The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading

By Meir Sternberg

Meir Sternberg’s classic study is “an important book for those who seek to take the Bible seriously as a literary work.” (Adele Berlin, Prooftexts)
 
In “a book to read and then reread” (Modern Language Review), Meir Sternberg “has accomplished an enormous task, enriching our understanding of the theoretical basis of Biblical narrative and giving us insight into a remarkable number of particular texts.” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion). The result is a “a brilliant work” (Choice) distinguished “both for his comprehensiveness and for the clearly-avowed faith stance from which he understands and interprets the strategies of the biblical narratives.” (Theological Studies). The Poetics of Biblical Narrative shows, in Adele Berlin’s words, “more clearly and emphatically than any book I know, that the Bible is a serious literary work―a text manifesting a highly sophisticated and successful narrative poetics.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 22, 1987
• ISBN: 9780253114044

Book preview

THE POETICS OF BIBLICAL NARRATIVE

Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature

Herbert Marks and Robert Polzin, General Editors

THE POETICS OF BIBLICAL NARRATIVE

Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading

MEIR

STERNBERG

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

BLOOMINGTON

First Midland Book Edition 1987

Indiana University Press Bloomington

Copyright ® 1985 by Meir Sternberg

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of Indiana University Press.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Sternberg, Meir

The poetics of biblical narrative

(Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature)

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Bible as literature. I. Title. II. Series

BS535.S725  1985  809’.93522  85-42752

cl. ISBN 0-253-34521-9

pa. ISBN 0-253-20453-4

6   7   8   99

To the memory of my beloved mother, Esther Sternberg, née Friedmann

CONTENTS

Preface

1. Literary Text, Literary Approach: Getting the Questions Straight

Discourse and Source

Fiction and History

Form and Doctrine

The Drama of Reading

2. Narrative Models

3. Ideology of Narration and Narration of Ideology

Omniscience Charged and Monopolized: The Epistemological Revolution

The Omnipotence Effect: Control Claimed and Disclaimed

4. Viewpoints and Interpretations

Point of View and Its Biblical Configuration

The Wooing of Rebekah

Positions and Discrepancies Established

The Movement from Divergence to Convergence of Perspectives

New Tensions and Final Resolution

5. The Play of Perspectives

Narrator vs. God

Narrator and Reader vs. God and Characters Spheres of Communication

Three Reading Positions

From Plot to Perspective

From Ignorance to Knowledge

Privilege and Performance

6. Gaps, Ambiguity and the Reading Process

The Literary Work as a System of Gaps

The Story of David and Bathsheba: On the Narrator’s Reticence and Omissions

The Ironic Exposition

What Is the King Doing in the City?

Uriah the Hittite Recalled to Jerusalem

Does Uriah Know about His Wife’s Doings? The Twofold Hypothesis

What Does David Think That Uriah Thinks? The Three-Way Hypothesis

How Joab Fails to Carry Out David’s Order

How the Messenger Fails to Carry Out Joab’s Order

The Analogy to the Story of Abimelech and the Woman

On Mutually Exclusive Systems of Gap-Filling: Turning the Screws of Henry James and Others

7. Between the Truth and the Whole Truth

Foolproof Composition in Ambiguity

The Relevance of Absence

Temporary and Permanent Gapping

The Echoing Interrogative

Opposition in Juxtaposition

Coherence Threatened and Fortified

Norms and Their Violations

From Gapping to Closure: The Functions of Ambiguity

8. Temporal Discontinuity, Narrative Interest, and the Emergence of Meaning

Suspense and the Dynamics of Prospection

The Pros and Cons of Suspense in the Bible

Modes of Shaping the Narrative Future

Darkness in Light, or: Zigzagging toward Siseras End

Curiosity and the Dynamics of Retrospection

Joseph and His Brothers: Making Sense of the Past

Surprise and the Dynamics of Recognition

9. Proleptic Portraits

Character and Characterization: From Divine to Human

Why the Truth about Character Does Not Suffice

The Art of the Proleptic Epithet

Epithets and the Rule of Forward-looking Exposition

10. Going from Surface to Depth

Character as Action, Character in Action

The Composition of Character and the Limits of Metonymic Inference

Old Age in Genesis

Good Looks in Samuel

11. The Structure of Repetition: Strategies of Informational Redundancy

Similarity Patterns and the Structure of Repetition

Formulaic Convention or Functional Principle?

Constant and Variable Factors

Verbatim Repetition

Repetition with Variation: Forms and Functions of Deviance

Repetition and Communication: Pharaoh’s Dream

Basic Axes and Natural Combinations

From Natural to Functional Combinations

Deliberate Variation: (Figural) Rhetoric within (Narratorial) Rhetoric

Generic Transformation into Parable

Permutations and Some Complications

Repetition and Narrative Art: Some General Consequences

12. The Art of Persuasion

Persuading in the Court of Conscience

Delicate Balance in the Rape of Dinah

The Rhetorical Repertoire

13. Ideology, Rhetoric, Poetics

Justifying the Ways of God to Man: Saul’s Rejection

Dancing in Chains

Dialogue as Pressure, Variations as Judgment

Convergence with Belated Discovery: Rhetorical Overkill

Notes

Index

PREFACE

Some of the book’s theses and analyses have appeared in a long series of articles on the subject, and I am grateful for permission to use the material: The King Through Ironic Eyes: The Narrator’s Devices in the Story of David and Bathsheba and Two Excursuses on the Theory of the Narrative Text, Hasifrut 1 (1968) 263–92; Caution, A Literary Text! Problems in the Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative, Hasifrut 2 (1970) 608–63; Delicate Balance in the Story of the Rape of Dinah: Biblical Narrative and the Rhetoric of Narrative, Hasifrut 4 (1973) 193–231; The Structure of Repetition in Biblical Narrative: Strategies of Informational Redundancy, Hasifrut 25 (1977) 109–50; Between the Truth and the Whole Truth in Biblical Narrative: The Rendering of Inner Life by Telescoped Inside View and Interior Monologue, Hasifrut 29 (1979) 110–46; Patterns of Similarity: Part and Whole In Biblical Composition, presented to the Eighth World Congress of Jewish Studies (1981); Language, World, and Perspective in Biblical Art: Free Indirect Discourse and Modes of Covert Penetration, Hasifrut 32 (1983) 88–131; The Bible’s Art of Persuasion: Ideology, Rhetoric, and Poetics in Saul’s Fall, Hebrew Union College Annual (1983) 45–82. The two earliest articles were written in collaboration with Menakhem Perry. As the notes will indicate, I have also freely transplanted ideas and examples from my various theoretical studies; or perhaps I should say retrieved, since the theories themselves often trace back to my exploration of biblical practice.

This being a rather long book, it is only fair to point out that the argument covers both less and more ground than may appear. Less, because it does not incorporate all the work I have done on the Bible since the sixties, not even all the published work. The emphasis here falls not just on narrative as distinct from other genres but on those narrative principles crucial to the marriage of ideology to reading that governs biblical poetics. Involving problems underrated or neglected in literary theory itself, the working and rules of this ideological art need systematic reconstruction. To keep the argument in focus, therefore, I reserve for separate treatment issues like the Bible’s generic variety, its composition of units into books, or its modes of rendering speech and thought, discussed in some of the papers listed above.

On the other hand, this volume covers more ground than its table of contents may suggest. For one thing, since narrative always works in opposition to other genres and biblical narrative even incorporates them into its prose, questions of generic variety often rise to the surface. Such glances at the meaningful opposition between prose narrative and poetry or parable bear, for instance, on speech situation, rhetorical strategy, transparence of discourse, making sense of discrepant or, on the contrary, parallel and apparently repetitive units. Within narrative itself, for another thing, my tracing of the Bible’s rich and novel repertoire of forms is intentionally distributed (up to the end of chapter 12, where the whole picture emerges) in order to put it in its proper place. However impressive that repertoire, it still figures only as a means to an end, offering the biblical artist an assorted set of choices to be made and coordinated and varied according to higher principles. Contrary to what some recent attempts at literary analysis seem to assume, form has no value or meaning apart from communicative (historical, ideological, aesthetic) function. Nor has its typology as such. Accordingly, I have decided against isolating several of the Bible’s protean forms that I am most concerned with in a variety of roles and contexts. To mention three that recur throughout: analogical structure; modes of naming or reference; types of quotation, including dialogue and free indirect style. Readers with special interest in such techniques may want to consult the Index (as well as the references to more continuous discussions given in the notes).

In emphasis and arrangement, more generally, this differs from the book that I might write, indeed from the drafts I did write, without the benefit of hindsight. For its thrust reflects the experience gained from the reception and fortunes of my published work on the Bible over the last fifteen years. Starting from the repercussions of the very first essay in the series (The King Through Ironic Eyes, 1968), the need for a poetics offering a new language and sense of purpose has turned out even deeper, certainly more widespread, than one familiar with the unhappy state of the field might expect. Even the antagonism evoked, often to be silently revoked in time, would appear only differently revealing from the more common welcome and acceptance. By a process too recent and multiple to trace, but clearly gaining momentum, the situation has changed for the better since. Gaps, ambiguity, redundancy, exposition, temporal ordering, omniscient viewpoint, reading process, patterns of analogy, alternative forms of reference, indirect characterization and rhetoric: such concepts (among the most productive so far) show signs of generating a powerful discourse about the Bible, which traditional scholarship must come to terms with. I for one am now more convinced than ever that here lies the future of biblical studies as a whole. Yet time has also revealed some covert (perhaps not even conscious) variations within this evolving discourse, uniformly oriented though it seems to the text itself as object and to literary study as a discipline. Of course, the new approaches need no more speak with one voice than the old; but nor must terminological pass for conceptual unity, or reaction for reorientation. Ironically enough, it is on such matters that I have increasingly found it necessary to enlarge from one version of the book to another, with a view to sorting out the lines of inquiry as well as in pure self-defense against the good intentions of fellow inquirers in Israel and elsewhere. Hence the care taken, as early as the opening chapter, to spell out the business of biblical poetics, historical dimension included; to dissociate it from some assumptions about text and context recently made (and attributed to me) by the literary approach; and to suggest how far the relationship between literary theory and biblical analysis is from the one-way traffic called application. If anything, it still needs to be repeated, doing justice to the Bible’s intricate art requires a theory and for that matter a history of narrative considerably more developed than the best now available.

Even such questions of method and theory, however, are not in heaven. On the contrary, since the Bible takes measures to render its story accessible to all—here lies much of its originality and my theme—it is only appropriate that a work in biblical poetics should follow suit. This book is addressed to all students of the Bible, professional and other; also to comparatists, narratologists, and lovers of narrative at large. No special expertise in literary or biblical study is assumed. My translations are literal enough, and the transliterations simple enough, to enable even the Hebrewless reader to follow the textual analyses as well as the drift of my argument.

This is a good opportunity to thank the many—scholars, academic audiences, schoolteachers, common readers, not least my students—who have responded and questioned. Perhaps their most important contribution has been the evidence that it still greatly matters how we make sense of the Bible. I owe a special debt to Menakhem Perry, with whom I made the first step (and met the first wave of attack) on the way to this book. Thanks are also due to two other colleagues, Benjamin Hrushovski and Itamar Even-Zohar, for having opened the columns of the literary quarterly Hasifrut to the adventure of biblical poetics at a time when editors might well hesitate. The final version of this book would probably still be in the making were it not for Robert Polzin’s encouragement and support, far beyond the call of editorial duty; his vision and friendship have made all the difference. To give an idea of my debt to Tamar Yacobi, Proverbs 31 might serve well enough, except that it says nothing about the wife’s being a professional helpmate and one as worth listening to as ready to listen.

I want to end where my schooling began and my affections still linger: with a tribute to the great tradition of Jewish exegesis, originating and to me also culminating in the ancient rabbis. My admiration for their interpretive genius—and I do not use such terms lightly—is only equalled by my variance from their premises and licenses. At a level higher than method, deeper than the ready-made opposition of the scholarly to the creative, their way with biblical language remains exhilarating and liberating. However wild by normal standards of interpretation, their readings do at least practice all the time what Humpty Dumpty with his footling glosses on his opaque text merely preaches: that if you make words do your will, you must pay them extra. Whether and how a poetics can improve upon that balance, whether its sense of a system at work can keep the interpreter’s will on a tighter rein while offering the Bible’s words comparable if not higher pay, this is the question.

M. S.

THE POETICS OF BIBLICAL NARRATIVE

• 1 •

LITERARY TEXT, LITERARY APPROACH: GETTING THE QUESTIONS STRAIGHT

The few, by Nature form’d, with Learning fraught, / Born to instruct, as others to be taught, / Must study well the Sacred Page; and see / Which Doctrine, this, or that, does best agree / With the whole Tenour of the Work Divine.

John Dryden, Religio Laici

What goals does the biblical narrator set himself? What is it that he wants to communicate in this or that story, cycle, book? What kind of text is the Bible, and what roles does it perform in context? These are all variations on a fundamental question that students of the Bible would do well to pose loudly and sharply: the question of the narrative as a functional structure, a means to a communicative end, a transaction between the narrator and the audience on whom he wishes to produce a certain effect by way of certain strategies. Like all social discourse, biblical narrative is oriented to an addressee and regulated by a purpose or a set of purposes involving the addressee. Hence our primary business as readers is to make purposive sense of it, so as to explain the what’s and the how’s in terms of the why’s of communication.

Posing such a question in the clearest terms is a condition for reasonable and systematic inquiry, rather than a panacea or a shortcut to unanimity. The answers to it would doubtless still vary as well as agree, since the reticent narrator gives us no clue about his intentions except in and through his art of narrative. To reconstruct the principles underlying the textual givens, therefore, we must form hypotheses that will relate fact to effect; and these may well differ in interpretive focus and explanatory power. But even the differences, including those not or not immediately resolvable, would then become well-defined, intelligible, and fruitful. That they are not remarkable for being so in the present state of affairs is largely due to the tendency to read biblical texts out of communicative context, with little regard for what they set out to achieve and the exigencies attaching to its achievement. Elements thus get divorced from the very terms of reference that assign to them their role and meaning: parts from wholes, means from ends, forms from functions. Nothing could be less productive and more misleading. Even the listing of so-called forms and devices and configurations—a fashionable practice, this, among aspirants to literary criticism—is no substitute for the proper business of reading. Since a sense of coherence entails a sense of purpose, it is not enough to trace a pattern; it must also be validated and justified in terms of communicative design. After all, the very question of whether that pattern exists in the text—whether it has any relevance and any claim to perceptibility—turns on the question of what it does in the text. Unless firmly anchored in the relations between narrator and audience, therefore, formalism degenerates into a new mode of atomism.

What, then, does the biblical narrator want to accomplish, and under what conditions does he operate? To answer this question, both the universal and the distinctive features of his communication must be taken into account. Those features combine, in ways original and often surprising but unmistakable, to reveal a poetics at work. Whatever the nature and origin of the parts—materials, units, forms—the whole governs and interrelates them by well-defined rules of poetic communication.

To many, Poetics and Bible do not easily make a common household even as words. But I have deliberately joined them together, avoiding more harmonious terms like Structure or Shape or Art in order to leave no doubt about my argument. Poetics is the systematic working or study of literature as such. Hence, to offer a poetics of biblical narrative is to claim that biblical narrative is a work of literature. Not just an artful work; not a work marked by some aesthetic property; not a work resorting to so-called literary devices; not a work that the interpreter may choose (or refuse) to consider from a literary viewpoint or, in that unlovely piece of jargon, as literature; but a literary work. The difference is radical. Far from matched by whim or violence, the discipline and the object of inquiry naturally come together. And if this claim made for poetics sounds either tantamount to or more extreme than the alternatives just mentioned, that only shows how liable it is to misunderstanding even from sympathetic quarters—or perhaps, judging by past experience, especially from sympathetic quarters.

Since the sixties, I have found myself more often commended than condemned for developing the literary approach to the Bible. I was surprised when this description first arose, in regard to a programmatic analysis (written in collaboration with Menakhem Perry) that centered in the David and Bathsheba story.¹ However, my subsequent studies came yet more automatically under the same label, which has gained currency and prestige over the years but only grown more unwelcome to myself. Churlish as it is to quarrel with compliments, it would be still worse to pretend that I have ever advocated quite this kind of program and am happy with all its recent variants, or even those related to my own work. It is not that a biblical poetics and a literary approach must be doctrinally opposed, but that they tend to become so and are indeed on the way to becoming so (still retrievably, I believe) in practice. Nor is it that the literary approach, whatever it may mean and however it may operate, has failed to yield good or at least stimulating results. On the contrary, the small and uneven corpus thus far produced has done more to illuminate the text (and enliven the field) than traditional research many times its size and duration. Rather, the practice suffers from the deficiencies of the underlying theoretical framework, so that both are exposed to serious and often gratuitous objections. Were the theory more on a par or even in alignment with the practical analysis, I would gladly begin this chapter with an exploration of the family resemblance.

As it is, a whole set of problems emerge. To begin with, the very phrase literary approach is rather meaningless in view of the diversity of the languages of criticism throughout history, and "the literary approach, with its monolithic ring, is downright misleading. Worse, either phrase is also ambiguous between object and method. Whatever the critical mode adopted, there arises the formidable question of its applicability to the Bible. Of course, where there’s a will there’s always a way of imposing it, as the ancients, misled by Josephus and their own classical bias, already demonstrated in twisting Israelite poetry into hexameter or trimeter form. Such acts of violence can be perpetrated even more easily on the text’s world and meaning than on the formal properties of its language: interpretation can take greater liberties than description. The question is only whether we are free to take them with the Bible. Does the literary approach differ from all others in being self-justifying? Or does the expression serve as a shorthand for an approach to the Bible as the literary text it is"? And if so, why does one so rarely encounter an explicit statement to this effect, complete with an indication of the narrative features that warrant it?

These built-in ambiguities hardly recommend the term literary approach and have indeed determined me against it (and its cognates) from the start. On top of them, however, there have gathered a number of strange ad hoc commissions and omissions. Some would appear to relate to the vagueness promoted by the unhappy terminology—above all, the silence on the issue of the Bible’s literariness, which one might expect to open and inform every discussion. Others have crept in by different routes. These include the making of claims and assumptions (not always the same ones) that actually fail to establish the relevance of literary analysis, let alone the nature of the object, and discontinuities between theory and practice.

Terminology apart, again, the conceptual and methodological weaknesses do not mar the literary approach as such but its few existing formulations (and their implied counterparts in the practice of criticism and teaching). Nor do the weaknesses bear on all these formulations with equal force. What follows should be taken, therefore, as an anatomy of issues—rather than anything like a survey of specific critical performances—and a measure of my belief in their resolvability compared with the chronic ailments of traditional scholarship.

The only thing beyond cure is incompetence. The literary approach may sink to a level as low as David Robertson’s The Old Testament and the Literary Critic, ² which undertakes to initiate readers, by precept and example, into its mysteries. This guide betrays all the weaknesses to which I pointed, in their least acceptable form and with no redeeming features except as negative illustration. The assumption that the Bible is imaginative literature is arbitrary. No one forces us to make it, nor does the Bible itself demand that we make it. We make it because we want to, because literary criticism can yield exciting and meaningful results (p. 4). Actually, to ensure the divorce between method and object, those aspiring to study the Bible as literature are even urged to resist the natural inclination to operate in terms of its original context and original intention (p. 2). Instead, they must learn to subject it to the tools of criticism or, in the original’s idiom, the conglomeration of procedures and manipulations people have invented to study imaginative literature (p. 3).

To qualify the novitiate for this task, a sprinkling of general guidelines is provided, e.g., that the critic operates whenever possible by the principle of synecdoche (p. 6), that his final concern is with Beauty, not Truth (p. 13), or that literary criticism, conceived of as a language, is more agglutinative than analytic (p. 7). Shorn of its aphoristic generalities, however, the conglomeration amounts to three procedures. First, the critic assumes that the text he is interpreting is a whole (p. 7). Second, he takes everything in the text as fictional and hence essentially metaphoric (p. 5). To understand the fiction, third, he picks up clues from the work itself and relates them to the genre to which the work belongs. Since all contexts are equally valid, the choice of this generic context is entirely arbitrary. Only considerations of what the audience is likely to find more exciting determine whether the critic will perform a literary study of Biblical hymns" in relation to Mesopotamian or to Methodist hymnody (pp. 9–10).

That such a hodgepodge of vulgarized truisms and plain nonsense should masquerade as a theory of literature, indeed as the distillation and consensus of literary study, might suggest a parody in the manner of F. C. Crews’s The Pooh Perplex. The self-contradictions, not to speak of the giveaways, leap to the eye. If the adoption into literature or the exercise of the literary method is a matter of free choice, why will it go well with some texts, including the Bible, and poorly with others (p. 3)? If literary criticism, like all sciences, is defined by the nature of the object it studies (p. 5), how can the defining class of objects be indiscriminately enlarged at will? And if the Bible is to be wrenched fairly suddenly and none too gently from one context to another (p. 4), how can the procedure yield understanding or insight? Insight into what, and, given the recommended variability of the wrenching among readers, for whom?

Still, in view of the claims made for the approach as a paradigm change comparable to the shift from Newtonian physics to Einstein’s theory of special relativity (p. 4), the least one might expect from its application is a crop of provocative readings. But the case proves to be one of the Horatian mountain and mouse. The analyses, operating at the level of extended summary, could hardly be more pedestrian and less unorthodox, except perhaps for verdicts like reading Greek literature as a whole is better practice for adult living than reading Hebrew literature (p. 31). By any standard, including excitement, they are not fit to be compared with the insights into the same texts afforded by pre-Einsteinians such as Hermann Gunkel on Psalms or Moshe Greenberg in Understanding Exodus. What is worse, the practice leaves behind or contradicts the very precepts introduced with such fanfare. In violation of the holistic imperative, no place is found in the tale of the Exodus for a major character: Aaron is never well integrated into the story, and just as well could be edited out (p. 20). The premise of fictionality, bristling with possibilities of interpretive fireworks, never comes into significant play. Conventions, supposedly imported into the text on the reader’s whim, often turn out to have been there all the time, firmly embedded and in a controlling position at that. Indeed, phrases like if this interpretation is correct or most readers experience or the abundant we’s betray a yearning for old-fashioned objectivity, a wobbling between the conceptions of biblical literariness as pure fancy and as an inherent, regulative feature. Obviously, if this were what literary criticism has to offer, one could not dispense with its services too soon.

No discipline can insure itself against abuse and misrepresentation, least of all in foreign lands that professionals rarely visit. It would therefore be premature for those ill-disposed toward the whole enterprise to rub their hands. Beyond all questions of theoretical persuasion, this self-appointed spokesman and his like no more speak for literary inquiry, the better sort of its promoters in biblical circles included, than a Thomas Rymer represents Shakespearian criticism. Their vagaries do not and must not reflect on the serious work done, and only betray the proverbial effects of a little knowledge. One would much rather shrug off the whole thing were it not for the danger that in a field where editors judged the book worthy of mentorship, the prospective audience might take it as its own valuation.

Even among scholars whose work commands respect, however, Robertson proves far more exceptional in the level at which he advocates the literary approach than in the doctrines advocated. Almost invariably, the impression that an outsider might get of literary criticism is one of a homogeneous and self-explanatory pursuit, with hallowed articles of faith to which all practitioners do and all aspirants must subscribe. It is as if all that remains is to apply to the Bible the proven tools ready to one’s hand. But all too often these invoked articles do not reflect the history or state of the art and would not pass theoretical muster. However laudable their intentions, therefore, not one of the more explicit or missionary statements of belief I have seen outlines a viable framework. Nor do the results achieved in and through the practical criticism always follow from the official platform. It is the consistency of the theory, its continuity with the practice and its relation to the object that form the main, certainly the first, problem. My biblical poetics does, I believe, make a reasonably coherent argument along the lines indicated in the opening paragraphs. But were the points at which it opposes various literary approaches of a terminological or even conceptual nature only, my quarrel with them would not go much beyond indicating the moot questions. In the circumstances, the great enemy is not disagreement but darkness, shadowboxing, artificial divisions between traditionalists and innovators, with each side more inclined to differ than to ascertain if and where genuine differences lie. This introductory chapter, I hope, will at least get the issues straight and the lines properly drawn.

Kenneth Gros Louis’s Methodological Considerations, introducing a recent anthology to which he has contributed some fine analyses, may serve as a point of departure. Here are the most basic assumptions³ supposedly shared by literary critics of the Bible, myself, alas, included:

1. Approaching the Bible as literature means placing emphasis on the text itself—not on its historical and textual backgrounds, not on the circumstances that brought the text into its present form, not on its religious and cultural foundations. In short, our approach is essentially ahistorical (pp. 14–15).

2. The literary critic assumes unity in the text (p. 15).

3. A literary critic begins by being primarily interested in how a work is structured or organized (p. 17).

4. Teachers of literature are primarily interested in the literary reality of a text and not its historical reality, literariness being equated here with fictionality: Is it true, we ask, not in the real world but in the fictional world that has been created by the narrative? (p. 14).

5. The literary reality of the Bible can be studied with the methods of literary criticism employed with every other text (p. 14).

I am sorry to say that, with the possible exception of the second, I do not share any of these tenets, certainly not as they stand and least of all as a package deal. Nor do I see how this quintet adds up to an approach as distinct from a declaration of independence—the less so since almost all its parts would apply to the study of nonliterary texts, and none legitimates the literary study of the Bible in terms other than the critic’s choice to exercise it. What, if anything, makes the literary critic an overdue arrival rather than an intruder on the biblical scene? But it may be well to sort out these matters in a more orderly fashion. So the three following sections will examine the cruxes that have generated most of the debate between (and within) the various camps; the fourth will then gather up the threads into a more systematic argument for a functional poetics.

Discourse and Source

To the student of theory, the list just cited will have a familiar ring and carry its own note of warning. The literary approaches to the Bible that would uphold those fiats are for the most part children of the New Criticism, inheriting its emphasis on the direct encounter with the text and, less fortunately, its professions of faith. This explains a good deal. The New Criticism, no longer new except in name, arose in the first quarter of this century (and gained a large following in the second) as a reaction against the excesses of historical scholarship. One of its foremost advocates, looking back on the scene of his youth, describes his own sensational contribution as a kind of banner, or rallying cry, for those literary theorists who would no longer put up with the mishmash of philology, biography, moral admonition, textual exegesis, social history, and sheer burbling that largely made up what was thought of as literary criticism in academic circles.⁴ In preaching and practicing close analysis, with particular reference to the language, the New Critics have rendered an invaluable service to the study of literature. But theirs has remained a movement of reaction, iconoclastic, often extravagant, polemical rather than theoretical, speaking in many voices, raising more problems than it would or could handle, and laying itself open to a variety of charges, with self-contradiction at their head. Not much has survived, except the practical and educational effect.

History, it is said, repeats itself. In the face of a situation that duplicates the mishmash and bankruptcy of literary scholarship at the beginning of the century, the New Criticism resurged in the biblical arena. The enemy has remained the same, and so have the issues. But the weapons have already proved ineffective beyond shock tactics in the old campaign and cannot achieve much in the new beyond redirecting attention to the text. For good or for ill, such literary approaches express a reaction, an understandable and timely call for a shift of priorities that overreaches itself and falls short of an adequate countertheory. They advocate the methods and rehearse the manifestoes of the New Criticism, but without duly adjusting them to the theoretical revaluations made since or to the conditions of biblical study or even to their own practice as readers (often shrewd readers) of the Bible. As such, their dismissal of historicism makes an ideological rather than a methodological reorientation: polemics may at best clear the ground but not substitute for a scholarly alternative. At times, indeed, the emphasis laid on the classroom and immediate enjoyment, with the Occasional hint that neither requires even a knowledge of Hebrew, gives the impression that the object is rather to save the Bible from the hands of the scholars. Which is not such a bad idea, except that there are hands and hands.

Of this antihistorical bias, the notorious problem of intention affords a miniature. Predictably enough, it heads Gros Louis’s list of irrelevancies: We know, as students of literature, that the author’s intention, his goals in writing for his contemporary audience, and his religious convictions, play a small role indeed in literary criticism (p. 16). One wonders who we refers to. So far as this is an empirical matter, it can easily be demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of literary critics have ascribed the greatest importance to the author’s intention and that the New Critical attacks only set out and indeed managed to refine the appeal to it. Moreover, if this is a matter of theory, then the question of intentionality has little of its usual bearing.

The affirmation of irrelevance alludes, of course, to Wimsatt and Beardsley’s classic attack, The Intentional Fallacy (1946). In a retrospect already mentioned, the latter co-author describes it as a designedly subversive and unpleasantly provoking essay (Intentions and Interpretations, p. 188). For all its reaction against the mishmash of scholarship, however, the argument is more moderate than its reputation might suggest. The fallacy actually debunked consists in the reliance on external intention, gathered from the author’s psychology or biography or revelations (in journals, for example, or letters or reported conversations) about how and why [he] wrote the poem—to what lady, while sitting on what lawn, or at the death of what friend or brother.⁵

It follows that biblical study can (indeed cannot but) leave on one side the pros and cons of so-called external intention. About this necessity there is even nothing like the aura of heroism that surrounds the rabbinic choice to the same effect. Though committed to the tenet of the divine authorship of Scripture, the ancient sages flatly dismissed the ruling of a heavenly voice that intruded on their deliberations in its authorial capacity:

Rabbi Joshua rose to his feet and said: ‘It is not in heaven’ [Deuteronomy 30:12]. What does not in heaven mean? Rabbi Jeremiah said: The Torah has already been given at Mount Sinai, and we pay no heed to any heavenly voice. … Rabbi Nathan met Elijah and asked him: What did the Holy One, blessed be he, do at that hour? Elijah answered: He smiled and said, My sons have defeated me, my sons have defeated me. (Baba Metzia 59b)

In the absence of heavenly voices, the question does not arise at all, since none of the biblical authors has left journals or letters or any other biographical matter outside the writings themselves. The writers of narrative, with the possible exception of latecomers like Ezra and Nehemiah, have not revealed so much of themselves as their names. Had the Bible been the whole stock and store of world literature, Wimsatt and Beardsley would not have penned their—or at least not this—New Critical manifesto.

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 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. In this respect, the Bible does not vary from any other literary or ordinary message except in the ends and the rules that govern the forms of communication. Minor differences apart, however, this is quite compatible with the original Wimsatt and Beardsley position and a variety of others, including the fairly recent pragmatics or speech-act theory. The more so because intention no longer figures as a psychological state consciously or unconsciously translated into words. Rather, it is a shorthand for the structure of meaning and effect supported by the conventions that the text appeals to or devises: for the sense that the language makes in terms of the communicative context as a whole.

With the interpreter removed from the Bible’s sociocultural context, intention becomes a matter of historical reconstruction. And to this some would object on grounds familiar to students of literary and biblical hermeneutics alike: for example, that we cannot become people of the past or that to equate meaning with the original author’s intention and his audience’s comprehension is to impoverish the text. The problems raised and tangled by this influential minority view, itself far from homogeneous, are too complicated for me to go into here.⁶ Nor, despite appearances, is a systematic examination really vital, considering the biblical text and its current scholarly ambiance—the New Critical spirit included. With these provisos let me say, quite simply, that the hard antihistorical line in hermeneutics is too condescending and inconsistent (in varying combinations) to make a viable theory.

It is condescending, not to say arrogant, because it still remains to demonstrate that in matters of art (as distinct from their abstract articulation) the child is always wiser than its parent, that wit correlates with modernity, that a culture which produced the Bible (or the Iliad) was incapable of going below the surface of its own product or referring it to the worthwhile coordinates of meaning. (The naive assumption turns grotesque when preached by some of the poorest readers that the Bible has known.) Even worse is the equation of author’s and audience’s meaning. What text the author made and what sense a reader or public made of it are always distinct in principle; and the Bible’s practice brilliantly drives home this variance in that it provides, as we shall see, for all levels of reading through a "foolproof composition.

Nor is this line consistent. The claim that one has the right to fashion and in effect invent the text anew as one pleases would at least enjoy the virtue of unassailability. But nothing short of this will do. From the premise that we cannot become people of the past, it does not follow that we cannot approximate to this state by imagination and training—just as we learn the rules of any other cultural game—still less that we must not or do not make the effort. Indeed, the antihistorical argument never goes all the way, usually balking as early as the hurdle of language. Nobody, to the best of my knowledge, has proposed that we each invent our own biblical Hebrew. But is the language any more or less of a historical datum to be reconstructed than the artistic conventions, the reality-model, the value system? Given their interpenetration, moreover, where does the linguistic component end and the nonlinguistic begin? Or how does one draw the line between the aesthetic shape of cyclical or symmetrical plot and the religious belief in God as the shaper of plot? If the whole network of past conventions is empirically unattainable, then dividing the indivisible is even theoretically untenable.

Once the choice turns out to lie between reconstructing the author’s intention and licensing the reader’s invention, there is no doubt where most of us stand. This does not exclude the literary approaches that seem to profess otherwise or even vacillate in practice. ("Conscious art" is one of their favorite phrases.) There remain differences, of course, but regarding emphasis more than substance. And no wonder they should arise, since the practical difficulties of reconstructing the Bible’s code, though they hardly amount to a doctrinal objection, are quite troublesome and procedure still requires considerable attention.

"The age of the text makes no difference. It is from the story of David and Bathsheba itself that we infer its poetics, just as we do with Lolita, regardless of what its author or the modern theory of literature may say."⁷ This generalization has gained some notoriety by being stood on its head. When the first sentence is torn out of context to make a better slogan or target, indeed, it sounds like a call for setting the text free from the prison-house of history. Actually, by an ironic variation on authorial intention, almost the opposite was claimed and demonstrated.

The text’s autonomy is a long-exploded myth: the text has no meaning, or may assume every kind of meaning, outside those coordinates of discourse that we usually bundle into the term context. The appropriate coordinates are historical, and the main trouble with the historical approaches to the Bible is their antihistorical performance. Not even the literary critics that they oppose have subjected the biblical text to so many anachronistic (and often bizarre) norms of unity, social conduct, world order, convention, value judgment. This is largely due to the failure to appreciate the striking systematicity of biblical narrative, which enables the interpreter to derive its poetics from its reticent practice, with some aid (but no dictation) from such extratextual clues as have survived. Historical and literary inquiry thus fall into an unhappy symmetry. In their concern with whatever frames or antecedes the text, the historians tend to overlook the chief body of historical evidence that awaits proper interpretation. In their concern with interpretation, the critics tend to overlook the extent to which their goal involves and commits them to the quest for frames and antecedents. It is for a closer interworking of text and context that the rest of this section, and much of this chapter, will argue.

To begin with the literary side, I have already noted that language exposes the Achilles’ heel of anti-reconstructionism; and the Bible offers the best case in point. Nobody is likely to regard the grammar and semantics of biblical Hebrew as irrelevant to a literary approach. But are they given in the text? Surely not, for the Bible presupposes rather than makes explicit its language system, as every message does its code. To determine the meaning of a word, the syntax of an utterance, the possibilities of stylistic variation, the dividing line between idiomaticity and metaphorical force, the interpreter turns to the linguist and/or turns linguist himself, conducting his own analysis of the underlying system. We thus engage in a historical reconstruction that delimits what the writer could have meant against the background of the linguistic knowledge that, even in artful manipulation, he must have taken for granted. Doing so is evidently as far from reducing the text to extrinsic factors—as if it were a storehouse of verbal data—as it is from the making of a new language at will. Nor is it anything like a compromise between the extremes, but simply the normal business of interpretation.

As with linguistic code, so with artistic code. With a biblical metaphor, for instance, the question whether it is stereotyped or newly coined, dead or live, obviously will make an enormous difference to its meaning and effect. But it has quite a similar (and often more easily determinable) bearing on a compositional measure: dialogue, repetition, omission, ring pattern, temporal ordering, narrative stance. Let us take the last of these, which not only bears clear marks of literariness but also must be appraised by all readers, because the sense of the information presented depends on the rules and authority of its presentation. For these reasons, as it happens, I was drawn to this issue from the outset and can now retrace some of the inevitable steps in the process of grappling with it.⁸

Given the biblical narrator’s access to privileged knowledge—the distant past, private scenes, the thoughts of the dramatis personae, from God down—he must speak from an omniscient position. This establishes authority but not yet originality. Is the stance of omniscience due to tradition or innovation? The formal systematicity of the narrative from Genesis to Kings still leaves this question open, and the critic has no choice except to turn to the literature of the ancient Orient. There he will deduce the conventional nature of the technique from the extant practice of Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Canaanite storytelling and, with the net cast even wider, Homeric epic too. The end of the road? No, because a structural convention, just like a verbal cliché, may be revitalized by being put to new uses or into new contexts. The most promising place to look for these is the Bible’s original world view: unlike all pagan deities, God is truly and exclusively all-knowing. Does this epistemological novelty in the sphere of world order extend to the epistemology and operation of point of view in the narrative? Does the monotheistic article of faith give a new bearing to the inherited rule of omniscience? Is it, for example, that the narrator assumes omniscience because he could not otherwise do justice to an infallible God and impress on the reader, by appropriate suppressions, his own fallibility? Since the Omniscient inspires his prophets, moreover, does the narrator implicitly appeal to the gift of prophecy, so as to speak with redoubled authority as divine historian? And does this storytelling posture link up with another biblical novelty—human usurpation of knowledge right at the beginning of history?

Whatever the answers—and all evidently bristle with significance—they must also reckon with the fact that books like Nehemiah and (partly) Ezra assume the form of eyewitness narrative. Does that mean that the biblical writer, like his modern or for that matter ancient Egyptian counterpart, can choose between two opposed strategies of narration? If so, his choice of persona would in either case take on new import and require explanation by reference to the specific goals and exigencies that determined it in each book. But is it accidental that the instances of limited (first-person) narration are all very late writings, which find their equivalents only in apocryphal and gospel literature? Is their divergence from the omniscient perspective, then, a measure of artistic choice or of historical change in the Bible’s storytelling? Again, the answers can wait. All that needs emphasizing is that for literary analysts to deal responsibly with a compositional issue par excellence they must engage in a poetic valuation of a whole range of so-called extrinsic evidence: from the art of the Oriental tradition through the premises of monotheistic theology to the dating of the biblical canon. Milieu, world view, history of formation—all untouchables prove indispensable to literary study as such.

The same holds true not only for extraliterary history but even for that taboo called the genesis of the text. Literary analysis, we often hear, has no truck with textual prehistory. This is neither reasonable nor quite true. Why anyone should wish to deny himself a universal resource for explaining a text’s incongruities, whether by appeal to its transmission or to any other framework, remains a mystery. Or rather, it would remain one were it not for the incredible abuse of this resource for over two hundred years of frenzied digging into the Bible’s genesis, so senseless as to elicit either laughter or tears. Rarely has there been such a futile expense of spirit in a noble cause; rarely have such grandiose theories of origination been built and revised and pitted against one another on the evidential equivalent of the head of a pin; rarely have so many worked so long and so hard with so little to show for their trouble. Not even the widely accepted constructs of geneticism, like the Deuteronomist, lead an existence other than speculative. Small wonder, then, that literary approaches react against this atomism by going to the opposite extreme of holism. But the excesses and fruitlessness of traditional source criticism no more legitimate the waving aside of its available data than they illegitimate its goals.

An example would be another inescapable principle of composition, to which chapter 11 is devoted. Briefly, the repetitions in the Masoretic Text appear in an elliptical or variant form compared with their equivalents in the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch, which have recently gained support from the Qumran scrolls. The literary critic is hardly entitled to disregard this systematic noncoincidence. Actually, far from threatening his analyses of the received text’s variations in repetition, the external evidence of verbatim rehearsals confirms it by highlighting the distance between two poetics of repetition within the Bible’s line of development. The Masoretic Text’s functional structuring contrasts with the others’ throwback to the formulaic tradition. While neglect or self-denial will impugn the critic’s very method, therefore, the sense of a system may turn the data to poetic account in terms undreamt of by the geneticist bent on harmonizing and purifying versions.⁹

By a triumph of common sense over reaction, moreover, no one practices self-denial all the time. In the face of Saul was one year old when he began to reign (1 Sam 13:1), all differences of approach evaporate: the Masoretic version must be corrupt, and the question is only what number fell out. Nor is this a logical—hence automatic and trivial—but a full-fledged hermeneutic must. Logically speaking, one can easily imagine a world where, by divine grace for example, a one-year-old Saul wields royal power. This is by no means impossible, only implausible and even so only in context. It follows that the dismissal of this possibility constitutes an act of interpretation performed on empirical grounds: it makes more sense to infer a scribal error than a reality-model within which the incongruity will fall into literary pattern. The exigencies of simplicity outweigh the postulate of unity-within-the-given-text, which turns out to be a working hypothesis rather than a categorical imperative. The rabbis, predictably, found a way out by twisting one year into the figurative meaning of newborn innocence. But then their very wrenching betrays their awareness of the dilemma, and their choice to wrench the sense in order to save the wording dramatizes the antithesis between their doctrinal commitment and the literary interpreter’s pragmatic orientation to the received text.

However small this example, accordingly, its implications bear on all the aspects of textual history—glosses, documents, copying accidents, editorial splicing—for the principle is one and indivisible. Far from out of bounds to all but one line of biblical inquiry, genesis as a framework of intelligibility is ever-available to all: it would be as idle for the literary scholar to deny it (and unscholarly to deny oneself of it) as it would be for the traditional biblicist to maintain that genesis comes to light regardless of exegesis. Whatever they may say or think, the only point at issue between them is where and how the appeal to the genetic option serves a purpose.

Indeed, it is in the purpose that the nub of the difference lies. Methodologically speaking, in fact, approaches to the Bible do not ramify into an indefinitely large number of categories distinguished by subject matter, e.g., theological, historical, sociological, anthropological, linguistic, genetic, literary, etc. At a less superficial level, they fall under no more than two heads, which I shall call source-oriented versus discourse-oriented inquiry. Cutting across lines of discipline and resource and vogue, the logic of this bipartition resides in the type of questions asked—in the object of inquiry, both in the sense of the thing considered and the goal envisaged by its consideration.

Source-oriented inquiry addresses itself to the biblical world as it really was, usually to some specific dimension thereof. The theologian, qua theologian, dreams of piecing together a full picture of ancient Israelite religion, mutations and conflicts included. The historian wants to know what happened in Israelite history, the linguist what the language system (phonology, grammar, semantics) underlying the Bible was like. And the geneticist concentrates on the real-life processes that generated and shaped the biblical text: the origins and features of the material (documents, traditions) that went into the Bible, the passage from oral to written transmission, the identity of the writers or schools, the modes of editorial work, the tampering by way of interpolation, scribal misadventure, etc. In each case, then, interest focuses on some object behind the text—on a state of affairs or development which operated at the time as a source (material, antecedent, enabling condition) of biblical writing and which biblical writing now reflects in turn.

Discourse-oriented analysis, on the other hand, sets out to understand not the realities behind the text but the text itself as a pattern of meaning and effect. What does this piece of language—metaphor, epigram, dialogue, tale, cycle, book—signify in context? What are the rules governing the transaction between storyteller or poet and reader? Are the operative rules, for instance, those of prose or verse, parable or chronicle, omniscience or realistic limitation, historical or fictional writing? What image of a world does the narrative project? Why does it unfold the action in this particular order and from this particular viewpoint? What is the part played by the omissions, redundancies, ambiguities, alternations between scene and summary or elevated and colloquial language? How does the work hang together? And, in general, in what relationship does part stand to whole and form to function? The thrust here remains determinate and stable under wide terminological, even conceptual variations. To pursue this line of questioning is to make sense of the discourse in terms of communication, always goal-directed on the speaker’s part and always requiring interpretive activity on the addressee’s. In the framework of an implicit sociocultural code, the one wields certain linguistic and structural tools with an eye to certain effects, the other infers a coherent message from the signals, and the discourse mediates between the two, embodying intent and guiding response.

Thus drawn, in terms of object, the line separating the two inquiries brings out the need for a community or overlap rather than a division of labor. This directly follows from their common exigency as reconstructions of the Bible. I have already suggested why and how the analysis of discourse presupposes, among other things, a reconstruction of various sources—the Bible’s language system, cultural milieu, theology, dating, development within the canon, origins, and transmissional fortunes. All these dimensions of the source then operate as parameters of context: the world they compose becomes a determinant and an indicator of meaning, a guide to the making of sense. Accordingly, the more complete and reliable our knowledge of the world from which the Bible sprang, the sharper our insight into its working and meaning as text; and the limits of this knowledge—for example, regarding biblical semantics, politics, rules of parallelism, editorial license, ties with Oriental art—may coincide with the limits of interpretation. But the converse also holds true and, due to the unfortunate limitations under which biblical scholarship operates, with even greater force than usual.

When all is said and done, the independent knowledge we possess of the real world behind the Bible remains absurdly meager, almost nonexistent when compared with the plenty available to, say, Joyceans or even Shakespearians. For better or worse, most of our information is culled from the Bible itself, and culling information entails a process of interpretation, where source abjectly waits on discourse. There is no escaping this necessity—though, again, many would like to and may even pretend they do. Source-oriented critics often imply that they deal in hard facts and consign aesthetic analysis to its fate at the none too reliable hands of the literary coterie. If seriously entertained, this is a delusion, bearing the name of positivism with none of its excuses and facilities. There is simply nothing here to be positive about—no, or almost no, facts concerning the sources of the Bible apart from those we ourselves make by inference from the Bible as source. The movement from text to reality cannot but pass through interpretation.

If the Bible is a work of literature, therefore, nobody can evade the consequences. As reader, for example, the historian must take into account that every item of reality given in the text may have been stylized by conventions and for purposes alien to historical science. The linguist must reckon with the shifts between colloquial dialogue and formal narrative or with the poetic manipulation of the rules of the language, or else he will mistake the liberties taken by art for the encoded norms. The reading lot of the geneticist is perhaps the hardest of all, because the task of decomposition calls for the most sensitive response to the arts of composition. How else will one be able to tell deliberate from accidental roughnesses and identify the marks of disunity in unity throughout a text whose poesis covers the tracks of its genesis? It is this enforced movement from discourse to source by way of interpretation that allies genetic criticism with that branch of acrobatics known as lifting oneself up by one’s bootstraps. But then it’s either acrobatics or nothing.

Nor will the denial of the Bible’s literariness provide any escape hatch. For the constraint of reading is no more peculiar to a certain kind of text or approach than the search for antecedents. No matter how the writing is viewed, its reading remains the pivotal activity of biblical study as a whole, for a scholar is only as good as his interpretation. Define the Bible as theology, history, myth, or what you will. In each case you have to interpret it in the light of the conventions postulated and defend your interpretation against all rivals who appeal to other frames of reference—literature included—seeing that hypotheses about source stand or fall on the cogency of the analysis of discourse. Indeed, objective lacunae apart, our scanty and chaotic knowledge of the biblical world reflects the interpretive competence of its seekers at large. But this causal relationship may work the other way too, and there are promising signs that it ultimately will.

However this may turn out, the laissez-faire gestures (You go your way and I’ll go mine or, more belligerently, You keep off my grass and I’ll keep off yours) made occasionally from both sides of the literary-approach fence only confuse the issue. They speak as if there were one Bible for the historian, another for the theologian, another for the linguist, another for the geneticist, still another for the literary critic. But there are not enough Bibles to go round, and even Solomon’s wisdom cannot divide the only one we do possess among the various claimants. Its discourse remains indivisible for all, and so does its source. Naturally, we may quarrel about its form and meaning and origins—just as we may put different questions to it—but not along predetermined or, worse, insulated lines. Each reading of the