Ezekiel

by Margaret S. Odell

Smyth & Helwys, Macon, 2005. 565 pp. $60.00. ISBN 1- 57312-073-1.

MARGARET S. ODELL’S HIGHLY-anticipated Ezekiel commentary joins a spate of recent studies on the prophetic corpus attributed to a Judean priest compelled by God to function as prophet to his fellow exiles in Babylonia. In lucid, often eloquent prose, Odell guides her readers through Ezekiel’s literary units in two sections: “Commentary” and “Connections.” In the former, critical methodologies illumine a text’s linguistic, historical, literary, and theological dimensions. In the latter, she probes its potential relevance for contemporary, Christian readers. Sidebars set in smaller typeface and scattered throughout the book supply additional insights gleaned from various fields (e.g., archaeology, sociology, theology, politics, and church history), as well as technical information that can be essential for weighing Odell’s arguments and conclusions.

Chock-a-block with illustrations and photographs, this handsome volume (reproduced on an accompanying CD-ROM) sets before its readers a visual feast. True, one longs for the occasional color plate. But the sheer quantity of stunning images and informative captions more than compensates for the book’s black-and-white format. As Ellen Davis observes, “[t]he truly ‘illuminating’ illustrations are a study in themselves” (p. x).Moreover, Odell further enlivens the reading experience with a wealth of (mostly) Ezekiel-inspired literary works, including poetry by George Herbert and Yehuda Amichai, to name only two. Together, these resources not only enrich our encounter with Ezekiel’s text, but also teach us much about its “multimedia” history of interpretation.

Odell describes Ezekiel’s book as a “prophetic diary” (p. 1) that possibly documents his words on specific occasions, but functions in its final form as YHWH’s appeal to the second generation of exiles. This approach acknowledges the prophet’s multiple audiences, including fellow deportees who encounter his judgment oracles even as Judah’s fate hangs in the balance, and those who read his book on the other side of Jerusalem’s destruction with an eye to its relevance for their own uncertain future. But it blunts the question of how Ezekiel’s oracles might have impacted his pre-586 B.C.E. contemporaries. In a brief introduction, Odell sketches the collection’s contents, touches upon its literary structure, distinctive features, coherence, and genre (it bears striking similarities to Esarhaddon’s Babylonian inscriptions), summarizes its historical context, and identifies several of its overarching theological themes. Radically theocentric, the book of Ezekiel constitutes a “theological manifesto for exiles,” provides a “foundation for the reconciliation of a deeply fragmented Judean community,” and emphasizes YHWH’s “faithfulness” to rebellious Israel (pp. 10–11). Most scholars would agree that ancient Near Eastern (especially Assyrian) ideology, iconography, traditions, and literary genres have influenced Ezekiel and his scroll. But Odell’s decision to devote over five pages of an eleven page introduction to argue this point leaves little space for the full range of critical issues that are best broached before readers launch into portions of the Commentary proper. Many of these issues are treated in subsequent sections, but there is no guarantee that Odell’s readers (who, unlike reviewers, seldom digest commentaries from beginning to end) will encounter all of them.

As one progresses through the commentary, the length of Odell’s analyses decreases. Her intense interest in Ezek 1–24, where judgment oracles against Jerusalem/Judah abound, is evident: each chapter merits an average of almost thirteen pages of commentary, connections and sidebars. Chapters 25–39, containing Ezekiel’s oracles against foreign nations and rulers, as well as important restoration oracles addressed to Israel, are treated in approximately ten pages each. The text of her commentary on Ezek 37:1–4, a “report of a trance experience” (p. 453) in which the prophet witnesses a valley filled with dry bones, fills fewer than two pages. But chs. 40–48, Ezekiel’s “Vision of the Dominion of Yhwh,” receive on average only six plus pages of commentary and connections each, bucking recent trends to delve more deeply into the book’s climactic conclusion. Her treatment of the temple complex meticulously detailed in those final chapters emphasizes its “openness”: “Here the exiles would encounter open doors and gates, open and everlasting access to the sanctifying presence of God” (p. 531). But she downplays the text’s evident concern to keep the structure’s most sacred precincts “off limits” to all but the high priests.

Specialists will discern in Odell’s commentary her keen desire to examine Ezekiel’s oracles afresh, to reject established arguments, and to chart innovative avenues of interpretation. This approach generates intriguing ideas for Ezekiel scholars, who are in a position to locate and evaluate her arguments within the larger context of informed debate. But readers for whom her work serves as an entrée to the field are left with some highly idiosyncratic notions about this prophet’s “brainy, enchanting book” (p. xiii). (Ezekiel’s book is certainly “brainy,” but “enchanting?”) Note, for example, her interpretations of the “sour grapes” proverb performed in ch. 18, and especially of the four “abominations” Ezekiel witnesses after the “spirit” transports him to Jerusalem’s temple (Ezek 8). Commentators tend to interpret these abominations as more-or-less discrete examples of idolatry, but Odell views them as separate stages in a coherent, thoroughly Yahwistic complaint ritual that fails to elicit God’s return because the people rely on cult monuments instead of offering the child sacrifices YHWH demands. Odell’s primary agenda is to advance her own interpretations, but an important task of commentators writing for a broad readership is to situate their own scholarship within the broader horizon of interpretive opinions. A substantial number of errors slipped through the copy editing process. (It would take a better woman than me not to note that the general bibliography attributes my own Ezekiel commentary in the New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary Series to Daniel I. Block.) Sidebars, in particular, suffer from errors: “Birth Narratives and National Destinies,” to cite a single example, ends mid-sentence. Moreover, locating sidebars can prove irksome for readers. They sometimes fall on or near the pages where bracketed references to them occur. But frequently, one must “flip” to find them. For example, p. 30 refers readers to the “Many Waters” sidebar, which does not appear until p. 240; p. 436 directs us to “Uses of the Word- Event Formula in Ezekiel” sidebar, which appeared on p. 78. Under these circumstances, one’s only recourse is to flip forward to the “Index of Sidebars.” This problem could easily have been rectified by placing a page number after the sidebar citation. One might assume that reading the commentary on CD-ROM alleviates this problem. Perhaps it does, but this reviewer could not access the sidebars without quite a lot of “clicking.” Daunted, I set my software-steeped research assistant to the task of demonstrating just how simple the search process really was, but it confounded her as well.

Despite these limitations, Odell’s commentary contributes substantially to the everburgeoning field of Ezekiel studies. Few scholars, I suspect, will reread Ezekiel’s initial description of God’s enthroned Glory without recalling her detailed demonstration of how Assyrian throne room iconography has left its mark upon his account. However, her insistence that Ezekiel’s vision is “static” does not accord with its repeated emphasis on mobility, as well as its depiction of God’s Glory speaking to the awe struck prophet-in-the-making who witnesses it. Her commentary and connections on Ezek 31:18 include superb statements about the impact of the fall of Assyria, the great tree, on Ezekiel, his nation, and their world. Her claim that the “shepherds of Israel” in 34:1–34 are foreign overlords, not native Israelite leaders, commands immediate assent, with important consequences for how we interpret the restoration oracles in chs. 34–48. And her sidebar on “Postcolonial Criticism” (p. 397) presents as succinct a summary of that method as one could wish. In short, no one who wishes to remain abreast of contemporary conversations in Ezekiel scholarship should overlook Odell’s thought-provoking, sometimes controversial, contribution.

Katheryn Pfisterer Darr
BOSTON UNIVERSITY
BOSTON, MASSACHUSSETS

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Psalms 2: A Commentary on Psalms 51–100

by Frank-Lothar Hossfeld and Erich Zenger. Edited by Klaus Baltzer. English translation by Linda M. Maloney.

Hermeneia. Fortress, Minneapolis, 2005. 552 pp. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8006-6061-7.

FRANK-LOTHAR HOSSFELD (University of Bonn) and Erich Zenger (University of Münster) have teamed up to develop a literarily sensitive and technically sophisticated commentary on the middle portion of the Psalter. Their work originally appeared in German (2000) in the Herders theologischer Kommentar zum Alten Testament (HTKAT) series. Now it appears in English under the aegis of Hermeneia. The next volume will be on Pss 101–150 and thereafter Pss 1–50. The order is deliberate: it is only in the last volume that the authors will proffer a detailed analysis of the entire Psalter’s formation in their introduction. So the last shall be first. In the meantime, the reader must hit the ground running with an all too brief introduction that focuses exclusively on the Psalter’s redactional development. The introduction to this volume is not for the neophyte.

To summarize, Hossfeld and Zenger identify various groupings of psalms (shaped by certain “compositional arcs”) and their order of codification. They identify Pss 52–68 as the “oldest collection,” which came to be expanded into a “Davidic Psalter” consisting of Pss 51–72 through the work of the “Asaphite theologians,” who also created Pss 50, 73–83. But before this collection was finalized, the Korah cluster (Pss 42–49) was added, together forming the so-called “Elohist Psalter” (Pss 42–83). This “partial Psalter,” the authors contend, is not the result of a “reticence toward the misuse and utterance of the Tetragrammaton”—a much later development—but the product of “theological thought that emphasizes God’s distance and transcendence” (p. 5). The resulting collection subsequently grew into the “Messianic Psalter” (Pss 2–89), divided into three “books.” Finally, Pss 90–92 were added, serving as transition to the final collection, namely, Pss 93–100, the “YHWH is king” psalms. And so (voila!) we have our fully redacted collection for this volume. How the authors actually know the precise ingredients and their order vis-à-vis the final product remains an open question, but as a heuristic model it is useful.

As with most Hermeneia volumes, much space is devoted to copious translation notes, including text-critical notations. The authors skillfully navigate the various scholarly positions on a given psalm (complete with extensive quotations), attending to matters of genre REVIEWS Interpretation 219 and poetic form as well as theological significance. Exposition follows. New to this volume is the sustained attention given to “context, reception, and significance” for each psalm. “Context” refers to a psalm’s relationship to neighboring psalms; “reception” discusses how the psalm was appropriated in later textual traditions, from Targum and Septuagint to the NT. “Significance” refers primarily to the psalm’s theological contribution to biblical faith.

Some psalms are also given iconographical treatment. For Ps 76, the authors present several ancient drawings of lion and solar imagery, particularly of Egyptian and Mesopotamian provenance, which supports their argument that God is profiled as a “fighting lion” and sun-deity (pp. 265–69). The authors’ generous use of iconographical material, drawn in part from the work of Othmar Keel, highlights the rich stock of mythical tropes that many an Israelite psalmist adopted for liturgical usage.

A description of the authors’ treatment of a particular psalm is revealing. Psalm 82 has been the darling of countless exegetes, and for good reason. It is, in the words of Zenger, “one of the most spectacular texts of the Old Testament” (p. 337). And this opinion is shared not only by a few erudite Psalms scholars. John Dominic Crossan refers to Ps 82 as “the single most important text in the entire Christian Bible” (The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years after the Execution of Jesus, HarperSanFrancisco, 1998, 575). But Ps 82 is also one of the most controversial, if not ambiguous, of biblical psalms. It reports a particularly dramatic scene “in the assembly of the gods” in which God judges and sentences to death all the “sons of the Most High” for failing to establish justice for the marginalized.

But does the psalm actually engage the gods from on high, or does it speak metaphorically of corrupt judges on earth? Zenger first discerns three discrete ideas in Canaanite myth that the psalm retrieves “to shape an original Israelite poesy”: 1) “the Canaanite pattern of the hierarchical assembly . . . with a ‘god-president’ at its head”; 2) the distribution of territories to individual deities; and 3) the rise of a particular deity to the pantheon’s summit (p. 329). The use of the felicitous designation “god-president” may be more than just a scholarly designation for the rank of high god in the assembly, because, at least in modern American discourse, it just as easily refers to a human individual within the political realm. (I’ll let readers fill in the blank.) And therein lies the crux: does the psalm operate primarily within the heavenly or in the “world-political” realm?

Only after Zenger discerns the various roles Israel’s God assumes within the psalm (i.e., as accuser, judge, and governor) does he wade into the debate with characteristic judiciousness. He presents the case for each position and identifies a third position, namely, that to choose between the two assumes a “false dichotomy” (p. 330). The psalm, he concludes, operates on both levels. It announces the “death of all the gods—except for the God of Israel— and the disempowerment of the systems of dominance that rely on these gods” in the earthly realm (p. 334). Psalm 82 thus presents a “powerful social critique” (p. 331).

Zenger presents a careful analysis of the literary contours of the text that unites v. 1 (an “exposition” cast in “reporting style”) with v. 5, which he interprets as a communal lament corresponding to the concluding petition in v. 8. The rest is divine discourse (vv. 2–4, 6–7). Central to the psalm is what Zenger calls the “radicalizing of the ancient Near Eastern ‘ethics for the poor’” in vv. 3–4: the psalm calls for a “comprehensive alteration in social and political conditions” in behalf of the marginalized, which includes not only widows and orphans but also the “mass of small farmers, artisans, and day laborers” (pp. 333–34). Dramatically, Israel’s God does not simply ascend to top rank among the gods; YHWH dissolves the whole divine assembly (p. 336).

Regarding the psalm’s preceding context, Zenger finds an integration of the “theology of the poor” in previous psalms, particularly in the Asaphite collection. Moreover, Ps 82 “offers a visionary glimpse of the fulfillment of Ps 81” (p. 336). Looking forward, Ps 82 is transitional for the following psalm, the climax of the Asaph composition. In terms of reception history, Zenger makes the suggestive claim that the Septuagint resets the psalm on Olympus. He notes the quotation of 82:6a in John 10:34–35, which allows him to explore briefly the hermeneutical appropriation of OT texts in the New. The psalm’s significance, in conclusion, lies in its “definition” of the true God as one “whose divinity [is tied] to the fate of the poor and dispossessed” (p. 337), much in tune with the portrayal of God in Exodus.

The discussion of Ps 82 is illustrative of the scholarly rigor and passionate convictions that characterize the authors’ discussion.We will no doubt hear more about the Psalter’s “theology for the poor” and creational emphases in the subsequent volumes.

And now for some quibbles. The authors’ translations of the Hebrew are frequently cumbersome, indicating exegetical indecision and inconsistency. Alternative translations for a particular Hebrew word are featured in the translation itself: e.g., “indeed/for,” “scattered/ scatters,” “rejected/rejects” all in Ps 53:6, “indeed/certainly” in 62:2, “blind/arrogant” in 73:3, and “steadfast love/mercy” in 59:11. The enigmatic term Mahalath is left untranslated in Ps 53:1 but is translated in 88:1 (“Sickness”). Misprints and editorial sloppiness also hamper the presentation: several of the exegetical notations for Ps 56 do not match the translation (due to a missed footnote in v. 5; see also 72:17). The “ancient persons” of Ps 78 are actually “ancient versions” (p. 285). Although the notations are full, certain words in the translation require notation but are curiously left unaddressed (e.g., 73:3a; 79:5b; 90:10c). Finally, scarce mention is made to Qumranic versions of the Psalms in the text-critical discussion.

To an extent, such mistakes and inconsistencies are expected for such a substantive and detailed volume. Still, they are annoying. In comparison to the commentary’s masterful exposition of these psalms, they are mere blemishes. The next volume is eagerly awaited.

William P. Brown
COLUMBIA THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
DECATUR, GEORGIA

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