Grasping the Field of Biblical Studies

I’ve been reading Rabbi Joshua Maroof’s blow-by-blow commentary on Rambam’s Mishneh Torah.

Maroof makes an excellent point about the Talmud in his first post:

I have often observed in the past that reading the Talmud is like perusing the pages of an academic journal. One who has a foundation in the discipline treated by the journal will appreciate the meaning and significance of its articles, their context and purpose. He or she will leave further edified and maybe even enlightened. On the other hand, an uninitiated individual will be rebuffed by the abundance of technical jargon, unfamiliar topics, obscure references and technical methodology. He will close the journal more confused and frustrated than he was before opening it.

He also says:

Anyone seeking an elementary Torah education will be seriously disappointed by the Talmud, which invariably seems to the newcomer like a disorganized hodgepodge of rather trivial arguments.

If I’m not mistaken, nevertheless, a student of the Talmud is still encouraged to begin in media res, that is, to dive into the Talmud and sink or swim (mostly sink, to begin with), rather than absorb Torah through the mediation of Rambam. Rambam’s mediation is best appreciated, nay, can only be appreciated, by someone familiar already with what is being mediated.

Rightly or wrongly, I went about reading my way to a sense of control of the field of biblical studies by the dive-in head-first method.

One of the airiest, most pleasant rooms at the Memorial Library on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is the Current Periodicals Room. Very early on, I began spending many an “idle” hour there. I would pick up the latest issues of a number of journals in the field - Biblica, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Jewish Quarterly Review, Journal of Biblical Literature, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Orientalia, Revue Biblique, Vetus Testamentum, Zeitschrift für alttestamentliche Wissenschaft – and skim the contents of the pile in search of something that grabbed me. Then I would settle in and try to make sense of the article footnote by footnote.

The time-consuming effort involved making innumerable trips to the main stacks in search of cited works. At first it was frustrating. One has to start from scratch, after all. One of the first scholars I discovered via footnote was William Foxwell Albright. What a discovery! The volume of essays in his honor edited by Hans Goedicke made me think long and hard about a lot of things.

The decision to begin with technical, up-to-date articles and figure out how they work paid off handsomely. In a matter of months, I began to realize what languages I wanted to learn and what intersecting fields of inquiry might be brought to bear on a particular problem of interpretation. The time came when almost every name in the footnotes was a known quantity. The reference works scholars cite became familiar to me.

I did not read or even consult an Introduction to the Old Testament or the New Testament or a History of Israel until much later. By the time I did, the inevitable biases and gaps introductory works have seemed obvious. I could argue my way intelligently through almost every page of them.

You really don’t want to know how many hours were involved in grasping the field in this way. I enjoyed it thoroughly, or I would never have done it. Of course I knew, in those same years, that many of my friends were sleeping around, and enjoying life in that way. I did not envy them. I was reading around. It was a very promiscuous activity in its own way.

I am struck by statements made by Maroof of which this is an example:

[O]ne who has not yet developed a vision of the Torah system as a whole should experience shame – he should be keenly aware of the deficiency of his knowledge and therefore of the fact that many of his actions and reactions are still under the sway of his instinctual makeup. Until he can systematically apply principles of Torah insight to every area of his life, he realizes that his conduct will continue to be driven by the lower elements of his nature.

I don’t understand this contrast between the higher and lower elements of human nature. Freud is more helpful here. Love of halakhah and aggadah is shot through with barely sublimated eros, or it remains a feeble force in one’s life. You have to be in love with the text, perhaps even with the author of the text ( a sticky wicket, I know), for the day ever to arrive, if indeed it does, that the text holds your interest like nothing else.

To recapitulate, it is not at all obvious that one should begin study of the Torah with Rambam’s Mishneh Torah, and save the Talmud for later. In the same way, it is not at all obvious that one should begin the academic study of the Bible with survey and intro courses which require little or no first hand reading of biblical literature itself, and no direct engagement with the technical secondary literature.

It is also worth emphasizing that one cannot master a field like biblical studies once and for all. While one is sleeping, the field is ploughed again. There is always more to learn.

At its best, the academic study of the Bible is a great intellectual adventure. The literature contained in the Bible is protean. Once you realize how different and strange its contents are, not at all edifying, necessarily, in the expected way, you will have begun the journey of a lifetime.

“New every morning are your mercies, great God of light. All day long you are working for good in the world.”

Comments

[voxstefani]

This is a fascinating post, and it clicks with me in several ways. Although I do not claim mastery of anything, my own introduction to Biblical studies happened much along the same lines: I spent more hours than I care to count in the periodicals room while in college reading current and back issues of journals in the field and following the trail of the notes, which naturally introduced me to, and lead me to pursue, the works of the authors quoted. I have often recommended to others that they try a similar approach (especially if they're very young and have that kind of time!), simply because opportunities to develop that kind of exposure are very hard to come by otherwise. I certainly have never come across a chance do something like that since, but every single thing I learned in those "idle" hours remains foundational to this day, even after my interests have expanded, then refined, and even shifted.

Esteban

[RJM]

Thank you for your attention to my posts on the Rambam.

In all honesty, I hear where you are coming from and you register several valid points. I wonder if I would appreciate the value of the Rambam's work as much had I not first been given a "traditional" Talmudic education.

Be that as it may, I firmly believe that a great deal of time is wasted, and the "big picture" obscured, when students are introduced to the Oral Torah via the Talmud.

As I will argue in future posts, I maintain that the Rambam's method is a more accurate representation of how Oral Torah was intended to be taught by its classical practitioners.

With regard to your comment on eros - of course, passion for learning is at the heart of Jewish religious experience, but that is channeling erotic energy - it is a displacement of the libido from its natural object to a superior goal.

[JohnFH]

Rabbi Maroof,

I look forward to your future posts.

Probably some combination of detailed study of specific texts and a "big picture" overview is ideal. It's one without the other that tends to be misleading. In another post, "drilling down and wide-angle photography,' the methodological question is reviewed again. In the comment thread, Lingamish, a Bible translator in Africa, makes a point not unlike yours.