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Book Reviews 177 and its careful treatment of specific texts. It will have to be taken into account in any future work on Joshua. Nevertheless, one may leave Auld's work, as I do, with reservations about some of his own hypotheses. As I suggested, I find his text-critical work compelling. The LXX must certainly be given full consideration as a textual witness. Moreover, Auld's observation that the line between literary and textual stages of development (as distinguished by "higher" and "lower" criticism) is blurred has been confirmed by work outside of Joshua. But Auld's conclusions about the literary relationships among biblical books is on much shakier ground. His questioning of scholarly assumptions about such relationships focuses especially on portions ofJoshua 12-22, which is often seen as a late addendum to the Deuteronomistic history. Hence it would not be surprising to fmd influence from thatmaterial on Chronicles. But the situation is quite different in otherparts ofJoshua and the Former Prophets. I remain especially unconvinced about Auld's theory of a "Book of the Two Houses" drawn on independently by SamuelKings and Chronicles. Here, the evidence seems clearly to favor the traditional view that the Chronicler relied on Samuel-Kings, as I have argued elsewhere ("The Chronicler as Redactor," forthcoming in M. P. Graham, G. N. Knoppers, and S. L. McKenzie, eds., The Chronicler as Author, Sheffield Academic Press). I also retain my belief in the existence ofthe Deuteronomistic History. Auld's sketch ofhis alternative theory in the last two pages of this book is the clearest expression of his view yet. While I have doubts that a convincing case can be made for this theory, I look forward to Auld's presentation ofmore detailed arguments on its behalf. Steven L. McKenzie Department of Religion Rhodes College The Burden of Prophecy: Poetic Utterance in the Prophets of the Old Testament, by Albert Cook. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University, 1996. 163 pp. $29.95. It may seem an odd thing to say of a book that took me a year and a half to read, but Albert Cook's The Burden ofProphecy is too short. Aiming to investigate "the tonal range of biblical prophecy and ... its burden" (p. 1), while extending the scope of prophecy to include wisdom and psalmic literature (albeit in modified form), Cook sets an ambitious agenda for a mere 160 pages. The discussion includes sophisticated introductions to Hebrew parallelism and contemporary speech-act theory, judicious treatments ofhistorical settings, and wonderfully deft close readings. Yet it is all so compact and specific to selected texts that one struggles to detect a connecting thread or comprehensive thesis. When one arrives at the concluding sentence to learn that the sweeping, unconditional predictions of Daniel "constitute the fullest expression ofprophecy" (p. 178 SHOFAR Fa1l2000 Vol. 19, No.1 146), one wonders how one got there. Fuller development and more explicit road signs were required. The opening chapter is certainly promising. In foregrounding the term "burden" (Hebrew massii), Cook seems to have found a suitably multifaceted idea around which to organize his book. As both a technical genre designation and a more general term indicating a weight to be borne, "burden" fuses the writing prophets' religiously strenuous form oflife with their primary literary form, the poetic-prophetic oracle (a cry to be 'raised,' an utterance to be 'lifted'). Indeed, the concept of the burden is the perfect instrument for analyzing in a wide assortment of oracles the rapidly shifting force vectors along the triangular God-prophet-people relationship. This Cookproceeds to do with Amos in his Introduction and with Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel in the following three chapters respectively. A recurring terminology of"bearing," "posture," "pressure," and "intensities" reinforces this analytic motif. But with the fmal three chapters on Psalms, Qoheleth, and Zechariah-Daniel, the "burden" motif virtually disappears, undercutting the continuity-in-modulation that Cook promised at the outset. Granted, it does appear once (p. 124), but only in quotation ofSecond Zechariah (9:1), and without remark on the existential posture of the prophet himself. The effect is that these three chapters treat their subject matter more as a foil to, than as an extension of, classical...

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