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Priests, Prophets, Diviners, Sages: A Socio-historical Study of Religious Specialists in Ancient Israel. By Lester L. Grabbe. Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1995, xviii + 261, $20.00 paper.
Grabbe examines all the main forms of religious specialists in Israel-those who devote themselves to "a particular branch of religion, or viewed organizationally, of a religious system" (p. 2). The author takes a very skeptical view of the historical reliability of Biblical texts because the original authors and redactors did not have an unbiased view of what they were describing. Thus Grabbe relies heavily on (1) hints in the text, (2) cross-cultural comparisons and (3) some authentic texts. To aid his approach, he uses anthropological enthnographies of primitive peoples plus M. Weber's sociological method of developing "ideal types" to suggest new possible interpretations, to provide models that can be tested, to fill in gaps missing in the Bible and to suggest new questions to ask the Biblical text. By taking a synchronic look at various OT texts and comparing them to ancient Near Eastern material (which is often quite a good survey), Grabbe develops a Gestalt, or composite picture of each religious specialist: the king, priest, prophet, diviner and the sage. The main difficulty with his methodology is that it excessively highlights minor and unclear points (e.g. Joseph's divination cup) and regards any theological interpretation...