Trauma Theory, Trauma Story

This work offers an overview of trauma theory’s relations to biblical studies. In addition to summarizing the theoretical landscape(s), it provides exegetical forays into Ezekiel and, in part, Exodus and the Eucharist. The analysis will engage these materials’ traumatic ethoi, including their connections to trauma informed eating and queerings, so as to offer entryways into the wider critical conversation. While these exegetical foci may seem arbitrary, that is in part the point. As readers will see, trauma defies sense-making. Akin to postmodernist poststructuralist intertextualities, trauma cannot be flattened into neat narration. Trauma is capricious, leaving survivors to carry with them multivalent and even paradoxical connections to their experiences. This project thus attempts to perform trauma’s plurisignification as much as it tries to explain it, using a set of traditionally unexamined pairings to do so. While not an exhaustive survey on trauma theory and the Bible – such work could fill the space of multiple publications – the following work provides a representation of both the theory of trauma and its applications within the biblical field.

Influence: On Rhetoric and Biblical Interpretation

The influence of the Bible in human history is staggering. Biblical texts have inspired grand social advancements, intellectual inquiries, and aesthetic achievements. Yet, the Bible has also given rise to hatred, violence, and oppression—often with deadly consequences. How does the Bible exert such extraordinary influence? The short answer is rhetoric. In Influence: On Rhetoric and Biblical Interpretation, Michal Beth Dinkler demonstrates that, contrary to popular opinion, rhetoric is not inherently “empty” or disingenuous. Rhetoric refers to the art of persuasion. Dinkler argues that the Bible is by nature rhetorical, and that understanding the art of persuasion is therefore vital for navigating biblical literature and its interpretation. Influence invites readers to think critically about biblical rhetoric and the rhetoric of biblical interpretation, and offers a clear and compelling guide for how to do so.

Black/Africana Studies and Black/Africana Biblical Studies

In this study, Abraham Smith introduces the nature, history, and interventions of two theoretical-political cultural productions: Black/Africana studies (the systematic and rigorous study of Africa and African descendants) and Black/Africana biblical studies (a biblical studies’ subfield that analyzes and appraises the strategies of reception and the historical and contemporary impact of the Christian bible for people of African descent). Both cultural productions were formally introduced in U.S. educational institutions in the late 1960s as a part of the Black Freedom movement. Both have long and deep intellectual antecedents on the one hand and ever-evolving recent interventions that challenge a narrow politics of identity on the other. Through the interrogation of keywords (such as race, family, and Hip Hop or cartographies, canons, and contexts), moreover, the study examines how these two theoretical-political projects question the settled epistemologies or prevailing intellectual currencies of their respective times.

Apostles of Revolution? Marxism and Biblical Studies

Marxist analysis of the bible is spreading, but clarity about what constitutes Marxist readings and Marxist categories of analysis is lacking. This lack of clarity is compounded by the different strands and factions within Marxist politics, which have subtle resonances in biblical scholarship. These issues are canvassed in the first part of the article. The major focus of the article, however, is the collaboration between biblical studies and liberal ideology, which is examined in two ways. First, by presenting and discussing some of the central Marxist categories of analysis, namely history, ideology and class, and how these categories have been co-opted into biblical studies and in the process lost their radical edge. Second, by discussing the emergence of the discipline of biblical studies during the Enlightenment, and to what extent the containment strategies of biblical studies overlap with those of liberalism and capitalism.

Latina/o/x Studies and Biblical Studies

This essay introduces Latina/o/x studies for a biblical studies audience. It examines crucial themes that bridge Latina/o/x studies and biblical studies, themes such as identity and difference with special attention to ethnicity and race; also migration with attention to homing, diaspora, transnationalism, and citizenship. The place of Latina/o/x studies in relevant Hebrew Bible and New Testament scholarship on these topics is also discussed. Ultimately this essay argues that Latina/o/x studies’ epistemological commitments to complexity, relationality, particularity, and collaborative knowledge-making can help ground critical interpretive approaches in biblical studies. This essay also imagines a way that biblical studies—capaciously encompassing the study of Jewish and Christian literature in the ancient world as well as Jewish and Christian biblical reception and rejection histories, and the very category of scriptures more broadly—could deepen Latina/o/x studies own thinking about canon formation and history.

Critical Entanglements: Postmodern Theory in Biblical Studies

While postmodernism remains an ambiguous and messy phenomenon to represent, it also remains a compelling prophetic voice in the ongoing development of contemporary biblical studies. This article tracks the various strands of postmodernism threaded through the discipline, drawing on a range of evocative biblical readings as well as key examples from the art world. It demonstrates that the scholarly “entanglement” with postmodern theory provides a valuable critical sensibility to biblical readings, and referring to specific examples from reception history, one that has the potential to showcase biblical studies at its best. When it comes to reading practices, scholarly voices and identities, postmodern theory shows that biblical scholarship is ethically oriented and has an expansive sense of the text and textual effects. The distinctive ways in which postmodern theory has shaped scholarship of the bible are plotted, while continuing to beckon in unanticipated ways from unexpected vantage points.

History and the Hebrew Bible: Culture, Narrative, and Memory

This essay offers an introduction to select disciplinary developments in the study of history and in historical study of the Hebrew Bible. It focuses first and foremost on “cultural history,” a broad category defined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in anthropology and sociology, literary theory and linguistics, and other fields of study. The first part of the essay comments on developments since the so-called “linguistic turn,” highlighting some key works on culture, narrative, and memory, in order to establish a contemporary historical approach to biblical studies. It then turns to questions of the Hebrew Bible’s usefulness for historical study, and highlights studies of King David and the Davidic polity in ancient Israel/Judah, to show how scholars of the Bible have done historical work in recent years. And finally, it provides a case study of the book of Joshua, demonstrating how historians can utilize biblical texts as sources for cultural history.

Anthropology and Hebrew Bible Studies: Modes of Interchange and Interpretation

Interaction between anthropology and biblical scholarship began because of perceived similarities between “simpler” societies and the practices and ideas seen in the Bible. After some disengagement in the first half of the twentieth century, new cross-disciplinary possibilities were envisioned as the structuralist approach emerged in anthropology. Ritual and mythology were major topics that received attention and structuralist methods were partially adopted by some biblical scholars. Anthropological research itself extended to complex societies and also affected historical studies, yielding models of inquiry that engaged a range of disciplines. Among the issues explored in this essay are ritual and notions of purity in the Bible, and the place of literacy in Israelite society and culture. These discussions are followed by three examples of structuralist-inspired analysis that partially take into account historical and literacy-based facets of the Bible.

The Sense of Quoting

This essay argues that the neutral continuous script of ancient manuscripts of the Greek New Testament composed with no punctuation and no spacing provided readers discretionary authority to determine and assess the status of phrases as they articulated a cohesive and coherent reading of the script. The variety of reading renditions, each differently scored with punctuation, supported the production of quotations. These cultivated and harvested quotes, while useful for authorizing sectarian discourse, rarely convey the sense of the phrase in the continuous script. Augustine’s work on punctuating the scriptures in service to the production of plainer quotable passages in support of the rule of faith is addressed. The textual analysis of a plainer quotable passage at 1 Cor. 7:1b concerning male celibacy supports the thesis that plainer passages are the product of interpretative scoring of the script in service to discursive endeavours. To quote is often to misquote.

Writing/Reading the Bible in Postcolonial Perspective

Examining the legacies of European imperialism, this essay traces how the Bible reflects strong affinities with empire and provides ongoing justifications for empire and concentrations of power, including the evolution of the Bible from its production in empires of antiquity and the Bible’s supportive role in the development of modern imperialism. The essay also engages the ambiguities of the Bible as anti-imperial tool. Set within an examination of postcolonial studies as a revolutionary and revisionary discourse, this essay presses for a more vigorous postcolonializing of the Bible in biblical studies. A description of the contemporary features and manifestation of empire forms the context within which further exploration of postcolonial biblical critical work can take place. Following an assessment of previous work in the field, the challenges of intersectional work with queer studies, terrorism studies, technology, and ecological studies are laid out as future tasks.