Kim jest człowiek? Antropologia vs. antropologie Starego Testamentu

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Who Is The Man? Anthropology vs. Anthropologies of the Old Testament

The problem with the anthropology of the Old Testament today is this, that we do not know whether we are to study it only as historical anthropology. In this case, views and ideas about man, his place in the world, rights and duties in society, as written in the pages of the Bible, will be treated in categories assigned to a certain epoch and its specific cultural and social conditions. However, if we want to study theological anthropology, we must also notice, despite these conditions, some universal questions and the timeliness of the answers given to them, treating them as an important contribution also to our contemporary question about man. One approach does not exclude the other. Knowing the conditions in which the anthropological views of the Old Testament authors were shaped, what and why they thought about themselves and their relations with the world around them, and what role their faith played in this way of thinking, and then also based on what experiences they shaped, we can get to know not only the most fundamental question about who the man of the Old Testament felt in relation to himself, to other people and to the world in which he lived, but also the reasons why he gave himself such and no other answers. These question and these answers are also valid today, despite the significant multiplication of views and ways in which people nowadays answer such questions.

The presented book is an attempt to comprehensively present the current knowledge in the field of biblical anthropology of the Old Testament. In the introduction to it, we present the contexts in which the fundamental question of who a human being is posed, as well as brief outline of the history and current state of the discussion on how to practice this anthropology? In the next chapters we discuss the geographical and cultural environment (I), the way of looking at fact of birth and death (II), way of looking at human gender and sexuality (III), human experiences in the bodily and spiritual sphere (IV), social relations (V) and activity (VI), forms of communication with the world (VII), the sense of space and time (VIII), and finally the multiplicity and diversity of answers (anthropology vs. anthropologies) to who a man is and their contextual conditioning (IX). The last chapter is an attempt to summarize and extract from the above review what constitutes a common belief in every biblical era about being human in relation to the world, and what distinguishes these views in relation to contemporary anthropological approaches.