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Biblical Text and Texture: A Literary Reading of Selected Texts
An exploration of key texts representing the use of three particular literary elements in the Hebrew narrative text; sermons; prayers and speeches.
168 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
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February 9, 2018
Reading this book was a weird experience. On the one hand, this is an important book to read, important for those who know anything about Biblical Horizons, Deep Exegesis style hermeneutics. On the other hand, if you are familiar with that sort of thing, you probably know 90% of it.
Let's unpack that a bit shall we. Up until now the only sources for the kind of biblical criticism that genuinely illuminated the Bible's concerns (rather than the concerns of the preacher or commentator) was through folks like Leithart, Jordan, and Robert Alter. Fishbane wrote this book in 1979 and a great deal of stuff that I realized/learned from those guys can be found here. Alter's book was written in 1981; Jordan's in 1988. Got chiasms? Check. Tabernacle as Second Garden of Eden? Check. Typology? Bajillions of it! There's very few surprises for me. Heck, I was even charting out how the Jacob-narrative was a chiasm and the very next day I picked this book up and found that Fishbane had nearly exactly the same outline. That's both comforting and unnerving. It encourages me in seeking meaning, but also makes me think, thanks to some references in Jewish commentators, that we are currently unpacking Jewish exegesis, rather than discovering Biblical theology for the first time. Glad to have some context. That said, I also appreciate the careful and precise nature of what Leithart and Jordan are doing, since their exegesis is at it's best when they are taking the hermeneutical discoveries of folks like Fishbane and summarizing them, popularizing them, and making pointed insights on other topics.
That said, there were some surprises. More than anything, this book reminded me of Robert Alter who has been at great pains to point out that the Bible is, for want of a better term, existential--concerned with the mystery of the human condition. As an Evangelical, I recognize the tendency to want to simplify everything and use the Bible as a rulebook rather than as a collection of stories meant to provoke meditation and questioning as much as moral striving (though anyone who doesn't see that part would have to be incredibly blind). Consider this:
"No direct answer from God is found in [the psalmist's] prayer. All we have are the psalmists's words: words of praise and hope; words of struggle for spiritual integrity before God. And yet it is the mystery inherent in the process of prayer that an answer is, in fact, given; it is an answer expressed in and through the very capacity of the psalmist to voice his anxiety. The grace of a petition-prayer is the gift of hope received in the very process of its recitation." -p. 90
Powerful, and even more powerful in context. Fishbane's descriptions of Adam and Eve, of Cain and Abel, and of the Tower of Babel are especially potent. It's not all good: Fishbane and Robert Alter find themselves somehow agreeing with textual criticism while actually undoing it. For instance, Fishbane points to how there are two conflicting motives for Jacob leaving Canaan, but he then points out how a later redactor had to combine the two motives. Wouldn't Occam's razor demand that there be no conflict in the first place. Redacted =/= untrue. Literary "doing up" =/= untrue.
His interpretation of the Jacob narrative is right up there with Alter's interpretation of Joseph. He gets the tensions, the sense of family tensions (Rachel-Leah as compared with Jacob-Esau) and best of all the importance of divine grace and the key references to God in the reconciliation scene. I wish he could include more human ambiguity in this scene. This was gold:
"The wrestling scene thus appears to be part of Jacob's dream-work, whereby he "works through" the anticipated struggle with Esau by fusing it with earlier wrestlings with his brother--in the womb and at birth. The use of the wrestling image not only underscores the agon-struggle which Jacob anticipates with Esau, but effectively discloses the psychic core of the event (also indicated by the tongue-slip). Compounded by guilt, the anticipated fraternal strife is fused with an earlier one, allowing Jacob to resolve the conflict raging within him. In the "night encounter" Jacob wrestles with the "Esau" he carried within him. The "rebirth" Jacob achieves by his psychic victory in the night had still to be confirmed with the light of day. Jacob awakens with the deep conviction that he had faced his struggle with courage and had been blessed by divinity. He greets the morning light with the glow of his own self-transformation and illumination. Having seen Elohim face to face at Penuel, Jacob can prepare to meet Esau face to face as well."
I disagree with Fishbane, insofar as this seems to lean into a Catholic rather than a Protestant moral: Fishbane can be summarized as saying that Jacob wrestles with himself and wins. Rather, I think that the silent implication is that God has wrestled with Jacob and--being the almighty--He lets Jacob win. I have never quite understood what this means for Israel's future history of questionable covenantal faithfulness (though it seems to illuminate the Psalms and some of the prophets), but I'm glad to have had the thought stimulated by someone asking the same questions.
Let's unpack that a bit shall we. Up until now the only sources for the kind of biblical criticism that genuinely illuminated the Bible's concerns (rather than the concerns of the preacher or commentator) was through folks like Leithart, Jordan, and Robert Alter. Fishbane wrote this book in 1979 and a great deal of stuff that I realized/learned from those guys can be found here. Alter's book was written in 1981; Jordan's in 1988. Got chiasms? Check. Tabernacle as Second Garden of Eden? Check. Typology? Bajillions of it! There's very few surprises for me. Heck, I was even charting out how the Jacob-narrative was a chiasm and the very next day I picked this book up and found that Fishbane had nearly exactly the same outline. That's both comforting and unnerving. It encourages me in seeking meaning, but also makes me think, thanks to some references in Jewish commentators, that we are currently unpacking Jewish exegesis, rather than discovering Biblical theology for the first time. Glad to have some context. That said, I also appreciate the careful and precise nature of what Leithart and Jordan are doing, since their exegesis is at it's best when they are taking the hermeneutical discoveries of folks like Fishbane and summarizing them, popularizing them, and making pointed insights on other topics.
That said, there were some surprises. More than anything, this book reminded me of Robert Alter who has been at great pains to point out that the Bible is, for want of a better term, existential--concerned with the mystery of the human condition. As an Evangelical, I recognize the tendency to want to simplify everything and use the Bible as a rulebook rather than as a collection of stories meant to provoke meditation and questioning as much as moral striving (though anyone who doesn't see that part would have to be incredibly blind). Consider this:
"No direct answer from God is found in [the psalmist's] prayer. All we have are the psalmists's words: words of praise and hope; words of struggle for spiritual integrity before God. And yet it is the mystery inherent in the process of prayer that an answer is, in fact, given; it is an answer expressed in and through the very capacity of the psalmist to voice his anxiety. The grace of a petition-prayer is the gift of hope received in the very process of its recitation." -p. 90
Powerful, and even more powerful in context. Fishbane's descriptions of Adam and Eve, of Cain and Abel, and of the Tower of Babel are especially potent. It's not all good: Fishbane and Robert Alter find themselves somehow agreeing with textual criticism while actually undoing it. For instance, Fishbane points to how there are two conflicting motives for Jacob leaving Canaan, but he then points out how a later redactor had to combine the two motives. Wouldn't Occam's razor demand that there be no conflict in the first place. Redacted =/= untrue. Literary "doing up" =/= untrue.
His interpretation of the Jacob narrative is right up there with Alter's interpretation of Joseph. He gets the tensions, the sense of family tensions (Rachel-Leah as compared with Jacob-Esau) and best of all the importance of divine grace and the key references to God in the reconciliation scene. I wish he could include more human ambiguity in this scene. This was gold:
"The wrestling scene thus appears to be part of Jacob's dream-work, whereby he "works through" the anticipated struggle with Esau by fusing it with earlier wrestlings with his brother--in the womb and at birth. The use of the wrestling image not only underscores the agon-struggle which Jacob anticipates with Esau, but effectively discloses the psychic core of the event (also indicated by the tongue-slip). Compounded by guilt, the anticipated fraternal strife is fused with an earlier one, allowing Jacob to resolve the conflict raging within him. In the "night encounter" Jacob wrestles with the "Esau" he carried within him. The "rebirth" Jacob achieves by his psychic victory in the night had still to be confirmed with the light of day. Jacob awakens with the deep conviction that he had faced his struggle with courage and had been blessed by divinity. He greets the morning light with the glow of his own self-transformation and illumination. Having seen Elohim face to face at Penuel, Jacob can prepare to meet Esau face to face as well."
I disagree with Fishbane, insofar as this seems to lean into a Catholic rather than a Protestant moral: Fishbane can be summarized as saying that Jacob wrestles with himself and wins. Rather, I think that the silent implication is that God has wrestled with Jacob and--being the almighty--He lets Jacob win. I have never quite understood what this means for Israel's future history of questionable covenantal faithfulness (though it seems to illuminate the Psalms and some of the prophets), but I'm glad to have had the thought stimulated by someone asking the same questions.
August 24, 2024
This was a fun read.
“Form is inseparable from content, such that every textual formulation of an event constructs a unique literary reality; to imagine a different formulation of it would be to construct a different reality. It is in this fundamental sense, at least, that the Bible is to be understood as revelation. Through its words, the world of a text, and the multiple worlds of its many texts, are disclosed.”
“What is sayable is knowable. And what can be said can be shared and transmitted. To give verbal shape to experience is to control the understanding of it indefinitely. Language both constructs a universe of meaning and becomes the means whereby that universe is presented to consciousness.”
“The human creature not only differentiates itself from its environment through the symbolic medium of language, but establishes therewith diverse orders of differentiation as well. In so doing, man-the-steward, like God-the-creator, creates a world with words.”
“Miqra is also a "calling out" and revelation of the self-contained world of a text, through its particular combination of words and rhythms and structures. This is not to deny that a text may also attest to an experiential or historical reality external to it. It is rather to stress the fact that a text constitutes a self-referential world of meaning, that it is the representation of a nontextual reality in new-literary— terms. One may nevertheless hope that in and through the uniquely literary reality of a text the roots of such a nontextual reality may be revealed. At such a moment, at least with respect to the Bible, it is not only a text or an external world but God Himself who is revealed.”
“Form is inseparable from content, such that every textual formulation of an event constructs a unique literary reality; to imagine a different formulation of it would be to construct a different reality. It is in this fundamental sense, at least, that the Bible is to be understood as revelation. Through its words, the world of a text, and the multiple worlds of its many texts, are disclosed.”
“What is sayable is knowable. And what can be said can be shared and transmitted. To give verbal shape to experience is to control the understanding of it indefinitely. Language both constructs a universe of meaning and becomes the means whereby that universe is presented to consciousness.”
“The human creature not only differentiates itself from its environment through the symbolic medium of language, but establishes therewith diverse orders of differentiation as well. In so doing, man-the-steward, like God-the-creator, creates a world with words.”
“Miqra is also a "calling out" and revelation of the self-contained world of a text, through its particular combination of words and rhythms and structures. This is not to deny that a text may also attest to an experiential or historical reality external to it. It is rather to stress the fact that a text constitutes a self-referential world of meaning, that it is the representation of a nontextual reality in new-literary— terms. One may nevertheless hope that in and through the uniquely literary reality of a text the roots of such a nontextual reality may be revealed. At such a moment, at least with respect to the Bible, it is not only a text or an external world but God Himself who is revealed.”
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews