Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Tory Thorpe <torythrp AT yahoo.com>]

Karl:

--- On Wed, 5/20/09, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 10:23 PM, Tory Thorpe <torythrp AT yahoo.com> wrote:

>> What I'm saying is something along the lines of Robert Alter, 
>> The Art of Biblical Narrative, 1981, i.e. that there is here in 
>> this LXX tradition a more credible view of the past conveyed by 
>> the narrator (= usually the author of the final form of the text). 
>> Whether that tradition actually reflects reality is irrelevant to 
>> a literary-critical approach: it is enough to recognize that the
>> biblical writers believed in the stories they told. That's why we 
>> have them.
>>
>
> By literary-critical approach, do you mean looking at the text 
> according to linguistic and literary standards to try to understand
> it, without passing judgments on its origins nor sources?

Yes and no. I see that the primary aim of the literary-critical method is to 
discern what is the message being conveyed in a text, the reason for the 
message, and the techniques used to convey the message. The literary critic 
does not, or should not, remotely concern himself (or herself) with the 
validity or accuracy of a message. For example, he does not care if Arthur 
really existed and pulled the sword from the stone. Neither does he care if 
Ramesses II is lying or telling the truth about what happened in the war with 
the Hittites. But in this latter case, the material is prompting such 
questions because Ramesses II was giving his version of a past episode. The 
biblical texts also prompt similar questions because the authors believed the 
stories they told happened in the past and they used techniques that 
obviously betray an attempt at historiography in the modern sense (e.g. in 
Gen 11, X's age at the birth of Y and the number of years X lived after
 the birth of Y is not how myths and legends are written. As far as I know, 
this level of detail is unparalleled; it is does not exist in Mesopotamian 
texts reporting incredible lifespans of heroes and kings). So I suppose the 
biblical literary critic can't be blamed for sometimes putting on the 
historian's cap during a critical evaluation of a biblical text, even if he 
probably shouldn't.

Tory Thorpe