Julius Wellhausen Old Testament
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Pious and Critical Scholarly Paradigms of the Pentateuch •Fl
Author Biography Spencer is a third year History major from Martinez, California. In addition, he is perusing a minor in Religious Studies. His major research interests involve the study of the Old and New Testament, as well as military history. After graduation, he hopes to take his passion and research to seminary, where he can further his study of the field and history of Biblical criticism. Morgan Pious and Critical Scholarly Paradigms of the Pentateuch — during the 19th & early 20th centuries by Spencer Morgan Abstract This paper examines the antithesis between Christian scholarship and modern higher criticism of the Pentateuch during the 19th and early 20th centuries. During the 19th century, the popularization and eventual hegemony of the Doc- umentary Hypothesis revolutionized the field of Biblical studies. Modern criti- cal scholars claimed that Moses did not write the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) during the 15th century BC, but rather it was the product of a later redaction of at least four separate documents: J, E, P, and D. Writing hundreds of years apart and long after Moses, their authors reflect not the ancient covenantal religion of Moses, but rather various periods in the evolution of Israel’s religion. The implications of the Documentary Hypothe- sis bring into question the historicity and theological validity of not only the Pen- tateuch, but also the Christian New Testament which presupposes it. The goal of this research is to identify the foundational presuppositions, conclusions, and contextual consciousness that both the modern critics and the Reformed body of Christian scholars opposing them brought to their scholarship. -
William Robertson Smith, Solomon Schechter and Contemporary Judaism
https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.jhs.2016v48.026 William Robertson Smith, Solomon Schechter and contemporary Judaism bernhard maier University of Tübingen, Germany* During Solomon Schechter’s first years in the University of Cambridge, one of his most illustrious colleagues was the Scottish Old Testament scholar and Arabist William Robertson Smith (1846–1894), who is today considered to be among the founding fathers of comparative religious studies. Smith was the son of a minister of the strongly evangelical Free Church of Scotland, which had constituted itself in 1843 as a rival to the state-controlled established Church of Scotland. Appointed Professor of Old Testament Exegesis in the Free Church College Aberdeen at the early age of twenty-four, Smith soon came into conflict with the conservative theologians of his church on account of his critical views. After a prolonged heresy trial, he was finally deprived of his Aberdeen chair in 1881. In 1883 he moved to Cambridge, where he served, successively, as Lord Almoner’s Reader in Arabic, University Librarian, and Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic. Discussing Schechter’s relations with Robertson Smith, one has to bear in mind that direct contact between Schechter and Smith was confined to a relatively short period of less than five years (1890–94), during which Smith was frequently ill and consequently not resident in Cambridge at all.1 Furthermore, there is not much written evidence, so that several hints and clues that have come down to us are difficult to interpret, our understanding being sometimes based on inference and reasoning by analogy rather than on any certain knowledge. -
Prophets Postcolonially Initial Insights for a Postcolonial Reading of Prophetic Literature
ARTICLES PROPHETS POSTCOLONIALLY INITIAL INSIGHTS FOR A POSTCOLONIAL READING OF PROPHETIC LITERATURE Steed Vernyl Davidson Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary / Graduate Theological Union This article examines the conception of the genre prophetic literature and how a postcolonial examination probes its production. A postcolonial engagement can offer more than simply anticolonial resistance dis- course as can be gleaned from the theo-political contexts of prophetic material. Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s reflection on ‘the book’, other postcolonial theorists, as well as genre theory, the article traces elements that constitute a ‘prophetic book’ and interrogates the power of the canonical category ‘prophetic literature’. In the end it offers three defining features of a postcolonially resituated reading of prophetic literature. The relationship between Biblical Studies and Postcolonial Studies rests on the presumption that at multiple levels the Bible exists as a product of empire. This presumption readily leads to the application of postcolonial theory to the reading of biblical texts without a preliminary interrog- ation of the literature that constitutes the body of texts called ‘Bible.’ While biblical critics pay attention to the socio-cultural milieus that generate major portions of the Bible such as Greco- Roman society (Moore 2006; Carter 2001; Liew 1999), classification of biblical material into prophetic literature, gospel, apocalypse, and so on remain unexamined from a postcolonial per- spective. Since the synchronic/diachronic option that the general field of Biblical Studies insists on may be a false choice for most postcolonial biblical scholars, users of postcolonial theory in relation to the Bible tend to probe the Bible as literature from the perspective of what Homi Bhabha regards as ‘the edict of Englishness and the assault of the dark unruly spaces of the earth’ (Bhabha 1994, 107; Sugirtharajah 2005, 2003, 2002, 2001; Boer 2008). -
The Theological Development of the Young Robertson Smith by Donald R
81 The Theological Development of the Young Robertson Smith by Donald R. Nelson Dr. Nelson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at Michigan State University, was awarded his doctorate by that university in 1969 for a thesis on "The Life and Thought of William Robertson Smith, 1846-1894". Here he studies the early influences on Robertson Smith's thought, and finds that these included deter minant philosophical influences as well as those of philological and historical study. RITING in 1889 of the impact of theories of higher criticism upon W the Christian's understanding of the Old Testament, Mary Augusta Ward interpreted "the present collapse of English orthodoxy" as resulting from "one cause only-the invasion ofEnglish by German thought."l Though doubtless there were believers who contested her assessment of the state of the Faith, few would have contradicted her notion that in recent decades British religious insularity had been breached by a theological barrage of Teutonic origin. The publication in 1860 of an incendiary little volume titled Essays and Reviews was a clear warning that the Channel no longer provided protection against "German rationalism." The chief intention of its seven Anglican contributors was to "break down the conspiracy of silence" that they felt had kept otherwise educated people in ignorance of the revolutionary developments that had long before occurred in German theology and biblical study.2 Essays and Reviews, its non-committal title notwithstanding, sparked two ecclesiastical trials and a literary battle of considerable magnitude. When in the eighteen-seventies and eighties the German "historical consciousness" first made its way to Great Britain on a scale sig nificant enough to warrant Mrs. -
Wellhausen, Julius (1844-1918)
Das wissenschaftliche Bibellexikon im Internet (WiBiLex) Wellhausen, Julius (1844-1918) Meik Gerhards erstellt: Mai 2018 Permanenter Link zum Artikel: http://www.bibelwissenschaft.de/stichwort/34720/ Wellhausen, Julius Meik Gerhards Julius Wellhausen gilt als „Bahnbrecher in drei Disziplinen“ (Smend 2006): der Alttestamentlichen und der Neutestamentlichen Wissenschaft sowie der Arabistik. Der Artikel widmet sich Wellhausens Werk als Alttestamentler (vgl. dazu auch Kraus, 255-274; Graf Reventlow, 302-316; Smend 2013b, 436-453; kürzer: Perlitt 2. Au. 1967; Spieckermann; Smend 2006, 16-26; Kratz 2015a, 71-77; 2015b). Seine bedeutendste Leistung auf diesem Gebiet liegt in der Erarbeitung eines neuen Bildes der Geschichte Israels, das ältere Ansätze der Forschung aufnehmend auf der Abb. 1 Julius Wellhausen. Spätdatierung der Gesetzescorpora des Pentateuchs beruht. Das betrit neben dem → Deuteronomium auch die bis dahin üblicherweise früh datierten priesterlichen Gesetze (→ Pentateuchforschung). Wellhausen zeigt auf, dass das kanonische Bild der Geschichte Israels von exilischen Bearbeitungen im Geist des Deuteronomiums geprägt ist (so im Hexateuch und in Richter bis 2Könige; → Deuteronomismus) oder in nachexilischen Neufassungen im Geist der → Priesterschrift vorliegt (→ Chronikbücher). Trägt man entsprechende Überarbeitungen ab, zeigt die ältere Geschichtsschreibung und Prophetie, dass Israel bis in spätvorexilische Zeit keine schriftliche Gesetzesgrundlage hatte und weder → Monotheismus noch Kultuszentralisation (→ Josia) kannte. Wellhausens Rekonstruktion der Literargeschichte und der politisch-religiösen Geschichte Israels konnte eine Fülle von Spannungen in den Texten erklären und auösen und wurde so zu einem bis heute prägenden Meilenstein der Forschung. Der Artikel stellt auch die Frage nach dem theologischen Ansatz, der Wellhausens historische Arbeiten bestimmt. Die Frage hängt mit dem „ersten großen Problem einer Wellhausen- Biographie“ (Jepsen, 261) zusammen: den Gründen seines Wechsels von der Theologischen in die Philosophische Fakultät. -
Philhellenism and Orientalism in Germany Suzanne Marchand
Philhellenism and Orientalism in Germany Suzanne Marchand Introduction. The divergence of the disciplines Most readers of Lynchos will probably know something about the history of classical scholarship, and, understandably, regard the period of post- 1790 secularization and specialization as one of great progress. That it was, in many respects; the sharpening of text-critical skills and the driving out of wild speculations and politicized argumentation did indeed lay the foundations for the professionalization of classical scholarship, especially in the university-rich territory of German-speaking central (and especially northern) Europe. But a great part of this professionalizing process – and one under-reported in such classic accounts as Ulrich von Wilamowitz- Moellendorff’s History of classical scholarship (1921) – also entailed the closing of some doors.1 Most obviously being slammed shut were the passageways that once allowed scholars to wander between classics, theo- logy, and the study of the ancient Near East; and as classics and classicists increasingly claimed one set of rooms in the house of ancient history for themselves, they compelled others, too, to adapt to new accommodations. That accommodation is by no means so well-known a story; in part this is the result of the way in which the history of nineteenth-century orien- talist scholarship, too, fails to recognize not only the deep roots of the discipline but also its ongoing focus on the ancient world, and long-lasting classics-envy.2 It is my contention that one gets a much richer and better picture of changes in the disciplinary landscape and the significance of the disciplinary divergences that began around 1790 by recognizing that Orientalistik was, like classics, a child of Christian humanism; it was, importantly, the sibling left to tend the cavernous old house when the classicists remodeled their rooms and locked the doors. -
The Victoria Institute, Biblical Criticism, and the Fundamentals
The Victoria Institute, biblical criticism, and the fundamentals Mathieson, S. (2021). The Victoria Institute, biblical criticism, and the fundamentals: with James C. Ungureanu, “Introduction to the Symposium on Science, Religion, and the Rise of Biblical Criticism”; Paul C. H. Lim, “Atheism, Atoms, and the Activity of God: Science and Religion in Early Boyle Lectures, 1692–1720”; Diego Lucci, “The Biblical Roots of Locke's Theory of Personal Identity”; Jon W. Thompson, “The Naturalization of Scriptural Reason in Seventeenth Century Epistemology”; James C. Ungureanu, “‘From Divine Oracles to the Higher Criticism’: Andrew D. White and the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom”; Nathan Bossoh, “Scientific Uniformity or ‘Natural’ Divine Action: Shifting the Boundaries of Law in the Nineteenth Century”; Stuart Mathieson, “The Victoria Institute, Biblical Criticism, and The Fundamentals”; and Samuel Loncar, “Science and Religion: An Origins Story.”. Zygon. https://doi.org/10.1111/zygo.12676 Published in: Zygon Document Version: Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Queen's University Belfast - Research Portal: Link to publication record in Queen's University Belfast Research Portal Publisher rights Copyright 2021 the authors. This is an open access article published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the author and source are cited. General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Queen's University Belfast Research Portal is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. -
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 fas- cinated by it, and his impact on Old Testament scholarship of his time was so overwhelming, that during the following decades it be- came 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 de- cades before Wellhausen. -
Table of Contents
T ABLE OF CONTENTS Epigraph v Dedication vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction xi PART ONE 3 Post-Bellum Aftermath: An Anthology of Anomalies, Elites, and Agendas 1. Koldewey’s Conundrum and Delitzsch’s Dilemma 5 A. Koldewey’s Conundrum: The Sirrus 6 B. Delitzsch’s Dilemma: Babel und Bible 14 1. The CuneiformT ablets and an Out-of-Place Name for God 20 2. The Documentary Hypothesis: Astruc to DeWette 21 3. The Documentary Hypothesis: 24 Hupfeld’s “Copernican Revolution” 4. The Documentary Hypothesis: 25 Karl Heinrich Graf and Julius Wellhausen 5. The Critical Suspicion of an Agenda 26 6. The Suggestions of an Agenda at Work with the Critics: 27 Weishaupt’s Strange Comment and a Hidden Illuminist Role in Early Old Testament Criticism? 7. The Explosive Thunderclap of Delitzsch’s Dilemma 28 2. “Marduk Remeasured the Structure of the Deep”: 31 The Megalithic Yard and the Sumerian Reform A. An Oxford Professor Overturns the Standard Model: 33 Alexander Thom, isH Work, and its Implications 1. Thom’s Megalithic Yard and the Expansions 35 of Knight and Butler 2. TheM ethods 37 a. Thom’s “Ancient Bureau of Standards Theory” 37 GGMM-guts_FIRSTPASS_UPDATED.indd 19 3/1/11 1:10 AM 3. Celestial Geometries and the Pendulum Method 38 4. Beautiful Numbers: The 366-, 365-, and 360-Degree Systems 41 5. TheN ext Step: Measures of Weight and Volume 44 6. Ancient and Megalithic Anticipations of the Imperial 45 and Metric Systems B. The Hidden Elite and the Cosmic War Scenario 46 1. The Ancient Elite: Astronomy, Finance, and the God of Corn 46 versus the God of Debt 2. -
Authorship of the Pentateuch
M. Bajić: Authorship of the Pentateuch Authorship of the Pentateuch Monika Bajić Biblijski institut, Zagreb [email protected] UDK:27-242 Professional paper Received: April, 2016 Accepted: October, 2016 Summary This piece is a concise summary of the historical and contemporary develo- pment of Pentateuch studies in Old Testament Theology. This article aims to provide information on the possible confirmation of Mosaic authorship. The purpose is to examine how the Documentary Hypothesis, Fragment and Su- pplemental Hypotheses, Form and Traditio-Historical Criticism, Canonical and Literary Criticism have helped to reveal or identify the identity of the author of the Torah. To better understand the mentioned hypotheses, this article presents a brief description of the J, E, D, and P sources. Key words: Pentateuch, authorship, Mosaic authorship, Torah, Documen- tary Hypothesis, Fragment and Supplemental Hypothesis, Form and Tradi- tio-Historical Criticism, Canonical and Literary Criticism. In the most literal sense, the Pentateuch 1 (or Torah) is an anonymous work, but traditional views support the belief of Mosaic authorship (Carpenter 1986, 751- 52). Yet, with the advent of humanism and the Renaissance, the sense of intellec- tual freedom and upswing in research have led to the fact that many have begun to read the Bible critically, trying to challenge its text as well as the traditions and beliefs that are formed from it (Alexander 2003, 61-63). One of the most commonly attacked beliefs is Moses’ authorship of the Torah. There has been an 1 Taken from the Greek translation LXX. Pentateuch is derived from the Greek word pentateu- chos, which means a five-book work, known as the Books of Moses (Carpenter 1986). -
Julius Wellhausen, Anti-Judaism, and Hebrew Bible Scholarship
religions Article Unapologetic Apologetics: Julius Wellhausen, Anti-Judaism, and Hebrew Bible Scholarship Stacy Davis Department of Religious Studies and Theology Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA; [email protected] Abstract: Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) is in many ways the ancestor of modern Hebrew Bible scholarship. His Prolegomena to the History of Israel condensed decades of source critical work on the Torah into a documentary hypothesis that is still taught today in almost all Hebrew Bible courses in some form. What is not taught as frequently is the anti-Judaism that underpins his hypothesis. This is in part due to unapologetic apologetics regarding Wellhausen’s bias, combined with the insistence that a nineteenth-century scholar cannot be judged by twenty-first century standards. These calls for compassion are made exclusively by white male scholars, leaving Jewish scholars the solitary task of pointing out Wellhausen’s clear anti-Judaism. In a discipline that is already overwhelmingly white, male and Christian, the minimizing of Wellhausen’s racism suggests two things. First, those who may criticize contextual biblical studies done by women and scholars of color have no problem pleading for a contextual understanding of Wellhausen while downplaying the growing anti-Judaism and nationalism that was a part of nineteenth-century Germany. Second, recent calls for inclusion in the Society of Biblical Literature may be well intentioned but ultimately useless if the guild cannot simply call one of its most brilliant founders the biased man that he was. Keywords: Wellhausen; anti-Judaism; historical context Citation: Davis, Stacy. 2021. Unapologetic Apologetics: Julius Wellhausen, Anti-Judaism, and Hebrew Bible Scholarship. -
GENESIS in the PENTATEUCH Konrad Schmid I in the Heyday of the Documentary Hypothesis It Was a Common Assumption That Most Texts
GENESIS IN THE PENTATEUCH Konrad Schmid Introduction In the heyday of the Documentary Hypothesis it was a common assumption that most texts in Genesis were to be interpreted as elements of narra- tive threads that extended beyond the book of Genesis and at least had a pentateuchal or hexateuchal scope (J, E, and P). To a certain degree, exe- gesis of the book of Genesis was therefore tantamount to exegesis of the book of Genesis in the Pentateuch or Hexateuch. The Theologische Realen- zyklopädie, one of the major lexica in the German-speaking realm, has for example no entry for “Genesis” but only for the “Pentateuch” and its alleged sources. At the same time, it was also recognized that the material—oral or written—which was processed and reworked by the authors of the sources J, E, and P originated within a more modest narrative perspective that was limited to the single stories or story cycles, a view emphasized especially by Julius Wellhausen, Hermann Gunkel, Kurt Galling, and Martin Noth:1 J and E were not authors, but collectors.2 Gunkel even went a step further: “‘J’ and ‘E’ are not individual writers, but schools of narrators.”3 But with the successful reception of Gerhard von Rad’s 1938 hypothesis of a tradi- tional matrix now accessible through the “historical creeds” like Deut 26:5– 9, which was assumed to have also been the intellectual background of the older oral material, biblical scholarship began to lose sight of the view taken by Wellhausen, Gunkel, Galling, and Noth. In addition, von Rad saw J and 1 Julius Wellhausen, Die Composition des Hexateuchs und der historischen Bücher des Alten Testaments (3rd ed.; Berlin: Reimer, 1899); Hermann Gunkel, Genesis (6th ed.; HKAT 1/1; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964 [repr.