Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk" <Peter_Kirk AT sil.org>]

Title: Re: Monotheism was: "admittedly syncretistic..

Jonathan, I agree that critical research on the biblical texts is desirable. But it is also very difficult, because everyone comes with their own presuppositions.

 

But you really cannot claim that Wellhausen succeeded in not introducing his “own religious belief system”. What do you think his belief system was? Do you think he was an orthodox Christian just because he had (I assume) been baptised as a Christian? No, his belief system, whether or not you call it “religious”, was based around popular 19^th century ideas of evolution and the inevitable progress of man from savagery to perfection – ideas the fallacy of which were rudely exposed in 1914-18 and again in the Holocaust. His belief system is dead, or nearly so, but for some reason his theories which are so dependent on it still live on, even in your argument from “the development of Israelite religion” that the Torah must depend on Hammurapi rather than vice versa because it is more “developed”.

 

 

Peter Kirk

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan D. Safren [mailto:yon_saf AT bezeqint.net]
Sent: 26 January 2002 09:02
To: Biblical Hebrew
Subject: Re: Monotheism was: "admittedly syncretistic..

 

Dear Rolf,

You write:

 

[Rolf] in scientific research "God" as a *factor* must a priori be excluded. We cannot seek recourse in something metaphysical ("God") if we are doing scientific research. The problem, however, is that we research documents that not only speak about God, but where several authors explicitly say that they were inspired by God. So how can we do an intelligent research on documents that are claimed to be rooted in something that we a priori exclude?

 

[JDS] Nothing is or should be excluded from scientific research. I realize that many, if not most, people have an emotional problem doing research into the God they believe in. But, first of all the study of ancient Israelite religion need not concern the validity or invalidity of this or that belief system (that would be engaging in religious polemics), but the phenomenology or historical development of Israelite religion and its belief in God,

I realize that this is difficult for most people, even scholars to do, without introducing one’s own religious belief system (witness Wellhausen!), but this is what must be done. Otherwise, it would be like not investigating whether the earth was round because it interferes with established belief. Moreover, I have known Orthodox Jewish scholars who have had no problem with critical scholarship (for example my own teachers Loewenstamm and Seeligmann); others did and do: At Bar Ilan University in Israel, there are no courses in the books of the Torah, only in commentaries to the Torah. They are afraid of what they might get into. This avoidance, I might add, has been a cause of ridicule, in at least one article I have read.

Secondly, why should shamanism, Buddhism, totemism, animism, Canaanite, Babylonian and Ugaritic religions and their gods be investigated while the Israelite God remains immune?

 

<snip>

 

[JDS] Most definitely. And this should be explained in terms of the development of Israelite religion. First of all, the various “law codes” of the Torah function as stipulations in the Divine suzerainty treaty with Israel, and are not at all equivalent with Codex Hammurapi or the Laws of Ur-Nammu, which serve to demonstrate that the king was just. The fact that the laws of the Pentateuch are treaty stipulations explain why they include cultic-religious laws, as these are the ways of expressing loyalty to the sovereign.

And, according to Weinfeld, this also explains the presence of apodictic formulation, entirely absent in the ANE law codes, but quite conspicuous in the suzerainty treaties (which also include casuistic formulations).

The fact that the Torah was later understood, both in Judaism and Christianity, as the “Law”, helped obscure the original nature of the laws; but Rashi, citing R. Yitzhak, pointed this out already in his 11^th century commentary to Gen. 1:1.

 

Whew! Rolf, for me this  has been an exceedingly long discourse, and I think I’ll end it here. Sincerely,

Jonathan

Jonathan D. Safren

Dept. of Biblical Studies

Beit Berl College

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