Editor’s Foreword: The Journal of Biblical Literature and the Critical Investigation of the Bible

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Contrary to the usual practice, this issue of the Journal of Biblical Literature begins with an editor's foreword. There is no particular occasion for this unusual step. This issue-134.3-does not mark a particular milestone in the history of the Journal, the Society, the field, or the world. And while it happens to be the fifteenth issue to appear under my editorship, there is no particular significance to that minor fact. The foreword is prompted only by my curiosity about the Journal's past, and the personalities and issues that have helped to shape it. The pages of the Journal itself provide fascinating insights into the history of our discipline, and of the decisions and tensions that have shaped the Journal and continue to do so today.I begin with a confession. Aside from a short book review in the 1990s, I have never published any scholarly work in JBL. It was not for lack of trying. In the early stages of my career, I wanted nothing more than an article in the Journal, as a validation of my own fledgling identity as a biblical scholar, and as reinforcement for my tenure and promotion dossiers. To that end I twice submitted manuscripts- once in 1986 and once in 1996-that in my view represented my best, most exacting scholarship at the time. Both submissions had historical foci, but both made extensive use of literary-critical methods. Both were rejected. I no longer recall the reviewers' comments in detail; the sting of rejection was softened considerably by the fact that both appeared shortly thereafter in other reputable publications. But from these experiences I formed the impression that a paper that deviated significantly from a narrowly defined historical-critical approach was not likely to be accepted by JBL.I did not try again; in the early 1970s I, like others who were attracted to structuralism, reader-response criticism, and the like, turned to Semeia and other journals that were more welcoming to new approaches. By the early years of the twenty-first century, JBL had caught up with the times. When asked to be on the editorial board in 2002, my lack of JBL success was not held against me, and I can only assume that all reservations had been overcome when I was asked to be general editor in 2012.Today, the relevance of literary-critical and other approaches that originated in other disciplines needs no defense. The field, and the Journal, have changed, under the influence of developments both within our discipline, such as the growing interest in noncanonical texts from the ancient Mediterranean region, and outside it, such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, and feminism. The current volume, number 134, includes articles by women and men on the ancient Near East and Greco-Roman contexts, translation theory, redaction criticism, digital humanities, archaeology, poetics and literary criticism, and reception history; gender, sexuality, slavery, imperial-critical studies and ritual studies, pertaining to the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Septuagint, and a broad range of noncanonical material from the ancient Near East to late antiquity. To provide fair peer review, recent general editors have paid close attention to the composition of the editorial board-the group that provides peer review for most of the submissions-to ensure gender balance; international representation; and familiarity with a broad range of approaches, viewpoints, and methods, as well as to provide adequate coverage of the range of biblical and related materials.A peer-reviewed print journal committed to a high quality of both content and production is not a nimble enterprise; the time lines from submission to decision and from acceptance to publication, while improving, remain lengthy. This situation is frustrating for authors, particularly those in the process of preparing their dossiers for the job market, tenure, or promotion. It also means that new approaches may take longer to reach the pages of the Journal than they do the program units of the SBL's annual or international meetings. …