etc. Under 'Formulas' there are 'Acclamation Formula', 'Assistance
Formula', 'Greeting Formula', 'Messenger Formula', 'Oracle Formula'.39
The form-critical method does not solve all text problems but
makes us aware of them. In the preface to his commentary on 2 Kings,
Burke O.Long says that “the reader should be aware of some of the
limitations under which I, and I believe all modern critics, must work. The
notions of unity, formal coherence and meaning I take not so much as
qualities somehow contained within the text, awaiting discovery. Rather I
look upon them as aids to making sense of what I read. Furthermore terms
that suggest a creative mind behind the biblical text, such as
intention,...writer, or author...are partly misleading. They encourage us to
ignore our active involvement in reading analysis, interpretation, and
criticism. These images of a single writer, or even multiple editors, are
really shorthand codes for an authorial presence.'40
The editors of FOTL, Rolf P. Knierim and Gene M.Tucker, say in
their preface to the book of Ezekiel: "If the results of form criticism are to
be verifiable and generally intelligible, then the determination of typical
forms and genres, their settings and functions, has to take place through the
analysis of the forms in and of the texts themselves. This leads to two
consequences for the volumes in this series. First, each interpretation of a
text begins with the presentation of the structure of that text in outline. The
ensuing discussion of this structure attempts to distinguish the typical from
the individual or unique elements, and to proceed on this basis to the
determination of the genre, its setting, and its intention. Traditio-historical
factors are discussed throughout this process where relevant, eg. is there
evidence of a written or oral stage of the material earlier than the actual text
before the reader?41.
The various commentators apply the form-critical method to all the
books of the Old Testament and show the rules by which the texts are
commented. Knierim and Tucker continue: the interpretation of the texts
accepts the fundamental premise that we possess all texts basically at their
latest written stages - technically speaking, at the levels of the final
redactions. Any access to the texts, therefore, must confront and analyse
that latest edition first, i.e., a specific version of that edition as represented
in a particular text tradition. Consequently, the commentary proceeds from
the analysis of the larger literary corpora created by the redactions back to
any prior discernible stages in their literary history. Larger units are
examined first, and then their subsections. Therefore, in most instances the
first unit examined interms of structure, genre, setting, and intention is the
entire biblical book in question; next the commentary treats the individual
larger and then smaller units.42
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