山道期刊

The Historical Critical Method: Its Assumptions, Concerns and Contributuons

Jeffrey R. SHARP

One of the clearly recognized facts about modern biblical interpretation is that the Scriptures are rooted in history and that the interpreter who wishes to understand their message must delve into that history. In the words of one evangelical scholar, the Scriptures are “the Word of God in the words of men in history.” Some of the most useful tools for biblical study are the various disciplines which can be grouped under the title “The Historical Critical Method.” There are many different responses to criticism which range from a rejection of any form of criticism as being incompatible with a Sacred Text to the willingness to follow the logic of criticism and accept the conclusions to which criticism points as firmly as the evidence suggests. In this article the writer does three things: a) discusses the concerns and assumptions which gave birth to and inform the Historical-Critical approach to the Biblical texts; b) introduces historical criticism and its Bible study methodologies; and finally c) provides some comments on historical criticism's contributions and ongoing usefulness to modern Biblical study.

What is Parallelism?

Robert LO

The main purpose of this essay is to briefly introduce the reader to recent developments in the study of parallelism in biblical Hebrew poetry. Ever since the eighteenth century, parallelism has been roughly analyzed into three categories: synonymous, antithetic, and synthetic. But recent studies have shown the inadequacies of such categorization. It is especially discovered that the last category is too broad to serve any useful purpose in the analysis of biblical Hebrew poetry.

The author discusses three recent attempts to bring parallelism into sharper focus. These are represented by the studies of James L. Kugel, Adele Berlin, and Robert Alter. Each of them approaches parallelism from a different perspective. Among them, Kugel has the greatest reservation about the presence of parallelism as such. His studies have been the most controversial. Adele Berlin approaches parallelism from the perspective of modern linguistics. And Robert Alter deals with the same phenomenon on the basis of literary theory and semantics.

Each of these studies offers us a different perspective or method to the study of parallelism, and broadens our understanding of this phenomenon. Altogether they serve to remind the reader of ancient Hebrew poetry of the importance of not just extracting messages and applications from the texts but also the need to deal with the texts from an appreciative and aesthetic standpoint.