Old Testament Scholarship and the Religious-Philosophical Sense of “Life” in Ordinary Language

The word “life” appears in a variety of contexts in Old Testament (OT) scholarship. Included are the use of non-technical senses from ordinary language and the associated folk-philosophical assumptions implicit therein. This article investigates whether and to what extent the recent history of interpretation reflects what the philosopher of religion Don Cupitt refers to as the “turn to life” in everyday speech. To test the hypothesis, samples of the relevant data are selected from the related second-order discourses of popular Bible translations and prominent theologies of the OT. The analysis shows strong correlations in terms of quantitative and qualitative conceptual-historical diachronic variability. Thus, it is concluded that the emergent quasi-religious sense of “life” in ordinary language is also a supervening folk-philosophical concept, concern and category in contemporary OT scholarship.


INTRODUCTION
In Old Testament (OT) scholarship, the word "life" is both a term of art and a fuzzy concept, the meanings of which vary in different contexts of discourse. 1) In the first-order religious language of the OT itself, a long, rich and complicated conceptual-history lies behind the most familiar Hebrew word in different worlds of the text. 2 2) In the second-order discourse of the various interpretative approaches in OT scholarship, the concept is polytypical and its nuances as many as the multiplicity of senses encountered within the different auxiliary disciplines informing them. 3 In ordinary language use, a familiar concept is that of life as a whole and of one's own life in relation thereto. According to the philosopher of religion Don Cupitt, this sense of "life" and "my life" is, however, a relatively recent yet very significant development in conceptual history. 4 What Cupitt calls the "turn to life" has occurred in both religious and secular everyday speech. In this view, we have come to think of life and our own lives in cosmic and existential folkphilosophical ways, comparable to how people of earlier times used to speak of their relationship to "God" or "Ultimate reality." Examples of the reification, personification, objectification and universalisation involved include popular phrases such as "To love life," "Such is life," "How's life treating you?," "Life has a way of," "Life has taught me," "Life is good," "Life is sacred," "Life is not fair," "The best things in life are free," "It's my life," "True to life," "What do you want from life?," "Don't waste your life," "Life's great mysteries," "Get a life" and many more (including the way the verb "live" and the adjective "living," all part of what are now very serious manners of speaking). 5 Though making general claims about how "we" think nowadays, Cupitt acknowledges the historical and cultural relative nature of his Western/English "take on life" and its religious-philosophical sense. Perhaps that is why, extending the tradition of Nietzsche (genealogy), Wittgenstein (ordinary language philosophy) and Foucault (archaeology) on the value of micro-histories of concepts, Cupitt writes: Before long, someone must attempt the first history of life, reviewing the manifold ways in which people have seen life and their own lives in different periods and under different systems of thoughthow people feel about life as a whole, and about their life in particular is different from certain related ideas. 6 What is in view here is clearly different from writing a scientific narrative about the origins and development of life as told from a cosmological or biological perspective. It is also not to be confused with anthropological and sociological accounts of different forms of human life or culture over time. In the context of OT scholarship in particular, such an inquiry is related to but ultimately not the same as traditional linguistic, literary-critical, comparative-religious, religioushistorical and theological perspectives of the concept. On the one hand, Cupitt's perspective would have us consider the ways OT scholars have used of the word "life" in the recent history of OT interpretation. On the other hand, of interest would be whether and in what ways the ordinary language of life in our secondorder discourses might have come to mirror the "turn to life" as a religiousphilosophical concept, concern and category.

B RESEARCH DESIGN
The research problem identified in this article is constituted by the lack of OT scholarship on the relation of its second-order discourses to the conceptualhistorical changes outlined above. The corresponding research question involves asking if and how the words "life" and "my life" in its religious-philosophical sense appear within the contexts of specific interpretative approaches. The hypothesis of this study is that the recent history of OT scholars' recourse to ordinary language is likely to reflect an increased quantity and quality of the associated folk-philosophical presuppositions, problems and perspectives on "life" as a religious-philosophical concept, concern and category. The method adopted for the purpose of application and illustration will be that of a descriptive (rather than critical) meta-commentary operating in tandem with historical and comparative varieties of philosophy of religion. The objective of the study is to determine the nature and scope of any apparent conceptual-historical correlations within selected samples of data. As will become apparent in the discussion to follow, the research presented here relates to other intra-and interdisciplinary discussions of "life" in/and the OT (scholarship) in a variety of supplementary and complimentary ways. In these variables of the research design lies its originality, relevance and actuality.

C RESEARCH SAMPLES
Since it is impossible to analyse all potentially relevant data, the samples selected for this preliminary investigation will come from two contexts where the word "life" (in different configurations) and any related conceptual-history changes are likely to be present. This includes the second-order discourse at the most basic level of analytic interests (i.e., references to "my life" in Bible translations) and on the highest level of attempts at conceptual synthesis (i.e., references to "life" in OT theology). Any findings pertaining to the partial set of samples that could be accommodated from these dense and complex domains of discourse are limited in scope and do not warrant untested generalisation or extrapolation.
1 "My life" and the meta-languages of some popular translations of the OT In the context of Bible translations, the preliminary inquiry focuses on samples from one older and one more recent version, namely the KJV and the NRSV. The general philosophical background contexts of both versions are well known. 7 The references to "my life" listed correlate with texts in the MT of BHS based on verbatim occurrences of the common masculine plural noun ַַּ ‫י‬ ‫חַ‬ in the construct state with first person singular suffix ‫ָּ֑י(‬ ‫יָ‬ ‫.)חַ‬ Further qualifications and acknowledgements related to grammar, semantics and pragmatics are provided in the subsequent comments. 7 For the philosophical background that shaped the initial translation early in the 17th century but before Descartes and the theoretical beginning of the modern-era, see Henrik Lagerlund, The Routledge Companion to Sixteenth Century Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2017). For a useful introduction of the diffused and complex historical situation with American pragmatist, process and linguistic philosophy preceding the NRSV and indirectly influential on the religious-philosophical assumptions of the time as well as OT theology, see David  To be sure, correlation does not mean causation and numbers are not in themselves meaningful. That being said, it cannot be denied that within this data set there is clearly a statistically significant variation in both the quantity and quality of the ways in which the words "my life" appears. Whereas the MT only has 21 instances of the noun, as constructed above, the KJV has 64 references to "my life" and the NRSV which is the more recent 80. Though there is a slight variation in the versification of the Hebrew and English at some points, the only texts where "my life" appears in all three contexts, i.e., the MT, KJV and NRSV are One way to account for the diachronic discrepancies is of course to note the more dynamic equivalent styles of translation in the NRSV in relation to the KJV. However, this would only confirm the supervening influence of the folkphilosophical assumptions about life in ordinary language as being meaningful to the implied reader. Another obvious reason for the quantitative differences is later developments in associated research. An example of this would be when "my life" became the terms of choice for rendering other Hebrew words like ‫י‬ ‫שִּ‬ ‫ַפְ‬ ‫,נ‬ previously translated as "my soul" under the influence of Greek Christian philosophical-anthropological assumptions. Though not the only explanatory framework that can account for the new references to "my life" in the NRSV compared with the KJV, the conceptual-historical "turn to life" cannot be ruled out as one sufficient reason that it would have seemed fitting to choose "my life" rather than, for example, "me," "myself" or other overlapping alternatives.

"Life" in the second-order discourses of OT theologians
The concept of "life" is also popular at the broadest level of synthesis in OT scholarship, namely OT theology. 8 Here, the OT scholar can easily include, more than anywhere else, a variety of senses from both popular ordinary-language and second-order uses of the word "life." As with the remarks on trends related to "my life" in translation, it is impossible to do justice to the sheer quantity of data available. Many scholars' writings relevant to this section therefore could not be included. 9  demonstrate the plausibility of the hypothesis in the present context. Being a comparatively younger discipline featuring more idiosyncrasies than translations, the samples will be limited to classic 20th century and popular 21st century publications. 10 Though some cases listed may seem prima facie trivial or even "biblical," the question is whether it might turn out on closer inspection that some additional religious-philosophical sense has been imported into even the most familiar expressions.
To start with, the English translation of the German original two-volume publication of Walther Eichrodt contains over 400 occurrences of the word "life" in the first volume, and over 800 in the second. 11 Though some of these appear in the context of quotations from the OT itself or relate to the usual anthropological-ethical concerns, the nuances of meaning (despite some verbal overlap) include more than those of the OT's first-order religious language. Included are repeated references to, among others, "individual life," 12 "personal  10 In contrast to the previous section, the present one will not focus on the first-person perspectives of "my life" but on "life," the primary broader term Cupitt mentions as point of orientation in the inquiry. One reason for the switch is that "my life" is usually not standard in the OT theological meta-language as it is in translation. Moreover, while Cupitt notes the first stirrings of the turn to life in the early modern period, the most noticeable increase in associated phrases and idioms in English can only be dated from the second half of the 20th century to the present. For that reason, the translations of the KJV and NRSV sufficed for the intended purpose whereas here, with OT theology only becoming a separate discipline later, the data set from which samples will be drawn will commence with the so-called classic period associated with the writings of German scholars like Walther Eichrodt and Gerhard von Rad onwards. In the discussion to follow, instead of merely noting the usual concerns with life in publications dealing with conceptions of the person or life as a divine attribute, gift or such, the focus will be on those elements in second-order discourse most related to the ontological and axiological dimensions of the religious-philosophical turn to life in contemporary ordinary language. 11 Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament (Vol. 1; Trans. J.A. Baker; London: SCM Press, 1961), Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament (Vol. 2; Trans. J.A. Baker; London: SCM Press, 1967). 12 Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament I, 327. a scholar," 181 "life-antagonistic desert," 182 "life expressions," 183 "basic precepts of life," 184 "experience in life," 185 "profanation of everyday life," 186 "conduct of human life," "life and faith of a community," 187 "whole life," 188 "daily life," 189 "mundane life," "human life will remain ambivalent," "post-cultic philosophy of life," "theocratic ordering of life," 190 "permanent life is possible," 191 "the world of human life," 192 "public life" 193 and so on. 194 The associated content from these samples appears indicative of an increased correlation with the "turn to life" on a qualitative rather than a quantitative level. Newly emergent religious-philosophical senses are clearly correlated with corresponding changes in ordinary language over time. Second, popular ways of phrasing ordinary language and its folk-philosophical framework seem to be taken for granted, i.e., "life" as an acceptable and unproblematic religious-philosophical concept, concern and category. This is evident from its location not only in discussions of topics the focus of which lies elsewhere but also from its inclusion in titles, forewords, tables of contents and indices. This includes "life" as somehow a sacred human and divine attribute, function and relation (and of extensions of the divine e.g., the divine spirit). Subsequent references to life are subsumed under traditional loci, e.g., creation, blessing, governance, providence and so forth. Interesting is the ongoing tradition of referring to "the life of Israel" and other "non-living" social entities in ways that have some influence of the folk-philosophy of life in ordinary language as one of the conditions of possibility for its meaningfulness.

D CONCLUSION
From the samples discussed, the following conclusions may be drawn from the preliminary findings. Both the selected Bible translations and samples from popular OT theologians offer traces of second-order discourse featuring the religious-philosophical sense of "life" and of (my) life in ordinary language. This in turn confirms the hypothesis of this study i.e., that the "turn to life" in the corresponding conceptual history of everyday speech can be positively correlated to those contexts of OT scholarship included in the analysis. In other words, the emergence of "life" as religious object, as noted by Don Cupitt, also has its counterpart as a popular supervening folk-philosophical concept, concern and category in OT scholarship.