… the present form of Old Testament books is due to the activity of editors. While their work was carried out anonymously, meaning that their names are not know, traces of their activity can be demonstrated in many places in Old Testament writings. — Henning Graf Reventlow (1990, translated 2009 by Leo Purdue). History of Biblical Interpretation: Volume 1: From the Old Testament to Origen, p. 5.
Reventlow begins his History of Biblical Interpretation not with the first post-biblical authors to comment on the biblical texts, but within the Bible itself. The Hebrew Bible shows signs of having been compiled through a long process, in which existing texts are reworked by later scribes or redactors. “We are able to recognize in these redactional activities recurring models which point to ways in which older prophetic words were transformed to speak to a later time and situation that had changed.”
Reventlow begins with the famous example of the book of Isaiah, which for the first thirty-nine chapters takes as its apparent context the life and message of the prophet Isaiah, whose career spanned the latter half of thee eighth and the beginning of the seventh century BCE. Along with materials that presumably come from Isaiah himself, the book of Isaiah, especially the last twenty-seven chapters, contain information from after the fall of Babylon, which occurred in 587 BCE. While Isaiah himself was concerned with the fates of Israel and Judah in the context of Assyrian aggression, later editors continued to expand the book in order to address in similar fashion the later encounter of Judah with the Babylonian empire which would succeed Assyria as the dominant power in the area.
As a result, modern scholarship speaks of a “First Isaiah”, a “Second Isaiah”, and even a “Third Isaiah” as discernible layers within the book of Isaiah as it exists today. Not all biblical readers have reacted well to this development. To some readers, this conclusion threatens respect for the Bible, as it seems to make the book of Isaiah into a fraud. Reventlow suggests that the negative reaction to the redaction criticism of Isaiah is due to a modern misunderstanding of the norms that governed the production of scholarly texts during the production of Isaiah.
“The modern ideas of an author holding a ‘copyright’ to his or her material and of authorial originality as possessing value were unknown in the ancient world. Instead, there was the understanding that there were valid traditions in which one had to insert new materials in order for them to participate authentically in new situations” (Reventlow, p. 7). In other words, as Reventlow sees it, the extension of the book of Isaiah to cover the Babylonian exile is not a matter of cheating, but of a normal historical process.
In addition to several passages in Isaiah, Reventlow looks at the Deuteronomists, a hypothesized school of thinkers who viewed religion through the lens of Deuteronomy’s ideology, and in Joshua-2 Kings told Israel’s story in terms of that theology. Reventlow also sees Deuteronomistic interventions in Hosea and Amos.
Reventlow dwells at some length on how Chronicles was composed, mostly by adding to, subtracting from, and otherwise altering the text of Samuel-Kings to fit the Chronicler’s purposes. At first glance, this might not look like what a modern reader would see as interpretation, but Reventlow claims (p. 15):
In the Chronicler’s work of history, we have the first example of a type of exegesis that we shall encounter frequently in early Judaism: a text’s narrative expansion regarded as authoritative (haggadah).
After a few more examples, Reventlow sums up carefully.
In regard to this first look, one must be satisfied with the selection of examples offered. This is the case because redaction history is one of the latest fields of work in Old Testament criticism. Therefore, many questions are still contested that have kept a broad consensus from emerging. One cannot speak of the unanimity of views concerning the findings and their explanations. We may expect that, in the future, many illuminating understandings will be achieved.
Reventlow wraps up his summary of inner-biblical interpretation in 18 pages, ready to move on to interpretation in the more usual sense of the term. A selected bibliography at the end of the book offers a variety of sources on this topic, mostly in German. For those who don’t read German, there is one English source cited: Michael Fishbane’s 1985 Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, a book which I highly recommend. There, the interested reader can feast on over 500 pages on the way that biblical interpretation can be found within the biblical texts themselves.
Next time, Reventlow will turn his attention to the Septuagint.