The Unsung Buber-Leibowitz Coda to the German Jewish Swan Song

Among the hidden treasures squirreled away in the archives of Israel’s National Library lies a fragmented correspondence that sheds new light on the afterlife of a project that was long deemed the farewell gift to the German language and culture from the remnants of its Jewry. It is an exchange of letters between two scholars, whose interest in the German rendition of the Bible occupied them for many years, first in Germany, and later in the land where Hebrew was vernacular and where one might think there would no longer be a need for translations of the Bible; particularly not into a language that aroused considerable aversion in the aftermath of the war. And yet, the 1963–64 exchange between the two Jerusalemites, the Vienna-born and Frankfurt-crowned philosopher, theologian, and translator Martin Buber and the Riga-born, Berlin- and Marburg-educated biblical scholar Nechama Leibowitz tells a different story. It shows they both believed the project that began under the title Die Schrift, zu verdeutschen unternommen should be revised once again, after its completion so as to underline its ongoing relevance for present and future readings of the Bible tout court, in German and Hebrew speaking lands alike.

Metamorphoses of the Divine Absolute in the Light of Religious Studies Vision (by the Work of Kyiv Theological Academy Professor Yakym Olesnytskyi “From Talmudic Mythology”)

The article continues the series of investigations that demonstrate the experience of religious reading of the significant works of prominent Kyiv professors-academics of the last third of the 19th – early 20th century. These works have accumulated a powerful array of empirical material relevant to the history and theory of religious studies. Accordingly, the reconstruction of the field of theoretical positions important for the formation of the “science of religion” in the domestic intellectual tradition is currently being updated.The work of the Hebrew scholar and biblical scholar Yakym Olesnytsky is represented. This researcher was one of the first in the domestic humanities to analyze the “aggadic” layer of Talmudic writing through the prism of comparative-religious and religious-historical approaches. Metamorphoses of biblical images and plots, events of the ancient history of the Hebrew people, which arose under the influence of various mythological, philosophical, and folk traditions, were revealed. There was a real demythologization of “aggadah” from the standpoint of historical and literary criticism.On the basis of a religious reading of J. Olesnytsky’s text, this article traces some metamorphoses of theistic ideas in the process of the rise of Talmudic Judaism. They are analyzed from the point of view of the categories relevant to the philosophy and phenomenology of religion: Religious Experience, the Supernatural, the Another Reality as Sacred, the Absolute. A number of cognitive situations initiated by Olesnytsky, valuable from the point of view of a wider range of disciplines: philosophy and phenomenology of religion, history of religion, sociology and psychology of religion, religious comparative studies have been identified. This experience will be used in further research on the materials of the work of a well-known Kyiv academician.

The Literary Motif of Cush in the Old Testament

There are 56 references to Cush in the Old Testament and these occur in all the three main corpuses of the Hebrew Bible namely the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. Traditional historical-critical scholarship has not showed great interest in the Old Testament texts about Cush. However, the Nigerian biblical scholar David Tuesday Adamo has through his many contributions about the Cush texts made the guild observant of what can be labelled an African presence in the Old Testament given that Cush is applied as a literary motif in the Old Testament. Following a presentation of the Cush texts in the Old Testament, this paper examines how the literary motif of Cush functions in the text, taking Isaiah 18 as a representative example.

Rediscovering the community of creation

The biblical scholar Richard Bauckham’s 2010 book Bible and Ecology provides a useful jumping-off point for his conversation with liturgist and writer Pat Bennett on humanity’s relationship to the rest of creation in the context of the current ecological crisis. Their discussion reflects on Bauckham’s view that a correct biblical understanding of this relationship requires us to read beyond Genesis 1:26–28’s mandate of human dominion over other living creatures. They explore how, rather than a relationship of dominance (which has been used by some to justify exploitation of the earth’s resources), the full picture the Bible presents is one where humans are part of a community of creation alongside other creatures.

Documentary Hypothesis of the Origin of the Pentateuch in the Works of Erhard Blum

В статье рассматриваются труды современного немецкого библеиста Эрхарда Блюма, посвящённые анализу истории и современного состояния документальной гипотезы происхождения Пятикнижия, которая до сих пор является доминирующей в современной западной библеистике. В начале статьи рассказана краткая история этой гипотезы, затем излагается её современное состояние, как его описывает Э. Блюм с выделением трёх основных направлений развития, и приводится его критическая оценка её проблем и перспектив. Далее рассматриваются рассуждения Блюма о проблемах лингвистической датировки библейского текста, очень важной для разных аспектов современной библеистики и в том числе документальной гипотезы. В качестве примера описывается лингвистический анализ отрывка Быт. 24 (о женитьбе Исаака), сделанная израильским библеистом А. Рофэ, и даётся его критический разбор. В конце статьи приводятся выводы автора о современной критической оценке документальной гипотезы на основе анализа трудов Э. Блюма. Автор считает, что история данной гипотезы и её современное состояние наглядно показывают её спорность и хаотичность выводов. Вместе с тем альтернативные (по отношению к традиционной церковной позиции) точки зрения на происхождение Пятикнижия не обязательно должны противоречить церковному вероучению и могут быть полезны для обнаружения и решения некоторых проблем библейского текста. В частности, может быть перспективной гипотеза Девятикнижия. Эрхарда Блюма можно назвать типичным представителем современной библейской критики, с одной стороны использующим документальную гипотезу для своих исследований, а с другой - способным её критически оценить. Ввиду того, что профессор Э. Блюм является ныне действующим исследователем, его научное творчество до сих пор, насколько известно автору, не было объектом научных исследований. Таким образом, данная статья может считаться первой в этой области, и автор вынужден был опираться только на труды самого немецкого библеиста. The article examines the works of the modern German biblical scholar Erhard Blum, devoted to the analysis of the history and contemporary state of the documentary hypothesis of the origin of the Pentateuch, which is still dominant in modern Western biblical studies. An introduction to the article contains a brief history of the documentary hypothesis. Further in the text, the contemporary state of the hypothesis is represented by the description of Blum, with three main directions of its development, which he distinguishes, and his critical assessment of its problems and prospects. The author considers Blum's reasoning about the problems of linguistic dating, which is important for various aspects of modern biblical studies, including the documentary hypothesis. As an example, the linguistic dating of Genesis 24 (the marriage of Isaac), made by the Israeli biblical scholar Alexander Rofe, is described, and its critical analysis is given. The author reasons about the modern critical assessment of the documentary hypothesis based on the analysis of Blum’s works, and applies his own interpretations. The author presumes that the history of the documentary hypothesis and its current state clearly demonstrates controversy. Meanwhile, opinions on the origin of the Pentateuch, alternative to the traditional church views, should not necessarily contradict the church doctrine and may be useful for identifying and solving some problems of the biblical text. Due to the fact that Blum is a contemporary biblical scholar, his person, as far as the author knows, has not been an object of academic research yet, and the present article can be considered the first in this area, and the author, therefore, is forced to rely solely on Blum’s works.

Jerome's Commentaries on the Pauline Epistles and the Architecture of Exegetical Authority

In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, during a fifty-year stretch sometimes dubbed a Pauline “renaissance” of the western church, six different authors produced over four dozen commentaries in Latin on Paul’s epistles. Among them was Jerome, who commented on four epistles (Galatians, Ephesians, Titus, Philemon) in 386 after recently having relocated to Bethlehem from Rome. His commentaries occupy a time-honored place in the centuries-long tradition of Latin-language commenting on Paul’s writings. They also constitute his first foray into the systematic exposition of whole biblical books (and his only experiment with Pauline interpretation on this scale), and so they provide precious insight into his intellectual development at a critical stage of his early career before he would go on to become the most prolific biblical scholar of Late Antiquity. This monograph provides the first book-length treatment of Jerome’s opus Paulinum in any language. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, Cain comprehensively analyzes the commentaries’ most salient aspects—from the inner workings of Jerome’s philological method and engagement with his Greek exegetical sources, to his recruitment of Paul as an anachronistic surrogate for his own theological and ascetic special interests. One of the overarching concerns of this book is to explore and to answer, from multiple vantage points, a question that was absolutely fundamental to Jerome in his fourth-century context: what are the sophisticated mechanisms by which he legitimized himself as a Pauline commentator, not only on his own terms but also vis-à-vis contemporary western commentators?

Ad fontes

In the years leading up to his work on Paul, Jerome had become hardened in the conviction that biblical scholars should possess a mastery of the biblical languages, Hebrew and Greek, so that they can read Scripture in its original form. During his stay in Rome between 382 and 385, he had experimented with this back-to-the-sources approach in a number of shorter exegetical set pieces, but it was not until he embarked on his opus Paulinum that he was able finally to apply it systematically in the context of commentaries on whole biblical books. This chapter explores, through detailed case studies, how he develops his ad fontes methodology in the four Pauline commentaries and cumulatively builds the case for Hebrew and Greek philology being absolutely vital to serious study of the Bible, all the while attempting to demonstrate by example that he is the model biblical scholar.

The Low-Church Idea of a University

William Rainey Harper, founder of the University of Chicago, was an accomplished biblical scholar who convinced John D. Rockefeller Sr. that Baptists needed a great university. While Harper emphasized Christian character, chapel, community, and Christian dimensions in teaching, he was also an efficiency expert who was later accused, as by Upton Sinclair and Thorsten Veblen, of building a university too much beholden to business interests. Amos Alonzo Stagg saw football as contributing to building character and community. In Harper’s “low-church idea of a university,” America was his parish. Sociology, as represented by Albion Small, was presented as a Christian and democratic moral enterprise and can be seen as a last flowering of moral philosophy. John Dewey, who had abandoned earlier Christian faith, exemplifies how a broadly Christian moral heritage might blend with democratic ideals.

The Author of Sin and Demoniacs

The view that Hobbes was an English Calvinist is supported by considering his positions on two issues, the author of sin and demoniacs. Hobbes’s debate with Bishop John Bramhall is structurally similar to two other debates in seventeenth-century England between Calvinists and Arminians. Hobbes, along with William Barlee and William Twisse, claimed that God is the cause of evil but not its author. Bramhall, Thomas Pierce, and Thomas Jackson accused the Calvinists of holding that God is not only the cause but also the author of sin. On the issue of demoniacs, Hobbes follows the great biblical scholar Joseph Mede, who had support from important English Calvinists, in holding that demoniacs were madmen, and the idea that they were possessed by the devil was imported from pagan religions.

Making sense of the COVID-19 pandemic from the Bible – Some perspectives

In this article, a brief survey of some of the ways in which biblical scholars try to make sense of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is offered. The views of the following scholars are discussed: Walter Brueggemann, Ying Zhang, John Goldingay and Kathleen Scott Goldingay, N.T. Wright, Philemon M. Chamburuka and Ishanesu S. Gusha, and Peter Lampe. This is followed by the reflections of a biblical scholar and a systematic theologian. From the perspective of a biblical scholar, the following issues are raised: the richness of biblical traditions, the influence of social location on the interpretation of the pandemic in the light of the Bible, the importance of the emphasis on lament, the reluctance to interpret the pandemic as a punishment from God, the importance of the interpreter’s view of God and the emphasis on the way in which the ‘new normal’ should be approached. From the perspective of a systematic theologian the following issues are discussed: The nature of doing theology, the role of the symbol of the Divine, performativity of sense-making, the Trinitarian confession, an emerging new self and the importance of an ethic of responsibility.Contribution: The article is a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and emphasises the critical importance of engaging the Christian scripture. The role accorded to hermeneutics and to an explicit interdisciplinary conversation makes a particular contribution to the emerging crisis discourse.