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Religious Affirmation and Historical Criticism in Heschel's Biblical Interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2010

Jon D. Levenson
Jon D. Levenson
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
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Extract

Not least among the bittersweet gifts of modernity to the Jews is the complication of dealing with the Bible both as sacred scripture and as a document subject to the same canons of inquiry as any other historical, or putatively historical, record. The problem goes far beyond the familiar one posed by narratives that ancient historians find doubtful or quite impossible. For historical critical research into the Tanakh (as into all other scriptures) also uncovers the processes of development of the worldviews within the literature and thus puts a painful question to those who wish to affirm Judaism as a contemporary reality. How can a literature so variegated and contradictory speak with a normative voice today? It is no wonder that so many biblical scholars avoid the normative theological questions altogether and content themselves with historical and philological description (which, of course, presupposes norms of its own). It is also no wonder that so many religious practitioners neglect the historical issues and treat their scriptures as representing a static, uniform, and unvarying worldview—not surprisingly, the worldview of their own, postbiblical affirmation.

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Articles
Information
AJS Review , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , April 2001 , pp. 25 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2001

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References

1. Quoted in Dentan, Robert C., Preface to Old Testament Theology, rev. ed. (New York: Seabury Press, 1963), pp. 22–23.Google Scholar For a more recent survey of the nature and state of the field of Old Testament theology, see Hasel, Gerhard, Old Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate, 4th ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991).Google Scholar

2. Spinoza, Benedict de, A Theologico-Political Tractate (New York: Dover, 1951), p. 101.Google Scholar The work was originally published in 1670. See Levenson, Jon D., The Hebrew Bible, The Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), pp. 91–96.Google Scholar

3. See Levenson, Hebrew Bible, pp. 33–61.

4. Dentan, Preface to Old Testatment Theology, p. 92.

5. See Levenson, Hebrew Bible, pp. 54–56. For a recent example, see Knierim, Rolf P., The Task of Old Testament Theology: Substance, Method, and Cases (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1995), pp. 18–19.Google Scholar Although Knierim uses the term “theological criterion” rather than “center” to describe God's “universal dominion in justice and righteousness, along with its subsequent priorities,” the effect is the same.

6. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe H., “Jewish Biblical Theology and the Study of Biblical Religion” (in Hebrew), Tarbiz 50 (1980–1981): 45Google Scholar (my translation). See also Levenson, Hebrew Bible, p. 166, n. 19.

7. See Kaplan, Edward K. and Dresner, Samuel H., Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 101–71.Google Scholar

8. Heschel, Abraham Joshua, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1955), p. 169.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., p. 172.

10. Ibid., p. 223.

11. Ibid., p. 230.

12. Ibid., p. 241.

13. Ibid., p. 245.

14. Ibid., p. 247.

15. Ibid., p. 222.

16. Ibid., p. 205.

17. Ibid., p. 223.

18. Note the absence of a chapter on Ezekiel in Heschel, Abraham Joshua, The Prophets: An Introduction (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).Google Scholar Ezekiel is the only major prophet to whom no chapter is therein devoted.

19. See Koch, Klaus, The Prophets, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 92–94Google Scholar; Halperin, David J., Seeking Ezekiel: Text and Psychology (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

20. See Kaplan and Dresner, Abraham Joshua Heschel, pp. 101–171.

21. God in Search of Man, p. 230.

22. . See Levenson, Jon D., The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 125–42 and 173–232.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., pp. 18–24.

24. Ibid., pp. 43–52.

25. On the danger of decontextualizing the ancient practice of the sacrifice of the firstborn son, see Levenson, Jon D., “Abusing Abraham: Traditions, Religious Histories, and Modern Misinterpretations,” Judaism 47, no. 3 (1998): 259–77.Google Scholar

26. God in Search of Man, p. 241.

27. The tension between this argument that the Jewish scriptures are self-evidently the most excellent and Heschel's commitment to religious pluralism and interfaith dialogue is painful. The tension is not one that he succeeded in resolving, probing, or interpreting. On Heschel's general failure to acknowledge and grapple with the tensions in his work, see Levenson, Jon D., “The Contradictions of A.J. Heschel,” Commentary 106, no. 1 (July 1998): 34–38.Google Scholar

28. See Levenson, Hebrew Bible, esp. 56–61.

29. God in Search of Man, p. 222.

30. Ibid., p. 247.

31. Ibid., p. 88.

32. Cf. Heschel, Abraham Joshua, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1951), p. 76Google Scholar: “We usually think that the earth is our mother, that time is money and profit our mate. The seventh day is a reminder that God is our father, that time is life and the spirit our mate.”

33. Cohen, Arthur A., The Natural and the Supernatural Jew: An Historical and Theological Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), p. 246, n. 25.Google Scholar

34. Ibid., p. 44. Cohen's section on Heschel (pp. 234–59) is to date one of the few discussions that are hard-headed enough to subject Heschel's interplay of medium and message to critical scrutiny.

35. Ibid., p. 235. Note that Cohen does not use the term “rhetoric” solely in the negative sense that it has acquired. He is at pains to point out that it has “a distinguished, an illustrious past” and that “the rhetorician, because of the morality of his end, possesses a constructive art” (p. 234).

36. Note Kaplan, Edward K., “Abraham Joshua Heschel,” in Interpreters of Judaism in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. Katz, Steven T. (Washington: B'nai B'rith Books, 1993), p. 131Google Scholar: “His work, in its pragmatic aspect, functions as a vast apologetics.” Note also that H. Susannah Heschel, borrowing a term from Richard Rorty, sees her father as an “edifying philosopher.” Kaplan, p. 142, referring to p. xxxvii of her preface to the 1987 version of God in Search of Man (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson).

37. Cahill, P. J., “Apologetics,” in The New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 672.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., p. 674.

39. Ibid., p. 673.

40. Ibid.

41. God in Search of Man, p. 197.

42. Ibid., p. 167.

43. Ibid., p. 178. The irony is that probably no tradition in the world has been more meticulous in matters of punctuation or committed to the idea that accurate punctuation is critical to the proper conveying of meaning than the Jewish tradition of scriptural transmission and study.

44. Ibid., p. 258.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., p. 257; see Levenson, Hebrew Bible, p. 67.

47. Ibid., p. 257.

48. See Fackenheim, Emil L., Quest for Past and Future: Essays in Jewish Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968)Google Scholar, especially chaps. 2, 3, 6, 14, and 18.

49. Still less should the book be seen as exemplifying the subjectivism or relativism of reader-response criticism or kindred methods that have emerged since his death, for these are quite alien to Heschel's theological agenda.

50. It is true that Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra already recognized the unlikelihood that Isaiah of Jerusalem authored the passages in the book of Isaiah that speak of the return from the Babylonian exile a century and a half after his death (see ibn Ezra to Isa 40:1). It is a far cry from this single observation to the treatment of Isaiah 40–66 as a separate work from Isaiah 1–39, with its own distinctive theology. On this, see Rosenthal, Erwin I. J., “The Study of the Bible in Medieval Judaism,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible: vol. 2, From the Fathers to the Reformation, ed. Lampe, G.W.H. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 267–68Google Scholar, and Levenson, Hebrew Bible, pp. 66–70. Given his involvement in critical biblical study, incidentally, it is odd that Heschel did not reckon with the substantial evidence, already developed by the time he wrote, that Isaiah 56–66 came from a Third Isaiah.

51. See Levenson, Hebrew Bible, pp. 10–15.

52. The Prophets, p. xi. The relevance of this to contemporary religious life is, however, a more vexed problem and one of which Heschel seems unaware. The effort to make the prophets into spiritual exempla, though of high antiquity, is in substantial tension with the phenomenon of book religion and is especially problematic for rabbinic Judaism, since the latter tends to see prophecy as passé in certain important ways. The general point has been well put by Childs, Brevard S., Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), p. 589Google Scholar: “The authority of the biblical text does not rest on a capacity to match original experiences, rather on the claim which the canonical text makes on every subsequent generation of hearers.”

53. God in Search of Man, p. 179.