Hidden in Plain Sight

Esther and a Marginalized Hermeneutic

Debelak Jr.

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781498275378
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Hidden in Plain Sight explores the potential contours of reading biblical narrative. The Old Testament book of Esther is used to advance a prospective shape for this reading method, and proposes a profile for curriculum design. This work demonstrates that the text of Scripture itself proposes a reading method.Esther is an underestimated heroine in her story world. Her character is informed by the silent actions of Vashti and by the intentionality of Mordecai. She is confronted with a writing that challenges her with few options, each of which is deconstructed and focused in community dialogue. At a pivotal stage in the narrative, she acts in solidarity with those under a death threat, emerging as an agent of life.Esther's actions and speeches are traced as one entry into a story world, proposing a means for students of Scripture to gain appreciable reading skills via sensitivity to the general components of Old Testament narrative. This reading informs a study method enabling direct engagement with a text and appreciation for the art of literary crafting. The approach is suitable for Christian education and biblical study settings at the academic level, and for use in local church ministries.

1

Biblical Story

“A good story is irresistibly persuasive.”

—Yairah Amit1

A Need for Reading Biblical Narrative

The proclivity to tell story is part of human experience. Ask someone to rehearse the events of their day, and the response is a “story.” Jokes are told as “funny stories.” Eager listeners tune in to hear “personal and political stories.” Readers flock to newsstands for the latest international “story.” Daily interaction occurs as personal traits engage a world of change. Conflict pinnacles and subsides; it mounts or is resolved. How one tells the story of their life says much about their worldviews and coping skills. People communicate effectively in narrative forms. In short, we are narrative beings; we like a good story and we like to tell good stories.

What makes a story “good”? What riveting features of a saga glue one’s attention to the pages of a text? Subjective responses vary with personal taste; but a gripping story line and the style by which a story is conveyed acknowledge the background and shaping of protagonists (heroes, heroines) and antagonists (villains) readers can identify with. Audiences interface with the actions, emotions, challenges, etc., of the characters in their contexts. These experiences build a platform for sympathy, empathy, emulation, and the like. The more one can see herself or himself in the manners, celebrations, and struggles of the characters, the more an individual reader “enters the world of the story.”

Given the penchant to good story, intentional ministry opportunity exists for Christian education emphases to foster reading the Bible as narrative. Raising a reader’s sensitivity to the presence of narrative genre (and its qualities) in the Bible is the focus of this work. As narrative beings, knowledge and analysis of narrative components heighten appreciation for the prose elements of scripture. Heightening this awareness, however, is not without challenges.

In an era exhibiting less than optimum biblical literacy rates,2 the diminished capacity to appreciate Holy Writ is in part due to a reader’s unfamiliarity with what to look for in stories of the Bible. Passing acquaintance with general content of a few Bible stories may be present at varying levels in any given ministry setting, yet it is becoming rare to hear substantive discussion from pulpit, pew, or pupils on the components and crafting of biblical story. Culturally conditioned readers can demonstrate a general interest in “good story,” while projecting a largely obscure awareness of their appreciation for the specific qualities of that story. Reflective of Stone and Duke’s “embedded theology,”3 a framework of presuppositions becomes more meaningful as basic assumptions are subjected to greater and more deliberate scrutiny. Thus, a general appreciation for good story may be acknowledged, but concrete commitments of reading remain veiled in one’s personal analysis. To help alter this, a schematic is sought that will empower readers to identify, comprehend, analyze, and evaluate a text for personal and corporate meaning.4

Function, Power, and Biblical Stories

The presence of biblical stories testifies to the perpetuation of memories belonging to one era or group, providing a sense of identity, testimony, and historical continuity for subsequent generations of diverse audiences. One generation learns from another as telling “the story of the past is a mechanism for coping with exile and disruption.”5 For readers inheriting these narratives, the biblical stories entertain while simultaneously evoking response. The scrutiny of biblical narratives “reads the reader,” and among many possible outcomes, imparts social mores, questions ethics, and offers character skills to deal with life. Readings elicit reactions that critique or inform the status quo, personal perspectives (faith, social, political, etc.), and the like.

These bare functions of story are relevant to contemporary Christian faith communities seeking to understand ancient biblical narratives for devotion and doctrine:

The theological viewpoint that Christians form in the course of the life of faith is a distinctive set of many views, each relating in one way or another to the Christian message of God. Exactly what that message means is of primary concern to those seeking to understand their faith. In the church its substance is transmitted from generation to generation by means of the language of faith, a loose-knit collection of stories and symbols.6

As theology and worldviews (for these communities) are often shaped and reframed through perceptions derived from chosen passages of scripture, it is incumbent upon these audiences to be intentionally aware of the genre they are reading, and the reading methods they employ. As sacred, authoritative literature, sensitivity to biblical genre and its respective components offers fruitful ground for consideration in the quest for spiritual meaning:

The distinction between the Bible as literature and the Bible as scripture is largely artificial. The church can properly hear its Bible as scripture only when it reads it as literature.7

This risky venture is open to the critique of whether or not one imposes modern tools of literary analysis on an ancient story or if the reader studies a text inductively seeking to read/hear the material on its own merits.8 Biblical9 narratives construct written worlds open to exploration through a variety of portals (or entries into that story world). Biblical narratives creatively integrate a narrator’s telling of story through a variety of characters (each who embody and reflect numerous traits), scenes and settings, challenges, reversals (setbacks), irony, triumphs, and the like. The Bible captures these human experiences in this means of literary communication, blending these components (and more) to offer case studies of a sort,10 for readers to explore beliefs, motives, and ethics. In this way, the biblical story is a mirror for reflection. The biblical story world (potentially) becomes a vicarious arena of self-expression, where story characters and the complexities of their persona form a significant platform for analyzing what is esteemed or neglected among confessing Christians:

In general, the biblical story is designed to enable us to discover who we are. We do that by telling our own story . . . in the context of the Bible story. We find ourselves by setting ourselves in that other story.11

Toward the interests of spiritual formation (experience and growth in Christ; a process informed by qualitative biblical study), a means of reading scripture is proposed in this work enabling students of the Bible to more intentionally observe the mechanics of biblical story. The means of reading advanced in this project are not a grid imposed upon scripture; rather, the paradigm stems from the structure and content of a selected biblical story itself.

Perspectives and Research Focus

Without claiming an objective-free perspective (bias) for reading, any particular lens impacts the potential for, and outcomes of, understanding a biblical story. To put it another way, how one reads either helps or hinders a close reading of the text. Understandably, how biblical narrative is read is the subject of various opinions, indicative of reading commitments, pedagogical concerns, theological and political persuasions, educational goals, depth of learning, etc. Any two (from among many) selected reading models illustrates the potential polarized challenges for the modern reader, though the reading options (inclusive of both stress and depth) generally range from those disposed toward the rigors of intense analysis, to practices preferring casual or less serious levels of reading.

Defining a pole of reading commitments as a “less serious level” may be a critique surfaced by the demands of good scholarship. Without overgeneralizing, devotional readings often pegged in this category likely represent the largest segment of contemporary readers in the North American, English-speaking context. Bridging the gap between these two camps (scholarly and devotional) is, in part, the goal of quality Christian ministry. In an entertainment age inundating readers and viewers with a plethora of “story” in various forms (literary and dramatic), the trained observer (student of scripture), who is called to responsible Christian leadership, finds an initial gateway into valuable, age-appropriate, and reader-experience (appropriate) dialogue on the basis of the literature itself. This work advances the idea that the text itself offers the primary platform for a method that invites readers to glean the benefits of exploring and appreciating biblical narrative.

Regarding more intense forms of biblical study, a cursory glance reveals inclination (in our era) toward the influential historical-critical camp.12 It is conceded that grounding texts in real time periods is a vital and apologetic goal of solid historical-critical work; this is a valuable component in the quest for meaning, and an appreciated discipline assisting in the differentiating between texts deemed part of a time-honored canon versus the spurious. However, the literary crafting and power of biblical story itself may be less evident or devalued if historical minutiae are the sole goal of scholarship.13 This outcome may be less the fault of the discipline itself, and more indicative of any particular reader’s choice. At the risk of undue segregation between the fields of biblical criticism and biblical ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Biblical Story
• Chapter 2: A Reading of Esther
• Chapter 3: Findings
• Chapter 4: Conclusion
• Appendix 1—Study Questions on the Text of Esther
• Appendix 2—Framing Observations
• Appendix 3—Compiling Narrative Observations
• Charts
• Bibliography