Andrew R. Davis. <i>The Book of Amos and Its Audiences: Prophecy, Poetry, and Rhetoric</i>

The author, associate professor at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, explores the probability that the audience addressed in a text often will differ from those designed to be addressed by the text. The latter would be another audience, contemporary with the producers of the text for whom its message was actually intended. This literary feature, Davis argues, exemplifies a “rhetoric of entrapment” by which those later readers, by agreeing with the indictment against evildoers in the textual world, condemn themselves. They are the real targets of the work. Davis’s test case is the prophetic book of Amos, which, he believes, exhibits several groups of readers that correspond to the redactional layers.The theoretical grounding of the argument is laid out in the first chapter. Davis looks to poetic studies for his approach of “overreading.” The idea is that the goal of the tradents who reworked a text was that “overhearers” or “overreaders” of the tradents’ own context would discern a word for themselves. This can happen, Davis argues, because there is a level of continuity between the addressees of the textual world and later groups. Methodologically, identification of these subsequent readers (and their setting) requires careful attention to textual particulars and to the sociohistorical location of those readers. The second chapter illustrates the phenomenon of multiple audiences in literature with examples taken from English lyric poetry, Roman satire, and some Old Testament passages. In the volume’s three subsequent chapters, Davis applies this method to passages in Amos.In chapter 3, Davis turns to Amos 6:1–7. Based on his critical presuppositions, he sees three different addressees in 6:1–7. One would have been those who may have heard a message from the prophet. A second is manifest by the mention of Zion in v. 1 and the comparison of v. 2, revealing that Judah ultimately is in view, not the well-to-do of Samaria of Amos’s day. Davis locates the tradents who wrote these lines in mid-eighth century Judah, after the time of the prophet but before the fall of the northern kingdom in 722 BC. Taking his cue from liturgical elements in 6:3–7 (wine bowls, the oil for anointing, musical instruments, the mention of David, the marzeaḥ feast), Davis claims that this text’s true audience were the decadent temple personnel in Jerusalem. They would have recognized themselves in the passage’s censure of cultic excesses.Amos 3:9–11 is treated in chapter 4. In Davis’s critical reconstruction, the addressees of this passage lie beyond the fictive audience of Amos’s warning to Samaria. They are Judah in the late eighth century, which was contemplating joining a coalition against Assyria in 713–711 BC. The nations cited in 3:9 would refer to potential allies in that rebellion (cf. Isa. 18:1–7; 20:1–4). Verses 10–11, earlier fragments of words against the northern capital, were now employed to portray Judah’s sins and foretell its possible demise if they were to make that disastrous foreign policy decision.Davis’s last example is Amos 7:10–17 (chapter 5). Like many critical scholars, he locates this passage in postexilic Yehud. Davis argues that two purposes undergird this scene. On the one hand, it would reflect the move at that time to recenter the proper place for prophecy from the religious center at Mizpah/Bethel after the Babylonian destruction back to Jerusalem. On the other hand, and more importantly, Davis contends that the passage was an attempt to redefine postexilic prophecy in at least two ways. First, the exchange between Amos and Amaziah would communicate that prophecy was no longer to be characterized by visions but rather by the divine word; the new identity of postexilic prophets was that they now were scribal prophets. Second, by giving Amos a rural origin (Tekoa), it would have been easier for Yehud’s largely peasant population to accept these scribal prophets (who, in this view, were urban elites) as legitimate heirs of the Amos tradition. A surface reading of 7:10–17 simply as a harsh confrontation between the eighth-century prophet and the high priest misses what the prophets who wrote this passage were attempting to do.A short epilogue presents more examples from other Old Testament texts, as well as Amos 4:1–3 (a complicated text whose addressees are too difficult to ascertain with confidence), that Davies believes also demonstrate this literary phenomenon of “overreading.”The title, The Book of Amos and Its Audiences, aptly reflects what Davies tries to uncover and explain in this volume. He does not interact with the arguments of scholars who take Amos as an overwhelmingly unified text connected to the eighth-century prophet (Davies cannot say for sure that Amos was a historical person), although occasionally some of these scholars appear in footnotes. His thesis conceptually makes sense, and the theoretical framework can be useful for reading biblical texts. This is Davies’s most valuable contribution. Most scholars could agree that biblical texts can have multiple audiences within their textual world and also have in view other hearers and readers than those within that world. This work provides a lens and a vocabulary to process this feature.The challenge is to specify who those other addressees might have been and what the textual message was to each. The success of Davis’s presentation depends on how convincing the critical reconstructions of his hypothetical audiences within their respective settings are to his readers. This reviewer found his arguments for the three Amos passages interesting, at best possible, but not probable (particularly the first and third). Scholars committed to redactional approaches, however, might receive the book as opening up new ways to entertain fresh ideas about the work of tradents.