How Repentance Became Biblical tells the story of repentance as a
concept. Many today, in both secular and religious contexts, assume
it to be a natural and inevitable component of our lives. But where
did it originate? How did it become so prominent within Western
religious traditions and, by extension, contemporary culture? What
purposes does it serve? This book identifies repentance as a
product of the Hellenistic period, where it was taken up within
emerging forms of Judaism and Christianity as a mode of subjective
control. Lambert argues that, along with the rise of repentance, a
series of interpretive practices, many of which remain in effect to
this day, was put into place whereby repentance is read into the
Bible and the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament,
comes to be seen as repentance's source. Ancient Israelite rituals,
such as fasting, prayer, and confession, all of which are
incorporated later on within various religious communities as forms
of penitential discipline, are understood as external signs of
internal remorse. Hebrew terms and phrases, such as the prophetic
injunction to "return to YHWH," are read as ancient representations
of the concept, repentance. Prophetic literature as a whole is seen
as serving a pedagogical purpose, as aiming at the reformation of
Israel as a nation. Furthermore, it is assumed that, on the basis
of the Bible, sectarians living in the late Second Temple period,
from the Dead Sea sect to the early Jesus movement, believed that
their redemption depended upon their repentance. In fact, the
penitential framework within which the Bible is interpreted tells
us the most about our own interpretive tendencies, about how we
privilege notions of interiority, autonomy, and virtue. The book
develops other frameworks for explaining the biblical phenomena in
their ancient contexts, based on alternative views of the body,
power, speech, and the divine, and, thereby, offers a new account
of repentance's origins.
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