Mês: agosto 2009

In any case, we need to use a proper critical descriptive language in our biblical scholarship. A dictionary is still a good idea.

Philip R. Davies faz, em The Bible and Interpretation, um alerta quanto ao uso inadequado e ingênuo que frequentemente fazemos da linguagem bíblica.

Watch Your Language!

About twenty years ago, I gave a conference paper called “Do Old Testament Studies Need a Dictionary?”[1] In those days, “Old Testament” was unselfconsciously used—but so were biblical categories of description. I was railing against “Academic Bibspeak,” in which key terms were not translated into meaningful modern equivalents but remained fossilized within biblical scholarship. My argument was that to be “critical” we had to analyze one kind of vocabulary by using another, and not in its own—and thus be able to offer a “judgment” by translating the vocabulary.

Rereading this old piece recently—for the first time since its publication, I think—I expected symptoms of youthful brashness and was not disappointed. Did I also recognize how far the discipline had progressed since? Just a bit.

Here is one of my original proposed dictionary entries (p. 333):

ISRAEL

(a) A probably fictitious entity supposedly composed of the elements of two nation-states formed in Palestine during the Iron II period under the kings David and Solomon

(b) The name given to a kingdom centered in the Ephraimite hill country of Palestine between the end of the 10th and the end of the 8th centuries BCE, possibly deriving its name from a group mentioned in the MERNEPTAH STELE.

This entry greatly oversimplified the issue: the Israels that the biblical writers offer us are more varied and variegated: the books of Deuteronomy, Kings, Ezekiel, Chronicles, and Ezra, for instance, all differ on what “Israel” includes (make up your selection from Samarians, Judeans, and Judeans claiming to be returned from exile, proselytes, gerim). It is now clearer, too, that Judah and Israel probably originated independently, developed independently and, though closely associated during their history (by temporary political union and vassalage), were at their demise antagonistic neighbors. Yehud and Samerina later must have combined into some kind of religious unit called “Israel”: the Pentateuch is a set of texts canonized by both Judeans and Samarians and describe this “Israel” as a fictitious twelve-tribe nation existing from patriarchal times, enslavement in Egypt, and escape to the land of Canaan. While a few historians accordingly now speak of “Israel and Judah,” distinguishing their social and religious attributes and their memories of the past, it is all too common to find “Israel” used without discrimination between the two kinds of Israel or between either of them and Judah.

The problem does not stop there. Many scholarly books mention the “religion” of “Israel” as “Yahwism.” As far as I know, Yahweh was a god worshipped in Israel and Judah, and apparently also in Teman and elsewhere. But a “religion of Yahweh”? There was no “Baalism” “Mardukism,” or “Elism.” Deities are not religions. Indeed, it is misleading to use the word “religion” to imply a system of belief and practice. In the ancient Near East, people venerated many deities and participated in many cults simultaneously. Their “religion” was an amalgam of these—ancestral cults, city cults, royal cults, national cults, cults of sacred places, and so on. People were far too religious to have one “religion.”

And what are “the prophets”? Do the “prophetic books” include Joshua to Kings? Daniel? Jonah? Were false prophets still prophets nonetheless? What made them “false,” anyway? I can find no adequate anthropological or sociological description of “prophet”: it’s a biblical category masking as social description Wilson proposed “intermediary”[2] but without much success.

Many other terms still need to be replaced. The “ark” of the covenant was a box. “Righteousness” (tsedeq) can mean “innocence,” “integrity” or “honesty”: a “covenant” is a treaty. “Salvation” very often means no more than “safety” or “security.”

Then we have “bless,” “glory,” “holy”—cultic and liturgical language that is quite technical. It persists in modern Christian liturgy, but how many Christians know what “blessing God” means—let alone “blessing his holy name”? Many such terms are alien to the sphere of everyday life: others can be illuminated by modern language. Hesed, for example, sometime used of God and sometimes of humans, has its closest English equivalent in “loyalty,” signifying the obligations incumbent on both client or patron in the kind of relationship quite familiar to anyone who has seen The Godfather. Human’s hesedis “respect” (yir’ah). The relationship entails a “deal” or “understanding” and sometimes the patron makes an offer (“promise”) that cannot be refused (“rejected,” ma’as). A good patron’s hesed is benevolence or generosity (“grace”), and he gives “protection” (yeshu’ah, “salvation”).

Moving further, “heaven” should be replaced by “sky” (shamayim). Or should we say “space”—if we think God lives in any particular place.

All right: we can’t turn everything in the Bible into modern language. But we need both to defamiliarize it to those who think it speaks directly to their modern religion and familiarize it to those for who (rightly) think its religious discourse is alien. In any case, we need to use a proper critical descriptive language in our biblical scholarship. A dictionary is still a good idea.

Notes

[1] “Do Old Testament Studies Need a Dictionary?” in Clines, Fowl & Porter (eds), The Bible in Three Dimensions, Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990: 321-35.

[2] R.R. Wilson, Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel [sic], Philadelphia: Fortress 1980.

 

Escrito por Philip R. Davies, Professor Emérito da Universidade de Sheffield, Reino Unido – Agosto de 2009

The contents of the volume reflect a shift in Persian-period studies from a paradigm of “exile and restoration” to a paradigm of “empire and colony”. Issues of imperialism and resistance recur constantly, and some esssays make explicit application of postcolonial hermeneutics.

Ou seja:
Os tópicos deste volume refletem uma mudança de paradigma nos estudos sobre a época persa de “exílio e restauração” para “império e colônia”. Questões sobre imperialismo e resistência ocorrem constantemente e alguns ensaios fazem uma aplicação explícita de hermenêutica pós-colonial.

 

Em fevereiro do ano passado chegou meu exemplar da coletânea de ensaios sobre a época persa (538-332 a.C.) e a Bíblia, organizada por Jon L. Berquist:

BERQUIST, J. L. (ed.) Approaching Yehud: New Approaches to the Study of the Persian Period. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007, ix + 249 p. – ISBN 9781589831452.

Mas só ontem e hoje tive oportunidade de começar a ler algumas coisas sobre ele, como a resenha de Stephen L. Cook publicada na CBQ – The Catholic Biblical Quarterly – Vol. 71, n. 3, July 2009, p. 668-670 e a quem pertence a primeira frase deste texto.

O Dr. Stephen L. Cook, do Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria, VA, USA, é um colega biblioblogueiro e anotou em seu Biblische Ausbildung no dia 15 de julho passado a chegada da revista: My Review of _Approaching Yehud_, edited by Jon L. Berquist (eu, morando mais longe, só a recebi em 4 de agosto, terça-feira passada).

Li também as resenhas de Armin Siedlecki e de Ernst Axel Knauf, publicadas em meados de 2008 na RBL – Review of Biblical Literature.

 

De qualquer maneira, o pouco que já li – tenho que ler o livro todo primeiro para falar com mais propriedade – entusiasmou-me bastante.

Especialmente a percepção de que o paradigma exílio-restauração, que sempre dominou os estudos históricos e textuais deste período, está caduco e precisa ser sublinhada a realidade de um Yehud (nome da província judaica na época persa) que passa de um domínio imperial babilônico para uma realidade de colônia da Pérsia…

E esta realidade pode ser percebida, segundo os autores, nos textos bíblicos redigidos na época, como alguns Salmos, trechos do Trito-Isaías, Zc 1-8, recortes de Ezequiel, capítulos de Provérbios etc.

Interessante na resenha de Stephen L. Cook é seu entusiasmo na apresentação do livro – uma obra com ensaios de 13 autores – e sua extrema cautela na avaliação do conjunto, especialmente quando fica preocupado com os métodos utilizados e a perspectiva hermenêutica dominante nos estudos. Ele diz por exemplo: “O’Brien in her ‘Response’ accurately sees this volume as presenting the biblical texts embroiled in human struggle, not theology (p. 210)”.

Ora, pois eu penso exatamente assim: a teologia é um “discurso segundo” que vem dentro – e como consequência – da conflitiva vivência humana em todos os setores da vida…

Neste sentido, a resenha de Armin Siedlecki – Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA – é mais interessante. Depois de introduzir a tendência dos estudos bíblicos na época persa, o resenhista fala dos métodos utilizados nos estudos de maneira positiva:

This collection of essays represents an example of the culmination of a two-decade-long development in biblical studies as well as an overture to new approaches to Persian period studies. In his introduction to this volume, Jon Berquist outlines several important changing assumptions in biblical scholarship (p. 3–5), including the dating of texts and our confidence in reconstructing preexilic history, ideas about the size of deportations from Judah to Mesopotamia in the early sixth century, the ideological and ethnic homogeneity of the postexilic community, the impact of Persian imperial politics, and the significance of economic relationships to understanding the social context of biblical literature. Thus, while the Persian period had been neglected for much of the twentieth century, the study of Persian period texts is no longer a marginal interest among biblical scholars, and the impact of Persian imperial politics on the development of biblical literature in general is increasingly acknowledged as a formative factor. John Kessler is hardly exaggerating when he speaks of a “torrent of scholarly interest in the Persian period over the past twenty years” (p. 139) (….) A common characteristic of the essays in this book is their use and often creative combination of a variety of different approaches (e.g., linguistic, literary, archaeological, social scientific).

E ele acrescenta:
Jon L. Berquist, em seu ensaio nas p. 195-202, adds postcolonial considerations that highlight “the interplay of empire and resistance” (196). His contribution is an apt concluding essay, since the three principles he outlines as central to his postcolonial reading are shared by virtually every essay in this collection: (1) rooting the experience of Yehud within the time after exile; (2) taking into account “the colonized nature of Yehud (as well as the colonized nature of much present scholarship)” (197); and (3) the conviction that all reading must be partial, since all ideologies are incomplete.