Review in: Interpretation
2004 58: 404
Review door: K.L.
NollGevonden op: http://int.sagepub.com/content/58/4/404.full.pdf+html
1 Samuel
by Antony E Campbell, SJ. FOTL, 7. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2003.
350 pp. $55.00. ISBN 0-8028-6079-6.
BECAUSE A BIBLICAL
TEXT IS A CULTURE-BOUND artifact from a dead world, Jewish and Christian
readers seek words to explain their Word, to make the dead come to life once
again. The venerable genre called "the commentary" reflects the needs
of the reader, not the intention of the biblical authors. This is no surprise.
The intention of a long dead author is difficult to discern in any case, and
the Bible's status as sacred scripture has obliterated any hope the ancient
authors might have harbored that their words will be taken at face value. It is
all the Word of God now, for better and for worse.
Nowhere is the ironic
artifice of the genre more visible than when the subject of a commentary is the
books of Samuel. Commentators treat Samuel's god as the God, the
supernatural being who, one presumes, created and sustains the universe. The
fit between textual god and actual God is unnatural, for Samuel's god is
fiction, a capricious story-world character, at this moment destroying a priest
who dares to protect a holy object, at that moment murdering some 70,000 people
to punish the sin this same god seduced his anointed king to commit. Like the
book of Job, Samuel seems designed to undermine all piety, all theodicy, all
doctrine. Unlike Job's reader, Samuel's reader is not forewarned that it is all
a test. Thus, there is no textual guidance for parsing a literary god who is
neither the reliable covenantal partner of Deuteronomy nor the majestic Holy
One of Isaiah. An author of the commentary genre faces a formidable task when
writing on 1 and 2 Samuel.
Antony Campbell and Tony
Cartledge are two recent scholars rising to this challenge. Each has produced a
serviceable commentary with flashes of brilliance. But like every commentator
before them, these two scholars, in this reviewer's view, fail to tame the
capricious god of Samuel.
More satisfying to this
reviewer is the shorter work by Campbell, who has issued another installment in
the FOTL commentary series. In the twenty-first century, the notional
foundation of the FOTL series seems almost quaint, though it constituted
cutting-edge research when introduced about a generation ago. The idea was to
provide the pastor with a handbook outlining the fruits of historical
criticism, especially hypotheses dealing with the earliest stages of the
Bible's formation, the form or genre of the text, and its presumed life
setting. Campbell has modified these original goals by paying greater attention
to the final form of the text, and eliminating speculation about historical
circumstances that honest historians must admit are beyond available evidence.
Two features of Campbell's commentary are worthy of emphasis.
On the one hand, Campbell values what might be termed an ethics of reading. He
does not pretend to offer
the correct interpretation of 1 Samuel, but an interpretation
that is both "responsible and adequate" (p. xvii, and passim). That
is to say, the interpretation refuses to go beyond what the text actually says.
For this reason, sermonizing is at a minimum, and the pastor who seeks material
for Sunday morning will need to work a little harder than will be the case with
Cartledge's commentary. A second feature in Campbell's approach is his thesis
of "reported stories" (p. 30, and passim). What Campbell intends by
this term is his very cogent hypothesis that 1 Samuel does not pretend to be a completed
literary work. Rather, it is an assemblage of brief story summaries, complete
with variant details, from which an ancient Israelite story teller was free to
choose for each oral performance. With this model of an anthology in mind,
Campbell's interpretation of each passage is far more open-ended than one
usually encounters in the commentary genre.
Ultimately, however,
Campbell, like Cartledge, is concerned about the relationship of Samuel's
story-world god to the God of Jewish and Christian devotion. His approach is
more subtle than Cartledge's, but no less determined to find resolution. For
Campbell, the Bible is not a source of doctrine, but a "participant in
dialogue" (p. 11), and as such, provides "glimpses of God" (p.
11). Those glimpses often involve ancient values that Campbell deems repugnant
and he pauses to wrestle with them, sometimes successfully, other times less
so. Like Cartledge's, Campbell's superb scholarship is ultimately no match for
the capricious god of this ancient narrative. Samuel's politically incorrect
deity refuses to be tamed.
K.
L. Noll
KENTUCKY WESLEYAN COLLEGE
OWENSBORO, KENTUCKY
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en:
Zie ook de review
op: Antony E Campbell, SJ, 2
Samuel (FOTL), Eerdmans, 2005:
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