The Art of Biblical Narrative

After having stumbled onto this subject more or less by chance in the later 1970s, a happy accident that led to four published articles, it occurred to me that I had some possibly interesting ideas on how biblical narrative worked that would be worth putting together in a book. I did not have a very clear idea at the time about the potential audience for such a book, though, as with all my writing before then and since, I tried to put what I wanted to say in terms that would be accessible to a general readership and at the same time would be sufficiently rigorous to command the attention of scholars. I was not in the least thinking of framing this work as a textbook, though it turned out that this is one of the uses to which it has been put. The enthusiastic critical reception that the book was given on its publication surprised me a little, perhaps because I thought I was going to annoy readers by ruffling scholarly feathers and otherwise proposing a view of the Bible that might upset common preconceptions. What was even more surprising to me was that as time passed, the book continued to sell steadily, and then, with the advent of e-mail, readers wrote me, as they still do, to say how much the book had meant to them. A friend who always kept a close watch on academic market trends once said to me that the average shelf life of a work of literary scholarship was six years, after which nobody cared about it. His remark was made some fifteen years ago in regard to the longevity of The Art of Biblical Narrative, and now, thirty years after its initial appearance, it still seems to be a book that fills a felt need for many readers, whether their interest in the Bible is religious or literary, academic or cultural.

Writing around 1980, I complained in the first chapter and elsewhere in the book about the woeful absence of literary understanding among professional scholars of the Bible. Some things have changed for the better over the past three decades, but as is often the case with intellectual work, not entirely in the way one would have hoped. Literary analysis is now an accepted emphasis in the guild of Bible scholars, and that is all to the good. (Some reviewers of my Bible translations in the past few years have attributed this development to me, but I am convinced that this is a serious exaggeration. It would almost certainly have happened anyway, and The Art of Biblical Narrative was at most a modest catalyst in the process.) There has been some excellent literary work on the Bible in America, England, France, Belgium, and Israel, but only in patches. I would mention fine books by Ilana Pardes and Yair Zakovitch in Israel, Robert Kawashima in this country, and the Vatican scholar Jean-Pierre Sonnet. But some who have embraced literary perspectives have chosen to ignore text-critical analysis and the rigors of philology, though even in the polemic zeal of The Art of Biblical Narrative, I made clear that these were indispensable tools for dealing with ancient texts. Other Bible scholars, in the supposed interest of literary understanding, have sought to apply to the Bible one or another fashionable academic ideology—postcolonialism, gender studies, radical feminism, deconstruction. My own position remains what it was thirty years ago—that the best way to get a handle on the Bible's literary vehicle is to avoid imposing on it a grid external to it but instead to patiently attend to its minute workings and through such attention inferentially build a picture of its distinctive conventions and techniques.

Going over the 1981 book line by line has been instructive for me, and I hope the resulting revisions will be useful to readers. I have corrected a few minor inaccuracies and added an occasional nuance or amplification to statements made in the original version. There are at least a few points about biblical narrative that I have come to understand better over the years. Some of my argument with biblical sourcecriticism has been tempered in this new version, and I am especially grateful to my good friend and colleague Ron Hendel for going through the book and making specific suggestions in this and other regards. I have inserted a few new pages in the chapter on type-scene because I was trying to define a particular ancient convention, and so it seemed to me that some issues of methodology—especially the relation of type-scene to biblical form-criticism—were worth clarifying. The chapter on composite artistry now incorporates a few qualifications of the original argument because I have come to see that the discrimination of multiple sources can be more fully embraced as a complement to literary analysis than my initial formulations would lead one to think. All in all, however, this revised version remains basically the same book as the one that appeared in 1981, but at least in some regards I think it is now tighter and more precise.

I should add that the most extensive revisions are of the ad hoc translations I originally did of all the biblical passages discussed in the book. Three decades back, I was decidedly too much under the influence of the English translations of the Bible that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, and, especially, the New Jewish Publication Society translation. I had no notion then that, beginning in the mid-1990s, I would become a translator of the Bible myself. In doing that, I quickly realized that a faithful and effective English version needed to emulate the distinctive stylistic traits of the Hebrew and follow wherever possible its purposeful syntactic contours. Though when I began, I was unsure whether it was really feasible to do this in readable literary English, I became convinced through experience, and through the response of many readers, that this was not an entirely impossible undertaking. In light of my recent experience as a translator, I am rather aghast at the versions I did for the first edition of this book, in which Hebrew sentences that begin with "and" are made to start with "when," "now," "since," and the like, and the lovely eloquence of coordinate clauses in the Hebrew is recast in modernizing subordinate clauses that sound like the daily newspaper. In all instances, then, I have substituted my own subsequently published translations, which cover most of the passages cited, and for a few others I have drawn on as yet unpublished translations that I have done. I would hope that these English versions will convey to readers a better sense of the literary allure and subtlety of the Hebrew narratives that the book is meant to illuminate. With these different translations, then, and with the occasional amplification and tightening of the argument, I offer a refurbished Art of Biblical Narrative that I trust retains the timeliness of the original book.

The aim throughout is to illuminate the distinctive principles of the Bible's narrative art. Numerous examples, both brief and extended, are analyzed, but always with the purpose of illustrating general principles, not to provide a commentary, comprehensive or otherwise, on any particular passage. The term "Bible" here will refer only to the Hebrew Bible. I adhere to the traditional Jewish practice, now widely adopted by biblical scholars, of not using the Christian designation, Old Testament, which implies that the Old is completed only in the New and that together they comprise one continuous work. There are, of course, certain literary as well as theological continuities between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, but the narratives of the latter were written in a different language, at a later time, and, by and large, according to different literary assumptions. It therefore does not seem to me that these two bodies of ancient literature can be comfortably set in the same critical framework, and, in any case, I would not have the linguistic and scholarly competence to deal with the New Testament. The Hebrew Bible itself is a collection of works written at intervals over a stretch of seven or eight centuries; and since the narrative books like Esther and Daniel composed in the latter part of this period, after the Babylonian Exile, generally reflect rather new literary practices, I have concentrated on the great body of works for the most part initially formulated in the preexilic age, that is, the Pentateuch and the Former Prophets.

As far as possible, I have tried to make my argument intelligible to the general reader and at the same time precise enough to be instructive to those who may have a more specialized knowledge of the Bible. When I began this study, I hoped I might be able to throw some new light on the Bible by bringing a literary perspective to bear on it. It is an aspiration I have not relinquished, but I also discovered for myself something unanticipated in the course of minutely examining many biblical texts: that the Bible on its part has a great deal to teach anyone interested in narrative because its seemingly simple, wonderfully complex art offers such splendid illustrations of the primary possibilities of narrative. This book, then, is directed to anyone concerned with the Bible, whether out of cultural or religious motives, and also to students of narrative. Readers in this last category will find no more than a couple of passing allusions to the new narratology that has flourished in France and America over the last decade because, quite frankly, I find its usefulness limited, and I am particularly suspicious of the value of elaborate taxonomies and skeptical as to whether our understanding of narrative is really advanced by the deployment of bristling neologisms like analepsis, intradiegetic, actantial. Occasionally, it has seemed necessary to use an established technical term in order to describe exactly a particular feature of style, syntax, or grammar, but I cling to the belief that it is possible to discuss complex literary matters in a language understandable to all educated people. Beyond such considerations of formulation, my approach differs from that of the new narratologists in my sense that it is important to move from the analysis of formal structures to a deeper understanding of the values, the moral vision embodied in a particular kind of narrative. Precisely for that reason, I think this study may have something to say to readers trying to make sense of the Bible as a momentous document of religious history.

The shape and meaning of any literary text will naturally be dependent to some extent on its linguistic fashioning. Because of that fact, I refer intermittently to matters of word-choice, sound-play, and syntax perceptible in the original Hebrew, occasionally even offering alternative translations to indicate a significant pun. All of this, I think, should be fairly easy for a reader to follow without any knowledge of Hebrew; and the main topics I have chosen are features of biblical narrative that for the most part can be observed reasonably well in translation. (For this reason, I decided not to include a chapter on style, which I had originally contemplated, because it would not have been of much use to readers without Hebrew.) I have done my own translations of all biblical texts cited. The King James Version, of course, remains the magisterial rendering in English, but even in its modern revised form it lacks a good deal in the way of clarity and philological precision, while the various contemporary translations, in striving for just those two qualities, tend to obliterate literary features of the original like expressive syntax, deliberate ambiguity, and purposeful repetition of words. My own versions at times may seem a little awkward, but at least they have the virtue of making evident certain aspects of the original that play an important role in the artistry of biblical narrative.

The earliest idea for this project began with an invitation in 1971 from the Department of Religion at Stanford University to give an informal colloquium on the literary study of the Bible. That session, devoted to Genesis 38 and 39 (echoes of which will be found in chapters 1 and 5 here), turned out to be rather more successful than the carefully meditated public lectures on modern Jewish writing I was giving that week at Stanford. I put my notes for the colloquium away in a drawer, and some four years later, on an impulse, I asked the editors of Commentary whether they would be interested in an article on the need for a literary approach to the Bible. I am grateful to them for their receptivity, and especially to Neal Kozodoy, who encouraged me to make this backward leap of almost three millennia from my usual period of critical specialization. I am even more grateful to the readers of Commentary, so many of whom wrote me or the magazine after the appearance in December 1975 of the first article (in revised form, it now constitutes chapter 1) and convinced me that this was a subject eminently worth pursuing. Three subsequent articles were published in Commentary, in May 1976, October 1978, and November 1980; these now form part of chapter 5 and all of chapter 6 and chapter 8. Slightly shorter versions of chapters 2 and 3 appeared, respectively, in Poetics Today (Spring 1980) and in Critical Inquiry (Winter 1978). I would like to thank the editors of all three journals for their openness to a subject that might have seemed outside the chiefly modern purview of their publications, and I want to express my appreciation for their willingness to place the articles in question at my disposal for this book.

Preliminary versions of some of the material were tried out in the Buckstein Memorial Lectures at Trent University, Ontario, at the Indiana University Institute on Teaching the Bible in Literature Courses, and at a conference on biblical literature sponsored by the University of California at San Diego; and in each case the intelligent responsiveness of the audience helped improve the final version. I have also learned much from the keenness of my students in two graduate seminars on biblical narrative taught at the University of California at Berkeley. My colleague Tom Rosenmeyer was kind enough to respond in critical detail to the published segments of this study, and, though he may not agree with everything I finally say, his good judgment and learning have saved me more than once from invidious simplifications of the Greeks.

Typing and incidental research costs were covered through the assistance of the Committee on Research of the University of California at Berkeley. The typing itself was done by Florence Myer with her usual meticulous care. Finally, I would also like to thank the many biblical scholars who have encouraged me in this undertaking, a few of them old friends, others whom I came to know through the publication of the first two articles. In my polemic beginning, I imagined, as I suppose most of us sometimes like to imagine, that I was going to ruffle a lot of feathers; instead, what I have discovered for the most part among professionals in the field is a generous receptivity to my ideas.