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Bill Brown has rightfully taken his place among the most gifted scholars presently working in Old Testament studies. Brown's work pace is amazing, his literary output prodigious - worthy of a Walter Brueggemann - the present volume being at least his fourth or fifth monograph. This tally does not include a number of commentaries, numerous articles and essays, and three or four edited collections. But it is not only his work pace that is 'Brueggemannesque': Brown's writing and rhetorical flair are also reminiscent of Brueggemann in their immediacy, evocativeness, and impact. Even more impressive, this book stands to make an impact on Psalms-scholarship not unlike Brueggemann's own seminal contributions to the study of the Psalms (especially his alternative typology of orientation-disorientation-new orientation). These comparisons are quite serendipitous as Brown moved to fill the Old Testament position at Columbia Theological Seminary, previously held by Brueggemann.
Brown has written on a number of topics with great effect and it is to our good fortune that he has now set his sights on the Psalms. In Seeing the Psalms , Brown advocates a brilliant but rather simple thesis: the psalms qua poetry are replete with metaphors and these metaphors deserve as much attention and as thorough an investigation as the Psalms' other aspects (e.g., parallelism, metre [if it exists], cultic significance, form-types, place in Israelite religion, etc.), each of which has received intense if not exhaustive scrutiny. As obvious as it seems, the thesis is rather novel: thoroughgoing studies of metaphor are still few and far between in biblical studies, and Brown's is the first monograph devoted exclusively to analysing them throughout the Psalter as a whole. Given this hole in previous scholarship, Brown's work is to a large degree the first of its kind. The standard he has set is impressive; the bar for subsequent studies is set high.
After an introduction that introduces the poetics of psalmic metaphor and imagination, and which also lays some groundwork and theory in image and metaphor analysis, Brown offers chapters on particular metaphors or metaphor-complexes....