Article

Linguistics, Philology and the Biblical Text

Elizabeth Robar
https://orgic.org/0000-0002-1884-5941
Cambridge Digital Bible Research, United Kingdom
elizabeth.robar@cdbr.org

Abstract
The relationship between linguistics and philology, within biblical studies,
became a fraught issue when the Society of Biblical Literature proposed
subordinating linguistics to philology. The larger concern is the integrity and
integration of scholarship within biblical studies, which itself is related to the
integration of scholarship within the academic world. The history of
institutionalised scholarship suggests two potential paths for biblical studies:
one in which each sub-discipline pursues relative independence and expands the
field of knowledge from a detached, scientific vantage point, and one in which
the role of the text in speaking to a community is sought in the context of
relational knowledge.

Keywords: biblical studies; hermeneutics; integration; linguistics; philology

Journal for Semitics https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6573/8514

https://upjournals.co.za/index.php/JSEM ISSN 2663-6573 (Online), ISSN 1013-8471 (Print)
Volume 29 | Number 2 | 2020 | #8514 | 23 pages © The Author(s) 2021

Published by Unisa Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)
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Introduction
To write about the relationship between linguistics and philology is to enter into a
discussion with a venerable pedigree, for it really involves how we, “academics,”
organise our scholarship, our very understanding of knowledge and our purpose for
engaging in such scholarship. To speak responsibly, therefore, requires both an
understanding of historical underpinnings (where we come from) and aspirations (where
we are going).

The following is intended as a reflection—reasoned thinking—on a situation already

well researched by others.1 My purpose is not to regurgitate dates and facts but to raise
fundamental questions about why we find ourselves in our current predicament. Such
reflection is an activity in which a healthy discipline must engage in order to stay
healthy.

A Review of Institutionalised Scholarship2

The Ancient World
Preserving Culture
That language was an early scholarly concern is amply attested in ancient Mesopotamia.
Soon after the invention of cuneiform writing in the fourth millennium B.C.E.,
Sumerian lexical lists were drawn up for transmission to later generations (Veldhuis
1997, 1). Though Sumerian and Akkadian were genetically unrelated, their own
speakers considered them not only related on numerous levels, but providing “a
privileged access to essential truths” (Frahm 2011, 12). After the end of the third
millennium B.C.E., lexical lists had two columns: Sumerian on the left and Akkadian
on the right (Veldhuis 2013). In time, grammatical texts and glosses followed, and
eventually full translations (Lambert 1999; Frahm 2011, 12–20). By the beginning of
the first millennium B.C.E., southern Mesopotamian scholars began to write
commentaries on the omen, legal and scientific texts in which both language-centred
analysis (i.e., literal) and figurative hermeneutical techniques can be detected (Frahm
2011, 59–79). Preserving language was a means of preserving culture and was therefore
just as much the object of their scholarship as the requisite medium in which it took
place.

1 Much of this reflection is based on Krishnan (2009), Turner (2015), Pollock et. al. (2015), Naudé and
Miller-Naudé (2017), and Khan et al. (2020).
2 This is primarily a discussion of Western scholarship, since that is the tradition of the Society of
Biblical Literature whose recent actions prompted this paper.
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Preserving Wisdom
In the geographical West, scholarship took the form of philosophy, and debate was the
chosen method for pursuing truth. Because debate inherently involves language, and
language once recorded becomes literature, language and literature became part of this
pursuit: not only wisdom as inherent content, but wisdom as expressed content. Thus
was born Western philology, the appreciation of the (written) word that pursues
wisdom.3

Consequently, from the first compilations of texts (eventually, books), there was a
practical need to preserve and pass on that knowledge, since where texts multiply,
organisational systems must arise. Alphabetising, the idea of editions, and emendations
then became ideas that were institutionalised to manage the new libraries (e.g.,
Pergamum and Alexandria) (Casson 2001).

Grammar was part of this systematising motivation: whereas alphabetising was a means
of organising physical books, grammar was a means of organising the language
structures within those books. Dionysios Thrax, in the first known grammar, defined it
thus:

Grammar is an experimental knowledge (ἐμπειρία) of the usages of language as

generally current among poets and prose writers. It is divided into six parts:
1. Trained reading with due regard to Prosody.
2. Explanation according to poetical figures.
3. Ready statement of dialectical peculiarities and allusions (ἱστορία).
4. Discovery of Etymology.
5. An accurate account of analogies.
6. Criticism of poetical productions, which is the noblest part of grammatic art.
(Davidson 1874)

With the writings of the poets and prose writers now defining an ideal, grammar became
the canon delineating that ideal and therefore prescribing how other authors ought to
use the language if they wanted to adhere to this ideal. The pronunciation, accent,
punctuation, and poetic forms and meanings of words as established by these poets and
prose writers became the norm for future writers. Grammar that began as descriptive (of
the established texts) thus became prescriptive (to mimic the style of those texts).
Philology encompassed the breadth of scholarly exploration, description, and

3 The derivation of philology from philosophy does not imply that it was appreciated by all philosophers.
Plato preferred the certainty of deductive reason in pure philosophy and saw rhetoric, the task of
persuasion, as a fall from lofty assurance of truth to an impoverished probability and possibility.
Philology, as the study of rhetoric in written form, would obviously need to partake of this fall. Plato’s
student, Aristotle, was actively engaged in politics, and he saw the value in persuasion regarding the
time-bound and particular (Turner 2015, 43–44).
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crystallisation of what was discovered to ensure future language and texts would meet
the same standard.4

Preserving Authority
Similar forces were active with regard to the Hebrew Bible. Biblical texts were the
standard requiring preservation, with editions requiring authorisation (Tov 2001; 2003;
2004). Writing and reliable dictation were vital instruments that safeguarded against
wrongful alteration and ensured appropriate preservation. To “be written” became a
powerful argument for authority.5 The authority of the texts stretched beyond the world
in which they originated as they increasingly became the basis for interpreting
contemporary events and shaping the identity of the contemporary community (Lim
2002; Khana 2006; Hirshman 2006; Elman 2015).

The Middle Ages

Aquinas, Scholasticism and Theology Before History
Philology was displaced by Christian theology in Europe in the Middle Ages.6 The Bible
eclipsed Homer and the classics as the fount of knowledge. Philology of the classics
could only lead to knowledge of time-bound matters, whereas the Bible as divine
revelation enabled the elevation of philosophy (matters of timeless and eternal wisdom)
into theology (knowledge of God).

Thomas Aquinas towers above all other scholars of the time. In his view, existence (that
which can be empirically observed) and essence (that which can be known) are to be
distinguished, and it is in the mind (which knows) that the image of God is found
(McInerny 1977). The ultimate good is knowledge of God that becomes union with
God; savoir becomes connaître as knowledge is no longer of an object but becomes a
relationship with a person. It is in this sense that theology became the “queen” of the
sciences: if science is the systematic search for knowledge, then when the search has
reached its aim, it has arrived at knowledge of God, namely, theology.

4 “Except for Varro, of the 1st century BC, who believed that grammarians should discover structures,
not dictate them, most Latin grammarians did not attempt to alter the Greek system and also sought to
protect their language from decay. Whereas the model for the Greeks and Alexandrians was the
language of Homer, the works of Cicero and Virgil set the Latin standard” (Editors of Encyclopaedia
Britannica 2020). The distinction between descriptive and prescriptive grammar was not a dominant
concern among the ancient Greeks who were more concerned with philosophy (deductive reasoning
that could lead to certainty) and philology (inductive reasoning based on observations) (Turner 2014,
44).
5 Cf. the many instances of γέγραπται in the New Testament; also, “The book of Jubilees also fills its
50 chapters with an obsessive habit of recording and protesting that all of the traditions that are being
written in this book are already inscribed” (Khan et. al. 2020).
6 Although kept alive in the Islamic Golden Age.
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The tension between the timeless and the time-bound continued. Christian education
included the entire trivium (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric) encompassing all of
knowledge, but Scholasticism arose and privileged dialectic as more closely affiliated
with philosophy, theology, and abstract truth compared with grammar and rhetoric
(which dealt with temporal realities). Ever increasingly, studying at a university meant
studying Aristotle and his philosophy, such that in Isaac Newton’s day, in the university
classroom, scientific “experiments” were performed by lowly assistants and, if the
experiments did not demonstrate what they were intended to demonstrate, they were
dismissed as of less value than Aristotle’s timeless wisdom. The natural, the historical,
and the antiquarian simply held less interest when compared with eternal and abstract
truth.7

In consequence, although there were Scholastics such as Hugh of St. Victor who
instructed his students to study scripture in light of history and geography (that is,
philologically), the prevailing Scholastic voice was that which, “by squeezing biblical
truths through the grid of philosophical analysis, created a totally ahistorical theology
that could be studied independent of the sacred text from which it ultimately derived”
(Turner 2015, 86). With successive layers of abstraction, first the historical manuscript,
and eventually even the text itself, became less and less relevant to the philosophical
enterprise.

Arabic Scholarship and the Poetic Before the Linguistic

The Middle Ages also witnessed the beginnings of Arabic philology. During the late
seventh and early eighth centuries, the rapidly growing Islamic empire needed a
unifying, official Arabic dialect. Islam’s sacred text, the Qur’an, was the first source;
Arabic tribal poetry was the second. Critical analysis required first gathering and
codifying material, which also prompted the subsequent translation and preservation of
Greek and Persian learning. Within this intellectual milieu, a new stream of poetic
criticism emerged in the mid-tenth century that was more concerned with the rhetorical
and aesthetic features of the discipline than the linguistic. In their own way, the Arabic
scholars made the language a battleground between new and old poetry critics
(Gruendler 2015).

7 It is an irony often noted that Aristotle, who respected rhetoric and the value of the particular and the
historical, was thus set up as the monument to the universal and timeless. Aquinas sought to rein in
this runaway interpretation with Aristotelian principles that the substance had to be expressed
somehow in the text, rather than only spiritually derived from it, but his voice on this point was only
one among many.
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Jewish Scholarship and the Text for the Sake of Meaning

Arabic scholarship was the likely foundation for the floruit of Hebrew philology at this
time. The Jews adopted the codex from the Muslims8 and followed their innovations to
further preserve the accepted reading tradition of their Scripture (Khan 2020). They did
not develop the systematic treatises of the Scholastics but rather lists of and comments
on exceptional forms, which presupposed a systematic understanding of the grammar
that recognises completely normal forms (Dotan 1990; Ofer 2019, 221–27). The
Tiberian Masoretic text represents the climax of preserving the text of the Hebrew Bible,
and it paved the way for the scholars who would preserve its meaning through grammar
and Biblical exegesis among the Jews. The most notable scholars for the discipline of
biblical exegesis in the early Middle Ages were Saadya Gaon (882–942) and scholars
affiliated with the Karaite movement in Judaism who were based in Jerusalem (Habib
2020, 290–92).

Consequently, it can be seen how in multiple traditions the preservation of the text was
followed by an increase in the interpretation of and commentary on the text, followed
by, in some cases, a subsequent distancing of commentary from the text.

Defining a National Identity

The tradition of Jewish scholarship ever maintained a dialogue with the text, which is
to be expected given that the founding of the Jewish nation (and its subsequent story)
comprised the very content of their textual tradition. Joel Rembaum has laid out the
trajectory of Jewish interpretation during the Middle Ages based on Isaiah 53, from
understanding the suffering servant as the messiah who suffers on behalf of the Jewish
nation, to the Jewish nation in exile that suffers on behalf of the entire world. In the face
of Christian anti-Jewish propaganda (which claimed that the Jewish exile proved God
had rejected and abandoned the Jewish people), the Jewish interpreters sought to
“rationalize their status and affirm their covenantal relationship with God. In the process
certain Jews came to view the Jewish people as the Suffering Servant of God functioning
in exile as ‘a light unto the nations’” (Rembaum 1982, 292; Alobaidi 1998).

The study of the biblical tradition was to inform the community of its meaning and
purpose, and at some level the purpose of the community was to preserve the biblical
tradition. This is the greatest intimacy between a community and its philological pursuit.

8 Early on in the Islamic movement, the Qur’an was laid out in a codex, and the fact that the medieval
Hebrew term for “codex” (‫ מצחף‬miṣḥaf) is a loanword from the Arabic term (muṣḥaf) suggests this line
of influence (Khan 2013, 6–7). See also Stern (2008). See Drory (2000) for a full account of literary
contacts between Muslims and Jews.
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The Renaissance
A New Christian Identity
In Europe, eventually “theologians were growing disenchanted with an excess of logic
and showing a new fondness for the ancient Church Fathers” (Turner 2015, 90), and the
Italian universities, where Scholasticism had never held full sway, began to perceive in
the ancient Roman writings a wealth of material relevant to the political needs of the
day. An appreciation of elegance of expression restored classical rhetoric to a seat of
value, displacing dialectic as alone worthy. “The Christian religion does not rest on
proof, but on persuasion, which is superior to proof,” declared the humanist Lorenzo
Valla in the fifteenth century (Turner 2015, 98). Indeed, with the Reformation,
Protestants and Catholics found themselves engaged in a philological war, seeking to
control the story of the past that would legitimate one party over the other. As Aristotle
had found with politics, so these religionists found that rhetoric was an invaluable
weapon, highly practical and relevant. The content of this rhetoric was to be found
largely in the documents of the early church and, through and alongside them, the
classics.

Philology as an occupation was thus born in European Renaissance humanism.

Whoever interpreted the text most persuasively also interpreted the world. The same
forces at work within Jewish scholarship became prominent within Christian
scholarship.

Doorway to New Worlds

The study of ancient texts led to further discoveries, such as the ability to recreate lost
worlds through comparative studies. If one could recreate the world of the biblical text,
one could recreate other worlds. The discovery of Sanskrit led to the recognition of how
Indo-European languages and literature are related, and with it a brand-new interest in
how these relationships are structured: phylogenetically over space (geography) and
time.

Interest shifted from theological universals to what the new comparative method, with
its historical developmental stories, could reveal about the human story. A historical
consciousness was reborn, with historical texts as the centrepiece. The question became
how to approach them: dialectically and logically (looking for universal truths, like the
Scholastics) or rhetorically and logically (looking to recreate lost worlds, like the
philologists)? Philologists were becoming increasingly less interested in metaphysics
and more interested in the historical and rhetorical, which paved the way for philology
to reach its greatest heights.

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Nineteenth-Century Philology
Philology reached its zenith in nineteenth-century Europe, enshrined in the university.
Berlin (whose university was founded in 1809), the epicentre of German philological
scholarship, proclaimed philology the new queen of the sciences. Philosophy had
represented the ultimate goal of wisdom, theology the ultimate goal of knowledge of
God, and now philology as queen represented the ultimate goal of recreating a lost world
which could explain and structure one’s understanding of the present. This was
epitomised by Germany’s choice of philology as the means by which to re-establish its
identity after its humiliation under Napoleon. Humboldt described his plan for the
university that would begin this as follows:

the [philological] study of a nation offers all the advantages which history has in general,
namely to increase our knowledge of human beings by examples of actions and events,
to sharpen our power of judgment, and to improve and raise our character. Yet it does
more. In trying not only to unravel the thread of successive events, but rather to explore
the condition and the state of the nation altogether, this kind of study gives us a
biography, as it were. (Humboldt 1793; quoted in Güthenke 2015, 269)9

Philology’s purpose was to retell history to make sense of and give purpose to the
present. Humboldt’s comments on the intended role of philology are “symptomatic of a
wider and lasting tendency to establish a developmental, narrative model both for use
in scholarly discourse and for articulating the discipline’s own self-understanding”
(Güthenke 2015, 269). Historical, empirical research interpreted with the comparative
method became the source of knowledge, both of the world as well as of self.

As long as this empirical research began predominantly in texts, philology’s throne was
secure.

Modern Philology
Before long, the comparative methods of philology were applied elsewhere than texts,10
leading us into the modern period in which empiricism continues to reign as the
preferred source of knowledge in the academy, but no longer predominantly operating
on written texts. Greek temples, medieval cathedrals, and Renaissance paintings could
equally be submitted to the historical-comparative method as metaphorical “texts”
(Turner 2015, 17).

9 This research programme was intended to do nothing less than provide the “only true foundation of
national prosperity” (Turnbull 1923, 184).
10 By no means for the first time, but now they were so applied systematically. Already in 1578 a German
humanist physician had considered philology’s purview to extend beyond linguistic matters to
chronology, rivers, cities, morals, and religious rituals; “in short, everything to be found in ‘good
authors’” (Turner 2015, 123).
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As the object of study became divorced from the method of study, this inductive,
historical-comparative method became the foundation of the very science of
interpretation, of any kind of object. Internal organisation was needed for this body of
knowledge. Language and literature were split.11 Language then became the prerogative
of linguistics and literature that of national literary histories (cf. Humboldt above),
comparative literature, and eventually literary theory (Pollock 2015, 8). When classics
became its own discipline, “philology” was reduced to technical skills in reading texts:
a far cry from the national- and self-understanding of Humboldt. Now there was only
Monsieur Procruste, Philologue, who bypassed any literary beauty and psychological
intricacy and saw with a text critic’s eyes nothing but words and letters that were copied,
mis-copied and inserted over the years. The literary monuments of philology to be
appreciated became historical documents to be textually dissected (Fleischman 1990,
19; Cerquiglini 1999, 13–32).

Philology Wistfully Defined as Slow Reading

The ghost of philology, that which brought about self-understanding, seemed lost.
Literary theories and exegetical methods supplanted the art of slow reading, such that
Nietzsche’s yearning came to be considered quaint but utterly pre-theoretical:

For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to
go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow. It is a goldsmith’s art and
connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and
achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more
necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the
most, in the midst of an age of ‘work’, that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring
haste, which wants to ‘get everything done’ at once, including every old or new book:
this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read
slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left
open, with delicate eyes and fingers . . . My patient friends, this book desires for itself
only perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well! (Nietzsche 2007, 8)

Needing a New Queen to Integrate Knowledge

When philology’s young all departed the nest in the West, they kept their shared
methods but lost their integrating, organising principle. The philological method
(inductive, historical, and comparative) has grown into the modern scientific method,
empiricism and induction enthroned. The philological object of study (written
documents) is now only one of very many objects of study. If philosophy were once
queen of the sciences (in the ancient world), then theology (in the Middle Ages), then

11 “With the goal of defining a science of language that would be superior to philology; philology would
be the working phase, while linguistic science would be ‘the regulative, critical and teaching phase of
the science’” (Chang 2015, 317).
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philology (in the Renaissance and onward), what would it be in the modern academic
establishment?

The division of knowledge was now based on the object of study: natural objects (the
sciences) versus man as object (social sciences) versus culture (humanities). The same
methods applied to different objects led to a splintering of domains of institutionalised
knowledge. A new organising principle was needed.

In the early twentieth century, logical positivism emerged, with the goal of reuniting
these fractured disciplines and research agendas. It situated itself within philosophy,
establishing empirical observation as its proper object of research, on which logical
reasoning would cumulatively build a full body of objective knowledge (Krishnan 2009,
13–14). The historically observable became transformed through timeless reason to
offer genuine knowledge.12 The scientific method sought the role of queen.13

The idea of science as a cumulative process came under heavy fire in Thomas Kuhn’s
1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Instead of a steady evolutionary
process, a succession of scientific revolutions is understood to fundamentally reorganise
scientific fields and disciplines. The whole idea of a “paradigm shift” was to convey
this concept that disciplines are based on theoretical frameworks, which claim to
organise the empirical phenomena in that field. When more data are observed, or when
theories are perceived wanting, an entirely new theoretical framework—paradigm—is
needed to re-organise the discipline entirely.

12 It was a short step from here to timeless truth, which precisely prefigures the rejection of the long
history of logic and the iron wall between induction and deduction that culminates in Stephen
Hawking’s (see next note) claim that “philosophy is dead.”
13 Some have still ventured to give a specific discipline the crown. Stephen Hawking claimed physics
has usurped theology’s crown as queen of the sciences, in that it is now the discipline able to answer
the ultimate questions about who we are and why we are here (Hawking 1998). This of course runs
into the rather difficult problem of induction: valid induction requires that the logical strength of the
conclusion never exceed the logical strength of the hypotheses. If the conclusion is considered logically
stronger than its hypotheses, the conclusion is invalidated. Two wrongs can never make a right, and
two possibilities can never make a certainty. By definition, when we say science is “inductive” we
acknowledge that it is exploratory and aiming to provide the best explanation yet to fit the data; but it
can never be certain or “true,” only very probable. By its very definition, neither physics nor any other
science can ever answer the ultimate questions of life.
Unless, that is, one wants to claim that philosophy is dead and the problem of induction is irrelevant
(Hawking 2010). This would make a mockery of all of Western civilisation, which seems a high price
to pay for physics as a new queen.
From the other end of the philosophical spectrum, theological metaphysics has been proposed as the
new reincarnation of theology as queen. Given that, from a philosophical perspective, knowledge itself
is not fully possible as long as a distinction between subject and object is maintained, theological
metaphysics provides a framework in which subject and object can be reunited and true knowledge
can be had. But this very idea would pull the rug completely out from under science’s positivistic feet
(DiDonato 2015).
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The paradigm in place at any given time is deterministic: it both shapes the very
questions scientists ask and it pre-defines the available answers. It precludes certain
questions and presupposes others. What is needed is not a final, ideal theory, but rather
a frank acknowledgement of an ever-continuing succession of theories to organise our
world of data (Krishnan 2009, 14–15). Logical positivism might reign for a time, but
self-evidently it could not provide a final, cumulative body of knowledge and truth. No
theory could ever do that; a higher framework than theories is needed to deal with the
concepts of knowledge and truth.

Postmodernism has not resolved the question of how to divide up knowledge of the
world. Logical positivism would limit knowledge to that which is based on empirical
observations, with metaphysics rendered meaningless. The ancient queens of theology
and philosophy would become meaningless and be replaced by that which was once
scorned: time-bound empirical observations, to be then manipulated by critical
reasoning. Kuhn warned that logical positivism needed to be dethroned, and he
redefined the throne of science as a practical matter of historical reality (what fits the
facts of the time) rather than philosophical necessity (how to attain truth).

But then postmodernists attempted to dethrone even systematic knowledge itself,

scorning it as but a social construction designed to reinforce societal power
arrangements and therefore itself inherently suspicious.14 For social constructionists,
scientific truth itself becomes historically contingent, referring to nothing other than
itself and its own development. As a framework locked within a societal context, unable
to access any form of universal truth, an academic discipline can only be a
Wittgensteinian “language game”; progress is illusory because it is in fact impossible
(Krishnan 2009, 16).

In the postmodern world academic institutions do not have a coherent organising

principle. The adoration of the scientific method wants to turn induction (possibility)
into deduction (certainty). True metaphysical “knowledge” becomes meaningless to
those reared on the restriction of knowledge to the empirically observable.

Philosophy gave birth to theoretical physics and yet it is pronounced dead by one of its
most prominent practitioners. Today, there is no coherent view of knowledge.

14 In the 1960s, using an anthropological analogy, the sociologist Burton R. Clark joked: “Men of the
sociological tribe rarely visit the lands of the physicists and have little idea of what they do over there.
If the sociologists were to step into the building occupied by the English department, they would
encounter the cold stares if not the slingshots of the hostile natives.” Krishnan (2009, 22–23)
concludes: “In academia disciplinary languages are developed at least in part with the goal of
protecting knowledge and disciplinary identity from outside infringement. If knowledge would be
universally understandable and easily available for everyone, the specialists in the disciplines would
lose their authority and influence as the most important interpreters of their discipline’s accumulated
knowledge.”
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Challenges of Postmodernism (and SBL)

This provides the backdrop for the challenge facing the field of Biblical Hebrew studies,
within the larger field of biblical studies. As best I understand it, the problem consists
of the following tensions:

1. Academic disciplines (and sub-disciplines) have become so fragmented and cut off
from one another that they are like “watertight compartments.” They base their work
on mutually incompatible presuppositions and dismiss each other’s work as
irrelevant for their own (Barfield 1963).

2. Philology, which once held together the humanities, where it continues to exist at
all has fallen from being the window into lost worlds to being Monsieur Procruste,
Philologue (Cerquiglini 1999) with no ability to bring coherence to any other
disciplines.

The manifestation of these tensions within the world of Biblical Hebrew, and yet more
specifically within the Society of Biblical Literature, are as follows:

3. Biblical Hebrew linguistics has increasingly cut itself off from the rest of biblical
studies and its academic papers and presentations are often no longer accessible or
even intelligible to non-linguists.

4. The nature of the Society of Biblical Literature as a society depends on its members’
ability to sustain interdisciplinary dialogue, and therefore linguistics’ growing
separation threatens the very integrity of the society.

Like the rest of the academic world, the SBL is suffering from the fragmentation of
disciplines and needs to restore a framework of relationships that will enable the
disciplines to simultaneously thrive individually and interact corporately.

Functionally, one might ask, what is there already that unites the humanities and
sciences? When philology played that role, it was in terms of method, object, and goal
of knowledge. What has happened to each of those?

Regarding method, Turner (2015) has shown how the children of philology have,
largely, taken over its comparative, culturally sensitive methods that employ historical
lineage to interpret their objects of study. The scientific “method” is the protégé of the
philological method, but the term is now used more as a theory (with its own
philosophical assumptions) than a mere method, which Kuhn would caution is a threat
to its longevity.

Regarding the object of study, physical written documents are now but one of many
sources of knowledge. Anthropologists and psychologists study human behaviour;
historians of art study the products of culture; linguists study texts and recorded speech,

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etc. Is biblical studies, for instance, united around anything more than the text of the
Bible?

Regarding the goal of knowledge, postmodernism has no ready response. In the ancient
world, the goal was to preserve texts and the language of those texts. In Modern
Philology, it was to recreate the lost worlds of the texts to explain and give meaning to
the present and one’s own existence. This latter, arguably, is precisely the goal of many
at the SBL: to recreate the lost world of the biblical texts, in order to properly interpret
the text. But this is by no means the only approach, with reader-oriented criticism
representing a very different option that, for example, arguably has little to do with
historical, comparative philology.

Indeed, postmodernism founders on precisely this question of the purpose of our

scholarship and knowledge. Practically, some say the goal of a discipline is to eventually
become a reference discipline, a repository of data and interpretations to be useful to
others. Religious groups would agree with Aquinas that, ultimately, the purpose of
knowledge is to lead us to God. Other groups might argue for knowledge of self or of
the universe, or perhaps expression of self. If our culture cannot agree on the purpose
of knowledge and study, what likelihood is there that we could agree on an organising
principle to unite the pursuit of knowledge today?

Biblical Studies, Philology and Linguistics

But even if this is true for academia as a whole, we have clear statements of the reference
point and rallying point for the sphere of Biblical Hebrew, as articulated by the SBL on
their home page: it is “devoted to the critical investigation of the Bible from a variety
of academic disciplines”15 which it accomplishes as it “supports scholarly research and
fosters the public understanding of the Bible and its influence.”16

The rallying point is the text (literature) of the Bible and its later influence. By its
mission and vision statements, SBL proclaims itself as focused on scholarship of the
Bible, which is a text. Although texts are no longer the door through which our society,
as a whole, accesses the bulk of its knowledge, one particular text is still the door
through which the SBL accesses its knowledge. How, then, is “the critical investigation
of the Bible” different from “philology” of the biblical text? Or have we merely
rechristened the traditional understanding of philology?

15 “Mission.” Society of Biblical Literature (website). https://www.sbl-site.org/aboutus/mission.aspx,

accessed 15 February 2021.
16 Society of Biblical Literature (website). https://www.sbl-site.org/default.aspx, accessed 15 February
2021.
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Biblical studies17 shares with philology, in its grandest sense,18 the biblical text itself
(and later interpretation) as the object of study. They share the goal of their scholarship
in recreating the lost world of the Bible. But the methods visible within biblical studies
extend beyond the historical-comparative method, such that it no longer fits entirely
within the rubric of traditional philology. Where the methods deviate the goal must as
well, reducing the unifying principle within biblical studies to the text alone.

The text, then, is the immediate object of study for biblical studies, biblical philology
(again, in the grandest sense), and linguistics of Biblical Hebrew: a set of historical
documents written in ancient Hebrew (and some Aramaic). But where the goal of both
biblical studies and philology is to recreate the world of the text, the goal of linguistics
is entirely different. Linguistics aims at a scientific description of language, explaining
how it works and how it came to be the way it is; biblical studies and philology aim at
humanistic descriptions of the text itself.

The adjectives “scientific” versus “humanistic” may be observed to refer primarily to

the nature of the object as perceived, not to the methods used: linguistics sees the
language of a text as a specimen of a natural object, to be dissected as any scientific
object. The result of the scientific method on an object is a set of theories explaining
that object. L’on sait (interpréter) le texte.

Biblical studies (and philology), by contrast, sees a text as a cultural product, a product
of civilisation, to be explored and known and interacted with. The text is not merely an
object but a subject that “speaks” into human society repeatedly. L’on connaît le texte.

Consequently, the “scientific method” of inductively generating hypotheses, testing

them with multiple studies, and finally generating conclusions may be identical, with
the results being cultural interpretation within a “humanistic” perspective rather than
something more akin to a biological interpretation within a “scientific” perspective.

17 Defined here as “a collection of various, and in some cases independent, disciplines clustering around
a collection of texts known as the Bible whose precise limits (those of the Bible) are still a matter of
disagreement among various branches of the Christian churches” (Rogerson and Lieu 2006, xvii).
Krishnan notes that when a discipline is referred to as “studies,” it often indicates a lack of
disciplinarity, typically a lack of theorisation or specific methodologies. As will be seen below, biblical
studies suffers thus in a way that parallels philology (Krishnan, 2009, 10).
18 In philology’s more narrow forms it contents itself with questions of grammatical and manuscript
details and leaves to the likes of literary theory questions of beauty and meaning. In this more technical
textual and editorial sense, philology represents only a small portion of biblical studies, which in
general stresses interpretation over text critical details.
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An Organising Principle and a Purpose

We return to the biblical text as that which causes biblical studies to cohere, but is there
more to be said? Can the disciplines of biblical studies be further organised? Such a
question presupposes that academic disciplines are the appropriate form for organising
our educational and research institutions in the first place, a notion that Turner, our
advocate of philology, calls into question:

Today’s humanities disciplines are not ancient, integral modes of knowledge. They are
modern, artificial creations—where made-up lines pretend to divide the single sandbox
in which we all play into each boy’s or girl’s own inviolable kingdom. It is a sham.
(Turner 2015, 717)

His implication is precisely that postmodernism’s problem of fragmented disciplines

lies in the very definition of academic disciplines as carving up their own “sandboxes”
of knowledge.

Prior to academic disciplines, the umbrella of philology enabled a “university” of

knowledge. Now, there is ample diversity, but there is little unity to behold. If biblical
studies wishes to remain integrated, attention to its own self-organisation is critical.

Where Disciplines Multiply

The solution to “narrow and possibly arbitrary or artificial disciplinary boundaries,
which sometimes prevents academics seeing the close connections of different
phenomena and also of the other disciplines” (Krishnan 2009, 4) is, according to many,
interdisciplinarity. Yet, while it is on everyone’s agenda, “actually implementing it in
institutional settings is a more difficult proposition” (Krishnan 2009, 5; Klein 1996,
209). After a recent Old Testament Studies conference, whose very existence should
embody interdisciplinarity, a scholar joked to me, “I found myself asking if there were
a text in this conference!” There was no end of theories and insights presented, but
somehow lost to sight was the biblical text itself.

Herein lies the crux of the matter. With the separation of interpretation from text,
Scholasticism led to “a totally ahistorical theology that could be studied independent of
the sacred text from which it ultimately derived” (Turner 2015, 30). Philology was a
grand mansion based on texts, but daughter interests became enamoured with their own
theories and specialties, again, independently from a particular text.

So, too, biblical studies is finding its daughter disciplines spinning off from the biblical
text into worlds of their own, only loosely connected in that they begin with the biblical
text, but many end up far from the text.

When the SBL saw this happening with Biblical Hebrew and linguistics, they sought to
rein it back in, so that its own mansion should not be carved up. Is there more hope for
its success than for that of medieval scholarship or traditional philology?

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Miller-Naudé and Naudé (2017) propose complexity theory as a solution to the lack of
organisation (indeed, chaos) and the clear need for an organising principle. Complexity
theory describes the behaviour of a system or model in terms of local rules in the absence
of higher instruction. Complexity theory might thus enable the various sub-disciplines
of biblical studies to interact without claiming priority or pre-eminence for any
particular sub-discipline. In place of an overarching organising principle would be local
systems and models to facilitate interaction.

While complexity theory may thus be a useful expedient and solve many of the problems
where interdisciplinarity failed, it begs the question of whether or not there is an
overriding organising (and integrating) principle within biblical studies. Is there any
“queen” remaining to integrate the various streams of scholarship? Or must we resort to
a theory that is built on the assumption of the absence of an overriding organising
principle (or absence of an accessible overriding principle)? Given the fragmentation of
academia within postmodernism in general, this may be the best we can do.

The Text as a Text

Side-stepping to another field united around shared texts may be helpful. Suzanne
Fleischman, a renowned scholar of medieval French poetry, writes from the opposite
perspective of Biblical Hebrew scholars: in her field, linguistics is presupposed as a
discipline and it is philology that needs to justify itself or be consigned to history. She
insists that there is still much to be gained from the texts themselves, which reveals her
understanding about philology: philology sees scholarship from the perspective of
particular texts. Because the texts in question embody written language, linguistics as
the science of language is obviously vital. But linguistics remains a tool to understand
the text itself and what it has to offer humankind, as a cultural object. The text is
simultaneously a “document” to be submitted to linguists’ technical ministrations and a
poetic and historical “monument” to be known and interpreted by philology
(Fleischman 1990).

One might argue that the organising principle within biblical studies ought to be: how
does each sub-discipline contribute to understanding the biblical text as a text, as a
cultural phenomenon? It is also of interest like other objects (e.g., as a specimen of
language, or as evidence of a historical reconstruction), but what unifies biblical studies
in the end is the text speaking for itself, culturally. In other words, the goal is to recreate
the lost world of the text in which it first spoke, to enable it to speak again into our
world, to help us understand both it and ourselves.

This is what philology intended (but failed) and the tradition of Jewish philology
pursued for centuries. Which pattern will biblical studies follow?

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What Role Does Theory Play?

Philology fails the modern test of disciplinarity, and indeed has been denounced as
precisely “practice without theory” (Naudé and Miller-Naudé 2017, 10n42; Pollock
2015, 3). In the hands of a careful scholar, a “close reading” leads to insights into the
text as a monument of human achievement, while in the hands of others, it amounts to
little more than an ad hoc justification of one’s own intuition.

Herein is both the strength and weakness of traditional philology. A close reading
assumes an unstated theory, which, for medieval French texts, was revealed to be that
the text was a record of what people said (Fleischman 1990). An essential insight of
Fleischman’s was that these unstated assumptions were likely incorrect, and the text is
more likely a record of what people wanted others to say (as in a play).

Within biblical studies, theories abound about how the text functions as a text. The
History of Religions school has claimed that the text is the result of gradual accretions
marking the different stages of Israel’s history, and to let the text speak for itself is to
untangle the various layers. Canonical criticism claims that the final form of the text
should be understood as a synchronic text, regardless of its compositional history.

Must a biblical scholar choose between these various theories, in order to interpret the
text? In one sense, certainly. One’s interpretation will change depending on whether or
not one embraces such a theory. As Kuhn laid out, one’s theory will largely
predetermine the questions asked and the answers provided, regardless of whether or
not one is conscious of the theory.

We must carefully distinguish between a discipline in which standard practices are so

ingrained they are not recognisable as embedded within theory, and a discipline in which
there is truly no theory and so mutually incompatible practices are not even recognised
as mutually incompatible.19 The question becomes how to ensure the consistency and
rigour that characterise what we would like to call “scholarship.” This is not a new topic,
but rather the very definition of education in its classical sense. Charles Eliot, in his
1969 inaugural address as president of Harvard College, addressed this with vigour.

Philosophical subjects should never be taught with authority. They are not established
sciences; they are full of disputed matters, and open questions, and bottomless
speculations. It is not the function of the teacher to settle philosophical and political
controversies for the pupil, or even to recommend to him any one set of opinions as
better than another. Exposition, not imposition, of opinions is the professor’s part. The
student should be made acquainted with all sides of these controversies, with the salient
points of each system; he should be shown what is still in force of institutions or
philosophies mainly outgrown, and what is new in those now in vogue. The very word
education is a standing protest against dogmatic teaching. The notion that education

19 Holmstedt’s (2019) critique is apt.

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consists in the authoritative inculcation of what the teacher deems true may be logical
and appropriate in a convent, or a seminary for priests, but it is intolerable in universities
and public schools, from primary to professional. The worthy fruit of academic culture
is an open mind, trained to careful thinking, instructed in the methods of philosophic
investigation, acquainted in a general way with the accumulated thought of past
generations, and penetrated with humility. It is thus that the University in our day serves
Christ and the Church. (Eliot 1968, 35–36)

Conclusion
The history of Jewish interpretation provides innumerable examples of Hebrew
philology that explicates and interprets the text in order to explicate and interpret the
history and the very identity and purpose of the Jewish community. Nineteenth-century
philology (or simply “the humanities”) in the West drew near to this level of intimacy
between text and community for a short time. When its daughter disciplines departed,
however, the humanities grew large and the one organising and integrating vision was
lost. Attempts at interdisciplinarity have failed at recovering integration or unity.
Biblical studies in the West may be poised to follow the same path as nineteenth-century
philology, fragmenting into isolated sub-disciplines suspicious of each other and jealous
of their own territory.

The recent ferment between philology and linguistics, whether in the field of biblical
studies or medieval French, may fruitfully be viewed in this light. The technical study
of the codicological features, the scientific study of the language, the literary study of
the literature—all are valuable and important. Inevitably different periods will favour
some scholarly approaches over others. The historical overview suggests two possible
paths for the future of biblical studies.

Scholarship for Scholarship’s Sake

As happened with the Scholastics, within Arabic philology, and in the twentieth century,
discussion “about” the text can become increasingly distanced from the text itself. This
is perhaps the most natural path for developing scholarship. Philology could become its
own world of technical detail, linguistics its own world of scientific study, and each
could flourish largely on its own. The focus of each discipline is its own set of methods
and theories applied to the objects in question. Scholarship is valued for scholarship’s
sake alone.

Scholarship to Pursue Self-Understanding

The examples of Jewish and nineteenth-century philology provide an alternative model,
in which the study of the text is a means to discover an understanding of contemporary
events and to construct the very identity of a community. Scholarship is here a tool that
serves the community’s self-understanding. For communities with a sacred text, that

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text speaks truth into the life of the community, cultivating both solidarity and critical
self-awareness (Pollock 2016).

Both forces were visibly at work in the same year that Nietzsche (1969, 41) declared
“God is dead” and Charles Eliot announced his programme for the university to serve
“Christ and the Church” (Eliot 1968, 35–36). Yet both pleaded for a kind of scholarship
that cannot be encapsulated or carefully defined within any method, theory or discipline.
Such scholarship will make use of any method, theory, or discipline that suits the
purpose, but the scholarship itself must rise above all these. The purpose of the
scholarship (regarding texts) is to hear the text speak “for itself,” which requires
resisting every impulse to impose a foreign framework of interpretation.

Philosophical Hermeneutics and Truth

At this point we transgress on the scholarly field of philosophical hermeneutics, which
Pollock (2016, 16ff.) argues is the implicit theory behind modern philology. Hans Georg
Gadamer (1900–2002), who most shaped the field, argues from the perspective of
“truth.” He opposes a detached, scientific approach (savoir) with an engaged, relational
approach (connaître), concluding that only one can lead to truth:

The text that is understood historically [or linguistically] is forced to abandon its claim
to be saying something true. We think we understand when we see the past from a
historical standpoint—i.e., transpose ourselves into the historical situation and try to
reconstruct the historical horizon. In fact, however, we have given up the claim to find
in the past any truth that is valid and intelligible for ourselves. Acknowledging the
otherness of the other in this way, making him the object of objective knowledge,
involves the fundamental suspension of his claim to truth. (Gadamer 2004, 302–303)20

What Gadamer calls truth the ancient Qumranian scholars might have called the proper
interpretation of history or of their community identity and the Protestant and Roman
Catholic parties would have called the rightful perspective of history that legitimated
one over the other. Humboldt would have called it Germany’s true identity.

A Choice to Make
At this point we return to our organising principle and purpose of scholarship: why do
we engage in scholarship? Is it to seek wisdom and truth, like the ancients? Is it to
recover lost worlds, as in the Renaissance? Is it to discover our own identity, as with
many communities? The answer to this question determines which queen we must
choose to integrate our scholarship and world of knowledge.

20 See Fry (2012, 35–38) for elaboration on Gadamer’s idea here.

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If we are content with scholarship for scholarship’s sake, then there is no difficulty with
biblical studies splitting into multiple sub-disciplines; indeed, it accelerates the growth
of the body of knowledge.

Alternatively, if we engage in scholarship in pursuit of truth, then we may need to strive,

like Nietzsche, with the impossibility of systematic access to that truth in the text. For,
there is no systematic method that guarantees the “proper” interpretation of a text. Each
step closer to a systematic theory is potentially a step farther away from truth. There is
an unavoidable tension between theory and disciplinarity, on the one hand, and listening
to what truth the text may speak, on the other. We may need to feel the weight of
Gadamer’s insistence on choosing between Wahrheit und Methode (Gadamer 2004).

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