A New Look at the Old Testament
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
ANEW LOOK AT THE OLD TESTAMENT BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Although the Bible is still a best-seller, the Old Testament has become less and less accessible to general readers. Since the last century...
...resentful or perhaps contemptuous of your father but also capable of the deepest filial regard...
...It is this stubborn resolve to portray the uncomfortable, contrary material, rather than edit it out, that makes the Bible a supreme work of literature as well as sacred history...
...When Joseph's brothers sell him into slavery, they deceive their father into believing him killed by dipping his coat of many colors into goat's blood (se'ir 'izim...
...fiercely asserting your own independence but caught in a tissue of events divinely contrived...
...Alter addresses this audience with the good news that the Bible was meant to be read as an account of our humanity in relation to God and "the perilously momentous realm of history...
...outwardly a definite character and inwardly an unstable vortex of greed, ambition, jealousy, lust, piety, courage, compassion, and much more...
...He sees the monotheistic revolution as profoundly disquieting because "it left little margin for neat and confident assertions about God, the created world, history, and man as a political or moral agent, for it repeatedly had to make sense of the intersection of incompatibles-the relative and the absolute, human imperfection and divine perfection, the brawling chaos of historical experience, and God's promise to fulfill a design in history...
...These patterns have long been recognized, though, and Alter is more interested in analyzing the differences...
...Outside of fundamentalist circles, this view is so uncontroversial that it can be taught in Sunday schools...
...Poetry and fiction," Alter observes, "involve a condensation of meanings in which multiple and even mutually contradictory perceptions of the same object can be fused within a single linguistic structure...
...17) represent the conflicting views of the Yahwist Document and the Priestly Document, Alter proposes that both are deliberately meant to function together as a "human-centered, richly detailed 'horizontal' view following...
...Since the Bible is not a unified work of Divine authorship, they say, we must be careful not to interpret it so rigidly as to restrict human inquiry...
...In the latter half of this century, Biblescholars are still tied to many of the notions of the Higher Criticism...
...More pressing is the fact that the Bible is taken as a pastiche of incompatible texts and the general reader feels barely equipped to tackle it at all...
...Although any sensitive reader can accept Alter's interpretations as a way of "harmonizing," it does not follow that his parallels noted are not, in some cases, the work of critical ingenuity...
...Jacob, in contrast, must always overcome adversity: removing the stone from Laban's well is merely a thematic prelude to his arduous service to win Rachel, his rocklike determination to best the angel he wrestles with and the other trials on his stony path...
...the displacement of the older son by the younger (Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Joseph and David over all their brothers...
...and the slaying of Goliath, I Sam...
...Through linguistic analysis, a further linking of the stories is uncovered...
...Before Alter has finished, Nabokov and the metaphysical poets themselves (who were, of course, Bible scholars) look like novices beside the writers of the Old Testament...
...Genesis is not Pale Fire, but all fiction, including the Bible, is in some sense a form of play," Alter contends...
...Alter argues that Rebekah's initiative is in keeping with her future character as a manipulator (she persuades Jacob to cheat Esau out of his birthright and helps him fool the dying Isaac...
...Such literalism is hardly the problem today, the Moral Majority notwithstanding...
...And when one of those same brothers comes upon Tamar disguised as a prostitute, he buys her favors by leaving some of his clothing in pledge for a kid (gedi 'izim) to be sent later...
...Alter rightly observes, "This instance may suggest that in many cases a literary student of the Bible has more to learn from the traditional commentaries than from modern scholarship...
...when her son, Jacob, goes to Laban to seek a wife, and finds Rachel at the well, he must remove a stone from its mouth to water her beasts...
...In a brilliant new study, The Art of Biblical Narrative (Basic Books, 189 pp., $13.95), Robert Alter insists that, on the contrary, the Old Testament was shaped by literary techniques as precise in "the minute choice of words and reported details, the pace of narration, the small movements of dialogue" as fiction, and that it offers a complex and subtle delineation of character...
...What is it like, the biblical writers seek to know through their art, to be a human being with a divided consciousness-intermittently loving your brother but hating him even more...
...the betrothal at the well (Isaac by proxy with Rebekah, Jacob with Rachel, Moses with Zipporah, and, in a more elliptical form, Boaz with Ruth...
...Alter counters that Judah's cavalier dismissal of Tamar's rights, followed by his "sexual incontinence" with her, forms a dramatic parallel to Joseph's righteousness in his dealings with his Egyptian masters and his uprightness in repulsing the crude advances of Potiphar's wife...
...In contrast to previous ancient religious documents, he notes, it holds that "every person is created by an all-seeing God but abandoned to his own unfathomable freedom, made in God's likeness as a matter of cosmogonic principle but almost never as a matter of accomplished ethical fact...
...Joseph practices a cruel deception on his family to pay back an old wrong...
...Alter believes the Bible actually invented "new and surprisingly supple techniques for the imaginative representation of human individuality...
...This verbal play was explained by an early Jewish commentary on the text: "The Holy One Praised be He said to Judah, 'You deceived your father with a kid...
...Thus, when Abraham's servant meets Rebekah, she draws water for him and his camels and then runs to announce his arrival to her brother, Laban...
...King David commits adultery with Bathsheba, while sending her husband to be killed in battle...
...and each individual instance of this bundle of paradoxes, encompassing the zenith and the nadir of the created world, requires a special cunning attentiveness in literary representation...
...Robert Alter's enlightened and enlightening explication is itself a joyful discovery...
...To cite one example: Modern scholars have generally assumed that the story of Tamar (Genesis 38), which breaks into the middle of the narrative of Joseph in Egypt, is an interpolation by a Yahwist party anxious to remind readers that Davidic kings spring from Judah, not his lucky brother Joseph...
...While academics debate this matter, however, we can recognize the importance of Alter's demonstration that it is possible to achieve a sophisticated reading of the Bible without regarding it as a primary source for a dissertation on primitive theology, historical reconstruction, or any of the other nonliterary disciplines...
...Alter is not interested in "The Bible as Literature," divorced from its theological context...
...His objective is to show that its peculiar narrative devices arose as a direct expression of Judaic monotheism...
...This approach, he promises, will bring the Old Testament to life and dissolve one's preconceptions...
...Both contribute to the multifaceted portrait of David, sometimes a valiant and appealing figure, sometimes ruthlessly ambitious??and always God's chosen...
...For instance, where it is commonly argued that two different accounts of the calling of David (the anointing of Samuel, I Sam...
...dictated by the biblical view of man...
...a more symmetrically stylized ' vertical' view which moves from God above to the world below...
...Alter, a professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Berkeley and the author of many critical studies, is impatient with the "usual limiting view of what 'religious' material must consist of among most modern Bible scholars: The experts are willing to assume all kinds of theories about the nature and origin of their texts-historical, mythic, archeological-yet balk at the idea of deliberate artistic shaping...
...Bereshit Rab-ba 84:11...
...He claims the same for the Bible...
...In a sprightly exegesis...
...stumbling between disastrous ignorance and imperfect knowledge...
...Jacob cheats to get ahead...
...Nevertheless, each is a principal player in the drama of God's intervention in history...
...Modern translations, moreover, refer to God as " Yahweh" and footnote textual discrepancies, increasing the impression that the Bible is a crude, confusing work best left to theologians, folklorists or similar musty professions...
...He believes that most deviations from mythic norms are deliberate attempts to indicate the nature of the protagonists...
...By fiction, he means a story that advances its action through character rather than through simple narration of events, and by play he refers to a deliberate delight in such techniques as wordplay, suspense and building up dramatic tension...
...Since the last century (when the Higher Criticism sought to shake off the yoke of Christian literalism), Bible scholars have maintained that Scripture, far from being divinely inspired, is a miscellany of primitive documents by authors of diverse, even contradictory perspectives, assembled by credulous redactors...
...Adhering to the traditional Jewish practice of avoiding the Christian designation, "Old Testament," he uses the term "Bible" to refer to the Hebrew Scripture...
...By your life, Tamar will deceive you with a kid...
...Other Bible scholars may accuse Alter of confusing the "function" of the passages he discusses with their "origin...
...On the other hand...
...Variations in a now dim narrative tradition, he points out, would have immediately been significant to contemporary readers or heroes...
...Archetypal scenes recur throughout the Bible: the "annunciation" of the birth of the hero to his barren mother (Sarah before the birth of Isaac, Rachel before the birth of Joseph, Hannah before the birth of Samuel...
...For Alter, the very nature of the Bible is contained in such contradictions...
...Those heroes and heroines whose moral behavior leaves much to be desired particularly fascinate Alter...
Vol. 64 • November 1981 • No. 21
