Power In His Presence

GILGAMESH EPIC

The Epic of Gilgamesh is a story about a Sumerian king (Gilgamesh) who seems to have lived around 2500 BC, in Mesopotamia. The story was probably made up not long after he died, but the oldest written copy of it that we still have dates to the Assyrian period (around 900 BC), and was found in the ruins of the palace of one of the Assyrian kings.

SUMMARY:

The Epic begins with Gilgamesh ruling the city of Uruk, but he is not doing a good job. Everyone is mad at him because he has a lot of girlfriends all at once, he spends all his time partying instead of working, and he is disrespectful to the elders in the city.

Then a messenger tells Gilgamesh about a wild man who is living out in the hills near the city. This wild man’s name is Enkidu. He goes naked or wears furs, and he drinks only water from the river. But he is very strong. Gilgamesh thinks this is interesting, so he sets a trap for Enkidu to get him to come to the city and be his friend.
Gilgamesh sends a beautiful woman to Enkidu, and when he sees her he kisses her and the kiss works like magic to tame him: he follows her back to the city and becomes civilized.

Now that Gilgamesh has a friend, Enkidu, he is not so bored anymore and he stops being mean to everyone and bothering the girls. Instead, Gilgamesh and Enkidu plan a big heroic trip to the West to get wood for building (because very little wood grew in Mesopotamia). They travel there and fight the great monster Humbaba.

When the two heroes get home, though, they begin to have problems. Gilgamesh is so cool now that the goddess Ishtar falls in love with him, but when she asks him to be her boyfriend, Gilgamesh says no (and he is pretty rude about it too). Ishtar is angry and she makes Enkidu die of a fever. Gilgamesh is very sad and upset that his friend died. And he is afraid that he will someday die too.

Finally Gilgamesh travels to the Land of the Dead to see if he himself can somehow live forever. While he is there, he meets a man named Utnapishtim, who tells Gilgamesh a story about a great flood. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh that the gods sent this flood because people made too much noise on earth and hurt the gods’ ears. He himself survived the flood in a boat. (This is probably related to the story of Noah).

This is what one of the tablets that was found in the Assyrian king’s library looks like. This one tells the story of the Flood. Gilgamesh finds out that he can live forever if he can stay awake for a week watching this plant. But he falls asleep in the end. He goes back to his city, still sad but realizing that everyone has to die sometime, and he goes back to being a good king.

THE STORY IN FULL:

1. The story starts with an introduction of Gilgamesh of Uruk, the greatest king on earth, two-thirds god and one-third human, as the strongest King-God who ever existed. The introduction describes his glory and praises the brick city walls of Uruk. The people in the time of Gilgamesh, however, are not happy. They complain that he is too harsh and abuses his power by sleeping with women before their husbands do, so the goddess of creation Aruru creates the wild-man Enkidu. Enkidu starts bothering the shepherds. When one of them complains to Gilgamesh the king sends the woman Shamhat who might have been a priestess/prostitute (a nadītu or hierodule in Greek). The body contact with Shamhat civilizes Enkidu, and after several nights, he is no longer a wild beast who lives with animals. In the meanwhile, Gilgamesh has some strange dreams, his mother Ninsun explains them by telling that a mighty friend will come to him.
2. Enkidu and Shamhat leave the wilderness for Uruk to attend a wedding. When Gilgamesh comes to the party to sleep with the bride, he finds his way blocked by Enkidu. Enkidu and Gilgamesh fight each other. After a mighty battle, Gilgamesh breaks off from the fight (or defeats Enkidu in other versions, this portion is missing from the Standard Babylonian version but is supplied from other versions).
3. Gilgamesh proposes to travel to the Cedar Forest to cut some great trees and kill a demon Humbaba for their glory. Enkidu objects but can not convince his friend. They seek the wisdom of the Elder Council, but Gilgamesh remains stubborn. Enkidu gives in and both prepare to journey to Cedar Forest. Gilgamesh tells his mother, who complains about it, but then asks the sun-god Shamash for support and gives Enkidu some advice. She also adopts Enkidu as her second son.
4. Gilgamesh and Enkidu journey to the Cedar Forest. On the way, Gilgamesh has five bad dreams, but due to the bad construction of the tablet, they are hard to reconstruct. Enkidu, each time, explains the dreams as a good omen. When they reach the forest Enkidu becomes afraid again and Gilgamesh has to encourage him.
5. When the heroes finally run into Humbaba, the demon/ogre guardian of the trees, the monster starts to offend them. This time, Gilgamesh is the one to become afraid. After some brave words of Enkidu the battle commences. Their rage separated Syria mountains from the Lebanon. Finally Shamash sends his 13 winds to help the two heroes and Humbaba is defeated. The monster begs Gilgamesh for his life, and Gilgamesh pities the creature. Enkidu, however, gets mad with Gilgamesh and asks him to kill the beast. Humbaba then turns to Enkidu and begs him to persuade his friend to spare his life. When Enkidu repeats his request to Gilgamesh, Humbaba curses them both before Gilgamesh puts an end to it. When the two heroes cut a huge tree, Enkidu makes a huge door of it for the gods and lets it float down the river.
6. Gilgamesh rejects the sexual advances of Anu’s daughter, the goddess Ishtar, because of what happened to her previous lovers like Dumuzi. Ishtar asks her father Anu to send the “Bull of Heaven” to avenge the rejected sexual advances. When Anu rejects her complaints, Ishtar threatens to raise the dead. Anu becomes scared and gives in. The bull of heaven is a plague for the lands. Apparently the creature has something to do with drought because, according to the epic, the water disappeared and the vegetation drought. Whatever the case, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, this time without divine help, slay the beast and offer its heart to Shamash. When they hear Ishtar cry out in agony, Enkidu tears off the bull’s hindquarter and throws it in her face and threatens her. The city Uruk celebrates, but Enkidu has a bad dream detailed in the next tablet.
7. In the dream of Enkidu, the gods decide that somebody has to be punished for killing the Bull of Heaven and Humbaba, in the end they decide to punish Enkidu. All of this is much against the will of Shamash. Enkidu tells Gilgamesh all about it, and then curses the door he made for the gods. Gilgamesh is shocked and goes to temple to pray to Shamash for the health of his Friend. Enkidu then starts to curse the trapper and Shamhat because now he regrets the day that he became human. Shamash speaks from the heaven and points out how unfair Enkidu is; he also tells him that Gilgamesh will become a shadow of his former self because of his death. Enkidu regrets his curses and blesses Shamhat. He becomes more and more ill and describes the Netherworld as he is dying.
8. Gilgamesh delivers a lamentation for Enkidu, offering gifts to the many gods, in order that they might walk beside Enkidu in the netherworld.
9. Gilgamesh sets out to avoid Enkidu’s fate and makes a perilous journey to visit Utnapishtim and his wife, the only humans to have survived the Great Flood who were granted immortality by the gods, in the hope that he too can attain immortality. Along the way, Gilgamesh passes the two mountains from where the sun rises, which are guarded by two scorpion-beings. They allow him to proceed and he travels through the dark where the sun travels every night. Just before the sun is about to catch up with him, he reaches the end. The land at the end of the tunnel is a wonderland full of trees with leaves of jewels.
10. Gilgamesh meets the alewyfe Siduri and tells her the purpose of his journey. Siduri attempts to dissuade him from his quest but sends him to Urshanabi the ferryman to help him cross the sea to Utnapishtim. Urshanabi is in the company of some stone-giants. Gilgamesh considers them hostile and kills them. When he tells Urshanabi his story and asks for help. He is told that he just killed the only creatures able to cross the Waters of Death. The waters of death are not to be touched, so Urshanabi commands him to cut 300 trees and fashion them into oars so that they can cross the waters by picking a new oar each time. Finally they reach the island of Utnapishtim. Utnapishtim sees that there is someone else in the boat, and asks Gilgamesh who he is. Gilgamesh tells him his story and asks for help, but Utnapishtim reprimands him because fighting the fate of humans is futile and ruins the joy in life.
11. Gilgamesh argues that Utnapishtim is not different from him and asks him his story, why he has a different fate. Utnapishtim tells him about the great flood. His story is a summary of the story of Atrahasis (see also Gilgamesh flood myth) but skips the previous plagues sent by the gods. He reluctantly offers Gilgamesh a chance for immortality, but questions why the gods would give the same honor as himself, the flood hero, to Gilgamesh and challenges Gilgamesh to stay awake for six days and seven nights first. However, just when Utnapishtim finishes his words Gilgamesh falls asleep. Utnapishtim ridicules the sleeping Gilgamesh in the presence of his wife and tells her to bake a loaf of bread for every day he is asleep so that Gilgamesh cannot deny his failure. When Gilgamesh, after six days and seven nights discovers his failure, Utnapishtim is furious with him and sends him back to Uruk with Urshanabi in exile. The moment that they leave, Utnapishtim’s wife asks her husband to have mercy on Gilgamesh for his long journey. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh of a plant at the bottom of the ocean that will make him young again. Gilgamesh obtains the plant by binding stones to his feet so he can walk the bottom of the sea. He does not trust the plant and plans to test it on an old man’s back in Uruk. Unfortunately he places the plant on the shore of a lake while he bathes, and it is stolen by a serpent which loses his old skin and thus is reborn. Gilgamesh weeps in the presence of Urshanabi. Having failed at both opportunities, he returns to Uruk, where the sight of its massive walls prompts him to praise this enduring work to Urshanabi.
12. Note that the content of the last tablet is not connected with previous ones. Gilgamesh complains to Enkidu that his ball-game-toys fell in the underworld. Enkidu offers to bring them back. Delighted, Gilgamesh tells Enkidu what he must and must not do in the underworld in order to come back. Enkidu forgets the advice and does everything he was told not to do. The underworld keeps him. Gilgamesh prays to the gods to give him his friend back. Enlil and Sin don’t bother to reply but Enki and Shamash decide to help. Shamash cracks a hole in the earth and Enkidu jumps out of it. The tablet ends with Gilgamesh questioning Enkidu about what he has seen in the underworld. The story doesn’t make clear if Enkidu reappears only as a ghost or really comes alive again.

Storytelling, the Meaning of Life,
and the Epic of Gilgamesh

Arthur A. Brown

Stories do not need to inform us of anything. They do inform us of things. From The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, we know something of the people who lived in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the second and third millenniums BCE. We know they celebrated a king named Gilgamesh; we know they believed in many gods; we know they were self-conscious of their own cultivation of the natural world; and we know they were literate. These things we can fix — or establish definitely. But stories also remind us of things we cannot fix — of what it means to be human. They reflect our will to understand what we cannot understand, and reconcile us to mortality.

We read The Epic of Gilgamesh, four thousand years after it was written, in part because we are scholars, or pseudo-scholars, and wish to learn something about human history. We read it as well because we want to know the meaning of life. The meaning of life, however, is not something we can wrap up and walk away with.

To see for ourselves the meaning of a story, we need, first of all, to look carefully at what happens in the story; that is, we need to look at it as if the actions and people it describes actually took place or existed. We can articulate the questions raised by a character’s actions and discuss the implications of their consequences. But we need to consider, too, how a story is put together — how it uses the conventions of language, of events with beginnings and endings, of description, of character, and of storytelling itself to reawaken our sensitivity to the real world. The real world is the world without conventions, the unnameable, unrepresentable world — in its continuity of action, its shadings and blurrings of character, its indecipherable patterns of being. The stories that mean most to us bring us back to our own unintelligible and yet immeasurably meaningful lives

History

Gilgamesh’s supposed historical reign is believed to lie within the period 2700 BC to 2500 BC, 200-400 years before the earliest known written stories. The discovery of artifacts associated with Agga and Enmebaragesi of Kish, two other kings named in the stories, has lent credibility to the historical existence of Gilgamesh

The history of the epic is often divided into three periods: old, middle, and late. Many versions exist from this almost 2,000 year span, but only the old and the late periods have yielded significant enough finds to enable a coherent translation. Therefore, the old Babylonian version, and what is now referred to as the standard edition, are the most frequently utilized texts. However, the standard edition has become the basis of modern translations, and the old version only supplements the standard version when the lacunae – or gaps in the cuneiform tablet – are great.

The earliest Sumerian versions of the epic date from as early as the Third Dynasty of Ur (2150 BC-2000 BCE) (Dalley 1989: 41-42). The earliest Akkadian versions are dated to the early second millennium (Dalley 1989: 45). The “standard” Akkadian version, consisting of twelve tablets, was edited by Sin-liqe-unninni sometime between 1300 BC and 1000 BC and was found in the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is widely known today. The first modern translation of the epic was in the 1870s by George Smith. More recent translations into English include one undertaken with the assistance of the American novelist John Gardner, and John Maier, published in 1984. In 2001, Benjamin Foster produced a reading in the Norton Critical Edition Series that fills in many of the blanks of the standard edition with previous material. The most definitive standard edition is the carefully edited two volume critical work by Andrew George. This represents the fullest treatment of the standard edition material, and he discusses at length the archaeological state of the material, provides a tablet by tablet exegesis, and furnishes a dual language side by side translation. George’s translation was also published in a general reader edition under the Penguin Classics imprint in 2003. In 2004, Stephen Mitchell released a controversial edition, which is his interpretation of previous scholarly translations into what he calls “a new English version.

Standard version

The standard version was found in the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. It was written in standard Babylonian, a dialect of Akkadian that was only used for literary purposes. This version was standardized by Sin-liqe-unninni sometime between 1300 BCE and 1000 BCE out of the older versions to one official one. This was a common process in this time and Gilgamesh was no exception. The standard and earlier Akkadian versions are differentiated based on the opening words, or incipit. The older version begins with the words “Surpassing all other kings”, while the standard version’s incipit is “He who saw the deep” (ša nagbu amāru). The Akkadian word nagbu, “deep”, is probably to be interpreted here as referring to “unknown mysteries”. However, Andrew George believes that it refers to the specific knowledge that Gilgamesh brought back from his meeting with Uta-Napishti: he gains there knowledge of the realm of Ea, whose cosmic realm is seen as the fountain of wisdom (George 1999: L [pg. 50 of the introduction]). In general, interpreters feel that Gilgamesh was given knowledge of how to worship the gods, of why death was ordained for human beings, of what makes a good king, and of the true nature of how to live a good life. The eleventh (XI) tablet contains the flood myth that was mostly copied from the Epic of Atrahasis.

The twelfth tablet is appended to the epic representing a sequel to the original eleven, and was most probably added at a later date. This tablet has commonly been omitted until recent years. It has the startling narrative inconsistency of introducing Enkidu alive, and bears seemingly little relation to the well-crafted and finished 11 tablet epic; indeed, the epic is framed around a ring structure in which the beginning lines of the epic are quoted at the end of the 11th tablet to give it at the same time circularity and finality. Tablet 12 is actually a near copy of an earlier tale, in which Gilgamesh sends Enkidu to retrieve some objects of his from the Underworld, but Enkidu dies and returns in the form of a spirit to relate the nature of the Underworld to Gilgamesh – an event which seems to many superfluous given Enkidu’s dream of the underworld in Tablet VII.

Old-Babylonian version

All tablets, except for the second and third, are from different origins than the above, so this summary is made up out of different versions.

1. Tablet missing
2. Gilgamesh tells his mother Ninsun about two nightmares he had. His mother explains that they mean that a friend will come to Uruk. In the meanwhile Enkidu and his woman (here called Shamshatum) are making love. She civilizes him in company of the shepherds by offering him human food. Enkidu helps the shepherd by guarding the sheeps. They go to Uruk to marry but Gilgamesh want to use his privileges to sleep with Shamshatum first. Enkidu and Gilgamesh battle but Gilgamesh breaks off the fight. Enkidu praises Gilgamesh as special person.
3. The tablet is broken here but it seems that Gilgamesh has offered the plan to go the cedar forest to cut trees and kill Humbaba. Enkidu protests, he knows Humbaba and is aware of his power. Gilgamesh talks Enkidu into it with some words of encouragement but Enkidu remains reluctant. They start preparation and call for the elders. The elders also protest but after Gilgamesh talks to them they wish him good luck.
4. 1(?) tablet missing
5. Fragments from two different versions/tablets that tell how Enkidu encourages Gilgamesh to slay Humbaba. When Gilgamesh does so thay cut some trees and find the dwellings of the Annunaki. Enkidu cuts a door of wood for Enlil and let it float down the Euphrates.
6. Tablets missing
7. Gilgamesh argues with Shamash the futility of his quest. The tablet is damaged. We then find Gilgamesh talking with Siduri about his quest and his travel to Ut-Napishtim (here called Uta-na’ishtim). Siduri also questions his goals. Another hole in the text. Gilgamesh has smashed the stone creatures and talks to the ferryman Urshanabi (here called Sur-sunabu). After a short discussion Sur-sunabu asks Gilgamesh to cut 300 oars so that they may cross the waters of dead without the stone creatures. The rest of the tablet is damaged.
8. Tablet(s) missing

Influence on later epic literature

According to the Greek scholar Ioannis Kordatos, there are a large number of parallel verses as well as themes or episodes which indicate a substantial influence of the Epic of Gilgamesh on the Odyssey, the Greek epic poem ascribed to Homer.

FORM CRITICISM

Form criticism is a method of biblical criticism adopted as a means of analyzing the typical features of texts, especially their conventional forms or structures, in order to relate them to their sociological contexts.

Form criticism is the Biblical method which seeks to discover the type of literature which is contained in the Bible

In the OT, form criticism is a method of study that identifies and classifies the smaller compositional units of biblical texts, and seeks to discover the social setting within which units of these types or literary genres were originally used.

A. History and Development

B. Stages of Form Critical Analysis

1. Form

2. Gattung

3. Sitz im Leben

4. Form and Function

A. History and Development

OT form criticism is usually held to have begun with the work of Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932), who wrote major studies of the stories in Genesis (Gunkel 1964) and of the Psalms (Gunkel 1967).

Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932) was a German Protestant Old Testament scholar. He was born in Springe, Germany (near Hannover, Lower Saxony).

Gunkel was the a son of a Lutheran pastor. He studied theology in Göttingen and Hanover.

In 1895 Gunkel became a professor of Old Testament in Berlin. In the same year his book Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (Creation and Chaos) was published. In 1901 the first edition of his Genesis commentary appeared. In 1926 he published another standard work, his commentary on the book of Psalms (Die Psalmen).

For health reasons Gunkel retired and became professor emeritus in 1927. His Einleitung in die Psalmen (Introduction to the Psalms) was his last major project, which was brought to completion with the help of Joachim Begrich, who was both his former student and his son-in-law.

Gunkel had become an outstanding representative of the “History of Religion School” (die religionsgeschichtliche Schule). This was a circle of scholars from Göttingen, who shared assumptions regarding the analysis of the development of religion. In addition to Gunkel, the original group also included Albert Eichhorn, William Wrede, Wilhelm Bousset, Johannes Weiss, Ernst Troeltsch, Wilhelm Heitmüller, and P. Wernle. In the beginning, they were primarily concerned with the origins of Christianity. But this interest eventually broadened to include the historical backgrounds of ancient Israelite religion and other ancient Near Eastern religions.

He is sometimes called the father of form criticism and of tradition history, critical methodologies that his work had helped develop.

Earlier work on the oral literature of other nations formed the basis of Gunkel’s work. He was the first to suggest that it was possible to penetrate behind even the earliest-written source material in the Pentateuch to a preliterary stage at which the individual stories were transmitted by word of mouth. Many of them, he suggested, owed their origins to the need to explain particular local customs, institutions, or natural phenomena, and so were aetiological legends.

For example, the story of Jacob’s dream at Bethel (Gen 28:10–17) was originally a legend explaining the existence of a sanctuary there (“Bethel” = “house of El”) taken over by the Israelites from the Canaanites. In his study of the Psalms, Gunkel proposed that the present Psalms derived from earlier prototypes which were not (as he believed the present Psalms to be) personal lyric poems, but liturgical texts actually used in the cultic life of Israel.

Gunkel’s classification of the Psalms into 5 basic types (hymns, communal laments, royal psalms, individual laments, and individual songs of thanksgiving) is the basis of all modern study of the Psalter.

Sigmund Mowinckel developed Gunkel’s theories about the Psalms further and simplified them by proposing that many of the Psalms in the present Psalter were themselves cultic texts (Mowinckel 1962). With the aid of comparative material from other Near Eastern cultures he then sought to reconstruct the worship of the preexilic Temple by suggesting occasions on which the Psalms might have been used, adding rubrics to the Psalms to account for the changes of form within a single Psalm (see below) and hypothesizing an annual “Festival of Yahweh’s Enthronement” as the setting for many Psalms. Subsequent scholarship has been skeptical of the more speculative parts of Mowinckel’s work (see Kraus 1966). For example, it is not clear that all the Psalms can be fitted into a single festival; while many of Mowinckel’s suggestions rest more on comparisons with other cultures of the ancient Near East than on form criticism, in any case.

B. Stages of Form Critical Analysis

Form criticism is concerned with texts that contain material belonging to different genres, whether or not they are by a single author. For example, prophetic books often contain passages belonging to different genres within a single chapter. Thus Isaiah 5 begins (vv 1–7) with a poem which is generically a love song, but then continues with several oracles beginning “Woe to . . . ,” which are probably modeled on funeral dirges.

In vv 24–5 the text shifts to a proclamation of divine judgment, and in vv 26–30 it concludes with a poetic description of the Assyrian army. To understand this chapter, it is obviously essential first to break it up into its separate parts and then to identify the genre of each.

The word “genre” perhaps suggests to a modern reader the categories of written literature (novels, lyric poems, etc.); but many of the genres we can identify in the OT, though now fixed in writing, probably go back to a time of oral composition, as Gunkel was among the first to recognize (see above). In any culture where literature is transmitted by word of mouth, different genres have different social contexts: Indeed, this is still true even in our own society of such genres as the sermon, the political speech, and the popular song. In societies such as ancient Israel, many types of utterance were strictly tied to particular settings, and followed highly stereotyped patterns.

Consequently it is sometimes possible to learn about the social and religious life of ancient Israel by paying attention to the various oral and literary forms of speech encountered in OT texts. It is a feature of the OT, however, that one genre is often embedded in another. In the example from Isaiah, a poem in the form of a love song is set within the larger context of a collection of oracles, and this collection in turn forms part of a prophetic book. Detailed critical work may be needed before the various genres to be studied can be disentangled. Furthermore, even the term “genre” is too imprecise.

Form critics distinguish 2 categories, known by the German terms Form and Gattung. Analysis of a text begins by identifying each Form within it, grouping them together to identify the Gattung, and then asking about the text’s Sitz im Leben and its function.

1. Form: Confusingly, the English word “form” is used to render 2 of these technical terms of German form criticism, Form and Gattung. The first, the “form” properly so called, is the structure or shape of an individual passage or unit, as in this may be described without regard to the content of the passage. For example, in studying the Psalms we can begin by describing each Psalm in terms of its meter, the number of stanzas or strophes it contains, whether the speaker is singular or plural, whether it is addressed to God or (as in Psalm 37) to the reader, and so on. Formal description at this level is an important method of breaking a text up into its component parts, and is essential in studying the OT because as it now stands the text lacks the kind of section divisions we are familiar with in modern books.

In a prophetic book such as Hosea, for example, a reader who tries to read the text as a coherent and continuous whole is soon frustrated by the lack of overall shape, and begins to feel that the book needs to be broken up into shorter sections. Modern translations indicate such divisions by leaving blank lines, and sometimes by introducing subheadings. The criteria for these divisions are often connected with formal features of the text: for example, a change of speaker (e.g., between Hosea 5:15 and 6:1); a new start with a different audience addressed (5:1); a shift from a prediction of judgment (13:16) to an exhortation to repentance, introduced with an imperative (14:1).

In the same way the Psalms sometimes “change gear” in a disconcerting way, but the change can be precisely described in formal terms. Thus in Psalm 118, vv 1–18 are a hymn of praise, but v 19 is a request (“open to me the gates of righteousness”); v 25 a prayer for deliverance (“Save us, we beseech thee, O Lord”); v 26 a blessing (“We bless you from the house of the Lord”); and v 27b perhaps a rubric (“Bind the festal procession with branches up to the horns of the altar”) in imperative form. Formal description at this level does not tell us much that is new about the text, but it does help us to analyze it and, in some cases, to understand at a more theoretical level why it is intuitively puzzling.

2. Gattung. Once a number of passages have been analyzed from a formal point of view, it may be possible to see them as belonging to a general class or genre, and it is for this that the German term Gattung is used. Thus there is a large number of Psalms that begin with a call to worship God and go on to extol God’s mighty acts (e.g., Psalms 29, 33, 47, 66, 96, 98, 100); there are many laws in the Pentateuch that begin “If a man . . .” (e.g., Exodus 22:1, 5, 7, 10, 14 [Heb 21:37; 22:4, 6, 9, 14]); there are many prophetic oracles that run “Because . . . therefore thus says the LORD . . .” (e.g., Isa 7:5–8; 29:13–14; Amos 1:3–5). Having discerned the presence of such repeated structures and phrases, we are justified in concluding that Israel’s literature (written or oral) included such stereotyped forms as standard types of which the particular cases we encounter in the OT are examples.

Once scholars are convinced that a passage they have analyzed formally belongs to a more general class, they usually devise a shorthand title for the Gattung, and these results in many technical terms. In Psalm-study, common Gattungen are the hymn, the lament, and the thanksgiving, all of which may be further subdivided (individual laments, thanksgiving for victory in battle, etc.); legal sections of the Pentateuch yield “apodeictic” and “casuistic” laws; wisdom literature contains proverbs, riddles, fables, and rhetorical questions; and prophetic books are made up of such forms as the oracle of judgment (Drohwort), the accusation (Scheltwort), the “woe,” and the taunt.

There is obviously a danger in inferring the existence of a Gattung from very few examples, since it is always possible that a single text is anomalous. If the book of Psalms contained only one “lament,” it would be hazardous to say very much about laments in general. Nevertheless, a culture which values tradition more highly than creativity is likely to be very conservative in the way it uses its traditional forms, and so even a few examples of a Gattung may give us quite a clear impression of the conventions governing its composition. For instance, the OT records only a few cases of legal procedures, but they are enough to give us some idea of the conventional formulas used in the practice of law—for example, acquittal was probably accomplished by the stereotyped formula “He/she is righteous (s\addiq)” (see Gen 38:26; Psalm 51:5; Isa 41:26).

Already in moving from Form to Gattung considerations of content begin to arise. Though form critics have sometimes maintained that form criticism should appeal only to strictly formal features (grammatical, syntactical, and metrical features of the text), most, in practice, regard the subject matter as relevant in establishing the Gattung to which a text belongs. In some cases, for example the category “royal psalms,” subject matter is expressly the criterion used; more often, however, subject matter is one among a number of factors. Oracles of judgment in the prophets can be identified both by formal features (e.g., first person address by God, often with “Thus says the LORD” or “oracle of the LORD” attached) and by their distinctive content, concerning the future of Israel or of other nations. This mixture of form and content as criteria for assigning a text to a particular Gattung is no different in principle from what happens in classifying modern literature, where to call a work a tragedy, for example, is to say both that it has the formal features of a play—with acts, scenes, dialogue, and so on—and that it has a certain kind of theme and plot.

3. Sitz im Leben. In saying that a text belongs to a particular Gattung we are already saying something about the context in the life of Israel in which the text originated. If a text is a hymn, then people must have sung hymns, and there must have been occasions on which hymns could be sung; if there are laws in the OT, then Israel must have had a legal system of some kind in which these laws were used. The occasion or social setting for a given form is known as its Sitz im Leben (German, “setting-in-life”), a term for which no adequate English equivalent exists.

The Sitz im Leben must be carefully distinguished from the historical occasion that may have led to the production of any particular text. Thus, it is possible that certain Psalms can be dated to a particular period in Israel’s history, perhaps even to a space of a few years—Psalm 74, for instance, seems to reflect the situation of Israel in the early years of the Babylonian Exile (6th century b.c.). The Sitz im Leben of the Psalm, however, is not the period, but whatever context (presumably a liturgical context) it was composed to be used in. In the nature of the case, a Sitz im Leben is a general, and in principle repeatable occasion, not a single historical event. In the study of the Psalms, form criticism has been particularly useful, since the Psalms are the clearest case in the OT of texts intended for public use on many repeated occasions. Psalm 74 is rather an exception in being dateable to one particular period. Most of the other lament Psalms are so general in their description of the plight of the worshippers that they could come from almost any period. Indeed, the essential form-critical insight is that the question of their date is in many ways less interesting and important than the question of their intended use as conventional liturgical texts on any and every occasion of public lamentation.

Although liturgy is one of the clearest examples of the kind of Sitz im Leben the form critic can reconstruct, other spheres of Israelite life also had their distinctive forms, and by paying attention to them we can understand many OT texts better, and in turn derive from the texts more information about the spheres concerned. An example already mentioned is the law court. The OT provides only one clear account of proceedings in court, in 1 Kgs 21 (the trial of Naboth), though there are frequent passing allusions to the institution. Form criticism, however, can throw considerably more light on the subject. For example, the prophets frequently use a form in which God (or his prophet) is portrayed as pleading a case in court (e.g., Isa 1:2; Mic 6:1–5)—the so-called rîb or controversy form—and they also describe visions of courtroom scenes in the heavenly world which are probably modelled on earthly legal processes (e.g., Zech 3:1–5). From these it is possible to form a fair idea of procedures in the courts: for example, to infer that Israelite courts knew of counsel for the plaintiff and for the defendant and those cases were heard by a panel of judges. These conclusions in turn help us to understand such passages more clearly—to see that God is cast variously in the role of judge (Zech 3), plaintiff (Isa 1), and defendant (Micah 6), thereby gaining a sharper focus on these important texts.

Other spheres of life which form criticism can illuminate have proved to be education, commercial practice, and the life of the royal court. Interest in recent years in the sociology of ancient Israel will both contribute to and benefit from form-critical studies of OT texts.

4. Form and Function. Form criticism of the prophetic books raises some particularly interesting issues. As we have just seen, some of our information about certain spheres of life in Israel—for example, the procedures in law courts—derives from the use of legal forms by the prophets; but this use is at one remove from the primary or original use of legal forms, since the prophets are deliberately adopting forms from a sphere of activity other than their own in order to communicate their message more vividly. Whereas descriptions in the first person of a vision (as in 1 Kgs 22:19–23 or Amos 9:1–4) may be regarded as characteristically prophetic forms, with their Sitz im Leben in public prophesying, forms from the law court, the world of the popular singer (Isa 5:1–7), or the priestly call to worship (Amos 4:4) represent a deliberate use (or rather misuse) by the prophets of forms from other spheres of life. Amos, in effect, pretends to be a priest in order to utter sentiments that no priest would have accepted: that God no longer requires the worship of the sanctuaries. A form-critical study, by showing us the original and proper function of the forms used by the prophets, helps us to see more sharply the originality with which they contradicted the people’s expectations.

This does not in any way diminish the historical value of form criticism in elucidating Israelite institutions; for the prophets’ words can only have been effective if the forms they used did indeed have a proper sphere of life in which they were completely familiar to people at large. But it does urge us to be cautious in thinking that form criticism can tell us exactly how a given text was actually used in ancient Israel; for clearly it would be illegitimate to argue from Amos 4:4 that the prophet was a priest, or from Isa 5:1–7 that Isaiah was a popular singer, simply because they use forms properly belonging to these spheres. The form of the popular song could not have existed to be exploited by Isaiah if no one in Israel sang songs; but it does not follow from this that any given text which we can classify as belonging to the Gattung of the popular song really was used as one, and Isa 5:1–7 provides a clear example of one such text that is transparently not a real song.

This has implications also for the form criticism of the Psalms. Once certain genres of text exist, it is always possible for them to be imitated in a purely literary way, or even parodied—and parody is perhaps the best description of the use made of a variety of forms by the great prophets. The fact that a form has a proper or normal function in a particular society must not be allowed to lead us to the hasty conclusion that any given example of the form represents a primary case: It may be a secondary imitation or use of the form for some other purpose.

Form critics believe that the Gospels are loose collections of short, easily-memorized narrative snippets, compiled and rearranged in a way that served each evangelist’s agenda. In the Bible, each of these snippets is called a pericope. Bultmann believed that most of the pericopes found in the New Testament could be categorized as belonging to one of a limited number of forms (hence the name “forms criticism”). The most important of these forms are the following:

1. Pronouncement Stories, also known as paradigms or apothegms.
These are brief stories which culminate in an authoritative saying. For example, when the Pharisees complain about the fact that Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners in Mark 2:15-16, Jesus silences them by announcing, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” Jesus’ point is made pithily and memorably; if he is in conflict with some sort of opponent, he is always made to look wittier and more composed than they are. The pronouncement story is related to the classical Greek rhetorical technique known as the chreia.

2. Miracle Stories.
These are self-contained, highly descriptive stories about a healing (e.g. Mark 2:3-5), an exorcism (e.g. Mark 5:1-13), or some other type of miracle. Miracles that are difficult to categorize — such as the feeding of the five thousand, the only miracle that appears in all four gospels — are often given the catch-all name “nature miracle.” There are dozens of miracle stories in the New Testament; often they have some point to make about Christology, the kingdom of God, the meaning of true discipleship, or some such.

3. Logia, also known as dominical sayings. The word logion simply means “saying” (logia is plural). Bultmann classified Jesus’ sayings into a number of specific types, including:

1. • Wisdom saying or proverb, such as “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20).
   • Prophetic or apocalyptic utterances, such as “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom…” (Mark 13:7-8).
   • “I” sayings, sometimes known by the Greek phrase ego eimi “I am”. These are statements in which Jesus makes a memorable observation about his own nature, especially popular in John’s gospel. e.g., “I am the bread of life” (John 6:48); “I am the door” (John 10:9).
   • Legal sayings and church rules
     These are not always “legal” in the sense that we might think of the word in modern English. Rather, they are quotations from the Torah or creative interpretations of it. For instance, “You have heard it said to the men of old, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgement.’ But I say to you: everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgement” (Matthew 5:21-22).

4. Parables, which is to say short metaphorical or allegorical narratives with startling and sometimes counter-intuitive conclusions.
Sometimes these are further subdivided into “similitudes,” “example stories“, and “parables” proper, but I personally can’t be bothered with worrying about details like whether or not the story’s in the past tense. Anyway, Jesus is famous for his parables, even among people who are not Christian. “The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed…” (Mark 4:30-32 and parallels).

5. Myths and Legends.
These are stories with a supernatural element, such as can be found in the baptism or the Transfiguration of Jesus. Despite the name, it is not necessary to assume these stories are false; however, Bultmann often did.

6. Speeches.
Quite a few characters deliver speeches in the New Testament, not only in the Gospels but also in Acts. However, since this entire categorization system arose out of the desire to find the Historical Jesus, it is Jesus’ speeches that usually get the closest attention. Speeches in this sense tend to be significantly longer than both logia and parables, though Bultmann believed that they were originally made up of shorter bits that once circulated independently before being crammed together by the evangelists. An example of a speech would be the lengthy “farewell discourse” that fills John 14-17.

The driving assumption behind form criticism is that these small narrative units were rearranged and rewritten by the evangelists in ways that often obscured the original historical saying or event that lay behind them. Bultmann, despite being a committed Christian and serious theologian, was notoriously skeptical regarding the reliability of the gospels. He applied what we might call a “guilty until proven innocent” hermeneutic to most of the texts he studied. He (and the form critics who followed him) tended to see the evangelists as thoughtlessly cutting and pasting the traditions they inherited in artificial ways, cheerfully adding misleading “interpretations” of their own to Jesus’ words. For instance, a form critic would argue that the parable of the sower in Mark 4:1-9 was originally delivered without any explanation at all; it was the evangelist, not Jesus, who added the secondary interpretation of the story’s symbolism in 4:13-20. Needless to say, this angered a lot of traditional Christians who maintained the inerrancy of the Bible.

Today, form criticism is not as fashionable as it once was, but its insights have served as the building blocks for newer, more sophisticated theories. After the Second World War, form criticism was replaced with other interpretive techniques, particularly redaction criticism. However, even though some of Bultmann’s assumptions have been rejected in recent years, is nevertheless impossible to engage in serious study of the New Testament without understanding his analyses.

Form criticism is sometimes known by its German name, formgeschichte, even among English speakers, since the technique was designed and promoted primarily by scholars in Germany.

Let me conclude by listing some benefits of form criticism and some potential problems.

Benefits:

1. Gets us to look closely and in detail at a small portion of the text
2. Encourages us to ask certain questions of the text
3. Helps us discover other passages that we can use effectively in comparison
4. Encourages us to discover, if possible, how a text has been used in various settings
5. Helps us block off a subsection of text and to find its function in a larger passage

Dangers:

1. It’s a tree method rather than a forest method, i.e. it gets you to focus on a small portion of the text, and then often you won’t look more broadly. Avoid this by first surveying a larging scripture portion before looking at the individual passage.
2. It tends to focus us back on the original setting and purpose of a passage. For example, the form critic is first interested in why a proverb or parable would have originated in oral use. It’s final use, such as by Ezekiel or Paul can be ignored. Avoid this by continuing your study after identifying and working with an individual passage as a form using other methods, especially using redaction, literary, and canonical criticism.

In NT, Form criticism study was spearheaded by a trio of German scholars who were busily researching the oral prehistory of the Gospels. They are K. L. Schmidt, M. Dibelius and most notably Rudolf Bultmann; they pioneered the form criticism of the NT. The earliest form critics based their study on several foundational presuppositions. All agreed that the teachings of Jesus and the narratives about his life which comprise the Gospels were transmitted orally over a considerable period of time before they were ever written down. They believed that these units of material for the most part circulated independently of one another. They affirmed that the closest parallels to the transmission of the gospel tradition could be found in the oral and folk literature of other ancient.

They concluded that comparison with these parallels made it highly likely that the final form in which the Gospels appeared could not be trusted to supply a reliable account of what Jesus actually said and did. Rather one had to work backward and remove various accretions and embellishments which had crept into the tradition and so try to recover the original, pure forms. These forms, they believed, were originally short, streamlined and unadorned, and very Jewish in style and milieu.

Their Objectives

The original form-critical agenda included three main tasks: classifying the individual pericopes (self-contained units of teaching or narrative) according to form, assigning each form to a Sitz im Leben («life-situation») in the early church and reconstructing the history of the tradition.

Use in the Early Church

The form critic next tries to determine in which contexts in the life of the early Christian community each of these forms would have been most valued. For example, it is widely accepted that pronouncement stories would have been most used in popular preaching. Miracle stories were probably most significant in Christian apologetic against Greco-Roman beliefs in other divine men or primeval heroes. Legends, it is often maintained, were created primarily out of a desire to glorify and exalt Jesus. Sentences of holy law were probably most relevant in settling church disputes. Parables may well have been transmitted during times of popular storytelling. Many forms are not readily associated with just one Sitz im Leben, and most critics agree that this objective is the most speculative of the three.

Writing the Tradition-History

Finally, each form is studied in light of what kinds of changes it most likely underwent during the transmission of the oral tradition. For example, it is usually affirmed that the bulk of the parables was well preserved, but introductions and conclusions were commonly altered as they were applied to new contexts. The pronouncement stories carefully preserved the pronouncements (comparable to the punch line of a joke), but the historical trappings in which they were encased might be altered greatly. Legends usually formed around a historical kernel which was then significantly embellished. Prophetic sayings (and various other forms) were often first spoken by early Christian prophets in the name of the risen Lord and later read back onto the lips of the earthly Jesus.

Form critics also believe that various tendencies of the developing tradition were widely applicable, irrespective of the given form of a pericope. Most of these can be summarized under what Bultmann termed «the law of increasing distinctness»: stories became longer, incidental details were added, nameless characters were identified and place names were included. Additional dialog, interpretation, expansion and contemporization all appeared. Reapplication from a Palestinian-Jewish to a Hellenistic-Jewish and eventually to a Hellenistic-Gentile context also greatly transformed the form and content of much of the tradition.

Aids to Interpretation

Form criticism can provide guidelines to interpreting individual pericopes. This objective is probably the most significant and manageable of the three. The Gospels are not monolithic narratives; each section cannot be treated like every other. Interpretation is genre-bound, that is, there are often distinct hermeneutical rules for distinct literary forms. Recognizing that the emphasis in a pronouncement story is on the pronouncement helps the interpreter to avoid stressing peripheral details. For example, the focus of Mark 3:31-35 is not on Jesus’ apparent neglect of his family but on his embracing his followers as part of his family. This approach also reveals how often Jesus’ pronouncements focused on the radical newness of the kingdom vis-à-vis the prevailing forms of Judaism of the day (e.g., Mk 2:23-28).

Recent form criticism of the miracle stories has demonstrated how they usually focus on Christology and the kingdom–demonstrating who Jesus was and what was the nature of the new society he envisioned. Thus the cursing of the fig tree (Mk 11:12-14, 20-25) was no petulant outburst, nor even primarily a lesson about faith, but a symbolic demonstration of God’s impending judgment on Israel (comparable to the cleansing of the Temple around which Mark sandwiches this miracle-story–see w. 15-19). So too Jesus’ walking on the water (Mk 6:45-52) was neither a convenient way to get across the lake nor an arbitrary demonstration of his gravity defying power but a revelation of himself as the Lord of the wind and waves (cf. Ps 107:23-32) and the very «I am» (Yahweh) of Exodus 3:14.

Parable research has probably benefited the most from form criticism. Only about half of the passages in the Gospels usually called parables are specifically labeled as such by the Evangelists. Sometimes those, which are not so labeled, are treated differently. For example, the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Lk 16:19 31) has often been viewed as a true story, or at least as giving an accurate description of the afterlife.

In light of the structural parallels between this passage and many which are explicitly labeled parallels, both of these views are doubtful. One dare not derive doctrine from the details of a parable unless it can be corroborated by less

Keys to Gospel Outlines

Classification of the Gospel pericopes by form also enables one to discern the types of structures and outlines which the four Evangelists used. Sometimes they arrange material in chronological order, sometimes in topical order. In several instances they seem to have grouped a series of like forms together. Thus Mark 2:1–3:6 collects together a group of pronouncement stories; 4:35– 6:6a comprises a collection of miracles (as does most of Mt 8–9); and Matthew 13:1-52 is made up primarily of parable (as is most of Luke 14–16).

Ambiguities

Many passages, however, do not easily fall into one of the primary form-critical categories. Many seem to mix together several forms. For example, Mark 2:1-12 shares features of both a healing miracle and a pronouncement story. Early form critics usually assumed that mixed forms had undergone more complex development and that their historical kernel was therefore less recoverable. But in the ancient world students of rhetoric regularly claimed that mixed forms were aesthetically pleasing so it is likely that many such forms appeared right at the start of the Gospel tradition. Other form critical categories seem to combine form and content. An example-story is largely indistinguishable from a parable in form; so too a myth and a historical narrative. Interpretive presuppositions unrelated to pure literary form seem to have influenced several of the form critics’ classifications.

Use in the Early Church

In principle the attempt to assign a Sitz im Leben to each form is well motivated and potentially helpful. If one can discern how the early church used a certain aspect of the Gospel tradition, one may better understand in what contexts today it may be most useful. Occasionally comparative data permit reasonable inferences; Paul’s knowledge of Jesus’ «words of institution» (I Cor 11:23-25) suggests that part or all of the story of the Last Supper (Lk 22:13-38) may have been read or recited during celebrations of the Eucharist, much as it often is today. But in most cases such reconstructions are highly speculative because they are based on what other ancient cultures did in settings that are not always closely parallel to the rise of Christianity.

 

Bibliography

D. E. Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983); R Bauckham, «The Delay of the Parousia,» TynB 31 (1980) 3-36; K Berger, Formgeschichte des Neuen Testaments (Heidelberg: Quelle und Meyer, 1984); C. L. Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables (Downers Grove: Intervarsity, 1989); M. E. Boring, Sayings of the Risen Jesus (Cambridge: University Press, 1982);R. Bultmann, The History ofthe Synoptic Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963); M. Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel (Cambridge:J. Clarke, 1934); B. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript (Lund: Gleerup, 1961); S. C. Goetz and C. L. Blomberg, «The Burden of Proof,» JSNT 11 (1981) 39-63; R G. Gruenler, New Approaches to Jesus and the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1982); A. J. Hultgren,Jesus and His Adversaries (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1979); W. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983); R. Latourelle, Finding Jesus through the Gospels (New York: Alba, 1979); E. V. McKnight, What Is Form Criticism7 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969); R. Riesner, Jesus als Lehrer (Tübingen: Mohr, 1981); E. P. Sanders, The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition (Cambridge: University Press, 1969); H. Schürmann, «Die vorösterlichen Anfänge der Logientradition,» in Der historische Jesus und der kerygmatische Christus, ed. H. Ristow and K Matthiae (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1960) 342-70; V. Taylor, The Forrnation of the Gospel Tradition (London: Macmillan, 1933); G.Theissen, The Miracle Stories of the Early Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1983); D. Wenham, The Rediscovery of Jesus’ Eschatological Discourse (Sheffield: JSOT, 1984);