This book takes the reader into the world of recent German-language scholarship on the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. Schmid correlates substantial changed understandings of the literary/redactional history of the biblical text with revised accounts of theological thinking on the part of those responsible for the text's formation. As such, this is essentially a study in the history of ideas and redaction, which does not seek ‘any immediate kerygmatic or normative functions’ (p. xvii).

Schmid works lucidly through a wide range of issues appropriate to this historical project. There is methodological discussion of the nature of ‘theology’ in relation to the Bible, and of the pluriformity of the biblical documents as Hebrew Bible, Old Testament and Tanakh. There is reflection on the theological significance of extant Hebrew Bibles and Old Testaments as overall collections. There is reflection on the theological meaning of the three constituent parts of the Hebrew Bible (Torah, Nevi'im, Ketuvim) as discrete collections. There is an account of the principal theological guidelines in the literary history of the Hebrew Bible from the eighth to the second centuries bce. The longest part of the book is an account of themes in the theology of the Hebrew Bible, themes both familiar and less familiar: 1) literary genres and forms of theological statements; 2) perceptions and impressions of God; 3) from counterworld to everyday world: the basic precepts of life; 4) divine intervention in history; 5) political theology; 6) law and righteousness; 7) temple worship and sacrifice; 8) people of a nation, people of God and the individual; 9) monarchy, theocracy and anticipation of a ruler; 10) Zion and Sinai; 11) interpretations of humanity; 12) theological diversity and unity.

The book is clearly written and has real strengths. One of the most striking, for those mindful of Wellhausen and the history of modern scholarship, is the positive evaluation of the priestly material:

Or:

Some of the proposed redactional interpretations are suggestive. For example, ‘the notion of a judgment of “all flesh” in the final two verses of Jer. 45:5–6 before the complex of oracles against the foreign nations in Jer. 46–51 interprets the latter as a prophecy of world judgment’ (p. 348). In relation to recurrent debates about a possible ‘centre’ for the Hebrew Bible, Schmid nicely observes, with reference to the Torah, that ‘the Hebrew Bible … does not have a “middle”, but does have a prominent “head piece”’ (p. 444).

Overall, however, my response to the book is distinctly mixed. Throughout, the theological formulations – the understandings of the tradents of the material – are kept in closest contact with the historical context and literary developments that accompany them. One consequence is that Schmid's formulations can sometimes sound reductive in a way that I think he may not intend. For example, the Persian period, which is now considered to be the context for the redaction of a majority of Hebrew Bible material, is seen as a time when, for Israel's tradents, ‘the salvific goal of Yhwh's history with Israel and the world has virtually been accomplished’; Schmid observes that ‘this position is basically nothing more than the Jewish reception of the official Persian imperial ideology’ (p. 241). Moreover, God's universality and concern for justice appears to be the result of ancient Near Eastern conceptions of a solar deity: ‘A God represented by the sun can have the entire earth in view … God is a reliable entity in the same way that one can rely on the daily rising and setting of the sun’ (pp. 290–1). Although Schmid says that he recognises only a ‘kernel of truth’ in the reductive critique of religion characteristic of Feuerbach and Freud (p. 352), some might infer that his discussions suggest rather more than a kernel. Schmid himself is clear about the value of his work within the wider context of Christian theology. But the fact that he restricts himself to historical description and eschews explicit questions about criteria for constructive theological evaluation in relation to possible enduring truth may mean that some readers who are not antecedently committed to the enduring theological value of the biblical documents might perhaps wonder what enduring value there really is.

Relatedly, the strict focus on historical and redactional developments means that much that has come to characterize recent Hebrew Bible scholarship, at least outside Germany, is missing. Neither the renewed literary insights of, say, Alter, Sternberg and Berlin, nor the hermeneutical insights of Gadamer and Ricoeur make any apparent difference to Schmid's handling of the biblical text. Recent Hebrew Bible theologies mentioned on the first page are solely German, and most of the sectional bibliographies are strongly German-language. One would not know that Childs and Brueggemann, or Levenson, had made any contributions to thinking about the possible nature and purpose of the theology of the Hebrew Bible. In addition, the major theological topic of election, on which Levenson has initiated fresh debate and literature, hardly features in Schmid's topical discussions.

One further difficulty is that some of Schmid's claims about redactional purpose and meaning can feel somewhat too quick and too confident. For example, he claims that the promise of a ‘prophet like Moses’ in Deuteronomy 18:15 is ‘contradicted’ and ‘abrogated’ by the ‘no other prophet like Moses’ in Deuteronomy 34:10, because of a redactional concern to affirm Moses’ incomparability (p. 146). Yet if the point of 18:15 is similarity rather than equality, there may be no problem in the first place.

Schmid refers often to Christian theologians, especially Bultmann. Yet his programme is narrower than Bultmann's ever was, and Bultmann's understanding of the relationship between exegesis and presuppositions does not feature here. A more dialectical relationship between present and past in the understanding of theology would surely make for a richer account of the content of the Hebrew Bible.