Form and Intertextuality in Prophetic and Apocalyptic Literature (review)

Hebrew Studies 48 (2007) 370 Reviews support the daily worship in the Temple. Jesus believed that the poor should not be forced to pay for these endeavors and that the community should offer funds in their place. This position is morally tenable and yet it does not force us to understand Jesus’ Pharisaic/rabbinic opponents as greedy or corrupt. An inclusive vision of sacrificial worship meant to the Pharisees/rabbis that even the poor had to pay the Temple tax and that the money-changers had a right to collect their surcharges. Finally, Klawans notes that while there are clearly anti-Temple polemics in the New Testament, such as that found in Hebrews, these were not shared by Jesus or even Paul, who also exhibits a fairly positive attitude towards Temple worship. Throughout the book, Klawans freely admits that his own interpretations are subject to critique and that some are more speculative than others. His main contribution is not so much in his own interpretations as in a general critique of scholarship on the Temple and sacrifice. His interpretations point the way for others to think in a more balanced fashion, to recognize regnant biases and put them aside. It seems that his main hope is to open up new and better avenues in thinking about these issues, rather than offer final answers. Finally, I cannot conclude without offering a general praise of the clarity of Klawans’s writing, a clarity which also made his first book, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism, a pleasure to read. All too often scholars obscure their basic points by couching them in scholarly jargon. Klawans shows that it is possible to engage in a bibliographical survey without becoming obscure . Klawans’s methodology and writing are both models of articulate, thoughtful, and balanced scholarship. Joshua Kulp The Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies Jerusalem, Israel kulp@uscj.org FORM AND INTERTEXTUALITY IN PROPHETIC AND APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE. By Marvin A. Sweeney. FAT 45. Pp. xiii + 295. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005. Cloth,
79,00. $101.18. Hearty congratulations to Marvin Sweeney on this fine collection of research articles on the biblical (and post-biblical) prophetic and apocalyptic literature. All of the essays in the volume, several of which appear here for the first time, are helpful or insightful, many particularly so. Some are more vulnerable to criticism than others, of course, but each makes its own contribution . The articles fit together nicely to form a coherent whole, testifying to Hebrew Studies 48 (2007) 371 Reviews the consistency of the author’s thinking and to his sustained commitment to his methodologies of choice. The volume’s title fittingly describes the essays’ attention to matters of literary form and intertextuality. Despite Sweeney’s commitment to redaction criticism and diachronic analysis, he prefers to initially bracket such angles of approach and attend to the major structural features and logical flow of a biblical text’s final form. A proper synchronic understanding of a passage is the best launching point, Sweeney believes, for reconstructing preceding phases. More than once, he laments that scholars have misconstrued the final form by bringing in questions of compositional history too early. The five parts of the volume cover the biblical prophetic and apocalyptic corpus. Part 1, “Isaiah,” includes four essays: “The Book of Isaiah as Prophetic Torah,” “On Multiple Settings in the Book of Isaiah,” “On ûmĕśôś in Isaiah 8:6,” and “Prophetic Exegesis in Isaiah 65–66.” Part 2, “Jeremiah,” consists of the following essays: “The Masoretic and Septuagint Versions of the Book of Jeremiah in Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective,” “The Truth in True and False Prophecy,” “Structure and Redaction in Jeremiah 2– 6,” and “Jeremiah 30–31 and King Josiah’s Program of National Restoration and Religious Reform.” Part 3, “Ezekiel,” includes “Ezekiel: Zadokite Priest and Visionary Prophet of the Exile,” “The Destruction of Jerusalem as Purification in Ezekiel 8–11,” and “The Assertion of Divine Power in Ezekiel 33:21–39:29.” Part 4, “The Book of the Twelve Prophets,” contains “Sequence and Interpretation in the Book of the Twelve,” “The Place and Function of Joel in the Book of the Twelve,” “Micah’s Debate with Isaiah...