The Poetics of Biblical Narrative

Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading

Meir Sternberg

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 1987
• ISBN:
  9780253114044
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

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."

• 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 r...