Scriptural Vitality

Rethinking Philology and Hermeneutics

Bibliographic Data

ID19928682
AuthorsHindy Najman (0000-0002-9834-0534, University of Oxford, corresponding author)
Year2025
Publication date2025-01-16
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueScriptural Vitality (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressOxford (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/9780191898037.001.0001
OpenAlexW4405397116
ISBN9780191898037
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited163

Scriptural Vitality challenges the view that the Persian and Hellenistic periods constitute a time of decay, a period of ‘late Judaism’, languishing between an original, vibrant Judaism and the birth of Christianity. Instead, this book argues that the Second Temple period was one of untethered creativity and poetic imagination, of dynamism exemplified through philosophical translation, poetic composition, and a convergence of ancient Mediterranean cultures that gave birth to hermeneutic innovation. Building on Nietzsche’s critique of classical philology and drawing on new ways of reading the Dead Sea Scrolls, the book carries out a radical rethinking of biblical studies. Instead of seeking to reconstruct the original text and to find its original author or at least the original context of its production, Najman celebrates textual pluriformity and transformation, tracing ways in which texts and meanings proliferated within interpretive communities through new performances and fresh articulations of the past. Engaging with thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Peter Szondi, whom biblicists have rarely considered, biblical philology is reimagined as the forward-moving study of the poetic processes by which Jewish communities re-created their past and revitalized their present. The Second Temple period emerges as a golden age of creativity, whose traces may still be discerned in Judaism and Christianity today

Theology · Vitality · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Philosophy

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