Parallelomania in Biblical Studies

Charles Halton has a nice thread on Adam the gardener and Adam the king. The issue for me is: the extravagant use of “parallels” in biblical exegesis. As Charles points out, an argument of this kind, “Adam is a gardener¹; in Babylon, in a neighboring culture, kings had gardens; ergo, Adam is, most likely, a king” is not a weak argument. It is not an argument at all.

Parallelomania is a term that was popularized by Samuel Sandmel in his Presidential Address delivered at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis held at Concordia Theological Seminary (LCMS) in 1961.

Sandmel’s commitment to sound scholarship impelled him to identify a disease known to grip the most capable of scholars. He labels it parallelomania:

I encountered the term parallelomania, as I recall, in a French book of about 1830, whose title and author I have forgotten, in a context in which there were being examined certain passages in the Pauline epistles and in the Book of Wisdom that seem to have some resemblance, and a consequent view that when Paul wrote the Epistle to the Romans [datable to the late 50s ce], a copy of the Book of Wisdom [i.e., the Wisdom of Solomon, usually ascribed to a Jewish author whose transparent hatred of Egyptians makes sense in the context of the grievous mistreatment of Alexandrian Jewry under A. Avillius Flaccus in the late 30s ce; Flaccus got to taste his own medicine, for he was executed in turn] lay open before him, and that Paul in Romans copied generously from it. Three items are to be noted. One, that some passages are allegedly parallel; two, that a direct organic literary connection is assumed to have provided the parallels; and three, that the conclusion is drawn that the flow is in a particular direction, namely, from Wisdom to Paul, and not from Paul to Wisdom. Our French author disputes all three points: he denies that the passages cited are true parallels; he denies that a direct literary connection exists; he denies that Paul copied directly from Wisdom, and he calls the citations and the inferences parallelomania. We might for our purposes define parallelomania as that extravagance among scholars which first overdoes the supposed similarity in passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying literary connection flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction.

The questions at hand: (1) Is Adam described as a king in the book of Genesis? (2) Does the ANE context of the Hebrew Bible clarify the matter in some way?

In the rush to answer questions of this kind, many fall into the trap of parallelomania, to wit: very loose and even non-existent parallels are dressed up as stringent parallels with the result that the sense of a particular biblical text is over-specified. It’s easy to do. At some point or another, everyone I know, in a moment of Schwärmerei, has fallen prey to parallelomania.

¹ In Genesis 2-3, God has a garden, Adam is his gardener (2:15). Adam is to “work” the garden and “keep it,” that is, cultivate and manage it. The traditional translation in English, “till” the garden, is overspecific. It suggests that Adam was to break up the garden’s ground with a hoe as in a vineyard, with a shovel as in an orchard, or with a plough as in a field. The verb עבד does not necessarily imply that. It might just as well refer to thinning and transplanting.

To be continued.

Comments

[Thomas Samuel]

It is true that the modern scholarship is bent on finding out parallels between the biblical text and its contemporary literatures. one reason for finding parallel could be to make their investigation objective. For studying an ancient is this the only method? are there other methods? certainly reader response and narrative critic approaches are free from parallomania. how about rescuing historical critical method also from this trap?

[Thomas Samuel]

Luke-Acts researchers often compare the text of Luke-Acts with Greco-Roman epics and conclude that the supernaturalism found in Luke-Acts, such as theophanies, dreams and visions are imitation of Homeric epics or they are literary conventions.Hardly any scholar give attention to Luke as an insider who write these incidents from his own religious experience. A faith-reflection of Luke can be a different way of looking at these religious experience. Some scholars have gone to the extant of seeing these as mere myths by quoting parallel attempts seen in non-biblical texts.

[JohnFH]

Thomas Samuel,

It is condescending and misguided to dismiss theophanies in Homer or Luke-Acts as made-up by a literate author.

The accounts reflect experiences people had. One can argue about what the experiences mean and the levels of reality behind them, but to dismiss them out of hand is an example of rationalist prejudice.