The relationship between linguistics and philology, within biblical studies, became a fraught issue when the Society of Biblical Literature proposed subordinating linguistics to philology. The larger concern is the integrity and integration of scholarship within biblical studies, which itself is related to the integration of scholarship within the academic world. The history of institutionalised scholarship suggests two potential paths for biblical studies: one in which each sub-discipline pursues relative independence and expands the field of knowledge from a detached, scientific vantage point, and one in which the role of the text in speaking to a community is sought in the context of relational knowledge.