Book review: The theology of the book of Amos

This is a review of the book The theology of the book of Amos by John Barton (Old Testament Theology; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, ISBN 9780521671750).\ud Introduction: In this, the third contribution to Cambridge University Press’s Old Testament Theology series, John Barton investigates the theology of both the prophet and the book of Amos. His discussion opens with a 50-page research review, which looks at various compositional theories that (a) ascribe (most of) the book to Amos, (b) regard it as the process of an editorial process, (c) see it as a deliberate literary production (Barton here focuses especially on assumed chiastic structures), or (d) consider Amos to be a later invention. This is followed by a brief discussion of recent investigations of Amos’s place in the Book of the Twelve and some concluding considerations, in which Barton, following largely the proposals of Tchavdar Hadjiev in The Composition and Redaction of the Book of Amos (BZAW 393; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), makes a case for what might be described as a fairly conservative redaction-critical reading of the book