A Survey of Old Testament Studies

Extract

Contemporary study of the Old Testament appears to be dominated by three trends, associated with three broad groups of scholars. For practical purposes these groups may legitimately be described as ‘schools’, but only in a sense broad enough to allow for the intellectual independence of each individual scholar. The designation ‘school’ is often resented and repudiated nowadays.

The first group, led by the German scholars, A. Alt, M. Noth and G. von Rad, is usually called the ‘History of Tradition’ school. The second, consisting primarily of Scandinavian scholars with S. Mowinckel and J. Pedersen at their head, is sometimes described as the ‘Comparative Religion’ school. For reasons which will appear later I personally prefer to call it the ‘Palaeo-anthropological’ school. The third general trend is that of ‘enlightened orthodoxy’. It is characteristic of the new awakening of Catholic Old Testament scholarship, especially in France, and here the leader is unquestionably R. de Vaux. The approach of certain American scholars such as W. Albright, G. E. Wright and J. Bright is markedly similar to that of the French, and it would not be wholly inaccurate to classify these too under the same general heading of ‘enlightened orthodoxy’. Let us very briefly consider the distinctive approaches of each of these schools as exemplified in their most important and most representative works.

The characteristic approach of the German school may be described by means of a double simile. The enormously complicated amalgam of tradition which we call the Old Testament is regarded as a sort of snowball. The nucleus of the snowball is constituted by the Grundlage, the central ‘pan-Israelite’ traditions recording the events of the exodus, Sinai and the entry into the promised land.