The Limits of Form Criticism [A paper delivered at the winter meeting of the Society for Old Testament Study, Birmingham, 4-6 January 2006] Convention has a significant role to play in every form of human communication, from everyday speech through to art, cinema, and music. It conveys meaning beyond the literal, and shapes or constrains our understanding. Through it, we understand that we should be cheering on the cowboys with the white hats, or sympathising with the drunken detective, not the charming man in a suit (whose English accent reveals him to be a dangerous psychopath). Spinning the radio dial, we know in an instant whether we are listening to pop, classical, or jazz music, sport, drama, or news, and little more than a glance at the bookshelf distinguishes fiction from non-fiction, the encyclopaedia from the blockbuster. In conversation, we understand both that “could you possibly …?” means “I’d like you to …”, and that enquiries about our health do not require a full medical report in response. Convention is immensely powerful, and ignorance of convention can, at best, blind us to the full meaning of something; at worst, it may lead us to a complete misunderstanding of what we are seeing or hearing. Obviously, it is important for us to have ways of dealing with this, as best we can, in the interpretation of biblical texts. Much of what convention conveys can be deduced from other information in a text, but some cannot, and we risk misreading our literature if we cannot discern the signals within it. We do not, however, have any methodology that has been specifically developed for this task. What we do have, in form criticism, is an approach that was developed originally to study the pre-literary history of materials now taken up into the biblical text, but thought to have developed according to the generic constraints and social requirements of an earlier oral society. Form criticism has often applied its results to the interpretation of biblical literature, not always in a way that has been entirely helpful, but has been intrinsically a diachronic, historical approach. In recent years, however, perhaps as a result of shifting assumptions and interests, there has been an increasing tendency both to call on form criticism to assist in the literary, synchronic study of genre or convention, and to characterise all study in this field as form-critical. Although I shall indulge myself in some more general complaints about form criticism, my main purpose in this paper is to suggest that this tendency does no favours either to form criticism or to biblical