Every year, either in Oxford or in Cambridge, a day‐long seminar takes place involving graduate students in Old and New Testament studies from the two Universities. It ends with a plenary session that tends to raise general questions about the disciplines and the ways in which they are developing, and there are two questions that invariably arise: the first is the relationship between the use of the bible in the Church and its place in academic life; the second is how biblical studies relates to theology. Legaspi's book makes an important and fascinating contribution to these questions by helping us to understand the contribution of a seminal figure in the history of post‐enlightenment study of the bible, Johann David Michaelis.
Michaelis (1717–1791) was the author of Raisonnement über die protestantischen Universitäten, written in four volumes between 1768 and 1776. It was a programmatic work that outlined what he considered to be the function and contribution of a non‐confessional university in Germany in the aftermath of the religious strife that had riven his nation in the first half of the previous century. There were two elements to this programme, both of which did indeed drive forward the development of universities in many of the German states in the eighteenth century: they should ‘redound to the glory and benefit of the state’ (p. 34), being at the forefront of discoveries in the natural and human sciences and creating a class of enlightened leaders of society; and when it comes to religion, they should abandon the aim of preserving and advancing Christianity, still less a particular Christian denomination, instead promoting an ecumenical irenicism that would maintain the peace and stability of society.
These principles governed Michaelis's particular field of study at the new Georgia Augusta University at Göttingen (established by George II as Elector of Hanover in 1734 and opened to students three years later), where Michaelis taught from 1745 until his death, having felt out of place at the Pietist‐influenced University of Halle. Michaelis's project, put simply, was to re‐conceive the study of the Old Testament in the mould of the neo‐humanist studies of classical literature undertaken at Göttingen by, notably, J.M. Gesner and C.G. Heyne. The Old Testament was of value – vital importance, indeed – for Michaelis, but not because it was the word of God speaking afresh in every generation to the Church as the source of theological doctrine. That way lay the dogmatic disputation and division above which the enlightened university man must rise. Rather, Israel's scriptures offered a window into the life of a classical civilisation: the Hebrew people stood alongside the Greeks and the Romans as a model of society to be admired and imitated, and the Hebrews the more so because their ideals formed the basis of European society with its Christian heritage. And so, as the students of classical literature used the latest critical scientific techniques of history, archaeology, linguistics and such like to bring the ideal societies of Greece and Rome to life, so must the biblical scholar do for Israel.
This meant, of course, that the study of the Old Testament was no longer the study of a document that spoke directly to the whole of humanity. Rather, Michaelis's ‘primary interpretive lens’ was ‘the cultural particularity of the Ancient Israelites’ (p. 51), and so he injected into biblical studies the presupposition that the bible is a document fundamentally alien to the reader, unless that reader be enlightened by the critical scientific skills of the academic interpreter with his knowledge not just of history – although this has come to predominate since the nineteenth century – but also of ‘botany, criminal law, climate, zoology [and] geography’ (p. 51).
In fact, Michaelis's own speciality was in linguistics, and for me the most fascinating chapter of this book is the fourth, ‘Michaelis and the Dead Hebrew Language’, which outlines how, as ‘the leading Orientalist scholar of his generation’ (p. 80) Michaelis made the study of Biblical Hebrew a branch of Semitic philology in a neo‐humanist context. In practical terms, this meant that for the first time Hebrew was studied not as an older form of a living language, that of the European Jews, but as a dead language. Scholars of the Old Testament would learn little, may even be misled, by studying the language of the Rabbis, but needed instead to immerse themselves in Ethiopic, Syriac and above all Arabic. This of course had implications for the relationship between the Jewish people and Christendom: the latter was the authentic inheritor of the Hebrew people, the Jews had no claim on the Old Testament, and ‘cutting them off from their biblical past and their Christian contemporaries, Michaelis stranded the Jews [and] provided scholarly reinforcement to anti‐Jewish attitudes and ideas’ (p. 97). But in fact, as Legaspi goes on to show, Michaelis's approach to linguistics also contributed to cutting off all particular religious traditions from academic enquiry into the Hebrew Bible.
Even if one is not interested in the broader implications of Michaelis's work, this chapter offers a genuinely intriguing and illuminating account of a part of the history of the study of Hebrew, just as those interested in the history of humanism in eighteenth century German universities will be gripped by the preceding two chapters. Equally, Legaspi's eminently readable prose and lightly‐worn scholarship make the fifth chapter an extremely interesting account of Michaelis's engagement with the work of Robert Lowth, the ‘seemingly dilettantish clergyman’ (p. 107), whereby he made the greatest contribution to the development of ideas about Hebrew poetry. Indeed, we may go so far as to say that, by mediating Lowth to J.G. Eichhorn, Michaelis was more than anyone else responsible for the invention of biblical poetry.
The final substantive chapter of this book deals with Michaelis's approach to the person of Moses, who was for Michaelis the founding genius of the Israelite culture: educated in Egypt and imbued with its intellectual inheritance, yet also sensitive to the distinct needs of a more primitive people, Moses was not a prophet or a mediator of the word of God but a genius of philosophy and jurisprudence who bestowed upon the Hebrews ‘a sane, rational and irenic monotheism’ (p. 152) in a form appropriate to their manner of life. Legaspi shows clearly how, in this above all, Michaelis's project became self‐defeating, for his Moses was made to bear the weight of Western culture, thereby securing the value of the scriptures of Israel, only by losing entirely his Israelite identity. Moreover, the necessities of his project meant that Michaelis missed the opportunity to contribute the immensity of his philological expertise more profitably to the newly opened question of the authorship of the Pentateuch; this subject, too, Legaspi expounds upon very interestingly.
Michaelis is neither the hero nor the villain of this book; similarly, when Legaspi traces the role he played in bringing about the present situation of the bible's use in the academy and the church, he does so without polemic. What he does, rather, is to demonstrate convincingly that addressing this urgent question can only be aided by understanding the motives and concerns of those who brought it to its present state. Everyone who is interested in such matters should read this book, and will enjoy doing so.
