The original version of this paper was delivered as the Presidential Address to the Society of Old Testament Study, in Birmingham, Januaary 1996. An abbreviated version has been published in Auguries: The Jubilee Volume of the Sheffield Department of Biblical Studies (ed. David J.A. Clines and Stephen D. Moore; Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series, 269; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 276-91, in Australasian Pentecostal Studies 1 (March 1998), pp. 41-54, and in The Interpretation of the Bible: The International Symposium in Slovenia (ed. Joe Kra¡ovec; Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series, 269; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998).
1. Zygmunt Baumann, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 272.
2. Robert Fowler, 'Post-Modern Biblical Criticism: The Criticism of Pre-Modern Texts in a Post-Critical, Post-Modern, Post-Literate Era', Forum 5 (1989), pp. 3-30.
3. See Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, orig. edn, 1983]), with Foreword by D.C. Greetham, from which some phrases in my exposition have been borrowed (especially from pp. x-xiii).
4. Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi (eds.), The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 207 (s.v. 'New Historicism', pp. 206-209).
5. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, 'The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship', JBL 107 (1988), pp. 3-17 (15).