The Book of Amos in Emergent Judah.

• Author: Rodas, M. Daniel Carroll
• Position: Book review

The Book of Amos in Emergent Judah. By JASON RADINE. Forschungen zum Alten Testament, 2. Reihe, vol. 45. Tiibingen: MOHR SIEBECK, 2010. Pp. xii + 270. [euro]59 (paper).

The Book of Amos in Resurgent Judah is a slightly revised doctoral dissertation completed at the University of Michigan in 2007 under the supervision of Brian Schmidt. It is a creative attempt to offer a new historical reconstruction of the composition of the book of Amos. The first paragraph of the introduction states Radine's thesis. In his view, the initial form of the book of Amos was composed in Judah soon after the fall of the Northern Kingdom in the last quarter of the eighth century B.C.E. It is not a "prophecy," he says, but rather a document of Judahite propaganda that acknowledged the judgment of Israel by Yahweh as deserved and legitimized Judah as God's true kingdom.

Chapter one surveys the book of Amos to sort out what Radine believes would have been its earliest layer. The criteria of authenticity are both literary and historical. For instance, he defends the authenticity of 5:1-17 and 6:1-14, because their chiastic structure suggests that they were an intact unit from the start. This first composition, he contends, consisted of 1:1-2; 2:6-7:9; 8:1-9:10, with doubts about 3:1-2 and the doxologies (4:14; 5:8-9; 9:5-6). With the content of the earliest layer established, the second chapter attempts to determine its date. The author reviews historical evidence that might confirm the reigns of Uzziah and Jeroboam II, but he finds it less than substantial. He then argues that the referents in 6:2, 5:26, and 8:14 should not be dated earlier than 722. His premise is that the descriptions of disaster in Amos are retrospective and that predictions of invasion and exile are vaticinium ex eventu.

The third chapter is the first of three that try to categorize the first version of Amos within ancient Near Eastern literature. While reflecting some literary characteristics of prophecy elsewhere, Radine says, biblical prophetic literature cannot be equated with it. Prophetic texts from Mesopotamia are anthologies of brief oracles, not lengthy literary works, and do not emphasize social critique. Chapter four argues that Amos is more akin to "literary predictive texts" (a term coined by M. D. Ellis). Like the Akkadian prophecies, Egyptian material, and the Deir 'Alla inscription, the book of Amos is not linked to an historical prophet and from the beginning was a written...