Literary Forms/Techniques & Methods of Study

Abstract

Literary Forms/Techniques & Methods of Study Fred W. Guyette, Christopher T. Begg, Richard A. Taylor, and Brian J. Meldrum 170. [Bible Study in Orthodox Judaism] Hayyim Angel, "Bridging Tradition and the Academy: The Literary-Theological School in Orthodox Bible Study," JBQ 50 (1, 2022) 19–35. Traditional Judaism includes core beliefs in prophecy, the divine revelation of the Torah through Moses, and the existence of an Oral Law that accompanies the Written Torah. However, beginning in the seventeenth century with the philosophers B. Spinoza and T. Hobbes, and moving through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with Liberal Protestant critical Bible scholarship, these and other basic religious foundations came under attack by a host of writings and new assumptions. Can faith and scholarship walk together? Nehama Leibowitz (1905–1997) believed these two approaches could enrich each other. Rabbi [End Page 53] Mordecai Breuer (1921–2007) accepted many of the claims of the JEDP model proposed by J. Wellhausen, except that he did not think the documents were written by a human being. Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, for his part, is among those who choose to bypass historical considerations in order to take a literary approach to Scripture. Bin-Nun believes that it is important to see the nuances, the complexities, and the faults of biblical heroes. Only in this way can value and moral meaning truly be drawn from, e.g., the stories of the patriarchs.—F.W.G. 171. [Literal and Allegorical Readings of the Psalms] John Barton, "Literal and Allegorical Readings of the Psalms: Imagining the Psalmist," Psalms and the Use of the Critical Imagination, 138-45 [see #927]. For most contemporary readers of the Bible, there is an irreducible difference between Jewish and Christian readings of the Psalms. The roots of the traditional Christian reading can already be seen in the way Peter uses Psalms 16 and 110 in Acts 2:24-36. On the Day of Pentecost, Peter was trying to explain to a gathering of Jews why Christ died, how God raised him up on the third day, and how Jesus ascended into heaven. The Church Fathers—Ambrose and Augustine spring readily to mind—took this allegorizing approach to the Psalms even further. For them every Psalm somehow pointed to Christ, the promised Messiah. For Jewish readers, however, the Messiah has not yet come, and God is One, not Triune. For them, a more literal approach to the Psalms is called for: each Psalm is a prayerful dialogue between the human soul and God, the Creator of the Universe. A passage from Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1597) can help bring this difference into sharper focus. Hooker begins by saying that the Psalms can teach the virtues that all people need to live a moral life: "Heroical magnanimity, exquisite justice, grave moderation, exact wisdom, repentance unfeigned, unwearied patience …" But then Hooker's summary of the Psalms continues in a way that has more to do with a Christian view of salvation history. They show us, he says "the mysteries of God, the sufferings of Christ, the terrors of wrath, the comforts of grace, the works of Providence over this world, and the promised joys of that world which is to come." We cannot undo the ancient "parting of the ways," but there are good reasons for Jews and Christians to keep probing the boundaries that separate them from one another, in ways that build up friendship and mutual respect.—F.W.G. 172. [Claus Westermann; The Assumptive World of Trauma Survivors] Elizabeth Boase, "Engaging Westermann and the Assumptive World," JSOT 46 (2, 2021) 177-92. The work of Claus Westermann was foundational for the modern study of lament literature in the HB. Westermann's work on the Psalms arose from his experiences in World War II, where he learned to value both the praise and lament elements of the Psalms. This article reconsiders Westermann's contribution to the theology of lament in light of contemporary theory concerning the impact of trauma on individuals, focusing on the understanding of the impact of traumatic experience on the "assumptive" world of those who suffer. There are, I argue, significant points of...