Recherche – Detailansicht
Ausgabe: | März/2022 |
Spalte: | 191–193 |
Kategorie: | Altes Testament |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Hays, Christopher B. |
Titel/Untertitel: | The Origins of Isaiah 24–27. Josiah’s Festival Scroll for the Fall of Assyria. |
Verlag: | Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2019. XIV, 334 S. m. Abb. u. Tab. Geb. £ 75,00. ISBN 9781108471848. |
Rezensent: | Marvin A. Sweeney |
Christopher B. Hays proposes a new model for the composition of the core of Isaiah 24–27 in relation to the late-seventh century B. C. E. reforms of King Josiah of Judah (r. 640–609 B. C. E.). He contends that these chapters »celebrated the crumbling of the Neo-Assyrian empire as an act of divine deliverance« and that they »exhorted the former Northern Kingdom of Israel to reunite itself with Judah at a moment when that was a plausible choice for the first time in centuries« (1).
H. makes additional points in his Introduction, viz., Isaiah 24 begins in a manner typical of royal propaganda with a depiction of destruction and a failing natural order; Isaiah 25 has a festival character, which includes portrayals of YHWH’s victory over death, commonly associated with political victories; Isaiah 26 continues with contrasting portrayals of the fate of Zion/Jerusalem and the downfall of an Assyrian »compound«; and Isaiah 27 concludes with an appeal to the former Northern Kingdom of Israel to be gathered in from their exile to reunite the tribes of Israel. He challenges past scholarship that has identified Isaiah 24–27 as a late, Hellenistic text, based especially on the motif of the resurrection of the dead. He indicates basic agreement with earlier theories of a Josianic or Assyrian redaction of Isaiah as argued by the reviewer, Barth, Clements, de Jong, and others, but he stipulates that these arguments were made on different grounds, eliminating the need for him to defend their views. He presents a heavily annotated English trans lation of the Masoretic Hebrew text that interacts appropriately with major textual versions, such as the Judean Wilderness Scrolls, the various Greek witnesses, the Peshitta, Targum Jonathan, the Vulgate, the major Masoretic witnesses, and others.
H.’s first chapter on »The Rhetoric of Chaos« challenges apocalyptic and eschatological readings of the text. The theory is especially based on Duhm’s dating of Isaiah 24–27 to the Hellenistic period when early texts were frequently read as apocalyptic texts after their original historical settings were removed. He correctly argues that eschatology is a mythologization of history in that it does not refer to the end of history or the destruction of all creation as portrayed in apocalyptic texts. Isaiah 24–27 instead depict cosmic destruction. Comparison with Neo-Assyrian divination texts; the K untillet ‘Ajrud Inscriptions; the Egyptian Prophecy of Neferti; the Hellenistic Egyptian Potter’s Oracle; the Sumerian Shulgi Prophecy; the Akkadian Erra and Ishum text; and Biblical prophetic texts, such as Amos 5 and Zephaniah, make the point clear that cosmic destruction is hardly a late motif that must be considered apocalyptic or eschatological. The absence of Josiah from purported Josianic texts, such as Zephaniah and Deuteronomy, presents no problem as the absolute failure of Josiah’s reform program would have prompted later redactors to edit him out of these texts.
H.’s second chapter, »The Royal and Divine Victory Banquet,« reexamines the motif of feasting in Isaiah 24–27. Most scholars have argued for a context in ritual to explain the banquets, but com-parative study of banquets in ancient Near Eastern literature, such as the banquet for Baal in the Ugaritic Baal cycle prior to building his house and the temples built for Marduk and the other gods in the Enuma Elish, points to the political contexts in which they func-tion. H. is correct to point out the political dimensions of these texts, but it is best to remember that the ritual elements also pertain as the gods very frequently functioned as divine royalty in ancient Near Eastern myths the (cf. Isaiah 6; 66). The royal and ritual spheres frequently work together in Judean and other ancient Near Eastern ideology.
H.’s third chapter, »Revivification of the Dead as National Deliverance,« reexamines a motif that served as a key argument in Duhm’s Hellenistic dating of Isaiah 24–27. H. points out that myths serve as metaphors. Baal’s resurrection from the dead, for example, may relate to the agricultural cycle of the land, but it also portends political and economic revival. Texts that speak of rising from the dead, such as Hosea 6:1–3; Ezekiel 37:1–14; and Daniel 12:1–3, are written in relation to portrayals of national revival as well.
H.’s fourth chapter, »The Lofty City and the Army of the Height,« revisits the vexed question of the City of Chaos in Isaiah 24–27 which most scholars associate with the downfall of Babylon. H. makes a cogent argument for identifying the anonymous city featured in Isaiah 24–27 with the site of Ramat Raḥel, located to the south of Jerusalem, which served as an administrative center for Assyrian rule over Jerusalem and Judah. Recent archeological reports indicate that the site was built in the latter part of the eighth century B. C. E., and it surprisingly avoided destruction during Sennacherib’s 701 B. C. E. invasion. It was apparently abandoned or taken over by Judean authorities at some point after the mid-seventh century B. C. E.
H.’s fifth chapter, »Josiah and the Remains of Israel,« reexamines texts in Deuteronomy; 2Kings; Zephaniah; Jeremiah; and Ezekiel in an effort to demonstrate that these texts both represent Judean interest in recovering the remnants of the northern kingdom of Israel and that they use language oriented to the northern Israelite dialect of Hebrew. In addition to his tables of northern Israelite language, he makes a particularly important observation as to how the modern Republic of China (Taiwan) claims the identity of China in general, much as Judah claimed the identity of Israel.
Chapter six, »The Language of Isaiah 24–27 in Light of Hebrew Diachrony,« correlates H.’s analysis of language in Isaiah 24–27 with recent studies of the linguistic development of ancient Hebrew. Isaiah 24–27 includes a relative low rate of late biblical Hebrew features that is more consistent with pre-exilic prophetic texts than with later Hebrew texts.
Finally, chapter seven, »Stirring the Echoes,« presents an intertextual analysis of Isaiah 24–27 with its texts in proto-Isaiah; Hosea; Jeremiah; Deuteronomy; and Zephaniah to show that Isaiah 24–27 fits more comfortably into the middle of the development of the Book of Isaiah rather than at its end. His suggestion that Isaiah 24–27 and Zephaniah may stem from the same hand appears to push the evidence too far, but his contention that Zephaniah is largely a seventh-century work with an identical worldview and shared vocabulary is absolutely correct.
Overall, this is a very cogent study that combines comparative study of ancient Near Eastern texts, rethinking of the role of metaphor in ancient mythology (particularly in relation to ancient political concerns), examination of archeological evidence, linguistic dating of the Hebrew text of Isaiah 24–27, and intertextual analysis to argue for the reign and reforms of King Josiah of Judah as the historical and political context for the composition of Isaiah 24–27. It lacks a major redaction-critical analysis of this text, but it supplies some very secure foundations for a renewed attempt.