Notes on Ethnographic Method and Biblical Interpretation

Abstract

These observations offer some thoughts of epistemological and methodological character on the ways the social information found in biblical stories is commonly used for social-science interpretations in contemporary Old Testament scholarship. The uses of biblical narrative as some kind of historical ethnographic record on the society of "ancient Israel" during the first millennium BCE should be challenged on two basic levels: an ethnographic level, in which to deal with issues of cultural representations, ideological and symbolical constructs, ancient epistemological matrices, etc.; and a historical level, in which to treat the primary and secondary sources for history writing and reflect on how the data from such sources is analysed and used.