Heath A. Thomas and Brittany N. Melton, eds. <i>Reading Lamentations Intertextually</i>

This book continues an LHBOTS series on intertextuality. Three earlier volumes, all edited by Katharine Dell and Will Kynes, dealt with Wisdom texts, Job (2013), Ecclesiastes (2014), and Proverbs (2019). The initial essay in the first volume, in which John Barton discusses the academic background and meanings of the term, remains an invaluable, if challenging, contribution to the series as a whole. In this volume, three types of intertextuality are investigated: relating to the direct use of material found in earlier literature, to the independent and different use of similar material, or to a combination of either with a dominating canonical factor—though a few essays do defy a straightforward classification. As hitherto, the present volume primes readers with an invaluable editorial introduction that guides readers through the following essay chapters. Twenty detailed essays are organized along the lines of the first of the three earlier volumes of the series: Lamentations’ relationship to the Torah, the Prophets, the Writings, and also to postbiblical literature. Due to the volume’s wide coverage, for this review, each type will be considered separately with only samples of specific essays discussed in detail, rather than a full analysis of all twenty.The first type reflects the traditional, diachronic meaning that scholars have attached to the term “intertextuality.” Nearly all the relevant essays find reception of Lamentations in later texts, while one essay treats Lamentations as the borrower. In one example, Katie M. Heffelfinger (pp. 85–96) develops earlier scholars’ view of literary allusions to divine comfort in Second Isaiah as an exilic response to its lack in Lamentations. She urges that Second Isaiah’s emphasis on the divine voice constitutes a structural reinforcement of such allusions and reveals its intention to be an answer to Lamentations’ appeals that breaks the divine silence in that text. Heffelfinger takes Isa 49:13–26 as an example of divine speech that not only incorporates the complaint of divine abandonment in Lam 5:20 but redeploys maternal imagery from Lamentations, using it positively of Yahweh rather than negatively of Judean women.The second type of intertextuality represents a postmodern, “readerly” definition. The reader creates a synchronic dialogue from a comparative study of similar material that independently is treated in different ways. Texts are regarded as spatial—occupying different places in space rather than in time. For instance, Samuel E. Balentine sets the horrific destruction of Zion and the people’s plight found in Lamentations over against the normative cultic and theological background of Leviticus (pp. 29–42). The priests, once guardians of Israel’s purity, defiled themselves and so deserved the lepers’ shunning they had advocated (Lev 13:45; Lam 4:15). Balentine suggests that Lamentations lays blame at God’s own door, for example, finding in Lam 2:1a, 2c references to God’s being the agent of defilement and in 2:6a to waging a violent assault upon the temple. Elizabeth Boase discusses Lamentations and Deuteronomy as different responses to destruction and exile (pp. 55–69). She has abandoned the frequently encountered academic agreement found between both Deuteronomy and Lamentations, in which destruction and exile are the result of sin. Instead, stimulated by more recent study, she finds distinct yet self-related responses to communal trauma and seeks to come up with a possible contribution for both regarding traumatic experience. While Lamentations offers a variety of different perspectives on the people’s life experience, Deuteronomy’s contribution is one of causal predictability. Boase finds in this contrast successive stages in recovery from trauma: remembering the traumatic event in Lamentations and reconnecting to normal life in Deuteronomy and also in parts of Lamentations. These different voices are not competing voices but fit their rhetorical stages; each one has its necessary place in traumatic experience.The third variety of intertextuality relates to a prevailing factor of scriptural canonicity as context, whether the treatment is diachronic or synchronic. Brittany N. Melton’s essay strikingly pinpoints and contrasts unnatural phenomena in the Megilloth (Esther, Ruth, Song of Songs, and Lamentations), where the “conspicuous” role of women is coupled with the “inconspicuous” role of God (pp. 193–203). She suggests that Judah’s exilic experience of vulnerability and disempowerment and of inability to discern the divine will for them resonated with the experience of women in ancient society. Texts of women acting boldly provided hope for the postexilic community that eventually God’s hidden purposes would triumph. Melton finds God’s absence harder to explain but links it with the less direct way of speaking of God in the Second Temple period. Accordingly, disempowered Israel was forced to take the initiative, and the women in the Megilloth portray this need.Intertextuality of any type has the potential to open a side door for the exegete of the basic text and to afford him or her with a new understanding of it in some respect, thus revealing the relevance of other texts. It is to be hoped that this series will continue to challenge readers with fresh insights to assess.