Chapter Three
The book of Genesis is a collection of
stories woven together by some unknown redactor. The work contains legend,
poetry, fantasy, genealogy, short story, and other literary forms which
are blended together to form a more or less coherent whole. Genesis is a
kind of universal history; like other myths, it presents a story about
what the beginning of time may have been like. It opens with two distinct
creation myths: one emphasizing the transcendental nature
of the creator god and the other emphasizing the human-like properties of
the same creator god. The first god creates by fiat, by giving verbal commands;
the second creates by breathing air into a lump of clay. The two may be
different versions of the story by different poets, or they may
be contrary projections of the complex human creation called god. The
"third," if the projection is read as a psychological ground,
would be this: the verbal is the lump of clay. God speaks and the world
begins. God speaks and life begins. The creative power of speech is
celebrated in the beginning. Language with its formal aspects - its rules
of syntax and semantics - is the perfect analog for creation itself, since
language gives us the power to create order and meaning out of the chaos
of experience.
The creation myth can be read as a description of any act
of creation: first the intention, then the translation from mind to
matter, and then the evaluation: "and it was good." Professor
Douwe Stuurman, who taught
The Bible as Literature at the University of California in the nineteen
sixties, pointed out in lectures that the creation myth, when read aloud,
will be heard to be an accurate description of the completion of any creative
act. He told us the story of his first wife, a blind poet, who had asked
him to read Genesis 1 and 2 aloud to her and who when he finished said
"that is precisely the feeling of creating a poem." In writing a
poem one starts with an idea and a blank and formless page. The creative
act of beginning to "blow" life into that page and after some
time (and with some luck) giving form to the stuff of the
mind, transforming it into a new medium has formed a completed work. Human creation,
like Eliot's The Wasteland, is often a multi-staged affair with
false starts, revisions, crumpled failed attempts tossed away, and a
complex of discovery and creation. The poet does not know the poem until
it is finished. And when finished the feeling is there to be expressed:
"And it is good."
Read this way `good' is an aesthetic
term, as in "Shane is a good movie" or "King Lear is Shakespeare's best
play." Value terms are ambiguous in that sense, for we use many of
the same words to describe both aesthetic and moral judgments, `good'
doing service in both categories of judgments. "And it was good"
as used in Genesis is evaluative, but not in the moral sense. The story itself
is silent on the moral status of the creation and therefore the puzzle of how evil can
arise in a perfect creation arises only because of the confusion between
aesthetic and moral uses of the word `good.' `Is the universe
and everything in it good?' is the wrong question to ask when `good' is
used in the moral sense. Such a question gets currency only if one
presupposes that the logically prior assertion `God is good' is true, and
that there is a perfect transfer from creator to creation. But in the
creation myths in Genesis we have no argument to establish the truth of that claim, in fact, Genesis actually
tells us very little about God. "In the beginning of creation, when
God made heaven and earth..." presupposes the existence and nature of
God and the reader has the task of creating God from the narrative stuff
provided. From the first line of the book the main character is a given,
yet a mystery, a term looking for a referent. Here again confusion arises
when we fail to see that the particular kind of verbal act the writer uses
in the story is not one to be evaluated by some correspondence theory of
truth, but is rather a proclamation or statement in the sense that the
Canadian Constitution is a proclamation or set of statements. If one says
of a country's constitution, `It is true' what exactly is one saying?
Constitutions constitute the rules of the game, and are, as we all know,
subject to interpretation throughout time. The logical status of
many statements in the Bible is similar to the logical status of rules of
a game: `three strikes and you are out' not only regulates the game of
baseball, it also constitutes the game. "And it was good" is thus
proclamation and aesthetic judgment. The priests who compose the account
of the creation presuppose God, as an objective being. God, as a character in a
narrative, is yet to be discovered.
After the creation stories come a series of
"beginnings" stories. We are given a story that
"explains" the multiplicity of languages in the world. We
are told why pain and death enter the world. We are told of the first
murder and of god's method of dealing with the first murderer. He does not
use capital punishment but instead marks Cain as a stranger, someone cut off
from society and from the earth itself. The jealousy that motivates the
act of murder is the second indication (the first had been the
disobedience of Eve and Adam) we have
of the source of conflict and that conflict comes from the human creatures'
inner thoughts and feelings. A seed of conflict, of internal disruption grows
in the psyches of the humans and proves to be the narrative source of the
evil that enters the story in opposition to the expected goodness transferred
from creator to created. Cain, unable to accept God's rejection of his
gift, strikes out against his brother instead of addressing his own
psychic problems of insensitivity and jealousy, and is punished by complete
and awful rejection. We are shown in this story of the first murder that
the results of murder are to make the murderer non-human: God removes Cain
from life, from human society, and even from the fruits of the garden.
Isolated, Cain must walk the earth alone and friendless marked so that no
one will kill him to relieve him from his life sentence. Cain's mark is a
visible sign of God's absence and punishment as well as a symbol of the
burden Cain must carry to his grave as a result of the inner turmoil that
led him to commit fratricide.
As human-like characters enter the narrative,
they are presented as nomadic mideastern tribesman who wander the
semi-arid country of Canaan and Egypt and who learn the importance of
dreams and of a belief in the future. Abraham, who is a hero
to three religions, walks onto the stage as the father of countries who
has, above all, the virtues of loyalty and obedience. In the most powerful
and disturbing narrative in the collection, Abraham is commanded by Yahweh (the Hebrew name for the creator-god) to
sacrifice his young son. This, Abraham agrees to do, but is stopped at the
last moment by Yahweh, who it seems, is only testing Abraham's obedience.
A ram is substituted for the boy and the end of human sacrifice is
signalled. This story has haunted the twentieth century imagination -
Kirkegaard wrote a book based on the questions raised by this 300 word
story - because it raises so many profound questions. If a voice orders
you to do something how do you know the voice is the voice of god and not
of the devil? If god demands complete and unthinking obedience is god
worthy of worship? Can we worship a being willing to murder to make a
point? Is an action good because god says so or does god say so because it
is good?
The other key idea in the book of Genesis
is nationality. Yahweh and his chosen people join in the
covenental stories that image the agreement and promise between Yahweh and
the Patriarchs. If you will follow me, says Yahweh, I will provide you and
your offspring with land. The narrative that follows traces the covenant from generation to generation through a
number of deceitful, lustful, conflict-ridden, loving, loyal, ordinary people.
But the overriding theme developed in
this set of stories is this: how can human beings learn to resolve
conflicts without committing fratricide? The first murder, of brother by
brother, is a description of the worst failure: homicide. The relationship
of brotherhood is expanded and developed to meta- phorically include our
relationship with each other within the human tribal family, and in the
triumphant meeting of Jacob and Esau hatred and conflict melt away into a
very human embrace that suggests a way for all of us to behave. Esau, who
had lost his birthright to Jacob his younger brother, had said to himself,
"The time for mourning for my father will soon be here; then I will
kill my brother Jacob." Esau's threat is real; his injury greater than
Cain's, and
the expectation of yet another murder of brother by brother is acute. When
finally the two brothers are reunited we are prepared for the worst.
Jacob raised his eyes and saw Esau
coming towards him with four hundred men; so he divided the children
between Leah and Rachel and the two slave girls. He put the slave girls
with their children in front, Leah with her children next, and Rachel with
Joseph last. He then went on ahead of them, bowing low to the ground seven
times as he approached his brother. Esau ran to meet him and embraced him; he
threw his arms round him and kissed him, and they wept. (Gen. 33 1-5)
Instead of arms raised in anger we get
arms that embrace. Anticipating a weapon we get a kiss. Conflicts between
brothers need not end in murder. The word "brother" is given to
us just at the moment of recognition to remind us that these two are
brothers. Reconciliation occurs in the midst of danger as we are reminded
by the mention of an army of men and by the prudent way that Jacob
arranges his people, using the slave girls and their children to protect
the inner circles of Leah and his favorite Rachel. And who is in
the centre of the protective shields? Joseph. Joseph of the many coloured
coat; Joseph the special.
LITERARY DEVICES
Robert Alter, in his excellent book The
Art of Biblical Narrative (upon which I draw heavily in the following),
writes:
The God of Israel, as so often has
been observed, is above all the God of history: the working out of His purposes
in history is a process that compels the attention of the Hebrew imagination,
which is thus led to the most vital interest in the concrete and differential
character of historical events. The point
is that fiction was the principal means which the biblical authors had at their
disposal for realizing history.1 (emphasis mine)
Fiction is the key to understanding the
many biblical stories. "Fiction" comes from the Latin,
"fictio," which means "a making, counterfeiting." It is
a form of "fingere", "to make, to form, to devise." Think
of "fiction" in the sense of making or forming and not in its
sense of "false". When I say the bible is fiction I am not
saying that the Bible is false. What I am saying is that the Bible is a
creation, a making, a
story which is formed and molded to certain ends; it is a formed and
molded story in the same way that The Great Gatsby is a novel. Obviously,
there are many differences between the stories presented in the Bible and
the stories presented in twentieth century novels. The techniques of narration
have evolved and the conventions that stand behind a literary work have
also changed over the last 2,500 years. But the basic enterprise of story
telling has not changed significantly. And, what we need to realize is
that the religious vision of the Bible is given depth and subtlety by
being conveyed through the sophisticated resources of prose fiction. Like
the Greeks, the Hebrews learned to tell their story in a unique way, to
glorify their God in songs, poems, and anthems. Unlike the Greeks, they
chose a different genre.
The ancient Hebrew writers
purposefully nurtured and developed prose narration to take the place of the
epic genre, which by its content was intimately bound up with the world of
paganism, and appears to have had a special standing in the polytheistic cults.
The recitation of the epics was tantamount to an enactment of cosmic events in
the manner of sympathetic magic. In the process of total rejection of the
polytheistic religions and their ritual expressions in the cult, epic songs and
also the epic genre were purged from the repertoire of the Hebrew authors.2
Any comparison of the Homeric gods with
the god of the Old Testament reveals the essential difference between the
two cultures. Although the Homeric poems played the same role in Greece
that the Old Testament stories did in Palestine, in the subsequent development
of the civilization from which they grew, the differences are dramatic.
The Olympian gods, as conceptual representations of the power which
governs the universe, are totally irreconcilable with the one god of
Abraham. The Greek
conception of the nature of the gods and their relation to humans is so
alien to us that it is difficult for the modern reader to take it
seriously. The Hebrew basis of European Christianity has made it almost impossible for us to
imagine a god who can be feared and laughed at, blamed and admired and
still worshipped with sincerity--yet these are all proper attitudes toward
the gods on Olympus.
The Hebrew conception of god is clearly
an expression of the emphasis on those aspects of the universe that imply
a harmonious order. Any disorder in the universe is blamed on man and
woman, not on God. Thus we have a story to explain why there is death and
pain in this otherwise perfect world. Human errors bring about the advent
of pain, sin, and death. Interestingly, there can be no sin without God
since "sin" is a thoroughly religious word. Those ancient Hebrews
expressed their feelings and awe when faced with the wonder and miracle of
life; yet, they also had to make sense of the world they found themselves
a part of - a world with life and joy but also death and suffering.
In all the stories in the Bible the
Hebrew writers struggle to reconcile evil with an a priori assumption of
one all-powerful, all-knowing and just God. Greek poets and philosophers
conceived their gods as an expression of the disorder of the world they
inhabited: the Olympian gods, like the sea and the wind, follow their own
will even to the extreme of conflict with each other, and always with a
sublime disregard for the human beings who may be affected by the results
of their actions. They are not
concerned with morality and leave it for human beings to talk about. The
Old Testament God, on the other hand, is presented
most of the time3 as one who is intimately involved in morality to the
extent of providing in the decalogue the covenant between him and his people and following
(cf. Numbers) with hundred of rules and regulations to be followed by the
people.4
The epic poems of Homer provide a much
different conceptual scheme than do the prose narratives of the Hebrew
writers. The difference between the Greek and Hebrew hero, between
Achilles and Joseph, for example, is remarkable, and has led many to claim
that there are no heroes in the Old Testament. These Hebrew
heroes are all tentative; all flawed in spirit or in body and seem too
common to be real heroes. Homer's poetry depends largely on image and
other poetic devices for its marvellous effect while the Hebrews use the
devices of a newly developed prose narrative to convey an equally marvellous
subtlety. The subtle interplay of Homeric lines is not often found in the
Bible, not because the Hebrews were inferior artists but because they were
writing in a different genre and hence employing different techniques.
As Alter puts it:5
The Bible presents a kind of literature in
which the primary impulse would often seem to be to provide instruction or at
least necessary information, not merely to delight. If, however, we fail to see
that the creators of biblical narrative were writers who, like writers
elsewhere, took pleasure in exploring the formal and imaginative resources of
their fictional medium, perhaps sometimes unexpectedly capturing the fullness
of their subject in the very play of exploration, we shall miss much that the biblical stories are meant to
convey.
In the next few pages we shall consider
some of these "formal and imaginative resources" in an attempt
to see how knowledge of them can help us to understand the complex stories
we are told in the Bible. While discussing these formal attributes of the
literary style we will also want to know more about the informal
attitudes, the conventions, that the writers and readers shared and which,
as in all literature, provided the soil for the growth of the formal structures
which we call narratives. To stay with the plant metaphor for a moment,
one can say that the conventions extant at a given time provide
the "root system" for the literature, which grows above ground
as a formal production of the human mind. Let us look at a few of the key
literary devices employed by the Hebrew writers:
1. verbal repetition
2. thematic key words
3. delayed exposition
4. reiteration of motifs
5. dialogue
6. narration
7. type-scene
The very famous opening passages of the
King James Genesis will serve to show several of
these devices at work.
In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth.
2. And the earth was without form,
and void; and darkness was
upon the face of the deep. And the
Spirit of God moved upon the
face of the waters.
3. And God said, Let there be light;
and there was light.
4. And God saw the light, that it was
good: and God divided the
light from the darkness.
5. And God called the light Day, and
the darkness he called
Night. And the evening and the morning
were the first day.
6. And God said, Let there be a
firmament in the midst of the
waters, and let it divide the waters
from the waters.
7. And God made the firmament, and
divided the waters which
were under the firmament from the
waters which were above the
firmament: and it was so.
8. And God called the firmament
Heaven. And the evening and
the morning were the second day.
9. And God said, Let the waters
under the heaven be gathered
together unto one place, and let the
dry land appear: and it was so.
10. And God called the dry land
Earth; and the gathering
together of the waters called he Seas:
And God saw that it was
good.
11. And God said, Let the earth
bring forth grass, the herb
yielding seed, and the fruit tree
yielding fruit after his kind, whose
seed is in itself, upon the earth: and
it was so.
12. And the earth brought forth
grass, and herb yielding seed
after his kind, and the tree yielding
fruit, whose seed was in itself,
after his kind: and God saw that it
was good.
13. And the evening and the morning
were the third day.
14. And God said, Let there be
lights in the firmament of the
heaven to divide the day from the
night; and let them be for signs,
and for seasons, and for days, and
years:
15. And let them be for lights in
the firmament of the heaven to
give light upon the earth: and it was
so.
16. And God made two great lights;
the greater light to rule the
day, and the lesser light to rule the
night: he made the stars also.
17. And God set them in the
firmament of the heaven to give
light upon the earth,
18. And to rule over the day and
over the night, and to divide
the light from the darkness: and God
saw that it was good.
19. And the evening and the morning
were the fourth day.
20. And God said, Let the waters
bring forth abundantly the
moving creature that hath life, and
fowl that may fly above the
earth in the open firmament of heaven.
21. And God created great whales,
and every living creature that
moveth, which the waters brought forth
abundantly, after their
kind, and every winged fowl after his
kind: and God saw that it was
good.
22. And God blessed them, saying, Be
fruitful, and multiply, and
fill the waters in the seas, and let
fowl multiply in the earth.
23. And the evening and the morning
were the fifth day.
24. And God said, Let the earth
bring forth the living creature
after his kind, cattle and creeping
things, and beast of the earth
after his kind: and it was so.
26. And God said, Let us make man in
our image... in the image
of God created he him; male and female
created he them...and He
rested on the seventh day from all his
work which he had made.
Perhaps the first thing we notice about
this creation story is that we are confronted with a
very talkative God. The writer chooses to present the story (and uses the
word "story" to describe it) in a kind of permanent present
tense with the commands of God clearly presented as verbal performances.
This is a God who creates by verbal fiat. And stories are verbal
constructs, which also create by verbal fiat: there is no character, no action,
no place until some words are spoken or written; until we name the objects
of the world we have no way of linguistically referring to them: no words,
no world. The repetition of the imperative `Let there be...' shows us that
we are confronted here with one god, with one God for whom language is
important: after creating something he immediately names it, and then
evaluates it. Everything is brought into being by the verbal order of God;
then named by him (later Adam will be given the task of naming the animals)
as if the creation of an entity is not complete until it is given a name.
The repetition of the imperative `Let there be...'is an obvious literary
device which draws our attention to the verbal power of this unique god. A
comparison with other creation myths is instructive.6 Nowhere else is this
verbal quality so dramatically presented.
A pattern emerges: on the first day light
enters the world for the first time and then each day's creative work
produces more complex components of the world and its inventory. By the
sixth day mammals and complex fruits and trees are present. These created
things are not part of a logical progression of ever more complex
structures; for example, how can there be day and night before there is a
sun? They are more an expanding circle of consciousness. From the instant
of conscious awareness (light) the child's world expands until it finally
includes a sense of the cycles of day and night, a realization
of something outside the individual ego, and a powerful acquaintance with
the external world with all of the stuff which it contains. A
psychological, not a logical pattern develops.
KEY WORDS IN THE
STORIES
"And God saw that it was good"
appears after each creative act, after each day's work. One way of reading
the Hebrew creation story is as a description of any creative
act. Write a poem, make a pot, or build a bird house - if all goes well the feeling of "and it
was good" comes after
completing the day's work. Further, the description is accurate in that
first comes the idea ("Let there be...) and then that idea is given
reality ("and it was so"), and then the reality is blessed
("and it was good"). From concept to concrete being is a good
description of a creative act - and with the act comes the sense of making something
out of formlessness by acting on raw material with a consciousness that
can then see that it has form, and can value the new creation. The voice
of God in this creation myth is a voice which imparts value to the
universe ("And it was good"), gives form to an earth that was
without form ("Let there be"), and fills up that which was void
("and it was so").
Does that mean that value is in the
universe? That is certainly the position presented here in this story,
presented in the narrative, but not argued for. The value claim is asserted,
is given form in the repetition of the evaluative utterance of the only
character in the story, but it is presupposed, not offered as the conclusion
to an argument. At this point we are given a god who is different from his
creation, a god who
acts verbally on the stuff of the universe to give it form and announces the aesthetic value of the
creation. Unlike other mid-eastern creation stories where the god-creator
is the stuff of the creation here we have a distinct verbal character who
commands the things of experience into being. This god does not make
things from parts of his body, does not give birth to his creation, but,
instead, commands the mental to produce the physical.
Thematic key words in this narrative
include: "let", "God", "and",
"good". To reiterate: "let" serves as an imperative, a
command on each of the days of the creation and tells us of a god who creates by fiat and
who infuses matter with concept and name. "God" is the name of
the author of this creation and we are made to feel that he is one, that
he is all powerful, and that he is a god who speaks in a human tongue.
"And" functions to introduce each day and each part of the total
creative effort. It gives each sentence equal weight, hence equal importance.
Coordinating conjunctions tend to do that, especially
"and", which refuses to attach more weight to one main clause
over another leaving each conjoined clause separate and equal. There is
also the sense of a huge enterprise which the series of "and"
introduced sentences provides: and ..., and..., and..., filling up the
void with earth and stars, sun and moon, plants and animals, oceans and
dry lands.
Using this passage as a model as one
reads the stories can provide a key for several of the literary devices
used by the Hebrew writers to relate their accounts of god, man and woman,
and their relationships. Anytime one notices verbal repetition it brings
about an effect which influences meaning. Sometimes repetition changes
from verbatim repetition to near repetition with slight changes that
subtly introduce a new level of meaning. For example, at the end of the
sixth day, for the first time, an adverb ("very") is used in
the value assessment: "And god saw every thing that he had made, and
, behold, it was very good." Also, we get "behold" for the
first time. It is as if we were present to review all of the week's work,
to look back at the creative activity of those first six days with a cumulative
feeling of the celebration of creativity urged on by "beholding"
the fruits of the creative spirit which now flourish in what was before a
formless void. Land, sky, sun, moon, plants and animals are all celebrated
in this short creation myth. That feeling of celebration, of creativity,
is what is true about this story. Those who insist that it is a literal explanation
of the beginnings of species reduce its meaning by failing to recognize
the literary subtleties of the piece that raise it above mere literal prose.
What we find in the creation account is not a
psuedo-scientific description of the origin of the species but a fully
conceived and richly presented story about creativity.
Creation as described in this story is a
process and not a series of events. The question of how there can be days
before there is a sun disappears when one realizes that the acts of
creation are presented as process and are of a
whole. Critics who argue that these kinds of inconsistencies are evidence
that the story is not to be taken literally because to do so leads to
inconsistency have not realized that they too are depending on a literal
model as their stalking horse. But this is not a newspaper account of the
creation of the universe, full of brute facts to be checked against what
is, nor is it theory to base predictions on; it is a poem celebrating
creativity and worth.
DELAYED EXPOSITION
Later in Genesis we are told of Joseph
and his many brothers; brothers who are jealous of him and of his special
treatment by their father Israel (Jacob). The brothers decide to kill him, are
talked out of it by Reuben, and then they decide to throw Joseph into a
pit:
When Joseph came up to his brothers,
they stripped him of the
long, sleeved robe which he was
wearing, took him and threw him
into the pit. The pit was empty and
had no water in it....Meanwhile
some Midianite merchants passed by and
drew Joseph up out of
the pit. They sold him for twenty
pieces of silver to the Ishmaelites,
and they brought Joseph to Egypt.
(Gen, 37, 23 ff.)
What is important in this passage is what
we are not told. We are not told anything about Joseph's feelings or
whether he was afraid that he would be killed by his brothers (fratricide
again) or sold into slavery. The author delays telling us anything about
Joseph's response to the attack by his brothers until much later in the
story when the brothers are sent to Egypt to get food. There, in a brilliant
scene where Joseph knows his brothers but they know him not, we are told
of the feelings Joseph had when his brothers sold him to the Ishmaelites.7
We are told that when his brothers sold him he pleaded with them but they
turned a deaf ear to his pleas. Now they are in a position where they must
plead for food from this same brother (although they do not yet know it is
Joseph, we do) and hope that he will not turn a deaf ear to
their importuning. Joseph, who had his coat of many colours stolen by his
brothers, now provides each brother with a new suit of clothes. By
delaying this information until later in the story the writer is able to
create an ironic scene where we know more than the characters and can see
the relationship between the attack on Joseph and the request to
Joseph.
Joseph could no longer control his
feelings in front of his
attendants, and he called out, `Let
everyone leave my presence.' So
there was nobody present when Joseph
made himself known to his
brothers, but so loudly did he weep that the Egyptians and
Pharaoh's household heard him. Joseph
said to his brothers, `I
am Joseph; can my father be still
alive?' (Gen.
45, 1-3, emphasis added)
Joseph is alone with his brothers, and he
must announce himself in Hebrew: `I am Joseph...'! There in a strange
land, surrounded by people speaking a strange language, the sound of
Hebrew would surprise, and the announcement `I am Joseph' would be like
hearing a person returned from the dead. "His brothers were so
dumfounded at finding themselves face to face with Joseph that they could
not answer." We heard nothing from Joseph in the pit; now we hear nothing
from the surprised brothers responsible, albeit it unknowingly, for
Joseph's dreams coming true. Delayed exposition plays a key part in
producing the complex of feelings that we go through in the
recognition scene.
MOTIFS
A motif is a concrete image, sensory
quality, action, or object that occurs in the narrative and that takes its
meaning from the defining context of the narrative (water in the Moses cycle, stones in the Jacob story). When
a motif is reiterated throughout the story, take note, for it may carry a
shifting meaning from context to context. In the story of Samson we are
introduced to the motif of flame or fire from the beginning. "And
while Manoah and his wife were watching, the flame went up from the altar
towards heaven..." (Judges 13, 20 ff.)...and there are torches and
burnt tow, and the destructive force of fire. Samson's father makes a
burnt offering after hearing that he was to have a brave son. As the flame
goes up toward heaven from the altar, an angel of the lord ascends in the
flame. Later Samson catches three hundred foxes, ties firebrands between
them and turns them loose in the cornfields and vineyards of the
Philistines. Imagine the foxes running desperately, wildly, and
spreading destruction wherever they run. Destruction comes in a blind rage
of fire, and the Philistines answer with fire torture for Samson's wife
and her father. Fire becomes a defining characteristic of Samson; not a
metaphor for him, but a metonym for his destructive rage at the end of the
story, a rage, which is, like fire, blind.
DIALOGUE
When King David is "old and stricken in years" the
process of maneuver- ing for the crown begins as the various sons of David
prepare to make a claim for the throne. Adonijah, believing he has a right
to his father's position, declares himself next in line and gathers a
group of loyal followers, priests and soldiers. Bath-sheba, the mother of
Solomon, has an
interest in the outcome of this struggle for power, and wants very much
for her son to be the one who gets David's blessing and David's crown. In
the King James translation of the First Book of Kings
we hear:
11. Wherefore Nathan spake unto Bathsheba the mother of
Solomon, saying, Hast
though not heard that Adonijah the son of
Haggith doth reign, and David our Lord knoweth it not?
12. Now therefore come, let me, I
pray thee, give thee counsel,
that thou mayest save thine own life,
and the life of thy son
Solomon.
13. Go and get thee in unto king
David, and say unto
him, Didst
thou not, my lord, O king, sear unto
thine handmaid, saying,
Assuredly Solomon thy son shall reign after me, and he shall
sit
upon my throne? why then doth Adonijah
reign?
14. Behold, while thou yet talkest
there with the king, I also will
come in after thee, and confirm thy
words.
15. And Bathsheba went in unto the king into the chamber: and
the king was very old; and Abishag the
Shunammite ministered
unto the king.
16. And Bathsheba bowed, and did obeisance unto the king.
And the king said, What wouldest thou?
17. And she said unto him, My lord,
thou swarest by the Lord
thy God unto thine handmaiden, saying,
Assuredly Solomon thy
son shall reign after me and he shall
sit upon my throne....
20. And thou, my lord, O king, the
eyes of all Israel are upon
thee, that thou shouldest tell them
who shall sit on the throne of
my lord the king after him.
We can be sure what Nathan the prophet will say. Bath-sheba
addresses her husband with honorifics while remembering all the time to
repeat his name and to repeat the name of Solomon. David the king must pass on the kingship to
Solomon. But, an even more magnificent use of dialogue comes
when Bath-sheba changes the rehearsed script crafted by Nathan to an even
more effective rhetoric. She reminds the king of his vow to his God. The
promise to make Solomon king is not just a promise to her but also to God.
Bath-sheba, by adding the oath to god and the idea that all of Israel is
watching David to see that he does right by Solomon, is very convincing
and we see she knows how to talk to her husband. She knows of his need for
public ego massage. She knows of his susceptibility to clever flattery.
The artist here is presenting us with a complex and subtle change in
dialogue which reveals, in the context of the scene, the character of the
speaker, as well as the relationship between Bath-sheba and King David.
Nathan's entrance completes the task as David is overwhelmed by the two of
them, and of course, Solomon will get the job.
SPOKEN LANGUAGE
Spoken language is the substratum of
everything that is human and divine in the Bible, and the Hebrew tendency
to present stories by giving us speech is testimony to this belief that
the spoken word will lead us to the essence of things. Dialogue can also
be effective when used in a contrastive way. In the Second Book of Samuel Amnon pretends to be sick so that he can ask
his sister Tamar to come into his tent to nurse him. Amnon lusts after
his sister and finally after sending all the servants away, rapes her.
Their exchange:
...he caught hold of her and
said, `Come to bed with me, sister.'
But she answered, `No, brother, do not
dishonour me, we do not
do such things in Israel; do not
behave like a beast. Where could I
go and hide my disgrace? - and you
would sink as low as any beast
in Israel. Why not speak to the king
for me? He will not refuse you
leave to marry me.' He would not
listen, but overpowered her,
dishonoured her and raped her. (2 Sam.
13.12-15)
Tamar's eloquent refusal, couched in a
long speech is dismissed by Amnon, whose response
to her plea is the brutal act of rape followed by his only words - the
three words, `Arise, be gone,' by which he dismisses her after the
incestuous rape. The contrast between Tamar and Amnon is heightened by this
skillful use of dialogue in this scene. It is important to realize that
these stories are not primitive, but are presented with a set of literary
conventions as complex and valid as any of our current ones. Dialogue is
one of those literary conventions which, when we pay attention to its use,
can enhance the meaning and enjoyment of biblical stories. As Alter says:8
In any given narrative event, and
especially, at the beginning of any
new story, the point at which the
dialogue first emerges will be
worthy of special attention, and in
most instances, the initial words
spoken by a personage will be
revelatory, perhaps more in manner
than in matter, constituting an
important moment in the exposition
of character.
Biblical narration is the subject of many
critics9 and in this matter it is instructive to compare the Greek with
the Hebrew writers. The differences are easy to spot. As Auerbach puts it,
"...the basic impulse of the Homeric style: to represent phenomena in
a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts,
and completely fixed in their spatial
and temporal relations"10 while the Hebrews externalize only so much
of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the story, leaving in
the background time and place, feeling and thought unless such expression
is crucial to the narrative. As he puts it:11
It will at once be said that this is
to be explained by the particular
concept of God which the Jews held and
which was wholly different
from that of the Greeks. True enough -
but this constitutes no
objection. For how is the Jewish
concept of God to be explained?
Even their earlier God of the desert
was not fixed in form and
content, and was alone; his lack of
form, his lack of local habitation,
his singleness, was in the end not
only maintained but developed
even further in competition with the
comparatively far more
manifest gods of the surrounding Near
Eastern World. The
concept of God held by the Jews is
less a cause than a symptom of
their manner of comprehending and
representing things.
While Homer is celebrated for his precise
detail and descriptive power, the biblical writers can be celebrated for
their superb economy - economy to the point of sparseness at times. But,
as Auerbach says, "in Homer, the complexity of the psychological life
is shown only in the succession and alternation of emotions; whereas the
Jewish writers are able to express the si- multaneous existence of various
layers of consciousness and the conflict between them."12 It is
different with biblical stories partly because the aim of the Jewish
writers is not to bewitch the senses but to provide
the"necessary" narrative that makes up and expresses their claim to absolute historico-religious
truth.
In Homer's famous opening to the Odyssey:
Sing, Muse, of that versatile man, who
wandered far, after sacking
Troy's holy citadel. He saw the cities
of many men, and knew their
mind; he suffered much on the deep
sea, and in his heart,
struggling for a prize, to save his
life...
we notice the
invocation to the muse, the placing of the story in time, and a preview of
the events, the travels that will be sung about. His story of wandering is
to follow the Trojan War and the time and place are explicit. Compare that
opening with the opening of the Book of Ruth:
Long ago, in the time of the judges,
there was a famine in the land,
and a man from Bethlehem in Judah went to live in the Moabite
country with his wife and his two
sons. The man's name was
Elimelech, his wife's name was Naomi, and
the names of his two
sons Mahlon and Chilion. They were
Ephrathites from Bethlehem
in Judah. They arrived in the Moabite
country and there they
stayed.
Elimelech Naomi's husband died, so
that she was left with her two
sons. These sons married Moabite
women, one of whom was called
Orpah and the other Ruth. They had
lived there about ten years,
when both Mahlon and Chilion died, so
that the woman was be-
reaved of her two sons as well as of
her husband.
The stacking up of information, sentence
atop sentence is typical of the Old Testament. Compression
of time, economy of narrative, speed of narration all are a part of the
biblical style. In this compressed narrative we are given a tremendous
amount of information and absolutely no description, we are given motivation
for action but no feeling by the characters. Deaths are re- corded but reactions
to them are not. All of this allows for concentration on Ruth alone as
this short story unfolds. Her eventual marriage to Boaz will make her the
great grandmother of King David; hence
cleverly suggesting that racial intermarriage is to be tolerated since
Ruth, as we are told, is a Moabite, and is the mother of Ohed: the father
of Jesse, the father of David. The theme of the story is beautiful and
simple: we must show hospitality to strange or new ideas or persons. And,
the writer presents this bit of didacticism by a simple narrative style
that gains power from the context of the entire Jewish story - from Ruth
to David to Jesus with the mention of Bethlehem. Biblical
writers seem motivated not by a desire to be accurate poets of the senses
but rather to fit their stories into a predetermined "Story".
The purpose or intention of this official "story" is always
accessible; from the Christian point of view Ruth is an important reminder
of the universality and Old Testament authority of the Christian story.
The human story is the more important one: the love and openness to the
new, of a loyal and steadfast woman, can give birth to new nations.
Form and content have long been
recognized as two distinct aspects of literature. Many have argued that
the two can not be meaningfully separated - that form is content or
content is form. Though interesting, those arguments are not very useful
to the practical critic. For the purposes of discussion here let us assume
that there is a real difference between form and content in a literary
work. One of the ongoing dialectical processes in literature comes about because
of the necessity to use established forms in order to be able
to communicate coherently while at the same time struggling to break
and remake these forms because they are arbitrary restrictions and not
an a-priori part of literary "knowledge". Each generation of
writers, it seems, struggles to break free from the perceived fetters of
the past generation. As criticism has taught us, it is helpful to know
where a particular form came from, or what its ancestors were like, in
order to understand the new form. Romantic poetry can be studied as a
rebellion against the Neo-classical poems that came before. Wordsworth, striving to
break free from Pope's couplets, created a new poetic line; and, of
course, many of today's poets fight to be free from Wordsworthian influence.
In any case, the form of a literary piece
can be important to understanding the piece. It is important to notice
that the "Song of Songs" is a wedding idyl, and that "The
Book of Job" is a play. "Ruth" is the first short story.
"Type-scene" is the name of a literary device worked out for Homeric poems
by Walter Arend and used by Alter in his analysis of the Old Testament.13 The idea is
that there are certain fixed situations which the writer is expected to
include in his/her narrative and which he/she is expected to perform according
to a set order of motifs - situations like the arrival of a messenger, the
hero's voyage, the oracle, the arming of the hero and several others. The
type-scene of the visit, for example, should be presented according to a
conventional blueprint which includes: a guest approaches; someone
spots him, gets up and hurries to greet him; the guest is taken by the
hand, led into a room, invited to take the seat of honour; the guest is
enjoined to feast; the ensuing meal is described. Almost any description
of a visit in Homer will reproduce more or less this sequence not because
of an overlap of sources but because that is how the convention requires
such a scene to be rendered.
In the Bible we find several common
type-scenes. As Alter says: "Some of the most commonly repeated
biblical type-scenes I have been able to identify are the following: the
annunciation...of the birth of a hero to his barren mother; the encounter
with the future betrothed at a well; the epiphany in the field; the initiatory
trial; the danger in the desert and the discovery of a well or other
source of sustenance; the testament of a dying hero."14
When one looks carefully at the many
betrothal scenes in the Old Testament a pattern emerges. A young man must find a
mate in the outside world; hence, he travels to a foreign land. The well
or oasis where he meets his future mate is an obvious symbol of fertility
and life, a clear and powerful female symbol. Drawing water from the well
establishes a bond between male and female, host and guest, benefactor and
benefited, and leads to the excited announcement and the actual betrothal.
What is interesting is not the recurring
form of the type-scene but the variations writers use for character
development and emphasis. These variations of the application of this
pattern yield rich interpretive differences, which can be seen by comparing the
betrothal of Jacob and Rachel, Moses and Zipporah, Boaz and
Ruth, and Samson and the woman in Timnath. In each case a careful analysis
will reveal (as Alter does so well in his book) how slight variations of
the pattern can light the story with new meaning and subtle change. Far
from being primitive, the biblical stories are rich in narrative complexity
and subtlety of character.
An intelligent reading of any work of art
requires some knowledge of the grid of conventions the work is laid out on
and against. Though we have lost some of the conventions of the biblical
writers we can come to see how they define the story after coming to
appreciate these old and different conventions. And remember, the
conventions change but the stories remain the same.