Concepts of Scripture in Yehezkel Kaufmann 235Cultural Creativity and Empirical Investigation
Kaufmann thus conceives of the Bible as a historical artifact that must be
studied like any other historical document. For him, biblical scholarship
must abstain from any speculative metaphysics. He is thus an “empiricist”
but, at the same time, not an empirical “materialist.” In other words, he
thinks that we cannot explain cultural creativity by material conditions
alone and that we must take into account a category of ruah., which, for
him, is a primary and fundamental factor in cultural creativity, a factor
equally as important as any other moment or element, be that material
or social. By the term ruah., he refers not to some Hegelian or romanti-
cist concept but to an empirical category of historical experience, as does
Dilthey. And to give an empirical grounding to this category, Kaufmann
introduces a cultural phenomenon that he calls an “infi nite variety of cul-
tural creative forms” — in a turn of phrase reminiscent of Dilthey’s “infi nite
variety of philosophical forms.”20
Kaufmann questions two dominant approaches in modern historical
studies, namely, dialectic idealism and empirical materialism.21 Th e former
approach, like Hegel or Wellhausen, seeks to explain the origin and history
of a cultural phenomenon through a preconceived metaphysical paradigm,
whereas the latter, like Marx or Durkheim, seeks to explain it through its
physical and social settings and causalities. In Kaufmann’s view, neither ap-
proach adequately accounts for the origin of the infi nite variety of cultural
forms as an empirical phenomenon, for such a phenomenon involves mul-
tiple, heterogeneous factors — material and nonmaterial, which in turn in-
fl uence each other — along with contingent elements and therefore cannot
be explained by general overarching principles.
Like Dilthey, Kaufmann asserts that as each individual has this creative
potential or ruah., so does each social group. Kaufmann insists this term be
used only in an empirical sense as a collective potential of cultural creativ-
ity and not as an abstract metaphysical entity. For him, as for Dilthey, any
cultural organic phenomenon with its own internal logic and principles,
such as language or religion, involves this collective creative potential or
ruah..22 Indeed, his overall thesis is that biblical religion, as a cultural sys-
tem, is a product of the collective creative potential of ancient Israel — a
system that involves a distinctive worldview that is categorically diff erent
from any polytheistic worldview.