IntroductoryThe publication in 1986 in a single volume of initial position papers, together with several responses by Barthelemy, Gooding, Lust and Tov, has helped to clarify many issues relating to the composition and textual history of 1 Samuel 17-18. These essays have also made it unnecessary for us to offer a full review of earlier scholarship. Although in some respects the four distinguished scholars appear as far apart in their approaches to these issues at the end of their joint volume as at the beginning, the quality of their rehearsal of the questions has enabled us to suggest a new way out of their impasse. In what follows, we propose a history of the composition of these two chapters that takes account of the fact that the Septuagint represents only some 55% of the Masoretic Text. Lust (1986: 5-18) thinks that there once existed two independent histories (H1, H2) of David. HI, represented in this section by 1 Sam. 17.12-31, 55-58 and 18.2, can be recognized from its 'relics' found in the MT pluses; and H2 (1 Sam. 17.1-11, 32-54; 18.1b, 3-4) was the Hebrew story translated into Greek which subsequently gave rise to LxxB (minus 18.lb, 3-4). Textual criticism rules out the possibility that the Greek version was shortened from the Hebrew story; and literary appreciation of the structure of the shorter story confirms that it (H2) was the basis from which expansion took place.Tov's study of the translation techniques that produced LXXB (1986: 19-46) persuaded his colleagues as well as himself that the translator would not have shortened the parent text. The comparison of the structures of the two versions side by side (pp. 40-41) suggests to him Downloaded from 20 that his Version 1 (Lust's H2) 'provides a sufficiently full picture, so that it could have existed as an independent version', whereas because of its incompleteness 'Version 2 [the MT pluses] could not have existed in its own right in its present form'.1 It cannot be known whether it once existed in a fuller form (p. 41). He suggests that major M T pluses were derived from a written source, with the addition of minor details by a final editor. A close reading of the two versions shows that Version 1 is more logical than Version 2 in the flow of the story. Several changes made by an editor after the juxtaposition of the two versions are also noted (p. 43) and used to support his view of the originality of Version 1.Tov's argument for the carefulness of the translation is very strong, well based on text-critical data, and supported by literary arguments.However, this does not preclude a truncation of the text prior to the translation. Moreover, as he himself admits, it is not known to him why the editor wanted to create an amalgam out of the two stories. These two points seem to be the only weakness or incompleteness of his argument. But they leave room for literary arguments such as Barthelemy's and Gooding's, which favour the longer story as more original than his Version 1.
There is seldom a lack of new studies of Isaiah. In this article I want to mention some aspects of a few recently published studies which direct our attention in different ways to the book of Isaiah, rather than to Isaiah of Jerusalem (or the so-called ‘second Isaiah’) as an individual with an historical role. Not that I am not concerned with the historical Isaiah of Jerusalem: in fact the concern is greater than the following reviews might suggest. Positively I am insisting that our quest for him must start from the book of Isaiah in all its variety and complexity, and not from its few familiar and congenially informative prose sections. Then the more negative suggestion that Isaiah may not have been a ‘prophet’ (at least in the sense that tradition came to regard him) is an attempt to clear the ground for a better point of view.
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