This article takes a closer look at how the so-called Analytic-Continental divide within meta-philosophy has manifested itself within various forms of “philosophical criticism” of the HB.¹ It is argued that, based on data collected from recent related conferences, there is evidence of influence from both sides of the divide within both broad/narrow and explicit/implicit types of philosophical criticism. However, in contrast to tense relations elsewhere in generic philosophy, the study of philosophy in the Bible includes an interdisciplinary intersection of biblical scholarship, philosophy of religion and Jewish philosophy, appearing to display a general acceptance of methodological diversity.

Footnotes

This article discusses a selection of the most recent examples from both biblical scholarship and Jewish philosophy of the construction of the Hebrew Bible as a philosophical resource. By way of a descriptive overview of the relevant ideas in the writings of exemplars such as Davies, Hazony, Gericke, Glouberman and Sekine, the study reveals a neglected albeit radical trend in the contemporary attempted return of philosophy to Hebrew Bible interpretation and vice-versa. These new developments of philosophy in the Bible are labelled “philosophical maximalism,” involving as they do the classification of the entire corpus of the Hebrew Bible as philosophical literature, in one sense or another.

Jaco Gericke, “Is there philosophy in the Hebrew Bible? Some recent affirmative perspectives,” Journal for Semitics 23/2i (2014): 583-598.

Following 19th-century distinctions between Hellenism and Hebraism, many popular 20th-century histories of Western philosophy assigned the intellectual world of the Hebrew Bible to a twilight zone between late mythological and early philosophical ways of thinking. Partly in response to this, research in Semitic languages during that time began to include comparative-linguistic arguments hoping to demonstrate radical structural incommensurability between Hebrew and Greek ways of thinking. In the latest trend in the associated research, a multidisciplinary dialogue has been initiated on the subject of ” second-order thinking ” within the ancient Near East ” before ” or ” outside ” Greek philosophy. In this article, the author aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion by suggesting that Biblical Hebrew as religious language already presupposes an intricate variety of transposed second-order thinking.