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Testimony to Otherwise: The Witness of Elijah and Elisha. By Walter Brueggemann, St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001. 140 pages.
In this work, Brueggemann takes a literary approach to the stories of Elijah and Elisha found in 1 and 2 Kings. These stories occur in the context of the royal narrative of the kings of Israel and Judah, but they represent a different worldview. The royal narrative makes a claim about life as it is. The stories of the prophets question and undermine this claim and offer a vision of an "'otherwise' as a genuine possibility" (3). By giving voice to the reality of this otherwise, the prophets present the community of faith with "a radical either/or decision" to accept the given or to seek the otherwise, "the world enacted by YHWH" (2). Seeking the otherwise requires imagination, which Brueggemann describes as "the God-given, emancipated capacity to picture (or image) reality - God, world, self- in alternative ways outside conventional, commonly accepted givens" (27).
A brief examination of II Kings 5:1-19 illustrates Brueggemann's approach and shows how the testimony to the possibility of an otherwise changes reality. The Syrian commander Naaman, a powerful military man, is afflicted with leprosy. That this affliction is a death sentence for Naaman is a given. In...