Programme
In the last 25 years several different approaches to Biblical exegesis were developed. The classical historical analysis with its origin in the philology of the 19th century and the tradition historical method which at first was developed by H. Gunkel are today still of importance; the latter because of the huge input by the research of Israel‘s neighbouring cultures. In these years, however, several new strategies were introduced using methods and theories from the literary studies and the modern linguistic sciences. The postmodern questioning of the intentionality of literature introduced the reader-response criticism into Biblical exegesis. The philosophical and literary theories of J. Kristeva and R. Barthes were used and so the canon of the Hebrew Bible could be understood as an intertext.
This rough overview on recently pracised methods of Biblical exegesis is much simplified because there are also regional perferences of methods and approaches. For instance connected to the postcolonial discourse there exist traditions of exegesis which consiously take the geographical, ethnical and social origion of the recipients into account.
That the interpretation often does not come to comparable results even by using similar methods could indicate deficits. The proposed session wants to introduce a discourse on methods and possibly to attempt a solutions.