The Substance of Psalm 24: An Attempt to Read Scripture after Brevard S. Childs 9780567662101, 9780567656179, 9780567656162

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LIBRARY OF HEBREW BIBLE/ OLD TESTAMENT STUDIES

600 Formerly Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series

Editors Claudia V. Camp, Texas Christian University Andrew Mein, Westcott House, Cambridge

Founding Editors David J. A. Clines, Philip R. Davies and David M. Gunn

Editorial Board Alan Cooper, John Goldingay, Robert P. Gordon, Norman K. Gottwald, James E. Harding, John Jarick, Carol Meyers, Carolyn J. Sharp, Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, James W. Watts

ii

THE SUBSTANCE OF PSALM 24

An Attempt to Read Scripture after Brevard S. Childs

Philip Sumpter

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as T&T Clark 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Philip Sumpter, 2015 Philip Sumpter has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

HB: ePDF:

978-0-56765-617-9 978-0-56765-616-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Forthcoming Publications Ltd (www.forthpub.com)

To the most precious gifts in my life: my wife, Ingrid, and our children, Jasmine, Jacob and number three, who is on the way

vi

CONTENTS Acknowlegments Abbreviations

xi xiii

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION

1 Part I VERBUM AND RES: ESTABLISHING THE CONTEXT

Chapter 2 CHILDS AND SCRIPTURE IN THE DIVINE ECONOMY

7

Chapter 3 VERBUM: THE SHAPE OF ISRAEL’S WITNESS 3.1. Diversity 3.2. The Question of Unity 3.3. Form, Function, Context, and Content 3.3.1. Content 3.3.2. Function and Context 3.3.3. Form 3.3.3.1. Form and the Sachkritische Process

12 14 14 18 20 20 22 23

Chapter 4 RES: THE SHAPE OF ISRAEL’S GOD 4.1. A Challenge: The Otherness of God 4.2. The Solution: God Reveals Himself by Means of Himself

33 33 34

Chapter 5 RES AND FORM CRITICISM IN THE WORK OF CHILDS AND GERSTENBERGER

42

1

viii

Contents

Chapter 6 HERMENEUTICAL IMPLICATIONS 6.1. The Tension Between Verbum and Res 6.2. A Multiple-Level Approach to Scripture 6.2.1. Which Canon? 6.2.2. Which Version? 6.3. Acquiring the Proper Stance

45 46 51 52 53 55

Part II PSALM 24: ENTERING THE DIALECTIC Chapter 7 A CANONICAL APPROACH TO PSALM 24 7.1. The Nature of the Task 7.2. The Structure of the Presentation Chapter 8 VERBUM 1: FORM, CONTENT, CONTEXT, FUNCTION 8.1. Methodological Considerations 8.1.1. Contemporary “Form Criticism” 8.1.2. The “Poetic Function” 8.1.2.1. Linearity 8.1.2.2. Non-linearity 8.1.2.3. Ideology 8.1.3. Structure of Presentation 8.2. Text and Translation 8.2.1. Translation and Poetic Structure 8.2.2. Textual Notes 8.3. The Synchronic Dimension (Poetics) 8.3.1. Structure and Proportion 8.3.2. The Special Function of Verses 1–2 8.3.2.1. Creation as the Horizon for the Interpretation of Psalm 24 8.3.2.1.1. The Rhetorical Function of Yhwh’s World Dominion 8.3.2.1.2. The Canonical Function of Creation 8.3.3. Content—An Initial Probe 8.3.3.1. Half-Stanza I 8.3.3.2. Stanza II 8.3.3.2.1. Identity and Destiny 8.3.3.2.2. Reciprocation 1

59 59 61 64 64 64 69 71 71 72 75 75 75 77 83 84 87 90 90 92 95 96 101 102 110

Contents

8.3.3.3. Stanza III 8.3.3.3.1. Reciprocation 8.3.3.3.2. Polemics 8.3.3.4. The Psalm as a Whole 8.3.3.4.1. Theocentric Focus 8.3.3.4.2. Kerygmatic Function 8.3.3.4.3. Parallelismus Stantiarum 8.3.3.4.4. Time, Space, and the Realization of a Journey 8.3.3.4.4.1. Half-stanza 8.3.3.4.4.2. Stanza II 8.3.3.4.4.3. Stanza III 8.3.3.4.5. Summary: Linear Development and Symmetry 8.3.3.4.6. Psalm 24 as Witness to the Consummation of Creation 8.4. The Diachronic Dimension 8.4.1. Structure of Presentation 8.4.2. Cultic Origins 8.4.2.1. Stanza III 8.4.2.2. Stanza I 8.4.2.3. Stanza II 8.4.3. Outline of a Possible Tradition History 8.4.4. The Forces at Work in the Canonical Process Chapter 9 RES 1: FORCE (GOD IN SE) 9.1. The Location of Heaven 9.2. The Nature of Heaven 9.3. Psalm 24 as a “Mini Dogmatics” Chapter 10 VERBUM 2: THE BROADER LITERARY CONTEXT 10.1. The Superscription: :#/$/ #+ 10.1.1. The Complexity of #+ 10.1.2. Canonical Pointers 10.1.3. The David of the Books of Samuel 10.1.3.1. Two Histories, Davidic and Divine 10.1.3.2. 2 Samuel 5–8 10.1.3.3. 2 Samuel 6 and Psalm 24 10.1.3.4. David as a Vehicle of God’s Redemption of Israel 1

ix

112 114 115 117 117 117 119 120 120 121 122 123 125 129 130 130 131 135 140 144 149 152 152 154 161 164 164 166 167 171 171 174 176 182

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Contents

10.1.4. Summary: David in the Context of Psalm 24 10.2. The Sub-Collection of Psalms 15–24 10.2.1. The Structure of Psalms 15–24 10.2.2. Chiasm and Aspect 10.2.3. The Dialectic of Divine and Human History 10.2.3.1. The Outer Frame 10.2.3.1.1. Climax 10.2.3.1.2. Creation 10.2.3.2. The Intervening Psalms 10.2.3.2.1. Parallelismus Psalmorum 10.2.3.2.2. The David of Psalms 15–24 10.3. The Book of Isaiah 10.3.1. Isaiah and the Psalms/Psalter 10.3.2. Isaiah 33 10.3.3. The Servant and the Servants 10.4. Taking Stock 10.4.1. Verbum 10.4.2. Res

183 185 187 187 189 189 190 191 194 195 197 203 203 204 209 219 220 224

Chapter 11 RES 2: THE DIVINE ECONOMY (GOD PRO NOBIS) 11.1. Eberhard Jüngel on Psalm 24 11.1.1. Jüngel’s View of the Res 11.1.2. Jüngel’s Sermon on Psalm 24 11.1.3. Response to Jüngel’s Actualization of Psalm 24 11.2. The Church Fathers on Psalm 24 11.2.1. The Fathers’ View of the Res 11.2.2. Patristic Interpretation of Psalm 24 11.2.3. Response to Patristic Interpretation of Psalm 24 11.3. Psalm 24 and “Jesus History” 11.3.1. “Jesus History” 11.3.2. Psalm 24 and “Jesus History”

226 226 226 227 230 232 232 234 237 239 239 243

Bibliography Index of References Index of Authors

247 262 271

1

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply grateful for the support, guidance and inspiration offered by my doctoral supervisor, Gordon McConville, particularly given the long-distance mode of study. My research was carried out in Bonn, Germany, and I owe a debt of gratitude to professors Udo Rüterswörden, Frank-Lothar Hossfeld, Ulrich Berges, Andreas Pangritz and Dr. Axel Graupner of the University of Bonn for the warmth, hospitality, and openness shown to me. I remain deeply impacted by our exchanges and will always feel like a “Bonner.” I would also like to express gratitude to Professor Herbert Klement and his wife Rita for their hospitality, for the conversations, and for integrating me into the Facharbeitsgruppe Altes Testament. I cannot name here now all the people who have helped me along the way—some are mentioned at the appropriate junctures in this book—but three people deserve special thanks for reading through my manuscript and providing critical feedback: Dr. Susan Gillingham, Dr. Jan Fokkelman, and Professor Juergen von Hagen. Finally, this list of acknowledgments would not be complete without mentioning my parents, Martin and Lynne Sumpter. They have been a source of continuous support in innumerable ways and this project would have hardly been possible without them.

xiL

ABBREVIATIONS AFPMA BDB

BHS CD COS DCH DOT:HB DOT:P DTIB KD NIDOTTE ThWAT

Francis I. Andersen and Dean I. Forbes. The Hebrew Bible: Andersen-Forbes Phrase Marker Analysis. Software. Oak Harbor, Wash.: Logos Research Systems, 2005 Brown, Francis, Samuel Rolles Driver and Charles Augustus Briggs. The Enhanced Brown–Driver–Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon with an Appendix Containing the Biblical Aramaic. Electronic edition. Oak Harbor, Wash.: Logos Research Systems, 2000 (1906, 1951) Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia Karl Barth. Church Dogmatics I/1–IV/4. Edinburgh, 1936–69 The Context of Scripture. Edited by William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger. 3 vols. Leiden, 1997– The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew. Edited by David J. A. Clines. 8 vols. Shef¿eld, 1993– 2011 Dictionary of the Old Testament: Historical Books. Edited by Bill T. Arnold and H. G. M. Williamson. Downers Grove, Ill., 2005 Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch. Edited by T. Desmond Alexander and David W. Baker. Downer’s Grove, Ill., 2003 Dictionary for the Theological Interpretation of the Bible. Edited by Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Craig G. Bartholomew, Daniel J. Treier and N. T. Wright. London, 2005 Karl Barth. Die Kirchliche Dogmatik. Vols. 1 and 3. Zürich, 1980 New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis. Edited by Willem VanGemeren. 5 vols. Carlisle, 1996 Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Alten Testament. Edited by G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry. 8 vols. Stuttgart, 1970–94

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Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

This book has two concerns. Its primary goal is to engage in deep exegesis of Ps 24, so deep that we begin penetrate to its ultimate “subject matter,” to the theological reality that evoked it and to which it testi¿es. In other words, it attempts to delineate the “substance,” “Sache,” or “res” of Ps 24. To anyone acquainted with typical scholarly study of the Old Testament in the twenty-¿rst century, this way of framing the goal of exegesis may sound unusual. The vast majority of publications on the Bible, whether commentaries or thematic studies, focus their attention on much more “historical” concerns, such as the authors’ own interpretation of the reality spoken of (rather than the reality itself), or the sociological, psychological, or political forces at work in the composition of the material in its original contexts. Given the relative newness of the territory being explored here, the ¿rst section of this book (Part I) is dedicated to setting up the theoretical framework for engaging in such a form of “theocentric” exegesis. Here we will ¿nd the theory that will guide our exegetical praxis. The source for my vision of the nature of the text and thus, derivative of that, the best way to read it, is the “canonical approach” of the late Brevard S. Childs (1923–2007). Childs’ approach is attractive to me because of its comprehensive nature. I am not aware of another Biblical scholar who has ranged so broadly and fruitfully across the various subdisciplines of theology in a quest for a single approach to reading. Childs was originally trained in Switzerland and Germany shortly after the Second World War in the classic historical-critical approach to the Old Testament. His quest for more depth launched him on a journey that saw him rethink the disciplines of Biblical Studies in general (in addition to individual monographs he published introductions to both testaments1), 1. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979); The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). For an exhaustive bibliography of Childs’ works, see Daniel Driver, Brevard Childs, Biblical Theologian: For the Church’s One Bible (FAT 2/41; Tübingen: MohrSiebeck, 2010).

2

The Substance of Psalm 24

explore the nature of the Bible’s unity in relation to dogmatic theology (see his magnum opus, his Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments2), and analyse the history of the Bible’s Christian reception in order to identify constitutive features of Christian exegesis (see in particular his surveys of the Wirkungsgeschichten of Exodus and Isaiah3). Of central signi¿cance to this exploration was his quest for harmony— even if always tentative and ultimately respecting of particularity. Childs was not interested in simply documenting what has been said and done in the spheres of Bible, church history, and systematic theology, but was concerned with uncovering the nature and the grounds of their coherence—a coherence he located, I will argue, within the divine economy, both pro nobis and in se. Much has been written on Childs. Thankfully, I will not have to review that reception here, for an excellent analysis has been recently provided in Daniel Driver’s Brevard Childs, Biblical Theologian,4 the insights of which I af¿rm and commend. I worked out my own understanding of Childs by myself and independently of Driver’s book5 (with a signi¿cant impetus from the writings of Christopher Seitz6) and have developed my own focus. Unlike other interpretations, I have attempted to reduce the wealth of Childs’ thought in relation to the Bible and its interpretation to its most basic components. The result is systematic, “synchronic” and thus fairly abstract. The key element within this picture 2. Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological ReÀection on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992). 3. The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1974); Isaiah: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001). 4. Other summaries and interpretations of resistance to Childs’ approach can be found in Daniel J. Treier, “Theological Hermeneutics, Contemporary,” in Dictionary for the Theological Interpretation of the Bible (ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Craig G. Bartholomew, Daniel J. Treier, and N. T. Wright; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2005), 787–93; Christopher Seitz, “The Canonical Approach and Theological Interpretation,” in Canon and Biblical Interpretation (ed. Craig G. Bartholomew, Scott Hahn, Robin Parry, Christopher R. Seitz, and Al Wolters; Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006), 58–110. 5. I discovered that Driver was writing his Ph.D. on this topic after I had already ¿nished the bulk of my own analysis. It was satisfying to see that his results are consistent with mine. I am grateful to Driver for providing me with a draft of his Ph.D. before its publication as well as pdf ¿les of various unpublished documents by Childs. I found the most helpful aspect of his work was his treatment of “the mystery of Israel.” 6. His most helpful and inspiring article was “The Canonical Approach and Theological Interpretation.” 1

1. Introduction

3

is what Childs has variously called the “reality,” “content,” “substance,” “Sache,” or “res” of the Biblical text. Until very recently, the centrality of this dimension for understanding Childs’ thought has often been either overlooked or underemphasized by both Childs’ detractors and supporters. Driver highlights its signi¿cance (especially in Chapter 5 of his book), yet apart from stating that it is important, that it is overlooked by his critics, and that it is foundational to his concept of Biblical referentiality, he does not provide us with a systematic overview of the manner in which Childs’ concept of “reality” integrates with the material dimension of the form of Scripture itself. Even Christopher Seitz, a brilliant interpreter of Childs’ work and practitioner of his approach, has not made the concept of the res central to his construal of the approach as a whole.7 In a recent volume of essays on Childs, published long after the research for this book was completed, a number of scholars with strongly systematic sensibilities (Rae, Rowe, Collet) have helpfully worked out the signi¿cance of the doctrines of God, the incarnation, the divine economy, and revelation for Childs’ approach in ways which both con¿rm and develop my insights here.8 Yet here too, these insights are not grounded Biblically and hermeneutically in the way that will be demonstrated in this volume. Furthermore, no single essay treats what I consider to be one of the most important elements of Childs’ approach, namely the function of Sachkritik in the passing on and shaping of the Biblical tradition throughout the “canonical process” (see §3.3.3.1). The content of Part I of this book, then, is a systematic outline of Childs’ vision of Scripture within the divine economy, along with the hermeneutical conclusions implied by that vision. It ¿rst sketches this vision by drawing on form-critical categories to describe the nature of the text as a human “witness” (simply called verbum as a shorthand in 7. Cf. Christopher Seitz, “ ‘We Are Not Prophets or Apostles’: The Biblical Theology of B. S. Childs,” in his Word Without End: The Old Testament as Abiding Theological Witness (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1998), 102–12; and “Canonical Approach,” in DTIB, 100–102. In a review of Christopher Seitz’s Prophecy and Hermeneutics: Toward a New Introduction to the Prophets (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2007), Julia O’Brien laments that Seitz himself does not make his own doctrinal position clear enough when articulating his literary and hermeneutical theses (“Review of Prophecy and Hermeneutics,” Review of Biblical Literature [2008]. Online: http://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/6055_6906.pdf). I hope to clarify some of Childs’ ambiguity on this issue in what follows. 8. See the contributions by Murray Rae, C. Kavin Rowe, Don Collett, and Mark Gignilliat in particular in The Bible as Christian Scripture: The Work of Brevard S. Childs (ed. Christopher Seitz and Kent Harold Richards; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013). 1

4

The Substance of Psalm 24

this book) to a “reality” (simply called res in this book). The conclusion is drawn that this vision cannot be fully appreciated without grasping how the object of the text’s witness—namely God—is also its subject. A canonical approach is inconceivable without a rudimentary appreciation of divine inspiration. It is only when these two dimensions—the human and the divine—are brought together that the hermeneutical implications are drawn in preparation for my own act of canonical exegesis in Part II. It is here, in the practice of theological exegesis, that the value of the model can be tested, both for its viability as a coherent approach as well as its ability to truly open up the text (“the proof of the pudding is in the eating”). The text that I have chosen for Part II is Ps 24, a psalm both mysterious in terms of its internal coherence and referentiality and yet of great signi¿cance in the theologizing of the early church. Through progressively penetrating into the depth of the psalm by means of the dialectic between verbum and res outlined in Part I, I hope to show that Childs’ “canonical” interpretation is not only a viable project that can genuinely open up the various levels of meaning of a text, but that it can also help the church critically retrieve key moments of exegeticaltheological insight from the past, providing them with a more robust Biblical pro¿le in light of modern Biblical scholarship.

1

Part I

VERBUM AND RES: ESTABLISHING THE CONTEXT



Chapter 2

CHILDS AND SCRIPTURE IN THE DIVINE ECONOMY

The primary thesis of the ¿rst of section of this book is that Childs’ approach cannot be fully appreciated without taking into account the intimate connection between ancient Israelite traditions latterly-turnedScripture and their “substance” or “res,” both in terms of its (dialectical) relation to the human testimony (verbum) as well as in terms of its own inherent identity (the relation is that between the economic and immanent Trinity).1 The corollary is that it is impossible to offer an adequate account of the whole without engaging to some degree in systematic theology, that branch of theological inquiry which is dedicated to investigating precisely the nature of the res. Drawing on systematic theology, however, to interpret Childs’ “canonical approach” may appear odd, given that the vast bulk of his writing was dedicated to explicating in as careful a manner as possible the contours of Israel’s and the church’s historical religious documents, taking into account authorial intentionality, cultural context, theological diversity, and the variegated growth of tradition (at all times, however, deeply aware of the limitations imposed upon such inquiry). Childs hardly thematizes his undergirding theological assumptions, let alone makes them explicitly programmatic for his exegetical work. After all, he considered himself ¿rst and foremost a Biblical scholar whose task was to allow the reality of the text to constrain all that he thought and wrote about it. That he had theological assumptions is inevitable, however, and Childs would be the ¿rst to admit that. Many scholars have pointed out—fairly or not, depending on the way the claim is formulated—the strong Barthian colouring of much of what he had to say.2 An 1. See especially C. Kavin Rowe, “The Doctrine of God is a Hermeneutic: The Biblical Theology of Brevard S. Childs,” in Richards and Seitz, eds., The Bible as Christian Scripture, 155–70. See also Driver, Brevard Childs, 254–64 (“Noetic and Ontic Trinitarianism”), and Childs’ section “Reading Scripture in Light of the Full Divine Reality” in his Biblical Theology, 379–383. 2. Marvin Sweeney notes that Childs is often accused (unfairly in my opinion) of reading the Bible as a proof text for Barthian theology (in “Canonical Criticism:

8

The Substance of Psalm 24

example of a theologically loaded statement placed programmatically at the beginning of a relatively early piece of exegesis can be found in an exegesis of Ps 8. The task of the exegete, Childs asserts, is “to penetrate [the] texts of scripture and grapple with the reality which called…them forth.”3 What does Childs have to assume in order to say that the text is “called forth” by a particular “reality,” one which apparently desires, by means of this medium, to be grappled with (note that in Childs’ phrase, “reality” is the subject of the verb “call forth,” i.e. it is the agent of the action)? The remainder of Part I of this book is dedicated to unpacking the constellation of theses and assumptions that undergirded Childs’ approach to the Bible as Scripture. For me, a decisive element within the overall picture is his understanding of the res, the subject matter of the text, as a living, dynamic, personal reality—as God—who calls the text into being in order to continuously shape his people in light of his own reality and according to his will. I will argue that without an assumption of this kind, Childs’ approach falls apart; indeed, it must be presupposed at every level of his analysis. It is the “glue,” as it were, of the canonical process, the ontological foundation not only of Scripture but also true interpretation of Scripture throughout the ages. In order to highlight the necessity of this reality, however, I will leave my treatment of the res to the end of Part I (Chapter 4). I will ¿rst outline the basic components of Childs’ vision of Scripture with as little reference to God as a dynamic,

Childs’ Approach,” in Dictionary of Biblical Criticism and Interpretation [ed. Stanley E. Porter; Oxon: Routledge, 2007], 46–47, here 47). The key texts by Childs on this matter are “Karl Barth as Interpreter of Scripture” in Karl Barth and the Future of Theology: A Memorial Colloquium Held at the Yale Divinity of School January 18 1969 (ed. David L. Dickerman; New Haven: Yale Divinity School Association, 1969), 30–39, and “Karl Barth: The Preacher’s Exegete,” Paper presented at The Lyman Beecher Lectureship on Preaching, Yale University (New Haven, 1989), two papers made available to me from Daniel Driver, who got them from Christopher Seitz. Driver’s own discussion is found in Brevard Childs, 89–93. Charles Scalise makes perhaps the strongest statement of af¿nity in “Canonical Hermeneutics: The Theological Basis and Implications of the thought of Brevard S. Childs” (Ph.D. diss., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1987), 197; cited in Driver, Brevard Childs, 89 n. 36. See also his “Canonical Hermeneutics: Childs and Barth,” SJT 47 (1994): 61–88. Chen Xun provides useful bibliographic references for the secondary literature in Theological Exegesis in the Canonical Context: Brevard Springs Childs’s Methodology of Biblical Theology (Oxford: Lang, 2010), 225–36. His own analysis, however, is very weak. 3. “Psalm 8 in the Context of the Christian Canon,” Interpretation 23 (1969): 2031, here 20. 1

2. Childs and Scripture

9

living reality as possible. In my initial chapter (Chapter 3) I will focus entirely on the human rather than the divine dimension of Scripture, only to conclude in the end that such a separation is ultimately impossible. The title of this chapter is Verbum, and the title of the latter chapter is Res.4 These two categories will provide signi¿cant coordinates for my later interpretation of Ps 24. Before we make this unnatural separation between the human and the divine in Scripture, it would be helpful to ¿rst take a brief look at one of Childs’ statements that concisely illustrates the interaction of the two. My analysis of this citation will not only provide a starting point by which to move into his canonical thesis, it will also provide us with a vantage point from which to perceive the basic theological structure I will claim undergirds the whole. In our citation, Childs provides a description of what is involved when he, a modern American Old Testament professor, approaches ancient Israel’s religious texts, precisely because he is a confessing Christian: I do not come to the Old Testament to learn about someone else’s God, but about the God we confess, who made himself known to Israel, to Abraham, Isaac and to Jacob… The Old Testament bears witness that God revealed himself to Abraham, and we confess that he has also broken into our lives… In the context of the church’s scripture I seek to be pointed to our God who has made himself known, is making himself known, and will make himself known… We live our lives in the midst of confessing, celebrating and hoping. Thus I cannot act as if I were living at the beginning of Israel’s history, but as one who already knows the story, and who has entered into the middle of an activity of faith long in progress.5

It is immediately clear that Childs is fully committed to the constitutive role of God in the tradition-historical process—a history that encompasses his own act of exegesis: God “has made himself known, is making himself known, and will make himself known.” Though a statement of faith on the part of Childs, he clearly thinks that this is also a statement of reality.6 This explains the boldness with which he places ¿rst-order 4. Childs uses this dialectical pair to describe what he was trying to achieve in his Biblical Theology: “By offering a modern constructive reÀection I tried to move from the Biblical witness (verbum) to its theological subject matter (res) within the con¿nes of the Hebrew Bible” (p. 101). 5. Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 28–29. 6. This assertion may sound strange in the ears of the now heavily secularized ¿eld of Biblical Studies, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world. Yet the illustrious Gerhard von Rad could, almost as a matter of course, attribute the primary force at 1

10

The Substance of Psalm 24

faith claims at the head of a section describing how to approach the Bible (his opening question was: “I would like to start talking about God in the Old Testament, but how do I do this?”7). A closer look reveals a particular three-fold structure to God’s acts of revelation. In short: (1) God himself (2) reveals himself (3) by means of human witnesses.8 1. The divine subject: Before the act of interpretation, the Christian interpreter has already experienced God. “God has [already] made himself known” and it is God alone who initiates this experience. This act of self-revelation is described with almost violent language (“he has…broken into our lives”) and it is one of a repeated series of such acts spanning the interpreter’s past, present, and future. In every event, God remains the agent of revelation. The interpreter can only “seek to be pointed to our God,” he cannot control the moment itself (by means, for example, of a hermeneutical “method”).9 2. The divine object: God “has made himself ” known, and is thus not only the subject but also the object of revelation. In response to being objecti¿ed by God’s knowledge, the interpreter becomes a subject by knowing, worshipping, and seeking God. God desires for knowledge of himself to increase (“he will make himself known”) and the interpreter shares this desire, for he “seeks” God in the hope of further illumination. 3. The human vehicle: This “vertical” aspect of divine revelation is correlated with a “horizontal” dimension. God not only reveals himself “from above” (to “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”), speaking to each recipient of revelation on a one-to-one basis, he mediates himself to each new generation by means of the witness of those work in Israel’s history to the reality of God himself, “das lebendige Wort Jahwes, wie es an Israel…je und je ergangen ist”; it was the “Offenbarung Jahwes” that “Israel selbst als den eigentlichen Gegenstand seines Glaubens angesehen hat” (Theologie des Alten Testaments [2 vols.; Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1958], 1:125, 127). In his overview of scholarship on the canon towards the end of his life, Childs still felt that German scholarship remained more theologically sensitive than its AngloSaxon counterpart. See Childs, “The Canon in Recent Biblical Studies: ReÀections on an Era,” in Bartholomew et al., eds., Canon and Biblical Interpretation, 33–57. 7. Childs, Old Testament Theology, 28. 8. To anticipate what will come in Chapter 4, part three of this structure will be supplemented by, “God reveals himself by means of himself.” This is akin to Barth’s doctrine of the threefold-form of the Word of God. See Chapter 4 for the details. 9. On the problem of the use of method in theological exegesis, see Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), a book endorsed by Childs. 1

2. Childs and Scripture

11

who have gone before. Within the divine economy of revelation, in order to know more about God above the Christian interpreter must go to the testimony of God’s witnesses here below, to those whose “activity of faith” is “long in progress.” God reveals himself now through the ways he revealed himself then. Moreover, Childs enters into this humanly mediated event of divine revelation as a conscious and committed member of the Christian “community of faith” (“I come to a God we confess”; he is one “who already knows the story”). In the communal reading of Scripture—or, for Israel and the early church, in the interaction with whatever levels of tradition counted as “canonical” for their day and age—the horizontal and the vertical intersect. This three-fold pattern of (1) God (2) revealing himself (3) by means of witnesses in community constitutes the outer boundaries of the traditional-historical or, to emphasize its “qualitative” aspect, canonical process.10 I am suggesting that everything Childs has to say about the text and the interpreter is con¿gured in one sense or another to this overarching scheme. In what follows I will ¿rst show how this is true for point (3) of our scheme; I will then show that Childs recognized that it is ultimately impossible to describe (3), what one could call the “noetic” dimension of revelation, without factoring in an account of (1) and (2), its “ontic” dimension. We turn now to the human witness.

10. It is possible to roughly associate key words from Childs’ typical vocabulary with each element of the structure. Concerning the divine subject (1), the following terms spring to mind: salvi¿c event, force, coercion, evocation, illumination, infusion, Spirit. For the divine object (2): theocentric, thematic, ontic/divine reality, res, substance, content, subject matter, Sache, Christ. For the communal context (3): community of faith, prophets and apostles, form, function, witness, testimony, kerygmatic, proclamation, confessional, canonical, cult, struggle, Israel, the Church. 1

Chapter 3

VERBUM: THE SHAPE OF ISRAEL’S WITNESS

In terms of what might be called a “noetic structure” of revelation,1 Childs confesses that God utilizes a “vehicle” by which to reveal himself, and this is a thoroughly human community.2 God revealed himself to Abraham and his progeny and it is to their historical testimony that he expects us to go if we are to grow in knowledge of him. As Bengt Hägglund puts it in an article that deeply inÀuenced Childs,3 revelation is “mediated through the word” (“durch das Wort vermittelte Offenbarung”), and so all talk of God is bound (“gebunden”) to the historically particular witness of “the prophets and apostles.”4 This has consequences for theological method: The word “revelation” means…that we are concerned with matters which on our own terms we are not able to perceive or generate. We are dependent on the witness of others, on that which “we have heard,” what others have related to us. It is for this reason that the “process of passing on” [“das Tradieren”] is accorded such signi¿cance.5

Given the central signi¿cance of this human medium within the structure of Childs’ spiritual experience, it is important to pay closer attention to his understanding of its nature. The focus on personal names 1. I got the phrase from David Guretzki, Karl Barth on the Filioque (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 98. 2. Cf. Childs, “Speech-act Theory and Biblical Interpretation,” SJT 58 (2005): 375–92, here 380: “The most fundamental Àaw in the new hermeneutical theory [i.e. Wolterstorff’s ‘divine discourse’] arises from the failure to understand the role of the church in collecting, shaping and interpreting the Bible, which is the issue of canon.” 3. Bengt Hägglund, “Die Bedeutung der ‘regula ¿dei’ als Grundlage theologischer Aussagen,” Studia Theologica 1 (1958): 1–44. Cf. Driver, Brevard Childs, 251: “Apart from Seeligmann’s essay on midrash, I suspect that no other single article had more impact on Childs early on than Hägglund’s.” I thank Driver for pointing this out to me personally. 4. Hägglund, “Bedeutung,” 41 (translation mine). See also Christopher R. Seitz, “Prophets and Apostles,” in Word Without End, 102–12. 5. Hägglund, “Bedeutung,” 41.

3. Verbum: The Shape of Israel’s Witness

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(“Abraham”) and communal functions (“prophets”) as well as the very human activity of “passing on” revelation keeps the “textuality” of Scripture grounded in some account of human intentionality and the social context within which communicative acts were executed. Scripture preserves the testimony of the historical prophets and apostles, it does not replace it with its own, secondary, self-referential form of discourse.6 As Childs put it, it “is impossible to have free-Àoating literary constructs which are totally without historical rootage because authority ultimately rests on divine communication through these prophetic messengers.”7 It thus remains imperative for Childs that, however one characterize the nature of Scripture, our thought needs to move from a critical appreciation of the communicative function of its human “tradents” to the form of the literature thereby produced. He stated this early on in his career in his work as a form critic with the following words: “That which is ultimate in the Old Testament has been inextricably tied to the forms of Israel’s daily life, including her history, tradition, institutions, thoughtpatterns, and language.”8 He also stated this long after he had developed a canonical approach, when he argued for the superiority of those forms of speech-act theory which limited themselves to discerning human discourse alone rather than a secondary, superimposed form of divine discourse. The theological legitimation is that God has “communicated his will to Israel and the church by means of the witness of human agents.”9 As such, the “prophetic and apostolic” nature of Christian truth means that Sitz im Buch—however signi¿cant it may be—never replaces Sitz im Leben. An initial corollary of this commitment, then, is that Israel’s and the church’s traditions must be interpreted as thoroughly human documents, acts of interpersonal communication within the context of contingent historical communities. This is a primary rationale for taking historicalcriticism seriously. Any approach which wishes to read the Bible as a message to the church today about the unchanging reality of God must go through this dimension of the text. We shall now look at Childs’ own description of the nature of these traditions in response to the ¿ndings of historical criticism (§3.1–3.3). This will then set the stage for our discussion of divine agency within the process (Chapter 4). 6. See, e.g., Childs, “Speech-act.” 7. Childs, “Retrospective Reading of the Old Testament Prophets,” ZAW 108, no. 3 (1996): 362–77, here 362. 8. Childs, Myth and Reality in the Old Testament (2d ed.; London: SCM, 1962), 98. See also Childs, The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004), 309, and “Speech-act,” 379. 9. Childs, “Speech-act,” 378. 1

14

The Substance of Psalm 24

3.1. Diversity A basic contribution of historical-critical analysis to Biblical exegesis is its uncovering of the breadth and depth of the historical, cultural and theological diversity that characterizes the entity commonly known as “Israel.”10 Childs fully af¿rms the reality of this diversity in ancient Israel, present on both diachronic as well as synchronic levels. Across time, for example, Childs af¿rms that there are shifts in various modes of social and economic organization and thus the attendant forms of religiosity that shaped the traditions out of which “Scripture” grew. Nomadic traditions were combined with Canaanite festivals, Jerusalemite inÀuences worked their way into a new temple-centred spirituality, wisdom inÀuences reshaped patriarchal narrative and the exile precipitated a massive existential crisis that led to new modes of existence, hope, and self-perception. Oral tradition, cultic liturgy, isolated literary documents and intertextually interwoven prophecy characterize some of the modes of religious, political, and sociological expression that have all fed over the centuries into the composite phenomenon that came to be called “Scripture.” Again, across space there is also diversity and Àuctuation: Royal court, northern sanctuary, various wisdom centres and prophetic dissidence represent just some of the groups of “tradents”11 that mediated the material that was to become our “Scripture.” In short, there is such a thing as a “history of Israelite religion,” one which does not necessarily correspond to the narrative portrayal found in the Bible. This diversity is part of Scripture itself and as such is a datum to be considered when formulating an appropriate hermeneutic of “Scripture.”12 In this basic assumption, there is little to distinguish Childs from the majority of mainstream Biblical analysis in the modern period. 3.2. The Question of Unity Yet the simple description of diversity does not do justice to the historical-critical task of analysing the nature of Israelite tradition. Another characteristic of such analysis is its attempt—sometimes explicit 10. Contemporary cultural theory has problematized concepts of “ethnicity” and the homogeneity of cultures. For the broader issue, see Michael Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 11. I am aware that this term of Childs’ is unusual. I retain it because of its connotation of “tradieren,” passing on. See the Hägglund quote above. As we will see, the critical questions are: “what is passed on, how, to whom and for what purpose?” 12. See, for example, Childs, Introduction; Childs, Struggle, 321. 1

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and sometimes not—to integrate this account of diversity into an overarching theory of unity, with the implication that this unity is as much a constitutive element of those traditions as their apparent diversity. Whether this unity consists in a philosophical account of the nature of “history” (e.g. Wellhausen’s Hegelianism, perhaps),13 a sociological account of universal class conÀict (e.g. N. Gottwald), an existential account of the basic human need for a coherent identity (e.g. J. Sanders), a political account of the human drive for power (the so-called Copenhagen School), or a theological account of divine intervention and sustenance (e.g. G. von Rad), the need to make this move seems motivated by the recognition that Israel itself does not exist in a bubble; it is grounded in some kind of “anterior reality.” This is not to say that Biblical scholars are necessarily reductionistic in their accounts of the matrix that generates Israel’s traditions. The scholars brieÀy cited above are nuanced enough to see a diversity of factors at work in Israel’s tradition history. Nevertheless, these examples also indicate that one particular factor tends to be emphasized as the primary driving force.14 Childs, too, is aware that Israel’s traditions are not “a hermetically sealed system,”15 which may surprise those who claim that his canonical approach bears strong analogy with French literary structuralism and a form of literary criticism which is exclusively interested in the “story world” generated by Scripture’s self-referential narrative.16 In fact, as we will see, the “ontological” question of the presence and nature of an “anterior reality” grounding Israel’s tradition is of vital importance to Childs’ entire conception of the nature of the tradition-historical development of Israel’s traditions. Without it the canonical approach falls apart. 13. Cf. Craig G. Bartholomew, “Uncharted Waters: Philosophy, Theology and the Crisis in Biblical Interpretation,” in Renewing Biblical Interpretation (ed. Craig Bartholomew, Colin Greene, and Karl Möller; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2000), 1–39, here 15. Bartholomew himself notes that this claim is contested. 14. See, for example, Gunther Scholtz, “The Phenomenon of ‘Historicism’ as a Backcloth of Biblical Scholarship,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation. Vol. 3/1, The Nineteenth Century (ed. Magne Sæbø; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 64–90. 15. Childs, Biblical Theology, 100. 16. One only needs to look at the way Childs structures each chapter of his Biblical Theology (written after the aforementioned volume) to see that this is not the case. Rather than moving from Old Testament to New, Childs often introduces a chapter on early Judaism; when treating a subject within the New Testament he usually starts with Paul rather than the gospels, even there distinguishing the Synoptics from John. When treating the “law” he chooses an explicitly tradition-historical framework for his presentation. In his treatment of Gen 22 (§V.1) he starts with Gunkel and moves from there towards the ¿nal form. 1

16

The Substance of Psalm 24

We thus ¿nd that Childs is still within the bounds of acceptable academic historical procedure when his thinking about Israel’s traditions integrates categories that go beyond simple cultural description. What constitutes the context of Israel’s traditions and thus the element of coherence behind their diversity? This is, of course, a highly complex question and Childs himself provides no absolute answer. He does, however, stake out a set of parameters which he believes do justice to both what criticism has told us about the diversity of Israel’s tradition as well as what his experience tells him about the basic fabric of reality. His own particular approach to the issue can be understood in light of his description of his situation as a Christian Old Testament scholar outlined above (Chapter 2). As we have seen, Childs describes the Christian scholar as existing within a dialectical tension between two dimensions of reality. On the one hand, a radically different dimension “breaks into” his or her world. On the other hand, this experience of the radically new is “punctiliar,” in that it does not transform the scholar’s “old world” into the new, although the experience certainly shakes his or her interpretation of the old. The “new” is experienced proleptically, such that the Christian scholar must seek it afresh within the framework of his old order of existence. Signi¿cantly, the very place he or she must go to seek this alternative dimension of reality is the human testimony of their forebears in the faith, a testimony that fully participates in the old order. In Childs’ own words, “The heart of Christian theology is the confession that God has brought into being a new reality which is different in kind from all immanental forces at work in the world (Isa. 65.17; Rom. 4.17)”;17 yet, “no theological formulation stands apart from its time-conditioned quality.”18 However one handles the tension, Childs insists that “the theological dimensions of the biblical tradition…can never be either separated from or identi¿ed with the life of empirical Israel.”19 Given this experience of the “qualitatively new,” it is understandable that Childs is suspicious of methodologies which claim to “know better”20 than Israel itself about the reality that constitutes its true context. In other words, Israel has its own perspective on this matter and it needs to be taken seriously. For Childs, this is a genuinely “ontological” issue and not just a matter of personal piety. If it is the case that one does

1

17. 18. 19. 20.

Childs, Old Testament, 25. Ibid. Ibid. Childs, Biblical Theology, 98.

3. Verbum: The Shape of Israel’s Witness

17

not assume Israel’s basic “truth telling” stance,21 thereby assigning “no privileged status to Israel’s record,”22 one will inevitably have an “oblique angle of reading”23 of that record and thus risk misconstruing it.24 The issue at stake here is not the validity of church dogma but the capacity of our theoretical construals to do justice to the actual nature of Israel’s tradition. This is the level of his critique of the approaches of J. J. Collins, J. Blenkinsopp, and P. Davies when he asks whether their sociological categories “will prove more objective and unbiased than the theological ones being replaced.”25 His concern is whether such an “oblique angle of reading” can “generate enough empathy for interpreting religious texts where the perspective is often radically alien to the entire Western mentality.”26 Childs’ own approach to the issue is to try and hold an etic (outsider) and an emic (insider) perspective in dialectical tension,27 assuming all the while, however, the basic “truth telling stance” of the tradition.28 In this sense, although his modern critical training provides him with categories and tools for interpreting Israel’s own statements of faith, those statements in turn inÀuence his “outsider perspective,” as a modern critical scholar attempting to account for the totality of a tradition that is greater than the sum of the tradents who mediated it. Despite the dialectical “starting point,” the basic thrust of his approach is to move through Israel’s emic perspective in order to enrich his own inevitably etic perspective (for an illustration of this interrelation by way of comparison with E. Gerstenberger, see Chapter 5).29

21. Childs, “Speech-act,”391. 22. Childs, Biblical Theology, 98. 23. Childs, “Canon in Recent Biblical Studies,” 38. 24. Childs, Biblical Theology, 98. 25. Childs, “Canon in Recent Biblical Studies,” 38. 26. Ibid. 27. Childs, Biblical Theology, 417. For a discussion of emic and etic in Biblical Studies, see an unpublished article by Dan Wu, “Emics and Etics in Biblical Studies: A Fresh Approach.” Online: https://www.ibr-bbr.org/¿les/pdf/wu_dan_emics_and_ etics.pdf. 28. Cf. Childs, “Speech-act.” 29. This is “faith seeking understanding” applied to historical-critical reconstruction. For Childs’ own statement on this principle, see, for example, Biblical Theology, 86. Paul McGlasson (to whom Biblical Theology was partly dedicated) links this move to Barth in Invitation to Dogmatic Theology: A Canonical Approach (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos, 2006), 91. 1

18

The Substance of Psalm 24

Having moved from an account of historical diversity to the question of its underlying “ontological” unity, we ¿nd ourselves having to return again to concrete exegesis in order to identify the nature of the reality behind the text.30 The dialectic continues. 3.3. Form, Function, Context, and Content Childs’ early career was spent as a form critic and it is remarkable how consistently the vocabulary of “form,” “function,” “community” and “content” accompanies his thought throughout his career,31 even as these terms are used in ways that go beyond their original intention.32 For example, the task of his Introduction is “to describe the form and function of the Hebrew Bible in its role as sacred scripture for Israel”;33 his use of the cipher34 “canon” is meant to emphasize Scripture’s “function as the Word of God in the context of the community of faith”;35 grasping this involves “establishing the initial setting of a witness within the history of Israel” and then “following a trajectory of its use and application within Israel’s history.”36 It would appear that these four categories 30. In his discussion of “theories of access to the subject matter” of the Bible in his Biblical Theology, Childs claims that we need to avoid all “foundationalist categories” which are then simply “transferred to God. Rather it is crucial that the reality of God be understood as primary” (p. 82). Childs then goes on to set the parameters for beginning to de¿ne the subject matter by discussing the form and function of Scripture. It is fresh exegesis of Scripture that should always guide us towards God. That it is the reality of God that is ultimately at stake when reading scripture is guaranteed by his actualistic understanding of ongoing revelation (see Chapter 4 below). 31. In light of what we have seen about the nature of “canon” as a communal “rule of faith” grounded in the testimony of “prophets and apostles,” perhaps this is not surprising. Cf. Klaus Koch’s characterization of the method in Was ist Formgeschichte? Neue Wege der Bibelexegese (2d ed.; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1967), xiii. 32. See the discussion in Driver, Brevard Childs, 125–236, especially 134. See also David L. Peterson, “Brevard Childs and Form Criticism,” in Richards and Seitz, eds., Christian Scripture, 9–20 (my emphasis). 33. Childs, Introduction, 16 (my emphasis). 34. Childs, Biblical Theology, 70 (my emphasis). 35. Childs, “The Canonical Shape of the Prophetic Literature,” Interpretation 32 (1978): 46–55, here 52 (my emphasis). 36. Childs, Biblical Theology, 98 (my emphasis). This assumes that the meaning of a “form” can change when its use has changed. Childs was no “generic realist.” For a de¿nition of this term, see Kenton Sparks, Ancient Texts for the Study of the Hebrew Bible: A Guide to the Background Literature (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2005), 6, as well as §8.1.1 below. 1

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were key in helping Childs formulate his understanding of Israel’s traditions. Committed as he was to the totally human nature of Israel’s traditions, he seems to have operated with the assumption that for any act of interpersonal communication to communicate a content it requires a form, function, and context. The task of the interpreter, then, is to uncover the interrelationship between these four coordinates that constitute typical acts of communication. In what follows, I will also use these categories to describe what Childs felt to be common to all the traditions that have been latterly textualized into Scripture. I will of necessity have to treat the category of form last, as for Childs—contrary to much misinterpretation37—his understanding of this category is derivative of the other three. I will also have to treat it in the most detail, as Childs’ interpretation of the diachronic shifts in the forms that the various traditions took over time (e.g. liturgical to scriptural) requires nuance in order to rightly appreciate the dialectic he maintained between continuity and newness. These “etic” categories, then, will provide us with a framework for understanding Childs’ construal of Israel’s “emic” perspective along with the consequences he drew from that for his own “etic” proposals. As in Chapter 2 above, a quote by Childs will serve to orient us in what follows. In this case he is making an attempt to interpret in emic terms Israel’s own understanding of its sacred written tradition. He quotes Deut 31:9–13, a text in which God instructs Moses about the role of the written Law, and summarizes its content as follows: Israel’s sacred tradition is “theocentric in orientation. It identi¿ed the will of God for successive generations so that they might live in accordance with the enduring commands of God… It is not simply a Àexible paradigm without an established content.”38 This summary can be made to apply to Childs’ understanding of the entirety of Israel’s canonical heritage.39 Let us unpack it in light of the aforementioned form-critical categories.

37. A typical misunderstanding is that Childs’ emphasis on the ¿nal “form” makes his approach a species of “structural analysis,” which is only interested in the patterns created on the surface of the text regardless of the process that created it or the context within which it functioned. 38. Childs, “Canon in Recent Biblical Studies,” 39 (emphasis mine). 39. One can substantiate this argument by analysing the following works by Childs in light of it: Introduction to the Old Testament, his The New Testament as Canon, or his Biblical Theology. 1

20

The Substance of Psalm 24

3.3.1. Content For a start, we see at the outset that the question of “external reality” is in fact a central concern of Israel itself, for Childs claims that the traditions of Israel are theocentric. Regardless of genre (liturgy; law; narrative; poetry) or age (pre-exilic or post), these traditions are always oriented towards a single referent: the realty of God and his will, which are their content (Israel’s traditions have a “God saturated stance”40). This is not to say that Israel’s traditions all contain the same theo-logy, “talk about God,” but it is to say that they are all looking in the same direction: at the reality of God himself. Regardless of how this reality was perceived, from Israel’s point of view it existed independently of its perception, such that that which it “saw” cannot be said to have been purely constructed out of its own psychological, spiritual, or intellectual resources.41 This theological reality is the ontological precondition of Israel’s tradition which stood over and against this tradition and functioned as the criterion for its claim to truth and authority. 3.3.2. Function and Context Israel’s traditions are not about God in some accidental sense, independent of the communicative intentions of the tradents of those traditions. Israel sought to actively identify God, the traditions’ “established content,” and it did so within and for the sake of a speci¿c context, namely the successive generations of the people of God. As such, the function of these traditions is “kerygmatic,”42 “proclamatory,” “witnessing” or, indeed, “canonical.” Childs even characterizes Biblical intra-textuality as “deictic,”43 for it intentionally functions to illuminate individual texts and traditions by setting them within the context of a fuller grasp of the one theological reality that undergirds them all. And this act of witnessing was not done for the sake of abstract knowledge, its telos was to enable 40. Childs, Isaiah, 31. 41. In contrast to German pre-World War I Neo-Protestantism, for example, Israel’s religion is no “Ausprägung seiner ‘Volksseele’ ” (Otto Bächli, Das Alte Testament in der Kirchlichen Dogmatik von Karl Barth [Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1987], here 324). 42. When Childs says that “kerygmatic reading” is “Christological reading,” he is using this phrase in the referential sense that Scripture functions to point to the objective reality of Christ (Biblical Theology, 66). Note also that for Childs the category of “eschatology” references another dimension of reality that intersects with ours, and not our personal attitude within our dimension of reality. See also Old Testament, 23. This appears to contrast with the approach of Rudolph Bultmann; see, e.g., Jesus Christ and Mythology (London: SCM, 1960), 51. 43. Childs, Isaiah, 445. 1

3. Verbum: The Shape of Israel’s Witness

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God’s covenant partner to live in accordance with the enduring commands of God. The relation between reality and response is important. What Israel should become is determined by the reality of God himself, who is the sole content of Israel’s tradition and who stands over and against Israel as judge and redeemer.44 This conscious pointing function for the sake of the people of God has hermeneutical implications. Taking it seriously means cynical approaches that interpret the function of Israel’s traditions as serving hidden political agendas must be rejected. It also excludes as inadequate “post-modern” approaches that ignore the question of the nature of the tradition’s referent,45 or “narrative approaches” which fail to reckon with a relation between the world “within” the text and the reality “outside” of it.46 It problematizes approaches which collapse Biblical referentiality into subjective experience and it rejects those methods which attempt to turn a neutral text into a witness so that it can become theologically relevant. According to Childs, the traditions are already a witness—they do not become a witness when read in a certain manner.47 44. See, for example, Childs‘ chapter on “Ethics” in Biblical Theology, 658–717. 45. For example, Childs, Struggle, Chapter 17. Antonius Gunneweg appears to be confusing “epistemology” and “ontology” in his derogatory characterization of these kinds of claims (in this case he is critiquing H. Gese) as “Offenbarungspositivismus” (“Altes Testament und existentiale Interpretation,” in Sola Scriptura: Aufsätze zu alttestamentlichen Texten und Themen [ed. Peter Höffken; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992], 66–81, here 73). A rejection of the epistemological stance of “positivism” does not automatically lead to a rejection of the existence of an objective referent of the text (“revelation”). Whether and how one can identify this reality is a separate issue to a confession of its existence. Gunneweg’s rejection of the prioritization of “reality” over “Daseinsverständnis” is grounded in a dogmatic presupposition about the nature of “faith” (73 n. 13), yet dogmatics can also provide a way of bridging the epistemic gap he wishes to keep open (e.g. in the work of K. Barth, see Chapter 4 below). The same point can be used to refute Walter Brueggemann’s epistemological critique of Childs in “Canon Fire: The Bible as Scripture,” Christian Century 118, no. 33 (2001): 22–26. 46. Childs is appreciative of Meier Sternberg’s The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), on this issue. See, for example, Childs, Biblical Theology, 19–20. 47. This is suggested by Georg Steins, “Kanon und Anamnese: Auf dem Weg zu einer Neuen Biblischen Theologie,” in Der Bibelkanon in der Bibelauslegung: MethodenreÀexionen und Beispielexegesen (ed. Egbert Ballhorn and Georg Steins; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2007), 110–29. Steins agrees with Childs’ historical-critical thesis, but goes beyond Childs by trying to develop a means of methodologically securing the moment by which Israel’s past traditions are actualized. The implication is that they are inert until application of the method allows them to become a witness. See also Die “Bindung Isaaks” im Kanon (Gen 22): Grundlagen und Programm 1

22

The Substance of Psalm 24

3.3.3. Form This brings us to the complex category of form. In light of what has been said thus far, it should be clear that, in the ¿rst instance, Childs is not committed to any one form. A whole variety of forms (e.g. narrative [saga, myth, historical report], law [casuistic, apodictic], prophecy [cult, literary, oral], liturgy [Northern, Southern], wisdom [practical, speculative, eschatological], etc.) share the same function of witnessing, each in their own way, to the self-same content within and for the sake of the same community. As Childs stated in an earlier work, “That which is ultimate in the Old Testament has been inextricably tied to the forms of Israel’s daily life, including her history, tradition, institutions, thoughtpatterns, and language.”48 As such, on the basis of what has been said so far there is nothing to stop a theologically interested exegete from critically disentangling the “spaghetti” of traditions that constitutes the ¿nal form, situating each tradition in its historical and cultural context, discerning their basic theological content, and then bringing the various theologies that arise into dialogue with each other, guided by the church’s more mature dogmatic formulations. So how is it that Childs gets to his trademark focus on the “¿nal form of the text” as the only arena in which the interpreter may legitimately engage in theological exegesis? And in light of all the aforementioned diversity, what would be the nature of this form? The answer has to do with the nature of the process that eventuated in the form that the community of faith called Scripture. In order to catch Childs’ distinctive angle, it is worth comparing his approach with that of the teacher he admired so much, Gerhard von Rad. Like Childs, von Rad attributed the primary force at work in Israel’s history to the reality of God himself, “the living word of Yahweh as it repeatedly addressed Israel.”49 He also argued that this external (ontological) ground of Israel’s einer Kanonisch-Intertextuellen Lektüre (HBS 20; Freiburg: Herder, 1999), and “Kanonisch-intertextuelle Bibellektüre–my way,” in Intertextualität: Perspektiven auf ein interdisziplinäres Arbeitsfeld (ed. K. Hermann and S. Hübenthal; Aachen: Shaker, 2007), 55–60. As we shall see in Chapter 4 below, Childs is far more Barthian, in that the only thing the Bible becomes is the Word of God, and that is something beyond methodological control. See, e.g. Childs, Biblical Theology, 724. It is interesting to note that Steins attributes Childs’ “ambiguity” in relation to method to a “ ‘barthianisch’ anmutende Aversion gegen ‘profane’ Wissenschaft” (“Kanonisch-intertextuelle Bibellektüre,” 60). 48. Childs, Myth and Reality, 98. 49. Von Rad, Theologie, 1:125 (all translations are mine); cited appreciatively in Werner H. Schmidt, Alttestamentlicher Glaube (9th ed.; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2004), 19. 1

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traditions, the “revelation of Yahweh,” was at the same time the subject matter of authoritative Israelite tradition, for it was that which “Israel itself took to be the true object of its faith.”50 This fact has consequences for his appreciation of the nature of Israel’s traditions, which he consequently characterized as “Träger, Mund ”51 (“tradent, mouth”). Finally, this overall construal of the nature of Israelite tradition led von Rad to draw similar hermeneutical conclusions to Childs: the divine revelation itself is the “prime object of a theology of the Old Testament.”52 In contrast to Childs, however, von Rad never shifted his primary focus to the present form of what Israel itself came to call “Scripture,” opting instead to engage in precisely the disentangling activity mentioned above.53 Given the strong similarities between these two Old Testament scholars, the question is inevitably raised as to how Childs moved beyond von Rad’s approach, yet all the while retaining his basic insights. In short, the answer has to do with a conjunction between the progressive textualization of tradition and the nature of that process as “Sach-critical.” 3.3.3.1. Form and the Sachkritische Process. It is not only the case that the Bible contains a diversity of forms and traditions; critical analysis has also revealed that these traditions and forms themselves went through a series of transformations over a long period of time, changes which often massively altered the semantic content of the earlier layers of tradition. The ¿nal form of the text is the fruit of a long process of collecting and editorially recon¿guring Israel’s sacred traditions into larger blocks of material, then books, and then arrangements of books. Childs’ contribution to this insight is to argue that this process was of a particular nature, namely that it was “canonical.” What this means in the ¿rst instance is 50. Von Rad, Theologie, 1:127; cited in Schmidt, Glaube, 19. 51. This is Schmidt’s summary, Glaube, 19. The language echoes that of Hägglund, who states that Scripture is “Träger der Offenbarung, Vermittler der Heilswirklichkeit” (“Bedeutung,” 161). See also Driver’s citation of von Rad in Brevard Childs, 131. 52. Von Rad, Theologie, 1:125; cited in Schmidt, Glaube, 19. See Childs’ critique in Biblical Theology, 102–3. Similar assumptions are held by Hans-Joachim Kraus, in, for example, Theology of the Psalms (trans. Keith Crim; Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1992). 53. See, for example, his independent treatment of the disentangled J and P sources in his Genesis commentary (Das erste Buch Moses, Genesis [5th ed.; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958]). The very nature of his traditionhistorical theory of continuous “actualization,” however, did lead him to highly value later stages of the tradition which approximated the ¿nal form. 1

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that the diachronic growth of the tradition is characterized by the same set of features already described above in relation to the diversity of Israel’s traditions. In short, whether we are dealing with the viva voce of the eighth-century prophet Isaiah, for example, or the collection and ordering of his oracles by his disciples, the sewing together of these oracles with other oracles by unnamed prophets further down the “stream,” the editorial glosses by post-exilic redactors, or the minute changes by the sages responsible for what came to be the Masoretic text, each stage of the process had the function of pointing the People of God (their context) towards the tradition’s divine content, such that God’s People would be shaped for obedience. The two primary challenges to ¿nal-form exegesis that are raised by this developmental process are (1) the continuity of the content of the tradition and (2) the binding nature of the ¿nal form over and against everything that went before. Concerning the ¿rst challenge: if a Biblical witness is functioning in the capacity of creative editor, how is it that his new product stands in continuity with the old? As Childs himself often pointed out, the meaning of the older tradition is often changed when an editor integrates it into a new literary framework; the witness that it renders is now different to what went before. In what sense, for example, is the referent of Ps 2, understood as a fragment of a coronation liturgy, the same as the referent of Ps 2 when juxtaposed to Ps 1 and transformed into the “gate” of the Psalter (or one of its earlier sub-collections)? Concerning the second challenge: why should the content of Ps 2 as “literary gate to the Psalter” be more theologically normative than Ps 2 as Israelite liturgy? It is the function of the concept of Sachkritik in combination with the hermeneutical function of literary shaping to respond to these challenges. Sachkritik—literally, “content/substance/reality/res criticism”—is the name for a mode of interpretation which tries to extract from a text its proper truth content by using an understanding of that truth as the criterion for identifying it. As such, the relation between witness and content (or verbum and res) is dialectical: the interpreter goes to the text/tradition in order to perceive the reality it mediates, but he can only perceive it if he has already, to some degree, experienced it.54 The

54. See, for example, Robert Morgan, “Sachkritik in Reception History,” JSNT 33 (2010): 175–90: Sachkritik is “critical assessment of what a biblical text says in the light of the gospel that the author intended to communicate… Since the gospel is itself heard in and through the witness of scripture this implies a dialectic between them” (175). Rudolf Bultmann’s technical term for this kind of prior-knowledge is 1

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“sachgemäße” (i.e. “object-adequate”) interpreter, then, is one who already exists in a relationship with the text’s subject matter and has thus acquired the capacity to perceive it. Although theological exegetes such as Bultmann and Barth applied this concept to the modern interpretation of Scripture,55 Childs applies it to the work of the Biblical editors themselves who were responsible for making what came to be Scripture. It seems that he does this in order to claim (1) that the ¿nal form mediates a “truer” witness to a reality more fragmentarily testi¿ed to at an earlier stage and (2) that this ¿nal rendition is binding for the community of faith. We might sketch an example of this happening as follows: the editor comes to his material in order to fully comprehend the God it refers to (e.g. an Isaianic oracle about Zion). Yet he comes to it as a participant in the unfolding of the divine economy and thus as one who has received further divine revelation, mediated through the tradition/text under study but also those traditions that are becoming part of the broader developing canonical corpus (e.g. other Isaianic texts; Pentateuchal material) as well as God’s historical intervention in the life of the Community (e.g. through the return from exile). The broader understanding of God’s economy thus acquired helps the editor to perceive a fullness to the text not previously grasped (Childs talks of the text being “infused with its full ontological reality”),56 and in the process becomes aware that the text as it stands does not do justice to the full dimensions of the reality it is struggling to mediate. Given the editor’s desire (function) to shape the community in light of the reality pointed to by the text, he reshapes it so that it may better ful¿l this function. In other words, by remoulding the material in a diversity of ways (helpfully if imperfectly uncovered by historical criticism), the older material is rendered in such a manner that in its newer form it does better justice to the one reality only fragmentarily witnessed to at an earlier stage. Importantly, this theological shaping was not only oriented

Vorverständnis. See his Jesus Christ and Mythology, especially 46–49. Bultmann differs to Karl Barth (on whom, see Chapter 4) in terms of his understanding of the nature of the “Sache.” 55. For a comparison between these two theologians on the issue of Sachkritik, see Bernd Jaspert, “Sachkritik und Widerstand,” Theologische Literaturzeitung 115 (1990): 161–221. 56. “The Nature of the Christian Bible: One Book, Two Testaments,” in The Rule of Faith: Scripture, Canon, and Creed in a Critical Age (ed. Ephraim Radner and George Sumner; Harrisburg, Pa.: Morehouse, 1998), 115–25, here 124. In the context of this essay, this “infusing” is necessarily a pneumatological event, on which, see Chapter 4 below. 1

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towards the “Sache” (in light of the “Sache”), it was also “kritisch” in that it rearranged the material so that the Sache would better come to light and be preserved from misunderstanding. Childs talks of editors seeking to “critically enrich earlier parts of the corpus…as a means of clarifying and deepening a grasp of the substance to which scripture [or the tradition at an earlier stage] as a whole points.”57 As a critical process, it was the later rendition of the tradition that does the best justice to the reality (in the minds of those who did it as well as those who received it); as such, this form was also authoritative, binding on the next generation of the community of faith. The shaping process eventually came to an end because the tradents of the tradition felt that they had reached a point where further embellishment was not necessary, possible, or otherwise desirable. As Childs put it in his Isaiah commentary, The decision [to read the ¿nal form] is not derived from a higher evaluation of the last level of redaction per se, but rather in the entire critical assessment provided by the ¿nal form of the text as to what is normative for Israel’s faith involving all the different levels. It is constitutive of canonical shaping to offer this theological Sachkritik on the tradition in its entirety.58

57. Childs, Isaiah, 102. There appears to be a similarity here to Steck’s de¿nition of the nature of redactional work in the prophetic literature as “prophetische Prophetenauslegung.” The explication of this phrase by M. Leuenberger reveals both points of contact with Childs’ comments here as well as divergence: “Der Begriff will ausdrücken, dass sich der Sinn der Prophetenworte nach der Ansicht der Redaktoren nicht in dem erschöpft, was sie ursprünglich einmal bedeutet haben, sondern dass ihnen als Gottesworten ein tieferer Sinn innewohnt, der z.B. künftige Zeiten im Blick hat. Diesen tieferen Sinn wollen die Redaktoren herausarbeiten, und damit explizieren sie die bleibende Aktualität der Überlieferung. Als prophetische Prophetenauslegung bietet ihre Arbeit folglich eine aktualisierende Neuinterpretation des vorgegebenen Textes in Bezug auf die eigene Situation. Historisch-kritisch gesehen sagen die Redaktoren etwas durchaus anderes als das fortgeschriebene Prophetenwort, nach ihrem eigenen Selbstverständnis machen sie jedoch genau das nicht, sondern sagen nur, was das Prophetenwort seinem tieferen Sinn nach bedeutet” (“Redaktoren,” in Das wissenschaftliche Bibellexikon im Internet [http://www. bibelwissenschaft.de/wibilex/dasbibellexikon/lexikon/sachwort/anzeigen/details/ redaktoren-3/ch/70a07f5f8823e084a321410bdf7a2308/], 2007, §2.2; accessed in December 2014). The difference is that Childs, as someone who locates himself confessionally within the stance of the canon, af¿rms the truthfulness of what the redactors were in fact doing, refusing the measure that truthfulness in terms of modern (historical-critical) canons of truth 58. Ibid., 441. Childs’ Isaiah commentary is full of these kinds of observations. 1

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This is where Childs’ critique of von Rad sets in: von Rad did not fully appreciate the critical nature of the tradition-historical process in rendering by means of a new hermeneutically reshaped witness a truer and more normative account of the one subject matter.59 It is admittedly the case that Childs’ phraseology is not always as clear as one would wish when discussing the issue of continuity and change in the growth of the tradition. For example, the following quote might give the impression that Childs is not interested in extra-textual referentiality but only in what the latest editors thought: Recent redactional criticism has shown that often a biblical text has been subsequently interpreted within a literary framework which has the effect of reinterpreting the text in a manner different from its original meaning. In other words, a later redactor has interpreted the text according to a different referent, that is, according to another understanding of its reality. One thinks, for example, of the later redactional framework constituting chapters 6–9 of Isaiah which now interprets the term Immanuel in a highly messianic fashion, which was not clear in the earliest level of the tradition (cf. Isa 7.14)… The task of critical exegesis involves a careful analysis of the relation of both levels of the text’s witness, but also an analysis of the effect of the redacted text on its understanding of the referent.60

Childs’ talk here of “a different referent” may lead to the impression that he thinks that the tradents were talking about different things. The meaning of the word “referent” in this context, however, is constrained by his use of the word “reality.” Childs insists that the reality remains the same, despite the change in “referent,” so that here the term “referent” refers to a different dimension of the one reality. Here is another illustration of the point: imagine that the reality at stake is God’s promise that he would redeem Zion. An older layer of the tradition may have referred to Zion as a historical referent; it was the historical Zion of Isaiah’s day that would be redeemed. That Zion did

59. See, for example, Childs, Introduction, 157. See also Christopher Seitz, “The Historical-Critical Endeavour as Theology: The Legacy of Gerhard von Rad,” in Word Without End, 28–40. Childs’ af¿rmation of this form of Sachkritik also provides the basis for his critique of Walter Brueggemann’s approach to Old Testament theology. Childs claims that Brueggemann creates a “false dialectic” by playing canonical traditions off against one another (core testimony vs. counter testimony) instead of attending to the judgment that the tradition itself has already rendered on the matter. This is illustrated in relation to Brueggemann’s interpretation of Qohelet. Cf. Childs, “Walter Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament. Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy,” SJT 53 (2000): 228–33. 60. Childs, Biblical Theology, 84. 1

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The Substance of Psalm 24

indeed experience a historical redemption (e.g. under the rule of Hezekiah from Sennacherib). Later tradition, however, judged this salvi¿c moment to be only a foretaste of something greater, a proleptic in-breaking of a fuller reality. As such, a later re-interpretation of the oracle set the historical referent within an eschatological context (e.g. Isa 1:21–26), thereby af¿rming the salvation of Zion (i.e. the message of the older layer of tradition), yet Zion only “as far as it was truly Zion,” which was a “faith reality, distinct from a merely political entity”61 (i.e. the message of the newer layer of tradition). In his Isaiah commentary, Childs insists that this theological interpretation of Zion was already implicit within the older concept. Another example is the manner in which historical narratives are “broken” (my phrase) by later editors: “[B]oth past and present events are often restructured by an eschatological perspective which views an occurrence as a manifestation of God’s righteous rule.”62 Chronology is often inverted in favour of a different “history,” the history of God’s eternal ways with his world. Thus, in relation to the complex fusion of temporal perspectives in Isa 51:9–16 (creation, Exodus, redemption from Babylon), Childs can say, [T]he occurrences are three moments in the one purpose of God for Israel’s salvation. Because the content of God’s redemptive intervention, that is, its substance, is the same, the three events have been fused together as a uni¿ed ontological witness to the one purpose of God concerning his people.63

The dif¿culty this form of the rendering of the witness causes for modern interpreters is due to the fact that the tradents of Israel’s tradition had a different grasp of the nature of “truth.” For a modern critic, an inverted chronology is simply “wrong,” the overlayering of earlier events with later events is “anachronistic” when measured according to a standard of truth taken from outside the tradition. Within the tradition itself—according to its emic perspective—it is only by such inversion and over-layering that one can catch a glimpse of the fullness of truth, the actual reality that is present in events otherwise disassociated by created time.64 As Childs put it, the editors were concerned “for the truth 61. Childs, Isaiah, 22. 62. Childs, Biblical Theology, 101. For an illustration in relation to the books of Samuel, see §10.1.3, below. 63. Childs, Isaiah, 403–404. 64. Note that Childs says that the canonical shape of the text has a hermeneutical effect on its reader, but “especially to the extent in which he or she identi¿es religiously with the faith community of the original tradents” (Biblical Theology, 71 [emphasis mine]). 1

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of the witness, which is measured by its faithfulness to its theological context rather than by modern criteria of testing the accuracy of a biblical text according to the original sequence of events.”65 We now move to a ¿nal observation concerning Israel’s emic understanding of the suf¿ciency of text—disconnected from its original author, time, and place—to continue to function in the same manner described above for all of Israel’s traditions. As we have seen, Childs’ understanding of the content, function, and context of Israel’s traditions initially applies across the board to any traditional form taken to be authoritative (oral, liturgical, textual). We have also noted how “increasingly in the late pre-exilic and post-exilic periods Israel’s tradition was given a written form and transmitted by scribal schools… [T]here was a growing tendency towards the textualization of the tradition.”66 It should be pointed out that according to Childs, as far as Israel was concerned this development of “a new medium of witness”67 which unleashed “a new dynamic…for its interpretation,”68 “a set of forces which then tended to operate according to laws quite distinct from those at work in the development of oral tradition,”69 did not in any manner limit the capacity of the tradition to continue to operate along the lines delineated above. Israel considered the prophetic message in textual form to be fully adequate to the prophetic function of mediating the kingdom of God. “The prophet serves as the living voice of God now preserved in a living text of Scripture.”70 One warrant for this view is the way in which the prophet Moses and his written law were received in the Biblical tradition: Within the Pentateuch, Moses’ writing activity is closely tied to his mediatorial role in receiving the divine law at Sinai. Whereas God himself is portrayed as writing the decalogue (Ex. 34:1; Deut 4:13; 10:4), Moses 65. Childs, Isaiah, 102 (emphasis mine). 66. Childs, “Analysis of a Canonical Formula: ‘It Shall be Recorded for a Future Generation’,” in Die hebräische Bibel und ihre zweifache Nachgeschichte Festschrift für R. Rendtorff zum 65. Geburtstag (ed. Erhard Blum, C. Macholz, and E. W. Stegemann; Neukirchen–Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1990), 357–64, here 360. 67. Childs, “The One Gospel in Four Witnesses,” in Radner and Sumner, eds., The Rule of Faith, 51–62 here, 25. Here Childs applies the phrase to Luke’s use of the “report genre,” but the concept can be expanded. 68. Childs, “Response,” 54. 69. Childs, “Midrash and the Old Testament,” in Understanding the Sacred Text (ed. John Reumann; Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson, 1972), 45–59, here 53. Isaac Seeligmann’s term was “Kanonbewusstsein”; see his “Voraussetzungen der Midraschexegese,” in Congress Volume: Copenhagen, 1953 (VTSup 1; Leiden: Brill, 1953), 150–81. For Childs’ relation to Seeligmann, see Driver, Brevard Childs, 173–74. 70. Childs, “Retrospective,” 375. 1

30

The Substance of Psalm 24 not only proclaims the ‘words and ordinances’ of God to the people (Ex. 24:3), but he is also commissioned to write them (v. 4; cf. 34:27). The signi¿cance of Moses’ writing of the law receives its clearest formulation in Deut 31. The context of the chapter is the impending death of Moses, and his commissioning of the writing of the law. Several crucial points are made in the chapter. The law, which derived from God’s speaking to Moses, applies to every successive generation of Israel (31:11–13). It serves as a witness to God’s will (v. 28). The law of God has now been transmitted for the future generations in the written form of scripture. It is placed next to the ark in book form to be read to the people periodically (10ff.). Indeed, the original role of Moses as the unique prophet of God (34:10) who proclaims the word of God as a witness (31:27ff.) will be performed by the book of the law in the future (31:26ff). Moses will shortly die, but his formulation of the will of God will continue. Throughout the rest of the Old Testament the identi¿cation of the divine law with Moses’ writing of it in a book is continued (Ezra 6:18; Neh 13:1; II Chr 25:4).71

A text replaces the viva vox of the historical prophet because ultimately it was the viva vox of God himself, communicating through the prophet and then later through his words that mattered.72 This commitment, coupled with the dialectical, Sach-critical nature of the canonical process and the hermeneutical capacities of written tradition enable Childs to make the following shocking statement concerning the “authorship” of the book of Isaiah as a whole, a book initiated by the historical prophet but brought to completion by a host of later tradents: The resulting shape [of the book of Isaiah] bears a truthful witness to the selfsame divine reality ¿rst testi¿ed to by the eighth century prophet Isaiah, but then continually unfolded, modi¿ed, and enriched by successive generations of prophetic tradents to serve as Israel’s authoritative scripture, a prophetic word that stands forever (40:8) and accomplishes its divine purpose (55:1).73

Finally, even here in this focus on the text as a suf¿cient mediator of revelation, Childs is always attuned to the particular features of the literary ¿nal form. Israelite tradition has not been rendered Scripture in a Àat and uniform manner. Childs thus talks of the need to be aware of “different degrees of consciousness”74 within the canonical process. For example, purely synchronic types of exegesis which “evaluate the 71. Childs, Introduction, 133–34. 72. In this context, Christopher Seitz draws upon Zech 1:6 to talk of the words of the former prophets “overtaking” later generations (Prophecy and Hermeneutics, 134). 73. Childs, Isaiah, 449. 74. Childs, “Response,” 54. 1

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present composition consistently on the same level of intentionality throughout” fail to deal with “the historical dimensions of the canonical process which established a scale of intentionality.”75 For example, the “actualization of the Exodus traditions by Deuteronomy which von Rad…studied reÀects a very different process from the proto-midrashic, inner-biblical exegesis of texts of the exilic and post-exilic periods.”76 Or when comparing the nature of the intertextuality between First Isaiah and the Second and Third Isaiah, Childs initially wrote in an earlier period that Third Isaiah’s use of Second Isaiah was characterized by exegesis of Second Isaiah’s texts: there is an enormous difference between Second Isaiah’s use of First Isaiah and “Third” Isaiah’s use of Second. In the latter instance far more is involved than the inÀuence of earlier prophetic preaching. The author of Third Isaiah is clearly working with written texts which are quoted, adjusted, and adapted.77

And yet, writing at a later period, Childs can offer the following two warnings in response to attempts to overemphasize the literary nature of Third Isaiah: First, Third Isaiah remains a prophetic collection, both in form and content, which means there is an encounter with actual historical realities, albeit seen in the light of the divine. This dimension dare not be Àattened simply into a type of learned scribal activity dealing exclusively with literary texts. Second, not every occurrence of a parallel can be assigned to an intentional reuse. A critical assessment must be made that reckons with the theological substance at stake beyond merely identifying formal parallelism discovered by the perusal of a concordance.78

This very brief survey of the Childs’ understanding of the nature of Israelite tradition-turned-Scripture has illustrated that Childs’ interest in the ¿nal form is grounded in the insights of modern historical-critical research, for it posits a theory of the intentionality of the process and binds our interpretation to it.79 The hermeneutical conclusion is this: all 75. Childs, Introduction, 630. 76. Childs, “Review of Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel,” JBL 106 (1987): 511–13, here 512. 77. Childs, “Midrash,” 53. 78. Childs, Isaiah, 462. 79. Pace many interpreters of Childs, including Brueggemann, who claims that Childs was interested in nullifying “the entire modern period of interpretation and the historical-critical project as a failed attempt” (“The ABC’s of Old Testament Theology in the US,” ZAW 114 [2002]: 412–32, here 426). 1

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interpretation—whether Christian or not—that wishes to engage with the subject matter of the text, its content, the reality that it is ultimately about, must, by virtue of the nature of the process that gave us this text, focus upon the hermeneutical shape of the ¿nal form, appreciated in light of its historical rootedness and yet always in connection with its eternal and uni¿ed subject matter, for it is here alone that witness is born to the “full history of revelation.”80

80. Cf. Childs, “Canonical Shape,” 47–48: “Within the Old Testament neither the process of the formation nor the history of its canonization is assigned an independent integrity. These dimensions have been lost or purposely blurred. Rather, canon asserts that the witness to Israel’s experience with God is testi¿ed to in the effect on the biblical text itself. It is only in the ¿nal form of the biblical text in which the normative history has reached an end that the full effect of this revelatory history can be perceived.” 1

Chapter 4

RES: THE SHAPE OF ISRAEL’S GOD

4.1. A Challenge: The Otherness of God So much for the “horizontal” dimension of Israelite tradition. The emphasis throughout has been on Israel’s understanding of God as the continuous source and the subject matter of its response. As it stands, however, such a rigorously theocentric view is hardly able to convince, for it is open to criticism on epistemological grounds. Is it not the case, as Bultmann claimed, that every human response to the “kerygma,” by very virtue of its humanity, veils the ultimate reality of God himself, for it is also ¿ltered through a fallible human tradition and grasped in terms of historically contingent categories?1 Surely all we as interpreters of the Bible can do is interpret the response to the revelation but not describe the content of that revelation itself.2 And if this is true of us, then it must also apply to the long chain of the tradents of the tradition. How could 1. Theologie, 587–89. 2. This is the conclusion the Old Testament scholar Werner H. Schmidt draws after qualifying von Rad’s theocentric approach to Israelite religion in light of Bultmann’s hermeneutical reÀections: “D.h., Gegenstand der Theologie kann nur das Zeugnis des Glaubens, die Rede von Gott, die Aussage des Offenbarungsverständnisses sein,” rather than God, the “Offenbarung” (Schmidt, Glaube, 19). (A similar move is also made by Gunneweg in “Interpretation.”) In a long yet informal conversation with W. H. Schmidt in Bonn in 2008 about the nature of the “canonical process,” he seemed to af¿rm my rendition of Childs’ basic theory outlined in Chapter 3. above, with the signi¿cant reservation being that he did not believe that later stages in the tradition represented a “Sachkritik” over against earlier layers. As such, he could not take the ¿nal form as binding over and against what went before. He also felt that to do so would lose the theologically signi¿cant “existential” dimension of the tradition, as expressed, for example, in the laments of Jeremiah. My exegesis of Ps 24, in contrast, will highlight the “ontological” dimension, within which the existential receives its ultimate meaning (see especially §10.2). A helpful canonical response to the kind of existential reading of the prophets favoured by Schmidt is provided by Christopher Seitz in “On Letting the Text ‘Act Like a Man’—The Book of the Twelve: New Reasons for Canonical Reading, with Hermeneutical ReÀections,” SBET 22 (2004): 151–71.

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they have been able to adequately grasp the “Sache” of earlier strands and then reshape them in a “sachgemäße” manner, such that the ¿nal form does it fuller justice?3 And in addition to this historical and cultural gap we must add the all-too-human will to power. Is it not naïve to believe that the tradents of Israel’s traditions as well as modern human interpreters are characterized by a selÀess deference to a truth outside of themselves for the sake of a people they were often in conÀict with?4 The systematic theologian Karl Barth locates the challenge within the conÀict between the holy majesty and “otherness” of God and the ¿nitude and sinfulness of humanity. God is not “just another phenomenon within the world of human experience”;5 there is an “in¿nite qualitative distinction”6 separating him from the creature. As such, in order for humans to apprehend revelation at all, regardless of the medium, a miracle is required. This is where Barth’s understanding of revelation comes in and with it, I will argue, the essential presupposition that holds Childs’ understanding of the canonical process together. 4.2. The Solution: God Reveals Himself by Means of Himself Barth’s and, I will suggest, Childs’ understanding of revelation was actualistic in that it has the character of a divinely initiated event that must occur again and again within history. God himself intervenes in order to open our eyes and to allow us to “see” him, and he does this precisely within the human form of the witness to himself. The “God, who cannot be ‘objecti¿ed’,…renders himself a possible object of human knowing in an act of supreme divine condescension, entering into the world of our conceptuality and experience and somehow giving himself to be known within its terms.”7 The result is the establishing of “an 3. See, for example, Manfred Oeming’s criticisms of Gadamer and the traditionhistorical approaches of von Rad, Gese, and Stuhlmacher in Gesamtbiblische Theologien der Gegenwart: Das Verhältnis von AT und NT in der hermeneutischen Diskussion seit Gerhard von Rad (3d ed.; Zurich: Kohlhammer, 2001). It is telling that although Oeming rightly picks up on the theological dimension in von Rad’s thesis, he completely ignores it in his critique of von Rad, treating his traditionhistorical approach as if it were a mere variant of Gadamer’s very secular understanding of Wirkungsgeschichte. 4. This is roughly Brueggemann’s critique of Childs; see, for example, “Canon Fire,” as well as their exchange in the Scottish Journal of Theology 53/2. 5. Trevor Hart, “Revelation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (ed. John Webster; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 37–56, here 42. 6. Guretzki, Filioque, 65. 7. Hart, “Revelation,” 44. Guretzki talks of revelation as “gift” (Filioque, 66). 1

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unnatural or supranatural correspondence between the media of revelation and of God.”8 In other words, a “person, an event, a text which in itself is not God and veils God nonetheless becomes transparent to faith and refers faith beyond itself appropriately to God.”9 In this event of the temporal, cultural gap (and any other obstacles that may separate the exegete from the authoritative tradition) is bridged. Barth talks in terms of a single Word of God appearing in a number of manifestations: ¿rst there is the original moment of revelation received by the prophet or apostle, then there is the proclamation of that revelation by the prophet or apostle. Finally, at a greater temporal remove, there is the ongoing interpretation and proclamation of that prophetic and apostolic testimony. These three separate moments in time become one by the power of God. As Barth puts it: “[T]o the extent that proclamation really rests on recollection of the revelation attested to in the Bible and is thus obedient repetition of the biblical witness, it is no less the Word of God than the Bible.”10 Two forms, one substance, “two entities…set initially under a single genus…Scripture as the commencement and present-day proclamation as the continuation of one and the same event, Jeremiah and Paul at the beginning and the modern proclaimer of the Gospel at the end of one and the same series.”11 In short, Scripture or any form of authoritative tradition cannot make God known by itself. Only God can make himself known by means of this tradition. As Alan Torrance puts it, God is “not only the Subjectmatter of theological discourse, but…[also] the essential condition of its actuality and possibility.”12 Or as Barth himself famously put it, “God reveals Himself, He reveals Himself through Himself, He reveals Himself. God, the Revealer, is identical with this act in revelation and also with its effect” (cf. Chapter 2 above).13 8. Hart, “Revelation,” 47. 9. Ibid., 46. 10. Barth, CD I/1, 120; cited in Guretzki, Filioque, 99. 11. Barth, CD I/1, 102; cited in Guretzki, Filioque, 98. Cf. Hermann Diem, Dogmatics (trans. H. Knight; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1959), 97: “Through these two witnesses [i.e. Scripture and preaching] the being of Jesus Christ is incarnate historically… Certainly these various times…have a historical continuity even in earthly history. But again they receive their material identity from a dogmatic presupposition, namely their potential contemporaneity as the speech and action of God.” 12. Alan Torrance, “Trinity,” in Webster, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, 72–91, here 74. 13. Barth, CD I/1, 296 (emphasis original); cited in Torrance, “Trinity,” 77. Torrance goes as far as to say the following: “[K]nowledge of God [is] a form of 1

36

The Substance of Psalm 24

The power within which this ever-occurring event takes place is the Holy Spirit, so that “evangelical theology…is only possible and can only become a reality pneumatologically.”14 Without it, both proclamation and original witness remain a “burnt-out crater,”15 the “impress of revelation” (“Eindruck von Offenbarung”), “a human worldly factor side by side with other factors… The signpost has become meaningless.”16 The Spirit enters into our created time and space so that its objective work in the interpreter of the Bible (or, as we shall see, any other layer for authoritative tradition on the way to a ¿nalized Scripture) becomes the ground for his or her subjective “apprehension of revelation.” Barth talks of the Spirit in terms of a “hidden, ungraspable, indisposable [unverfügbaren] power.”17 This Spirit is the same one who not only operates today within the church as it engages in Biblical exegesis, it has been “present and ef¿cacious” throughout the entire tradition-historical process that gave us the present form of Scripture.18 This power of the Spirit is a creative power (schöpferische Macht) that relates to those it inhabits as a master to a servant. This Spirit, then, rather than culture, psychology, politics, or the accidents of history, is the ultimate force at work in the production of the various witnesses to revelation—either the historical prophets, their written Scripture, or contemporary “secondary” witness in the form of commentary or proclamation. Both the Biblical tradent and the modern confessional exegete “can only allow their thought and speech to be controlled by it and not the other way around.”19 How does this relate to Childs’ canonical process? Childs nowhere explicitly claims to be working with a Barthian doctrine of revelation, and yet he was outspoken in his appreciation of the man whom he once participation within the divine life, within God’s Self-knowledge into which we are taken as ‘secondary, subsequent subjects’ (CD II/1, p. 181). The taking up of humanity into the ‘event’ of God’s being is more than simply knowledge, however, it is humanity’s salvation—a salvation which is ful¿lment, ‘the supreme, suf¿cient, ¿nal and indestructible ful¿lment of being’ ” (“Trinity,” 89). 14. Karl Barth, Einführung in die evangelische Theologie (Zurich: EVZ-Verlag, 1962), 64–65 (all translations from this source are mine). By “evangelical,” Barth does not mean Protestant, but any form of theology which orients itself in light of the “evangel,” the good news of the covenant, which is the substance of Scripture and faith. Cf. Einführung, 11. 15. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (6th ed.; trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns; London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 65, 74; cited in Guretzki, Filioque, 66. 16. Barth, Romans, 74; cited in Guretzki, Filioque, 66 n. 61. 17. Barth, Einführung, 60. 18. Ibid., 60. 19. Ibid., 61. 1

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compared to an Israelite prophet.20 We noted at the beginning of this section that unless Childs is operating with a crass form of positivism in which the reality of God is simply an object present in the text to be accessed by anyone in possession of the right method, something is required in order to bridge the gap between the res witnessed to by the tradition and the interpreter of that tradition. Much of Childs’ language con¿rms that he was working with a similar conceptuality as the one outlined here. He often talks of both the Biblical tradents as well as their later interpreters responding to a “force” or “coercion” emanating from that text. He talks of fresh revelation coercing interpretation of the old, so that “when the interpreter moves from the reality of God manifested in action back to the text for further illumination of the divine plan, he or she is constrained to listen for a new song—a song that breaks forth from the same ancient sacred texts of Israel.”21 He can say that in light of fresh revelation, the earlier tradition—whether cultic, oral, or textual—was “infused…with the full ontological reality of God,” it “resonates with a fresh voice.”22 When Childs says that it “is only in the ¿nal form of the biblical text in which the normative history has reached an end that the full effect of this revelatory history can be perceived,”23 what can he mean by “effect” other than that the revelation itself—the ontological reality of God—has impacted the tradents and left its mark, generating a connection between form and content?

20. Childs, “Interpreting the Bible Amid Cultural Change,” Theology Today 54 (1997): 200–211. For a treatment of Barth and Childs see, for example, Driver, Brevard Childs, 82–93. The most explicit endorsement of Karl Barth’s doctrine of revelation comes in an unpublished paper delivered once in the 60s and again in 1989, where he brieÀy mentions Barth’s doctrine of the “three forms of the Word of God” (“Karl Barth: The Preacher’s Exegete”). He does not say much, except to note with enthusiasm that for Barth “The text is alive, it speaks.” In another unpublished transcript of a colloquium on Barth at Yale in 1969, Childs talks with admiration of Barth’s desire and indeed capacity “to go through the text, to the reality,” with the consequence that the text itself “becomes a transparency, that the walls that separate the Apostle from the reader are dissolved, and one then begins to confront the reality itself.” For Barth, “exegesis can never rest content with talking about the ‘Deuteronomic view of covenant’, or of ‘Paul’s concept of faith’. Rather the goal is to move from the witness to its content—to talk about covenant, and faith, the reality itself” (Childs, “Interpreter,” 30, 34). This all resonates strongly with Childs’ own understanding of theological interpretation. 21. Childs, “Nature of the Christian Bible,” 124. 22. Ibid., 124. 23. Childs, “Prophetic Literature,” 48. 1

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The Substance of Psalm 24

One of the great values of Childs’ commentary on Isaiah is the way in which he more clearly articulates his understanding that this actualistic, pneumatological and theocentric concept of revelation was the primary force at work in the development of Israelite tradition. He states, for example, that because the major force in the history of growth was the continued impact on the Jewish community of the reality of God mediated through its authoritative writings, it is a fundamental misunderstanding to attribute the development within the prophetic corpus merely to extrabiblical sociological or historical inÀuences.24

One exegetical example is his treatment of Isa 6:13 (“And though a tenth remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak, whose stump remains when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump”). According to Childs, this verse contains a jarring postexilic gloss. After the threat of unrelenting judgment—Israel is like a tree burnt to a stump—we suddenly read: “Holy seed is its stump.” This form of textual extension (Fortschreibung) “is a response to the coercion of the prophetic text on late scribal transmitters of the tradition.”25 Elsewhere Isaiah had spoken of a remnant and so the editors identi¿ed this stump with the remnant, for whom there is hope after judgement has taken place. “The force of the entire narrative of chapter 6, particularly in the larger context of chapters 1–12, strove for an exposition of the meaning of v. 13.”26 Thus, this act of retrojection is not the “tendentious reading back of a subsequent political agenda,” but is rather part of a process of canonical shaping that stems from a holistic reading of the larger prophetic corpus. The witness to God continues to grow in richness and understanding. This true subject matter is then often extended to earlier portions of Isaiah without attention to the age of its discovery, but rather only to the truth of its witness when measured 24. Childs, Isaiah, 265 (emphasis mine). In the same paragraph Childs talks of the forces of Scripture and history. See also Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29–30, for the work of the Spirit throughout the tradition-historical processes, including our present age. Michael Welker, “Sola Scriptura? The Authority of the Bible in Pluralistic Environments,” in A God So Near: Essays on Old Testament Theology in Honour of Patrick D. Miller (ed. Brent A. Strawn and Nancy R. Bowen; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 375–92, also talks of the reality of God leaving an impress on the form of the traditions: “The historical, the cultural, and the canonical weight of scripture are only a mirror and reÀection of the theological weight bestowed upon scripture by its content and object, by the living God” (383). 25. Childs, Isaiah, 58. 26. Ibid. 1

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according to its theological substance. Thus the portrayal of God’s rule in 2:1–4 and again in 4:2–6 resonates with elements of Isaiah’s vision of chapter 6 and is grounded in the reality of God’s eschatological rule, revealed to the prophet in chapter 6. Likewise, 2:6ff. also reverberates with the imagery of God’s glory, but here revealed in terror (2:21). The point to emphasize is that canonical shaping develops from a holistic wrestling with the subject matter of the biblical text, and as comprehension grows through encounter with the living God it begins to infuse the entire book with a truthful witness to the one story of God’s salvi¿c purpose with Israel.27

In this brief exposition we see the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical, of economy and ontology in Childs’ view of the nature of the Bible: throughout the complex process that gave us the “¿nal form,” it is the self-same God who both evoked the witnesses and continuously infused them in light of ongoing revelation, enabling prior tradition to become a transparency for future Spirit-¿lled interpreters to grasp the reality it struggled to mediate. One ¿nal brief comment must be made here concerning the “shape” of this continuing event of divine self-revelation, not only to better grasp its ultimate ontological grounding but also to prepare the way for my own appropriation of Childs’ approach in Part II. In short, this movement has a “Trinitarian grammar.” 28 As Alan Torrance points out, Barth’s doctrine of God as the condition of his own knowledge implies a theological ontology in which the one given to know is incorporated by the Spirit into God’s own eternal self-knowledge between the Father and the Son: [K]nowledge of God [is] a form of participation within the divine life, within God’s Self-knowledge into which we are taken as “secondary, subsequent subjects” (CD II/1, p. 181). The taking up of humanity into the “event” of God’s being is more than simply knowledge, however, it is humanity’s salvation—a salvation which is ful¿lment, “the supreme, suf¿cient, ¿nal and indestructible ful¿lment of being”.29

I will not follow this line of thinking further here, not least because Barth himself appears to have struggled with how to correlate God’s selfrevelation in time—the “economic Trinity” and his eternal being, the “immanent Trinity.” According to Guretzki, Barth initially correlated the Father, Son, and Spirit with “reality,” “Scriptural witness,” and “proclamation” respectively before, in a later re¿nement (or correction), describing the relations in “perichoretic” terms, seeing all three persons

1

27. Ibid., 59. 28. Torrance, “Trinity,” 75. 29. Ibid., 89.

40

The Substance of Psalm 24

present in each stage.30 Though signi¿cant for a theory of the ultimate nature of the canonical process and Scripture, these questions do not need to be answered here. What matters for now is simply that Childs, like Barth, assumed—usually implicitly—that the dynamic in which the production and reception of what came to be textualized Scripture took place within the power of God: it involved God witnessing to himself by means of himself, God being the object, subject, and condition of the witness. This Trinitarian theology was clearly beyond the horizon of the Biblical authors themselves. Yet it is arguable that it is a faithful rendition of the substance to which Scripture as a whole is pointing. As such, I believe it both possible and necessary to posit this Trinitarian “grammar” as an important hermeneutical framework in interpreting the ultimate coherence of Scripture (for which, see Part II below). In terms of the use of “emic” and “etic” above, perhaps we could argue that this Trinitarian pattern is a “derived etic”31 which helpfully functions to orient us in the “strange new world of the Bible.” 32

30. Guretzki, Filioque, Chapters 2 and 3. Gureztki offers a “generous” interpretation that tries to see Barth as supplementing an older view, but he does not feel it is likely. 31. For the phrase, see the discussion in Wu, “Emics and Etics,” 5. 32. Cf. McGlasson, Invitation, 193–94: “dogmatics begins with the doctrine of the Trinity in order to orient dogmatic reÀection to the God of the biblical witness from the outset and there to discover a God of glorious life and unconditional love.” McGlasson’s adoration of Childs is quite unparalleled in the secondary literature. Here he is in his own words: “The third decisive inÀuence [on my approach] is the biblical work of Brevard S. Childs. I attended Yale Divinity School primarily in order to learn directly from Childs, and my eager expectation was met by an even greater reality. It is now clear that the work of Childs on canon amounts to nothing less than a brilliant new vision of scripture without parallel in the history of the church, though deeply rooted in the church’s tradition of reading scripture. Every theologian worthy of the name has turned directly to scripture as the one source for the knowledge of God. Where else does the church learn to know Jesus Christ? However, never before has the church been closer to the shape and subject matter of scripture than in Childs’s work on canon. The confession of canon was the ¿rst and foundational creedal af¿rmation of the ancient church; yet not until Childs’s work have the full implications of that confession been so crystal clear and inviting for reÀection. Once again, a new era has begun. Theology can never again go back behind Childs when it wrestles with scripture, nor can it count as genuine Christian theology unless it sees with precision the full force of the vision he articulates. The future of dogmatic theology lies with realizing the connection of the discipline with the Bible, and that connection depends upon a ¿rm theological grasp of the issue of canon. The confession of canon is an ontological necessity for dogmatic inquiry and the proper beginning of all valid theological reÀection” (14–15, emphasis mine). 1

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Before moving on to discuss the hermeneutical implications of this network of concerns, it would be helpful to highlight the distinct pro¿le of Childs’ approach, now with the reality of the Trinity factored in, by comparing his approach to that of a close friend and colleague who in many respects shares Childs’ methodological commitments and yet whose own approach to the Bible has taken a radically different turn, namely the German form critic Erhard Gerstenberger.

1

Chapter 5

RES AND FORM CRITICISM IN THE WORK OF CHILDS AND GERSTENBERGER

Erhard Gerstenberger, like Childs, af¿rms that the texts of the Bible are documents of genuine human interpersonal communication and as such cannot be extracted from their sociological context. Again, similarly to Childs, Gerstenberger asserts that in “interpreting texts we must consider immediately the reality behind the text,” for, he tells us, “Text without reality does not exist.”1 In order to access this dimension of the text, both of these scholars draw on form criticism, which pays attention to the function of the various forms of tradition within a sociological context. The difference in their approach does not consist in their methodological starting point—Gerstenberger and Childs were close colleagues for ¿ve years at Yale (1959–1964) before Childs turned to focus on the “¿nal form”—but in their dogmatic starting point, i.e. their understanding of the ultimate content and context of the tradition. Gerstenberger’s perspective is that the major force at work in the editorial growth of the tradition is the human existential question of identity and the regulation of society. Because this is a general human phenomenon that can be observed in many cultures, he concludes that “the formation of the Torah was a very normal process of text production. A particular group…used older materials in an updated form in order to articulate its own existence, conduct worship services, educate young people, administer justice, and so on.”2 In light of this ultimate content, the “reality” within which the traditions are situated is their Sitz im Leben des Volkes. Though Gerstenberger may share Childs’ convictions about diversity within the tradition, in light of his identi¿cation of the primary force at work with the human attempt to understand God 1. Erhard Gerstenberger, “Canon Criticism and the Meaning of ‘Sitz im Leben’,” in Canon, Theology, and Old Testament Interpretation: Essays in Honour of Brevard S. Childs (ed. Gene M. Tucker, David L. Petersen, and Robert R. Wilson; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), 20–31, here 30. I am grateful for the time Gerstenberger took to discuss this issue with me as well as his review of this section. 2. Ibid., 25.

5. Res and Form Criticism

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(rather than the human response to a God that stands over against it and de¿nes it), it is logical that he denies the possibility of a “biblical theology.”3 Furthermore, this community is a phenomenon of the past: we are not part of this community, we have a different knowledge base and our existential needs are not the same. Thus, if we are to utilize the tradition in the present, our rule of faith (our “canon,” as Childs would put it) must be our understanding of “the structure of contemporary reality.” This is the Sache that orients our Sachkritik, that gives us “some sort of orientation as to the path and goal of Biblical exegesis. The exegete and his or her community pose their problems, ask their questions, open their lives in the face of a God who is ready to help now.”4 Gerstenberger’s conclusion is inevitable: “[W]e have to ¿nd our canon in our time.”5 Gerstenberger’s existential and sociological framework is clearly etic, yet I have argued that Childs, too, works with an etic framework. Our grasp of reality never remains the same, so that a purely emic perspective is impossible.6 Each generation must formulate anew the question of the nature of the reality within which human culture itself has its being, holding our construals in tension with the phenomena before us. The difference our answer to this broader question makes to our interpretation of the parts can be illustrated by looking at the way Gerstenberger’s description of the form, function, and Sitz im Leben of the formation of Scripture in the post-exilic period resonates within a Childsian framework. According to Gerstenberger: The focal point of all activities probably was the assembly of the congregation. Here all vital concerns met, and here the authoritative will of Yahweh was experienced in the reading of scripture. Divine instructions for the members’ life, admonitions, chastisement, absolution, and comfort occurred in the assembly. Thereafter, the Word of God accompanied the members into their daily routines, being remembered, restudied, and rehearsed whenever necessary.7 3. Note the plural in the title of his book: Theologies in the Old Testament (trans. John Bowden; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2002). 4. Gerstenberger, “Canon,” 26. 5. Ibid. 6. Even in terms of the Bible’s own witness there is a growth in knowledge of Yhwh, so that those coming to earlier testimony (e.g. the Patriarchal traditions) in light of later revelation (e.g. the Mosaic traditions) must read those traditions in a “fuller” light. 7. Gerstenberger, “Canon,” 25. For Barth’s special sympathy for form criticism, see Bächli, Barth, 12, 20, 25, 94, and 324. Diem, another “Barthian theologian,” also draws heavily on the logic of “proclamation” as a “function” of Scripture recovered by form criticism (Dogmatics).

1

44

The Substance of Psalm 24

Childs can af¿rm everything that Gerstenberger has said here. The only difference is that he takes Gerstenberger’s language literally. For Childs, Gerstenberger’s claim that Israel “experienced” “the authoritative will of Yahweh” is more than a phenomenological description of what Israel said about what it thought had happened, it is a true description of the actual content of that experience. There really is a God, this God really is Yahweh (and not another God), he really did reveal his will in the context of the community of faith, and this act of divine revelation really did “accompany” the Jews as they went from Scripture back to the world. But precisely because Childs takes Gerstenberger literally here, he cannot adopt Gerstenberger’s conclusion that “the formation of the Torah was a very normal process.” A tradition-historical process generated by the fact of the self-revelation of the named God of Israel is hardly a phenomenon like any other. It also does not follow that Israel’s question about either God or its own identity is the decisive force at work in the process, but rather God’s question to us. If we take Gerstenberger’s words literally, the “reality” of the text can only be the Sitz im Leben des Volkes (i.e. the “community of faith”) in a derivative sense. According to its own testimony, the Volk understood itself to be responding to a living reality other than itself, one that called it into being, sustained it and guided it. Understood now in light of our “etic” Trinitarian framework, it is likely that Childs would say that the true context of both Scripture and community is their Sitz im Leben Gottes, both economically in terms of his plan of salvation and immanently in terms of God’s own eternal inner-dialogue.8 This is the true reality “behind the text,” without which the text “does not exist.” In the light of our hermeneutical discussion above, this would mean that it is this reality that ought to provide us with “orientation as to the path and goal of biblical exegesis.” It is time to turn to the hermeneutical implications.

1

8. On Scripture as being God’s speech-act, see Webster, Holy Scripture, 5.

Chapter 6

HERMENEUTICAL IMPLICATIONS

I believe I have made a case for factoring the reality of God—a God with a particular modus operandi—as a constitutive element into Childs’ understanding of the canonical process by which Scripture has come to us as well as the ongoing process by which the faithful continue to encounter God within the words of the text. Childs’s apprehension of this divine dimension led him to draw a wealth of hermeneutical implications for how modern scholars should begin to penetrate these texts in order to grasp—or be grasped by—their ultimate subject matter. This is the subject of this ¿nal chapter in Part I, and it will set the stage for the remainder of this book, which is dedicated to apprehending the res mediated by the verbum of Ps 24. In what follows, I will ¿rst establish in §6.1 the principle that, for Childs, theological exegesis always involves a continuous struggle to perceive the res within the verbum. In Childs’ words: constitutive of the theological task “is the critical tension between the form and the substance of the church’s witness in scripture which calls for a continual struggle for truthful interpretation.”1 In light of this basic principle, Childs outlined a dialectical, multi-level approach to Scripture which involves a continuous movement between part and whole in light of the one subject matter. This is treated in §6.2 (where we will also look at the questions of “which canon?” and “which text?” in §§6.2.1 and 6.2.2 respectively). Finally, the pneumatological basis of the entire approach also brings with it a set of hermeneutical considerations concerning the proper stance and context of the interpreter. This is treated in §6.3.

1. Childs, Biblical Theology, 67. This concept of “struggle” is key to Childs’ hermeneutics. Note the title of his study of the history of Christian interpretation of Isaiah: The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture.

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The Substance of Psalm 24

6.1. The Tension Between Verbum and Res Childs believes that in order for exegesis to be true to its subject matter, the interpreter must constantly attempt to move from the witness (verbum) to the reality (res). The reality is the goal of exegesis. The challenge is to make this move while fully respecting the speci¿c contours of the witness to the reality. An overhasty rush to the referent which treads roughshod over the instituted means of its mediation will lead to its perversion and ultimately captivity to a human agenda rather than the agenda of God. This tension between witness and reality can be illustrated in the history of the interpretation of the tradition. We turn ¿rst to an example provided by Childs of inner-Biblical exegesis, noting a continuous “thematic” (rather than “midrashic”) orientation consonant with the theocentric thrust of the tradition. We then look at the connection between this thematic focus and a later traditional Christian exegetical approach known as “allegory,” a mode of reading of which Childs was cautiously appreciative.2 Finally, we will look at how, despite this legitimate history of theo-refential reading, the church must also bene¿t from the necessary check provided by other modes of reading that continuously call our interpretations to account in light of the plain sense of the text. Interest in the substance of Scripture means interest in the “particular realia of salvation history and the transcendent God.”3 Elliott’s use of the word “realia,” here, it seems to me, is largely synonymous with Childs’ identi¿cation of a consistent thematic interest in those strands of Biblical and inner-Biblical interpretation that are most adequate to the material they are interpreting. This can be illustrated in his analysis of the story of the manna and quail in Exod 16:1–36. At the level of the composition of the story itself, Childs notes an anachronism: the jar of manna is to be placed “before the Testimony” (v. 34), even though Israel has not yet arrived at Sinai and the Ark has not yet been built. In terms of literary history of the book, this tension provides evidence for the presence of various originally independent traditions which have only latterly been brought together by an editor. In terms of the purpose of this particular editorial move, however, Childs insists that the editor’s desire was to make a theological point: “A jar of 2. See, for example, Childs, “Allegory and Typology within Biblical Interpretation,” in Bible as Christian Scripture, 299–312. 3. This is Mark Elliott’s way of describing Childs’ understanding of the “subject matter” of Scripture (“Childs and the History of Interpretation,” in Richards and Seitz, eds., Christian Scripture, 119–36, here 135). 1

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manna which is the sign of God’s sustaining mercy is kept alongside the tablets of the law… [T]he point of the text focuses on the testimony that the manna and the tablets belong together before God. In New Testament terminology, the gospel and the law cannot be separated.”4 The narrative framework of the book of Exodus as a whole in which the Ark is only built after the reception of the law at Sinai is certainly an important part of the book’s message, yet here we see another dimension intersecting and interrupting that narrative sequence: the nature of God’s activity in history as gospel and law. A “thematic” consideration has interrupted the narrative.5 This thematic mode of appropriation continued within the broader canon. Deuteronomy 8 contrasts the manna with bread and suggests that Israel learned humility through the eating of this food. The Priestly writer emphasizes the exact matching of the individual need. For the Psalmist, the failure to respond to the gift of manna provides a major testimony to Israel's unbelief which leads to judgment.6 Again, the New Testament continues this basic stance by avoiding the midrashic method, which attempts to “harmonize dif¿culties and render the material pliable for fresh practical application.”7 Childs explains the contrast as follows: It is theologically signi¿cant to note that basically the New Testament does not follow this lead in its handling of the manna stories, although it does make considerable use of midrashic tradition. Rather, it ¿nds its warrant in the Old Testament for selecting certain themes from the variety and elaborating on these. The gift of manna is above all a gracious sign of God’s care which sustains a rebellious, murmuring people and seeks to point them to an apprehension of the real meaning of provision through this divine favor. Because this selective process already operates within the Old Testament, the New Testament approach does not provide a sharp contrast, as is frequently the case; rather, it extends and develops the direction taken by Deuteronomy and the Psalter. Even John’s use of the tradition, which marks the furthest extension of the Old Testament in the direction of Philo’s exegesis, begins with themes which are ¿rmly anchored in the Old Testament. Indeed, his christological interpretation moves far beyond the Old Testament text but retains the central theme of ‘heavenly bread which brings life to those who eat.8 4. Childs, Exodus, 291–92. 5. This kind of inversion provides a check on over-emphasizing “narrative” as the exclusive hermeneutical framework for appropriating Scripture theologically. Childs often talks of the tradition’s regular disregard for chronology as events are arranged on a “qualitative” rather than chronological basis. 6. Childs, Exodus, 303. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. Childs has argued elsewhere that the Old Testament only contains a form of “proto-midrash” and not the full-blown method known from Rabbinic Judaism 1

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The Substance of Psalm 24

Again, this thematic focus was continued in later post-Biblical interpretation: “The manna stories were frequently used by the early church Fathers as a homiletical vehicle for a great variety of themes,” though often lacking originality in Childs’ judgment.9 The ¿rst real break in this tradition came in the high Middle Ages, when Jews started wrestling with the question of whether the manna was a natural phenomenon or not. The issue was taken over by the Church after the Reformation and continued until the nineteenth century.10 It appears that there is a direct analogy in Childs’ thought between this “thematic” approach, which attempts to grasp the “realia” of the divine economy by means of concrete traditions, and the traditional Christian method of ¿gurative (allegorical, typological) exegesis. This approach “¿nds meaning by moving to another level beyond the textual. It seeks to discern meaning by relating it referentially to a substance (res), a rule of faith, or a hidden eschatological event.”11 This contrasts with midrash, which “works at discerning meaning through the interaction of two written texts”12 and through the interaction generates a kind of “imaginative universe” without a clear interest in external reality. “The technique of midrash was basically incompatible to Christian faith because the Biblical text itself was never assigned the role of a reality-creating medium. Instead the Biblical text was always regarded as a vehicle of the Spirit who directed its readers to the reality of the exalted Christ as the transforming power for Christian living.”13 “It is for this reason that allegory or typology, when properly understood and practised, remains an essential part of Christian interpretation and reÀects a different understanding of how Biblical reality is rendered than, say, midrash does

(see Childs, “Midrash”). He is insistent that the New Testament is not a “midrash” on the Old Testament (e.g. Biblical Theology, 211). For example, in relation to the hermeneutics of Hebrews, he can say, “When that divine presence is identi¿ed with Christ ([ch. 11], v. 26), the author of Hebrews is not simply offering a Christian midrash on the biblical text, but he is seeking to grapple on an ontological level with the christological problem of Christ’s role as the eternal mediator of God’s redemptive will in the history of Israel and the world” (Biblical Theology, 617). 9. Childs, Exodus, 297. 10. For the details, see ibid., 297–99. 11. Childs, “Critique of Recent Intertextual Canonical Interpretation,” ZAW 115/2 (2003): 173–84, here 182–83. See also Childs, Struggle, 299–322, and Childs, “Allegory.” This insight already distinguished Childs from Hans Frei in 1969. See their dialogue in “Interpreter,” 56. 12. Childs, “Intertextual,” 182–83. 13. Ibid., 671. 1

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within Judaism.”14 In §6.2 below we will see how Childs attempts to develop a ruled method of reading by which the Scripture’s sensus literalis is enabled (under the conditions outlined in §6.3) to “resonate in a new and creative fashion when read from the vantage point of a fuller understanding of Christian truth.”15 At the same time, this legitimate and textually warranted interest in the sensus spiritualis must always remain bound to the plain sense of the text. This sense may be “extended through ¿guration” but its integrity must not be threatened,16 for this sense is the “critical norm…on how the tradition functions authoritatively.”17 Thus having distanced himself from midrash as a viable means of Christian exegesis, Childs af¿rms that the dangers inherent in allegory mean that interpretation can never ignore the critique of the synagogue. Childs characterizes the hermeneutical tension between these two communities as follows: “Where the Jews were saying, read the text! read the text!, the Christians said, there’s something behind the text.”18 The Church needs to listen to both, form and substance, and that is part of the ongoing “mystery of Israel.”19 “For the Christian church the continuing paradox of faith lies in its encounter through the Jewish Scriptures with the selfsame divine presence which it confesses to have found in the face of Jesus Christ.”20 No wonder Childs characterizes Christian exegesis as a “struggle”! Childs provides an interesting illustration of the dangers of rushing too quickly to “reality” without attending to the written word by comparing some of the worst moments of medieval allegory, which regularly fell 14. Ibid., 87–88. 15. Ibid., Ibid., 87. For some excellent considerations of Childs’ hermeneutics in light of the dogmatic categories of the immanent/economic Trinity, Christology, and the divine economy, see Rowe, “God Is a Hermeneutic,” Gignilliat, “A Shared Reality,” and Collett, “A Tale of Two Testaments” in Richards and Seitz, eds., Christian Scripture, 155–70, 171–84, and 185–220, respectively. 16. Childs, Biblical Theology, 88. 17. Childs, “The Sensus Literalis of Scripture: An Ancient and Modern Problem,” in Beiträge zur alttestamentlichen Theologie: Festschrift für Walther Zimmerli zum 70. Geburtstag (ed. Herbert Donner, Robert Hanhart, and Rudolf Smend; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977), 80–93, here 89. 18. Childs, “Interpreter,” 61. 19. Driver’s treatment of the “mystery of Israel” greatly aided my understanding of this theme in Childs’ thought (see Childs, 184–208). 20. Childs, “Does the Old Testament Witness to Jesus Christ?,” in Evangelium, Schriftauslegung, Kirche: Festschrift für Peter Stuhlmacher zum 65. Geburtstag (ed. Jostein Adna and Scott J. Hafemann; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), 57–64, here 64. 1

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into this trap, with some of the more incautious moments of modern historical-critical exegesis, which is equally interested in the “reality” behind the text, even if it de¿nes the reality in entirely different terms.21 Childs lists the parallel dangers as follows:22 1. The medieval application of the various senses (literal, mystical, moral, anagogical) often threatened to destroy the signi¿cance of the literal sense. In the same way, historical criticism threatens to destroy the integrity of the literal sense when it merely functions as a window to a historical reality behind the text. 2. Just as within (bad) medieval allegory all control of exegesis was lost through the abuse of the multiple senses, critical Biblical interpretation can become a speculative enterprise as the ¿xed literary parameters of the plain sense dissolve before hypothetical reconstructions. 3. The canonical process which shaped the text to function as scripture for a community of faith is denigrated, as it is now assumed that there are other avenues to truth beside the tradition. The medieval parallel is seen in the tension between text and tradition. Finally, an insurmountable gap arises between the historical sense, now fully anchored in the past, and the search for its present relevance for the modern age. The modern parallel is seen in the attempt by some Christian theologians to abandon all concern with the literal sense of the text in order to construct a relevant theology. How, then, should the exegete deal with this tension between form and content? Consonant with the logic of the verbum as a formal medium of a living, personal res requirements for exegesis include both a formal, text-oriented procedure as well as the acquisition of a subjective stance. We look at each in turn.

21. Cf. Childs, “Sensus Literalis.” See also James Barr’s response, “The Literal, the Allegorical, and Modern Biblical Scholarship,” JSOT 44 (1989): 3–17. Childs responded in turn in “Critical ReÀections on James Barr’s Understanding of the Literal and the Allegorical,” JSOT 46 (1990): 3–9, to which Barr had the ¿nal say in “Allegory and Historicism,” JSOT 69 (1996): 105–20. 22. Childs, “Sensus Literalis,” 90–92. 1

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6.2. A Multiple-Level Approach to Scripture Childs calls for “a single method of interpretation which takes seriously both the different dimensions constituting the text as well as distinct contexts in which the text functions.”23 He has in mind three levels that must always be held together as part of an integrated whole, although there is no ¿xed point of entry. The movement is circular, encompassing “both the movement from text to reality as well as from reality to the text.”24 1. Thus, one avenue of access is the discrete voice of each testament, heard in its own right.25 This requires attention to historical, literary, and canonical contexts. In classic terminology, this means reading the text for its sensus literalis. Such a move, however, does not involve bracketing out theological questions because, as we have seen, it is the nature of the text to talk about and respond to God. 2. Another avenue of access takes into account the whole of the twotestamental Bible, perceived as a combined witness to one God. A relationship of content is pursued by means of structural similarities and dissimilarities where care is taken not to fuse the contents of each witness. The results should not contradict the literal/historical reading but rather extend it.26 “Once again, a theological relationship is pursued both on the level of the textual witness and on that of the discrete matter (res) of the two collections.”27 3. The ¿nal entrance operates on the basis of the Christian confession that the Bible constitutes a theological unity, despite its two-testamental division. Here, the full reality of the subject matter of scripture, gained from a close hearing of each separate testament, is explored. This stage, however, is not a ¿nal step. True to the logic of the hermeneutical spiral, we should then return 23. Childs, “Witness,” 61. A similar analysis can be found in Biblical Theology, 379–83. Signi¿cantly, these consideration are located in a chapter about the identity of God (see Rowe, “God Is a Hermeneutic,” for an exposition of this fact). 24. Childs, Biblical Theology, 381. 25. For Childs’ defence of the need for Christians to respect the voice of the Old Testament in its own right, see the sub-section “Canonical Shaping and the Two Testaments of the Christian Bible” in his Biblical Theology. 26. Cf. Chapter 1 of Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). See also Childs, Biblical Theology, 14. 27. Childs, “Witness,” 62. 1

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to the text in the light of the “full-blown reality of God” and allow it to affect our perception, yet not in such a manner as to drown out the historical and literary readings.28 This is the point in which dogmatic theology can ful¿l its hermeneutical function of helping us better appreciate the contours of the text at hand in its depth dimension.29 Such a multi-level reading of Scripture is highly unusual within academic Biblical exegesis, whether confessional or not, and will inevitably meet resistance from various quarters and for various reasons. Given that “actions speak louder than words,” my response here will be con¿ned to simply attempting to put the theory into practice, in the hope that actual exegesis will illustrate both the viability as well as fruitfulness of this approach to reading. For more on how I propose to do this, see Chapter 7 in Part II below. For now, however, there are two issues of a more material nature that ought to be touched upon before ¿nally outlining Childs’ understanding of the proper stance that the interpreter should adopt (§6.3). These concern both the textual version to be interpreted (Masoretic text? A reconstructed autograph? The LXX or Peshitta? etc.) as well as the outer limits of the Christian canon (i.e. the narrower “Protestant” canon or the broader “Catholic” one?).30 6.2.1. Which Canon? Concerning scope, Childs sees two principles at work. On the one hand, the establishment of the scope of the narrower canon was concerned to preserve the purity of the witness. The principle for selection was the decision already made by the community that serves as God’s special vehicle of revelation: the Jewish people. “[T]o use a different collection of Old Testament writings from those accepted by the Jews appeared as a threat to the theological continuity of the people of God.”31 Childs 28. Childs, Biblical Theology, 381–82. 29. Childs traces the hermeneutical function of dogmatic theology back to John Calvin (Biblical Theology, 49–50). 30. For a helpful overview of the technical details within the perspective being defended here, see Christopher R. Seitz, “Two Testaments and the Failure of One Tradition History,” in Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1989), 35–48, and especially J. Ross Wagner, “The Septuagint and the ‘Search for the Christian Bible’,” in Scripture’s Doctrine and Theology’s Bible: How the New Testament Shapes Christian Thought (ed. Markus Bockmuehl and Alan J. Torrance; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2008), 17–28. 31. Childs, Biblical Theology, 65. 1

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coordinates this “purer” canon with the category “word.” On the other hand, the establishment of the parameters of a broader canon was concerned to emphasize the catholicity of the Christian faith, which was expressed in an unbroken continuity of sacred tradition from its risen Lord to his church.32 Childs coordinates this broader canon with the category “tradition.” The tension between these competing approaches mirrors the tension between form and content, sensus literalis and sensus spiritualis, verbum and res. On the one hand, one must acknowledge the fragmentary nature of all revelation. In hope that God will act, one reads to grasp the reality witnessed to, starting from within the “inner parameters” of the narrower canon, which Childs associates with “form,” and moves towards to the outer parameters of the broader canon and church tradition, which Childs associates with “substance.” Childs understands the narrower canon to be a sphere in which one may be con¿dent that this is the place where our theology may be critiqued by the norm of the Word. Yet text and referent are distinct and Scripture as critical norm is insuf¿cient in practice to identify the fullness of the latter, hence the need for the catholicity of church tradition, with its af¿rmation of a broader yet more ambiguous canon and creeds, which function to guide our grasp of the substance of the Word. Within this dialectic, the exegete “searches” for the Christian Bible, as the “hearing of God’s Word is repeatedly con¿rmed by the Holy Spirit through its resonance with the church’s Christological rule-of-faith.”33 6.2.2. Which Version? The same dialectic is found regarding the relation between the Masoretic Text and the various textual versions and translations. Given the presence of a signi¿cant interpretative element to scribal activity, Childs understands the history of textual transmission to be part of the canonical process.34 Nevertheless, consonant with his desire to attend to form and function, Childs also notes a distinction between an earlier and a later phase. The earlier phase was characterized by the freedom with which editors could shape the literature with great hermeneutical effect; the 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 67. 34. Childs, Introduction, 523. Cf., for example, Arie van der Kooij, “Zur Frage der Exegese im LXX-Psalter. Ein Beitrag zu Verhältnisbestimmung zwischen Original und Übersetzung,” in Septuaginta und seine Tochterübersetzungen (ed. Anneli Aejmelaeus and Udo Quast; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 366–80. For a conservative evangelical take on this issue, see Bruce K. Waltke, “Aims of OT Textual Criticism,” WTJ 51 (1989): 93–108, especially 100. 1

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later phase is characterized by a different concern, namely that of textual preservation. This latter phase was “focused on preserving and maintaining the traditions rather than creating them.”35 Childs argues that in the ¿rst-century C.E. the proto-Masoretic text had been established by the Pharisaic-rabbinic party as a norm over against tradition.36 This is the Jewish community that has survived the destruction of the second temple and, given that Childs is committed to preserving the “ontological unity of the people of God,” he respects this community’s decision. As such, he suggests that the church’s “canonical text” be that which lies behind the Masoretic text: the proto-Masoretic text, that “of¿cial Hebrew text of the Jewish community which had reached a point of stabilization in the ¿rst century AD, thus all but ending its long history of Àuidity.”37 Nevertheless, as with the “catholic canon,” so with the versions: the various translations and recensions were often the result of the coercion of the broader theological matrix that constituted the interpreters’ horizon, and as such may provide pointers for the text’s appropriation.38 As Childs puts it: there is a “dialectical relationship of text and canon which seeks to relate what was written with what was heard.”39 Finally, in light of what has been said about the “event” nature of revelation and the in¿nite qualitative gap between the world of the res and our own world, the successful interpreter must do more than oscillate between “the outer boundaries” of tradition and the “inner boundaries” of Word; he or she must acquire the proper stance within God’s economy of revelation. To this we now turn in the ¿nal section of Part I. In the opening of Part II I will outline my own manner of putting these principles into practice. 35. Childs, Introduction, 95. 36. Here Childs differs to the position of Neusner, who says that Judaism did not make this kind of distinction. Cf. Driver, Brevard Childs, 184–93. In defence of Childs’ position concerning the period in question, see Sue Groom, Linguistic Analysis of Biblical Hebrew (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2003), 91. 37. Childs, Introduction, 100. As of 1943, this is close to the of¿cial Catholic position; cf. Gunild Brunert, Psalm 102 im Kontext des Vierten Psalmenbuches (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1996), 80. Emanuel Tov points out that the term “Masoretic text” is “an abstract unit reÀected in various sources which differ from each other in many details” (Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible [2d ed.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001], 22). 38. Goldingay, for example, refers to the versions in order to see “whether they raised questions about exegesis or text” (Psalms 1, 12). Note Waltke’s account of Justin Martyr’s manner of dealing with differences between the MT and Greek translation (“Textual Criticism,” 60). 39. Childs, New Testament, 522–23. Cf. Wagner, “Septuagint,” and Seitz, “Two Testaments.” 1

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6.3. Acquiring the Proper Stance As for Barth (§4.2), so for Childs, “the interpreter’s fuller grasp of God’s reality…is…a response to a living God who graciously lets himself be known. Much of the success of such an exegesis depends on how well God’s presence has been understood.”40 This event cannot be controlled by a method, nor can the Spirit be conjured up. Nevertheless, as we have touched upon above, there is a noetic structure to revelation, “a logic within the Christian rule of faith.” Childs identi¿es ¿ve pointers which he garners from a review of those moments in the history of Christian exegesis in which the Bible was felt to come alive and radiate with a new power:41 1. The Bible must be regarded as the main vehicle for encountering the living God. “To speak of moving beyond the Bible always signals a return to the wilderness and a loss of divine blessing.”42 2. The Bible accrues its proper authority when it is read and celebrated in the community of the church. That means that the Bible must be read as addressing issues of life and death, as a guide for faith and practice, and as a critical theological norm. 3. Faithful interpretation should be able to identify a “family resemblance” with all past interpreters of “genuine understanding and insight” (Childs names Augustine and Bernard, Luther and Calvin, Pascal and Wesley, Kierkegaard and Kähler). “The likeness arises from the serious encounter with the selfsame God who shapes obedient response into Christian likeness.”43 In his Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture, Childs identi¿ed the following six constitutive features: Scripture is authoritative, has a literal and a spiritual sense, it consists of two testaments, is divinely and humanly authored, has a Christological content, and has a dialectical understanding of history.44 40. Childs, Biblical Theology, 382. 41. Childs, “Cultural Change,” 210–11. 42. Ibid., 210. 43. Ibid. See Elliott, “History of Interpretation,” for a discussion of Childs’ approach to this subject. Elliott makes many important and nuanced observations. However, I feel that he has still not picked up on the full signi¿cance of Childs’ language of “family resemblance.” As is made clear in the quote above, one should expect an almost “genetic” similarity across time given the self-same identity of the source of these disparate acts of theological exegesis. The similarity is grounded ontologically. 44. In my ¿rst attempt to understand Childs, I structured his thought in terms of these six constitutive features in order to illustrate how his canonical approach 1

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4. Faithful reÀection also demands faithful action. “Where there is true understanding of the Scriptures, by necessity, there arises an imperative for evangelism and mission, a care for the impoverished and suffering.”45 5. Finally, the function of the Holy Spirit as a continuing guide in faith means that understanding must grow and be renewed. “Our understanding of the Bible can never be static. Its pages continue to radiate fresh guidance into the knowledge of God and his Son, Jesus Christ.”46 We have now traced Childs’ understanding of the nature of Israelite tradition, both in its human and divine dimensions, along with the hermeneutical implications he derived from this approach. The question of how I will appropriate this ambitious programme in my exegesis of Ps 24 will now be addressed in Chapter 7 at the head of Part II.

belongs to the same pattern. See Philip Sumpter, “Brevard Childs as Critical and Faithful Exegete,” The Princeton Theological Review 14, no. 38 (2008): 95–116. Online: http://www.princetontheologicalreview.org/issues_pdf/38.pdf. 45. Childs, “Cultural Change,” 211 46. Ibid. For a treatment of this issue within the context of Old Testament theology, see Childs, Old Testament Theology, 41. 1

Part II

PSALM 24: ENTERING THE DIALECTIC

57

Chapter 7

A CANONICAL APPROACH TO PSALM 24

7.1. The Nature of the Task As should be clear in light of Part I, Childs is not so much proposing a method of interpretation as a particular stance vis-à-vis a phenomenon described in terms of its historical characteristics (the verbum) as well as the ultimate reality within which it subsists, to which it points, and of which it is a vehicle (the res). In short, Childs’ interpretation of the verbum was constrained, to a degree, by the question of human intentionality (whereby he spoke of a spectrum of intentionality, all united by a common res yet pointing to it in varying ways). These texts are “kerygmatic” in that they “witness” to a divine reality beyond themselves and they are “canonical” in that they do so authoritatively in order to shape future generations of the faith in the truth of God. This witness has a diachronic dimension in that it is multi-layered, yet it also has a synchronic dimension, in that this layering consisted in a hermeneutical recalibration of earlier tradition in light of a theological critique of the content of that prior tradition, itself garnered from a later and fuller understanding of God, the res of the tradition. In addition to this, the divine reality himself is not only the object of the verbum’s witness, but also its subject, being directly involved in both its production and its capacity to continue rendering its function for each new generation of interpreters. This involvement generates a unity that goes beyond the horizon of each individual tradent of the tradition. It also renders possible a unity within the history of faithful interpretation. Finally, this res has a concrete, Trinitarian shape. He is the eternal Bundesgeschehen (“Covenant event”), to use Barth’s expression,1 who has opened himself into created time in order to bring humanity into that communion. 1. “The object of theological perception” is the “covenantal event” (Barth, Einführung, 220). On the appropriateness of this category as a description of God’s being, see Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology. Vol. 1, The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 222: §13:VI, 221–23. In answer to the question, “What kind of being does God have as the one God?,” Jenson claims that God is an

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The hermeneutical implications are that we should focus on the ¿nal form of the text as a fuller rendition of reality fragmentarily testi¿ed to in earlier levels, in dialogue with the broader Biblical tradition (“Word”) on the presupposition of ontological unity, as well as with the history of Christian interpretation and dogmatic reÀection (“Tradition”), on the presupposition that here, too, God’s voice was faithfully heard in the exegesis of Scripture. At the same time, the would-be theological exegete must be an active participant within the broader concerns of the divine economy, within which exegesis ¿nds its true raison d’être (§6.3). In Part II I will adopt Part I as my working hypothesis. My goal is to demonstrate that this kind of framework can increase one’s “reader competence” and thus serve as an aid for progressing along the hermeneutical spiral towards the reality witnessed to by the text.2 At the same time, it should be made clear that I am not attempting to read Ps 24 as Childs himself might have read it. Childs’ contribution is only to have provided a framework. Method in Biblical study as well as systematic theological formulation are constantly developing, so that it is impossible and undesirable for later generations of scholars to attempt simply to recapitulate the modes of reading of their forebears. The ¿rst great challenge to such an enterprise is the enormity of its scope. Christopher B. Hays correctly summarizes the dif¿culty as follows: The intellectual entrance fee for writing good theological exegesis must be very steep. If Childs or his heirs want to claim an elevated status for their project, that ambition should come with an even higher standard of training and preparation than “mere” historical-philological scholarship. Childs certainly met any standard that anyone could set, but not every theological interpreter does… [T]here are few who can and will ever master all of the necessary skills. It may be that the array of tools

event (“God is what happens between Jesus and his Father in their Spirit…God is what happens to Jesus and the world”), a person (“As triune…all his acts cohere to make the one act that he personally is”), a decision, and a conversation (“Language is the possibility of historical being; the word as address and response is its actuality”). 2. John Barton, Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1984), 11. Barton is working with a very different de¿nition of the nature of the “reality” in which the traditions consist (cf. the comparison between Childs and Gerstenberger in Chapter 5), but his description of the hermeneutical spiral is still valid. A helpful appropriation of the theory of the hermeneutical spiral within a theological context is provided by Walter Moberly, who exegetes the Emmaus road pericope from the gospel according to Luke in “Christ in All the Scriptures? The Challenge of Reading the Old Testament as Christian Scripture,” JTI 1 (2007): 79–100. 1

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one needs to conduct theological biblical criticism is so extensive that canonical criticism is not really a young scholar’s game. How then could theological exegesis be carried out without requiring one person to master both biblical studies and theology?3

I would like to believe that the kind of exegesis that Childs demanded is not an impossibility and that as theologians and theological exegetes continue to reÀect upon the “shape of the faculty,”4 scholars with Childs’ comprehensive vision will not remain a rare species. Nevertheless, as a “young scholar,” I recognize my limits and do not claim that the piece of canonical exegesis that follows is the de¿nitive answer to the question of the substance of Ps 24. My goal is more tentative. Part II intends to demonstrate what an integrated, cross-disciplinary interpretation along the lines sketched out in Part I may look like, and I hope that those among my readers who are specialists in the various ¿elds touched upon will be generous in their critique. My emphasis here is on the potential coherence that can be achieved between the various ¿elds as they orient themselves around the single text of Ps 24. My claim is that Childs’ thesis as an outer framework along with the speci¿c contributions of the scholars I draw upon can help us see this coherence and may therefore help specialists communicate more effectively across disciplinary boundaries in a united effort to achieve a single goal: the illumination of the subject matter of the Biblical text. 7.2. The Structure of the Presentation In Part I we have seen that a major component of theological exegesis is to maintain a critical tension between witness and reality, moving between the two dialogically, allowing the former to point to the latter but also allowing the latter to “infuse” the former, expanding its plain 3. Christopher B. Hays, “ ‘Bard Called the Tune: Whither Theological Exegesis in the Post-Childs Era?,” JTI 4 (2010): 139–51, here 151. See H. G. M. Williamson’s similar comments in his review of Childs’ Isaiah commentary: “He is…right that most of us stop short of taking this ¿nal step in the exegetical task, because there are few indeed who can master both the historical and the theological disciplines that it requires” (“Isaiah: A Commentary [Review article],” in Theology Today 59 [2002]: 121–24, here 124). In my opinion, part of the solution to this problem lies in the way in which the theological curriculum in seminaries ought to be structured. At this juncture, it is worth pointing out that I in fact completed my analysis of Childs’ canonical approach before attempting to interpret Ps 24. In other words, I approached Ps. 24 without any preconception of how I was going to live up to Childs’ demands. 4. Elliott, “History of Interpretation,” 136. 1

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sense language in light of a fuller grasp of its ultimate referent. I have tried to do justice to this movement by structuring my exegesis accordingly (bearing in mind, as Childs himself makes clear, that there is ultimately no one starting point and that both dimensions are continuously fused in the mind of each reader). As the chapter titles indicate, I start with the verbum, move to res, return to verbum and then conclude by moving back to res, at each stage never losing sight of the text of Ps 24. The contents of each chapter can be summarized as follows: 1. Verbum 1: Form, Content, Context, Function (Chapter 8): In this chapter I open with some general methodological considerations (§8.1; this is necessary as the canonical approach itself is not a method). I then make an initial synchronic (§8.3) and diachronic (§8.4) probe into Ps 24, inquiring into its literary structure, potential thematic unity, historical contexts, and communicative functions. In short, I will argue that Ps 24 is composite in nature, being uni¿ed secondarily by an editor who also composed elements speci¿cally for this new composition, although even here he has drawn on earlier ritual practice. In terms of Israel’s experience of God, this Psalm has grown out of both its experience in terms of history (a “horizontal dimension”) as well as the cult (a “vertical dimension”), unifying the two into a single theological witness. In both its historical as well as ontological dimensions, this witness has a “narrative” quality which may also be described, albeit imperfectly, as “eschatological” (see my quali¿cation of this problematic term below). 2. Res 1: Force (Chapter 9): The foregoing analysis will have suggested that the primary force at work in the composition of Ps 24 was mediated both liturgically as well as historically in terms of the events of history and their canonical narration. The centrality of the temple as the originating context for key elements of the psalm raises the question of the nature of the reality that was experienced within the temple. This question provides the departure point for an analysis of the “metaphysics of heaven,” in particular its shape (which is Trinitarian) and the way in which this shape relates to the form and content of Ps 24. The move from temple ĺ heaven within God’s Trinitarian being then leads us back to a better appreciation of the coherence and ontological grounding of Ps 24 itself.

1

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3. Verbum 2: The Broader Literary Context (Chapter 10): On the presupposition of the ontological unity of Scripture, it is suggested that the pattern identi¿ed within Ps 24 can be found elsewhere in Scripture. This supposition is con¿rmed when we analyse the text’s immediate and broader literary context, namely Ps 24’s superscription as a Davidic Psalm (§10.1), its location within the Psalter (§10.2), as well as its connection with Isa 33, itself con¿gured within the broader Isaianic tradition (§10.3). An analysis of this broader canonical context functions to sharpen our interpretation of the content of Ps 24 itself. Not only does exegesis highlight dogma, the perspective raised by dogma sharpens our further exegesis. 4. Res 2: The Divine Economy of Salvation (Chapter 11): The discussion of Ps 24’s relation to its divine source in Res 1 focuses on God in se (more consonant with the liturgical focus on the temple). Yet the doctrine of the Trinity also implies an economic dimension: God pro nobis. This dimension of God’s reality accords better with the canonical function of Ps 24, understood both on its own as well as within the broader literary context outlined in Verbum 2, for it is ultimately directed to the community of faith in order to elicit worship and obedience in light of the divine economy of the salvation of the world. In order to better plumb this dimension, this ¿nal chapter turns to the preaching of a contemporary systematic theologian (Eberhard Jüngel) (§11.1) as well as the exegesis of some representative early Church Fathers (§11.2) in order to see how a particular construal of the gospel may both help and hinder our appreciation of the inner dynamic of Ps 24. In light of this analysis, it is suggested that Douglas Farrow’s account of the Ascension provides the most promising avenue for further reÀection on the substance of Ps 24 (§11.3). This dialectical presentation also has a linear, sequential logic, which again reÀects the presentation of Childs’ theory found in Part I. The move from Verbum 1 to Verbum 2 is a move from individual text to its broader literary context. The move from Res 1 to Res 2 is a move from the immanent Trinity to the economic Trinity.

1

Chapter 8

VERBUM 1: FORM, CONTENT, CONTEXT, FUNCTION

8.1. Methodological Considerations In light of Childs’ concern for the noetic structure of revelation, what methods may help us access the human dimension of the text as an intentional act of communication? We have seen that Childs’ approach was strongly inÀuenced by the assumptions of form criticism (§3.3). Although this approach is no longer the dominating force it once was, it is still practiced, albeit with new variations,1 and its various concerns continue to live on in other ¿elds of inquiry (speech-act theory emphasizes genre and function; poetics gives the question of form a new dimension).2 In order to ground my exegesis in contemporary method I will provide my own summary and synthesis in the light of Childs’ concerns outlined in Part I. 8.1.1. Contemporary “Form Criticism” “Text without reality does not exist.”3 This is the central axiom of Erhard Gerstenberger (see above, Chapter 5), a contemporary practitioner of a mode of interpretation developed initially by Gunkel and put to theological use by scholars such as von Rad, Westermann, Wolff, and Zimmerli. At a minimum, this reality is understood to be the text’s 1. Cf. John Barton, “Form Criticism,” in ABD 2:838–44, here 839. See the various contributions in The Changing Face of Form Criticism for the Twenty-First Century (ed. Marvin A. Sweeney and Ehud Ben Zvi; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003). 2. Cf. Ehard Blum, “Formgeschichte–A Misleading Category? Some Critical Remarks,” in Sweeney and Ben Zvi, eds., The Changing Face, 32–45. In response to his concluding question, “Do we really need the label of ‘form criticism’… ?” (45), I respond that I am simply using it here because it is an established term in English scholarship and because of Childs’ association with the method early on in his career. 3. Gerstenberger, “Canon,” 30.

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human-to-human communicative context and the means by which this context is identi¿ed is an analysis of the text’s form, function, and content.4 Although recent research has tended to focus on identifying the communicative function of larger chunks of discourse rather than reconstructing original units,5 the principles of the discipline as originally formulated by Gunkel are still widely respected.6 The centrality of “function,” for example, has been highlighted by recent speech-act theory, which seeks to understand the “illocutionary force” of texts, i.e. the task to which language is put.7 Again, as in classic form criticism, identifying the illocutionary force of a text requires situating it in its communicative context, and that requires identifying its genre,8 i.e. the typical communicative conventions of the culture within which this communicative act takes place.9 These considerations, therefore, will be addressed in our interpretation of Ps 24: we will ask about its genre, which will necessitate inquiring further into its particular content and shape (§8.3), function and communicative context (§8.4).

4. Cf. Barton, ABD 2:838–41. 5. Ibid., 2:839; see especially the various contributions in The Changing Face. 6. On the contemporary relevance of Gunkel, see Blum, “Formgeschichte.” Gunkel framed the question of function as follows: “welche Wirkung wird erstrebt?” (Hermann Gunkel and Joachim Begrich, Einleitung in die Psalmen: Die Gattungen der religiösen Lyrik Israels [4th ed.; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985], 37). Harry Nasuti also argues for the priority of function “as one of the primary determinants of how texts are grouped” (De¿ning the Sacred Songs: Genre, Tradition and the Post-Critical Interpretation of the Psalms [Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1999], 128). Cf. Van Leeuwen, “Form Criticism, Wisdom, and Psalms 111–112,” in Sweeney and Ben Zvi, eds., The Changing Face, 83: “To accomplish a certain function, an artefact must have a certain ‘shape’ and certain features of content… So it is with literary genres: their common function creates a recognizable group of features. Genres have a certain gestalt, with functions and features that appertain thereto.” 7. K. J. Vanhoozer, “Language,” in NIDOTTE 1:33 and n. 73. “The illocutionary act is the touchstone, the aspect that breathes semantic life into what otherwise would be a lifeless chain of signi¿ers” (34). 8. Ibid., 1:35: “As with langue, so with parole: The general principle is that context disambiguates… If understanding is a matter of recognizing the nature of communicative action (e.g., what it is), and if the literary context is the best clue to the meaning of the text as a whole, then identifying a text’s genre is of the utmost importance” (emphasis original). Although I have drawn on Vanhoozer here, I have done so only to outline speech-act theory as it applies to normal human communication. I am not adopting Vanhoozer’s broader attempt to correlate speech-act theory with a theory of “Scripture acts” and divine discourse. 9. Sparks, Ancient Texts, 10. 1

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We may note two signi¿cant theoretical developments in genre analysis: an increased focus on the particularity of each individual text in contrast to “pure types”10 and a recognition of the capacity of texts to transcend their original communicative context and speak to new ones. Concerning the former, Sparks draws a helpful contrast between analytical genre, i.e. typical communicative conventions, and intrinsic genre, i.e. the particular, unique act of communication that makes every text ultimately sui generis.11 Each composition has a mixture of both the typical and the unique.12 Sparks describes their interaction from the perspective of the reader as follows: At ¿rst glance, it seems that the intrinsic uniqueness of each text would create problems for readers, since this implies that every text is in some sense new to us. Although there is some truth in this observation, many of the interpretative problems implied by this scenario are resolved because the text is similar enough to other text types that we recognize… This grouping of similar texts…[helps] us adjust our generic expectations, which may be either broadened or narrowed, depending on the situation.13

In relation to Childs’ approach, we have seen that he too af¿rms both elements of continuity and uniqueness in Israel’s literary heritage. The cypher “canonical” intends to highlight that which is peculiar to the particular body of literature collected as canonical scripture, despite

10. Cf. Blum, “Formgeschichte.“ 11. Sparks, Ancient Texts, 10. Blum, citing Richter, makes a similar distinction using the terminology of “genre” vs “form”: “ ‘Genre’ is…a concept for an ‘ideal’ and ‘typical’ form, which does not exist in reality; it is obtained through the process of selection (abstraction), which holds several features of a form to be characteristic, though it disregards others. ‘Genre’ is therefore a theoretical result of scholarship; in actual literature only the forms exist. It is, however, not pure theory. For if related forms existed independent of each other, one must conclude that a certain structural pattern has preceded the individual form, which consists of a certain number of structural rules” (Wolfgang Richter, Exegese als Literaturwissenschaft: Entwurf einer alttestamentlichen Literaturtheorie und Methodologie [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971], 132; cited in Blum, “Formgeschichte,” 34 n. 6). 12. Conventions are necessary because, as Van Leeuwen puts it, “nothing that communicates is absolutely new… The absolutely new is literarily unrecognizable” (“Form Criticism,” 75; emphasis original). Tremper Longman III makes the following three points concerning genre: “(1) genre explains the possibility of communication in a literary transaction; (2) genre rests on expectations that arise in readers when they confront a text; (3) authors can be coerced in composition to conform to genre expectations” (“Israelite Genres in their Ancient Near Eastern Context,” in Sweeney and Ben Zvi, eds., The Changing Face, 182). 13. Sparks, Ancient Texts, 10. 1

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the fact that it has often drawn upon genres typical of the ancient Near East in general in order to render its message. As such, in our analysis of Ps 24 we must go beyond attempting to identify a general category (or a series of categories) to which the Psalm belongs, we must also outline its uniqueness, its own sui generis pro¿le and individual statement. Generic similarities with other texts serve to guide us to the text itself, to its “intrinsic genre.” I have mentioned that recent scholarship tends to invest less energy in reconstructing original independent literary units and their sociological contexts and focuses instead on broader units of discourse. This development may be due to a number of factors, such as the uncertainty of the results of such hypothetical reconstructions, the feeling that the fruit of such analysis is of little relevance, or the excitement generated by different critical questions (e.g. redaction or reader-response criticism).14 Recent work on Biblical poetics, however, also points out that texts can be intentionally designed in order to speak to new contexts beyond the horizon of the one within which they were originally generated. From within the concerns of form criticism, Van Leeuwen notes that although locating a text in a concrete institution such as “the temple, cult, synagogue, or shrine”15 is helpful, it is not necessarily the most important determinant of meaning. Rather, More helpful is to ask concerning the human functions and problems that a genre seeks to address… [F]or example… Matters of religion are human functions, and while certain institutions may specialise in those functions, prayer, adoration, celebration, sacri¿ce, piety, and religious instruction are not per se institutional functions. One must ask of genres, What recurring human problem, general or particular, is this piece of communication seeking to address or solve?16

This insight is particularly helpful when it comes to analysing the kinds of texts found in the Bible which have intentionally obscured their original institutional context for the sake of a theological witness to later generations of faith.17 Van Leeuwen’s insights on this matter will be particularly helpful for our analysis of the kind of text that Ps 24 is, so I quote him at length:

14. ABD 2:839. 15. Van Leeuwen, “Form Criticism,” 82. 16. Ibid. 17. This is a basic characteristic of most of the Biblical literature, according to Childs. See Childs, Introduction.

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The Substance of Psalm 24 …literary production permits the adaptation of primary genres to new contexts, functions, and the creation of new genres based on the extension and combination of primary oral or inscriptional genres, or of previous literary genres. This generic fecundity is rampant in Scripture, both on the micro- and macrolevels. This means that while all human utterances and writings employ genres and possess social location and function, it does not follow that writings always reveal their social or historical settings. Genres can be adapted for a variety of purposes outside their original contexts, whether oral, inscriptional, or literary. Speci¿cally, genres and their subunits can be adapted in a literary culture into larger works, for purposes different from their original ends. The power of genres is that even when modi¿ed and adapted, their original, primal force is evoked. Indeed, larger literary works…often serve not a speci¿c life setting but many, and try to address human existence comprehensively, by creating a literary world that implicitly encompasses all human situations. One must distinguish life setting as a generative source of genre (via the author) from the implicit life setting that is intrinsic to a genre’s meaning (as when a poet writes a love poem). Both of these types of “life setting” must be further distinguished from life setting as communicative target, that is, of those to whom the literary [sic] wishes to speak. The last is initially local, but may ultimately be universal in its intended audience. …[This is] what Gadamer called the text’s Wahrheitsanspruch. What more-than-local truth claims are being made about reality in forms and language alien to us?18

This again links up with Childs’ understanding of the “canonical process,” in which sacred traditions (generated in a life setting as their source) went through a process of reinterpretation (e.g. “extension,” “combination”), oriented towards a particular theological goal (Wahrheitsanspruch) for a future audience that no longer shares in the original context (life setting a communicative target). Whereas Childs talks of hermeneutical reshaping, Van Leeuwen talks of the creation of a “literary world.” The implication is that although the original setting remains relevant (their “original, primal force” may continue to be evoked), the

18. Van Leeuwen, “Form Criticism,” 81. See Sparks, Ancient Texts, 8, for more details on “generic assimilation” and “generic extension.” This dimension of genre is also recognised by Kreuzer/Vieweger, if only as a Randbemerkung: “Gattungen unterliegen daher im Verlaufe einer langen Geschichte Veränderungen. Die Gattungsgeschichte geht diesem Entwicklungprozess nach und versucht dabei, die zu untersuchende Einheit in diesen Entwicklungsprozess einzuordnen” (Siegfried Kreuzer and Dieter Vieweger, Proseminar Altes Testament: Ein Arbeitsbuch [Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1999], 78). The focus here, however, is on the development of the “generic convention” itself, rather than the particular text which creates its own genre. 1

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literary medium can be exploited in such a manner that the text becomes relatively self-referential; it sets the co-ordinates for its own interpretation. For Ps 24, then, we will have to look for indications of literary artistry, inquire into their function as well as ask about the continuing effect of older genres on the newer context. Some scholars ascribe the ability of a text to become its own context to that particular function of language that Jakobson calls “aesthetic” or “poetic.” Given its hermeneutical signi¿cance, we will look more closely at the nature of this linguistic function. 8.1.2. The “Poetic Function” The poetic or aesthetic function within an act of communication is a “relational concept” in that it exists alongside a number of other linguistic functions (e.g. expressive, appellative, or denotative).19 The meaning of a text is constituted through the interplay and relative prominence of these various functions. Jakobson, for example, claims that epic poetry (focussed on the third person), the lyric, and poetry (of the second person) are all dominated by the “poetic function,” yet their varying relations to the other communicative functions means that they cannot be reduced to one genre called “poetry.”20 With this understanding we ¿nd that Jakobson’s theory is in accord with our discussion of form criticism above: no matter how much the poetic function dominates a particular text, interpretation cannot ignore its broader historical and ideological context.21 19. Linda Waugh, “The Poetic Function in the Theory of Roman Jakobson,” in Poetics Today 2, no. 1a (1980): 57–58; Sternberg, Poetics, 40. 20. “Epic poetry, focussed on the third person, strongly involves the referential function of language; the lyric, oriented toward the ¿rst person, is intimately linked with the emotive function; poetry of the second person is imbued with the conative function and is either supplicatory or exhortative, depending on whether the ¿rst person is subordinated to the second or the second to the ¿rst” (Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language [ed. T. A. Sebeok; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1960], 350–77, here 357; cited in Waugh, “Poetic Function,” 59). Waugh talks of a “hierarchization” of functions within a text, so that it “is the relations between the major functions which are relevant, rather than any absolute and isolationist de¿nition of any particular function” (“Poetic Function,” 58, 59). On the relationality of the functions, see also Landy, “Jakobson,” 112, and Sternberg, Poetics, 40. 21. Waugh, “Poetic Function,” 72–73: “a poem does not exist in a vacuum: it is part of a general historico-cultural context and indeed depends on that context for its interpretation. Nor is it sealed off from a literary context. It may adhere to or, on the contrary, combat literary norms and values, but in some way the literary 1

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The poetic or aesthetic function within an act of communication “comprises the focus within the verbal message on the verbal message itself.”22 In other words, the focus is upon the form or the design of the message as a means of communication, rather than simple referential description. In particular, Jakobson and his followers understand this form to consist in “parallelism” or “juxtaposition,” whereby the linear sequence of, say, a predominantly referential text, is replaced by a series of repetitions characterized by “equivalence in difference.”23 This sameness and contrast is used as the major means of constructing the whole sequence of the text.24 As Berlin describes it: “One selects from a group of similar or paradigmatic elements, and one then arranges the selected item, along with items selected from other groups, into a contiguous or syntagmatic chain.”25 The elements to be juxtaposed apply to every level of the language, including phonetics, grammar, lexis and semantics,26 and their pairing can extend beyond poetic lines to include larger sections of text, such as the strophe, stanza, or even—as has recently been suggested—entire poems (cf. §10.2 for a defence and application). As a result of this particular kind of structuring, the linearity that is proper to most texts is not only altered, it is enriched by a non-linear dimension,

conventions of the times are relevant; the poetic code or codes which exist with the poem provide an important, overarching context; and a given poem may be meant for certain kinds of readers and certain kinds of reading, etc. In this respect, the poem is highly contextualized.” See also Weber, “Entwurf einer Poetologie der Psalmen,” in Lesarten der Bibel: Untersuchungen zu einer Theorie der Exegese des Alten Testaments (ed. Helmut Utzschneider and Erhard Blum; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2006), 127–54, here 135. This dimension of the text often goes under the vague rubric of “intertextuality.” See Beth LaNeel Tanner, The Book of Psalms Through the Lens of Intertextuality (New York: Lang, 2001), for the various way of conceiving this phenomenon and possible applications to the Psalms. 22. Waugh, “Poetic Function,” 58 (emphasis original). What follows is my summary of Waugh’s summary of Jakobson’s approach. This article was inÀuential for Adele Berlin’s important book, The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); see pp. 10–13. 23. Jakobson’s famous formulation is as follows: “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (“Poetics,” 358; cited in Waugh, “Poetic Function,” 63). On the non-linearity of poetry, see also Alviero Niccacci, “Analysing Biblical Hebrew Poetry,” JSOT 74 (1997): 77–93. 24. See also Berlin, Parallelism, 6. 25. Ibid., 7. 26. These categories provide the framework for Berlin’s own analysis in Parallelism. 1

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for now “it is the interpretive relation between linguistic signs which is important.”27 We will look at each in turn. 8.1.2.1. Linearity. According to Robert Alter, despite the repetitiveness that often obtains between parallel pairs, there is a general pattern or “rule of thumb” by which a semantic shift takes place as the reader moves from colon A to colon B.28 This movement consists in a “heightening or intensi¿cation…of focusing, speci¿cation, concretization, even what could be called dramatization.”29 Alter characterizes this “structure of intensi¿cation” as “incipiently narrative,”30 for it creates a sense of movement towards a goal: If…one recognizes that the semantic orientation of the system of apparent repetitions…is toward a focusing, a heightening, a concretization, a development of meaning, it is possible to see that the movement generated between versets [i.e. cola] is then carried on from line to line into the structure of the poem.31

It follows that our interpretation of Ps 24 should be sensitive to this sense of subtle linear development. 8.1.2.2. Non-linearity. Despite this sense of “narrative” development, parallelism also complexi¿es the sequence, for the pattern of juxtapositions weakens “metonymic or syntagmatic relationships—i.e., the relationships of contiguity in time and space, and of cause and effect,”32 in favour of metaphorical or paradigmatic relationships.33 Berlin talks of parallelism’s “binocular vision”: “Like human vision it superimposes two slightly different views of the same object and from their

27. Waugh, “Poetic Function,” 67. 28. The idea is taken from James Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), who described the movement with this shorthand formula: “A, and what is more, B.” 29. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic, 1987), 19. 30. Ibid., 28. 31. Ibid., 29. 32. D. Lodge, Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: E. Arnold, 1977), 104; cited in Waugh, “Poetic Function,” 66–67. 33. Waugh, “Poetic Function,” 68. Sternberg takes a similar stance in relation to narrative art (e.g. Poetics, 43, 47). See also Weber, “Entwurf,” 134–35, who, citing Jurij Lotman (Vorlesungen zu einer strukturalen Poetik: Einführung, Theories des Verses [trans. Waltraud Hachnow; Munich: Fink, 1972]), talks of the poem as “eine mehrdimensionale, eine räumliche bzw. Stereometrische Struktur.” 1

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convergence produces a sense of depth.”34 The result is that “the relation between word and object is called into question,” thus problematizing a “literal” (i.e. referential) reading of the text.35 This “profound alteration of the referential function”36 is signi¿cant in light of the centrality of referentiality for Childs’ understanding of the text of the Bible. Poetry’s self-contained structure does not dispense with referentiality, it enriches it. Waugh, for example, can say that where the poetic function predominates, the “denotative precision arrived at by ‘practical language’ gives way to connotative density and wealth of associations.”37 The terseness of juxtaposition, which does not provide an explicit explanation of the nature of the relationship, creates an interpretative “gap,” an “ellipsis,” that invites the interpreter to “oscillate between semantic planes” and “acknowledge possibilities of the code.”38 Thus, “with a minimum of means a maximum of meanings is generated.”39 The consequence for our interpretation of Ps 24 is that we must relate the sequential dimension to the symmetric (cf. §8.3.3.4.5). 8.1.2.3. Ideology. As stated above, the “semantic fecundity” generated by the internal structure of a poetic text is just one function among others. It serves a particular communicative goal and must be interpreted in relation to it. This relates to another important element of Childs’ canonical thesis: the texts of Scripture are theocentric and they are

34. Berlin, Parallelism, 99. See also Alter, Poetry, 10, citing Shklovsky from “Art as Technique”: “The purpose of parallelism, like the general purpose of imagery, is to transfer the usual perception of an object into the sphere of a new perception—that is, to make a unique semantic modi¿cation.” Cf. Weber, “Entwurf,” 132: grasping the form of a text is important, “weil in seiner ‘Gestalt’ eben wesentlich der ‘Gehalt’ zum Vorschein kommt.” 35. Waugh, “Poetic Function,” 67, 68. 36. Ibid., 68. See also Ellen Davis, “Exploding the Limits: Form and Function in Psalm 22,” JSOT 53 (1992): 93–105, for an illustration of the capacity of the poetic function to “demand of its audience a high level of imaginative engagement, not only with the language of the text, but, more deeply, with the reality to which it refers” (95, emphasis mine). 37. V. Erlich, Russian Formalism (The Hague: Mouton, 1955), 185; cited in Waugh, “Poetic Function,” 68. Cf Jakobson, “l’art poétique,” 542: “il s’agit dans le langue poètique [sic] d’un changement essential du rapport entre le signi¿ant et le signi¿é, ainsi qu’entre le signe et le concept”; cited in Waugh, “Poetic Function,” 67. 38. Waugh, “Poetic Function,” 68, 73, respectively. 39. Ibid., 73. This is not to say that Waugh believes that there is no determinate meaning, cf. p. 74: there is also “equivalence under isomorphic transformations.” 1

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oriented towards instructing future generations in the faith. The relation between the “ideological” function and poetics within Scripture has been particularly emphasized by Meir Sternberg.40 His basic thesis is that the primary goal of Biblical narrative art is “ideological,” by which he means it serves the purpose of inculcating a particular view of God, the self, and the world.41 As far as Biblical narrative is concerned, …it is hard to separate the ideology from the art… Its model of story telling…adopts techniques for their functional value rather than any intrinsic worth. And among the principles that determine tactical choice, the glori¿cation of God largely ¿gures.42

As such, the Bible “follows its own code in suiting a poetics to a world picture.”43 This is not to say that the Bible necessarily invents its own poetics (though Sternberg does think that Israel’s “ideology” is responsible for its creation of “realistic narrative”), it is to say that it draws upon the techniques at its disposal and uses them to serve its own theological goals. As such, the Biblical narrator is an “artful ideologist.”44 True to his thesis, Sternberg goes on to make explicit theological statements about the content of the faith of the authors of the segments of Biblical literature that he is interested in. He talks of a “cultural [i.e. theological] imperative” that “addresses a people de¿ned in terms of their past and commanded to keep its memory alive,” which commandment they incorporated into the “narrative texture and composition” of their traditions.45 This explains the overwhelming presence of history,46 yet it is a history guided by a particular kind of God with his own goals

40. Poetics. This book is cited by Childs in critique of those literary approaches which bracket this dimension out (Biblical Theology, 20). 41. As such, his use of the term is different to its popular meaning as unethical manipulation. For lack of this kind of ideology in the Bible, see Patrick Miller, “Faith and Ideology in the Old Testament,” in Israelite Religion and Biblical Theology: Collected Essays (Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 2000), 629–47. Sternberg’s talk of “goal,” “purpose” or “communicative function” is equivalent to speech act theory’s “illocutionary stance.” See his appreciation of the theory in Poetics, 9. 42. Sternberg, Poetics, 119. See also the section “Form and Doctrine,” 35–40. 43. Ibid., 179. 44. Ibid., 38. This approach has a different emphasis to that of Miller (Israelite, 233–49), whose approach to the question of the theological signi¿cance of poetry in the Bible is more to inquire into the nature of poetry per se, rather than to look at the kind of theology the poetry is made to serve. 45. Sternberg, Poetics, 31. 46. As we have seen (§8.1.2.1), even within poetry there is a strong “narrative impulse” (Alter, Poetry, 28). 1

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for the people that are constituted by that history. Through the particular art of the narrator, “God shapes the world plot with a view to getting his creatures to ‘know’ him.”47 Yet there is an important epistemological gap separating this God from those he would reveal himself to, one which needs to be maintained. To this end, the Bible’s “unique rules of discourse” are deployed to educate the reader concerning his ¿nitude, God’s magnitude, and the need to stay constantly engaged with this God through an interpretative process Sternberg calls the “ordeal of understanding.”48 This function is realized through techniques such as “objective” depiction, multiple viewpoints and intentional ambiguity created through “gapping” (cf. §8.1.2.2). Biblical aesthetics “twists” the way to knowledge, exposes us to our ignorance, and forces us to evaluate agents and actions according to particular norms that are revealed piecemeal throughout the entire composition. Consonant with the poetic function discussed above, in poetic narrative part and whole are interrelated so that reading is an ongoing process, a dialectical movement between each pole. Sternberg summarizes as follows: Biblical history…stretches as a long series of demonstrations of divine power followed by tests of memory, gratitude, inference from precept and precedent, or, in short, of “knowledge,” with further demonstrations staged in reward and punishment. God ultimately ¿gures not only as the norm and source but also as the object and tester of knowledge. And by the narrator’s art, the historical tests applied to the fathers in the world are perpetuated in the discourse addressed to the sons as a standing challenge to interpretation.49 47. Sternberg, Poetics, 48. According to Childs, this is the purpose, the goal toward which God’s self-disclosure pointed: “God revealed himself that all may see and know how God is” (cf. Isa 45:5–7) (Old Testament Theology, 45). 48. Sternberg, Poetics, 47. 49. Ibid., 48. On the relationship between theology and composition in the Minor Prophets, see Seitz, Prophecy and Hermeneutics. Von Rad was also sensitive to the theological function of Biblical poetics: “Die künstlerische Eigenart der Dichtungen Israels steht zweifellos in einem sehr engen… Bezug zu seinem Glauben, von dem sie letztlich ihre Prägung empfangen haben. Denn der Glaube ist es, der sich die Form und den Stil schafft” (Theologie, 1:362). Von Rad does not, however, explicate the signi¿cance of, for example, the “asyndetic” juxtapositions that characterize Hebrew poetry. The bene¿ts this awareness would have had for his interpretation of creation, for example, can be seen if one compares his interpretation of the relation of creation and history in the Psalms (in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays [trans. E. W. Trueman Dicken; London: Oliver & Boyd, 1966], 131–44) with Adele Berlin’s interpretation of Ps 114 (“Myth and Meaning in Psalm 114,” in Diachronic and Synchronic: Reading the Psalms in Real Time: Proceedings of the Baylor Symposium on the Book of Psalms (ed. Joel S. Burnett, W. H. Bellinger Jr. and W. Dennis Tucker Jr.; London: T&T Clark International, 2007), 67–80. 1

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It is not necessary to go into the details of Sternberg’s understanding of the Bible’s poetics and ideology; it is suf¿cient to note that this theological dimension is an integral part of the context of a poetic composition and thus must be factored into an interpretation of the text. Whereas Jakobson’s poetics makes room for a variety of functions within a piece we may wish to call “poetry,” Sternberg highlights the centrality of theology to an understanding of Biblical poetics. My own position on this matter will arise in the course of interpretation (see especially §8.3.2.4.3.2). 8.1.3. Structure of Presentation In the following sections, the methodological insights sketched out above will be distributed over two parts (§§8.3 and 8.4). After the translation and text-critical notes, the ¿rst part will deal with the “synchronic” dimension of the text, the second part will look at the “diachronic” dimension. Although this separation is ultimately arti¿cial (for the poetic function is a “relational concept,” cf. §8.1.2), for analytical purposes this prior emphasis on the particularity of the text will set the parameters for interpreting its historical contexts and functions.50 Thus, in §8.3 I will be looking at “the verbal message itself” in terms of the “literary world” created by its text-internal syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships. We will see that “gaps” are created, which “twist the way to knowledge” and invite us to explore the “possibilities of the linguistic code.” This will provide the context for exploring in §8.4 issues of analytical/ intrinsic genre, both in terms of source as well as communicative target. The most signi¿cant element of the analysis will be our determination of the psalm’s “illocutionary force,” especially as this relates to the “human functions and problems” addressed by the author(s). 8.2. Text and Translation 8.2.1. Translation and Poetic Structure The letters in superscript refer to the text-critical comments in §8.2.2. The psalm has been divided according to the prosodic analysis outlined in §8.3.1 below, namely into its hierarchy of stanzas (Latin numerals in the left-hand column), strophes (capital letters following the Latin numerals), verses (in the following column and numerated according to the MT), and cola (indicated with an a, b, and c) 50. This is standard practice now among many form critics. See, e.g., the editor’s forward to the FOTL series by Knierim/Tucker. 1

76

The Substance of Psalm 24

Translation Strophes Verses Cola and (MT) stanzas 1 Of David. A psalm. a b

Masoretic Text

I

IL+ r š /K ’ 7:˜ „ š !š ! š#!'+  Ž ™

a b 2

a b

II A

3

4

II B

5

6

a

Yhwh’s is the land and what ¿lls it,51 World-Disk52 and those who c inhabit it, for d he is the one who, upon the seas, founded it and upon currents established e it.

Who may ascend Yhwh’s mountain? b And who may stand in the place of his holiness? a One innocent of deed and pure of disposition, b who has not set his heart f upon deceit c and has not sworn to deceive. g a May he/He will receive a blessing from Yhwh b and a righteous act from the God of his salvation. a Such is the generation of those who h seek him, i b who search out your face: Jacob. j (Selah)

:L/† ’$/–Œ #y – š +’

ªI  š '— f’ '„œ ’# +y— k— Ir š 2š ’' -']™'¡+ „ – 4™ K!¡' x V– ª! š 1˜ ’1L) ’' =L:y !š 1¡+  ’ 4™ ’#

!r#! š ’'¡:!™ ’ !+† ˜ 4” ™'¡'/  – ªLf  ’ 9š -L9† /’ C– -K9'¡' š /K – † š +¡: — Œ ™  K - –'a™ y )™ '9܆ – ’1  ’#i„ š +™ g„ š š1¡œ+ £:f… ˜ ” 'fr – 6’ ™1 ª!/  š :’ /– +’ 3C„ ™ f’ –1 œ +x ’# !r#! š ’' =„ — /— !)š :š Ž ’ j„ š –' ªL4  f’ –' '!Y † — “ /— !9y š š 8’ K #fr š :œ‘ ’ G :LG„ !$Ž˜ ª!+š 2  ˜ œ9„ 4” ™' U'x1˜ 6š 'f—‰ 9’ ™ /’

51. The suf¿x is technically a subject rather than an object suf¿x, in contrast to 1b. However, I have opted for this translation in order to maintain the end rhyme of the third person feminine suf¿x which rounds off every colon. 52. += is a proper noun, comparable to -#!= and +#< (cf. Bruce Waltke and M. P. O’Connor, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax [Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1990], 240; Christo van der Merwe, Jackie Naudé, and Jan H. Kroeze, A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar [Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1997], 188), hence my use of capitals and no de¿nite article (as in the Hebrew). In contrast to all translations I am aware of, I opt for the concrete terms “land”/“earth-disk” instead of “earth”/“world.” The connotations of the latter terms obscure the message of the strophe (cf. the commentary in §8.3.2.1). 1

8. Verbum 1 III A

7

a b c

8

a b c

III B

9

a b c

10

a b c

Lift up your heads, gates and lift yourselves, entrances of eternity53 k that the king of glory may enter! Who is this king of glory? Yhwh, mighty and heroic Yhwh, a hero of war. Lift up your heads, gates, and lift, l entrances of eternity, k that the king of glory may enter! Who is then, this king of glory? Yhwh of Hosts, he is the king of glory. (Selah).m

77 -)' ˜y f — :  š £-':‰ – 4š f’ K… g’ -r+L3 š '%„ — =’ a– Kg’ š^!Ž–   ’# ªL  Vš !™ T+˜ /„ ˜ Lš' y ’# L† VšŒ !™ T+˜ /… ˜ ! ˜$ '/† – :LCr – ’# $K „O4– ! š#!Ž'’ ª!/  š %š +’ /– :LC† –E !#! y š '’ -)' ˜y f — :  š £-':‰ – 4š f’ K… g’ -+L3 r š '%„ — =’ a– KgŽ’ K ªL  Vš !™ T+˜ /„ ˜ œš' ’# L† VšŒ !™ T+˜ /… ˜ ! ˜$ K!„ '/… – =Lr š 8’ !†#! š ’' ª!+š 2  ˜ L„ Vš !™ T+˜ /x ˜ K!…

8.2.2. Textual Notes a

Various versions of the LXX add ÌýË ÄÀÜË (ÌÑÅ) ʸ¹¹ŠÌÑÅ: “for the ¿rst day of the week.” This is a Jewish addition that refers to the day of the week on which the Psalm was to be sung by the Levites in the Second Temple.54 According to Beckwith, interpreters have not been able to identify the logic by which the LXX and the Mishnah appoint certain Psalms to certain days of the week.55 The Talmud attributes the decision to the theme of creation.56 b The LXX has the usual sequence ¸ÂÄġË ÌŊ ¸ÍÀ»: (“A Psalm of David”). c LXX and Peshitta add “all” (ÈŠÅÌ¼Ë = +)). This is probably a gloss in order to clarify the universal character of the statement.57 53. For this translation, see §8.3.3.3.1. 54. Alfred Rahlfs, Psalmi cum Odis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967), 30–32. 55. Roger Beckwith, “The Courses of the Levites and the Eccentric Psalms Scrolls from Qumran,” RevQ 11 (1984): 499–524, here 500. 56. “On the ¿rst day what did they sing? [Ps 24, which begins]: ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, [the world and they who live therein].’ [This psalm was used] because [on Sunday God] took possession and gave possession and was ruler over his world [without the heavenly hosts, who were created on the second day]” (tractate Rosh haShanah 6b, in Jacob Neusner, The Babylonian Talmud: A Translation and Commentary [Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2011], 190; cf. Tamid 22c, in Babylonian Talmud, 31). 57. Jerzy Seremak, Psalm 24 als Text zwischen den Texten (Berlin: Lang, 1998), 41; Charles Briggs, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Psalms, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1906), 218. 1

78

The Substance of Psalm 24

d

') is missing in LXX, Symmachus and Theodotion. Jerome’s Psalterium Gallicanum has quia (“because”). MT makes clear what is implicit in LXX. e BHS (but not BHK) suggests emending yiqtol !š ˜1 ’1L)’' to qatal I š1 ”1LV (“he established it”) in order to synchronise the tense with qatal Iš 2š ’' in the previous colon. Despite ongoing debate concerning the translation of the qatal//yiqtol sequence in poetry, the pattern is common and should be retained.58 f The Masorah in BHS gives us the ¿rst indication that the ketiv is unusual with ¯ 0), “this is how it is written.” Many scholars reject the ¿rst perits warning: =) son singular suf¿x and follow the versions (including the Targum and the Cairo Geniza) as well as a number of Hebrew manuscripts59 in replacing it with the third person singular suf¿x #