Social Justice and the Hebrew Bible, Volume One

By Norman K. Gottwald

CONTENTS

PART 1: METHODS, MODELS, AND COMPARATIVE STUDIES
What Does Sociology Have to Do with The Bible?
The Bible and Economic Ethics
Social Class as an Analytic and Hermeneutical Category in Biblical Studies
Social Class and Ideology in Isaiah 40-55: An Eagletonian Reading
Ideology and Ideologies in Israelite Prophecy
Periodization, Interactive Power Networks, and Teleogical Constraints in Hebrew Bible Studies
Icelandic and Israelite Beginnings: A Comparative Probe
Structure and Origin of the Early Israelite and Iroquois "Confederacies"
PART 2: TRIBUTES TO COLLEAGUES
James Muilenburg: Superlative Teacher
David Jobling: Fearless Frontiersman
Marvin L. Chaney, Master Social Critic
Jack Elliott: Breacher of Boundaries

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Oct 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781498290562

Norman K. Gottwald

Norman K. Gottwald, Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at New York Theological Seminary, is the author of numerous groundbreaking works, including The Tribes of Yahweh, The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-literary Introduction, and Politics in Ancient Israel.

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Social Justice and the Hebrew Bible

Volume 1

Norman K. Gottwald

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SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE HEBREW BIBLE Volume 1
Center and Library for the Bible and Social Justice Series 2

Copyright © 2016 Norman K. Gottwald. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback ISBN: 978-1-4982-9055-5

ebook ISBN: 978-1-4982-9055-5

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Names: Gottwald, Norman K. (Norman Karol), 1926–.

Title: Social justice and the Hebrew Bible, volume 1 / Norman K. Gottwald.

Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books | Center and Library for the Bible and Social Justice Series 2 | Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Identifiers: ISBN: 978-1-4982-9055-5 (paperback) | 978-1-4982-9056-2 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible. O.T.—Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Sociology, Biblical. | Bible. O.T.—Social scientific criticism.

Classification: BS1192 G675 2016 v. 1 (print) | BS1192 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Gottwald’s Hermeneutical Ellipse/Circle

Gottwald’s Hermeneutical Circle, Spiral, or Flow

An Autobiographical Introduction: My Path through Life

Abbreviations

Part One: Methods, Models, and Comparative Studies

Chapter 1: What Does Sociology Have to Do with the Bible?

Chapter 2: The Bible and Economic Ethics

Chapter 3: Social Class as an Analytic and Hermeneutical Category in Biblical Studies

Chapter 4: Social Class and Ideology in Isaiah 40–55

Chapter 5: Ideology and Ideologies in Israelite Prophecy

Chapter 6: Periodization, Interactive Power Networks, and Teleogical Constraints in Hebrew Bible Studies

Chapter 7: Icelandic and Israelite Beginnings

Chapter 8: Structure and Origin of the Early Israelite and Iroquois Confederacies

Part Two: Tributes to Colleagues

Chapter 9: James Muilenburg

Chapter 10: David Jobling

Chapter 11: Marvin L. Chaney

Chapter 12: John H. Elliott

Acknowledgments

Center and Library for the Bible and Social Justice Series

Laurel Dykstra and Ched Myers, editors

Liberating Biblical Study

Scholarship, Art, and Action in Honor of the Center and Library for the Bible and Social Justice

Norman K. Gottwald

Social Justice and the Hebrew Bible

3 volumes

Dedicatory Poem

Metaphysical

It may be

Meta

Physical

But there is

Still pain

And pleasure

In the simple signs

Of aging

Running water

Bright sun

Sudden cold

Will produce tears

Momentary blindness

Frequent needs

Which are already

Inconvenient

To evacuate

Empty the body

As though it were

A house on fire.

—Mark C. Johnson

(Ecclesiastes 12:1–8)

Preface

This three-volume work is a successor to The Hebrew Bible in Its Social World and in Ours (Atlanta: Scholars, 1972). As with the collection of pieces in that work, the works gathered here are of diverse provenances: classroom and public lectures, working papers for professional societies and conferences, periodical articles, contributions to anthologies, book reviews, tributes to colleagues, and sermons. The pieces I have chosen for reprint are drawn largely from periodicals and other sources not widely or normally read by scholars in the biblical field. The exceptions are two articles, one from the Journal of Biblical Literature (Social Class as an Analytic and Hermeneutical Category in Biblical Studies, my SBL Presidential Address) and the other from Semeia Studies (Social Class and Ideology in Isaiah 40–55: An Eagletonian Reading). They are included because of the many scholarly and lay responses I have received to them, and because they perhaps best articulate my use of social-scientific methods and models for understanding biblical texts.

Additionally, I have placed an autobiographical essay at the head of the collection. This essay provides orientation to the volume as a whole, presenting as it does the way I view the course of my professional career and contributions to biblical studies.

I wish to credit K. C. Hanson, editor in chief at Wipf and Stock Publishers, for literally hounding me for more than a decade to collect my miscellaneous papers since 1991 for publication. In particular, I am indebted to Mark C. Johnson, Executive Director of The Center for the Bible and Social Justice, for providing me the immediate inspiration and editorial help necessary to bring this project to fruition. And thanks to Professor Archie Smith Jr. for providing the hermeneutical charts on pp. xi–xii.

Above all, I must express my unbounded appreciation to students, colleagues in biblical studies and other fields, clergy and lay audiences, family and friends, who in person or in writing have struggled with me to understand the social shape and significance of ancient Israel.

Norman K. Gottwald

Stony Point, New York

December 2015

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An Autobiographical Introduction

My Path through Life

I attended a Baptist college and seminary, earned an MDiv at Union Theological Seminary in New York and a PhD in the joint Union–Columbia University graduate program, taught for two years in the Dept. of Religion at Columbia, for 11 years at Andover Newton Theological School, for 14 years in the Graduate Theological Union, and another 14 years at New York Theological Seminary, and have allegedly been in retirement since 1995.

My life began in depression-ridden Chicago. Neither of my parents went to college, nor had anyone in their farming and immigrant families, at least in living memory. They were very keen, however, that I should go if I wished to. Fortunately I got in and through college, seminary, and graduate school before runaway costs could constitute serious obstacles.

In the denominational Baptist setting, I acquired an excellent grounding in liberal arts and biblical languages. At Union I studied under Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, and those theologies they ignored or rebutted. I learned a lot from the less flashy teachers John Knox and John Bennett, including a fair hearing for Henry Wieman, in a context where Wieman was a theological no-no.

But I was most engaged by Hebrew Bible studies with James Muilenburg and Samuel Terrien. I took my PhD in Biblical Literature with a strong minor in history of religions. At the time, I was much under the spell of Neo-Orthodoxy and the so-called Biblical Theology movement, which retained their appeal for the first ten years or so of my teaching career. My present theologizing blends process theought and liberation theology.

In 1965 I came to Berkeley on a two-thirds appointment to Berkeley Baptist Divinity School and one-third appointment to the Graduate Theological Union. Up to that point, on the verge of turning 40, I had been a fairly conventional, mainline biblical scholar, not having contributed anything startling to the field, although I had written a very well received introductory text called A Light to the Nations: An Introduction to the Old Testament (1959, reprinted by Wipf & Stock, 2009). It has always been something of a puzzle to me that this textbook, firmly based on historical-critical method, was widely adopted in conservative colleges and seminaries in the Midwest and South, especially among Southern Baptists, prior to the fundamentalist takeover of that denomination. At Andover Newton I was known to my students as an exacting instructor, appreciated by the brightest students, but with minimal sensibility to the different ways in which students learn. Looking back, I view myself in those years as intense, professionally aspiring, but emotionally immature. I can easily imagine that many of my students viewed me as stuffy.

I landed in Berkeley in the midst of the Free Speech Movement, as the push for civil rights was in full force, opposition to the Vietnam War was mounting, and the counter-culture was washing over the Bay Area. In this cultural and political maelstrom, two currents in my life that had been converging for some time, intermingled to shape my identity and sense of purpose in life down to the present day.

One current was a concern for justice in human affairs that began at the Baptist seminary where I led a student campaign to retain a professor whose theology offended the board. With the growing threat of nuclear war, I was active in the American equivalents of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

The other current was my professional immersion in the biblical prophets that increasingly informed my outlook on issues of the day, in international relations. My third book, published just before coming to Berkeley, was titled All the Kingdoms of the Earth: Israelite Prophecy and International Relations in the Ancient Near East (1964, reprinted by Fortress Press, 2007).

My early scholarly work had been on the book of Lamentations and its exilic and early postexilic setting (Studies in the Book of Lamentations, 1954, reprinted by Wipf & Stock, 2010). Over the years my interest gravitated increasingly toward the prophets. I began to wonder about the source of their convictions about the fundamental values and structures of society. Not content to attribute it to the vagaries of divine revelation, I began to perceive that the groundwork of the prophetic outlook on corporate life derived from the pre-state period of Israel’s history. In this, of course, I was not alone. What began to characterize my approach as a departure from the pack was to analyze the religion of Israel, not as the prime mover, but as one factor working interdependently with cultural and social history to shape a radical communitarian practice that aimed at the leveling and sharing of wealth and power as the precondition for a humane society.

This grasp of emerging Israel as an egalitarian peasant movement in the hill country of Canaan was developed along two fronts within the social sciences. All of this was an intellectual retooling experience for me because my previous training in the social sciences had been virtually nil, so I had to read furiously to catch up on all that I had missed that was now so amazingly relevant to my quest.

The one front of my social-critical approach was the body of social theory developed by Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and successors, which enabled me to see religion as one variable among many that contributed to the shape of a society. Among these theorists I found Marx’s method to be most effective in reconstructing the social dynamics contained in texts or implied by texts.

The other front in my social-critical approach was political anthropology and social history that opened up the world of prestate, traditional societies as a resource for understanding tribal Israel. The heuristic values in studying such groupings as the Iroquois Five Nations, the Icelandc commonwealth, and the Swiss Confederation allowed for viewing lsrael against a backdrop of a multitude of social and religious formations that could be explored for the ways in which they did or did not approximate what we know of early lsrael.

The combination of macro-social theory and micro-social history produced hypotheses about the origins and social dynamics of Israel that found expression in The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 BCE (1979, 2nd corr. ed., 1981) a work that was fifteen years in preparation, and subsequently refined and modified over the years. A twentieth anniversary reprint was released in 1999. The most widely quoted statement from Tribes is this: Only as the full materiality of ancient Israel is more securely grasped will we be able make proper sense of its spirituality (xxv). Materiality in my usage meant historical materialism as a method if not necessarily a metaphysic. Another way to state the import of my work is to show that Israel’s notions of socio-economic and political justice were not simply religious ideas; they were actually practiced at Israel’s birth.

Tribes was praised and damned from the start. Two significant consequences of the controversy surrounding its claims are worthy of note:

1. In terms of the scholarly claims of the book, its specific hypotheses about early lsrael have been overshadowed by the heuristic value of social-scientific methods and theories which it espoused. My portrait of early lsrael as a revolutionary peasant movement is accepted by many, but many more have come to accept social-scientific criticism as a valid sub-field in biblical studies. This reality was given official recognition when I was chosen as president of the Society of Biblical Literature in 1992. In a second introductory text, The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction (1985), I applied social critical method in interface with the standard historical-critical method and emerging literary critical methods. This introduction was recently published in an abbreviated edition, making it more accessible to a new generation of students. If any of you want a synopsis of Tribes that is more or less up-to-date, I recommend that you read the Preface to the 1999 reprint.

Although I have only hinted at them in writing, I believe there are major historical implications of my hypothesis of early Israel as a revolutionary peasant movement. I believe this hypothesis not only helps to explain Israelite prophecy, it also contributes to an understanding of Israel’s survival of exile and subsequent domination by foreign powers. It further throws light on Jesus and the early Christian movement, on Rabbinic Judaism, and on the persisting revolutionary undercurrent in Jewish and Christian history.

2. The second consequence surprised me. A ponderous work written directly for a scholarly audience was read widely beyond academic circles, among social activists and community organizers in the so-called developed world and among their counterparts abroad. It has been translated into Portugese in Brazil and distributed in condensed or excerpted form throughout Latin America in both Portuguese and Spanish. It has been highly influential in South Africa, fueling the religious sentiment to overcome apartheid. The same may be said for its role in the Philippines and Korea among dissidents struggling against authoritarian regimes.

When I taught at New York Theological Seminary, I also discovered that my view of early Israel made sense to our largely African American, Latino, and Korean student body, even among students more culturally and theologically conservative than I, for the reason that they experienced discrimination and oppression in their own lives and ministries in and around New York City. Also, there is no doubt that my work was spread and amplified by its affinities with feminist criticism and other liberation agendas.

In recent years, I have published a volume on The Politics of Ancient Israel and composed numerous articles for anthologies and Festschrifts. I have taught from time to time at Pacific School of Religion and in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. I remain active in the Society of Biblical Literature. In 2011, along with Jack Elliott and Herman Waetjen, I cofounded The Center and Library for the Bible and Social Justice located at Stony Point Conference Center, some thirty miles up the Hudson River from Manhattan. The three of us donated nearly 1,000 books, which have swollen to 9,000 volumes by 2015. It is intended as a resource for biblical scholars, pastors, social activists, community organizers, popular theological educators, and interested folks from all walks of life for whom we are in the process of developing educational programs (see www.clbsj.org).

I venture a comment on retirement since I know a number of you are in the same stage of life. Although plenty busy, I am not the center of attention I was for a time. Recently I read a comment of the retired astronaut Jim Lovell that says it very well: Remember where you are standing when the spotlights go off. Because you will need to find your own way off the stage. Well, I’m not quite off the stage, but I am also not being blinded by spotlights.

Abbreviations

AB Anchor Bible

ABD The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Edited by David Noel Freedman. 6 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1992

BibInt Biblical Interpretation

BibSem Biblical Seminar

BTB Biblical Theology Bulletin

CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly

CRBS Currents in Research: Biblical Studies

FOTL Forms of the Old Testament Literature

JBL Journal of Biblical Literature

JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

JSOTSup Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series

LAI Library of Ancient Israel

Matrix Matrix: The Bible in Mediterranean Context

OTL Old Testament Library

SBLMS Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series

SJOT Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament

SWBA Social World of Biblical Antiquity

VT Vetus Testamentum

VTSup Vetus Testamentum Supplements

Part 1

Methods, Models, and Comparative Studies

1

What Does Sociology Have to Do with the Bible?

Abstract

In this overview, which originated as a lecture to seminarians, the key terms of sociology are defined; the relation of sociology to the study of religion is addressed; the importance of race, class, and gender—as well as their interaction—are articulated; and four lines of sociological approach are discussed: social description, social history, social theory, and sociological exegesis. These four approaches are not self-contained or mutually exclusive, but are, in fact, interlocking procedures that often need to be employed in combination.

•

This kind of course is new to theological education. We don’t even know if there is such a course in any other seminary. It has been difficult to find books that introduce this approach to students, but we think that the three texts we have chosen are suitable to our purposes. We believe that this course is important enough to include in our required curriculum. I will try to explain why. To do that properly I will need to