Reading Biblical Narrative

An Introductory Guide

J. P. Fokkelman

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781611644425
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

Narrator, characters, action, hero, quest, plot, time and space, entrances and exits--these are the essential components of all narrative literature. This authoritative and engaging introduction to the literary features of biblical narrative and poetry will help the reader grasp the full significance of these components, allowing them to enter more perceptively into the narrative worlds created by the great writers of the Bible.

1

Preliminary exercise: a very short story

The narrative structure of 2 Kings 4:1-7

The first half of the Hebrew Bible is taken up by two extensive narrative complexes. The Holy Scriptures of the Jews (also those of Jesus of Nazareth!) start off with the five books of the Torah, the series Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, as they are called in the West. The word Torah means “instruction,” both in the sense of a rule, specifically one set by a priest, and in the sense of “tuition.” As some collections of rules have been included in Genesis through Deuteronomy, in New Testament Greek the Torah is often called “The Law.” Still, the framework for the religious, civil and criminal laws remains narrative; the Torah is in the first place defined by a vast body of pious historical writings: from the beginning of the world to the moment when the chosen people of Israel are about to enter the land of Canaan, promised by God.

The next complex is called “The Early Prophets” in the Jewish canon and covers the period from the entry into the Promised Land to the great catastrophe in 586 BCE, when the tiny kingdom of Judah is wiped off the map by the neo-Babylonians, Jerusalem is captured, and Solomon’s temple is razed to the ground. This composition consists of three pairs: the books of Joshua and Judges depict the arrival and settling down of the tribal community. The books of 1 and 2 Samuel cover about a century: the perilous transition from a tribal existence to the unified state governed by a king, and the reigns of the first king, Saul, and his famous successor David. 1 and 2 Kings describe the period of the monarchy, the three-and-a-half centuries from King Solomon to the end of the kingdom of Judah.

In the middle of the books of Kings the prophet Elijah and his disciple Elisha are each the subject of a cycle of stories. The Elisha series runs from 2 Kings 2, when he takes over the prophet’s mantle from his master, through to ch. 13, his own death. Elisha is the main character in about ten literary units (stories). Here follows the shortest unit of the series, the first seven verses of 2 Kings 4. The numbers are those of the traditional verses, the letters indicate a division into what I will call lines, and which are usually clauses:

v. 1a	A certain woman, the wife of one of the disciples of the prophets, cried out to Elisha:
b	“Your servant my husband is dead,
c	and you know how your servant revered the Lord;
d	and now a creditor is coming to seize my two children as slaves.”
v. 2a	Elisha said to her:
b	“What can I do for you?
c	Tell me, what have you in the house?”
d	She replied:
e	“Your maidservant has nothing at all in the house, except a jug of oil.”
v. 3a	He said:
b	“Go, and borrow vessels outside, from all your neighbors,
c	take as many empty vessels as you can.
v. 4a	Then go in and shut the door behind you and your children,
b	and pour [oil] into all those vessels,
c	removing each one as it is filled.”
v. 5a	She went away
b	and shut the door behind her and her children,
c	They kept bringing [vessels] to her and she kept pouring.
v. 6a	When the vessels were full,
b	she said to her son:
c	“bring me another vessel.”
d	he answered her:
e	“There are no more vessels;”
f	and the oil stopped
v. 7a	She came and told the man of God,
b	and he said:
c	“Go sell the oil
d	and pay your debt,
e	and you and your children can live on the rest.”

This might seem an extremely simple story—wouldn’t even a child get the point immediately? The prophet gets the woman out of her predicament by a miracle; that’s all there is to it.

It does seem to be that simple, and we tend to conclude that this is a bit of colorful folklore, nothing extraordinary, just a piece of anonymous folk literature, possibly an instance of oral transmission in honor of the prophet.

There is much more, however, to this story. If we ask the basic question of who exactly is the hero of this episode, things instantly prove to be less simple than they seem. Isn’t it the prophet? Before we conclude this we shall have to see if we are justified in denying the role of heroine to the widow, or how we must weigh one against the other.

However short the story may be, it is a mature and carefully structured, written composition. We meet two main characters, an anonymous widow and a prestigious man of God, the prophet Elisha. We are tempted to see him as the hero of the piece: after all, doesn’t he perform a miracle?

The woman is in dire straits. Her deceased husband was their provider, and upon his death he has left a large debt. She is very poor and can pay off the debt neither in money nor in goods. As there were no social safety nets at all in the ancient world, in this precarious situation the creditor is fully justified in taking possession of the labor force represented by the sons his debtor left. This is exactly what is going to happen. One catastrophe, the death of the husband, threatens to unleash another: the boys will be slaves, and the widow is desperate. There is only one last resort: she can appeal to the prophet for help, as Elisha is the spiritual leader of the guild which her husband belonged to.

The narrator takes the shortest route to the point where he can give the floor to the woman. In one line we only get the minimum of information necessary about the woman and the nature of her action; her crying out means that her appeal to Elisha arises from distress. Next, the widow explains her problem in three lines. Isn’t she the best person to do it? This opens the trajectory taken by the story, which reaches a happy ending in v. 7 with the solution to the predicament.

In both cases the narrator withdraws behind his characters, a decision on the writer’s part which invites some consideration. By having the woman speak for most of v. 1 he has refrained from formulating the problem himself, which would have been easy enough. In v. 7, too, he resists the temptation to reserve the last word for himself, leaving that to the prophet, who instructs the woman how she can now easily pay off her debt. The writer does not even consider it necessary to report that this is in fact what happens: the readers can deduce that themselves. The happy ending is a case of omission—ellipsis in literary terminology.

These are two extremely pertinent decisions on the writer’s part. The widow is the asking party; she is best qualified to plead her cause. Having as a spokesperson someone in distress lends dramatic impact to the opening and invites the reader to follow her with sympathy. The answering party is the man of God, who knows a miraculous way out. His speeches in vv. 3-4 and 7 offer the solution to the pressing problem, so it is appropriate to grant him the last word. In this way, alternating the speakers creates a balance between the opening and the ending: the woman opens; the prophet closes. Thus the starting and the winning posts of the plot are presented: the development which takes us from misery to relief.

The writer supports this coherence of head and tail by applying a threefold or fourfold frame (inclusio in technical terms). Not only is there the relation between problem and solution which exactly delineates the course of the plot, but also a deliberate choice of words that create correspondences between the first and last verses, and thus perfectly round off the miniature. The first obvious link exactly indicates what is at stake in this story: it is a matter of life and death! Verse 1a tells of the husband’s death, v. 7e of the life of the woman and her sons. Another set of complementary concepts comes close to this: in v. 1d the shadow of the creditor looms, but 7d mentions an easy way to pay off the debt. In this way the boys’ slavery, which we may see as a second representation of death, is prevented. The taking on the part of the creditor (1d) is contrasted in v. 7 with the giving on the part of the widow: she will offer oil at the market and sell it for a good price, after which she can give the creditor what is his. She will even have enough left, and it is not for nothing that the word for that (“the rest”) has been placed at the end of v. 7e. With its semantic overtones of “surplus” this very last word of the literary unit indicates that there is, after all, a good life waiting for her on the other side of this harrowing episode—an enormous relief.

One of the main characteristics of this story is that it is carried largely by the spoken word. If for the moment we leave aside the obligatory quotation formulas, as they only serve the speeches (vv. 2a, 2d, 3a, 6b, 6d, 6f and 7b), we see that this leaves very little genuine narrator’s text, which moreover in three places consists of rather scant factual information; I am referring here to lines 1a, 6a and 7a which are little more than introductions. This leaves only one sequence where the narrator has the field to himself, the three lines in v. 5. This trio, however, does make a special contribution.

In his relatively long speech in vv. 3-4 the prophet has used a series of no fewer than seven predicates; strictly speaking, the speech consists of seven sentences which are nothing but instructions in the second person feminine. The woman is to collect a lot of empty vessels together with her sons and pour these full of oil from the jug that was all she had (as she told Elisha in v. 2). The writer can then decide dutifully to report the execution of all seven instructions in v. 5, but that would be rather boring; instead, he makes a selection from the instructions in 3b-4c, and tells us only how the actions mentioned in 4ab are carried out.

First two verbs are used momentarily, i.e. describing actions which are just a point in time: “she went away and shut the door behind her and her children.” The collecting of the vessels has simply been left out—a barely noticeable ellipsis, a gap which readers can fill in for themselves. What follows in v. 5cd captures our attention through a radically different time aspect: “they kept bringing [vessels] to her a...