Childs and comparison

Brevard Childs was a theologian of the word of God.Footnote ¹⁰ God's self-revelation is the sine qua non of Childs’ approach, and, as is well-known, Childs upholds the ‘final form’ of scripture as the premier ‘vehicle’ of God's ‘revelation and instruction’.Footnote ¹¹ Childs was trained as a form critic and accepted that there were earlier, non-final forms preceding scripture's final shape. But relative to such forebears, Childs maintains that the biblical text in its received contours is the place at which the word of God is optimally available. This is not a historical or literary judgement, as if later (or the latest) contributors in the process of biblical composition were more accurate or more tasteful than their predecessors.Footnote ¹² It is, rather, a thick, theological claim about scripture's place in the economy of God's gracious self-revelation – and the progressive character of that self-revelation to Israel.

John Webster's book on Holy Scripture can serve as a helpful point of entry and comparison with Childs in this regard. Like Childs, Webster works to situate scripture within a larger account of God's ways in the world. Webster argues that the doctrine of scripture needs to be grafted back onto doctrinal loci such as providence and sanctification. Providence, for example, ‘speaks of the divine activities of ordering creaturely realities to their ends’. Scripture can then be construed as one such creaturely reality, uniquely ordered by God to its end of brokering God's self-revelation.Footnote ¹³ The concept of sanctification likewise addresses God's designation of creaturely realities to a new role in God's economy, but perhaps more than providence it secures their enduring creatureliness. Describing scripture as sanctified thus protects the integrity of composition as a human enterprise while also indicating God's ‘annexation’ of this process to God's economy.Footnote ¹⁴ Webster notes that the concept of sanctification offers the further benefit of including a ‘horizontal’ dimension; sanctification is not occasional or punctiliar, but ongoing and processual.Footnote ¹⁵

This is as close as Webster comes in his opening chapter to citing ‘Israel's history with God’.Footnote ¹⁶ And perhaps his omission occurred for fear of once more allowing the doctrine of scripture to collapse back into a mere rehearsal of its ‘natural history’.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet it was a history – and a history more particular than ‘God’ and ‘creaturely realities’ and ‘human beings’ writ large and generic – through which God curated scripture for the sake of God's self-revelation.Footnote ¹⁸ To quote Childs, ‘[t]he witness of Moses and the prophets, of the psalmists and sages, all arose within Israel's history’.Footnote ¹⁹ If Webster sits light to this particular history of God with Israel,Footnote ²⁰ as an Old Testament expert, Childs makes it integral to his account of God's economy.

One aspect of Childs’ emphasis on the history of God's life with Israel is his acknowledgement of its progressive character. That is, to use Christopher Seitz's phrase, the word of God ‘gathered steam’ in Israel.Footnote ²¹ God's self-disclosure to Israel did not arrive all at once; rather, God journeyed with a people over time and through the crises of their history such that earlier oracles inspired chain reactions of later reflection, reception and agglutination. Earlier stories attracted further episodes, grew into larger cycles and received editorial linkage to other complexes. The ‘horizontal dimension’ of God's life with Israel means that the final form of scripture is the place at which the word of God is optimally available, because it is there that we find it at ‘full stretch’Footnote ²² – configured so as to gather up all its past unfolding and to render that accumulated depth accessible for all generations. As Childs put it:

Seeking to hear the word of God from an earlier, reconstructed textual stratum is then to ‘kick against the goads’ of divine providence: wilfully to turn back the clock on the path of God's word through time by imagining oneself into a superseded frame of reference. In effect, it is like trying to put oneself in the place of the disciples of John the Baptist who confessed that they ‘have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit’ (Acts 19:2; or, mutatis mutandis, ‘a completed Isaiah’, or ‘a stabilised Pentateuch’).

And yet for all his insistence on the final form as the vehicle of God's word, Childs defends the usefulness of ‘recovering a depth dimension within the canonical form of the biblical text’.Footnote ²⁴ Childs supports the scholarly task of discerning the prehistory of the scriptural text insofar as this work aids in understanding the theological claim of the final form.Footnote ²⁵ Just as one might consult earlier sketches of an artistic masterwork to appreciate its features more finely, Childs commends reconstruction of textual and traditional strata preliminary to the received form. Recovering earlier levels of tradition ‘has its proper function within exegesis only in illuminating the final text’.Footnote ²⁶

Childs’ own practice suggests that one key way of ensuring reconstructive work illuminates and does not eclipse interpretation of the final form is to isolate only the earlier stages of a tradition that eventuated in scripture. In other words, there were plenty of traditions and practices in ancient Israel. But not all were received and passed on as a word from God with an enduring claim on the community of faith. If in some quarters in ancient Israel the goddess Asherah was once worshipped as a consort of YHWH, no tradition that would become scriptural included this as normative: it did not gather steam, but ran out of it. To quote Gamaliel, ‘it came to nought’ (Acts 5:38, AV). Childs rules out the recovery of this kind of dead-ended ‘tradition-historical trajectory’, since it ‘does not reflect actual layers within Israel's tradition, but is a critical construct lying outside of Israel's faith’.Footnote ²⁷

Childs criticises practitioners of comparative method for following just such a procedure. His objection to Frank Moore Cross is not that Cross busied himself with Ugaritic myths per se, but rather that he failed to direct his findings back towards expositing the scriptural text in its received form.Footnote ²⁸ Instead, by philological craft, Cross reanimated that which had come to nought (or never was): positing ‘an original meaning [without] raising the question to what extent such a signification was ever actually heard within Israel’ as God's word.Footnote ²⁹ In fact, so long as comparativists retrace the actual path of the word of God – and thereby clarify the cumulative achievement of its final form – Childs welcomes their endeavour. For example, because Exodus 6:3 remembers their convergence, Childs himself offers a brief, developmental account of the divine names, an account that Cross would basically approve: ancient Canaanite el names became identified with the deity YHWH of the Mosaic tradition.Footnote ³⁰ Childs also gives a qualified endorsement to the research of Werner Schmidt, who tells a story of YHWH’s evolution similar to Cross’, and uses comparative data from Ugarit to do it.Footnote ³¹

These, then, are the concerns governing Childs’ perspective on comparative scholarship: most importantly, it must fructify interpretation of the final form and, correlatively, delineation of scripture's prehistory must avoid importing ‘a critical construct lying outside of Israel's faith’ – i.e. asserting as interpretively crucial what was never heard as God's word in ancient Israel. It seems, however, that whereas the first concern drove Childs’ programme from early on (from at least 1970),Footnote ³² the latter grew in importance to him over time. Childs became increasingly doubtful about the utility and feasibility of reconstructing strata lying aback of scripture's final form, not least because the scholarly temptation to overinvest in pet historical speculations and to underinvest in scripture's received form as arbiter of interpretation proved so strong.

Perhaps Childs himself in his earliest publications did not resist the temptation completely.Footnote ³³ Nonetheless, other writings also from Childs’ early career – like his Exodus commentary – belong to his corpus and demonstrate his distinctive interpretive programme, albeit in an intermediate phase. Here, as in later works, Childs investigates tradition-history only so as to appreciate the final form. But unlike in his later works, Childs is less guarded in his stipulation that treating only of those traditions that were certifiably heard as the word of God in ancient Israel can help to gauge the progress of God's self-disclosure in Israel. At very least, Childs found a more constructive way of leveraging comparative materials – ‘inert sherds’ – for theological interpretation: he plied them as indirect witnesses to earlier layers of normative tradition.Footnote ³⁴

Textual criticism supplies a helpful analogy for understanding the uses to which Childs puts comparative data. As a discipline, textual criticism traditionally seeks to retrieve the most original form of a biblical text, especially by purifying it of later additions. If there are two Masoretic manuscripts and the later one has ‘pluses’ relative to the earlier, textual criticism weeds these accretions out. But another school of textual criticism does not seek a ‘more authentic’, earlier version; it evaluates the features of each manuscript, even the pluses of the younger, as interpretive data in their own right.Footnote ³⁵ This latter corresponds to Childs’ first and guiding principle for comparative research: one compares an earlier form of tradition with its successor in the final form not to gain purchase on a ‘more authentic’ version of the biblical text, but to understand the interpretive contribution of the final form in finer grain. ‘Plus materials’ of scripture relative to its earlier stages are not dross but a main point of interest.

But in textual criticism one need not only consult texts in the same lineage of manuscripts. One may also use versions – ancient translations – as indirect witnesses to an earlier form of the textual tradition. This is done by retroverting from the version to a proposed Hebrew Vorlage, an operation of disciplined speculation. To return to the opening simile, the David and Goliath story in the LXX is much shorter than in MT (1 Sam 16–18). No scene exists in the Greek, for example, of David taking food to his brothers.Footnote ³⁶ From LXX Samuel, many scholars reconstruct a shorter Hebrew base text, in relation to which MT represents an expansion. This shorter version went unguessed from Masoretic manuscripts. In his earlier works, Childs embraces the use of comparative data for a similar operation: for retroverting by disciplined speculation from an ancient Near Eastern analogue to an earlier stage of biblical tradition – a stage that was, notably, unreachable from text-internal clues. Such a reconstructed stage is necessarily a ‘critical construct lying outside of Israel's faith’.

The section below shows Childs working at his most comparative: in the second chapter of his 1974 Exodus commentary, itself an adaptation of a 1965 article.Footnote ³⁷ As will be seen, Childs labours over the Akkadian Sargon Legend as an indirect witness to a possible Vorlage from which the biblical writer(s) in Exodus 2:1–10 departed. This comparison enables Childs to specify the ‘transformation’ which the biblical writers wrought on their source material (i.e. the pluses and expansions).Footnote ³⁸ From the vantage of God's economy, that transformation represents not just human ingenuity but the effect of God's sanctification: when the God of Israel takes up the ancient Near Eastern story of a foundling destined for greatness and curates it for the sake of God's self-revelation, this – Exodus 2:1–10 – is the result.Footnote ³⁹ The fruit of Childs’ comparison between Vorlage and final form is a clearer articulation of the latter's theological meaning. The second section below reprises the same exercise, only this time using the comparative datum of the Mesha Inscription to clarify the theological achievement of 1 Kings 22. The end-goal of both demonstrations is, once more, to reactivate an exegetical possibility within Childs’ interpretive programme in hopes of tempering the feud between many comparativists and theological interpreters.

The Sargon Legend and Exodus 2

The Sargon Legend was discovered in stages during several archaeological digs of the 1850s and 1860s; it was first published in 1870.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is worth noting that, until this time, in all the long, long history of reading Exodus 2, interpreters had never had to reckon with the fact that the story of baby Moses in his reed basket had an antecedent. Not Origen, not Augustine, not Calvin: the challenge is unique to the modern era. Childs’ 1965 article on the birth of Moses was published less than 100 years into Christian reflection on this novum. Hugo Gressmann, whom Childs’ article cites as the most recent, important entry on the topic, wrote in 1913, a mere forty or so years after the Sargon Legend first came to light.Footnote ⁴¹ Our ‘season of interpretation’ has been understandably occupied with a new surfeit of historical issues.Footnote ⁴²

The Sargon Legend is the fictional autobiography of an Akkadian king, Sargon, likely written in the Neo-Assyrian period (eighth century bce).Footnote ⁴³ It tells in first person of how Sargon's mother, who was a priestess,

Baby Sargon is then found by ‘Aqqi the water bearer’, who adopts him and raises him. Because of the deity Ishtar's favour, Sargon later rises to become a mighty and conquering king.

Childs points out commonalities between this birth legend and Exodus 2: in both stories, ‘a rejected child is exposed to danger, rescued, nurtured into manhood, and finally succeeds to a position of honor’.Footnote ⁴⁵ In his article (though not in his commentary) Childs argues at length from other comparative data that several additional features of Exodus 2 are also traditional, including Moses’ adoption as a foundling, his deliverance over to a paid wet nurse and his naming.Footnote ⁴⁶ Childs notes that the Sargon Legend and Exodus 2 both paper over unknown or dubious parentage.Footnote ⁴⁷ Gressmann made the further claim that Exodus 2 inherited from its Vorlage the threat to the child's life and a prophecy of his future greatness, but this Childs denies.Footnote ⁴⁸ Nonetheless, even granting that the theme of threat is unique to the biblical Moses story and not borrowed from its predecessor, what remains is a substantial range of characteristics shared between the Sargon Legend and Exodus 2.

To be clear, Childs is not claiming that Exodus 2 is directly dependent on the Sargon Legend, as if the writer of Exodus 2 had a copy of the cuneiform text before him as he wrote (though others have made that case).Footnote ⁴⁹ Rather, Childs uses the Sargon Legend as an indirect witness to the tradition from which the biblical writer likely worked. His goal is not to sort out what is ‘authentic’ versus what is ‘secondary’ in the birth story of Moses. The ‘plus materials’ of Exodus 2 relative to its antecedent are exactly the point of Childs’ interest: ‘the purpose of studying the traditional material has been to provide a perspective from which to understand more clearly the newer, non-conventional elements of the chapter’.Footnote ⁵⁰ These newer, non-conventional additions to the inherited story represent the contribution of the biblical text – indeed, the ‘transformation’ which it effected on the traditional materials.Footnote ⁵¹

This transformation is theologically laden: to become an adequate witness of the God of Israel, it was necessary for Israel's authors to make certain modifications to the tradition of a foundling set loose on the water, adopted and grown to greatness. Theologically, from the perspective of God's work, God's ‘annexation’ of this ancient Near Eastern tale to God's self-revelation resulted in several additions and recalibrations.

Childs writes of the most important change:

‘The weight of the whole story has shifted’ – the Sargon Legend (or its lookalike from which the biblical author departed) represents the boasting of a self-made king, who rose from obscure origins and apprenticeship to a lowly water-bearer to conquer vast territories.Footnote ⁵³ But in Exodus, the birth story does not exemplify Moses’ lowly origins so much as his initial privilege: he is adopted by royalty! And, as Childs observes, he subsequently leaves it behind. Instead of climaxing with the kingly prerogatives of its hero, Exodus begins with his kingly prerogatives – and then shows Moses following a different and non-kingly way: namely, the way of standing in solidarity with YHWH’s people, Israel (2:11–15) and of hearkening to the command of YHWH (3:1–12).

As such, Childs rightly emphasises that the role of the birth story in the final, scriptural presentation is preparatory: Moses has been ‘miraculously saved from destruction and prepared for a special mission’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The full significance of Moses’ rescue and preparation is yet future in the narrative.Footnote ⁵⁵ But already in Exodus 2, Moses’ greatness differs from Sargon's. Perhaps like Sargon's, his origin is suspect or unusual; but unlike the Akkadian conqueror, Moses’ greatness has to do with his identification with the Hebrews and, in Exodus 3, with the call of their God, YHWH.

Childs in his corpus never draws lines overtly between the birth story of Moses and the larger ‘canonical Moses’ of the whole Pentateuch, but the two are ripe for connection.Footnote ⁵⁶ Childs writes of the crucial importance of Moses to the final form of the Pentateuch: Moses is the literary guardian and guarantor of Torah from Sinai. ‘The most important point to make’, Childs says, ‘is that Moses was assigned a unique role in Israel . . . as mediator of the covenant’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Moses’ office as mediator was singular because the divine revelation on Sinai that he mediated to Israel was also singular in its authority: ‘he was the only means by which Israel knew anything about God to begin with’.Footnote ⁵⁸ To the uniqueness of these two (Moses’ office and the Torah Moses received) Moses’ own biographical uniqueness makes a fugue: a reinforcing variation on the common theme.

Moses’ singular personal story of rescue and adoption buttresses the singular theological authoritativeness of Torah from Sinai. Moses’ birth story, as Childs observes, marks him out as special and destined for greatness. And that specialness and greatness, as noted, has fundamentally to do with Moses’ solidarity with the Hebrews and his call by YHWH. Moses’ birth story thus serves as a fitting prelude to his unique role in the final form as covenant mediator. Childs’ comparison with the Sargon Legend helps to bring these features of Moses’ portraiture in the final form into sharper relief.

The Mesha Inscription and 1 Kings 22

The Mesha Inscription (henceforth MI) came to public attention in 1870, the same year the Sargon Legend was published.Footnote ⁵⁹ A royal monumental inscription, it recites the exploits of a ninth-century bce Moabite king in a dialect extremely similar to biblical Hebrew. Childs never commented on MI, and so the following section goes beyond Childs in at least that regard. It also goes beyond Childs in that it compares the final form of scripture with a reconstructed scenario in ancient Israel that Childs expressly rejects. And yet inasmuch as the following exercise reprises Childs’ operation with the Sargon Legend, it cannot be said to be alien to his programme; anathema to Childs’ own judgement, but different in scale and not in kind from Childs’ own earlier procedure.

As with Childs’ use of the Sargon Legend, the following section plies MI only so as to illumine scripture's final form. And like Childs’ treatment of the Sargon Legend, it uses MI as an indirect witness to an earlier stage of the biblical tradition. In common with the mature Childs, it is alert to the danger of artificially reanimating what ‘came to nought’ and was never received as normative in ancient Israel. Nonetheless, it remains a retroversion by disciplined speculation – and the earlier situation it recovers was hardly knowable from the particular biblical text itself.

The use of MI as an indirect witness to an earlier form of scriptural tradition is more complicated than the Sargon Legend. The Sargon Legend directly underlies the biblical text, or (so Childs) closely approximates that which underlies the biblical text. This is not so for MI; no scholar claims that MI directly underlies or closely approximates any biblical text.Footnote ⁶⁰ The manner in which MI attests a prior stage of biblical tradition is less direct: less formal and literary than with the Sargon Legend, and more institutional. MI gives indirect evidence about the institution of prophecy in monarchic Israel, and not about a literary precursor to the biblical text. It acts as an external confirmation of clues present within the Bible suggesting that prophets were (whatever else they may also have been) a part of the royal bureaucracy and an arm of the king's divinatory apparatus. Reconstructing the institutional Vorlage of a biblical text by using MI is more difficult and circuitous, more like retroverting to the Hebrew from the targumim or the Peshitta, versions standing at greater remove from their Hebrew base text than the LXX of the previous analogy.

In MI two oracles from the national deity Kemosh address the Moabite king, Mesha. This king, Mesha, sought to recover disputed territory in the Transjordan that had been lost to the Omri dynasty in Israel. Kemosh commands Mesha in two direct speeches to attack two places. Kemosh first commands king Mesha to ‘Go (ךלה), seize (זחא) Nebo from Israel’ (line 14). Kemosh later commands Mesha to ‘Go down (דרי), fight against (םחל) Ḥoronen’ (line 32). Both times, an imperative of a verb of motion precedes an imperative of military action with a place-name as direct object. MI does not specify the human agents that mediated Kemosh's voice; they could have been technical diviners or non-technical intermediaries.Footnote ⁶¹

Many of these same features of MI appear in 1 Kings 22, but overall, it is the institutional role of prophecy that runs parallel. Prophets in this biblical text function as part of the royal divinatory apparatus, offering supernatural intelligence to the royal war machine. The situation is comparable: the king of Israel, Ahab, and his vassal king Jehoshaphat seek to recover disputed territory in the Transjordan that had been lost to Aram. The kings enquire of the national deity, YHWH, by gathering four hundred prophets and asking if they should go (ךלה) to fight against (םחל) Ramoth-gilead (22:6a). The prophets answer: ‘Go up!’ (הלע)’ (v. 6b). ‘My lord will give (it) into the hand of the king’. Later in the same chapter the prophets repeat and expand this oracle: ‘Go up (הלע) to Ramoth-gilead and triumph (חלצ); YHWH will give it into the hand of the king’ (22:12). The court prophets mediate a single imperative verb of motion from YHWH, and, in the repetition of their oracle in 22:12, one followed by a place-name and an imperative verb.

This picture of prophecy corresponds to that revealed by other materials unearthed from the ancient Near East, especially the Neo-Assyrian prophecies. Like MI, these documents record prophetic oracles given in service of the royal divinatory apparatus: they encourage the king and often promise military victory.Footnote ⁶² These comparative data together suggest that – barring a historical aberration – prophecy in ancient Israel may have functioned similarly: as a part of the state bureaucracy, and so fundamentally supportive of it. This is not to say there weren't prophets in the ancient Near East – or in ancient Israel – who criticised the king.Footnote ⁶³ But such criticisms were likely recuperative and system-immanent. The legitimacy of kingship remained intact.Footnote ⁶⁴

If this is true, then it suggests the ‘plus materials’ of 1 Kings 22 are in fact the entire Micaiah story, in which the court prophets are false prophets – and the true prophet, Micaiah, issues an oracle of doom: ‘I saw all Israel scattered on the hills (םירהה־לא םיצפנ) like sheep without a shepherd! And then YHWH said, “they have no master. Let them return safely to their own homes”’ (22:17).Footnote ⁶⁵ Micaiah's prophecy, in context, foretells the death of Ahab in battle (22:29–38). But it anticipates not just the death of a single king but the suspension of kingship itself. Again, barring a historical aberration, this kind of oracle is hard to imagine in the ninth century when Ahab was king.Footnote ⁶⁶

What is not being claimed is that the text of 1 Kings 22 is literarily composite. The story of the four hundred prophets belongs together with Micaiah.Footnote ⁶⁷ Rather, what is argued is that the chapter as a whole remembers an earlier institution of prophecy in Israel, and then it condemns and supplements its own historical past.Footnote ⁶⁸ If, in an earlier era, the word of God came straight from the mouths of the official divinatory experts, the contribution of scripture's final form is to pass judgement on this simplistic state of affairs. National defeat falsified their recuperative message so that, in Reinhard Kratz's words, ‘the seers and prophets of old were transformed into “false” prophets’.Footnote ⁶⁹ By contrast, the hero of 1 Kings 22 is Micaiah, the dissident prophet of doom – who may represent an ‘addition’ relative to the historical practice of prophecy in the ninth century, but who became necessary to a literary presentation of prophecy that took up the insights gained from journeying with God through the crises of Israel's history. Micaiah is the ‘newer, non-conventional element’ – the ‘transformation’ the biblical writers wrought on their tradition.Footnote ⁷⁰

Childs rejects this reconstruction of Israel's religious history: he repudiates the (Wellhausian) view that an ‘ideology of kingship’ obtained in ancient Israel up until the time of the Assyrian threat when prophets first announced doom.Footnote ⁷¹ He criticises such a reconstruction precisely on the grounds that it depends overmuch on a ‘critical construct lying outside of Israel's faith’. Its ‘scientifically reconstructed history’ is wholly ‘etic’ and discordant with ‘Israel's own testimony’ and Israel's own memory, according to which there never was a time when Israel lived before God oblivious to the possibility of divine wrath and desertion. And yet, as we have seen, Childs was himself capable – in his earlier days – of reconstructing an earlier form of biblical tradition through disciplined speculation: an earlier form to which scripture itself – Israel's own testimony and memory! – hardly give access. The text of Exodus 2 is as mute about a prior stage of the foundling story as 1 Kings 22 is about an earlier condition of prophecy when God's word through prophets was only recuperative. But in fact, unlike the proposed Vorlage of Exodus 2, the reconstructed scenario of ‘sacral kingship’ vacant of doom prophecy actually does count other biblical witnesses.Footnote ⁷² It is thus not like the worship of Asherah, which came to nought and never belonged to any of Israel's traditions that would become scriptural.

Childs himself refers to 1 Kings 22 twice: while discussing ‘the Deuteronomistic Redaction’, Childs lists Micaiah among the ‘prophetic stories’ that the ‘Dtr. Writer’ used as a source.Footnote ⁷³ But the stories’ provenance is not his focus. In his biblical theology and at greater length in his introductory treatment of Kings, Childs commends von Rad's essay on the crucial role these prophetic stories play within the message of the book of Kings, taken as a whole.Footnote ⁷⁴ That message in the final form is pre-eminently theological: God's word of judgement pierces through lies and disguises with ‘history-creating force’ – even when its communicators are unworthy.Footnote ⁷⁵ The psychology and the ethics of true and false prophecy are incidental to the theological demonstration that the final form emplots. Childs’ words about 1 Kings 13 – another odd prophetic story involving untruthful prophecy – apply well to 1 Kings 22, too: ‘the narrative is presented from such a theocentric perspective that it appears almost incomprehensible to rational reflection. All the ethical issues are simply by-passed. The story has to do with the fulfilment of God's word of judgment which will not tolerate any softening or compromise.’Footnote ⁷⁶

From the perspective of God's economy, the additions made by the final form of scripture to the earlier institution of prophecy don't just represent human ingenuity. The kind of prophecy featured in MI – and in similar, earlier layers of Israel's own tradition – made for an inadequate witness to God. It was too simple: God's faithfulness to Israel did not mean God's word would only ever be recuperative, or that God would always patronise the human kingship (at least in a straightforward, non-eschatological manner!). Rather, God's annexation of the common ancient Near Eastern phenomenon of prophetic oracles to God's self-revelation resulted in several adjustments thereto: namely, it expanded the repertoire of God's address to include oracles of doom on king and country. Comparison between MI and 1 Kings 22 helps to bring these theological features of scripture's final form into sharper relief.