Old Testament Ethics DOUGLAS A. KNIGHT I N DISCUSSING Old Testament ethics, we are not faced with the usual problem of trying to pick out a consensus from a welter of diverging viewpoints and methods. If only there were such an abundance of careful studies on biblical ethics, we would find ourselves in the luxurious position of highlighting the helpful approaches, discarding those which are problematic, and generally drawing together the "as- sured results" of scholarship. When one considers how often people invoke bib- lical teachings in matters of morality, it seems that biblical ethics would be an inviting terrain for schol- ars to explore. Yet there is a perplexing scarcity of comprehensive, systematic studies of the material. Several general treatments of Old Testament ethics appeared around the beginning of this century — W. S. Bruce's in 1895, Archibald Duffs in 1902, Hinckley G. Mitchell's in 1912, and J. M. Powis Smith's in 1923. But to my knowledge the only study devoted to Old Testament ethics since 1923 is a German monograph of less than 200 pages, written in 1967 by Hendrik van Oyen as part of a series on the general history of ethics in the West. The situa- tion is only slightly better in the field of New Testa- ment studies, although there also the several sys- tematic overviews are all rather too concise. When biblical scholars have interested themselves in ethical studies, they have tended to focus on rather specific, narrow topics: social justice, the status of women, war, vengeance, property rights, ecological concern for nature and the like. Many also address problems tangential to ethics: social structures, po- litical organization and control, economic systems, the ethos and the world view of the people, theologi- cal interpretations of moral issues and much more. What is missing is the effort to bring these aspects together and to examine the ways in which they in- terrelate in a general system of ethics. Perhaps we can find part of the reason for this lack in a statement made by ethicist James Gustaf- son: biblical ethics, he observed, is in itself "a com- plex task for which few are well prepared; those who are specialists in ethics generally lack the intensive and proper training in biblical studies, and those who are specialists in biblical studies often lack sophis- tication in ethical thought" ("The Place of Sciipture Dr. Knight, associate professor of Old Testament at Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nash- ville, is on sabbatical leave at the Ecumenical In- stitute for Theological Research, Tantur, Jerusalem. January 20, 1982 in Christian Ethics: A Methodological Study," In- terpretation 24 [1970], p. 430). A person venturesome enough to engage in interdisciplinary work runs the risk of being tagged a dilettante by colleagues in each discipline. But the root problem is how to conceive and conduct the work. Biblical studies and ethics do not mate easily; each has a quite different purpose, method, set of presuppositions and subject matter. O NE WAY to demonstrate both the dilemma and the possibilities of biblical ethics is to retrace my own efforts to acquire an understanding of the field. From my first exposure to the critical study of the Old Testament in seminary, I found certain of its moral teachings and its general view of humanity and community attractive, indeed compelling. Yet like most seminary students I had little more than the standard introductory courses in ethics, and nothing at all in biblical ethics specifically. My graduate training focused almost entirely on the Old Testament itself, again with no attention to its ethics but with much work on its theology. It was not until a few years into my teaching career that I was able to indulge my fancy by teaching a trial course at the seminary and graduate levels. That I survived that first stumbling attempt to put together an overall approach to biblical ethics — indeed to experiment with whether there cpuld be said to exist such a dis- cipline — I owe to the goodwill of those first students. What I needed was a second graduate education in ethics. I decided instead to devote a sabbatical in 1976 to as much reading in the field as I could man- age. With the advice of some colleagues I tackled a mass of materials ranging from Aristotelian ethics to contemporary analytical philosophy and phenome- nological thought. The readings included key con- tributions in both philosophical and theological ethics. I sought to familiarize myself with these in- tellectual traditions, to ascertain what were the re- current issues in the study of ethics and to identify categories and methods which could be helpful in conducting a study of biblical ethics. This reading had a rather sobering effect on me, and I was tempted to abandon the whole project. What I discovered was that there is no generally ac- cepted definition of the field of ethics, nor any widely practiced method for "doing" ethics. To my knowl- edge, there is, no other field in which graduate stu- dents, often at the point of their doctoral examina- tions, are expected to define their discipline — both its subject matter and the viable ways to approach it. 55