Revelation and Redaction: Rethinking Biblical Studies and Its Intellectual Models

FAIN: FT-52091-04

Bernard Malcolm Levinson
University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN 55455-2009)

This manuscript analyzes the concepts "revelation" and "redaction" and how they function within academic biblical studies, where they are understood as antithetical. A sustained reading of four important texts in the Hebrew Bible that helped generate this binary model allows it to be challenged. Cuneiform literature, on the one hand, and Jewish literature of the Second Temple period (including the Dead Sea Scrolls), on the other, provide a richer range of options for thinking about how authors and redactors created new literary works in antiquity. Consideration of these comparative models allows the creativity and originality of Israelite authors, who often worked as editors, to emerge. Their redactional compositions gave rise to the idea of divine revelation.

Associated Products