UPSALA, EXERGETICAL SCHOOL OF. – A Lutheran exegetical school that emerged during and after the Second World War, led by Ivan Engnell of the University of Uppsala. Owing to the singular appeal of its central “message,” it continues to increase its international influence despite the severe criticisms to which it has been subjected.
The school’s most complete and up-to-date expression is the biblical dictionary *Svensk Biblist Uppslagsverk* (2 vols., Gävle 1948 and 1952).
With great emphasis, the Uppsala exegetical school professes itself to be “realistic,” even “unprejudiced.” Abandoning modern European interpretation, it seeks to return to the simple facts of the ancient Near East. It regards the historical-critical school of Wellhausen (q.v.) as its number one enemy, repeatedly condemning it as “evolutionary,” launched as it was in 1866–82. This school, it argues, has disastrously misled all biblical exegesis by introducing a modern conception of the “book,” binding observed facts to an a priori system of values, at the head of which was placed the “ethical monotheism of the prophets,” and mingling exegesis with “anachronistic” fantasies that have no foundation prior to the nineteenth century. Alongside Wellhausen, H. Gunkel must also be “de-occidentalized,” since he still describes the literary genres (q.v.) of the Old Testament “according to a typically Western conception of the book” (I, col. 558).
Ivan Engnell strives to arrive at an Oriental exegesis of the Bible, and on this point he extols the merits of the comparative religion school of W. Bousset and H. Gressmann, even though this school, too, has not always respected the special character of ancient Near Eastern religion and thus does not escape the ranks of the enemies of the “revolution against evolutionism” (II, col. 888).
To achieve, according to Engnell, a realistic exegesis—one that seeks to read the sacred texts as the first listeners and readers would have done—careful philological analysis is not enough. One must form a clear conception of the book as it was then, still accompanied by oral tradition, which could even serve to correct the book itself. This is not a tradition of the common people but of specialists in the temples: oral and written tradition in the East arose in the temple as a “little book” or “legend” read or performed during a rite. In addition to philological analysis of the text and its “forms” or genres, one must also analyze the “history of ideas” and the “history of religion” of that supposedly homogeneous ancient Near Eastern world. The ancient Near East as a unit of cultural morphology is the fundamental concept of Uppsala hermeneutics.
The Uppsala exegetical school arrives at this concept by noting the remarkable similarities among all the components of that highly religious cultural sphere—for example, between Old Kingdom Egypt and third-millennium BCE Mesopotamia. Yet in interpreting these similarities, it employs an intuitive method rather than the causal method that seems obvious to us, which proceeds by positing “prehistoric contacts,” such as commercial relations, through which culture or an equivalent stimulus might have spread. If the convergences are numerous in quantity or striking in quality at several points, one might think that both similar cultures derive, like daughters of the same mother, from a more remote culture in time. If such convergences occur in elementary matters among peoples living under similar conditions (for example, in irrigated fields), one might think that human nature under the same conditions produces similar things. After vast research conducted with rigorous method on the facts establishing such relations, one may attempt to sketch the true “cultural history.”
Engnell, however, arrives at his conception less through causal means than through a living intuition drawn from all the archaeological and philological material remaining from the ancient Near East. He calls four sciences to aid him: the history of religion, which gathers vast material; the sociology of religion, which concerns itself with the social structures corresponding to certain “types” of religion; the psychology of religion, which, through experiments or analyses, examines the typical relations between religion and life; and, most important, the phenomenology of religion, which describes religious phenomena, including “ideas” in themselves, without regard to origins, consequences, or evaluations. Engnell’s intuition thus reaches a very simple content of all ancient Near Eastern religion, which he calls “the royal idea.” The king of ancient Near East held religious significance, that is, he was the protagonist of the supreme rite: the renewal of life at the New Year. On this occasion, in a five-act liturgy, the king performed the abundance and blessing from heaven: the death of old corrupt life was enacted through the dramatic representation of the death and resurrection of the god (Tammuz); the creation of the world was recited or staged in a ritual combat in which primordial monsters and their retinue—the present enemies—were defeated; to obtain fertility, the sacred marriage rite was performed; the gods were led in a triumphal 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 throughout the year (which repeat particular traits of the New Year rite); secondary are the social functions of the deified king, for example, the works he performs to promote the people’s well-being, his judgments, and his wars against enemies—all reflecting the ritual action celebrated at the New Year.
Literature, whether written or oral, with all its genres—stories and histories, hymns, lamentations—derives from this great rite of the deified king. In this rite, the Uppsala exegetical school locates the origin of laws, religious conceptions, the original prophecy of Israel (seers who see destinies fixed at the New Year and secondarily during the year), and even messianic faith: the hope in the king who will bring about the total renewal of life. Yet Engnell concedes that there was in Israel an “anti-Canaanite” movement, during which the rites and the king’s position were first theologized by the priests (already in the “Tetrateuch,” the first work of “tradition” history in Israel: Gen., Ex., Lev., Num.), and then more radically in the unified work of the “Deuteronomist” (all the historical books from Deuteronomy to Kings inclusive), where passages unfavorable to the king are not infrequent, and finally, with even greater vehemence, in the prophetic books, with their fierce anti-Baal polemic, and in the work of the Chronicler, while many psalms still evoke the original “schema” 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” stage. The task of biblical hermeneutics is to reconstruct and reintegrate them, using all the means of modern science, above all philology and archaeology of the ancient Near East.
The considerable merits of the Uppsala exegetical school must be acknowledged. It usefully invites deeper study of ancient Near Eastern science: even according to *Divino afflante Spiritu* (q.v.), one must immerse oneself in the knowledge of Oriental matters to avoid the danger of falling into a merely European interpretation. It must also be credited for having reintroduced into the discussion of the Pentateuch (q.v.) and other biblical books the concept of “oral tradition,” and for having shown that a stable “redaction” of certain texts is possible even using only oral means.
On the other hand, it is not permissible to associate oneself with the partial positivism or scepticism of the school. Ethnography, even prehistoric, proceeding along the causal path indicated above, has developed a logic which, with moderate confidence, can be employed. When dealing with the concept of primitive monotheism, for instance, Engnell (II, col. 88g) describes Fr. W. Schmidt as an "apriorist," without acknowledging the merit of having established a method and gathered concrete data for the history of culture, which present a probability or certainty far superior to that of the special and exceedingly difficult problem of primitive monotheism.
That almost universal ritualism, extended to the entire culture of the Old and even the New Testament, appears to be based on a great exaggeration. The "reintegration" of the schema in texts where it would be much "disintegrated" may lend itself to incredible arbitrariness. This demonstrates that a logical defect has been committed. The reintegration of a substantially pagan rite into the Bible cannot be the end and purpose of exegesis, especially when one seeks to exempt its interpretation from the analogy of faith, practised since the earliest times in the history of exegesis. Nor can the ancient East, in principle, be reduced to a "paniric" expression of the solemn New Year's rite. That rite is indeed a very important centre; but God is at the centre of creation in every sense. Therefore, the total importance attributed to that rite must be denied, for which reason the school, despite its desire, does not sufficiently evaluate the differences between individual peoples, periods, texts, and remnants of the ancient East. For those who take all these differences into account, the unifying intuition of the so-called "Scuola esegetica di Uppsala" (Uppsala exegetical school) is not necessary; there are many other components of religious, civil, and autonomous social life.
Although it is described as "unprejudiced," the Uppsala exegetical school is in fact of a Lutheran nature. Engnell should concede that, like Luther, he wishes to carry out his "reformation" of modern exegesis, reacting against modern German idealism, which has infiltrated exegesis in a manner not altogether dissimilar to that in which Luther reacted against the "Greek element" introduced especially through Christian Aristotelianism. Like Luther, Engnell also underwent some "conversion experience," namely, the very simple reality of the rite of the deified king at the New Year, which, once admitted, easily justifies exegesis as being imbued with Oriental reality; whoever does not admit it is accused of introducing gnoseological and metaphysical principles which Engnell terms "aprioristic" and which all the Orientalist works of such exegesis will never justify, lacking the "intuitive" and "ritualistic" faith which, for him, constitutes the only organon lepticon of exegetical reality. Engnell's exegesis therefore has the advantage of a strong faith in a simplifying message of a moving rite, which explains its success, but it must be approached with caution due to the danger always inherent in a "revolution" which, while bringing much good, in some respects does not respect the dignity of human reason. Far more than Engnell does, one must admit the analogy of faith in Scripture and tradition, and the history of exegesis must not be regarded as a mere succession of errors of human reason.
Predecessors of the Uppsala exegetical school 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 which is promoted in the king.