Abstract
This book is part of a three-volume work by Tremper Longman III titled Approaching the Old Testament and which focuses on literary, historical, and theological perspectives on the Old Testament. While he views these three perspectives as being deeply interconnected, in this first volume Longman specifically seeks to explore the literary quality of the biblical text by examining how narratives and poems are presented.
The book is broken into three major sections. In part one, Longman tackles the theory and conventions which have informed literary readings of the Old Testament. Chapter 1 focuses on the location of meaning in the process of literary communication, which Longman describes as ‘an author writing a text to communicate a message to an audience’ (p. 18), and concludes that biblical interpretation’s goal should be to detect the intention of the author (both human author and divine). The issue of the text’s divine authorship could have been explored further here and some discussion of different understandings of this idea would have been informative, though perhaps this is being saved for the volume on theological approaches. The second chapter charts the history of literary readings of the Old Testament and introduces many key literary theories which have been applied to biblical interpretation. While Longman is right to demonstrate how post-structuralist readings have fallen out of fashion, he seems hesitant to accept the positive insights such studies have revealed. Nevertheless, this is a helpful introduction to a range of theoretical approaches which have been drawn upon by biblical scholars since the 1970s. Longman turns to look at genre theory in chapter 3 and provides a valuable outline of how the concept of genre could be understood. This is then put into practice in chapters 4–5 where the literary conventions of narrative prose and poetry in the Old Testament are considered. The reader who wants to understand the basics of Hebrew poetry will find chapter 5 particularly enlightening. Part one finishes with a discussion of intertextuality (ch. 6) and the ways in which biblical texts may make use of one another.
The remaining two parts of the book draw upon the conventions and theory outlined in section one to conduct analyses of different biblical texts. Part two (chs. 7–8) demonstrates literary readings of prose narratives from both the Torah and the Historical Books. Part three (chs. 9–11) then conducts similar readings but of poetic texts in the Psalms, Wisdom Literature, and the Prophets. These example readings really reinforce the value of appreciating the literary quality of the Old Testament and demonstrate how to apply the theoretical work from part one.
In sum, this volume provides a rich and detailed discussion of how Christian interpreters can read the Old Testament with attention to its literary quality. Longman carefully introduces and explains the more technical or theoretical details on the topic so that even those who are unfamiliar with much of the terminology will find this a rewarding read.