You have not Spoken What is Right About Me: Intertextuality and the Book of Job (review)

Hebrew Studies 46 (2005) 427 Reviews as an element motivating God to respond causes the penitential aspect to dominate the form and content of these prayers. These exilic and post-exilic penitential prayers thus “represent a nadir in perceptions of the divine-human relationship” (p. 159). In the later Hellenistic and Roman periods, by way of contrast, this communal confession of sin became less prominent. Bautch gives explicit attention to textual criticism and offers a wealth of textual data in the form of charts. Still there are some omissions and small lapses in this area. Several difficult textual problems, some of which have implications for interpretation and translation, are not fully analyzed, even if the evidence of the early witnesses is given. Readers are told that the translation of the prayers is based on the Masoretic text and rendered as poetry but no mention is made of the source of the Hebrew text, though one presumes it is Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. With regard to Psalm 78, Bautch suggests that “MT indicates Ps 78:32–39 as a distinct unit” by “indentation” (p. 51, n. 69). If Bautch refers to the indentation in BHS, this is not a feature of MT, but represents the interpretation of the editor of the Psalms in BHS, H. Bardtke, who is nowhere cited. These quibbles in no way touch on the major contributions of this book, which will be of particular interest to scholars of biblical prayer and the Second Temple period. Stephen D. Ryan Dominican House of Studies Washington, DC 20017 sdryan@dhs.edu YOU HAVE NOT SPOKEN WHAT IS RIGHT ABOUT ME: INTERTEXTUALITY AND THE BOOK OF JOB. By Yohan Pyeon. Pp. 239. Studies in Biblical Literature 45. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Cloth, $65.95. In his Ph.D. dissertation from Claremont Graduate University, Pyeon seeks to show the intertextual connections on two “levels”: first, among the various speakers and, second, between the book of Job and “past traditions” (as he always calls them.) He recognizes that others have dealt with these matters to varying degrees, but he feels that previous scholarship may have been “hindered” from investigating intertextuality because of the problem of dating the book and “the absence of proper methodology” (p. 45). To solve the first problem, Pyeon surveys some standard arguments to settle on a fifth to third centuries B.C.E. dating. Presumably now less “hindered ” by this problem than previous scholars, he turns to the second problem , “proper methodology.” Hebrew Studies 46 (2005) 428 Reviews His “methodology” he calls “intertextuality,” though intertextuality has usually been understood as a fact of literature, not a method. His survey of concepts of intertextuality (pp. 49–56) is clear and valuable, but I find his application of the term confusing. Pyeon believes that intertextuality exists on two “levels”: On the synchronic level, intertextuality combines elements of form criticism and rhetorical criticism in order to discern the relationship among the units, in this case the speeches (pp. 57–58). On the diachronic level, he considers how the book cites and alludes to other works and the particular twists it places on them. As for the first level, it seems to me a waste of a good term to call such interactions “intertextuality.” In almost any book with dialogue, the characters will be citing and alluding to things said earlier, and responding to what the others have said or what they imagine others to have said (as often in Job). In any case, this cross-talk is not textual. For us it is textual, but the characters are interacting orally, and to label their exchange “textual” obscures the orality of an argument conducted face-to-face, in which they miss what each other is saying, or come back too it only later, or fail to hear each other. In any case, we can expect much from this “methodology,” because, Pyeon explains, “[s]cholars are finding that reconstructions of the compositional history of a book do not always provide a full understanding of the book and, that, in many cases such models cannot be proven decisively” (p. 57). Aside from the fact that one does not “prove” methodologies, he is misrepresenting historical criticism...