The Vitality of Old Testament Traditions, Revised Edition

Some books introduce the topic more clearly by analyzing its various components parts than by taking a standard survey approach. This is the case with Brueggemann and Wolff's excellent analysis of the Pentateuchal sources. Readers will discover in this slim volume a clear introduction to the standard `sources' of Pentateuchal criticism, but also a compelling presentation of form/tradition criticism in the tradition of G. von Rad. The volume is an unconventional shared labor by the senior Wolff and Brueggemann, his appreciative interpreter. In his preface (pp. 1-9), the latter announces the authors' intention to write for the church and synagogue under the conviction that `every stratum of the Pentateuch represents a fresh sensing of vitality (hence the book's title) in the ancient traditions-revising faith for a new context when faith was sorely being tested and tried.' Over against the kind of objectivizing criticism that Brueggemann decries, we are promised the kind of exegesis that requires `a responding faith and a perceptive mind.' This book is an artifact, but only if the description is taken with the appreciative warmth with which one regards a family treasure from a previous generation. That is, the form criticism that Wolff in particular practices is breathtaking in its self-confidence. Few would disentangle sources with the same assuredness today. As an exemplar of its type, however, each chapter displays admirable erudition and the occasionally devastating turn of phrase. Brueggemann introduces the work by sketching the importance of tradition and the historical contingencies that press out of it fresh vitality for a subsequent generation (`Introduction: the word in particularity and power', pp. 11-12), then launches a neat survey of the trends that lead up to and nurture the kind of tradition history practiced in this volume (`Questions Addressed in Study of the Pentateuch", pp. 13-28). Wellhausen, Gunkel, and Albright come in for special mention as the respective fountainheads of the schools that so often bear their names. Von Rad is then honored for his attention to the kerygma that brings traditions into scriptural form, a matter of prevailing interest in the exegesis that Wolff and Brueggemann practice. The following chapter (`Wolff's Kerygmatic Methodology', pp. 28-39) also does introductory duty, specifically by focusing upon Wolff's debt to von Rad. They ask the same question about the kerymatic concerns that `refashioned' texts and made them say something they did not originally mean to say. The concerns of both German scholars are rooted in the Confessing Church movement of the 1930s-deeply influenced by Barth-where a pressing need was felt to hear the text in the fresh and deeply discouraging moment in which National Socialism was consolidating its chill grip. Wolff seeks the text's latent meeting in the Pentateuch's narrative `strands' (Wellhausen's documents or sources), the reconstructed social contexts of whic

The Vitality of Old Testament Traditions is a collection of essays written by Walter Brueggemann and Walter Wolff. The subject of these essays is concerned with interpreting the text of the Pentateuch. These essays expand on the Documentary Hypothesis approach established by Julius Wellhausen, the theory that the text is a composite of documents from various time periods. The authors feel that Wellhausen and others were too concerned with scientific methodology and historical facts while dissecting the Pentateuch (or Hexataeuth, on up to the Enneateuch). The mood of the scholarship used by many in analyzing the hypothesis left the text with little authority and vitality, transforming the Bible into a lifeless specimen. Brueggemann hopes to avoid that tendency with his approach by sustaining the original vitality of the text. The essays by Wolff explore the kerygmatic focus of the J, D, and E sources, while Brueggemann makes use of Wolff's methods in his essay on the P source. Brueggemann's analysis of the central kerygma comes out of the narrative texts, while Wolff stresses law and genealogy portions of the text. Brueggemann writes with poetic style and his writing is rhetorically powerful. His, and Wolff's, Christian perspective is clear.