Between Historical Criticism and Holistic Interpretation: New Trends in Old Testament Exegesis

Abstract

In Old Testament scholarship the late forties and particularly the fifties of this century were the time of the great the two main schools, the School and the Alt and in addition to them the British-Scandinavian cultic schools: the Myth and Ritual School, and the Uppsala School. This chapter focuses on the question of continuity and discontinuity in Old Testament exegesis. The main impact comes from modern literary criticism and its predecessors in different kinds of Literaturwissenschaft . Thus within main-stream Old Testament scholarship of the period under discussion, the given text of the Hebrew Bible is rarely taken as the subject of interpretation or as material for historical exploration. Instead, texts have been used that existed only as a result of critical destruction and reconstruction by modern scholars. Keywords: Albright school; British-Scandinavian cultic schools; Hebrew Bible; historical criticism; holistic interpretation; Old Testament exegesis