Philology – the Oldest Profession?

Abstract

»Philology – the oldest profession?« is a response to Chapter 8 of Marianne Moyaert’s Christian Imaginations of the Religious Other. A History of Religionization (Blackwell Wiley, 2024), which focuses on how eighteenth and nineteenth century human scientists contributed to European imperialist and colonialist endeavors. Even as they turned from scriptural to secular explanations for why the world was the way it was, Moyaert says, practitioners of oriental studies, comparative religion, and anthropology preserved biblical modes of categorization and organization. In this chapter, she pays special attention to philologists. In my response, I show that many of the eighteenth and nineteenth century perspectives on languages she discusses have self-aware biblical parallels.