The Bible and the Politics of Exegesis: Essays in Honor of Norman K. Gottwald on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (review)

Abstract

Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 163 Reviews For example, the sacrifices not eaten at all or eaten by priests should all be placed under the "very holy" category (hence making a subdivision in that category if sacrifices not eaten are, in fact, more holy than others) and the sacrifices eaten by nonpriests should be moved over to the "holy" column. Despite these qualifications, the volume is a solid and beneficial contribution . Its comprehensiveness (including its full bibliography) places it among the basic works on priestly ritual. thought, and theology to which careful attention must be paid. David P. Wright Brandeis University Waltham. MA 02254 THE BIBLE AND THE POLITICS OF EXEGESIS: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF NORMAN K. GOTTWALD ON HIS SIXTY·FIFTH BIRTHDAY. David Jobling. Peggy L. Day. and Gerald T. Sheppard. eds. pp. xvii + 360. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1991. Paper, $26.95. Norman Gottwald ranks arguably as one of the most creative and influential Hebrew Bible scholars of the second half of the twentieth century, in the league of Wellhausen. Gunkel. Noth. von Rad, Kaufmann, Albright, Cross, Barr, and a few others. He has asserted forcefully-and persuasively for many scholars-that the sociological study of ancient Israel presents a new and necessary paradigm: through a refined use of sources (literary. archaeological , comparative) and sociological models. one can uncover social forces and ideologies at work in ancient Israel and inscribed in the biblical texts. Religion, similarly. must be understood in its social context and not in some type of idealistic isolation from it. Perhaps of equal value among Gottwald's contributions is his insistence that the social and class location of the scholar affects the outcome of research in ways scarcely appreciated heretofore. The passion with which Gottwald has pressed his claim. including his embodiment of it politically and professionally in his own life. has turned him into a model of the progressive, committed scholar-activist. Politics. thus. plays a key role in the picture-both in the complexities of Israel's social history and in the work of the modem scholar. The present volume. which represents a most appropriate tribute to Gottwald. intends to focus on both aspects. although as a collection of essays it can hardly do so Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 164 Reviews in a systematic manner. An overview of the diverse studies in this volume provides some sense of the enormous range of the impact that Gottwald's work has enjoyed. The essays are organized into three sections, the first of which is "SocioLiterary Readings in the Hebrew Bible." Walter Brueggemann treats Psalms 9-10 as an "act of political imagination" that shapes social process through a bold reorientation of power relations between the wicked and the poor. Claudia Camp's subject is the image of the "strange woman" in Proverbs 19 , which she considers not an allusion to actual wanton women but a metaphor expressing the threat felt by men in the postexilic context of religious and political power struggles, foreign rule, and cultural assimilation. Psalm 139 is for Robert B. Coote a complaint expressed by one whocaught in the throes of a real, not imagined, conflict against powerful opponents-appeals to God for vindication. Re-evaluating the bet 'ab, the "extended family" which Gottwald considers the tertiary level of early Israel's society, Carol Meyers suggests that the occasional references to the "mother's house" reflect a female perspective in the text, one which points to the household setting where a woman's role was generally as substantial as her husband's. George V. Pixley presents a picture of Micah as an advocate of peasant insurrection in eighth-century Judah. Taking his cue from Gottwald's proposal that the enemies in the psalms are often the ruling elite or their sympathizers and that praying these psalms in public meant risking recrimination from these oppressors, Gerald T. Sheppard argues that such psalms were delivered in public as a calculated means of exposing, indicting, and correcting the "enemy" and at the same time securing popular protection of the complainant. Minka Shura Sprague offers an "exegetical storytelling" of the flood narrative as a demonstration of the contribution of scholarly methods to the apprehension of biblical materials. The...