Narrative Obtrusion in the Hebrew Bible
Narrative Obtrusion in the Hebrew Bible

Author: Christopher T. Paris

Publisher: Fortress Press

Published: 2014-07-01

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1451487452

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Narrators of the Hebrew Bible generally allow their stories to proceed while relying on characters and dialogue to provide necessary information. Paris calls attention to when the story teller “breaks frame” to provide information or direct reader understanding, preventing undesirable construals or interpretations of the story. After surveying the phenomenon in the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literature, Paris focuses on the Deuteronomistic History. Paris argues that attention to narrative obtrusion offers an entry point into the world of the narrator and redefines aspects of narrative criticism.

How God Forms Abraham to Be a Blessing
How God Forms Abraham to Be a Blessing

Author: Qiang Fu

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2023-02-22

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 166675546X

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This book aims to understand God's interactions with Abraham in relation to God's command that Abraham "be a blessing" (Gen 12:2d), which is directly tied to God's goal that "in you all the families of the earth will be blessed" (Gen 12:3b). The book proposes a formative narrative approach to examine interactions between character and plot, the movement of plot, and the connection between sequential plots. An analysis of thirteen Abrahamic narratives (Gen 12-22) suggests a classification based on four different types of interactions between God and Abraham, which indicate how cooperation and conflict between God and Abraham advance the narrative's plot. The book then proposes a narrative discourse analysis to examine how Abraham evolved through different stages of the narrative by moving from deviation to cooperation. Detailed analysis of this transformation process reveals three turning points in Abraham's life. The formative narrative approach and narrative discourse analysis proposed in this book can contribute to the analysis of two important aspects of Old Testament narratives: the formation of plot and the cause-and-effect structure in narrative discourse.

The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative
The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative

Author: Danna Fewell

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-06-01

Total Pages: 657

ISBN-13: 0199967733

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Comprised of contributions from scholars across the globe, The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative is a state-of-the-art anthology, offering critical treatments of both the Bible's narratives and topics related to the Bible's narrative constructions. The Handbook covers the Bible's narrative literature, from Genesis to Revelation, providing concise overviews of literary-critical scholarship as well as innovative readings of individual narratives informed by a variety of methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks. The volume as a whole combines literary sensitivities with the traditional historical and sociological questions of biblical criticism and puts biblical studies into intentional conversation with other disciplines in the humanities. It reframes biblical literature in a way that highlights its aesthetic characteristics, its ethical and religious appeal, its organic qualities as communal literature, its witness to various forms of social and political negotiation, and its uncanny power to affect readers and hearers across disparate time-frames and global communities.

The ‘Geometrics’ of the Rahab Story
The ‘Geometrics’ of the Rahab Story

Author: Andrzej Toczyski SDB

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-05-17

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 0567679055

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Examines the dialectic relationship between the text, conceived as the vehicle of narrative communication, and the reader in an assemenent of the story of Rahab – the prostitute from Jericho – in Josuha 2. Toczyski uses his study to examine how this story has been read by various audiences across time, the different interpretive perspectives and methodologies that have thus been brought to the text and the influences this has had on the manner in which the story has been interpreted. In particular Toczyski focuses on internal literary analysis of Joshua 2 and the external historical approach and what this can say about the readers of the text. The purpose of such insight is to register how successive interpretations overlap and set the interpretative pattern for subsequent generations of readers. As a result of this conceptual framework, Toczyski presents the Rahab story in the broader context of the communicative process, which has been challenging the story's readers for centuries. This deep immersion into both internal and external contexts reveals the generally-overlooked thread within the Rahab story, namely “the power of storytelling”, which may prove relevant for contemporary readers by providing grounds for inter-cultural dialogue in the postmodern world.

Interludes and Irony in the Ancestral Narrative
Interludes and Irony in the Ancestral Narrative

Author: Jonathan A. Kruschwitz

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2020-12-18

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1725260778

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The stories of Hagar, Dinah, and Tamar stand out as strangers in the ancestral narrative. They deviate from the main plot and draw attention to the interests and fates of characters who are not a part of the ancestral family. Readers have traditionally domesticated these strange stories. They have made them “familiar”—all about the ancestral family. Thus Hagar’s story becomes a drama of deselection, Shechem and the Hivites become emblematic for ancestral conflict with the people of the land, and Tamar becomes a lens by which to read providence in the story of Joseph. This study resurrects the question of these stories’ strangeness. Rather than allow the ancestral narrative to determine their significance, it attends to each interlude’s particularity and detects ironic gestures made toward the ancestral narrative. These stories contain within them the potential to defamiliarize key themes of ancestral identity: the ancestral-divine relationship, ancestral relations to the land and its inhabitants, and ancestral self-identity. Perhaps the ancestral family are not the only privileged partners of God, the only heirs to the land, or the only bloodline fit to bear the next generation.

Literary Approaches to the Bible
Literary Approaches to the Bible

Author: Douglas Mangum

Publisher: Lexham Press

Published: 2018-03-14

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1577997077

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The study of the Bible has long included a literary aspect with great attention paid not only to what was written but also to how it was expressed. The detailed analysis of biblical books and passages as written texts has benefited from the study of literature in classical philology, ancient rhetoric, and modern literary criticism. This volume of the Lexham Methods Series introduces the various ways the study of literature has been used in biblical studies. Most literary approaches emphasize the study of the text alone—its structure, its message, and its use of literary devices—rather than its social or historical background. The methods described in Literary Approaches to the Bible are focused on different ways of analyzing the text within its literary context. Some of the techniques have been around for centuries, but the theories of literary critics from the early 20th century to today had a profound impact on biblical interpretation. In this book, you will learn about those literary approaches, how they were adapted for biblical studies, and what their strengths and weaknesses are.

Judges 1
Judges 1

Author: Mark S. Smith

Publisher: Fortress Press

Published: 2021-11-23

Total Pages: 924

ISBN-13: 1506480497

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This groundbreaking volume presents a new translation of the text and detailed interpretation of almost every word or phrase in the book of Judges, drawing from archaeology and iconography, textual versions, biblical parallels, and extrabiblical texts, many never noted before. Archaeology also serves to show how a story of the Iron II period employed visible ruins to narrate supposedly early events from the so-called "period of the Judges." The synchronic analysis for each unit sketches its characters and main themes, as well as other literary dynamics. The diachronic, redactional analysis shows the shifting settings of units as well as their development, commonly due to their inner-textual reception and reinterpretation. The result is a remarkably fresh historical-critical treatment of 1:1-10:5.

Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story
Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story

Author: Martin Worthington

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-10-29

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 0429754507

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This volume opens up new perspectives on Babylonian and Assyrian literature, through the lens of a pivotal passage in the Gilgamesh Flood story. It shows how, using a nine-line message where not all was as it seemed, the god Ea inveigled humans into building the Ark. The volume argues that Ea used a ‘bitextual’ message: one which can be understood in different ways that sound the same. His message thus emerges as an ambivalent oracle in the tradition of ‘folktale prophecy’. The argument is supported by interlocking investigations of lexicography, divination, diet, figurines, social history, and religion. There are also extended discussions of Babylonian word play and ancient literary interpretation. Besides arguing for Ea’s duplicity, the book explores its implications – for narrative sophistication in Gilgamesh, for audiences and performance of the poem, and for the relation of the Gilgamesh Flood story to the versions in Atra-hasīs, the Hellenistic historian Berossos, and the Biblical Book of Genesis. Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story will interest Assyriologists, Hebrew Bible scholars and Classicists, but also students and researchers in all areas concerned with Gilgamesh, word-play, oracles, and traditions about the Flood.

David's Capacity for Compassion
David's Capacity for Compassion

Author: Barbara Green

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-04-20

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0567673596

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In this book Barbara Green demonstrates how David is shown and can be read as emerging from a young naive, whose early successes grow into a tendency for actions of contempt and arrogance, of blindness and even cruelty, particularly in matters of cult. However, Green also shows that over time David moves closer to the demeanor and actions of wise compassion, more closely aligned with God. Leaving aside questions of historicity as basically undecidable Green's focus in her approach to the material is on contemporary literature. Green reads the David story in order, applying seven specific tools which she names, describes and exemplifies as she interprets the text. She also uses relevant hermeneutical theory, specifically a bridge between general hermeneutics and the specific challenges of the individual (and socially located) reader. As a result, Green argues that characters in the David narrative can proffer occasions for insight, wisdom, and compassion. Acknowledging the unlikelihood that characters like David and his peers, steeped in patriarchy and power, can be shown to learn and extend wise compassion, Green is careful to make explicit her reading strategies and offer space for dialogue and disagreement.

The Structure and Function of the Prologue of Judges
The Structure and Function of the Prologue of Judges

Author: Yohannes Tesfaye Sahile

Publisher: Langham Publishing

Published: 2017-11-14

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1783683082

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In this book, Yohannes Sahile tackles the problem of Judges’ prologue, proposing that it is a single introduction with a narrative trajectory that begins with the death of Joshua. The prologue captures how, during the period of testing, the generation after Joshua’s death failed in their commission to take possession of the land allocated to them. Instead they lived with and made a covenant with the pre-existing inhabitants of the land promised to Israel. Judges 1:1–3:6 is often understood as a double introduction to the book, but here Dr Sahile presents a well-argued alternative. He thoroughly dissects the passage in question, adding to ongoing scholarship of Judges and bringing new insight to our understanding of the development of the nation of Israel in the Promised Land.