Current Trends in Academic Biblical Studies

Many secular as well as religious universities and colleges offer courses in biblical studies, usually in departments of religious studies, theology, Judaic studies, history, or comparative literature. A quick look at the biblical criticism section in any university library will immediately show that biblical scholars read the Hebrew Bible in a variety of ways. This article is a survey and not an evaluation of the worth or validity of any approach.

Additionally, there are several professional associations devoted to biblical studies. For example, the Society of Biblical Literature, a membership organization with over eight thousand scholars, is the oldest and largest learned society devoted solely to the critical investigation of the Bible from a variety of academic disciplines. Through its work, the organization supports scholarly research and fosters the public understanding of the Bible and its influence. The SBL Press publishes books within a variety of series that cover all aspects of academic Hebrew Bible studies, including: Ancient Israel and Its Literature; The Bible and Its Reception; The Bible and Women; Early Judaism and Its Literature; Resources for Biblical Study; Rhetoric of Religious Antiquity; Septuagint and Cognate Studies; Text-Critical Studies; Wisdom Literature from the Ancient World; Writings from the Ancient World; Bible in American Culture; Global Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship; History of Biblical Studies; The Bible and Its Modern Interpreters; and Masoretic Studies. Additionally, SBL sponsors annual academic conferences with over one hundred sections devoted to the Hebrew Bible.

The term “biblical criticism” is an unfortunate one, because it gives the impression to some that the scholars who practice it are engaged in criticizing the Bible, in a hostile sense. In fact, like the related term “literary criticism,” it refers not to hostility towards the text, but the application of one’s critical faculties to reading it.¹

Twentieth century biblical criticism began with source criticism (also called “literary criticism”). Other approaches, historical criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, structural criticism, and reader-response criticism soon followed. As a background material for more current trends, some of the major approaches that arose prior to approximately 1970 are briefly described.

Historical Criticism

Historical criticism is about discovering the historical, geographical, and cultural setting of a biblical text. This means investigating customs, events, places, and names of people cited in a passage. Historical criticism also examines the history of the text itself: its place of origin, its audience, and the historical events surrounding its creation. Briefly, historical criticism scholars try to interpret any biblical passage according to the probable meaning of the author.

Julius Wellhausen’s four-source theory of the Pentateuch in its “classic” form (J, E, D, and P), dominated Hebrew Bible scholarship for more than a century. As the title of his most famous work (Prolegomena to the History of Israel)² indicates, Wellhausen appears to have been more interested in reconstructing the history of ancient Israel than in articulating the sources of the Pentateuch. Disagreeing with many of the source critics who preceded him, Wellhausen argued that the priestly document (P) was not the earliest, but rather the latest source of the Pentateuch to be composed, and that it presupposed Israel’s exile in Babylon. In Wellhausen’s view, the P source and Chronicles were therefore not sources from pre-exilic Israel, but rather were postexilic Jewish sources. Thus, the extensive law had only taken shape in the post-exilic era. While many forms of twentieth century scholarship went substantially beyond what Wellhausen had done, the vast majority of scholars built upon the core of his work, rather than fundamentally revising it. As Joshua Berman notes, the earliest major academic assaults on the documentary hypothesis came from two traditional Jewish scholars, Umberto Cassuto and Benno Jacob.³ Both objected to the documentary hypothesis even as they avoided Mosaic composition of the Pentateuch.

Their opposition to the hypothesis was not rooted in adherence to doctrinal orthodoxy. In proposing a paradigm shift toward a system of analysis that focused on the unity of the text, however, they espoused a new paradigm that may be demonstrated to be fundamentally Jewish in orientation. For classical rabbinic Judaism, the biblical text itself is the vehicle of revelation, and every word is therefore holy and immutable. Cassuto does not spell out his theology, but he seems to have regarded the Torah as a divinely inspired whole, even if not composed by Moses, and even if it comprises and reworks pre-existing sources. In any case, the paradigm he lays out here is rooted in the rabbinic tradition in which he was so steeped — a tradition that took the unity of the Torah as axiomatic. The source critics, by contrast, saw the earlier sources to be the only context in which the final form of the text before us makes any sense. Thus, a later redactor’s erasure of the boundaries between the original texts was to be lamented.⁴

Historical criticism is the name usually given to what may be termed “mainline” biblical criticism, although it is increasingly in dispute in recent years.

According to James Barr,⁵ it is misleading to speak of “the historical-critical method”: “there are methods used by historical-criticism, but there is no such thing as the historical critical method.” Whether the adjective “historical” is always appropriate also may be questioned. That said, historical methods are those which use as the basis of their scholarship that biblical texts were written in a cultural matrix very different from our own, and that the texts must be studied in the context of that ancient setting. Historical considerations require an approximate idea of the time, place, and circumstances of composition. The goal of historical criticism, however, is not necessarily historical in a narrow sense. As David Clines points out, it might just as well be the theology or rhetoric of the text, seen in light of its historical context.⁶ As an example, the commentary on the prophecy of Habakkuk composed by members of the Dead Sea scrolls community at Qumran⁷ apparently interpreted the “righteous” and “wicked” referred to by Habakkuk (late seventh century BCE) as persons contemporary with the Qumran community (first century BCE), but the historical method views these words as those persons intended by the prophet. Although the historical approach is widely accepted, it is not so clear to all scholars that the meaning of a passage should be restricted to “the meaning intended by the author.” This doubt arises partly because authors (especially poets) do not always intend just one meaning.

Form Criticism

Form criticism classifies types of biblical literature by genre. The word “genre” suggests categories of written literature (novels, lyric poems, etc.), but many of the biblical genres go back to a time of oral composition. In any culture where literature is transmitted by word of mouth, different genres have different social contexts. In societies such as ancient Israel, many types of utterance were associated with particular settings, and followed stereotyped patterns. As a result, it is sometimes possible to learn about the social and religious life of ancient Israel by paying attention to the various oral and literary forms of speech encountered in biblical texts. For example, form criticism has been applied to the Psalms, each type of psalm (thanksgiving by an individual, hymn of praise, appeal by the community, etc.) belonging to an occasion in Israelite worship. Narratives were also designated as “aetiological” (a tale accounting for the origins of a custom or a place) or “legend” (a tale about a holy man, holy place or sacred custom).

Form criticism is no longer the center of interest in Hebrew Bible studies, as other approaches have focused attention on the finished form of the text, rather than on preliterary stages of the text’s growth. Nevertheless, form criticism is considered an indispensable tool for the historical study of the Hebrew Bible.⁸

Redaction Criticism

Redaction Criticism focuses on the intentions of the editors or redactors who compiled the biblical texts out of earlier source materials, as opposed to historical criticism which focuses on the authors. It presupposes and builds upon the results of both historical and form criticism. In most cases the sources are hypothetical, although contemporary scholars seem to agree that some Hebrew Bible texts may have been drawn from royal annals or collections of stories about “heroes” (written or oral). Redaction critics reconstruct the redactor’s sources from the text as it now stands, and then try to discover why the redactor changed these (hypothetical) sources to produce the present form.

Strictly speaking, it may make sense to practice redaction criticism only when it is certain that a book is composite in character. For the majority of Hebrew Bible texts, this assumption is considered fully justified: for example, the Pentateuch and most of the prophetic books are understood to be the result of a long process of editing or redaction. Where a text seems to have been composed by a single writer, redaction criticism tries to discern the “intentions” of this writer, who is an “author” akin to the modern sense of the word, rather than a redactor. Nevertheless, in practice the distinction may be hard to maintain. For example, Kohelet might have undergone several stages of redaction, but the intentions of an original author are somewhat evident throughout the book; some of the Psalms seem to be freely composed lyrics with no prehistory as a collection of older fragments; and some narrative books (e.g., Ruth, Jonah) probably had a single author. On the other hand, as Gerhard von Rad points out, some of the biblical editors have reshaped the material so freely that we might call them “authors” rather than mere redactors. For example, the academic approach to Genesis understands that it represents such a thoroughgoing reworking of its underlying source materials that “the Yahwist” should no longer be called a redactor at all, but an author, an original writer.⁹ To some extent redaction criticism has been overtaken by newer movements, as described below.

Structuralism

The major influence of structuralism on biblical studies has been in the area of exegesis and literary analysis. The initial impetus for a structuralist study of the Bible came not from biblical scholars themselves, but from within the French structuralist movement. A pioneering study is that of Roland Barthes on the story of Jacob and the angel in Genesis 32:22–32.¹⁰ Barthes interprets this story as a folktale in which a new twist has been given to the plot by using some of the conventions with which folktales normally operate. He defines the participants in the story by their functions: God is the “originator,” Jacob is the “hero,” the angel is his “opponent.” In the “syntax” of folktale proper, these three may interact in various ways: the “originator” may step in to help the “hero”; or one or more “helpers” may be introduced into the plot; or the “hero” may succeed in his quest by his own efforts, but at the end be rewarded by the “originator.” But in the story in Genesis none of these patterns is followed. Instead, as Barthes shows, the “originator” and the “opponent” turn out to be one and the same — God (who sent him on his journey with whom Jacob wrestles all night), then blesses Jacob for his persistence in resisting him.

A structural analysis reveals that Genesis 32 is an artificial folktale, whose effectiveness depends entirely on its success in “subverting” the normal rules of folktale to produce a surprising outcome which shocks and disturbs the reader. The idea that God stands behind all that happens to his servants is a central theme of Hebrew Bible narrative, which avoids dualistic explanations of history and attributes both good and bad experiences alike to the providential guidance of a single God; as Joseph says to his brothers, As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive (Gen. 50:20). A structuralist analysis can help to show by what methods the biblical writers convey their message, pointing to structural possibilities.

Since Barthes many biblical scholars have seen in structuralism a tool for discovering new meanings in the biblical text. As in redaction criticism, the arrangement of elements within the text is significant, and attention is devoted to the shaping of texts through repetitions, chiastic arrangement, and stereotyped formulas, as well as by contrasting pairs. A major theme of structuralist approaches to biblical study has been undermining the results of conventional “historical” criticism. Many structuralist studies reveal patterning and order in texts which biblical critics had previously seen as fragmentary or confused. Many biblical scholars are attracted to structuralist analysis of the Bible because the biblical texts, being often anonymous, traditional, and complex, seem to demand an explanation that does not emphasize the deliberate intentions of an individual author but rather the operation of subconscious patterns buried in the human psyche.

Reader-Response Criticism

Reader-response criticism focuses on the reader and the process of reading. Although many scholarly approaches to biblical interpretation try to determine how the writing produces meaning or communicates a message to the reader, reader-response theorists assume that the reader contributes to the meaning of a text as well.¹¹ Readers take a stance toward the material that ranges from “efferent” (reading for practical information) to “aesthetic” (reading for enjoyment and appreciation). When a reader connects in an aesthetic or emotional manner, the reader’s life-experiences, culture, presuppositions, theological traditions, background, and knowledge help to formulate the meaning of the biblical text.

When exposed to a narrative, readers tend to respond differently, based partly on the character with whom they most closely identify. This identification is based on a number of factors, including the readers’ social location and reading strategy.¹² For example, a man might identify more easily with a male character, and a marginalized group may identify more easily with an oppressed character. Another factor is the understanding of “meaning” itself. One reader may define meaning as the point or moral of the story, while another may define meaning in terms of the story’s emotional effect (e.g., tears, laughter, fear, joy). Reader-response critics do not speak of a text as having a meaning, a single, determinate meaning that we should as interpreters of the text be seeking to discover. “Meaning” is what readers find in texts, what comes into readers’ heads when they are reading texts. A text means whatever it means to its readers, no matter how strange or unacceptable some meanings may seem to other readers. Thus, if there is no “correct” meaning of a text, no determinate meaning, there are no intrinsically right or wrong interpretations. The only source for validity in interpretation has to lie in “interpretative communities” — groups that authorize certain meanings and disallow others. Such a group may be an academic community, which establishes norms by which it will allow certain interpretations and disallow others. Or it may be a religious community, which will decide on what kinds of interpretations are suitable for its own purposes. Validity in interpretation is then recognized as relative to the group that authorizes it.

In the last thirty years, biblical study has expanded from what might be termed “traditional” approaches into methods of criticism which fit under the general rubric “poststructuralism,” with feminist, ideological, and materialist criticisms the most significant.

Intertextuality

Since the techniques of post-structuralist literary critics have been appropriated by scholars, sequential narrative episodes which reflect upon each other are described now as “intertextual” and are being studied from a literary perspective.¹³ Intertextuality allows that prior readings are not errors to be discarded (contra source critics), but instead reveal repetitions of textual structures.

Biblical intertextuality exists on both micro- and macro-levels. On the smallest linguistic level (individual words and phrases), the relationship is easily recognizable. Repetitions and shifts represent the basis for a wealth of scholarly material. The study of lexical similarities and differences is, in fact, one of the mainstays of biblical criticism. Adele Berlin, among others, explores how “lexical cohesion” (the ways in which words are linguistically connected within a sequence) plays a role in interpretation, and how awareness of this relationship can lead to better readings.¹⁴

Biblical scholars have studied intertextuality on a larger level as well. “Type-scenes” are intertextual in that they relate narrative events using fixed modes or sequences of action. However, type-scenes are most often discussed in the context of the biblical writer’s ability to shape the text, rather than the reader’s role in interpreting it. Biblical “typology” is also intertextual, since characters and scenes symbolically pre-figure later events (most often, the “Old Testament” is read as a prefiguration of the events of the “New”). Of course, the Hebrew Bible also has several self-contained examples of typology.

This interaction between reader and text occurs, in part, because of what literary theorists call “intertextuality,” the relation of a particular text to other texts. According to this theory, a work can be read only in connection with or against other texts. A biblical example is the literary topos dealing with the “Matriarch of Israel in Danger.” In three places in Genesis, different combinations of patriarchs, matriarchs, foreign kings, and social settings are recorded, but the scenario and key terms basically coincide. All three passages give essentially the same story: a patriarch and his wife visit a foreign land. Fearing that the woman’s beauty might become a source of danger to himself as the husband, the man resorts to subterfuge by claiming that his wife is his sister. In Genesis 12, the encounter involves Abraham and Sarah with the ruler of Egypt. The incident is repeated twice: in Genesis 20 the same couple confronts Abimelech of Gerar; and in Genesis 26 Abimelech is similarly embarrassed by Isaac and Rebekah.

Narrative intertextuality not only involves continuity but also some measure of discontinuity, for the ancient story is both “disrupted” and “regenerated” when used in new and perhaps unforeseen situations. All retelling of the past, as opposed to merely repeating it, involves an element of transformation.¹⁵ Narrative intertextuality emphasizes both the continuing role of a significant story, while also acknowledging that each new retelling is in some sense a reshaping of that story.

Deconstruction

Deconstruction, according to its practitioners, is an observation we can make about texts rather than a method that can be applied to texts. Although a scholar may write a deconstructive analysis of a biblical text, it would be more correct to say that the scholar is showing how the text deconstructs itself than that the scholar has performed a deconstruction of the text. Deconstruction is an especially powerful tool in biblical study in that it relativizes the authority attributed to biblical texts, and makes it evident that much of the power that is felt to lie in the texts is really the power of the community that supports them and sanctions them.

The “common sense” assumption about texts and their meanings is that texts have more or less clear meanings and manage more or less successfully to convey those meanings to readers. But the philosophy of deconstruction is that, however true that may be in a practical sense, words and texts are ultimately inadequate for the tasks we put upon them, and inevitably undermine themselves, usually in a way that calls into question the ideas that the texts apparently exist to express. A text typically has a thesis to defend or a point of view to espouse; but inevitably texts falter and let slip evidence against their own cause. A text typically sets forth or takes for granted some set of oppositions, one term being privileged over its partner; but in so doing it cannot help allowing glimpses of the impossibility of sustaining those oppositions.

Genesis 9 is an example of a self-deconstructing text. After the Flood is over, God gives to Noah a new set of commands for the age that will follow. Among them is the sentence, “Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed” (v. 6). At its face value, this is an authorization of capital punishment for the crime of murder and it is, no doubt, at the same time, the severest of warnings against committing the crime of murder. But in permitting or authorizing or demanding (whatever it is precisely that the verse does) that an act of murder be followed by an act of capital punishment, the command allows what it also prohibits: shedding the blood of another human. The text deconstructs itself by setting up an opposition between murder (bad) and capital punishment (good) and then undermining that distinction by giving the same name to the two acts: “shedding the blood of a human.” One might ask, if the two acts are the same, why should one be good and one be bad? The very way the text is written raises the question whether there is or should be a distinction between murder and capital punishment or whether they are both acts of murder, differing perhaps only in the fact that one is illegal (biblically prohibited) and the other is legal (biblically mandated). Deconstructionism is an attempt to undermine the reader’s expectations that a text will communicate some independently existing truth, by showing that author and reader alike are caught in the system of constraints imposed by the linguistic and literary system to which they belong, and are capable of communicating or receiving only such meanings as this system makes possible.¹⁶

Ideological Criticism

Ideological criticism is interested in the ways biblical texts served in the past and still serve today as vehicles for the use of power and in the interests of certain class or sectional groups. Ideological criticism is frequently referred to as “critical theory,” often shortened to the word “theory” itself. These methods include post-structuralism, feminism, psychoanalysis, ideological criticism, Marxism, eco-criticism, post-colonialism, queer theory, narratology, new historicism, utopian studies and so on. In literary criticism outside biblical studies these methods and others like them engage the majority of critics. Biblical studies remains in an extraordinary state of flux: the various methods of critical theory have been used by biblical critics for some time now. These methods have raised questions about the Bible concerning race and ethnicity, indigeneity, gender and sexual difference, the human-animal binary, class and ideology, hegemony and subversion, the nature of history, texts and readers, and so on.

In ancient societies like Israel, as today, there were rich and poor, people with power and those without; and “materialist criticism” seeks to identify whose interests a text served. David Clines uses the Ten Commandments as an example: “This text has usually been understood purely theologically, that is, as representing the will of God for human behaviour . . . whether or not that is the case, the Ten Commandments must have been promoted by some group in ancient Israelite society, for their own interests,” and tries to identify who that group would have been. “It is clear that those who need a law against theft are those with property to steal, and so on; and in fact, once we ask the question, Who is addressed in the commandments?, it is not at all difficult to answer it in terms of class and gender. The Ten Commandments are evidently addressed to males, who are old enough to have sons and daughters and young enough to have living parents, who are men of property with houses and oxen and asses, who are men of standing in their community who can give true or false testimony in a law court, and so on. Other persons in the society, such as the young, the disabled, the foreign residents and women, are referred to but are not the subject of the laws; though some of the laws may benefit them, it is not for their sake that the laws have been created, but to sustain those who framed the laws in the positions of power they have become accustomed to.”¹⁷

The intentions of ideological criticism is to show that the biblical texts represent sectional interests and are not equally beneficial to all segments of Hebrew society. In so doing, materialist criticism tends to relativize the authority and continuing validity of the biblical texts, in stressing their human, and often, all too human, origins.

Additionally, ideological criticism focuses on ideas, perceptions, and values held by a particular group of people today, which give them a perspective on how they fit into the world, and supply a means for exerting influence on the world. Ideological methods both reject the idea of objectivity, arguing that all readings are subjective and thus the author’s intent is both unrecoverable and irrelevant. Such scholars instead advocate reading the text from specific, stated ideological stances.¹⁸

This is not necessarily to imply that biblical writers consciously distorted the facts. One biblical example might be the portrayal of Manasseh in the Deuteronomistic history as a villain, while for the Chronicler he was a model of repentance and reconstruction. Neither historian has necessarily distorted the facts: it is a matter of selection, omission, emphasis and interpretation of the facts, a process conditioned by the writer’s conscious or unconscious ideological perspective.¹⁹ Below are descriptions of some of the many methods scholars of ideological criticism use.

Feminist Biblical Criticism

Feminist criticism considers the relationship of the biblical text to women’s experiences. It does not seek an objective, disinterested lens, but “in one way or another seeks to depatriarchalize not only the biblical texts but also theological traditions and systems that are based on patriarchal interpretations of the patriarchal texts.”²⁰

Some feminist critics are dismissive of the Bible based on its patriarchal nature. They deconstruct and rewrite what is understood by these interpreters to be an ultimately flawed text. Others consider an integration between the patriarchal overtones of the text, women’s experience, and the tradition from which the biblical narrative was developed. This approach assumes that although a patriarchal bias exists, a critique is possible and even essential to a proper biblical hermeneutic.

Several studies attempt to retrieve women’s place in the narrative toward restoring those who have been relegated to silence; others question whether the text reflects women’s experiences are being properly considered. Although there is very little consensus among feminist approaches to the Bible and few fit neatly within any one category, there are three major hermeneutical perspectives:

First, author-oriented critics give priority to the original meaning of the text. Within this perspective, feminists are able to locate positive readings for women in the balance of acknowledging patriarchy and honoring authorial intention.

Second, reader-oriented critics pursue inexhaustible meanings in the text, while the original meaning is essentially lost to present readers. This approach allows for extensive reader-response textual readings, depatriarchalization, and the maintenance of a “restless hermeneutic,” which claims to decenter the reader and honor marginality.²¹ Schussler Fiorenza’s influential feminist approach argues for a “canon within a canon,” in which some texts are dismissed as representative of a flawed patriarchy and others are considered authoritative.²²

Third, text-oriented critics aim for a synthesis of the above two perspectives in the search for the author’s “intention” rather than the author’s “results.” Ricoeur is credited with the phrase “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a principle incorporated into the biblical hermeneutical strategies of most feminist scholarship.²³

Post-Colonial Criticism

Postcolonial theory as a general term comes from literary theoretical movements in the late twentieth century that attend to questions of power dynamics, especially between an imperial metropolis and its peripheries; between colonial centers and margins; questioning the relationships of imperial power and also how they end up being negotiated: discursively, especially within texts, and within art, especially within literature. The reason that it matters for biblical studies is multi-fold. First, and long before postcolonial literary theory became significant in the US academy, biblical scholars had noted the importance of various empires in shaping biblical material, for example the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. Postcolonial theory provides a set of questions that focus on issues of power, identity, and the ambivalence that is inherent in the colonial exchange rather than particular reading methods.

Thus, postcolonial biblical interpretation can direct thinking about not just how imperialism and contestation of imperialism mattered in the ancient world but also how imperialism and anti-imperialism show up in modern uses of biblical material. For example, readings which examine how the power imbalance between colonizer and colonized may shed light on biblical texts and reveal new readings. Postcolonial interpretation varies from culture to culture; in Latin America postcolonial interpretation of biblical texts includes studies about oppression (such as Ex. 1-14), allowing readers to reject the colonizers’ use of the Bible as a means to maintain their own power.

Another example is the theme of divine election, as vital for biblical ideology as it is ethically problematic. Because the overarching history of Israel as a divinely elevated nation is propelled through a succession of chosen individuals, the theme of election seems to draw its ideological power from the implication that those individuals (and, by extension, the nation that they metonymically represent) are inherently superior to their non-elect counterparts. Regina Schwartz, for example, concludes that this dynamic cultivates an “us vs. them” mechanism of identity formation whereby the violent exclusion of the inferior other is not only legitimate, but encouraged.²⁴ In a recent paper,²⁵ Ashley Tate raises the question of whether or not such an ethically troubling attitude toward the other is indeed coequal with the biblical narrative in its own terms. In doing so, she uses the method of narratology to assess how the theme of election develops progressively throughout the biblical narrative and argues that, although an ideology does gradually emerge according to which the elect are inherently more deserving of the reader’s engagement, the development of the theme deliberately begins with the story of Cain and Abel, one that has thwarted attempts to pin down the divine rationale behind God’s preference for Abel’s offering rather than Cain’s. The narrative aligns the reader’s sympathies with the unchosen brother, thus anticipating and mitigating against the reader’s tendency to turn an ethical blind eye toward the unchosen. Strategically placed at the very beginning of a cycle of election narratives, the reader is drawn into an ethical relationship with the “other,” one which will be carried through subsequent encounters with the theme. Thus, according to Tate, Genesis 4’s “pride of place” serves as a subtle but persistent ethical call to take seriously the subjectivities and experiences of the other, even and especially when later instantiations of the theme seem to privilege the perspectives of the elect.

Marxist Criticism

Marxist interpretation looks at how economics and power function in biblical texts, exposing how those dynamics can allow them to be overturned, such as reading wisdom in Proverbs 1-9 as a commodity to be acquired and thus accessible only to those with the time and money to pursue it. One of the values of Marxist approaches to texts is that they enrich analysis by expanding beyond the narrow confines of so many ways of reading such texts. Instead of the reductionism typical of literary interpretations, which feel that the task has been done when the literary workings of a text have been explored, a Marxist reading regards this as the first step. Scholars who approach the Hebrew Bible using Marxist methodologies ask questions such as: what are the social and political dynamics of such a text; what are the economic implications; what are the ideological and cultural implications?

Psychological Approaches

Generally speaking, there are three points at which psychology can enter the study of a biblical text: examining the mind of the author (highly speculative), the mind and behavior of the author’s character (less speculative), or our own minds (most frequent approach).²⁶ There is a long tradition of psychological approaches to literature that examine the text for buried motives and hidden neurotic conflicts that generated the writer’s art: (in writing Hamlet, for example, Shakespeare was working over the death of his son). Because the hazards of examining an author’s mind are inversely proportional to the amount of material available on the writer’s life and private thoughts, it is never completely safe to guess at the psychic significance of a work of art, even that of a candid living author. And for biblical writers, we have only the most minimal sense of what their private lives may have been.

Applying psychological methods to biblical characters has not fallen into as deep a disrepute as concentrating on the writer, in great part because fictional characters are viewed as representatives of life and as such can be understood only if we assume that they are “telling a truth.” This assumption allows scholars to find “unconscious” motivations, albeit in fictitious characters. For example, Abraham’s actions and language reveal a great deal about him, despite the fact that all we will ever “know” is contained in the 1,534 verses of Genesis.

On the other hand, literary characters are both more and less than real persons. This presents a problem. While one aspect of narrative characterization is to provide a mimetic function, another aspect is primarily textual — to reveal information to a reader or to conceal it. This situation has no precise parallel in life (although it can be argued that real persons often resemble literary characters in the masks we present to the world). As a result, examining a narrative character is not risk-free either. For instance, contradictions in Abraham’s character may result from the psychic complexities the biblical writer imagined; or, they may result from the fact that Abraham is an agent in a literary narrative with a highly developed system of conventions — his “traits” may be more a function of the requirements of the story line than his personality.

Since authors may not provide much material for the theorists and since characters are not real persons, many scholars have shifted their focus from the interpretation of meanings embedded within a text to the processes of reading. Rather than attempting to determine objective meanings hidden within a text, which a reader needs to extricate, some scholars concentrate on the subjective experience of the reader, interactions between reader/text/author, and the values and premises with which a reader approaches interpretation of a text.

Until recently, reading the Bible was thought to be a rather straightforward process. The goal was to respond “properly” by trying to “understand” the text and grasp the “meaning.” The unspoken and unwritten rule was: “Do not confuse what you are doing to the text with what it is doing to you.” Yet, in spite of the impressive pressures designed to preserve this view of reading Scripture (both within the academy and by society at large), the rules seemed to change when the Bible became an object of interest to literary theorists. Poststructural literary criticism was particularly influential in drawing attention to the problematic interaction between reader and text. Scholars were producing counterexamples of irreducibly different and often contradictory readings of the same biblical narratives, and this wealth of interpretations had the effect of undermining the long-established and accepted doctrine of “objectivity” (whatever that may mean). As a result, scholars began to acknowledge the idea that how a biblical text is read is determined, in great part, by who does the reading.

The effect of text and reader on one another has been the focus of several poststructuralist analyses, including deconstructionist, rhetorical, reader-response, and ideological (including Marxist, feminist, womanist, liberationist, Hispanic, etc.) approaches. Further, the approaches are neither monolithic nor mutually exclusive. Biblical scholars who use psychological approaches seem to agree that “meaning” does not inhere completely and exclusively in the text and that the “effects” of reading Scripture, psychological and otherwise, are essential to its “meaning.” Ultimately, this type of literary criticism yields in biblical studies a way of looking at biblical narratives and readers that reorganizes both their interrelationships and the distinctions between them. As a result, recognizing the relationship of a reader to a text leads to a more profound awareness that no one biblical interpretation is intrinsically “true.” That is, the “meaning” of biblical narratives is not waiting to be uncovered but evolves, actualized by readers (and interpreters).

Conclusion

Notably, biblical scholars do not necessarily have a faith commitment to the texts they study, but many do. According to Joshua Berman: “A tradition imbues its sons with a conceptual framework and interpretive horizons. A tradition provides its adherents with the questions to be asked of a text, which in turn allows the text to answer those questions within the framework of the tradition.”²⁷

Indeed, some biblical scholars with a strong faith commitment have expressed disapproval of the current state of biblical studies: “I must confess that, as a Bible scholar, I register disappointment with the current state of the discussion. In the writing that comes under the rubric of ‘Orthodoxy and biblical criticism’ I see a great deal of close examination of ‘Orthodoxy’ but very little close examination of ‘biblical criticism.’ The fields of biblical studies generally, and the sub-field called Pentateuch Formation in particular, are in an intense state of flux, some would say crisis. The methodologies that supposedly could tell us how to unravel a text into its constituent parts, approaches that held sway for more than a century, are now widely called into question.”²⁸

What most academic biblical scholars have in common, though, is that they avoid overtly doctrinal readings based on the idea that the Bible is the “word of God.” Although there is a place for theology in biblical scholarship, most scholars treat the Bible as a text with human authors and readers who live in particular places and times that affect what they write or how they read a text. Biblical scholars tend to use a combination of these methods, as each reveals different aspects of the text, and when scholars of different backgrounds, faiths, and cultures weigh in, they bring their own unique experiences and questions to the text. The fullest understanding of the biblical text is gained by trying to see the text from as many perspectives as possible.

In this respect, it should be noted that archaeology, although not a means of reading the Hebrew Bible per se, is another useful tool in the biblical scholar’s toolbox. When archaeologists determine the identity of a site mentioned in the Bible and excavate it, their findings may be important for understanding biblical narratives that mention that place. For example, excavations at the site of Jericho, which according to Joshua 6 had walls in the period of the Israelite conquest, have revealed no walls for the historical period in which the conquest is supposed to have happened, thus indicating that the biblical account cannot be considered to be entirely historical. That said, however, a recent article by Leibel Reznick²⁹ highlights the many archeological finds that substantiate and support the biblical text as historical, or as preserving historical characters and settings which are not debated. Organizations such as the American Schools of Oriental Research foster archaeological scholarship on Ancient Israel, and the Biblical Archaeology Society is a nonprofit, nondenominational, educational organization dedicated to the dissemination of information about archaeology in biblical lands.

After more than 3,000 years, biblical interpretation is alive and well — and amazingly creative. Many of the approaches discussed above blend into one another, feed off one another, and enrich one another. Whether historical, form, redaction, structuralism, reader-response, feminist, intertextuality, psychological, deconstructionist, rhetorical, Marxist, womanist, liberationist, Hispanic, or any combination thereof, over the past thirty or so years, there has been a shift in focus from the author to the text to finally the reader — dissenters notwithstanding.