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H G M Williamson, Present and Future of Biblical Studies: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of Brill’s Biblical Interpretation. Edited by Tat-Siong Benny Liew, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 70, Issue 2, October 2019, Pages 734–737, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flz059
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Extract
Some of us are old enough to remember well when David Orton, then working for the publisher Brill in Leiden, announced his plans to launch a new journal which would welcome the discussion of biblical texts from multidisciplinary points of view. The impression was given that there would be an especial welcome for what at the time sounded like very ‘daring’ approaches, and the editorial statement in the first issue spoke of ‘sociology, anthropology, psychology, archaeology, history, philosophy, linguistics and literary theory’. Since then, of course, post-colonialism, feminism, gender studies, and more have been added.
By whatever means I do not know, but perhaps partly because she had previously been one of the editors of the Semeia series, Orton wisely recruited Cheryl Exum, then of Boston College and later of Sheffield University in England, initially jointly with Mark Brett of Melbourne in Australia, as the founding editor; she served for sixteen years until 2007 (see the appreciation by her successor Hugh Pyper in BibInt 16 [2008], 307–14). She succeeded in rapidly establishing the journal as an international forum whereby what once seemed marginal is now mainstream. With more than 150 titles also now included in the journal’s associated monograph/collected studies series, it was understandable indeed that the journal’s current editor should have wanted to celebrate the first twenty-five years. Liew tells us with some honesty that he had no real conception of what sort of collection would emerge from his invitation to twelve other authors to write on ‘the present and the future’ of the discipline. The result, almost inevitably, is a mixture which in his extended introduction he attempts bravely, but perhaps a little too optimistically, to weave together into some sort of coherent whole.
