Notes
1. A. C. Thiselton, The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1980), 51f.
2. I owe much to K. J. Vanhoozer's Is There a Meaning in This Text?: The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1998). His arguments greatly help shaping and sharpening my thoughts.
3. Thiselton offers another "traditional" definition of hermeneutics: "Traditionally hermeneutics entailed the formulation of rules for the understanding of an ancient text, especially in linguistic and historical terms." The Two Horizons, 11.
4. Terminology may be confusing. In this paper, the term "exegesis" is used for inquiry of "what the text meant for the original author and readers," while the term "interpretation" is reserved for the searching of "what the text means for the readers today." Similar distinction can be found between "meaning" and "significance." For more general sense, the term "understanding" will be used in this paper.
5. This is not to say that everything is interpretation or that there is no difference between text and commentary, as Derrida says "There is nothing outside texts" (See, Vanhoozer's observation on Rabbinic exegesis; Meaning, 115-16). Practically, the distinction between exegesis and interpretation is still important. However, we need to be aware of the subjective element in exegesis.
6. I am not objecting to Osborne's assertion that "arguments regarding the 'mixing' of genres and the difference between individual texts belonging to a particular genre do not militate against the classification function of genre" (G. R. Osborne, The hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1991], 150), for it is thanks to this function that we can distinguish our text from the literary context as different genre. Rather, it is to be said that we need to study the text of mixing genres with careful application of the genre criticism.
7. Tremper Longman, III, Literary Approaches to Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987), 17-18. See also Grant R. Osborne, Hermeneutical Spiral, 366.
8. Longman makes the deconstruction as the forth type of interpretive theories. See, Literary Approaches, 41-45.
9. Longman, Literary Approaches, 22, 24.
10. Following weaknesses of author-centered approaches are more apparent in historical-critical methods than in historical-grammatical approach, probably because the latter focuses not only on the author but also on the text itself, in terms of its "grammatical" orientation, more than the former.
11. Thiselton, Two Horizons, 22.
12. Redaction criticism may be an exception, but it as well focuses on the prehistory of the text, not on the final form.
13. Osborne, Hermeneutical Spiral, 374.
14. Thiselton, Two Horizons, 15
15. Ibid., 12.
16. Osborne, Hermeneutical Spiral, 367.
17. Longman, Literary Approaches, 32.
18. Ibid.
19. Osborne, Hermeneutical Spiral, 374.
20. Ibid., 386.
21. Ibid., 370-1.
22. Ibid., 377-80.
23. Vanhoozer, Meaning, 153.
24. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992); idem., Two Horizons; Vanhoozer, Meaning.
25. Thiselton, New Horizons, 11: "The modern interpreter, no less than the text, stands in a given historical context and tradition."
26. Vanhoozer, Meaning, 230-1.
27. For the alternative picture of human being, Vanhoozer advocates the communicative agent. We will return to this communication theory in due course.
28. Vanhoozer, Meaning, 106.
29. Ibid., 299.
30. For our text, at least, the parallel passage in Kings is an example.
31. Osborne, Hermeneutical Spiral, 6. See also Thiselton, Two Horizons, 22.
32. Vanhoozer, Meaning, 212.
33. Ibid., 322.
34. Vanhoozer correctly depicts this nature of understanding as "eschatological"; Meaning, 335.
35. Thiselton, New Horizons, 49. If "The most radical question of all in hermeneutics concerns the nature of texts," the question about the nature of language may be most radical in the study of understanding the text.
36. Vanhoozer gives similar example, using the term "a root metaphor"; Meaning, 101.
37. Vanhoozer, Meaning, 17-18, 203.
38. Ibid., 204: "Language . . . is a gift of God . . . . Language . . . should be seen as the most important means and medium of communication and communion."
39. Ibid., 201-65.
40. Ibid., 208-14.
41. See Vanhoozer's critic to Habermass, Ibid., 222-225.
42. Ibid., 224.
43. Ibid., 261.
44. Ibid., 224.
45. Ibid., 243.
46. Ibid., 261.
47. In the equivalent verb in Japanese, the sense is related to the action itself than to the result.
48. This is more apparent when we compare this passage with, for example, Genesis 18:22-19:14, where Abram, the messengers of God, and Lotto persuade (or try to persuade) Yahweh, Lotto, and his family, respectively.
49. Vanhoozer, Meaning, 301.
50. Ibid., 129, 140.
51. Ibid., 284-6.
52. Ibid., 297-99 and 377.
53. In this paper, the terms "text linguistics" and "discourse analysis" will be used interchangeably. See, W. R. Bodine, "Introduction: Discourse Analysis of Biblical Literature: What It Is and What It Offers," in Discourse Analysis of Biblical Literature: What It Is and What It Offers (ed. W. R. Bodine, The Society of Biblical Literature Semeia Studies [ed. E. L. Greenstein], Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 2, n. 4. The reason of this use of the terms is that I adopt both Cotterell's Discourse Analysis and Wiklander's Text Linguistics, each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages.
54. K. E. Lowery, "The Theoretical Foundations of Hebrew Discourse Grammar," in Discourse Analysis of Biblical Literature: What It Is and What It Offers, 110-111.
55. For example, P. Cotterell and Max Turner, Linguistics and Biblical Interpretation (Downers Grove, Ill.; InterVarsity Press, 1989). See also K. E. Lowery, "A Classified Discourse Analysis Bibliography," in Discourse Analysis of Biblical Literature: What It Is and What It Offers (ed. W. R. Bodine, The Society of Biblical Literature Semeia Studies [ed. E. L. Greenstein], Atlanta; Scholars Press, 1995), 248-51.
56. For example, B. Wiklander, Prophecy as Literature: a Text-linguistic and Rhetorical Approach to Isaiah 2-4 (Uppsala: CWK Gleerup, 1984).
57. See, Wiklander, Prophecy, 31, note 11, where he gives eight major schools of "discourse analysis."
58. Wiklander, Prophecy, 25-48; 97-240.
59. Cotterell and Turner, Linguistics, 232-33; also, Cotterell, "Linguistics, Meaning, Semantic, and Discourse Analysis," in NIDOTTE (ed. W. A. VanGemeren, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997), vol. 1, 155-56.
60. Wiklander, Prophecy, 45.
61. For the examples of poetical analysis, see, R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985); D. L. Pertersen and K. H. Richards, Interpreting Hebrew Poetry (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992); A. Berlin, The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992). For narrative analysis, R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981); M. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1985).
62. For thematic net, see Cotterell and Turner, Linguistics, 232-3. Also references and deixis create the other sets of nets in the text. See, id., 232-3, 236-40.
63. C. B. Chhetri, "The Servant Motif in Isaiah 41, 42, and 43: A Text-Linguistic Study" (Ph.D. diss., Trinity International University, 1997), 96. For the semantic domain, Cottrell and Turner, Linguistics, 135-70.
64. Cotterell and Turner, Linguistics, 175: "The context of the utterance usually singles out . . . the one sense, which is intended, from amongst the various senses of which the word is potentially capable.
65. For the seven standards, which include cohesion and coherence, of text, see, Wiklander, Prophecy, 45-7; Cotterell, "Linguistics," 154-5. Both of them refer R. de Beaugrande and W. Dressler, Introduction to Text Linguistics (London and New York: Longman, 1981).
66. Chhetri, "Servant," 115.
67. Examples of procedure in exegesis can be found in the introductory books, such as: Gordon D. Fee, New Testament Exegesis: A Handbook for Students and Pastors (rev. ed., Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 34-41.
68. Cotterell and Turner, Linguistics, 43-44.
69. Vanhoozer, Meaning, 335-50; D. B. Sandy and R. L. Giese (eds.), Cracking Old Testament Codes: A Guide to Interpreting Old Testament Literary Forms (Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman & Holman, 1995). While many studies of individual genres have been developed, few have been done for mixed genre.
70. While Isa. 38:9 can be included as the superscription of the psalm, the understanding of the psalm should be mainly the result of the observation of the psalm itself, not by the interpretation of the superscription.
71. For the summary of the argument, see James W. Watts, Psalm and Story: Inset Hymns in Hebrew Narrative, JSOTSS 139 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992), 120-21; M. A. Sweeney, Isaiah 1-39: With an Introduction to Prophetic Literature, FOTL 16 (Grand Rapids, Mich. and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1996), 494-5.
72. While Kugel is correct in rejecting the discontinuity between prose and poetry, it does not necessarily means there is no genre in the Old Testament. Some passages are hardly classified whether they are poetry or prose, but our text is obviously a poem. See, J. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 59-95.
73. For the example of the poetical analysis, see n. 61 above.
74. "Jeanrond suggests that text genres demand appropriate 'reading genres.'": Vanhoozer, Meaning, 338, citing W. G. Jeanrond, Text and Interpretation As Categories of Theological Thinking (New York: Crossroad, 1988), 94-119.
75. For (1), see, Watts, Psalm and Story; for (2), W. S. McCullough asserts:
The view of death which dominates the psalms is that in Sheol there is no remembrance or praise of the Lord (6:5, 30:9, 88:3-12; 115:17). It is only in such passages as 49:15; 73:23-26, that there may be a hint of the hope of survival beyond death. (IB vol 4, 12)
It is remarkable that the prayer of Jonah, i.e., Jonah 2:2-9, resembles to our text in terms of both form and theme.
76. The structure of narrative may not be found in the cases of the historical prose in the prophetic books. Cf., Longman, Literary Approaches, 92-94; Cotterell and Turner, Linguistics, 241-48.
77. For the example of the study, see n. 61 above.
78. Vanhoozer, Meaning, 341.
79. M. A. Powell, What is Narrative Criticism? (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 23-24.
80. Watts, Psalm and Story, 130.
81. Among many, Peter R. Ackroyd, "Isaiah 36-39: Structure and Function," in Von Kanan bis Kerala: Festschrift für Prof. Mag. Dr. Dr. J. P. M. van der Ploeg, O. P. zur Vollendung des siebzigsten Lebensjahres am 4. Juli 1979 (ed. W. C. Delsman, et al., AOAT 211, Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1982), 3-21.
82. It is beyond our scope to argue for the unity of the book in the traditional sense. It can be literary unity, however, in which the author as communicative agent is the person(s) who had the responsibility for the composition of the whole book. Thus, the author could be the final redactor. The identity of the author is not a subject in our research, but it is quite legitimate to say that the inferred author of the book is the prophet Isaiah son of Amoz.
83. Wiklander combines rhetorical analysis to his text linguistics. See, Prophecy, 33-34. For the examples of the rhetorical criticism, see, P. Trible, Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 29-52. Within his survey of the studies, some consider the rhetoric as the art of persuasion and apply it to prophetic books; see, id., 41-45.
84. A good example is: C. R. Seitz, Zion's Final Destiny: The Development of the Book of Isaiah: A Reassessment of Isaiah 36-39 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991).
85. Vanhoozer, Meaning, 132-33.
86. Cotterell, "Linguistics," 155. Cf., Wiklander, Prophecy, 45-46. The term "textuality" also differs according to the scholars; cf., Vanhoozer, Meaning, 111-12.
87. A. C. Thiselton, New Horizons, 39. Cf., M. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
88. W. C. Kaiser, Jr., The Use of the Old Testament in the New (Chicago: Moody Press, 1985), 226; quoted in Thiselton, New Horizons, 37.