Canter Bridge

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R. Reed Lessing has written a sleeper.

His Concordia Seminary doctoral dissertation starts off reading like a cross between confessional screed and a too conventional presentation of biblical form criticism. Before long, however, the careful reader finds himself immersed in a compelling interpretation of one of the book of Isaiah’s most difficult `oracles against the nations’. Lessing understands the difficult text of Isaiah 23 not as a fairly inadequate redactional stitching together of disparate sources, but rather of an intentionally ironic piece of prophetic satire that uses the incalculable power of irony to bring low one of the eighth century’s (!) most potent economic powers.

Along the way, Lessing credentials himself as one of a growing number of capable younger scholars who are willing systematically to press questions regarding several of the key dogmas of form and tradition criticism as biblical scholars practice them. These include the insistence that prophetic oracles begin as small, exclusively oral, utterances that are subsequently-and not very impressively-joined together by redactors with very different things on their mind.

One is reminded of Brian Jones’ 1996 dissertation, published as Howling Over Moab: Irony and Rhetoric in Isaiah 15-16. Curiously, Reed lists Jones’ work in his bibliography but does not interact with him in his text. He might have discovered in Jones a cheerful fellow traveler.

In chapter one (`Introduction’, pp. 1-38), Lessing asks the single important question that his dissertation then attacks with admirable tenacity: In an oracle like this one, what does discontinuity *mean*? The answer of form and tradition critics is well known, but Lessing wants to make a claim that this nearly `assured result’ is in fact wrong because it underestimates the prophetic author and overestimates the rigidity of genre. A single prophet, in Lessing’s view, is capable of a kind of ideological and literary multitasking that creates what tradition critics regard as the celebrated `seams’ that justify their craft. Lessing thinks they are something else.

Chapter two (`Redaction criticism’, pp. 12-38) explains how form criticism produced and then ceded prominence to redaction criticism, or what some specialists might prefer to call `tradition criticism’.

Reed swings into `worthwhile reading’ gear in his third chapter, where he presents three well-known twentieth-century practitioners of redaction criticism upon the book of Isaiah (`The Redactional Reading Strategies of Otto Kaiser, Hans Wildberger and Marvin Sweeney’, pp. 39-65). One hastens to add that, happily, Marvin Sweeney is still with us in the 21st. This is the beginning of Reed’s creative contribution to the conversation, for he deftly lays out how what each of these scholars has made (or chosen not to) of the `discontinuities’ thrown up by the book of Isaiah’s twenty-third chapter.

By today’s more chastened standards, the self-confidence of these scholars as they reconstruct an ancient text may seem breathtaking when it does not seem quaintly archaic. Lessing nicely maps out the major (including ideas that allegedly date the document according to standard critical reconstructions of Israelite religion) and minor criteria that orient these redaction critics as they work on the Isaiah text.

Chapter four (`A Redactional Translation and Commentary on Isaiah 23′, pp. 66-98) analyzes the results that Kaiser, Wildberger, and Sweeney have produced as examples of redaction critics performing their respective close readings of Isaiah 23. Anyone interested in the history of biblical criticism-as is this reviewer-will appreciate Lessing’s work here, notwithstanding its role as polemical setup to his own `rhetorical’ reading of the same text two chapters later.

First, however, Lessing introduces rhetorical criticism, a method with which biblical scholars invariably link the work and name of J. Muilenburg (chapter five, `Rhetorical Criticism’, pp. 99-132). The author is careful to credit rhetorical critics with the `emancipation of the text from the oral situation’. It is not that Lessing wants to discard orality at the genesis of biblical texts; rather he is arguing against a reductionism that would limit the biblical prophets to an oral (and therefore, presumably, a briefly enacted) role. Susan Niditch is at this point brought into the discussion for her work on the coexistence and mutual interaction of orality and literate culture.

Lessing introduces the theoretical foundation that will undergird his own rhetorical criticism in Isaiah, including surveys of the notions of persuasion in rhetoric, pragmatics, illocutionary force and perlocutionary intention. `It will be argued’, he explains, `that the illocutionary force of Isaiah 23 is a warning. The oracle warns Judah not to emulate the pride of Tyre. The perlocutionary force is to persuade Judah not to enter into alliance with Tyre against Assyria.’

It is clear from these programmatic statements that Lessing will place the bulk if not the entirety of the text in the time of Isaiah ben Amoz, a matter to which we will return briefly in due course.

In this rich chapter, Lessing begins to build a case for a coherent literary reading of Isaiah 23 that discovers in the text a satire upon the established genre of the city-lament. Schadenfreude is not so rare a sentiment in the Hebrew Bible as sensitive souls might wish. Lessing finds in his text a particularly biting manifestation of it.

The rubber hits the exegetical road in chapters six and seven, where the author takes his theory and method to the text (`A Rhetorical Translation of and Commentary on Isaiah 23′, pp. 133-168; `A Rhetorical-Historical Analysis of Isaiah 23′, pp. 169?-197). Lessing attempts a reading of the whole chapter as `an oracle delivered in the Jerusalem court in 701 B.C.’ In this reviewer’s judgment, he does so to good effect, with the exception of his insistence that the `in that day’ prose colophon also comes from the mouth (or pen!) of Isaiah ben Amoz. It seems more consistent with this phenomenon’s recurrence in the Oracles Against the Nations to see it as a subsequent elucidation of circumstances based upon the prophetic word and the circumstances which in due course fleshed out its meaning in space and time.

When Lessing turns to the detection of satire in his text (chapter eight, `Determining Prophetic Satire in Isaiah 23′, pp. 198-209), he does so by means of Ricouer’s emphasis upon context as a broad and necessary determiner of the meaning of words. The author wants to argue that the Tyre oracle-like some biblical parallels-is an oracle about a future event couched in terms of the past. He is at pains to demonstrate how the oracle’s volubility and energy serve the prophet’s satirical purpose. This purpose is further illuminated in chapter nine (`An Analysis of the Rhetoric of Isaiah 23′, pp. 210-240) via a verse-by-verse examination of Isaiah’s rhetorical tools in what Lessing regards as a prediction of events that will occur in the near future from the perspective of the eight-century prophet.

Chapter ten is worth the book’s price and could well be used as stand-alone reading for a course on hermeneutics or biblical criticism (`A Debate Between Redaction and Rhetorical Methods’, pp. 241-267). It is not that Lessing achieves stunning new insight here, but rather that he manages pithy critique of the logic and method of redaction criticism while arguing that rhetorical criticism avoids similar pitfalls. His argument for simultaneity where others would prefer to see discontinuity and a longer horizon for the words `in that day’ than in the oracles upon which they follow is unconvincing in the light of the judgment/restoration pattern that this phrase appears to mediate. Nevertheless, he does present a plausible argument that a chapter like Isaiah 23 represents a `one-time speech act’.

In this reviewer’s opinion, plausibility in such matters of historical and literary criticism is no empty result. Over against Lessing’s considered reluctance to tie text fragments to historical moments about which we know-dare we say it?-extremely little, some of the older, classical, and almost `canonical’ twentieth-century critics seem rather sure of themselves in the light of the paucity of data with which they labored.

Chapter eleven (`Conclusions’, 268-272) is what is says.

Reed’s book is plagued by formatting infelicities (uneven spacing where Hebrew text appears and inverted Hebrew clauses mishandled by the author’s word processor) and spelling errors. The latter include a persistent inability to get authors’ names and books’ titles right (Christiansen/Christianson, Osborne/Osborn, Huffmon/Hoffom, Kuntz/Kunz, Sheppard/Shepherd; R.P. Gordon, `The Place is Too Small’/`This Place is Too Small’) and a not victorious struggle with the Hebrew gentilic `chasdiym’. Alas, these deficiencies are joined by redundancies (`an earlier precursor’) and footnote vertigo (ch. 2, fnn. 129, 130, ch. 8, fn 34 and corresponding text). This is sad, since it detracts from a fine argument otherwise presented with verve. It might have been ironed out by another week of editing.

Nevertheless, Interpreting Discontinuity is a valuable contribution. Lessing has worked hard to show that a text like the Tyre oracle goes back in its entirety to the eight-century prophet.

Does he succeed? Not entirely. But monographs like this one are not adequately apprized by a two-column win-loss chart. Rather, this monograph adds cumulative evidence to the affirmation that satire is both part and parcel of a rugged and even jarring manner of writing and speaking in the oracles against the nations. In the face of such literature, Lessing might suggest, a historical `over-reading’ gets the text wrong on the one extreme. On the other, `ahistorical’ rhetorical criticism is vulnerable to the charge of not getting it at all.