canon-and-literature
After Behr In Accordance with the Scriptures pick up Christopher Seitz, then Walter Moberly
From gpt
- Starting Points: the “Canon and Literature” conversation If you want to start where both the theological and literary paths meet the road, try this sequence: a. Robert Alter – The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981) Short, readable, and elegant. Alter teaches you to see how the Bible’s stories are crafted—repetition, silence, irony, wordplay. You’ll never read Genesis or Samuel the same way again. b. Brevard Childs – Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (1979) This is where canonical criticism really takes form. Childs insists on reading the final form of the text as the theological vehicle, while not ignoring history. It’s denser but foundational. c. Walter Moberly – Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture (2013) A spiritual descendant of Childs, but more approachable. Moberly models theological reading that’s faithful, critical, and humane. His essays on Abraham, Joseph, and Jonah are both scholarly and devotional. d. Christopher Seitz – The Character of Christian Scripture: The Significance of a Two-Testament Bible (2011) This one picks up Childs’ vision and pushes it into ecclesial theology. It’s also a crash course in how Anglican thought holds the two Testaments together.
Inspiration
from the-baal-book
CONTEMPORARY OLD TESTAMENT SCHOLARSHIP LARGELY arrives at its present conclusions based on its currently accepted methodology. One might assume that being an Old Testament or a Hebrew Bible scholar means that someone is a scholar of those particular texts, in the same way that a Shakespeare scholar is an expert on his plays and Elizabethan theater more generally. New Testament scholarship has largely reoriented itself in this mode over the past few decades. Old Testament scholarship, however, represents a conjectural discipline that tries to reconstruct the “actual” history of the nations of Judah and Israel in the first millennium BC.
Old Testament scholars have largely divorced themselves from the text itself. The Hebrew Bible has been sliced into increasingly small shreds dated to various levels of editorial activity across centuries. The discipline now takes for granted that the biblical texts are not accurate witnesses in any way to historical events and that the ideas expressed in Psalms, the prophets, and the wisdom literature do not accurately reflect the views of Israelites and Judahites at the time of their supposed composition. These scholars, therefore, set aside the text and proceed to reconstruct the “real” history by other means.