John Hobbins of Ancient Hebrew Poetry has recently performed a deep crawl of blogs related to the Bible. His attempts to map them have garnered some attention (Iyov wonders, "what am I?") and if the attempt is open to challenge, I can at least note with gratitude my own inclusion.

Yesterday John cataloged a few bloggers indebted to Childs in a post preliminary to the final mapping, which he later followed up with a charge to let canonical exegesis take a wider view. One worry of his may be that conversation in this camp (if it is even proper to speak of such a thing) is insular. He writes, "It bothers me when Bible blogdom becomes a monologue among like-minded Christians." John does a good job taking his own advice, however, and omits to name names:

Scholar-bloggers fall into two categories. Those that keep a blogroll and interact with a community of other bloggers, and those that don't. Those that don't abuse the genre. Here is a list of the worst offenders: [omitted by a thoughtful editor].

The complaint leveled at canonical exegesis links to B. Sommer's review of Michael Fishbane's Haftarot commentary to reinforce the point that canonical reading should learn from Jewish as well as Christian history of reception.

I confess that I try to keep something of a low profile as a blogger, not for fear of conflict, but because as an impoverished grad student time is about the only commodity I have to my name. Having had a Childs-related (because research-related) online presence for not quite three years, it was with bemusement, but not envy, that I noted Phil's success in launching a vigorous debate about Childsean hermeneutics just this September. I have followed the discussion there as best I can, but have confined myself mostly to posting links in my sidebar/blogroll. In Phil's own words, "I've been having online dialogues of the most colossal proportions. So involved, in fact, that I have no time or energy to write anything substantial today." Which is a major reason I've had to keep my distance.

Nevertheless, John's post managed to draw me out this morning. I have commented on it already (with a PS), and I repeat my remarks here as well, in part so I can link them up:

Hi John,

I have been very reluctant to get drawn into the debates that have recently surfaced online even though, as you note in the sidebar, there has been some "astoundingly thoughtful comment." That's because (a) I'm working against several deadlines at the moment, (b) I've been working on the particular problem of Childs' reception too long probably, so little seems fresh on the Q to me, and (c) I have some doubts about blogs as a medium for advancing the state of the Q here when so much energy has been expended on it in more traditional media over the last 2.5 decades. Also, though the reasons why I was drawn to my PhD topic are complex and rightly point to an appreciation of Childs' work on my part, this is not uncritical. I find myself wondering about how to get out from under this first project in the next.

Nevertheless, you have drawn me. I'm still facing immanent deadlines, so I'll have to get to it.

James makes a good point, and so do you, John, in response. It has often been claimed that Childs frequently changes his mind (so Barr above all, but by no means exclusively), and typically I think this perception has been overstated. On this precise point, it is unquestionably true that Childs had to rethink some of his initial work on what he calls "the mystery of Israel" (see chapter 4 of my forthcoming dissertation). Fishbane is a great figure to bring up at this juncture.

Rolf Rendtorff, as a self-professed Christian canonical reader, is another. He fell out with Childs over precisely this issue (see his review of BTONT in JBTh 9). I don't know if you've seen his Leviticus commentary yet, but it represents a career-long effort to give the Jewish reception of the Hebrew Bible its due. For Rendtorff this is an imperative for Christians reading the OT.

On the other hand, though Childs moved from talk of midrash (Jewish in his view) to allegory (the traditional Christian reading strategy—I know that can sound over simple, but its how he sees it), he still strove to be a student of the Jewish tradition. When I interviewed him in Cambridge I pushed him exactly here. Why no midrash anymore? His answer came out as advice to a student—you'll never master the material; trust me, I've tried. Also, Jewish readers themselves don't agree on these things.

To my mind the best further reading here is Childs' 1999 essay "The Almost Forgotten Genesis Commentary of Benno Jacob." Not only does it tell the the story of Jacob's Genesis commentary, it also alludes to Jacob's Exodus commentary, which Childs used heavily in his own commentary of 1974. The astonishing thing is that Childs, when in Jerusalem [in 1963], secured a copy of the then almost unknown manuscript and brought it back to Yale. He was making serious use of it decades before it was printed (first in English translation [1992], and only very recently in its German original [1997]). There is a deep commitment to Jewish readings which really never leaves, even though he gains clarity over the years on what an explicitly Christian reading of the tradition entails.

Personally I haven't sorted out where I stand on these issues. At the seminar paper I gave on the topic last week there seemed to be quite a bit of sympathy for Rendtorff's position over against Childs'. Still, the latter is (in a sense) the lectio difficilior. Should a Jewish and Christian scholar really come to different results on that basis? (If no, why not?) I agree with your general point, however. It would be ironic indeed if Childs became a warrant for "canonical readers," what ever that may mean, to neglect Jewish reception in preference for Christian. Fortunately, some of the best theological readers today (who follow Childs at times and do not follow Childs) avoid this: Walter Moberly, Markus Bockmuehl, etc.

Incidentally, I also agree with your comment on Cook's blog about the neglected works. The only real Wirkung the NT Intro got seems to have been among Roman Catholic scholars in Germany. And James Kugel explicitly mentioned the sensus literalis essay in his respectful comments at the small Childs session at SBL Vienna this summer, but who has worked with it seriously?

I'm quite happy for any discussion of this to continue on John's page, where it originates, but I did want to put my answer in a broader context as well.

I might add, too, that my focus on Childs of late is born of at least three things: his recent passing, my work locating his, and an increasing reluctance to speak too far beyond my competence. I do think the scope of Occasional Publications will broaden once I dig into the next project.

Tags: Childs, Theological Exegesis, Midrash

I've just complete a (bloated) 20K word chapter on Childs and midrash, part of which I'll be presenting in a seminar next Wednesday. I've titled the section I'm presenting "The Mystery of Israel" (a phrases from Biblical Theology in Crisis).

The full title of the piece is something like: "Midrash, Kanonbewußtsein, and the Mystery of Israel."

It's good to get underway again.

Tags: Childs, PhD, Midrash

Adriel often meets with international students on Saturday nights, so I sometimes spend them at work. Tonight I'm plowing through some bibliography entries, always slow-going. I'm mining them from David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

Stern mentions Isaac Heinemann, who he says is the first modern to critically (rather than dogmatically) examine midrash. The analysis is found in his Darkhei HaAggadah (The Methods of Aggadah). I'm having trouble locating the volume but at least found a web page all about Heinemann, by Marc Bregman. (Looking at the rest of his faculty web page, I see he links several other online publications.) I'll need to get my hands on the Heinemann study at some point…

Tags: Midrash