The field of biblical studies has yet to escape from its nineteenth century move toward a largely positivist historical paradigm. Stephen Moore and Yvonne Sherwood’s The Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto portrays a century and a half of scholarship as a dead end path, hopelessly bound to a historical paradigm despite the emergence of postmodern methods in recent decades. They advocate a rigorous examination of the history of the discipline that would reveal paths not taken in its early stages. A more recent essay by Ronald Hendel, “Mind the Gap: Modern and Postmodern Biblical Studies” (Journal of Biblical Literature, 2014), addresses similar questions and engages the work of Moore and Sherwood. Hendel identifies a “strong” and a “weak” form of postmodernism within contemporary biblical studies; he rejects the former because of its radical subjectivity. He attempts to link Moore and Sherwood’s work to the more desirable weak form and advocates using Nietzche’s understanding of philology — “the incomparable art of reading well” — as a bridge between modern and postmodern biblical scholarship.
Both works are helpful and I do not dispute the critiques they offer. Yet for two reasons I found myself vaguely troubled as I read them. First, the authors write about academic biblical studies as an activity in which others are engaged, even though they are all productive scholars who have been actively engaged in the field themselves. Whatever I may think of the last three decades of biblical scholarship, I have been a participant, not an observer above the fray, and my academic work has taken shape in that context. Sherwood and Moore, in particular, want to erase the past century and a half without recognizing how their own work is integrally connected to it, even when reacting against it. Second, while Sherwood, Moore, and Hendel attempt to move beyond diagnosis to treatment, they offer no concrete solutions. I came away from these laments unsure what their new vision of scholarship looks like.
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