Materializing German Old Testament Exegesis: The Social Historical Method in the Work of Willy Schottroff (1931–1997)

The progressive German-speaking scholarship produced by Old Testament exegete Willy Schottroff (1931–1997) is often neglected in historical reviews of biblical studies. Schottroff adhered to a marginalized intellectual tradition in German Protestant late twentieth-century Hebrew Bible scholarship th...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Scholz, Susanne 1963- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Brill 2022
In: Biblical interpretation
Year: 2022, Volume: 30, Issue: 2, Pages: 197-215
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B Horst, Friedrich 1896-1962 / Rad, Gerhard von 1901-1971 / Sölle, Dorothee 1929-2003 / Schottroff, Willy 1931-1997 / Schottroff, Luise 1934-2015 / Stegemann, Wolfgang 1945-2023 / Jews / National Socialism / Ideology / Cognition theory / Neutrality / Ecology / Exegesis / Old Testament
IxTheo Classification:HB Old Testament
NCA Ethics
TK Recent history
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Summary:The progressive German-speaking scholarship produced by Old Testament exegete Willy Schottroff (1931–1997) is often neglected in historical reviews of biblical studies. Schottroff adhered to a marginalized intellectual tradition in German Protestant late twentieth-century Hebrew Bible scholarship that preserved and nurtured exegetical integrity and theological ethics in resistance to imperial intellectual and political ambitions and practices. This essay traces Schottroff’s exegetical efforts to read the Hebrew Bible with a method, called social historical criticism, not much known outside German-speaking contexts. Three sections depict Schottroff as standing in this liberationist-materialist view of historical criticism. A first section surveys my personal encounter with Schottroff’s work in the West German Post-Holocaust, Post Civil-Rights, and Peace Movement era of the late 1980s. A second section connects Schottroff’s reliance on social historical criticism to Gerhard von Rad’s insistence of historical criticism during the Nazi and Post-Holocaust German era. A third section analyzes the materialist German Hebrew Bible exegesis as it appears in the work of Willy Schottroff. A conclusion reflects on the politics of biblical historiography in German Post-Holocaust Old Testament exegesis.
ISSN:1568-5152
Contains:Enthalten in: Biblical interpretation
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1163/15685152-00284P17