The Centre for Jewish Studies
University of Manchester
Extra-Mural Lectures January-March 2000
Roger Tomes
DIVIDED BY A COMMON SCRIPTURE:
JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN APPROACHES TO THE BIBLE
IV
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III
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It could be argued that biblical criticism began with Jews. Ibn Ezra
pointed out that there were passages in the Pentateuch which must have been
written after the death of Moses, and that Isa 40 onwards reflects different
historical circumstances from the preceding chapters. Spinoza carried critical
observations a good deal further. Nevertheless the development of criticism
in the late 18th and 19th centuries was almost exclusively the work of Protestant
Christians. Their most important conclusions were that the Pentateuch was
the work of a number of compilers at different points in Israel's history,
so that for the most part the work of the prophets Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and
Micah preceded the codification of the law; that Isa 40-66 was the work
of a prophet or prophets who lived during or after the Babylonian exile;
that the Psalms were probably not composed by David and may have been composed
long after his time; and that the book of Daniel was a product of the Maccabaean
age.
These conclusions met with resistance from both Christians and Jews.
At a quite early stage one of the first members of staff of the Lancashire
Independent College in Whalley Range dared to publish an introduction to
the Old Testament which reported the findings of German scholars and dared
to question the inspiration of, for example, some of the imprecatory passages
in the Psalms. In 1857 he was forced to resign, and biblical criticism was
not taught at the college for another forty years (R. Tomes, '"We are
hardly prepared for this style of teaching yet"; Samuel Davidson and
Lancashire Independent College,' Journal of the United Reformed Church
History Society 5 (1995), pp.398-414). In 1875 William Robertson Smith
was dismissed from his post at the Free Church College in Aberdeen as a
result of the article on 'Bible' he had written for the ninth edition of
the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There were similar cases in the United
States. It was only towards the turn of the century that critical scholars
began to receive a more sympathetic hearing and the teaching of biblical
criticism became the norm in Protestant theological colleges. In the Roman
Catholic Church the process took much longer. It was only with the publication
of the Jerusalem Bible in French in 1955 that Catholics had a version of
the Bible translated from the original languages with introductions and
notes from a critical perspective.
At first the Orthodox Jewish response to biblical criticism was to reassert
the superhuman character of the Torah and its complete congruity with rabbinic
tradition. This was the approach of the Vilna Ga'on (1720-97). He does not
seem to have had any direct knowledge of the work of the critics; Jacob
Zevi Mecklenburg and Malbim, who did, also maintained the correctness of
rabbinic interpretation. However, Jewish scholars gradually began to answer
the critics on their own ground: David Hoffmann, and later Umberto Cassuto.
The Jewish Chronicle took an interest in the controversies which
arose over the publication of Essays and Reviews in 1860 and Bishop
Colenso's writings on the Pentateuch a few years later (David Cesarani,
The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry 1841-1991 (Cambridge,
1994), pp.45-47). It was only in the 1890s, however, when Claude Montefiore
and Israel Abrahams launched the Jewish Quarterly Review, that there
was any marked acceptance of the validity of biblical criticism. Leading
critics, such as T.K. Cheyne and S.R. Driver wrote for it, and Montefiore
and others wrote appreciative reviews of critical works, sometimes comparing
them with traditional Jewish commentary. For example, Lawrence M.Simmons,
in a review of the commentary on Daniel by the Karaite Jephet ibn Ali, said
this (JQR 2 (1890), 187):
Surely, in one respect at least, the exegesis of our days is to be
commended. It is judicial, it is impartial. In the days of orthodox interpretation,
the commentator was like an advocate holding a brief for his religious
party. 'Shiloh' Jews have held to mean the Messiah; Christians have referred
it to Jesus; Moslems to the 'Apostle of God' ... Modern exegesis at least
endeavours to discover what the writer of the inspired record really means.
It is not perpetually working up evidence to gain a case and defeat an
opponent.
Montefiore expressed 'the hope that our magazine ... may be the means
of securing to the subject and the method (both critical and religious!)
of Professor Cheyne some Jewish followers and disciples.' (JQR 1
(1889), 2)
That does not seem to have happened. Although Montefiore himself, in
his book A Short Devotional Introduction to the Hebrew Bible for the
Use of Jews and Jewesses (1936), dealt with the Prophets before dealing
with the Pentateuch, described the Pentateuch as 'the work of many different
writers and ìeditorsî, extending over a long period of time'
(C.G. Montefiore, A Short Introduction, p.36), and attributes Isa
40-55 to 'an unknown and nameless prophet of the Babylonian exile' (A
Short Introduction, p.29), the only commentaries he can recommend to
his readers are by Christian scholars (A Short Introduction, p.159).
The commentary which has been most used by British Jews, J.H. Hertz's The
Pentateuch and Haftorahs (1936), speaks of 'the utter falsity of the
critical theory' of the composition of the Pentateuch' (The Pentateuch
and Haftorahs, pp.198-200). And of course when Louis Jacobs argued,
in We Have Reason to Believe (1957), that scripture was 'the humanly
mediated record of revelation' and that the authority of Jewish law was
not 'weakened as the result of scientific investigation' (We Have Reason
to Believe, pp.72,76), his chances of becoming Principal of the then
Jews' College were effectively blocked.
There has been a much greater contribution by American Jews to general
biblical studies. Harry Orlinsky, who directed the Jewish Publication Society's
translation of the Torah (1962), also served on the committee which produced
the Revised Standard Version of the Old Testament (1952). The commentary
based on the JPS translation and edited by W.Gunther Plaut and others for
the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (1981) plainly accepts the methods
and results of biblical criticism, while recognising that there is still
considerable resistance in some quarters (The Torah: A Modern Commentary
(1981), pp.xxi-xxiv). American and Israeli Jews have contributed to
the Anchor Bible series, along with Roman Catholics and Protestants, and
the JPS Torah Commentary takes full account of general critical work. Jewish
scholars play a full part in the activities of the Society for Biblical
Literature in America, and it is much more common for American Jewish biblical
scholars to hold university posts and even to teach in Christian seminaries.
Biblical scholarship also flourishes in Israel, though here perhaps
the main contributions have been to textual criticism and biblical history
and geography and archaeology. The Dead Sea Scrolls have obviously received
a lot of attention. But there have also been substantial contributions to
exegesis by such scholars as Moshe Greenberg, Moshe Weinfeld and Menahem
Haran. When I was working on the Elijah and Elisha stories a couple of years
ago I found the work of Alexander Rofé the most stimulating. The
only drawback is thatthe bulk of their work is in modern Hebrew, which means
that it is only accessible to a minority of scholars.
But I have the impression that Jewish scholars in Britain today generally
accept biblical criticism in principle without being particularly interested
in pursuing it. Alan Unterman says that 'the whole subject of biblical criticism
is a very sensitive one' (Jews: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices
(1981), p.39), though Nicholas De Lange thinks that biblical interpretation
is 'a living tradition in which modern scholarship can take its rightful
place.' (Judaism (1986), p.65). A few years ago I contributed to
a composite introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Stephen Bigger, ed., Creating
the Old Testament: The Emergence of the Hebrew Bible (1989)) which was
intended to be written from Jewish, Christian, Muslim and humanist perspectives.
In the event the sections on 'The Authority and Use of the Hebrew Bible'
from Muslim and humanist perspectives were written by the (Christian) editor.
The Jewish contributors, Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Sybil Sheridan, for the most
part restrict themselves to expounding traditional Jewish approaches, leaving
critical matters to others. In the chapter on the Psalms, there was to have
been a contribution on 'The Psalms in Jewish Worship' by, I think, Jonathan
Magonet, but he withdrew, and I found myself writing that section as well
as the rest of the chapter. I quote this in support of my impression that
not many Jewish scholars are interested in such joint enterprises. Dan Cohn-Sherbok
has written his own introduction to the Hebrew Bible, in which he says that
'there is a general recognition among modern biblical critics - including
Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Jews - that the Pentateuch was
not written by Moses. Rather, it is seen as a collection of traditions originating
at different times in ancient Israel.' He also speaks of a First, Second
and Third Isaiah, and says of the book of Daniel that 'most scholars contend
that it was composed in the second century BCE' (The Hebrew Bible
(1996), pp.5,85-90,209). But once again his reading list contains relatively
few books or articles by Jewish scholars, and only one, as far as I can
tell, by a British Jewish scholar, Jonathan Magonet's Form and Meaning:
Studies in the Literary Techniques in the Book of Jonah (1976).
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