Law and Ideology in Monarchic Israel.

• Author: Friedman, Richard Elliott

This book is composed of three works of non-standard size, longer than articles, shorter than books. It thus serves a useful purpose, and it serves as a useful model for others to consider when publishing their research: one need not always cut a longer work to make it into an article nor stretch it into a book. The result here is a fruitful volume both for the content of the research and in regard to method. The contributions focus on the period between the destruction of Israel and the destruction of Judah. Each is valuable in a different way.

Paul Dion's contribution, "Deuteronomy 13: The Suppression of Alien Religious Propaganda in Israel in the Late Monarchical Era" (pp. 147-216), treats a single text with great specificity. It involves painstaking philological analysis: textual criticism, form criticism, and source criticism. It is particularly valuable for Dion's use of ancient Near Eastern parallels that shed real light rather than provoke mere parallelomania. Dion's case for tracing Deuteronomy 13 to the Josianic era (especially against Holscher) is meticulously argued and extremely strong.

Brian Peckham's contribution is "The Function of the Law in the Development of Israel's Prophetic Tradition" (pp. 108-46). Those familiar with other recent works by Peckham know that he has formulated a rather idiosyncratic picture of Biblical composition. This piece builds on and extends his earlier work. He identifies the order in which he thinks a number of works of history, law, and prophecy were written, and he contends that at several key junctures these works were responding to those which came before them. Historiography (always including some law) comes first, prophecy responds to it, and prophecy itself is overtaken by subsequent history and law. The order, Peckham contends, is: J, Isaiah, Dtr(1), Amos, P, E, Hosea, Micah, Jeremiah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Ezekiel, Dtr(2). He traces a series of relationships among some of these works as well as second and third Isaiah, who, he says, added lines to Isaiah until his text was "gradually overwhelmed by intricate interpretations."

Peckham does not refer to various other models that are well within the mainstream of scholarship, and so it is hard to know how to address his picture. His work is possibly brilliant but so self-contained as to be unserviceable to anyone else. To fashion one's own model without a full defense of that model's departures from its predecessors puts the burden on...