114 - Between Text and Community: The "Writings" in Canonical Interpretation

Between Text and Community: The "Writings" in Canonical Interpretation

By Donn F. Morgan

Minneapolis, Fortress, 1990. 164 Pp. $9.95.

It is easier to say what this book is not than what it is. It is not an introduction to the third part of the Hebrew canon, the Writings, as individual literary works. Such knowledge is generally presupposed, even as the author makes reference to the content of the individual Writings as he develops his thesis. It is also not an introduction to the historical period in which the Writings were composed, with the customary explanations of author, audience, and historical setting. And finally, it is also not another contribution to the question of the canon as an historical problem. This must be said even as the author is forced to choose between some competing reconstructions of the canon, its history, development, and stabilization.

Morgan is interested in the Writings as a literary collection, which

115 - Between Text and Community: The "Writings" in Canonical Interpretation

gives evidence of the interaction between community and text, the latter represented by a relatively fixed Torah-Prophets collection. This gives him an opportunity to reflect on two recent proposals for conceiving the task of biblical theology and exegesis (B.S. Childs and J.A. Sanders) and to try to flesh out aspects of their concern with canon using the example of the Writings. Morgan attempts to demonstrate that so diverse a collection as the Writings nevertheless shared a common concern with the interpretation of Scripture, expressed in a plurality of ways (Sanders) but hedged about by an original textual base (his Torah-Prophets corpus). There is a kind of two-stage process whereby communities produce texts in dialogue with Torah Prophets, and where texts then produce communities. Morgan tries to link up this process and align it with the emergence of intertestamental literature, the New Testament, and the rabbinic corpus of developing Judaism.

This is an intriguing book that helps introduce a neglected section of the Old Testament canon, even though it is more a contribution to hermeneutics than an introduction proper. Several questions remain, however. Are the proposals of Sanders and Childs finally incompatible, sharing only the terminology of "canon" but little else, and difficult to employ as mutually edifying? What about the prominence of the Septuagint for Christian communities, whose structural organization has obtiterated the category "Writings" (there is no serious discussion of this problem despite Morgan's interest in the NT)? Do the Writings really take shape with such attention to text (Torah-Prophets) as Morgan suggests, and if so, does the very heterogeneity of the Writings render such attention negligible at best, and extraordinarily complex? And finally, while a valiant attempt has been made to take seriously the possibility of "canonical interpretation," the actual proposal remains, as the title suggests, somewhere between text and community, with the final emphasis falling on communities, a plurality of interpretations, and a variety of paradigms and analogies for our edification. As such, the proposal is decidedly an extension of the work of Sanders, rather than that of Childs. Morgan has produced an intriguing, thoroughly modern paradigm for working with Scripture, but it is unclear what kind of serious contribution to the problem of canon-as a theological, historical, and literary problem-his work will make.

Christopher R. Seitz, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.