Mitzvoth Ethics and the Jewish Bible: The End of Old Testament Theology

Description

Ratheiser's study provides the framework for a non-confessional, mitzvoth ethics-centered and historical-philological approach to the Jewish bible and deals with the basic steps of an alternative paradigmatic perspective on the biblical text. The author seeks to demostrate the ineptness of confessional and ahistorical approaches to the Jewish bible. Based on his observations and his survey of the history of interpretation of the Jewish bible, Ratheiser introduces an alternative hermeneutical-exegetical approach to the Jewish bible: the paradigm of examples. His study concludes that the biblical text is a collection of writings designed and formed from a specifically ethical-ethnic outlook. In other words, he regards the Jewish bible to be written as an etiology of ancient instruction by ancient Jews to Jews and for Jews. As such, it serves as a religious-ethical identity marker that provides ancient Jews and their descendants with an etiology of Jewish life. Ratheiser regards this religious-ethical agenda to have been the driving force in the minds of the final editors/compilers of the biblical text as we have it today.

Dr. Gershom M.H. Ratheiser is Lecturer/docent at Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universitaet Muenster, Germany, and Director of the Euregional Centre for Jewish History & Cultuur, Enschede, the Netherlands.

"A great deal can be learned from this study...This book is an important one, but it is a penultimate one. It leaves open the shared issue of what to do in each other's presence, after 'the end' has been announced but not enacted." -Walter Brueggemann, Review of Biblical Literature, May 2008 -- Walter Brueggemann