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Book Review: The Prophetic Literature

rary performance studies. Doan and Giles challenge the common assumption that prophetic books were compiled by loyal disciples seeking to preserve the authority of the original prophets. Instead, the power dynamics of writing created "a struggle in which the prestige of the charismatic prophet-performer was usurped by the power of the pen" (p. x). This book helpfully reminds us that prophets were engaged in continual interaction with their audiences, flexibly adapting their delivery in order to "hold" and persuade the listeners. It also reminds us that when scribes composed their accounts of prophetic words and deeds, they assumed control of the action. The prophet was no longer a live, real-time actor, but a character in a dramatic script shaped by the scribe, even though we still encounter the forms of traditional prophetic presentation and are imaginatively positioned as audiences of such. However, once one has waded through the fairly thick methodological material to arrive at the authors' discussions of actual texts (1 Sam 3 and Amos), one discovers that the questions posed to the stories (about body language, tone, and delivery of the prophets, dramatic sequencing, and possible audience responses) are strikingly like those posed by past commentators who took the accounts as straightforward reports of actual events. The theoretical case made for "usurpation" of prophetic power by later scribal writers makes sense, but Doan and Giles do little to illumine what the agendas and results of such a powerplay might have been in the texts they study. In keeping with its self-presentation as a starting proposal for further development of biblical performance studies, this book will likely be of more interest to scholars than to the working pastor.