Isaiah's Vision and the Family of God (review)

Hebrew Studies 37 (1996) 168 Reviews perience of God's love during the exile...became an 'underground' movement once Haggai and Zechariah gained the leadership.... Their theological position was to be revived only with the coming of Christianity" (p. 22). One may well sympathize with Knight's wish that the Christian Old Testament be heard more loudly in the churches (pp. 139-140) and that the three Western monotheistic faiths could find in their common heritage the grounds for rapprochement (pp. 143-145). Knight's methods, however, are a step backwards. For those trained in the "archeological" methods of modern historical and literary criticisms, which pay attention to every layer of meaning and composition, Knight's "strip-mining" of Deuteronomy 32 by tearing ideas and metaphors out of all literary and historical contexts leaves the text looking like a quarry indeed. James W. Walls Hastings College Hastings, NE 68902-0269 ISAIAH'S VISION AND THE FAMILY OF GOD. By Katheryn Pfisterer Darr. Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation. Pp. 280. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1994. Paper, $21.99. The last two decades have seen a dramatic shift among critical scholars who increasingly recognize the need to read the book of Isaiah as a coherent work of literature. This shift does not entail the end of scholarly attempts to reconstruct the literary history of Isaiah or to identify the perspectives and concerns of the individual writers whose works appear in the present form of the book. Rather, it represents a major advance, enabling scholars to assess the literary character and the ideological or theological perspective of the book as a whole and to gain some understanding of the hermeneutical process by which Isaiah was created. Darr's monograph stands squarely in the midst of this discussion as one of the first critical attempts to read major Isaian metaphors, namely, the family metaphors of children and women in relation to the present form of the book of Isaiah as a whole. (An earlier noteworthy work by Kirsten Nielsen, There is Hope for a Tree: The Tree as Metaphor in Isaiah [JSOTSup 65; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989] treats only Isaiah 1-39.) Darr's work grows out of two convictions: 1) that sequential readers of the book of Isaiah will discover the unfolding themes and motifs that are usually Hebrew Studies 37 (1996) 169 Reviews overlooked by readers of individual pericopes, and 2) that figurative language functions strategically in that its metaphors and related tropes "invite readers to particular perceptions of reality" (p. 11). She employs a "textspecific" reader-oriented approach developed by her husband John A. Darr in recent works on the interpretation of the Lukan narratives in the New Testament. J. Darr's approach employs three critical premises: 1) that literature functions rhetorically, employing rhetorical strategies in order to achieve certain effects upon its audience; 2) that meaning in a text results from the "dynamic interaction" of the text's rhetorical strategies and the reader's interpretative structures; and 3) that a host of text-specific factors are relevant for contemporary interpretations of ancient texts. With these methodological principles in mind, K. Darr asserts that the reader of the book of Isaiah is a culturally literate (Judean) scribe, religious leader, or educator who lived under Persian rule near the beginning of the fourth century B.C.E. She does not justify this date fully, but merely states in a footnote that it is "a likely, though not universally-accepted date, by which to posit Isaiah's existence in its final form" (p. 229). She asserts that this reader is aware that some of the book's prophecies were fulfilled during the period from Isaiah's lifetime until the reader's own day and that others have yet to be fulfilled. This reader thereby lives with the expectation that Isaiah's vision of the Deity's plan for Israel and the nations will ultimately be realized. She chooses the familial metaphors of children and women in part because they have generally been ignored or treated cursorily in prior studies of Isaiah and in part because they aid in conveying the relationships and experiences that bind Israel and its Deity. In treating metaphor and...