Abstract
The nature of the Book of the Twelve—not least whether and/or how far the collection has been deliberately redacted to form a single ‘book’—has been widely discussed in recent times and remains far from settled. Although not so prominent, new directions in form criticism are also subject to current debate and both issues are brought together in this book. In his ‘Introduction’, Michael Floyd notes that the focus of form criticism has shifted from the original words of the prophets to the much later message of the scribes who composed these books. Floyd also provides the first of the sixteen essays that follow, reaching ‘a partial, tentatively positive’ conclusion that the writers of some of the prophetic books were in a limited sense historiographers. In her carefully constructed essay Beth M. Stovell uses examples especially from Hosea and Micah to demonstrate that ‘insights in modern metaphor theory provide the groundwork for thinking about genre in helpful new ways’. Next, James M. Trotter, surveys Near Eastern legal practices in the First Millennium bce before briefly examining the ‘prophetic lawsuit’ in the Book of the Twelve.
By paying attention to the relationship between the vision account and accompanying divine oracles, particularly in Amos 7–9 and Zechariah 1–6, Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer concludes that from a form-critical perspective the divine oracle, although usually included, is not necessarily clearly connected to the vision report. Further, lack of divine speech does not necessarily indicate that the vision report is earlier. For Carol J. Dempsey, the genres of woe and promise ‘provide a window into the human-divine relationship that existed in ancient Israel and that continues to exist today’. Erhard S. Gerstenberger is impressed by the range of genres represented in the Twelve and seeks to show how smaller clusters of genres, coalescing around particular themes, were designed to be directed in spoken form to communities rather than individuals.
Marvin A. Sweeney is concerned with the different ordering of the twelve in MT and LXX versions, which results in different formal characters and eschatological concerns in the two versions. His discussion indicates that form criticism must in future take account of multiple distinctive forms of the same book as well as those books that are simultaneously single literary works and compilations of multiple literary works. Asking ‘Where Are the Prophets in the Book of the Twelve?’ James D. Nogalski examines several features—headings, anthologies and small collections, source blocks and the uses that have been made of them, and the like—and finds that interest is centred in the message of Yahweh, not the person of the prophet. Working with the MT order, Mark J. Boda, finds in the first half of the Twelve examples of prayers directed to Yahweh that provide normative speech for the people’s address to God, but these cease with a call to human silence before the deity in Habakkuk, Zephaniah, and Zechariah 1–8. These exhortations, he suggests, ‘share a common origin and redactional strategy related to the latter portion of the Book of the Twelve’.
For Tim Bulkeley the term ‘prophetic fiction’ which ‘does not…imply a biographical interest’ provides an appropriate genre category for the prophetic books and ‘allows us to read…in ways that permit the flow of sections (as well as the individual sections themselves) to make sense’. Colin M. Toffelmire raises the question ‘Sitz im What?’ and introduces method derived from Systemic Functional Linguistics (STM), which he understands to share ‘a similar focus on the relationship between genres of texts…and some identifiable social context’ as Sitz im Leben, before applying it to Obadiah as a test case. It may be worth noting that a fuller introduction to the method and its use may be found in Toffelmire’s A Discourse and Register Analysis of the Prophetic Book of Joel.
Rather than understanding the references in Zephaniah to foreign nations worshipping Yahweh (2.11; 3.9) as redactional additions, Daniel Timmer borrows the notion of conceptual coherence from linguistic theory and argues that in similar fashion to Judah’s promised restoration following punishment at least some of the nations will likewise be restored. In his examination of ‘Form Criticism in Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi’, Paul L. Redditt seeks to highlight what has happened over recent decades as scholars have engaged with ‘the whole history of traditions, from their oral, preliterary stage to their latest redactional stage’. His understanding of form criticism therefore appears closer to form criticism as it was earlier construed than the ‘new form criticism’ as it is applied by most of the other contributors. In contrast to Redditt’s contribution, Anthony R. Petterson, ‘A New Form-Critical Approach to Zechariah’s Crowning of the High Priest Joshua and the Identity of “Shoot” (Zechariah 6:9–15)’, is much concerned that for the audience of the final form of the book the one identified as ‘shoot’ could not have been Zerubbabel (as a redaction critic might suppose) but a later descendant of David.
The book concludes with two invited review essays, Martin J. Buss, ‘Goals and Processes of the “New” Form Criticism’ and Robert R. Wilson, ‘New Form Criticism and the Prophetic Literature: The Unfinished Agenda’. Buss’s essay is much the shorter and consists in indicating a few of the important themes addressed by several of the contributors before providing a brief account of his own position. Wilson’s rather longer response provides some account of the inception and development of the form critical method, picks out some of its strengths and weaknesses, and with respect to the new form criticism indicates important issues that are yet to be addressed.
A positive aspect of this sort of collection is that it allows several scholars working in the same general area to showcase some aspects of their present thinking. Yet clearly not all are agreed on the extent to which the so-called ‘Book of the Twelve’ can be thought of as unified or the product of a final redaction. In much the same way as the various contributions reflect several different standpoints the texts examined in the collection are not subjected consistently to an agreed method since there is as yet no agreed shape to the ‘new form criticism’. These observations should not detract, however, from the overall impression that here is a stimulating collection of essays that will provide the reader with much food for thought with respect both to the texts examined and the nature of the method brought to bear upon them.