The ‘rhetorical situation’ of Hebrews

We might define the rhetorical situation behind a speech or writing as the complex of persons, settings and events that results in the creation of that piece of rhetoric. In this definition I am building on the work of Lloyd Bitzer. We can identify three basic factors in such a situation: (1) the particulars of the audience, (2) the particulars of the rhetor, and (3) what Bitzer calls the ‘exigence’, the efficient cause behind the creation of the rhetorical piece. While we can induce some basics from the text of Hebrews about the author and audience, the focus of our interest should be the so-called exigence. The exigence is what actually leads to the creation of a discourse, that which culminates in speech or writing. Bitzer defined it as ‘an imperfection marked by urgency … a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other than it should be’. This exigence corresponds closely to what George Kennedy has called the central ‘rhetorical problem’ that an author addresses.

The purpose of this chapter is to understand the overall rhetorical strategy of Hebrews enough to interpret individual passages relating to its eschatology and cosmology appropriately. The first chapter identified the failure to consider this overall strategy as a key methodological pitfall in prior studies of specific topics in the book.