Literature as Flexible Communication: Variety in Hebrew Biblical Texts (2018) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Making the Biblical Text: Textual Studies in the Hebrew and the Greek Bible
2015
Originating in a symposium organized by the Institut Dominique Barthelemy and held on 4-5 November 2011 at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, this book presents eight essays on the textual and literary history of the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Bible. It is commonplace today to speak of multiple text types in the earliest text history of the Hebrew Bible. But how can this multiplicity be most adequately explained? Does it result from different places, or from different Jewish communities reading texts in parallel text forms (Jews in Jerusalem, Samaritans, Alexandrian Jews, etc.)? Does one have to reckon with different qualities and/or evaluations of certain text forms? In other words, among the different text types known to us, were there some which enjoyed special esteem and recognition in antiquity – and if yes, by whom?
Dissimilatory Reading and the Making of Biblical Texts
Empirical models challenging biblical criticism, eds. R. Person & R. Rezetko (SBL), https://secure.aidcvt.com/sbl/ProdDetails.asp?ID=062628P&PG=1&Type=BL&PCS=SBL, 2016
The evolution of biblical texts has been described mainly from the perspective of textual composition and transmission in writing. In It seems obvious, however, that the formation of ancient hebrew texts was heavily influenced by oral performance and oral traditions, not only in the early stages, but throughout the whole literary process until the emergence of texts regarded as authoritative and fixed, from the late 2nd century BCE onwards. One aspect of this interplay of oral and literary textual representation and transmission is that the orally realized reading of written records in different contexts, as well as the subsequent emergence of oral reading traditions, influenced and shaped the written transmission of biblical texts and became a most influential factor in their multiplication and dissimilation, leading to diverging written consonantal frameworks. The paper demonstrates that the emergence of both the Samaritan and the Jewish text of the Pentateuch should at least partly be understood as resulting from divergent reading traditions, which had been orally transmitted in different contexts and by different communities.
Approaches to Literary Readings of Ancient Jewish Writings
2013
Biblical scholars have done a great deal to advance our appreciation of the literary sophistication of biblical texts. Biblical commentaries and a host of other publications now regularly draw our attention to a multitude of textual devices that operate on micro-and macro-levels such as punning, allusion, inclusio, chiasm, repetition, and ring structure, to name just a few. While such research has at times emphasized literary similarities at the expense of cultural diffferences, it nonetheless has removed the study of the Hebrew Bible from its relative literary isolation. The combined influence of these factors has allowed scholars to speak about biblical texts on par with Homer, Beowulf, Shakespeare, and other great works of literature. In this essay, I shall argue that while such literary and comparative approaches have helped us to appreciate more fully the repertoire of technical devices employed by the Israelite writers, in the main, they have not helped us to understand their functions. In particular, I shall argue that a comparative examination of the social context for textual production in the ancient Near East suggests that we should think of biblical literary devices not as stylistic embellishments, but as performative devices of perceived power.
Dissertation, Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, VA, 2010
fp feminine plural fs feminine singular mp masculine plural ms masculine singular phenomenon of changing and ambiguous speakers throughout the book of Jeremiah, without regard to literary genre. As Samuel Meier 1 documents, however, such changes of speakers are found exclusively in pericopes that are widely recognized as being either poetry or a highly poetic type of prose. 2 Sections which are narrative or exhortatory prose will thus not supply examples of the phenomena of changing speakers by their nature. But I did not limit my analysis a priori to texts which are considered poetic. The Present Study in the Context of Current Scholarship This dissertation bridges two discrete areas of current research in literary criticism of the Hebrew Bible: the technical/formal study of biblical Hebrew poetry; and the study of rhetorical aims, strategies, and literary effects in the Hebrew Bible in general and the book of Jeremiah in particular. Current research on biblical Hebrew poetry typically addresses phenomena that are evident on the level of verses and parts of verses, such as syllable count patterns (Willem van der Meer, Michael Patrick O'Connor, David Noel Freedman); or on the level of verses and small groups of verses, such as parallelism and the use of imagery (Robert Alter, Adele Berlin, James L. Kugel, William Brown). Other studies address overall structures such as ring patterns and strophes or stanzas. Such studies, however, tend to approach poems from a bird's eye point of view, treating the relevant pericope in its entirety. The approach of this dissertation, by contrast, is more closely in tune with the sequential experience of listening or reading, whether aloud or in 11 Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible