Search

The Prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible are more than documents containing pronouncements from the prophets after whom the texts are named. They include not only prophecies, but also interpretations of these prophecies’ historical consequences, a quality that makes the Bible’s prophetic literature stand out from its ancient Near Eastern counterparts. This interpretive dynamic is indispensable for understanding the reception of these prophecies in the texts from Qumran and in the New Testament.

When interpreting biblical texts historically, it is crucial to acknowledge the difference between the world of the narratives and the world of the narrators and to account for this difference in a methodologically controlled manner. The biblical account of Israel’s exodus from Egypt narrated in Exodus 1–15 is a highly debated topic in Hebrew Bible studies, in terms of both its compositional and also its historical evaluation. Nonetheless, in the global discussion on the Pentateuch, there is broad consensus about the Priestly texts in Exodus 1–15 (Exod 1:7, 13–14; 2:23*–25; 6:2–12; 7–11*; 14–15*). They provide an apt starting point for inquiry into the different historical settings of the biblical exodus account. The present chapter will discuss several narrative peculiarities in the Priestly exodus account that might be explained by their authorial setting in the early Persian period.

The intensity of the research on the Book of Isaiah entails that it is difficult to find a lecture title has not already been used once.This chapter is to some extent inspired by four issues, the sociology of literature, the (book cross) Editorial history, theology, history and the history of religion. In a situation of extreme branching and specialization of research, as it shapes the Old Testament scholarship for some time, knowledge gains are not least also be expected that one associates different question respects each other. The considerations plays an integrative contribution to the emergence of the prophetic literature based on their perhaps most prominent representative in a larger humanities, literature and religious historical context to understand. The chapter presents three prominent findings in younger prophets Isaiah and research which have certainly found in broad recognition. The original text of the chapter is in German. Keywords: Book of Isaiah; prophets Isaiah; history of religion; the Old Testament scholarship

John Durham opens his Exodus commentary with the sentence: "The Book of Exodus is the first book of the Bible". This is obviously meant to be a provocative statement that tries to lay more emphasis on the significance of the book of Exodus itself than on its placement after the book of Genesis. Indeed, it is striking that the exodus story introduced in the book of Exodus takes up four of the five books of the Pentateuch and that its foremost hero, Moses, even provides the name for the overall narrative in later Jewish and Christian tradition as the "Torah of Moses" or the "Five Books of Moses", even though these titles also includes the book of Genesis. The book of Exodus apparently also includes literary elements. Within the book of Exodus, the Priestly texts are especially prominent and extensive in the second half of the book. Keywords: Bible; book of Genesis; Exodus; John Durham; Pentateuch; Torah of Moses

Starting in the seventies of the twentieth century, the modifications to Noth's theory were still comparatively modest and were centered around the discussion of whether the Deuteronomistic texts in Deuteronomy through Kings should be sorted out along the line of Cross or of Smend. Steck's book developed some groundbreaking ideas, and it is even today helpful in three respects, which include (1) "Deuteronomism" as a long-term phenomenon, (2) "Deuteronomism" as a theological tradition, and (3) the transformation and development of "Deuteronomism" in Second Temple Judaism. Identifying a specific "Deuteronomistic" school behind "Deuteronomistic" texts is unwarranted with respect to the available sources. There is another feature of "Deuteronomistic" texts that can be explained better by the tradition model than the school model - the transformation of the picture of the "Deuteronomistic" history that these texts exhibit. Keywords:Deuteronomistic texts; Noth's theory; Second Temple Judaism; Steck's book

Erzvater and Exodus: Untersuchungen zur doppelten Begrundung der Ursprunge Israels innerhalb der Geschichtsbucher des Alten Testaments, by Konrad Schmid. WMANT 81. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1999. Pp. xii +449. DM 138.00. The present volume is a slightly revised Habilitationsschrift presented to the University of Zurich in 1998. It belongs to a second generation of "revisionists" in pentateuchal studies, often taking the earlier revisions in directions that were hardly anticipated by the reviewer or the author's father. The problem of understanding the relationship of the ancestors tradition of Genesis to the exodus-conquest tradition is not new, but the solution offered here is certainly bold and revolutionary. Schmid begins by looking at the "primary history" of Genesis-2 Kings for narrative breaks and historical transitions as indicators of separate blocks of tradition. Among the most marked and significant is that between the time of the patriarchs and the story of the exodus. The persistence, in biblical scholarship, of dealing with the problem of the connection of these two blocks of tradition leads him to call into question a continuous pentateuchal source "J" and the very notion of a Tetrateuch. The break between Genesis and Exodus is for him more significant than that between Numbers and Deuteronomy, with the next major break coming at the end of Joshua. This tripartite division of the primary history likewise calls into question the notion of a distinct Deuteronomistic corpus (Deuteronomy-2 Kings). At the same time, some redactional clues suggest that there is a structural continuity that overcomes these breaks to create a single history in Genesis-2 Kings. These synchronic observations of structure lead him to focus on the diachronic relationship between Genesis and Exodus (and secondarily between Joshua and Judges) to discover the nature of the literary and conceptual interconnections between the two themes of the ancestors and the exodus. Schmid surveys the texts in Genesis that may be viewed as anticipating the exodus tradition, those in Exodus-Deuteronomy that refer back to Genesis and the patriarchs, and those in Joshua to 2 Kings that make reference to either of the two origin traditions. He concludes that only at the latest redactional level of this whole complex are the two origin traditions combined, and this conclusion is confirmed by other indicators throughout the rest of the Old Testament. The patriarchal tradition and the exodus tradition are then set forth as two independent literary compositions that focus on two quite different origin traditions, with the primeval history of Genesis 1-11 as a third independent corpus. The heart of the thesis (part C) lies in a detailed analysis of four basic texts that interconnect the two major origin traditions: Genesis 15; Exodus 3-4; Joshua 24; Gen 50:24-Exodus 1. Schmid argues that all of these texts are post-P and reflect the same extensive redactional layer. This late redaction was anticipated by P, which was the earliest attempt at combining the two origin traditions into one, inspired by their combined treatment in Second Isaiah. Yet it was only with the post-P redaction that the whole of Genesis-Kings was created as a single historical work. Schmid disputes that there ever was a Deuteronomistic History as such and that only with this post-P redaction was the Hexateuch, understood as Heilsgeschichte, combined through the link with Joshua 24 and the time of the Judges with the monarchy, understood by this redactor as an Unheilsgeschichte. Thus the historical corpus of Genesis-2 Kings is dated to the Persian period, the work of a priest in Jerusalem in the mid-fifth century BCE. It was created as a companion to the whole prophetic corpus Isaiah-Malachi, which was already in existence. Part D then surveys the sequence of ancestors and exodus within the rest of the OT and in post-OT and other Jewish and non-Jewish sources down to the NT. …