen books … From Artaxerxes to our own time the complete history has been written, but has not been deemed worthy of equal credit with the earlier records, because of the failure of the exact succession of prophets.’ On the one hand, this supports the idea that the title ‘prophets’ is an attribution of authorship; but on the other, as is well known, it is nearly impossible to make Josephus’ thirteen books correspond to the prophetic division of the Hebrew canon, and it seems certain that he includes some of the Hagiographa as well. It tells us that all inspired books, worthy of complete credence, were written during the period in which – according to the theory that prophecy ceased with Malachi – there were prophets to write them; but it does not give us any specific explanation why just the books now in the second division of the Hebrew canon were called ‘the prophets’. It may be, however, that Josephus is being read with the wrong expectations. It has been usual to take this passage as a witness to the closing of the Hebrew canon; to see Josephus’ apparent belief that prophetic inspiration ceased in the days of Ezra at the latest as a dogma derived from the fact that the prophetic section of the canon already ended where it does now. The theory of the demise of prophecy, that is to say, was produced ex post facto once the ‘council of Jamnia’ had fixed the limits of the canon. Now in support of the idea that Josephus is appealing to a closed canon it can be noted that his argument at this point is about the strictly limited number of books recognized as authoritative by the Jews, as opposed to the multitude of inconsistent writings used by others. But we then have to explain how Josephus comes to include in his closed prophetic canon books other than those we now have – for example fairly certainly Esther. The older explanation of this was that the prophetic canon was indeed closed, but there was more than one version of what it contained. This used to be commonly held,5 and it results in the so-called ‘Alexandrian canon’ hypothesis, where the LXX arrangement and selection of books is seen as an example of the kind of arrangement Josephus was taking as his datum. But this hypothesis has fallen on bad times, and most scholars would probably now follow Sundberg6 in holding that there never was a widely accepted Jewish canon different from the present Hebrew Scriptures of Law and Prophets. Josephus’ arrangement is peculiar to him, and reflects his desire to assimilate as many books as possible to the model of ‘historiography’ – accurate history written by inspired prophets. It seems to me that this may well be Josephus’ motivation, but that the issue has been somewhat clouded by the assumptions that he must have been working with some kind of canonical list arranged in a certain way, which he must be either following or deliberately varying, an assumption which is common to Sundberg and defenders of the ‘Alexandrian canon’ alike. To ask which canon Josephus knew and how it was arranged begs the prior question whether it makes sense to talk about ‘canonicity’ at all in this period, for books other than the Torah. If it is really true 5 See H.B. Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek (Cambridge, 1900), esp. pp. 1–28. 6 A.C. Sundberg, The Old Testament of the Early Church (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1964); see also his ‘The “Old Testament”: A Christian Canon’, CBQ 30 (1968), pp. 143–55.

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that the prophetic canon was fixed enough to have actually produced the theory that prophetic inspiration ceased with Malachi, then surely it was far too fixed for Josephus to have meddled with it for any purpose whatsoever. His freedom of manoeuvre suggests to me that it was not fixed in this way at all; and hence that the theory that prophetic inspiration ceased with Malachi is much more likely to have some other explanation. Furthermore, this would suggest that this theory was itself a genuine factor in leading to the eventual exclusion of some books from the ‘prophetic’ section when the canon was finally closed. My suggestion, then, is that the term ‘prophecy’ or ‘prophetic book’ meant, for Josephus, not much more than ‘inspired’ or ‘authoritative’ book. For him, the distinction between (a) histories, (b) prophecies (in our sense), and (c) other kinds of literature, is insignificant compared with the only distinction that mattered to him, that is, the distinction between the Torah and everything else, between the words of Moses and the writings of those who came after him. It is often said that his ‘canon’ was tri-partite, even though the arrangement was different from ours, in that he recognizes (a) the Law, (b) the Prophets (though a different selection) and (c) ‘writings’. Thus he writes: ‘the prophets subsequent to Moses wrote the history of the events of their own times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God and precepts for the conduct of human life.’ This may indeed mean that the prophets wrote thirteen books, and someone else the other four books accepted by the Jews as authoritative; but it could equally well mean that thirteen of the books written by prophets are histories, and four hymnographic and sapiential. Even apart from this, it seems that Josephus’ understanding of Scripture allows only a basic twofold division. There is the Law, and there are the books of prophets, and no other books are authoritative in the same way. Books of prophets are books written by the properly authorized successors of Moses – not the Torah, but the next best thing. Because he is concerned, in Contra Apionem, with the modest compass and reasonableness of Jewish tradition, he stresses that these books are very few – no more than seventeen are to be found. But this does not imply that he is working with a canon which is closed in principle. It implies only that, if one had found a hitherto unknown book, one would have had to decide whether it passed the test: was it written by a true successor of Moses during the period before inspiration ceased? The Torah was a fixed entity, as all agree; but though there were criteria for deciding whether to treat any other books as authoritative, there was no fixed list below which a line had been drawn: in that sense, there was no prophetic canon.7 7 A rather similar problem arises with 2 Maccabees xv 9, where Judas Maccabeus is said to have encouraged his troops with quotations from ‘the law and the prophets’. Sundberg uses this verse against the Alexandrian canon hypothesis, arguing that when 2 Maccabees was written the first two divisions of the canon must have been established, and the dividing line between the prophets and writings must have already been in existence – whereas proponents of an Alexandrian canon are obliged to maintain that Greek speaking Jews did not distinguish between prophets and writings, and hence were free to use an arrangement such as that in the LXX, where some ‘prophets’ appear among the writings and vice versa. But one can accept that Sundberg has disposed of the Alexandrian canon hypothesis with his other arguments, and yet reject his conclusions on 2 Maccabees. For this verse to be available for Sundberg’s argument, we have to know that ‘prophets’ here means the books we now have as a second

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This proposal in effect accepts Sundberg’s conclusions and takes them somewhat further. He argues that it is a mistake to think of the Hebrew and Greek canons as two separate lists with an independent history; rather, each represents a selection from a larger, uncanonized corpus of ‘holy books’ which Jews and Christians shared. The Law and the Prophets, according to him, were fixed, but the writings were open; Jews and Christians made a different selection from them. My suggestion is that the Law alone was fixed, and all other books formed an open corpus. (The Law, after all, is the only constant between the Hebrew and Greek canons.) In Josephus’ day, I believe, none of the decisions about where to draw lines among other books had yet been made. There was the Law, and there were inspired books outside the Law which everyone already accepted, but there were also books that might turn out to be inspired. The name for an inspired or authoritative book outside the Law was ‘prophet’; just as in Western Christianity the name of any liturgical reading from the Old Testament was to be prophetia, and of any non-gospel New Testament reading epistola. The main argument of this first section, then, is that insofar as we can speak of a ‘canon’ at all in the days of Josephus, it was bipartite, Torah and Prophets. When ‘other books’ are mentioned, as in the passage we have been considering, or as in the Prologue to Sirach, this means simply any other books there were – it is not, even in a rudimentary way, a third division of the canon. But a corollary of this is that ‘prophecy’ covers more than it was to cover in later times. A prophetic book is an inspired book from the prophetic age, written, in other words, between Moses and Ezra. This almost certainly implies that the idea that inspiration was limited to that period is not a back-projection from the existence of a canon whose limits were originally fixed on other grounds, but a genuine criterion for authenticity that may have quite an early origin. I doubt whether there is any book in this period that claims divine inspiration, and yet confesses to being written later than the time of Ezra. This cannot have anything to do with the canon’s having been already closed; for, if the canon was closed, what point can there have been in producing a book pseudonymously and attributing it to the prophetic age? If the object of projecting a book back in this way was to give it authority, that can only mean that the canon was not closed; that it was still perfectly conceivable for a ‘newly discovered’ book to be accorded authority because it came from the right period. In fact, the category ‘canonicity’ is not the right one to describe this process, which has nothing to do with drawing limits to the number of books accorded authority, but only with testing the claims of any prima facie candidates for authoritative status. So a prophetic book is an inspired or authoritative book: and a prophet is an inspired, sacred author who lived before Ezra. This means that there is for later Judaism a ‘prophetic age’ (like a ‘heroic age’). Within this era no very clear distinction is drawn between the prophets who did inspired things, and the prophets

division of the canon, and this we do not know. If the author called all inspired writings outside the Torah ‘prophets’, then we should be no nearer discovering which books actually were canonical for him. It seems quite possible that the principle here is the same as the one I am proposing for Josephus, and that 2 Maccabees tells nothing about ‘the canon’ at all.

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who wrote inspired accounts of their own or other people’s deeds. It is this age, incidentally, that ben Sira covers in his praises of famous men (44ff.), which ends with Nehemiah – not with anyone in our ‘prophetic’ canon, such as Malachi – apart from the supplementary piece on Simon son of Onias. It is hard to say how soon the idea established itself that inspiration belonged to just this period. But I do not believe it was fixed only ‘at Jamnia’ – that is, in the first century AD – as a way of excluding apocalyptic writings; it seems far more likely that it was not long after Ezra himself that people began to think in terms of a period that had closed. After all, Haggai and Zechariah already attest a feeling that the pre-exilic age had a status that their own day could not emulate; and the Hellenistic world was rich in ideas about golden ages in the past which the degenerate present could not match9 There is a sense in post-exilic Judaism that the story of Israel in its crucial, formative period is now over.10 The idea that the gift of prophecy, understood as the gift of communicating words that have God’s own authority, has also ceased, seems to me to be of a piece with this, rather than being a much later theory. 2 The Form of Prophetic Books A prophetic book, then, is an inspired book written in the classical prophetic age, before the Spirit departed from Israel. What form did such a book take? We are inclined to say that the books that make up the Old Testament Scriptures are of very diverse genre: histories, prophecies, poems, legends and so on. But post-exilic Judaism lacks much sense for literary genre or, rather, expectations about genre are determined by the books that already exist, in ignorance of the fact that many of them are really composite works. We can see this in the case of the Torah. Paul Ricoeur, in his unpublished Sarum Lectures in Oxford, pointed out that we see the Pentateuch as an odd mixture of stories and laws, muddled up together in a rather unsatisfactory way; and as a matter of history, we are right. But for Judaism the Pentateuch, not some prior expectations about genre, is the given, and one must strive to read what is there as some kind of coherent whole. This then produces the sense that there is a perfectly satisfactory genre, Torah (a class with only one member, as it happens), which is an indivisible compound of narrative with legal prescription. I would argue that in just the same way it happened that the books which could reasonably claim to be prophetic, in the sense just established, turned out to combine narrative with prediction and moral teaching – the latter often in the form 8

This accords well with the practice in rabbinic Judaism of using the term to describe any great figure in Jewish history, irrespective of whether he was what we might call a prophet. When Joshua or David or Solomon are called prophets, this is not necessarily an interpretation of their primary work as ‘prophecy’ – it is sometimes little more than an honorific. 9 See M. Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism (London, 1973) (translation of Judentum and Hellenismus (2nd edn, Tübingen, 1973)), vol. I, pp. 241–3. 10 Cf. J. Barr, ‘Story and History in Biblical Theology’, JR 56 (1976), pp. 1–17; reprinted in The Scope and Authority of the Bible, Explorations in Theology 7 (London, 1980), pp. 1–17. On p. 15 Barr writes ‘The story that is central to so much of the Old Testament gradually became a completed story … the completion of the story lets it fall into the past.’

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of denunciation of sin. And so a prophetic book is taken to be a book that includes all these three elements. Josephus will play up the narrative, or historiographical, aspect; the prophets are those who recorded the history of their own times (Isaiah is the same kind of book as Kings). Johanan b. Zakkai, or whoever it was, will concentrate more on the predictive element: Kings is a book that ends in despair, whereas Isaiah ends in hope (but Kings is the same kind of book as Isaiah). And if we try to close our eyes to our modern notions of genre, and read the books as if they were all the same sort of thing, we shall find it is quite possible. The problem lies in our feeling that narrative is simply about the past, and prophecy of a predictive kind simply about the future, so that they belong in different sorts of book. This seems obvious to us, and it may have been obvious also in pre-exilic Israel, where there are some glimmerings of a genuine sense for the pastness of the past, and an awareness of historical change. But it was not at all obvious in the world of post-exilic Judaism, which was a very a-historical world, almost wholly devoid of any sense of anachronism, reading back its newest institutions into remote antiquity and finding no difficulty in thinking that Moses had forseen the exact problems of life under the Persians and Ptolemies. James Barr has dealt with this as it affects narrative: Narratives are not necessarily written because of a primary interest in the past. They can be written for quite a different reason: they can be written to provide pictures of the promises of God which will come to pass in future. Even if their literal purport concerns the past, their theological function and purpose may be directed towards the future…In general, for much of the Old Testament material, even when past events are being narrated this is not necessarily out of an interest in past history but because of patterns of future hope…It is wrong to think of scripture as a ‘record’: it is not in essence a record, though in places it may incidentally be so. Even in its past narratives its function is often not to be a record of past events but to present paradigms for thinking about the present or hoping for the future.11

But we can equally well apply this to predictive prophecies, standing the argument on its head. For the community of post-exilic times, we might say, the authoritative material from the classical period is not just narrative, but narrative + (what we call) prophecy; just as the Law is not only what we call law, but law + narrative. Just as narrative is not there simply for its value as a historical record, but for its paradigmatic quality directed to present and future; so the predictive elements are not there simply for future reference, but also for their paradigmatic quality in the present, and for the sense they make of the recorded past by telling the reader where, ultimately, this past is leading. As Barr, again, points out in a review of B.S. Childs’s Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture,12 it is quite reasonable (with Childs) to say that the ‘canonical shape’ of the book of Isaiah has resulted in the prophecies of Deutero-

11

J. Barr, ‘Historical Reading and the Theological Interpretation of Scripture’, in The Scope and Authority of the Bible, pp. 30–51; this quotation is from p. 36. It is worth mentioning here Cornill’s pregnant description of Israelite historiography as rückwärts gekehrte Prophetie (cited in L.H.K. Bleeker ‘De geschiedenis van het Oude Testament (Hoseah 11, 1–3)’, in Geschiedenis, een bundel studiën over de zin der geschiedenis (Assen, 1944), pp. 32 and 39). 12 J. Barr, ‘Childs’ Introduction to Old Testament as Scripture’, JSOT 16 (1980), pp. 12–23.

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Isaiah ceasing to be a specific prophecy for a particular situation, and becoming a generalized expression of the eternal good purposes of God toward his people; but it is a mistake to think this has happened only to Deutero-Isaiah. It has happened to the prophetic corpus as a whole. Just as the mixture of narrative and prediction in the Pentateuch has become the eternal Torah, so the mixture of narrative and prediction in the former and latter prophets has become an expression of the eternal shape of God’s purposes for his people: a pattern of his chastisement and consolation. And a prophetic book, I am suggesting, is a book whose form fits this specification: a book that in some combination or other includes the elements of narrative, prediction and moral concern that is found in these books – provided always that the narrative is both about, and apparently written during, the classical prophetic period. 3 Modes of Reading the Prophetic Books In the way of reading the prophetic corpus I have just outlined, unity is found in a superficially chaotic collection of material by allowing one element to predominate and act as the controlling thread to guide the reader through the whole. All reading of texts depends on our ability to identify which elements are dominant and which subordinate in this way, but with texts from a very different culture it is sometimes difficult. The prophetic books of the Old Testament are often rather random collections of fragments, and – despite the claims made by proponents of ‘canonical’ reading – the act of canonization does not tell us how to give them a unity or synthetic reading, even if it may be thought to imply that that is what we are to do. There are, in fact, several ways of reading these books that respect the unity they were felt to have, which differ according to where they allow the emphasis to fall as among the narrative, predictive and moral elements all prophetic books contain. I shall first set them out in theory, and then go on to how we can discover which of them was current in different periods or among different groups. (1) The prophetic books, like the Torah, can be read as an expression of the eternal character of God, illustrated by stories and prophecies from various periods. The stories are important not for their narrative movement, but for the light they shine on divine attributes. Here would be the paradigmatic quality of the biblical story, to which Barr refers: it shows you what God is like. Similarly the predictions of the latter prophets, and of the various seers who appear in the former prophets, give an insight into how God behaves in general. The stories and the prophecies alike become ‘moral tales’, or even theological tales, illustrating the character and attributes of God. Coming a little closer to taking the narrativity of the narrative seriously, one might read these books as illustrating the regular and recurring pattern of God’s actions in history. This is not eschatology, quite the reverse. It is a matter of saying: judgement always follows sin, but is in turn followed by mercy. This is arguably the message of the Deuteronomistic History; all one has to do is to assimilate the latter prophets to the same model, and use the narrative as the hermeneutic key to the prediction. (2) The prophetic books can be read as haggadic or even halakhic commentary on the Torah, hence (like the Torah itself) as a guide to how to live as a good Jew.

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This plays up the moral element, noticing the stories in the former prophets that illustrate moral points (for example Naboth’s Vineyard), and makes much of the moral exhortation and denunciation of the latter prophets. Here is prophecy as sort of first stage ‘fence about the Law’ – probably the major hermeneutical approach in Tannaitic Judaism. (3) It is quite possible, with Josephus, to read all the prophetic books as a kind of historiography, by letting the former prophets dominate the latter. To do this, however, one will have to mean by ‘historiography’ something other than we habitually mean by it, something more like what Barr calls ‘story’. No one would simply reduce the books of the latter prophets to a record of the times in which their authors lived unless, like Josephus, he had a special reason for wanting to play up the straightforwardly historiographical aspect of the Scriptures. More likely, one would want to see the story that these books tell as a story about past and future – in other words, as a sort of eschatology, in the sense of a story that is going somewhere and whose completion lies in the future. The former prophets tell us what happened, the latter prophets what will happen. This is one way of taking the saying about the movement from gloom to hope as we pass from Kings to Isaiah, following the Talmudic arrangement. It is vital to note, however, that such an eschatology is quite different from the apocalyptic belief that the end is about to break in at any moment. One can easily have an eschatology of this kind without any sense of urgency. It expresses, not a sense of immanent collapse, but a calm conviction that the movement of events in the world is carefully controlled by God, and that all will be well in the end. This distinction is quite crucial, and will concern us again. (4) Finally, it is indeed possible to read the prophetic books with a concentration on their predictive aspects in another sense. One can read them as predicting things that are about to happen in one’s own day, as the Qumran community and the early Christians did. The history in the former prophets is then seen as a record of what God has already done, which is soon to be fulfilled or surpassed by what he will do in the end; and such a reading draws its existential urgency from the belief that the age in which the reader (not the putative author) lives is the age in which the decisive event is to occur. On this way of reading prophecy, all the prophets were looking forward to a coming age, and the only proper way to read their writings is in the light of the knowledge that comes from living in that age and knowing that one does so. To anyone else, the true reading is veiled. 4 Prophecy and Apocalyptic How are we to discover which of these modes of reading prevailed at any given time or place? Sometimes, as with Qumran or with Josephus, we have direct references in which the writer’s own hermeneutical assumptions are made explicit. But where this is not so, it might be possible to find guidance in the kind of literature that was being written. It is widely recognized that very few new genres were produced in post-exilic Judaism. No doubt partly as a result of the sense that all originality and creativity lay in the past, in the golden age, and partly as a means of gaining recognition and credence for new works by casting them in an acceptable ‘prophetic’

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mould, post-exilic writers almost always produced pastiche, imitations of material in the former or latter prophets. It might be possible to judge how they read their models, by seeing what they evidently thought an authentic ‘prophetic’ book would look like. For example, it seems reasonable to suggest that the authors of Esther and Tobit and similar tales were reading the prophetic corpus in the first mode, in terms of stories and prophecies illustrating the character of God and the patterns of his historical action. They write stories of this kind, because they take Scripture to be composed primarily of stories of this kind. Scripture in general may not look much like Tobit to us, but we could probably adjust our focus so that it did, at least for a time, and that might help us to understand the author of Tobit better. However, we cannot here say more along these lines in general. The relevance of all this for the present enquiry can be simply stated. Imitations of the prophetic corpus read in the third and fourth modes are to be found in, respectively, pastiche historiography (such as Chronicles) and apocalyptic; and this fact provides the essential answer to the question with which we began, the question about the relation of apocalyptic to prophecy. It is important to see the difference between the third and fourth modes, because often they have tended to be fused. The reason for this is that both can in some sense be called ‘eschatological’. People often say that the idea of a long-term plan in history is precisely one of the things that distinguishes apocalyptic from the earlier prophets; and any work which thinks in terms of such a plan is then classified as apocalyptic. This produces the Plöger–Hanson line:13 apocalyptic is an eschatological movement interested in where history is going, as opposed to static priestly theology. Usually it is said that the long-term plan in which apocalypticists believed came about because the many unfulfilled prophecies led people to think the prophet’s hopes must have been more long-term than had at first appeared. But I believed this is a misreading of the evidence. One of the problems about Plöger’s theory, as is well known, is the dating scheme of the Priestly Work, with its clear sense that history is going somewhere for priestly thinkers, too. But another is that the delay in fulfilment of prophecy, and consequent lengthening of the divine plan, is by no means a problem only for apocalyptic sects. If it is a problem, it is a problem for all currents in post-exilic Judaism; and it is generated, not by specific failures in fulfilment, but by the creation of a ‘prophetic golden age’, now firmly in the past. This means that people were constrained to read the prophetic predictions as concerned with a more remote future. But this reduces their urgency, rather than increasing it, as in apocalyptic. Apocalypticists started from common ground in speaking of God’s long-term plan, which, in fact, they assume rather than asserting. Everyone who read the prophetic books according to our third mode assumed it too – Tobit would again be a good example (see Tobit 14:3–8). What distinguishes apocalyptic is its belief that the time predicted was about to dawn, that the plan was about to be realized. Apocalypticists – and this is the new thing – read all Old Testament prophecy (which means the histories as well as what we call the prophecies) as predicting things that are happening in their own day. Consequently, when they write prophecy and – like all other post-exilic writers – produce imitations of what 13

See O. Plöger, Theocracy and Eschatology (Oxford, 1968) (1st German edn, 1959); P.D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic (Philadelphia, 1975).

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they take prophetic books to look like, they write works set in the past in which are predicted events that will happen in a future remote from the putative writer, but contemporary with themselves. But they were no more interested than the pre-exilic prophets in long-term historical developments – they were interested in the present and immediate future. The long-term plan is part of the stage-machinery, dictated by the pastiche form. What determined which of the four ways of reading the prophets would be chosen? Against ‘canonical’ approaches, we must say that it cannot be anything internal to the books themselves; there is nothing to force the reader one way or the other. It must be some external factor that gives the reader one hermeneutical key rather than another. The first mode seems to derive from an interest in abstract theology, and the second from post-exilic preoccupation with the law. The third, the non-apocalyptic eschatological mode, might reflect an antiquarian interest in schematizing history which is not specifically Jewish, or it may indeed have something to do with the perceived failure of prophetic predictions. But the fourth, the apocalyptic mode, must surely derive from a sense of having received some message that reveals the end to have arrived – in other words, from some feeling of being inspired, and charged with an immediately relevant message. The apocalyptic writers could not have described this as a prophetic inspiration, because prophecy was supposed to have ceased – and anyway, on their reading of the prophets, a prophet was not someone who was charged with a message for his own day, but someone with a message whose relevance would appear at some time in the remote future. But paradoxically, the sense of inspiration they must have had is exactly what we, from our reconstructions of pre-exilic prophecy against its own time, call prophetic. We say that a prophet is someone who experiences some call or message from God, and expresses it in whatever speech-forms are conventionally available. This is exactly what apocalyptic writers did. The conventionally available form, for them, was what they called a ‘prophetic’ book, that is, a book written long ago and predicting events which for the writer were in the remote future, but also recording moral exhortation and past history. Daniel is just such a book. The upshot of all this is that apocalyptic ought indeed to be included in a study of prophecy, but not for the reasons usually given. It is not so much that it derives from earlier prophets by direct descent; rather, it is the form in which people who had what we would call a prophetic vocation were constrained to express it, in a period when prophecy was taken to be a thing of the past. They did this by writing imitations of the older prophetic books. We do not think that what they produced is much like these books but that is because our way of reading the prophets is extremely different from theirs. The author of Daniel was aiming to produce a book like Ezekiel, or like the whole corpus of the prophetic literature on a minor scale, whose overall purpose was the same as he took the purpose of those books to be – namely, to predict what was going to happen in the Maccabean age. The thought-forms he used are in many cases very different from those of the genuine prophets, but that is chiefly because he actually wrote in the second century, rather than because he was an apocalypticist; having no historical sense he assumed that Ezekiel or the minor prophets thought in just the same ways he did himself. He did not see differences,

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14

as we do. He read all the prophets as if they were what we should call apocalyptic, and so, when he came to write imitation prophecy, it too came out as what we should call apocalyptic. But the question of whether he himself, the real author, had what we call a prophetic vocation, is quite a different question, which nothing internal to the book can possibly resolve.15 I think we should say he did have such a vocation, because he had the essential prophetic experience of feeling called to communicate a word to his own day about an impending crisis in the nation’s affairs. Before summarizing the conclusions from our discussion, which is now essentially complete, a word may be said about the passages sometimes called ‘protoapocalyptic’. These are generally held to belong to the period of gradual transition in which the hopes of the prophets slowly lengthened to issue eventually in the ‘longterm’ plan which is the touchstone of true apocalyptic. By treating the development of a long-term perspective as an entirely separate matter from the rise of apocalyptic, our discussion has suggested that such a theory is hard to sustain. Instead we ought to distinguish more sharply among different types of additional material in the prophetic corpus. There are certain passages where the original prophet is made to speak a word about some specific event in much later times (for example Isaiah 13 and 14), and here we can see an example of our fourth mode of reading. We may decide to call this apocalyptic only when it comes from the late post-exilic age, and in that case ‘proto-apocalyptic’ would do well enough for its earlier phases; but it should be stressed that the logic of its attitude to the nature of prophecy is the same whatever the date. But there are also passages that seem to belong to the third mode: oracles in which an author expresses hopes for a far distant future which he himself readily believed to be distant, and which he expected his readers to think of as distant. Such passages teach that salvation is coming though it may delay – the stock theme of mainstream eschatology in both Judaism and Christianity (see Amos 9:13–15). This is poles apart from apocalyptic; so far from preparing the ground for it, it removes the age of salvation to the future, and positively discourages hopes of imminent deliverance. I suspect – though it would be difficult to show – that many ‘In that day’ prophecies belong to this category. It is interesting to reflect that true apocalyptic writers would probably have agreed with us in finding such additions to the prophetic books lacking in the true prophetic spirit of immediacy which they themselves shared with the pre-exilic classical prophets – if, that is, they could have known that they were additions. As it was, they took them to be true prophecy, and read them through their usual hermeneutical spectacles as predictions of their own day. 14 One might compare the author of Job. He was, we may suppose, trying to produce something like a patriarchal story; but he made numerous anachronistic mistakes, such as having Job live in a house, and mentioning the Satan. They did not seem anachronistic to him, because he read the original patriarchal stories as belonging to a time like his own, not in a remote culture with its own patterns. He did not, we could say, notice that Abraham did not live in a house or that Satan was not mentioned in Genesis. 15 D.S. Russell, The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic (London, 1964), seems to me not to distinguish between the experiences of inspiration attributed to the seer in an apocalypse and the experience which may have led the real author to write it, and this mars a good deal of his discussion – see, for example, his comments on the ‘literary’ character of apocalyptic inspiration, pp. 118–22.

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At all events, ‘proto-apocalyptic’ is a term that could well bring confusion, and a blurring of significant distinctions; the study of post-exilic prophecy might be better off without it. 5 Conclusions It may be useful to end with a brief summary of the suggestions that have been made. (1) In New Testament times, to describe a book as one of the prophets, or as written by a prophet, is to say that it is authoritative and inspired although not part of the Torah. If there was a canon it was bi-partite – law and prophets – but this does not mean that everything except what we call ‘the prophets’ was excluded; it simply means that whatever was included, apart from the Law, was called ‘prophets’. In fact the term ‘canon’ would be better avoided in that period, in which there was a criterion for authority – ostensible date of writing – but no limit on the number of books that could be accepted. (2) The theory that prophetic inspiration ceased with Malachi is not a backprojection from the existence of the canon, but an early idea – probably part of the general tendency of post-exilic Israel to see itself as living in a silver age – which was itself an important factor in the process by which the ideas of ‘canonicity’ eventually arose. (3) Once there was a sizeable body of ‘prophetic material accepted as genuine and authoritative, the question arose of how it should be read. Neither we nor the post-exilic community could follow B.S. Childs’s approach, and ask what is the ‘inner logic’ or ‘canonical intentionality’ of the material, since these books, which are fairly chaotic, can be read in a number of ways, four of which I have outlined. A useful clue to how particular groups read the prophetic corpus is the literature they themselves produced, since this is often conscious imitation of the prophets; and from an imitation we can deduce how the imitator must have seen the original. (4) Apocalyptic writers evidently read the prophets as if they were what we would call apocalyptic –that is, as predicting events far off for the original prophet, but contemporary with the apocalyptically minded reader. The impetus to read prophets in this way, and to write imitations which assume this is how they are to be read, comes from a prior conviction that God is about to do something decisive in the world: and this is the sort of conviction which, if we found it in pre- or early post-exilic Israel, we should describe as ‘prophetic’, using the term in its modern scholarly sense. As with earlier prophets, so here, the way in which this conviction is expressed is conditioned by concepts and literary genres available; but the experience underlying it may well be much the same. In short, any comprehensive book on the prophets should include apocalyptic literature in its purview.

Chapter 2

The Canonical Meaning of the Book of the Twelve In his Old Testament Guide to Nahum, Rex Mason writes: Nahum deserves our attention, then; but if we examine the book with too narrow a lens we may distort it. We shall not read it properly unless we see it as part of ‘The Book of the Twelve’ (the name given in the Hebrew canon to what are often described as ‘The Minor Prophets’), the ‘Prophets’ as a whole, and, indeed, the entire canon. Here, if ever, there is a case, not only for the textual analysis and dissection of the more traditional approaches, but for what is often called today a ‘canonical’ reading.1

Brevard Childs’s ‘canonical approach’ to biblical interpretation has indeed been a major talking point in our discipline for nearly twenty years now. Most people have found it stimulating and, like Rex Mason in this quotation, have seen that it fills a recognizable gap in the study of the Old Testament. Yet few have found it wholly persuasive as it stands.2 One of the most interesting reactions has been the attempt by Mark Brett to reformulate Childs’s proposals ‘charitably’: that is, to say in effect, there are a number of flaws in Childs’s position, but nevertheless he is on to something important, and it is worth trying to build a more solid structure on the foundations he has laid rather than being content to pull down his own.3 James Barr has pointed out, in a review of Brett, that there is absolutely no reason to suppose that Childs would accept Brett’s reformulation.4 But that, though probably true, is not quite the point; Brett’s idea is that there is a baby in the bath water that Barr and others have thrown out, even if it needs redesigning a little (or even a lot). Childs may not recognize it when this task is complete, but that does not matter much if everyone else likes it. Brett’s argumentation is subtle and ingenious, but I don’t want to describe it here, merely to note that a ‘charitable’ rereading of Childs is on the agenda. Some comments I made on Childs’s approach in my book Reading the Old Testament were meant to 1

Rex Mason, Micah, Nahum, Obadiah, OTG (Sheffield: Academic Press, 1991), p. 58. Childs’s position is set out in Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia and London: Fortress and SCM, 1979), Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (London: SCM, 1985) and Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (London: SCM, 1992). Among the criticisms should be mentioned the set of reviews in JSOT 16 (1980); and James Barr, Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism (Philadelphia and Oxford: Westminster and Clarendon, 1983). 3 Mark G. Brett, Biblical Theology in Crisis? The Impact of the Canonical Approach on Old Testament Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 4 James Barr, review of Brett, Biblical Theology in Crisis?, JTS (1992), pp. 35–41. 2

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THE OLD TESTAMENT: CANON, LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY

achieve something similar, to suggest that the canonical approach was inadequate as a theological programme, but well worth contemplating if reinterpreted as a form of literary criticism, a sort of biblical version of the ‘New Criticism’ of Anglo-American, literary studies that prevailed up until the early 1960s. Whatever may be Brett’s fate, that suggestion was certainly rejected by Childs as a complete misunderstanding of his intentions5 – though indeed it was never meant as a description of his intentions, rather of what his approach could usefully turn into. Be that as it may, I should like in this article, offered to Rex Mason in gratitude for friendship and support over twenty years, to make another attempt to discover whether there really is such a thing as the ‘canonical’ meaning of biblical texts, by focusing on ‘The Book of the Twelve’. As Mason goes on to remark: It is a peculiarity of Childs’s approach to this issue that he considers the canonical form and its significance for interpretation only within each individual book. He does not go on to ask what its final placing in the canon as a whole has done for the way we are meant to read it.6

This is indeed surprising, but it enables us to try to see what can be said about the Book of the Twelve from first principles, since (so far as I know) Childs has nowhere commented on it. We can attempt, so to speak, a ‘blind tasting’ of the canonical wine. I Childs seems to accept that there are four approaches to a text that at least move in the same general direction as his canonical approach, though none of them is identical with it. These are reception history, traditio-historical criticism, redaction criticism and what may be called ‘final form’ exegesis. I shall examine each of these in turn as it bears on the Book of the Twelve, and try to indicate in each case how and why, according to Childs’s criteria, it falls short of being identical with the canonical approach. By the end of this negative enquiry we may then hope to have the outlines of what, by contrast, the canonical approach might amount to in the case of the Book of the Twelve, and be in a position to ask whether there really is such a thing or whether it is a figment of the imagination. Reception History Childs’s commentary on Exodus showed him to be a leader in the field when it comes to the study of the biblical text’s reception through the ages. The learning needed to write such a commentary is surely beyond most biblical scholars, and the results are dazzling. To write a similar commentary on the Book of the Twelve would be a fascinating but almost infinite task. Nevertheless parts of the task can be attempted. For example, one could ask how the twelve prophets were being interpreted in the New Testament period. A good contribution to this question is provided by an 5 6

See Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context. Mason, Micah, Nahum, Obadiah, p. 58.

THE CANONICAL MEANING OF THE BOOK OF THE TWELVE

21

article of Ronald Clements, written in 1977, to which Childs draws attention in his Introduction.7 Clements is talking about the prophetic books generally, not just about the Twelve, but what he says is certainly applicable to them. He writes that by the close of the Old Testament period, The prophets were interpreted in relation to their message, not the special experiences of God which they encountered. Hence it was the message that was regarded as inspired, and the inspiration of the prophet was inferred from this. [This I think is only partly true: Josephus, for example, is deeply interested in prophetic inspiration, since he thought he had received some himself. But it may be true for what became rabbinic Judaism.] This message concerned the destruction and restoration of Israel, but special emphasis was attached to the latter. This was because this restoration was still looked for in the future, while the destruction was believed to have already taken place. The prophets therefore were felt to have foretold the future, but in certain very broad categories. [Again, this will depend on where we look for our evidence. Groups who read the prophets as if they were something like what we generally call apocalyptists thought in terms of very precise predictions, coming true in their own day.8 Clements is certainly right, however, so far as those strands of Jewish thought that became ‘mainstream’ are concerned.] This message of restoration allowed great flexibility of interpretation as regards time, circumstances, and the particular form which Israel would assume in the time of its salvation. The great variety of ways in which Jewish messianism has been expressed and understood is a consequence and expression of this.9

The Twelve Prophets were read, for the most part, as uttering vague promises of a salvation which would one day come about, while their prognostications of doom, though more specific, were taken to refer to disasters now already past. The collection is headed by Hosea, whose book illustrates these points perfectly. Commentators cannot agree on the relationship between weal and woe in the message of the historical Hosea. He may have foretold destruction, to be followed by restoration – both of course on the scale of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, not on an international, still less cosmic, scale; or he may have prophesied only doom, later editors contributing the message of hope; or he may have been divided in his own mind (or even seen Yahweh as divided in his mind) between the two possibilities. By the New Testament period, however, the book was taken to be a prophecy of the doom that would come on unrepentant Israel – a prophecy that had come true in the Exile of the sixth century – and a promise of limitless good to be looked for in the future, when God would finally vindicate Israel and usher in the new age of which Chapter 2 speaks, when even the animals would be at peace with each other (cf. Isaiah 11).

7

Ronald E. Clements, ‘Patterns in the Prophetic Canon’, in Canon and Authority: Essays in Old Testament Religion and Theology, ed. G.W. Coats and B.O. Long (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), pp. 42–55. 8 On this see my Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (London: DLT, 1986; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 179–213, with examples. 9 Clements, ‘Patterns’, p. 45.

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THE OLD TESTAMENT: CANON, LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY

Is such reception history the same as the canonical approach? Fairly clearly not, for two reasons. First, it is an historical study, which says, this is how the prophets were in fact read. As such it is no different in principle from the historical-critical methods which Childs regards as theologically inadequate. Instead of asking historical questions about the authors of the texts, it asks historical questions about their early readers, which in principle is exactly the same kind of exercise. Secondly, as a corollary of this, reception history does not at all imply that the readers it is studying understood the text correctly. Whether or not they did so is a matter of indifference; reception history is value-neutral. Whereas for the canonical approach, I take it, the claim is that the true meaning of the text is being discovered. How the text was read in the past may suggest promising lines of approach to this meaning, but only in an ancillary way. The canonical meaning cannot be discovered from how the text was read in the New Testament or any other period, but only by examining the text itself. Reception history obviously fascinates Childs, and he conveys this fascination powerfully to his readers. But he sees it at best as a staging post on the way to the canonical meaning, for a canonical approach means one may sometimes have to say that past generations completely misread the text – whereas in the study of the text’s reception this is a virtually meaningless concept. Reception history is not looking for ‘what the text really means’. Traditio-historical Criticism Most scholars would agree that the Book of the Twelve passed through many stages of development before it reached its present form. So far as I am aware, there has been only one attempt to study this process from start to finish, R.E. Wolfe’s article ‘The Editing of the Book of the Twelve’.10 Wolfe sees the Book of the Twelve as having developed as what McKane, in his Jeremiah commentary, calls a ‘rolling corpus’11 – a snowball, to put it less formally, which gradually accumulates more and more material as it rolls downhill. Wolfe attempted something which tends not to happen because we generally write separate commentaries on each of the prophets, rather than on the prophetic corpus as a whole: to suggest correlations between the strata in different books. Thus, for example, where commentators on Amos point to a deuteronomistic redaction of the book, Wolfe tried to show that there was a deuteronomistic stratum in almost all of the minor prophets, in other words that an early edition of the Book of the Twelve had been subjected to a deuteronomistic redaction. Many of Wolfe’s stages are hard to justify – for instance, the ‘Day of Yahweh editor’ and the ‘Anti-Idol Polemist’, who are supposed to have interpolated the collection at just a few salient points, are quite impossible to prove. Nevertheless the recognition that the collection of the minor prophets functioned as one book from an early date, and that many of the passages we see as interpolations in this or that book are part of a larger editorial activity practised on the collection as a whole, was an important insight. 10

R.E. Wolfe, ‘The Editing of the Book of the Twelve’, ZAW 53 (1935), p. 90. W. McKane, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Jeremiah, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 986), pp. l–liii. 11

THE CANONICAL MEANING OF THE BOOK OF THE TWELVE

23

Is this anywhere near Childs’s canonical approach? It seems to fit better with the alternative theory of canonical criticism put forward by J.A. Sanders.12 According to Sanders the theological value of the canon lies not in the finished product, the books as they were definitively canonized, but in the process which led up to canonization. The traditio-historical process rather than the final form of the text is the subject studied by canonical criticism. The point was put concisely by Robert B. Laurin, two years before Childs’s Introduction: The canonizing process … teaches us to accept each stage in the developing canon as having authority in witnessing to how each generation heard God’s will for themselves … No stage … is the final or more authoritative stage. The people of God in every generation must engage in the canonizing process, that is, must hear the spirit convincing it of God’s word for itself in its own situation.13

This is said in conscious opposition to Childs’s announcement of his own programme in his article ‘The Old Testament as Scripture of the Church’.14 Thus one can certainly annexe traditio-historical criticism of the Twelve to a theological programme concerned with the canon; but it will be in the mould of Sanders rather than of Childs. Indeed, if we attach religious significance to the successive stages in the growth of the Book of the Twelve, we may well find ourselves deploring the fact that the process eventually came to an end. As Laurin puts it, ‘The canonization or closing of tradition was based on radical political and psychological threat, and the need for a safe tradition … the continuing work of the Spirit was forgotten in the attempt to find theological security.15 If that is the kind of conclusion to which a high theological valuation of tradition history leads, then manifestly it will not be a good ally for Childs, for whom the final canonization of Scripture is very positively evaluated. Redaction Criticism To some extent it is a matter of convention whether we describe study of the various recensions through which the Book of the Twelve passed as traditio-historical criticism or redaction criticism. But perhaps it is useful to save the latter term for the study of the final editing, the process which gave us the book we have today; especially if this is seen not as the mere accumulation of traditions and interpolations, but as a purposive and deliberate act. It has been suggested, for example, that the final editor of the Book of the Twelve arranged the books in chronological order

12 J.A. Sanders Torah and Canon (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), the introduction to which is entitled ‘A Call to Canonical Criticism’; see also the articles collected in his From Sacred Story to Sacred Text: Canon as Paradigm (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987). 13 R.B. Laurin, ‘Tradition and Canon’, in Tradition and Theology in the Old Testament, ed. Douglas A. Knight (London: SPCK, 1977), pp. 262–74; the quotation is on p. 272. 14 Brevard S. Childs, ‘The Old Testament as Scripture of the Church’, CTM 43 (1972), pp. 709–22. 15 Laurin, ‘Tradition and Canon’, p. 272.

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THE OLD TESTAMENT: CANON, LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY

(as he understood it).16 If true, this might be a clue to one of the hermeneutical intentions of the editor, who meant the prophets to be read as commentators on the events of their day and so wanted them to appear in the correct chronological sequence. If this was the redactor’s intention, it was soon ignored in favour of a ‘timeless’ reading, as the reception history shows us. The order is already different when we reach the Septuagint, where it seems to be calculated by the length of the books. More important theologically, perhaps, would be the idea that it was the final editor of the book who added the last verses of Malachi (4:4–5 in the English numbering), which speak of the law of Moses and of the ministry of the prophet Elijah in close juxtaposition, thereby showing that there is no tension between prophets and Torah, but that they are complementary. Joseph Blenkinsopp has made a good deal of this in his important book Prophecy and Canon, suggesting in fact that the verses are intended as a coda to the whole prophetic corpus, not just to the Twelve.17 The final redactor was thus telling the reader how to approach the prophetic books: to read them as support for the study of the Torah. Such has been, indeed, the normative way of seeing the prophetic books in most streams of Jewish thought to this day, and it would not be surprising if the Twelve had been edited so as to endorse it. Rex Mason’s approach to the prophets has been redaction-critical in the same way. He stresses, for example, that like almost all the prophetic books, Zephaniah, as we have it, is a postexilic book, and can only be read intelligibly when we recognize this and liberate ourselves from exclusive preoccupation with unearthing the actual words of a particular historical prophet … Even so, we must not exclude efforts to see how the book developed; for by such efforts, however imperfectly we succeed, we shall understand more clearly the aims and methods of the later, postexilic redactors.18

There is a ‘message’ in the Book of the Twelve as it left the hands of the final redactors which is not at all the same as the sum of the messages of each of the prophets taken individually. And it is important that students of the Old Testament

16

See Barton, Oracles of God, p. 88. Joseph Blenkinsopp, Prophecy and Canon: A Contribution to the Study of Jewish Origins (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), pp. 120–23. In two recent large-scale studies of the redaction of the Book of the Twelve, Nogalski seeks to show that the twelve books were already combined before each had its final revision, and hence that the Book existed as a whole at an earlier stage than commonly supposed. He believes that it consisted of the amalgamation of two earlier collections, Haggai + Zechariah 1–8, and Hosea + Amos + Micah + Zephaniah. See J. Nogalski, Literary Precursors of the Book of the Twelve, BZAW 217 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1993) and Redactional Processes in the Book of the Twelve, BZAW 218 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1993). A further interesting study of the redaction of the Twelve can be found in R.C. van Leeuwen, ‘Scribal Wisdom and Theodicy in the Book of the Twelve’, in In Search of Wisdom, ed. L.G. Perdue, B.B. Scott and W.J. Wiseman (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1993), p. 31–49: ‘the end-redaction of the Book of the Twelve is sapiential in character … My analysis assumes that the end-redaction of the Tanakh as a whole was the work of scribal sages who were forerunners of Ben Sira.’ 18 Rex Mason, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Joel, OTG (Sheffield: Academic Press, 1994), p. 54. 17

THE CANONICAL MEANING OF THE BOOK OF THE TWELVE

25

should concern themselves with the post-exilic prophetic books as well as with the pre-exilic prophets. Would this kind of redaction-critical enquiry count as a canonical approach to the text? It certainly comes very close to many of Childs’s own assertions about the way books of the Old Testament have been shaped with a particular theological agenda in mind. But again there are two ways in which it falls short. First, the redactor is not the same as the community that canonized the Book of the Twelve, but was probably earlier by several centuries. Secondly, even if in this case it should happen that the ‘canonical’ meaning is identical with the meaning intended by the final redactor, this is no more than a happy accident. In general the canonical meaning is not discovered by looking for the intention of a redactor (or anyone else), but by examining the profile of the text itself. Other features of the Book of the Twelve, such as the way it blurs the individuality of each prophet by subordinating him to a larger collection, are ‘canonically’ important but were not necessarily intended by the redactor: at least, one could defend the position that they were not. Once again, then, we have drawn a blank in our search for the canonical meaning. Final Form Exegesis What of an interest in the final form of the text, which has become such a prominent feature in modern literary studies, and in biblical interpretation influenced by them? Childs’s approach can look very similar to a modern literary concern with the text just as it stands, prescinding from questions of the intentions of authors, redactors and collectors. Since Childs’s Introduction was published The Literary Guide to the Bible has appeared. The contributors differ among themselves, but most are committed to reading the biblical text (often in the AV!) just as it is, and not trying to dig beneath it to discover earlier strata.19 All this, one might expect, would be much to Childs’s taste. In particular, the Guide contains an important essay on the Book of the Twelve by Herbert Marks which finds meanings in the text that were not put there by any deliberate act of writers or editors and which have theological importance. The conclusion that they are the canonical meaning lies very close to hand, for example: in [various] late interpolations … we can see the revisionary gestures becoming more deliberate, the network of echo and allusion increasingly dense. Such persistent reference to earlier texts is an active part of the circular process of canon formation. Sources, elevated by virtue of being cited or echoes, lend back their growing authority to the writings that appear to sustain their tradition. The obsession with a textual heritage which animated the founders of Judaism and Christianity at the turn of the era thus has its origins in the later layers of the Bible itself. 20

19 The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1987). 20 Herbert Marks, ‘The Twelve Minor Prophets’, Literary Guide, pp. 297–33; the quotation is from p. 229.

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Thus the later strata in the Book of the Twelve were already treating earlier ones as incipiently ‘Scripture’ – a development that also lies at the heart of much of Rex Mason’s work, both on the prophets and on the Chronicler.21 The scribes who finalized the redaction of the book were thus not producing merely ‘a text’, but were shaping a work that was intended to be canonical Scripture; and it is the final form of this text that ought to be the object of interpretation. This sounds very like Childs. On the other hand, Marks’s interpretation is plainly meant to be a literary one. He is interested in the way each stratum in the Book refers back to earlier ones and is itself the given for later strata because this makes it possible to read the work as a unity. What began life as chronologically successive layers now present themselves to us as components of a synchronic structure, an intertextuality that exists within the text itself.22 And in so far as final form exegesis is literary in this sense, it presumably fails Childs’s test, since it is not concerned with the theological level of the text but only with its internal logic. Nevertheless, it is hard not to feel that Childs’s position is closer to this kind of final form interpretation than to any other among the range of interpretative strategies we bring to texts. Childs constantly stresses that it is indeed the final form that is canonical for the Christian (or Jewish) community. But, no doubt, it is the final form considered from a theological rather than a literary perspective: and that makes all the difference in principle, even though in practice, and with any given text, it is quite hard to see just what exactly is that difference. II Can we discover a canonical meaning in the Book of the Twelve which is really distinct, not only from the meanings found by so-called historical-critical study, but even from the four much more similar approaches I have just been surveying? To recapitulate: the history of the text’s reception may provide clues, but is not itself the solution; its tradition history may be construed as part of the canonizing process, but while this satisfies Sanders it will not satisfy Childs, who is concerned with the end product; the final redactor of the text may have had ideas about how it should be read as a unified whole, but these may not be identical with its canonical meaning in Childs’s special sense; and even the final form as studied by a literary critic is not absolutely decisive, for the theological meaning of the final form may not be the same as its literary meaning. It has to be admitted that Childs’s canonical approach begins to look extremely exacting, its goal a kind of holy grail that few of us are likely to find, or identify when we have found it.

21 See Rex Mason, Preaching the Tradition: Homily and Hermeneutics after the Exile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 22 For a recent large-scale study of the Twelve from a ‘synchronic’ point of view, see Paul R. House, The Unity of the Twelve, JSOTS 97 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990). There is a particularly interesting discussion of synchronic (and redactional) readings in Richard J. Coggins, ‘The Minor Prophets – One Book or Twelve?’, in Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honour of Michael D. Goulder, ed. Stanley E. Porter, Paul Joyce and David E. Orton (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 57–68.

THE CANONICAL MEANING OF THE BOOK OF THE TWELVE

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I think I have found some clues to what the canonical meaning could be in a paper read to the international Old Testament congress in Edinburgh in 1973, when Childs had already published his Biblical Theology in Crisis but had not yet produced the Introduction. The paper was by Edmond Jacob, and was called ‘Principe canonique et formation de l’Ancien Testament’.23 Jacob was obviously sympathetic to Childs’s emerging programme, but (in this rather more like Sanders) he was interested in the canonical process as well as in the final act of canonization and the final form that it sanctified. But he asks, very much in the manner of Childs, what was (and is) the function of the Hebrew canon in Israel. ‘The primary function of the canon’, he writes, ‘is to allow Israel to affirm its identity through all the variations of its history, and to keep its tradition intact.’24 Now if we start with such a definition, which is surely close to Childs’s understanding of the matter, we may be able to define a ‘canonical’ meaning for the Book of the Twelve. The canonical meaning will be that meaning which enables Israel, by using this book, to maintain its traditions and its identity. If, for example, the original meaning of Amos was to deliver an uncompromising ‘no!’ to Israel’s traditions as they stood in the eighth century,25 in making Amos part of the Book of the Twelve the editors have (wittingly or unwittingly, it does not matter) relativized this absolute ‘no’ and made it merely a device whose purpose is to keep the nation on course. ‘Amos’ as part of the Book of the Twelve, with all its promises of restoration and exhortations to remain loyal to God, does not mean what Amos originally meant. This is not necessarily to say that its final form is any less uncompromising than Amos himself; it is to say that the book’s deliberate juxtaposition with other, more ‘positive’ prophets has produced a ‘canonical meaning’ whose aim is the preservation of Israel. Jacob’s definition of the function of the canon works well for the Book of the Twelve. The epilogue to Malachi, which I have already referred to, fits the model well. It instructs the reader to use all the preceding prophecies as admonitions to keep the Torah faithfully and so be ready for the events of the last days. Thus the Book of the Twelve, which begins with the disobedience of Israel in the days of Hosea, ends with a challenge to each new generation to be obedient, and promises God’s faithfulness to Israel if it is faithful to him. A number of interpolations and additions to the individual prophets can also be read at this canonical level, rather than merely at a redactional one. Take, for example, the last verse of Hosea, ‘Whoever is wise, let him understand these things; whoever is discerning, let him know them; for the ways of the LORD are right, and the upright walk in them, but transgressors stumble in them’ (Hosea 14:9). This can indeed be read merely as a scribal, ‘wisdom’ addition to Hosea. But it can also be read canonically, as a key to how the whole prophetic collection is to be read: as advice which will keep the Israelites on the right path and ensure a continued walking with God. It is a possible view of the prophets as 23

Edmond Jacob, ‘Principe canonique et formation de l’ Ancien Testament’, Congress Volume: Edinburgh 1974, SVT 28 (Leiden: Brill, 1975), pp. 101–22. 24 ‘Permettre à Israël d’affirmer son identité au cours des variations de son histoire et de garder intacte la tradition, telle est la fonction première du canon’, ibid., pp.104–5. 25 See Rudolf Smend, ‘Das Nein des Amos’, EvTh 23 (1963), pp. 404–23; reproduced in R. Smend, Die Mitte des Alten Testaments (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1986), pp. 85–103.

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historical figures that their task was to keep Israel loyal to Yahweh. But whether that is so or not, such is certainly the role of the canonical collection of the prophets. III Here, then, are some possible approaches to the ‘canonical’ meaning of the Book of the Twelve. Let me in conclusion make two comments on it, which will perhaps explain why I remain cool about Childs’s programme, however charitably it may be presented. (1) Might it not be said that the actual exegetical yield of the canonical approach is rather small, in return for the effort that needs to be expended? It is not necessary to go as far as James Barr did in his review of Childs’s Introduction: ‘every one of the forty-odd chapters says the same thing’.26 But it is true that the ‘canonical’ meanings that emerge from the various texts in the Old Testament tend to be very much the same. Not just the Book of the Twelve but all the prophets emphasize, in their canonical form, the same need for Israel to be true to its heritage, to maintain its identity by adherence to the Torah, to look for restoration and salvation beyond past suffering and present destruction. These are of course very important and largescale religious truths – I have no intention of trivializing them. But there must be a suspicion that deducing them from the present, canonical form of the scriptures is not a very difficult or lengthy task; and a suspicion, moreover, that they are much the same as the teachings of mainstream Judaism in the New Testament times, so that we could have arrived at them through the history of religion, or even the reception history of the biblical text, without needing to invent a special category, ‘canonical meaning’. When Childs maintains that the specificity of each Old Testament book has been deliberately blurred in the canonizing process, we can see what he means, but the result is such a uniform message, to be found in practically every book of the Bible, that we may soon cease to find the canonical approach interesting, and yearn for the variety and diversity of meanings which old-fashioned historical criticism put us in touch with. (2) Childs’s emphasis is very much on the inherent meaning of the canonical text. Though he rejects the identification of the canonical approach with final form exegesis in its literary mode, he does claim it is the final form that is the proper object for ‘canonical’ study. I have a suspicion, however, that the canonical meaning he finds in the final form of biblical texts is already given in his understanding of the status and function of the canon. In my own quest for the canonical meaning of the Book of the Twelve, I drew a blank until I found Jacob’s definition of the function of the canon; once this was applied to the book, a canonical meaning could easily be extracted. I suspect that the same is true of most of Childs’s canonical readings. We begin with a conception of what the canon is for: to sustain the people of Israel in being, for example, or to keep them true to their covenant tradition, or to emphasize biblical monotheism. Then it becomes an easy task to use this conception

26

James Barr, ‘Childs’s Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture’, JSOT 16 (1980), pp. 12–23; the quotation is on p. 12.

THE CANONICAL MEANING OF THE BOOK OF THE TWELVE

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as a hermeneutical key that will unlock all the individual scriptural books. I don’t say this is necessarily wrong, only that it is not what Childs claims to be doing – for, in a rather Barthian manner, he claims to eschew all external criteria for the meaning of the Bible and to use only principles inherent in the text. Hence the emphasis on the final form, which is not arrived at by some style of criticism motivated by external theological criteria, but is simply there before us when we open the Hebrew text. My suggestion is that there is an element of self-deception here, and that the conception of the canon is actually what guides exegesis – just as much an external criterion of interpretation as any other. In a way that is not true of reception history, traditio-historical or redaction criticism, or final form exegesis, we know what the canonical meaning of a book will be before we examine it, for we know already what the canon is, and what points it exists to make. This makes the canonical approach, in my judgement, somewhat sterile. This must sound a very negative conclusion, but really it is an expression more of puzzlement than of hostility to the canonical approach. The quest for canonical meaning is elusive, yet it seems to me at the same time to be in principle eminently reasonable. We may put it like this: the Church evidently wants us to have the Bible; what does it want us to get out of it? Childs’s argument is that we are presumably meant to attend to Scripture in the form the Church has given it to us, not to rearrange and divide it so as to suit our own ideas. Given the premise – certainly true in my judgement – that we receive the Bible from the Church, I find it difficult to see how something like this conclusion can be avoided. Yet when we actually attempt the task, it seems to come apart in our hands. For the traditional biblical critic, this is not strictly a problem; but it is a problem for a theologian who is trying consciously to work within Christian tradition, and with a high view of scriptural authority or inspiration. I am tempted to say that, since the task of looking for the canonical meaning cannot (apparently) be carried out successfully, there may be an undetected incoherence in its definition. But perhaps, if we can end on the note of charity with which we began, we could say that Childs has pointed us to an essential aspect of Christian use of Scripture, yet one which is so difficult that no one has yet quite succeeded at it. Making the Bible fruitful for Christian faith is a task that is never complete. All serious proposals for carrying it out – and Childs’s is probably the most sophisticated and impressive in recent times – should be tried and tested; but none should be accepted uncritically.

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Chapter 3

Canon and Old Testament Interpretation When the history of twentieth-century biblical interpretation comes to be written, will the various movements known as ‘canonical criticism’ or ‘the canonical approach’ be assessed as major or minor events in biblical studies in the last two decades of the century? At one level they can hardly be said to have started ‘schools’: the number of biblical scholars who are card-carrying members of the canonical criticism union is really quite small. On the other hand, to change the metaphor, they have succeeded in moving the goalposts. This is especially true, I think, of Brevard Childs’s canonical method,1 which because it is superficially rather like some literary movements in biblical criticism, particularly in its concern with the ‘final form’ of the biblical text, is very much in tune with the spirit of biblical study in our day. While few scholars declare themselves canonical critics, many feel the force of Childs’s argument that we should be much more interested than biblical criticism has traditionally been in the text as it lies before us, and want to ask about the relationship between different books within the canon of Scripture rather than acting as though the canon were essentially an irrelevance. We find scholars asking about the overall structure and theology of the Pentateuch,2 the shaping of the book of the Twelve3 and the meaning of the book of Isaiah in its complete form.4 Such interests, though they do not necessarily amount to the canonical approach as Childs himself understands it, do owe a lot to his influence in changing the questions it is thought sensible to ask about the Old Testament.5 We should not measure Childs’s importance simply in terms of 1

For Childs’s approach, see B.S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press; London: SCM Press, 1979), Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (London: SCM Press, 1985) and Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (London: SCM Press, 1992). 2 Cf. D.J.A. Clines, The Theme of the Pentateuch, JSOTSup 10 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1978). 3 Cf. J. Nogalski, Redactional Processes in the Book of the Twelve, BZAW 218 (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1993). See also my discussion in J. Barton, ‘The Canonical Meaning of the Book of the Twelve’, in After the Exile: Essays in Honour of Rex Mason, ed. J. Barton and D.J. Reimer (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996), pp. 59–73 (reproduced as Chapter 2 in this volume). 4 See E.W. Conrad, Reading Isaiah, OBT (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991) and other works cited in J. Barton, Isaiah 1–39, OTG (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), pp. 121–2. 5 Childs’s concerns were anticipated in a highly creative article by Ronald E. Clements, ‘Patterns in the Prophetic Canon’, in Canon and Authority: Essays in Old Testament Religion and Theology, ed. G.W. Coats and B.O. Long (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), pp. 42–55. This article was a contribution to the historical development of the canon of the prophets, and

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adding up his disciples, who are admittedly few, but should credit to him at least part of the great sea-change which has come over Old Testament study in our day, as a result of which the exegesis of whole books and even of the Old Testament as a whole is now on the agenda in a way unthinkable in, say, the 1950s or 1960s. Obviously, then, the canonical approach is a new approach to the Old Testament: indeed, it defines itself by contrast with the historical-critical movement which was dominant before its arrival on the scene. Yet there is a certain ambivalence in Childs’s own assessment of his approach. At the same time as he emphasizes its novelty by contrast with historical criticism, he also wishes to assert its substantial continuity with what are usually called ‘pre-critical’ approaches to the biblical text. Childs is not saying that we should begin to look at the finished form of the canonical text, but rather that we should get back to looking at this form. Historical criticism, on his view, has been one long bad dream, separating two periods of a real waking attention to the text, the first represented by the classic Christian commentators of the past – the Fathers, the Reformers – and the second by his own programme of canonical reading. Thus the canonical method, though in one sense new by comparison with historical criticism, is in another sense much older. It is an attempt to recapture, in a postcritical world, the genuine theological engagement with the Bible that characterized what we dismissively call the pre-critical era. In this essay I want to examine this dual claim to be both new and old. My argument will take the form of trying to show that, though both sides of the claim have some validity, the canonical approach as a form of biblical interpretation is neither so new nor so old as it appears. I shall then go on, however, to suggest that this rather negative conclusion points not in the direction of suggesting that the canonical approach is therefore rather unimportant, but on the contrary that it is too important to be understood purely within a biblical studies context. The canonical method is a method within systematic theology, and it is as such that it should be evaluated. The Alleged Novelty of the Canonical Approach So long as we stay within the world of Old Testament study, it is not hard to show that Childs’s approach is in fact less novel than he himself claims. It is indeed a sharp departure from the normal approach of historical criticism. But it is a mistake to think that historical criticism has been so enormously dominant in twentiethcentury interpretation as Childs suggests. Part of the rhetoric of all the newer methods – canonical criticism, the newer literary approaches, poststructuralist and postmodernist movements of all sorts – is that historical criticism has had an unchallenged dominance in our field since the late nineteenth century or perhaps for even longer, and that it is only in the 1980s and 1990s that anyone has begun to see through it. This, however, is a distortion of the history of twentieth-century biblical interpretation. It rests on a memory (but in many cases, I think, a false memory) is not an exercise in the ‘canonical approach’ in the sense discussed in the present article. It is a great pleasure to dedicate this article to Ronald Clements, who has done so much for biblical scholarship, and who greatly encouraged me when I was beginning my academic career and has been unfailingly kind and gracious ever since.

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of being told by a lecturer or professor that now one was at university one was to ask only historical questions of the Old Testament: that in his class no theological interpretation of the Old Testament was allowed. I can think of teachers of Old Testament of whom this was probably true, but I greatly doubt whether they were ever in the majority. Most Old Testament teachers in the twentieth century have been religious believers (it is only in the last couple of decades that this has ceased to be true, if indeed it has even now), and they have seldom been uninterested in the possible religious meaning of the texts they have studied. Jewish critics of Christian biblical interpretation argue, indeed, that the historical-critical approach itself was mostly a cover for Christian theological preconceptions, and though I believe this in general false, I think its plausibility seriously undermines the claim that historical critics operated without theological interests. This has two aspects. On the one hand, most historical critics probably thought their historical conclusions were in themselves of religious importance. Since the God Christians believed in was continuous with the God worshipped as Yahweh in Old Testament times, what was then believed about him, as it could be reconstructed through historical criticism, could not be a matter of indifference to the modern believer. Paradoxically, the suggestion that the Christian God is not continuous with Yahweh, who is simply an ancient Near Eastern god of a fairly standard type, has come to be made only in the same period that has witnessed the rise of such movements as canonical criticism. It would not have occurred to most of the scholars who taught me that one should use a small ‘g’ in referring to this god, since he was, after all, ultimately the same as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And many scholars quite untouched by post-critical movements continue happily in this tradition. Whether or not it is ultimately compatible with a historical-critical approach, it was certainly perceived as being so. The idea that historical criticism emptied out the enduring religious value of the Old Testament text is now common, but it was generally not a conscious part of the self-understanding of actual historical critics. It would be easier to construct a case against them as having been too pious, than to show them up as radically untheological and irreligious. Historical-critical questions were being asked of texts which were taken for granted as sacred texts: most historical critics were far from seeing themselves as iconoclasts. But, on the other hand, the desire to move beyond historical criticism to a more systematically theological interpretation of the Old Testament has also been a recurring theme in Old Testament studies. For most of this century this has not been linked to a rejection of historical criticism, but more to a feeling that historical criticism gets us only so far along the road to a theological appreciation of the text’s meaning, and that something more is needed. One sees this very clearly in a scholar such as Gerhard von Rad. Von Rad was fully committed to critical scholarship, and himself contributed substantially to critical analysis of the Pentateuch. But he was also convinced that critical investigation, especially of an analytical kind, was not enough. Beyond analysis there must be synthesis; beyond the critical investigation of how texts came to be, there must be an exploration of their finished form and

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the theology which that form expresses. Hence his commentary on Genesis,6 which clearly distinguished J from P and yet was interested in the work of the redactor who made J and P into the text of Genesis we have inherited, the redactor (R) whom following Franz Rosenzweig he calls Rabbenu, ‘our Master’. Hence also his work on the narrative art of the Succession Narrative and the Joseph Story, and his concern for the overall message of the book of Deuteronomy. Childs’s canonical approach has many anticipations in von Rad, whom it is far from adequate to call simply a ‘critical’ scholar. We can see the drive to synthesize and theologize even more clearly than in the case of von Rad if we consider the work of the ‘Biblical Theology Movement’. It was the demise of this movement that provided the first impulse for Childs’s own work, as set out in his book Biblical Theology in Crisis.7 Biblical Theology, in this technical sense, was a primarily North American phenomenon, and to a much greater extent than the work of von Rad, which is similar in some ways, it reflected a disillusionment with critical scholarship. The Biblical Theologians were not concerned simply to move on beyond the historical-critical method while fully accepting its findings. Rather, they tended to argue that historical criticism was in any case a defective approach to the study of the Old Testament: that, after a century or more of the method, it had got us nowhere, or at least nowhere worth getting. What was needed, they said, was to turn away from minute analysis of the biblical text and instead synthesize, putting back together the pieces that had been taken apart. Then the Bible would once again be able to communicate a properly theological message applicable to our own day. We would, to use Krister Stendahl’s terms, be able to move from what the Bible meant to what it means.8 Childs’s recipe for what should replace historical criticism is different from that of the Biblical Theologians in many respects, and to that extent his programme is undoubtedly new. But the underlying theory about how the Bible ought to be treated by the biblical scholar is much the same as theirs. Respect for the whole should replace concern for the parts; theology should replace history; a religious frame of reference should take the place of the essentially secular norms of historical criticism. The Bible ought once again to become the Church’s book, to which we go for inspiration and revelation, and should cease to be seen as the proper province of rationalist critics. All this the canonical approach shares with the Biblical Theology Movement. Thus it is fair to say that, already in the generation before Childs, many biblical scholars perceived historical criticism much more negatively than people nowadays seem often to think. It is not that there was a time before Childs when everyone regarded the historical-critical method as the Holy Grail. On the contrary, at least as early as the late 1940s doubts were being expressed about its dominance, and 6

G. van Rad, Das erste Buch Mose, Genesis, ATD (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1956) (English translation Genesis, OTL (London: SCM Press, 1961; rev. edn 1963)). 7 B.S. Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970). 8 K. Stendahl, ‘Biblical Theology, Contemporary’, The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, I, ed. G.A. Buttrick (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962), pp. 418–32.

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proposals were being made for outflanking or superannuating it, in the interests of a mode of biblical study more congenial to the kind of theological use to which the Church wanted to put the Bible. A sentiment that could be roughly formulated as ‘The historical-critical method is all very well but…’ can thus be found long before Childs. Moreover – and I shall return to this – polemic against what Robert Alter calls the ‘excavative’ character of historical criticism9 can also be found before the Second World War, especially in the work of Karl Barth and biblical scholars who agreed with him, such as W. Vischer. I doubt in fact whether historical criticism ever enjoyed the undisputed hegemony against which people nowadays protest, and suspect that phrases such as ‘the assured results of historical criticism’ were always easier to find in the work of opponents of such criticism, where they were used sarcastically, than in the historical critics themselves. Most historical critics worked in an avowedly religious environment, and had a generally reverent attitude towards the biblical text: how often does one read a classic of biblical criticism in which a given Old Testament book is debunked or even mildly criticized, or in which a critical analysis is presented as detracting from its religious value? Wellhausen, certainly, was notoriously disrespectful towards some books and strata, as in his robust demolition of the ideas in P. But how many scholars ever followed Wellhausen in this freedom towards the text? The history of scholarship since his day is largely a history of increasing respect for the Old Testament, not of ever sharper criticism of it, if criticism is taken to imply hostility. The modern notion that biblical scholars spent their time emptying the Old Testament of religious value until people like Childs came along to give it back its rightful place is, I believe, a straw man, a useful foil with which to demonstrate the importance of canonical criticism, final-form exegesis and other recent trends. And it is an unnecessary straw man, for these modern trends, whether one likes them or not, are of undoubted intellectual seriousness, well worth taking seriously and evaluating carefully. They do not need to rest on the foundation provided by a tendentious and unfair reading of all that went before. The Alleged Antiquity of the Canonical Approach But a canonical approach does not only claim novelty; it also, paradoxically, claims antiquity. It says that there were no ‘canonical’ readings during the ‘historical-critical’ period, which, as we have seen, is at best partially true. But it maintains that there were such readings in pre-critical times. The programme of the canonical approach as argued for by Childs is to reclaim the biblical hermeneutic of the era before historical criticism – in effect, before the Enlightenment. When in his great Exodus commentary Childs surveys the interpretations of the Fathers and the Reformers, he is not practising mere reception history, out of a historical interest in what people in the past made of the Bible. He is setting out an agenda for the modern interpreter, in the belief that commentators nowadays ought to be sensitive to the interpretations of their ‘pre-critical’ predecessors, who may not have possessed as much historical

9

See R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981).

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knowledge about the Bible as we do, but who had a far clearer sense of the text as Holy Scripture and felt impelled to interpret it as such. This respect for interpreters of the past may be seen in modern Old Testament study even where there is no explicit commitment to canonical criticism. One sees it clearly in much literary interpretation, where rabbinic and patristic exegesis is enjoying a renewed respect – in Robert Alter10 and Gabriel Josipovici,11 in Frank Kermode12 and Jack Miles.13 There the reason is perhaps a sense that these interpreters read the biblical books as ‘texts’ in the pregnant sense that term has in modern literary criticism, or even as works, an equally important term. Jack Miles, for example, tries to see how the Hebrew Bible would look if one interpreted it as a single work with a unified plot and consistent characterization: hence his title God: A Biography. Both here and in more theological canonical criticism one finds a drive towards holistic reading, resisting the historical-critical tendency to divide texts up into sources and interpret them piecemeal, and concentrating instead on the text in its present form. Now it is in their holism, it seems to me, that theological and literary interpretation in our day fail to make good their claim to be recovering the scriptural vision of the Fathers, the rabbis or the Reformers. It is true that pre-critical interpretation regarded books of the Bible as a unity, in the sense that they did not think they were composed from pre-existing fragments or even longer source-documents: Isaiah was by Isaiah, not by First, Second and Third Isaiah together with a whole heap of other contributors. But it is not true that they therefore interpreted the biblical texts holistically, as having a beginning, a middle and an end, a plot, a shape, a Gestalt. Rabbinic exegesis, for example, often sees no divisions in the text where critical commentators find dislocation – they do not find any disjunction between Isaiah 39 and 40. But at the same time they do find it possible to break the text down into verses and half-verses and to comment on each as if it were a text in its own right. The Midrashim are apparently serial comments on biblical books, proceeding verse by verse. But any reader of these texts knows that it is folly to try to find any progression of thought within a midrash, still less any progression which is an attempt to mirror the ‘ductus’ of the book being commented on. The principle that ‘there is no before and after in the Torah’ justifies any amount of jumping from text to text, in a way that negates any idea of plot, the development of arguments or narrative shape. It is rather as though every biblical book were like Proverbs, and like the sentence literature of Proverbs 10–29 at that: isolated atoms of communication, each to be interpreted in its own right. Where rabbinic exegesis is holistic is in its interpretative framework, which is provided by the whole tissue of rabbinic assumptions about theology and ethics. The framework, not the scriptural text, is the unified whole to which the rabbis pay attention. Similar things could be said of patristic and Reformation exegesis; for 10

Ibid. See G. Josipovici, The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). 12 See F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); cf. R. Alter and F. Kermode (eds), The Literary Guide to the Bible (London: Collins, 1987). 13 See J. Miles, God: A Biography (London: Simon & Schuster, 1995). 11

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the former it is the rule of faith which provides a unifying scheme, into which any and every text can be fitted: the internal organization of the individual books is of far less interest than their concord with Christian doctrine. And for the Reformers, who evince more concern with biblical books in their own right, it is still an external theological scheme – albeit claimed as deriving from Scripture itself – that controls the interpretation of individual books. Holistic reading in the modern sense is very hard to detect. I think myself that the claim to be recovering pre-critical attitudes to the Old Testament is concerned more with reverence and respect for the text than with particular ways of reading it, whether holistic or (as I believe is more commonly the case in pre-critical exegesis) atomistic. The sense one gets from Childs is not so much that he is reading the Old Testament in the way pre-critical interpreters read it, as that he is reading it with the same attitude. The details of the interpretative method are really neither here nor there – this is one reason why Childs (rightly) dislikes it when his approach is described as canonical ‘criticism’, suggesting a method parallel or alternative to form criticism or redaction criticism. What matters is the state of mind with which the text is approached. Historical criticism approaches texts with suspicion, with an interest in historical reconstruction, with a reductionist view of them as merely human products; whereas the canonical reader is seeking to read the text as the Church’s Holy Scriptures, and therefore as speaking truly of God. It is in this, rather than in any preference for holistic interpretation, that the similarity to pre-critical approaches lies. If this is true, then we ought probably to distinguish more sharply than is currently usual between canonical and holistic readings, since, though they can of course be combined, either can exist in the absence of the other. A desire to read the Old Testament as Scripture need not predispose one to prefer holistic readings, for it certainly did not so predispose the rabbis. And on the other hand holistic reading can easily belong to some other, quite non-theological, programme – hence its prevalence in practitioners of the newer literary approaches who could not care less about the Bible’s theological claims. Even to read the Old Testament in its final form, as Childs insists we should do, is not necessarily to read it holistically: St Paul certainly took the Old Testament to be God’s revelation exactly as it stood, but there is precious little evidence of holism in his reading of it – rather a digging out of proof-texts in a manner deeply unwelcome to practitioners of holistic interpretation. One can understand, from this perspective, why Childs is annoyed to find his canonical approach equated with a modern literary style of scriptural reading, and even when critics who do not make the equation nevertheless point to the resemblances (as I myself have done). The similarity between canonical ‘final form’ exegesis and literary ‘holistic’ exegesis is essentially accidental, the chance confluence of two very different attitudes to the Bible. But if this is true, then it is in its theological commitment rather than in the details of its method that the canonical approach resembles pre-critical exegesis. I shall return to this point later, since it seems to me extremely important. The point can also be made that the canonical approach is by no means simply a return to the kind of biblical interpretation current before the rise of historical criticism, but depends on the critical method as a foil for its own proposals. This is

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something James Barr has stressed: Childs’s interpretation of Isaiah, for example, depends on our knowing that Isaiah 40–55 is later than 1–39, in order then to be able to see how the ‘canonical shaping’ of the book has decontextualized it.14 No one who simply believed unreflectively that all of Isaiah was from the pen of the eighthcentury prophet would be able to appreciate this point. It is a mystery concealed from generations of Fathers and rabbis, and revealed only in these last days to those who have first sat at the feet of the historical critics. This point may, however, conveniently lead into the more positive things I should now like to say about the canonical approach. For, we may reason, it is a fairly obvious point: it is hardly likely that Childs himself does not realize how often his ‘canonical’ readings rest on critical positions, and indeed he is perfectly willing to concede it, and not only to concede it but to state openly that he regards the historicalcritical method as important and by no means simply evacuated of significance by the canonical approach. It might be that in this he is simply being inconsistent. But before attributing inconsistency to a scholar of his intellectual stature, perhaps we should do well to pause, and ask whether we may have been evaluating the canonical approach from the wrong angle, or through the wrong focus. How is it possible for Childs to maintain that the historical-critical method remains both valid and important, when he is all the time trying to show how desirable it would be to get back into a state of mind for which it had not yet been discovered? I believe that it is by probing this puzzle that we may come to a more useful assessment of what canonical criticism is really about, and thus to a more just evaluation of it. The Canonical Approach and Theology The truth about the canonical approach is, I think, that it is a proposal about how theologians should use the Bible, rather than about how biblical critics should study it. The difference may seem unimportant, and of course the same person may be both a biblical critic and a theologian – many people, myself included, believe that this is desirable. Nevertheless there is a conceptual distinction to be drawn between what the critic does when studying the Bible, and what the theologian does when drawing on biblical materials in the process of producing systematic theology, preaching or apologetic; and it seems to me that it is the latter which Childs is really concerned with. The canonical approach does not begin with the biblical text, asking, what can we say about this text if we apply a critical intelligence to it? The canonical approach begins with the need to formulate theological truth, and it asks how the Bible can be used in that context. The canonical theologian is one who, coming from a broadly Reformed background, takes the Bible very seriously indeed as the source of theological truth, but has at the same time a confessional framework within which the Bible’s teaching is to be received. The question for such a person is how the Bible can actually be fruitful, but also how we can do it justice: how we can ensure that we hear its whole witness to Christian truth, not just the parts we choose for

14

See J. Barr, ‘Childs’ Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture’, JSOT 16 (1980), pp. 12–23.

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ourselves, and how we can ensure that we are not diverted by apparent (or even real) discrepancies within the text from assimilating it as a coherent whole. It is, broadly speaking, fair to say that this amounts to a return to a ‘pre-critical’ reading of the Bible, in that interpreters during the patristic or Reformation periods shared the concern to assimilate the Bible as a whole, and to show that all of it was fruitful for Christian faith. It is equally true to say that it was not far from the concerns of many in the Biblical Theology Movement to seek out ‘the biblical doctrine’ of this or that theological theme and to present it as an integrated whole. Above all, I think, it would be true to say that the hand of Karl Barth may be seen strongly at work in a canonical approach to the text, something that I imagine Childs would not wish to deny. Barth lay behind much of von Rad’s concern to move beyond source analysis to an appreciation of biblical books as a whole, and he is also at work in the background of canonical criticism. For a ‘canonical reading’ of the Bible one need look no further than many of Barth’s excursuses on biblical passages, where the reading of the Bible is carried out within a clear doctrinal framework and where it is taken as a given that the Bible will speak with a consistent voice on any given subject. It might, indeed, be argued that canonical reading is what not only theologians but ordinary Christian believers instinctively engage in whenever they open a Bible. They assume that what they will get from any given portion of Scripture is religious truth; and since there cannot be mutually inconsistent versions of such truth, they assume that any other passage will help to elucidate the same message. This is not to be confused with a fundamentalistic insistence that there cannot be the slightest inconsistencies in the Bible: ordinary Bible readers, like canonical critics, have enough breadth of mind to realize that the biblical books were written at different times and have different concerns. But they assume, in approaching Scripture, that it will be reasonably consistent and coherent, and also that the message it conveys will be important and serious, not inconsequential or trivial. On matters that deeply concern us, we expect the Bible to have things to say that are worth hearing, and we also expect that it will speak, to a great extent, with a single voice. These assumptions are probably given in the very term ‘Scripture’: they are assumptions made in many religions that have sacred books, not just in Judaism and Christianity. The canonical approach is essentially an attempt to formulate carefully and programmatically the attitude towards the biblical text that most believers share. This partially explains what sometimes seems the rather ambivalent attitude of canonical critics towards historical criticism. On the one hand, they are clear that we must move beyond it; on the other, that it has a legitimate place. The mystery is solved when we see that the agenda of the canonical approach is essentially how to read Scripture in a way that is religiously edifying and helpful. Sometimes historical criticism can be useful in this, as for example in showing us that the book of Isaiah comes from a diversity of periods and therefore in its finished form is not to be located in any of them, but has a certain ‘timeless’ quality. This could not be known so long as people thought it was all the work of the eighth-century prophet whose name it bears. It is precisely the historical-critical insight into the book’s provenance that shows us how the tradition has freed it for applicability in ever new situations. On the other hand, when historical criticism seeks to insist that passages are to be read against the background of their times, and hence as having a narrower

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applicability or truth than the Christian believer would like to see in them, it is to be regarded as having exceeded its brief and led us astray. There is no inconsistency here, once we grant that the canonical approach is concerned with what is profitable for the Christian reader, ergiebig in the useful German shorthand expression. As observed above, it is probably not the case that a canonical approach necessarily leads to a final-form reading of any given text. The association is close, in most people’s minds, and Childs himself often speaks of the need to respect the final form. But that means, on the whole, the text as it is presented to us, not necessarily the text understood as an aesthetic or theological whole. I do not think that a canonical reading of Proverbs, for example, is committed to finding order and sequence in the sentence literature of Chapters 10–29; what it is committed to is making sense of the book we now have, rather than of putative earlier collections that may lie beneath it. And ‘making sense’ means making religious sense, treating the text ‘as Scripture’, not just as an ancient document, and hence asking questions about its intertextual relations with other books in the canon and its theological relations to Christian doctrine. On this understanding the canonical approach is really rather simpler than it is sometimes thought to be – and none the worse for that. Its agenda is to show the Bible’s relevance and significance for religious readers by an appropriate style of interpretation. Is that not what all students of the Bible are really concerned with anyway? It is tempting to answer ‘yes’ to this, and indeed it may almost seem so obvious as hardly to need stating. But biblical criticism, as traditionally conceived, is not really directed to that aim, as Childs, I believe, sees only too clearly. What drives ‘historical criticism’ so called is not theology, but a concern to let the text speak for itself. Religious believers who engage in biblical criticism hope that what they discover through their critical studies will support rather than undermine their faith; and since until recently virtually all biblical critics were religious believers, we may assume that they generally found it did, unless they were dishonest. But biblical criticism dies at birth if it is told to find in the text only what will support the critic’s faith. In that sense its role is genuinely critical: to establish what is the case, prescinding for the time being from the question of whether this is religiously edifying or not. And, unfortunately for the canonical approach, there comes a point where biblical critics cannot rest content with inhabiting the restricted world of biblical studies, but have necessarily to interfere in the activities of doctrinal and systematic theologians. This they have to do when such theologians make a use of biblical materials which the biblical critics believe the text cannot sustain. When they do this, it is not enough to reply that the theologian is making a constructive and edifying use of the Bible and therefore is not subject to the verdict of mere biblical critics: for the use cannot really be as edifying as it looks if it rests upon falsehood in exegesis. Error is never truly ‘helpful’: any scholar who believes that it is has given up his or her claim to be called a scholar. This is to put the matter in a very sharp and polemical way, and for the most part, of course, the differences between critical and canonical readings will be slight, if they even exist at all: but I believe it is important to see what is at stake. The canonical approach ultimately tells the student of the Bible what to think the text says on doctrinal grounds, rather than on the basis of the philological and textual criteria which historical criticism has developed. It says, for example, that since the

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overall drift of the Bible is in the direction of monotheism and the framework within which we are meant to read it is that of Judaeo-Christian monotheism, any given text in Scripture should be interpreted as a witness to such monotheism, for by definition any non-monotheistic interpretation can only be of a level of the text which is sub-, or not yet, canonical and therefore is ruled out by the canonical approach. Hence when Ps. 97:7 says that ‘all gods bow down to’ Yahweh, this must ‘canonically’ be read as a metaphorical way of saying that Yahweh is the only God (or, better, that there is only one God), since in a canonical perspective the assertion that there are other gods who bow to Yahweh cannot be tolerated. The traditional biblical critic, on the other hand, will at least ask whether the verse is not meant literally, and whether it does not imply the existence of many gods, of whom Yahweh is the chief. There may be good critical grounds for preferring the monotheistic reading, but they will not owe anything to the fact that the interpreter who is deciding between the two readings is himself or herself a monotheist. Only think how we should react if a modern ‘pagan’ insisted that the polytheistic interpretation must be preferred because, as we all know, there are in fact many gods and the Bible can be trusted to get this right! The essence of biblical criticism is that the Bible is not ‘owned’ by anyone, not even by orthodox Christians, but should be interpreted according to publicly available criteria of the meanings of words and sentences. It will not do to say that this is true when it is being read ‘critically’, but that different standards of evidence apply when it is being read ‘canonically’. The Task of Biblical Criticism What then is the place of ‘canon’ in biblical interpretation? At one level, there is none. Biblical criticism has always been, and rightly so, of its essence anti-canonical in the sense that it refuses to allow for the framework within which the Church has placed the Bible when asking about the Bible’s meaning. In practice very few biblical critics have actually spoken against or criticized the existence of the Bible as canonical Scripture, since most biblical critics until our own day have been Christian believers, and they have not seen their work as tending to undermine the canon at all. But their work has always contained the possibility of finding things in canonical Scripture which are incompatible with this or that theme in Christian theology, and when this has been the case they have been willing to say so. Where they have tried to be ‘helpful’ to religion, it has often been by attempting to synthesize what is in the Bible into an ‘Old/New Testament Theology’; but the results have seldom proved able to feed systematic theology very successfully, except perhaps when they have themselves been conceived on a model drawn from systematic theology in the first place (compare Eichrodt’s very ‘Reformed’ Theology of the Old Testament).15 To retain its cutting edge, biblical criticism needs to remain on the alert for any sign that it is being dragooned into the role of edifying helper to doctrinal theology; and when a systematic theologian is also a biblical critic – as in a sense is true of Childs 15 W. Eichrodt, Theologie des Alten Testaments, vols I–III (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1933–39) (English translation Theology of the Old Testament, vols I (from 6th German edn) and II (from 5th German edn) (London: SCM Press, 1961–67)).

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– then the critical side of the personality needs to be, precisely, critical of the other, not subordinate to it. Once we suspect that the systematic tail is wagging the critical dog, our confidence in the whole system is undermined. It is this that lies behind the widespread neglect among students of the Bible of so much in Karl Barth’s immensely detailed and careful exegesis of the Bible: the suspicion that, however deeply he delves into the text and however much he knows about it, we already know what he will find there, because it is dictated by his prior theological convictions. In short, Christian theologians do have an obligation to take account of the Bible, because it is an acknowledged source of authority within Christianity. That does not mean, however, that everyone who studies the Bible has an obligation to help them by providing readings easily assimilated into a systematic theology. Biblical critics’ obligations are to the text, not to the Church or to theology, and they have the duty of reporting what the text says, not what the theologian wants to hear. The idea that there is a special ‘canonical’ level of meaning above the natural sense of the text has been widespread in Christian history and has, of course, an extremely distinguished pedigree; but it is not compatible with biblical criticism as this has developed since the Reformation, and nothing is gained by pretending that it can be made compatible. The best service biblical critics can render to religious believers (among whom they are often numbered themselves) is to tell the truth about what the text seems to them to mean, not to be talked into believing that it means something more helpful, more edifying or more theologically correct than it does.

Chapter 4

Canonical Approaches Ancient and Modern Introduction The ‘canonical approach’ to reading the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is a new feature of biblical scholarship in the last twenty-five years or so. It was formulated as a conscious programme by Brevard S. Childs with the publication of his Biblical Theology in Crisis,1 and developed in his crucially important study Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture.2 It arose from the perceived demise of the North American ‘Biblical Theology’ movement of the post-Second World War period, which had attempted to produce a grand theological synthesis in biblical studies by moving beyond ‘historical’ criticism to an analysis of the underlying theological concepts of the Bible. By the late 1970s this kind of biblical theology was no longer very fashionable: its linguistic basis had been demolished by James Barr,3 and many of its leading concepts called in question by others. Rather than simply rejecting the constructive agenda of the Biblical Theologians – who had wanted above all to make the Bible fruitful for the work of theologians and ordinary believers – Childs proposed a new way of approaching the matter. He fully shared Biblical Theology’s concern for the essential unity and religious importance of the Bible, but argued that this unity was not to be perceived, as they had thought, at the level of the Bible’s leading concepts, or in a kind of ‘Hebraic thinking’ which distinguished the Bible from modern modes of thought and had to be painfully reconstructed so that we could learn to adjust our own ideas to match the biblical witness. On the contrary, the unity of the Bible lay not beneath its surface but in its final form, which the Church had accepted as its canon. What was needed was close attention to the Bible as it stands, rather than an excavation of the text as if it were merely another ancient document of purely historical interest to us. He argued that if we began, as historical critics do, by ignoring the Bible’s religious claim on us, and studying it as though it were a document that had just happened to turn up from the ancient world, we should be bound to have difficulty in subsequently making connections with our own belief. But the problem would be of our own making. If you take Christianity’s sacred text and insist on ignoring its sacredness, then you 1

B.S. Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970). B.S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979). 3 J. Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961) is the major work concerned here. 2

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are bound to find it hard to move from the mode of study you have chosen back into a theological appropriation. What the Christian who studies the Bible should do, on the contrary, is to begin by treating the Bible as the Church’s book. That will not preclude asking historical questions about it; but such questions will be clearly seen as secondary to the task of expounding the text as it is, in the form in which Christians (and Jews) have canonized it. There can be no doubt that this represents a new position in modern biblical studies. As I have tried to argue elsewhere,4 it was clearly anticipated in some measure by earlier biblical scholars. Gerhard von Rad already sought an appreciation of the whole text, beyond the fragmentation brought about by source criticism; and there is a general movement of thought going back to Karl Barth (a clear influence on von Rad) that insists on reading the Bible as the Word of God, and not merely as an ancient document. The Biblical Theology movement, as Childs himself stresses, had the same vision of biblical study as part of the Church’s theological task, rather than as an ‘antiquarian’ pursuit. But in the form it now takes Childs’s programme is certainly a new departure. Childs has not had many direct disciples, though one may think of G.T. Sheppard and Christopher Seitz among American scholars, and among British ones of Walter Moberly. The recent Festschrift for Childs, Theological Exegesis,5 bears witness to his influence on many other scholars too. But his whole approach has stimulated many who do not subscribe to it in full to ask questions about the Bible ‘as Scripture’ in a new way, and it is now usual to read papers and books concentrating on the ‘final form’ of the biblical text and treating the Bible as a whole in a way that would have been distinctly unusual thirty years ago. The whole ethos of current biblical studies, especially in North America, owes much to the new questions Childs has placed on the agenda. Misunderstandings of the Canonical Approach There are four points on which I believe Childs is sometimes misunderstood, and which could benefit from some clarification. (1) The first matter is the interest of ‘canonical’ interpreters in the ‘final form’ of the biblical text. ‘Final form’ exegesis is at present very much in the air because of the growing interest in literary study of the Bible. Literary critics tend in general to be uninterested in genetic questions, showing little concern for the sources underlying our present texts and not caring much about their cultural roots: they direct attention to the text as a finished artefact. Indeed, for literary critics of a more postmodern variety the whole question of the origins of texts is a matter of complete indifference, since what is interesting to them is the interplay between text and reader.

4

See J. Barton, ‘Canon and Old Testament Interpretation’, in In Search of True Wisdom: Essays in Old Testament Interpretation in Honour of Ronald E. Clements, ed. E. Ball, JSOTSup 300 (Sheffield: Academic Press, 1999), pp. 37–52 (reproduced as Chapter 3 in this volume). 5 C. Seitz and K. Greene-McCreight, Theological Exegesis: Essays in Honor of Brevard S. Childs (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999).

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This creates a superficial resemblance to the canonical approach, which many have commented on.6 In both cases we are urged to look at what lies before us on the page, not at what may (or may not) have preceded it in the text’s long history of composition and transmission. But appearances deceive. When Childs talks of the ‘final form’ of the text he does not mean the text as a unified aesthetic object, but (Barth-like) as the communication of the word of God. This communication may in some cases be aided by recognizing features of the history of the text: for example, the Deutero-Isaiah hypothesis is illuminating for faith, because it enables us to see that words once directed to a specific set of circumstances have been incorporated into a larger work (the book of Isaiah) and so set free to speak to all generations. The question is not: what does the final form mean as a literary unity? but: what word of God is communicated through this passage? Since church and synagogue have canonized a particular form of the text, it must be through that form that theological insight is meant to be generated. It may well be illuminated in some ways by our knowing about the background of the text – historical, archaeological, text-critical, even source-critical in some cases. But the essential point to hold on to is what our exegesis should be directed to: knowledge of God through Scripture. That aim can never be attained if we ignore the form in which the Bible has come down to us, as though the church had canonized ‘J’ or ‘Proto-Isaiah’. Knowledge of the process that led up to canonization can certainly be illuminating, but only so long as it is recognized as ancillary to the theological task. (2) Secondly, some confusion has been generated by Childs’s use of the word ‘canon’. Though he speaks of ‘the canonical approach’, his seminal book used the phrase ‘as Scripture’ (Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture) rather than ‘as canon’. In practice he often seems to use the two terms interchangeably. This has led some to think that he is interested in canon formation as a historical process, and produces objections based on that understanding – for example, that the church and the synagogue canonized two different collections as Hebrew Scriptures and Old Testament respectively, or that the ‘canon’ is really a post-scriptural phenomenon.7 If Childs is speaking of the canon as the principle whereby the exact contents of the Bible are delineated and defined, then it is not hard to show that his position lands him in some odd conclusions. For example, it seems to commit him to exegesis of the Bible as it existed in the second or third centuries AD, or even in the eighth or ninth if the Masoretic Text is regarded as the authoritative version of the canon: and why, people ask, should that be more determinative for modern Christians than the Bible as it existed in, say, the New Testament period? Or again, why should we not be interested in the process of canonization, as James Sanders is, arguing that there is something authoritative in each stage of the development that led to the final form of Scripture.8 6

See my own comments in J. Barton, Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study (London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1984; 2nd edn, 1996), pp. 100–103. 7 On this see especially J. Barr, Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 8 See J.A. Sanders, Torah and Canon (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972) and From Sacred Story to Sacred Text (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987).

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But this is to misunderstand. In saying ‘canon’ Childs does not primarily mean the Bible considered as an official list, but the Bible considered as the authoritative word for the church. That is, it is the binding character of the canon he is concerned with, not its character as an authoritative selection of particular books. I have argued at some length that much clarity could be gained if we agreed to distinguish sharply between these two concepts, using ‘scripture’ for the first and ‘canon’ for the second, and I am quite sure that this is so.9 But it is equally clear that Childs does not use the two terms in that way, but in speaking of a ‘canonical approach’ intends what others might express by saying that the Bible is meant to be read as ‘holy’ or as ‘authoritative’ or indeed ‘as Scripture’. To call the Bible ‘canon’ for Childs is, I believe, another way of saying that it is Christians’ sacred book. Of course it may be slightly fuzzy at the edges, and I do not think that is a problem for him, though as a rule of thumb he recommends that we should work with the Hebrew canon of the Masoretes. Far more important than any marginal disagreements about the canon, however, is the fact that it is the church’s scripture, and therefore not to be read ‘like any other book’. Christians go to the Bible expecting to find in it the word of life: that is what Childs means by calling it ‘canonical’. To me it seems a pity to have two terms, ‘scripture’ and ‘canon’, yet to use them as though they were complete synonyms. But my strong impression is that that is what Childs does, and that we understand his meaning best by glossing ‘canon’, wherever it occurs, by ‘Holy Scripture’. (3) Thirdly, from the beginning other scholars have referred to Childs’s programme as ‘canonical criticism’. He himself has always rejected this term, arguing that it tends to suggest that there is simply a progression from one kind of ‘criticism’ to another: source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, traditio-historical criticism, canonical criticism. On the contrary, the canonical approach is compatible with all these other ‘criticisms’, provided they leave room for the overarching question about the text’s authority as Scripture, but with none of them if they are presented as asking the only appropriate questions and seeing these as historical in character. The problem is that all the standard ‘criticisms’, in Childs’s view, have been absolutized. His own canonical approach is meant to raise a wholly fresh issue, and to ask the only question that really ought to be absolute for the Christian scholar: what does this text tell us of the God to whom Scripture bears witness? This question takes us completely outside the purview of historical criticism of any kind, and into a directly theological engagement with the text. Canonical criticism is thus a misleading, because relativizing term, which seeks to reduce his approach to merely the latest in a long line of methods when in reality it is an attempt to engage with the text at a wholly new level. (4) Fourthly, it is important not to confuse what Childs is advocating with the history of interpretation. Study of earlier interpreters has always been one of 9

See J. Barton, Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1984), pp. 55–82 and The Spirit and the Letter: Studies in the Biblical Canon (London: SPCK, 1997), pp. 1–24 (the American edition is called Holy Writings, Sacred Text: The Canon in Early Christianity (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/ John Knox)).

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Childs’s great strengths as a biblical scholar, and his commentary on Exodus shows just how broad is his acquaintance with patristic and Reformation commentators. It established a new model for the commentary form. Not many scholars followed it at the time, but recently we have seen the history of interpretation (Wirkungsgeschichte) moving to the top of the agenda for a number of biblical scholars. While it is true that the history of interpretation has come to dominate many of the humanities, within biblical studies Childs has surely been instrumental in raising its profile, and leading scholars to think that the quest for the ‘original meaning’ is not the only worthy goal that a commentary might set itself. But the canonical approach is certainly not conceived as a history of biblical interpretation, even though it may use this history and give it a far more honoured place than it has traditionally occupied since the rise of biblical criticism. The canonical approach is focused on establishing what the text communicates of theological truth, and the reading of past interpreters is ancillary to that. Ancient Roots of the Canonical Approach But the history of interpretation is crucial for Childs in another aspect. His conviction is that so-called ‘pre-critical’ interpreters read the Bible in a way much closer to his own canonical approach than has been usual since the rise of ‘critical’ methods at the Enlightenment. The fact that the canonical approach is a novelty within modern biblical scholarship must not disguise its historic importance for most Bible-readers. What Childs is proposing, in his view, is not the invention of a new style of criticism but essentially a return to something that was taken more or less for granted until ‘historical critics’ began to assume control of professional biblical studies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Most interpreters in all generations (including, in fact, our own, if by interpreter we mean ‘reader of the Bible’) have gone to Scripture because they have expected to find there the word of life. They may or may not have been interested in how the Bible came to be, but they have certainly been interested in what it has to say – now. One could put it this way: seen from a foreshortened, modern perspective, ‘critical’ biblical scholarship seems to dominate the landscape, and the canonical approach is a minor feature. But if we take a bird’s eye view over the whole study of the Bible from ancient to modern times, biblical criticism represents a brief and unsatisfactory interlude in a long history of the reverent study of Scripture by believers seeking theological insight. The Fathers and the Reformers are thus not drawn on simply because they were important in the past, but because they are likely to show us the way back to a proper theological appropriation of the biblical text. Childs’s aim is thus not so much to invent a new mode of Bible study as to reconnect us all with an old one. In his eyes the canonical approach is ancient, rather than modern. To accept it is at once to rehabilitate the thousands of past interpreters conventionally dismissed as ‘pre-critical’, as well as ordinary believers today who read the Bible not for the historical or literary information they can extract from it, 10

B.S. Childs, Exodus, OTL (London: SCM, 1974).

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nor out of an interest in the history of the text, but because they have a faith which is seeking understanding. Indeed, in a certain sense Childs is not only trying to bring back past modes of biblical study, but to re-validate what ordinary Christians do anyway when they study the Scriptures privately or in Bible-study groups. One reason why his approach has been influential well beyond the bounds of those who consciously adopt it as an academic programme is that it resonates with what so many non-academic Christians do when they open a Bible: they ask what it is saying to them in the here and now. It is not surprising that the canonical approach often appeals to people training for Christian ministry. They hear it as an academically respectable support for the kind of Bible study they want to do anyway, as part of the pastoral task of getting from the Bible insights applicable to the people to whom they are going to minister. The canonical approach makes the Bible profitable for the Christian reader, or better, it endorses the questions Christian readers tend to put to the Bible, such as: What must I do? What must I believe? What is God saying to me? It is only in this sense that the canonical approach is committed to a ‘final form’ reading of the biblical text. This is just as well, because with most biblical books older interpreters seldom practised the kind of ‘holistic’ reading we have come to experience from modern literary critics. Many such critics have great respect for patristic or rabbinic commentators (the use of rabbinic interpretation is specially noticeable in the work of Robert Alter11 and Gabriel Josipovici12) but they seem generally not to notice that rabbinic commentary is seldom holistic in their sense. The rabbis treat biblical books as wholes in the sense that they do not divide them up into sources, but they hardly ever pay attention to them as finished ‘works’: rather, they treat them as collections of individual verses, any one of which can be interpreted in isolation. That is already how St Paul treats the Old Testament text. The Fathers are more varied in this respect, and many patristic commentaries do attend to the overall shape of biblical books; but even so, it is not uncommon for them to treat individual sayings as dicta probantia in a way that rides roughshod over the integrity of the book containing them. And one might say the same of the Reformers. ‘Final form’ exegesis as now practised is not all that much like the commentaries of the past. But, as we have seen, Childs is not committed to a final form reading in that sense of the term, with a premium set on seeing the book as an aesthetic whole or ‘work’. What he sees as a whole is the Bible in its complete form, and there he is certainly at one with many earlier interpreters. The canonical approach treats the Bible as unlike any other book, as a text to be read with quite different questions from those we put to other ancient (or modern) texts. And in that it is certainly at one with much ‘pre-critical’ exegesis, and with modern ‘non-critical’ reading by ordinary Christians. Like them, it works with the principle that the meaning that can correctly be found in this book is always a meaning compatible with its status as Holy Scripture: an edifying meaning, a ‘confessional’ meaning, a worthy meaning, a consistent meaning. Scripture is special. Different criteria of meaning, truth and consistency apply in reading Scripture from those we 11 12

1988).

See R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981). See G. Josipovici, The Book of God (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,

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regularly employ in reading other books. To put it in more technical vocabulary, there is a special hermeneutic applicable in reading the Bible, which is distinct from the general hermeneutic that applies to all other texts. What this approach produces is an account of the meaning of biblical books which is holistic, not in the sense of treating each of them as a coherent ‘work’, but in the sense that the whole Bible is felt to have a single overall ‘message’ or thrust. Childs is at one with the Fathers and the Reformers in this way of thinking about the Bible. How is this overall message to be established? In the case of the Fathers it may be provided by the ‘rule of faith’, a basic quasi-credal outline of Christian belief; for Reformation commentaries, it is sometimes derived from a Confession. In either case, of course, the writers in question would themselves have claimed that it derived from the very Scriptures for which it then provided the proper interpretative framework. Childs does not overtly begin from a confessional account of Christian truth, but seeks to derive the coherence of the biblical message from within the Bible itself: but he can only do so, of course, because he has a commitment to the Bible’s internal integrity and truth-filled character, and that commitment itself necessarily derives from a confessional point of view which is in fact broadly a Reformed one. When he begins to outline the message of the Bible taken as a whole, in Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testament,13 the generally Reformed character of the enterprise becomes even more apparent. This is the strength of the project, but also its weakness, for how could the canonical approach be applied by Christians with a different conception of the relationship between Scripture and belief – Catholics or Lutherans, for example? But leaving that question aside, we may certainly say that something like the canonical approach can be encountered in many past ways of conceptualizing the essential meaning of the Bible. All of Scripture was thought to contribute to a single coherent message. For the Fathers, applying to Scripture the ‘rule of faith’, the biblical material was interpreted as being about four things: creation, fall, the coming of Christ and the final consummation.14 Everything had to be fitted into this framework, and all the individual books were to be read as illustrations or exemplifications of some part of this pattern of belief. The sufferings of Job made sense as part of the Bible because they prefigured those of Christ; the sinful backslidings of Israel in Kings illustrated the fallenness of humankind; the prophets foretold the final consummation. In this way all the disparate parts of the Bible could be made to cohere with each other in a harmonious whole. The fact that the ideas of creation and fall, for example, were not present in some parts of the scriptural record did not matter, because they were there in the Bible taken in its ‘final form’ and could quite properly be read from one book into another. The Bible as a finished whole bore an even and steady witness to these major themes, and to read bits of it as though one were unaware of the themes would have been to read it against the grain.

13 B.S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible (London: SCM, 1992). 14 This way of putting the matter depends on the illuminating work of R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996).

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As Childs says when speaking of the covenant idea in the Old Testament (and I take this example as typical of many), there is a basic hermeneutical issue at stake … On the one hand, it is evident from critical research that Israel’s religion underwent a history of development. Its pre-exilic form differs from its post-exilic, and Deuteronomic theology is also distinct from that of Isaiah’s [sic] … On the other hand, it is equally evident that the compilers of the Old Testament did not collect and order their material from the perspective of modern critical scholarship. Rather, the Hebrew scriptures were formed and structured for predominantly theological concerns.’15

Historical reading may thus validly point to elements of change and development, and may find a theme present in one book but lacking in another; but a canonical reading will look to the finished product, and seek to find an overarching meaning to which all the parts contribute. That would also have been a common patristic or Reformation understanding, I believe; it is also the normal rabbinic position. Childs thus shows what ancient credentials his canonical approach can claim. My intention so far has been to try to clarify what is meant by the canonical approach, and to present it so far as possible in terms that I hope Childs and its other proponents would accept. It seems to me that the canonical approach is a proposal about how Christians should read the Bible within the context of faith. As such it is in a way insulated from critical enquiry. So far as ‘canonical’ readers are concerned, the truth about the historical development and original context of biblical texts is interesting (or may be so), but it has nothing to contribute to a Christian reading (or ‘construal’, to use a favourite term of Childs’s) of the Bible. The canonical approach, though it is about the Bible, does not belong to biblical studies in the sense commonly accepted nowadays, but to systematic or constructive theology: it is a theory about how we should use the Bible in seeking to deepen and ground faith. As such it is a theory that biblical critics need have no quarrel with, so long as it is not used as an instrument for opposing their work or for suggesting that it is illegitimate: Childs himself generally avoids this, though not all of his followers do so. But of course there is built into the canonical approach, as into any new programme, the implication that it is a better use of the theologian’s time than other pursuits – among them above all ‘historical criticism’, which is felt not to have contributed much to a religiously fruitful understanding of Scripture. Historical criticism is legitimate but largely useless: that is the message that most people get from exponents of canonical criticism. Or, if it does have some use, its usefulness is small enough to be out of all proportion to the amount of time traditionally spent on it in theological education and scholarship. My purpose in this paper has been not to criticize the canonical approach, but to describe it, and to identify its roots. In the process I have argued that Childs is quite correct in claiming that it represents a return to pre-critical exegesis: not in the sense that we should use the methods of pre-critical interpreters (he is not hospitable to allegorization, for example), but in the sense that like them we should approach the text of the Bible as a finished whole and look for religious edification in it as it stands. 15

Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, p. 415.

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‘Critical’ analysis is not illegitimate, but it is not productive spiritually (it is unergiebig, as one would say in German). The ‘canonical’ interpreter is like the Fathers or the Reformers in seeking what is religiously edifying in the biblical text and in looking for coherence, depth, consistency and spiritual truth there: that, indeed, is what is meant by calling it ‘scripture’ or, in Childs’s use of the term, ‘canon’. The question that remains on the table, of course, is whether it is really a good idea to go back to the interpretative concerns of the classic commentators of the patristic or Reformation periods. Granted that that is indeed what Childs is seeking to do, is he correct in thinking that it will make the Bible ‘come alive’ again for modern readers? I have raised critical doubts about the canonical approach in other places, and will not repeat them here.16 In the present paper I will say only this. To practise ‘canonical’ exegesis of the Bible before the questions characteristic of critical scholarship had been raised was not the same thing as it is to practise it now that they have. Biblical criticism is not in the end concerned merely with questions of ‘Introduction’ – date, place of writing, authorship – as Childs sometimes appears to suggest. It is concerned with a systematic attempt to discover whether the Bible does indeed say what the tradition (as encapsulated, for example, in the patristic ‘rule of faith’, the creeds, the Reformation Confessions) claims that it says, by applying the normal criteria we apply to all texts in trying to discover their meaning. It dethrones the special hermeneutic that traditional reading reserved for biblical texts, and applies instead a general hermeneutic such as one would use in reading anything else. It is exceedingly doubtful whether this genie can be pushed back into the bottle once it has emerged. Much more than the mere assertion that we need to ‘get back behind’ biblical criticism is called for if the canonical approach is to be established on a firm foundation: nothing less than a complete change in mental perspective is required. Childs is well aware that this is what he is calling for; it is important that it should be generally recognized that this is how far-reaching a change the canonical approach requires.

16

See Barton, Reading the Old Testament, pp. 89–103.

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Chapter 5

Unity and Diversity in the Biblical Canon That the biblical canon contains diversity is obvious to most readers; that it is nevertheless a unity is the conviction of those for whom it functions as Holy Scripture. In the history of Christian thought there have been many ways of trying to hold together an awareness of both diversity and unity. I shall highlight some salient moments in the debate by examining, first, approaches to the Bible in which diversity is seen as a problem – a problem with a number of possible solutions; and secondly, some which perceive it as a virtue, as one of the positive advantages that Christians gain from having as their holy book this complex, interrelated set of diverse documents, rather than some simple and uncomplicated text with strong internal unity. Diversity as a Problem Rab Judah said in Rab‘ s name: In truth, that man, Hananiah son of Hezekiah by name, is to be remembered for blessing: but for him, the book of Ezekiel would have been hidden, for its words contradicted the Torah. What did he do? Three hundred barrels of oil were taken up to him and he sat in an upper chamber and reconciled them.1

This anecdote reminds us that in post-biblical, rabbinic Judaism it is essential for the teaching of Scripture to be consistent in matters of halakhah. It is not possible to tolerate diversity, because clear rulings are needed on matters of conduct if one is to lead an observant Jewish life. It is perhaps difficult to imagine a religion which ascribed ‘scriptural’ status to a collection of books and yet was indifferent to their mutual consistency – a problem that Christian ethicists who wish to use the Bible still grapple with today. It may be worth noting, however, that it is consistency on matters of torah that seems to be of concern in Judaism. There are no rabbinic debates about how to reconcile Kings and Chronicles, for example, probably because in that case no issues of halakhah arise: consistency in telling the history of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah is not an essential part of Judaism. What is essential is that Scripture shall speak with a single voice on those matters that are central to the actual operation of the religious system. Josephus, it is true, did defend the historical consistency of the Jewish Scriptures:

1

b. Shabbat 13b.

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THE OLD TESTAMENT: CANON, LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY We do not possess myriads of inconsistent books, conflicting with each other. Our books, those which are justly accredited, are but two and twenty, and contain the record of all time.2

But his context is polemical. He is contrasting the consistency of Jewish books with the chaotic muddle, as he sees it, of Greek histories. The argument is unfair, since the contrast is not between similar things – the whole of Greek literature is being compared with the narrow compass of the biblical books in Judaism, not with all books written by Jews. Nevertheless the argument that the scriptural books are consistent historically is clearly a powerful debating point. Christians, later, were to find Scripture (both Testaments) attacked by pagans as riddled with inconsistencies, and in patristic writings some space is devoted to attempts to confute this objection. It seems to me likely that the earliest Christians were interested principally in one particular kind of consistency in Scripture. Whereas for Jews the Bible needed to be read as presenting a coherent picture of how Jewish life was to be led, so that inconsistency was a problem where matters of halakhah were concerned, for Christians the crucial question was the consistency of the prophecies that pointed forward to Jesus Christ. If God had ‘spoken through the prophets’, he must have announced through them a consistent scheme of salvation. Collections of testimonia, whether as free-standing texts or in the form of lists of prophecies embedded in other works, aimed to show that God had predicted the coming of Christ in a self-consistent way. Christianity could not live with alternative schemes of salvation-history, but needed to show that the prophetic message was coherent and pointed in a single direction. It is thus clear that, in both early Judaism and early Christianity, there were at any rate certain kinds of inconsistency or diversity that could not be tolerated in Scripture. The possession of holy texts that could be read as fully self-consistent was a feature that might be used to commend either religion, and significant inconsistency was a problem.3 I think this continues to be the case for most people who turn to the Bible as an inspired or authoritative or sacred text. They expect it to be consistent, and are worried if they find within it a level of diversity that makes it difficult to hold all its material in the mind at the same time. This may be called a common-sense reaction, found among ordinary Christians and Jews alike. At the same time careful readers of the Bible have always noticed that there are in fact problems about its internal consistency, and that its contents are extremely diverse. There are inconsistencies in the historical information the text imparts, in its moral teaching and in its theological understanding. It is felt, rightly, that the socalled historical-critical method has been particularly alive to such problems, and has forced them to the forefront of attention. It was not until the rise of historical criticism that inconsistencies within the text of the Bible became a tool with which it was possible to reconstruct an account of the political or intellectual history sharply at variance with what emerges from a naive reading of the text. It is not true to say, however, that biblical criticism imported inconsistencies into Scripture or 2

contra Apionem 1:37–143. Cf. H. Merkel, Die Pluralität der Evangelien als theologisches und exegetisches Problem in der Alten Kirche, TCh 3 (Bern/Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1978). 3

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deliberately read the text as inconsistent – though this is sometimes said nowadays by scholars who regard historical criticism as having been a mistaken avenue in biblical studies. The presence of (at least apparent) diversity and inconsistency is a matter of empirical observation, and in many cases ‘pre-critical’ interpreters were well aware of the difficulties. What was new in historical criticism was a refusal to deal with such inconsistencies through the kinds of traditional means I outline below. Thus it is difficult to read either the Old or the New Testament carefully without becoming aware of the presence of diversity and inconsistency, and both in the early church and in modern times Christians have devised ways of dealing with it in such a way as to retain a belief in the authority and integrity of Scripture. Three such approaches may be outlined. 1 Deletion and Alteration One way of dealing with observed inconsistency in Scripture is – to put it crudely – to decide which of the various positions adopted in the text is correct, and then to excise all others by deleting verses, chapters or even books. What is given is the apparent meaning of particular books or sections, and this cannot be changed so as to conform to what the Christian reader believes to be the truth (historical truth, theological truth, ethical truth and so on). If the meaning of books or sections is at variance with this truth, then so much the worse for these books or sections: the Christian reader is entitled to demand that they be omitted or, at least, sidelined – shunted into an ‘apocrypha’ or supplement to the Bible, or read only under special terms and conditions. This radical solution to the perceived problem of diversity in the canon has had few proponents, even in modern times, but those it has had have been of considerable historical importance. We might list Marcion, Tatian, Luther, Bultmann and Käsemann! Indeed, the list should perhaps begin even before Marcion, with Luke, who believed that other Gospel writers had presented an account of the life of Jesus which was historically inaccurate and ought to be improved upon. (Maybe even he had a precursor in the Chronicler, who was dissatisfied with the mistelling of the history of Israel in Samuel-Kings and wanted to present a ‘corrected’ version of it. In this case, as in that of Luke, the replacement and what it replaced were in the end both canonized.) Marcion (and perhaps Luke) had a theory about the Gospel tradition which was not unlike the theory about the Old Testament in the Pseudo-Clementines, according to which false teachers had interfered with the accuracy of the text, and their errors should be corrected by changing or omitting material in the commonly received version.4 Celsus was aware of such theories, which he saw as devices to enable Christians to make their Scriptures less open to criticism than they really were: ‘some of the faithful, as though coming from a drinking bout, fight one another and alter the Gospel after it had first been written down three or four times, indeed many times, and falsify it, so that they can reject arguments against it (better)’.5

4 On this theory, see H. von Campenhausen, The Formation of the Christian Bible (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1972), p. 79. 5 Origen, contra Celsum 2:27.

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It is unlikely that Marcion had genuinely independent information about the life of Jesus. Rather, he had a theological conviction that certain things were true (above all, the distinction between the saving God of Jesus and the Creator-God of the Jews) and that Jesus – being himself the truth incarnate – can only have taught such true things. But whereas the ‘orthodox’ might have treated this as a hermeneutical obligation to read whatever the Gospels delivered as Jesus’ teaching as though it taught these things, Marcion refused to ‘falsify’ the plain sense of the Gospel tradition in its Lukan version, and preferred simply to delete it. He recognized material that contradicted his own position when he saw it, and drew the entirely logical conclusion that, since it must be untrue, it ought not to be read as though it had authority. Out it went.6 Tatian‘s Diatessaron, though far more reverent in its approach to received tradition and widely accepted in the East for some centuries, belongs logically to the same type as Marcion. Whereas ‘reconcilers’ argued that the four Gospels already made coherent sense despite their apparent conflicts, Tatian like Marcion (and like modern biblical critics) thought that they could not all be correct because their conflicts were real.7 He therefore eliminated the discrepancies to produce a single consistent narrative. He does not seem – in this he was unlike Marcion – to have censored the Gospel material theologically; what he rectified were the historical inconsistencies.8 No doubt this is one reason why his version endured for so much longer than Marcion‘s expurgated Luke, being untainted by heretical teaching and attractive in offering a coherent picture of the life of Jesus. Indeed, it could be said that it represents the only really successful attempt to deal with inconsistency through deletion, for even after it was officially replaced in the Syrian churches by the four-Gospel canon (thanks to Theodore of Mopsuestia), it went on being read and translated into many languages. Tatian’s spirit lives on in Lives of Jesus, and even, one could say, in the various Quests for the Historical Jesus, which are interested in the facts about Jesus as these can be historically established, rather than in the ‘canonical’ version of his life; though the tools they use to get at the facts are of course quite different from those available to Tatian, who had only his eye for inconsistency to guide him. Martin Luther‘s treatment of Esther, James, Hebrews and Revelation seems to me to inhabit the same mental universe as these early thinkers, in that it results from refusing to harmonize them with the rest of the Bible or to read them ‘in the light of’ other Scripture, as ‘canonical critics’ would put it. He insisted on attending to the ‘plain sense’ of such texts, and judged that sense to be more or less incompatible with the truth of the Gospel as he had heard it from other biblical books and especially, of course, from Romans and Galatians. Like Marcion, he would not ‘allegorize’ in order to force texts to witness to Christ when they did not, in his judgement, really do so. He preferred 6

Cf. H. Merkel, Die Widersprüche zwischen den Evangelien, WUNT 13 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1971), and see my discussion in J. Barton, The Spirit and the Letter: Studies in the Biblical Canon (London: SPCK, 1997) ( = Holy Writings, Sacred Text: The Canon in Early Christianity (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997)), pp. 35–62. 7 Tatian may have been following his teacher Justin, who is thought to have used a gospel harmony: cf. M. Hengel, The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ (London: SCM Press, 2000), p. 26. 8 Logically harmonizations between the Gospels in the textual tradition belong to this same movement of thought.

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to remove them from the canon, even if he bowed so far to tradition as to translate them and keep them available, like the Apocrypha, for Christian readers. They have continued to be read in all the churches of the Reformation despite Luther‘s structures: their ‘deletion’ is more theoretical than actual. Nevertheless Luther established the possibility of criticizing biblical books on the basis of a theological principle. But it is remarkable how comparatively seldom even biblical ‘critics’ follow him and actually ‘criticize’ the Bible in this sense. Julius Wellhausen was one great exception – he used to call a spade a spade, and expressed himself freely about portions of the Old Testament of which he disapproved. But such has never become the standard practice in biblical studies. There has been, however, a certain willingness among Lutheran scholars – albeit in a more polite way – to question the value of parts of the canon. One thinks above all of Rudolf Bultmann’s negative judgements on the Old Testament as a whole, which more conservatives Christians are apt to dub ‘neo-Marcionite’, though in fact they are surely far less hostile than Marcion’s or even, for that matter, Adolf von Harnack’s. Käsemann’s famous strictures on the Lukan corpus belong in the same camp: they too, rest on a judgement about where Christian truth lies, and a willingness to use that judgement as a criterion by which to assess the adequacy of Scripture. None of these scholars, to the best of my knowledge, has actually gone so far as to propose a revision of the canon. But they are not to be persuaded that the canon contains a ‘higher unity’ (see below) which turns their critical comments into matters of mere detail: Käsemann’s argument that the New Testament canon is the basis not for the unity but for the disunity of the Church is proof enough of his unwillingness to think of the theological discords in the Bible as ultimately expressive of some grand symphonic design. In short, the ability to engage in theological criticism of the contents of the canon has a sharp cutting edge – one which the Church ought perhaps to beware of deliberately blunting for the sake of peace. The theory that there is a ‘canon within the canon’ represents the ‘deletion’ approach in a more nuanced form. The less important parts of the canon are not rejected, but a hierarchy is established whereby Scripture has a core surrounded by a penumbra of decreasing value. Judaism may be said to operate in practice with such a theory, in that the Torah is of vastly greater importance for the religion than the rest of the Bible: indeed, Mishnah and Talmud matter considerably more than (say) Kings or Chronicles. While as a conscious theory the ‘canon within the canon’ has been prominent in particular types of German-language theology, it may reasonably be said that almost all Christians informally espouse such an approach. Most people who read the Bible have an ‘effective’ canon which is smaller than the theoretical one. This can be illustrated from lectionaries, which (even when they attempt to be as even-handed as the Revised Common Lectionary now used widely by all kinds of churches) inevitably tend to foreground some books and soft-pedal others. Liturgically, indeed, the Gospels have had for Christianity something like the kind of centrality that the Pentateuch has for Jews – the parallel extends even to the existence of specially written or printed texts (evangeliars) containing liturgical Gospel readings, and produced to a higher standard than volumes containing the rest of Scripture. Although Luke and Acts appear to be volumes 1 and 2 of a single work, we have no evidence that they have ever been treated equally: Acts, in fact, is particularly little-

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cited in early Christian literature,9 and liturgical readings from it have always had the status of an ‘Epistle’ rather than a ‘Gospel’. And of course the two Testaments have traditionally had a different status in many varieties of Christianity; except in parts of the Reformed tradition, the Old Testament normally plays second fiddle to the New. This is not Marcionism, but a nearly universal Christian belief that ultimate authority in Christianity lies with the new revelation in Christ, even though, because this revelation was ‘in accordance with the Scriptures’, the Old Testament can never be abandoned. The ‘second rank’ character of the Old Testament as Scripture is perhaps more marked in Lutheran than in other Christian thinking; there is a slight paradox here, in that the New Testament book one might most plausibly appeal to in support of such an idea is probably the Epistle to the Hebrews, whose own status was in doubt for Luther himself! In fact even Hebrews does not challenge the authority of the Old Testament, but it does interpret it as making sense only in the context of the new covenant in Christ. Incidentally, there are anticipations in early Judaism of all the tendencies I have included under the umbrella category ‘deletion and alteration’, even apart from the general and continuing Jewish tendency to privilege the Pentateuch. The Qumran community similarly corrected the Pentateuch when it felt the need: There are five versions of the reworked Pentateuch (4QI58; 4Q364–367), which is not dissimilar to the Samaritan Pentateuch in purpose and even in the form of its text. This composition adjusts the text of the books of the Law in various minor ways so that its consistency is enhanced and its style and grammar improved … The many copies of the Book of Jubilees and of compositions somewhat similar to it (for example 4Q225–227) reflect a similar interest in rewriting the biblical accounts of Genesis and Exodus so as to have particular halakhic views incorporated within an authoritative text.10

2 Reconciliation The word ‘harmonization’ often appears in discussion of traditional ways of reading the Bible and coping with its inconsistencies, but it is a slippery term which I shall avoid here. The problem is that it can describe one of two things which it is important to keep separate, since they are in many respects actually opposites. One is the attempt to show that a number of documents (for example the four Gospels) are in fact fully consistent with each other as they stand in spite of apparent or prima facie inconsistencies. (This is the kind of ‘harmonization’ practised by Hananiah b. Hezekiah in the anecdote quoted above.) The other consists in changing one or more of the texts concerned to make them all convey the same message, often by omitting passages in which there is conflict, in other words the method described above as ‘deletion and alteration’. Scholars sometimes fail to draw this distinction: thus, for example, S.J. Patterson in his 9

Cf. F. Stuhlhofer, Der Gebrauch der Bibel von Jesus bis Euseb. Eine statistische Untersuchung zur Kanonsgeschichte (Wuppertal: R. Brockhaus, 1988), and my comments in The Spirit and the Letter, pp. 14–24. 10 G. Brooke, ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls’, in The Biblical World!, ed. J. Barton (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 257–8.

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11

article ‘Harmony of the Gospels’ writes ‘a gospel harmony rests on the proposition that the four canonical gospels are in fundamental or substantive agreement (consensus evangelistarum) in their presentation of the life of Jesus’.12 But a gospel ‘harmony’, in the sense of a single account produced by weaving together incidents and sayings from the four separate Gospels, is more likely to change the individual accounts: indeed, it is impossible to produce a consistent account without doing so, and we have already looked at some efforts in this direction. This procedure is very different from (indeed, diametrically opposed to) trying to show that there is no difference that would require a change anyway. What I am concerned with in this section is ‘harmonization’ in the first sense: the attempt to demonstrate that inconsistencies between biblical texts are only apparent. For this ‘reconciliation’ is a less ambiguous term. In the English-speaking world at least, reconciliation of biblical texts is nowadays associated with fundamentalism. At the level of historical fact, it may take the form of trying to reconcile dates and figures between Kings and Chronicles, or of seeking to show that the four Gospels present a single and consistent account of the events leading up to the crucifixion, or of the resurrection appearances. At a more theological level, it may consist of demonstrations that there is really no tension between Paul and James, or that the Pentateuch has a single theological message rather than representing a compromise between the theology of the various sources discovered by historical critics. But reconciliation was certainly not invented by fundamentalists. It has an ancient pedigree. Its best patristic representative is perhaps Augustine’s de consensu evangelistarum, and it can be seen clearly at work in Andreas Osiander’s great harmony of the Gospels, which does not correct one Gospel by another but simply adds together all the data in all the Gospels, so that Jesus cleanses the Temple three times, and heals four blind men.13 An early example of reconciliation is the attempt to make John consistent with the Synoptic Gospels by proposing that the events recorded in John took place before John the Baptist was imprisoned, part of the life of Jesus which the Synoptics largely pass over in silence: The three Gospels already written were in general circulation and copies had come into John’s hands. He welcomed them, we are told, and confirmed their accuracy, but remarked that the narrative only lacked the story of what Christ had done first of all at the beginning of his mission.14

3 The Search for a Higher Unity An alternative approach – or perhaps in a way a more sophisticated form of ‘reconciliation’ – is to argue that the admitted diversity, even inconsistency, in Scripture is subordinate to a higher unity. The texts do not all speak with a single 11

S.J. Patterson, ‘Harmony of the Gospels’, Anchor Bible Dictionary 3 (1992), p. 61. Cf. the much fuller discussion in D. Wünsch, ‘Evangelienharmonie’, TRE 10 (1982) pp. 626–36, esp. pp. 631–5. 13 Cf. Hengel, The Four Gospels, p. 23. 14 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History III:34. 12

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voice, yet taken together they witness to a unified truth. In this way of understanding the Bible there is no attempt to deny the empirical evidence that shows we are dealing with many writers and points of view, and that all do not say the same thing. The intuition of ordinary readers that there are inconsistencies in Scripture is acknowledged to be correct, and in modern versions of this approach even the observation of historical critics to the effect that the biblical text is highly variegated and uneven is not necessarily denied. But it is held that, properly read, the scriptural texts have a unity of purpose and message which is more important than their mutual tensions and disagreements in detail. I think there are two versions of such a ‘search for a higher unity’. (a) One takes the form of arguing that the overarching unity of the Bible is just as empirically observable as the internal inconsistencies, provided one reads it with an open mind. That is to say, the Scriptural writers really were communicating an essentially unified vision of the truth, even though they differed on points of detail. In ancient times such is the view, for example, of Origen, writing on the four Gospels: I do not condemn them if they even sometimes dealt freely with things which to the eye of history happened differently, and changed them so as to subserve the mystical aims they had in view … Jesus is many things, according to the conceptions of him, of which it is quite likely that the Evangelists took up different notions; while yet they were in agreement with each other in the different things they wrote.15 Just as the Gospel which several people preach is one, so (too) that which has been written by many is in its spirit-gifted significance one, and therefore in truth the Gospel, which consists of four texts, is one.16

In modern biblical study, such an approach seems to me to characterize most of what describes itself as ‘biblical theology’, at least where this discipline has set itself the task of producing a complete ‘Theology of the Old/New Testament’, or even the whole Bible.17 None of the great biblical theologies of the twentieth century assumes that the texts are to be harmonized; they are perfectly aware of diversity and inconsistency, and make a point of trying to hear the separate witnesses to theological thought of different strands in the Bible. But they affirm, in various ways, that there is some underlying unity within the texts, and that to read them as having a centre or fundamental theme is not a matter of the interpreter’s choice, but corresponds to something that is and always was true to their content. Walther Eichrodt,18 for example, was not saying that the idea of covenant was one we might choose as a key to the Old Testament, but rather that it was (though often not overtly expressed) the concept that held all this disparate material together. Equally, for Gerhard von Rad19 the Heilsgeschichte was the thread on which all the scriptural 15

Origen, Comm. on John X:4. Origen, Comm. on John V:5; cited in Hengel, The Four Gospels, p.12. 17 Cf. M. Oeming, Gesamtbiblische Theologien der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1985); H. Gese, Vom Sinai zum Zion (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1974); J. Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective (London: SCM Press, 1999). 18 W. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, 2 vols (London: SCM Press, 1960–67). 19 G. von Rad, Old Testament Theology, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962–65). 16

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beads had been strung by their authors and tradents and compilers. By articulating it he was not imposing a unity on the Old Testament, but rather was elucidating the unity it really had. The American ‘Biblical Theology Movement’ of the 1950s and 1960s often expressed a measure of disenchantment with what it portrayed as the ‘fragmentation’ of the text common in historical criticism. In doing so it was claiming that the text was more truly unified than the historical critics believed. They were not wrong to identify detailed points of diversity and inconsistency, but they were in danger of not seeing the wood for the trees, ignoring the equal or greater volume of evidence that pointed to unity and singleness of purpose. Thus most kinds of biblical theology were interested in unity as a historical fact about the text, just as important as (or more important than) the element of variety and disparity which was admittedly not to be denied. There was a clear sense that the true unity of the biblical witness was being discovered, not imposed. So far as I can see this remains true of the biblical theologies still being produced today. Otto Kaiser,20 for example, in taking the Torah as the ‘centre’ of the biblical canon, is making a historical claim about the text: that the Pentateuch emerged as central in Judaism precisely because it really was the focal point around which other biblical material had gathered. In treating Torah as the fundamental unifying principle of the Old Testament we are doing justice to something inherent in the texts themselves, recognizing what is really there. To put it in terms developed by Umberto Eco: there is a real diversity in the texts, because the intentio auctoris is in each case different; but there is a unity at the level of the intentio operis, the ‘intention’ (using the term metaphorically) of the work taken as a whole.21 (b) There is, however, another way of seeking a higher unity in the Bible, and this lies in proposing that the text should be read as unified – whatever the historical facts about its origins may be – in accordance with a hermeneutical imperative which flows from the Church’s recognition of it as Holy Scripture. This, it seems to me, is essentially what is proposed in the ‘canonical approach’ of Brevard S. Childs.22 Here the unity of the Bible is not a matter of empirical observation, on a par with the equally empirical observation of its diversity, but a theologoumenon deriving from a doctrine of Scripture. What Childs suggests is that Christians ought to read the Bible as a unified text because of what they believe about its status as Scripture for the community. There is here no harmonizing tendency: it is entirely open to a ‘canonical’ reader to think that, as a matter of empirical fact, there is a great deal 20 See O. Kaiser, Der Gott des Alten Testaments. Theologie des Alten Testaments. I. Grundlegung (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993). 21 See U. Eco, Zwischen Autor und Text (Munich: dtv, 1996), pp. 71ff. I am grateful to Michael Wolter for this suggestion. It may go some way, incidentally, to meet James Barr’s objection to Brevard Childs’s phrase ‘canonical intentionality’, which he dismisses as ‘a mystic phrase’ (see B.S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture ( London: SCM Press, 1979), p. 78; J. Barr, ‘Childs’ Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture’, JSOT 16 (1980), pp. 12–23, esp. p. 13). Cf. my comments in J. Barton, Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1984), p. 224. 22 See B.S. Childs, Introduction and Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (London: SCM Press, 1985); Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflections on the Christian Bible (London: SCM Press, 1992).

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of variety and even contradiction within the biblical text. In so far as it is read as Scripture, however, this variety is to be subsumed in a higher unity. The unity that is to be looked for in the canon may quite well be a complex unity: the Bible is multifaceted, not simple. But Christian readers qua Christian are not at liberty to expound this multi-faceted character as evidence of a basic disunity or inconsistency. They are to read Scripture as an integrated work, in which all the diverse parts witness to the one God revealed in Christ and believed in the Church. Historical-critical observations of disunity are perfectly acceptable in the context of historical study, but they do not have the power to overrule the Church’s perception of the unity of Scripture once we move on to the level of a theological appropriation of the text.23 I have suggested elsewhere that Childs’s proposal, though novel in the context of modern academic study of the Bible, is (as indeed he himself claims) quite close to how many ‘ordinary’ Christian readers instinctively approach the Bible.24 People expect the Bible to be consonant with their Christian faith, and though they are open (unless they are hard-line fundamentalists) to variety and inconsistency on detailed points, they do not regard reading the Bible as a collection of wholly disparate and unrelated items as a serious option for the Christian. What Childs offers is a theologically informed and academically underpinned argument to support Christians in approaching the Bible as they are in any case likely to do, unless biblical critics tell them otherwise. The important point here is that the ‘canonical’ approach is a hermeneutic of the text – and one that chimes in with the perceptions of most Christians – rather than a critical observation about it. It is issued in the imperative, not the indicative mood. Diversity as a Virtue ‘Turn it, turn it, for everything is in it’ (m. Aboth V:22)

Despite the freedom of earlier forms of Judaism, (such as the Qumran community, as discussed above) later rabbinic Judaism did not easily tolerate discrepancies between different parts of the Bible on matters of halakhah. But in all other areas Jews have tended to be far more relaxed than Christians about the diversity within the canon. Because the real and effective authority for the practice of Judaism is the oral law, not the text of Scripture, it does not matter very much if there are different points of view and even factual disagreements between different parts of the biblical text. Catholicism, though in theory committed to the infallibility of Scripture and so unable to take the matter in such a relaxed way, has similarly in practice not been very concerned about inconsistencies within the text, because it is the church’s 23

For a strongly argued statement of this case see R.W.L. Moberly, The Bible, Theology, and Faith: A Study of Abraham and Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 24 See J. Barton, ‘Canon and Old Testament Interpretation’, in In Search of True Wisdom: Essays in Old Testament Interpretation in Honour of Ronald E. Clements, ed. E. Ball, JSOTSup 300 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 37–52 (reproduced as Chapter 3 in this volume).

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magisterium, not the contents of the Bible, that directs what shall be believed. It is Protestant Christians for whom the shoe pinches most, because for them Scripture is the ultimate court of appeal and has to act as its own interpreter, there being no higher court which can adjudicate when it seems to give an uncertain judgement. It is perhaps this Protestant attribution of all authority to the Bible that leads to the need to find a ‘canon within the canon’, to take over the role that traditional authoritative teaching plays in both Judaism and Catholicism. Nevertheless, at least in modern Protestant thinking the diversity in Scripture has sometimes been given a favourable spin. Diversity, after all, though it can be a source of confusion or a sign of muddle, can also be a mark of richness and subtlety, and can point to a mystery that lies beyond precise formulation: As the second century superscriptions remind us, none of the Gospels is the Gospel. They are all fallible human witnesses. Their theological subject-matter lies beyond the text and beyond anything the historian can draw from these sources. The biggest danger of the socalled quest of the historical Jesus is the suggestion that the historian’s conclusions might provide not simply one critical norm amongst others but the foundation and substance of Christian faith. This critical reduction to a single norm, like Tatian’s solution to the plurality of the Gospels, would be in danger of making the Gospel into a new law. The variety of witnesses (which include the other New Testament writers) to the one Lord is one way of ensuring that this Lord transcends not only these Witnesses but also all subsequent Christian theological and ethical positions and decisions … A normative portrait of Jesus would perhaps facilitate theological criticism of unsatisfactory faith images and judgements. But any simple measuring of these against that would rapidly extinguish the freedom of the spirit. It would also imply that the Christian gospel could be identified with anyone’s formulation of it. Perhaps Matthew, and certainly later harmonizers, wanted this. One can understand why. The Christian church has always had to exercise some control over the enthusiasms of faith. Perhaps that is why the Gospels were composed. But it seems to have been a higher wisdom which resulted in a plurality of Gospels in the canon.25

In precisely this form such an idea is perhaps a modern perception. But the fourGospel canon is, after all, not in itself a modern product, but something on which Christians agreed from quite early times. Despite the influence of Tatian in the Syrian churches, in both East and West there was the early authority of lrenaeus to support the importance of there being four Gospels, no more and no less, by the end of the second century. lrenaeus does not exactly see the four Gospels as four different portraits of Jesus, each with its own character: it has taken redaction criticism to develop this idea in detail. He thinks more in terms of each supplementing the others by providing additional (rather than alternative) information. Nevertheless, he never produced a harmony of the Gospels, and he was clearly aware, for example, of the divergent character of John as against the Synoptics, to be summed up in Clement of Alexandria’s description of it as a ‘spiritual’ Gospel designed to teach truths of a different kind from Matthew, Mark and Luke. 25

R. Morgan, ‘The Hermeneutical Significance of Four Gospels’, lnterpretation 33 (1979), pp. 376–88; the quotations are from pp. 387 and 388.

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It is possible to argue that Irenaeus’s defence of the four separate Gospels rests on an earlier idea already implied in the titles ‘According to X’ which seem to derive from a time before the tendency developed of referring to them as ‘The Gospel of X’. Even though Justin seems to know of the use of ‘Gospel’ as a genre-description, he himself refers to them as the ‘memoirs’ (apomnemoneumata) of the apostles, and it is not until Origen that they are called simply ‘the Gospels’. The earlier perception is that they are four versions of the (single) ‘gospel’, that is, of the message about Jesus.26 Even if each was originally intended by its author or compiler to be the one authoritative account of the life of Jesus – only Luke makes this explicit – and were so used in the community that produced them, that very early period is now wholly hidden from our view. As soon as we have evidence of their use, it is as multiple accounts of equal standing, although, as is well known, Matthew tends to be cited more than the others by most writers from the second century onwards, and is often thought of as the earliest. The diversity of the Gospels seems not to have been thought of as a problem, even if it was not actively promoted as a benefit. One reason for this may have been, as I have argued elsewhere,27 that they were felt to be codified extracts from a larger corpus, the traditions about the acts and sayings of Jesus, which existed primarily in oral tradition and on which Christian teachers were free to some extent to extemporize.28 ‘Clement does not yet quote the text of a Gospel literally, because he feels bound up with the teaching of Jesus through the living oral tradition … The fact that it was there in different versions gave him freedom to shape his own.’29 The looseness of patristic citation from the Gospels, which is such a headache to textual critics, may not indicate sloppiness or carelessness but more an attitude of freedom towards written sources which died out only slowly in the Church and may, indeed, still be seen today in the way preachers and others commonly conflate and combine sayings from several Gospels. In a similar vein David C. Parker has argued that the early textual tradition of the sayings of Jesus is often flexible not merely in practice but in principle. The sayings were not treated in the Church of the first two or three centuries as holy Writ in the same way as the Old Testament, but were seen as enshrining basic ideas which could be developed flexibly in different situations. The flexibility was not infinite, but its bounds were not exactly defined, and they certainly were not so tight that we can confidently reconstruct, from the words a given writer cites as Jesus’, precisely what he found in the manuscript of the Gospels he habitually used. Against this background the existence of four varying versions of the life and teachings of Jesus, and perhaps even of other texts such as the putative Q and the Gospel of Thomas, was not the problem it has been for later, more ‘literalistic’ readers. The existence of variant versions of what Jesus said or did on any particular occasion 26

Cf. Hengel, The Four Gospels, p. 3. Barton, The Spirit and the Letter, pp. 79 and 91. 28 Cf. also Hengel, The Four Gospels, pp. 61–5: ‘“Euangelion” or “the Kyrios”’. 29 29 Ibid., pp. 128–9. Cf. p. 134: ‘Appeal to the “word of the Lord” always made a better impression, referring directly to a pre-existent, incarnate and exalted Kyrios rather than to a mere writing … It was in the nature of things for his words still to be quoted freely from memory.’ 27

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may have helped to authorize the preacher’s freedom to tell the story in a new way, not corresponding exactly to any of the written accounts. Along these lines one might argue that diversity, even inconsistency, was seen at least by some in the early Church as having a distinctive value, rather than being simply a problem. This cannot have been a universal perception, or there would be no Diatessaron nor any patristic treatises on the ‘consensus of the evangelists’, but it may have been a common one. the church came into being through the Spirit, as the community of the Spirit. The oral and written traditions together were and remain a principal element in the church’s finding its calling. But the tradition is manifold. There are four quite different Gospels, none with a claim to authority over the other three; there is no authoritative text beyond the manuscripts which we may follow without further thought … Rather than looking for right or wrong readings, and with them for right or wrong beliefs and practices, the way is open for the possibility that the church is the community of the Spirit even in its multiplicities of texts, one might say in its corruptions and restorations. Indeed, we may suggest that it is not in spite of the variety but because of them that the church is that community.30

Where the Old Testament was concerned, there was of course no corresponding sense of a freely adaptable text. These books had been written Scripture from time immemorial, and inconsistencies within them could hardly be handled in the same way. When Origen encounters pagan objections to the Old Testament based on its diversity, he does not argue that this diversity is beneficial, but meets the argument head-on by trying to rebut the accusation of inconsistency. Sometimes, as Philo had done before him, he will try to show that the surface inconsistency points to some deeper truth, which does in a sense amount to making a virtue of what had been raised as an objection.31 But it would be hard, I think, to find a patristic author who takes the kind of delight in the sheer diversity of the Old Testament evinced in the rabbinic saying with which this section began. For a modern Christian, diversity and inconsistency in the biblical canon is likely to be seen as a fact of life. Given what we know of how haphazard and unplanned was the growth of the canon, it would be surprising if this were not so. Despite the best efforts of biblical theologians and canonical critics to show that the Bible exhibits, or can or should be read as if it exhibited, an impressive unity, anyone who has engaged in the detail of modern biblical study is likely to have a stronger sense of its variegated and untidy character. To commend such a book honestly as a vehicle for the Word of God must somehow involve seeing this diversity not merely as no worse than neutral, but rather as in some respects a positive advantage. One may say, for example, that scriptural diversity is a check on authoritarianism, part of an insistence on there being legitimately different Christian perceptions of the truth: the freedom within the canon permits Christians also to explore freely. The Church thus acquires 30

D.C. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 212. 31 For examples see J. Barton, Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1986; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 250–51.

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the benefits of a fixed corpus of texts but without the straitjacket it would impose if all those texts spoke with a single voice. Protestant Christians are convinced that the Bible ‘contains all things necessary for salvation’, as Anglican formularies put it: but it is its unity of witness to central Christian truth that matters, not a total inner accord on all matters however small. Martin Hengel sums this up very well: The early church could therefore endure and make fruitful the offence which was caused by its four very different Gospels and which continually threatened to be a stumbling block, because it knew that despite all the differences, indeed manifest contradictions, these four reports were grounded in the Lord and his work of salvation for God’s lost creatures and because beyond all the contradictions, this ‘plurality’ pointed to a wealth of theological thought and narrative which first fully developed this work of salvation in its various perspectives. The work of Christ and the message which goes out from it cannot adequately be summarized in the theological outline of a single Christian teacher. From the beginning the difference between the Gospels was necessary and was not only tolerated by the church but willed in this form.32

32

Hengel, The Four Gospels, pp. 166–7.

Chapter 6

Marcion Revisited In the patristic period Marcion, who died about 160, was described in highly negative terms.1 He was, of course, a ‘heretic’. His errors had been twofold, and both had to do with the Bible. First, he had rejected the Old Testament as having any authority for Christians, arguing that the God of whom it spoke, the God of the Jews, was entirely different from the Christian God who had revealed himself in Jesus as the Saviour of the world; indeed, it was from the evil creator-god of the Old Testament that Jesus had delivered his followers. Secondly, Marcion had reduced even Christian scripture by deciding that there should be only one Gospel, Luke, and no epistles except those of Paul; and even these texts he had expurgated and diminished, removing from them all references to the Old Testament and all mention of the true God, the Father of Jesus, as the creator of the world. Marcion’s version of the gospel was thus, in the eyes of the orthodox, a reduction of the contents of the true ‘catholic’ gospel to a message of salvation alone, shorn of any concern with creation. And his effect on scripture was also reductionist, cutting away much that the church valued, and constructing a sort of Bible through his own misguided efforts instead of accepting the scriptures that had always been regarded as sacred in the church. The Question of Marcion’s Influence Marcion’s reputation survives today in the use of the term ‘Marcionite’, which theologians sometimes use of other theologians if they suspect them of being hostile to the Old Testament or of concentrating on salvation to the detriment of a creation theology. Bultmann was often accused of ‘Marcionism’ in this sense. And modern theology did indeed produce one clear ‘Marcionite’ in the person of Adolf van Harnack, with his famous dictum, ‘To reject the Old Testament in the second century was a mistake which the Church rightly repudiated; to retain it in the sixteenth century was a fate which the Reformation could not yet avoid; but to continue to

1 For an excellent brief guide to Marcion’s thought, see S.G. Hall, ‘Marcion’, in A Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, ed. R.J. Coggins and J.L. Houlden (London: SCM, 1990), pp. 422–4. The fragments that remain of Marcion’s writings, together with patristic quotations and allusions, can be found in A. von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, TV 45 (Leipzig: J.G. Hinrichs, 1921; 2nd edn, 1924). See also E. Evans (ed.), Tertullian: Adversus Marcionem (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), and my own discussion of Marcion in The Spirit and the Letter (London: SPCK, 1997), pp. 35–62. The American edition of this book is called Holy Writings, Sacred Text (Louisville, Ky.: Westminister John Knox, 1998).

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keep it as a canonical document after the nineteenth century is the consequence of religious and ecclesiastical paralysis.’2 But detailed study of what Marcion actually taught, which in modern times takes its rise from the work of Harnack, has shifted the emphasis in our understanding of this maligned figure. It is not that anyone denies that Marcion tried to abolish the Old Testament and to truncate the New, but that his work has come to be seen as far less an opposition to an already prevailing understanding of scripture, and far more creative in prompting the church to make up its mind about the character of its scriptures, than the church fathers realized. Especially where the New Testament is concerned, modern scholars have argued that the church had not yet ‘canonized’ (at least in the sense that term would come to bear) the New Testament by the time of Marcion, and that it was largely through the need to react to him that the standard Christian canon of the New Testament came to be established. Thus Harnack argued that ‘the Catholic New Testament beat the Marcionite Bible; but this New Testament is an anti-Marcionite creation on a Marcionite basis’.3 Campenhausen argued similarly: ‘The idea and reality of a Christian Bible were the work of Marcion, and the Church which rejected his work, so far from being ahead of him in this field, from a formal point of view simply followed his example.’4 And John Knox wrote, ‘The structural principle of Marcion‘s canon became the organizing idea of the catholic New Testament. Here is the fundamental fact in the relation of Marcion and the canon . . . Marcion is primarily responsible for the idea of the New Testament.’5 More recent scholarship has been less sure of Marcion’s influence on the formation of the canon, but still regards him as important. Metzger, in his definitive guide to the canonization of the New Testament, writes: It is nearer to the truth to regard Marcion’s canon as accelerating the process of fixing the Church’s canon, a process that had already begun in the first half of the second century. It was in opposition to Marcion’s criticism that the Church first became fully conscious of its inheritance of apostolic writings. As Grant aptly puts it, ‘Marcion forced more orthodox Christians to examine their own presuppositions and to state more clearly what they already believed.’6

Thus the impression persists that without Marcion the church might well not have developed a ‘New Testament’, even though he may not have been the only or the dominant influence, as Harnack thought. There are, however, two reasons why this position is harder to defend than it seems. First, Marcion’s concern was to exclude books that he disapproved of from 2

Harnack, Marcion, pp. 248–9; translations from this work are my own. Ibid., p. 357. 4 Hans von Campenhausen, The Formation of the Christian Bible (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), p. 148. 5 John Knox, Marcion and the New Testament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 11. 6 Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 99, referring to Robert M. Grant, The Formation of the New Testament (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 126. 3

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his ‘canon’. He was not assembling a collection of Christian books, but making a (very restricted) selection from the corpus of texts which already existed and which must already have been recognized as sacred by many in the church – otherwise he would not have needed to insist on abolishing them. To have imitated Marcion, other Christian thinkers would have had to make their own selection (no doubt a larger one) and try to enforce its limits. Now there is little evidence of canonization in the sense of restricting accepted Christian writings to a limited compass as early as the second century. Setting bounds to what may be read as Christian scripture is essentially an activity of the fourth century, reaching its culmination in Athanasius’s Festal Letter 39 of 367. There is really only one possible piece of evidence for the desire to limit the canon as early as the second century: the Muratorian Fragment. But the recent detailed study by Geoffrey Hahneman, following A.C. Sundberg, seems to have shown convincingly that this is a fourth-century text, and does not reflect the situation in the age of Marcion.7 If this evidence is excluded, then there is little reason to suppose that the church at large followed Marcion’s attempt to restrict the compass of acceptable Christian texts. Rather, their concern was to reject Marcion not by imitating but by contradicting him, and insisting that far more books had authority in the church than he was prepared to allow. In principle, what Christian writers of the second century defend is the variety and profusion of Christian texts, just as they also defend the continued acceptance and use of the Old Testament. As we shall see, Marcion did have successors who thought that scripture should be reconstructed in a minimalist way: Tatian’s Diatessaron is one example. What was to become the mainstream of Christian thought, however, did not follow this example but insisted on accepting what had come down from the past, even if this resulted in the problem of inconsistencies, for example, as between the different gospels.8 Second, if Marcion caused the church to have a ‘New Testament’, we should see an increase in the use of New Testament texts from the mid-second century onwards, as the church in general became more aware of its own scriptures as distinct from the Old Testament. Christians should have become, for polemical reasons, more selfconscious in using the texts that would eventually form the New Testament. But in fact this is not the case. The New Testament books, or at any rate the central ‘core’ of the Gospels and the Pauline and Catholic Epistles, were already used very widely in the time before Marcion, and continued to be so used after him. Franz Stuhlhofer has shown by a detailed statistical analysis that, proportionately to their length, the New Testament scriptures were already cited considerably more intensively than the Old by the early second century, and no difference in their use can be established

7 See Geoffrey M. Hahneman, The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); A.C. Sundberg, ‘Muratorian Fragment’, in IDBSup (1989), pp. 609–10. 8 On this problem see Oscar Cullmann, ‘Die Pluralität der Evangelien als theologisches Problem im Altertum’, TZ 1 (1945), pp. 23–42 (English translation in Oscar Culimann, The Early Church (London: SCM, 1956), pp. 37–54); Helmut Merkel, Die Widerspriiche zwischen den Evangelien, WUNT 13 (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1971).

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following Marcion.9 He cites Overbeck’s characterization of ‘the deep silence, for observers from later generations, in which the canon [of the New Testament] came into existence’.10 Thus Marcion seems to have had far less influence on the development of the New Testament canon than he is still given credit for, despite modifications to Harnack’s rather extreme proposal. He was rejected and anathematized, but not paid the compliment of being imitated, not even in the sense that the church felt constrained to produce a rival ‘New Testament’ as a response to his truncated one. The development of the New Testament followed its own logic, and Marcion did not influence it one way or the other. But if this is so, in what does his importance really consist? Is there a stream of tradition within Christianity which is indeed indebted to him, or to which he belongs, or is he simply the outsider that the church fathers regarded him as being? My tentative answer to this question is that Marcion was in all essentials a conservative thinker who did not realize that the tide of Christian opinion was moving beyond the attitudes for which he stood; but that he did have certain followers in his conservatism, who eventually became, as those do who try to prevent the development of Christian thought, ‘heretics’. We can see the importance of Marcion by surveying four topics: his attitude towards the Old and New Testaments respectively; his rejection of allegorical interpretation; his bipartite canon (Gospel plus Paul); and his writing of the work called Antitheses to be a companion to his reduced ‘Bible’. Marcion’s Attitude towards the Bible In what follows I shall refer to the ‘Old Testament’ and the ‘New Testament’, meaning by these terms those texts that are now so described, but with no implication that their limits were defined or that they were already established as ‘canonical’ in Marcion’s day – as we shall see, the term ‘canonical’ is somewhat anachronistic for this period. My purpose is to describe, on the basis of such evidence as we have, how Marcion regarded the Old and New Testament books, and to show that his attitude is indeed more conservative than radical. It is usually said that Marcion ‘rejected’ the Old Testament and accepted in its place only his own canon of Luke plus Pauline Epistles, edited to remove all allusions to the Old Testament. This, however, obscures two important points. First, Marcion’s rejection of the Old Testament was indeed total, in that he regarded it as completely alien to the revelation of salvation brought by Jesus and recorded in the New Testament documents he accepted. But this was not because he did not believe that the God of the Old Testament actually existed, or thought that the Old Testament itself was a purely human invention, pseudo-oracles of an imaginary god. On the contrary, Marcion firmly believed that the Old Testament God did exist, and that he was the Creator of the world. The problem was that his creation was evil and 9 Franz Stuhlhofer, Der Gebrauch der Bibel von Jesus bis Euseb: Eine statistische Untersuchung zur Kanongeschichte (Wuppertal: Brockhaus, 1988). 10 lbid., p. 75, quoting Franz Overbeck, Zur Geschichte des Kanons (Chemnitz: E. Schmeitzner, 1980; repr. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgeselischaft, 1965).

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he himself therefore a malign being; it was precisely the role of Jesus, and of the Unknown God now revealed in him, to deliver humankind from the malice of the evil Creator. Furthermore, the creator-god really had spoken the words attributed to him in the Old Testament: these were fully true and accurate oracles, not a human invention. They truly expressed the thoughts of the maker of the universe, and there could be no question of suggesting that they had been falsified in any way or contaminated by human intervention. ‘The Jewish Scriptures represent a true revelation of the Creator, but they do not speak of or for the God whom alone Christians ought to worship.’11 Marcion’s ‘rejection’ of the Old Testament thus needs to be qualified. He believed that when read properly (as we shall see, that meant without the help of allegorizing interpretation) it would at once be seen that it was incompatible with the New Testament. But that did not undermine its claim to a ‘divine’ origin; it simply meant that the ‘divinity’ who inspired it was an evil one. Marcion’s attitude to the New Testament, however, was not simply the mirror image of his attitude to the Old, as though the New Testament was equally divinely inspired only in this case by a good God. He appears not to have thought of the New Testament as ‘scriptural’ in the sense in which the Old Testament was scriptural, but to have thought of it as a collection of generally reliable historical documents which, however, needed editing to remove errors and slips. The Gospels (or in Marcion’s case the one true gospel, Luke) were not revealed scripture; they were a historical record of the doings and, especially, of the sayings of Jesus. He had no hesitation in reworking the book or books which he had received as the gospel of his own community, any more than he had in rewriting Paul: the important thing was to establish the truth about Jesus, and to remove from the texts those errors which, because he himself knew this truth, he could identify and correct. This is quite unlike his attitude to the Old Testament, which for him was not a record of independently existing tradition but the direct utterances of the (evil) creator-god. In an important sense, therefore, Marcion was not abolishing the Old Testament and putting the New in its place – as though he was substituting one ‘canon’ for another. He was recognizing the continuing existence of ‘scripture’ (the Old Testament), but announcing that ‘the gospel’ – the good news of Jesus and the salvation brought by him – showed this scripture up for what it was, the utterances of an evil being. Now – and this is my point – these attitudes, once we remove the negative evaluation of the Old Testament, are simply a mirror-image of the attitudes of most Christian writers in the second century. ‘Scripture’ for them meant what we call the Old Testament, though exactly what were its contents is another question, which we cannot enter into here.12 The life and teachings of Jesus, and the apostolic witness to them, were not ‘scripture’ but ‘gospel’, fresh divine revelation, but not inherently 11

Knox, Marcion, p. 7. See my discussion in J. Barton, Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1986; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) and ‘The Significance of a Fixed Canon of the Hebrew Bible’, in Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, ed. Magne Sæbø (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 1.1, pp. 67–83. 12

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encoded in books and documents. The Christian books were merely memory-joggers, not independently existing scriptural oracles. Christians knew about Jesus from the tradition, not essentially from books. Even though in practice it might be from a book that a given Christian learned something about Jesus, it was not a book considered as ‘scripture,’ a kind of Torah, but a book considered as a historical record. As Ellen Flesseman-van Leer puts it, ‘People knew what the gospel message was, and no one asked how they knew. The Church as a whole knew what had happened, and also knew its meaning, because it was constantly recounted and proclaimed.’13 Or, to quote von Campenhausen, ‘“The Gospel” to which appeal is normally made, remains an elastic concept, designating the preaching of Jesus as a whole in the form in which it lives on in church tradition. The normative significance of the Lord’s words, which is the most important point . . . is not transferred to the documents which record them.’14 Helmut Koester summarizes the matter well: In the first one and one-half centuries, ‘scripture,’ i.e., authoritative writing, comprised exclusively what was later called the Old Testament. Any additional authority referred to in order to underline the legitimacy of the Christian message and the teaching of the church was present in a variety of traditions which were still undefined. Sometimes these were transmitted orally, sometimes in written form. Such authority could be called ‘the sayings of Lord,’ usually transmitted orally. But even the quotations of Jesus’ sayings in 2 Clement although drawn from a written source, are still introduced as words of the Lord, just as Justin (1 Apology 15–17) introduces the teachings of the gospels as ‘what Jesus said’ and not as quotations from a book.15

Two features of early Christian manuscripts of the gospels help to confirm this impression. One is the well-known fact that Christians from early times preferred the codex to the scroll for recording their own texts (and in due course for all books, including the Old Testament). There has been much speculation on the reasons for this. C.H. Roberts, the main contributor to the debate, has emphasized the status of the codex in the ancient world as an essentially informal method of recording information, roughly corresponding to a note-pad.16 His suggestion is that the Gospels were not regarded as finished texts – the kind of thing one would write on a scroll – but as notes from which to develop oral proclamation or teaching. Like the Oral Law in Judaism, such material could legitimately be written down, but its essentially 13

Ellen Flesseman-van Leer, ‘Prinzipien der Sammlung und Ausscheidung bei der Bildung des Kanons’, ZThK 61 (1964), pp. 404–20, at p. 405. 14 Campenhausen, Formation, p. 129. 15 Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (London: SCM, 1990), p. 31. See also Knox, Marcion, p. 30: ‘Harnack accounts for the very occasional use of gegraptai in introducing a quotation from a Gospel in the period before the New Testament had taken form by the practice of public lection … This may well be true, especially for the several cases in Justin. Since in earlier cases, however, it is the words of Jesus which are always quoted, is not reverence for these words – a reverence which placed them on a par with or even beyond the Scriptures in importance – a more likely explanation?’ 16 C.H. Roberts, ‘The Codex’, in Proceedings of the British Academy 40 (1954), pp. 169–204; C.H Roberts and T.C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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oral character was safeguarded by avoiding the use of a formal scroll. According to rabbinic conventions, the Oral Law may likewise be noted down to aid memory, but not enshrined in a scroll. To quote what I have written elsewhere the first Christian codices, if Roberts is right, were used because the works they carried were not really ‘books.’ However the evangelists may have perceived their own work, their early readers saw it merely as a convenient repository of the kind of oral Jesus-tradition that they already knew, and were accustomed to pass on in teaching and preaching; and so they wrote them on sheets loosely sewn together, rather than on formal scrolls.17

A second point about the early manuscript tradition of the gospels is made by David Parker.18 He argues that the early textual tradition of the sayings of Jesus is often flexible not merely in practice but in principle: the sayings were not treated in the Church of the first two or three centuries as holy writ in the same way as the Old Testament, but were seen as enshrining basic ideas which could be developed flexibly in different situations. The flexibility was not infinite, but its bounds were not exactly defined, and they certainly were not so tight that we can confidently reconstruct, from the words a given writer cites as Jesus’, precisely what he found in the manuscript of the gospels he habitually used. Against this background the existence of four varying versions of the life and teachings of Jesus, and perhaps even of other texts such as the putative Q and the Gospel of Thomas, was not the problem it has been for later, more ‘literalistic’ readers. The existence of variant versions of what Jesus said or did on any particular occasion may have helped to authorize the preacher’s freedom to tell the story in a new way, not corresponding exactly to any of the written accounts. Along these lines one might argue that diversity, even inconsistency, in the handling of gospel materials was seen at least by some in the early Church as having a distinctive value, rather than being simply a problem. Where the Old Testament was concerned, there was of course no corresponding sense of a freely adaptable text; these books had been written scripture from time immemorial, and inconsistencies within them could hardly be handled in the same way. In time Christians, like Jews, developed imaginative ways of resolving these, among which allegorical interpretation was important. Marcion seems to fit well within this way of handling Old and New Testament materials. He differed from his ‘orthodox’ contemporaries in thinking the Old Testament bad rather than good, but he agreed with them that it was a divinely inspired text, which could not be changed or edited. Like them he thought of the gospels as corrigible in the light of further information, and as forming a collection of archive material that Christians could develop further. Indeed, Marcion’s successors seem to have felt free to modify his own work, apparently supplementing his ‘Luke’ from Matthew and Mark.19 There was no sense that he had established a kind of ‘scripture’ 17

Barton, The Spirit and the Letter, p. 88. David C. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); ‘The Early Traditions of Jesus’ Sayings on Divorce’, Theology 96 (1993), pp. 372–83; and ‘Scripture Is Tradition’, Theology 94 (1991), pp. 11–17. 19 Cf. Barton, The Spirit and the Letter, p. 46. 18

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in editing Luke, and in that sense Marcion’s rival to the Gospels was not ‘canonical’, any more than the Gospels then were for the larger church. In a sense we may say that by dismissing the Old Testament as no longer having authority for Christians, Marcion abolished ‘scripture’ altogether instead of substituting the ‘New Testament’ for it. But paradoxically, as we have seen, his ‘abolition’ of Old Testament scripture did not lead him to lose interest in it or to regard it as false. It remained a true revelation, but a revelation from an evil deity. Thus Marcion was in important respects a traditionalist who did not create any new way of looking at what would become the New Testament. He was much more radical than most contemporary Christians in regarding so much Jesus-tradition as erroneous; but he did not create the new category of Christian scripture. He remained firmly attached to the usual contemporary paradigm, in which Gospel books were convenient but corrigible records – important for their reusability in telling the story of Jesus and reminding people of his words, rather than because they were ‘scripture’ after the manner of the Old Testament. The creation of ‘critical’ versions of the Gospels soon ceased in the patristic church, with the firm establishment of the four-gospel canon from the time of Irenaeus onwards. There are two broad possibilities for dealing with the discrepancies within the Gospels. One is to argue that the differences are only apparent, and to show that the texts really harmonize perfectly; this is the line taken by patristic treatises on the ‘consensus of the evangelists’, and it remains popular today in circles where the Bible is not read critically. Eusebius’ suggestion that the incidents in John fit into the ‘silent’ period in the Synoptics between Jesus’ temptations and the death of John the Baptist belongs to this approach.20 The other possibility is to alter the texts so that they harmonize better. This approach rests on a clear perception that they are not harmonious as they stand. Marcion represents an extreme version of this tendency, actually deleting all the other Gospels except Luke (not that we know for sure how many of them he was familiar with), and even then editing out passages he found objectionable. Tatian’s Diatessaron is the logical successor to this attitude of Marcion’s, producing as it were a single Gospel by weaving together the existing four and eliminating contradictions, not showing that the Gospels are harmonious but forcing them to be so. It is a pity that the term ‘harmonization’ tends to do duty for both of these diametrically opposed operations. But was Marcion innovating here? The very Gospel he took as his base text, Luke, is surely an example of the same tendency, if we are to believe its prologue. ‘Luke’ examined existing Gospels and other traditions and wrote a definitive version of the events they narrated, correcting what was in error in earlier works. Marcion did (to his own mind) nothing different from this. Indeed, it seems plausible to think that each of the Gospels represents an attempt to provide an authoritative answer to the question of what Jesus did and said. It is hard to imagine that any of the redactors of the Gospels wrote with the intention that his version should stand alongside others in a multi-Gospel canon. Rather, each is an attempt to supersede its predecessors. Marcion was, in effect, an evangelist, who unfortunately for him lived too late for 20

Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3:24; see the quotation in Barton, The Spirit and the Letter, p. 85.

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this to be an acceptable profession. It was far from being an innovative role. On the contrary, it was one that had now gone greatly out of fashion. His idea was a simple and ‘primitive’ one: to tell the story of Jesus in one straightforward account. But by his day the church at large had rejected this ideal in favour of the vastly more complicated task of coping with four alternative, and incompatible, gospels. Marcion’s Rejection of Allegory Marcion refused to read the Old Testament allegorically. Now allegorical interpretation was one very important way in which the early Church managed to hold on to the Old Testament as its own scripture rather than declaring it to be part of the older and superseded Jewish dispensation. For Marcion, the Old Testament was not a holy text but the revelation of an evil deity, and as such it did not qualify for the allegorical treatment that other Christians regularly practised. He insisted on its literal meaning, arguing, for example, that the Messiah predicted in the prophets was a royal, purely human figure who had not yet arrived but was still to come, just as the prophets had said. Other allegedly ‘messianic’ texts were not interpreted messianically at all but were said to refer to ancient Jewish kings: Marcion anticipated the ‘historicalcritical’ reading of Isaiah 7:14 as referring to the birth of Hezekiah. It is not easy to say which came first, Marcion’s rejection of the Old Testament as authoritative or his insistence on non-allegorical reading. Common sense suggests that he noticed the literal meaning of the text, concluded that it contradicted the Christian revelation and so ‘decanonized’ it. However, I have suggested elsewhere that the process may have worked in the opposite direction; being convinced that the Old Testament was not holy because it was the revelation of a non-Christian god, Marcion denied that it was a suitable candidate for allegorical interpretation, which in the ancient world generally was regarded as the most appropriate way of handling a sacred text.21 Thus Origen can write ‘Not even Celsus asserts that only vulgar people have been converted by the gospel to follow the religion of Jesus; for he admits that among them are some moderate, reasonable, and intelligent people who readily interpret allegorically.’22 It is true that there developed in Christianity an anti-allegorical school of thought, the Antiochene school, but even some of their ‘literal’ interpretations strike the modern reader as fairly allegorical in tone. The majority tradition in the church certainly operated with allegorization as the best way of reconciling Old and New Testaments. Whichever of these suggestions is true, it is at any rate agreed that Marcion refused to allegorize the Old Testament, and that this fits well with his insistence on its lack of concord with the New. His contemporaries spent a lot of effort interpreting the Old Testament in such a way that it would appear to be in harmony with the new revelation in Christ. Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho is a case in point: at every turn he tries to convince his opponent of the non-literal meaning of Old Testament texts, and so to show that Jesus can be seen as their fulfillment. But this reminds us of a

21 22

Barton, The Spirit and the Letter, pp. 53–5. Origen, contra Celsum 1:23.

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point that can easily be missed. Marcion was, of course, strongly anti-Jewish in his theology, believing Judaism to be the worship of the evil creator-god whom Jesus had come to defeat. Yet his literal reading of the Old Testament is often quite close to a Jewish reading. Jewish interpreters, like Marcion, argued that the messianic texts in the prophets were either yet to be fulfilled or were in fact simply concerned with actual earthly kings who had already existed. This means that the arguments attributed to Trypho in the Dialogue are often quite close to Marcion’s arguments. Jewish and anti-Jewish readings are strangely united by their shared opposition to ‘mainstream’ Christian allegorization. This is readily comprehensible once one realizes that Marcion shared the Jewish view that the Old Testament texts belonged to Judaism, not to Christianity. This has led Charles Cosgrove to argue that the Dialogue is not really about Christian–Jewish discussion at all, but that the rabbi Trypho is instead a cipher for Marcion, whom Justin opposed with all his force. As in much early Christian polemic against the Jews, what may in reality be going on is a conflict with ‘judaizers’ or those suspected of being such within the church. As Cosgrove writes, The apology draws the outer world into its own inner circle for judgment as a way for the group to make sure of itself. The ostensibly centrifugal cast of apologetic literature may function as a mere foil for this more pressing internal process of self-identification; the dialogue with the outsider may represent no more than internal monologue.23

According to Justin, the problem with Judaism is that by insisting on a literal observance of what is laid down in the Old Testament it encourages those Christians who want to understand the Law literally so that they can be justified in rejecting it as unworthy of the God revealed in Jesus. In other words, a literal Jewish reading ultimately gives comfort to Marcionism. To ‘judaize’ is to read the Old Testament in a non-Christian way, and that has the consequence of making its lack of fit with the new revelation apparent, and therefore of leading to its rejection. And that in turn means that the one great truth for which the Old Testament is valued, namely that it teaches that there is a good creator, will be bound to fall by the wayside, and the way will be open to heresies such as Marcion’s. Modern biblical theology has often argued that the Old Testament, read in its own terms and with an eye to its literal meaning, is entirely compatible with Christian faith. ‘Pan-biblical’ theologies24 bear especial witness to this belief, but it is implicit 23 C.H. Cosgrove, ‘Justin Martyr and the Emerging Christian Canon: Observations on the Purpose and Destination of the Dialogue with Trypho’, VC 36 (1982), pp. 209–32, at p. 219. Cf. Miriam Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus, Studia postbiblica 46 (Leiden: Brill, 1995) and P.F. Beatrice, ‘Une citation de l’Évangile de Matthieu dans I’Epître de Barnabé’, in The New Testament in Early Christianity/La reception des écrits néotestamentaires dans le christianisme primitif, BETL 86 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1989), pp. 231–45. Campenhausen (Formation, p. 59) argues a similar case for ‘the Jews’ in John’s Gospel. 24 See especially M. Oeming, Gesamtbiblische Theologien der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1987), and the general discussion in James Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999).

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in most if not all of the great theologies of the Old Testament written by Christian Old Testament scholars. The early Church, on the other hand, did not in general think that a literal reading of the Old Testament would prove its compatibility with Christian faith. Some Christians went down the road of correcting the Old Testament to bring it into line with Christianity. This line of approach is represented by the Clementine Homilies, with their theory of ‘false pericopes’, inserted in the Old Testament by the Jews, which Christians must remove. Even Justin makes occasional accusations of this kind, as in his discussion of Psalm 96:10, which he, followed by later Christian tradition, claimed had been corrupted by the Jews to remove a reference to God reigning ‘from the tree’.25 But the majority did not adopt this radical approach to the text, but preferred to apply allegorical or other non-literal reading strategies. What was Marcion’s effect on Christian attitudes to the Old Testament? If Justin is correctly interpreted along the lines proposed by Cosgrove, then the need to confute his rejection of the God of the Old Testament was one factor in promoting allegorical reading and deterring Christians from reading the Old Testament along the same lines as their Jewish contemporaries. He was also, of course, a factor in persuading the church that the Old Testament should continue to be honored, since its rejection was so strongly tied up with the Marcionite distinction between the Creator and the God and Father of Jesus Christ. To put it in a somewhat exaggerated form, Marcion was not responsible for Christians adopting a New Testament; he was responsible for their retaining an Old Testament. Interestingly enough, Stuhlhofer’s statistics indicate an increase in the citation of Old Testament texts by Christian writers from about the time of Marcion onwards.26 The early tendency to feel that the gospel was so new that it hardly needed expounding in terms of the older scriptures gave way to a more even use of both testaments. In his attitude to the Old Testament Marcion really does look more like an innovator than he was in his ‘canonization’ of the New Testament. Nevertheless it is unlikely that his theology seemed so new to him. Rather, he regarded it as the continuation of a central theme in Paul: the supersession of the law by the gospel. Paul ‘spoiled’ the novelty of this theme by continuing to quote the Old Testament as though it were authoritative for Christians, and Marcion accordingly had to expurgate even the Pauline letters that he retained. But Paul in any case refers much less to Old Testament texts than later Christian writers were to do, and there are whole epistles with very little Old Testament material in them; while his description of worship in Corinth, for example, does not suggest that much use was made there of the Old Testament (cf. 1 Corinthians 14). It was plausible, even though to a modern reader not convincing, to argue that Paul regarded the Old Testament as having been superannuated by the fresh revelation in Christ – the line sometimes developed by modern theologians accused of ‘Marcionism’, such as Bultmann. Of course, in believing that the creator-god who had inspired the Old Testament was an evil being, Marcion departed very far from Pauline theology, but it is quite conceivable that he was not aware of doing so. Other people in the early Church found Paul hard to understand (cf. 2 Peter 3:16), and the argument of James makes it likely that he was 25 26

Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 73. See the discussion in Barton, The Spirit and the Letter, pp. 64–5.

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widely interpreted as antinomian, that is, as having taught that the Jewish law was now superseded and need not be observed at all. Marcion’s ‘low’ reading of the Old Testament, which highlighted its lack of concord with the Christian gospel, was not an unknown position in the early Church. As we have argued, following Cosgrove, what Justin combated in his Dialogue may well have been the view that Christians need no longer bother with the Old Testament. Ostensibly, he is trying to show Jews that, correctly interpreted, it points to Christ: that is, he is assuming that it is a valid revelation of the true God and then showing that it prophesies the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. But the true line of argument probably runs in the opposite direction. Because the Old Testament can be shown (through allegorization and similar methods) to point to Christ, it is therefore not to be discarded by Christians. Marcion was probably not the only thinker in the early Church to believe that it should be discarded, though he is the most prominent one known to us. The seeds of such a position are there in Paul. Whatever Paul himself meant by ‘Christ is the end of the law’ (Romans 10:4), people could easily perceive it as a rejection of the Old Testament, as Marcion evidently did. In respect of his anti-allegorical stance, then, Marcion was quite innovative. I suspect that his main originality lies here. At the same time, this stance was connected with certain ideas about the way the Old Testament had been superseded in Christ which were definitely not new, but correspond to one facet of the many-sided Pauline gospel, divorced from other, complementary insights in Paul. A ‘Pauline’ rejection of the Old Testament certainly seems to have been one option that some early Christians were drawn to: Irenaeus still has to argue at length for the identity of the Creator God, revealed in the Old Testament, with the Redeemer God, revealed in Jesus. Those he opposed were regarded by him, and naturally by later Christians, as ‘heretics’, but at the time it was a question which party would eventually triumph. Marcion’s Bipartite ‘New Testament’ One of the ways in which Marcion is said to have influenced the development of a New Testament is in his bipartite ‘canon’ of Gospel plus Epistles (Apostolikon). Harnack argued that this was the foundation on which the church later developed its slightly more complicated New Testament, in which the Epistles are headed by Acts, and Revelation, a late arrival in many churches, and disputed by some even in the fourth century, is added at the end. Now it is true that there is no evidence before Marcion for a dual collection of documents in this form. Obviously both the Gospels and the Epistles already existed, and there is some evidence that Paul’s letters had already been collected into a corpus Paulinum, but we do not know when they were added to the Gospels to form a bipartite collection. Nevertheless the derivation of authority from two sources, ‘the Lord’ and ‘the Apostle(s)’, is well attested in the early Church, and it seems to be essentially this model with which Marcion was working. It may be that writers who spoke in such terms were thinking primarily of oral tradition, though this is more plausible in the case of Jesus than of Paul, who after all was known only through his writings. As we have seen, early Christians often seem to have regarded

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Christian teaching as somehow inherently oral, even though in practice they may have encountered it through written texts. At all events all Christians seem to have been aware of the twofold source of Christian teaching, and it may well have existed in written form. Indeed, one example of this tendency can be identified: the Didache. I repeat here some observations from my The Spirit and the Letter: The date of the Didache is still disputed, with English-speaking scholars tending to favour a mid- to late-second-century date, and continental [European] scholarship continuing to defend the late first century and so placing it before the writing of some of the later books of the New Testament. In either case, however, we may see it as a significant parallel to Marcion’s Apostolikon. The final authority for the author of the Didache is the words of Jesus: the Lord’s Prayer, for example, is to be recited hos ekeleusen ho kyrios en to euangelio autou (as the Lord. commanded in his gospel) (8:2), where euangelion could well mean a written gospel (perhaps Matthew); 9:5 cites a word of Jesus with the formula hos errethe. There is no doubt that the Didache was intended to be the authoritative handbook for Christian practice in the churches for which it was written, probably in Syria, and most likely it was meant to stand alongside a gospel (Matthew?) as the official apostolic commentary on the words of the Lord himself.27

Matthew plus Didache would thus correspond to Marcion’s Luke plus Apostolikon. The Epistle of the Apostles may well represent another experiment in this genre. If the Didache is as early as some continental European scholars think, then Marcion would stand in a tradition that predates him. Marcion’s Antitheses To accompany his ‘Bible’ of Gospel and Apostolikon, Marcion also compiled a work called the Antitheses. Harnack argued that this text had a quasi-credal character for Marcion’s followers, providing a guide to the correct exegesis of the authoritative text. Apparently it contained an introductory section giving an account of the essential gospel message of deliverance through Christ from the evil creator-god, followed by a pericope-by-pericope exegesis of the Gospel and Apostolikon, showing how these exemplified the gospel message and also (vital for Marcion) how they differed from the Old Testament, read literally. The Old Testament is thus present in a shadowy form in Marcion’s collection of texts: one needs to know it in order to recognize how wrong it is, and how fortunate Christians are to have been delivered from the god of whom it speaks. The content of the Antitheses will thus have differed radically from anything else we know in the early Church. Indeed, it must have argued for the very opposite of most doctrinal and exegetical positions espoused by ‘orthodox’ Christians. Obviously we could argue that it marks Marcion out as a highly original writer. But things look rather different if we think more formally about the kind of ‘kit’ which Marcion’s various works provided for his followers. It consisted of (a) a Gospel; (b) a collection of apostolic epistles; (c) a doctrinal handbook, containing a short credal section 27

Ibid., p. 49.

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followed by an exegetical guide to the ‘New Testament’ and an account of how it differs from the Old; and (d) the Old Testament itself, of whose (literal) contents the reader needed enough knowledge to understand why it was to be rejected. Seen in this light, the Marcionite ‘kit’ looks not unlike that provided by other Christian teachers for their readers. For example, anyone who, some years later, would study with Irenaeus would have become familiar with (a) the Gospels; (b) various apostolic epistles; (c) the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, giving guidance on the ‘canon of truth’ or rule of faith, together with illustrations of it through exegesis of various parts of the ‘New Testament’; and (d) the Old Testament, which the reader had to understand allegorically in order to see how it conformed with the other three elements. This might suggest a broad agreement on the kind of documents a church needed to possess. The Antitheses in particular, though highly distinctive in the way it described the Christian faith, was similar to a text like Irenaeus’ Demonstration in the sort of guidance it provided, combining credal and exegetical material. Of course it showed the alleged lack of concord between Christianity and the Old Testament, whereas Irenaeus’ work argues for a positive correlation, but formally speaking the task was much the same. Irenaeus worked a little later than Marcion, so that it might be felt unreasonable to cite him as evidence against Marcion’s originality – though I suppose few would argue that he borrowed the pattern of his work from Marcion! In any case, there are earlier parallels to the Antitheses. The Epistle of Barnabas and Melito’s Paschal Homily are also examples of the genre; both take Old Testament passages and show how they are fulfilled in Christ through an allegorical or typological reading, just as Marcion showed how such passages were not thus fulfilled. And Justin’s Dialogue seems quite close to the kind of thing the Antitheses must have been, with its extensive quotations of biblical material and its detailed attempts to demonstrate their concord with the gospel message. Harnack himself proposed various possible ‘canons’ of texts that might have emerged in the early Church instead of the Bible that in the end was accepted; and one of these is ‘A book of the synthesis or concordance of prophecy and fulfillment in reference to Jesus Christ, the Apostles and the Church, standing side by side with the Old Testament.’28 This is more or less what Justin, Barnabas, Melito and Irenaeus provided; and Marcion produced its exact opposite or mirror-image, a book of the discord of prophecy and fulfillment in relation to Jesus Christ, the Apostle and the Church, standing in contrast with the Old Testament. At the formal level, therefore, Marcion was not an innovator but a traditionalist. It was his doctrine that was novel, not the literary forms in which it was expressed. Conclusion My argument in this paper has been that in many respects Marcion should be seen as a conservative rather than as an innovator. In particular, his alleged importance in the development of a ‘New Testament’ seems to have been much exaggerated. 28 Adolf von Harnack, The Origin of the New Testament and the Most Important Consequences of the New Creation, trans. J. R. Wilkinson (London: Williams and Norgate, 1925), p. 170.

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The documents which Christians accumulated and transmitted as the literary part of their religious heritage seem on the whole to have developed independently of Marcion, and his own writings, together with his editions of Gospel and Epistle texts, seem to have followed a pattern known to have been widespread in the secondcentury Church. Like his contemporaries and predecessors, he tended not to see the Gospels or the Epistles as sacred texts, after the model of the Old Testament, but more as reliable documents which could be made even more reliable by those with special knowledge. He was not compiling a ‘New Testament’ but a set of valuable historical and doctrinal texts, and in any case his chosen categories ‘the Lord’ and ‘the Apostle’ correspond to the sources of authority normally cited by writers of his age. In thinking that the compass of Christian writings should be limited to a minimum he was not influential in his own time, for Christian teachers reacted rather by insisting on the authority of more texts than he allowed, and refusing to ‘close’ the ‘canon’ (both terms are rather anachronistic in any case for this period, as I have tried to show elsewhere).29 And when the Church did come to draw boundaries around the New Testament, it was a couple of centuries later, when his influence could not have been at work. Marcion, we may conclude, was important for two reasons. He rejected the Old Testament as the document of an alien religion; and he taught that Jesus had come to save humankind from the control of the evil Creator to whom the Old Testament witnesses. These are precisely the two aspects of his work on which patristic condemnations from Tertullian onwards, focus. In the process he denied the validity of allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament, which he saw as a means of accommodating it to Christian belief; this too is picked up by Tertullian. In short, Marcion was not a major influence on the formation of the New Testament; he was simply a Marcionite.

29

Barton, The Spirit and the Letter, pp. 1–14.

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Chapter 7

Old Testament or Hebrew Bible? For some years there has been discussion in theology and biblical studies about whether it is right to continue with the traditional term ‘Old Testament’, or whether we ought to change to ‘Hebrew Bible’ or ‘the Hebrew Scriptures’. The question does not arise because the traditional term is in any way ambiguous. It arises because of the fear that it is implicitly anti-semitic. It implies (people say) that the Bible has another part, the ‘New Testament’, which has superseded the first part, as in the system of thought in Hebrews 10, where the ‘new covenant’ is said to render the ‘old covenant’ obsolete. Thus in the very terms it uses for its scriptures, Christianity has enshrined its own sense of its superiority to Judaism. The only proper course is now for Christians to make belated amends by adopting a more Jewish, or a more neutral, term for these books. ‘Hebrew Bible’ is the best term available for this. This change has already happened to a considerable extent in the USA. ‘Old Testament’ survives in America in overtly Christian contexts – liturgy and the like – and in the curriculum of more traditional seminaries. But the American academic world has espoused ‘Hebrew Bible’ fairly comprehensively. It is with this much as it is with the question of ‘BC’ and ‘AD’; Americans, at least those from the theological world, treat the use instead of ‘BCE’ and ‘CE’ as the least Christians can do to make some small amends for Christian anti-semitism. I do not think much prophetic foresight is needed to see that this view is eventually going to prevail in Britain, too. We are out of step with the great centre of theological study, the USA, and we are likely to fall into line fairly soon. Virtually all English language usage in any case now moves from west to east – British influence on American English would make the subject of an extremely short dissertation – and in this case, after all, we’re not talking about mere habits of speech, but about a principled change. The case against ‘Old Testament’ was made most strongly by John Sawyer in an article in Theology in 1991.1 He has long been an opponent of the term, and at a meeting of the Society for Old Testament Study some years ago proposed that the name of the Society should be changed, finding less support than I would have expected but as little as any visiting American scholar would have feared. He takes very high ground indeed, linking the term ‘Old Testament’ explicitly to anti-semitism: In spite of belated efforts on the part of some religious and academic institutions in the second half of the twentieth century, the language of Christianity is still encumbered with much that reflects attitudes and structures of its past history, a history in which there

1

J.F.A. Sawyer, ‘Combating Prejudices about the Bible and Judaism’, Theology (1991), pp. 269–78.

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THE OLD TESTAMENT: CANON, LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY is much to be ashamed of, especially in regard to the Jews. The Christian terms ‘Old Testament’ and ‘New Testament’ are part of that lexical baggage. A moment’s thought will show how damaging they can be, at all levels, literary, theological and political. The traditional division of the Christian Bible into the ‘Old Testament’ and the ‘New Testament’ inevitably implies some kind of invidious comparison between the two parts. It suggests that what is said in the ‘Old’ part is somehow less authoritative or less important than what is said in the ‘New’, although this goes entirely contrary to official Christian teaching on Scripture. Everyday expressions like ‘Old Testament ethics’ and ‘the God of the Old Testament’ suggest cruelty and ruthless legalism, in spite of the fact that the commandment to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ first appears in Leviticus 19:18 and many of the descriptions of God’s love are to be found in the Psalms and the prophets. But it is not only books of the Bible that suffer from being labelled ‘Old’, superseded, inferior. Ninety-nine per cent of the world’s Christians probably still believe that ‘Old Testament religion’ is more or less the same thing as Judaism, that is to say, a somewhat primitive pre-Christian religion characterized by the ethics of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’, a religion superseded by ‘New Testament religion’ and therefore irredeemably inferior to Christianity. Such language, though people who use it are usually unconscious of what they are doing, reflects and perpetuates traditional Christian attitudes to the Jews which range from arrogance and a sense of superiority to hatred and violence.2

Rearguard actions are unlikely to succeed against this weight of rhetoric, which suggests that we should be ashamed of ourselves for even thinking of continuing to use ‘Old Testament’. Yet I feel some disquiet with Sawyer’s case. No doubt we have to say that if a term is perceived as anti-semitic, then it is anti-semitic, and should be avoided. But I do find myself wondering whether the term ‘Old Testament’ has not been defined as anti-semitic. There was a time, not so long ago, when Jewish scholars would use the term ‘Old Testament’, and some still do: recognizing that it was not of course a term usual in Judaism, but treating it as the normal everyday term in English-speaking culture. Arguments from what is normal in the environing culture are nowadays always suspected of cultural imperialism, but this has not always been so. At least until recently once could say that ‘Old Testament’ was the default term (as linguistics call it, the ‘unmarked’ term), and I am not clear why that could not have continued to be the case. Until a few years ago, it was not generally thought by either Christians or Jews to be a linguistic expression of anti-semitism: it was just the ordinary name for these particular books. Need this change? A factor that complicates or confuses matters, and which is not completely in focus in Sawyer’s article, is the question whether we want a neutral term – a term everyone would agree to regard as unmarked – or a term which would be just as ideological as ‘Old Testament’ is claimed to be, but in the opposite direction, imparting a Jewish rather than a Christian emphasis. People usually seem to advocate ‘Hebrew Bible’ not as a neutral term, but because it makes some amends to Judaism by saying, in effect: we’ve culpably designated these books as though we were entitled to an opinion about them, and the name we chose expressed an adverse judgement on them. Now we’ll agree instead to acknowledge that they are your books. We can’t

2

Ibid., pp. 269–70.

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3

call them simply ‘The Bible’, because our Bible contains other books too, but we’ll at least call them ‘The Hebrew Bible’ in acknowledgement that they are in the Hebrew language and come from Hebraic culture. To feel the force of this, suppose that Judaism had continued to call the Gospels ‘the books of the heretics’, and then Jews had one day come to see that this was offensive to Christians and had decided instead to call them (say) ‘the Christian Scriptures’ or ‘the Greek Gospels’. Such terms would at least be an accommodation to Christian language. In the present issue some would now go even further and call the Old Testament ‘The Tanakh’4 or ‘The Jewish Bible’. At all events the modern changes are a deliberate attempt to choose a title that will be acceptable to Jews, even if it isn’t identically the same term they would most naturally use themselves. On this model, the change of vocabulary is the redressing of an injustice. Now it sounds as though this is what Sawyer wants. He certainly thinks that getting rid of the term ‘Old Testament’ will help to clear away some prejudices about Judaism. But his position seems to me to shift about, in a way which helps to show just how difficult the subject is. Later in the article it seems as if what he is looking for is really a neutral term. For, as he points out, ‘Hebrew Bible’ may remind the reader of the Jewish origins of the ‘Old Testament’, but it is woefully inadequate in other ways. For example, it makes it difficult to grasp that for Christians these books have traditionally functioned in Greek or Latin (or indeed other languages). There are professors of ‘Hebrew Bible’ who primarily study the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament. The term also fails to register that for Catholic and Orthodox Christians the collection includes books that never existed in Hebrew at all. And it obscures (as ‘Old Testament’ does not) the fact that the Christian Bible contains another collection, the ‘New Testament’. As Sawyer reminds us, the ancient Greek codices of the Bible such as Codex Sinaiticus (now in the British Museum) contain the Bible as a whole, not one Testament alone. I think this makes a good case against ‘Hebrew Bible’, on the assumption that we are looking for an accurate neutral term; and the fact that ‘Hebrew Bible’ has been so widely accepted despite these disadvantages strongly suggests that it has usually been an ideological choice. For all the radical appearance of his article, Sawyer is actually rather old fashioned in looking for a term that will be value-free. Along those lines I am sure one would need to go much further, and some are already doing so. Sawyer points out that New Testament studies departments in the USA are now often departments of ‘Christian origins’, and that ‘Hebrew Bible’ is not really a good parallel to that: something like ‘Ancient Israelite Writings’ would be needed to function in an equally value-neutral way. However, Sawyer then moves a stage further, and ends up in a more ideological position after all. What is really wrong with ‘Old Testament’ and ‘New Testament’ is that they signal a theology of supersession or (which is what matters) are heard as doing so. The only way to avoid this is to adopt terminology that signals instead the unity of the whole of Scripture. For this the only solution is to say simply ‘the Bible’. 3 In Israeli universities, a person who teaches the Old Testament is called simply ‘the Professor of Bible’. 4 Tanakh is a modern acronym, formed from the first letters of the three divisions of the Old Testament in Hebrew, Torah, Neviim, Kethubhim.

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After all, he argues, for Christians the Epistles, Isaiah and the Psalms are all very much on the same level of authority. Why distinguish the section of the Bible that contains the Epistles as ‘the New Testament’ and the section that contains Isaiah and the Psalms as ‘the Old Testament’ at all? All are just parts of the one Bible. So we should use this term, ‘The Bible’, for all the books, and make no sharper break between, say, Isaiah and the Gospels than between Deuteronomy and Micah. There seem to me many problems here. On some Christian theories of biblical authority that authority is indeed diffused evenly through Scripture; but for others it is not. If the criterion for naming the Scriptures is to be the Christian view of Scripture, then we should have to say that some major portions of the Christian world do operate with a two-tier system. They may be wrong to do so, but if we are trying to be neutrally descriptive, that is how things are. But in any case, would not this proposal be just as offensive to Judaism as the Old/New Testament division, or even more so? Most Jews would regard it as rather blasphemous to assert that the Gospels were just continuous with the Prophets, and they would hardly be delighted to hear the Old Testament described as ‘those parts of the Bible that Jews accept as Scripture’. Christians of course do make such an assertion, if not the even more scandalous one that the Gospels stand higher than the Prophets. And this is a real point of disagreement between the two religions. To invent terms for Scripture that change the vocabulary in such a way that the Jewish point cannot even be made seems to me worse than all the harm supposedly done to Jewish–Christian relations by the use of ‘Old Testament’. A footnote: Sawyer commends J.A. Sanders’ proposal of ‘First Testament’ and ‘Second Testament’5 as worthy of consideration – again, on neutralist grounds. We could do worse, though there would be no difficulty in finding ideology in these terms too. ‘First’ and ‘Second’ could be heard as indicating superiority and inferiority. And why use ‘Testament’? Here it has lost its connection with ‘covenant’, and become simply a label for parts of the Bible; and once we leave the connection with ‘covenant’ behind, all the arguments about the supersession of the old by the new become entirely irrelevant. Indeed, quite apart from Sanders’ proposal, I believe it is quite mistaken to think that the idea of the covenant comes into the ordinary person’s mind at all when he or she hears ‘Old Testament’ or ‘New Testament’. Most people with neither Latin, Greek nor Hebrew simply do not know that ‘Old Testament’ derives from ‘old covenant’, and have not read Hebrews 10 either. This discussion of neutrality versus commitment raises the possibility that we might want different terms for different contexts. Walter Moberly has responded to Sawyer by making this very point. In his book The Old Testament of the Old Testament,6 Moberly maintains that the patriarchal stories in Genesis had for ancient Israel very much the function that the Old Testament as a whole has had for Christians. They functioned as a kind of ‘protology’ in which paradigms of human and divine action were laid down, but were open to being superseded by subsequent revelation. 5 See J.A. Sanders, ‘First Testament and Second’, Biblical Theology Bulletin 17 (1987), pp. 47–9. 6 R.W.L. Moberly, The Old Testament of the Old Testament, Overtures to Biblical Theology (Minneapolis, 1992).

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The analogous way in which the Old Testament functions for Christians makes it imperative to use a term such as ‘Old Testament’ to describe it: the supersession factor, which for Sawyer is so objectionable, is for Moberly essential to any Christian understanding of Scripture. Consequently within the context of Christian theology we not only may but must speak of ‘The Old Testament’. On the other hand, Moberly argues, in academic discussion and in the historical study of the literature it can be offensive to use such a term, and Christians and Jews must together find a neutral way of speaking about these books.7 Wherever one’s sympathies lie in all this, it is important to notice that both scholars have in mind the possibility that the Bible will be differently regarded – and therefore differently described – according to whether it is being used in a Christian or Jewish religious context or studied in an academic one. In many ways this is probably rather uncontroversial in modern biblical studies. Much as another religion – Islam, for example – is practised in its indigenous cultural context but studied in a Religious Studies course, so the Bible is one thing for the practising Jew or Christian but another for the student of Religious or Biblical Studies. Yet I remain uneasy with this. It suggests to me that either the practice of the religion or its academic study is being somehow devalued. My suspicion in both the cases I have been discussing is that the religious claims of the text are being allowed to gain the upper hand, with the argument that we may call Scripture only by a name that expresses a correct theology. I find myself wanting to make two points: 1. The academic study of the Bible ought to proceed along the same lines as the study of any other texts. For this purpose something even more neutral than any of the terms so far suggested might be appropriate. 2. The conclusions we come to in such study have religious/theological importance, or can have, and are therefore relevant to the practice of faith in the religion in question. I therefore feel unhappy with the dichotomy implied in saying that what we call the texts should depend on what we’re reading them for. Consequently, though I can sympathize with the structure of thought in both Sawyer and Moberly, even though it leads them to some extent in opposite directions, I find it in both cases difficult to share it. The idea, for both scholars, seems to be that study of the Bible needs to begin with the statement of a position about these texts and their status: we’re to study them as ‘The Old Testament’ (the document which Christianity supersedes) or ‘Jewish Scriptures’ (which have not been superseded), or part of the canon of Christian Scripture (all on the same level of authority). What this leaves out is the possibility of studying them with no prior commitment. Yet it is this above all which academic study should want to encourage, if it is looking for truth rather than traditional authority. The case for continuing with the term ‘Old Testament’ which I should want to urge is the very neutralist case that it is nowadays supposed to be incompatible with. This is just what these books have been called in English for as long as they have had 7

Ibid., pp. 159–63.

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a name. I fully accept that usage changes, and if enough people come to find ‘Old Testament’ unacceptable, as I think they will, then the change will occur whether one helps or tries to hinder it. But the paradox here is that, in British English, there used to be a genuinely neutral term – for it is to me beyond belief that most people who used or use the term ‘Old Testament’ were or are thinking anti-semitic thoughts about the supersession of Judaism – but now there is going to be no neutral term at all, only a selection of possible ideological terms. ‘Hebrew Bible’, at least in a British context, is a clear way of saying: these books are Jewish. Someone may reply: well, so they are! But that at once moves us away from any possibility of using the term as a label. My real fear here, which comes from attributing a high importance to Jewish–Christian understanding, is that the perceived harping on the Jewish character of the Old Testament is more likely to be productive of Christian anti-semitism than the term ‘Old Testament’ ever was, and far more likely to lead to a kind of Marcionism. It will be heard by Christians as a way of saying that the Old Testament is a Jewish work which Christians need no longer attend to – in other words, it will result in supersessionism. But this would not be the first time that well-meaning changes in usage have produced the very opposite effect from the one intended. In what sense should we regard the Old Testament as a ‘Jewish book’, or as the proper possession of Judaism? At one level it is absolutely obvious that this is so. What Christians call the Old Testament remains the Scriptures of Judaism; those who compiled it were unquestionably Jews; the religion which these books enshrine is visibly continuous with modern Judaism. To deny any of these things is Christian anti-semitism. From a Jewish point of view, to regard the Old Testament as instead a Christian book can only be seen as a crude takeover bid (though the title ‘Old Testament’, I would argue, makes it less likely to occur). When Christians ask what a piece of the Old Testament has to say ‘to us’, it is reasonable of Jews to become irritated and to say that the portion in question isn’t addressed to Christians but to them, the Jews. Nevertheless, the matter does not end there. One of the findings of nineteenthcentury Old Testament scholarship was that there was less continuity than people generally thought between Judaism and the religion of ancient Israel. It makes sense to call Jesus ben Sira a Jew; it’s conventional to call Ezra a Jew, and indeed he can be seen as one of the founders of Judaism. But Ezekiel used to be dubbed ‘the father of Judaism’ precisely because it was felt that he was the first to turn the national religion in a new direction, and pave the way for ‘Judaism’ proper, which had not existed in that form before his time. It sounds odd, in an academic context, to call Isaiah a Jew rather than a Judaean, and most peculiar to call Solomon a Jew, or the religion of the court of David Judaism. At most we might say that the religion of David’s day was one element in what later developed into Judaism. These may sound like paradoxes: it is worth remembering, in the same vein, that Jesus was not a Christian, but a Jew. From the point of view of modern scholarship there is a different, but equally difficult problem about saying that the Old Testament is a Jewish book and ‘belongs to’ Judaism, and this is the problem raised by recognizing that there were varieties of Judaism at the turn of the era, just as there have always been varieties of Christianity.

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The Old Testament is indeed part of the heritage of Judaism, but that does not mean it is the exclusive heritage of what became mainstream rabbinic Judaism. Christianity was one of many small groups in Judaism: the Dead Sea Community was another. Due respect between Jews and Christians should certainly deter Christians from the absurd claim, of which they should repent, that the Old Testament is now ‘ours, not yours’. But this should not lead scholars to speak as if we have now realized that Christians have no stake at all in the inheritance of the Old Testament and its religion, or to imply that the Old Testament is correctly read only from the standpoint of rabbinic Judaism: scholars are neither required nor permitted to make valuejudgements of that kind. The religious system which the Old Testament attests is certainly different from Christianity, but also from Judaism as we now encounter it. A classic mistake in Christian scholarship has been to think that when we know about the Old Testament, we also know about Judaism. But there is an equal and opposite mistake: to suppose that a knowledge of Judaism gives one special insight into the Old Testament, which is in reality the document of a pre-Jewish (and needless to say also pre-Christian) religion. For the scholar, texts are not possessed anyway, either by individuals or by a community. They lie open to investigation by anyone with the necessary skill. So, while wanting by all means to repudiate the idea that Christians have acquired the Old Testament from the Jews and that they have no longer any stake in it (heaven forbid!), I still think it is important not to say: these are your books, and you must tell me what they mean. In that sense, these or any other books are no one’s: books are not owned, except as physical objects. And in another sense, they belong to all whose religious heritage derives from them, and that includes Christians and Muslims as well as Jews, and many small groups in all three religions which have now ceased to exist. To return at the end to the question of neutrality: is it desirable to have a neutral label for the Old Testament, and if so, what might it be? Opinion, especially in the American context, seems to swing uneasily between the desire to be neutral – with the problem that every proposed ‘neutral’ term turns out to be ideological – and the desire to make amends to Judaism for having at one and the same time annexed and devalued the books that are its Bible. Where every new proposal bristles with difficulties, my proposal is that in British English we might consider continuing to speak of the ‘Old Testament’, and concentrate our efforts to eschew anti-semitism not on linguistic usage, which will lead us up all too many garden paths, but on the attempt to understand, respect and learn from Judaism.

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PART II Literature

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Introduction Is there a dichotomy between biblical criticism as practised under the banner of ‘historical-critical method’ and the newer ‘literary’ approaches that have been making themselves felt since the rise of structuralist approaches in the 1960s and 1970s? This is generally assumed to be the case. There are traditionalist ‘historical critics’ for whom the very word ‘literature’ in a biblical studies article is a sign that an enemy is present, while words such as ‘deconstruction’ or ‘postmodernism’ immediately provoke fight or flight mechanisms. On the other hand, there are ‘literary’ critics for whom anything remotely diachronic belongs to a critical Dark Age. While reserving the right to be critical of work done in both camps I have tried to suggest that there is often more common ground than meets the eye. My Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1984; 2nd edn, 1996) was an attempt to look dispassionately at various ‘methods’ that have been current in biblical studies, while questioning whether ‘method’ is in fact the right word for them. Part of the work involved here was to classify different styles of biblical study, and my paper ‘Classifying Biblical Criticism’ (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29 (1984), pp. 19–35) was published just before that book and presented a taste of how such a classification might work, using the scheme provided by M.H. Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London and New York, 1953). I went on, in ‘Reading the Bible as Literature: Two Questions for Biblical Critics’ (Journal of Theology and Literature 1 (1987), pp. 135–53), to propose that historical-critical and literary approaches to the Bible each raised questions that only the other could answer, thereby showing that neither can exist wholly without the other. Similar themes appear in ‘Historical Criticism and Literary Interpretation: Is there any Common Ground?’ from Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honour of Michael D. Goulder (ed. S.E. Porter, P. Joyce and D.E. Orton (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), pp. 3–15). ‘What is a Book? Modern Exegesis and the Literary Conventions of Ancient Israel’, published in Intertextuality in Ugarit and Israel: Papers read at the tenth joint meeting of the Society for Old Testament Study and Het Oudtestamentische Werkgezelschap in Nederland en België, held at Oxford, 1997 (ed. J.C. de Moor, Oudtestamentische Studiën 40 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 1–14), seeks to continue some of these thoughts by focusing on the literary conventions of Israel so far as we can reconstruct these. A repeated plea in recent biblical study has been that the critics have taken the Bible away from the Church and ought to be made to give it back – a programme summed up in the title of a collection edited by Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, Reclaiming the Bible for the Church (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1996). My own conviction is that this is misguided, since critical biblical study thrives only when it is pursued in a neutral way, without confessional commitments, and that in reality this happens all too little, not at all too much: the setting free of the Bible from ecclesiastical control was begun at the Reformation, but is far from being complete.

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This theme is at the heart of ‘Should Old Testament Study be more Theological?’ (Expository Times 100 (1989), pp. 443–8), and of my inaugural lecture as Oriel & Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Scripture in the University of Oxford, The Future of Old Testament Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). I pursue it in more detail in The Nature of Biblical Criticism (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2007). ‘Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to the History of Israel: Influences and Effects’, from Text and Experience: Towards a Cultural Exegesis of the Bible (ed. D. Smith-Christopher (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), pp. 316–29), was delivered at a conference in Los Angeles on ‘cultural exegesis’, the idea that exegetes are always part of the culture of their time. Not totally receptive to this idea, I tried to show that Wellhausen himself had had a much more neutral stance than he is sometimes credited with, though remaining of course aware of how much he did indeed owe to his background and environment. I suggested that he transcends his own culture, in a way characteristic of the greatest critics. Two essays, ‘Intertextuality and the “Final Form” of the Text’, delivered as part of a panel discussion at the meeting of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament in Oslo and published in Congress Volume Oslo 1998 (ed. A. Lemaire and M. Sæbø (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 33–7), and ‘The “Final Form” of the Biblical Text’ (published as ‘Looking Back on the Twentieth Century 2: Old Testament Studies’, Expository Times 110 (1999), pp. 348–51), examine the recent trend towards ‘final form’ exegesis which looks away from diachronic enquiry and insists that we should read what lies before us when we open a Bible. My suggestion is that the ‘final form’ is highly elusive, and that a concentration on it may not in any case lead to the ‘holistic’ approach now often recommended. In these papers my continuing attachment to ‘historical criticism’ should be apparent. Attachment to the final form is also often a feature of ‘reader-response’ criticism, and in ‘Thinking about Reader-Response Criticism’ (Expository Times 113:5 (2002), pp. 147–51), I try to suggest that it is a complex movement, parts of which are highly suggestive for biblical studies while others are inimical to true criticism. Finally I have included my A.S. Peake Memorial Lecture ‘On Biblical Commentaries’ (Epworth Review 24:3 (1997), pp. 35–44). This restates the case for traditional criticism while recognizing that it needs to be ‘chastened’ by more recent developments, to use the term employed by John Muddiman when we were preparing our jointly edited work The Oxford Bible Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Chapter 8

Classifying Biblical Criticism I In 1953 the American critic M.H. Abrams published a study of the Romantic movement under the title The Mirror and the Lamp.1 His purpose was to chart the rise, in the theory and the practice of the Romantics, of a new understanding of the nature of art, especially literary art. The ‘mirror’ of the title stands for the function of art in much pre-Romantic criticism: to reflect the external world, to be, in Dr Johnson’s famous commendation of Shakespeare, ‘the mirror of life’.2 In Romantic theory the poetic mind ceases to be a reflector and becomes instead a lamp, ‘a radiant projector which makes a contribution to the objects it perceives’.3 Abrams shows that both aesthetic theory and practical criticism from the early nineteenth century until the period between the wars accepted, often without question, this image of the artist’s mind as a lamp, and consequently saw the function of criticism as lying in the elucidation of the artist’s intention and achievement. Artists illuminate life; criticism therefore seeks to understand the artist, to recapture his creative perception of the world. In John Middleton Murry’s words, ‘To know a work of literature is to know the soul of the man who created it, and who created it in order that his soul should be known’.4 Abrams sums up the contrast between Romantic criticism and its predecessors as follows: To pose and answer aesthetic questions in terms of the relation of art to the artist, rather than to external nature, or to the audience, or to the internal requirements of the work itself, was the characteristic tendency of modern criticism up to a few decades ago, and it continues to be the propensity of a great many – perhaps the majority – of critics today.5

That was written in 1953, and we shall see that a good deal has changed since then; but it provides an admirable summary of Abrams’s thesis. It will be noted, however, that the contrast being drawn here is not a simple one, between a Romantic theory and a unified ‘pre-Romantic’ theory, but between a Romantic theory and at least three other possible theories. Abrams speaks of answering aesthetic questions ‘in terms of the relation of art to the artist, rather 1 M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London and New York, 1953) (hereafter Abrams). 2 From Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare; see Abrams, p. 30, and Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Walter Raleigh (London, 1908), p. 10. 3 Abrams, Preface. 4 Quoted by Abrams, p. 226. 5 Abrams, p. 3.

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than to external nature, or to the audience, or to the internal characteristics of the work itself’.6 This suggests that there are as many as four possible kinds of critical theory, and that the thesis of The Mirror and the Lamp will be easier to grasp if some preliminary map-work makes clear the ways in which critical theories can differ from each other. Accordingly Abrams prefaces his study with an introductory chapter called ‘The orientation of critical theories’, in which he provides a beautifully elegant and simple model for classifying different approaches to criticism – a model which has become classic for understanding the history of criticism. Abrams proposes that there are four basic coordinates which must be allowed for in any comprehensive critical theory. These are (1) the work itself; (2) the artist who made it; (3) its subject matter – what it is about – for which he uses the deliberately vague term ‘universe’; and (4) its audience. These four elements can most conveniently be represented by a triangular diagram, with the work itself at the centre and the other three radiating from it.

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Fig. 8.1 Abrams’s scheme By using this diagram it is possible to ‘translate as many sets as possible [of statements about art] onto a single plane of discourse’,7 and thereby to identify the real points of contrast between them. For although, as we have seen, any comprehensive critical theory must say something about all four coordinates, practically every theory that has been important in the history of criticism has as its distinctive characteristic a tendency to concentrate on one of them as primary. There are therefore four major ‘families’ of critical theories, as well as many subtypes and mixed varieties, which can be very simply identified. According to Abrams, the oldest critical theory in the West takes the ‘universe’ as its crucial coordinate. This is the mimetic theory, whose classic exposition can be found in Book I of Plato’s Republic. Art is here defined as imitation. The theory is complicated in Plato himself by his belief that the visible world is already nothing 6 7

Ibid.; my italics. Ibid., p. 5.

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more than an imitation of the eternal Ideas, so that the poet is an imitator of imitations or copies – hence his lowly status in Plato’s scheme of things. But if this complication is removed we have quite a simple definition of art as the imitation of the external world. Though critical practice has in fact rarely valued pure representationalism in art, the belief that imitation ought to be a primary concern of the artist has often been a more or less unquestioned assumption. This is so in Johnson’s formulation already cited, and (to take one further example from many possible ones) in Ben Jonson’s definition of comedy in words allegedly borrowed from Cicero: imitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis, imago veritatis.8 Secondly, a critical theory can concentrate on the audience: an approach which Abrams terms pragmatic. Such a theory arises from the assimilation of poetics to rhetoric – classically seen in Horace’s Ars Poetica – where literary art is judged by its success in persuading or moving its readers or hearers. The pragmatic approach was in practice the dominant Western theory from Horace onwards. It becomes explicit in European criticism after the Renaissance, and in England its most notable proponent (despite his attachment at the same time to a mimetic theory) is Dr Johnson. The famous line ‘The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing’9 serves to sum up his position. The reason why Shakespeare is to be commended for accurately recording all the facets of human life is that such imitation affords the reader the keenest pleasure, and therefore renders him or her receptive to his teaching; and insofar as Shakespeare on occasion writes ‘without any moral purpose’ and thus fails to instruct the reader or spectator, he deserves (according to Johnson) some degree of censure. Both mimetic and pragmatic theories, despite their venerable history, strike few chords in the average modern reader, who is apt to find an interest in representational art a sure sign of the philistine, and to think Johnson’s belief that art should edify a misplaced moralism. Both will be dismissed by most people today as essentially ‘unliterary’: poems should not be assessed as if they were sermons, and as for representation, we may well find ourselves agreeing with Rebecca West that ‘A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned thing is ample.’10 That we react in this way, however, only shows how far we are heirs to the Romantic movement, which embraced the third sort of critical theory, dubbed by Abrams expressive. In expressive theories, the criterion of aesthetic value is the success of art in communicating the emotion of the artist, and the good poem is a vehicle by which we enter into the poet’s own experience and reconstruct it in ourselves. It is not surprising, then, that it is in Romantic criticism that the lyric poem moves for the first time to the centre of the literary stage, displacing epic from its traditional place of honour, since it is in lyrics that the identification of the speaking voice with the poet’s own soul is easiest. In the Preface to his own Lyrical Ballads in 1800 Wordsworth sums up the expressive theory perfectly: ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’11 Exactly a century later we find essentially the same 8 9 10 11

Ben Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour III, vi, 201ff.; quoted in Abrams, p. 32. See Johnson on Shakespeare, p. 16. Quoted by Abrams, p. 100. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (London, 1800).

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idea somewhat more floridly expressed in Sir Arthur Quiller Couch’s preface to the Oxford Book of English Verse: The numbers chosen are either lyrical or epigrammatic. Indeed I am mistaken if a single epigram included fails to preserve at least some faint thrill of the emotion through which it had to pass before the Muse’s lips let it fall, with however exquisite deliberation.12

It was wholly consistent with such a view for early Romantic critics in Germany to regard music as the purest form of art, since there more than in literature it is impossible to see the communication of a message or the imitation of nature as central, and an ‘expressionistic’ interpretation lies ready to hand. It is against expressive theories that the main thrust of much of the criticism of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot was directed, and with them and their followers we arrive at the fourth family of critical theories, which Abrams calls objective: theories where interest centres on the work itself, considered as an object over which neither writer nor reader exercises any control. In 1953 it was perhaps not quite clear that proponents of objective criticism formed a unified school, but most critics now think that they did, and at least in its North American version objectivism often goes by the name of the ‘New Criticism’. There are affinities with Russian Formalism, and with the earlier forms of structuralist criticism. Objectivism too has classical roots; as Abrams shows, Aristotle’s Poetics can well be seen as the application to tragedy of a mainly objective theory of art, concerned with the internal relations within a work rather than with its relation to author, reader or the external world. By the early 1960s objective criticism (especially in the form of the ‘practical criticism’ pioneered by I.A. Richards) was in the ascendant over other theories in the teaching of literature, and if we find Quiller-Couch’s interest in the Muse’s emotions slightly comic, that is probably because we have acquired from objective criticism the sense that a poem is an independently existing artefact, rather than ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. II Abrams’s model is so simple, so illuminating and such a powerful analytical tool that I have been led to wonder if it could not be adapted so as to provide biblical critics with a map on which to locate the various theories and methods that play so large a role in biblical scholarship today.13 Rather than presenting the case for such an adaptation first, I propose to set out the schema with which I have been experimenting, and then to give examples of what seems to me its considerable usefulness in resolving some questions about the interrelationships of various critical methods. Here is the basic diagram:

12

Oxford Book of English Verse, ed. A. Quiller-Couch (London, 1900), p. ix. I used the adapted diagram described here in my Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study (London, 1984), but with less detailed explanation than I provide here. 13

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Fig. 8.2 A biblical adaptation of Abrams’s scheme A preliminary survey of the history of biblical criticism (which I shall modify as we proceed) would probably run as follows. Until the rise of the ‘historical-critical method’, the overwhelmingly most common theory about the Bible corresponded to Abrams’s ‘mimetic’ mode: in other words, it was concerned with the coordinate ‘historical events or theological ideas’, which occupy the same place in our scheme as ‘the universe’ in Abrams’s. The biblical text mirrored reality; the events it reported were events that had happened in the real world, the theological ideas it presented to the reader were theological truths about God and humanity and nature. Fundamentalists continue to occupy this position, but critical scholarship has moved to the place occupied in the diagram by ‘author(s)’. Biblical criticism in the modern sense can be said to begin when readers of the Bible, faced with inconsistencies or contradictions, cease to ask in the first instance ‘What, then, really happened?’ or ‘How can we find theological truth in the light of these divergent testimonies?’, and instead start to inquire about the intentions of the author (or authors) of the texts in question. Another way of putting this is to say that pre-critical study of the Bible assumes that the biblical record corresponds directly to external reality, whereas for the critical scholar it corresponds with reality only at second-hand (at best), via a primary correspondence with the intentions of some writer or writers. James Barr illustrates this point with a diagram which can be seen to form one segment of ours:14

14

J. Barr, The Bible in the Modern World (London, 1973), p. 61.

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Fig. 8.3 Barr’s scheme (A corresponds to our ‘historical events or theological ideas’, B to ‘author(s)’, and C to ‘text’. The advent of biblical criticism represents a move from A to B. Position C, study of ‘the text itself’, will concern us next.) I shall want to argue later that the story is in reality more complicated than this makes it seem, but for the moment this account will serve. An important point, and one which I shall go on to develop, is that all the traditional forms of biblical criticism (‘literary’ or source criticism, form criticism and redaction criticism) belong, from our point of view, at the same place on the diagram. The first really fresh departure comes with the attempt, first encountered no earlier than the late 1940s or early 1950s, to read the Bible ‘as literature’, not in the sense of reading it for aesthetic pleasure (a considerably earlier development), but in the sense of reading it in the same way as literary critics read secular literature. What biblical critics who support this approach seldom make clear is that they are interested in reading the Bible as modern – that is, post-Romantic, post-Eliot – critics read secular literature.15 With this proviso added, it becomes clear that what is being proposed is a shift to the centre of our diagram (Barr’s point C), in other words to concentration on the text itself as the proper business of criticism. This, it seems to

15

There is a lack of clarity about this, for example, in N.R. Petersen, Literary Criticism for New Testament Critics (Philadelphia, 1978).

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me, is clearly where B.S. Childs’s ‘canonical approach’ belongs; and a good many of the books and articles that have ‘structural’ or ‘structuralist’ somewhere in their title, or which talk about a ‘synchronic’ or ‘holistic’ reading of the Bible,17 should be located in the same place. They correspond, within biblical studies, to ‘objective’ theories of literary criticism. Finally, we might argue that in some very recent biblical scholarship there is evidence of a shift to the coordinate marked ‘reader’; but this is the most problematic of the four types, and will require a more detailed exposition. Bearing in mind this basic outline classification of critical and pre-critical approaches to the Bible, we can now go on to examine some particular examples in more detail, and try to show the explanatory value of our scheme. III Historical Criticism and the ‘Canonical Approach’ Proponents of any new approach tend to make extravagant claims for it: such is human nature. In following pioneers, however, one is always wise to find some way of determining for oneself exactly how new their proposed route really is, if one is to avoid the equal and opposite dangers of following an apparently exciting new road which deviously loops back on to the old path and merely wastes time, and of taking an alternative route which claims no more than giving access to better scenery, only to find oneself right off the edge of the map. Form criticism, redaction criticism and the ‘canonical approach’ have each in turn given rise to extravagant claims of novelty and excitement; our chart helps to introduce some sense of proportion into these claims. Most students of the Bible are probably convinced by now that form criticism, for all its difference from the source-analysis of the last century, belongs in the same conceptual realm. The suggestion that many biblical texts have an oral pre-history, that they were used in particular social settings rather than coming into existence as written texts from the beginning, and that they are therefore the product of the community rather than of ‘authors’ in the modern sense, represented an important advance in the study of the Old Testament; but in our terms it is essentially a refinement of author-centred criticism: for ‘author’, now read ‘authors’ or ‘tradents’ or ‘the community’. Redaction criticism, however, often strikes students of the Bible 16 Among B.S. Childs’s numerous publications in this field the following are particularly relevant to the present discussion: ‘The Exegetical Significance of Canon for the Study of the Old Testament’, VTS 29 (1978), pp. 46–68; ‘Interpretation in Faith: The Theological Responsibility of an Old Testament Commentary’, Interpretation 18 (1964), pp. 432–49; Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia and London, 1979); and ‘The Old Testament as Scripture’, Concordia Theological Monthly 43 (1972), pp. 709–22. 17 See, for example, R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (London and Sydney, 1981); Structural Analysis and Biblical Exegesis, ed. R. Barthes, F. Bovon and others (Pittsburgh, 1974); P. Beauchamp, ‘L’analyse structurale et l’exégèse biblique’, VTS 22 (1972), pp. 113–28; D. Jobling, The Sense of Biblical Narrative: Three Structural Analyses in the Old Testament, JSOTSup 7 (Sheffield, 1978); D. Patte, What is Structural Exegesis? (Philadelphia, 1976).

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as a more radical departure. Insofar as redaction critics very consciously distinguish their own interest in what the redactor of a text meant from any concern for the truth of the matters which the text deals with, they are undoubtedly making a sharper break with a pre-critical reading of the text than was in practice the case in source or form criticism. Thus, where a critic like Streeter could be seen as analysing the Gospels into their sources in order to reconstruct the most primitive and hence most authoritative traditions, the author of a ‘Theology of St. Luke’ is much more obviously bracketing out questions of historical veracity.18 But in principle this is merely a matter of emphasis. The fundamental shift, from a ‘mimetic’ to an ‘expressive’ theory, has already been made, and the redaction critic is doing no more than to take the critical interest in the author’s intention, as against the factual data, to its logical conclusion. The whole of ‘historical-critical’ method belongs, in fact, to the position on our diagram marked ‘author(s)’. Just as with secular literary criticism, so with biblical scholarship, absolutely pure specimens of the four possible positions are rarely encountered; and it might make sense to say that redaction criticism is the purest form of author-centred criticism. The earlier methods, and even more so their combination to produce tradition-historical criticism, retain some concern for ‘historical events’; but they already differ decisively from pre-critical study by insisting that these events can be recovered only through historical criticism, not by a straightforward reading off of ‘facts’ from the biblical record, such as fundamentalists still believe in. The traditional methods therefore form a coherent family, even though there are variations within it. But Childs’s ‘canonical approach’ represents a real shift of perspective. It is sometimes asked whether his canonical readings of biblical books do not in the end amount merely to the ultimate in redaction criticism, but I am convinced that this rests on a misunderstanding of what he is trying to do. The distinction can be most easily drawn by contrasting his work with that of Sanders, who (unlike Childs) is willing to use the term ‘canon criticism’ .19 Sanders’ work is essentially a sophisticated study of the final stages in the growth of the Old Testament, which he sees (in a manner somewhat similar to von Rad’s suggestions in ‘The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch’20) as the development of a quite early understanding of Israel’s history. In the process Sanders uses source, form and redaction criticism, as well as the traditio-historical approach; and because he understands the self-appraisal at which Israel eventually arrived as in some way providential, he argues further that 18 I have in mind H. Conzelmann, Die Mitte der Zeit. Studien zur Theologie des Lukas, BHTh 17 (Tübingen, 1954; 2nd edn 1960, translated as The Theology of St. Luke (London, 1960)). 19 See J.A. Sanders, Torah and Canon (Philadelphia, 1972). Sanders and Childs are well compared in the penetrating study by F.A. Spina, ‘Canonical Criticism: Childs versus Sanders’, in Interpreting God’s Word for Today: An lnquiry into Hermeneutics from a Biblical Theological Perspective (Wesleyan Theological Perspectives 2), ed. J.E. Hartley and R. Larry Shelton (Anderson, Ind., 1982), pp. 165–94. 20 See G. von Rad, Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuch, BWANT IV:13 (Stuttgart, 1934); also in Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament (Munich, 1958), translated as ‘The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch’, in The Problem of the Hexateuch and other Essays (Edinburgh and London, 1965).

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the canonical shape of the finished Old Testament has some authority even for the modern Christian. But his study is essentially historical-critical. Childs, by contrast, is interested only peripherally in the intentions of those who produced our canonical Scriptures, only where these intentions can provide a clue to the canon’s inherent and objective meaning; and he regards historical criticism undertaken as an end in itself as a complete waste of time and misapplication of critical energies. The text itself is what matters for him; and in this we have a far more radical shift of interest than in any previous refinement of method. When he rejects the expression ‘canon criticism’ on the grounds that it might seem to suggest merely one more ‘criticism’ to be added to the existing list (‘source’, ‘form’, ‘redaction’, ‘traditio-historical’ and so on), he is correctly perceiving that his work represents a really radical innovation in biblical studies. One may, of course, hold that it is also a radically wrong-headed innovation; but we shall be wrong if we suggest that we have seen it all before. ‘Objective’ biblical criticism never existed before Childs.21 Two further remarks might be made on Childs’s approach. First, I have been careful not to argue that he depends on any movement in ‘secular’ criticism, such as the New Criticism. He himself sharply rejects any suggestion that he has been influenced by secular critics, and there is no reason why we should not accept his own perception in this. This in no way affects our observation that the shift from historical biblical criticism, even in its redaction-critical form, towards the canonical approach is formally the same as the shift from ‘expressive’ to ‘objective’ criticism in the wider literary world. If this is so, then possible objections to (for example) the New Criticism could quite reasonably be applied, with suitable modifications, to Childs’s work, without this implying any bad faith on his part in failing to acknowledge his sources, and equally without being vulnerable to the response that the New Criticism did not in fact have any influence on him. I have attempted to carry out this task in my book Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study.22 Secondly, Childs’s attempt to have his cake and eat it by claiming both that his method is radically new and that it represents a return to the practice of the Fathers (or the Reformers) must be rejected.23 It is quite true that patristic exegesis often works with the final form of the text and expounds it as it stands, and does not ask questions about the intentions of the (human) author, the date of composition and so on; but the similarity between this and Childs’s ‘canonical’ reading is of the most superficial kind. For the Fathers, the intention of the author or the circumstances in which he wrote do not stand between the text and the truths it reports, but are a wholly transparent vehicle of those truths. This is miles removed from a critical decision to treat even composite texts as though they were a unified whole. This contrast, again, is developed at length in my longer study.

21

For a detailed comparison of Childs and Sanders, see J. Barr, Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism (Oxford, 1983), pp. 156–8. 22 See note 13. 23 See Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, p. 42 (with reference to Augustine’s de doctrina christiana).

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Structuralist Criticism At about the time as Abrams was writing The Mirror and the Lamp, critics in France were beginning to experiment in applying the insights of structural linguistics, in the form developed by Saussure and his disciples, to the study of texts at a literary level. Just as structural linguistics has contributed to the study of language the crucial idea of synchronicity, that is, the idea that a natural language in any given period forms a unified system, the meaning of whose parts is a function of their interrelationship within that system, rather than of their history, so structural (or structuralist) poetics began to work with ‘synchronic’ readings of texts. Instead of seeking the meaning of a text by asking what its author meant by it – the ‘historical’ approach of all expressive criticism – we should try to read texts as they stand, and see their meaning as a function of the interrelatedness of their parts. I do not need to chart the course by which this kind of structuralist reading has found its way into biblical studies. It is sufficient to say that we have here not simply an analogue to secular criticism, as in the parallel between the ‘canonical approach’ and the New Criticism, but a direct use of a secular critical method in biblical studies. The early development of structuralist criticism may reasonably be regarded as a Gallic version of the ‘objectivist’ approach that was to become, in America, the New Criticism. As Jonathan Culler, one of the leading English exponents of structuralism, suggests, ‘the conclusion that literature could be studied as … a system with its own order … has been eminently salutary, securing for the French some of the benefits of Anglo-American “New Criticism”’.24 Like the New Critics, structuralists were interested in ‘the text itself’; in Abrams’s diagram they would clearly belong in the centre, and their biblical disciples would, equally, be at home in the centre of our version of it, alongside Childs. So far all is comparatively simple: according to our scheme, canonical criticism and structuralist criticism are subtypes of ‘objective’ criticism, which may have its earliest roots in Aristotle, but which came into its own only in the twentieth century. However, there have been fresh developments in structuralist thinking in the literary world which increasingly suggest that the map is changing again. These developments have not yet, I believe, made a full impact on biblical studies, but I suspect that we should be wise to prepare a place in our chart for them against their arrival, even though they may prove to be short-term visitors. Structuralist enthusiasm for ‘the text itself’ has been quite short-lived, for in the world of post-structuralism, semiotics and ‘deconstruction’ there is now something like unanimity that ‘the text itself’ does not, as a matter of fact, exist. What does ‘exist’ is reading: a highly formalized activity, whose conventions differ from one culture to another, and which has a high degree of artificiality. When an author writes words on paper he or she is producing a text which will be actualized in different ways by different readers, according to the set of reading conventions within which they choose, or are socially constrained, to read it. To objectify the text as though it had some existence that transcended the moment of reading is in its own way as ‘romantic’ as those theories which ‘objective’ criticism is so proud of itself for superseding. When critics, therefore, produce different ‘readings’ of a work, these are 24

J. Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London, 1975), p. 255.

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not to be judged as better or worse approximations to some ‘real’ meaning inherent in the text. They are to be understood as alternative ‘performances’, equally valid but making no sort of truth-claims.25 There can be little doubt that this kind of ‘post-structuralist’ critical theory would need to be placed on Abrams’s diagram in the ‘audience’ position, alongside ‘pragmatic’ theories such as that of Dr Johnson, though they make remarkably odd bedfellows. Perhaps, in fact, the diagram breaks down with the advent of this monster among critical theories; or perhaps we should find some fifth position, halfway between ‘work’ and ‘audience’. At any rate it is clear that an equivalent of it in biblical studies would occupy a similar position on our own diagram, and we might be more inclined to assign it to the ‘reader’ position if only because we have not so far found any other theory of biblical criticism that belongs there. My impression is that biblical studies have not yet thrown up anything exactly like this variety of post-structuralism: the most apparently avant-garde exponents of biblical structuralism prove on examination to be still at the stage of interest in ‘the text itself’, or even, I would claim, to represent extremes of redaction criticism dressed up in structuralist terminology.26 We can at least say that our diagram provides us with some criteria for recognizing post-structuralist criticism in biblical studies, if it ever arrives. ‘Reader-response’ criticism may well be heralding this arrival, but as yet I would hesitate to pronounce on this. The Bible as the Word of God: A Pragmatic Theory? As we have just seen, our biblical criticism diagram lacks until now any theory that occupies the ‘reader’ position, corresponding to Abrams’s ‘audience’: in other words, we seem to have nothing parallel to ‘pragmatic’ theories of art, where the criterion of success is persuasiveness or attractiveness to the reader or spectator. Barr’s diagram, it may be noted, lacks this element too. In view of the dominant position of pragmatic theories in secular criticism, this might seem puzzling. It will be remembered that pragmatic theories of criticism displaced mimetic theories, to speak very generally; and it could therefore be plausibly argued that the much longer ascendancy in biblical studies of a theory formally like the mimetic – that is, the theory that the Bible should be read for the true information it contained – arrested any comparable development in biblical studies. However, Abrams shows that lip-service was often paid in secular criticism to the mimetic principle long after 25 A useful introduction to this area is provided by J. Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London and Henley, 1981); see also Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. J.V. Harari (Ithaca, NY, 1979). 26 This seems to me true, for example, of much of R.M. Polzin’s very interesting work: see his Biblical Structuralism: Method and Subjectivity in the Study of Ancient Texts (Philadelphia and Missoula, Mont., 1977). The same might be said of R.C. Culley, Studies in the Structure of Hebrew Narrative (Philadelphia and Missoula, Mont., 1976) and of J.A. Loader, Polar Structures in the Book of Qohelet, BZAW 152 (1979) [Though in general I am not updating these essays, I must say here that I badly misjudged prevailing trends: reader-response criticism of course became a massive movement shortly after these words were written!].

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pragmatic considerations had in fact begun to sway practical critics – Johnson is a case in point. We might pause to ask whether any parallel tendency can be found in the history of biblical study. I believe that it can, and would see some such movement of thought in certain forms of the doctrine that the Bible is the Word of God. It is tempting to speak, as I did in my initial outline explanation of my own diagram, as though there were a single basic contrast between ‘critical’ and ‘precritical’ biblical study: pre-critical exegesis regarded the Bible as a source of information (treating it, in Barr’s terminology, as referential in function), whereas biblical criticism studies the minds of its authors (what Barr calls an intentional mode of study). But just as Abrams’s contrast between the ‘mirror’ and the ‘lamp’ proves on closer examination to be too simple and to hide what is really a four-way contrast, so here the suggestion that all pre-critical biblical exegesis rested on a referential or ‘mimetic’ model fails to do justice to certain subtleties. As we have seen, in this way of presenting the matter pre-critical exegetes find themselves in the same corner of our chart as fundamentalists. Superficially this is what we should expect, and it is undoubtedly how fundamentalists themselves perceive their own position. But any acquaintance with fundamentalist literature, on the one hand, and patristic or Reformation commentaries, on the other, will lead one to doubt whether they really belong in the same world. If we wanted to sum up the difference succinctly, we might point to the different ways in which Scripture functions for various commentators. Much patristic commentary, which more often than not takes the form of oral exposition of Scripture in sermons, clearly operates with a model for which the biblical text is a vehicle for God’s revelation of himself, rather than a reference book full of correct information. Certainly the Fathers, and indeed most Christians before the Enlightenment, believed that all the apparent information contained in Scripture was indeed accurate; but its inerrancy as what we might call brute fact was generally not an important issue for them. The conservative evangelical insistence that the Bible is primarily a book full of facts, like a text-book or encyclopedia, is surely a comparatively modern phenomenon, part of the legacy of rationalism and the Christian response to it in which fundamentalism was formed. For much pre-critical exegesis the biblical text is a medium through which God addresses the Christian reader or hearer, and it is a book by which the church is to be built up in the faith. A motto for this way of understanding Scripture might be John 20:31: ‘These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.’ There is some continuity between such a view and the idea sometimes expressed in (broadly) Barthian circles, that the Bible becomes the Word of God when it transforms its hearers as they receive it in faith.27 I am not concerned at the moment to comment on the theological adequacy of this idea, but merely to note that it is one useful way of expressing an attitude to Scripture that was characteristic of a good deal of pre-critical interpretation. It seems to me fair to describe this as a pragmatic theory of biblical study, in the sense that term bears in Abrams’s scheme. The Bible is not so much a source of information (though it is also that) as a means of edification, a tool which God uses to ensure that Christians are nourished in the faith. Seen in this light, a good deal of the biblical study that 27

See the discussion of this position in Barr, The Bible in the Modern World, pp. 18–22.

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preceded the rise of critical scholarship could in fact be located at the ‘reader’ position on our diagram, in that its primary (though not of course its exclusive) orientation is to the reader or hearer. It may be odd, as I have suggested, to find poststructuralists rubbing shoulders with Dr Johnson in this corner of the diagram, but he would surely find himself quite at home with a patristic approach, a style of biblical study that sought first and foremost for what could nourish the Christian soul. And in passing we might add that, if much traditional Christian thinking about the Bible is ‘pragmatic’ in its orientation, the same is even more evidently true of Jewish modes of interpretation, where (with the exception of certain specialized traditions) an interest in the purely referential or informative value of Scripture is quite weak by comparison with mainstream Christian exegesis – let alone with fundamentalism. All in all there seems a great deal to be said for differentiating between two different orientations in pre-critical biblical study, and for assigning much more of it to the reader-centred pole in our scheme than might at first appear. IV The attempt to adapt M.H. Abrams’s classification system for literary-critical theories to biblical criticism certainly does not solve all our problems in understanding the development of biblical studies, but it has proved, I think, to throw some light on a few obscure questions. In conclusion it may be said that it also contributes to a discussion which has been going on for some time among biblical scholars about the relationship between biblical criticism and literary studies in general. Proponents of text-centred criticism – especially in its structuralist forms – frequently lament the lack of contact between biblical scholarship and secular literary criticism in the past, and present their own preferred methods as putting the student of the Bible in touch with the literary world for the first time in the history of the discipline.28 Now it is certainly true that it is only since the rise of structuralism that biblical scholars have taken much interest in ‘the text itself’: as Barr29 points out, ‘text-immanent’ readings are a very recent feature of the biblical scene, still regarded as undesirably avantgarde by many established biblical scholars. What should also be stressed, however, is that the text-immanent approach is not of much greater antiquity in secular criticism. Biblical scholarship lags behind the literary world in this respect, but the lag is of the order of thirty, not three hundred, years. It is not simply that there were no ‘literary’ readings of the Bible in the eighteenth century; there were no ‘literary’ readings of any text, in the narrow sense in which ‘literary’ is used by supporters of synchronic or holistic criticism. Furthermore it should be remembered that historical scholarship of the kind most biblical scholars have been trained in may be out of fashion among secular critics where modern literature is concerned, but it can hardly be regarded as decisively superseded in areas of literary study which have more obvious affinities with biblical criticism. Students of medieval literature, for example, still commonly analyse the different recensions of texts, ask about their authors’ historical and social 28 See Petersen, Literary Criticism, and J.F.A. Sawyer, From Moses to Patmos: New Perspectives in Old Testament Study (London, 1977). 29 The Bible in the Modern World, pp. 63–5.

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setting, and trace the history of their source material. Medievalists are under the same pressure as biblical scholars from structuralists and other ‘literary’ critics, but the field has by no means yet been won for the newer methods.30 Our analysis confirms, in fact, that the course of secular and sacred criticism has been broadly the same in general outline, despite the many features peculiar to each. A long period in which criticism was interested chiefly in either the subjectmatter of the texts being studied or their effect on the reader was succeeded by a century or so of concern for the intentions and motivations of the authors of the texts. In literary studies generally this tended, for a variety of reasons, to be associated with a Romantic curiosity about the quality of the author’s inspiration and genius; in biblical studies with more mundane matters of date, place of writing and social setting. Since the beginning of the twentieth century there has been a shift in both fields to preoccupation with the text itself, considered as a verbal artefact existing in its own right; and in the last few years this has shown signs of being replaced by a fresh concentration on the audience, in theories (as yet hard to see in the round) which locate the meanings of texts in their performance or actualization by readers. The lack of contact between biblical scholars and their colleagues in the literary field has been very marked in some periods, but in the context of a longer historical perspective than most of those who are troubled by this allow themselves, it is a matter of two parallel courses of development that fall out of step from time to time, rather than a chronic alienation or a fundamental difference of interests.

30

See the discussion of these trends in J.A. Burrow, Medieval Writers and their Work: Middle English Literature and its Background 1100–1500 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 12–23.

Chapter 9

Reading the Bible as Literature: Two Questions for Biblical Critics A layman’s guide to medieval literature by J.A. Burrow, entitled Medieval Writers and their Work: Middle English Literature and its Background 1100–1500 (Oxford, 1982), seems to me to raise some issues that might profitably engage the attention of biblical scholars. Two questions in particular deserve an airing. The first represents something of a challenge to the traditional kind of historical criticism with which all students of the Old and New Testaments are familiar, and suggests that ideas drawn from the newer ‘literary’ approaches to the Bible may turn out to be needed even by those who retain a commitment to the historical-critical method; the second, by contrast, casts some doubt on the more far-reaching claims of these newer approaches and argues for a substantial continued use of historical criticism. I make no attempt to cast a balance at the end between the advantages and drawbacks of the rival camps in contemporary biblical study. Is Historical Criticism Anachronistic? The thinking behind this rather paradoxical question was greatly stimulated by Burrow’s work, but I can set it out more easily if I approach the subject obliquely, first making a couple of general observations about literary criticism in all its branches, and then turning to biblical studies in particular by way of some pregnant suggestions made by Burrow. I (1) Aesthetic theories, and especially theories of literature, usually exhibit a strange paradox. Almost all attempts to state a general theory of aesthetics are ostensibly intended to cover all kinds of art; but in practice they nearly always take their cue from the art of some particular preferred period or movement. In the realm of literary theory this is very easy to illustrate. ‘Classical’ or ‘Romantic’ theories of literature appear at face value to be competing statements of the kinds of meaning it is possible for a work of literature – any work – to express. Broadly speaking, a classical approach to aesthetics will find the meaning of a literary work in the interrelation of its parts, the formal character of its composition and the universal application of the ideas it expresses. Romantic theories, on the other hand, concern themselves chiefly with the thoughts or emotions of the poet, of which the work is seen as an almost compulsive expression. Both types of theory have traditionally

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been ‘intentionalist’, but classical types have much more easily led to an interest in the meaning which the text itself generates by its shape and composition (as in the so-called ‘New Criticism’), while Romantic theorists have usually located the work’s meaning in the powerful emotions of which it is no more than a vehicle. In principle, both ways of seeking meaning in art should be universally applicable. In practice, as everyone knows, critics have concentrated – sometimes very narrowly – on works that are especially congenial to their own theory. Thus literary theory passes by gradual stages into literary preference; or, to put it another way, literary preference leads to the erection of a framework of theory which ensures that only the theorist’s preferred types of writing will be reckoned as truly ‘literature’. Thus the neo-classicism of Pound and Eliot and their followers did not in practice lead to new ways of reading the Romantics, but rather to a shift in literary taste, rehabilitating the Augustans and the more contrived productions of the Metaphysicals. Thus also the more recent trends that outsiders, at least, call ‘structuralist’ began as an attempt to see literary meaning as inhering in the conventional systems within which literature operates, but quickly turned into a revolutionary programme to change the sort of literature that should be produced. Theories which begin as apparently descriptive systems (‘Literature is X’) very soon become prescriptive codes (‘Good literature is X’) and thence criteria for excommunication (‘Only X is literature’). We certainly now have enough historical distance from the early nineteenth century to see this process clearly at work in the Romantic movement, where Wordsworth’s formulation in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), ‘All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, very soon ceased to be a principle for understanding all good poetry and became the charter for writing poetry that understood itself in these terms. Poets, in consequence, began to see their ‘vocation’ (itself rather a new idea), in terms of cultivating certain kinds of emotion which could be distilled into verse, rather than in terms of acquiring various formal skills. And it was only a small step then to dismiss from the literary canon poets whose own understanding of their task was clearly defective when measured against such a standard: exeunt Pope and Dryden. This means, what is no doubt obvious in any case, that the history of literature and the history of literary criticism are tightly inter-woven. There is generally a considerable overlap between the kind of literature being produced in any period, and the styles of aesthetic theory then in vogue. Poets in most ages are also critics, and as such subscribe to some particular view of what art is; and there is a reciprocal relationship between their theory and their practice. It is rarely easy to say which comes first. Wordsworth found himself writing verse that was difficult to account for on a ‘classical’ theory; he developed a theory that gave a greater place to the poet’s emotions; this in turn stimulated him and others to write what we call Romantic verse. Sometimes, it is true, there is a striking instance of literature which we feel constrained to understand in terms of a theory that would not have been available to the poet himself. Thus someone might want to say that Donne was ‘really’ a Romantic poet even though he could not have articulated to himself a Romantic theory of poetry, which had to wait two hundred years longer to find conscious expression. But for the most part there is a strong correlation between theory and practice. This is the first point to be made by way of introduction: that literary artists are usually also literary theorists (not necessarily

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very articulately), and that theories of literature exercise a considerable constraint on the kinds of literature that get themselves written in any given period. (2) What critical approach should a modern critic use when studying literature from the past? Each age has had its own preferred style of criticism, and it is possible to chart the course that criticism has followed. One of the best classification schemes which enables us to see how literary criticism has developed is provided by M.H. Abrams in his classic work The Mirror and the Lamp (1953),1 and elsewhere I have summarized his scheme and tried to apply it to understanding the direction biblical criticism has taken and is now taking.2 Until the early years of the twentieth century the dominant theory used by most literary critics since Wordsworth had been a Romantic one, in which the primary question critics would ask of any work was what we could learn from it about the author, and especially about his emotional or ‘spiritual’ life. But this approach has been succeeded in turn by the neo-classicism of Eliot and his school, already referred to, and more recently by various sorts of formalism, mainly originating in French structuralism. Most recent of all are forms of ‘post-structuralism’ such as reader-response criticism, in which interest moves away not only from the author but even from the work itself and focuses instead on the process of reading, as a social institution. In biblical studies, for various reasons, a ‘historical’ approach having some affinities with the Romantic style of secular criticism has reigned supreme for nearly two hundred years, and it is only quite recently that serious biblical critics have begun to take an interest in other modes of study, which as yet are perceived by most biblical scholars as a single, undifferentiated alternative to historical criticism. For practical purposes most biblical critics will distinguish simply between a historical and a ‘literary’ approach meaning by ‘literary’ any way of studying texts that concentrates on features immanent to the text itself. Some ‘literary’ approaches have, in fact, more in common with the ‘New Criticism’ (this is true of B.S. Childs’s ‘canonical approach’), others with structuralism, but they all contrast so sharply with traditional historical criticism that they seem, from the perspective of a traditional biblical scholar, to form a single family. For our present purposes, therefore, it will probably be sufficient to divide literary criticism similarly into ‘historical’ and ‘non-historical’ or ‘aesthetic’, understanding this second category to include all theories of literature in which meaning inheres in the text itself independently of the intentions or wishes of its author. This is a comparatively crude division within the complex world of secular literary studies, but it will serve our immediate concerns well enough. In both the literary and the biblical worlds the impetus towards ‘nonhistorical’ (‘synchronic’) study of texts has been born of a certain impatience with the apparent irrelevance of much traditional historical (‘diachronic’) study to a contemporary appreciation of texts. Both literary and biblical critics have come to ask ‘What does this text mean now?’; they have grown impatient of an exclusive concern with what it meant when it was written. The author, after all, may be dead, 1

See especially Chapter 1. J. Barton, ‘Classifying Biblical Criticism’, ]SOT 29 (1984), pp. 19–35 (reproduced as Chapter 8 in this volume). See also my Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study (London, 1984). 2

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but his or her work is still with us; why should we not read it as it stands, and leave the dead to bury the dead? The decision that is required of the critic here is not one that can be made from within the discipline of critical study itself; it is what may be called a metacritical question, involving various philosophical considerations that carry us well outside literary studies. It is no part of the purpose of this paper to try to resolve it. The point which is to be made here is simply that the critic must make a decision; any critical judgements one may make on a literary work or on a biblical text must be either historical or non-historical in character. There is no middle way. To opt for the nonhistorical alternative means that all suggestions about the text’s meaning are to be justified in terms of features within the text as read by a modern reader; questions of the author’s intention, even of the author’s possible intention, are irrelevant. Such a reading can never coherently be charged with anachronism, since it is not making historical proposals about how the text could have been understood when it was written: it is asking about its coherence as it stands. To opt, on the other hand, for the historical alternative is to be committed to asking questions about what the author or authors of the text meant it to mean; to be interested in the quest for ipsissima verba; to seek out possible information about the literary conventions of the author’s day; and to want to get inside the author’s mind, and to find out what he thought he was doing in writing such a work. These are the traditional agenda of historical criticism, and they rule out suggestions for the meaning of texts that rest on (for example) reading as a whole a work which is in reality fragmentary, or finding ambiguity in terms which when the text was written had only one meaning. The two approaches are thus mutually exclusive. At the metacritical level the choice between them is clear-cut and admits of no compromise. Starting with these two preliminary observations, I now want to suggest that some very tangled questions arise as soon as we try to combine them. II Neither a biblical nor a literary critic is faced with any great problems in opting for the non-historical approach, and seeking to explicate a text by examining its internal relations and structures. Historical criticism, however, needs to deal with a problem which is not readily apparent, but which appears as soon as we tease out the implications of the preliminary observations above. The historical critic is presumably committed to taking into account not only the words of a writer, but also his or her underlying assumptions and beliefs. Unlike the non-historical, ‘synchronic’ or ‘textimmanent’ reading, historical criticism is not concerned merely with the surface of the text, but with the historical conditions under which its author wrote, including (among other things) the conventions of literature that were available and under whose constraints he or she operated. It is for this reason that critics are not content to specify the genre of an old text by reference to modern genres, but take trouble to reconstruct and understand the genres that were actually available when the text studied was being written. One cannot understand Homer historically without some knowledge of the existence of epic as a genre; and since epic no longer exists as a live option in modern literature, this inevitably entails a good deal of work in the

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history of literature as a necessary preparation for understanding Homer. In the same way, historical biblical critics would claim that we can understand Proverbs only if we have some knowledge of the conventions of ancient wisdom literature, another genre or set of genres that has more or less ceased to exist. So much is reasonably obvious, and indeed it is attention to historical questions of this kind that marks off proper historical criticism from the casual, uninformed reading of texts that so easily leads to shallow and anachronistic literary judgements. Now among the conventions of literature within which any author of the past worked, and which we try with great effort to reconstruct as a precondition of understanding ancient literature, will be some kind of consensus, however inarticulate, about what sort of thing literature is, what it is to be a writer, and what kind of meaning literary works are supposed to have: in short, some sort of theory of literature or theory of art. As I argued in the first preliminary point above, the theory and practice of literature are intimately interlinked, and part of the mental furniture of any writer which as historical critics we are obliged to attend to, is some notion of what literature is and of how it ought to be written. To revert to our earlier example: to understand Wordsworth’s poems, from a historical point of view, we need to know what Wordsworth saw as the essence and function of poetry. The fact that he embraced a ‘Romantic’ poetics is far from irrelevant to understanding the actual poems he wrote. This, no doubt, is also relatively uncontroversial. The information a historical critic needs includes information about the basic approach to literature held by the author being studied, whether that view is consciously articulated – as it was by many of the Romantics – or is more a matter of unspoken assumptions, an unquestioned set of expectations which the writer had not consciously formulated even to him- or herself. In this second case the critic’s job is of course harder, but may not be shirked on that account. This is part of what we need to know if we are to understand a poet fully. The question, however, to which this apparently straightforward discussion is leading is this. What happens when the historical critic is studying an author who held (consciously or unconsciously) a non-historical theory of literature? Suppose we are reading an author whose own belief is that the meaning of the very words he or she is in the act of writing does not depend on his or her intentions and is not conditioned by the conventions of language or literature operative at the time of writing, but inheres in the words themselves as part of an artefact which passes, on its completion, from the author’s control? Such a situation seems to make historical criticism difficult, to say the least, since the author (who for the historical critic is crucial) seems to be systematically refusing the role in which historical criticism casts him or her, and falsifying the reader’s reasonable expectations. The problem is similar to that facing a critic trying to write ‘classicist’ criticism of the Romantics, only ten times worse. It may seem perverse, indeed it probably is perverse, to analyse Wordsworth’s poems according to classical criteria, asking all the time about the prosody or the construction instead of concentrating, as the poet himself would want us to, on the emotional states being expressed. Many of Dr Johnson’s criticisms of Shakespeare, whom we are apt to see as a kind of Romantic before this time, seem nowadays to be tinged with some such perversity: for example, Johnson often applies a heavy test of verisimilitude, a ‘classical’ virtue in poetry, in places where to us (and no doubt

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to Shakespeare too) it appears inappropriate. But at least classical and Romantic theories share, as we have seen, a common commitment to the author’s intention as a relevant criterion for meaning. Wordsworth would have disagreed with Johnson about what sorts of intentions authors might properly have – Johnson required a desire to instruct, Wordsworth a longing to communicate profound emotion – but they would have agreed, in general terms, that a poem meant what its author meant by it. The contradiction between author and critic we are envisaging at the moment goes well beyond this. In the situation being imagined here, the critic is insisting on asking about the author’s intended meaning, while all the time the author is denying that such a thing exists at all. Since historical criticism regards the author’s own perception of his or her intentions as crucial, the historical critic will presumably be constrained by the author’s view of the matter; yet to accept what the author says then seems to imply that historical criticism is actually inappropriate for the matter in hand, since the author’s ‘intention’ is to produce an ‘intentionless’ work. This seems to yield the paradoxical conclusion that a rigorous pursuit of a historical approach would result, in such cases, in an obligation to practise a non-historical mode of criticism. Stated in this way, this may appear merely as a logical paradox, and indeed my point has obvious affinities with problems in philosophical logic such as the selfreferring propositions and riddles studied by Russell and Frege: the village barber who shaves all men who do not shave themselves and is then frozen into logical paralysis when asked whether or not he shaves himself, the Cretan who affirms that all Cretans are liars and therefore does not qualify for either our belief or our disbelief, and the rest of the Kafkaesque characters in the logicians’ menagerie. Such paradoxes are of interest, no doubt, to philosophers, but have little appeal for the average literary critic, still less perhaps for the average biblical critic, who might at this point in our discussion merely reassert a traditional belief that criticism of criticism is a sophisticated excuse for ignoring the biblical text, and read no further. Whether or not the theoretical discussion of such convoluted issues is worthwhile, however, it cannot be said that the situation I have constructed is an unreal one. Indeed, a few examples will show, I hope, that it is actually rather common, much commoner than one might suppose, and that it raises a number of awkward practical questions which practical critics of the Bible ought to give some thought to, since they affect even what we might call the purely exegetical, no-nonsense level of biblical study. III It is true that the examples which lie readiest to hand come from modern literature. There are, for example, stories about T.S. Eliot which stress his unwillingness to say what he meant by his poems except by repeating them in the same words: the bestknown is the anecdote about the undergraduate who asked him what he meant by ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree’, to whom Eliot replied that he meant ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree’. Eliot was not, we may suppose, just being awkward (though he was probably also being awkward); having released his text for public consumption, he did not believe that he retained any

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control over its meaning. This has undoubtedly raised problems for critics of Eliot who wish nevertheless to relate his poems to his life and his beliefs. It has tended to force them into a rather modest style of criticism which seeks to discover why he wrote the poems he did, rather than claiming to establish the meaning of the poems. In other words, critics have been well aware of the sorts of difficulty I have in mind in the case of an anti-intentionalist author such as Eliot, and have had to work within the constraints this imposes. Even clearer examples could be found in the literature produced by authors of a more or less ‘structuralist’ turn of mind. The tendency of critics to concentrate on works amenable to their own literary theories means that most criticism of such writers comes from within the structuralist camp itself, and so is not historical in character; but one of the problems traditional critics complain of in structuralist literature is precisely the one I have mentioned, that it seems deliberately designed to elude their normal critical categories. The hatred of structuralism and all its works that can be found in run-of-the-mill newspaper criticism of avant-garde fiction evinces a clear sense that such writers are not playing by the rules, that they are trying to put themselves above criticism. Writers who refuse to have intentions about the meaning of their own works induce in the critic a sort of paralysis; the impotence that the critic feels tends to come out in an undifferentiated rejection of them all. It would not be true, however, to say that the problem we are considering is confined to the criticism of modern literature; and it is here, at last, that I turn to the work of Professor Burrow, which makes this abundantly clear. As a medievalist who is sensitive to the pressures of modern literary theory, Burrow draws a number of striking contrasts between medieval and modern literature – most of which are not controversial, but which are nevertheless not always given due weight in criticism. For example, in describing the role of the audience in the production of literature in the Middle Ages, he writes: People in the Middle Ages treated books rather as musical scores are treated today. The normal thing to do with a written literary text, that is, was to perform it, by reading or chanting it aloud. Reading was a kind of performance. Even the solitary reader most often read aloud, or at least muttered, the words of his text – performing it to himself, as it were – and most reading was not solitary. The performance of a text was most often a social occasion.3

Now this sense that the literary work exists in its performance, rather than having its being on the written or printed page, has possible consequences for the location of literary meaning. Meaning is not so squarely in the hands of the author in an age which ‘performs’ its literature as it is in our entirely bookish literary culture. This complication is greatly enhanced if we attend to some of Burrow’s other comments on Middle English literature. Not only is there a difference in the way a written (or printed) text is received by its public; there is also a difference in what is supposed to be going on when a book is in production. For us, there is a clear distinction between ‘writing’ as a literary activity and ‘producing a book’ as 3

J.A. Burrow, Medieval Writers and their Work: Middle English Literature and its Background 1100–1500 (Oxford, 1982), p. 47.

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a physical or technological process. In Burrow’s words, ‘What is not composition is left to the compositor.’4 We should think it absurd for someone to say that he couldn’t write any more novels because he had forgotten how to mix the ink. But in the medieval situation writing is essentially a continuum, stretching from the copyist to what we should call the author, and any given writer may well move freely within that continuum. Even highly creative writers will unconcernedly copy other people’s words into their own texts; even copyists in a scriptorium will rearrange, condense, gloss and emend. There is little sense of the integrity of literary works as the product of a single creative imagination. Indeed, to the modern reader’s stupefaction, medieval writers often quite falsely disclaim the very creativity for which we admire them, and make positive claims to be collecting older material when they are in fact composing freely. ‘In this great age of the manuscript book’, Burrow writes, conditions encouraged a certain ‘intertextuality’ or interdependence of texts. Few works have the free-standing independence to which modern writers generally aspire; most are related to other texts by some degree of compilation, or translation, or even simple transcription. Yet in those works which still interest us this dependence upon other texts proves to be partially illusory. The writer himself will often encourage the illusion of dependence by assuming the role of translator or compiler when he is in fact writing his own words ‘in prime place’. The creative act of the auctor is concealed from the reader, as if to protect or excuse it.5

Granted that this modest assertion of dependence may be little more than a literary convention, the reason for the convention still needs explanation; and it clearly lies in a markedly different conception from ours of what the role of a writer is. The historical critic’s criterion of authorial intention as the key to a text’s meaning runs into as great difficulties here as it does with modern literature in which intertextuality is a conscious ploy. To ask about the detailed intentions of authors who understood themselves to be producing for public performance texts that were primarily a compilation and re-ordering of older texts is to ask an anachronistic question. To invoke the paradox again, only modes of criticism that are in some measure nonhistorical appear to be satisfactory on historical grounds. I do not think the implications of this discussion for the study of the Bible, and especially of the Old Testament, are difficult to discern. To a considerably greater extent than with medieval literature, the texts comprising the Old Testament are either anonymous or pseudonymous, and a century and more of historical criticism has demonstrated that they are very often composite, the accumulation of generations of transcription, of a more or less creative kind. Biblical critics attend partially and sporadically to the implications of this. In general, we take it seriously as soon as we are sure that we are dealing with second and third generation accretions and redactions of a text, where we cease to ask what the text means and ask instead how it was read. But when we are handling the original composition – the ipsissima verba of the first author, or the intentions of the generation that first told a story or sang a psalm – there we treat the reconstructed first stage in the text’s growth as something 4 5

Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 34.

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freely and creatively composed, something with an original authorial mind behind it. The secondary literature on both Testaments and on other ancient Near Eastern literature is full of the suggestion that second-generation scribes and transmitters did not see authorship as we do (often this is said as a way of exonerating them from charges of plagiarism and false attribution); but the first authors of biblical texts tend to be treated much more as authors in the modern sense. But this will not do. There was not in fact a single golden age, in which there were real authors in the modern sense, followed by a long secondary period of copyists. As in the Middle Ages, so in the days when our biblical texts were being written, the mentality which took no interest in originality and treated all words on paper as public property was universal. There is no reason to suppose that the authors of the little pieces of original bedrock that we dig down to with such labour in the Pentateuch or the prophets had a different view of their own ipsissima verba than of anything else that was written or recorded for posterity. The picture one gets from much that is written on the Bible is that then as now there were original creative authors who had their own literary identity, but that they existed as islands in a scribal sea that overwhelmed their work once it had been extant for a generation. But the islands may well be figments of an anachronistic modern understanding of literature. The original authors were, perhaps, part of the scribal sea themselves, sharing the same view of authorship as those who anonymously handed down and embellished what they had written. Let me make it clear that I am not saying we are necessarily wrong to detect the presence of creative innovators, even creative geniuses, among the biblical writers. Writers may hold an understanding of their own role which quite fails to do justice to their own originality – just as Chaucer can be clearly seen to have been more creative than he claims to be, living as he did in a literary culture for which creativity had not been articulated or at least not identified as a virtue; or just as Donne might be claimed as a Romantic two hundred years before his time. I am not saying that we ought to adopt the kind of approach advocated by Scandinavian scholars between the wars, according to which the Old Testament is the deposit of an undifferentiated tradition, and no more can be said about it. I am concerned with the narrower question of what kinds of meaning it is fruitful or proper to look for in the biblical text, and am suggesting that, given the historical possibilities I have presented, it may be anachronistic to look for the meaning even of ‘original’ Old Testament writers by asking questions about their intentions, their interests, what was going through their minds, what insights they wanted to communicate. Sometimes it may be that more appropriate questions would focus on types of meaning that do not require an author with intentions to mean them: the kinds of meaning, in fact, that newer, non-historical styles of criticism concentrate on. Let me develop this point a little further. IV The most obvious case in the Old Testament of texts that either had no authors, in the ordinary sense or whose authors were largely reworking traditional material and writing to a formula is the Psalms. Andrew Louth, in his book Discerning the Mystery, rightly identifies the psalter as a problem for traditional, author-centred historical criticism. He writes:

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THE OLD TESTAMENT: CANON, LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY What is the meaning of these poems that we recite, and continue to recite after three thousand years or so? Is it what the original writer intended, or what whoever it was who introduced the psalm into the worship of the Temple thought, or what? Clearly too restrictive an understanding of the meaning of a psalm will make nonsense of the recitation of the psalms and deny the basis of the spiritual experience of generations of Christians … The tendency of the historical-critical method has been to concentrate on originality and regard what is not original as secondary; but if we see here a process of inspired utterance and reflection on – comment on – inspired utterance within the tradition, itself regarded as inspired, then we have a more complicated but, I suggest, truer picture … The art of understanding is more complicated, and richer, than an attempt to isolate the earliest fragments and to seek to understand them in a conjectured ‘original’ context: we hear the voice and the echoes and the re-echoes, and it is as we hear that harmony that we come to understanding.6

Even if we could reconstruct a level in the psalter, or identify some particular psalms which really were the work of a highly original and creative poet, rather than a highly stylized use of stock forms, that would not necessarily render the historical question of the author’s intention any easier to resolve. For our putative original psalmist would be most unlikely to have understood his own task as essentially different from that of all the other psalmists and psalm-tradents who failed to produce such original works. Most likely he will have fully shared their view of themselves as anonymous craftsmen working to traditional designs; he will have had no particular sense that he was creating original literature to convey fresh ideas. Now it seems to me that our task as historical critics is to take very seriously such a writer’s perception of his own function. To do so will, paradoxically, involve us in asking primarily questions about the text-immanent features such as motifs, stock themes and underlying structures, which give the text a profound meaning that its original author would probably have been unaware of: we cannot investigate his intention, since in a sense he had none. To ask about the meaning of such an anonymous text is to ask what meaning its construction generates, independently of any intention on the poet’s part; but a question like this would normally be seen as belonging to a non-historical mode of criticism! Yet the alternative seems to be the loss of our intuitive sense that in the Psalms we are often in the presence of great poetry. If we are to continue to believe this, once we have properly faced up to the probability that the actual authors of the Psalms had no awareness of producing literature in this sense at all, it can only be by adopting an essentially non-historical type of critical approach: by seeking an explanation of the Psalms’ literary merit that is located somewhere other than in the intentions of the psalmists. We shall have to believe, in C.S. Lewis’s words, that there can be ‘poetry without a poet’.7 It is impossible to do justice to this unless there can be some understanding between practitioners of historical and non-historical criticism.

6 A. Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology (Oxford, 1983), p. 108. 7 E.M.W. Tillyard and C.S. Lewis, The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (London, 1939, 2nd edn, 1965), p.16.

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Something similar might be said of the book of Job. Historical criticism has often sought to establish the earliest form of this work, or at least to trace the various stages in its redaction. In recent years we have seen a much greater desire to read the book as it stands: to speak of the interests and intentions of the final redactor, and to deflect attention from the questions of ‘Introduction’ that traditionally played so large a part in critical study of the book. In the present context we might want to ask whether both approaches may not be somewhat misguided. Suppose the book is not, and was not at any stage in its development, the expression of a particular writer’s point of view, but rather an assemblage (within the framework of a traditional tale, and in the form of a poetic drama) of a large number of ‘stock’ positions on the questions of theodicy with which each part of the work deals in some way or other? Is it not possible that the writer was trying to provide a complete set – a sort of sampler – of all the arguments in common use on this theme? If so, then it would no longer be very appropriate to look for the ‘original meaning’ either of the first author or of the final editor. Job would not be ‘intentional’ at all. It is not only in the poetic parts of the Old Testament that issues like this arise. One of the great achievements of the redaction-critical approach has been to make us see the narrative books of the Old Testament not so much as evidence for historical events – though they may also be that – but rather as the work of historiographers who had a message to convey. Classic cases of this would be the Deuteronomistic Historian as reconstructed by Noth, and the Yahwist as reconstructed by von Rad. Michael Goulder has raised a question about these redaction-critical studies, however, which suggests to me that there is still some unfinished business here. Discussing Noth’s theories about the work of the Deuteronomic Historian, he writes: The completed D-corpus was never intended to be a literary work, laid by, like Hilkiah’s book of the law, to be found during Temple renovations. It was intended and used for liturgical proclamation.8

And in a similar vein, speaking of the complex pattern of inner-scriptural allusion that he believes can be found in Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, he first rejects the possibility that it is accidental, and then continues: A second, if remote, possibility might be that the Chronicler was an artist: seeing the natural parallel between the Kings story and the Pentateuch, he has elaborated it with the touches we have seen. Such a theory does not impress. Who wrote, who read works of art in the Jerusalem of 350 B.C.? The suggestion seems foreign to the Jewish mind, unpractical and pointless.9

One does not need to subscribe to Goulder’s own liturgical theory of the origins of these two narrative works to see that he has put his finger on a real difficulty in what may be called the consensus view of the redaction of biblical ‘historiography’. The redaction-critical interest in the motives and intentions of the editors has, in 8 M.D. Goulder, The Evangelists’ Calendar: A Lectionary Explanation of the Development of Scripture (London, 1978), p. 114. 9 M.D. Goulder, Midrash and Lection in Matthew (London, 1974), pp. 218–19.

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fact, pushed to one side a question that earlier form- and traditio-historical criticism had paid more attention to: the question of the intended use of lengthy narrative material in ancient Israel. Scholars sometimes speak of the D history’s having been ‘published’ during the Exile: but in what sense published? Even if we do not adopt a theory of liturgical origins for it, we can scarcely think of it as a literary history for circulation among the literate elite, or for deposit in a public library. When we ask what the redactor is trying to convey, what view of Israel’s history he would like his readers to accept, we need to be clear what kind of social setting we are presupposing. In what contexts in Israel during the exilic age could one encounter such a work as the D history and be either convinced or unconvinced by its lines of argument? Form critics have written much about the Sitz im Leben of the einfache Formen of which much of the Old Testament is supposed to be composed; but what was the Sitz im Leben of long narrative works such as Joshua-Kings or Chronicles? It is quite true that we do not know, and perhaps we should not waste time on unanswerable questions; but it is also true that to speak of the intentions of the redactors of the D history tends to imply that we do know, since it tacitly presupposes a literary culture not unlike our own, in which books are written by private individuals and read by the literate for pleasure or instruction. Was Israelite society in the exilic and post-exilic ages like that? Ought not this question to be on the agenda of Old Testament studies? Is there any Literature in the Old Testament? By reminding ourselves of a number of aspects of the Old Testament on which, in themselves, there would probably be quite general agreement, we have been able to question some of the claims of ‘historical’ criticism to exclusive appropriateness. Old Testament literature, to an even greater extent than the literature of medieval England, is traditional literature, often anonymous and making no claims to originality; it frequently amounts to what might be called a creative transcription of earlier documents, rather than being the conscious product of an author trying to convey his own ideas. This already means that much of it is very different from what we normally call ‘literature’. However, there may be other ways in which ‘literature’ is not the most suitable description of the Old Testament, unless we define ‘literature’ much more broadly than is usual, and I want to suggest that this equally undermines some more recent trends in biblical study, which in their eagerness to apply the ‘nonhistorical’ or ‘literary’ methods developed in modern criticism are tending to argue that more traditional methods are not sufficiently sensitive to the ‘literary’ character of the text. I begin with a summary of an important section of Burrow’s book; most, of his remarks seem to me to apply, mutatis mutandis, to the Old Testament. I ‘Literature’ in most modern writing comprises, as Burrow says, poetry + prose + fiction + drama. There is a general agreement (despite protests from some literary theorists) to exclude discursive prose – scientific, philosophical, arid technical writing – from ‘literature’. ‘The huge and miscellaneous corpus of non-fictional prose . . .

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attracts relatively little attention either from critics or from literary historians, except in so far as it assists the study of poems, novels and plays.’10 The conceptual basis for this notion of literature may be found in the combination of two factors to make up an idea we may call ‘literariness’, littérarité. The first of these is a particular use of language, which might be summed up as follows: in literature language ceases to be merely a tool for the expression of thoughts, to which it seeks to be so far as possible transparent, and becomes instead an object of interest in its own right. Iris Murdoch has put this point very clearly: ‘Literary writing is art, an aspect of art form. It may be self-effacing or it may be grand, but if it is literature it has an artful intention, the language is being used in a characteristically elaborate manner in relation to the “work”, long or short, of which it forms a part … A philosopher [on the other hand] must try to explain exactly what he means and avoid rhetoric and idle decoration.’11 The second factor in ‘literariness’ is a certain relation to truth. ‘Literature’, says Burrow, is distinguished from history or philosophy or science as a fictional, or non-affirmative, or non-pragmatic, or hypothetical mode of discourse. It is not committed, in any ordinary, straightforward fashion, to the truth of the events which it reports or the ideas which it propounds … Northrop Frye says: ‘In literature the standards of outward meaning are secondary, for literary works do not pretend to describe or assert, and hence are not true, not false, and yet not tautological either.’12

And Burrow quotes the classic statement of this position from Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry (1595): ‘Now for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.’ This second idea is in origin Aristotelian: in the Poetics we find: ‘You might put the works of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history’ – that is, not poetry. As Burrow shows, this concept of ‘literature’ is hardly to be found in the Middle Ages in England. Eloquence does not entail fictivity; high style is rhetoric rather than ‘art’; the poet is under no self-denying ordinance which binds him, as a poet, to refrain from affirming. There are indeed works, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which are plainly literature in our sense, and where ‘final moral judgements are uttered, not by their author, but by Gawain, Bertilak, and the Round Table; and, since their judgements disagree, the ultimate effect is pleasingly oblique and nonaffirmative’.13 But there are many other works which clearly observe no convention of fictivity: we find, says Burrow, ‘sermons in verse, instructions for parish priests in verse, courtesy books and chronicles in verse, even poems on alchemy stained with chemicals’. 14 In practice most of such material is excluded from what is studied 10

Burrow, Medieval Writers, p. 12. In Men of Ideas: Some Creators of Contemporary Philosophy (London, 1978), p. 265. (This volume contains transcripts of a series of television interviews, under the same title, conducted by Brian Magee with various leading philosophers.) See also Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford, 1983), pp. 1–16. 12 Burrow, Medieval Writers, p. 13. 13 Ibid., p. 18. 14 Ibid., p. 19. 11

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under the heading ‘Middle English Literature’. But there is a great deal of medieval writing that occupies a sort of middle ground, which we certainly want to claim for ‘literature’, yet which has as its aim a direct, rather than an oblique, relation to truth, especially theological or moral truth. A good example is Pearl, where, says Burrow, ‘even the most literary of readers has to recognize … that one of the immediate objects of the poem is theological truth’.15 An even better example, if we move outside England, is Dante’s Divine Comedy. The Comedy contains lengthy passages of philosophical and theological exposition; but its claims to be literature can hardly be called in question! It is possible, as apparently some sixteenth-century critics did, to read these passages in an Aristotelian manner, as imitations of philosophical or theological argument; to suggest that Dante, in so far as he is a true poet, offers the reader not arguments and ideas but images of arguments and ideas, and the reader, in so far as he is a true reader of poetry, will look not to be convinced by arguments but to be delighted by their imitation.16

But to maintain this for the whole of the Comedy would be something of a tour de force. It is much more likely that Dante, whose conception of literature was much broader than ours, wanted to state certain ideas that he thought were correct, and saw no reason why he should not do this within the fictive framework of his poem. The notion that to do this was illicit was not available to him: he did not have our idea of littérarité. It is what seems to us this unhappy mixing of fiction and non-fiction, in fact, that makes medieval literature difficult for the modern reader. One last example from Burrow will serve to sum up the difficulty and to lead into a discussion of related problems in the study of the Old Testament: Critics are often excessively eager … to insist that this or that passage of philosophical or theological exposition in a medieval poem is to be read ‘dramatically’ – as the expression, that is, of the partial point of view either of the Narrator (a favourite figure) or of some character in the story. Such imitation of ideas, of course, does occur, in medieval literature as elsewhere. The long speech in which Chaucer’s Troilus argues the doctrine of predestination (IV 958–1078) should certainly be read dramatically, as a philosophical projection of the hero’s distress at the prospect of losing Criseyde … Yet not even Chaucer can be completely contained within the limits of literature, however hard critics may try. The Canterbury Tales (in its surviving fragmentary form) ends with the Parson’s Tale and Chaucer’s Retractation. The Parson’s Tale is a treatise on the sacrament of penance. The literary approach to the Tale will emphasize its appropriateness to its teller, a priest who would have administered the sacrament, and also its dramatic fitness as the last tale before the pilgrims enter the holy city of Canterbury; but such attempts to reabsorb the Tale into the spectacle of the Canterbury pilgrimage do not, I think, entirely convince the disinterested reader. Followed as it is by the Retractation, the Parson’s Tale seems to break out of the fictional world of the poem and confront the reader directly with the realities of penance.17 15 16 17

Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., pp. 21–2. Ibid., pp. 22–3.

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II Once again I do not think it requires much imagination to see that the student of the Bible faces problems similar to those encountered in the study of medieval literature. It is, again, primarily in the narrative books of the Old Testament that these problems arise; but that is serious enough, since narrative accounts for considerably more than half of the Old Testament, and similar questions cannot fail to be asked of the Gospels and Acts, too. There is coming to be a general consensus among critics who prefer ‘literary’ readings of the narrative books, to the effect that it is inappropriate to use them as sources of historical information at all. They are, it is said, works of literature, to be studied with the methods and aims proper to literature. In part this is, of course, a perfectly reasonable reaction against a fundamentalist insistence on taking the biblical histories as ‘evidence’ or ‘solid fact’ and nothing more. In part, too, it is a reaction against the positivism of the fact-centred approach of the Albright school of ‘archaeological’ criticism, who in their worst moments tended to treat the Old Testament as a mere repository of historical facts, and who seldom showed any understanding of the texts as literature at all. Nevertheless there is a danger that a ‘literary’ approach to the Bible could in its own way prove as anachronistic and inappropriate to the texts in question as other methods have been, by ignoring the difference between ancient and modern conceptions of literature. For us, as we have seen, a highly-wrought narrative style tends to carry implications of fictivity; but this may not have been so for the biblical writers, any more than it was for writers of medieval England. I doubt if we can say of the writer of Genesis or even of 2 Samuel that he ‘nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth’. My impression is that the writers of the Old Testament have as good an understanding as we have of the difference between fact and fiction, and that the author of the ‘Succession Narrative’ may well have been intending to convey factual information, just as the author of Tobit, for example, was almost certainly consciously aware of writing fiction. Where they differed from us was in their understanding of the kind of writing appropriate to the two types; for them, the difference was not closely correlated with a distinction between bald chronicling and ‘novel-like’ characterization and dialogue. To ask, then, whether the events recorded in works such as 2 Samuel actually occurred is not necessarily to reveal oneself as a hopeless philistine, insensitive to the questions proper to literary criticism; it is, rather, to recognize that modern literary criticism has excessively narrowed the range of questions deemed allowable, in a way that causes no serious distortions when modern literature is under examination, but is less appropriate in an ancient context. What goes for the events recorded in Old Testament narrative may also apply to the speeches with which the historical books are studded. When in the Deuteronomistic History we find lengthy sermons, placed in the mouth of Moses or Solomon or Ahijah, we may be sure that we are dealing with fiction, in the sense that they are inventions of the author or redactor; but this does not in the least imply that they are to be read obliquely, as imitations of what characters in the story might have said. On the contrary, the most notable feature of such speeches is their uniform house-style, and the complete concord with sentiments expressed by the redactor when speaking

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in propria persona (as in Judges 2:11–21 or 2 Kings 17:7–23). The reader is meant to take them seriously as statements of theological truth, not merely to entertain them as fictive, ‘in character’ utterances. The same is surely true a fortiori of divine speeches. As a matter of literary history, Yahweh is a character in a story told by the Deuteronomistic editor, the Priestly Document, the Yahwist’s history, or whatever it might be. But no one in ancient times ever saw him in that way, and if anything is certain it is that the authors in question meant, in these speeches of God, to convey to the reader or hearer a serious and non-fictitious divine address. The omniscience of the narrator, which extends even to what Yahweh said in private to Moses or to Solomon, is meant by the actual author to be taken at face value; the ‘Narrator’, whose distinctness from the author himself is so essential to most modern literary criticism, does not have this kind of independent existence for either the readers or the authors of the biblical histories, I would suggest. Consciously fictive narrative does exist in the Old Testament and Apocrypha, but hardly in the primary historyworks of the Pentateuch and Former Prophets. All this means that the application of modern literary techniques to this material is fraught with hazard. Conclusions The upshot of the present discussion is necessarily a certain coolness towards most theoretical positions about the kind of criticism appropriate in biblical studies. I have tried to suggest (with the help of Burrow’s illuminating discussion of medieval literature) that the books of the Old Testament do not fall easily within our category ‘literature’. On the one hand, they are in most cases anonymous, lacking the stamp of a single creative mind, and do not themselves operate with the notion of an ‘original meaning’ which is so crucial for traditional historical criticism. That suggests that biblical critics need to learn from their secular colleagues a mode of criticism appropriate to authorless, non-intentional texts. On the other hand, where we can speak of the intentions of the biblical writers, those intentions may well include a desire to communicate facts or ideas in a quite direct way. Not all points of view expressed, not all events reported in biblical texts are meant to be taken obliquely, as the ideas or actions of characters in a fiction; for these authors the ‘Narrator’ is sometimes thought to be God, who addresses the reader directly and can be expected to have an accurate grasp both of historical fact and of theological truth. And that means that traditional kinds of criticism cannot be simply set aside in the interests of a ‘literary’ (synchronic, holistic or fictive) reading. As promised at the beginning, I have no intention of quantifying the claims of the two sides to this question; but I am sure at least that both need weighing. The result would surely be a greater pragmatism in the use of the various methods at the disposal of biblical scholarship. By becoming more sensitive to questions of literary convention, genre and audience expectation – the sorts of issues that interest ‘literary’ critics – traditional historical scholarship could, I have suggested, actually become more historical, not less, and could avoid the risk of anachronism in understanding writers who lived in a very different literary culture from our own. On the other hand, those of a more ‘literary’ turn of mind need to remember that ‘literature’ has not always been the

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tightly-defined thing it is now; in the past it has often included discursive writing which did not confine itself to a fictitious world with its own laws, and sought to be justified in terms of truth-claims, as well as of what we now think of as ‘merely aesthetic’ features. Both styles of criticism have a tendency to narrow our vision of what is actually in the Bible. Like all other kinds of criticism, they tend to recast the material they are studying in their own image. We cannot clear our minds of all literary presuppositions when we approach the Bible, but it cannot be a bad thing to spend time occasionally clarifying what our presuppositions are.

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Chapter 10

Historical Criticism and Literary Interpretation: Is there any Common Ground? There are of course many more than two positions among scholars about the way to interpret biblical texts. But my shorthand terms, ‘historical criticism’ and ‘literary interpretation’, point to a tendency to polarization in our field which would be widely acknowledged. Biblical studies at the moment well illustrate the phenomenon structuralists used to be so interested in, the binary opposition, and a few such pairs will be enough to identify the two trends involved: diachronic vs. synchronic; historical vs. literary; objectivist vs. subjectivist; empirical investigation vs. literary theory; what the text meant vs. what the text means (or what readers may mean by it). Discussion between supporters of what might be called the right-hand or lefthand options in this list has become rather acrimonious, where it has not been broken off altogether, and there is considerable mutual suspicion and even mutual contempt. Occasionally a writer appears who tries to bridge the gap: one that comes to mind is Eep Talstra, whose monograph Solomon’s Prayer1 is a conscious attempt to combine a synchronic with a diachronic approach to 1 Kings 8. But they do not disturb the growing sense that our armies, like so many we read of in the Old Testament, are drawn up on opposite hills with a great valley between. The difference, of course, is that in our case each camp thinks it is the other that contains the Philistines. In asking whether there is any common ground I am not pretending to occupy a neutral position myself. Nor do I want to argue that there are really no fundamental differences between them, as if peace could be restored by a lazy eclecticism – treating contradictory critical theories as though they were simply alternative items on a menu from which students of the Bible can choose whatever happens to appeal to them. The conflicts are not illusory or trivial, but reflect passionately held convictions about what it is to read a text. The extent of the disagreement, at a high theoretical level, can be gauged from the fact that the two sides never agree even in formulating just what the disagreement between them is. Typically, people committed to so-called ‘historical’ criticism tend to be objectivists, and hence to argue in terms of what texts ‘really’ or ‘actually’ mean; whereas most literary interpretations regard it as obvious that texts have a plurality of possible meanings. The two positions thus do not clash head on, differing about what the text means; they slide past each other without real engagement. Whereas historical criticism has 1

E. Talstra, Solomon’s Prayer: Synchrony and Diachrony in the Composition of 1 Kings 8, 14–61, Contributions to Biblical Exegesis and Theology 3 (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1993).

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the goal of advancing our objective knowledge about a text, most literary critics think this is a hopeless quest. They talk not of where the evidence inexorably leads us but of the kinds of meanings that can be found now that we are working with a new, post-historical-critical paradigm. ‘Paradigm’-language seems to have become embedded in our current discussions of method,2 and it perfectly illustrates my point. For it is not as if everyone agrees that there is something called the ‘historical-critical paradigm’, and that scholars committed to new methods attack this while traditionalists defend it. That is how it looks to those who attack historical criticism. But for historical critics themselves, to use ‘paradigm’ language is already to have sold the pass. The ‘paradigm’ paradigm, if I may call it that, already presupposes the relativism that traditional scholars rightly see, and (whether rightly or not) object to, in newer methods. ‘Paradigm’ language implies that there are many valid ways of reading texts, and I choose this one, or that one. But what we have come to call ‘historical’ criticism never saw the matter in those terms. Historical criticism was never meant to be one valid option among many: it was supposed to yield truth, and truth independent of the outlook of the investigator. There is thus no way, at the theoretical level, in which older and newer-style critics can even communicate their differences, let alone find agreement. They cannot even agree what it is they disagree about. On both sides there is an awareness of belonging to irreconcilably opposed parties, which do not even enjoy a shared vocabulary for debate and are not, in fact, talking about the same things. A shared antipathy to ‘historical’ criticism unites such diverse critics as those committed to ‘close readings’ of the Bible in a humanistic vein (Alter, Kermode, Josipovici, Sternberg), and more experimental interpreters who draw on post-structuralism, deconstruction or various postmodernist modes of interpretation. And it is matched by the united front against a common enemy that can now be seen among the otherwise equally diverse proponents of traditional historical criticism. Very few envoys pass between these two opposing forces; at most the odd giant challenging opponents to single combat. All this may make the question which forms my title seem pointless. There is no common ground unless we abandon the claims of both groups to intellectual seriousness, and trivialize the questions they ask. However, I want to suggest that there are more similarities between our two approaches than appears on the surface, and that it is possible to take their ultimate incompatibility seriously without thereby making all dialogue between them impossible or unfruitful. First of all I shall examine two (possibly unexpected) resemblances between so-called ‘historical’ criticism and at least certain types of literary approach; then I shall try to point to two ways in which collaboration seems to be essential if interpretation is to make any progress.

2

Compare the comments on this in my Oxford inaugural lecture, The Future of Old Testament Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), reproduced as Chapter 13 in this volume.

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I There are two points of resemblance between these apparently so different approaches to criticism. First, I would argue that ‘historical’ criticism has always been more like literary interpretation than it seems. Traditional critics, when reviewing literary studies of the Bible, tend to use the distinction sometimes made by contrasting exegesis – understood as exposition of what is actually said in the text – with eisegesis, pseudo-Greek for reading one’s own ideas into a text that does not really contain them. Eisegesis of course is a term of abuse, but most current literary theory would regard the ‘reading in’ of the reader’s ideas into the text as unavoidable, and not just unavoidable but something it makes no sense to try to avoid: reader-response criticism only states explicitly what most other literary critics take for granted. Historical critics on the other hand try to avoid ‘reading in’ wherever possible. This apparently amounts to a complete contrast between the two styles of criticism. However, once we move from theory to practice, the distinction becomes far more blurred, and it would be good if critics on both sides were to recognize this. It was acknowledged a long time ago in perhaps a surprising place, E.D. Hirsch’s important book Validity in Interpretation3 – surprising because Hirsch has come to be seen by many as the epitome of opposition to the more reader-orientated methods of recent years. Hirsch has a section called ‘The Self-confirmability of Interpretation’. This makes the point that all readings of texts are in some measure self-confirming. The reason for this is that any reading, however tentative, orders the text in at least a preliminary way, imposing structures of understanding upon it. Hirsch’s observation, made from a ‘historical’ point of view, is in practice very close to what might be said by a ‘post-critical’ literary interpreter. The theoretical basis is different in the two cases. Proponents of ‘historical’ and ‘literary’ methods will argue about whether what is going on in reading is the recognition of a meaning already present in the text, or the attribution of meaning to the text (or indeed the discovery of meaning in dialogue with the text). Hirsch of course believes it is the first – recognition rather than attribution. So an irreconcilable theoretical difference remains. But the mental processes involved seem almost identical, and the reinforcement of the interpreter’s initial intuition of meaning by the way the text is read in the light of it feels just the same for both sorts of interpreter. The psychological experience of exegetical work cannot itself adjudicate between the different modes of criticism, but is compatible with either: a point, I believe, that it would be valuable for both sides to recognize. The same point might be made in a different way. Historical critics and their detractors sometimes seem to agree in thinking that historical criticism has about it a certain preference for ‘hard facts’. Historical critics, so literary interpreters allege, are not interested in the finished form of a text as it lies before us, but only in the bits from which (perhaps) it was originally put together. Unable to see the wood for the trees, they have no appreciation for the literary whole. Historical critics themselves 3

E.D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 164–9.

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nowadays often tend to endorse this way of looking at their own work, differing only in seeing it as perfectly correct. Both they and their opponents are thus apt to present the task of historical criticism in rather positivistic terms. If this were true, then the amount of common ground between historical and literary criticism would certainly be very small. I am not at all convinced, however, that it is true. If we take the most obviously fragmentative branch of historical criticism, source analysis, still flourishing all over the world despite the supposed paradigm-shift away from it: there can be no doubt that the underlying perceptions that make such criticisms possible are essentially literary ones, related to the attempt to appropriate a text as a living whole, cohering in all its parts. Its German name, Literarkritik, is not the misnomer people sometimes think it. The difference between the different sorts of critic is a matter of how soon they give up this attempt in the face of a perception that they are dealing with recalcitrant material. Literary critics today, like other kinds of ‘final form’ interpreters, generally see themselves as having a duty to persist with a holistic approach until the whole text is in focus as a unified entity, even if this involves suppressing intuitive suspicions that the text was not originally designed by anyone to have exactly its present form. Source critics on the other hand allow such suspicions to have full rein, and are content when they have divided the text into sections each of which in itself has a coherent shape. But in both cases the mental processes involved are literary. Both are concerned with the Gestalt of the text, with the attempt to grasp it as a comprehensible whole. Historical critics are much readier than modern literary interpreters to accept the possibility that the text is not such a whole. But the question ought to be discussable between them, not regarded as just a matter of incommensurable expectations. Here, then, is one way in which so-called historical and so-called literary interpretations are close in practice, however different in theoretical aims and intentions. Both imply the quest for some unitary grasp of the text, an interest in its Gestalt. Both must engage with the text’s discrete details; neither can rest content with describing the text as no more than these details. A second resemblance between historical and literary method can be found by looking at an equal and opposite point. If historical criticism is more like literary interpretation than people think, so literary interpretation is seldom in practice completely detached from historical interests. There are admittedly extreme (or ultra-consistent) forms of literary interpretation in our field where synchronic reading is treated as an absolute, and historical questions are simply not allowed. But in practice such cases are rare. Far more often a literary reading is one in which these questions are indeed not foregrounded, but are present none the less. This can produce what may correctly be criticized as inconsistency, but on the other hand may be seen as a sign that the lines of communication are still open. The work of Robert Alter4 presents interesting examples. On the one hand, it is obvious to any reader that Alter is cool towards any suggestion that we should treat biblical texts as collections of fragments or as composed from several sources. 4

See especially R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), and The World of Biblical Literature (London: SPCK, 1992).

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His criticism is an attempt to expound the biblical text as a unity. The unity extends even beyond the bounds of individual books: thus stories in the Former Prophets can be treated as alluding to stories in Genesis, for example, irrespective of any historical questions of relative date. Such intertextuality is so intense as logically to imply that most of the books of the Bible are parts of a greater whole. Alter’s assumptions seem not unlike those of canonical criticism, though of course without the theological implications. But the conceptual basis for Alter’s work seems to me often to shift in a puzzling way between historical and non-historical considerations. All we have, he argues in one mood, is the biblical text, and questions about what may underlie it are more or less unaskable, certainly unanswerable. Only a rather ‘unliterary’ person would be interested in such ‘excavative’ matters. Why should anyone want to know about the pre-history of such texts, instead of reading them in their finished form? This is a consistent literary-critical judgement: the pre-history of texts is irrelevant, we should read them as they now are. In other places, however, Alter seems to argue in a different way. The reason why we should read the texts holistically is that they never were fragmentary or composite anyway. Source analysis and redaction criticism have been thoroughly misguided enterprises, not because they lack literary refinement, but because they are historically misinformed. You cannot study the redaction history of a text that was written all in one piece in the first place. Now at one level, Alter must be convicted of inconsistency here. Either questions about the origins of biblical texts can be asked, or they cannot; and if we know the answer to them, then it cannot at the same time be said that they are unaskable. Alter’s literary proposals, if they are to be thoroughgoing, ought to be compatible with even the most extreme kind of source-critical theory. If only the finished whole is to be of interest to us, why should it matter if it is the result of thousands of sources being combined? The literary critic, qua literary critic, has neither interest nor competence in the realm of source analysis or redaction criticism. Thus we could say that Alter is trying to have his cake and eat it, despising historical criticism yet quite willing to meddle in it when it suits him. Superficially I think there would be something in this: it certainly expresses some of the irritation Alter causes in old-style critics. But on another and more important level a more charitable account can be given of what is going on here, and one which recognizes Alter for the great critic that he is. Although Alter is interested in Hebrew literature from the viewpoint of a literary critic, he does not see it as a timeless body of writing, but as a corpus from a distinctive historical culture. Maybe the texts should be read synchronically, in the sense that they should be treated as existing in the same broad time-span as each other. But they are not, as on some postmodernist theories, to be read as synchronic with us, the readers. Alter’s point then is that within their ancient context, of which he is fully aware, the discrepancies and developments within these texts can be shown, through literary methods of exposition, to be very much less than a historical but unliterary critic might think. In this Alter comes much closer to the agenda of traditional Biblical criticism than he acknowledges. Once again, the fundamental issue is how far one can grasp the text whole: and this literary question, far from being irrelevant to historical issues, has

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much to contribute at the historical level. Once Alter asserts that the historical unity or disunity of the text is not a matter of indifference, and that he knows the answer to it, then he cannot avoid engaging with historical critics. But (and this is my point here) it is literary perceptions that predispose him to think that he does know the answer to the historical question, and that the answer strongly favours the non-composite character of biblical texts; and these perceptions ought not to be indifferent to historical critics. To the extent that they show the possibility of reading texts as unitary, they weaken the foundation for a source criticism based on the detection of inconsistencies. Here again, therefore, so-called historical and so-called literary criticism are not in hermetically sealed compartments, but do have some opportunities for talking across the divide that appears to exist between them, and can even affect each other’s conclusions. Once we recognize, on the one side, that a literary reading should not be anachronistic, or on the other that historical biblical criticism rests on the attempt to grasp the unity of a text even if that attempt is frustrated, then it becomes clear that there is common ground, and that both sets of critical and interpretative skills may be needed if justice is to be done to the texts. II So far my aim has been to suggest that historical critics and literary interpreters of the Old Testament already have more in common than they are prepared to acknowledge, and that there is considerable overlap between the questions they ask. Now I should like to draw attention to two aspects of biblical study where better progress could be made if critics of the two opposing schools collaborated more, because questions are being asked within one kind of criticism which cannot be answered without straying into the other. Consistency The first aspect is the question of inconsistency or incoherence in texts. It is not too much to say that the observation of inconsistency lies at the root of what we have come to call a critical attitude to the Bible. Or rather: what is basic is the observation of inconsistency together with a refusal to think that it must be an illusion. Patristic, rabbinic and mediaeval anticipations of critical insights differ from post-Enlightenment criticism because they are concerned to neutralize any inconsistencies they have noticed in the text, so that the road to any explanation in terms of the text’s actual incoherence is effectively blocked. Biblical criticism proper depends on contemplating the possibility that texts really are incoherent, and seeking rational explanations for this: explaining the phenomenon, rather than explaining it away. Some historical-critical scholars suspect that newer literary methods of detecting unity in texts previously thought incoherent are a return to pre-critical solutions, and arise from a prior religious commitment to the unity of the text. The text is given the benefit of every doubt, because the interpreter already ‘knows,’ on religious grounds, that the text is a unified product of the mind of God. I believe this is sometimes what is happening. But it is certainly not always the reason why some interpreters see unity

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where others find only chaos. Sometimes the reason is that one interpreter’s chaos is another’s rich tapestry. And it seems to me that while interpreters will argue at length over whether or not a given text is incoherent, not much attention is paid to what counts as incoherence. Why should traditional historical critics and newer literary interpreters not engage together with the question of what we mean by calling a text incoherent or inconsistent? This problem runs all the way from the divine names in the Pentateuch to the presence of double or multiple versions of a story, either interwoven (as traditionally supposed for the Flood Narrative) or found in different places in the text (as with the three ‘wife-sister’ stories in Genesis). Historical critics face the problem that on their interpretation (a) only a theory of multiple sources will explain how the text can be so incoherent, but (b) it is then very hard to see why the editor, who was ex hypothesi fully aware of the inconsistency, can have woven them into a finished text in which the inconsistency was allowed to remain. This is one of the great continuing problems in Pentateuchal criticism, but it is discussed by few writers on the Pentateuch.5 How can such a problem be handled? It is surely right to take the historical, empirical route pioneered by Jeffrey Tigay in his Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism.6 This may be able to establish that composite works of the kind hypothesized did exist in the ancient world, and hence that the critics could be right to think that the Pentateuch is of that kind. But equally this is not the whole answer: for it gets us no further with the question how such (to us) incoherent works were read and understood. I believe that we are likely to get further only if modern literary critics are willing to join in the discussion, and offer us models from literature (either ancient or modern) where similar phenomena occur and where we know how they were or are handled interpretatively. Robert Alter suggests that experience in reading James Joyce can help with the interpretation of the Pentateuch. Twenty years ago Frank Kermode was observing both the difference and the unexpected confluences between our own literary conventions and those not of the Bible but of the Middle Ages, where similar puzzles occur. In the Chanson de Roland, as he put it, ‘Roland dies three times, as if in a novel by M. Robbe-Grillet.’7 This hints at common problems in pre-modern and ultra- or postmodern literature, and suggests that a collaboration could be fruitful. Historical criticism may be able to tell us how the Pentateuch got put together; we may need help from literary critics if we are to understand why. Theme Commentators of every kind set out to answer the linked questions: what is this text about, and what does it say about what it is about? Such questions seem so obvious, and so unproblematic, that we hardly notice we are asking them. Literary theory is an essential reminder to the historical critic that on the contrary they are very 5

An exception is R.N. Whybray, The Making of the Pentateuch, JSOTSup 53 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1987). 6 J. Tigay (ed.), Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). 7 F. Kermode, Novel and Narrative (Glasgow, 1972), p. 7.

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complex indeed. The way that some biblical books have been read in the history of their reception and interpretation shows that people in the past did not necessarily ask what a book was ‘about’ in the same way that we do: the idea that every book has a ‘theme’ or ‘centre’ would have been quite alien in some past cultures. Some critics would claim, of course, that literary works acquire themes only within the specific interpretative contexts in which the theme is not discovered but attributed. But those who regard this as an exaggeration should not therefore conclude that modern theory has nothing to contribute when it questions the assumption that themes reside in texts. Looking for themes or messages or overall thrusts in literary works might be a more time-bound and culture-bound preoccupation than we naively assume. Two examples may illustrate this.8 (a) First, the book of Job. A modern reader is usually shocked by the discovery that for much of its history Job was interpreted by both Jews and Christians as a tale about someone who suffered but was rewarded by God for his endurance (as in James 5:11). Such a reader usually argues, on the contrary, that the centre of the book lies in the dialogue, and that, accordingly, it is ‘about’ the justice of God, or the comprehensibility of human suffering, or some similar theme. The speeches of Job, we take it for granted, are where the heart of the book lies. We wonder how past readers can have been so unintelligent as not to see this. But an approach open to modern literary theory might remind us that books do not have to have a centre or a theme. When interpreters down the ages saw Job as a type of Christ, or as a hero who proved that God rewards the patient who endures, they were not necessarily saying that this was what the book was ‘about’. For them, the book provided information about Job, and once we had the information, we were free to ask what God was teaching us through Job, not through the book as such. The book may have been seen, and conceivably may have been written, as a compendium of material about Job, a digest of the many Jobs that had probably existed for centuries before it was assembled. Such a book need not have a consistent theme at all. A literary critic used to reading plotless and themeless books written in the late twentieth century might, paradoxically, be more attuned to such a work than a traditional historical critic who tends to read Job as if it were a modern – not postmodern – novel, with plot, characterization and theme. (b) A second example could be the so-called Deuteronomistic History. Since Martin Noth’s great redaction-critical study it has been usual to search for a theme, a plot, sometimes even a ‘kerygma’ in this work. This is discovered by what is essentially a literary analysis, deciding which features to foreground, identifying the underlying structure of the work, spotting thematic connections running through it. It is seldom that any commentator questions the underlying literary model here, which is that of the realistic prose fiction we are familiar with from post-Enlightenment literature.9 8

I have used these examples before, though with some difference in the argument, in J. Barton, ‘Reading the Bible as Literature: Two Questions for Biblical Critics’, Journal of Literature and Theology 1 (1987), pp. 135–53, reproduced as Chapter 9 in this volume. 9 Michael Goulder is one of the few to have questioned the idea that Old Testament books were written as literary art. ‘The completed D-corpus was never intended to be a literary work’

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A more modern style of literary criticism might question whether this is really appropriate, and ask whether we might not see the Deuteronomistic History as altogether a more accidental piece of writing. Perhaps the author wrote some parts of it with deliberate skill, but in other places merely copied out what was before him in the form of sources and other previously existing documents. In that case, as with Job, searching for underlying themes or structures would be beside the point. The History would not be a work of ‘literature’, as we now understand this, or as we understood it until the self-undermining works of post-structuralism. The Deuteronomistic History may not be a work written to explore a theme. It may be a compilation of materials only loosely held together. And interpreting it may need different criteria for the meaning of texts from those historical redaction critics are accustomed to use. But there is a paradox here; for to make suggestions like these is, in effect, to argue that older historical critics, practitioners of source criticism, may have been justified against their more recent redaction-critical successors, who practise a ‘close reading’ in which exact verbal nuance is a central concern. The divide in biblical studies here runs, not so much between historical and literary criticism, but between redaction-critical investigation, on the one hand, and both source- and modern literary interpretation, on the other. Once we introduce the possibility of themelessness into biblical study, some of the old alignments start to look insecure. This example may help to indicate why deliberate collaboration between historical critics and literary interpreters could be useful. The judgement – which of course mayor may or may not be correct – that the Deuteronomistic History (or any other extended narrative in the Bible) is not a carefully planned work with intended structures and themes, but an uneven blend of original writing and mere transcription, is a historical judgement. Yet it is essentially recent literary criticism that has alerted us to the existence in modern writing, and hence potentially in ancient writing too, of apparently casual and unplanned works that are nevertheless not to be seen as accidental or meaningless, and which offers resources for interpreting and making sense of such literary puzzles. The ultra-literary and the not-yet-literary seem to join hands, and both require interpretative skills somewhat more sophisticated than traditional historical biblical criticism can offer. At the same time, it is historical criticism that reveals the extent of the problem. At this point historical and literary criticism meet, even cross, and an ideal student of the Bible, it would seem, ought to be competent in both. It is in the interests of all students of the Old Testament that historical and literary critics should somehow be brought to inhabit the same world, not to spend time

(The Evangelist’s Calendar: A Lectionary Explanation of the Development of Scripture (London: SPCK, 1978), p. 114); ‘A … remote possibility might be that the Chronicler was an artist … Such a theory does not impress. Who wrote, who read works of art in the Jerusalem of 350 B.C.?’ (Midrash and Lection in Matthew (London: SPCK, 1974), pp. 218–19). It is a great pleasure to be able to dedicate this article to him, in gratitude for the many shafts of light he has thrown on biblical study. Perhaps I could suggest mischievously that his own work refutes his conclusions here: few people produce academic discursive prose which is so obviously also literary art!

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staking out their own territory but to recognize that the whole land lies before them, and that most of the texts they interpret need both historical and literary skill if they are to be adequately interpreted. To suggest that historical criticism itself shows us features of texts that only literary interpretation can cope with, and vice versa, is probably to court unpopularity with both. Yet the Old Testament contains some very strange literature; perhaps it will not be surprising if it takes more than one kind of sensibility to understand it.

Chapter 11

What is a Book? Modern Exegesis and the Literary Conventions of Ancient Israel In the liturgy of the synagogue, when the scroll of the Torah is removed from the ark, a verse from Numbers 10 is quoted: ‘Whenever the ark set out, Moses said, “Arise, O LORD, and let thy enemies be scattered; and let them that hate thee flee before thee”’ (a quotation from Psalm 68:1); and at the end of the Torah reading, when the scroll is returned to the ark, the next verse is used: ’And when it rested, he said, “Return, O Lord, to the ten thousands of Israel”’ (Numbers 10:35–6). Whether for this or some other reason these two verses in Numbers have been regarded in Judaism as peculiarly significant, and they are marked off in the Massoretic text with inverted nuns before and after. According to M. Yadaim 3:5, they constitute a yardstick by which to measure whether a segment of the biblical text is or is not long enough to have the capacity to defile the hands which, as is well known, is a property of holy books in Judaism. The measure is an exact one: Numbers 10:35–6 contains eighty-five letters, and precisely so many letters must be present in a piece of text for it to be able to defile – and hence to need the careful treatment accorded to the scriptures, being handled reverently and, if damaged, stored away in a genizah rather than being destroyed. Eighty-five letters sounds like a highly arbitrary measure, and I don’t think we should imagine that it was arrived at first, and then a passage found that was exactly that long. Presumably the matter worked the other way round: Num. 10:35–6 was regarded as particularly holy, and then its letters were counted and used as a norm. It is not clear what was so special about Num. 10:35–6. If its two verses were already used as prayers at the opening and closing of the ark in the period when the ruling about eighty-five letters arose, we might suppose that this association with the Torah in its physical form was the reason why it came to have prominence in Judaism, and that it then came to be treated as somehow the quintessence of a scriptural text. But we do not know how old is the custom of using these words at the opening and closing of the ark. Certainly the text has one of the features that Judaism prizes in scriptural texts, in that it includes the holy Name not once but twice, once in each verse. But other equally short texts can be found that have it even more times. Perhaps the thinking works as follows: to be certain that a text should be treated as defiling the hands we need to be sure that it is indeed a piece of scripture, and below a certain length coincidence with words of scripture might be accidental. With eighty-five letters there can scarcely be any doubt: the likelihood of that many words merely coinciding accidentally with a passage of scripture is minimal.

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But the rabbis’ own explanation of the special benchmark-status of Num. 10:35–6 is rather different, and brings me to the main topic of my paper. The sense that these verses are a kind of sample of scriptural texts, and the presence of the opening and closing inverted nuns, leads to the assertion that they form a book, a sepher, of their own: see b.Shabbat 116a. Presumably the thinking then is that any scroll containing as many as eighty-five letters might turn out to contain precisely these eighty-five letters, and if it did, it would be a complete Torah scroll, which therefore would undoubtedly defile the hands; so, to be on the safe side, any text this long should be treated carefully as potentially a scroll of the Torah. But the implication of calling these two verses a sepher is that there are actually seven books of the Torah, not five, and Proverbs 9:1 (the ‘seven pillars of wisdom’) is duly cited. Moses, that is, wrote the following seven books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers 1:1–10:34, Numbers 10:35–6, Numbers 11–36 and Deuteronomy: a Heptateuch rather than a Pentateuch. To our eyes, Numbers 10:35–6 is a very strange kind of ‘book’. Obviously the incongruity must have been apparent to some extent to the rabbis themselves. But it reflects something known to all students of Hebrew, that a sepher is not the same as a book. Any piece of writing can in principle be called a sepher in Hebrew. To call Numbers 10:35–6 a sepher is thus not to call it a ‘book’ in our sense. This is not to resolve the matter, however, because we need to ask why there is no unambiguous term in Hebrew corresponding to our ‘book’. The answer is, I think, because no one had yet combined two ideas which form parts of our concept of a book, one physical, the other metaphysical. We make a clear distinction between a book in the sense of a volume and a book in the sense of a work. To say someone is writing a book does not mean simply that they are covering each of the pages in a volume with words, but that they are composing a work which in principle exists even if there is no physical copy of it in existence. Conversely, if I say that I am selling in a bookshop sixty-six books, I mean sixty-six volumes irrespective of their contents, not sixty-six items of literature, as it were – a volume containing, say, the sixty-six books of the Bible. Colin Roberts, in The Birth of the Codex, offers a quotation that may be one of the earliest examples of the conceptual distinction, from the Roman jurist Ulpian in the third century AD, who ruled that ‘if someone is left one hundred books (libri), we shall assign to him one hundred volumes (volumina), not one hundred pieces of writing material that someone might ingeniously measure as sufficient for the writing of a book: if, say, he had the whole of Homer in one volume (in uno volumine), we should not reckon that as forty-eight books, but think that the one volume of Homer should be regarded as a book (pro libro accipiendum est).’1 There is little evidence that this distinction was clearly in focus in rabbinic Judaism, at any rate where scripture is concerned. There is an interesting discussion of this point in a recent article by Benjamin D. Sommer, called ‘The Scroll of Isaiah as Jewish Scripture, or, Why Jews Don’t Read Books’.2 Sommer contrasts the traditional critical division of Isaiah into three sections on the basis of a diachronic study with the now popular preference for 1

C.H. Roberts and T.E Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London, 1987), p. 34. B.D. Sommer, ‘The Scroll of Isaiah as Jewish Scripture, Or, Why Jews Don’t Read Books’, Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers (1996), pp. 225–42. 2

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reading the book as a unified whole. He points out that, while the diachronic division has some anticipations in Judaism, notably in the comments of ibn Ezra and in the use of material only from Deutero- and Trito-Isaiah for haphtarot, the synchronic approach of recent literary interpreters finds little support in traditional Jewish commentaries. He writes, I would like to suggest that viewing the book of Isaiah as containing at least two distinct corpora works quite well for a modern Jewish view of scripture for two reasons: first, the unity or coherence of biblical books has traditionally not been important for Jewish views of scripture; and second, because separating the book into non-exilic and exilic portions engages modern Jewish concerns particularly well. (p. 230)

He goes on: In Jewish scripturality, the literary unit of ‘book’ is insignificant. For the midrashic exegete, the next unit after the verse that matters is the Bible as a whole, or perhaps the section (Torah or Nach … i.e., Prophets and Writings), but certainly not the book. (p. 230)

Again: One might be tempted to regard midrash as a holistic reading method and therefore to liken midrash to canon and literary criticism, with which It shares an apparently integrative approach. Such an analogy … would be misleading. Midrash is first of all a fragmentary mode of reading; it examines words, verses, or small collections of verses quite independently of their context in a given biblical book. (pp. 230–31)

For rabbinic exegetes, he argues, ‘Isaiah does not function as a book but as a collection of verses and pericopes’ (p. 231). In the light of the discussion so far, we might say that rabbinic exegesis regards Isaiah as a ‘book’ in the sense that there is a scroll called ‘Isaiah’, but not in the sense that Isaiah is a literary work with beginning, middle and end, and internal coherence, as we expect in a ‘book’ in our literary sense. By saying that there is a book called ‘Isaiah’ rabbinic commentators are not implying that it possesses unity of theme or closure in its literary form, only that there is a collection of verses and paragraphs written by Isaiah and gathered together in one place. And this distinction, I want to argue, may have some importance for the modern debate about the interpretation of biblical texts. For modern literary readings are sometimes justified or at least supported by the argument that they represent a return to traditional ways of reading the Bible – that post-critical, holistic reading joins hands with so-called pre-critical reading in joint opposition to the historical-critical method. Robert Alter, for example, commonly argues in this way.3 It seems to me, however, that it is true only to a very limited extent. At least where traditional Jewish modes of reading are concerned, there is, perhaps, holistic reading of the Bible as a whole, but seldom of the individual book. Furthermore, and linked with this, the idea that closure can be found in biblical books is very weak. Think of the classic text in Baba Bathra 14b–15a where a 3

Cf. R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (London, 1981), pp. 10–12.

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progression of thought is traced through the three major prophets, in order to argue for the arrangement of them in the order Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah: ‘Isaiah was prior to Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Then why should not Isaiah be placed first? – Because the book of Kings ends with a record of destruction and Jeremiah speaks throughout of destruction and Ezekiel commences with destruction and ends with consolation and Isaiah is full of consolation; therefore we put destruction next to destruction and consolation next to consolation.’ This is holistic in much the way a game of dominoes is holistic, with matching bits of text placed next to each other. But there is no quest for a literary unity and integrity in each individual book. This does not, of course, mean that modern literary readings with an interest in closure are illicit, only that they cannot be justified by an appeal to Jewish tradition. Literary critics who first show on modern literary grounds that a text can be read as a unity but then appeal to Jewish tradition to support their argument are trying to have their cake and eat it, and at the same time giving hostages to fortune (to mix my metaphors). Safer to remain on purely modern soil and not invoke a tradition of biblical exegesis which has in reality so little to say about the biblical books as ‘works’. So long as a holistic approach makes no historical claims about how the text was read in the past, it is impregnable. To those whose concerns remain historical it will not be very interesting or important, but it will certainly be possible, and will only have to show that biblical texts can be read in a holistic way. My own impression is that this is in fact always possible for all texts, as Stanley Fish classically showed in Is there a Text in this Class?4 One may think that a technique which will work in all cases indiscriminately lacks a certain cutting-edge, but that is a matter of opinion. Modern literary critics of the Bible have surely produced enough interesting readings to show that there is something in this kind of approach which is worth investigating. My own concern is for a rather harder question than the legitimacy of literary approaches, which I take for granted. It is to ask how far the traditional Jewish perception of biblical books as non-integrated, non-holistic works lacking closure can inform us about the books themselves and their own coming into being, from a historical point of view. If early Jewish interpreters (and this would include, say, St Paul as well as the early rabbis) read biblical books with so little attention to their themes, their overall shape and their closure, is it possible that the books were actually written without attention to those features? Here we ought perhaps to distinguish two phases: the redactional activity which composed books from various units of material, and the free composition of original material in the first place. As we shall see, the second is much the harder case to evaluate. On the whole the model of composition implied by the rabbinic preference for small units, verses and paragraphs over whole books is highly compatible with a historical-critical atomization of the existing biblical books into smaller units put together secondarily. Against more sophisticated types of redaction criticism, which share with modern literary approaches an attachment to finding unity and closure in the finished form of books, the older style of historical criticism represented by source 4

See S. Fish, Is there a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).

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analysis treats the biblical books we now have as put together without great skill from pre-existing fragments or longer continuous sources which have been broken up into smaller sections. Despite frequent Jewish opposition to ‘higher criticism’, the picture of the Bible which emerges from the work of traditional Pentateuchal critics actually blends quite well into midrashic exegesis in its more atomistic aspects, though of course it does not include its commitment to finding links across the whole body of Scripture: it lacks what would now be called midrash’s intertextual dimension. And the form-critical view of the prophetic books as assembled from individual sayings, oracles and stories fits perfectly into the midrashic approach. This is essentially the case that Sommer argues, and he can claim a lot of support from Michael Fishbane’s Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel,5 with its detailed presentation of evidence for thinking that the Bible evolved very much through addition and supplementation in the same mould as midrashic supplementation of the biblical text. The compilers of the biblical books were not trying to produce ‘works’ in the literary sense, with a clear theme or plot and a high degree of closure, but rather anthologies of material which could be dipped into at any point. To put the point in a way I have used elsewhere, it is as though all of Scripture, Torah and Prophets and Writings alike, were conceived of as being like Proverbs 10–22 – aphorisms applicable quite apart from their literary context.6 The Old Testament literature consists of many books, sepharim in the sense of documents or pieces of writing, but not of many ‘works’, books in our literary sense of the term. There are some works whose status as compilations from older documents is generally accepted among Old Testament scholars. We argue about whether Genesis was put together from earlier sources or written by a single hand, but no one adopts the second of these options in the case of Chronicles or 1 Esdras. We take it as a given in those cases that people in Israel must have regarded it as legitimate to make a book by combining bits of other books, and we do not look for a very high degree of unity in the resulting books. We do not, for example, normally treat the Chronicler’s genealogies as forming a literary unity with his narratives: we recognize that they are a disparate sort of material, and that the unity of Chronicles is simply of a lower order than that of, say, Esther or Ruth. We do not worry that his narrative begins abruptly with the death of Saul. Though it would be going much too far to say that we interpret Chronicles atomistically, we do certainly tend to understand the different types of material it contains in a different way. One can mount a redactioncritical or literary-critical bid to treat Chronicles as a unity at a higher level than this: rhetorical critics too have a liking for such an approach. But most biblical critics of all persuasions tend to draw a distinction between clearly composite works such as Chronicles or indeed Kings and those which come more obviously from a single author. What can be said, however, is that it was evidently acceptable in Israel to produce such composite books: they fell within the definition of a book. Though they had to be read in a different way from the way we read modern books, people did

5

M. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford, 1985). See J. Barton, The Spirit and the Letter: Studies in the Biblical Canon (London, 1997), p. 154. 6

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know how to read them: they were not puzzling or cryptic. Conventions must have existed within which such works could function. When we turn from the compilation to the original writing of books, we have to confront an argument which begins with what we have just established and tries to show that it undermines itself. The argument runs as follows: If it was acceptable to people in ancient times to have books, sepharim, which were collections of fragmentary verses and paragraphs without order or closure, then why should similar works not have been equally acceptable as original compositions? The redactors who allegedly produced these patchwork books must have believed that people would regard them as acceptable, that is, such books must have fallen within the conventions of the time governing literary works. This is what we have been arguing. But our reason for thinking that they are a patchwork normally rests on the premise that no one would deliberately write a book so full of inconsistencies as the Pentateuch or the prophets: that is how we justify identifying contradictory passages as coming originally from different sources. But if the patchwork was acceptable to the redactor and the redactor’s audience, why should it not have been acceptable to the original author and that author’s audience? In other words, self-contradiction is not a valid criterion for detecting the presence of disparate sources if one lives in a culture in which there is no literary convention against works containing contradictions in the first place. If a ‘book’ means simply a piece of writing, with no implication or expectation of coherence or closure, then the presence of inconsistencies in it will be no cause for surprise, and provide no justification for dividing it up into previously existing works, each consistent within itself. One author really could have produced the whole of Genesis, if he was an author in the mould we have been considering – if Genesis is not a book but only a sepher. We find ourselves drifting in the direction of Cassuto, who often argued that the conventions of literature in ancient Israel allowed for the, to modern western eyes, muddled texts that made up the Pentateuch, while also (another scholar trying to have his cake and eat it) that they were much less muddled anyway than modern people thought.7 If the previous point helped to establish, against those who oppose traditional source and form criticism, that the model of a book with which those methods work was indeed current in the ancient world, then this point seems to undermine such a conclusion by removing the evidence on which it rests. In a culture where texts that look to us muddled and inconsequential are perceived as perfectly acceptable books, sepharim, why should people not have written such books quite freely in the first place? Obviously this case looks sounder with some books than with others. There are texts in the Old Testament that are not particularly incoherent anyway – one might think of Esther or Ruth; and there are others which it remains sensible to regard as the result of redaction, as with the texts examined a moment ago, Chronicles and 1 Esdras. But that leaves a large range of texts, including most of those that have traditionally been most interesting to biblical critics, in the case of which our traditional perception that they are composite is vulnerable to the argument 7 See U. Cassuto, The Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch (Jerusalem, 1961; Hebrew original, 1941) and A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Jerusalem, 1964; Hebrew original, 1949).

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I am trying to develop: the Pentateuch, many of the Prophets, the Psalter, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Ezra and Nehemiah. All these texts have been persuasively argued down the years to be composite, on the grounds that no single author would have perpetrated the degree of self-contradiction and formlessness which they manifest. But if their authors lived in a culture where such features of texts that really are composite were not felt to be a problem, then, it may be asked, why should they not have themselves composed texts manifesting the same characteristics? Perhaps I need to give an example of what I have in mind. Take Genesis 38, the story of Judah and Tamar. Traditional source-critical studies argued that this chapter was an interpolation, since it interrupts the flow of the Joseph story, Genesis 37–50. The Joseph story has a thematic unity (there is a problem about a few doublets within it, for example the Midianite–Ishmaelite issue, but we can leave that aside for now). Especially as described by von Rad,8 the Joseph story is a Novelle, a story centred upon one major theme, and with a cast of characters all of whom serve that theme. There are no loose ends in the narrative, but it moves steadily forward to the denouement, Joseph’s disclosure of his identity to his brothers and the journey of Jacob to Egypt to settle where he can be with Joseph again. From such a perspective, it is impossible to think that Gen. 38 was originally part of the story, for it contains an account about two different main characters which fails to contribute anything to the story of Joseph. No author, especially not one as skilled as the author of the Joseph story, would have included such an extraneous incident; and so Gen. 38 must be from a different hand, interpolated into the account by a later redactor. So it seemed until Robert Alter came along to upset things by arguing on aesthetic grounds that Gen. 38 is in fact integral to the story. At the very beginning of The Art of Biblical Narrative he throws down the gauntlet by arguing that Gen. 38 is, on the contrary, an essential part of the Joseph story, crafted throughout to fit its present context. The argument is too lengthy even to summarize here, but it depends on exact verbal echoes that set up a parallel between Tamar and Joseph, and are only explicable if there is no seam between Gen. 38 and the surrounding chapters. We have misled ourselves by seeing Joseph as the only theme of Gen. 37–50; in fact the chapters have a wider perspective, and add up to a perfect whole. Thus Alter, from a consciously literary point of view, wants us to see Gen. 38 as perfectly suited to its present place. It is not a clumsy insertion, but an element in the high literary quality of Genesis. What he implies is that it would be reasonable to dismiss it as an insertion if it could be shown to be dissonant; but in fact a more subtle and penetrating reading of the text shows that it is not dissonant at all. For Alter, we may say, authors in ancient Israel shared something like our notions of coherence and aesthetic form, but we have to dig a bit deeper to find the evidence of this than traditional biblical critics suppose. When we do so we find more often than not that what looked like blemishes in the text are really keys to its unity. So far, so good: this is the now classic disagreement between so-called historicalcritical method and the newer style of literary criticism. My own proposal, then, is this. It is clear from elsewhere in the Old Testament and in the ancient Near East that 8

G. von Rad, ‘The Joseph Narrative and Ancient Wisdom’, in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (Edinburgh, 1966), pp. 292–300 (= VTS 1 (1953), pp. 120–27).

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composite and interpolated works did in fact exist. Since people used these works apparently without difficulty, it may be that, rather than engaging in interpretation at Alter’s level of sophistication, they simply did not find such composite works to be problematic. Hence they might well have found Genesis 37–50 equally unproblematic, whether (as a matter of historical fact) it was composite or not. Alter might be right in thinking that Genesis forms a unity, but for the wrong reasons. It may be that Genesis is a unified text, not because it manifests the great internal coherence and closure which Alter tries to demonstrate, but because no one bothered about coherence and closure in texts anyway. It was enough for the text to be written on a single scroll and to have, let us say, some broad general theme sufficient to attract all stories about Jacob, Joseph and their families into the same sepher. My own proposal amounts to a questioning of both traditional source criticism and literary criticism. Both, rather paradoxically, appeal to the notion of a unity in the text that can be demonstrated by analysing such matters as theme, closure and narrative drift. Typically, source critics pursue this line of enquiry in order to show that there are elements in the text that do not contribute to its unity, or, more strongly, undermine it. Literary critics, on the other hand, take these apparently dissonant elements and try to show that they are not dissonant at all, and thus conclude that the text is a unity after all. My suggestion is that they could both be wrong if the culture in which our Old Testament texts were produced was not marked by an attachment to unity and closure in texts in the first place. This would demolish the basis on which source critics work, since it would mean that conflicts within the text might have been intentional or, better, casual and unimportant – hence not evidence for multiple sources. On the other hand, the literary-critical attempt to demonstrate a high aesthetic unity in the text would be equally misguided, unless it were pursued purely as a modern enterprise and not thought to connect at all with the ancient culture from which the texts come – which in my experience is quite rare, even among the most enthusiastic literary critics. There might be no unity in the text, because ancient authors and readers may not have expected there to be any. Composing a book, for them, might have been simply putting together pieces of text without any presumption that they would form a new unity, characterized by coherence and closure, even if the pieces of text had been written by the author himself. This possibility is well illustrated in a recent essay of David M. Carr.9 Commenting on the recent quest for a unitary reading of the whole book of Isaiah, a quest which he shares, he nevertheless writes: Although ancient readers seem to have been conscious of major themes stretching across the Isaiah tradition, they do not seem to have had the same preoccupation with literary ‘coherence’ that modern readers often have, particularly literary coherence across large blocks of material like the sixty-six chapters of the Isaiah scroll … Part or all of Isaiah 9

D.M. Carr, ‘Reading for Unity in Isaiah’, JSOT 57 (1993), pp. 61–80, and ‘Reading Isaiah from Beginning (Isaiah 1) to End (Isaiah 65–66): Multiple Modern Possibilities’, New Visions of Isaiah, ed. R.F. Melugin and M.A. Sweeney (Sheffield, 1996), pp. 188–218; E.W. Conrad, Reading Isaiah, Overtures to Biblical Theology 27 (Minneapolis, 1991); C.R. Seitz, ‘Isaiah 1–66: Making Sense of the Whole’, in Reading and Preaching the Book of Isaiah, ed. C.R. Seitz (Philadelphia, 1988).

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65–66 was probably written in relation to parts of Isa. 1.2–31 (among other Isaiah texts). Certain parts of Isa. 1.231, particularly Isa. 1.29–31, seem to have been written in relation to Isaiah 65–66. But there is no evidence that the authors/editors who produced these connections also fully incorporated the divergent rhetorical perspectives of these two texts into a cohesive, literary whole.10

Another way of coming at this might be to say that in any age the books people write are conditioned by the books they read, and the theories that are around about how books are to be read. Literary theory affects literary composition. If an ancient Israelite author, say the author of Genesis 37–50, wanted models to work with, he might have looked to other historical or legendary works that were themselves composite in origin, and have regarded the dislocations which lead us to think that such works were composite as natural features which such a work ought to have. Then he would have introduced such complications into his own work. They would not, however, in his case be evidence of the work’s composite character, but would all derive from a single author following a particular literary theory. Thus historical critics may be right to say that Old Testament texts contain inconsistencies, doublets and incongruities, but wrong to think that that shows them to be composite: such features may simply be part of how, according to the literary tradition they were following, books were to be written. Literary critics may equally be right when they say that such features are not evidence of the composite character of these texts; but they may be wrong to say that this is because the inconsistencies, doublets and so on are only apparent. They may be perfectly real, but allowable under the literary conventions of the day. What I have been saying so far may sound like an attempt to solve one problem by introducing a much larger one, and I must say that I am convinced that many of our disagreements about questions of method do derive from an inability to see that the problem is much greater than we commonly suppose. Nevertheless my suggestion is not that the matter simply cannot be resolved, so that we must suspend judgement about how the Old Testament is to be read. Nor are these purely matters of theory, unavailable for empirical examination. On the contrary, the question what people took to constitute a book in various periods is in principle quite answerable. If we want to know whether books were meant to be free of internal contradictions in, say, the Second Temple period, we can look at what may be called the secondary literature of the period, books modelled on older books. I have already referred to Chronicles, which is an invaluable source for information about what was taken to be the nature of a book at that time since it is a reshaping of earlier books. Without prejudging the precise relation of Chronicles to Samuel and Kings we could surely say that there are contradictions in that collection which Chronicles irons out, while not introducing any fresh contradictions of its own. It looks, from Chronicles, as though internal consistency was valued in Second Temple Judaism. At the same time, Chronicles mixes different genres of literature, such as historical narrative, genealogies and poems, in a way that strikes us as odd but was evidently not a problem for its intended readers. And this points to a 10

Carr, ‘Reading Isaiah from Beginning (Isaiah 1) to End’, pp. 216–17.

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general feature of Old Testament literature, both primary and secondary: there is a weak sense of genre, so that material which we should regard as too disparate to be juxtaposed in a single book is freely intermingled. This is such a recurring feature of the literature from early times to late that it would be unwise to base any sourcecritical conclusions on it. But at the same time it militates against the kind of literary evaluation in which unity and closure is sought in books on the basis of generic consistency: such considerations probably did not play a very important part in the composition of Old Testament books. This would suggest – and these are just samples of the conclusions that might follow from a proper investigation – that old-fashioned source critics were probably right to see inconsistency as evidence for sources, since it occurs in works such as the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic History and prophets but very little in later works such as Chronicles which are modelled on these. Evidently it mattered to later writers to iron out inconsistency, and not to introduce any into their own work. It is thus not a figment of the historical-critical imagination to see inconsistencies as significant for the origins and development of biblical literature: it is not just we moderns who see inconsistency as a problem, but the ancient writers themselves. On the other hand, it is unsafe to base anything on the mixture of genres in biblical books, since this is a feature that recurs even when people start to copy biblical books. Chronicles mixes up genealogies and narratives just as much as Genesis does, and one need only think of the wild profusion of genres in 1 Enoch to see that this tendency continued and was apparently not regarded as a flaw. A great deal more time than I have here would be needed to test various characteristics of biblical books in the attempt to discover how significant they are for understanding what people in late biblical times thought constituted a ‘proper’ book, but these are just examples from what I hope may turn into a larger study. What is a book? At first sight, it seems that a sepher was anything written down, what we might call a ‘text’. On closer inspection, however, we can see that people in various periods in ancient Israel did have ideas about the characteristics a book should have. Some of these were like our own – I have instanced an avoidance of inconsistency – while others were not – for example, Israelite books were allowed to slide from one genre to another in a way bewildering to us. An interesting and important question that remains on the table is how far literary closure was regarded as necessary. This has been important in both historical-critical and literary studies, but I am personally not convinced that it was all that important to the biblical authors. If I am right, then the presence of closure probably should not be used as evidence of literary skill, as is done by literary critics, nor its absence as a sign of a fragmentary or composite text, as is usual in source-critical studies. Much of the quest for inclusio and chiasmus that is popular in rhetorical criticism might also need to be re-examined, in the light of the possibility that biblical texts are rather more accidental and unplanned than this school of criticism generally supposes. Much of what may be called the rhetoric of rhetorical criticism consists of saying that this or that text is much more carefully crafted than historical critics think and hence does not contain the kind of loose ends or inconsistencies that are traditionally thought to point in a source-critical direction. But inherent in this claim is a desire to vindicate the text against a supposed imputation of being flawed because of a lack of unity.

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My suggestion is that there need not be any such imputation. In saying that a text contains evidence of lack of consistent construction or planning one is not saying that its original readers, or its author, would have found anything to criticize in it. Books just were untidy, and were allowed to be so. Where factual inconsistency is concerned, I believe that a source-critical theory remains the likeliest explanation. But there is no negative verdict on the text implied by such an explanation. It was not, in our sense, a book; but it was, in their sense, a sepher.

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Chapter 12

Should Old Testament Study be more Theological? ‘Does biblical study still belong to theology?’ The title of James Barr’s 1977 inaugural lecture at Oxford1 sums up a suspicion that many people, in the Church and in the universities, feel about the current state of Old Testament study. There is a widespread perception of professional biblical scholarship as concerned only to talk to itself, taking the Bible away from the believing community and encapsulating it in a small world with its own rules. The Bible, people feel, needs to be given back to the Church. And for this some way must be found of bridging the gap between the professionals, on the one hand, and pastors and ordinary Christians, on the other. The study of the Old Testament has indeed developed into a bewildering array of technical specialisms. Three of these are perhaps particularly baffling to lay people who feel that the specialists ought to be helping Christians to understand this major part of the Christian Bible better, and who sense that having asked for bread, they are being given a particularly hard and craggy stone. The first is the now traditional discipline of ‘historical-critical’ study, especially in its three related branches of source, form and redaction criticism, which continues unabated (especially in German scholarship) and with an ever-increasing refinement and detail. To understand the old ‘JEDP’ theory of the Pentateuch was within the capacity of average students, even if its relevance to a religious appropriation of the Old Testament was far from clear to them. But no amount of work with coloured pencils, highlighters or even different type-faces (as in von Rad’s classic Genesis commentary)2 will help us to chart our way through the sophisticated source-critical theories of Van Seters, Rendtorff or Schmid. People found Martin Noth’s The Deuteronomistic History3 a stiff read; but current source-critical theories about the historical books, with sigla such as DtrG and DtrN, seem to be taking us back to a view of the Bible as an infinitely complex, many-layered work. It is almost as if we were back in the 1920s, when (many felt) detailed Pentateuchal source criticism had reached such a pitch of fragmentation that the Pentateuch was threatening to disappear altogether. What all this has to do with religious faith or ‘theology’ is far from evident to clergy or ordinands, let alone to the average Christian. But, secondly, things seem hardly any better if one turns to the movements that have set themselves up in conscious opposition to these minute dissections of the 1 J. Barr, Does Biblical Study still belong to Theology? (OUP, 1978), reprinted in Explorations in Theology 7 (SCM Press, 1980). 2 G. von Rad, Genesis (SCM Press, 1961, 1963). 3 M. Noth, The Deuteronomistic History (JSOT Press, 1981).

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text – the various ‘holistic’ approaches now popular in the English-speaking world. ‘The Bible as literature’ has become the watchword of a movement that produces analyses of the biblical text often as intricate in their way as the work of traditional biblical criticism. Structuralism and its various offspring attempt to read the biblical text as it is, rather than to reconstruct (or ‘excavate’, as Robert Alter puts it4) what lies behind the text. But the Christian who naively supposes that this means a return to a simple, pietistic reading of what lies open in the printed Bible is doomed to disappointment. In the world of inclusio, chiasmus and semiotic squares there is not much room for simple faith. The third (and most recent) movement that has to answer the charge of taking the Bible away from the people is the new sociological and anthropological approach to the Old Testament. In materialist readings of the Old Testament, biblical religion is regarded as merely the ‘ideology’ current in ancient Israel, and all religious institutions are interpreted as projections of essentially economic factors. Such an approach may not commend itself to all biblical specialists, but there is no doubt that it has led to important new questions in Old Testament study: one need think only of N.K. Gottwald’s massive work The Tribes of Yahweh.5 And anthropology is beginning to be taken seriously by students of the Old Testament, who are increasingly selfaware in their use of its categories. The effect of both disciplines on biblical study, however, is again to produce a way of reading the Bible which many lay people perceive as foreign to traditional religious concerns. To read the Bible like this is to secularize and relativize it, it seems, turning it from a book of faith into a mere source for the study of ancient ideologies and alien belief-systems. One could find other trends in modern study that are perceived as contributing to the gulf between believer and biblical critic; but these are enough to hint at the scale of the problem. Biblical scholarship may be a fascinating pursuit for biblical scholars; but where, we are asked, is its commitment to Christian faith and to the life of the churches and their members? But most professional theologians are believers, too; and they have not been sitting idly by while the biblical scholars play their self-absorbed little games. Some who are also themselves biblical scholars, deeply concerned about the way biblical studies are going, have been mounting a rescue bid. The most widely canvassed attempt to win back the Bible for the Church, outside the fundamentalist camp, has been ‘canonical criticism’. This is not really a single movement, but contains at least two separate strands, and possibly more. In the work of Brevard Childs (more properly called the canonical method or approach) it aims at a new, post-critical reading of the finished form of biblical texts; but, unlike holistic ‘literary’ readings, with their addiction to modern literary theory, a ‘canonical’ reading is concerned with the religious meaning of the Bible as this has been distilled into the exact form of the biblical text handed down by synagogue and church. The validity of ‘critical’ methods is not denied, but for the believer or theologian critical questions

4

See R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (George Allen & Unwin, 1981). N.K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 BCE (SCM Press, 1979). 5

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are bypassed in an attempt to get at the message the canonical text can impart, as it speaks from faith to faith.6 In the canonical criticism pioneered by J.A. Sanders, on the other hand, the present form of the text is seen more as the end-product of a process of canonization, and authority for the believer lies in this process, rather than simply in its conclusion.7 But it is not permissible to see the development of the text as an accident of history, or to read it in a secular or reductionist manner. At all stages in the growth of the text divine providence operated, and the task of the interpreter is not to bracket out this providential character, but on the contrary to bring it alive for modern believers. Both Childs and Sanders, accomplished and experienced critics and commentators, are anxious to carry as much traditional ‘critical’ insight as possible over into their own ‘canonical’ method. Thus they hope to regain not only the Bible itself, but also the professional study of the Bible, for the Church and for faith. If biblical criticism has killed the Bible as Christian Scripture, then a canonical approach seeks to breathe new life into it. At the same time it tries to help the critics themselves to be more theologically and religiously sensitive. Canonical criticism is not antiintellectual or pietistic. It wants to bring the critics, with all their skills, back into the fold of the Church: to enable them to share with simpler believers the experience of finding again in the Bible the living word of God. Canonical criticism is not the only proposed solution to the present malaise about biblical scholarship, though it is currently the most influential. Does the future of Old Testament study indeed lie in trying to find its way back to a more religiously conceived role, and so contributing more directly to the life of the Church – coming out of its private world, and beginning again to contribute to the theology and faith of the churches? Will the rescue-party find Old Testament scholars in time, before the snows of obscurantism finally engulf them, and they disappear down the fissures of specialism or perish under an avalanche of secularism? Can they be saved from the torrents of their own footnotes? Many (including the present writer) have questioned whether the canonical critics in particular are properly equipped for the daring feat of mountain rescue on which they are engaged; but even if they fail, others may arise to take up the challenge. There is, however, a prior question. Before sending out search-parties it is as well to be sure that people are lost. In the rest of this article I shall suggest that biblical scholarship may not be in need of the kind of rescue that is proposed: it is alive and well. It has of course no reason to be complacent; yet the country it inhabits is a wider and more spacious land than its would-be rescuers think, and if they would only throw away their ropes and crampons and raise their eyes to the horizon, they would see happier prospects than they fear. There are two odd things about the prevalent perception of biblical criticism as anti-theological, even anti-religious, that might make us question whether our current ills have been correctly diagnosed. First, anyone who is familiar with the 6

See B.S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (SCM Press, 1979), The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (SCM Press, 1984) and Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (SCM Press, 1985). 7 See J.A. Sanders, Torah and Canon (Fortress Press, 1972) and From Sacred Story to Sacred Text (Fortress Press, 1987).

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writings of theologians and biblical scholars for the last fifty years or so is likely to have a certain sense of déjà vu on being told that recent biblical studies have taken the Bible away from the Church. One of the driving forces behind much of Gerhard von Rad’s work, for example, including his great Old Testament Theology,8 was the conviction that biblical criticism had fragmented the Bible, and that it was now high time to put the pieces back together and to hear its message whole. Only so (he believed) could the Church reclaim the book that the critics had dissected. Of course von Rad in no sense rejected biblical criticism; but he had a clear sense that we must move beyond it and appropriate the Old Testament in faith. One cannot understand him except by seeing that he thought much contemporary scholarship had failed to make this move back towards a properly religious or theological use of the Bible. The so-called ‘Biblical Theology movement’ in Anglo-American scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s evinced the same tendency, even more clearly. It was not exactly against biblical criticism, but it had little patience with the minutiae of technical scholarship, and felt that the time had more than come for students of the Bible to stop analysing and to begin synthesizing. The movement of thought that has now given us canonical criticism is thus hardly a reaction against a new or newly-perceived divorce of Old Testament study from faith. It is essentially the continuation of a tradition of thought which goes back for thirty or forty years, in which biblical criticism is portrayed negatively and scholars are urged to move beyond it. But of course this movement has roots that go back well before the Second World War, and (as all acknowledge) the influence of Karl Barth is easily detectable in it. For Barth, much biblical criticism and exegesis should properly be seen as ‘mere’ history or ‘mere’ archaeology: for the sake of theology, and for the life of faith, the Bible needed to be removed from the clutches of the critics and restored to the believing community. Now one may of course think that Barth was quite right about this, and that his heirs (canonical critics and others) who find recent biblical scholarship too unhelpfully non-theological are also right. But we should not overlook the possibility that recent disenchantment with biblical criticism is based less on actual observation of criticism as it works in practice than on a prior commitment to a Barthian approach to theology. What is more, it is not even clear that laments about the secular, theologically neutral and unconstructive character of biblical criticism began with Barth. In a sense this is only a latter-day working out of the opposition which nineteenthcentury critics encountered from conservatives such as Hengstenberg and Pusey. It is very doubtful whether recent biblical scholarship is more to blame for taking the Bible away from the Church than the founders of modern biblical criticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We may remember the trial of Robertson Smith, and Wellhausen’s sad request to be transferred from the faculty of theology to the faculty of arts because, as he put it, he found that his lectures were systematically disqualifying students from employment as Lutheran pastors.9 If biblical criticism is the enemy of true religion, then it has always been so; its intention has always 8

G. von Rad, Old Testament Theology, 2 vols (Oliver & Boyd, 1962–5). See R. Smend, ‘Julius Wellhausen and his Prolegomena to the History of Israel’, Semeia 25 (1982), pp. 1–20. 9

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been neutral with respect to faith, its effect always perceived as hostile. And in every generation there have been practising biblical critics who have themselves felt that the charge of hostility was justified, and who have accordingly sought to integrate their findings with a religious perspective, to synthesize them and show their positive value for the Church. Indeed, the second feature that may make us pause before accepting the common evaluation of modern biblical scholarship as merely cool or even antagonistic towards a theological commitment is that the present generation seems if anything more concerned than its predecessors to develop styles of biblical study that will make the Bible fruitful for religious uses. This is certainly true of two of the three trends in Old Testament study outlined above. Holistic literary readings began in the 1960s under the influence of French structuralism, and in origin this had nothing to do with theology; indeed, most structuralists were openly hostile to religion. Yet as literary readings have become naturalized within departments of biblical studies and have begun to appear in the journals read by scholars and students of the Bible, there has grown up a strange alliance between the literary critics and rather conservative Christians. It has come to be felt that holistic readings respect the biblical text in a way that ‘historical-critical’ methods do not. Thus the literary concern for the ‘final form’ of texts has climbed into the theological fold on the back of very much the kind of concerns that have produced canonical criticism. Today we have the strange spectacle of near-fundamentalists who prefer styles of biblical study originally pioneered by Marxists to the older critical approaches associated with ‘liberal’ theological scholarship. In the process, the new literary movement has acquired a high religious validation, and it is perceived by many who practise it as an example of just that reclaiming of the Bible for faith which we are told is so badly needed. Evidence in these matters is necessarily subjective and anecdotal, but I doubt whether more than a handful of those who seriously pursue ‘literary’ interpretation of the Bible do so out of purely ‘secular’ motives. Nearly always there seems to be an undisclosed agendum: to show that a truly literary reading is superior to ‘critical’ readings not only at the literary level, but also in restoring to the reader the true religious value of the Bible, so long concealed through the ‘excavative’ tendencies of the historical critics. Literary critics claim to be the first truly to observe Jowett’s prescription, to ‘read the Bible like any other book’.10 But few would dissent from his dictum that, when one does so, one finds that it is not like any other book, but is a work of incomparable spiritual power. And this may very well be true; but it gives the lie to any suggestion that biblical study has suddenly moved into a more secular phase. Literary readings of the Old Testament in which there is genuinely no religious motivation at all are, I believe, very rare indeed, despite disclaimers to the contrary. Nor are sociological and anthropological study of the Old Testament usually devoid of a theological interest. Gottwald’s The Tribes of Yahweh is a case in point. Gottwald’s intention, in fact, is to replace what he sees as a too neutral, detached, 10 See B. Jowett, ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’, Essays and Reviews (London, 1860); cf. J. Barr, ‘Jowett and the “Original Meaning” of Scripture’, Religious Studies 18 (1983), pp. 433–7 and ‘Jowett and the Reading of the Bible “Like any other Book”’, Horizons in Biblical Theology: An International Dialogue 4 (1982), pp. 1–44.

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non-religious style of biblical criticism with something far more religiously robust. So far from being an example of a growing divorce between biblical study and faith, The Tribes of Yahweh is one of the works that most forcefully argues the case for seeing most traditional criticism as too religiously neutral. The subtitle, ‘A sociology of the religion of liberated Israel, 1250–1050 BCE’, points to the passionate concern for human liberation that animates Gottwald’s work. His essentially Marxist analysis of the period of the ‘judges’ in Israel is inextricably linked to a commitment to liberation theology in the present. Now though it would be true to say that few sociological studies of the Old Testament make as clear a link as this between the history of Israel and the concerns of modern theology, most scholars who use sociological categories in biblical study probably do so because they see significant parallels between the Old Testament world and the world of today. They believe that the biblical text (being God’s word) should be read with the help of any interpretative categories that will enable it to speak to the modern situation. Gottwald’s work in particular has been deeply influential for biblical study in parts of Latin America, and he is there widely perceived as having effected just that reappropriation of the Bible for theology and church which is said to be so desirable. It is only with the first of the specialisms described at the beginning of this article that one can begin to speak of a self-perpetuating tradition of biblical criticism, and one which has not been driven into new channels through precisely the desire to speak to modern religious concerns that biblical scholarship is said to lack. German scholarship continues to use, and to refine, techniques of source, form and redaction criticism which few, apparently, in the English-speaking world can see as having anything more to contribute to theology (if indeed they ever had anything at all). Whose salvation, it is asked with scorn, hangs on the relative dates of J and P, or on the exact stratification of the Deuteronomistic history? Such questions are indeed ‘merely’ historical; furthermore, they are sterile and pointless in themselves. When Childs contrasts the living voice of the finished form of the Bible with the reconstructed remains of earlier drafts by saying that the latter would be no more important for faith than ‘inert sherds which have lain in the ground for centuries’, these sherds are, in his view, the kind of thing that most German critics still study. There is a certain paradox here, for it remains the case that German university faculties of theology are far more tightly linked to the training of clergy than their British or American counterparts. Yet it is in them that a style of biblical study continues which is felt by many (inside as well as outside Germany) to have little relevance to the work of Christian ministry. And it is probably chiefly of such continuing ‘excavative’ work in the German-speaking world, with its counterpart especially in more traditional centres of theological education in Britain and North America, that people are thinking when they condemn biblical scholarship as out of touch with the needs of the Church and the believer. Now there are many points to be made in favour of such condemnation. There are probably some critical questions about the Bible we are simply never going to discover the answer to. The Synoptic Problem may well be one, and the exact history of the composition of the Pentateuch is probably another. Maybe it is time to stop hitting our heads against a brick wall; though pure intellectual curiosity is a rare enough commodity, and in a world that looks for quick and instant results the

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churches and the universities alike might be thought to have a duty to encourage it. Again, no church can afford to have too much of its manpower deployed in enquiries whose relation to faith is at so many removes as the questions biblical critics have traditionally studied. All Christian communities need those who can make connections between the Bible and the Christian faith, people whose expertise is not narrow but very broad. Yet non omnia possumus omnes, we can’t all do everything, and not everyone with an aptitude for biblical study with its demanding linguistic and historical basis can also be a good systematic theologian: it is a mercy if there are at least some people who can manage both. Nor should scholars think that ordinary believers need to read themselves into the latest theories about the various types of deuteronomist before they can claim to understand the Bible and find in it the words of life; though, again, I should like to be shown the scholar who does think so. But none of this touches the fundamental misunderstanding or misperception that lies at the heart of the religious objection to biblical scholarship, seeking always to divert it into fresh channels not of its own choosing, and often succeeding. At the root of the matter there is a false assumption: the assumption that believers should turn to the Bible with only certain types of question in their minds; that they should go to it for theology, or religious knowledge, but should not be interested in non-theological aspects of the text. At one level there is obviously something in this. It is a commonplace now to say that we cannot use the Bible as a source of geographical, scientific or technological information. But at another level this way of putting the matter misunderstands how the Bible mediates knowledge of God, and also, perhaps, what knowledge of God is. If it is a commonplace that the Bible is not a book of science or geography, it is also a commonplace that it is not a theological handbook or a collection of definitions of the faith; it is a large compendium of narratives, hymns, poems, prophecies, laws and much else besides. And to study such a book with attention to the natural contours of the text is necessarily to ask questions that are not immediately theological. Interest in the sources from which the biblical books were composed, or the forms they use, or the skills with which they were assembled by redactors, is a natural consequence of attending to the givenness of the text, and of realizing that if the Bible does mediate knowledge of God, it does it through these means and not otherwise. Current concern for such matters as the final form of the text or for the sociological and anthropological framework from which it derives are, however, equally legitimate and (in our day) equally inevitable questions for the student of the text to ask. Neither these latter questions nor the more traditional source-, form- and redactional-critical ones can be justified on the grounds that they lead directly to the heart of the Bible’s religious ‘message’ for us – they do not. But nor do they need to be so justified. Once the Bible can be freely studied, it is inevitable that such questions will sooner or later be raised; and the theological or religious results that will follow cannot be predicted in advance. That, of course, is why the study of the Bible is always a risky enterprise, and why authoritarian forms of Christianity are wise (according to their own lights) to ban or circumscribe it. It is also why Lutheran scholars are right in essence when they maintain that biblical criticism does not conflict with the spirit of the Reformation, but is its natural friend and ally.

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What in any case is theology, or the knowledge of God? Those who complain that biblical scholars spend too much time on history, geography, textual criticism, sociology or literary criticism seem to think that there exists ‘theological’ knowledge which is quite distinct from these questions. Perhaps we all have somewhere in our minds a theological knowledge scale of 1 to 10, on which (say) direct personal encounter with God would score 10 and knowledge of textual variants in the Qumran Isaiah scrolls about 1 or 2. But persuasive though this way of seeing the matter is, it misleads. Just as scientific research, quite unpredictably, often throws up results with enormous practical consequences from the most theoretical projects, so biblical study has a way of surprising even its practitioners. The painstaking observation of minor variations among the Pentateuchal sources eventually led to the complete revision of the history of Israel, through the work of Graf and Wellhausen; and this new historical framework for understanding ancient Israel, conceived as a purely ‘secular’ history, in turn raised enormous questions about how the history thus reconstructed could be seen as providentially guided. Early Israel emerged as a far less ‘sacral’ society than on a non-critical reading of the Old Testament. The way was opened for a re-evaluation of the meaning of ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ in human history and society, for a new understanding of the Israel into which Jesus came, and for a fresh interpretation of the origins of Judaism. All this had and has profound implications for ‘theology’, for understanding God’s way with his world. But it could never have come about if someone had ruled that questions about stylistic variation in the Pentateuch were ‘not theological’, and therefore could not be entertained. Theologians perhaps above all need a conviction of the unity of all knowledge, if they are to avoid a cramping narrowness of spirit that in the end restricts knowledge of God to a set of formulas passed on unthinkingly from one generation to another. Biblical studies, now a rich and varied field of many specialisms, has no less (though perhaps also no more) to contribute to knowledge of God and of his creation than the other variegated arts and sciences. Of course parts of it seem over-minute and selfabsorbed; but that is the price of allowing scholars their head, and the alternative is far worse. Biblical specialists should be sensitive to calls to become more theological, but they should also know when to take them with a pinch of salt; for the Church is not best served by an academic community that delivers the verdicts it wants to hear.

Chapter 13

The Future of Old Testament Study There are few more certain ways of stopping the conversation than to announce that you spend your time in the study of the Old Testament. The cleft stick in which it places others is almost visible: should they give offence by swiftly changing the subject, or invite you to explain in more detail and risk terminal boredom? Worse still, the contents of the Old Testament are so generally assumed to be both religiously weird and morally repugnant that you can see a swift reassessment of your character being undertaken – rather as though you had announced that you were a druid or (on the other hand) a used-car salesman. The academic study of theological subjects is not well regarded in this country anyway, and the study of the Old Testament can well seem the low water mark of a very minor discipline. Many people in Oxford are likely to be not so much intrigued by the future of Old Testament study as amazed that it has a present, though they will probably not object to its having had a past. All disciplines, of course, look different from inside. Old Testament study in the last three centuries has been pursued by some of the best minds in theological scholarship, and it remains a lively field, noted especially for its openness to neighbouring disciplines – whether classical and oriental studies, literary criticism, social anthropology and sociology, archaeology, ancient history or systematic theology. Oxford has been and is a notable centre of Old Testament study. This is borne out if one considers the previous holders of the Oriel Professorship; and I can claim a distinction which no previous Oriel Professor has had, that three of my predecessors are still active in the subject. It is pleasant to recall that my first tutorial, when I came up to Keble in 1966, was with the then Oriel Professor, Hedley Sparks,1 who came to the Chair forty years ago this term and who, in a long life, has contributed much to the textual criticism of the Bible and its ancient versions, as well as to the history of its interpretation in antiquity. James Barr’s2 international reputation should not disguise his great contribution to the teaching and organization of Old Testament study in Oxford. His own inaugural lecture, ‘Does Biblical Study Still Belong to Theology?’,3 raised many of the issues that have remained on the agenda for teachers of the Old Testament here, some of which I shall return to later in this lecture. And it was he who initiated the Old Testament seminar, now with about thirty members, from which many publications have flowed and which has provided a forum for us to meet Old Testament scholars from other universities worldwide. 1

H.F.D. Sparks was Oriel Professor from 1952 until his retirement in 1976. J. Barr was Oriel Professor from 1976 to 1978, when he became Regius Professorof Hebrew (1978–89), afterwards becoming Professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt University. 3 Oxford, 1978; reprinted in his collected essays The Scope and Authority of the Bible, Explorations in Theology 7 (London, 1980). 2

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The Old Testament group in the Theology Faculty also owes a great debt to Ernest Nicholson,4 my immediate predecessor and now Provost of Oriel, for giving it the cohesion it still retains, making the holder of the Oriel Chair part of a supportive, constructive and collaborative team in a way that is not universal in the humanities. My personal debt to him for his support and encouragement is also great, and I acknowledge it very gladly. And his books set a standard for the kind of critical biblical study I want to go on to discuss in a moment. Through the work of all these people, my predecessors in this Chair and past and current members of the Old Testament group, Old Testament study has gained in the Theology Faculty and, I hope, more widely in the University the respect it hardly enjoys in the world at large. But the difficult times in which we live might well have resulted in a long vacancy in the Chair had it not been for the generosity of Sir Kirby Laing. Many will know, from the news of other benefactions to Theology in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, that Sir Kirby is not among those who consider the study of theology, or of the Bible, a waste of time. All with a concern for these things must be glad that the Chair is now permanently funded through his generosity. My own gratitude, as the first Oriel and Laing Professor, can hardly be disinterested, but it is certainly heartfelt. Now at one level these comments on the healthy state of Old Testament study could be repeated for many other centres of biblical and theological research throughout the world. The study of the Old Testament is flourishing, and the interests of its practitioners seem to grow ever more diverse. Interest in the historical aspects of the Old Testament has increased in recent years, and embraces the history of Israelite religion as well as political and economic history. A further group of scholars has opened up lines of communication between biblical and literary studies, reading the Old Testament either in an older literary-critical mode as a ‘classic’ of world literature, or in the manner of newer critical movements, seeking out ‘subversive’ texts and deconstructing apparently respectable ones. Traditional studies such as textual criticism are flourishing, with major work on the ancient versions (the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Peshitta), and the planning and preparation of a fifth edition of Biblia Hebraica, the standard international Hebrew Bible. Middle Eastern archaeology is thriving too, and commands the respect of everyone in biblical studies. The catalogue could continue, but is already long enough to make my point. The Old Testament is a body of texts that seems inexhaustible in setting fresh questions to each generation of scholars. Yet I do not think I am alone in detecting a certain malaise among Old Testament specialists, a feeling of disappointment, even disillusionment, with the common task on which we are engaged. Many feel that this task is in danger of breaking up into a loose confederation of barely related specialisms, perhaps not even that. Of course no one can be an expert in all parts of any academic field; but this fragmentation now goes well beyond what is dictated by merely practical considerations, and is felt to threaten the integrity of the discipline. Biblical archaeologists often simply do not see themselves as belonging in the same intellectual world as biblical theologians; 4

E.W. Nicholson was Oriel Professor from 1979 until 1990, when he became Provost of Oriel College.

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those who reconstruct the history of ancient Israel acknowledge no common cause with literary critics. We seem to have moved from a pluralism in which anyone of broad sympathies should rejoice, to what amounts almost to a breakdown in communication between experts in what are perceived not as complementary but as competing, even mutually exclusive, interests. Each specialist field becomes more and more intensively cultivated, but the ditches between the fields grow ever wider. When I began Old Testament study in the mid-1960s there was an impressive consensus about what held it together. Things look very different nearly thirty years on, when we might ask about the postwar synthesis in our subject what Haggai asked the generation that returned to Jerusalem from exile, and saw the ruins of the Temple: ‘Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory, and how do you see it now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?’ (Haggai 2:3). The pile of stones which we see before us contains some beautiful specimens, and there is much work to be done in rearranging and decorating them. But they do not add up to a Temple, and those who come looking for one can hardly be blamed if they feel a certain disappointment. For me, the question about the future of Old Testament study is essentially the question whether this tendency to fragmentation might be overcome, or whether, indeed, it shows that the discipline is (and perhaps always has been) fundamentally incoherent. Is there anything that could reunite us? The most important proposal on the table at the moment is theological, or perhaps we should say religious, in character. It reminds us that the reason why these texts are studied with such energy is that they are Holy Scripture – the sacred texts of two major monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity. Old Testament study has gone off the rails, it is widely felt, because it has acted as though our study of these texts could ignore the reason why anyone ever supposed they were worth studying in the first place. The strength of Old Testament study in the 1950s and 1960s was precisely that it respected the theological character of the literature, and attempted to respond by expounding the texts in religiously fruitful ways, eschewing mere antiquarianism. So it might be hoped that a fresh theological interest in the Old Testament, integrating (but also transcending) all the individual types of study which are right and proper in their limited field, could enable a fresh generation of religious believers to appropriate this vital religious foundation-document. Any student of the Bible who is a practising Christian is likely to find such a programme attractive. A realignment of scholarship so that the religious value of the Old Testament became the hub around which the whole of the discipline turned might seem to offer many advantages. But there is an important distinction to be observed here. On the one hand, it is more or less self-evident that any adequate study of the Old Testament needs to be theological. Anyone can see that the Old Testament is religious literature. Like any other culture, ancient Israel did possess non-religious writings, and a few fragments have turned up, in inscriptions and on ostraca; but virtually none found its way into the Old Testament, which is more or less exclusively about God and his relations with Israel, with human beings in general, and with the rest of his creation. It is therefore perverse to try to study the Old Testament without regard for its theological content. Old Testament specialists should surely not only interest themselves in, let us say, Hebrew orthography or the design of houses in the

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ninth century BC, but also and indeed primarily in the religious message that biblical writers were conveying. For my part, I must say that my own interests lie chiefly in this direction. I am definitely a theologian rather than an orientalist, and I believe that the study of biblical theology ought to occupy a central place among the many other areas of interest to the student of the Old Testament. But such an emphasis on the fact that the Old Testament is a religious text does not yet amount to the kind of realignment of Old Testament study that is now being demanded. After all, biblical theology remains (as Gabler argued classically in his inaugural lecture of 17875) a descriptive discipline – just as much as all the other disciplines that make up the study of the Old and New Testaments. It tells us what people believed, just as the study of orthography tells us how they spelt. A concern for the religious ideas of the Bible, rather than (say) its history or geography or languages, cannot be guaranteed to make Old Testament study religiously fruitful for us. The religious ideas could turn out on examination to be utterly diverse, jumbled and incredible. The call for Old Testament study to become more theologically serious is asking for more than a revival of interest in biblical theology. It is asking for Old Testament study to be reunited with theology proper, re-orientated towards religious faith and theological truth. It is asking us to remember that the Old Testament is part of a volume called ‘The Holy Bible’; not ‘An Interesting Collection of Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic Religious Documents’. The prospectus for a new biblical commentary, which was presented at the international Old Testament Congress in Paris in August 1992, puts the point lucidly: There are two deficiencies in existing commentaries that we particulary wish to address: the two things that the normal reader of commentaries actually desires. First, the reader is probably motivated not by academic curiosity, but rather by the wish to penetrate to that level of the text where a divine encounter can take place. Secondly, the consumer of commentaries, often in a position of pastoral leadership, does not belong and would not wish to belong to a pre-Christian culture … These readers seek from their reading of the Bible an illumination and deepening of their present religious culture, not an artificial return to an ancient one! By what exegetical principles and by what literary theory can we provide a commentary of this kind?6 5 J.P. Gabler, Oratio de justo discrimine theologiae biblicae et dogmaticae regundisque recte utriusque finibus (Altdorf, 1787), in his Kleinere theologische Schriften (Ulm, 1831), ii, pp. 179–98. See p. 183 for the present point: ‘Est theologia biblica e genere historico, tradens, quod scriptores sacri de rebus divinis senserint.’ 6 Sean McEvenue, in an abstract presented to the Fourteenth Congress of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament in Paris, August 1992. The (unpublished) original French text reads: ‘II y a deux défis auxquels nous voulons spécialement faire face, à savoir les deux désirs réels d’un lecteur normal de commentaires. Premièrement, celui-ci est motivé probablement, non par curiosité académique, mais plutôt par le désir de percer au niveau du texte où l’on expérimente un rapport divin. Deuxièmement, le consommateur de commentaires, souvent un pasteur ou animateur, n’aura pas, et ne voudrait pas avoir, une culture préchretienne … Il cherche dans sa lecture de la bible une illumination et un approfondissement de sa culture religieuse actuelle, et non un retour artificiel en arrière! Par quels principes exégétiques, et par quelle théorie littéraire … peut-on arriver à ce genre de commentaire?’

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Here it is urged that the interpreter of Scripture should operate with a set of hermeneutical principles which will make the reading of the text fruitful for theology and religious faith. The Old Testament should be read, not in an antiquarian sense, but for what it means now, in the context of the modern believing community. A religious commitment, taken as our starting-point, can generate regulative principles to guide us in putting the right sort of questions to the text, and can alert us to what kinds of answers we should expect to get from it. By following the correct hermeneutic, biblical scholars will break out of the merely historical understanding that has limited the discipline and has enabled it to fall apart into so many seemingly unrelated pursuits. There are signs that where people are worried about the future of Old Testament study, something like this answer to the problems of its coherence, relevance and role is beginning to prevail. If the title of this lecture seems to promise some prophetic insight into the future, then I must offer this as my best guess. Students of the Old Testament hardly need reminding that prophets are often wrong. But sometimes they also hope to be wrong, and that is my position today. For I believe that current calls for Old Testament study to become more religious, for all that they sound so constructive, often conceal a cast of mind with which modern biblical criticism has continually had to struggle in order to maintain its right to exist. That is, in fact, the crucial term: biblical criticism. The thing that has united so many Old Testament scholars over the last two centuries has not been the particular aspect of the Old Testament they have devoted their attention to – textual criticism, literary appreciation, archaeology, biblical history or biblical theology – but the spirit in which their study has been undertaken. And it is this spirit to which the term ‘biblical criticism’ applies. What after all is biblical criticism, as distinct from simply biblical study? Despite the fact that the term ‘the historical-critical method’ has more or less replaced it in many contexts, it is not a method or even a series of methods; nor is it a mode of study which regards history as all-important. It is a particular attitude towards the study of the biblical text, which became usual in German biblical study in the nineteenth century, and until recently was widely regarded as normal in most university faculties of theology. One of the best discussions of its nature is in James Barr’s Sprunt Lectures, published as Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism. Barr wrote: The concept of freedom is of central importance here, for I wish to suggest that freedom is the central content of the idea of criticism when it is applied to the Bible. Criticism, as I shall later argue, is not one method, such as historical method, nor even a group of methods; it has generated various methods, but it is not in itself a method. In biblical research one can use ‘modern methods’ or even ‘critical methods’, without being in the least touched by the spirit of criticism; criticism means the freedom, not simply to use methods, but to follow them wherever they may lead. Applied to theological problems, this means: the freedom to come to exegetical results which may differ from, or even contradict, the accepted theological interpretation. Criticism in this sense is of course a child of the Enlightenment; but, if so, it is also a child of the Reformation, for the Reformation was expressly ‘critical’ in this sense.7 7

Barr, Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism (Oxford, 1983), pp. 33–4. A similar passage occurs in his earlier essay, ‘Bibelkritik als theologische Aufklärung’, in Glaube

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To put it simply, the Bible is read critically where it is believed that its meaning can be determined only by unprejudiced investigation, and is not known from tradition, through ecclesiastical authority, or by applying certain hermeneutical rules. More particularly, the meaning of the Bible does not depend on its truth.8 What I mean by this is that we do not begin by knowing that what the Bible says must be true, and therefore attribute to the text a meaning which we judge capable of being true. The relationship is the other way round. The truth or falsehood of the biblical texts depends on what they turn out to mean. The essential point is that we cannot predict either in advance. The term ‘biblical criticism’ is associated in most people’s minds especially with what is now commonly called the ‘source criticism’ of the Pentateuch. Hence, perhaps, its reputation for ‘dividing up’ the text, which from the first beginnings of critical study until our own day has often been evaluated very negatively; for classic Pentateuchal criticism does indeed argue that the Pentateuch is not a single document, but the end-product of a long process in which different source documents were conflated. But what makes this hypothesis distinctively ‘critical’ is not its conclusions, but its starting-point. It results from noticing inconsistencies in the text – unevennesses and awkwardnesses – and refusing to explain them away. And this is a semantic matter: it depends on a grasp of what various parts of the text mean. Biblical criticism allows the reader to accept that such inconsistencies are real. It begins with minute semantic details in the text, yet it leads, through a slow accumulation of such details, to a point where profound questions have to be asked about the whole content of the text, and about its nature, inspiration and religious status. But the question it asks is always ‘What does the text say?’, rather than ‘What have we always been told that the text says?’ or ‘What would it be good to believe that the text says?’9 Such a style of biblical study has often – and quite correctly – been seen as a serious challenge to religious and ecclesiastical authority: not just if it happens to lead to unorthodox conclusions – which of course it may not – but because it transfers the decision about the text’s meaning away from the believing community, with its appointed guardians, and on to the individual student of the Bible, striving to read the text as disinterestedly as possible. In nineteenth-century Oxford, conservatives such as E.B. Pusey clearly perceived this challenge, and opposed biblical criticism und Toleranz: Das theologische Erbe der Auffklärung, ed. T. Rendtorff (Giitersloh, 1982), pp. 30–42, esp. p. 32. 8 Cf. Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), ch. 7: ‘Eas sententias hic obscuras aut claras voco, quarum sensus ex contextu orationis facile vel difficulter elicitur, at non quatenus earum veritas facile vel difficulter ratione percipitur. De solo enim seusu orationum, non autem de earum veritate laboramus … ne verum sensum cum rerum veritate confundamus, ille ex solo linguae usu erit investigandus vel ex ratiocinio, quod nullum aliud fundamentum agnoscit quam Scripturam.’ See Baruch de Spinoza, Opera (in Latin and German), ed. G. Gawlick and F. Niewöhner (Darmstadt, 1979), ii, pp. 234–5. 9 Cf. Barr, Holy Scripture, p. 37: ‘Biblical criticism followed Reformational exegesis in emphasizing what the biblical text actually said, the linguistic and grammatical datum of the text with the semantic implications of that datum. . . the criterion for biblical criticism is, and always has been, what the Bible itself actually says.’

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vigorously. But, as Ernest Nicholson showed in his inaugural lecture, S.R. Driver (in the Regius Chair of Hebrew), alongside T.K. Cheyne (in the Oriel Chair), was decisive in bringing about a general acceptance of the critical spirit in British scholarship by the beginning of the twentieth century. The commitment to the human intellect’s ability and right to choose between different interpretative possibilities on rational grounds, unconstrained by the deliverances of authority, shows at once that biblical criticism is a child of the Enlightenment – as I suppose no one would deny. But I believe Barr is right to claim that it is equally a child of the Reformation. In England those who are most confident of standing in the Protestant line are sometimes sharply at odds with biblical criticism, because of what they see as its tendency to ‘attack’ the Bible. But if, as I have argued, it begins not with hostility to the biblical text but with a determination to understand it for oneself, independently of the Church’s traditional exegesis, then its closeness to the Protestant spirit is obvious. Criticism in biblical scholarship, exactly like Protestantism in religion, might take as its motto St Cyprian’s dictum: ‘custom without truth is just error in its old age’.11 Criticism is part of a quest for truth, and its practitioners ought to be guided by that goal, not for ever asking themselves whether they are getting out of step with what the churches teach. One does not need much experience of the social reality of religion to know that authoritarianism is all too often part of the religious temperament; and authority-structures are not adapted to discovering the truth, but to maintaining the tradition, true or not. Power wielded in the name of religion is still power, often more corrupt for being able to shelter behind such exalted credentials, and many people in the modern world suffer profoundly from its oppressive effects. The right to read the Bible by following where the evidence leads, as one would with any other ancient text, was not won without cost, and is by no means obviously secure in the churches. If there is good religion – and I believe there is – there is also bad religion; and there is no reason to apologize for following a critical path, when it can lead to the liberation of those blighted by that dead hand of empty authority which is religion gone wrong. If biblical scholars who are Christians do have special obligations to their fellow believers, then these (it seems to me) are not discharged by feeding the churches with ‘edifying’ or ‘reverent’ scholarship, but by freeing people from authorities and traditions that usurp their own right to ask for themselves what the Bible means.12 10

E.W. Nicholson, Interpreting the Old Testament: A Century of the Oriel Professorship (Oxford, 1981), esp. pp. 14–19. 11 Cyprian, Letter 74 (ad Pompeium), §9: ‘Nec consuetudo quae apud quosdam obrepserat impedire debet quo minus veritas praevaleat et vincat. nam consuetudo sine veritate vetustas erroris.’ See Saint Cyprien: Correspondance, ed. Bayard (Paris, 1961), ii, pp. 285–6. I am very grateful to Fr. Ian Brayley, SJ, for tracking down this passage, quoted without reference (and reading traditio for consuetudo) in J.P. Meier, ‘On the Veiling of Hermeneutics (I Cor. 11:2–11)’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 40 (1978), pp. 212–26; the quotation is on p. 213. 12 How essential it is to the Church itself that biblical interpretation should not be controlled by the Church is admirably stated by Anthony Thiselton in ‘The Morality of Christian Scholarship’, in Their Lord and Ours: Approaches to Authority, Community, and the Unity if the Church, ed. M. Santer (London, 1982), pp. 20–45; the quotation is on p. 34: ‘Gerhard Ebeling and Jaroslav Pelikan are among those who insist that Martin Luther

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Commoner, perhaps, than an outright attack on biblical criticism is the suggestion that it has done its work and has begun to grow sterile – so that it is now time to move on to a ‘post-critical’ phase of biblical study. The ‘historical-critical paradigm’, as people now call it, has dominated Old Testament study for a century and more, but its time is now up.13 The odd thing about this suggestion is that it seems to recur in each generation; it is a topos among students of the Bible. The so-called ‘Biblical Theology movement’ in Anglo-American scholarship back in the 1950s was the expression of a feeling that analysis had gone on long enough, and that it was time to synthesize, in order to provide the Church with a theologically fruitful account of the Old Testament, rather than a laboratory full of dissected specimens. 14 Gerhard saw himself first and foremost as a university professor of Old Testament, standing in the tradition of humanist scholarship. Scripture must be allowed to speak in such a way that it may correct and reform the life of the Church; but if it is taught and studied only by those who see everything through the eyes of that life, how can the Bible speak freely and powerfully to the Church’s condition, confronting even churchmen as a word of both grace and judgement? For this reason, Pelikan observes, the Bible and theology are “too important a part of scholarly enquiry to be left only to churchly theologians”. In other words, it is to the good of the Church that the Bible is not taught and studied exclusively by the official spokesmen of the Church of the day. Otherwise there is the danger that the Church will hear only what it wishes to hear.’ The quotation from Pelikan is from his The Christian Intellectual (London, 1966), p. 103. The Revd Professor P.B. Hinchliff has drawn my attention to a letter from Frederick Temple to Bishop Tait at the time of the condemnation of Essays and Reviews, in which he insists that no worthwhile biblical study can be undertaken without intellectual freedom: ‘Such a study so full of difficulties imperatively demands freedom for its condition. To tell a man to study and yet bid him, under heavy penalties, come to the same conclusions with those who have not studied, is to mock him. If the conclusions are prescribed, the study is precluded.’ 13 I think it likely that the use of ‘paradigm’ here rests (consciously or unconsciously) on T.S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962). It seems to be used with two different implications: either (a) that our ways of approaching and understanding reality change, more or less deterministically, from generation to generation, and attempts to evade such changes are pointless – hence we should recognize that the historical-critical paradigm is now no longer available; or (b) that we have a range of choices about the interpretative frameworks we use for understanding the world, our own experience or (in the present case) biblical texts, and the historical-critical framework is now passé. On this use of Kuhn’s terminology I would make two comments. First, though it is conceivable that either of these theories could be correct, it is hard to see how both can be: changes of paradigm cannot be both irresistible and a matter of free choice. Secondly, neither theory seems to have much in common with Kuhn’s own use of the term ‘paradigm’. According to him a change of scientific paradigm occurs when empirical evidence, assembled under the assumptions of the old paradigm, become impossible to accommodate and the mould has to be broken. A new paradigm emerges which can accommodate both the new evidence and the evidence that the old paradigm had appeared to account for. Paradigm-shift is here neither deterministic nor a matter of choice or whim, but rational and empirically governed. Use of the phrase ‘the historical-critical paradigm’ to suggest that biblical criticism is either dead anyway, or an option that the discriminating scholar might do better to shrug off, cannot appeal to the authority of Kuhn. I am grateful to the Revd Dr A.R. Peacocke for advice on this point. 14 Cf., from 1955, the Interim Report of the Church of Scotland Special Commission on Baptism, Edinburgh, p. 3, cited in J. Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (London,

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15

von Rad’s great Old Testament Theology, from the same period, stemmed from much the same impulse. In both these developments we can readily see an influence from the previous generation, the influence of Karl Barth, who thought that biblical criticism had its place but should know its place, and who challenged students of the Bible to practise exegesis that would make sense within a theological system, rather than having a merely antiquarian character. And, moving back further, in the late nineteenth century innumerable biblical scholars urged that biblical criticism was negative, destructive, unable to feed the Church – Hengstenberg in Germany and, again, Pusey in Britain would be obvious examples. People who study and teach the Bible seem to suffer constantly from a bad conscience about biblical criticism, and recent appeals for biblical study to become ‘post-critical’, and therefore more helpful to religious faith, may be simply one more example of this. At any rate it is odd for this to be presented as a startling new insight. It is itself part of the tradition of biblical scholarship, part of its built-in guilt about laying profane hands on holy things: part, therefore, of the evidence for saying that biblical scholars are in general very far from being too secular or too detached from the life of the churches. On the contrary, they are perhaps too pious, and too readily internalize the distrust they attract from fellow believers. This leads to a quite unrealistic fear that the discipline is getting too secular, and a consequent fortifying of the defences in exactly the place where attack is least likely. What Old Testament study needs to guard against is the loss of its independence to religious authoritarianism, the prescription of what kinds of truth it is allowed to pursue, the suggestion that it ought to be practised only in a religious environment. The danger that its practitioners will otherwise become less and less religious is (I believe) so small as to be negligible. Most biblical scholars in the 1990s are still religious believers. Most have a great desire to be useful to theology and to the religious constituency which many of them serve in a teaching or pastoral role. I am saying nothing whatever against this, which is my own position too; I am simply pointing out that it renders the picture of biblical scholarship as a haunt of secularism and irreligion highly implausible. On the contrary, the strong religious commitment of most biblical scholars means that they probably have more need to remind themselves that biblical criticism has its own pace and style, and must not be dictated to by religious interests. 1961), pp. 5–6: ‘New Testament studies are passing from the stage of “divide and rule” into a stage of more positive theological exegesis. In the stage of “divide and rule” we subjected the Scriptural teaching to our analysis. This involved our control, for, so long as we employed merely critical methods, the element of individual judgement entered disproportionately into the reckoning, and it was only too easy for us to allow our own preconceived ideas to dictate what we got out of the Scriptures. In the stage of more positive theological exegesis we let the Scriptures speak to us in terms of themselves, and allow a synthetic approach to gather up the results of analysis. The resulting solidity and unity of the biblical teaching withdraws it from our control. In this situation the Word of God controls us, and presses upon us a deeper theological understanding of the Scriptures.’ 15 G. von Rad, Theologie des Allen Testaments (Munich, 1957, 1960); English translation Old Testament Theology (Edinburgh and London, 1962 (from 2nd German edn, 1957), 1965 (from 3rd German edn, 1960)).

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My hope for the future of Old Testament study, therefore, is not that it will strike out in new ‘post-critical’ directions – most of which I suspect of being old precritical ones in disguise – but that it will return to its past, to its roots. We need to recapture something of the attitude of the great nineteenth-century German critics who established our discipline in the form we now know it, and convinced the best British scholars of the time that there could be no return to a pre-critical era. We shall not do this by slavishly accepting their particular conclusions, but by striving to share their willingness to be excited, surprised and challenged by the text. There are many kinds of biblical study that begin from such an openness to what Barr calls the ‘factuality’ of the text16 – its givenness, its refusal to say just what we should like it to say. These may be primarily historical or primarily literary; they may draw on many related fields of knowledge. To establish critical study as the central aim is not at all to exclude any of these specific branches of our discipline. On the contrary, it is to insist that all are legitimate so long as they are genuinely open to the text. It is the insistence on religious relevance that results in excommunications, and it is there that one hears a word I have used several times in this lecture, the word ‘antiquarian’. This or that type of biblical study is thereby dismissed as ‘merely’ historical, having no contemporary relevance or use. I believe there are two valid responses to such rubbishing of other people’s work. First (to take the high ground) truth is always worth pursuing, whether apparently relevant or not, and in Christian tradition has long been regarded as an imperative for the scholar. But secondly, ‘irrelevant’ and ‘antiquarian’ truth sometimes proves to contain implications with the most far-reaching consequences for modern thought. I have mentioned nineteenthcentury German criticism; and that gives me the excuse (if one were needed) to name Julius Wellhausen – perhaps the greatest Old Testament critic of the nineteenth century, maybe of any century, and still honoured in Oxford, though not so much in some other parts of the English-speaking world (nor indeed uniformly in Germany). Wellhausen’ s Prolegomena to the History of Israel17 begins in what seemed to me, when I read it as an undergraduate, to be the most boringly pedestrian way possible, with a ‘purely antiquarian’ examination of the evidence for the different kinds of sanctuary, sacrifice, festivals and orders of priesthood attested in the Old Testament. Four hundred pages later one has had one’s entire picture of the history of ancient Israel and the development of its theology taken apart and reassembled, in such a way that the Bible can never be the same again. The nature of biblical inspiration, the way that divine providence operates or does not operate in human history, the relation between external observances and inner spiritual experiences in religion – all these (still topical) questions have been opened up. And this is accomplished merely by attending to the ‘factuality’ of the Old Testament; by asking what it says and what it 16 For this expression, see J. Barr, ‘Exegesis as a Theological Discipline Reconsidered and the Shadow of the Jesus of History’, in The Hermeneutical Quest: Essays in Honor of James Luther Mays on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. D.G. Miller (Allison Park, Pa., 1986), pp. 11–45; the word ‘factuality’ occurs for the first time on p. 21. 17 J. Wellhausen, Geschichte Israels I (Marburg, 1878); 2nd edn as Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (1883); English translation Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Edinburgh, 1885), repr. as Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (New York, 1957).

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does not say, by establishing which documents depend on which, and by refusing to let preconceptions about what ‘must have’ happened obscure the empirical evidence of the text. Wellhausen’s epoch-making work is the limiting case of what is true in a more dilute form for all critical Old Testament scholarship: the most important new insights sometimes arise from the least promising, most apparently ‘antiquarian’ work. I hope that the future of Old Testament study will continue to include plenty of research that cannot immediately be pressed into the service of theology – partly (I must admit) because I know it is often from such research that great theological consequences do in fact follow in the end, but chiefly because it is for the health of any subject that its students pursue whatever questions arise in their minds, whether they seem to have an immediate utility or not. Of course in Old Testament study as in any other discipline one looks also for the people who can achieve great works of synthesis; and personally I hope also to see biblical scholars continuing in the future to ask big theological questions, just as they have in the past. But diversity is by all means to be encouraged; and a call to return to the nineteenth-century vision of biblical studies is a call for greater diversity, not less; a call for more freedom from theological constraint, and for a higher valuation of pure intellectual curiosity in our discipline.18 My unhappiness at current trends in Old Testament study begins when I see the whole critical attitude we have inherited from the last century being rejected: either in the name of a pluralism which simply recognizes no criteria of truth, and therefore thinks that all readings are equally valid; or in the name of a resurgent religious conservatism which wants to legislate against freedom in reading the Bible. Sometimes, strange as this may seem, these are linked. There is a type of fundamentalism that welcomes a postmodernist view of truth because it gives it the licence to adopt an anti-critical stance – that being just as valid as any other stance in a world where there are no fixed points. The true pluralism that can benefit biblical studies is one which supposes there can be a common quest for truth, in which a rich diversity of skills and interests is essential; not one which encourages us to choose apodictically what sort of truth we will believe in, and to excommunicate every other kind. The study of the Old Testament belongs to no special interest group, but is open to any who will open themselves to it; and to what discoveries of truth it will lead, no one can say in advance. This the founders of modern biblical criticism grasped; and for that reason I hope the future of Old Testament study will lie in a reappropriation of the spirit of criticism, which frees the text from being anyone’s special possession, and makes it available for all who are willing to read it receptively. The Old Testament contains texts that are profound by any standards, and its students need wisdom as well as mere cleverness if they are to do justice to what they are interpreting. We cannot want biblical interpreters to be two-dimensional people who empty out the profundity in their quest to be immaculately critical. But this I have been taking for granted, for biblical criticism has never meant any such thing. A critical study of texts takes as its model the openness and engagement that characterize our best relationships with other people; and the precondition of 18

Cf. my article ‘Should Old Testament Study be More Theological?’, Expository Times, 100 (1989), pp. 443–8 (reproduced as Chapter 12 in this volume).

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understanding others is that we allow them to be themselves, and aim to understand them but not to acquire or appropriate them. So it is with the study of the Old Testament. The best interpreters are those who are non-acquisitive, who respect the otherness of the text and do not try to turn it into a ventriloquist’s dummy for their own opinions and beliefs, however religiously important and however deeply held. Biblical scholars who work in theology faculties need to recognize in this critical openness their affinity with colleagues in other text-based disciplines; and not to pursue some kind of special theological hermeneutic that will guarantee that these great texts say what they want to hear. We do not spend much time in this University talking about our vocation to the pursuit of truth; we try, and rightly, not to take ourselves too seriously. But there are occasions, and perhaps an inaugural lecture is one, when it does no harm to pause and reflect on that common quest, which brought us into the academic world and keeps us in it, in spite of the daily tasks that often keep us from raising our eyes to the horizon. Critical biblical study, like all the other arts and sciences, belongs to that quest. It is no more opposed to organized religion than it is under its control: all it demands is that students of the Bible should follow where the truth leads, and not allow their religious or non-religious convictions to predetermine the outcome. Old Testament study needs to retain that commitment, in the face alike of the scepticism that believes truth cannot be found, the dogmatism that believes it is completely known already, and the cynicism that thinks it does not matter anyway; and if it can do that, then its future will be as exciting as its past has been, and all of us, religious believers or not, can look for continuing fresh insight from these profound and fascinating texts.

Chapter 14

Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to the History of Israel: Influences and Effects ‘Cultural exegesis’ seems to have two possible senses, one positive, the other negative. Positively, it can be the name of a programme to improve understanding between people of different cultures. In interpreting texts, we can try to look over the shoulders of our fellow interpreters of other backgrounds and assumptions, and see a text as they see it. Thus the white Western male asks, what can I learn from the way a text is perceived by people who are non-white, non-Western or non-male? Biblical texts seem especially rich in resonances which no one culture alone is able to make audible, and ‘cultural exegesis’ might be a good name for the collaborative effort that is able to do so. In such a task some of those who were last become the first, and the first become last. But ‘cultural exegesis’ also has a negative sense, as a way of identifying the cultural rootedness of interpreters with whom we disagree. It belongs essentially to the world of the sociology of knowledge, and emphasizes that there are no neutral or objective interpreters. Everyone has, as people now say, ‘an agenda’; everyone has an axe to grind, everyone starts from somewhere. Thus we may sometimes identify an interpreter’s cultural background in order to debunk his or her interpretation. There is no surprise if those who served medieval kings interpreted the Bible as supporting kingship. What else would you expect? we ask, implying that their cultural setting has so conditioned their judgement that there is no reason to pay them any attention. There is thus an ambivalence about the term ‘cultural exegesis’. Being aware of the ambivalence, however, can help us to understand biblical interpreters – perhaps especially those from other centuries – with less naivety, and less inclination to apportion either praise or blame. This may be especially valuable when studying the ‘giants’ of biblical criticism, about whom feelings can run high. One such is Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), a founding figure for modern biblical study. His rootedness in nineteenth-century European culture is obvious. Does it ‘explain’ him, with no remainder? Or did it open his eyes to truth hidden from previous students of biblical culture? Certainly Wellhausen’s influence is by no means uncontroversial: some regard it as positively malign. In this paper I intend to trace some of the cultural influences of his work, and to ask how far they go towards explaining it away, and how far the continuing effects of his contributions to biblical study do, and should, remain with us. The work which made Wellhausen’s name, for good or ill, was his Prolegomena to the History of Israel, published in 1878 when he was 34, and professor of Old

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Testament at Greifswald.1 The Prolegomena was originally called History of Israel I, since it was intended to be followed quickly by History of Israel II. The first volume assembled the sources from which a history of ancient Israel could be written, and – most important – dated them. The second was to be the substantive history to which Volume I was indeed the prolegomena. But it was not until 1894 that Wellhausen’s lsraelitische und jüdische Geschichte2 appeared, and by then the earlier work had long been retitled Prolegomena to the History of Israel. Wellhausen’s reconstruction of the history could in any case be predicted fairly readily from the Prolegomena, and it is from that work, whose implications were very quickly grasped, at least in Germany, that his influence derives. Wellhausen’s one essential insight (or mistake, as his detractors would say) is simply stated. It concerns the date of the so-called ‘P’ source in the Pentateuch, the material that runs from halfway through Exodus, includes virtually all of Leviticus, and ends halfway through Numbers, and which in the late nineteenth century was often referred to as the ‘basic document’ (Grundschrift) of the books of Moses. On the surface, P is the main foundation document for Israel from the time of Moses onwards, and it provides all the detailed legislation, especially about ritual, food, priesthood, festivals, circumcision, sabbath observance and purity, which is still close to the heart of Judaism. Apart from the occasional eccentric such as the early nineteenth-century Wilhelm Vatke, almost everyone until Wellhausen’s time assumed P to be the earliest of all the Pentateuchal sources. Wellhausen’s proposal, as simple as it was revolutionary, was to argue instead that it was the latest. By a detailed comparison of the early historical books, such as the books of Samuel, with their later equivalents in Chronicles, he showed (or claimed to have shown) that P must have come into being between the two bodies of material; for Chronicles showed a detailed awareness of the priestly legislation in many areas, whereas from the earlier books one would never guess that it existed at all. P was in fact a work of the post-exilic age, of the Second Temple period as we might now call it. It was the foundation of Judaism, meaning by ‘Judaism’ the whole religious and cultural system we now call by that name. It was not the basis of social and religious life in ancient Israel, whose outlook was not yet in any recognizable sense Jewish. Ancient Israel emerges as a nation much like others in the ancient Near East; later Judaism is not a natural development from it, but an artificial religion constructed de novo by the priests and legislators who returned to Palestine from the Babylonian Exile. Wellhausen himself summed up his historical work on the Old Testament in the words ‘Judaism and ancient Israel in their opposition’.3 1

J. Wellhausen, Geschichte Israels: In zwei Bänden. Erster Band (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1878); 2nd edn, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1883); English translation Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1885); reprinted as Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (New York: Orbis Books, 1957). On Wellhausen’s time in Greifswald, see R. Smend, ‘Wellhausen in Greifswald’, ZTK 78 (1981), pp. 141–76 and Deutsche Alttestamentler in drei Jahrhunderten (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989), pp. 99–113. 2 J. Wellhausen, Israelitische und judische Geschichte (Berlin, 1894). 3 In a letter to J. Olshausen, 9 February 1879, cited in R. Smend, ‘Julius Wellhausen and his Prolegomena to the History of Israel’, Semeia 25 (1983), pp. 1–20, at p. 9.

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And he made no secret of the fact that his sympathies lay with ancient Israel, not with this narrow religious sect, as he saw it. Prefixed to the Prolegomena is a motto from Hesiod, pleon hemisu pantos, ‘the half is greater than the whole’. In other words, the pre-exilic age, the age of J and E and D and the classical prophets, gains in stature if P and the books influenced by it are removed. Of course it would be possible to accept Wellhausen’s dating without also accepting his value judgements, but in fact this has proved difficult. Those who have reacted most violently to the portrayal of post-exilic Judaism as ‘artificial’ have usually proceeded by redating P, returning to the pre-Wellhausen dating and claiming it for the Mosaic or early postMosaic age. Nevertheless, almost all modern study of the Pentateuch begins with Wellhausen’s scheme, summarized in the four letters J, E, D, P arranged in that order and no other. The idea is extremely simple; the implications are so far-reaching that biblical scholarship has still not entirely come to terms with them. From the first publication of the Prolegomena to our own day Wellhausen has been sharply criticized, and in a way very relevant to the theme of this conference. Of course there have been any number of detailed critiques of his analysis of the Pentateuch, and also many attempts, often highly successful, to move beyond it into the realms of form or traditio-historical criticism, redaction history or (now) ‘final form’ exegesis. But the really trenchant criticisms of Wellhausen have always concentrated not on the detailed analysis but on the assumptions underlying the analysis: on Wellhausen’s cultural prejudices and his historical conditioning. Three such lines of attack are still current. The first is that Wellhausen was a Hegelian, who saw the history of Israelite institutions as passing through a number of phases on its way to a goal because he saw human history in general in this way. The second is that he was an evolutionist, a kind of theological Darwinian, who forced the biblical materials into the mould of gradual evolution, with J, E, D and P as successive stages in that process. And the third, and most passionately felt criticism, is that he was anti-semitic, hating Judaism and wanting nothing more than to show it up as an artificially concocted religion, designed by proto-rabbis who were the enemies of all that is natural and spontaneous in religious sentiment. The first two of these charges have most commonly been brought by conservative evangelicals, the third by Jewish scholars, but all have been influential also on those outside the particular constituency involved. (1) The allegation that Wellhausen was a Hegelian, or at least influenced by Hegelianism, was already made in the 1920s by M. Kegel: ‘Hegel begat Vatke, Vatke begat Wellhausen’.4 But it was disseminated widely by Albright in the 1950s, through his influential From the Stone Age to Christianity, and was accepted by important figures in Old Testament studies such as H.J. Kraus and Gerhard von Rad.5 The association with Vatke has always been one of its strong cards, for Vatke had already come to the conclusion that P was late in the 1830s, fifty years before Wellhausen. Wellhausen expressed his indebtedness to Vatke, and Vatke was undoubtedly a 4

M. Kegel, Los von Wellhausen! (Gütersloh, 1923), p. 10. W.F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), p. 88; see L. Perlitt, Vatke und Wellhausen, BZAW 94 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965), pp. 2–3 for the references to the Hegelian accusation in Kraus and von Rad. 5

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Hegelian. I believe, however, that the Hegelian interpretation of Wellhausen has been decisively refuted by Lothar Perlitt in his Vatke und Wellhausen.6 As he shows, Hegelianism was scarcely a viable intellectual option by the 1870s, and indeed was more or less already dead when Wellhausen was born. Vatke was a kind of throwback to earlier times, and for that very reason was more or less ignored by the scholarly community when he published his history of Israel. It was his misfortune, as Wellhausen saw it, to have linked a perfectly correct perception of the lateness of P to an impossibly outmoded philosophical framework, that of Hegel. That was why no one had taken any notice of him. To suggest that Wellhausen’s thinking in the 1870s was Hegelian is thus a hopeless anachronism. Possibly the neatest refutation of the theory that Wellhausen was a Hegelian can be found in his own work, at the place where he is discussing the often noted patterning of history in the book of Judges. Here, he remarks, ‘one is reminded of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” when one listens to the monotonous beat with which history marches on or turns round in circles: rebellion oppression repentance rest, rebellion oppression repentance rest.’7 No one who would criticize the biblical text by drawing this comparison could seriously be a Hegelian. Rudolf Smend sums up matters by writing, ‘Wellhausen stood at as great a remove from Hegelian speculation as a German historian of the nineteenth century could without falling out of context.’8 (2) Similar things can be said about the charge that Wellhausen merely applied the theory of evolution to the Bible. Delitzsch was already remarking in 1882 that ‘Wellhausen’s speculations’ were ‘merely applications of Darwinism to the sphere of theology and criticism’.9 The repetition of this suggestion in Anglo-American theology down to the present day is partly tied up, I believe, with a certain misreading of Wellhausen. When I learned as a student about J, E, D and P, I was taught that they represented an orderly progress, a growing awareness of the transcendence of God, which was assumed to be a good thing. The parts of the Priestly document drawn on to support this were not from the central legal section which was what had mostly interested Wellhausen, but from Genesis, where P is very fragmentary but contains, of course, the opening chapter of the whole Bible, the sublime creation story in Genesis 1. It was easy to argue from this that the Israelite understanding of God progressed from the primitive to the more advanced, and we were encouraged to think of P as a distinct improvement on J. From such a perspective, Wellhausen’s theory does look evolutionary. But his own value judgements, of course, went in the opposite direction altogether. He saw P not as an advance on J but as a decline from it, in which intimate contact with the divine is replaced by a frosty legalism, and transcendence mocks the human desire for communion with God. An evolutionary view of the history of Israel would have to say something like the following:

6

Cf. B.S. Childs, ‘Wellhausen in English’, Semeia 25 (1983), pp. 83–8. Geschichte Israel, I, p. 240. 8 Smend, ‘Julius Wellhausen’, p. 14. 9 A comment made by Delitzsch to a Scottish visitor in Leipzig in 1882, reported in W.R. Smith, ‘Wellhausen and his Position’, The Christian Church 2 (1882), pp. 366–9; cited in Smend, ‘Julius Wellhausen’, p. 14. 7

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The history of this ancient people is in reality the history of the growth of true religion, rising through all stages to perfection; pressing on through all conflicts to the highest victory, and finally revealing itself in full glory and power, in order to spread irresistibly from this centre, never again to be lost, but to become the eternal possession and blessing of all nations.10

But that is a quotation from Heinrich Ewald, thirty years before Wellhausen. It was just the kind of history that Wellhausen wrote in order to refute. If we want to understand how such erroneous interpretations of Wellhausen gained currency, we can, I think, identify two features of his work which are highly characteristic of nineteenth-century historiography, in Germany particularly, and which lend colour to charges that would otherwise seem immediately implausible. One is that Wellhausen instinctively thought in terms of stages and developments in history on what we might call a macro-scale. As P.D. Miller puts it, ‘Wellhausen seems … to have wanted to schematize [the] history [of Israel]. He was in that respect a child of his times, seeing in the historical process stages in a development.’ For example, he goes on, ‘in his penchant for stages and phases Wellhausen saw in Amos “the founder, the purest type, of a new phase of prophecy”’.11 It is a mistake to think that Wellhausen saw progress in the history of Israel, and that is the flaw in both Hegelian and evolutionary interpretations of him. But he did see progression – change and development. History as a kind of positivistic accumulation of discrete facts was an idea he did not have and probably could not have had. This is just as apparent in the way he presents the post-exilic age as a decline, as it would be if he saw it as an advance. In that sense he shared many of the same assumptions as Hegelians and evolutionists, though crucially turning their presentation on its head. Secondly, Wellhausen had what Smend calls ‘a total view’.12 One reason why the Prolegomena is exhilarating to read, when other works of biblical scholarship from the same period are mostly somewhat yawn-inducing, is that the whole thing unfolds with such a sense of inevitability, every detail contributing to a coherent and convincing whole. Others before him had redated P – Vatke and Graf to name but two – but no one had seen how this changed everything in our understanding of the Old Testament. As Wellhausen himself put it, Critical analysis [had] made steady progress, but the work of synthesis did not hold even pace with it … It was not seen that most important historical questions were involved as well as questions merely literary, and that to assign the true order of the different strata of the Pentateuch was equivalent to a reconstruction of the history of Israel.13

But of course the total view, which is Wellhausen’s great strength, is also one of the features that most declares him to be a child of his time. Nineteenth-century 10 H.G.A. Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel bis Christus (Gottingen: Dietrich, 1843–55); English translation, The History of Israel (London, 1869), p. 5. 11 P.D. Miller, ‘Wellhausen and the History of Israel’s Religion’, Semeia 25 (1983), pp. 61–73, at pp. 63, 64. 12 Smend, ‘Julius Wellhausen’, p. 13. 13 J. Wellhausen, ‘Pentateuch and Joshua’, EB, 9th edn, XVIII, pp. 505–14; the quotation is from p. 508.

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scholarship in all fields went in for total views, for vast systems and far-reaching syntheses. We are more suspicious today of all such operations. (3) I suppose that the accusation of anti-semitism is one we are likely to take more gravely than the alleged Hegelianism or evolutionism, which for us today amount to scarcely more than the suggestion that Wellhausen is out of date. Overtly anti-semitic sentiments are hardly to be found in Wellhausen’s works, but occasionally what one may call the common nineteenth-century mid-European anti-Jewish comment does indeed appear, leading one to surmise that there may have been a good deal beneath the surface in the way of largely subconscious anti-semitism. For example, 1 Chronicles 22–9 is said to be a horrible example of the statistical phantasy of the Jews which revels in vast sums of money on paper, in artificially devised regiments of names and numbers … the monotony broken occasionally by unctuous speeches that never come to life.14

Hardly an amiable sentence. But more serious in a way than occasional comments like this is the allegation that Wellhausen’s whole scheme is in its consequences anti-Jewish, or even that it is driven throughout by a desire to denigrate and degrade Judaism. Lou Silberman argued this case in a contribution to Semeia published on the occasion of the centenary of the Prolegomena.15 This work, he suggests, ‘like practically everything written by German Protestant theologians of the period and many subsequently and to this day, is a work of anti-Judaism’. Readers of Chaim Potok’s novel In the Beginning may remember how the young Jewish hero is attacked by friends and family for reading Wellhausen, for they hold, as Silberman also does, that Wellhausen contributed, however indirectly, to that devaluing of Jewish life and culture whose ultimate outcome in central Europe we now know only too well. The implication of Wellhausen’s late dating of P is seen to be the accusation that the leaders of post-exilic Israel falsified the truth about the religion they wished to promote, calling it Mosaic when really they had themselves invented it. As Wellhausen puts it, It is not the case that the Jews had any profound respect for their ancient history … The theocratic ideal was from the exile onwards the centre of all thought and effort, and it annihilated the sense for objective truth, all regard and interest for the actual facts as they had been handed down. It is well known that there have never been more audacious inventors of history than the rabbis. But Chronicles affords evidence that this evil propensity goes back to a very early time, its root the dominating influence of the Law, being the root of Judaism itself.16

On reading this a conscientious person may ask, what further need have we of witnesses? Should we not throw out Wellhausen and all his works? Two factors dispose me to proceed with caution even here, however.17 First, the Judaism of his 14

Wellhausen, Geschichte Israels, I, p. 166. L. Silberman, ‘Wellhausen and Judaism’, Semeia 25 (1983), pp. 75–82. 16 Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel, p. 161. 17 A comprehensive discussion of Wellhausen’s alleged anti-semitism is provided by R. Smend, ‘Wellhausen und das Judentum’, ZTK 79 (1982), pp. 249–82; reprinted in his 15

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own day is not in focus for Wellhausen. I do not suppose he had much idea how his contemporaries in Judaism viewed the questions with which he was concerned. He was interested in origins, in the motivations that led to the composition of the Pentateuch; and it would be entirely possible to share his estimate of what this motivation had been, and his analysis of how it worked itself out in actual literary compositions, without sharing also his value judgement on the resulting system. The empirical observations which generated his Prolegomena remain in place, even if one thinks his interpretation of them anti-semitic. But secondly, and more important, I do not believe that it was really Judaism Wellhausen had in his sights at all – as Silberman to his great credit sees clearly. What Wellhausen was against in religion was empty formalism, legalism, the letter instead of the spirit, authoritarian structures instead of the freedom of the individual. The contemporary manifestations of such aberrations, as he saw them, were not in Judaism but in the Christian churches: not only in Catholicism, which like all nineteenth-century Protestants he would have accused of such abuses, but in the Lutheran church in which he had grown up but in which he had come to feel that he could no longer serve as a Professor training men for Christian ministry – with the well-known consequence that in the years after writing the Prolegomena he moved to Halle, and took up a post teaching Arabic studies in the Faculty of Arts. As Silberman acutely observes, what he attacked in the Judaism of the Second Temple period was, in effect, ‘none other than the ecclesiastical establishment that while not attacking him made it impossible for him to retain his theological professorship in Greifswald’. 18 If we want to explain away his conclusions, we may do it by saying that his whole cultural context – and his discomfort with it – led him to reject ecclesiastical authority; and that when he looked back into the Old Testament he saw this abomination ‘reflected there’ (to use his own words in another context) ‘like a glorified mirage’.19 If we want to understand him empathetically, on the other hand, we may say rather that his experience of organized religion sensitized him to the same phenomenon when it occurred in past ages. And as always when explicating the cultural assumptions of a past writer, choosing between these options is extremely difficult, and often reveals as much about our assumptions as it does about his. For explanation by cultural assumptions lands us in a hall of mirrors, as soon as we remember that our own stance is no more privileged than that of the writer we are studying. Wellhausen’s contemporaries seldom perceived him as anti-semitic (but then, that may just show how anti-semitic they all were – they hardly noticed it); but they certainly grasped the danger in his work for the established Christian religion. ‘Troubling the Church of God’ was how Delitzsch described him to a Scottish visitor.20 ‘It seems as though the author delights in wounding the sensibilities of his Epochen der Bibelkritik: Gesammelte Studien Band 3 (Munich, 1990), pp. 186–215. The classic formulation of the allegation is Solomon Schechter’s comment that the ‘higher criticism’ amounts to ‘higher anti-semitism’: see p. 213. 18 Silberman, ‘Wellhausen and Judaism’, p. 78. 19 This is Wellhausen’s well-known comment on the stories of the patriarchs: see Prolegomena, pp. 318–19. 20 Smith, ‘Wellhausen and his Position’, The Christian Church 2 (1882), pp. 366–9.

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Christian readers’, wrote an early British reviewer.21 Wellhausen’s style probably annoyed people as much as his content, for it was far from having the gravity then expected in a work on the Bible: it was light, playful, often irreverent. But Douglas Knight is right to say that at the … base of Wellhausen’s opinion about [Jewish] ‘distortions’ of past history was his own anti-institutional posture, which turned him against the postexilic intentions – as he identified them – and drew him to the free spirit which he saw at play in the early period.22

And this anti-institutionalism, rather than the anti-semitism which was a by-product of it, is what is central to understanding the character of his research. If none of these three things – Hegelianism, evolutionism and anti-semitism – were the driving forces behind Wellhausen’s work, what was? Lothar Perlitt argues convincingly that there are two main influences on Wellhausen, two aspects of his cultural conditioning, as we might put it: nineteenth-century German historiography and the Romantic movement. (1) To take historiography first: German history-writing in the nineteenth century developed as it did not through the influence of Hegel, but by way of reaction to him. Its achievement was to emancipate itself from enslavement to Hegelianism, or indeed any other overt philosophy, and to try to study ancient cultures and civilizations in all their particularity. Especially in the work of Theodor Mommsen on classical antiquity we find the insistence that good history-writing depends on the accumulation and analysis of empirical evidence, which cannot be predicted in advance on the basis of any philosophy of history. Mommsen, like all the German historians of the period, thought on a very large scale, and was interested in ‘world history’. But this was conceived pragmatically, as the result of minute and particular knowledge of every relevant culture – not as something to be deduced from the first principles of some philosophical system. Mommsen’s watchword, which Wellhausen borrowed with acknowledgment from him, is ‘presuppositionless’ investigation. In a work of 1901 Wellhausen wrote Our vital concern is research without presuppositions: research that does not find what it is supposed to find according to considerations of purpose and relevance, but what seems correct to the conscientious researcher from a logical and historical point of view – to put it in a single word: truthfulness.23

Presuppositionless study is, I suppose, regarded as possible by almost no one today, and we have already seen how very far from being free of presuppositions Wellhausen really was. Nevertheless, what he thought he was doing was research free from presuppositions, and in this he was pre-eminently the heir of German historiography in general, and of Mommsen, whose work he loved, in particular.

21

S.I. Curtiss, ‘Delitzsch on the Origin and Composition of the Pentateuch’, PR 3 (1882), p. 84. 22 D.A. Knight, ‘Wellhausen and the Interpretation of Israel’s Literature’, Semeia 25 (1983), pp. 21–36, at p. 23. 23 J. Wellhausen. Universitätsunterricht und Konfession (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1901), p. 153.

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(2) Wellhausen’s antecedents in the Romantic movement are also clear, and important. Why did he have such a high regard for what he called ‘naturalness’, in religion as in life? Why this assumption that organized religion, ritual and law represent a decline from an earlier spontaneity in which alone the true goal of human existence is to be found? Wellhausen’s early dating of J, with its lack of regimentation, can be defended by analysing the relevant texts; but his valuation of J as superior to D and P does not, obviously, derive from the biblical text itself. Not Hegel, but Romanticism, offers the best explanation of this. If we want a single source for this love of individualism and freedom from restraint, it will be Herder, who lies at the origin of so much in the traditions of German Romanticism. From him derives the idea that each age has its own particular style or character, what we might call a Zeitgeist; and the spirits of successive ages do not necessarily manifest progress, but only change. But also from Herder comes the belief in the primitive as often the most sublime. Human awareness of the divine does not improve over time; what is earlier is usually best, and the later ages of a culture represent more a decline than a progress. B.G. Niebuhr’s history of Rome, which influenced Wellhausen’s thinking, argued in just this way for the earliest days of the Republic as the golden age of Rome. Wellhausen’s affinities with such a way of thinking should be obvious. Characteristic of Romanticism, too, was the enthusiasm for individual heroes rather than for institutions, and we have already seen enough to catch the echo of such an idea in Wellhausen. His interpretation of the prophets was a very clear case in point. If one wanted to explain Wellhausen as merely the product of his influences, German historiography and Romanticism would be the best candidates for the task; and compared with them, Hegel and Darwin are quite insignificant influences, while his anti-semitism, though not to be ignored, played a very small part in dictating the form his reconstructions took. In a way the single most important presupposition for Wellhausen, and the one which continued (until very recently) to set the agenda for biblical study, is the presupposition he shared with the German historiographers, and to which I have already referred: the notion that research should be presuppositionless. To put it in a way that connects with the idea of cultural exegesis: Wellhausen was culturally conditioned to think that history could be written free from cultural conditioning! In his Preface to his translation of the Prolegomena, W. Robertson Smith argued that Wellhausen’s achievement was to break free from received, inherited opinion: ‘in the course of the argument it appears that the plain natural sense of the old history has constantly been distorted by the false presuppositions with which we have been accustomed to approach it’.24 It was this plain, natural sense which Wellhausen had rediscovered. A century of philosophizing about reading and understanding texts lies between us and this great pioneer, and perhaps in nothing does he seem so dated as in his belief that he had discovered truths that would not date. Yet we should concede how much more he was than merely a child of his time. His act of synthesis, what Smend calls his ‘total view’ of the Old Testament, was indeed a liberation from the accumulated assumptions of centuries. It is hard to think of any other Old Testament 24

W.R. Smith, Preface to Prolegomena, p. viii.

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scholar whose creativity, and ability to redirect the entire enterprise of Old Testament study, has ever equalled Wellhausen’s. After him, nothing was ever the same again. This may seem a strange thing to say if we think of Wellhausen primarily as the great Pentateuch critic, for in the study of the Pentateuch scarcely one stone remains on another of his elegant but maybe over-simple edifice. Some of us, it is true, do still believe in J, E, D and P in the old way, but I would guess that many more have become sceptical not only of the results but of the very methods and aims of traditional source analysis of the Pentateuch. Wellhausen did indeed set the agenda for several generations, but the modern agenda in Pentateuchal studies owes little to him. But if we look in another direction, toward the history of Israel for which (after all) he himself regarded source criticism as mere prolegomena, then the greatness and the continuing influence of Wellhausen appear very clearly. Wellhausen, it would be fair to say, discovered the Exile. Of course people before him knew that it had happened, but so long as the Priestly Work was dated early, there was no reason to think that the Exile had changed anything in the inner constitution and temperament of the Israelites and their religion. It was an event which had happened to the body of the nation. But Wellhausen showed for the first time that it had also decisively affected the nation’s soul. The experience of being exiled in a foreign land, without national institutions such as the monarchy and the Temple, had made the Israelites turn in on themselves and ask questions about their religious identity. The leading people among them had developed the blueprints for life in a restored community, where obedience to carefully devised rituals would replace the chaotic spontaneity which had encouraged the syncretistic tendencies now being punished by Yahweh. Israel could become a confessional, rather than a national community. These were the implications of Wellhausen’s dating of P, and they have become quite firmly embedded in the study of the Hebrew Bible, accepted even by many who would reject the underlying source analysis and dating. The fact that we speak of ‘Israelites’ before but ‘Jews’ after the Exile, of ‘Yahwism’ as the pre-exilic religion but ‘Judaism’ as the post-exilic, is a testimony to the pervasiveness of Wellhausen’s historical reconstruction. The sense that the Exile marked a crucial change in Israel is part of our mental furniture as biblical scholars – for a detailed treatment of how and why it was crucial, one need look no further than Daniel Smith’s The Religion of the Landless.25 All such works are the heirs of Wellhausen’s Prolegomena. They testify to the way that his ideas have survived well beyond the historical and intellectual setting within which they were conceived. Working in a time of quite different presuppositions, they show how far Wellhausen was from being merely a child of his time. Anyone who wishes to shake off his influence will find that almost the whole basis of modern biblical study unravels in the process. For my part, I believe that his work was so rich and many-faceted that we have not yet done justice to it all; and so, far from wanting to purge our subject of his continuing influence, I should like to think that modern students of the Hebrew Bible might start to return 25 D.L. Smith, The Religion of the Landless (Bloomington, Ind.: Meyer-Stone Books, 1989). Daniel Smith (now Smith-Christopher) was the convenor of the conference at which this paper was presented.

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to it for challenge and inspiration. It is the work of a large, uncluttered and creative mind; and at the same time as it demonstrates how far interpretation is influenced by cultural assumptions, it also offers hope for the human ability to transcend them and to communicate across the gulfs that divide us.

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Chapter 15

Intertextuality and the ‘Final Form’ of the Text In the English-speaking world, there has been in the last twenty years or so a clear drift in the direction of exegesis of the ‘final form’ of the text as the preferred style for biblical interpretation. There are at least two different conceptual bases for this shift. One is theological, and is associated with so-called ‘canonical criticism’;1 the other is literary, and rests on the argument that the interpreter of any text, biblical or not, has a primary duty to interpret the text that lies before us, before (or instead of) being concerned with putative earlier stages underlying that text. Where we are told in the Gospels that the disciples, as they go out on their preaching mission, are to eat what is set before them, the motto of current biblical studies might be ‘Read what is set before you’.2 The drift has been so marked that it is now sometimes described as a paradigm-shift, using Thomas Kuhn’s controversial term from the history of science.3 It has produced a sharp cleft between the English- and the German-speaking worlds in biblical studies. One of the common features of ‘final form’ exegesis is an interest in reading holistically, that is, reading the text in its final form as an aesthetic or communicative unity. Lack of interest in possible underlying sources issues in a suspicion that there never were any underlying sources anyway, or at least that they are irrelevant to the text as it now is. This produces a tendency to interpret the text as the kind of unity that older, ‘historical-critical’ interpreters would have denied to it. Consequently ‘final form’ exegesis makes common cause with something like rhetorical criticism, the attempt to show how the text is articulated as it stands.4 ‘Final form’ interpreters, 1 See especially B.S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia and London: Fortress Press and SCM Press, 1979), Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (London: SCM Press, 1985) and Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (London: SCM Press, 1992). 2 See R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (London and Sydney, 1981); R. Alter and F. Kermode, The Literary Guide to the Bible (London, 1987); M. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington, 1985); F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); G. Josipovici, The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1988). 3 See T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962), and compare my comments in J. Barton, The Future of Old Testament Study (Oxford, 1993), reproduced as Chapter 13 in this volume. 4 See P. Trible, Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah (Minneapolis, 1994); see my discussion in J. Barton, Reading the Old Testament: Method in

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like rhetorical critics, see their task as being to provide an account of the text which explains as part of its communicative intent even those features which in historical criticism were taken as evidence of disunity. We trace a progression of ideas which integrates every part into the greater whole. The result is that we perceive a single, coherent Gestalt in the text, to which every part of it contributes. There are no loose ends, nothing superfluous or confusing. Once one sets out on this route, there is no logical reason to stop at any particular level within the biblical text. To take a now familiar example, Robert Alter has tried to show how Genesis 38, the story of Tamar and Judah, is not the erratic block within the Joseph story that generations of commentators have believed, but can be read as perfectly well integrated into its narrative context.5 The clue is the theme of recognition: Judah ‘recognizes’ (in a technical, legal sense) the items he left with Tamar, just as he forced his own father Jacob to ‘recognize’ Joseph’s blood-stained coat. The theme of the brothers getting what they deserve through the way events unfold is thus present here just as much as in the rest of the story of Joseph, and there is no need to posit an interpolator who has inserted chapter 38 after the Joseph narrative was complete. But clearly such an argument, which depends on verbal connections as well as on connections of theme, need not stop at the level of the (supposed) ‘Joseph narrative’. It can be applied, and Alter does apply it, to Genesis as a whole, or to the historical books as a whole. Thus he traces connections between widely separated narrative texts, established by identifying Leitwörter and ‘type scenes’. Along similar lines, other scholars have sought to find patterns that show the unity of the book of the Twelve,6 or the prophetic corpus as a whole.7 And the method reaches its apotheosis in Jack Miles’s book God: A Biography, in which the entire Hebrew Bible is read as if it were a novel with a single plot and developing characterization of the main protagonist, God.8 It is a kind of Bildungsroman. The question I want to raise is how far ‘final form’ exegesis need in fact be also holistic in this sense. A simple observation that may help to show what I mean is this: rabbinic exegesis is commonly based on the final form of the text; but it is hardly ever holistic. Alter draws on a rabbinic comment in making his case about Gen. 38. In 37:32 the brothers ask Jacob ‘Please recognize (haker-na): is it your son’s tunic or not?’ (Alter’s translation). In 38:26 Judah ‘recognized’ (wayyaker) the objects he had left with Tamar. Midrash Bereshith Rabbah 84: 11–12 comments, ‘The Holy One (blessed be he) said to Judah, ‘You said to your father, “haker-na.” By your life, Tamar will say to you “haker-na.”’ In this particular case, the comment does assist in Biblical Study (2nd edn, London, 1996), pp. 198–219. 5 See Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative. 6 See J. Nogalski, Redactional Processes in the Book of the Twelve, BZAW 218 (Berlin, 1993), and my discussion in J. Barton, ‘The Canonical Meaning of the Book of the Twelve’, in After the Exile: Essays in Honour of Rex Mason, ed. J. Barton and D. Reimer (Macon, Ga., 1996), pp. 59–73, reproduced as Chapter 2 in this volume. 7 See especially R.E. Clements, ‘Patterns in the Prophetic Canon’, in Canon and Authority: Essays in Old Testament Religion and Theology, ed. G.W. Coats and B.O. Long (Philadelphia, 1977), pp. 42–55. 8 J. Miles, God: A Biography (New York, 1995).

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reading the text of Genesis holistically. But in general this kind of rabbinic technique is not really an example of holism, but more of a concern for intertextuality. Any text within Scripture can illuminate any other text, not because the texts form a rhetorical unity, but because Scripture forms a kind of compendium or thesaurus of terms and turns of phrase and word associations. Rabbinic reading, like ‘final form’ exegesis, is innocent of sources or underlying documents, but it is not at all interested in the biblical text as a communicative unity. On the contrary, its approach is commonly atomistic, and it plucks texts from anywhere in Scripture without regard to their context in order to assemble its garlands of proofs for this or that disputed point of halakhah. The rabbis treat Scripture rather as we treat dictionaries. They pay no attention at all to diachronic questions about how their text came to be, and in that sense concentrate entirely on the final form. Yet they invoke no principles of rhetorical unity except the assumption that every term has a constant meaning throughout the work, so that any entry can be appealed to in elucidating any other. My argument is thus that the current conjunction between ‘final form’ exegesis and ‘holistic’ interpretation is accidental rather than necessary. Rabbinic interpretation clearly shows that it is possible for the two to be dissociated. The unity of the text for the rabbis rests on its inter- and intratextuality, not on a unified rhetorical thrust. My purpose in trying to show this is not to claim that we should or should not practise holistic reading, but to open up the possibility that even current concentration on the ‘final form’ need not lead in that direction. My own belief is that ‘final form’ exegesis can just as well lead towards a recognition of disjunctions and inconcinnities in the text, and thence back to something more like what we have come to call historical criticism. In current thinking about ‘old-fashioned’ biblical criticism there is a shortcircuit. We talk as though ‘historical’ critics approached texts looking for sources or underlying documents as their first concern. But in fact there were always two stages in the argument. The hypothesis that the text was put together (from a diachronic point of view, as we now call it) from pre-existing documents was an attempt to explain observations that operated originally at the synchronic, ‘final form’ level. Critics initially attended to the text just as it lay before them. But when they attempted to read it just as it lay before them, they noticed inconsistencies: inconsistencies, that is, within the text as it stands. Because they worked in a climate where historical explanation was the preferred model, they started then to take an interest in how and why the text had come to be so inconsistent, and this led them to the kind of conclusions about sources that we all know about. But the initial perception of inconsistency was a literary, synchronic perception. If they had not been trying to read the text as some kind of finished whole, the perceptions would not have arisen in the first place. After all, we are not worried, and therefore do not formulate complex hypotheses to explain inconsistencies between texts that we do not in any case think form part of some larger whole – a bundle of letters of different authorship, for example. It is only when the texts claim to form some larger whole that is, when it presents itself to us as a ‘final form’, that inconsistencies worry us. And when they do, they may lead us down the road that leads to historical explanation, if the prevailing culture regards this as the most interesting avenue to explore. In the present climate, it is more likely to make us interested in hermeneutical techniques for nevertheless reading the text

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as a unity, and that produces the interest in holism that we see at the moment. But the perception that leads either to historical reconstruction or to holistic reading is the same perception: a literary perception of stresses and strains within the text.

Chapter 16

The Final Form of the Text The nineteenth century went out in a blaze of glory for Old Testament studies. Julius Wellhausen’s brilliant hypothesis about the character, chronological order, and dating of the four major Pentateuchal sources had won the day: even Oxford, released from the dead hand of E.B. Pusey, was beginning to acknowledge the strength of the new theory! Where do we find ourselves as we prepare to leave the twentieth century? In many ways the trend at any rate in the last few decades of the century has been to reverse the achievements of the nineteenth and to reassemble the Bible which, it is widely felt, Wellhausen and others had taken apart. On all sides today we are told that we should be attending to the final form of Old Testament texts, not to the earlier stages in their development that interested people in the heyday of historical criticism. We should read Isaiah, rather than the three bits of Isaiah; Genesis, rather than J, E, D and P; indeed, we should perhaps read the prophets rather than Isaiah, and the Pentateuch rather than Genesis; or even, on a still larger scale, we should read the Old Testament or the whole Bible rather than the individual books or collections that make it up. And we should read these works precisely as ‘works’, that is, as finished wholes. ‘Holistic’ reading tends to go hand-in-hand with ‘final form’ exegesis, and Anglo-American Old Testament study is set very firmly now in that direction, towards a concentration on the finished product of the biblical text rather than on earlier stages or fragments of it. Synthesis, rather than analysis, is the watchword now. I think there are three separate, though often closely allied, interests at work in this new direction in Old Testament study, which has made the task of being a biblical interpreter so different from what it was in the 1890s, or even when I was a student in the 1960s. (1) The first is a theological movement of which the various varieties of canonical criticism or the canonical approach are particularly significant examples. In the work of Brevard Childs1 in particular we find an insistence that the final form of biblical texts is not the only but the only proper object for the biblical exegete to work on: and that for religious or theological reasons. The final form is the text which the Jewish and Christian community has canonized, their authoritative text. The Church did not transmit and deliver to us its scriptures so that we could dig beneath them, but so that we could read them in their finished form. It is not putative earlier stages but the final stage in the text’s formation that is canonical and authoritative for us, if we are modern believers. This is in no way to deny that other kinds of study of the text 1 See especially B.S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (SCM Press, 1992), which subsumes the ideas of Childs’s earlier works, such as Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (SCM Press, 1979).

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may be appropriate for particular purposes: archaeology of the text can be as useful as archaeology of the land if we are trying, for example, to undertake research into the history of ancient Israel, and Childs has nothing against that. But a theological reading of the Old Testament text should be a reading of its final form. That which God has joined together, let no man put asunder. As I read the current scene in English-speaking and especially in North American scholarship, there are not all that many people who are, as it were, card-carrying supporters of Childs; there is not much of a ‘Childs school’. Yet more and more scholars now feel that the final form of the text is more interesting and important than earlier stages in its growth, even if they do not have a developed theological theory about it. Final form exegesis is on the agenda. If you read a paper about, say, the sources of an Old Testament book, you are likely to be asked afterwards, ‘Yes, but what about the final form?’ The culture in our discipline has moved in a final form direction, and both Childs and J.A. Sanders,2 with his rather different version of canonical criticism, can claim a good deal of the credit for that. Those training for ordination in theological colleges and on training courses are increasingly, in my experience, presented with final form exegesis as a desirable goal, and quickly come to think that it is more useful for the task of biblical preaching than the older, more analytical model. To defend traditional source or even form criticism is to swim very much against the current. (2) The second major influence propelling us towards the final form of the text is the newer literary criticism, of the kind associated with Robert Alter,3 which tries to approach the biblical text in much the same spirit that one would approach a modern novel, reading it as a finished product. This is not necessarily hostile to the possibility of writing a literary history of any given text, but it does not see this as the natural thing to do, or essentially as very interesting. The feeling is that we should read what is there on the page to be read, not trouble ourselves with what may have preceded it. And in the hands of someone like Alter such a final form reading often produces a really coherent and exciting interpretation, in which all the elements of the whole text – including many that earlier generations of scholars saw as evidence for underlying sources or as unsatisfactory insertions or fragments – play their part in making up the finished whole. An example of this is the way Alter deals with the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38. This chapter has long been read as an insertion into the already finished Joseph story, which it interrupts in an irrelevant way. Not so, argues Alter. The story is integral to the narrative as a whole. Like the story of Joseph, it is concerned with the legal recognition of certain objects – those Judah left with Tamar, which Judah has to acknowledge as his, and Joseph’s robe, which Jacob is forced to accept as evidence that his son has been killed by wild animals. The idea is that Judah gets his comeuppance; the tables are turned on him. Just as he forced Jacob to recognize Joseph’s robe and so to give credence to the theory that he had been killed, so Judah 2 J.A. Sanders, Torah and Canon (Fortress Press, 1972); From Sacred Story to Sacred Text: Canon as Paradigm (Fortress Press, 1987). 3 R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (George Allen & Unwin, 1981); The World of Biblical Literature (SPCK, 1992).

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has to put himself in the wrong by recognizing the objects he left with Tamar. There is a deep thematic correspondence between the two tales, which argues strongly against the idea that chapter 38 is a later insertion in an already finished work. Thus the story emerges as a polished whole, not a collection of bits and pieces. (3) The third factor which may be less obvious, but which probably affects the first two, is sheer disillusion with the work of traditional historical criticism, a feeling that it has run out of steam. This can be seen, for example, in a book which does not belong to either of the movements I have just been outlining, the late Norman Whybray’s book on the composition of the Pentateuch.4 This attempts to show that all the traditional kinds of source analysis of the Pentateuch, though in no sense improper or unreasonable in principle, have in practice not advanced our understanding of the text. There is simply no good reason to think that the Pentateuch grew in the ways source criticism supposes, or that Old Testament texts in general did. Source criticism is not wrong in itself, just unsuccessful: it does not deliver what it promises. This can be clearly seen also in Alter’s work. Alter oscillates between arguing that the final form of the text is what we should study irrespective of whether it grew as the source critics suppose, and arguing (as in the case of his discussion of Genesis 38) that it generally did not grow in that way in any case. The second of these is the argument I am concerned with at the moment. It is in principle an argument against the source critics on their own ground, and maintains that they have simply got it wrong: the text never was compiled from sources in the first place. That being so, the final form is all we have to work on: there are no earlier sources. I think this belief that source criticism is a failure even on its own terms is sometimes overlooked when people write or speak about recent trends in biblical study. But it is certainly a potent force in persuading people that the newer holistic trends are correct. The importance of the final form of the text thus comes to many like a breath of fresh air, a new way of bypassing what is felt to be the sterility of much that has passed for study of the Old Testament. Personally I find many final form, holistic readings highly stimulating, and am not surprised that they have become so popular. But I should like to ask the rather fundamental question: What is the final form of a biblical text? The answer may seem obvious: it’s what we see when we open a Bible. But in fact matters are more complicated than that, and I hope that thinking this question through will help to focus on some important issues raised by all these recent movements. (a) Which Bible do we have to open to find the final form of the text? Presumably it is a Hebrew Bible. In practice, no doubt, it is likely to be Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, the most recent edition of Biblia Hebraica: in other words, the final form is the Masoretic Text as we have received it. Childs specifically states that this is the case, and gives as the reason that the MT is the form of the text which has come to be accepted in the Jewish community, which was the community principally responsible for transmitting the Hebrew Bible. So much may seem obvious. But is it the unemended MT that we have to interpret, or are we allowed to emend where the text is corrupt or nonsensical? 4

R.N. Whybray, The Making of the Pentateuch (JSOT Press, 1987).

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Most biblical scholars feel free to emend when they write commentaries, and in fact even very conservative scholars who defend the verbal inspiration of the Hebrew text generally make it clear that it is the form this text originally had, not necessarily exactly the form of it that has come down to us, which is inspired, and so are prepared to countenance so-called ‘lower’, that is, textual criticism. It could be argued that to give a privileged status to the MT for the interpreter should really rule out emendation, for we know that one of the great preoccupations of the Masoretes, the Jewish scholars who fixed the Hebrew text between the sixth and tenth centuries or so, was to transmit what had come down to them even where they could see it was corrupt: indeed, they invented ingenious ways of making sure that even meaningless words were faithfully transcribed. To take the final form really seriously and to mean by that the MT is probably to rule out textual criticism for the biblical interpreter. One could argue as follows: for anyone trying to reconstruct what the text may once have been, textual criticism is acceptable and indeed unavoidable; but for the biblical interpreter the final form must prevail, so that even ‘obvious’ textual emendations are ruled out. This conclusion does seem to follow from a strict application of the term ‘final form’, but it will strike most biblical scholars as rather counter-intuitive: why should we not emend the text where there is an absolutely obvious reading that will make sense of it? But if we once allow emendation, we are on a very dangerous slippery slope from the point of view of final form exegesis. For textual criticism and historical methods like source analysis are not completely discrete: one fades off into the other. Emendation works not only with what the manuscript evidence tells us, but with conjectures about the kind of thing a biblical author is likely to have said, and that presupposes historical judgements about the author. One cannot keep one’s textual criticism in some kind of ideologically pure state, safe from all contamination by historical criticism. This is admittedly more obviously true with the New Testament, where the textual history is so variegated, than it is with the Old Testament, but in principle the same considerations apply. In an important recent book David Parker5 points out that the variations between two manuscripts of the Gospels in a given passage can sometime be as great as, or even greater than, the variation between two of the Synoptic Gospels in one and the same manuscript: thus Matthew and Luke may in one manuscript agree against a divergent reading of Matthew in some other. This means that textual criticism fades indistinguishably into source criticism. In the case of the Old Testament there is hardly the same position in the manuscript tradition, because of the high degree of standardization of manuscripts of the MT; but when we bring in, for example, the Qumran material, we can see that similar situations could arise, and perhaps do arise. And it is odd to argue that the MT should be our norm and standard in cases where Qumran manuscripts preserve a reading that may be 1000 years older, on the grounds that the MT is the final form, since this seems to attribute more authority to the Masoretic schools who standardized the text than to what we might call the text itself as it was received in earlier, but still post-biblical times. It means, logically, that the imperative laid on the Christian theologian and exegete is to interpret a text from, perhaps, the ninth century AD, rather than the text 5

D. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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which, let us say, may have been authoritative in New Testament times. This can be defended, but is, again, counter-intuitive. (b) Secondly, where do the ancient versions fit into the theory? Could there never be a case where the LXX, for example, represented the final form of a biblical text? What do we say about a book like Jeremiah, where the LXX preserves a version of the text which is clearly sharply divergent from the Masoretic tradition as well as being much shorter? Why could there not be a final form reading of Greek Jeremiah? Obviously in principle there could, and some such thing does exist in practice in the case of Esther: in the Oxford Bible Commentary,6 for example, we commissioned separate commentaries on Hebrew and Greek Esther on the premise that it makes sense to regard them as two different books. It may be said that for the Christian interpreter, who is in focus for Childs and other canonical critics, the Hebrew text represents the authoritative version, but this is not obviously so for Catholic or Orthodox Christians, only for Protestants. This draws us quite unintentionally into the question of the canon. Is the canon of the Christian church the Hebrew Bible or the Greek Bible, or even the Latin or Ethiopic Bible? Even if we leave aside the last possibility as too complicated to contemplate at the moment, it remains true that the official canon for Catholics is the Latin Bible, which corresponds much more closely to the Greek than to the Hebrew. When Catholics interpret the Hebrew rather than the Latin text of those books that exist in Hebrew, that is, those books that are in the Hebrew Bible, they are doing so on the historical grounds that the Hebrew represents the original text. But if we are to press instead for the final text, I cannot see how we can justify appeal to the Hebrew rather than to the Greek or Latin. The Vulgate, after all, is certainly the Bible as it has been received in Catholicism, and the final form of the Bible for a Catholic reader is therefore the Latin text of the Vulgate, just as for an Orthodox Christian it is the Greek Bible. We cannot simultaneously insist on the final form as what the Church has received and insist on the MT of the Hebrew Bible because it is more original; that is an attempt to eat one’s cake and still have it. To take this point a little further: once we are in the business of reading the whole Bible as a single book, which is the logical culmination of final form criticism, it becomes crucial to know which individual books this single work contains, so that again the question of the canon surfaces. If we want to read Proverbs from a historical-critical perspective, the existence of other wisdom books is important from a historical point of view, because they may throw light on Proverbs, but it does not matter whether these other wisdom books are inside or outside the canon, whether they are Israelite or Egyptian or Mesopotamian: they are still evidence. But if we are to read the wisdom books as a coherent collection, as final form exegetes want to do, then it matters greatly which books these are. The meaning of a corpus of texts which includes Ben Sira and the Wisdom of Solomon can hardly be the same as the meaning of one which excludes these books. The themes of the wisdom collection, if it includes the Wisdom of Solomon, will encompass a belief in the immortality of the soul and life after death, and the juxtaposition of Wisdom of Solomon with Proverbs 6

J. Barton and J. Muddiman (eds), The Oxford Bible Commentary (Oxford University Press, 2004).

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will mean we have somehow to read Proverbs in the light of this teaching. That may produce a quite different reading of Proverbs from the one we should arrive at if the collection included only Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes. What is true of the wisdom corpus will then be true of the whole Bible. If we want to read it as a single work in its final form, it will be crucial to know what that final form contains. The presence or absence of the Apocrypha, which is of purely historical concern to the historical critic, will be a central worry to the final form exegete. (c) Thirdly, if we follow the line of thinking that proceeds to press for a final form exegesis on literary rather than theological grounds, another set of questions presents itself. The Literary Guide to the Bible7 frequently adopted the Authorized Version (KJV) as its text, on the grounds that this is the Bible as it has been important in English-speaking culture since the seventeenth century. And this is true, and important. There is no reason at all why one should not write a literary interpretation of a seventeenth-century work considered as the immediate source of quotation and allusion in modern English literature, even if it is composed of older pieces. But most of the authors of The Literary Guide could not quite bring themselves to do that, and tended to bring in extraneous questions about the original Greek and Hebrew. Final form interpreters should not concern themselves with such matters if what they are interpreting is the Authorized Version. But even this is not as simple as it looks. For reading Shakespeare and other pre-AV works in modern English one presumably needs to adopt a different Bible as one’s basis, the Geneva Bible, for example, or the Bishops’ Bible. Again, I can see no reason why one should not do this, but it would produce a very different kind of biblical interpretation from any we are familiar with and from anything that has yet appeared, so far as I am aware, under the rubric of final form exegesis. Most biblical scholars would describe such an interpretation as belonging to the reception history of the text. This is a topic which is also coming to the centre of interest, as can be seen in John Sawyer’s excellent book The Fifth Gospel, a study of how Isaiah has been read and interpreted down the centuries.8 But final form exegesis normally sets itself up as a synchronic reading style and eschews historical considerations, so that one could not describe what Sawyer has done as final form exegesis, and I am sure he would not so describe it himself. What is clear, however, is that what counts as the final form of the text depends on what constituency, as it were, we are thinking of, and it is very hard to argue that the final form for the Christian church has ever been the MT of the Hebrew Bible. It has almost always been a translation, often of more books than are in the Hebrew Scriptures. The only really successful attempt at a final form reading of the Hebrew Bible known to me is Jack Miles’s book God: A Biography.9 Miles sets out to read the Hebrew Scriptures, as arranged in the MT, as if they were a novel about God and the development of his character, deliberately avoiding all historical questions. He produces some fascinating ideas: for example, God speaks more at the beginning of the work (in the Pentateuch and Prophets) than he does in the Writings, and after his 7 8 9

F. Kermode and R. Alter, The Literary Guide to the Bible (Fontana, 1987). J. F.A. Sawyer, The Fifth Gospel (Cambridge University Press, 1996). J. Miles, God: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 1995).

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final speeches in Job he falls silent completely: there are no divine speeches in EzraNehemiah or Chronicles.10 This is an authentic final form reading, treating the MT as a cultural artefact exactly as it stands, and not asking about the underlying history. Even the arrangement of the work is not questioned. For a historical critic, the books in the Writings have no ‘order’: they are discrete works. But for this final form reader there is a Masoretic Bible which can be read in the way outlined. It is clear, however, that in doing this Miles is reading a Jewish work from well on into the Christian era, not the Bible which the Church ever canonized. Such a reading seems to me totally defensible and absolutely fascinating, but I cannot see on what grounds it could be said to be normative or obligatory. From all this we can see, I think, that the promotion of final form exegesis on either literary or theological grounds raises a number of important and fascinating questions for us. On the face of it it sounds simple and almost obvious to say to the interpreter: Read what is before you in the text, instead of delving into all kinds of hypothetical queries about it. Just read what is there. But as soon as we begin to unpack this proposal, it turns out to be far from simple. It brings us up against questions such as: Which books belong in the Bible? Is the canon of scripture for Christians the same as it is for Jews? Does it, or should it, make a difference to the interpretation of particular books whether one approaches them as a religious believer or as a scholar? Which has authority for the believer, what Isaiah wrote or what the church thought Isaiah wrote or what the Masoretes codified as what Isaiah wrote? Is there ultimately such a thing as the final form of a text, any text? If there is, why does it have a preferential place for the interpreter? Can final form reading be combined in any way at all with historical reading, or do they inhabit quite different mental universes? Thus in looking at this elementary and perhaps obvious proposal, that we should read what we find when we open our Bibles, we find ourselves staring at some of the biggest questions in any theory of reading. It is a good example of the interconnectedness of every part of the subject, and reminds us that there are few simple questions in the world of Old Testament studies. The last century has seen a slow and gradual return from analysis of the biblical text to something that looks uncannily like a pre-critical interest in its finished form. The pendulum swings to and fro, and each time it does so good ideas are discarded along with bad. What new ideas the twenty-first century will bring we cannot tell, of course; we may perhaps hope at least that it will help us to gather up the fragments that remain from previous questionings, so that nothing is lost.

10 My colleague John Day points out that this is not strictly true: for example, God speaks to Nathan in I Chron 17:3. If one followed the order of the Leningrad Codex, where Chronicles is the first of the Writings and thus precedes Job, Miles would be on firmer ground!

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Chapter 17

Thinking about Reader-Response Criticism In her book A Biblical Text and its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture, Yvonne Sherwood writes: Though it may come as a surprise to literary specialists operating outside the discipline, reader-response is still considered a fairly hot topic here in Biblical Studies. As Stephen Moore wryly observes, there appears to be something of a ‘time-warp factor’ in operation that ‘enables reader-response critics to seem like an exotic new species of scholar to their biblical colleagues long after the last reader-response critic in the far distant galaxy that is literary studies has gratefully closed her book, and then her eyes, and slipped into the slumber from which there is no awakening’.1

This is a clever postmodern comment on reader-response criticism; for at the same time as declaring it rather passé (and therefore not worth wasting much time on) it also makes it impossible to attack it as mistaken (because by now all sensible people have assimilated it into their system). Any biblical scholar who actively espouses it is convicted of being out of date, but any who dissent from it are at one and the same time showing their lack of interpretative sophistication, tilting at windmills and taking themselves too seriously. Reader-response approaches to texts (it is implied) are, in the wider literary culture which biblical scholars vainly try to enter, now so taken for granted that only the naive discuss them as though some question of truth or falsehood were involved. My high respect for Yvonne Sherwood’s work is does not prevent me from wanting somehow to get round this brilliantly contrived road-block, and to ask even now whether students of the Bible are wise to adopt reader-response criticism. What the book which is the source of this quotation shows is how, in expert hands, a style of criticism which includes a reader-response approach (though it is not exhausted by it) can yield exceptionally interesting results. It shows that such an approach is not merely the latest fad but an intellectually serious and challenging contribution to biblical studies. It does not show that all other approaches should be abandoned. In this paper I intend to argue that (as one might expect) reader-response approaches

1

Yvonne Sherwood, A Biblical Text and its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah, in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 212. This is one of the most exciting works on the history of interpretation of a biblical text known to me, and this judgement is not undermined by my disagreements about the underlying theory. Some people are worth disagreeing with!

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are a mixture of good and bad, and that we should be discriminating in using them when studying the Bible. I think that reader-response criticism exists in two forms, which I will call hard and soft. In the hard version, there is full assent to the celebrated remark that books are like a picnic to which the author brings the words and the reader the meaning. ‘The reader’ here may mean the individual reader, or it may imply an ‘interpretive community’, as argued by Stanley Fish:2 a group of readers who agree on what kind of meaning they will find in a certain text. But the reader has the leading role (‘is privileged’) over the author and indeed over the text, and uses the text as a vehicle for meaning which ultimately derives from elsewhere. Thus an interpretation of a text is not an exegesis in the old-fashioned sense but a ‘reading’. Readings can be interesting or uninteresting, but not true or false. They can also be moral or immoral. A number of those with an interest in the history of interpretation – one of the most important new avenues in biblical studies at the moment – would argue that the text can mean anything that it has ever been taken to mean (indeed, they would regard this as analytically true), but that it ought not to be made to mean anything which could lead to socially harmful conclusions. Professor John Sawyer argued this case passionately at the January 2001 meeting of the Society for Old Testament Study in Leeds, maintaining that a biblical (or any other) text has no determinate or absolute meaning, so that the history of interpretation simply is the meaning(s) of the texts, except that meanings which would give comfort to, for example, Nazism or fascism must be excluded as illicit. This is the ‘hard’ version of reader-response criticism. In it the reading of texts is an attempt, not to discover a meaning that is hidden until the necessary skills are applied, but to construct a meaning. The interpreter is a creator. Like any creator, the interpreter is under moral constraints. If it is wrong to produce a text in support of Nazism, it must be equally wrong to produce a Nazi reading of an existing text. There are elements of such a ‘hard’ view in Sherwood’s book, when she argues that readings of Jonah which are anti-Jewish are undesirable and therefore to be eschewed, but not because they are ‘incorrect’ as readings (there being no such thing as a ‘correct’ reading of a text). She writes: I cannot claim (much as I would like to, because in certain quarters it might increase the impact of my reading quite considerably) that I am somehow stripping away a false reading to let the text speak in its own native, guttural, Hebrew accents … But what I can do is to create another Author (who will be just as much a readerly construct) to replace ‘Our Author’ and to pluralize the voices competing for ownership of this text … But even as I read against the grain, enlisting alternative tradition, I know that there is no virgin territory, and that the space in which I read is set by my feelings about (in this case my absolute reaction against) these antiquated, venerated, canonized meanings.3

I have two naive questions about this kind of reader-response criticism. First, is it possible to write a text which puts forward an immoral point of view? If someone 2 Famously in Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). 3 A Biblical Text and its Afterlives, pp. 86–7.

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did so, how would we know? Presumably we are bound (morally) not to read texts as though they espoused morally undesirable causes. But does that not imply that we can never recognize an immoral text and dissent from it? To take the limiting case, does it not mean that we are committed to a non-Nazi reading of Mein Kampf, since it is wrong to read texts as supporting Nazism? Is the common sense response, that we can correctly recognize Mein Kampf as a work promoting Nazism and on that account condemn it as immoral, not preferable? There are several possible replies to this challenge, but they are generally not available to anyone committed to reader-response criticism. One is that Mein Kampf is avowedly in favour of Nazism, that it was written by a Nazi. But to appeal to that to justify a Nazi reading is surely intentionalism! And intentionalism is passé if anything is: we won’t catch any kind of postmodernist committing intentionalism. Another, perfectly reasonable point is that Mein Kampf is a piece of discursive writing, not a ‘literary text’. Most people with no particular axe to grind would think that interpreting discursive texts is different from interpreting works of poetic art. But the problem here is that reader-response critics have put themselves under a self-denying ordinance, and are not allowed to make this kind of distinction. For we can only tell that a text is discursive or poetic if we can tell what the text means in and for itself, and that is exactly what reader-response critics deny we can ever do. Thirdly, it might be said that different rules apply to biblical texts than to others, and that reader-response criticism is a special hermeneutic applicable to texts in the canon but not to those outside. Thus Jonah would be a candidate for a reader-response approach but Mein Kampf would not. A canonical/non-canonical distinction, however, is anathema to almost all postmodern styles of criticism; and, in any case, the reason for embracing reader-response criticism is supposed to be that it applies to texts as such. Its use in biblical studies is an example of biblical scholars trying to catch up with the literary world, and is the very opposite of the attempt to discover a special biblical hermeneutic. It seems to follow that, for a reader-response critic, it is not possible to compose a text which in any way has the power to constrain its interpreters to read it in one way rather than another. This must apply to all texts without exception, and so it must be entirely legitimate to read reader-response interpretations themselves ‘against the grain’ if one chooses to do so (incidentally, how does one discover – discover! – which way the grain runs?). Critical discourse is no more exempt from being the subject of a ‘reading’ than what we think of (wrongly) as ‘primary’ texts. But then what is the point of writing it? The authors of reader-response ‘readings’ appear to be trying to convey certain ideas, which they wish their readers to understand and, perhaps, agree with: they are trying to be persuasive. But on their own terms their attempt is doomed to fail. There are postmodern writers who seem entirely unfazed by this, but biblical reader-response critics do not seem to be among them: they deeply want other people to agree with them, since they are normal scholars who write because they have a point to make. But they saw off the branch on which they are sitting. My second naive question about ‘hard’ reader-response criticism is this. How can a text ever surprise or inform us, if we ourselves bring the meaning to it, if the text is nothing but an occasion for us to formulate ideas which we ourselves find

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unexceptionable? In the case of biblical texts, this of course raises questions about authority. Reader-response criticism has become popular with some people who have a rather high view of the authority of Scripture, and has the advantage that it enables them to bypass what they may see as the sceptical and rationalistic questionings of ‘historical-critical’ approaches. But surely it is a dangerous ally in that cause. For the reader-response critics’ texts are not set over against them, as voices they must hear whether they like it or not. Reader-response criticism in its ‘hard’ form is essentially solipsistic, even if the reader is a corporate entity such as the Church rather than an individual. Where in this is the Protestant belief that the Bible tells us things we cannot tell ourselves? We acknowledge the Bible as an authority, and yet can hear it only when it says what we already believe to be true. Indeed, even that is too optimistic a way of putting it. We do not truly hear the Bible at all: we perform an act of ventriloquism with the Bible as our dummy. I am naturally sympathetic to the idea that we would not wish to use the Bible in defence of racism, or Nazism, or fascism. But the traditional Protestant idea would be that the Bible cannot be used in support of these things because the Bible does not teach them. This can only be shown if what the Bible teaches can somehow be investigated independently of our own belief-system. If the Bible is simply to be deemed to give sound teaching in these areas because that is how we choose to read it, we should give up any suggestion that our beliefs in some way depend upon the Bible. Of course there are many good, non-biblical reasons for not being a Nazi. But whether or not the Bible supports these reasons is essentially an empirical question. If the Bible contains no determinate teaching at all independent of its readers, then it is pointless to cite is as the basis for rejecting or accepting any belief system whatsoever. It is simply (in Luther’s phrase) a wax nose. ‘Hard’ reader-response criticism should thus, in, my view, carry a Health Warning, especially for Protestants who like to appeal to the Bible to undergird what they teach. On some traditionalist Catholic understandings of the place of Scripture it is much more harmless, since the beliefs being defended are not supposed to derive from the Bible anyway, and it matters much less if the Bible is simply heard as supporting what is believed on other grounds; though this would not apply in more modern forms of Catholicism, for which the witness of the Bible is seen as far more important than that. We could say in general that any version of Christianity in which the Bible can challenge what people otherwise believe should avoid ‘hard’ readerresponse criticism. Does this not mean that something like traditional ‘biblical criticism’ is not only religiously permissible, not only rationally defensible, but actually required in any faith system for which the Bible is an important witness? Crucial to any such system is that the Bible’s meaning can be established only by inspection, not by ‘creative reading’; and that the inspection must try, so far as humanly possible, to avoid contamination by the actual beliefs of those carrying it out. And crucial to that is the belief that the Bible, like any other text, has a meaning (or meanings), that its interpretation is not, as Germans put it, beliebig, just anything you like. I believe that the idea that texts have determinate meanings can be argued for in general literary and philosophical terms, but here I simply point out that the idea is apparently implied also in the logic of ascribing some kind of authority to a given collection of texts.

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A theory of scriptural authority in which everyone can choose (or the Church corporately can choose) what the scriptural texts are to mean is so weak a theory that there seems little point in bothering with it. It does indeed remove one embarrassing feature of most actual Christian reading of the Bible: the occasions when readers find they cannot accept what the text is actually saying. The temptation to finesse the matter by saying that after all there are only ‘readings’, so an acceptable sense can be found if we choose, is very strong, but needs at all costs to be resisted unless we are willing to give up the claim that the text has authority. There are many ways of dealing with texts we disagree with, among which one is to say that they are mistaken (unacceptable, of course, to those with a very high theory of scriptural authority), and another that they must be contextualized or relativized, historically or in relation to other texts. But to deal with the problem by saying that we can simply choose to read them as denying what they plainly affirm seems to me the worst possible way out of the dilemma. There is a further point here. Biblical criticism began as a defence for the reader against an ecclesiastical authoritarianism which claimed to tell us how the Bible ought to be read – what meanings it was acceptable to find in it. Reader-response criticism, in a theological context, delivers us straight back into the same captivity, only this time under the domination of ‘the interpretive community’ rather than the Church. It claims to tell us not what the text actually means (‘actually means’ is deemed to be a risibly old-fashioned expression) but what it is permissible for it to be taken to mean, as in Professor Sawyer’s insistence that it must not be taken, for example, to support Nazism. No problem there, because no one thinks it does or wants it to. But there are people in the world who do not at all share Professor Sawyer’s humane beliefs. How shall we respond if one day they are in the ascendant in the world of biblical studies, and they tell us that the text ought indeed to support some new form of Nazism or some other abomination? It will be no use saying that ‘the text does not mean that’, because we have abandoned such appeals to the text as illicit. My fear is that reader-response criticism can have far-reaching political repercussions of a highly authoritarian kind, and if we accept it we may find we have bitten off far more than we care to chew.4 Thus I find myself in the camp of those who think that texts have definite meanings, which it is the business of the critic to discover, and consequently I hope that ‘hard’ reader-response criticism does not establish itself in biblical studies, whatever its fate may be in the literary world. But to believe that texts have meanings is not to say that they have simple or obvious meanings, or that there is only one set of procedures that will enable us to discover them, or that some particular school of critics has a monopoly on the quest. When we turn to the arduous task of trying to discover what ancient and obscure texts in fact mean, we need all the help we can get. And here, it seems to me, a ‘soft’ version of reader-response criticism may prove invaluable. As a matter of fact those who have written on the theory of reader response have by no means always espoused a ‘hard’ form of the approach. Wolfgang Iser, from whom much of the current discussion derives, is far more nuanced in his style than 4

Compare the discussion in Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 36–7, 104–5 and 134–5.

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popular presentations of reader-response criticism might suggest.5 His work, it might be said, is concerned more with how readers perceive meaning in texts than with any desire to deny that the texts inhere in the texts: he is not really an exponent of the ‘picnic’ theory in a pure form. Iser believes that texts and readers are in dialogue. Texts do not wear their meaning on their sleeve: it has to be worked for. One method is Iser’s celebrated interest in the Leerstellen, ‘empty places’ in the text, the gaps which make texts appear inconsequential and which we, the readers, have to fill in, rather like joining up the dots to produce an unexpected picture in a children’s comic.6 The reader can thus be said to ‘create’ the text’s meaning, but the process is not exactly beliebig: there are constraints. Precisely this sense that the text is at least a partner in the production of meaning, not a tabula rasa on which the reader is free to write his or her own interpretation at will, is the basis of Stanley Fish’s virulent attack on Iser.7 Fish correctly perceives that, as against his own ‘hard’ reader-response approach, Iser still thinks that there is something ‘there’ in the text to which the reader has to respond.8 It may be true that interpretation is a ‘reading’ of the text, rather like a performance of a play or of a piece of music; but it is a reading of this text rather than another one, and it is not a matter of indifference which precise words make up the text that is being read. This must imply that in some sense or other these words ‘mean’ something which the interpreter is trying to discover, and is not an empty vessel into which meaning is poured. One might perhaps say that Iser is concerned with how we read texts in fact, rather than issuing a programme for how we ought to read them. What concerns him is what is going on in interpretation, and he is not directly concerned to deny that interpretation is an exercise in discovery. No doubt there are several possible readings of Iser! But the point I am making can stand independently of whether he himself would agree that meaning is already present in the texts we read, or whether he is closer to Fish than Fish himself supposes. The point is that one could conceive of a ‘reader-response’ approach which concentrated on how we perceive the meaning of texts yet did not deny that this meaning is already in some sense ‘there’ to be discovered. One reason why interpretation has to be done again in each generation is that new readers discover new things in texts – which to me suggests not that there is simply an endless plurality of equal readings, but rather that progress is possible in interpretation. The interpreter points others to the text, saying: I have seen this in the text; can you not see it too? He or she does not say: I have used this text in order to formulate the following 5 ‘One of the milder reading theories’: Sherwood, A Biblical Text and its Afterlives, p. 211. Two major works by Iser are The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 6 Cf. Sherwood, A Biblical Text and its Afterlives, for this analogy. 7 See S. Fish, ‘Why No One’s Afraid of Iser’, in his Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 8 See the helpful discussion in A.C. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics (London: HarperCollins, 1992), pp. 652–3.

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ideas myself, though I could equally well have used any other text in the world. But ‘seeing’ things in texts is not a simple process, and a theory such as Iser’s, I believe, genuinely illuminates how it takes place. This kind of reader-response criticism does not have the solipsistic character of the ‘harder’ version, but it does take seriously – as all theorists of interpretation since Schleiermacher have done – the fact that reading is not simply the transference of one person’s ideas into another’s mind via words on paper. Such an understanding would indeed be naive. This somewhat softer form of reader-response criticism seems to me intuitively convincing. I should very much like to ‘re-read’ those reader-response critics whose work I value, such as Sherwood with whom this essay began, in this mode, seeing them as engaged in the highly complex task of discovering the meaning of texts that are overlaid with generations of critical conjectures by challenging their traditional interpretations, and re-examining their Leerstellen to arrive at a more just understanding. I am afraid that the people in question will not welcome my attempts to annexe them for such an exercise in old-fashioned criticism, as they will see it. This is a pity, because there is much more common ground between a traditional biblical criticism, properly understood, and these newer approaches than either side in our current debates is apt to think. Both proceed by corrigible conjectures about meaning which appeal to the text itself against the interpretative tradition; both recognize that criticism is an art rather than a science, and that finding meaning in texts requires empathy and Einfühlung, not simply good technique. Neither believes, despite the mutual caricatures, that there is one simple meaning, whether contributed by the author or the reader, but both are open to complexity and polyvalence. To show this in detail, however, would require more space than I have in this essay, and I develop the theme in my book The Nature of Biblical Criticism.9 It remains that there is genuine disagreement between what is traditionally called ‘historical-critical method’10 and reader-response criticism in its hard form, a crack I would make no attempt to paper over. My question is whether biblical critics of the old style might not have much to learn from a softer form of reader response, which lays bare some of the mechanisms by which all of us read and make sense of texts. If so, those who oppose its hard form, for what seem to me very good reasons, should still read reader-response critics for the insight they can give into the fascinating question of how we read texts. We need not agree with people to learn from them. Those who read the Bible above all should be familiar with this point: for they are often confronted in biblical texts with unpalatable ideas, yet they do not abandon the attempt to understand and to empathize – certainly not if they are traditional ‘historical’ critics!

9

John Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2007). 10 I have strong reservations about this term, which I believe invites many of the caricatures of ‘traditional’ biblical criticism on which theories such as reader-response criticism feed: see my essay ‘Historical-Critical Approaches’, in The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 9–20.

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Chapter 18

On Biblical Commentaries The A.S. Peake Memorial Lecture exists to further the objects of the Memorial Trust: ‘to memorialise the contribution of Dr A.S. Peake to biblical scholarship’, and ‘to continue the tradition of biblical scholarship which he represented, namely, the application of historical principle to the interpretation of Scripture as “the written record of the progressive revelation of God in history and experience”’. Peake’s biblical scholarship was expressed through many distinguished and lasting publications, but he is chiefly remembered today for his one-volume Bible Commentary.1 This, it is not too much to say, made the critical reading of Scripture accessible for the first time to many of the ‘ordinary readers’ for whom he was so concerned, and in whose service all his scholarly work was undertaken – not to mention his work of training ministers to serve Methodist congregations. It was a fitting tribute to the uniqueness of Peake’s own work that the complete revision and overhaul of his work undertaken by Matthew Black in the 1950s and published in 1962 still appeared under his name as Peake’s Commentary on the Bible,2 even though it contained not a word of his own writing. The consequence is that ‘Peake’ has been for nearly eighty years a shorthand term for a commentary tradition that seeks to serve students, ministers and interested general readers, and to do so not by ignoring critical enquiry, but by making its fruits more widely known. The ‘Peake’ tradition is a tradition of historical biblical criticism undertaken in the interest of theological understanding: these two things are seen not as rivals but as natural allies. My interest in Peake’s Commentary, in its original and its revised version, does not only derive from the fact that it was my first introduction to biblical scholarship when I was a student in the 1960s, and the ‘New Peake’ really was new. The Peake tradition has a particular importance to me because I am at the moment editing a one-volume Bible Commentary myself. My New Testament colleague in Oxford, John Muddiman, and I are joint editors of a commentary to be published by Oxford University Press under the title The Oxford Bible Commentary.3 It will contain about one and a half million words on 1000 pages, and will include commentaries on all the books of the Old and New Testaments and Apocrypha by the best biblical scholars, of any tradition and nationality, that we have been able to find. It is not officially a new ‘new Peake’, since the copyright on Peake is held by Routledge, who have no plans for letting it go out of print. But we do informally think of it as a new ‘new Peake’, because our aim is to continue the same tradition of historical-critical method with a concern for what the Bible has to say to the non-expert reader. Of course we do not claim to be improving on 1 2 3

A.S. Peake, Commentary on the Bible (London, 1919). Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, ed. M. Black and H.H. Rowley (London, 1962). J. Barton and J. Muddiman (eds), The Oxford Bible Commentary (Oxford, 2004).

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the new Peake, any more than Matthew Black claimed to be improving on the original Peake. But we are aiming to produce a suitable commentary for this generation, as those two distinguished works did for theirs. It sounds all very well to say that this or any other commentary seeks to combine historical-critical method with a theological interest – a laudable desire to get the best of both worlds. When Peake himself wrote it was by no means obvious that a historical critic should concern himself with theological relevance, since it might be thought this would compromise the purity and objectivity of the historical criticism. In our own day perhaps the opposite is the case: many theologians would argue that historical criticism can never be made to yield anything theologically relevant, and therefore so much the worse for historical criticism! A commentary which seeks to help the beginner, the theological student, the ministerial candidate, the preacher, should set its face (it might be said) against the aridity of historical criticism from the outset, and not waste time on this outdated mode of study. Because I think this is a serious and important point of view, though one with which I profoundly disagree, I thought it would be worthwhile in this lecture to look again at the widespread opposition to historical criticism now to be found in the academic world, in all the churches and among ordinary Bible-readers, and to ask whether we ought now, in deference to Peake’s commitment to theologically useful scholarship, to cut the link with history which to him was so self-evidently right but to many now seems so pernicious. There is much talk nowadays of the need for a shift away from historical methods and towards ‘text-immanent’ interpretation, which is not concerned with the historical context and meaning of texts; it is widely felt that historical criticism is now itself of largely historical (or ‘academic’!) interest.4 But what is historical criticism? It may be helpful to begin by identifying the features which many students of the Bible now find objectionable in it, before trying to see what can be said in its defence. Let me outline four features normally said to be central to historical-critical study of the Bible. (1) Genetic questions. Historical critics, it is usually said, are interested in genetic questions about the biblical text. They ask when and by whom books were written; what was their intended readership; and, in the case of many biblical books, what were the stages by which they came into being. Often the finished product seems to be of less interest to the critics than the underlying sources. Thus, in the case of the Pentateuch, historical-critical approaches generated the hypothesis that Genesis-Deuteronomy should be read, not as five discrete books, but as the interweaving of four separate, older sources. Once they had established the existence of these sources, Pentateuchal critics took little further interest in the Pentateuch as it now stands. Even where they asked about the theology of the work, they took this to mean the four separate theological outlooks of the sources J, E, D and P, and made no attempt to integrate these into any larger whole. To the question ‘What is the Pentateuch?’ they answered ‘The amalgam of J, E, D and P’: thus a question potentially about the nature of the work was given an answer couched 4 See my lecture The Future of Old Testament Study (Oxford, 1993) (reproduced as Chapter 13 in this volume) and F. Watson, Text, Church and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective (Edinburgh, 1994) for two opposing views of this matter.

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purely in terms of the work’s origin. Much the same would be true for the Synoptic Gospels, where historical criticism concentrated on the ‘Synoptic Problem’: how are the overlaps and divergences among the three Synoptic Gospels to be accounted for, and how far can we reconstruct the process by which the Gospels as we now have them were compiled? It might be said that historical criticism addressed itself almost entirely to the question of how we came to have the Bible, and when it had solved this problem, saw little else for the biblical scholar to do. (2) Original meaning. Because of its concern for the history and pre-history of the text, historical criticism tended (it may be said) to be interested in the ‘original’ meaning of the text, what it had meant to its first readers, and not what it might mean to a modern reader. Very sophisticated philological and linguistic studies could be brought to bear on obscure texts in order to establish what the original author could have meant in his own historical period. The concern was always to place texts in their historical context, and to argue that we misunderstand them if we take them to mean something they could not have meant for their first readers – indeed, most historical critics regarded this as obvious. The original meaning was the true meaning, and the main task of biblical scholars was to get back to this meaning, and to eliminate the false meanings that unhistorical readers thought they had found in the text. Thus when in Philippians 1:1 we read in the AV of ‘bishops and deacons’, a historical critic would point out that these terms did not mean what they later came to mean, as titles for two levels in the developed Church hierarchy of later times, but referred to quite different officials in the early Pauline churches. This made it illicit to appeal to such a text in support of Catholic church order, for example. (3) Historical reconstructions. Historical criticism was also concerned with history in the straightforward sense of the term – not only the historical context of words and meanings, or the historical development of texts, but what happened in the past. In the nineteenth century a major influence on great biblical critics such as W.M.L. de Wette, Julius Wellhausen and D.F. Strauss was the burgeoning discipline of historical writing in the German-speaking world. Scholars such as Mommsen and Ranke set themselves the task of writing, for the first time, a properly critical history of the classical world, by going back to the original sources and refusing to accept what ancient writers said at face value. In the same way, biblical historians subjected the historical books of the Old Testament, the Gospels and Acts to a critical scrutiny that asked what really happened – as opposed to what the writers of those books believed (or wanted their readers to believe) had happened. Similarly, source analysis of the Gospels had as one of its aims the recovery of the earliest sayings of Jesus and the original stories about him. This would make it possible to reconstruct a genuine history of his life and times, rather than simply retelling the story as the Gospels present it. Wellhausen called his examination of the Pentateuchal sources and their themes Prolegomena to the History of Israel: sorting out the order and historical implications of the four Pentateuchal sources was the necessary precondition to writing a critical history of Israel (which, however, never got written). (4) Disinterested scholarship. Perhaps most important of all, historical criticism was meant to be value-neutral, or disinterested. It tried, so far as possible, to approach the text without prejudice, and to ask not what it meant ‘for me’, but simply what it meant. Against any ‘pious’ reading, a historical-critical enquiry is guided by a desire to

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discover the facts as they actually are, as in Ranke’s famous dictum that the historian’s task is to establish the facts about the past ‘as it actually was’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen). For the historical critic, the ‘holiness’ attributed by Christians to the biblical books might be the reason why people studied them in the first place, but it certainly did not give them any kind of diplomatic immunity once historians had them in their hands. The historical critic’s calling was to be a neutral observer, prescinding from any kind of faith-commitment in order to get at the truth. This might result in accounts of Jesus, the early Church or ancient Israel wildly at variance with the accounts of them given by the biblical writers: Strauss and Wellhausen both lost their theological chairs because of the revisionist character of their historical reconstructions. But both felt they must follow where the truth led, and not be silent about what they saw as the real facts which the biblical writers had suppressed or distorted. All these characteristics – but especially the last, the belief in scholarship’s ability to arrive at objective truth – are commonly seen nowadays as part of the legacy of the Enlightenment. It is, indeed, from the Enlightenment onwards that historical biblical criticism seems to have become a dominant force in the academic world, bringing it into a more or less uncomfortable relationship with traditional theology. In England, the publication of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan in 1651 brought a critical understanding of the Bible to the attention of the reading public for the first time, and it was followed by many works stemming mostly from the deist tradition and perceived, correctly, as hostile to an orthodox theological position about the Bible. Such works were united by a refusal to let the traditional religious authority of Scripture dictate the conclusions to which historical investigators might come: they were in the literal sense ‘free-thinking’. Since the heyday of historical biblical criticism, which lasted into the postwar years, many alternative approaches have arisen. In many cases they are predicated on the conviction that historical criticism, even if useful and important in its own day, rested on a series of mistakes. Many scholars now argue that there needs to be what is called a ‘paradigm shift’, that is, a complete mental realignment, resulting in styles of biblical study and interpretation that avoid the traps which historical critics fell into. Perhaps the central accusation against the historical-critical method that one hears nowadays concerns its Enlightenment origins. The neutral, scientific pursuit of truth by a disinterested scholar has been shown (it is said) to be bankrupt. The presence of the observer makes a difference to all scientific experiments, and in the same way the concerns of the investigator colour, even determine, historical reconstructions. No one is really ‘disinterested’; everyone has an axe to grind. We should therefore abandon the pretence of academic neutrality, and accept that our biblical study serves some interest or other. For example, it may serve our Christian commitment as members of the Church, and there is no reason why we should be embarrassed about that, for in acknowledging it we are at least being honest about our commitment – unlike historical critics, who are pretending to be neutral but thus smuggle in their commitments under cover of dark. (This case is argued with great skill by Francis Watson.5) A postmodernist position, especially, legitimates scholars 5

See note 4.

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in being candid about the ends they wish their enquiries to serve, and encourages them not to imagine that they can serve simply ‘truth’ – an entity that does not exist in its own right, but only within some intellectual system or other. Such a shift would also affect our other three points. It would make the exclusive concern for ‘original’ or ‘historical’ meanings in texts pointless as well as impractical; for why should it matter to us (except perhaps as a kind of harmless hobby) what texts meant when they were first written? Why should this meaning enjoy any privileges above all the other meanings the text has been taken to have throughout its history? This in turn would render the genetic interest of historical critics largely irrelevant. It would also mean that the quest for historical reconstruction is a fruitless quest, since even to pursue it is to assume that objective historical facts can be recovered, which is an illusion. From a postmodern perspective, the historical-critical method is just a piece of self-deception. Now there are two issues here. One is the validity of a postmodern attack on the pursuit of objective truth. This is an enormous subject in its own right, but this is not the best place to discuss it. It will be clear already from the tone of my discussion that I do not by any means believe that the case has been made, and therefore think the argument in favour of the recommended ‘paradigm shift’ needs to be made much more rigorous before it will command assent. But the other issue is the nature of historical criticism itself. The account I have given (into which I have tried to insert ‘it is said’, ‘so people say’ and so on) certainly does seem to invite the postmodernist response in many ways. But my own suspicion is that ‘historical criticism’ is thus defined in order to invite this response, and that the definition does not correspond to the historical-critical method as one actually encounters it in practice. This has in turn two aspects: the detailed interests which ‘historical critics’ have had; and the theory of historical criticism they have worked with. (1) If we survey the past hundred years of ‘historical criticism’, we can see that it has a number of features which are puzzling in the light of its concerns as commonly identified nowadays. (a) Commentaries on the Pentateuch or the Gospels which have taken an interest in the sources of these texts can be called ‘historical’ in the sense that they are what is nowadays known as ‘diachronic’. They are concerned with the development of the texts through time, rather than with the finished product just as we encounter it. It is also true that some ‘historical’ critics have been interested in source-analysis of the biblical text because of an overarching concern with writing history – Wellhausen is a case in point. But the general impression an ordinary historian is likely to form after reading books dubbed ‘historical-critical’ by theologians is that they are predominantly literary in their interests. The primary motivation behind both Pentateuchal and Synoptic criticism was the desire to untangle the complex interrelationships within and between complex texts. It is common nowadays to contrast historical with literary criticism and to regard the former as markedly ‘unliterary’ in character. But this is because ‘literary’ criticism nowadays has become so very unhistorical itself, with an enormous emphasis on ‘synchronic’ reading of texts exactly as they lie before us. Two generations ago much ‘literary’ criticism was just as diachronic as the work of most biblical interpreters. To call what biblical critics did until thirty or so years ago ‘historical-critical’ makes it

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sound as though they had a choice whether to work diachronically or synchronically, and consciously chose the former. But this is anachronistic. Biblical critics applied to biblical documents the kind of detailed analysis which anyone engaged in ‘literary’ studies at the time would have been likely to practise, asking questions about the origins and development of the text, the intentions of its authors or author, and its connection with other, similar, texts. It is in the sophistication of their literary analysis that most so-called ‘historical’ critics excelled. When they turned to write history in the normal sense of the term their efforts were usually far less sophisticated, being often guided by theological assumptions or even by a tendency to paraphrase the biblical text (very obvious in Bright’s History of Israel6). (b) Even the diachronic concerns of traditional critics can be exaggerated. On the whole these appear patchily. In studying the Pentateuch, critics of the historicalcritical persuasion certainly did analyse earlier stages of the text, though (as just remarked) this would at the time have been regarded as a perfectly normal interest for a literary critic. But the study of the wisdom literature, for example, has seldom been very ‘historical’. Gerhard von Rad’s Wisdom in Israel7 lacks almost any concern for dating the material or tracing ‘historical’ developments within it, and the average commentary on Job, for example, has always been a commentary on the ‘final form’ of the book, or at most has allowed for a few ‘additions’ to a mostly unified book. Genetic concerns have been comparatively uncommon in the study of Paul’s epistles, which the majority of commentators interpret as self-contained theological works. Most interpretation of Paul has until recently been more open to the criticism that it studies him in a historical vacuum than that it is excessively historical in its interests – a point made forcefully by E.P. Sanders.8 (c) The allegation that ‘historical-critical’ scholarship has been indifferent to the contemporary relevance of the biblical text and ‘antiquarian’ in its concerns can be made plausible only by concentrating on a few extreme cases: Pentateuchal critics who reduced the books of Moses to sixty-five separate documents, or something like that. The vast majority of biblical interpreters until very recently have been religious believers, and most are so still. Many have worked in ecclesiastically supported colleges and seminaries, and most have been intensely interested in the religious relevance of their exegetical work, as Peake himself so obviously was. E.P. Sanders’ trenchant criticisms of most scholars who have written on Jesus and Paul show that their reconstructions have normally been heavily influenced by their religious beliefs: by the need to show the uniqueness of Jesus, or the essentially Lutheran character of Paul’s teaching. The neutrality at which historical criticism aims, so far from having been taken to the point where the Bible is no longer the Church’s book, has hardly ever gone far enough to pose any kind of threat to most believers. The accusation that historical criticism has neglected the contemporary application of the Bible is a useful ploy to make other approaches seem attractive, but is historically on very weak ground. The reverse could be argued: that criticism has scarcely ever been historical enough, 6

J. Bright, History of Israel (London, 1960; several subsequent editions). G. von Rad, Wisdom in Israel (London, 1972). 8 Cf. E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (London, 1977) and Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia, 1985). 7

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that it has usually been far too influenced by commitments lying outside scholarly detachment. A single example: if one compares Wellhausen’s reconstruction of Israel in the Old Testament period with that of John Bright or even Siegfried Herrmann,9 one has the impression that there has been a slow back-pedalling, from a sharply focused and very critical approach in the late nineteenth century to a far more bland and accepting attitude towards the biblical materials in the mid-twentieth. To suggest that biblical study became increasingly ‘historical-critical’ during that period, so that a fresh paradigm is needed to make biblical study relevant to the concerns of religious believers, is to argue in the face of the evidence. (2) A larger question can be asked about historical-criticism. What was its overall aim or philosophy? The usual perception today is that historical criticism derives from the Enlightenment, and that its practices belong to ‘modernity’ – a rationalistic approach committed to an ideal of neutral, universal truth attainable by ‘scientific’ procedures. It would be foolish to deny historical criticism’s debt to the Enlightenment. Nevertheless it is possible to attempt a revisionist account which makes some of today’s attitudes towards it seem less plausible. There is a tradition in German scholarship of tracing the origins of historical criticism not to the Enlightenment but to the Reformation. Rather than speak of ‘the historical-critical method’, it may be argued, we should speak simply of ‘biblical criticism’, for the connection with history is (as I have been suggesting) at best partial and occasional.10 The idea of reading the Bible critically is not derived from an interest in history, even though in the nineteenth century there was a (contingent) alliance between the two concerns; it is linked with the Reformation insistence on the authority of the Bible, read freely, over the Church. Christian believers, according to Reformation principles, have the right to ask whether the Bible really means what the Church says it means. In that sentence lies the whole development of biblical criticism in germ. Faced with an ecclesiastical interpretation of this or that text, the biblical critic does not automatically accept that the magisterium of the Church guarantees that the meaning proposed is the true one, but reserves the right to apply rational principles of criticism. Chief among these will be to ask whether the proposed meaning was possible at the time the text was written: did a given term have the range of meanings being put forward? The example from Philippians 1 above illustrates this well: were there ‘bishops’ and ‘deacons’ in the sixteenthcentury sense in Paul’s day? This is certainly a historical question; but it derives from a question about language usage, about the meaning of such terms as episkopos and diakonos in New Testament times and thus about what the text ‘really’ means. An effect of postmodernism has been to banish the expression ‘really means’ to outer darkness, and consequently to brand any style of academic enquiry for which it is still regarded as usable as hopelessly naive and outmoded. But we should not necessarily be swayed by that. In all sorts of contexts we operate quite uncomplicatedly with the idea that words have definite meanings, and postmodernists do the same 9

S. Herrmann, A History of Israel in Old Testament Times (London, 1975). Cf. J. Barr, ‘Bibelkritik als theologische Aufklärung’, in Glaube und Toleranz: Das theologische Erbe der Aufklärung, ed. T. Rendtorff (Gütersloh, 1982), pp. 30–42; Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism (Oxford, 1983). 10

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when they read everyday texts: instruction booklets that come with household equipment, legal documents, personal letters conveying information, shopping lists or cookery books. In asking what a text really means or actually says, and being open to the possibility that this is not what the Church, or tradition, or the individual thinks or wishes it says or would like to make it say, biblical critics were trying to let the text speak through the stifling wrappings of interpretation with which it had been surrounded. This led, inevitably, to historical reconstruction, textual analysis and the whole range of so-called ‘historical-critical’ enquiry. The proliferation of historical-critical writings has threatened, of course, to become simply a fresh set of wrappings with the same effect, and it is understandable that people should feel that it is time to begin again. But the underlying motivation of ‘historical’ criticism is to free the text to speak. Where it has failed to do this, in my judgement, is because it has continued to be too hidebound by tradition and by the expectations of the wider religious community; and the cure is more criticism, not less. Biblical criticism so understood is concerned with the ‘plain sense’ or ‘natural sense’ of the text. It is usually harmless to describe this as the ‘historical’ or ‘original’ sense, meaning ‘what the writer meant by the text’. But strictly speaking these are not exactly the same. Where we do not know who wrote the text or what he or she meant by it, we may still be able to say that the text ‘could mean A’ or ‘could not mean B’ on the basis of our knowledge of the language in which the text is written. This is indeed a ‘historical’ point in the sense that it concerns the language, Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic, at some particular point in its history; but not in the sense of ‘historical’ usually understood today, in which the ‘historical’ critic is assumed to be locked into seeking past meanings when present ones are what is needed. So-called ‘historical criticism’ has the task of telling the reader what biblical texts can or cannot mean, not merely what they did or did not mean; to say of this or that interpretation, ‘No, the text cannot possibly mean that, because the words it uses will not bear that meaning.’ This is potentially an enormously iconoclastic movement, because it refuses to allow people to mean anything they like by their sacred texts. So far from this movement having had its day in the churches, it has scarcely even arrived there. The world of academic biblical interpretation is already trying to move people on from a position whose strength they have by no means yet grasped, and to offer instead allegedly new modes of exegesis which will allow a place of refuge within safe ‘interpretive communities’ of faith to those who do not wish to be challenged by the biblical text, despite the place of honour they claim to give it. Historical critics are not, I believe, an endangered species; nor are there any good reasons why they should be regarded by proponents of new paradigms as lost souls beyond redemption. Biblical studies have always involved bitter feuds – most academic fields do – but there seems little reason for a rift to run precisely between ‘synchronic’ and ‘diachronic’ approaches. All the more is this true if we depart from customary usage and speak, in the revisionist way I’ve outlined, of ‘biblical criticism’ rather than ‘the historical-critical method’. According to that way of speaking, it is not the ‘historical’ (diachronic) element that is the defining characteristic of biblical criticism, but its ‘critical’ character: its emphasis on asking free questions about the meaning of texts unconstrained by alleged authorities – whether the authority of Christian or Jewish tradition, the authority of current

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ecclesiastical structures or the authority of received academic opinion. The point is that no one may legislate as to what questions the reader of Scripture is allowed to ask, or declare that certain questions (‘synchronic’ or ‘diachronic’) shall be deemed ‘uninteresting’ or unimportant. If we now try to lay this interpretation of the current scene in biblical commentary alongside what I’ve taken to be A.S. Peake’s own equal commitment to historical criticism and to theological meaning – indeed, his assumption that the two go hand in hand – what might we say about the functions of a biblical commentator today? Trying to take what is said against the historical-critical method seriously and in good part, despite the objections I’ve raised, we may say that many theologians are concerned that the biblical commentator should not be merely an antiquarian; and that seems to me to be an important point. My response has been to say that very few commentators ever have been mere antiquarians, not to defend the idea that they should be. A.S. Peake was decidedly one of those who thought that his scholarly work should serve the Church by penetrating to the theological meaning of Scripture. Few of us probably believe now in the theory of progressive revelation which he thought emerged from a historical examination of the Bible, for reasons which John Rogerson outlined in his Peake Lecture in 1981.11 But most of us probably continue to share his belief that the Bible has something important to say, that its message is profound, not trivial, and that a commentary which ignores this profundity is certain to be an inadequate commentary. Commentators should be interested in the content of the book they are commenting on, not just its historical context or the process by which it came into being. They should ask what the book is about, and what it says about what it is about. As I’ve indicated, I think that commentaries which fail to ask these questions are much rarer than the opponents of historical criticism allege: still, no doubt they do occur, and are best avoided. A further point, however, which I’ve tried to show is essential in the so-called ‘historical-critical method’ is the attempt to seek objective truth about the text’s meaning, truth which is not read in by the commentator from an already existing theological agenda. It is common nowadays to deny that such a quest can ever succeed, but I’ve proposed a rather robust response to this denial. Critical scholarship (and let us agree to drop the prefix ‘historical-’ for the moment) is typified, indeed defined, by its commitment to reading only what is in the text, not what the commentator wishes were there. In many cases this distinction can be quite easily demonstrated and is entirely unproblematic. A commentator must be able to say: I wish the text didn’t say the following, but it does. That is the sum total of what a commitment to critical method amounts to, but it is desperately difficult to hold on to in practice. The Bible is a source of comfort and illumination, but it also has sharp edges, and commentators fail in their duty if they write with a pen in one hand and a piece of sandpaper in the other. Nevertheless there is also some truth in the claim that historical criticism can be obscurantist, some reason for church people to be impatient with the purism of some commentators. Those of us engaged in commentary work need to hear the 11

J. Rogerson, ‘Progressive Revelation: Its History and its Value as a Key to Old Testament Interpretation’, Epworth Review 9 (1982), pp. 73–86.

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criticisms that are current at the moment. John Muddiman, my fellow editor of The Oxford Bible Commentary, has coined the expression ‘chastened historical criticism’ to describe what we are aiming at, and I think this sums up well the kind of approach I have been trying to advocate. We think that what I’ve called the Peake tradition could well be characterized by the same term; and we hope that what we produce will not be alien to the spirit of A.S. Peake himself.

PART III Theology

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Introduction Any contribution I have made to biblical theology has been very partial and occasional, but a few essays are reproduced here that may hint at ideas which could usefully be developed further. They are, however, more miscellaneous than the other essays in this volume, and I have simply arranged them in chronological order. The reader will notice, I hope, that what I have to say about biblical theology is very much of a piece with my opinions on biblical interpretation and criticism. ‘Gerhard von Rad on the World-View of Early Israel’ (Journal of Theological Studies 35 (1984), pp. 301–23) arose from the experience of tutorial teaching on the pre-monarchic and monarchic periods, at a time when most biblical scholars still thought we could know something about those early times, and that von Rad’s theory of a ‘Solomonic Enlightenment’ illuminated them. I found that students were often confused by von Rad’s writing, and set out to analyse what might be the cause. My colleague Robert Morgan edited a volume by ordained Anglican members of the Oxford Theology Faculty as a centennial counterpart to Lux Mundi, published in 1889 with a similar authorship. The volume was called The Religion of the Incarnation (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989). Each contributor took one of the original chapters and tried to see what could be said today on the same topic. My essay in this volume, ‘Preparation in History for Christ’ (pp. 60–73), reacting to the original one by Edward Talbot, was quite experimental, and I surprised myself by finding that I wanted to defend ‘progressive revelation’. Perhaps its chief merit is to have introduced some readers in Britain to Gerd Theissen’s important Biblical Faith: An Evolutionary Perspective (London: SCM Press, 1984). ‘History and Rhetoric in the Prophets’, published in The Bible as Rhetoric: Studies in Biblical Persuasion and Credibility (ed. M. Warner, Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 51–64), was delivered to a conference on Rhetoric and the Bible held at the University of Warwick. It took further some ideas about the implausibility of the prophetic message, sketched in my article ‘Begründungsversuche der prophetischen Unheilsankündigung im Alten Testament’ (Evangelische Theologie 47 (1987), pp. 427–35). For some years the Old Testament Seminar in Oxford has hosted series of ‘themed’ papers in specific areas, as well as hearing talks on members’ general work in progress, and these have been edited by my colleague John Day in three large volumes. My contribution to the first of these volumes, King and Messiah (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), was on ‘The Messiah in Old Testament Theology’ (pp. 365–79), and is reprinted here because it touches on wider issues than simply messiahship. I examine the question of how theology is to be deduced from the biblical text, and how the reception of the biblical books creates a web of expectations within which they are then read, on the principle of a feedback loop. I believe this may be illuminating for biblical theology more generally. Similar ideas were developed in my article ‘Alttestamentliche Theologie nach Albertz?’ in

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Religionsgeschichte oder Theologie des Alten Testaments (Jahrbuch für biblische Theologie 10 (1995), pp. 25–34), and in a lecture delivered when I received an honorary doctorate in Bonn, ‘Altes Testament und Theologie’ (Bonner Akademische Reden 82 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1999)). ‘Covenant in the Old Testament’, a contribution to a Festschrift for Ernest Nicholson, who has been such an important friend and colleague to me, deals with the slightly unreal question whether Julius Wellhausen could ever have written a ‘Theology of the Old Testament’ – there is in fact much evidence that he distrusted the concept. I suggest that covenant as studied by Nicholson provides the basis on which there could indeed have been a Wellhausen ‘Theology’. The article appeared in Covenant as Context: Essays in Honour of E.W. Nicholson (ed. A.D.H. Mayes and R.B. Salters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 23–38). Finally I reproduce a second Festschrift article, written for Kevin Cathcart, another good friend, on ‘The Day of Yahweh in the Minor Prophets’, from Biblical and Near Eastern Essays: Studies in Honour of Kevin J. Cathcart (JSOTSup 375, ed. C. McCarthy and J.F. Healy (London: T. & T. Clark International, 2004), pp. 68–79). This makes a case for a ‘popular eschatology’ in Israel that both preceded and outlasted the ‘classical’ prophets. Its existence strengthens the idea of these prophets as remarkable, original, creative figures – an insight of nineteenth-century Old Testament scholarship that is sometimes in danger of getting lost nowadays.

Chapter 19

Gerhard von Rad on the World-View of Early Israel Most of the ideas that students form of Israel immediately before and after the rise of the monarchy tend, in my experience, to come directly or indirectly from the work of Gerhard von Rad. This is largely because so many of his books and articles still form the standard treatment of this period. For the faith of early Israel and for the basic ground-plan of the Hexateuch the obvious thing to read is ‘The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch’;1 for the Succession Narrative and the ideas of J, his essay ‘The Beginnings of Historical Writing in Ancient Israel’;2 for the primeval history and patriarchal traditions in Genesis, his commentary;3 and for the themes of ‘old wisdom’, his Wisdom in Israel;4 not to speak of the OT Theology5 for a systematic account of the principles that held the faith of Israel together. In this article I shall discuss some problems in van Rad’s reconstruction of the early Israelite world-view. My aim, however, is not at all to belittle his remarkable achievement in gaining some insight into this remote period, but simply to raise a few questions about the internal coherence of his presentation. Of course there have been many detailed criticisms of van Rad which have tried to show that his account is not true. For example, the so-called ‘Solomonic Enlightenment’ has come under heavy fire,6 as scholars 1 Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuch, BWANT 4.26 (Stuttgart, 1938) (= Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament (Munich, 1958), pp. 9–86) (English translation ‘The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch’, in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (Edinburgh and London, 1966), pp. 1–78). 2 ‘Der Anfang der Geschichtsschreibung im alten Israel’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 32 (1944), pp. 1–42 (= Gesammelte Studien, pp. 148–88) (English translation ‘The Beginnings of Historical Writing in Ancient Israel’, in The Problem of the Hexateuch, pp. 166–204). 3 Das erste Buch Mose-Genesis, ATD 2/4 (Göttingen, 1949) (English translation Genesis, OTL (London, 1961 (from German edn, 1956); 3rd edn, 1972)). 4 Weisheit in Israel (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1970) (English translation Wisdom in Israel (London, 1972)). 5 Theologie des Alten Testaments (Munich, 1957, 1960) (English translation Old Testament Theology (Edinburgh and London, 1962 (from 2nd German edn, 1957); 1965 (from 3rd German edn, 1960)). 6 The theory of a ‘Solomonic Enlightenment’ was questioned as early as 1955 by R.B.Y. Scott, ‘Solomon and the Beginnings of Wisdom in Israel’, in Wisdom in Israel and in the Ancient Near East, VTS 3 (1955), pp. 262–79; see also M. Noth, ‘Die Bewährung von Salomos “göttliche Weisheit”’, ibid., pp. 225–37. The period of David and Solomon is comprehensively surveyed in the symposium Studies in the Period of David and Solomon and Other Essays (Papers read at the International Symposium for Biblical Studies 5–7 December

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in recent years have questioned the early dating of J,7 and even of the Succession Narrative, which are necessary preconditions of there having been an ‘Enlightenment’. The notion of a Hexateuch is more problematic than von Rad thought, and hard to square with the now widely accepted idea of a Deuteronomic History beginning with Deuteronomy.8 The date of the so-called ‘old wisdom’ is once again in question.9 It is easy to construct a version of the development of theological writing in Israel that makes von Rad’s theories impossible to sustain. But my purpose here is not to produce factual evidence that undermines particular parts of von Rad’s magnificent structure by trying to show that it does not fit the empirical historical evidence. Instead, I want to ask about the way it hangs together. The questions I shall be raising arise in part from reading undergraduate essays which lack somewhat the delicate touch of von Rad himself, but which depend heavily on his ideas. A number of suggestions that seem mutually compatible when stated in von Rad’s own careful way begin to pull against each other when, in the hands of less-skilful writers, they are taken to their logical conclusion and used as a basis for further speculations; and this has made me wonder whether they may indeed be less consistent than they look. I The simplest way to present the inconsistencies that I suspect in von Rad’s scheme will be to summarize two well-known positions that he adopted in his writing on early Israel, and then to tease out the difficulties I feel in them. Both are concerned with the change of world-view allegedly experienced by early Israel, as a concomitant of the change from tribal alliance to organized state under the early monarchy; and both can be found in works from every period of von Rad’s career. (1) The first position is this. In the times before the monarchy, Israel had what von Rad, drawing on Buber, calls a pan-sacral view of the world. All that happens in what we should call the secular world had, for Israel, a religious or sacred dimension; indeed, the sacred and the secular were not divided for them as they are for us. In Wisdom in Israel von Rad takes 1 Samuel 13–14 as a classic example of what he means. Here, he says,

1979), ed. T. Ishida (Tokyo, 1982); see in particular R.N. Whybray, ‘Wisdom Literature in the Reigns of David and Solomon’, ibid., pp. 13–26. See also the discussion in D.M. Gunn, The Story of King David: Genre and Interpretation, JSOTSup 6 (Sheffield, 1978). 7 See J. Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven and London, 1975); H.H. Schmid, Der sogenannte Jahwist: Beobachtungen und Fragen zur Pentateuchforschung (Zurich, 1976); R. Rendtorff, Das überlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Pentateuch, BZAW 147 (1977); M. Rose, Deuteronomist und Jahwist, AThANT 67 (Zurich, 1981); and H. Vorländer, Die Entstehungszeit des jehowistischen Geschichtswerkes, Europäische Hochschulsschriften 23.109 (Frankfurt am Main, 1979). The Solomonic date is defended by W.H. Schmidt, ‘A Theologian of the Solomonic Era?’, in Studies in the Period of David and Solomon. 8 See the discussion by J.R. Porter, ‘Old Testament Historiography’, in Tradition and Interpretation, ed. G.W. Anderson (Oxford, 1979), pp. 125–62, especially pp. 145–52. 9 See R.N. Whybray, ’Wisdom Literature’, and The Intellectual Tradition in the Old Testament, BZAW 135 (1974).

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the narrator brings every decisive event, military advantages and setbacks as well as all human conflicts, into association with the world of the sacred and the ritual: the vow of abstention which Saul imposes on the warriors, with the total cursing of any potential transgressor, the obtaining of a sign through Jonathan, the divine ‘panic’ which strikes the Philistine camp, the overhasty eating of ritually unclean meat on the part of the exhausted soldiers, the ‘redemption’ of Jonathan from the death penalty by a substitute, and much more besides … Without question we are dealing with a very old-fashioned faith which believed that every event was encompassed by rites and sacral ordinances, and for this reason we can call it a pan-sacral faith.10

There are similar remarks in von Rad’s essay on the Old Testament ‘world-view’11 and in his Old Testament Theology.12 Now one might think that von Rad was here speaking of Israelite thought in terms borrowed from anthropologists of the early twentieth century:13 that he was talking about a mode of thought supposed to be common to all early societies, which in the case of Israel was superseded by the religion of Yahweh. But this would be a mistake. It is true that a great many popular presentations of Israelite religion as ‘progressing’ in an evolutionary way in the course of its development do work with some such model in mind. The crucial period for the change of outlook may be differently identified – for some it may be the transition from tribal league to monarchy,14 for others the transition from patriarchal religion to the faith of Moses,15 or for others again the period of the great prophets;16 but, whenever the change occurred, it will be suggested that Israel’s faith progressed from a ‘primitive’ pan-sacralism to a purer form of religious awareness in which God and the world were more sharply distinguished from each other, an important milestone on the road to theoretical monotheism.17 Such ideas played their part in theories of ‘progressive revelation’;18 10

Wisdom in Israel, pp. 58–9 (German, pp. 82–3: ‘… eine pansakrale Gläubigkeit’). G. von Rad, ‘Aspekte alttestamentlichen Weltverständnisses’, EvTh 24 (N.S. 19, 1964), pp. 57–98 (English translation ‘Some Aspects of the Old Testament World-View’, in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, pp. 144–65). 12 Old Testament Theology i, pp. 36–9 (= Theologie des Alten Testaments i, pp. 44–7). 13 Cf. the discussion in J.W. Rogerson, Anthropology and the Old Testament (Oxford, 1978), pp. 46–65. Suggestions of this kind may be found, for example, in W.O.E. Oesterley and T.H. Robinson, Hebrew Religion: Its Origin and Development (London, 1930), pp. 3–17. 14 There are hints of this in E.W. Heaton, Solomon’s New Men (London, 1974). 15 Thus Oesterley and Robinson, Hebrew Religion, and H.H. Rowley, The Faith of Israel (London, 1956). 16 Thus classically in J. Wellhausen, Geschichte Israels (Marburg, 1878); 2nd edn Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Marburg, 1883) (English translation Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Edinburgh, 1885)). See also A. Lods, The Prophets and the Rise of Judaism (London, 1937). 17 There is an excellent summary of this position in P. Berger, The Social Reality of Religion (London, 1969), pp. 119–26. (The American edition was calIed The Sacred Canopy (New York, 1967).) See also its use by H. Cox, The Secular City (New York and London, 1965), pp. 31–50. 18 See J.W. Rogerson, ‘Progressive Revelation: Its History and its Value as a Key to Old Testament Interpretation (The A.S. Peake Memorial Lecture 1981)’, Epworth Review 9 (1982), pp. 77–86. 11

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they were also influential on writers of the ‘Biblical Theology’ school.19 However, it is important to see that this is not the way von Rad argues. For him, the ‘pansacral’ faith of early (pre-monarchic) Israel is already a characteristic expression of Yahwism, understood to have been a distinctive form of religious belief from its very beginnings. A ‘pan-sacral’ world-view is not a quasi-magical or pantheistic view – it is one of Israel’s special possessions, and the God who meets with the Israelites in sacred and secular institutions alike is Yahweh. What made the early Israelite world-view so thoroughly ‘sacral’, then, was not that people believed in some vague divine force, nor (as some older scholars argued20) that they believed in local spirits, but that they believed in Yahweh. It was Yahweh who was encountered everywhere equally, Yahweh who could not be excluded from any sphere of human existence. ‘Experiences of Yahweh were, for Israel, experiences of the world, and vice versa.’21 And again: ‘For Israel there was only one world of experience and … this was apperceived by means of a perceptive apparatus in which rational perceptions and religious perceptions were not differentiated.’22 The early monarchy, and specifically the reign of Solomon, marks for von Rad the beginning of something radically new in this area. As a result of the cosmopolitan culture introduced into Israel in this period of her expansion and prosperity, the ‘pansacral’ view of life and experience dissolves, and gives way to a quite new way of looking at the world. The change may be characterized as ‘secularization’, though this must at once be hedged about to guard against the idea that it meant the decline of religious faith.23 Yahweh’s hand is no longer seen at work everywhere, in secular as well as sacred activities – or at least, not in the same way. People begin to recognize that events in the political sphere, for example, unfold themselves according to their own laws: the sacred is not intimately bound up with the political, and we hear no more of battles being lost because a taboo has been broken.24 A better term for this than ‘secularization’, in fact, is probably ‘spiritualization’. It is now recognized that God is not equally present everywhere: there are sacred areas, and there are secular or profane areas. That does not mean that God can be simply ignored in the events of secular life, rather that he is present there in a different way; but the basic assumption of pan-sacralism has broken down. No longer is every perception of the world also and at the same time a perception of Yahweh. There are still more or less immediate perceptions of his hand at work, in the sphere of the sacred, but much more he is perceived as being at something of a distance, set over against human affairs in such a way that these affairs can unfold according to their own autonomous laws. 19 See, for example, G.E. Wright, The Challenge of Israel’s Faith (Chicago, 1944) and Before Philosophy, ed. H. Frankfort et al. (London, 1949) (= The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Chicago, 1946)). 20 For example Oesterley and Robinson, Hebrew Religion, pp. 29–47. 21 Wisdom in Israel, p. 63 (German, p. 87). 22 Ibid., p. 61 (German, p. 86). 23 ‘The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch’, pp. 48–50, 68–74 (= Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuch, pp. 43–6, 62–8 – in Gesammelte Studien, pp. 55–8, 75–81). 24 ‘The Beginnings of Historical Writing in Ancient Israel’, p. 201 (= Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 32, pp. 37–8 – in Gesammelte Studien, p. 185).

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The classic cases of this are of course the Yahwist’s History, and the Succession Narrative. In both these works there is (according to von Rad) a loss of interest in the cultic side of Israelite religion, and with this a rejection of the tendency to let the sacred sphere spill over into the rest of life and colour even ordinary humdrum political or social developments. The sacred, the area where God may be encountered at first hand, is no longer all-embracing, as it was in earlier times; it has become something definable and separate, the world of priests and prophets, rather than of kings or statesmen. To call this development ‘Enlightenment’ seems to me reasonable enough; all cultural comparisons are dangerous, but the similarity between the Israelite experience, as von Rad conceives it, and the European Enlightenment is suggestive enough to make the deliberate anachronism of such a term thoroughly worthwhile. Of course there are plenty of difficulties in holding that the development described by von Rad actually took place! But for the moment I am not concerned with them; I want simply to argue that, if it did, ‘Enlightenment’ is quite a good description for it. And when all the criticisms have been allowed, one must surely concede that von Rad does very accurately capture the change of mood that we are almost bound to feel if we turn from Judges to 2 Samuel: the sense that the world of 2 Samuel is much more our world, in which people do not go about expecting the countryside to be peopled with angels and God to be everywhere perceptibly present, and where the God who continues to be acknowledged in worship and prayer is not expected to take a minute interest in the detail of everyday life or in how exactly battles are fought. Von Rad’s presentation may be open to question, but it bears testing, and it has provided for many people a good model with which to approach the diverse material deriving from or dealing with the transition from the ‘judges’ to the monarchy in Israel. (2) The second position to be described is probably most clearly stated in ‘The Beginnings of Historical Writing in Ancient Israel’, though it was already important as background for ‘The Form Critical Problem of the Hexateuch’, and finds echoes in the later Genesis commentary and in Wisdom in Israel. It begins from the observation that events we would call miraculous are unevenly distributed through the Old Testament, and that they are most concentrated in accounts of the period before the monarchy. In the hero-sagas of Judges, especially, ‘God himself intervened miraculously in earthly events; and this activity of God in human affairs was so conclusive and so all-embracing that there was no room left for any human activity.’25 God is not some kind of benign general providence: he intervenes, does specific things, interrupts the flow of events in the human order so as to bring about his own designs. He is to be perceived in discrete, particular events, not everywhere in general. Sometimes, indeed, he even intervenes in person to direct the course of events. Some places, the places where God has appeared in a theophany, become ‘holy’, and they are then different from ordinary places which have experienced no such revelation of his presence. Consequently these places become cult-centres, and ‘to seek God’ means to go to the cult-centre, the place where he is truly present. God’s activity, says von Rad, is for the Israelites of this early period ‘miraculous

25

Ibid.

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and intermittent’.26 The Solomonic Enlightenment brings about the most far-reaching change in this view of experience. In the Succession Narrative, God’s activity is no longer ‘confined to sensational events which stand out from all other occurrences’.27 The events at Absalom’s council of war are neither more sensational nor more miraculous than any of the other happenings which the historian describes. Rather he depicts a succession of occurrences in which the chain of inherent cause and effect is firmly knit up – so firmly indeed that the human eye discerns no point at which God could have put in his hand. Yet secretly it is he who has brought all to pass; all the threads are in his hands; his activity embraces the great political events no less than the hidden counsels of human hearts. All human affairs are the sphere of God’s providential working.28

In ‘The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch’, where von Rad argues that the J writer came later than the author of the Succession Narrative and inherited much of his spirit, we have the clearest statement that the various patriarchal stories, originally local cult-legends, have been detached by J (or his sources) from their anchorage in the cult and have become parts of a single, coherent narrative which is interested in the development of Israel as a nation-state, and quite unconcerned for those cultic matters which were the legends’ original raison d’ être. The effect of this, von Rad argues, is not at all to make the stories profane: on the contrary, it takes them up into a much more profound theological scheme. God’s activity is now perhaps less perceptible to the outward sight, but it is actually perceived more fully and more constantly because his guidance is seen to extend equally to every historical occurrence, sacred or profane, up to the time of the Settlement … The providence of Yahweh is revealed to the eye of faith in every sphere of life, private or public.29 This view of faith did not regard the activity of God as tied to the time-honoured sacral institutions of the cultus, holy wars, charismatic leaders, the ark and so on, but undertook to discover it by looking back on the tangled skein of personal and political destinies.30

The same point is made, perhaps most clearly of all, in the commentary on Genesis: Ancient Israel considered God’s speaking and acting for man’s salvation as confined to the sacred institutions, particularly to the narrower cultic sphere of sacrifice and divine decision mediated by the priest. But one also experienced God’s gracious, saving act in 26

‘wunderbar und intermittierend’. See ‘The Beginnings of Historical Writing’, p. 202 (= Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 32, p. 39 – in Gesammelte Studien, p. 186). 27 ‘The Beginnings of Historical Writing’, p. 201 (= Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 32, p. 38 – in Gesammelte Studien, p. 185). 28 ‘Der ganze menschliche Bereich ist das Betatigungsfeld der gottlichen Vorsehung’ – see ‘The Beginnings of Historical Writing’, p. 201 (German references as in preceding note). 29 ‘The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch’, p. 71 (= Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuch, p. 65 – in Gesammelte Studien, p. 78). 30 Ibid.

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the wider cultic sphere, in the holy war, the charisma of a qualified leader, the ‘terror of God’ which fell upon the enemy without human agency, or in other miracles that occurred because of the presence of the sacred Ark. The Yahwist, however, considers God’s activity in a fundamentally different way … He sees God’s leading in the facts of history as well as in the quiet course of a human life, in the sacred things, but not less in the profane, in great miracles as well as in the innermost secrets of the human heart … In a word, the chief importance of God’s activity suddenly lies outside the sacred institutions.31

The idea of divine activity implied here is roughly what may be called double agency. Instead of taking the atypical or spectacular occurrence as the strongest witness to the existence and activity of God (as in apologies for religion based on an appeal to miracles), a theory of double agency holds that God is most present, or at least most clearly seen at work, precisely in those events which appear to happen by the most natural causal links with preceding events. God is most truly at work when his hand is most hidden. This is not the place to discuss whether double agency is philosophically satisfactory,32 but it is worthwhile to mention the main flaw that is sometimes found in it, since this is a useful confirmation that it does indeed run counter to the kind of religious world-view alleged by von Rad to have characterized pre-monarchic Israel. The difficulty in sustaining a theory of double agency, put briefly, is that it runs the risk of being non-falsifiable and therefore ultimately vacuous. If God is most present when his presence is least discernible, why should we not simply say that he is absent? If he is present everywhere in general, then little of value is asserted by saying that he is present in any given place or situation: if all events reveal God and those where there is least trace of him reveal him most, then we might as well say that no events reveal him. Whatever may be the correct solution to this problem, we can surely draw some conclusions which have a bearing on the historical question under discussion here. If the ‘Yahwist’ and the author of the ‘Succession Narrative’ were indeed presenting God as working behind the scenes, in ways not perceptible to natural human insight but only to the eye of faith, then certainly they were as far away as one can be from a belief in intermittent, miraculous interventions. The contrast between ‘early’ Israel and the Israel of Solomon would be, if anything, even sharper than von Rad wishes to maintain. Pre-monarchic Israel believed that God could be encountered spasmodically in human events (when he intervened in what we should call a miracle), and regularly in appointed institutions, especially cultic institutions; but not in all aspects of life. The Yahwist and his contemporaries thought that God could 31

Genesis, p. 28 (von Rad’s italics) (= Das erste Buch Mose-Genesis, pp. 20–21). See also the section ‘The New Spirit’, in Old Testament Theology i, pp. 48–56 (= Theologie des Alten Testaments i, pp. 56–65). 32 A sophisticated statement of a theory of double agency can be found in the works of Austin Farrer: see especially A Science of God? (London, 1966), Faith and Speculation (London, 1967) and Reflective Faith (London, 1972). Recent discussions of Farrer’s position can be found in B. Hebblethwaite, ‘Providence and Divine Action’, Religious Studies (1978), p. 223, and M.F. Wiles, ‘Farrer’s Concept of Double Agency’, Theology 84 (1981), pp. 243–9. Neither of these touches on Farrer’s The Freedom of the Will (London, 1958), where his ideas are perhaps stated most exactly.

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be seen everywhere: indeed, it was at those times when his hand seemed most hidden that he might well be carrying out his most important work, guiding the history of the whole nation in the direction he had chosen. For them, unlike their forebears, no sphere of human action was outside Yahweh’s interest and concern. He was not restricted to ‘sacred’ places, times or occasions, for everything was in reality sacred. Even wrong human choices could be the locus of God’s guiding purpose, for in such cases one might say, as Joseph did to his brothers, ‘as for you, you meant evil, but God meant it for good’ (Gen. 50:20). II Both of the positions that have just been outlined seem to me tenable, even though neither is above criticism; but I cannot see that they are compatible. If all experience in early Israel was experience of God, then it cannot also be the case that God was then experienced only intermittently and in miracles. Again, if the author of the Succession Narrative and the Yahwist saw the world as containing spheres of life which were not under God’s influence, then it cannot also be the case that they saw everything that happened as the result of his controlling providence. We cannot have a move from seeing God everywhere to seeing him only in particular areas of experience, and at the same time a move from seeing God only in particular areas of experience to seeing him everywhere. At least, we could have both things if we were prepared to say that world-view varied with social grouping, so that some people might be moving from pan-sacral concepts towards Enlightenment at the same time as others were moving from experiencing God in intermittent events towards a sophisticated belief in double agency that made everything God’s sphere of action. But von Rad does not generally speak in terms of different social groupings: he talks always of ‘Israel’, and he is not describing the beliefs of particular groups or classes but the Zeitgeist. And so long as one works at that level, then there is a real contradiction within von Rad’s thought. Is there any way of doing justice to the persuasive character of many of von Rad’s suggestions, while avoiding the inconsistency into which he appears to have fallen? I may say at once that I have no alternative theory to present; and that I am in fact inclined to be agnostic on the question whether some major shift of perspective or world-view occurred in the time of Solomon. But it seems to me that a number of matters could well be clarified in such a way that von Rad’s insights might continue to be fruitful for Old Testament studies. What follows are tentative suggestions, offered in full awareness that it is easier to knock down an impressive structure such as von Rad’s than to build anything even half as good in its place. (1) One factor which somewhat complicates von Rad’s reconstruction of the Israelite world-view is his own attitude towards the Old Testament. Long before ‘the canonical approach’ von Rad was insisting that the scriptural witness to God should be heard in its entirety, without selecting only those elements that might prove congenial to a particular reader; and it is well known that this was no merely ‘academic’ point,

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but a conviction that brought him persecution and, indirectly, imprisonment.33 On the specific matter under discussion, however, his desire to attend to all of Scripture stands in tension with his belief that Scripture itself bears witness to a distinct shift in the religious awareness of the community that produced it. This tension generates the inconsistency just analysed, but also, I believe, an uneasy awareness in von Rad’s own mind that all is not entirely well with the distinctions he is drawing between the thought-worlds of early and Solomonic Israel. In Wisdom in Israel, for example, there seems a certain hesitancy or lack of clarity in the discussion of whether old wisdom was ‘secular’ or ‘religious’. It clearly seemed very important to von Rad to insist that early wisdom, for all the ‘worldliness’ of its style, was really ‘religious’ at core. He calls it ‘madness’34 to hold that proverbs about God and proverbs about man rest on a different perceptual or theoretical basis. He says, ‘It has rightly been said that in all knowledge faith is at work’,35 and even goes so far as to argue that ‘it was precisely because [their] knowledge of Yahweh was so strong, so unassailable, that Israel was able to speak of the orders of this world in quite secular terms’36 – a potentially somewhat damaging remark, since it is hard to see what would count as evidence against it. But so far as I can see the principle, though strongly stated, is never explicitly argued. It is presented as the sort of point that must be clear to all sensible readers of the Old Testament. Similarly, von Rad is aware that there is a certain awkwardness in presenting the Succession Narrative both as a product of a desacralized, Enlightenment view of human history and also as marking the high point of a theological development in which God is no longer spasmodic in his visitation of human affairs but rather controls all the threads of human existence. He tends to qualify all the disjunctions between Israel before and after Solomon with a rather too ready ‘of course, this is not to say that …’37 I assume that what lies at the back of this is a certain reverence for the authority or status of Scripture. What von Rad wants to affirm is that some aspects of the texts he is discussing suggest that people at some time or other in Israel were less concerned with God’s part in things than the final form of Old Testament faith allowed; or that they believed in God in a way that was less than adequate, seen from a later Christian or Jewish perspective; or that they were rather secularized by comparison with what a more central kind of Biblical faith required, and so on. After all, in order to glorify the achievements of Solomon’s reign, and thereby the literature which it produced (and which is now canonical Scripture), it is almost inevitable that one will tend to criticize or devalue the beliefs of the age 33

See J.L. Crenshaw, Gerhard von Rad (Waco, Texas, 1978), pp. 20–25. ‘Unverstand’: Wisdom in Israel, p. 62 (German, p. 87). 35 ‘Man hat mit Recht gesagt, daß in jedem Erkennen zugleich auch ein Vertrauen wirksam sei’ – with reference to E. Spranger, Die Magie der Seele (1947), p. 52: see Wisdom in Israel, p. 62 (German, p. 87). 36 Wisdom in Israel, p. 63 (German, p. 88). 37 See, for example, ‘The Beginnings of Historical Writing’, pp. 196–7 (= Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 32, pp. 33–4 – in Gesammelte Studien, pp. 180–81), Genesis, pp. 29–30 (= Das erste Buch Mose-Genesis, pp. 21–2) and Old Testament Theology i, p. 38 (= Theologie des Alten Testaments i, p. 46). Note also the constantly shifting emphasis in the section ‘The New Spirit’ in Old Testament Theology i, cited in note 31 above. 34

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that came before. Proponents of progressive revelation, of course, have never had any hesitation in doing this, and would probably be quite happy to say (to put it bluntly) that 2 Samuel was a marked improvement on Judges. But von Rad is far more sensitive than this to what we now have to call the ‘canonical’ dimension. The texts (such as Judges) on which 2 Samuel is an improvement are themselves part of Scripture: the stages of theological tradition which Israel passed through on the way to the beliefs of the J writer are stages in the faith of the people of God, and it will not do to speak as though they were crude, or characterized by a lack of true faith in Yahweh, or indifferent to divine providence. Equally, it is inadmissible to speak as though Israel in the age of Solomon became secular and abandoned the faith of Moses. Von Rad is intensely aware that he is not merely a cultural historian or historian of ideas, but a theologian, and this commits him, as he understands the task of theology in relation to biblical study, to show both the diversity of the Old Testament’s theological witness and, at the same time, its essential unity. This is no easy undertaking. It produces rather nervous formulations of the form: early Israel believed A, Solomonic Israel B – not, of course, that B had ever really been lacking, and naturally A was by no means abandoned. One has a sense of making progress rather slowly, as in a prolonged game of snakes and ladders. All this gives rise to the suspicion that what, for von Rad, appear as tensions or complications in the history of Israel’s religious thought may in reality be problems generated by the attempt to write an Old Testament Theology within the parameters prescribed by a particular confessional allegiance. It is not, of course, that this allegiance has warped his judgement: on the contrary, it is because he has discovered some genuine truths about ancient Israel that the problems arise. His theory of Scripture requires it to form a greater unity than his own empirical observations will allow, but instead of letting these observations change his view of Scripture, he tries to find ways of making the facts continue to fit the less than perfect framework his theory provides. Hence a certain unevenness in his interpretation of the evidence, and hence also a vague disquiet in the reader.38 (2) A further source of unclarity in von Rad may lie in certain aspects of the terms he uses, which do not focus the material quite sharply enough. What I have particularly in mind is that von Rad habitually speaks of the ‘faith’ (Glaube or sometimes Vertrauen) of Israel as the subject under discussion. Israel before the monarchy had a pan-sacral faith in Yahweh;39 there was faith in Yahweh’s overall power, which conditioned Israel’s understanding of reality.40 The contents of the Hexateuch (whatever accurate historical material they may happen to include) are

38 With the comments in this section compare the penetrating analysis of H.H. Schmid, Altorientalische Welt in der alttestamentlichen Theologie (Zurich, 1974), especially pp. 145–8, where von Rad’s theological presuppositions and context are briefly but convincingly identified. 39 Wisdom in Israel, p. 59 (German, p. 83). 40 Wisdom in Israel, pp. 62–3 (German, p. 87): ‘Thus here, in proverbial wisdom, there is faith [Vertrauen] in the stability of elementary relationships between man and man, faith in the similarity of men and of their reactions, faith in the reliability of the orders which support human life and thus, implicitly or explicitly, faith in God who put these orders into operation.’

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primarily documents of faith – structured, after all, around the basic historical credo.41 My suspicion is that by concentrating on various terms from the same semantic field as Glaube, von Rad tends to oversimplify some subtle but quite important distinctions. For example, in Wisdom in Israel it is clear that for some of the time he is talking about what is sometimes called a paradigm or set – in effect, a conceptual apparatus through which the world is perceived, which cannot itself become the object of conscious attention so long as one remains in the culture to which it belongs. When pan-sacralism is replaced in the Solomonic era, what happens is described as follows: in the understanding of reality, in the whole sphere of comprehension in which men’s lives operated, some decisive change must have taken place … As a background to this [sc. the Succession Narrative’s] presentation of history, there lies an understanding of reality, a conception of the environment, which has fundamentally altered vis-à-vis that of ‘pansacralism’.42

It is tempting to think that all of von Rad’s reconstructions are thus reconstructions of paradigms, descriptions of Weltanschauungen or some such thing.43 However, at other times it is clear that he is thinking more of articles of faith – consciously articulated (or at least articulable) beliefs to which the Old Testament authors or their contemporaries were personally committed. (This is in line with von Rad’s general tendency to regard the Old Testament as a confessional document – an idea not always easy to grasp for readers whose religious orientation is different from his, especially if they are English.) Thus in deciding that the Yahwist is an author rather than a mere compiler, he was in effect saying that at least some of the theological positions that could be read in J were deliberately put there by the Yahwist in an attempt to convince his readers of them.44 It is not merely that the Yahwist did not think to look for God in sacral institutions, but tended naturally to find him outside the cult – as though that were part of the Yahwist’s mental make-up; rather, the idea that God is to be found outside sacral institutions is one of the beliefs that he was actively seeking to communicate in his work. The message of J, if we can put it so, is that God is to be encountered as much in the secular as in the sacred. ‘The Yahwist

41 Thus in ‘The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch’ von Rad speaks of the historical and theological materials of the Hexateuch as ‘allein und ausschließlich vom Glauben Israels gesprochen’ (English: ‘it is of the faith of Israel that they speak’): see ‘The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch’, p. 2 (= Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuch, p. 1 – in Gesammelte Studien, p. 10). 42 Wisdom in Israel, p. 59 (German, p. 83: ‘[Es] muß sich in dem Wirklichkeitsverständnis, in dem ganzen Verstehenshorizont … etwas Entscheidendes gewandelt haben’). 43 This is how they are taken by J.W. Rogerson, ‘The Old Testament View of Nature: Some Preliminary Questions’, in Instruction and Interpretation (Leiden, 1977), pp. 67–84. Rogerson discusses in particular von Rad’s essay ‘Natur und Welterkenntnis im Alten Testament’, in Gottes Wirken in Israel (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1974). See also von Rad, ‘Das theologische Problem des alttestamentlichen Schöpfungsglaubens’, in Werden und Wesen des Alten Testaments, ed. P. Volz, F. Stummer and J. Hempel, BZAW 66 (1936), pp. 138–47. 44 ‘The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch’, p. 50 (= Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuch, p. 45 – in Gesammelte Studien, p. 57).

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bears witness to the fact that history is directed and ordered by God. The providence of Yahweh is revealed to the eye of faith in every sphere of life, private or public.’45 With these two ways of understanding von Rad’s undifferentiated term Glaube – world-views or mental sets, on the one hand, and positive theological assertions, on the other – it is already possible to ring some complicated changes on the simple straight-line development of thought suggested by him. For example, we might resolve the contradiction set out in section 1 as follows. Von Rad’s position, simply stated, appeared to present an irresolvable tension: the change from tribal league to monarchy was marked by a shift from seeing God everywhere to seeing him only in certain specific spheres, and also by a move from seeing God only in certain specific fields to seeing him everywhere. But the evidence which seems to point in these opposing directions could all be accommodated if we distinguished between world-views and conscious beliefs. We could say that the Israelites’ fundamental way of perceiving the world (their unconscious Glaube about it) shifted, during the early years of the monarchy, from a pan-sacral understanding, in which every stick and stone was charged with divinity, towards a more secularized understanding; and thus people came to expect there to be rational, natural causes for most events in life, although room was left for occasional miracles or divine interventions – they were not so ‘secular’ as we are today. All this, we could say, is a matter of the Israelites’ perceptual framework: in the early period they simply perceived all experience as experience of God, but in later times they perceived it more nearly as we do. We might then, however, go on to suggest that at the same time as this development was taking place, the beliefs which theologically advanced writers were seeking to communicate to their readers underwent a shift in another direction. Those who had told the original tales that appear in a heavily redacted form in Genesis and Judges had been trying to convey the sudden, irruptive power of Yahweh, breaking in to human experience where he was least expected. After all, people who lived in a world which they quite naturally saw as imbued throughout with divinity might well need to be brought face to face with the stark reality of Yahweh, who was not simply a divine force permeating everything, but had a will and a purpose, and could initiate surprising events that interrupted the steady flow of human affairs. Such story-tellers had to confront their hearers with the hand of Yahweh in spectacular and charismatic happenings. But later writers, such as the Yahwist, lived in a world which had a much more secularized outlook; and their task was to begin from this point of view, but to show with great skill that what seemed like natural causality was in reality a manifestation of the hidden hand of God, who was not so absent from human affairs, not so deistic a deity, as their contemporaries unthinkingly took him to be. Such a task might even be called prophetic, in the sense in which that term is applied to challenging figures such as Elijah or Amos; it confronts those who have pushed God to the fringes of their experience with the possibility that all the threads of ‘natural’ 45

‘Es ist eine Geschichte göttlicher Führungen und Fügungen, die der Jahwist bezeugt: in allen Lebensgebieten, den öffentlichen wie den verborgensten, offenbart sich dem Glauben die Vorsehung Jahwes’; see ‘The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch’, p. 71 (= Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuch, p. 65 – in Gesammelte Studien, p. 78). My italics in the quotation.

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cause and effect in fact run through his controlling fingers. If we were to say this, we should be deliberately contrasting the Yahwist or the author of the Succession Narnltive with the Zeitgeist of their day: much of the meaning of their works would be a function of this contrast. The last paragraph states one possible way of unravelling the somewhat tangled skein of von Rad’s argument, using the realization that his term Glaube is ambiguous, and trying to distinguish between its two senses. It should be said that I am not putting this account forward as the truth about the period under discussion: it is presented merely as a sample of how much more nuanced the discussion could become, if conducted with more carefully defined terms. As a matter of fact there is yet a third possible sense of Glaube, which could be brought in to make things more complicated still. At times von Rad plainly uses Glaube where English would use ‘faith’ in contradistinction to ‘belief’, to imply what we might call the official or normative faith of Israel – the confession to which Israel was committed by her election by Yahweh. Here Israel’s Glaube does not mean Israel’s outlook on the world, nor the beliefs which Israelites happened to hold consciously and articulately, but a third thing: that to which Israel was committed, the article on which she took her stand, the ‘faith of the people of God’. Wisdom in Israel in particular clearly has this in mind. Von Rad there tries to show that the wise men of the Old Testament presuppose the ‘faith of Israel’ as the backdrop to their own wisdom, rather than being (as scholars like McKane suppose) purely humanistic teachers.46 The mode of God’s relationship to the world was not merely a matter which Israel could not help seeing in a certain way, nor was it merely a question which was debated by her best thinkers so that they produced original treatments of the subject (as in the two options so far discussed); it was one of the crucial issues that formed part of Israel’s distinctive confession of faith. Although the Old Testament nowhere explicitly asserts that God’s relation to the world and to human events is to be understood in one way rather than another, it is precisely on this point (it might be said) that the faith of Israel is distinctive among the religions of the ancient world, for Israel alone saw God’s purpose at work in all that happened. Once we introduce this further refinement into our attempt to understand von Rad, the ensuing complications are likely to deter all but the most intrepid from pursuing the enquiry any further. Did von Rad mean that the Succession Narrative’s presentation of God as the secret mover behind the events of David’s reign was properly to be understood as an application to contemporary history of the picture of God, and of his dealings with the world, that was present implicitly in the early ‘credal’ beliefs of Israel which would necessarily mean (for him) in such formulations as Deut. 26:5–10? Something like this seems to be implied at the end of ‘The Beginnings of Historical Writing in Ancient Israel’, where von Rad asserts that the author of the Succession Narrative extended the idea (present in germ in that and the other ‘credos’) that God was active in history, so as to make it apply to the events of his own day. This must surely imply that the real theological affirmation to which an Israelite who recited Deut. 26:5–10 was committing himself was: ‘God is 46

Cf. W. McKane, Prophets and Wise Men, SBTh 1.44 (London, 1965), discussed in Wisdom in Israel, p. 68 (footnote) (German, p. 95).

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active in our history’. To apply this same principle to the events of the reigns of David and Solomon was to affirm that contemporary narratives were to be read as making the same point, as expressing that same ‘faith’. Here, again, I have severe doubts about the appropriateness of terms such as ‘credo’ or ‘faith-commitment’ to the Old Testament; but my purpose is simply to suggest that such categories were present in von Rad’s mind. If we recognize that Glaube in his writing is a catch-all term, including at least the three distinct senses ‘world-view’, ‘articulated belief’, and ‘faith-commitment’, considerably more clarity might be introduced into our reading of some pages in his works that are superficially straightforward but difficult to ‘cash’ – like a very valuable cheque written in a combination of different currencies. Until we can be clearer about what he was saying, we shall not be in a position to decide whether or not he was right. (3) A further source of confusion may lie in the term ‘pan-sacralism’ itself. To put the matter rather simply, a ‘pan-sacral’ view of the world could mean one of two things. It could mean that everything is perceived as equally charged with divinity: even commonplace, everyday experiences reveal God. In this sense we might want to say that there is a certain kind of spirituality – as much a possibility today in the West as in ancient Israel – which has advanced to the point where no part of life is perceived as ‘secular’, but all things in some measure reveal God. An ancient Israelite who had a ‘pan-sacral’ understanding of life would then be at one with George Herbert: All may of thee partake: Nothing can be so mean, Which with this tincture (for thy sake) Will not grow bright and clean. A servant with this clause Makes drudgerie divine: Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, Makes that and th’ action fine. This is the famous stone That turneth all to gold: For that which God doth touch and own Cannot for lesse be told.47

It would be reasonable to describe the characteristic attitude of Tannaitic Judaism as ‘pan-sacral’ in this sense: the whole of life, in the human and even in the inanimate spheres, is a kind of liturgy in praise of God. Such a view is quite compatible with a very low expectation of ‘miraculous’ occurrences, and indeed some of its exponents might adopt something like the ‘double agency’ theory described above, according to which it is the most natural, least apparently miraculous events which best reveal the hand of God.48 47

George Herbert, ‘The Elixir’. This is approximately how J.W. Rogerson, ‘The Old Testament View of Nature’, takes von Rad. He argues that such a view is indeed found in the Old Testament, but as a matter of 48

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But we could also use the term ‘pan-sacral’ to describe a mentality which is particularly prone to find overt traces of divine activity in the world, and for which therefore the possibility of miracles is constantly to be reckoned with. A ‘pan-sacral’ view of life would then be approximately equivalent to what a sceptic would call a ‘superstitious’ world-view, in which there is a high expectation of extraordinary or supernaturally caused events. A person who embraced ‘pan-sacralism’ would then be markedly interested in particular providences, and liable to interpret the happenings of daily life as the result of direct divine intervention. He would regard a lucky escape from danger as evidence that God had personally stepped in to save him; what is more, he would be much more willing than the average person to believe accounts of events in which the laws of nature had been suspended, and would find no difficulty in thinking that God might stop the sun in its course, or make animals able to speak. If the Israelites of the ‘judges’ period regularly expected to encounter angels or other divine beings, and regarded divinely caused disturbances in the natural world as unproblematic, then they must have had a ‘pan-sacral’ understanding of things in this sense. Their modern heirs would be those in any religion who look for miraculous demonstrations of God’s power, just as the heirs of the other sort of ‘pan-sacralists’ would be those who have a high sacramental theology but are less prone to expect unequivocal divine interventions. It seems to me reasonable to use ‘pan-sacralism’ for either of these approaches, but not for both at the same time, and I suspect that some unclarity in von Rad’s work comes from a failure to distinguish them sufficiently. Did early Israelites believe that everything was imbued with divinity, or did they believe that miracles happened rather often? This is, of course, a crass oversimplification of the matter, but it does reflect a real conceptual contrast, and the impossibility of finding a clear answer to it in von Rad’s studies is symptomatic of a failure to focus sharply on the phenomenon which ‘pan-sacralism’ is supposed to describe. (4) A fourth suggestion, which I make with some diffidence, concerns the relation of von Rad’s analysis of ancient Israelite mentality to the work of social anthropologists who have handled similar questions, It is certainly an error to suppose that Old Testament scholarship should adopt a supine position, taking the often hotly disputed theories of the latest school of anthropologists as possessing some kind of binding authority – the common error of trusting experts in every field but one’s own. Nevertheless, anyone concerned with questions of ‘mentality’, ‘world-view’ or ‘perceptual apparatus’ must take some account of what is being said about such things by workers in related fields. It so happens that the very issues with which von Rad was concerned – spiritualization versus ritualism; the contrast between a faith that sees God in certain concentrated, highly charged areas of life and a more diffused awareness of the divine presence in everything; particular providence as against the ‘hidden hand’ – are extremely close to the topics handled by Mary Douglas in her book Natural Symbols,49 which was published in the same year as Wisdom in Israel. One of her major theses is that the opposite poles of these contrasts can be closely correlated with different kinds of social structure, but that conscious theological affirmation, not at the level of the Israelites’ ‘perceptual apparatus’. 49 M. Douglas, Natural Symbols (London, 1970).

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they show no significant correlation with respect to the ‘advanced’ or ‘primitive’ character of a particular society, and cannot be made part of any developmental view of human societies. The material assembled by von Rad could certainly be discussed alongside that treated by Douglas; his conclusions might well need to be seriously modified as a result, or, of course, they might in their turn throw some doubt on the universal validity of her findings. I am not competent to take the matter any further than this, but merely note that it would probably be worthwhile to establish what von Rad’s anthropological assumptions were, and to test these assumptions against more recent work in social anthropology. (5) At the beginning of my discussion I stressed that my criticisms of von Rad bore essentially on the internal consistency of his analysis, not on the truth of particular parts of it. This distinction is particularly important where his treatment of the ‘Succession Narrative’ is concerned. Most readers of ‘The Beginnings of Historical Writing in Ancient Israel’ are likely to feel that (whatever may need to be corrected in the light of more recent study of 2 Samuel) von Rad identified, and described with precision and luminous clarity, a vital aspect of the narrative about the struggle for the throne of David which had not been properly appreciated before. He showed that these narratives formed a subtle and sophisticated piece of literary art, in which God (though barely mentioned in an explicit way) is presented as secretly directing the unpromising deeds and motives of men and women towards a goal chosen by him, yet without ever forcing the hand of the strongly independent characters in the story. With this understanding of 2 Samuel (and parts of 1 Kings) I have no quarrel at all. But when we have said that the meaning of the Succession Narrative is as von Rad describes it, we could still go on to ask at what level this is its meaning. We might here bring in the threefold distinction drawn under point 2. above, and ask (a) is the doctrine of the ‘hidden hand’ of God one of the underlying assumptions shared by author and readers, which finds expression in this work simply because all Israelites thought in that way? Or (b) is it an idea which the author is consciously trying to persuade his readers of; that is, a theological belief which was the author’s own discovery and which he felt driven to press upon an audience which was still locked in an understanding of God that saw him as simply excluded from ‘secular’ political events? Or (c) is the idea of God’s mysterious and secret working part of the creed to which Israel’s faith committed her – one of the beliefs that marked Israel off from other nations, the essential theologoumenon in all her confessions of faith? As we have seen, all these interpretations seem to be allowable ways of reading von Rad; and all of them could be defended as historical truths about the assumptions or beliefs of ancient Israelites, to which a study of the Succession Narrative gives us access. There is, however, a further possibility, which von Rad does not seem to have on his agenda, but which more recent Old Testament study might incline us to give a hearing to. This is the possibility that the ideas about God and his activity in the world which von Rad found in the Succession Narrative are primarily a function of its narrative form or style. It is not, we might say, that people in Israel unconsciously perceived God’s hand in secular events, nor that the author of the Succession Narrative consciously wanted them to see it there, nor that Israel was committed to such a view of divine providence; it was simply that the narrative conventions

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available to the author resulted in the story’s being told in this way rather than in any other. Of course we should still want to ask what it was about ancient Israel that led them to have precisely these narrative conventions rather than others, and we might then find ourselves once again speaking of a shared Weltanschauung, though one not confined to any one period. But the proper focus of our interest would be the elucidation of how Hebrew narrative in fact functions, the mechanisms by which it constrains a narrator to produce stories with the dimension of theological depth that von Rad so brilliantly uncovered. Two literary studies of Old Testament narrative lead me to think that this explanation of the secret divine providence in 2 Samuel might be correct. The first is Erich Auerbach’s now famous treatment of the Binding of Isaac (Gen. 22) in Mimesis, over forty years ago.50 Auerbach presents the remarkable character of the Genesis narrative, ‘mysterious and “fraught with background’”, as an effect intended by the author and resulting from the distinctively Israelite concept of God. Both these things may be true; but what his study uncovers is the narrative techniques or conventions through which this character is actually produced. The picture of God we receive from Genesis 22 is a function of the chapter’s narrative style, whatever may be the reasons why such a style developed in Israel and not (as his discussion tries to show) in Greece. But – and this is crucial to the point I am making – Auerbach sees this distinctive character as a feature not just of Genesis 22, but of Hebrew narrative in general. Of the stories in the Old Testament taken as a corpus he writes: Doctrine and promise are incarnate in them and inseparable from them; for that very reason they are fraught with ‘background’ and mysterious, containing a second concealed meaning. In the story of Isaac, it is not only God’s intervention at the beginning and the end, but even the factual and psychological elements which come between, that are mysterious, merely touched upon, fraught with background; and therefore they require subtle investigation and interpretation, they demand them. Since so much in the story is dark and incomplete, and since the reader knows that God is a hidden God, his effort to interpret it constantly finds something new to feed upon.51

This is close to von Rad’s understanding of the Succession Narrative; but it has no necessary link with any theory about the changes wrought by Solomon’s ‘Enlightenment’. We might wonder whether von Rad, looking for what was new and original in the age of Solomon, may not have stumbled upon a characteristic that is common to much of the Old Testament. This possibility is reinforced by the much more recent work of Robert Alter.52 Alter’s discussion also treats Hebrew narrative as a whole, and sees it as characterized throughout by the enigmatic, theologically and psychologically sensitive quality that von Rad tends to restrict to the two major works of the ‘Solomonic Enlightenment’. Thus, commenting on 2. Samuel 6:20–23, he writes:

50 E. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, 1953) (German original Berne, 1946). 51 Ibid., p. 18. 52 R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (London and Sydney, 1981).

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THE OLD TESTAMENT: CANON, LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY I would suggest that causation in human affairs is itself brought into a paradoxical double focus by the narrative techniques of the Bible. The biblical writers obviously exhibit, on the one hand, a profound belief in a strong, clearly demarcated pattern of causation in history and individual lives, and many of the framing devices, the motif-structures, the symmetries and recurrences in their narratives reflect this belief … The very perception, on the other hand, of godlike depths, unsoundable capacities for good and evil, in human nature, also leads these writers to render their protagonists in ways that destabilize any monolithic system of causation, set off a fluid movement among different orders of causation, some of them complementary or mutually reinforcing, others even mutually contradictory … The accidents befalling and the actions performed by man as a free agent created in God’s image are more intricately layered, more deviously ramified, than many earlier and competing views of humanity might lead us to imagine, and the narrative technique of studied reticencies which generate an interplay of significantly patterned ambiguities is a faithful translation into art of this view of man.53

Like Auerbach, Alter sees this as giving us insight into the distinctive character of Hebrew culture, which sets its literary products off as a coherent and unified corpus. Both these writers – no doubt because they are involved professionally with the study of other literatures besides the Old Testament – are much more impressed than von Rad or, indeed, most other biblical scholars, with the substantial unity of Old Testament narrative. By contrast with them von Rad appears both too ambitiously precise, in drawing fine lines between ‘early’ and ‘late’ ideas within the body of narrative material in the Hebrew scriptures, and yet also too timid, in failing to see how much of Israel’s literary tradition achieved the same high level of sophistication as the ‘Succession Narrative’. The essential unity of the Old Testament, which von Rad sought but which, as we have suggested, eluded his grasp, can be found much more readily if we concentrate on the literary characteristics of the text. Ironically, if von Rad had followed his own insights into 2 Samuel to their logical conclusion, he would have avoided drawing a sharp line between it and the literature of early Israel and thus undermining his own attempt to demonstrate the substantial unity of the Old Testament; and he would have uncovered a genuine unity lying beneath the shifting currents of the ‘message’ of this or that writer, beneath the speculative reconstructions of ‘world-view’ or creed or assumption, and located instead in the biblical text itself with its highly distinctive narrative style. I believe that some progress could be made along these or similar lines. The current trend towards ‘text-immanent’ readings of Old Testament narrative cannot be regarded as the last word on the meaning and significance of these texts, but it does open up a new additional range of possibilities, alongside the questions with which traditional biblical criticism has dealt. As well as asking about the subject-matter, intention and theological content of narrative texts, it makes sense to probe the means by which they communicate their ‘message’; how is as important as what. It seems to me that it might be at this level that many of von Rad’s suggestions, for all that they were conceived as suggestions about the intentions of authors and the prevailing mentality of readers, in fact have their proper place. We do not, perhaps, learn as much from von Rad about the age of 53

Ibid, pp. 125–6.

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Solomon and its values as we may once have thought; but we may well learn a great deal about the conventions and style of classical Hebrew narrative, if we are prepared to transpose his ideas into this new key.

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Chapter 20

Preparation in History for Christ Beloved in Christ, be it this Christmastide our care and delight to prepare ourselves to hear again the message of the angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger. Therefore let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious redemption brought us by this Holy Child.1

The King’s College, Cambridge, Carol Service is the perfect expression of what Christians have meant by ‘preparation in history for Christ’. Behind the selection of the traditional Nine Lessons lies the conviction that the sacred history of Old and New Testaments is not an aimless assemblage of old tales, nor a collection of timeless examples, but a story with a plot. Its denouement is to be found in the ‘things concerning Jesus’ – the Christ-event, to translate Greek into German. For Anglicans, it is in general probably the liturgy – and not only in the form of carol services – that helps to define the shape of this plot. Indeed, recent lectionary revisions and adjustments to the liturgical year have tended to heighten the emphasis on salvation history. The Elizabethan Church chose lessons for the major festivals from the wisdom books of the Old Testament wherever it could, aiming at moral edification.2 But the Church of England today prefers readings that speak of the ‘mighty acts of God’ in history. It has reorganized Advent and the preceding weeks to make sure that its people know the ‘tale of the loving purposes of God’ in the Old Testament, and has made Epiphanytide and Lent into a chronological presentation of the life of Jesus according to a kind of harmony of the gospels.3 At the same time the Eucharistic Prayer in most Christian traditions has recovered its (presumed) original connection with Jewish berakoth, with the effect that the Preface, for so long a rather perfunctory seasonal variation, has expanded into a full account of the works of God in creation and redemption. Eucharistic Prayer D of the 1977 American Book of Common Prayer, modelled on the Anaphora of the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, is a particularly clear example:

1

From the Bidding Prayer of the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, King’s College, Cambridge. 2 In the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer the first lessons for Morning and Evening Prayer on saints’ days are not chosen with regard to the particular saint being celebrated, but are a selection from Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus read in continuous series. 3 See the lectionary in The Alternative Service Book (1980). Since this article was written this lectionary has been replaced with one based on the Revised Common Lectionary, to which many of the criticisms I make here do not apply.

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THE OLD TESTAMENT: CANON, LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY We acclaim you, holy Lord, glorious in power. Your mighty works reveal your wisdom and love. You formed us in your own image, giving the whole world into our care, so that, in obedience to you, our Creator, we might rule and serve all your creatures. When our disobedience took us far from you, you did not abandon us to the power of death. In your mercy you came to our help, so that in seeking you we might find you. Again and again you called us into covenant with you, and through the prophets you taught us to hope for salvation. Father, you loved the world so much that in the fullness of time you sent your only Son to be our Savior. Incarnate by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, he lived as one of us, yet without sin. To the poor he proclaimed the good news of salvation; to prisoners, freedom; to the sorrowful, joy. To fulfill your purpose he gave himself up to death; and, rising from the grave, destroyed death, and made the whole creation new.4

Why is this turn to salvation history, to the preparation in history for Christ, a problem for a modern biblical scholar or theologian? There is one extremely general objection which I shall say little about, though if valid it is utterly devastating to the whole history-centred approach of modern liturgy. This is the objection that God is not revealed in the particular events of history at all: that providence is always general, never particular; that there cannot in any sense be divine actions in the world. If I do not spend time on this objection, it is not because I think it unimportant, but because I do not have the philosophical expertise to handle it. It is clearly one of the great questions in modern Anglican theology, as witness the very different recent contributions of Maurice Wiles5 and of David Jenkins.6 There are, however, three more small-scale objections to the current liturgical preoccupation with what is now sometimes called the ‘story’ understanding of the eucharistic offering.7 First, is there something a bit too optimistic, even triumphalistic, in Christian insistence that human history was providentially guided in such a way as to run up into the Christian dispensation? Jewish commentators on Christianity are forever asking where, in the world after the Holocaust, is the evidence that God has ‘loving purposes’ which he is working out in the history of mankind; and how, in particular, it can be affirmed that he accomplished some decisive act, fit to be seen as the climax of all his purposes, in the events surrounding Jesus, when the sad tale of human wickedness and persecution continues unabated. If we must speak teleologically, they protest, let us at least say that the messianic age is still to come, for if this is it, then God must have a black sense of humour. For some, of course, post-Holocaust theology can only be agnosticism or despair or wry gallows humour. A Jewish tailor told his customer it would be a month before his suit was ready, and he complained, ‘A month you should need? In six days God made heaven and earth.’ ‘So have you looked at them?’ asked the tailor.8

4 The Book of Common Prayer according to the use of the Episcopal Church (Seabury Press, 1977), pp. 373–4. 5 M.F. Wiles, God’s Action in the World (London, 1986). 6 D.E. Jenkins, God, Miracles, and the Church of England (London, 1987). 7 See K.W. Stevenson, Eucharist and Offering (New York, 1987) for comments on this approach. 8 I am grateful to my colleague Dr Glenda Abramson for this story.

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But even without astringent Jewish criticisms of Christian raptures about the loving purposes of God, there is an uncomfortable gap between the liturgical celebration of the sacred story, in which ‘the hand of God has guided his flock from age to age’, and the understanding of world history to be found even in those few historians who are prepared to risk themselves on such a wide sea. As soon as we ask some ‘cash-value’ questions about the fourth American Eucharistic Prayer, instead of being content to glory in its sublimity, it starts to sound like the Whig interpretation of history; and the one matter on which modern historians agree with Dr Johnson is that the first Whig was the devil. Indeed, the new-style nine-week Advent of the Church of England, tracing God’s providence from creation through fall to prophetic predictions of the Saviour and the fulfilment of God’s faithful promises in Christ seems (from this point of view) an astonishing thing for liturgists in the 1970s to have invented: a monument to a nineteenth-century liberal belief in progressive revelation, foisted on the Church just at the moment when no one can possibly believe in it any longer. Perhaps it confirms the suspicion that the Church of England is the Whig faction at prayer. Nothing in Edward Talbot’s essay ‘Preparation in History for Christ’ seems quite so dated as his title. Once given the brief, he handled it with great skill and was far from accepting a simple, optimistic and progressivist interpretation of human history; but the brief itself belongs to a world of thought that seems to have passed away except in the liturgical sphere, where the antiquarianism of modern liturgists has given it an artificial new lease of life. But if ‘preparation in history for Christ’ seems to some not to do justice to history, others may ask whether it does justice to Christ. Anglicans have generally felt comfortable with the picture of human history under God as a seamless garment, the old dispensation and the new complementing each other perfectly, the new concealed in the old, the old revealed in the new. Like the Fathers to whom they have always returned as an inspiration, they have believed that the word of God was known in the world before his incarnation in Jesus, both in Israel and in the wider world of human culture. In Austin Farrer’s words, the rays of light that stream from the eternal Word are concentrated like the sun’s rays through a burning-glass in order to enter in unique fashion into our world through Mary, the Lord’s mother;9 but this incarnation does not mark a break or disjunction in human history, rather its culmination and goal. Matters look different from a Lutheran perspective, of course. English readers react with a kind of mildly baffled amusement when German writers speak of Christ as the end of history, as the abolition of religion, as an eschatological event that breaks the matrix into which it irrupts. They do not necessarily think such language exactly false, but they find it exaggerated and perhaps a little tasteless. German Lutherans have no doubt their own reasons, often the opposite side of the coin from the Jewish reasons of which we have been speaking, for distrusting Whiggery in matters of religious faith. If Christ is to save us, it cannot be by accentuating or concentrating aspects of human culture or religion that had existed before him. The sanctification of existing human culture, human history, human institutions, a German may well feel, is the road to Auschwitz, and no one goes down that road 9

See A.M. Farrer, Lord I Believe (London, 1962), p. 88.

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any longer. Yet the Lutheran stress on the disjunction introduced by Christ actually long antedates the postwar suspicion of history in German life, and is echt lutherisch. Genuinely Pauline, too, surely: ‘Christ is the end of the Law’ (Romans 10:4); ‘if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come’ (2 Corinthians 5:17). Anglican talk of Jesus as the promised Messiah, seen in the extreme reluctance in Britain to this day to accept any understanding of Old Testament prophecy incompatible with the King’s Carol Service, strikes Lutherans as a failure to see that in Jesus something genuinely new and unprecedented has arrived. It is part of that same English unawakened innocence which also fails to see that the Reformation actually made a difference to Christian faith and life, which regards the French Revolution as a little local unpleasantness, absolutely typical of the French, and the student revolts of the 1960s as a campaign for the abolition of academic dress. Can you not see, they ask us, that the skies have fallen? That the only ‘preparation’ for Christ took the form of hopeless and irremediable unpreparedness? That all who came before him were thieves and robbers? We may (I think we should) resist this rhetoric; but we should not go on talking as if it were all just a storm in a teacup. Even from an English perspective, we must be on our guard against making the Christian faith merely a kind of intensification of existing culture, one more step in ‘the education of the world’, to move from Lux Mundi back to Essays and Reviews.10 Talbot was wisely anxious not to overplay his hand by presenting the preparation for Christ as so perfect that he might appear as no more than someone whose time had come, the man of the moment, the one than whom nothing more inevitable can be imagined. Yet to Lutheran eyes even this caution does not save the project from looking like an apologetic attempt to make Christianity plausible, by showing that it is the infinity at which the various parallel lines of human thought, in Israel, in Greece, in mankind in general, finally converge. And the Chair of Christian Apologetics has been gathering dust now for many decades in most German theology faculties. A third and less obvious problem for a modern Christian in accepting the idea of salvation history lies in the direction indicated by Hans W. Frei in his The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.11 Modern readers, Frei points out, are in a radically different position from their Christian forbears because they know, as earlier generations did not, that the narrative account which forms more than half of the Bible is not an accurate report of the course of world history, but a story. This story is anchored in history at various points but, taken in sum, it is not ‘history’ in our sense. Frei coined the expression ‘history-like’ for the character of biblical narrative. For pre-critical readers, a commitment to the sacred history as told by the Bible was not a decision either for or against a secular reading of world history, since no such option existed. For the modern reader, on the other hand, the biblical text stands against what a literary theorist might call a counter-text – the secular historian’s reconstruction of human history. The problem is not merely that this secular reconstruction is often non-religious: even a highly theological account of world history – indeed, even a 10

See Frederick Temple, ‘The Education of the World’, Essays and Reviews (London,

1860). 11

H.W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, 1974).

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fundamentalist version of it which insists on the accuracy of the biblical account at all points – is still different from an uncritical and unquestioning acceptance of the Bible’s version as the sole horizon of thought. In a critical age, to trace ‘the tale of the loving purposes of God’ cannot be a matter of entering naively into the world of the biblical text. It entails making a decision between two options. Either modern Christians who wish to go on affirming that God directs human history and brings it to fulfilment in Christ must break out of the world of the biblical text, and try to show that the hand of providence can be detected in history, not as narrated in the Bible, but wie es eigentlich gewesen; or they must adopt the kind of attitude sometimes called ‘second naivete’ (much adopted by Paul Ricoeur, but anticipated in Barth12), and declare that so long as they are thinking in the Christian mode they will allow the biblical narrative to function as their horizon of thought. Either course may be defended, but it is important not to confuse the two. The modern liturgical recovery of the virtue of ‘narration’ as the means by which Christians declare their allegiance to God often looks, from this perspective, like an uneasy compromise. This is in fact the case in the Eucharistic Prayer already quoted, but perhaps it is even clearer in Eucharistic Prayer C of the American Prayer Book: God of all power, Ruler of the Universe, you are worthy of glory and praise. At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home. From the primal elements you brought forth the human race, and blessed us with memory, reason, and skill. You made us the rulers of creation. But we turned against you, and betrayed your trust; and we turned against one another. Again and again you called us to return. Through prophets and sages you revealed your righteous law. And in the fullness of time you sent your only Son, born of a woman, to fulfill your law, to open for us the way of freedom and peace.13

The problem about this from the point of view of Frei’s analysis is not, as British readers will tend to feel, a lapse of literary taste. It is an impossible mingling of two idioms of thought: critical reconstruction of the history of the world (indeed of the universe) and the retelling of the biblical story. An account in which the human race was made the rulers of creation, in which there is something called ‘the fullness of time’, and in which prophets and sages revealed God’s righteous law, is not part of the same world of thought as the one in which the universe contains the vast expanses of interstellar space and the earth as a fragile island within them. That is not necessarily to say that the two stories conflict, in a ‘science versus religion’ opposition; it is to say that they are incommensurable. Frei’s book did not present a clear programme, but others have developed from his careful distinctions the project of a narrative theology, in which there is a conscious decision for the second option, the acceptance of the biblical story not as a basis for the reconstruction of ‘real’ history but as the irreducible frame of

12 See P. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. L.S. Mudge (Philadelphia, 1980; London, 1981); K. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2 (Edinburgh, 1956), pp. 493–4 and IV/2 (Edinburgh, 1958), pp. 478–9. 13 The Book of Common Prayer according to the use of the Episcopal Church, p. 370.

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reference for Christian thought.14 In this there15 are of course heavy influences from Barth, from the entire tradition in German Protestant theology which declares (in Lessing’s famous words) that the ‘ugly, broad ditch’ between truths of historical research and truths of faith is for ever unbridgeable, and – in the last few years – from Wittgenstein’s ideas about encapsulated language-games. ‘Canonical criticism’ of the Bible marches to much the same tune. For people of this persuasion, Eucharistic Prayer C would represent a failure of nerve: a radically unsatisfactory attempt to connect the language of faith with the language of secular history and science. And talk of ‘preparation in history for Christ’, at least as interpreted in Talbot’s essay, would presumably evince a similar confusion of thought. For the phrase makes sense only in the context of the biblical story of prophets and kings and messiahs, and the attempt to make it apply to ‘real’ history is faintly ludicrous – and also theologically undesirable, for would not any divine plan or providence that could be caught in the nets of human historical study be by definition less than fully divine? But to this question, expecting the answer ‘yes’, the tradition of English theology answers ‘no’. The religion of the Incarnation is faith in a God who presents himself for historical inspection; the light of the world is not confined to the Holy of the Holies, not encapsulated in the Bible or in formulations of doctrine, but let loose upon the world to bring illumination to all spheres of knowledge and action. And the notion that historical study can contribute to our understanding of that light should not be given up without a struggle, however quaint such phrases as ‘preparation in history for Christ’ sound in twentieth-century theology. In this context, the similarity between Christian ‘narration’, especially in liturgy, and Jewish liturgical custom is really less close than it looks. Once given a canon of scripture containing Old and New Testaments, understood as a single seamless work, the Christian listing of the great events of salvation looks formally just like the Jewish one, the sole difference being that the things concerning Jesus are of course added to the catalogue. Jewish thanksgivings list the creation, the exodus, the giving of the promised land; Christian thanksgivings go on to include the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Spirit. A ‘narrative theology’ therefore seems, superficially, adequate to account for either; both communities of faith have a story to tell, which runs parallel to begin with; though it then diverges.

14

See R.E. Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame, 1985), G.W. Stroup, The Promise of Narrative Theology (London, 1981) and the Festschrift for Hans Frei, Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation, ed. G. Green (Philadelphia, 1987), which contains a critical evaluation of narrative theology by Maurice Wiles, ‘Scriptural Authority and Theological Construction: The Limitations of Narrative Interpretation’ (pp. 42–58). See also my comments in People of the Book? The Authority of the Bible in Christianity (London, 1988), ch. 4. 15 See B.S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia and London, 1979) and The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (Philadelphia and London, 1984); J.A. Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text (Philadelphia, 1987). See also the critical comments of J. Barr, Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism (Philadelphia and Oxford, 1983) and my own evaluation in Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study (London and Philadelphia, 1984), pp. 77–103 and 140–79, and in People of the Book?, ch. 3.

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But the resemblance is far more apparent than real. Jewish thanksgivings, like the Hebrew canon of scripture on which they depend, do not just happen to stop short of the events of the New Testament period; they never go beyond the end of the exile, and more often than not stop far earlier, at the entry to the promised land or even at the death of Moses. The sacred history which they narrate is the sacred history contained in holy scripture, for which most of the Persian and the whole of the Graeco-Roman age form an empty blank. Salvation history, in the kind of Judaism that produced the extant berakoth, does not mean an account of the purposes of God from creation to the present, but the narrative of Israel’s history during the sacred period covered by the law, the prophets and the writings – or even by the Pentateuch alone. Now when a past age, seen as closed and completed, forms the entire content of historical narration, especially in a liturgical context, the effect is quite the opposite of historical in any normal sense of the word. What happens is rather that the sacred events become paradigms for understanding present experience. This process is already at work in Deuteronomy, which most think had a liturgical origin, in the reiterated ‘today’ motif: ‘not with our forefathers did the LORD make his covenant, but with us, who are all alive here today’ (Deuteronomy 5:3). The effect, in fact, is exactly the same as in the Christian context when (for example) the account of the crossing of the Red Sea is read at a baptism. As James Barr puts it, ‘The more one hears of the exodus of Israel from Egypt as part of the liturgy for the baptism of infants in water, the less one is concerned to ask whether any Israelites ever came out of Egypt and, if they did, how they got out.’16 People sometimes describe the process by which Jewish festivals ceased to be primarily harvest festivals, and became instead celebrations of the mighty acts of God, as a ‘historicization’ of the Israelite cult; but it might be truer to say that it represents the ‘mythicization’ of the history of Israel. And for most varieties of Judaism in the New Testament period, and for the mainstream from the Tannaitic period onwards, there is little sense of historical events as part of a continuing divine story. Contemporary events never belong to the sacred history; liturgical narration does not make the historical reality of the narrated events important, but on the contrary empties them of historicity, making them into timeless symbols. The Christian observation that there are no debates in Judaism about the historicity of Moses analogous to those about the empty tomb or the Virgin Birth accurately reflects the far smaller importance that questions of historicity have in mainstream Judaism. Now of course for us, at a remove of two thousand years from the events concerning Jesus, the narration of the stories in the gospels tends to function in much the same way as the narration of the exodus does in Judaism: as a potent symbol of the character of God and as a paradigm of his action in the world. But from the beginning it was not so. In adding references to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus to the list of the magnalia Dei in their berakah, early Christians were taking a radical step, and breaking the mould they were using. Very recent events, which fell entirely outside the sacred period to which the holy scriptures belonged, were set alongside, indeed, said to be greater than, the traditional sacred history. 16

J. Barr, The Bible in the Modern World (London, 1973), p. 59.

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Furthermore, the Christian eucharistic narration was not content to leave matters even there, but spoke also of the activity of God through the Holy Spirit in the present: sacred history continued to this day. The creation of a New Testament, and its eventual inclusion in a single codex as part of an undifferentiated Bible, had the fateful effect of concealing this highly innovative move. But for early Christianity, the narratives about Jesus and the present experience of the Spirit lay firmly outside holy scripture, and yet were held to tell of the activity of God in human history even more ‘classically’ than the stories that were scriptural. This claim that the events of contemporary history are not merely some kind of re-enactment of the holy events of old, which have passed into myth, but the locus of a fresh and unprecedented encounter with the living God, at once (so I believe) cuts the ground from under the ‘narrative theology’ approach and both legitimates and requires an engagement with real, as opposed to sacredly-narrated, history. The contrast between Christianity and what was to become mainline Judaism on this point has been made well by Krister Stendahl, who has championed the cause of getting behind the biblical text against narrative theology in his article, ‘The Bible as a Classic and the Bible as Holy Scripture’. After noting that modern Christian theology has moved away from a concern with history towards a concern for ‘story’, he continues: There is a striking analogy to such a move from history to story and wisdom. I think of the major move of rabbinic Judaism after the fall of Jerusalem and the Bar Kokhba catastrophe. Rabbinic Judaism – a child of the very tradition which is often credited with having given ‘the idea of history’ to the world – cut loose from the frantic attempts at finding meaning in and through history. At Jamnia and through the Mishnah the center of religious existence was placed in Halakah, i.e., in the lifestyle and wisdom of Torah. To be sure, the historical consciousness remained strong in Judaism, but not any more as the center of attention. It becomes exactly ‘story’, Haggadah, with far less binding authority. To be sure, the Mishnah and the Talmud are not the sum total of Judaism. There are the prayers and the memories, but the center, the equivalent to what Christians came to call theology, is in Torah as Halakah. Those Jewish writings that struggled with meaning in and through history, writings like 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, have survived through Christian transmission. They were not part of the living tradition of Judaism. It was the Christians, new on the block, who inherited and renewed the historical mode. To them history was not mute, for now ‘in these last days God has spoken to us by a Son’ (Heb. 1:2).17

All this implies, to my mind, that we should adopt not Frei’s second option, but his first, and go down the road that is said to be blocked and in any case to lead nowhere: the road called ‘preparation in history for Christ’. The question is not: How does the Christian story fit into the sacred story of Israel? – or, as it is sometimes put, What is the relation of the New Testament to the Old? These are questions about innertextual relations, and they make sense only if Christianity is the religion of a book. The question we should be asking is: What can be said about Jesus in the context of human history and human religious thought? If it is in Jesus that we encounter God, what is new in either his message or his mission? What is old? Where is he continuous with 17

K. Stendahl, ‘The Bible as a Classic and the Bible as Holy Scripture’, Journal of Biblical Literature 103 (1984), pp. 3–10; quotation on p. 4.

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the culture into which he came, where discontinuous? These are directly historical questions; they are also theological or religious questions, because on them hang decisions about whether he is worth believing in and being committed to. To put the matter somewhat sharply: it is customary to say that the English obsession with asking purely historical questions about Jesus shows a philistine insensitivity to real theology, of a piece with our notorious failure to produce systematics. Those who hold that nothing of religious importance can hang on the contingencies of history are supposed to be the people who are really serious about theology. Precisely the opposite is the case; for theology is not a game played among those already in a charmed circle, but a set of assertions about the way things really are; and if it fails to connect with what may be discerned through other modes of study, history, the natural sciences, and so on, then it is saying nothing worth saying. It is therefore precisely those students of Christian origins who are most scrupulous about religious neutrality, most purely descriptive, who seem to me to have most to contribute theologically, because they are contributing some real knowledge rather than a self-contained system of religious thought that might as well exist on Mars. Preparation in history for Christ is a question, therefore, about the world into which Jesus came; and Edward Talbot’s decision to treat it by asking about the confluence of religious and moral ideas form ancient Israel and from the GraecoRoman world to form the matrix within which Jesus taught, lived, and died, seems to me still entirely the right approach. But this does not, of course, acquit it of the other two charges with which we began: that it is inclined to a triumphalistic or overoptimistic interpretation of the hand of God in human religious progress, or, on the other hand, that it allows too small a place for the radical discontinuity of Jesus with what preceded him. Here, it seems to me, the question is one of balance and proportion. The radical discontinuity of Christ with existing culture is indeed a very important truth. One can understand why German theologians in particular are so touchy about it; but one may also wonder if it is not being used to solve a problem which is a Lutheran creation in the first place. Of course National Socialism deified the (supposed) orders of nature and society, and thought in terms of religion as subservient to the historical process that would vindicate all things German; and of course the Confessing Church was right to say ‘no!’ to that, and to insist that the call of Christ cuts across all human cultural allegiances. But an Anglican may wonder whether a less extreme separation of the orders of nature and of grace in Lutheran thought, a less rigid insistence on the idea that the gospel does not speak in the political sphere, less of a political via negativa in Lutheran theology, might have produced a context less congenial to Nazi ideology in the first place. If a stress on the discontinuity of Christ from all that preceded him is part of the cure, it looks surprisingly like a homeopathic cure. This does not mean that we have to rush to the opposite extreme, and talk as though Jesus and his gospel are a mere epiphenomenon of the onward march of human culture. The relation of Christ to those aspects of human religion and philosophy that may be seen (from a Christian point of view) as a preparation for him is surely best seen as dialectical: a reaffirmation that transforms what it reaffirms, a transformation that respects what is transformed. Classic formulations of the doctrine of the Incarnation provide just the kind of paradoxical terminology we need: Christ is totus in suis,

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totus in nostris; he fulfils all human hopes, yet redefines them in the very moment of fulfilment. From an Anglican perspective the need to stress the unexpectedness or distinctiveness of Christ springs rather from the desire to insist that it is God with whom we have to do in him – that he is not explicable in merely human terms. But I do not find that the distinctiveness of Christ is understated in Talbot’s essay in any case. Much more serious, in my judgement, is the suggestion that the whole idea of a preparation in history can make sense only within the biblical way of telling the story of the world, and that when we abandon the narrative framework of the Bible for secular historiography the notion that human history has any direction at all, let alone a progressive one, is so nonsensical that Christian faith must on no account be risked on an association with it. The idea that history is going somewhere is as much of a bad dream for modern German theology as the idea that human culture is sacred; and world history is deeply unpopular with most professional historians anyway, while any teleological form of it is quite beyond the pale. Is it still possible to speak other than mythologically of the ‘loving purposes of God’ in human history? The possibility of answering ‘yes’ to this question has recently come from a surprising (because essentially Lutheran) source: Gerd Theissen’s Biblical Faith: An Evolutionary Perspective.18 On Theissen’s model, something really new happened in ancient Israel, which is the precondition for mankind coming to terms with the physical and cultural world within which human life is set, and reacting to it creatively rather than destructively. This new thing is the recognition of the single God confessed by the monotheistic faiths, a God who offers mankind the opportunity of adapting to the pressures of life in nature and culture by moral change, and especially by concern for the rights of the disadvantaged, rather than by being simply swept away by the historical process. And this new thing was repeated and intensified in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, in the commitment which led him to his death. To give thanks that this is so is, implicitly, to say that God was himself behind these two ventures of human faith, the prophetic movement in Israel and the ministry of Jesus. The history of human religion as presented by Theissen is not itself a theologically neutral history, because within it these two stages can be recognized as genuine breakthroughs, points at which the human religious quest showed itself to be adapted to ultimate reality. All that went to make these breakthroughs possible, the whole long and winding history of ancient Near Eastern religion and the entire intellectual and spiritual background to Jesus and his disciples, is therefore properly seen as a preparation in history for Christ: the remote preparation that make it possible for a decisive mutation – which is none the less a random mutation – to occur. Jesus, as Theissen puts it,19 is the black moth which embodies properties apparently, and at an earlier stage of evolution really, dysfunctional, but in the advanced stage of human culture at which he appeared offering a model which alone can ensure the survival of the species. 18 G. Theissen, Biblical Faith: An Evolutionary Perspective (London, 1984). I have discussed Theissen at more length in People of the Book?, ch. 5. 19 Biblical Faith, p. 168.

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Now in this Theissen is not concerned, like the narrative theologians, with the Jesus of the New Testament as a literary character, and with the canon of the Old Testament as the literary matrix within which he is to be understood, but with Jesus of Nazareth, the person studied by historians (not necessarily the same as the ‘Jesus of history’ theologians abstain from studying out of theological asceticism). Similarly, he is concerned with the beliefs that were actually held by the prophets of Israel, people we can reconstruct only by digging beneath the surface of the Old Testament and other ancient Near Eastern literature. He is concerned, that is to say, with Jesus in the context of Israelite, Jewish and world history. Furthermore, he is concerned with the development of human religious consciousness, especially in its Jewish and Christian forms, in the context of intellectual history in general and of the account of the emergence of man from nature provided by the natural sciences through the theory of evolution. Theissen believes that Jewish belief in the one God, and Christian faith in Jesus Christ, can be seen as two giant leaps forward in human evolution, through which the possibility arises that mankind may at last break out of the iron laws of competition for survival which if left unchecked, will eventually destroy the earth. Discontinuity is stressed – they are leaps; and Whiggery is avoided – they are random mutations, not part of an inevitable ‘ascent of man’. Nevertheless, like all evolutionary changes, they presuppose the context from which they come, and are not examples of direct divine intervention in the world. If God is at work here, it is through the most natural of means, letting the world and mankind make themselves, not by suspending the laws of nature. Working in terms of Hans Frei’s models of biblical narrative, there is no doubt that Theissen belongs (with the Anglo-Saxon tradition) in the reconstructive camp. He does not claim to be restating the biblical idea of prophecy and fulfilment, or of goal-directed narrative; still less to be telling us that this was what the old idea of prophecy and fulfillment ‘really meant’. The theory that the faith of Israel and the gospel of Christ represent two leaps in evolution is not in any sense a restatement of what the Bible says, but a completely new theological theory appealing to biblical material as evidence for the developments it traces. In that sense, it must be called a ‘liberal’ theory: it lies to the left even of Eucharistic Prayer C (the one about interstellar space), because it is not in any sense merely a retelling of the biblical story. But it can claim, I believe, to be a cogent modern statement of a theory about ‘preparation in history for Christ’; and in essentials it strikes me as perhaps the new version of Talbot’s essay which the Church of England needs today. It would be good to think that some of his ideas might rub off on English theology, for which he has evidently more time than many German theologians. For I am convinced that it is correct to speak of ‘preparation in history for Christ’, and to mean by it some tendency that can be detected in human history as it has in fact unfolded, not merely in history as the Bible narrates it. Human culture is not empty of traces of God or of rumours of angels: and God was seen at work in a human life, not merely in narratives about a human life. Theissen’s thesis seems to me to offer the most hopeful possibilities for rehabilitating the idea of a preparation; indeed, for asserting not only that the ground in which the seed was to be nurtured was providentially prepared, but also that God is not absent from its subsequent growth, and by his Spirit is still active today. What is needed is a development of Theissen’s

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theme that will avoid the shoals of triumphalism and over-optimism that are always a lurking danger for those who try to give a theistic account of human cultural history, so that it may not go the way of Teilhard de Chardin. If it can be combined with the recent upswing in the cause of natural theology, we may be about to witness new possibilities for seeing the hand of God in history and culture; perhaps European theology is at last ready to return to this theme. The older liberalism failed us; a chastened, more tentative and more humble liberalism might still succeed, and might still achieve what to me is the great prize for theology: to connect at every point with secular study, humanistic and scientific alike, and to work towards a unification of knowledge, not as an imperialist queen of the sciences but as a humble learner who accepts all sources of knowledge as the gift of God.

Chapter 21

History and Rhetoric in the Prophets The books of the classical prophets of the Old Testament contain two themes which are so interwoven that they strike the modern reader as indivisible parts of a single whole. Oracles denouncing the sin and apostasy of Israel and Judah alternate, in such books as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and Hosea, with predictions of national calamity – usually at the hands of foreign powers, though sometimes apparently by means of natural disasters. The predicted calamity is said by the prophets to be the direct result of the sins they denounce, and this leads in some places to a third theme, the urgent call to repent before it is too late. This whole package of ideas deeply influenced the later generations who wrote the history of Israel, first in the books from Joshua to Kings (the so-called ‘Deuteronomistic History’, or Former Prophets, as the Hebrew Bible perhaps significantly calls them), and then, during the Persian period, in the books of Chronicles. In all these works there is a strong tendency to present the history in such a way that the prophetic message is shown to be exemplified in the events that befell. The nation sinned, both corporately in turning aside to worship other gods and individually in crimes against the person; consequently God punished them, by sending in foreign armies to invade, destroy and deport. Only when the people repented did divine judgement abate, though (at least in the more optimistic version of the history in Chronicles) whenever repentance was forthcoming, God relented. The moral for the reader of these histories is scarcely concealed: in every generation, sin leads to national disaster, but repentance leads to new life and salvation. Indeed, sometimes prophets are planted at salient points in the historical account to make just this point in so many words. Thus the history of Israel becomes an extended illustration of the justice and mercy of God, an acted parable of the prophetic message. As Josephus was later perceptively to put it: The main lesson to be learnt from this history by any who care to peruse it is that men who conform to the will of God, and do not venture to transgress laws that have been excellently laid down, prosper in all things beyond belief, and for their reward are offered by God felicity; whereas, in proportion as they depart from the strict observance of these laws, things otherwise practicable become impracticable, and whatever good thing they strive to do ends in irretrievable disasters. (Antiquities 1:14)

But the seamless unity of the prophetic message as it formed the Jewish consciousness in later generations may not necessarily imply that the prophets themselves came to it in a single moment of illumination. In this paper I shall be arguing that there is a great deal more artifice in the message of the prophets than appears at first sight. So far from hanging together naturally, the different parts of their reading of the historical experience of Israel form a considerable rhetorical tour de force.

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The genius of the classical prophets was to take the highly recalcitrant facts of history, whose religious and moral implications were in fact extremely ambiguous, and to give an account of these facts which would convince people not only that the hand of God could be seen in them, but that the operations of the divine hand were entirely comprehensible in human moral categories – indeed, that given the right ethical framework one could see that history could not but have unfolded in the way that it did. Prophetic rhetoric is designed, that is to say, to make the contingencies of human history look like divine necessities. Another way of putting this would be to say that the chief concern of the prophets is theodicy, the justification of God’s ways with his world. In the interests of a coherent theodicy, great rhetorical skill needed to be employed. Even if we can hardly avoid questioning the prophets’ theology, we are bound to admire their literary talent. A traditional Anglo-Saxon way of interpreting the prophets minimizes the degree of artifice in their message, and enables us to go on believing that they were essentially right when they spoke of inevitable judgement on a sinful nation. This line of interpretation is most attractively summed up by E.W. Heaton in his little classic The Old Testament Prophets, where he talks of Amos and his successors as ‘morally sensitive laymen’ (Heaton 1977: 36). What this means is that the classical prophets did not receive their message of coming judgement as a revelation, but arrived at it as the conclusion to a moral analysis of the contemporary social and political scene. Far from being visionaries filled with a non-rational foreboding, they were clear-sighted commentators on the society of their day. Their conviction that disaster was coming was a moral conviction: a God such as they believed the God of Israel to be could not but destroy a nation such as Israel had become. Filled with this sense of moral outrage, the prophets then surveyed the international scene, and identified more or less plausible candidates for the role of the ‘staff in Yahweh’s hand’ (cf. Isaiah 10:5). Sometimes, in fact, they were carefully reticent about the identity of this divine agent: Amos said simply ‘An adversary shall surround the land’ (3:11), and Jeremiah spoke merely of a ‘foe from the north’ – playing very safe, for (unless the Egyptians were to invade) any foe was likely to approach Jerusalem from the north. The very vagueness of such threats helps, on this view, to confirm the impression that the prophets began from moral sensitivity and concluded that judgement was coming – unless the people repented. I shall return briefly at the end to the suggestion that the prophets should be seen as ‘laymen’, because I think it highly illuminating in other ways. But its association with this rather rationalizing explanation of their oracles of judgement seems to me less well grounded. The mainstream of German Old Testament scholarship has been right, I believe, to argue that the prophets’ moral analysis does not, as this would imply, invariably have the priority in their thinking. The main difficulty in seeing the ostensible argument from sin to inevitable judgement as also, historically, the way in which prophetic thinking actually worked is that it does not do justice to the political realities of the prophets’ times. Amos, the first of the classical prophets, has been rather a misleading example here. When he prophesied, perhaps in the 760s, well before the expansion of Assyrian power that began with the accession of TiglathPileser III in 745, it was indeed unlikely that many people could have foreseen the eventual extinction of the northern kingdom of Israel. Israel was apparently enjoying

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an Indian summer of prosperity. But all the later prophets lived in times when the threat to national security was palpable, and Jeremiah and Ezekiel of course actually lived through national disaster and went on prophesying after it. The certainty such prophets had that Israel’s existence was threatened was certainly unwelcome: they were regarded as lowering morale, perhaps even as agents of the Assyrians or the Babylonians paid to lower morale. But it can hardly have been incomprehensible, or have struck their contemporaries as a totally implausible product of the prophetic obsession with national sin. On the contrary, it was the prophets who said ‘Peace, peace’ who were peddling an implausible message, as Jeremiah was quick to point out. The plausibility of the classical-prophetic proclamation of judgement in political terms was very high, however much in the popular mind wishful thinking prevailed over it. This being so, it seems unlikely that the prophets for the most part arrived at their expectation of disaster only because of their unique sensitivity to the moral condition of the nation. The counsellors of Hezekiah or Zedekiah had already arrived at the same conclusion by a simple consideration of diplomatic dispatches and news from border towns: that was why they paid so much attention to improving the national defences. The originality of the prophets lay not in what they had to say about the future as such, but in the fact that they gave a particular theological interpretation of it not as the result of Realpolitik but as the working out of the will of Yahweh, offended by national sin; and corresponding to this, in their insistence that national repentance, not military measures, was the only possible means to avert the disaster that threatened. This strongly suggests that moral sensitivity came in to provide explanations of a foreboding of the future that had originally been derived from a quite different source: political sensitivity. As a matter of fact, even Amos may not really be an exception to this. If the ‘adversary’ he so vaguely describes was indeed the Assyrian empire, then we should have to ascribe a more-than-human prescience to him or, if we wanted to avoid this, fall back on the position that he was indeed ‘morally certain’ of Israel’s downfall. But a good case can be made for seeing the ‘adversary’ in question as the Aramaean kingdom of Damascus, with which Israel was actually at war in Amos’s day. To think that the temporarily successful anti-Aramaean campaigns were about to go into reverse may have required more political astuteness than most of Amos’s contemporaries possessed; but it is not an idea of a different order from the forebodings of doom in later prophets. We do not have to rationalize all such prophetic forebodings as political insight, or exclude the possibility that their antennae were more sensitive than those of their colleagues in the royal court, but there is still no need to rationalize them in the other way, by deriving these political predictions from their moral insight. It is the predictions about the future that are primary, not the moral analysis. A great deal more could be said about the question of which came first, moral analysis or prediction of doom; but let us at least for the sake of argument accept that a case can be made for regarding the moral analysis as secondary, and ask where this leads. It seems to me that, as I have already suggested, the moral condemnation in the prophets functions essentially as part of a theodicy. The prophets’ object is to demonstrate not only that disaster is coming, which many suspected, but that

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it is coming for a good and adequate reason, and that it vindicates (rather than impugning) the justice of Yahweh, Israel’s God. This is indeed something of a tour de force, for there is no reason to suppose that a neutral observer would have seen anything in either the religious practices or the social relationships of Israelites in the period of the great prophets greatly different from what had been current in earlier times or what was to be common later on. The distinctively new feature from the eighth to the sixth centuries was the international situation. This made the two small kingdoms of Israel and Judah pawns in the ambitions of various superpowers, and the historian is bound to say that they would have been that whatever their internal moral or religious character had been. The prophets’ task was to make these perfectly contingent political circumstances look like the most obvious and inevitable outcome of national sin: to create, in fact, exactly the impression which has been accepted for the truth by the English-speaking tradition of talking of the prophets as morally sensitive critics who felt that the sins of Israel cried out to heaven for vengeance, At the simplest level, the prophets do this by liberal use of words such as ‘because’ (ki) and ‘therefore’ (laken) to link denunciations of sin with predictions of disaster. But they are far from content merely to use such logical connectives to suggest causal connections that were in fact not at all evident. They manifest extreme ingenuity and resourcefulness in the way they present history as determined by moral forces. An important point to note here is that the prophetic concern to show that historical events reflect divine decisions, not merely human intentions, is not in itself any kind of novum in the ancient Near Eastern context. Everyone in the ancient world, so far as we can tell, believed that the rise and fall of nations was determined by the gods. While this in no way inhibited political leaders from acting in the light of normal political and military calculations, it meant that the eventual outcome of such decisions for good or ill was commonly given a theological interpretation. One of the achievements of Bertil Albrektson’s History and the Gods was to remind Old Testament scholars that there was a widespread theology of history in the ancient world. According to this theology, military defeat, invasion and national disaster were the working out through human instruments of the will of offended gods. The prophets of Israel refined this common theology in various ways, but they certainly did not invent it. When they announce the coming downfall of foreign nations as a divine judgement on them, they are often saying nothing that would have been strange either to their Israelite contemporaries or, in principle, to the nations concerned. People in the ancient world regularly predicted and gloated over the collapse of their enemies and neighbours, and as regularly attributed this collapse to divine displeasure. In the ancient Near East there were two kinds of offences against the gods in particular which were widely believed to call down their wrath and to lead to the fall of kingdoms. These provided the raw material for prophetic rhetoric to get to work on, though (as we shall see) in a very subtle and ingenious way. The first is what we generally call hubris: arrogating to oneself the privileges and status of the gods. Of course kings in the ancient Near East were never noted for their humility, and one may ask whether the idea of pride as a sin was conceivable at all to some of the Assyrian rulers. But there is a difference between what is regarded as a sin in moral codes of a sapiential or legal kind, or in conventions for royal proclamations

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and propaganda, on the one hand, and the sins for which people cast around once a disaster has already struck and requires theological justification. Barnabas Lindars made this distinction very helpfully in a little article on ‘Ezekiel and Individual Responsibility’: Thought about the divine retribution proceeds from a point quite different from that of criminal responsibility. The laws concerning crime start with the fact that a crime has been committed and impose the appropriate remedy. But ideas of divine retribution start with the recognition of a state of affairs which appears to be brought about by God, e.g. prosperity or adversity, and seek to account for it by tracing it back to God’s favour or displeasure. (Lindars 1965: 4–5)

Furthermore, people will frequently castigate as sins in fallen enemies qualities they regard as admirable in themselves – I do not think one needs much proof that this is a constant feature of human nature. Post eventum explanations for national decline, and predictions of the decline of foreign powers, operated both in Israel and among its neighbours with a concept for which hubris is a perfectly serviceable shorthand term. It is the commonest reason adduced for the downfall of foreign nations in prophetic oracles against the nations in the Old Testament, and widespread also outside Israel. A second major model for interpreting disaster thinks in terms of divine anger at offences against humanity. As a number of studies of international conventions about war, diplomacy and international relations have shown, apparently modern ideas such as ‘atrocity’ or ‘outrage’ were current, mutatis mutandis, in many ancient cultures. Wars waged without regard to such conventions risked the anger of the gods. Again, we must distinguish between propagandist glorifications of atrocities, such as we find in Assyrian annals, and rationalizations of decisions to go to war against enemies or explanations of defeats that have already occurred. Of course all nations practised atrocities, and justified them. But when defeat struck, people might look around to find atrocities – oath-breaking, massacres of innocent populations, infringements of diplomatic immunity and so on – which could account for the divine anger that had caused the defeat. When cursing their enemies or praying for their downfall, they would point to similar crimes and call on the gods to avenge them. There is often in this a sense that such outrages are offences against a kind of order of nature. Now the skill of the prophets lies in deploying the almost instinctive feeling that such offences as these form a sufficient ground for divine retribution, in order to show that the state of the nation in their own day was inviting the wrath of Yahweh. When the prophets looked around at society in the times of the Assyrian and Babylonian threats, they did not in fact see much that appeared obviously to smack of either hubris or transgression of natural law. Israel and Judah were not expanding an aggressive empire, but fighting for their lives; and often they were relying not on their own military might but on the help (fruitless as it proved) of such allies as the Egyptians. Nor were Israelites and Judaeans committing war-crimes or otherwise offending against common humanity. Indeed, in the time of Amos or Isaiah there seems little that can even be called crime for the prophets to batten on: outwardly society is quite calm and prosperous. (Hosea and Jeremiah do admittedly

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reflect a more disordered society.) Yet the prophets contrive to dress up the sins they can detect in language which assimilates them to these dominant models. Thus they make them seem to lead inevitably, even obviously, to the disaster which they are sure (on quite other grounds) will fall on the nation. Four examples of the technique may be considered. (1) We begin with the second kind of sin, offences against natural order. As a number of commentators have suggested, both Amos and Isaiah show considerable familiarity with this way of thinking. Isaiah’s ultimate condemnation of Judah’s rulers takes the form ‘You turn things upside down!’ (19:16), while Amos describes the perversion of justice he claims to see around him as being like an attempt to plough the sea with oxen: an absurd contravention of the order of nature (6:12). The technique most commonly used to make this point is in fact, as in this example, the rhetorical question expecting the answer ‘no’: ‘Can horses run upon rocks? Will you plough the sea with oxen? Yet you have turned judgement into poison, and the fruit of righteousness into wormwood.’ All the prophets deploy this form, whose natural home is generally thought to be in the Wisdom literature, in order to convey a sense not just of moral condemnation but of uncomprehending moral outrage. What the nation is doing cries out to heaven; no rational person can begin to understand how such things are even thinkable. The verse from Isaiah just referred to continues, ‘Shall the potter be regarded as the clay, that the thing made should say of its maker, “He did not make me”?’ This sounds as though it ought to be a condemnation of overt blasphemy; but in fact it is part of an attack on those who ‘hide deep from the LORD their counsel, and whose deeds are in the dark’. Probably, therefore, it is no more than part of the prophet’s opposition to the secret diplomatic negotiations in which Hezekiah’s counsellors were engaged, in their desperate attempt to save the nation from the Assyrians. But Isaiah presents it as an attempt to hide from Yahweh – something which, as the Psalms or the book of Job testify, is a vain hope; and this makes it possible for him to speak of it as though it were a most impious reversal of the natural order in which the Creator has pre-eminence over his creatures. The best examples of the technique come, however, from Jeremiah, who conveys throughout his oracles a sense of half-choked fury at the absurdities of his contemporaries’ conduct. The tendency in his day to worship gods other than Yahweh, which we now know was not widely felt to be wrong in pre-exilic Judah, he presents as a ludicrous breach of every natural sense of loyalty, even as an offence against common sense: ‘Can a maiden forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire? Yet my people have forgotten me days without number’ (2:32); ‘Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit’ (2:11). On a number or occasions Jeremiah contrasts the regularities and predictabilities of the natural world with the irregularity and unnaturalness of the conduct of Israel. ‘Hear this, a foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but see not, who have ears, but hear not. Do you not fear me? says the LORD; do you not tremble before me? I placed the sand as the bound for the sea, a perpetual barrier which it cannot pass; though the waves toss, they cannot prevail, though they roar, they cannot pass over it. But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart; they have turned aside and gone away’ (5:20–23); ‘Even the stork in

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the heavens knows her times; and the turtledove, swallow, and crane keep the time of their coming; but my people know not the ordinance of the LORD’ (8:7); ‘Does the snow of Lebanon leave the crags of Sirion? Do the mountain waters run dry, the cold flowing streams? But my people have forgotten me, they burn incense to false gods’ (18:14). Compare Isaiah: ‘The ox knows its owner, and the ass its master’s crib; but Israel does not know, my people does not consider’ (1:3). This is a technique pioneered in the old Egyptian wisdom schools, in which the pupil’s stupidity and recalcitrance is compared unfavourably with the orderliness and obedience of dumb animals and inanimate objects. Compare, for example, this passage from an Egyptian scribe’s rebuke to his pupil: You do not hearken when I speak. Your heart is heavier than a great monument of a hundred cubits in height and ten in thickness, which is finished and ready to be loaded … The cow will be fetched this year and will plough by the return of the year; it begins to listen to the herdsman; it can all but speak. Horses brought from the field have already forgotten their mothers; they are yoked and go up and down on every manner of errand for his Majesty. They become like those that bore them, and they stand in the stable, whilst they do absolutely everything for fear of a beating. But even if I beat you with every kind of stick you do not listen. (Caminos 1954: 377; cf. Blackman and Peet 1925)

The effect of this way of thinking, when applied to the sins of Israel, is to remove any suspicion of arbitrariness in the punishment which Yahweh is about to exact, by showing that the people, contrary to popular belief, have sinned in ways that cry out to heaven. (2) In Amos we find the commonplace belief that the gods vindicate breaches of natural morality used rhetorically in order to justify the coming fall of Israel. This can be seen in the way the opening oracles of the book are arranged. As I have argued elsewhere (Barton 1980), the oracles against the nations at the beginning of Amos all deal explicitly with war-crimes committed by Israel’s neighbours. Here the prophet can count on it that his audience will, like him, expect divine judgement to fall on those who commit such offences. This cleverly prepares the way for the oracle against Israel itself in 2:6–16. Here the sins singled out for mention fall far short of what most people in the ancient Near East would have regarded as atrocities. Many of them are highly ‘respectable’ sins, such as breaches of trading standards, which were certainly forbidden in Israelite law but no doubt widely connived at in practice. But by juxtaposing these things with the atrocities in 1:3–2:3, the prophet contrives to make the reader feel that they lead just as obviously to divine judgement. Here the rhetorical trick lies at the level of structure. The patterning of the oracle against Israel on the same model as those against foreign nations constrains the readers (or hearers) to overlook the very different nature of the offences being highlighted, and so to suppress the feeling they would otherwise have that the kinds of sin condemned in the two units do not really play in the same league. (3) A further technique for creating an impression that the predicted judgement is only what the nation should have expected, and that its sins can hardly fail to be avenged by God, may be found in the ‘poetic justice’ pattern of many prophetic oracles. The prophets like to show that divine punishment takes the form of tit for tat. In Isaiah Judah has sinned, in the prophet’s view, by disregarding the proper

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ordering of society, with upstarts trying to direct the affairs of state. Shebna, the king’s chief secretary, was a ‘new man’ with no family background in Jerusalem (22:16); and according to 3:12 ‘children and women’ are being allowed to rule in the capital, which Isaiah – a much more reactionary figure than the modern picture of an Old Testament prophet might suggest – deeply disapproves of. Now of course the overthrow of the country by military invasion would be bound to cause anarchy, with the natural rulers removed and their place taken by Assyrian puppets. Accordingly Isaiah links the punishment with the crime: voluntary anarchy will be punished by compulsory anarchy: ‘I will make boys their princes, and babes shall rule over them … the people will oppress one another, every man his fellow, and every man his neighbour … woe to them, for they have brought evil upon themselves’ (3:1–9). Just so those whose ambition is to ‘dwell alone in the midst of the land’ by enclosing the fields of peasants will find their houses left desolate and without inhabitants altogether (5:9); those whose appetite for food and drink makes them drunkenly disregard the works of the LORD will die of thirst and hunger, and will become food for Sheol: ‘therefore Sheol has enlarged its appetite, and opened its mouth beyond measure’ (5:14). Little of this, I think, should be seen as the prophet’s attempts to devise punishments suitable for the crime; rather, it is a matter of presenting the crime in such a way that it becomes manifest that it merits the coming punishment (cf. Barton 1979). (4) If we now turn to the other traditional theme which accounts for national disaster, we shall find the same kind of material. Pride or hubris is certainly the commonest explanation of the downfall of foreign kingdoms. But given the weak and dispirited condition of Israel and Judah in much of the period when the classical prophets were active, it is in some ways rather surprising to find it as an accusation against them. Particularly in Isaiah, however, it is one of the major categories for interpreting the disaster foretold by the prophet. ‘Jerusalem has stumbled and Judah has fallen, because their speech and their deeds are against the LORD, defying his glorious presence’ (3:8); they are ‘wise in their own eyes, and shrewd in their own sight’ (5:21), ‘heroes at drinking wine and valiant men in mixing strong drink’ (5:22). The inhabitants of the northern kingdom ‘speak in pride and arrogance of heart’ (9:9). Given Isaiah’s highly hierarchical vision of the ideal human society, it is not too difficult for him to assimilate sin to pride, suggesting that rulers and those in positions of trust are lording it over their subjects and therefore that they have incurred the kind of judgement that was generally believed to fall on foreign rulers whose pride led them to despise the people of Yahweh – as in the case of the Assyrians, condemned for arrogance in chapter 10. Even the worship of other gods is assimilated, perhaps oddly from our point of view, to pride. To the modern reader, the proliferation of gods that seems to have occurred in eighth- and seventh-century Judah looks like an acknowledgement of human weakness and a desire, in a crisis, to appropriate the power of as many divine forces as possible. But Isaiah consistently presents ‘idolatry’ as an expression of human arrogance. He stands at the beginning of the tradition that comes to be typical of Judaism, presenting ‘idols’ as ‘the work of human hands’ rather than as alternative sources of divine power, or rivals for Yahweh. In chapter 2 he sets out the three charges ‘their land is full of silver and gold’, ‘their land is full of horses’ and

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‘their land is full of idols’ as parallel accusations, all three alike symptoms of human self-aggrandizement and signs of a failure in humility towards the true God. In the same way, in all the prophets sacrificial worship (even of Yahweh himself) is regarded as a form of self-assertion, rather than of self-abasement before the divine. All such attempts to be ‘like God’ come under the judgement of the ‘day of Yahweh’ described by Isaiah: The LORD of hosts has a day against all that is proud and lofty, against all that is lifted up and high; against all the cedars of Lebanon, lofty and lifted up; and against all the oaks of Bashan; against all the high mountains, and against all the lofty hills; against every high tower and against every fortified wall; against all the ships of Tarshish, and against all the beautiful craft. And the haughtiness of man shall be humbled, and the pride of men shall be brought low; and the LORD alone will be exalted in that day. (2:12–17)

Here, as with the appeal to natural orders in the world, patterning human sins after analogies from nature is designed to bring out their sinfulness – though (in this somewhat cutting across the prophets’ other arguments from nature) it seems to be implied that the natural order, too, is out of joint and is afflicted by the same insubordination as the people of Judah. Consistency on this sort of point is not the prophets’ main concern. What they are concerned to do is to paint contemporary society in colours that will make its imminent collapse seem reasonable and even inevitable. The analogy of a tree which grows too high and so is felled by the wind suggests itself to them, because overweening pride was a classic example of the sin that causes the fall of nations. To sum up. Prophetic rhetoric skilfully assimilated the shortcomings of Israel and Judah to models which were generally held, in the ancient world, to cause divine displeasure. In the process the prophets sought to make (and succeeded in making) the coming disasters comprehensible to their contemporaries, who learned to see in them not the hand of a capricious tyrant, but the chastening of a good and consistent Creator. The constant appeals to the order of nature in particular show how much the prophets saw their task as being to reason with their contemporaries; and if a prophet in the ancient world was essentially someone who reported non-rational experiences and premonitions and appealed simply to his divine authorization, not to the reason of his hearers, then the classical prophets were very far from being ‘prophets’ in this technical sense, and we might well follow Heaton and call them ‘laymen’. But as we have seen, the appeal to reason may sometimes fairly be called a rationalization, and we should not be taken in too much by the force of their rhetoric. It was not really obvious that God was bound to punish Israel. The fact that even modern readers of the Bible are inclined to speak as if it was is a tribute to the rhetorical skill of the classical prophets.

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References Albrekston, Bertil (1967), History and the Gods: An Essay on the Idea of Historical Events as Divine Manifestations in the Ancient Near East and in Israel (Lund: Gleerup). Barton , John (1979), ‘Natural Law and Poetic Justice in the Old Testament’, Journal of Theological Studies 30. Barton, John (1980), Amos’ Oracles against the Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Blackman, A.M. and T.E. Peet (1925), ‘Papyrus Lansing – A Translation with Notes’, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 11. Caminos, R. (1954), Late-Egyptian Miscellanies (London: Oxford University Press). Heaton, E.W. (1977), The Old Testament Prophets, rev. edn (London: Darton, Longman & Todd). Lindars, B. (1965), ‘Ezekiel and Individual Responsibility’, Vetus Testamentum 15.

Chapter 22

The Messiah in Old Testament Theology Our subject is the Messiah in Old Testament theology; but what is Old Testament theology? The very idea of such a discipline has come under fire in recent years, from two directions. First, there are those who say that writing a theology of the Old Testament is a Christian tendency, whose covert aim is to claim the Old Testament for Christianity and take it away from the Jews. There is no doubt that very few Jewish scholars have shown much interest in Old Testament theology, even when renamed Hebrew Bible theology. The case against it has been strongly argued by Jon D. Levenson, who tries to show that most Old Testament theologians have tried to unify the theological ideas of the Old Testament in such a way as to show that they contain a Christ-shaped hole, in other words that they require ‘fulfilment’ through the (alleged) Christian revelation.1 I do not want to discuss this objection in detail, but note it here because I shall come back to it later, since it has a particular relevance to the question of the Messiah, the topic par excellence where Christian scholars may be expected to distort the natural contours of the Hebrew Scriptures. The second objection to Old Testament theology has been advanced in the last few years above all by Rainer Albertz, in his two-volume work A History of Israelite Religion.2 Albertz shares the suspicion that Old Testament theology as traditionally conceived has had an inbuilt tendency to anti-Judaism or even to anti-semitism, but this is not his main reason for rejecting it. Primarily he dislikes theologies of the Old Testament as inappropriately systematizing data from different periods, different types of literature, different strata in society, to make a fictitious theological unity – a creed, we might say, that no given historical person ever actually believed in. The more large-scale the theological scheme – and some, notably those of Eichrodt3 and von Rad,4 have been on a very large scale indeed – the less it does justice to the concrete reality of what people in ancient Israel in fact believed, and the more it becomes a kind of ‘official’ version of ‘the faith of Israel’ (to use Rowley’s 1 See J.D. Levenson, ‘Why Jews are not Interested in Biblical Theology’, in Judaic Perspectives on Ancient Israel, ed. J. Neusner et al. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), pp. 281–307. 2 R. Albertz, Religionsgeschichte Israels in alttestamentlicher Zeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1992) (English translation A History of Israelite Religion in Old Testament Times, trans. I. Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1994)). 3 W. Eichrodt, Theologie des Alten Testaments, 6th edn (Stuttgart: Klotz; 5th edn, 1959) (English translation Theology of the Old Testament, trans. J.A. Baker (London: SCM Press, 1967; 1961)). 4 G. von Rad, Theologie des Alten Testaments (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1957–60) (English translation Old Testament Theology, trans. D.M.G. Stalker (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1962–5)).

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expression).5 But the danger with this – and here Albertz’s objection converges with the Jewish one – is that it is very likely to be shaped by the actual theological beliefs of the interpreter. Since the interpreter is likely to be Christian, almost inevitably the contours of the alleged ‘faith of Israel’ will be dictated by a Christian theological agenda. The Old Testament will be recognized as different from the New Testament, but the difference will be seen as a series of mortises into which the tenons of New Testament faith can be neatly fitted. The possibility that people in ancient Israel had, as people say nowadays, a different problematic from early (let alone modern) Christians will not be given a fair hearing, indeed will not even be noticed. In Albertz’s view, Old Testament theology should be replaced by the study of Israelite religion. At first glance one might think that this proposal goes too far in the opposite direction. If Old Testament theology concentrates too much on a supposed underlying structure of belief in ancient Israel, when in reality hardly anything can be known of what people actually believed in a spiritual or intellectual sense, one might object against Albertz that the study of the religion of Old Testament times ignores belief altogether in favour of concentrating on the external manifestations of religion: the cult, sacrifices, festivals and so on. What becomes clear as one reads on in Albertz’s work, however, is that he uses the term ‘the religion of Israel’ in a sufficiently broad way as to include quite a lot of what is commonly understood by Old Testament theology. His study is not a positivistic accumulation of detailed facts about how many times people offered which sacrifices where and when. It also encompasses the question why they did so, what they thought they were up to; and that question inevitably involves matters that we should naturally call theological. Theology becomes a much less central concern for students of the Old Testament than it has been for much of the present century, but it does not fall out of the frame altogether, as one might imagine (or hope, or fear). Albertz thus leaves open the possibility that one might write a theology of the Old Testament, not merely a phenomenology of the religion of ancient Israel, though he does not do much to illustrate the possibility. What should be noted, however, is that a theology in his sense would still have to be essentially historical, rather than a synthesis of what was believed in many periods or an analysis of some supposed essence of that belief. It would, that is to say, be a theology in the sense propounded by Gabler,6 or in this century by Krister Stendahl: a statement of what people believed, not of what we should believe on account of having the Old Testament as our Scripture. The latter project, if legitimate at all, belongs to systematic theology, not to biblical studies. Where the Messiah is concerned, Old Testament theology in the sense allowed by Albertz could say what people at various times believed about the Messiah, but not what the Messiah is ‘really’ like or whether Jesus of Nazareth fulfils the conditions necessary to confess him as that Messiah. The truth of Old Testament, of biblical theology, is historical truth, the discipline is as Gabler insisted e genere historico: it is not the ultimate or metaphysical truth to which systematic theology aspires. 5

See H.H. Rowley, The Faith of Israel (London: SCM Press, 1956). J.P. Gabler, Oratio de iusto discrimine theologiae biblicae et dogmaticae regundisque recte utriusque finibus (Altdorf: n.p., 1787), in his Kleinere theologische Schriften, II (Ulm: Sumtibus Stettin, 1831), pp. 179–98. 6

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This still leaves an irreconcilable difference from Old Testament Theology as practised by, say, Gerhard von Rad. Von Rad, just as much as a canonical critic in our own day, approached the Old Testament as part of canonical Christian Scripture, and his understanding of what made it hang together was not driven by the empirical discovery of what various people in Israel believed from time to time, but by a quest for a theological shape that would enable it to flow into the New Testament. The Jewish suspicion of Christian Old Testament theology is justified to a great extent where von Rad is concerned, though we would do well to remember that in von Rad’s own historical context any principled defence of the Old Testament was a stand against anti-semitism – even if to our present eyes it looks as though the price he paid, by reading the Old Testament through New Testament eyes, was too high. The idea of Heilsgeschichte which dominates von Rad’s conception of Old Testament faith is an idea that arises from a Christian sense of a divinely guided history in which the arrival of Jesus as Messiah is the final stage; it is not a central Jewish idea, not at least as Judaism has come to be in our times. If we want to say that it was normative before Judaism took its decisive ‘rabbinic’ turn, then we shall find ourselves having to declare that ancient Israel believed in something which Christianity built on, even though in the intervening period the Jews had lost sight of it: which leads to that emphasis on the pre-exilic period which until very recently was universal in Old Testament scholarship, and to that denigration of the Second Temple and all that went with it which is the heritage of Wellhausen, and which von Rad accepted as a matter of course. Since most of the ‘messianic’ texts in Scripture are probably post-exilic, this would make a problem for our present concern. For von Rad, however, it is avoided because of his study of the Deuteronomistic History in his article ‘The Deuteronomic Theology of History in I and II Kings’,7 where he seeks to show how central to the D History are the promises to David, which are bound to be fulfilled sooner or later. His immediate purpose is simply to argue that the History is hopeful, not (as Martin Noth maintained) pessimistic.8 But I think it is not reading too much between the lines to detect a subtext or hidden agenda, which is to do with the fact that the Davidic promises never were fulfilled in the new dispensation after the exile. The restoration of the imprisoned Jehoiachin (2 Kings 25:27–30) is a beginning, but there remains a great surplus of still unfulfilled Davidic prophecy. And just as, for the writer to the Hebrews, the original settlement of the Promised Land under Joshua was only a foretaste of the entry into the heavenly realm accomplished through the new Joshua, Jesus (Hebrews 4:8–9), so for von Rad the rather pathetic ‘restoration’ of the last king of the Davidic line merely hinted at

7

G. von Rad, ‘Die deuteronomistische Geschichtstheologie in den Königsbüchern’, in Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament, TBü 8 (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1958), pp. 189–204 (English translation ‘The Deuteronomic Theology of History in I and II Kings’, in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, trans. E.W. Trueman Dicken (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1966), pp. 205–21). 8 See M. Noth, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien, in Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testamen (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1958 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2nd edn, 1957)), pp. 1–110 (English translation The Deuteronomistic History, trans. H.G.M. Williamson, JSOTSup, 15 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1981)).

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the coming of the true and final David. So, at least, it seems to me. There is more going on in von Rad’s Old Testament theology than meets the eye. So far I have talked about two options in the pursuit of Old Testament theology. There is a historical option, which is certainly theological in that it is concerned with the religious beliefs of the biblical writers and of the people who stand behind them: prophets, kings, officials, priests, landowners, peasants and so on. The idea of the Messiah is a theological concept through and through, and any historical study of it is therefore bound to be also theological. But it is theological à la Gabler, not in the manner of a systematizing Old Testament theology. There is also the option pursued most clearly, as I would see it, by von Rad, which is systematizing. But the problem with this is that it so easily does less than justice to the historical variety and inconsistency lying behind our texts, and is so apt to import Christian ideas into the Old Testament. One might criticize von Rad, in effect, for bad faith: he claims to be writing an Old Testament theology which is historically rooted, but in practice he produces Christian theology loosely draped across a number of Old Testament pegs. Where the Messiah is concerned, he says little overtly, which is not surprising, given that the Old Testament for him hardly contains the post-exilic texts where the Messiah is most (if indeed at all) to be encountered; but he smuggles a messianic interpretation into his Old Testament exegesis in a way that can only serve to show how threadbare the idea of a Christian Old Testament theology really is. The only solution to von Rad’s difficulties, it seems to me, is to go more consistently down the road of integrating the two Testaments into a single canon, eschew historical concerns altogether and practise a consistent canonical criticism. For reasons which I cannot go into here, I am not personally convinced that the canonical approach will bring us into the Promised Land.9 But if that is so, then the future for an Old Testament theology that is more than an empirical description of the realities of faith in Israel, that has something to say about the religious claims of the Old Testament text and its significance for either Jews or Christians, looks rather bleak. Aporia would seem to be the order of the day. Is there any way forward? In 1994 I wrote a paper for a session at the International SBL meeting in Leuven dedicated to discussion of Albertz’s work, and set out to ask whether there can be any Old Testament theology after Albertz.10 I suggested that one might accept Albertz’s argument that the history of Israelite religion is a more powerful tool than a traditionally conceived Old Testament theology for unifying the discipline of Old Testament studies around a theological centre, but might still wish to identify a space in the study of the Old Testament which the history of Israelite religion does not wholly fill – a kind of theology-shaped gap. The history of Israelite religion does not help with the task of connecting the theological concepts and insights of ancient Israel (as evidenced by the Old Testament) with the theological concerns 9

See my comments in Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study, 2nd edn (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1996), pp. 77–103 (first published 1984). 10 J. Barton, ‘Alttestamentliche Theologie nach Albertz? Religionsgeschichte oder Theologie des Alten Testaments’, in, Religionsgeschichte oder Theologie des Alten Testaments, ed. B. Janowski, N. Lohfink et al., Jahrbuch für Biblische Theologie 10 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: NeukirchenerVerlag, 1995), pp. 25–34.

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of people in the later religious traditions that it nourishes. There needs to be some kind of interface between biblical study and systematic theology, for example, and it is not the task only of systematicians to investigate this; it is also the task of Old Testament specialists. ‘Old Testament theology’ might be an appropriate name for the enterprise, even if that is not exactly how the term has been used in the past. I believe that the first aim of the scholar interested in theological aspects of the Old Testament must be historical and descriptive: we should not try to go back behind Gabler’s formula e genere historico in the attempt to produce an account of what is in the Old Testament that is driven by a theological, a priori commitment to what we think ought to be in it. But description is not a purely factual, positivistic assembling of data. It already has an interpretative aspect too. How we describe the phenomena we have discovered inevitably involves using terms we ourselves can understand, which are not necessarily (and sometimes are necessarily not) terms that people in ancient Israel would have understood. It is therefore essential that we should compare their religious categories with ours, realizing that complete understanding is of course impossible, but not allowing this to produce a kind of nihilism in which ancient questions and modern questions are seen as so different that no kind of dialogue is possible. Somewhere the study of theology needs to have room for systematic theologians and biblical specialists to talk to each other about Old Testament texts. And anyone who helped to mediate in that discussion could reasonably be called an Old Testament theologian – though I have no commitment to that term in itself. In effect, biblical theology as I am defining it is a critical analysis of the reception history of biblical texts, but one which compares that history carefully both with the original meaning of the texts and with the theological doctrine that has both resulted from and been read back into the texts in question. In my article I illustrated this idea from the book of Ezekiel, which has often been taken to exemplify what might be called ‘biblical monotheism’, but which on a modern critical analysis is much nearer to the polytheism from which Judaeo-Christian monotheism emerged than a practitioner of Old Testament theology would probably want to think. I suggested, for example, that when Yahweh in Ezekiel acts ‘for the sake of his holy name’, that originally meant not ‘out of his own sovereign freedom’, but ‘in order to protect his (fragile) reputation’; and that this concern for what the neighbours will say is in some ways the opposite of what the philosophical stream in Judaism or Christianity means by the omnipotence of the one and only God. But I also urged that that very philosophical tradition would not have come into being without texts such as Ezekiel, which laid the foundation for thinking about divine transcendence in such a way that something emerged which it is not unreasonable to call ‘biblical’ monotheism. We partly misread Ezekiel if we think it is about monotheism or divine omnipotence in our sense: yet the distorting lens through which we read the book is itself partly a result of the book’s existence and contents. This is something like what in postmodernist theory is called a ‘feedback loop’, where information generated by a given system begins to scrutinize that system itself. Some such model seems to be required if we are to make any progress in understanding the relation of biblical texts to the theological concepts and systems which are partly their product but partly the framework through which we read them.

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My question here is whether we could undertake a similar examination of the idea of the Messiah. Could we admit straightforwardly that the Messiah was not an important theme in most Old Testament books, and therefore probably not in the minds of most people in post-exilic Israel, yet still see some lines of connection between the Old Testament texts that later messianism appealed to and the fully fledged messianic doctrine that, in different ways, has played an important role in both Jewish and Christian belief? So far as I am aware comparatively little work has been done that would contribute to this possibility, unless perhaps by the Scandinavian critics to whom messianism was so much more interesting than it seems to have been to German- or English-speaking scholars. I think of Mowinckel’s great work, He That Cometh,11 and of course of the book from which the volume for which this paper was written takes its title, Aage Bentzen’s King and Messiah, originally published in German as Messias-Moses redivivus-Menschensohn,12 a title which is a fairer pointer to its synthesizing and patternistic intention. These works attempted to trace the acorn in the oak: to show a certain appropriateness or inevitability in the way early Israelite conceptions of sacral kingship evolved into the idea of the Messiah. We might say that they illustrate the constructive, as well as the critical, function of Old Testament study within theology. They help to show that the job of the biblical critic is not merely to tell systematic theologians that the biblical texts do not mean what theology has thought they meant, but sometimes also to show how they are at least congruous with later developments. Reading Bentzen again to prepare this article, I was struck with a certain affinity to Brevard Childs, a concern for the wholeness of the Old Testament text as a witness to divine providence, which has not been common in studies of the Messiah by critical scholars in other traditions.13 A less theological work, but one which is also interested in tracing the development of a messianic idea back to the ideology of kingship in Israel from Saul onwards, is the study by Tryggve Mettinger, also called King and Messiah.14 In the Scandinavian tradition, as I see it, there is a concern not to lose sight of the wood by concentrating too much on the trees, to avoid the minimalism which might lead an English-speaking or German-speaking critic to note that the developed Messiah concept is not yet present in pre- and most post-exilic literature, and so to declare the idea simply post-biblical. Instead, scholars like Bentzen saw the development from king to Messiah as a smooth and coherent one. The seeds of messianism were present in Israelite thought from very early times, although they did not sprout and blossom till the post-biblical period. We might say that, despite this, Bentzen’s concern remains primarily historical. He brings biblical texts into contact with post-biblical concepts, but he does not ask how 11

S. Mowinckel, Han som kommer (Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gad, 1951) (English translation He That Cometh, trans. G.W. Anderson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956)). 12 A. Bentzen, Messias-Moses redivivus-Menschensohn, ATANT 17 (Zurich: Zwingli Verlag, 1948) (English translation King and Messiah, trans. G.W. Anderson (London: Lutterworth Press, 1955)). 13 Cf. B.S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (London: SCM Press, 1992). 14 T.N.D. Mettinger, King and Messiah: The Civil and Sacral Legitimation of the Israelite Kings, ConBOT 8 (Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1976).

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they might relate to the concerns of modern systematic theology. This question could be asked, however, along the same lines as my brief discussion of Ezekiel, and in the remaining pages of this article I should like to sketch a possible discussion of it. I began with a definition of Old Testament theology, but to say anything sensible about the Messiah within such a theology we also need a definition of the Messiah. The problem here is that it can be defined very narrowly or very broadly. A very narrow definition would make the link with the Israelite king explicit, and would regard any expected deliverer as the Messiah only if he was a new David, a descendant of the pre-exilic monarchs. This is how many Jews and Christians understood the ‘messianic’ prophecies in Jeremiah 23:5–6 or 33:14–18, and it is the reason why, in order to justify the claim of Jesus to be the Messiah, the New Testament writers had to show that he was of the line of David; if he were not, he could not be the Messiah. Hence the Matthaean and Lukan genealogies, the nativity in Bethlehem and so on. A very broad definition of the Messiah would be that used by most sociologists, where the term is used by analogy with the Jewish and Christian tradition to apply to any charismatic leader, real or expected. Of course terms are ours to use, and there is no point in saying that one or other of these uses, or any other, is the ‘true’ meaning of the term ‘Messiah’ as it exists in modern English, as opposed to ancient Hebrew or Aramaic. But for the biblical scholar neither use is very helpful, because they filter out either too many texts or too few. I think a good definition is that provided by Jacob Neusner in the collection Judaisms and their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era, which begins like this: A Judaism comprises a world view and a way of life that together comes to expression in the social world of a group of Jews. The ‘Judaisms’ of the title therefore constitute several such ways of life and world views addressed to groups of Jews. A Messiah in a Judaism is a man who at the end of history, at the eschaton, will bring salvation to the Israel conceived by the social group addressed by the way of life and world view of that Judaism. Judaisms and their Messiahs at the age of the beginning of Christianity therefore encompass a group of religious systems that form a distinct family, all characterized by two traits: (1) address to ‘Israel’ and (2) reference to diverse passages of the single common holy writing (‘Old Testament’, ‘written Torah’).15

This is narrow enough for our purposes, since it treats the Messiah as a Jewish phenomenon and also limits its reference to an eschatological context: not just any religious leader, but a Jewish one, and not at just any time, but only in the last days. But it is also broad enough; it does not, for example, run into difficulties when faced with the Messiah of Judah and the Messiah of Aaron at Qumran on the grounds that one of these is a royal figure and the other is not. It sees messianism as squarely an aspect of Jewish eschatological expectations, but allows that in different forms of Judaism, which includes early Christianity, the Messiah may appear in different guises. Now as with my discussion of Ezekiel, so here, it is plain that many of the texts to which different ‘Judaisms’ have appealed for their idea of the Messiah were not written in the context of such an eschatological scheme. It is at least arguable that 15

J. Neusner, E.S. Frerichs and W.S. Green (eds), Judaisms and their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. ix.

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the prophecies of a new David in Jeremiah are meant to refer, not to a figure of the end-time, but to a new king who will be not the end of David’s line but the beginning of a new dynasty which will last for a very long time and make what we would call an eschatological intervention by God unnecessary. In the case of another important ‘messianic’ prophecy, Isaiah 32:1 (‘Behold, a king will reign in righteousness’), it is entirely possible that the prophecy is not predictive at all, but is a kind of wisdom saying, pointing out that it is by righteousness that a king – any king – does or should reign. It is equally plain that such texts, once read in the context of a prior commitment to the idea of an eschatological deliverer, can be made to yield a ‘messianic’ sense; the history of reception of these texts makes that obvious. I suppose that, still keeping to the model of my discussion of Ezekiel, the question that concerns me is whether the messianic idea, for all that it distorts the plain sense of these texts, is none the less also in some way their source. And just as Ezekiel’s concern for the honour of Yahweh’s name is recognizably an important source for Judaeo-Christian monotheism, despite the fact that Ezekiel was not yet in that sense monotheistic himself, so ancient Israel’s thinking about the monarchy can be seen to lie at the root of later messianism, despite the great gulf between the two. Had there never been a monarchy in Israel, and had it not taken on the high ideological stance which the prophets often in fact criticized, messianism could hardly have taken root. That is where much of the Scandinavian work on kingship has been so important. When, as perhaps is the case with Bentzen, it tried to show that messianism is already latent in the kingship ideology of the Psalms, and even more, that people in Israel fused kingship with the image of Moses and with DeuteroIsaiah’s suffering servant, it overplayed its hand. But it could be said that it saw real, not illusory, lines of connection between ancient religio-political ideas and the messianic hopes of Jews and Christians. And this says something about the continuity of Judaism, helping us to see that – despite its enormous diversity – ancient Israel and the Judaism (or Judaisms) that succeeded it share certain ways of thinking and form a single religious tradition with certain common features. No one in ancient Israel believed in the Messiah, and the texts they wrote which would later come to be taken as messianic were not so intended. Yet messianism was not simply an alien idea stuck unnaturally on to Judaism, but one which developed insights there from early times. What are these insights? One is the intimate connection of God with political reality. Long before messianism appeared on the scene, writers in Israel were engaged in a violent dialogue about the legitimacy of kingship. Whatever the compositionhistory of the so-called Deuteronomistic History may have been, it can hardly be doubted that it bears witness to strongly opposed beliefs about the monarchy: whether it was divinely ordained, or evidence of rebellion against God. Even the notion that God himself is the true king of Israel does not settle this debate, because the kingship of God might be honoured through eschewing human kingship or, as in many human societies, by setting up a human king to be God’s image on earth. Language about the making of human beings in God’s image may indeed derive from what was sometimes said of ancient kings, and represent a ‘democratizing’ of such language. But what these fiercely opposed traditions had in common is just as important as what they quarrelled over. The common ground is a passionate belief that God cares

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how human society is ordered. The kind of ‘indifferentism’ that would characterize thinking about monarchy in some post-Reformation Christian traditions, notably Lutheran and Anglican, is hard to justify from the pages of the Old Testament, where it matters extremely how political affairs are organized, because God has a clear view of his own about such matters which it behoves human beings to discover and to implement. The idea of the Messiah is of a piece with this, because it presupposes that a day will come when God will find means of intervening to establish his own rule, and that he will do so through a human, and hence potentially political, agent. The Messiah is a human being among others: this is stressed even in the type of Judaism most inclined to believe in intervention through God in person, Christianity, which went through agonies to insist that the heavenly redeemer in whom it believed was nevertheless truly human. It is familiar ground that most Jewish eschatological predictions are, seen through later Christian eyes, rather strikingly realistic and this-worldly, and reflect a belief that God’s blueprint for the future age still involves political realities, just as it still involves birth and death. The enormous gulf between, say, the royal Psalms on the one hand and the messianic hopes of late Jewish apocalyptic on the other should not be allowed to obscure the shared commitment to the belief that God is interested in the world order and has specific and detailed plans for it. Forms of Christianity that deny this are no longer in continuity with the tradition that runs through all the types of Judaism that were concerned either with kingship, pro or con, or with the Messiah, pro or con. I do not say they are wrong, only that they are out of step with biblical emphases; these two things for me are not analytically related. Secondly, a point that perhaps may seem more negative: thinking about the Messiah, and thinking about the various political institutions such as kingship which were its forerunners and necessary preconditions, are characterized equally by extreme diversity. Some Jewish scholars (see, for example, William Scott Green in the volume mentioned earlier16) see the very interest in ‘THE Messiah’ in Judaism as already introducing a Christian bias into the discussion. One wonders whether it would have occurred to us to have a seminar series on the theme ‘King and Messiah’ if it had not been for Christian interest in the Messiah, which has kept the subject central when in a purely Jewish context it might have become little more than a footnote in religious history. Of course, there were and are many Jews for whom the concept of the Messiah is quite remote, and others for whom it makes sense to speak of a messianic age but not of the Messiah. Once again, we can say that this kind of diversity in expectations is matched by the diversity of political institutions which existed at various periods in Old Testament times. A characteristic feature of Judaism in all periods is the attempt to detect divine providence in whatever institutions there are, and to hope for deliverance either through or from these institutions. In many ways the book of Esther is one of the best illustrations of this, despite its reputation as a radically untheological work: Mordecai says to Esther, ‘Who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?’ (Esther 4:14), surely an expression of faith in divine providence if ever there was one. 16

W.S. Green, ‘Introduction: Messiah in Judaism: Rethinking the Question’, in Neusner et al. (eds), Judaisms and their Messiahs, pp. 1–13.

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Yet in the same breath he comments, ‘If you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from some other quarter’. The primary faith is in divine providence to use all circumstances to bring Israel deliverance, but at the same time there is a conviction that the present circumstances offer an opportunity of co-operating with these providential designs. Belief in the Messiah rests ultimately on the belief that God can be relied on to have the right people in place at the right time to save and deliver Israel, whether through the specific vehicle of a descendant of David or in some other way. The very diversity of the hope attests a belief in God’s ingenuity and versatility in turning hopeless situations into occasions of salvation and deliverance. Thirdly, the definition of the Messiah I quoted from Neusner specifies the deliverance of Israel – whether all Jews or the Jews who belong to the Judaism in question. It does not envisage the salvation of Gentiles, or any kind of universal deliverance involving also the natural world. In some ways this fails to do justice to some later apocalypses, and also to rabbinic thought, where the messianic age, whether or not it includes a Messiah, brings the gathering in of the Gentiles alongside the salvation of Israel. Here it is certainly possible to speak of a theological inheritance from the Old Testament, and not just from post-biblical books. Whether the term ‘universalism’ should be used of any biblical texts is disputed, though (as Anthony Gelston points out in his article ‘Universalism in Deutero-Isaiah’) it depends very much on our definition of universalism.17 But at least we may say that the coming rule of the restored Israel (probably without a king at its head) over surrounding lands is thought of as a mild and beneficent rule, not as cruel domination. And in earlier texts the king who will exercise rightful dominion over all nations will be the king who attends to the needs of the poor and needy, no doubt abroad as well as at home – Psalm 72 perhaps exemplifies this. This is part of the ideology of kingship outside, and indeed long before, Israel’s monarchy, and is found in many ancient Near Eastern texts. Jewish belief that God would in the last days include the Gentiles in his blessings on Israel, and Christian belief that these last days had begun and that the conversion of Gentiles to the new faith was evidence of this, thus have roots that reach back well beyond the Exile, and they are bound up with kingship from early times. The underlying belief here is that the one God must have benign purposes for the whole world he has made, and that the election of Israel has to be understood within that context. We can see such a belief at work in most Old Testament texts, including those like Amos that go so far as to question the election of Israel on the basis of God’s universal moral demands. Clearly it is possible to exaggerate the universalism of the Old Testament, and some, perhaps through a Christian commitment, have done so: I think, for example, that Zimmerli’s insistence that the nations are to be saved in Ezekiel is probably a Christian exaggeration,18 and the same could be said for von Rad’s insistence on the traditional translation ‘in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed’ in Gen. 12:3 17

A. Gelston, ‘Universalism in Second Isaiah’, JTS NS 43 (1992), pp. 377–98. See W. Zimmerli, Ezechiel, BKAT 13.2 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1969), pp. 877–8, 915 (English translation Ezekiel 2 (25–48), trans. J.D. Martin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979–83), pp. 248, 277). 18

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against the normal preference in modern scholarship for ‘by you shall all the families of the earth bless themselves’.19 Nevertheless the gathering in of the nations is an authentic Jewish theme, and also an authentic element in the theology of the Old Testament. Where it occurs in late messianic texts, it rests on something that is already present in earlier Israelite tradition, however differently conceptualized. In this article I have tried to present a model for what might be meant by ‘Old Testament theology’ as a discipline that can be practised by theologians and by biblical specialists, in which a line is traced from the original Old Testament texts to the concepts in later Judaism and Christianity which both rest upon them and in some measure influence the way in which they are now read. I have applied this approach to the question of the Messiah, trying to show both how messianism departed from the texts to which it appealed, but yet how it developed lines of thinking already present in those texts, in a manner sometimes now called a feedback loop. I hope thereby to have contributed something both to the question of messianism and to the theoretical basis of Old Testament theology as a discipline that may continue – despite the very proper criticisms of Albertz and others – to flourish in the world of biblical studies.

19 See G. von Rad, Das erste Buch Mose, Genesis, ATD 2.4 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1956) (English translation Genesis, trans. J.A. Marks, OTL (London: SCM Press, 1961)).

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Chapter 23

Covenant in Old Testament Theology Sometimes I speculate on books that do not exist: Dr Johnson’s Life of Boswell; Shakespeare’s Queen Elizabeth I; Jane Austen’s History of the French Revolution. Among these more or less impossible works is Julius Wellhausen’s Theology of the Old Testament. Could one conceive of Wellhausen’s having written such a volume? Surely not. Wellhausen understood his work as historical and philological; he was not particularly interested in theology as a discipline. He would have understood very well Rainer Albertz’s objections to Old Testament theology, and, like him, would surely have preferred the history of Israelite religion.1 Old Testament theology as it has been practised in the last hundred years would have seemed to Wellhausen a falsely systematizing project, smoothing out the discrepancies and unevennesses in the development of the religious thought and practice of ancient Israel to produce a misleadingly reconciled picture. Above all, he would not (I believe) have seen how it could accommodate the two major disjunctions in that development: the work of the classical prophets in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, and the codification of priestly torah after the Exile. Though he would have said that both developments were theological, in the sense of concerned with conceptions of God, he saw them as so changing the previous course of religious history that they could not be brought into a consistent scheme. Indeed, that was the whole point of Wellhausen’s startlingly novel way of understanding the Old Testament.2 It was not the unified literary product of a single religion or theology, but the legacy of at least three incompatible religious conceptions: early Yahwism, the ‘natural’ religion of an ancient people very like its neighbours; prophetic faith, in which Yahweh was set free from his automatic bond with Israel and conceived as free to destroy them if their conduct deserved it; and a priestly religion of cultic ‘good works’, guaranteeing the presence of God through correct observance, understood by him as continuous with later Judaism. An ‘Old Testament Theology’ would have been the hopeless attempt to comprehend these three incompatible things in a single system.

1

See R. Albertz, Religionsgeschichte Israels in alttestamentlicher Zeit, 2 vols (Göttingen, 1992) (English translation A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, 2 vols (London, 1994)). See also Albertz’s essay ‘Religionsgeschichte Israels statt Theologie des Alten Testaments! Plaidoyer für eine forschungsgeschichtliche Umorientierung’, in Religionsgeschichte Israels oder Theologie des Alten Testaments?, JBTh 10 (NeukirchenVluyn, 1995), pp. 3–24. 2 See J. Wellhausen, Geschichte Israels, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1878), republished as Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels in subsequent editions (English translation from the 2nd edn (1883), Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Edinburgh, 1885)).

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Now a particular difficulty in this would have been posed by the idea of the covenant. For Wellhausen, the covenant between Israel and Yahweh was an idea that owed its existence to the great prophets. A ‘covenant’ is, metaphorically, a treaty, in other words a two-sided contract. Characteristic of early Yahwism was that it did not see the relationship between Israel and its God as contractual in character. It saw it as the same kind of natural bond that all ancient nations believed to exist with their national god: Yahweh simply was the God of Israel, Israel simply was the people of Yahweh, and the notion that this link depended on any specific decision, or that it could be broken by the actions of one or other of the two partners, was inconceivable. As for the substance of the national faith, it was summed up principally in the proposition that Jehovah is the god of Israel. But ‘God’ was equivalent to ‘helper’; that was the meaning of the word. ‘Help’, assistance in all occasions of life – that was what Israel looked for from Jehovah, not ‘salvation’ in the theological sense. The forgiveness of sins was a matter of subordinate importance; it was involved in the ‘help’, and was a matter not of faith but of experience. The relation between the people and God was a natural one as that of son to father; it did not rest upon observance of the conditions of a pact.3

It was the great prophets, according to Wellhausen, who first envisaged the possibility that Yahweh had freely chosen Israel, which in turn had decided to take Yahweh as its God and to be obedient to his guiding hand.4 Through the work of Amos, Hosea and Isaiah, Israelite thinkers began to conceive that the Yahweh–Israel relationship was artificial, in the sense that it had come into being through a joint human–divine decision at some point in the past, and that it implied a contract with terms to be observed by both parties – as in any contract. The prophets themselves did not use any particular technical term for the contract, but their followers – among whom should be identified the authors of Deuteronomy – soon came to use the normal Hebrew word for ‘treaty’, berith. This was a wholly novel way of conceptualizing relations between God and human beings, and it constituted (according to Wellhausen) one of the original insights that ancient Israel had contributed to human thought about theological matters. The prophetic insight was soon read back into earlier sources, so that the covenant-making was projected back into the past, and said to have taken place on Sinai/Horeb where Moses had mediated it to the people; but this was, of course, a historical fiction. It resulted in the reconceptualization of old laws as the terms of the covenant, as may be seen most strikingly in the Decalogue, where moral obligations are presented as though they flowed from Yahweh’s contract with Israel instead of being (as they really were) general ethical principles.

3 ‘Israel’, Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 13 (9th edn, 1881), republished as an appendix to Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1885). This quotation appears in E.W. Nicholson, God and His People: Covenant and Theology in the Old Testament (Oxford, 1986), p. 4. 4 This attribution of central importance to the prophets as those who developed the idea of a two-sided covenant between Yahweh and Israel was developed by R. Kraetschmar in Die Bundesvorstellung im Alten Testament (Marburg, 1896); see Nicholson, God and His People, pp. 15–18, esp. p. 18.

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Wellhausen argued that the insight, once gained, was unfortunately lost again in post-exilic Israel. The Jews of post-exilic times did, it is true, retain the idea that Yahweh made demands, and was not simply by nature the God of Israel. But they failed to keep hold of what might, in more modern terms, be called the existential dimension of the covenant idea: the notion that it required radical obedience especially in the sphere of human social relations. Instead they lapsed back into a common ancient pattern of seeing human obligation as consisting primarily in correct cultic observance. So long as the sacrificial and purification rituals were maintained, Israel’s salvation by Yahweh was assured. The covenant was no longer a living thing, but a dead code of literal observances, and most commonly later writers spoke of it as something God had simply given or established: the sense that Israel had had to accept it in free assent, to sign up to it (so to speak), was lost. This third phase of the religion of Israel thus saw the loss of the great ethical insights of the prophets, demanding acute moral response, and their replacement by an ordered and lifeless system of legal ordinances. Thus the covenant concept would have presented the most acute difficulty for anyone trying to base a Theology of the Old Testament on Wellhausen’s work. It is particularly ironic, then, that this very concept should have served as the very heart of the unity of the Old Testament witness for one of the two most important Old Testament theologians of the twentieth century, Walter Eichrodt.5 By the time Eichrodt was writing, in the years before the Second World War, Wellhausen’s literary analysis of the Old Testament and especially of the Pentateuch had come to be almost universally accepted, yet the picture of the development of Israelite religion he had based on this had almost faded from view. Now people thought of ‘Mosaic Yahwism’ as a system in place from very early in the history of Israel, and therefore as the firm foundation on which the prophets had been able to build: when these men condemned Israel for disloyalty to Yahweh and called for a return to the old ways, they were to be taken at face value. Where Wellhausen had seen them as innovators, propounding as a new idea the antiquity of a contract between God and people, Old Testament scholars now saw them as conservatives, appealing to traditions that were genuinely old. The covenant had been the true basis of Israel’s life from earliest times, and Mosaic Yahwism was already a distinctive faith, set off from its pagan environment. Such a picture resulted from a slow but steady back-pedalling from Wellhausen’s position, arriving eventually at a point of view almost the opposite of his, despite the fact that (because scholars still believed in J, E, D and P) there was little awareness that his heritage was in reality being largely abandoned. Nevertheless Eichrodt was well aware that he was attempting something that Wellhausen would not have undertaken, though he presents this as being because Wellhausen and his followers were historians rather than theologians in their approach, rather than on the grounds that Wellhausen thought the covenant a late arrival. The historical treatment of ancient Israelite thought and practice, he wrote,

5 W. Eichrodt, Theologie des Alten Testaments (Stuttgart, vol. 1, 1933, vol. 2, 1935, vol. 3, 1939) (English translation Theology of the Old Testament (London, vol. 1, 1960 (from 6th edn of the German, 1959), vol. 2, 1967 (from 5th edn of the German of vols 1 & 2 in one volume))).

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THE OLD TESTAMENT: CANON, LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY reaches its high-water mark with Wellhausen and his school, and for decades diverted work on OT theology into historical channels … Of what avail was it that a Beck or a Hofmann should attempt, about the middle of the last [i.e. the nineteenth] century, to develop a system of biblical doctrine? By making use of the OT for this purpose they were indeed standing up for its vital importance for the Christian faith, but they made no headway against the rising stream of historical investigation.6

Eichrodt goes on to argue that, though a historical approach is needed and cannot be ignored, it overlooked the need for a more systematizing and consciously theological approach: the method had a particularly fatal influence both on OT theology and on the understanding of the OT in every other aspect, because it fostered the idea that once the historical problems were clarified everything had been done. The essential inner coherence of the Old and New Testaments was reduced, so to speak, to a thin thread of historical connection and causal sequence between the two . . . There was no longer any unity to be found in the OT, only a collection of detached periods which were simply the reflections of as many different religions.7

Wellhausen would have said, it may be guessed, that this is precisely what the Old Testament was, and that the attempt to systematize it theologically was therefore doomed to failure. But Eichrodt sees this as part of Wellhausen’s excessive attachment to the historical at the expense of the theological. It is high time that the tyranny of historicism in OT studies was broken and the proper approach to our task re-discovered. This is no new problem, certainly, but it is one that needs to be solved anew in every epoch of knowledge – the problem of how to understand the realm of OT belief in its structural unity and how, by examining on the one hand its religious environment and on the other its essential coherence with the NT, to illuminate its profoundest meaning.8 6 Eichrodt, Theology, vol 1, p. 29; ‘…hat mit Wellhausen und seiner Schule einen Höhepunkt erreicht und die Arbeit an der alttestamentlichen Theologie auf Jahrzehnte ins historische Fahrwasser hinübergelenkt. Was half es, daß ein Beck oder Hofmann um die Mitte des vorigen Jahrhunderts ein System der biblischen Lehre zu entwickeln versuchten? So gewiß sie mit der Benutzung des Alten Testaments zu diesem Zweck ein Lebensinteresse des christlichen Glaubens verfochten, so kamen sie doch gegen den reißenden Strom der Geschichtsforschung nicht an, ganz abgesehen von den Mängeln des dogmatischen Systems, in das sie die alttestamentliche Gedankenwelt einspannten’ (Theologie, p. 3). 7 Eichrodt, Theology, pp. 30–31; ‘… sie ist für die alttestamentliche Theologie wie für die Gesamtauffassung des Alten Testaments überhaupt dadurch verhängnisvoll geworden, daß sie die Meinung großzog, als ob mit der Aufhellung der geschichtlichen Probleme alles geschehen sei. Der innere Wesenszusammenhang zwischen Altem und Neuem Testament wurde sozusagen auf dem dünnen Faden der geschichtlichen Verknüpfung und ursächlichen Folge der beiden Großen reduziert … [so] daß man im Alten Testament keine Einheit mehr fand, sondern sich ablösende Perioden, die womöglich ebenso viele verschiedene Religionen widerspiegeln’ (Theologie, pp. 3–4). 8 Eichrodt, Theology, p. 31; ‘In der Tat ist es hohe Zeit, daß auf dem Gebiet des Alten Testaments einmal mit der Alleinherrschaft des Historismus gebrochen und der Weg zurückgefunden wird zu der alten und in jeder wissenschaftlichen Epoche neu zu lösenden

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And he has no doubt what is the concept that will act as the guiding thread in attempting this rediscovery. It is the covenant. The concept in which Israelite thought gave definitive expression to the binding of the people to God and by means of which they established firmly from the start the particularity of their knowledge of him was the covenant … it can be demonstrated that the covenantunion between Yahweh and Israel is an original element in all sources … Indeed, this is still true even of those passages where the word berit has disappeared altogether … Moreover, in the post-Mosaic era, wherever the relationship with God has the character of a relationship of grace, that is to say, it is founded on a primal act in history, maintained on definite conditions and protected by a powerful divine Guardian, then even where the covenant is not explicitly mentioned the spiritual premisses of a covenant relationship with God are manifestly present … The safest starting-point for the critical examination of Israel’s relationship with God is still the plain impression given by the OT itself that Moses, taking over a concept of long standing in secular life, based the worship of Yahweh on a covenant agreement.9

Thus covenant becomes the centrepiece of Eichrodt’s Theology. The idea that it was an artificial concept which reconfigured Israel’s relationship with Yahweh from the eighth century onwards is altogether lost, and a synthesis becomes possible according to which the Old Testament (indeed, the Bible) as a finished whole witnesses to an essentially unified idea of how Israel was related to its God. The problem with continuing to use the covenant as the focus for Old Testament theology today is that Wellhausen’s basic hypothesis has in recent years reasserted itself. One may think primarily of the work of Lothar Perlitt, who has sought to establish that the covenant as a bilateral contract became important only towards the end of the monarchic period, and was then read back into earlier times, very much Aufgabe, die alttestamentliche Glaubenswelt in ihrer struckturellen Einheit zu begreifen und unter Berücksichtigung ihrer religiösen Umwelt einerseits, ihres Wesenzusammenhanges mit dem Neuen Testament andererseits in ihrem tiefsten Sinngehalt zu deuten’ (Theologie, p. 4; Eichrodt’s emphasis). How extraordinarily modern this sounds! It could stand as a statement of the thought of many now pursuing ‘canonical’ approaches to biblical theology – both in its positive proposal, and in its criticism of what it sees as an all-too-prevalent ‘historicism’. Sometimes I wonder whether this ‘historicism’ ever in fact existed in the twentieth century except in the minds of its critics, for whom it has always served as a useful foil for their own thinking. 9 Eichrodt, Theology, pp. 36–7; ‘Der Begriff des Bundes, in dem sich für israelitisches Denken die Beziehung des Volkes zu Gott entscheidenden Ausdruck verlieh, stellt die Besonderheit israelitischen Gotterkennens von vornherein fest … Indessen läßt sich in allen Quellen trotz ihrer teilweise recht fragmentarischen Gestalt der Bundesschluß zwischen Jahve und Israel als ursprünglicher Bestandteil nachweisen, und zwar auch dort, wo das Wort berith verloren gegangen ist … Und wenn in der nachmosaischen Zeit das Gottesverhältnis, auch wo nicht vom Bund geredet wird, als ein Gnadenverhältnis gilt, begründet durch eine historische Anfangstat, aufrecht erhalten unter bestimmten Bedingungen, geschützt durch einen mächtigen göttlichen Helfer, so sind damit offenbar die geistigen Grundlagen für ein Bundesverhältnis mit Gott gegeben … So bleibt die vom AT selbst an die Hand gegebene Vorstellung, daß Mose, auf einen aus dem profanen Leben längst bekannten Begriff zurückgreifend, die Jahveverehrung auf einen Bundesschluß begründete, die gesicherte Grundlage für die Beurteilung des israelitischen Gottesverhältnisses’ (Theologie, pp. 6–7).

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as Wellhausen and Kraetschmar had argued.10 Late datings for J, as by Schmid11 and Van Seters,12 have also fed this stream of thought. And Ernest Nicholson has come to very similar conclusions, in his detailed study God and His People. On the face of it, one would therefore think that we are back in the situation as Wellhausen left it, and that the covenant could hardly serve as an organizing theme for a theology of the Old Testament. Indeed, such a theology seems itself to be an impossibility, at least as conceived by Eichrodt, von Rad13 and most others who have written Old Testament theologies; for the development of Israelite religious thinking has once again been shown to divide into such discrete periods that no systematizing approach can possibly do it justice. If an idea as important as the covenant became central only in the eighth or seventh century, then not only can it not serve as a focal point for a theology of the Old Testament: there cannot be such a focal point, since the whole conception of the relationship between Israel and its God – which surely must be at the centre of a theology – underwent a complete sea-change through the work of the prophets. Does not the work surveyed and endorsed by Nicholson derail the whole project of Old Testament theology? If by Old Testament theology we understand a discipline that seeks to show a system of religious thought to be found more or less throughout the Old Testament material, then I think it does, unless we go down one particular road. Eichrodt, we might say with hindsight, was trying to have it both ways. He was looking for a co-ordinating principle which would bring together most of the contents of the Old Testament, at least its central parts, and he thought that using the covenant idea would achieve this. But he happened also to believe, against Wellhausen and others but with the general drift of Old Testament scholarship in the 1930s, that the covenant really was an ancient concept, so that it could be seen as organizing Israel’s beliefs not only at the level of the Old Testament text but in historical reality. Once we abandon this belief in an early covenant, and return to Wellhausen’s late dating of it, then one half of Eichrodt’s package deal has been lost. All that is left, if we want to go on regarding the covenant as central, is to see its centrality as functioning at the level of the Old Testament as a book, rather than as the record of what Israelites actually believed in historical times. In other words, the best option will be to adopt what would nowadays be called a ‘canonical’ approach, in which the covenant is central to the Old Testament considered as a unified Scripture, even though it may not have been central in certain particular periods considered historically. It might even be suggested that that is what Eichrodt himself was really doing; it was simply that the prevalence in his day of relatively early datings for the covenant idea made it possible for history and theology to mesh together rather smoothly, and

10

L. Perlitt, Bundestheologie im Alten Testament, WMANT 36 (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1969). H.H. Schmid, Der sogenannte Jahwist: Beobachtungen und Fragen zur Pentateuchforschung (Zürich, 1976). 12 J. Van Seters, In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origin of Biblical History (New Haven, 1983). 13 G. von Rad, Theologie des Alten Testaments (Munich, vol. 1, 1957, vol. 2, 1960) (English translation Old Testament Theology (Edinburgh and London, vol. 1, 1962 (from 2nd German edn, 1957), vol. 2, 1965 (from 3rd German edn, 1960))). 11

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so conceal the essentially text-centred basis of his synthesis. He presents his work as combining history with theological synthesis, arguing that it is essential ‘to have the historical principle operating side by side with the systematic in a complementary role’.14 But if the historical principle reveals that the covenant was not in fact central to Israel as a historical reality, or at least not in some periods, we could still continue to allow the systematic principle to operate: only it would now be at the level of the text rather than of the reality behind the text. Eichrodt would have been uncomfortable with this, but it could be argued that he need not have been. In the context of modern biblical studies and modern theology such a shift from historical reality to text is not in the least a problem, for vigorous currents of thought in both now regard the textual level as all-important, and the historical as of very small moment. Why should we not have a ‘canonical’ or ‘final form’ theology of the Old Testament? And if we do, would not the covenant still be an excellent focus around which to organize it? Brevard Childs’s Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments15 shows that it is indeed possible to identify covenant as a central concept in the Bible regardless of whether or not it operated as central in any given period – indeed, in principle it could be so treated even if it never existed in the thought of actual ancient Israelites at all, though that might be felt a bit far fetched. As the texts stand, God entered into a covenant relationship with Israel through Moses, and it is with that belief that many Old Testament texts operate. It may perfectly well be, as Wellhausen argued, that the covenant was an invention (or discovery) of the classical prophets, but their books as they have come down to us assume that it was an older concept to which they appealed, and that is what matters for a ‘canonical’ theology of the Old Testament. It may be that some of those who favour a ‘canonical’ approach to matters such as this also tend to favour earlier datings of important Old Testament concepts than some others do, and I suspect on the question of the covenant many would probably be closer to Eichrodt than to Wellhausen. But my point is that this is an entirely contingent matter: in principle one might be a pure Perlitt student so far as the history of the covenant concept is concerned and yet, as a ‘canonical’ interpreter, continue to treat covenant as one (or the) central theme of the Old Testament (or of the whole Bible). For Childs the covenant is certainly a central concept, even though not the controlling one that it was for Eichrodt. Like Eichrodt, he argues that it is often present in essence in the Old Testament even where the word berit does not occur. ‘To summarize, even though the Deuteronomic formulation of covenant dominates whenever the topic arises, this theology consistently rests on earlier tradition which, though far from identical, has a very strong theological continuity in its earliest witness to a relationship between God and his people.’16 And he maintains that there is a characteristic ‘Old Testament understanding’ of covenant which overrules – for a canonical reading – the details of historical development, and renders the questions asked by such as Wellhausen essentially unimportant for the theological task of reading Scripture: 14

Eichrodt, Theology, p. 32; ‘…daß man das historische Prinzip dem systematischen ergänzend zur Seite treten läßt’ (Theologie, p. 5; Eichrodt’s emphasis). 15 B.S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible (London, 1992). 16 Ibid., p. 418.

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THE OLD TESTAMENT: CANON, LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY It distorts the theological significance of covenant if one literary level is isolated and historicized within a developmental trajectory of Israel’s religion. Rather, the various levels have been fused into an authoritative, literary composition – that is the meaning of canon – in which one particular theological formulation of God’s relation to Israel in terms of a covenant has become normative, namely Deuteronomy, and then read into the entire tradition. The shapers of the scripture were uninterested in preserving the historical lines of the development of Israel’s covenantal theology, much to the frustration of modern research. Rather, they interpreted the tradition in terms of its substance which they assumed to be best expressed as a covenant regardless of when or how God established his relationship with Israel. It is therefore quite impossible to speak theologically of Old Testament covenant without reckoning with the perspective of the final editors of the collection who shaped the literature as a whole.17

This is, perhaps, not all that far from what Eichrodt might have said, had he known of the researches of Perlitt and others and accepted them on historical grounds. He, like Childs, regarded the Old Testament’s overall theological witness as more significant than the detail of its historical origins. Along these lines his basic project could probably have survived the loss of the ‘Mosaic’ dating for the covenant concept. But suppose one thinks, on other grounds, that a ‘canonical’ approach to Old Testament theology is undesirable, as many biblical scholars surely do, and that no theology will be satisfactory unless it is rooted in the historical actuality of ancient Israel. Suppose, in fact, that one is much nearer to Wellhausen than to Childs. Can such a person write a theology of the Old Testament, or at least develop ideas that could be used in one? And, if so, can the covenant still play a central role in it? I believe the answer to both questions is yes. But this depends on a somewhat different idea about the nature of Old Testament theology from what we find in Eichrodt (or Childs). As Albertz argues, ‘Theology of the Old Testament’ is often conceived as a rather a-historical subject, a systematic summary of the Old Testament’s ‘message’ from what would nowadays be called a synchronic perspective. 18 Unless we adopt either a canonical or a ‘new literary’ approach, that will be an inappropriate project if, as Wellhausen argued and as Albertz agrees, the religion of ancient Israel passed through a series of phases; for a systematizing theology of the Old Testament will tend to flatten them out, and produce a two-dimensional picture. But Old Testament theology need not work in that way. It could be conceived as part of the history of ideas, alongside the history of institutions that forms the subject-matter of studies of the religion of ancient Israel. Albertz allows for this possibility, though it is not where his own major interest lies.19 If Old Testament theology is conceived of as the intellectual history of ancient Israel, then there will be no difficulty in allowing for development and change, even for contradiction within the thought of the ancient Israelites: it will be e genere historico, as Gabler thought all biblical theology 17

Ibid., p. 419. Albertz, ‘Religionsgeschichte Israels’, p. 11. 19 See R. Albertz, ‘Hat die Theologie des Alten Testaments doch noch eine Chance?’, Religionsgeschichte Israels oder Theologie des Alten Testaments, pp. 177–87, esp. on p. 181 in response to my own paper in the same volume, ‘Alttestamentliche Theologie nach Albertz?’, pp. 25–34. 18

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20

should be. At the same time it will obviously not be ‘confessional’ in character: it will not tell us what we ought to believe on the basis of the Old Testament. (This ‘neutrality’ with regard to our own beliefs was of course another point intended by Gabler in that description: the biblical theologian was not a systematician but provided the systematician with raw materials, as it were.) If we take Old Testament theology to mean a description of the development of ideas in ancient Israel, as evidenced in the Old Testament, there will be no particular difficulty in dealing with the covenant idea even if it passed through several stages of development or is, as Perlitt and others have argued, a relatively late arrival in Israel’s thought about God. It is just here that Ernest Nicholson has made a signal contribution in his God and His People. He argues that the covenant idea, which we owe mainly to the work of the prophets, is one of the major distinguishing marks of Israel among the nations of the ancient Near East. Against the trend in the earlier twentieth century, he maintains, with Wellhausen, that the idea arrived no earlier than the eighth century, so that earlier Israel was not distinctive in this respect. But once it did arrive, it became the basis for a highly original way of thinking about the relationship of God and Israel and, potentially, about God and humankind in general. It ‘desacralizes’ or ‘disenchants’ the world, thereby making a marked advance in the understanding of what it means for God to be transcendent: In their condemnation of Israel and in the prophecies which some of them announced of a transformed Israel beyond judgement, they [sc. the prophets] gave a qualitatively new dimension not only to the perception of the nature of Yahweh as transcendent, but also to the concept of Israel as the ‘people of Yahweh’. Theirs was a radically theocentric understanding of Israel’s existence; whether explicitly or implicitly their vision of Israel was of a people summoned to live in single-minded obedience to the claims of God: herein lay Israel’s very raison d’être, and short of this it had none … They themselves did not engage in any systematic rationalization of Israel’s life on this basis. But what came to the fore in their preaching and the desacralized understanding of Israel which it embodied initiated, at the hands of others, just such a rationalization, And it was this that found expression in the notion that Israel’s relationship with Yahweh was a covenant relationship.21

That the Old Testament desacralizes the world would be affirmed by many who have worked in biblical theology, and it was certainly argued for in the so-called ‘Biblical Theology Movement’ in the period after the Second World War. But because of the then prevalent very early datings for the covenant, and the assumption that it formed a social institution in early Israel (expressed in the ‘amphictyony’ of the judges period), it was unclear where the great prophets fitted in to this development: on the whole they tended to be seen as mere transmitters of an already existing tradition. Nicholson’s work, resting on the researches of Perlitt and others and reaching back towards Wellhausen, pinpoints far more precisely how this desacralization came about.

20

J.P. Gabler, de justo discrimine theologiae biblicae et dogmaticae regundisque recte utriusque finibus (Altdorf, 1787), reprinted in his Kleinere theologische Schriften (Ulm, 1831), vol. 2, pp. 179–98; translated in J. Sandys-Wunsch and L. Eldridge, ‘J.P. Gabler and the Distinction between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology’, SJT 33 (1980), pp. 133–58. 21 Nicholson, God and His People, p. 211.

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It resulted from the prophetic refusal to see Israel and Yahweh as linked by a natural, and therefore automatic and unbreakable, bond. Instead, the prophets maintained, the relationship rested on choice on both sides: Yahweh had freely chosen Israel (and could therefore also reject it), and Israel had opted to obey Yahweh, but might fail to do so. It is precisely such a failure that the prophets pointed to, and in the light of which they foretold the doom of Yahweh’s chosen nation, though some of them at least foresaw a reconstitution of the bond through the supervening mercy of Yahweh. But how far the relationship came to be seen as grounded in a ‘covenant’, that is, a contract established through the freely given assent of both parties, may be seen in the way the new bond is portrayed in the ‘new covenant’ passage Jeremiah 31:31–4, where an insistence on the non-automatic character of the covenant is maintained even in a passage which is precisely concerned to say that God’s grace is in the future to be bestowed without the requirement of any human response, and that it is, indeed, guaranteed: so imbued is the author with the idea that the covenant was a two-sided affair with no built-in guarantees that he is constrained to produce a paradoxical theory according to which God himself promises to make possible the very response which he inexorably demands.22

As Nicholson suggests, this is more radical even than Wellhausen thought, for we understand now better than he did how far religion is normally the legitimation of an existing order in society. That a religious message should have as its task the de-legitimation of the bond between God and people – or the assertion that it can become possible again only on a wholly new basis – is a remarkable departure from the norm. Thus study of the covenant from a historical point of view has succeeded, paradoxically, in identifying one of the main distinctive features of the Old Testament, where earlier attempts to find this in some feature of the Old Testament constant across many periods (for example, in the idea that ‘God acts in history’) have largely failed. The historical study of the development of Israelite tradition – to which Ernest Nicholson has been a particularly distinguished contributor – has turned out to have implications for Old Testament theology, a pursuit usually regarded as quite distinct from the history of traditions or of the religion of Israel. Nicholson’s work on the covenant holds the promise of a reunification of ‘historical-critical’ and theological work on the Old Testament, on a historical rather than a systematizing or ‘canonical’ basis. It thus contributes to the unity of Old Testament study, which in our days has become a sadly fragmented and fissiparous discipline. He has in some respects taken us ‘back to Wellhausen’; but he has also shown that a Wellhausen informed by his researches could, after all, have written a Theology of the Old Testament. It is a great pleasure to be able to dedicate this essay to Ernest Nicholson, who is important to me certainly as a productive scholar and a valued colleague, but much more as a longstanding and trusted friend, to whom I owe so very much.

22

Ibid., p. 16.

Chapter 24

The Day of Yahweh in the Minor Prophets The ‘Day of Yahweh’ is a subject Old Testament study seems to have lost interest in. It was a lively topic of debate in the era of Gerhard von Rad and Sigmund Mowinckel, and still engaged scholarly interest twenty years ago, but lately it seems to have faded from the scene. In this essay my aim will be to suggest that a number of received opinions that go back to those earlier periods could do with reassessment, and that there is still life in what may seem a slightly stale subject. I shall look at the ‘Day of Yahweh’ from two points of view, historical and literary or ‘canonical’. I One of the most recent treatments of the Day of Yahweh is by Kevin Cathcart, in the Anchor Bible Dictionary (Cathcart 1992), and it is a pleasure to dedicate my own study to him, with gratitude for his friendship over many years. Cathcart surveys the history of interpretation of the Day of Yahweh, so full of speculation, and concludes that the only safe place to start an investigation is with Amos 5:18: ‘Alas for you who desire the day of the LORD! Why do you want the day of the LORD? It is darkness, not light … gloom, with no brightness in it’ (quotations following NRSV). This is almost certainly the earliest reference to the ‘day’ in the Old Testament. A history of the term can best proceed by examining what the background must have been, given that Amos is able to refer to it as something people already know about and to which they are looking forward, and then tracing its development from Amos onwards. But if we do this, I shall argue, we may reach a rather surprising conclusion. First, the background. If Amos condemns people in Northern Israel in his time who were looking forward to an occasion or event they referred to as ‘the Day of Yahweh’, then it must have formed part of a widespread popular expectation – otherwise his condemnation would have made no sense to his hearers. Furthermore, we may be able to learn a little more about the character of this supposedly joyful ‘day’ by seeing what kind of inversion of it Amos tells his audience to expect. If the day is to be ‘darkness, and not light’, then presumably it was a ‘day’ (not necessarily in the literal sense of a 24-hour period, but possibly in the broader sense of an ‘occasion’) on which the people looked for ‘light’. ‘Light’ is probably a metaphor for success and prosperity. Since their experience on that ‘day’ will be ‘as if someone fled from a lion and was met by a bear, or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall, and was bitten by a snake’ (5:19), then the popular expectation must have been of something that would induce a relaxed and comfortable feeling, the

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very opposite of this experience of being driven from pillar to post by a succession of terrors. All in all, there must have been a popular expectation of a ‘day’ on which God would bless his people and make them happy. So far, so obvious. Disagreement begins when scholars try to get a sharper focus on just what sort of occasion was envisaged. As is well known, there have been two main proposals. Mowinckel (1917, 1922, 1956) argued that the ‘day’ must be a cultic or liturgical occasion, a festival, in fact. This may be supported by the fact that the passage continues immediately after Amos’s denunciation of expectations of the day with ‘I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assembles’ (5:21), assuming that this pericope was originally linked to 5:18–20 and has not simply been placed here editorially. The expectation of ‘light’, on the cultic interpretation of the Old Testament that Mowinckel pioneered, would be a very natural one in the context of a cultic ‘day’. Amos’s announcement that doom would fall on the Day of Yahweh would thus be very much like our saying that some terrible disaster was going to strike on Christmas Day. One point that may be urged in support of this is that the imminence of the ‘day’ is not only asserted by Amos, but presupposed by him as part of the popular hope he is countering. If he had in mind a coming festival, this would make excellent sense, for his hearers would actually know exactly when the ‘day’ was due to fall, and he could give his prophecy a particularly strong claim by maintaining that it would be on that very day that disaster would strike. Of course this degree of specificity is a high-risk strategy for a prophet, but Amos strikes one as just the kind of person to take this risk. The alternative explanation has been that of von Rad (1959), who took the ‘Day of Yahweh’ to mean ‘the day of Yahweh’s battle’, deriving it from the (putative) Holy War tradition. This theory goes back to R.H. Charles (1913). Like the ‘day of Midian’ in Isaiah 9:4, the ‘Day of Yahweh’ was the name of a day when Yahweh routed his enemies on the battlefield and gave victory to Israel – or rather, the day on which he would do so in the future. It was part of a popular hope (sometimes described as ‘popular eschatology’, but I shall avoid this term for now). Amos saw that his contemporaries, who were already at war with the Aramaeans and were likely, in his view, soon to be oppressed by the Assyrians, had a groundless assurance that Yahweh would stand by them in all their conflicts. In particular, there would come a day when he would destroy not simply this or that enemy but all the foes of his holy people, on a ‘day’ he had appointed. On this interpretation, Amos’s audience were confidently looking forward to a reasonably imminent implementation of this promise of help. Amos’s task was to inform them that there would indeed be a ‘day of Yahweh’, but it would reverse all their confident expectations: the enemy would overpower them instead of being overpowered. But this would not spell the defeat of Yahweh; on the contrary, Yahweh himself would stand behind the enemy assault, and guarantee its success. There seems little hope of deciding rationally between these two explanations of the Day of Yahweh in Amos. But it is worth emphasizing the points on which they agree. First, there was a popular hope of divine intervention in world affairs, which would establish Israel in a position of supremacy vis-à-vis other nations, and especially its enemies. This was not a hope for some otherworldly realm, but for the transformation of the present world order into a state much more favourable to Israel. It might be accompanied by great meteorological disturbances – earthquake,

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fire, and so on – but it was not to be a ‘cosmic’ event that would change the course of nature itself or affect the order of the whole universe. Whether it was to be brought about by a unilateral act of Yahweh on a cultically significant occasion, or by his co-operation with the armies of Israel in conflict with their enemies, it would greatly change the present state of political relations in the Syro-Palestinian area and perhaps in the whole Middle East. Secondly, the hope had a certain urgency to it: it was not a matter of an expectation about the very remote future, but rather a belief that very soon Yahweh would step in to rectify the parlous condition of his people. Thirdly, such a hope would not have been possible unless people in general believed that Yahweh’s power extended beyond Israel and controlled the other nations – a belief that was, of course, normal in the ancient Near East, where most nations attributed victory over foreigners to their own god or gods (cf. the Moabite Stone). Yahweh’s universal dominion was the presupposition of the popular hope, not an idea first entertained by the prophets. Amos is not being original in asserting that Yahweh controls the fates of all nations in Israel’s general area, but in claiming that he will exercise this control against, rather than in favour of, the interests of Israel, his own special people. That is the scandal of Amos’s message. So much for what we can reconstruct of the expectation signalled by the phrase ‘Day of Yahweh’ before Amos. What became of the idea in later times? Isaiah seems to have shared Amos’s perspective on the matter, explaining that Yahweh has ‘a day’ against all human pride, which will have particularly dire consequences for Israel (Isaiah 2:12–17). In post-exilic times it was still possible to speak of the Day of Yahweh as a day of divine judgement on Israel, as we see in Joel 1:15. Here the locust-plague, or whatever exactly the disaster that is described is thought to be, is a ‘day’ of Yahweh against his people, resulting in famine, and in the suspension of the sacrificial system for lack of raw materials to offer. But in the second half of the book, we read of the Day of Yahweh as a day of judgement on other nations rather than on Israel, with Yahweh sitting in the ‘valley of Jehoshaphat’ to ‘judge all the neighbouring nations’ (Joel 3:12 (I shall cite Joel according to the English numbering)). How we interpret the different pictures here depends in large measure on our theory about the unity of the book of Joel. The majority view in modern scholarship, seen clearly in Wolff’s commentary (Wolff 1977), is to regard the book as a single whole and thus to use verses in the second part of the book (2:28–3:21) to help interpret those in the first part. If we do that, we shall arrive with Wolff at the conclusion that Joel was confronted with a locust-plague, which he saw as the first instalment of the ‘Day of Yahweh’, to be succeeded by a far more large-scale judgement that would include the punishment of all nations. References to the Day of Yahweh in chapter 2 are meant to show that the locusts in chapter 1 were only the forerunners of an invading army, and that army would be no merely local scourge but the ‘eschatological’ army of Yahweh, punishing and purging Israel but then helping to restore them by inflicting judgement on their enemies. If, however, we think that the book of Joel is composite (as I have argued elsewhere, see Barton 2001), then it may be that there is no inherent connection, except in the mind of the final redactor, between the locust-plague and the Day of Yahweh. But that that ‘day’, foretold by a prophet later than Joel himself, is fully eschatological in the sense that it spells the

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downfall of whole kingdoms and the establishment of Israel as the leading people in a new world order. Certainly the Day of Yahweh foretold in Joel 2:28–3:21 goes well beyond the local troubles of the first part of the book, and has a much broader scope. First, it will bring about a radical change in the order of the world, with ‘the nations’ being judged on a grand scale by Yahweh, who takes his seat within Israel (Judah) to pronounce and execute his judgement. Such judgement on the nations is essentially good news for Israel, Yahweh’s own people. They will get their revenge on (for example) the Tyrians and Sidonians who have sold some of them to the Greeks (3:4–8), and will become a powerful army to wreak vengeance on their enemies (3:9–10), reversing the prophecy in Isaiah and Micah of a peaceable time when swords will be beaten into ploughshares. Judah and Jerusalem will be inhabited forever after these events, while enemies such as the Edomites, and even the Egyptians, will be utterly crushed (3:19–21). This is not, it should be noted, a hope for an otherworldly realm, but for a transformation of the present world order, albeit on a large scale. It is accompanied by signs and portents in heaven and on earth – as great events were widely thought to be in the ancient world – but it is not a ‘cosmic’ judgement such as that, for example, in Rev. 21:1 (‘a new heaven and a new earth’). Secondly, the hope that all these things will happen is probably a hope of imminent divine intervention: Israel is in some kind of trouble – our general ignorance of the Persian period precludes us from saying what this was – but can look for speedy assistance from Yahweh, who will reverse the present unfavourable world order and give Israel a position of supremacy very soon. Thirdly, by so doing Yahweh makes clear his dominion over the whole world: he is the God who can pour out his spirit on ‘all flesh’ (2:28), which usually in the Old Testament means the whole of humanity (cf. Barton 2001: 96). By the time that this section of Joel was written – maybe in the fifth or fourth century – it was in any case established that Yahweh was the God of the whole world; but such, as we saw above, had evidently been the conviction even of Amos’s contemporaries in the eighth century, because otherwise the prophet’s message would have meant nothing to them. Now the surprising conclusion I mentioned above is simply this: the expectation of the Day of Yahweh in a late post-exilic text such as Joel 2:28–3:21 seems, on the face of it, to be more or less identical with that which must have existed in the minds of Amos’s audience, if his message could have been comprehensible to them. It has been usual to argue that the post-exilic ‘eschatological’ hopes we find in a book such as Joel are a development from the thought of the pre-exilic prophets: Amos’s prophecy of a coming day of judgement on Israel was gradually transmogrified into a hope for the great Day of Yahweh that would see other nations put down and Israel established in a position of leadership. Similarly, it is commonly thought, the sheer scale of post-exilic ‘Day of Yahweh’ passages represents a change as against earlier prophecy, where all is concentrated on Israel and the surrounding nations. But in fact the picture is very similar. Post-exilic texts such as Joel still think in terms of vengeance on this or that nation – Tyre, Sidon, Egypt, Edom – not of the world itself made new, just as Amos’s contemporaries believed Yahweh would judge Edom,

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Moab, Aram and so on. The language used to describe the coming transformation may be slightly different, but the underlying thought seems more or less the same. Rather than the Day of Yahweh developing from an early hope into the hostile act of divine judgement foretold by Amos, and then into a universal day of vengeance in Joel, it seems rather that people in Israel before and after Amos shared a very similar set of beliefs: a day was coming soon when God would vindicate Israel, overthrow ‘the nations’ and establish a new world order with Israel at its head. Amos represents, not a stage in the evolution of this set of beliefs, but really an interlude in which it was temporarily replaced – for those who took any notice of him! – by a theory that Yahweh was actually hostile to Israel. Most people never believed this, and after Amos the older and more comforting view simply reasserted itself. This tends to support Charles’s now rather outdated idea that there was a ‘popular eschatology’ before Amos, which was extremely similar to the prophetic eschatology of those who came later. Most Israelites in most periods thought that Yahweh was on Israel’s side; and when they thought through the implications of this, they came to believe that the present world order, in which Yahweh’s special nation was beset by enemies on all sides, could not endure. Any day now Yahweh would sweep it away and give Israel its rightful place. A few maverick figures such as Amos opposed this optimistic scenario, but their message did not endure, and by the Persian period Israelite ‘prophecy’ had largely reverted to the traditional position. It also tends to endorse the late nineteenth-century view of the great ‘classical’ prophets of the pre-exilic era as highly original thinkers, who set themselves against the generality of their contemporaries by proclaiming doom, rather than blessing, on Yahweh’s chosen nation. Their belief that Yahweh was hostile to Israel was never anything but a minority position, and it did not pass into the mainstream of Israel’s culture: in later times, prophets were seen as those who ‘comforted the people of Jacob, and delivered them with confident hope’ (Sirach 49:10). The idea of the Day of Yahweh did not develop over the course of Israelite prophecy. It was part of a fixed system of popular thought found in all periods, and only challenged by the few, such as Amos and Isaiah. II Though the first part of this essay may have come to a non-traditional conclusion, it lies wholly within the tradition of historical criticism in asking questions about the history and development of a particular theological concept, the Day of Yahweh, during the period covered by the Old Testament. Recent study of the Old Testament has become impatient with such historical enquiries, preferring to ask about the meaning and significance of the text as it lies before us in its ‘final form’. A move in that direction, though still informed by historical questions, can be seen in the recent concern for the editing of the Minor Prophets (the ‘Book of the Twelve’, as it is now normal to call them). Following the early – though at the time neglected – work of R.E. Wolfe on the editing of the Minor Prophets (Wolfe 1935), scholars have lately begun to focus on the possibility that some person or school was expressing a coherent perspective in the way that the book was compiled (see House 1990;

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Nogalski 1993a, 1993b; Coggins 1994). It is not denied that the individual books once had an independent existence, but it is argued that the way they have been put together reveals literary art and skill, and that various pervasive themes have been introduced that bind the whole collection together. Now one such theme might well be our present concern, the idea of the Day of Yahweh. Rolf Rendtorff has argued, in two extremely similar essays (Rendtorff 1997 and 1998), that there is a consistent ‘Day of Yahweh’ idea running through the Minor Prophets. Whereas the historical quest for the origins and development of the Day of Yahweh has to probe behind the text of Amos and try to establish the beliefs of his audience, a literary or ‘canonical’ reading is concerned with the way the day is portrayed sequentially in the Book of the Twelve where, in the Hebrew Bible, Joel precedes Amos and is therefore ‘prior’ to it: Amos usually is deemed to be the first to use the term yom yhwh (Amos 5.18, 20). But the reader will realize that Amos does not use a hitherto unknown term; on the contrary, he is opposing an obviously common understanding of this particular day among his audience: ‘Why do you want the day of the LORD?’ Amos’s listeners know about this day, and they desire it to come. But what about the reader? Does he or she know as well? Yes, of course, from the previous use of the term in the writing of Joel. Therefore, in order to understand Amos we have to read Joel first. (Rendtorff 1998: 254)

Rendtorff then goes on to show that the book of Joel, which from a synchronic literary or canonical point of view is the ‘forerunner’ of the book of Amos, enshrines a many-sided vision of the Day of Yahweh, as meaning both disaster for Israel (in 1:1–2:27) and disaster for the nations (in 2:28–3:21), and a final eschatological consummation: It is not a balanced doctrine of the day of the LORD that we find in the Joel writings. The day of the LORD can be disguised as a terrible attack of locusts; but when it becomes obvious that God himself is acting in these events it turns into a great cycle of liturgical lament, repentance, and finally divine forgiveness and restitution (Joel 1–2). Here the day of the LORD is a transaction between God and his people. But there is also the distinctively different idea of the day of the LORD as a divine judgment against Israel’s enemies. Here Israel stands aside, accepting the final affirmation of Zion’s and Jerusalem’s holiness and safety (chap. 3 [MT 4]). In a third concept the day of the LORD is a much more ‘eschatological’ event accompanied by thoroughgoing changes in human behaviour and leaving only a remnant of believers on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem (2.28–32 [MT 3.1–5]). (Rendtorff 1998: 258)

Now the book of Amos as it stands clearly draws on all three ways of seeing the Day of Yahweh. In the opening oracles against the nations, we have a parallel to the presentation of the ‘day’ as a day of judgement on foreigners which we find in the second part of the book of Joel. But we also find a contradictory notion, that Israel will itself be judged on the expected Day of Yahweh. Yet, again, if Israel repents and turns to Yahweh in lamentation, ‘it may be’ (5:15) that he will have mercy upon them and bring about a glorious restoration – and in any case such a consummation is predicted with confidence in 9:13–15, which (whatever its literary history) is certainly part of the book of Amos in its final form. Thus the Day of Yahweh in Amos

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can be understood from the way it is presented in Joel: all three elements present in Joel are also present in Amos. Rendtorff goes on to show that this threefold identity of the Day of Yahweh – disaster for Israel, forgiveness after repentance together with judgement on other nations, and the final consummation bringing blessings to Israel – can be found more or less completely in all the books of the Twelve, which thus exhibit a common pattern in their eschatology. It is interesting to note that this is much like the pattern discovered in the overall canon of the prophets by R.E. Clements, in his important article ‘Patterns in the Prophetic Canon’ (Clements 1977). The final editors of the prophetic collection do seem to have had a coherent, if complex, eschatology: certainly this appears to be broadly true of the Book of the Twelve. Rendtorff is probably right when he claims that it is already present in Joel, one of the ‘first’ prophetic books from the canonical point of view. (It is a pity, for the sake of the elegance of his argument, that it is not there already in Hosea!) It can also be found in the ‘last’ book, Malachi. To read any one of the Minor Prophets with understanding it is thus necessary, he argues, to see the pattern that runs through them all – which a merely ‘historical’ reading ignores, because it takes each as an independent book, and even then distinguishes ‘authentic’ from ‘inauthentic’ sections. It seems to me that a literary or canonical reading such as Rendtorff’s has many advantages. It corresponds to how an ‘innocent’ reader might understand the books, but systematizes and analyses an innocent reading so as to make it more coherent: one could say that it exhibits a kind of ‘second naivety’, to use Ricoeur’s famous expression. It suggests a religious ‘message’ that one might extract from all the Minor Prophets – indeed, probably from the whole prophetic corpus – which has something to say to anyone who wants to take seriously the possibility that God might actually be involved in world affairs. It encourages vigilance and repentance, yet also hope, and reliance on the mercy of God. It can fairly easily be accommodated to a Christian eschatology, which speaks of the consummation of all things after human sin, punishment, repentance and grace. It is not hard to see why such readings have become popular in religious circles. At the same time, it is also appealing to the more ‘literary’ reader who encounters the Bible as a finished text, rather than as a collection of evidence from the ancient world about the variegated beliefs of certain Israelites from the eighth to the fourth centuries. Such a person is assured by this reading that the text is indeed a whole, something which tells a coherent story and can be read through as one would read most modern texts, not simply atomized and reconstructed. There are drawbacks, too. One of these is that the very peculiar position espoused by Amos and his successors, so far as we can reconstruct this in the way outlined in section I above, gets lost to sight. The eighth-century prophets are no longer read as uttering a strong challenge to accepted understandings of God’s intentions for Israel, but become part of a scheme of thought which remains more or less constant throughout the Minor Prophets. The nineteenth-century rediscovery of the angularity and negativity of a prophet like Amos – Amos’s ‘No’, as Rudolf Smend put it (Smend 1963) – disappears beneath a reconciled picture in which each prophetic book plays a harmonious rather than a discordant role. We might say that nineteenth-century scholarship discovered Amos, by contrast with the book of Amos. With Rendtorff he

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disappears again. This seems to be a regular effect of canonical readings. One may argue that, in the providence of God, Amos’s harsh and unyielding message was tempered by other voices, so that the Bible does not present us with an unequivocal ‘no’ but always, in the end, with a ‘yes’ (cf. 2 Corinthians 1:20!). But the historian is bound to regret the loss of a figure who had, surely, something important to say, which we should try to hear despite the literary context in which it is now embedded. Canonical readings are smooth readings, and sometimes roughness may be a virtue. Secondly, there is a loss of the idea that biblical research is an act of discovery, whose results may be surprising and unpalatable. Rendtorff’s unifying reading of the corpus of the Minor Prophets presents in a sophisticated form the message that a reader who sees the text in two dimensions, as it were, is likely to perceive from a surface examination. It codifies what the innocent reader is apt to find in the prophetic texts: the message that, as Eliphaz puts it in the book of Job, ‘He wounds, but he binds up; he strikes, but his hands heal’ (Job 5:18). It does not challenge the reader with the possibility that beneath the surface there may lurk a far more radical and disturbing message. In a way my discussion in section I confirms historically much of what Rendtorff argues ‘canonically’, by attempting to show that there was indeed a consistent and basically hopeful eschatological schema in the minds of many in Israel from quite early times, and that it remained constant over a long time: it was already there before Amos, and it was still there when the second half of Joel was being added to the oracles of Joel himself, perhaps some time in the fourth century. It was also present, as Clements argued, at the final redactional level of the prophetic books some time later still. In that sense it is fair, even from a historical perspective, to say that readers of Amos can be better prepared to understand the book if they have already read Joel; for much of what Joel asserts in a later period is actually consonant with what was in the minds of Amos’s hearers in the eighth century. But what Rendtorff’s proposal misses out is the possibility that Amos contains evidence for an ‘eschatology’ radically incompatible with the one popular in either the eighth century or the fourth. The book of Amos is thus a witness to something that a two-dimensional, surface reading of the text could never discern: a complete rejection of popular tradition, a divine threat unbalanced by a divine promise. What modern religious believers are to ‘make’ of this uncompromising message is a good question for theologians and preachers, but the Old Testament scholar is not focused primarily on ‘making’ something of the text, but on discovering currents of thought in the text whether they are ‘constructive’ or not. Amos, as we can reconstruct him from the book that bears his name, was a radically destructive figure, and surely there should be room for the biblical scholar to register this without having to think of ways of making it more palatable. Canonical reading risks domesticating a figure such as Amos. Even from a historical perspective, however, Rendtorff’s discussion has something to contribute; for the ‘canonical’ level of the text is one that came into being at a particular time. That time, if we are to insist as he does on the order of the Minor Prophets in the present Hebrew canon, is probably the Middle Ages. For the LXX attests to different orders in early times, with Joel following Amos and Micah rather than preceding Amos, for example. By reading the text ‘canonically’ we are (so a historian might say) recapturing the text as it spoke to those who arranged it in

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its present order, and who therefore read it as we do now. This is a valuable aspect of the text’s reception history, another branch of study particularly important in modern biblical studies. Its weakness is that it argues from the eventual order of the books to how people must have read them, rather than pointing to any empirical evidence that they actually did so; but still, it alerts us to a dimension of the text we can easily miss. I do not see, however, that it renders pointless or illegitimate the older critical attempt to discern beneath the canonical text the voice of a figure like Amos, and to be disturbed by it. References Barton, J. (2001) Joel and Obadiah: A Commentary, OTL (Louisville: Westminster/ John Knox). Cathcart, K. (1992) ‘The Day of Yahweh’, Anchor Bible Dictionary (Garden City, NY: Doubleday), ii, pp. 84–5. Charles, R.H. (1913) A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life in Israel, in Judaism, and in Christianity (London: Adam and Charles Black). Clements, R.E. (1977) ‘Patterns in the Prophetic Canon’, in Canon and Authority: Essays in Old Testament Religion and Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress), pp. 42– 55; reprinted in R.E. Clements, Old Testament Prophecy: From Oracles to Canon (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1996), pp. 191–202. Coggins, R.J. (1994) ‘The Minor Prophets – One Book or Twelve?’, in Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honour of Michael D. Goulder, ed. S.E. Porter, P. Joyce and D. Orton (Leiden: Brill). House, P.R. (1990) The Unity of the Book of the Twelve (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press). Mowinckel, S. (1917) ‘Tronstigningssalmerne og Jahwes tronstigningsfest’, Norsk theologi til reformasjonsjubileet, Spesialhefte NTT, pp. 13–79. Mowinckel, S. (1922) Psalmenstudien, ii (Kristiania: J. Dybwad). Mowinckel, S. (1956) He That Cometh (Oxford: Blackwell). Nogalski, J. (1993a) Literary Precursors to the Book of the Twelve, BZAW 217 (Berlin: W. de Gruyter). Nogalski, J. (1993b) Redactional Processes in the Book of the Twelve, BZAW 218 (Berlin: W. de Gruyter). von Rad, G. (1959) ‘The Origin of the Concept of the Day of Yahweh’, JSS 4, pp. 97–108. Rendtorff, R. (1997) ‘How to Read the Book of the Twelve as a Theological Unity’, SBL Seminar Papers, pp. 420–32; reprinted in Reading and Hearing the Book of the Twelve, ed. M. Sweeney and J. Nogalski, SBL Symposium Series 36 (2000) and in R. Rendtorff, Der Text in seiner Endgestalt: Schritte auf dem Weg zu einer Theologie des Alten Testaments (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2001), pp. 139–51. Rendtorff, R. (1998) ‘Alas for the Day! The “Day of the Lord” in the Book of the Twelve’, in God in the Fray: A Tribute to Walter Brueggemann, ed. T. Linafeldt and T.K. Beal (Minneapolis: Fortress); reprinted in R. Rendtorff, Der Text in

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seiner Endgestalt: Schritte auf dem Weg zu einer Theologie des Alten Testaments (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2001), pp. 253–64. Smend, R. (1963) ‘Das Nein des Amos’, EvTh 23, pp. 404–23; reprinted in R. Smend, Die Mitte des Alten Testaments (Zurich: EVZ-Verlag, 1970), pp. 85–103. Wolfe, R.E. (1935) ‘The Editing of the Book of the Twelve’, ZAW 53, pp. 90–129. Wolff, H.W. (1977) Joel and Amos, (Hermeneia, Philadelphia: Fortress); English translation of Dodekapropheton 2 Joel und Amos (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1969, 2nd edn, 1975).

Index

Abrams, M. H. 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 104, 105, 107, 111 Abramson, G. 236 Albertz, R. 213, 257–8, 260, 269, 276 Albrektson, B. 250, 255 Albright, W. F. 123, 171 Alter, R. 25, 35, 36, 48, 101, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 139, 143, 150, 181, 182, 186–7, 190, 231–2 Anderson, G. W. 216 Auerbach, E. 231 Auwers, J.-M. 3 Ball, E. 4, 62 Barth, K. 35, 39, 42, 44, 152, 165, 239 Barthes, R. 101 Barr, J. 11, 12, 14, 20, 28, 38, 43, 45, 61, 76, 99, 100, 101, 103, 105, 106, 107, 149, 153, 157, 161, 162, 164–5, 166, 207, 240, 241 Barton, J. 3–4, 21, 24, 30, 44, 45, 46, 51, 56, 58, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79, 81, 93, 94, 98, 103, 111, 128, 134, 141, 167, 181, 182, 189, 199, 202, 240, 253, 255, 260, 276, 281, 282, 287 Beal, T. K. 287 Béatrice, P. F. 76 Beauchamp, P. 101 Bentzen, A. 262, 264 Berger, P. 217 Black, M. 201–2 Blackman, A. M. 253, 255 Bleeker, L. H. K. 12 Blenkinsopp, J. 24 Bovon, F. 101 Braaten, C. E. 93 Brett, M. 19, 20 Bright, J. 206, 207 Brooke, G. 58 Brueggemann, W. 287 Buber, M. 5

Bultmann, R. 55 Burrow, J. A. 108, 109, 112, 113, 120, 121, 122, 124 Caminos, R. 253, 255 Campenhausen, H. von 55, 68, 72, 76 Carr, D. 144 Cassuto, U. 142 Cathcart, K. 214, 279, 287 Charles, R. H. 280, 283, 287 Cheyne, T. K. 163 Childs, B. S. 3, 12, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 61, 62, 101, 102, 103, 111, 150, 151, 154, 172, 181, 185, 186, 187, 240, 262, 275–6 Clements, R. E. 4, 21, 30, 32, 44, 62, 182, 285, 286, 287 Clines, D. J. A. 30 Coats, G. W. 21, 30, 182 Coggins, R. J. 26, 67, 284, 287 Conrad, E. 30, 1440–5 Conzelmann, H. 102 Cosgrove, C. H. 76 Cox, H. 217 Crenshaw, J. L. 223 Culler, J. 104, 105 Culley, R. C. 105 Cullmann, O. 69 Curtiss, S. I. 176 Day, J. 191, 213 Delitzch, F. 175 Douglas, M. 229–30 Driver, S. R. 163 Dunn, J. D. G. 6 Eagleton, T. 121, 197 Ebeling, G. 163 Eco, U. 61 Eichrodt, W. 41, 60, 257, 271–5, 276

290

THE OLD TESTAMENT: CANON, LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY

Eliot, T S. 98, 100, 110, 111–12 Evans, E. 67 Ewald, H. G. A. 173 Farrer, A. M. 221, 237 Fish, S. 140, 194, 198 Fishbane, M. 141 Flesseman-van Leer, E. 72 Frankfort, H. 218 Frege, G. 114 Frei, H. W. 238–9, 240, 245 Frerichs, E. S. 263 Gabler, J. P. 160, 258, 261, 277 Gamble, H. Y. 3 Gawlick, G. 162 Gelston, A. 266 Gese, H. 60 Gottwald, N. K. 150, 153–4 Goulder, M. D. 26, 93, 119, 134–5, 287 Graf, K. H. 173 Grant, R. M. 68 Green, G. 240 Green, W. S. 263, 265 Greene-McCreight, K. 44 Hahneman, G. M. 69 Hall, S. G. 67 Hanson, P. D. 15 Harari, J. V. 105 Harnack, A. von 57, 67, 68, 72, 79, 80 Hartley, J. E. 102 Healy, J. F. 214 Heaton, E. W. 5, 217, 248, 255 Hebblethwaite, B. 221 Hempel, J. 225 Hengel, M. 11, 56, 59, 64, 66 Hengstenberg, E. W. 152, 165 Herder, J. W. 177 Herrmann, S. 207 Hill, D. 6 Hinchliff, P. B. 164 Hirsch, E. D. 129 Hobbes, T. 204 Houlden, J. L. 67 House, P. R. 26, 283, 287 Iser, W. 197–8 Ishida, T. 216

Jacob, E. 27 Janowski, B. 260 Jenkins, D. E. 236 Jenson, R. W. 93 Jobling, D. 101 Jonge, H. J. de 3 Josipovici, G. 36, 48, 128, 181 Jowett, B. 153 Joyce, P. 26, 93, 287 Käsemann, E. 55, 57 Kaiser, O. 61 Kegel, M. 171 Kermode, F. 25, 36, 128, 133, 181, 190 Knight, D. A. 23, 176 Knox, J. 68, 71, 72 Koester, H. 72 Kraetschmar, R. 270, 274 Kraus, H. J. 171 Kuhl, C. 5 Kuhn, T. S. 164, 181 Laurin, R. B. 23 Leeuwen, R. C. van 24 Leiman, S. Z. 6 Lemaire, A. 94 Levenson, J. D. 257 Lewis, C. S. 118 Linafeldt, T. 287 Lindars, B. 251, 255 Lindblom, J. 5 Loader, J. A. 105 Lods, A. 217 Lohfink, N. 260 Long, B. O. 21, 30, 182 Louth, A. 117–18 Magee, B. 121 Marks, H. 25, 26 Mason, R. A. 3, 19, 20, 24, 25, 30, 182 Mayes, A. D. H. 3, 214 Mays, J. L. 166 Meier, J. P. 163 Melugin, R. F. 144 Merkel, H. 54, 56, 69 Mettinger, T, N, D, 262 Metzger, B. M. 68 Miles, J. 36, 182, 190 Miller, D. G. 166

INDEX Miller, P. D. 173 Moberly, R. W. L. 44, 62, 86, 87 Mommsen, T. 176, 203 Moor, J. C. de 93 Morgan, R. 63, 213 Mowinckel, S. 262, 280, 287 Muddiman, J. 94, 189, 201 Murdoch, I. 121 Murry, J. Middleton 95 McCarthy, C. 214 McDonald, L. 3 McEvenue, S. 160 McKane, W. 22, 227 Néher, A. 5 Neusner, J. 257, 263, 265 Nicholson, E. W. 157, 163, 214, 270, 276–8 Niebuhr, B. G. 177 Niewöhner, F. 162 Nogalski, J. 24, 30, 182, 284, 287 Noth, M. 119, 134, 149, 215, 259 Oeming, M. 60, 76 Oesterley, W. O. E. 217, 218 Olshausen, J. 170 Orton, D. E. 26, 93, 287 Overbeck, F. 70 Parker, D. C. 64, 65, 73, 188 Patte, D. 101 Patterson, S. J. 59 Peacocke, A. R. 164 Peake, A. S. 201, 202, 209, 210, 217 Peet, T. E. 253, 255 Pelikan, J. 163–4 Perdue, L. G. 24 Perlitt, L. 171, 172, 176, 273, 274, 275, 276 Petersen, N. R. 101, 107 Plöger, O. 15 Polzin, R. M. 105 Porter, S. E. 26, 93, 216, 287 Pound, E. 98, 110 Pusey, E. B. 152, 165, 185 Quiller Couch, A. 98 Rad, G. von 7, 33, 34, 39, 44, 60, 102–3, 119, 143, 149, 152, 165, 171, 206,

291

213, 215–33, 257, 259, 260, 266, 274, 280, 287 Raleigh, W. 95 Ranke, L. 203, 204 Reimer, D. J. 3, 30, 182 Rendtorff, R. 149, 216, 284, 285, 286, 287 Rendtorff, T. 162, 207 Richards, I. A. 98 Ricoeur, P. 11, 239, 285 Robbe-Grillet, A. 133 Roberts, C. H. 72, 73, 138 Robinson, T. H. 217, 218 Rogerson, J. W. 209, 217, 225, 228 Rose, M. 216 Rosenzweig, F. 34 Rowley, H. H. 201, 258 Russell, D. S. 17, 114 Sæbø, M. 71, 94 Salters, R. B. 214 Sanders, E. P. 206 Sanders, J. A. 3, 23, 27, 45, 86, 102, 103, 151, 186, 240 Santer, M. 163 Saussure, F. de 104 Sawyer, J. F. A. 83–4, 85, 86, 87, 107, 190, 194 Scott, B. B. 24 Scott, R. B. Y. 215 Schmid, H. H. 149, 216, 224, 274 Schmidt, W. H. 216 Seitz, C. R. 44, 144 Shelton, R. L. 102 Sheppard, G. T. 44 Sherwood, Y. 193, 194, 198, 199 Silberman, L. 174, 175 Skeat, T. C. 72, 138 Smend, R. 27, 152, 170, 172, 173, 174, 285, 288 Smith/Smith-Christopher, D. L. 94, 178 Smith, W. R. 172, 175, 177 Sommer, B. D. 138–9 Soulen, R. K. 49 Sparks, H. F D. 157 Spina, F. A. 102 Spinoza, B. de 162 Spranger, E. 223 Stendahl, K. 34, 242, 258 Sternberg, M. 128, 181

292

THE OLD TESTAMENT: CANON, LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY

Stevenson, K. 236 Strauss, D. F. 203, 204 Streeter, B. H. 102 Stroup, G. 240 Stuhlhofer, F. 58, 70, 77 Stummer, F. 225 Sundberg, A. C. 8, 9, 10, 69 Sweeney, M. A. 144, 287 Swete, H. B. 8 Talbot, E. 213, 237, 243, 244, 245 Talstra, E. 127 Taylor, M. 76 Temple, F. 164, 238 Teilhard de Chardin, P. 246 Theissen, G. 213, 244–6 Thiemann, R. E. 240 Thiselton, A. C. 163, 198 Tigay, J. 133 Tillyard, E. M. W. 118 Trible, P. 181

Vatke, W. 170, 171, 172 Vischer, W. 35 Volz, P. 225 Vorländer, H. 216 Warner, M. 213 Watson, F. 202, 204 Wellhausen, J. 35, 57, 94, 152, 166, 169–79, 185, 203, 204, 207, 214, 217, 259, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278 West, R. 97 Wette, W. M. L. de 203 Whybray, R. N. 133, 187, 216 Wiles, M. F. 221, 236 Wiseman, W. J. 24 Wolfe, R. E. 22, 283, 288 Wolff, H. W. 281, 288 Wolter, M. 4 Wright, G. E. 218 Zimmerli, W. 266

Van Seters, J. 149, 216, 274