Mark J. Boda, «Freeing the Burden of Prophecy:Mas%s%a4) and the Legitimacy of Prophecy in Zech 9–14», Vol. 87 (2006) 338-357
Prior to the 1980’s the definition of the Hebrew term mas%s%a4) as a reference to
prophetic speech or literature, was largely dominated by etymological
argumentation. However, Richard Weis, in his 1986 Claremont dissertation
leveraged form-critical categories and evidence to argue that this term was a
formal tag defining a particular type of literature, an argument that has been
applied and developed by the subsequent work of Marvin Sweeney (Isaiah,
FOTL; Book of the Twelve, Berit Olam) and Michael Floyd (JBL 12.1 [2002] 401-
422). This paper offers a critical review of this history of research with a view to
its impact on the interpretation of Zechariah 9–14. A new proposal is put forward
for the use of this term in Zechariah 9–14, one that reveals the influence of
Jeremianic tradition and highlights concern over certain prophetic streams in the
community that produced these texts.
Freeing the Burden of Prophecy 349
The variety in the formal aspects of the texts should have been a
signal to Weis that he may not be dealing with a form at all (29). The
appeal to “purpose†or “intention†appears to be a last ditch attempt to
rescue his genre hypothesis. One could say in response to Weis, that in
prophetic speech one can speak (for instance) about the “intention†to
express God’s impending judgment, but this does not signal a form,
since a variety of prophetic speech forms expresses this intention (woe
oracles, dirges, laments, announcements of judgment, lawsuits), but do
so with radically different forms.
Furthermore, when Weis treats the issue of “intention†again he
finds a dominant intention, but then must admit that many texts do not
fit this category. In the end, not only must he try to fit the many
“deviations†into his hypothesis, but must generalize the intention to
the point that it could describe many prophetic texts which are not
ma¢¢Ë’. So when he concludes: “Perhaps we should think in terms of
the genre responding to situations corresponding to one or the other of
these two basic problems (indeterminacy connected with the
revelation, indeterminacy connected with the human situation), or to
some combination of both†(30), the issue is that prophetic texts often
speak to problems of indeterminacy in the human situation. This
feature cannot be limited to ma¢¢Ë’.
When Weis investigates the genre’s use (the ma¢¢Ë’ texts as they
function in their final literary context), he is limited in the number of
texts which he can use and in each case must rely on contentious
conclusions on the shape of the final form of the respective books,
especially in the case of the ma¢¢Ë’ texts in Isaiah and Zechariah-
Malachi.
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theophany a Gattung, but he defines it in terms of formulaic themes and motifs
that tend to cluster in the context of various compositional forms, without ever
constituting an independent form of their ownâ€.
(29) In dealing with the term ma¢¢Ë’ in the book of Isaiah, Sweeney speaks of
“a consistent generic pattern known as the ma¢¢Ë’ or prophetic pronouncementâ€
which he admits “has no fixed structure and may be composed of a number of
diverse generic elementsâ€; SWEENEY, Isaiah 1–39, 227; so similarly in Sweeney’s
work on Habakkuk, M.A. SWEENEY, “Structure, Genre, and Intent in the Book of
Habakkukâ€, VT 41 (1991) 65: “the genre is not constituted by a well-defined
literary structure as examples of ma¢¢Ë’ôt texts included a variety of literary
elementsâ€. For similar remarks see SWEENEY, Twelve, 423-425, 458-459; cf. M.A.
SWEENEY, “Concerning the Structure and Generic Character of the Book of
Nahumâ€, ZAW 104 (1992) 364-377.
(30) WEIS, “Definitionâ€, 230.
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