Literature as Flexible Communication: Variety in Hebrew Biblical Texts (2018) (original) (raw)

By looking at the parallel passages 2 Kings 25:1-12 // Jeremiah 52:4-16 // Jeremiah 39:1-10 I hope to be able to raise the question of what sort of texts we have in Biblical literature and hence how best to read them. The way I will structure the discussion is by way of three 'hypotheses'. These hypotheses express expectations about the parallel texts which are meant to mimic an imagined thought process as a reader moves from understanding ancient texts as if they were modem ones, to a deeper understanding of the nature of the Biblical texts in their ancient context, where each manuscript of a Biblical composition represented a different performance of the tradition.