The Old Testament and Christian Spirituality - International Voices in ...

Introduction
This volume is a collection of previously published journal
articles and chapters in books. For a number of reasons, none of
which are good, the academic wheels in South Africa turn not on
books, as is the international convention, but on articles in refereed
journals. One of the results of this South African habit is that
sustained projects by scholars often do not appear in print together.
I am very grateful therefore to the publisher, the Society of Biblical
Literature, for assisting with, in this case at least, rectifying that
situation. I also thank the editors of the International Voices in
Biblical Studies series for taking up this volume in their series.
Special mention must be made of Louis Jonker and Leigh
Andersen in this respect, for their patience and tireless efforts.
The fact that most of the studies collected here have been
published in South African journals, has limited the international
reach of the scholarship. That some of these studies were first read
as congress papers in Europe hardly remedies this situation. With
the strong growth currently experienced in the field of Spirituality
Studies in general, and Biblical Spirituality in particular, this
volume makes these studies more accessible to a wider audience,
in the hope of providing some further impetus to the multiple fields
of study which combine to form the academic discipline of Biblical
Spirituality, or more specifically in this case, Old Testament
Spirituality. (What is meant by this terminology is made clear in
Chapter 5.)
In a way it is not strange that, relatively speaking, Biblical
Spirituality should experience such strong growth as it has in South
Africa. On the one hand, South African theologians tend to have a
very acute critical sense of the way the Bible is employed, because
of the country’s socio-political history during particularly the
second half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, earlier,
while the Western theological world was making sense of
historical-critical methodologies of exegesis and trying to digest
the implications thereof, South Africans were involved in the
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