"A judgment pronounced in accordance with the facts can therefore assign to it an historical place only within that movement of reformation which was brought to a victorious issue by King Josiah"
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Wellhausen writes like a judge who already knows the verdict and wants you to admire the method. The phrase "in accordance with the facts" is doing heavy rhetorical lifting: it casts his reconstruction of Israelite history not as interpretation but as disciplined inevitability. Once that ground is claimed, the rest of the sentence becomes a quiet act of intellectual governance, assigning a text or event "an historical place" only if it fits a particular arc: the reform movement culminating in Josiah.
The specific intent is programmatic. Wellhausen is signaling the core move of modern biblical criticism: dating and locating religious material by tying it to political-religious centralization in the late 7th century BCE. Josiah becomes less a pious monarch than the hinge of an explanatory system. "Only within that movement" is the tell. This is not merely an argument about one king; it's a boundary line around what counts as historically intelligible.
The subtext is the confidence (some would say audacity) of 19th-century scholarship: religion is read through institutions, reforms, and winners. Calling Josiah's reform "victorious" imports a narrative of progress that flatters the rational, administrative consolidation of worship in Jerusalem. It also marginalizes rival religious practices as survivals destined to be sorted, dated, and domesticated.
Context matters: Wellhausen is writing in an era fascinated by origins and development, applying evolutionary models to texts and traditions. His prose performs that authority, turning messy, contested memory into a neat timeline with a triumphant endpoint.
The specific intent is programmatic. Wellhausen is signaling the core move of modern biblical criticism: dating and locating religious material by tying it to political-religious centralization in the late 7th century BCE. Josiah becomes less a pious monarch than the hinge of an explanatory system. "Only within that movement" is the tell. This is not merely an argument about one king; it's a boundary line around what counts as historically intelligible.
The subtext is the confidence (some would say audacity) of 19th-century scholarship: religion is read through institutions, reforms, and winners. Calling Josiah's reform "victorious" imports a narrative of progress that flatters the rational, administrative consolidation of worship in Jerusalem. It also marginalizes rival religious practices as survivals destined to be sorted, dated, and domesticated.
Context matters: Wellhausen is writing in an era fascinated by origins and development, applying evolutionary models to texts and traditions. His prose performs that authority, turning messy, contested memory into a neat timeline with a triumphant endpoint.
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| Topic | Bible |
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