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Social Matrix and Canonical Shape
By Norman K. Gottwald

"One way of exploring the contact points between social scientific, criticism and canonical criticism is to examine what happens when the essence of the claims of each is carried into the territory, of the other. "

THE CATCH phrases "social matrix" and "canonical shape" suggest the relationship between social scientific criticism and canonical criticism in Old Testament studies. In particular, I want to stake out the intrinsic comparability of their respective concerns, and even the necessity of their collaboration, in order properly to fulfill what each approach hopes to achieve. In the process, I will offer a critique of certain inadequacies and dangers in the formulations of both types of critics.

I

Social scientific criticism, also known as sociological criticism or biblical sociology, starts from the premise that biblical writings are social products. ¹ They were written by people shaped by and interacting within institutional structures and symbolic codes operative in the primary sectors of communal life, such as economy, family, government, law, war, ritual, and religious belief. These Israelite-Jewish social networks, always in flux and full of tension and contradiction, supply an indispensable context for grounding other insights of biblical studies, including the results of historical critical methods and the newer literary methods, as well as canonical criticism itself. The guiding question for social science approaches to the Bible might be framed in this way: What social structures, processes, and codes are explicit or implicit in the biblical literature, in the scattered social data it contains, in the overtly political history it recounts or touches on, and in the religious beliefs and practices it attests?

Norman K. Gottwald is Professor of Biblical Studies at New York Theological Seminary. A leading figure in the social scientific criticism of the Old Testament, his major works include The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 B.C.E. (1979), and The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction, (1985).

¹ On social scientific methodology, see the essays by Bruce J. Malina, Norman K. Gottwald. and Gerd Theissen in N. K. Gottwald (ed.), The Bible and Liberation: Political and Social Hermeneutics (Maryknoll: Orbis. rev. ed., 1983), pp. 11-58. For bibliography, see N. K. Gottwald, "Bibliography on the Sociological Study of the Old Testament," American Baptist Quarterly, 2 (1983), pp. 168-184.

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Social scientific criticism is many-faceted, proceeding along several fronts or axes of inquiry and employing a variety of methods and theories. For example, it works along a continuum from limited inquiries into particular offices, roles, and institutions toward more inclusive analyses and reconstructions of the larger social system. At times, it operates with synchronic analysis of social realities at a particular historical juncture or in a posited representative moment that gives a cross-section of social life. At other times, it operates with a diachronic analysis of how the social phenomena, of whatever scale, developed over time. Typically, it organizes the inquiry and the results into the rubrics supplied by the social sciences, but it may also bring a social scientific perspective into exegesis that follows the discursive form of the biblical texts.

Social scientific criticism, in addition to drawing on archaeology, cautiously employs comparative method for studying social formations cross-culturally in order to theorize about the social history of Israel, since it is well known that the biblical texts are frequently too restrictively religious, too fragmentary, or too anachronistic to be able by themselves to give us a balanced picture of Israelite society. All in all, in contrast to past erratic or undisciplined efforts, there is currently good reason for confidence in proposing controlled hypotheses about Israelite society. Granted that important social data are lacking for ancient Israel, we can nonetheless formulate testable models for conceiving the society, models that are necessary for interpreting the knowledge we do have and suggestive of additional research needed to refine and revise our tentative mappings of biblical societies.

Insofar as the whole of biblical societies is the object of study, global social theorists such as Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber are key influences and guides. The use of Marxian, Durkheimian, and Weberian tools of analysis and synthesis is often highly eclectic. What is especially important in the work of these theorists is that they held broad and coherent perspectives which, in varying ways, viewed the components of society as multi-dimensional and interactive, giving rise to contradictions in society that fuel social change. Furthermore, after a long era of reaction against crude social evolutionary schemes of the nineteenth century, neo-evolutionary social theory is being cogently applied to ancient Israel, allowing as it does for different rates of social change from society to society, for leaps in stages or retrograde developments, and for calculations of trends or tendencies in terms of probabilities instead of heavy-handed determinisms.

I do not hesitate to claim that social scientific criticism completes the task of historical criticism by providing more or less detailed social referential readings of the biblical texts. Admittedly, these texts differ greatly in their accessibility to social analysis. One might generalize that laws and prophetic texts have been somewhat more amenable to social scientific exegesis than have imaginative narratives, such as sagas and legends, and wisdom genres. Yet it is fair to state that some headway is

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being made in the social interpretation of texts composed of all the major genres of biblical literature.

A word should be said about where I see my own study of premonarchic Israel falling within this description of social scientific criticism. In The Tribes of Yahweh and subsequent studies, ² I propose in considerable detail that the body of literature identifiable as probably premonarchic is most satisfactorily explained as the creation of a social revolutionary movement. largely of a peasant populace, carving out its own material and cultural living space in the highlands of Canaan in a trans-tribal, village-based revitalization process that consciously broke with centralized government in the Canaanite form of city-state hierarchy.

The religion of these Israelite folk arose co-terminously with their social and political struggle and was both the ideological propulsion for and the most distinctive cultural expression of their movement. This social organization, along with its religious ideology, continued as an active force throughout the changing conditions of later Israelite and Jewish social history. In my recent overview of the Hebrew Bible, I attempt to trace the social organizational and conflictual threads that run unbroken throughout biblical history and literature. ³

My hypothesis is comprehensive and many-stranded and it is comparative. It also includes major efforts at sociological exegesis of texts, especially in Joshua and Judges. The hypothesis stands or falls on the sum total of evidence it appeals to in biblical and extrabiblical texts, material culture, and comparative studies. Of course, this "evidence" is not piled up and counted, so to speak, for it has to be interconnected, weighed, and prioritized, which necessarily leaves considerable room for differences of interpretation, even among those who share my broad perspective. It is also to be expected that the hypothesis will have to be modified, enlarged, and corrected over time. Also, while this whole approach raises critical questions about our own religious faith, the truthfulness of my hypothesis is not determinable by whether it suits piety, church tradition, theology, or politics.

II

Canonical criticism has set for itself the task of showing how the biblical text was shaped and interpreted as scripture and what that

² Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 B.C.E. (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1979): idem. "John Bright's New Revision of AHistory of Israel." Biblical Archaeology Review, 8 (1982). pp. 56-61: idem. "Two Models of the Origins of Ancient Israel: Social Revolution or Frontier Development." in The Quest for the Kingdom of God: Studies in Honor of George E. Mendenhall. ed. H. B. Huffmon et al. (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. 1983). pp. 5-24: idem," The Israelite Settlement as a Social Revolutionary Movement." in The Proceedingsof the International Congress of Biblical Archaeology Marking the 70th Anniversary of the Israel Exploration Society (forthcoming).
³ Norman K. Gottwald. The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction (Philadelphia: Fortress 1985).

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means for properly understanding it in its own setting and in properly appropriating it in our settings. While social scientific criticism draws upon a body of methods and theories developed in the social sciences, canonical criticism has a less sharply demarcated set of analytic tools.

Canonical criticism draws mainly on aspects of literary theory and hermeneutics in order to push beyond redaction criticisms interest in single books and series of books to an examination of the final form of the text as a totality, as well as the process leading to it, and to raise issues of theological authority and hermeneutics in a manner that grows organically out of the historical literary description of the canonizing of scripture. But precisely where the emphasis falls in canonical study and how the elements at work interact is heatedly discussed among canonical critics. For instance, does the emphasis fall on the final shape of canon or on the shaping process that culminates in canon?

The most prolifically published representative of canonical criticism, Brevard S. Childs, focuses heavily on "the canonical shape" of the final form of the text conceived as determinative for historical and theological interpretation. ⁴ The actual role of historical criticism in the canonical task posited by Childs has been the subject of much controversy. I conclude that, in practice, Childs builds regularly on historical critical insight, but that in his theoretical formulations he often appears to denigrate historical criticism per se, which is either outright self-contradictory or, more likely, a miscommunication on his part, since he may be meaning to say that historical criticism is necessary but not sufficient to canonical criticism. More problematic and crucial to his enterprise is exactly how the final shape of the canon is normative for interpretation.

In the main, Childs canonical shape seems to be the final redactional stroke that disposes the contents in certain ways and thereby accents or interconnects motifs and perspectives that control the overarching reading of the text. Examples of this canon-controlled structuring are intricate arrangements of judgment and salvation patterns, and oscillating movements between past, present, and future in the operative hermeneutic of the final hand (redactor/canonizer?). I credit Childs with an acute intuitive eye for seeing redactional constructs, especially in the prophetic literature. For me, the most original and perceptive aspect of his work is redaction critical, in which he advances toward a phenomenology of canonical form.

In his recent canonical analysis of the New Testament, Childs tends to replace the earlier term "canonical shape" with "canonical form," and he offers a section on "Methodology of Canonical Exegesis."⁵

⁴ Brevard S. Childs, "The Old Testament as Scripture of the Church." Concordia Theological Monthly, 43 (1972). pp. 709-722: idem. "The Exegetical Significance of Canon for the Study of the Old Testament." Vetus Testamentum Supplements, 28 (1977), pp. 66-80: idem. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress. 1979): idem, The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (Philadelphia: Fortress 1985).
⁵ Childs, New Testament as Canon, pp. 48-53.

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Canonical exegesis seeks for "traces either of how the author intended the material to be understood, or of the effect which a particular rendering has on the literature." ⁶

Among the signs of canonical shaping are the following features: I the overall structure of the book; (2) prescripts. conclusions, and superscriptions; (3) assignments of historical setting for the book; (4) the relation between the authors stated vantage point and the probable audience of the document; (5) the function of the addressee; (6) the function of indirect authorship or pseudonymity; (7) the effect of putting certain books side by side so that material is dropped, added, or separated. I should also add that, with this new book, Childs removes all doubt about his emphatic rejection of literalistic, univocal, fundamentalist readings of the canon.

James A. Sanders, in distinction from Childs, does not give excessive or privileged stress to the final form of the canon. What interests him is the canonical process operative through all the stages of Israel's literary history. ⁷ The canonical process was a trend toward repeating communal values and resignifying them in textual form. Furthermore, the various ways in which biblical writers repeated and resignified these values along the trajectory toward the final canon provides us appropriate canonical hermeneutics for our own reading of the Bible. Scripture is seen as "adaptable for life" throughout its entire course from initial composition and collection down to its present appropriation.

Gerald T. Sheppard attempts to nuance and refine Childs approach, which he prefers to call "canon contextual criticism." He does so by trying to include all the compositional and redactional moments in the development of Scripture within the paradigm of the "final" canonical perspective. ⁸ For Sheppard, canon contextual reading sees the final text dimensionally and includes a careful delineation of numerous ways that Scripture comments on Scripture. Sheppard seeks to overcome a narrow theory of intentionality (Child's inclination). but also to contest the assumption that theological exegesis simply imitates the technical hermeneutics of biblical writers (Sander's inclination). For example, Sheppard describes three forms of inner-biblical exegesis that represent different expressions of canon consciousness: (1) midrash, in the sense of reemploying set phrases in an anthological manner; (2) "canon conscious redaction." which relates one canonical book or part of a book to

⁶ Ibid., p. 49.
⁷ James A. Sanders. Torah and Canon (Philadelphia: Fortress. 1972); idem. "Adaptable for Life: the Nature and Function of Canon." in Magnolia Dei-The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernst Wright, ed. F.MJ. Cross et al. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976). pp. 531-560: idem. "Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism," Horizons in Biblical Theology 2 (1980). pp. 173-197; idem. Canon and Community. A Guide to Canonical Criticism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984).
⁸ Gerald T. Sheppard,"Canon Criticism: The Proposal of Brevard Childs and an Assessment for Evangelical Hermeneutics," Studia Biblica et Theologica, 4 (1974), pp. 3-17: idem. Wisdom as a Hermeneittical Construct: A Study in the Sapientializing of the Old Testament (New York/Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. (1980); idem. "Canonization: Hearing the Voice of the Same God through Historically Dissimilar Traditions," Interpretation, 37 (1982), pp. 21-33: see also, note 26 below.

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some other canonical book or collection; (3) thematization of historically disunified traditions under the canonical rubrics of Law, Prophets, and Wisdom.⁹ It may be added that Joseph Blenkinsopp's work on prophecy and canon argues a particular case of canon-conscious redaction in the sense that the Law and Prophets have been accommodated to one another, notably in the inter-textual formulation of the conclusions to Deuteronomy and Malachi.¹⁰

III

Suppose we now undertake a conversation between the two forms of criticism, chiefly but not exclusively with Childs as the voice for canonical criticism. It is acknowledged that I speak primarily as a practitioner of social scientific criticism, but I do so as one who takes canonical criticisms concerns seriously and who respects what it aims to accomplish even when dissenting on the presuppositions and conclusions of certain of its advocates. Immediately, we can recognize a systemic drive and a comprehensive impulse in canonical criticism that is analogous to the systemic drive and comprehensive impulse in social scientific criticism. Each can be conceived as total in its aims and formulations. Each attempts to resolve the multiplicity of the texts into common denominators, whether the common denominator of social matrix, which birthed the texts and is more or less reflected in them, or the common denominator of canonizing consensus in the religious community, which put its stamp of approval on the present scope and form of the texts and which urges us to locate particular texts within a body of texts viewed as an authoritative theological complex.

So the question arises: Are these two "totalisms." these comprehensive canonical and social scientific methods, irreconcilable and exclusive of one another? Is either of them mistaken from the outset? Or are they schemata which can each get at something important, leaving us with the problem of how to relate them in a historical understanding of ancient Israel and in a contemporary appropriation of the literature?

It seems to me that, while they are totalistic in methodological thrust, the two methods are not intrinsically "totalitarian." by which I mean that I cannot see anything in the essential enterprise of either form of criticism that excludes the other on principle. Nevertheless, to carry through a methodology properly, all the way to its limits so that it gives maximal yield, means that a single-mindedness must be applied. This does not mean that the advocate of the method, much less the whole community of scholars and interested people at large, necessarily accepts that this method alone yields truthful and valid results. It only means that the results achieved by this method are significant and must be addressed. The overall significance of such a comprehensive method,

⁹ Sheppard, "Canonization."
¹⁰ Joseph Blenkinsopp. Prophecy and Canon. A Contribution to the Study of Jewish Origins (Notre Dame, London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977).

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and especially its precise relation to other valid methods, is hardly assessable prior to the results of detailed inquiry and certainly not by fiat of single scholars, including those most committed to the new method and those most opposed to it.

One way of exploring the contact points between social scientific criticism and canonical criticism is to examine what happens when the essence of the claims of each is carried into the territory of the other.

To begin with, what has canonical criticism to say to social scientific criticism? When assertions about canonical process and shape are brought into play, what is their legitimacy and pertinence for social scientific criticism? Through the categories of sociology of literature, ideology, and symbolic interaction, it is at once obvious that canonical criticism poses a set of issues altogether proper to social scientific criticism.

Consider canonical process for a start. The Pentateuchal themes, by way of example, are selective and highly arbitrary in their accents. Narratives, poems, and laws are brought into an ordered design around key nuclear themes or motifs. At the earliest stage of Israelite traditioning, there was a stylizing and patterning impulse at work that condensed, expanded, juxtaposed, interwove, and prioritized elements in the tradition without any strict regard for actual spatio-temporal relationships. This tendency systematically centralized the experiences of diverse groups in early Israel as if they had happened to a united Israel. The centralizing manipulation of the traditions gives them, at an early stage, the character of "canonical traditions." ¹¹

Consequently, we can say with confidence, and precisely as an aspect of the sociology of Israel's literature, that from Israel's beginnings as a tribal confederation in Canaan an ordering transmutation of historical events and social processes was decisively at work, doubtless because this revolutionary people relentlessly asked for its own mythos, its own foundation charter, its own objectified validation for being what it was and what it was struggling to become in a sociopolitically alien environment. Thus something like a "canonical process" was indeed operative as a basic communal activity at an early date, and this very tendency or process had a social matrix.

It is more difficult to form a judgment about canonical shape, if only because its various literary and theological dimensions have yet to be sorted out and the status of canonical shape seems to mean somewhat different things to different canonical critics. Immediately, however, it must be acknowledged by social scientific critics that late biblical society produced a canon of set books and that the adoption of this canon was highly significant of and for the direction that early Judaism took. A social reconstruction of post-exilic Israel that ignored the emergence of "the religion of the book" would be truncated and inadequate social description and social analysis.

¹¹ Gottwald, Tribes. pp. 35,40,63,92, 111-183 passim.

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Both canonical process and canonical shape are ways of underscoring the ideological component of Israelite society and religion. The scripluralizing tendency in Israel brings its symbolic world front and center as part of the agenda of social scientific criticism. In a recent article on Old Testament theology, ¹² Walter Brueggemann points out that the radical social equality of Israel and its embrace of the pain of the oppressed and the deprived has its counterpart in a radical deity who affirms the oppressed and embraces their pain. He goes so far as to say that the struggle between a severe contract theology and a theology of pain and oppression is internal to God as "a question of God seeking to present and represent himself as taking all of these data into account." ¹³ For the social study of religion as ideology, it is certainly a datum of importance that the picture of God in ancient Israel has this characterization of a deity who struggles to overcome conceptions of gods as endorsers of social inequality and despisers of the underclasses of society. Israel's characterization of God contends with exactly the points of a just and humane public order that Israel contends with.

For the sake of a social understanding of Israel, it is appropriate and necessary that biblical theology should examine carefully what is said about the thoughts, feelings, and actions of this Yahweh. There is, for instance, solid ground for social symbolic reflection in the discovery of Raymund Schwager that, while there are no less than 600 Old Testament passages about instances of violence that are condemned by Yahweh, there are a full 1000 cases that display Yahweh's own violence. ¹⁴ I contend that this is a social datum because it correlates both with the forms of violence that Israel suffered and that Israel practiced, as it also correlates with Israel's ambivalent assessments of and copings with violence. I would, therefore, argue that theological and social inquiries into biblical violence are greatly limited when they are separated and that correspondingly they gain depth and explanatory reinforcement when associated." ¹⁵

What now does social scientific criticism have to say to canonical criticism? When the assertion that all religious expressions have a social context and a social counterpart is brought into play, how does this impact our discernment of the canon?

To begin with, there is the question of the positions of various social groups with respect to their preferences for and their interests in this or that canonical shaping of the literature. It is not sufficient to speak of an undifferentiated "communal mind or will" as the stimulus to canonical process and the arbiter of canonical closure. Literature, especially

¹² Walter Brueggemann, "A Shape for Old Testament Theology, I: Structure Legitimation." Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 47 (1985), pp. 28-46.
¹³ Ibid., p. 43.
¹⁴ Summirized in Robert North, "Violence and the Bible: The Girard Connection." Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 47 (1985), pp. 14-15.
¹⁵ "For fuller elaboration, see Norman K. Gottwald. "Sociological Method in Biblical Research and Contemporary Peace Studies." American Baptist Quarterly, 2 (1983), pp. 142-156.

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canonical literature, is not disinterested. Every text has its social matrix and represents one or more social interests, whether we can easily identify them or not. And the final act or series of acts that fix a canonical boundary and content have a social matrix and interest as well.

Childs refers to social factors in the shaping of the canon but in little more than a formal way, with little specificity, and never-as far as I can see even in his most recent work-in such a way as to grant that the very act of canonization, conceived as the ultimate religious act in a literary mode, is itself a thoroughly social act conditioned by a social locus in which this particular canon won out over other possible canons or over against resistance to canonization itself.

As Sanders concedes, and Sheppard and Blenkinsopp more explicitly recognize, social scientific criticism helps us to grasp the tensions and conflicts expressed in the inclusion and exclusion of texts and in their articulation in relation to one another. Without this sensitivity and method, canonical criticism may lapse into harmonization that simply accepts a communal decision to validate a collection and arrangement of literature as somehow overcoming, flattening out, and resolving all the prior and continuing socio-religious struggle in the community. In the absence of social scientific criticism, canonical criticism may obscure the reality that the mere assertion of what has been affirmed as canon does not tell us precisely enough what the force and thrust of the canonical decision actually was for the canonizing community, and thus derivatively or analogously what its force and thrust might be for us.

Blenkinsopp has put this social ingredient of canonical studies very well indeed:

The biblical canon cannot be taken as an absolute, in the sense of providing in a straightforward way a comprehensive legitimation or normative regula fidei. For the canon itself arose out of the need to resolve conflicting claims to authority in the religious sphere and the resolution did not come in the form of a final verdict. These claims, moreover, can be traced back to the prophets whose language about the nature and activity of God simply rules out the idea of a canon as it is generally understood .... in the last analysis we cannot dissociate religious authority from personal experience." ¹⁶

The idea of a canon, in particular, would call for examination as an aspect of social history, implying as it does claims to authority and comprehensive attempts at legitimation on the part of different groups and individuals. For the most part this work still remains to be done, and it is no wise derogatory to the religious claims being made to insist that it needs to be done." ¹⁷

At this point, a word of caution to both parties in this dialogue of criticisms is advisable. All comprehensive methods and forms of criticism, including theology I should add, can go awry by turning into dogmatism and positivism and dead-ending in a sort of methodological fundamentalism. The same can happen with social scientific criticism

¹⁶ Blenkinsopp, Prophecy and Canon, pp. 142-143.
¹⁷ Ibid., p. 148.

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and canonical criticism, and it is most likely to happen when critics of one persuasion talk only or mainly among themselves.

Social scientific fundamentalism results when one lapses into thinking that a social matrix can be conjured out of thin air, or that knowledge of a social matrix directly accounts for a text in all its features, or that everything in a text that is not immediately traceable to a social rootage is inconsequential.

Canonical fundamentalism results when one lapses into thinking that the religious community's authority-affirming fiat floats transcendently above history and society, or that the canonical decision gives us an indisputable clue to meaning that can shortcut the inquiry into the entire history of the text and its changing shapes, or that from the canonical form of the text we can directly read off prescriptions for our situation in the absence of information and sensitivities about what is at stake in their and our social contexts.

Both forms of methodological fundamentalism can produce flat or monolithic readings of texts that ignore individualities in the growth and functioning of texts in the communities where they were at home, and in particular may miss the special complexity of language in its relation to social and intellectual history, both in biblical times and in our own socio-religious situations.

Semiotics or sociolinguistics will be increasingly vital both to a proper social criticism and a proper canonical criticism. How do the special interests of groups get articulated and how are they given compelling currency in particular genres and aggregations of texts? What is the social status of texts that seek to give large-scale interpretations of the origins, meanings, and obligations of communities? Why do some texts make more direct allusions to social data and others more indirect allusions and some no allusions at all, at least in any denotative sense? What are the different kinds of socially perceived texts signifying, really signifying: that one should do or not do certain things, think or not think certain thoughts, obey or not obey certain leadership claims, side with or oppose this or that interest group, social tendency, or governmental act or regime?

If we make a distinction between penultimate canonical process and a culminating canonical shaping, what in fact happens when the meanings of texts are re-signified along the way and in the final closure, sometimes sharply re-signified? Certainly, the way we should understand canon will be affected by what we understand the function of these canonical texts to be as signifiers of particular meanings to the canonizing community. For example, are the significations from earlier stages of canonical process carried over into the "canonical intentionality" so-called? Or are the earlier significations abolished or altered so that a higher order intentionality cancels out, heightens, spiritualizes, historicizes, or subordinates the preceding significations of texts as they functioned in prior contexts? Childs seems to be arguing some form of the latter but his results to date, while suggestive and at times even

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brilliant, are impressionistic and appear far from definitive. A "final shape" that is supposed to be determinative of our interpretation ought to be demonstrable according to widely agreed criteria.

At issue is not only how significations may change through stages of literary development, but also the question of the status of language offered as authoritative language. What did the canonizing community think it was commending when it singled out this particular literature? This may seem a relatively easy question to answer when the language is directly prescriptive of particular ritual or social behavior. Even in that case, however, we observe prescribed behavior that may no longer have been doable or may not have been of much relevance to the canonizing communities preferred repertory of behavior. When it comes to language of celebration, admonition or warning, or history-like narratives. the authority claimed is especially problematic. The intended and actual results of conferring authority on these texts may have been manifold: to secure particular kinds of ritual or social behavior, to strengthen internal unity or consensus in the community, to give an identifying stamp to membership in the community, to insure obedience to authorities whose entitlements to be obeyed or whose interpretations, instructions, and policies were in dispute, or simply to preserve cherished stories.

Much the same questions about what authority of the canon specifies apply equally wherever later generations have affirmed this canon as their own. New social factors and new comprehensions of language continuously reshape the range and quality of authority which the ongoing communities assign to the canon. In our own time, how do changing notions of the relation between the oral and the written. between factuality and interpretation, between literal and symbolic meanings, and of the very import of language as metaphor-how do all these intellectual and sociocultural developments give different colorations to what is signified by accepting a canon? Then and now, how closely and over what range were and are behaviors and meanings in the community expected to be regulated by this normative literature? What sanctions, if any, have been applied for violating the canon? An astute canonical criticism, informed by social critical awareness, should be able to help us with such questions.

IV

To sharpen the dialogue, I conclude with a focus on the canonical closure of the Law to bring out the agreements and differences in the ways that Childs and I approach the issues. The shared ground between Childs and myself can perhaps best be seen by noting our criticisms of the biblical theology movement. Walter Brueggemann has made a most interesting, if fleeting, association between my attitude toward biblical theology and Childs attitude toward the same subject.

Gottwald has found a way (even if he is not interested in it) of giving substance and credibility to the now discredited "mighty deeds of God" construct. As is well known, Childs saw the problem: "Mighty deeds of God"

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is a way of speaking that seems to float in the air without historical basis. The approach of Wright and von Rad had not solved the problem of "actual" history and "sacred" history. The recital of sacred history appeared to have no rootage in historicality. Gottwald has found a way for those who will speak in terms of "mighty acts." But now it must be faced that the recital is an ideological articulation of a radical social movement. Obviously the implications for doing Old Testament theology are acute." ¹⁸

What Brueggemann correctly notes is that Childs and I are looking for a way to anchor biblical theology in something broader and deeper than a series of confessional statements abstracted from biblical texts and communities. Child's manner of doing this has been to lodge biblical theology in the broad contours of the scriptural collections as designed and affirmed by a canonizing community which serves as our authoritative ancestor in the faith. For Childs, the canon itself as a total content becomes an enlarged confession of faith whose accents and proportions are to be determined by a continuous reading of the whole.

On the other hand, I choose to locate biblical theology in its metaphorical range of reference to Israelite socioeconomic, political, and cultural life by showing how the basic assertions of that theology correspond to socioeconomic, political, and cultural interests and desiderata in ancient Israel. I claim that anything experienced or claimed with respect to God has a counterpart experience or claim with respect to human life in the concrete Israelite community.

So what is at stake between these two views of biblical theology? The difficulty I find: with Child's way of anchoring biblical theology, broader gauged though it is by far than the acts of God theology, is that it rests in the end on the narrow base of the canonizing community. It overlooks the special pleading of that community and misses the tremendous social systemic tensions and conflicts integral to the final outcome of the communitys canonical decisions, of the sort initially explored in the work of Burke O. Long and Paul D. Hanson. ¹⁹ Moreover, the canonical appeal tends not only to negate, or at least slide over, the social problematic of the canonizing community, but also to obscure the social problematic of the interpreting communities in which we are discerning the ancient canons applicability to us. That Sanders to a degree, and Sheppard and Blenkinsopp more explicitly, are open to the social placement of the canon, implies that canonical criticism need not be, and I would say should not be, as "a-social," even "anti-social," as Childs makes it out to be.

Let me now illustrate these issues with respect to the canonical closure

¹⁸ Walter Brueggemann, "The Tribes of Yahweh: An Essay Review," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 48 (1980). p. 445; The Bible and Liberation, pp. 175-176.
¹⁹ Burke O. Long, "Social Dimensions of Prophetic Conflict," Semeia, 21 (1982), pp. 31-53, with response by Norman K. Gottwald, pp. 107-109; Paul D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic. The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975).

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of the Law. I begin with the widely held view that the thrust of the community in canonizing the Law was to achieve order, stability, and fidelity to established priestly leadership and interpretations, assuming for the moment that P-like tendencies were principally at work in the scripturalizing of the Law. If that was the social matrix of the canonizers of the Law, does that not already orient us, the interpreters, toward an ordering and stabilizing purpose in our use of Scripture? What then are we to do with the challenge and threat to order and stability in our own social and ecclesial milieus and in many parts of the biblical canon itself? (Likewise, is not the sharpness of radical prophecy toned down by engulfing it in the moderating and comforting wrappings of the redacted collection of the prophets?) Does it not seem likely that a canonical criticism uncorrected by social scientific criticism, and not greatly concerned with historical criticism, will "stack the deck" toward a kind of biblical theology that is ecclesially circumscribed and committed in advance to preserving and reinforcing the current churchly and academic privileges and outlooks of contemporary official interpreters?

It is true that at a number of points Childs attempts to guard against this kind of circular exegesis and theology. But by accenting the surface structure of the finished text and by underplaying history and society, much the same kind of hypostatizing or reifying of the canon can result as occurred with the elevation of confessions of the acts of God to normative rank. I detect just such a dangerous leaning in some of Child's remarks, especially where he exeludes from consideration social factors that were not in the conscious minds of the canonizers or which they deliberately expunged from the text. For example, Childs says:

It is clear from the sketch of the [canonical ] process that particular editors, religious groups, and even political parties were involved.... But basic to the canonical process is that those responsible for the actual editing of the text did their best to obscure their own identity.... Increasingly the original sociological and historical differences within the nation of Israel were lost, and a religious community emerged which found its identity in terms of sacred scripture. Israel defined itself in terms of a book! The canon formed the decisive Sitz im Leben for the Jewish community life, thus blurring the sociological evidence most sought after by the modern historian. When critical exegesis is made to rest on the recovery of these very sociological distinctions which have been obscured, it runs directly in the face of the canons intention. ²⁰

A little later, Childs speaks of "' a canonical intentionality' which is coextensive with the meaning of the biblical text." ²¹

To the contrary, it seems to me that only through recovery of-sociological distinctions which have been obscured" by collectors, redactors, and canonizers can we get a true sense of the pluriformity of the canon, and thus give a full hearing to its various voices in relation to all the factors at work in our own situations as interpreters.

²⁰ Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, p. 78.
²¹ Ibid,. p. 79.

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By way of recovering these lost dimensions of canonical politics, we can identify two sets of vested interests at work in the canonizing of the Law, one from outside the restored Jewish community and one from within it.

(1) The Demotic Chronicle from Egypt discloses the Persian initiative in commanding the priests of Egypt to codify the ancient laws of the land which then became Persian provincial law. Precisely the same Persian intervention makes sense as the governmental instrument by which the reforming Jews from exile were able to make the Torah both the distinctively Jewish religious and civil charter and the Persian provincial or district law honored in Judah. ²²

(2) Secondly, the curious combination of P Torah in Genesis through Numbers with D Torah in Deuteronomy probably signifies that the priestly establishment favoring P had to make concessions to other groups who favored D, such as Levites and prophets. in order to effect a broad enough coalition of forces to make the new law persuasive and enforceable. Thus, the first stage of canonization can be seen to have produced a "new consensus Torah." ²³

If we grant social conflictual origins to the canon, Childs is not very convincing or self-consistent when he says:

The canonical interpreter stands within the received tradition, and, fully conscious of his own time-conditionality as well as that of the scriptures, strives critically to discern from its kerygmatic witness a way to God which overcomes the historical moorings of both text and reader. ²⁴

In my judgment, neither the socio-historic process of canonization nor the requisites of theology itself give warrant for using the Bible "to discern... a way to God which overcomes the historical moorings of both text and reader." As far as I can see, the canon is very historically and socially moored. and I as interpreter am very historically and socially moored, and the God shown in Scripture is very historically and socially moored. Childs may here be confusing the capacity of widely separated historical contexts to address and inform one another with a severance from historical moorings altogether.

VIII

As I view the future of canonical criticism, which I take to be a bright and promising one, it will not lie along the route of collapsing the

²² S. Dean McBride. Jr., has so far offered the fullest account of this Persian intervention in Jewish canonization (lecture on the Pentateuch and the Law of the Temple in Ezek. 40-48, Yale Divinity School, February 1977; to my knowledge McBride has not published on the subject); see also George Widengren in Israelite and Judaean History. ed. J. H. Hayes and J. M. Miller (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976). p. 515, indebted to Egyptologists W. Spiegelberg and F. K. Kienitz.
²³ Sheppard's term in "Canonization," p. 25; see also Robert R. Wilson, Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980). pp. 305-306. Gottwald. The Hebrew Bible, pp. 103, 106, 436-437, 459-469 elaborates on the impact of the conjunction of Persian intervention and Judahite political compromise on canonization and social history.
²⁴ Childs, New Testament as Canon, pp. 51-52.

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meaning of the biblical text into what the final canonizers made of it. It will have to embrace all the varied fought-over meanings and their social settings, from the beginning, and not excluding the canonizers. To capitulate to the obscuring process of the canonizers in effacing the identities and conflictual stances of editors, religious groups, and political factions, would be to default both as historians and as theologians.

Theology does have truth at stake, including the truth of how theologies have arisen in our past.²⁵ A moments reflection tells us that one of the prime reasons for obscuring the identity of those who advocate authoritative decisions and interpretations is to make their judgments look unquestioned and ancient, even timeless, and certainly descended from divine authority. To overlook this psychosocial reality of ideology and mystification in religious assertions, canonical assertions included, is to deliver theology into an uncritical subjection to the unexamined self-interests of canonizers and contemporary interpreters. This, in turn, leaves us vulnerable to unconscious captivity within our own horizons, at a loss for a critical perspective by which the Bible could tell us anything we did not already know or by which it could come to bear tellingly on thought and practice today.

I conclude with the confidence that canonical criticism is not inconsistent with social scientific criticism, provided that each sees the element of the other that is intrinsic and necessary to its own enterprise. As Sheppard concisely formulates it, the two criticisms belong together:

Better theological exegesis requires a recognition that all the words of scripture are human words. historically conditioned, and contextually, relativized in service to a larger theological claim upon a later believing community. ²⁶

A social hermeneutic open to the social locus of original texts and canon and to the social locus of interpreters will have both a linguistic canonical sensibility and a sociological bent toward uncovering the self interests, past and present, through which the divine interests are asserted. In plain truth, in biblical traditions, every assertion of divine interest is also someones human interest. The collaboration of canonical criticism and social scientific criticism will improve our chances of discerning, focusing. and critiquing the admixture of divine-human interests which form the content of biblical revelation.

²⁵ Norman K. Gottwald. "The Theological Task After The Tribes of Yahweh," in The Bible and Liberation, pp. 190-200.
²⁶ Gerald T. Sheppard, "The Use of Scripture Within the Christian Ethical Debate Concerning Same-Sex Oriented Persons," Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 40 (1985), p. 31.