Interpreting Ancient Israelite
History, Prophecy, and Law
John H. Hayes
Edited and Introduced by
Brad E. Kelle
INTERPRETING Ancient Israelite HISTORY, PROPHECY, AND LAW
Copyright © 2013 John H. Hayes. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Scripture quotations from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible are copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America and are used by permission.
Cascade Books
A Division of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
ISBN 13: 978-161097-883-5
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Hayes, John Haralson, 1934–
Interpreting ancient Israelite history, prophecy, and law / John H. Hayes ; edited and introduced by Brad E. Kelle.
ISBN 13: 978-161097-883-5
EISBN 13: 978-1-63087-440-7
xxiv + 296 p. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
1. Bible O.T.—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Jews—History—To 70 A.D. 3. Bible O.T. Prophets—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 4. Law (Theology)—Biblical teaching. I. Kelle, Brad E., 1973–. II. Kuan, Jeffrey K. III. Title.
BS1188 H35 2013
Manufactured in the USA
To
J. Maxwell Miller
a longtime colleague at Emory University
and coauthor over many years
Preface
None of the essays in this volume have undergone any major revision or updating. A very few changes and additions have been made, mostly in the footnotes and bibliographies
I am greatly indebted to K. C. Hanson and the staff at Cascade Books and Wipf and Stock Publishers for reformatting all of the essays and for producing a very handsome volume. I hope the volume will sell sufficiently to repay their efforts and expenses.
Special thanks go to Brad E. Kelle, my former student, who I have often said knows more about what I think than I do myself. He helped select the essays, provided the press with copies, secured permissions to reprint, and wrote the introduction.
—John H. Hayes
Introduction
Brad E. Kelle
John Hayes’s scholarship has had an important and wide-ranging influence on scholars and students in the field of Hebrew Bible study for more than five decades. Many of his published works on Israelite history, prophecy, law, and the history of biblical interpretation made timely contributions at crucial moments in the field and have proven to have lasting value for scholars working in those areas today.
Hayes began life as the seventh of eight children born into an Alabama sharecropper’s home in 1934. Seventy-three years later, he retired in 2007 as the Franklin N. Parker Professor of Old Testament at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. In the intervening years, he served Baptist congregations in three states, earned degrees from three institutions, taught at two universities, published over forty books and numerous scholarly articles, and even operated a small beef-cattle farm in rural Alabama, where he continues to enjoy his retirement years. This unique blend of personal and professional experiences gave Hayes an approach to Hebrew Bible scholarship that not only resulted in new ideas that continue to inform the scholarly conversation today but also provided needed clarity on developments that were occurring in the field at various moments and turned out to be of continuing importance in the early decades of this new millennium.
This volume collects ten scholarly essays written by Hayes from 1968 to 1995. Some of these originated as papers given at scholarly meetings such as the Society of Biblical Literature or addresses delivered in public lecture series. Others represent essays solicited for particular volumes or articles from major scholarly journals in Hebrew Bible study. The pieces here are organized loosely in three topic areas, corresponding to each piece’s primary focus: Israelite/Judean history, prophets, and law. During the later phases of his teaching career, Hayes was famous in the classroom for his graduate seminars on the History of Hebrew Bible Interpretation, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Isaiah. Students knew each of these seminars to bring a new breadth and depth to the material, and many of the articles in the present volume reflect these long-standing interests and the unique, sometimes provocative, approaches that Hayes employed. The goal of this volume is to make available some of Hayes’s scholarly articles that provided important perspectives within mid- to late-twentieth-century interpretation when they first appeared and helped to shape the scholarly discussion of these topics that one now finds in the field. These articles allow current scholars to see the emergence and development of some important ideas and trends still present in contemporary scholarship and to envision potentially new avenues and perspectives for advancing the critical discussion.
The contemporary relevance of the articles included here is apparent on several counts. At the most basic level, some of the articles proposed new theories, explanations, and interpretations of issues that were at the center of Hebrew Bible scholarship throughout the last half of the twentieth century (e.g., the formation of early Israel, form-criticism of the prophetic literature, the history of the Israelite and Judean kingdoms). Some of Hayes’s proposals helped to solidify emerging consensuses, while others offered new, sometimes daring interpretations. He exemplified a scholar who is willing to move outside of and challenge the mainstream of scholarship, nudging his field toward greater self-reflection. While Hayes’s specific proposals concerning such things as historical reconstruction or prophetic interpretation received a variety of responses from acceptance to modification to rejection, each helped to move the critical conversation of its topic forward toward some of the forms one sees today. One such specific proposal evidenced in some of the articles included here is Hayes’s unique approach to understanding the prophets and the importance of history for them, an approach that might be called the direct rhetorical-historical approach.1 In this view, nearly every element of books such as Amos and Isaiah needs to be understood as connected to a particular historical occasion, with much of the material constituting rhetorical compositions that reference a chain of closely related political-historical circumstances in the ancient Near East. While not immune to disagreement, the manifestations and ramifications of Hayes’s specific proposals have been evidenced in relevant scholarly work up to the present.
Beyond the first level of the specific proposals made in some of Hayes’s work, the timing and context of many of the articles included here constitute a second, broader factor that commends their ongoing consideration. Several of these articles emerged at crucial moments in the discipline of Hebrew Bible study, when many long-standing interpretive settlements were being reconsidered and, in some cases, set aside. These essays identified, clarified, and further developed several of the major trends that have shaped the study of Israelite history, prophets, and law throughout the later twentieth and now early twenty-first century. Regardless of the specific proposals advanced by a particular article, Hayes’s work in this way provides contemporary interpreters with glimpses of key moments