Prophets And Paradigms PDF Download

This study endeavors to expand the horizon of possibility for what the texts within the corpus of the Bible known as the Latter Prophets can be qua literature, and, with that, to introduce a reading strategy that pays greater attention to textual speakers and their internal speaking situations for the purpose of delimiting compositional units and establishing coherence. Biblical scholars have long shared the view that the texts of the Latter Prophets correspond to real speech that was eventually written down and, over time, amplified. More recent attempts to view the Latter Prophets as literary tend to focus on such expansions or on different elements of the texts' style. However, these studies have not succeeded, in theory or practice, in making and maintaining the necessary distinction between the phenomenon of the literature, on the one hand, and the historical phenomena of prophets and prophecy of which the texts continue to be seen as derivative, on the other hand. Indeed, despite claims to the contrary, contemporary approaches do not necessarily move beyond older methods for the study of these texts. By contrast, this study approaches the Latter Prophets in conversation with prominent theories of literature and literariness, such as fictive speech acts and textually independent fields of reference. Utilizing four principle issues, or paradigms, with which the study of biblical prophecy is typically undertaken (cross-cultural comparison; historicity and historicism; orality and writing; and the poetics of biblical prophecy), it then examines select passages in accordance with each (respectively: textual exemplars of non-biblical prophecy, especially the Deir 'Alla inscription; the book of Amos, especially Amos 1-3, 7:10-17; the book of Jeremiah, especially Jeremiah 1-6, 36; and Second Isaiah, especially Isaiah 40-48, 49) in order to yield new interpretative insights and collective possibilities. The work thereby illumines the uniqueness of the prophetic texts of the Bible and offers a richer understanding of their nature and function as creative artworks which construct prophets and prophecy of a certain type rather than as merely imitative of reality.