Materializing German Old Testament Exegesis: The Social Historical Method in the Work of Willy Schottroff (1931–1997)

The progressive German-speaking scholarship produced by Old Testament exegete Willy Schottroff (1931–1997) is often neglected in historical reviews of biblical studies. Schottroff adhered to a marginalized intellectual tradition in German Protestant late twentieth-century Hebrew Bible scholarship that preserved and nurtured exegetical integrity and theological ethics in resistance to imperial intellectual and political ambitions and practices. This essay traces Schottroff’s exegetical efforts to read the Hebrew Bible with a method, called social historical criticism, not much known outside German-speaking contexts. Three sections depict Schottroff as standing in this liberationist-materialist view of historical criticism. A first section surveys my personal encounter with Schottroff’s work in the West German Post-Holocaust, Post Civil-Rights, and Peace Movement era of the late 1980s. A second section connects Schottroff’s reliance on social historical criticism to Gerhard von Rad’s insistence of historical criticism during the Nazi and Post-Holocaust German era. A third section analyzes the materialist German Hebrew Bible exegesis as it appears in the work of Willy Schottroff. A conclusion reflects on the politics of biblical historiography in German Post-Holocaust Old Testament exegesis.