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[For what it’s worth for those who wish to read The Bible as ‘Literature’, these excerpts from The Literary Guide to the Bible, eds. Alter and Kermode, offer a different approach to reading this book of antiquity, not as ‘religious” or “sacred text” but more as literary pieces, some even masterpieces, worthy to land in the reading list of students of comparative literature. Reformatted and highlighted for this post.—Admin1.]
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Introduction to the Old Testament
Robert Alter
The difficulty of getting a bearing on the Old Testament as a collection of literary works is reflected in the fact that we have no comfortable term with which to designate these books. Common usage in Western culture, following Christian tradition, calls them the Old Testament, a name originating in the assumption that the Old requires completion in the New or is actually superseded by the New. (The term itself, more properly rendered “new covenant,” derives from the reading given in Hebrew 8:6-13 of a prophecy in Jeremiah 31:31, where the phrase first occurs. In Jeremiah it actually signals a grand renewal of Israelite national existence under God, but Hebrews takes it to mean the replacement of an “aging” covenant about to expire by a new one.) That is in fact how major writers from Augustine to Dante to Donne to Eliot have conceived Hebrew Scripture and absorbed it into their own work, and this conception is persistent enough to have figured centrally as recently as 1982 in a book by one of our most important critics, Northrop Frye’s The Great Code: The Bible and Literature.The Jews collectively have rejected the term for all that it implies, and as a matter of literary history there is surely no warrant to imagine that the ancient Hebrew writers composed their stories and poems and laws and genealogical lists with the idea that they were providing a prelude to another set of texts, to be written in another language centuries later. Harold Bloom, a critic who has tirelessly studied the ways in which later writers appropriate the achievements of their predecessors for their own purposes, makes this point with witty incisiveness when he speaks of “the Christian triumph over the Hebrew Bible, a triumph which produced that captive work, the Old Testament.”
It is nevertheless a question what to call these books and how to think of them outside a state of captivity. The very term Bible (from the Greek ta biblia, “the books”) is more a vague classification than a title. Jewish Bible refers to the choice and order of the texts made by rabbinic Judaism for its canon, and so in its way it also represents an appropriation of ancient writings by latecomers, though not so egregious a one as the Christian. Hebrew Bible, the term which Bloom prefers and which I shall use in what follows, comes closer to the originating literary facts, though it is not strictly accurate, for three post-Exilic books, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Daniel, are partly composed in Aramaic, a Semitic tongue merely cognate with Hebrew. Postbiblical Hebrew tradition itself has never enshrine a single title but instead has wavered among several that in different ways suggest the elusive heterogeneity of the corpus. Rabbinic literature refers to the Writings and to the Twenty-four Books. Most commonly, the Hebrew Bible has been designated by Jews as Tanakh, an acronym forTorah (Pentateuch), Neviim (Former and Latter Prophets), and Ketuvim (miscellaneous Writings, or Everything Else), which is no more than a crude generic division of the books in their traditional order according to the Jewish canon. Finally, these books are often called Miqra’, especially in modern secular contexts, and that term simply indicates “that which is read,” more or less in the sense of “the Text,” and so will scarcely serve as a definite title.
Any literary account of the Hebrew Bible must recognize just this quality of extreme heterogeneity, a condition which the essays in this volume will vividly confirm. From one point of view, it is not even a unified collection but rather a loose anthology that reflects as much as nine centuries of Hebrew literary activity, from the Song of Deborah and other, briefer archaic poems embedded in the prose narratives to the Book of Daniel (second century B.C.E.). The generic variety of this anthology is altogether remarkable, encompassing as it does —-
- historiography,
- fictional narratives,lists of laws,
- and much that is a mixture of the two,
- prophecy in both poetry and prose,
- aphoristic and reflective works,
- cultic and devotional poems,
- laments and victory hymns,
- love poems,
- genealogical tables,
- etiological tales,
- and much more.
One might imagine that religious ideology would provide the principle of selection for the anthology. In some minimal sense, that must be true. There are, for example, no truly syncretistic or pagan texts included, though it is perfectly plausible that there might have been ancient Hebrew compositions written in such a spirit. The Hebrew Bible itself occasionally refers to annalistic or possibly mythological works such as the Book of the Battles of YHWH and the Book of Yashar, which have not survived. (The oldest extant scrolls, it should be noted, are those that were found in the caves at Qumran, going back to the first century B.C.E.; as far as we know, whatever else was written in the ancient period in Hebrew on parchment or papyrus has long since turned to dust, so we can only guess at the full scope of this literature.) But even within the limits of monotheistic ideology, there is a great deal of diversity in regard to —
- political attitudes;
- conceptions of history,
- ethics,
- psychology,
- causation;
- views of the roles of law and cult,
- of priesthood and laity,
- Israel and the nations,
- even of God.
Indeed, when one contemplates the radical challenge in Job not only to the doctrine of retribution but to the very notion of a man-centered creation, or Ecclesiastes’ insistence on cycles of futility in place of the linear, progressive time familiar from Genesis, or the exuberant eroticism of the Song of Songs, one begins to suspect that the selection was at least sometimes impelled by a desire to preserve the best of ancient Hebrew literature rather than to gather the consistent normative statements of a monotheistic party line. In fact, the texts that have been passed down to us exhibit not only extraordinary diversity but also a substantial amount of debate with one another.
But the idea of the Hebrew Bible as a sprawling, unruly anthology is no more than a partial truth, for the retrospective act of canonization has created a unity among the disparate texts that we as later readers can scarcely ignore; and this unity in turn reflects, though with a pronounced element of exaggeration, an intrinsic feature of the original texts—their powerfully allusive character. All literature, to be sure, is necessarily allusive: as a writer, you are compelled in one way or another to make your text out of antecedent texts (oral or written) because it would not occur to you in the first place to do anything so unnatural as to compose a hymn or a love-poem or a story unless you had some model to emulate.
In the Hebrew Bible, however, what is repeatedly evident is the abundance of authoritative national traditions, fixed in particular verbal formulations, to which later writers respond through incorporation, elaboration, debate, or parody. Perhaps, as a good many scholars have conjecture, these formulations first circulated in oral tradition in the early, premonarchical phase of Israelite history. In any event, literacy is very old in the ancient Near East and there is no preliterate stage of full-fledged Israelite national existence; so there is no reason to assume that the activity of putting things down on a scroll (sefer; see, for example, Exod. 17:14) was not part of the formative experience of ancient Israel. The internally allusive character of the Hebrew texts—not to speak of allusions in them to non-Hebrew ancient Near Eastern texts—is more like the pervasive allusiveness of Eliot’s The Waste Land or Joyce’s Ulysses than, say, the occasional allusiveness of Wordsworth’s The Prelude. In this central regard, the Hebrew Bible, because it so frequently articulates its meanings by recasting texts within its own corpus, is already moving toward being an integrated work, for all its anthological diversity.
Let me offer one relative simple example.
When Boaz first meets Ruth in the field, after she prostates herself before him in response to his offer of hospitality and protection, he praises her in the following words: “It hath been fully told [AR] me, all that thou hast done unto thy mother in law since the death of thy husband; and how thou hast left thy father and thy mother, and the land of thy birthplace [AR], and art come unto a people which thou knewest not heretofore” (Ruth 2:11).
There is a strong echo here, as surely anyone in the ancient audience would have recognized of God’s first imperative words to Abraham that inaugurate the patriarchal tales: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy birthplace [AR], and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee” (Gen. 12:1).
The identical verbal-thematic cluster, land-birthplace-father, stands out in both texts, though the author of Ruth adds “mother” to the configuration, understandably enough because his protagonist is a woman and because she takes Naomi, her mother-in-law, as a kind of adoptive mother when she abandons her homeland of Moab.
What is the point of the allusion? It sets Ruth up as a founding mother, in symmetrical correspondence to Abraham the founding father. She, too, comes from a foreign country to the east to settle in the Promised Land. God’s next words to Abraham—“And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great” (Gen. 12:2)—will also apply directly to her as the woman from whom David will be descended. Progenitrix as Abraham is progenitor, she too will have to overcome a palpable threat to the continuation of the family line for the fulfillment of the promise. The very encounter here of a future bride and groom in a pastoral setting involving the drawing of water (Ruth 2:9) recalls a series of similar patriarchal tales. And perhaps most pointedly in regard to the complex themes of the Book of Ruth, God’s very first word to Abraham, lekh, “get thee” (root halak), or simply “go,” is made a chief thematic key word strategically reiterated in her story: again and again, we are reminded that her “going” from Moab is, paradoxically, a “returning” to a land she has never seen, a return because it is now by choice her land. Thus, taking up the destiny of the covenanted people, for Ruth as for Abraham, means putting behind one the filiations of geography and biology, replacing the old natural bonds with new contractual ones, as Abraham does with God, having left his father’s house, and as Ruth does with the clan of Elimelech and the land of Judea. The patriarchal text, trumpeting the departure from father and birthplace,
announces a new relation to God and history; the text in Ruth, with a less theological and ultimately more political frame of reference, adopts the language of the earlier writer to define its own allied but somewhat different meanings: the tale of the foreign woman who becomes staunchest of kin through her acts of love and loyalty. Such intertextual play occurs repeatedly in the Hebrew Bible, drawing its disparate elements into a certain mobile, unpredictably unity.
The very invocation of the technique of allusion, some may object presupposes what is most in need of demonstration—that the primary element that pulls the disparate texts together is literary. According to one common line of thought, the Hebrew Bible exhibits certain literary embellishments and literary interludes, but those who would present “the Bible as literature” must turn it around to an odd angle from its own original emphases, which are theological, legislative, historiographic, and moral. This opposition between literature and the really serious things collapses the moment we realize that it is the exception in any culture for literary invention to be a purely aesthetic activity.
Writers put together words in a certain pleasing order partly because the order pleases but also, very often, because the order helps them refine meanings, make meanings more memorable, more satisfying complex, so that what is well wrought in language can more powerfully engage the world of events, values, human and divine ends. One hardly wants to deny the overriding spiritual earnestness of the ancient Hebrew writers; certainly what has survived of their work in the canon offers no more than occasional fleeting glimpses of the kind of playfulness often detectable in ancient Greek and Latin literature. And yet, a close study of these writings in the original discoveries again and again, on every level from word choice and sentence structure to the deployment of large units of composition, a delight in the manifold exercise of literary craftsmanship.
It goes without saying that these writers are intent on telling us about—-
- the origins of the world,
- the history of Israel,
- God’s ethical requirements of mankind,
- the cultic stipulations of the new monotheistic faith,
- the future vistas of disaster and redemption.
But the telling has a shapeliness whose subtleties we are only beginning to understand, and it was undertaken by writers with the most brilliant gifts for intimating character, defining scenes, fashioning dialogue, elaborating motifs, balancing near and distant episodes, just as the God-intoxicated poems of the psalmists and prophets evince a dazzling virtuosity in their arabesques of soundplay and syntax, wordplay and image.
It is probably more than a coincidence that the very pinnacle of ancient Hebrew poetry was reached in Job, the biblical text that is most daring and innovative in its imagination of God, man, and creation; for here as elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible the literary medium is not merely a means of “conveying” doctrinal positions but an adventurous occasion for deepening doctrine through the play of literary resources, or perhaps even, at least here, for leaping beyond doctrine.
The facts of the matter, however, are rather more untidy than I have indicated so far. It is our own predisposition to parcel out prose writing into fiction and nonfiction, as is done in our libraries and our lists of bestsellers; and, despite the occasional occurrence of a prose-poem, we also tend to think of prose and poetry as distinct, even opposed, categories. For the ancient Hebrews, these were not strict oppositions, and sometimes they could be intertwined in baffling ways. Fiction and nonfiction, because they seem to involve a substantive issue of the truth value of a text, pose a thorny question to which we shall have to return, but from where we stand we probably have no way of recovering what might have figured as a fact in the ancient Hebrew mind, whether the narrative data of centuries-old oral traditions were assumed to be facts, or to what extent the writers consciously exercised a license of invention.
The interplay of poetry and prose is more definable because it is a formal issue, verse being scannable, even the “free rhythms” of biblical parallelistic verse. Some texts, like Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Songs, and all but the frame-story of Job, are unambiguously assemblages of poems, but there are also many mixed instances.
Biblical prophecy is composed predominantly in formal verse, but there are also substantial portions of prose prophecy and passages of rhythmic prose that sometimes almost scan. The overwhelming bulk of the narrative books, in contrast to the practice of other ancient literatures, is written in prose; but the texture of the prose is studded with verse insets, most often a memorable small set piece just one or two lines long at some particularly significant or ceremonial juncture in the narrative; occasionally, a full-scale poem of fifty or more lines.
This by no means exhausts the formal untidiness of the texts with which we have to deal. For the Hebrew Bible quite frequently incorporates as integral elements of its literary structures kinds of writing that, according to most modern preconceptions, have nothing to do with “literature.” I am thinking in particular of—-
- genealogies,
- etiological tales,
- laws (including the most technical cultic regulations),
- lists of tribal borders,
- detailed historical itineraries.
Those who view the Bible as literature in conventional terms have quietly ignored these materials as unfortunate encumbrances, while most modern historical scholarship has seen in them either an inscrutable ancient impulse to cherish traditions for their own sake or an effort to provide quasi-documentary authentication for political realities of the later biblical period. As a result, the sundry lists have been chiefly analyzed by scholars for whatever hints of long-lost history they might preserve in fossilized form or for whatever oblique reflections they might offer of the situation of the writers and redactors. One need not reject such considerations to note, as several recent literary students of these texts have persuasively argued, that the lists are very effectively employed to amplify the themes and to effect a complementary imaginative realization, in another genre, of the purposes of the narratives in which they are embedded.
- Thus J.P. Fokkelman proposes that the abundant genealogies in Genesis are enactments of the theme of propagation and survival so central to that book;
- David Damrosch invites us to see the laws of the cult in Leviticus as a symbolic realization of an order of wholeness contrasted to the pattern of human failure reiterated in the surrounding narrative;
- David Gunn suggests that the lists of tribal borders in Joshua are a way of imaginatively mapping out and making real the as yet unconquered Land.
In any case, the Hebrew Bible, though it includes some of the most extraordinary narratives and poems in the Western literary tradition, reminds us that literature is not entirely limited to story and poem, that the coldest catalogue and the driest etiology may be an effective subsidiary instrument of literary expression.