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377 - The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism |
The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical
Criticism:
Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies
By Jon D. Levenson
Louisville, Westminster/John Knox, 1993. 208 pp. $14.99.
These collected essays, all revised for the present volume, make an important contribution to the discussion of method in biblical studies today. The status of historical research is presently a subject of vigorous dispute. It is widely recognized that even the most "objective" historians are wont to pursue their own unacknowledged interests, and many would now argue that: the pretension to objectivity has been mistaken all along. Levenson adds a compelling Jewish perspective to this debate. For most of this century, Levenson maintains, biblical scholarship has promoted the replacement of traditional exegesis with historical-critical method. In theory, historical study-which proclaims itself as a universal and rational method-cannot serve the interests of specific religious communities. Yet in practice, historical-critical interpretation has too often simply recast Christian views of the Hebrew scriptures, denying, at least implicitly, the continuity of the Hebrew Bible with Judaism. The result, Levenson argues, is a Christianity that masquerades as historical criticism and historical research that is skewed by its unadmitted religious commitments.
Key to Levenson's view is a recognition of the influence of anti-Judaism upon the founding figures of modern Old Testament studies. Wellhausen, for example, despite his tensions with the church, retains a profoundly Lutheran hostility toward biblical law and toward what he sees as the "decadent" postexilic period of biblical history and, hence, toward Judaism. Eichrodt's classic Old Testament Theology bases its covenantal emphasis not on historical ground but on New Testament caricatures of the Hebrew scriptures, calling them at the end of the work a headless "torso" apart from the Christian Bible. Even von Rad, who could never be charged with active hostility to Judaism (as Levenson admits), nonetheless silences Judaism by reading the Old Testament fundamentally as a book of anticipation, to be completed finally by the New Testament.
In short, Levenson suggests that the liberal Protestant scholarship that has dominated) the biblical field in Germany and the United States unwittingly uses historical criticism to reproduce an "Old" Testament. Historical criticism has not, therefore, provided a "neutral ground" where Jews and
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378 - The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism |
Christians can meet in dialogue about the Hebrew scriptures. Nor has the turn in recent decades to canon as a context for interpretation solved this problem. A biblical canon, Levenson notes, is always either Jewish, Samaritan, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or Protestant-never generic or universal. The selection of a canon (always a postbiblical decision) is not all historical judgment but rather an option for a literary context bearing the interests of the religious community that produces it.
Readers should not mistake Jon Levenson-who is himself an accomplished biblical historical critic-for an opponent of historical criticism per se. Nor do Levenson's arguments belong in any way to a Jewish-versus-Christian polemic. Rather, Levenson aims to criticize the unacknowledged religious and cultural commitments, and hence the falsely objective "universal" stance, of much biblical scholarship. Christian scholars who, like Levenson, maintain dual commitments to their religious community and to the academic guild can learn much from this critique.
The finial essay in this collection belongs to a different debate. Starting with a critique of George Pixley's 1987 Exodus commentary, Levenson develops an argument that, in my view, inappropriately links liberationist biblical interpretation with the abuses of communist totalitarian regimes throughout this century. Levenson's attack on impoverished Latin American Chri1stians' appeal to the exodus story is hard to reconcile with his eloquent argument (elsewhere in the book) that religious communities cannot escape the particularities of their own recontextualizing of the reading of Scripture.
Nonetheless, these essays will be of value to all who are interested in the future of critical biblical studies. They will not, to be sure, calm the methodological debate, but they bring to it a strong and credible Jewish voice. Levenson's views, anchored resolutely in the Jewish past, may provide glimpses of a postmodern hermeneutical situation. The present generation is witnessing the emergence of critical biblical study in which localized, committed readings of the Bible, like Levenson's, engage historical inquiry on new terms, and the history of the interpreting community is seen to be as decisive as the history of the text.
HAROLD C. WASHINGTON
Saint Paul School of Theology
Kansas City, MO