By David M. Howard, Jr.

This review appears in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 39.3 (Sept 1996): 473-75.

Solomon's Prayer: Synchrony and Diachrony in the Composition of I Kings 8, 14-61. By E. Talstra. Translated by G. Runia-Deenick. Contributions to Biblical Exegesis and Theology 3. Kampen, The Netherlands: Kok Pharos, 1993, 306 pp., $35.25 paper.

This work was originally a 1987 dissertation at the University of Leiden and is translated and published with essentially no changes. Despite its title, Talstra's work is more about method than it is about one specific text. Talstra's overriding concern is that texts be analyzed first on their own terms, as written documents, using the methods of linguistics, which is the study of language (not languages). This linguistic study can and should be done independently (i.e., classifying and sorting of clause types, syntactical relations, etc.). Only later should analysis of texts proceed to consideration of semantics, contents, themes, and literary origins. The text of Solomon's prayer in 1 Kings 8 provides Talstra with a convenient test case for his method.

After a preliminary chapter in which he orients readers briefly to linguistic analysis, he turns to Martin Noth's influential work on the Deuteronomistic History and analyzes Noth's argumentation for distinguishing "Deuteronomistic" editing from non-Deuteronomistic material (pp. 22-33). He shows that, whereas Noth claimed to base his identification of several key texts as Deuteronomistic compositions (Joshua 1, 23; Judges 2; 1 Samuel 12; 1 Kings 8; 2 Kings 17) upon purely "linguistic" considerations ("Sprachbeweis"), in fact he was methodologically inconsistent, and more often than not reverted to considerations of structural placement, literary genre, or presumed literary origins of texts, rather than strictly linguistic analysis, especially later in his work.

Talstra then turns to the scholarly reaction to Noth, and considers the most influential treatments in the vast literature, showing how each measures up to Talstra's standards of putting linguistic standards first (pp. 34-82); most do not measure up. Talstra does commend a few, however, most notably Brekelmans (pp. 54-57 and passim) and Langlamet (pp. 63-65, 75-77).

Talstra then devotes two lengthy chapters to, first, synchronic analysis of Solomon's prayer, and, second, diachronic analysis of the same text. He argues that this is the most proper and correct order and method of analysis. In the first of these chapters -- a brilliant and most helpful analysis (pp. 83-170) -- he systematically classifies each clause in the prayer, and shows the syntactical relations among them. I highly recommend a careful study of this chapter for both students and teachers, and scholars not familiar with detailed linguistic analysis. It is a masterpiece of careful observation of the objective data of textual phenomena.

The following chapter (pp. 171-256) is devoted to diachronic or "literary" analysis (Talstra speaks of "literary criticism" to mean "source criticism"). Talstra identifies no less than five literary strata in Solomon's prayer (mainly using Brekelmans's supposedly "objective," purely "linguistic" criteria [see p. 55]), including a pre-Deuteronomistic layer, two separate Dtr1 layers, a Dtr2 layer, and a post-Deuteronomistic layer (see his chart on pp. 276-87). These correspond in various degrees to different proposals by scholars about the various editions of the Deuteronomistic History, but they also "disprove" Noth's theory about 1 Kings 8 being a unified Deuteronomistic composition coming directly from the Deuteronomist's pen.

How are we to evaluate this work? I cannot escape the impression after reading Talstra that I also have had after reading Brevard Childs's commentary on Exodus (OTL) or his Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. That is, Childs engages in the requisite historical-, source-, form-, and tradition-critical analyses before commencing on his distinctive analysis of the text as canon. Yet, the latter analysis usually does not hinge in very crucial ways upon the former analyses; it is as if Childs must prove his critical credentials before doing what he is truly interested in doing, namely, canonical analysis. So too with Talstra. While he claims that the diachronic questions arise out of the synchronic analysis (p. 170), it is difficult to see how his extensive synchronic analysis necessarily informs his equally extensive diachronic analysis. This reviewer, at least, comes away from the diachronic analysis no more enlightened concerning the meaning of the text than when he began, and wondering about the relevance of this diachronic analysis to exegesis. (Actually, Talstra acknowledges that the two methods are different, when he equates "meaning" with synchronic analysis and "genesis" [i.e., source criticism] with diachronic analysis [p. 257], but his claims for the necessary interrelatedness of the two are unconvincing.)

With this work, Talstra departs from his earlier published articles, in which his concern is almost exclusively (if not entirely) a linguistic one. Whether this new approach is merely to prove his source-critical credentials or whether this represents a true change in his thinking is difficult to discern. However, to this reviewer's eye, his diachronic analysis bears no necessary relation to his synchronic work, and it sinks into the same morass of subjective criteria for distinguishing layers of editing that is so commonly found in works on the Deuteronomistic History.

Despite these criticisms, Talstra's work is extremely beneficial on several fronts. (1) It provides a penetrating critique of Noth's method of argumentation, and it helpfully reviews the methods (not the substance) of subsequent work. (2) It provides a well-formulated model for a linguistic analysis of a text. (3) It argues well that linguistic analysis should precede other forms of analysis, whatever they may be. Here, evangelicals may also be instructed, even if they do not wish to engage in the source-critical analysis done by Talstra and others. That is, linguistic analysis should precede considerations of semantics, contents, themes, etc. (This is what Walter Kaiser argues for with his "syntactical analysis" in his Toward an Exegetical Theology; Kaiser's weakness is that he does not acknowledge, as Talstra does, that at times syntactical analysis must look to semantics or other tools to resolve certain cruxes. Even "linguistic" or "syntactical" analysis is not completely devoid of the need for exercising one's critical judgments on occasion.)

I recommend this work first as a primer on linguistic method, and second as a commentary on Solomon's prayer.