JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

tion. It was Weber who delineated distinct groups of Israelite
intellectuals and, using the source-critical insights of his day,
correlated them with specific biblical texts and literary/theological
genres. It was Weber who argued that the prophets of
Israel aspired to de-magicize the world. In this manner they
were harbingers of the slow, millennial process of rationalization
that culminated in Occidental modernity. It is important
to note the trans-civilizational scope of his analysis; the inchoate
rationalism of these ancient Israelite intellectuals provides
one way in which “Jewish religion has world-historical
consequences” that extend into the modern period. It was
Weber who audaciously suggested that biblical Decalogues
were something of a mnemonic device for the less theologically
sophisticated masses. And it was Weber who wondered
if the austere ritualistic segregation of ancient Judaism
inadvertently triggered the antisemitism of antiquity and
beyond.
Yet these theories and their corresponding methodological
initiatives were overlooked for nearly half a century. It was
only in the 1970s that a sustained effort to think sociologically
about ancient Israel garnered widespread interest. Central
to the rise of this second wave was Norman Gottwald’s
The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated
Israel 1250–1050 B.C.E. This work elicited denunciations of
the sociological method as applied to the Bible (Mendenhall)
and charges of rank amateurism (Rainey). Whether one
agrees with Gottwald’s thesis of a peasant rebellion in ancient
Palestine, a revolt catalyzed by the enigmatic group known
as the habiru, his text was crucial in that it consciously attempted
to engage in dialogue with the writings of Marx, Weber,
Durkheim and Talcott Parsons (Berlinerblau, 2002; Boer).
What characterizes Gottwald’s project and that of other contemporary
biblical sociologists is an attempt to use biblical,
epigraphic, and archaeological data as a means of reconstructing
ancient Israelite history (Wilson) and society (McNutt).
They work closely, if somewhat uncritically, with the biblical
text in order to gain insight into ancient Israel as it actually
was in the early Iron Age. Gottwald and a few others notwithstanding,
biblical sociologists tend to eschew serious engagement
with sociological research. Indeed, an astonishingly large
number of studies in this field use terms such as “social location,”
“social world,” “social setting,” “social-scientific analysis”
(a trend initiated by the sociologist Peter Berger’s important
1963 article on the social location of prophecy). All of these
terms are useful in their own way, but decidedly distinct from
the lexicon employed in standard sociology.
What would the third wave of biblical sociology entail? A
list of desiderata might be framed as follows. The move from
“social studies” to sociology will only take place when biblicists
thoroughly and creatively confront the immense canon
of sociological literature. Next, a greater degree of sophistication
in approaching the Hebrew Bible qua historical text is
necessary. Philip Davies, in commenting on Gottwald’s Tribes,
aptly notes that there exists a difference between the society
represented in the Hebrew Bible and the real society in which
bible
the Hebrew Bible was produced. Accordingly, biblical sociology
must develop criteria for assessing when scriptural data
offers accurate data for sociological reconstruction. Self-reflexivity
has always been a staple of the sociological imagination
and the study of how knowledge has been produced
in biblical studies (across two millennia) and who produces
such knowledge, stands as one of the most fertile areas for
further exploration. Finally, as a means of moving beyond the
rather positivistic project of reconstructing ancient Israelite
society, and as a means of remaining loyal to Weber’s transhistorical
vision, biblical sociologists might look at how the
Hebrew Bible itself has functioned across sociological time
and space. A sociology of interpretation, or “socio-hermeneutics”
(Berlinerblau, 2005) would look at how situated Jewish
and Christian interpreters have read the Bible and how such
readings came to exert world-altering effects upon the social
body in question.
Bibliography: M. Weber, 1952. Ancient Judaism, 194–218,
5, 242, 417; T.O. Beidelman, W. Robertson Smith and the Sociological
Study of Religion (1974), 68; W.R. Smith, The Religion of the Semites.
Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: Second and Third Series,
J. Day (ed.) (1972); P. McNutt, Reconstructing the Society of Ancient
Israel (1999); F. Frick, “Norman Gottwald’s The Tribes of Yahweh
in the Context of ‘Second-Wave’ Social-Scientific Biblical Criticism,”
in: Tracking the Tribes of Yahweh: On the Trail of a Classic (2002);
J. Pedersen, Israel: Its Life and Culture: 1–4 (1926); A. Lods, Israël.
Des origines au milieu du VIIIeme Siècle (1930); A. Causse, Du groupe
ethnique a la communauté religieuse: Le problem sociologique de
la religion d’Israël (1937); A. Alt, Essays on Old Testament History
and Religion (1967); R. De Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions
(1961); M. Noth, The History of Israel (1958); C. Van Leeuwen,
Le développement du sens social en Israël avant lère chrétienne (1955);
C.E.H. Mayes, “Amphictyony,” in: The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Volume
1:A–C., 212–216 (1992); N. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh:
A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel 1250–1050 B.C.E. (1980);
G. Mendenhall, “Ancient Israel’s Hyphenated History,” in: Palestine
in Transition: The Emergence of Ancient Israel (1983); A. Rainey,
“Review of The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated
Israel, 1250–1050 B.C.E.,” in: JAOS, 107 (1987):540–543; J. Berlinerblau,
“The Delicate Flower of Biblical Sociology,” in: Tracking
the Tribes of Yahweh: On the Trail of a Classic (2002), 59-76; R. Wilson,
Sociological Approaches to the Old Testament, 30-53 (1984); P.
Berger, “Charisma and Religious Innovation: The Social Location of
Israelite Prophecy,” in: American Sociological Review, 28 (1963):
940–50; P. Davies,. “The Society of Biblical Israel,” in: Second Temple
Studies 2. Temple and Community in the Persian Period (1991), 23;
J. Berlinerblau, The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take
Religion Seriously (2005); R. Boer (ed.), Tracking the Tribes of Yahweh:
On the Trail of a Classic (2002).
[Jacques Berlinblau (2nd ed.)]
RELIGIOUS IMPACT
in judaism
In Hellenistic Judaism
Hellenistic Jewish literature, dating from about 250 B.C.E. to
40 C.E., may be regarded as the fusion of the biblical tradition
with the Greek language and culture. The literary activ-
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