Developing his earlier work on Isaiah and Zechariah, Conrad here reads the Latter Prophets both as a compositional unity and as a continuation of the Former Prophets. Methodologically, he draws on the semiotic theory of Umberto Eco. While readers play an active role in interpretation, they must ‘respect textual limits’, which for Conrad means respecting canonical form and sequence. Acknowledging that different canons contain different sequences, Conrad chooses to follow the Talmudic order, reading the Latter Prophets immediately after Kings, and with Jeremiah and Ezekiel preceding Isaiah.

Likewise, Conrad accepts Eco’s view that we can discover the intent of a work (though not of its author) by observing the textual ‘codes’. The codes to the Prophets, Conrad argues, lie in their superscriptions. Jeremiah and Amos, for instance, begin with ‘the words of’. This is ‘not a coincidence’ (92), but rather alerts us to other similarities between the two books: in both of them the prophet is an outsider who announces the end of a nation. Conversely, Isaiah designates itself as ‘vision’ (hazôn), which Conrad believes is revelation received in the temple and written down for another time; here, the emphasis is on salvation. As hazôn, Isaiah is keyed to Joel, Micah, Obadiah, Nahum, Habakkuk and Zephaniah. Ezekiel and Jonah, meanwhile, open with ‘and it happened to’, indicating that they are narratives ‘about how Yahweh interacts with a ‘prophet’ in a foreign land’ (163).

Setting aside the distinctly contrived links between Ezekiel and Jonah, Conrad’s thesis is weakened by the fact that, as he admits, the superscriptions of neither Joel, Micah, Habakkuk nor Zephaniah use the term hazôn at all. Moreover, his polarity of ‘hazôn / temple / Isaiah’ versus ‘words / outside temple / Jeremiah’ overlooks the temple setting for Jeremiah’s vision of the two fig baskets (Jer. 24:1). Granted, Jeremiah 24 does not say that the prophet himself was in the temple, but nor does Isaiah 6; and neither are designated hazôn. And isn’t the book in Jeremiah 30–31 as much for a later time as the hazôn of Isaiah? In short, the prophetic books seem to resist Conrad’s analysis.

Conrad certainly offers some thought-provoking insights. His suggestion that Jeremiah moves ‘from siding with his people (chs 12–14) to siding with Yahweh (chs 15–20)’ (132) is attractive, though vulnerable if Mark Biddle is right to see the speaker in some of the laments as ‘Lady Jerusalem’ rather than Jeremiah. On Isaiah, Conrad shows how language used to comfort the king is reapplied to the people, strengthening Hugh Williamson’s argument for a ‘democratising’ trend in Isaiah. Less convincing is his insistence on seeing warrior motifs throughout these two books, conflict (in Jeremiah) does not necessarily mean military conflict, nor does ‘plan’ (in Isaiah) necessarily mean military plan.

I think Conrad unnecessarily abandons the quest for authorial intent. Indeed, his own example (2)—how knowing the ‘code’ of his Pennsylvania Dutch community enabled him to interpret his mother’s instruction to ‘red up the room’—implies a more hopeful prospect Granted, a prophetic vision is far more complex than a parental note. But the key, as Conrad himself says (27), lies in developing our intertextual knowledge of the OT. To admit we do not know all is not to say we can know nothing.

The book is not helped by editorial sloppiness; witness the confused quotation from John Barton (52), inaccurate biblical references (Isa. 1:10 = Isa. 1:1, p. 66; Joel 3:16 = 3:16, p. 251) and ‘all this rbd of Yahweh’ (90). The spine wrongly gives the series as JSNTS.

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