Today was spent revising a paper on Deuteronomy and Joshua as a combined document that I am presenting next month, so very little new research was done.  When that was finished, I did some reading in source criticism to pick up on a few little books I hadn’t seen before.

One of the things I have enjoyed about this week is re-reading some of the things written by Gerhard von Rad and Martin Noth.  It is amazing to me how insightful some of their material is.  Even when I disagree with them, it is impressive to read the clarity and originality in their thought.  There are many ideas floating around in Pentateuchal studies today that were first suggested by one of them, but quite often we take these ideas so much for granted that we forget someone had to think of it first.  We are truly standing on the shoulders of giants.

My Old Testament class in seminary was the last class that had to wade through von Rad’s Old Testament Theology, and I am glad I had to do that.  It is a shame that he is no longer studied as regularly as he once was, although I suposed we all must move on sometime.  We would all be lucky if even one of our ideas was an influential as many of his were, even if some of them have now been abandoned.

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