Jaco Gericke

This study pioneers the use of philosophy of religion in the study of the Hebrew Bible. After identifying the need for a legitimate philosophical approach to Israelite religion, the volume traces the history of interdisciplinary relations and shows how descriptive varieties of philosophy of religion can aid the clarification of the Hebrew Bibles own metaphysical, epistemological, and moral assumptions. Two new interpretative methodologies are developed and subsequently applied through an introduction to what the biblical texts took for granted about the nature of religious language, the concept of deity, the properties of Yhwh, the existence of gods, religious epistemology, and the relation between religion and morality.

In this book Jaco Gericke is concerned with different ways of approaching the question of what, according to the Hebrew Bible, a god was assumed to be. As a supplement to the tradition of predominantly linguistic, historical, literary, comparative, social-scientific and related ways of looking at the research problem, Gericke offers a variety of experimental philosophical perspectives that aim to take a step back from the scholarly discussion as it has unfolded hitherto in order to provide a new type of worry when looking at the riddle of what the biblical texts assumed made a god divine. Consisting of a brief history of philosophical interpretations of the concepts of whatness and essence from Socrates to Derrida, the relevant ideas are adapted and reapplied to look at some interesting metaphysical oddities arising from generic uses of elohim/el/eloah as common noun in the Hebrew Bible. As such the study seeks to be a prolegomenon to all future research in that, instead of answering the question regarding a supposed nature of divinity, it aims to complicate it beyond expectation. In this way a case is made for a more nuanced and indeterminate manner of constructing the problem of what it meant to call something a god.

“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them...well, I have others.”Groucho MarxWe also know of another superstition of that time: that of the Man of the Book. On some shelf in some hexagon (men reasoned) there must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has gone through it and he is analogous to a god.... How could one locate the venerated and secret hexagon which housed Him? Someone proposed a regressive method: To locate book A, consult first book B which indicates A’s position; to locate book B, consult first a book C, and so on to infinity... In adventures such as these, I have squandered and wasted my years.2 J.L. Borges, The Library of Babel.

An increasing number of studies have seen the light over the last few decades concerning the epistemology of the book of Ecclesiastes. The extant research seems to be limited to try to find a suitable philosophical profile for Qohelet’s concept of knowledge whilst ignoring a whole array of topics and theories in contemporary analytic epistemology. The available research thus reveals an ‘inside-out’ approach that is, reading Qohelet and then seeking to link his thought to a particular epistemological stance. In this study, however, an ‘outside-in’ approach is opted for that involves noting all the various issues in epistemology and then comparing each with what, if anything, Qohelet assumed in relation to the specific matter at hand.

Recourse to auxiliary disciplines has greatly contributed to the ways in which biblical scholars seek to elucidate various dimensions of meaning in textual constructions of dreams and dreaming in the Old Testament. The original contribution this article hopes to make to the ongoing research on associated oneirocritic topoi is to propose the so-called philosophy of dreaming as a potential dialogue partner to supplement already available perspectives within the multidisciplinary discussion. At present, there is no descriptive philosophical approach exclusively devoted to the identification and clarification of the folk-philosophical assumptions implicit in oneirocritic materials as conditions of their possibility. By way of comparative-philosophical commentary, the article features a brief introduction to the related research within Old Testament studies, an overview of the history and problems of the auxiliary subject, and an illustration of how the new approach might look when applied to texts involving ‘oneirophany’ (Gn 15:1–21, 20:3–6, 28:11–17 and 1 Ki 3:5–15). The study concludes with a few remarks on the limits of the proposal and suggestions for more extensive and in-depth future research in related and alternative areas.