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In my reading today of Rolf Rendtorff’s The Old Testament: An Introduction, pages 189 and 192 stood out to me.
On page 182, Rendtorff criticizes biblical scholars who try to discern the original words of a prophet in the book that bears his name, as if those are the very words of God. Rendtorff doesn’t really explain why he feels as he does, but perhaps he thinks that we should honor the redaction, reinterpretation, and re-application of prophecies that occur within the prophetic books, for those things demonstrate the prophecies’ function as Scripture within a religious community, which seeks to apply them to its own context.
On page 192, Rendtorff states that we can’t establish the historical profile of Isaiah with certainty from the book the bears his name, for its portrait of Isaiah “has been deliberately shaped in retrospect”.
