REVIEWS

615

doi:10.1093/jts/flt173
Advance Access publication 2 September 2013

JOHN GOLDINGAY
Fuller Theological Seminary
johngold@fuller.edu

The Book of Joel: A Prophet between Calamity and Hope.

By ELIE ASSIS. Pp. xiv 289. (Library of Old
Testament/Hebrew Bible Studies, 581.) London &
New York: Bloomsbury/T & T Clark, 2013. ISBN 978
0 567 14787 5. N.p.
ELIE ASSIS has written extensively on the biblical material which
he regards as having emerged from that vital period in Israels
historythe sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Fourteen previously

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speaker and the servant is less developed. Dr Tiemeyer notes

that Duhms servant songs theory has now mostly been abandoned (p. 311); I think she exaggerates, though I could wish she
were right. Yet she seems still to work with this theory, and in
my view she thereby undermines her treatment of both the servant and the prophetic speaker. In contrast to her chapters on
Jacob-Israel and Zion-Jerusalem, this aspect of the study seems
somewhat inchoate. Her comment that the servant picture in
50:49 is not gender-specific (p. 23) made me wonder how she
understands its reference to having a beard, and I was puzzled
by the assertion that Isaiah 4055 contains virtually nothing in
terms of a prophetic bibliography, in contrast to what is found,
for example, in the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel (p. 15: perhaps she meant biography?).
The work firmly establishes some points that ought to have
been obvious but have been obscured by that prevailing assumption that Isaiah 4055 is of Babylonian provenance. The opening
in 40:111 is about comfort for Jerusalem. In chapters 4055,
Zion does not refer to the exiles; it refers to Zion. Lamentations
is enough to show that Judah did not lack people capable of
producing material of the kind we find in these chapters, and
the close links between Isaiah 4055 and Lamentations make
more sense on the hypothesis that Isaiah 4055 is of Judahite
rather than Babylonian origin. Finally, this latter view points to a
more elegant and simpler understanding of the origin of the
book of Isaiah as a whole, and implies the attribution of a greater
coherence to the book. Isaiah 4055 is part of a continuous
Judahite Isaianic prophetic tradition (p. 363).

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published books and articles are listed in the bibliography, and

three of the chapters in the present volume are substantially reprints of some of that earlier work. What is here oVered is therefore not a commentary, though the whole Hebrew text of Joel,
along with an English translation, is included; and any danger
that the inclusion of previously published material would break
the flow of the final work has been skilfully avoided. Assis has
been consistent in his view of the historical situation and the way
that it has shaped the response to it as it is enshrined in the
Hebrew Bible. As expressed in his final chapter, his assumption
is that the biblical text deals with concrete political realities that
must be understood on a fixed historical background in which
the author lived (p. 256).
It will be seen that such an assumption implies that it is possible to reconstruct the history of ancient Israel with suYcient
confidence to enable us to identify those concrete political realities. While he makes it clear that he does not accept the reliability of every detail of the biblical history, his view of Judah in
the sixth century BCE is very much on traditional lines. While
such works as Barstads Myth of the Empty Land receive a passing mention, it is clear that the basic picture of the destruction
of much of Jerusalem and in particular its temple, along with the
deportation of a substantial number of its citizens, provides the
essential context of his work. This stress on the historical background as the vital clue to the understanding of Joel means that
literary links, such as that between Joel 3:16 (MT 4:16) and
Amos 1:2, receive no more than a brief comment in a footnote.
There is no suggestion here that the Book of the Twelve (Minor
Prophets) is anything more than a random collection of originally distinct works to be studied primarily in their historical
setting.
In the light of these assumptions it is natural that much
attention is paid to the locust plague, so prominent in the first
part of the book, and its relation to the devastation brought
about by human enemies in the remaining chapters. Some interesting observations are made on the deliberate use of ambiguity,
and the way in which the locusts can be understood both in a
very literal sense and as standing for human adversaries. This
enables Assis firmly to reject those views which have dated the
two parts of Joel into entirely distinct backgrounds. Whether his
subsequent reconstruction of the transition from agricultural
salvation from the locust plague to political salvation from
Babylon and other oppressors will be found acceptable is much
more open to question.

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617

doi:10.1093/jts/flt122
Advance Access publication 5 September 2013

RICHARD COGGINS
Lymington
richard@coggins.org.uk

Contesting Conversion: Genealogy, Circumcision, and

Identity in Ancient Judaism and Christianity. By
MATTHEW THIESSEN. Pp. x 246. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011. ISBN 978 0 19 979356 3 and
979367 9. Hardback 40; e-book n.p.
MATTHEW THIESSENS revised dissertation from Duke University
makes a significant contribution to the scholarly understanding
of ancient Jewish views of the functions and possibilities of circumcision. The work oVers necessarily more than an enlarged
understanding of bodily practice, butas Thiessens subtitle indicatesprovides a way to query the transformations of social
and religious formations and the possibilities of individuals
movement among those formations.
After economically introducing a variety of scholarly understandings of the possibility of Gentiles becoming Israelites or
Jews, Thiessen outlines his work and lays out the road ahead.
The insight that the introduction asks the reader to hold is in
some ways standard: that Judaism was multiform and diverse,
that modern conceptions may cloud our understanding of ancient thought and practice. Working out this insight is an

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One other point must be made, though some may regard it as

unnecessarily old-fashioned. It seemed slightly unexpected to
find the series editors name misspelt in the acknowledgements,
and this proved to be an ominous portent. The text contains
several references to a scholar named Burton; closer investigation revealed that this was actually John Barton, whose 2001
commentary was among the most recent to receive detailed consideration. I gave up counting when I had reached 25 misprints
and literals; many of these are trivial, but they are regrettable
because they engender a lack of confidence that one is doing the
author justice. More generally one can say that Assiss work
embodies an older tradition of scholarship; commentators from
an earlier generation such as Bewer, Rudolph, and WolV are
those who receive detailed and generally appreciative evaluation;
more recent writers, and much of contemporary Hebrew Bible
scholarship, seem to be much more marginal.