This research project investigates the history of ideas in ancient Israel and examines the content and processes through which the divine was conceived, remembered, documented, and disseminated. To this end, biblical and extra-biblical texts, as well as the material culture of the southern Levant in the 1st millennium BCE, are researched in relation to knowledge constructions about the divine and the thought structures and patterns underlying them within their respective contexts. Based on these sources and their diverse perspectives, the project adopts an interdisciplinary approach aimed at identifying and reconstructing religious agencies, ancient socio-epistemic communities, centers and networks, whilst analysing and profiling their settings, regional and socio-historical contexts, dynamics and ideas.
The project comprises four subprojects that bring their research findings together on a shared digital platform, thereby creating synergies between the studies. In this way, knowledge constructions about the divine and the underlying thought structures are made visible; these are discussed in workshops and conferences and documented in various publications.
Subproject 1 Thinking Emerging Monotheism: Towards an Epistemology of the Divine as the One (PI Jan Dietrich, Bonn): How and why did monolatry and monotheism become thinkable in ancient Israel? Monolatry/monotheism implies, next to concentrated forms of belief and practice, a monistic thought structure that focuses, in religious terms, solely (“mono”) on the one or only God. How and why could this monistic thought structure emerge? What kind of knowledge constructions materialize as outcomes of this thought structure? To answer these innovative questions, strategies and processes of centralization, system differentiation, and abstraction as well as special focus points in the history of ideas will be analyzed and related to possible conditions, causes, and parallels.
Subproject 2 Thinking about God’s Knowability in Different Discourse Contexts: Towards an Epistemology of the Divine as the (Un-)Recognizable (PI Annette Schellenberg-Lagler, Wien): The subproject focusses on knowledge constructions of the divine in the Hebrew Bible as they relate the question of God’s knowability. How can YHWH (and work, will, etc.) be experienced, recognized, known, and understood? Why/How does this experience/knowledge matter? How can it be transmitted to others, and where are challenges and limitations? To answer these questions, we aim to unravel and explain the complexity and diversity of how the HB approaches the question of God’s knowability by reconstructing the knowledge constructions about God`s knowability in various writings and identifying their connections to discourses and epistemic communities.
Subproject 3 Daily Visible: Towards an Epistemology of the Divine Mediated Through (the) Pictures (PI Thomas Wagner, Wuppertal): The subproject examines the mediation of knowledge constructions of the divine through stamp and cylinder seals as first mass media. The seals are understood as externalizations of religious thoughts and as a medium to communicate a model of reality. Images serve to manifest ideas as well as social structures, and their increased outspread establishes spheres of influence and knowledge. Basing on these assumptions the project aims to map epistemic centers and the networks emanating from them in relation to local social and economic conditions, land use, settlement patterns, trade, and communication routes. In this way, the relationship between the communication of knowledge construction through sign/symbol/sujet, the resulting standards, the relationship of the individual artifact to the local and regional pictorial program and thus their local interpretations, become visible.
Subproject 4 Epistemic Centers or Networks: Towards an Epistemology of the Divine as the Many (PI Angelika Berlejung, Leipzig/Stellenbosch/Bar Ilan): Subproject 4 investigates the epistemology of the divine in Palestine/Israel (Cisjordan) in the first mill., mainly the Iron Ages I-III (1200-538 BCE), based on the study of sanctuaries and their cultic assemblages which are seen as external representations of religious thinking, repositories of religious knowledge, and strategies of religious action and communication. It encompasses a spatial analysis and models regional phenomena in order to gain a better understanding of the nature of the remains and artifacts discovered, their distribution within the sacred space, but also of the distribution of sanctuaries, their interaction and function as epistemic centers or networks in relation to natural resources, land use, settlement patterns, trade and communication routes.
In recent decades, Old Testament scholarship has increasingly adopted philosophical approaches to describe the traditional texts beyond their origins. In doing so, epistemological aspects that appear in the biblical texts have also been taken into account. Even though the biblical texts do not engage in a discourse on second-order thinking, as is customary in Western philosophical traditions, implicit epistemological assumptions can be observed within them. Consequently, various studies have appeared whose aim is to reconstruct some of the associated epistemological presuppositions, problems and perspectives. One part of the canon that lends itself more than others to such comparative-philosophical exegesis is the so-called ‘wisdom literature’. Thus, the Book of Qohelet in particular, but also the Book of Proverbs, have been the subject of epistemological analyses. The epistemology of the Book of Job, on the other hand, has so far received only marginal attention. This changes with this collection of essays, which appeared in 2023 in the journal Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel (HeBAI):
Jaco Gericke: Job’s First-Person Knowledge Claims and the Epistemology of Religious Disagreement
Jan Dietrich: Modes of Argumentation: The Epistemology of Arguments in the Book of Job
Katharine J. Dell: Representing Tradition: Exploring the Epistemology of the Friends in the Book of Job
Annette Schellenberg: Reflections on the Limitations of Cognition in the Book of Job
Thomas Wagner: Job as Sufferer: Self-Knowledge under the Influence of Permanent Pain
Mark Sneed: Epistemological Transcedence (the Sublime) as a Rhetorical Device in the Second Divine Speech
zuletzt bearbeitet am: 16.04.2026
