Perspectives on Language and Text: Essays and Poems in Honor of Francis I. Anderson's Sixtieth Birthday, July 28, 1985 (review)

Hebrew Studies 33 (1992) 110 Reviews Clines is simply too fine a biblical scholar to write 164 pages of text without including a host of valuable critiques, insights, and interpretations. (Unfortunately, a generous serving of typographical errors has found its way into the text as well.) What Does Eve Do to Help? is certainly worth reading; it's enjoyable reading, at that. But some of its essays reveal the dangers of methodological "snacking." A reader-response methodology, like any other, is taken piecemeal to one's peril. Katheryn Pfisterer Darr Boston University School of Theology Boston. MA 02215 PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE AND TEXT: ESSAYS AND POEMS IN HONOR OF FRANCIS I. ANDERSON'S SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY, JULY 28, 1985. Edgar W. Conrad and Edward G. Newing, eds. Pp. xxviii + 443. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1987. Cloth. Francis Anderson is well-known to readers of this journal as a scholar who has made seminal contributions to our understanding of biblical Hebrew sentence structure and other matters of Hebrew and Semitic grammar and philology. He has brought to his studies an unusually sophisticated knowledge of syntactic theory, and he has pioneered the applications of computer analysis and statistics to research into biblical usage. He has also authored or co-authored commentaries on Hosea, Amos, and Job. The editors of the Festschrift under review regard Anderson more fully, both as a scholar and teacher of distinction and as an active Christian and religious poet. The thirty-one articles are divided according to the following heading: "Semitics," "Statistics and Linguistics," "The Hebrew Bible," "The Greek Bible," and "Religion." Fourteen poems are interspersed , including six by Anderson himself, most of which feature biblical phrases and imagery. There are two tributes to Anderson, by an Australian colleague, Stuart Babbage, and an American collaborator, David N. Freedman. Anderson's Curriculum Vitae closes the book; there are regrettably no indices. The admixture of academic scholarship and religious poetry in the volume focuses a perennial issue for those of us engaged in biblical studies-the tension between the supposed dispassion of scholastic analysis and the irrepressible passion of religious commitment. One of the Hebrew Studies 33 (1992) 111 Reviews poems, by Linda Conrad, and one of the articles, by co-editor Edgar W. Conrad, directly address this theme. Several contributions offer an exegesis of biblical texts: Genesis 1-11 (I. M. Kikawada), Numbers 8 (J. Milgrom), Numbers 14 (E. G. Newing), Isaiah 7 (F. C. Fensham), Isaiah 40 (D. N. Freedman), Zephaniah 2 (I. J. Ball), and Ruth (B. Rebera). As one might expect of authors paying tribute to Francis Anderson, a principled textual conservative, there is a pronounced tendency to interpret passages as rhetorically organized units whose meaning depends on the surrounding literary context. The presupposition of textual integrity is made explicit in the definition of "text" that Rebera presents in the first sentence of his article: "a written or spoken passage of any length, that can be discerned as a unified whole" (p. 123). The question of textual unity that preoccupies so much of literary theory today might have been left more open, as in the definition of "text" one finds in, for example, Paul Ricoeur's essay, "What Is a Text?" (reprinted in From Text to Action, Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. K. Blarney and J. B. Thompson [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 19911, pp. 105-124). There Ricoeur tentatively suggests, "a text is any discourse fixed in writing" (p. 106). Two contributions endeavor to resolve problems in biblical Hebrew philology. A. D. Kilmer draws some comparisons between the neff/fm of Gen 6:4 and the primeval sages of Mesopotamian mythology, the semidivine apkallu. She proposes that Hebrew neff/fm denotes "anomalies," an extension of the term nefel, "stillborn fetus" (p. 43, n. 14). J. Milgrom suggests that "all texts which construe kipprir with qesep/neqep have koper in mind" (p. 209). That is, in contexts where kippur, which one might otherwise understand as expurgation or purification, is mandated to prevent or remove divine affliction, it has the sense of paying a ransom. In Numbers 8, "the bulls are the kipprir on behalf of the Levites," just as "the Levites are the kippr1r on behalf of the...