Corrine Carvalho, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Ezekiel

This addition to the illustrious Oxford Handbook series brings together a diverse lineup of over two dozen scholars to address one of the Hebrew Bible’s most provocative and peculiar books—the scroll of Ezekiel. Although Ezekiel has often been overshadowed by its elder siblings, Isaiah and Jeremiah, the upsurge of recent research on this Cinderella prophet has stirred up fresh insights and vigorous debates, both of which are encapsulated in this handbook.After an introductory essay by the editor Corrine Carvalho, the subsequent entries branch out into a wide array of topics, including Ezekiel’s historical context, intertextuality, textual criticism, rhetoric, literary themes, reception history, pastoral appropriations, classification as “trauma literature,” and other topics. The following discussion highlights three central issues in Ezekiel studies on which the essayists disagree.The first crux interpretum involves Ezekiel’s composition. Contributors to the Handbook are divided between those who attribute the lion’s share of the book to the historical prophet in an exilic milieu and those who view the book as largely a scribal creation of the Persian period. Vying for the latter position, Wilson opines that scribes composed Ezekiel as an “archive” that “imaginatively elaborated on the records of a prophet from the past” (p. 169). Bodi, on the other hand, marshals literary, iconographic, and philological evidence that the author bore intimate knowledge of Babylonian culture (ch. 3). Perhaps the most interesting case for Ezekelian authorship derives from Poser (ch. 23) and Smith-Christopher (ch. 24), who independently assert that the book bears the psychological imprint of someone who had suffered the trauma of exile firsthand. On balance, it is hard to disagree with Sweeney’s verdict that “clear and direct evidence of a Persian-period setting for the book’s composition is lacking” (p. 30).A second and related area of debate has to do with redaction criticism. Several authors in the Handbook contend (or assume) that the book underwent considerable textual evolution. For instance, some of Strong’s exegetical conclusions (ch. 13) only hold water if one assigns several key passages (20:27–29; 34:24; 36:28; 37:27) to later Fortschreibungen (scribal “updates”). Likewise, Klein asserts that scribes inserted 2:3–7; 3:4–9, 20–21 into Ezekiel’s call narrative (pp. 78, 82). At times, such claims are backed by solid evidence (e.g., the omission of 36:23c–38 in Papyrus 967); at other times, they lack methodological constraints. Mackie’s essay on textual criticism, however, blows a refreshing gust of objectivity into the discussion. Mackie analyzes nine instances where proto-Masoretic scribes supplemented their base text for the purposes of clarification or coordination (ch. 7). Of course, one can only guess how much material Ezekiel’s tradents added before it left a trace in the textual witnesses we have today. An oft-overlooked consideration in the Handbook, however, is that all fourteen of the dated superscriptions (1:2 excepted) are imbedded in first-person discourse. Though some would chock up these references to a “pseudo-autobiographical” perspective (see Wilson, p. 172), it seems more natural to conclude that the historical prophet had a hand not only in writing but editing the book.A third, and final, disagreement revolves around Ezekiel’s graphic depiction of Jerusalem as Yhwh’s promiscuous and punished bride (Ezek 16; 23). Echoing a feminist critique, a few contributors charge Ezekiel’s deity with domestic violence (Graybill, pp. 424, 428–29) and/or condoning a social hierarchy that tolerates such horrors (Carvalho, pp. 511–12). Others counter that Ezekiel’s goal in these chapters was not for his (predominantly male) audience to objectify women but precisely for them to identify with lady Jerusalem (e.g., Tuell, p. 352; Kalmanofsky, pp. 403–4; cf. Carvalho, pp. 514–15; Bodi, p. 48n29). Since a “dispassionate, factual report” would not be heeded by the Jerusalemites (Launderville, p. 153), Ezekiel ramped up his rhetoric in order to warn them that without repentance, this lurid metaphor would become a reality, and Jerusalem would suffer the same trauma as Ezekiel and the other exiles had already endured (Tuell, p. 351).More than anything, The Oxford Handbook of Ezekiel provides a snapshot of a scholarly field that has emerged from a valley of dry bones but has yet to strike a consensus on a number of core issues. Perhaps the book’s greatest strength is that it contains a veritable goldmine of up-to-date bibliographic details. Such information will prove immensely helpful to students in search of a thesis, thus fulfilling Carvalho’s aspiration that new voices will enter the burgeoning field (pp. 11–14).Regrettably, however, there are several defects that make this volume almost unusable as a “handbook” on Ezekiel. First, there seems to be little rhyme or reason for the arrangement of the essays; the table of contents lacks section headings that appear in other Oxford handbooks. Second, a relatively skimpy topical index (pp. 525–43) and a nonexistent scriptural index require the reader to slog through hundreds of pages of small font to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. Third, despite some notable exceptions, several of the essays veer off into idiosyncratic, speculative, or narrow proposals rather than what one might expect from an entry in a handbook—namely, robust and systematic engagement with the text of Ezekiel and secondary literature on a given subject. Fourth, the volume sometimes privileges twenty-first-century perspectives over ancient ones (including Ezekiel’s). Some of the articles say far more about the contributor’s ideology than the prophet’s. One author, for example, accuses Ezekiel of an imperialistic cartography that smacks of later European colonialism, while ignoring the fact that the prophet himself was a victim of Babylonian colonization! The three essays that do address reception history (chs. 17, 19–20), though stimulating in their own right, focus upon a single pericope, a single verse, and a single set of paintings, respectively, thus forcing the reader to look elsewhere for what the rabbis, reformers, and others wrote about the rest of Ezekiel.In short, while this volume contains a great deal of high-caliber, cutting-edge Ezekiel scholarship, its inaccessibility converts its goldmine of data into a part-exhilarating, part-exhausting treasure hunt.