Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 58:3 (Sep 2015)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

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JETS 58:3 (September 2015) p. 615

Book Reviews

Genesis: History, Fiction, or Neither? Three Views on the Bible’s Earliest Chapters. By James K. Hoffmeier, Gordon J. Wenham, and Kenton L. Sparks. Counterpoints. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015, 176 pp., $16.99 paper.

OT scholars, claimed Edwin Good some years ago, are a “notably quarrelsome lot.” Quarrel and debate are different things, of course, and the Hoffmeier-Wenham-Sparks book under review shows well how to contend earnestly without being contentious. The discussion presents three major chapters of lively and rigorous exchange about whether Genesis is history (Hoffmeier), proto-history (Wenham), or historiography (Sparks)—more specifically, whether Genesis 1–11 mainly declares the past (chap. 1), attests to the past artistically (chap. 2), or constructs the past through fictional stories (chap. 3). Each of these chapters offers a major essay by one scholar and responses by the other two, reflecting the format of the Counterpoints collection. Book-ending these three chapters are an editor’s introduction to genre theory and a conclusion urging that scholarly disagreement proceed with mutual deference and edification. This book is eristical but not combative, the disputation made with the best of gracious candor.

Genesis: History, Fiction, or Neither? (hereafter Genesis: HFN) has other strong points as well. Its copious documentation and lucid writing invite, not just instruct, readers to consider some new as well as long-held assumptions about the first eleven chapters of Genesis. Also, the general tone enhances a substantive engagement with literary features of the biblical passage. This dialogue is noteworthy in two respects. First, the Genesis: HFN authors’ definition of literature as artistic writing is current, a welcomed update of the older definition, that is, written texts in any discipline. This distinction matters in Genesis because the methodology goes well beyond the once-dominant source criticism and posits theses about genre as it relates to plot, structure, motifs, themes, and (at times) authorship. Second, such robust integration of literature and Scripture has not come easily in biblical scholarship, stretching across a half century of sometimes confusing efforts to deal with literariness and its treatment by different literary theorists and critics. Since the 1960s, Leland Ryken, Robert Alter, and others have had to address, on the one hand, the very relevance of literary studies to biblical scholarship and, on the other, the problematic effects of radical types of literary criticism in vogue. Their task may not have rivaled the Jews’ rebuilding the city walls in Nehemiah’s day, with tool in one hand and weapon in the other, but the twentieth-century project has...

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