Deutero-Isaiah. (Briefly Noted).

Deutero-Isaiah. By Klaus Baltzer (Fortress, $78). B., longtime professor at Munich and famous for his earlier work on covenant in the Old Testament, believes that Isaiah 40-55 should be classified as a liturgical drama, which was performed for a largely nonliterary public. B. divides the text into six acts framed by a prologue and an epilogue. The so-called servant songs appear in acts 1, 4, 5, and 6. B. departs from the majority of scholars in identifying Jerusalem as the place where the book was composed, but he holds that the book was performed for the exile group in Babylon, heralding Jerusalem as a place of pilgrimage. The author of the work is unknown, but authorship was probably a group effort anyway. B. also proposes a radically new date, 450--400 B.C.E., rather than the usual 547--540 B.C.E., and sees important continuities between this book and the book of Nehemiah. B. understands the "servant" as a call to imitatio of his virtues: renunciation of renown, readiness not to repay evil with evil, avoid ance of violence and deception, and intervention for others. While many will question the overall hypotheses about genre and date, all will profit from this learned philological and exegetical contribution to the Hermeneia Commentary series that has been ably translated by Margaret Kohl.