Orientalism and Hebrew Bible Scholarship

The standard version of Orientalism as a pernicious regime of power/knowledge is simplistic and somewhat grotesque. It entails the negation of the very possibility of philological knowledge and critical scholarship of ancient Middle Eastern texts, including the Hebrew Bible.

See also Genesis 1-11: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary ‎(Yale University Press, 2024).

By Ronald Hendel
University of California, Berkeley
October 2024

I am an Orientalist, and what I do is Orientalism. I learned this from Edward W. Said’s classic book Orientalism, the founding work of postcolonial studies. He writes (2014: 2): “Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient – and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist – either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism.” What is Orientalism? In Said’s argument, it is an oppressive discipline which elucidates the Orient according to Western concepts and thereby perpetuates violence – both epistemic and political – on the peoples of Asia, particularly the Middle East. He defines Orientalism in historical and political terms (2014: 3):

Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.

Orientalism is an institutional discourse of domination, an apparatus for the exercise of Western power. It includes description, teaching, and governmentality, each of which is linked in a web of authority and erasure. Said (2014: 18) includes Hebrew Bible scholarship in the discourse of Orientalism, which indeed has its “background in Biblical scholarship.”

            On the one hand, it is flattering to think that my scholarly work has power in the world, implicit or otherwise. On the other hand, I think that Said overplays his hand. There are important differences between governmental decrees, military formations, and philological analyses of verbal forms in ancient texts. Said has to rise to a high level of generality to say that all these together form a discourse of Western domination. This is not to say that scholarship cannot espouse hateful prejudice or be complicit in political oppression or even slavery and mass murder. The history of Orientalism under Nazi rule is a powerful example. But it seems wrong to say that studying texts from the ancient Middle East is necessarily a form of hegemonic oppression. It can be, but it’s not necessarily so. For instance, I may be complicit in American governmentality as a taxpayer and an employee of a public university, but my work on textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible or historical linguistics of Biblical Hebrew is less sinister.

            But Said and most postcolonial scholars insist that all academic study of the Middle East is pernicious. Said (2014: 138) decries the idea of “making the Orient deliver up its secrets under the learned authority of a philologist whose power derives from the ability to unlock secret, esoteric languages.” Philology, he maintains, is a form of power that underwrites the colonial enterprise of the West. The prevailing view of Orientalism in academia is aptly summarized by Ivan Kalmar (2019: 138), “Western power is one of its underpinnings regardless of any individual Orientalist’s good intentions.” The prevailing view is the same in postcolonial biblical studies, as Steed Davidson (2017: 29) states, “The deployment of western intellectual tools to construct knowledge of the geographical and cultural context of the Bible amounts to a form of Orientalism as described by Said.” Even if my scholarship is good, it is morally, politically, and epistemically bad. Because it claims its authority from Western concepts and institutions, it is necessarily a form of oppression.

            I am sympathetic to Suzanne Marchand’s (2009: xiv, xx) more expansive view of Orientalism, expressed in her history of German Orientalism:

I do not think that all knowledge, orientalist or otherwise, inevitably contributed to the building of empires, or even to the upholding of Eurocentric points of view… Of course, knowledge can be used in this way, but knowledge as understanding can also lead to appreciation, dialogue, self-critique, perspectival reorientation, and personal and cultural enrichment… [M]odern orientalism has furnished at least some of the tools necessary for constructing the post-imperialist worldviews we cultivate today.

            Let me give an example of my recent Orientalist activity in order to gauge the relative merits of these diagnoses. I recently spent three months at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. This is the oldest bastion of American Orientalism in the Middle East – indeed its name used to be The American School of Oriental Research. What activities occur at this place? Well, I did some research and writing, visited archaeological sites, and became friends with other Albright fellows, including several Palestinian scholars and artists. The Albright, it seems, is one of the few places in the Middle East where Jewish and Palestinian intellectuals can meet and mingle. We discussed politics, music, art, and much else as we enjoyed evenings in the garden and traveled in East and West Jerusalem for cultural events. I learned a lot from my Orientalist friends. My political and cultural horizons were certainly broadened by our exchanges. This is a wholly positive consequence of Orientalism, despite the fact that we were actively complicit in an Orientalist institution.

            So perhaps many postcolonial scholars overstate their case, conflating a whole range of Orientalist scholarship, past and present, into a monochromatic discourse of domination and political erasure. Forms of life, even in academia, are usually more complicated than that. I would say that there is a spectrum or scatter chart of varieties of Orientalism, including beneficial, benign, and malicious forms. But the standard version of Orientalism as a pernicious regime of power/knowledge is simplistic and somewhat grotesque. It entails the negation of the very possibility of philological knowledge and critical scholarship of ancient Middle Eastern texts, including the Hebrew Bible. In my view, such postmodern disavowals of universal concepts – including knowledge, empathy, tolerance, equality, and inalienable human rights – are symptoms of something deeper, a reaction to the uncertainty of the modern world and the decline of the humanities. We need not retreat into all-or-nothing thinking and esoteric governmental conspiracies. To paraphrase a Renaissance author who had his own issues, the fault is not in Orientalism, but in ourselves.

Bibliography

Davidson, Steed V. 2017. “Writing/Reading the Bible in Postcolonial Perspective.” Brill Research Perspectives in Biblical Interpretation 2.3: 1-99.

Kalmar, Ivan. 2019. “Orientalism and the Bible.” Pages 133-48 in Orientalism and Literature. Edited by Geoffrey P. Nash. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Marchand, Suzanne L. 2009. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Said, Edward W. 2014. Orientalism. 25th anniversary ed. New York: Vintage.