Norman Gottwald is a pioneering Marxist Biblical scholar--a distinction shared by far too few in his profession.
In my view, there are two reasons to read the Bible: the first is for aesthetics (that of the Biblical texts themselves and of the vast body of art and literature upon which they have left their impact), and the second is for its utopianism (the Bible's major contribution to the Near Eastern prophetic tradition).
While it is true that most Marxian social and economic categories belong to an industrial era and are not an exact fit for the prevailing conditions of ancient Israel, they are quite suggestive and shed light upon the problems of equality/inequality and liberation/bondage--problems that are not unique to modern societies but have plagued human communities around the globe for as long as human beings have lived in them.
Reading Gottwald, one is never very far from these issues--and that is a good thing, because too many people turn to the Bible in order to escape them.
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