Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of its Interpretation. Volume 3: From Modernism to Post-Modernism (The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries). Part 1: The Nineteenth Century: A Century of Modernism and Historicism. Edited by MAGNE SaeBO.

Abstract

T his book is Part 1 of the third and final volume of a substantial reference work on the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. It covers the nineteenth century, though the discussions sometimes spill over into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. All the essays are concerned with the interpretation of the books found in the Bible used in Rabbinic Judaism. Therefore the deuterocanonical books found in the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate are not included. The designation of the deuterocanonical books as ‘Catholic Apocrypha’ (p. 108) is misleading, for it was Martin Luther who separated these books from their usual place in pre-Reformation Christian Bibles and placed them in a section he labelled ‘Apocrypha’. The volume has three major sections: ‘A. The General Cultural Context of Nineteenth Century’s Biblical Interpretation; B. Main Regional and Confessional Areas of the Nineteenth Century’s Biblical Scholarship; C. Special Fields and Different Approaches in the Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament’. The essays in section A treat cultural and philosophical aspects of interpretation, the phenomenon of ‘historicism’, the ancient Near Eastern context of the Bible, and the anthropological, sociological, mythical, and linguistic context. These essays are interesting and informative. Holloway’s statement on p. 96 that the decipherment of Akkadian was ‘officially recognized as an accomplished fact by the Royal Asiatic Society in 1857’ serves as a correction of Rohl’s reference to ‘the decipherment of the Assyrian-Babylonian language in 1857’ (p. 59). The decipherment of Akkadian and the cuneiform script in which it was written began in 1846 and the main phase was complete by 1852. See the reviewer’s article, ‘The Earliest Contributions to the Decipherment of Sumerian and Akkadian’, Cuneiform Digital Library Journal 2011:1, pp. 1–12 (online). The event that took place in 1857 was the submission of four independent translations of parts of an inscription of Tiglath-Pileser I to an academic panel, which concluded from a comparison of the translations that the decipherment which had been accomplished during the previous decade was proven.