Joshua Retold: Synoptic Perspectives. By A. Graeme Auld. Old Testament Studies. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998. Pp. X + 179. $44.95. ISBN: 0-567-08603-8.

Auld, who is writing a commentary on Joshua for the International Critical Commentary, here publishes thirteen essays, written over a period of two decades, all but one previously published. An introductory chapter ("Orientation ") attempts to relate the subsequent text critical and vocabulary studies to one another, and concluding observations ("Reorientation") respond to critics and competing hypotheses.

Many of Auld’s opinions flow from his conviction that the Septuagint of Joshua was based on a somewhat shorter and earlier text than MT. The following illustrates the kind of evidence he is working with: Joshua 8:30-35 in MT is found after 9:2 in the LXX, and Auld notes that it appears in a third position, after 5:1, in one of the Qumran scrolls. He holds that this paragraph, with its close ties to Deuteronomy 27, was not an original part of the work. While complimentary toward the work of Max Margolis and his editing the Greek manuscripts of Joshua, Auld believes that Margolis was mistaken in consistently favoring the MT over the LXX. Such inattention to the superior features of Joshua LXX is also found in Martin Noth, Volkmar Fritz, and other scholars.

Auld believes, with Rudolph Smend and Fritz, and contrary to Noth, that the division of the land in Joshua was a part of the first draft of the book, but he agrees with Noth, partly again on the basis of LXX, that there was no priestly contribution to the book of Joshua. Turning the Deuteronomistic History hypothesis on its head, Auld asks whether many of the principles now enshrined in Deuteronomy were deduced from portions of the story of the nation in Joshua-Kings.

1 Chronicles 6, in his view, preserves an earlier form of the list of Levitical Cities in Joshua 21, and the Greek text of Joshua 21 is earlier than Joshua 21 MT. The nine priestly cities in Judah (and Simeon) were the kernel of this material, with the present 48-city list being late and schematic. Chapters 20-21 of Joshua harmonize two approaches: Deut 4:41-43 and 19:1-3 propose that there were three such cities of refuge on both sides of the Jordan; 1 Chronicles 6 implies that all forty-eight of the Levitical cities were also cities of refuge.

Many of his literary critical stances are in tension with the majority scholarly opinion. Judges 1, he concludes, was composed on the basis of several notes scattered throughout Joshua and is not an early document. The secondary character of Judg 1:1-2:5 is supported by the duplication of Josh 24:28-31 in Judg 2:6-9. Part of Judges 1 suggests that the troubled history of the northern tribes was due to their failures during the time of their settlement in Canaan; another part compensates for the scanty mention of Judah in the rest of the book of Judges. Judges 2:6-3:6, usually considered the deuteronomistic introduction to the book of Judges, is also in this reconstruction a very late composition, and Judg 10:6-16 is indebted to 1 Samuel 12, but is not part of the same composition. Another deuteronomistic passage in Judg 6:7-10 is missing in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls and considered secondary. A two-verse supplement at the end of the LXX of Joshua contains materials, now found in Judg 2:12; 3:7, 14. While the majority of scholars believe that Joshua LXX supplement consists of excerpts from the opening part of Judges, Auld holds that Judg 2:10-3:6 "develop from this" [= the equivalent of Judg 2:12 in Joshua LXX]. Most of the stock details of Judg 2:10-3:6, in his opinion, are derived from the Othniel story in Judg 3:7-11, with some significant wording coming from 2 Kings 17. Most scholars see 3:7-11 as a schematic narrative about Othniel built on the principles laid out in Judg 2:10-3:6.

Auld believes that the Books of Kings must be "depriveleged," meaning that Kings is not the source behind Chronicles, but that both Kings and Chronicles drew on a common source that was written after the fall of Jerusalem. The book of Kings is a revision of a document that is at the earliest exilic. 1 Kings 8 was in the source document used by Kings and Chronicles and therefore needs to be distinguished from the deuteronomistic sermon on the fall of the Northern Kingdom we find in 2 Kings 17. Solomon’s prayer is not a deuteronomistic oration. Auld has developed these ideas more thoroughly in Kings without Privilege (1994), and he expresses an increasing skepticism in this book about the existence of a connected Deuteronomistic History.

The author laments that the critique by other scholars of the textual and literary observations in these essays has hitherto been offered only piecemeal, but there is clearly not space in a review to respond to so many criticisms of widely-held hypotheses. I hope to reply critically to his proposal about Kings and Chronicles being based on a common source in another context. Auld, however, may need to shoulder some of the blame for the lack of critique since this publication of unrevised Kleine Schriften does not result in a coherent and sustained development of his own argument. In addition, some of his discussions end in rhetorical questions rather than statements (e.g. p. 107), and he occasionally does not supply all the evidence one would need to make an evaluation (e.g. we are not told which parts of Josh 8:30-35 are actually on the leather of the Qumran fragment or the wording of the plus in v 35).

These essays offer many resources and challenges to all who want to read Joshua critically.

Ralph W. Klein

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago 63105