The weakness of this volume, however, lies in the fact that it perpetuates serious
methodological confusion common to our discipline. In assuming that the book of Isaiah
is a “collection or anthology” (13), Couey strongly implies that final-form readings of
Isaiah are inherently anachronistic to the text, in that such readings inevitably treat Isaiah
as a modern novel while recusing themselves of serious engagement with the text’s
history of composition. While true of some scholarship, this characterization appears to
misunderstand B. Childs’s primary historical-critical insight: the Bible in general, and
Isaiah in particular, is a kind of literature generically distinct from nonscriptural
literature. This distinction is relevant not because later readers frequently discuss theology
with reference to biblical texts but because Isaiah has been written up to be a “scripture”
in its “original,” written iteration. The only text to which we have access has been
constructed for a reception community that is ancient and historical but also one that
moves forward in tradition. In treating Isaiah’s poetry “in much the same way as other
poems” (14), Couey reads the text as if it were a transcript of the prophet’s own words,
originally uttered in the late eighth century BCE and preserved in hypostasis since that
time. Redaction scholars have taught us that this assumption does not hold water. Isaiah
has been constructed and reconstructed again and again for an ongoing audience, not an
audience lodged at one specific point in time.
Daniel J. Stulac in a review (not generally
accessible) of J. Blake Couey,
Reading the Poetry of First Isaiah: The Most PerfectModel of the Prophetic Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) in
RBL 02/2017. While Stulac rightly points out that this is a serious methodological flaw, he nevertheless commends Couey's work as an important contribution to the study of Isaiah and, more generally, Hebrew poetry.
