Reviving the dead letter: Johann David Michaelis and the quest for Hebrew antiquity

This is an inquiry into the history of scholarship of the Hebrew Bible in Germany in the mid-eighteenth century. Its central concern is the rise of an historical and scientific philology in this period and the extent to which a philology oriented toward a critical recovery of the biblical world can retain its contemporary relevance---especially when practitioners no longer plead the special status of the Bible. This dissertation examines the work of one scholar, Gottingen professor Johann David Michaelis (1717--1791), widely hailed as a founder of critical study of the Bible. It argues that Michaelis's strategy for reviving biblical studies was bound up with the larger, contemporaneous attempt to make the study of classical literature a force in cultural transformation. By examining the work of Michaelis in a previously neglected context, neohumanist classical philology at Gottingen, this study explicates what must be seen as its deepest concern: the construction of a new paradigm for the study of the Hebrew Bible. What churchmen and theologians regarded as a coherent collection of sacred Scripture became, for Michaelis, the literary remainder of a classicized Hebrew antiquity. This study examines, in particular, three dimensions of Michaelis's attempt to reconstruct a classical Israel: the scientific study of Hebrew as a 'dead' language; the historical and aesthetic criticism of Hebrew poetry in its ancient Near Eastern context, and the recovery of Moses as a paragon of Israelite civilization. Michaelis, whose empirical method was explicitly non-confessional, addressed his work to the wider republic of letters in an attempt to vindicate the significance of the Bible in cultural, not ecclesial, terms. Critical successors rejected the neohumanistic program of Michaelis but retained his historical and philological mode of inquiry. They also assumed the Michaelian burden of providing new, non-confessional rationales for the study of a biblical corpus shorn of traditional meanings and embedded in a remote past, thus providing the framework for an idiosyncratic mode of biblical interpretation at odds with the historic sources of its own legitimacy.