UPPSALA, EXEGETICAL SCHOOL OF. — A Lutheran school of exegesis, which emerged during and after the last world war, headed by Ivan Engnell of the University of U., and which, because of the singular appeal of its central “message,” continues to increase its international influence, despite the sometimes severe criticisms to which it has been subjected. Its fullest and most up-to-date expression is the biblical dictionary Svenskt Bibliiskt Uppslagsverk (2 vols., Gävle 1948 and 1952).
With great emphasis, the E. S. of U. professes to be “realistic,” and even “unprejudiced.” Abandoning “modern European interpretation,” it wishes to return to the simple facts of the ancient Near East. It WELLHAUSEN, JULIUS (v.) as its number-one enemy, repeatedly condemned as “evolutionistic,” since it was launched by the Hegelian W. Vatke (1806–82); this school is said to have disastrously led all biblical exegesis astray by introducing a modern conception of “book,” binding the observed facts to an a priori system of values, at the head of which it placed the “ethical monotheism of the prophets,” and mixing exegesis with “anachronistic” phantasies that have no foundation earlier than the nineteenth century. Besides Wellhausen, his critic H. Gunkel must also be “de-Westernized,” since he still describes the literary genres (v.) of the Old Testament too much “according to a typically Western conception of the book” (I, col. 558).
I. Engnell strives to arrive at an Orientalist exegesis of the Bible, and on this point he extols the merits of the Comparative School of Religions of W. Bousset and H. Gressmann, although, since even that school did not always respect the distinctive character of ancient Near Eastern religion, it does not stand outside the ranks of the enemies of the “revolution against evolutionism” (II, col. 888). To arrive, according to Engnell, at a realistic exegesis—that is, one that strives to read the sacred texts in the manner of their first hearers or readers—careful philological analysis is not enough. One must gain a perfectly clear understanding of the conception of the book held at that time, when it was still accompanied by oral tradition, which could even serve to correct the book; this is not a tradition of the common people, but of specialists in the temples: oral and written tradition in the East originated in the temple, as a “booklet” or “legend” read or performed during a rite. Besides the philological analysis of the text and of the “forms” or genres, there must be an analysis of the “history of ideas” and of the “religious history” of that world, regarded as a homogeneous ancient Near Eastern world: the ancient Near East as a unity of cultural morphology is the fundamental concept of Uppsala hermeneutics.
The E. S. of U. arrives at this concept by noting the existence of considerable similarities among all the components of that highly religious cultural sphere—for example, between Egypt in the Old Kingdom and Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C. Yet in interpreting these similarities it uses an intuitive method, not the causal one that seems obvious to us, which proceeds by assuming prehistoric “contacts,” such as commercial relations, on the occasion of which a culture or an equivalent stimulus would have spread. If the convergences are numerous in quantity or stand out in quality at several points, one might suppose that the two similar cultures derive, as daughters of the same mother, from a more remote culture. If such convergences occur in certain elementary matters among peoples living under similar conditions (for example, in irrigated fields), one may suppose that human nature under identical conditions produces similar things; and after very extensive research conducted by a rigorous method into the facts establishing such relationships, one may attempt an outline of the true “cultural history.”
Engnell arrives at his conception, however, more through a living intuition based on the entire archaeological and philological material that has survived from the ancient East than by a causal route. He calls four sciences to his aid: the history of religion, which gathers extensive material; religious sociology, which deals with the social structures corresponding to certain “types” of religion; religious psychology, which through its experiments or analyses examines the typical relationships between religion and life; and finally, the most important, religious phenomenology, which describes religious phenomena, including “ideas” in themselves, without concern for relations of origin, consequences, or evaluations. Engnell’s intuition thus reaches a very simple content of the whole of ancient Near Eastern religion, called “the real idea.” The king of the ancient East has religious significance; that is, he is the protagonist of the supreme rite: the renewal of fertile life at the New Year. On this occasion, in a five-act liturgy, the king implores and brings about abundance and blessing from heaven: the death of the old, corrupted life is enacted through the dramatic representation of the death and resurrection of the god (Tammūz); the creation of the world is recited or performed theatrically, with a ritual combat in which primordial monsters and their following—the present enemies—are defeated; to obtain fertility, the rite of the sacred marriage is performed; the gods are led in a triumphant procession, signifying the triumph of the risen god. According to Engnell, all ancient Near Eastern life revolves around this rite: secondary is the “myth,” born from the “text” of this rite; secondary are the festivals held throughout the year (which repeat some particular feature of the New Year rite); secondary are the social functions of the deified king—for example, the works he undertakes to promote the welfare of the people, his judgments, and the war against enemies; everything reflects the ritual action celebrated at the New Year. Both written and oral literature, with all its genres—narratives of stories and history, hymns, lamentations—is derived from that great rite of the deified king; in this rite the E. S. of U. places the origin of the laws, of religious conceptions, of the original prophetism of Israel (visionaries who see the destinies fixed at the New Year, and secondarily during the year), and even of messianic faith: the hope in the king who will bring about the total renewal of life. Engnell concedes, however, that in Israel there was an “anti-Canaanite” movement, during which the rites and the position of the king were first theologized by the priests (already in the “Tetrateuch,” the first work of “traditional” history in Israel: Gen., Ex., Lev., Num.), and then more radically in the unified work of the “Deuteronomist” (all the historical books from Deuteronomy through Kings, inclusive), in which passages unfavorable to the king are found not infrequently, and finally, with still greater vehemence, in the prophetic books, with their bitter anti-monarchical struggle, and in the work of the Chronicler, while many psalms still evoke the original “pattern” of the New Year rite. In the other works of the Old Testament, the rite and the corresponding ideology of the deified king are found in a “disintegrated” state. The task of biblical hermeneutics is to recompose and reintegrate it, using all the resources of modern science, above all the philological and archaeological sciences of the ancient Near East.
The considerable merits of the E. S. of U. must be acknowledged: it usefully urges a deeper study of the ancient Near East; also SPIRITO (v.), one must immerse oneself in knowledge of the things of the East to the point of avoiding the danger of falling into a merely European interpretation. It must also be commended for reintroducing into the discussion Pentateuch (v.) and of the other biblical books the concept of “oral tradition,” and for showing that a stable “redaction” of some text is possible even when using only oral means.
On the other hand, it is not permissible to align oneself with the school’s partial positivism or skepticism. Ethnography, including prehistoric ethnography, proceeding along the causal path indicated above, has developed a logic that can be employed with moderate confidence. In treating the concept of primitive monotheism, for example, Engnell (II, col. 889) describes Fr. W. Schmidt as an “apriorist,” without acknowledging his merit in establishing a method and gathering concrete data for cultural history, which present a probability or certainty far greater than that of the special and extremely difficult problem of primitive monotheism.
That almost universal ritualism, extended to the whole culture of the Old and even of the New Testament, appears to be based on a considerable exaggeration. The “reintegration” of the pattern in texts in which it would be highly “disintegrated” can lend itself to incredible arbitrariness. This demonstrates that a logical error has been committed. The reintegration of an essentially pagan rite into the Bible cannot be the aim and end of exegesis, when its interpretation is to be removed from the analogy of faith, practiced since the earliest periods of the history of exegesis. Nor can the ancient Orient, in principle, be reduced to a “panritual” expression of the solemn rite of the New Year. That rite is indeed a most important center; but God stands at the center of creation in every sense. The total importance attributed to that rite must therefore be denied; as a result, the school, although it desires to do so, does not sufficiently assess the differences among the individual peoples, periods, texts, and remnants of the ancient Orient. For anyone who takes all those differences into account, the unitary intuition of the U. e. s. is not necessary; there are many other components of autonomous religious, civil, and social life.
Although it calls itself “unprejudiced,” the U. e. s. is really Lutheran in nature. Engnell should concede that he, like Luther, wishes to carry out his own “reform” of modern exegesis, reacting against modern German idealism, which has infiltrated exegesis, in a manner not entirely dissimilar to that in which Luther reacted against the “Greek element” introduced especially through Christian Aristotelianism. Like Luther, Engnell too underwent a kind of “conversion experience,” that is, an experience of the very simple reality of the rite of the deified king at the New Year; once this is admitted, exegesis is easily justified as imbued with the reality of the Orient. Whoever does not admit it, on the other hand, is accused of introducing epistemological and metaphysical principles that Engnell calls “aprioristic,” and which all the Orientalist works of such exegetes will never justify, since they lack the “intuitive” and “ritualistic” faith that for him constitutes the sole organon lepiticon of exegetical reality. Engnell’s exegesis thus has the advantage of a strong faith in a simplifying message of a moving rite, which explains its success, but it must inspire caution because of the danger always entailed by a “revolution” which, while bringing much good, in some respects fails to respect the dignity of human reason. Much more than Engnell does, one must acknowledge the analogy of faith in Scripture and tradition, and the history of exegesis must not be regarded as a mere succession of the errors of human reason.
Predecessors of the U. e. s. were the Myth and ritual school (S. H. Hooke and others) in England, as well as S. Mowinckel in Oslo and others in Scandinavia, who refer everything, especially the Psalms, to a social naturistic ritual centered on the king.