DISCOURSING OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY

BEN C. OLLENBURGER
Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries

The Old Testament is a theological book. Hence, a presentation of the theology of the Old Testament requires no particular justification. 1 We may contrast these opening sentences of Rolf Rendtorffs Old Testament theology with David H. Aarons judgment, certainly not new to him, that the Hebrew Bible contains very little theology or none at all.2 The Bible, Aaron says, is replete with beliefs and ideologies about God, politics, social order, ritual, etc., but not theology. Even so, scholars have not refrained from imposing constructed theologies upon Tanakh, from which it strictly follows that scholarly attempts to describe such a theology are essentially irrelevant to the furtherance of our understanding of Israelite ideas.3 What then makes the Old Testament a theological book, on Rendtorffs view, such that Old Testament theology requires no particular justification? If I have understood him fairly, Rendtorff holds that the Old Testament is a theological book, thereby justifying Old Testament theology, for three reasons: (1) the Old Testament or Tanakh is, or has been until modernityin any event, it should remain of foundational (grundlegende ) significance to Judaism and Christianity, and respectively, to the their faith and life; 4 (2) the final and canonical form of the Old Testament has enjoyed and should enjoy that significance, thereby justifying a canonically oriented Old Testament theology; (3) this canonical re-narration of the texts in (Hebrew) canonical sequence helps to recover their theological intentions, which can then be interconnected thematically. 5
1 Rolf Rendtorff, Theologie des Alten Testaments: Ein kanonischer Entwurf (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, vol. 1, 1999), p. 1. 2 David H. Aaron, Biblical Ambiguities: Metaphor, Semantics, and Divine Images (Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. 17. 3 Aaron, Biblical Ambiguities , p. 17. 4 I take Rendtorff to mean that the Old Testament or the Tanakh is foundational if apart from it a community could not fulfill its commitment (before God) to be that kind of community. 5 Rendtorff, Theologie , pp. 1-3. He discusses the different canons, and the

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2003 Also available online www.brill.nl

Biblical Interpretation 11, 3/4

618

ben c. ollenburger

The Old Testament is thereby a theological book, and Old Testament theology has its justification. Rendtorff and Aaron understand different things by theology. They differ, then, over whether the Tanakh/Old Testament is in any sense a theological book. It is not my aim to assess these differences and possible disagreements, much less try to adjudicate or resolve them. Rendtorff and Aaron serve but as examples, neither entirely representative, of Old Testament theology, on one hand, and contemporary academic biblical studies on the other. I will stipulate here that, for the purposes of this essay, academic biblical studies refers to biblical scholarship, and the disciplines it comprises, pursued in and for the academy, from which they derive their rationale, aims, and criteria of assessment.6 Putting it that way suggests a distinction, perhaps even a disjunction, between the twoa disjunction between Old Testament theology and contemporary academic biblical studies. That disjunction, in turn, would alarm a great many of those who have proposed or fabricated Old Testament theologies.7 Regardless, Rendtorff and Aaron together imply such a disjunction. Let me hasten to add that I intend no criticism of Rendtorff in drawing this conclusion. The quality of Rendtorffs contributions to academic biblical studies is not in question, least of all by me. Neither does the conclusion drawn in the preceding paragraph imply criticism (or, for that matter, approbation) of Rendtorffs Old Testament theology. The first few pages of that works first volume serve my purposes here by virtue of their straightforward claims that (a) the Old Testament is a theological book, and that (b) Old Testament theology thus needs no particular justification. These are matters for exploration and of dissent. Stephen Fowl, for example, would agree with Rendtorff on two matters. The Old Testamentin Fowls case, Scripturedoes and should nourish
terms for referring to them, on pp. 3 and 8. His reference to re-narration quotes Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology (New York: Harper & Row, vol. 1, 1962), p. 120. 6 Compare Jacques Berlinerblau, Poor Bird, Not Knowing Which Way to Fly: Biblical Scholarships Marginality, Secular Humanism, and the Laudable Occident, BibInt 10 (2002), pp. 267-304. 7 E.g. Bernd Janowski, Theologie des Alten Testaments: Plydoyer fr eine integrative Perspective, in A. Lemaire (ed.), Congress Volume Basel 2001 (SVT 92; Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 241-76. According to Aaron, there are only biblical theologies when scholars or religious communities insist on their fabrication (Biblical Ambiguities, p. 17, his italics).

discoursing old testament theology

619

the faithful life of Christian and (as Tanakh) Jewish communities; and this requires theological reading and interpretation of scripture. However, Fowl argues that biblical (including Old Testament) theology has been too much the child of modernity, with its limiting effects, to serve as or to further theological interpretation of Scripture, whose concerns presuppose a setting within Christian or Jewish communities. 8 On this point, Philip Davies agrees, by way of asking Whose Bible is It Anyway? 9 In his terms, theological interpretation, of the kind Fowl commends, is confessional; it has its place in the church (or in the seminary as part of the church domain, p. 51). Davies further agrees with Fowl, for different reasons, that Old Testament/biblical theology may not serve confessional interests, whatever these may be, or any interests at all: The function of Old Testament theology puzzles me, Davies says. What is the purpose of doing and redoing it? (p. 79, emphasis his). I will return to Daviess puzzlement, which is not his alone, but after a tour through his remarks on the confessional character of Old Testament theology, and thereby about discourse(s). While Old Testament theologys function may puzzle him, Davies insists that it cannot help being confessional, even if it tries to be rigorously descriptive. The Old Testament is a Christian entity, Davies observes; this underwrites his claim that any description of its contents will be inevitably a confessional account and, if systematic, will serve the Christian religion (p. 78). The observation is true, the claim a non sequitor, or two of them. The Old Testament is indeed a Christian entity; it does not exist apart from the New Testament. 10 From this it does not follow that any description of its contents will be a confessional account. The Nicene Creed is a Christian entity; descriptions of its contents need not be confessional, and systematically descriptive accounts of it those requiring evaluation of its contentswill not necessarily
8 Stephen E. Fowl, Introduction, in Fowl (ed.), The Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Blackwell Readings in Modern Theology; Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. xvi, xix; further, Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 13-21. 9 Philip R. Davies, Whose Bible is It Anyway? (JSOTSup 204; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995). Page numbers here and in the following pages refer to this book. 10 The reverse is true as well, Marcion, Schleiermacher, and Harnack (among others) notwithstanding. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Die Bedeutung des Alten Testaments fr den christlichen Glauben, JBTh 12 (1997), pp. 181-92.

620

ben c. ollenburger

serve, by intention or effect, the Christian religion. They may serve investigation of imperial religion or of hegemonic discourse(s), for example. Davies may counter that, in these cases, the creed is being treated in other than creedal fashion. Indeed so, but its status as a canonical entity precisely constitutes its eligibility for such non-confessional description. Mutatis mutandis , the same obtains regarding non-confessional descriptions of the Old Testamentnot, in this instance, of a Hebrew (or Greek) biblia, but of the Old Testament. Description, or the practice of describing, is not innocent. It operates concepts, instruments of description, which are not simply, much less immediately, donated by an object inhabiting them as its attributes. Description, a form of representation, is definitional, definitive (a mildly Kantian remark), implicitly ontological, and hence particular.11 Descriptions depend on and serve what Janet Martin Soskice, following Saul Kripke, has called linguistic communities, which are also communities of interest and investigation, whose descriptive vocabulary is embedded in particular traditions of investigation and conviction. 12 But in so defining and (but only co-) constituting its object, a descriptive practice and discoursea description and, hence, representationevinces or shows what is therein unrepresentable as its own absent other (remarks conscious of de Certeau).13 Description, then, can but amount to provisional and powerful redescription, whether in dialogue with, in resistance against, or in disregard of an other, including an other description, an other discourse, hence an other community. Notoriously, this is the case with Old Testament theology, and precisely when it is descriptive of its object as the Old Testament. Daviess point that Old Testament theology cannot help being
11 Cf. Conor Cunningham, Wittgenstein After Theology, in John Milbank, Catherine Pinkstock, and Graham Ward (eds.), Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 73-75. Cunningham might abjure my hence. My reasons for thinking otherwise are indicated elsewhere, in Mennonite Theology: A Conversation Around the Creeds, Mennonite Quarterly Review 66 (1992), pp. 57-89. 12 Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 127, 149; Kripke, Naming and Necessity, in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1972), pp. 253-355. 13 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University, 1988); The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkely, CA: University of California, 1984); Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986).

discoursing old testament theology

621

confessional serves his larger concern: the principles of a selfconsciously non-confessional discourse (p. 16) of biblical scholarship, a concern energized by his convictionone whose truth seems to him self-evident 14that a confessional discourse and a non-confessional one cannot possibly combine to form a single discourse (p. 27). It pays to attend to what Davies means by discourse; namely:
Communication governed by a set of conventions agreed between the participants, conventions that do not have to be specified but are either carried by signals in the communication itself or indicated by external contexts. Discourse defines particular groupings who, in using it, identify themselves with its user-group and implicitly or explicitly exclude others from that group. Choice of discourse is a form of social identification (p. 25).

Daviess discourse resembles my own, borrowed remarks about description, above. But he goes on to say that [e]ach discourse also conveys or implies an ideology that defines the community that shares and possesses that discourse, and reflect its social world, the reality that it constructs around itself. A discourse, then, constitutes itself as a site of struggle: a defensive struggle for an exclusive identity and control. This becomes the more evident when Davies puts a single discourse in service of a single discipline (p. 27, his emphasis). A discipline, Davies suggests, requires a coherent world-view as part of its justification (pp. 26-27). A single discourse, and so also a single world-view, renders possible that primary disciplinary singularity. This singularity escapes us, Davies says, if a putative discipline comprises radically different accounts of how the world works, what human [sic] are here for, what knowledge is, how truth is sought, and so on. These accounts are what Davies means by a discourse. In other words, then, we should want a single discipline, which we can achieve only on condition of a single discourse, and thus on condition of agreement on how the world works, what humans are here for, what knowledge is, how truth is sought, and so on. Thereby we can achieve a single biblical scholarship, which entails having common criteria of evaluation, use of language and philosophy ... in place. Not that these perennially contested, numinous, and variously conceived questions (and philosophy!) should be either bracketed or discussed, but that answers to them should be assumed and taken for granted
14

It would seem to me self-evident that (p. 27).

622

ben c. ollenburger

(as if doxa), as conditions for participation in a singular, self-policing discourse and academic discipline.15 Thus does Davies define a field of cultural production that I referred to above as academic biblical studies. Whether the practice of academic biblical studies, as the meeting of what Bourdieu called habitus and field (the space of possibilities), could ever achieve the singularity Davies envisions seems both undesirable and unlikely.16 Davies here advocates a strict orthodoxy, which delimits the universe of possible discourse ,17 and ineluctably produces its heterodox rival: Orthodoxies call into existence their heterodox reversals by the logic of distinction that operates in cultural fields.18 Orthodox criteria of evaluation in biblical studies, for example, have been vigorously challenged in recent decades criteria that once were themselves (in Bourdieus sense) heretical. To adopt terms I borrowed earlier, alternative descriptive vocabularies have emerged, sometimes insistently, together with specific communities of interest and investigation and conviction. Davies, in Whose Bible is it Anyway? , exposes Brevard Childs and Frances Watson to searing criticism for transgressing irresponsibly the non-confessional discursive boundaries of academic biblical studies. Watsons extended reply, which Davies invited, argues against Davies for the inclusion of expressly confessional, confessionally Christian, discourse and conviction in the university in the non-confessional university.19 The university, in this case, provides the institutional, thus political and economic, context of the structured space for the field of academic biblical studies, a
15 In the body of his argument Davies seems (p. 51) to entertain what Alvin Plantinga calls Duhemian (after Pierre Duhem) biblical criticism, which doesnt involve any theological, religious, or metaphysical assumptions that arent accepted by all parties to the discussion Warranted Christian Belief [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000], p. 397. 16 Pierre Bourdieu, The Market of Symbolic Goods, Poetics 14 (1985), pp. 13-44. See David Swartz, Bridging the Study of Culture and Religion: Pierre Bourdieus Political Economy of Symbolic Power, Sociology of Religion 57 (1996), pp. 71-85. Judith Butler offers criticism of Bourdieu, in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). 17 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 169, his italics. 18 Swartz, Culture and Religion, p. 80. 19 Francis Watson, Bible, Theology and the University: A Response to Philip Davies, JSOT 71 (1996), p. 12.

discoursing old testament theology

623

field from which both Davies and Watson protest their exclusion.20 It is also the contested space of an academic-exchange economy, where symbolic and cultural capital are at stake. The antagony between Davies and Watson sustains the economy. Profound matters divide them, to be sure. But these are refracted in a debate about whats seriously discussable in the university, or in one region of its disciplined discourses and places. Whether a university may or should include confessional and self-consciously non-confessional (as well as anti-confessional) discourses, we may leave aside. The more tractable issue concerns the character of academic biblical studies as non-confessional. Confessional discourse Davies characterizes as emic, contrasted with the etic discourse of the academy. Norman Gottwald introduced these terms into biblical scholarship, borrowing them from Kenneth Pike by way of Marvin Harris.21 In Daviess terms, an emic description of a society, for example, would use the categories of the culture being described. Academic discourse, by contrast, is etic: it uses the categories of the scientific observer. Emic description, in other words, is that of an insider, while etic description is external (p. 33). Davies refers these distinctions, not just to contrasting descriptions of bibles, much less of ancient societies that may have produced them, but primarily to different discourses. What principally distinguishes academic, etic discourse its main featureon Daviess view, is that it permits and stimulates criticism of its own practices and beliefs (p. 48). Perhaps the strongest criticism Davies lodges against theology (biblical scholarship included) as confessional discourseas emic, in other wordsis that its academic, critical capacity is limited to exercises in self-regulation, or self-critique. Merely self -critique (p. 42). Here lies its contrast with properly academic and thus etic discourse, which holds open to criticism its own beliefs and practices. Whence does this criticism arise, one may ask, and whither does it go? As Davies not only grants but insists, etic discourse, the dis20 Davies, Whose Bible, p. 53; Watson, A Response, pp. 15-16. Together they tend to confirm Bourdieus remarks about the structure of conflict as paradigmatic in all fields of cultural production. 21 Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 19779), pp. 337, 58586; Watson, A Response, p. 6. Watson appears to be quoting from Mark G. Brett, Biblical Criticism in Crisis? The Impact of the Canonical Approach on Old Testament Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 11. Brett cites the relevant literature.

624

ben c. ollenburger

course of academic biblical scholarship, has beliefs and practices that are its own. These may be subject to criticism, which the discourse itself permits and stimulates. Who offers such criticisms, and who assesses them? If this critical discourse shall be etic, as Davies uses the term, then it may not be performed in the categories of biblical scholarship, as if by an insider. It will not depend on the very beliefs and practices that it describes or inspects, for that would be to perform an emic discourse. The discourse of the academy, Davies says, excludes emic discourses (p. 48). But Davies has proffered an emic, an insiders, description of the discourse of academic biblical studies in its own categories, in order to promote and to nourish its own beliefs and practices. That this disciplined discourse includesthat it draws from and (poaches) uponan ensemble of other academic discourses does not affect the point. Neither should it amount to a criticism. Any academic discipline or fieldthe academy itselfmust and does perform an emic (in Daviess sense) discourse, or more than one, in order to assess such criticisms as it may receive or generate, perchance thereby coming to revise some among its beliefs and practices. Otherwise, it becomes a barren species of discourse (p. 42). Indeed, it is Daviess argument that academic discourse should be vigorously self-regulating and self-critical. What is the optionexternal regulation? In this regard, Daviess strong criticism of confessional, emic discourse (that its academic, critical capacity is limited to exercises in self-regulation, or selfcritique) loses much of its force. Continuing briefly in Daviess terms, that a community or guild or discipline assessesin its own (emic) discourse(s)some product of an etic, hence external, discourse performed on it does not, once more, amount to a criticism. Of course, Davies uses the terms etic and emic in ways different from Gottwalds remarks about their use in ethnological theory. Most notably, emic and etic accounts both (if both are available) serve precisely that theory and thereby the discipline of anthropology.22 These accounts, respectively gathered and proffered, do not aim principally (or at all) to sustain and nourish the cultures and practices of which they are a theory-driven and theory-building account. Certainly, and obviously, Gottwald does not aim to
22 Gottwald, Tribes, p. 785. Gottwald has explanations where Davies has descriptions. See Bretts comments, in Crisis, p. 18.

discoursing old testament theology

625

nourish the culture of a no longer, if ever, extant pre-monarchic Israel. One of his aims, on which his massive theoretical argument bears and depends heavily, is to present the preconditions for a new theological method as a replacement for biblical theology23 We have returned, then, to biblical and Old Testament theologyto theory, so also then description, in that sense. Whom or what do they serve? And how is such service rendered? Early on, and with reference to Rendtorff, I suggested a distinction between academic biblical studies and Old Testament theology. A detour through Davies has problematized the distinction, but it has also prepared the conclusion, or reaffirmation, that Old Testament theology is indeed confessional. That is to say, Old Testament theology aims to nourish, directly or by indirection (for example, through critique), communities of faith and practice for whom it remains, by confession, of foundational (grundlegende ) importance. 24 Along the way I adverted to the interest, tradition, and conviction-specific character of description, which it turns out is also theory-driven. As Mary Hesse noted long ago, empirical evidence underdetermines the choice of theory, which thus depends on non-empirical criteria. 25 One such criterion is that the description of a practice should be recognizable by actors engaged in a practice as a description of what they are practicing, and that the theory-driven account of it should enable the actors to reflect on and to change their practice as so described. 26 Charles Taylor calls such theories self-defining, by contrast with external theories that have as their aim reflection on, and the improvement of, (for example) the practice of anthropology. Social theory as self-defining, then, does not seek so much to explain some dimension of social life (or all of it) as to define the understandings that underpin different forms of social practice. 27
23 Tribes, p. 668. Theology is here defined, without argument, as a scientific account of the divine manifestation in history (p. 794). 24 Such communities, in whatever space or place, could not follow R.S. Sugirtharajahs counsel that they should be prepared to give up the very texts themselves (Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpreation [New York: Oxford University Press, 2002], p. 206). Neither, of course, could academic biblical studies. 25 Theory and Value in the Social Sciences, in Hookway and Pettit (eds.), Action and Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 1-16. 26 Adapting John B. Thompsons remarks, in Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jrgen Habermas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 208. 27 Charles Taylor, Social Theory as a Practice, Philosophy and the Human

626

ben c. ollenburger

A theoretical formulation in this sense renders a pre-theoretical understanding explicit,

in order to rescue a practice, to make it possible to continue it, to put it on a securer basis, or perhaps to reform it or to purify it. The point, one might say, of the formulation here is just to provide the constitutive understanding necessary for the continuing, or reformed, or purified practice. 28

A practice, Taylor goes on to say, requires certain descriptions to make sense.29 A theory, or the use of it, cannot hope to reform or transform a practice if actors cannot recognize themselves in the description, or if they cannot reflect on their practice as described. For some communities, their practices will be referred, directly or (sometimes very) indirectly, to scripture. The practices themselves, especially linguistic, ritual, moral ones, are mutually imbricated with, among other things, particular convictions, dispositions, and affections; these may count among their pre-theoretical understandings (Bourdieus doxa ). In them, too, scripture figures directly or indirectly, yet still necessarily for such communities: in their perhaps argumentative, conversational, yet common life. But some such communities also want to acquire a more fully theoretical understanding of their practices, not only when these come under duress, perhaps due to intractable dissensus regarding or new challenges to the convictions sustaining and deriving from them, but as one of the communitys ongoing discursive practices. In such communities, both the description of their practices and reflection on them, critical and constructive, will include direct or indirect reference to scripture. Scripture-reading practices, then, are partially constituent in and constitutive of such communitiesessential to their living faithfully before God.30 As noted earlier, Stephen Fowl argues that biblical theologys dominant tradition is too much the child of modernity, and too implicated in an academic economy that fragments theology, to foster theological interpretation on behalf of a communitys living faithfully before God. 31 Perhaps so. But the setting within Christian or Jewish communities, which Fowl assigns theological
Sciences (Philosophical Papers, vol. 2; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 108, his italics. On external theories, see p. 101. 28 Taylor, pp. 93, 105. 29 Taylor, p. 108. 30 Fowl, Engaging Scripture , p. 54. 31 Fowl, pp. 13-17.

discoursing old testament theology

627

interpretation (see above), corresponds to the space Davies assigns (confessional) Old Testament theology. Biblical theology, and Old Testament theology as a species of it, having no academic place, can mark a practiced space, discursively undermining theologys fragmentation temporally and locally.32 Attending the contexts of temporally and locally various Christian communities, Old Testament theology can engage the sorts of interpretive improvisations that diverse Christian practices require for both their description and their reflection, and so their (quite variously understood) faithfulness before God. That is why Old Testament is constantly redone. In particular, Old Testament theology carries a brief for the Old Testament, as if for a friend, and resists global definitions of the relation between Christian scriptures two testaments. 33 Even when Old Testament theology elevates itself above the practices of (not?) everyday life to propose a particular panoptic vision, or an orchestration, of the material under its temporally abstracted gaze, it constitutes a provisional monologization, in Dennis Olsons superbly monstrous terms.34 In these cases, as always, Old Testament theology is non-violently parasitic. This is also why it is continually redone. It neither possesses nor conducts a singular and insular discourse, but poaches onwithout despoilingwhatever resources may serve its occasional purposes, including the changing discourses of academic biblical studies.35 It has no anxieties about boundaries or disciplinary control. And it marvels at the mystery of how Gods world works. One trusts.

Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life , p. 117. Ellen F. Davis, Losing a Friend: The Loss of the Old Testament to the Church, in Alice Ogden Bellis and Joel S. Kaminsky (eds.), Jews, Christians, and the Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures (Symposium Series; Atlanta: SBL, 2000), pp. 83-94; Rainer Albertz, Hat die Theologie des Alten Testaments doch noch eine Chance? JBTh 10 (1995), pp. 182-83. 34 Biblical Theology as Provisional Monologization: A Dialogue with Childs, Brueggemann, and Bakhtin, BibInt 6 (1998), pp. 162-80. 35 Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997). Poaching, of course, is Certeaus term. Stephen Fowl and Eugene Rogers adopt, to similar effect, Origens (and Gregory of Nyssas) metaphor of plundering or despoiling the Egyptians (Fowl, Engaging Scripture , pp. 180-83; Rogers, The Stranger, in James J. Buckley and David S. Yeago [eds.], Knowing the Triune God [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001], p. 283).
33

32

628

ben c. ollenburger Abstract

Stephen Fowl has argued that biblical (so Old Testament) theology is too beholden to academic biblical studies, and too far removed from settings in particular communities of faith, to nurture theological interpretation of scripture. Philip Davies has argued that Old Testament theology is inevitably (Christian) confessional and has no place in academic biblical studies, which should practice a self-consciously non-confessional and only etic discourse. Traversing Daviess argument and his use of discourse, this essay makes brief and unassuming reference to Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau in moving toward Charles Taylors definition of self-defining social theories. It argues that such practices and convictions of certain communities provide the context and purpose of Old Testament theology.

Copyright of Biblical Interpretation is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.