The discipline that seeks to understand what and how literary-rhetorical conventions have shaped, influence and have been adopted/adapted in those writing. Its aim is to uncover the argumentative strategy employed by the author of a document to optimize his/her telling in order to persuade or dissuade his audience. Rhetorical criticism is a growing discipline in biblical studies and the fruit it has so far yielded has greatly enriched and deepened our understanding of the biblical books.
Every culture has its own ways of expressing itself. These are usually most evident in the styles and approaches taken it its literature.The literature we have in the Bible, e.g., are not flat two-dimensional works but dynamic living creations reflecting the customs and conventions of their times. It is, therefore, to be expected that ancient Hebrew writers of the OT would write and make their points in ways different from the Greek writers of the NT. Rhetirical criticism helps us to understand and appreciate the different styles and approaches are and how they impact our interpretation of the document in point.
Biblical rhetorical criticism has its birth in the 1969 presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature by James Muilenburg when he called for biblical studies to move beyond the then dominant—and then also yielding rather meager returns—of form criticism to what he called rhetorical criticism. It primary goal, he says, should be:
exhibiting the structural patterns that are employed for the fashining of a literary unit, whether in poetry or in prose, and in discerning the many and various devices by which the predications are formulated and ordered into a unified whole. Such an enterprise I should describe as, rhetoric and the methodology as rhetorical criticism. ("Form Criticism and Beyond," Journal of Biblical Literature 88 (1969): 8.)
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