The Promise and Peril of Prophetic Language: An Assessment of O'Brien's Middle Course

THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF PROPHETIC LANGUAGE: AN ASSESSMENT OF O’BRIEN’S MIDDLE COURSE Joel S. Kaminsky Smith College jkaminsk@email.smith.edu A review of Challenging Prophetic Metaphor: Theology and Ideology in the Prophets. By Julia O’Brien. Pp. xxii + 202. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/ John Knox Press, 2008. Paper, $24.95. Biblical scholarship has a duty as well as a vested interest in reaching a wider audience and doing so requires that scholars distill information into an accessible form while limiting the number and size of their footnotes. Professor O’Brien has accomplished this worthy goal and produced a concise and thought provoking book. In this monograph, O’Brien sets out to steer a middle course between feminist rejection of problematic prophetic texts and the path taken by traditional interpreters, ranging from ancient to contemporary exegetes, who view the prophets in a positive light, often ignoring recent feminist criticism. The introduction and the first three chapters give an overview of the history of scholarship that has resulted in the current binary appraisal of the prophetic books and map out the methodology O’Brien will employ. The author then proceeds to analyze five prophetic metaphors: God as husband, God as father, God as warrior, Jerusalem as daughter, and Edom as brother. While not always successful, O’Brien deserves praise for placing various biblical texts into conversation with contemporary political and ecclesiastical concerns. Although O’Brien has found a way to engage the biblical text rather than opting to discard it as some feminists advocate, ultimately she leaves much if not all of Scripture functioning as a negative example of how one should not speak about God or live one’s life. O’Brien’s approach may work for theologically liberal Jews and Christians whose central value systems are animated more by modern ideological commitments than by communal norms grounded in a set of ancient Scriptures and the centuries of theological commentary upon these sacred texts. But, it is difficult to see how broad swaths of Jews and Christians can live out their faith commitments from Professor O’Brien’s stance, a stance which views the Hebrew Bible as containing metaphors that reveal little if anything about God’s true nature. The trouble is that traditionally both Jews and Christians have lived their lives in relationship to a personal God whose attributes are revealed through the Hebrew Studies 50 (2009) 384 Review Essay Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Both Jews and Christians worship the God of Israel, not some abstraction directly correlated to the contemporary egalitarian concerns that so dominate this book. While I agree with O’Brien’s sentiment that the Bible is not simply “a transparent window into the divine” (p. 60) and that there is value in our wrestling with Scripture, I disagree with her attempt to view Scripture primarily as a type of literature. O’Brien makes this move so as to enable her to use the Hebrew Bible as “a resource for our lives, even when we cannot or will not submit to its claims” (p. xxii). But as James Kugel pointed out over twenty-five years ago, to ignore the Bible’s religious character, the scriptural claims its makes upon Jews and Christians, “and to act as if the Bible had suddenly one day materialized on the shelf stuck between Great Expectations and The End of the Affair is to give the phrase Mymvh Nm hrwt a new and singularly unfelicitous interpretation.”1 Let us now examine some specific contentions with which I take issue, beginning with chapter 2 in which O’Brien discusses various feminist critiques of Hosea. She and other feminists are rightly disturbed by God’s treatment of his wife within Hosea’s extended husband-wife metaphor. Thus, twice within her book she heartily endorses Judith Sanderson’s proclamation that “no aspect of God’s relationship with humankind can be represented in the modern world by an image that depends on a destructive view of women’s bodied selves” (pp. 39, 113).2 While the rhetorical effect of this statement is powerful, upon deeper inspection its logic seems questionable. Why should only the destruction of women’s bodied selves be off limits...