Biblical Hebrew Forum

[HarryJ_Harm AT kastanet.org]

Dear Loren,

Greetings from Mississippi.

During my studies for a graduate degree in linguistics I studied 
languages from many different parts of the world, e.g., Asia, Africa and 
Native American.  After I graduated I have had the privilege of working 
with speakers of SE Asian, Middle Eastern, Native American and minority 
European languages.

Some of the discourse styles in these languages cause texts to be 
"impossible to read" unless one understands the language somewhat.  I 
have seen languages use a discourse device called overlay which involves 
telling the story or part of the story several times.  Each retelling 
adds new information or a different perspective.  To an outsider it 
seems as if someone stitched together fragmentary parts of different 
versions of the same story. To an insider the overlays are part of 
focusing on different aspects of the story and are tied into such 
concerns as "information flow".

Dr. Robert Longacre presented an article on the flood narrative from a 
non-Indo-european discourse perspective. I believe it was presented at 
an SBL meeting many years ago.  Does anyone have ready access to the 
bibliographic information?  If it is not readily available and if anyone 
is interested I can dig through my files to try to find the information.

Sincerely,

Harry J. Harm  :{)

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Bryan,

That was a clear, well crafted statement.  Thanks!

It is worth noting, however, that the pre-Wellhausen practitioners of
"cut-and-paste" exegesis were *not* primarily historians, but *literary*
scholars (e.g., Eichhorn, Hupfeld; the same could probably be said of most
of the later scholars as well).  Their main concerns were to make sense of
what is at times very difficult to read -- as you say -- with the
assumption of unity.  True, they understood the literature historically,
but their main concern was not to learn history to do literary criticism.
The _locus classicus_ of this sort of work is of course the Flood
narrative, which is almost impossible to read without either some sort of
redactional theory or an extraordinarily huge amount of "willingness to
suspend disbelief," as you say.

Also, I can think of no reason to study history, except that it is "alive
now," speaking to the present while retaining its historicality.  The fact
that something is an artifact does not preclude its being meaningful to the
present.  Witness, for example, Norman Gottwald's reconstruction of
Israelite history and its clear connection to Gottwald's own political
ideas.

Cheers!
Loren Crow