S. R. Driver “Taught the Faithful Criticism, and the Critics Faith”

The book is on the Jewish reception of critical biblical scholarship, written with Professor Edward Breuer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

G. A. Cooke, “Driver and Wellhausen,” The Harvard Theological Review 9 (1916), 249-257 [253].

I would like to thank Fred MacDowell for the suggestion to look in the Jewish Chronicle.

This obituary appears on pp. 19-20. I am the sort of person who enjoys reading scholars’ obituaries, and even visiting their graves; I twice put a small stone on Wellhausen’s gravestone in Göttingen. (Yes, I do have a sense of irony.)

No biography, or even long biographical sketch of Driver has been written, which is quite surprising given his significance. The longest description of his life and work known to me is J. A. Emerton, “Samuel Rolles Driver: 1841-1914,” in C. Edmund Bosworth, A Century of British Orientalists: 1902-2001 (Oxford: The British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2001), 122-138, and the following paragraphs are based on that account. See also James Barr, “The Old Testament,” in A Century of Theological and Religious Studies in Britain, ed. Ernest Nicholson (Oxford: The British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2003), 31-32.

Samuel R. Driver, A Treatise on the Use of the Tenses in Hebrew and Some Other Syntactical Questions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1892). It was republished in 1998 by Eerdmans with an important introduction by W. Randall Garr.

See the bibliography of his selected works in J. A. Emerton, “Driver, Samuel Rolles,” Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, ed. John H. Hayes (Nashville: Abingdon, 1999), 1.310, and his complete bibliography in his posthumous The Ideals of the Prophets: Sermons by the Late S. R. Driver (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1915), 213-234.

Editor’s note: Joosten held the position at the time of this post.

James Barr, “The Old Testament,” 31, speaks of “his care, his caution, and his avoidance of improbably novelties.”

See John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (London: SPCK, 1984), 273-275, introducing the chapter “England from 1880: The Triumph of Wellhausen.”

Marc Zvi Brettler and Lawrence H. Schiffman, “Nahum M. Sarna,” TheTorah (2017).

Marc Saperstein, “Israel Abrahams: Historian and Liberal-Traditional Jew,” in Danny Rich, ed., in Responding to the Call: A Life of Liberal Jewish Commitment (A Festschrift in Honour of Rabbi Harry Jacobi MBE) (London: Liberal Judaism, 2015), 148-160.

Ibid., 157.

Claude G. Montefiore, “Israel Abrahams and Liberal Judaism” in Jewish Studies in Memory of Israel Abraham by the Faculty and Visiting Teachers of the Jewish Institute of Religion, ed. The Faculty and Visiting Teachers of the Jewish Institute of Religion (NY: The Press of the Jewish Institute of Religion, 1927), LXII-LXVI [LXIII].

This may be a polemic against British scholars like Thomas Kelly Cheyne (1841-1915), also a contender for the Regius Professorship, who was much freer in emending biblical texts.

See Schechter’s 1903 address, available here: http://www.bombaxo.com/2009/06/27/higher-criticism-higher-anti-semitism/. As Professor Breuer and I will show in our forthcoming book, Schechter here and elsewhere did not object to higher-criticism per se, but to the manner in which Wellhausen and some others practiced it, using it to show the devolution of Israelite religion, which necessitated the rise of Christianity. In addition, most current readers of Schechter’s address no longer realize that it is primarily a polemic against Friedrich Delitzsch’s “‘Babel und Bibel’ Lectures,” and the emerging Bible-Babel controversy. On this controversy, see Bill T. Arnold and David B. Weisberg, “Babel und Bibel und Bias: How Anti-Semitism Distorted Friedrich Delitzsch’s Scholarship,” Bible Review 18 /1 (2002): 32–40, 47, and in greater detail, the same authors in, “A Centennial Review of Friedrich Delitzsch’s ‘Babel und Bibel’ Lectures,” Journal of Biblical Literature 121: 441–57. Thus, a careful reading of Schechter’s address in its historical context shows that the oft-repeated position that Schechter objected to biblical criticism is wrong. For an important treatment of Wellhausen and Judaism, see Lou H. Silberman, “Wellhausen and Judaism,” Semeia 25 (1983), 75-82.

This comment should be understood in the context of the competitive—often in an ugly fashion—attitude of German and British scholars toward each other in the early twentieth century.

I much prefer the term “traditional” to “Orthodox.” Orthodoxy as a movement began to develop only in the eighteenth century; see Moshe Samet, “The Beginnings of Orthodoxy,” Modern Judaism 8 (1988), 249-269, esp. 251: “There are numerous and varied proofs that Orthodoxy represents an historic innovation.”

Maimonides, “Eight Chapters,” in A Maimonides Reader, edited by Isadore Twersky (New York: Behrman House, 1972), 363.