Old Testament Studies: An (Un)Academic Modern History

Lord Kames believed that societies became increasingly better and so the Old Testament is a relic of earlier, flawed culture and mythology but the creation of humans in Genesis was essentially true.

John Toland rejected traditional interpretations of the Bible and wanted modern scholars to use newer techniques to analyze meaning of the language and the placement of biblical books within the canon. He believed that both the Old and New Testaments taught the law of nature when they were interpreted properly.

Thomas Morgan called himself a Christian deist and argued that the Old Testament was political religion used to enslave the Israelite people and entirely at odds with true Christianity and the religion of nature.

William Warburton argued that the Old Testament does not talk about human immortality or the afterlife because the Israelites had a special divine provision where they received earthly rewards and punishments based upon their following of the law.

William Stevens argued that Benjamin Kennicott was deceived by Jewish forgers and no variant manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible were legitimate and these forgeries were intended as a Trojan horse to infiltrate and destroy Christianity.

Bossuet organized history into epochs and claimed that the Old Testament shows God's interaction with humanity and the devolvement of human culture that can only be rectified by divinely appointed monarchs.

William Wotton argued that Chinese history was unreliable but the Old Testament explains the history of the world perfectly including the development of languages from the tower of Babel story in Genesis 11.

William Jones compared the Old Testament to Hinduism and Persian poetry. He questioned whether Indian philosophy informed Moses and asserted the theological unity of Hebrew poetry with Persian poetry and other hymns to God.

John Hutchinson claimed that Hebrew was the language given by God and the words allow people to properly perceive the world and understand the deeper divine truths.

Samuel Clarke claimed that the Old Testament was written by idolaters, including Moses, and for idolaters, so it is no longer necessary after the pure, logical, spiritual teachings of Jesus in the New Testament.

Thomas Burnet used the Bible, other ancient authors, and geological theories to understand the formation of the earth, Noah's flood, and the future of the earth as it returns to paradise according to his reading of the Bible.

Isaac Newton tried to show how the religion of Noah matched the organization of the universe and attempted to extract deep esoteric truth and mathematics from Old Testament texts.

Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi created a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible with a massive amount of sources and engaged with the arguments for and against biblical inspiration by many scholars of the early modern period.

Benjamin Kennicott was a clergyman and Hebrew scholar who created a critical edition of the Old Testament and attempted to resolve the textual variants to remove the transmission errors and return to the pure, original, inspired Word of God.

Albert Schultens claimed that Arabic was a sister language to Hebrew and, more importantly, that it was better preserved from the mother language because the southern Arabian Peninsula was more geographically and culturally isolated than Israel/Palestine. 

Berriman critiqued the assumptions for cultural borrowing and the place of miracles and divine inspiration in Old Testament interpretation by scholars using allegorical and deist methods.

Wilhelm Schickard was a great Hebrew scholar and scientist who developed innovative teaching methods and used his Hebrew knowledge to interpret the Hebrew Bible.

Robert Boyle claimed that divine revelation was necessary to do science and philosophy properly but also that the Bible must be used with care so that it is not read overly literally but also not simply relegated allegorical interpretation.

William Derham was scientist and theologian. He used the natural sciences and astronomy to prove the existence of God and the truth of the Bible.

Lightfoot used Jewish texts like the Talmud to read the Bible and interpreted the biblical history and chronology literally including the date for creation and Noah's flood.

Conyers Middleton wrote three rebuttals to Waterland and Tindal. He took a middle ground approach critiquing both Tindal's optimism about a pure rule of natural law in the past and Waterland's insistence on special revelation as necessary for the incomplete revelation of natural law.

Daniel Waterland wrote a book refuting the views of Matthew Tindal. He argued that special revelation was known to all people in all times through the efforts of Israelites, Jews, and Christians so everyone had access to the necessary salvific message.

Tindal believed that the Bible was only part of the natural religion, and a flawed retelling of the natural religion at that. He proposed allegorizing certain parts of the Bible in order to go back to primitive religion that was more pure than the present forms.

Carpzov was a German Lutheran scholar who asserted verbal inspiration and the integrity of the biblical text. He wrote hugely influential works that denounced William Whiston, Clericus, and Richard Simon as opponents of Scripture.

Voltaire was a Deist who attempted to separate the Old Testament from Christian theology and questioned the history presented by the Old Testament and the historicity of the text of the Old Testament.

John Gill argued for the archaic nature of Hebrew vowel points and the entire Hebrew language and wrote on the entire Hebrew Bible using many ancient and early modern sources.

Anthony Collins disputed the literal interpretation of prophecy that Whiston proposed and used a typological interpretation but the question remains whether he genuinely believed that allegorical interpretation was true.

William Whiston believed that prophecy had only one meaning and the Hebrew Old Testament was corrupt and needed to be restored in order to align more clearly with the New Testament.

Calmet argued for the literal reading of the Bible. He claimed that even the miracles of Jesus align with reason and can be trusted because of the unbroken chain councils that refined the doctrines of the Catholic church.

Robert Lowth studied Hebrew poetry and analyzed types of parallelism based upon the content of the lines rather than counting syllables.

David Hollaz argued that passages in the Old Testament clearly show Trinitarian thought, not just plurality, following in the footsteps of his teacher Calovius.

Abraham Calov argued for a unified reading of the Bible and specifically attacked the historical and untheological reading by Grotius.

Jerusalem claimed that humanity was on an upward progression and the Pentateuch accurately records the interaction between God and humanity in this providential progress toward enlightenment.

Rambach was a Pietist theologian who laid out criteria for a mystical reading of the Bible and specifically finding hidden references to Christ in the Old Testament.

Jean Astruc argued that Genesis was compiled from earlier sources by Moses but the rest of the Pentateuch was written by Moses from his own experience.

A reflection on Hobbes, Spinoza, Simon, Blount, and LeClerc and a response to a recent listener email.

Jean LeClerc countered Richard Simon's hypothesis of "prophet/scribes" and claimed that the Pentateuch was written during the exile by a priest.

Charles Blount was an English Deist who questioned the literal interpretation of Genesis and claimed that Deuteronomy was forged by Hilkiah the priest during the time of Josiah

Richard Simon argued for a long process of text transmission by prophets reworking ancient texts by the inspiration of God to suit the needs of their communities.

Spinoza advocated for a naturalistic reading of the Old Testament focused upon moral examples and teaching as opposed to history and truth.

Thomas Hobbes was a political philosopher who believed that the Old Testament was primarily a materialist religion. He centered his views on a rejection of the spiritual, Greco-Roman thought, and any influence on the interpretation of the Bible apart from the interpretation provided by the state sovereign.

Reflection on Huet, Spencer, and La Peyrère

Isaac La Peyrère was a theologian and lawyer who questioned the literal understand of Genesis and put forth a Pre-Adamite theory. He posited that Adam was not the first human created but, rather, the first Jewish person. Adam was God's second creation after the creation of the Gentile nations.

John Spencer was a priest and theologian who argued that the Israelites "translated" Egyptian rituals into their religion and learned the esoteric meaning of the rituals from the Egyptians during the sojourn in Egypt.

Huet was a philosopher who attempted to show how all religions and law codes derive from Moses. He used similarities in laws and his knowledge of ancient trade to argue for the transmission of the Torah to the rest of the world in ancient times.

In this episode I revisit the first two thinkers that I discussed. I dive a little deeper into their work and my thoughts on their methodology and how it has affected modern thinking today.

Louis Cappel was a Hebrew scholar who questioned the history of the Hebrew vowels and cantillation marks. He also attempted to separate text criticism from Christian theology.

Grotius was a Dutch lawyer, philosopher, and theologian who made a significant impact on the study of the Old Testament in the 1600s especially with his use of the philosophical concept of moral/natural law.

In this episode, we set a foundation for our historical investigation. The basics of the historical-critical method are explained and set against textual criticism and other forms of Old Testament inquiry. This will provide the background for our survey of early modern thinkers by explaining what was so unique about their work.

In this episode, we explore our field of study, Old Testament scholarship, as well as the time period we are studying, the early modern period to present. I will set the parameters for the exploration and explain why I chose the 1600s as the starting point for our historical journey.