The Art of Biblical Narrative in a Bible as Literature
The writers of the Hebrew Bible, when they're telling a story, they're like Homer with the Iliad — they're omniscient. They know the story as if they've watched it unfold from some vantage bespeak higher up and effectually and inside the activeness.
Still, unlike Homer, the biblical storyteller doesn't make the characters and their motives clear to the reader.
Instead, the storyteller is selective, as Robert Modify explains in his groundbreaking 1981 study The Fine art of the Biblical Narrative:
He may on occasion choose to privilege usa with the knowledge of what God thinks of a particular character or activity — omniscient narration can go no college — just as a dominion, because of his agreement of the nature of his human subjects, he leads u.s.a. through varying darknesses which are lit up by intense but narrow beams, phantasmal glimmerings, sudden strobic flashes.
Nosotros are compelled to get at character and motive, as in impressionistic writers like Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, through a process of inference from bitty data, often with crucial pieces of narrative exposition strategically withheld, and this leads to multiple and sometimes fifty-fifty wavering perspectives on characters.
There is, in other words, an abiding mystery in graphic symbol as the biblical writers conceive information technology, which they embody in their typical methods of presentation.
A mess of contradictions
This is a rich insight about the Hebrew Bible — what Christians call the Erstwhile Testament.
In the Iliad, Achilles is a adequately simple character in that, when he's angry, he knows he's angry and knows why he'south angry, then does the reader (or, originally, the listener). When he's grieving, he knows he's grieving and knows why he's grieving, so does the reader.
By contrast, David or Jacob or Joseph are much more mysterious — to the reader and to themselves. The typical biblical character comes across as a mess of contradictions, doing skillful and doing bad, frequently from one moment to the next; having an agenda, often hidden from others and sometimes, it appears, from themselves; living in a fog of confusion, even when getting direct advice from God.
In other words, they're people moving well-nigh in "varying darknesses which are lit up by intense but narrow beams, phantasmal glimmerings, sudden strobic flashes."
For instance, who is the true David? Alter writes:
David,…in the many decades through which nosotros follow his career, is kickoff a provincial ingenu and public charmer, then a shrewd political manipulator and a tough guerilla leader, later a helpless male parent floundering in the entanglements of his sons' intrigues and rebellion, a refugee all of a sudden and astoundingly abasing himself before the scathing curses of Shimei, then a doddering old human bamboozled or at least directed past Bathsheba and Nathan, and, in still another surprise on his very deathbed, an implacable seeker of vengeance against the same Shimei whom he had forgiven afterwards the defeat of Absalom's coup.
All of that — and Alter doesn't fifty-fifty mention the lustful David who stole Uriah'due south married woman Bathsheba and sent him to his death in boxing, or the David who wrote or may have written all or some of the Psalms.
"Abiding mystery"
As Modify notes, the biblical writers meet the "abiding mystery" at the eye of the man psyche, and that resonates much more deeply for me than Homer'due south Greeks with their long, self-important speeches.
Don't go me incorrect. I am no expert on the Iliad, but I know that information technology is ane of the great works of human civilization. Information technology provides its ain insights into the human soul.
However, the mystery at the core of the Hebrew Bible — the mystery of human selection and the mystery of the mind of God — is something that is at the center of my own life.
I look around, and I know that I get just glimmers of what other people are thinking and why they are doing what they're dong. And I know that I get merely glimmers of why I'm doing what I'g doing, and, as for my thoughts, well, they're all over the place, flitting from trying to observe the next give-and-take for this book review to an image of shoveling snow afterwards today (possibly) to the guy I had coffee with yesterday to the estrus of the heating pad on my sore back.
The biblical writers seem to me to be writing about people like me. Homer — he's dealing with larger-than-life heroes.
I'm no Achilles, and, I suspect, neither are you. But Jacob, Joseph and Esau, to name just a few biblical figures — these are human beings I've passed on the street or sat adjacent to at a conference.
"The cryptic conciseness of biblical narrative"
Of course, I'grand aware that my preference for the Bible stories may be due simply to my training. I alive in a Judeo-Christian civilization, and my life has been immersed in the sea of the Bible.
To some extent, all Americans as well as the people from many other nations have had some sort of immersion in the Bible whether they've been believers or non. It's woven into how we talk and how we think. In some other book, Pen of Iron, Alter details how, over the past two centuries, the Rex James Version of the Bible has been a strong influence on American writers, from Herman Melville to William Faulkner.
In his 1946 book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Erich Auerbach began with a chapter that juxtaposes the Book of Genesis with Homer's Odyssey. Modify writes in The Art of the Biblical Narrative:
Auerbach must be credited with showing more conspicuously than anyone before him how the ambiguous conciseness of biblical narrative is a reflection of profound art, not primitiveness.
Modify praises Auerbach's "central notion of biblical narrative every bit a purposefully spare text 'fraught with groundwork,' " equally "resoundingly right." Nonetheless, he as well criticizes it for being "too sweepingly full general."
Express in their art the human condition
The cardinal thing, it seems to me, that Auerbach asserts and that Alter endorses is the recognition that the Hebrew Bible, at least in function, is swell literature.
In 1981 when he published The Art of Biblical Narrative, Alter was an early on voice to argue for this agreement of, unquestionably, i of the almost influential documents in human history.
However, for thousands of years, the Bible was the domain of theologians, viewed as a holy volume — as The Holy Book — and the word of God. Literature and writing techniques didn't enter into the word.
In recent centuries, the written report of the Bible has widened to a close reading of the texts to sympathize when they were written, how they were written and why they were written as a means of better understanding the words and their message.
These studies, though, Change argues, take treated the texts as highly primitive. Various disconcerting aspects, such every bit the frequent repetitions of stories, take been dismissed as errors by writers or editors or transcribers.
Alter, however, argues persuasively that the writers and editors of many of the books were highly talented. Their goals, while certainly theological, were likewise undeniably literary.
When they echo a story, Change argues, we need to realize that they are doing it for a reason — a reason we may not immediately recognize or, given the difficulty of understanding a cultural so chronologically distant from us, perhaps ever. When something that they've written seems contradictory, our job, he asserts, is to avoid rejecting information technology out of hand, simply to realize that they had a reason for doing so.
The biblical writers wanted to communicate the word of God, in whatsoever manner you lot understand that. But they besides were craftsmen and artists who wanted to express in their art their insights into the human being condition.
Nosotros don't have any problem seeing this in Michelangelo's Pieta or The Final Sentence or in Rembrandt's The Return of the Dissipated Son or in The Last Supper past Leonardo de Vinci.
It'southward the same for the biblical writers.
Taking dictation from God?
Of class, throughout much of the past two,500 years, religious leaders and scholars accept argued that the Hebrew Bible was the word of God. That the writers were inspired to put their words downward. That, in a fashion, God was dictating the words to the writers.
Today, scholars recognize that many of the books of the Hebrew Bible were created by stitching together several before documents. Equally Change notes, much of Genesis is the consequence of an editor or a grouping of editors weaving together three literary strands.
Other books were written near events that may have been historical in nature only had occurred much earlier, hundreds of years earlier.
Information technology's a mistake to expect objective reporting by an eyewitness, even if the text is written as if based on an eyewitness account. That's a writer's technique.
The biblical writers weren't doing journalism or crafting history. They were taking whatsoever was available and useful and telling a story that communicated their insights into human nature and the relationship of God and humans.
Making the story upwards
In other words, they were making the story upward to brand a indicate. They were, Alter asserts, writing fiction.
"Look, expect, await!" some will respond. "Is he maxim that the bible stories are the equivalent of ancient novels? That parts of Genesis are like something Shakespeare would take written and others are like something Faulkner would take written?"
No, and yes.
Shakespeare and Faulkner made upward their stories to communicate their insights most human beings and the nature of human being life.
The biblical writers were attempting to do the same thing — simply with the additional goal of seeing these people and the human being condition in the context of a belief in God.
God doesn't play a direct office in Hamlet or The Sound and the Fury. But God, directly and indirectly, is present in every judgement in Genesis or Chore or Ecclesiastes.
The writers of the Bible books are wrestling with how humans try to know God — who is unknowable — and endeavour to live their lives with that painfully fractional knowledge, even as they are pulled in many directions, not all of which are toward their concept of God and their concept of what God expects from them.
Inspired?
Was God whispering into their ears? I don't think so.
Were they inspired past God in some way — through that unfathomable body of water of their experiences in life, their talents for observation and communication, their emotional resonances with others, their deep philosophical searchings, their understandings of earlier writers and before teachers and earlier prophets?
Yes, I recollect so.
I recall that's how they came to create the fiction in which generations upon generations of people, Jews and Christians, have found deep and abiding rich truth, truer than bald facts and scientific formulas.
Why practise the books of the Hebrew Bible withal resonate with modernistic readers?
One could say that it is because they offer a fashion of thinking virtually life that helps people live. I could say that it is because they offering insights into the human condition that assist each of its readers discover significant in their daily existence.
And one could say it is because they were written with slap-up talent so that their insights and their concepts well-nigh people and almost God go across logic and intellect and philosophy — that go directly to the human being heart.
That's great writing. And, to my heed, it's inspired.
Patrick T. Reardon
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Source: https://patricktreardon.com/book-review-the-art-of-biblical-narrative-by-robert-alter/
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