Progress and Confusion: On a New Introduction to the Old TestamentIntroduction to the Old Testament. Georg Fohrer , David Green

Abstract

A colleague of mine says that one simply does not read a book on Old Testament introduction all the way through. Such works are not meant for that, he says, but for reference use, and besides they are much too boring. I hesitate to admit to him that I have read yet another Old Testament introduction all the way through, and yet one might be able to justify such a reading of this book. It is not so dull after all, and that is saying quite a lot for any work of technical introduction which has been translated from the German. Georg Fohrer's Introduction to the Old Testament,1 translated by David Green, is a remarkably clear piece of writing, excellently translated. Fohrer has succeeded, probably better than any other modern writer, in providing for us a handbook which covers this enormous amount of material in a comprehensive, concise, and readable manner. To merit those three adjectives is no small accomplishment. But this book is being given an extended review not just because one may predict that it will become a standard resource in the field for Old Testament students in the coming years. This is a book which provokes further comment about some of the riddles which face Old Testament scholars at the moment, and so, after a paragraph or two about the nature of Fohrer's book, it is to certain of the issues which his work raises about the reconstruction of a history of Old Testament literature that I wish to turn. Fohrer is no bandwagoner, and that should make the reading of his book a stimulating, if not disturbing, experience for many. Let us simply note, without discussion, some of the fashions in Old Testament scholarship about which he is skeptical. Since he is German, we would not expect him to be overly enthusiastic about the New Year's festival (pp. 34, 26I ff.) or oral tradition (pp. 37-40); and he is not. Neither is it surprising to find him critical ofWeiser's Covenant Festival theory (pp. I 1819) and of other reconstructions which assume that much of the Old Testament as we have it originated in or was used in the cult (pp. I 17, 284 ff.). But the influence of Noth and Von Rad on American Old Testament scholarship has been so strong in the last decade