Middlemas, Jill

Danish

Tidsskrift.dk (Det Kongelige Bibliotek)

28God, the human person, and its recep-tion in religious communities against the backdrop of cultural embeddedness. My work includes monographs, edited volumes, essays, and articles that fall under 5 main topics; (1) reconstructions of the thought and literature of the period considered to be the great watershed in biblical memory, commonly referred to as the exile, but which I call the Temp-leless Age, (2) attention to the distinctive contribution of biblical Diaspora case studies which evidence positive attitudes towards an adoptive homeland as well as strategies for constructive and successful integration, (3) greater awareness of pro-phetic ethics that contribute to inclusion and openness in theological and anthro-pological reflection, (4) the significance of the temple as a religious, economic, and social edifice in biblical Israel and for Jewish communities in the Greco-Roman world, and (5) re-defining and characte-rizing aniconism and its importance for theological analyses of the imago Dei.Historicity and God-talkReligious communities understood that they could modify and create new stories of encounters with God exactly The Old Testament,  the Bible, and HistoryBy assistant professor, PhD Jill MiddlemasA number of years ago, a professor of Systematic Theology in Berlin, Notger Slenczka argued that the Old Testament should no longer be included in the sa-cred scripture of the Christian Church. His was not a new argument. Negative at-titudes about the inclusion of the OT date back already to the debates surrounding the formation of the Bible that circulated around Marcion in the second century CE. Thinking along these lines resurfa-ced time and again, but notably in con-junction with the German Christians in the period of National Socialist rule who removed the OT from the scripture of the church and any sympathetic passages or books in the New Testament. Before I consider my view about the irreplacea-ble contribution of the OT to theological study, let me briefly introduce myself. My work on the OT over the last 15 years has taken me from Oxford to Århus to Zürich and now to Copenhagen for a two-year appointment to fulfill the tea-ching duties of Associate Professor Søren Holst. Degrees in Jewish Studies, Orien-tal Studies, and Theology have sparked my interest in a number of research areas. What unifies my work is the endeavour to understand the record of thinking about 29because the Hebrew scriptures present a testament of a deity active within hi-storical time. Notably, a consideration of the OT or perhaps better, the Hebrew Bible, discloses an overwhelming in-terest in historicity. The historical bent of the OT encourages us to get to know something about the cultural contexts in which it arose. Its literature, then, invites us to have a narrow view of the world in which it claims to have arisen as well as a broader view of the various ancient Near Eastern cultures within which it existed, with which it shared ideology and theo-logy, and against which it negotiated for its distinctiveness and survival. Through this narrow and broader view, we come to know both the oddness of the biblical world and possibilities for approaching its message today. With the risk of being reductionist, let me point to two examp-les of what I mean. (1) The OT comes from a cultural set-ting that is vastly different from (post-)modern Europe. The material evidence that remains includes copious religious and administrative records, such as li-turgies, laments over fallen cities, and details about cultic preparations and ritu-als as well as lists of various monarchs, their military campaigns, and treaties or other bureaucratic documents, but with less narrative framing and interpretation than that found among the traditions of ancient Israel. Moreover, the iconograp-hy of the ancient world from Egypt, the Mesopotamian empires of Assyria and Babylonia, and the Persians farther to the East, discloses how ancient peoples sought to depict themselves and their ide-ologies. They conceptualized themselves quite differently than we would – with exotic hairstyles, exaggerated eyes, long beards for the men, different clothes, and vastly distinct depictions of symbols, flying disk deities, and other mysterious creatures – hybrid and whole. To learn about the OT entails getting to know the different and, from our point of view, of-ten strange world in which it existed. When seen in this way, the loss of the Hebrew scriptures from the canon remo-ves the opportunity to experience the ‘old’ of the OT or the symbolic universe of the ancient world that is from our post-modern vantage point totally other. In so doing, it omits that which can make us uncomfortable or challenge our concep-tions of ourselves, our societies, our sy-stems of government, and our religious beliefs. At the same time, greater aware-ness of a critical approach to the biblical literature that includes a view to its cultu-ral context in the ancient world restricts the interpreter from making facile, one to one correspondences in interpretation, application, and exegesis.(2) The study of the OT also enables us to think through questions about the authority of scripture as a testament se-parated from the ‘old’ that we name it. A way to think about this results from new research that I am conducting on Rewrit-ten Scripture in antiquity, but which also aligns with some texts we recently stu-died in class. Rewritten scripture refers to sacred traditions, often understood as hi-storical accounts of encounters with God, that were inherited, updated, and modi-fied within local religious communities to meet the needs of the present. There are examples of Rewritten Scripture in the Bible, but the terminology primarily describes a phenomenon related to extra-30biblical literature of the intertestamental period know from the Dead Sea Scrolls (the book of Jubilees or the Genesis Apocryphon), Josephus’ Antiquities, and Greek versions of the stories of Esther and Daniel, for example. One of the clearest examples of a bibli-cal book that has been updated, added to, and modified over time is the book of Isa-iah. Starting with the Enlightenment, but certainly consistent with the precedent set by the pre-critical work of the medie-val rabbis, the book of Isaiah divides into three main sections. It includes prophetic oracles associated with different histo-rical figures; Isaiah of Jerusalem who prophesied in the eighth century BCE (chs. 1-39), an anonymous prophet of the Exile active after the fall of Jerusalem in the sixth century BCE (chs. 40-55), and another anonymous prophet of the Resto-ration associated with the reconstruction of the imperial province of Yehud with its capital in Jerusalem in the fifth century BCE (chs. 56-66). Chapter one seems to represent the work of the final editor of the book of Isaiah who intended to provide a suitable introduction to its 66 chapters of dispara-te material. Because the work introduces the prophet Isaiah by presenting a sum-mary of the entirety of his prophecies, the first chapter can appear disjointed, with various verses spliced together in the redactor’s presentation. For example, an oddly placed woe oracle appears as an independent unit between material with which it otherwise has nothing to do, “Ve det syndige folk, et folk der er læsset med skyld, en slægt af forbrydere, børn der volder fordærv; de har svigtet Herren, la-det hånt om Israels Hellige og vendt ham ryggen” (Es. 1,4). According to redaction critics, this saying has been relocated from its place as the introduction to a se-ries of woe oracles that appear in chapter 5 (Es. 5,8-23) after what is known as the Song of the Vineyard (Es. 5,1-7). In its rightful place, it would have introduced a series of woe oracles directed to specific groups with a general divine word and rounded the number of woes to 7, one of the numbers in scripture that symbolized holiness and completeness. Attention to the historical embedded-ness of scripture reveals that the book of Isaiah has been organized and framed in order to introduce its message to a new audience in a new cultural context, even perhaps in a new place. Without diving too deep into a discussion of the editing of biblical texts, it suffices to point out what is important about this illustration. Sacred scripture was inherited and up-dated in later times and by different aut-hors within communities that found its message authoritative, and so important to frame and maintain for the current ge-neration and for posterity. This suggests something about the task of the interpre-ter and the theologian: sacred scripture licenses the ongoing disclosure of religi-ous messages for the succour of people and communities of faith in new times and circumstances by priests, preachers, and teachers, not rigidly and woodenly, but flexibly and imaginatively. Appreciating the stranger  among usCircling back to calls for the ejection of the Hebrew scriptures from the Bible of the Christian Church, perhaps we should be honest about the fact that the OT is 31not an easy read. It is full of conflicting messages, difficult passages in terms of translation as well as appreciation, hor-ror stories and tales of tragic loss, hu-man suffering, and catastrophes, strange concepts, weird cultic rituals, and even a marked preference for exclusion – what I have recently discussed with my students as intolerant monotheism. The OT is as fraught with competing voices, entrenc-hed views, and discord as the recent pre-sidential election in the United States of America. Similarly, it invites its readers and hearers into dialogue and debate in order to grasp their ‘better angels’ and lean into justice and ethical behaviour to the neighbour, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan – as we just translated in class, ‘to put right the oppressor (lit. ‘the exploiter’)’ (Isa. 1,17). The OT forms an important part of the anthology of the Christian Bible. By reminding us of what is different, odd, and strange, it enables us, encourages us even, to be tolerant of, to acknowledge lines of commonality with, and have re-spect for other points of view, cultures, and religions. At the same time, scripture presents itself as holding universal truths that span time to speak a new word bey-ond its cultural embeddedness. It is the responsibility of practitioners, then, to update its message to meet the challenges of changing times whilst respecting a di-stinctive voice from a setting that differs dramatically from our own. The Old Testament is a significant part of holy scripture, not just because the early church used it for liturgy and self-understanding, but also because it enables us to better appreciate that which makes us uncomfortable. To lose the OT is to whitewash the messiness of the testi-mony of scripture. Through the ‘strange fire’ of its literature we are in a better position to grapple with that which is foreign to us, with that which is odd to us – in outlook and expression, and ulti-mately with that which can challenge us to confront and wrestle with as well as to see what is remarkable and beautiful in the ‘other’.

The Old Testament, the Bible, and History

https://tidsskrift.dk/teolinformation/article/download/124493/171358

The Old Testament, the Bible, and History

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