The Sense Of Biblical Narrative

Since it was first published nearly three decades ago, The Art of Biblical Narrative has radically expanded the horizons of biblical scholarship by recasting the Bible as a work of literary art deserving studied criticism. Renowned critic and translator Robert Alter presents the Hebrew Bible as a cohesive literary work, one whose many authors used innovative devices such as parallelism, contrastive dialogue, and narrative tempo to tell one of the most revolutionary stories of human history: the revelation of a single god.

Laced with brilliant insights, broad in its view of the interaction of culture and theology, this book gives new resonance to old and important questions about the meaning of the Bible.

David Jobling uses a structuralist method developed mainly from Claude Levi-Strauss and A.J. Greimas to apply to various texts and problems in the narrative sections of the Hebrew Bible. Areas of the Bible covered are 1 Samuel; Numbers 11-12, and 1 Kings 17-18.

There has been much discussion of narrative aspects of the Bible in recent years, but the ends of biblical narratives – how the ends contribute to closure for their stories and how the ending strategies affect the whole narrative – have not been studied comprehensively. This study shows how the writers and editors of short narratives in Genesis gave their stories a sense of closure (or in a few cases, the sense of non-closure). Multiple and sometimes unexpected, forms of closure are identified; together these form a set of closural conventions. This contribution to narrative poetics of the Hebrew Bible in the light of source criticism will also be valuable to those who are interested in narrative and in concepts of closure.

These three studies continue the methods and aims of Volume I (1978, 2nd edn 1986), applying a structuralist method developed mainly from Claude LTvi-Strauss and A.J. Greimas to various texts and problems in the narrative sections of the Hebrew Bible. The new studies go beyond those of the previous volume, however, in two ways. They begin to take account of the deconstructive method of Derrida, the 'standing on its head' of structuralism; and they seek to make a contribution to feminist and liberation exegesis and hermeneutics. The first study is a deconstruction of Genesis 2-3, showing that the oppositions which the text purports to establish (including divine vs. human and male vs. female) are in fact assumed in advance. The second deals with the implicit political theory of the Deuteronomists, and discovers an 'indeterminate' attitude to monarchy. The third, inspired by Norman K. Gottwald and seeking, from a great methodological distance, to illuminate his problematic of Israel's origins, analyses the attitude implied by the Bible towards Transjordan and the Israelites who live there.