STUDENT NO:11361949
COURSE: OTW 311
ASSIGNMENT NO: 02
Topic: What according to Whitelam (1998), Dutcher-Walls (2009) and Steinberg (1995) is a social scientific approach to the OT? How does this approach help us understand Judges 9 better?
Introduction: The aim of social scientific criticism, as a subfield of biblical exegesis, is to study the biblical materials as a reflection of their cultural setting. The meaning and/or the social background of the text are thus more fully illumined by the exercise of sociological and anthropological methods and theories. The era of modern social-scientific research began in the late 19th century with the work of Karl Marx, Auguste Comte, and Herbert Spencer. Their social theories created an atmosphere of curiosity about the human condition and advanced the evolutionary perspective that had taken hold with the writing of Charles Darwin. As sociology and anthropology emerged as separate sciences.
Social scientific criticism is an interpretive method that uses heuristic models from the social sciences to understand the social context of ancient Israel and to interpret texts create within that context. From 1960’s there develops some of the Social groups, cultural relationships, patterns of behaviour, political structures which all of them are under the topic social criticism. As I have stated above that in 19th century many of the scholars were very much interested on the issue of social. In 1970 they were uses of the social criticism methods from variety of situations, and especial the one of sociology , which stress the life between social behavior of the people during the time of the old testament. Which has emerged is how scholars might have access to the ancient past and the multifaceted social world of ancient Palestine and the Mediterranean.
The quest of the social world of the bible
Those who were travelling from the east they reported about the culture that they were