A solid commentary by a well-known evangelical scholar. Clearly written. Well-rounded bibliography. Less concerned than Butler and Hess about archaeological and historical matters. Grants the requisite attention to questions of date and historical influences on the book, then proceeds along a strongly textual trajectory directing attention to what the narratives mean rather than simply to what they refer. Going the extra mile in this respect renders this commentary especially useful for preaching and teaching.

Based on the NIV.  A thoughtful commentary by a well-known professor at Denver Seminary.  Detailed, verse-by-verse treatment with ample footnoting.  Somewhat technical discussion at points but informative and readable.  Like Butler, the influence from historical and archaeological concerns makes itself known but narrative structure and other literary phenomena are also considered.  An important reference in the study of Joshua.  

THE APPEAL

This article is, more than anything else, an appeal to hermeneutic humility. It invites us to be still, to sit quietly in self-restraint and self-critical inquiry at the feet of our elders, Jewish and Christian, from whose deep well of biblical reflection many centuries ago we may draw and drink, but only if we are quick to listen and slow to speak. As concerns our subject, the Song of Songs, those who respond to this unusual appeal will gain a strangely different and, depending on their perspective, an immeasurably richer appreciation than has grown popular in the last two centuries.

So that readers may beware, I intend in what follows to reexamine and challenge those approaches to the Song which understand it primarily or exclusively as a manual of biblical guidance on godly love, sex, and marriage and which defend that interpretation on the claim of its superior literal or plain-sense approach over against nineteen centuries of allegorical or spiritual(ized) readings. I will contend that the popular view rests on flawed assumptions and careless generalizations that represent a serious misstep in the history of interpretation, with sobering implications for how interpreters perceive themselves, their material, and their task. I shall argue that this modern understanding and novel use of the Song is not only out of tune with most of Israel’s and the Church’s interpretive tradition, a point on which there is no debate at all, but that this situation calls for longer and more humble reflection than it usually receives.

I am not unaware of the risks involved in this undertaking or of the protests it may elicit from those who with elation have read a book or heard a talk on the Song and learned “how to do it” from the Good Creator himself. Many have been blessed that God in grace and wisdom saw fit to counsel his creatures on the intimate side of life, long before psychologists and sex manuals got around to doing it, and that his counsel coincides closely with the professionals’ advice about candles and scents and negliges and imagination and mutuality and positions. Perhaps it was in reading the Song that someone was prompted to pursue engagement and marriage in the first place, or it was the Song that reignited the flame of marital love gone cold. I can appreciate the objections; I once voiced them myself, confidently teaching and preaching in a direction I now consider grounds for repentance. No honorable purpose will be served in blaming the many sources to which I trustingly looked at that time; I assume responsibility for my own interpretive missteps. Slowly I am learning of the temptations and dangers of taking ourselves too seriously, especially those of us who preach sermons, or present lectures, or publish articles, or write commentaries, or conduct seminars.

My intent is not to judge those who persist in singing the Song of Songs, or Canticles, to use its Latin title, in what now sounds strangely off key to my ear; but I do appeal that much will be lost if we fail to adjust our ears and voices to the sense of the “music” in its “classical” arrangement, as earlier interpreters “performed” it. This puts demands on readers and recipients alike in the form of a less dismissive and more modest deference to those whose agendas were not constrained by the concerns of modernity. Hence my plea for humility–humility to admit that even our best attempts at interpretation may be hindered by our own tendency to stand in the light, casting shadows upon the scriptural page shaped by the outline of our own history and perceived needs. In this way the Song comes to sound very much like what we had hoped, but–and this is the disturbing part–very little like the message most of its interpreters through history heard when they read it. Of course, our progressive and triumphal culture has found ways to justify our ignoring almost all interpretive tradition as unenlightened, unsophisticated, and unscientific, the stuff that nourished personal and churchly needs in olden days, before folks learned how to do real exegesis (i.e., the way we do it). A humbler spirit, on the other hand, at least prompts in us the possibility that we may be the ones out of step and off key, that other voices in the interpretive choir, including our exegetical forebears, actually got it right. Deep suspicion about our own rightness can be a good thing; repentance of arrogance always is.

For those who are still with me, I intend in Part One to set forth a thesis in the context of a short discussion on ancient and modern approaches to the Song of Songs. Part Two will identify several lines of evidence that I think underwrite this thesis and will suggest some of the blessings of re-tuning our interpretive efforts accordingly.

THE CONTEXT

In broad strokes, prior to (a) the Renaissance of the 15th century, with its interest in historical origins; (b) the Reformation of the 16th century, with its emancipation of interpretation from ecclesial authority; (c) the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, with its elevated confidence in the critical powers of human reason to anchor the Bible’s meaning by “neutral” or “objective” (read: “scientific” or “historical”) canons of judgment rather than by a confessed “rule of faith”; (d) the modern advent of a sexually liberated culture, both churchly and worldly (if they are still different); and (e) the corresponding pressures felt by the Church to address the convulsive state of marriage and to withstand the tide of promiscuity with a corrective but positive word from God–prior to all of this the Song of Songs was heard in a different key from how it has come to be read and understood in most circles today. These factors, in other words, helped create a climate in which the near-unanimous readings of the Song well into the 19th century would be tested and largely discarded, to be replaced by updated approaches that assumed exegetical superiority and claimed a more relevant voice in addressing the current social situation in Church and world.

Specifically, before all these influences came to play, the Song was highly esteemed and exceedingly praised in both Synagogue and Church not because of how it expressed and taught God’s view of romance and intimacy, but principally (not secondarily) because of how it was understood to give expression, in descriptive language, to something both ideal and real about the bond of mutual love between the biblical Lord and his people, whether YHWH and Israel or Christ and the Church. There are even reasons to believe that among those responsible in God’s providence for the admission of books into the biblical canon, it was this consideration–the Song’s religious or theological value–that secured for it a place in Israel’s and the Church’s Scriptures. Responding to those who disputed the canonical holiness of the Song in his day, Rabbi Aqiba (d. AD 135) insisted that “the entire age is not so worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel. For all the scriptures are holy, but the Song of Songs is holiest of all” (m. Yad. 3:5). Again, “Had not the Torah been given, Canticles would have sufficed to guide the world” (Midr. ’Ag. Shir).{en2} (These convictions led Marvin Pope to quip, “If Aqiba was concerned about secularization of the most holy song, he would be spinning in his grave at the present-day use. . . .”3) From early on (at least by the 8th century) the Song had become a part of the annual Passover liturgy, doubtless because of its understood associations with YHWH’s great love that liberated Israel from bondage (not merely, as some have suggested, because of its springtime poetry). And it makes complete sense that leading voices in the early Church, like Origen of Alexandria (AD 185-254), pronounced the benedictions they did on the Song, supported by a ten-volume commentary and several homilies; or that Jerome (AD 331-420) regarded the Song as an appropriate culmination to a mature Bible reading program, where it was less likely to be misunderstood, since, “though it is written in fleshly words, it is a marriage song of a spiritual bridal”{en4}; or that during the later patristic period and into the Middle Ages, Christian interpreters wrote more works on the Song of Songs than on any other biblical book, including Romans and Galatians. For example, over an eighteen-year period in the 12th century, Bernard of Clairvaux (AD 1090-1153) wrote 86 sermons on mostly chapters 1 and 2, before death prevented his completing the task!{en5}

Behind this uncommon regard among the Synagogue’s rabbis and the Church’s fathers and among the later Jewish and Christian commentators lay a consensus in premodern exegesis: The Song of Songs speaks a message and depicts a reality that demands more of the interpreter than what is easily read off the page as a timeless celebration of human love and mutual desire. On the other hand, “The near-unanimous answer of interpreters in the modern period is that [finding anything other than sensuous poetry] is ‘allegorical exegesis’ and that such exegesis is a bad thing.”{en6} The attitude that we have advanced beyond the old approach and that we know better now is reflected in a widespread assumption that earlier interpreters both failed to understand literal interpretation and the importance of plain meaning (the way we understand these things) and lacked the tools for scientific and historical research (the way we do it); or at least their understanding of the Song was obviously faulty (compared to our correct view).

The usual narrative goes something like this: Indebted to the Jewish community and its allegorical practices (Philo is representative) and influenced by Platonic and Gnostic dualism (which polarized spirituality and sexuality), the Christian Fathers and their followers simply misread the Song. It was a case of letting Christian sensitivities, embarrassed by the Song’s physical content, get in the way of plain-sense reading. Failing to see that God loves his creatures as whole beings, not just as temporarily embodied spirits, and that the Song exists to affirm and celebrate the gifts of sensuality and sexuality, the Church suffered some 1800 years, deprived of God’s best secrets about these aspects of our creatureliness, until the modern period discovered what the Song really means and saved the day. If this overconfident caricature of earlier exegetes were not so far off the mark, both in how it construes their motives and methods and in how it assesses (or fails to assess) its own assumptions and procedures, we might be amused at its naivete and disregard it as absurd.{en7} But the widespread circulation of this tragic misrepresentation continues to define matters in both church and academy–equally shocking, for different reasons.

In any event, freed now from the bondage of faulty premises and procedures, by the mid-19th century and continuing to the present, interpreters have pompously proceeded on their liberated way, swiping any spiritual meaning from the text as “a kind of eccentric archaism” and taking swipes at any reading other than human love and desire as “incredibly arbitrary.”{en8} This now is the truly incredible part: In due course, modern exegetes were able to unleash an astonishing assortment of divergent views and approaches to the Song–dramatic, cultic, natural/physical, psychological, political, satirical, feminist, anthological–each modifying or replacing its predecessors by responding to their perceived shortcomings in accounting especially for the origin of the material and how it ought be read (now that we know better than those who used to read it). We can only wonder in amazement at the sundry proposals spawned by this objective hermeneutic and its confident conclusions, as expressed recently, in “the natural, ordinary and in my view self-evident meaning of the Song,”{en9} over against all those arbitrary approaches of earlier interpreters. The multiplicity of proposed alternatives renders illusory the promise of interpretive progress. The correct interpretation turns out to be whichever one the individual interpreter prefers.

There is no need now to rehearse these novel replacements, as surveys and discussions pose all too shamelessly in the corpulent front pages of virtually every commentary on the Song and in most volumes on Old Testament introduction. One does not have to look very long in such sources to see that approaches nowadays fall into three broad categories: (1) There are the few who think the earlier interpreters were on the right track in seeing the Song as essentially theological, but whose “eccentric archaism,” once it has been labeled “allegorical,” constitutes for that reason alone grounds for immediate dismissal by those in the next category. (2) There are the many who fancy themselves champions of the literal method and meaning, who are freed from earlier hangups and are now able to read the Song straight, for its plain sense, as God’s guide to celebrating a godly sexual relationship and experiencing marriage the way it should be. (3) There are the uneasy centrists who locate themselves safely in the second camp (job security may be at issue) but who wish also to salvage, perhaps in a footnote or an appendix, at least a whisper of something distantly metaphorical or illustrative of the Lord’s relationship with his people, something in the category of theological implication or analogy.

We cannot now review the history of interpretation and its complexities in more detail than we have done; but for reasons that will become increasingly clear, the situation we have described raises a number of disturbing concerns, with too much at stake simply to ignore.

THE THESIS

Here then is my thesis, in two parts:

(a) The Song exists first and foremost, not secondarily and illustratively, to advance the scriptural vision of the Lord’s eschatological oneness with his people, most ideally celebrated in the language of love and marriage. This is the Song’s canonical plain sense.

(b) Whatever the Song means to say about human love, sex, and marriage, that message is actually subordinate to and derivative from its primary theological function.

In Part Two of this discussion, I intend to set out various lines of evidence in support of this thesis. In what immediately follows I would like to sharpen our focus on several points at issue that, if God grants us the grace of humility to which I am appealing, could open up fresh and fruitful paths toward renewed readings of the Song. Those paths and those readings, I submit, will be more in tune with interpreters who pondered the Song long before modern exegetes had a go at it, which tune, I suggest, may still be capable of carrying an important message, however strange its sound to those who now sing in a key that would have sounded equally strange to the Song’s earlier interpreters. Moreover, in the end, all anxieties that the Song might not turn out to sponsor the interests of human romance and intimacy will in fact be offset by an even richer reward, now funded by a safer and sounder hermeneutic than the popular approaches are able to produce.

First, regarding part (a) of my thesis, it is entirely possible that so-called allegorical approaches did not all (or, not at all) gain popularity among earlier interpreters for the alleged reasons assumed and charged above, but because those interpreters operated with a certain conception of the material and of the Bible and of the nature and structure of the world and its history as a whole that simply was not afflicted with the worries that would later (after the developments outlined above) become distractions. Put more sharply, it may be the case that earlier interpreters have become the target of cheap shots fired by those who assume a more solid exegetical and metaphysical footing than their predecessors, but whose assumptions reflect nothing more than the philosophical mindset of modernism and its self-acclaimed superiority to premodern exegesis. The theological presuppositions and cultural assumptions of others are always more apparent than our own.

To illustrate my point, a recent commentary asserts, “The allegorical interpretation was kept alive by the force of tradition, and in the post-Enlightenment period, this was not adequate to sustain it.”{en10} When we inquire what it might be that counts in the post-Enlightened period as having more exegetical force than the Church’s interpretive tradition, the very next paragraph supplies an answer: Since it was discovered in the 19th century that love poems from the ancient Near East share many of the Song’s themes, poetic devices, and metaphors, and since these comparative texts were nonreligious, “this fact led many [including the author himself] to conclude that the Song of Songs was also human love poetry.”{en11} But what if the “force of tradition” reflects a certain reading strategy congruent with the peculiar construal of the material within its native context in the canon of Israel’s and the Church’s Scriptures, including a certain conception of the way Scripture is understood to function in terms of its theological relevance? Relocating the Song’s context of meaning to the secular love poetry of Mesopotamia and Egypt as preferred and superior to that context given it in Scripture, where early interpreters orientated their exposition, and redefining the Song’s function along lines analogous to that love poetry, is an illustration of what Samuel Sandmel once called, unsympathetically, “parallelomania.”{en12}

Second, regarding part (b) of my thesis, it is entirely possible that the Song does mean to instruct God’s people on what the wise Creator intends love and marriage to look like, but that its instructions are imparted to us in a manner exactly upside down from how they are popularly conceived and presented–not, in other words, as something direct or immediate, simply to be read off the page as a manual or guidebook (which represents a serious misunderstanding of the genre, as I will show in Part Two), but as something indirect and mediated, as a reflection of what runs beneath the surface and gives it shape. What the older interpreters seemed to grasp better than their modern counterparts is that a prior and grander metaphysical reality (the theological story of the Lord and his people) creates and controls the textual imagery (the overt story of human lovers).{en13} It is not that the story about human love and desire might perchance cause us to think of a story about God and his people, as an obligatory afterthought, but the other way around. The Song clothes the primary story about God and his people in the dress of human love and desire, which look a certain way because God is fitting them to resemble the “connotating form”{en14} of his very own relationship with his people. In that case, to read the Song as principally or exclusively about what is being fitted (the poetic dress) rather than what it is being fitted to (the shaping reality) is to constrain the interpretation in a manner that leaves a whole lot of things unaccounted for (as we shall see in Part Two). We could say that the visible “earthly” language of the Song focuses on the invisible “heavenly” reality that human love and desire are meant to figure, or at least this appears to be how the earlier interpreters saw things.

The idea at work here should be familiar to us from the way Paul declares his own focus in a famous passage where his explicit point goes regularly overlooked: “This mystery is great, and I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:32, italics mine). The literal or plain-sense reading of Ephesians 5, then, does not center on the attitudes and behavior of wives and husbands, but centrally, not secondarily, on the theological reality which God created and shaped marriage to fit and reflect. Or at least that is what Paul tells us he is talking about, as we should have discerned, even without his making the point explicit, from the way he developed his argument from chapter 1 onward. On this understanding, approaches to the Song which see nothing more than human love, sex, and marriage represent a serious hermeneutical confusion and a resultant superficial reading–akin to man’s looking on the outward appearance. Of course, once the exegetical task has been inverted in this way, the appending of theological implications to an otherwise nontheological text, on the back of an illustration or metaphor or analogy, shows itself arbitrary and contrived, which is ironic since these are precisely the criticisms brought by “literalists” against those they brand as “allegorists.”

Finally, a note of caution about this very matter of allegory. Discussions critical of so-called allegorical interpretation are not infrequently weakened by definitional imprecision, unacknowledged assumptions, sweeping generalizations, and popularized misinformation. It is entirely possible that the best way to talk about the Song is in fact as an allegory, that it functions the way allegories are meant to function, in the vein of other biblical allegories (e.g., Judg 9:7-21; Ezek 17:1-21; Gal 4:21-31; cf. Hos 1–3; 1 Cor 10:1-5, 11). In that case its plain-sense meaning would then be its effective allegorical meaning, its meaning as an allegory.{en15} Strictly speaking, literal and allegorical are not mutually exclusive categories. The problem arises when a text not meant to be an allegory (as a genre category) is read as though it were (allegorically, as an interpretive strategy), especially if such a reading seeks hidden spiritual meanings limited only by the interpreter’s ingenuity, notwithstanding the absence of any hint that the material means to function that way. That in the history of interpretation allegorical approaches did sometimes get out of hand I am not disputing, although it does occur to me that, as regards the Song, allegorists are not the only ones to whom this worry applies. Some of the currently popular literal(ist) teachings are equally, if not surpassingly, inventive and arbitrary, including those which ride the confident waves of post-Enlightened certitude and enjoy the enthusiastic backing of experience and expert counsel. The perceived excesses of allegorism are not overcome in literalism, and it is patently naive to assume that a case for literalistic reading finds traction in perceived allegorical excess. By carefully wielding the proverbial knife that cuts both ways, we will refrain from measuring the best expression of either approach against the worst expression of the other. It is largely the failure to observe this caution in a humbly informed and cautious way that occasions the present critique.

At the end of the day, the question to be answered on this matter is this: If the Song is an allegory, why would that be such a bad thing? In response to that question, it simply will not do to repeat dogmatic denials (“It is not an allegory.”{en16}) solely on the basis of (a) modern aversions to traditional understandings, (b) appeals to nonreligious love poetry in the ancient world, (c) the absence of any explicit allegorical signal within the Song, (d) worry that then interpretation would be thrown to the whims of imagination, beyond the controls of objective and verifiable criteria, or (e) the complaint that then the Bible would be bereft of its only full-scale celebration of love, sex, and marriage. On multiple counts, logical and otherwise, none of these amounts to any argument at all against the Song’s being an allegory; and yet these pretty well exhaust the grounds on which that conclusion is reached and advanced in both scholarly and popular treatments. Moreover, every one of these responses conveniently sidesteps the question with which we began, for which I am not certain any other answer exists than this: If the Song were an allegory, it would be a bad thing because then the criteria of interpretive certitude, the hallmark of historical criticism, would have failed us, which means also that some of our sermons and lectures and books anchored to the assured results of modern exegesis would have to be revised. To be found out as the one singing off key in any choir can be terribly embarrassing.

THE CHALLENGE

If this discussion has succeeded in raising doubts that allegory is a bad thing and that those who see in the Song first and foremost a message about human romance and intimacy are interpreting it literally while everyone else is interpreting it nonliterally, then I will consider it an important gain. This appraisal arises from concerns over the misunderstandings and misrepresentations, still propagated as established, that have bedeviled any hope of reading the Song the way it was once read–and the way it should continue to be read.

With that last line–the one in italics–I do fully intend to throw down an unsubtle gauntlet that will not be lost on those who look now for hope and reason amidst this plea for humility. They might well be asking: If, as you have suggested, the dominant approach to the Song through most of the Church’s history should not be so quickly abandoned and discarded, and if, as you assert, there is too much at stake for the Church simply to imbibe the hermeneutic of modernist criticism and the tottering premises on which it rests–if, in other words, the vast majority of interpreters until the 19th century were onto something when they read the Song as somehow descriptive of the Lord and his people–where then, someone will ask, is the hard evidence for such a reading within the biblical book itself? It is an important question, and a fair one, even if uttered naively, as if modern exegetes now patrol the pool of criteria on what counts as hard evidence once the long tradition of the Church has been judged inadmissible. In a style that would do the Reformers proud, with a Cartesian twist, we demand proof–the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text. This seems to be the conviction behind one recent commentator’s bombastic claim: “The book itself has no signals that it is to be read in any other way than as a [human] love song. No one can dispute this fact.”{en17} Especially the second sentence should be deeply troubling to us all, given the long and well-populated history of interpretation, with which the author is fully aware. It is never made clear to me exactly what would qualify as ‘signals’ in this author’s mind, although it seems doubtful that what I present next would meet his criteria. But with due respect, I think there are sufficient signals to regard both of his assertions as simply false.

Of course, it will not do for me now to claim that the burden of proof lies on the shoulders of others, although I do strenuously hold that position for reasons that should be obvious. It is time rather to take up the challenge and to deliver what has been assumed nonexistent and to contest what has been judged indisputable. I shall attempt to do so in Part Two, where readers can make up their own minds on whether or not I have finally succeeded.

PART TWO: SIGNALS AND SIGNIFICANCE

THE TASK

On the one hand, the task before us is straightforward: to supply data in support of the conviction that the Song means to be understood as expressing something about the love relationship between the Lord and his people, as it was read and heard almost without exception throughout the history of its interpretation until the modern period. On the other hand, our task is daunting, as it challenges the widespread assumptions and assertions of most recent interpreters, for whom no basis exists for the Song’s being understood as anything other than biblical love poetry in celebration of godly love, sex, and marriage. We are drawn to one side by nineteen centuries of interpretive tradition which sounds strange, arbitrary, archaic, and mystical to modern ears, and pulled to the other by a recent consensus that would have sounded equally strange, arbitrary, novel, and superficial to earlier readers.

Part One was an attempt to explain why I find the claims of modern interpreters pompous and presumptuous and their arguments unconvincing and overreaching. In that discussion it was not my intent to defend all the earlier interpreters and their understanding of specific lines in the Song or to imply that we cannot, through further study, gain new insights into the Song. My purpose there was simply to register an appeal for hermeneutic pause and humility and to set forth in historical context a twofold thesis. It will be my purpose here to present some of the indications that I think fund that thesis: (a) that the Song exists first and foremost, not secondarily and illustratively, to advance the scriptural vision of the Lord’s eschatological oneness with his people, most ideally celebrated in the language of love and marriage, and that this is the Song’s canonical plain sense; and (b) that whatever the Song means to say about human passions and desires, that message is actually subordinate to and derivative from its primary theological function. Against the heavy-handed and supposedly indisputable claim that the Song contains no signals at all that it should be read in any other way than as human love poetry, we now consider some of the opposing evidence as well as some of the blessings and benefits that are forfeited on this novel reading.

KEY SIGNALS

A considerable number of signals suggest a reading more in tune with the earlier interpretations than with their recent replacements–things unaccounted for if we read the Song chiefly or solely on the surface, as a story of human lovers rather than the theological reality that gives that story its shape.

1. The Genre of the Song

I agree with those who argue that “one’s interpretation of the text will be driven from beginning to end by what position one takes with regard to the book’s genre.”{en18} Indeed, there is not to my knowledge another biblical book in the interpretation of which one’s presupposition about what it is or what we should read it as factors more decisively in the outcome. This observation about the importance of the book’s genre is widely recognized among commentators, who almost uniformly go on to conclude that on this criterion the case is locked up in favor of the Song’s belonging to the genre human love poetry, widely represented in the ancient world.

My argument is not that the genre question is the wrong one–it is the right question–but that the discussion has already been framed much too narrowly when it focuses on the book, segregated from the wider genre category–the genre canon. Exiling the Song from its native hermeneutical home has the effect of relativizing definitive theological judgments that are rendered on the material by virtue of its canonical function. In other words, when modernism neutralizes the hermeneutic impact of the canon on grounds of form-critical criteria assumed informing, the outcomes are predictably more reflective of Enlightened interests and agendas than of earlier conceptions of the material. This illustrates the classic genre-category mistake of atomization. What needs to be stressed is that the Bible typically subordinates and takes over existing genres with parallels in the larger world (e.g., genealogies, law codes, proverbs, letters) and puts them to unique, not strictly equivalent, service in the interests of its own peculiar theological concerns. Simply put, the fact that the Song bears some resemblance to nonreligious love poetry in the ancient world does not make the biblical Song nonreligious.

The genre question that demands answering focuses on the definitive effect of the Song’s participation in the shape and fabric of Israel’s and the Church’s Scriptures. This question goes much deeper than the obligatory nod given canonical considerations in those many studies which eventually get around to acknowledging that, yes, the Song is in the canon, where it offers a book-length discussion on God’s view of love, sex, and marriage. This sort of unreflective concession simply fails to factor the hermeneutic impact of the canon as constraining a book’s context of meaning and ensuring its role in an overall thematic strategy introduced in the Bible’s earliest pages and concluded in its last. On this understanding, it might be debated whether love, sex, and marriage–or anything else for that matter–are ever presented in Scripture outside a larger theological context which defines their meaning. A reading strategy that comprehends the relevant issues appraises a book in terms of how it promotes the biblical vision of God and his people, not simply how it sanctions a point of special interest to humans (the celebration of romance and intimacy), even if this should qualify (which it does) as properly a matter of biblical concern. The position taken here then does not set spirituality and sexuality at odds. Rather, it focuses solely on the question: How does the Song participate in and contribute to the Bible’s overall narrative from creation to new creation? Almost no interpreter for nineteen hundred years answered that question skin-deep. The context of understanding (the canonical story) and performance (the Synagogue and Church) demanded a look beneath the surface.

So, then, have we arrived at the conclusion that the Song of Songs is an allegory–overtly talking about human love and desire but, in its canonical context, meaning to say something about the divine-human relationship dressed in that language and imagery? I do not see how an argument can be made against this possibility. Certainly none of those usually offered (see Part One) carries any conviction stronger than its own say-so. For example, if the simple observation that the Song nowhere claims to be an allegory qualifies as insurmountable evidence against its being such, then I am unsure what we shall do with a great many portions of Scripture which fail to identify themselves to us by formal literary labels. In this connection it is important to note–let the reader understand–that allegory was not rejected in the history of interpretation because it failed the text itself, but because it threatened the confidence with which historical criticism insisted on its ability to identify precise historical referents over against what it considered arbitrary “pious mystification.”{en19} Recalling an earlier doubt as well, were it not for the perception that so much stands to be lost if the book does not simply guide us, as a manual, in our love life, we could wonder if the attacks against allegory would ever have grown so shrill.

But have we then loosened or lost our grip on interpretive certitude? Perhaps we should ask why that would be such a bad thing, especially since modern alternative approaches, as we have seen, can hardly claim to make good on a better promise. Wisdom invites us to weigh carefully whether the larger fabric of Scripture is as deficient in illuminating its own meaning as many have hastily assumed, and whether different but non-incompatible understandings of the same line in the Song may not be as problematical to interpretation as modern interpreters insist, especially given the nature of poetic description (on which see next). For example, what really would be lost, other than doctrinal certitude, if the “sachet of myrrh that lies between my breasts” in Song 1:13 represents the Shekinah between the two cherubim that stood over the Ark of the Covenant, or the fragrance of Christ between the two Testaments, or remembering Christ’s crucifixion in one’s heart (i.e., between one’s breasts), all represented in Jewish and Christian interpretation? Perhaps the Scriptures do not always mean to conjure up just one possibility, or to be anchored with as much confidence as pride demands.{en20} In this connection, I am forever amazed that even the most outspoken defenders of a single-correct-meaning hermeneutic find ways (under different terms, of course, like ‘application’) to make biblical texts say what clearly their surface language does not say. And I am puzzled that even the most ardent opponents of allegory wish to retain a theological message for the Song (under terms like ‘implication’ or ‘illustration’), having severed the hermeneutic limb on which that conviction safely perched for nineteen centuries.

2. Poetry and the Song

Closely related to the issue of genre, the Song of Songs consists in lush Hebrew love poetry that oozes with all the finery that makes poetry so delightfully poetic.{en21} This too is generally acknowledged in the commentary literature, where very often crucial differentiations are more carefully spelled out than popular treatments reflect. One of the issues variously handled in technical studies but almost everywhere confused in nonspecialist uses focuses on the nature of poetic textual depiction, with far-reaching implications on how the Song means to function. It is part of the genius of poetic imagery to offer a textual depiction of something beyond the image itself. John Sailhamer gets at this issue succinctly and clearly:

[T]he book is poetic and, as such, much of its visual imagery is intended to portray themes and ideas that lie outside the range of the poetic images themselves. There is no question that the book is a poetic drama of a lover’s longing for his beloved and of her willing complicity. To suggest, however, that this drama of two lovers is, in fact, the intent of the book is to confuse the poetic imagery with the purpose of the poem.{en22}

There is nothing particularly complicated, exceptional, or controversial about this matter; but it is lost from view whenever the Song’s imagery is applied immediately and directly–guidebook style–back upon the image itself. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the function of poetic imagery. To be sure, the Song’s imagery is that of human love and longing. But what is the reality which the Song means thereby to image? To leave matters at the level of imagery would be somewhat akin to interpreting the psalmic depiction of trees–“Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the LORD” (Pss 96:12-13)–as material for an arborist’s training seminar. This is not the way of poetic imagery. The Song’s imagery (human love and longing) images a reality other than itself (love and longing on another plain), in the form of which reality the imagery is made to conform.

3. God in the Song

It is sometimes argued that like Esther the Song never mentions God. The opinion of one recent commentator is shared by many: “To be sure, God is not named or even alluded to within the book.”{en23} This observation seems to support the idea that the Song really is not about God, or, in any event, that we should not be surprised with the absence of God in love poetry that means only to speak of human lovers.

On the other hand, R. M. Davidson has argued in a carefully reasoned study that “God is clearly present in the Song–and he is not silent!”{en24} God’s presence, according to Davidson, shows up in at least three clear and striking ways: (a) by means of allusion and wordplay in the threefold adjuration of 2:7; 3:5; and 8:4 (far more apparent in Hebrew than in English); (b) in the climactic last line of the Song’s structural/symmetrical center (4:16–5:1), where it is probably the voice of YHWH himself, or the narrator/poet on YHWH’s behalf, who says, “Eat, O friends! Drink, and be drunk, O beloved ones!” (5:1b); and (c) the explicit appearance of the divine name in the Song’s thematic climax and conclusion, where we read of the lovers’ love as “the flame of Yah(weh)” (8:6b). The last-mentioned is most impressive and instructive, and most problematic to translators and commentators, who seem to have a difficult time rendering the term in question in its most likely sense. For if the love of which this Song speaks is in fact “the flame of Yah(weh),” then clearly the overt story points to something beyond itself, namely, to the Lord of love and the love of the Lord.

The inference of personal absence based on verbal paucity is likewise mistaken. It is widely recognized in studies on biblical characterization that the veiling or absenting of God’s presence is one way for a writer actually to highlight divine presence–the presence of absence. Reading the Song in this light, evident also in books like Ruth, Esther, and Daniel, each in different ways, enables a depth of understanding otherwise completely missed.

4. Solomon, wisdom, and the Song

However we are to translate the titular first line, “The Song of Songs which is by/to/for/concerning/in the tradition of Solomon” (all grammatically possible), it is clear that the Song is somehow related to Solomon (in addition to 1:1, also 1:5; 3:7, 9, 11; 8:11, 12). Most scholars conclude that in this way the Song is brought within the biblical wisdom tradition associated with Solomon, but rarely are the implications of that observation discussed and drawn out along lines of their messianic connotation. When, however, the role of Solomon and the biblical conception of wisdom are pursued along their messianic trajectory,{en25} it is not hard to see that the Song likewise gets swept up into larger-than-life significance, as participating in a grand messianic stream across the Testaments.{en26}

5. Intertextuality and the Song

That the Song enjoys many interpretive connections with other biblical passages is not surprising, but once again the full implications of those intertextual links are not always teased out along the contextual grain of the passages involved. To observe, for example, that the Song offers a commentary of sorts on Eden’s garden wedding (Gen 1–3) invites further reflection on how this story, like that, means then to image a reality greater than itself (cf. Gen 1:26-28), or how the Song (see 7:11; 8:5) might shed helpful light on the notoriously difficult Genesis 3:16, which itself must be understood somehow in relation to the promise of verse 15 (cf. 1 Tim 2:8-15). Other examples include an impressive correspondence between Hosea 14 and the Song,{en27} and between Psalms 45 and the Song (e.g., Pss 45:2/Song 5:13; Pss 45:8/Song 4:14; and many others)–each in its own way reinforcing the messianic-eschatological associations of the Song’s language and imagery.

6. Canonical location of the Song

The issues here are related to #1 above, but now with the Song’s more immediate context in view. There is general recognition in canon research that the formation of the Hebrew Bible (Tanak) reflects a time and a community that looked eagerly toward the coming of the messiah, which anticipation appears to have impacted both the selection and the arrangement of the books. The Old Testament, in other words, is an intentionally shaped canon, reflective of a thematic strategy (only partially preserved in the English Bible order of books).{en28} Attention is often drawn to the Hebrew Bible’s locating Ruth immediately after Proverbs and the almost certain intention (based on verbal and thematic links) of associating Ruth with the virtuous woman of Proverbs 31:10-31 (we could say that Ruth embodies such a woman). It is equally possible that the Ruth-Song juxtaposition (in the Hebrew Bible) reflects a desire to celebrate in the Song an “ideal” marriage such as that of Ruth and Boaz immediately preceding. It is entirely conceivable that this association influenced the traditional reading which understood the Song to depict the love relationship between YHWH and Israel, since the Ruth story so graphically shapes human love in the form of YHWH’s love (e.g., Ruth 1:8; 2:20). It is possible that in the marriage of Boaz and Ruth and its role in bringing David into the world (and David’s son, Jesus; Ruth 4:17-22; Matt 1:1, 5-6), lie factors that contributed to the Song’s messianic interpretation in the early Church.

7. Language of the Song

We are often reminded that the language of the Song does not speak of anything other than the love between a man and a woman. By now it should be clear that this perspective on the Song’s language and imagery is much too superficial and prejudicial, with the conclusion deeply embedded in the premise. If that is all one determines to see, then that is all one will see. But words like ‘king’ (5x: 1:4, 12; 3:9, 11; 7:6), ‘Jerusalem’ (8x: 1:5; 2:7; 3:5, 10; 5:8, 16; 6:4; 8:4), ‘Zion’ (1x: 3:11), ‘bride’ (6x: 4:8, 9, 10, 11, 12; 5:1), ‘David’ (1x: 4:4; but the cognate ‘beloved’ 39x!), and many others (e.g., ‘garden’, ‘flock’, ‘vineyard’) certainly belong to a rich biblical vocabulary stock with imaginative potential. Why, for example, is the chorus of onlookers consistently referred to as “the daughters of Jerusalem/Zion” (8x) and not simply “the women”?

8. The New Testament and the Song

There are not, to my knowledge, any direct quotations of or unambiguous allusions to the Song in the New Testament. This fact puts the Song in a category by itself, since the same can probably not be said of any other Old Testament book. But then, this is not the only feature that sets the Song off from the others. Referenced or not, on the conviction that every book of both Testaments exists for the very purpose–its raison d’être–of bearing witness to the one God revealed in Christ, the Song takes its place within those Scriptures of “Moses, the Prophets, and Psalms” which speak of him (Lk 24:44-45). And recalling earlier remarks about Ephesians 5, this should not be hard at all to understand. The nuptial figure is made to fit the relationship of God/Christ and his people. But that is to say that the Song does much more than tell us about love, sex, and marriage. It figures a profound mystery.

BLESSINGS AND BENEFITS

If the proof of the proverbial pudding is in its eating, then it should be the case that the reading we have proposed, consistent with a long interpretive history, will recover important blessings and benefits otherwise forfeited in novel readings, however popular. It is also the case that these blessings and benefits will have to await fleshing out in another setting. I limit my remarks to just two.

First, as regards what the Song means to say about the relationship between the Lord and his people, apparently it is the case that language of this sort is not only appropriate but positively necessary to get at certain dimensions. A cerebral faith, filled with theological formulations and fueled by propositions and exhortations, is wholly deficient for experiencing and expressing the kind of mutual love God envisions with his people. Second, as regards what the Song means to say about the love of woman and man, apparently it is the case that this wonderful gift, paradoxically, is not to be understood solely in terms of “what works”–there is no manual or guidebook here–but in terms of something infinitely larger, as the clothing in which God comes to be dressed. The transforming power bound up in this twofold message goes a long way toward explaining the esteem in which the Song was held until recently, when other impulses pushed their way to the fore.

Let me borrow a line from the conclusion to Martin Luther’s work on the Song and not be judged presumptuous for doing so: “If I am wrong about this [understanding of the book], a first effort deserves lenience.”{en29}

So long “the orphan of Israelite theology,”{en2} the wisdom literature of the Old Testament,3 and Proverbs in particular, has in recent years become the recipient of a well-deserved surge of focused attention, both exegetical and theological. Between 1997 and 2000 alone, for example, no fewer than five full-length, serious-level commentaries appeared on Proverbs; and the publishing stream continues to flow with at least ten important works since then. Certainly it is not the case that this book had been completely overlooked prior to the 1990s, but specialized attention to Proverbs was beset with an array of critical concerns that hindered its being heard as a theological message demanding the Church’s ear.

I suspect that a corresponding neglect had long taken its toll on Christian use generally. To be sure, there were always the occasional odd references to this proverb or that at the popular level, especially among those looking for a financial principle or grasping for a biblical whip to crack on errant children. But who of us has ever experienced or ourselves developed a serious and sustained study, as in a preaching or teaching series, through the book of Proverbs the way many of us have through at least portions of Genesis or Jonah or Romans or Ephesians?

Not all the reasons for pushing Proverbs to the perimeter of the Church’s diet or the academy’s interests over the past centuries are the same. But common to both are troubling and sometimes crippling issues relative to how Proverbs goes about mediating the will of God and whether or not whatever it is Proverbs has to say is all that important for Christians to believe and obey. We can get to the heart of things by posing two related questions, both of which have befuddled specialist interpreters and generalist readers alike. One concerns the source of the wisdom Proverbs imparts; the other concerns the normativeness of the book’s teaching and the seriousness with which its prescriptions and promises ought be taken. Both require thoughtful engagement, and this in turn will determine in large measure how we go about reading this book and responding to the voice of wisdom that speaks there, or whether such an exercise is even worth our trouble.

1. THE QUESTION OF SOURCE: IS THE WISDOM OF PROVERBS ROOTED IN REFLECTION AND INVESTIGATION OR IN REVELATION AND INSPIRATION?

Three interrelated observations make this an especially interesting question. First, there is in Proverbs a general paucity of explicit God-talk or content normally regarded as religious or theologically significant. With its focus on how to cope with life’s “practical” realities, at least on the surface, Proverbs tends to say relatively little about some of the things that occupy the interests of other OT scriptures, including Israel’s history, covenants, exodus deliverance, laws, religious activities, major institutions, or great personalities. The book seems largely concerned with “secular” matters. Second, Proverbs appears to be more friendly toward Israel’s neighbors than one expects the Bible to sanction. Specifically, there are obvious and remarkable literary and conceptual similarities to the wisdom texts of other ancient Near Eastern peoples, most notably Egyptian, Canaanite, and Mesopotamian. Third, Proverbs draws heavily for its teaching on what seems like common sense from real life. One does not need any special instruction from God to know that laziness leads to poverty or a loose mouth to social trouble or sexual unfaithfulness to marital calamity or bad table manners to disaster in the king’s presence. It appears that observation and experience–what works in life–may be as fertile soil for the wisdom of Proverbs as anything that resembles divine revelation.

But we must be careful to factor these considerations critically lest we distort the true nature and function of Proverbs. I have discussed these and related issues elsewhere,{en4} and it is not possible to review that material here; but let me summarize the direction a critical response to each of the three points above might take. First, the Bible does not know anything of the sacred-secular dualism implicit in the objection. Money, mouth, manners, morals, marriage, and other matters of which Proverbs speaks are not hereby set off as secular; but, grounded in yir’at yhwh (“the fear of YHWH”) and by virtue of their inclusion in the word of YHWH, they are given full sacred status. These are as defining of what it means to live in the Creator’s world on the Creator’s terms as are the covenants, the exodus, the laws, and the other more religious sounding institutions of which the Scriptures speak.

Second, it is true that there are transparent points of contact between Proverbs and the wisdom writings of Israel’s ancient neighbors, even as there are between Proverbs and what the Church’s present neighbors sometimes believe and practice. But there is a danger of overstating the commonalities and understating the contrasts. The truth is, there are far-reaching differences as well. Duane Garrett maintains that “the Book of Proverbs does not simply attach the caboose of Yahwism to the train of secular, international wisdom. . . . On the contrary, the Lord and the precepts of Israelite faith dominate biblical wisdom as the explicit fount of true understanding and the rule by which all is judged.”{en5} In this connection, Bruce Waltke has demonstrated that the fundamental theological convictions of biblical wisdom are substantially the same as those of the Pentateuch and Prophets: the same Lord, the same religious system, the same inspiration, the same authority, the same anthropology, the same epistemology, the same spiritual demand, the same ethical demands, the same hope, the same faith.{en6} If Solomon and his fellow sages trafficked in the wider sapiential traditions of their day, which doubtless they did, they obviously filtered the intellectual heritage, removing any traces that were incompatible with the fear of YHWH. Moreover, to whatever extent Israel’s arm-chairing with her pagan neighbors may have contributed to her own wisdom material, her canonizing that material in a biblical book self-evidently oriented to the early chapters of Genesis shows that the roots of true wisdom ultimately lie in a wise Creator. In this way Proverbs effectively retells the wisdom of pagan sages, showing there to lie behind its true insights a foundational heritage that is not at all pagan in the first place because it is begotten of the wisdom of the Creator.{en7}

Third, and related, it is true that a certain form of wisdom exists that is not the exclusive property of those who know God or read the Bible. Some people achieve a measure of wisdom, a being good at the craft of life, by observing the present universe, drawing lessons from what works and does not work, and living in harmony with these insights and observations. By this brand of wisdom, drawn on reflection and investigation, many people find a way to get along reasonably or even admirably well in this world, with upright lives, exemplary marriages, decent kids, well-managed finances, and social grace. On superficial reflection the wisdom of Proverbs may not look appreciably different from this, but here we must be on guard against dangerous assumptions with large implications. The correspondence between what works in life “under the sun” and what Proverbs tells us about living there only underscores what we should expect since the Creator of the former is the Author of the latter. But such correspondence does not collapse the categories into an equation or synonymy whereby the former effectively renders the latter complemental but inessential. The biblical conception of wisdom is textually mediated and context-dependent, by virtue of which it contains plus factors that vastly supersede any observations one might make on life “under the sun,” including the centrality and essentiality of the fear of YHWH, the criteria by which God measures success and failure or good and not good, and the provision of divine insight amidst life’s mysteries and reversals. Biblical wisdom does not consist merely in living generally in sync with what exists and what works (the created order), but in living in harmony with what the Scriptures say about life in that created order (the Creator’s perspective and plan). Responding to the third point above, then, it is a misconstrual of enormous consequence to credit common sense as the source of Proverbs. It is true that one does not need any special instruction from God to know many of the things taught in Proverbs, but to think that success can be measured in these terms and that Proverbs has nothing more in mind than this is a serious misunderstanding. These principles work, but that is not the point. Without the divine word of Proverbs, it is impossible to know how or that these realities factor into God’s vision of the world and the purposes he has in mind in its making. We can be more blunt about it: To become wise in all ways accessible through reflection and investigation while ignoring what God actually says about life in his world, is to remain thoroughly fooled. One can be worldly wise and biblically foolish. The reverse–biblically wise and worldly foolish–is not possible. Let the wise ponder and not be fooled.

2. THE QUESTION OF NORMATIVENESS: DOES PROVERBS COMMAND TOO FREELY AND PROMISE TOO MUCH?

We may sharpen the question: How authoritative are the instructions of Proverbs, and are its promises true? Do the commands of Proverbs reduce to good but optional advice–general principles in a category different from, say, Exodus or Isaiah or Matthew or Romans? After all, “Listen, son, to your dad’s advice” hardly compares with “And YHWH spoke to Moses” or “Thus says YHWH” or “The words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand.” And do the assurances of Proverbs reduce to that which may be regarded as more or less typical–what generally happens as observed in the realities of life but nothing you should count on? In short, is this a book of human counsel and inflated hope, or a book of divine mandate and confident expectation? How we resolve these issues will have significant bearing on how we go about pondering and performing and preaching Proverbs.

It has been fashionable, and suspiciously convenient, in both scholarly and popular circles to demote Proverbs to a secondary level of authority, primarily on the basis of its apparent exceptions (e.g., 3:9-10; 22:6), contradictions (e.g., 26:4-5), appeal to experience or tradition (e.g., 4:1ff.; 24:30-34), and use of such expressions as ‘counsel’ or ‘advice’ (e.g., 1:25; 8:14). In addition to our discussion above, several other points challenge this notion and call for a revision.

First, it is noteworthy that the voice of wisdom speaks in Proverbs with the very authority of God (e.g., 1:20-33; 8:22-36) and is not shy in referring to its own teaching by the same term Moses used in identifying his–torah (e.g., 1:8; 3:1; 13:14; et al.).

Second, Proverbs appears in the Ketubim or Writings of the biblical canon alongside the Pentateuch and the Prophets, to which it is hermeneutically and theologically related as exegetical reflection and normative tradition. In other words, biblical proverbs are not merely to be understood as general principles drawn from life “under the sun,” but as canonized reflections on life as it is meant to be lived in the Creator’s world on the Creator’s terms, consistent with the perspective of Torah and the Nebi’im. One cannot affirm the authority of Moses and the Prophets and dismiss the authority of Proverbs. The imperatives are to be heeded and the blessings anticipated. What might be construed as exceptions to the rules and the promises do not demonstrate the weakness of Proverbs or of wisdom but the mystery of faith in a personal, sovereign, good, but inscrutable God, not unlike other promises in Scripture (e.g., the prayer promises of the Gospels).

Third, the Book of Proverbs itself addresses these very issues. According to the book’s introduction, one purpose of Proverbs is to enable the timely and appropriate application of proverbs (so 1:2-6). In other words, the proverbs of Proverbs teach their own limitations and appropriate applications. They do not reduce life to a set of formulas; rather, they place wisdom in a manifestly theological context (so the function of chs. 1-9 relative to chs. 10ff.) where the fear of YHWH and submission to his sometimes inscrutable will transcend all such mechanical systems (e.g., 3:5-6; 16:1, 2, 9; 19:21; 20:24; 21:30-31; 27:1). Gerhard von Rad hits very close to this mark:

Reduced to its bare essentials, these regulations of theirs for a fruitful life seem determined by a remarkable dialectic. Do not hesitate to summon up all your powers in order to familiarize yourself with all the rules which might somehow be effective in life. Ignorance in any form will be detrimental to you; only the ‘fool’ thinks he can shut his eyes to this. Experience, on the other hand, teaches that you can never be certain. You must always remain open for a completely new experience. You will never become really wise, for, in the last resort, this life of yours is determined not by rules but by God.{en8}

Biblical proverbs permit mystery. They are grounded in and built on the fear of the LORD, and that implies a submission to a personal and inscrutable God whose will and ways do not always conform to tight boxes and stiff formulas. Applying proverbs requires and assumes a prior submission to YHWH and a timely application. On this latter, “Look before you leap” and “He who hesitates is lost” are equally true; but one must discern the situation of the moment to know which to apply. Alas, so-called exceptions to the rule turn out to be more a problem with untimely and inappropriate application than with the rule itself. What I wish to stress is that the Book of Proverbs itself acknowledges these limitations and teaches that it is in the pondering of Proverbs that one acquires the requisite discernment. Frustration over the commands and promises of Proverbs, in other words, calls for more attentive study of the book, not less.

The familiar domain of English grammar provides a helpful, if imperfect, illustration of this point.

Rules: In English, verbs form their past tense by adding ‘-ed’ and nouns form their plural by adding ‘s.’
Examples. ‘I walk’ and ‘I walked.’ ‘Book’ and ‘books.’
Evaluation: These are good rules. They are accurate. They are true.
Question: Do these rules always apply?
Response: No. We say, “I go” but not “I goed,” “I see” but not “I seeed.” We say “mouse” but not “mouses” (although we do say “houses”!), “woman” but not “womans.”
Analysis: Even good, accurate, true rules do not always apply because certain verbs and nouns require a different set of rules. We might say that the problem is not with the rules, but with the situation (i.e., with the verb or noun).
Solution: We must know the rules, we must know the verbs and nouns, and we must know which rules apply in which situation. This requires our living in the English language long enough to gain the requisite knowledge.
Analogy: It is by living in Proverbs that we gain such insight into the performance or proper application of wisdom.

Raymond Van Leeuwen captures the point well:

What is the upshot of all this? To use proverbs wisely, whether from the Bible or the sayings of contemporary America, one must have a proverb repertoire adequate to handle the complexities of life. If you know only, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” and not also, “It’s never too late to learn,” you might commit a faux pas by using the wrong proverb! Goethe said of languages, “He who knows one, knows none” (Wer nur eine Sprache kennt, kennt keine). The maxim applies even more forcefully to Proverbs. Even in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus presents sayings that on one level or another present conflicting advice (cf. Matt. 7:1 and 7:6, which require the reader to make judgments; cf. also 6:1 and 5:14-16). Rather than forcing us to erase or “harmonize” the ambiguities and “contradictions,” biblical wisdom invites us to ponder the nuances and complexities of life; it invites us to become wise.{en9}

CONCLUSION

Of the many conclusions and applications which flow from this discussion, I choose to highlight the most obvious. The Book of Proverbs speaks to us the word and will of our Lord. Its instructions are binding and its promises true. It tells us how to go in life, and it assures us of the blessing of God when we do. Of course, it does so in the context of the fear of YHWH, where personal relationship, worshiping submission, and dynamic faith are never negated by mechanical positivism, cold certitude, and fixed formulas. The former leads to “wisdom that comes down from above”; the latter to a less desirable but more familiar prospect (Jas 3:13-18).

The question posed by the subtitle connects to the italicized word left of the colon–not simply have we read the Book of Psalms, but have we read it as a book? In other words, have we read Psalms as a thoughtfully authored composition with a beginning and an ending and a cohesive progression between, complete with true chapters or groups of chapters, not isolated and independent poems from hither and yon dropped helter-skelter onto the page in a manner comparable to the proverbial pebbles on a beach? The implications of such a question should be obvious: If Psalms is a book with thematic unity or a “story line” that runs from 1 to 150, then most of us have habitually and repeatedly done more than exercise wanton literary license, we have gotten away with murder–murder of the author of record who, although anonymous, composed this work to communicate a coherent message of divine-human intention. Moreover, if Psalms is a book, then we may be certain that reading and proclaiming its parts in light of the authored strategy of the whole will not lessen, but enhance, its value immeasurably, with the added blessing that the meaning and message so enhanced will actually be the word of the Lord, not merely the warm, appreciative sentiments of the reader.

In what follows I intend to survey some of the more noteworthy indications that the Book of Psalms actually is such a book. There will be a sequel to this article in the form of a lecture entitled “Psalms as the Church’s Book: From Meditation to Proclamation” at the July 27 MIQRA seminar. There I plan to develop the thesis (that Psalms is a unitary composition) by exhibiting its payoff in terms of structural contours and thematic progression and by illustrating its effect on how we read, live, and proclaim any of the constituent psalm-chapters from 1 to 150.

DEVELOPMENT: SELECTED INDICATIONS

Several years ago I received a phone call from a physician friend in Chicago. As was his practice with biblical books, Dr. Dunlop had just completed a six-month “residency” in the Book of Psalms. Before moving on to another canonical location for six months, he was calling to inquire on the state of psalmic studies among biblical scholars relative to his own tentative conclusion. To the eye of this fine physician and faithful layman, Psalms appeared to be more than a disjointed collection. He was pleasantly surprised to learn that well over 50 studies in some way support the conclusion to which his own observations had pointed. That bibliography has continued to grow, as exegetical evidence continues to pour forth in support of the conviction that by taking the Book of Psalms seriously as a book we have entered “a quite new season in Psalms studies”{en2} and “we now stand at the borders of the promised land.”{en3} In what follows I intend to show that this is more than mere threshold rhetoric.

The evidence for compositional shaping of Psalms is impressive. Here I simply identify seven such indications, the development of which deserves a full-length study.

1. The Book of Psalms has a discernible introduction, body, and conclusion. Psalms 1-2 provides a two-part hermeneutic introduction to the book: Meditation on YHWH’s Torah defines the way of the righteous, the true path to blessing (1), and YHWH’s Torah points ultimately to trusting and obeying YHWH’s Messiah-Son-King, who will judge all peoples (2). Psalms 3-145 comprises the body of the book in five parts or books, each ending with a doxological refrain (41:13; 72:18-19; 89:52; 106:48; Eng. verse numbers), climaxing in the fivefold crescendo of praise (146-150) which, accordingly, concludes both Book 5and the fivefold book itself. Generally the body develops around the theme of Messiah’s promised and awaited rule. The wide range of life’s experiences and emotions all find their true meaning in the anticipation of YHWH’s coming King and Kingdom in fulfillment of his promises in covenant to David. The fivefold conclusion extols YHWH alone as worthy to be praised–generally for all his glorious attributes, specifically for his messianic promise.

2. The five books are marked not only by echoing doxologies, but by other indications at the seams. For example, Books 1-3 display a “royal covenantal framework” (cf. 2, 72, 89), and books 4-5 a dominant “wisdom framework” (cf. 90-91, 106, 145). The author-compositor of inspired record apparently had in mind to highlight the convergence of kingdom and wisdom themes, pointing ultimately to a divine king who would be a wise man.

3. Obviously the Book of Psalms represents a selection of OT psalms, from which we may reasonably infer that these and not others were included by design and decision. The exclusion of many extant psalms (e.g., Exod 15:1-18; Num 10:35-36; Num 23-24; Deut 32; 33; Judg 5:1-31; 1 Sam 2:1-10; Isa 38:10-20; Jer 20:7-18; Jon 2:2-9; Hab 3; Lam) raises the question of what should account for the inclusion of just these psalms. Moreover, while many existent psalms are omitted, a few within the book are actually duplicated (compare 14 and 53; 40:13-17 and 70). These and related phenomena render extremely unlikely the conception of Psalms as a random anthology of Israel’s praises.

4. One of the most coercive indications of “the impress of one ordering mind”{en4} consists in the remarkable number of verbal and thematic links in neighboring psalms where the connections count for something. As J. P. Brennan noted, “a consecutive reading of the Hebrew Psalter leads to the conclusion that one of the principles governing the compilation of the collection was that of juxtaposing Psalms in such a way that various key words and expressions in one pick up and develop a theme already enunciated in another.”{en5} There are many examples, but none more impressive than those links consisting in two occurrences of a term or line in contiguous psalms which occurs only there in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., the refrain in 42:5, 11; 43:5) or only there in Psalms (e.g., ‘the angel of the LORD’, many times elsewhere in the OT but only in the adjacent 34:7 and 35:5-6 within Psalms). Among other factors, the verbal and thematic details binding psalms 1 and 2 are many and compelling, rendering their function as a two-part introduction to the book unmistakable.

5. Because we typically begin our reading of a particular psalm with v. 1, we sometimes overlook the fact that all but 34 of the 150 psalms are in fact introduced by a prefaced title or superscript that precedes v. 1 in English translation. That being the case, most readers are not likely to consider the relevance of these prefatory notations to compositional unity and thematic interests. Hebrew readers have a decided advantage here since what appears in English versions as a mere title typically comprises v. 1 (or a portion of v. 1, and in some cases vv. 1-2) in the Hebrew psalm. In other words, most of our public and private reading of 116 of the psalms omits part of the content of the actual psalm. We cannot now engage this matter further except to point out that very often these introductory lines contain editorial details that signal important thematic (not merely historical) interests. For example, the superscripts in psalms 3-9 help advance an emerging ‘son’ theme in the early part of the book; the notice ‘of David’ in 73 psalms does far more to promote a “Davidization” theme for the whole than merely identify original authorship{en6}; and ‘To the Choirmaster’ or ‘For the Chief Musician’ in 55 psalm titles almost certainly reflects a mistranslation of a term that has no unambiguous reference to music at all. On lexical, exegetical, and traditional grounds, this last-mentioned, like the previous two, probably directs attention to an eschatological messianic figure who will be victorious in the end of time, not to a leader of temple worship as is regularly assumed.

6. The Book of Psalms shows considerable evidence of subgroups or micro-collections which are not likely accidental or coincidental. Examples include the Davidic collection (3-41, 51-72 => 72:20); the Korahite collection (42-49, 84-85, 87-88); the Asaphite collection (50, 73-83); and the Songs of the Ascents (120-134).

7. The Book of Psalms displays a discernible thematic progression from lament to praise, from the individual to the community, from Torah to Messiah, from kinglessness to kingship. The details are too involved to develop here; but as an example, it is remarkable that all three sharply focused Torah-psalms are immediately followed by highly concentrated Messiah-psalms (so 1 => 2; 19 => 20-25; 119 => 120-134), as if to indicate that the author-compositor had a particular agenda in mind: Torah points to Messiah!

CONCLUSION: SELECTED IMPLICATIONS

We have already hinted at some of the implications which follow on from the observation that a divine-human intention appears to have been operative in the composition of the Book of Psalms. Let me highlight three of the most informing.

First, thematic cohesion. The Book of Psalms is a cohesive theological-thematic unity, not a haphazard collection of independent poems. When once we abandon age-old bad habits of grab-bagging a psalm “for every occasion” and with more readerly respect determine to follow the author’s lead–like we know we should elsewhere in Scripture–then a new world of meaning and relevance opens before our eyes. It will assuredly affect how we hear, heed, and herald this favorite of all biblical books.

Second, messianic orientation. Many readers of the NT puzzle over the manner in which Jesus and the apostles regularly find Christ in psalms where the rest of us do not (e.g., a prophecy of Jesus’ resurrection in Pss 16; cf. Acts 2:25-33). When compositional features are carefully factored, the NT understanding of Psalms as messianic actually turns out to be more in line with the shaped message of the book than our popular approach has permitted us to see. Moreover, NT writers who discern in Psalms a rich prophetic and messianic well from which to draw may in fact be plumbing the depths of the book at a considerably deeper level of responsible exegesis than their critics, who see only history, sometimes acknowledge.

Third, contextual interpretation. Once the notion has been dislodged that Psalms should be regarded as an exception to the hermeneutic axiom of interpreting in context, the world of the book becomes an exceedingly better place to live for both the devotional reader and the preacher (even if some sermons will have to be revised!). Informed by its context in the book, the ever-popular Shepherd Psalm, for example, embodies a meaning and message much deeper and richer than stand-alone readings are able to hear (alas, the most loved psalm may not be the best understood). In this connection, setting a psalm in the context of history (e.g., ancient sheep and shepherding practices) leads to a quite different construal from setting it in the context of canon. However well the former may preach, the latter will preach even better. And for those who in the spirit of hermeneutic pluralism insist on having it both ways–history as context and book as context–it is worth pondering whether the psalm, functioning now in the fabric of the shaped composition, means to preserve and convey both resultant meanings.

A solid contribution to a multivolume commentary (12 large ones in all) by an eclectic “who’s who” in contemporary biblical scholarship. Includes standard introductory discussion, with noteworthy comments on the text and composition of Samuel, and section-by-section (not verse-by-verse) exposition that includes introductory overview, textual commentary, and expository reflections. Preachers and teachers will find Birch’s treatment generally readable and especially helpful in grasping the significance of Samuel for the church’s life and faith.

Views the book as a sophisticated, “kaleidoscopic” narrative, “more like an extended parable than a historical report” (891), with similarities to Jonah, or Nathan’s story to David in 2 Samuel 12:1-7. But in lieu of easy character correlation in these other stories, Farmer is more cautious than Hubbard about seeing in the person of Ruth an obvious set of moral qualities which the book means to bring to bear on the reader. In fact, while the key interpretive issue lies in the area of identification, Farmer argues that it is Naomi, not Ruth, whose qualities the book highlights as becoming to the people of God. Moreover, it is Naomi’s redemption which provides the specific context for a more subtle and elaborate presentation of the way God redeems his people over time. A unique feature of Farmer’s commentary is a section entitled “Reading Ruth in Various Life Settings.” This is a welcome feature (and could have been longer!) which highlights only a few of the many ways different approaches to interpretation might be confronted by the message of the book. Reflection on this key hermeneutical issue stands to enrich the use of this commentary for study and teaching in a variety of contexts.

Over the years I have had many occasions to spend time in the Book of Jonah–first preaching a series of sermons that highlighted its compelling story and convicting message, then introducing class after class of Elementary Hebrew students to its relatively simple vocabulary and grammar, and finally producing a Hebrew Exegesis manual that explores its finer linguistic and literary features. Until recently, most of my attention has been taken up with the book’s textual details, almost to the neglect of its deep theological reservoir and rich typological resonances. Gradually I have come to understand why “Jonah was one of the principal books of exegesis for the church fathers,” whose main interest was “to see Christ as the new Jonah who fulfilled and transcended the old covenant” (ACCS XIV, 128).

This latter interest is what motivated my most recent venture into Jonah, in connection with the seminar conducted here at MIQRA on April 28. There, under the title “The Story of Jonah and the Logic of Redemption: A Narrative-Theological Reading,” I attempted to highlight some of the theological treasures of this magnificent book, especially when it is read in conversation with the rest of Scripture, most notably the Gospel of our Lord (Jonah appears in Matt 12:38-42; Matt 16:1-4; and Lk 11:29-32; cf. Matt 16:17). And with help from some of the Church’s earliest interpreters, I was able to gain a fresh appreciation for the contribution Jonah makes to the Bible’s story of salvation.

Let me cite a few examples from my recent quest:

“For even as Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” [Matt 12:40]. Now when we study the story of Jonah the force of the resemblance becomes striking. Jesus was sent to preach repentance. So was Jonah. Though Jonah fled, not knowing what was to come, Jesus came willingly, to grant repentance for salvation. Jonah slumbered in the ship and was fast asleep amid the stormy sea; while Jesus by God’s will was sleeping, the sea was stirred up, for the purpose of manifesting thereafter the power of him who slept. They said to Jonah, “What are you doing asleep? Rise up, call upon your God, that God may save us,” but the apostles say, “Lord, save us!” [Matt 8:25] In the first instance they said, Call upon your God, and in the second, save us. In the first Jonah said to them, “Pick me up and throw me into the sea, that it may quiet down for you”; in the other Christ himself “rebuked the wind and the sea, and there came a great calm” [Matt 8:26]. Jonah was cast into the belly of a great fish, but Christ of his own will descended to the abode of the invisible fish of death. He went down of his own will to make death disgorge those it had swallowed up, according to the Scripture: “I shall deliver them from the power of the nether world, and I shall redeem them from death” [Hos 13:14]. (Cyril of Jerusalem, c. 313-386; Catechetical Lecture 14.7)

What happened in the case of blessed Jonah the prophet was similar: when Jews were unbelieving and reluctant to heed his prophecies, God had him go instead to the nations. Then, after remarkably keeping him safe inside the sea monster for three days and nights, he brought him to the city that was full of countless vices and caused him to preach repentance and become a source of salvation for all in that place, so that from the comparison we might not lack faith in Christ the Lord, who was kept incorrupt for the same number of days, rising from the dead and providing all nations in general with salvation by way of repentance and enjoying immortal life. (Theodore of Mopsuestia, c. 350-428; Commentary on Jonah)

Why, then, are we asked what was prefigured by the prophet being swallowed by that monster and restored alive on the third day? Christ explained it when he said an evil and adulterous generation seeks a sign, and a sign shall not be given to it, but the sign of Jonah the prophet. For as Jonah was in the whale’s belly three days and three nights, so shall the Son of man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights. . . . So then, as Jonah went from the ship into the belly of the whale, so Christ went from the tree into the tomb, or into the abyss of death. And as Jonah was sacrificed for those endangered by the storm, so Christ was offered for those who are drowning in the storm of this world. And as Jonah was first commanded to preach to the Ninevites but his prophecy did not come to them until after the whale had vomited him out, so the prophecy made to the Gentiles did not come to them until after the resurrection of Christ. (St. Augustine, c. 354-430; Letter 102.6)

And here’s a more recent example that draws out the “logic of redemption” as we encounter it in Jonah 1:

       There at the bottom of the boat he becomes as it were the unknown secret at its core, the hidden meaning of its disaster–like Israel among the nations, the chosen ones who give meaning to the world and its history. Unknown to the terrified Gentiles on deck, the Israelite unconscious in the inner part of the ship is the clue to the real story of their lives. Even the violence of the sea is determined by his hidden presence. It is no comfort to them now, but it all means something.
       And it may be, despite all appearances, that they are not really in danger so long as Jonah is with them. Would the LORD really sink the vessel that contains the apple of his eye? Jonah is the representative of Israel among the nations, God’s beloved among the peoples. Of course we are reminded of a yet more representative Israelite who also slept in a boat threatened by a great storm that terrified everyone else aboard–who were all nonetheless quite safe because he was with them (Matt. 8:23-27; Mark 4:35-41; Luke 8:22-25). We must wonder if in this episode too Jesus deliberately identifies with Jonah, the obedient prophet identifying with the disobedient. Of course Jonah is unlike Jesus in that he has no power of his own to still the waves. Yet when push comes to shove he does still the waves. He accomplishes this by giving himself up to death, . . . freeing everyone else from the threat of harm. We would all be doing well if we were as effective as Jonah, this prophet who in spite of himself anticipates Christ in so many ways.
       And of course in many ways we do resemble disobedient Jonah without really noticing, being quite capable of sleeping through disasters and unconscious of the ruin we bring upon our neighbors. The church should consider identifying with Jonah, but with less innocent confidence than our Lord Jesus. The number of ways we have run away from the word of our Lord, descended among the nations, and fallen asleep among the disasters for which we are responsible are no doubt beyond counting. But perhaps we could consider first of all the great disaster of the dissolution of Christendom, which leaves the West full of wealth and contrivance, commerce and technology, pleasures of all sorts to be bought and consumed, but no meaning of life worth living for. It would be worth hurling it all overboard if we could find who slumbers at the bottom of it all. (Phillip Cary, Jonah, 50)

And again, with reference to Jonah’s willingly placing himself into the hands of the sailors:

       . . . in handling himself over to God in this way, Jonah is at his most Christlike. He gives up his life so that others might live. . . . We would all be doing well if we were as much like Christ as Jonah is. Though Jonah may give himself up in despair, he does have his priorities straight: he treats the lives of these good sailors as more valuable than his own. . . .
       The prophet instructs the sailors how to propitiate the wrath of God [a phrase not used here]; you do it by getting rid of the prophet who instructs you. This would not be the first time people killed the messenger, even a messenger from God. Jesus tells a parable about this just a few days before his crucifixion (Matt. 21:33-46). This turns out to be the fundamental shape of redemption: we kill the ultimate messenger–God’s own Son–and that is the propitiation to end all propitiations. (Cary, 66)

Obviously, those who ponder the story of Jonah will find a richer and deeper message here than simply a tale about a disobedient prophet who learns the hard way that you can’t run from God and get by with it (If that were the case, why does the book not end with ch. 1?), or a drowning prophet who gets swallowed by a submarine-like fish and lives to tell about it (If ‘Monstro’ is such a key figure in the story, why is he mentioned in only three verses?), or a disgruntled prophet who reluctantly fulfills a mission and so provides a moral for missionary speakers who need an illustration and a clincher for their next motivational talk (If the main teaching point centers on being a willing and obedient  missionary, why does the book end the way it does?).

On that last question, let me propose that the book ends the way it does for a definite reason. In the final verses of chapter 4, YHWH presses home the lesson of the gourd and the grub by asking Jonah why he (YHWH) should not be as concerned about a great city full of people and animals as Jonah is about a comparatively valueless plant with which he had nothing to do. The end. The fact that Jonah is not even given a chance to respond suggests that the purpose of the book is not finally to give us a biography of Jonah, much less to criticize him, but to leave us pondering as readers: Does God have the freedom to distribute his sovereign and saving mercy as he wills, or does he owe us a consultation on that matter? Jonah is given no space to respond because after all, by his own earlier declaration, which he shouted exuberantly in response to his own deliverance, “Salvation belongs to YHWH!” (2:9). The lesson of the gourd and the grub is simply to register the more sharply how far off the mark our own theology, like Jonah’s, sometimes gets when it comes to how God dispenses his mercy and grace. Jonah is pathetic, as are we–pleased with God’s compassion toward us and our comforts, but displeased when he extends that same compassion to those we consider less deserving. No answer is recorded at the end of 4:11 because it remains open for the reader to respond–in humility and repentance.

In other words, by the end of the story we are to see that the real joke is not on Jonah, but on us. And we are to let it hit us between the eyes, as we sit silently with Jonah at the end of the story, considering our own “Ninevehs”–evildoers, whether individuals or people groups, we would rather see getting what they deserve than being transformed and ultimately saved. Where Jonah got it wrong, and where we sometimes get it wrong, is not in his expectation that the people of Nineveh deserved God’s judgment (they did), but in his presumption that he did not, and in his wishing that YHWH, “a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Jon 4:2; cf. Exod 34:6-7), would be more that way with Jonah and his people and less that way with others.

And so, we could all be both a little more like Jonah, as Jesus was–naming the true God and giving his own life so that a boatload of desperate sailors from many nations could know that “salvation belongs to YHWH”–and a little less like Jonah–peeved that YHWH’s mercy, grace, patience, steadfast love, and faithfulness are generously offered to all the unworthy, including those we dislike, since “salvation belongs to YHWH.”

In the mercy, grace, patience, steadfast love, and faithfulness supremely displayed in Christ our Lord,

Vern Steiner

Visitors to our website will have noticed the featured articles on Obadiah and Jonah. In recent weeks, and in the ongoing interest of making our materials available to a wider readership, I have posted six additional articles on the Old Testament Prophets formerly published in various issues of the MIQRA Journal between 2003 and 2010.

In “Judges among the Prophets: Messianic Secrets in Unexpected Places” (Spring 2003), I explore the prophetic message of Judges by attending to the book’s location within the Former Prophets in the Hebrew canon and especially to its own literary and thematic strategies, in the light of which this “historical” book in fact reveals an unmistakable messianic orientation.

“Samuel, Leadership, and the Church: A Few Disquieting Reflections” (Spring 2004) takes a careful look at 1 Samuel 8 and seeks to listen to its convicting cautions on how leadership is popularly conceived in the Church today.

In “Jeremiah’s Counterworld: The Subversion of Misguided Values and Misplaced Securities” (Spring 2007), I expound and explore the implications of Jeremiah 9:23-26, where we are treated to one of the Bible’s clearest statements on the kinds of things God deplores in his people and on the values and virtues God most desires in his people.

“Ezekiel, the ‘Spiritual’ Prophet: Reflections on the Spirit in Ezekiel” (Spring 2008) examines all the references to the Spirit in Ezekiel (arguably the most Spirit-rich book in the Old Testament), and shows how Ezekiel informs the New Testament understanding of the person and ministries of the Holy Spirit.

In “Hosea and The Twelve: A Short Introduction to the Minor Prophets” (Spring 2009), I discuss the evidence for and the significance of respecting the long Hebrew tradition of reading Hosea through Malachi not as twelve free-standing little books, but as member parts (“chapters”) of a single composition with an internal structure and a cohesive theme.

“On Proclaiming the Prophets: Joel as the Church’s Scripture” (Spring 2010) tackles a challenging and immensely practical issue that faces almost everyone who reads the Bible’s Prophetic books: What is this saying (or how does this apply) to us?

I offer these pieces for the blessing of God’s people, the health of the Church, and the promotion of God’s kingdom and glory through his Son. As always, I welcome engagement and interaction among those who find these discussions stimulating and valuable, including suggestions for further consideration.

In the love, grace, and peace of Christ our Lord,

Vern Steiner

This article is headed in directions some readers of the title will not expect it to go. First, there will be no listing of lessons on leadership from the life of Samuel. This is not a book about that. Rather, from one end to the other, 1-2 Samuel unfolds an understanding of kingship from a certain theological perspective which the Church needs desperately to hear in fresh ways today.

Putting matters this way requires a second clarification. There will be no facile drawing of any direct correspondence between monarchy and Church or between kingship and pastorate, notwithstanding those churches and leaders who never quite get the differentiations straight. I intend to engage something more profound than this.

Third, the subtitle hints that thinking about some of these issues may be disturbing, in which connection W. A. Kort voices a penetrating question: “Why should anyone want to read scripture, when to read scripture is first of all to allow one’s location and world to be disconfirmed and destabilized?”{en1} Readers proceed from this point at their own risk.

GOD’S KIND OF KING

The story of Israel’s kingship begins much earlier than the people’s demand for a king in 1 Samuel 8. In fact, it begins in the Pentateuch, where as early as Genesis the message is clear that God’s plans for Israel included the office of kingship. From the very beginning God had promised kings to Abraham (Gen 17:6,16; cf. 35:11), which promise would come to fulfillment in a scepter that would not depart from Judah (Gen 49:8-12; cf. Num 24:3-9, 15-24). Later, Deuteronomy 17:14-20 explicates with marvelous clarity the fourfold ideals for God’s kind of king: (a) he must be chosen by the Lord (v. 15a); (b) he must be a brother Israelite rather than a foreigner (v. 15b); (c) he must practice restraint in war horses, wives, and wealth (vv. 16-17); and most highlighted of all, (d) he must lead God’s people in the will of the Lord:

And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, approved by the Levitical priests. And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them, that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left, so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children, in Israel (vv. 18-20).

Significantly, the will of God could be learned in only one way, by reading the “authorized version” of the written Torah. It was there the king would learn to fear and obey and maintain a heart of humility that befits a leader who is under authority and who serves rather than lords.

“GIVE US A KING”

Fast forward to 1 Samuel 8. It was a sad day in the life of God’s people, but not for the reasons many readers have assumed. Some have supposed, on the basis of the people’s demand “now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations” (v. 5b), that Israel’s failure consisted in her looking around, seeing that all her neighbors had kings, and so concluding that it would be a good idea if she had one as well. On this understanding, Israel is faulted for imitating a socio-cultural norm: The people want a governance like the surrounding nations. Others appeal to the Lord’s words to Samuel, “they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them” (v. 7b), from which the conclusion is drawn that Israel’s sin lay in her insistence on a human king in place of God. On this understanding, Israel is blamed for discontentment with God as king, for rejecting God’s exclusive sovereignty. In fact, neither of these explanations for what went wrong in Israel’s “give us a king” quite gets at the problem or at the point of the passage. Moreover, each in its own way mutes a message the Church and all its ministries cannot afford to miss.

The latter interpretation–that Israel failed in wanting any king but God–can be called into question in light of those passages in the Pentateuch (above), the Prophets (e.g., 2 Sam 7; Isa 9), and the Psalms (e.g., 2; 89) where God’s own plans for Israel obviously included human kings. Kingship is a matter of divine imprimatur. In the context of our passage, the Lord’s clarification to Samuel that “they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them” (v. 7b) should not be construed to mean that Israel’s requesting a human king meant per se that she was rejecting the Lord’s kingship. The immediately following verse clarifies what God is driving at in his response to Samuel: “According to all the deeds that they have done, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you” (v. 8). Israel’s rejection of God’s kingship long predated her present demand for a king. Something lies behind Israel’s request for a human king that reflects a spirit of rebellion against the Lord, but the request itself is neither invalid nor necessarily the signal of Israel’s rejecting God’s kingship. In the larger story of Scripture, accepting God’s kingship would in fact entail accepting the human rulership of God’s messiah-king. To put this in other words, in God’s world divine kingship is mediated through human leadership, so that Israel’s living properly under the rule of God would be defined in her living properly under the rule of God’s anointed.

We shall not linger here long, as this point lies more in the background than the foreground of our passage. Still, we should not dash away so quickly that we miss the obvious: On at least this issue, nothing has changed theologically in the move from monarchy to Church. Those who continue to babble pious-sounding nonsense about reporting only to God, with no duty of submission to God’s appointed leaders, certainly stand on shaky ground when they make impertinent appeal to passages like ours. There is no haven in this prooftext for any pretense of loyalty directly and exclusively to God that does not also imply a submission to those whom God appoints over us. Those who have no authority but God really have no authority at all. The god to whom they report is the one they see in the mirror.

But let us return to the former interpretation, that Israel’s failure consisted in her conformist impulses in wanting a king because kingship was the rule of the day. This explanation appears to gain support from the people’s expressed request, “Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations” (v. 5b), which clearly echoes Moses’ earlier words, “When you come to the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you possess it and dwell in it and then say, ‘I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me’” (Deut 17:14). But these lines can be misread and important details missed. There is no indictment of any kind, neither explicit nor implicit, in Moses’ (and the Lord’s) earlier acknowledgment that the people may request a king to be set over them, “like all the nations that are around.” Nor does v. 5 in our passage hint of anything inappropriate in their simply wanting a king “like all the nations.” On one reading, their request has Deuteronomy “written all over it”; we might even say that they are thinking biblically. Samuel’s advanced age and reprobate sons had occasioned a leadership crisis, in response to which the elders of Israel looked around at nearby nations, observed that each had its own king, and concluded that a similar governing structure would be desirable for them. Nothing in the text suggests that Israel’s representative leaders did anything wrong in assessing the present circumstances and presenting to Samuel their request for a king. Moreover, a concluding refrain in the book immediately preceding–“In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judg 17:6; 21:25; cf. 18:1; 19:1)–reminds readers of just how desirable an alternative to that situation might be.

But all of this does not get Israel off the hook. Important details in the wording of their request suggest that Israel’s desire for a king was not prompted merely by the observation that all the surrounding nations had kings, which is what Deuteronomy 17:14 envisioned. The infinitive phrase “to judge us” is crucial here, as it focuses their request on a particular role for the king they envisioned–judging or governing by means of decisions. So far so good, especially in light of the sorry failure of Samuel’s delinquent sons in fulfilling that role (vv. 2-3), notwithstanding Samuel’s interpreting the elders’ request personally, as an attack on his own earlier judging role (vv. 6-8; cf. 7:6,15-17).{en2} For a few moments we are left wondering about the precise meaning of the entire phrase “to judge us like all the nations,” which conjures up more than one possibility, as we shall see. The issue of likeness to the nations fades from the page temporarily, as the narrative spotlight focuses on Samuel’s displeasure at their request (v. 6), the Lord’s clarification about the larger issues (vv. 7-8), Samuel’s commission from the Lord to listen and solemnly warn (v. 9), and Samuel’s recitation of what they are in for (vv. 10-18).

Specifically, Samuel is called upon to warn the people about “the ways of the king who shall reign over them” (v. 9, 11), which he proceeds to do in no uncertain terms. However the first part of this line in vv. 9 and 11 is translated, an important point will be missed if we fail to see the connection between “the ways (mspt) of the king” and their seeking a king “to judge (spt) us.” This is crucial: As a successor to Samuel and his crooked judge-sons, they want a king to judge them; and it falls to Samuel to announce in prophetic detail, by the word of the Lord, what the king’s judging will look like. In short, the kind of king they would choose (v. 18; cf. “our king” in v. 20) will initiate a policy of injustice in every imaginable way–one characterized by the abuse of royal privilege in the form of grasping (see “take” in vv. 11, 13, 14, 16; and “confiscating a tenth” in vv. 15 and 17) and ultimate reduction of the people to slavery (vv. 11-17). The kingship they have in mind, Samuel threatens, would undo everything God had done in the exodus! Or as B. C. Birch puts it, “The fate Samuel described would undercut the very identity of Israel as God’s delivered people. For the security of a king, the people would surrender their freedom.”{en3} The cost of kingship will be dreadful, Samuel warns, culminating in the threat that “in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day” (v. 18). Here is the frightening part: What they want they will get, as God sometimes permits what he does not approve; but what they end up getting will not be what they want! Human history, from the desire in the Garden to the narcissism of the present, reveals how little we actually learn from our tragic past on this matter.

But we have yet to understand what exactly is so wrong in Israel’s wanting a king “to judge us like all the other nations.” The people’s response to the catalogue of dangers that await reveals more than simply a refusal to be dissuaded, and herein lies the key to their failure in the matter of kingship:

But the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel. And they said, “No! But there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles” (vv. 19-20).

Every line is telling. First, in their refusal to obey Samuel’s voice they are rejecting the Lord, whose word the prophet speaks (cf. v. 10; also 10:19; 15:23, 26; 16:1). It is now clear that their insisting on a king in fact stands in rebellion against the Lord–not because the desire itself is prompted by the contemporary model, nor because having a king in itself constitutes the rejection of God’s sovereignty, but because their desire and determination will override anything God has to say on the subject through his prophet. Second, “that we ourselves may be like all the nations,” as the next line should read, adds an important clarifying emphasis to their earlier request for “a king to judge us like all the nations” (v. 5b). Their real motive is now out in the open: They are not simply requesting a king because each of the surrounding nations has one, but because in their having a king they see the prospect of their becoming like their neighbors. The difference is subtle but crucial. The drive to conform extends beyond simply emulating the nations in having a king; it entails the underlying hope that by having a king they themselves will become like their neighbors–no longer the distinctive, separated community of God’s people fulfilling their covenant vocation in the world, but blended into the cultural patterns of those all around. Third, in addition to having a leader who will facilitate their world-likeness, they outline three specific expectations for their king: that he will judge or govern them (by standards respectable in the eyes of the nations), that he will lead them (in the manner that other kings lead their nations), and that he will fight their battles (in the event of conflict with the nations)–everything but what YHWH had in mind for Israel’s king!

As we have noted, Deuteronomy 17:14-20 spelled out in detail what God envisioned in a king. There is none of that here. God’s qualifications were clear and straightforward. The king must be (a) chosen by the Lord, but they will choose their own (1 Sam 8:10; significantly, the name “Saul” means “the one asked for”!; cf. Hos 8:4); (b) a brother Israelite rather than a foreigner; but they want a king who, even if he is an Israelite, might as well not be; (c) not a hoarder of war horses, wives, and wealth; but the king they envision will make taking his royal policy; and (d) above all, a reader and doer of the written Torah–the Pentateuch’s “arch-reader”{en4}–but they have their own reading list on leadership, their own criteria by which kingship will be defined and measured. The initial idea for having a king seems to have come from Torah (it is likely that they had read Deut 17:14), precipitated now in the present circumstances by internal pressures (Samuel’s near-retirement and unfit successors) and external culture (the surrounding nations). From there, they write their own profile and position description on what they seek in a king.

CONCLUSION: SOME DISQUIETING REFLECTIONS

It would be possible, and doubtless a whole lot safer, to conclude this discussion right here. The effects would be benign. Readers could draw their own inferences on what could possibly be so disquieting, or in Kort’s words, so disconfirming and destabilizing, about these reflections and any relevance they might have to leadership and the Church. I shall indeed leave to readers the business of pressing on toward specific conclusions, but let me at least extend an invitation to linger for a few moments within earshot of what the Spirit says to the churches from this passage.

First, I find it disquieting that God’s people may want a good thing, even something God endorses–leadership, for example–but define its function and measure its performance in ways God does not, in ways that arise from their own criteria or from the ideals set forth in the surrounding culture (including Church culture). The Church and its leaders are in trouble when the best or preferred or most effective model for “doing church” is found by looking around for the latest summit or seminar or simulcast or strategy or success story on how to “make it happen,” where 'it', oddly, is supposed to be God’s work.

Second, I find it disquieting that God’s people are sometimes ready to abandon the only thing that makes them really special in this world–their distinctive identity as God’s covenant community–in order to imitate that from which they have been graciously delivered. The Church and its leaders are in trouble when the lure of cultural conformity, justified on any grounds (including ones with a spiritual ring, like ‘relevance’), becomes a higher value than the call to authentic holiness and lordship, when internal crises or worldly pressures are met with compromise and accommodation, when the answer to every challenge is found in an organizational fix that misses the heart of the matter. In the path of becoming “like all the nations” the Church ceases to be the Church.

Third, I find it disquieting that God’s people and their leaders may become so consumed and distracted by their own agendas of many good things that they sometimes lose sight of that which most marks a leader as God’s kind of leader–one who reads and listens to and obeys the written word of the Lord. Nothing seems to have changed in the theology between the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Pastorals on this point. The Church and its leaders are in trouble when any modus operandi threatens to displace that of faithfully listening to God’s say.

Fourth, I find it terribly disquieting that God’s people and their leaders may want something so badly that God, against his own better judgment, does not veto but gives them what they want–a “grudging grant”{en5} (cf. 8:7, 9, 22). Sometimes they wholeheartedly awaken and discover that what they got is not really what they wanted, and God in mercy grants repentance. Other times they halfheartedly awaken, regret the consequences of their choice, though not the choice itself, and God in judgment says, “Grace is more than a game.” Sometimes they remain forever in their slumber. It may be too early to say in which category the Church and its leaders fall today.

Let the one who has an ear hear whatever the Spirit says to the Church from 1 Samuel 8.

N’s commentary splits the difference between the technical precision of Raabe and the preachability of Baker. It’s visually attractive from an aesthetic perspective, and pleasant to read. There is plenty of space at the margins, with numerous inset sections—including various graphics—to develop theological or topical points of interest, whereas the textual engagement in the comments more steadily pursues the book’s own development. But it isn’t the easiest commentary to consult, given the large chunk of Obadiah that N consigns to one section (vv. 1-14+15b). Boldfacing individual verses prior to their comments, or in some way setting them in relief, is always a welcome feature. Nitpicks aside, N is important reading, and often cited in modern Twelve scholarship.

From the foreword: "The purpose of this commentary series is to help readers navigate this strange and sometimes forbidding literary and spiritual terrain...so that the power and meaning of these biblical texts become transparent to contemporary readers" (ix).  Based on the NIV, the treatment is readable and uncluttered though Brown's endnotes exhibit a well-rounded engagement and are worth the page-flipping.  The bold text in her section by section treatment refers to more specific comments and explanations at the end of each section----a particularly helpful feature for those interested in more details about certain passages. 

A standard, critical treatment of Joshua.  Historical and archaeological concerns rank high.  Follows the standard format of the WBC (section by section with Bibliography, Translation, Notes, Form/Structure/Setting, Comment, and Explanation). Somewhat technical but well-written; the reader will benefit from the breadth of research consistent throughout the commentary.  A good exposure to a scholar well-familiar with current discussion on the traditions lying behind the received text. 

Not as technical as Butler, but impressive nonetheless in its breadth of research. Inroads absent from more historical treatments are made here. Opts for a theocentric perspective which attends to the cohesiveness of history under a sovereign God as presented in and by biblical narrative. On this note, Woudstra invites his readers to consider the dynamic aspects of Hebrew narrative when it comes to the interruptions, repetitions, and tangents which litter the book of Joshua—what historicists often attribute to variety among earlier source-texts. Readable, informative, and at times, inspiring.

This is an updated and expanded version of B’s 1988 Tyndale commentary on Obadiah (which has since been updated). In the Tyndale commentary, Obadiah is read before Jonah and Micah (the order in which one finds them in the OT), whereas in this NIVAC volume, Obadiah is read between Joel and Malachi (an arrangement motivated by topical similarity). B's interpretations (Original Meaning) will be helpful along with his applications (Bridging Contexts; Contemporary Significance), as he shows how numerous literary features give shape to Obadiah's message. He also renders important Hebrew nuances available for those who do not have facility in the language. While "decanonicalizing" these books does allow the similarity of their individual emphases to be highlighted and explored, this decision raises important questions about how meaning is communicated across the Twelve, and whether some of it is lost when the canonical arrangement is disregarded.

While W’s commentary is clearly dated, it can be considered a counterpart to Raabe (Anchor Bible, 1996) in this way: it is the only other stand-alone commentary we’ve reviewed, and it is similary technical in its pursuit of a close reading of the text. However, W’s is considerably shorter than Raabe’s, and unlike Raabe’s, W’s commentary does not require facility in Hebrew. It may be upstaged in certain respects by other more recent commentaries on Obadiah, but Watts’ reputation as a careful scholar (Isaiah, Amos) warrants at least a mention here. His work on the Minor Prophets is still being cited (e.g. by Nogalski, 2011).

R’s commentary is exactly what can be expected of the Anchor series: long (overwhelmingly, considering the length of the other commentaries on Obadiah, which is itself a single chapter, and the shortest book in the OT); technical (there seems to be no nuance R has not belabored); and quirkily committed exclusively to transliteration (not only will a working knowledge of Hebrew be required in order to benefit fully from this commentary, it’s purely transliterated Hebrew at that). So why pick it up? Simply because of those we’ve surveyed, it is the most exhaustive treatment of the book’s textual features. It is to exegesis what Baker’s commentary is to reflection and application, and for that reason, readers who want all the information laid out before them will certainly want to consult R’s work.

Readers of the Old Testament in due course land upon a group of books known by the classification label ‘Latter Prophets’. These are the books that begin with Isaiah and end with Malachi.{en1}  They are Latter, obviously, because they follow another group of books called ‘Former Prophets’ (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings). The Latter Prophets are subdivided into two groups, known to most Bible readers by the designations ‘Major’ and ‘Minor’–terms that were based strictly on size considerations, not relative importance, from the 4th or 5th century in the Latin/Roman Church, with the first known reference to “the Minor Prophets” in Augustine’s De civitate dei, xviii, 29. This differentiation “stuck,” for reasons completely understandable, since the Minor Prophets are rather smallish in size when they stand next to their intimidatingly large prophetic colleagues Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Obadiah’s two pages up against Jeremiah’s sixty pages in a standard English Bible illustrates the point remarkably well.

But this entire discussion about relative size assumes that we are reading the books of Hosea through Malachi separately, as stand-alone volumes. Things take an interesting turn and the ‘Major’ and ‘Minor’ labels lose their relevance when we leave the familiarity of our Sunday school heritage, where many Christians were taught how many books are in the Old Testament (39, of course), and we venture into Hebrew or Jewish tradition where the Minor Prophets have always been known as ‘The Book of the Twelve’ or simply ‘The Twelve’. More significant than their number, they have been viewed throughout their native existence not as twelve individual and independent books, but as a twelvefold book with the thematically cohesive internal character of a single prophetic composition (rather like the Pentateuch as a fivefold book instead of five separate books).{en2}  Then when the words are counted, the Book of the Twelve, with 14,338 Hebrew words, holds its own alongside Isaiah’s 16,920, Jeremiah’s 21,673, and Ezekiel’s 19,123.{en3}  Suddenly, these Prophets are not so minor, and our predisposition to reading them as little things that probably do not carry the same weight as their bigger neighbors has to be rethought and revised.

My purpose in this essay is fourfold: to offer a brief survey of the renewed interest in the Twelve as a single composition, to summarize some of the supporting data for this conviction, to comment on the arrangement of the Twelve, and to suggest some implications for interpreting and proclaiming the message of the Twelve in a manner that respects its internal structure. My rationale for engaging this discussion in an issue featuring Hosea should be obvious: If Hosea serves a larger purpose and function than simply that of a free-standing book (cf. Genesis relative to the Pentateuch), surely that larger significance deserves our interest in appreciating Hosea on the Bible’s own terms. We will return to this point later on.

RENEWED INTEREST IN THE TWELVE AS A SINGLE COMPOSITION

In an important recent study Prophecy and Hermeneutics: Toward a New Introduction to the Prophets, Christopher Seitz remarks:

The Twelve are getting a lot of attention today. Or, I should say, the Twelve is getting a good deal of attention. The comparison with Isaiah is helpful. That book was pulled apart and made into three or more separate collections. The sense that something was lost in reading the book as a whole in time returned and captured the attention of the field. Renewed interest in the larger book meant a spate of publications and fresh approaches. The Twelve is now a similar case.{en4}

Thirteen years earlier, Barry Jones began his The Formation of the Book of the Twelve: A Study in Text and Canon with the following observation:

Scholarly interest in the Book of the Twelve as a literary unit has ebbed and flowed over the course of the last century. Currently, interest in the Scroll of the Minor Prophets is again on the rise and at a level approaching flood tide. As evidence one may cite the inaugural meeting of the Book of the Twelve Consultation at the 1994 SBL Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois, which attracted a standing-room-only audience of scholars from widely divergent areas of specialization in the field of biblical studies.{en5}

In testimony to the “lot of attention” and “approaching flood tide” interest in this topic, over the past decade or so I have attended a number of study sessions at the Society of Biblical Literature annual conferences where scholars from around the world have convened to promote research on the formation of the Twelve. The publishing stream from this symposium and from other researchers and commentators tells the story. Here is a small sampling of representative titles: “The Editing of the Book of the Twelve” (R. E. Wolfe; Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1933); “The Unity of the Book of the Twelve” (D. A. Schneider; Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1979); “The Canonical Unity of the Scroll of the Minor Prophets” (A. Y. Lee; Ph.D. diss., Baylor University, 1985); The Unity of the Twelve (P. R. House; Sheffield, 1990); “Redactional Layers and Intentions: Uniting the Writings of the Book of the Twelve” (J. D. Nogalski; Ph.D. diss., University of Zürich, 1991); Redactional Processes in the Book of the Twelve (J. D. Nogalski; de Gruyter, 1993); The Formation of the Book of the Twelve: A Study in Text and Canon (B. A. Jones; Scholars Press, 1995); Reading and Hearing the Book of the Twelve (13 essays supporting the single corpus thesis; ed. J. D. Nogalski & M. A. Sweeney; SBL, 2000); The Book of the Twelve Prophets (M. A. Sweeney; Liturgical Press, 2000); Thematic Threads in the Book of the Twelve (ed. P. L. Redditt & A. Schart; de Gruyter, 2003); and the list continues.

The upsurge of interest in this question coincides, of course, with a large-scale revival of attention generally to the phenomenon of the biblical canon, as a point of both historical inquiry (how, when, where, why, and by whom these and only these books were selected for a home in the Bible–canon as collection) and hermeneutical inquiry (the resultant interpretive setting within which these biblical books are best read–canon as context). At long last the question of the Twelve is receiving the attention it has deserved, with a near consensus in the academy that the Minor Prophets represent more than a loose collection of independent little books, that in fact the Twelve exists as the product of definite intentional shaping.

SUPPORTING DATA FOR THIS CONVICTION

What sorts of evidence are put forth for this thesis?  To be clear, there is no suggestion here that the Twelve were originally written as one book. It is entirely possible, and equally unprovable, that these “books” circulated independently at an earlier stage (as did individual psalms that now make up the book of Psalms). At some point in their compositional history Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, and all the others were edited into a twelve-part final form, which is their present shape in the scriptural canon. Moreover, to be completely accurate, this final canonical shape is the only historical context in which these “books” exist. The Twelve in its given formation represents a piece of prophetic history writing in its own integrity. Seitz gets at this point with characteristic sharpness:

My more contentious point is that those who claim that their reading is more historically appropriate–a reading in which the individual prophets are isolated from one another, recast according to date, and placed in a reconstructed temporal context–are actually the ones who are not reading the prophets sufficiently historically, for final canonical form is also a piece of history, belonging to decisions made in the past about how an ancient prophetic witness is finally to be heard.{en6}

There are four lines of evidence in support of this conviction. First, the earliest testimonies to the Hebrew canon uniformly number the books as 24 (or 22) instead of 39, which works only if Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles are treated as one book each and the Twelve as one book. So the evidence from Sirach, various pseudepigraphal works, Philo, Josephus, Talmud, and the Targumim. Second, throughout all the manuscript and early translation tradition (MT, LXX, 4QXIIa), the Twelve uniformly circulate as one book. There are no attested departures in any known scribal practices. It is always a single manuscript, with a smaller space between the “books” than between other biblical books. Moreover, the customary Masoretic scribal notation at the end of Malachi totals the number of verses not only for Malachi, but for all Twelve. Third, and most significantly, the internal evidence of compositional integrity testifies to a thoughtful strategy (see further below). Finally, the New Testament evidence, though scant, leans favorably in this direction. Granted, only three times do New Testament authors cite texts from the Twelve by name of the individual prophet (Acts 2:17; Rom 9:25, 26); but Acts 7:42-43 introduces a quotation of Amos 5:25-27 with “as it is written in the book of the prophets”; Acts 15:15 cites Amos 9:11-12 as “the words of the prophets”; and Acts 13:40-41 cites Habakkuk 1:5 as “what the prophets said” (Jones, 10).

Accordingly, it is not too much to say with C. F. Keil more than a century ago, “On the completion of the canon these twelve writings were put together, so as to form one prophetic book, ”{en7} and with Jones more recently, “The ancient manuscript remains of the Minor Prophets and the ancient references to them in extra-biblical literature are nearly unanimous in their attestation of the transmission of these twelve prophetical writings as a single compendious volume, the Book of the Twelve Prophets”; or again, “All of the ancient literary attestations of the Minor Prophets confirm the evidence of the ancient manuscripts concerning the antiquity of the literary unity and sacred status of the Book of the Twelve” (pp. 1, 8). Moreover, the overwhelming and one-sided nature of the evidence underscores the importance of keeping the discussion in proper perspective. Renewed interest in this topic should not be construed in terms of a new position or a novel view. Indeed, the charge of novelty goes precisely the opposite direction. History and tradition in this case are decidedly on the side of those who wish to move away from a fragmented view of twelve individual and independent Minor Prophets to a more unitary view of the Book (singular) of the Twelve.

THE ARRANGEMENT OF THE TWELVE

When it comes to the arrangement of the Twelve, we encounter a situation in which the evidence for is more ready to hand than the explanation of, whether in terms of how the Twelve came to be so arranged (i.e., their compositional history) or why they are so arranged (i.e., the basis for the present formation). This is not unusual in matters biblical, of course, where the existence of a phenomenon (e.g., miracles, the incarnation, the reality of God) is more apparent than its explanation. As to the resultant achievement in terms of the meaning/message of the Twelve, we shall have more to say in a few moments.

What we can say with reasonable confidence in this regard, although some have disputed this point, is that the traditional arrangement of the Hebrew (Masoretic) text–followed, happily, in all English versions–is to be preferred over the only notable exception.{en8}  For reasons unknown, the Septuagint (LXX) shows a departure from this positioning of the twelve “books,” affecting the positioning of Joel, Obadiah, and Micah–Hosea, Amos, Micah, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah instead of Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah. Otherwise, the order is identical to that in the Hebrew and English arrangement.{en9}

Returning for a moment to a point raised just above, scholars have long wondered about possible factors that might account for the arrangement. Four main proposals have been offered. (1) Some have suggested that the order is mere coincidence, that the Twelve are a random collection without any real influencing factors on their respective location at all. “Books” simply landed in their present place by chance. This view fails to account for any of the data rehearsed above, which probably explains why no scholar of my acquaintance holds it. (2) Others have proposed that the books are arranged in chronological order, or at least in chronological groupings: Hosea-Micah (8th century), Nahum-Zephaniah (7th century), Haggai-Malachi (6th/5th century). This view (a) collapses the important differentiation between the dating of prophets (when they lived and ministered) and the dating of books written about (note: not necessarily by) them; (b) overlooks the implications of the Book of the Twelve and its author-compositor(s) who must have lived long after some of the prophets, and with different purposes in mind for the whole than for each of its constituent parts (compare the similar situation in Psalms); (c) assumes relative dating when in fact no certain historical data exist for Joel, Obadiah, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Malachi (see the commentary discussions); and (d) leaves unexplained why the Hebrew tradition did not follow the same chronology as the LXX presumably did.{en10}  (3) Still others suggest that the books are arranged in order of comparative length (i.e., longest to shortest), which simply does not work, since this would require the order Zechariah, Hosea, Amos, Micah, Joel, Malachi, Zephaniah, Jonah, Habakkuk, Haggai, Nahum, Obadiah–an order completely without witness in the tradition. (4) By far the best proposal considers the internal coherence and logic of the twelve in their present position as reflective of an overall thematic intentionality with theological significance. This view deserves a little fuller explanation.

Whether by observing and examining literary/lexical “catchwords” that link adjoining “books,” or by exploring thematic/theological trajectories achieved by positioning “books” in a particular sequence, or a combination of the two (my view), this reckoning assumes an intentional strategy at the final authorial-editorial level,{en11} as it does in approaching every other biblical book. Its goal is not to prove anything, but to explain the meaning and significance of the present order as it is. Or as Paul House puts it, “the question is not how the books came to be arranged as they are, but is how they are to be understood as they now appear.”{en12}  In other words, it could be argued that catchword associations (as illustrated below) are equally apparent in the LXX order (so Jones). This may or may not be the case (the relative merits of MT vs. LXX have to be argued on other grounds; see endnote 8), but what has to be acknowledged is that a different arrangement would yield a different outcome for the whole. The message of the book would be different.{en13}

Space permits just a few selected and perhaps titillating illustrations of the kinds of catchword-thematic links that bind the Twelve into a whole. When we inquire, for example, why Hosea occupies first place in the Twelve, we should consider its close associations with Ezekiel (which immediately precedes in the Hebrew canon), as, for example, their shared language and imagery of “whoredom” (using the same root znh more often than any other biblical books) in both its literal and metaphorical sense and their common theme of “knowing YHWH” (more than 70x in Ezekiel and prominent in Hosea; cf. 4:1, 6; 6:6); the precise manner in which Hosea is itself introduced as “The beginning of ‘YHWH spoke’ [was] with Hosea” (v. 2., lit.), marking Hosea’s first position in a series of prophetic messages;{en14} and the inclusio formed with Malachi at the far end of the Twelve on the very note of marriage, infidelity, and divorce with which Hosea begins (cf. Hos 1-3; Mal 2:10-16), among many others.{en15}

As for Joel-Amos-Obadiah-Jonah, “Just as the LORD’s roaring from Zion ends Joel and begins Amos, Amos ends with a promise of Edom’s demise (9:12), and Obadiah unhesitatingly describes it” (Seitz, 237). Of course, God can be merciful toward evildoers who repent, like Nineveh in the Jonah story, while YHWH’s prophet acts, tragically, like the Edomites who are condemned in Obadiah for proudly preferring the destruction of others over their salvation!  So, like Edom in Obadiah, God has to “bring Jonah down” (yrd in Obad 3, 4; and Jon 1:3, 3, 5; 2:7). Again, if both Obadiah and Jonah show what happens to those who exalt themselves, like the Edomites and the disgruntled prophet, Jonah also shows what happens to those who humble themselves, like the Ninevites. Alas, the sailors, the king, and the repentant people of Nineveh, perhaps even the obedient fish, the plant, the worm, and the scorching east wind–all prove to be more compliant than YHWH’s prophet, and so a foil against which to see the tragedy of Jonah’s pathetic perspective. This is the Jonah who in 2 Kings 14:25 (his only other mention in the Old Testament) is called YHWH’s ‘ebed, “servant,” and now in the Twelve Jonah follows Obadiah, “servant of YHWH,” inviting the question: Will Jonah live up to that expectation?  Obadiah concludes on the universalistic note “The kingdom belongs to YHWH!” and Jonah proclaims “Salvation belongs to YHWH!”  One wonders if even the people of Nineveh might come within the reach of YHWH’s kingdom and salvation, a prospect Jonah finds completely insufferable.{en16}

Many similar examples could be noted throughout the Twelve. This is the kind of study on which whole books have been written, literally. Hopefully these few examples are sufficient to illustrate what rich dividends reward the study of the twelve as the Twelve, that is, as an intentionally shaped complex but single book.

SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERPRETATION

The main implications of such an approach will already have been anticipated in the preceding discussion and illustrations. Still it may be helpful to gather them up in three summary statements.

First, reading and respecting the twelve as the Book of the Twelve locates the primary informing context of interpretation in the composition’s own rendering of its material rather than in a retrieved and reconstructed socio-historical situation (Sitz im Leben) unique to each prophet’s life and times. It is true, of course, that six of the twelve begin with a titular verse that locates the prophet and his ministry relative to named kings and/or events in Israel’s/Judah’s history (Hos 1:1; Am 1:1; Mic 1:1; Zeph 1:1; Hag 1:1; Zech 1:1), not unlike some of the psalm headings that associate the psalm with certain events in David’s life. These historical notices signal that at least these particular “books” are to be read in some respects against the background supplied by the relevant material in especially Kings. But–and this is crucial–the message of a “book” drawn on the background understanding supplied from elsewhere has now been subordinated to the specific concerns of the author-compositor of the Twelve. The former functions in the service of the latter, so that the context provided by the Twelve in its own configuration, with internal cohesion among its twelve members, provides for each the primary interpretive setting. To put this differently, whatever may be gained by hearing a prophet’s words in its time (diachronic reading), that message now comes to bear in a subservient way on the projection or trajectory of meaning shaped in the Book of the Twelve (synchronic reading). In this way also, prophecies which lack historical notices, like Joel, Obadiah, and Malachi, all notoriously difficult to pin down in terms of temporal locatedness, are not dependent on the interpreter’s supplying what inspiration has left out, but on attending to precisely that which inspiration has foregrounded–their given context in the dynamic composition of the Twelve. And so, in addition to the examples already cited, Joel provides “a concrete occasion for hearing the call to repentance at the end of Hosea” (Seitz, 233) and projects the imagery of blessing at the end of Hosea into a promise of eschatological blessing dependent upon that true repentance. It does not matter to the interpretation of Joel that we settle matters of date and place, and nothing will be gained–this should be completely obvious–by speculating on these matters and constructing and supplying an “external scaffolding” (Seitz, 196) for its understanding. This is not a matter of dehistoricizing the prophets, as some have needlessly worried and errantly charged; it is precisely a matter of hearing them in the only historical setting they have been given–in the Book of the Twelve.

Second, reading and respecting the twelve as the Book of the Twelve raises the question of thematic progression and integrity. What exactly does the authored-composed shape of the Twelve intend to say?  One would think that with all the attention given to this topic, an answer that commands a consensus among interpreters would have been produced by now. That this is not the case should not be construed as a flaw in the basic thesis (unless the lack of unanimity on any book of the Bible calls its integrity into question). Proposals have been offered for the dominant thematic scheme of the Twelve, of which I mention two. In a book-length study of this topic, Paul House finds thematic structure to the Twelve in the threefold prophetic message of sin, punishment, and restoration, along the following lines: Hosea-Micah focus on sin, covenant and cosmic; Nahum-Zephaniah focus on punishment, covenant and cosmic; and Haggai-Malachi focus on restoration, covenant and cosmic. House’s proposal has been questioned on grounds of its adequacy, as being a little too neat and somewhat oversimplified–a critique which I believe he has received, leading to some revision in the years since his 1990 publication. More recently, Paul Redditt has discerned the following plot in the Book of the Twelve:

Hosea, Joel, Amos–Warnings of Impending Divorce from Israel
Obadiah, Jonah, Micah–Punishment for Judah and Others
Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah–Punishment to Restoration
Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi–Restoration, Renewal, and God’s Eternal Love{en17}

Now is not the time to settle this matter, nor am I settled in my own mind, although I do find Redditt’s proposal to hold considerable promise. What I do wish to stress is that among the Twelve–on this point all agree–Hosea is most admirably suited for its position at the head, with discernible effects on how we are to read the whole.{en18}

Third, reading and respecting the Twelve as the Book of the Twelve requires a post-exilic dating for the whole. If the Twelve is an organic compositional unit, then the actual author of record is not each original prophet but the compositor of the Book of the Twelve, with the interpretive context shifted accordingly from the setting of the individual prophet to that of the post-exile community, at a time of surging hope for the Messiah. (In this way, interpreting each Prophet in the Twelve is analogous to interpreting a psalm in the post-exilic Book of Psalms, irrespective of when each poem was first written.)  The actual addressees of the Twelve are not those identified by name in some of the prophetic oracles (Israel, Judah, the nations, et al.), but readers of the Book, including us today who sit before its pages and ponder its message as Scripture. Abiding relevance of the word of the Lord, we could say, is a functional achievement of the canonical shaping process.

CONCLUSION

Returning now to Hosea, it may be the case that the story of Hosea’s/YHWH’s tumultuous marriage to Gomer/Israel recounted in Hosea 1–3 serves double duty, with a twofold structural-thematic function–as both the exordium to Hosea 4–14 (i.e., “the exegetical key in the framework from which the entire book [of Hosea] is to be read”{en19}), and the thematic microcosm of the Twelve. Highlighted thereby in both Hosea and the Twelve are (a) YHWH’s suffering and steadfast devotion to his covenant people; (b) their persistent rebellion, both internal and external, both national and international; (c) YHWH’s punishment of his wayward people in a period of separation and desolation (exile); (d) their repentance and restoration after this period of separation and desolation; and (e) YHWH’s plans fulfilled through a messianic figure in a future day (cf. Hos 3 and Mal 3–4 [MT, 3:1-24]).

The most comprehensive and meticulously detailed commentary available. S is at his best when he engages in textual and philological analysis, although some will appreciate his frequent reference to material from the ancient Near East and Jewish sources. One gets the impression that S has read just about everything ever written on Jonah (the Bibliography alone covers 32 pp.), to which he adds his own erudition. Hebrew readers will benefit most, even if they frustrate over AB’s transliteration policy. Beyond the commentary proper, S includes a large end section on “Interpretation,” including discussions on “Jonah as History or Fiction” and “Narrative Art and Literary Typology in Jonah.” A technical but valuable resource.

A standard verse-by-verse commentary from a moderately critical perspective, including a fresh translation and a generally judicious examination of the biblical text. Between the Introduction (36 pp.) and an Appendix which highlights the interpretation of Jonah in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic literature and art (25 pp.), the commentary proper turns out to be slim (62 pp.). Still, L has managed to pack a helpful discussion into short space, with a keen eye as well on the significance of the Jonah story for our time.