The Bible After Babel: Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age (review)

REVIEWS THE BIBLE AFTER BABEL: HISTORICAL CRITICISM IN A POSTMODERN AGE. By John J. Collins. Pp. x + 201. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005. Paper, $18.00. As a past president of the Society of Biblical Literature, an esteemed Yale professor of Old Testament, and an authoritative voice on the state of Biblical studies, Collins writes with both an insider’s knowledge of recent changes in the field and the critical distance of an academic whose reputation and place have long been established. Over the course of six chapters, each representing expanded forms of lectures delivered in Edinburgh in November 2004, Collins uses his particular expertise in Hebrew Bible to draw out a wider analysis of the state of biblical studies and more particularly , of historical criticism, in an academic world increasingly fixed by, and in, postmodernism. Collins’s opening references to Babel are indicative, and fit well his larger metaphor of biblical studies as “conversation” (p. 11 and passim). “In the context of biblical studies,” Collins writes, “ historical criticism, or the dominant mode of biblical criticism for the last two centuries or so, has been cast as a tower, and the confusion of languages is taken as the joyful eruption of a chatter of new approaches” (p. 3). For Collins however, little is joyful in such a shift if it means that academics no longer care to, or even find themselves able to, engage in dialogue. “Scholarship is a conversation,” he maintains, “in which the participants try to persuade each other by appeal to evidence and criteria that are in principle acceptable to the other participants. This model…has served the academy well and is not something that should be lightly abandoned” (p. 11). Here is Collins’s thesis, and he proceeds to use his considerable experience to try to prove the point. In chapter two, “The Crisis in Historiography,” Collins begins his exploration of common language precisely where postmodernism first broke down scholarly certainties. (Collins makes reference to, but does not examine in detail, Jean Lyotard’s seminal study The Postmodern Condition, in which Lyotard remarks [p. xxiv] that postmodernism necessarily means an “incredulity toward meta-narratives.”) Concerning the history of Israel and questions around the historicity of exodus, conquest and early monarchy, Collins finds many of the conclusions of the biblical postmodernist scholars laudable , but on very different grounds from those they espouse. For Collins the problems in settling historical fact during these periods arises not “from philosophical predispositions but from the limitations of the available evidence” (pp. 33–34). Here, in microcosm, is Collins’s argument, implied or expressed throughout the book, that “good” deconstructionist or post- Hebrew Studies 48 (2007) 344 Reviews modern biblical criticism is simply good exegesis rigorously applied—that is, scholarship that takes historical criticism to its logical limits. In chapter three, “Exodus and Liberation in Postcolonial Perspective,” Collins examines the issues of universalism and particularism as they are embodied in various liberation and post-colonial readings of the Hebrew Bible. While not willing to dispense entirely of analogical readings of scripture (p. 60), Collins concludes that such approaches are inherently problematical (p. 74). The issue of how prescriptive biblical readings may be considered to be is addressed in a different way in chapter four, “The Impact of Feminist and Gender Studies.” Collins proceeds to undertake his own limited study of Genesis 2–3 in dialogue with several leading feminist scholars , concluding that the Bible is “not innocent in the matter of power relations ” (p. 98). The subject matter of chapter five, “Israelite Religion: The Return of the Goddess,” allows Collins to take up the matter of increasingly important extra-biblical evidence for matters of interpretation and historical analysis. Scholars working on Hebrew Bible from a social-scientific or archaeological point of view may find this chapter the most interesting for its discussion of the Asherah or consort figure in archaeology and in the reconstruction of the cult of ancient Israel and Canaan. Collins’s own important conclusions, however, also serve the more contemporary purpose of the book, in that for him, such revisionist scholarship while, in effect “deconstructing the canonical account of Israelite religion” does so because it has been “driven primarily...