Experiencing the Word of God: Reading as Wrestling

Abstract

Analytic philosophers are generally advised to steer clear of the substantive use of literary tropes whose ‘semantic content outstrips their propositional content’ (Rea, 2009: 6). But this poses a problem for analytic theologians whose primary texts are beset by such literary devices. Can such material be usefully marshalled, or should it be left to one side, to remain unemployed by analytic theologians? In The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture Yoram Hazony offers what I take to be the most convincing argument to date that the entire biblical narrative (literary tropes and all) ought both to be read as philosophy and that the philosophical content contained in the biblical narrative can be marshalled into non-narrative propositional arguments. In this paper I will address three areas of concern for his project, and by extension, what I take to be concerns for other analytic theologians who might follow his lead.