Currents in Biblical Research 15, 3 (June 2017)

The latest Currents in Biblical Research recently arrived, with titles and abstracts of the main articles as below.

Thomas B. Dozeman

The Book of Joshua in Recent Research

Research on the book of Joshua is developing significantly in a variety of different areas. The review summarizes current scholarship in six distinct methodological approaches: (1) textual criticism; (2) composition and literary context; (3) history, archaeology and geography; (4) violence, genocide and conquest; (5) literary and ideological studies; and (6) reception history. The article will conclude with a brief summary of recent collected studies and commentaries on Joshua. The focus of interpretation will be the last ten years supplementing Greenspoon (2005).

David Tabb Stewart 

LGBT/Queer Hermeneutics and the Hebrew Bible

LGBT and queer interpretive approaches have moved beyond the identitarian and apologetic stances of the 1970s–90s, when the first order of business was to respond to anti-gay voices and understand social location as an interpretive standpoint. The HIV/AIDS health crisis helped move some LGBT interpreters away from homosexuality as an object of study to placing themselves inside the text as subjects, lamenting with the Psalms or putting God in the dock like Job. Queer interpretation, anti-essentialist in spirit, moved away from identitarian concerns placing queer interpreters outside the text as interrogators. Queer biblical criticism resists heteronormativity as the default interpretive stance, but embraces the study of the body, gender performance, midrash-making and playfulness with biblical texts. The queer interpretive approach has begun to mature as it seeks intersections with minoritized criticisms, disability studies and the rising consciousness of intersex people, while criticizing itself as well.

Nicholas A. Elder

New Testament Media Criticism

This article introduces and overviews New Testament media criticism. Media criticism is an emerging biblical methodology that encompasses four related fields: orality studies, social memory theory, performance criticism, and the Bible in modern media. The article addresses the methodological foundations of these fields and reviews recent contributions in each of them.

R.B. Jamieson

When and Where Did Jesus Offer Himself? A Taxonomy of Recent Scholarship on Hebrews

This article surveys how recent scholarship answers the question, ‘According to Hebrews, when and where did Jesus offer himself?’ Much interest has been paid to this topic in the wake of David Moffitt’s 2011 monograph, but the debate is often framed in potentially reductionistic binary terms: either Hebrews depicts a sacrificial sequence beginning on the cross and culminating in heaven, or else Jesus’ ‘heavenly offering’ is a metaphor for the cross. By contrast, this article asks how scholars correlate three variables: Jesus’ death, offering, and entrance to heaven. It registers five answers that have been offered, explores the textual basis taken to support each, and articulates the issues which divide each view from the others. Further, the article surveys recent answers to two material questions that arise in the wake of this formal one. First, is Hebrews’ sacrificial theology coherent? Second, in Hebrews, is Jesus’ death atoning?

Dov Weiss

The Rabbinic God and Mediaeval Judaism

From the earliest stages of Wissenschaft des Judentums, scholars of Judaism typically read statements about God in the classical sources of Judaism with a mediaeval philosophical lens. By doing so, they sought to demonstrate the essential unity and continuity between rabbinic Judaism, later mediaeval Jewish philosophy and modern Judaism. In the late 1980s, the Maimonidean hold on rabbinic scholarship began to crack when the ‘revisionist school’ sought to drive a wedge between rabbinic Judaism, on the one hand, and Maimonidean Judaism, on the other hand, by highlighting the deep continuities and links between rabbinic Judaism and mediaeval Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah). The revisionist scholars regarded rabbinic Judaism as a pre-cursor to mediaeval Kabbalah rather than mediaeval Jewish philosophy. This article provides the history of scholarship on these two methods of reading rabbinic texts and then proposes that scholars adopt a third method. That is, building on the work of recent scholarship, we should confront theological rabbinic texts on their own terms, without the guiding hand of either mediaeval Jewish framework.