Interpreting Ancient Israelite History, Prophecy, and Law. John H. Hayes
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realities of early Israel were being subject to intense methodological scrutiny. Hayes’s work captured the major criticisms that precipitated this change, assessed their weight, and, rightly, pronounced the collapse of the older theory. By comparing this essay with the preceding examination of Wellhausen, readers can identify important ways in which Noth both built upon and moved beyond Wellhausen’s approaches. Moreover, this essay once again embeds a seminal figure and theory within the context of the wider interpretive trends that preceded and gave shape to more well-known formulations.
The last article related to historical study, “The Final Years of Samaria (730–720 BC)” (co-authored with Jeffrey K. Kuan in 1991), has become established as one of several major studies that deal with the historical reconstruction of the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel in the late eighth century BCE.8 What made this study unique, however, was that it emerged directly from work Hayes had recently undertaken on the historical background of the prophetic literature.9 Hence, in addition to embedding this topic into historical perspectives informed by Assyrian royal inscriptions, Hayes’s approach featured extensive and bold use of Hebrew Bible prophetic texts for historical reconstruction, with a willingness to take these texts—and the specificity one finds within them—seriously as some kind of data for historical reconstruction. This approach rested on Hayes’s conviction that the prophetic literature could best be thought of as rhetorical discourses shaped to function within particular social and political circumstances. The article thus provides contemporary readers with an example of the way some scholars employed certain biblical texts just prior to the full outbreak of the so-called minimalist controversy in the 1990s. Additionally, it makes a thought-provoking case for approaching topics of historical reconstruction from a different angle than that provided by the use of archaeology or an emphasis on the Hebrew Bible’s historiographical texts.
The first article devoted specifically to prophetic interpretation, “The History of the Form-Critical Study of Prophecy,” reflects one of the primary areas of scholarship to which Hayes contributed over his career. Hayes wrote this essay while editing a volume devoted to new approaches to Hebrew Bible form criticism, and the paper served as the basis for discussion in the form criticism section at the 1973 Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting.10 At a crucial moment in the reconsideration of methods and practices related to prophetic interpretation, the paper embedded this important method and its major practitioners within the full context of the history of scholarship up through the 1970s. Hayes highlighted the place of Hermann Gunkel within the larger intellectual movements of the early nineteenth century and provided a thick description that illuminated other important, but perhaps lesser known, figures. He demonstrated their connections to one another and their significance for the method that became established in modern scholarship. This article familiarizes contemporary readers with the major developments in form-critical study from the 1940s to the 1970s and reveals some of the background that helps to contextualize new approaches to form criticism that have emerged in the 1990s and beyond.11
In relationship to the general discussion of the previous article, the next two studies represent form-critical analyses that helped to shape scholarship’s approaches to one prophetic genre in particular, namely, the oracles against the nations. The first article, “The Usage of Oracles against Foreign Nations in Ancient Israel,” constituted a summary of Hayes’s unpublished 1964 Princeton dissertation and remains one of the most commonly cited sources in discussions of this particular prophetic genre. This genre provided key material for early form-critical explorations, with Gunkel and others proposing that the oracles against the nations were the oldest form of prophetic material. Hayes built upon earlier scholarship to propose that the rhetorical function of these oracles within ancient Israelite society was linked with the preparation and execution of warfare. Through comparison with a variety of ancient Near Eastern textual traditions, he further suggested that this genre typically functioned in cultic lamentation services or royal contexts such as coronation rituals. Similarly, in the next article, “Amos’s Oracles against the Nations (1:2—2:16),” Hayes applied his general treatment of the rhetorical function of the oracles against the nations to the specific collection in the opening chapters of Amos. The article (published in 1995) originated as an invited follow-up to Hayes’s then recently published commentary on Amos.12 The discussion remains one of the clearest examples of a rhetorical-historical approach to the prophetic texts. This approach, which has generated a number of similar studies by Hayes’s students and colleagues, seeks to identify the rhetorical functions of the prophetic speeches as embedded within the historical-political realities of their time.13 The article provided a new perspective on Amos’s use of the oracles against the nations genre by approaching Amos 1:2—2:16 as a coherent unit with specific rhetorical purposes related to political developments in the mid-eighth century BCE.
The final three articles in this collection relate to Hayes’s work on the legal texts in the Hebrew Bible, exemplified throughout his teaching career by his popular graduate seminars on Leviticus and Deuteronomy. “Restitution, Forgiveness, and the Victim in Old Testament Law” originated in 1982 as part of a Festschrift for a retiring colleague at Trinity University and appeared in Trinity University Studies in Religion. Given his colleague’s interest in Christian ethics, the article adopted an explicitly ethical engagement with the Hebrew Bible laws concerning cases between persons, and it remains a suggestive model of what such engagement may look like. Hayes proposed that the focus of the Hebrew Bible’s formulations in such cases was primarily, if not solely, on the restoration of the victim rather than the punishment of the perpetrator. The article once again exemplifies the effort to embed such analysis within the reception history of the relevant laws, with a special eye to post-biblical Jewish writings.
The remaining two articles in the volume offer a similar reexamination of the interpretive issues connected with the long-standing scholarly notion of covenant and its origins within ancient Israelite culture and the biblical literature. The first article originated as the dictionary entry for “Covenant” in the Mercer Dictionary of the Bible (1990). Following his thick-description approach to the history and formulation of such concepts, Hayes offered a general survey of covenant as both a term and idea within the Hebrew Bible and its ancient Near Eastern background. The discussion remains one of the clearest surveys of the concept, which stresses the diversity of the ways covenant was understood and employed. Moreover, Hayes advanced a theory that remains significant for current study of covenant as an idea, as well as the conceptual background of the prophets in particular. The historical and literary analysis led Hayes to endorse the conclusion that the idea of a bi-lateral covenant between Yahweh and Israel was not known before the work of deuteronomistic circles of the seventh century BCE. Rather, the eighth-century prophets in particular drew upon conceptions associated with international political treaties and assumed a triangular covenant notion in which Yahweh was the guarantor of Israel’s treaty with partners such as Assyria and Babylonia.
Similarly, the final essay here, “Covenant and Hesed: The Status of the Discussion,” provided a critical evaluation of the popular connections long-made in scholarship between the concept of covenant and the Hebrew term, hesed. This piece is the only article included in the volume that was not published previously. It originated as the Boone M. Bowen lecture given at the First Methodist Church in Clemson, South Carolina shortly after Bowen’s death in 1987. In the true spirit of Hayes’s consistent emphasis on evaluating ideas of scholarship within their formative intellectual currents, the article offers one of the most comprehensive assessments of the development of the notion of covenant within Hebrew Bible scholarship from the 1920s to the mid-1980s—a virtual snapshot of how covenant as a theological, social, and institutional concept emerged from Max Weber forward and where that discussion stood near the end of the twentieth century. Additionally, Hayes successfully set out the history of the connection of the term hesed with the concept of covenant before explaining the more recent challenges to this association. For today’s