Introducing the contextual orientation to Bible: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Barry Holtz' (2003) presentation of a map of orientations for the teaching of Bible provides a certain kind of focus for research, enabling us to ask deeper and richer question about those orientations. This article investigates the teaching of one teacher, in two different settings— more specifically, how that teacher introduces Bible in those settings— as a way of generating insight into the particular features of what Holtz calls the “contextual orientation.” Building on the sketch that Holtz offers, it explores the internal variation within that orientation, and hence begins to reveal some of the pedagogic possibilities.

I appreciate the contributions by Shani Bechhofer, Gail Dorph, Sue Fendrick, David Starr, David Weinstein, and the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, not all of which I was wise enough to accept.

Notes

¹Holtz describes an orientation as follows: “An orientation is a description not of a teacher's “method” in some technical meaning of the word, but in a deeper sense, of a teacher's most powerful conceptions and beliefs about the field he or she is teaching. It is the living expression of the philosophical questions [that have been under discussion]: What is my view of the aims of education, and how as a teacher do I attain those aims?” (Holtz, 2003, pp. 48–49). Unfortunately, space does not permit a thorough discussion of the concept of an orientation, of the relationship among orientations, and of the distinction between a teaching orientation and a research methodology. I hope to address these issues in future work.

²Holtz deals exclusively with the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, as will I. It is of course true that “Bible” means different things to different people, itself an important pedagogical topic. But for the purpose of this article, I will simply use “Bible” to refer to the Hebrew Bible.

³The precise “context” to which the contextual orientation refers is actually ambiguous (Moshe himself frequently talks about “contexts,” in the plural). Is it the original meaning of the original author(s)? Or the meaning as understood by the original audience(s)? Or the meaning as understood by the redactor, or the audience at the time of redaction? These are obviously significant questions that go to the heart of what it means to interpret biblical texts. At the same time, it's important to recall that a pedagogical orientation is not the same as a research methodology. Not every distinction makes a pedagogical difference.

⁴My casual dismissal of “contemporary literary theories” is intended to represent what I take to be a dominant attitude among contemporary academic scholars of Bible. This attitude is surely not shared universally, nor is it fair to ignore the internal variation within all those theories that demand that we attend to the instability of meaning. But for the present, and especially for Holtz who wishes to signal the way in which the contextual orientation is directed towards original meanings, it will have to suffice.

⁵ Dewey (1904): “The first observation of instruction… should not be too definitely practical in aim. [The observer] should not be observing to find out how the good teacher does it, in order to accumulate a store of methods…[The observer] should rather observe with reference to seeing the interaction of mind…to see what is going on in the minds of a group of persons who are in intellectual contact with each other” (pp. 324–325).

⁶The use of a pseudonym requires some explanation, especially since many readers will easily discern the identity of the subject. If his identity is already known, then what is the purpose of pretending to conceal it? But more important than protecting anonymity, and more important than following scholarly conventions for educational research, the pseudonym serves another significant function: to signal that, as I will repeat below, the purpose of this paper is not to discover the truth about this particular teacher but to use him as an example in order to explore certain ideas. I do not want the reader to think about the particular person, but rather the character that is portrayed within these pages, for the following reason: I believe that what I say about this teacher is true, and the teacher himself believes that what I say about his teaching is true, but even if it were not true, the ideas may still be generative. Thus, the pseudonym serves to distance the reader from the actual teacher in a way that serves the goals of this inquiry.

⁷The question of whether these introductions are representative of Moshe's teaching in general is a fair one—and one that I address below—but the question of whether they pedagogic moments themselves is not. Moshe is not talking about his teaching in these introductions; he is teaching. There is no reason to say that his teaching in these sessions is any less (or more) authentic than the 10th session, or the 20th.

⁸Regardless of the efficacy of frontal models of teaching in general and regardless of the pedagogic techniques this particular teacher employs at other times, the frontal nature of these two introductory sessions provides a simplified basis for analysis of Moshe's approach to the teaching of the subject.

⁹For some readers, this may seem problematic. After all, teaching is far more than just what a teacher says in a classroom. It encompasses the entire process of planning, executing, adjusting, reacting to students, and assessing—all the things a teacher does, not just what a teacher says. Yet it can hardly be denied that a teacher's direct speech is one significant aspect of the educational encounter that he frames for the students. It is not the sum total of his teaching, but it is an important component, and one that may provide straightforward insight into the teacher's thinking.

¹⁰Of course, one does not always simply teach what one knows; a teacher might have reasons for using one orientation in one setting, and a different orientation in another. Fortunately, in this case, Moshe is committed to teaching within the contextual orientation in both Bible 101 and Bible for Adults.

¹¹This is not the place to discuss the issue of authorial intent. But my use of the adverb “not always” is intended to signal a moderate view. Is the author's intention the criterion of correctness in interpretation of a text? Well, it depends on the genre that we assign to the text and the questions that we are interested in pursuing. So, too, whether we rely on the practitioner depends on the questions we want to ask.

¹²A model here is Sam Wineburg and Suzanne Wilson's (2001) delightful study of two accomplished History teachers. In this case, the teachers seem to be employing something like different orientations to the teaching of History, rather than operating within one orientation, but the emphasis of the paper is to reveal the differences rather than to explain them.

¹³Actually, this is not the first meeting of the class (as mentioned above, a year-long course). Before the class formally begins, there is preliminary session in which the students get to know each other and the instructor, share expectations of the course, and do some preliminary study. But the session under investigation here is where Moshe begins to introduce the study of Bible within the contextual orientation.

¹⁴This is not quite precisely true, since the courses took place at different times. Moreover, Moshe himself wonders whether there is a sense in which he is a different person in different settings (for example, he claims that he is “more Jewish” in B4A). But it seems more accurate to say that he employs different aspects of his personality in different settings, or that he makes slightly different choices in different settings, rather than to say that he is actually a different person.

¹⁵This sentence contains an allusion to Schwab's two kinds of subjectmatter knowledge, syntactical and substantive. In general, there is almost no literature on subjectmatter knowledge for teaching Bible, that is, the nature of Bible teachers' knowledge and especially how they use that knowledge in teaching. (Note that asking what good teachers know and how they use that knowledge is a very different question from lamenting what teachers in general do not know. The former issue is, at least potentially, more constructive for the purposes of developing appropriate learning opportunities than the latter.) Susie Tanchel (2006) has begun to study this issue (see chap. 4, in which she differentiates the uses of subjectmatter knowledge in Bible and develops a provisional taxonomy of those uses.

¹⁶To describe a “methodological commitment to the contextual orientation” is not to claim that Moshe employs the contextual orientation exclusively. In fact, Moshe claims that he uses almost all of Holtz's orientations to some degree and at various times. Nevertheless, it is still accurate to say that his fundamental allegiance is to contextualism, with other orientations complementing it as appropriate.

¹⁷Moshe also claims that since that time, each of these two courses— the university course and the adult education course —have developed along their own independent trajectories over many years. While the present article focuses only on the introductory session, it would be fascinating to compare the two courses as a whole, in their current incarnations, to understand the similarities and differences between them. It would also be interesting to understand those trajectories, that is, the development of Bible 101 over time and the parallel development of B4A over time.

¹⁸I am using “values” somewhat loosely, to signal a sphere that is distinct from Moshe's subjectmatter knowledge on the one hand (addressed above) and distinct from his objectives on the other (addressed below). Within this sphere, I am identifying three pedagogic practices that are not mere techniques or strategies but that seem to represent some deeper convictions about teaching, and not just teaching in general but about teaching this specific subject.

¹⁹There are a number of possible reasons for this. It may be that the subversion of preconceptions functions as a feature of contextualism, given the role that the Bible plays in the religious lives of some students. Alternatively, it may be that subverting preconceptions is a helpful technique to use in an introductory session, when a teacher is trying to engage his students in the course of study ahead of them. On this theory, subverting preconceptions is a strategy for hooking students on the subject and for getting them to return to the course. A third possibility is that subverting preconceptions is a productive pedagogic technique to use in general, perhaps because real learning only occurs when one's prior expectations are disrupted. On this theory, subverting preconceptions is always the goal of good teaching.

²⁰Not all profound issues are necessarily relevant, of course (and vice versa). Nevertheless, Moshe associates profundity with relevance, because in the sense in which he is using the term, profound issues are fundamental human-existential issues, which are by definition relevant in every age.

²¹There's a relationship between these two. Without the argument for diversity within the text, precisely on the profound questions that Moshe has identified, one might conclude that the reason to study the text is to discover the biblical position—a unified biblical position—on, for example, why one should bother living. Why? Because that biblical position is authoritative. It is the correct view. However, once one recognizes the internal diversity in the text, the answer to “Why study this text?” demands a far more complicated argument, perhaps about the value of confronting multiple profound answers to profound questions.

²²Moshe uses the term “sex” but the passages that he introduces are neither about sex in the sense of intercoursen or about sex in the biological sense but rather about gender. I will therefore simply refer to this theme as “gender” from this point forward.

²³The passages are as follows (JPS translation): From Deuteronomy: “The LORD spoke to you out of the fire; you heard the sound of words but perceived no shape—nothing but a voice…For your own sake, therefore, be most careful—since you saw no shape when the LORD your God spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire—not to act wickedly and make for yourselves a sculptured image in any likeness whatsoever” (Deut. 4: 12–18). From Exodus: “And they saw the God of Israel: under His feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity. Yet He did not raise His hand against the leaders of the Israelites; they beheld God, and they ate and drank” (Ex. 24: 9–11).

²⁴Thus, there is an interesting paradox here: to the extent that there really are no prerequisites for Bible 101, the process of subverting preconceptions will not work. Preconceptions, after all, come from prior exposure to the text. So one might wonder whether, despite his rejection of prerequisites, Moshe's course does have prerequisites, simply because his pedagogy needs student preconceptions as the basic material with which to work. But this is not a critique of Moshe; it is rather an aspect of the Gadamerian insight that all interpretation is preceded by preconceptions of the text, and cannot be otherwise.

²⁵Moshe knows the students' preconceptions through his years of teaching experience as well as his more general understanding of the ways that the Bible has been interpreted. But this knowledge is a preconception about the students—a preconception about their preconceptions. Just as it is impossible to approach a text without preconceptions, so too it is impossible to approach teaching without them.

²⁶I owe this idea, that Moshe's line may inoculate against transference of hostility, to Sue Fendrick.

²⁷'Look,” Moshe says, 'I hope that they will take the text as seriously as I take it…I try to convince my students that this is an interesting text and an important text and a dangerous text.”

²⁸The distinction between history and literature is overstated here, given the significance of literary techniques in the study of historical texts, on the one hand, and of historical background in the study of literature, on the other.

²⁹Consider, by way of contrast, that he does not invite students to talk with him about God or death or gender, or source criticism, or anything else. He is surely willing to talk about those topics, if asked, but the only topic that he actively invites students to talk about is the existential one, that is, the topic on which he is an expert not (or not merely) because of what he knows but rather because of who and what he is.

³⁰Moshe's suggestion that “what the Bible means is an issue which is up to every individual”—as if there were a realm of personal meaning-making that is unconstrained by any demands for arguments and evidence—is well-intentioned but misguided. Of course people do discern idiosyncratic meanings, but those meanings are no more justified than equally idiosyncratic claims about historical meaning.

³¹Compare Holtz' (2005) characterization of the contextual orientation, quoted above, that it “hopes to make that [ancient] world intelligible to students of today” (p. 92). In Moshe's view, the contextual orientation aspires to far more than intelligibility; it provides the grounds for personal connection.

³²This is not the place for a nuanced account of the nature of objectivity in biblical studies. But it should not be particularly controversial to note that contextualism typically aspires to objectivity, at least in the sense of a broader perspective informed by the historical context. The depiction of Israel as a “small, hick country” and “latecomer” may not be a purely objective, neutral description—a “view from nowhere,” as Thomas Nagel (1989) famously put it in his book by that title—but it is surely more objective, because it encompasses a broader horizon, that the Israelites' subjective self-description in the biblical text.

³³The phrase “hermeneutics of suspicion” was apparently coined by Paul Ricoeur (1970, p. 32), who used it to refer to a mode of interpretation represented especially by Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, in which the interpreter assumes that the surface or naïve meaning of a text (or a person's utterances) mask a deeper political or sexual meaning. This mode of interpretation has its excesses, to be sure, but fundamentally, the stance of suspicion about the self-representation of a text is a hallmark of any critical inquiry.

³⁴I have said that this article is not interested in the actual effects of Moshe's teaching on the students, but this is one of the moments that call out for such an assessment. How do students react to this “establishing of critical distance”? Do they make the connection between the geographical claim and the implications for how to read the text? What kind of actual impact do statements such as “Israel is a latecomer nation,” or “I am not responsible for all the thoughts that the Bible contains,” have on real students in real settings?

³⁵Moshe's ironic “apology” may seem insensitive, implying that the students will just have to cope on their own with the discrepancy between their religiously informed preconceptions and the reality. This stands in sharp contrast to his explicit reassurance, to his university students, that he does not intend to be anti-religious. Why is he attuned to the students' concerns there, but apparently dismissive here? Moshe notes that adults are better able to deal with irony and, furthermore, that he treats them more as peers. But beyond that, note that the examples that he uses here are hardly the most controversial ones that he could find. The ideas of food taboos or sacred space are basic to the anthropology of religion; the discovery that cultures other than ancient Israel possess such ideas need not be threatening. It may be no coincidence that his tone seems most insensitive at the moment where the specific examples are least significant.

³⁶Moshe himself notes that the students know that he wears a kippah, and most know that he is observant.

³⁷Moshe affirms the interpretation offered here, and expands on the point: “Part of the point of Torah as instruction…reflects an interest in getting away from Torah as history, and planting the seed of an idea that fiction can instruct as effectively as, or more effectively than, non-fiction” (personall communication). Moshe has also observed, interestingly, that the idea of Torah as instruction might be associated with a very different orientation on Holtz's map, namely, the Moralistic-Didactic Orientation. Here, however, Moshe integrates it into the contextual orientation, or alternatively, comfortably shifts from the contextual orientation to the Moralistic-Didactic without demonstrating any methodological tension.

³⁸In an interview, Moshe makes the point explicitly, in terms of the establishment of a relationship: “The whole point of…a lot of my teaching is to show that the contextual method is useful…for creating a relationship between the text and the life of today.”

³⁹Spinoza (1632–1677) argued, in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), against the Mosaic authorship of the Bible, as had Hobbes (1588–1675) a bit earlier in his Leviathan (1651). Both of these books are not primarily works of biblical scholarship, however, but rather political philosophy. Wellhausen (1844–1918) is generally credited with the development of the documentary hypothesis in his Prolegomenon to the History of Israel (1886).

⁴⁰Moshe is referring here to Exodus 21:2–6, which describes the conditions under which a slave may be retained beyond the standard six years of servitude. According to a plain-sense reading of that passage (v. 6), such a slave is retained “forever.” However, Leviticus 25:40 seems to indicate that a slave is freed at the jubilee year. These two contradictory passages are reconciled by the midrashic claim (Mekilta De-Rabbi Ishmael 3.17) that “forever” in the first passage means until the jubilee year.

⁴¹It is also worth noting that scholarship always builds on a tradition of inquiry by others, even as it constructs new understandings, so it is never only a matter of using “scripture for interpreting scripture.”

⁴²Recall that Moshe wears a kippah on his head, and that his adult students know that he is observant.

⁴³The significance of this difference is attenuated by the fact that Moshe typically does teach one or more biblical texts in the preliminary session that precedes the formal beginning of the course (depending on available time). So one should not draw mistaken conclusions, for example, that he intentionally uses non-biblical texts prior to any exposure to biblical texts.