Sárospataki Füzetek 20. (2016)

2016 / 2. szám - ARTICLES / STUDIEN - György Kustár: Ont he Slopes of Sinai - Some Hermeneutical Questions in Light of the Kabbalistic and Historical Critical Exegesis

On the Slopes of Sinai - Some Hermeneutical Questions

2. In Modern Critical Studies

a) New Context

This would not apply in the age after the Enlightenment. The new sense of past and the growing awareness of the historical distance from ancient cultures made inexorable the continuous effort to make the past available. In a paradoxical sense, the historical consciousness further enlarged the gap between history and the present as it required impartial treatment of past in order to regain it in its clearest form.46 The Bible was treated as a historical document, partly in order to maintain its authority in an age that gained a totally different sense of history than it was conveyed by the Scriptures. By a long development and finally by the grounding works of Friedrich Wellhausen, the New Documentary Hypotheses became the generally accepted idea about the historicity of the texts. Although it was criticized from certain circles as largely dependent on Darwin’s and E W. Hegel’s evolutionary theory, his model went through several stages of refinement but only recently received profound critique.47 This theory’s basic argument is that the narrative flow at certain point in its present form does not make sense. The ruptures, ungrounded repetitions, interruptions and inconsistencies in the text are signs of different sources being compiled together in a defective way. In the Sinai Tradition, after the quest for the authorship of Moses48 and an attempt to reconstruct the events as they were in order to legitimate the biblical testimony, the historical studies turned from the actual events to the history of traditions. Besides, the biblical tradition was used as a more or less adequate source to reconstruct the real history of Israel. In this enterprise, the problem of Sinai revelation appeared to be one of the typical examples where the attempt to reach back behind the tradition handed down causes the most problems. The complexity and the obsoleteness of assumed reworking processes make the separation of sources extremely difficult.49 The place of the Decalogue in this tradition and the relation between the Exodus and Sinai tradition is only a piece of the complex debate. Though the Decalogue was paralleled with the Hittite suzerain treatises, especially by Mendenhall, the identification hasn’t appeared to be convincing.50 The attempt to place

46 In his book, Gregory W. Daves gives a valuable overview of the emergence of the historical perception in connection with the historical-Jesus question. Daves, Gregory W.: The Historical Jesus Question, 1 -23. Cf. Cohen - Mendes-Flohr (eds.): Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, 382.

47 McKenzie, Steven L.-Haynes, Stephen R. (eds.): To Each Its Own Meaning-An Introduction to Biblical Criticism and Their Application, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky, 1993,35.

48 The beginning of the quest is hallmarked by Jean Astruck with his attempt to distinguish between the sources Moses used. It ended with the questioning of the mosaic authorship itself. Cf. McKenzie-Haynes (eds.): op. cit., 31.

49 Noth, Martin: Exodus, A Commentary, trans. J. S. Bowden, London, SCM Press Ltd., Bloomsbury Street, 1959,154.

50 Nicholson, E. W.: Exodus and Sinai in History and Tradition, Richmond, Virginia, John Knox Press, 1973, 36ff„ 39-40.

2016-2 Sárospataki Füzetek 20. évfolyam 39