Jon Levenson, Historical Criticism, and the Fate of the Enlightenment Project [Levenson, J.]

[Source: The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies, Chapter 5. Jon D. Levenson, 1993, 106-126]

Summary

Levenson looks at three problems with historical criticism:

1. Historicism undermines itself. It should recognise that, and stop pretending otherwise.
2. Historical criticism has wrongly monopolised biblical studies. It should make way for a plurality of methods.
3. Historical critics must explain the use of their work, but historical criticism, as a value-neutral discipline, is unable to explain why it is worthy studying. Historical critics must therefore explain the use of their study in other terms, such as its benefit for religious traditions.

1. Historicism undermines itself. It should recognise that, and stop pretending otherwise.

• To explain this, we’ll use the hermeneutics of suspicion as an analogy. It makes a good analogy, since, like historicism, it both undermines itself and tries to solve that problem by claiming that it is an inviolable universal. The hermeneutics of suspicion interprets the bible as mere ideology, as nothing more than a justification for political arrangements. Privileging their opinions over the material’s, its practioners assume that behind the text’s apparent meaning is hidden a political meaning that its writers did not perceive, and that this meaning is the real meaning of the text. Suspicious hermenuts have a problem though: we can suspect them back. What if, when the modern critic writes that ancient religious texts were really about power, he himself is really playing a political game? What if behind their writings lies a hidden political meaning that they do not perceive, and that is the real meaning of their writing? Suspicious hermeneuts answer that they sit outside the systems of politics, and have an all-seeing, universal perspective. They overcome the contradiction of their discipline by claiming that they are the norm by which all else is judged, and can never be in error.
• Historicism follows the same logic. Historicism asserts that all human thoughts and beliefs are historical, destined to perish and be superseded. Historicism has a problem, though: it is a human belief, so it too must be fleeting. To assert historicism is to doubt it. But historicists answer that historicism must be exempted from its own verdict because it is universal, inviolable, and transcends history. And so, like the suspicious hermeneuts, historicists makes their discipline uncontestable. This is ridiculous, and historicists must recognise that that they cannot sensibly make absolutes of their methods.

2. Historical criticism has wrongly monopolised biblical studies. It should make way for a plurality of methods.

2.1 In the Enlightenment, biblical studies sought to rid itself of divisive, monopolistic methods; but it has simply replaced the intolerance of religious beliefs with the arrogations of historicism.

• The structure of the academy reflects the structure of the Wesphalian state. At the time of the Thirty Years War, the public sphere was dominated by clashing and unyielding worldviews, unable to converse or to coexist without devastating violence. The Treaty of Westphalia ended the conflict, and to prevent future wars of religion, it ruled that religious convictions should be kept out of public life: state and church should be separated, and the latter relegated. In this new arrangement, being a citizen of your state is necessary and is your public identity, but associating with a religion is optional and must be done in private. This structure later became one of the crucial elements of the Enlightenment.
• As a child of the Enlightenment, Biblical studies has been arranged according to the same ideals. The academy is the state, scholars are the citizens, religious beliefs are unwelcome, and study is steered away from contentious matters, like ethics and theology, and towards historical criticism, a value-neutral subject matter that everyone can agree on. But historical criticism has become hegemonic, belittling other methods and deriding other areas of study.

2.2 Historical criticism’s monopoly of biblical studies is unjustified, and it must learn to accept a plurality of methods from different traditions. This is for two reasons.

• Firstly, historical criticism is a tradition, a community of interpretation, just like the church or the synagogue, and therefore is no more ‘objective’ than them. As an Enlightenment discipline, biblical studies intended to replace the biases and assumptions of religion with reason and pure, interpreted science. It thought itself neutral, able to produce knowledge that does not need any culture or tradition to validate it. But it’s actually a social group, and shares traits with other traditions.

• Like other traditions, it has assumptions, not all of which are self-evident: that the past is analogous to the present—at the very least, the same laws of nature prevail; that every event in history is dependent on causes, and has effects; that prior commitments should be distrusted; that skepticism should be part of one’s methodology.
• Like other traditions, it has social processes for validating knowledge, since knowledge has a social character. The academy validates knowledge not by papal bulls or excommunication, but through hiring, promoting and giving tenure, or through ignoring, criticising, withholding funding, or refusing to publish someone’s manuscript.
• Like other traditions, there is a correlation between the character of its social body and the nature of the knowledge it validates. In the past, most universities articulated the perspective of a Christian society, so they privileged the study of Christianity and minimised or misrepresented other religions. Today, universities suppose that religion is irrational, so they privilege the perspective of the irreligious outside observer, and minimise or belittle religious convictions. And tomorrow it will prefer and privilege another viewpoint.
• For comparison, take Child’s canonical method. It prefers certain interpretations and presumes a certain view of Christian faith, and those who do not take its view will not like it. But that’s no different from thoroughgoing historicism: it too corresponds to a particular community founded on discrete assumptions.
• Secondly, if recontextualisation is possible, then although the historical method is necessary, it is not sufficient. Something is recontextualised when it survives the culture in which it was produced, and means something in another context too. Canon is an example of this, since the texts of the canon have been taken from their original context and recontextualised into another: the bible. Recontextualisation can never wholly divorce the text from its original meaning: that’s why historical criticism is necessary, since it focuses on things in their original context. But unless historical critics want to claim that the bible did not deserve to survive that context, unless they think it means nothing today, they must accept that historical criticism should never be the only method we use. It must abandon its totalistic claims, it must make room for and learn to interact with other senses from other traditions, neither surrendering to them or demanding their surrender.
• Hence, historical criticism must neither demand that other traditions surrender to it, nor surrender to them. It must abandon its totalistic claims and must embrace a plurality of methods, learning to interact positively with them.

• A note on this: Scripture, like all texts, has multiple senses, some of available across community boundaries, others not. Marxist and protestant evangelical communities will share some methods, and have some methods that the other community cannot accept. So we must embrace pluralism, but we must do so without degenerating into relativism.

3. Historical critics must explain the use of their work, but historical criticism, as a value-neutral discipline, is unable to explain why it is worthy studying. Historical critics must therefore explain the use of their study in other terms, such as its benefit for religious traditions.

3.1. Historical critics need to explain the usefulness of their study. [Note: The following bulletpoints one continuous argument.]

• The humanities today understands that a normative claim informs every selection of subject matter, and demands that projects explain why they’re worthwhile.
• This is a problem for historical criticism because it cannot explain its own worth. Some subjects can make that explanation on their own terms: the subject of ethics can itself explain the value of considering how best to live. But because historical criticism is value-neutral, it cannot explain in its own terms why it is worth studying. It cannot even protest that its value to biblical traditions makes it worthwhile, as it does not attach any value to biblical traditions itself: As a neutral historical discipline, it distances itself from religious traditions, and reserves the right to interpret the bible against them; and as a merely historical discipline, it is concerned with the bible’s past, not its relevance, value or trans-historical message.
• A second reason this is a problem historical criticism that it can no longer presume society will think their study is important. Until recently, society, including the academy, generally took the bible’s message seriously, and historical critics hardly had to defend their work. Yet now that culture has become secular and multicultural, it has a lower view of the bible and of religious cultural traditions, and is increasingly demanding that they explain the worth of their study.
• Therefore historical critics must explain the worth of their study (the second problem), explaining things in a way that goes beyond the terms of historicism (the first problem). If their motivation is religious, that’s okay, but they need to be explicit that they rely on the values, influence and money of religious traditions. Secular motivations are okay too. Historicism is intrinsically secular, and secular practitioners will help their religious friends produce more honest history; but secular practitioners must not parasitically depend religious traditions: they must give a secular justification for studying the bible.
• If historical critics argue that they’re studying the Bible because it is significant for Western culture, they must explain why Western culture matters more than Indian or Indonesian culture.

3.2 This means that historical critics must also explain their choice of methodology etc.

• Historical critics must explain why they’re studying the canonical bible. The canon is a religious creation, so historical critics need to explain why they’re studying that, rather than, say, looking at all ANE documents. They also need to explain whether they will study the OT or the Tanakh, and if the former, whether they will credit christological claims, and if not, why not.
• Historical critics need to explain how their method, historicism, fits in with their motivations. If they’re motivated by religious values, they will need to explain whether an exclusive focus on historical criticism best helps them uphold those values.
• If the ‘ancillary disciplines’ (Syro-Palestinian archeology, or Northwest Semitic philology) want to stand alone, apart from biblical studies, they can no longer rely on their relevance to religious biblical interpretation. There may be good secular reasons why one should study Coptic over Hungarian; whatever they are, they need to be stated.

How should we read the early chapters of Genesis? [Moberly]

Moberly, RWL, How should one read the Early Chapters of Genesis?, from Reading Genesis After Darwin, OUP 2009, ed. Barton and Wilkinson

Two sentence summary. Darwin would only make a difference to how we read Genesis if we read the text at face-value, like creationists do; but tensions in the story suggest that it was artificially constructed from originally disparate narratives. A face-value reading is therefore wrong-headed, and Darwin should not make a difference to how we read the early chapters of Genesis.

1. The difficulties of reading Genesis at face-value.

1.1 Introduction. Certain kinds of face-value readings of Genesis 1-11 meet with difficulties. These difficulties were recognised a long time before Darwin by exegetes like Origen, whose work reminds us that Genesis was not always read creationistically. In a similar manner to Origen, Moberly undermines face-value readings by pointing out elements of the text that stand in tension with their context. (While Moberly focuses on Gen 4-9, the same sorts of arguments could be made for Gen 1-3.) It is possible to resolve all of the issues below; but it is much harder to resolve them and also do justice to concerns and form of the narrative.

1.2 Cain and Abel. The context is the outset of human life on earth, but the story presupposes the earth is populated.

• There are advanced divisions of labour (tiller of the ground/keeper of sheep).
• Cain deliberately kills Abel in the open countryside, i.e. away from settlements where no one can see.
• Cain complains about becoming a restless wanderer who will be killed if found, which is only an issue in a widely populated world.
• At the end of the story there is a reference to the building of a city (‘ir).
• Whence Cain’s wife?

1.3 Noah and the Flood.

• The story seems to have priorities other than historical realism.
• We hear divine soliloquies, and we hear them on the same level with everything else in the story. We hear nothing from Noah.
• The narrator has no interest in practical feasibility: what animals were on the ark, how they got there etc. (Though the narrator is very interested in the entry and exit from the ark, and the increase and decrease of flood waters, matters that don’t interest most readers.)
• The ark is impractical. Those inside appear to be in total darkness, since it has but a door (which God closes from the outside) and a hatch (not a window, otherwise Noah could have just looked out of it, instead of releasing the dove through it).
• After a year under the sea the trees would be indistinguishable from seaweed. They would not show fresh life (the freshly-plucked olive leaf) or be in a state to house a dove.
• The wider narrative context is written as if the flood never happened.
• The Nephilim are said to be ‘on the earth in those days and also afterwards’ (Gen 6.4; they appear again in Num 13.33).
• Cain’s pre-flood descendants are the ancestors of those engaged in certain pursuits, e.g. Jabal, ancestor of those who live in tents and have livestock; Jubal, ancestor of those who play the pipe and lyre. The narrator is presumably referring to people known in his own time.

1.4 Language and drama. The perspective and convention embodied in the use of Hebrew language is characteristic of dramatic narrative portrayals, rather than of strict history.

• All characters in the story speak Hebrew, God and humans alike. For instance, the first human speech involves a Hebrew pun on ish and ishshah, man and woman (Gen 2.23).
• It is common among dramatic narrative portrayals (e.g. Shakespeare’s plays) for foreigners (e.g. Julius Caesar or Othello) to speak the language of the reader (e.g. English). The point of the story isn’t that God speaks Hebrew.

2. Moberly’s alternative to face-value readings.

• The story is composed of originally disparate narratives which were once located in the context of ancient Israel. But they’ve now been brought together and placed in a new context, the beginning of human history. The whole narrative sequence has been artificially constructed. This is why they stand in tension with each other, and with this setting. This is a common phenomenon in literature, and we need to take seriously the Bible’s literary character.
• The writers are juxtaposing certain archetypal portrayals of life under God to provide an interpretative lens for reading God’s call of Abraham and his descendents.

3. Consequences.

• The role of normal human processes in Genesis’ composition—literary conventions and the historical process of its composition—does not mean it cannot simultaneously be divine self-communication.
• If we understand the text as a narrative construction, Darwin makes no real difference to how we read the text.
• Darwinian biology does raise important questions though: what does it mean for an evolved creature to be ‘created in God’s image’?
• Belief in creation needs to be divorced from the modern idea of ‘design’, and the narrative’s own concerns with creation brought to the fore: creaturely contingency, responsibility, the difficult that humans have in genuinely trusting God as a wise Creator and living accordingly etc.

Private Ryan's added value

It’s never pretty when marketers unwittingly juxtapose the weighty with the unworthy. Sainsbury’s last Christmas advert was widely reviled because it evoked one of WWI’s most surprising, human moments, just to get people to buy bars of chocolate. Yesterday, when I was looking through my DVDs, I found something even worse.

On the back of the D-Day 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition of Saving Private Ryan, the blurb begins promisingly. ‘In the last great invasion, of the last great war, the greatest danger for eight men… was saving one.’ Of course, this isn’t strictly true: their greatest danger was defending an important bridge, not saving Private Ryan. It is good English, though—very good, in fact. ‘In the last great invasion’ balances ‘of the last great war’; the syllables of ‘last’, ‘great’ and ‘invasion/war’ are all stressed, which makes them appropriately ponderous; ‘great war/invasion’ escalates to ‘greatest danger’; and ‘danger’ and ‘eight’ transition emotively to ‘saving’ and ‘one’. That sort of craftsmanship does justice to its subject matter. The next sentence continues in more-or-less the same vein. ‘The Saving Private Ryan D-Day 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition is a poignant and powerful homage to the soldiers of World War II.’ A phrase like ‘poignant and powerful’ is, well, poignant.

But this powerful paragraph is bludgeoned to bathos by the next sentence. ‘This epic film is now presented as a 2-disc DVD set, featuring all-new, never-before-seen added value.’ This is a triple thunderbolt, a concatenation of two synonymous hyphenated horrors and a degrading financial term. Craftsmanship is replaced with coarseness, and the commemoration of D-Day’s courageous soldiers is cheapened with the language of commerce.

It’s an issue of marketing. It’s fine to promote your wares with gimmicky language. There is a place for ‘never-before-seen,’ and even for ‘added value’—but that place is not on a Commemorative D-Day Edition; just as there is a place for a touching short about the Christmas truce, but that place is not in an advert for Sainsbury’s. Marketers should avoid these uncomfortable combinations: they sully the worthy elements, and make the trivial seem more trivial still.