Abstract: It is important when evaluating the words of others to consider the intention of their writing. It also does not hurt to consider what may go on behind the scenes before an article (or a book review) even reaches a particular readership.

I recently penned a review of The Vision of All: Twenty-Five Lectures on Isaiah in Nephi’s Record, a book by Joseph M Spencer.1 Josh Sears, a colleague of Spencer’s, felt compelled to take issue with certain portions of my review.2 In my own view, and regrettably, Sears has wrenched certain details of my review, in order to take a stand against it and to defend Spencer’s book. But rather than respond to Sears’s arguments point by point (and continue to drag this discussion out), I will briefly express matters in general terms, specifically by examining the concept of authorial intention.

The concept of authorial intentionality is a topic of great interest as well as controversy.3 To demonstrate that author intentionality continues to hold significance to biblical scholars, view the following words of the eminent biblical scholar and literary critic, Meir Sternberg:

As interpreters of the Bible, our only concern is with “embodied” or “objectified” intention; and that forms a different business altogether, about which a wide measure of agreement has always existed. In my own view, such intention fulfills a crucial role, for communication presupposes a speaker who resorts [Page 22]to certain linguistic and structural tools in order to produce certain effects on the addressee; the discourse accordingly supplies a network of clues to the speaker’s intention.4

To provide an example of authorial intent, consider the opening paragraphs of an article I published in 2010, titled “Hannah in the Presence of the Lord”:

The Hannah pericope features representative characteristics of a narrative: a plot structure with an exposition, a conflict and resolution; a comparison and contrast of characters; and a narrator’s evaluative point of view. The narrative is dialogical; the narrator cites the words of Elkanah (1 Samuel 1:8, 23), Hannah (1 Samuel 1:11, 15–16, 18, 22, 26), and Eli (1 Samuel 1:14, 17). The pericope also contains linguistic forms that are characteristic of biblical narratives, such as chronological markers and multiple examples of waw conjunctions, articles, and object markers. Similar to other biblical narrators, the narrator of the Hannah story is omniscient. The narrator knows the precise words uttered by Hannah, Elkanah, and Eli, is aware of a particularly personal and private matter — that the Lord shut up Hannah’s womb, and the narrator is even cognizant of the thoughts of the characters in his story, for Eli thought that Hannah was drunk.

In this narrative, Hannah’s character zone is greater than others, including her rival wife Peninnah and the story’s male characters, Elkanah, Hannah’s husband, Eli the chief priest of the Shiloh cultus, and Samuel,