In the 1976 Book List of the Society for Old Testament Study Peter Ackroyd wrote an appreciative review of R. E. Clements' Prophecy and Tradition, which ended thus:

The review is characteristic of its author both in its generous appreciation and in its care to warn that an accepted pattern or a scholarly consensus may need a greater degree of modification than would appear. Much study of the prophets in recent years has indeed assumed that one tradition can be invoked to account for all their characteristic concerns and emphases.

A generation ago the situation was markedly different. I. Engnell, in an article substantially dating from the 1940s, argued that ‘broadly speaking, the prophetic literature may be divided into two main types, which may be called the liturgy type and the diwan type’ (Engnell, 1970, p. 166), and he went on to list Joel, Habakkuk, Nahum and Deutero-Isaiah as characteristic examples of the ‘liturgy type’. Engnell's work aroused violent controversy in his own lifetime, and there have been few scholars outside Scandinavia who have accepted his views without drastic modification.