Biblical Sociology

Been reading a great deal of Norman Gottwald for a class I have on the Hebrew Bible. Gottwald brought about a massive change in the way the "Old Testament" is read--from arguments about whether or not the stories in the Bible (like Exodus, Genesis) "really happened" to a social-scientific reading of the texts.


From the blurb concerning his landmark 1979 work The Tribes of Yawheh:

A twentieth-anniversary reprint of the landmark book that launched the current explosion of social scientific studies in the biblical field. It sets forth a cultural-material methodology for reconstructing the origins of ancient Israel and offers the hypothesis that Israel emerges as an indigenous social revolutionary peasant movement. In a new introduction, written for this edition. Gottwald takes account of the "sea change" in biblical studies since 1979 as he reviews the impact of his work on the church and academy, assesses its merits and limitations, indicates his present thinking on the subject, and points toward future directions in the social-critical study of ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible.

The phrase "indigenous social revolutionary peasant movement" is the key one. If you read the Book of Joshua in the OT the text gives a picture of a united 12 tribes who all came from Egypt in the Exodus through the wanderings in the Desert to the brink of the Land of Canaan. Moses dies on the edge of the Promised Land and Joshua is nominated to succeed him. Joshua's name incidentally in Hebrew means "God saves"--in Greek his name would be Jesus.

The Book of Joshua follows Joshua as military leader of this united 12 tribes--supposedly descended from the sons of Jacob/Israel the last of the patriarchs--who is given the command by God to cleanse the land of the Canaanites and their religion. God repeatedly tells Joshua that conquered cities are to be put under the ban. The ban is to kill all the men, sell the women and children into slavery. The cleansing image, what today we call ethnic cleansing (see Baghdad) is theologically to make the land "holy", pure. The burning of infidel human flesh is to be a holocaust, a sacrifice to God.

But of course a quick reading of the text with any degree of some questioning will show that this overall picture of the united 12 tribes just doesn't hold up. Joshua is constantly "letting" Canaanites off the hook, as it were. The 12 Tribes (or is it 14 the lists never exactly match up) grumble and do not fight in concert. There are references to some of the tribes having coming from the Wilderness and others not. But it just said they all came from Egypt.

What Gottwald did was to apply sociological methods, specifically (it was the 70s) Marxist categories to the text. Hence not surprising that he comes up with the conclusion of social revolutionary peasants. I think that might be overstated and/or overinfluenced by his Marxism, but either way Gottwald discovered a vein (in the gold mining sense). What he did in the general Hegelian-Marxian line was to say that ideas, specifically in this case religious ones are never socially and politically neutral. They never exist except embodied in time, space and therefore have ingrained points of view.

From a Marxian standpoint, theologies never are class-free. They don't just drop out of heaven. What Gottwald argued is that the groups (and they were groups not one group) that became the ancient Israelites were a mixture of some former slaves from Egypt, disaffected elements from northern Israeli city-state kingdoms, bandits, tribal peasants (communes?).

Not all of those groups were connected to the Mosaic tradition of Exodus. In fact, in Genesis with source critical methods we discover a clan/group from the south who looked to Abraham as their patriarch while the Northern groups had stories concerning Jacob. The later editors of the Bible merged the two traditions into one family by the literary creation of Abraham as father of Isaac, Isaac father of Jacob. Originally these two strands were separate.

And even within the Exodus Mosaic tradition the stories concerning the giving of the Law break up the narrative of escape from Egypt, wandering in the desert, heading to Canaan.

What occurred in these social revolutionary peasant groups were cultic ritual sites where timed with agricultural festivals, the historical acts of Yahweh/Elohim (same God, different god?gods?) were recounted. The separate groups became one through the common sharing of these stories and then "grandfathered", as it were, the stories to fit their lives.

The stories of freedom from oppression under Pharaoh in the south must have connected with those recently escaped from the bondage of northern city-state monarchs. At these cultic ritual sites, laws for tribal order were recounted along with the mighty deeds of their g/God and ancestors. These laws became the basis for the later Purity and Priestly Ritual observances of Judaism.

Gottwald also showed that the prime mode of production was not herding sheep for the Jews, although some was done. The prime production mode was small scale agriculture. Order was maintained through tribal elders and in times of crisis (e.g. invasion by Philistines) judges, charismatic military-judicial leaders would rise in temporary leadership roles to save the people. See the Book of Judges.

These ritual sites existed in many spots other than Jerusalem (no temple yet). And while Yahweh God of Liberation was certainly worshiped perhaps under the form of El Shaddai (the High God) off Near Eastern mythology, fertility rites were also practiced. i.e. Goddesses were devoted to, usually as consorts to Yahweh (Asherahs in the Bible).

Monotheism, the belief in one God alone does not occur in the Bible until the Exile (after 586 BCE). The time frame I am talking about is roughly 1100 BCE. 600 years difference. The same difference between us and the Later Middle Ages. That belief was first announced it seems by the Prophet Second Isaiah and did not become a mainstay, it is argued of common belief on the ground until around 300 or even up until 100 years before Jesus.

The Old Testament is mostly a henotheistic text--that is there is a High God above other gods. God is called Yahweh Lord of Hosts--the Hosts are the Armies of Heaven. The Psalms discuss God deliberating with the heavenly court, again other gods. From the Psalms: "You are a great God above all gods."

Gottwald's genius was to link all the different theologies and worldviews/cosmologies of the Hebrew Bible to social-political class correlates. Which theologies came from which classes and supported which social political orders?

Of course this is just one of many readings. By itself its absolutist and socially-technologically deterministic. But it's an indispensable element necessary in a larger holistic sense of what the history, beliefs, and text of the Hebrew Scriptures in my opinion.