Tales of the Scriptural as the Basis of a "Textual Anthropology" of the Old Testament (C02)

• Subject Area: Protestant Theology
• Term: from 2011 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 178035969

At the heart of this project are methodological reflections on the connection between praxeologically orientated artefact analysis and metatext analysis. While the artefact analysis looks at the usage of writing ¿ given that it can be illustrated with the artefacts ¿, metatext analysis tries to reconstruct the discourse surrounding writing and to illustrate the consequences of this for the usage of writing. A new aspect will be the method of text-pragmatic analysis, which evaluates signals internal to a text that pertain to the usage of writing. With the aid of manuscripts found in the Judean Desert (including Qumran, Masada, Nahal Hever, Wadi Murabbaat) and dating from the third century B.C. to the second century A.D., the project plans to test these procedures in order to describe in a way that has not been done before both the fictional and the actual modes of dealing with and handling writings in early Judaism.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 933: Material Text Cultures. Materiality and Presence of Writing in Non-Typographic Societies
• Applicant Institution: Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
• Project Heads: Professor Dr. Jan Christian Gertz; Dr. Friederike Schücking-Jungblut