To Each Its Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and Their Applications (review)

Book Reviews 143 division into chapters suggested less, it seems, by pertinent historical considerations than by current trends in socio-musicological thought. Deprived of any consistent sense of chronology one cannot always be sure about the relative significance of documents which, though ostensibly related in both content and intent, turn up in rather different or but loosely connected contexts. Leaving aside such minor qualms, whether pertaining to matters of overall structure or of occasionally puzzling linguistic usage, this reviewer, for one, questions the wisdom of an editorial decision that deprives serious scholarship of the German originals of the very documents that after all form the raison d'etre of what Professor Bohlman calls his "multivocal text." If only because those originals are located so far out of reach of the musicological world at large, their inclusion should have served to broaden the volume's scholarly appeal considerably. But whatever a given reader's personal desiderata, nothing can diminish the far-reaching documentary value of this latest labor of love of an as yet youthful American scholar who has already shed much needed light on the decisive contribution of good music to the spiritual welfare of Central European Jewry, not only in the diaspora which in the end rejected them so violently but also in the land of Zion where the plentiful cultural seeds they planted well over half a century ago have yielded such abundant fruit ever since. Alexander L. Ringer Department of Music University of Illinois To Each Its Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and Their Applications, edited by Steven L. McKenzie and Stephen R. Haynes. Louisville: Westminster!.John Knox Press, 1993. 251 pp. $12.99 (P). A couple of years ago I attended a session of the Matthew Group at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. As best I could tell, what I heard was one of the group members' deconstruction of a second member's deconstruction of still another member's deconstruction of a section of Matthew's Gospel. What I understood was almost nothing. Soon after, I sat in on another group of papers and heard a presenter use speech act theory to analyze part of the First Epistle of John. After 25 minutes of complex analysis done in an arcane code language the presenter concluded that the epistle basically says that if the reader doesn't 144 SHOFAR Summer 1994 Vol. 12, No.4 agree with the letter's author, he or she is damned. Most in attendance seemed impressed. I was somewhere between amused and bemused. But in both sessions I might have had a different response had this book by McKenzie and Haynes been available to me. This work is specifically meant for folks like myselfwho have found it increasingly difficult to keep current on all the latest methodological developments in the field of biblical studies. The editors have collected essays on various older and newer types of biblical criticism, thirteen in all. Under the category "Traditional Methods of Biblical Criticism" are chapters on Reading the Bible Historically (by J. Maxwell Miller), Source Criticism (by Pauline A. Viviano), TraditionHistorical Criticism (by Robert A. Di Vito), Form Criticism (by Martin J. Buss), and Redaction Criticism (by Gail Paterson Corrington). A second category is called "Expanding the Tradition" and includes discussions of Social-Scientific Criticism (by Dale B. Martin), Canonical Criticism (by Mary C. Callaway), and Rhetorical Criticism (by Yehoshua Gitay). The final category is termed "Overturning the Tradition." Included here are Structural Criticism (by Daniel Patte), Narrative Criticism (by David M. Gunn), Reader-Response Criticism (by EdgarV. MCKnight), Poststructuralist Criticism (by William Beardslee), and Reading the Bible Ideologically: Feminist Criticism (by Danna Nolan Fewell). Each essay addresses five sets of issues. First is a definition of the method and its most important terminology, history of its development, assumptions it holds about the relationship of text and history, and its prospects for the future. Next, the method is set in relationship to other methods described in the book. Essayists then demonstrate each method on particular texts in either Genesis or Luke-Acts. Finally, after the limitations or drawbacks of each method are spelled out, each essay concludes with a bibliography...