Yoram Hazony on the Bible’s Political Teaching

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 13 July 2018

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the last decade, a fascinating area of political thought has begun to receive increasing attention from scholars in the field: the political philosophy of the Hebrew Bible. After all, at the core of Scripture lies the story of the creation of the nation of Israel and the rise and fall of its first commonwealth—a narrative that can be mined not only for religious guidance, but also for social and political wisdom.

Perhaps no contemporary thinker has devoted as much attention to the Bible’s political teaching as Herzl Institute President Yoram Hazony. Author of God and Politics in Esther, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, and much more, Dr. Hazony is a leading pioneer in the field of Hebraic political thought. In this podcast, Dr. Hazony joins Jonathan Silver for an discussion about one of his early essays on this topic, “Does the Bible Have a Politcal Teaching?” Published in 2006 in Hebraic Political Studies, the piece takes a close look at the sweep of biblical history and makes the case that the Hebrew Bible seeks to find a middle path between the tyranny of the imperial state and the anarchy of tribal politics. In this conversation, Hazony and Silver examine the key arguments of the essay as well as the bias against the Bible in the modern academy and Scripture’s influence on the modern West.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble, as well as Midnight Three by Sirus Music.

This podcast was recorded in front of a live audience at the Hertog Foundation in Washington, D.C.

Transcript

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0:00.0	In the last decade, university presses of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, and Chicago
0:13.5	have all published academic studies that investigate both the influence of the Hebrew
0:18.5	Bible on the political ideas of the West and of the political
0:21.7	teaching of the Hebrew Bible itself. Students of politics are starting to rediscover the Bible
0:26.7	as a source of social and political wisdom. But what does it really say? Do the politics of the
0:32.8	book of Deuteronomy, accord with the politics of Esther or Daniel, or the teachings about justice that
0:38.7	emerge from the book of Job? Does the Bible advance a distinct political teaching?
0:43.8	Welcome to the Tikva podcast on great Jewish essays and ideas. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver,
0:49.3	and my guest today is Israeli philosopher and the president of the Herzl Institute, Yoram Hazani.
0:55.0	Dr. Hazani has written several Cambridge University Press books about the political and moral
1:00.8	wisdom of the Bible, and in today's conversation, we return to an early foray into Dr.
1:06.4	Hazoni's study. Our focus is a 2006 article that he wrote in the journal of Hebraic political studies that
1:13.0	asks, does the Bible have a political teaching? If you enjoy this discussion, you can subscribe
1:18.6	to the Tikva podcast on iTunes and Stitcher, where I hope you'll leave us a rating and a review.
1:23.4	If you want to learn more about our work at Tikva, you can visit our website, tikfafund.org,
1:28.0	and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Here now is my conversation with Yoram Hazoni,
1:32.6	originally recorded live at the Hurtag Foundation's Political Studies Fellowship in Washington, D.C.
1:39.2	Yarm Hazani, welcome back to the Tikva podcast. Glad to be here.
1:42.4	We're going to discuss whether or not the Bible has a political teaching. But to begin with, we might discuss the extent to which the Bible is studied by people who look for political wisdom at all, by political theorists and political scientists. And you begin the article by explaining that it's not much studied in the classic curriculum of political science,
2:01.7	one of the objections to the view that it should be is that politics is the art of applying
2:07.7	human wisdom to human affairs. The Bible, as it presents itself, is not the product of human
2:13.6	wisdom. I think there are many different reasons that are actually advanced. If you challenge
	...

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