True biblical scholarship should be completely objective (if you believe the text that’s a strike against you and if you live the text in the context of an active religious community that’s two strikes against you), focus on source identification, contain as many citations of the most up-to-date critical scholarship as possible, and not make any observations that one could use to enrich their personal life, right? Wrong says Leon Kass in The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis.

Public teachers of the book, I then thought and still think, should be either biblical scholars or knowledgeable and religiously observant keepers of tradition–preferably both–and I was neither. But adhering to these strictures led to a difficulty. As I soon learned, biblical scholars, preoccupied with determining the sources of the text or comparing it with the writings of other traditions, now rarely read and teach the Bible in a wisdom-seeking spirit. And the traditional readers of the text often read too narrowly, resolving textual difficulties in the most pious direction. After a while, I persuaded myself that I would do my students no harm if I convened a not-for-credit course on Genesis in which we would read philosophically, solely for meaning and understanding in search of wisdom (xii).

This quote is a breath of fresh air. I could not count the times I have heard of Old Testament classes that spend the first third of the course addressing source critical issues, then the next third deals with modern interpretive philosophies, and then the rest of the semester is spent looking at passages and trying to decide where P starts and E ends. Amazingly, the message of the text is not seriously dealt with and even more sadly, personal growth and wisdom are not considered worthy goals of the course.

Kass’ approach of seeking the text in order to find wisdom should be applied to all biblical classes. If we are not seeking wisdom, what are we seeking? To be able to identify hypothetical sources? Even if we could do this, what good does it yield–how are our lives different because of this? True scholarship enriches people. It impacts them, it leaves them changed for the better for the rest of their life. If we aren’t leading people to wisdom and instead just filling their heads with little bits of trivia (verse x is an insertion from source y which then leads to source w which was composed in…) we are failing in the scholarly calling of helping people flourish and reach their dreams. We need more of Kass in biblical studies and less useless trivia. Let the text speak so that we may gain wisdom.

Purdue librarian Lawrence Mykytiuk has developed a system for testing whether ancient inscriptions refer to a specific biblical character. For an article about this “system” click here. For Mykytiuk’s book click that explains the “system” in detail click here. The Purdue article referes to three elements of Mykytiuk’s system (I haven’t read the book and don’t plan to, the Cliffs’ notes version is all I need on this one):

Whether the data included in the inscription is reliable;

What the “nationality” and the time frame of the inscription are and what Biblical person might be involved;

How strong the match is with the biblical person.

For a purportedly “objective” system, there is an awful lot of subjectivity here. All of this seems to try to quantify that “feeling in your gut” as to whether or not an inscription refers to the specific biblical person. I think in most cases it will be pretty obvious if an inscription refers to a specific person. And for the less than obvious cases it is probably better to err on the side of caution and say that the inscription might refer to the biblical person than to try to quantify and calculate a series of assumptions, guesses, and hunches.