Biblical Interpretation 

About: Biblical Interpretation is an academic journal published by Brill. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Biblical studies & Hebrew Bible. It has an ISSN identifier of 0927-2569. Over the lifetime, 644 publications have been published receiving 3212 citations.

Returning To China: Biblical Interpretation in Postcolonial Hong Kong

Abstract: The paper aims to construct a new framework for biblical studies from the context of postcolonial Hong Kong. While present biblical scholarship has largely depended on historical-critical exegesis, biblical scholars of Asia have begun to conceive a different approach to the Bible, because of not only a new context of reading, but also a radically different cultural-political location of the reader. This location, as it is now being formulated, is a reading between East and West, between the dominant interpretation and scholarship of the formerly colonial and Western cultures and the newly arising consciousness of emerging postcolonial identities in the histories and cultures of Asia. After about some 150 years of British colonial rule, the identity of being a people of Hong Kong is highly hybridised. It is a hybrid identity of being cultural Chinese and yet pragmatically British, both a strong sense of identification with China and an unexplainable fear of being national Chinese. Such location of a reader transforms one's understanding of a biblical text such as Isaiah 56-66 and sheds a new light on the meaning of the return in some of its major passages.

Heterosexism and the Interpretation of Romans 1:18-32

Abstract: This article, concentrating on two articles by Richard Hays, critiques recent interpretations of Rom. 1:18-32. Modern interpreters, influenced more by particularly modern forms of heterosexism and its construction of homosexuality, desire, and "nature" than by a straightforward historical-critical reading of Paul's letter, portray Paul as referring to the "Fall" of Genesis 1-3 in Romans 1. Paul, it is assumed, takes homosexuality to be a sign of "humanity's fallen state." These interpreters, therefore, inscribe homosexual desire into universal fallen humanity in a way that Paul does not do. For one thing, Paul is referring not to the Fall in Romans 1 but to the invention of idolatry and polytheism by the Gentiles; homosexual intercourse is therefore not a symptom of "the Fall" but of Gentile polytheism. For another, Paul is not giving an etiology of homosexual desire, which for him as for most ancients was not different from heterosexual desire, but an etiology of homosexual intercourse. Furthermore, modern scholars misconstrue Paul's references to "nature" and acts "contrary to nature" because they import into Paul's discourse particularly modern notions of "natural" and "unnatural" not available in the ancient world. Heterosexist scholars interpret Paul the way they do not because they are simply and objectively "reading the text," as they claim, but because of their implication in homophobia, a particularly modern ideological system that constructs desire, "nature," and sexuality in particular ways.

The System and the Speaking Subject in the Hebrew Bible: Reading for Divine Abjection

Abstract: What appears to be self-evident in biblical studies — what "can be assumed" — may in fact be quite problematic Invariably and unquestionably, scholars of Micah 1:8-9 identify its speaker as the prophet rather than YHWH Yet when one tugs at a few loose threads, that supposedly self-evident reading unravels After problematizing that identification, this paper argues for reading YHWH as the profoundly unstable speaking subject of this abjectionable dirge As such, the divine subject of this prophetic discourse is rendered entirely ambivalent, sweeping through and among the people with all the rage and all the grief of absolute disorientation Understood thus, the book of Micah opens with a theophany of, in Julia Kristeva's terms, a "subject on trial," brought about by the "fracture of a symbolic code which can no longer 'hold' its (speaking) subjects" (1986a:30) This reading, which draws inspiration from Kristeva's theories of textuality and the construction of the speaking subject in discourse, is placed in intertextual tension with Kristeva's own reading of the biblical God in The Powers of Horror (1982), which, ironically, depicts that divine subject as the stable, univocal Guarantor of patriarchal order Thus this paper is intended to problematize Kristeva's reading of the divine subject of biblical discourse, even while it depends heavily on her theoretical work to evolve a new reading of the text

Out of Mind, Out of Voice: Slave-Girls and Prophetic Daughters in Luke-Acts

Abstract: The promise in Acts 2 (disclosed in Peter's programmatic citation of Joel at Pentecost) that women in general and female slaves in particular will become Spirit-inspired prophets is never fully realized and is even resisted to some degree within the wider Lukan narrative. An examination of three cases involving direct speech by slave-girls (paidiskai) in Luke-Acts, set within diverse literary and social contexts (Lk. 22.54-62; Acts 12.12-17; 16.16-18), uncovers a consistent pattern of truthful proclamation on the part of each slave-girl followed, however, by some form of repudiation-even stigmatization-of her and her message. Despite its more inclusive and receptive ideals, ultimately Luke-Acts more mirrors than challenges conventional first-century Mediterranean society in its suppression of lower-class female voices.