a certain rendering of reality.
The upshot of this view of method, ideology, and testimony–dispute–advocacy is the recognition that every text makes its claim. Each such claim, moreover, requires attention, that it be recognized and understood and weighed alongside other texts with other claims. Such a perspective on biblical texts sees the “canon” as a venue for contestation. It takes the canon seriously but recognizes that the canonical literature does not offer a settled, coherent account of reality; rather it provides the materials for ongoing disputatious interpretation. Any consideration of the “culture wars” of our society—wherein both sides appeal to biblical texts—makes clear that the biblical text is a venue for contestation and that the texts themselves are grist for the dispute. In what follows I consider a text that surely is to be understood as thick with ideology, but that nonetheless is a carrier of “a disclosure” of the Holy One of Israel.
1. See the summary statement of Wilson, Sociological Approaches to the Old Testament; Overholt, Cultural Anthropology and the Old Testament; and Carter, “Social Scientific Approaches.”
2. A helpful example of how sociological analysis may shape exegetical interpretation is offered in God of the Lowly, edited by Schottroff and Stegemann.
3. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh; see also his The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-literary Introduction.
4. Flanagan, David’s Social Drama.
5. Wilson, Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel; Overholt, Channels of Prophecy.
6. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic.
7. Berquist, Judaism in Persia’s Shadow.
8. Meyers, Discovering Eve; and Households and Holiness.
9. Grabbe, Priests, Prophets, Diviners, Sages.
10. See Füssel, “The Materialist Reading of the Bible”; and more generally, Clevenot, Materialist Approaches to the Bible.
11. Leonardo Boff has applied these categories to the sacramental life of the church, even as Füssel has applied them to the character of the text; see Boff, Church: Charisma and Power, 110–15.
12. For a critical assessment of this interpretive view as it pertains to biblical interpretation, see Barton, Reading the Old Testament.
13. Ricoeur’s work is scattered in many places, but see especially Interpretation Theory; The Conflict of Interpretations; and The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. See also Crossan, editor, Paul Ricoeur on Biblical Hermeneutics.
14. For a most helpful introduction to Wilder’s view of literature as world-making, see Wilder, “Story and Story-World.”
15. Gunn, The Fate of King Saul; and The Story of King David.
16. See especially Clines, I, He, We and They.
17. Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, Texts of Terror, and Rhetorical Criticism.
18. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative.
19. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative.
20. Myers has shown how the work of Hobbes is “the text” for Adam Smith, which in turn has become the text for the capitalist world, even if unacknowledged; The Soul of Modern Economic Man.
21. On the active power of “sense-making” as the production of sense, see Jobling, The Sense of Biblical Narrative, especially 1–3; and Brueggemann, “As the Text ‘Makes Sense,’” 7–10.
22. See my attempt at such a methodological interface in Brueggemann, David’s Truth; Theology of the Old Testament; and most recently in A Pathway of Interpretation.
23. Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System.”
2 Discerning Revelation from God
To pursue this matter of “revelation in context,” I will address an exceedingly difficult text in the Old Testament, Joshua 11. The reason for taking up this text is to deal with the often asked and troublesome question: What shall we do with all the violence and bloody war that is done in the Old Testament in the name of Yahweh?1 The question reflects a sense that these texts of violence are at least an embarrassment, are morally repulsive, and are theologically problematic in the Bible, not because they are violent, but because this is violence either in the name of or at the hand of Yahweh.
The questions we shall consider are the following: How are these texts of violence to be understood as revelation? What is it that is disclosed? And how shall this disclosure be received as serious, authoritative, and binding as the only rule for life and faith? We shall consider the revelatory question in two dimensions. The first is revelation within the text. What has drawn me to Joshua 11 is the awareness that within the text as such very little, surprisingly little, is directly assigned to Yahweh as revelation. So we ask how the characters in this text discerned God’s revelation. Second, we shall go on to ask about how the whole of the text is taken as revelation, once the text is stabilized for us. It may well be that this distinction will be useful in understanding how this text should be handled in faith communities that celebrate revelation but flinch from violence linked to God. The warrant for violence within the text may yield a very different disclosure when we take the text as a stable revelatory unit. In our text, what Joshua and ancient Israel took as revelation may provide a clue for our hearing the text as revelatory. But the two may not be identified or equated.
It is clear that this text, like every biblical text, has no fixed, closed meaning; it is inescapably open to interpretation that reflects specific circumstance and location. In this case, the Joshua material in the thirteenth century (if the text were that old) may have “revealed” a divine intent about “conquest.” But in the fifth century, the likely time of the final form of the text, the revelatory dimension would have been read with much less attention to the raw assertion of divine agency through violence against the Canaanites. In our own time, moreover, these texts may assert divine resolve and intentionality, but very many readers cringe from the divine readiness for violence. Thus, whatever is taken as revelatory in this text in our circumstance, it is certain that the articulation of divine violence
