Marrying a foreign woman - 2 May 2009 |
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The pace of Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative hots up in chapter 3, ‘Biblical Type-Scenes and the Uses of Convention’. Observing ‘the perplexing fact that in biblical narrative more or less the same story often seems to be told two or three or more times about different characters, or sometimes even about the same character in different sets of circumstances’ (p. 49), Alter sets about uncovering some of the conventions followed by the biblical authors. He takes the example of ‘the betrothal’ (p. 51) type-scene, drawing attention to the skill of the biblical authors in narrating the betrothals of Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, Moses and Zipporah, and a whole load more besides.
Did you notice how all the action seems to take place at a well in a foreign land?
‘We must keep in mind’, he insists, that this is ‘not merely the technical manipulation of a literary convention for … sheer pleasure’; it is also intended to convey ‘a larger pattern of historical and theological meaning’ (pp. 59, 60). The Bible is beautiful; but beauty does not exclude utility.
It’s just a shame Alter wrote as a non-Christian. A believer might have recalled another account of a Man meeting a foreign woman at a well. And before long they, too, were talking about marriage.
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Posted by Steve Jeffery · Topics: Books, Minister's Blog, The Art of Biblical Narrative