The Art of Biblical Narrative |
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A finished work of art - 2 May 2009
More on Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative:
Chapter 4, ‘Between Narration and Dialogue’ explores how the biblical writers do their business ‘when the narrative tempo slows down enough for us to discriminate a particular scene’ (p. 63). In contrast to ‘Greek epics and romances and … much later Western literature’ (p. 64), the Hebrew writers make extensive use of direct speech. Just read some Austen, then read 1 Samuel 21. Weird.
Chapter 5, ‘The Techniques of Repetition’, explores an oft-cited feature of the Bible, whose presence is generally obvious, but whose significance is often missed.
Chapter 6, ‘Characterization and the Art of Reticence’ shows how the Bible manages to say so much by saying so little.
Chapter 7, ‘Composite Artistry’, explores the conundrums arising from apparent or alleged ‘internal contradictions’ (p. 135) in the biblical narrative. Alter is less pessimistic than most scholars about the number of such ‘insoluble cruxes’ (p. 133) in Scripture. Personally, I’m less pessimistic still – I don’t think anything in the Bible is ‘insoluble’ in principle, though I readily grant that there are plenty of things that are ‘hard to understand’ (2 Peter 3:16). Credit to Alter for at least throwing a spanner in the works of liberal OT scholarship; shame he didn’t go all the way.
Chapter 8, ‘Narration and Knowledge’, explains how and why the biblical narrator keeps us in the dark about something he knows, or tells us something the characters in the story don’t know, or plays some other trick on us. Shame he keeps banging on about ‘fiction’. Sigh.
Interesting, though. For example, at what point in the story of Ehud are we supposed to realise that Eglon is going to meet a messy end (Judges 3:12-30)? Dunno, but we certainly find out before the King’s attendants – much to their embarrassment, and our amusement (vv. 24-25). Again, why don’t we discover that Adam was standing right next to Eve until after the conversation with the serpent had finished (Gen 3:6)? And so on.
Finally, Alter devotes an entire chapter (9, ‘Conclusion’) to helping the man in the street work out how to make practical use of the book in reading and understanding Scripture. Now there’s a rare thought.
Marrying a foreign woman - 2 May 2009
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.
The most beautiful story in the world - 1 May 2009
There’s always a fly in the ointment. At at the risk of overstating the case (and mixing metaphors), chapter 2 of Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative (’Sacred History and the Beginnings of Prose Fiction’) is a real bluebottle in the honey.
It would be unfair to suggest that Alter denies the historicity of the Bible. His discussion is more nuanced than that. There is, however, an underlying methodological issue that I want to take issue with.
Alter seems to assume that there is a trade-off between a narrative’s literary artistry and its historical accuracy. The more a writer seems to embellishes details, portrays the psychological features of the protagonists, draws attention to word-play and repetition, alludes to other narratives and so on, the more (it seems) we are forced to concede that he has fiddled the facts. We can admire his elegance and subtlety, we can be drawn my them more deeply into the story, but we cannot finally believe that it all actually happened this way. Literary beauty and historical veracity is a zero-sum game.
This assumption evaporates completely once we step back for a moment and ask ourselves who the real storyteller is. God can not only write a story with the literary beauty that Alter describes; he can make it all come alive. Men and women write books; God creates worlds. Why should the literary beauty of the Bible not be a precise reflection of God’s sovereign power?
The Master Storyteller - 1 May 2009
Chapter 1 of Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative is an introduction to his topic, entitled ‘A Literary Approach to the Bible’.
Beginning with an illustration from the account of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38, Alter loses no time in showing the riches that may be uncovered through literary readings of Old Testament narratives. Alter expounds much of his theory through such examples, making the book a delight to read.
The second half of the chapter is a historical survey of the present state of the field, amply justifying the author’s contention that (in the early 1980s, at least), ‘literary analysis of the Bible … [was] only in its infancy’ (p. 12).
Setting the agenda for the rest of the book, he concludes the chapter with the claim that:
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. (p. 22)
God is the Master Storyteller, and we need to learn how to read his story.
The Art of Biblical Narrative - 30 April 2009
Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative is truly fabulous. Original and insightful – indeed, genuinely groundbreaking in many respects – it still manages to avoid the technical jargon sometimes found in books on biblical interpretation.
But it’s not all wine and roses. Alter is a Jewish scholar, not a Christian. He therefore doesn’t call the Old Testament by this name, preferring the description ‘Hebrew Bible’, or even just ‘Bible’, because the term ‘Old Testament … implies that the Old is completed only in the New and that they comprise one continuous work’ (p. ix). Understandable, perhaps, but it rather begs the question.
Furthermore, it’s not clear how much Alter respects the historicity of the OT narratives, which he describes ‘as historicised prose fiction,’ or at best ‘fictionalized history’ (pp. 24-25, italics original). He emphasises that he does ‘not mean to discount the historical impulse that informs the Hebrew Bible,’ but nonetheless claims that ‘under scrutiny, biblical narrative generally proves to be either fiction laying claim to a place in the chain of causation and the realm of moral consequentiality that belong to history … or history given the imaginative definition of fiction’ (p. 32).
The historicity issue looms large in many of the best works on narrative art in Scripture, partly, perhaps, because evangelicals have been absent from the forefront in this field. Fortunately, V. Philips Long’s The Art of Biblical History has gone some way towards setting the record straight here. There’s no reason why the Bible’s literary subtlety should call into question its historicity.