The New Handmaid: The Bible and the Social Sciences

Abstract

higher criticism of the late 19th century, which was a response to the new scientific enthusiasm that was sweeping that era. The belief that scholars had developed a foolproof method for establishing the meaning of the text in its own context was long in dying. If today that myth has been shattered and we find ourselves somewhat less sanguine about our ability to enter and interpret a world from thousands of years ago, still the scientific investigative mode is proving useful, now by approaching the texts in question with specifically social questions and models for­ mulated from social science. The present article will attempt to survey the origins, development, and present state of this method. HISTORICAL SKETCH: OLD TESTAMENT To attempt a thorough historical survey of the use of the social sciences in OT scholarship would be to encompass most of the major work of the last century, since modern scholarship about ancient Israel has long tried to take advantage of the possibilities. Since neither is there room for such a survey in the present article nor is this my area of expertise, the summary will be brief. At the end of the last century, scholars like Julius Wellhausen (18441918) and W. Robertson Smith (1846-94) were seeking to reconstruct the social world of ancient Israel through attention to its religious institutions and beliefs as essentially social phenomena. Robertson Smith especially followed a theory of the significance of the social dimension and of social pressure in ancient societies, in which the religious and political aspects of life were intermingled. Both Wellhausen1 and Rob­ ertson Smith2 limited their study for the most part to the literary evidence. James Frazer was to extend the search to the customs and