Several books are now being published on the Internet; some of them are first published in paper, and then digitalized and published on the net.
What we might expect in the future is that Internet-publishing will be used more and more; some works will be published on the Internet, and not on paper, and some in both ways. The book I would like to point your attention to is one of those that is only published on the net. If you want a paper version for yourself, you will have to print it out:
Knut Holter & Louis C. Jonker (eds.), Global Hermeneutics? Reflections and Consequences.
SBL International Voices in Biblical Studies No 1. Society of Biblical Literature, Atlanta, Ga. 2010.
Several things might be said about this publication: First it is not a publication that take full advantage of publishing on the Internet. It is not a truly digitalized WWW version as it is simply a pdf version of what otherwise looks like a printed book version. It this case this means that there are just a few (5 or 6) hyper-links in the file. Just a simple .pdf file.
On the other hand, that being said, if the purpose is to make a publication assessable around the world in a speedy and cheap way this is achieved with this version too. This sems indeed to be some of the intentions behind this publication.
The volume has the following contributions:
PART I: CONTEXT
GEOGRAPHICAL AND INSTITUTIONAL ASPECTS OF GLOBAL OLD TESTAMENT
STUDIES
Knut Holter ………………………………………………………………………………………………..3
PART II: CASE STUDIES
HERMENEUTICAL PERSPECTIVES ON VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND ON
DIVINE VIOLENCE IN GERMAN-SPEAKING OLD TESTAMENT EXEGESIS
Gerlinde Baumann …………………………………………………………………………………….17
LAND IN THE OLD TESTAMENT: HERMENEUTICS FROM LATIN AMERICA
Roy H. May, Jr. …………………………………………………………………………………………25
READING THE OLD TESTAMENT FROM A NIGERIAN BACKGROUND: A WOMAN’S
PERSPECTIVE
Mary Jerome Obiorah ………………………………………………………………………………..35
PART III: CONSEQUENCES
THE GLOBAL CONTEXT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR OLD TESTAMENT
INTERPRETATION
Louis C. Jonker …………………………………………………………………………………………47
THE GLOBAL CONTEXT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR OLD TESTAMENT
TRANSLATION
Aloo Mojola ……………………………………………………………………………………………..57
PART IV: AFTERWORD
WHEN BIBLICAL SCHOLARS TALK ABOUT “GLOBAL” BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION
Knut Holter ………………………………………………………………………………………………85
In order to wet your appetite for this volume, I provide a rather extensive quote from the Introduction in the first study by prof. Knut Holter:
Academic studies of the Old Testament—as we know this field within our
guild, the International Organisation for the Study of the Old Testament (IOSOT)—
are for most practical purposes a northern, theological enterprise.
First, it is mainly a northern enterprise, simply because most of us are
northerners. We call ourselves an international guild, and when we interact—by
visiting each other, sending students to each other or doing research together—we
refer to this as ‘internationalisation’ in our annual institutional reports. Still, it is
mainly a northern internationalisation, as most of us come from—and therefore
express and reflect the concerns of—the North Atlantic or North Mediterranean. As
far as IOSOT is concerned, it is mainly a European organisation, as pointed out at
our congress in Oslo nine years ago by David J. A. Clines. After a survey of
participants and paper readers in the IOSOT congresses between 1953 and 1998, he
concludes that the organisation will have to decide whether to rename itself a
European organisation or to take steps to become what its traditional name actually
suggests, a more representatively international organisation.
Second, academic Old Testament studies—again, as we know this within the
IOSOT—are mainly a theological enterprise. Certainly, not all of us consider
ourselves theologians. And our guild has members whose institutional framework
is not a faculty of theology, but rather faculties of arts or social sciences, with their
various departments of Ancient Near Eastern languages, linguistics, literature,
religious studies, or even biblical studies. Still, the majority of the guild members
work in institutional frameworks of theology, that is, Christian theology. This fact
explains the relatively high number of Old Testament scholars compared to that of
specialists in other classical religious texts, and it also explains why a theologically
biased name like the “International Organisation for the Study of the Old
Testament” has survived up until today.
My message here is that the first of these two points, the predominantly
northern context of academic Old Testament studies, will soon be history, whereas
the second point, the—institutionally speaking—theological context of academic
Old Testament studies will continue to play an important role. I will argue that we
today are able to see how the two develop in parallel. In the same way as
Christianity throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is gradually
becoming a religion of the Global South, so too are theological and biblical studies
gradually becoming southern academic enterprises. The consequence as far as our
guild is concerned is that our traditional northern concepts of Old Testament studies
will eventually have to be balanced by more southern concepts, as we are heading
towards a more global Old Testament studies. This was the rationale behind the
organising of a seminar on global biblical hermeneutics in the midst of a typically
northern organisation like the IOSOT. The seminar was divided into three parts:
Contexts, Cases and Consequences. My own contribution deals with the question of
contexts, and it is an attempt at discussing some geographical and institutional
aspects of a new and global Old Testament studies in relation to its traditional
northern location.”
Philonica et Neotestamentica 