HOPES-AND FEARS ROLF RENDTORFF University Of

THE PARADIGM IS CHANGING: HOPES-AND FEARS ROLF RENDTORFF Universityof Heidelberg This has been a great century in Old Testament scholarship. At its dawn we find a number of names that have left their stamp on the whole century, and the ideas of these scholars still serve as guide- lines in many areas of Old Testament studies. I name three of them: Julius Wellhausen, Bernhard Duhm, and Hermann Gunkel. Wellhausen, in a sense, represented the conclusion of one epoch of research and, at the same time, the opening of a new one. The question how to interpret the history of the origins of the Pentateuch was discussed throughout the whole of the nineteenth century, and different models were proposed and applied. Now one model gained the upper hand: the "newer documentary hypothesis". It was not invented by Wellhausen. His own contemporaries, for example, Heinrich Holzinger in his famous Einleitung in den Hexateuch (1893), called it the "Graf Hypothesis", because Karl Heinrich Graf was the first to publish the new hypothesis. But Wellhausen was so fascinated by it, and his impact on Old Testament scholarship of his time was so overwhelming, that during the following decades it became more and more the Wellhausen hypothesis, as it is to this day. Let us consider for a moment what happened when, after a short while, this new theory became commonly accepted. In a more tech- nical sense, it was the victory of the "documentary hypothesis" over the earlier "fragment hypothesis", and in particular over the "sup- plementary hypothesis" that had been widely accepted in the decades before Wellhausen. But it is obvious that the main reason for this victory was not the purely literary question of dividing sources. Wellhausen himself explained quite clearly the main reason for the fascination with this new theory. In the introduction to his famous Prolegomena to the History of Israel,2 he told the reader how, as a young 1 K.H. Graf, Die geschichtlichenBucher des Allen Testaments:Zwei historisch-kritische Untersuchungen(Leipzig: T.O. Weigel, 1866). 2 J. Wellhausen, GeschichteIsraels (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1878); 2nd edn: Prolegomenazur GeschichteIsraels (1883); English translation from the 2nd edn: Prolegomenato the History of Israel (Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1885) = 35 scholar, he had loved the stories about Saul and David, Ahab and Elijah, and the early prophets, but how he had felt it to be impossible to understand the Pentateuchal law as the basis of all this literature. Then, "in the summer of 1867 [when he was 23 years old], I learned ... that Karl Heinrich Graf placed the Law later than the Prophets, and, almost without knowing his reasons for the hypothesis, I was prepared to accept it: I readily acknowledged to myself the possibi- lity of understanding Hebrew antiquity without the book of the Torah. "3z That was what fascinated Wellhausen, and then the majority of European Protestant Old Testament scholars: to liberate Hebrew antiquity from the burden of the later Jewish law. Therefore it be- comes clear that the acceptance of the "newer documentary hypothesis" included a particular view of the history of Israelite religion. This view was not new. Already De Wette had divided his "Biblical Dogmatics" (1813) into two parts which he called "Hebraism" and "Judaism". The latter he viewed as "the unsuc- cessful restoration of Hebraism ... : a chaos which is longing for a new creation" (§ 142).4 Together with this concept Wellhausen in- herited from De Wette an emphatic romantic view of earlier Israelite history: "the history of the ancient Israelites shows us nothing so dis- tinctly as the uncommon freshness and naturalness of their im- pulses. The persons who appear always act from the constraining impulse of their nature, the men of God no less than the murderers and adulterers: they are such figures as could only grow up in the open air".5 In contrast, the Torah belonged to the era of Judaism: "the warm pulse of life no longer throbbed in it to animate it ... The soul was fled; the shell remained, upon the shaping out of which 6 every energy was now concentrated".6 This new hypothesis had fundamental consequences for the reconstruction of the history of Israel. And this was Wellhausen's leading interest, as the title of his foundational book, History of Israel, demonstrates, and as is apparent from the second edition, Prolego- Prolegomenato the History of AncientIsrael (New York: Meridian Books, 1957). 3 English edition, pp. 3-4. 4 With this view of post-exilic Israel, compare R. Rendtorff, "The Image of Post-exilic Israel in German Bible Scholarship from Wellhausen to von Rad", in Sha<areiTalmon: Studies in the Bible, Qumran, and the Ancient Near East Presentedto ShemaryahuTalmon (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1992). 5 English edition, p. 412. 6 English edition, p. 78. .

Load more