Metacommentating Amos* Metacommentary, what is that ... - Fontes

18 Interested PartiesThese commentators surely know that they have many optionsopen to them when they themselves are wronged by someoneelse, and that inflicting injury on others is either a raw instinctiveimpulse or else a cruel cold-blooded decision that they come toat the end of their tether, feel guilty about, but try to justifynevertheless on some rational grounds. But once they startcommentating on Amos they accede to Amos’s simple moraldefeatism. Not one of them has the courage—or the intellectualcapacity—to extract himself (they are all males) from the ideologyof the text and to pronounce a moral judgment upon theprophecy. To be sure, the future was very much as the prophecysays—whether it predicted it or wrote it up in hindsight. Thingswere awful, for rich and poor alike. But it is even more awful toascribe the destruction of a state and the forceable deportation ofits citizens to an avenging God. If that is how a believer findshimself or herself impelled to conclude, that it is a terrible thingto fall into the hands of the living God, the metacommentatorcan respect that. But to affirm it casually, to pretend that it isunproblematic—that is not scholarly, it is not even human.Must the metacommentator be so waspish?, readers are likely tobe asking themselves. Does everything have to become sopersonal, and is it truly scholarly to question the motives andinterests of our colleagues, as I have been doing throughout thispaper?The answer is, Yes. It must be, once we admit that we are notall engaged in some objective quest for determinate meanings,and that our ideologies, our locations, our interests and our personalitiesdetermine our scholarship—and separate us from oneanother. Strip away the bonhomie that passes for scholarly interutmostconsideration of the poor and weak,—moral justice’ (William RaineyHarper, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Amos and Hosea[International Critical Commentary; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1905],pp. cxvii-cxviii, cxx). It simply does not occur to this commentator to askwhether in Amos’s conception this moral standard applies to Yahweh, andwhether the threats of famine, fire, exile and the like can be accommodatedwith ‘the utmost consideration of the poor and weak’. At least Harper doesnot try to argue that the punishments are ‘a token and proof of divine concernand commitment’ (Andersen and Freedman, Amos, p. 383), a disingenuousclaim if ever there was one.