How to read the Bible has been a perpetual question for centuries, probably even since religious leaders decided to put the wide variety of literatures we call the Bible into a canonical format during the fourth and fifth centuries CE. The canonical process has, of course, been vastly different for Jewish and Christian communities and this content will focus on the Christian Western side here. The canonical formation of the Bible is also largely shrouded in the distant past of the first few centuries of what we call the “Common Era (CE).” For that reason we know very little about the history of the biblical canonical process because people of that era did not care for what is called the quest for the historical origins of the Bible today. This quest has characterized the modern era that emerged in sixteenth-century European societies due to various scientific, cultural, social, religious, economic, and political developments.
When the modern worldview fully replaced the medieval worldview by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a new exegetical methodology for reading the Bible established itself, eventually becoming known as “historical criticism.” In the nineteenth century, this new method of biblical interpretation came to be accepted as scientifically appropriate, and after institutional-academic and religious-theological battles this method was recognized as reading the Bible “accurately.” To this day, many people still believe that proper exegesis explains who the original authors were, why they composed this or that biblical text, and what they meant in their context. Historical criticism is surely one of the most successful marketing triumphs in theological and religious studies. Nowadays, all readers assume this approach if they are not outright fundamentalist Christians who consider the Bible as the Word of God that does not require or involve any interpretive process at all.
The question for contemporary readers is how to read the Bible during this time that the economist Yanis Varoufakis and others characterize as the biotechnofeudal era, the time after capitalism when corporate-militaristic-economic infrastructures have gained superior feudalistic power threatening to leave national-economic sovereignty in the dustbin of history.
Of course, the characteristics of our era are not entirely new. After all, already at the turn of the millennium famous philosophers, such as Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida, talked about the postmodern era, the time after modernity, and what this shift means for thinking about the world today. Moreover, already in the early decades of the twentieth century, scientific ideas arose that expanded, and even challenged, the modern worldview.
As the world is increasingly moving into a multilateral system in which Western countries do not dominate the
In short, the question for Bible readers today is no longer what the Bible meant way back when it was written, and the question is surely not what the Bible means for a reader personally. Instead, biblical interpreters need to face the question of how to read the Bible in today’s biotechnofeudal era.
And what are the characteristics of the biotechnofeudal era? As Varoufakis explains, we do not live anymore in a
What does this kind of social location mean for biblical interpretation? If one reads in favor of the biotechnofeudal
A very short example shall illustrate this hermeneutics of liberation, freedom, equality, and justice. For instance, how shall we read Joshua 2 for gender justice in the biotechnofeudal era? In the PPS way of reading the Bible, Rahab turns into a kind woman who falls in love with God and thus helps the Israelite spies to conquer the land. Historical critics debate when Joshua 2 was written and by whom and whether the story reflects a postexilic, Babylonian context. Feminist historical critics emphasize the centrality of the female Canaanite character and redefine the negative stereotypical characterization of Rahab as a prostitute.
Perhaps the best interpretation in the biotechnofeudal era is a feminist-postcolonial reading that takes seriously the difficult economic, socio-political, cultural, and religious setting of Rahab, as she encounters the colonizing power in the form of the two Israelite spies. Here is how the theologian, Marcella María Althaus-Reid, describes Rahab’s predicament in Joshua 2. In this reading, Rahab emerges as a complicated, and ultimately defeated, character submissive to the colonizing transformation of her land. Althaus-Reid explains:
In this feminist-postcolonial reading, Rahab is a highly compromised and lost biblical character. After all, she complies with the colonizers and becomes one of them. As a result, she loses her identity, her heritage, and her history. Giving up her identity as a Canaanite to survive, she becomes an Israelite and nothing is known about her previous life. In Joshua 2, her Canaanite voice is absent.
Is this not an appropriate interpretation of Joshua 2 in the biotechnofeudal era? Cooptation into digital platforms, being lost in somebody else’s habits and conventions, and not even knowing anymore from where one hails are central characteristics of millions and millions of people today. Althaus-Reid’s creative and highly provocative reading is grounded in a cultural-studies hermeneutics at its best.
Yet the point is not to agree with this interpretation but to critically analyze and think about the conditions of our lives during the biotechnofeudal age, as we read the Bible. How to read biblical texts thus turns into a much needed exercise of cultural, political, economic, and theo-religious interrogation about what it means to live in this world in the Here and Now.
[1] Marcella María Althaus-Reid, “Searching for a Queer Sophia-Wisdom: The Post-Colonial Rahab,” chap. in Patriarchs, Prophets and Other Villains, ed. Lisa Isherwood (London: Equinox, 2016), 137.