Covenant As Context: Essays in Honour of E. W. Nicholson

A. D. H. Mayes and R. B. Salters have done a splendid job editing this fine volume in honor of E. W. Nicholson on his sixty-fifth birthday. A leading scholar in Old Testament studies, Nicholson has been a teacher in the Universities of Dublin, Cambridge, and Oxford for nearly thirty-five years. During this time, his major publications have focused, albeit not exclusively, on the Pentateuch and the Prophets, with particular attention to theological constructions of covenant in ancient Israel. My first exposure to Nicholsons substantial contribution to the field was as a graduate student in 1978. In a seminar on the book of Jeremiah I was introduced to his monograph Preaching to the Exiles: A Study of the Prose Tradition in the Book of Jeremiah (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970). In this important work Nicholson argues that the prose sermons in Jeremiahthe body of literature that poses the most daunting interpretive problem in the bookderive from Deuteronomistic traditionists who were active in the exilic period. He develops this argument into a working hypothesis for the prose material as a whole (the so-called B and C materials). Unlike many of his predecessors, Nicholson read the prose literature as an adaptation of the Jeremianic traditum to real contingencies in the life of the Judean community in Babylon, an adaptation that had an integrity and vitality of its own (see also the incisive treatment of the Jeremianic prose tradition in the work by Enno Janssen, Juda in der Exilszeit: Ein Beitrag zur Frage der Entstehung des Judentums [1956]). [Full Review]