Global Hermeneutics? - International Voices in Biblical Studies ...

Geographical and Institutional Aspects of Global
Old Testament Studies
KNUT HOLTER
INTRODUCTION
Academic studies of the Old Testament—as we know this field within our
guild, the International Organisation for the Study of the Old Testament (IOSOT)—
are for most practical purposes a northern, theological enterprise.
First, it is mainly a northern enterprise, simply because most of us are
northerners. We call ourselves an international guild, and when we interact—by
visiting each other, sending students to each other or doing research together—we
refer to this as ‘internationalisation’ in our annual institutional reports. Still, it is
mainly a northern internationalisation, as most of us come from—and therefore
express and reflect the concerns of—the North Atlantic or North Mediterranean. As
far as IOSOT is concerned, it is mainly a European organisation, as pointed out at
our congress in Oslo nine years ago by David J. A. Clines. After a survey of
participants and paper readers in the IOSOT congresses between 1953 and 1998, he
concludes that the organisation will have to decide whether to rename itself a
European organisation or to take steps to become what its traditional name actually
suggests, a more representatively international organisation. 1
Second, academic Old Testament studies—again, as we know this within the
IOSOT—are mainly a theological enterprise. Certainly, not all of us consider
ourselves theologians. And our guild has members whose institutional framework
is not a faculty of theology, but rather faculties of arts or social sciences, with their
various departments of Ancient Near Eastern languages, linguistics, literature,
religious studies, or even biblical studies. Still, the majority of the guild members
work in institutional frameworks of theology, that is, Christian theology. This fact
explains the relatively high number of Old Testament scholars compared to that of
specialists in other classical religious texts, and it also explains why a theologically
biased name like the “International Organisation for the Study of the Old
Testament” has survived up until today.
My message here is that the first of these two points, the predominantly
northern context of academic Old Testament studies, will soon be history, whereas
1 See D. J. A. Clines, “From Copenhagen to Oslo: What has (and has not) happened at
congresses of the IOSOT,” in On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays, 1967–
1998. Volume I. (ed. D. J. A. Clines; Sheffield; JSOT.S 292; Sheffield Academic Press,
1998), 194–221.
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