CHAPTER 1
DIALOGICAL BIBLICAL THEOLOGY
A Jewish Approach to Reading Scripture Theologically
Benjamin D. Sommer
"Any disagreement that is for the sake of heaven is destined to endure." m.' Abot 5.19
INTRODUCTION
Strictly speaking, there can be no such thing as Jewish biblical theology. While many definitions of the term "biblical theology" exist, they all accord some privileged place to the Bible. All forms of Jewish theology, however, must base themselves on Judaism's rich postbiblical tradition at least as much as on scripture, and hence a Jewish theology cannot be chiefly biblical. (By Judaism's rich postbiblical tradition, I mean first of all rabbinic literature found in the Talmuds and midrashic collections, which stem from the first through eighth centuries C.E., and also postrabbinic Jewish commentaries, legal literature, mysticism, and philosophy from the eighth century through the present.) Conversely, any theology that focuses especially on scripture isby definition Protestant and not Jewish, for the notion of sola scriptura has no place in Judaism—even as an unrealizable ideal. Nevertheless, there can be such a thing as a Jewish theology that attends to scripture along with tradition, or perhaps to scripture as one part of tradition. Such a theology would recover or renew biblical voices that are often lost in Jewish thought, while placing them in the larger context of Jewish tradition. It is in the interaction or dialogue between biblical and postbiblical Jewish thinkers, then, that something we might loosely call a Jewish biblical theology can arise. The model I propose here might also be termed "dialogical biblical theology." This model works well for modern Judaism's attempt to think theologically with its scripture, but it can be adapted for other religious communities. While it is especially appropriate for those forms of Christianity that emphasize tradition, such as Catholic and Orthodox Christianities, it may be useful, we shall see, for Protestant Christianity as well.
In the following, I intend to accomplish several tasks. I will explore the question of whether a field such as biblical theology can really exist; I will articulate a program for what I call dialogical biblical theology, a program that involves a method of reading or a hermeneutic more than a particular theological viewpoint; I will discuss several scholars, Jewish and Christian, who have implied this program in their work without actually articulating it (and, in some cases, without relating it to the field of biblical theology); and I will provide several examples of how a dialogical biblical theology in a Jewish context might work, thus putting to work the hermeneutic I propose. Before doing any of this, however, it behooves me to discuss a claim frequently heard in academic discussions of this field: to wit, that Jews are not interested in biblical theology. Discussing this claim will reveal much about the field of biblical theology as it was practiced in the twentieth century.
ARE JEWS INTERESTED IN BIBLICAL THEOLOGY?
In 1987 Jon Levenson published an essay with the provocative title "Why Jews Aren't Interested in Biblical Theology." He contended that Jews had paid scant attention to that field, and he attempted to explain why this was the case. Moshe Goshen-Gottstein had made similar points about Jews' lack of participation in this field several years earlier.
I hope to show that Jewish interest in this field had in fact been vigorous even before the publication of Levenson's article. Nevertheless, Levenson's essay remains important and instructive. Levenson succeeded in showing that the dominant model of biblical theology as practiced in the past two centuries was uninteresting, indeed deeply problematic and often offensive, for Jews. As a result he implicitly suggested how Jews should not do Jewish biblical theology—and how Christians interested in engaging in dialogue with Jews ought not to do Christian biblical theology either.
Jewish Work on Biblical Theology before and after Levenson
As a number of people have pointed out since Levenson's stimulating essay was published, many Jewish scholars have engaged in theological and even systematic expositions of biblical texts. These Jewish scholars did not use the term "biblical theology" in their titles, however, and the structure of their works differed considerably from those of most Protestant biblical theologians. (To Levenson's credit, we should note that nobody found Jewish biblical theology until Levenson prompted his fellow biblicists to go looking for it.) Shimon Gesundheit, for example, recently pointed out numerous examples, such as Leo Adler's Der Mensch in der Sicht der Bibel, which was published in 1965. We might readily add Abraham Joshua Heschel's book The Prophets (first published in 1962) or numerous works by Martin Buber. It will be noticed that none of these authors are biblical scholars. Adler was the rabbi of the Jewish community of Basel, and he also published on modern analytic philosophy. While Heschel and Buber defy easy categorization, the label "biblicist" does not quite fit either one especially well. On the other hand, all these authors devote considerable space to explicating biblical passages for theological purposes, and they attend to modern biblical scholarship when doing so.
Jewish scholars whose training was primarily in biblical studies and whose academic appointments were in departments of Bible also produced works that can be seen as belonging to the field of biblical theology. I think first and foremost of the most influential Jewish biblical scholar of the modern era, Yehezkel Kaufmann, and his four-volume magnum opus Toledot Ha-Emunah Ha-Yisraelit. The title of this work is usually translated into English as The History of Israelite Religion, but it might be more accurately rendered The History of Israelite Belief or even The Generations of Israelite Faith. 10This magisterial work is an outstanding—and foundational—example of Jewish biblical theology. One might object to my characterization by pointing out that Kaufmann's study is historical in nature and thus presumably not theological. I will return in the next section to the unfounded presumption that a historical work cannot also belong to the field of biblical theology; for my present purpose, it will suffice for me to show that on closer inspection, one finds Toledot to share essential features with many works of biblical theology. By investigating one central biblical idea (Israel's monotheism and concomitant rejection of mythology), its growth, and its permutations, Kaufmann wrote a text comparable to some of the most famous works of biblical theology. Many biblical theologians have focused their work on some central idea or process. To name only a few prominent examples: Walther Eichrodt structures his theological analysis of the Old Testament around the idea of covenant; for Gerhard von Rad, the idea of salvation history and the process of transmission and transformations of biblical material work together to form the pivotal concern of the canon and its theological interpreter; Samuel Terrien finds the pivotal theme in Christian scripture in the interplay between divine manifestation and absence; Walter Brueggemann sets out in his theology of Hebrew Scriptures to explicate the process of conflict and disputation through which Israel arrived at complex truth-claims about Yhwh; Yochanan Muffs identifies the genius of biblical religion in its insistence on the personhood of God. We might note further that von Rad's Theology is explicitly diachronic or historical in at least one of its dominant concerns: von Rad describes a diachronic process of transmission and transformation, just as Kaufmann describes how the monotheistic idea works itself out so that mythology is rejected ever more clearly over the course of the biblical period.
All these works attempt—in my opinion, successfully—to find unity amid the diversity of material, genre, and period in the Hebrew Scriptures. Although many subsequent critics derided these searches for a Mitte (a central idea in scripture), these and other scholars did find unifying factors in scripture. The problem with the attempts was not that no Mitte exists. Rather, it is the presumption of many of these scholars that a single Mitte exists or that one particular Mitte could objectively be labeled most important or most compelling. Further, some scholars failed to acknowledge that their candidates for Mitte were absent in parts of scripture. Several unifying themes run through scripture, though no one theme encompasses every single book. Expounding one such theme is a perfectly valid activity for a biblical theologian. Criticisms of the search for the center are well-taken, but this does not mean that search for a focal point is illegitimate. Scripture might be compared not to a circle with one central point but to an ellipse, with more than one focal point. Scripture is not, as some critics of the Mitte hypotheses seem to hold, a random form or a shifting shape without boundaries.
Biblical theologians such as Eichrodt, von Rad, Terrien, Brueggemann, and Muffs uncover unity whose nature is theological: it involves some relatively consistent statement about God or about God's relationship with Israel or humanity. In each case, the unifying element is relevant for a contemporary religious community, and the scholar's focus on that particular element results from the preexisting concerns of that community. (Eichrodt's stress on covenant, while hardly lacking legitimacy in the biblical texts themselves, clearly emerges from and gives succor to Reformed theology. Brueggemann emphasizes the value of theological disputes within scripture, and he insists on the positive religious role played by the doubt, despair, and anger that those disputes evince. Brueggemann's emphasis fits quite well with trends among liberal Protestants in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Muffs explicitly notes the connection between the Bible's anthropopathic view of YHWH and the portrayal of God in midrash and in the Zohar.) Precisely the same point can be made about Kaufmann. The idea he identifies as pivotal in the Bible reflects clearly identifiable tendencies in modern Jewish thought, even as his work implicitly provides scriptural support for those tendencies. Kaufmann asserts that monotheism's emergence in premonarchical Israel represented a revolutionary change from its cultural environment, but he also describes an evolution within Israelite monotheism from early priestly texts found in the Pentateuch to later prophetic ones. Earlier texts do not fully develop the implications of monotheism, but classical prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah espouse ideas that necessarily follow from the Bible's radical monotheism. These include the primacy of morality over cult and the eventual recognition of the one God by all humanity. In arguing for the centrality of a monotheism that was above all ethical and universal in its implications, Kaufmann recalls late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century German-Jewish thinkers such as Herman Cohen. In this sense Kaufmann's work is as deeply connected to a particular religious movement as the work of Eichrodt or Brueggemann. In short, if Eichrodt, von Rad, Terrien, Brueggemann, and Muffs can be called biblical theologians, so can Kaufmann.
Kaufmann is not the only Jewish biblicist whose work can be understood as belonging to the field of biblical theology. Even before Levenson wrote his 1987 essay, scholars including Moshe Greenberg, Yochanan Muffs, and Jacob Milgrom wrote essays (though not monographs) treating crucial issues of biblical theology in a specifically Jewish manner. In the years that followed the publication of Levenson's provocative essay, more contributions to the burgeoning field of Jewish biblical theology appeared. Many of these have been surveyed ably, and I need not review them here. In addition to the usual suspects (Levenson himself; Marvin Sweeney; Stephen Geller; Marc Brettler; Joel Kaminsky, to name but a few), we should note several books that are markedly theological but are usually not mentioned as examples of Jewish biblical theology: works by Richard Elliot Friedman, James Kugel, Israel Knohl, and Mordecai Breuer.
Friedman's book The Disappearance of God: A Divine Mystery represents a Jewish biblical theology for three reasons. First, the book is about how humans perceive and relate to God. Friedman argues that the Hebrew Bible portrays God as becoming ever more distant from humanity through time, and humans as becoming ever more independent as a result. In short, this book is a study of divine-human interaction in the Bible, and thus it is a theology in the most basic sense of the term. Second, it is biblical: its starting point is the tripartite biblical canon as preserved in Jewish tradition. Its thesis is that God slowly disappears as one moves through the Jewish canon from Torah to Prophets to Writings. Third, it is Jewish: not only does he use the Jewish order of the canon as the basis for his argument (his thesis is considerably less striking if one reads through the Old Testament canon as ordered in Christian Bibles), but he moves on to compare the canonical Bible's disappearing God to the God of classical Jewish mysticism. Further, the upshot of his study of God leads most of all to a view of humanity and its responsibilities, and this feature of his work typifies Jewish thinking about God generally. A similar point can be made about Kugel's The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible. As an explication of how the divine manifests itself to humans in early biblical texts as opposed to later biblical and postbiblical thought, this work is also a biblical theology in the most straightforward meaning of the term.
Knohl's The Divine Symphony: The Bible's Many Voices differs from the works by Friedman and Kugel in that it does not focus specifically on biblical views of God. In a manner reminiscent of more familiar biblical theologies, it attempts to summarize crucial aspects of biblical thought that recur throughout the Bible. Further, it explicitly links particular strands of biblical thought with postbiblical literature. Knohl shows that the Priestly Torah in the Pentateuch and the book of Job point toward an abstract deity and depict worship as a human responsibility wholly disconnected from any hope of benefit. These austere views, he claims, link up with the Essenes and with rabbinism's somewhat peripheral Shammaitic school. The Pentateuch's Holiness School and Deuteronomy depict a more approachable God and emphasize religious ethics. This more popular religiosity links up with Pharisaism and with rabbinic Judaism's mainstream Hillelite tradition. Oddly, Knohl does not pause to discuss another connection that is, I suspect, the main engine for his comparison: when the Priestly Torah avoids attributing actions or emotions to God (other than the act of commanding), it shows itself to be a predecessor for the leading philosopher of Jewish tradition, Moses Maimonides. In light of Knohl's work, it becomes clear that Maimonides represents the apogee of a long trajectory that goes back to certain parts of the Pentateuch—and that Maimonides' method of reading scripture in the first third of his Guide of the Perplexed is more deeply rooted in scripture than scholars have recognized. (Knohl's decision not to articulate this crucial implication of his own work is surprising.)
Finally, in the work of Mordecai Breuer, we find an extraordinarily bold attempt to synthesize findings of modern biblical scholarship and Orthodox Judaism. Breuer accepts the division of the Torah into four underlying documents, but, in a strikingly deft combination of source criticism and midrash, Breuer maintains that it was God who composed the four documents, redacted them together, and then used the resulting document as the blueprint for creating the world. (Breuer's work represents the ultimate early dating of P: for him, P—along with the other three sources—is not merely preexilic but precosmic.) Each of the four sources, he insists, reveals a particular aspect of the Deity. Contradictions among the documents result not from differing versions of the events the sources narrate (that is, not from the fragility of human memory), but from the failure of reality to conform to the underlying truth each document embodies. The documents appear to contradict one another only because of the limitations of our physical world, which conforms imperfectly to the four documents that came together to serve as the world's blueprint.
