Self-Consciousness and Conversation

Abstract

"The major task of biblical scholarship in the last one hundred years has been to establish historical contingency as a principle of interpretation. The application of scientific method to the question of the composition of the biblical texts has enabled us to view them as products of ancient Israel's culture and yielded insight into the complex social processes through which they emerged. The present essay seeks to supplement that line of investigation by drawing attention to another dimension of the historical or cultural conditioning of the text: namely, that which unfolds when it is read. The same forces which gave rise to historical study of the Bible also produced the discipline of literary criticism, whose concern is systematic reflection on the activity of reading itself. In the past two decades, "literary readings" of biblical texts have proliferated in response to what some scholars perceive to be the sterility of the historical approach"