Canter Bridge

Even if John C.L. Gibson admits that the OT is “capable of causing not a little embarrassment to the two religions which have adopted it as their Scriptures”, he finds it also “seductive”, “moving” and “illuminating”. His little book is meant to guide the reader to fuller appreciation of the latter qualities and in this he must be judged to have succeeded. His first of seven well-written chapters, entitled “The Energies of the Hebrew Language”, presents the lack of abstract terms and the linking together of clauses by “and” as the “two basic characteristics of biblical Hebrew.” The picture is filled out by several not unimportant features: prominence of direct speech, cosmological descriptions of heaven and Sheol, the extravagance of Semitic address, folk etymologies, figurative language, hyperbole, personalisation, irony, et al. Throughout this chapter Gibson indicates the considerable distance which separates theological language from that of the OT.

In ch. two (“Language about God in the Old Testament”), Gibson approaches the (non-)problem of anthropomorphism by way of the recognition that all theology is metaphorical. Faced with such incautious expression, the point is to understand rather than to approve. A discussion of the incomparability of Yahweh (closer to heno- than mono-theism) rounds out the chapter. Full-blown monotheistic statements such as Isa 43.10 represent “the exaggeration of faith” rather than systematic theology, since so much of the OT refuses to evacuate creation of other “theologically real” gods.

Ch. three (“The Rhetoric of Hebrew Prose Writing”) asks us “Why Prose?”, a question occasioned by the paucity of ANE precedent. En route to a tentative answer in terms of narrative theology, Gibson guides us through such features as composite authorship, reticence, the resonance of key words, and characterisation by what the protagonists say, here and there pausing to criticise the “fissiparous tendencies” of “excavatory scholarship”, too full of sources and too deaf to accomplished story-telling.

After sketching out the basics of metre and parallelism, ch. four (“The Rhetoric and Melodies of Hebrew Poetry”) explains and illustrates the rhetoric of judgement, comfort, praise, lament, confident wisdom, and questioning wisdom. Gibson allows us his own evaluation of aspects of biblical poetry, whether this be his appraisal of Proverbs (“too smug by half”), his suggestion that Christian poetry is more preoccupied with sin and confession than that of the Psalms, or his traditional conclusion that Job’s “redeemer” (19.23ff.) must be God himself.

Gibson’s ch. five (“The Rhetoric of Hebrew Myth”) mounts an apology for the genre, whether its toned-down priestly variety in Gen 2 or the less restrained mythic voice of the psalms and prophets. Israel’s mythology has points of contact with that of her neighbours, but Israel’s experience of God in her own history produced a unique “standard of judgement”. Gibson’s reading of the second Yahweh speech in Job is an illuminating attempt to beat back the modernisers and rescue this divine soliloquy for the genre.

The second half of the book’s title becomes the focus of its last two chapters (six, “Images of God”; seven, “Images of Humanity”). Sustaining the point that images-like all God-talk-are metaphorical and suggestive, Gibson cites texts which illustrate the principal ones (king, judge, father [and mother], redeemer, et al.). Refusing to be drawn in theological directions-though perhaps not entirely-Gibson concludes that such images tell us how Israel conceived of God, not how he is in himself: “The time for knowing him is not yet, but in another life.” Similarly in his discussion of human imagery (e.g. “knowledge of good and evil”, “human creatureliness”), Gibson’s avowedly empirical survey of OT language and imagery ends with an expression of the chastened faith which this literature so often evokes (p. 154).