[MS Sheet: Revised November 12, 2022]
The Literary Guide to the Bible, edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode 1987 (copyrighted material)
[MS - Alter's 1987 essay, Introduction to the Old Testament in the Literary Guide to the Bible, alerted larger audiences to phrases like "the literary style of the Bible". (Alter also explains why the Bible is not the "Old Testament".) Decades of Alter's work after 1987 led to two books , one on prose and the other on poetry, and his landmark translation of the whole of the Hebrew Bible. In another recent book in 2019, The Art of Bible Translation, Alter looks back on the journey to explain the literary style of the Hebrew Bible and why it matters. [See MS Sefaria Sheets in Collection Robert Alter - parshat hashavua, references and themes.]
Introduction to the Old Testament - Robert Alter
Excerpts from pages 11-35. [MS: Additions/deletions, highlighting and reformatting are supplied]
(pp 11-13) The difficulty of getting a bearing on the Old Testament as a collection of literary works is reflected in the fact that we have no comfortable term with which to designate these books....
Common usage in Western culture, following Christian tradition, calls them the Old Testament, a name originating in the assumption that the Old requires completion in the New or is actually superseded by the New. ...That is in fact how major writers from Augustine to Dante to Donne to Eliot have conceived Hebrew Scripture and absorbed it into their own work ... The Jews collectively have rejected the term [Old Testament] for all that it implies ...
Harold Bloom, a critic who has tirelessly studied
the ways in which later writers appropriate the achievements of their
predecessors for their own purposes, makes this point with witty incisiveness when he speaks of "the Christian triumph over the Hebrew Bible, a triumph which produced that captive work, the Old Testament." [See citation in Notes at end]
....
Any literary account of the Hebrew Bible must recognize just this
quality of extreme heterogeneity, ... From one point of view, it is not even a unified collection but rather a loose anthology that reflects as much as nine centuries of Hebrew literary activity, ...
(p.13) But the idea of the Hebrew Bible as a sprawling, unruly anthology is no more than a partial truth, for the retrospective act of canonization has created a unity among the disparate texts that we as later readers can scarcely ignore; and this unity in turn reflects, though with a pronounced element of exaggeration, an intrinsic feature of the original texts--their powerfully allusive character. All literature, to be sure, is necessarily allusive: as a writer, you are compelled in one way or another to make your text out of antecedent texts (oral or written) because it would not occur to you in the first place to do anything so unnatural as to compose a hymn or a love-poem or a story unless you had some model to emulate. In the Hebrew Bible, however, what is repeatedly evident is the abundance of authoritative national traditions, fixed in particular verbal formulations, to which later writers respond through incorporation, elaboration, debate, or parody.
Perhaps, as a good many scholars have conjectured, these
formulations first circulated in oral tradition in the early, pre monarchic phase of Israelite history. In any event, literacy is very old in the ancient Near East and there is no preliterate stage of full-fledged Israelite national existence .... so there is no reason to assume that the activity of putting things down on a scroll (sefer; see, for example, Exod. 17:14) was not part of the formative experience of ancient Israel.
In this central regard, the Hebrew Bible, because it so frequently articulates its meanings by recasting texts within its own corpus, is already moving toward being an integrated work, for all its anthological diversity.
(p.13-15, edits combined) ... [W]hat is most in néed of demonstration [is]- that the primary element that pulls the disparate texts together is literary. According to one common line of thought, the Hebrew Bible exhibits certain literary embellishments and literary interludes, but those who would present "the Bible as literature" must turn it around to an odd angle from its own original emphases, which are theological, legislative, historiographic, and moral. This opposition between literature and the really serious things collapses the moment we realize that it is the exception in any culture for literary invention to be a purely aesthetic activity.
Writers put together words in a certain pleasing order partly because the order pleases but also very often, because the order helps them refine meanings, make meanings more memorable, more satisfyingly complex, so that what is well wrought in language can more powerfully engage the world of events, values, human and divine ends. One hardly wants to deny the overriding spiritual earnestness of the ancient Hebrew writers.... And yet, a close study of these writings in the original discovers again and again, on every level from word choice and sentence structure to the deployment of large units of composition, a delight in the manifold exercise of literary craftsmanship.
It goes without saying that these writers are intent on telling us about the origins of the world, the history of Israel, God's ethical requirements of mankind, the cultic stipulations of the new monotheistic faith, the future vistas of disaster and redemption. ...
(p.15) But the telling has a shapeliness whose subtleties we are only beginning to understand, and it was undertaken by writers with the most brilliant gifts for intimating character, defining scenes, ... It is probably more than a coincidence that the very pinnacle of
ancient Hebrew poetry was reached in Job, the biblical text that is most daring and innovative in its imagination of God, man, and creation; for here as elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible the literary medium is not merely a means of "conveying" doctrinal positions but an adventurous occasion for deepening doctrine through the play of literary resources, or perhaps even, at least here, for leaping beyond doctrine.
The facts of the matter, however, are rather more untidy than I have
indicated so far. It is our own predisposition to parcel out prose writing
into fiction and nonfiction, as is done in our libraries and our lists of best-sellers; and, despite the occasional occurrence of a prose-poem, we also tend to think of prose and poetry as distinct, even opposed, categories. For the ancient Hebrews, these were not strict oppositions, and sometimes they could be intertwined in baffling ways.
....
(p.16) In any case, the Hebrew Bible, though it includes some of the most extraordinary narratives and poems in the Western literary tradition, reminds us that literature is not entirely limited to story and poem, that the coldest catalogue and the driest etiology may be an effective subsidiary instrument of literary expression.
(pp16-17) The evidence of the texts suggests that the literary impulse in ancient Israel was quite as powerful as the religious impulse, or, to put it more accurately, that the two were inextricable, so that in order to understand the latter, you have to take full account of the former.
[MS: pp. 18-21 reviews examples, especially the Jephthah story ]
....
(p.21) What can be inferred from all this about the workings of the literary impulse in the Hebrew Bible? Perhaps the most essential point is that literary art is neither intermittent in its exercise nor merely ancillary to the writer's purposes....
To be sure, the writer here is deeply concerned with questions of political leadership ... man's real and imagined vehicle
obligations before God; but as a shaper of narrative he engages these
complex issues by making constant artful determinations, whether con-
sciously or intuitively, about such matters as the disposition of character, the deployment of dialogue, the attribution or withholding of motives, the use of motifs and thematic key words, the subtle modification of near-verbatim repetition of phrases. For a reader to attend to these elements of literary art is not merely an exercise in
"appreciation" but a discipline of understanding: the literary vehicle is so much the necessary medium through which the Hebrew writers realized their meanings that we will grasp the meanings at best imperfectly if we ignore their fine articulations as literature. ...
The narrator's extreme reticence in telling us what we should
think about all these conflicts and questions is extraordinary, and, more
than any other single feature, it may explain the greatness of these narratives. Is Jephthah a hero or a villain, a tragic figure or an impetuous self-destructive fool? There are bound to be disagreements among readers. but the writer draws us into a process of intricate, tentative judgment by forcing us to negotiate on our own among such terms, making whatever use we can of the narrative data he has provided. ...
(p. 22) ...The general rule that embraces the more characteristic refusal of explicit judgment is the famous laconic quality of biblical narrative. There is never leisurely description for its own sake; scene setting is accomplished with the barest economy of means; characters are sped over a span of years with a simple summary notation until we reach a portentous conjunction rendered in dialogue; and, in keeping with all this, analysis and assessment of character are very rare, and then very brief....Many of these habits of reticence may be plausibly attributed to an underlying aesthete predisposition.
The masters of ancient Hebrew narrative were clearly writers who delighted in an art of indirection, in the possibilities of intimating depths through the mere hint of a surface feature, or through a few words of dialogue fraught with implication. Their attraction to narrative minimalism was reinforced by their sense that stories should be told in a way that would move efficiently to the heart of the matter, never pausing to elaborate mimetic effects for their own sake, In Homer we are given, for example, a feast of feasts, these daily rituals of hospitality and degustation having an intrinsic allure for the poet and his audience. In the Hebrew Bible, we learn precious little about anyone's menu, and then it usually proves to be for a thematic point....
[MS: p.23: examples given of meals or menus, as exceptions]
(p.23) It is the often drastic reticence of the Hebrew writers that led Erich Auerbach, in a famous essay that could be taken as the point of departure for the modern literary understanding of the Bible, to speak of Hebrew narrative as a text "fraught with background." [MS: see footnote 5 below] Auerbach, analyzing the somber and troubling story of the Binding of Isaac, was thinking chiefly of the way that the stark surface details bring us to ponder unexpressed psychological depths and theological heights; but in more typical biblical tales, where the perspective is not the vertiginous vertical one between man and God but a broader horizontal overview on the familial, social, erotic, and political interactions among human figures, the crucial consequence of reticence is the repeated avoidance of explicit judgment of the characters. There is, in the view of the Hebrew writers, something elusive, unpredictable, unresolvable about human nature. Man, made in God's image, shares a measure of God's transcendence of categories, images, defining labels. The recourse to implicit judgment opens up vistas of ambiguity -- sometimes in matters of nuance, sometimes in essential regards - in our perception of the characters. ... [MS: text has discussion of Esau vs Jacob character]
(p.24) What I have said so far may seem to sidestep a fundamental methodological question that has preoccupied biblical studies for a century and a half: the frequent unreliability of the received text and its accretive evolution through several eras of Israelite history. It is all very well, many biblical critics would still argue, to speak of unities and internal echoes and purposeful ambiguities in a short story by Faulkner or a poem by Wallace Stevens, because one writer was responsible for the text from beginning to end, ... But how can we address the patchwork of the biblical text in the same fashion?
(p25) Modern biblical scholarship is a product of the post-Gutenberg era, which may be one reason why it is predisposed to conceive authorship in rather narrow and exclusive terms. Collective works of art are not unknown phenomena, as we should be reminded by the medieval cathedrals growing through generations under the hands of successive waves of artisans, ... or cinema ... in the editing room....
The new literary perspective, let me stress, does not come to restore the seamless unitary character of the biblical text ... but it does argue
in a variety of ways that scholarship, ... has drawn attention away from the design of the whole. ... [MS pp. 25-31 discuss scholarship of texts]
(p31) We have seen, then, that there is striking variety in the body of
ancient Hebrew literature preserved in the Bible, a variety that stems from the long centuries through which it evolved, the different genres it represents, the divergent aims and viewpoints of its authors. All that notwithstanding, this is a corpus that bears within it the seeds of its own canonicity. ...
(p.34) This endlessly fascinating anthology of ancient Hebrew literature was also, against all plausible acceptations of the word, on its way to becoming a book.
....
(p.35) NOTES [ MS: Footnotes omitted in excerpts above]
I. Harold Bloom, "'Before Moses Was, I Am'; The Original and the Belated Testaments," in Notebooks in Cultural Analysis, I (Durham, N.C., 1984), 3.
2. For all three, see the essays on the respective biblical books in this
volume.
3. On the perceptibility of the verbal medium as one way of distinguishing literary from historical narratives, see T. G. Rosenmeyer,
"History or Poetry?
The Example of Herodotus," Clio, I1 (1982), 239-259.
4. I was first alerted to the shrewd play between "head" and "captain" in
the story by an astute paper presented by Nahum Sarna at the Institute for
Advanced Studies in Jerusalem in 1983.
3. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Litera-
ture, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, 1953), chap. I.
6. Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1985), Pp. 30-38.
7. Edmund Leach and D. Alan Aycock, Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth (Cambridge, 1983), p. 3.
8. The notion that every text is divided against itself is a fundamental dogma of the critical school known as Deconstruction, which began in Paris in the late 1960s and became fashionable in America and England a decade later.
9. Robert Polzin, Moses and the Deuteronomist. A Literary Study of the Deuteronomic History, Part One: Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges (New York, 1980), p. 2.
10. For a general exposition of this technique, see Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York, 1981), Pp. 97-113. Many examples are also analyzed by Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative.