History, Archaeology and The Bible Forty Years After Historicity

Changing Perspectives 6

Ingrid Hjelm, Thomas L. Thompson, Ingrid Hjelm, Thomas L. Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317428145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

In History, Archaeology and the Bible Forty Years after "Historicity", Hjelm and Thompson argue that a 'crisis' broke in the 1970s, when several new studies of biblical history and archaeology were published, questioning the historical-critical method of biblical scholarship. The crisis formed the discourse of the Copenhagen school's challenge of standing positions, which—together with new achievements in archaeological research—demand that the regional history of ancient Israel, Judaea and Palestine be reconsidered in all its detail. This volume examines the major changes that have taken place within the field of Old Testament studies since the ground breaking works of Thomas Thompson and John van Seters in 1974 and 1975 (both republished in 2014). The book is divided in three sections: changing perspectives in biblical studies, history and cult, and ideology and history, presenting new articles from some of the field's best scholars with comprehensive discussion of historical, archaeological, anthropological, cultural and literary approaches to the Hebrew Bible and Palestine's history. The essays question: "How does biblical history relate to the archaeological history of Israel and Palestine?" and "Can we view the history of the region independently of a biblical perspective?" by looking at the problem from alternative angles and questioning long-held interpretations.

Unafraid to break new ground, History, Archaeology and the Bible Forty Years after "Historicity" is a vital resource to students in the field of Biblical and East Mediterranean Studies, and anyone with an interest in the archaeology, history and religious development in Palestine and the ancient Near East.

Part I

CHANGING PERSPECTIVES IN BIBLICAL STUDIES

1

OLD AND NEW IN SCANDINAVIAN INTERPRETATION OF THE HEBREW BIBLE¹

Douglas A. Knight

In the coastal district of Puri, located some 500 km southwest of the city of Kolkata, one can witness every June or July the Hindu festival of Ratha-Yatra, the Chariot Festival. The three gods celebrated are Jagannatha (an avatar of Vishnu), his brother Balabhadra, and his sister Subhadra. A distinctive feature of the festival is its three wooden, wheeled carts, ponderous and enormous at nearly 15 m high and 11 m square, which workers spend two months every year to construct anew. These chariots transport the three gods over a distance of 3 km from one temple to a second temple, where they can enjoy a seven-day holiday from their “job” as gods before returning again to their home temple. Thousands of devotees converge in Puri to attend this festival, when possible gaining honor and blessing from pulling the carts. Observing the festivals, early British colonialists thought that religious enthusiasts sometimes threw themselves under the wheels as an act of devotion to earn liberation. The massive carts are unwieldy, top-heavy, cumbersome, and laborious to move in the heat, and occasionally a devotee is crushed under the wheels due to the sheer force or unstoppable momentum of the moving chariot. The festival has left its linguistic mark in the West: the name of the god Jagannatha, “Lord of the Universe”, is the etymological root for our word “juggernaut”, meaning a seemingly unstoppable force.²

This ritual festival serves as an effective metaphor to illustrate the weight that scholarly tradition, for all its admirable and necessary features, can have in overpowering new ideas and confining its practitioners to traditional ways, especially in certain groups and regions. In the world of biblical research, Continental scholarship, in particular its German tradition, has enjoyed a leading role in developing methods, questions, issues, hypotheses, and conclusions that together have influenced generations of scholars in those countries and elsewhere. Yet this growth of knowledge has at times become a juggernaut, leading to frustration if not disenchantment, which some of its own advocates have at times expressed. Note, for instance, four examples from one ten-year period alone: Gerhard von Rad, in his landmark study of 1938, Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuch, stated on the first page:

No one will ever be able to say that in our time there has been any crisis in the theological study of the Hexateuch. On the contrary, it might be held that we have reached a position of stalemate which many view with considerable anxiety. What is to be done about it?

(Von Rad 1966 [1938]: 1)³

In his 1941 presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis (in 1962 the name was shortened to the Society of Biblical Literature), Julius Morgenstern criticized the Society for having “mired itself in a steadily deepening rut, from which, but a little longer, it may never extricate itself”. Its meetings, he observed, “fail to stimulate as they should and to not a few of our members seem even empty and boring”, and he urged the Society to “arouse itself from its long lethargy and become once again alert and progressive”. He attributed the ennui to the circumstance that the “techniques of documentary analysis of the OT are being increasingly outmoded”; they as well as form criticism were “becoming more and more subject to question” (Morgenstern 1942: 7–9, 1–2). A few years later, in 1947 in Scandinavia, Ivan Engnell referred dismissively to the received scholarly tradition as the interpretatio europeica moderna (Engnell 1947: 114; see also his larger discussion in 1945: 168–209). Shortly thereafter, in the preface to his 1948 book Überlieferungsgeschichte des Pentateuch, Martin Noth advocated introducing new questions in biblical studies:

I was especially concerned here to raise questions which must be asked and whose answers must be attempted, even though the answers may sometimes appear purely hypothetical. The concern of this work would be realized in large measure if the manner of raising the questions proved itself to be proper.

(Noth 1972: xxxv)

Beginning two decades later, the period from 1968 until the present has similarly witnessed many other scholars who have been dissatisfied with the status quo, and they have introduced radically new approaches—feminist criticism, new literary criticism, critical race theory, deconstruction, postmodernism, queer theory, ecological criticism, and much more—a density of new inquiry that has shaken the foundations of past ways.

This engagement with new issues and questions, specifically within the Scandinavian countries, is the topic of this chapter. While orienting much of their work toward the historical-critical study they inherited regarding the Hebrew Bible, Scandinavian scholars throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries have repeatedly introduced new ideas and approaches distinctive in the discipline. Even when they did not gain many followers from inside or outside this region, they have been successful in triggering debates and presenting perspectives that have advanced our understanding of antiquity in the region of ancient Southwest Asia.⁴ They often opposed the ruling methods and assumptions directly—more so in Scandinavia during this period than in most other regions of scholarly activity. In North America the source-critical hypothesis was still taught into the 1960s as an assured result of scholarship. From 1968 onwards the situation began to change there and elsewhere. Changing perspectives occur, it would appear, either at the instigation of certain individuals or groups or as a part of the shift in values and outlooks in the culture at large.

My goal here is not to offer an extensive history of Scandinavian research; an overview has recently been presented in the series Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, edited by Magne Sæbø (1996–2015) who, himself a Norwegian, has conducted a much needed service for the biblical disciplines with his nearly 5,000 page history of international scholarship from Qumran to the present day. In it are two chapters surveying Northern European research on the Bible: one on the nineteenth century by Jesper Høgenhaven (2013) and the other on the twentieth century by Antti Laato (2015). Rather than duplicating their efforts, I aim instead to draw attention to a selection of key instances, mainly from the first half of the twentieth century, when scholars in Scandinavia stepped apart from the conventional work of others—the juggernaut—and offered distinctive proposals or approaches that stimulated, if not always won over, biblical scholars elsewhere.

Let me first say a word about the accessibility of Scandinavian publications to those native to other lands. James Barr once mentioned to me that he learned to read Norwegian so he could make direct use of Sigmund Mowinckel’s 1951 book, Offersang og sangoffer, which was not translated into English until 1962. Not all scholars have been as willing to go to such an effort, nor perhaps as linguistically adept as was Barr. Nordic authors face a dilemma similar to others from small countries or from language-fields outside the perimeters of the so-called international research languages—English, German, and French. Even Latin, once the lingua franca of scholarship, has receded in importance on the modern academic scene. Scandinavian scholars, like those from similar lands, must not only learn other languages but even become proficient enough in writing them that they can express the nuances necessary in technical discourse. In addition, virtually all scholars in this region, as elsewhere, write also for their own compatriots in their native languages, which others from the outside rarely see and appreciate. For example, Mowinckel together with four other Norwegian scholars (varying from volume to volume: Simon Michelet, Nils Messel, Arvid S. Kapelrud, and Ragnar Leivestad) collaborated in producing in their own language a 5 volume, 2,600 page translation and commentary of the Hebrew Bible over the period from 1929 to 1963 (Mowinckel et al. 1929–1963), and of it Mowinckel wrote nearly 80 percent, a major part of his total output for which he gets little or no credit outside Scandinavia, in fact scarcely outside Norway alone. It is quite common for Nordic scholars to write their studies first in their own languages and only later, if possible, see them translated, or translate them themselves, into English, German, or French. So the languages can be a barrier, but not an insurmountable one. On a personal note, I learned Norwegian while studying at the University of Oslo and also spent time in Sweden and Denmark. My first book, based on my dissertation, deals with the history and methods of traditio-historical research, half of it on Scandinavia and the other half on other European, British, and North American work (Knight 2006). The response in the reviews was perhaps predictable: those from outside Scandinavia typically commented on the importance of the Scandinavian half, and reviews from Nordic countries either focused on the non-Scandinavian half or noted that it was good for non-Nordic researchers to get better acquainted with what was happening among their colleagues to the North. Comparable perspectives and reactions about other types of scholarship can be observed in most countries.

Axel Olrik (1864–1917)

Early Scandinavian work on folklore and the history of religion encompassed a variety of cultural areas and historical periods but also influenced biblical studies. In 1908 Axel Olrik published in Danish an article that was revised and translated into German in the following year and later also into English, entitled “Epic Laws of Folk Narrative” (Olrik 1908). As simple and straightforward as it now seems, this brief listing of “epic laws” has had a substantial influence on later folklore studies, and no less a specialist than Alan Dundes has called it a “classic in international folkloristics” (Dundes 1999: 85). Coinciding with Hermann Gunkel’s interest in the folk tales of ancient Israel, it draws on various folk traditions, of which the old Nordic and Germanic folktales were the closest at hand. Olrik had studied in Copenhagen with Svend Grundtvig, generally regarded as the founder of Danish folkloristics and the initiator of the series Danmarks gamle Folkeviser [Denmark’s Old Folksongs], the first volume of which appeared in 1853. Olrik also studied with Moltke Moe in Oslo (then Kristiania), from whom he heard the idea of “epic laws”. There was, though, a clear difference between these two. Moe, whose own study of such laws appeared posthumously (Moe 1914–1917), thought of these epic laws as keys to the development of folk materials (Dundes 1999: 85). Olrik, on the other hand, took more of a synchronic view and regarded his “laws” as formal elements (see also the introduction to Olrik 1992: xxi–xxii). Thus he spoke of, for example, the Law of Repetition, the Law of Three, the Law of Two to a Scene, the Law of Contrast, the Importance of Initial and Final Position, the Unity of Plot, and the Concentration on a Leading Character. He found these principles at work not only in European lore but also in a wide variety of other narratives. After reading the 1909 German translation of the article, Gunkel corresponded with Olrik concerning his own Genesis commentary, noting the “almost uncanny affinity between your research and mine” (cited in Olrik 1992: 156; see also xxiii) and referring to it explicitly in his third edition of Genesis (1910: xxxvi ff). For his part, Olrik subsequently consulted Gunkel’s commentary and published his own folkloristic observations about the ancestral stories in Genesis (Olrik 1992: 116–33; see also 180–82). Other biblical scholars, both inside and outside of Scandinavia, have also drawn on Olrik’s seminal proposals articulated in this seemingly slight article of 1908.

Vilhelm Grønbech (1873–1948)

Another early Scandinavian scholar from outside the biblical disciplines is the Dane Vilhelm Grønbech, a philologist and historian of religion with exceptional range and creativity. Grønbech’s scholarly output was extraordinary—over thirty volumes altogether on such subjects as Teutonic culture, India, Jesus, Paul, William Blake, Goethe, nineteenth-century religious currents, Hellenism, ancient Hellas, collections of Germanic myths, literature, humor and tragedy, and more, including essays on psychological research, the soul or mana, and even the atomic bomb. His writings exhibit a sympathetic, nuanced understanding of whichever culture he was studying. All forms of religious phenomena captured his attention—literary expressions, religious leaders, cultic rituals, religious forms and beliefs among the general populace as well as those in organized religion. Even though he used the term, he opposed the pejorative evolutionary notion of “primitive” because of his high regard for these cultures; he found them to be harmonious and argued that they should be called “classic” rather than “primitive” (Grønbech 1955, vol. 2: 220). For him it was essential to understand a society as a whole, not to break it into supposedly separate parts as is still frequently done.

His work influenced subsequent biblical scholars in Scandinavia in especially two ways. First, his approach in the f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• History, Archaeology and the Bible Forty Years After “Historicity”
• Copenhagen International Seminar
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Changing Perspectives in Biblical Studies
• Part II Archaeology, Cult and History
• Part III Ideology and History
• Index of sources
• Index of authors