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  • From: "Heard, Christopher" <Christopher.Heard AT pepperdine.edu>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Inspiration
  • Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 19:34:39 -0700

Kevin,

As you know, this question can draw very heated or dismissive replies, and as such any discussion of "inspiration" on this list tends to get shut down very quickly. The fact of the matter is that we have precious little comment within the Tanakh from the Tanakh writers about their own writing activity ... but there _are_ some such statements. In my exegetical judgment, all such statements refer to texts shorter, and other, than our present canonical biblical books. In other cases, there are not _explicit_ statements, but very easily inferrable factors about how particular texts came to be written. If you expand the data to the New Testament, you can get a little bit more, but not much.

Over the years, in trying to explain "inspiration" to my students (who are mostly conservative evangelical or quasi-evangelical Christians), I have tried to use those precious few places where biblical writers explicitly reflect on their own writing activity to develop a model of the "mechanisms" of "divine inspiration" of scripture (and, yes, in putting it that way, I am "tipping my confessional hand"). I am actually trying to develop that model into a publishable form for a denominational journal, but I would be happy to share those ideas and the data behind them. However, that's probably best done off-list, knowing the history of what tends to happen here when the concept of inspiration is bandied about.

In another reply to your (Kevin's) post, Jim West wrote that there is nothing in the Hebrew Bible about inspiration and that it is a purely Christian notion. Jim, I don't agree with you on that. Inspiration is clearly not a completely Christian notion--in fact, I would argue (though I'll just posit for right now) that contemporary Christian ideas about inspiration are significantly Islamicized, and actually owe more to Islamic/Qur'anic tradition than to the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition. But returning to the Hebrew Bible for a moment: I do actually agree with Jim _to an extent_. That is, the Hebrew Bible has no such thing as a "doctrine of the inspiration of scripture" within it, and for that matter, neither does the New Testament have a "doctrine of the inspiration of the New Testament" within it. The writers of the Hebrew Bible did not know of the existence of any such thing as the Hebrew Bible, nor could they have, because it did not exist until well after they did their work, and therefore they did not theorize or dogmatize about it and could not have done so. The same applies, _mutatis mutandis_, for the New Testament and the Christian Bible. Even so, the Hebrew Bible does witness to certain beliefs about God being involved with the creation of written texts, in a variety of ways, and therefore the _concept_ of "inspiration," if I may change Kevin's definition slightly to "the process of God causing texts to be written," is definitely present within the Hebrew Bible. I would go beyond that to say that there are certain implicit dynamics in some texts that would allow us to infer certain things about how God will have been involved in the creation of those texts. Therefore, the concept of inspiration is, in my exegetical judgment, present both explicitly and implicitly in the Hebrew Bible--but please note that I mean the inspiration of _texts_, and not the inspiration of the _canonical form of the scriptures_, for on _that_ score we have no inner-biblical _data_.

I probably should stop with this right now in this forum, but would be happy to discuss the data, and what I think may reasonably be inferred from it (given a belief in God), back-channel with anyone who wishes to do, or here if the moderators want to give the green light to this topic on-list (which I doubt will happen since the topic so often turns contentious).

Best wishes to all,

Chris

On Aug 1, 2005, at 6:52 PM, Kevin Riley wrote:
A question raised by a recent [and now ended] discussion: is there any
clear evidence in the Hebrew scriptures or in Hebrew writings from *before*
the exile that give us a clear picture of how the ancient Hebrews perceived
inspiration [or whatever you want to call the process of God causing the
scriptures to be written]. It seems to be assumed that they viewed
inspiration in one of the ways we do, yet I wonder if we have any evidence
of that, and if so what it is? I don't want a reply that tells me what
inspiration is, or to start a discussion on which current view is correct -
just what actual original evidence we have for an ancient Hebrew
understanding of it.

--
R. Christopher Heard
Assistant Professor of Religion
Pepperdine University
Malibu, California 90263-4352
http://faculty.pepperdine.edu/cheard
http://www.iTanakh.org
http://www.semioticsandexegesis.info




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