Konrad Schmid's The Old Testament: A Literary History opens a window on the past few decades of

European biblical scholarship. Its great benefit is in making accessible an important discussion of the
Hebrew Bible’s development mostly conducted in German dissertations and habilitations, with the
exception of key American interlocutors such as John van Seters and David Carr. Though clearly intended
for a theological audience (12- 13, 22; unexplained terms such as "inbreaking” will befuddle readers
unfamiliar with German Protestant metaphysics) the book highlights vital questions that will not go
away, and the tradition it represents deserves careful attention for this no less than because of its
unflagging productivity. And such an overview of an academic tradition provokes reflection on its
particular strengths and weaknesses in explaining the Bible’s formation. Schmid first lays out what is
distinctive about the book’s approach by asking "Why Do We Need a Literary History of the Old
Testament?" as opposed to the more common Introduction. Introductions are book-by-book surveys
that can just begin with Genesis and take the canonical text as given. By contrast, a literary history is
determined by the methodological choices it makes about how to investigate what came first; it cannot
simply redescribe the existing sources. A brisk discussion of "Language, Writing, Books, and Literary
Production in Ancient Israel" follows. The survey is sensible but shows limited familiarity with the past
few decades of epigraphic data and research. It may have been satisfactory thirty or forty years ago,
before Haran demonstrated the shift from a Hebrew-and papyrus-dominated writing culture to one
dominated by Aramaic and parchment that began around the Babylonian period. There is no mention of
Renz’s discovery, deepened by Rollston’s work, on the common scribal training--and thus, perhaps,
literary culture--shared between Israel and Judah in the eighth century. The absence of Renz's
convenient German-language report is particularly hard to understand.
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Expanded"version"of"a"review"to"appear"in"Near$Eastern$Archaeology. Schmid asserts that there was
only one master copy of each major text circulating in Iron Age Israel, based on Deut 17:18’s command
to make mishneh hattorah hazzot “a copy of this Torah.” It would be hard to justify this idiosyncratic
reading with biblical Hebrew evidence for “copying,” and though other arguments in the book depend
on it, Schmid does not try to. It is followed by a section on method highlighting two departures from old
approaches. The book will connect each major element of biblical literature with history by reading it for
its “political theology,” its argument about the divine foundations of human order (43). And editing, the
elaboration and reuse of earlier elements by which biblical texts grew, is to be read not as tampering
but as itself the history of exegesis, the reception and interpretation of Hebrew literature. The heart of
the book is an analysis of biblical books into an edifice built onto very short, originally independent
writings: Abraham’s authors did not know of Jacob, neither first, introduced into biblical studies by
Gunkel and applied by Noth, predicts what sorts of texts will be early or late based on the idea that
literature moves from short, simple and oral to long, complex and written. Following Rendtorff, Schmid
abandons the assumption of orality, arguing that this literature is scribal from its earliest knowable
point. But he retains the essential idea that form is a key to history. The second principle, which
determines relationships between texts by finding allusions, is more common-sense. It assumes that if a
text does not mention another text, its authors were unaware of it. But if one text shares themes and
words with another text, one text must have influenced the other (he does not seriously reckon with the
possibility of cultures simply having favorite themes and phrases that recur independently). This
principle is sometimes violated by a plausible, if inherently contradictory principle: allusions could
always have been added into a text by later editors. The consequence is that arguments about allusions
can become highly arbitrary, because one can always decide ad hoc that an allusion does not fit its
context and is merely a late addition. These two principles allow Schmid to deal in a powerful if not
consistent way with the most important questions in biblical literature. Schmid’s discussion of the first
phase of Hebrew literature follows Kratz in seeing the narratives of Saul and David as composed of very
short, originally independent pieces of writing and “only after 720 BCE were David and Solomon
declared to be successors to Saul through the literary combination of “their” traditions.” (62). The
second, Assyrian phase deals with a key problem in the study of the Pentateuch: when did extended
narratives arise and how were they built? Schmid points out an old and crucial problem in the
Pentateuch’s construction: aside from Genesis 15 and Exodus 3-4, narratives that have long puzzled
scholars, there are few extended references forward or backward between these books. Schmid’s
solution to the problem of how Pentateuchal narratives were constructed builds on an old recognition
of their roots in local folklore. He sees the stories of the individual patriarchs in Genesis, on the one
hand, and Israel’s redemption from Egypt on the other, as separate, competing written origin stories
during the Iron Age and Babylonian periods, only joined in response to the Priestly work later in the
Persian period. This theory begins, plausibly enough, by understanding the “bridging” passages in
Genesis 15 and Exodus 3-4 as late. It then proceeds to excise briefer connections, such as the reference
in Exodus 1:8 to “the pharaoh who did not know Joseph,” as designed to bond two originally separate
stories with different attitudes toward Egypt: the Joseph story, in which his family’s relief from famine
and Joseph’s success in the court of the foreign king makes it a place of refuge, and the Exodus
narratives, in which Egypt is a place of danger. While intelligently argued, Schmid’s solution seems to
depend on accepting some unlikely things and bypassing significant Near Eastern evidence. First, since
Schmid is clear that all of these early texts were circulated by scholars, and each patriarch’s short
independent cycle had no literary contact with others, it requires sophisticated scribal schools who each
focused on a single text of perhaps 2-3 chapters in length—and only that text. What did they do the rest
of the day? From the Old Babylonian period onward, cuneiform scribes collected wide swaths of texts.
Second, Schmid’s principle that if a text never alludes to another one its authors do not know it is
demonstrably false. Despite having at least the full contents of our Hebrew Bible before him, Josephus
never refers to the covenant in his writings. His statement that unlike the composite patriarchal
narratives the Joseph story was “conceived from the beginning as a dramatic cycle” (121) does not
explain the relentless doubling of chapters like Gen 37. And his claim that Joseph’s court tale has no
natural connection with Exodus’ theme of fall from favor at the death of a king is surprising: this is
precisely what happens in the famous Persian-period tale of Ahiqar, and the theme of sudden reversal
pervades Daniel: Egypt, or Babylon, or Persia always threatens to turn deadly at the whim of a petulant
king. Similar problems occur with poetic texts: neither a Babylonian collection of Psalms 3-14 (114) nor a
Seleucid psalmic Pentateuch (124) are suggested by the earliest manuscript evidence at Qumran, which
is not mentioned. If Schmid’s solutions are messy and incomplete it is because he has taken on such a
great task: the recent Neo-Documentarian approach is more coherent in sorting out extended
compositions based on the single axiom of plot. But it only accomplishes this by limiting itself to
providing a literary solution to a literary problem; it does not bother with history. The question remains
whether one could provide an account that treats literary production itself as a three-dimensional
historical entity. Doing this would require reading Hebrew texts both inside and outside our Bible in
dialogue with how contemporary literatures also changed their scope and modes of production,
considering how media and literary imaginations changed throughout the Levant and the Near East
during the first millennium. The book's presentation in terms of audience and editing is not always: it
tells us which books are in the Pentateuch and what the Septuagint is but this sort of basic information
becomes sparse after the first few pages. After this, it might be rough going those without strong
background in biblical studies (it doesn't say what apocalypticism is, just critiques tendencies in its
study) and for those interested in Near Eastern context. The only sources indexed are of the Christian
bible; Old Testament, New Testament and Apocrypha. By contrast, no actual texts from historical
contexts appear—one must hope to stumble upon mentions of the relevant Hebrew, Phoenician,
Ugaritic or Babylonian inscriptions. The footnotes do not seem to have been proofread with care: a
desultory check indicates that a key argument is supported only by references to a random part of the
bibliography in Knauf’s major article on Bethel and biblical tradition (237), works cited by Kaiser 1992
(244), Ska 2005 (238) and Janowski 2001/2003 (253) do not appear in the bibliography, and Oeming and
Lifshitz’s important volume on Judah and the Judeans is given three different publication dates (248,
276, 283). The book is full of perceptive observations--the treatments of Isaiah and the Persian period
are particularly good--but in the end does not support its claims with contemporary documents or
manuscript evidence well enough to succeed as a history. But its overview of recent European
scholarship will be of great value for scholars looking to understand current debate