Robert Alter - The Art of Biblical Narrative - 2011 (copyrighted material)
Chapter 1 - A Literary Approach to the Bible [MS: Formatting, excerpting and highlighting added]
p.1 WHAT ROLE DOES literary art play in the shaping of biblical narrative? A crucial one, ... finely modulated from moment to moment, determining in most cases the minute choice of words and reported details, the pace of narration, the small movements of dialogue, and a whole network of ramified interconnections in the text.
... it would be well to follow the sustained operation of narrative art in a biblical text. Let me propose for analysis a supposedly interpolated story, because it will give us an opportunity to observe both how it works in itself and how it interacts with the surrounding narrative material. I should like to discuss, then, the story of Tamar and Judah (Genesis 38), which is set in between the selling of Joseph by his brothers and Joseph’s appearance as a slave in the household of Potiphar.... [MS pp1-10 Alter makes a close reading of the Tamar and Judah story to explain why it is inserted ("interpolated") into the Joseph story.]
....
[MS Alter discusses Midrash, pp10-12, 17, 19, 22-23, 24-27, 33-34, 37 and 47]
p.10-11 It is instructive that the two verbal cues indicating the connection between the story of the selling of Joseph and the story of Tamar and Judah were duly noted more than 1,500 years ago in the Midrash: “The Holy One Praised be He said to Judah, ‘You deceived your father with a kid. By your life, Tamar will deceive you with a kid.’ ... The Holy One Praised be He said to Judah, ‘You said to your father, haker-na. By your life, Tamar will say to you, haker-na’” (Bereishit Rabba 84:11, 12). This instance may suggest that in many cases a literary student of the Bible has as much to learn from the traditional commentaries as from modern scholarship.
The difference between the two is ultimately the difference between assuming that the text is an intricately interconnected unity, as the midrashic exegetes did, and assuming it is a patchwork of frequently disparate documents, as most modern scholars have supposed. ...
With their assumption of interconnectedness, the makers of the Midrash were often as exquisitely attuned to small verbal signals of continuity and to significant lexical nuances as any “close reader” of our own age.
p.11 There are, however, two essential distinctions between the way the text is treated in the Midrash and the literary approach I am proposing. First, although the Midrashists did assume the unity of the text, they had little sense of it as a real narrative continuum, as a coherent unfolding story in which the meaning of earlier data is progressively, even systematically, revealed or enriched ... What this means practically is that the Midrash provides exegesis of specific phrases or narrated actions but not continuous readings of the biblical narratives: small pieces of the text become the foundations of elaborate homiletical structures [MS ie preaching or sermons] that have only an intermittent relation to the integral story told by the text.
p. 11-12 The second respect in which the midrashic approach to the biblical narratives does not really recognize their literary integrity is the didactic insistence [MS: teaching aggressively a moral lesson] of midrashic interpretation. One might note that in the formulation recorded in the passage just cited from Bereishit Rabba, God Himself administers a moral rebuke to the twice-sinning Judah, pointing out to him the recurrence of the kid and of the verb “to recognize” that links his unjust deception of his father with his justified deception by Tamar. That thematic point of retaliation ... is intimated in the biblical text, but without the suggestion that Judah himself is conscious of the connections. That is, in the actual literary articulation of the story, we as audience are privileged with a knowledge denied Judah, and so the link between kid and kid, recognize and recognize, is part of a pattern of dramatic irony, in which the spectator knows something the protagonist doesn’t and should know. The preservation of Judah’s ignorance here is important, for the final turn of his painful moral education must be withheld for the quandary in which he will find himself later when he encounters Joseph as viceroy of Egypt without realizing his brother’s identity. The Midrash, on the other hand, concentrating on the present moment in the text and on underscoring a moral point, must make things more explicit than the biblical writer intended.
p.17 The one obvious reason for the absence of scholarly literary interest in the Bible for so long is that, in contrast to Greek and Latin literature, the Bible was regarded for so many centuries by both Christians and Jews as the primary, unitary source of divinely revealed truth. ... The momentum of this enterprise [MS: of finding fragments or sources] continues unabated, so that it still seems to most scholars in the field much more urgent to inquire, say, how a particular psalm might have been used in a hypothetically reconstructed temple ritual than how it works as an achieved piece of poetry.
p.17 At the same time, the potent residue of the older belief in the Bible as the revelation of ultimate truth is perceptible in the tendency of scholars to ask questions about the biblical view of man, the biblical notion of the soul, the biblical vision of eschatology, while for the most part neglecting phenomena like character, motive, and narrative design as unbefitting for the study of an essentially religious document. ...
p.19 The one celebrated instance is the immensely suggestive first chapter of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, in which the antithetical modes of representing reality in Genesis and the Odyssey are compared at length. Auerbach must be credited with showing more clearly than anyone before him how the cryptic conciseness of biblical narrative is a reflection of profound art, not primitiveness ...
p.19 The most recurrent theme of the article’s critics was that the biblical story was, after all, religious, moral, and didactic in intention, and so would hardly indulge in all this fancy footwork of multiple ironies that we moderns so love. (Implicit in such a contention is a rather limiting notion of what a “religious” narrative is, or of how the insight of art might relate to a religious vision. This is a central question to which we shall return.) [MS: See pp 12-19, 23-27, 37, 47 and 54, especially in Chapter 2 -Sacred History and the Beginnings of Prose Fiction]
p.20 The notion of “the Bible as literature,” though particularly contaminated in English by its use as a rubric for superficial college courses and for dubious publishers’ packages, is needlessly concessive and condescending toward literature in any language. (It would at the very least be gratuitous to speak of “Dante as literature,” given the assured literary status of Dante’s great poem, though the Divine Comedy is more explicitly theological, or “religious,” than most of the Bible.) ...
[MS Alter discusses many articles on this theme in the past decades. See text pp.18-21 and, especially Meir Sternberg in Poetics of Biblical Narrative and articles in the Israeli journal Ha-Sifrut 1973- 1977, footnotes 11, 12. Sternberg won an Israeli Prize in 1996 for contributions to literary theory. Alter notes, p.19:
"More recently, Sternberg, writing alone, has provided a shrewdly perceptive analysis of the story of the rape of Dinah, concluding his discussion with a general description of the spectrum of rhetorical devices, from explicit to (predominantly) oblique, through which biblical narrative conveys moral judgments of its characters. Finally, Sternberg, ... has catalogued with apt illustrative explications the repertory of repetitive devices used by the biblical writers."]
....
[MS: Rabbi Sacks also analyses the unresolved moral ambiguity in this story: The debate continues today among Bible scholars. ...
Two in particular subject the story to close literary analysis: Meir Sternberg in his The Poetics of Biblical Narrative[5] and Rabbi Elchanan Samet in his studies on the parsha.[6] They too arrive at conflicting conclusions. Sternberg argues that the text is critical of Jacob for both his inaction and his criticism of his sons for acting. Samet sees the chief culprits as Shechem and Hamor.]
Both point out, however, the remarkable fact that the text deliberately deepens the moral ambiguity by refusing to portray even the apparent villains in an unduly negative light.
p. 20 [MS: There is] ... a complete interfusion of literary art with theological, moral, or historiosophical vision, the fullest perception of the latter dependent on the fullest grasp of the former. ... “The Bible’s value as a religious document is intimately and inseparably related to its value as literature. This proposition requires that we develop a different understanding of what literature is, one that might—and should—give us some trouble.” One could add that the proposition also requires, conversely, that we develop a somewhat more troublesome understanding of what a religious document might be. ...
p.21 There is no point ... in pretending that all the contradictions among different sources in the biblical texts can be happily harmonized by the perception of some artful design. ... we may still not fully understand what would have been perceived as a real contradiction by an intelligent Hebrew writer of the early Iron Age [MS: 1300 BCE to 550 BCE] so that apparently conflicting versions of the same event set side by side, far from troubling their original audience, may have sometimes been perfectly justified in a kind of logic we no longer apprehend.
p.22 ...we have to learn ... to attend more finely to the complex, tersely expressive details of the biblical text. (Traditional exegesis [MS i.e. Midrash] in its own way did this, but with far-reaching assumptions about the text as literal revelation that most of us no longer accept.) [MS Alter expands on this, see pp.33-34]
p. 22 Biblical narrative is laconic but by no means in a uniform or mechanical fashion. Why, then, does the narrator ascribe motives to or designate states of feeling in his characters ... in some instances, while elsewhere he chooses to remain silent on these points? ... In a text so sparing in epithets and relational designations, why are particular identifications of characters noted by the narrator at specific points in the story?
p.23 What we need to understand better is that the religious vision of the Bible is given depth and subtlety precisely by being conveyed through the most sophisticated resources of prose fiction. In the example we have considered, Judah and Jacob-Israel ... are individual characters surrounded by multiple ironies, artfully etched in their imperfections ... all such subtly indicated achievements of fictional characterization suggest the endlessly complicated ramifications and contradictions of a principle of divine election intervening in the accepted orders of society and nature.
p. 24 The biblical tale, through the most rigorous economy of means, leads us again and again to ponder complexities of motive and ambiguities of character because these are essential aspects of its vision of man, created by God, enjoying or suffering all the consequences of human freedom.
p.24 Almost the whole range of biblical narrative, however, embodies the basic perception that man must live before God, in the transforming medium of time, incessantly and perplexingly in relation with others; and a literary perspective on the operations of narrative may help us more than any other to see how this perception was translated into stories that have had such a powerful, enduring hold on the imagination.
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End of Chapter 1 in The Art of Biblical Narrative