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Chapter 7 - Orientalism and the Bible

from Part 1 - Origins

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2019

By
Ivan Kalmar
Edited by
Geoffrey P. Nash
Geoffrey P. Nash
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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Summary

It has become something of a cliché that the “western discourse” that Edward W. Said labeled “orientalism,”1 which included scholarship about an area labeled the “Orient,” regarded the Orient as the West’s “Other.” However, it was a crucial fact for both scholarly and popular Orientalism that the Orient contained the homeland of the Bible. This was because the Bible is the defining document of Christianity, and Christianity the defining document of the West. Hence the Orient was regarded as much as the Mother as the Other by Orientalists in the nineteenth century, which saw the spectacular rise of biblical philology, a discipline that regarded the Bible as an Oriental document: the product of the Oriental mind. The very concept of an Oriental mind, in fact, owed its modern essence to biblical philology.

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Chapter
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Orientalism and Literature , pp. 133 - 148
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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