scholarly journals Unapologetic Apologetics: Julius Wellhausen, Anti-Judaism, and Hebrew Bible Scholarship

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 560
Author(s):  
Stacy Davis

Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) is in many ways the ancestor of modern Hebrew Bible scholarship. His Prolegomena to the History of Israel condensed decades of source critical work on the Torah into a documentary hypothesis that is still taught today in almost all Hebrew Bible courses in some form. What is not taught as frequently is the anti-Judaism that underpins his hypothesis. This is in part due to unapologetic apologetics regarding Wellhausen’s bias, combined with the insistence that a nineteenth-century scholar cannot be judged by twenty-first century standards. These calls for compassion are made exclusively by white male scholars, leaving Jewish scholars the solitary task of pointing out Wellhausen’s clear anti-Judaism. In a discipline that is already overwhelmingly white, male and Christian, the minimizing of Wellhausen’s racism suggests two things. First, those who may criticize contextual biblical studies done by women and scholars of color have no problem pleading for a contextual understanding of Wellhausen while downplaying the growing anti-Judaism and nationalism that was a part of nineteenth-century Germany. Second, recent calls for inclusion in the Society of Biblical Literature may be well intentioned but ultimately useless if the guild cannot simply call one of its most brilliant founders the biased man that he was.

Author(s):  
Joshua A. Berman

This chapter seeks to understand the origins of the intellectual commitments that shape the discipline today, and its halting disposition toward empirical models of textual growth. It examines how theorists over three centuries have entertained the most fundamental questions concerning the goals and methods of historical-critical study of the Hebrew Bible. The axioms that governed nineteenth-century German scholarship were at a great divide from those that governed earlier historical-critical scholarship, such as that of Spinoza. From there, the chapter offers a brief summary of the claims of contemporary scholars who are looking toward empirical models to reconstruct the textual development of Hebrew scriptures. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how this vein of scholarship undermines an array of nineteenth-century intellectual assumptions, but would have been quite at home in the earlier periods of the discipline’s history, and calling for a return to Spinozan hermeneutics.


Author(s):  
Jan Moje

This chapter gives an overview of the history of recording and publishing epigraphic sources in Demotic language and script from the Late Period to Greco-Roman Egypt (seventh century bce to third century ce), for example, on stelae, offering tables, coffins, or votive gifts. The history of editing such texts and objects spans over two hundred years. Here, the important steps and pioneering publications on Demotic epigraphy are examined. They start from the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt found the Rosetta stone, until the twenty-first century.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shohei Sato

AbstractThis article re-examines our understanding of modern sport. Today, various physical cultures across the world are practised under the name of sport. Almost all of these sports originated in the West and expanded to the rest of the world. However, the history of judo confounds the diffusionist model. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a Japanese educationalist amalgamated different martial arts and established judo not as a sport but as ‘a way of life’. Today it is practised globally as an Olympic sport. Focusing on the changes in its rules during this period, this article demonstrates that the globalization of judo was accompanied by a constant evolution of its character. The overall ‘sportification’ of judo took place not as a diffusion but as a convergence – a point that is pertinent to the understanding of the global sportification of physical cultures, and also the standardization of cultures in modern times.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 187-207
Author(s):  
Peter Arnds

This article focuses on the concept of randomness as the absence of goal-oriented movement in literary walks. The literature of walking displays the happenstance of adventure as one of the great antidotes to our inane, highly technologized, digitalized twenty-first-century lifestyle. In the end, however, such randomness may reveal itself as not so random after all, as the purpose of the journey, its inherent telos, discloses itself while travelling or in hindsight. This article provides brief glimpses into the history of literary walks to examine this tension between apparent randomness and the non-random. By drawing on a range of cultural theories and theorizations of travel and especially of walking, I look at literary foot travel in the nineteenth century, the Romantics and American Transcendentalists, some great adventure hikes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the urban and rural flâneur. In doing so the article does not lose sight of the question of how we can instrumentalize the literature of walking for life during the current pandemic.


Author(s):  
W. Andrew Collins ◽  
Willard W. Hartup

This chapter summarizes the emergence and prominent features of a science of psychological development. Pioneering researchers established laboratories in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century to examine the significance of successive changes in the organism with the passage of time. American psychologists, many of whom had studied in the European laboratories, subsequently inaugurated similar efforts in the United States. Scientific theories and methods in the fledgling field were fostered by developments in experimental psychology, but also in physiology, embryology, ethology, and sociology. Moreover, organized efforts to provide information about development to parents, educators, and public policy specialists further propagated support for developmental science. The evolution of the field in its first century has provided a substantial platform for future developmental research.


Love, Inc. ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 83-112
Author(s):  
Laurie Essig

Getting engaged now requires more emotional and financial resources than ever before. Here Essig traces the history of engagements from the birth of companionate marriages in the nineteenth century to the invention of rituals like the bended knee and fetish items like the diamond ring in the early twentieth century. But the real change happened at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as engagements became “spectacular,” requiring not just highly staged events but also highly produced videos and images that could then be disseminated to the larger world.


Author(s):  
Gerard P. Loughlin

This chapter considers how gay identities—and so gay affections—were formed in the course of the twentieth century, building on the late nineteenth-century invention of the ‘homosexual’. It also considers earlier construals of same-sex affections and the people who had them, the soft men and hard women of the first century and the sodomites of the eleventh. It thus sketches a history of continuities and discontinuities, of overlapping identities and emotional possibilities. The chapter resists the assumption that gay identity and experience can be reduced to anything less than the multitude of gay people, and that as Christians they have to give an account of themselves in a way that heterosexual Christians do not. The chapter warns against thinking gay identity undone in Christ.


Author(s):  
William Schniedewind ◽  
Elizabeth VanDyke

Education is a wide-ranging topic concerning the variety of ways in which people acquire knowledge, skills, and behaviors. As a key facet of culture, one might expect education and instruction to appear frequently within the Hebrew Bible, yet biblical literature actually provides little direct evidence as to how the ancient Israelites learned. This is true both for traditional vocations, such as the production of pottery or soldiering, and for more scholastic pursuits, such as reading or accounting. Biblical scholarship has particularly focused on scribal education, with less attention to the broader questions of enculturation. Several passages, particularly Isaiah 28, Proverbs 22–23, and Ben Sira 51, refer to education and have engendered numerous discussions. Increasingly, though, scholars have turned to extra-biblical sources in order to understand scribal culture. Studies on scribalism in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Ugarit feature prominently in many overviews of Hebrew learning. In some cases, scholars posit that these foreign scribal systems directly influenced Israelite scribes. The New Kingdom administration of Egypt left its vestiges on the Late Bronze Levant, and the empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia also had a lasting impact on scribal curriculum and tradition. These contextual studies can also be used for comparison, helping scholars model what a scribal community in Israel may have looked like. Epigraphic material from the Levant has supplemented this picture. Archaeologists have excavated a number of school texts and seals that attest to the exercises and extent of Israelite education. However, the interpretation of the biblical, comparative, and epigraphic material remains fiercely contested among scholars. Scribal education had an immediate impact on the composition of the biblical corpus, and inquiries into Hebrew education often become intertwined with theories regarding the history of biblical literature. Furthermore, discussions of scribal culture are often divorced from questions of how the society as a whole transmitted skills and knowledge. The ancient Israelite scribe is thus decontextualized from his original setting. In sum, many questions regarding education in ancient Israel remain unanswered, tantalizing, and crucial to the field as a whole.


2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-12
Author(s):  
Melissa L. Archer

This essay reviews Rev. 1.1–6.17 of Craig Koester’s Revelation commentary (Anchor Yale Bible, 2014). The essay was originally presented as part of a three-person panel review on the commentary presented to the Society for Pentecostal Studies Biblical Studies section at the 2014 Society for Biblical Literature meeting. Koester’s commentary represents a major contribution to Apocalypse studies. Along with a critical review of the commentary proper, Koester’s inclusion of hymns in his introductory chapter is discussed as an important acknowledgement of the role of worship in the Apocalypse. Comment is made on Koester’s history of interpretation sections that introduce each major section of the text of Revelation under consideration. This review seeks to demonstrate the relevance of Koester’s work for Pentecostal readers who have often read and interpreted Revelation from a dispensational perspective.


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