A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, Volume I

From the Beginnings to the End of the Monarchy

Rainer Albertz

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 1994
• ISBN:
  9781611645927
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

This book, the first of two volumes, offers a comprehensive history of Israelite religion. It is a part of the Old Testament Library series.

The Old Testament Library provides fresh and authoritative treatments of important aspects of Old Testament study through commentaries and general surveys. The contributors are scholars of international standing.

1 Introduction

C.J.Bleeker, ‘Comparing the Religio-Historical Method and the Theological Method’, Numen 18, 1971, 9-29; A.Causse, Du groupe éthnique à la communauté religieuse. Le Problème sociologique de la religion d’Israël, 1937; B.S.Childs, Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context, 1985; W.Eichrodt, ‘Hat die alttestamentliche Theologie noch selbständige Bedeutung innerhalb der alttestamentliche Wissenschaft?’, ZAW 47, 1929, 83-91; id., Theology of the Old Testament, ET 1961, 1967; O.Eissfeldt, ‘Israelitisch-jüdische Religionsgeschichte und alttestamentliche Theologie’(1926), in id., KS I, 1962, 105-14; id., ‘Werden, Wesen und Wert geschichtlicher Betrachtung der israelitisch-jüdischen Religion’ (1931), ibid., 247-65; G.Fohrer, History of Israelite Religion, ET 1972; id., ‘Zur Einwirkung der gesellschaftlichen Struktur Israels auf seine Religion’, in id., Studien zu alttestamentlichen Texten und Themen (1966-1972), BZAW 155, 1981, 117-31; G.F.Hasel, ‘Major Recent Issues in Old Testament Theology’, JSOT 31, 1985, 31-53; M.Hill, ‘Social Approach (1)’, see F.Whaling (ed.), Vol.II, 89-148; G.Kehrer and B.Harding, ‘Social Approach (2)’, see F.Whaling (ed.), Vol.II, 149-77; S.T.Kimbrough, ‘A Non-Weberian Sociological Approach to Israelite Religion’, JNES 31, 1972, 195-202; id., Israelite Religion in Sociological Perspective. The Work of Antonin Causse, Studies in Oriental Religions 4, 1978; H.G.Kippenberg, ‘Diskursive Religionswissenschaft. Gedanken über eine Religionswissenschaft, die weder auf einer allgemein gültigen Definition von Religion noch auf einer Überlegenheit von Wissenschaft basiert’, in B.Gladigow and id., Neue Ansätze in der Religionswissenschaft, Forum Religionswissenschaft 4, 1983, 9-28; H.-J.Kraus, ‘Die Anfänge der religionssoziologischen Forschungen in der alttestamentlichen Wissenschaft. Eine forschungsgeschichtliche Orientierung’ (1969), in id., Biblisch-theologische Aufsätze, 1972, 296-310; G.Lanczkowski, Begegnung und Wandel der Religionen, 1971; T.Luckmann, Das Problem der Religion in der modernen Gesellschaft. Intuition, Person, Weltanschauung, 1963; id., The Invisible Religion. The Problem of Religion in Modern Society, 1967; J.Matthes, Religion und Gesellschaft. Einführung in die Religionssoziologie I, ²1969; G.Mensching, ‘Religion, I. Erscheinungs- und Ideenwelt’, RGG³ V, 1961, 961-4; P.D.Miller, ‘Israelite Religion’, in D.A.Knight and G.M.Tucker (eds.), The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters, 1985, 201-37; H.Mol, Identity and the Sacred. A Sketch for a New Social-Scientific Theory of Religion, 1976; L.Perlitt, Vatke und Wellhausen, BZAW 94, 1965; H.D.Preuss, Theologie des Alten Testaments, I, 1991; O.Procksch, Theologie des Alten Testaments, 1950; G.von Rad, ‘Offene Fragen im Umkreis einer Theologie des Alten Testaemnts’ (1963), in id., Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament II, TB 48, 1973, 289-312; R.Rendtorff, ‘Alttestamentliche Theologie und israelitisch-jüdische Religionsgeschichte’ (1963), in id., Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament, TB 57, 1975, 137-51; id., ‘Theologie des Alten Testaments. Überlegungen zu einem Neuansatz’, in id., Kanon und Theologie, Vorarbeiten zu einer Theologie des Alten Testaments, 1991, 1-14; H.Ringgren, Israelite Religion, ET 1966; C.Schäfer-Lichtenberger, ’The Pariah: Some Thoughts on the Genesis and Presuppositions of Max Weber’s Ancient Judaism’, JSOT 51, 1991, 85-113; id., ‘Vom Nebensatz zum Idealtypus. Zur Vorgeschichte des “Antiken Judentums” von Max Weber’, in E.Blum, C.Macholz and E.W.Stegemann (eds.), Die Hebräische Bibel und ihre zweifache Nachgeschichte. FS R.Rendtorff, 1990, 419-33; W.Schluchter (ed.), Max Webers Sicht des antiken Christentums, 1985; W.H.Schmidt, The Faith of the Old Testament, ET 1983; R.Smend Sr, Lehrbuch der alttestamentlichen Religionsgeschichte, ²1899; R.Smend Jr, ‘De Wette und das Verhältnis zwischen historischer Bibelkritik und philosophischem System im 19. Jahrhundert’, TZ 14, 1954, 107-98; id., ‘Johann Philipp Gablers Begründung der biblischen Theologie’, EvTh 22, 1962, 169-79; F.Stolz, ‘Probleme westsemitischer und israelitischer Religionsgeschichte’, TR 56, 1991, 1-26; G.E.Swanson, The Birth of the Gods. The Origin of Primitive Beliefs, 1974; W.Vatke, Die biblische Theologie wissenschaftlich dargestellt, I: Die Religion des Alten Testaments, 1835; T.C.Vriezen, An Outline of Old Testament Theology, ET 1958; M.Weber, Ancient Judaism (1921), ET 1952; J.Wellhausen, ‘Israelitisch-jüdische Religion’ (1905), in R.Smend (ed.), Grundrisse zum Alten Testament, TB 27, 1965, 65-109; C.Westermann, ‘Das Verhältnis des Jahweglaubens zu den ausserisraelitischen Religionen’ (1964), in Forschung am Alten Testament. Gesammelte Studien I, TB 24, 1964, 189-218; id, Elements of Old Testament Theology, ET 1982; W.M.L.de Wette, Lehrbuch der christlichen Dogmatik in historischer Entwickelung dargestellt, I: Biblische Dogmatik Alten und Neuen Testaments oder kritische Darstellung der Religionslehre des Hebraismus, des Judenthums und Urchristentums, 1813, ³1831; F.Whaling (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Religion (2 vols), in J.Waardenburg (ed.), Religion and Reason 27, 1983; 28, 1985; W.Zimmerli, ‘Biblische Theologie’, TRE VI, 1980, 426-55; id., Old Testament Theology in Outline, ET 1978.

Today the ‘history of Israelite religion’ is no longer a standard subject in most theological faculties, at any rate in Germany. In its function of bringing together the various aspects of Old Testament research, in many places it has either been completely replaced by lectures on the ‘theology of the Old Testmaent’ or pushed aside as a special subject.¹ A survey of publications since the end of the Second World War gives the same impression: whereas the ‘Histories of Israelite Religion’ written in this period of almost fifty years can be counted on the fingers of one hand,² new ‘theologies of the Old Testament’ are appearing in regular succession and now outnumber threefold the histories of Israelite religion.³

This fact is a direct consequence of the upheaval in theology which took place in Germany after the First World War, the break with nineteenth-century ‘liberal theology’ and the triumphant progress of ‘dialectical theology’.⁴ Quite apart from the demands of the subject, that the new insights of detailed studies in the history of religion and comparative religion should be brought together, the fact that ‘the history of Israelite religion’ nowadays again seems to be a meaningful and theologically necessary task is connected not least with the present situation in theology generally, in which the great systematic schemes of Bultmann, Barth and their successors have lost their all-prevailing fascination. We find ourselves thrown back – though at another level – on the problems of nineteenth-century theology; this comprehensive new conception of a ‘history of Israelite religion’, the desire to re-evaluate this discipline within the canon of Old Testament scholarship, is one more example of the trend.

1.1 History of research

The way which led to the development of the history of Israelite religion as an Old Testament discipline is a complex one and has often been described from a great variety of perspectives.⁵ So I can limit myself to some broad outlines. In 1931 Eissfeldt mentioned five sources of the historical approach to the religion of Israel and Judah: 1. the rationalism of the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth; 2. Herder; 3. the influence of Hegel’s philosophy of history, above all on Vatke; 4. the results of research into neighbouring religions during the second half of the nineteenth century; and 5. the history-of-religions school from the end of the nineteenth century to the First World War.⁶

The first starting point, rationalism, was common to both ‘Old Testament theology’ and ‘the history of Israelite religion’. In it, the concern to regard the religion of the Old and New Testaments as an independent historical entity over against dogmatics was a clear systematic interest: in the effort to demonstrate that Christianity was the ideal of reasonable, natural religion, the aspects of biblical religion which did not fit this ideal were explained away either as accommodation of the great religious mediators to the limited notions of their people⁷ or as influences from neighbouring religions which were at a lower level.⁸ In his famous inaugural lecture at Altdorf, which today is often claimed as the starting point for ‘Old Testament theology’,⁹ Gabler classified ‘biblical theology’ as e genere historico, but here ‘historical’ means above all the history of concepts, i.e. of ideas, and the historical investigation of biblical statements (interpretatio) is only a preliminary stage to philosophical reflection on the biblical concepts (comparatio), which links them to the true basic ideas of biblical religion on which dogmatics works.¹⁰

So Gabler’s programme in no way led to a really historical account of biblical religion, or Old Testament religion, which began to become an independent area of study in the subsequent period. One example of this is the remarkable rigidity of de Wette’s ‘biblical dogmatics’,¹¹ which, despite all the distinguished historical criticism in which its author had engaged over a variety of fields, divided up the biblical testimonies in a dogmatic way with a philosophical hermeneutic derived from J.F.Fries. For de Wette, the ‘idea of religion’ in the Old Testament could only be recognized ‘in its manifold and impure appearances in history’,¹² and it was necessary to strip off the ‘particularism’ which had found expression in partially degenerate ‘symbols’, in order to rise to its timeless ‘universalism’.¹³ De Wette did not see a continuous historical development; there were some high points only with Moses, the prophets and in the Psalms. But Christian prejudices and the early romantic influences of Herder continued to be evident in his marked disparagement of the post-exilic period as ‘Judaism’ in comparison to the pre-exilic period, ‘Hebraism’: ‘Whereas Hebraism was a matter of life and enthusiasm, Judaism is a matter of the concept and literalism.’¹⁴

The first scholar to break through to a really historical account of the religion of Israel was Vatke, with his Religion des Alten Testaments of 1835.¹⁵ The widely accepted Hegelian philosophy of history offered him not only the possibility of overcoming the hiatus between the historical and the theological approach but also a hermeneutical framework for understanding the history of Israelite religion as a ‘spiritual process’ of the revelation of the absolute Spirit progressing dialectically, and the union and ultimate identity of the human spirit with it.¹⁶ ‘The whole history of Old Testament religion is . . . a constant battle and victory of thought over the natural.’¹⁷

Even if it seems doubtful from a present-day perspective whether this is an apt description of the driving force of Israelite religion, the heuristic value of this philosophical-historical approach is evident from the help it gave Vatke in destroying the peculiar presentation of the Old Testament which depicted the whole of Israelite religion as already developed in the early Mosaic period, and which had hitherto stood in the way of any genetic understanding – even before Graf and Wellhausen had demonstrated that the Priestly legal material came into being at a late date. In reality the beginnings had to look very much simpler if the divine wisdom was not to have ‘leaped over several necessary elements of development’.¹⁸ For Vatke, Moses is a prophetically gifted nomadic leader who in antithesis to the natural religion of the people introduced the worship of Jehovah as the ‘one national God’.¹⁹

According to Vatke, the dialectical process, which began on a small scale with Moses, reached its first climax in the eighth-century prophets; they had for the first time decisively shaped the universalistic view of God and the idea of theocracy in the face of the national and nature religion of the people. In this way, the dialectical Hegelian model of thesis, antithesis and synthesis also gave Vatke a broad principle for dividing the religion of Israel into a pre-prophetic, prophetic and post-prophetic period. Indeed it enabled him – in contrast to de Wette and many who followed him – to evaluate the post-exilic era positively as ‘synthesis’, as the attempt at a benevolent transposition of theocracy in a legalistic direction, universalizing it in wisdom and internalizing it in religious poetry (551-577). For Vatke it was the Hellenistic period which first led to a decline, from which Christianity then rose to a final climax (577-590).

Although with this approach in terms of the philosophy of history Vatke was able to tackle the living dialogical structure of the history of Israelite religion much more appropriately than the approaches before him, which had been either didactic or expressed in terms of the history of concepts, as a result he remains far too imprisoned in the history of ideas and his account seems abstract, almost docetic. For example, he sees the prophets as the ‘main organs of the idea’ (480), not really human beings of flesh and blood; for him, events of political history like the rise of Assyria as a world power or the downfall of the Israelite states are ‘accidents’: they may support the dialectical spiritual process (universalization, separation from the world), but cannot produce and determine it.

Nevertheless, Vatke’s approach was a brilliant one. However, to begin with he found no successors. His philosophical diction, which was difficult to understand, was a deterrent, and his critical destruction of ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• General Bibliography
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The History of Israelite Religion in the Period before the State
• 3 The History of Israelite Religion during the Monarchy
• Notes