James Barr

Man and nature ? the ecological controversy and the Old Testament

IT is hardly necessary for me to inform this audience that we live in a time of controversy about ecology, about the balance of the natural environment in which man lives. The subject has sprung into increasing prominence in the last decade or so, and now hardly a day passes without revelations of the danger threatened to our natural resources and our future life by toxic wastes, by ill-used pesticides, by all kinds of pollution of land, sea and air. This phenomenon is not entirely new; the industrial landscape of much of the north of England is an instance close to us at this moment, and much of it goes back to the older industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But in recent years the problem has become much more acute, because our technology can upset the balance of nature more profoundly than the older forms of waste or exploitation did. At the same time scientific knowledge makes us more aware of the danger. Politicians are becoming more conscious of the matter, and it is likely that the control of pollution and the protection of the environment will be a main centre of social and ethical discussion in the next decades. This present lecture, however, is not concerned primarily with the political, social and technical possibilities, though it may have some connection with them. What interests me specifically is the relation between the ecological controversy on the one hand and on the other the Jewish-Christian religious tradition, with its foundation in the Bible and particularly in the Old Testament. 2 It has been argued that religious currents of

The Literal, the Allegorical, and Modern Biblical Scholarship:

There is no field of human thought in which the concept of the ’literal’ is as much used as in the understanding of the Bible. It is used also in law, it is used in literary criticism, but nowhere is it so much used as with reference to the Bible. ’Taken literally’, we say, ’this means so and so’; or ’this shouldn’t be taken literally’. People may say, ’I think the Bible is entirely true, but of course I’m not a literalist’. Mostly, people think, it is wrong to be too literal, to think (say) that Jesus in the ascension rose vertically from the ground like a helicopter until the clouds hid him from sight or to think that hell is a very hot place, of uncertain location but definitely somewhere, where a thermometer would give a very high reading. In such cases, literality sounds foolish to most of us. And yet, on the other side, literality can be a sign of great strength. If we say, ’the Bible literally says’ that God is love, or that Jesus rose from the dead, or that God

Childs' Introduction To the Old Testament as Scripture

Brevard Childs is one of the great personalities of contemporary Old Testament study: open-minded and imaginative, generous and creative, aware of every side of the subject, international in the scope of his understanding. His concern for methodology is matched by his mastery of the past scholarly literature, and his great learning is combined with deep theological understanding. One cannot but want to be on his side. His new and massive book presents, however, a strange set of puzzles and potential contradictions. His insistence on the canon of scripture and the canonical form of

The symbolism of names in the Old Testament

A^L study of names in the Old Testament, of the symbolism associated with them and the literary effects which they exercise, begins with the recognition of one central fact, namely, that a large proportion of Hebrew personal names are intelligible sentences or phrases. A name like Jonathan meant God has given ; Eleazar meant God has helped . Both of these are verb phrases, with a past reference. We also find names which have the form rather of a prayer, a request : Ezekiel, may God strengthen (this child) . Others have no verb, and take the form of a phrase like The Lord is father (Joab) or Servant of the Lord (Obadiah). There were also animal names, like Rachel ( ewe ) ; plant names, like Tamar ( palm-tree ), and names specifying physical or mental features, like Manoah (probably generous ). Thus the names had meaning. They are not names which are intelligible only to the modern philologist with his historical interests ; they were intelligible to the people who gave them and to the people who bore them. Because this was so, we may very probably suppose that peoples mental attitude to their names was very different from that of our contemporaries. Of the millions of men who bear common names like my own, James, or John, or William or Harold, not one in a thousand has the slightest idea of any meaning which it may possess. There are indeed exceptions : some small proportion of Margarets may know that the name means pearl , and a famous biblical incident will have made most Peters aware that their name means rock . But on the whole names in our society do not have intrinsic meaning in the way in which other words have meaning ; and when it happens, as it does with many surnames, that the name coincides with a normal and common noun, it seems that our mechanism for understanding that it is a

Mythical Monarch Unmasked? Mysterious Doings of Debir King of Eglon

The name Debir king of Eglon (Joshua 10.3) appears very odd, since Debir is a familiar city name and Eglon prominent as a kings personal name. Moreover, the LXX has the city name Adullam where MT has Eglon. Various explanations are reviewed. It seems likely that Debir was indeed the city name and that it was transformed into a personal name in the course of redactional processes.

Luther and Biblical chronology

Since these pages granted hospitality to a study of James Usshers work on biblical chronology, 1 it is fitting that the same should be done for Martin Luther, whose historical importance was much greater but whose interest in chronology, one may suspect, is very largely unknown, even to his admirers, at least in the English-speaking world. 2 Luthers Supputatio annorum mundi is readily available, having been excellently edited in volume liii (1920), 1-184, of the Weimar edition, 3 including an introduction by the editor, F. Cohrs, which admirably states the necessary bibliographic information. There are two manuscripts in Luthers own handwriting (excellent photographs of which are reproduced within the volume), and the book itself appeared in two editions in Latin in 1541 and 1545. A German translation appeared in 1550 and was reprinted in 1551, 1553 and 1559. The frequent reprinting indicates a substantial reputation and demand for a work which Luther had originally intended only as working notes for himself. It was, not surprisingly, the writing of his commentary on Genesis, and especially chapter v of that book, that stimulated him to chronological computation: for the years of the lives of the patriarchs demand some sort of chronological table if they are to be made intelligible, and that is what he produced. The essence of Luthers work is very simple. Vertically, down the middle of the page, he made what looks like a ladder with seventy rungs, each of which represents a year. The tens are marked with an X, the hundreds with a C. On either side of the ladder, notes are inserted, against the year space to which they refer. Great typographical virtuosity was required for the reproduction of this in the

Jowett and the ‘Original Meaning’ of Scripture

To read the Bible ‘like any other book’: that is one of the striking phrases in Benjamin Jowetts sprawling essay – it is over roo pages long – ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’ in Essays and Reviews (1860; cf. pp. 338, 375, 377, 404 of that edition, which is quoted without further reference throughout this article). Another memorable phrase concerned the ‘original’ meaning: ‘the office of the interpreter is not to add another [meaning], but to recover the original one; the meaning, that is, of the words as they first struck on the ears or flashed before the eyes of those who heard and read them’ (p. 338).

The Book of Job and its modern interpreters

I *HE Book of Job and its meaning forms a subject to which A audiences at the Rylands lecture series are not strange. In particular, my distinguished predecessor, Professor H. H. Rowley, in about the last year of his tenure of the chair at Manchester delivered, and later published, a very thorough study entitled The Book of Job and its Meaning .2 To this we may add by way of a postscript that in the new series of The Century Bible there recently appeared a full commentary on Job from his pen, published posthumously in 1970 and therefore perhaps unless other such works are still in the publishing pipeline his very last contribution to Old Testament scholarship. 3 To return, however, to his Rylands lecture this was, as was all of his work, a very able and judicious survey of the subject, with painstaking annotation and widespread reference to all currents of scholarly opinion ; it covered the ground, and offered a conspectus of then current opinion about Job, in a way which in comprehensiveness far exceeded what I shall attempt here. It is not my purpose to offer an equal and balanced survey of present-day scholarship about Job, which one might hope to set alongside Rowleys masterly review. Nor shall I even endeavour to bring his work up to date by listing and discussing the contributions which have been added to Job studies in the last decade or so.4

Book Review: Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, Vol. II

O N E OF T H E FOREMOST biblical interpreters at the present time—Walter Brueggemann—is offering herewith an introduction to the meaning of the Bible. Like other writings by the same author, it deserves careful attention. The volume is friendly in tone, but opposes cultural predilections. It rejects the modern-industrial-scientific model for emphasizing what is manageable, the existentialist model for its thoroughgoing individualism, and the transcendentalist model for locating meaning beyond history. Against these is set the covenantal-historical model, which stresses risk and mystery, communality, and involvement in the incongruities of life. In the process of argumentation, little is said about the positive contributions of the criticized views. Brueggemann asserts strongly the uniqueness of the biblical view. He states that the life-world of the Bible differs more from other cultures than they differ from each other (p. 29) . Such a judgment is very questionable historically and probably accepts too uncritically a modern interest in peculiarity. It is likely that the notion of uniqueness has only an ambiguous or partial value for faith, like the industrial and existentialist models, with which that notion is historically and logically associated. Specifically, Brueggemann sets forth covenant history as the main theme of the Bible. This history, in his view, provides the identity of a particular group. Readers are invited to join this group, to become insiders, as members of Gods people. Such a theme is easily understood in terms of a tendency to contrast in and out ; yet is not divine activity and revelation in the Bible rather more paradoxical? In terms of practical guidelines, Brueggemann calls especially for action of solidarity with the little ones, the weak, the poor, the powerless and asks that we think in new ways about power, not as a means of security and control, but as a way of participation and communion, so that we have power with others rather than power over others (p. 130). He believes that a redefinition of power will affect ones conceptions about the role of women in ministry and may lead to an abandonment of hierarchical power in the church (p. 131). The working out of detailed implications is left to the reader, for the Bible is to be discerned as much as a set of questions posed to the church as a set of answers (p. 149). I t is possible to differ over whether these suggestions cohere with the theoretical views presented in the book, but Brueggemann succeeds in raising significant issues.

St Jerome?s appreciation of Hebrew

IT is a commonplace that St. Jerome was one of the greatest biblical, linguistic and literary scholars of Christian antiquity, and in particular that his translation of the Bible into Latin was a work of immense importance, one of the major events in the intellectual history of the Latin West.2 If his translating activity appeared original and revolutionary in his own time, one of the main reasons was his insistence that the Old Testament should be translated from the hebraica ueritas. By putting this into effect, Jerome came near to making obsolete the existing translations of the Latin Church, which had been done from the Greek. This depended entirely on the fact that Jerome, almost uniquely among the principal figures of the ancient Church, had made himself a Hebrew scholar. There is only one other scholar of the ancient Church who can be compared with Jerome for his service to the biblical text, namely Origen, almost two hundred years earlier. Origen in the Hexapla or compendious parallel expose of biblical versions included in his first column a Hebrew text in Hebrew characters, and in his second column a Hebrew text in Greek characters. 3 But it seems that Origen, though he could read Hebrew and transcribe it, had only a superficial knowledge of the language.4 His use of the Hebrew text was in large measure a quantitative one : the Hebrew served as a norm, by which additional matter in the Greek could be judged to have been intrusive, and by which gaps in the Greek, where the Septuagint had left some Hebrew