Benjamin D. Sommer: The Jewish Concepts Of Scripture

Sommer

In the Jewish Concepts of Scripture, Benjamin D. Sommer talks about what Scriptures mean and how they are important to different Jewish people. Sommer begins his Introduction with asking the question “What is scripture for the Jews?”. He starts to answer this question by talking about the different writings that are generally accepted as scriptures. Jewish religion differs from that of the Catholics or Orthodox Christians or because they accept more writings as scripture than the Jews do. Generally there are 24 books that make up the readings the Jewish people recognize as scriptures. These book are broken down into three parts: Torah, Nevi’im, and the Ketuvim. Together these books make up the Tanakh (Jewish Bible). All Jewish people

He begins this piece with a story of a colleague who calls him asking for some information on which jewish scholar Levenson thought had the best information written on Biblical Theology. With some hesitation Levenson gave him a source to look into but knew it would not live up to the expectation of his colleague. He talks about how he knew that his colleague was expecting the equivalent of one of the great biblical theologists such as Walther Eichrodt, but he knew there really is no Jewish equivalent. The rest of this piece is an explanation given by Jon Levenson of why he believes that there is no equivalent pieces of theology written by Jews because they just aren't interested in biblical

Many of the classic pieces in the field of biblical theology tend to be quite prejudice towards jews or as he calls it “anti-semitism”. Throughout old testament theology he states that there is repeated use of Adversus Judaeos. Adversus Judaeos is the greek term for “against the jews”. So obviously if there is re-occurring use of Adversus Judaeos, jewish people would be reluctant to get involved in this field. We should not only focus on the lack of jewish involvement in the field of biblical theology. Catholic involvement in the field is actually quite new and up until a few decades ago biblical theology was mainly protestant. Catholics gained involvement in biblical theology in 1943 after the papal encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu came to