Genre, Gunkel, and More

Andy Judd’s new book, Modern Genre Theory (Zondervan Academic, 2024) starts off with a bang. It’s not just because he is a good writer, with a palpable sense of wittiness and awareness of popular culture, but also because he offers a shot across the bow of Biblical Studies. On the one hand, he’s correct to emphasize the preoccupation and emphasis upon genre for the hermeneutical process. It’s critical…and at the heart of what we do! However, we are often either under-informed or operating on out-of-date paradigms. That’s not a good scenario to be part of.

               So, it’s pretty clear that Judd wants to educate us about genre and the way that we invoke it in the interpretive process. And I am okay with this. Biblical Studies is a discipline that tends to get entrenched with certain methods. So occasionally we need a swift kick in the butt to encourage us to rethink things and engage in other conversations around the topic. And I will gladly take that kick in the rear from Judd…his presentation tends to assuage the jolt of a size 10 boot to the backside.

               For the moment, I want to focus on Judd’s first chapter, particularly his focus upon Hermann Gunkel and form criticism. He opens by telling a funny story of a home-brewing experiment going pear-shaped, and he then transitions to Gunkel’s seminal work on form criticism and literary types. Essentially, Judd argues that the ideas of genre and literary forms developed by Gunkel—and so often used in the history of biblical scholarship—were built upon faulty assumptions. Sure, Gunkel was astute to link these literary forms to a situation in life, but he was off on four fronts:

1.        His categories of what a literary form was and looked like were too rigid.

2.        He employed presumptuous ideas about ancient cultures, ideas that were mis-informed by his own context, experiences, and expressions.

3.        When Gunkel would “reconstruct” the development of textual types, often trying to identify a base form that was at the root of it all, he simply lacked the empirical evidence to make the claims that he did.

4.        His emphasis upon getting behind the text to the base form obscured any interest in the final form of the text.

Now truth be told, I exchanged emails with Judd on Gunkel, form criticism, and any way forward in late 2022. I was particularly interested in what he had to say about Gunkel and form criticism, particularly as it may or may not relate to comparative analyses. At that time, I was working on a project myself with Dr. Drew Holland (Silhouettes of Scripture [Lexington Books, 2023]). We recognized the problems of form criticism, classically articulated to Gunkel and his ilk, while not accepting some of the reimaginations of some members in the guild. For example, in widely circulated series of articles, form criticism was reimagined without a concern for placing a form in a social context, or a situation in life (e.g. A. F. Campbell’s “Form Criticism’s Future” in The Changing Face of Form Criticism for the Twenty-first Century [Eerdmans, 2003], 15–31). To Holland and myself, this felt like people were cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Sure, the out-of-control pre-occupation, perhaps even obsession, with a text “behind” the final form is silly, and all the historical critics of the late 19th and 20th centuries were often victims of their own intellectual contexts. But to then take the step and say that considerations of a text’s genre need to be divorced from the pursuit of a social context was not necessary.

               Judd would agree with this, I am guessing. In chapter 1, he praises Gunkel’s thinking in linking a textual type to a recurring social context. In fact, Judd states, “His insight into the link between genres and a recurring social setting is brilliant” (p. 8). He even suggests that Gunkel anticipated the concern within modern genre theory for social contexts. Yet identifying social contexts and situations in the ancient world is a really hard thing to do. I will be interested to see what Judd does here specifically as the book unfolds. But for the moment, I will say that Holland and I sought to consider how similar texts could potentially clarify those potential situations that either gave rise to these literary forms or facilitated their usage and development. Our work in Silhouettes of Scripture sought to build upon a series of textual convergences and divergences between texts to consider what could be said about the textual types, including their context of usage and development.

               But alas, let’s move on from my shameless plug for our book. Judd is right. Biblical Studies tends to use ideas about genre in problematic ways. These are not static categories. These types develop and are influenced by a number of variables, including context and similar texts from other cultures. Then there’s the mixing of genres. So, it can’t be about a checklist of what you see or don’t see. It’s also about applying an informed set of sensibilities to a text. There’s no cookie-cutter or “one-size fits all” answer. So, while I don’t think I am ready to say “Gunkel must die” (and I shared that with him in our email exchanges), what has come after him needs to be adjusted and rethought…within reason.