Hartenstein, Friedhelm

Senior Fellow: October 2021–February 2022

Research Project: Scepticism and Language

This project will investigate recent concepts of a Jewish and Christian hermeneutics of the Hebrew Bible in order to evaluate the role of scepticism and doubt in such approaches. It is remarkable how many scholars of the Hebrew Bible in the last decades have devoted their research to wisdom literature from Persian and Hellenistic times. Books such as Job and Kohelet/Ecclesiastes have generally been acknowledged as the outcome of an intellectual dialogue with Ancient Near Eastern and Greek thought. This dialogue in early Judaism encompassed pluriform and contradictory ways of understanding human existence. The disputes reflected in works of wisdom in the later Tanakh reveal a critical attitude towards the founding traditions of Judaism, which have become questionable. This critique of tradition was not merely destructive, but aimed for a reaffirmation incorporating arguments of doubt. The need for the translation of the scriptures (predominantly into Greek; cf. the Septuagint) and the difficulties of transcultural understanding made a remarkable contribution to an explicit notion of the ambiguity of traditions. The current interest of scholars in such early forms of “enlightenment” in the Hebrew Bible (for example, in problems of theodicy or the veneration of images) also mirrors the present needs of a sceptical hermeneutics. This project aims to arrive at a new interpretation theory for Hebrew Bible studies based especially on the thought of Paul Ricoeur, Hans Blumenberg, and cognitive linguistics (for example, George Lakoff): a critical hermeneutics uniting sceptical doubt and an ongoing interpretation of religious symbols, the latter being a given infinite task of religious thought.

Friedhelm Hartenstein is a professor at the Institute of Old Testament Studies II at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany.