Minimally, the Old Testament and New Testament logic on this question requires that our inquiry stems from the particular teaching and practices prescribed from Moses to Jesus. Christian inquiry and philosophy in the Bible does not necessarily derive from an inward spiritual/mental realm, but is primarily depicted as guided and embodied practices that shape the community to develop discernment, or what Scripture calls “wisdom.” A note on biblical methodology ensues my conclusions.

See also Dru Johnson’s notable books on Bible and Philosophy featured here at the EPS website.

Last century, a robust debate about the nature of Hebrew mentality (i.e., how they actually thought) eventually became known as the Hebrew-Greek mind problem. Though that debate ended in academia with a fairly definitive loss for those who maintained the Hebrew-Greek dichotomy, it certainly engendered a legacy of thought patterns that extends to today.¹

The mid-twentieth century debate focused on this question: Did ancient Hebrews think like we do today? Did they have abstract thoughts? Did they “think about thinking”? Those who answered “no” on this question were verbose. Johannes Pedersen posited that the Israelites, like other ancient cultures, had no embedded construct for thinking and therefore, had no language to discuss a construct which they did not hold. Instead, the Israelite mind could only address things directly perceived. According to this view, the Israelite could not conceive of water qua water, but only of water in a river or puddle. Thus, the Hebrew mind did not abstract:

The Israelite does not occupy himself with empty nor with sharply defined space images. His logic is not the logic of abstraction, but of immediate perception. It is characteristic that the problems treated in the Old Testament are problems pertaining, not to thought, but to life, and that what they seek are not logical results.²

For Pedersen, the Hebrew mind is marked by the complete fusion of concepts so that a man can only conceive of action and outcome as a unity, not a cause and effect which demands further investigation. For the Israelite, “there is no such thing as ‘good intentions’” because, “the intention or will is identical with the totality of the soul which creates action”:³

For the Israelite—as for primitive peoples generally—the mental processes are not successive, but united in one, because the soul is always a unit, acting in one. But no more are the action and its result to be distinguished from each other or from the mental activities; they are implied in the actual mental process.⁴

This inability to abstract, argues Pederson, means that ancient Hebrews could not think as we do. Their thoughts are mired, fused in body and action whereas ours can freely range in the abstract world of ideas.

In a similar comparative study, Thorlief Boman develops the contrast between Israelite and Greek thinking using a dynamic/stative dichotomy.⁵ Where Israelites could only think in terms of dynamic action, Greeks harnessed the ability to think of bodies and properties as stative concepts now domesticated by their minds. His examination of Hebrew language looks at elements such as the verbs that describe inner mental states as movement (e.g., “turn my attention to,” “a thought is coming,” etc.).

In making the case, Boman argues that Hebrew thought was fundamentally psychological while Greek thought was logical. Logical, in this sense, consists of the ability to place “ourselves objectively and impersonally outside the matter and ask what is the strict truth about it.”⁶ As for the psychological Hebrew mind, “In our psychic life, thinking and understanding are inseparable.” And, “when we would understand a matter psychologically, we familiarize ourselves with it and through sympathetic pursuit of its development we try to grasp it as a necessity.”⁷ Thinking, for Boman, is abstract and objective. Yet the ancient Hebrews are associated with somatic ideas of thought from embodied experience. This might seem like an advance toward our thesis, but Boman’s use of “familiar” and “acquaintance” for Hebrew thought is to show why it is not really thinking at all, but reacting to environment.

James Barr’s unfavorable appraisal of these two-mind constructs was definitive. He groups the two-mind proposals by the following properties: 1) contrasts Greek thinking as stative and Hebrew as dynamic, 2) contrasts Greek thinking as abstract and Hebrew as concrete, and 3) contrasts the Greek conception of man as a duality and the Hebrew as unitary being. All of this is based upon the nature of language, the philology of mind in the extant texts of the Hebrew Bible.

Barr’s basic rejoinder aims at the faulty claim that two distinct mentalities can be derived from the languages of the people represented. If Hebrew represents the “verb” mentality and Greek the “noun,” does that dichotomy reflect their mentality per se or the nature of the texts? Barr argues for the latter, pointing out the phenomenological aspect of the extant texts: “The typical vehicle of Hebrew thinking is the historical narrative or the future prediction, both forms of literature in which the verb is likely to be of great significance.”⁸ His second major critique points to the vague nature of the comparison itself.

Boman et al. have constructed a theory of mentality that includes their own European mentality and Indo-European language group as the contrast to the Hebrew mentality and Semitic language group. This creates an ineffectual comparison to which Barr raises one penetrating implication. “[I]f the Greek language can be somehow correlated with certain abstract or static features of Greek thought, how is (say) the Albanian language, which is also Indo-European, related with these features?”⁹ In short, the two minds analysis is not self-reflected on the analysts themselves, and therefore, it is incomplete.

Later, Julian Jaynes would provide the evolutionary fuel for this discussion in his The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.¹⁰ The basic premise focuses on the two parts of early man’s brain (i.e., bicameral) where one side fires off commands to the other side and it obeys. This work in and of itself enters biblical criticism right at the level of bicameral functions, so that the right side of the bicameral brain is the center of processing voices. Bringing this analysis to the Hebrew text, Jaynes argues that the Hebrew Bible offers the reader a history of the developing mind. Beginning with guidance by hallucinogenic voices from divine beings (e.g., Exod 3), the early human bicameral mind operates by voice. Hence, Moses does what the other hemisphere of his brain, known to him as YHWH Elohim, tells him. Only when consciousness later arises in human beings does the visual command guide humanity and seeing then becomes metaphorical for knowing.

Where we find the ancient person of scripture “hearing” God, according to Jaynes, we are reading about the bicameral human. When humankind reaches consciousness, then we read about people “seeing” what is going on. We cannot review the inherent problems of Jayne’s position here, other than to say that one must accept much more than merely the concept of a bicameral mind, which most scholars do not, in order to bear fruit from such an analysis.¹¹

Indeed, the basic question needs to be taken up: Did ancient Israelites, as described in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, think and therefore know like we do? Moreover, do we share any mentality with ancient peoples so that our constructs and language can map onto theirs in a productive way? An affirmative answer is required without hesitation in order to do any broad-ranging analysis of ancient texts. After this, we must then go along with Barr and Carasik to affirm that the biblical languages refer to the same epistemological constructs we have today mutatis mutandis.

If we do share mentality communicated by language, then how does one go about translating the language of Scripture into the common epistemological referents that we share today? Carasik prescribes the study of lexical use within narratives in order to gain an understanding of overlapping language and constructs. For instance, when we say, “He thought X,” we grasp that some biblical authors would state this differently. Some would have understood the heart (לבב) to be the center of thoughts and intent. In looking at those narratives, we do not expect to see language about thinking, but rather the actions of one’s heart. Through building up matrices of the use of specific language with reference to what we call mentality (i.e., epistemology),¹² we can then come to appreciate what writers intended to portray. Carasik is not suggesting that this would be a method for finding hidden beliefs about mentality, but that it becomes the framework to justify any conclusions we may draw from the texts.

If ancient Hebrews did not think as we do, then we can barely claim to have any access to their thinking through the biblical texts. For the above reasons and many more, we reject the absolute dichotomy of Hebrew from Greek thought. This should not be taken as a rejection of Greek thought, as I do not believe that this dichotomy actually captures Hebrew or Greek thought aptly. Instead, I want to suggest that what the Platonic tradition parceled out to the eternal and heavenly realms could be found here in our earthly bodies. We do not lose the benefits of the Hellenistic tradition on my account; only seek to better explain them apart from the heavenly forms.

Though these debates have continued in corridors of academia, it was not until the end of the twentieth century that the body took center stage in various academic discourses, creating an implicit argument that complicates a naïve view of the mind-body schism. The rise of feminist critiques, analogical reasoning, and recent nonverbal psychology gave compelling reasons to regard the body as integral to thinking, to what had previously been considered the domain of abstract Greek thought. We are not merely thinkers who act, but our thinking is shaped by our action and our acts are types of thinking. That embodied thinking is as true in Greek thought as it is in Hebraic thought, making the dichotomy untenable.¹³

This essay is from “The Centrality of the Body for Knowing,” in Knowledge by Ritual: A Biblical Prolegomenon for Sacramental Theology (Eisenbrauns/Penn State University Press, 2016).

Footnotes

Konrad Schmid prefers to speak of theology in the Hebrew Bible as rarely explicit yet pervasively implicit through the rational project of inner-biblical exegesis in the Bible.² This present work takes Schmid’s—and others such as Fishbane and Hays³—suggestion seriously. If there is theology (or philosophy) expressed in the biblical texts, a method sensitive to the author’s constructive use of prior texts (i.e., inner-biblical exegesis) must be paramount in discerning a coherent view of knowing as it develops in the Torah and Gospels. It now seems that the marginalization of Semitic and Mesopotamian texts as un-philosophical is fading.⁴ This marginalization usually entails the uncritical assumption that the Greek form of philosophy is paradigmatic of the nature of the philosophical task. It’s not that Semites and Babylonians can’t be philosophical, it’s that they cannot be Greeks, a handicap that no longer ought to be considered apropos. Though East Asian philosophies (i.e., Indian and Chinese philosophy) have found their way into the curriculum of most philosophy departments in the West, Southwest Asian, North African and Mesopotamian texts are still relegated to products of divine revelation. Hence, African and Southwest Asian philosophies end up in religion departments and taught primarily as religions.

Is there epistemology in these texts?

As a prima facie answer to the question of knowledge in the biblical narratives, “who knows what and how” appears relevant at every stage of Israelite history. It first appears as the crux of the first story of humanity (Gen 2–3). Knowing YHWH and his relationship to Israel then becomes the conflict to be resolved in the Exodus story (Exod 1–14). The ritualed world created by YHWH often entails performing a rite explicitly in order to know (e.g., Gen 15:8–13; Exod 16:11–12; Lev 23:43; etc.).⁵ The wisdom literature develops a nuanced distinction between mere recognition and discernment. Jesus’ intense focus on his disciples skips past their moral behavior in order to hone, or more often attempt to hone, their understanding of the secret of the kingdom of God (Mark 4:11; 6:51; 8:17–21). Jeremiah even paints the last days—the eschaton—in the hues and strokes of epistemology, who knows what and how (Jer 31:33–34). It is difficult to escape the robust infusion of epistemically driven storylines and outcomes across the biblical literature.

Methodology

The form of philosophical criticism I am developing here requires some kind of biblical theological impulse. By biblical theology, I am not referring to a particular movement, but a desire to trace an idea within a text and across texts. The methodology of this work intentionally restricts me to considering instances where knowing is present, persistent, and relevant to the text being analyzed. First, the presence of a structure to knowing will be considered when it appears both lexically and conceptually. The mere presence of epistemological language (i.e., ידע or γινώσκω) within a pericope does not signify that a passage is concerned with epistemology. For example, Genesis 4 has three punctuated instances of ידע (Gen 4:1, 17, 25), yet all three describe procreative sex with a spouse. Although there is room for a logical connection between knowing and sexual intimacy, Genesis 4 does not explore that connection. I am only interested in texts where both lexical and conceptual epistemic discourse occurs. As it turns out, some of the most structured use of epistemological lexicography will not be ידע or γινώσκω, but שמע (listen), רעה (see), and their Greek equivalents. Second, beyond presence of the terms and concepts, the biblical authors must persistently pursue the idea in their texts. By this, I mean that the texts evince the persistence of the author when an intentional development of the idea can be discerned. Epistemological concepts are not mere one-off sideshows, but are a matter of concern for the author’s rhetorical strategy. Third, the epistemological content must have relevance to the central story being told or the instruction at hand. Merely seeing a character in the narrative figure something out as a positive move in the narrative’s rhetoric does not qualify it for investigation. However, when a portion of these texts can demonstrate the presence, persistence, and relevance to the larger story being told, then it crosses the threshold for further analysis to reveal a possible structure of knowing discernible in a text.⁶

Demonstrating Epistemology in the Biblical Texts

The specific goal is to demonstrate through philosophical criticism of the biblical literature that epistemology in these texts is concerned with the relationship between hearing (שמע/ἀκουω), seeing (ראה/βλεπω), and knowing (ידע/ἐπιστευω/συνιημι)—for instance.⁷ In my monograph Epistemology and Biblical Theology, I examine Genesis 2–3 to show that it chronicles an epistemological process. At the fore, I justify whether I am imposing epistemology or if knowledge is a concern present within Genesis 2–3. First, the emic lexical patterns and narratival tensions of the texts suggest an epistemological resolution. Second, asking etic philosophical questions of a text is not methodologically out of sorts with exegetical practice, but it does run the risk of asking the wrong questions of the text. For instance, it is difficult for the exegete to ask simple questions such as, “What is at stake in this story” and circumscribe the answers of that question—in advance—to a non-philosophical category. Merely asking what is at stake presupposes an ethical realm within which causal connectives of the narrative can reconcile and evince. So exegesis does not shy from asking philosophical questions, but is careful to ask philosophically relevant questions. So we proceed with an awareness of the types of questions appropriate to ask of the text and its ability to answer.⁸ I also employ a spate of twentieth-century philosophers to explain epistemological notions in the biblical texts—claiming all the while that these ideas are emic to the texts. I want to advise that I am inviting on a cluster of philosophers to participate in this exegesis (i.e., Marjorie Grene, Thomas Kuhn, Charles Taylor, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michael Polanyi, among others). Of these, I most readily employ Michael Polanyi’s epistemological categories for examining these texts and the reason for this is manifold. First, his epistemology is scientific and so it has a broader appeal than strictly analytic modes of epistemological analysis. Second, and as evidence of the first point, Polanyi accredits the body as central to the task of epistemology. This helps me to account for the many instances of knowing that go well beyond articulable propositions and through the body. Third, knowing does not appear to be constrained by discrete epistemic events, but a process through which one acquires the knack or skill of knowing. Within this epistemological process, discrete statements of knowledge can be formulated and confessed. Some like to call these statements “sentential propositions,” but I will avoid such a reduction of rich epistemic understanding to a singular primitive statement of propositional fact. From that analysis of Genesis 2–3, it appears that the epistemological description from the Eden narrative⁹ creates reverberations for the reader that continue into Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.¹⁰ I hope to demonstrate more specifically, both diachronically and synchronically,¹¹ that Brueggemann among others has perhaps overlooked some of these intertextual links when he maintains that Genesis 2­–3 is an “exceedingly marginal text” without “clear substantive references” in the remainder of the Hebrew Bible.¹² Genesis 2–3 will be shown to be a text that resonates powerfully in the Pentateuch, evinced by showing how other Pentateuchal texts share the themes and lexical connections with it. If Fishbane is correct in saying, “myth is kept alive by its uses and reuses, as it moves from context to context and serves different cultural or individual needs,” then the question becomes: Why and how is the story of Genesis 2–3 “kept alive” in the mind of those reading the Pentateuch?¹³

Discerning resemblances between texts

Because studying Hebraic thought is focused on tracing a single construct through variegated texts, I must notice how later texts (in canonical order) employ or echo earlier texts. I will follow the Pentateuch and then Mark as a reader of the canon, observing how these stories unfold before the reader, and build up to the climax of interconnections in Deuteronomy. Then, I examine how Mark employs the Deuteronomic descriptions of epistemic errors, even preferring the Deuteronomic language of the Sinai narrative to the Exodus version in its allusions at the Transfiguration (Mark 9). At times, similarity between texts is unmistakable (cf. Deut 29:3 [MT]; Isa 6:9-10). But most instances fall into the realm of echo-like intertextual links.¹⁴ An example would help to demonstrate intertextual connections that may create theological questions. In chapter four, I will argue that Deuteronomy’s list of items forbidden to be made into idols goes beyond mere lexical correspondence (Deut 4:15-19). The list appears to reflect almost directly the things created in Genesis 1. Further, the lexical connections are unique between Genesis 1 and Deuteronomy 4—male and female, winged birds, and creeping things only appear together in two places in the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 1 and Deuteronomy 4.¹⁵ But it is the rhetorical role of their mention in Deuteronomy 4, without any direct mention of creation, that signals a possible rhetorical link to the creation account in Genesis. The conspicuity of the created items of Genesis 1 found in Deuteronomy 4 leads some commentators to surmise that the creation event (Gen 1) is intended to be reflective of the rhetoric of forbidding idolatry (Deut 4). I might even argue that Deuteronomy 4 is a rhetorical allusion to Genesis’s creation á la intertextual play, meaning that the notion of worship to YHWH, an idea absent in Genesis 1, is transumed by the reader to YHWH’s role as Creator, an unstated notion in Deuteronomy 4. (In literary terms, this type of intertextual play is called metalepsis.¹⁶) This understanding, of course, presumes that those who read/heard Deuteronomy 4 had “ears to hear the echoes and construe their significance” from Genesis 1.¹⁷

Following the story

Employing the methodological pluralism described above, the motif of epistemological process emerges: What one can “see” and then “know/understand” is dependent on to whom one “listens.” The texts center their foci on ensuring that Israel is “listening to the voice of” the authentic authority in order to know correctly. The reasons for limiting my study in Epistemology and Biblical Theology to the Pentateuch and Mark were two-fold. First is the issue of constraint. In the effort to maintain a coherent thesis that manages to do minimally faithful exegesis of the texts, primary texts must be given priority, especially if they might be the lens through which to view other texts in the Hebrew Bible and NT. Second, the Pentateuch and Gospel stories are central narratives of Israel’s canon and the NT church’s canon respectively. And while the narratives are not properly theology or epistemology, as Barr contends, they are the “raw material for theology.”¹⁸ Because my focus was upon the possibility of a consistent epistemological process from the Pentateuch to Mark’s Gospel, I read the Pentateuch in a way that is consistent with a Markan author and audience. In this sense, I assume some type of canonical reading, but for the purpose of seeing how Mark might be utilizing Pentateuchal language and themes. I, therefore, approach the text at the level of its literary form, noticing the canonical movement that sets these stories in a particular order. I will follow the narratival inertia as a literary reader of the Pentateuch and Mark. Certainly this sounds like a biblical theology of sorts, and that it is. But I must clarify what I am and am not attempting. First, I am not endeavoring to see the epistemological process as necessarily bound to a single biblical theological approach: salvation-history,¹⁹ promise-fulfillment,²⁰ typology,²¹ or covenant theology.²² This study evinces affinity with the covenantal approach to biblical theology inasmuch as the garden story is read as covenantal²³ and at least one goal of covenant aims at knowing. But even then, I want to consider a mere continuity of rhetoric and narrative retelling, the story of knowing told in Genesis 2-3 is re-told to the reader over and again.²⁴ Methodologically, I recognize that “The possibility of biblical theology remains, even for its own practitioners, a very precarious thing …”²⁵ Hence, Watson’s call to lower the “lines of demarcation” between biblical studies and systematic theology²⁶ guides this study. Similarly, F. F. Bruce warns:

This is not to say that the tracing of patterns is illegitimate, but that it should not be pressed beyond the plain sense of the biblical narrative and language. It is better to think of recurring patterns of divine action and human response … all the more so because such recurring patterns were recognized by the biblical authors themselves, in both Testaments. ²⁷

In short, due to the resemblance of Genesis 2–3, both in the theology and narratives of Israel’s canon, I work from the beginning of the Pentateuch forward. But I am not bound to a particular school of biblical theology. In this manner, I follow this epistemological process through the narratives rather than make theological statements about individual passages.²⁸

1. 1. I share at least some epistemological constructs with ancient Israelites.
   2. Those constructs can be accessed through disparate linguistic depiction.
   3. I can justify my findings by demonstrating the patterned use of this language that corresponds to the structure of narratives.

For this type of philosophical criticism to be viable, my lexical and conceptual analyses must make sense within their narratives; hence, classical words studies alone are insufficient to the task.²⁹

Is there philosophy in these texts?

In his declaratory work—Philosophy Before the Greeks—Marc Van De Mieroop explains divergent roles of texts in the thought-world of the ancient Near East. Specifically for Van De Mieroop, the Babylonian esteem for textualizing knowledge appears at odds with Plato’s disdain for knowledge being turned into text. However, Van De Mieroop claims that difference does not equate to defect: The fundamental difference between Greece and Babylon should not lead to the conclusion that the Babylonian approach was not philosophical or systematic. On the contrary, it was a rigorously disciplined, scientific search for truth.³⁰ Van De Mieroop goes on to show how the eruption of longer and longer word lists in Babylon cannot be neglected as mere lexica or writing exercises by scribes. Rather, they represent a certain style of philosophizing with which the Hellenistic tradition appears unfamiliar. Epistemology as displayed in writings on language, the future, and law . . . do not state theories but develop examples on the basis of underlying principles. Their reasoning is pointillistic, cumulatively exploring issues cases by case. . . . They disclose what Babylonians thought about reality; they reveal a Babylonian epistemology.³¹ Notice that Van De Mieroop draws a strikingly different conclusion from the textual observations of Thorleif Boman and Johannes Pedersen. The regulative use of concrete instances does not mean that abstraction is absent in their mentality, but rather, that scholars need to bring apt analytical tools to the texts in order to understand how those texts make abstract claims. Of late, scholars have made a clearer case for how the biblical texts might also be making claims and arguments about the nature of reality or a way of justifying knowledge.³² Yoram Hazony’s 2012 work—The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture—makes a significant case for the thought-world of ancient Semites expressed in story and oracle.³³ Likewise, Jaco Gericke’s Society of Biblical Literature volume cited above shows how the various instances of a word can reveal concepts that must undergird the term, even if only by fuzzy logic.³⁴ John Barton notes that these two books—Hazony and Gericke—are part of a trend: “Scholars are beginning to ask more about the rationality of the Hebrew Bible than they once did.”³⁵ Barton himself also attests to seeing a quasi- or proto-philosophy in the Hebrew Bible:

Ancient Israelite culture had the beginnings—even if faltering at times—of a philosophical mentality, in which people asked what diverse phenomena, such as the many precepts of moral teaching, came down to in the end.³⁶

Konrad Schmid prefers to speak of theology in the Hebrew Bible as rarely explicit yet pervasively implicit through the rational project of inner-biblical exegesis in the Bible.³⁷ This present work takes Schmid’s—and others such as Fishbane and Hays³⁸—suggestion seriously. If there is theology (or philosophy) expressed in the biblical texts, a method sensitive to the author’s constructive use of prior texts (i.e., inner-biblical exegesis) must be paramount in discerning a coherent view of knowing as it develops in the Torah and Gospels. It now seems that the marginalization of Semitic and Mesopotamian texts as un-philosophical is fading.³⁹ This marginalization usually entails the uncritical assumption that the Greek form of philosophy is paradigmatic of the nature of the philosophical task. It’s not that Semites and Babylonians can’t be philosophical, it’s that they cannot be Greeks, a handicap that no longer ought to be considered apropos. Though East Asian philosophies (i.e., Indian and Chinese philosophy) have found their way into the curriculum of most philosophy departments in the West, Southwest Asian, North African and Mesopotamian texts are still relegated to products of divine revelation. Hence, African and Southwest Asian philosophies end up in religion departments and taught primarily as religions.

Is there epistemology in these texts?

As a prima facie answer to the question of knowledge in the biblical narratives, “who knows what and how” appears relevant at every stage of Israelite history. It first appears as the crux of the first story of humanity (Gen 2–3). Knowing YHWH and his relationship to Israel then becomes the conflict to be resolved in the Exodus story (Exod 1–14). The ritualed world created by YHWH often entails performing a rite explicitly in order to know (e.g., Gen 15:8–13; Exod 16:11–12; Lev 23:43; etc.).⁴⁰ The wisdom literature develops a nuanced distinction between mere recognition and discernment. Jesus’ intense focus on his disciples skips past their moral behavior in order to hone, or more often attempt to hone, their understanding of the secret of the kingdom of God (Mark 4:11; 6:51; 8:17–21). Jeremiah even paints the last days—the eschaton—in the hues and strokes of epistemology, who knows what and how (Jer 31:33–34). It is difficult to escape the robust infusion of epistemically driven storylines and outcomes across the biblical literature.

Methodology

The form of philosophical criticism I am developing here requires some kind of biblical theological impulse. By biblical theology, I am not referring to a particular movement, but a desire to trace an idea within a text and across texts. The methodology of this work intentionally restricts me to considering instances where knowing is present, persistent, and relevant to the text being analyzed. First, the presence of a structure to knowing will be considered when it appears both lexically and conceptually. The mere presence of epistemological language (i.e., ידע or γινώσκω) within a pericope does not signify that a passage is concerned with epistemology. For example, Genesis 4 has three punctuated instances of ידע (Gen 4:1, 17, 25), yet all three describe procreative sex with a spouse. Although there is room for a logical connection between knowing and sexual intimacy, Genesis 4 does not explore that connection. I am only interested in texts where both lexical and conceptual epistemic discourse occurs. As it turns out, some of the most structured use of epistemological lexicography will not be ידע or γινώσκω, but שמע (listen), רעה (see), and their Greek equivalents. Second, beyond presence of the terms and concepts, the biblical authors must persistently pursue the idea in their texts. By this, I mean that the texts evince the persistence of the author when an intentional development of the idea can be discerned. Epistemological concepts are not mere one-off sideshows, but are a matter of concern for the author’s rhetorical strategy. Third, the epistemological content must have relevance to the central story being told or the instruction at hand. Merely seeing a character in the narrative figure something out as a positive move in the narrative’s rhetoric does not qualify it for investigation. However, when a portion of these texts can demonstrate the presence, persistence, and relevance to the larger story being told, then it crosses the threshold for further analysis to reveal a possible structure of knowing discernible in a text.⁴¹

Demonstrating Epistemology in the Biblical Texts

The specific goal is to demonstrate through philosophical criticism of the biblical literature that epistemology in these texts is concerned with the relationship between hearing (שמע/ἀκουω), seeing (ראה/βλεπω), and knowing (ידע/ἐπιστευω/συνιημι)—for instance.⁴² In my monograph Epistemology and Biblical Theology, I examine Genesis 2–3 to show that it chronicles an epistemological process. At the fore, I justify whether I am imposing epistemology or if knowledge is a concern present within Genesis 2–3. First, the emic lexical patterns and narratival tensions of the texts suggest an epistemological resolution. Second, asking etic philosophical questions of a text is not methodologically out of sorts with exegetical practice, but it does run the risk of asking the wrong questions of the text. For instance, it is difficult for the exegete to ask simple questions such as, “What is at stake in this story” and circumscribe the answers of that question—in advance—to a non-philosophical category. Merely asking what is at stake presupposes an ethical realm within which causal connectives of the narrative can reconcile and evince. So exegesis does not shy from asking philosophical questions, but is careful to ask philosophically relevant questions. So we proceed with an awareness of the types of questions appropriate to ask of the text and its ability to answer.⁴³ I also employ a spate of twentieth-century philosophers to explain epistemological notions in the biblical texts—claiming all the while that these ideas are emic to the texts. I want to advise that I am inviting on a cluster of philosophers to participate in this exegesis (i.e., Marjorie Grene, Thomas Kuhn, Charles Taylor, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michael Polanyi, among others). Of these, I most readily employ Michael Polanyi’s epistemological categories for examining these texts and the reason for this is manifold. First, his epistemology is scientific and so it has a broader appeal than strictly analytic modes of epistemological analysis. Second, and as evidence of the first point, Polanyi accredits the body as central to the task of epistemology. This helps me to account for the many instances of knowing that go well beyond articulable propositions and through the body. Third, knowing does not appear to be constrained by discrete epistemic events, but a process through which one acquires the knack or skill of knowing. Within this epistemological process, discrete statements of knowledge can be formulated and confessed. Some like to call these statements “sentential propositions,” but I will avoid such a reduction of rich epistemic understanding to a singular primitive statement of propositional fact. From that analysis of Genesis 2–3, it appears that the epistemological description from the Eden narrative⁴⁴ creates reverberations for the reader that continue into Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.⁴⁵ I hope to demonstrate more specifically, both diachronically and synchronically,⁴⁶ that Brueggemann among others has perhaps overlooked some of these intertextual links when he maintains that Genesis 2­–3 is an “exceedingly marginal text” without “clear substantive references” in the remainder of the Hebrew Bible.⁴⁷ Genesis 2–3 will be shown to be a text that resonates powerfully in the Pentateuch, evinced by showing how other Pentateuchal texts share the themes and lexical connections with it. If Fishbane is correct in saying, “myth is kept alive by its uses and reuses, as it moves from context to context and serves different cultural or individual needs,” then the question becomes: Why and how is the story of Genesis 2–3 “kept alive” in the mind of those reading the Pentateuch?⁴⁸

Discerning resemblances between texts

Because studying Hebraic thought is focused on tracing a single construct through variegated texts, I must notice how later texts (in canonical order) employ or echo earlier texts. I will follow the Pentateuch and then Mark as a reader of the canon, observing how these stories unfold before the reader, and build up to the climax of interconnections in Deuteronomy. Then, I examine how Mark employs the Deuteronomic descriptions of epistemic errors, even preferring the Deuteronomic language of the Sinai narrative to the Exodus version in its allusions at the Transfiguration (Mark 9). At times, similarity between texts is unmistakable (cf. Deut 29:3 [MT]; Isa 6:9-10). But most instances fall into the realm of echo-like intertextual links.⁴⁹ An example would help to demonstrate intertextual connections that may create theological questions. In chapter four, I will argue that Deuteronomy’s list of items forbidden to be made into idols goes beyond mere lexical correspondence (Deut 4:15-19). The list appears to reflect almost directly the things created in Genesis 1. Further, the lexical connections are unique between Genesis 1 and Deuteronomy 4—male and female, winged birds, and creeping things only appear together in two places in the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 1 and Deuteronomy 4.⁵⁰ But it is the rhetorical role of their mention in Deuteronomy 4, without any direct mention of creation, that signals a possible rhetorical link to the creation account in Genesis. The conspicuity of the created items of Genesis 1 found in Deuteronomy 4 leads some commentators to surmise that the creation event (Gen 1) is intended to be reflective of the rhetoric of forbidding idolatry (Deut 4). I might even argue that Deuteronomy 4 is a rhetorical allusion to Genesis’s creation á la intertextual play, meaning that the notion of worship to YHWH, an idea absent in Genesis 1, is transumed by the reader to YHWH’s role as Creator, an unstated notion in Deuteronomy 4. (In literary terms, this type of intertextual play is called metalepsis.⁵¹) This understanding, of course, presumes that those who read/heard Deuteronomy 4 had “ears to hear the echoes and construe their significance” from Genesis 1.⁵²

Following the story

Employing the methodological pluralism described above, the motif of epistemological process emerges: What one can “see” and then “know/understand” is dependent on to whom one “listens.” The texts center their foci on ensuring that Israel is “listening to the voice of” the authentic authority in order to know correctly. The reasons for limiting my study in Epistemology and Biblical Theology to the Pentateuch and Mark were two-fold. First is the issue of constraint. In the effort to maintain a coherent thesis that manages to do minimally faithful exegesis of the texts, primary texts must be given priority, especially if they might be the lens through which to view other texts in the Hebrew Bible and NT. Second, the Pentateuch and Gospel stories are central narratives of Israel’s canon and the NT church’s canon respectively. And while the narratives are not properly theology or epistemology, as Barr contends, they are the “raw material for theology.”⁵³ Because my focus was upon the possibility of a consistent epistemological process from the Pentateuch to Mark’s Gospel, I read the Pentateuch in a way that is consistent with a Markan author and audience. In this sense, I assume some type of canonical reading, but for the purpose of seeing how Mark might be utilizing Pentateuchal language and themes. I, therefore, approach the text at the level of its literary form, noticing the canonical movement that sets these stories in a particular order. I will follow the narratival inertia as a literary reader of the Pentateuch and Mark. Certainly this sounds like a biblical theology of sorts, and that it is. But I must clarify what I am and am not attempting. First, I am not endeavoring to see the epistemological process as necessarily bound to a single biblical theological approach: salvation-history,⁵⁴ promise-fulfillment,⁵⁵ typology,⁵⁶ or covenant theology.⁵⁷ This study evinces affinity with the covenantal approach to biblical theology inasmuch as the garden story is read as covenantal⁵⁸ and at least one goal of covenant aims at knowing. But even then, I want to consider a mere continuity of rhetoric and narrative retelling, the story of knowing told in Genesis 2-3 is re-told to the reader over and again.⁵⁹ Methodologically, I recognize that “The possibility of biblical theology remains, even for its own practitioners, a very precarious thing …”⁶⁰ Hence, Watson’s call to lower the “lines of demarcation” between biblical studies and systematic theology⁶¹ guides this study. Similarly, F. F. Bruce warns:

This is not to say that the tracing of patterns is illegitimate, but that it should not be pressed beyond the plain sense of the biblical narrative and language. It is better to think of recurring patterns of divine action and human response … all the more so because such recurring patterns were recognized by the biblical authors themselves, in both Testaments. ⁶²

In short, due to the resemblance of Genesis 2–3, both in the theology and narratives of Israel’s canon, I work from the beginning of the Pentateuch forward. But I am not bound to a particular school of biblical theology. In this manner, I follow this epistemological process through the narratives rather than make theological statements about individual passages.⁶³

This is an adapted version of "Biblical Theology and Philosophy" in
Epistemology and Biblical Theology: From the Pentateuch to Mark's Gospel
(Routledge, 2018).

The idea that the biblical texts carry out an extended discourse about the nature of knowing often strikes both philosophers and biblical scholars as odd. Epistemology makes for a good example of Hebraic thought because epistemological discourses are essentially demonstrating “thinking about thinking” (as Michael Carasik once called it). There are ways to know that are better than others, namely because they lead the knower to see more truly. To show this, I trace those ideas in literary order, from the origins stories of Genesis through the origins of Israel to the origins of the first-century messianic prophet from Nazareth. Throughout, a structure to knowing appears endemic to these texts. Generally, the term “epistemology” applies to descriptions about and analyses of structures of knowledge:

• • Who knows something?
  • Is that something true?
  • How does she justify such knowledge?

The analytic tradition of epistemology currently owns the market share of scholarly discussions on knowledge.⁶⁴Accordingly, those three questions about justified true beliefs stem from a particular view of anthropology, humanity, and knowledge—a view that some ancient Semites might not have shared, even up through the period of Hellenistic Judaism. The epistemological matters implied or described in the Pentateuch and Gospels shift focus away from justifying discrete beliefs—captured by the three questions above—and toward embodying a process in order to know. Who knows what and how? The answer to this more amenable question will require serious consideration of the authorized docents in Scripture. These authenticated guides lead their subjects to see that which they are showing to them, something present the whole time but unseen to the novice apart from developing the skill to see—like a medical student who finally recognizes a benign tumor through the repeated practices guided by radiology professors. The process of seeing under such guidance, also called “knowing” in these texts, requires full bodily participation in order to bridge the gap between knowing and not knowing. I am using the term “knowing” rather than “knowledge” because the aim of the epistemology in these texts is not acquired knowledge. Rather, the goal homes in on creating a kind of person and people that have the skill to see what is being shown to them. Hence, the epistemology found across these texts betrays the Semitic view of skilled knowing rather than discrete logical justification of a belief that biblical authors then deign knowledge. A handful of works on epistemology in Scripture have peppered the landscape of biblical scholarship⁶⁵ and theology⁶⁶ over the last few decades, each providing valuable insights into the role of knowledge in biblical literature. This volume differs most notably from those by working in the method of what Jaco Gericke has termed “philosophical criticism.” By this phrase, philosophical criticism, Gericke means to include philosophical analysis of biblical texts as one more type of critical inquiry that uses the text to understand how ancient Semites might have conceived of philosophical concepts.⁶⁷ Even if biblical philosophy turns out to be “folk philosophy,” as Gericke claims, the authors still have some kind of philosophical notions about humanity and the cosmos and those notions are evinced in these texts.⁶⁸ In short, philosophical criticism is a form of biblical criticism:

. . . as a descriptive type of philosophical analysis aimed at the clarification of meaning in the biblical texts . . . in discovering what, if anything, a given passage assumes or implies on these matters and in translating the findings of the analyses into philosophical terms.⁶⁹

As a form of biblical criticism, an umbrella term with intentional largess, Gericke houses philosophical criticism mostly within the methodologies of literary and rhetorical criticism. In addition, we shall be first and foremost concerned with the world in the text alone. The world behind it (historical background) and the world in front of it (our world and those of earlier reception history) are of relevance only to the extent that the meaning of folk philosophies in the text can be elucidated.⁷⁰ I follow Gericke’s lead to a great degree, but focusing on narratives requires that I bring different tools and tacks to the task than he espouses. What Gericke offers us in methodology carries self-imposed limits, but I push back on the idea that assumed or implied notions in the text only represent folk philosophy. By examining foundational narratives, something more than implications and assumptions are afoot in the world of the texts. Narratival conflicts, climaxes, and resolutions have a logical structure to them and that logic means that necessary conclusions may proceed from the logical nature of the story itself. Continuing actions can also offer interpretive clues as to the logic of a story that may have multiple conflict/resolution patterns within. All things being equal, narratives can do something more than imply.⁷¹ They might possibly argue too. Biblical criticisms identify themselves by method and the layers investigated in the texts. Gericke primarily pursues Yahwist religion in the Hebrew Bible in order to demonstrate his method, with a specific interest to show a language-concept relation.⁷² Eleonore Stump also believes that analytic philosophy of religion should consider the biblical texts as a source of philosophical thought played out in the biblical narratives.⁷³ She has often returned to stories in the Bible that force reflection on a philosophical problem. For instance, Stump uses the Cain and Abel story of Genesis 4 to discuss theodicy in light of the fact that YHWH does nothing for Abel and yet intervenes and then shows mercy for murderous Cain.⁷⁴ For Stump, the story itself prompts philosophical questions to be answered. I practice a philosophical criticism distinct from yet sympathetic to the kinds advocated by Jaco Gericke and Eleonore Stump. This philosophical criticism will attend to narratives first and seek to understand the paranesis of these texts in their literary context. To varying degrees, Eleonore Stump, Craig Bartholomew, and Yoram Hazony—among others—have constructively practiced this type of analysis.⁷⁵

How to Proceed?

At its core, my work intends to show that the Pentateuch and Mark’s gospel evince a consistent view of epistemology—who can know what and how. Beyond a consistent view, Genesis 2–3 broaches a seminal depiction of knowledge that develops into a prescriptive account in Exodus, reified in Deuteronomy, and ultimately employed in the rhetoric of the Markan Jesus. In order to trace that line of epistemology, I employ two methods: discerning philosophical argument from within biblical texts and pursuing consonant epistemological constructions across texts. The former has been largely relegated to the usual subjects of investigation. Job and Qohelet are examined for their proto-existentialism.⁷⁶ Equally frequent, the epistemology of wisdom literature recurs with new insights or conversation partners.⁷⁷ The latter technique—pursuing notions across texts—is often called biblical theology and has seen its favor devolve in a guild that increasingly valued the explanatory power of variegated textual sources.⁷⁸ The problematic assumptions of ventures in biblical theology receive no small amount of scrutiny when broached among many scholars today. Deep skepticism still pervades any attempt to look across texts—and often within texts—in order to demonstrate consonant thought between them. Below, I will describe why some form of biblical theology is best suited to do the descriptive work of philosophical criticism, especially when dealing with narrative.

Are ancient Semites philosophical?

Questions about the philosophical commitments of biblical authors beg many others. How one defines philosophy and conceives of its task determines in advance whether or not any ancient culture—apart from the Greeks—can be considered philosophical. Most basically, do ancient Israelites think about the nature of a topic as such? Do they think about thinking, knowing, relations, movement, accidental properties, time, logic, and more apart from individual instances in their daily lives? Thorlief Boman and Johannes Pedersen famously argued that Hellenistic thought revolutionized abstraction in human reason. According to them, the Greeks were able to separate an object from the actions it performed (i.e., it’s accidental qualities) just as we do today. Greeks could think of a “ball qua ball” or “ball-ness” as distinct from “that red ball being thrown through the window over there.” Hebrews, so Boman claimed, could neither separate the ball-ness from the ball, nor the idea of movement from the historical reality of the ball being thrown. Object and actions were forever fused for the Semitic mind and therefore, abstraction cannot occur. If ancient Hebrews cannot conceptualize by abstraction as we do today, how can they do philosophy, which requires such abstraction and conceptualization by the nature of the task? The proponents of the Hebrew-Greek minds dichotomy source their ideas from the Hebrew Bible itself, as does a significant portion of this present volume. Below, I will take a closer look at their suppositions and the later rejection of the Hebrew-Greek dichotomy in biblical scholarship. However, as James Barr pointed out, we do not have access to the minds of ancient Hebrews, only their texts. Hence, as much as is possible, my project discerns coherent patterns of epistemology in those texts without determining the mentality or ability to philosophize of the biblical authors in advance.

The Hebrew-Greek Minds Problem

Title Footnote⁷⁹

The scholarly division between action (the body) and abstract thinking (the mind) widened in the Hebrew-Greek mind debate of last century. Though that debate ended in academia with a fairly definitive loss for those who proffered the Hebrew-Greek dichotomy, it certainly engendered a legacy of thought patterns that extend into today.⁸⁰ The mid-twentieth century debate focused on this question: Did ancient Israelites think like we do today? Those who answered “no” on this question were verbose.⁸¹ Though these theories of ancient Semitic mentality would whither under later critique,⁸² they subtly persist in corners of contemporary scholarship today. In short, the Hebrew-Greek mind theory failed because the dichotomy was not self-reflected on the analysts themselves, and therefore, it is incomplete, and most likely a project of projection. Nevertheless, the basic question needs to be considered: Did ancient Israelites, as described in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, think and therefore know like we do? Moreover, do we share any mentality with ancient peoples so that our constructs and language can map onto theirs in a productive way? Admittedly, we must share some basic mentality sine qua non in order to do any broad-ranging analysis of ancient texts. Along with the critiques of Barr and Carasik against the Hebrew-Greek mind dichotomy, I want to affirm that biblical language refers to the similar epistemological constructs we can recognize today mutatis mutandis. Though the biblical epistemology needs translation into current modes of discourse, we can understand it nonetheless. If we share mentality that can be communicated by language, then how does one go about translating the language of these biblical texts into the common epistemological referents that we share today?⁸³ That is exactly what I hope to accomplish. In order to find any coherent view of knowledge in the biblical texts, I proceed with the following presumptions:

1. 1. I share at least some epistemological constructs with ancient Israelites.
   2. Those constructs can be accessed through disparate linguistic depiction.
   3. I can justify my findings by demonstrating the patterned use of this language that corresponds to the structure of narratives.

For this type of philosophical criticism to be viable, my lexical and conceptual analyses must make sense within their narratives; hence, classical words studies alone are insufficient to the task.⁸⁴

Is there philosophy in these texts?

In his declaratory work—Philosophy Before the Greeks—Marc Van De Mieroop explains divergent roles of texts in the thought-world of the ancient Near East. Specifically for Van De Mieroop, the Babylonian esteem for textualizing knowledge appears at odds with Plato’s disdain for knowledge being turned into text. However, Van De Mieroop claims that difference does not equate to defect: The fundamental difference between Greece and Babylon should not lead to the conclusion that the Babylonian approach was not philosophical or systematic. On the contrary, it was a rigorously disciplined, scientific search for truth.⁸⁵ Van De Mieroop goes on to show how the eruption of longer and longer word lists in Babylon cannot be neglected as mere lexica or writing exercises by scribes. Rather, they represent a certain style of philosophizing with which the Hellenistic tradition appears unfamiliar. Epistemology as displayed in writings on language, the future, and law . . . do not state theories but develop examples on the basis of underlying principles. Their reasoning is pointillistic, cumulatively exploring issues cases by case. . . . They disclose what Babylonians thought about reality; they reveal a Babylonian epistemology.⁸⁶ Notice that Van De Mieroop draws a strikingly different conclusion from the textual observations of Thorleif Boman and Johannes Pedersen. The regulative use of concrete instances does not mean that abstraction is absent in their mentality, but rather, that scholars need to bring apt analytical tools to the texts in order to understand how those texts make abstract claims. Of late, scholars have made a clearer case for how the biblical texts might also be making claims and arguments about the nature of reality or a way of justifying knowledge.⁸⁷ Yoram Hazony’s 2012 work—The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture—makes a significant case for the thought-world of ancient Semites expressed in story and oracle.⁸⁸ Likewise, Jaco Gericke’s Society of Biblical Literature volume cited above shows how the various instances of a word can reveal concepts that must undergird the term, even if only by fuzzy logic.⁸⁹ John Barton notes that these two books—Hazony and Gericke—are part of a trend: “Scholars are beginning to ask more about the rationality of the Hebrew Bible than they once did.”⁹⁰ Barton himself also attests to seeing a quasi- or proto-philosophy in the Hebrew Bible:

Ancient Israelite culture had the beginnings—even if faltering at times—of a philosophical mentality, in which people asked what diverse phenomena, such as the many precepts of moral teaching, came down to in the end.⁹¹

Konrad Schmid prefers to speak of theology in the Hebrew Bible as rarely explicit yet pervasively implicit through the rational project of inner-biblical exegesis in the Bible.⁹² This present work takes Schmid’s—and others such as Fishbane and Hays⁹³—suggestion seriously. If there is theology (or philosophy) expressed in the biblical texts, a method sensitive to the author’s constructive use of prior texts (i.e., inner-biblical exegesis) must be paramount in discerning a coherent view of knowing as it develops in the Torah and Gospels. It now seems that the marginalization of Semitic and Mesopotamian texts as un-philosophical is fading.⁹⁴ This marginalization usually entails the uncritical assumption that the Greek form of philosophy is paradigmatic of the nature of the philosophical task. It’s not that Semites and Babylonians can’t be philosophical, it’s that they cannot be Greeks, a handicap that no longer ought to be considered apropos. Though East Asian philosophies (i.e., Indian and Chinese philosophy) have found their way into the curriculum of most philosophy departments in the West, Southwest Asian, North African and Mesopotamian texts are still relegated to products of divine revelation. Hence, African and Southwest Asian philosophies end up in religion departments and taught primarily as religions.

Is there epistemology in these texts?

As a prima facie answer to the question of knowledge in the biblical narratives, “who knows what and how” appears relevant at every stage of Israelite history. It first appears as the crux of the first story of humanity (Gen 2–3). Knowing YHWH and his relationship to Israel then becomes the conflict to be resolved in the Exodus story (Exod 1–14). The ritualed world created by YHWH often entails performing a rite explicitly in order to know (e.g., Gen 15:8–13; Exod 16:11–12; Lev 23:43; etc.).⁹⁵ The wisdom literature develops a nuanced distinction between mere recognition and discernment. Jesus’ intense focus on his disciples skips past their moral behavior in order to hone, or more often attempt to hone, their understanding of the secret of the kingdom of God (Mark 4:11; 6:51; 8:17–21). Jeremiah even paints the last days—the eschaton—in the hues and strokes of epistemology, who knows what and how (Jer 31:33–34). It is difficult to escape the robust infusion of epistemically driven storylines and outcomes across the biblical literature.

Methodology

The form of philosophical criticism I am developing here requires some kind of biblical theological impulse. By biblical theology, I am not referring to a particular movement, but a desire to trace an idea within a text and across texts. The methodology of this work intentionally restricts me to considering instances where knowing is present, persistent, and relevant to the text being analyzed. First, the presence of a structure to knowing will be considered when it appears both lexically and conceptually. The mere presence of epistemological language (i.e., ידע or γινώσκω) within a pericope does not signify that a passage is concerned with epistemology. For example, Genesis 4 has three punctuated instances of ידע (Gen 4:1, 17, 25), yet all three describe procreative sex with a spouse. Although there is room for a logical connection between knowing and sexual intimacy, Genesis 4 does not explore that connection. I am only interested in texts where both lexical and conceptual epistemic discourse occurs. As it turns out, some of the most structured use of epistemological lexicography will not be ידע or γινώσκω, but שמע (listen), רעה (see), and their Greek equivalents. Second, beyond presence of the terms and concepts, the biblical authors must persistently pursue the idea in their texts. By this, I mean that the texts evince the persistence of the author when an intentional development of the idea can be discerned. Epistemological concepts are not mere one-off sideshows, but are a matter of concern for the author’s rhetorical strategy. Third, the epistemological content must have relevance to the central story being told or the instruction at hand. Merely seeing a character in the narrative figure something out as a positive move in the narrative’s rhetoric does not qualify it for investigation. However, when a portion of these texts can demonstrate the presence, persistence, and relevance to the larger story being told, then it crosses the threshold for further analysis to reveal a possible structure of knowing discernible in a text.⁹⁶

Demonstrating Epistemology in the Biblical Texts

The specific goal is to demonstrate through philosophical criticism of the biblical literature that epistemology in these texts is concerned with the relationship between hearing (שמע/ἀκουω), seeing (ראה/βλεπω), and knowing (ידע/ἐπιστευω/συνιημι)—for instance.⁹⁷ In my monograph Epistemology and Biblical Theology, I examine Genesis 2–3 to show that it chronicles an epistemological process. At the fore, I justify whether I am imposing epistemology or if knowledge is a concern present within Genesis 2–3. First, the emic lexical patterns and narratival tensions of the texts suggest an epistemological resolution. Second, asking etic philosophical questions of a text is not methodologically out of sorts with exegetical practice, but it does run the risk of asking the wrong questions of the text. For instance, it is difficult for the exegete to ask simple questions such as, “What is at stake in this story” and circumscribe the answers of that question—in advance—to a non-philosophical category. Merely asking what is at stake presupposes an ethical realm within which causal connectives of the narrative can reconcile and evince. So exegesis does not shy from asking philosophical questions, but is careful to ask philosophically relevant questions. So we proceed with an awareness of the types of questions appropriate to ask of the text and its ability to answer.⁹⁸ I also employ a spate of twentieth-century philosophers to explain epistemological notions in the biblical texts—claiming all the while that these ideas are emic to the texts. I want to advise that I am inviting on a cluster of philosophers to participate in this exegesis (i.e., Marjorie Grene, Thomas Kuhn, Charles Taylor, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michael Polanyi, among others). Of these, I most readily employ Michael Polanyi’s epistemological categories for examining these texts and the reason for this is manifold. First, his epistemology is scientific and so it has a broader appeal than strictly analytic modes of epistemological analysis. Second, and as evidence of the first point, Polanyi accredits the body as central to the task of epistemology. This helps me to account for the many instances of knowing that go well beyond articulable propositions and through the body. Third, knowing does not appear to be constrained by discrete epistemic events, but a process through which one acquires the knack or skill of knowing. Within this epistemological process, discrete statements of knowledge can be formulated and confessed. Some like to call these statements “sentential propositions,” but I will avoid such a reduction of rich epistemic understanding to a singular primitive statement of propositional fact. From that analysis of Genesis 2–3, it appears that the epistemological description from the Eden narrative⁹⁹ creates reverberations for the reader that continue into Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.¹⁰⁰ I hope to demonstrate more specifically, both diachronically and synchronically,¹⁰¹ that Brueggemann among others has perhaps overlooked some of these intertextual links when he maintains that Genesis 2­–3 is an “exceedingly marginal text” without “clear substantive references” in the remainder of the Hebrew Bible.¹⁰² Genesis 2–3 will be shown to be a text that resonates powerfully in the Pentateuch, evinced by showing how other Pentateuchal texts share the themes and lexical connections with it. If Fishbane is correct in saying, “myth is kept alive by its uses and reuses, as it moves from context to context and serves different cultural or individual needs,” then the question becomes: Why and how is the story of Genesis 2–3 “kept alive” in the mind of those reading the Pentateuch?¹⁰³

Discerning resemblances between texts

Because studying Hebraic thought is focused on tracing a single construct through variegated texts, I must notice how later texts (in canonical order) employ or echo earlier texts. I will follow the Pentateuch and then Mark as a reader of the canon, observing how these stories unfold before the reader, and build up to the climax of interconnections in Deuteronomy. Then, I examine how Mark employs the Deuteronomic descriptions of epistemic errors, even preferring the Deuteronomic language of the Sinai narrative to the Exodus version in its allusions at the Transfiguration (Mark 9). At times, similarity between texts is unmistakable (cf. Deut 29:3 [MT]; Isa 6:9-10). But most instances fall into the realm of echo-like intertextual links.¹⁰⁴ An example would help to demonstrate intertextual connections that may create theological questions. In chapter four, I will argue that Deuteronomy’s list of items forbidden to be made into idols goes beyond mere lexical correspondence (Deut 4:15-19). The list appears to reflect almost directly the things created in Genesis 1. Further, the lexical connections are unique between Genesis 1 and Deuteronomy 4—male and female, winged birds, and creeping things only appear together in two places in the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 1 and Deuteronomy 4.¹⁰⁵ But it is the rhetorical role of their mention in Deuteronomy 4, without any direct mention of creation, that signals a possible rhetorical link to the creation account in Genesis. The conspicuity of the created items of Genesis 1 found in Deuteronomy 4 leads some commentators to surmise that the creation event (Gen 1) is intended to be reflective of the rhetoric of forbidding idolatry (Deut 4). I might even argue that Deuteronomy 4 is a rhetorical allusion to Genesis’s creation á la intertextual play, meaning that the notion of worship to YHWH, an idea absent in Genesis 1, is transumed by the reader to YHWH’s role as Creator, an unstated notion in Deuteronomy 4. (In literary terms, this type of intertextual play is called metalepsis.¹⁰⁶) This understanding, of course, presumes that those who read/heard Deuteronomy 4 had “ears to hear the echoes and construe their significance” from Genesis 1.¹⁰⁷

Following the story

Employing the methodological pluralism described above, the motif of epistemological process emerges: What one can “see” and then “know/understand” is dependent on to whom one “listens.” The texts center their foci on ensuring that Israel is “listening to the voice of” the authentic authority in order to know correctly. The reasons for limiting my study in Epistemology and Biblical Theology to the Pentateuch and Mark were two-fold. First is the issue of constraint. In the effort to maintain a coherent thesis that manages to do minimally faithful exegesis of the texts, primary texts must be given priority, especially if they might be the lens through which to view other texts in the Hebrew Bible and NT. Second, the Pentateuch and Gospel stories are central narratives of Israel’s canon and the NT church’s canon respectively. And while the narratives are not properly theology or epistemology, as Barr contends, they are the “raw material for theology.”¹⁰⁸ Because my focus was upon the possibility of a consistent epistemological process from the Pentateuch to Mark’s Gospel, I read the Pentateuch in a way that is consistent with a Markan author and audience. In this sense, I assume some type of canonical reading, but for the purpose of seeing how Mark might be utilizing Pentateuchal language and themes. I, therefore, approach the text at the level of its literary form, noticing the canonical movement that sets these stories in a particular order. I will follow the narratival inertia as a literary reader of the Pentateuch and Mark. Certainly this sounds like a biblical theology of sorts, and that it is. But I must clarify what I am and am not attempting. First, I am not endeavoring to see the epistemological process as necessarily bound to a single biblical theological approach: salvation-history,¹⁰⁹ promise-fulfillment,¹¹⁰ typology,¹¹¹ or covenant theology.¹¹² This study evinces affinity with the covenantal approach to biblical theology inasmuch as the garden story is read as covenantal¹¹³ and at least one goal of covenant aims at knowing. But even then, I want to consider a mere continuity of rhetoric and narrative retelling, the story of knowing told in Genesis 2-3 is re-told to the reader over and again.¹¹⁴ Methodologically, I recognize that “The possibility of biblical theology remains, even for its own practitioners, a very precarious thing …”¹¹⁵ Hence, Watson’s call to lower the “lines of demarcation” between biblical studies and systematic theology¹¹⁶ guides this study. Similarly, F. F. Bruce warns:

This is not to say that the tracing of patterns is illegitimate, but that it should not be pressed beyond the plain sense of the biblical narrative and language. It is better to think of recurring patterns of divine action and human response … all the more so because such recurring patterns were recognized by the biblical authors themselves, in both Testaments. ¹¹⁷

In short, due to the resemblance of Genesis 2–3, both in the theology and narratives of Israel’s canon, I work from the beginning of the Pentateuch forward. But I am not bound to a particular school of biblical theology. In this manner, I follow this epistemological process through the narratives rather than make theological statements about individual passages.¹¹⁸

This is an adapted version of "Biblical Theology and Philosophy" in
Epistemology and Biblical Theology: From the Pentateuch to Mark's Gospel
(Routledge, 2018).

The idea that the biblical texts carry out an extended discourse about the nature of knowing often strikes both philosophers and biblical scholars as odd. Epistemology makes for a good example of Hebraic thought because epistemological discourses are essentially demonstrating “thinking about thinking” (as Michael Carasik once called it). There are ways to know that are better than others, namely because they lead the knower to see more truly. To show this, I trace those ideas in literary order, from the origins stories of Genesis through the origins of Israel to the origins of the first-century messianic prophet from Nazareth. Throughout, a structure to knowing appears endemic to these texts. Generally, the term “epistemology” applies to descriptions about and analyses of structures of knowledge:

• • Who knows something?
  • Is that something true?
  • How does she justify such knowledge?

The analytic tradition of epistemology currently owns the market share of scholarly discussions on knowledge.¹¹⁹Accordingly, those three questions about justified true beliefs stem from a particular view of anthropology, humanity, and knowledge—a view that some ancient Semites might not have shared, even up through the period of Hellenistic Judaism. The epistemological matters implied or described in the Pentateuch and Gospels shift focus away from justifying discrete beliefs—captured by the three questions above—and toward embodying a process in order to know. Who knows what and how? The answer to this more amenable question will require serious consideration of the authorized docents in Scripture. These authenticated guides lead their subjects to see that which they are showing to them, something present the whole time but unseen to the novice apart from developing the skill to see—like a medical student who finally recognizes a benign tumor through the repeated practices guided by radiology professors. The process of seeing under such guidance, also called “knowing” in these texts, requires full bodily participation in order to bridge the gap between knowing and not knowing. I am using the term “knowing” rather than “knowledge” because the aim of the epistemology in these texts is not acquired knowledge. Rather, the goal homes in on creating a kind of person and people that have the skill to see what is being shown to them. Hence, the epistemology found across these texts betrays the Semitic view of skilled knowing rather than discrete logical justification of a belief that biblical authors then deign knowledge. A handful of works on epistemology in Scripture have peppered the landscape of biblical scholarship¹²⁰ and theology¹²¹ over the last few decades, each providing valuable insights into the role of knowledge in biblical literature. This volume differs most notably from those by working in the method of what Jaco Gericke has termed “philosophical criticism.” By this phrase, philosophical criticism, Gericke means to include philosophical analysis of biblical texts as one more type of critical inquiry that uses the text to understand how ancient Semites might have conceived of philosophical concepts.¹²² Even if biblical philosophy turns out to be “folk philosophy,” as Gericke claims, the authors still have some kind of philosophical notions about humanity and the cosmos and those notions are evinced in these texts.¹²³ In short, philosophical criticism is a form of biblical criticism:

. . . as a descriptive type of philosophical analysis aimed at the clarification of meaning in the biblical texts . . . in discovering what, if anything, a given passage assumes or implies on these matters and in translating the findings of the analyses into philosophical terms.¹²⁴

As a form of biblical criticism, an umbrella term with intentional largess, Gericke houses philosophical criticism mostly within the methodologies of literary and rhetorical criticism. In addition, we shall be first and foremost concerned with the world in the text alone. The world behind it (historical background) and the world in front of it (our world and those of earlier reception history) are of relevance only to the extent that the meaning of folk philosophies in the text can be elucidated.¹²⁵ I follow Gericke’s lead to a great degree, but focusing on narratives requires that I bring different tools and tacks to the task than he espouses. What Gericke offers us in methodology carries self-imposed limits, but I push back on the idea that assumed or implied notions in the text only represent folk philosophy. By examining foundational narratives, something more than implications and assumptions are afoot in the world of the texts. Narratival conflicts, climaxes, and resolutions have a logical structure to them and that logic means that necessary conclusions may proceed from the logical nature of the story itself. Continuing actions can also offer interpretive clues as to the logic of a story that may have multiple conflict/resolution patterns within. All things being equal, narratives can do something more than imply.¹²⁶ They might possibly argue too. Biblical criticisms identify themselves by method and the layers investigated in the texts. Gericke primarily pursues Yahwist religion in the Hebrew Bible in order to demonstrate his method, with a specific interest to show a language-concept relation.¹²⁷ Eleonore Stump also believes that analytic philosophy of religion should consider the biblical texts as a source of philosophical thought played out in the biblical narratives.¹²⁸ She has often returned to stories in the Bible that force reflection on a philosophical problem. For instance, Stump uses the Cain and Abel story of Genesis 4 to discuss theodicy in light of the fact that YHWH does nothing for Abel and yet intervenes and then shows mercy for murderous Cain.¹²⁹ For Stump, the story itself prompts philosophical questions to be answered. I practice a philosophical criticism distinct from yet sympathetic to the kinds advocated by Jaco Gericke and Eleonore Stump. This philosophical criticism will attend to narratives first and seek to understand the paranesis of these texts in their literary context. To varying degrees, Eleonore Stump, Craig Bartholomew, and Yoram Hazony—among others—have constructively practiced this type of analysis.¹³⁰

How to Proceed?

At its core, my work intends to show that the Pentateuch and Mark’s gospel evince a consistent view of epistemology—who can know what and how. Beyond a consistent view, Genesis 2–3 broaches a seminal depiction of knowledge that develops into a prescriptive account in Exodus, reified in Deuteronomy, and ultimately employed in the rhetoric of the Markan Jesus. In order to trace that line of epistemology, I employ two methods: discerning philosophical argument from within biblical texts and pursuing consonant epistemological constructions across texts. The former has been largely relegated to the usual subjects of investigation. Job and Qohelet are examined for their proto-existentialism.¹³¹ Equally frequent, the epistemology of wisdom literature recurs with new insights or conversation partners.¹³² The latter technique—pursuing notions across texts—is often called biblical theology and has seen its favor devolve in a guild that increasingly valued the explanatory power of variegated textual sources.¹³³ The problematic assumptions of ventures in biblical theology receive no small amount of scrutiny when broached among many scholars today. Deep skepticism still pervades any attempt to look across texts—and often within texts—in order to demonstrate consonant thought between them. Below, I will describe why some form of biblical theology is best suited to do the descriptive work of philosophical criticism, especially when dealing with narrative.

Are ancient Semites philosophical?

Questions about the philosophical commitments of biblical authors beg many others. How one defines philosophy and conceives of its task determines in advance whether or not any ancient culture—apart from the Greeks—can be considered philosophical. Most basically, do ancient Israelites think about the nature of a topic as such? Do they think about thinking, knowing, relations, movement, accidental properties, time, logic, and more apart from individual instances in their daily lives? Thorlief Boman and Johannes Pedersen famously argued that Hellenistic thought revolutionized abstraction in human reason. According to them, the Greeks were able to separate an object from the actions it performed (i.e., it’s accidental qualities) just as we do today. Greeks could think of a “ball qua ball” or “ball-ness” as distinct from “that red ball being thrown through the window over there.” Hebrews, so Boman claimed, could neither separate the ball-ness from the ball, nor the idea of movement from the historical reality of the ball being thrown. Object and actions were forever fused for the Semitic mind and therefore, abstraction cannot occur. If ancient Hebrews cannot conceptualize by abstraction as we do today, how can they do philosophy, which requires such abstraction and conceptualization by the nature of the task? The proponents of the Hebrew-Greek minds dichotomy source their ideas from the Hebrew Bible itself, as does a significant portion of this present volume. Below, I will take a closer look at their suppositions and the later rejection of the Hebrew-Greek dichotomy in biblical scholarship. However, as James Barr pointed out, we do not have access to the minds of ancient Hebrews, only their texts. Hence, as much as is possible, my project discerns coherent patterns of epistemology in those texts without determining the mentality or ability to philosophize of the biblical authors in advance.

The Hebrew-Greek Minds Problem

Title Footnote¹³⁴

The scholarly division between action (the body) and abstract thinking (the mind) widened in the Hebrew-Greek mind debate of last century. Though that debate ended in academia with a fairly definitive loss for those who proffered the Hebrew-Greek dichotomy, it certainly engendered a legacy of thought patterns that extend into today.¹³⁵ The mid-twentieth century debate focused on this question: Did ancient Israelites think like we do today? Those who answered “no” on this question were verbose.¹³⁶ Though these theories of ancient Semitic mentality would whither under later critique,¹³⁷ they subtly persist in corners of contemporary scholarship today. In short, the Hebrew-Greek mind theory failed because the dichotomy was not self-reflected on the analysts themselves, and therefore, it is incomplete, and most likely a project of projection. Nevertheless, the basic question needs to be considered: Did ancient Israelites, as described in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, think and therefore know like we do? Moreover, do we share any mentality with ancient peoples so that our constructs and language can map onto theirs in a productive way? Admittedly, we must share some basic mentality sine qua non in order to do any broad-ranging analysis of ancient texts. Along with the critiques of Barr and Carasik against the Hebrew-Greek mind dichotomy, I want to affirm that biblical language refers to the similar epistemological constructs we can recognize today mutatis mutandis. Though the biblical epistemology needs translation into current modes of discourse, we can understand it nonetheless. If we share mentality that can be communicated by language, then how does one go about translating the language of these biblical texts into the common epistemological referents that we share today?¹³⁸ That is exactly what I hope to accomplish. In order to find any coherent view of knowledge in the biblical texts, I proceed with the following presumptions:

1. 1. I share at least some epistemological constructs with ancient Israelites.
   2. Those constructs can be accessed through disparate linguistic depiction.
   3. I can justify my findings by demonstrating the patterned use of this language that corresponds to the structure of narratives.

For this type of philosophical criticism to be viable, my lexical and conceptual analyses must make sense within their narratives; hence, classical words studies alone are insufficient to the task.¹³⁹

Is there philosophy in these texts?

In his declaratory work—Philosophy Before the Greeks—Marc Van De Mieroop explains divergent roles of texts in the thought-world of the ancient Near East. Specifically for Van De Mieroop, the Babylonian esteem for textualizing knowledge appears at odds with Plato’s disdain for knowledge being turned into text. However, Van De Mieroop claims that difference does not equate to defect: The fundamental difference between Greece and Babylon should not lead to the conclusion that the Babylonian approach was not philosophical or systematic. On the contrary, it was a rigorously disciplined, scientific search for truth.¹⁴⁰ Van De Mieroop goes on to show how the eruption of longer and longer word lists in Babylon cannot be neglected as mere lexica or writing exercises by scribes. Rather, they represent a certain style of philosophizing with which the Hellenistic tradition appears unfamiliar. Epistemology as displayed in writings on language, the future, and law . . . do not state theories but develop examples on the basis of underlying principles. Their reasoning is pointillistic, cumulatively exploring issues cases by case. . . . They disclose what Babylonians thought about reality; they reveal a Babylonian epistemology.¹⁴¹ Notice that Van De Mieroop draws a strikingly different conclusion from the textual observations of Thorleif Boman and Johannes Pedersen. The regulative use of concrete instances does not mean that abstraction is absent in their mentality, but rather, that scholars need to bring apt analytical tools to the texts in order to understand how those texts make abstract claims. Of late, scholars have made a clearer case for how the biblical texts might also be making claims and arguments about the nature of reality or a way of justifying knowledge.¹⁴² Yoram Hazony’s 2012 work—The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture—makes a significant case for the thought-world of ancient Semites expressed in story and oracle.¹⁴³ Likewise, Jaco Gericke’s Society of Biblical Literature volume cited above shows how the various instances of a word can reveal concepts that must undergird the term, even if only by fuzzy logic.¹⁴⁴ John Barton notes that these two books—Hazony and Gericke—are part of a trend: “Scholars are beginning to ask more about the rationality of the Hebrew Bible than they once did.”¹⁴⁵ Barton himself also attests to seeing a quasi- or proto-philosophy in the Hebrew Bible:

Ancient Israelite culture had the beginnings—even if faltering at times—of a philosophical mentality, in which people asked what diverse phenomena, such as the many precepts of moral teaching, came down to in the end.¹⁴⁶

Konrad Schmid prefers to speak of theology in the Hebrew Bible as rarely explicit yet pervasively implicit through the rational project of inner-biblical exegesis in the Bible.¹⁴⁷ This present work takes Schmid’s—and others such as Fishbane and Hays¹⁴⁸—suggestion seriously. If there is theology (or philosophy) expressed in the biblical texts, a method sensitive to the author’s constructive use of prior texts (i.e., inner-biblical exegesis) must be paramount in discerning a coherent view of knowing as it develops in the Torah and Gospels. It now seems that the marginalization of Semitic and Mesopotamian texts as un-philosophical is fading.¹⁴⁹ This marginalization usually entails the uncritical assumption that the Greek form of philosophy is paradigmatic of the nature of the philosophical task. It’s not that Semites and Babylonians can’t be philosophical, it’s that they cannot be Greeks, a handicap that no longer ought to be considered apropos. Though East Asian philosophies (i.e., Indian and Chinese philosophy) have found their way into the curriculum of most philosophy departments in the West, Southwest Asian, North African and Mesopotamian texts are still relegated to products of divine revelation. Hence, African and Southwest Asian philosophies end up in religion departments and taught primarily as religions.

Is there epistemology in these texts?

As a prima facie answer to the question of knowledge in the biblical narratives, “who knows what and how” appears relevant at every stage of Israelite history. It first appears as the crux of the first story of humanity (Gen 2–3). Knowing YHWH and his relationship to Israel then becomes the conflict to be resolved in the Exodus story (Exod 1–14). The ritualed world created by YHWH often entails performing a rite explicitly in order to know (e.g., Gen 15:8–13; Exod 16:11–12; Lev 23:43; etc.).¹⁵⁰ The wisdom literature develops a nuanced distinction between mere recognition and discernment. Jesus’ intense focus on his disciples skips past their moral behavior in order to hone, or more often attempt to hone, their understanding of the secret of the kingdom of God (Mark 4:11; 6:51; 8:17–21). Jeremiah even paints the last days—the eschaton—in the hues and strokes of epistemology, who knows what and how (Jer 31:33–34). It is difficult to escape the robust infusion of epistemically driven storylines and outcomes across the biblical literature.

Methodology

The form of philosophical criticism I am developing here requires some kind of biblical theological impulse. By biblical theology, I am not referring to a particular movement, but a desire to trace an idea within a text and across texts. The methodology of this work intentionally restricts me to considering instances where knowing is present, persistent, and relevant to the text being analyzed. First, the presence of a structure to knowing will be considered when it appears both lexically and conceptually. The mere presence of epistemological language (i.e., ידע or γινώσκω) within a pericope does not signify that a passage is concerned with epistemology. For example, Genesis 4 has three punctuated instances of ידע (Gen 4:1, 17, 25), yet all three describe procreative sex with a spouse. Although there is room for a logical connection between knowing and sexual intimacy, Genesis 4 does not explore that connection. I am only interested in texts where both lexical and conceptual epistemic discourse occurs. As it turns out, some of the most structured use of epistemological lexicography will not be ידע or γινώσκω, but שמע (listen), רעה (see), and their Greek equivalents. Second, beyond presence of the terms and concepts, the biblical authors must persistently pursue the idea in their texts. By this, I mean that the texts evince the persistence of the author when an intentional development of the idea can be discerned. Epistemological concepts are not mere one-off sideshows, but are a matter of concern for the author’s rhetorical strategy. Third, the epistemological content must have relevance to the central story being told or the instruction at hand. Merely seeing a character in the narrative figure something out as a positive move in the narrative’s rhetoric does not qualify it for investigation. However, when a portion of these texts can demonstrate the presence, persistence, and relevance to the larger story being told, then it crosses the threshold for further analysis to reveal a possible structure of knowing discernible in a text.¹⁵¹

Demonstrating Epistemology in the Biblical Texts

The specific goal is to demonstrate through philosophical criticism of the biblical literature that epistemology in these texts is concerned with the relationship between hearing (שמע/ἀκουω), seeing (ראה/βλεπω), and knowing (ידע/ἐπιστευω/συνιημι)—for instance.¹⁵² In my monograph Epistemology and Biblical Theology, I examine Genesis 2–3 to show that it chronicles an epistemological process. At the fore, I justify whether I am imposing epistemology or if knowledge is a concern present within Genesis 2–3. First, the emic lexical patterns and narratival tensions of the texts suggest an epistemological resolution. Second, asking etic philosophical questions of a text is not methodologically out of sorts with exegetical practice, but it does run the risk of asking the wrong questions of the text. For instance, it is difficult for the exegete to ask simple questions such as, “What is at stake in this story” and circumscribe the answers of that question—in advance—to a non-philosophical category. Merely asking what is at stake presupposes an ethical realm within which causal connectives of the narrative can reconcile and evince. So exegesis does not shy from asking philosophical questions, but is careful to ask philosophically relevant questions. So we proceed with an awareness of the types of questions appropriate to ask of the text and its ability to answer.¹⁵³ I also employ a spate of twentieth-century philosophers to explain epistemological notions in the biblical texts—claiming all the while that these ideas are emic to the texts. I want to advise that I am inviting on a cluster of philosophers to participate in this exegesis (i.e., Marjorie Grene, Thomas Kuhn, Charles Taylor, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michael Polanyi, among others). Of these, I most readily employ Michael Polanyi’s epistemological categories for examining these texts and the reason for this is manifold. First, his epistemology is scientific and so it has a broader appeal than strictly analytic modes of epistemological analysis. Second, and as evidence of the first point, Polanyi accredits the body as central to the task of epistemology. This helps me to account for the many instances of knowing that go well beyond articulable propositions and through the body. Third, knowing does not appear to be constrained by discrete epistemic events, but a process through which one acquires the knack or skill of knowing. Within this epistemological process, discrete statements of knowledge can be formulated and confessed. Some like to call these statements “sentential propositions,” but I will avoid such a reduction of rich epistemic understanding to a singular primitive statement of propositional fact. From that analysis of Genesis 2–3, it appears that the epistemological description from the Eden narrative¹⁵⁴ creates reverberations for the reader that continue into Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.¹⁵⁵ I hope to demonstrate more specifically, both diachronically and synchronically,¹⁵⁶ that Brueggemann among others has perhaps overlooked some of these intertextual links when he maintains that Genesis 2­–3 is an “exceedingly marginal text” without “clear substantive references” in the remainder of the Hebrew Bible.¹⁵⁷ Genesis 2–3 will be shown to be a text that resonates powerfully in the Pentateuch, evinced by showing how other Pentateuchal texts share the themes and lexical connections with it. If Fishbane is correct in saying, “myth is kept alive by its uses and reuses, as it moves from context to context and serves different cultural or individual needs,” then the question becomes: Why and how is the story of Genesis 2–3 “kept alive” in the mind of those reading the Pentateuch?¹⁵⁸

Discerning resemblances between texts

Because studying Hebraic thought is focused on tracing a single construct through variegated texts, I must notice how later texts (in canonical order) employ or echo earlier texts. I will follow the Pentateuch and then Mark as a reader of the canon, observing how these stories unfold before the reader, and build up to the climax of interconnections in Deuteronomy. Then, I examine how Mark employs the Deuteronomic descriptions of epistemic errors, even preferring the Deuteronomic language of the Sinai narrative to the Exodus version in its allusions at the Transfiguration (Mark 9). At times, similarity between texts is unmistakable (cf. Deut 29:3 [MT]; Isa 6:9-10). But most instances fall into the realm of echo-like intertextual links.¹⁵⁹ An example would help to demonstrate intertextual connections that may create theological questions. In chapter four, I will argue that Deuteronomy’s list of items forbidden to be made into idols goes beyond mere lexical correspondence (Deut 4:15-19). The list appears to reflect almost directly the things created in Genesis 1. Further, the lexical connections are unique between Genesis 1 and Deuteronomy 4—male and female, winged birds, and creeping things only appear together in two places in the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 1 and Deuteronomy 4.¹⁶⁰ But it is the rhetorical role of their mention in Deuteronomy 4, without any direct mention of creation, that signals a possible rhetorical link to the creation account in Genesis. The conspicuity of the created items of Genesis 1 found in Deuteronomy 4 leads some commentators to surmise that the creation event (Gen 1) is intended to be reflective of the rhetoric of forbidding idolatry (Deut 4). I might even argue that Deuteronomy 4 is a rhetorical allusion to Genesis’s creation á la intertextual play, meaning that the notion of worship to YHWH, an idea absent in Genesis 1, is transumed by the reader to YHWH’s role as Creator, an unstated notion in Deuteronomy 4. (In literary terms, this type of intertextual play is called metalepsis.¹⁶¹) This understanding, of course, presumes that those who read/heard Deuteronomy 4 had “ears to hear the echoes and construe their significance” from Genesis 1.¹⁶²

Following the story

Employing the methodological pluralism described above, the motif of epistemological process emerges: What one can “see” and then “know/understand” is dependent on to whom one “listens.” The texts center their foci on ensuring that Israel is “listening to the voice of” the authentic authority in order to know correctly. The reasons for limiting my study in Epistemology and Biblical Theology to the Pentateuch and Mark were two-fold. First is the issue of constraint. In the effort to maintain a coherent thesis that manages to do minimally faithful exegesis of the texts, primary texts must be given priority, especially if they might be the lens through which to view other texts in the Hebrew Bible and NT. Second, the Pentateuch and Gospel stories are central narratives of Israel’s canon and the NT church’s canon respectively. And while the narratives are not properly theology or epistemology, as Barr contends, they are the “raw material for theology.”¹⁶³ Because my focus was upon the possibility of a consistent epistemological process from the Pentateuch to Mark’s Gospel, I read the Pentateuch in a way that is consistent with a Markan author and audience. In this sense, I assume some type of canonical reading, but for the purpose of seeing how Mark might be utilizing Pentateuchal language and themes. I, therefore, approach the text at the level of its literary form, noticing the canonical movement that sets these stories in a particular order. I will follow the narratival inertia as a literary reader of the Pentateuch and Mark. Certainly this sounds like a biblical theology of sorts, and that it is. But I must clarify what I am and am not attempting. First, I am not endeavoring to see the epistemological process as necessarily bound to a single biblical theological approach: salvation-history,¹⁶⁴ promise-fulfillment,¹⁶⁵ typology,¹⁶⁶ or covenant theology.¹⁶⁷ This study evinces affinity with the covenantal approach to biblical theology inasmuch as the garden story is read as covenantal¹⁶⁸ and at least one goal of covenant aims at knowing. But even then, I want to consider a mere continuity of rhetoric and narrative retelling, the story of knowing told in Genesis 2-3 is re-told to the reader over and again.¹⁶⁹ Methodologically, I recognize that “The possibility of biblical theology remains, even for its own practitioners, a very precarious thing …”¹⁷⁰ Hence, Watson’s call to lower the “lines of demarcation” between biblical studies and systematic theology¹⁷¹ guides this study. Similarly, F. F. Bruce warns:

This is not to say that the tracing of patterns is illegitimate, but that it should not be pressed beyond the plain sense of the biblical narrative and language. It is better to think of recurring patterns of divine action and human response … all the more so because such recurring patterns were recognized by the biblical authors themselves, in both Testaments. ¹⁷²

In short, due to the resemblance of Genesis 2–3, both in the theology and narratives of Israel’s canon, I work from the beginning of the Pentateuch forward. But I am not bound to a particular school of biblical theology. In this manner, I follow this epistemological process through the narratives rather than make theological statements about individual passages.¹⁷³

Footnotes