Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 132-134
Author(s):  
Nyasha Junior
Keyword(s):  
Black Woman ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Racial Identification ◽  
The Future ◽  
Potential Benefits ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Biblical Scholar

The Epilogue offers the author’s reflections on being a Black woman biblical scholar and writing on issues relating to race, gender, and biblical interpretation. It includes the author’s discussion of hopes for the future of biblical studies, including biblical reception history projects on race. It discusses the desires of reading communities to see themselves reflected in biblical texts and to interpret Hagar in ways that resonate with their experiences and concerns. It addresses the potential benefits and drawbacks of the ethnic and racial identification of and cultural appropriation of biblical characters. It concludes that the story of Hagar offers us a unique opportunity to investigate the ways in which we use biblical texts to illustrate how we see ourselves and others.

Reimagining Hagar

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nyasha Junior
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Key Points ◽  
History Of ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Biblical Texts

This book offers a reception history of biblical Hagar. Despite the limited description of Hagar in biblical texts, she becomes an important figure in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. While many interpreters often treat biblical characters as White or as non-Black, this book investigates how, when, and why some interpreters choose to identify biblical Hagar as a Black woman. It centers on treatments of Hagar by African American biblical interpreters and focuses attention on how professional and non-professional interpreters identify and engage issues of difference, including gender, race, ethnicity, and status. Building on the work of African American classicists and biblical scholars, Reimagining Hagar discusses the African presence in biblical texts and issues of race within biblical studies. It details the portrayal of Hagar in nineteenth century pro- and anti-slavery literature in the United States, in African American vernacular traditions, and in religious studies and biblical studies scholarship. Engaging an array of literary and artistic sources, Reimagining Hagar illustrates that interpretations of Hagar as Black emphasize elements of Hagar’s narrative in order to connect her with or disassociate her from particular groups. This book traces some of the key points within the emergence and development of this unique understanding of Hagar as a Black woman.

Transforming Historical Objectivism into Historical Hermeneutics: From “Historical Illness” to Properly Lived Historicality

2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 490-515
Author(s):  
Thomas Tops
Keyword(s):  
Reception History ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
History Of Interpretation ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Texts

Summary The present study analyses recent criticisms against the use of modern-historical methodologies in Biblical Studies. These methodologies abstract from the historical horizon of the researcher. In order to relate properly to the historicality of the researcher, historical objectivism needs to be transformed into historical hermeneutics. Recent developments in the historical methodology of biblical scholars are unable to reckon with the historicality of the researcher due to the partial or incorrect implementation of Gadamer’s views on reception history. I analyse the views of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Gadamer on historicality and contend that the study of reception history is a necessary condition for conducting historical study from within the limits of our historicality. Reception history should not be a distinct methodological step to study the “Nachleben” of biblical texts, but needs to clarify how the understanding of these texts is already effected by their history of interpretation. The awareness of the presuppositions that have guided previous interpretations of biblical texts enables us to be confronted by their alterity. This confrontation calls for a synthesis between reception-historical and historical-critical methodology that introduces a new paradigm for conducting historical study in Biblical Studies in dialogue with other theological disciplines.

The Writings and Canon

2018 ◽  
pp. 462-472
Author(s):  
Donn F. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Reception History ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Biblical Faith

This chapter provides a summary of the Writings, describing the contribution this division makes to the Hebrew canon and to subsequent biblical interpretation. Acknowledging that the Writings are often perceived as amorphous, filled with diversity and difference that prevents a perception of order and purpose, the chapter asks whether these very characteristics witness to other intentions: (1) that diversity and difference are necessary for living out biblical faith; (2) that all biblical praxis (worship, discernment of wisdom, governance, envisioning the future, etc.) requires a relationship with both Torah and Prophets of the biblical canon. The Writings are seen to be a generator of questions and relationships with scripture, and to represent the first instance of canonical reception history, that is, the history of the impact and shaping of scripture in the subsequent history and faith of the community.

Introduction: Queerness, Time, and Biblical Interpretation

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 385-397
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Moore ◽  
Denise Kimber Buell
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Thematic Issue ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
The Future

Abstract This article introduces a thematic issue of Biblical Interpretation on the “temporal turn” in queer theory as it relates to biblical studies. Queer theorists of time have variously interrogated inherited concepts of history, historiography, historicity, and/or periodicity; the chrononormativity that regulates contemporary sexual lives; reproductive futurism, which evokes “our children” and their future to shore up heteronormativity and anathematize queerness; or explored the complex relations of queerness to the future and hence to hope. The contributions to this thematic issue, also introduced in the article, creatively harness these temporal theories and analytic strategies for queer biblical criticism and queer biblical hermeneutics.

The Bible as a Document of the Church: A Personal View

2016 ◽  
Vol 128 (6) ◽  
pp. 276-285
Author(s):  
George G. Nicol
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Theological Interpretation ◽  
Personal View ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Church

Following some general remarks on recent significant trends in biblical studies, I note that these will exacerbate the gulf between church and academy with respect to biblical interpretation. A brief introduction to the official documents of the Church of Scotland shows that they provide little indication of how the Bible should be interpreted as a document of the church. In view of the ideological nature of many of the biblical texts an argument against too ready recourse to theological interpretation is outlined.

Bathsheba in Contemporary Romance Novels

2020 ◽  
pp. 405-423
Author(s):  
Sara M. Koenig
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Text ◽  
Reception History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Kings 1 ◽  
Romance Novels ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
1 Kings ◽  
2 Samuel

The biblical texts about Bathsheba have notorious gaps, even by the laconic standards of Hebrew narrative. Post-biblical receptions of the story flesh out the terse chapters of 2 Samuel 11–12 and 1 Kings 1–2, ascribing feelings and motives to Bathsheba and David that are not contained in the Hebrew text. This essay examines the intersection of reception history and feminist biblical scholarship by considering eleven novels about Bathsheba from the twentieth and twenty-first century. These novels expand Bathsheba’s character beyond the text, but in fairly gender stereotypical ways, such that feminist readers of the novels may be left wanting more.

Teaching the Bible and Popular Media as Part of Contemporary Rape Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 423-439
Author(s):  
Beatrice J. W. Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Rape Culture ◽  
Pedagogical Strategies ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Cultural Myths ◽  
Biblical Texts

This essay explores pedagogical strategies for addressing rape culture in biblical studies courses, employing Genesis 34 and Judges 19–21 as primary texts. The first section discusses the nature of popular culture and its impact on gender. The following four sections highlight cultural myths about sexual assault by focusing on significant biblical texts and incorporating aspects of popular media to facilitate conversations about rape culture. The conclusion summarizes the main points and encourage further studies that combine the study of popular media and biblical texts. Overall, the essay contributes to the reading and teaching of the Bible within contemporary rape culture so that students become critical interpreters of biblical texts, as they become resistant readers of past and present rape culture.

Reception History and the Interpretation of Revelation

2020 ◽  
pp. 375-393
Author(s):  
Ian Boxall
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
History Of Interpretation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Texts

The chapter describes the discipline of reception history as the study of the ongoing use, interpretation, and impact of a biblical text. If the history of interpretation has often focused on the ways biblical texts are understood in commentaries and theological writings, reception history also considers how a book was received in spirituality and worship, in music, drama, literature, visual art, and textual criticism. Criteria for selecting and organizing materials useful for reception history are discussed, and there is a review of recent attempts to provide broad overviews of Revelation’s reception history, along with specific examples of the value of the discipline for interpreting Revelation.

Postcolonial Liberation: Decolonizing Biblical Studies in the South African Postcolony

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald O. West
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
The South ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
The Bible ◽  
African Black ◽  
History Of ◽  
Land Economics ◽  
The 1960S

Liberation biblical interpretation and postcolonial biblical interpretation have a long history of mutual constitution. This essay analyzes a particular context in which these discourses and their praxis have forged a third conversation partner: decolonial biblical interpretation. African and specifically South African biblical hermeneutics are the focus of reflections in this essay. The South African postcolony is a “special type” of postcolony, as the South African Communist Party argued in the 1960s. The essay charts the characteristics of the South African postcolony and locates decolonial biblical interpretation within the intersections of these features. Race, culture, land, economics, and the Bible are forged in new ways by contemporary social movements, such as #FeesMustFall. South African biblical studies continues to draw deeply on the legacy of South African black theology, thus reimagining African biblical studies as decolonial African biblical studies—a hybrid of African liberation and African postcolonial biblical interpretation.

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