Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 40:4 (Dec 1997)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

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JETS 40:4 (December 1997) p. 681

Book Reviews

Rhetorical Criticism of the Bible. Edited by A. J. Hauser and D. F. Watson. Biblical Interpretation Series 6. Leiden: Brill, 1994, xx + 206 pp., $74.50.

Volume-length bibliographies tend to be labors of love: love for the subject matter, and a love of the field and those who labor within it. Without such affection the effort would be an intolerably boring and wearisome task. With that affection, it may still be a wearisome task but an interesting one, and therefore doable.

We can be grateful, then, that Duane F. Watson and Alan J. Hauser cared enough about the rhetorical criticism of the Bible to produce this work. They have done their fellow scholars the admirable service of culling from the four winds a broad range of works that pertain, more or less, to the application of the methods of rhetorical criticism to both Testaments of Scripture. The result cannot be an exhaustive bibliography—the notion of rhetorical criticism is too ill-defined and the literature too large for that. But it is nonetheless a very complete bibliography.

From the moment they are published, volumes such as Rhetorical Criticism of the Bible become instant standards, indispensable for those working in the field. But that does not mean that Watson and Hauser have done all our dirty work for us. Like all bibliographies, this one began to age the moment Watson and Hauser said “enough” and finalized their work to send to the publisher. Since that was probably as much as a year before the volume became available to the public, and since, by the time reviews such as this one appear, as much as another two years or so can have elapsed, the chances are that by now the reader will already have several years of additional bibliographical work to do just to catch up.

Still, that does not diminish the value of Watson and Hauser’s work. It has established a bench-mark summary of the literature as of approximately 1992–1993, and for that we can be grateful. The introductory essays to both halves of the bibliography (Hauser on the OT, Watson on the NT) are brief but workmanlike, demonstrating that both authors know their subject. These essays make no attempt to break new ground but they do offer useful introductions to their respective subjects.

This is not a perfect bibliography (bibliographies are never perfect), but the work has been carefully and expertly done, and I refuse to nitpick about items I think might have been included or excluded. I would have preferred an annotated bibliography, of course, but we do not yet live in a perfect world. A more puzzling lacuna is the lack of an authors’ index. I am not sure why it is missing since it would have added significantly to the text’s usefulness, and in the age of wo...

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