Introduction
Julius Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to the History of Israel proposed that a “sharp break” marked the course of Israel’s religious history.Footnote 1 At first, Israel looked much like its ancient neighbors, an Iron Age kingdom with a warlike patron god.Footnote 2 Then, according to Wellhausen, the eighth-century prophets broached this “paradoxical thought”: the national protector deity, YHWH, could turn in wrath against his own nation, and only executing justice would ensure his favor.Footnote 3 These prophets were “the spiritual destroyers of old Israel”—sweeping away “the old popular half-pagan conception of Jehovah” and laying the theological groundwork for Deuteronomy, deuteronomism, and early Judaism.Footnote 4
Wellhausen’s Prolegomena threw the theological world of the late nineteenth-century North Atlantic into a furor. Journals sprang up to rebut the book’s ideas. Heresy trials ensued when professors espoused its conclusions, and newspapers reported on the proceedings.Footnote 5 The devout German scholar Friedrich Delitzsch accused Wellhausen of “troubling the church of God.”Footnote 6 Another, quite un-devout Friedrich—Friedrich Nietzsche—happily concurred: he read Wellhausen’s book with great interest and paraphrased its argument in his own tellingly titled work The Antichrist.Footnote 7 So radically did Wellhausen’s proposal depart from the Bible’s own self-presentation that Delitzsch confided to a Scottish visitor, “if [Wellhausen’s] conclusions be true, the Old Testament cannot in any distinctive sense be the Word of God.”Footnote 8
This judgment was hardly an isolated case in Delitzsch’s day—nor is it in our own. A sense of competition between Wellhausen’s reconstruction and the Bible’s eligibility as “Word of God” persists. The biblical theologian Brevard S. Childs (1923–2007) presents one example of this persistence, and an influential one, given his founding role in the contemporary movement for “theological interpretation of scripture.”Footnote 9 Childs’s canonical approach grew out of critical research, and it stayed involved with its historical claims. Over against Wellhausen’s “sharp break,” however, Childs insisted—as a historical postulate—that “very strong theological continuity” characterized the development of Israelite religion from its outset.Footnote 10 Childs could sound almost like Delitzsch: “if Wellhausen [were] right … one could no longer meaningfully speak of [scripture’s] canonical shape,” and nor then of a theological approach such as Childs articulated.Footnote 11 With few exceptions,Footnote 12 practitioners of theological interpretation share Childs’s—and Delitzsch’s— sensibility.Footnote 13 A Manifesto for Theological Interpretation reads, for instance: “the validity of the Old Testament’s witness depends on covenant as an early [and therefore continuous] institution in Israel.”Footnote 14
The present article accepts and takes up the goal of theological interpretation, and it even seeks to identify with the species of theological interpretation that Childs championed: one oriented towards the truthfulness of scripture vis-à-vis God and engaged with critical judgments about history.Footnote 15 But the present article raises the very possibility that Delitzsch and Childs alike deny. It asks, “If Wellhausen’s conclusions be true, might the Old Testament still be the Word of God?”
The question is productive on several counts. First, Biblical scholarship has moved on from Wellhausen in many ways, but the basic contours of his “sharp break” remain viable, and indeed a so-called “Wellhausen renaissance” is underway in the study of ancient Israelite religion and early Judaism.Footnote 16 The resurgence of Wellhausen’s account in these quarters poses an unresolved challenge for theological interpretation. Second, even if biblical studies should trend away from Wellhausen, his thesis is still helpful to “think with”—not only because of its classic status, but because of how radically his version of Israel’s history diverges from the Bible’s own testimony.Footnote 17 Considering Wellhausen and theological interpretation also promises to yield mutual clarification: theological interpreters will know more exactly why and in what ways historical reconstructions matter to theological reading, and historians of religion may more richly appreciate the theological implications of their work.
Although its ultimate aim is constructive, the first step of the present article is diagnostic: it must determine why some theological interpreters—and in this case, Childs—reject Wellhausen’s thesis.Footnote 18 The second, constructive task of the article is to test whether Childs’s interpretive program—the very same that informed his repudiation of Wellhausen—might accommodate Wellhausen’s historical claim.Footnote 19 The final result will be to set Wellhausen and Childs, historical reconstruction and theological interpretation, in a noncompetitive relationship.
Theo-Referentiality in Childs’s Program
Childs rejects Wellhausen’s “sharp break” because it violates his understanding of scripture’s theological truthfulness. Before considering the exact dimensions of Childs’s rejection, the following section describes the commitment to “theo- referentiality” that shapes it.Footnote 20 Walter Brueggemann once wrote that “it is my impression that in his most recent work, Biblical Theology, [Childs] attends to the problem of referentiality in a way that results in a God ‘out there.’”Footnote 21 Brueggemann does not compliment Childs with this observation, but his impression is correct.Footnote 22 In BTONT and throughout his works, Childs affirms “the reality of an external, out-there-in-the-world, living God.”Footnote 23 This theological realism is an indispensable component of Childs’s interpretive program. Brueggemann also identifies another: namely, Childs’s answer to the “the problem of referentiality” is that scripture refers truthfully to the out-there-in-the-world God.Footnote 24 For Childs, God is living, active, and extra-textual, and scripture is God’s faithful human witness, pointing like John the Baptist’s finger in Grünewald’s altarpiece.Footnote 25
This much, theologically, Childs shares in common with many in the post- Barthian theological stream.Footnote 26 To be sure, it is unusual that Childs as a biblical scholar gives such prominence to terms more often used in systematic theology (witness, Sache, res).Footnote 27 But the unique profile of Childs’s interpretive program has not yet come into view when only these two components are considered. The distinctiveness of Childs’s approach lies in his way of situating these two key convictions—the extra-textual God and scripture as God’s truthful witness—relative to the achievements of critical biblical scholarship.Footnote 28
With most mainstream critical research, Childs accepts that scripture developed over a long period of time rather than emerging pristine and complete as if by an oracle. But his investment in the witness-function of scripture means that Childs insists—quite unlike most mainstream academic research—that at every stage of the traditioning process, God “made known his ways unto Moses, his acts unto the children of Israel” (Ps 103:7, KJV). That is, even as the traditions that eventuated in scripture grew and coalesced, they were true witnesses of the living God from their earliest levels.
An example will clarify what this claim entails. Childs agrees with Gunkel that the Abraham cycle in Genesis (Gen 12–25) formed out of several stories that once circulated independently of one another, each associated with a different sanctuary in ancient Israel. The various protagonists of these once distinct cult stories gradually merged with one another to become the scriptural conglomerate, Abraham.Footnote 29 Theologically, however, the evolution of the Abraham cycle did not mean that its constituent stories became truer and truer relative to their divine referent; they did not progress from being less to more faithful vis-à-vis the God “out-there-in-the-world.” The tradition grew (and ultimately found literary fixity in the final form of scripture) not in order to represent God more adequately—but because its already-adequate testimony continued to address new circumstances. Tradents merged their stories because they found that these stories kept speaking beyond their first contexts, and they sought to ensure that subsequent generations could clearly receive the abiding theological truth to which the earlier, disparate traditions bore witness.
This is, however, but one side of Childs’s vision for scripture’s theo-referentiality: the view from the “divine side,” as it were. The “divinely-facing” meaning of theo- referentiality is the most important aspect of Childs’s understanding of scriptural formation. But there is another: the view from the “human side.” Childs held that the traditions lying aback of scripture were primordially theo-referential in the minds and hearts of the communities that preserved and curated them. Not only were the traditions theo-referential in that they told truthfully of the living God; they were also perceived as such by their tradents, and for that very reason handed on through the generations. The first, divinely-facing side of Childs’s vision for theo-referentiality is hardly falsifiable, empirically, and is a matter for dogmatics. The human side of Childs’s vision for scriptural theo-referentiality is, on the other hand, eminently corrigible, and a matter for historical investigation.Footnote 30
The human side of theo-referentiality is what is at stake in Childs’s use of the term Kanonbewußtsein, or “canon consciousness,” as well as his phrase “canonical process”: the recognition among the community of faith that their traditions mediated an authoritative word from God, and their practice of handing them on for that reason.Footnote 31 The process of scripture’s formation was, humanly speaking, theocentric. Israel’s tradents did not pass along their inherited stories, songs, and laws merely out of a desire to inculcate a new collective identityFootnote 32 or to resolve priestly rivalriesFootnote 33 or to overcome the trauma of displacementFootnote 34—at least not principally.Footnote 35 These and many other human factors contributed to the formation of scripture; Childs acknowledges that the canonical process includes such factors (“no religious force is entirely isolated from so-called secular influences”).Footnote 36 But still he maintains, as a historical premise, that “the decisive work in the formation of the canon emerged in the transmission of a divine word in such form as to lay authoritative claim upon the successive generations.”Footnote 37
Childs’s phrase “in such form” is important here. The “final form” of scripture—a well-known emphasis of Childs’s—extends and completes the canonical process described above: the recipients of various traditions in ancient Israel heard in them a divinely-given word, and so transmitted them to successors. But they did not pass the traditions along unchanged. They adjusted and updated them, e.g., by merging distinct cult stories into the Abraham cycle, or by supplementing and linking prophetic oracles. They did not make such changes because they discerned some theological deficiency in the traditions’ prior, received form(s).Footnote 38 Rather, they streamlined the formal aspects of each tradition that would prevent it from serving as an enduring witness to God through all generations, i.e., its orality, or its obsolete points of reference.Footnote 39 A tradition’s inadequacies were formal and not theological; changes made improved “its ability to do its job” and not its truthfulness.Footnote 40 The final, canonical form culminated this process of optimization. The superiority of the final form relative to its predecessors is neither historiographic nor theological perse—but functional.Footnote 41 The canonized text is uniquely “in such form” as to address the people of God in all the times and places they may inhabit.Footnote 42
In sum, Childs’s view of scripture as a truthful witness to God did not mean he took it as a uniformly accurate rendition of empirical history. And yet, for as much as he accepted historical-critical insights, Childs did not completely sunder the Bible’s theological truthfulness from its purchase on reconstructable history.Footnote 43 In the words of Daniel Driver, “canon-consciousness [is] one place where the historian of religion and the theologian cannot help meeting.”Footnote 44 In fact Childs’s vision for the process of scriptural formation committed him to a specific range of historical- critical hypotheses and ruled out, as he thought, certain other reconstructions available to him: for example, Wellhausen’s.
Wellhausen’s Reconstruction and Childs’s Rejection: Diagnosis
To comprehend Childs’s rejection of Wellhausen, the previous section has outlined Childs’s understanding of scriptural formation. But some account must be given of Wellhausen’s own position—and its theological implications—to understand Childs’s rejection as fully as possible. Such comments remain diagnostic only: they inventory Childs’s opposition to Wellhausen before undertaking several prescriptions that would render it compatible with theological interpretation.
Childs’s caption for Wellhausen’s point of view—the titular “sharp break”—gets to the heart of the latter’s historical claim. In a letter dated to 1879, Wellhausen wrote that already for ten years what had occupied his scholarship was “Judaism and ancient Israel in their oppositions.”Footnote 45 This would remain Wellhausen’s theme throughout his works on the Hebrew Bible: that there was a basic opposition—a break—between Israelite religion and early Judaism. Reinhard G. Kratz identifies this antithesis as Wellhausen’s distinctive interpretive pattern.Footnote 46 Uwe Becker calls it Wellhausen’s theologiegeschichtliche Gesamtbild, his “overall picture of theological development.”Footnote 47
Because Wellhausen’s account of Israel’s religious history has been rehearsed so often and so well, Childs’s own brief summary will here suffice:
In the earliest stage of its history Israel was related to Yahweh in terms of a natural bond, and not that of a legal pact. The story of the giving of the law at Sinai was actually a much later development which was projected back into the past once a new concept of law had developed. The major force for the change stemmed largely from the influence of the great prophets who broke [nota bene: sharply!] the natural bond of the old religion, and interpreted the relationship between God and people as based on ethical behavior. The actual term “covenant” (berīt) occurs infrequently in the eighth-century prophets, but arose in Deuteronimic [sic] circles in the seventh century in order to emphasize the idea that the covenant depended on conditions which might be dissolved through disobedience. Finally, according to Wellhausen, following the destruction of the nation, a full-blown priestly concept of Israel’s relation to Yahweh as a people under the law emerged. This fifth-century Priestly system was then projected back into the earliest period and formed the bulk of the legislation of Exodus 25ff. and of Leviticus and Numbers. In sum, the prophets preceded the law, and the concept of covenant was a relatively late corollary of this historical development.Footnote 48
Childs rejects this historical thesis because it offends against the two principal components of his program: the divine and human sides of theo-referentiality.Footnote 49 With regard to the first, divinely-facing side, Wellhausen does not absolutely sever the Hebrew Bible from an “out-there-in-the-world, living God.”Footnote 50 In spite of Wellhausen’s famous resignation from a theological professorship,Footnote 51 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, a classicist and colleague of Wellhausen’s, recollects that “Wellhausen always remained a Christian and never ceased to pray the Lord Jesus to be his guest at every dinner. He also remained a theologian.”Footnote 52 Some of Wellhausen’s most dedicated disciples echo von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff’s final point.Footnote 53 Rudolph Smend even argues that Wellhausen’s Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte Footnote 54 contains many “materials and viewpoints” tending towards biblical theology, and that Wellhausen’s formula, “YHWH the God of Israel and Israel the people of YHWH,” serves as a convincing center for Old Testament theology.Footnote 55
Wellhausen took a definite view of divine revelation.Footnote 56 His sympathies lay wholly with Israelite religion in its primitive strata, an era during which it was “completely earthy.” God spoke then “through humans … to humans. Not through letters, but through the spirit he revealed himself, according to the exigency and occasion of history; he did not yet make his testament, but lived, and his word was living.”Footnote 57 Or again and elsewhere, Wellhausen wrote that history alone can be considered as a predicate of “the divine subject.”Footnote 58 Lothar Perlitt directly addresses theo- referentiality in Wellhausen’s thinking:
The theo-referentiality [Gotteszeugnis] of history lay for Wellhausen in its facticity, in its process at once hidden and evident, which goes against a spiritualization or theologization of the “earthly nexus.” Because one can apprehend God’s actions in history not with the hands but only by faith, Wellhausen wrote the history of Israel in analogy to all history, as profane history, renouncing the possibility of tracing special “revelations” with the historian’s tools … Heilsgeschichte is profane history with the eyes of faith.Footnote 59
The profane history of the nation—and of its most energetic, individual actors—was for Wellhausen the only “transparency of the divine.”Footnote 60 Consequently, Wellhausen thought that the ascendancy of the law and of book religion constituted a step away from the site of God’s activity and self-witness. God’s immediacy in the natural, spontaneous, and naïve religion of earlier times receded; Wellhausen spoke of “the Judaizing tendency to remove God to a distance from man,” a tendency enacted precisely through the intermediation of scripture.Footnote 61
At its best, then, for Wellhausen, scripture in its canonical form provides a veiled and indirect access to the kind of religion—and to the God—that Wellhausen embraced. Perhaps the stories of Saul and David, Ahab and Elijah, and the discourses of Amos and Isaiah that Wellhausen so enjoyed as a student comprise his “canon within a canon,” given that they are where (in his view) the remnants of Israel’s early and earthy mode of relation to God are least obscured.Footnote 62 But the fact remains: for Wellhausen, the traditions that became scriptural deteriorated in their witness function. Though initially more transparent to God, even these stories became congested with artificial concerns about torah observance.Footnote 63 This perspective runs directly counter to Childs’s affirmation that scripture was a truthful witness to God from its earliest tradition strata onward to its textual Endgestalt.
But Childs’s actual, express concern with Wellhausen’s reconstruction looks in the opposite direction: not that scriptural traditions ran from more theologically truthful to less, but that on Wellhausen’s hypothesis, the later (covenantal) understanding of Israel’s relation to God wholly supplants the earlier generations’ experience of God as being in a “natural bond.” The problem, that is, is supersession. The word usually describes the privileging of a junior and successor religion relative to its antecedent; Wellhausen by contrast valorized the older form of religion relative to its aftercomer, early Judaism. But the theo-referential consequence is much the same: epochs within a single trajectory of religious development are set against one another to such an extent that it becomes impossible to treat them both as testimonies to the selfsame divine reality. If the later dispensation eclipses the earlier completely, they can hardly both be considered as truth-telling witnesses.Footnote 64
So much for the divinely-facing side of Childs’s objection to Wellhausen. In both BTONT and OTTCC, Childs is even more explicit about the way in which Wellhausen’s history of Israel’s religion offends against the human aspect of scriptural theo-referentiality. Childs alleges that Wellhausen makes basically non- religious forces the explanation for scripture’s formation. It was not because the people of God heard in their traditions a true word from God that they passed them on, but because they “attempt[ed] to combat the threat to the religious identity of the nation in the crisis of the seventh century. “Footnote 65 This is an essentially sociological motive and for Childs “a self-serving ideology.”Footnote 66 In OTTCC, Childs writes:
If Wellhausen or Cross were right that the present form of the Old Testament reflects a completely artificial construct, and that the real forces determining the priestly institution [for example] were internal political struggles for pow- er, then one could no longer meaningfully speak of a canonical shape … it runs in the face of a canonical understanding to assume that the present form of the text is merely a cover for the real political forces which lie behind it, or to posit that the later theological use transformed the tradition into something different in kind from the original secular function.Footnote 67
Childs also lodges a different but related objection. He repeatedly accuses Wellhausen of “regard[ing] the covenant as a theological ‘idea’ … devoid of institutional roots.”Footnote 68 Or, again, he suggests that Wellhausen’s hypothesis lacks “a genuine historical context.”Footnote 69 This charge would sound enigmatic except for Childs’s frequent appeals in the same contexts to the advantages of form criticism, which “attempt[s] to ground covenant in a concrete sociological context of religious institutions, which has a warrant in all ancient cultures.”Footnote 70 Childs alleges that Wellhausen’s explanation of religious change is too abstract: prophets speak a new vision of God and his people, and somehow their theological breakthrough “catches.” But it is unclear with whom or how. It is also difficult to explain, institutionally, how traditions that were not religiously authoritative for an ancient community ab initio would become so.Footnote 71 The Alt school on the other hand kept the question of Sitz im Leben in view, and so could give a more compelling account of how a tradition functioned as theologically normative, longitudinally, within an ancient community. Childs thus thought that Wellhausen’s reconstruction defies what is known of ancient near Eastern societies as well as “modern sociological analysis of primitive cultures.”Footnote 72
Childs judged that Wellhausen’s historical claims butt up against scriptural theo-referentiality, humanly considered. If the scriptural texts themselves prioritize the publication of divine instruction for a religious community, then it is poor historiography (not to mention sociology) to propose a completely different and alien explanation for their development—one that is flatly political, abstract, or overly invested in individual religious genius.
Three Routes: Prescription
The first task of the present article has been to identify the reasons behind Childs’s rejection of Wellhausen. It has found that Wellhausen’s version of Israel’s religious history transgresses the two principal components of Childs’s interpretive program: that scripture speaks truthfully about an out-there-in-the-world, living God, and that scripture emerged through a community’s curation of their traditions because they heard in them an enduring word about God. Wellhausen understood scripture as (at best) a half-truthful witness to the living God. He also seemed to propose non-religious forces to explain scripture’s development, forces that subsisted (as Childs thought) in abstraction from the long-term practice of religion on the ground.
The constructive question, remains, however, whether—over against his own judgment—Childs’s program might still accommodate Wellhausen’s historical claim about a sharp break in the history of Israelite religion. The second and creative task of this article is to test this possibility—a possibility that would allow for Wellhausen’s history and the confession of the Bible as true testimony to God to obtain noncompetitively. The following sections pursue this test by three possible routes. These “thought experiments” involve re-reading both Wellhausen and Childs. The first section re-reads Wellhausen’s sharp break; it does not seek to reduce the scale of the religious sea-change that Wellhausen proposed, but it re- envisions this change in light of Childs’s canonical process. In other words, it bends Wellhausen towards Childs. The second section below revisits Childs’s reasons for rejecting Wellhausen on historical grounds: it re-reads Childs to suggest that under certain conditions, Childs countenances significant religio-historical change. The third section re-evaluates Childs’s reasons for rejecting Wellhausen on biblical grounds—in view of the Bible’s own self-presentation. These two final sections in effect bend Childs towards Wellhausen.
A. Bending Wellhausen towards Childs
The first route towards a version of Childs’s program amenable to Wellhausen’s historical claim re-envisions the latter’s sharp break—not to diminish its size but to refocus it, to identify its driving dynamic as theo-referential.Footnote 73 For all that the stark dividing line of torah separates ancient Israelite religion from early Judaism in Wellhausen’s writings, Wellhausen maintains a religious continuity throughout all levels of tradition in the Hebrew Bible; his history is basically concerned with religion.Footnote 74 There was for Wellhausen no “conversion” (such as Childs feared) from initially secular, “vulgate” tradition and literature belatedly into “sacred literature.”Footnote 75 Israel’s stories, songs, and its laws—the lower-case torah tradition of everyday legal decisions and priestly instructions—were primordially religious. Wellhausen writes that in ancient Israel, even matters of “war and administration of justice were regarded as matters of religion.”Footnote 76
This may go some way towards satisfying Childs’s outcry that “the real forces” driving Israelite religion on Wellhausen’s hypothesis are political, or that the religious ideals of Israel are merely a “self-serving ideology.” But reclaiming “religion” as the animating force in Wellhausen’s history does not yet approximate Childs’s vision of theo-referentiality, humanly considered. However, it may be that even Wellhausen’s account of the sharp break in Israelite religion can be considered in terms of “canon-consciousness.” On Childs’s thinking, described above, recipients of Israel’s traditions updated them out of recognition that, as a divinely-given word, they spoke truthfully to new contexts and future generations. In a similar way, Wellhausen argued that the prophets—”the spiritual destroyers of old Israel”—did not intend “to say anything new[;] they are only proclaiming old truth.”Footnote 77 They received Israel’s traditional theology of YHWH as “the head of the nation” as true and normative—but in order to sustain this belief in the eighth century and beyond, they radically revised it.
Wellhausen is clear that what galvanized Amos’s theological vision was a looming historical event: “the dark cloud that threatened the horizon was plain enough—the Assyrians.” And yet, although the events of history carved out space for these prophetic insights, it was not mere political savvy that produced the prophets’ theological innovation.Footnote 78 What was at stake for Amos and other prophets of his time was their traditional faith in the supremacy and loyalty of their national deity, YHWH.Footnote 79 In the face of awesome Assyrian expansion,
The prophets of Israel alone did not allow themselves to be taken by surprise by what had occurred, or to be plunged into despair; they solved by anticipa- tion the grim problem which history set before them. They absorbed into their religion that conception of the world which was destroying the religions of the nations, even before it had been fully grasped by secular consciousness.
Where others saw only the ruin of everything that is holiest, they saw the triumph of Jehovah over delusion and error. Whatever else might be over- thrown, the really worthy remained unshaken.Footnote 80
The eighth-century prophets were politically engaged, and their preaching was self-serving in that it enabled Israel to survive where its neighbors like Moab faded.Footnote 81 But in the above quote from Wellhausen, it is not concern for Israel’s survival that generated Amos’s oracles and gave them force and power. The theological is not “merely a cover” for sociopolitical considerations. The theological is essential: Amos and his aftercomers were concerned for the name of their god. Would their deity share the fate of the gods of the nations, about whom the Rabshakeh taunted, “Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivvah?” (2 Kgs 18:33–34 // Isa 36:18–19, NRSV). These gods were defeated. But Israel’s prophets “refuse[d] to allow the conception of Jehovah to be involved in the ruin of the kingdom.”Footnote 82
The content of Israelite religion dramatically changed. The new, “paradoxical thought” took hold, that the national god could turn against his own king and nation. But in terms of canon-consciousness, the newer idea of YHWH’s special, conditional election of Israel emerged to protect the theological truth of the older and unassuming traditions of YHWH’s natural, father-to-son solidarity with Israel. The latter outlook was not deficient so much as unable to continue “doing its job,” theologically, in the changed conditions of the eighth century. Indeed, the same conviction that the God of Israel was their helper and benefactor served as the theological taproot for both the generation of Israelites living before the eighth century and those living after.Footnote 83 Childs himself seems almost to acknowledge this when he remarks that “in one sense, the theme of election is an extended commentary on Israel’s basic conviction of being the people of Yahweh.”Footnote 84
The first route proposed here—of bending Wellhausen towards Childs—involves the human side of scriptural theo-referentiality. It brackets the divinely-facing side and mounts a case merely that something resembling canon-consciousness was at play in the sharp break that Wellhausen describes: the prophets reimagined Israel’s inherited traditions exactly because they received them as truth-telling about God and so deserving of transmission to a new generation of the people of YHWH. They accepted YHWH’s solidarity and supremacy and for that reason pioneered new theological ways of upholding these in the face of political collapse.
B. Bending Childs towards Wellhausen: Historical Considerations
A second route would bend Childs towards Wellhausen by showing that Childs’s program already countenances significant religious discontinuity. This is an argument a maiore ad minus: if Childs already (though provisionally) accepts other forms of religio-historical rupture, then his approach might also then tolerate a Wellhausian breach between ancient Israelite religion and early Judaism.Footnote 85
As it happens, Childs does work from a historical reconstruction featuring a large religious disjunction—namely, Alt’s hypothesis about the “God of the fathers.”Footnote 86 Alt argued that the el names in Genesis (El Bethel, El Shaddai, El Olam, El Elyon) were originally the titles of Canaanite deities. Later, when the proto-Israelite tribes entered the land, their religion, focused on the “God of the fathers,” absorbed these Canaanite titles. Names that formerly evoked Canaanite deities came to be regarded as epithets of the nameless ancestral God. In a later, third stage, this God would become identified with YHWH, the God of Sinai. Childs adopts Alt’s reconstruction. In his discussion of Alt in BTONT’s section on “Patriarchal Traditions,” he notes that Alt’s hypothesis “has shown serious signs of erosion.”Footnote 87 But later in his section on “the Identity of God,” Childs essentially paraphrases Alt’s thesis, speaking of “an identification of Yahweh with the various el figures.”Footnote 88
Childs could make this ad hoc affirmation of Alt’s hypothesis because Alt kept critical reconstruction and the Bible’s own witness in dialectical relationship. That is, Childs’s recognized that Alt’s account and the Bible’s vary from one another— not least in that the Bible’s telling of Israel’s past is theocentric while Alt’s is thoroughly mundane. Although the “two pictures of Israel’s history,” critical and biblical, differ importantly, Childs preferred to keep them in a relationship of subtle overlap rather than absolute sequester.Footnote 89 This relationship of subtle overlap Childs described as “dialectical.” He was unhappy with this adjective and regarded it as a stopgap.Footnote 90 Nonetheless, the worse decision, Childs thought, would be to posit “no relationship whatsoever” between scriptural testimony and historical retrieval.Footnote 91 The latter situation was unacceptable because it would reduce the “biblical witness to divine intervention in time and space [to] merely literary convention.”Footnote 92 It would be too simple to say that Childs endorses Alt’s theory because it paraphrases the Bible’s own, emic account of Israel’s past life with God.Footnote 93 But on Alt’s thinking, at least the critical reconstruction was not “totally alien to the canonical construal.”Footnote 94 Alt’s theory preserved a relationship of subtle overlap; it did more justice to theo- referentiality in its human aspect. For these reasons, Childs approved it.
While accepting Alt’s hypothesis, at least provisionally, Childs could also and at once repeat the Bible’s own claim that the same God self-disclosed to the ancestors and to Moses: God “revealed himself to the Patriarchs as El Shaddai, El Olam, and El Elyon, but above all to Moses he made known his name as YHWH (Exod 3:15).”Footnote 95 But, at the same time, in spite of this dialectical convergence between critical and biblical pictures, the point cannot be lost that on the critical side, the historical process is that of distinct religions coming together.Footnote 96 The radicality of this fusion can be shown, for example, by James Loader’s use of the same historical reconstruction as a paradigm for a Christian theology of the religions.Footnote 97 Loader writes of Alt’s hypothesis:
Yahweh did not only “infiltrate” other numina and take over their functions [,] but the historically preceding faiths of their fathers were different religions altogether… The Old Testament heritage of the church preserves among its host of themes the idea that the one true God can be known in religions that differ from its own.Footnote 98
The point is, Childs embraces a religio-historical break of such size that it could be considered a paradigm for interreligious dialogue. Which, then, is the larger difference, the sharper break? That between the el religion of Israel’s ancestors and Mosaic Yahwism in Alt’s hypothesis, or that between ancient Israelite religion and early Judaism such as Wellhausen imagines? The first reconstruction involves the absorption of a different religion into Yahwism: deities that were once worshiped under their own titles—or under no title, as with the “God of the fathers”—came to be seen as identical to YHWH. The second reconstruction seems, comparatively, a more modest change: the same god, YHWH, is viewed at first as the natural, unconditional sponsor of the nation Israel and then later as Israel’s free-willed and conditional elector. To Childs, it appeared historically (or even sociologically) implausible that a theology like the deuteronomists’ would have utterly supplanted its forerunner. On the other hand, for Alt—and so, too, for Childs—Israel’s forebears in faith were able to move from one practice of religion to a quite different one.Footnote 99 At least as a historian, then, this example shows that Childs could sometimes stomach a sharp break after all.
C. Bending Childs towards Wellhausen: Canonical Considerations
The section above has explained that Childs sought to keep critical reconstruction in a relationship of subtle overlap with the Bible’s own account of Israel. Alt’s hypothesis enabled Childs to affirm just such a dialectic between the two pictures rather than an absolute sequester such as he attributed to Wellhausen’s religion- history. The preceding section has argued from the critical side of the paired accounts: Childs endorsed one critical reconstruction insofar as it ran parallel with the Bible. But that critical reconstruction in fact shared with Wellhausen’s hypothesis enough religio-historical breakage to relativize Childs’s historical objections to Wellhausen’s sharp break. The section that follows argues, on the other hand, from the biblical side: that the Bible itself may narrate some sharp breaks. On such a basis, Childs’s own logic of keeping the two pictures in a subtle relationship of overlap may then warrant a corresponding historical reconstruction like Wellhausen’s. In other words, perhaps one could accept Wellhausen’s Gesamtbild not merely on historical grounds, but on canonical ones: because “the Bible tells me so,” or suggests something of the sort, at any rate.Footnote 100
Scripture itself—in Exod 6:3—is aware of the historical discontinuity between the religion of the ancestors and that of Moses. This text reads: “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty (El Shaddai), but by my name YHWH I did not make myself known to them.”Footnote 101 And yet at the same time as it acknowledges discontinuity, the verse also vouches for theological convergence— at the level of referentiality to an identical “out-there-in-the-world God.” Footnote 102 Because of scripture’s own testimony to this theo-referential unity across different dispensations, Childs was able to subscribe to Alt’s historical hypothesis. The scholarly reconstruction paralleled the canonical rendition, and the “two realms” coordinated into a subtle relationship of correspondence.
On the other hand, as Childs thought, scripture does not testify to a religious progression—or better, a turn of dispensations—that would parallel Wellhausen’s historical reconstruction. There is no equivalent of Exod 6:3 for Wellhausen. God does not say to Ezra or to someone else from later in the story of Israel, “I appeared to David and Solomon as an unconditional benefactor deity, but as a jealous and destroying Lord I did not yet make myself known to them.” No programmatic, inner-biblical recognition exists of an earlier stage of Israelite religion, a prior era of divine self-disclosure, when Israel’s relation to YHWH resembled the national religions of its neighbors, and which was later transformed through the prophets. If this is the inner-biblical bar, the “emic” prerequisite for accepting a given historical reconstruction, then Childs was justified in rejecting Wellhausen’s history of Israelite religion. As Childs writes in OTTCC, it seems that on Wellhausen’s reasoning, the Bible’s own self-presentation and memory about God’s history with Israel diverges almost wholly from historical-critical reconstruction: “these are two separate realms which function fully independently of one another.”Footnote 103
However, it may be that Childs’s resistance to biblical-theological proposals emphasizing divine repentance led him to deprioritize biblical texts that might have suggested a more complex and subtle relationship between “the two realms” of biblical testimony and critical reconstruction, even and also Wellhausen’s reconstruction. When commenting on the work of Terence E. Fretheim, for whom divine repentance is a leading theological motif, Childs sounds a critical note.Footnote 104 To Fretheim’s contention that “God changes in light of his relationship with the world,” Childs says that “this depiction is not the way that Israel throughout all of its history understood God or interpreted biblical imagery.”Footnote 105
But this judgment seems premature. Take, for example, the recent chapter by Jean-Pierre Sonnet, entitled “God’s Repentance and ‘False Starts’ in Biblical History.”Footnote 106 Sonnet takes up and develops Fretheim’s claim that the theme of God’s repentance “appears at some of the key junctures in the canon … therefore, its role is very significant.”Footnote 107 Sonnet organizes his discussion around three “dramatic divine changes” in the books of Genesis, Exodus, and Samuel, each featuring the verb םחנ in nifal and corresponding to the institution of a covenant.Footnote 108 In the first, the flood story of Genesis 6–9, God “re-launches”Footnote 109 after the false start of destroying all life. In Exodus 32–34, God turns from the false start of destroying Israel and starting over with Moses. In 1 Samuel 15, God corrects the false start of the Saul dynasty. Sonnet observes that in each text, the sinfulness of God’s human partner causes the false start, and God then inaugurates a new covenant to insure the relationship against future transgressions.
If Sonnet is correct, then contra Childs, Israel did indeed understand God as capable of making a false start and then course-correcting: “reversing direction,” to use Sonnet’s words.Footnote 110 In and of itself, Sonnet’s article has nothing to do with Wellhausen’s Gesamtbild. The two theses operate on distinct explanatory planes: Sonnet explains the Bible’s own literary self-presentation while Wellhausen reconstructs the history of Israelite religion.Footnote 111 And yet for Childs, the two cannot be wholly separate realms, but must relate and intersect, even if dialectically—because for Childs, what matters is scripture’s theo-referentiality, including its “witness to divine intervention in time and space.”Footnote 112
The key, programmatic examples of divine repentance that Sonnet specifies do not constitute an inner-canonical parallel to Wellhausen’s “sharp break.” But they are suggestive. According to Daniel Driver, the historian of religion and the theologian cannot help meeting, and the place of their intersection is canon-consciousness. In this case, Israel passed on as an enduring word about God that at several crucial points in “Israel’s history with God,” God effected an about-face.Footnote 113 God said no to God’s own past way of relating, damaged as it was by human sin, and set out in a new direction with “upgraded regulations.”Footnote 114
Admittedly, the false starts and divine repenting in the texts that Sonnet exegetes do not mirror the “sharp break” of Wellhausen’s religious history. The Bible’s own testimony is theocentric and offers an account of God’s own decision-making. Wellhausen’s oeuvre is historiographic and so is concerned with human forces and agents.Footnote 115 The texts of Sonnet’s chapter attest to multiple events of divine course- correction, whereas Wellhausen indicates one definite, dramatic tidal change from Israelite religion to early Judaism. The divine repentance passages address perennial, intergenerational issues of human sin—violence, idolatry, and disobedience—but Wellhausen’s reconstruction turns on a unique historical event, the advent of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the eastern Mediterranean.
Many of these same differences, however, apply to the Bible’s own memory of different eras of divine self-revelation and Alt’s hypothesis about the God of the fathers. These two may parallel one another more closely than the divine repenting of Sonnet’s chapter and Wellhausen’s religious history. Nonetheless, the Bible’s testimony is theocentric and Alt’s is not; he needs no living God to give his theory traction. Alt also multiplies stages in Israelite religion, when the text of Exod 6:3 authorizes only two eras in God’s history of self-disclosure. Still further, Alt’s hypothesis, like Wellhausen’s, relies on time-specific cultural and historical factors; it is more time-stamped than the Bible’s own witness. And this is the theory to which Childs lends his probationary acceptance, since it brings the “two realms” of critical historiography and biblical witness into a subtle overlap. It seems that if this were possible for Childs, it could also be possible for one of his interpretive successors—on canonical grounds and in light of Israel’s own testimony—to embrace Wellhausen’s historical claim about a “sharp break” between ancient Israelite religion and early Judaism.
Conclusion
After determining the reasons for Childs’s resistance to Wellhausen, the present article has sketched three constructive routes towards a version of Childs’s interpretive program that would accommodate Wellhausen’s theologiegeschichtliche Gesamtbild. The first route identifies a theo-referential continuity in Wellhausen’s thesis, even arguing that something like canon-consciousness motivated the innovation of the eighth-century prophets. The second route demonstrates one sizeable religio-historical discontinuity that Childs already (if provisionally) accepts, and it recommends that if this were possible for Childs as a historian, then a break like Wellhausen’s might also be; Childs could evidently stomach sharp breaks. The third route explores whether there may be inner-biblical warrant for entertaining historical claims about a change of dispensations in Israel’s religious history. It particularly considers important biblical witnesses to divine repentance. Said differently, “God made a sharp break—this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
These three routes together present a reckoning between projects in academic biblical studies: on the one hand, Wellhausen’s resurgent history of Israelite religion and, on the other, the theological interpretation of scripture, and especially Childs’s theocentric version of it. A sense of competition between these two has prevailed.
To this sense, the present article suggested an alternative: it asked, “If Wellhausen’s conclusions be true, might the Old Testament still be the Word of God?”
Answering this question has required some re-reading of both Wellhausen and Childs. Each appears in a less familiar aspect, Wellhausen in his theological dimension and Childs as a critical historian (even a sometime-sociologist). Reading each scholar in light of the other also silhouettes features of their proposals that have gone relatively unemphasized: the theological dynamic that Wellhausen builds into his account of the eighth-century prophets, or the significant disjunctions that Childs accepts into his critical reconstruction of early Israel. Such results are instructive beyond the present article’s exercise, and beyond these two specific figures. They provide a detailed example of how two influential impulses in modern biblical studies intersect: how historical judgments and theo-referentiality remain ensnarled—if not, perhaps, rivaled.
