My 1974 PhD Thesis Introduction i-xi

Introduction 1.1 pages i-ii

The chapter begins with comments on connections between OT studies and anthropology. Up to the 1960s, most scholars had insufficient understanding of anthropology to critique it clearly. Some ideas drawn from primitive anthropology were taken up uncritically and lasted unchallenged for decades. I make reference to Wheeler Robinson's 'corporate  personality', challenged by J.R. Porter in 1965 and John Rogerson in 1970. This introduces marriage and family issues, on which anthropology has much to say. I started with Farber as he was reliant on one of my key texts, by Louis Epstein. Epstein covered Jewish texts into the middle ages and was not confined to the Hebrew Bible. He has previously written  The Jewish Marriage Contract (1927) which again covered the broader period. Other key texts were Ephraim Neufeld's Ancient Hebrew Marriage Laws which compared the OT with ancient Mesopotamian law, and David Mace's Hebrew Marriage, essentially his PhD thesis which I read in Birmingham University. Some books added in later Jewish commentaries which, though of course interesting from a later Jewish point of view, does not necessarily add to our understanding of historical sociology. Rabbis read into the material issues that concerned them in their own time.

Therefore this account of a thousand years of history was totally the opposite of a field study of a tribe covering a single year. I appealed for sound methodology (how proud am I!). I remember being heartened by Evans-Pritchard's lecture asking for comparative studies. He meant comparison of a range of contemporary fieldwork. He would probably be horrified by my comparisons with an ancient people. In my head I saw the Hebrew family much as I read about the Nuer family in Africa, studied by Evans-Pritchard. Indeed there were simiarities. The anthropologists had read about levirate marriage in the Bible for example, and they managed to spot examples. Their descriptions might not be true comparisons of the human social condition.
A casual look at OT society would see it was patriarchal, with inheritance  and succession being in the male line. We would expect women to be somewhat out of focus. However, recognizing that the narratives cover more that five hundred years the picture is unlikely to be so simple. As I say at the end, let the data speak for itself, let us not superimpose inappropriate theories onto OT narratives.

SFB April 2017.

1.2 Theories pages iii-vi
This passage reprises the anthropological theories evolutionism, functionalism and structuralism. The University of Manchester Department of Anthropology  was headed by Max Gluckman who was fiercely functionalist. I have later studied deeply the work of his Manchester student Victor Turner who ended up as professor in America.
Much will be said about evolutionism. This has nothing to do with Darwin's evolutionary biology but with breathtaking hubris modelled society as progressing from simple to modern. The top of the tree were of course white Victorians. In OT circles, this was influenced by the work of Robertson-Smith which though spirited and detailed in his study of Bedouin, took in some of the more generalised evolutionist assumptions. This view looked for vestiges of earlier stages of social development, matriarchy being deemed more primitive than patriarchy. German articles used the term 'mutterrecht' for matriarchy. These assumptions could be found up to the 1960s in books on OT marriage. In practice, sometimes wives joined her husband, sometimes the husband joined the wife's family. So what?
Functionalism was the British favorite. Anthropology was then a colonialist project, studying primitive tribes in the colonies. They wanted them 'pure', as like the stone-age as possible. The age of trousers and transistor radios gave the anthropologists palpitations. Customs survive because they have functions, otherwise they wither. The function of levirate marriage is to ensure family women have children (maybe?). It is true that people tend not to behave in senseless ways (really, where have I been?) but claiming function must not be unchallenged.
Structuralism was a French invention, over-theorised to irrelevance. I did read Levi-Strauss, alas, but that is in the next section.


April 2017

1.3 Social Structure pages vii-ix
Structure has been debated since the 1960s. It focused more deeply than describing a patriarchal structure, though that is not unimportant. The deep structures of the human brain were said to have effected how humans operate. Claude Levi-Strauss wrote The Elementary Structures of Kinship in 1949 but it was not till 1969 that an English translation appeared. His early research had been in the Amazon. His theory of kinship moved away from dynasty (genealogies going back to a distant ancestor) and embraced structures based on intermarriage (affinity). Marriage produces relationships between two families, which are structural as well as personal. When multiple marriages in a family are in evidence, the affinal network can be complicated, but in general they cement alliances. So we find the terms exogamy and endogamy (marrying out of or within the family). Intermarriage is discussed in chapter two. Mental, linguistic and social structuring underpins community assumptions. Our problems surround the questions which community or communities, and when? Levi-Strauss also wrote on the structures underlying mythology, which included thematic analysis and binary oppositions (good-evil etc). Others also see marriage as a means of strengthening kinship ties, sometimes called 'amity' (formalised friendship).
One Manchester anthropologist just before my time was Victor Turner, and a comparison with his work is enlightening. His fieldwork was on schism in Africa, that is social groups splitting (or deciding not to split). In OT narratives there is a fair degree of social tension and I will use Turner's analysis on some stories. Turner opposed structuralism in favour of considering process. Society is always changing and tensions jockey back and forth until equilibrium is reached. If no satisfactory compromise can be found the community will split into factions and separate. Generally the rebalancing is in the best interests of the community (eufunctional is his term). The pressure towards eufunction he called communitas, Latinised simply to stop it being misunderstood as other forms of community action. Structure assumed society was/is static, unchanging. The myth of the unchanging East, for example. In fact social life is always turbulent. As I write, the Brexit referendum vote has caused schism which will take a generation to work through. Resolution, in Turner's sense, has to positively involve the whole community in a spirit of wanting a resolution. That is unlikely to happen. In America, President Trump can only be described as turbulent, with little sign of a desire on any side to compromise, again with a schismatic legacy that will last for years. So social structure is itself a contested concept. We should at least give social dynamism a chance. I discuss this here as an example of how anthropology might be helpful to exegesis, in examining processes and assumptions and wondering whether anthropology might shed light on biblical issues.

1.4 Fieldwork, page ix.
The heart of social anthropology is fieldwork, which may be gathered over time, but this will be a brief time, a few years at the most. This will include observation and interviews with participants. There may be some hard artifacts such as art or writings. Two points need to be said: in applying anthropology to the Bible, there is nothing to observe and no participants available; and secondly, the artifacts, the Hebrew text, is unclear in all contextual details. When, where and why texts were written is unknown, but can only be surmised. We also have to admit that researchers have their own issue and problems. They might arrive with little facility in the local language. They have their own agendas and interests. They might see what they want to see, or not understand what they are seeing. Their informants might also have agendas. So too in Bible study, scholars have different agendas, conservative, liberal, radical. So applying anthropology to biblical texts is not remotely parallel to modern fieldwork. The use of anthropology in exegesis needs to be far more subtle.

1.5 Hebrew Marriage  pages x-xi
Robertson-Smith was a Victorian ethnologist of the old school, who collected travellers' stories and notes. He too had a view of the unchanging East, but produced a scholarly account, much drawn from Bedouin customs. There were more popular accounts, such as by Alfred Edersheim (still in print) and W. Thompson's The Land and the Book. Through these, the romantically minded could imagine a background for biblical stories dressed up in 'authentic' clothes. In a popular book on Jewish marriage, Victorian lantern slides, the TV of the day, showed Bedouin as Sarah, or Rebekah by the well, or Jesus on a doney. Raphael Patai does the same, assuming "a remarkable degree of persistence". They are all of course illusions, as are details of Bedouin weddings illuminating the Bible.

The ancient Near Eastern texts are in a different league, but are not unproblematic. It is good to see Bible texts within the wider context of Assyrian and Babylonian law and documents, and I was fortunate to have Pritchard's extended 3rd edition. I was fortunate also to learn some Akkadian and Ugaritic as an undergraduate, and Epigraphic South Arabian texts as a postgraduate. The use of Ugaritic to support exegesis was in its early stages then. The main issue was the need to remember that these had their own contexts and were from a range of dates. Nevertheless I ploughed through them and made what deductions I could. I was lucky to find J M Breneman's Nuzi Marriage Contracts (1971) which was his own PhD. In those days there was a reprint service for American theses. This thesis was a presentation and translation of a body of contracts from Akkadian. It was yet another case of a conservative Christian avoiding Biblical exegesis by studying something safe on the periphery, but I thank him for it. I still have the copy. If he reads this I hope he sends greetings,