Religion Compass 8/3 (2014): 71–80, 10.1111/rec3.

12099

New Historicism, Historical Criticism, and Reading the

Pentateuch
Angela Roskop Erisman*
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion

Abstract
This article surveys the development of Pentateuchal scholarship, from the emergence of historical
criticism in the 19th century as a tool for understanding how the Pentateuch might be used to reconstruct
the religious and social history of ancient Israel, to its abandonment in favor of literary criticism in the late
20th century by scholars concerned to establish an aesthetics of biblical literature that can help modern
readers engage meaningfully with the Pentateuch. Historical criticism and literary criticism are now prac-
ticed largely in isolation, which is problematic because residue of the Pentateuch’s composition history
and the historical references it contains are part of the experience of reading the Pentateuch. Other
disciplines have gone through the same turn from historicism to formalism that biblical studies has, and
this article explores what students of the Pentateuch might gain from a critical orientation called new
historicism. New historicism has been tapped in synchronic studies of biblical literature but never applied
to questions of composition history. This article outlines the assumptions, strategies, and techniques that
characterize new historicism and articulates its potential for providing 21st century answers to the classic
questions of historical criticism.

Introduction: The Present State of Pentateuchal Studies

Biblical studies emerged as an academic discipline in 19th-century Europe, where intellectual
culture was steeped in historicism. In its various manifestations, historicism emphasizes the
importance of context for understanding any expression of culture and involves a ‘profound rec-
ognition that to be human is to be thoroughly embedded in history’ (Davaney 2006, p. 144).
The Bible came to be studied like any other cultural artifact, and the Pentateuch became the
proving ground for historical criticism, which involved understanding the history of a text as
well as its relationship to the historical context in which it was written.
Scholarship in the 19th century was concerned less with how the Pentateuch might be
meaningfully read than with how it might be used to reconstruct religious and social history.
Julius Wellhausen strove to account for the literary integrity of the Pentateuch as well as the
places where it fails to cohere, but literary criticism was for him a means to an end: studying
the Pentateuch’s literary history could yield the primary sources he needed in order to write a
history of ancient Israel (Weyde 2013). Historicist literary criticism viewed literature as an
expression of the material and ideological aspects of the historical period in which it was
written, and this enabled Wellhausen to date each of the four sources of the Pentateuch:
the Yahwist (J) to tenth–ninth century B.C.E. Judah, the Elohist (E) to slightly later Israel,
Deuteronomy (D) to the seventh century B.C.E., and the Priestly source (P) during or after
the Babylonian exile (587–538 B.C.E.). The teleological view of history he imposed on these
sources enabled him to see in them a development ‘from the free to the fixed, from the
simple to the formal, from the natural to the ceremonial and institutional’, a shift from nature
(JE), to history (D), to law (P) (Miller 1983, p. 62; Knight 1983; Knierim 1985; Wellhausen
1885, 1899).

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72 Angela Roskop Erisman

Wellhausen’s elegant synthesis of previous work set the tone for the practice of historical
criticism and established the model used to carry it out through most of the 20th century. But
three developments have raised serious problems for the Graf-Wellhausen documentary
hypothesis specifically and historical criticism generally. First, historicism was increasingly
viewed as problematic, in biblical studies as elsewhere. The idea that a national spirit is the
primary influence on humans and their intellectual and artistic pursuits in each age, evident
in the view that each Pentateuchal source captures the Tendenz of its historical period, was
understood to be overly simplistic and, in the wake of two world wars fueled by nationalism,
dangerous. The idea that history is teleological, evident in Wellhausen’s understanding of the
sequence of sources from the natural religion he valued to the law he found constricting and
ultimately to Christianity as the apex of history, suffered the same fate. As scholars in the lat-
ter half of the 20th century brought attention to perspectives omitted from the grand historical
models that characterized 19th-century historicism and the role of power in constructing
them, it became evident that imposing such models was an intellectually unsound and a poten-
tially oppressive way to write history.
Second, nearly every aspect of the Graf-Wellhausen model has been called into question.
Can J and E really be distinguished from one another (Baden 2012, pp. 104–115)? Does a
tenth–ninth century B.C.E. date for J hold up, or is a post-exilic date more appropriate
(Van Seters 1992, 1994)? Given the influence of Deuteronomistic ideas on a late J, is it mean-
ingful to continue referring to this material as J (Dozeman et al. [eds.] 2006)? Is P an independent
source document or a layer of composition that supplements other material in the Pentateuch
(Cross 1973; Blenkinsopp 1976; Johnstone 1998)? The independence of Deuteronomy and
the exilic or post-exilic character of Priestly narrative are the only ideas that still command
any measure of consensus. The questioning became most profound in the late 20th century,
but problems actually arose much earlier: Giants of biblical scholarship in the late 19th and
20th centuries such as Hermann Gunkel, Gerhard Von Rad, and Martin Noth sought to frame
their work within Wellhausen’s source-critical paradigm (Gunkel 1997; Noth 1972; Von Rad
1966), even as their ideas about literary and tradition history had implications that transcended
Wellhausen’s model. It took until the last quarter of the century for these implications to be fully
drawn out (Rendtorff 1990, 1993; see Erisman 2014, pp. 54–67 for a specific example).
Finally, biblical scholars have become increasingly less convinced by the yield of
historical-critical studies. Historical criticism came under fire for ‘its obsession with
attributing every conceivable inconcinnity to some intrusive hand, for its unscrupulous
fragmentation of a perfectly good text in its search for a hypothetical original’ (Peckham
1995, p. 364). Because scholars rarely articulated the warrants for identifying a particular
feature of the text as problematic, the historical-critical enterprise seemed to be ‘depen-
dent on aesthetic premises which were often arbitrary’ (Gunn & Fewell 1993, p. 8).
Moreover, historical criticism seemed to serve only antiquarian interests rather than
helping readers find meaning and significance in the text we now have. Many scholars
abandoned historical criticism, turning to the formalist and structuralist literary theories
in vogue during the 1970s and 1980s in an effort to establish an aesthetics of biblical
literature that would be useful to modern readers and provide a control for historical
criticism. They often successfully demonstrated that historical critics could be too quick
to jump in with a diachronic solution to what may be a synchronic problem.
The result of these developments is a methodologically bifurcated discipline. Historical
criticism and literary criticism are practiced largely in isolation, and even the landscape within his-
torical criticism is dotted with silos. Some scholars still ‘live in the era of Wellhausen’ (Rendtorff
1993, p. 36), and the documentary hypothesis is enjoying a renaissance in the United States (e.g.,
Baden 2012) and Israel. But European scholars have returned their attention to fragments and

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 New Historicism, Historical Criticism, and Reading the Pentateuch 73

supplements, approaches used in 19th-century scholarship alongside attention to documents un-

til the Graf-Wellhausen model garnered broad consensus. Dialogue among these groups of
scholars is challenging, when it happens at all (Dozeman et al. [eds.] 2011; Erisman 2013a).
What is lost in this compartmentalization is a clear sense of how academic biblical scholarship
can help readers engage meaningfully with the Bible without sacrificing the historical at the altar
of the aesthetic. The two main tasks of historical criticism remain relevant: Texts often do make
references to their historical contexts, although we have tended to focus on whether or not a
narrative is a history rather than what bearing these references might have on meaning and in-
terpretation no matter what genre the text might be (Frei 1974, p. 16). And signs of the
Pentateuch’s historical development are very much part of the experience of reading the text.
Points where the narrative simply does not cohere must be taken as seriously as points where
it does (Barton 2007). Formalist literary theory did biblical studies an enormous service by teach-
ing scholars to read with an eye to literary concerns they had not considered before, but its
ahistorical sensibility is unequipped to deal with issues like the composite nature of biblical
literature or its rootedness in ancient culture (Dobbs-Allsopp 1999, p. 235). Biblical scholars
stand to benefit from employing literary theories that are equipped to deal with both formal
and historical aspects of the biblical text, to help us identify and understand how to meaningfully
process the incoherence as well as the coherence we encounter as we read the Pentateuch. Now
is an opportune time for experimentation with new methods. The present state of Pentateuchal
scholarship gives ‘considerable freedom to those who are looking for new approaches and who
are ready to move ahead’ (Rendtorff 1993, p. 53), and my aim in this essay is to offer a frame-
work in which this freedom might be fruitfully exercised.
Fortunately, other disciplines have gone through the same turn from historicism to formalism
that biblical studies has. They have addressed the problems with formalism by turning to a new
historicism that seeks to retain the best traits of formalism, such as close reading, and to return a
historical dimension to literary study without revisiting the problems with classic historicism.
New historicism has been characterized as a ‘debate about how and why literature should be re-
stored to the past in order to make it count to the present’ (Ryan 1996, p. xi).1 It is not a step-
by-step recipe for reading texts, but an orientation (Montrose 1992, pp. 406–47) that influences
the kinds of questions we ask of a text and gives us ‘a flexible repertoire of strategies and tech-
niques’ (Ryan 1996, p. x) to help us answer them. Biblical scholars have tapped new historicism
to aid in pinpointing ideological tensions within biblical narrative that might enable the recov-
ery of minority voices, as well as to draw attention to the situatedness of the interpreter and the
importance of interpretive traditions that are typically bypassed (Hens-Piazza 2002, 2013;
Rowlett 1992; essays in Moore [ed.] 1997; Aaron 2004). But new historicism has never been
applied to questions of composition history. This is not surprising, given the bifurcation between
literary-critical (synchronic) and historical-critical (diachronic) approaches in biblical studies. But it
is unfortunate, since it is often at points of ideological as well as formal tension that a narrative fails
to cohere, and we rightly suspect the presence of compositional or editorial activity. New
historicism thus has the potential to guide students of the Pentateuch while at the same time
giving them the freedom they need to explore new ways to understand its composition history
and how that history impacts the experience of reading it today. In the following paragraphs, I
will outline the assumptions, strategies, and techniques that characterize this orientation and artic-
ulate its potential for providing 21st century answers to the classic questions of historical criticism.

New Historicism and its Potential to Revitalize Historical Criticism

New historicism, at its core, involves critical reflection on the relationship between literature
and history. The very term new historicism speaks to its differences from previous iterations of

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74 Angela Roskop Erisman

historicism as well as its character as an alternative to New Criticism, a dominant school of

literary formalism (Ryan 1996, p. xiii). On the one hand, new historicism rejects the idea that
the meaning of a work of literature is determined by a historical background, which can be
recovered independently of it and then related to it as ‘some ultimate explanatory horizon’
(Colebrook 1997, p. 18). Literature is not ‘simply a medium for the expression of historical
knowledge’ or the ideology of a dominant power in a particular historical context (Brannigan
1998, p. 3). We see these problematic dynamics operating within biblical studies in the debate
between maximalists, who tend to date texts early and see them as accurate reflections of history,
and minimalists, who tend to date texts late and find little historical value in them apart from
being reflections of the authors’ ideologies. Despite radically different outcomes, both treat
literature as a medium for expression of the history or ideology of the period in which they were
written. Hans W. Frei noted long ago that our focus on whether or not a text is history is
misdirected, and that we should instead investigate what bearing historical references in a text
might have on its meaning and interpretation (Frei 1974, p. 16). The problem becomes espe-
cially clear in texts, like the spies episode (Numbers 13–14), that use historical references in a
complex and creative way. The spies episode is set at Kadesh, which was a significant site on
trade routes outside the southern boundary of Judah in the eighth–sixth centuries B.C.E. But
idealizations of the territory held by a united Israel in the eleventh–tenth centuries B.C.E.,
written with a view to restoration after the exile, place it inside the southern boundary. Scholars
have long debated which of these historical realities is reflected in Numbers 13–14, but their
framing of the problem prevents them from seeing how complex the representation of historical
and geographical realities in this text is. An understanding of Kadesh in both historical contexts is
necessary to appreciate the clever way this place name was used in the spies episode to further
the author’s literary goals of giving the Israelites a place outside the land from which to launch
their mission into it and articulating the idealized vision of a united land, which includes Kadesh
(Roskop 2011, pp. 252–264). We cannot do justice to this episode if we assume it to reflect the
historical reality of a single period.
While new historicism problematizes a simple correspondence view of the relationship
between literature and history, it does not deem history irrelevant for interpreting literature.
That was the stance of New Criticism, a school of formalism that was among the early literary
theories used by biblical scholars in their effort to find an alternative to the historical-critical
method. For New Critics, meaning is not a function of the author’s intention, shaped by her
biography or the social and political events of her time, but is a feature of the text itself,
produced by the relationships among words and grasped through close reading (Wimsatt and
Beardsley 1954). New historicism emerged in opposition as much to literary formalism as to
historicism, out of a sense that close reading, practiced in isolation, tends to simply reproduce
the text in different words. Wolfgang Iser did not identify among new historicists (who are
largely American, not German), but his critique of New Criticism certainly resonates with their
objections: When we finish reading a text, all we can do is ‘congratulate’ ourselves that we
found the meaning (Iser 1978, p. 4). A formalist reading strategy fails to help us get at how
literature is significant, how the act of reading enables us to view ourselves and our world
differently (Iser 1989, pp. 273–278). In light of Iser’s critique, which is roughly contemporary
with the turn to formalism in biblical studies, we might wonder whether scholars chose the right
tool for giving modern readers the ability to read biblical narrative in a way that might be
meaningful and significant to them.
How, then, is history relevant for interpreting literature? The key is to recognize that the
relationship between text and context is more complex than either historicists or formalists have
maintained. Louis Montrose points to a ‘reductive tendency to formulate our conceptual terms
in binary opposition’ (Montrose 1992, p. 413), a tendency to which biblical scholars have not

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 New Historicism, Historical Criticism, and Reading the Pentateuch 75

been immune. New historicism instead views literature as ‘an active part of a particular historical
moment’ (Brannigan 1998, p. 3). Viewing a text as an event that is shaped by the context in
which it was written and in turn shapes its readers allows us to move away from seeing in it ‘a
simple reflection or rejection’ of history and see it instead as ‘part of a process of historical
change’ (Brannigan 1998, p. 203). Formalism helped biblical scholars become attuned to how
texts are constructed, but it ignores the fact that authors of literary texts do refer to things in their
cultural background and often do so creatively in order to shape possibilities of meaning we
could not grasp, even from a distance of thousands of years, without knowledge of that cultural
background (Iser 1978, pp. 68–79). If we knew nothing about the geography and history of
Kadesh, for example, we would fail to understand how the author of the spies episode stretches
historical plausibility (by using a place name with a nod to its conflicting roles in the geopolitics
of two different periods) in order to achieve his literary goals, and we might make the mistake of
thinking that his goal was to accurately represent a historical event. Likewise, when we lack
access to knowledge about the location or history of places mentioned in the wilderness
narrative, as we do for the long string of names in the middle of the Numbers 33 itinerary,
we may have difficulty understanding the meaning, never mind the significance, of the text
(Roskop 2011, p. 279). New historicism can help us shift our focus from whether or not a text
is valuable as a source for writing history to what bearing historical references in a text have on its
meaning and interpretation. The fact that the spies narrative is not history does not mean it has
no historicity. Rather, its complex entanglement in history both creates possibilities for and
places important constraints on its interpretation.
New historicism’s concern with how power is expressed in literature and how literature,
in turn, exercises power has potential to illuminate the social dynamics of the Pentateuch’s
composition and reception history. New historicist studies have drawn criticism because they
sometimes assume that power is totalizing and that even resistance to the dominant power in
a culture ends up merely reproducing it, effectively lapsing back into the old historicist
notion that each period is a closed system characterized by a single culture and a single
ideology (Brannigan 1998, pp. 50–52, 75–77). But it is possible to recognize that competing
ideologies are not on a level playing field without silencing all but the dominant voice. Alan
Sinfield notes that ‘dissidence operates, necessarily, with reference to dominant structures’
(Sinfield 1992, p. 47, emphasis mine). Competition with the dominant power is not
subsumed in it but ‘may derive its leverage, its purchase, precisely from its partial implication
with the dominant’ (Sinfield 1992, p. 48). We may see this very dynamic in the composition
history of the Pentateuch. For example, the bulk of the wilderness narrative envisions a
Promised Land whose extent is limited to Cisjordan. Authors seeking to subvert that domi-
nant land ideology in favor of an alternative that includes Transjordan did so by revising the
inherited text to include episodes in which the Israelites conquered and took possession of
land in Transjordan. These episodes were blended into the dominant narrative, appropriating
its genre and style in an effort to read as part of it even as they seek to subvert its land ideology
(Roskop 2011, pp. 204–215; Erisman 2013b; see also Levinson 2006, 2008 on the herme-
neutical character of biblical law). The fact that the author of the Transjordan revision
promoted his competing ideology by seeking to change the way readers relate to the
inherited tradition probably speaks to the cultural stability and power of the received tradi-
tion. Of course, even as the Transjordan revision derives leverage from operating with refer-
ence to the dominant narrative, it also ends up reinscribing the Cisjordan-only ideology,
which is still in the text to be had. We learn that composition history is reception history,
and the creative reception of inherited literary tradition exercised by the authors of the
Pentateuch may serve as a model for how readers might appropriate this literary tradition
in ways that are significant today.

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76 Angela Roskop Erisman

New historicism also has implications for how we date biblical texts. Wellhausen’s simple,
linear scheme for dating his four sources to successive periods rested on a simple correspondence
model of the relationship between literature and history: if one can identify the historical and
cultural background that matches the literature, one can date the source. But the complex
and creative way historical references are often used to create possibilities of meaning foil any
such effort. The spies episode cannot possibly mirror one historical period or another, given
its use of Kadesh with a nod to historical realities from both the eleventh–tenth and eighth–sixth
centuries B.C.E. Rather than looking for a text–context match, we might recognize that there is
‘cultural matrix of signs and information that allows for anything we say or write to be possible’
(Aaron 2006, p. 38). Scribes could tap into their knowledge of historical realities, present or past,
for whatever information might help them achieve their literary goals; one question we might
ask if we wish to date the spies episode is in what cultural matrix Kadesh could have had the rich
set of associations upon which the scribe drew. A second problem with classic historicism is its
monolithic view of culture: each period is characterized by a uniform culture and ideology with
clear boundaries, and ‘difference is acknowledged between but not within periods’ (Colebrook
1997, p. 20). New historicism recognizes that any period consists of ‘very diverse configurations
of beliefs, values and trends, often coming into conflict’ (Brannigan 1998, p. 31). Thus, litera-
tures that express competing ideologies need not come from successive periods but might be
contemporary. The Cisjordan-only and Transjordan land ideologies we find inscribed in different
compositional layers of the Pentateuch may come from different periods, but they may also
reflect the ideological tensions between different factions of Israel’s intelligentsia in a single
period. We cannot assume one or the other but must investigate. Dating biblical texts is thus
an extremely complicated endeavor, and we usually lack sufficient data to draw any firm
conclusions. Often the best we can do is draw limits and frame our conclusions as probabil-
ities: in the case of the spies episode, we can say that knowledge of Kadesh’s role in the
geopolitics of the eighth–sixth centuries B.C.E. cannot have been had prior to that time,
so the narrative is not likely to have been written earlier. What is important is not how
precise our limited remains allow us to be, but the shift in how we conceptualize our task
(Aaron 2013).
Part of what has driven the sharp distinction between literature and history assumed by both
historicist and formalist literary criticism is the notion that literature is a category unto itself as the
highest form of human expression and exists in a self-perpetuating tradition. New historicists,
however, recognize literature as one of many forms of expression alongside art, architecture,
philosophy, science, law, newspapers, letters, or administrative documents, all of which are
implicated in and, in turn, influence economic, political, and social conditions. All types of
human expression are necessary in order to understand ‘the linguistic, cultural, social and
political fabric of the past’ (Brannigan 1998, p. 12), and new historicists put them in conversation
as equal dialogue partners because they understand that we have no access to history indepen-
dent of them. Students of the Pentateuch have much to gain from paying equal attention to all
potentially relevant types of data rather than privileging the Bible. Local ostraca and Assyrian
royal inscriptions, which speak to Kadesh’s ethnic affiliations and role in geopolitics, stamped
jar handles, which provide data on its role in trade, and even knowledge of the settlement
history of Kadesh and the surrounding region gleaned through archaeological excavation and
survey are just as important as other references to Kadesh in biblical narrative for ‘stitching
[the spies episode] back into the intertextual quilt of its initial context’ (Ryan 1996, p. xiii) so
that we might be better positioned to interpret it.
Dealing with material alongside textual data presents biblical scholars with a particular
challenge, and we must be careful not to treat all of our data as though it is subject to the same
interpretive methods as literature, a tendency for which new historicism has sometimes been

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criticized (Ryan 1996, p. xiv; Brannigan 1998, pp. 75, 204). We can recognize the hermeneu-
tical character of our engagement with the diverse types of data at our disposal without losing
sight of the fact that different methodological tools are appropriate for interpreting different
kinds of sources. As Raymond Williams put it,

we cannot separate literature and art from other kinds of social practice, in such a way as to make
them subject to quite special and distinct laws. They may have quite specific features as practices, but they
cannot be separated from the general social process (Williams 1997, p. 44, emphasis mine).

Construction of a landscape or an economic system that we can study through material

remains is just as much a social practice as the production of literature (e.g., Tuan 1974), even
as the specific methods used to study each practice will vary.
It should come as no surprise, then, that new historicism is interdisciplinary and rejects
totalizing theories in favor of methodological pluralism. A new historicist approach to the
Pentateuch has to be willing and able to draw on literary theory, archaeology, ideological
criticism, sociological approaches (e.g., study of the social and material aspects of scribal
practice), or any other method or combination of methods that might prove useful to help us
understand how and why a text coheres (or fails to cohere). Especially at this moment in the
history of scholarship, when we lack a paradigm that commands consensus, a new historicist ori-
entation can give students of the Pentateuch the freedom to experiment, to innovate, and to
think creatively about how new methods might be used to solve old problems while remaining
anchored in the general principles discussed here. A clearly articulated and methodologically
rigorous reading strategy is essential if one is to avoid the arbitrary aesthetic premises that have
frequently characterized historical-critical studies of the Pentateuch. New historicism has often
been criticized for its reticence to theorize, an understandable reaction against the problems with
totalizing theories. But one can put together a coherent reading strategy that will aid in the
treatment of specific texts without framing it as one that must be applied by every scholar to
every text (e.g., Roskop 2011, pp. 14–49).
A new historicist study should also be characterized by thick description rather than painted in
broad strokes (Geertz 1973; see Brannigan 1998, pp. 32–34 for discussion of Geertz’s influence
on new historicism). Wellhausen sketched out a general model of literary development, leaving
others to fill in the details, and his historical analysis is more epochal than historical, focused
more on identifying the broad features of each period than on the finer details (Williams
1997, p. 38). Thick description demands focus on the concrete and particular in intricate detail.
To tackle the entire Pentateuch in this fashion would be impractical, and carefully detailed study
of literary and historical aspects of specific texts may be more effective. It may be better to allow
a model of composition history to emerge organically from a series of more focused studies than
to impose a model that may work well on one set of texts but be ill-suited to another. The
general models with which students of Pentateuch have worked since the advent of modern
criticism—documentary, supplementary, fragmentary—remain valuable. Finely focused work
need not ignore larger interpretive issues. But we might work in dialogue with these models,
flexible and open to change, rather than impose one or another of them, which often results
in force-fitting the data to the model rather than tailoring one’s model to what best explains
the data.

Conclusion
The bifurcation between historical and literary-critical approaches in biblical studies has
promoted a misunderstanding that historical criticism is a tool for those with antiquarian

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78 Angela Roskop Erisman

interest, while those who want to understand what a biblical text might mean for us today
turn to literary criticism to illuminate the final form. New historicism, done well, offers
‘the possibility of transcending [this] formalist-historicist opposition in a new mode of
textualist-materialist critical practice’ (Montrose 1992, p. 412). Historical criticism is not only
of interest to those concerned with how the Bible might be used alongside other sources
of data to write a history of ancient Israel; it is also relevant for reading the Pentateuch
meaningfully in the form we have it. We encounter the residue of its historical development
in places where the text fails to cohere, and the dynamics of its composition and reception
history may provide models for our own creative engagement with this literary tradition.
Moreover, its embeddedness in history often creates possibilities for and places constraints
on interpretation that readers will miss if they ignore the relationship between text and
context. Students of the Pentateuch have an opportunity to experiment with ways to integrate
the historical and the aesthetic in a holistic approach that can enhance our understanding of
how we got the Pentateuch as well as how we might appropriate it in ways that are significant
to us thousands of years later while still ‘honor[ing] the text as part of the givenness of a world
we did not make’ (Barton 2007, p. 182).

Short Biography
Angela Roskop Erisman is the Managing Director of Hebrew Union College Press and Editorial
Director at the Marginalia Review of Books. She earned her MA in Hebrew and Northwest Semitics
from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1998) and her PhD in Bible and Ancient Near
East from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (Cincinnati 2008). She has
worked as a developmental editor and writing coach, and has taught courses in Hebrew language
and Bible at HUC-JIR and Xavier University (Cincinnati). Her research interests include
Pentateuch/Torah, ancient historiography, literary theory, archaeology, and biblical law.
She is the author of The Wilderness Itineraries: Genre, Geography, and the Growth of Torah
(Eisenbrauns, 2011), which won a 2014 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological
Promise, and several articles on the literary formation of the Pentateuch. When not studying
Torah, she cooks, does calligraphy, and plays the violin.

Notes
* Correspondence: Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, 3101 Clifton Avenue, Cincinnati, OH 45220.
E-mail: angelaroskop@gmail.com; http://huc.edu/directory/angela-erisman; http://huc.academia.edu/AngelaRoskopErisman
1
Readers of literature on new historicism will also encounter the terms cultural poetics and cultural materialism. Cultural
poetics, a term coined by Stephen Greenblatt in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is a variation on new historicism that
seeks to avoid being seen as a reaction against historicism (as the name new historicism implies) and to respond to critiques
of how early new historicist studies handled power relations by placing more emphasis on the textuality of culture than
on the historicity of texts (thus the term cultural poetics). Cultural materialism tends to focus more on how the present has
been influenced by the past in terms of power relations than on describing the past using textual artifacts. While not
wishing to minimize the distinctions among these practices, I think it is helpful, as Kiernan Ryan (1996) has done, to
see them as operating in the same orbit and sharing the core concerns I articulate here.

Works Cited
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June 2004]. [Online]. Retrieved from: http://sbl-site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleID=260
—— (2006). Etched in Stone: The Emergence of the Decalogue. New York: T & T Clark.

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 New Historicism, Historical Criticism, and Reading the Pentateuch 79

—— (2013). Reflections on a Cognitive Theory of Culture and a Theory of Formalized Language for Late Biblical
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Further Reading
Barton, J. (1994). Historical Criticism and Literary Interpretation: Is There Any Common Ground? In: S. E. Porter, P. Joyce
and D. E. Orton (eds.), Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honour of Michael D. Goulder, pp. 3–15.
Leiden: Brill.
—— (1998). Historical-critical approaches. In: J. Barton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation, pp. 9–20.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Blenkinsopp, J. (1992). The Pentateuch: An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible. New York: Doubleday.
Carr, D. M. (1997). Controversy and Convergence in Recent Studies of the Formation of the Pentateuch, Religious
Studies Review, 23(1), pp. 22–31.
Eco, U. (1992). Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gallagher, C. & Greenblatt, S. (2000). Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Greenblatt, S. (1989). Towards a Poetics of Culture. In: H. A. Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism, pp. 1–14. New York:
Routledge.
Habel, N. (1971). Literary Criticism of the Old Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Hamilton, P. (2002). Historicism (2nd edn). London: Routledge.
Nicholson, E. (1998). The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Paulson, W. R. (1988). The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Powell, M. A. (1992). The Bible and Modern Literary Criticism: A Critical Assessment and Annotated Bibliography. New York:
Greenwood.
Ska, J.-L. (2006). Introduction to Reading the Pentateuch. P. Dominique (trans.). Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns.
Sternberg, M. (1985). The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading. Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press.
Veeser, H. A. (1994). The New Historicism. In: H. A. Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism Reader, pp. ix–xvi. New York:
Routledge.

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Religion Compass 8/3 (2014): 71–80, 10.1111/rec3.12099
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