'As Those Who Are Taught': The Interpretation of Isaiah from the LXX to the SBL. Edited by CLAIRE MATTHEWS MCGINNIS And PATRICIA K. TULL.

Abstract

This wide-ranging collection of studies in the history of interpretation evolved out of the ‘Formation of the Book of Isaiah’ Seminar, a feature of the American Society of Biblical Literature programme since the early 1990s. A useful introductory chapter by the editors, with the title ‘Remembering the Former Things’ (Isa. 46:9), comments on the ‘chronological snobbery’ (C. S. Lewis) of much modern scholarship and celebrates the recent rediscovery by biblical scholars of earlier interpreters. These are ‘sociologically closer to the original communities of Scripture’ (p. 9), and often provide new insights and inspiration, even in relation to the most familiar passages, in the academy as well as in church and synagogue. There are chapters on the Greek Isaiah (Baer, van der Kooij), Isaiah at Qumran (Brooke) and in the New Testament (Wagner, Williams, Fekkes), the patristic period (Cassel), Jewish perspectives from the twelfth century (Harris) and the sixteenth (Cooper), the commentaries of Calvin (Plantinga Pauw) and Lowth (Stansell), and modern critical scholarship from Eichhorn to Westermann and his successors (Sweeney, Melugin). In a concluding chapter entitled ‘One Book, Many Voices’, Tull returns to the hoary question of the unity of Isaiah and surveys relevant approaches (redaction criticism, canonical criticism, reader response), and some of the many scholarly voices, from Douglas Jones and John Eaton in the fifties to Williamson and Rendtorff in the nineties, who agree that, however intriguing the prehistory of the book may have been, its afterlife from the LXX down to the era of modern historical criticism is at least as worthy of our critical attention.