New Historicism, Historical Criticism, and Reading the Pentateuch

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 practiced largely in isolation, which is problematic because residue of the Pentateuch's composition history and the historical references it contains are part of the experience of reading the Pentateuch.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.