JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

of Israel may be seen in the two major mid-twentieth century
histories of Israel by the American John Bright (1959) and the
German Martin *Noth (1950). The disposition of some “biblical
theology” writers (especially Gerhard von Rad), to argue
that Israel’s original theological interpretations stand even if
there are no factual traditions behind them may be of help to
the theologically minded but to few others.
Certain of the religionsgeschichtliche developments
stemming from Gunkel’s work were at least as problematic.
Whereas Wellhausenianism and classical liberalism had solved
the problem of distance and relevance by a drastic reductionism
to what allegedly had timeless truth and value (mostly
ethics!), Religionsgeschichte tended to accentuate – and often
exaggerate – the distance of the material from modern man
and its strangeness to him and evidenced little or no concern
for the questions of the relevance and factuality of the material,
or for the contemporary philosophical and theological
debates in general. Furthermore, the exploitation of the many
parallels between Israel and her neighbors easily developed
into a “parallelomania” (Sandmel) which judged Israel almost
totally in the light of her neighbors. The “pan-Babylonianism”
of A. *Jeremias, Friedrich *Delitzsch, and H. *Winckler was
one of the major manifestations of this mood, but it continued
to some extent in the later “myth and ritual” school of S.H.
Hooke, the Uppsala school of I. Engnell, and in the works of
Sigmund *Mowinckel. (Not quite so all-encompassing and
pretentious were the collections of comparative materials in
the many works of J. *Morgenstern and T.H. *Gaster.) Impressive
theories about “divine kingship” in Israel and about an alleged
autumnal “New Year” festival, strongly patterned along
foreign lines are especially associated with Mowinckel. Rival
theories, drawing more upon the biblical sources as they now
stand, were developed especially by Artur Weiser and Hans-
Joachim Kraus. One of the most devastating critiques ever leveled
against the cultic “patternism” common to many of these
efforts was H. *Frankfort’s Kingship and the Gods (1948).
Furthermore, in connection with many of the theories
of this type, the common assumption was that the cult created
its own supporting stories which were later “historified,”
rather than celebrating historical events to begin with. Similarly,
many traditio-historical theories saw the cult as the
major factor in not only the production of the stories but in
their canonical ordering and interrelationship as well. One of
the more curious developments in the attempt to understand
biblical antiquity on its own terms was the attempt to isolate
“Hebrew thought,” especially in contrast to “Greek” (classically
perhaps in T. Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared With
Greek, 1960). While this line of investigation was helpful in
excluding certain alien concerns of Western philosophy and
rationalism, it easily left the impression that the difference
was intrinsically linguistic or ethnic, rather than a matter of
pre-secular and pre-philosophic (not “prelogical”!) forms of
expression. Sometimes this approach was confused with “biblical
theology,” and at other times it confused the “mythologic”
of paganism with Israel’s “empirical logic” (the terms
bible
are Albright’s) in an indiscriminate “primitivism” (the weakness
of J. Pedersen’s Israel (1926), which, however, is still useful).
James Barr leveled especially devastating critiques at this
approach. H. Frankfort’s The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient
Man (1946; later reprinted under the title Before Philosophy)
remains an outstanding study.
“Biblical Theology”
In a way, the last of the supplements to classical Wellhausenianism,
although it often overlapped with the movements
already noted above, was that of “biblical theology,” a movement
that initially attracted minimal attention in Judaism. Its
roots lay in the post-World War I disillusionment with both
the reductionism of the earlier liberalism and the deliberate
“irrelevance” of Religionsgeschichte (as expressed also in the
“neo-orthodoxy” of the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth
(1886–1968) in particular). While unwilling to return to the
pre-Kantian “orthodoxy” of an objective norm in an inspired
Scripture, this movement did strongly affirm the truth of the
Bible’s “record of revelation” because it allegedly “rang true”
to man’s existential condition. It revolted especially against
the earlier critical tendency to limit criticism to questions of
date, authorship, sources, etc., without pressing on seriously
to consider the message. No doubt, since Gabler’s manifesto,
most “biblical theology” had in actuality been little but “history
of Israel’s religion.”
Most work in this field tended to have somewhat of a
Heilsgeschichte (“salvation history”) character. However, no
unanimity at all was reached concerning the order or system
which was most appropriate, and on this reef the movement
itself eventually foundered. Among the major names may be
mentioned: Edmond Jacob (1955) who produced a theology
using quite traditional categories; Walther Eichrodt (1933) who
tried to arrange his material around the internal biblical category
of *covenant; and Gerhard von Rad (1957), author of the
last and perhaps the greatest of the works of this school, who
attempted to return to a more strictly chronological arrangement,
thus abandoning all attempts to find any real internal
unity in the material. Hence it became plain that this movement
too had come full circle, and in subsequent years works
on the “religion” of Israel again began to supplant “theologies.”
Interestingly, Jews showed little interest in biblical theology in
its heyday but now seem increasingly open to the enterprise
(Brettler in bibliography).
Finally, there is the ecumenical spirit of the age, which
has seen Roman Catholicism join most of the rest of Western
Christendom and Judaism in the historical-critical enterprise.
Jewish and Catholic Bible scholars now participate in collaborative
scholarly projects that were once exclusively Protestant.
(Oddly, despite Jewish participation in Protestant translations,
no Christian scholars have participated in the translations or
commentaries sponsored by the Jewish Publication Society.)
To the extent that this cooperation has progressed beyond
theologically neutral philological matters, probably two traditional
blindspots of the previously dominant Protestantism
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3 651