Читать книгу A Contemporary Introduction to the Bible - Colleen M. Conway - Страница 39

Reading biblical texts in relation to their original contexts can make many aspects of them come alive, but the reason such texts are read now is that they have remained meaningful to diverse communities in much later contexts. These texts are in the Bible because they have transcended their origins. This Introduction will discuss both aspects of the Bible: its origins in the ancient Near East and its later interpretation by Jewish and Christian communities today. Knowing more about the Bible’s early contexts gives some perspective on contemporary differences in interpretation. The more you know about the antiquity of the Bible, the more you may appreciate both the care and the creativity with which it has been read and reread over time by different communities.

This can be illustrated through a brief look at how different methods of biblical criticism might look at Israel’s “exodus,” the story of Yahweh’s (see the Special Topics Box on “The Name of Israel’s God: Yahweh/the LORD”) liberation of the people from Egypt that is now found in the first chapters of the book of Exodus (Exodus 1–15). To start, some scholars try to reconstruct whether and when this exodus actually happened. Such academic study of the history of Israel uses biblical texts as one among multiple sources for the reconstruction of “what probably happened.” So far, the results of such study have been inconclusive. On the one hand, many scholars believe some sort of exodus out of Egypt happened, probably during the centuries just before the emergence of the people of “Israel” as a distinct group in the highlands of Canaan. On the other hand, most academic scholars of the Bible also believe that the written texts of the Bible are so far removed from the events that they describe that they are not useful for precise retelling of what actually happened back then: who said what, how many and who were involved, etc. The biblical texts are not reliable for such details because they have been filtered by centuries of oral retelling and written expansions by later Israelites. Imagine a game of “telephone” where hundreds of people over a period of five hundred years retell stories about an event important to them (e.g. of the exodus from Egypt), continually adapting such stories for new situations and audiences, and then imagine trying to use the end result of this complex process for historical analysis. Because biblical texts are so shaped by time, scholars studying the history of Israel attempt to reconstruct what happened through analyzing them and comparing them – where possible – with archaeological records and non-biblical historical sources.