Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Lloyd Barre <barre AT c-zone.net>]

Dear List,

I think it would be timely to urge that the interpretation of Old Testament 
necessarily involves what I call composition criticism, formerly and narrowly 
defined as "source criticism" and sometimes "literary criticism."  It is 
necessary because it is well known that this literature has undergone 
extensive editing over the long period of its development into its present 
form.  This process is most evident in the Book of  Psalms with its 
superscription, smaller collections, doxologies, broken acrostics, doublets 
and similar phenomena.  The same intensity of editorial activity is also 
present in Old Testament narrative which the Documentary Hypothesis and 
Noth's study of the Deuteronomistic History revealed.  Accordingly, one must 
have a firm grasp of a convincing compositional model for this literature and 
bring it to bear when studying individual texts.  Resistance to composition 
criticism for some reason demands "extra-biblical" evidence, which has been 
supplied by Jeffrey Tig!
ay's landmark work, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic (1982). 

An escape from compositional criticism has also been sought by the 
hermeneutics informing the so-called "synchronic readings" of those who hold 
that texts are consciousness entities with their own authorial will."  Those 
not finding this position compelling are called upon to embrace compositional 
as a indispensable method on a par with textual criticism or linguistic 
analysis.  Texts must be compositionally defined before they can be 
interpreted.  For this, I would recommend the introductions of S.R. Driver 
and O. Eissfeldt.  Even better is the hard to find commentary by 
Hartsford-Battersby.  A fine recent analysis to the Pentateuch may be found 
in the appendix to R. Friedman's, Who Wrote the Bible?  In short, the 
difficulties of composition criticism do not remove it from its place as an 
indispensable exegetical concern and to ignore it is to abandon he critical 
interpretation of the extremely complex literary composition of this body of 
ancient literature.  Only a embracing!
 of subjective eisegesis can excuse this task.

L. M. Barre, Ph.D.

barre AT c-zone.net
www.angelfire.com/ca2/AncientIsrael