Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Walter Brueggemann is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary. A past president of the Society of Biblical Literature, he is one of today's preeminent interpreters of Scripture.

Bruce C. Birch is Dean and Professor of Old Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, DC. He is a contributing author to volume II of the New Interpreter's Bible and The Old Testament: A Theological Introduction.

2001 TERENCE E. FRETHEIM is Elva B. Lovell Professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary, and has been on the faculty of 7 seminary schools, including Princeton, Graduate Theological Union, Vancouver and McCormick. He has authored or contributed to eighteen books, four by Abingdon and a forthcoming commentary on Jeremiah.

David L. Petersen is Franklin N. Parker Professor of Old Testament at Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Professor Petersen is a distinguished Old Testament scholar. His current research focuses on the book of Genesis and on prophetic literature. During 2004, Petersen served as president of the Society of Biblical Literature. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Dr. Petersen has written, coauthored, or coedited a number of scholarly and popular books and articles. He was the senior Old Testament editor for The New Interpreter's Bible.

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A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament

Abingdon Press

Chapter One

The Old Testament can be read from many different perspectives, and each contributes to the richness of meaning recognized in these texts by generations of readers. The Old Testament is a collection of ancient literature. These texts reflect the history of a people called Israel. Behind and beneath the texts lies a wide variety of social contexts that gave rise to and shaped the text. Current biblical studies have benefited from decades of generative scholarship that has illumined the literary, historical, and sociological dimensions of our understanding of the Old Testament. This book has been deeply informed by such scholarship and will reflect it at many points. But this book will focus on the Old Testament as a theological witness to the experience of ancient Israel.

What does it mean to read and interpret the text of the Old Testament theologically? At its most fundamental level such reading and interpretation means taking seriously the claim of the text that it is speaking about encounter and relationship with God. Claims are made by and for these ancient texts that make them more than the literature, history, and sociology of an ancient people called Israel. These texts were written, collected, and passed on through generations as the witness of a community of faith shaped in relation to the character and actions of the God of Israel.

To read and interpret the Old Testament theologically is, however, a complex and multifaceted task. For us, such work means standing within several sets of creative, interpretive tensions that we will discuss in the remainder of this chapter. Our intention here is both to illumine what is meant by theological perspectives on the Old Testament and to clarify the perspectives at work in this volume.

Ancient Testimony, Enduring Scripture

The Old Testament is the collected faith testimony of ancient Israel. Yet, at the same time, this collection is regarded in Judaism and Christianity as scripture through which God's word becomes a reality and a resource to the modern synagogue and church.

1. Whose book is this anyway? On the one hand, we can answer that this is obviously Israel's book. The first community to which the text of the Old Testament is addressed is the community out of which the text arose. That community was ancient Israel. Voices from different periods and social contexts of Israel's life address the wider community of which they were a part. Since the experience of ancient Israel stretches over many centuries, the Old Testament is a library that includes faith testimony, moral admonition, liturgical remembrance, and religious story. The ancient communities decided that these texts were the authoritative witness to their experience of God and their life as the community of God's people. The texts of the Old Testament were initially words addressed to an audience in Israel, but they have been judged by the community as worthy of preservation and reading through subsequent generations.

2. Since ongoing communities of faith, Jewish and Christian, have claimed these texts as scripture, there is a sense in which the Old Testament is not just ancient Israel's book but belongs to the church and synagogue as well. To claim these texts as scripture is to acknowledge authority in these texts for the ongoing life of the religious community and its individual members.

To read the Old Testament theologically is to recognize that when we read as people of faith within a confessional community, we are interested in more than conveying information about an ancient community. The events of Israel's history and the witnesses to Israel's experience of God contained in the Old Testament are of interest because we read as a part of communities that still seek to stand in the presence of that same God. To read the Old Testament theologically is to seek in its texts wisdom on the ways of God that allows us to submit ourselves and our actions to that same God in the effort to be faithful communities in the world. The Old Testament as scripture gives us imaginative categories for discerning God's presence and will in the deeply troubling challenges of our own time.

Every reading of an Old Testament text involves at least two distinct audiences: the audience to whom the text was originally addressed and the audience supplied by the reader and the context that informs the reader. To read the Old Testament as scripture is to suggest that the ancient story intersects our contemporary stories in ways that inform and transform lives and communities. To read these texts as scripture is to expect such informing and transforming power. To read these texts as scripture is to bring the multiple voices and contexts of ancient Israel into dialogue with the complexities of our own reading communities and the world in which we read.

This book is written from the perspective of the Christian church and its reading of ancient Israel's testimony. We write as those engaged in teaching these biblical texts to those who will draw upon them as a scriptural resource for Christian ministry. We are deeply informed and grateful to the ongoing reading of these texts in the Jewish community, and we are aware of the shaping influence of Jewish tradition on the church, particularly its influence on Jesus and the earliest church. Nevertheless, we cannot escape the particularity of our exposition of the biblical text as Christian interpreters. We continue to use the term Old Testament, though we are aware of its problematic character in interfaith contexts. Alternative terms seem equally problematic in other ways and have achieved no wide use or recognition in the church. We reject the destructive implications of any form of supercessionism and affirm the ongoing debt and necessary interrelationship of the Christian church to Judaism, both ancient and modern. We have tried to be open to contemporary Jewish interpretive voices and readings in our encounter with these texts. We are convinced that commonalities between Christians and Jews in reading these texts are more important than differences. But Christians and Jews alike must allow for readings that reflect the particularities of distinct religious traditions and their communities. This is part of what it means to read these texts as scripture for church and synagogue. The concerns we bring to our dialogue with the Old Testament are the concerns that are provided by the Christian church and the challenges to its identity and mission in our world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For us this means there is a continuity between the texts of ancient Israel, the person and work of Jesus, the formation of the early church, and the ongoing history of the Christian churches with their diversity of tradition. We reflect this trajectory in our discussions, but this is not the only trajectory of these texts; and our discussions are also influenced by an ongoing conversation with Judaism, its claim on these texts as scripture, and a trajectory in Judaism that moves from Tanak to Talmud.

Critical Understandings

The Old Testament as the literature of ancient Israel must be understood critically. Likewise, the claims of authority for the Old Testament as scripture in the church must be critically assessed. In both of these arenas a variety of critical approaches contributes to the discussions in this volume, and this book is greatly informed by generations of productive critical scholarship. These critical approaches are not without tensions and competing claims, and it is important to discuss some of our perspectives on these issues.

Historical Criticism and Beyond

Historical criticism rose to the height of its influence in the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century as an effort to apply Enlightenment epistemological assumptions to the biblical text and to escape the dominance of church authority in biblical interpretation. Its various methods (e.g., source criticism, form criticism, traditio-historical criticism, redaction criticism) collectively assumed the possibility of objective and scientific interpretive results that would not be affected by prior dogmatic assumptions about the biblical text. The use of these methods allowed the development of a more detailed understanding of the complex processes through which our biblical texts developed into their present form. The rise to dominance of historical criticism in biblical interpretation fit with the spirit of modernity, which prevailed through the mid-twentieth century, even though significant battles continued with those who held to more restrictive views of ecclesial authority in interpreting the Bible. Much of the interpretive literature available and used in the church still today is deeply influenced by historical-critical approaches.

More recently some of the assumptions and results of historical criticism have become widely viewed as problematic. Some have claimed that historical criticism is bankrupt, and some have argued that these critical methods have been superseded. We would agree that there are significant issues to be raised about historical-critical approaches to biblical interpretation, but these are often issues posed by the more extreme claims made for historical-criticism. Or these are sometimes issues that arise with the inability of some to acknowledge the legitimacy of interpretive methods that go beyond or build upon the historical critical method.

(a) Few would any longer defend the possibility of genuinely "objective" interpretive readings of biblical texts. We agree with those who would argue that there are no disinterested readings of biblical texts. Every reader or reading community brings a set of contextual assumptions, perspectives, and values into the interaction with the biblical text. Thus, interpretation must critically reflect on the context of the reader as well as the text. In this volume, we offer our theological interpretation of the Old Testament as a reading informed by our particular contexts, but also as aware of and in conversation with interpretive voices from other contexts dissimilar to our own. While we do not believe there are totally disinterested "objective" readings of texts, we do not consider this an invitation to uncritical relativism in reading the biblical text. We have attempted to approach this theological introduction to the Old Testament with a disciplined and critical awareness of the text, the context out of which its witnesses arose and the context out of which we read it. To do this we necessarily continue to gratefully use historical-critical tools and methods.

(b) Historical criticism has also at times become problematic for developmental assumptions that have regarded as valuable only what resembled, moved toward, or could be reduced to the prevailing patterns and assumptions of twentieth-century Euro-American intellectual life. Thus, for example, some scholars viewed the period of second-temple Judaism as a degeneration into legalism from the high watermark of the prophets—a view that fostered disregard for the creative response of Judaism to the challenges of the time after the return from Babylonian exile. As a further example, the developmental assumptions of some advocates of historical criticism, fearful of supernaturalism, relegated theological claims about the activity of God in Israel's story to a secondary level of importance less significant than the investigation of literary and social processes at work in the formation of the text. Many of the theological claims of the text were, accordingly, explained away or regarded as early, more primitive religious expressions. Such a perspective is, of course, contrary to the claim of the text itself that the activity of God—including all of God's mysterious, hidden, and alien aspects—is at the heart of any meaning ascribed to these texts. The movement beyond historical criticism in recent interpretation attempts to read the text with attention to all of its claims, including those that seem odd, alien, or difficult but are nevertheless part of the text that is to be read as scripture by the church.

(c) Positivistic philosophical assumptions, operative in the exercise of much historical-critical work in the twentieth century, often resulted in a search for the meaning of a biblical text. This led to a tendency to value the discovery of underlying sources, and supposed original intent, more highly than the completed text of many biblical books. In the approach of this volume we believe that critical understanding of the development of a text through complex processes may inform our understanding of the text, but never to the exclusion of interest in the witness of the final form of the text as we now have it.

Some of these criticisms of the way in which the historical-critical method dominated previous generations of biblical scholarship are justified. New methods of interpretive encounter with the text are demanding and receiving attention, and our approach is influenced by some of these as discussed further in this chapter. But historical-critical methods cannot be set aside and are still an important part of disciplined critical study of the Old Testament, even one that stresses the theological address of the text.

If this volume reflects interpretation that moves beyond historical criticism, it nevertheless cannot interpret as if we stood prior to the contributions of historical criticism. We continue to use many historical-critical tools of analysis and continue to be informed by the contributions of historical criticism to our knowledge of the text and the world out of which it came. In particular, historical criticism has given us a respect for the complexity of the process that produced the biblical writings of ancient Israel. It has made us aware of the patterns and propensities of various genres of ancient literature. It has heightened our awareness of the shaping influence of various social, economic, and political factors that define the contexts out of which biblical texts are formed. In short, even as we move beyond historical criticism, we remain engaged in and indebted to its contributions and perspectives.

History, Language, Story, Song

There is increasing recognition that interpretation now takes place in a postmodern context, one in which the previously settled assumptions of the modern world have become unsettled and must, therefore, be reassessed. One of those assumptions, closely allied with the claims of historical criticism, was that history was the primary category for assessing the truth claims of the biblical text and the reality assumed to "stand behind" the text. In our view, the search for a historical reality behind the text sometimes did violence to the imaginative and rhetorical integrity of the text itself. In particular the confessional speech of Israel about God was often judged to be lacking a ground in historical reality, and much of this speech about God was placed either to the side or on the margins of efforts to describe biblical "truths."

As a category for assessing the claim to authority for the texts of ancient Israel, history has become a battleground. Only a generation ago, scholars were confidently writing histories of Israel using the biblical text itself as a primary resource and supplementing that with ancient Near Eastern and archaeological data. There was some recognition that texts, particularly those telling the story of early Israel, were shaped by confessional tradition. Nevertheless, Israel's testimonies were confidently believed to have a base in historical reality, and this claim was considered important to the theological authority of the text.

For over thirty years this claim has been under serious attack. At present there are many scholars who regard most of the texts of the Old Testament as having no basis in historical reality. Most of these scholars regard the bulk of the Old Testament narrative tradition as a fiction generated by the community of post-exilic Judaism. For most making this argument, this lack of historical basis undermines the authority of the theological claims of the text as well.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from A Theological Introduction to the Old Testamentby Bruce C. Birch Copyright © 2005 by The United Methodist Publishing House. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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