Spirit and the Word (Fortress Classics in Biblical Studies) [Paperback]

Sigmund Mowinckel (Author), K. C. Hanson (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2002 | Series: Fortress Classics in Biblical Studies

This volume brings together some of Mowinckel's most important and interesting work on the prophets. He begins by introducing the reader to the method of tradition history and how it is related to form criticism and literary criticism. From this groundwork, he goes on to explore how this method is essential for analyzing the prophetic literature in the Hebrew Bible. In order to make it more helpful for students, each essay has been supplemented with additional notes and bibliography to show where the discussion has continued since Mowinckel. A bibliography of Mowinckel's works in English and a bibliography of essays evaluating Mowinckel's contributions are also included. This will provide an excellent supplementary textbook for courses on the prophets. Key Features: provides an introduction in Old Testament tradition history an editor's foreword highlights the importance of Mowinckel's work includes updated notes and bibliographies includes chapters not previously published in the U.S. indexes of ancient sources and authors

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Sigmund Mowinckel was Professor of Old Testament at the University of Oslo, Norway, and one of the most important biblical scholars of the twentieth century. Among his many publications in English are He That Cometh (1956), The Old Testament as Word of God (1959), and The Psalms in Israel’s Worship (1962).

About the Editor K. C. Hanson is the biblical studies editor at Fortress Press. His published works include Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts (with Douglas E. Oakman; Fortress Press, 1998).

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers (August 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080063487X
• ISBN-13: 978-0800634872
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,821,375 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars the tradition and the saying, August 10, 2006

By 

David A. Baer (Indianapolis, IN USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Spirit and the Word (Fortress Classics in Biblical Studies) (Paperback)

This entry in the Fortress Classics in Biblical Studies series brings to fresh light some classic exemplars of twentieth-century Old Testament criticism, no small contribution in a moment when the discipline's fast-fragmenting methodologies threaten biblical scholars with amnesia.

K.C. Hanson's introduction of Mowinckel manages to be both judicious and concise, clarifying his role as both heir and critic of the older literary criticism and a shaper of tradition criticism, one of the dominant strains of biblical criticism in the twentieth century. Subsequently the book's eleven essays are organized under three rubrics: `Part I: The Relationship of Methods; `Part II: Tradition History and the Study of the Prophets'; and `Part III: The Prophetic Experience'.

The book's opening section (`Part I: The Relationship of Methods') displays Mowinckel's self-conscious efforts to move his guild beyond source criticism and on to a reckoning with his material's essential orality. The first of two essays (`1. Form, Tradition, and Literary Criticism', pp. 3-15) allows Mowinckel to identify a mediating position between literary criticism and its form- and tradition-critical successor. Indeed, he might have preferred the term `complement' to `successor', for he is vehement in his advocacy of a both/and approach to the literature rather than an exclusivity of one method over against another. `Scholarship', the author reminds us, `is not well served by slogans.'

A review of the essays' titles leads one to anticipate a degree of overlap in content and presentation, a promise that the book keeps (`2. Tradition Criticism and Literary Criticism', pp 16-29). Yet this does not detract from its value. Indeed, in our day of methodological self-doubt, it is refreshing to observe a convinced practitioner from several angles as he drafts his apology and profiles his method.

In the book's second essay, Mowinckel looks at examples of literary growth and editing from Kings/Chronicles, Ezra/Nehemiah, and Jeremiah/Baruch, and then asks whether similar growth of a tradition happened as well at the pre-literary stage. In this discussion, a polemical and sometimes defensive edge is detectable in Mowinckel's prose. Clearly an approach that has come to be regarded in biblical criticism as quite conventional was under some attack when Mowinckel wrote these pieces.

A different `period note' rings in Mowinckel's naïve reference to the `laws' that govern oral and literary traditions as well as social and psychological processes. Mowinckel is probing at dynamics and results--fixed and malleable--that Fishbane would helpfully entitle `traditio' and `traditium'.

The second set of collections (`Part II: Tradition History and the Study of the Prophets') contains seven of the book's eleven essays, which elucidate what would come to be considered the cardinal points of form and tradition criticism. The title of chapter three, for example, indicates the method's concern for the brief oracular declarations that stand at the root of the prophetic material (`The Original Units of Tradition', pp. 33-37). He is particularly keen to call out methodological reserve--Engnell's for example--as intellectual laziness. Mowinckel's scholarly vocation to press the logic of his method to its uttermost reaches occasionally betrays him into the besetting sin of form criticism: a fixation upon small units at the cost of denying any large (and usually literary) coherence across collections of such `units'. In my judgment, this price was worth paying for the exegetical gains it produced. But it takes a kind of culpable innocence to cling to it in our more settled time in the way that Mowinckel did in his moment of conquest.

An ironic allusion to `assured results' has become almost canonical among those who criticize biblical criticism, if such redundancy may be permitted. Mowinckel actually uses the term in referring to his persuasion that `the prophets did not act as orators with long speeches with a connected development of ideas according to modern rules of logic ... Long passages in the prophetic books consist of just such detached, inherently complete sayings that take no account of each other, either formally or with regard to more concrete content. The connection that might exist between them is quite general.'

With the exception of the reference to `modern rules of logic', a whole school of Old Testament exegetes would today beg to differ with such assurance. Nevertheless, Mowinckel should be allowed a certain sympathy as he exorcises some of the methodological demons of his own day.

Mowinckel's most straightforward description of form-critical method comes in chapter four (`The Form-Critical Investigation', pp. 38-53). He finds his precedent for brief, prophetic oracles in passages of biblical narrative, where the prophets are depicted as making such pithy declarations. Mowinckel is not shy about assumptions that contemplate the conservative nature of `Near Eastern civilizations' nor of taking lessons for Hebrew prophetism from `the ancient Arabic visionaries'. All this is merely to observe that the growing knowledge of `the Orient' (with apologies to E. Said) that had accumulated among divinity schools and faculties of Oriental Studies in Mowinckel's heyday was treated comparative with a healthy does of self-assurance. He is also sure that `the prophets did not write', a statement that in its time required no apology directed at scholarly proponents of Schriftprophetie.

The logical core of Mowinckel's method is that assumption of a very tight relationship between form and content. If one can identify the form, it is `not difficult to discover what principle has been followed in the formation of tradition'. Eventually the critic's attention must turn to the editorial work that assembled the complexes of independent sayings that we find in the literature, where some of the most interesting fruit has been harvested from tradition criticism, even (particularly?) by scholars who employ assumptions more plastic than those established by Mowinckel.

In chapter five ('Tradition and Writing', pp. 54-59), the author is concerned to demonstrate how oral and written traditions existed side by side in biblical antiquity, with occasional intersections. His parade example is the then oral and preached deuteronomistic tradition of Jeremiah's legacy, one that existed alongside of Baruch's book and eventually came itself to be written down. Indeed, in the end, both Baruch's and the Deuteronomists' memory of Jeremiah's preaching became components of the same book.

In chapter six (`The Growth and Development of Tradition', pp. 60-64), the author achieves an admirably nuanced speculation about how a prophetic tradition grows and develops within a `circle' of `disciples'. The first word in quotes is used extensively in this chapter, the second with caution. In my judgment, Mowinckel's utilization of Deutero- and Tri-Isaiah as his case studies is well done. He has taken care, it would seem, to avoid the surprisingly incendiary word `school'. Isaiah scholars routinely savage any peer who does so on the grounds that `school' implies an established institution for which we have no evidence. Strictly speaking, such critics are right though the ferocity of their insistence on this point sometimes verges on overkill. Mowinckel has captured the essential fact that transmission of a tradition requires people who do the transmitting, and he has confined himself to alluding in the direction of `circles' of `disciples' who might well have been expected to carry out the task.

Chapter seven ('The Transformation of the Separate Prophetic Sayings', 65-70) broaches the question of the psychology of the transmitter/transformer of his 'master's' words. His parade example is the fascinating and convenient case of the 'new Judean actualizations' in the eponymous books of the northern prophets Amos and Hosea. That is, '(w)hat Yahweh first said to Israel he new says to Israel and Judah, or to Judah alone. Mowinckel presents several examples from the book of Isaiah where he understands such a tradent to have reinterpreted gloom into promise. For example, he finds in Isa 29.1-17 a 'reinterpretation of a word of threat into a prophecy according to the scheme of disaster, then deliverance.' The author is more certain than this reviewer that it is 'psychologically (in)conceivable that Isaiah would simultaneously announce the threat ... and the exact opposite.' It seems to me natural that the prophet might do so if his rhetorical objective is to move people from those activities that he understands to provoke Yahweh's anger and towards those that are sure to meet instead with his responsive mercies.

In chapter eight ('The Trend of Tradition Development', pp. 71-80), Mowinckel displays one of the reductionistic doctrines of early Form Criticism's preoccupation with analysis: 'The result reached by the form-critical analysis of the prophetic sayings with regard to the division of the traditional complex into original units shows, among other things, that in the predominant number of cases a saying is either a pure prophecy of disaster or a pure promise ... It is only a small minority of the transmitted, detached sayings that contain both, and then, generally, as in the scheme according to which the collections are arranged: disaster-deliverance. One must then admit in the name of all reason that this presents a problem and that these exceptions demand an explanation.'

The schematic nature of Mowinckel's approach is evident. Exceptions to the 'purity rule' are to be explained by the 'disaster-deliverance' developmental scheme, one whose 'impurity' (this reviewer is supplying the term to match Mowinckel's vocabulary) is entirely a... Read more ›