David Lambert

What emerges from my first book project, How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)  is actually a series of questions concerning the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Western subjective terminology, the construction of Scripture as a personal, inward-directed, pedagogical, ultimately, pietistic text. In my second book project, "The Bible and its Translation: How Western Notions of the Self are Read into Scripture", I take up this matter much more broadly by examining translational practices for the full range of Hebrew terms associated with feelings, cognition, mind, and the self. Other scholars have pointed out specific instances in which the objective, material quality of certain Hebrew terms, such as those for "love", "honor" and "joy" has been effaced.

I believe that an even broader case needs to be made, that it is possible to speak of an overall psychologization of the biblical lexicon that has largely disrupted what were once not only the material, but also the social implications of such terms. While this process of psychologization continues to the present day in many respects, its foundations are to be found in late antiquity, a period of increased focus on notions of interiority and the individual self as the nexus of religious knowledge and practice. Developments in discourses of the self can be traced through translations (such as the Septuagint and the Vulgate) but also, more broadly, by means of innovations in language usage. As with my previous project on "repentance", my aim is to identify and articulate distinctions through comparison of broad swaths of primary material ranging from the Hebrew Bible to Hellenistic Jewish texts, early Christian texts, and rabbinic literature. In particular, I intend to focus on late antique interpretations of biblical literature that reveal changing notions of the self and, most significantly, an imposition of these notions back onto the biblical text.