Up the Steep and Stony Road: The Book of Zechariah in Social Location Trajectory Analysis.

• Author: Meadowcroft, Tim
• Position: Book review

Up the Steep and Stony Road: The Book of Zechariah in Social Location Trajectory Analysis. By BYRON G. CURTIS. Academia Biblica, vol. 25. Atlanta: SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE, 2006. Pp. xiii + 328. $44.95 (paper).

On the first page of his monograph Byron Curtis states his intent to discover the "social matrix, that gave birth to the strange fourteen-chaptered form of the book of Zechariah" (p. 1). Very early on it becomes clear that this quest is in the service of a wider argument that the compilation of those fourteen chapters may be attributed either to Zechariah or to a single tradent group of which Zechariah was a part. In fact, both a strength and a weakness of this book is that Curtis does somewhat more than explore the social matrix of Zechariah.

Beginning from work on the social location of prophecy done by Max Weber and Theodore Long and then applied in various ways by such biblical scholars as Wilson, Petersen, Overholt, and others, the author develops a methodology that he calls "social location trajectory." This is an attempt on his part to take account of the fact that social locations of prophetic figures arc not static: often they can be seen to be on trajectories of shifting location. And this may account for the same prophet displaying different characteristics and concerns at different times according to where she or he is on the trajectory of social location. One possible benefit of this methodology, Curtis suggests, is that it may help to overcome the tension between charismatic and role-related descriptions of the prophetic enterprise.

A significant portion of the book, some sixty pages, is then spent outlining the methodology and testing it against five case studies of prophets and/or the prophetic movements that grew around them: Simon Kimbangu in the Democratic Republic of Congo; Isaiah Shembe amongst the Zulu of South Africa; the prophet Muhammed in seventh-century Arabia; Tomo Nyirenda in Nyasaland; and Alice Lenshina in Zambia. With the exception of Muhammed, all did their work in the first half of the twentieth century. Curtis demonstrates that all of them occupied different social locations at different stages of their careers and that this influenced both their role and their message. Principally, with respect to social location Curtis distinguishes between the social center and the social periphery, and argues, contra Hanson, that a single figure may move between one and the other within quite short...