Being an Old Testament scholar and a minister who is preaching from Old Testament texts on a regular basis is something of a challenge. It means that as a scholar, you are constantly aware that the Hebrew bible is not just a collection of documents from the first millennium BCE, but Scripture, authoritative both for Jews and Christians. It also means that as a preacher, you are aware of a variety of problems with regard to the transmission of these texts and their meaning through the centuries between then and now, problems you often can’t simply skip to arrive at a simple, acceptable meaning for the church community of today.
Between then and now, between a scholarly and a pious reading of the bible, between the individual texts and Scripture as a whole, that is where my work has its place. The discipline, called biblical theology, is a controversial one because its hypothesis (or belief, if you want) is, that the Hebrew bible has, notwithstanding the obvious diversity, a central meaning and message. To discover this message, going to and fro between biblical research and preaching, is the task to which I am dedicated.

I have been working for several years now on a project investigating the openness (or the lack of it) of Yehud, the post-exilic community centred around Jerusalem during the Persian Period (± 539-333 BCE). Biblical texts written during this period show remarkable differences in dealing with the boundaries of the community. In some texts (e.g. Ezra, Nehemiah) there is a strong tendency to keep foreigners at a distance and focus on maintaining the boundaries to safeguard the identity of Yehud as a separate community. Other texts (e.g. Deutero- and Trito-Isaiah, Jonah, Ruth, Zechariah) offer much more openness towards strangers. My hypothesis is, that this difference is not only due to different external circumstances, such as tenser or more relaxed relationships with the neighbours but is mainly the result of a different politico-theological view on what the ground rules of the community are. It is obvious that this theme is closely related to present-day issues concerning refugees, migration, and national and religious identity.