JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

commentaries on Daniel, worthy of special mention is J. Collins,
The Apocalyptic Vision of the Book of Daniel (1977).
Recent study of the psalter, in contrast to the above areas,
does not appear to describe so marked a contrast to earlier
work. The older cultic approach appears to thrive only in
England: J.H. Eaton, Kingship and the Psalms (1976; cf. his Festal
Drama in Deutero-Isaiah, 1979); A.R. Johnson, The Cultic
Prophet in Israel’s Psalmody (1979); and J. Gray. The Biblical
Doctrine of the Reign of God (1979). In contrast to that more
corporate accent, there are signs that the pendulum may be
swinging back to a more individualistic perspective; a harbinger
may be R. Albertz, Persönliche Frömmigkeit und offizielle
Religion (1979).
Finally, the continuing intense research into the nature
of biblical poetry may be noted. The pioneering study of F.
Cross and D. Freedman has been reprinted (Studies in Ancient
Yahwistic Poetry (1975)). Other important investigations
include D. Robertson, Linguistic Evidence for Dating
Early Hebrew Poetry (1972) and M. O’Connor, Hebrew Verse
Structure (1980). It is apparent, however, that in this area also
consensus is far off.
[Horace D. Hummel]
Developments in the Late 20th Century
The last thirty years of the 20th century were momentous in
biblical scholarship. The feminist movement brought women
scholars into a field that had been almost exclusively male,
and in addition, added a feminist dimension to biblical criticism
that male scholars had often ignored. In Orthodox Jewish
circles in Israel and to a lesser extent in the United States,
text-critical and historical study of the Bible became increasingly
tolerated, if not whole-heartedly embraced. In the United
States, the academic legitimation of ethnic studies, including
Jewish studies, the rise of the Christian religious right with
its bibliocentrism, and court decisions permitting the teaching
of religion in publicly funded schools made for heightened
interest in Bible. One result of increased undergraduate
instruction in Bible was the “Bible as Literature” movement,
now in decline. In contrast to classical “literary criticism” of
the Bible, the “literature” approach focused on the final form
of the text from a literary-aesthetic point of view, often borrowing
methods employed in criticism of world literature after
they had passed their prime in their original settings. Ignoring
the inconsistencies and inner contradictions of texts
resulting from multiple authorship and concentrating on uncovering
the “integrated literary whole” (Alter) of the final
editor or redactor, the new literary reading made the Bible
more accessible to a wider public whose members did not
require competence in the increasingly refined text-critical
methods or in the ancient literatures that had themselves influenced
the Bible. Among the earlier borrowed approaches
was structuralism, which asserted the existence of binary oppositions
that structure human thought that could be viewed
objectively by an observer and could unlock the actual meanings
of a text. The weakness of structuralism lay in the simple
bible
fact that different readers failed to agree on what constituted
an objective understanding. In opposition to structuralism,
reader-response theory focused on the role of the reader in
progressively producing meaning against the background of
the interpretative communities to which the reader belonged.
The parameters of meaning would be fixed by the communities.
For example, readers of the Old Testament in Christian
communities would produce meaning different from communities
of rabbinic Jews. A different attack on structuralism was
mounted by post-structuralism, or deconstruction, famously
associated with the name of the philosopher Jacques *Derrida
(1930–2004), which attacked the notion of binary opposition
as artificial. Applied to biblical texts (as well as others), deconstruction
frankly abandoned the attempt to understand the
meaning that an author might have wished to convey in favor
of engaging the text and discovering the ways in which it “inscribes”
power and privilege. Deconstruction, along with post-
Freudian psychoanalytic perspectives, neo-Marxism. M. Foucault’s
(1926–1984) attention to the complex relations between
power and “discourses,” and F. Jameson’s identification of the
contemporary focus on the present and the consequent loss
of connection to history, are often grouped under the rubric
of post-modernism. As applied to the Bible, post-modernist
interpretation resurrected the pre-critical lack of interest in
the temporal distance between the biblical text and the contemporary
audience. Borrowing the notion of undecidability
from physics, post-modernism maintained the impossibility
of deciding between two (or more) competing interpretations,
harking back to the pluriform approaches of medieval Christianity
and Judaism. A useful corrective to modern notions
that one could recover the “original meaning” of an ancient
text with full confidence, post-modernism tended to reveal
more about the interpreter than about the Bible.
The last decade of the twentieth century inaugurated
the Minimalist-Maximalist debate. Primarily associated with
the names of the Sheffield scholar Philip Davies and the Copenhagen
scholars Niels Lemche and Thomas Thompson, the
Minimalists (sometimes called “Revisionists”) argue for very
late datings of the books of the Bible, sometimes characterizing
the Bible as a Hellenistic book. They claim, in addition,
that the Jewish community of post-exilic times was a mixed
population not continuous with the Iron Age people who
lived in the central mountain regions of Israel. Accordingly,
Minimalists maintain that the biblical narratives covering the
period from Abraham to the fall of Jerusalem in 586 lack probative
value, and that “Ancient Israel” is a modern scholarly
misconstruction. “Maximalists” covers a broader range than
the term might imply, including scholars who are skeptical of
the biblical accounts of enslavement, exodus and conquest as
well as some who continue to maintain the existence of a historical
Abraham. Maximalists are united in their belief that
the Bible and archaeological evidence clearly establish the existence
of an ancient Israel, the contours of whose history are
recoverable. The Minimalist critique of earlier overly nthusiastic
claims of biblical historicity has proved useful. For their
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3 655