Thomas Römer (1) (1955–)

This is a valuable and approachable summary aimed at the student as well as the specialist; because it is aimed at the student it is accessible to informed members of the general public - although the level of “informed” requires at a bare minimum “is familiar with the documentary hypothesis” and preferably “is broadly familiar with the works of the major German Old Testament form critics of the middle of the 20th Century”. (In contrast, Römer’s more recent The Invention of show more God really is aimed at the general public, and part of it covers the broad conclusions of this more detailed study.)

Römer provides good coverage of the major older and current scholarly positions and then goes on to cover his own model, with detailed textual arguments to back him up. This is an area of long expertise for Römer, and it shows.

This isn't to imply that he's necessarily right on every detail: one of the interesting aspects of this is the availability (currently) on-line of this roundtable (PDF warning) of responses to the book by his peers, with his further response to them. Together with the book, it allows one to see the areas of broad consensus and the scale and import of the disagreements. At a detailed level there’s plenty to argue about, with little chance of evidence emerging to resolve it; but to a non-specialist it's the broad agreement that stands out.

In summary: the Babylonian Exile generated, probably by a “school” (Noth originally thought by a single individual) a coherent history running from our Book of Deuteronomy through to the end of the Second Book of Kings, substantially redrafted and possibly largely composed at that time. The same group probably was responsible for the cores of an earlier generation of the individual books in the Josianic period. Some tertiary levels of editing took place after the return from exile. Only rather later on were the connections realigned to make Deuteronomy part of the Pentateuch (the rest of which was not pulled together until somewhat later) and segregated from the Joshua-to-Kings sequence.

Although they did draw on Hebraic traditions - part of their whole point was to recast names that were already familiar in a different light - the models for the covenant literature in Deuteronomy were (vastly more probably) current documents in the Assyrian context rather than old Hebraic traditions, and much of the Court history reflects conditions of the sixth century rather than of the ninth and tenth.

Most importantly for many people, although there are internal and external reasons to believe that the compilers did not make everything up out of whole cloth, there is abundant evidence to show that their purpose of retrojecting an Israel which was monolatrous and committed to a centralised place of worship into a distant past made it very difficult to recover anything other than an extremely scanty outline of “what really happened“ from their work. (The fact that this can be done to the degree it can is part of the evidence that they didn't make everything up.) Still, the Exodus, the history of conquest, and the Davidic United Kingdom have to be bid goodbye (the possible to probable existence of Moses, David, Solomon remains).

Römer’s specific contributions centre around the identification of three main stages (Josianic, Exilic, Persian) with different core concerns (centralisation of worship, explaining the exile, and separation from the “people of the land” along with an emergent monotheism). These are reasonable arguments, but consensus is still a long way away. show less

Questo libro è entrato subito nelle mie simpatie dichiarando nell’introduzione: L’approccio integralista, che pensa di poter utilizzare i grandi testi fondamentali come dei «libri di ricette» applicabili direttamente in tutti i tempi e in ogni circostanza, di fatto li manipola, in modo consapevole o inconsapevole, trasformandoli in armi ideologiche.

Da atea mi sembra un discorso quasi banale: la storia dovrebbe averci insegnato che prendere alla lettera i testi considerati sacri è show more raramente una buona idea, soprattutto se l’interpretazione è avulsa dalla realtà – come di solito lo sono quelle integraliste. D’altro canto, trovare conferme di concezioni progressiste in testi scritti da persone vissute in un contesto socio-culturale dal quale ci separano secoli di evoluzione culturale non ha senso: come potevano essere favorevoli ai rapporti omosessuali persone che manco avevano il concetto di omosessualità?

Che fare dunque? Visto che ignorare cosa dicono i testi considerati sacri non sembra al momento un’opzione praticabile, direi che iniziare con il collocarli nella loro epoca storica e interpretarli di conseguenza sia già una buona idea. Come l’esistenza della schiavitù non è più tollerabile (o almeno, non dovrebbe esserlo), così non è più accettabile la discriminazione in base all’orientamento sessuale. Checché ne dica la Bibbia, perché la parola scritta è rimasta immutata, ma noi siamo cambiatu.

L’omosessualità nella Bibbia e nell’antico Vicino Oriente è un libriccino agile per introdursi nella questione. Si legge con piacere e interesse e in un numero di pagine contenuto riescono a spiegarci qual era la visione di quelli che noi oggi chiamiamo rapporti omosessuali nelle civiltà mediorientali dell’antichità. show less

> Nicolas (Amazon) : https://www.amazon.fr/gp/customer-reviews/R3QQ50P9RXJUX2?ref=pf_vv_at_pdctrvw_sr...
> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Romer-LInvention-de-Dieu/982339
> Études (revue) : https://www.revue-etudes.com/article/l-invention-de-dieu-16452

> Entretien avec Thomas Römer, professeur au collège de France, lauréat 2014 du Prix d’histoire des religions de la Fondation « Les amis de Pierre-Antoine Bernheim » décerné par l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. show more
—le 22 oct. 2014 (Canal Académie)

> Vidal Daniel. Thomas Römer, L’INVENTION DE DIEU , Paris, Éditions du Seuil, coll. « Les Livres du nouveau monde », 2014, 352 p.
In: Archives de sciences sociales des religions, n° 172 (2015), p. 364. … ; (en ligne),
URL : http://journals.openedition.org/assr/27452 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/assr.27452 ; JSTOR : https://www.jstor.org/stable/24741158 show less